In this session, Ronnie Rich, Executive Health & Fitness Coach & Transformation Specialist, Keynote Speaker & Founder of FITBANKER has discussed how anyone can improve your health and fertility through exercise.
I’m going to be sharing my journey as to how I went from being a fatbanker to a fitbanker of this organization. Our mantra is:
Everything is transformable.
Whoever you are that’s listening in, that is looking to create, getting to parenthood is looking to go through maybe the IVF route, wherever you are and whatever you’re dealing with, whatever might occur as hard as impossible as a struggle, I invite you all to consider that everything and anything that we’re dealing with is transformable.
I’m going to kick off with this beautiful quote by Thomas Edison, which inspires who, how, and why we exist the way we do as an organization. This quote is:
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patient in the care of the human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.
Thomas Edison made this quote in 1903, and almost 120 years since then, it’s interesting to note that we still have a world which isn’t exactly this way. We still have a world where our medical system and the way we tend to leverage it or go to it, is one where we go for fix and repair rather than for optimization; however, we would love to be identified as an organization that focuses on really letting people know what an amazing gift they have in their physiology, in their biology, and what is possible by this awesome, amazing human frame.
Ronnie shared one of his favourite stories about a beautiful lady who was very open and authentic about wanting to have one more baby. One area where she received feedback from her doctor was to lose weight to increase her chances of fertility and ensure a healthy, safe, and happy pregnancy. So, she reached out to us, and I won’t say much more—just listen to our interview. It’s one of my favourite stories, and if you find it touching, moving, or inspiring if you feel it could be a contribution to someone out there, I invite you to love it, like it, share it, and send congratulations to this amazing participant.
Ushma Vaghela struggled to conceive a second child after having her first daughter, Sia. Despite trying various diets, pills, and lifestyle changes for a year, she was unable to lose the necessary weight to start IVF. She then joined the FitBanker challenge, lost eight kilos in 10 weeks, and was cleared for IVF. Soon after, she successfully conceived and later gave birth to two more daughters. Unexpectedly, during an interview about her journey, it was revealed that she had naturally conceived a fourth child, despite previously being told it was impossible. Now a mother of four, Ushma’s story highlights the power of health transformation in achieving life-changing results.
That’s me, 2013-2014, the fatbanker living what I thought was the definition of success till in 2013 actually I had a setback and this is very connected to what we’re talking about today which is living what I thought was the life of success.
My wife and I were newly married, we were 3 months pregnant, and we’re excited to share this news with the world. We were in Edinburgh, we were in the fringe festival, and we thought the perfect backdrop to be able to take a photo and announce to the world that we were soon going to become parents, but while we were there, it all turned 180 degrees and we had a miscarriage.
We lost our little one, it was a crushing moment for my wife, it was a crushing moment for me, it was new for me to be able to process that event emotionally plus deal with a grieving mum. As a result, I tended to as an overweight guy at the time, I got these random heart palpitations that weren’t just going away that night, and the following day and the next day I ended up in hospital. It was lying in the hospital bed that I got there for myself, that I am so not going to be one of those people who grow up needing to be nursed, taken care of, or dependent on medication when I can learn and discover how to optimize my health and my well-being.
In transforming my health, I lost 70 pounds, and that image on the right is after about 5 and a half months.
Now, most of us grow up in a world where lots of informants are delivered to us, whether it’s in a school setting, or the health bodies website, and the intention is good, which we just simplify the messaging so the mass population understand. The downside of that is that every human being translates the advice around lifestyle or nutrition as one thing applicable to all.
What we do in transformative health is we let every individual know that you are unique, and you need to understand you, so if you’re somebody that is either a dad or a mum, or mum to be, and you’re a couple that are both trying for a family, both of you in that family are unique by a lifestyle that you live and what your stresses and your emotional stress factors are. You’re different by what’s called body types, something that I didn’t know about and something that I discovered through my studies and what I decided to niche in on and what a big part of the fitbanker challenge is.
Different body types come with a different metabolism. That different metabolism reacts and responds differently to the types of foods we eat and some foods, which we’re never told about, actually work against us, and they’re quite in what we call inflammatory in nature.
We have you learn what foods work against you based on your body type and remove those that we can start optimizing your vehicle or your body that is going to be a space of you experiencing yourself with more energy, more strength, for trying to start family having the internal state of your body be more fertile rather than hostile.
We teach you what’s called functional eating, which is understanding how to eat by the activity or the day or the week that you’re about to engage in.
Furthermore, we also look at and work with body composition rather than weight. Most of us, consider or are judged about our well-being based on our weight or what’s called our BMI, which is just a ratio of our weight to our height, but in this day and age, we have something called bioelectrical impedance scales. These scales can tell us a bit more about us and tell us what we’re made of in terms of muscle, in terms of fat, and terms of bone. Knowing that and knowing where we are at any point in time allows us to know where to get to an optimal level that is optimal for energy, strength, and in this case as well fertility.
The fifth part of transformative health that we focus on is that we’re not just coaching at the physical level, but we are coaching at the emotional, the mental, and the spiritual level, a very high level I won’t go into that much depth on that today, but today we will talk a bit about the exercise front because if you are joining this session today as part of the series of the webinars running this week, there are amazing partners in this program that are also sharing about various things from nutrition to the role of stress, and so on, that support us through our fertility journey.
From my moment of being a fatbanker, our miscarriage, and our loss, it was a real struggle for us to conceive, and for two and a half three years it began to have an impact on my and my wife’s mental and emotional well-being, and more often than not when we think we’re struggling with an area something that parents or parents-to-be don’t want to look at is to look at what’s going on over there with them, which are they may think, or they may consider, ‘why is this happening to me? What’s wrong with me? Why is my body not just ready to go and conceive and have a baby?’ It feels like a real struggle, and it begins to work on our minds and has an impact on us, but what we decided or what we created was we gave up, and I’m going to talk about at a mental and emotional level, we had to give up being attached to becoming parents through natural birth, and we said we just want to be parents, we want to be custodians of amazing, beautiful human beings whoever they’ll be and however they come to us.
Now, for us to have this miracle event, this miracle is coming into our world, we need to also look at have we or are we, as our physiques and our body and our biology, safe space as a custodian for the new baby that’s going to come into the world. So, both Ambika and I, my wife Ambika who despite having a doctorate in that field, was unaware of what may be going on within her.
We both went for health checks to make sure that my male reproductive and fertility health was okay, and she also had checks on hers and, in those checks, which took us something just to go and look at if everything was okay, we found that Ambika had a cyst growing on one of her ovaries, the size of a little golf ball. That image on the left shows cysts and we then found out that there’s a way we can deal with that, and that being there could be at the source of us trying to conceive naturally being a struggle, and even if we tried for IVF, that might impede our chance of a successful IVF.
So, we agreed to go ahead and have the surgery. They said it was going to be a small surgery, they said it was keyhole surgery, but that small keyhole surgery led to Ambika being kind of bedridden for about three to four weeks. She required a whole month off of recovery and we’re grateful that we’re able to take out what was in the way. What I’m saying is we often look outside for a solution, going to the doctors, the experts to say please solve this for me, please tell me what to do, please give me the magic potion, but sometimes we need to pause. We need to reflect and acknowledge what is it that our body and vehicle are going through, telling us or communicating to us and looking internally. When I say look internally, not just physically like in this case where we had a checkup and we found a cyst, but also what’s going on for us internally, emotionally, and mentally where are we being resistant, to pausing and just checking, hang on, maybe there is something about our lifestyle that isn’t working.
Sure this after, I’ve gone through my health transformation. I’ve lost 70 pounds, and still, despite having made multiple changes, we found that there was still something going on inside Ambika’s body that was a sort of barrier to successful conception. We went through this surgery, and I was grateful for that journey. We then got put on the IVF list, so we’re excited that we’re now, despite having the surgery, the doctor said to us that you now have a 50/50 increased chance of naturally conceiving, and we said ‘got it doctor’, but we’re so clear that we want to become parents and we want to become parents soon, and we want to increase all our options, so we started to go around the IVF route.
We went through applying for it, being accepted under the NHS, we went through completing all the paperwork and going through various checks and stops, and we realized actually that there were some delays in the paperwork with Ambika having grown up in Africa, had missed certain vaccinations and by the time all got put in place and it was time to start our IVF process, the morning that we were meant to receive a rubella vaccination, we found on that day that we naturally conceived but we had already begun all the paperwork, the mindset, and the preparation to start our IVF.
There’s the placebo effect and equally on the flip side of that there’s what’s called the nocebo effect.
The placebo effect, you might have heard this frustrating process, is where a patient deals with something as some illness. There are so many visits, so many checks, and so many injections or whatever is going through for you, you’re creating a mind and a belief system that’s impacting your biology through what’s called, to the reverse, the nocebo effect and it is creating a plate internally that is hostile and that may be rejecting your body from conceiving or becoming this safe fertile place for you to bring life into.
I’ll explain to you how that happens hormonally in our body. So, connected to our brain we have a set of our nervous system and the newest cords that pass through us and, with that, two systems regulate or control how the mind communicates and saves communication from the body. We have what’s called the parasympathetic also known as the rest and digest of the feed and breed response system, and then we have what’s called the sympathetic part of our nervous system which is the fight or flight.
The sympathetic nervous system is what our body through our senses and organs communicates to the brain to say there is some perceived threat going on over here. What happens when people are trying to conceive, whether naturally or through IVF, and every time a month passes and our cycle comes, and we find that we are not pregnant, what happens is it puts the mind puts the body into a state of stress called fight or flight, and when it’s in a state of stress, it brings forth and brings presence and hormones that are ready to fight off and fend off any external perceived threat.
When the body is in that hostile state, it cannot be at the same stage as what’s called the fertile state. I’m simplifying what goes on hormonally and biologically here, but I’m intentionally simplifying it because I want everyone to not get too complex about the simplicity and, therefore, the power of the human body and the human mind. So, even when it comes to taking on exercise that contributes to our fertility, as part of getting ready to take on the exercise something we need to do before the body level is at the mind and intellect level, is to begin to calm the body for its readiness of what is about to arrive or getting the body into a calm and fertile state.
Getting into what’s called the feed and breed or the rest and digest state, which is exactly what we need for us to successfully see, for us to get pregnant, and it is really important for various processes of functions that we do like sleep, muscle repair, muscle tissue repair, fat loss, increasing off muscle mass, so a lot of positive things happen when our body is in the parasympathetic state or stage of hormonally. This is something that I want to invite many of us to get presents to do.
The brain and the sympathetic nervous system are essential. Historically, when we’re hunters and gatherers, if we’re ought to be attacked by a sabre or tiger or as hunters, gatherers, we need to go and find food or shelter, we need to be in the fight or flight stage to be able to achieve or fend off danger, but in today’s world, the mind and the eyes don’t know any difference of what’s externally out there, whether it’s a sabre or tiger, or whether psychologically it’s some other state of stress called, ‘my period has come again’, ‘why are we getting stressed and always arguing about why we’re not successfully conceiving?’, or ‘we’re in some form of relationship strain or dispute that is impacting the mental, emotional, and physical well-being that is interfering with us successfully conceiving.’ I stress this point before going to the physical because mentally we need to create a state of calm, a state of rest and digest, or feed and breed.
Going back to the fitbanker challenge, a big part of our focus and for everyone that’s listening in, you must understand certain things about your physique, so you eat according to it but you also learn how to train appropriately for the type of body you have. I’ll give you an example of something I didn’t know.
That was me and my fiancé at our engagement party and I had the kind of body where if I would go out, we would eat and drink. I would feel sluggish, I’d feel, lethargic my skin would flush as you can see in the image there, and the following day I’d put on half a kilo; whereas my wife would eat the same, drink the same, party right away, she doesn’t have as much of a hangover the next day, and she looks and feels the same. I was very clear that life is unfair.
Something we coach on is getting present to the limiting beliefs that exist in our mind. What I didn’t know, and a science that’s out there and has been out there for a long time, was the science of body types. If you can understand the science of your body type, you will know how to remove certain foods that might be what we call inflammatory for your physique and, therefore, for your biology, which means it begins to impede certain foods and certain diets make it harder for your body, for your womb, to become this fertile state. This, by the way, is not only applicable for the females in a relationship but also for the male reproductive. This is important and something I think contributed to my male reproductive and sexual health by knowing how to eat and train according to my body type.
Prior to knowing this, training was something that caused a lot of pain, injury, and damage to me, so what I would classically do was I would work hard and party harder as a banker for five days of the week and two days of the weekend I would think one is for partying, relaxing, socializing, and tanking my body further, and Sunday was to try and clean six days of a mess up, which is I’ll try to run 10 or 12 or 15 kilometres, try and clean up all the choices that I’ve made during the week. That didn’t work. Anything has trained my body physically, but it had a lot of injuries like shin splints and knee issues, it didn’t optimize my body. One day out of seven days a week was not sufficient enough to do adequate transformation against the six days of damage or devaluation that was happening to me at a mind and intellect level.
A big part of our program is, if we’re working with somebody or if you’re going to take on transforming your health, I would invite you to look up and discover what is your body type and your body type will tell you that certain foods don’t work for you or, put it in another way, they cause a certain inflammatory state in you which aren’t great or optimal for you to experience more energy, more strength, or to even conceive.
Secondly, what are we doing with our bodies and our physics to go through a transformation and create our bodies optimal for energy, strength, and fertility?
As males, there is an optimal muscle mass, optimal fat percentage, and optimal water and bone level to get in our body. Without knowing that, most of us will be operating a vehicle or a body where there is excess body fat or a sub-optimally functioning body which means if one set of organs isn’t working well because they’re an overdrive to fulfil, in my case I had excessive fat, then my digestive system and my reproductive system are compromised because the way the body works is all these systems are interconnected and so I had to learn how to optimize my body to reduce unnecessary fat and increase necessary muscle mass.
For females, we want to get females to about 36% muscle mass and we want to bring the fat percentage to, for most females, it’s between 21 to 33 is the healthy range, but research has shown that the most optimal fat percentage for successfully conceiving is between 22-25% body fat. Even too low of a fat percentage in the female body is not great for reproductive health and it’s not unsurprising that ladies reduce their fat percentage too significantly and go into the athletic range that they also struggle to conceive. They also tend to find that they are irregular with their month.
This big part of us is how we bring accountability at a granule level to your biology and your physiology. I’m going to share with you a couple of apps that we use and that I recommend that you use. We use these in our program. If you’re doing our program, these are some apps that we will use and if you’re not, if you’re working on your own, I would invite you to take on downloading these two apps called myfitnesspal and runkeeper.
They’re great to support you in really understanding what is it that you’re putting inside of your body and what role and function is it playing. Further, you also get to understand if I’ve just consumed 500 calories or 700 calories or 1000 calories in a meal, but my total daily goal is about 1500 and I’ve just taken a thousand and it’s created in me a blood sugar spike, an insulin spike, and therefore it’s putting my body into an inflamed state, how long does it take to spend that amount of energy?
Runkeeper is an app where we document and record our walks, our runs, our workouts in the gym and, by syncing the two apps, we learn how to function and operate this body at an optimal level and to strike the balance of moderate intake of quality nutrition and moderate level of not excessive burnout exercise, but a moderate level that will create in us what our body needs, whether it is a certain calorie deficit, be calorie neutral, or create a calorie surplus depending on where you are as a starting point with your body composition that allows us to know or advise people what kind of nutrition, quantity and quality of nutrition do they need to be taking in and, therefore, what amount of expenditure do they need.
What you’ve probably been waiting for is what can I do in terms of exercise. What are the exercises that I can do that could optimize me at a body-mind level?
When I say mind level, exercise contributes to if our body is not in a stress state under fight or flight, where it’s being driven by adrenaline and cortisol, the opposite of that is pumping our body daily and regularly with endorphins, with serotonin, and with the good kind of dopamine.
Dopamine is a hormone that’s released when we’ve got a certain sense of achievement or accomplishment, and by simply having a certain walk, a workout, and doing that regularly you’re creating this very internal happy state. Endorphins and serotonin are your happy hormones, they are telling you they are communicating to your body, that you’re doing well, and that we are in a peak mental and emotional state.
In terms of exercise, it is not complex, and it is as basic as walking 40 and up to 80 minutes which is just about under an hour and a half a day. You don’t have to do that all at once, you can do that spread out across the day, and you could do that in 20-minute windows. So, a 20-minute brisk walk three times a day and you would have met your target of creating the calorie burn that you require there are a few other factors we look at or in lockdown if you cannot go out as much, aim for what’s called 10,000 steps. You could get something like a Fitbit, something that counts your steps, or most mobile phones do that and it’s something that can very easily be done even indoors, although we do highly recommend going outdoors and being in nature for your optimal well-being.
What you could do as well is four times a week, at least four times a week, do some form of resistance or HIIT designed workout. HIIT is called high impact interval training and the design of that workout is intended to raise your heart rate and your pulse, and even your body temperature to a certain level that triggers what’s called Thermogenesis.
Thermogenesis is the body’s ability to convert fat cells into heat which breaks down the fat cells and, therefore, helps to keep us at a healthy fat percentage level. When you’re exercising, there are three things you want to look out for before you know that exercise is effective, even if it’s as simple as a walk. If you’re walking I recommend trying to do some hills, trying to walk uphill if you’re on a treadmill, increasing the incline of the treadmill and looking out for three things:
You might ask, ‘What is my max heart rate running?’ The answer is 220 minus your age. In my case, I’m 41, so 220 minus my age is 179, and then 70% of that is around about the 125-126 pulse. I want to look out in a workout, am I getting to 126? This applies again both to males and females which contributes to optimizing our vehicle to get us primed for great reproductive and fertile health.
Here’s another one we can do, which is the HIIT workout. This is a simple, seven minute workout that you can do at home, from home, you can do it in your living room, or you can do it outdoors, in the park.
You can take a screenshot of this and if any of you are connected to me on any social media platform, connect with me on Instagram or Facebook, look me up or search for fitbanker. If you send us a message and say, ‘Ronnie, I want that workout that you shared, the seven-minute HIIT workout,’ I can share this with you.
Something that we’re offering right now, during the lockdown, are free HIIT workouts that are on Zoom and also streamed on Facebook if you can’t join live, you can do them on catch-up, but the design of these workouts is called high impact interval training is that we are working intensely for about 40 seconds, then you have a 20-second rest before you move on to the next exercise, and by the time you’ve done seven exercises, that’s seven minutes done and you have triggered thermogenesis in your body. It’s very easy to do, it’s something my 76-year-old dad does and can take on, and if you did one, two, or three circuits of this so you could push it up to 30 minutes of workout, it will contribute to your overall cardiac as well as overall body health.
Some of the work that you can do, you can also do them from home. There are a lot of online options offering some of these classes, multiple of them on Instagram and, like I mentioned, we offer some but, what is it you need to work out to prepare your body for getting pregnant, through pregnancy, and even beyond pregnancy?
It’s very important now that we think about the strength, energy, physique, and functionality that our body needs when we become this new mom or dad. When I say that, I mean right to the extent that I have now a nine-and-a-half-month-old baby and we need a certain amount of strength and physique to be able to carry him with a baby carrier and it doesn’t impact our posture or doesn’t cause back pain or doesn’t cause rolled shoulders. All of this gets taken care of by training adequately before and also during our trying and while we are pregnant.
If you’re somebody who has not been active and, if you are soon after this webinar, you are expecting, you don’t want to go from zero to excessive training during pregnancy. That isn’t great, but what happens to most people is when they become pregnant, suddenly, health becomes very important to them. They suddenly want to get very healthy, and they suddenly think, ‘I’ve now got to take care of my body. I’ve got to take care of my physique.’ They stop their alcohol and a lot of other not-so-great foods when they’re pregnant you’d hope so at least, and then, they suddenly want to take on activity and exercise. That’s not a good thing to get into a new level of training and exercise when you’re pregnant.
You want to start this before, so if you find that you’ve just conceived or you find out in the next week or so, if you’re somebody that’s been trying, you don’t want to suddenly go into an intense level of training, but even then you can do what you want to work on or what you need to develop for your journey through pregnancy for a healthy pregnancy, for a healthy mom, and healthy structure and posture beyond that are exercises that work and contributes to:
You will need that to uphold a slightly larger physique.
This can help you have good posture, upright, and your core is both the front, your abdomen, your lower back as well as your upper back, all those you need to work on and develop.
You can do normal yoga before you’re expecting, such as Bikram yoga or Hatha yoga. Try some classes that are at a beginner-intermediate level if you’ve never tried these. You can also try some of these online and you can get to do it at your own pace. If you are and when you are pregnant there are certain things we need to look out for, like at a certain point in our pregnancy, in the third trimester we have a high level of what’s called relaxing in the body, and relaxing is a hormone that’s released especially around our joints that makes us flexible, sometimes, hyper flexible and when you’re hyper-flexible that may not be a good thing because you might overextend yourself and you could cause injury, so when you have a high level of heightened relaxing in the body, you don’t want to overstrain your body.
As you go into the third trimester, you might start to taper down the intensity or you might avoid just certain exercises and continue. I know many moms who have been joining and attending CrossFit classes right up to eight and a half months pregnant and in the last couple of weeks maybe they’ve focused more on walks or bodywork. They’ve had a very happy healthy and successful delivery, so strength and conditioning, even a CrossFit class, if you are not yet expecting it’s good to start now. They do sound intense by their name, and they do sound intense about what you see on social media, but they’re amongst the best for really contributing to good inner strength and also really supporting you happily and healthily through your transformation journey.
A great HIIT session that is good for triggering a good amount of thermogenesis, which means fat burn and contributing to your fitness, to great respiratory health, which means getting to breathe at a certain level – I would say about 21 minutes of a workout is adequate. The HIIT workout that I shared was a 7-minute routine. Seven minutes is the minimum you can do, but I would recommend people for trying to aim for 21 minutes. Also, 3 rounds of those active work out, or you could even join a 30-minute class. If you did at least four 30-minute sessions a week, that is what is recommended for a good level of fitness and activity. Especially, in today’s world and today’s lifestyle, given some of the foods that we eat and the sedentary or not as active lifestyles that we’re currently living, I would recommend at least four days of doing that and up to six days of doing workouts. If you enjoy them, you could go up to six days, and you could also combine HIIT on three or four days with yoga on another couple days of the week but do please always give yourself at least one if not two rest days during the week.
It’s not necessarily more beneficial, but I do recommend doing them in the mornings, and for some people, their work routine may not support that. If you’re somebody who is already a parent, maybe you’re trying IVF for having more children, you might find that your mornings aren’t practical for you to work out or go to the gym. If you can, however, I do recommend the morning. Early in the morning, by doing that to our body, we are kind of shocking our body, and we’re temporarily tapping into our fight-or-flight state during the workout. We are creating a spike in our body of adrenaline and cortisol and a surge in energy to deliver and fulfil energy over that workout. By doing that in the morning, especially if you’re someone that’s trying to conceive, I’m going to assume, I know some people do it at lunchtime, in the afternoon, but the majority might be working on reproduction in the evening whether you’re trying naturally or through IVF, you’ll be going into a rest state in the evening rather. You want your body to shift from the fight-or-flight state into the rest and digest. By getting the workout over and done in the morning, there are multiple benefits, you allow your body to burn fat after that while you’re at work or home or your desk because you’ve triggered the thermogenesis in the morning.
You also feel great in the morning, so it’s great for mental and emotional health because you’ve created a spike in endorphins and serotonin, and then later in the day, you’re beginning to taper down those hormones that are getting your high energy, excited or in a stressful state and by those coming down you’re allowing your body to start to go into a sleep state at night, you create a spike in another hormone called melatonin and melatonin is one of the most amazing hormones, it’s a super drug that’s created naturally by our body that allows for muscle tissue repair. It allows for fat burn and also really gives us good quality sleep.
Most of us are going to sleep in a stress state and are wondering why our body is not ready to receive or conceive a new life form in it, so that’s why I recommend the morning and if you cannot do the morning, then go for the evening. Try to leave at least a three-hour gap between the time you’ve done your workout and your bedtime. If you do your work-out too close to bedtime, you might find that you struggle to sleep, and you also may defer the onset of melatonin in your body.
When it comes to weight loss, I recommend a minimum of an hour of walking. It doesn’t have to be done all at once but try to get a 20-minute walk in the morning. Try to get at least a 10 to 15-minute walk after every meal. If you could do 20 minutes, then 20 minutes, 20 minutes or 20 minutes in the morning before breakfast, which we call fasted cardio, if you’re able to do that, then I recommend that. That’s the first one you do in the morning, trying to get 15, 10, 15 or 20 minutes after lunch if time permits and again in the evening after supper if you can, and if it’s not too late, then just maybe before supper or dinner time you could go for a 15 to 20-minute walk that will support you.
In total, cumulatively across the day, you want to have about 60 minutes of walk time, it might sound like a lot if you’re doing it all at once, but I promise you that it passes quickly. If you work from home, and you have a lot of phone calls, I would recommend getting a nice good headset when you have certain meetings, if you’re short on time, take those meetings on a walk if you can. Put yourself on mute, and there’s no wind distraction in the background, it’s something we coach on called time merge skills because we’re creative and came about to serve busy professionals and busy professionals have a lot of calls that they have to join are quite routine. A lot of those calls, you just need to listen in, they probably need to unmute themselves and speak for a minute or 30 seconds, and when they do, they can do so in a quiet place, but we do recommend taking calls so long you can be present on the call and safe on the street. Doing that while walking, it’s what we call time to merge that, but I would say about an hour is what will contribute to that and what’s different from going out for what we call an intentional walk, which is walking at least five minutes and at least 500 meters at a go count. It will be done for a sustained enough amount of time to create a pulse razor that is raising your heart rate. If you just count your walking within your house from your kitchen to your living room to the bathroom that’s not sustained for long enough to create the pulse razor effect. Therefore, to trigger thermogenesis, you might get 10 000 steps indoors where you work or at home, but it won’t be sustained for longer than five minutes to create what’s called a pulse raiser.
BMI for everyone else that’s listening in, and if you’re not familiar with how it’s calculated and why it’s popularized, it stands for body mass index. What BMI is doing is it’s taking your weight in kg, so if you let’s say weigh 70 kg, but your height is 5 ft, it takes your height in centimetres, and 5ft is about 153, so it takes your weight divided by your height in meters 1.53 squared and that number that’s arrived at is your BMI. It is just a ratio of your weight to your height. The reason BMI is popularized is that it was a very easy way during the world war era and the baby boom era to measure and identify whether somebody was fit or not to get into the army or not, that’s where it got popularized. We human beings made that to dictate how well or healthy we are, or we aren’t. That’s quite misleading because I’ll give you an example, I am 5.8, but because of my muscle mass, my overall body weight is 80 kg for somebody who’s 5.9, an optimal weight according to BMI, I’d be somewhere around 72-74, as a result of being 80 kilos with high muscle mass my BMI shows a slightly higher number, which is always 26 something or 27.
The healthy range for BMI is between 18.5 and 25. If you are over 25, your doctor or whoever checks you up might say you need to reduce your BMI, and their intention is good, but in the year 2021 and the last 5 or 10 years, we have access to what are called bioelectrical impedance scales, if you can connect with me on any social media platform, I will send you the links of the six recommended scales, you can buy some as little as 30 quid, a good quality one is about between 60 quid, and then they go up to a few 100 depending on how much you’re willing to spend. Those scales will tell you why your BMI is high, what you are made of, what percentage is fat.
You have two types of fat, one’s called visceral fat, which is the fat in between your organs that are not great for us, that’s not good for our health. Normally women with a high-fat percentage over 33% or over 35% and with a high visceral fat struggle with fertility, but they’re not told that. On our program, that’s a big thing, we focus on that and like I said, in about 5-6 years of existence, we’ve had about 7 or 8 FITBANKER babies. Moms have taken on our program where we focus on fat percentage, and within 10 weeks, they’ve reduced their fat percentage to a good level. Including the lady whose video we played at the start where for a whole year she was just being sent back by the IVF clinic as she was not even allowed to come in because they kept asking what’s your BMI and said that she needs to lose weight before she can come in, and it kept impacting her mental and emotional well-being. She did a program within ten weeks, she lost 8 kg, and she was right away approved to stop the IVF process. Within a month after that, she successfully conceived and as she shared, she wanted just one more, and they got twins, and thereafter, they conceived naturally. That’s why it’s possible when we focus on the right aspect of how to measure our well-being rather than BMI. Nobody should be let down by their weight, that can be misleading.
Immediately after a workout session and within 40 minutes of that session, I recommend getting a certain amount of protein intake. For ladies, I recommend getting in your protein shake at least between 20 and 30 grams of protein powder, which gives you a net protein of somewhere between 20 and 24, depending on the brand and the quality. If you aim to get between 20 and 30 grams of protein in your shake, consume it within 40 minutes after the workout because it’s after we’ve created the muscle tissue tear that we want to first get in a certain amount of protein. If your workout was intense, and you’re feeling drained, you can get something that is a slow-digesting and burning carbohydrate, it could be a banana piece of fruit. If you are getting something that is carb in nature maybe have something that is like oats, however, I do recommend if you do want to lose fat percentage that you don’t take that carb in nature right after your workout.
You only focus on taking a high protein intake like a protein shake or a protein bar, and multiple protein bars are not protein bars. People think they’re protein bars, but they have less protein than they have carbohydrate and sugar, so they’re energy bars, but the graphic designers and marketing professionals out there put certain labelling that makes you think that it’s got protein, and it often does not have adequate or enough amount of protein that your body needs. We calculate your total daily protein needs, and for a female, it’s between 1 gram to 1.5 grams of protein per kilo of body weight. That’s what you need in the whole day, so if you weigh as an example, 70 kilos, you need between 70 and 105 grams of protein in a day, and ideally, you want to spread that out across the day, so you want to get 20 to 25 grams at a go and maybe have that spread out across three meals and two snack times. By the end of the day, you will reach your goal of protein, and the protein is what you take from your natural foods, whether from fish or eggs or meat or vegetables, and you can supplement whatever your total daily goal is from a natural healthy protein shake. There are protein shakes, which have a lot of bad rep because there’s a lot of non-essential stuff being added to them to reduce the cost, but it also reduces the quality. You want to have quality stuff other than your protein.
I would recommend that you have a meal for about two hours or three hours after. Especially if your workout is in the morning, and you want to lose fat, then have only protein allow a three-hour window before you have your next meal, but of course, hydrates a lot of drink, a lot of water, and it will contribute to your recovery. If anyone feels kind of low in energy, you can have a little electrolyte added to it. It replaces and replenishes the blood, the body’s natural body salts and minerals and any blood sugar that might have reduced over that period.
