Good morning,
I hope you had a fantastic weekend.
Starting next week, I’m changing how I do this newsletter.
Instead of me deciding what you need to know, I want you to tell me.
Every week I’m going to pick a few of your questions and answer them in depth sometimes in writing, sometimes in a video, sometimes showing you an exercise or walking you through a meal. The goal is simple: I want this to feel less like a newsletter and more like a conversation.
So here’s what I need from you: reply to this email or reply on substack below the post with one specific question you’ve been sitting on. About plant-based nutrition, building muscle after 50, fat loss, recovery, mindset anything in our world. Be specific. The more specific your question, the more useful my answer will be for you and for everyone else reading.
This is coming out while I’m on digital detox as I take the first week of every month completely offline. When I come back, the first thing I’m doing is reading your questions and building the next newsletter around them.
Hit reply. Ask me anything.
Also, as you may know, every month I go on GoFundMe and find patients who are trying to heal from the cancer diagnosis. We donate to them on behalf of our Mavy Wellness community and on behalf of everyone that supports the work that I do. This month we got to support Judy (https://gofund.me/afc0fd81f ) to help her pay her medical bills and cancer treatments. I want to say a big thank you for supporting the work that I do.
I do this because when I was a caregiver to my late partner, it meant a lot to me that strangers donated to our fundraiser and tried to support us. I feel blessed to be able to do this every month on behalf of all of us, so thank you ❤️
Alright let’s get into today’s last newsletter with this format:
I recorded a podcast recently with one of our members, Patty, and her story has been sitting with me since. She’s 69 years old, turning 70 next year, and when she joined us about a year and a half ago, she was struggling to lift Christmas boxes out of the garage. Her shoulder was in constant pain from a cycling accident five years earlier, and she had sciatica that kept her sleeping on her back every night because laying on her side hurt too much. She was active, walking, hiking, cycling, but she could feel herself getting weaker, and it scared her.
What I found interesting about Patty’s story is that she wasn’t starting from zero. She was already doing five or six cardio sessions a week when she came to us. She was already eating well. She was already moving her body. But she had never consistently strength trained in her life. At 68 years old, she started for the first time, and the difference it made was something even she didn’t expect.
Within the first few months, her shoulder started to feel normal again. Not perfect, she says it’s about 80% compared to her other shoulder, but she went from barely being able to lift her purse into the car to pressing dumbbells overhead without pain. The sciatica that had been bothering her for two years just disappeared. She’s not even sure which exercises fixed it, but one day she realized she could sleep on her side again, and it wasn’t an issue anymore. She told me something that stuck with me. She said she had just accepted those things as her new normal. The pain in her shoulder, the discomfort sitting in the car, the weakness when she tried to lift anything. She thought that’s just what getting older meant and there was nothing she could do about it.
That’s the part that gets me, because I hear it all the time. People normalize pain. They normalize limitation. They tell themselves this is just what 55 or 62 or 70 feels like, and they stop trying to fix it. But Patty’s body didn’t accept it. Her body was waiting for her to give it a reason to heal, and when she started loading those muscles properly, even starting with the thinnest resistance band she had for her shoulder, the body responded. It always does when you give it the right stimulus.
The win that made me the most proud was the skiing. In 2019, Patty had a serious ski accident. Broke her tibia plateau, had surgery, couldn’t walk for three months, and spent a full year recovering. After that, she just couldn’t bring herself to get back on the mountain. She didn’t feel strong enough, and there was a real fear there, almost like PTSD from the accident. So when she committed to our program, she set a quiet goal for herself. Next winter, I’m going to ski again.
In March, a big snowstorm hit Tahoe. She bought new equipment, drove up, and did it. She told me on the podcast that she’s already getting a season pass for next year. That’s not a woman who’s winding down. That’s someone whose world is expanding because her body can support the life she wants to live.
And that’s really what this is about. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it. Being fit and strong is the foundation to living an incredible life. It’s hard to live your best life when your body is limiting you from doing the things you want to do. For Patty, that was skiing, traveling, hiking in Croatia, planning a pilgrimage in October. For you, it might be something completely different. But the principle is the same. Your body should never be the thing holding you back.
One thing Patty said that I want to highlight because I think it applies to a lot of people reading this. She told me that in the beginning, her goal was to lose 30 pounds. She’s lost 12 so far, and for a while that frustrated her. But then she said something really honest. She said she’s gained so many other things that the weight loss has almost become secondary. Her shoulder works again. Her sciatica is gone. She skied for the first time in five years. She’s doing lunges with 8 to 10 pound dumbbells when she couldn’t even balance doing them with no weight at the start. She just got back from two weeks in Croatia climbing stairs and hiking without a second thought. She’s planning a 50 mile bike ride as her next goal.
That’s what body recomposition actually looks like. It’s not always a dramatic number on the scale. Sometimes it’s your friend telling you that you look lean. Sometimes it’s lifting a 50 pound box of flooring and not being sore the next day. Sometimes it’s realizing that you stopped thinking about what you can’t do and started thinking about what you want to do next. The scale is one pixel of the entire picture, and Patty’s picture is looking pretty incredible right now.
The last thing I’ll share is her advice for anyone sitting on the fence about starting. She kept it simple. Just do it. You can think about it, you can straddle the fence, you can research programs and watch YouTube videos. But at some point you have to jump in and trust the process. She told me that when she looks back at her first workouts, everything was hard. She was wobbly, she couldn’t hold weights during lunges, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to do a proper push up. And now it’s become such a core part of her identity that she can’t imagine her life without it. That didn’t happen because she had some perfect plan from day one. It happened because she kept showing up, even during the weeks where life got chaotic and she could only manage her strength training and nothing else.
Consistency doesn’t mean perfection. It means you keep going. And Patty, at 69, with a healed shoulder and a season ski pass and a 50 mile bike ride on the horizon, is living proof of that.
I hope this week’s message serves you on your journey.
I appreciate you and I hope you have a fantastic weekend.
Consistency compounds.
Sincerely,
Maxime Sigouin
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