A woman transformed her body in the run-up to her 40th birthday — with high-protein foods and weight-lifting
Eating more protein and doing glute exercises helped a 39-year-old woman burn fat, build muscle, and fix her back pain before turning 40.
Courtesy of Sanduni Gamage
- A woman in her late 30s finally saw the results she wanted in the gym, burning fat and getting stronger.
- Since May 2024, she transformed her fitness by eating more protein and lifting weights reguarly.
- Her personal trainer said full-body workouts can help you lose weight without long hours of exercise.
With a milestone 40th birthday coming up, Sanduni Gamage decided the best gift she could give herself would be to finally get in shape.
At 39 years old and balancing exercise with a desk job, she was started to feel frustrated after her efforts at the gym didn't seemed to pay off.
"I had been trying to reduce my weight for a very long time, but I didn't see anything different," Gamage told Business Insider. "I just thought this was how my body is."
Gamage, an accountant based in Ottawa, said her brother had recently gotten into shape and built six-pack abs with the help of a personal trainer, so she reached out.
Working with Adam Enaz, a personal trainer and dietitian who specializes in fitness transformations, she made a few simple but significant changes to her diet and exercise routine.
Less than a year later, she's lost a total of about 35 pounds and trimmed inches from her waistline. She also said she's gotten stronger, has more energy, and fixed knee pain and back pain.
"My knees were noisy, it would hurt to go up stairs. Now I feel so energetic," she said. Courtesy of Sanduni Gamage
Gamage said her progress was the result of simple but sustainable changes: tweaking her diet to include more protein, and doing full-body strength workouts with a focus on glute exercise.
A high-protein meal plan
Gamage said one of the biggest mistakes she had made in her earlier attempts to lose weight was ignoring her nutrition. Her eating habits involved a lot of Southeast Asian cuisine full of carbs and oils and light on protein.
"I didn't follow a diet plan or anything," she said.
Enaz developed a diet plan for Gamage: three meals and two snacks a day, cutting calories with the aim to lose about a pound per week. Each plate centered high-protein staples like Greek yogurt, chicken, and fish.
"For the first two to three weeks it was hard, because it was the opposite of what I was used to," she said.
Meal-prep helped, making her weekday meals in advance.
She also found ways to incorporates high-protein ingredients into her favorite meals such as using Greek yogurt instead of coconut milk for curry.
On the weekends, Gamage said she remained a bit more flexible in what she ate She still enjoyed dining out and other social events, sticking to her calorie and protein goals as much as possible and picking smaller portions.
"I would just take little bites and that helped me a lot," she said.
Weightlifting workouts
Gamage said full-body strength training was the staple of her workouts to burn fat, with an extra focus on glute exercise.
She hits the gym four times a week, and each session is about an hour.
The workout kicks off with a bit of cardio on the treadmill or step stepper, then four exercises each for upper and lower body. Gamage said she does three sets of each exercise and aims to do each set to muscle failure — meaning she can't do another rep.
For upper body, she does exercises like:
- shoulder presses
- tricep extensions
- chest presses
- lat pulldowns
Exercises for lower body and the one day a week dedicated to glutes include:
- Bulgarian split squats
- leg extensions
- deadlifts
- reverse lunges
- hip thrusts
Many of the workouts include free weights like dumbbells, which help build core strength by requiring the body to stabilize more during the movement.
Enaz told Business Insider these techniques can help people work smarter instead of harder to build muscle and burn fat without long, grueling workouts.
"A lot of people that I work with really struggle with losing fat and getting in shape," he said. "There's a misunderstanding that you just need to do loads of exercise."
For Gamage, the key was making changes she could stick to, and being able to see the changes over time as she eventually had to upgrade her whole wardrobe to keep up with the weight loss.
"It's not fast, it's time-consuming, but I think it's sustainable," she said.
