Improving body composition, female-specific training principles, and overcoming an eating disorder | Holly Baxter, APD

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you wanna take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you wanna learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Holly Baxter. Holly is an accredited practicing dietician, a competitive bodybuilder, a physique coach, and a personal trainer. She's also a fitness educator and competition coach.
In this episode, we talk about Holly's background, her interest in nutrition, and Holly opens up in detail about her struggle with an eating disorder throughout a portion of her life. From there, we dive into a case study of what a typical female patient that Holly may work with could experience and what she might be thinking about as she trains, not necessarily for competitive bodybuilding, of course, but just to sort of improve her physique. Holly builds out what a training and nutrition program might look like for a female who wants to improve, say, putting on five pounds of muscle and simultaneously losing five pounds of fat. We then talk further about female-specific principles when it comes to training. So even if you're not aspiring to be a bodybuilder, which I assume many of you listening to this are not, I think everybody is somewhat interested in improving their physique, and therefore I think there's a lot of valuable information in this episode to learn about building muscle, specifically for females, which is an important aspect of longevity. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Holly Baxter.

**Holly Baxter** (2:02)
Hey!

**Peter Attia** (2:02)
Holly, thanks so much for making time to sit down today. Look forward to talking about a lot of things. My wife has already peppered me with a hundred questions for you today.

**Holly Baxter** (2:10)
I'm really excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

**Peter Attia** (2:13)
So tell us a little bit about yourself. I know you grew up in Australia, and I know that you, I think you ran track growing up.

**Holly Baxter** (2:19)
Yes, I did. So I grew up in Tasmania, Australia. So for those that may not be a geographic of where that is, it's the little island that sits just south of the mainland. So pretty small place.
And I think part of the evolution of me now being where I am in Florida was just having such a big open mind and I didn't want to stay there. So I moved away to do college. So I moved over to Melbourne Deakin University where I did an undergraduate in nutrition science, food science nutrition, and then a master's in dietetics.

**Peter Attia** (2:53)
I know Tasmania by landmass looks pretty big, but is it a tiny population?

**Holly Baxter** (2:57)
It's tiny. I think at the moment it's probably like 500,000. Where I grew up specifically when I was living there, the population of Launceston was about 90,000. So pretty small.

**Peter Attia** (3:06)
So in high school, you ran track or in college?

**Holly Baxter** (3:09)
All the way through. So I started track at about age eight, and I went right through till age 18 So I finished by the time I got to like second or third year of university, I guess at that point, that was when I could either go for a sporting career or choose academics. So I ended up choosing academics because unfortunately in Australia for females, it just isn't a whole lot of opportunity to, you know, have a successful career in sport.
For males, it's a little bit different. We have Aussie rules football, which is incredibly popular and absolutely can make a killing. And I think perhaps now that social media has grown to be where it is, maybe females have an opportunity to have a good career in sport, but academics was kind of the only option really for me at that time.

**Peter Attia** (3:51)
What did you run in track?

**Holly Baxter** (3:53)
So I was a sprinter, 100 meters, long jump, triple jump. And if someone dare ask me to do a relay or 400, I might do that. So lots of fast twitch, anything explosive and powerful and short.