The Real Housewives of Orange County star Tamra Judge is clearly having a great time on the new season of the hit Bravo show. Judge, 56, shared a clip from a recent episode of the show of herself wearing black leggings and cropped shirt, posing on the sand with Katie Ginella, Alexis Bellino, and Jennifer Pedranti. “Flag football: because tackling would be too much fun. 🏈😂,” she captioned the post. Judge is in the best shape of her life in her 50s—here’s how she does it.
Judge transformed her body in her 40s to train for the Muscle Mania bodybuilding competition, which she won. “I would wake up around 4:30 a.m. and I would do low intensity cardio at home,” she told PEOPLE. “Then I would meet [Finnegan] and she would just take me through lifting. I would do split body parts, legs and shoulders, or biceps and triceps. We do two body parts and pretty much always do abdominals — we’d work those out every single day.”
Judge knows you have to put the work in for fitness, especially as you get older. “I truly believe that working out, eating well, and taking your supplements is really the key to staying young,” she told ET. “I can see it in my face. I can see it in my skin. I can just see it in my whole body… I started to see just a layer of fat developing around my midsection. And I’m like, ‘Oh no! This is not happening.'”
Judge emphasizes how important protein is when training. “If you don’t have enough protein in you, it’s as bad as overeating,” she told PEOPLE. “I would eat often. In the morning I would eat oatmeal with blueberries, and then I would have four egg whites. Then I would go and work out, I’d come back home, I’d take an after-workout AdvoCare drink — I’m on a ton of supplements, still am. Then I would have maybe four oz. of ground turkey and raw vegetables, and then I would have a protein bar, and then I would have a piece of chicken. It was about eating all day long, it wasn’t about being hungry, ever. I was never hungry.”
Judge wants people trying to lose weight not to fixate on the scale. “Most women think, ‘I’m just not gonna eat, and I’m gonna be thin,'” she told ET. “Well, you’re going to be thin, but you’re going to have zero muscle tone — zero. And your body fat’s gonna be higher than what you think it is. You have to realize that you’re building muscle as fast as you’re losing body fat. So, the scale won’t move … Don’t step on the scale, that’s all I can say. Don’t do it.”
Judge wanted to compete to prove something to herself. “To me, it was never about getting on stage and winning,” she told PEOPLE. “It was more about setting a goal for myself and completing it. That’s what I did. That was the rewarding part. I was at the age where a lot of women’s bodies start to go through menopause, and I’d been seeing some changes in my body and I didn’t like it.”