Marlene Flowers is a 69-year-old champion bodybuilder. Now she’s sharing the food that helped her get swole.

It’s not every day you get flexed on by a grandma.

Marlene Flowers was 65 when she entered her very first bodybuilding competition. She worried it’d be a tough crowd, but she was used to tough things. She’s been through a lot in her life, she explains, including two divorces and a years-long struggle with an eating disorder.

With her second husband, Flowers founded an auto repair shop; after their separation, she became its sole proprietor, and spent more than a decade doing everything from running the front office and managing employees to diagnosing cars herself.

It all started catching up with her–and her body. “I live on a small farm,” she says. “I have horses and I had to climb this hill up and down to go feed them every day, and I was getting really weak doing that. I decided that I had really poor eating habits. So I started exercising, which I did here at home, to try to build my strength and my stamina because I was really losing it at that age, and that’s a little early to be doing that.”

She made significant progression at home, completing follow-along programs like Body Beast. It got to the point, she says, where she’d mastered those and wasn’t making any further progress.

That’s when her son Ryan stepped in. “He’d started going to the gym, he’d been a little bit of a couch potato and decided to get physically fit, and he transformed his body by going to the gym,” she says. “When I got bored, he said, ‘Well, why don’t you go to the gym with me and try it out and lift weights?’ So I did–hesitantly.”

Her main concern? Anxiety about exercising in front of a bunch of people. “I was used to the isolation,” she says. But she went, and kept going. “I guess I started bulking up, and people in the gym noticed,” Flowers says. “They were suggesting, like, ‘Wow, she’s got some muscles. Why don’t you go compete?'”

She initially dismissed the idea, but with further encouragement from gym folks and Ryan, she agreed to enter a competition. She competed in the Women’s Classic Physique division, which involved getting up onstage in a bikini and flexing, followed by a short pose routine set to the theme from 1983 classic Flashdance.

“I was really proud of myself,” Flowers says–and for good reason.

She decided she’d keep going. That first competition was in the spring; she enrolled for another one in the fall. Somewhere in between, Ryan decided to start filming her. He set up accounts across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram–all under the name “Granny Guns“–to document Flowers’ already impressive accomplishments and continued #gains.

One of his earliest videos is a pretty excellent encapsulation of Flowers’ content. Set to an uber-slowed, meme-y rendition of The Neighborhood’s viral “Sweater Weather,” the clip has Ryan asking, “Grandma, do you wanna go to the gym?” Flowers, dressed in a demure pink sweater, shrugs and says, “I’ll try it.”

Smash cut to her bulging biceps as she dominates the curl machine.

These days, Flowers has more than 2 million followers on both TikTok and Instagram, and another ~120K on YouTube. After Ryan moved cross-country, she got some temporary help with videos from her niece, but now she’s a one-woman show (supported by the team at Viral Nation, which reps her). She films, edits, and posts all her own content, much of which is aimed at inspiring people to overcome challenges and live their best lives while keeping their bodies healthy and strong.

And a big part of keeping bodies healthy and strong is making sure they’re fueled. Flowers, who’s been taking it easy on competitions for a while as she recovers from two torn rotator cuffs and deals with arthritis, is a protein-consuming machine. As soon as I mention my partner and I have struggled to find protein bars that actually taste good, she’s off and running, giving me personalized recommendations based on the many she’s tried.

But of course her biggest recommendation is her own product: Granny’s Protein Cookies, which were born out of the gym-conscious cooking adventures she posted on her socials.

“Amongst the many cooking videos we were doing and experimenting with, we came up with the idea of making a protein cookie that was low in sugar, high in protein, low in fat,” Flowers says, then chuckles. “Well, they’re not so low in fat, but they’re fairly low in fat and carbs. It’s something gym people will really like.”

Flowers has been perfecting the cookies for years, and has come up with nearly a dozen different varieties. The brand officially launched this week with five flagship flavors: chocolate chip, white chocolate, peanut butter, snickerdoodle, and s’mores.

For now, the cookies are available for purchase on Flowers’ Granny Guns website. She says some local gyms have also agreed to stock them.

So what’s next? Much of Flowers’ focus currently is on giving her body time to heal. She plans to return to competitions later this year. She’s also got a memoir kicking around; she says it needs a polish, and then will go out on submission to publishers.

When I asked what Flowers likes most about being the internet’s buff grandma, she says her biggest joy is motivating other people.

“When I post a video and I get positive feedback, people tell me they’re so thankful and inspired by what I do and it gets them motivated–that makes me feel good,” she says. “It makes me want to keep going, because I want to make other people healthy. I want them to be happy. I want them to be inspired, because being physically fit helps you so much. I have a better attitude toward life and I don’t let things drag me down because I have something to look forward to. I think that if people feel better about themselves, it keeps them going. And helping others gives me more incentive to keep going and set an example.”

Viral Nation is a Tubefilter partner.