Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Hosted by Paul Evans, Registered Nutritionist (@paulthenutritionist)
Tired of the endless food fads, influencer nonsense, and TikTok nutrition “hacks”? This podcast cuts through it all.
No Forking Nonsense delivers straight-talking, science-backed nutrition advice that actually makes sense — in under 20 minutes. No fluff. No fads. Just real answers from a qualified expert who knows what works in the real world.
Each episode tackles one myth, one headline, or one common mistake — and gives you clear, practical takeaways you can apply straight away.
Whether you're trying to eat better, feel more human, or just stop falling for the same old food BS — this is the show for you.
Follow now and stop forking about.
Hello and welcome to another episode and today I'm going to be giving you a sneak under the magician's hat. We're going to be talking through three different people with three different problems and three things which probably were going on that was not what the three people were expecting. I'm going to show you through how we got success with these people, what their problems were and how you can apply what I taught these individuals to yourself. But before we get to that, if you wanna update your algorithm so that you're no longer being shown irrelevant, unfactual bits of information, follow this podcast, subscribe to this podcast, follow me on Instagram to teach your algorithm you only want factual information. Let's get into today's episode.
@paulthenutritionist:So the first person is the man who ate nothing all day and what he did is he was in his early 40s and he had a very reactive job, so his day got hijacked constant and no two weeks were the same. He had been trying to lose weight for about three years and he said, I'm quoting here, I'm really good all day but come the evening, it all goes to shit. What he wanted from me was strategies for the evening, so he wanted me to give him foods that were lower in calorie, he wanted me to teach him how to have a stronger mindset, he wanted something to stop him come 09:00 but what was actually happening was that he would have a coffee at seven, nothing till about two and then only if a gap appeared, which he often didn't, he would be home by six and was absolutely starving. He'd have a huge dinner and then spend three hours just grazing until bedtime and he genuinely believed that the problem was the evening and everyone he'd asked had agreed with him and said he just needs to get on top of the evening.
@paulthenutritionist:The evening wasn't the problem, the evening was just the outcome of what had happened before and by 06:00 he had eaten almost nothing in eleven hours and what happened was just the outcome of that and because he had been good all day, he felt like he had earned it. That is a psychological problem rather than a physical problem. What we did is we didn't look at the psychological issues that he wanted me to look at, as in trying to find him things to be stronger in the evening, we ignored the evening entirely for
@paulthenutritionist:the first month. What we did is we built
@paulthenutritionist:very strategic things into his day. The first thing that I told him to do is I wanted him to initially, because he'd say to
@paulthenutritionist:me I wasn't hungry in the morning and that was obviously because
@paulthenutritionist:he was eating a shitload of food in evening, so I said for one day I just want you to have a decent dinner and we outlined what that dinner was, and then I just want you
@paulthenutritionist:to have nothing after dinner. He messaged me
@paulthenutritionist:the next day and said
@paulthenutritionist:he was absolutely ravenous and we'd already agreed that he was going
@paulthenutritionist:to have a breakfast every day and the reason why I said to him don't have anything the evening before he first tried this was because I
@paulthenutritionist:was confident that in the morning, if
@paulthenutritionist:he didn't spend three hours grazing, then he'd probably find that he was more hungry and he was.
@paulthenutritionist:So we made breakfast a non negotiable and it had
@paulthenutritionist:to have a source of protein in it, it wasn't a cereal bar and after that we just ensured that there was food strategically that he could really quickly eat throughout the day. We made sure that he was eating enough food throughout the day. Within three weeks, the evening grazing just completely stopped and within three months he had lost the weight that he wanted to lose steadily and most importantly he stopped thinking that he was just shit, that actually he just needed tools to engage his willpower a little bit better. The lesson here is that if you lose it at night, the problem is usually somewhere between eight in the morning and four in the afternoon, so we want to not
@paulthenutritionist:try and fix what
@paulthenutritionist:we think the symptom is, go back about six hours and it's probably going be that. The second client I had, the woman who was doing everything right. They sound like story books, don't they? The woman who did everything right. This lady, she was late 40s I'm going to say.
@paulthenutritionist:I was getting stressed then because I thought to myself, she's younger than that but she doesn't know who she is, it could be any of you, if you're listening to clients. She was late 40s, she trained I think about five times a week, she already tracked everything, she actually knew more about nutrition than most people I speak to but nothing was happening, the weight stuck for about eight months, she was tired constantly, sleeping really poorly and increasingly convinced that something was medically wrong with her. She came to me expecting a metabolic explanation of her thyroid was broken, her hormones were on their ass, we needed to test her for something but actually what was happening is she was eating far too little and she had been for ages and every time progress stalled, she cut a little bit more off, had a little bit more training, which I guess is logical and it's something that a lot of people do, but over two and a half years that had compounded into
@paulthenutritionist:genuinely like nothing, alongside a real high training load. She was absolutely exhausted, she was under recovered,
@paulthenutritionist:her training performance had completely fallen off a cliff and she stopped noticing because it kind of happened gradually. She hadn't broken her metabolism, that's not really a thing in a way that people seem to think it is but she had built a situation where her body had very little to work with and she removed pretty much everything that was working away. So what we did, I asked her to
@paulthenutritionist:eat more, that was the plan and to be honest that was the whole
@paulthenutritionist:plan and she absolutely hates it, in fact she really despised it and it took probably two phone calls of me explaining exactly why we're going to
@paulthenutritionist:do this before she agreed. I want to
@paulthenutritionist:be honest that this is probably the hardest Sal in my job because everything she'd been told was that she needed to eat less and I was saying you need to eat more. So we increased her intake gradually over six weeks and we dropped one training session and we replaced it with a recovery day and her weight went up initially, which she was really stressed about and that is the bit that makes people quit usually and it's why doing this alone is quite hard because by week two, everything says that this isn't working.
@paulthenutritionist:But at around week five,
@paulthenutritionist:her sleep improved and by around week seven, suddenly in the gym, she started to see the weights go up and then her body composition started shifting somewhere around month three and at a lower training volume and a higher intake of calories than she'd ever had before, she hit her goal weight. The lesson that you can use here is that if you've stalled and you've thought I need to just eat less and train more and if you think that that's the answer and it's the move
@paulthenutritionist:that you've already made, making it a gain is just going to make things worse. You want do is you want
@paulthenutritionist:to check your inputs before you go looking for some kind of medical explanation. How's your sleep? How's your energy? How's your sex drive? How's your hormones?
@paulthenutritionist:How's your training? And what we are looking for is recognisable patterns and usually that will guide us that it probably isn't your thyroid. Sometimes the answer is more food and often you don't want
@paulthenutritionist:to hear it but that, I'd say more often than you'd imagine, is one of
@paulthenutritionist:the solutions to people consistently not losing weight. Final client, the one who trained hard and felt like shit. So he was
@paulthenutritionist:in his theatres and he
@paulthenutritionist:trained very seriously, he ran, he lifted, had a couple of events in the calendar, he wasn't interested in weight loss at all, his complaint was that he just felt flat. He felt that his sessions used to feel fine but now they are a proper slog, that recovery between them was taking days. He was getting ill more than
@paulthenutritionist:he thought he should, had a cupboard full of supplements, like
@paulthenutritionist:probably too many. But what was actually happening was that he was fuelling like somebody who wasn't training, so he had very low carbohydrate intake because he had absorbed the idea somewhere that they were going to cause more disruption, they needed to be minimised and he had a training load that absolutely required them but he wasn't having enough then. Separately, he was eating almost nothing around his sessions, so he was training fasting in the morning and then not eating properly till lunch. So He was doing all the hard work on an empty stomach and then recovering gone not very much. The supplements were fine but most of them did nothing, one or two were kind
@paulthenutritionist:of reasonable and none of
@paulthenutritionist:them would probably compensate the actual issue but you know, it was fine. So what we did is we put carbohydrates back in specifically around training, something before, something after and we stopped those bastard sessions and we took him off most of the supplements, which saved him a shitload of money for starters but also we kept two or three with decent evidence around them, so I always like to on client plans, I I literally always will do the research around the individual and I will suggest four or five supplements that actually will benefit them specifically for them, only when they got researched to back it up. What we also did is we made him eat properly on rest days, which he had been treating as days to eat less when that isn't the case, because rest days are when the adaptation happens and if you undereat on them, you're basically undoing the hard work that he did on the other. Days. What happened was that he noticed a difference in about ten days, which is unusually fast but fuelling problems often resolve quite quickly because there's nothing structurally wrong.
@paulthenutritionist:So recovery normalised I think within about a month as well and everything just improved because his recovery improved, his sleep improved, the training improved, the output improved, all income teachers felt better. The lesson in this is that feeling flat in training is usually sensory refuelling, rather than you need some bonus supplement. It's usually not genetics, it's probably something to do with your training output. If your sessions are hard, you need carbohydrate and that is just basic sports nutrition and biology. On rest days, if you train hard, those are the days that your body is actually building something so you want to fuel it as much as possible.
@paulthenutritionist:Now here's the thing that all three of those have in common. They're three completely different people, but in every case the presenting complaint was not the problem. The evening grazing wasn't the problem, the stored scale wasn't the problem, the flat training wasn't the
@paulthenutritionist:problem, those were all kind of the things that were happening down the line, whereas the answer was something that was happening earlier. That's most of what I do if I'm honest.
@paulthenutritionist:There isn't loads of special diets, it's not the secret magic that I'm going to tell you about. I just look at the whole picture and I spot the thing that's actually causing it and then I'm the person who says, no, don't cut further at the exact moment when all of your instinct is to cut things further. All three of those people in theory probably could have worked
@paulthenutritionist:this out alone, but the information is not the secret, I have
@paulthenutritionist:just given it all of you. What's genuinely hard is you being able to see your own pattern and holding a course through two or three weeks where you
@paulthenutritionist:are feeling like it isn't working. I say
@paulthenutritionist:to clients we just got to bore on, just got to do the boring stuff, you just got to crack on, because it's that that will get us results. Here's five things to take away: number one, if you lose control at night, look at your morning and your afternoon, because the evening is usually not what the cause is here. Number two, build around the schedule that you have. Anchors that survive a bad day are going to probably beat your plan that you think is perfect, when it doesn't. Number three, if you've stalled, cutting harder is never what you need to do, because you've already tried that and look what happened.
@paulthenutritionist:Number four, if you are tired, you sleep badly, your training is going to shit and the scale is stuck in a pattern, then it's usually not a medical problem. Number five, if you are flat whilst you are
@paulthenutritionist:training, that's usually a fuelling thing and on a rest day, you need to eat, you don't need to undereat. So if you recognise yourself in any of these, then you've got a diagnosis, and hopefully you've got
@paulthenutritionist:the fix now so you can go and use it. But if you'd rather not try and guess on your own, if you'd rather not try and work out your own patterns, I am here for it. Top link in the episode description, send me a little message, it would be an absolute pleasure to help you out like I have done for these three people. Thanks for listening to this episode of No Forking Nonsense. If you would like to get your question on a future episode, email podcastnutritionistuk dot com.
@paulthenutritionist:If you would like a free meal maker resource, click the top link in the description. And don't forget to follow me on Instagram PaulTheNutritionist. Catch you next week.