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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello everyone, good morning. So today's podcast I'm going to bring you some wisdom from a book club session we did with author Donald Robertson. So he's recently launched his new book, How to Think Like Socrates, which brings to life the figure Socrates, you know, the person who essentially started off Western philosophical thought and a lot of Western thinking and thinkers have roots all the way back to him, psychotherapy. So believe it or not, the ancient Greeks did have something called therapeutic, it wasn't quite like the modern version, but for sure it was a mix of psychotherapy slash philosophy. Donald was saying it was kind of all in one thing.
Speaker 1:It wasn't that philosophy was split off from psychotherapy, it was kind of like how you help your own mind and how you become more rational and how you become more with less mental issues was also the view you have of life. It is all mixed in, the operating system you work from. So he was speaking about it and a few interesting points for me I think is useful for you all listening now. When you think of things that help you, so for example he was saying often advice given through self help books don't actually help. So if you look at people who read a lot of self help books you might find they actually haven't improved how they cope with things or they haven't improved things, they just kind of read in it and it's kind of pleasurable.
Speaker 1:Then you look at some other things like, he was mentioning people that listen to Andrew Tate who's kind of meant to be the men's self help guru to young men, but really the young men that follow him become more angry, irritated, close minded. So is listening to him actually improving these guys' lives or is it just not? So he's clearly not. And he was saying in one example he gave us, people with social anxiety disorder, they basically, what happens is when they go out, they're thinking about themselves all the time. They're very self conscious, so when they enter the room, they're thinking, how are people looking at me?
Speaker 1:How do I look to everyone here? How do I look? How do I look? How do I look? Even when they speak to people, they're thinking about viewing their own face and how they look.
Speaker 1:So it's a very self yeah, just I wouldn't necessarily say it's an ego thing, it could be part of that, but it's also just continuous self monitoring, self consciousness, and not kind of being in the room saying, oh, how can I go near you and have a good time speaking to people and have a good conversation? It's like, how am I going look good going into this room? How do I not look stupid? You know, how do I not look a thing? And he says one advice people give that actually makes it worse for these types of people is that you should take deep breaths and do some meditation or do some breath work before going into a meeting or into a room or into a social event.
Speaker 1:Now what breath work does is, or meditation, it makes you think about yourself even more. So when they basically think about yourself even more, then going in and being self conscious anyway is actually not the right advice. Even though it's the right advice in different places, it's not often the right advice. So you're just explaining that sometimes something useful might be said and might not be used in the right way, and it's important to think about that. And he went on to say about a lot of people take wisdom and wise quotes and maxims as too rigid.
Speaker 1:So they read something and they take it too literally and not actually looking at the concept it gives you. He was saying that one of the most surest ways or one of the ways you can pretty much increase your risks of having anxiety and depression is to have an end goal in your mind at all times, an end goal thinking. So when it comes to weight loss, a lot of people say, I want to be this weight. We were talking about it, I want to be this weight and I need to get this weight. Thinking in those terms is going to lead you to I'm not happy now, I'm not going to be happy until I reach that weight', that's one thing your mind is basically going to say to you.
Speaker 1:The next thing you say is well if I'm not going be happy to get there, I need to get there. It becomes all consuming, you're not even thinking of your day to day process, you're not thinking of what you should be doing to become a person that does lose weight long term, you're thinking how do I lose weight fast? And this is why people have a little goal sometimes in the app, why can't I decide in the app to lose weight quicker? Because it plays into that, it literally plays into something that's really going to harm you. So you're not meant to be thinking really of an end result you were saying.
Speaker 1:It's like one of the surest ways to have anxiety depression is to just always think of end result, end result, end result, end result. It's so far away and you may never reach there ever. The sad part is when you do reach there, you're still not happy because you think of someone else. So it's a trick, it's an illusion. Don was saying you have to be flexible with your approach to how you look at wise thinking or quotes and stuff, you can't be too rigid with ways of life.
Speaker 1:So if you read something online or you read something that's like, an example in the book is people think you should never lie and therefore if they do a white lie they're like oh my god, I'm a bad person. That's an example of taking something too rigidly because of course you should lie sometimes. Of course you should lie if you've got a kid and they need to take medicine and they think I'm not eating enough, it's got medicine. They go No, there's no medicine, no problem. Then he says, go medicine, this can help him.
Speaker 1:That's a white lie. It's a white lie if someone's in distress and just wants something to calm their mind down and you just do a white lie to help them. That's the right thing to do. Again, don't get too rigid in your approaches, and this is especially true for nutrition. Do not get rigid in, Oh my god, I should eat brown rice, not white rice.
Speaker 1:No, that's silly. That's not the point of the advice. The advice isn't to corner you into specific foods. There's so many food options, you should eat the foods you like, you should eat foods that are convenient for you also to make or also for you to eat. You don't have to tunnel vision yourself in to a small set group of foods because someone has said they're the best.
Speaker 1:Just because some foods got more nutrients and stuff in another food doesn't mean it's better for you. Why is that the case? Well you might not like the food that's got more nutrients, you don't actually consume it. So great, you've bought it, it's been in your fridge, you haven't eaten it. You what I mean?
Speaker 1:But you think oh I'm going to change my lifestyle so much, it's going to be in this rigid plan, I'm going to do meal plans and this and that' And you don't. You don't stick to it, you know you don't. This is what I find fascinating about this whole nutrition space is there's people that talk about eating, they talk about minute details, things that really don't matter unless the fundamentals are in place anyway. And then they're talking as if every human being does want, or at least has the capability to eat fresh farmers market food all the time. Everything's cooked from fresh every single day.
Speaker 1:This is done, this is done, this is done. And if you were to ask these athletes and these people saying this thing as well, they don't do it themselves. Do you know how we know? Because we all are human beings and we've got these flaws or I don't know if you call it flaws, just how we are, how the brain works. We all know.
Speaker 1:You speak to athletes that eat McDonald's. Okay? You speak to these high performance coaches and no, no, they don't wake up every single day and have this crazy routine. It's not a lifestyle that people actually live, but in the online world this delusion is that it's possible to live that way and if you don't it's a failure. It's a rigid approach, missing the point.
Speaker 1:The point of the whole thing about nutrition is that we should be aware that there's a few fundamental things that we need to think about when it comes to our nutrition and weight loss and stuff like that. First of all, when it comes to weight loss, we need an energy deficit. We measure energy through the unit of measurement called calories. I don't care if it's called calories, energy, whatever stupid word you want to use, it's just a unit of measurement of energy. And we measure energy from food, from the macronutrients, and we can find it out and they do it for all foods.
Speaker 1:So you find out the energy of food. If you eat less energy than you, you burn every day, you're gonna use your fat stores and potentially other tissues to to replace that energy that's not there, and then you're gonna lose those fat cells are gonna shrink, and potentially muscle is gonna be lost or whatever in the process. That is a That's the world of it. It's not like a rigid kind of is like how am going explain it? You can live within that world however you want.
Speaker 1:So you can eat the perfect diet in your eyes, perfect in know, it doesn't exist, but you can eat the perfect farmer's market food, you can eat McDonald's, you can eat a mix of both, you can do whatever you want. But you abide by the energy concept and you're either going to lose, maintain or gain. That's kind of the three things. That's how you operate in. It's up to you how many more steps you want to go, but you don't have to go down to such a minute step that you are only eating specific foods for weight loss because you don't need to.
Speaker 1:When it comes to then looking at things like your general health as well, so because I want to lose weight, I want to lose weight, energy deficit, I want to maintain muscle mass, I need to hit the protein target, that's another one. But you can have your protein sources from wherever you want. Whatever protein source you want, have it whatever you want. Any time of day, just have the protein in. Okay?
Speaker 1:That's it. Some proteins have got better, amino acid profiles, but again, does it really matter for us for us, you know, average Lemmings listening, all of us, me, you're all included, we're we're not Olympic athletes, you know, we're not trying to we're not gonna lose by naught by naught one second in a in a race that there could have been a difference between my nutrition per perhaps. We're You trying to manage our weight, we're trying to get on with our lives, enjoy ourselves, live a healthy lifestyle, be a healthy person, be a good role model for people around us, pretty much what we want to be doing, right, that's pretty much it. I wouldn't say that, we need to be going it too deep. But then it comes to your own individual stuff, this is flexibility.
Speaker 1:A lot of people say this food is bad for my gut, this food is bad for me, maybe it is bad for them but it doesn't mean it's bad for you. Again, it's not rigid, just because someone says oh this food can be an upset stomach, maybe it doesn't for you. This is trial and error. Again, Donald was mentioning this on the talk. He was saying you need more trial and error, you need more flexibility.
Speaker 1:Rigidity doesn't really help you, it makes things worse. Rigidity in food choices increases your chance of a higher BMI, increases anxiety, increases the chance of people with depression. Because it's rigid. It's the same in food, it's the same if you've a rigid approach to your work, rigid approach to your relationships, rigid approach to anything in your life. If you are rigid, you're likely going to have adverse effects from the rigidity.
Speaker 1:Know, talk about this in philosophical sense, Bruce Lee talked about it, the Zen masters talked about it, the Buddhism's talked about it. You want to be the bamboo, The bamboo doesn't break in high winds, but the oak tree which is way bigger and rigid and stiff than the bamboo, high winds can break it and it crashes down. But the bamboo, small little bamboo but flexible, goes with the wind. The ball creak hard, it doesn't and therefore it breaks. So this mindset just reinforced after speaking to Donald.
Speaker 1:Like he's read and researched Socrates, the Socratic method, stoicism, he's a psychotherapist, CBT, been in the game for years. For him to come out and say, 'Listen, flexible approach, flexible approach'. This is what the research says as well, we have to take it seriously. If you start seeing that someone's making you think too rigid about things and your food choices are becoming rigid and you start panicking and worrying about that you've had an orange and not a banana and brown rice not white rice, sorry white rice not brown rice, you've had a McDonald's burger, you shut in the bar, oh my god I'm going to die. No.
Speaker 1:You really need to step in and then start questioning yourself and this is what Socrates was all about. You start questioning things and you start seeing the contradictions. Need to start asking yourself the right questions. An example of this is you wake up in the morning, you're three pounds heavier, you hit your targets yesterday, it's water weight, put it away. Oh my god, catastrophize, I've gained fat.
Speaker 1:Oh my god, gained fat. Look, if you did the simple exercise of going, Did I hit my targets yesterday? Yeah, okay, My weight's gone up this morning. Did I eat thousands, thousands, thousands calories? I say, no.
Speaker 1:Okay. Is my body 60% water and fluctuations is very normal? Yeah. Okay. No problem.
Speaker 1:I walk out the door. It doesn't bother me. This is how we got to do it. This is how we got to do it. But yeah, he was mentioning a few other things as well about the ancient world was probably more into talking about philosophies of life.
Speaker 1:You could pick a specific philosophy of life. You could pick, I want to be in the Stoicism school, which is about the characteristics and ethics. I want to be a cynic, which I question everything. I'm sceptic, you know, I'm sceptical about things. I want to be in the philosophy school that thinks maximising pleasure is what the life, goal of life is.
Speaker 1:And, things like this, there's different schools and stuff you could go to, and it's alien to us today. We don't really have that today. We wake up, we go to school, we leave school, we go to university, or if we don't go to university straight to work or whatever, and we never think about what operating system we work from, philosophical operating system, your core beliefs and stuff like that. Again, we talk about this in health and fitness. You think, what's this got to do with weight loss and weight management and health and fitness?
Speaker 1:It's got everything to do with it. It's got everything to do with it. It's all encompassing, right? You can't think about your weight management journey without thinking about what you think of yourself, your self knowledge, how you deal with emotions because emotional eating is a big thing, like it all plays into it. And Donald was saying as well, you know, the book that the only true knowledge is self knowledge.
Speaker 1:The problem is we've got a lot of blind spots about ourselves. So you referenced a study and it showed that when you give advice to someone above relationships, the advice is usually objective. It's not you. You're seeing it clearly and you give good advice. But when it comes to ourselves, because we're biased, we can't give ourselves the same advice.
Speaker 1:And back in the day, someone would have come to you, pulled you aside, and said, hey. Listen, mate, Scott. You are taking the piss here, buddy. Your character traits here. You know?
Speaker 1:What are you doing? Today, maybe it's not as, you know, it's maybe seen in a bad way now or like people pay therapists to do it. Therapists should essentially do that for you, help you bring those out, those contradictions and how you see yourself. And ultimately what does it come down to? What does it come down to if I'm thinking of the end goal is weight loss, that's going increase my chance of being anxious and depressed about stuff because end result, end result, end result, but I never get happy when I reach the end result, that's the illusion.
Speaker 1:What is the actual solution and what's the path I should go down? And all of these philosophical schools, most of them agreed, and especially Socrates and stuff, it was to focus on your own character. It was about saying I want to be the type of character that when the things come in my life, when these things happen, I can deal with them, and I'm going to live one day at a time. Donald was saying one day at a time, one step at a time. There's a reason this podcast is called One Day at a Time.
Speaker 1:There's a reason it's ancient wisdom. There's a reason why this one step at a time approach I'm talking about, I want to be a healthy person today, therefore I'm going to live and my character today is going to be healthy. I'm going to go for my walks, I'm going to try and eat the best foods I can for myself, not just in terms of nutrient quality, but there'll be things you learn in trial and error. Well, if I ate too many grapes, it'll be bad stomach, so I won't eat too many grapes. That's one for me.
Speaker 1:I love grapes, but when I ate too many, my stomach's killing me. So then it puts me out of action for two hours. It's not probably the best for me. But there's things that go. So you think of the character you want to be, and you can do that today.
Speaker 1:You don't have to wait twelve months to reach your weight loss goal. You can say, 'Today I'm going to live the life of a person that I value, that the values I want to live by. Moderation, the four virtues in Stoicism and Socrates' moderation. Moderation in my spending, moderation in my eating, moderation in my drinking, you know, moderation in work. Courage is another one.
Speaker 1:Doing the right thing. Am I gonna do the right thing today? Am I gonna be a coward? Am I gonna do the right thing when actually I should have stood up for that person and said something? Or I should have, you know, put myself first and not let people walk over me.
Speaker 1:Today, I live with courage today. The other one's wisdom, doing the right thing, living wisely. You've got to earn this through trial and error. Okay? Sometimes you don't fight today, sometimes you do.
Speaker 1:You know? It's about living today with the best, you know, using the tools you have. You've got courage, you've got wisdom, moderation, and you've got justice as well. Again, linking into doing the right thing, being fair. These things, looking at how you and when you live through those, and it doesn't have to be those four, right?
Speaker 1:When you live day to day, living up to a character, the characteristics you want, you are fulfilling yourself daily, and only today you have anyway. You can only be alive today, you can only act today. So therefore you are living fulfilling today. So like Donald was saying, if you get hit by a bus, you mention it many times, you get hit by a bus tomorrow, you've managed to live the virtues, the characteristics you want to be today. If you don't have to wait twelve months to be the weight, you have to be to be happy.
Speaker 1:So really, it's about what can you do today from now to bedtime to be the person you really want to be. Okay? And that's the real thing. And then as a byproduct of that, you will have less body fat, you will have a better, you'll be fitter and you'll be walking more, you'll have better mental health, you'll have better tools, you'll have a better mind, you'll be sharper. All of those things will come as a side effect of working on your character day to day, and that's exciting because you get to work on every day.
Speaker 1:No matter if you can go to the gym or not, no matter if you've had to go to a work party and you've consumed way too many calories, you get the chance to work on moderating your thoughts and not catastrophizing. You don't wanna be a person that loses their head easily because what does that say about you? How does your kids see that when you lose your head over every single small thing? How does that pass on to them when they stress over small things? Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:So the wisdom really boils down to that. The way to live is to live through your character, and you can decide today to be the character you genuinely wanna be, and that's amazing. So crack on with your day, flexibly, don't be too rigid about things, don't panic if you haven't had the perfect two hour ice bath morning blah blah blah nonsense. Don't panic if you had a cookie. Enjoy it.
Speaker 1:Don't worry. Don't panic if you haven't eaten the freshest vegetables in the world. Focus on the big things and the fundamentals, and then spend the rest of your day being the type of person you want to be, and You're going to be a lot happier from now. And don't think too much about your weight all the time. I know weight loss is a goal and we ask the numbers and we do the daily weigh ins together, weekly average, it's data collection, you're a scientist.
Speaker 1:But let go of the end result. Enjoy day to day steps and it'll be a lot easier for you, especially coming up to Christmas and stuff like that. Come on, ease off, ease off and enjoy. See you back here tomorrow.