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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. Hello. Good morning, everyone, or good evening wherever you are in the world. Hope you're well. And remember, one day at a time.
Speaker 1:So if yesterday or the last week or whatever has not been where you wanted to be, today's a new day. So remind yourself of that. Now today is a cautionary tale because Nicolas came into the group a few days ago and said, hey. I haven't been tracking for ages. Head has been in the shed.
Speaker 1:I have managed to put on put the eight kilos lost back on after coming off Ozempic, which is a weight loss medication. Sure you've heard of it on before. And I've reduced my calories to what I thought was okay and not taking your advice. Are you able to assist in giving me the appropriate calories again, please? I will listen this time.
Speaker 1:Just so desperate. If you can help, then thank you. So chat, chat, chat. Nikola mentions no idea. I was trying to do an eighteen hour fast at the time whilst taking Ozempic.
Speaker 1:I'm now officially getting Mounjaro from the GP. Problem, I can and then she says, I just can never get my head around that I'm allowed so many calories, and I know I need to stop fearing them. Just so alien to me. So I send a voice note back to help, And she says, thank you so much for taking the time to provide me with a voice message. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Makes much more sense. You've explained it, and this is exactly what's happened. My muscle mass has definitely gone down after an assessment. And I just had at the gym, which is too frightened to go back to, and their advice is so different, low calories, blah, blah, blah, blah. So what is the cautionary tale here?
Speaker 1:So a lot of you guys wanna lose weight. A lot of you get hit by ads. A lot of you get hit by influencers. Do this. Do this.
Speaker 1:800 calories, you know, super low calories, fast in all this stuff because you want to get rid of that weight so fast. And you think if you can go more extreme, you're going to lose the weight quicker. And the first mistake is thinking that because we've got research behind this, we've got anecdotal evidence, we've got your own experience probably tells you this. The more times you try and crash diet, the more the longer you're gonna take to lose weight. The chances are the more the more crash diet you do, the more likely it is you're gonna try to lose weight all your life.
Speaker 1:That's what a survey I did on 1,800 people that gone to slimming clubs showed that there's people in their sixties and seventies who've been trying to lose weight until since their twenties, and we go to slimming clubs back and forth. So the answer is never these crash diets. You have to change your lifestyle. You have to change it because your lifestyle is what led you to where you are today. Now the first point is I can't get my head around the calories being too high.
Speaker 1:It's an often common concern. The fact is for you to be the weight you are today, you would have been consuming far more calories than the app would give you. That's the fact you have to accept because it is the laws of thermodynamics. It's physics. It's you can't it's impossible for you to be the abnormally to this.
Speaker 1:What none of us the energy system, all of this stuff, it applies to us. Now a lot of people will say, well, it's not a closed energy system, the body. So how does it work? Obviously, not perfect system. The efficiencies of things and energy used for this and that's not it's not perfect.
Speaker 1:It's hard to track perfectly, but it's still an energy system where if you consume too much energy, your body will use it for other processes such as maybe building lean muscle mass tissue, but for sure will store it away as fat mass. We know this happens because all of you right now can feel a bit of fat mass, subcutaneous fat. You all go fat. You've gone up and down over your life. So you know your body stores extra energy away.
Speaker 1:Right? It only does that if you give it too much energy, more than it needs. So we have to accept that even though the app has given me calorie targets I'm not familiar with because I've been told to eat a thousand calories a day, you have to tell yourself that is a false assumption. Just because you've been seeing 1,000 calories a day, 800 calorie fast, standard calorie fast, diet fasting, 1,200 calories in MyFitnessPal. Just because you've seen something a lot doesn't mean it's right.
Speaker 1:And really, you know, there's really a study on this that shows the more times you will get shown something, some data, the more chances you are gonna believe it even if it's fake news. And this is why there and was a study actually on fake news and propaganda and kind of conspiracies. It's like you tell someone in that more and more, you tell someone enough times, even if they think it's wrong on the first instance, they'll start actually believing this right if they hear it so many times. So we have to be aware, like the Stoics would say, you have to guard the mind, man. That's the most important thing.
Speaker 1:You let someone come in and just stir you up. You wouldn't even let someone steal £1 from you, but you let someone steal your mind every day. Think about that now. It's a bit crazy when you think about it. We shouldn't let someone come in and disturb us that easily and give us these false facts and we just run off of them.
Speaker 1:So that's the first thing. The calorie target you're given, you will be in a calorie deficit. Fact. And if you're not, or you will be in a deficit, but if you're not in a deficit that's large enough to see some progress at a rate we need, it will be automatically changed. So you don't have to worry about it.
Speaker 1:So back to the cautionary tales, empic weight loss drugs. What do they do? Hey, what do they do? These weight loss drugs. Now they're not magic like fat blasters.
Speaker 1:You don't inject them and your felt melts away or runs away screaming. Oh my God. I'm just saying picks in my body. Gonna put doesn't work that way. They are appetite suppressants.
Speaker 1:There's two ways for you to get into an energy deficit. You either put less energy in the system or you keep the same energy coming in the system, but you have to vastly increase the energy the system uses so that it uses more energy than you put in. The second option of using more energy, so more and more steps, and more workouts isn't something that's sustainable for us because you have to do a lot of stuff to burn a certain amount of calories. So you've seen the messaging before, like it takes you like sixty minutes to run off like a Mars bar or something, you know, the equivalent calories. And that's kind of that's kind of how it is.
Speaker 1:Right? So you have to make sure that the answer really isn't in increasing energy expenditure, even though we should aim to do this through steps and general movement for sure because it does help a lot. We can get that up a significant amount. The main factor, which we've known for decades, is it is easier and more manageable for us to start with the energy in equation, the food we eat, the energy we get from food. If we can decrease this, we can make it easier to be in a calorie deficit, and then we're gonna lose fat.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, or lose weight because you're a smoker protein yet. So a lot of these weight loss drugs are targeted towards the appetite side. They reduce your appetite. Peptide reduces your appetite.
Speaker 1:It slows gastric emptying as well so you feel fuller for longer. Your appetite goes way down. And for most people, it goes down enough that they automatically end up eating so little that they are in a calorie deficit even without tracking. Now some people will say intuitive eating and this and that's great, and that's fine enough to track, right? But the danger we have with these drugs is they don't create more muscle loss than if you had the same diet without them.
Speaker 1:So if you had if you were on the same calories and protein on Ozempic or off Ozempic, and you were super low, you'd lose the same amount of weight, the same amount of muscle if your protein was low. Okay. So they don't actually enhance if you were to match the calories and protein. Yeah. That's super important here because it means you can get the same results if you could without them.
Speaker 1:But it's tricky. It's difficult because the severity of the deficit people go into is quite high. We're looking at one thousand one thousand two hundred calories deficit a day that people end up being in as a base, and they're not hungry. You know, that's magic, really. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:You think about it. The food noise is gone as they say. So she said, wow. I I can I can easily eat in a calorie deficit? So the mistake Nicola made while she's saying, I want Ozempic now.
Speaker 1:I don't need to bother with lifestyle changes. I don't need to bother with having wanting to know what my calorie intake is or my protein intake is. I don't need to do that because Ozempic is gonna fix me. It doesn't fix you. What Ozempic does and these other weight loss drugs do is they give you the chance to think clearly and some control over your eating so you can actually make the lifestyle changes that are needed.
Speaker 1:Let that sink in for a second. You have to do the lifestyle changes. They enable you to do it. It's like starting a business. And so starting a business without a drug, like let's say Ozempic, Now it's a business drug.
Speaker 1:So without Ozempic, you start a business, it's hard. You got no money, you got no funding, you need to get it off the floor. Door to door sales, you're knocking people on the doors, you're going around cold calling people, you're going on social media grinding away, you've got no money to hire people, it's all your own graft. And it's a squeeze and you're not you're not getting any return from it. Okay?
Speaker 1:You could over time still work on it, still work. And then you build a system that works, which obviously a lot of people do because not everyone starts their money. Or you take the Ozempic business drug and it gives you a lot of funding, gives you a lot of space, it gives you someone to maybe do some other jobs. You hire a few people, and now you're able to think clearly. And instead of you being in the trenches every day talking to customers, getting so told no, no, no, can think about the bigger picture of the business and where you wanted to go, the product strategy, customer service, all that type of good stuff that you need to focus on for the business to be successful.
Speaker 1:But if you're a one man show, and you're really struggling with growing and you can't get people, you're bogged down in those details, and you maybe can't think of the bigger picture. And that's a analogy to essentially when you take Ozempic. Yes. If you don't take it, a lot of you got a lot of food noise, you're struggling. You're in the trenches, you're fighting food every day, you're eating snacks, la la la.
Speaker 1:And then when you're on those epic, that goes, and you've got like a few employees helping you out. You know what I mean? You got a few employees helping you. It's all chilled down. And now you've got the vision.
Speaker 1:Where do I wanna go? I mean, no problem for me now. My appetite is no problem for me. So maybe now I can look at my lifestyle. My hunger is not super strong, but I still wanna be eating foods that are good for me.
Speaker 1:I still wanna be able to enjoy the foods I love and stuff as well. I still wanna have this lifestyle where I can go out and eat food and not beat myself up and look at my relationship with food. Why am I labeling foods good and bad? They're not inherently good or bad, just different nutritional comp compositions. Doesn't make it good or bad.
Speaker 1:Gummy bears or, you know, sugary sweets might you think it bad sitting down on couch watching TV, but a lot of sports people, rugby players, endurance athletes will have sugary sweets before enduring runs for that energy. So it's good for them. You And can say it's bad for you. So it's neither. It's neutral.
Speaker 1:It depends on the purpose and use use of it. So that's what it does, guys. You have to change your lifestyle. Now, if you can change your lifestyle on these drugs and then you come off them, you might get a huge spike in your appetite going up. Now the main factor and this is what happened to Nicole.
Speaker 1:The main thing that happened here was didn't track calories, didn't track protein, probably didn't do any weight lifting or resistance training. Eight kilograms lost rapidly. But as she confirmed, muscle was lost. Right? Muscle was lost.
Speaker 1:You do not want to lose muscle, guys. That is like having. It's like you have a 100 gold coins, and I come up to you and go, do wanna trade? And you said, what? Like, give me an offer.
Speaker 1:I say, well, I'll trade you. I'll give you 90 gold coins and 10 silver coins for your 100 gold coins. And you go, yeah, great deal. Here you go. What an idiot.
Speaker 1:What are doing? What are you giving away 10 gold coins, silver coins? But that's what you're doing every time you're going crash diets and low protein and not doing anything about it. You are giving away your gold coins for silver. You're fat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can lose you know, you can lose fat, but you're losing the gold. You're losing the muscle. Muscle is essential. It's not muscle for bodybuilding. It's not muscle to look like Al Schwarzenegger.
Speaker 1:That's not what I'm on about. It's just muscle to function, to move your body, strength, resilience, cognition, all of this comes together. You having strong healthy muscles, not bodybuilder, forget that, just strong healthy muscles that are not deteriorating is so important, especially as you age. So if you were to lose it, it's hard to get it back. Now what happens when the body loses muscle?
Speaker 1:Luckily, there's an experiment done during World War II. Now this experiment during World War II would never be able to replicate today. There's no way. But what they did was they wanted to replicate what it would be like to be in a concentration camp and what it would do to people. Imagine.
Speaker 1:Yes, sign me up. I'll find out. What happened? So they lost a lot of weight, obviously turned to skin and bones, lost a lot of muscle mass. What happened when they told them?
Speaker 1:So after this, it was a brilliantly designed study. After the study finished, they had him on a controlled diet. It didn't let him go off, you know, go, But they did eventually. And they said, now is the time you can go and eat whatever you want. Now, when they went to eat whatever they wanted, they tracked their body weight and everything.
Speaker 1:Their hunger levels were so high, it didn't start dropping to normalize until they regained the muscle they lost. But the problem was by the time they regained the muscle from all the overeating they did, their body fat percentage was increased by a 100180%. So when you think about that for a second, it's huge. So that's what's happening is that you call it lose eight kilograms, you put 80 kilograms back on, like it probably would have started gaining ten, twelve, 14 kilograms back on just to get back to the same rate of muscle, but then you've gained four or five kilograms of fat on top. This happens very, very common.
Speaker 1:It's very, very frequent to happen. So the more you crash diet, the more muscle you're probably gonna lose, you get back to the same weight, but your body fat percentage is higher. So the goal of all of this is to lose fat. When we say weight loss, what we mean is fat loss. I wish it was just most common to say fat loss.
Speaker 1:We don't want to lose muscle, man. Like, that's why some the scale is useful, obviously, long term trends, and it's easy because we can get up in the morning, go toilet, get on the scales, we can get a read and it's accurate, we can use as a trend. But if you start going to the gym, for example, start eating higher protein, then you might not lose total weight for a while because you gain a bit of muscle and you're losing fat. So yeah, you might be the same weight, but you look different. You lost inches.
Speaker 1:This is very common. So it was all common. That's why you don't need to panic. But that's why our algorithm in the app is clever. It do make sure it detects fat loss.
Speaker 1:That's why it doesn't. It's not quick to make changes just because your weight hasn't dropped because it knows this is not always an issue. Okay, because we don't, we're not stupid around here. We know we're aiming for fat loss, not weight loss, but we got to calm you down first, chill out about it. So to wrap all of this up, and again, I did a podcast about when I met the Cambridge University experts doing clinical trials, and they were talking about their concern about muscle loss and weight loss drugs is, no judgment whatever on these drugs if you end up on them, please, dear God.
Speaker 1:And there's another member that was talking about trying to convince his sister, I believe, to get on on par just to log her calories and protein and make sure that she's doing lifestyle changes as well, and she's not interested. It's like, guys, if you're not going to do the lifestyle changes and you're given a chance to do it, it's like having to go and start your own business. Here's a huge amount of funding, all the help you need, build a system that works, build the right system for the business. Now I'm right. I'll use the money, get those customers, won't care about it, make money, and I'll just it'll all work out.
Speaker 1:When that funding runs out, what's gonna happen? Down. You're going down. You're going down, down, down to hell. It's gone.
Speaker 1:It's over. And you start thinking, man, I wish I was more wise when I had that money and support and help. But that's where you're getting with these drugs. If you're going on them, you're getting a lot of help and support with them. And you will be very unwise not to use this time to change your lifestyle because you have to change it at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:Whatever you've been doing, the accumulation of your lifestyle is who you are today. Okay? You can look at your lifestyle and go, that equals me today. For me to change me today in the future, right, I'd have to look back and go, my lifestyle was changed. There's no change if you don't change.
Speaker 1:It's just a simple fact. So what lifestyle can you lead that is a balance of not overeating consistently, being more active with your steps, more steps is is fundamental. If you're not doing any workouts, you gotta be getting more steps in. Then you gotta start looking at strengthening the body, strengthening the muscles, and it also strengthens the mind. One or two workouts a week would be great to add into your system over time.
Speaker 1:Your protein's gotta be higher. It's gotta be higher. We know now research data, higher protein has to be in there. You've to enjoy the process. You've got to not be psychologically trapped in good and bad.
Speaker 1:You can't be psychologically trapped in thinking that you have to track every single data point and thing and worry about everything and jump on different bandwagons. I just do the fundamentals. When you look back and you've done the fundamentals for three years, your lifestyle is moderation. Not like every day, but like some days are higher, some days are lower. But overall, I've been quite moderate.
Speaker 1:I haven't been crazy insane for weeks and weeks on end and months and months on end. I've been good to my steps. I've been walking more than I have been before. I began outside. I've been hitting my protein.
Speaker 1:This type of lifestyle you build will also help you psychologically and you start thinking all the free time I've now saved from worrying. Oh my God. The free time that you get back from not worrying about every thousand diets you see, focusing on fundamentals and getting on with your life. So social health is important. Working on your career, your job, your kids, whatever it is you you're prioritizing to be able to put energy back into that is huge.
Speaker 1:When you look back in a few years and you've done these basics and you've had this time and energy and you've changed this way, this new lifestyle isn't something you want to do temporarily. You live and breathe this new amazing lifestyle you have, but it's not an extreme one. It's not an extreme one. A lot of people go on the path of like thinking they got to work out six times a week and they got to go super low calories forever. No, no, no.
Speaker 1:You lose the weight. You go to maintenance phase. You find the buffers on your happy with. You make sure you're still tracking certain elements. Sometimes you go on and off, you still you still gonna do those things.
Speaker 1:You're still gonna walk. You're still gonna you're gonna enjoy your walks. You're gonna listen to podcasts, whether it's this one or new ones, audiobooks or just music you love. You're gonna enjoy the steps. And if you have kids, you're gonna enjoy showing them.
Speaker 1:Look, this is amazing. We're gonna go get steps in. Maybe you find a fitness class local to you and you meet the new community and you love it there and you meet the instructors and other people and you get into that once or twice a week and it ticks two boxes, workout and social. I do jujitsu down the road. My godson Leo are taken.
Speaker 1:Now his little friend from nursery is coming as well. I'm seeing them play is amazing. I'm sweet to Ryan and the other parents. They're like, the community is amazing. Come down.
Speaker 1:You're having so nice. Everyone's having a laugh. Add so much to your life. Finding something like that adds so much to your life. I'm gonna leave it on that.
Speaker 1:So the cautionary tale is if you're gonna do anything to lose weight, and I think it's meth, whatever, don't do that. But if you're gonna do these things, make sure you change your lifestyle or you risk losing your muscle, and then you're back to square one. So please, please, please listen to that. Hit the fundamentals. Get on with your life and live one day at a time.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to this extra long podcast for today. But I thought it was warranted. And guys, thank you as always. Any questions, let me know. And there's a new AI clone of myself available for you guys to talk to.
Speaker 1:It will reply as me trained on the podcast I've done. So hopefully it's actually quite accurate. Yeah. Let me know how it goes. But thanks everyone.
Speaker 1:See you soon.