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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. Welcome back to the One Day at a Time podcast. No studies today, but a very important question from one of the members. And let me just recall the question. I exercise twice per week for about one hour.
Speaker 1:I also play tennis at least one per week, so three hours a week, say. But I'm having trouble getting my steps in because I'm always short on time during the day because I work. I work in a desk job and I just am struggling to fit any other time to get steps in because I either have to work, cook or sleep. And there's just I've tried, there's just no other time to fit more steps in. Should I switch one of my strength sessions to a cardio running session to increase steps or should I keep as two strength sessions two one hour strength sessions?
Speaker 1:First thing here, guys, rule of thumb, never substitute a strength session for a cardio session. And here's why. Your strength sessions actually still work your cardiovascular system, especially if you're doing weights that are challenging. So you're going to take, say, thirty to sixty seconds to do a set, you're going to get out of breath a bit, if you're pushing it, and you have a little break, and you go again. And there's studies showing that doing weights actually has nearly similar impact on the cardiovascular system as cardio specific workouts.
Speaker 1:Obviously, both combined is the best. So, never substitute strength and resistance training also helps you preserve muscle is the strongest signal you can give to your body to maintain or gain muscle mass. And this is important for functional strength. This is important for your mind as you get older, your cognition, and holding on to muscle is going make it a lot easier for you to maintain your fat loss, right? That's the first thing.
Speaker 1:The second thing is, what's your step target? Is it too high? Is it too low? Like what is it? And you can't reach your step target?
Speaker 1:Do you have to reach your step target? Is it realistic? The podcast I mentioned the other day, the ultimate podcast on steps, have a listen. If you're doing at least six seven thousand steps a day, if you're 60, and then if you're 60, you're doing like 8,000 plus a day, Doing more than that isn't required for the health benefits of steps, which is the main thing for us. If you want to burn more calories, and you want to kind of be more active, fine.
Speaker 1:But make sure you're wearing like a watch so you can actually track the steps you do about in about the kitchen, upstairs and stuff, not just when your phone is on you. So that's another thing. So that's what I said, stick to strength, don't try and be hard on yourself. Strength, calories, protein in the right place is amazing for your health. She mentions she has a standing desk when you get steps in.
Speaker 1:Look, if you've got a standing desk and you're walking during your work hours, you should be getting your steps in because your step target is literally forty to sixty minutes of walking a day if you were to time it. So if you've got a standing desk, and you can actually walk for one hour a day whilst you're doing your meetings, you're easily going to smash your steps target easy. So you could be like marching on the spot on a standing desk if you wanted to. I mean, are things you can add in if you want, or put a timer on every twenty minutes to do five minutes of stepping. And there's a study I said I wasn't going to mention studies, but here we go.
Speaker 1:There was a study on it's called exercise snacks, which means like mini exercises every hour as a desk worker, and it showed that cognition was improved, fatigue went down, general alertness was much better. And this is just from doing five minutes of walking every sixty minutes of seating. So you can do something like that. Every hour, you can just maybe just step on the spot, do some lunges, step, know, you might look crazy in your office, but, you know, it's part of the game, I suppose. And you can do that, and that'd be awesome for you.
Speaker 1:So you can try something like that. And then difficult because my walk to work is forty minutes. If I were to do that every day, then I'm back, I would lose someone and have to take it out somewhere else, la la la. Then I mentioned, look, sounds like you're already doing a fantastic job, everything, obviously. Should I then add an extra session, an extra cardio session, so run once per week?
Speaker 1:Addition isn't the answer sometimes. You can add via subtraction. Classic Bruce Lee quote, addition via subtraction, instead of adding stuff all the time, he thought, why don't we subtract what is not doing good for us? And then that gives us more to our life. Add in more workouts all the time to try and the goal, I suppose, is weight loss isn't the answer.
Speaker 1:It's not the answer. If you're already doing two strength workouts a week, and you're playing tennis, and for you listening, that could be two strength workouts a week, long walks, dance class, wherever, you're doing enough. Adding in more exercise isn't going to solve the problem you're trying to fix, which is you want to lose fat. If you do more exercise than that, probably diminishing returns in terms of like energy burn for sure. You might get tired, and then you might actually move less, so your calorie burn might actually go down.
Speaker 1:And you think the answer lies in that and the answer is actually in your intake of energy through what we measure calories. You need to refocus more on your calories in because that's the answer. And increasing your protein, not trying to outwork that. It's very, very difficult, near impossible to do that. So don't try and always add stuff.
Speaker 1:You're adding more stress to your body. And then she goes on to say, I feel a bit overwhelmed and also really fixated on doing everything correctly. I feel guilty when I don't do it correctly. I feel like no matter what I do, I just feel bad for not doing something. I just feel a bit hyper fixated.
Speaker 1:This is classic. When we start the program, and I posted a screenshot yesterday of one of the members mentioning after thirty years, I'm actually going read it out because I think it's so important, thirty years of kind of conditioning in diet culture, conditioning in basically all sorts of silly plans, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let me read it out to you. This is the first time in thirty years that I've been brutally honest for my food and drink consumption because I can believe there's no judgment on me. It's taken me over two weeks to start getting my head around being honest as the way forward realistically for me.
Speaker 1:I've been dieting for over thirty years, holding myself up as a failure to every diet regime out there and getting nowhere fast. Actually, that isn't true. I've actually doubled my weight in the last three decades. Very sad, but also true. I was scared of my high calorie target initially, but I realized now that very low calorie diets aren't realistic and put me into general panic mode, which is never sustainable.
Speaker 1:This is genuinely the first time in so long that I've not seen foods as good or bad, and I find this so helpful and realistic. Thanks, Scott, for making me believe I'm not actually a failure. I was trying to keep to an unsustainable lifestyle before finding PowerPow. And then another mention, I feel like there's two Scott's no BS, a simple, honest, evidence based approach. I love it.
Speaker 1:I came for the app and it's changing me after forty years of yo yo dieting. Someone else mentions, I can totally relate. I feel like a light bulb has been switched on. Everything makes so much sense with this app. I'm realizing how ridiculous it was in the past to try and lose weight with these mega low calories.
Speaker 1:I've not been hungry once. If anything, I've struggled to get all the food in and much protein. I feel satisfied for hours rather than constantly peckish. And thanks, Scott, your podcasts are absolutely chef's kiss. Amazing.
Speaker 1:Thanks, guys. I appreciate that. But you're doing all good work. So what do we learn from those messages? I'm coming back to this one about being hyper fixated on perfection.
Speaker 1:Perfectionism is never good. I mean, I don't know any part of life that if you're a perfectionist that's helping you, it's going to hold you back. One of the main things it causes is actually procrastination because you think if you're not going to do it perfect, what's the point? You're not perfect. You know, a classic stoic quote by Epictetus two thousand years ago, this genius of a man was a former slave, became a teacher, and he said, All horses become stallions.
Speaker 1:Do all dogs become greyhounds? You know, does everything become the best? So do not stop, do not quit something just because you're not going to be the best at it. If we lived in a world where you only can be the best, the stallion, you can only be the grey on the fastest dog race winner, you can only be a winner, can only be number one, unless there's no point. What world is that?
Speaker 1:It doesn't exist. And even the winners, they lose. Even the winners in training, they have maybe 70% of the training is good, 20% sucks, 10% they quit, they don't do it, they give up for a bit, or they just whatever injuries, it could be anything. So when we're talking about all of these things, we put these huge expectations on ourselves to be perfect, to do the perfect plan, because you've seen online everyone does perfect plans apparently, which is nonsense, by the way. All of these people claiming perfect lifestyles, perfect eating, they are lying to you.
Speaker 1:You are a human being. I'm a human being. We know what we're like. We know we're like greedy. We know we're anxious.
Speaker 1:We know we tend to eat a bit more than we want sometimes. We know that if have a few drinks, we drink a bit more than we want sometimes, we know sometimes we lay in too long on weekends, we know sometimes we should have gone to the gym and we didn't, we know sometimes we should have had that meal that we actually prepped, was, you know, veggies and stuff, we've actually felt like having an ice cream instead of watching TV. We've all been there. That's the reality of who we are as humans. So when someone comes along and says, Hey, I'm perfect, follow my plan, the chances of actually following our plan perfectly is quite slim.
Speaker 1:Then you think people actually do that, and then you think you've got to be like that. So you create this illusion basically of yourself, you create an illusionary image of perfection, you compare yourself all the time to that and because you never reach that illusionary image of perfection, it stresses you out. Does that make sense? So the key thing here is that that image needs to go. There is no image to get to, there is no perfect state to get to.
Speaker 1:You have to work from what you have right now, which is we are, as human beings, faulty. We just have to do our best every day and we start here. And if we start close, if we start here, we can get very far. But if we start with we got to be perfect, we don't get anywhere because it doesn't exist, if that makes sense. So I think in regards to questioning on this one is that this person is trying to be perfect.
Speaker 1:They're trying to be living to an unrealistic lifestyle. They're trying to do everything bang on and because they're not perfect, they feel very stressed and anxious and they never feel good enough. And that's because they're in a constant state of comparison basically. And that's really what we're trying to get out being a science experiment is like, we're trying to look at ourselves objectively like a scientist. We're trying to collect data and actually be interested and intrigued by it, not like always thinking things are bad or judging ourselves.
Speaker 1:We don't learn from that because we're clouded by like hateful eyes, annoyed eyes. So we have to think, okay, what can I learn from these behaviors like a scientist? And what can I do tomorrow that's slightly different? Like Thomas Edison, to do the light bulb, apparently the story goes, a thousand different filaments, 1,000 different failed experiments before you found the right one. Can you imagine that?
Speaker 1:Can you imagine doing this 1,000 times until you found the routine that worked for you? You probably think no. And it's the same scenario. And I mentioned this one because it's quite comical, but also it's something that really makes sense. If you've got a child and a baby and it starts to walk for the first time and it falls, and it starts to walk and it falls, and it starts to walk and it falls, you don't say to that baby after a few tries, Hey, you might as well not bother, don't bother to happen to walk, you can't walk, so don't bother, stop it.
Speaker 1:You'll be thinking stupid. The baby's going to keep trying and you're going to keep helping the baby until it does eventually walk, no matter how many times it falls. And that's how we learn to walk. Same with language, how many times did you fail saying certain words? I don't know, some people maybe 10, some people maybe 100, but we don't stop doing it.
Speaker 1:We eventually get there and you might have better speech than me, you might be able to speak with more of a vocabulary than me, but we all can get to the goal of speaking and writing and walking. And it's the same with this stuff. If you think you can't do it and you have to be perfect and there's no point and you have to be the perfect, perfect, and you think I'm going to give up, then yeah, you might as well you might as well have the mindset of telling everyone not to bother walking, not to bother talking, not to bother reading and writing. And this is a health journey, so it's not about I think people think health is about a bunch of hacks, it's a bunch of like extreme routines, but really when it comes down to it, and I mention this all the time with the Pareto's principle, there's a few key things we can do every day. And they really have an outweighed impact than the rest of the stuff we do.
Speaker 1:And if we can figure out what those few key things are, the punch way above their weight, we can ignore 90% of the noise and focus on the stuff that matters. And then we can just get on with our lives. That's really the crux of this. If I can hit, if I can eat the right amount of energy a day, if I can eat the right amount of energy a day for what I need, if I can eat the protein, the building blocks of my body enough for that a day, if I can send my body enough of a signal to say, Hey, hold on to this muscle, which we do through training, if I can do that, and I can just move a bit more so I can keep my steps a bit higher and moving, if I can just do those things, they have the biggest punch. The rest of the stuff is noise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can optimize your vitamin C intake, you can optimize certain potassium, sodium, and obviously we need these things, but you will eat them with the food you have anyway. You can optimize it whether you're going to do three workouts a week or two workouts a week, you can optimize three liters of water, two liters of water. You can optimize, God knows, if you're going do low intensity cardio, high intensity cardio, you can go into as much detail as you want. But the fundamentals are the main thing. People always get confused as well.
Speaker 1:They like lose a lot of weight. Some people will say, look, I dropped my carb intake and I lost loads of weight. Therefore, the reason I lost weight is because my carbs went down. But actually, they just reduced their calorie intake through carbohydrates. So that means they lost fat because they were in deficit, not because they dropped carbs, because you can still get the same result if you kept carbs high, but still went into a deficit.
Speaker 1:So people sometimes have a false belief of things, of why things work. Often when you see success stories and stuff, it's sexier to talk about things they did, like, yeah, I took this supplement, and I did this crazy worker program. But actually, if you look down the list of things they did, they probably got their steps in, they probably ate the right amount of calories, probably had a high protein diet. Beyond that, the arrest is single digit impact. So stop comparing yourself to people online doing these silly, perfect routines, especially LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:LinkedIn is the worst first. These people, oh my God, they wake up at like 03:22AM. They do fucking XYZ until four or five. Honestly, they're full of nonsense and people believe them. And I think you've got to wake up at 03:22AM if you want to have like an abs and stuff.
Speaker 1:That's the problem. That's not where we want to get to. So in answer to this, there was one thing she said as well about, mentioned the stoic archer analogy, she mentioned, well, what if these are things in my control that I'm not doing correctly in my best? The thing is, you try your best, or you know you can do more, it's not a failure, You can learn from that and go, Right, maybe I could have done differently that day. But in this case, it's not that.
Speaker 1:This case, it's always no matter if this person did three workouts, four workouts, five workouts, six workouts a week, it would never be enough for this mind. It's the same with greed. It can never be enough for some of these rich people to have more and more money. We've all got this built into us more, more, more, more, more. More is not the answer.
Speaker 1:Actually, if you can cut out needing more all the time, you've got to the solution, you've got to the answer much quicker. So it's more about, am I asking myself more? Will I always be demanding more no matter what level I get to? And is it because I have this unrealistic vision of what my life should be like? And maybe I should calm down a bit.
Speaker 1:And I think like demanding more is the problem. So when it comes to health and fitness, when it comes to all this stuff, I beg you to focus on the fundamentals and stop thinking you need to do more and more all the time, you're going to burn yourself out. And the last thing to say is there's something called allostatic load, which is like your total stress on the body. Working out adds to this. And the bad stress adds to it.
Speaker 1:Every stress adds to it. No matter how good it is for you on paper, I guess, doing more exercise is good for me, you can still fill the stress bucket up and it can actually be overfilled and you have to have good sleep, you have to have a good routine. A lot of you would be better take a week off your training regime, just eat the calories you need, hit your protein, de stress, read some stoicism, chill, connect with your family, connect with the community, have good sleep, and drink enough water, and after a week, you might notice, wow, my body is less stressed, you might hold on to less water because cortisol is down and stuff like that, and the stress hormones that cause water retention will go down. And then you think, wow, have I dropped weight now and I'm training less? Well, you were doing things to cause fat loss, but you were in a constant state of stress.
Speaker 1:You were psychologically stressed because you're just judging yourself all the time. You're stressed because you're trying to do too much exercise and too much this and too much that. Calm down. Get a cool head. Take things one day at a time.
Speaker 1:From now to bedtime, deal with that, and let's not overdo it for ourselves. And if you do one or two strength workouts a week, try and get your steps in as much as you can, hit your calories and protein. That's all you've got to start doing consistently and things will click, I promise you. And I know I'm drilling it in all the time, drilling in all the time, but please, this is the golden ticket. This is the path.
Speaker 1:It's been decades of research, and we're fortunate the path isn't too hard to achieve for all of us listening. So I'm going leave you with that. After this podcast, get your steps in, track what you've eaten. If you haven't tracked yesterday, go and do it now for what you remember. You don't have to be perfect.
Speaker 1:Do not be perfectionist. And yeah, let's start building momentum every day. But from now to bedtime, let's think of that one big thing we want to get done. And let's chase that and we will feel on top of stuff. So have a good day, everyone.
Speaker 1:See you back for another day.