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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. So today's going to be some tough love on the podcast and I say this and I'm going to be direct, but I do love you all. That's where it comes from. I care for you all so I want to break through this wall and hopefully get through to you guys. So I do get a lot of comments and questions that are very similar.
Speaker 1:One of them is my calorie tag is too high, I've changed it. Now why would you do this? If whatever you've done has worked in the past, which you most likely have, then the reality is the more times you've tried to do past forms of dieting, the more chances you've regained weight. But not just regained weight, you've overshot and regained more weight because that's how it works. When you do severe diets and low calories, you lose a lot of muscle mass and then by the time you regain that muscle mass, where the body's happy, your hunger levels shoot up until your body recovers lost muscle mass, usually you've got to regain more body fat percentage to get to that part.
Speaker 1:It's a bad place to be. So when you're given new targets that are wow this is higher than usual that should be great news for you. Not, I'm going to drop it because you dropping is doing exactly what you've been doing in the past. What's the point to starting something new if you're going to go back to old ways? Now when you think your calories are too high, let me tell you straight, you have been eating more calories than the target you were given over time.
Speaker 1:You think this is not true. So you say, Scott, I've been given a target 2,600 calories a day. There's no way I'm going be losing weight than this. I have many dinners a day. For you to weigh the weight you currently do, you've had to eat five hundred-six 100 calories plus on top of what the target has given you.
Speaker 1:That's the reality. So if you say I been given a target of say 2,200 calories a day, you say no way I'm gonna lose weight in that, you've been on average consuming at least 2,800 calories, maybe 3,000 calories a day on average for quite a long time. And it might be shocking for you to admit it, but that's the truth, the numbers are there. The reason this happens is because a lot of you, you only think of your calorie intake in terms of your weekly calorie, your week day. Yeah, don't eat 2,200 calories, no way, because you're comparing it to Monday where you're motivated and you have nothing for breakfast, if you leave for lunch and then you have a dinner and you're like, we're eating 1,100 calories today, how am I not losing weight?
Speaker 1:Well, what happens is you do that for a few days and then when it gets to the weekend you are annihilating it. Three, four thousand calorie weekends, sometimes Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays are huge calorie intake days. So on average over a week your intake is beyond what you think. Even though one or two days of the week you can think of, and this is cherry picking, this is a confirmation bias, you look at some of the days that you remember, that was a good day, that Monday three weeks ago, and that Tuesday two weeks ago' and then you omit the fact that you don't want to accept the fact that the weekends are way heavier. Way heavier.
Speaker 1:I've been tracking my weekends honestly most of this year and the majority of my weekends are social. I'm easily clearing 4,000 calories, some days about 5,000 calories. But you know what, it didn't feel like that. It didn't feel like I was eating 5,000 calories because these foods are so hyper palatable that you can eat them all day. You think about things like this, you have a shared bag of Doritos, 1,200 calories.
Speaker 1:You have in your Starbucks massive frappuccino with the creams of 500, 600, 700 calories. You have a few digestive biscuits and you have 300 calories. God, you haven't even had a meal yet. So in your brain you're thinking there's no way of eating that many calories because I've not actually had any meals. But it doesn't matter, your body's not going that's a meal, that's a snack.
Speaker 1:No, that's not how it works. Your body doesn't know brands, doesn't know names, it just goes macronutrient composition and energy. So it doesn't matter if you think something's a snack therefore less calories, this again, that's something we mistake. Go and eat some of the calories on the menu, and don't tell me you're not shocked by what you see. There's some starters in places I've been, 800 to 1,000 calories.
Speaker 1:Starter. I'll have the focaccia starter, please. Yeah. Yeah. It's only 850 calories.
Speaker 1:Okay. Great. And then can I have the double cheeseburger with fries in here for the thing? Okay, 1,300. Okay, we've already hit 2,000 calories.
Speaker 1:And can I have two glasses of wine please, large? Okay, that's another 400 calories. Well, I've cleared done 2,500 calories there, that's one meal on a Friday night. Saturday, you do the Saturday mornings, you've got so many other meals in the weekend. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:There's even research on this. When they asked people to estimate the calories they consumed, on average we were underestimating calorie intake by 1,000 calories a day. These were trained people. Some of these are dietitians, nutritionists. What you think you consume is way, way more than in reality.
Speaker 1:You're consuming a lot. That's the first thing. So you're giving these targets, you go too high and dropping them. First mistake, come on, let's not go down that route. Give yourself at least a few weeks of data to put your own hypothesis test.
Speaker 1:If you really think you haven't been eating that many calories, why don't you actually eat that many calories tracked properly and then see what happens? Because if changes are happening, there's only one or two things that's happening there, right? Either calories magically changed meaning and value since the last time, or you are eating more calories than you thought before. And let me tell you, human error, we are definitely guilty of that. We don't like to admit these things because they're hard truths but it's just the fact of it.
Speaker 1:It's the fact of it. And the sooner you accept that, better it's going to be for you. This is not an attack on anyone's character. We are all flawed, we are all greedy, greedy human beings, desires run our lives, we want more, we want more, it's so nice, this and that. Emotions are turbulent and we eat with emotions depending on other things.
Speaker 1:We are very mercy people. All of us have got these coping mechanisms that really don't serve us that well. So we start from that fact. I'm not saying you're going to be a saint and let's move towards being a saint. What I'm saying is accept we're all greedy buggers, simple, and once we accept that we can actually work from the facts and work from the truth of things as opposed to thinking you're a saint of eating and there's no way these things are true because you are bang on with calories and have never overeaten in your life blah blah blah.
Speaker 1:Come on, come on, come on. We can't be going down that path. We're just lying to ourselves So start from the facts, that's the best form of self love we can give ourselves and then that's it. So that's the calories part. The next part is people thinking about adding more complications for the sake of it.
Speaker 1:Should I track my carbs and fats and salts and saturated fat and this and that and this and this and this and that and that and this? When was the last time you tracked all of those pieces of information for a long enough time and actually made a decision of it that actually helped you? The chances are slim, unless you've got medical condition or you're an elite athlete. The chances are you knowing all that piece of information is not going to be doing well last week I was fifteen grams on average high in carb. Great, what do we do with this?
Speaker 1:Do you feel better? Subjectively, maybe you're in there. How many weeks of data have you gone this? Oh well it's patchy, I did a week of it and then three weeks ago it was too much, didn't track, it was overwhelming' then seven months ago I did a week again. So we haven't really got any long term consistent data to go off here, have we?
Speaker 1:So instead of thinking of tracking everything, let's focus on tracking things that really are the important ones: your energy intake measured via calories, your protein intake, and your step count. If you could have those three pieces of data for a consistent amount of time, most of you don't need anything more. Because if you're going be losing weight, for example, your calories are be there, your protein is going to be there, help you with keeping your muscle and maybe building if you're doing weight training and satiety and your steps are going to be a much bigger factor in how active you are. If everyone in the world could just get those three in line consistently, everything will change. So stop trying to add things that you think you need to add because you're not going to track it anyway.
Speaker 1:Again, this comes back to the fact of us as greedy, lazy human beings, which we are. Of course we're not all lazy here and there, we've got things we work hard on, but when it comes to nutritional health and things like that we have to admit that we're not born with a desire to be absolute health machines. We live the lifestyle where we like a few drinks, we like eating out, we don't want to be doing things that bore us, we want to be doing fun things. This is a fact, so you can't fight against it all the time, you have to accept that. So let's start with a minimum we can take on that's the maximum benefit.
Speaker 1:This is known as the law of the vital few, Pareto's principle. If you understand Pareto's principle, it applies to everything in your life and it's a life changing thing to understand. 20% of something or 20% of your efforts generate 80% of your results. This famous Italian economist found out that 20% of people owned 80% of the land in Italy. 20% of the people owned 80% of the wealth.
Speaker 1:20% of the roads have 80% of the traffic. 20% of your wardrobe is worn 80% of the time. Now it's not going be exactly eightytwenty, it could be like eighteen, eighty two and stuff like that or thirtysempty, but the power laws are there. When it comes to marketing or market share, first position typically has like fiftysixty percent of the market share, second position will have 25%, and then third position will have like 5%. Same as Google search, I used to do SEO.
Speaker 1:If you were number one you would get about sixty-seventy percent of the clicks from the Google search. If you were number two you get about 20 and number three you get about five. After number three it was literally pointless, You'd be number four on search results thinking I'm number four on Google, that's amazing! No it's not because the top three take everything and really the top one takes everything. This is just fact, it's everywhere you want to see it.
Speaker 1:So this applies also to what effort we should put into weight loss, what metrics we should focus on brings back the results. You've heard the saying your abs are made in the kitchen, it's 80% diet, 20% training. It is 80%, 90% nutrition, 10% maybe additional activity, but within the nutrition part, if you were to rank them top three, you've got calories, obviously number one, because you need the energy balance to be in a deficit to lose weight. Then you've got protein and steps. The three Those things that deliver the 80, time after time shown all the time.
Speaker 1:That's true, do you want to spend think of it this way, if 20% of the metrics, which is Cali reporting steps, deliver 80% of the results, that must mean that the 80% of effort in the other metrics only bring back 20% of results. Does that make sense? So if 20% of our efforts or metrics bring 80% of the results, then the other 80% of metrics only bring back 20%. Most people are spending 80% effort the metrics, 80% of the time on those metrics for 20%. That's where most people are wasting their time.
Speaker 1:Should I eat six meals a day or two meals a day? That's in that effort most people are doing, 80% effort for 20%. Should I eat sweet potato or white potato? Should I have white rice or brown rice? Should I do three sets or two sets?
Speaker 1:Should I do twenty minutes of cardio or thirty minutes of cardio? Should I do a faster cardio or cardio after my workout, after I've eaten? None of these can matter. None of these matter for your goal weight loss. It's like you're wasting your time in the 20, you're ignoring the 80 and you're spending time in the 20.
Speaker 1:But like Britain is doing now, we're ignoring our biggest partner in terms of economic partner, the EU, and we're spending it on oh we've made a trade deal with Japan, oh brilliant mate, 0.1% or 0.2% increase in goods. But let's ignore the biggest trading partner that we have not got customers to now, which is right there. The big boys, the ones that are delivering most benefit to us. It's right there. No, don't worry about them, focus on Japan.
Speaker 1:That's what you're doing when you're saying oh I want to track what about my salt intake and my ratio of carbs and fat, should I do two sets or three sets or four sets? You're in Japan world, you need to come back to the EU world. The EU is in your face there, obvious benefits in front of you. No, ignore them. Come on, we need to grow up.
Speaker 1:I remind myself as this: you can overcomplicate things all you want. Overcomplicate things all you want, not going to be to your benefit at all whatsoever, It's just a waste of time. And then yeah. Okay. And last one is, you know, should you eat back calories you've burned?
Speaker 1:Like, should you subtract calories you've burned from exercise? In short, absolutely not. To put it simply, if you sleep eight hours a night, you're awake for sixteen hours a day. Sixteen hours a day times seven is one hundred and twelve hours a week you're awake. If you did three big workouts for sixty minutes, and I mean sixty minutes of work three times a week, that is only 2.6% of your waking hours.
Speaker 1:It's even less a percentage of your actual hours alive for the week. So if you think those 2.6% of your waking hours is more impactful on your calories burned than your eight hours a day of work, so you're awake eight hours a day pretty much for work, and you've got eight, sixteen, 24, 30 two, say forty to fifty hours, which is about 30 to 40% of your waking hours, is at your job. That's way bigger percentage than three workouts a week. So your job, what you do for your work, has a much bigger impact on how active you are. So if you're a teacher or you're a construction worker or you're a desk worker, these have huge impacts.
Speaker 1:If you really wanted to be a different type of active person and you're a desk worker, and then you moved on and you did three months on a building site, oh my god, your calories burned would go through the roof. I mean, if you could eat more calories and you could get into a deficit far easier, that's got a much bigger impact on workouts. We take into account how active you are as a whole over the week. We look at your job, how many workouts you do a week on average, even though it's a tiny percentage we still play a factor into it, and then we look at other factors and we give you an activity score for the week. So you don't need to eat back calories because of a workout, we've already accounted for that minuscule percentage.
Speaker 1:So don't worry about it. And here's the worst thing: activity trackers, whilst they're good at heart rate they're quite good for step counts and heart rate, none of them are very good for calories burned prediction. So say your watch tells you you've burned 500 calories, the truth is you've actually burned maybe two fifty calories. When you add energy compensation into the mix, which means your body down regulates the rest of the day after workouts because it wants to lower energy out. You've just done a workout, it doesn't like the fact that that's happened, should recoup.
Speaker 1:Your metabolic rate drops a bit. Say two fifty calories, energy compensation says only 70% is net, so 70% of two fifty calories, can't work it out, say 200 calories. So your watch says you burn 500, net you've added 200, but then you eat back 500. So now you've added 300 calories on top and you've messed it all up. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Again, these numbers aren't perfect but that's what people do on other apps like MyFitnessPal and it really messes them up. It's like I'll eat it back my calories and stuff like that. Listen, you shouldn't be looking at it day to day, you need to be looking at yourself as an average over the week. That's why the food example is perfect because you can't look at it day to day because you are going to omit the weekends. You have to look at my average calorie intake is likely gonna be higher than my targets because I'm looking at my weekdays but I'm not accounting for weekends.
Speaker 1:But if I did account for weekends, my average shoots up. That's the same with your energy out. If I've done my workout once or twice a week but I'm sitting on a chair the rest of the week, that brings my average way down. Makes sense? So we need to look at it as an average over the week and that's why the weekly check ins look at your data on average and make tweaks based on your actual data, not predictions and like who says this, who says that.
Speaker 1:Let's just go from facts. What else? I think that's it guys for today. Again, nothing on anyone personally. Again, I remind myself of these as well every day.
Speaker 1:We just need some tough love sometimes, we need to be told that's the truth. If any of you want links to the research studies about no diet is better for fat loss, well that's another one I've mentioned. No diet is better for fat loss if calories and protein are the same in the diet. So if you've got keto, intermittent fasting, low carb, high fat, whatever diet, If calories and protein are the same in those diets you do, you'll have the same fat loss results. Today you could go super high fat but your calories and protein are the same.
Speaker 1:Tomorrow you can go super low fat, super high carb, calories and protein are the same, you'll have the same fat loss results. That might blow your mind, but that's the fact. We don't need to be concerned about carbs and fat ratio in our diet. If fat loss is a goal, focus on calories and protein. Again, medical reasons you may want to look at it but in general, no.
Speaker 1:And that's it guys. So just a bit of positivity back to this. Have a good day obviously, one day at a time. Live from today till midnight, whenever you go to bed. Don't want to just distract yourself with too much data.
Speaker 1:We want minimal really, maximum impact, minimal time, maximum impact, so we have more time for our actual lives. Your friends, your family, your work, things are more important than your ratio of carbs and fat intake today, whether you've consumed a bit too much salt today or not. Come on, spend your time on other important matters and your quality of life will shoot up. This will free you from all the time you spent thinking about these questions that don't matter, the 80% of effort you've all put in to the minuscule 20 you get back or less 10% you get back. Think of all that time you spent to research this and that online, looking at articles, looking at influencer videos, all this stuff, waste of time.
Speaker 1:Hit the fundamentals, you'll see they work and then you won't even give a shit about that stuff then. You're like 'I don't care where I'm hitting the fundamentals, go away, bugger off'. That's what I look at. I'm like 'Sah mate, I'm doing the fundamentals, go away. I don't to go into all of this all the time.
Speaker 1:I've spent my years researching deep into it all and I've come to the conclusion, like many of the people that's been in the industry for thirty-forty years, do the fundamentals and grow up. Go and live your life. And that's my message for today.