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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.
Good morning, everybody. So this podcast is going live on a Monday. So hopefully, you've had a good weekend. But as always, as always, if it hasn't gone to plan, right, if you had the best weekend ever or the worst weekend ever, you can start fresh today. It's nil nil.
Speaker 1:Let's go. You know, that's the mindset to have. Each day is in its own block. Yeah. It's own little twenty four hours off.
Speaker 1:If you wanna be more specific, it's own sixteen hour block from now until you go to sleep is all you have, which is what your life is made out of. Remember that. So how would you wanna how would you want your life to be is how you can act in the next sixteen hours and the attitude you bring to the next sixteen hours. Now today, wanna talk about a study done on is self compassion. Does self compassion help with weight loss?
Speaker 1:Because I speak about this all the time on the podcast, you know, I speak about like, you will slip up. Like, don't don't act like you're not gonna eat a full tub of Ben and Jerry's. Don't act like you're not gonna have five cookies in a row. Don't act like you're not gonna eat three bags of crisps like a monster. Right?
Speaker 1:Don't act like you're not gonna do these things. Don't act like you're not gonna drink too much or have more food than you really should have. These are gonna happen to you 100%. They happen to all of us. Right?
Speaker 1:So what do we do when we know it's gonna happen? Right? So a lot of the mindset is like, why do I do this all the time? I'm the worst. And you think it might be just you, but every single person, most people in the Western world are exactly the same.
Speaker 1:A lot of people walk to the fridge, open it, look, close the fridge, go back, go back and forth all night because they wanna eat something, but they think, oh, should I? I've already had food. Why why do I always feel hungry? We kind of let this, like, craving take over a bit, and then we eat loads food, and then we feel bad after it. You know, it's a it's a cycle we all go through very frequently.
Speaker 1:Right? So self compassion is like a kind approach towards yourself during some challenging times. Right? That's what it means is to look at it maybe with a bit more kindness to yourself. Right?
Speaker 1:So I've covered it in the past, but there is a study that looked at when people do mess up. And I mean, we don't really mean mess up. We mean when life actually happens. When when things happen, they call it diet diet mishaps in the study, right? Diet mishaps.
Speaker 1:When you have, like, a stress response and you eat a cake or this and that, like, what happens? You know? They looked at people that had looked at the research and a lot of people more people that had more diet mishaps tended to gain more weight, right, which makes sense because they beat themselves up over and there's a vicious circle. So a new study in the journal Appetite looked at, does self compassion work in the context of weight loss when we do mess up and feel bad about it? Right, so several times a day, 140 participants who were trying to lose weight recorded how well they were sticking to their diet.
Speaker 1:They also noted how they responded emotionally to any diet slip ups. As a side note, right, again this does this dietary lapses, diet slip ups is the term they use, mess ups, when you know, you might overeat or emotionally eat. Okay? So hunger, stress, being around foods, a tomb oh, that diet that Oreo ice cream sandwich. Oh, that cookie.
Speaker 1:That pasty. Greg's pasty. If you're from from The UK, you're missing out Greg's pasties all day. You know? So the more lapses, the more likely the person less likely the person is to reach their weight loss goal.
Speaker 1:This is very simple, guys. This is kind of like, okay. Yeah. Whatever, Scott. Carry on.
Speaker 1:But what the research wanted to look at is, okay. What if we took these people and helped them with self compassion? Three things they did. So they did mindfulness, which is being nonjudgmental yet consciously aware of what you're doing, thinking, feeling, and experiencing. This is very important.
Speaker 1:Common humanity, recognizing that we're a part of the greater who and not isolated weirdos with unusual problems. And then self kindness, being generous and decent to yourself. So what did the study actually find? All three components of self compassion were associated with feeling less negative after the diet slip up, but higher self kindness and high overall self compassion were more strongly associated with feeling in control and ready to move on. So all in all, the results suggest that self compassion and self kindness in particular helped keep dietary lapses from making people abandon their goals altogether.
Speaker 1:You might be thinking, wow, this is not news to me. This is obvious. But this is really important, right? Because when you think about it, those diet mishaps, whatever they call they call in a study, where those these moments are the big moments. Right?
Speaker 1:You think, oh, well, imagine I could eat a cookie and I've just eaten more energy and I leave it there and I carry on with the day. Imagine how freeing that is for you. Imagine how freeing it is for you to have a really big calorific day and to wake up the next day and leave it there as if it never happened. Imagine the freedom that brings to you. Right?
Speaker 1:That is the that is the juicy stuff here because if you can't move on from these small things, are you literally hitting a wall three, four, five times a day, slashing your head against a wall, beating yourself up because you're not perfect, not doing things, you're like why do I keep doing this? You need to see it like this. I've consumed too much energy today for my needs. Maybe my body will store a percentage of that as fat. Maybe some of that will be used to build muscle.
Speaker 1:Maybe some of it will be utilised more and I've moved more today. Maybe some of it I just need it. But yes, I have eaten more energy than my body requires today. It's not always a bad thing. I can understand that.
Speaker 1:And I've just accepted that I've now got more energy in my body. That's fine. Okay? And then the next day you go, if I wanna reduce my energy stores, my fat stores, I need to eat a bit less energy today, so I'll do my best to do that. Right?
Speaker 1:That's how we see it as. Ryka, you've gone a thousand calories over. Okay. What does that what is that, like, reality? This is another thing to add in kind of CBT technique as well last week.
Speaker 1:Right? It's like when you look at things as facts, right, real facts, they should be helping you. So for example, in some studies, they say that so we know that one pound of fat contains roughly 3,500 calories. But what one study showed was for you to gain one pound of pure fat, right, you'd have to eat about 6,000 calories over your maintenance. And to put that into perspective, say you're on say your maintenance is 2,000 calories.
Speaker 1:So say your deficit we're including your deficit. So you got a 500 calorie deficit. You're on 1,500 a day, but your maintenance is 2,000. For you to gain one pound of fat, you're gonna have to eat 2,000, which is your maintenance, plus 6,000. So that's 8,000 calories in one day to gain one pound of fat.
Speaker 1:Right? And there's no way you're doing that. You know, 8,000 calories, how much that's that is that's 18 double cheeseburgers from McDonald's. 18. There's no way you've eaten 18 double cheeseburgers from McDonald's in one day.
Speaker 1:Right? So you put it in an up spec, if you go, oh, what I doing? Yeah. Maybe I have eaten a bit more energy. Maybe I have run a thousand calories over my target, which means you've only gone 500 calories over your interns, which means in real terms, you have not gained fat.
Speaker 1:You have simply put on some water weight. Apologies for that, but maybe something is needing some help in the end of this. You simply have just gone over. So even if you go over your target by two, three hundred calories, you're likely still in a deficit. You're likely still chipping away.
Speaker 1:If you're hitting your maintenance, right, you're definitely not gaining fat. Right? You're probably giving your body what it needs, good for recovery, muscles, you know, everything. And even if you go 500 calories, 1,000 calories over, the chances of all of that being stored as fat is slim, right? Especially if you're training.
Speaker 1:So you need to when you put these into perspective, when you write down the facts, you go, why am I being so silly for? You know, we would say this to a kid, wouldn't we? We'd say to kids, if this was a fact and the kids were worrying about something, say, but don't worry about This is last thing you'd be worried about. You've been a bit silly. You've been silly.
Speaker 1:Know what they used say as a newer kid? You've been a bit silly, Scott. Don't worry about it. Be silly. There's ghosts all time.
Speaker 1:I'm scared. We're silly. There's no ghosts out there. You know? And like but when it comes to us and our weight, we see the weight on the scales go up, we go, oh my god, what did I eat yesterday's gain fat?
Speaker 1:We fall into the same trap. No one singular food causes fat gain. It is the over accumulation of energy over time that causes fat gain. People actually gain fat slowly most time. It slowly adds on one to two pounds maybe a month, and it adds up to twenty, thirty pounds a year.
Speaker 1:And after three or four years, it's like 50 pounds 60 pounds, you know, it starts adding up, right? That's how we gain weight. Some people gain rapidly back from yo yo dieting, which is really bad. But most of the time, it's slowly accumulating. Right?
Speaker 1:That's what happens. You know, there's no one food. It's like, oh my god. I knew I shouldn't have I knew I shouldn't have had the Mars yesterday, but I I came within my calories. Mean, I know there's no way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe it is the Mars bar then. You start doubting yourself. You start doubting the science. You start doubting logic.
Speaker 1:You start doubting, like, facts. Because that's what happens. We get emotional and worried. And I'm here to say this I have seen countless, countless people who have freed themselves from this, who all struggle with this initially, who then come to see their weight is just data, they see their fluctuations daily is just water retention mainly, your body 70% water. You know, you fluctuate your water weight one or 2%, which is easily doable depending on what you've eaten, the exercise, the food, the salt, You can fluctuate your weight between two to three to four pounds every day.
Speaker 1:You know, my weight has been going my weight has been going down and I've been eating a thousand calories plus over my maintenance for the last week. Makes sense of it. I don't know. Who knows? You know, I'm definitely not losing fat.
Speaker 1:That's for sure. I've been I'm I'm not losing fat, but maybe I'm not gaining fat either. Maybe think what's going on? Well, maybe I don't know. Let's let's let's let's let's theorize.
Speaker 1:Did it just get to competition? Trained hard for it. Maybe maybe needed to go into a a surplus for a bit because I had to drop some weight. Maybe this energy bringing in is maybe I've caused some injuries that are needing to, like, heal, and maybe I'm utilizing my who knows? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Maybe this extra calories have put me in a less stressful state than I was before, so I was in a deficit training hard, maybe that was a very stressful state. After competition, stress goes down, you stop worrying about it. You stop training as hard, you stop worrying about the weight because you have to make weight, right? Your total stress goes down, and some of these things you don't even notice, you know, like allo so when it comes to stress, right, there's something called allostatic load, it is stress from all angles and it all goes into the same stress bucket, right? So you've stress from working out.
Speaker 1:Working out is a stressor. You're damaging your muscles. It's a good thing overall, but you don't want to be doing too much of it. You've got psychological stressors. They they like sledgehammers.
Speaker 1:You've got other stressors. Right? And all of these play a role. And when you are more stressed, we do tend to hold on to more water retention when we're stressed, right, and all this stuff. And then when you're not worrying about stuff, guess what happens?
Speaker 1:The weight comes down. You think what's going on? You've you've you've made it less of a thing. You've stopped worrying about it so much. Actually started to drop.
Speaker 1:Your stress levels have dropped. You know, when you look when you stare at the clock, it goes slow. But when you're enjoying it, it by fast. Things tend to happen when we stop trying to force a singular thing. Right?
Speaker 1:That's why you can't just live day to day only looking at the weight. You you weigh daily to get rid of that thing. You just weigh it daily, fine, whatever. I'm using this data. Change the scale numbers so you don't know what the weight is.
Speaker 1:Make buy some Bluetooth scales. You never see the weight. It doesn't matter. Just let the app collect the data. Right?
Speaker 1:I stopped. It's it's it's it's about it. You know? Go and enjoy your life. Look around you.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the people you speak to. Drink water. Eat good food. Train well. Get your steps, and you're doing these amazing things for your overall health.
Speaker 1:Your weight is just a part of this. Is it is inevitable as a byproduct of your plan if you are being honest with your track and you're hitting your calories and your protein and your steps, you're fat, you are losing fat. Okay? You are part of this universe, you abide by the laws of the universe, you are not different from that. Now please realize this because you every day, you're gonna ruin each day.
Speaker 1:You're gonna ruin your days until you and then you're gonna look back and go, why was an idiot? Why did I waste those days worrying about my total weight when I knew I was hitting my car with the steps? I just needed more time. You look back in three months ago, I wasted like six to eight weeks of my time worrying so much, but I just had to give it time and trust the process. Now I can see it, now I can see that I've lost fat.
Speaker 1:But really through those processes, was so stressed, I was holding a lot of water, you know? And you start kicking yourself because you don't get that time back. And your life is made up of those days and times, and you think back, I'll just stress it all my life. I'm on my weight. Come on.
Speaker 1:Come on. We can do better than this. We can do much better than this. And even if you're listening, you're like, Scott, it's easy for you. You're not overweight or obese.
Speaker 1:I'm in a I'm obese right now. I got loads of weight to lose. Yeah. Fine. I'm just I'm a 100% sympathetic with your situation.
Speaker 1:But you also need to realize that magically the weight loss magically coming off, it won't just change your life overnight. You are the same core person. You've got to work on the core as well. You know, you are more than your weight, for sure, all of you, everyone. Of course, are.
Speaker 1:Come on. We're more than our weight. It's just a bit of just a bit of fat. It's bit of extra stored energy. We've stored a bit too much energy away over time.
Speaker 1:Okay? We can get that down, but we get it down slowly. We get it down strategically, we get it down whilst having fun, we get it down with folks in our mindset, we get it down with us enjoying our lives at the same time, we get it down by not catastrophizing. Right? Some weeks will suck, some weeks will be great.
Speaker 1:But there's a great Viktor Frankl quote, and he talks about how happiness is like success. It it it can't be pursued. It only ensues. It only comes as a byproduct of your life. Right, so if you force something, it doesn't come, it doesn't happen.
Speaker 1:It must come like nature, like the seasons, you nurture things over time and you must nurture the seeds, you've planted many good seeds, keep nurturing them, they will grow and you will reap. You will sow and then you will reap and that will happen. But it is like the seasons, is like nature, you know, which is the universe ultimately in it. So don't be so hard on yourself. Remember mindfulness, non nonjudgmental, recognizing the problems you have every human being has, the Western world, right, we're all both of the same struggles.
Speaker 1:It's about being honest, open, understanding of them, and be generous and decent to yourself, guys. Come on. Give yourself a pat on your back for even doing these things. So enjoy your day. Put a smile on your face.
Speaker 1:Hit your targets. Let go of the results. Just do what you need to do, and I'll see you back here tomorrow.