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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, hello, good morning, welcome back to the podcast. So today's podcast is an important one, and it's going to talk about the problem with rigid diets and meal plans. So I've heard this for years, like going back to when I was 16, starting on my first fitness website, working in Cardiff, you know, hearing from bodybuilding coaches, fitness coaches, speaking to coaches. The most frequent thing you'd hear from a customer or a client is, just tell me what to eat. Just tell me what to eat.
Speaker 1:Don't care. Scott, just tell me what to eat. Because when I was a 16 to 18 in six farm, I remember there were so many heated debates about nutrition in that six farm room. A six farm is like, you know, like a What would it be for Americans? Like, before you go to university, know, like the last two years, like, oh, shit, shit.
Speaker 1:And people would be like, just tell me
Speaker 2:what to eat. Just tell
Speaker 1:me what to eat. I'm like, just hit your macro. Like a new back end, hit your macros, just eat what you like. People wanted a plan, and I've seen this firsthand over half my life. Why do we want this?
Speaker 1:Well, we think it works. We think if we just get given a plan, it's going be easy to follow. You know, we we don't think about the map isn't the terrain. We think, well, if someone just tells me what works, then I'll just fall away. It's easier for me to do that than to, you know, think about these things all by myself.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna think too much about things. I just want to follow a plan, man. Don't make this harder for me. Why are you doing this? People get wound up about it.
Speaker 1:But it's never about making it harder for you. It's actually making it more realistic for you that works. So there was a study done by the Stanford University scientists actually. Findings are not going to shock you if you've listened to this podcast for a while, but they might do. They might give you a surprise.
Speaker 1:So people want done for you meal plans, precise recipes. Again, I need more recipes. No. You don't. You don't need more recipes.
Speaker 1:How many recipes have you come across? Hundreds, if not thousands of recipes. More recipes are not your answer. I'm sorry. They're not.
Speaker 1:There are some pieces of advice that do help, like, oh, I didn't know you could put a protein bar in the microwave for eight seconds. Brilliant. You know, protein. I didn't know you could mix, you know, whey protein with oats and mix that up in overnight oats. That's a great find.
Speaker 1:You know, people come up with like Greek yogurt and mix sour protein and blueberries. There's other things like protein pancakes. So there's just other there's like bagel thins with like lean bacon and cheese and stuff. There are these like what we might call consider, like, hacks or something that you can come across, but there there's not loads of them. It really just boils down to eating the food you like.
Speaker 1:Okay? So here's how the study worked. Researchers asked 42 adults, average age of 59 years old, to spend twelve weeks on either the Mediterranean style diet or the keto diet. The participants had either type two diabetes, forty seven percent of them, or pre diabetes, which is fifty three percent. After twelve weeks, the participants switched diets.
Speaker 1:The ones following the Mediterranean diet started following keto and vice versa. Participants maintained a food log throughout the study. For the first four weeks of either diet, participants were given all of their meals and snacks. No cooking or food prep required. Right?
Speaker 1:Think we'll ask, sir. For the first four weeks of either diet, participants were given all of their meals and snacks, no cooking or food prep required. Sounds perfect. Unreal. During the next eight weeks, participants were on their own to plan, shop, form, cook meals that worked with a diet they were following.
Speaker 1:Okay. So here's the snapshot of what the diets look like. Just to remind you what Mediterranean and keto diet means. So Mediterranean diet is minimally processed plant foods, olive oil as the main source of fat, fish as the primary animal protein, no added sugars, no refined grains. Okay?
Speaker 1:Very good base to have, obviously, for those high micronutrients and stuff. The keto diet was carbs of 20 to 50 grams a day. 70% of calories were from fat. Protein was 1.5 grams per kilo of body weight, which is a good place to be. Three servings of veggies, and then no added sugars, no refined grains.
Speaker 1:Okay? Hard. Tough to follow that. So this was a study found. Researchers used a one to 10 scale to score everyone's food logs for adherence.
Speaker 1:So basically, you know, how could this you know, the how can you stick to it, Leo? How how well did you follow the goals or the defined goals, essentially. Right? So even when food was delivered to them, the average participant strayed from the diet occasionally, scoring seven on a scale of one to 10. So even when their food was delivered, even when you're given everything delivered to your door, people still did not follow it.
Speaker 1:Seven or 10 on the scale of sticking to it. Then once people started cooking for themselves, that score dropped on a five regardless of the diet they were following. So Mediterranean or keto. Right? Not really surprising.
Speaker 1:This is not really surprising. But what really this proves to us is about human behavior is that what people think they want often isn't what they actually want. Right? So the researchers in the paper says this, we initially assumed that study participants would be reluctant to shift to purchasing and preparing their own foods after receiving free delivery of foods. Thus, we provided an option to continue receiving some of the delivered foods at the participants' own cost.
Speaker 1:We observed somewhat to our surprise after after four weeks of food delivery, all of the participants declined and prefer to prepare their own foods, largely due to an interesting greater variety, another lie to ourselves, of foods and have been provided in the seven day cycle of delivering foods for the past month. Right? So for the record, they say as well participants were very eager to have shopping lists, recipes, and sample meals. Right? They provided all of this to them, and it didn't help much.
Speaker 1:They didn't bother. Right? They they expressed strong intentions to use materials. That's another quote they said here. And interestingly, we observed that these were seldom used.
Speaker 1:So people come up to me all the time, you know, tell me or eat, maybe me bum. No follow anyway. There's no point. Why are we starting from an illusion? You know, that's the main thing is.
Speaker 1:What does it stand from an illusion? It's an interesting one about human behavior. Right? Because there was another study I read about food logging with photos versus food logging with texting or just using to text, right? And the initial participants said in the studies that most I think nearly all of them said actually they think food logging with pictures will be better.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be easier. It's gonna be more accurate, and they're gonna stick to it. Right? That's what they thought. But after seven day only seven days, by the way, of them doing so they had to either send a photo of what they were eating over iMessage or just text what they were eating over iMessage.
Speaker 1:Right? That's it. After seven days. Right? Results were this.
Speaker 1:Nobody preferred food log in. They tracked way less food. They didn't even track most of the days. They found it more stressful. They omitted foods because, you know, you have to take a photo before you eat everything, which is another stressor.
Speaker 1:And it was a huge difference between what they thought was gonna work and what actually the reality is. The reality is in real life, we're not going to take a phone or take a photo of everything we're eating before we are there because we often track after the fact or sometimes we track in advance so it doesn't work. So we got to think of these like where are we blinded in our thought process when it comes to nutrition? Where do we think things are gonna work, but they're not realistic? Same goes for workout plans.
Speaker 1:Hey, just give me a workout plan five days a week, I'll smash the gym, I'm off, tell me what to do. Well, you're not gonna go from zero gym sessions to going to the gym five times a week, you're gonna sustain sustain it. You know? Like, you might not even like the workouts I'm giving you. I'm speaking to a member the other day, and they're saying that they found oh, no.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yesterday. They found that Pilates, you know, the beginners Pilates class really resonated with them. Because they tried Pilates on a thirty minute workout or a twenty to thirty minute workout. And they were like, I really like it.
Speaker 1:Really, really resonates to me. So it's like, you've got to find what you like, and that's your own journey. That's not for me to say, hey, I think you have to do these workouts. There's obviously the science behind strength training, but that is still not one workout. It is resistance bands.
Speaker 1:It is body weight. It is using dumbbells, using barbells, using kettlebells. You can have a TRx bar bands. There's a lot of different workouts you can do that would be under resistance training or strength training. When it comes to recipes and meal plans and stuff, the person best in deciding what that person should eat is that person.
Speaker 1:That is a very long way of saying you should decide because ultimately you're gonna rebel against any rigid plan. It does not work. And this study hasn't even touched on a fact that rigid diet plans have got really bad outcomes when it comes to, failover for relationship with food, inflexible approaches, binge eating as another one associated with, rigid plans and meal plans. Look. You can use a meal plan as a base.
Speaker 1:There's no problem with this. No problem saying, hey. I want an I want a base to look up, but don't put all your eggs in one basket, basically. Don't say this is this. This is it.
Speaker 1:It's all I gotta do is ask. If it was that easy, guys, god, people will be it'd be no problem. What is the what is difficult is, again, finding these blind spots and being able to act as they happen or just before. So another blind spot we have is and this even says in a study, people decided against the food delivery because they would rather eat a variety of foods. They wanna eat different right?
Speaker 1:That's another lie to ourselves. We don't eat a variety of foods. There's a study on this. The average British person rotates, right, between six, seven foods a week. You know?
Speaker 1:So it's like, I'll have the same lunch and the same dinner and the same breakfast, the same snacks, and I might have something different on Saturday, maybe something different on Sunday. That's not much. We go through the same rotation. We go through what we like. We go through what is easy.
Speaker 1:There's kind of like this maybe, you know, we all wanna think we're mental chefs. Like, we're not. I'm sorry, but we're not. A lot of people love cooking. Great.
Speaker 1:But, you know, you if you cook in a different breakfast, different lunch and dinner every single day, you turn all your cooking, you're gonna stress you out. So you think of a convenience and stuff as well. So you you find what you all like and you go for it. You know, that's how it works. And the the again, you have to find this for yourself.
Speaker 1:And that's, you know, that's quite exciting. There's no real anyone else. So again, these studies showed people preferred making their own meals versus even getting them delivered, even if they were bang on what they needed. They wanted expert curated shopping lists, meal ideas, recipes, but they didn't actually use them. They only made small adjustments to their normal diet after they got back to buying whatever they wanted to.
Speaker 1:And this doesn't solve the real problems we all we all face. Right? It's it's it's not. It's it's not solving it. Is it useful to try a meal plan service, for example?
Speaker 1:You see a lot of them these days. I mean, try it. Right? Try it. If you if you really wanna try, think it benefits you, give it a go, you know?
Speaker 1:But don't put everything on it. That's alright. That's the said I know it's not. It's not. It's quite generic, and it's nothing like, you know, big punch advice there.
Speaker 1:But I'm kind of just trying to remind you of the truth, and potentially you can zoom out a bit and then make some adjustments. Even when we're given expert, diet plans and recipes and meals, we still only make small incremental changes anyway because we know big ones don't work. Right? We know big ones don't work. But that's what we're here for.
Speaker 1:It's like the daily support, just to chat, just to go through these things. Because ultimately, what is gonna be the difference between you succeeding in this weight loss journey, keeping your weight off and all this, is that you really understand yourself more through the process. If you're not learning more by year through this process, you're not gonna be changing much. You know, for you to change, for things to change, you gotta change. There's a very simple quote by Jim Rohn that always rings true.
Speaker 1:You know? For things to change, you need to change. But to go very far, you gotta start very near as well. You know, these things, you know, the tortoise and the hare story, all of these stories hold truths to them that stand the test of time. You know, there's no such thing as overnight success, say that it's ten years of graft, then one day it comes to fruition, and people are like, oh, you got lucky.
Speaker 1:You know, and Seneca, an ancient philosopher two thousand years ago, had quote about luck. He said luck is just when preparation meets opportunity. That's all luck is. You've been preparing, preparing, preparing, preparing three, four, five, six, seven, eight years. Opportunity comes, you miss that one, you miss that one, miss that one, one comes right at the right time and you think, oh, I'm lucky for this.
Speaker 1:Well, you ought to be prepared to also take that opportunity. Right? So, you know, these things matter. These lessons matter, and we have to remind ourselves of them as the day days go on, ideally one day at a time. There's kinda like three or four things you should hold in your head at once if you wanna start trying to live through, like, certain virtues or whatever.
Speaker 1:Like, you wanna think, well, let me let me think let me thick think. Let me think of three quotes or something like that or three statements or whatever I'm gonna follow. I have to write them down or you can buy a coin or whatever it is. Right? And there's these ones, they can help you guide guide yourself.
Speaker 1:You know? I was speaking to a one to one client as well, semi photom book, unprocessed food book. Basically, any of this unprocessed food is gonna kill you, right? And it changes people's behavior, you know? It said that people in their life read it, and now saying, you know, don't buy this, don't buy that.
Speaker 1:That's gonna kill you, that's poison. And you're really left with a handful of foods left. Right? And what they don't tell you in these books, and what these, you know, physicians who are writing these books don't tell you is that in the context of a healthy diet, having ultra processed foods does not equal the bad outcomes. Most of the studies done on ultra processed foods are correlation studies.
Speaker 1:They are observational. It means they're like, okay, we see these people are eating way more ultra processed foods and the depression rates are going up. We're linking them. Right? But if you were to take a group of people who enjoyed their Mars bars, enjoyed their Snickers bars, had their Greek yogurts and yogurts, that's ultra processed food, right, and add cereals, but also make sure they add some veggies, make sure they add their meat.
Speaker 1:So if you're a vegan, you're other sources of protein, make sure you add your fruits and make sure you drink your water. But then you also have the ultra processed foods and your calories are controlled and protein is equated, right? You don't see those negative outcomes in those groups. That but they won't tell you this because it it means that moderation is a kind of a defensive mechanism. If you are moderate in the things you do and you don't take them too far, that isn't the problem with them.
Speaker 1:The the real question is how moderate can you be with some of these things? And if you can't be moderate with some of them, maybe there is a there is where you have to pull back. For example, alcohol. Right? Countless studies on alcohol.
Speaker 1:In terms of performance, men can have two drinks a day. Women can have one drink a day, and it doesn't impact performance, doesn't impact fat loss. You know, you could argue that it could impact mental health and stuff like that, maybe perhaps. But if you have a few drinks on Saturday morning or a Sunday or a Friday night with your friends, and that social vibe, it loosens the conversation up. You have that kind of bonding and chats, and that gives you happiness, and you love that.
Speaker 1:That's more powerful than the down impact of, like, one or two or three drinks. Right? That's a that's a fact. Like, they can say the drink alcohol permanently impacts you, but they're they're they're looking at the downsides, and you can say, well, you can have these charts without alcohol. Of course, you can.
Speaker 1:But alcohol is a social lubricant, and it does open people up to charts and stuff, and people take it too far. Are you one of the people that take it too far? Same with these foods. Like, can you have one chocolate bar? Can you start having one slice of cake?
Speaker 1:Can you have, like, you know, just like a moderate amount of these things, and maybe it takes time to get there and once you can and it's in the context of a healthy diet and you're hitting your calories, hitting your protein, you're making sure you're trying to get your vitamins and minerals in, no problem at all. Can ignore the noise, and great thing. Because once you've ignored this noise, you're not getting pulled in by all of these headlines. Even BBC News and stuff are saying it. Ultra processed foods linked ultra processed foods linked to causing causing depression, causing these things.
Speaker 1:And, hey, there's definitely a link between the gut, and how we how the the foods that can impact the gut, potentially this access on impacting our mental health and stuff, but it's still new. And it's more likely that it is the fact that this lifestyle of people eat higher, ultra processed foods is more likely to mean that they are probably not walking, probably not working out, probably not, like, calorie control in their intake, probably gaining weight over time, and that's also having a bad impact overall in the mental health as well. So, yeah, little ramble at the end of all that because I think it's important that we don't get scared by these people because that causes more stress. And that stress response being triggered over these fear mongering things that causing you more and more, and it's probably more harmful to stress about these things than to just have an Oreo ice cream sandwich. And that's what I'm gonna have today.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna have an Oreo ice cream sandwich. I'm gonna eat it, and I'm gonna collapse on the floor, and I'm gonna have a heart attack, and then they'll all be right on TikTok. They say Scott Flea died via Oreo ice cream sandwich, and then they can take that right to book about it. But in all seriousness, guys, there's the reason one of the tasks on the masterclasses are to eat your, what we call maybe a problem food where you you struggle with it in moderation is to actually eat that within your targets and to be able to monitor your your mindset about it, maybe even write down how you feel about it, and to have it in in your allowance that day and move on the next day. And you haven't self combusted and you were still alive, and you go, wow.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. And then when you do your weekly check-in, you've lost weight, and you're like, oh, wow. Really? You can lose weight and eat chocolate. That's mental.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. There's a reason we do those tasks because they are breakthrough tasks.
Speaker 1:And if you wanna do that task again, join me today on the Oreo ice cream sandwich. Happy days. Let's go for it. 240 calories. Who cares?
Speaker 1:Let's get in. I'm gonna also hit my protein. I'll also hit my calories. I'll also get my steps in. I'll also probably do a jiu jitsu session, get some exercise in.
Speaker 1:You know, I'll be doing these things for my, my my body and my mental health. So have a good day, and I hope this podcast was useful.
Speaker 2:Speak to you soon.