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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 One Day at a Time. Take it seriously, yeah? So, first thing, I want to cover a bit about a book from a hundred years ago. I've covered this before, but it's important to cover what is true in that, what is not true, and how the hell we've gone on a hundred year loop around in circles in different places and ended up that most advice given on Instagram is worse than advice given in 1918.
Speaker 1:Right? It outperforms 90% of what influencers post today, and it is brilliant. This woman was a dragon. She was cutthroat. She didn't take prisoners.
Speaker 1:She was going at it directly, and they worked, and it didn't work. But the point remains, it was true. Most of it was true, and this was the first time this came into the mainstream. So basically, a woman called Doctor. Lulu Peters, she's one of the first female doctors in California, first woman to intern at Los Angeles County General Hospital.
Speaker 1:She led its pathology lab. She lost 70 pounds herself using calorie counting from two twenty pounds down. She published Diet and Health with Key to the Calories in 1918. It was the world's first best selling diet book. And unfortunately, the rest of the diet book policies were terrible in a, you know, most of them are.
Speaker 1:She sold 2,000,000 copies. In 1924, 1925, she was on a non fiction bestseller, and she did a daily newspaper column called Diet and Health in the early times from nineteen twelve nineteen twenty two, sorry. So her core principles basically from this book that went viral, if we put it that way, because this was new to people, right? So anything new kind of maybe goes viral. And some new things are right, some new things are wrong.
Speaker 1:But she says, you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread or piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 350 calories of pie. She basically organized foods into 100 calorie portions, which is the same concept that reappeared in 2007 with 100 calorie snack packs. It was marketed as a modern invention. Now, energy balance is the foundation.
Speaker 1:So we're going to go through what she says and see if it's right or wrong. This is true. Energy balance is the foundation. The fitness industry spent one hundred years trying to find a way around this to make out that, you know, it doesn't exist. Some people go extreme saying calories just don't exist at all.
Speaker 1:Calories is just a unit of measurement. Anytime someone says your body doesn't work of calories, you stupid? You need to say, what calories is your unit of measurement, mate? It's measuring energy. You know, liters doesn't really exist in the sense of it's physical, but petrol, in terms of petrolitres, that does exist, it's real.
Speaker 1:That's the energy. So we're trying to measure something, and we've picked the word calories to measure the energy from food. This is really as simple as an energy we burn. So it exists, the unit of measurement. You can't have a code the unit of measurement, right?
Speaker 1:It's like being mad at meters and liters and millimeters. You'd be seen as a crazy person. Maybe it's locking you up if you were going to protest against the liters and meters. So she then says energy in versus energy out. She says cutting out 1,000 calories per day would equal a reduction of approximately eight pounds per month or 96 pounds per year.
Speaker 1:So obviously it's a bit oversimplified. Right? She's assuming weight loss is very straightforward, linear, which we know it's not, right? Metabolic adaption can happen and stuff, but the principle is that the deficit equals the loss is correct. So she got the direction right, the mechanism is right, but she just didn't account for actually, if you were to lose eight pounds over a year, 96 pounds in one year, would you lose it strictly straightaway one pound a week type of thing, pound or eight pounds a month as she said?
Speaker 1:Or does it get harder over time when we have to sometimes take a break and all that? Yeah, of course. Okay. The next thing she says is intermittent fasting. So she suggests taking a fast for one or two days before beginning her calorie restricted diet, basically.
Speaker 1:So she would advise patients from abstaining from all foods before sticking to her calorie target. So basically she was a hundred years ahead of the intermittent fasting trend, if you think about it. So she basically did a short fast and then structured restrictions, which is used still today. She wasn't doing it for like the longevity benefits as some people claim from intermittent fasting. She was doing things because they kick started things at the start.
Speaker 1:And sometimes, you know, people use this strategy because if you do abstain for a day or two, which is difficult by the way, some people will just like binge or whatever, you can maybe, you know, drop some water retention and stuff and then go into your kind of deficit, standard deficit. We've moved on from that now. You don't necessarily need to do it because we understand more what's happening with weight going up, weight going down, water retention, stress levels high means more water retention, stuff like that. Once we know that, we don't necessarily need to do this, you know. The next thing she said, You may be hungry at first, but you will soon become accustomed to the change.
Speaker 1:And she goes, Don't taste. You will find the second taste much harder to resist than the first. So she really understood basic hedonic adaption and the behavioural trap of just a bite. In modern, research confirms it both. Hunger does adapt to lower intake over days and taste testing triggers appetite centers that make restraint harder.
Speaker 1:This is basic behavioral science that most influencers still don't really mention or understand. She's correct here, you know, like we all know this. And it doesn't mean that we should stay away from foods that we label good and bad. It's not about that. It's just about like, if I taste this kind of like, what's my calorie allowance today?
Speaker 1:Okay. Do I mind going a bit over today? Will I pull it back? Actually, that's fine. Does one bite equal one bite or has that always been a lie I tell myself?
Speaker 1:Does one bite equals five? Because if one bite equals five, you need to say, okay, if I have one bite, I'm probably gonna need five. Know? And then you say, I'm gonna track five, but then we think, oh, I'm not gonna track five. I'm I I I feel sad I did that.
Speaker 1:And it's like this like, we deceive ourselves twice. We deceive ourselves in the fact one is not actually one is five. We then eat five and then we don't track the five because it's two times. Just be honest, you know, say like, there's a full chocolate bar there. Am I the type of person that usually can eat one fifth, which I know some people can, which blows my mind, by the way, because I don't.
Speaker 1:And then I say, well, there's a full bar there. I'm probably gonna eat it all. And I'm gonna track. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna kick myself. I'm not gonna hit I'm not gonna, you know, have a go myself, but that's the fact of me.
Speaker 1:And that's where we go. Right? Next thing she says, weight loss is about discipline, not tricks. So Lulu Peter says, reducing is like so reducing weight is like other things in life that make it worth living, being neat, being kind, being tender, reading, studying, and loving. She compared it to personal development and character, not a quick hack, Which, you know, this is like the adherence argument, you know, the best diet is the one that you can follow, the one that fits into your life.
Speaker 1:She didn't sell a supplement to your system, she just sold the concept of self regulation and the minimal regulation that you need. And it's honest, it's more honest than 90% of social media, that's for sure. People say like, Oh, if you go on Ozempic, you have to train and you have to make sure you eat better the rest of your life. What happens if you come off? It stops working.
Speaker 1:This is a lifelong thing. Yeah, like, you know, it's not like, I'm going to eat better for eight weeks, get better shape, feel better, then I'm going to go back to eating, weigh more calories than I need and not moving. That's not the intention of anything. The intention is, can we slowly build a lifestyle that suits us and our life because we're all different, but we're very similar in the same time? And that's the key.
Speaker 1:Can I stick to this or not? Can I do this most weeks of the year? Not can I do this every single day, but can I do this most of the time? And the times I don't do it, can I then be aware and I can get back to it? Know?
Speaker 1:That's why it's important, you know, people always mention, I need more recipes. I need more meal ideas. How many meal ideas do you need? You've thousands. How many recipes do you have?
Speaker 1:Thousands, cookbooks. That's not the answer. The answer is, what the hell do I like eating? And what the hell do I cook when I'm stressed out and no time? Just track those foods and say, what are these foods in terms of their macronutrients and calories?
Speaker 1:Is it any good or no? If it's not, I need to make a tweak to what I'm already eating and already liking because we can have the world's best recipes and they take too long to make and we just do them once a week, once a month. So we need to have our basics. It's true. Same with clothing.
Speaker 1:You wear 20% of your wardrobe 80% of the time. Fact. Fact. I've seen the data. I look at my wardrobe.
Speaker 1:It's nice and tidy these days, Blake. But I literally wear 5% if that. Same joggers, same t I I don't I'm not here to make big decisions on outfits, know? I know some people like, but you still look wear the same outfits. You wear what what what you grafted towards.
Speaker 1:So let's if we accept that, we can accept that we're we're gonna eat similar things. So when it comes down to your character, it is understanding what is my character? What are my character flaws in a sense? What are my values? And then can I can I build a system that works for me?
Speaker 1:And the first part of this is always honesty, and it's always not beating yourself up because you're not gonna get anywhere you beat yourself up. You're to run circles. You have to be honest and you have to have a bit of a laugh about stuff. Know, I do eat chocolate bars in full. Yes, like, you know, like when it comes to boredom, stressy, you know, we turn to food.
Speaker 1:Like let's not make it so serious. Yeah, we do. All right. Cool. What can we do about it?
Speaker 1:I don't know. It's up to us. Do we just eat it? Do we have a small amount in the house? Do we realize it's not the solution?
Speaker 1:And we realize we go for a walk instead, you bit of lightheartedness to it can help. She understood weight related disease, right? She linked excessive weight to heart disease and kidney problems, and that was just gaining some traction in scientific circles at the time. So she was basically practicing what we call today metabolic health awareness decades before it existed, and connecting obesity to cardiovascular risk in 1918. So she did some good work.
Speaker 1:But where does she get things wrong is important as well. So she didn't account for metabolic adoption. It's not that straightforward, but it's directionally correct. And for us, that matters more because we needed to know the direction we're going is fine, letting go of absolute targets. Oh my gosh, Scott.
Speaker 1:I didn't lose exactly one pound this week. Yeah. We're not saying you're gonna lose exactly one pound. We're gonna say you're gonna lose roughly one pound of fat if your target sign steps of that and your total weight will vary, but you are. And then as time goes on, your calories will be adjusted, they can't fix on the same point because as you lose weight, your maintenance will come down.
Speaker 1:So you do need to adjust and adapt that's and what we do. So we ensure that the adjustment happens automatically, so you stick to a decent deficit, so you can stick as close as possible over one year time. Two pounds of fat lost is not guaranteed exact number. Doesn't matter if you're at 48, 53, 45? No.
Speaker 1:You're moving in the right direction, and you're making tweaks. One thing she also doesn't mention is she doesn't prioritize protein at all. So she's just saying, like, 1,200 calories, 1,300 calories of anything is fine, But we do know protein is critical for muscle preservation, satiety, thermic effect, all that stuff. She had no macro hierarchy, but it was one hundred years ago. She also had a very toxic view, let's be honest, of the moral framing of things.
Speaker 1:So she would say some brutal things in her column. She would call overweight people fireless cookers, and she would frame being fat as a moral failing and even unpatriotic. She's American, you know? So this contributed oh, I can't even speak. Contributed Jesus, that's a hard word to say for me.
Speaker 1:To decades of fat shaming, which we're probably still dealing with today. You know, she was the first bestseller, like it would be ingrained in people. But modern science is clear on this, you know? Obesity has a strong genetic, hormonal, environmental cut off. Sorry, guys, back in now.
Speaker 1:So saying obesity has more to it than just willpower and stuff. We know that. We know that. I'm going to finish with this. A lot of people will say on social media, you know, like GLP-one drugs prove that people were just eating too many food, too many calories, and that's the reason they were obese.
Speaker 1:And whilst it proves like, of course, energy balance is the main factor, helping people get into a deficit has enabled them to lose weight. That's a fact. But it doesn't actually prove that it was a moral failing willpower because it still is a you know, it's a peptide, it's a hormones or impacts hormones. So it's not as simple as like, yes, it's like just because it's actually changed the person internally to reduce their food noise, to reduce their kind of reaction to environmental factors of food, making them feel fuller from meals as well. So it's not so like bottomless pit type stuff.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of things. And there's a study that gives people different weight loss drugs, depending on the kind of factors, kind of like the obesity they have in a sense, is it hungry gut? Is like hungry brain? There's another one called slow burn. I've done a quiz on it so you can find out what phenotype you are.
Speaker 1:And it shows much better results by giving them the right type of weight loss drug that helps mostly with that. So like slowing the gut, emptying, for example, or more like the kind of desire side of things. So yeah, of course it shows that it's the energy balance, we know that, but it's definitely not showing that they just could have just eaten less because these drugs help the middle part that then enables the deficit. Does that make sense? So yeah, a lot of people are saying like, Oh, well, you just needed the willpower from the start.
Speaker 1:No. No, no, no. And I think it's important that we're very honest and stuff about this because food is very complicated. Know, it's not just like food for fuel, food for energy. Like we've all got our routines and rituals and all our stuff with food, family celebrations, boredom, sadness, everything, you know.
Speaker 1:And we know it's not logical to just eat three bags of Maltesers. But when we're sad, we want to cover that gap. We want to bring the pleasure in and it helps for five, ten minutes, but then it makes us feel worse, you know. So we have to really realize that. But what these drugs do, they take away the desire to really want to eat food in huge amounts and give you the space to go and create a lifestyle that works for you.
Speaker 1:So if you are on a GLP one, please use it as a chance to create a routine and behaviors that last beyond it as well if you do tend to come off because that's the point of it, to give you the space and time to really eat nutritious foods, high protein, get focused on your steps, get some resistance training in, build our routine, build our lifestyle so then you can come out of it in a much better position. But that's it, guys. Wisdom from nineteen, eighteen, to help you in 2026.