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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, good morning everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. We're getting straight into business today. A few comments, emails, messages through and I see this so frequently that I bring it up again because it seems to be a common experience with a lot of you. By the way, when I talk about these experiences stories, I'm not going to name names and it's not calling people out in a bad way, it's just a way to explain a common viewpoint that can be changed quite quickly really.
Speaker 1:So the first one is like, hey, I've been hitting my calories, hitting my protein, getting my steps in for three weeks now and I haven't lost any weight. Surely I should have got results by now, surely this doesn't work. Like why are you saying it's working, why is this and it's not? And the first thing I ask people to do that is, well, maybe weight doesn't come down, because there is a difference between weight loss and fat loss. Weight is your total body weight, includes water.
Speaker 1:Your body is 60 to 70% water, so a fluctuation of a few percentage points in your water weight can lead to a quite a drastic change in your total body weight when you weigh yourself. So we've got to be kind of aware of this, but also not use it as an excuse long term. Does that make sense? Because I know a lot of people like, well you could blame water weight for weeks on end. But the truth is, if you have got a lot of weight to lose and you say you need to lose 5,100 pounds, the chances are you could be retaining a lot of water weight.
Speaker 1:Some people's weight drops quickly, so you'll see a two to three pounds drop per week for someone that's got a lot of weight to lose and some people remains stable for a few weeks. But when they take measurements, which is the second point, there's a change, there's inches down. So that means fat loss is happening regardless of total weight dropping. A very frustrating scenario to be in because when we do want to see a weight drop, and that's the easy metric we track with, and we don't see a drop, we're like, oh, it can't be working. And we see measurements go down, we're like, yeah, okay, that's good, it makes me feel better.
Speaker 1:But we kind of want to see all the metrics go in the right direction. That's how we've been wired. So we need to look at things holistically, we can't just be like, okay, I know weight's important because it is an easy metric and it's something we can track over time, but we have to actually look at the broad picture, what's happening with the body, take a bird's eye view. What's quickly done is quickly undone is probably a statement we should all follow. You see this everywhere, you see it in the rise and fall of companies, in the rise and fall of fame, in the rise and fall of someone starting an extreme plan and dropping off, only hear from them for ages.
Speaker 1:But the people that end up kind of becoming like overnight success we think, which it isn't, are people that have just been going out there five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years. And then wow how would you do it? I don't know, a few simple disciplines most days for the last ten years. And it's not going to take ten years for you to lose the weight you need to lose for anyone listening. If anything most of you will be done within a year and you might think that's a long time.
Speaker 1:It's not a long time because some of you have been losing weight, trying to lose weight for ten years, fifteen years, some of you haven't lived a life of not thinking about losing weight. And you think about this, it's absolutely crazy that we're in this position where we've been conditioned, especially women from the age of like even 10 years old, 11 years old, to lose weight. And this conditioning has caused a huge amount of guilt, huge amount of shame, huge amount of secret eating, huge amount of hiding behind bad feelings, hiding behind food, wanting to eat for comfort. And this keeps reinforcing, it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. All the bad things combined make it worse.
Speaker 1:It's like a feedback loop and it's a horrendous feedback loop. It's kind of the opposite of the positive feedback loop. So you think okay, I've been told to lose weight all my life, I've been told to be guilty if I'm gaining weight, I haven't even been explained why weight was up and down. I don't want to call out companies but companies like Slimming World and Weight Watchers who made their weekly weigh in this huge thing for the majority of their time operate and I think they've reduced it now, but this whole weekly loss or gain being all or nothing is a huge part of this problem. The consultants aren't even saying, well how have you actually been?
Speaker 1:I've actually been hitting my goals. Yeah but your weight's up so it's not good enough, you're lying. You should feel ashamed. Maybe you've got more problems and realise maybe it's someone else, maybe it's an undiagnosed problem. You start thinking, what's wrong with me?
Speaker 1:Am I broken? Am I the problem? I'm doing what they're saying. But when it comes to this and this app and this community, mean you say I'm doing what you guys are saying, I'm saying brilliant. Because if you're doing what we're saying I'm not saying that you're going to get exact weight loss every single week.
Speaker 1:It doesn't work like that. For those of you that weigh yourselves every day, you know what happens. Your weight goes up and down every single day. There's a handful of cases I'm aware of where weight stays the same every day and that's typically for people who are really light. Weight's stable, stable, stable, stable.
Speaker 1:For most of us, our weight is up and down, up and down, up half a kilo, down half a kilo, up one kilo, down 1.2 kilos, up 2.5 kilos, you know, down 0.2 kilos. Every day you're like, what's going on? But that's the natural fluctuation of the body and it's down to water retention. What impacts this? Many things.
Speaker 1:Your exercise the day before, how much you sweat, have rehydrated? If you do training for example in sports you'd weigh yourself before a game or before a run or before a big athletic event or a big training session and you say okay I weigh eighty five kilograms and then afterwards you weigh yourself and you're eighty two kilograms and you think those athletes aren't going I've lost three kilograms of fat, they're going wow I've lost three kilograms of water, I better replenish the water stores now, maybe even 1.5 x. So instead of drinking just three kilos of water back, which is three litres, you drink three by five litres and you make sure you get your electrolytes in as well because you'd lose a lot of that through the exercise. That's how it works in the sports world, there's no illusion that there's been a huge amount of fat loss lost after a big sweaty training session. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:So when it comes to weight loss stuff, we're under no illusions here what's going on when there's a big drop overnight. We're not saying, alright, you're gonna have a big drop one day. That big drop means all the fat you've lost will happen that night. Because this happens by the way, it's called the whoosh effect. You go up and down, up and down, up and down, and you're kind of stable, and then one day you weigh yourself and you're down three pounds.
Speaker 1:And then you go, how the hell has that happened? What did I do yesterday that caused this? It wasn't what you did yesterday that caused it really. It's what you did over the last three or four weeks that's led to this moment where one day you've dropped a lot of water retention. And, yes, this can be triggered by going to the sauna, having a long sweaty session, having less carbs, maybe having less salt intake.
Speaker 1:Of course, you can manipulate it this way, but you're only manipulating it acutely. You're only doing it for a short. It's not a long term thing. I can't go and lose three KGs after a long session and maintain that three KGs off because I have to replenish the water I've lost eventually because my body needs it. We can't live without water.
Speaker 1:You know the saying, you can't live without water. You can live without food for a while. Water, no chance. So we don't want to get into the territory of low water intake or dehydration tactics and stuff like that. We just want to say, I'm gonna hit my targets.
Speaker 1:I'm going to do daily weigh ins if I can, if not weekly. Daily with the weekly average is better, but do what's more comfortable. I'm going take measurements as well, maybe just my waist measurements for now. I don't want to mess up on my arms, legs, I'll do my waist. Maybe the other measurements have stressed me out and I can't do them all myself.
Speaker 1:Or you just do you do your waist, and you do that once a week. And you do your waist measurements in the morning after being in the toilet as well because, you know, over the day you can get bloated and eat food and all that. And then you start thinking about how my clothes are fitting. You might wear the same jeans or trousers once a week or every two weeks or you've got a work uniform you wear. You start thinking every Monday, let me see if I feel any different in it.
Speaker 1:And so I think, you know what, my trousers are a bit looser, my tops are bit looser. No, I haven't seen weights and scales but I'm definitely a bit looser. Those are the indications. How you feel about yourself is also important. Like, you're turning up and doing a few few of these simple disciplines that are powerful every day.
Speaker 1:And you start feeling motivated about, actually, I can do this. This is something I can do. I'm not following some sins or point based system that makes it over complicated and I have to eat these foods. Weight Watchers is like, well I want to eat this food but it doesn't what's the conversion to Weight Watcher points? All this stuff that they suck you into the point space system stresses you out and it's all overwhelming eventually.
Speaker 1:We want to reduce the overwhelm. We don't want this to grip us. I don't want it to grip you, genuine. I think it's such a shame that so much of our energies over the last decade, especially women, has gone to the concern about feeling guilty about eating certain ways. Think about that, the deficit didn't affect us hard and it's knocking on, but we are the ones listening here today and we're the ones that have to change this pattern because we're going be influencing people around us.
Speaker 1:I had a message as well from another member saying she was in a pub and she's listening, obviously just automatically these things they were next to her, some lads talking, some men talking about diabetes and how you can't put diabetes into remission and quite a lot of nonsense, not even indicating if it was type one or type two. It made her realise, she's like I want to say Zimmerman but I won't because, you know, no need. But she was like it makes you realise how much false information is out there. There is. And I will say that if you're listening to this podcast you have cut through a lot of the noise and you've come to a source that has worked alongside genuine experts for years and is telling you the truth.
Speaker 1:Everything is said here is pretty much backed by research and systematic reviews, researches of research, of high quality research. And things change. If your opinion doesn't change over time, you're following the science because they will change. Science does change but there are fundamentals that have been proven for decades unless something massive comes out and changes everything. But we know this stuff works because it's shown in the research but it's shown across the globe.
Speaker 1:Calorie deficit protein steps. A lot of studies on the importance of steps for all cause mortality. You walk 6,000, 7,000 steps plus, you start them reducing your risk of cardiovascular disease, all that type of stuff. Shown in this research is decades old, like they followed people all their life. The research behind energy intake.
Speaker 1:God, for people that don't believe in calories in calories out, they don't believe in physics. That's what they're saying. They're saying everything else works according to the laws of physics, but apart from us, we don't. All right toes are then. Well, we're different.
Speaker 1:And that's classic human, all of us do this. Dean Leake, our mindset coach, sent me an article about us. He's worked for the team GB Olympic team, he's been a mindset expert for years, worked a lot with me, worked a lot with members, sent me an article and he said in his article it was like 'There's one common human experience we all have and it's that we think we're the centre of the universe and it's kind of baked into us, it's innate. And we don't want to admit it because it's a dark truth but we feel that we are the center and things are happening around us. Things happening around us but we're in the middle.
Speaker 1:That's how we are, that's how we think. And when it comes to this calories in, energy systems, the cognitive bias maybe perhaps the word to use here is that, yeah I get that physics works everywhere else but I'm unique, I'm different. There's something wrong with me that's different to everyone else. My solution has to be complicated because there's no way I'm not special. I've got different metabolism, I've got this and that.
Speaker 1:And it's true, have got different gut microbiome is the top topic, with different weights, with different heights, but we are human beings. We've all got the same organs, 99.9999%. There's outliers where someone's got 11 and all this stuff and can debate this and be like, well not everyone has, but science wouldn't work unless we had things that stayed, the variable, a lot of variables are the same. So when it comes to weight loss and stuff, instead of thinking there's got to be something uniquely wrong with me because I'm a unique person and the world revolves around me, you say, Am I missing something glaringly obvious here? Because I am a human being, there's been studies on human beings for decades, there's proof of a lot of these concepts, Am I the one overcomplicating and thinking actually the reason I'm not losing fat is because one of my hormones is out of whack?
Speaker 1:No. Of course different hormone levels can have different impacts on your behaviour and your behaviour impacts your eating and your energy expenditure. That's how it impacts your weight. It's not impacting it directly where I have less testosterone, therefore I automatically have more fat. No.
Speaker 1:If I have less testosterone, I might have less energy. If I have less energy, might walk less. I might have less motivation to train. I might have less motivation to eat better because I don't care. My motivation is low.
Speaker 1:Therefore, it's impacted my energy out, my walking, my working out, my my desire to, like, train, And it's impacting me in the other side when I feel sad about it and weak and I actually just want to soothe those feelings with eating. That's how hormones can impact. But it doesn't outweigh if I could still retain my step count, my activity and my energy intake even despite of that low mood from low testosterone I wouldn't be gaining weight, I'd be losing fat. But it's harder obviously. Of course it's harder.
Speaker 1:A lot of people have got hormones out of whack and they feel low energy and I'm not saying dismiss the low energy, I'm saying is that is a factor and of course that factor can make you if you can resolve that factor and it makes it much easier for you to go for a walk and be active and more motivated obviously that's going to make it easier for you. I was diagnosed underactive thyroid at 16 years old. Felt like a fucking old man. I was sleeping all the time. I literally could not stay awake.
Speaker 1:I think what happens is, I'm gonna get this wrong I think, but essentially I was over tired of my body to try and make more thyroxine, but my gland was being stimulated to make it but wasn't actually making it. So then the the feedback loop was, okay, we need we need to do more and more and more, and that trying more to get that to stimulate more was there's something wrong there, right? So there was a lot of energy being used to try and get the right levels out and it wasn't happening. So you take this medication, job solved. So you kind of tie yourself out where you're always sleeping and your average energy burn throughout the day is lower if you've got that problem versus people that don't, and it's about 100 to 150 calories a day I believe on average.
Speaker 1:Obviously, some people it impacts more than others and average is an average, doesn't mean this is gonna be you. For me, sleeping all day in school. I had no desire to do any activity. I played sports but only when I required to go home, I play Xbox for an hour, and I'd be falling asleep for three hours, wake up at 09:10PM, play Xbox again, fall asleep, wake up, couldn't couldn't wake up. There was, you know, you could call out semi bedbound, really.
Speaker 1:I couldn't stay awake in school. Of course that's going to make it harder for me to be active. These are things to think about but don't let yourself be fooled that because that's the case then nothing else applies to you. The foundations. The foundations are all that's happening if you've gained weight is you've consumed too much energy.
Speaker 1:Some of you can consume more energy than others and not gain weight. Boo hoo, you know, tough shit. That's how it goes. There's some people who are six foot four who can consume 4,000 calories a day and they don't gain weight. I'm not going to compare myself to them because I'm not six foot four.
Speaker 1:I'm not them. I will look at my own intake and go, whatever I'm consuming right now, my weight is going up and I mean my fat is increasing over the last three months. So instead of me thinking, all about other people, I've got whatever I've been doing the last three months, that totality means that I haven't moved enough and I've consumed too much energy. That's it. I'm not a bad person, I'm not an idiot, I'm potentially not even lazy.
Speaker 1:I'm not stupid, I'm not pathetic, none of that. It's just that my balance of energy in and energy out has been a bit out of whack. I don't need to judge myself on it. I just need to make a few adjustments and keep going with those adjustments. Those adjustments for you listening, if weight loss is your goal, is to increase your step count if possible, to stand up more if possible, to take phone calls standing up, take the stairs, make activity in the weekend a thing, don't spend a day sitting down on the couch all day, make exercise something you like doing if you want to add it in, but be aware if you do hardcore exercise you're going be really, really, really hungry after it and you might consume more calories.
Speaker 1:Find something you enjoy doing. It could be social sports, could be swimming, it's whatever. And then just look at your calories in, calories out steps. That's all you gotta do, small tweaks. Okay.
Speaker 1:Maybe my problem is weekends. Maybe my problem is in the evenings. How can I make it a bit easier for myself? Okay. Instead of having five biscuits, I'm gonna have two and that's it, and I'm gonna practice that.
Speaker 1:These simple things add up over time, And that's it really. So I thought I'd cover that because I think that that's a similar story that comes in about how to look at your goal, how to look at your weight loss, how to look at your potential mindset that you're not losing fat, but you are losing fat, you're just not losing weight at the moment. There's other things you can do in the meantime. But if you just focus day to day, one day at a time, let the results happen naturally. If you know you're planting those seeds, they will grow.
Speaker 1:I promise you. But you have to be patient. This is a different type of game to the Slimming World and Weight Watchers and these quick fat loss things. There is no end. I'm going to lose x weight by x time.
Speaker 1:We're kind of throwing our rule book out. We're saying, hey, we're gonna try and lose weight moderately according to the science, which is moderate and safe, doesn't cause the yo yo diet in effect that others do, and we're gonna try and enjoy our lives at the same time because what's the point otherwise? So enjoy your day today, enjoy bettering yourself in small ways, and that's it. And we go again tomorrow. So write down your one big thing, get that done, and you've done more than most people do a day because most people stare at the to do list, do nothing, go home, watch TV, rinse and repeat.
Speaker 1:You're going to get something done right now and then we go from there. So I'll speak to you all soon.