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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. Hope you're doing well. We are only two days left now of this Christmas challenge and of turtle method for 2022. So if you look back at 2022, did quite a lot to me. Think about all the stuff you did, all the vaults you did for yourself to be a better, healthier person.
Speaker 1:I think doing an annual review is important. And I think by looking back, we can go, wow, I did try, I did do my best a lot of times and some weeks weren't the best, some weeks were awesome. That's how it goes, that's how it goes. I've just had our Slimming World, well not Slimming World sorry, Slimming Club survey, analyzed by data scientists just to look at, use all their tools and stuff to look at some questions they ask. So we got 1,800 responses on the dot actually which is awesome, it's a lot of data to look at.
Speaker 1:I want to cover a few things now coming up on this survey information going into Christmas because it's very important. So one question was what do you find most difficult about trying to lose weight? Now if I look at the word cloud for all age groups, the big words that are in my face right now binge eating, emotional eating, time to exercise eating. Finding time, willpower, sticking to diet, what are the big words there? Sticking to plan.
Speaker 1:I like food. Is there any other ones same size? Social events is that but it's quite small. Portion sizes are quite small. Sugar craving very small.
Speaker 1:So yeah, we got binge eating and we got emotional eating and finding the time and willpower and stick to diet as the main ones okay. So this makes sense obviously but let's break it down into age groups and let's see what the different ones are. The top three words for each age group is very interesting. Actually it's got top five. Top words used by the age group 18 to 24.
Speaker 1:Just to remind you of the question, what do you find most difficult about trying to lose weight? Eighteen to twenty four, healthy food, motivation for the gym, just losing weight, binge eating and sadness. Twenty four to thirty social life, binge eating, being consistent, exercise, social events. 31 39, time to exercise, binge eating, finding time, emotional eating, I want. I want to eat, I want to eat.
Speaker 1:40 49, losing weight, willpower, portion control, right food, interesting. 50 to 59 not eating bad foods, sticking to a plan, able to eat even in snacking, and then 60 to 69, keeping motivated, hard to stick to diet, binge eating, binge night, constantly thinking of food, and then 70 plus weak power willpower, weak willpower, temptation, high temptation, high calorie foods, eating a night night rubbish. Okay, so there is a difference here and you notice that like 24 to 30 the top five is social events are a big factor in 24 30. 31 to 39 it doesn't even come in the top five. Binge eating though, do I say out loud binge eating, is in nearly every age group's top five.
Speaker 1:Finding time comes in with 30 to 39 more than any other age group. So this is interesting. So binge eating, imagine we could fix binge eating, imagine we could lower our frequency of binge eating. Fat loss is really, it's not about tactics, it's about emotional management. If you were to distill it down, really is about emotional management like you can have the best plan on paper, you can have the best, you can have all the right meals in your fridge to eat prepped up everything, and then you have a massively emotional day, stress eat and you don't want those foods in your fridge, you want and this is science.
Speaker 1:If you're chronically stressed you do want, you do desire foods high in fat, high sugar, right? It's what you tend to crave when you're always chronically stressed. So you've got those meals in the fridge but you don't eat them. How many of you have done this? You've meal prepped and you still haven't eaten the meals you've meal prepped because you didn't want them.
Speaker 1:Your craving was for different types of foods, you go and eat the chocolate and all that. And then you won't even feel hungry after you've binged eat chocolate and then you kind of meals go and you don't eat them. This happens, this happens. So managing emotions and seeing our emotions, the root word for emotion, if we look at the root word, it comes from the where is it? Let me get it.
Speaker 1:Emoticon. Two seconds. Bear with me, it's a good one. Okay, here we go. Emotion borrowed from middle French means based on Latin which means to move out, move away, remove, stir up, irritate.
Speaker 1:So emotions are to stir up, they stir up and they irritate. Move, moving, stir in, irritation, it creates that. So our emotions, if they're not managed, will stir up such a whirlwind, such a storm in the brain, in the mind, you're going to find it hard to stick to any sort of plan you've put together, to think rationally to be a cool headed person, right. So it comes down to emotional management and really you know there's so many philosophies across the world that have come to try and figure this out but it really, the only way you can really look at your emotions and manage them is if you are present in the today. If your mind is always and fearful of the future or the past, you're always thinking of the future of the past, you're worrying about what you did before or why you're worrying about what's coming up in in the future, you're not living now at all.
Speaker 1:The days are just going by and have no you're not living presently at all, and that's how most people live. And that's why emotions when they come in, they do stir up a lot. You say like, how's oh my god. Come on. And it turns, it catastrophizes, it turned into a huge thing.
Speaker 1:So the theme for 2023 is really like, forget about all the tactics and stuff and you know, tracking and everything like that, less focus, let's look at how emotional are we? What is the emotion that really drives our lives? What's the emotion that drives your day to day? What's the emotion that drives your decision making? You know all of us are different types of, if we were to do like a spider diagram of all the emotions, like what emotion really is your main one?
Speaker 1:Have you ever looked into this to figure out? I think it's worth going into, especially looking at these this, survey. Let's have a look at other things. What would weight loss do for your life if you achieved it and kept it off? Main one here is confident, confidence, mental health, more energy, comfortable, happier, confidence, improve health, feel happier, boost confidence, better life, change life.
Speaker 1:Does it? Self esteem. All right okay big words confidence, self esteem make me feel better. Does weight loss itself do that? It's a question we brought this up a few times before.
Speaker 1:It's like does weight loss in itself generate more confidence? No. No. No. It doesn't.
Speaker 1:You can go down the wrong path and fall into the trap so much about thinking about getting lean that you have body dysmorphia where you don't even think you are lean when you are. This happens a lot in the fitness world. A lot of these big bodybuilders bikini competition girls or even like people who are in the gym shack type of girls back in the day, they would all say they thought they weren't lean, thought they didn't look good, they couldn't see themselves in the mirror like others saw them, complete detachment, difference, completely different from the reality. So just losing weight isn't enough to do this. We need to make that clear.
Speaker 1:Weight loss has to come with a mindset shift, with emotional management, with studying ourselves, know thyself, blah blah blah blah blah. Be the light to yourself, la la la Buddha. La la Buddha says that. Let's listen to Buddha maybe. But you have to find out where like you have to see the roots of things as well, like your core beliefs.
Speaker 1:If your core belief is that if you lose weight, you will feel more confident and you lose weight, you're just going to compare yourself to others and then you're going to think well I need to lose more weight and more weight and that's how people in the documentary with Zara, when she looked at one of those girls that did lose weight of a lockdown and then she went to the other side she went anorexic, she never thought she'd arrived at the leanest level she wanted to be, kept going. So whilst I 100 agree that if we get into better physical shape, we feel stronger, we feel like we can run and we feel like we can lift weights, definitely have a knock on effect of day to day confidence because we're going to feel better, we're going to be stronger right, but it has to come along the other stuff. That's the important part. So we're going to be thin, that's why a turtle we don't really just go like let's lose weight and off you go bye bye. It's like we're losing weight, but are we looking at these other things at the same time?
Speaker 1:Because if we're not, we're in trouble. And there's no point going down this route because you're gonna go and put the weight back on, you're gonna be back to square one going, put all the weight back on again. Well, did you change the route? No, you change the I just did a diet, lost weight and I thought it solved my problems but it didn't because I kept binge eating. Well, we need to change the route guys.
Speaker 1:Always pointless. This is an important one. What makes you decide to start another diet after one has failed? What do you think about this? You all know the answer to this.
Speaker 1:Biggest word in this word cloud, right on my face, huge letters, social media. Second, seeing people lose weight, which would probably be coming from social media. Another one actually, clothes fitting, looking in the mirror, tight clothes. Pretty much it. And, just goes to show the info on social media has madness.
Speaker 1:What are we gonna do with this then? Do you think you've got the capacity, the mental capacity to look at things in social media without reacting to them? Looking at someone on social media looks lean, some old friend who's lost a lot of weight and not compare and feel bad about it. Do you think that's possible for you? It's possible to do it 100%.
Speaker 1:You can look at people's pictures and go, wow. Transformation, not feel bad. Most people look at it and then compare and go, feel terrible now. I better buy that diet pill I just saw, like, ten minutes ago on Instagram because they they promised me I lose 10 pounds in ten days, and I might as well give it a go while we got to lose la la la. He got down this nonsense route.
Speaker 1:So we need to look at our relation with social media. This is where stoicism really is key, honestly believe the operating system of stoicism is key. You know, looking at the introduction to anxiety, Oxford University classics, talking about the history of anxiety, know, what what we've used before to kind of address and explain it. And we've come full circle, the Stoics Newer Handler two thousand years ago, and we've gone on its journey and we've come full circle and gone yeah, CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy works wonders for it. Looking at our thoughts and our core beliefs about our thoughts, brilliant.
Speaker 1:It's our opinion about the things that's the main thing, not the thing itself. Who would have thought Seneca with those words back in the day and Epictetus would be so so relevant and new really today with the research. But it's true. So die your mind with stoicism might help you. But again, like, you know, if we look at age group, eighteen twenty four social media seeing people twenty four to thirty social media losing weight seeing people 31 to 39 social media losing weight feel I need to 40 to 40 nine losing weight, I feel social media 50 to 50 nine lose weight I feel close fit in tighter 60 to 69 just feel in social media.
Speaker 1:Mad every age group, we've been poisoned on every age level. Where'd you get your health and fitness voids from? Biggest words, social media. Mad. Can't make sense because we spend all the time there.
Speaker 1:That's another realization. Our opinions come from where we spend most of our time, not so much actual actual analysis and critical thinking. If you spend your time reading the Daily Mail, guess where your opinions are gonna come from, even if you're not even aware. They're gonna come from the Daily Mail. If you are spending your time in Instagram scrolling through, you got x followers, your opinion is gonna come from the follower people you follow.
Speaker 1:And then you might think they're your own. They're not. This is not how human nature works. You have to be very, very selective with where you spend your what's the word? Where you spend your, like, mental capacity, where you who you spend time with in person is important, but what you're reading online because you spend so much time online is is even more important.
Speaker 1:So if you're only gonna get your advice from social media and you follow certain people, you know, they might be good people to follow, that's great. But what you'll end up seeing is posts that are gonna stir your emotions up, keep you on the on the on the, feed because that's how it works, negative, the negative news, things to get you commenting and arguing and stuff like that as what keeps you on air and makes more money for the advertisers. That's what they do. So yeah, that's a tough one. We've got so much information now.
Speaker 1:So much information. Okay, next one. What's the best thing you've ever experienced at a slimming club? Three stone, two stone, lose weight. See, if you were to ask what's the best thing you've ever experienced at Turtle, losing weight would not be the main thing.
Speaker 1:I would guess it would be part of it, but would definitely not be the main thing. So you can see straight away the difference between us and Slimming World and Weight Watchers is their main focus is on weight loss obviously because they call Weight Watchers Slimming World. But beyond that, it doesn't change the root. You shed a few pounds in your outer body, not changing your inner inner world, is it? Really?
Speaker 1:The inner world and the outer world. That's it. Few more then before I finish this podcast. I think it's interesting to look at this stuff. As long as you're in a calorie deficit, you lose fat no matter what food you eat.
Speaker 1:Is this true or false? Well, the younger groups are saying true, and as you get older, it comes false. So there's a big disconnect there between the older groups and the younger groups. The older groups have been exposed to such nonsense. That's probably one of the reasons.
Speaker 1:And I do trust experts and wow the difference here. Eighteen to twenty four year olds, 78% trust experts. Twenty to thirty years old, 71% trust experts. 31 to 3970% trust experts. Forty to forty nine seventy one, 50 to fifty nine sixty four, 60 to sixty nine fifty four, and then 70 plus 28%.
Speaker 1:Cynical, cynical. But the people in the older age groups have got more proof that they've listened to magazines where they thought were experts didn't work because they've all put their way back on. And the other question, fascinating stuff. We should trust experts who in their respective fields, but we also need to bring in critical thinking skills, we also need to look at how they word and things, how they frame something, how I frame something will change how you look at the answer completely. Know for example it's Graham Hancock guy who's framing ancient civilisation after died out when a comet hit and they were way more advanced right.
Speaker 1:And he says we can't believe we found this, we thought we would never find this burial site but it's 12,000 years old, way older than we thought possible and they had advanced buildings and it aligns with the time the meteor hit and this advanced civilisation that we didn't know about holds the keys to these mysteries in the past. How he said that, you're now like oh my god, he's bang on. He goes yeah, so basically advanced civilization we didn't know about and you're like yeah, makes sense. If you just said it was a comet hit thousands years later, there was a site in Turkey, we don't really know where the people were, there's a few things there's few buildings, few big pieces of stone. Homo erectus started doing fires one point eight million years ago, so they're you know close to us.
Speaker 1:So millions of years ago we were using fire, using tools hundreds and hundreds of thousand years ago. How I framed that now, you're probably not thinking that that's an advanced civilization that was in that the place in Turkey. You know, was thinking to think, well, maybe they did build some cool stuff. The way he frames it, because he does capital letters in his taxes and his books and all that, you're like, woah, shit. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Fucking damn right, mate. Aliens. So yeah, you gotta watch out for that. And that's it really, I wanna finish on that. Tomorrow's podcast will be, well, who knows, maybe I'll do like a I'm trying to like a review of the year or something like that.
Speaker 1:But I do wanna thank everybody for doing this challenge, for sticking around, doing the workout, sticking doing some doing some sort of tracking, know, you're probably sleeping still or you've gone on your walk or you're in the gym, wherever you are right now. You know, Christmas is coming, but you still gotta go through today. Today is an important day. Let's not throw it away because Christmas is a week and a half away. Let's let's make today a good day.
Speaker 1:And that's obviously, we're gonna do something for our health. That's what makes the day good. We do something for our health, which is either a walk, drinking lots of water, eating a good energy dense, yeah, good ratio of macros in a meal, hitting a protein target, maybe working out whatever. Do do something for your health today cause always the best days are days where we are moving or doing something that's good for our mind and body. So get going on our task because you're one big thing and I will see you all on the quiz tonight.