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Hosted by Paul Evans, Registered Nutritionist (@paulthenutritionist)
Tired of the endless food fads, influencer nonsense, and TikTok nutrition “hacks”? This podcast cuts through it all.
No Forking Nonsense delivers straight-talking, science-backed nutrition advice that actually makes sense — in under 20 minutes. No fluff. No fads. Just real answers from a qualified expert who knows what works in the real world.
Each episode tackles one myth, one headline, or one common mistake — and gives you clear, practical takeaways you can apply straight away.
Whether you're trying to eat better, feel more human, or just stop falling for the same old food BS — this is the show for you.
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Welcome to no forking nonsense. The podcast that slices through the nonsense and serves you straight talking nutrition advice that actually works. I'm Paul, a registered nutritionist and your host. And every episode, I'll be debunking diet myths, breaking down confusing food advice and giving you practical science backed tips to help you eat better, feel better and get your hedge back. There'll be no fads, no shite, just real talk that makes sense.
@paulthenutritionist:Let's get stuck in. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Forking Nonsense and today we are talking about weekends and specifically why your weekends are probably ruining your progress and what we can do to fix your weekends without living like a monk and having absolutely no social life, no friends and just staying in because you want to be quote unquote healthy and that is an interesting debate because many people will say oh well I'm being really good at the moment, it's dry January, I'm not going out, I'm not drinking, I'm not eating chocolate, doing this, doing that and I'm like is that healthy? Is it healthy to just have no social life and just not really do things which are enjoyable? So I just want to get into that and talk through how to address it and now I've got a free gift for you at the end of this so stay tuned to the end of this podcast. So specifically when it comes to fat loss, if fat loss was decided Monday to Friday I think pretty much everyone would be as lean as they would like to be, so most people do everything right all week and the reason for that is that we've got that structure and you know it's very easy to an extent anyway, it's very easy to eat maybe the same things if that's your vibe Monday to Friday.
@paulthenutritionist:We've got kind of set times of when we might do things, the alarm clock usually go off the same time, if you work in an office you usually have to be there at a certain time, your lunch is a similar time, your accessibility to food is at a similar time and you have that structure. What I often find is that people who are looking to, certainly when they're trying to lose weight is they'll usually under eat in the week, certainly in the daytime, breakfast and lunch sometimes people will say I don't eat breakfast and all I have is a salad for lunch and then come the evening it inevitably usually will end up overeating and you end up in this kind of cycle but the weekend is usually where things seem to fall apart because what happens is it shows up and quietly wipes the slate clean of what you've done during the week and this isn't a discipline thing, it's just that no one's really talked about the maths of it. So when it comes to weekends, what we have to remember is that fat loss is not like a daily equation, So it's a weekly, maybe even a monthly one when we really unpick it.
@paulthenutritionist:So typically weekly deficit target for example could be 2,400, maybe 3,000 calories and one takeaway, one night of drinks, one roast dinner with a dessert is probably going to be over though and that can raise an entire week without you even realising and this is why people feel really stuck despite feeling they're trying hard and I will say that nine out of 10 times when I work with people who say I just can't lose weight, I've done everything. When we actually look at the food that they're consuming it's usually weekends where things go amiss and this is with their best intentions. Either what happens is subconsciously they find that they just end up eating more because they've been in such calorie deficit during the week and they're exposed to perhaps higher calorie foods or social events and you know their body just goes great we've been starving all week so we're going to eat more or what happens is they say I've been good. I used to have a client who'd be like oh we always have a fuck it Friday, what's that? Oh well you know Monday to Thursday I'm really really good and then Friday fuck it and then that fuck it Friday turned out to be five to 6,000 calories every Friday.
@paulthenutritionist:So of course they're not losing weight. And the thing with weekends is that they're also emotionally different because as I say, you know, the routines disappear, you might get up a little bit later. If you've kids you've got to take kids to different events and you know your meals are usually later, perhaps they're bigger, there's less protein focused certainly but less planning with them. Alcohol lowers restraint and increases appetite and you're more likely to drink on Friday and Saturday night rather than the Wednesday night. And usually because you are so busy there's long gaps between meals that will probably lead to overeating later.
@paulthenutritionist:And then we can add into that dehydration because during the week you might have a water bottle on your desk because you're in one place then the weekend comes and you're all over the place, you don't think about water and that dehydration can masquerade itself as hunger or cravings. So it isn't that there's things going on and you're completely broken, your metabolism's on its ass, it's just you're probably quite predictable. So the mindset shift that I really want us to kind of think about here is that to tackle and fix all the fish you don't necessarily need to have a perfect weekend, we don't need to meticulously plan every single thing that you do and what you do need to do is just consider things a little bit more. You need a weekend that doesn't completely write off all of your quote unquote progress for the week and you also need to probably not look at your week as like this punishment. Progress comes from containment and anticipation and not restricting your food.
@paulthenutritionist:Enjoyment is absolutely allowed and encouraged but chaotic unplanned eating and drinking just isn't what we're looking for. So there are four rules that can protect your progress, certainly when it comes to the weekend. But the first thing I do want to touch on before we get into that is that it's super super important that your weeks allow for you to eat foods that you enjoy so you're not saving your inhibitions if you like for the weekends because suddenly those weekends become this big splurge and psychologically it can be quite testing to keep that under control. Certainly if you've been restricting for five days, the weekend comes and you know as I say consciously you're rewarding yourself like a dog and subconsciously your body just wants more energy because you've been on your arse all week. And often people will forget the fact that when you're working and if you work quite a taxing job, which many of us do, what happens is your body literally needs glucose to function and if you're not giving it that glucose and you perhaps add gym workouts on top of that, you're even more of an energy deficit forget about calories an energy deficit so again your body at the weekend, once everything's calm and you know you're a little bit more relaxed, what happens is those inhibitions just absolutely take over.
@paulthenutritionist:The things you can do at the weekend: hydrate before midday. Appetite is usually set early in the day and one litre before lunch will change everything if you're not doing it now. What I recommend is you wake up and you have a big glass of water just to get your body moving. Just hydrate as much as possible. You should always be thinking to yourself where's my bottle or where's my drink?
@paulthenutritionist:And just ensuring that you're as hydrated as possible throughout the day, every day but certainly at the weekend taking in some more consideration, you'll find that your energy stabilised, your appetite stabilised and probably your mood will stabilise and you'll probably sleep and recover better as well. When we're eating at the weekend, regardless, obviously as I said it's going to be less structured. So just aim to build a plate so you have half veg, a quarter protein and a quarter carbs. Even in restaurants you can't go wrong by doing that. Just look for where is the veg in this meal?
@paulthenutritionist:Let's have a fist full of carbs, fist full of protein. You can't go wrong. If you are going out for a restaurant, just choose one indulgence. Have either a starter or a dessert or alcohol. If you can work to those kind of perimeters then you'll find that things become a lot more disciplined and you're in more control of this scenario.
@paulthenutritionist:It's very unlikely that people have both a sweet tooth and enjoy starter, it's usually one or the other, so commit and stick to it. Don't have all three because usually it just ruined your meal anyway, the main event's the main course. You don't need to have all starter, dessert or alcohol, they're basically three separate meals in themselves. But also stop trying to be good and start by being strategic. Stop trying to be perfect at the weekend because again, all you're doing is restricting yourself and when we restrict ourselves and we don't allow certain foods, then usually that's where bad habits come and you find this kind of, ah fuck it, I'll start on Monday.
@paulthenutritionist:So just be strategic, decide what you're going to do prior to going perhaps to a restaurant or to some kind of engagement. So when you eat out, I want you to eat out without losing control, so you don't need to avoid restaurants, I'm a strong, strong advocate of you being able to go to a restaurant and enjoy the foods that you enjoy. As I said you just need to have kind of rules in place that work anywhere. So introduce what I like to call the two out of three rule. So protein, volume, flavour, right?
@paulthenutritionist:So you want to aim for two out of the three of those as an absolute priority. Avoid meals that hit all three of those plus loads of fat. So what I want you to do as well is to pre load your protein and check the menus in advance. So if you are going to a restaurant, perhaps it's a vegetarian restaurant where you go for a pizza and you know that most pizza, even chicken pizza have hardly any chicken on, just have some protein earlier on the day or I don't know perhaps know that you're going to come out and have a nice protein yoghurt or Greek yoghurt with some fruit or something like that. Just make sure that you're covering those bases just so you're feeling like you're having a proper sustainable meal.
@paulthenutritionist:Alcohol honestly isn't the problem. Although there are a lot of wasted calories out in alcohol, what alcohol usually leads to after usually about two drinks is your appetite will increase, your inhibition drops and then the colour is spiral. So if you can and you have control over this, I'd recommend introducing the two drink rule. So always one beer, sometimes two beers, never three beers. And it's super important that before you drink alcohol you eat, right?
@paulthenutritionist:Not only will this prevent hangover the next day, it helps metabolise the alcohol and it will just ensure that you're feeling a lot better. Alternate that alcoholic drink with water where you can, so if you do end up drinking more than two or three drinks, usually I say start with a couple of social beers and then move on to the lower calorie alcoholic drinks because let's be honest, after two or three beers the flavour just disappears anyway, it's not an enjoyable experience, you're not drinking for the nice flavour of beers, you end up drinking to get pissed. So just let's try and help ourselves out here. Drop to vodka soda and lime or a spirit and soda and lime or just a low calorie alcoholic option and then alternate it with water, sparkling water, perhaps a lime and soda without vodka in. And these are just like some really simple, handover kind of proofing things that you can do.
@paulthenutritionist:Now I just want to interrupt you to say that I've actually got something for you which goes into more detail about everything I'm talking about here, including how to drink alcohol and to stop yourself being hungover. So I want you to go to thenutritionistuk.com/weekend and what you will find is that we have a completely free resource and you can go on to this resource, download it and it is completely yours. It has a complete breakdown of how to drink, how to eat, how to not overeat at the weekend and sets you out an emergency plan as well. The aim being that you should be able to go to the weekend fully in control without completely battering your progress. Anyway the next thing, an overeating emergency plan.
@paulthenutritionist:So if you do overeat, which you are probably going to do in your life, then there's something that you can do which is gold. So the mistake is usually what happens next. So what we want to do is we want to stop the spiral, we want to ensure that we don't go oh I've let it all go now so that's it, might as well just start again on Monday and today's Friday. Let's stop that nonsense. Just rehydrate with water, maybe some electrolytes, get straight back to normal the next day, eat a structured meal, go for a nice short walk and just move on.
@paulthenutritionist:You don't need to punish yourself and there isn't any guilt there. One meal does not ruin your progress, spiralling does and turning that one meal, that one night out, that one alcoholic splurged evening into a whole weekend of writing off. So I've made no secret of saying, you know, I play rugby and often on a Saturday after a game I'll have a couple of beers and on the odd occasion that it does get out of hand, I have a rule for myself and it is that no matter how much it gets out of hand, the next day I get right back to it. I go to the gym, I eat normal, I drink normal and I ensure that that is the kind of fallout of an evening which has been disrupted. And when I mean disrupted, mean it will impact my sleep, my recovery is not going to be as good, so the next day I have to get straight back on it.
@paulthenutritionist:That's the kind of bargain that I've made with myself. Here is how to lose fat with a social life. Firstly, we are going to introduce 60% rule, if you hit 60% of the fundamentals in your life, progress will probably continue. Ideally we want it at 80% but if you hit 60%, you will be good. One big event per weekend, not three.
@paulthenutritionist:We have one evening, not three evenings. Always protein before meals out to reduce the total intake of your calories because protein as we all know, as I've said a thousand times, will help your appetite, keep you full for longer and this is how people will stay super lean. So I hope that makes sense. As I said, if weekends feel like your weak spot, it's not necessarily a motivation issue, it's just usually a strategy gap. And I've put all of this into a really simple downloadable guide that is completely free, Just really simple rules that work in real life and if you want this laid out clearly, you can download it completely for free.
@paulthenutritionist:It shows you exactly how to enjoy your weekend without undoing all your progress and the link is in the notes below. But all you have to do is go to thenutritionistuk.com weekend. Do that and I promise you that you will never ever ever fail at a weekend again. I hope you find this useful, as always if you've got any questions please do message me on instagram paulnnutritionist and if you've got any questions at all you can email me paulnutritionistuk dot com. I really appreciate all you listening, sending me loads of questions, keeping us in the charts despite January, I've seen thousands of different episodes popping up all over the gaff, people trying to jump on this new year, new you bandwagon.
@paulthenutritionist:They'll disappear. They're not like me, just relentlessly banging on week in week out. But of course if you've got any questions or if there's anything that you do want me to explore with you, I've got a whole list of episodes coming up. I had a couple of people ask that they wanted a episode about me and my story and how I've got to where I am in terms of how I'm a nutritionist. So we'll go into that, I'm going to record that at some stage in the next week.
@paulthenutritionist:But yes, there's that coming up, we've got bit more about energy, nutrition, mental health, nutrition for brainpower, some supermarket hacks, we're going to do a supplement episode, eating abroad, travel nutrition come summer, protein as a vegetarian, loads and loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of episodes coming up but of course if there's any episodes or things that you'd like me to discuss, like any other topics, send me a message on Instagram, send me an email, love to hear from you and I shall speak to you next week. That's it for this episode of No Forking Nonsense, where the fluff gets binned and the facts get served. If you found this helpful, share it with someone who could do with some clarity from an expert. That's me, by the way. And make sure you hit follow so you don't miss what's coming next.
@paulthenutritionist:And if you want more straight talking, no nonsense nutrition advice, come and find me on Instagram Paul the Nutritionist. Until next time, eat smart, feel human again and stop falling for the forking nonsense. See you next time.