A story to inspire you + are glucose monitors legit?
Hello everyone, welcome back to the One Day at a Time podcast. Now I do like sharing stories from the community, some research studies that I'm going to share today and also some success stories. It's hard to say it all in podcast, I think it's better sometimes people read it. But there is a really good post by Jules in the group and she says she wanted to come on and let people know how amazing PowerPal has been for a year. I got straight in my head about losing the food demons I've kept all my life.
Speaker 1:She mentions here, I've changed goal now and have taken up competitive bodybuilding in bikini category as a master's athlete, but the foundation of weight loss I achieved in discipline through daily non negotiable and mindset that Papa gave me was everything I needed and more. Scott, you really are onto something super cool, and I'm so pleased to see how much development and growth has gone on since I joined, like, maybe eighteen months ago. If you think you can't, you actually can. And she goes on, she looks amazing, shredded. Jules says, I'm living proof of the power of drive, dedication, determination, and discipline.
Speaker 1:Every single day, my relentless pursuit for better and more for me. I'm my why every day. Shared my picture. I went to the universe last weekend and out of 18 masters athletes, eight again taking the stage with pro athletes and more than a hold of my own. I'm so proud of the woman I am and I wanted to acknowledge Para Palin Scott for the start I didn't know I needed until I trusted the process consistently.
Speaker 1:Going, all of you, you can and will do exactly as you dream and desire one day at a time. Amazing. So to get down to the level of body fat Jills has reached would take a lot of determination, a lot of dedication, a lot of hard days. And people do forget, right, when you do lose weight and you go into a deficit, you are going to feel hungry from time to time. Now the larger the deficit the more this hunger is going to be and sometimes it gets overwhelming and you actually rebound and eat a lot and you can't hold it in.
Speaker 1:That's why it's recommended to go on a deficit that's not too aggressive but to get down to that level of body fat Jules has achieved means she's had to stay consistent with her activity even when energy is low, calories are coming low, you still got to eat protein, still go to the gym, still moving day to day is a really important part of the process because the body wants to compensate down, the body wants you to chill out a bit and preserve some energy because it's in a deficit. People have mistakenly called this like starvation mode and stuff, it's not starvation mode, Your body will still lose tissue, fat, muscle, whatever it is in a prolonged deficit. But it does adapt. It does tell you, hey, chill out a second. Sit down maybe.
Speaker 1:Stop going for walks. Stop going to the gym. We want to chill out and conserve energy. But it's all part of a process. Like Jill's mentioned eighteen months ago, joined the app and over the last year she's wanted to compete and she's gone to a competition.
Speaker 1:For many of you, and I've mentioned this before, for many of you, it takes one to two years for you to get to a place you want to be and then you maintain. But a lot of you've been trying to do this for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, twenty five years, some people thirty years. All your life, basically, a lot of you have been struggling all your life. And the secret, and there is no secret, but the secret is the fundamentals done. Steps, calories, protein.
Speaker 1:If you did that for eighteen to twenty four months, let the app adjust your targets based on changes to your metabolic rate, which it does. We're honest with yourself. We're flexible. Make sure you're not rigid. Rigid approaches to eating have got negative impact on your mental health and stuff.
Speaker 1:So you don't want be rigid in your approach, but you do want to be stern in your determination, stern in the one day at a time philosophy. Things will happen. Things will happen. So I just want to remind you guys, it's possible to lose the weight. It's possible to keep it off.
Speaker 1:And it's also possible, like Jules has done, to even go further beyond and get stage ready and have shredded abs and that takes a lot to get there and I've done it once before. It is very, very difficult and it's not something you should go into easily because it takes a lot of energy and time. But anyway, back to some studies now. Just wanted to give you some jewels boost. Some studies I want to cover.
Speaker 1:Glucose monitors. Do not believe the hype if you are not diabetic. Let's look at a recent research study that looks into this. For someone with type one diabetes, a continuous glucose monitor can help them calibrate their insulin dosage to account for their training program, for example. For type two diabetes, it can help limit their post meal glucose response.
Speaker 1:Just in general, it's useful and required when you've got diabetes, of course. Now, what if you don't have diabetes? That really is the question because a lot of advertising of these continuous glucose monitors is for people who don't have diabetes because if you already have diabetes, you don't really need to be marketed these products, you know you're going have them. So they're trying to market it to the non diabetics and say this would make you healthier. So can continuous glucose monitors provide metabolic healthy adults and individuals useful information that can lead you to have better health, improved performance, lower risk of diabetes, chronic diseases, and so forth.
Speaker 1:Can it actually do that? Because currently, there's no evidence and the information that continuous glucose monitors actually lead to any of those benefits. Now, the main reason is, and this is the most shocking reason, is they cannot predict how a meal will affect your blood glucose even if you ate the same meal. This is the big problem. Now, there's a new study by the US National Institute of Health, and it looks at these things.
Speaker 1:So what do they do? So they recruited participants diabetes. In both experiments, the continuous glucose monitor wearing participants lived in a research hospital for two weeks at a time. They were served a total of 21 different meals for the first week and the exact same 21 meals in the second week. You might expect different individuals to have different responses.
Speaker 1:You might also expect that each individual would have a similar response to the same meal on different days. That's what they're basically trying to say. Well, if you find the foods that match you, then you can have the same response for those foods whether it's today or tomorrow. Yeah. That's the assumption on the continuous glucose monitors like ZOWI and stuff.
Speaker 1:They'll say, Hey, we found these certain foods that respond best for you. You should eat these because the response is going to be the same the next time you eat these foods. That's essentially the claim they're making. And they're basically saying these glucose responses are unique to you and your unique glucose dynamics are consistent and reliable. That's kind of the base they're going off.
Speaker 1:Now is that what happens? Well, the sad news for these companies is it's not what happens. Participants had wildly different glucose responses to identical meals almost as if they had eaten two completely different meals. So they looked at the Dexcom G4, they looked at the Freestyle Libre CGM, the correlation numbers are terrible, pretty close to the bottom of the scale in fact. And previous studies have also shown the same.
Speaker 1:So they said the authors say, this is a quote, The differences in post meal glucose response between two people are trivial compared to the daily variations within each of those individuals. Basically, your own variation of the same meal is a bigger variant than comparing you to someone else. Okay, so how this of any use? It's not. Okay, so unless you have diabetes or you're at high risk, you don't need to buy these things and pay £200 a month, 100 a month.
Speaker 1:You're not going to get any useful information from it. There's a thing in the research that even if the data you're collecting is like, inaccurate, as long as the inaccuracy is consistent, you can actually measure trends from the inaccuracy of data. So one example of this is if you use those weighing scales that tell you what your body fat percentage is, which it doesn't do that accurately compared to actual other expensive tests. The inaccuracy of it, whilst it's not going to give you bang on numbers, that if you took the same test week in week out, you probably will see a trend into one direction and it would show that you're improving one of those functions. Now, another problem with that is that water intake can cause it la la la, so it might not be the best example, but it's one of those examples where the trend, you can be directionally correct.
Speaker 1:Honestly, obviously you don't need to be perfect with your numbers, but when it comes to the continuous glucose monitors, there isn't even a trend to go off. Like the data back is so different between the same meals. It's actually just useless. It's like when you look at the calories in terms of calories, you don't need to be perfect with your tracking. This is proven in the research.
Speaker 1:You can write down meals on a piece of paper and you can track every meal to the weight to the gram. And some people actually have the same significant weight loss over the trial period. It depends on what keeps you consistent obviously weighing things is going to give you more moments like, oh my god I didn't realise that was so many calories, But weighing is better overall for accuracy. But really what you're doing is you're building up a kind of behavioral pattern, a trend of your eating, of the things you typically eat day in, day out, And eventually, you get to the stage where you've enough data to determine whatever you're eating and moving results in either you're gaining weight, maintaining or losing. And you can use that trend to make adjustments.
Speaker 1:You can say, well, I've been writing down, even though I might not be bang on calorie wise, maybe for every breakfast I have is like a bowl of oats with flax seeds, a large latte, and I have a banana. And then you say, okay, well, I just remove the banana and I remove the flax seeds and then I'll go again. Does that make sense? You've got this kind of like predictive. You've got this kind of like trend.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't have to bang on, but you can make the changes from that because then they'll actually impact you and you can understand what's gonna do. With these continuous glucose monitors, you can say, well, maybe I have a bit more oats tomorrow and or a bit less, but you just don't know what it's going to do. There's no trend. It's just complete random. So if you're worried about these things, can get fasted glucose tests from the doctor, random blood sugar test, hemoglobin, test your hemoglobin and stuff like that and you're going to find out where you are in terms of diabetes risk.
Speaker 1:And there's another podcast on the best diet and there isn't really the best diet for type two diabetes to have a look into as well. So yeah, kind of useless if you're not diabetic guys, just to factor that in. And I want to finish off with some good news for you actually, some really good news. You would have noticed I've covered this topic quite a lot recently about training and the importance of doing resistance training and again that's like body weight, resistance bands, machines, free weight, dumbbells, barbers, whatever it is. Whatever you use, it's got weight that's gonna put some weight, put some resistance on your body to push and pull.
Speaker 1:That's what resistance training is. It doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be bodybuilder style. Doesn't have to be too you'd have to go to a hardcore bodybuilder gym. Now we used to think back in the day that you had to train really intensely five times a week to make any gains.
Speaker 1:That's kind of what people thought. This study by Lehrman College in New York, they got 50 young adults who were trained for at least a year, which is good, and eight weeks long because at least the newbie gains are gone, so at least a year means they're not gonna get these newbie gains. They did twice a week and they do eight to 12 reps of an exercise. So say now for example, an exercise is squatting, so you can just squat down and up, that's one rep, down and up, two reps. Do eight to 12 of those, maybe holding dumbbells or if you're on a machine or if you do a barber, whatever your choice is that's basically what these reps are and then one set is a completion of eight to 12 reps.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? So they only did 18 sets per week so I would do for example eight reps in the squats okay, and then I would move on and do eight reps in bicep curls just up, down, up, down eight times. Then I would go and do another exercise, maybe shoulder press in the machine. I would push the machine up and down eight times, and I would just go around full body and do 18 sets and just do eight to 12 reps basically, not much at all. So what actual results do get from this versus going to failure, going two reps shy of being able to do any more or just kind of winging it and doing, oh, this is easy.
Speaker 1:So that's what they looked at. Looked at it like, if we did a few sets a week on each body part, which would take you thirty to forty five minutes a week maximum. This is the good news, you can go in and out once a week to the local gym or at home and you can get this. I'm thinking of even recording one of these base workouts so let me know if you want me to do a recorder from my home just with a few sets of dumbbells and resistance bands, the cheapest possible combination and then you can just follow it once a week and you'd get results. Now, but the main thing is do you have to go all the way where you can't move the weight anymore so you're screaming like, oh my god, that's maximum?
Speaker 1:Or can you go to where you could have done maybe two or three more reps? Or would you go where you just easily do 12 reps and it was nothing? Like, what's the difference? So there was no significant difference in strength gains between these groups whether you went all the way to failure whether you went two or three reps shy so like you could do two or three reps more easily whether you just kind of wind it. Now the difference comes in muscle gain.
Speaker 1:You don't gain as much muscle if you don't go towards the failure level. So if you go towards pushing yourself, you likely going to gain a bit more muscle, you're going to improve your power and endurance as well. So depending on how you feel on a day, I'd recommend everyone start with just doing two or three reps shy, so doing these exercises, getting some dumbbells, go on YouTube, get a beginner's homework it up or I'll do one anyway. Two or three reps shy, it's safe, you're not going to be struggling too much, you're going be able to manage it and that's it. Happy days.
Speaker 1:You do that once a week for eight weeks and you're gonna improve your strength a lot. They improve their one rep max strength by 12 to 13% on the squat. So they've gained 12 to 13% in their one rep max on squats. Six to 7% in the bench press. Okay?
Speaker 1:So they gain strength and muscle mass. Okay? But you can get better gains if you do push yourself to like being maybe once a month you push yourself to where maybe you can't do another rep. And that's all you gotta do. That is brilliant news and I'm gonna drill it into all of your heads until you realize that if you are gonna do any exercise, if you are gonna do any workouts, you're not doing it to burn calories because it doesn't burn that many calories, net calorie burn.
Speaker 1:Do not look into this thing. It's a complete It's a failed system. You do not eat the calories you burned because you didn't burn the amount of calories. So don't do that. Do these workouts for gaining strength and muscle because this is gonna have a huge benefit to you and your metabolic health.
Speaker 1:Now do this once a week on happy days. Pay a PT. If you save some money, pay a PT, go through some basic exercises for a month and then you can do it yourself. And even if you've got some experience in weightlifting and stuff, you can still get results like this. So lower volume is often better.
Speaker 1:Less time, you're more willing to do it, and it's more motivational I think to start off this way. But anyway, I'm gonna leave you with that. So Jules is awesome story. She's stuck to the fundamentals, kept pushing in, managed to get on stage and become eighth in the tournament which is amazing. Continuous glucose monitors, don't fall for the hype, they're not going to work for you unless you've got diabetes so ignore that, another thing you don't have to think about.
Speaker 1:And if you have been worrying about muscle and straining and strength and long term health, the brilliant news is another study to come out saying you can do one, a few sets a week, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, not much and get most of the benefits. So have a good day, focus on the fundamentals like Jules has done, calories, protein and steps. If you feel you're behind or if you feel demotivated right now, pick one of them to hit today and have a good day. Put a smile on your face as well. Come on.
Speaker 1:You get to do these things, which is important. It's a good mindset to think about. I get to do this today. Not I have to. I get to improve my health, which a lot of people don't have a chance to do.
Speaker 1:So have a good day. Speak to you soon.
