Day 2 - Basics + action!
Good morning everyone, it's day two of the challenge. Now we need to focus on the basics right. Some of you are gonna feel overwhelmed, some of you are gonna feel like I'm on the I've just downloaded this app, I'm doing this master class, I'm listening to a podcast, I'm doing a task. You have to focus on things in day segments, otherwise it all becomes overwhelming. You don't learn to drive a car on the first day, you likely nearly crashed it.
Speaker 1:Like how the hell am I gonna drive a car like it's nothing? Now most of you can drive a car like it's second nature, you don't have to think about it. Every single thing you learn starts with quite a rough learning curve and then it becomes easy. And I'm telling you, once you pass the learning curve with the app and understanding, it becomes easy. Few minutes a day on the app is all you need.
Speaker 1:Now there was a chat with Alex last night and, asked the question, you know, are you struggling with or what you wanna do for the next four or five weeks. And there's a few topics I wanna cover because I think they're important. So a few people like, you know, more worried about food. Now I asked this question on the survey, alright, about Slimming World. And I covered this last week but some of you have been new.
Speaker 1:And the question was, What is it? Okay. Do you think this statement is true? As long as you're in a calorie deficit you lose fat no matter the food you eat. You know, 47% said it's true, forty two 40.2% said it's not true, and a lot of people were like, maybe it's true, maybe it's not true.
Speaker 1:It is 100% true. You cannot escape the fact. If you are in a deficit, which means you are not consuming as many calories as you need to to basically function that day, total daily energy expenditure. Your total accumulation of energy you need to use for your body to do everything in that day, say is 2,000 calories. If you're not eating 2,000 calories and you're in a deficit, your body must get those calories from somewhere.
Speaker 1:And luckily, we've got a mechanism in our body that takes it from our fat stores and all of us have got stored fat away, stored energy away to use in those circumstances. And if you're not careful and not eating enough protein and training, it'll also break down muscle at the same time or afterwards before when it gets too much, it'll break muscle down as well for energy. So the body will break down fat and muscle for energy, mainly fat if you're diet or your macros are on point. Right? That is a fact.
Speaker 1:Nothing else matters in that point in terms of the fact. You could say, yeah, but hormones make a difference. Yeah. Hormones might make a difference, but I'm still saying that they're still in a deficit. They're in a deficit also including the changes the hormones would have had to their calories in versus calories out.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? Like, I'm in if I was officially in a deficit, I will be burning fat net at the end of the day, maybe some muscle as well, like I said. Right? So because there's a lot of stuff here. That's just the fact.
Speaker 1:Right? I'm not saying this is healthier. I'm not saying there's nothing that plays into whether you're in a deficit or not, but if you are scientifically in a deficit and you were in a lab, that would be the truth of it. People replace it's not about a calorie deficit but eating healthy too. Missed the point of the question.
Speaker 1:The question is singular focused. Will you lose fat if you are 100% in the deficit no matter what food you eat? And that is true, right? That is true. That doesn't mean your diet quality is good.
Speaker 1:It doesn't mean you're gonna feel energetic throughout the day. It doesn't mean you're gonna have good workouts. It doesn't mean you're gonna have the best optimal split and you make sure your hormones are functioning properly or optimally. You know, that stuff, it doesn't say anything about that stuff, but it does say the energy part. Right?
Speaker 1:So that's the important thing. So you can eat whatever food you want as long as you're in a deficit and some some people are saying, I'm in a deficit, but I haven't lost weight, so it's not true. Well, if you're not losing weight, you're not in a deficit. It's just a fact. If you're not losing weight fat over four, five, six weeks and your stress levels are low and you say you're in a deficit, you're not in a deficit.
Speaker 1:This is a scientific fact, you cannot escape that fact. Another stuff here although I feel the type of food you eat affects the rate, of course if you eat more protein, protein has a higher thermic effect of food. So protein burns more calories to digest than carbs and fat. Right? But that still adds to the calories you put it in.
Speaker 1:It just means there's less net put being put into the pot because there's more protein because protein needs a bit more to be digested or go into the pot. Does that make sense? Yes, I do, but there must be a focus on Macrocell who can't eat a block of chocolate every day and be good for you. No, can't have a block of chocolate every day and it'd be good. Well, actually, you can have a block of chocolate every day and it's absolutely fine.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's no there's a I can't remember what it's called. Some nude disorder. It's kind of a clean eating disorder. It's like people think that you cannot eat chocolate every day and it's be healthy for you. Your health, right, how can I explain this and try and get it across?
Speaker 1:What matters for your health isn't the small bits and bobs and if you have a chocolate bar or if you have oats or if you have white rice or brown rice or white potato or sweet potato. What really matters is that you're looking at your total intake on average over a week. So you wanna make sure you have enough protein. So you are feeling satisfied. You're feeling full.
Speaker 1:Protein they did there's research on people. They were given these two groups. One group had a higher protein, and you could eat whatever you want. The other group was given a low protein, and then you could eat that whatever you want. The pro the group that was eating higher protein ate less even when they weren't tracking by three, four hundred calories a day.
Speaker 1:Even when they weren't tracking, they just didn't feel as hungry. So your hunger or your satiety your hunger is gonna come down, your satiety is gonna go up, and you will eat less calories as a result of a higher protein diet. Right? And protein is also more thermogenic than carbs and fats, so it's a double win there. The protein is great because less calories is added net and it's gonna make you eat less calories because of the fullness.
Speaker 1:So protein is an important macro. This is why a turtle we don't just focus on calories because the importance of macros is is is understated most of the time. People are just eat calories to absolutely lose weight. Yeah, for sure. But all we got to do, calories comes from macros.
Speaker 1:Right? You work out calories from macronutrients, four calories protein, four calories per gram of protein, four calories per gram of carbs, nine calories per gram of fat, that's how you work out calories. But some people just want the calorie total and they're missing out on loads of easy wins. Easy win, increase protein. Easy win, making sure you have enough fats in your diet.
Speaker 1:Right? People go really low fat, terrible for your hormones. Right? You need to eat a decent amount of fat. Carbs, you carbs is one of the things that varies the most.
Speaker 1:Some people prefer lower carb, some people prefer high carb, you still want to know are you having enough carbs in your diet? Are you having enough kind of complex carbs as well? If your energy levels are short all day, you've got spikes and you have spikes of energy and you're shot and you shoot down, maybe you're eating too many simple carbs multiple times a day as opposed to having say a bowl of oats for breakfast which will have a longer energy release because it's a more complex nature so it'll take time to break it down to release the energy into the bloodstream. So having a bowl of oats can last for three to five hours and keep you fuller for three to five hours. But if you had that in a simple form such as sugar, then it's gonna go in straight away and it's already broken down essentially.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be Australian and you're gonna have a spike of engines come back So of course it's important to track the macros because we there's more to this than just fat loss. Right? But the fact of the matter is you will lose fat if you're in deficit no matter the food you eat. This gives us a very nice slate to work from because there's research done, the Twinkie diet where the professor Mark Cobb ate just sugary sweets every day, every three hours for ten weeks. Right?
Speaker 1:And he lost 27 pounds because he said if as long as I'm in a deficit I'm gonna lose weight. He ate Twinkies, he ate sugary sweets. Every three hours for ten weeks, he lost 27 pounds. His health markers improved. Now that is a study done on himself.
Speaker 1:Some people's health markers might improve some more, but what he wanted to show was that he is healthier in a in a quote unquote healthier body weight than if he was overweight eating a quote unquote clean diet. What really helped his health improve was to drop his body fat percentage. Right? And he admits that's not the best way to live. He's not gonna eat sugar every three hours the rest of his life, but he went to the show.
Speaker 1:I had the worst possible diet for ten weeks and I was in a deficit and I lost weight. My health mark has actually improved because I was overweight and I brought it down. Now we're not going to that extreme at all, but don't be scared of having a fifty fifty diet. Some people talk about the eighty twenty, 80% clean foods as they say, nutrient dense and 20% processed. I think it's more realistic.
Speaker 1:60 50 to 60% of the average person's diet is can is ultra processed foods. Cereals, yogurts, chocolate bars, crisps, all that stuff. That's processed ultra processed foods. 50 to 60% of the average person's diet is that. Right?
Speaker 1:And then we need to look at right. Okay. So if I can get 50% or 60% of my diet and I make sure I have like lean meat, so if I'm vegan you have of nuts, legumes, all that stuff, you have veggies and your fruit. Right? You of course wanna eat solid quality stuff.
Speaker 1:But the rest of the stuff, don't be too hard on yourself if you are having a chocolate bar a day, you are having two biscuits with your cup of tea, you are having a drink after work because you're in it's Christmas period and you go for a few glasses and you go and work a few times a week, but you're tracking it. And as long as you're within your macros, it's fine. You'll quickly notice that doing that type of steady lifestyle changes will change and this is really important as well. If you can understand you can lose weight by eating chocolates, by eating crisps, by having glasses of wine, right, that is such a click, it's an moment. And you'll realise that doing that steadily and moderately, having it in control and you start feeling healthier over time is a far better way of going about things than thinking you have to eat clean as they say to lose weight, or you have to go away and not drink alcohol, you have to not eat chocolate, That's not going to work long term because we live in a world of abundance and we have to face the facts and the reality is we are surrounded by abundance.
Speaker 1:We have got social plans, we've got lives we're going to live, we're to have temptations, we're going to be surrounded by those foods. So instead of abstaining from them, we incorporate them, understand we can still be healthy and have those foods. Right? And that's it. There's no more psychological stress about them.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of stress that happens in your mind from the food you're trying to eat or not trying to eat and that psychological stress adds to something called allostatic load, your combined stress from training, psychological, whatever the work and all this stuff, right, you have stress. And there was even a study on women who had a dysfunctional, menstrual cycle, and I'll butcher the facts to get the exact facts for you, but they were managed to reverse the this, the menstrual cycle dysfunction in some of these people with CBT alone, cognitive behavioural therapy. So a lot of it was to do with the perception and the stress response and the psychological stress they had. And one huge thing to bring down stress was to have a look at how we perceive the actions that happen in our lives, how we look at things day to day. No matter what special diet you think is gonna work or whatever, if you're always gonna be stressed out about food day to day causing psychological stress, that's gonna have huge negative impacts in your life.
Speaker 1:That's why the masterclass that people have done and some of you going through, a lot of it's focused on the psychological part. Why are we fighting food all the time? When food when we look at our split food, if we can have 5060% wholesome nutrient dense foods and rest the processed, the ultra processed foods we're all used to and eating every day, if we can have that and not fight the foods all the time, not make food the enemy, not say a can of this, a can of that, there's just numbers. Numbers go into the game of Tetris which is macros, you try and fit the numbers in, did I fit in okay, happy days and do it like I do something change the next next day. We remove this constant bottle of food that brings down your psychological stress a massive amount.
Speaker 1:And when it brings down your psychological stress a massive amount, you're gonna hold on to less water. Water retention goes up when you go stressed. So cortisol, that's one of the stress hormones, when you are stressed cortisol goes up, water retention go up and that can mask your fat loss for weeks. You could be losing one pound of fat a week for four weeks, but you're getting more stressed, more stressed, more stressed, your cortisol going up and up and up and you're holding on to more water and you've put four or five pounds of water retention on, you're not going to see that fat loss progress for five or six weeks, but by then you have already given up no doubt. So that's why it's important that the psychological stress, the one we put on ourselves is one of the main things we can control actually.
Speaker 1:You know, stress from work sometimes we can't do anything about it, as in it's very stressful physically, you are working, you're in meetings, you're flat out, you got kids at home, you're just flat out, that's stress right? The stress from workouts, that's why you shouldn't work out flat out all the time, you definitely need to have rest days. But the way we perceive things, how we look at what happens to us and how we respond, we can massively reduce the stress we add to our stress bucket and reduce a lot of the problems that causes, and we can reduce our water retention, and we start seeing our fat losses results sooner even though that's not the main thing. I don't know if any of this makes sense to you, but that's why there's a big focus on the book club tonight, Discipline is Destiny, and it's about stoicism. It's really about discipline.
Speaker 1:Also, how we look at obstacles in our life, the perception. We wanna stop this conflict every day of doing stuff. We wanna limit our chronic stress and that is really down to us and we want to be taking responsibility about our lives as well. You know, we can't keep saying oh that's triggered me, this has triggered me. Whatever triggers you is your responsibility because you're getting triggered by something you see online, right, and it's your story about the thing that's triggering you and if you're living in a reactive world online getting triggered over every single thing, you're in for a really tough time trying to control your health because stress, chronic stress has been documented for years before even the research came out on it, it was terrible for us.
Speaker 1:In the 1930s Dale Carnegie in his book about how to stop worrying and start living, he talks in that book about doctors saying that the most deaths in The US like ninety percent stress related, they could see the stress coming through the people, they couldn't really, you know, didn't have the technology maybe to see exactly why. But we know now how bad stress is, we know categorically is a fact. And that's the main thing I want you to start focusing on. And one of the real big wins you can do to really reduce your psychological stress is to focus one day at a time. Because you might be thinking I got to do this for five weeks.
Speaker 1:I can't do it. It's too long for me. And you go well, don't to do anything for five weeks, only have now to act. You only got today to do. So if you do today, right, you have a successful day.
Speaker 1:You wake up tomorrow, fresh head again, and you go again. That's the only act you can only take action in the now. You can do all the best planning you want. You can have the best advice. And I was thinking this yesterday on a walk.
Speaker 1:I was like the only thing I matters is action. Like I can learn as much as I want. I can go and learn everything in the world. But if I'm not taking action when I can, which is now, nothing's gonna change. Nothing's gonna move.
Speaker 1:So what action are you taking today? You know, stop thinking of the small stuff that brings back nothing. We always focus on the minuscule stuff that makes no difference. I'm not worried about if I'm having white bread or brown bread, guys. Stop stressing about it.
Speaker 1:I'm not worried if I train today to ten or in the morning or 4PM or 5PM. I'm not worried about the training times. I'm not worried about perfecting my macros. I'm not worried about if I go over my fat so low and under my carbs and I go over my carbs and under my fats. I'm not worried if my protein today is 110 but tomorrow is 130 then it's 90.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, I'm looking at my averages and do tweaks. My data will tell me exactly what I need to do. Scott, your average protein this week was 30 grams less than last week. What can we do about that? Okay.
Speaker 1:I can add a clear whey shake and each day to boost my protein. Job done. I'll go with our happy days. Let's test that out. There's nothing else to say.
Speaker 1:There's nothing else to worry about. There's nothing else to catastrophize over. I simply do the obvious next step that my data tells me. If I'm not losing weight after four weeks, and I think I'm eating 1,200 calories, Obvious answer, either I'm highly stressed with insane levels of water retention, or I'm not consuming 1,000 odd calories, whatever I thought I was consuming. So the next action is obvious.
Speaker 1:I need to be way better tracking for the next week just to see if that is true. So we don't need to keep adding nonsense on towards, we just see the facts we act and we have to act to make a difference. So act now please, track your macros now. You got to do it like it's not something we are trying to track macros. You got an amazing tool, it costs a lot of money to build and it's there and your fingertips to do, it's five minutes a day.
Speaker 1:Don't waste your time thinking, there's some people around the world who got no access to tools I guess. We And live in a world of abundance which is quite hard, but we've got tools now to help us fight back against this. We can see screen time, we can track the food we're eating, we know exactly where we're going wrong and we can make changes to that. As long as you track though, as long as you're aware And use this as a prompt to get get that action get action done. So feeling lethargic or you're on the couch or sitting down now, time to get up, go for a walk.
Speaker 1:If you're ready in work, you haven't got your lunch planned, well, go and do your best in the shop. It's all you can do. Scan something and don't, like, not do it. There's a lot of things, know, you haven't trained this morning. Can you train later?
Speaker 1:If not, just, you know, leave it go. There's many other days of the week left to train. And that's really it, guys. And I'll see you all at Book Club if you join.
