Harsh reality of "my cals are too high" ft Epictetus
Hello everyone, back again with what Epictetus would tell you to questions you ask him. So Epictetus was a famous stoic philosopher and he had a very harsh way of replying, right? So what I'm going to say to you now is him, not me, but he trained on the truth of nutrition. So hopefully you're going to get some insight into how he would answer this very common question that we get and a lot of people panic. So the question is this, which loads of people do.
Speaker 1:I've been given a calorie target for weight loss based on my information, and I think the target is too high. There is no way I can eat 2,200 calories a day or whatever the target is. I've been eating way less than this, and I still can't lose weight. What's happening? Should I just eat 1,200 calories a day?
Speaker 1:So many of you guys have this train of thought. So what would Epictee to say if he was an expert in weight loss and management and knew all the research. So this is his reply to if you have this question. Ah so you think yourself wiser than nature and the laws that govern the body. You come to me with your scale, your fear, and your self imposed farming, and you say, I eat little, yet I do not lose.
Speaker 1:And you expect me to join you in your delusion. Listen carefully. The stomach is not your enemy and neither is the number 2,200. The enemy sits between your ears. The belief that starvation equals virtue, that suffering must mean progress.
Speaker 1:You are not a monk seat in enlightenment. You are someone trying to lose body fat and the body has rules. Let me ask you plainly. When did you last track truthfully? Not with guesses and guilt, but with clear brutal honesty.
Speaker 1:Do you know how much you consume or do you feel like you eat little? Because feelings, my student, are liars when fear runs the household. You say I cannot lose weight, yet the very act of survival demands energy. So where do you think that fuel is coming from if you were truly in a calorie deficit? If the laws of physics bend to your body, write it down.
Speaker 1:You've discovered magic. No. The simple answer is this. Either you overeat unknowingly or you undereat and then compensate in hunger, in movement, or in metabolism. The body is not broken.
Speaker 1:It's adaptive, efficient, even cunning, but it does not defy logic. You ask if you should eat 1,200 calories? Tell me, would you dig a deeper hole because you didn't strike water fast enough? Would you punish the soil because your seeds did not sprout in a day? Eat properly.
Speaker 1:Track honestly. Wait patiently. If you cannot do these three things, then go, not to another diet, but to a mirror. The obstacle is not your metabolism, it's your mindset. You want results?
Speaker 1:Then stop whining and do the work. Not the desperate, frantic work of 1,200 calories a day, but the calm consistent work. That is the stoic path. That is the only path. Brilliant.
Speaker 1:Honestly guys that is bang on. The problem is you guys think that you haven't been eating that many calories or you can't eat the target you've been given because you've gained weight. But you've been eating more calories than that to get to the weight you are today because you got you again, like Epictetus saying, you do not bend to the laws of physics. You don't. There was a study done on obese subjects and then non obese subjects.
Speaker 1:And they wanted to see a lot of the obese subjects are saying my metabolism is broken, I eat little and I gain weight. What's going on? So what they do, they got the groups together and they checked, they use state of the art machinery and, you know, in the lab type of work and they figured out, okay, let's have a look at how different are these obese subjects versus their, you know, what does the calculation say their maintenance should be and what is their actual maintenance calories. And what happened? Well, all of them were within 5% of the calculation.
Speaker 1:So their bodies weren't broken or damaged, they were actually within 5% of what the calculation says. So if they were to eat in a deficit below that, they would have lost fat. Okay? So there wasn't any actually, things have changed so much that their metabolism is completely broken and even if they eat 500 calories, gonna gain weight. It doesn't work like that.
Speaker 1:We know it doesn't work like that because you see vaulters of people from concentration camps. They are skin and bones. If you truly are in a deficit for a long period of time, your body will eat itself and you eventually die, which obviously we don't want to do. Right? It's stupid to go into such a long sustained extreme deficit.
Speaker 1:It would eat away at you, your mind would be broken, everything happens with that type of territory. You ask the bodybuilders who compete for stage, they go into a war like mindset. It's very difficult to get that low in body fat because you really have to fight the body to get there. You don't What they realized in that study was that people are just eating more than they think. It's not judging you.
Speaker 1:No one's judging you. I'm not judging you. I'm saying, I do the same. You do the same. We all do the same.
Speaker 1:We eat more calories or let's say, call it energy. The word calories has been God knows what's happened to it. People overgo calories all the time. You eat too much energy. You think you eat less energy.
Speaker 1:Simple as that. It's as simple as that. Foods you think are low in energy are actually high in energy, or you think they're not bad in energy, or they're high but not as high as you think, but they are higher. If you go and eat out, for example, you're gonna get shook to your core of how many calories are in certain dishes. And here's the problem as well, and this is reported in Dishoom's menu.
Speaker 1:50% difference in calories claimed on the menu versus actual. So when they were doing the tests for the menu and the chefs were preparing all the dishes immaculately to the gram, of course they have certain nutritional numbers. But when the chef is under pressure and there's like a 100 people in the restaurant and he's behind and everything and he's stressed, You honestly think it's gonna be the same measurement each time or do you think they're just gonna go with what they think is right and sometimes it's more most of the time it's more than what they would have done in the original test. That makes sense? But this doesn't mean tracking is useless.
Speaker 1:No. That's not what I'm saying. Just saying each corner we're likely over consuming or we were eating more than we think. That's a fact here. So we must track our behavior and eating patterns.
Speaker 1:You can track as easy as voice logging, texting, photos, whatever method you want to use. Do whatever method gets you consistent data. Then you're checking your weight trend. Then you're checking if your clothes are fitting differently, which is a big indicator. A lot of people say my clothes are I've lost a few inches of my waist, but my weight hasn't gone down.
Speaker 1:That's brilliant. You've lost fat and your weight is the same because of water retention stuff. Who cares? You've lost inches. That is far more of an indicator of progress than weight when it comes to fat loss.
Speaker 1:So make sure that you're looking at what matters here and you're looking at the facts. We all over consume. We're all over consuming. And when it comes to the topic of calories and people being annoyed at calories, like there's a vendetta against calories. Now, it's a bit strange because calories is just a unit of measurement of energy.
Speaker 1:So like it's just calories. Use calories as unit of measurement for energy. We use liters as a unit of measurement for how many liters or how much fuel you put in your car. We might use milliliters somewhere else. We'll use miles and kilometers if we're gonna be driving or running.
Speaker 1:You're not seeing people have massive fights against, oh my god, I can't believe you're using miles. That's disgusting. I hate miles. Or you go to a car and you fuel the car up and the car is fueled up on 50 liters, and then it doesn't take you very far. Okay.
Speaker 1:And you realize, oh my god. I put 50 liters in, and it's only taken me from my home to my work once. Like, how is that fair? Do you think that person is having a go at litres? Do you think they're saying, I hate you litres.
Speaker 1:I hate you garlands. What are you doing to me garlands? Why you using garlands as a devil? No. Obviously not.
Speaker 1:You actually look at if I'm getting 50 miles per gallon or whatever it is and I wanna improve that, you don't have a go with the measurement. You change how you drive. You drive slower. You check your tires. Are your tires flat?
Speaker 1:Because you use more energy if they're flat. It's using more fuel. You know, people with air con air con on, that uses more. You know, how many passengers are in the car? Is there anything in the boot that's got a lot of weight that's making you use more energy in the car?
Speaker 1:Now the car and the body, obviously, the car is way less complicated than the body. But the kind of system you can take lessons from, you would adapt things to the drive. Now you're not having a go at gallons or liters. Right? I just wanna get that point across.
Speaker 1:So we can't have a go calories. It's just a fact that your energy, your body needs x amount of energy, and we use calories. Don't fight it. Don't have a go against it. It's just a fact.
Speaker 1:And you must find a way to become more efficient or at least not really more efficient. You need to find a way to become less efficient. So you need to use more energy to create a bigger deficit or reduce the amount of energy put in your body to help you get into a deficit, which is the easiest way. So like eating less, consuming less is the easiest way. Trying to get into a deficit through exercise alone is difficult.
Speaker 1:It's possible. One strategy is eat at maintenance and then exercise to create a deficit. The study is showing that can be successful. But you might as well try and get into a deficit with food and then try and get your steps up and then any exercise you can do, whether it's going to have an impact or not, small impact, which is a benefit, right? There's a benefit to it, a small one, but really the benefit performance.
Speaker 1:Anyway, that's that chat. That's the advice for you guys. So if you ever find someone saying the calories too high, please link them to this podcast because the chances are the calories are not high, it's just the mindset that needs work to realise 1,200 calories is not serving you. So many comments I've seen the other day, gonna go on 1,200 calories. Guys, you're not Lemmins.
Speaker 1:You've seen this number online, you've seen it in other apps, You haven't realized what the hell the purpose of it is, where it comes from. It comes from old low calorie diets. Why the number 1,002? Because for ninety five percent of people or ninety eight percent of people, that's such a low target. They're gonna lose weight fast.
Speaker 1:That's the only reason it's been used. And there's other studies that show 800 calories fast with liquid diets to try and help people from with type two diabetes or obesity to lose weight fast. These are not lifestyle targets. The ones you can do over time and help with your mindset. They're aggressive, often failures in terms of the results they get because they're just too much.
Speaker 1:You're not gonna sustain it. You're gonna just overeat because you can't sustain it for a few days. And then the day you overeat, you consume way more calories than the target you've been given in this app and you don't realize it. And you think, oh, I've been eating 1,002. How am not losing weight?
Speaker 1:Well, you forgot about the two days a week you're eating 4,500 calories because you can't stand it anymore. Or you're just, you know, you're eating biscuits every every five minutes because you're so hungry. So yeah, like we need to get over this old school thinking. And if you ever see someone mention it, you please don't be like, try and explain that like why do you think that's the right target? Has it ever worked for you?
Speaker 1:If it worked for you why are you here today? These are the questions you ask yourself. It's not to be annoying, it's not to be insulting, it's not to be nasty, just to get you guys to start thinking. I'm not just following some stupid target set by the diet culture industry. That's not what we're trying to do here.
Speaker 1:We're trying to build a lifestyle that works for you. You want to lose fat gradually whilst living your life. Otherwise, it's not going to work. And that's it. So this is your motivation to track right now, whatever you're eating today.
Speaker 1:Get your steps in. If your steps are low, try and get to 5,000 a day. Try and get to 6,000 a day. Try and get up to 7,000 a day. Huge benefits for every thousand you lift up there up to 8,000, 9,000.
Speaker 1:Remember that. Weigh yourself daily if you can at same time in the morning and get a weekly average, and then compare weekly averages to weekly averages on the weekly check-in. And that's it. Let the app do the rest. You can crack on living your life, eat the food you enjoy, hit your protein and calories target.
Speaker 1:That's it. All we need you to do. Doesn't sound a lot. It can be difficult at times, but it's not a lot to think about. So simple fundamentals.
Speaker 1:So crack on with them today. I'll see you back here for the next podcast.
