"I'm down 10kg but lost motivation, help"
Hello, everyone. Welcome back. Right. Today, so we've had a message from Chris in the group saying, Moninor, nearly a year into Parapal and have been really successful. One hundred kg back in December, averaging mid ninety two kilograms now and a mid down to ninety one on a daily, so 10 kilogram loss.
Speaker 1:Now by the way, guys, 10%, that's about 10% of your body weight lost. The NHS and stuff, like, they any clinical trials, they look for about 5% weight loss as successful or 10% is even better. Right? But, again, they're not looking at the quality of that loss. Is it mainly in fat?
Speaker 1:Is it mainly is it in muscle and stuff like that? But following Parapal, likely gonna be saving a lot of muscle. 10 kilogram loss in a year maintained there, which is amazing. However, I'm losing momentum, motivation, whatever you want to call it. Been averaging in the 90 twos for weeks, and I know why.
Speaker 1:Not hitting steps, not hitting protein. Calories are usually okay, but gym is erratic. But can't remotivate. I'd love to get below eighty nine kilogram and reckon I could do this side of Christmas, but won't unless I get back get my ass back into gear. Gonna listen to Scott's pod on small changes in a little bit when walking the dog to start with.
Speaker 1:I listen to those every day, but lost that when they were they were challenges, events I wasn't part of, didn't really know what was happening, so didn't listen and didn't go back. Any direction regarding podcasts that might have motivated you will be welcome. Guess I basically need to remind myself why I started this journey in the first place. So again, Chris, thanks for posting, but also you've answered your own question there. The why is one of the most important parts.
Speaker 1:Just to give you context on how the way we speak to ourselves is really important by the way, and I'm going get into that in a minute. Of the journey isn't to just lose all the weight, get to the goal weight and then that's it. You can stop, pause, and maintain and reflect many times. So if you're walking up a mountain, you can stop 20% up, have a break for five minutes, walk again, have a break. You don't have to walk the entire thing in one go.
Speaker 1:Do what's comfortable for you, and if you are maintaining your motivation has dropped. Motivation is not reliable at all by the way, so we don't need to say I'm motivated or not for me to make changes. Yeah, you might be motivated, changes are easy for that week, but then most of the weeks we are not motivated, we're maybe in the middle where it's kind of like, yeah, feel alright, but I'm not super motivated, but we still do the actions we know benefit our health, right, so it's important we don't really think too much about motivation because it comes and goes. But maintenance, maintaining, this is one of the most fundamental parts of the journey. You should welcome maintenance.
Speaker 1:If it comes planned, you say, Scott, I want to do four weeks and then a week of maintenance, four weeks, week of maintenance, fine. Most of you will be pushed into maintenance by your own bodies. And that's not a bad thing. Your body just saying, chill out, buddy. Give me a break.
Speaker 1:Let's go to maintenance for a bit. Stop making me trying to lose weight. I'm in a deficit. Give me some energy. And basically, what happens in maintenance is what you're doing, you're supplying the energy, your body with the energy it needs to function.
Speaker 1:It doesn't need to use convert fat cells into energy or muscle into energy. It gets it from the food you're given, the food you're eating, sorry. And this has a big impact on our hormonal profile as well. So typically, if you're in a deficit genuinely for a long time, cortisol will raise. There's different hunger and satiety hormones that get impacted, so your hunger level starts going up, your satiety starts going down, and when we go to maintenance we normalize these levels again, we tend to normalize the cortisol levels again, and we tend to give our body a break.
Speaker 1:It basically chills out for a bit. Do you know like you work, you work, you work, and you have a holiday and it's chilled and you go back revitalized? It's the same thing. So take maintenance as something that's to be welcomed. Take maintenance as something to look forward to, and take maintenance as a chance to to pat your body and about, hey.
Speaker 1:Good round. We're gonna go again, but I'll give you a break. And this has, many benefits actually. You know, there's a there's something called diet breaks, in the literature, and just diet, you know, or weight loss phase. And when you get to super lean body fat levels, I think these are used more commonly because it's so hard to basically become super lean, to do ten, twelve, sixteen sixteen weeks in a row on low, low calories, high activity for people trying to get, like, competition lean.
Speaker 1:It's really hard. So they implement these kind of weekly breaks, or, like, two or three days super high carb just to kind of, like, get the body back to baseline a bit and then go again. So this is kind of a tactic used in more advanced type of scenarios, but really we utilize normally, us mere mortals who are not trying to get super shredded abs, we just want to be a healthy weight, so it's fine to do them. But I think as well when it comes to why you're doing something, if you're close to a goal, a few kilograms off, don't focus too much on weight to be the ultimate goal, Focus on getting into training. Getting into training is one of the most useful things you can do, especially if it's something that mixes things up for you.
Speaker 1:If you're gonna go to the gym on your own, right, you might get bored, just to put it bluntly. You might get bored unless you're trying to follow a structured plan and you're going up in weight and you feel feel great every few weeks getting heavy on weights. Sometimes people go to the gym, they just go through the motions, they're on their phone between sets, they're just not really that break you need from with the working world, the digital world, your family friends, it's not really the break you get. Sometimes doing a class is better because the instructor will, you know, essentially force you to the class basically, and you can't really just, get on your phone. So it depends, like adding something in that's new, that's fresh, that's something you can progress in apart from the weight loss part can move your attention away from the weight to that.
Speaker 1:And I'm not saying you're doing it for weight loss or training, you're doing it for other benefits, but it'll help you in terms of focusing there. And after a few weeks you've taken your eye off weight being the all encompassing goal and you're like oh my weight's coming down a bit, it's kind of like that thing. If you stare at the clock, I remember being in school, staring at the clock, it's like 3PM, I'm like why is that moving so slow for 03:30? You go out and play obviously dinner time and you play football or rugby and one hour goes fast, there's this kind of thing that happens with time where you're always looking at something, it tends to go slower than it is. It's important.
Speaker 1:Chris is mentioning the gym being rammed and stuff like that and 5AM starts, for sure I would look at doing something more social, community driven opposed to that. But on that note, a quick one on how we speak to ourselves really. I read a fascinating book on the unfolding of language it was called and there's another book about language or the philosophy of language by this guy called Ludwig Wittgenstein, I think I've seen it right. I'm basically saying that philosophy is not really a solution to things, it's sometimes a problem because philosophers tend to be stuck on similar debates, big questions that can't really be answered like what is the meaning of life. It was kind of really like asking what flavor is Thursday or what, you know, something you can't answer that, you're going around in circles.
Speaker 1:And they wrote a second book then about essentially, if we clean up the words we use in our mind, the way we speak to ourselves, we clean up the mess, is kind of, in short, what he's trying to say. And there's a truth to it, you know. When we speak to ourselves it defines our worldview. There's a quote he says which is awesome, he says the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Kind of true, you know, obviously.
Speaker 1:And we use phrases like I'm falling apart, which is going to obviously if you say I'm falling apart because you have to queue up for the shop, that's not the end of the world apocalypse, but the wording is used in that phrase in your mind. This is like, you know, aligns well with cognitive behavioral therapy, which I've spoken before, CBT, but basically our short thoughts shape our emotions and our emotions influence our behavior. Like I said the other day, it's not the event that disturbs you, it's your opinion about this, said by Epictetus a long time ago, two thousand odd years ago. So if you reframe the way you describe the experience, describe something, know, the experience itself begins to shift. So in this example of crescent, kind of like the negative view of maintenance, the negative view of weight not moving down and staying the same tends to bring a negative view of what's just happened.
Speaker 1:And from an objective view from my side, that is an absolutely brilliant outcome. And it is to be expected, maintenance is going to be part of that, because it's hard to keep going every month. Sometimes you gotta take a break. I see that break as a super positive break to reevaluate things, tweak a few things, and go back in stronger, wiser, more experienced to this phase two. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:So this narrator we have is usually negative, and sometimes we've got to proofread it. You know? I'm a failure. Why am I so terrible? Everything sucks.
Speaker 1:I mean, these words are common. We say that everything sucks. It's like, really? Or are you just annoyed that the delivery order didn't arrive? Because delivery sucks in that moment, but everything doesn't suck.
Speaker 1:Do you know what I mean? I am freaking out and stuff like I'm lazy. Maybe I'm lazy is because you're looking at something to do which is so big in your mind that it just feels too scary to start. And really, the problem is when people don't want to do something is because they're looking at the entire thing. There's this weird mental model of how would you eat an elephant?
Speaker 1:And it says, know, one bite at a time or something like that. It's like I know it's a weird one, but the thing about it is the oven's huge. Like, I'm not gonna eat that one bite at a time you probably will eventually. The mountain, how do you climb a mountain? You take 10,000 steps, it starts with the first step.
Speaker 1:This is all obvious stuff, this is true. You're not gonna be lazy if you have to take one step because you can do that. You're gonna be lazy if you think you have to do 10,000 in one day, as in up a mountain. Break things down. So when you start thinking I'm lazy, say what if I just did one task now?
Speaker 1:Would I be lazy to do one task? I'll do one task. But 10 tasks, yeah, maybe your body's like woah now buddy, Too much. That's why one day at a time, one task at a time, the one big thing, the thing I mentioned before, what's one big thing you can do today that if you just did that, it would be a successful day. Work on these mental models and they will help you.
Speaker 1:One, no one likes me. Maybe you just feel disconnected from the people you're with. And that doesn't mean you're a bad person, it means you just need to start looking for connections of people who are more aligned with you. Sometimes you're around people that you just don't match with, just how it is. You've got to remove yourself from the situation and sometimes it's bad luck, you've moved to a different city or the community you're in, there's no one there that you really match, you connect with, but at the same time, you've made the time to connect with anyone.
Speaker 1:And if you don't connect with people after a while, it's not because you are the problem. Maybe it's just not how it's just not connected. You know mean? Some people do, some people don't. Don't say no one likes me.
Speaker 1:People do like you. Unless you are a nasty person, and you need to whiz up, ain't it? So, yeah, like, types of thinking, it all connects to this journey, you know? I don't think usually when I have a weekend, super busy socially, eating or sometimes drinking, I tend to rewire it on Mondays as fast as I can. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of I just can't wait to get like, for example, my girlfriend would say to after we we went to we we went for a trip to the North Of Spain.
Speaker 1:She was in Madrid for a week, then we went to the North Of Spain for two weeks. So three weeks of kind of, like, exploring Spain and North Of Spain. Amazing place, by the way. If you get a chance, go North Of Spain. San Sebastian, for sure, for food.
Speaker 1:Anyway, got to the end of the trip. I said some stuff as well, but she was the same as saying, you know, oh my god. I can't wait to get back to the routine. It's been so much. You know, I'm just like, feeling a bit down.
Speaker 1:I need to get back into routine. You know, just feeling a bit down about and then, you know, we have to snap ourselves back and like but, yeah, like, we haven't we haven't been to war. We don't even look in the trenches. We've been lucky enough to be going around a lovely, beautiful country in unique places. Yes.
Speaker 1:It's tiring because you're moving around, but let's not make that into something negative that we need to get back into a routine and work because that will be there all your life. So let's take a step back. You know what mean? I said, let's take a step back. Let's stop speaking negatively about it.
Speaker 1:I know we're tired. It's coming to the end. But let's rest up now a few hours and then we go again for the weekend. The last place which was Beeritz and we'll enjoy ourselves and then yes, we will get back to routine and we will reminisce on this trip and we will be like, remember we should be back there. So the brain always works.
Speaker 1:It's just important to interject sometimes and be like, wait now. The wording we're using here is not valid for the situation. You know what I mean? And it's the same in everything. So look look at how you're speaking today and update it.
Speaker 1:Because if you don't, you're gonna start having issues. One more thing and advice from this guy, which is quite cool, tries to play role roulette in the mind. So if something happens to you or you think something, one thing to do is what would a different version of me say right now? Or even more common is like what would a role model, like for me growing up it was Bruce Lee, what would Bruce Lee do right now? What would X, Y, Z do right now?
Speaker 1:And by doing this we can give different reactions to the same event and then that's a different perspective and we don't have to take the initial one we had. Does that make sense? So we can say, you get a text message saying, hey, can we talk? Maybe the first thing you say is this is bad, I'm about to be fired, shamed, whatever. You can play a role here, different role.
Speaker 1:So you can play the scientist role which says interesting, my heart is racing, let's observe that. Maybe the executive who's calm and steady, they probably want clarification, let's see what it is, and then they're chronically unbothered, oh, well, I'll keep going making some barbecue meats and we'll we'll talk and see what it's about. It sounds weird to, like, do this to ourselves, like playing roles, but that's really what we're doing, and the voice in our head is just a character, essentially, that unfortunately the character is based off, your youth, essentially. So the monologue we have is like a propaganda machine, it's just a bunch of childhood wounds, cultural expectations, it's not the wisest, it's not the sharpest, it's not the wittiest, maybe a bit more negative than usual, and that's basically who runs the show in the mind. All you've got to do is bring another character on board to show another part, and you might think the other one has a better view of things.
Speaker 1:But on that note, if that resonates, maintenance and stuff, take the positives from there, go back into things. You don't have to jump in and climb the mountain in one day, go back in one step. If you need to mix things up, I would suggest finding something local like a fitness class, sports, group class, wherever it is. Take a friend with you if you feel uncomfortable to get involved in something social, something you move, something you can improve on every week that doesn't just focus on weight and fat loss and stuff like that. So have a good day.
Speaker 1:Speak to you all soon.
