Metabolic Adaptation: What is it?
Good morning, everybody. Hope you're having a good day, you better begin your steps in. This weather being however is the sun is out really early and really late, so if there's a time to build in a step habit, it is now, just as a reminder. But, today I want to talk about a few important factors actually. I've mentioned this on our full access, data breakdown sessions where I look at someone's data from the app, nutrition and mindset app, so we're looking at, protein, fat, calories, steps, menstrual cycles, stress scores, sleep, all this stuff, building a picture of what's going on, you know, like, let's see what's happening here.
Speaker 1:Like, is the expected weight loss the same or fat loss the same as the actual? And if it's not, what's happening? Okay? Because what does happen is and there is a difference, and it could be ranged from a 50% difference to 10% difference to a massive difference. Right?
Speaker 1:And one of the things that makes a difference is when we do lose weight and we lose fat over time, there is something called metabolic adaption. Now this does happen where your resting metabolic rate may drop, you might start moving less because you've got less calories and less energy. So your total daily energy expenditure will drop, right? And because this starts dropping and you're losing weight that gap, that deficit gets lower and lower and lower. And eventually you're not losing the amount of fat that is predicted based on intake.
Speaker 1:And this can range you know between 100 to 300 calories. And there was a study that looked at this. They looked at eight weeks of dieting, four weeks at kind of maintenance, then nine months maintenance. But they looked at base metabolic rate which makes up about 50 to 60% of your calories per day. And after weight stabilized, resting metabolic rate in this study on average was 137 calories than predicted so that's about a 7% drop.
Speaker 1:Now maybe that's not much but it can add up right so 137 drop. Then you've got non exercise activity which is walking, fidgeting, moving, typing, just being generally energetic in my drop down. So you can see how these can compound being like okay 130 maybe it goes up to 200, 300 calorie difference a day versus predicted and that's where the gap starts opening up. But what is interesting and what is good news for us is that when we do go to maintenance and this is why it's so important that we do understand that the goal of fat loss, the goal of Turtle is not to be always losing fat. We eventually over time want to get to a position where we don't actually need to track using the app.
Speaker 1:The app is one of the best tools for fat loss and to start with maintenance and if you want to be performance related it's fine. But eventually over time you want to be able to not have to use the app because you're in tune with your body's hunger signals, satiety response is on point and you can go along your day and you've got more information on food, you're now more moderate in your approach, you're not smashing the booze all the time and go eating junk food, you're just an overall calmer, better person when it comes to food and your relationship with it, the tracking eventually doesn't need to happen via the app. And we're saying, Scott, why are you saying that? You can need get more app downloads. But we're saying the app is a tool of turtle.
Speaker 1:The app isn't turtle. It makes sense. Let's make That's very clear. The app is a tool we built to make it easier for you instead of using other apps and that don't have all these built in stuff. Right?
Speaker 1:So what we know is when we go to maintenance, right, when we go to maintenance for a while, we eventually that metabolic adaption goes away so you become back into the predictive numbers. So when they looked at predicting their maintenance again or their base metabolic rate it was then pretty close to what the prediction was, back to normal. So we know that when we are in a fat loss phase, of course, a deficit, the body's gonna adapt and it's gonna wanna lose it's not wanna wanna lose fat. The body doesn't want to really do that, wants to maintain balance. But this doesn't mean that fat loss is pointless because your metabolic rate drops.
Speaker 1:It drops but not by a huge amount. It does drop though so that's where the differences come in, right? But the most successful kind of thing that we can do for weight maintenance is not just by understanding this deficit and stuff, it's actually building a lifestyle that's active. This is one of the most important factors in the entire thing. If you are just hitting a deficit and you're sitting around all day, yeah, you might be in a deficit, you might be losing fat, but eventually your weight's gonna drop and drop and then your maintenance, right, so your total daily energy expenditure is gonna be low and your intake is going to be higher and that intake might not be that high either.
Speaker 1:So for you to really increase your maintenance where you know you can maintain this kind of eating more food, having more food for energy, there's there's going to be a level for you that's much better than just if you just sat down all day. Does that make sense? So if you start building, moving into your lifestyle, your non exercise activity might go from 5% of your total daily energy expenditure to 25. So you might end up you might, if you sit down all day, maybe your maintenance 1,500. But if you build and walk and as part of your morning and your lunch and your evening and the weekends and more active stuff and you park your car further away, you're walking steps all the time up the stairs, you're never taking lifts, like you're doing all these small things every single day.
Speaker 1:You might move your maintenance up to 2,000 a day by doing these lifestyle changes. That is more predictive of weight maintenance than like tracking accurately all the time. We want to be able to move more over time. So when it comes to maintenance a lot of you, you start thinking about going into maintenance is a head masher because you're used to going to fat loss, you're losing weight, you start feeling tighter, less like water retention down, feel leaner and then when you go to maintenance yes you're have more, muscle glycogen, you're gonna have more food in your body and you're gonna feel a bit not bigger but not bloated but just a bit you're not gonna feel as tight as in your deficit but that's what we have to accept. Then in another study looked at okay are overweight people underestimating the calorie intake more than people who are under the, you know, normal BMI.
Speaker 1:What they found was on average no, but in people with a BMI of twenty five plus the range was much bigger. So even though the median was the same and you know the studies got limitations, The group that were, over 25, you know they some of them were underestimated by a thousand over a thousand a day, right, which is a lot. And that's where the app and tracking and understanding foods and now there's calories on menus in most places, which is a mind boggling thing to see because even on like Deliveroo, you look at now, you look at last night, they had a Five Guys. Right? I looked at the chips, large chips, Five Guys, 1,500 calories.
Speaker 1:Burger, over a thousand calories. Everything is massive. It's very, very calorie dense. You look at foods at restaurants, go for breakfast. Went to a breakfast place on Saturday.
Speaker 1:Look to the options. Most breakfast options there were between 800 to 1,300 calories. Now you might say I only had breakfast yesterday. Yeah, but that breakfast was nearly 60 to 70% of your target. And if you're in a deficit you'll one brunch and one dinner you're over if you're not careful.
Speaker 1:And this isn't to say oh my gosh terrible lifestyle it's just like the more aware you are the better choices you can make and you know where you're going wrong. It's as simple as that. Once you see where you're going wrong, you see the fact. The fact the the next move is obvious. If you see the fact clear, black, white, boom, I see the problem, you know the solution.
Speaker 1:Right? But if you're not willing to look at these things, I'm not looking at Karlism and don't wanna do art, be obsessive. It's not being obsessive looking at what would actually put newer bodies. Right? Okay.
Speaker 1:Now I see where we've been going wrong for the last ten years as a society. We've been hiding how calorie dense all the foods we eat out there and we don't want to talk about it because we don't want to we think talking about calories is obsessive and therefore we don't know where to go next. We don't know. We are we are blind. But now we're not we're now becoming less blind to this.
Speaker 1:So if we were to put all together, when you lose fat, your predictive, metabolic rate will drop. Your predictive metabolic rate will drop versus predictive 300 calories. This will go back to normal once you go to maintenance that's why it's important if you've been in a deficit for ages to go back to maintenance for a while. It's some overhead masher but you will have to do at one point. Actually one of the most important things to do is to ensure you increase your activity level.
Speaker 1:Not so much doing all the workouts but walking, moving, being energetic all that stuff. That needs to be a lifestyle. Because when they looked at a study, a meta analysis of decades of research on exercise activity, how many calories we burned for exercise, basically for every 100 calories you burn in the gym or wanna run, your total daily calorie burn increased by 72 calories out of the 100. So there's there's something called energy compensation happening. So you think I burned a 100 calories from a run.
Speaker 1:That's an extra 100 calories I burned overall in the day. It's not true. It's 7272%. Now that doesn't mean it's pointless doing it. Just means that there's a big difference there, 28% difference, plus the fitness trackers we use are off by between I think it was 20 to 90%, which is crazy.
Speaker 1:So you've got this huge difference in actual energy burned from a workout doesn't one to one go to total energy burned throughout the day. It's 72%. Then the fitness trackers are wrong, miles off, and then people are taking these numbers seriously. That's why fitness tracker show trends, which is nice and good, but it doesn't show actuality. It's not the actual numbers.
Speaker 1:You can't don't think, oh, I burned 350 calories at workout. No. You didn't. This is the biggest form my fitness pal has. Still haven't addressed it.
Speaker 1:Basically, eat back your calories. Not only I mean, this is I can't even believe they do it. Not only does the fitness trackers are miles off, but energy conversation happens. So they tell you to eat back way more calories than you've actually burned. And people wondering why they don't get results on MyFitnessPal's terrible low calorie diets when they give it to them as well.
Speaker 1:They tell them to eat back so many calories over, like removing the deficit from it, people get confused, they then go and reddit because MyFitnessPal have zero support and then end up taking advice from a random person on reddit. WillFred123 says yeah you gotta do two workers a day and then someone does two workers a day and then I mean, that's where terrible relationships. Training, food all comes in. So these are all factors. Mic nearly went on the floor.
Speaker 1:These are all factors, around I'm talking about this now because a lot of you are like most of the time 80 to 85% of you listening are concerned about fat loss. Fat loss at a slow and steady rate is very, very important. The more aggressive you go, the more aggressive the adaption. Right? The more aggressive you are gonna feel and all your stress is gonna go way higher.
Speaker 1:To think about it you're going into a huge deficit, you want fast results, you're doing more activity than you do, you're doing loads of training sessions, it's not sustainable. You're pushing your body that way then you bounce it back another way, you're dieting or just you're changing. That's the biggest problem. It's a very big problem. The only way is slow when it comes to fat loss.
Speaker 1:If you're gonna do the change, wanna do the change permanently and slowly. If you are not this if you are not doing it permanently and slowly and you're just doing it temporarily, the yo yo effect is so bad for the body and I've done another I need to share that again. It's so bad for the body that that's where a lot of damage happens. Not just physically but mentally. The mental strain of going into a diet strict, strict, hating the food, training, all out, bouncing back from all the weight on back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Speaker 1:Why do we do we fall into the trap of thinking that's the option, that's the right path? It is a terrible path. You wouldn't go down that path if you truly understood the danger of it. Right? So for everyone here listening, results are slower.
Speaker 1:I've lost I'm losing one point a week, whatever, because I've seen people lose five pounds, eight pounds a week from those bullshit ads you see on on social media and all that. Them, wave with them. Happy days mate, see you back at the start. Well you'll be back at the start in years and I'm going be going on like a turtle slow and steady, well a tortoise. But did you know a tortoise is a turtle?
Speaker 1:Just so you know guys. So we go slow and steady and we improve our mental health at the same time. We improve our relationship with food at the same time. It's so important that we do this. And I want to read an email out I had which was a really really nice read and just shows how we go about it.
Speaker 1:So Emily said, Good morning. My biggest win, hard to pick one thing here but I finally got it. One day at a time, so doesn't matter and I don't sweat the small stuff now. The choice of feeling angry, massive game changer. My mood has improved no end all because I don't make the choice to feel angry.
Speaker 1:It was so pointless. I have lived my life, tracked all my macros including the birthday cake, alcohol and buffet food and I've lost weight. No diet included. I'm feeling amazing so very grateful that it has been finally clicked. Thank you so much Scott.
Speaker 1:I've loved listening to you each morning and it has set me up for the best version of me going forward. Both my kids and husband have already seen and commented how much happy I am. That is my biggest win. I'm a little emotional in this. And you know what?
Speaker 1:That's what it's all about because when you are 75 years old or 94 years old on your deathbed you're not gonna go I wish I was six pounds lighter. No, it's not gonna be a thing you think about. We need to lose you for you to get if you are listening to this and you're overweight, the health benefits of losing weight, lose five to 10% of your body weight, a lot of health benefits from that. Right? That doesn't that's not gonna be a massive number.
Speaker 1:You don't have to lose 50 pounds in two weeks, you can lose that five-ten percent, you've got the health benefits of slowly dropping your body fat and then you work on other stuff like your relationship with food, how you respond into the slower weight loss. Okay, why have I got anxiety, I'm not losing weight fast. If you really look into that chain reaction it's because of what you think other people would think of you, society, all this stuff, social media, Instagram, people on Instagram looking shredded and all the holidays coming up, need look this way, that way for other people because you wouldn't think about these things if you lived on a known on your desert island. You'll be thinking about how I love someone else. You will do stuff for your health.
Speaker 1:So trust me on this process. It feels like it's gonna take ages, but a a year of the turtle method you will be near, most of you will be near the fat loss you need to have for the health benefits and where you want to be. And if that year hasn't been in a development of mindset as well, your relationship with food, with friends and family, looking at the bigger picture of life, you have gone backwards because you will feel like a failure at the end of a year. You feel like everything's about fat, everything's about body fat and it's not, it really really isn't. Fat loss is a byproduct of the turtle method lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Happiness is also a byproduct of a lifestyle. You can't hold on to happiness. You can't grab it and hold it. It is simply a byproduct and you think and chase about it doesn't happen that you can't you can't catch it. You know, the more you're trying to catch this number and happiness doesn't happen.
Speaker 1:So trust the process. Understand that, yes, over time, if you're in a long, long deficit, it's time to go to maintenance for about three to four weeks of maintenance. Try and stick to the numbers. You know, it's easier to overeat the maintenance, do it. Understand that energy compensation happens, so you can do all the workouts you want.
Speaker 1:Those don't add on to extra total calories burned throughout the day. So do exercise, not for the calorie benefit, do it for the performance benefit, the mental health benefit, all our stuff. Do not do exercise for calorie burn. Even though it does help NAT, it doesn't help one for one. Understand fitness trackers are a tool and they show trends not actuality.
Speaker 1:So don't take those numbers too seriously because they will mess your head up. Right? And track as honestly as you can use the turtle method app as long as needed and eventually it will be tool you can go back in in and out of. And we do more data than just food, right, and calories. You look at stress and menstrual cycles.
Speaker 1:So all that stuff is an amazing thing to build and that's why I do breakdowns now every Tuesday for Full Access members. And remember the slower way is the only way. I'm gonna go and say that flat out. The slower way is the only way for true health, happiness, fulfilment, all our stuff. If you're going too fast you're going against the laws of nature basically and it's not going to work for you.
Speaker 1:So hopefully that was a good little overview of what happens and why fat loss kind of slows down over time and why exercise isn't the be all end all of this thing. But the most important thing for you to do is build steps and movement into your daily routine. So if you're not walking enough, you're not walking every morning, every lunchtime, after work start building it in. Get a co worker to go lunch and walk, can't speak, walk over lunch with you. After work have a walk with your partner if you've one or friends or whatever, make weekends something where you go on activity, walk about, explore and trust me that over time is going to be the biggest difference between you holding on to your new kind of lower body weight versus you rebounding because if you're not very active your appetite regulation system doesn't work properly.
Speaker 1:You're going to feel hungry and when you do eat you're not going to feel full from it and it's a down spiral from there. So not only does walking increase energy expenditure, it actually makes our bodies work properly when it comes to appetite, like hunger regulation. So have a good day. And, we've got a new challenge coming soon. I'm gonna try and get it done by the end of this month to join, so access members get it for free, obviously.
Speaker 1:But I'm gonna, share more information on that. But again, as the podcast name one day at a time, if you focus on today, everything else melts away like you do today and then you do today again tomorrow, that's how it works. Silo the days off, of course you need a plan for future stuff but just take things one day at a time, you don't have to worry about doing it for a year, two years, three years. If you can do it today you can do it for two days, you can do three days and actually your days become more meaningful. Like the days are longer when you focus on them today otherwise you're daydreaming about yesterday and tomorrow and the day's gone.
Speaker 1:Then you look back at that day, it didn't exist, you didn't live in that day. Does that make sense? It does for me, guys. It does for me. Well, I'll speak to you all tomorrow.
