These 3 Studies Should Change Your Behaviour
Welcome to the one day at a time podcast with your host and the future leader of The Republic Of Wales, Sveldfjer. Now this might be the only podcast in the world where you actually have to reduce the speed instead of increasing it. However, what I wanna get over to you is that the past is gone. The future doesn't exist. So if you wanna make the most of your life, you've gotta make the most of these moments every single day.
Speaker 1:And this podcast is gonna help you live a healthier, more fulfilled life, hopefully, giving you some wisdom to take away every single day. So I'm gonna shut up now so you can get on with listening to the next episode. Good morning. Hopefully yesterday's voice note hit well. Let's talk about discipline.
Speaker 1:What is it about discipline? We need discipline every day, not just to work out, not just to track our macros but also not to stay on the death spiral of social media. Now with Turtle we are very big on looking and reading all the new research studies that we can find coming out obviously the quality ones and there's a lot of research coming out these days which is amazing and it's three studies I really want to focus on today because I think they're very important to learn about but also to understand that we also need discipline to overcome these problems that these studies are really showing that we've got. Okay, so the first study we're looking at is the influence of social media on body image, right? Quite a scary study, right?
Speaker 1:So this study looked up body image and there's four factors about body image. We look over how we perceive our body image, how you feel about your body image, how you think about your body image and how you behave as a result of your body image. So, you know, some of us are old enough to have lived before the internet and we've seen the explosion of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, you know, even before then you add the forums and stuff. And we know that, you know, in the last since about twenty fifteen, sixteen, we've really seen an explosion of influencer marketing and all of the stuff that the illusion that gives off on social media. Now Love Island is basically the manifestation of all the terrible stuff that social media has brought to light.
Speaker 1:And that is a society wherein is sick. We're in a sick and ill society when it comes to these things. And it's it's an illusion. It's not what it seems, but we can't help ourselves. Can we?
Speaker 1:So we look at the studies. And there was a study conducted by the Florida House Experience, a health care institution uncovered that both women and men, right, compare their bodies with those in the media. So the survey included a thousand men and women and focus on their body image confidence on the media. They found that 87% of women and 65% of men compare their bodies to images they consume on social media. In that comparison, half of the women and 37% of the men compared their bodies unfavorably.
Speaker 1:That's a huge number. That's terrible. So anyone that does, half of them are feeling terrible about themselves. Okay, another one looked at the women on equalities committee. So they did a study on body image between the sixth and the 07/19/2020.
Speaker 1:Right, they had 7,878 responses. Based on the survey, six in every ten females felt negative about their bodies. Diet culture, pressures bombarded with images of photoshopped, edited and sexualized women and the aging process and the lack of visual representation of older women, all things the women stated, which caused them to suffer from poor body image. Right? Now there's more.
Speaker 1:We just keep going. A 2017 study conducted a social comparison theory to examine the relationships between time spent on Facebook and body image right so eight eighty one women in this study findings show that ten percent had posted about weight body image exercise or dieting and twenty seven percent had commented on friends posts or photos. More time on Facebook related to more frequent body and weight comparisons, more attention to the physical appearance of others and more negative feelings about their own bodies for all women. For women who wanted to lose weight more time on Facebook is also related to more disordered eating symptoms. Guys this is dangerous stuff, right listen to it, listen to it.
Speaker 1:We keep going. The Mental Health Foundation conducted online surveys with YouGov in March 2019 to 4,500 UK adults 18. Here's what it said, one in five adults felt shame, nineteen percent felt disgusting because of their body image in the last year, one in eight experienced suicidal thoughts or feelings because of concerns about their body image. Okay, just over one third of adults said they felt anxious or depressed because of their body image and one in five said images used in advertising and social media had caused them to worry about their body image. A 2020 UK survey looked into the impact of lockdown on people's self esteem.
Speaker 1:It revealed that a significant number of people are now feeling more self conscious about the way they look, especially now that so many of our interactions with others are taking place on social media or through video calls. So sixty nine percent of people are now highly aware of their appearance due to increased use of video technology. Twenty one percent are happy, forty seven percent unhappy. So sixty nine percent of the eleven forty nine respondents have generally felt quite aware or highly aware of their appearance. Forty seven percent unhappy, right?
Speaker 1:So how can we compare this? This is like me saying run into a field of fire and expect not to be hurt. Would you run into a field of blazing flames? Would you? Answer the question.
Speaker 1:I don't think you would. Like, would I? No. I wouldn't. But that's what we're doing on social media.
Speaker 1:Those statistics are scary. You're literally running into fire and you're going, should I got burned? Yes you are gonna get burned. There's so much studies now, research to show how dangerous social media can be especially for women, men and less so but still is dangerous. I even looked at a study on rugby players and their body, self body, you know, body confidence stuff and they get impacted by it, right?
Speaker 1:So we need to see social media as a tool. It's a tool for connections with people, it's a tool for maybe, you know, like we do with the challenges, it's a tool for business, it's a tool for connection. It shouldn't be something you spend your time on leisurely. I don't think it's wise, I think it's good to connect, maybe it's good to show people what you're up to sometimes, but we need to break the relationship with social media. Now guess what we need to stop, we need self discipline.
Speaker 1:It is easy, we all do, I do it. You go on your phone in the morning, you start scrolling and you see something you didn't want to see. You see someone putting a picture of the abs up in The Maldives, eating some fresh fruit and you feel shit about yourself. Right? That's your fault because you've gone on your phone in the morning and let that dictate how you feel that morning.
Speaker 1:We have to take responsibility by this now. There's so there's so many warnings and red flags. This is one of the main things as humans. Are shitter. We will be given red flag after red flag after red flag, and we will refuse to acknowledge the red flags.
Speaker 1:This goes in relationships, friendships, jobs, just everything. We just we just for some reason, we just ignore red flags and they bite us in the ass. Right? So be very very careful on social media because those stats are scary. Delete, unfollow people to make you feel like shit.
Speaker 1:If there's someone you're following that's always putting photos up of them looking lean in the gym, unfollow them. Why do you need to see that? You don't. You don't need to see it. Unfollow them.
Speaker 1:Be brutal in your unfollowing quest today. I think it's very important you get going that, but it takes self discipline. Do not go on social media more than you need to. And, yeah, it is and essentially, it's now a form of self harm. Do you know I mean?
Speaker 1:And I know people, I know someone who's would go on social media a lot after the breakup And you would, you know, you'd you'd see something you wanna see, but you go looking for it, and then you get hurt by it. And then you then you blame yourself. And then it's normal. Psychological warfare. We're in the trenches.
Speaker 1:Get out. Fight. You have to fight against this. Okay. There's two more studies I wanna look at before I leave you go.
Speaker 1:And one of them is on a study on how much time we spend tracking our food. Now very basic study. This looked at, in general older women and they were using a web based, a web based nutrition thing. Right? Probably wasn't that intuitive, probably a bit slow.
Speaker 1:And it was shown that using using the nutrition tracking thing resulted in consistent weight loss just you know bang on and their time spent was went from twenty three minutes a day down to fourteen minutes a day using it so you they got better over time using it and logging their food which is obviously makes sense But what's interesting is like just how correlated weight loss is to tracking your nutrition. Just there's it is the number one kind of I hate the word hack, but it's the number one thing you can do that will determine if you lose weight loss to track what you're eating. As simple as I know social media and other people and experts, some quote unquote experts are coming out and taking a different stance like intuitive eating and all this stuff. The reality is if you wanna lose weight, you're gonna have to track weight for now. In the future, we can look at intuitive eating.
Speaker 1:We can look at being more in tune. You you this is the thing. Right? I saw a pulse the other day. This girl she's like really lean and then on the right she had gained muscle and she like said she looks healthy and fitter and she put it on the bullet points like yeah and I don't have to you know track my steps anymore, don't have to this and that anymore.
Speaker 1:Was like no shit you've probably made it a habit to have enough activity per day now right. It's not as if like, it's not as if she's like not done anything she's you know when she first started she was like right I get my steps in, I'll track my food, I'll go to the gym. Well, that's all now ingrained into her behavior. She doesn't have to think about it. So of course, she's gonna post like, don't need to think about it anymore because you still do it anyway.
Speaker 1:All of us, like I said yesterday, the dedication we need to unravel bad habits, we need a dedication to them build new ones. And once we've built the new habits, they are automatic. So of course, we don't have to think as much about them in the future, but we have to put in the work now. And people like that are basically putting people off doing the work they need to do. She's done the work, Other people have done the work, and now they're benefiting from it.
Speaker 1:I mean, like, there's there's another one that people are pissed off with China, right, going through the industrial revolution now. We went through it. The same thing. We are we can't. We we we it's easier for us to be like, look, China need to stop emitting emissions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They do ideally, but we went through, like, a hundred plus years of it, man. And now we're benefiting from the industrial revolution that happened ages ago. Now we take a high stance against it. Well, we did the same thing.
Speaker 1:Right? It's the same concept like you put the work in and then it gets easier and then yeah happy days you can then relax a bit but you know never relax too much go back into bad habits you can kind of cruise right. So with that study fourteen minutes a day but with our macros happy looking at less than five minutes a day and that is the number one factor for fat loss is tracking what you're eating. So happy days, five minutes a day for pretty much bang on success, guaranteed success in a sense if you stick to it. And the last study is a study on insufficient sleep.
Speaker 1:So they looked at two groups of people, five hours sleep a night, nine hours sleep a night. The average British person gets only six hours of sleep a night right and only two nights a week someone gets eight hours really bad. So what's the impact of this? Sleep influences energy metabolism. It impacts our satiety hormone leptin increases our hunger stimulating hormone ghrelin and increases our appetite.
Speaker 1:It's not good. Okay, so if we don't have enough sleep, we're going to make it harder for ourselves to lose weight because we're going to feel hungrier. Our satiety hormone is reduced so we don't even feel as full from meals. So they looked at this study right and they give the you know it was really done well done study and what they saw was the group that had five hours of sleep at a night and they were told to eat they were given balanced meals but they were told to eat whatever they wanted right. The five hour group ate 3,200 calories in the day and the group that did nine hours ate 2,900 calories.
Speaker 1:So the insufficient sleep led to 1.8 pounds of weight gain, than the nine hour sleep right. So this was only a small study let me just check the time this study was done for two weeks okay so you map that out over time and it's a big difference but what's this is the interesting thing this is the most interesting thing for me breakfast intake similar between two groups, their lunches were similar between two groups, Their dinner was similar between two groups in terms of calorie intake. Their daytime snacks were similar. The biggest difference came in the post dinner snacks those late night snacks. So it looks like if you have insufficient sleep, you will eat back or try and eat more really late at the night before you go to bed.
Speaker 1:And it's a double is nearly double of a difference. So the group that had nine hours was about 500 calories, and the group that had the five hours were nearing 1,000 calories from snacks. Right? That's very interesting. So think about it.
Speaker 1:Like Hugh said in the first one, the biggest hack we can do to improve our health and make it easier for us is to get good sleep. Go to bed at nine. No one cares you go to bed later on. Oh, I don't know. I'm wasting you're not you're not gonna waste your like, what are gonna do between nine and eleven?
Speaker 1:Honestly, you're just wasting your time just go to sleep wake up earlier get your eight hours in or even you know up to nine hours eight to nine hours of sleep make your life much easier wake up earlier get your walk in all associated with improved health markers, right? Again, what do we need? We need discipline to go to bed earlier. So we need discipline to stay off social media before we go to bed and in the morning. We need discipline to go to bed earlier so we can wake up earlier.
Speaker 1:And that's the first part of the day where you can, you know, deploy discipline is waking up on time. Don't bother snoozing. Right? We need to do that. And we need to discipline them to make sure we track our macros each day with less than five minutes time spent a day.
Speaker 1:If we do those, we're gonna be successful everyone. This is as simple as. It doesn't have to be complicated. It really isn't complicated. That is it.
Speaker 1:Believe it or not, that's it. That's the secret. The big secret is that those combinations, happy days, get your steps in there's nothing more. If you want more then you know go and buy into those silly marketing campaigns people do like p90x confuse the muscle, confuse your muscle. P90x you must have seen the DVD mega successful marketing campaign.
Speaker 1:They came up with a term confuse the muscle. It isn't possible to confuse the muscle but it was so effective that they turned into a billion dollar company. Okay, so you have to watch out for these manipulations they sound good, they sound like they've got a secret, must be that then but it's not just listen to these simple things. Use your other mental energy you're saving on researching stupid muscle confusion and other things in the industry. Spend it on improving yourself as a human being on your job and your family and your friends.
Speaker 1:You want to spend as little time as possible worrying about your nutrition. Let the app handle it, get you sleeping and you can have more mental energy to live a better life. How good is that? That's what it's all about. I'm not here to trap you into this fitness life and just all of our fitness fitness fitness is not going out, not living life, it's boring.
Speaker 1:We do the fitness to be free to live our lives, our proper selves, our authentic selves. We can do that. When we become fitter and healthier, we become more who we are and more comfortable. Right? But it starts with all of these basics.
Speaker 1:So enjoy yourself today. Do the basics, and we do it again tomorrow. And again tomorrow, the day after, and the day after, the day after. And before you know it, bam. You're living life.
Speaker 1:But guys, enjoy your day. Focus on your one big thing as well. Get that done and, speak to you tomorrow. And that is it for today's episode. So hopefully you took something away from it.
Speaker 1:If you didn't, here's what you need to take away. Media. Stop wasting time gossiping. You've only got a day to live. Today's the only day you ever have.
Speaker 1:So if there's anything to take away from this podcast, even if you can't understand the word I say, even if you didn't resonate with the wisdom I try to deliver, this is a reminder of you daily to live one day at time. Give your moments meaning today and don't be fooled by thinking you've
Speaker 2:got unlimited amount of days but if you
Speaker 1:can make the most of today I'm telling you you love a fulfilled life so enjoy your day and hopefully I'll see you back tomorrow. Do daily to live one day at a time. Give your moments meaning today and don't be fooled by thinking you've
Speaker 2:got unlimited amount of days. But if you can make the
Speaker 1:most of today, I'm telling you, you'll have a fulfilled life. So enjoy your day and hopefully I'll see you back tomorrow.
