Xmas Challenge Day 1 Pep Talk
Good morning everyone, it's day one of our Christmas challenge. Now we do this every year, think this is our fourth edition of the challenge and it's one of the most effective ones because it is essentially the opposite of what most people do during the winter. And we just fall into kind of automated core beliefs that during winter you should like not move much, you should stay in, should eat all the foods, you should drink a lot. And then what happens is every January comes and the New Year's resolution bug gets us and we think we need to smash the gym, but then 80% of gym resolutions end by mid Feb. So this system of over consumption before during Christmas into extreme low calorie diets in January, if you think about it is a terrible idea, it's never worked and never will work.
Speaker 1:So the important thing for us to do is to realize that what we're doing now is really setting ourselves up for the best 2023 possible, right. And now that's a long time away and we focus on one day at a time, but what we're doing is that because Christmas we can get sucked in, we get sucked into spending loads of money when you don't need to, especially this year, get sucked in by spending loads of money just because there's sales on, Keep the budget tight. When it comes to Christmas people would prefer personalized gifts you can make them for free or for a minimal cost than spending hundreds and hundreds on presents they don't really care about. So we're going be frugal with our spending, we're going to be frugal with our approach to Christmas, we're not going to want more than we need, you know, we're going to do what's nice, we're going to enjoy it, and we're going to try and remain moderate during these time periods and it's gonna need discipline. So when we look at this total challenge it's not really just about training, it's not really just about like getting leaner if your goal is to lose fat, it's about the total picture of how are we in control of our own lives going through one of the most turbulent times of the year where we have so many strings being pulled at us to consume or to buy more, to take death out for Christmas, to do this and now we must do this, you must go out New Year, you must do something big for New Year, la la la.
Speaker 1:And then January comes and we go, none of that was worth it and we do it every single year. Okay? So we are gonna go in feeling stronger this Christmas, we're gonna go in most of us are gonna go in going leaner, we're gonna feel more resilient, we're gonna feel more in control, we're not gonna be suckered into the whirlwinds of marketing and all this stuff into over consuming, overeating and we're gonna have more stillness this Christmas and that I can't tell you how much I was worth. Having a still mind means you can be responsive and not reactive. Most people are reactive.
Speaker 1:Social media has essentially given everyone a really short attention span. TikTok works because they're short videos. You need two or three seconds on a web page is all people give it before they click off. The bounce rates from websites is sky high. Our attention because of social media has gone down, we've got no attention anymore.
Speaker 1:So when it comes to focusing on the next five weeks, we want to be in a position where we're not just thrown around and our days are reactive, reactive, TikTok, social media, reactive, doomscrolling this and that. We want to be so still that we are aware of the chain reaction that happens during those time processes. When you think things are instantaneous, you think you just pick your phone up instantly, there's a chain reaction that always happens. So we can only really spot these behaviours when we're still, when we are observing and we take things one day at a time, and you start realising a lot of things that you do are just reacting to things in that environment stimulus. If you wake up every morning and you pick your phone up, you've already started the chain reaction that's taking you out of the control of your day.
Speaker 1:You read a social media post, you read a piece of news you hate, you get an email about work, it gets your heart rate going, you get a message from a friend, your heart goes all or whatever, things happen, you wake up, you're not in control anymore, your morning's gone, all you're thinking about is reacting to what you've seen on your phone and then you start your day and you have coffee and you start your day and you feel out of control, you feel like you haven't done anything for yourself because you haven't, you've given yourself away too early. So when we wake up in the mornings, okay, listen to the podcast, don't have to, give yourself the mornings where you do your workout, no phone. You'll be you the emails and stuff will come later. Give yourself some time to walk and be still and you'll start noticing by just giving yourself this hour in the mornings, includes the workout, includes just getting ready, includes the reading maybe, that your entire day changes. So if you're going to read Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holden, you read 10 pages a day or five pages a day every morning, you have a cup of coffee, you read five pages, you get ready, you do the workout, you go for a walk, you get ready for work.
Speaker 1:The change you notice within two or three days is going to be huge and you're going go I can't believe how better I feel. I feel it in control. And you do. Okay, so that's the first thing really I want to get across is that this challenge is really about stillness through discipline. Discipline really gives you freedom.
Speaker 1:If I got discipline to make sure I don't go on my phone in the morning and I give myself that hour, that hour of me time gives me freedom for the day to be responsive nor reactive. If I stop being reactive, my anxiety goes up, my stress response turns on, it's a chain reaction is hard stop and then I become very narrow minded thinking. And I just want a few tips to start this challenge, it's five weeks but nothing will change unless you focus on the day at hand. So all you got to do today is you've got to track your macros honestly, wherever you eat, track it. Don't say, Scott do I have to track, the button on my toast?
Speaker 1:Do I have to add all the ingredients into the recipe map? Yeah, you have to do that to start right. And the reason to do is because you learn, if you see it as a game, as a learning process, spend five-ten minutes learning, okay that amount of butter is that, wow I'm shocked. I used to put on three times that and think it wasn't much. Oh my god, that's how much a normal serving size of cereal is, I've been having double that.
Speaker 1:You know, oh my god, that's how many calories in that. I thought it was like way less. You start learning things you don't believe is true, right? And you have these insights, right? You have these insights from doing it and you spend four hours a day on your phone on average, you, me, everyone.
Speaker 1:We're on social media with Doomstrollers and Morales, four hours a day and you can't give ten minutes to yourself, for your health. If you're already on your day, on your phone for the day, why not take a segment of that time instead of reading shit tweets and shit posts on Instagram and seeing someone's fake life on Instagram as if they're living the dream. Go on the app and then what do I have now? Okay let me put her in, did I add my weight? Okay let me check my steps.
Speaker 1:Should I do my morning entry in a daily diary? Should I do my evening reflection? Yeah, I probably should. This data is gonna do me well because when you look at your data over time it's very surprising and it gives you a lot of insight. So you have got time you just need to prioritize it for yourself for once.
Speaker 1:And you can't, you don't have to take everything so seriously. Oh I gotta eat this, like I gotta do this, I gotta do the workout, oh my god you gotta track it, I gotta put a recipe in the app. Oh my god guys I'll put some perspective on it. You got to put a few taps in an app and it's gonna make a recipe and then it saves forever and you can add this to your food diary easy. And you're able to track your nutrition and see the breakdown of everything you put in your body in a matter of minutes.
Speaker 1:Think how crazy that is. That's phenomenal and it's a game. It's all a game. It's a fun game. Can I hit my macros today?
Speaker 1:I'm on the move but all I gotta do is scan a barcode and pop it in the app. It's not hard. Okay that's the okay I'm close, no, quite far. I've gone over, that's fine. I've gone over full stop.
Speaker 1:Now I've gone over oh my god I suck, I'm the worst person ever, I've gone over my macros full stop. Oh my steps are low full stop. You know what your steps are low, things change, things happen. Didn't get up to do your morning walk, didn't do your walk at lunchtime, work got so busy you couldn't you didn't get off your ass all day, and I've had a few weeks of low steps, my usual target and my usual steps are an 8,000 a day, seven to 8,000. And last week or so it's been like 5,000 on average, been way down.
Speaker 1:A lot of things, life things. And I'm not gonna tell myself I'm I'm I'm stupid, I hate myself when I get my steps in. I understand why, and I just gotta make it make it count the next day and go okay I'm gonna have my morning walk, I'm gonna prioritize it, get it up there, that's all I got to do. And don't catastrophize please, all the catastrophizing does is making a mountain out of a molehill, causes a stress response to turn on, your adrenaline starts rushing, start panicking, you start worrying, you're doing a stress response when you should be reserving that for real stressors not like perceived made up ones in your brain about stuff, and you need to become your own scientist. This is the main thing, main angle of turtle, you need to become the scientist of your own life.
Speaker 1:Scientists do not judge the data. The data will tell them the story, the data will tell them the truth over time. But you got to look at the data objectively. If you look at a data with an agenda and the agenda is put in there from diet culture, you're gonna look at your weight in the morning and their cultures already put the agenda in, any weight that's not below x amount you are useless, you're disgusting, this is disgusting weight. We don't have to accept that anymore.
Speaker 1:Whatever your weight is, is you wait. You do it, you let the app take the average full stop. You are the scientist, you're looking at the changes for you, but you look at data's numbers. If you are used to weighing yourself in kg's, weigh yourself in pounds. If you were used to weighing yourself in pounds, weigh yourself in kg's.
Speaker 1:If you're used to weighing yourself in stone change other pounds or kilograms. Kgs, kilograms, same thing right? And then you won't even know, you won't have this same association right and you put in the app, let it work do the work for you, amazing. I'll flow this shit to the app, don't need to worry about that, let the app worry about it. I grow on my day.
Speaker 1:I grow on eating. And you start thinking, no, I'm great. I wanna I don't wanna eat the same things every day. You don't have to eat the same things every day, but most people do. You know what you like.
Speaker 1:Most people have the same foods every day, you know. There's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to be chef and have different cuisines every day and make life harder for yourself by always having different meals. You know the easiest way to go about this is the meal prep and have two or three meals, two or three lunches ready each time. Your breakfast could be protein oats, you mix oats with a scoop of whey protein with milks and berries and it's amazing honey, people love it.
Speaker 1:You could have protein yogurt in the morning. You could have toast, jam and toast and a cup of tea because you love jam and toast and a cup of tea you know. Those little pleasures you love that bring you that in each day, don't take them away from your life. You know, imagine going to something like my mother for example, when her friends used to come over and they'd have a cup of tea, a few biscuits in the morning before work and after work. Imagine telling them you no longer can have your cup of tea and those biscuits, they'd be like I'm gonna have terrible days as opposed to saying you can have that cup of tea, you can have those biscuits but just be aware the biscuits are gonna be one hundred two hundred calories but you can fit them into your macros and you can still enjoy those little moments you have with your friends having a cup of tea and a biscuit.
Speaker 1:You know there's nothing else that needs to be added to this, don't know why and I don't know how it's got such a massive avalanche of nonsense from the diet industry that makes out that these things are like catastrophic to your health. Having sugar here or having drinks is poison. Yeah, alcohol technically is poison, on a few drinks isn't gonna do anything. If you're drinking every night all the time, right, there's a different story. Anything over, it's moderate to month's gonna cause a problem.
Speaker 1:More people die well, a lot of people die of vitamin c overdose per year. You can die from anything overdose. So we're going be moderate with stuff and some things need to be more carefully moderated than others of course because there's more danger to them. But sugar isn't a devil either. Sugar is not one thing that's causing all your problems.
Speaker 1:If your diet's high in sugar, slightly high in fat because all the foods that you love that are high in sugar tend to be 50% sugar 50% fat roughly on average. Chocolate for example, people think it's bad because it's sugary, very high in fat as well. Very very very pleasurable to the brain. And my last point, and I want you to take things one day at a time focus on what you can do today, that's all you need to do, is stop escaping what the now is. What I mean by that is if you're feeling hungry, don't try and escape that feeling of hunger by eating straight away.
Speaker 1:Check if it's hunger. Is it hunger? When did I eat last? Is that hunger or am I craving? Am I craving something?
Speaker 1:No, I think I'm craving something. Alright. Why am I craving something? Oh, it's because I'm bored right now in front of my work screen. I'm trying to escape what is now, what is the moment, this truth is that I'm bored and I'm trying to escape that boredom by eating because I'm on pleasure.
Speaker 1:So my my body started craving a pleasure to escape the current state of the now, which is I'm bored. But once you start seeing that psyche, like, I don't need to eat to escape this. I just need to either crack on my work or go and take a break, have a walk, come back, have a drink of water, a cup of tea, something that's gonna break the kind of pattern of just getting absorbed in the screen. And I don't need to always escape the now by eating over pleasure, right? That's what we do.
Speaker 1:We're always trying to escape the now. You feel a bit anxious, trying to run away from it all the time as opposed to sitting with the anxiety. I'm anxious right now that's the fact why I can see the trigger was that or the trigger is this. And I'm talking about mild anxiety now. So there's a lot of stuff that we do to eat, we boredom eat, we emotionally eat, we stress eat because we want to run away from the no or the what is.
Speaker 1:And we run away from the what is through the comfort of eating which generates pleasure which kind of masks the what is. But then we go back to it straight away afterwards and feel even worse about ourselves. Right and I love the quote by Socrates two and a half thousand years ago and he says paradoxically we get more pleasure if we say no to overeating the next days we look back and go my god I feel I'm so glad I didn't overeat versus if you did overeat and overeat so much you get full and you get pain and you'll eventually overeat until you feel, oh my stomach hurts and then it's not pleasurable anymore, you actually regret overeating. So there's always more pleasure in the delay and looking back and going fair play, fair play, I feel much better now because I didn't fall in, I didn't over indulge. That's a lot about discipline is destiny in book, you don't have to join the book club, you can listen to it on Audible, I suggest doing that, building in a routine of listening to a book on Audible or reading it will change your life over the years, so please do it.
Speaker 1:And that's it for today, think one day at a time, get your one big thing done in the app, you can type in whatever it is, track my macros, do the boxing workout, go on the ALEX seminar, get my steps to 5,000, whatever it is, one big thing, then your days of success no matter what. And have fun with it, put a smiley face man, don't have to be so serious about this stuff, we're here for a laugh, we're to enjoy and don't be sucked into being too serious about it or being too serious in yourself. If you overeat and you eat a Toblerone, you eat Toblerone, you know happy days. But I'll see you all in the seminar later and enjoy your first day of the challenge, speak soon.
