Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 38: Week 7 of my weight loss phase & how it's going!
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to today's episode of Cameron's Conversations. So in today's episode, I'm gonna talk a little bit about how I'm getting on with my weight loss phase as I get to week seven. And I always give the advice that the time passes anyway, and I very much feel like this. I was looking to do my progress photos, which I just posted on Instagram today. and on my stories as well, so you'll be able to check those out. I'm doing this on the 17th of March, so if you do want to have a visual representation of what I'm blabbering on about, then you can have a nosey there. But one of the things that I find funny is, as I was trying to do that, I was trying to figure out what week I was actually on, because the weeks do pass very quickly. It was kind of staggered that it's already week seven, and I'm very pleased with the progress I've made. I feel like now I've kind of turned that corner. And one of the things I often say is that With weight loss, it isn't this kind A to B effect where you will get to B and you suddenly feel much, much better. Typically, what you actually see is you feel a little bit better every single week. And in the start, it feels quite marginal, and as time goes on, you just feel a little bit better in yourself, whether that's because your clothes fit better, which I'm definitely noticing at this point, or whether you just like what you're seeing in your progress photos, what you see in the mirror, et cetera, et cetera. But. What I've definitely found, and this happens a lot with one-to-one clients as well, is there's sort of like inflection points as well where you seem to be just like chipping away, chipping away, feeling like maybe two or 3 % better each week. You know, it's noticeable, it's tangible, but it's gradual. And then all of a sudden you have a week where you're like, ⁓ crikey, I really see a difference. And sometimes that does come off as it has for me, the back of a progress photo where I can kind of look and go, actually, yeah, I am seeing a big difference now. feel... much comfier with what I'm seeing in that kind of progress photo than I was at the start. But sometimes it's in other things as well where you just put on some clothing or maybe a top of your t-shirt you haven't worn in a lot while. And this kind of happened to me earlier this week as well. So I was training, well not this week, but last week, late last week. And I tried, was in a gym training and I was wearing a t-shirt I hadn't worn in a couple of weeks and noticed a massive difference as well. I was that guy looking at myself in the mirror. How embarrassing. ⁓ But yeah, briefly, briefly I might add, wasn't spending the half an hour staring myself in a tank top, that's a bit much, right? But the changes aren't so subtle now and it's really, really motivating. And even for someone who has done weight loss phases before, done muscle gain phases before as well, and I've been through all of this, it's still good fun, right? I really enjoy this part of the process. And I often say that to people like, don't get me wrong, weight loss isn't always a... sort of thrill ride, right? It's not always that exciting. There are definitely moments where you just feel like you're plodding on and getting the job done. But I very much enjoy those moments where I'm like, cool, I can really see a change now. I find that to be quite motivating and I feel really, positive about that as well. And I think there's definitely something to be said of that where it can make your weight loss phase easier if you lean into that sort of positive dialogue with yourself as well where you're like, okay. Cool, I see a big difference. I do look a lot sharper, I look a lot better. I've got a semblance of a jawline now as well. All these kind of things, like rather than often as people do, you focus on what's ahead so heavily that you can almost demotivate yourself. And don't get me wrong, I'm still planning on, I'm probably dieting for about another 11 weeks, so I've still got a little bit farther to go. I'd kind of initially set maybe a little bit more of a conservative goal, and now I'm getting into it and feeling pretty good actually. I feel like now I'm gonna crack on and. push a little bit farther and not just get into good shape but into possibly about the leanest I've been or not far off it. We'll kind of see where I get to. But one of the things I kind of wanted to touch on was exactly that. That if you are kind of just feeling like you are plodding along, reaching along a little bit week by week, that is normal. And it's absolutely also normal to have these little inflection points and there'll be multiple ones in this journey. It might be another three, four weeks. before I kind of have that same sort of like, might look at my progress photos next week and be like, oh yeah, cool, see a bit of a change, cool. And the same thing happens for a few weeks. And then all of a sudden, like four weeks on from now, maybe mid April or something, I'll kind of go, oh crikey, like, yeah, there is a difference there. I can see a massive, massive change and you get that big boost of motivation too. But I think it's useful to see it through both lenses. I think that you definitely do feel better week by week by week, but those changes are subtle. And then you also have these little moments where you do put on a top you've not put on for a few weeks or you've maybe put on a jacket. I know for a lot of clients because it's kind of getting into, I was going to say springtime, but I don't know how the weather is ⁓ really allowing me to say that. But you know, it's getting a bit milder. You change your kind of wardrobe a little bit. You may be putting on clothes you haven't worn in a little while or going out in sort of thinner jackets, et cetera, than you were before. And all of a sudden you notice like, ⁓ man, there's a lot more room in this than there was at the kind of start of winter when I kind of. last wore it. So I think that's a really, really positive thing and having that view that it is going to be progressive, but you'll also have these little inflection moments too. That's what it often feels like in real life. I think this idea of I'll be happy when I get to X-weight, like it doesn't work like that. I know that I'm progressively going to feel better and better about where I am and the shape I'm in because I'm progressively getting in better shape, right? It's logical that that'd be the case, but I still feel much better now than I did seven weeks ago. And when I'm looking back at progress photos, I'm kind of like, I surprised almost the shape I was in seven weeks ago and the difference already. So I think there's a couple things to hopefully pick up from this one is that the time passes really, really quickly and I'm very, very conscious that the next seven weeks will also fly by and I'll probably be looking back as I get to kind of week 14 and thinking crikey, that went really, really, really quickly. And I think that can be quite useful too is that sometimes people allow their diet to become. too much of a focal point and I just crack on with the rest of my life. I'm really, really busy coaching clients, I'm really, busy training, I've got basketball, I've got all the other things that everyone has in their lives to focus on, right? You've got all these things to juggle and I just focus on cracking on with those things. My life does not stop whilst I diet and I think one of the things I also stress to people is that what I've found helpful is making sure that not all of my social interactions are driven around either alcohol or food. I think this can be something that sometimes people find hard to navigate. It's like if everything you do with your friends is always around a meal out or drinks, that's when sometimes you find it harder because you're like, well, I'm missing out on this or missing out on that. And it's like, well, actually to go out with your friends and have a couple of non-alcoholic beers and still hang out with people you like shouldn't be that big a deal. And if you do need to drink to hang out with them, well, maybe their chat's pretty terrible. Maybe you new friends. But the food side of it can be a little bit trickier as well because obviously you can maybe plan. a couple of in within a week, meals out, sorry, within a week and still make it work. But it gets harder, right? And it depends on the calories you're on. I probably have more flexibility to do that than a smaller female does. So that might be a little bit trickier. If I was on 1,300, 1,400 calories, going out for multiple meals in a week's probably a no-go if I want to continue to lose weight. So there is a bit of a balancing act. There is always going to be. But I think it helps tremendously when there's things like I'm gonna meet one of my best mates and I'm gonna go out for a walk with him this evening. So like that's just a really simple thing. We'll just have a bit of a plod around and just chat and just catch up. And that's quite a nice thing to do. I have another friend I'm gonna see at the weekend as well and I'm going to go for a couple of pints with him but I'll just have a couple of non-alcoholic beers and it's barely any calories. I'm actually driving anyway of a choice given where I'm gonna be up north. So it's not really an option to take public transport. Not easily anyway. So that can be really helpful. And I've got other friends that I'm planning on seeing over the next little bit and I'll start to plan in doing some kind of hill walks or some beach walks and things like that too. And I think that can be hugely helpful as well is that like it doesn't always have to completely orient around food or it can orient around a walk and other things too. So you also get your steps up and it makes life easy because you're not consciously having to do those steps. You're just kind of chatting to a friend. I think that is also something that can be quite useful when you are in these phases. But I just wanted to touch a little bit on how I'm feeling and how I'm getting on. I've kind of mentioned a thing the last time, the hunger side of it really hasn't been that tricky for me because I've been so focused on getting lots of fruit and veg in. Although, I will say, I made a bit of a mistake last week which was really stupid. I took my frozen berries out and then I put them back, but I put them back into the fridge, which meant that, of course, I didn't have berries for the rest of the week because they had melted all over my fridge, which made a right old bloody mess as well. But anyway, we'll gloss over that. So I did have to survive a week without smoothies, first of all problems. But I do love my protein smoothie for breakfast, because it really sets me up well. But things happen, little small inconveniences. I'm sure I'll survive. But the thing was that overall my fullness has sat really high. Lots of veg, I've been eating lots and lots of fruit and lots of berries in my smoothies when I've been having them, not last week. And that's made a huge difference. So the hunger piece has been pretty good. I am finding, like later evening, I get a little bit more tired. I think I've always wanted to be transparent about that, it's all gonna be sunshine and roses, it's nothing huge. ⁓ But I tend to start work quite early. This morning I was out walking at half past five, I walked for the better part of an hour, then I went to a 30 minute training session and all the rest of it. And then I was probably ⁓ doing a bit of work and starting to film some exercises for clients in the home gym set up at about half seven-ish in the morning, maybe just before. and I'll be working right through till seven tonight. So, you know, the days are fairly long. Like I do work quite long days, not every single day, but quite a few of them. And that sometimes means that by the time I get to like nighttime, I'm pretty conked out from just hitting my steps, hitting a gym session, and you know, two, three nights a week hitting basketball sessions as well. Like I am getting to sort of half nine and I'm feeling like pretty cooked, but that's okay. That's kind of what I might reasonably expect in the same way someone else might expect some more hunger than normal. I've not really hit that point yet, but I'm also not super, super lean yet, and I know that will happen. I will experience a little bit more hunger down the line, but for now it's feeling pretty good. I don't have a set of scales this week until Saturday, so it's hard to tell you exactly where my weight's been kind of at over the last couple of days, because it's been a couple of days since I last weighed, but I know that based on what I think I had five, six weigh-ins for the week before, that I've ended up about 0.8 kilos down. So, you know, 0.7, 0.8 kilos, something around that. So still dropping at a really steady pace. I'm quite happy with that. I mean, that's about 1 % of my body weight, because I'm around about 80 kilo mark now getting close to dropping under 80. So about 0.8 kilos per week is probably about right for me. I think that's a good spot to be in. If I can drop a little bit faster, I'm going to push a wee bit harder this week and next, because in two weeks' I go to Spain, so I'm going to be at maintenance for five days. So I've got a short kind of trip out there. So... that makes sense for me to kind of use this as like a mini sprint. So for 14 days, I'll push a little bit harder. I'm gonna push my step count a wee bit higher. I'm probably gonna do a few lower calorie days in the mix to bring my average for the week down just that wee bit more. But other than that, it's kind of business as usual. It's nothing too drastic, just a few days like today, I'm just gonna push my calories down to about 1700, 1600 because I can. I've got a super busy day and I don't have a lot of time to do much else. So I think that can be quite useful as well. But just to give you a bit of a general update on how it's going, any challenges I've had? Well, pretty minor so far, a bit of tiredness in the evenings creeping in, as I would expect. Probably the hardest thing for me has actually been ironically steps, because it's something I've always been really, really good at. Because I've pulled a lot of long days last week, and then I injured my quad playing basketball on Thursday night, and I had planned on catching up lots of steps across the weekend, I actually didn't hit my step target, and I was a ways off it. to about 1800 under it, which is really, really unusual for me. I'm really diligent with it, but I could barely get up and down the stairs, unfortunately, on Friday morning, least of all Thursday night. And then Saturday wasn't that much better. Sunday, I did manage to get out for a walk, but I was limping the whole way, so that wasn't ideal. Thankfully, nothing too major, just lots and lots and lots of pretty fun looking bruising. So it's gonna take probably about a week before I feel like my leg's back to normal, and it probably means no basketball for me. Probably no running until the back end of this week, but that's just the way it is. yeah, just to talk about that as well, that I find that a bit harder because during the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I kind of was at the desk 12, 13 hours and then I had basketball in the evening a couple of nights. And then later into the week, obviously I had planned on catching my steps up and it didn't quite happen. So this week I've been quite deliberate in the fact that I'm going to get up an extra half hour earlier because I know if I get that extra 30 minutes worth of steps done, It just alleviates the pressure on the tail end of my week and I'm not gonna get caught out again by just, you know, whether it's life stuff, hopefully no more quad injuries. But yeah, just wanted to talk about that too, that you know what, I'm a coach and sometimes I miss targets too. It's not something that I let myself away with very often. If I hadn't had my quad injury, I definitely wouldn't have. I would have pushed myself on Saturday and Sunday. But now this week I'm just course correcting and making sure I get my steps up. Because for it to happen once is one thing and that's okay. Like, you know, life happens. but for it to happen multiple times just shows that I'm not fully committing to it and I think that's something I'm really big on is if something doesn't go quite to plan, cool, that's not a problem, that's life, but then you have to kind of say to yourself, right, how do I problem solve that? And I think there's something that can be really useful is to always have that mindset with weight loss of like, okay, do you know what, things didn't go to plan, but I'm now going to adjust. If, however, you have a weight loss goal and I want to be in a certain place in, let's say, 11 weeks time, If I just miss my steps every single week and say it's because I'm busy, that doesn't really swing, it? Because I'm not actually in line. I've got this expectation of where I want to get to, but my behaviours don't match that. So I think sometimes as well, it's about being really deliberate. Me missing my steps by that much one week can have a minimal impact, but me missing that every single week definitely will. And I don't doubt if I'd hit the step target there, I would have seen an even bigger drop, probably closer to that kilo mark. So it does have a little bit of an impact in that regard. Yeah, that was a small adjustment that needs made for the next week. And that's my own little bit of weight loss tough love of like, cool, right, you had that, that happened, but this week needs to be better. Because it was great on nutrition, it really good on exercise, did play basketball three times, did get to the gym three times, that was all good, but steps weren't good enough and we've got to keep our standards if we want to get the result at the end of it. So that is pretty much it for me this week. If you do resonate with a little bit what I'm talking about, although it's not. It's mostly been about me, right? But if you are on your own weight loss journey and you are looking for a little bit more support and you are struggling a bit at the moment, then in the show notes, the link to one-to-one coaching is gonna be there as well as the link to my WhatsApp so you can pop me any questions just about anything related to the podcast or suggestions for future episodes or anything around coaching. Otherwise, have a great day and speak to you soon.