Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 49: Is not tracking your weekends really a problem?
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to today's episode of the Cameron's Conversations podcast. And every week or so, I like to do one episode, which is a little bit more tough love, right? So I try not to do this all the time because anyone who has coached with me, knows me, has been through sort and sex, or even just consumes my content on YouTube, on the podcast, obviously, or on Instagram, et cetera. We'll know that that is not my style all the time. I am not some mean coach shouting at you for having a piece of cake. That is not my style at all. Not even slightly. But one of the things that is really important as a coach is that there is absolutely a place to push and pull with clients and there's absolutely a place for a little bit of tough love sometimes too. And one of the things that I think has kind of popped up for me and it's something that I was talking to a couple of the coaches that I work alongside about is this idea of people just not tracking because they don't fancy tracking that day and then wondering why their progress is a bit slower than it should be. And I think here we have to get a bit direct and a bit honest about this. When was the last time that you didn't track a day that was low in calories? Right, so when was the first, the last time that you missed a day's worth of tracking and it was a quote unquote good day? And I mean like a properly good day, not on a ⁓ it felt pretty okay kind of way where actually you just nibbled on lots of stuff throughout the day and it was maybe nothing too crazy but you still probably went over your calories a bit. I don't mean that kind of good. mean like a, yeah, bang on, hit all my targets. For a lot of people, the answer's probably never. For most people, the answer's probably like one in 10 of the days that they don't track. The reality is is that most people don't track because they don't want to, because there's maybe a little bit of not kind of quote unquote owning up to it and kind of be like, ⁓ do you know what, that wasn't the best day. Now, to be clear, what I do not like and do not want for any client is for them to sit and feel guilty. And this is something I hammer home, right? Because absolutely, sometimes I'm kind of nudging clients and saying, hey, look, We can't get away with not tracking for whenever we don't fancy it, right? It doesn't work that way. That's not going to get us through our weight loss phase. It's going to get us stuck in a weight loss phase that goes on for eternity. And let's be honest, dieting is not that much fun that we want to be doing it for a long time. Maintenance, maybe a muscle gain phase or a performance phase, that's fun. Dieting, well, it's fun to see the results, it's fun to see the progress, but I would rather be in and out. I don't know about you. I mean, if you really enjoy. being a little bit hungry and not being able to eat as flexibly as normal, then great, but otherwise I think you should crack on, right? So what we want to do is do that. And what we don't want to do is be slowed down by the fact that when we're looking over 30 days worth of tracking, this can be a great thing to do for a lot of people who are maybe just getting into calorie tracking or been doing it a while but haven't seen quite the results they want. Look at the last 30 days. How many days have you missed? Then how many days have you maybe not tracked? completely fully, you've maybe missed a meal. Then how many times outside of that have you maybe missed small or minor things, a nibble here, a bite here? When you start to line that up, particularly the first two when we're talking about days that are untracked entirely or meals missed, when you look at it, and I absolutely have done this before, because I did a weight loss phase where I did this, I did a 30 day review of my, if you like, my performance in terms of tracking, I realised I hadn't tracked six days of that time, which is not. Terrible, but it's not brilliant at all. I mean, I'm literally a fifth of the days I'm not tracking so I could expect to make 20 % less progress at a minimum So you throw that in there and then I kind of looked at meals missed and it ended up being about three or four days as well and by the time I looked at I'm like basically I've tracked 17 days perfectly or very very well and the rest of it was not good enough and fun enough that was a slow weight loss phase and when I tightened that up I made more progress so one of the things I want you to take from this is this is that it is not as such acceptable to just not track because you don't fancy it, right? That won't work. Now, if a client says to me, ⁓ it's my 20th wedding anniversary, it doesn't have to be the 20th, it could just be the wedding anniversary, or it's their birthday, or it's something really important, then often as not, I will either give them A, a day of maintenance, B, a higher calorie day, knowing that it'll balance out over the course of the week, or C, an untracked day. And it will depend on the client, it will depend on where they are in their journey as to what I do. Because it might be, frankly, and this is a bit of honesty, here too early in someone's journey, I might know that they're a little bit likely, if I say no, don't bother tracking, that they'll go over their calories and just kind of get into that headspace, oh, it's all or nothing, quickly, Cameron's giving me a day off tracking, I'll go overboard. Now they might not want to do that ahead of time, but in the moment, they're not quite out of that headspace, that all or nothing headspace that a lot of people are in. So I might not give them that, I might just give them a higher calorie diet and say hey. Look, this is little bit above maintenance, but over the course, it's basically another day's deficit and a maintenance day. So let's say you're on 2,000 calories, your maintenance is two and a half, so you maybe say, okay, well, what we'll do is I'll give you 2,750, 2,800, and they've got this big day for something important. Cool, that's fine. But what we do not want is we don't want someone to go completely the wrong direction with it. And this is why I use these tools, right? And you can see I've got three options there. Untracked is one of them, but it's also probably the thing that people need. the most when they are a little bit farther into it, Where actually, they're in a good spot with their nutrition, they can trust themselves to eat pretty sensibly, or it's a really big event anyway, and we're just gonna allow for it and be a bit more relaxed. But what's not useful is, it's like your great auntie's birthday, that you don't even like that much, and then you're smashing cake left round centre, having all the nibbles on the buffet, and you're over your calories by 1200. And then there's this kind of mentality of like, oh, I'll get back on a Monday, great, that bit's good, but like it didn't have any impact. and then a week later it's like, oh my weight loss hasn't been so good this week. It's like, well that's because on Sunday we went massively over our calories. I think sometimes just being a little bit aware of that's important because there's no point in burying our head in the sand. We cannot pretend that it's not happened, right? That's not to be perfectly clear that we should guilt trip ourselves about it. I never encourage that. I actually really stress this to clients is we want to be analytical. What went a bit wrong there? What was it that kind of happened? Where was our head at? Yeah, I got back into all or nothing mentality. We have a talk around that mindset and give them some tools, maybe one or two key things that they can do so that they'll handle it better the next time and that keeps them on top of it. But the thing that I want to stress from this is if you are looking at, you do a 30 day review and you've not tracked two of your weekends entirely, maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday, two of the weekends you've half tracked kind of, a bit loose, a bit guessy, not too sure, and you're wondering why after a month you've lost. less weight than you expected and you're feeling a bit frustrated, there's your answer. And something that I want to bring into this as well is it is worth guesstimating your meals out. And the reason it matters to me and the reason I stress this is because a lot of meals are more calories than people think. Now, in Sorted Insects, because we have a lot of people who are coming in and there's this kind of like first time tracking calories or they've done it before but very loosely, sometimes we'll see things that I'll pick up on. I'll be like, hey, like that might not necessarily be completely correct. And one of them is, And I can think of it, the most recent intake we did, someone who put 700 calories for a meal out. Now, that's possible, depends what the meal out is, but they'd put that they'd had a three course meal. Now they made a sensible choice, they'd had soup with a bit of bread and butter on the side, and they had had whatever it was, I can't quite remember, like a chicken dish, something with a bit of protein in it as their main, and then they had a dessert as well. And I think it wasn't anything too crazy, I think they actually opted for like a couple scoops of ice cream or whatever. So relatively easy to track that. But one of the things that they'd done is they'd guesstimated, they just had this number in their head like, oh, that'll be about 800 calories. And we were like, okay, what type of soup was it? It was like a cream soup. And we kind of did a bit of a best guess on it. Then we guessed the piece of bread, and we know that the butter's like a standard, whatever it is, 10 gram packet, right? So we can quickly analyze how much that is. And then we could do the main. And when we had a wee look at that as well, we were like, okay, well, that's just probably comfortably over that initial target. And we actually figured it out to be closer to about. 1200 calories or 1100 calories, right? Because I think the chicken dish was actually quite high. The point is, is they were out by about 400 calories, right? And they thought they had overestimated. So this is the other reason that if you're not tracking the weekends, it can be a bit tricky, is sometimes what you think is actually in the food you're eating is not right. So you kind of go and you think, oh, the weekend, like Saturday was pretty good, but Saturday pretty good means, well, you didn't go completely overboard most of the time, but you had an extra croissant because there was one there at breakfast time. You had a couple of snacks throughout the day. You then went out for dinner. That dinner was actually, you five, 600 calories higher than you think it was. Those snacks were a couple hundred extra. The croissant was 300 extra. And suddenly you are 11, 12, 1300 calories over. And that's actually probably two to three days worth of dieting that you've knocked out, right? Being pragmatic about it, that's one day. If your Saturday and Sunday are both like that, and that's an extra two and a half thousand calories you're consuming between two of them, you've got a problem because you're not going to lose weight very quickly. You might lose some, but it's gonna be slow and you're gonna feel like you're slogging out on weekdays for little reward. So something to keep an eye on there as well. So a bit of tough love in there, I appreciate. And I try not to do that all the time, but I also think it's really good sometimes that like sometimes clients will say to me, do you know what? I'm really glad you've just done a bit in the mask and pointed that out to me because I think I was a little bit in denial or. I wasn't really aware, not that they are completely unaware that their weekends weren't perfect. Obviously they know that, but more just kind of the, I thought it wasn't too bad. And actually, yeah, do you know what? I'm kicking the backside out of it. That croissant I have, those few biscuits, that meal I have, and then a couple of drinks in the evening is knocking my calories over 1,500, and I'm in a deficit of 500 a day, and I'm doing that on a Saturday and Sunday. So really what I'm actually in is maintenance mode unintentionally, despite the hard work during the week. So something to think about. If you are struggling with weight loss right now though, and you feel like you need a bit of a hand, then there's a link in the show notes for a one-to-one call as well. So you can just book a little call with me, have a little bit of a chat, a time that suits you, and we'll just chat through where you're at right now, what you're struggling with, and if coaching is a good fit for you. If it is a good fit, then we can move into coaching. If it doesn't feel like it's the right fit, or I'm not 100 % convinced that I can help you to the best of my abilities, I will also nudge you in the right direction. If however, you're just looking for something short that you can have a little nosey at in the meantime, then I'm gonna put in the show notes a link for my free fat loss guide and you can have a nosey at that too. Otherwise, have a great day and I'll speak to you soon.