Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 48: How to approach holidays in a weight loss phase
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. And in today's episode, I'm going to talk about handling holidays. So this is very fitting because at quarter to five tomorrow morning, I will be stumbling into my car, hopefully with passport in hand and off to Spain for five days. It is a little bit of a working holiday for me, so I won't be fully off, but I will be in the sunny climbs just about an hour away from Alicante, near the coast actually, I believe. So I'm very, very much looking forward to that. And it course brought up the big challenge that a lot of people face around this time of year. I've noticed quite a few of my clients starting to go on holiday a little bit more. It always feels like around this time it picks up, perhaps as well because it's getting near the Easter holidays as well, of course. So I think this is really important. A lot of people struggle when it comes to holidays. And the reason they struggle is they've not really got the right mindset. They've either got the, well, it's a holiday, so I'm gonna bloody send it approach. which doesn't work, especially if it's over a week, right? Week, 10 days, 14 days, you can do some damage. And I know it's nice to say, ah, it's only a week, but let's kind of be honest here, right? If you have been cracking on with your diet, you're sitting in a kind of deficit of maybe 500, 600 calories a day. If you go over your calories by 12, 1500, which is easier said than, it's easier to do than you might think, I was gonna say easier said than done, but it's not. It's in fact easier done than said, in my case. So you are very easily able to go over massively. That could wipe out two to three weeks of dieting. Now, I do not want you to be feeling stressed about that because there is no need to. The reality is, is with a few little tweaks and tips that I'm kind of take you along through here, you can make a big difference and find that that's not the case, right? But if you do massively overeat and massively drink more than normal, at least, you're going to find that weight spikes up. quite significantly and you'll have quite a lot more body fat by the end of the trip than you did before. So what we want to figure out is, well, how would we reverse engineer this? But let's kind of do it in this fashion, which is one of my favourite things to do is, how would we make sure that we gain as much weight as possible on holiday? Well, really simple. I know what I'd do. I'd wake up, I'd go to the breakfast buffet, I would smash every mini pack of pano chocolat going. I would probably just take the whole basket of them. I wouldn't even just get a plate, I'd just take the basket. I'd eat as many of those. I reckon I could eat about 12. I reckon I've got maybe even 15. I think we could get 15. I think 12's rookie numbers really. So realistically, right, I could go in, overeat then, and yet I still would feel very little fullness, right? Or it would take me a long time to get to fullness. I've inhaled thousands of calories by the point I get there because of my food choices. Now I get to lunchtime, I do the same. I just eat exactly what I want. but with no focus on fullness at all. Same at dinner, and I have lots of snacks in between because I'm really, hungry. So, let's take a different approach to that. What if I was to go down to the breakfast buffet and say, ⁓ those croissants and my pan of chocolate ice cream look great? Then I would very likely, first off, have some low-fat Greek yogurt, which you get in pretty much every bloody hotel going, and I'd probably have some fruit as well, piled into it. I'd have lots of fruit, in fact. I might even have an apple on the side of that as well. Then what I would go and do is have a mini pastry. or whatever it is, right? I have a little bit of that. if it's kind of a buffet breakfast, I might have some beans and an egg or something like that. I'll give myself something high in protein too. But the point is that I will start with, start almost like an adult, right? Have your main first, have something filling first. Then when it comes to lunch, I would probably look at my day. If I'm out for the day and we're going somewhere nice for lunch, I might have something a bit more relaxed, right? A bit bigger in terms of portion size or whatever it is, or just something really fancy. then I might look at dinner and kind of moderate it, or I might go the other way around. I probably wouldn't try and kick the backside of it, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, right? I'm probably not gonna do that. I'm not sure why I said breakfast so oddly there, but I'm not gonna kick the backside of it, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I'm not gonna have the ultimate pano chocolat championship eating. For breakfast, that's not gonna be my competition, followed by pizza eating, followed by ice cream eating all through the day, because that's how I go overboard. In fact, instead, I'm just gonna try and focus on that bit of fullness. So I've got some fullness from breakfast, I had a bit of protein, I had some fruit, probably gonna steal an apple, not that I'm suggesting that theft's a good thing, but let's be honest, we all do it from the breakfast buffet. You take out a banana or an apple or whatever it is. Banana's always a terrible shout, because it always squishes in your bag and then you're filled with regret. But you take an apple with you, and it means that you've got something to snack on. So you snack on that, you have lunch, you can maybe try and have something with some protein or some veggies, know, keep it simple. You're not always gonna be able to hit everything you would like whilst you're out and about, but you have something sensible, and then you know you've got a nice dinner, you're gonna have a couple glasses of wine with dinner, you're gonna enjoy your meal. Cool, relax, enjoy it. That's going to be fairly moderate. Then maybe the next day you kind of know that it's gonna be a bit of a out and about, sight seeing a little bit more, so you kind of think it's roasting during the day, you're probably not as fussed for lunch, so you maybe have a smaller lunch, you maybe have an ice cream as a snack on the way. and then at dinnertime, maybe you just rain it in a little bit, you don't have dessert, you maybe do have a glass of wine and you have your main. So you just slightly restrict it. You maybe say, if I have an ice cream during the day, I'm probably not gonna have dessert, or if I have dessert, I'm not gonna have as much alcohol, for example. You make small trade-offs and it goes such a long way. The problem is is that what happens, sometimes when people are on holidays, they're like, ⁓ I'm just gonna enjoy myself. But they take it to the extreme end of it, where you end up waking up on day two, feeling bloated, overly full, and just like you've eaten a ridiculous amount because you're almost rushing through it. Remember you've got a whole week. So if you want to enjoy three ice creams over the course of your trip, well you can probably do that. You can tell I go on holiday in Italy a lot. Gelato is great. Walking to find a great gelato place is basically the meaning of a holiday for me. So that's something that might be an example. have those sort of three ice creams in there. So that's something you get to look forward to. So have something each day you're looking forward to. Then a couple of the evenings you maybe have a few more drinks, right? You have a couple of the nights you have a bit more to drink and you're pretty relaxed about it. Then the rest of the nights you maybe have one drink or two, but you try and keep it quite sensible, mostly so you're not a walking hangover for a week and get dehydrated and then get the world's worst headache and 30 degree heat, which I would not recommend to anyone. So you start to moderate it even a little. You've got the ice cream, you get to enjoy yourself drinking a couple of nights, a couple of dinners you have dessert, a couple of dinners you don't, right? You know, with your lunches, most of the days you have something you just quite enjoy that's relatively like filling, right? Maybe one day you have something that's really indulgent for lunch, but the rest of the time you're trying to have something with a better protein or a decent amount of veggies or just something that's gonna fill you up and not leave you starving for the rest of the day. It is amazing how much doing those basic things moderates it. And actually, for me, the key thing I focus on is just fullness. I just think, right, I need to make sure I'm full at this breakfast. So I have loads of fruit, I have the yogurt. then I might have that mini croissant. Then I go to lunch and I make sure there's something with veggies in it or protein because if I have either of those things, I'm probably gonna be quite full. Because what I'm aware of is that if I've been dieting, even when I'm not, but especially if I've been dieting, I am more likely to overeat in a scenario where I'm in a sort free food environment where there's loads and loads of food, loads of calories, lots of very tasty food, right? I'm aware that my hunger is a little bit higher because I've been dieting for the last while. Even if you've just shifted into maintenance, that's probably still true. hunger is higher than normal. So I know that it'd be easy for me to overindulge quite, and just simply, you're not gonna get that hunger, sorry, fullness signal quite as early. It'll be a bit delayed, and then you're too stuffed, and then you feel uncomfortable, right? So you want to kind of avoid that. So that fullness is my focus. So I'm thinking about breakfast. I'm thinking about that lunch. I also will have, I'm really deliberate. My thing is I have three pieces of fruit every single day. I don't know why. Well, I do know why, because there's fibre and the fullness in it. But for me, this is really profound. Like, this just makes such a difference to me. If I have three pieces of fruit in a day, with three servings of fruit, if you like, I just don't tend to overeat because my hunger's just very well managed. And I just find that if have a sensible breakfast, three pieces of fruit, and I keep well hydrated, like, it's enough. Like, that alone moderates the way I eat. I get to dinner, I maybe have a piece of fruit an hour before dinner, so I don't eat like a numpty. That's another little trick, but that's maybe more to eating out in general. I often, when I'm in a weight loss phase, if I've got a meal out, I always have like an apple before I go or something like that because it moderates my hunger. It brings me down to seven out of 10. I've talked about that before in the podcast. I find that super useful for a lot of people. It doesn't have to be a blink of an apple. It can be anything, a little protein pouch, something that just fills you up. You go in a six out of 10, seven out of 10 hunger, you eat sensibly. You go in a 10 out of 10 and you're smashing all the sides and they're not even your sides. You're stealing from others around you in the restaurant. That's not what we want. So we want this to be sensible. But as you can probably hear, so simple. I don't have anything incredibly fancy to give you here. This works, right? If you have a good bit more fruit than you normally do on a holiday, and if you have a more filling breakfast than you normally do on a holiday, and you make the occasional trade-off, you're still gonna come back and say, you know what, enjoyed a few drinks, enjoyed some ice creams, enjoyed some really good meals out. You've not been hard done by. The biggest challenge for a lot of people is that they get into this mindset that they need to indulge in absolutely everything from morning to night. That is no form of moderation and could put you back two, three weeks and it's just excessive. And let's just call it as it is. It doesn't need to be that way. Even an all-inclusive, which is perhaps the most dangerous food environment in the world, it doesn't need to be that way. If you focus on fullness, you will be amazed how much less of a numpty you eat like over that time. So that can be really, really helpful, right? And that way you go on holiday, you come back, you don't feel restricted. And one of the nicest things I can get from a client is a message. when they've gone on holiday and they said, do you know what, I really enjoyed it. My weight's like jumped up a little bit. Within three days, it's right back where it was. And they'll kind of say to me, do you know what, I really enjoyed that, but I didn't feel like I went overboard this time. That's the sweet spot. I actually don't want a client going away and coming back and be like, oh, I did a really good job. I didn't indulge myself at all. There are a few occasions where that might be the case if someone's got a very pressing weight loss, fat loss goal. you know, if they've got something coming up that's super important to them, I absolutely have had clients track on holiday for sure, or at least semi-track as best they could, or we'll focus on a habit-based approach if necessary. But that is the exception, not the rule, right? 80, 90 % of the time, I'm gonna get clients not to track on holiday and focus on some habits, enjoy themselves, and come back in a good spot after having a bit of a breather. That is much my preference. So that's really important. The goal shouldn't be to come back and say, oh, I did such a great job, I was super restrictive. It's not. It's not really teaching you how to deal with holidays in the long term, which is my kind of goal. So that is something that's also really, really useful to think about. Hopefully that has been helpful. Hopefully extra helpful if you've got a nice holiday upcoming for you. The weather is looking like 20 degrees in Spain when, well, I think about 16, 17 when we land, but over the couple of days after that, it picks up to 20 degrees. So wish me luck. I've got my SPF 125, specially commissioned. just made from mayonnaise and fence paint basically mixed together, the essentials for Scotsman in Spain. But I'm very much looking forward to it, I'm not gonna lie to you, I'm very much looking forward to it and hopefully you are looking forward to some nice holidays too and hopefully this leaves you feeling a bit more relaxed about it. Now, if you are interested in one-to-one coaching and you want to get into the shape of your life, you want to feel much less stressed about nutrition, And also feel like it's not consuming all your bloody mental energy, because it is exhausting thinking about needing to lose weight, trying to chip away at it, but feeling overwhelmed all the time. It's bloody knackering. So if you are in that place and you feel like you need a bit of a hand, then that is exactly what one-to-one coaching is for. And the link to that is in the show notes. You can jump in there, book a wee chat with me, and it will be super relaxed, and we will figure out what is the best fit for you, and. If it is a great fit for you, then we can potentially work together in one-to-one coaching and again, get you into the shape of your life as well. I can't guarantee that I can get you the SPF 125 sadly, because that is a bit specialist, but I can guarantee that you'll be in the best shape of your life for your holiday. That's what we want. So have a great day and I'll speak to you soon.