Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 61: Why you should tackle your bad habits first
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. So in today's episode, I want to talk all about the idea of building or working on the bad habits first rather than the good ones. So I think there's a balance sometimes that's needed, but a lot of the time, what we actually want to do is figure out what are the habits that are leading you to over-consume calories the most and tackle those. Because sometimes what I see is someone who is doing a really good job of sticking to their calories on a Monday to Thursday basis, and they're kind of almost trying to figure out how they can reduce their calories by 50 or 100 on a Monday. Then on Saturday, Sunday, it often doesn't get tracked at all. And on Friday night, they're having a few drinks and they're tracking kind of as tracked up to like sort of lunchtime. And then it just wobbles over and it falls to bits. And actually the weekend tracking is just completely inaccurate. So you've kind of got this like Friday night, which you go off piste on. And then Saturday and Sunday are seriously wobbly as well and things either aren't getting tracked at all or if they are. they're being tracked pretty loosely and they're maybe not accounting for like the food that you're eating out and how many calories are in it. So one of the things that can be really helpful here is to almost do an audit, right, of what are your worst nutrition habits? And I can tell you some of mine from like kind of where I previously was. I know when I was a bit of a stress eater and I was at my heaviest, I was very much in the habit of having like a family bag of like Cadbury's buttons or whatever it was, like a handful of times a week, know, three, four times a week, which is obviously. is about 600 calories in the region, although I think the bags have gotten smaller now, so it'll probably only be 550 these days, so shrink-flation is getting you everywhere, right? So the point is that you've got this kind of like habit right. Now, I could have looked at loads of different things. I could have looked at, okay, well, how can I get my protein up a little bit more, or how can I reduce calories out of meals, et cetera. But actually that's not the low hanging fruit. That is not the thing that's gonna have the most impact. The practical thing that's gonna have the most impact is 600 times four is 2,400 calories. So I could shave two and a half thousand calories a week off by changing one single habit and also saving some money doing it, right? So that's exactly what I did. I just pulled away the worst habit I had and actually after that I found that it was a lot more moderate and all of a sudden I was already in a better place in terms of nutrition and I had a lot more calories obviously to spend on. proper meals than I was obviously spending on, you know, having a big bag of chocolate or whatever in the evenings as well. Which is funny because at the time it became such a habit and now to do that every day, which is like, it doesn't appeal to me at all. Like it's, you know, don't get I still like chocolate, but having it that often in that quantity doesn't appeal to me. So your taste and preferences absolutely do change and you can shift towards feeling like you want to eat healthier over time. I can very much attest to that. But one of the things I definitely would stress is that a lot of the time, if you can attack your bad habits first, you'll have a lot of success. So I was thinking ⁓ of a client that I worked with as well, who very much had that habit of like going out Friday night, they go well over their calories because they would end up drinking loads and loads and loads and they tend to have like cocktails and some like quite high calorie choices. Then they would also, you know, have whatever on the, the Watt comb as well, which is always like a ridiculous amount of food. And then the next day they would obviously feel awful. So. What came with that is they would feel awful, they would then feel really demotivated, they would step on the scales and it was carnage because, you know, if you go for a salty McDonald's at midnight or one in the morning, it's likely that you then come home, you sink a pint of water so you're not as hungover the next day. Like you're gonna weigh a lot the next day and it just threw them off every single time. So we basically figured out, okay, well, yes, Saturday and Sunday weren't great either to be quite frank. Like they were often quite down in terms of motivation and that would be a problem because then they'd, you know. be phoning for a Domino's or whatever. But what we found is when we started to get them to moderate their Friday nights even a little bit, where they were picking better choices and they were starting to drink a little bit less in those kind of sittings, that all of a sudden on Saturday morning, they wouldn't feel quite as bad and they wouldn't be as inclined. And what we kind of found worked is like, if they go on a night out, they would buy in like a pizza, for example, but they'd buy in a pizza that they actually knew the calories of. And there was a bit more control rather than go to like a Domino's or a Pizza Hut where it's like 1800 calories. they moved to something that was 600 or 700 calories. And that was a really, really useful habit. like, as often does, like now their behaviors are kind of changed around that. It's not to say they never go on a night out, but it's definitely not, it's not significant in terms of consumption right now as well. And things have kind of moved on for them and life gets busier, right? But one of the things that has been super helpful is that habit became more and more moderate, right? Instead of probably having like McDonald's and even if it's just stopped doing it, like they realize that even when they're a bit drunk. can stop themselves doing that and they would order a bit less. And obviously the drinks they were choosing were a wee bit more sensible too. So we were probably shaving off somewhere in 1500 to 1800 calories in an evening. And then on the Saturday, because they weren't as high anything and we had that, we were definitely saving another 1500 calories there. And all of a sudden they were out of the loop of, you know, getting to Monday morning thinking, shit, I need to do something about this. trying to make a big change, really cracking on Monday to Thursday, and then to be so deprived that they would fall back into that habit. And that's something that we shifted away from. And it's meant that their weekday calories can now set higher, their weekends are more moderate, and they feel a lot better. And the point of all that is, everyone's different. I have clients who would laugh at that because they're like, they've got kids now, and they're like, to have a night out and be able to go to McDonald's, that would be great. It's just not part of their lives right now. Everyone's at different stages. But the point is this, that that was their one bad habit. They weren't a snacker, right? They weren't someone who was snacking on loads of stuff on a weekday. They handled like work stuff when they had client meetings and client meals out really, really well. They were doing a lot of things really, really well, but they had this one thing that was tripping them up, but it was pulling them back hard, right? And it was really, really throwing them off. So whether it is that, or whether it was me with my kind of bags of Cadbury's buttons back in the day, like... those things were the things that tripping me up. Like at that point, mean, as now, I'm not a big drinker. So that wasn't an issue. I wasn't, you know, adding loads of calories to my week through alcohol. In fact, very rarely was that ever happening. The reality is, is that it was all coming from sweets and stuff like that. So when I tackled that one big thing that was holding me back, it's not to say I didn't have to tackle anything else because I've improved everything across the board over time. But that was so impactful because as soon as I stopped that habit, even if I'd done nothing else, even if I hadn't tracked calories, that one habit would have stopped my weight gain, right? At the point that I was gaining weight, that would have stopped it in its tracks dead because that was probably a large part of my surplus. So actually getting rid of that brought me probably much closer to maintenance and then a few other small changes and suddenly you're making some progress. So I think that's a bit of perspective as well is that we all will have habits that we think, don't really, you know, that doesn't really serve me that well. tackle that one thing rather than worry about, because sometimes it can be overwhelming. I say this to clients sometimes where I'll maybe get a check and they'll be like, I'm gonna work on this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this week. And I'm just like, that's too much. Do two of those things really well. Like what's actually important in there that in the short term, like what are the two things that if you did better next week, you're gonna feel much better about, oh, well, probably this and this, cool. Then I hold them accountable to doing that and making that change. And we obviously go into detail and give them some more sort of in-depth feedback on those things. and then we progress onto the next things. And I do that all the time with clients where I'll be like, right, I can see that so-and-so really needs to work on this and this, and then we'll maybe dive into it for two, three, four weeks, right? We might work on it for a month until it becomes much more habitual. Then I'll move on to the next thing. And in that time, they make much better progress because we've tackled the key issue. That's not to say there aren't things going on elsewhere, but we can only tackle so many things at once. And sometimes we can overwhelm ourselves by trying to change eight things at once. And actually, you know, probably some of those things are really important, some of those things are more minor, but in the long term you'll tackle all of them, but in the short term probably one or two of them is the key thing. So that's kind of a few thoughts from this week of kind of coaching as well, is like let's just focus on one or two things that are really holding you back, and also just because of a lot of clients who have kind of conquered some of these habits that were really holding them back and are now maybe kind of at the end of their weight loss phases moving to maintenance, their calories going up, and we were doing a bit of reflecting on kind of how far they've come. that kind of came to mind is like looking at that, worst habit you have, tackle that first and foremost and you go such a long way. So hopefully that made some sense and was helpful. If you are interested in one-to-one coaching and getting support and accountability to make sure that you aren't just spinning your wheels in six weeks or eight weeks or six months time, then just go into the show notes and click on the link and you can book a little chat with me and I will talk you through how coaching works and how it can work for you and where we can get you to.