Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 51: How week 1 of my aggressive weight loss phase has gone...
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. In today's episode, I'm gonna talk a little bit about how my weight loss phase is going so far. So pre going on holiday to Spain, I'd been kind of sitting in a kind of more moderate weight loss phase. I actually did a little bit of a push the week before I went to Spain as well, up until the kind of last day before I left for Spain when I had some social plans. I ended up kind of having a day of maintenance. And then I went away to Spain and enjoyed some tapas and ice cream in the sun. And I was not sad at all when I came back from it being 21 degrees to Scotland and it was actually snowing in Edinburgh when we landed on Easter Sunday, which was very, very sad. And we did have a small Easter egg to cheer ourselves up after that, but then it was back to normality the next day. And thankfully over the time I was away, I I'll talk about this in a second, I feel like I was probably sitting at just about maintenance, if a very small surplus. It was pretty reasonable, steps were quite high. We went on three relatively short and sensible hikes because it's an area of Spain I've not been to before, so I wasn't being too ambitious. And also, I haven't been in the heat in a while, so was a bit worried I'd keel over. But that was really good, so we got a lot of steps in, got a bit of movement in. I managed to play a little bit of basketball as well, a couple of hours while I was out there too. So there was actually a good amount of movement. No training, sadly, because the gym I had planned to go to, which looks very cool, this very cool sports complex, was being refurbed, which was fab. But, so I went up. by one and a half kilos whilst I was away, so I jumped up a bit. And then after, what, four days of dieting, so this would be coming up for day five, I'm right back to where I was. So, and kind of like that, that's at the bottom end of where I'd been in that kind of week before I left for Spain as well. So when I say I'm back where I was, I was right in the bottom end of it. So pretty happy with that. Obviously I've got today, tomorrow, Sunday, so. I think even by Monday swinging around, I will be at kind of like new territory in terms of body weight, which is great. And I would expect I'll probably see a couple more days where it drops quite a bit because of all the food in the digestive tract type changes and because my calories are a bit lower in this phase than the previous phase. And then I think after that, it's gonna start to steady out a little bit more. So I'm being a little bit more aggressive in this phase. So I'm aiming for 1800 calories with one kind of like higher calorie day a week. So 2350. Because 1800 calories for me, and I know some of my female clients will be listening to this thinking, Crikey, that's not that low at all, but it's obviously relative to height, body weight and activity levels, et cetera, et cetera. And obviously I've trained for a while. That is quite a push for me. So having that one day where it's a little bit higher, still comfortably below maintenance, but not such an aggressive deficit, also gives me a little bit of balance. And it allows me to have a day where I can just spend a little bit of time with friends or family and enjoying a little bit of food. during the week there's not going to be so much of that because my calories are going to be a little bit more limited and realistically whilst I could absolutely squeeze more social kind of occasions and eating out into those kind of calories it would lead to a lot of hunger and because my steps are you know 13 000 I'm playing basketball three times a week I'm going to the gym four times a week I'm also doing about like a couple of short runs a week and also a bit of cycling as well where I can squeeze it in which I know sounds like an awful lot but I do have a bike set up inside and when I do my short runs they are 20-30 minutes But the reality is it's a lot of training and that means I'm gonna be in a pretty big deficit. I would estimate that my calorie expenditure is about 3,000 per day. So I'm expecting to be in a pretty tasty deficit, right? So I should be dropping weight pretty quickly. So it's gonna be good fun to see how that's going. What's been really nice is that sort pre-spain, I was really happy with progress. When I finished my muscle gain phase, I definitely felt a little bit soft. You know, I was definitely kind of getting to that point where I was like, I am looking pretty fluffy, shall we say. That's one way of describing it, but definitely needing to drop a few kilos. And I felt like that sort of five and a bit kilos I pulled off did a lot of damage. it made a big difference visually. I fit on my clothes a lot better. It's pretty comfy in Spain as well. I mean, to be fair, wasn't quite tops off weather because I would burn to a crisp. And actually it was quite windy at points as well, although it was quite warm. So it was definitely some nice moments to sit in the sun. probably not t-shirt off weather for the whole time. So by the next time I go out in nine weeks when I'm going back out to Spain again, I'm hoping to be in the kind of shape I would like to be in. So basically this phase, trying to get another six kilos off over the next eight weeks, got a little bit of stag do between now and then. So that's one of the other reasons that I'm keeping my calories quite low is obviously when I'm on the stag do, I will not be able to keep my calories as low. Thankfully I've become designated driver. I've volunteered myself cleverly because a couple of the guys were a bit like, I'm not sure if I want to do much driving and weren't sure if they wanted to have to have a car because then it'd be a faff, but then also it was really expensive to get taxis about all the time, especially if we're going a bit farther afield. So I kindly volunteered and said, I don't mind not drinking if it's easier for us to drive. A great sacrifice from me for the guy who drinks four pints per year. This is a sensible choice because there was chat about having drinks in the airport at five in the morning. Well, arriving at the airport at five in the morning, having drinks before the flight. there is absolutely no way, like it was too much for me to have a grenade bar, a creme egg grenade bar at 7 a.m. for a flight the other day. That felt like too much. mean, drinking at that time, I'm too old for that, clearly. 31 going on 301, but anyway. So that's gonna be a bit of a help, but I'm being pragmatic about that. That's not gonna be a weight loss, like sort of five days. So that week's probably a bit of a write off in terms of, you know, drop. Still walk a lot, I'm still move as much as I can. I'd love to say I train, I don't know whether that's realistic, but if there's a gym nearby, I might sneak out for a session at some point. But I'm just gonna take it easy and kind of enjoy it and it's my best mate's stag, so I'm not gonna stress about it. So feeling that, or sort of beyond that, I mean I've got four weeks probably on the back end of that, so basically I've got three and a bit weeks till then, and then after that are 20 days now. and then I've got four weeks off the back end of that as well where I'll be kind of coming to a halt after that in terms of my weight loss phase. So I'm trying to make the most of it, being quite assertive with it, really, pushing. In terms of kind of like hunger levels so far, the first couple of days were actually, I was quite hungry to be quite honest. I actually had my refeed day on the Tuesday, which I wouldn't normally do, I'd usually leave it for the weekend. So that's that kind of higher calorie day I was talking about. I had it earlier in the week simply because my hunger levels were a bit higher and I knew that that was just off the back of being on holiday. Like they hadn't actually slept particularly well for a few days and that was having a bit of a knock on effect. So I kind of thought, right, I'll probably use this here. And actually since then hunger settled right back down as I expected it would. I very often find, and I say this to clients all the time and I say this to anyone who comes to coaching, like my experience of dieting is very much the first week for me is always the trickiest. And actually nowadays, because I'm so much better at getting a lot of fullness through food and making good choices, even then I would say it's even more limited than that. It's probably closer to something like four days, maybe five days, and then it settles. Like today I was hungry when I woke up, but not crazy hungry, and my appetite's been more normal throughout the day. Whereas I definitely felt like on Monday I was hungry out the gate. Like trying to stick to 1800 calories was tough. And then Tuesday, a little bit more relaxed, obviously, because I had slightly higher calories, I really heavily prioritized very filling food. I tons of veggies and tons of fruit, and that also helped a bit. I think on Wednesday, and then I kind of started to settle into being on a kind of a calorie deficit. And I think from now, I'll find it a bit more steady. So that's been good. And then probably the only other thing I'd kind of noticed from it, it's a little bit of tiredness in the later evening. That's, as I've talked about in podcasts before, that is the thing that I will get the most of probably in this process, is tiredness into the later evenings. So I'm very deliberate about, start my work quite early, I start training quite early, I get my steps done early, like I tend to get up and get things done as early as possible. So I was up at five today, which is a bit of a blessing because the last two days I've woken up at four because as you might be able to hear from my voice, I have man flu. And of course, since I'm hard as nails, I'm surviving my very gentle light sniffle that I've got. But it did disrupt my sleep because I couldn't breathe properly. So just couldn't sleep. And when I woke up in the morning, I just knew I wasn't going back to sleep. So I was up at quarter past four, I think both days, which has obviously meant that evenings were a bit more tiring anyway. But I'm just kind of a sort of acutely aware that I'm being very deliberate and getting lots of steps in. Like I'm aiming for 13,000 steps and I've done 10,816 now, so 11K. So I've only got two K left to do, which is nice because I'll go out for like a brief evening walk. And I find leaving about two, two and a half, the evening works well for me because it forces me out to go for a little walk post finishing work. but it doesn't feel like a huge chore. And obviously the days are getting a bit like a lot longer now. So it's kind of like you're walking, I just listened to a podcast. By the way, on top of this podcast, probably shouldn't be recommending someone else's podcast. I discovered the Rest is History podcast recently, and I'm such a history nerd and it is bloody brilliant. I've been really enjoying it. And that's what I'd recommend to anyone is other than my obviously lovely soothing voice, ⁓ whilst you're out for walks, I would suggest definitely finding like a couple of podcasts that you really like, of course, including this one. and just listening to them in your walks, and that becomes quite habitual. So I always look forward to it. I try not to listen to it too much outside of that. I sometimes do when I'm driving, but I try to listen to it when I'm on walks, because I enjoy it so much. Or I have a series, one of the series where I listen to it when I'm out for a walk, one of the series in the car, and I have a bit of an association with that. I'm like, ⁓ I'd quite like to listen to that, and that encourages me out for that walk as well. So that's something I'd stress, because I think that... Like it can be really good to walk with your own thoughts and that's perfect. But if you're doing a lot of steps like I am, it's probably not pragmatic all the time. It can get a bit boring. So that's something that has been going pretty well as well. I've been quite enjoying and yeah, just feeling good for getting the extra movement in. And in the sort of training context outside of like nutrition and the hunger and energy levels, I've been training a lot as well. This week's been good. I hit two gym sessions, which is great. So far I've hit two over the weekend. I managed to run twice as well. I played a couple of basketball sessions as well and I got a little cycling, which probably sounds like an awful lot of training. I do actually deliberately stack training sessions together. So one morning I did actually go to the gym, do a brief run, and then I came back and used my indoor bike for half an hour. So I was actually, it sounds like so much, but by 8 a.m. I'd done a chunk of steps, done a training session, and got a bit of cycling done. So I do squeeze them all together because I don't have the time to split them all up. That just wouldn't work for me. So I find that helps to kind of get through. So sometimes that is useful. know, if you're doing a weight training session and you can just knock out run after whatever, sometimes that is practical. I think that's something that people feel like, you shouldn't do cardio after blah, blah. ⁓ Or they can't do it sometimes. I think there's this worry they'll be too tired. And I actually find like, yeah, your legs are a bit more tired, but it's often not as bad as you think. ⁓ But yeah, that's been super, super helpful. So activity level super high, hit my 13K steps, lots and lots of training and movement in which you'll probably hear and see. Then the thing I'll stress about this is you might think, gosh, that's so much cardio. I think it's important to remember that my goals are not just weight loss driven. Whilst that is one of my major goals right now, and there's probably two, and I tend not to too many goals because it's that classic cliche of if you try to chase too many rabbits, you catch none. Or if you can't try and chase two, you get none. In this case, I can probably chase two. And one of those is I want to bring my cardiovascular fitness up quite significantly. I had a bit of a quad injury at the last match I played. I don't know exactly what happened, but someone absolutely sprinted into me with their knee and battered into my quad and got the worst bruising I've ever had. I've actually had breaks that had less bruising. It was all over my quad and it took two weeks to develop fully. And then it's only recently started to fade to nothing and that was about four weeks ago. So was pretty significant. Thankfully nothing major. I could barely walk the next day. In fact, for about three days afterwards, I could barely walk. Still got my steps done limping around. So. Obviously during that time, whilst I'd been in the gym as normal and I worked around it, and even within a week I was still able to do some leg work, the only problem is I've not been able to do as much cardio, so I'm playing a little bit of catch up with that and we've still got a few games left this season, so I want to make sure I'm fit for that. that's also on my mind in terms of, okay, I don't want to let things slip in the cardio sense. So if it looks like I'm doing a hell of a lot, I'm almost doing a bit of an intense sort of. higher frequency phase of my cardio to bring it back up, because you do tend to get fit quite quickly from cardio work. So if I get a couple of runs in, if I get a little cycling and I do two basketball sessions in a week or three basketball sessions in a week, that's six lots of cardio, I'm going to gain a ton of fitness really, really quickly. Obviously in the longer term, that might be a little bit much to sustain, but I don't mind doing that for three, four weeks just to feel like I'm back and up and at it, because my team is in the playoffs and I don't want to go into that feeling. super unfit and there's a bit of pressure right if you're an online coach right and you're in fitness and nutrition can't be the guy who's lagging behind the rest of the team right so I've got a bit of pressure here guys got to get it done so that's pretty much a synopsis of kind of where things are at I know that was a little bit kind of like almost winding through I just wanted to keep this episode like super super casual and just talk a little bit about what I'm doing and just again I'm always gonna be super honest about it in terms of it like I wouldn't expect my clients to be doing this much cardio. I'll do a few clients who are doing ultras. Absolutely crazy, right? But please don't feel like all my clients do that. But yeah, so I just wanted to touch a little bit on what I'm doing right now and what my structure is looking like right now. Game plan for the weekend is knock out a couple of gym sessions, keep my steps up and just keep getting some fresh air. It's nice to get the sun, although it was bloody Baltic again this morning at three degrees. I'd be quite happy when this permanent winter is over, but otherwise. I hope you're having a good week so far. If you are interested in one-to-one coaching or if you are struggling with your weight loss at the moment, then there's going to be a link for both the one-to-one call, but there's also gonna be a link for a video that is going to take you through how I would structure out a weight loss phase. So you can click on that in the show notes. Otherwise, have a great day and I'll speak to you soon.