Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 36: Why you need to have more than one routine
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast and in today's episode I wanted to talk about why you need to have more than one routine. What I mean by that is most people will have a pretty standard kind of like Monday to Friday routine. Even within that some people are going to have like a kind of work from home day and they might have an office day so in that case you might not. You might actually have a couple of routines that run during the week and then you're probably going to have more like a weekend day routine. And then even further to that, you're probably going to do somewhere if you visit family, for example, or if you're going to visit a friend semi-regularly throughout the year, if you travel to a certain place, you probably want to establish a routine in all of those places, which sounds quite complicated, but often isn't, because actually, some of the habits will carry over, right? You might work from home and be in the office and have the same breakfast, regardless, right? Or you might pick from two breakfasts and you just rotate them, whereas at the weekend, you might have a slightly different breakfast. So I'll make an example. I know on weekdays, because I am... entirely working from home, I'm gonna have a smoothie pretty much every day for breakfast. Now, at the weekends, I might then have something a little bit different. So every so often, like probably once a month, I'll have something like some bacon or like a bacon roll or whatever and I'll just make that like brioche roll, ketchup obviously, because I'm a print sauce, I'm just not a fan. And I'll have some bacon or whatever it is. And then that's kind of something a little bit different, right? But I have a little mini routine with that. I know I buy a brioche roll, I know that I go for low fat bacon. Like I'm not spraying it with oil, but I'm making sure not to just glug oil into the pan. So I've got like a mini routine. So I still have my standard breakfast, which is a smoothie most of the time. So that's where start. Then if I'm traveling or whatever, might be, I just have protein yogurts with some berries. That works absolutely fine. And then at the weekends I have that. So I've got these mini routines and mini structures. And I think this is something that's really, really helpful because often it's not when I start with a client, really what we're focusing on is first off, the Monday to Friday. then the weekend, and then we start to build in other habits. And some of those habits are like, for example, on holidays, because I won't be the first to hold my hand up and say that my nutrition and the way I ate on holidays years ago wasn't brilliant. And it led to a lot of weight gain that I'd be dieting before a holiday, and then I'd be three, four kilos up afterwards. Now a lot of that would drop off, sure, but I'd still be up by like a kilo of fat mass, right? Because I'd significantly overeat in every day. because I had no habits, no routines for that holiday. Whereas now, if I was to go on holiday, I still try and have two pieces of fruit each day. And I know that that displaces my temptation to snack quite a lot, which is sometimes more tempting when you're traveling. I also really make an effort to try and have at least one, or if not two meals that have a good amount of protein in them. I always make sure to have one meal that has a decent amount of veg in it. So what tends to happen is that my holidays now are far more moderate. and I don't see a huge spike in weight. I'll see some because that's normal, right? But I don't see a huge spike because actually I eat quite sensibly. Now, I'm still more flexible. You can absolutely bet if you know from my Instagram how much I love ice cream, you can guarantee that I'm gonna have an ice cream when I'm on holiday, right? I'm still going to have an element of flexibility for sure, but there's still structure there. And this is something I'd encourage you to think about because for some people, they will be brilliant Monday to Friday until Friday evening. and then at the weekend it all goes wrong. And that's because you probably need a slightly separate routine. You probably can't have the exact same routine as Monday. I'm not saying no elements of it. You might still have the same breakfast. That's great. You might even have the same lunch, but you're probably gonna have more flexibility elsewhere. But having some sort of routine can be really helpful. So for example, if I am in the flat on a weekday, like I did this morning, get out first thing, go for a walk pretty much every day, unless I'm going to the gym, in which case I don't do that. because I'm at the gym, right? But any other day, I will just get out early for a walk. That's the first thing I do. I wake up, I go straight out. Don't check my work phone, I go straight out the door and I just go for a walk. Then when I get back, I check my work phone, apply to messages, get stuck into the work, the day's work, right? Whatever that may be. So that is my structure, right? I have that every single day. Now on a weekend, actually for me, it doesn't change that much because nature of being self-employed, sometimes I work quite a bit at weekends, especially in the early mornings and stuff. I'll get up, go for a walk, or I'll be at the gym. and then I'll probably check my work phone, reply to messages, maybe do a small amount of work and then relax for the weekend. What's really, really important here is that I have a routine and I have a structure, so I still get out for a walk. And the reason I do that is because of the way it makes me feel. It makes me feel more energetic, it makes me feel more productive, it makes me just feel more relaxed as well that I've ticked off a chunk of steps for the day. So I'm very, very deliberate with getting a chunk of steps done at the start of the day. That doesn't really change on a weekend. And okay, sometimes it will, because if, for example, I'm going for a hill walk in the summer months, I'm probably not gonna bother and go up for a walk in the morning because I know that I'm gonna get tons of steps. So I might skip that, and that's fine too. But generally, it's good to have these kind of routines. So something I want you to have a think about and what I wanted to talk about was this idea of having different routines. Because for a lot of people, when I first start coaching them, we build them on Friday, then we nail the weekends, then we have these kind of little sub-routines and habits for holidays. Because every holiday's different, right? Every weekend trip away is different, but there's still going to be some underlying structure to it, right? You if you go for a morning walk every single day during the weekend, it makes you feel really good. There's no reason you shouldn't do that the weekend. There's no reason that if you have two pieces of fruit on a weekday that you can't do that on a weekend, right? You might not be making your dinner because you're going for a meal out or someone else is making you food or you're somewhere completely different. That's absolutely fine. But is there anything really stopping you from bringing two pieces of fruit or buying two bits from, know, St. Peter's Tesco or whatever? Like, just grabbing a couple of bits, probably not bananas, because they'll be yellow as anything. My current struggle, I keep buying them and then I've got like three, four days before they are actually ready to eat, but anyway. But the point is, is that you can grab some fruit on the go really easily, but often we're too, what's the word, we're too relaxed about the routine bit going completely out the window. And I'm not saying we need all of it. But it's not unreasonable to think, well, do you know what, I'm still gonna get a couple bits of fruit in, cool, that's a bit of a win. I'm gonna do that. And then actually, I'm still gonna make sure that I have a meal with a good amount of protein. And I'm gonna try, if someone else is making dinner, to have an extra serving of veggies or a big serving of veggies to fill me up. And I'm gonna eat the vegetable part first before I eat the rest of it so that I'm nice and full and I'm more likely to be sensible around dessert and ask for a small dessert or no dessert, these kind of things. That can be really, really helpful. So I think a lot of the time, that is the way to go about it, is to start to build better routines. what I think sometimes happens is people get into the cycle of being bloody brilliant for Monday to Friday, maybe they get to the point where they're pretty good most weekends, and then they do go up to their family home or they go to see some friends or they go away for the weekend, and routine completely goes out the window and it's like, oh well, it's a weekend away so I want to relax. Completely get that. You can relax, but you've got to kind of ask yourself the question. It sounds really silly, right, in a small. But like, is having two pieces of fruit in a day making you less relaxed on holiday or on a weekend? Probably not, right? It probably has no tangible impact. Yet it'll have a tangible impact to your sort of nutrition, right? So that often is not where you want to start, is look at, can I change small things to make that better? Because I speak to lot of clients and we kind of look at weekends and we'll maybe do a review because the weekend didn't go quite to plan. And then it's like, okay, well, what didn't go quite right? And then we look at it it's like, well, When a pastry for breakfast and a coffee, which is tasty but not particularly filling, and then at lunch we just had whatever, and at dinner we had whatever and there's loads of snacks, and like, well, you usually, lots of protein and loads of fruit and loads of veggies and meals that you cook yourself, of course you're gonna find that much harder. Now, we can't cook those meals ourselves, but we could have more fruit, we could stay hydrated, we could still probably opt for some more veggies or something somewhere. We could make a lunch choice that was slightly better. That has a knock-on effect. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about this idea of like, it's really useful to have multiple routines and just start to recognise the low level habits. By no means am I suggesting that you go around to like, you know, a family member's house and bring like a tupperware filled with chicken and broccoli and rice. That is never going to be me and I'm never gonna make that suggestion. But I am saying, do you know what, maybe you could get a couple pieces of fruit. Like often it's not, you could do those things. You could stay better hydrated. You could pick a better lunch option. Try and get some of the basics right. and it'll go a long way. And you'll probably find that you're not so inclined to face plant into whatever it is throughout the day, right? Because this is what happens, is people get really, really hungry and they start to struggle. So just some thoughts on, we need more than one routine to be successful with weight loss and nutrition and probably weight maintenance too. If we want to think about it through that lens as well, we want to have a secondary routine. And if you are struggling a bit with weight loss right now and you would like to find out more about one-to-one coaching, then you can go to the show notes and there is a link to film the form to book a call for online, sort of one-to-one coaching, online coaching I should say. And there's also going to be a link to my WhatsApp as well. So you can click on that and pop me a message as well. If you have any questions, anything I've said in the podcast or any suggestions for future episodes, please feel free to drop me a little message. Otherwise, have a great day and speak to you next time.