Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 54: The MOST common weight loss mistakes we see
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Conversations podcast. And in today's episode, I've got Harry here with me. So it is actually a Cameron's conversation, not a Cameron's monologue will change, which will be very welcome. And what we're gonna talk about today is common, in fact, the most common weight loss mistakes we see. So there are a lot, right? We spend 90 % of our working lives talking about... all things weight loss and nutrition, and there are a lot of mistakes people commonly make. So we want to talk about a few of them, just so you have a little bit of awareness of what they are, and then also can potentially avoid some of the pitfalls as well that come with dieting and trying to lose weight, because some are fairly obvious, and some are not so obvious. And the first one I kind of wanted to start with is this kind of thing that people slip into, which is like, ⁓ that'll be fine, like it doesn't matter too much. Like it's okay, like I'll just give myself a day off here, I'll not track for a day. And in essence, what it is, it's a little bit of almost like complacency with weight loss where, and it can be in lots of different aspects of the diet where you just are too relaxed and let yourself off all the time, which might sound like it's being kind to yourself and there is a place to be more relaxed, right? If it's Harry's birthday, fair enough, he gets to relax, right? But you know what, if it's a random Monday and he's just like, you know what, it's a Monday, I just need a wee day off tracking, or I just deserve like this and it's okay if I just smash through my calories, that quickly becomes a bit of a problem, doesn't it? Harry: Yeah, that's a hundred percent. It's funny and it's when I talk about my common struggle is it kind of contradicts this, is why it shows how complicated this can be at times. But yeah, a hundred percent. think there's a lot of value in giving the effort it deserves. And I think that's the main thing is like, we need to make sure we're flexible. We need to make sure we can. fit things in and enjoy our life through the process, but you have to hold yourself accountable to what you're trying to achieve. And when you're trying to achieve things, what you do on a daily basis matter so much and trying to keep that up and keep that kind of momentum moving is so, so valuable. so yeah, a hundred percent agree. think it's, A lot of people fall into when it comes to this is like, ⁓ I treat myself to this, treat myself to that. And it's like, okay, do you need to? And it is a little bit of tough love sometimes, because the more positive actions you can do, the more momentum you're going to build. that, that will help you tremendously. And a lot of people, we know, we speak to people all the time that struggle to feel like they're spinning their wheels constantly. And this can quite often be why. Cameron Cummings: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the problem is, is you can feel like you're putting the effort in because some of the time you are. And I think that's the bit that can catch you out with that sort of this complacency thing of kind of being like, ⁓ it's fine. It's like, well, actually, you know, if we are tracking Monday to Thursday, and even if you're tracking absolutely bloody brilliantly, but then on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you've got that mentality of like, it's a weekend and I've worked really hard at my nutrition. So. I deserve a wee treat and it's like, your wee treat's 3000 calories. And you might think, oh no, I wouldn't eat that much, but let me give you a picture of what 3000 calories actually looks like. Right, let's say you wake up on a Saturday morning and you know what, I bloody love, it's a love of croissant. And I'm gonna live and die on this hill that butter croissant is the best type of croissant, which, what's your go-to croissant, Harry? Harry: I like an almond. I like an almond. Cameron Cummings: Terrible choice. We're not don't worry. We're not gonna have Harry back on that's that that's him now after that choice that that that's it We shouldn't listen to anything else. has to say no joking Ben Yeah, so like this perfect example, right? So they say Harry and I bloody love a croissant and you wake up on a Saturday morning And you have a cup of coffee and you have normal breakfast and you fancy just going out for croissant. Absolutely fine No problem with that, right? 350 calories for the croissant. It's probably pretty realistic, right? Harry: Thank Cameron Cummings: So that's pretty standard. If whether you go to kind of like a bakery, if it's a bit bigger, it might be more than that. And some restaurants will be up like four or 500 calories. If they're massive ones from the bakeries that you sometimes get here, sort of here. There's a few in Edinburgh that are like that. So there you go. You've kind of had your normal breakfast and then you've had that. So that's maybe in the region of like 600 calories. Then for lunch, you don't get particularly mad. You kind of maybe have something out for lunch and you have a little bit of like a slice of cake that you share with your partner or your friend. So that's maybe an extra 300 calories and then your lunch as well. So already you're probably on about 1500. And then you go out for a meal, you have a couple glasses of wine and then you have your meal out and your standard meal out is like somewhere between like 1000 to 1400 calories if you're sensible on your choices. And that's probably having like two smaller sensible courses. And if you go a little bit more overboard, you have a big main with a side of chips or something like that with their potatoes before you know it. Like by the time you've done that in a glass of wine, you are probably on 3,000 calories. And all you've done that day is have a croissant and then you go out and have a small lunch that's fairly sensible and share a cake. And then you also go out for dinner and have like one or two drinks and you are actually on 3,000 calories. So this is the bit that can catch people where you absolutely can put the effort in. But the problem is you do that on a Saturday. you maybe have a similar Sunday, I you're probably not going for a meal out on both days and all the rest of it, but you maybe are a bit more relaxed, have a few snacks, you don't track it, and you do the same again on Sunday in terms of calories and then you wonder why you can't lose weight throughout the week, and it's like actually your weekend calories are catching up and that doesn't include then if Harry then goes during the week and says, ⁓ do you know what to serve a wee treat because it's a Monday and Mondays are a tough day at work. Like it is really important that like Harry said, you put the effort in, but also that we put the effort in. every single day and it doesn't mean that every day has to be in a big deficit but I do think sometimes people underestimate like how much effort actually needs to go into weight loss and I think sometimes that ⁓ I just need to treat myself mentality really can hold you back like we can't be too complacent all the time as well and I know Harry's is going to go in very different direction so let's go into yours so this is kind of the opposite of it when you take that what I've kind of talked about you almost go too far with it where do we end up Harry? Harry: Yeah, so my kind of pick, and we haven't pre-planned this by the way, Cameron has no idea what I'm about to say, but he probably... Cameron Cummings: I'm fairly confident. I've spoken to Harry one or two times before now, so I think we know. Harry: Yeah, so I would be looking towards the all or nothing mentality or sometimes what I call the all then nothing mentality because what happens is people go too hard too fast they fit and this kind of does fit in with what Cameron was just saying around, um, you know, mid week days being spot on and then weekends being a bit wild. It's the same thing. It's the same mentality where, know, we get people all the time saying, I I just ⁓ And then he said, okay, meals out, he really liked wine. So he was drinking multiple glasses of wine and all these things. And it was like, that's, that's undoing everything. And it was having that switch. And we get it a lot with, with people where they've done diets in the past as well. And they kind of follow these strict rules and strict guidelines where they are a hundred percent on it and they're trying to be as perfect as they can. But then the end of the diet, there is a switch that just goes. all the way back to what they were doing before and probably worse, right? Because all of that hunger and cravings and over restriction from following these harsh plans, they cause you to go so far the other way. So you get this real strong all or nothing. And it always does lead to exactly that. You start off and you do really well. You push really hard. You're very hard on yourself. No flexibility, no balance just on it 100%. And then you are going to crash and it's going to go the wrong way. ⁓ and that is something that I see all the time. I'm sure you do as well. and it's, it's, it's softening that and trying to find a blend. And I kind of quite often explain to people that you don't want to be like a light switch where it's on or off. You want to be like a dimmer switch where you can turn it and move it around and be flexible with what's going on. But if you've got a meal out, okay, cool. That doesn't mean you have to go completely either completely restricted and have a starter. Cameron Cummings: as well as shit. Harry: as your main course and eat this little kind of pathetic little plate of food or go right I've got a meal out starter main course dessert cocktails bottle of wine four thousand calories Cameron Cummings: Yeah, have some sides, steal some food from the person across from you, right? Yeah. I think this is it. I think the all then nothing mentality, because we often say it all or nothing, but it is all then nothing. And unfortunately, like here's another little bit of throwing the harsh truth here. Most people's all isn't all that much. Like what we tend to find is like, you know, if someone says like, oh yeah, I'm just like super all or nothing. What that often looks like is really heavy restriction, but for very short periods. Harry: Yeah. Cameron Cummings: It's almost like intensity over consistency. So it's like Harry absolutely nails things for like a Monday and half of Tuesday. And then it goes to pop. Or he manages it maybe for four or five days at the top end. And then it goes completely out the window. And I think this is the thing as well is like a lot of the time what we actually see with all or nothing is like you almost kind of like think in your head like, I'm so like, I'm absolutely on it and dialed in and then I'm just not, I'm completely off. But in reality, most people aren't. They can string together two or three days consistency. and then they're completely off. And actually, if you were to look across a month, when you're talking about these phases of all or nothing, there's probably like 10 to 12 days of all and 18 days of nothing, right? That's often the reality. And all you sort of do there is you kind of put a little bit of a plaster on the fact that your weekends are much higher. Like Carrie just said, like you go all out and then you end up going way, way over. And then you're trying to almost like fix it across two days of really aggressive, like Monday, Tuesday dieting. And it just doesn't. Like you're never going to manage to restrict your calories enough to balance out where you go well overboard in that sort of scenario as well. So I think that's really important as well. yeah, almost two ends of the spectrum there, a little bit of the all or nothing. And then obviously from my end, the kind of other way round where it's kind of like, ⁓ yeah, I deserve a treat. And almost that sense of complacency and like sometimes over-justifying it's probably a good way of being like, ⁓ but it's a Friday, but it's this, but it's that. And it's like, okay. can't do that every single Friday indefinitely or we're just going to get nowhere. And then there's obviously a whole bunch of other things that have kind of come up and popped into my head. But one of the other ones that comes up too is, and like, think this is kind of ties in a little bit to it. And this will probably, we see this all the time, right? So sometimes someone will come in sorted in six and we always give them a, a bit of a nudge and be like, Hey, like actually that won't swing. And it's the not tracking weekends thing, which I think is the being of every coach's life, right? where a bit, and this kind of feeds into both of the things we've just talked about, but I think it's an important one where it's like, yeah, I've been really good, tracked everything all through the week as well. And then they maybe get to like Tuesday or Wednesday and they'll kind of be like, ⁓ yeah, I didn't really track the weekend. I'll maybe go back and do bits of it. And that just doesn't swing. It just doesn't work. It's so inaccurate that you have no idea what you ate and you probably didn't even know exactly the time because you weren't consciously tracking and being aware. but also that's where the damage is being done as well. So this is like another kind of like, if you like a little bit of a dieting red flag when you're trying to make progress is, ⁓ but I track most of the time, I just don't track weekends. Because as I always joke, no one has ever been like, do you know what? I nailed my calories, nailed my protein, I'm not gonna bother tracking today. Like, it's always the other way around, isn't it? It's like, so today I tripped up, fell into Pizza Hut, and then fell into the like, what is it? What did Peter used to do? sure when we were students we used to get this was like cookies and ice cream or something. I don't know. Anyway, I think you you trip up and fall into one of those by accident and you're like, oh, wow, I'm not going to track that. That's what gets missed. It's never just the good days, is it? Harry: Yeah. Yeah. And it falls in exactly to the other two points we made of like, you know, ask yourself why that's happening. Is it because you, you don't want to kind of admit what's happening? You don't want to have that restriction. So you falling back into that all or nothing, or is it that you're just being too complacent and you're, you don't want to see it. But like Cameron said, from our perspective as coaches, like it is one of those things that happens a lot. I understand it, of course we do, like you know you're going to go over your target. If you've got a calorie target, you know you're going over it and in your mind that's you failed, that's job done, you've ruined it and it's just not the reality. It's not the reality at all and when I see those gaps, it just makes me go, oh, because we now have no idea what was going on there and you equally have no idea, you know you're over, but you would realistically probably say, oh, I'm probably 500 calories over and you'll be thousand, two thousand easily. It's so easy to see. So it's one of those that's like, if anything, I'd rather see you track the weekend and not track Monday, Tuesday. Right. But of course we don't want to see any of that. There is a massive link between like where we have our client trackers and things and the clients that have the gaps in, they will make slower progress. There is no two ways about it. Those who are just solid with blocks of data make the best progress and Cameron Cummings: Yeah. Harry: As Cameron said, people who aren't tracking, they're not going to not track, but. be to their calorie target, it doesn't happen. If there's a gap, it's because they've gone over their target by probably a lot more than is needed because they've given us, given themselves this free pass to just be a bit silly. And it's just always going to attack your habits and the behaviors that you're trying to build. The person that you are trying to build, you're almost breaking it down a little bit every time that happens because you're losing accountability and you're not being true to yourself with what you're trying to do. So it's super important. just, know, go over your calories, do it, go over it. It's not a problem. But be honest with what you have done because then if you are consistently going massively over you can then go right Okay, this doesn't work. This puts me out of balance. This isn't where I want to be I need to have some form of Management over those days. It doesn't mean you can't go out and have a meal But it might mean you just need to be a little bit savvy about how you can balance and fit that in Cameron Cummings: Yeah, I agree. And the thing that I always think about it, and I think this is kind of what Harry's touched on in part around habits and behaviors. The problem for me is what it does is it doesn't allow you to actually improve the habits and behaviors around it. Because if you get to every weekend and you just don't track, we know what's gone on there. Likely it's not. We have a pretty good idea that your calories are over, but we don't know any specifics. And what we can't do is we can't look at. So I was looking at a client's food diary earlier this week. And he went over quite a bit the weekend, like quite a significant chunk. And there's been a little bit of a trend for that where you go over a bit weekend. So one of the things we've been doing is like finding ways of swapping things in. So like one of the things he's been doing is he's instead of having like, so he likes a beer, but he's now alternating like a non-alcoholic beer with a normal beer. Like you'll have his first one as a normal beer and then he'll alternate or like the other day he was like, actually just had one normal beer and then went to the non-alcoholic ones to save the calories. And he made that swap. Harry: Hmm. Cameron Cummings: And he's also now consciously making some swaps in terms of his food choices and meals out. And what we've seen now is from him initially just not tracking a few weekends in a row and me having to give him a bit of a kick up the bum and be like, hey, like we need to get those tracked. And then actually start tracking them. We've now picked them apart a bit and we found it's much more moderate. So he now knows roughly what his maintenance calories are. So here's a few events are coming up that are a bit more important. Like he's got like, few kind of like meals out there like family events and stuff like that someone's 60th and blah blah blah and actually what he's now doing is he's finding that he can just say okay well I'm gonna sit somewhere between my normal target and maintenance so I know I'm not going backwards and that's working really well for him and his sort of deficit calories during the week are a little bit lower right we're deliberately pushing his deficit to be slightly bigger so he's compensating a wee bit there but also even if he does spill over a bit, he's not spilling over so he's in a surplus and derailing two or three days of the next week's progress anymore. And we've been able to really challenge it. And he said he's found it really, really helpful because he can actually look at it objectively. And I've not asked him to be a saint. I've not said, right, no meals out or any of that nonsense, but we've just kind of looked at it and, you know, he's picked up himself that perhaps having four or five pints wasn't going to swing, right? Like he wasn't going to get away with that. But now he realizes like, well, if I have a... normal pint and then I have three or four non-alcoholic pints, well, I can get away with that. And I also don't feel like death the next day as well, because let's be honest, if you're over 30 and you have more than two drinks, it's just a gamble, isn't it really? mean, will you survive your hangover? Will it be three months that you're hung over for? I mean, it's just your 30s through and through. But like that, that's a perfect example of it's become so much more moderate because we've been able to change the habit. But if you don't track at all, it's very difficult to do that. It's very difficult to do that because you just think, with what's a but, I'm not gonna track it anyway, it doesn't matter. And you almost let yourself off a bit with it as well. So hopefully that has been helpful in giving you some ideas of the things that we come across day to day, week to week, and we think of the common issues, and honestly there's so many, we could go on for hours. But we'll leave it there. If you are interested in one-to-one coaching, then the link is in the show notes. And if you are just feeling a little bit lost and need a little bit more structure, there's also a link in the show notes for a free. that will structure out your nutrition a little bit better and give you an understanding of what weight loss should look like and is a really similar setup to the one I use with one-to-one clients to give you an idea of what you should do to get things moving. So you can click on that and download it in the show notes. Otherwise, have a great day and speak soon. Harry: Cheers guys.