Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 57: 3 Things you shouldn't waste time (and money) on for weight loss
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. And in today's episode, I want you to focus on these things a little bit less. So I've picked out three things which I think for most people are very much overrated. So the first one is focusing on higher reps in the gym to burn more calories or to lose more weight. So for a bit of context, this is like one of those myths that's just been around forever in a day, which is kind of like, If you're going to the gym and you're in a weight loss phase, you should move your reps up because you'll burn more calories and all the rest of it. Now, the reality is, is a session that you're doing eight reps on every exercise and a session you're doing 10 or 12 or even 15, 20, the difference in overall calorie expenditure is absolutely marginal. It's just marginal. It's just not going to practically impact you at all. You'd be far better worrying about doing an extra couple of thousand steps or worrying about Being a bit more organized with your food so you don't spill over your calories or tracking a bit more accurately, there's a hundred things I could probably list that I would prioritize first and foremost. Something I always like to stress is like I'm in a fast weight loss phase right now. The only thing that I will change about my training broadly is this, is that I will often move from three working sets down to two working sets. And when I say a working set, all I mean by that is. two challenging sets. So for example, if I'm doing a leg press, I'm probably, especially if it's the first movement in my session, I'm probably gonna do a warmup set. I might even do two warmup sets, depending on kind of what, you know, if it's in the afternoon, I tend to maybe just kind of do one, because I'm kind of up and moving and things, or if I've been sat still all day, I might go for a couple sets. Then I'm gonna do two hard sets, and that's it. Whereas when I'm not in a weight loss phase, I tend to do, or a fast weight loss phase, I will do. three working sets. Now, you might think, well that's quite a difference, right? You're doing two sets rather than three total. The only reason I do that is I am aware that as I get farther into a fast weight loss phase, because I train a lot, as in I go to the gym three to four times a week, I play basketball three times a week, and I often do a bit of running once or twice a week as well, and I walk a lot and do 13,000 steps, that I get a bit tired sometimes if I do three sets on each exercise. across all three to four sessions. So typically what will happen is maybe two or three of the sessions I'm doing two hard sets and then maybe one of the sessions of the weekend I might do three, because I've got a bit more time, a bit more energy. I'm not squeezing the session in the same way. I'm not fatigued from everything I'm doing because I've probably got a little bit more sleep into the weekend as well. Like that works great for me. So that is a change I do practically make, but that's based on my own experience of dieting beforehand. Now, Because I'm in a more aggressive weight loss phase right now, I know that my energy levels are somewhat limited, that for me doing an hour long session is probably a little bit much, and actually doing a 45 to 50 minute session feels far, far better, and it still allows me to make really good progress. So yeah, there are absolutely changes I make, like a couple little ones like that, but the exercises I pick, the rep ranges I pick, they're exactly the same in fact. Ironically, what I'm actually doing is I'm probably pushing myself even harder because I know I'm only doing two working sets, I'm not doing three, so I get through one really hard set and then really push for it on that second set and then I'm done and I move on to the next movement. That works really well, but if I was to go from eight reps or six reps or 10 reps and go up to 20 or 30, I would be expending minimally more calories, but what I would get is a bunch of fatigue because if you want a little bit of an experiment on this, Go do your leg press, for example, rather than doing your kind of normal weight, go down a little bit, maybe 20%, and then try and do 20 to 30 reps. It is soul-destroyingly long, right? It can get really, really long if you are doing every exercise in a session for 30 reps, because you are doing across like six movements. If you're doing three sets, for example, you're doing an unbelievable amount of reps. It's just very psychologically taxing. Now, someone who has been dieting for a while, and like most of us, that's a busy week and all the rest of it, it's gonna become really boring, really frustrating, it's not a particularly enjoyable way to train. So I would not recommend going down that route of super high reps. So that's the first thing that I think is just a bit of a waste of time. The second thing is supplements that don't work, right, or have minimal evidence for them. There's going to be so many things on the market that you get hammered with. And I'm just gonna come out and say it, right? If you want to make money, you might sell supplements. If you want to make really good money, you tend to sell supplements to women and hammer them with a certain type of messaging, right? It's a bit of a kind of like running marketing joke. And what I mean by that is that if you look at, and I have lots of clients who are menopausal, perimenopausal, et cetera, et cetera, and what happens is you get absolutely hammered at that stage. with adverts pushing on your supplements that are often not evidence-based, that there's no real backing for, that are really quite bloody expensive. So you'll see, like I was seeing the other day, like a sort of perimenopausal creatine, and I'm like, it's just flipping creatine. It literally is, there's nothing different in the product, it's just a branding thing. But they are absolutely hammering on about the benefits of it. Now, The benefits might be valid. This is an actual example of a supplement that you probably should be taking and that's great in that sense. But you're paying through the nose for a perimenopausal one, which so happens to be the exact same thing that I'm taking and have been taking for years and years and years. Doesn't make a ton of sense, right? So one of the things that's really important is we want to be a bit savvy with supplements as well. Generally, the things that I will take are creatine and vitamin D3. And actually I do have some like sort of like fish oil capsules or like if you like Mega threes, et cetera. The reason for that is I don't eat oily fish. So it does make a bit of sense to have that in my diet, right? Because I want to make sure I'm getting enough of those essential fatty acids. If you eat a bit more fish, then it probably isn't even relevant to do that, right? That's something that's specific for me because I know if I look at my diet, that'd be a limit, right? But vitamin D and creatine are by far the most common supplements I recommend to clients. And actually, rarely recommend much else. There's not that often that I will. Now, there are exceptions to that. There are definitely times where we'll have a bit of a chat about certain things and it might be worth playing with within someone's diet, but honestly, it is a disappointingly, a such, small list of supplements that I would recommend. And actually, being very savvy of the type of marketing that's getting pushed to you and what the evidence actually says is really important. Now, Doing that, of course, is all well and good. It's easy for me to say that, but how do you actually analyse that? Well, there's quite a good website, which I think is examine.com, that actually, if you put in, tells you a little bit about things. You can put in like vitamin D, and it gives you bit of an understanding about what it actually does and the strength of the effect in research as well. So that can be quite a nice way. It's quite simplified. So even if you're not really into that world and you're like, ⁓ I've heard about horny goat weed, for example. Right, well. let's go and have a little look at what it says on examine.com and it gives you little bit of context around like, okay, maybe that's not such a good idea or maybe it is such a good idea. It just sort of depends. But there are a lot of things that I see getting pushed and you know, like collagen's another one. I'm speaking to a client who's like, oh, but I've seen this collagen that was like, you know, it's meant to be for like menopausal women. And I had a wee look at it and it's just collagen. Like it's not, like there's nothing to it. Again, the same thing. It's the same issue on repeat is that. it's marketed to you in a specific way or high absorption creatinous or something like that. It's just creatine. It's just the same product, right? It's already really well absorbed by your body. they can say that because it's not untrue because it is well absorbed. what's the point in it? It's just marketed at you as well. So I think being a little bit cautious with supplements as well, I think a lot of people waste a lot of money on that. One thing I will hammer home is this. Fat burning supplements. are a complete waste of money and time. If they worked, of course I would use them with every single client. Of course I would. If they were safe and they actually did the job and it made someone expend an extra 50 calories a day, of course we would use it. Why wouldn't I? It makes perfect sense as a coach. It makes my life easier if I can say, there's this supplement which actually helps with fat loss. But there is nothing out there on the market that is successful in doing that. And I always kind of make this joke, it's it's basically the way it works is if it's not a like medicinal drugs, if it's not a drug, right, it doesn't work. That's in essence how it works with these like fat burning supplements, right, it doesn't work. And a lot of the things that, you know, we're all familiar with like weight loss drugs as such, right, and the way that even they work through appetite suppression typically, although some of the older class did work by limiting fat absorption, for example, but that unfortunately has some nasty gastric side effects. If you do eat fat, you tend to get an upset stomach. yeah, that's a big problem with that, particularly drug class. The point is this is that in general, Like I think people waste far too much energy and money on subs and they spend too much time thinking about, oh maybe I need this, maybe I need that, maybe. And it's like look, if your sleep is absolutely rubbish and you barely get a drink of water a day and you're not exercising and your step count isn't that great and you've seen a piece of fruit about three weeks ago and you're not having like veg a couple of times a day, the reality is is you're focusing on these tiny minute details and you're not hitting the big boxes. And there's almost a bit of a blunt truth in that as well where. Like I've absolutely said that to clients before as well and be like, look, I think there's this thing that we should really be focusing on because it's easy for us to focus on supplements, but it's like, we're going to bed at like two in the morning and we're getting almost no sleep and you're worried about this supplement that might improve your testosterone levels, for example. Like we're getting that all wrong. That sleep's far more important for that purpose than the supplement is, right? And I think that's quite important. It's like, don't miss the wood for the trees. Like that can be an easy thing to do. So that's the kind of second thing. And the third thing, that I think is a bit of a waste of time is these weird and wonderful walking protocols that I've definitely been asked about quite a lot and I get where it comes from in essence. What happens is it's like sort of incline walking and this, that and the next thing. So the first thing I'll say is any movement's good movement and walking more doesn't hurt your fat loss, right? Of course it doesn't. So that's a win, right? You walk more, you're probably gonna benefit your fat loss. Cool, that's good. If you walk at higher heart rate on an incline, that's also going to be even more calories expended and it's also gonna make you fitter. Cool, that's another win. But there is no magical ratio of, if you like, walking and walking speeds and incline that is going to lead to more successful long-term weight loss. What happens is this, is that if you keep your heart rate relatively low, you tend to expend more fat. as your primary fuel rather than glycogen, which is basically stored carbohydrate, right? So what tends to happen is this is when I did my cycling event at the weekend, when my heart rate is quite high, like when I was climbing a eight kilometer hill stretch, that definitely means that I'm going to be expending rather a lot of glycogen, right? That's going to be the preferred fuel because my body needs to get it quickly and it can get glycogen really, really quickly. can break it down really, really fast. Whereas, it's not going to be so fast on something like fat, but at a lower heart rate, because you're not burning through quite as much energy quite as quickly, it tends to be the case that you will kind of oxidize more fat basically. Now you might think, ⁓ great, well if I keep my heart rate lower, I'm actually gonna burn more fat. That's sort of true and untrue in the same sense. Like yes you are going to be expending a little bit more of your calories from fat, but you're just going to be. you're going to be expending the same amount of total calories. So over the course of a day it will make no difference because whether 200 calories comes from carbohydrate storage, it's glycogen, or whether 200 calories comes from your fat content, so for example dietary fat but predominantly fatty tissue that we have, right, that's broken down, the reality is it makes no difference because you still expended 200 calories. So all that happens is as you kind of look over 24 hours, yes in that exercise, about that cycle, if I go at really, really slow pace and I sit in that kind of zone, I might be burning more fat than glycogen. The reality is that from a body composition effect sort of impact, it makes no difference at all because if I'm still having the same amount of calories and I'm burning the same amount of calories in either instance, whether I'm at a lower heart rate for longer or faster, heart rate for shorter, I still end up in the same place. So this is something that's really, really misleading because... Yes, that is true. Your body does preferentially use fat for fuel at lower heart rates for sure. That's fine, that's valid. But it doesn't make any difference to the way one looks because otherwise I'd be recommending slow and steady cardio to every single client to get them to see a big difference. But I'm not and there's a reason for that is because it's about the actual total calories expended and it just basically balances out in the end because whether you're spending, you know, 200 calories of fat or 200 calories of carbohydrate, like, the total calories you consume that day still going to be the same. The total expenditure is still the same, so it makes no bloody odds. And I think this is sometimes where people can kind of get a bit bamboozled because it could be really easy for me to talk about being in a fat burning zone and what that looks like and you'd be sold on it. And it wouldn't even be completely untrue because actually it is utilizing more fat as a fuel source, right? But the problem is that your overall amount of calories is still there, right? It's a bit like the way of trying to explain it is like, Whether you get 2,000 calories from apples or 2,000 calories from bananas, you still get the same effect, right? You wouldn't expect that if you had 2,000 calories from apples or 2,000 calories from bananas to have any difference in your long-term weight loss, right? If you had that every single day and had, you know, one person has 2,000 from apples and 2,000 from bananas is the other person, you'd still expect them to lose the same amount of weight. The same rule applies here. Like, it doesn't make any difference in the long term. It's just simply that we might have... one fuel that's being used a little bit more than the other, but at the end of the day it balances out. So that's something that I don't want to go too nerdy into because it can get a bit confusing, I appreciate, but for simplicity's sake, the bit to take away is it just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, you're not actually going to be any better or worse off for being at a lower or higher heart rate, it just depends on the goals you have. So these kind of walking protocols that promise to burn you more body fat, well actually, yeah, some of them do burn more body fat than running because when you're running, actually what's happening is you are expending more glycogen and carbohydrates being used up, whereas in the walking you're using more body fat. But the thing that's problematic about that is actually the running of course expends more calories in total, so it might actually have the advantage, even although it's burning more glycogen. So it's kind of one of these things that's all over the internet right now, and you see someone who's in relatively good shape talking about it, it sounds like they know what they're talking about. But here's the wonderful thing about the fitness world, right? And I always stress this, is like, look, you can be in shape, but you can be in shape and not know what you're talking about. That's a reality. If someone has reasonably good genetics and they eat reasonably well, it doesn't matter. They could just kind have the approach of saying, ⁓ well, carbohydrates are terrible and they could be in really good shape and be telling you that and you could believe them because of that. But the reality is they're still constraining their calories by cutting out carbs. So they end up in the same place. They might not have a very good relationship with food because of it and there's other complexities to that as well. The point is they might still be in good shape and you see a lot of that with these kind of like walking workouts and I've had a client send it to me before being like, what do you think of all this? Kind of like the walking thing, you know, these different intervals and I'm like, look, you you want to get your heart rate up and getting out for a walk and doing it on an incline is bloody good thing to do, but it's not magically better than running for fat loss, for example. It's just the amount of calories you expend that's going to matter. So I think that's something that's really important. So those are my three things that I think you should waste less time on, less effort on. less money on whatever you like across those three things because actually they're not going to benefit your fat loss. And if you are struggling at the moment with your weight loss and you want to kick on and you want to know exactly what you need to do and not have the bloody guesswork and not feel like you're constantly going on your own and that you're trying to do it and everyone else around you is doing something a bit different, then you might want to have a look in the show notes for the link for one-to-one coaching because... If you want to have a little bit of a chat and get a bit of an understanding about what one-to-one coaching involves, how it can help you, and even if you realise that actually it's maybe not quite for you, you're going to walk away from that call knowing that you have a bit of a strategy, have a bit of a plan, and being a little bit clearer on what you need to work on next as well. So either way, you come at that call having a better idea of where you need to go, because I'm always going to be really honest. If I think you're great for coaching, then I'm going to say as much and I'm going to bring you into coaching. We're going to absolutely smash it. But equally if I feel like you just need a little bit of direction or I'm gonna nudge you in other directions as well, then I will do that for you, because I want to make sure that you are in the right spot and you've got the right coach for you as well. So if you are interested in that, that is in the show notes for you. Otherwise, have a great day.