Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 83: Why fibre matters
Transcript
- Cameron: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations Podcast. And in today's episode, I want to talk about why you should care about fibre. So I think for most people, the easy wins when you come into this weight loss thing, right? This weight loss journey is to focus a lot on calories, first off, which makes a ton of sense. Having a bit of awareness about higher calorie foods and less high calorie foods. Kind of foods that are higher in calorie density and foods that aren't going to be so high in calorie density is super super helpful, right? It's a pretty good starting point. Then for a lot of people, there's an easy win to be found in protein. And one of the reasons that I, as a coach, focus on a lot a lot on clients' protein initially is because it tends to be pretty awful at the start. Now, what I mean is when I say pretty awful, I don't mean that ⁓ they're not making any effort with it, it's just an awareness thing. People often know, like, ⁓ maybe I should have a protein shake once a week, and it's like cool. That's a good start. Like that there's a bit of awareness. We're having a little bit more protein. It's on the periphery. You know, we're we're maybe aware that protein's kind of important. And there's a lot more out there now. There's a lot more marketed at women than there's ever been. There's obviously a mixture still of the kind of dieting protein thing where it's like very much like, ⁓ have this whey protein, it's good for like fat loss, and it's like it's just a protein shake and it's just twice the price because you're female, because that's how marketing works, ⁓ which is very frustrating at times, but sometimes the way it goes. And also There's the other side of it where maybe towards perimenopause, menopause, and stuff like that, it's kind of sold as sort of sort of golden bullet or silver bullet, I should say it's not like protein's protein. Protein's great in lots of different ways, but it's not a miracle cure, right, by any means. But what it is useful for is if I have someone who walk through my my my proverbial doors, my and not physical doors, in Donline Coaching, and I look at their food diary and I see they've got 40 grams of protein. I know if I double that protein intake, which is relatively easy to do, you know, for someone on 40 grams, obviously if someone's already in 100, I'm not going to try and double it. But if they're on 40 grams, I know that's an easy win for me. It is, it's an easy win. Because if I double it, they'll say to me, ⁓ Cameron, I'm so much fuller than I used to be. This diet feels much easier. And that's a great starting point. And that's absolutely why calories and protein are usually the things we start on. Then we tend to look at food structure, and there's lots of other things that we go into, right? But this is where we'd start to plan things out and get more organized. So at this point, someone's come in the door, they're eating a bit more protein than they were before. We're maybe not trying to aim for what they're they're kind of eventually will get up to, but we're getting the hang of it, they're structuring the meals out so they be feel a bit more organized, and in addition to that, they are now starting to be more mindful of calories, so they're dropping some weight and they're feeling good. But it doesn't stop there. One of the things that we want to think about is fibre. Now, fibre can fall a little bit into the food volume thing, which we've talked about in a very recent episode as well, so I'm not going touch as much on that. Fibre is very important for health. In terms of things like consideration of risk of like colorectal cancer and all these kind of things, having a good amount of fibre in your diet is incredibly positive. It is good for our gut microbiota as well, so it's good for just our sort of general well-being. It's excellent for digestion. So it's not uncommon when someone reduces their calories, increases protein, sometimes unknowingly, they will just drop their fibre intake a bit because of eating less calories, and they'll start to feel a bit like, ⁓ actually, maybe not going to toilet quite as regularly, and I'll no problem. Here's a couple of tweaks. Let's add a little bit more of this food, a little bit more. We're maybe just aiming for five to eight grams more fiber in their diet, and all of a sudden they'll feel great again. They'll be like, actually, yeah, digestion's much better. And it's often not particularly complicated to do. Like I know one of my clients ⁓ right now who moved to maintenance two weeks ago. Our number one focus is we moved him to maintenance because he is Very structured with his nutrition, super organized. I mean he's you know relaxed as he in the weekends to an extent. He can have a glass of wine, you can do these things, very good at that. But during the week he plans out his meals, he knows what he's having, he's just made it incr his life incredibly easy. He's very organized with that. So it's minimal effort. But the one thing we picked up on is in the last couple of weeks, last two, three weeks of his weight loss phase, his digestion was a little bit slow. Now, the reason his digestion was a little bit slow was a couple of things. His calories were relatively low towards the back end. And he obviously was probably just seeing his fibre drop a little bit lower than it would have otherwise been because he dropped his calories slightly farther. So when we increased his calories up, the first kind of order of the day was, okay, let's bring up your fibre intake. And that's exactly what we did. And we brought his fibre intake up, and we just did it by five grams one week and another five grams the next week. And he's now averaging 10 grams more. In fact, he's slightly exceeded that. He's been smashing it, he's really taken it on board, and has noticed a huge difference, right? And he wasn't having like major issues or anything like that, but just noticing slightly slower digestion, right? Like we've all been there at some point where maybe our fibre's a bit and we feel a little bit. So that can be a really, really good thing to do is to just slightly nudge it up. And a lot of the time it's really simple to do. Like I typically will have sort of like Wheatabix like two, three days a week is just a slightly higher fibre option. I have a lot of fruit and I eat lots of veg. But I sometimes find that having two or three Wheatabics, which I tend to do as I say, every couple of days, Just as a quite a nice thing for me to get like an extra, I think six to eight grams. I can't quite remember if it's three that's eight grams, but have just a little bit more fiber because I know in a weight loss phase that sometimes my fiber can dip a little bit, just because I'm naturally eating less food, right? I'm not eating 3,000 calories as I was at the start of the year. I'm now eating 1,100 calories less than that and 1900. So I know that that helps. And often as not, when you up your fibre intake, your digestion feels brilliant. You start to feel really, really good. And not only that. You get the other benefit too that you tend to feel a little bit fuller because things like higher protein, overall food volume from having more veggies, more fruit, and also fiber make a big difference in terms of in fullness as well. So that's a quick thing that you can look at too. You don't need to go wild on it. And my recommendation is you don't go crazy because sometimes people go right, I'm gonna use one of those fiber supplements, I'm have 20 grams more fiber a day. And then they end up with digestive issues in a slightly different way. And sometimes, weirdly enough, with fiber. If someone has far too little, it can be a problem. But if they ramp it up too quickly and their body's not used to it, they sometimes aim up end up with the same problem because they've just done like gone overboard and gone the other direction. You've gone from, you know, fifteen grams a day to suddenly having 45 grams a day and your digestion does not know what's going on. There's probably a nice middle ground. As a minimum, I think ten grams per thousand calories is a good goal to have. So If you were on 1800 calories, 18 grams will is fine in the short term. Long term will push that up. I always encourage clients as we move to maintenance, it becomes a focal point for us and we'll start to push it up. It's something that we, you if I'm looking at the food diary and it's already high, then we won't touch on it so much. But otherwise I will kind of say, right, let's get your fibre up a little bit because it just makes you feel better and it keeps your digestion in a good spot. I aim for thirty-five grams per day normally. So when I'm on 3,000 calories, just over that 10 grams per day, because I know about 35 to 40 grams is very doable on those kind of calories. It encouraged me to eat more fruit and veg, which I like to anyway, where my calories are even higher. I try and hit more fruit in particularly, and it just makes me feel really good, you know, without going into too much detail. It just means your digestion's really, really good. So that can be a good thing to do, not just from a weight loss perspective, but also from a health perspective. There is a benefit from weight loss from the additional fullness, but also good digestion is well, good digestion, right? And it's good for our long-term health. So there's some thoughts around fiber and why you should care. Most people don't need to worry too much about how much soluble and insoluble fiber they're getting. I think for most people, if they're getting a good amount of fibre full stop, that's a good starting point. You can go down into weeds with that and sometimes you do that with clients. If you ever have a fiber supplement, and this is something to touch on, you can often get a fiber supplement of around about five grams, which can be useful to add in as well. I'm not saying you should be relying on that, you should be able to get enough through your diet, but it can be handy as a little top-up sometimes. And the other thing that I would say is try and increase your fibre by five grams in a weekly basis. So you almost think, right, I'm on fifteen grams. If I look at my fitness pal, for example, I'm on fifteen grams on average. Okay, I'm gonna try and move that to twenty or slightly above twenty for this next week. How do I feel? Mm, a little bit better, maybe not massive. Let's go up another five grams, cool. And often as not, I find for people if they go up about ten grams, that's a sweet spot where they'll be like, right, I feel a you know, a difference. If it's been a bit sluggish, it improves. Other things that can improve digestion as well, drinking enough water, it's really important. If you do not drink enough water, that can actually be quite problematic for digestion and it can actually cause a bit of constipation and things like that as well. And it's something that's very, ⁓ yeah, it doesn't matter. I'm sorry it does. Like you can't gloss over it. Keeping your hydration up is important. So a few things to kind of think about there. Hopefully helpful on all things glamorous like digestion around fibre. So, any questions, please just pop me a message. You there is a link in the show notes to my WhatsApp as well. And of course, if you are interested in one-to-one coaching, I don't talk about digestion. all the time, although I do talk about it where we need to. And there is more to it than just talking about your ⁓ going to the toilet habits for sure. ⁓ there's lots around weight loss and obviously around training and making sure that you make a ton of progress, getting into the best shape of your life in the least stressful way possible as well. So if you're interested in coaching, please just pop me a message there. You can pop a message saying coaching or just you know say hello, ask any questions you have and we can have a little bit of back and forth about that. Otherwise have a great day and I'll speak to you soon.