Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 67: What has come up in my week of coaching?
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. And in today's episode, I want to talk all about what's come up in my coaching week. So this is a little bit different podcast. So if you don't know, basically my day to day primarily is coaching my one to one clients. So that is the bread and butter of what I do. Not just a pretty face on Instagram. I'm definitely not a pretty face on Instagram. I'm on Instagram, pretty face doesn't come into it. But. What I do the bulk of my day is I coach my one-to-one clients. that looks like individualized feedback via video every single day to my clients or every single day weekly. But I spend my days doing that every single day. And then also messaging my clients back and forth and touching base and making sure that they're in a good spot. I'm obviously exposed all the time to the different challenges that come up. And there's a lot of things that are very much themes, right? Part of that's going to be time of year, but part of it's just that we're humans, right? And we all tend to struggle with similar things. I think sometimes that can be quite helpful in context of weight loss. A lot of the times someone will say, ⁓ I really struggle with this. I think they feel like they're the only person to ever struggle with it. I can promise you, if you do bit of emotional eating, most people do. More people than not do. There's different types of emotional eating. It could be stress eating, could be boredom eating, it can be sometimes happy eating, that's still emotional eating as well. There's lots of different types of these things. In general, there's these themes that and I always feel like in certain weeks there'll be like two or three things that'll be like, huh, that's come up a few times. And that can be quite interesting and I think it would be nice to explore a little bit about that. the first thing I wanted to talk about, which I've definitely touched on before in the podcast and I think is worth saying about 100 million times, is something that I will be saying the rest of my coaching career. And it is that your accuracy of your calorie tracking you very much live and die on. by that is I think it is so easy and I say this from a position of having done this myself not on my high horse but not tracking accurately is a killer. It is so common for people to either not track accurately the start, which is normal because it's a learning curve, and I often take new clients through that and talk about things they might get tripped up on. You know, they make a nice dinner and they forget that there's oil in the pan, olive oil in the pan, right? And then when they have toast and they've not put what they actually spread on the toast, and all these little minor things that you get much better at are condiments, so you forget about the ketchup you had and all these kind of things, right? Are the bites and nibbles? I have a lot of clients who are parents and the parent food tax is a dangerous thing, right? Instead of you eating it, you have to give it to the dog. That's the way it works, right? But the thing is, it's really easy to just nibble and bite and of course that adds up. But the point is that tracking accuracy is one of the biggest killers of progress. And it's often a bit insidious because what tends to happen is it tends to be quite gradual. So ignoring people at the start where it's just a learning curve. Sometimes what happens is someone who's six months in or four months in or three months in and they've made good progress right they've dropped a really good chunk of weight probably feeling a lot more comfortable and they start to get into a little bit of mentality where that'll do okay that'll be fine that's okay like that's roughly that and they start to eyeball and guesstimate more and more and more now Of course in real life we sometimes have to guesstimate. I'm gonna likely go out for lunch this weekend, I'm taking a guesstimation on it, right? I'm making an educated guess based on my understanding of what calories are likely to be involved. I can take a fairly educated guess and I'll slightly overcompensate maybe by 100 calories to give myself some wiggle room, right? That's pretty sensible. But what I mean is is that day to day, like I've just had my lunch, which was my chicken pesto pasta, chicken pesto and loads of veggies pasta that I've been having recently, would be a bit like me looking at that bowl and saying, ah, that's roughly 80 grams of pasta. When it's not, it's 100. And then I maybe put the pesto in, which is something that's like, you know, relatively calorie dense, right? Even the reduced fat ones, relatively calorie dense. And I maybe think it's 80 grams or 70 grams or whatever it was. And then I put 15 grams, sorry, not 15 grams, I put 15 grams under what it actually is. So I put 75 and it was 90. And then with the chicken, take a bit of an educated guess. It's maybe about a third of the portion. So I'm a little bit out on that. And the problem is, is it all starts to add up is I'm 30 40 calories out in the pasta 30 40 40 calories out in the pesto then I maybe have a little like I had a little sprinkling of like a hard Italian cheese over the top and which type anyway, gloss over that maybe Pecorino, anyway, doesn't really matter. But the point is is that I just maybe guess that as well. So now all of a sudden I'm 100 calories out from a lunch. And the thing is, is that that becomes an issue of scales. How often on frequency, how often are you doing that? And is that even more significant with the bigger meals of the day, the lunches and dinners, right? So if I do that every day, that's 500 calories during the week. And then on the weekends, I'm going out for meals a little bit more and I underestimate more significantly because I'm going for a meal out and I miss that even more. So the point I'm making is that it's incredibly easy to think, ⁓ I don't know why I'm not losing weight I'm on 1800 calories and in reality you're on 2002, 2300 and people think there's no way but literally you can have a day on the weekend where you quote unquote forget to track which usually means to be honest we just didn't want to track because we fell behind a little bit on it and then you maybe didn't eat so well and you actually go over your calories by you know a good chunk and then actually during the week you're 100 calories out in most of your lunches and there's maybe the odd snack and nibble and bite that gets missed and then there's a bit of dinner as well. And it all adds up, like you end up with a thousand calories on a Sunday, 300 calories each day of the week or a few days of the week, and suddenly you are significantly biting into the deficit. So what starts to happen is usually people still make progress but it feels like it's at a snail's bloody pace, it feels painfully slow, and all that's gone on is the tracking's not so accurate. So the reason that's come up is it's something that I often bring up with new clients but actually I periodically we'll remind my current one-to-one clients just be like, how's your tracking accuracy been? It's one of the things I often check in and touch or base on as well. How's that been? And I think that's really important because someone will sometimes say like, oh, it feels like a bit of a slower week. We'll have a bit of a conversation about tracking. say, ah, actually, feel like I had to guess quite a few things this week. It was quite a busy week. I maybe missed it. And we can see that. And then they say, right, the next week, I'm gonna really tighten up on that. And like magic, they suddenly make much faster progress. And it wasn't that they weren't making any progress the week before, but it was just blunted, right? Instead of going at 70 miles an hour, you're now going at 55. But the problem is, is it's demotivating, right? Because your progress slows, it's taking you longer than it needs to, and so on and so forth. So that was one of the things that came up. Another thing that came up as well that I think is really, common, and this was actually ⁓ a new client who I had fantastic conversation with who was just a way to start coaching and has started, but there's context to this, and had rolled their ankle at the weekend as well. ⁓ and it was definitely nothing to do with a couple of glasses of wine and wearing heels. Definitely nothing to do with that at all. They were out for a really nice meal but just rolled their ankle afterwards. ⁓ If you're listening to this, you'll think, ⁓ he's coming out. But it happened, right? That's real life. And they were like, ⁓ no, I'm not gonna be able to start because I'm not gonna be able to get stuck in. Now, this is a really common one, and I always joke about this. when I started coaching, when I started personal training actually specifically, when I was back as an in-person PT, in the gym the first gym I was in I had a lot of clients who were ex rugby players which is bloody brilliant for a couple of different reasons The biggest one is, is that they had loads of bloody injuries and loads of surgeries, right? Loads and loads and loads. They'd had two surgeries on this knee, one on the other knee, the shoulder had this, the other shoulder had this, this didn't move this way anymore, that had a limited range of motion. The point is, is that we get lots of people very early in my career through the door who wanted to train but had injuries, right? And this is something I've experienced myself because I've played quite a lot of sport, I'm pretty active sometimes with that, like I play basketball. and sometimes you get like something happens right I spray mangle last year last season thankfully not this season knock on wood we've only got one game so hopefully not but the point is this is that it happens right niggles and injuries come up you absolutely categorically can train around it so the point I wanted to make on this one was that some people will you will kind of almost not use in a negative way but they'll kind of be like oh I've done this I can't train it's like honestly there are so many situations probably 90 % of injuries that you can work around. It may be if you've bothered your knee that you might not be able to do leg extensions or split squats or leg presses, but sometimes you can still do a hamstring curl. And guess what? You can still do all your ab work. You can all do all your upper body work. You might still be able to do some work for your calves as well. So when you look at it, you're like, okay, well can still do 75 to 80 % of the training plan. Why don't we just adjust that training plan to make it a little bit more upper body focused or focused on the things that we can do and train around it for two or three weeks. And then before you know it, you're able to do some gentle leg pressing but maybe not 100 % and you build it back in, that mentality will serve you very well because not in a negative way but it is incredibly unlikely that you would go 10 years of training, 5 years of training, even 2 years of training without ever having a niggle in some way shape or form. Like I'm over 30 now and that means that any day now I will wake up and I'll have a sore neck for no apparent reason, right? You just sleep on it wrong and you can't move your neck for 3 days, it's just the way of it. what happens when you're 30, right? But the point is, and I'm half joking, because thankfully my body's bit more resilient than that, but also probably happened I've said that, but the point is this, that if I let that stop me, I mean that's gonna have a huge impact on my training, right? If I don't turn up and train because of straining my neck, I slept funny for three weeks, that's three weeks of my year gone in terms of training, whereas if I say, okay, well I probably can't do as much, like can't shoulder press because that's uncomfortable in my neck, but I can probably do some roll movements, I can probably do a slightly different like angled back pull. I can do loads of lower body stuff. That's all fine. Maybe I have a bar on my back, but I can do this instead. Again, all I do is a kick on and this is exactly what I did when I was playing basketball when I was younger as well because I took a hiatus for some years and they went back recently, last couple years. But when I played before and I kind of rolled my ankle or something I would just be like right, okay I'm gonna go and focus in the gym on upper body as much as I can. Now I'd often have two or three weeks where I made bloody brilliant upper body progress because I wasn't doing as much from my lower body and that was fine. I still doing a bit where I but I just made better progress in other areas. That's a great mentality to have as well, rather than feel held back. So obviously, this lovely client that I've taken on is cracking on with the training really happily. And they've actually realized it's really not made that much impact at all. There's most things we can do. There's a couple of things that we've kind of said, let's just leave that, but we're not gonna try and do a split squat on an ankle that's still a little bit swollen, things that would be silly, or reverse lunge. But there's loads of other stuff we can do, and our training is going great, and really, really enjoying it, and a few weeks in now. So the point is, is this, is that I think it can be really easy to write off training when you have a niggle of some sort. I would always encourage you to work around it. Always encourage you. Obviously if it's something really serious or you're in loads of pain, go to your doctor, go to your physio, be sensible. I'm not saying you can go through anything, that sort tis but flesh wound kind of approach isn't really what I'm going for here. But at the same time, just because we have a little niggle in our elbow doesn't mean that we can't train our legs. how it works. We have lots of joints in our body and lots of muscles that can be trained. So having that mentality will be hugely helpful for your consistency with training. And speaking of consistency and training, if you are struggling with your consistency and training at the moment, and consistency with nutrition and your progress with your weight loss, then that is exactly what one-to-one coaching is for. So if you jump into the show notes, you'll see a link to book a one-to-one call with me where you can book a chat, we can talk about what one-to-one coaching involves, and then we can take take it from there. I'm also gonna put the link to my WhatsApp number in there as well, so no winding me up about the fact I can't get a tan and our sunburn's so easy, that would be cruel, and it is my number, so you know, be kind, be kind. But no, joking aside, I will put my WhatsApp number in as well, so if you have any questions at all, you can just pop me a wee message, or if you do want to ask a little bit more about coaching, but you're not quite ready to jump on a call, you can do that there too. Otherwise, have a great day, and speak to you soon.