#88 - 14 Days To Sort Your Shit Out

You can want change badly and still get nowhere if you are guessing. We are done tiptoeing around that truth. If fat loss feels like a constant cycle of “I swear I am eating 2,000 calories” followed by no progress, the problem is rarely willpower. It is a missing baseline, plus the very human habit of under counting intake and over counting output.

Larry and Daniel lay out a practical two week reset: track everything that matters long enough to reveal patterns. Calories, steps, training, sleep and body weight go on the sheet, and “free calories” do not exist. We dig into why vague logs like “a sandwich” or “lasagne” sabotage accuracy, how wearables can help without becoming another distraction, and why focusing on the big rocks beats obsessing over sleep stages, HRV, or perfect macro splits.

We also talk about the real world bit people avoid: weekends. If your calories are set so low that one dinner out breaks the plan, you do not have a plan, you have a pendulum. We explain how a more sustainable calorie target can still create a deficit, give you flexibility, and stop the binge and restrict loop that keeps people stuck.

If you want a clearer, calmer approach to fat loss, hit play, try the two week tracking challenge, then subscribe, share the episode with a mate, and leave us a review. What is the one metric you have been avoiding tracking?

Got questions? simply email or dm us with those questions

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Transcript

Welcome And The Two Week Plan

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, you're listening to the Gen Pop Podcast with me, your host, Larry Doyle. Each week, I'm gonna bring in friends, guests, and experts to help enhance your health, fitness, and wellness journeys. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversations. You are welcome back to another episode of the Gen Pop Podcast, where this week co-host Daniel and I, we are gonna teach you how to sort your shit out in two weeks or less. We're gonna talk about some of the stuff that we see, like that are major gaps that people are just leaving completely unattended, that are overlooking the value of where you can spend a short amount of time, get your shit together, and get a really good understanding of what the hell is going on, where are the gaps I need to address and address them. It's not, yes, we want to look at long-term sustainability in the approach that we take, but very short-term, rapid phases of learning will allow you to sort out and iron out any kinks really quickly, get a much more speeded up version of what the hell is going on, and then we can get you to a point of proficiency, get you to losing some fat, get you to losing whatever it might be, or gaining those results, whatever you want to do. Daniel, where are people lacking? What do they need to sort out when it comes to their shit in two weeks?

The Baseline Problem And Misreporting

SPEAKER_01 1:16

I think they just need to get crystal clear on like where they actually are and what they're doing, because like a lot of people will see coming to us saying that uh we'll ask them like what's your calorie intake, what's your average calorie intake? And it's like, oh, I'm eating probably somewhere around like 2,000 calories, and it's like, right, but you're 125 kilos. So it's like there's something wrong somewhere that we might either have to start tracking a bit more meticulously, or we'll have to take you to some uh specialist clinic to actually yeah, and actually like do some testing you to see, like, are you actually just an anomaly, or are you going to be able to cure world hunger or something? Um I think people just genuinely don't know really know what they're doing, and they're just constantly just like shooting at the dark because they they've seen something online that they should be doing X, Y, and Z. They try doing it, but they half-ass doing it or they just don't do it properly, and then they say it doesn't work for me, it's this other problem. I Googled it and this is what it's telling me. So people need to first actually figure out what are they actually doing and where are they? Like, because that's saying, like uh what gets managed or what gets measured gets managed. Like if you don't actually know where you are at this given time, like how do you know where you're gonna go or what direction you're going to go in? So I think you first need to like establish exactly where you are at this given time in terms of like your steep steps, calories, training, literally everything. Because if you're trying to drop body fat and you're trying to do it like without tracking, but you think you're 2000 calories withdrawal, so but you're actually eating 3,000 calories, it's gonna be very hard to do so. So I think getting honest with your tracking and honest with where you are is probably the first step.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

It's the Google Map analogy. I always use this with everyone you're trying to get to point B, but you don't know where the fuck the start point is. If you can't put in your start location, how the hell do you know how to get to point B? So we need to know what you're doing currently and not some fictitious fantasyland, of course I'm doing this, I'm not gonna lie to a coach that I'm overeating. We fucking know you're overeating because you're grossly overweight. And we're not trying to, I'm not trying to insult you by saying that, but we can see there's an imbalance somewhere. You haven't accidentally got to being 10, 15, 20 kilos overweight. The reality of it is there's an imbalance with your energy balance somewhere. We just need to figure out where that is. Whether you're not moving as much as you think you are, whether you're eating way more than you think you are, whatever it might be. And we can look at all the studies and research on this. There is massive amounts of misreporting studies out there where again people are fat loss non-responders, and all of a sudden we look at the actual research, we look at putting them in under control situations, they're under-reporting by up to 50% with their intake with their food, and they're over-reporting their output and activity by up to 50%, also. So there's a huge huge mismatch. We're not just talking about like maybe I licked a spoon of a little bit of peanut butter or maybe had an extra little bit of butter on my bread, whatever it might be. You're grossly underestimating the amount of food you're consuming, and you're grossly overestimating the amount of output and activity you're doing. So the easiest way to understand what the hell is going on, track it. Track it meticulously, get anal with it. You're not supposed to know everything straight away, but the more you get exposure to it, the more it's gonna identify some areas. The thing is, people don't like being told that they're wrong, they don't like being told the truth when it comes to this stuff, and this is where we have to be the big bad guy sometimes and say, Well, actually, yeah, we'll frame it a little bit nicer, but we're gonna put you on that X amount of calories that you're actually assuming that you're on. We'll assess the response and we'll see all of a sudden there's a huge drop or their body weight will go up, whatever it might be. Um, because again, people are coming in misreporting, they're coming in just completely unaware, they're pulling numbers out of their ass with it all. So we need to actually investigate and see what's going on. So two weeks of tracking, and when we say everything, just put on your your pedometer, it's going to track your steps. Just wear it all the time. Wear it during your sleep. It's absolutely fine. Don't look at the numbers for two weeks, but just actually track what you're actually doing. Yes, these can influence it sometimes where you start wearing a pedometer and all of a sudden you just magically start doing more output and activity because you're drawing your attention to it, or when you start to track your calories, all of a sudden people will say, I didn't change my food at all. I'm eating the exact same, but I tracked it meticulously. I'm down two kilos over the week. Because you're tracking it, you start eating less shit, and now all of a sudden you were uno the shit you were unaware that you were eating, you were no longer eating it. And uh again, we're seeing actually some weight drop down, and it's not magic, all of a sudden you're in a deficit, you have now expended more energy, you're intaking less energy with food, and you're in the sweet spot of actually losing some body fat. But the thing is to draw your attention and create an understanding and awareness

Two Weeks Of Tracking Everything

SPEAKER_00 5:45

to it. Much like think of me like your financial advisor, you're coming in with a goal of saving X amount of thousands of euro. We need to figure out where you're leaking money and where your money is coming in from so we can actually get to the baseline to say, okay, we need to do X, Y, and Z per week to get you to that target. It's the exact same here. Yes, there's more emotionally driven responses when it comes to uh exercise and activity and nutrition for people, but the more we can get that baseline, the more we actually understand what the fuck is going on and what the fuck we need to do with it as well. So let's track your steps, get a wristwatch on, track your activity and movement, track your calories. That is a hard one. Yes, it's a bit of a pain at a hole, but you need to weigh up more. What's the bigger pain of the hole? Tracking your calories or being out of shape. If it's not that big a pain in the hole of being out of shape, it's not going to change. So again, there has to be a bigger driver there when it comes to it, right? And we say, like, you have to really want the change. If you don't really want the change, you're not going to change. So let's actually be sure that this is the goal that we want to accomplish when it comes to flat loss, that you've got the right reasons to be doing it, and then we will actually accomplish that as well, too. Or you have a far better likelihood of actually accomplishing that goal. So track your calories. If it's consumed, you track it. Don't take anything as free or zero or whatever. Fucking track everything. It'll give you a really good understanding of holy shit, I've actually been way over consuming food here. And now all of a sudden, people have this knowledge unlocked, they're this awareness unlocked of all of a sudden, well, actually, you know, I was actually eating 10 extra biscuits with my cup of tea throughout the day. I was snacking mindlessly on the kids' food, I was uh adding in extra servings that were, you know, double the amount of peanut butter that I thought it was having, whatever it might be. Yes, I was having loads of this grey protein, but it was actually way too high and it was driving my calories up. Yes, I was having loads of like fats I wasn't really aware of that were in certain foods, and all of a sudden, those superfoods or whatever it might have been are adding up to extra hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of calories. So now you've got a really good awareness. Okay, we're eating too much. How do we need to pull that down? Where's the gap we need to create? Okay, you've got a large gap in your day where your output and activity is down. Let's actually bump that up a little bit. And now, when we know consistently what's been going on for two weeks, we can make subtle adjustments that will put the ball back in our court and see body fat or body composition improving dramatically without the guesswork, without the wonder what the fuck is going on, without the having to slash your calories to the absolute basement. Yes, if you go on 1200 calories, you're gonna lose body fat, but you can't sustain that. So why the fuck are you doing it? So when we can make a more informed guesstimation based off that, put you on 22, 2300 calories you never even thought you'd be going on, but it's still a deficit for you, life is far easier than you can actually sustain

Sustainable Deficits And Weekend Reality

SPEAKER_00 8:24

it. How many times have you heard of Daniel where you give people nutrition, you dial in their macros and calories, and they're like, Daniel, you're fucking nuts. This is way too much calories for fat loss. Like every week? You hear that?

SPEAKER_01 8:39

Probably, yeah. And it is, it is, it's probably one of the most common things that you will hear is like that's either too many calories or I'll never be able to eat that many calories. It's like, but like you obviously can because like you're wildly out of shape, so you have been eating way above that for a long period of time. And the thing is, a lot of people will look at that and say, like, that's too much. Like I should probably be eating this much because like I have been eating, say, 1600 calories, but you want to put me on like 2200 calories, like, but you haven't been eating 1600 calories either because you haven't been tracking it accurately or because you might only do it for two or three days and then eat well above that for the rest of the week.

SPEAKER_00 9:14

1600 calories before fucking two o'clock in the day, and then you've been stopping tracking after that is the fucking thing with your 1600 calories.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

Yeah, you've you're tracking 1600 calories, but you're not eating 1600 calories, and again, we're looking at kind of the long-term averages. Um, and especially like you'll see as well that like people will be on such low calories that they could be fine maybe Monday to Friday, but then if they're going out at the weekend, they they find that they just don't have the flexibility that the calories are too low. It's like I don't really know what to do, like because like my calories are so low. If I wanted to go out for dinner, that's going to be like a thousand calories, then a couple of drinks. Like, that's not like my daily intake in a single hour sitting. So, what am I supposed to do? Starve myself. So, like, I might as well just not track for the day, it's just one day, I'll get back to it again on Monday, then that carries over to Sunday. There's a full two-day event, and that's pushed you out of a deficit straight away. So, like, if you were actually to have a higher intake all across the week, a bit more, you know, uh closer to 2000 or whatever, we don't need to get into numbers, but like something that's actually might be a smaller deficit, but still is a deficit, but actually gives you that flexibility and freedom that you can go out for meals at the weekend to have those drinks, whatever it is, you actually will find it's gonna be a lot of an easier experience. Again, you could say that, but like that's not it's a smaller deficit, it's gonna take a longer period of time, it's like, but it's actually gonna be still faster than you constantly binging and purging and just repeating that cycle because you haven't been losing weight, and that's why you are looking for coaching in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Yeah, we get this friction, and I'm like, and I'm not trying to we're not trying to be assholes when we're talking about this, but sometimes we just have to fucking talk straight about this because there is a thing now in the industry where it's like, oh, of course, you can eat all the food you want, and you don't have to give up your weekends, and like you got out of shape because you haven't been giving up your weekends, you've got out of shape because you have been going absolutely YOLO, and yes, people are trying to make sales and they're trying to get you across the line, and like they want to promise you the fucking sun, moon, and stars when it comes to getting in shape. The reality of it is there needs to be some form of restriction there because you've been over consuming calories, so now we need to restrict calories. We don't need to completely restrict or eliminate food groups, but we need to restrict calories because you've been eating too many fucking calories, and that's the reality of it. So when it comes to it, we need to look at where we need to restrict. Yes, we will still tell you to go out in the social on the weekends and do stuff, but you can't go on the rip, you can't go on the piss, you can't go for three days completely on track and expect Monday morning to be fantastic. Yes, we can factor that into an intake, yes, we can factor in your holidays, and we can look at gaps and areas where we can push, pull, and pause when it comes to your food, that you will intentionally bring that up. And people find us amazing and revolutionary that oh, we can actually bring our food up for our calories and our holidays and enjoy it, cool, go do it. But be aware that if it fucking spills way over, we're going to gain body fat. And for us to be the big bad guy again and tell people the truth and the reality of it, that's what we have to do. But ultimately coming back to it when we can track in those variables and those metrics and understand where the gap is. Now, us as the coach, we can do the job far better because we know where your output and activity needs to be, we know where your calorie needs to be, we know where your lifestyle, where your sleep, where your digestion, where everything needs to be, and the labours that we need to pull, as opposed to doing some random guesswork and throwing some shit and seeing what sticks. And that's the throw some shit, see what sticks is the 1200 calories and hope to God that someone can sustain it, because they've got a big enough white to sustain it. But ultimately, you're not gonna sustain that result. So the more we know, the faster we can get you to that point B from knowing the point A. So this is back to the Google Map analogy. Figure out that baseline, track everything for two weeks. Yes, it's gonna tell you a lot of things you mightn't want to hear. Track your weight, track your sleep, track your training, track your output, track your calories. Everything goes in. If it means you need to clear your calendar for two weeks, just fucking do it because it's gonna save you a lot of time and a lot of headache and frustration and just guesswork ultimately, right? Then we can say, okay, my baseline for my calories is two and a half thousand calories. I need to get into a deficit. How do I need to do that? I can manipulate my food, I can manipulate my output, my training, whatever. Do it. Now all of a sudden you know, and there's no more guesswork. You can actually improve things infinitely. And you'll see people spinning their wheels for a year, have been in a deficit for a year, haven't lost any weight. It's because you fucked around for the whole year and you ultimately weren't in a deficit. Spend two weeks doing the thing, and now all of a sudden you know where you need to go and you know what you need to do. Yes, there will be times when that needs to be manipulated and changed and altered and adjusted, and that's where us as the coach comes in. Now we know what we accurately need to do, as opposed to saying, fuck it, let's try this and see what happens. We never do that because we don't need to do it because we have that really good baseline of knowing exactly where you are. So again, it comes down to can we collect enough good information, then can we use that information for the betterment to see that more sustainable?

Keep It Simple And Track Accurately

SPEAKER_00 13:54

Um Is there any other metrics, Daniel, you'd like to see people tracking from that front in the two weeks? Sleep, training, output, intake. What else do you want to see?

SPEAKER_01 14:04

I think there most of what I actually would kind of like to see people kind of tracking initially because like I think the basics is really kind of where it starts and where it kind of is going to bring you the most results. And I think when you start kind of um getting into the more details with it, that's when it starts getting confusing, and that's when it becomes too much, there's too much friction there, and people just can't sustain that. Um and like I think the thing to add to like us asking people to track things is also the caveat is like do it accurately as well, because like you will have people just tracking it's like I had a sandwich for lunch, it's like okay, but but what sandwich? Or like they're putting in just generic stuff in there, like I just had lasagna. Lasagna is always the one I keep going back there for some reason. Yeah, or like yeah, or like um another one is like say people will say where they're gammon or where they're fitbit or whatever, and they're tracking their steps, but they'll also be say doing cardio or whatever alongside that as well, and that's pick you up the steps, and they'll say, like, oh, my steps and you know average are like 20,000. Um, and then you're kind of saying, right, Jesus Christ, it's a seriously high level of output, like so we'll have to set your you know intake based off of that, and then like they start maintaining their weight, or their weight might even go up, and it's like, oh, but like I've actually been doing cardio as well. But how many steps are you doing outside of your cardio as well? Again, that could be kind of bit a bit finicky as well. And some people again had to someone ask me that last week. It's like, of course, the steps count from that. It's like like they do when they don't, because like we kind of want to try and keep things as separate as possible. We just want to kind of say, right, this is your step target, this is your cardio target, wherever for the week, because um we're not purely looking at cardio for like pick-up steps, it could be for like just to increase the expenditure, but it could also be from a cardiovascular standpoint. So we want to have data we can measure for different reasons across the course of the week. Sleep is the other one that I'll see people getting seriously caught up in as well because they'll start going to the weeds of like, oh, my deep sleep is only this much, and it's like, right, look, just forget about sleep stages. I was like, the first thing you need to be concerned with is like the duration of sleep. It's like, are you actually say going to sleep at this time and wake at that time and getting you know your eight-hour sleep every single night? If you are, the rest of it doesn't matter that much. Like you were kind of ticking 90% of the boxes you need there, but so many people, because everyone has a wearable now, can see the data on their phone. And again, we can get into the accuracy of that, and I believe we have in the past, if you're sleeping with a partner or whatnot, it's going to skew it. But the main thing is the first thing is like, are you sleeping enough in terms of like the duration? Or are you in bed for nine hours but you're only sleeping six of those because you're spending three hours on your phone or watching TV or on your laptop, whatever it is?

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Well, it actually comes to it as well, yeah. Exactly. And this is like much like the calories, just to cut in, much like the calories, people don't really understand those other metrics and they get too caught up in the weeds with them all. So it's like, let's track your total calories as opposed to all the specific macros, let's track all your sleep as opposed to the specific phases. Let's just uh not get caught up looking at your HRV, your stress measure, did to close all my rings on my Apple Watch. Like, just fucking track this stuff, get a baseline, and then you can figure out the adjustments needed based off that. Like, look at the bigger helicopter view again as opposed to the keyhole view when it comes to the whole thing. Now we get a better understanding, better baseline of this is where we are exactly. You know, when Google Maps, it's not asking you what fucking room in the house you're standing in, it's just asking you where that location is. It doesn't care. So let's figure out that general location with everything. Then you can really start to get into the weeds thereafter. Um, and this is something we'll work with a lot when it comes, you mentioned that about clients and calories, that they'll track it as a sandwich. Okay, we need to look at that and say, okay, send me over a picture, we're gonna get you a better understanding of what the calories are actually within that. Uh, because again, the more accurate we get, the better it's gonna be. So this is where it comes into our side of it sometimes, or the client to look that little bit further, or the individual that isn't being coached, just look into it that little bit further to get that better understanding of it all, yes. Uh, but don't get caught into the hyper specifics of it all because you can really go down the rabbit hole. It depends on the individuals. You have your type A who will overanalyse everything, and your type B who will fucking underanalyse everything and be like, need a little bit of a fine line between both. Um, I think there's been a lot of stuff in this that we can definitely leverage off and lean into and get people to get a better understanding of and know what they need to know, and then really rock on from there. Like, again, don't start stepping over dollars to pick up dimes when it comes to the whole thing. Let's get the dollars in line first and then we can start looking at the dimes, right? Um, Dan, I think this has been a hugely productive episode. And again, it's got just probably one of our like more straight talking episodes where I'm fucking we're just gonna start talking straight, like because we're fucked off, just you know, pandering around everything and just tiptoeing. No more eggshells, we're just gonna get stuck into these and rip it off the band-aid straight away.

Questions, DMs And Wrap Up

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Um, if you've got questions, if you've got uh concerns, if you've got fucking you know something you want to bring up and debate with us or talk about, we're not looking for an argument with it, but we're always here for a bit of a chat and a discussion for sure. If there's topics you think that you'd like to see us expand further on, for sure, DM us, drop us a message, drop us an email, respond to these, drop a comment in underneath if it's in a real, and we will get back to it. We'll do our best to be able to help you out and see how we might be able to help you to ultimately succeed when it comes to your goals. Daniel, it's been an awesome one.