Stop Diet Confusion: 3 Simple Steps to Guaranteed Results

Feeling confused by endless diet trends and weight-loss myths? In today's episode, Josh simplifies the complex world of nutrition, highlighting the three fundamental levers you can control for real results. Discover how to effectively create a calorie deficit, understand the critical role of protein, and learn the importance of personalisation and flexibility to maintain lasting success.

Structured Show Notes:

• Introduction: Debunking complicated diet trends
• The 3 Levers of Weight Loss: Calories, exercise, and activity
• Understanding Calorie Deficit: The cornerstone of effective weight loss
• Importance of Protein: Satiety, muscle retention, metabolism boost
• Personalisation: Tailoring your nutrition strategy to your individual needs
• Flexibility & Adaptability: How to sustainably maintain progress and overcome plateaus
• Final Recap: Putting it all together for lasting results

• Effective weight loss strategies
• Creating a calorie deficit
• Importance of protein in diet
• Personalised nutrition coaching
• Sustainable dieting strategies
• Flexible dieting tips
• Weight loss plateaus
• Transformation Fit Podcast

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Transcript

Hi everybody and welcome back to this week's podcast in today's podcast. We're gonna be following on from our previous episode regarding nutrition. In the last one, we've spoke about how to set realistic expectations and we introduced you to the idea of the nutrition continuum with 0% consistency on the left hand side and 100% consistency on the right hand side. And if you've not listened to that one yet, then I would recommend going back to that because that paves the way for what we're going to discuss today. So today we're going to be stepping it up a level and giving you a little bit more in terms of tactical advice on what you can do to lose weight, Specifically with your nutrition. So let's dive in. To begin with, I think it's important to note that the weight loss industry is incredibly complicated. And in my opinion, a lot of the popular diets and schemes that you see people following out there are confusing for the person who's using those services or following those plans. And I believe that that's on purpose so that you think that there is something mysterious or special or even mystical about their particular method by not educating you on the underlying principles of weight loss, you fall into the trap of following one type of plan because you think that there's something special about that plan. So the first part of this episode is me, I'm just going to lay it out extremely clearly for you on what really drives weight loss. So in my opinion, there are only really free levers that you can pull to increase your weight loss. So imagine you're a pilot in a cockpit, you have free levers in front of you. Leaver number one is daily calorie intake and we can drive down the amount of calories that we consume on a daily basis to help initiate weight loss. The second lever will be exercise, so we can increase the amount of exercise that we do to help increase weight loss. And then the third lever would be your daily step count or your overall activity that isn't related to exercise. Okay? And we can increase that to help the body lose weight. Now, we can do all three of these at one time, a little bit, or we can drive one up more significantly than the others to try and create weight loss, but the important thing to note is that when we're trying to lose weight, what we are trying to do is create an overall calorie or energy deficit within the body. So what does that mean? On a daily basis, your body will need a certain amount of calories or energy, to function and get through your day-to- day activities. Now, depending on how intense those day to day activities are or how extensive they are, that will determine how many calories you need to consume in order to maintain your weight. So what we see with a lot of our clients is they say that, oh, I've got to, you know, my metabolism's really slowed down. And in some cases, that might be true, but the reality is that individual metabolism doesn't really differ that much from person to person. What does differ significantly is the amount of activity that people do on a daily basis and the amount of muscle that they hold. So two of the most significant drivers to increase your metabolism will be how much activity you do on a daily basis, but also how much muscle you hold as well. And that's often overlooked from people and that's going to that's going to be something we're going to talk about in a little bit more detail as we go through. So back to the point about the calorie deficit. If you consume less calories than that daily amount that you burn through your day-to-day life, then you are going to lose weight. If you consume about the same as you burn on a daily basis, then your weight will be somewhat stable. And if you're consuming more calories then you are burning on a daily basis, then that means you are likely to gain weight. So if you look at what your weight has done over the last three months, if it is roughly stayed the same, then your calorie intake has been about equal to the output. If your weight has come down, then that means that your calorie intake has been less than the daily output. And if your weight has increased over the last number of months, what that means is, is you've consumed more calories than you are burning on a daily basis. So if we're trying to influence that, we go back to those free leavers by either decreasing a daily calories that we consume, increase in the exercise or increase in a daily step count. And that's how we shift and change our body weight. Now, many people ask me about intermittent fasting, weight watchers, slimming world, keto diets. The important thing to recognise here is each of those do have individual nuances, but overarching reason why those diets work is that they create a calorie deficit and get you to consume less calories than you burn. And that is what principle one of weight loss is all about. The calorie deficit is the most important principle in this whole conversation. So it's super important that we calculate how many calories we burn roughly on a weekly basis and you can Google this or ChatGPT this and you can put your data in and find out very easily within a number of minutes, roughly how many calories you can you burn on a daily basis. And what we want to do is we want to create a deficit, so we want to subtract a certain amount of calories from that daily calorie maintenance estimate that you're given. And that will start to initiate weight loss. Now, different coaches have different ideas around how much you should be reducing calories by. And the truth is it totally depends on the person. And some people do better, off of a very, very marginal calorie deficit, say you subtract 5% off the daily calorie estimate that they've given you and you try and eat that amount of calories on a daily basis. Some people go 10%, some people go 20. Some people go really aggressive. The important thing to understand is the higher the deficit that you use to begin your weight loss journey typically, the harder it is to sustain although there are some exceptions to that and that depends very much on the psychological profile of the person. So for most people, a 10% calorie deficit is recommended, but others can go a little bit more aggressive of the deficit. Some can go a little bit smaller. It really depends on the person, okay? The second core principle is sufficient slash high protein intake. Now, this is important for a number of reasons. The fundamental reasons why high protein intake is an important principle with minute nutrition system is that when we increase the amount of protein that we eat, that typically helps us feel fuller. So if we're adhering to principle one of a calorie deficit, typically people will feel hungry. Now, when we shift our focus onto protein intake, that can help us feel fuller, for longer, in between meals, which helps us adhere to that calorie deficit in an easier way. The second reason why that's so important is if we don't equate for protein intake and we don't look to optimise protein intake, a significant percentage of the weight that you do lose, because you will still lose weight, but a higher percentage of the weight that you lose will be muscle mass. Okay? And as I mentioned earlier on, muscle mass is a key driver of your metabolism. And if we have a lower amount of muscle mass or metabolism will burn calories slower, and also as we age, the less muscle we have, the closer we will get to becoming disabled as we age. There's a certain threshold of muscle mass and strength that you need to be classed as physically abled. And once you cross and go underneath that threshold of mussel mass that you need to sustain day to day life and activities, that's when you can be classified as disabled because you don't have the required strength for muscle to actually move, okay, and do day-to-day things. So higher protein intake, especially when paired with resistance training, massively helps to retain the amount of muscle mass that we have and the strength, okay? Another important thing to notice about protein intake is that it has a higher fermic effect of food. And what the fermic effects of food is is when you look at the main sources of calories, so proteins, carbohydrates, and fat based foods. Protein has the highest fermic effect of food out of all of those macronutrients. Roughly to around about 30%. So what that means is, for 100 calories of protein that you consume, your body will burn approximately 30% of those calories because it's more expensive or energy, it uses more energy to digest those foods and convert them into energy. So a higher percentage of the protein that you consume will be burned through that digestion process. So that's important to note as well. So principle number two is that higher protein intake. So when we look at protein recommendations for people, the older you are and the leer you are, the higher the protein requirement becomes. So for most people, between 1.5 and 2.5 grams of protein per kilogramme of body weight each day. Now, where you start with that can be different from person to person and we're going to talk about that in a moment. And the older you are, the higher I recommendation would be, typically speaking, it's harder to maintain muscle mass as you age. So I like to recommend a higher protein intake for older individuals and also the less body fat you have as well, the higher we will go on that ratio to body weight because a higher percentage of your body weight is attributed to muscle. Okay? So that's what I'll say on protein intake for now. The next principle is going to be personalisation, right? So this is where we take the prior principles and we try to tailor it and customise it to you as an individual. Now, we have a lot of clients from, like, South Asian backgrounds, and we have a lot of them who also follow with vegetarian diet for various religious reasons. And for those guys, it's quite difficult to hit their daily protein target, especially at the beginning of their journey. So for those people, at the beginning, we might recommend trying to only hit 1.5 grams of protein per kilogramme of body weight because it's too much of a radical shift to get them to two, two and a half grams per kilo. So we might start with 1.5 grams per kilo with bows populations. Okay. With other people, let's say, they've got a specific goal that they needs to achieve within a shorter time frame, we might go with a higher and more aggressive calorie deficit target, knowing that it's more difficult to sustain, but if they're driven and they're focussed and they've done this before, then we might go with a higher calorie deficit because some people don't want to be dieting for a long period of time with others, we might go with a very slow and methodical and gradual calorie deficit because when we go with an aggressive calorie deficit, that's too much of a shock to a system and we can't deal with the hunger, et cet, that comes with it and the cravings. So we might go with only a marginal calorie deficit to kind of slowly expose them to dieting and we can gradually progressively build it up. But for some people that approach isn't going to work because the results aren't going to be quick enough and for other people via aggressive deficit, maybe too aggressive because they can't deal with the some of the side effects fact you get off that. So that's where personalisation comes into it. And that's where working with an experienced nutrition coach can actually help you identify how to personalise these principles to you and your lifestyle. So if that's something that you're struggling with right now, you can email me info at Transformation Fit.co.uk or you can DM me on Instagram at Josh Ryler and we can have a chat about how we can potentially personalise some of these things for you. And the final principle that I'm going to talk about today is flexibility, okay? And adaptability. So the process that begins working for you for the first, you know, three, four, five, six weeks within your dieting journey, may not be the same process which works for the final four weeks or of the next six weeks, depending on how, which weight you need to lose. Now, I've had clients where they've been given a meal plan and they've ate the same thing every day for nine months and lost 75 pounds with the occasional cheap meal, maybe once a week or something like that. And that's worked incredibly well for them. I've also had other clients where they start to plateau quite quickly after four, five, six weeks and we need to change the approach. So flexibility and adaptability is a massive part of a long-term weight loss journey. And typically speaking, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases, the more weight you have to lose, the more we might have to be flexible and adapt the plan as time goes on. So again, that's where experience comes into it. If you're working with a coach, this can help expedite this process. A lot of people, they will lose weight following the same thing that they've always done. Hit a plateau, then get demotivated, then fall off their diet, then they'll gain the weight back again until they hit a point where they have to get back on a diet and the process begins again. And that's where you're on that vicious cycle of yo-yo diet in. When you work with an experienced nutrition coach, they can help you with those final two principles. They can help you flex and adapt that plan, depending on what's going on in your life at that moment in time. They can help you personalise these principles so that it works for you as an individual with your family, your career, etcera, etcera. For a lot of our guys, we give them two calorie targets. We give them a weekday calorie target, and we give them a week end calorie target because those who socialise a lot of the weekends typically tend to find it difficult to follow a nutrition programme at the weekend. So we try and reduce calories during the week and increase it during the weekend. For other people, it might be something related to exercise. So, for example, if they are, if they know they're going to, let's say, quote unquote, cheat on their diet at the weekend due to a social occasion or a night out, we might do something with their exercise for a couple of days before so that we still feel like we're ticking that box and we're not going completely off the rails. How we flex it and how we adapt it massively depends on the person and that typically happens through regular reviews and conversations with your coach as well. So because I don't know who's listening to this, I can't give you personalised recommendations on how to adapt and how to flex your own individual plan and how to personalise it to you because I don't know what your circumstances are, but theirs just a couple of suggestions on how we might flex and how we might adapt the process to you. So, to recap, the first thing that you've got to get in place is a calorie deficit. And we typically achieve that through reducing calorie intake, increasing exercise activity, and then increasing nonex exercise activity. And we typically measure that through your step count. Next up, we've got making sure that we're hitting adequate protein intake on a daily basis. Then we've got personalisation, so personalising most principles to you and give you customised targets based on you as an individual. And then we've got flexibility and adaptability because life can get in away sometimes things happen, we have social occasions, work, stresses, etcetera, et cetera. So we need to know how to flex and adapt that nutrition plan. So that even if you're not following it 100%, you still feel like you're on plan and you're still making progress towards achieving your goal. And for some people, just maintaining where you're at and kind of treading water is progress because when things crop up, a lot of people tend to go backwards, whereas if you can maintain where you're at before you get ready for that next push again to try and hit that next weight loss target, in my opinion, that's progress because in many times in your life previously, you would have completely went off a rails and gained the weight back again. So small fluctuations and small plateaus in your journey are normal, are expected, and I use them as feedback to tell me as a coach and tell you as a client that something here is off and we need to make some adaptations. We need to be a little more flexible. We need to make some tweaks and some changes to your approach so that we can get you making progress again. So I hope that's useful for you. As I mentioned earlier, if you're listening to this and you feel like you need support and you feel like you need assistance and you feel like you could benefit from coaching on this topic, send me a DM on Instagram at Josh Ret or email me info at transformationfit.co.uk and we can look at putting a planning place to help you achieve your goals. That'll be it for today, guys, and I'll speak to you on my next one. Take care. Bye-bye.