Are You Choosing Fat Loss Or Weight Gain This Summer

Summer has a way of turning good habits into “we’ll see what happens.” We don’t buy that. We break down the real difference between a short holiday break and two straight months of switching off, and why the scale going up for a few days does not automatically mean you ruined anything. The headline is blunt for a reason: you can’t eat cake and stay ripped, so the goal is to choose your tradeoffs on purpose instead of letting summer choose them for you. 

We get specific about vacation nutrition and travel traps: how to handle a 7 to 14 day holiday without tracking every bite, why the breakfast buffet is your easiest win, and how a simple 50 percent “good food” baseline can keep you feeling lean and energetic. We also call out the sneaky stuff that derails people the most: airport eating, plane food, salty snacks, and poolside boredom grazing that adds calories without adding any real enjoyment. 

Then we zoom out to the full summer season and lay out the only three paths that exist: fat loss, maintenance, or weight gain. Maintenance is not a free pass, it is still structure, still protein, still movement, and still honest decisions around alcohol and treats. We wrap with quick summer hacks you can use immediately, from smarter drink choices to lighter dessert swaps, plus a reminder that missing a few workouts is not the end of your progress. If this helps, subscribe, share it with a friend who panics every summer, and leave us a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Summer Goals And One Hard Rule

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Record okay guys, tonight we are talking about navigating summer, keeping the results, maybe losing a bit of results, being confident through summer. Um yeah, and really there's just two things that we need to cover tonight. Number one, summer in general, like let's let's just say summer holidays, what we're talking, July, August, um, and then an actual summer holiday. So actually going away for a period of time on holiday. So we've got like the period of the summer, and then we've got the actual um going on holiday. So there's one sentence that I want to say before the call that will kind of sum up what I'm gonna say today, and that is you can't eat cake and stay ripped. Yeah, that's the uh that's the headline for the the call today. So we've got two scenarios, one being an actual holiday and one's general living. We're gonna talk about actual holiday first, whether it's seven days, 14 days, a few different ones, um, and how to navigate it, how to put your mindset in the right place, how to think about it, what I do. So you can maybe take a little bit about, you know, kind of how I think about it, um, and then we'll talk about general life and

Holiday Mindset For Seven Days

SPEAKER_00 1:20

again how I to deal with it and go about it. So going on holiday, seven to 14 days. Let's say seven days. Seven days, realistically, you're gonna want to have a break. Now, if you've been on the program for quite a while, seven-day holiday, it should in my eyes should be a break. Now, some of you might be quite early in your journey, might be thinking, I'm going on holiday for seven days, I don't really want to ruin it all. Well, ideally you wouldn't because it's only seven days. Um, you know, if you went to a seven-day health retreat, it you won't come back and be healthy forever. You know what I mean? So even if you went off the rails for seven days, you're not going to come back and be unhealthy forever. 14 days is a little bit longer, so we have got a bit more time to navigate, which a bit more damage can be done, but also a bit more time to actually have some healthy meals. You know, eating shit for 14 days is just ridiculous. That like no one needs to do that. And if you do, that's just you need to think about the lifestyle more than think about just dieting. So, realistically, if you're going away for seven days, I would be looking at it as a little bit of a rest. Um, now take my advice with a pinch of salt. If you want to go, I'm going on holiday and I want to stay on point. That's absolutely fine. You know, I'll champion you and I'll help work for it. But if you're going on holiday, I would always say, right, listen, take the seven days as a no tracking, relax. Maybe train if you want to, maybe do some movement if you want to, but take that as a break from everything. Look at this very similar to work. When you go on holiday from work, you want to take a break off work. You want to get your mind a reset. So when you come back, you've got fresh eyes, fresh, fresh thought process, and come back into it with a fresh set of energy. Now, if you take the same habits you have at home onto holiday, it will not feel like a break, a holiday. So therefore, you can come back and still what you sometimes see, people go on holiday, be healthy on holiday, the day they get back, start to be unhealthy. It's like, how have you put on more weight when you've got back than you did when you were away? And it's because you've tried to be too regimented on holiday and they've just eventually broken and said, I need I need to break. Um, so if we are going to take some rest for seven days, what the one thing we've got to be okay with in this journey is putting a little bit of weight on. Now, I know some of you might fall off your seat there because you're you're women, and you know, if it's not weight loss, it's nothing. But you've got to be okay with putting a little bit of weight on. If you want to have the best body in the world for you, your best body, not compared to anyone else. Um, you want to feel strong, you want to feel lean, you want to feel powerful, you want to feel healthy, you want to have longevity, you have to be okay with the scales going up eventually because the scales do not tell the full picture. Now, if you look at the picture that I posted yesterday of Steffi, we lost weight and then made her put weight back on. So then we lost it. We're now in another fat loss phase, but she had to put weight on to get the body that we wanted to get. And that is okay. Weight gain, not all weight gain is bad. When you're pregnant, you've got to gain weight because you're growing a baby. It's not all bad. When you're trying to become have bigger legs or bigger, bigger, bigger bum, you're gonna have to gain a little bit of weight. That's just how it is. So when you go away for seven days and you have a relaxed approach, you've got to be okay with the scales going up. Now, if you weigh yourself day one, when you get back, the scales are gonna be up way higher than they are gonna be if you come back seven, ten, ten days and then set yourself um on the scales again, they're gonna be more realistic to where they are. So we're having that seven-day break. We have to be okay with putting a bit of weight on because we should be at this point pretty confident that you can lose weight. If you're pretty confident that you can lose weight, like if I'm pretty confident that I can make money quick, I'll be more confident in spending it. Same as weight gain. You'd be more confident you lose it. You know, you should be okay at some point, at some period of time to be okay to go, you know what, this is worth a little bit of weight gain. Let's say it's a three-day wedding, let's say it's a holiday, let's say it's a stagdo, a hen do, whatever it is. There's got to be some points you go, the enjoyment, the fulfillment that's giving me over here, it's okay to offset this because I can lose this weight again. I'm not going to get the opportunity to go on a stagdo wedding or holiday again, but I can lose this weight again. So that's what I would be doing for seven days. Be thinking, right, let me

Build Meals That Limit Damage

SPEAKER_00 5:40

have to rest. But when I come back, the day I get back, I go, um, all that. Now, how to navigate them seven days without being a complete shit show. Seven to 14 days, complete shit show. We're realistically looking at four meals a day. Yeah. Holidays sometimes can be three breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and we sometimes snack it shit around the pool. But let's say we have four meals, let's take snack as an actual meal in itself. So 25% in each meal. Realistically, if you could do 50% of your day from good food and 50% of your day from not so good food, you're already going to be doing better. Most breakfast is on holiday at the breakfast buffet, you can be quite healthy and it tastes quite nice. You do not need to be at the breakfast buffet telling yourself you need pancakes. Most of them pancakes are stale, they taste a little bit like shit. You have them, they're never fulfilled. I don't think anyone's had pancakes on holiday and gone, oh my god, they blow my mind. I need to go back and have them tomorrow. It normally looks a lot better, you know, the tail has melted, whatever. It looks great, but once you've had them, you're like, you know, it's it is what it is. Get yourself some nice poached eggs on toast, smoked salmon, things that you normally would like to cook at home, but you don't have the time to because you're running out for work, you've got to have protein and a porridge. You know what I mean? So having some healthy meals throughout the day is gonna offset some of the damage. Same again for lunch when you're around the pool. Having just a chicken club sandwich is not gonna be the end of the world. You don't need the chips with it. Chips are chips. I know some of you love chips, but chips are chips at the end of the day. There's not a chip that you're gonna try that is gonna blow your mind so much, it's gonna be so different from chips that you've had um previously. That makes sense. So, really understanding that like chips are chips, crisps are crisps, chocolate's chocolate, you're not missing out on much. What you want to be doing is within their meals, going, right, tonight we're going to a fancy restaurant. I would like to eat X, Y, and Z and enjoy this nice food, get enjoyment out of it. But sitting in McDonald's at the airport having a Big Mac, bro, it's a Big Mac. It's the same McDonald's as everywhere else. You know what I mean? You're not getting that rest, you're just eating shit because you've taken the reins off, and that makes no sense whatsoever. So looking at 50% of your diet while you're on holiday to be smart. And then the other meals, you might be in a restaurant and go, you know what? I don't actually need to eat bad tonight. I can get this the sea bass and salt, some vegetables, potatoes. Brilliant. I don't need to smash seven pieces of bread in the bread basket because that is just greed, and because it's there, I feel like I need it. Again, we just need to be smart with our decisions. I say to everyone when they go, Hyundai, the best thing you can do is eat like a normal person. I've said this a thousand times, so you'd heard it. Eat like a normal person. You think what's in well, aren't I normal? No, no, because if a bread basket goes in front of most of us, we picket it until it's all gone and then go, how did I eat the whole bread basket? Because your eating habits aren't quite normal. Majority of us are like that. But if you eat like a normal person, you have one bit of bread, a little bit of butter, have your meal. That's just a normal, you know, the dream eating like a normal person. Now, when you get back home, instant, get back on it. That is the best way to navigate a seven to fourteen day holiday. Now, where people go wrong, airport there, airport back. Airport is a weird place that when you get there, it's like you it's I don't know what it is. It's like you you just feel like you should eat something bad at the airport, or take some snacks on the plane, or do

Airports Planes And Boredom Snacking

SPEAKER_00 9:20

some like it just feels part of the buy and let me buy some bits, you know. Just block all that out. You know, my clients that travel three, four times a week, they do not have that airport excitement. Again, the airport is Pret, Wagga Bombers, um, WH Smiths, all just dressed up in one place. You know, you don't walk around Westfield in Pret to be like, oh, I'm gonna grab that and grab that from Britt Smiths. It's it's the same with airport. Like we just because they're all with the one place, there's not, you know, it's an excitement that's that's made up. You don't need that. Get yourself a nice sushi tray, take it on the plane, eat that, avoid the playing food. There is nothing on the plane that's gonna be so delicious that you're gonna miss out. I flew economy, business class, and first class. There wasn't one single meal on either of them that I was like, oh my God, that was worth it. It's just never, it's playing food, it's cooked in a big train. So you're not missing out. And if you can understand you're not missing out, you're gonna be in a much stronger place because where you might have got your body in a good place, you get on a flight for let's say you're going long haul, you eat some salty shit on the flight, you drive some fucking beers, some peanuts, whatever, you land bloated, full of water retention on day one, all that hard work for what? You just feel like shit on day one. It's like, what? Sitting around a pool snacking endlessly. Ask yourself, am I that bored on holiday without work that I can't sit on my own without having the stimulation of snacks, alcohol, and stuff like that? Because that is all it is, is you're sitting there, it's been two hours, you're you're thinking, right, what do I do with myself now? It's like we're so stimulated all the time that when we aren't stimulated, we feel like we need something. It's like when someone sits down with their partner instantly, they go, Should we get a bottle of wine? It's like, well, let's just have a chat first. Do we need a bottle of wine to cut the air? You know, it's constant stimulation. It's like when people have social anxiety at parties, they have to have a cup in their hand because if it's not got a cup in the hand, my hands feel awkward. And what do I do with my hands? Like, do I do this? Like, you've got to get over that, especially if you're just with friends. Like it feels awkward. You feel like you need something, work on that because that is just uh a boredom thing. It's a I need something because I'm bored, or I need stimulating, or I need to pick at something because I need something in my hands. We we we can avoid that when we're here. Try and avoid that as much as you can on holiday. You know, it it's it's just not needed. Now, some people are asking me what I do when I go on holiday. So I'll be completely completely transparent. I will have normally got myself

What We Actually Do On Holiday

SPEAKER_00 12:10

in good shape for a holiday. Sometimes, sometimes I've been it's way and felt like shit. Um, but if I've got myself in good shape for a holiday, I've probably done a big enough dent, like let's say Dubai, for example, this year. I had a big enough dent where I said I could probably enjoy myself a little bit and be okay. Yeah. And when I got out there, I had some someone's mute myself, Nicole. I had some um nice foods. I didn't really have the pancakes in the morning or anything like that. I had just good breakfast. Lunchtime, I kind of stuck to my my my same thing. Sometimes the kids just had pizza and stuff, and I just would stick to you know, fish, whatever. I just felt like I was like being okay, but I didn't have any rules, I didn't track at all. Um, I did go gym sometimes, sometimes I just wanted to spend time with my family. But in the evening, when we went for dinner, I just ate what I fancied because I'd made a big enough dent that I knew that when I came back, I was gonna put on a bit of weight, but I it was okay. I'll taught metrics for you. I had a goal to be under 100 kg before I went on holiday. I ended up being 97 kg before I went on holiday. I came back, I was 98.9. So I put on about two kilos basically over the holiday, and that remained on. Um, but I was just a little bit of bounce back. But I just decided what I wanted to do on the day. I trained a little bit, but I I try and just take a break from the the regime because the regime um it does get tiring, you know, it does get tiring being healthy, it does get tiring um tracking your food, working out. You know, you sometimes will feel yourself aches and pains and getting up at five, six in the morning. It it is it is mundane, but the benefits of that is I can put a uh a shirt on or a t-shirt on, or you know, I'm going on a I'm going away on Friday with my friends to a stagdo. Like I can go there. I've got no anxiety about going to a beach with my top off. I've got no anxiety about sitting at a pool and thinking, oh my god, does my mates think of this of me? I just don't have them feelings because of the work that I do for myself within these times. And I can't explain to you how much that is a mental load off me, you know, where if I feel like that, I've got to think about all these things and what do I wear? Do I cover this? Do that. They are real thoughts in men and women, and it's just, you know, all this hard work is worth it. But sometimes we do need that break from it. So, holiday-wise, ideally, I would

Summer Structure Without Switching Off

SPEAKER_00 14:45

retain, take a break, and then come back and go hard. Now, general life is a little bit different because if we look at summer, let's say it's summer's two months, yeah. What we don't want to do is switch off for summer. Summer happens, we go, right, summer's here, I'm fucking social, I'm active, I'm this that nibble, it's part of me. I want to be this. It's like great. If that's who you want to be, that is absolutely fine. But I can tell you right now, at the end of the two months, you will not feel great. You will definitely have put on weight, you just won't feel as confident, you'd be fed up with drinking, you'd be fed up eating chocolate, and you'd be fed up eating shit because you've just gone wild for two months. Now, the you've got to think about this life as like work. Yeah, most of you got jobs. I hope so. That's why you can afford to be on the program. But when summer hits, you don't just go, boss, I'm off, mate. Or to your employees if you are the boss, hey guys, we're shutting down for summer, or yeah, I'm not working anymore. Why not? Summer. Fucking why are you working summer? Just does not happen. But so why would we turn off like all the things we do for ourselves? You know what I mean? It has to be be the same. That this is work itself work. Now, so I'd be looking at summer like that. Now, what you might find is you might want to go, you know what, Monday to Friday, I'm on it, Saturday, Sunday, I want to have a little bit more time, a bit more freedom. I want to go out, I want to drink. Again, that is fine. You've got to be okay with the weight gain that's going to come with it. Like I said in the beginning, you can't eat cake and stay ripped. So what people want is they want to have fun and eat what they want and they want to stay in shape. And unfortunately, the two don't go together if you completely just do whatever the fuck you want to do. Yeah. If you say, right, I'm going to have structure for this week, Monday to Friday, I'm going to be on it. Saturday, I've got this one meal I'm going to have. Great, I'm going to have that day off. But Sunday morning, I'm going to be back on it. Wednesday, I've got a night in my mate. I'm going to try. You will you can navigate summer quite well, but in the days where you're on, you're on. The days that you're working, you work. The days that you're off, you can spend off. That's fine. But you can't just go, whoa, I'm out for a couple months. Because if I look at myself when I was thinking about school, I was thinking myself thinking like, what you know, what do I do in summer? I was like, I just do what I do every. I don't really have like a winter summer fitness lifestyle. Like, this is just my life. I train five times a week. Um, I up my cardio, I less I lower my cardio depending on if I want less body fat or more. Um I diet Monday to Friday, Saturday to Sunday, I'm a little bit laxed, whether I'm cutting, gaining, whatever. Um and I just that's just my life. Like I just that's just what I do on a day-to-day basis. I don't think about it, I don't think that I need to be like this technical. Like at the minute, I'm trying to lose weight, but this weekend I had a five guys on Saturday night. It was part of the plan. I knew it was coming. I wanted one relaxed meal. Sunday came, my wife came home from a retreat. She said, Oh, should we have a pizza tonight? I said, To be honest, babe, I'd blown my load on the five guys last night. So I went and got her pizza because she wanted that from when she came back, and I cooked myself chicken and rice last night. It was just a sacrifice I had to make for my relaxed meal. But that's just me and what I do, you know. I can I just navigate this, it's just normal life, and this should be pretty much the same for you. Um, because if it's not, if it feels like it's holding you hostage, what's gonna happen is when the rains come off, you are going to go, right? Oh my god, I'm free. What should I do? Let me go eat and drink as much as I fucking can because I never know when I'm gonna put the cuffs back on. And then what happens is the weight will go bang and it will spike up because you've been so healthy, and then you put all this unhealthy stuff in and you fly up. So no matter what you do through summer, you still have to abide by certain rules if you don't want to gain loads of weight. Now, you can have more days off, you can have meals off, but if I'm going out on a Saturday night, I don't need to take Saturday morning off. If I'm going out on a Saturday, Sunday midday, when I get home from that, I can cook myself a healthy meal. It doesn't have to be like the whole weekend's off because there were

Maintenance Is Work Too

SPEAKER_00 19:10

two events. Does that make sense? Because if it is that, it's it's it's a miss. And this comes down to the same thing I said first was like a lot of people think it's fat loss or nothing. And if I ain't losing fat, I may as well pause, I may as well stop, I may as well quit and come back when I'm ready to lose fat. Now, here's what I think about that it's either fat loss or gaining weight. Yeah, they're the two choices it is it's either fat loss or gaining weight, or there is this middle ground called maintenance. But maintenance is the same amount of structure and the same amount of work as fat loss. So if you ain't working, because the work is fat loss or maintenance, they're both work. If you ain't working, it will always be weight gain. So you've got to ask yourself over summer am I working? It could be working on fat loss, it could be working on maintenance, but they're both structured, they're both work, they're both thought out. But if it ain't one of them, it's the other, and it's gaining. Now, you might gain a few pounds one weekend, you might gain a few pounds the next weekend, you might still feel okay. That compound effect will happen over two months, and let's say you gain four or five kilos, you will start to feel not good in yourself. Now, here's the uh the Joker card when you've lost weight and you gain it back, that yo-yo goes back up, your body makes it whatever percentage harder to lose it again. So if you are going down, up, down, up, down, up consistently in big, big lines, your body every time makes it a little bit harder to lose that weight. Gets a bit more resistance, get a bit more against it. So in my eyes, I'd be thinking about okay, what I'm what what do I want from this summer? Do I want to maintain my body? Do I want to keep pushing for weight loss? Like some people join the program like this week, last week, week before, they're on weight loss throughout the summer. They just said, right, I'm here for the summer, I'm here to lose weight. Some of you have been on the program a bit more, so you feel like you need a bit of fun in the summer, fair enough. But your three choices are this weight loss throughout summer, if that is your goal right now, maintenance throughout summer, if that is your goal right now, or weight gain. Yeah, there are your three options. There is no other option than that. If it's weight loss, what work am I doing? If it's maintenance, what work am I doing? If it's weight gain, do whatever the fuck you want. Because it doesn't matter. You just take your chances, yeah? But they are your three options, and that they're the three game plans that you need to basically follow. Two of them are work, one of them is not. And if you think you can cheat the system in any other Way, shape, or form coming from a fat loss specialist for 20 years working with so many people, you just can't. You can't, you can't, you can't. There's just no way around it. You know, it's like the the fast, fat, fat, fast weight loss. It's like how do I get results quick? It's all these things. There's no, there's no way around it. There's no, there's no quick way to get rich unless you win the lottery. It's all hard work. And it is all work. You know, mental health is work. Making yourself successful is work. Making yourself healthy is work. It just is, you know. I did a video today and I said, you know, when you ask, when you see someone that's lost a lot of weight or like feels really good, and you see him, not see him in a while, and you go, Oh my God, what have you done? Like you expect a different answer to I just started tracking my food, got myself a coach, started prioritizing protein, did strength training, um, stayed quite active, lifted really heavy, drank a bit more water, deprioritized alcohol, I dropped sugar for a little bit. Um like you thought there was going to be a different answer to all them things. Like, no, that's the only way to be in shape and get in shape and stay in shape. And if you ain't doing them things, you're going the other way, or you can do them things, but in a in a more calculated way to keep your weight the same, like you would whether you hit your goal or doing over some more.

Simple Summer Hacks That Help

SPEAKER_00 23:20

So they're your choices, and that's what you need to really think about going into these next um few months. Now, quick hacks. I did a little post about this, but really, really quick hacks. If it is going to be alcohol, it needs to be slim, slim alcohol, because at least then you're avoiding the sugars, even in wine, good wine, doesn't matter. Like at least you're avoiding the sugars and you're only getting the alcohol. Um, ice lollies over ice cream. Um, you do get some healthy ice creams. Oppo, um, Jude got not a bit in calories recently, but oppo, Calippos, Solero. Um, if you see ice cream van, always go for the ice lolly. Like the lemonade ones are like 30 calories. So if the family's having ice cream, you get a lemonade lolly, you know, it scratches the itch, but it feels like you're part of the gang, whatever. Lots of water, um, lots of movement, lots of activity. If you can't train, that's fine. Training can be deprioritized, you don't lose your gains. A woman will not lose any muscle for about a month of no training before that it starts to depreciate. So if you feel like one week you can't train, don't feel like that whole week is ruined. Just work on your diet. When you're in a restaurant, try and aim for salads because they're nicer in the summer. Um, you can eat a bit lighter in the daytime, avoid the snacks. You know, it's the same stuff that we do in winter over Christmas, it's the same stuff we do beginning of the year, it's the same stuff without because at the end of the day, guys, this is a lifestyle. And if you are here to block this in for a few months or a few weeks and you're hoping that once you come out of this program that everything's gonna stick and you've not done the work, remember this last thing again. I say it weight loss or fat loss is work, maintenance is work. The only time you are not working throughout your whole entire life is when you're gaining. That is it.