Top 4 Habits For Fat Loss | E19

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And welcome back to Train Like a Girl. My name is Abby. I'm an online women's health and fitness coach. And welcome back to the pod. Really happy to have you here. I'm filming or recording this one way ahead of time. I'm I'm just rushing ahead of myself, but I can't help it. I might actually have to start posting two a week. We'll see how this goes. But I'm just brimming with ideas, so had to bring you this. Today's one is all about the habits that you're missing if you want fat loss results, which doesn't sound very sexy, but it's an essential conversation to have because it's it's only the people I work with that implement these habits that actually keep their results. So I wanted to chat about it because I want the best for you and I want you to succeed. Um fat loss is easy in theory, but it's very hard in execution, isn't it? The ex and the execution is really everything. Because when well, let's jump into it. When people talk about fat loss, they almost always jump straight to calories. I am guilty of this because a calorie deficit is the only essential thing that we need to achieve fat loss. So it's hard to ignore, right? Obviously, we need to talk about calories when we talk about fat loss. That's correct. But what that, you know, having that information and actually implementing it to our life is hard, right? Like it's one thing having the knowledge, it's another acting on that knowledge and applying it to a real life and real human behavior and the reality of our habits and our behaviors that have been learned over time. Because fat loss doesn't fail at a knowledge level. Like once you have that knowledge, you have that knowledge. There's, you know, it's it's golden, it's solid, but where it fails is in in action and in consistency. It's not that you struggle because you know what to do, you struggle because you're tr what you're trying to do doesn't fit into your actual life. And that is where habits come in. Because fat loss is it's it is a physiological process, yes, but it's not just that. Because whilst you do need a sustained deficit to reduce body fat, and there's no escaping that, that's not an argument, that's fact, that's basic thermodynamics. Actually maintaining that deficit over weeks and months depends almost entirely, honestly, on behaviour and behavioural systems. It's not about white knuckling your way through, and you know, you know, when you get like a surge of motivation and it's like, right, this time I'm doing it, I'm I'm gonna start again Monday, I'm going all in, and then for some reason that fades, and it's like, oh, I'm back to where I started or I fucked up or whatever. And that is not a motivation problem. That is because the behavior system isn't correct, or the habits are not built in. It's so we're missing a component there, right? And one of the so we're gonna talk about those missing pieces, those missing habits today, because they are, they come up time and again for myself and with clients. And once you've figured these out, I really, really, truly hand on heart believe that fat loss not only becomes easier, but it became, it becomes sustainable. It becomes that you can maintain your result for the long term. So please listen up. I think one of the biggest missing pieces that a lot of people overlook is something called environmental design. So when we look at behavior psychology, we know that as humans, lots of us don't make neutral food decisions. And in fact, we make available food decisions. So, in other words, what is easiest to access is what gets eaten. So, this is this is a psychological thing. So, if your kitchen or your table or your cupboards or the thing that's most accessible as soon as you open those cupboards, is filled with hyper palatable, energy-dense foods, things high in fat, sugar, salt, all of those things, which are not bad things, by the way. That's not what we're saying here, but they are things that trigger your brain into wanting it's like a dopamine response. Your brain is constantly being triggered by reward pathways that involve dopamine. So, in other words, you see that stuff and you want it. But and that where things get where people get this conflated is they then they blame themselves. They think they're weak, they think they lack willpower, they think they lack discipline. But it doesn't mean that. It actually means that your environment is is just working against you. When we remove this idea of willpower, everything changes. The people who succeed long term aren't relying on discipline every single meal. What they do is they reduce friction for good choices and increase friction for impulsive ones. So in other words, they have the healthier stuff, quote unquote healthier. I don't like to do good bad foods here, but for the sake of for the sake of the the point I'm making, what those people do is they will have things like fruit more readily available than biscuits, for example, because it's very human nature. If we see the biscuits and they're really readily available and they're on hand, they're out on the countertop, you're far more likely to eat them. There have literally been studies on this, um, where people will choose what is most accessible. So the people that are more successful, they have this habit of making the protein dense or um fruits and veggies more visible. So it's not about willpower. They are just putting a system in place that reduces that decision fatigue. Like if every time you open your cupboard or go home, you're faced immediately with all of your favorite snacks and treats, which again, I'm not demonizing, but I'm just saying obviously, if you've got highly palatable sugary foods, they are foods like discret discretionary items. They they are things that we need to limit, right? They're things that we need to not only for our health, but because they are highly palatable, the likelihood of overeating on them is high. Whereas if you've got chicken pieces and I don't know, rice crackers or whatever, more readily available to snack on, they're so much harder to overeat on. And thus, if they are your go-to snack, because they are so visibly available and readily available, you're less likely to overeat on them, and therefore you are more likely to remain in your calorie deficit. So it's about reducing that decision fatigue. And decision fatigue is a huge factor because every decision you make across the day uses a I'm kind of like pivoting really into the next thing about decision. They overlap, but decision fatigue is a topic in and of itself, really, because across a whole day, every single micro decision we make takes up some uh brain energy, some cognitive energy. So by the end of the day, your pre-frontal cortex, so that the part of the brain that's responsible for self-control and planning, is less efficient. It's more tired. And that's why most people don't really break their diet at breakfast. They break it at night, when they're tired, when they're stressed, and when, crucially, when they are their brain is tired, they're cognitively more exhausted because they've made so many decisions throughout the day. So we need to, you know, we need to factor that in. We need to, we need to think about, okay, when I'm tired and when my brain has been working all day, late in the evening, I'm very likely, like the majority of people, to want to snack or to make poorer decisions around our health and fitness and our goals. So having that habit in place where fruit and high protein foods are more readily available than your more potentially more palatable foods is a really, it's just a really sensible thing to do, especially if fat loss is the goal. Okay, moving forwards, the next habit is more regarding movement than it is food, and it's all about your neat, which if you've listened to my podcast before, you may have heard me talk about briefly. And neat is your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. So what this means is, or what this is, is any movement that you do outside of normal, outside of like dedicated exercise. So it's not going to the gym, it's not running or anything like that. It's things like general daily movement, like standing, fidgeting, walking, talking with your hands. And these neat levels can massively differ between people, um, sometimes by hundreds or even thousands of calories a day, to be honest. Um, but what this means is two people can do exact like identical gym sessions, but have completely different fat loss outcomes. Simply because if when if you know, take diet out of it, but if we're just just purely looking at movement, if you had two identical twins and they were doing the same sessions, the same gym sessions, and they were eating the same foods, one might lose weight quicker, and this usually is because their neat levels are higher. It might be that they've racked up more general movement, maybe they've got a job where they're more on their feet, maybe they take the escalator more often, maybe they park the car further away from work to make their walk to work a little bit longer. It's and these, this, this neat, this non-exercise activity is a huge uh portion of our daily expenditure each day. More, more um percent, a bigger percentage than actual exercise itself, believe it or not. So having being mindful of this and making decisions around how much you move through the day actually is of huge benefit. So if you're somebody, for instance, that is sat at a desk all day, it would be a sensible thing to have a little timer on, to stand up and walk around a couple of a few times each day. That will make so much difference. And as I say, like parking the car further away from work or on your lunch break choosing to go for a walk rather than sit at your desk and scroll on Instagram. Um because your neat levels will have a big impression on your energy output, which of course is part of your when we're looking at fat loss, we need to look at we mostly need to look at nutrition. What's coming in is gonna be like a huge is gonna be the king, really, in my opinion, of of what happens to your body over time. But output certainly has an impression as well. And if we inc but a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking that they just need to do more gym sessions, more exercise, more running, when actually, if we just look at general daily movement and increasing that, even if it's from like let's say you're doing 6,000 steps a day, increasing that to 7,000 steps a day will have a big impression on your overall energy expenditure each day. So the second habit is increasing your neat, essentially. Third habit, sleep. And I'm not a sleep expert, so I'll keep this short and sweet, but sleep plays such a vital role in fat loss and a much bigger role than people realise. And I appreciate that I'm I'm talking about this from a privileged position. I don't have children, I work for myself, I know that sleep isn't always in somebody's control, but where possible getting decent sleep is gonna make a heck of a lot of difference to you if you are dieting, or just make a difference to you whether you're dieting or not, to be quite honest. Because sleep restriction has been shown in research to increase ghrelin, decrease leptin, and increase just subjective hunger. So what that means is we get an increase of ghrelin is like our hunger hormone. So our hunger goes up and our leptin, our fullness cue, goes down. So even if you're not physically hungry, your brain on sleep restriction will tell you that you you are. It basically tells you I need energy. And so it's easy then to fall into reaching for high-energy foods, um, energy dense foods, sugars, carbs. Um, and on top of that, it increases, so a lack of sleep increases your preference of high calorie, high palatable foods. So it's not like your hunger goes up and you crave chicken breasts and salads. No, your hunger goes up, but you're craving those addictive foods, which are not a problem, but we all know we need to have in moderation. And they're hard to have in moderation when you're sleep deprived because you want to just keep going and going and going. So if you're somebody that sort of says, Oh, I just I always lose control at night, or I always good all day, and then after dinner I I screw it up, which is so common, by the way. What you're actually experiencing is a biological response, essentially. You're more tired, and that is driving an increase in appetite. Combine that with what we talked about earlier, where your brain is more tired, and of course you're gonna be reaching for the chocolate. You're not gonna be like, oh, I'll just have a little bit more lettuce. Like, that's not gonna happen, is it? So the three main habits, they're the three main ones, I would say. So to recap, we've talked about making our um making our foods readily available, making our environment, you know, our environment um more successful for us. So it our changing our environmental design. We then talked a little bit off the back of that about decision fatigue. Um, we talked about increasing our neat levels, and we talked about getting more sleep. There is another one that is often overlooked, so number four, and that is meal structure. So outside of um calorie tracking and outside of um, you know, weighing out your foods and that kind of thing, um we want to think about what time of day we're eating. And that is not me saying that it's got anything to do with, oh, when you eat after a certain time, it's your metabolism, nothing like that. Your body doesn't know what time it is in terms of like, oh, I'm gonna stop burning fat after a certain hour. No, that's BS. What I'm saying is your body likes routine. When your meals are at random times, your hunger signals become a little bit chaotic. And so therefore, your appetite regulation is more difficult. Appetite regulation is actually influenced by a combination of your hunger hormone and leptin, your your fullness hormone, and and a range of kind of gut-brain signaling that's going on. So, and these all of these hormones respond really well to consistency. So if your meal timings are quite stable, for example, you always eat breakfast at eight, you always eat lunch at 12, you always have an afternoon snack at three, you always have dinner at seven, your hunger will fall in line with that. Your hunger will become more predictable. And but the alternative to that is if we're eating at random times, which is why it's so hard for like shift workers and that kind of thing, your hunger becomes erratic. And then your cravings off the back of that can feel really more a lot more intense and more impulsive. So having your meal times at a certain time at the same time every day, if possible, is going to be super helpful for you. So that's your four habits. And then finally, there is a habit that sort of ties all of this together. Consistency. But crucially, I should, and this is hard, but I should say consistency without perfection. Because, and this is something that I I'm constantly learning about myself and teaching my ladies that I work with because it is so common, this I this perfectionist mindset, this all-or-nothing mindset, but we know that fat loss is not about executing the perfect day and the perfect week and the perfect meals. It's about executing a sort of average, good enough pattern repeatedly over time. And the people I see succeeding with fat loss and keeping the fat off aren't the ones that don't go out to dinner and they never deviate from the plan. They are just the ones that recover quickly from those deviated plans. So they've got all of these habits in place and then they stick to it consistently, but they also understand it does it's never going to be perfect because we don't live in a perfect world. And I think that component, bringing all of those four habits, four key habits together with consistency, consistency, I feel like the four habits are a little present, and you wrap it all up with a bow called consistency. And that bow, I think, is coaching. I think that is where coaching becomes really important because most people don't need more information. You probably already know calorie deficit, weight loss, lift weights, gain muscle. It's not about the lack of information that you've got, it's the fact that you need some structure and some guidance that fits your real life. You need someone to help you sort of translate just eat in a deficit into something that actually works when you've got real life stress, when you've got work stress or social events or low motivation, or you're bloody knackered, or you've got busy weeks, or a busy uh week of socials coming up. That in itself is the gap that coaching fills. So it's one thing having a plan and calorie targets and all of that kind of thing, but coaching pulls all of that together. It's not just about telling you what works, it's actually about building that for your specific life so you can actually live with it and actually apply these things to your life. So if you're struggling to implement these habits and think that coaching could be useful for you, I would love to hear from you. I will pop some details in the show notes. You can apply directly from there. Doesn't tie you in, I'll just send you more information, or you can head to my Instagram and just drop me a line. I'm always here to answer any questions. But for now, that is everything on habits for fat loss, and I will speak to you again next week.