One month on …

A month without a blog post. It’s been a busy month and something had to give. So what have I done since my last post?

Well I visited France, tried Eurostar for the first time (a fan) and last week I ran a half marathon.

Did I feel ready to run? No. Honestly I don’t think I’d prepared enough and I knew it would be hard but wow.

It was hotter than the weather forecast predicted and my knee, even strapped up, didn’t hold out for that long.

For the first 6/7km I thought I was going to be pleased with my time but then the knee really started to hurt. So much so that when the 10km race and half split at 8.5km I really almost turned to finish at 10km.

A very last minute switch back the the half and i limped my way up multiple hills (Birmingham is hilly) and battled cramp right at the end (same point in the race as last year) to eventually get to the end.

Whilst I was really disappointed in myself in terms of time and how I did, I finished it – even when I really didn’t want to and that in itself is a win.

This week I’ve got back to it with a couple of Bootcamps, a strength class and some gym sessions and one small attempt at a run. My knee is still a massive issue but we move.

This week’s mission? Eat less!

Why is diet such a dirty word?

Mention diets and lots of people lose their mind.

You shouldn’t diet, diets are bad for you, they’ll never work, it’s all about a healthy lifestyle and so on and so forth.

What is really an issue is our mental associations with the word diet.

On a basic level we all have a diet. Whatever you currently eat, that is your diet.

What we generally mean when we refer to a diet of course though is an attempt to lose weight.

And there is nothing wrong with that. Maybe you’ve been told by a doctor you could benefit from losing weight for your health. Maybe you’d just feel a bit better in yourself if you did. The fact is unless you are already underweight it is ok to want to lose weight and, you know what, to do that you’re going to have to create a calorie deficit. Which is, a diet.

And diets don’t have to be bad. When we think about the bad rap the word diet gets, really what we dislike is the diet mentality.

Some of the habits and thoughts that can arise from fad diets and a lack of knowledge can create a bad mindset around food and exercise.

That doesn’t mean diets themselves are always bad though. When we talk about making it a lifestyle choice instead of a diet, what we mean is make it sustainable, so it fits into your lifestyle instead of being something you can’t keep up.

So are some diets not great for you long term, for your mindset, of course. Does that mean diets in themselves are bad – not at all. The key is how we are viewing the diet and ourselves during the process and avoiding the negative diet mentalities that are naturally ingrained in many of us.

What Healthy Is

Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

Being healthy is not:

Being a certain weight

Being a certain size or shape

Being ripped / having defined visible muscle

Being able to run a distance in a certain time

Being able to lift really heavy weights

Eating really strictly

All these things can be a result of being healthy but in themselves they are not indicative off being healthy.

I know people who live incredibly disciplined lifestyles and look in great shape. They are undoubtedly fit. That doesn’t mean they are healthy.

You can be in great shape but have difficulty managing your training and beat yourself up if you don’t stick to your training schedule and feel like you must do a certain amount each day.

You can be in great shape but beat yourself up for eating certain foods or having some time off from your normal diet, or find yourself being careful on nights out to avoid causing damage to your fitness.

You can have an Instagram worthy routine and lifestyle and find yourself turning down social events because it would interrupt that.

Equally you can be a little bigger than you’d like and eat a more rounded diet and still be fit and healthy, and importantly healthy in more way than just one, because you know that not doing things perfectly doesn’t matter.

That’s not to say I think being overweight is healthy. If you don’t do any exercise and eat too much that is likely to lead to health problems and not be healthy.

We don’t have to live to an extreme though and a balance where we eat well and move (preferably in a way we enjoy) to allow us to feel good and enjoy life is probably the healthiest way to be.

Weight Loss is Simple

Losing weight is easy.

Like literally all you need to do is consume fewer calories than you burn. Simple.

If that were the case why would a large proportion of the population be on a diet almost constantly.

Now factually it is correct that the actual mechanism for losing weight is ridiculously straight forward, the fitness industry over the years has created all these rules and systems for creating a calorie deficit but the actual principle remains remarkably simple.

Losing weight isn’t easy though is it?

Because people aren’t machines, we all do things that aren’t optimal for us, we have emotions and whilst we might know what would be best for us doing it doesn’t always seem quite so straight forward.

So the notion that losing weight is simple because the actual method of losing weight is simple doesn’t really help much. What we need to be able to do is work on our own obstacles and find ways to overcome them.

Depending on how much weight you want to lose and where your starting point is, those obstacles will be very different and some much harder to overcome than others. That’s why someone looking to lose a couple of pounds before their holiday is going to have a very differ net weight loss experience to someone with health issues who is looking to lose a couple of stone or more.

Understanding that just because something is theoretically simple doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy or straight forward in real life is the first step to being able to actually work towards weight loss.

Are the Scales Bad?

Scales get a bad rap.

These days multiple PTs will tell you to throw them out, so should you wiegh yourself?

Now he thing to remember is they are pretty inaccurate. The flooring your on, the make and model will affect the reading, what you’re wearing, the time of day, how hydrated you are, when you last went to the toilet, what you ate and when. All these things will affect the number on the scales.

It’s for this reason generally PTs are at pains to tell clients not to be too worried about that number. You could weigh yourself several times a day / week and get vastly different results.

And it’s not just that, what’s the right weight anyway. Most people know BMI isn’t the most accurate measure of a healthy weight and one person at a certain weight can look drastically different to another person the same weight. More than that you can be very slender and light and far less healthy or fit than someone bigger or healthier. So what weight do you even aim to be?

So weight monitoring isn’t the best motivating progress tool around. You have a week where you do everything right and still out on weight because of hormones or something else and then end up feeling disenchanted because what else are you supposed to do. This can end up being the thing that makes people think f**k it and give up.

Of course there are other ways to measure progress, but does that mean the scales should go?

I never quite managed to throw them out. I feel like knowing their limitations is enough and the fact is they can work for you. Regardless what the number is, if you weigh yourself at longer intervals, say monthly, you can see a trend of progress over time that should take into account fluctuations across the month. Another way to use them is the opposite end of the scale (no pun intended) and weighing yourself every day. If you do this you can get used to the fluctuations and the drastic up and down changes that do occur and as well as starting to see a pattern over time, this way also allows you to get used to and accept the daily changes you naturally see in weight.

Scales can be used as a tool to help you monitor your progress if you allow yourself to acknowledge that weight loss is never linear, and will happen over a period of time rather than on a day by day basis. The day to day fluctuations are just that.

Why Slower Weight Loss Is Better

Helps develop good habits
It’s more likely to be fat (rather than water) that you lose
Studies have found people with slower fat loss tended to lose less muscle mass thus helping with body composition (i.e. what you body looks like s your lose weight)
You are less likely to get loose skin, stretch marks (This is never guaranteed of course)
You are less likely to suffer health issues as a result
You are less likely to get brittle, dry hair
You will have more (not less) energy
You’re more likely to maintain it longer term

Why did you get fat?

When it comes to diets, we talk a lot about what to do to lose weight.

We talk less about how we got to the point where we needed to lose weight. Yet the understanding of how we got to a point where we were unhappy with our weight is actually pretty essential.

Of course we know the basic of ‘I was eating more than I was burning’ that’s why I put on weight, I don’t mean that.

I mean honest self reflection, as in what specifically was causing you to eat more calories than you burnt?

Was it nights out at the weekend and the hangover food the next day?
Was it a nightly chocolate and wine binge?
Was it emotional eating? If so what specific situations were causing it?
Was it lack of knowledge surrounding food?
Was it eating ’good’ ‘super’ foods like avocado on toast every day, which certainly have nutritional benefits but are way higher in calories than you small bowl of cereal?
Was it never counting the coffee shop coffees and sauces you added to meals each day?

There are loads of reasons we put on weight, some can be hidden calories and from a lack of knowledge, some are linked to lifestyle, some are linked to our mental health. When we identify specifically the reasons we put on weight, down to the specifics of certain situations causing us to over eat, we can look at how to combat it.

Because it’s no good saying on Monday I’ll eat less this week if weekends are your issue and you don’t have a plan, as come Saturday you’ll over consume on calories and be back at square one. Whereas if you know weekends are your sticking point you can look at a strategy. Maybe that’s eating less Monday to Friday so you can eat more over the weekend. Maybe it’s having a plan to reduce your weekend intake (lower calorie drinks, less alcohol so you crave hangover food less the next day, trying different types of nights out some weeks etc.).

If your trigger is a bad day at work causing you to binge on chocolate and wine mid week then saying I’ll be good this week isn’t going to cut it. You need to look at what’s causing the bad days at work or how else you can make yourself feel better after a rubbish day (phoning a friend for a rant instead of opening the wine or having a long bath for instance).

Once you know why you put on weight it becomes much easier to look at how you can cut back on the calories. That doesn’t mean never doing those things again, but if we really want change we do need to make changes to wat we currently do.

Skinny

I post my blog posts in full on Instagram.

In truth it probably hurts my blog, because I could refer people to the blog link and get more traffic, but actually the point of this blog was always to try and provide useful content, and if I post the full posts on social media more people will see it. If a few more people see it that is better than me just having better metrics on a blog.

But anyway, when you post on Instagram you obviously have to use a picture. I don’t really pay much attention to the picture, the post is what i focus on, sometimes I don’t even put anything vaguely related.

Yesterday though I posted a blog about Slimming World so I used an old photo of me back in the Slimming World sort of time, when my relationship with food wasn’t really that healthy. I was thin though. Arguably too thin, it wasn’t healthy or good for me and it was hard work to stay around 9 1/2 stone at almost 6 foot. I sit much more comfortably around 13/14 stone, I am much healthier with more fat on my body. My relationship with food is much healthier now days. I do think I need to lose a bit of weight these days (knees and running dislike my post lockdown weight) but even pre lockdown when I was fit and healthy and really quite happy with my body I was much bigger than I was in the photo I used.

I got more likes on this post than normal. I got 80% more traffic and views according to my insight page than any post this year.

Now maybe the blog post was just so well written it got a lot more traction, would be nice to think, but I know I’m not much of a writer. I think it was a picture of a much thinner me that did it.

We are conditioned to just see thinner bodies more positively, internet algorithms prefer thinner bodies, we look at people that have lost weight and think wow that’s great, it doesn’t occur to us they could actually be really ill and that’s why. Our brains are conditioned to equate thin with healthy.

I’m not a massive body positive movement supporter. Like most things I think it’s too complicated to simply look at it as black and white, and much like super thin doesn’t mean healthy, nor is being overweight always ok.

I think it highlights how we need to think beyond weight and scales and size in terms of health more than ever though. Are your habits healthy, are you fit and well, are you always tired, and you always stressed or sad, do you feel confident and good, are you doing exercise you actually enjoy? Fitness and health is more than one body type as much as it’s more than one way of training or one way of eating.

Not Losing Weight?

You’re tracking calories but not losing weight. Why?

You aren’t logging everything. Sauces, the odd biscuit, left overs, these all have calories too.
You’re underestimating your portion sizes. Apps like MyFitnessPal will bring up various portion sizes when you search and what you’re eating may be more than this amount.
You’re free pouring things. Again this comes back to portion size, you could be roughly working out your portion but underestimating it. That one bowl of cereal your tracking could in reality be more like 2.5 bowls to MyFitnessPal
You don’t log your drinks. Alcohol, coffee shop coffees, these can have more calories than a full on meal at times so if you aren’t logging them your stats aren’t acurate.
You have cheat meals. Calling something a cheat mean doesn’t mean it’s calorie free, it does mean you’re more likely to go over board and consume way more calories than you think.
Your eating your ‘exercise’ calories. Your watch is telling you you’ve burnt 500 calories so you’re adding an extra 500 calories to your daily allowance.
Your picking the ‘best’ version of a food in MyFitnessPal. Be honest, when you search a food on MFP you will see some questionable entries. As tempting as it might be to go with that really low one to make your data look better the food doesn’t have fewer calories in real life because you’ve done this.
You track daily rather than across a week and scrap a day if it’s ‘bad’. It’s what we do over time that matters not one really good or really bad day. If you stop tracking on days where you know you’re going to end up ‘over’ calories and then start again the next day you won’t see you’re true picture of how you did over the week.
Food on other people’s plate doesn’t count. In my head I live by this rule but it is of course bollocks
Your calorie goal isn’t right for you. Maybe it’s too low and restrictive so you keep ending up ‘binging’. Maybe it was right for you but you’ve lost weight and now it’s just a bit too high or you’ve changed your activity level and it needs adjusting.

The thing to remember is that if you are eating less than you are burning on a regular basis your weight will reduce. Regardless of what you track, if this isn’t happening you are going wrong somewhere with tracking. We all under or over estimate our food intake at times but if you are serious about creating change you need to have an honest look at your habits and see where you are cutting corners and look to rectify those little habits.

Why Scales Aren’t The Best

1) Your weight fluctuates. A lot.

The time of day, time of the month, how much water you have drunk, how much alcohol you have drunk, when you last had a poo, your hormones. They will all affect the number on the scale so it’s not the most effective way to track your progress and using weighing yourself alone can be inaccurate and disheartening.

2) A number on the scales won’t make you happy.

Being comfortable in your body won’t automatically happen when you hit a certain number on the scales. Everybody has some body hand ups regardless of their weight or size. Focusing on feeling strong and healthy will help you feel more positive about yourself in a way a number can’t and help prevent an all or nothing kind of outlook on your fitness journey, where how well you week went depends on one number.

3) Your weight isn’t an indication of your health or fitness level.

Have you ever seen one of those line ups of several women who all weight 60kg. You could weight the same as someone else and have a totally different body shape. Someone who is a size 10 could weigh the same as someone who wears a size 14. Height, muscle, body type – how we ‘wear’ a certain weight is different from person to person, and, unless you are medically obese, how fit or healthy you are has little to do with the number on the scale.

Just a note – muscle doesn’t weight more than fat. A pound of muscle weights a pound and a pound of fat weighs a pound. However muscle is less dense, so if you reduce body fat and build muscle you might not weigh less but you will look leaner.