This week, John is back from a long podcasting hiatus to cut through the noise od focus on the absolute essentials of weight loss that take precedence over every other consideration.
There are really only two things you need to do to accomplish your weight loss goals. Rather than creating a cookie-cutter approach, following these two principles will simplify your path while helping you to tailor your program to your needs.
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
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Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
This week, John is back from a long podcasting hiatus to cut through the noise od focus on the absolute essentials of weight loss that take precedence over every other consideration.
There are really only two things you need to do to accomplish your weight loss goals. Rather than creating a cookie-cutter approach, following these two principles will simplify your path while helping you to tailor your program to your needs.
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU
Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
EWO 15 - the only diet
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[00:00:00] Well, hello everybody. It's been a little while. It's good to be back. I'm going to say the same thing I say every time I take a few weeks off and then come back. I really hope to do this regularly. That's a dream. But I'm really glad to be here. Cause today I have a topic that's really important and I think it's going to be really eye opening for you and it's going to really help in basically anything you want to accomplish in life. First off.
Now you probably first saw me on tech doc but you may, follow me on Instagram or YouTube, or you might be signed up for the newsletter, which I'm going to try to have a link in the show notes for the newsletter signup. I realized that a lot of people don't know about that and I've been doing it for a long time and a lot of people haven't been able to enjoy it.
So hop on that. It's not a lot of spam. It's a lot of educational, inspirational content, just like you'd get here on the podcast, just in written form. Because believe it or not, it's actually easier for me to [00:01:00] express myself in writing a lot of the times even more so than talking, you know how much I love talking.
So no matter where you came from I really want you to get into the Facebook group, lose weight with John. There's a link for that as well in the show notes. Because I've put so much cool stuff in there that's free. It's in the guide section of the group. We have an emotional eating webinar, workshop, whatever you want to call it.
I've got numerous older podcast episodes up that I think are really good. So yeah, be sure to go over there. Lose weight with John. Sign up there. And if you give me your email as you sign up for the group, that will also get you signed up into the newsletter. So you could two birds, one stone, right?
The Weight Loss Freedom Academy is rockin and rollin we're about six months in. I've taught most of the course for that by now. And now we're moving into the very last phases [00:02:00] of the coursework.
And it's really exciting to see the people who have kept up with the coursework. Seeing the way it's affected their lives and the changes they're seeing. Yeah, it's just a really great group and this is slowly but surely kind of taking over for my one to one coaching because the group setting is really powerful in a lot of ways.
One to one is good, but the group setting has probably more advantages. And plus, when we need it, we can always jump on a call and do our one to one or whatever. So yeah, if you're looking to make a big change, if you're ready to Like go of emotional eating and reconnect with your innate motivation.
And you want me to guide you through that process. Then hit me up, email me, talk to me about coaching can't hurt. Worst case scenario. I get to know you which is always nice. Let's
see. I've got a book in the works.
The book centers around what I call the only diet. That's the title of the book. I [00:03:00] think because if you've If you're in the weight loss freedom Academy, then, you know, the very first module I take you through basically explains why there is only one diet for weight loss. And that sounds like it might be suggesting a cookie cutter solution.
Nothing could be further from the truth. When you understand the only diet for weight loss, it's based around two principles. I'm not going to get into it today. Heck, maybe I should just get into it.
Yeah, fine. F it.
So
I won't bury the lead. I'm writing a book based on this concept, but I'm going to go ahead and throw a couple of the concepts your way right now. There is only one diet for weight loss and that is get yourself into a calorie deficit and then manage the stress that deficit causes. Cause every calorie deficit causes stress.
This is something we don't talk about enough. It's one of the many topics that we should talk more about and less about carbs and a bunch of other [00:04:00] crap. When stress management is the number one task for somebody who wants to lose weight in the long run. That's why the only diet, I also call it the stress management diet.
So, what kind of stress has happened when we go into a calorie deficit? Well, let's go back in time, in the Wayback Machine, to when we are, running around in bands of 120 people on the plains of Central Asia, or Africa, wherever.
The biggest things that were a threat to your life were a lack of clean water, a lack of food, and a lack of food. And a lack of proper shelter
Our relationship to survival really centered around lack. This is why so many of our mentalities today center around lack that keep us stuck and keep us, in these impoverished mindsets.
So if you're suddenly without one of the things that your body needs more than anything to survive. Your brain is going to start to freak out about that. It's going to say this becomes number one priority. And if you think about things that are [00:05:00] stressing you out, it's not because they're not a priority.
It's because your brain is screaming at you saying this needs to get taken care of.
Or someone else is screaming at you saying this needs to get taken care of.
And when you go into a calorie deficit And remember for a calorie deficit to be significant in any way toward weight loss, it has to be sustained over time. So it's not like this happens if you go one day into a calorie deficit. This obviously starts to accrue after a few days and then more and more as days become weeks and weeks become months.
The stresses are psychological, the stresses are physiological.
If you diet too hard, if you get in too deep of a calorie deficit, you're gonna start to mess with your hormones, your sleep's gonna go to crap,
hunger regulation is gonna get real wonky.
There are sensory adaptations as well, where suddenly food will start smelling better and will start tasting better. Now you can use this to your advantage because now your quote unquote diet food, which is usually, whole food based, hopefully [00:06:00] And if you've struggled to eat that way in the past, one of the ways to really learn to love whole foods is to be in a calorie deficit because you're going to like them more when you're in a calorie deficit.
Why? Because your brain is trying to get you to eat more. So it's making what you eat more pleasurable to your senses. So if you have some Diet management techniques to remain consistent in a moderate calorie deficit, then actually you'll start to enjoy the food you are eating more, and that can make it more sustainable.
However, it also for some people makes it very hard to say no to, seconds, or an extra portion, or some, something that they've been craving. , if you're in a calorie deficit. You're going to lose weight. There's really not many ways around that. People are obsessed with genes and hormones. It's like, listen, okay, think of somebody in your life who they've got terrible genes and they've got terrible [00:07:00] hormones and they're sure that's why they can't lose weight.
And then we get them to sign up for. An experiment. And we get them to sign paperwork that allows us to pretty much do anything. And they didn't read the paperwork, which works out because what we're going to do is we're going to throw them in a prison cell. And
you and I are going to control what they eat day in and day out.
And they simply do not have the ability anymore to eat more calories than what we're prescribing for them. Does that person not lose any weight? I think if anybody wants to try this, I've got a jail cell, it's technically an Airbnb. You rent the Airbnb, I lock you in a cell and then yeah, it's weight loss camp.
No, that would be actually, that probably could get people to sign up for that, but it would work is what I'm saying is that if you were truly If you were truly throttling down your calories into a caloric deficit, , anybody in this space, you've heard people come to you and say, Oh, I was in a calorie deficit for [00:08:00] 17 weeks and I didn't lose a single pound. Any weight loss coaches heard that one and it's like, well then you weren't in a calorie deficit.
You'll know you're in a calorie deficit when you're losing weight. If you're not losing weight, you're not in a deficit for 99% of the time. It's that simple. Now, here's when things do get a little more complicated. When stress levels get really high. So when stress levels get really high.
Because you're in too deep of a deficit or you've been in even a moderate deficit for too long. All of a sudden things like your sleep can start to go out of whack. And if your sleep goes out of whack, you're not going to be recovering from your exercise as well. There might be inflammation, bloating, water retention.
Also there are psychological ways that I've seen. I see people's brains mess with them all the time. You know, one thing that I see is have you ever experienced where you're like let's say you're 360 pounds and you're trying to get down to three 50 and you work really hard to get down to 3 [00:09:00] 51, 3 50, 1 0.23, 50.4, and you're like, okay, tomorrow's gonna be the day.
And then it's three 50.6, and then you're like, okay, come on. I'm gonna really dial it in. And then you really do everything perfect. And it's, 3 51 again. And it's just like days and days, of coming so close, three 50.2 and you're like, okay, tomorrow surely is gonna be the day. And then of course, you know it's not, it's 3 51 0.4 all of a sudden when you've been at the sticking point for a whole week.
That's really common. I think that these things happen. They can happen at any phase if the body is unhappy or if something in the psyche is dysregulated. But what can happen is your body can choose to hold on to water. And when it does that, you tend to hold water in the places where you also hold the most fat.
So this can actually, this can really trick you because if your fat cells are holding a bunch of water, it just feels like fat to the casual observer. . So you [00:10:00] lose hope, and then you eat. If you've done this in the past, you started workout plan, you start a diet plan and then you get stuck at some point, you hit a plateau and then you quit.
If there's a piece of your psyche that doesn't want you to lose weight. I'm not saying there is, but if there were, you just gave it the exact game plan. And this is why so many people, they hit a plateau real early on and then they quit. They don't have to wait that long before they hit a plateau. Is there something in everybody's psyche that's...
Sabotaging them, that's a much more complex topic for some people. Absolutely. Other people, not so much for me, I definitely experienced that. So I I know firsthand how real it is,
but patience wins the day. If you're consistent over time, these things work themselves out. And what's called the whoosh effect when for whatever reason you've been holding on to a lot of water and you haven't been losing weight and then all of a sudden your body goes, okay, fine. And it just will just let it out all [00:11:00] at once.
I've seen people lose multiple pounds in a day.
When that happens.
So yeah, people do have a hard time getting into a calorie deficit. There's a lot of mistakes people make they will. Take some random number that arbitrary number that someone gave them and run with that and then, be baffled when either it's so extreme that they end up quitting or it's not a significant calorie deficit at all for them.
Or they go into a calorie deficit, but then they start becoming a lot more listless and sedentary and they're not looking after their exercise and their activity. And all of a sudden they're not burning as many calories, right? There's a lot of ways you can screw up a basic calorie deficit.
However, when it comes to comparing the two, getting into a calorie deficit versus staying there, I think staying there presents far more strategic. Emotional, psychological challenges,
Learning how to get into an effective calorie deficit. That's something that, [00:12:00] if I sat you down in a room for 20 minutes and you followed a list of things I told you to do, you'd be fine. You know how to do that for the rest of your life, but being compliant in the longterm where we really actually lose the weight.
That's where there's just such a greater variety of factors and variables and externalities. They can swoop in and complicate the picture. Just when you think you've seen it all of a sudden there's a new wrinkle and a new challenge to figure out. And these challenges are many. It's everything from well, I'd say there's temptation comes in about four different types.
There's temptation that, you know, to predict, like you're going to a wedding. There's going to be a cake, you know, the cake is a thing for you. Okay. Then there's temptation that you you could prevent, right? I don't need to buy ice cream, so I'm not going to put it in my house. And if I did leave it in my house and then I was tempted, okay, that's a different class of temptation.
Another very common one that hangs [00:13:00] people up, even after they've gotten really good at dealing with the first two, is, Oh, Debbie brought cupcakes to the office because it's so and so's birthday. And It's so unexpected that you haven't prepared yourself mentally for it, and, you know, catches you on the wrong day, and those cupcakes are just eating at you from the inside out.
And eventually, you just get worn down, and you eat a bunch of cupcakes. I guess that's three. Which, I could probably force a fourth one, I could probably think of one, but, ah.
Maybe the fourth situation is things like travel where you literally can't predict a lot of what's going to happen. You can't prep all your meals, just like you do at work. You can't know exactly what restaurants they're going to have in the airport in Charlotte.
And that is a little bit more difficult as well. That's a higher level of remaining consistent, being able to do so on the fly. Without stressing yourself out too much.
Now, every person is going to have their own particular flavor of struggle when it comes to [00:14:00] remaining consistent on a calorie deficit or workout plan for a considerable amount of time.
I'll talk about that a bit, but before I do that, let's talk about the fact that if you don't end your deficit, Your body will
weight loss is a biological adaptation that our bodies undertake when they're faced with a significant and sustained calorie deficit. Why? Because the amount of calories you burn in a day relates heavily to your mass. No pun intended.
Now, we're not talking about the difference between losing fat versus lean tissue, yet we're just talking about weight. You will lose weight in a calorie deficit because your body wants to burn fewer calories
so that it can create an equilibrium with its new food supply.
And it will try to do this even if you have plentiful fat stores a lot of the time. Why? Because, hey, it's like if you lose your job all of a sudden and you're living off your savings, wouldn't you maybe get rid of some [00:15:00] unnecessary expenditures just to make your savings last that much longer? Your brain's thinking the same thing.
That's why even though people have, dozens or hundreds of pounds of fat available on their frame, the body will still choose to reduce lean tissue if that person's not careful. I won't get into that in this podcast but it's an important topic, how to preserve lean mass when you're in a calorie deficit.
So if you go into, let's say a 750 calorie deficit after 12 weeks, you're not in a 750 calorie deficit. Your body weight has gone down. Hopefully, right. It's a significant deficit. The weight loss math nerds would tell you that's about a pound and a half a week of fat. If you're losing fat.
But let's say you're just losing two pounds a week and three quarters of it is fat and a quarter of that is lean mass, which is actually a pretty good ratio. It's normal to lose a little bit of lean mass as you're losing fat.
So you lose two pounds a week for 12 weeks.
Well, [00:16:00] now you're 24 pounds lighter. And if you were 240 pounds when you started, now you're 216. Did my math go, did I do that right? Yeah, well, you're considerably less heavy, so you're not going to burn as many calories at rest and you're not going to necessarily burn as many calories while you're exercising, especially if that exercise is done under your body weight.
If you're riding an exercise bike, probably not a huge difference in the caloric expenditure. But if you're running, yeah, that's going to be a considerable difference. And it's going to affect the calories you burn while walking as well. Now, oftentimes these can be made up for by improvements in fitness that come because of weight loss.
There's a yin and yang to all things,
but it's quite possible that after 12 weeks of sustained dieting caloric restriction, I should say,
you're no longer in a 750 calorie deficit by the end of that 12 weeks, your deficit might only be 450 calories or 350 calories.
And that's why thought person was steadily [00:17:00] losing to two and a half pounds per week at the beginning. By the end, they might only be losing, one and a half pounds a week. And that will continue to dwindle until it's zero pounds a week. And the body has just acclimatized completely to 750 fewer calories a day on average.
The body's kind of amazing like that, and it will ruin your diet. However it's doing it using the mechanism that gets the weight off in the first place. So you just remember that weight loss is absolutely possible, but you have to end it. You have to have an exit strategy or your body will end it for you.
And that's going to be a punishing experience, especially if you're fighting that and you still want to keep losing weight at the same rate. It's going to be very hard to do that for months and months. So yeah, when you go into a calorie deficit, it's good to have an exit strategy.
It's good to have a rough idea of, okay, here's the minimum amount of time I probably want to be in this deficit. And here's probably the maximum amount of [00:18:00] time. And then check in with your body, check in with the scale, check in with your coach, check in with me. Or if your doctor is overseeing your weight loss, right?
And make the smartest decision you possibly can. And then we come out of that deficit, we go to maintenance and obviously maintenance at two 40 is probably going to be a little bit higher than maintenance at two 16, but now we find our maintenance at two 16. And just by playing around, watching the scale, going to gain four or five pounds of water weight as we come out of a caloric deficit.
So, you know, wait, hangs out around two 20 to 21. You know, you're basically haven't gained any fat. And your maintenance calories is 300 or 3, 200 calories a day instead of 3, 400. And taking that opportunity to take a maintenance break is really helpful because this is when you're learning how to maintain weight that you've lost long term. And the longer you spend. In a maintenance period, the [00:19:00] better because you have put your body through a stressful situation and depending on the person, this can be super stressful or mildly stressful and really depends on the person how much time they need to take.
But, a rule of thumb I've heard from Dr. Mike Ezratel from Renaissance Periodization. He talks about doing Half to two thirds of the time that you were in a calorie deficit. So he takes this very seriously. And his recommendations are pretty extreme.
So if you were in a 12 week deficit, he would say, take a break at maintenance for at least six weeks. Interesting. I think a lot of the people he's talking to are strength athletes, physique athletes, bodybuilders, weightlifters often. I've heard him talk about this in the context of, extreme weight issues.
And he spoke about it in the same terms, you know, it's just saying like, well, if you're 500 pounds, lose 50 pounds staff after about 10%, take that time, whatever long it took, take [00:20:00] that time, half of that in maintenance and then go into another calorie deficit. And he's like, listen, yeah, it seems like it's going to take this long time, but.
Really you're not in a caloric deficit that whole time, which means you're just living life. And you're going through periods of losing and then maintaining and then losing and then maintaining. And the alternative, a lot of the time is to just end up hitting a plateau, grinding yourself to a halt and then quit.
Whereas this way, it's a little bit slower, it takes a bit more patience, but you are more likely to arrive at your goal weight. Feeling healthy, happy, bright eyed, bushy tailed, and prepared through at least one or two or three, maybe maintenance periods that you did at various like little terraces along the way, the little self imposed plateau that you created through maintenance.
Shure MV7: And I've come back after editing just to make sure that I'm clear here that you don't have to do this. This is, , a very smart man's. Recommendation, but it's one recommendation you don't have to [00:21:00] do. , these extremely long maintenance periods, if you don't want to sometimes. If you're very, very heavy. There is a sense of urgency. And.
Once you're making progress. You don't want to stop. Um, Really just realized that breaks are a great idea. , and keep in mind that, yeah, you just want to be in the driver's seat of your weight loss and not feel like. You're just putting so much stress on your body and driving it so hard that eventually it. You know, the wheels fall off. Um, that's ultimately the goal. And however you do that, that's totally up to you.
So I just wanted to make clear there isn't one set way. Anybody has to think about this or go about it.
So we know that there's a beginning and an end to a caloric deficit, and the more that we plan the end of the caloric deficit, and the more we understand what we want to see before we end the deficit. Like, all right, if I'm losing three pounds a day at the beginning, I'm a big guy, right? So if I'm losing three pounds a day, I might continue going [00:22:00] until I'm down to about a pound and a half on average a week.
And if I start to feel crappy, my sleep starts to go and I'm on point with my nutrition, meaning I'm getting my recommended daily allowance of my vitamins and minerals. I'm just in a calorie deficit doing so from ticking all my boxes. If I'm managing my stress, I've just been in this diet for quite a while and it's grinding to a halt.
Okay. Right. I stuck it out. For at least, the last two weeks, I'm like, is there a whoosh? Is there a whoosh? Is there a whoosh? No, this is just slowly grinding to a halt. Okay. And then I come out of the deficit. I go to maintenance or what I estimate my maintenance to be watch the scale. If the scale goes too high, drop the calories a little bit.
If I'm still ravenously hungry and the scale is not going up at all, then raise the calories a little bit. So you can just adjust until you find that maintenance.
So whether you choose to take breaks or not, your success is going to revolve around the consistency the [00:23:00] compliance to your caloric deficit. Obviously there's lots of strategies that we can put into place to do caloric deficits intelligently. At the end of the day, if you can't stick to your program, You're screwed.
You're never going to lose weight. So the stress management diet is predicated on this idea that we find the easiest possible way to do everything. We don't go saying, all right, what are the good foods and the bad foods? And we're not doing that. We're not saying, Oh, I got to get rid of all processed foods.
Nope. We're not saying you got to get rid of sugar. Absolutely not. In fact, what I want you to do is make the fewest changes as possible. It's fewest changes necessary. To create a meaningful,
sus significant but sustainable deficit and less is more, especially at the beginning, right? We can always deepen the deficit. It start small, keep it easy. You know, I teach people how to do this in depth in the Weight Loss Freedom Academy. [00:24:00] That's the first thing we go through.
But the key is to look at your diet, to really understand it. And this is a big thing. The stress management diet, the only diet success in general, however you wanna think about it. It's. So improved. Your chances of success are vastly improved if you take stock of your life as you've been living it before you get into the diet.
So many people look for a diet and they're like, okay, I want a diet. What's the diet? Give me the meal plan. Tell me what to eat and I'll eat that and then I'll lose weight. Wrong. You have to take stock of your life. Well, you don't have to. I encourage you to most people have never sat down and said, I would like to lose weight.
Okay. Let me write down five days of eating of what I've been eating for the last few months, just so I can see, okay, what's my baseline. What is my maintenance calories? Most people have no idea what their maintenance calories are when all it requires is counting what you eat. Get a calorie tracking app like you're gonna do like you're gonna go on a diet But don't go on a diet [00:25:00] just track your calories and see what you're eating.
And if it's shockingly high, that's good Because that means your maintenance calories is high, which means if we knock you into a thousand calorie deficit That's gonna be higher than if your maintenance calories were low If your maintenance calories are 4, 000 calories a day and you're horrified by that, realize that it's better than if it was 3, 000 because then when we put you in a calorie deficit, you're going to be eating roughly a thousand more calories given the deficit.
Does that make sense?
Flip side is you go, ah, I'm not actually eating as many calories as I thought. I thought I was going to be eating 4, 000 calories a day, but I eat between 3, 200. And honestly, if I'm looking at my weight, it's really been stable for a long time. I gained a lot of weight in that really stressful time. You know, five months ago, but since then, I've really been staying, staying at whatever the three 50 or four 20.
And that's another thing, note side note, many asterisks side notes on [00:26:00] this one. If you've maintained your weight, I don't care if it's 599 pounds, I don't care if it's a thousand pounds. If you've maintained your weight, that is a victory. You are not gaining. And if you have significant weight to lose, that means you are somebody who's prone to gaining significant amounts of weight.
Therefore, if you can maintain your weight, that is a massive improvement in the right direction. And yeah, that's why I find a lot of clients, they're not actively gaining so much as they're quite often maintaining.
And so you take a food log,
you start to look at your life objectively.
And start to take in all this glorious, beautiful, amazing data that's right there for you to pick up. And once you have all these data points, you have a detailed view of, okay, this is this person's life. What do they eat? How do they move? Okay. You can look at their food log and you can go, okay, they eat [00:27:00] this thing.
That's a lot of people would say that you can't have that on a diet. For instance, like a sugary soda, they drink two sugary sodas a day, but they also eat peanut butter every day. And if you take the calories of the sugary sodas
and compare it to the amount of peanut butter they're eating in a day, the peanut butter is actually more. So what if we could substitute or eliminate the peanut butter? And maybe ask yourself, I, I'm eating more calories of peanut butter. Well, if I had to give up one, which one would I choose the sodas or the peanut butter?
And you might be surprised by the answer. You might go, Oh, I could totally drink diet soda. That's fine. And then you knock out two or 300 calories a day, right? Just like that. Or you're like, I love my sodas. I'd rather remove something else. Maybe I'll remove them in the future. But for right now, John said to do the absolute easiest thing I could.
And for me right now, that's leaving my sodas in my diet. So, you [00:28:00] know what? This peanut butter is so calorically dense, if I get rid of that, or if I substitute it, or if I just heavily moderate it, I can put myself into a calorie deficit, boom, right, just like that, 200 calories a day on average, just by removing peanut butter or mitigating it.
And then I'm gonna find a couple other things that are easy to replace.
You know, I have a bag of chips with my sandwich at lunch. I'm just gonna start taking an apple instead. I kind of like apples. So like, yeah, it's not chips, but I mean, it's worth it. I can do that. And so you shaved off, you know, 50, 70 calories there. And sure enough, you do this in three or four places and all of a sudden you've created a moderate, but 250 calories.
to 750 calories, somewhere in there when you're just starting. And if if you're a smaller person starting closer to 250 is smart. And if you're a bigger person 500 to 750 calories shouldn't be that big of a problem. But it's really also depends on your hunger signals, not necessarily your size, right?
That's, we're talking about [00:29:00] size because we're talking about, Probably what your metabolism is relative to that, but people's metabolisms can vary wildly, even though they can be a bigger person can have a slower metabolism than a smaller person. How you get into your deficit is often the key to a lot of the stress management, because instead of going and picking out any old diet, make a diet. Tailor it to you. It's not that hard. Look at your life, write down the things that you put in your face. Don't change anything, right?
And for a lot of people, this brings up a lot of shame to have to write down the things that they're eating. However, a lot of times simply writing it down and seeing it on paper kind of takes the power away from a lot of it. And they go, I mean, a lot of stuff I just don't really need or even want.
Oftentimes, just writing it down , externalizing it helps you see, Oh, wow. I eat certain things that I'm just mindlessly doing it. I don't really care about it. I had a client who[00:30:00] maybe I did a podcast with her. I think I did, but she started counting her calories. And the first day she.
And she was like, what? That's nuts. And it wasn't like, it wasn't like a big shame spot or anything. She's just like, that's way more than I need. Even I can be in a healthy calorie surplus and be way under 5, 000. And so without even really trying she really averaged 3, 500 calories from there, which was a surplus, but far less.
A lot of times. You might be amazed by what your brain will do for you just by giving it data, just by bringing a little more awareness to your behaviors.
Another good thing about the only diet is that it makes things very simple. I need to be in a calorie deficit. I need to honor the fact that consistency is way more important than any other factor. I don't need to worry about carbs or even protein or fats necessarily. If I'm, if I want to lose weight, That stuff doesn't matter.
I can [00:31:00] lose weight simply by being in a caloric deficit and keeping it there. Now, over time, how you use your macros will help you with that because certain macro distributions are going to be more sustainable than others. Protein is highly satiating, right? Fat is more satiating than carbs for some people, but the right amount of carbs is what some people need to feel balanced and energized and to sleep well.
But your meal timing, . composition super foods, eating this food or that food or drinking this and that none of that matters. It doesn't matter at all. If it does, it's a secondary or tertiary consideration to the primary driver of weight loss, which is calorie deficit.
And so that's what makes the only diet. Actually, not a cookie cutter diet, because it's so focused on the only two principles that really matter, calorie deficit and sustaining that, managing the stress that it creates over time. What it does is it allows you to do it. You want to [00:32:00] do keto? Great. You want to be vegan?
Great. You want to eat only animal products. Great.
It works for any religion. It works for any food system, any culture.
I've coached clients through Ramadan, right? Clients who can't eat certain, you know, who don't eat pork and other clients who don't eat meat at all, or don't eat any sort of animal product. That's never been an impediment in my coaching because my view of weight loss is. grounded in the reality that calorie deficit is king and even more important than calorie deficit, I think is sustainability and stress management.
Now we have to say, if we're going to talk about stress management, the total stress in your life. is going to come from more than just your calorie deficit. And so, to lose weight effectively over time, you often need to take a look at your life and notice where the biggest [00:33:00] stressors are. Because if you can resolve those, if you can create new boundaries that get, that create less stress for you, or open up more of your, personal freedom, take a lot off your plate.
If you can... Make that job change that you've been thinking about doing, but just kind of haven't had the oomph to do. If you can, renegotiate that relationship in your life, maybe it's a family member who's just kind of wearing on you and you can redraw those boundaries. I've seen it happen in so many different ways.
That stress that you lessened now creates more bandwidth for you to introduce stress via diet and exercise. And obviously exercise, whereas it creates stress. a hermetic stress, a healthy stress it's only gonna, you'd have to really overdo it to stress your body, but you'd be surprised how many people do that.
Even though even people who aren't in shape, you start moving your body and it gets to be really addictive and you start doing things you didn't think you could do and you start snapping out of your rut. And usually the thing I have to [00:34:00] tell people to do is pump your brakes. It's the hardest thing when you've just started getting back into a certain activity, especially something you love like me.
I'm a big guy, but I actually like running. And if I get back into it, I'll often start going way too hard because, you realize I miss this. I miss pushing myself. I miss getting better each week. And then, of course, a lot of times. We have this arbitrary standard in our head of Oh, I was this good before.
So I have to be there in order to, feel good about myself. And that's silly.
And that maybe gets us into the topic that I was going to talk about today, which is goals and how they are completely screwing you and your progress in almost every aspect of your life. And goal culture is baked into prioritizing goals and goal setting and goal achievement is. Baked into just every nook and cranny of our culture.
So it probably sounds strange for me to say that your goals are a big factor [00:35:00] in what's screwing you up. But next time I will probably cover that. And that's a good addendum. A lot of what you can do to create more. Peace in your life in general, and especially when it comes to your health and fitness goals is to learn to look at goals differently and avoid the sort of five main pitfalls that I've identified with them.
So for this week, I'll end it there. It's a very broad topic. Like I said, I'm writing a whole book on it. I don't think it's going to be a tome I think it's gonna be pretty lean and mean, but I'll be able to cover most of the topics that people might have questions about. And the good thing is, I remember to tell myself sometimes, like, Hey John, not every book has to include everything because you get to write more than one book.
And maybe for some people that would be a death sentence, but for me it's a benediction. It's like, ugh, that's a relief. I don't have to cram everything into this one book. Yeah, it feels really good to be writing again. I'm excited [00:36:00] to share these ideas with people because mean, I had to learn this stuff because I couldn't find the perspectives I needed. That's ultimately where it all came from.
If you are in a calorie deficit and you're not losing weight, look to your stress management. Look to your sleep. See if you can create more peace in your life so that you can prioritize your fitness and your health, because honestly, whatever stuff is stressing you out, it's not more important than your health.
It really isn't. If you feel like it is, you're just falling into a delusion that it is.
Falling into old stories that you're not allowed to take care of yourself, you're not allowed to put yourself first that something catastrophic is going to happen if you do that. If you're someone who's just starting off, or if you've done this many times and failed, Do two things. Think about your life as it is now.
Think about the average day in your life. The things you eat, the things you do. Write it all down. Just take a snapshot of your, of this life. And hey, if it's a robust life, shall we say, if [00:37:00] it's a very caloric life full of many decadencies and pleasures and emotional eating, write that all down.
Because what may seem like obstacles to you right now. To a coach like me. I see those as areas for opportunity because I know how you can get through every single one of them. And that means that .
However, unhealthy your life feels right now there's really no place for shame in that. Obviously, I understand shame is fairly a common reaction, which, hey, book number two, it's going to be about shame probably. But really what you're giving yourself is invaluable data and you're doing something that very few people ever do.
You want to be someone who doesn't fail. Do the things that people never do before they start one being taken inventory of your life and the things you do and the things you eat and. Once, if you can write it all down in an objective manner, you can assess it in an objective manner and say, of course, and if there's feelings of judgment that come in and try to make you feel bad for what you're eating, say, of [00:38:00] course, I'm eating these things.
Because it's either because it's habits that you've never broken, there's conditioning that you've never found or dismantled, there's trauma that never got healed, there's mental illness that isn't being properly treated, and you can go, of course, I'm eating 4, 000 calories a day, of course, I'm eating 7, 000 calories a day.
And that doesn't mean that we're gonna stay there. Acceptance does not create the situation. Acceptance merely puts our feet on the ground in the situation as it is. And that puts us closest to the levers that are going to create change in our lives. So acceptance, it feels like wanting a thing or justifying it.
No, it's just accepting the truth of what is. And when you do that, you will be in an advantageous position going forward. And from there, you can take a look at your life. And start, drawing some easy lines through certain foods and [00:39:00] start, starting to go, Hey, I can get 200 more steps if I just park further away from the door.
You know, silly stuff like that, you hear those tips all the time, right? Just take the stairs instead of the elevator, that kind of stuff, right? Go, take a long route, a scenic route around the grocery store. And you'll find all these clever sneaky ways that you can just get in a few more steps every day.
And you'll find clever sneaky ways that you can get rid of calories and not even really feel it. Certainly not suffer because of it. That's how you really want to enter a calorie deficit with very little disturbance to your life because that's going to be the least stress. And it's going to leave the most leeway for if you want to turn the volume up on your calorie deficit.
If you're like, Hey, I'm losing a pound a week, but I mean, based on my size I could lose safely three pounds a week, so I'm going to do that. I'm going to, I'm going to slowly ratchet up my calorie deficit until I'm losing about three pounds a week. And now I have more runway to do so because the 500 calories I took out to start my diet were things that really [00:40:00] didn't affect my Life that much it didn't take a lot of didn't take a lot of willpower and didn't create a lot of stress Removing those things so
we have more runway. We have more wiggle room
Compliance is the key after that and one of the ways we screw up compliance is with how we set our goals So I think I will talk about that next time. I think I've talked about this enough I hope I've given a well rounded discussion. Obviously, I Can't, I don't want to go down every single rabbit trail and explain the whole spider web of how everything interacts with everything, which is what's very tempting to do.
If this interests you, if you like this idea and you want to get into a calorie deficit and you want me to help you do it if you want to want me to Beside you in that yeah, something I really like to do. If you're somebody who realizes that if I could stop emotionally eating and if I could read, regain some motivation, I could lose weight.
If that's where you [00:41:00] are, then please reach out about coaching, because that's the what I'm absolute best at. This is what we have that constantly you're seeing success with. Some people, they lose weight faster than others. And I can only control so much of that, right? I can only give the recommendations.
I can't decide what people are putting in their mouth.
I do see regularly is people letting go of compulsive behaviors. And reconnecting with their innate drives, their innate motivation. Not having to get on YouTube and get pumped up by somebody else's motivation, but really connecting with their own authentic passions and desire to move.
So if you've thought about doing coaching or if you're thinking about it now,
Shoot me an email. John at Oaks, weightloss. com. That's Oakes with an E, O A K E S.
Shure MV7: Another quick agenda. I'm having problems with my email. It's not working right now. So, uh, maybe tag also this email address, just to make sure I get it. John Oaks coaching@gmail.com.
And I'll ask you some questions, get to know you, and tell you [00:42:00] if I think that my program is a good fit for you or not. Yeah, so I'm going to keep working on this book. It's... Plunk, plunking right along that word I'm going to keep making podcasts and I'm going to slowly start to see how far my content wants to spread,
but I'm going to just try to be like I'm saying when it comes to my content strategy, consistency over intensity and try not to create expectations for myself that aren't really sustainable and really just do what's easy keep it easy. And. This is an example of how, if you can learn to lose weight the easy way, you can learn to run your life or your business the easy way.
And I am, I teach about these things in some ways because I'm, I struggle with them more than most people. And so that's why I'm obsessed with these ideas. That's why I've had to learn so much about them is because I needed to learn every single facet of this to give myself every toehold I could get to enact these changes in my life.
And still the process goes on.[00:43:00] Which is in a way exciting because it means there's limitless growth. Anyways, I hope you're well. If you're not in the Facebook group, I'd love to see you over there. If you are in the Facebook group, let's get some conversations going, post about how you're doing post about, you know, this is your group.
This is your space. If you've got struggles, you can talk about it. If you're not sure what to do, you have questions.
, you want to get into the group and kick around ideas for ways to make life easier for one another. It's so cool when people do that. And I always learned from that too. And it's like, wow, that's genius. I never thought of that. So use that group, pool your resources because for you, me and everyone else, we're only going to get better.
And. more resilient and more capable when we do that. So, all right, that's all for me this time. But I'll be talking to you again very soon about goals. If you have any questions, you can hit me at john at oaks, weightloss. com. Take care, everybody.[00:44:00]