In this podcast episode, John reflects on his weight loss journey, discussing what he would tell his past (423 lb) self about healthy and effective weight loss. He talks about the importance of self-care, maintaining a positive mindset, and finding a balance between pushing oneself and taking care of one's body.
John also discusses upcoming changes to his newsletter and encourages listeners to send in questions for future episodes. He concludes by offering free resources and inviting listeners to inquire about one-on-one coaching. The episode is not only about weight loss, but also about improving mental health and finding happiness throughout the journey.
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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
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Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
In this podcast episode, John reflects on his weight loss journey, discussing what he would tell his past (423 lb) self about healthy and effective weight loss. He talks about the importance of self-care, maintaining a positive mindset, and finding a balance between pushing oneself and taking care of one's body.
John also discusses upcoming changes to his newsletter and encourages listeners to send in questions for future episodes. He concludes by offering free resources and inviting listeners to inquire about one-on-one coaching. The episode is not only about weight loss, but also about improving mental health and finding happiness throughout the journey.
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
Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Hello and welcome to today's episode. Today we're going to talk about a few things. I would go back in time and tell myself back when I was £423, not just about how to lose weight and how to do it effectively, but how to do it the right way. How, how do I wish I had lost weight such that I wouldn't have had so much to fix after I got all the weight off? We'll jump into that in just a second. First off, I'm making some hopefully exciting improvements with my newsletter, which you may be receiving via email. You'll still receive it via email, but I'm strongly considering moving it to a different service, which will also turn those emails into sort of a blog site, a website, a place to act as sort of a library for all the info that I'm sending out via email, and it'll collect it for us and hopefully help organize it. So when you're when the mood strikes you and you want to really dive deep in a certain topic related to weight loss, you'll have an easy place to go.
Speaker 1 (00:00:57) - To dig through all my free text based content on the topic of your choosing. I'll be doing this via a service called Substack, which I don't know if that's important for you to know. Funny thing is that Substack suggests that you name your newsletter. And so I thought up about 300 names, and none of them seem to really encapsulate everything I want to do with it. And many of them get to the bigger picture of what I'm trying to help people do, which is obviously about more of a holistic view of getting healthier, healing your mental health. And sometimes when I'm talking about those topics, I'm afraid people aren't going to realize that I'm very much still super focused on helping people lose lots of weight. I don't see these as separate issues. I see these for many people as all part and parcel of the same thing. So I haven't decided on a name for it. But yeah, if you're already receiving my regular newsletter emails, then you'll be receiving them through this new service. If you're not signed up, you can go to the link in my bio and sign up there.
Speaker 1 (00:01:55) - Make sure that you're on the list and you're going to get all this cool, free content that's coming your way. If you ever have a question for the podcast, I'd love to do an All Questions Considered episode. I want to make sure I have enough questions to last me for a full episode, so please email me Jon. At Weight Loss, you can find my email in the show notes as well. I'd love to take your questions and answer them on a special show dedicated to just that. You can ask me anything about mental health, life advice, weight loss, anything at all that you think I might have a helpful perspective with? Okay, so five things I'd go back in time and tell myself when I was £423, how would I go back and quickly teach myself a few lessons to make that journey from the 400 down well into the two hundreds, to make that journey easier, easier to sustain, and generally better for my overall health because it was fairly easy to sustain. But I'd say there were mentalities around how I lost the weight that were more problematic than actually the exact diet or mechanisms I use to lose the weight.
Speaker 1 (00:03:00) - So just for context, in case you're wondering, how I lost the weight was mainly through restricting food and increasing activity. I would usually take a cheat day once a week. I was really strict about that. I never took more than one a week. It was always on the same day. It was very regimented about that. And no matter what I did to myself on cheat day, the next day, I was back at it first thing in the morning. I was religious about getting back to that workout because I saw that as a sacred part. Taking the cheat day is coming back from the cheat day and getting back on track. And then throughout the week, as I would be cutting calories if I had cravings rise up. If I had a bunch of hunger come up one day, I could just say, okay, we're only a few days away from cheat day. We're only two days, one day away from cheat day. Let's just have that psychological release valve to know its coming and use that as a way to hold off.
Speaker 1 (00:03:51) - Now this worked. But I think it speaks to the first mentality that I would go back and try to instill in myself, which is that there's something to be said for cut and Loose and having a psychological release valve. But there's something also to be said for just setting it and forgetting it, just doing a weight loss program that isn't so difficult during the week such that you need a cheat day. I would go back in and tell myself to instead of taking cheat days, just eat more on your normal days, it's not going to have some big impact. I thought that I was like doing something beneficial by organizing my days like that. That somehow that extra day of eating was going to help me. And there are good coaches out there who suggest that their clients do this, especially people who are more in the elite athlete realm where if they're going to go for a few days in a calorie deficit, they're going to deplete glycogen stores. It's going to really start to affect their workouts. And so people like, namely Paul Rovelli from Pro Physique, you have the great YouTube channel.
Speaker 1 (00:04:57) - He talks about how he likes to use re feeds and diet breaks to replenish glycogen stores. There's a bodybuilder named Fouad Abyad. He also has a YouTube channel. He talks about cycling, carbohydrate and calorie intake in order to replenish glycogen stored in the muscle, so that he can keep banging out great workouts even while he's in a calorie deficit. But as hard as I was working out, I think that my goals at the time were to lose a lot of weight. And while that is an elite goal, just like preparing for a bodybuilding show, preparing for a body building show, you're trying to cut down to 5% body fat for a man, maybe 12% of body fat for a woman, that's a big undertaking, but also losing nearly £200. That's a big undertaking as well. And so you have to see yourself partially as an elite athlete and partially as very much a civilian, very much in not what's not an amateur, but somebody who's just doing it for fun, a leisure sport, weight loser.
Speaker 1 (00:05:59) - So what do I mean by that? Well, in the sense of seeing yourself as an athlete, care for yourself. Don't think that just losing the weight is the answer, because losing the weight without taking care of yourself. We all know how that ends up. You're just going to burn out. You're going to break your body. It's just it's bad news. And so that's why I would go back and say, hey man, if you're if your program is fairly punishing to where you're just not having really productive workouts later in your week, then you're probably burning fewer calories, you're going to be really lethargic. And now I understand more about non exercise activity thermogenesis and how much the subconscious mind will down regulate your calorie expenditure during the day just with getting you to fidget less, sit more, move around less generally, and how really ratcheting down calories just causes your body to do that more and more. And I definitely remember on that fifth or sixth day of the diet week before that, that cheat day, just lying there being like, oh dear God, I can't wait for tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (00:06:56) - And so, yeah, I wasn't burning as many calories as I easily could have been if I had been keeping myself in a little bit less of a caloric deficit. And you can see yourself as a as a leisurely athlete in the sense that you're not a bodybuilder trying to maximize muscle gains. You're not trying to go beyond your genetic potential, oftentimes using performance enhancing substances. You're if you're overweight, you're probably someone who genetically has an easier time gaining and maintaining lean mass. So you do want to take advantage of that? Absolutely. You want to be doing your resistance training, but do you need to be working out as hard as a bodybuilder? No. Absolutely not. You can grow and you can get better and stronger without working yourself to the bone. So I'd go back and I'd say, John, let's lessen the intensity a little bit, both in how hard we're dieting and how hard we're working out. I don't think I was working out too hard, although I could have taken a couple percentage points off of it probably, and made in my life a little bit better, a little bit easier, but mainly.
Speaker 1 (00:07:55) - And how I was dieting, it was too extreme during the week, and then I was intentionally overeating that one day of the week I thought I was revving up my metabolism, which generally the consensus seems to be that's not really what's happening. It really, at the end of the day, comes down to calories in, calories out. I've been persuaded by that. And I would go back in time and say, hey man, just get off the the roller coaster. You think that you need a psychological release valve, but you really don't. And oftentimes by creating such a high pressure situation, that was how I was staying on my diet. And I was afraid that if I wasn't being super extreme, then I wouldn't have the focus necessary to stay on my plan. And that's not necessarily true. It's just it would have required just a tiny bit more maturity on my part. Now, when I'm on an eating plan, I don't have to go super intense to keep my focus. I know more about which foods, eating strategies, things that I teach my clients, how to stay in a calorie deficit in ways that are easy.
Speaker 1 (00:08:52) - You don't have to overthink it. So on to my next point about confidence. You can see why we tend toward extremes, or we tend toward things that maybe aren't super balanced because we think we can't do that, or else we won't have progress. Because most people tell me, if you identify with this, when I was big, I suffered from a lack of confidence that I was going to get the weight off. I remember being like £30 from my goal weight after I had lost like £150, £170, something like that. And still being like, I don't know if I can do it. My brain was still playing these tricks on me, saying, oh, you're not going to be able to do it, or you're just your body's done, you can't lose any more weight. And my brain was just constantly messing with me, and I would just go back right at the beginning and say, listen, dude, your brain is the issue here. Your brain is what got you here. Your brain is what's going to get in your way.
Speaker 1 (00:09:46) - Your brain is going to say a bunch of crazy, stupid shit to you. You got to ignore it. If you do X, Y, and Z, you are going to lose the weight. And if things pop up, there's ways to troubleshoot it. I'm not going to go into all those ways. I have like a nine step troubleshooting process. So a lot of the confidence I would instill in him would be based on the smarter strategies I have. But mainly just saying, listen, man, you don't have to be perfect to lose weight. If you're big, it's going to be easier to lose weight the more you keep going. The lighter you get, the easier it is to move. If you keep moving more, the easier it's going to be to lose weight. There's a balance to these things that as you lose more weight, you can be more active and you can maintain your calorie expenditure more or less. Instead of spending a bunch of time worrying about whether you're going to be able to lose the weight or not, think about what you value.
Speaker 1 (00:10:41) - Think about why you're moving. Think about why you're losing weight. You know, for me, at that weight, I had lost the ability to run. If I had to sprint, I probably would have to do it, maybe to save my kid's life or something. But then I would have been probably in the hospital because I broke something. I really started to miss that ability to break into a run whenever I felt like it. And so I would just go back and be like, yeah, focus on that, focus on how good it feels to move now that you've lost it. You know how good it feels. And so you can connect more viscerally with the desire to move than somebody who's at a healthy weight. So if you're at an unhealthy weight and it's been a long time since you've moved around a lot, it's easy to go, well, I don't feel like moving around, John. In fact, I feel like being very still. Sure you do now. And I know that's how motivation works sometimes.
Speaker 1 (00:11:30) - But think back to a time in your life when you weren't so sedentary. Think back to a time in your life when you liked to move and really get back there. Get back to that place where you remember how good it felt to get up and run and frolic and play and realize that's on offer. It's right in front of you if you just keep taking steps toward it. Weight loss is a process. So is mobility. So is fitness cardiovascular or endurance, fitness or the ability to walk or run. These things take time. But if ultimately the thing you love about running is the joy of movement, well, that's something you can connect with viscerally on those days when you're just going on a walk around the block to get your steps in, begin getting a thousand steps a day, or 1500 steps a day. When you're just starting out, you can get those steps connecting with the joy of movement. And that's going to do more for you than any goal about weight loss or yeah, some long term goal.
Speaker 1 (00:12:23) - Those are never going to be as powerful as having a visceral connection to what you're doing. Thirdly, I would go back and convince myself that, listen, man, you have a tendency to put your well-being second, third, fourth, 19th, very last place, because you think that getting the job done is more important than your well-being. You think that losing weight is more important than your well-being. You think that eating less is more important than your well-being. You think that reaching your weight loss goals is more important than your well-being. You think that reaching your exercise goals is more important than your well-being. And looking back, this seems silly. But when you're stuck in that place, it's really hard to see. It's really hard to see that there's a possibility that you could prioritize your well-being and make progress in your fitness. Because when you're really not in a good place, when you're sick, when you're unwell, your brain's constantly telling you that your well-being is not something you can afford. You have to do x, Y, and Z.
Speaker 1 (00:13:23) - You have to go. You have to get it done or else. So any time you feel that pull to, oh, I got to lose weight or I got to do this, ask yourself, am I putting my well-being first? Am I trying to drive this with well-being? If not, you want to think about okay, how could focusing on my well-being keep me from doing things that are ultimately destructive? How could that keep me out of cycles of shame and failure that just keep me on this hamster wheel of disappointment? And if I really valued my. A well being. What would have to change in my mentality toward myself to be able to do that? That's a big statement. That's one that I don't want to just brush past. That's something you should really put a star next to and really think about in your own time. What would have to change in your mentality for you to be able to prioritize your well-being over everything else? There's probably a story in your head that you're not allowed to do that for some reason.
Speaker 1 (00:14:14) - And once you can get your head around the mere idea of putting your well-being first, now you want to think about the fact that, hey, if you do that, it's not going to be harder to accomplish great things. It's going to be easier. It just may not look exactly the way you thought it was going to. So I would go back and impress upon John five years ago that, listen, you are the source of all the weight loss. It's all going to come from the things you do and the decisions you make. So take care of you. Take care of this person who's making these decisions, and trust that you will make good decisions because you probably don't trust yourself very much. And one of the ways you can start to rebuild your trust is by making your well-being the priority and not making decisions out of this life or death. Scramble to be okay and realize that, oh wow, I'm a good person who wants good things so I can make decisions that actually benefit me from a place of well-being.
Speaker 1 (00:15:08) - If I'm really thinking about my well-being, I'm not just thinking about laying on the couch all day. Is this really best for my well-being, or would going for a walk around the block be better for me? When you're really paying attention to your well-being, you know the answer to the question. And that's a powerful place to get to, because it's going to change how you're relating to everything in your fitness and in your goals. And it's going to make it's going to put you on surer footing when things do start to get difficult, and when obstacles come up and when you're having a hard days really motivating these positive changes in your life from a positive place that's purely about well-being is powerful, and keeping your balance keeping you from going too far off the path, either through overstress or under stimulation. And of course, this has ramifications for how you work your relationships. There are certain people are going to ask you to do things, and you're going to go, If I'm putting my well-being first, do I say yes to this? And you'll sometimes say, nope, this isn't best for my well-being.
Speaker 1 (00:16:08) - And at first it might be really hard to still say no to the thing, but eventually it starts to make sense and you're like, oh, this isn't good for my well-being. So that's a no. And you can just allow other people to handle their responsibilities because you're just looking after yourself. And it's not selfishness. It's actually the beginning of self love. It's the beginning of wellness. The fourth thing I'd go back and tell myself about is electrolytes. I did not understand how much my body was being depleted of my key electrolytes. Because of my low calorie diet and my lifting and cardio. I would have felt so much better if I had a little bit more sodium, potassium, and magnesium in my system and maybe other vitamins and minerals as well. And that's another reason why I would go back and be on a little bit more of a moderate calorie deficit, rather than the six days on one day off. I'd rather just be on a seven day a week calorie deficit that's a little less intense, because part of the reason for electrolyte depletion was the intensity of both my calorie deficit and the workload I was putting on my body.
Speaker 1 (00:17:13) - But I would have said, but I'm going to I'm going to gain 2 or £3 of water weight. If I start drinking some electrolyte powders here or there, it's like, yeah, so if you're at 370, then you're all of a sudden going away. 373 okay. Yes. This feels demoralizing. Whatever. But like if you can just pull the lens back and realize that you're going to make your life from 373 to 240, 230, you're going to make it so much easier and you're going to feel so much better the entire way. Isn't it worth taking this quote unquote setback? I would shake myself. I would slap him back and forth across the face until he realized that, yeah, that is really worth it. Because really, not looking after my electrolytes made my journey way more miserable than it needed to be. We are talking about sodium, potassium, magnesium for people with certain medical conditions. Maybe that's not something you want to be making changes without the advice of your doctor. So please, by all means, check in with your physician before you go making any changes to your electrolyte intake.
Speaker 1 (00:18:18) - Number five I would have told myself, don't be so rigid. I thought that I had to do the same thing every day. I thought that if I change things up that I was never going to lose weight, I would get it in my head that if I lifted too hard, I would stop losing weight. Yeah, because if I lifted for context, what do I mean by lifting too hard? The way I lifted was very high tempo. I wouldn't take very many breaks. I would superset everything. Normally, if I'm going to have a client do super sets, we'll superset antagonist muscle groups or muscle groups that don't tire one another. So doing some chest and back opposite of going back and forth. But what I would do was a superset that was like chest abs, chest abs, chest, abs. And then I'd go into two different exercises, both chest focused and do that. So it's 12 sets with like 5 or 6 sets of abs sprinkled in. And it was good. It provided me enough resistance to maintain a lot of my muscle mass, if not grow it sometimes.
Speaker 1 (00:19:19) - And I did burn a lot of calories in those workouts because I kept the pace high the entire time. However, did that get boring? Yeah, eventually it did, and I wanted to work out different ways. I wanted to focus more on strength, or I wanted to just do straight sets of something where you just say, I'm going to get on the incline machine press, and I'm going to just do three sets of ten at whatever weight I wanted to lift a little bit heavier and do those more traditional style workouts. But I thought that if I did that well, for instance, there was this one time I was maybe 312, 315, and my buddy Will from grad school. He was sending me pictures of him, like doing all this deadlifting and bench pressing with a friend from school where he was in school, where he was teaching at the time as a professor. And I was like, man, that looks fun. And he was losing weight and feeling good. I'm like, oh, but if I lifted heavy like that, I wouldn't lose weight.
Speaker 1 (00:20:08) - And that's just silly. What would happen is that instead of slowly chipping away at my weight, when you lift heavy, there's going to be more of a disruption to your muscles, which especially for someone my size, I'm six four, so even at my leanest, I'm still a very big person. If I'm lifting really heavy taking and I'm disrupting my muscles more, they're going to try to hold on to more glycogen and they're going to hold on to more water. However, what would that have done? It would have allowed my muscles to probably get bigger while I was losing weight. And if I had paired that with a more moderate calorie deficit, and I didn't jack my calories down so far during the week, that would have allowed me to have better muscle retention and better muscle growth all throughout losing the weight. So when I got to the end, my body composition would have been far more favorable. And also, the most important thing is just that it would have made things more fun. Working out that way is more fun.
Speaker 1 (00:21:04) - It's how I work out now. I don't get sucked into the old way of trying to work out where it's really high temp, and just really hammering one body part with a lot of high rep activity. That's the old school thought around weight loss, and it's not really. It's something I had learned years before that as a tool that worked for me, but by no means was it ideal. Did it work? Sure, it was good for me. It worked. But what? I've been happier just allowing myself to lift hard, lift heavy, maybe take more of like a bodybuilding style workout program, lifting program, or a power building style program where you're doing a little power lifting and a little bit of lifting for muscle growth. I think that would have been more fun. I think it would have allowed me to look forward to my workouts and dreading them a lot of the time, and I don't think ultimately that it would have caused me to lose weight slower or that much slower. I really think a lot of my fears of losing weight more slowly, or not losing any weight at all, or stalling out were overblown because I was freaking out over minute changes in my water weight that logically I knew I was happening, but illogically, my brain was freaking out telling me, oh, you're never going to lose the weight.
Speaker 1 (00:22:16) - Back to one of my very first points. My brain was always getting convinced that our weight loss was completely shutting down, and we had to keep taking history measures, and that just wasn't the case. So generally speaking, I gave five tips there. I would the overarching theme of it all is make it easier, make it more fun. Obviously there are probably 50 other things. I would go back and tell him, well, far more than that, but I would challenge him very much so to make it easier, to make it more fun. So occasionally people ask me questions that make it seem like they assume that how I teach people to lose weight is how I lost the weight. Like, no, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Good lord. No, I didn't start coaching until, yeah, until I was at a really healthy weight. And by then I'd already started to reevaluate. A lot of the things that I was doing to myself was sticking with the plan just because it had worked.
Speaker 1 (00:23:09) - And I was like, hey, if it isn't broke, don't fix it. And there is something to be said for that. Had a plan that was working, so stick with it. Hey, I got there in the end, but did I really I don't know, I think mentally there were mindsets that needed to change that I would have loved to go back and change those early. What it should have could have. But hey, it's a podcast. I can talk about maybes and what a show does and could as because for you, it's not going back in time for you. If you're at the beginning of your weight loss journey or in the midst of it for you today, you are me five years and you can take this information and challenge yourself to make it more fun. Make it a lighter experience, so to speak. Have more confidence that you can lose the weight. Really. Lacks trust. The laws of science, the laws of thermodynamics. Trust yourself. Trust your ability to handle emotions that come up, to be able to handle a little bit of hunger.
Speaker 1 (00:24:04) - To be able to manage your workouts and your eating such that if you're too hungry, you can arrange things so that you're not that hungry. And if you have questions on how to do that, please send them in to the podcast. We'll do that question and answer show. When I started this podcast, I didn't want it to be just about weight loss. And this is getting back to me talking about having to name that newsletter or this Substack thing, suggesting that I have a name for the newsletter. I named this The Easy Way Out. There's no allusion to weight loss in that title, even though anybody who's listened to this show knows the connection. The way we get out of severe weight issues is we take the easy way out. We make it as easy as possible, we make the easiest decisions, we take the path of least resistance. But you start to do that and you don't get very far before you realize that man making any sincere improvement in your physical health requires a sincere improvement in your mental health and your mental flexibility, and your ability to do things with relaxation and confidence, with your well-being first, and to actually have fun with your self-improvement projects and not just make them into a chore where everything's riding on it and it's like, yeah, there's a lot riding on it.
Speaker 1 (00:25:15) - There's a lot that that can improve when you lose weight. But a lot of times we think that, oh, we need to be in this mad dash to get the weight off when lots of people have done that. Maybe you have, I definitely have. When you do that mad dash style of losing the weight, you can lose all the weight and realize, like, I still didn't make the changes that really are going to change my life for the better that are going to make me happy. And so that's the main theme here, is think about how you could change the way your mind works such that not only was weight loss possible, but it was inevitable and that you are going to be happier all along the way and growing all along the way. Instead of thinking that your happiness or growth or wholeness was laying on the other side of the finish line on your on the other side of your goal weight, and that's very much not the case. All those things are available to you now before you start, or long before you get to your goal.
Speaker 1 (00:26:08) - And if you need help getting in touch with that, if you need help on the journey, I've got free resources in the Facebook group Lose Weight with John. Like I said, I have this newsletter which I'm only going to be probably leaning into even harder with lots of free content there. There's a link to there's a link to both of those in the show notes. And of course, if you're interested in one on one coaching with me, that's a conversation I'd love to have with you. I'll ask you some questions. Get to know you a little bit. Make sure that you're right for my style of program, and if so, we can get you started and you can be on a completely new path in the next week or two. It's not for everybody, but it definitely doesn't hurt to find out more. So please, if you're interested, email me John at Oaks Weight Loss and just subject line coaching inquiry. And just tell me a little bit about yourself and we'll get the conversation started.
Speaker 1 (00:26:55) - Apart from that, I'm going to make all the usual requests. Share this podcast with a friend. I'd love it if you left a review. I saw somebody left a review pretty recently. That's awesome. Especially on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Five stars. Kind words. Much appreciated. Thank you for listening. I hope this was helpful and I'll talk to you soon.