Episode 23: Adopting a Weight Loss Mindset

I'm going to do this in a couple of parts.
I'm going to talk on this episode about adopting a weight loss mindset.
And then in a future episode, might be the next one or maybe a couple down the road,
I'm going to go through more concrete tips,
things that I've done that have worked for me over the years
that I think can benefit other people.
About how to actually accomplish losing weight.
But getting the right mindset around it,
I think it is in a lot of ways a bigger piece than how you implement it
because there's a lot of ways to implement it.
I want to start by saying that, well, first of all,
and I feel like I got to give this, everyone gives this disclaimer.
I'm not a nutritionist.
I am not a physical therapist.
I am not a trained weight loss expert.
In fact, in some ways, I may be less, at least on paper,
less qualified than a lot of people to even talk about this.
I grew up an athlete when I was younger.
And then sometime in my late teenage years,
I picked up weightlifting in a bodybuilder style.
And I don't have a shorter way of saying that.
I very much hesitate to call myself even an amateur bodybuilder.
I've never done competition.
I just don't engage in a lot of that culture.
But I do like to lift weights.
I do like to exercise.
And when I'm lifting weights,
the way I approach that is very much the style of workout of a bodybuilder
as opposed to, say, an Olympic weightlifter or something.
That's not the style that I train in.
So in my late teenage years, I picked that up.
I did that for five, six, seven years, something like that.
Dropped it for six or seven years.
Didn't do much exercising at all.
Then got, you know, much more back into that in my early 30s.
And I've been consistently watching my nutrition, my weight,
and exercising consistently for the last seven or eight years.
So I say all of this for a couple of reasons.
One, my weight, my body weight does not fluctuate greatly.
I am not built – I do engage in bulking and cutting throughout the year.
But my range of bulking and cutting is pretty tight compared to what many people go through.
There are people who genetically are able to bulk and add 40, 50 pounds in a few months.
And then they cut and they shave 30, 40 pounds back off.
My range is a lot tighter.
When I was at my absolute heaviest after a bulk, I had only gained about – it was less than 20 pounds.
It was 15, 16, 17 pounds right in that range.
And when I cut, I can go from feeling and looking fairly bulky, at least for my frame,
down to a very shredded up cut look again by trimming maybe 15 pounds.
Like I just don't have that wide of a range genetically.
I share all this because I want to make sure I put out there that I have not struggled greatly with things like obesity
or really, really heavy body weight or extreme health issues due to fat or anything to that extent,
body fat, that kind of thing.
However, in the years I was not exercising, I did get into some bad habits.
Drinking a lot of beer, eating a lot of cheesesteaks.
That's how I usually describe it.
And I had, over those years, swapped sort of a fairly athletic physique for one with much more body fat.
Even though my weight only fluctuated by maybe, again, 15, 20 pounds,
the ratio of body fat to muscle and whatnot was much worse than it always had been.
So all of that is just kind of a preface.
Because when I give this advice, I don't want to give the impression that
I've been through a weight loss journey where I lost, you know, 100 pounds or something extreme.
Like that's not where I came from.
But I do think a lot of this same mindset and some of the tips that I'll get into in a later episode still apply.
I also want to say that, you know, it's all about where you want to be comfortable.
I'm not saying everyone has to lean out and, you know, be super cut or spend all their time lifting weights or anything else.
This is more for the person who has decided they want to lose weight
and is looking for a way to, you know, frame that to themselves and think about it.
First of all, let me just say what I mean when I say weight loss and what most people mean.
When people say I'm going to lose weight, what they really are saying is I want to lose body fat.
Most people are, if they could just add weight infinitely, but it was all muscle and it looked great,
they would probably choose that path.
That's not really how it works.
So I just want to be really clear.
What I'm talking about with weight loss is really around removing body fat.
Now, you will do that, you will do both, right?
If you are, if you have a lot of body fat and you start trimming it off, you will also lose weight on the scale.
Like that's just a normal thing.
Also, there's this, always this, you know, kind of adage or thing in the background.
Well, muscle weighs more than fat or whatever.
Yeah, okay, fine.
But if you're sitting on 40% body fat and you start trimming that out, even if you also gain muscle simultaneously, you will see the scale go down.
It's just how that works.
It's also a lot easier to have massive amounts of body fat than it is to have massive amounts of muscle.
At the end of the day, losing body fat really comes down to expending more calories throughout the day than you eat.
There's some argument on this out there.
Surprisingly, there's argument on the internet.
There's a lot of argument around this about, you know, is it, is that the only way to weight loss?
Are there other ways to do it?
What about these diets, fad diets, blah, blah, blah.
So my advice, skip the fad diets unless you have a legitimate, some sort of dietary necessity there where you can't eat certain types of food or whatever.
If you are generally able to eat whatever, eat a balanced, we're going to talk about balanced approaches to food, but just how do you bring those calories down?
So that's the first thing you got to put in your head is this is about calories.
And it's about trying to cut some calories out of your day-to-day eating while not being starving hungry.
But it brings up the next point, which is that you have to get into an 80% mindset.
What do I mean by this?
The 80% mindset means a few things in this context.
Ideally, you could cut calories and never be hungry.
That's not reality.
However, where a lot of diets and weight loss journeys fail is that people are too hungry.
They don't know the types of food to necessarily eat or they're trying to squeeze certain things in and then they skip meals and you get really hungry later and you don't realize those sorts of patterns are not great.
So what you want to try to do is shoot to be not hungry maybe 80% of the time.
Just get to a point where you're going to be a little hungry and you have to accept that you are actively trying to shave part of your body out.
You are trying to expend energy that has been stored in your body.
See, it's going to make you a bit hungry.
But your food choices, which again I'll comment in a later episode about some practical tips there, if you make the right food choices, you can cut down on how hungry you are.
Not that you'll never be hungry, but you'll be maybe less starving hungry than if you didn't go down a path like this.
The other thing you want to think about is that you should begin to expect that your food doesn't have to taste terrible.
You don't have to just sit around and eat spinach and, you know, dry toast or something.
But you should really only expect your food to be 80 to 90% as tasty.
And you have to just be okay with that.
If you're looking to eat the exact same foods at the exact same levels of flavor that you're already eating, then you're not changing anything.
Now, there's some easy trims, right?
80% might even be a lowball number.
I would argue that you can get easily to 90% as tasty and fulfilling and everything as the food you already eat.
But you have to be willing to take some cut there.
So, you have to be willing to be a little hungry some of the time.
And you have to be willing to eat foods that maybe aren't 100% as full of flavor and satiating and just huge meals as you're used to.
Another piece of this mindset.
So, you want to get into the 80% mindset.
You want to understand that calories are about this, or that this is really about calories.
The other thing that you really want to think about, or that I think about, is that weight loss is not the same as eating healthy.
There's a crossover there, but it's not the same.
And also, nutritious foods are not the same as weight loss foods.
Again, there's a crossover there.
There's like a Venn diagram to this whole thing.
But it's not the same.
A great example of this is avocados.
Avocados are a very healthy and very nutritionally packed food.
They're also really high in calories.
So, if you think, by eating a bunch of salads that have a bunch of avocado all over them, you're suddenly going to start losing weight, it's unlikely.
Because the mere presence of those avocados are going to hinder you because there's not a lot of food there.
They don't really fill you up.
So, you're going to be hungry, which means you're going to eat more food throughout the day.
And while you're eating them, that particular, you know, the avocados themselves are very calorically packed.
They're very high in calories.
So, while it's a very nutritious food, and while I'm not saying you shouldn't ever eat avocados, it's just that if you're really going to try to dive in on weight loss, that's the type of food that you want to at least avoid for now.
So, nuts are another great example.
Many nuts are very nutritiously packed.
They're also extremely high in calories.
So, again, if you're eating salads with walnuts and avocados all over them, you may be surprised how many calories are in that salad for a not particularly satiating meal.
So, so far, we've got focus on calories.
80% of what you're used to nutrition and healthy eating is not the same as weight loss.
Fourth point that I want to make, look at the bigger picture.
And you have to look at sort of the big picture and the details at the same time, but the focus should be on the big picture.
Weight loss is about how much weight you can drop over the course of a week or a month or a year.
However, it is not necessarily about the day-to-day.
Now, each day you want to make good food choices.
However, what you really should be looking at is how much you've accomplished over a longer period of time.
And it swings in the other direction as well.
Because if you spend a few days and you lose some weight and you go down, down, down, and then you think, oh, I'm good, I'm covered, and then you go back to your old way of eating and spike back up, then you're not looking at the big picture.
What you did is you looked at three or four successful days and then quit.
So it's about making the right choices day by day, but making sure that what you care about is what have you accomplished over the course of a month or two.
And then you want to keep that trend going.
I think the final point I want to make about this overall mindset is that what you should be looking for are sustainable strategies.
You shouldn't just be thinking about what can I cut out temporarily to lose weight.
It should really be what new sets of food can I really enjoy that also help me control or lose weight.
If your goal is to – that you're kind of heavy or too much body fat or whatever and you want to cut X pounds and then you want to stay there.
You don't want to just bounce back up.
Then you need to – along your journey, you need to also find foods that you really enjoy that you can then eat essentially forever, your new staples of food, the new things that become your go-to.
And it takes a little bit of time to find those, but once you do, you can just eat them over and over again without any fear of problems here.
So, those are my five points of getting into the right mindset here.
Just to recap, remember that it's about calories.
Get into that 80% mindset thing.
You want to be 80% full 80% of the time.
Your food should taste about 80% as good.
Just get your – you have to make some sacrifice, right?
So, calories, 80% mindset.
Nutrition and being healthy is not the same as weight loss.
Look at the bigger picture and find not just things to eat temporarily but things that you can then sustainably eat into the future and that become your new go-to's and staples.
In a future episode, I'm going to go through some more practical tips.
I know this is kind of like high level.
These things have worked for me.
This is all based on personal experience and what I've been doing for the last six, seven, eight years.
I have a longer story on that, but I won't bore you with all of it.
But this is based on personal experience and I'm a big believer in just cutting down to the basics and not focusing on all these minute little things that you might pick up around online that are very dubious whether or not any of them work.
So, more to come on some practical tips.
Hope this was helpful.
Try to shape your mindset around that if this is of interest to you and then we'll go through some more concrete things at another time.
Try to acquire more comfortable.
Try to integrate back into the future of the future of the future of the future of the future of the future of the future.
Continue gathering gathering with other people on the future of the future of the future of the future of the future.
TION