Episode 24: Foundational Weight Loss Tips

So this is a follow-up to the last episode where I talked about getting into or maintaining or being in a mindset for weight loss.
And this is sort of the companion to that where I want to outline a number of practical things that you can do to either start down this journey or if you haven't done these things, they're a good baseline of it.
And these are not, I would caution anyone who goes to like a YouTube or, you know, an Instagram or wherever and finds five tips that you didn't know about to lose weight or whatever.
Oftentimes, they're just false or have no actual backing whatsoever.
Other times, they can be true, but they could be so minuscule, so small and have such a small impact that if you're not already in a pretty lean spot and trying to optimize your weight and your body fat, then that's not the right place to focus.
In other words, if you haven't gotten the baseline of just getting into a good, pretty good shape and, you know, reducing your body fat to begin with, optimizing around something like how much cinnamon you eat per day or whatever, it's going to make this small little tenth of a percent of a difference compared to just doing the basics.
It's lying that foundation first.
That's where this is coming from.
This is about getting that, getting those basic things in and just starting down this path and then optimizing later.
Anyway, tip number one, it's all about protein and particularly lean proteins.
If you were really trying to shave body weight, you should be focused mostly on, on eating lean proteins.
That should be the majority of your meals in terms of space on the plate.
So if you think about a plate, circular plate kind of thing, you want to fill about half of it up with some sort of lean protein, chicken breast, ground turkey, ground chicken, things like that.
And for a little while, try to avoid the fatty, the fattier meats, try to avoid things like burgers, ground beef, big steaks.
That's not to say you can't work them back in later, but while you're trying to get this rolling back off of some of that and focus on the lean stuff.
Now, that doesn't mean you can slather it in sauce, and I'll talk about that in a second.
Like you kind of have to just eat the meat, but some stuff that often maybe you don't think about that can add a lot of flavor there, rubs, spices, some things like that on that meat.
Like if you say you want to bake some chicken or something, put like a rub on it, a lot of extra flavor, and essentially no calories, generally speaking.
Second big tip, you want to shoot for volume of food.
This is about controlling hunger.
What you're trying to do is figure out what is the most quantity of food that you can eat to stay full and feel full for the least amount of calories that you can stand.
And the reason I say that you can stand is because there are some of these, you know, zero calorie noodles and things.
I've tried them.
I hate them.
They're disgusting.
It's like just eating some sort of slime worm.
I don't know.
I couldn't stand it, right?
So within reason, but there are certain things that are better than others.
For instance, a big staple in my diet is 0% fat Greek yogurt with fat-free whipped cream on top of it for a little bit of sweetness because a 0% fat Greek yogurt is extremely bland.
These come in tubs.
They have, I think, five servings in them or something like that.
I'll eat half of that tub with some whipped cream.
And the grand total of all of that is like 300 calories.
It's a ton of volume of food.
It's just a big, big thing compared to if you snack on a few potato chips or something, you could burn up 300 calories and not even know it.
And it wouldn't even fill you up at all.
So shoot for volume of food.
So, so far we've got focus on protein, lean proteins.
Make that the majority of what you eat.
Number two, shoot for volume of food.
Number three, basic math.
Now, I did this, I explained this in the last episode as well.
I was never a calorie counter, but it's good to have some vague idea of the math and the calories because it helps you make choices.
So, the way I always thought about this is that typically what they say is for a moderately active male at about my age, going back a few years, they say that your sort of maintenance level calories, your just keep your weight where you are calories, is about 2,500 calories a day.
So, then I just, I did the math, right?
And I thought to myself, you know, I'd like to eat about five times a day.
So, what does that mean?
That means that any given sitting, I should be shooting for about 500 calories per meal.
Then you can play with things.
If you, for instance, wake up and have breakfast and your breakfast is only about 400 calories, that means your lunch or dinner could be 600 calories.
If your very last meal of the day, the fifth meal, is just a snack, and like I said, it's Greek yogurt, and it's about 300 calories, that means I have 200 more calories that I can distribute within the rest of my meals.
So, but if you start with that baseline of approximately how many calories do they say is maintenance, and how many times per day do I want to eat?
Maybe you don't want to eat five times a day.
Maybe you want to eat four times a day.
Well, now each meal can be a little bigger, right?
Now, this is all predicated on the idea that you don't run around snacking.
You want to schedule your meals and divvy them out throughout the course of the day the best that you can.
When you go to a restaurant, many restaurants these days have calories listed.
They're probably inaccurate, but it gives you some idea of whether this is a giant pile of calories or a smaller pile of calories.
If you go and you have a cheesy pasta dish somewhere, and it says 1,300 calories on the menu,
you can probably assume it's more like 1,400 or 1,500, compared to a different dish on that menu that maybe is like fish with two sides or something like that,
and then maybe it's more like 600 or 700 calories.
You at least have some idea that this meal is bigger than that meal, and you can kind of bake that into your day.
So again, I went through that, my math being 2,500 calories for a maintenance to maintain weight.
If you want to lose weight, you cut a little bit out of that, right?
So if it's 2,500 to maintain, maybe you shoot for 2,200 to lose weight over time.
So we've got focus on protein, shoot for volume of food, and do the math approximately.
And then you adjust, by the way, with the math.
If you think to yourself, oh, I think I've got this down, do that for two weeks consistently.
Like every day, do more or less that math and hit that type of eating pattern and see what the scale does.
You just have to watch it and see what happens.
Fourth thing, make sure you eat all your meals each day.
I talked about this a little bit on the mindset thing as well.
The big one that a lot of people do when they go to try to lose weight is they skip breakfast.
This is not a good idea.
This is not a good idea for a bunch of reasons.
Number one, that leads you to worse food choices later in the day because you're hungry.
By the time lunch rolls around or whatever your first meal is, you're way hungrier than if you had gotten up and eaten something.
Number two, eating in the morning when you get up in the first hour or so will start your body processing food.
It will help with beginning to kind of kickstart your metabolism for the day.
Number three, it helps you divide your protein out throughout the day.
You don't want to skip a chance to have a bunch of protein or, you know, first thing during the day.
You want that first, you know, 20 to 30 grams of protein in the morning.
There's a whole bunch of reasons, but make sure you hit breakfast, lunch, dinner, and maybe a snack.
Like, or however you want to divvy that day out, but try to set it up or I try to set it up where they are approximately evenly spaced out, right?
My ideal eating situation when I'm trying to lose weight, typically I'm shooting to eat about 9 a.m., 1 p.m., 5 p.m., and then 9 or 10 at night before I go to bed.
Those are like my four checkpoints when I'm on a cut.
So we've got, I'm just going to review this each time, focus on protein, shoot for volume, do the math, don't skip meals.
Number five is if you, if you're not sure where to start with your diet and you've been, you know, you've been eating pretty poorly over time, but you don't necessarily want to jump all the way to, like I said in the beginning, chicken breast and ground turkey, right?
Maybe you want something a little easier to sink your teeth into.
For most people or many people in that boat, if you make a few small sacrifices, you'll probably start to see some real difference.
And here's the ones that I had initially made when I was starting down this path.
Number one, I stopped cooking completely with butter and oil.
No more butter, no more oil.
You know how much difference that made in the taste?
Almost none.
Almost none.
The where I notice it the most is actually in, if I'm like cooking or roasting vegetables,
because the vegetables cooking with the fats from the oil or the butter, that kind of makes a difference.
But other than that, other than that, it almost made no difference.
I switched to the, to an avocado spray when I make like stuff in a pan or whatever.
Those sprays are lying to you.
They say they are zero calories.
They are not.
There is some fractional amount of calories in there.
So don't hold that spray down for five, five minutes while you're greasing your pan.
Give it a quick spray and be done with it.
But just skip the butter, skip the oil.
You, you, you really won't notice it over time.
Mayo and sour cream.
Move, if you use mayonnaise, go to light mayonnaise.
It really cuts the calories down and makes almost no difference in the taste.
Similarly with sour cream, if you eat a lot of sour cream, like maybe eat a lot of, you know, Mexican food or taco or something like that.
Move from a, a full regular sour cream to a light sour cream.
You'll barely notice the difference.
And it is a big cut in calories.
In fact, if you can, the other thing you can do is you can sub out sour cream completely for a 0% fat Greek yogurt.
And again, in most dishes, you'll barely notice the difference.
Huge difference in calories, huge difference in fat content really does make a difference.
And my final kind of like quick, easy food swap, whatever percent fat milk you're using, go to skim.
This one's really hard for some people.
I never quite got it because I grew up drinking, well, 1% for a good portion of my life.
And then I moved to skim and it, it really wasn't that big of a difference.
But a lot of people say, oh, it's so watery.
It's so watery.
Give it a chance for like a few weeks.
And by the end of those weeks, you probably won't notice the difference.
So the food tips, the easy things to make a small shifts in your diet that will have a big impact in terms of the number of calories you are ingesting without you noticing much taste difference.
Skip butter, skip oil, move to a light mayo, move to a light sour cream or a Greek yogurt if you can, and move to a skim milk.
So those are the five tips that I would give to get started on this, depending on where you are.
Focus on protein, shoot for volume of food, do the math around calories, even if you're not counting them, just have a general ballpark idea.
Don't skip meals and cut a few easy, low-hanging fruit items out of your diet.
Butter, oil, full mayo, full sour cream.
One more bonus, and this is just kind of a bonus tip that I'll give you at the end.
You may have heard throughout your life, don't eat past a certain time at night.
Don't eat at past six or past seven or past eight or whatever.
It's nonsense.
Doesn't matter.
In fact, I would encourage you about an hour or two before you go to bed to have at least a snack.
And again, my go-to is Greek yogurt with some whipped cream.
It's full of protein.
The protein digests fairly slowly, which means that it's in my system overnight, which is a good thing.
And it helps you wake up in the morning not starving hungry.
It's the same kind of thing as when you have breakfast in the morning.
You're not starving hungry by lunch.
You want to divvy your meals out.
And part of that is if you can eat a lighter breakfast, a medium lunch, maybe dinner's a little bit bigger, and then a light snack before you go to bed.
That's a good way to divide your day out.
And the more you can schedule that and always hit it at the same time, the more satiated you will feel over time, even if you are cutting weight.
So those are the tips.
If you've got some good ones, feel free to hit me back with them.
Those are the things that I did that I think are basic baseline things before you get into these other five tips to help you optimize this and that kind of stuff.
These are just basic things.
So I wish everyone luck, and I hope this was useful.