Informed Eating and Exit Strategies

i think that the result exists but we perhaps don't know the method as to why it does occur uh funnily enough you mentioning jackson it's the perfect example of that is that that we have been implementing these refeeds and intermittent dieting strategies and potential diet breaks. Which he's researching for those of you that don't know. Yeah, these high calorie days within a fat loss target for the long term. And there's always been ideas around why it works or why the result perhaps is better, but there is a fucking mess of data in regards to what the actual truth is Yeah Even he alluding to any he annoyed us with illusion alluding to like well my data doesn really go alongside what I thought was I thought was going to be the reason or like what was actually improving these strategies. So, well, when we spoke to Jackson, his paper was not yet finalized or conclusive or whatever. We were sort of talking to him just after he finished collecting the data and he was just going through the process of analyzing it. um and trying to piece it together so maybe he's made more progress since then i'm not sure yeah it's due for july but i think it was the same thing can't wait yeah he was alluding to like the result is probably in line with what we would expect but the reasons and some of the the stuff within that he expected to see with performance and high carbohydrate dieting uh intermittently didn't align and it surprised him and i was like fuck man like this is just going to make it more confusing again yeah i mean i've got my ideas around some of this stuff with continuous versus intermittent dieting and things like that. And like, I know his mentor did the Matador's diet and a lot of coaches will fill the matter or diet out. I think it was a stupid fucking study. I'm just going to say that. And I'm sorry, it has nothing to do with what we do. It was obese people that weren't training has nothing to do with anybody. If I have, if I have somebody who's morbidly obese and they come to me and they're like, I'm, I can walk and that's all I'm going to do. Great. That works well. But my clients all train four or five days a week with weights and they do like three or four conditioning sessions a week. To me, it's not a good example to throw out for your argument around intermittent dieting. I honestly don't think that continuous dieting, if you match the calories over the, say, six months, I don't think it really matters if you do continuous or in a minute, as long as the continuous diet isn't a massive calorie deficit. Stop dieting people on 40% deficit and thinking you're going to be able to sustain that for six months. It's fucking retarded. If you want to do that, give them diet breaks. But to me, I have to talk to my clients and say, okay, you guys have had your eyes checked before, right? And they go, which is more clear, lens A or lens B? Okay, then what about this one, lens A or lens B? Lens A or lens B? And you go through all these different lenses till you find the one that makes you see the most clearly. And that's how I look at like diet and training. I'm like, okay, what makes, what sounds better to you that you just under eat a little bit and you're never really that hungry, but you're a tiny bit hungry or you're real fucking hungry for two weeks, but you know, you get to eat a lot for two days, you know, depending on what they want. That's what I'm going to put them on and depending on what they can be complying on. but I don't, as long as the, as long as the calories are matched, I don't think it's that going to be that big of a deal, but who fucking knows I'm also a fucking college dropout. So who gives a shit? Well, we have a really thorough questionnaire and consultation process with our clients to figure out what does fit you best. Cause we don't have one way that's best. What's best is what works for the client. So that's why we ask a lot of annoying questions, which takes a little bit more time than just like, here's this program for $49.95, off you go. Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty similar to you, Luke, in that I don't really think there's a hell of a lot going on, like positively from a physiological point of view from intermittent versus continuous. I likely just think that it's mainly about managing the entire ecosystem of the individual with food and social interaction and like an all-encompassing holistic approach as as uh yogary is what people may think holistic is it really isn't um and that compliance factor is likely the biggest driver here of yeah success both in athletic development uh but obviously also in managing long-term weight loss clients because that's where this industry has failed miserably uh because we haven't got management systems in play to make this more sustainable because we do still have a lot of individuals that are saying this is how you lose weight and no one's really teaching the whys the hows and the management systems yeah and i think that's something i've been actually been working on on my whiteboard back here on some systems of how to initiate a diet then how to get through the middle of it and then kind of the exit strategy and one of the one of the quotes that i got from somebody who i've always had a lot of respect for which is dr not dr johnny balton who's a PhD in nutrition. He says that you should make like the weight loss journey should be like driver's ed for the maintenance. So it should be you're teaching them that this is how you're living for the rest of your life. So we need to find something that you can live with. It doesn't suck. And then understand that you know sometimes you need to speed on the highway but you don do that a lot or you get caught So if you going to overeat a little bit and speed on the highway that all right Just make sure it not enough to get caught And the majority of the time you need to make sure you make a full stop and you turn right and use your indicators and that type of thing. So they should be getting educated through this process that there is no end to what you're doing right now. there was a beginning but this is how you need to be doing for the rest of your life if you want to stay the way you know the way you want to look you know and then at least for the gen pop i mean we know with physique stuff it's a little bit different because you're going to to get to extremely low levels of uh of lean body mass you're going to have to do very extreme things that aren't particularly healthy um so but you which means you need an even bigger emphasis on exit strategy for that type of stuff. For sure. Right now, me and coach Shannon are working on a post comp prep program to help people organize their exit strategy and kind of understand where the pitfalls are. But Shannon actually wrote a book on this subject called Life After Dieting, a guide to informed eating. And we coined the term informed eating, meaning using the dieting process to be informed with nutrition, what your body needs, how you can get there, what works for or it doesn't work for you. And then we put away the food diaries. We put away like all the numerical data, the food scales, and then we just practice those habits that we've built up and using your informed decisions to eat for the rest of your life. So if anyone's interested in that book, Life After Dieting. Because it's for sure the hardest thing. The people that have tracked to learn generally hit a, you know, a big hurdle where they then don't know how to not track. they lose things they lose interoceptive feedback and awareness they don't understand mindfulness it's now just become a calculated game and that's what that whole thing is designed around is trying to manage the exit so that it becomes sustainable for life it's um life after there is a life after you see i like i actually i love to track my food which is a weird thing to say because for me, it gives me a feeling of power and control, and it keeps me on track. And, you know, some people might say, well, that sounds like an eating disorder. Well, I mean, here's the thing. Like I'm not using tracking for dieting. I just track all the time because I like data. So I want to see if I eat 3,000 calories, what does that do to my body? If I eat keto, what does that do to my body? If I eat high carb, because I've been playing with this shit for shit, man, since I was 18 years old. What's the best diet then, Luke? You know, the best diet is one that allows you to not binge and get the best results. For me, I'll tell you,