Luke Leaman on Weight Loss Psychology

I love a good interweb myth bust. And that's what my next guest, Luke Lehman, does best. Well, that and pissing off fitness industry gurus on the Internet for sport. Part of my conversation with Luke that didn't fit into the overall narrative of episode 32 on nutrition myth busting had to do with his own weight loss self-experiment and a method he learned in the process that he now uses to help clients get consistent. Part of it, too, is I'm trying to get down into the low 90s. And if I start taking creatine, that's going to bump me up. And even though I know that that's just from the creatine and water retention, to me, it's I'm looking at a motivation factor, like a headspace, the psychology of me losing body fat. And I need to be able to see, you know, a couple of like four or five hundred grams of weight loss per week. And if I start taking creatine, that's going to bump me up a little bit. And, you know, that's it to me. It'll be a mental screw with my head. And I know that sounds silly, but to me, it's important. And I need to be able to see that to stay motivated. This is actually quite interesting because in our last episode, we just talked about all the amazing benefits of creatine, especially for vegetarians. When Luke and I recorded this interview, he was actually experimenting with keto vegan because those two diets were and still are so polarized. And as we learned in episodes 30 and 60 that talked about creatine, it's a great supplement if you aren't eating meat. But the one downside of creatine is that you will gain weight. I am reloading my creatine at the moment and added three pounds in under a week with no other changes to my diet or training. And no, I didn't go crazy at Christmas dinner. And just thinking about what Luke was talking about if I were in a weight loss phase and saw my weight go up or even plateau it would mess with my mind Yeah 100 And it's one of those things where weight loss is never linear, but we want to try to make it as linear as possible. Even if you see a 50-gram drop in a week, but everything else is kind of staying stable. And then you see a 600-gram drop the next week, and it's that, what's the average over time? but it's demotivating when you don't see that stuff drop. And just working with clients over the last 20 years, you got to figure out ways for them to actually see that drop because for a lot of people, it can be disheartening to be training so hard and doing the dieting and taking the supplements and doing their least mode and all that stuff. And then nothing happens.