Jonathan Steedman (00:01.647)

Hey food groupies, today I'm gonna talk to you about aggressive dieting, which this podcast may not go in the direction that you think it's gonna go, especially if you've followed me for a hot minute. You might think you already know my thoughts on aggressive dieting, but I learned, what is every post doing now, because they're all using AI, but I learned this one thing and it changed everything. That's not exactly what happened, I learned lots of things.

and did lots of research and learned from some smart people like Martin McDonald. So just for those of you who don't know Martin McDonald, what the heck, go find him. He has an amazing aggressive dieting plan that they released earlier this year. And I was a little bit nervous because I'm gonna talk a little bit, I've called it the sprint phase. That's what I've been using with clients and then using it in my group for kind of more aggressive weight loss. And I've been using it for like a year. So I had the sprint phase before Martin McDonald released his thing.

And I was a bit nervous to be like, man, is everything he's gonna say different to what I'm gonna say? And that would be hard for me to swallow, because he's much smarter than I am. But fortunately, it just reinforced a bunch of stuff, so that's exciting. So I just wanted to talk to you today about aggressive dieting, very briefly. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it, that would be very irresponsible. So stop listening now that's what you're hoping for. I'm gonna give you some guidelines and some tips for doing it. I just can't give you like, eat this much food, because I don't know who you are, right? So.

First and foremost, there's two main myths that I go through in the group to bust around the idea of aggressive dieting. The first is it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be hungrier. We often see in aggressive diets, which I will define by the way as more than a 25 % reduction in your calories. So it doesn't have to be insane. Sometimes it can be up to like 40%, which is hardcore and there's potential cases where that's okay, but I'm not really talking about that. I'm just talking more than the like,

mild gentle calorie deficit that a lot of people try and achieve because the reality is that often doesn't work even though it would work on paper because you've got such a small deficit you you reduce your calories by 300 calories by like 10 to even sometimes 15 percent because it's such a small buffer it's really easy for life to wipe that buffer out because you've got a very small margin for error going in a larger deficit now within reason of course but a larger deficit

Jonathan Steedman (02:26.015)

means that you've got a bit more margin for error. You can absorb some of those calorie changes. So that's one reason why some of the people inside the weight off group opt for the sprint phase. Again, it's not an essential part of the process. Plenty of people don't do it because I take them through who should and who shouldn't. But yeah, for the people who do do it, that's why they find it potentially beneficial. And oftentimes, coming back to the hunger, what we see is we don't...

actually experience greater hunger in these more aggressive phases, which is counterintuitive. There's some biological explanation which I won't bore you with, like ketones and stuff like that. Not the ketogenic diet, different, but ketones. But ultimately, mean, personally, if I could lose slightly more fat and be the same amount of hungry, I'm opting for that, right? So there is that.

potential benefit. The other huge myth, which is something I said all through uni, even in my first couple of years as a dietitian, you know, because it was just this myth that gets repeated so often, I'm kind like the 95 % of diets fail garbage. This one just gets repeated so often as well that people just accept it to be true. And that is the faster you lose the weight, the more risk you are putting the weight back on. And that's simply not true. I think what it does is we've got some confirmation bias because either that's happened to us.

we've lost weight quickly and then put it back on quickly, or we've seen that happen to someone we know, maybe someone at the gym who's done an insane eight week challenge and has just thrashed themselves for eight weeks, lost a bunch of weight really quickly, but then six months later it's all gone back on. That really doesn't have much to do outside of losing excessively body mass, which is another conversation and actually reasonably hard to do. What is probably going on there is those eight weeks, they weren't really hard, but...

It's not about the eight weeks, it's what happened before the eight weeks and after the eight weeks. Before the eight weeks, it's generally someone who doesn't really know what they're doing with food, the kind of living day to day, take out to take out, no plan, don't know how to build a balanced meal, not sure about macros and vitamins and minerals and color and how to build all of those things. And I'm not like putting that person down, that's a lot of stuff to learn. But if you don't know that, and you don't very importantly have a good relationship with food, where you can, you know,

Jonathan Steedman (04:41.249)

comfortably moderate foods that you enjoy. And then you take that person and you slam them for eight weeks. Yeah, they're gonna lose weight. But then what are they gonna do at the end of that eight weeks? They're gonna go back to what they were doing at the beginning, because that's all they know. So of course, they're gonna put the weight back on quickly, right? So it's got nothing to do with how fast they lost it. It's got everything to do with not knowing what to do, not having a good nutritional structure before the aggressive diet, and or not having a good relationship with food before the diet.

So that is a huge thing that, you know, that's why we don't talk about the aggressive dieting. We don't talk about the sprint phase until towards the end of the eight weeks, because I want to make sure everyone's got a good day, good structure, balanced, their hunger's managed. We talk about a lot of relationship with food and mindset pieces. So we make sure all of those are installed. And then I believe certain people can do a healthy, aggressive diet. And oftentimes it's a smarter play because you get it done quicker, yet in...

you get out and you get happy, okay? The other thing people get wrong is not having an escape plan, which is literally what I call our next phase, the escape plan, right? It's how we intentionally increase calories back in, add more food back in, manage hunger. Don't let you, I hate the term blowout, but everyone knows what I mean when I say blowout. You don't fall into a vat of ice cream. It allows you to comfortably, sensibly move your food back up and get out of that more aggressive.

So I'd say the two big or I don't know how many big things I've spoken about but some of the big issues that people But make someone's aggressive diet not work. Like I said, just general nutritional structure is a bit wonky and knowledge is a bit wonky Relationship with food is not positive or at least neutral, right? It's it's it's damaged Again, not blaming that person nothing wrong with you at all, but work on that stuff first then

They don't have a good plan for exiting that aggressive diet, right? I would say the next mistake they make is they try and do it for too long. Eight weeks of aggressive dieting is hectic. We typically, we do one to four inside the group. I joke that you can do more than four, but it's by application, because I need to check in and make sure that you are truly okay to do so. But for most people, I wouldn't do longer than that.

Jonathan Steedman (07:02.475)

and we instead do cycles of one to three weeks, one to four weeks, and then a couple of weeks of rest, so that escape plan, bringing the calories back up and then back into the sprint phase, and that just seems to seems to work. Scientifically makes so much more sense, and then just based on results from the people inside, weight off inside the group, again, infinitely, better. The last big mistake I see people make with this more aggressive approach is they interpret more aggressive, pardon.

me for that reminder going off in the background. They interpret more aggressive as more restrictive. And I know that feels like a really logical relationship and what I want though is your regular meals, your regular structured meals are going to be a bit lighter. They're gonna be lower in calories. Maybe you've had to reduce carbs a bit more than you'd like to bring the calories down or.

dropped portions a little, maybe you've had to drop us some snacks or something else out of your day. So you've reduced those days, that's fine. But what you're not allowed to do is reduce going out with a friend for their birthday or if your kid wants that ice cream, you're gonna have that ice cream with them. You can decide if you're like, really don't feel like that food, I'm not gonna force myself to eat it, that's fine. But it's not okay, this is four weeks of absolutely perfectly quote unquote sticking to my plan with no deviations.

Again inside the group, we've got a whole bunch of strategies on dealing with deviations and I still encourage everybody on the sprint phase to Deviate when it is right. Okay, it's not about not deviating It's about what your daily structure is and I think that's another huge mistake people make just in general probably with all fat loss, but specifically a more aggressive approach is they're like, okay Well, that means I need to just do have no flexibility have no social life have no relaxed meals nothing

And that level of rigidity never, never works, right? So take homes. If you are someone that has a decent relationship with food, if you have a solid day on the plate, solid knowledge of nutritional structures and building a balanced meal and those sorts of things. And then if you are not gonna be doing it for a crazy period of time, if you know how to comfortably get your calories from those lower calories, faster weight loss calories up to...

Jonathan Steedman (09:26.32)

maintaining your weight calories and you know how to be flexible, you're good at flexible restraint, not being too rigid and too restrictive, then what's the one other thing? and you're not trying to do this thing at a dumb time of life. So I actually recorded a podcast just before, is now the right time to lose weight. And so obviously if it's not the right time to lose weight, it's absolutely not the right time to do a more aggressive weight loss phase. that's if you know.

you're sick, your kid's sick, work's crazy, you're traveling, you're busy, like all of these sorts of things. So yeah, also plan it, that's smart time. But if you can tick all those boxes, I think an aggressive diet can be a really good fit for some people. And if you would like some help either doing the aggressive diet, because you've ticked all those boxes, or if you would love to tick those boxes with or without, then moving into an aggressive diet, weight off opens, that's that group program I spoke about.

Everyone's killing it, everyone's having such good results. If you wanna learn a little bit more about it, the doors open this Sunday till Thursday. I only got a short period of time, because I wanna make sure I've got enough time to put everyone's plans together and support everyone, so I can't just let everyone in all the time. if you're keen, either hit me up on Instagram or jump on the link that I'll put in the bio, read a bunch about it, see if you're a good fit, see if it feels like the right thing for you, and hopefully we'll see you inside.