Jonathan Steedman (00:01.474)
Right team, we need to talk about the weekends because I am so sick of them slowing or stopping your weight loss progress because it's so commonly does and it doesn't have to, it shouldn't. You can absolutely enjoy your weekends, find a balance and still continue to lose weight across the week. All right. What I find first, there's kind of like two camps. The first camp is they try and eat the same way for seven days. We have this idea of like, okay, well I've got my meal plan or I've got my meal structure.

and it works during the weekdays, so I'll just keep going over the weekend. And that's pretty unrealistic. I don't know about your life, but my life looks significantly different on the weekend versus the week. Kids activities, you know, going around, like it's just a different beast. And so you try and keep your weekday nutrition going over the weekend. Inevitably you can't, and so you fail. And so then you rack that up as, I can't do this, I've failed. And that stacks, those experiences stack and continue in our minds to build.

quote unquote evidence that I can't lose weight. There goes your momentum, there goes your confidence and it can kind of just be the end of that. So I don't want that for you. But the other camp, what I often find, they already understand that. They understand that, look, I can't eat the same way on the weekend as I do during the week. That doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit in. And so what I will do instead is have no plan at all. I've got my weekday plan.

And then I'll just kind of wing it for a couple of days over the weekend or maybe just put my head down and pretend that Saturday and Sunday food doesn't count. And then I'll start again Monday, that old chestnut. And the reality is if that's how you're approaching each and every weekend, you're almost certainly going to be overdoing it. And what happens is you're losing weight for five days of the week and you're gaining weight for two days of the week and those just cancel each other out. And so across your whole week,

you're losing weight five days of the week, but then you are not getting any progress, which sucks. That's the worst, worst way to be. So Camp A, Camp B, I want you guys to be Camp C. Now this is a strategy that I pulled from something called the Weekend Toolkit, which is our big module inside Weighed Off, lets people kind of, it's all of the strategies that we use. There's this one, there's a few other.

Jonathan Steedman (02:26.444)
bits and pieces. So the main one though is this idea of building your own weekend eating pattern. So not trying to eat exactly like you do during the week, but having a new plan for the weekend. And I don't mean new meals and a whole bunch of new stuff, just tackling your day a little bit differently. And so this upcoming weekend, what I want you to do is identify main meals and light meals. So your main meals, your bigger meals across the weekend is going to be anything that is unusual, a meal out.

a takeout meal, a meal at a friend's house, a meal that you've cooked from home from scratch, which is epic. Maybe it's a giant curry or spaghetti or you're doing homemade pizza, something that is a little bit outside of your normal routine. Those are going to be your big meals because they're probably going to be higher in calories than your standard meal and that's okay. So you might have one or two of those in a day. So I want you to do those. There's things we can do, but we don't need to stress about them. Just do those.

The main magic comes from adding a light meal. So your light meal is the meal that goes in between or after those big meals. And it's really, really easy to fall into the trap of skipping this one if you're not careful, because you can tell yourself, I had a pretty big breakfast because I went out for the cafe. So I probably don't need lunch. I'll just skip lunch. And the little voice in your brain is probably saying, and that actually will be more weight loss because I'm eating less. Yeah, good job me. Pat on the back. The only problem is

about three or four o'clock comes around and you are so insanely hungry because you haven't eaten since 10 a.m. and out come the chips, the cheese, the crackers. And not that those foods are bad or not that you can't have those foods with weight loss, but if you're eating those foods when you're crazy hungry, your ability to moderate them is not good. You're doing it on hard mode basically, right? So that can significantly blow out your intake for the day.

Or maybe you don't do that at three or four PM, you limp through till dinner, but then by dinner, you're so hungry that you massively overeat at dinner. You feel crappy, you know, physically, but you also have probably over consumed more than you need. So make sure somewhere in your weekend, you are having a light meal. A light meal is not, it's not a snack. It needs to be a meal, but it's also not this giant smorgasbord. Inside the group, we typically talk about things like smoothies.

Jonathan Steedman (04:45.486)
yogurt and fruit a big bowl of yogurt and fruit by the way I'm talking like 250 grams of yogurt and fruit the 250 grams is the yogurt not just the not the whole thing so big bowl of yogurt and fruit maybe it's like a salad and a protein sauce tuna chicken eggs tofu or it might be like what oh like a veggie omelet is a really really good option that I like but just something light something simple sure it's not gonna be the most exciting thing you've eaten that day but ideally you're doing other fun stuff

over the weekend and having other fun meals anyway. So just putting in this little light meal at the time when you were the hungriest is the best way to do it. So what I want you to be doing is thinking about what are my big meals and when are they during the day? If they're split, like if it's like breakfast and dinner, I want your light meal to go as close to in the middle, halfway between those meals as possible. If your two big meals are back to back, maybe you've gone out for breakfast and then you're going over to a friend's for lunch.

then your light meal becomes dinner. You still don't go, well, I've had two big meals, so I guess I'll just skip dinner. No, you still have your light meal. Because if you skip dinner that day, guess what happens tomorrow? You're insanely hungry. So no matter what is happening, you always need to have that light meal. And switching from a few meals and a few snacks, which might work really well during the week, to two bigger meals and a light meal over the weekend is such a powerful hack. We've had so many people.

fundamentally shift their weight loss progress just by making this one little change inside the group. if you've got any questions, let me know. Otherwise, let me know how you go implementing this and I'll chat to you next week.