Jonathan Steedman (00:01.88)
Hey team, I wanted to take you through five little mental upgrades, I guess, that I've developed after working with thousands, literally thousands of people and having been a dietician for almost 10 years now. no, nine years. Don't round up. Anyway, it's been a while. And so these are.

Not things that I have read about or these aren't things I learned at uni or learned from a textbook. This is the stuff that having seen time and time again and, you know, had very similar conversations with people struggling with the same sort of stuff. People struggling with getting their nutrition to match life, right? Not just building an idealistic plan. These are the five little mental upgrades that these people have worked through and I've helped them work through that have allowed them to actually get that weight loss that they've wanted.

despite life not really caring about their health and fitness goals. So I'll go through them and like I said, of the five, think maybe all five will be relevant for you or otherwise potentially one or two will really stand out and those are the ones I want you to focus on. So the first thing is this idea about trying to add rather than take away, right? And so,

Across the board, I think everyone's instinct when they're trying to lose weight is, do I cut out? What do I cut out? Sugar. I cut out.

processed foods, I cut out whole food groups, you I can't eat dairy anymore, I don't eat grains, or don't eat carbs, I carbs aren't a food group, but you know what I mean. And that's where our time and our energy and our attention goes. But I would instead encourage you to try and flip that and look at more of what we would call like an approach versus an avoidance mindset. So an approach mindset is, can I, what can I do more of? So yeah, to lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit, so you certainly need to reduce the number of

Jonathan Steedman (01:55.616)
calories that you're eating. But you can do that by eating more other things. So rather than I'm going to eat less of all these things, I'm going to eat more vegetables at my meals. I'm going to have more protein at my breakfast. Maybe I'm going to actually start eating breakfast if I've been, if that's something I haven't been doing lately. What are the, how can I flip this?

and focus on what I, things I want to do more of, which yeah, will ultimately result in you eating fewer calories. But time and time again, I've seen people who focus on stuff they need to cut out, it crashes and burns. Whereas if they're focusing on things I need to add, stuff goes a lot better. So if you've been focusing on what to cut out, this is your sign to try and flip that on its head. The second little principle, I guess we could call them, that I would look at is,

stop thinking about it being a discipline or a willpower issue, it's a logistics or a structure or a planning issue, right? If your plan requires huge buckets and buckets of discipline or willpower to stick to, to adhere to, the hack isn't to try and build more willpower or discipline, it's trying to build a plan that doesn't need that much, okay? And so...

if your plan is super unrealistic, super doesn't match your timetable, your responsibilities throughout the day, whether that be work responsibilities or family responsibilities, if it requires you to completely avoid foods that you love for extended periods of time, if it, all of these things. If your plan looks like that, yeah, it's gonna need a heap of willpower and discipline. And that also probably means it's not gonna last.

super long. So if you're finding that your plan is impossibly hard and you know you're waiting to what's that meme you know my plans involve me waking up tomorrow with a sense of discipline and willpower that I've not once exhibited in my entire life. If that's you firstly I'm not laughing at you we've all done it I do it still with other areas of my life but

Jonathan Steedman (04:05.346)
I try and catch myself and go, no, Jonah, you're being unrealistic and you will require a ridiculous amount of willpower to stick to this. And so you're probably not going to. So how can I go back to the drawing board and build a better plan? Principle three, I mean, this is pretty obvious. Well, not obvious, it's become a bit, there's no good foods or bad foods. There's just foods, Foods also have different jobs. They all have different purposes.

And you'll probably still say in your mind good foods and bad foods. I honestly still say it in my brain. It's pretty ingrained. But I don't act on it. And I know that that's just conditioning. And then I can always counter that with, no.

I know actually there's no good foods or bad foods. This isn't a bad food. This isn't, there's anything wrong with this food. It's just a food that suits a different purpose. So making sure that we're not labeling any foods like that is really, really important. And also then remembering that the damage or the problem isn't eating these foods, these sometimes foods. It's our response to eating those foods, right? So.

It's very rare that a couple of biscuits is going to derail your weight loss, but if you feel guilt and shame and you spiral after eating those two biscuits and you eat the rest of the packet and then you go on to eat a whole bunch of other things and then maybe you ride off the rest of the week because diet starts Monday, that is going to significantly impact your weight loss results. So A, don't label foods as good or bad and B,

Don't focus on not eating those foods that trip you up. Focus on what you do after you eat those foods that trip you up. Much, much, much more important. Fourth thing that I see a lot of people, a lot of mistakes people make, this is kind of similar to the logistics in Willpower One, but if your plan, so you your goal is weight loss, you've thought about how you're gonna achieve that, you probably have mapped out, okay, I'm gonna eat this, I'm gonna plan this, I'm gonna prep this, this is how I'm gonna achieve it.

Jonathan Steedman (06:09.29)
If that plan falls apart the second there's a birthday party or a sick kid or a work trip or any of those normal life events, you need to go back to the drawing board. Again, I don't want you to have this idealistic plan, this unrealistic plan, and then blame yourself when it falls apart, right?

Way too many people I've worked with have come to me with plans that look amazing on paper, but just don't survive contact with real life. So just make sure that your plan does. Make sure that you have backup foods, you have alternative foods, you know how you're going to eat at a party, you know what you're going to do on that weekend when you're away. Don't ignore those events because they are going to happen, and building a plan to navigate them is a really important part of weight loss as a whole.

Finally, the last thing that I think if I could install honestly one belief in someone's brain at the moment anyhow, it's this idea that

Behavior beats information. And so what I mean by that is, I think we're still under the idea that I just need more information to lose weight. I need more recipes, I need more plans, I need a better meal plan, I need to learn more stuff, right? But you actually don't. You know what to do. So stop focusing so much on...

what I need to do and collecting all of these recipes and things. And maybe have a think about why you aren't doing it, why you can't do it.

Jonathan Steedman (07:43.817)
Is it some of the stuff I spoke about before? Are you trying to stick to a structure that really isn't right for you? Or are you focusing on the practical side of things, meal prepping and planning, but you haven't worked on your head, right? Have you not worked on things like mental mistakes and rolling back some black and white thinking, some labelling, some filtering, some all-certain catastrophizing? Are you falling into kind of really rigid restraint? Do you have these ideas of what I should and should not do rather

than being more flexible with your approach. That is where the magic lies. It's not another meal plan. It's not another recipe. It's working on that behavioral stuff. so no one wants to because it's not as sexy. I get it. But it's honestly the biggest gap that I see with people. Everyone's got all the knowledge. And honestly, you can also chat GBT or Claude or AI of choice. Probably a pretty respectable meal plan at this point in time.

But that's not what's holding you back, right? You can go do that now. Go do that and follow that for a couple of weeks. Let me know how you go. I'm pretty confident that it will fall apart. And it's not because the plan's wrong. It's because you're focusing on information, not behavior. So.

little bit of a rambly one, but those are really the five kind of principles, I guess we call them, that have really kind of stuck out to me over the years. And so what I'd love for you to do is maybe pick one that's really, I don't know, attacked you with love and make that the one that you focus on this week, because yeah, it's gonna be really important. Cool, on that note, I'll leave you to it. Just quickly, I have built a little...

If you're a parent and you're struggling with weight loss and juggling your needs versus your family's needs, I know firsthand how difficult that can be. So I made a couple of little videos that will help you with probably the three biggest problems that people have in that part. So if you jump onto my Instagram and you message me the word lunchbox, all one word, I'll send you those videos. So come find me, come do that. And I'll chat to you guys next week.