Jonathan Steedman (00:01.388)

Hey food groupies, today I'm gonna encourage you to stop trying to lose weight for a little while. So if you have a goal of weight loss or you think that potentially in the future you will have a goal of weight loss and you wanna be successful at that goal, then this podcast is gonna be very important because I think it's going to maybe change what you have planned to do. And if you're like most other people who have embarked on a weight loss goal, you're gonna get this wrong. So you can listen to this and not get this wrong. Basically the main thing I see that people get wrong is

They decide they wanna lose some weight. They make some changes. Hopefully those are positive changes and that's a whole other podcast episode. We made those changes and you decide that you will continue this process until you reach your goal. That makes sense, that's very logical. I'm not gonna stop trying to lose weight until I've lost the weight I wanna lose, whatever that means for you. However, I don't think that is the right way to do it because it's...

very undefined and there's no real goalposts, there's no real light at the end of the tunnel because you don't know how long this thing is gonna take. It could take four weeks, it could take four months, it could take two years. And so I think already if you start your weight loss pursuit with no clear understanding of how long you're be doing this for, that's already I think gonna put you on the back foot. The thing I always think about and I think this will be true for everyone. If someone came up to me and said, I need you to do 100 pushups,

Right, that's Johnno A has to do 100 pushups. Johnno B has to do as many pushups as he can. Johnno A can't do 100 unbroken pushups. Like if you can, props to you. I absolutely cannot. But I think if I had a target of 100, I had a specific target, a line in the sand, a goalpost to aim for, I reckon I would smash out way more pushups than in the scenario where someone says, just do as many as you can.

you know, I'd start to get a bit tired and I'd be like, that's probably as many as I can, you know. So I think the same thing happens with weight loss. If you decide to do this thing for the next six weeks versus I'm going to do this thing until I'm done, the person who has that defined six weeks can just be a little bit more focused and a bit more enthused and motivated about that goal because you have a sense of urgency about it, which is not, sometimes can be a bad thing when taken to the extreme, but a little bit of urgency about this goal is good.

Jonathan Steedman (02:23.38)

It lights a bit of a fire, gets you off your butt. Think about, like at high school or university when you studied and you had exams, or if you had an assignment and they were just like, I just handed in when you want, you'd never do it. I wouldn't have, right? Deadlines can be very helpful to provoke change. So that's the first reason why I would encourage you to break up your weight loss. So I guess what I mean when I say break up weight loss is, let's say that you need to accumulate

30 weeks of being in a deficit, right? So we know that you need to diet for 30 weeks. I would encourage you strongly to not diet for 30 weeks straight. I would encourage you to do four to eight weeks of dieting and then one to two weeks of increasing your food back up to what we would call maintenance. the group, we call it the escape plan. Helps you escape, helps you intentionally move from a deficit to maintenance in a sensible, smart, healthy way and gives your body and your mind.

physiological and a psychological break from dieting for a little bit of time. And then it means when you move back into a weight loss phase, you refresh, you rejuvenated, you're motivated, and you smash out that next four to six week block. And so what we wanna do is we still wanna accumulate 30 weeks of dieting. We just break it up and put some rests in between, okay? So yeah, that might mean that your 30 weeks of fat loss takes you 52 weeks, okay? Because with the, that's not, you don't need that many breaks.

I should have thought that through. It might mean that it takes 35 to 40 weeks instead of 30 weeks. But you know what else is probably going to happen? You're actually going to accumulate 30 weeks. You're actually going to get to your goal as opposed to, no, I just want to do it straight because I want to get it done as quickly as possible. Around week 12, you burn out and start spinning out and blowing out and all the outs and you never actually reach your goal. So breaking the stuff up actually makes it

far more likely that you will achieve your goal. What it also probably makes it, what it also probably increases the likelihood of significantly is you maintaining that progress when you're done, right? Because once you have finished losing the weight, once you've accumulated your 30 weeks of dieting, throughout that phase of dieting, you've also had plenty of times practicing maintaining your weight.

Jonathan Steedman (04:41.707)

In all of those breaks of one to two weeks, you've been maintaining weight. You know what that looks like. You know how much food that is. You know how that feels. You know what the scale or the measurements do. That is now a skill that you have rather than you finally achieve your weight loss. You can pull yourself out and you're like, okay, now to maintain. And then it's a whole other mountain that you've got to climb. So better to break that mountain up into little smaller chunks as well. so, yeah, okay, instead of 30 weeks of dieting, it's been a 40 week process, but at the end of that 40 weeks,

you've actually achieved your goals. And B, you've also practiced maintaining for 10 weeks. So that transition from losing weight to maintaining weight is so effortless because you've already done it three or four times this year, right? So way, way, way smarter to do it like that. And so that's why in the group and just for anyone I talk to, we do not start with weight loss and then diet through until you are finished. We break it up into specific chunks.

Everyone's specific chunk is a little bit different. For some people, it's three weeks. For some people, it's eight weeks. That's really, really personal. And you might do a four-week block, then a six-week block, and then a two-week block, and then with all the different rests in between, there's no global recommendation. We just take that on a person-by-person basis. But virtually everybody benefits from having it broken up in some fashion. So if the only way you have ever tried to lose weight is starting with

like starting to lose weight and then with the goal of I will stop when I'm finished, I strongly encourage you to not do that again. I strongly encourage you to build a slightly more sophisticated plan and periodize it, which is basically meaning, you know, pull some different blocks together, some different phases together and have different goals for those different phases. And finally, of course, if you need some help with that, that's like I said, that's exactly what we do in the group. We've actually got four different phases typically that will work people through the.

the weight loss phase, the escape plan, the off season and sprint phase, we've got all of these different things that we can help you with. if you're listening to this podcast going, that sounds awesome, but I don't know how to do that, don't worry, I do and I can help. So what's the bet? Just message me on Instagram or send me an email or something. otherwise, break up your weight loss, practice maintenance before the end, and you're gonna be way healthier and way more successful. So awesome. Thanks, team. I'll chat to you next time.