Leah:
Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. I’m Leah Higl and I’m here with my co-host Aidan Muir and today we’ll be talking about ways to make weight loss easier. So we actually have a very long list of things for you today. I think a list of 20, 22 things that you can do to make weight loss and fat loss easier. So we’re going to go a little bit into the kind of fundamentals around weight loss, give a bit of background, and then we’re going to head straight into it.
Aidan:
Yeah, and we may or may not get through all of them. We’re just going to go back and forth and see.
Leah:
We’ll see. I think a few of these will be quick.
Aidan:
Yeah, okay. So we’re going to go through a bit of background on fundamentals of weight loss because this is important for setting us up for everything else that we’re about to talk through. The overall fundamental principle involved in weight management is calories in versus calories out. That should not be a controversial statement. It is a simple formula, but there is many variables that go into it, which makes it a bit more complex.
The body is literally made up of calories. One kilo of fat contains around 7,000 to 8,000 calories. A kilo of muscle contains around 1,200 calories. It’s energetically expensive to create muscle. takes about five times the amount to create a kilo of muscle. Whereas body fat gets stored far more easily and it just takes that 7,000 8,000 type of number. The body burns calories every day doing a variety of different things. For example, your heart pumping, lungs breathing, brain functioning, et cetera, et cetera, before we even start talking about movement and stuff like that.
We only get calories externally from food and drink, and we also have internal stores of calories. Calories are simply a unit of energy, so that means they can’t just be created from nothing, and they also cannot just disappear either. That’s part of what people are referring to when they’re talking about this whole, quote on quote, law of thermodynamics. Calories even need to be utilised or stored. They can’t just disappear.
When we eat more calories than we burn, not controversial, it’s easy to see how this leads to fat slash muscle gain because there is a surplus of calories available that need to go somewhere. If they haven’t been utilised, they need to be stored on our body. When we eat less than we burn, it’s easy to see how that leads to fat loss. That’s where things start to get a more controversial in terms of people start talking about how hormones and everything like that fit into it. But the simple way of talking through that is just that hormones affect both sides of the equation.
Hormones can affect how many calories we eat and how many calories we burn. There’s many variables that go into this, but the overall principle of calories in versus calories out obviously matters. So when we are talking about ways to make weight loss easier, simplifying it down, we are simply talking about ways to make it easier to create and sustain a calorie deficit.
Leah:
Absolutely. That was a really great intro. So let’s get straight into the things that we can do. The first thing we’re going to touch on is protein. Protein is great for many reasons, but having a high protein intake during a caloric deficit can help with satiety tenfold. Like it’s really great in terms of having high protein meals consistently across the day to form an overall high protein intake can help with hunger management, satiety management, therefore making a calorie deficit easier to sustain. On the flip side of that, we also have the body composition stuff.
So if we are aiming for fat loss specifically, because obviously we can lose both muscle and fat as part of a caloric deficit. If we have a higher protein intake, so upwards of around that two gram per kilo body weight as a rough target, then we are more likely to be losing more fat and less muscle mass.
Aidan:
And chucking another variable in there, we’ve also got the thermic effect of food, which is a very small detail in amongst all of this, but protein has a slightly higher thermic effect of food versus carbohydrates and more so than fat as well. This is a small variable, this does mean energy expenditure is a little bit higher per calorie from protein basically. So that plays a tiny role, but a lot of the things we’re gonna talk about play small roles in it all at a time. Another thing that comes into this category as well is fibre.
So fibre is once again, more satiating. It also kind of sets things up to kind of probably change your food choices a little bit unless you’re using fibre supplements being like if you’re trying to eat out and you’re trying to get high fibre foods, you’ve to go to different places or get different foods and stuff like that. It can slow digestion a little bit, which is part of why it helps with that whole satiating thing. It’s mostly indigestible. Technically it contains calories. For example, soluble fibre is probably around two calories per gram, but it’s largely indigestible. So eating higher fibre is something that’s also going to help a fair bit too.
Leah:
The timing of meals can also be a substantial thing to consider during a caloric deficit there are many different ways that you can approach this I find that there is not a one-set rule for caloric deficit that is going to be a game changer for everybody. But typically eating frequent meals and snacks throughout the day that are not too frequent but also not too infrequent for your own personal appetite management is going to be something that you should consider.
Then maybe even just play around with how you are timing meals across the day and certain times that you feel like your appetite management could benefit from having a meal or snack can be a great way to overcome some of this hunger stuff.
Aidan:
And adding another layer onto that, paying attention to the size of your eating window can also matter as well. So I’m not necessarily talking about intermittent fasting. For example, if we were looking at 16:8 fasting, we’ve got an eight-hour hitting window. But there is some clues, some things to be learned from there. If we look at every randomised controlled trial that’s ever been done on intermittent fasting, it has resulted in weight loss. So like we know that people eat fewer calories when they have smaller eating windows. But what I’m really talking about, because I’m not, like there’s many reasons why I don’t just blanket, be like, everyone should intermittent fast. It’s like, it’s the reasons why I don’t do that obviously.
Let’s take some clues from there and then look at the other extreme end of the spectrum. What if you had a greater than 14 hour eating window? And that’s not as crazy as you think, because it could be like, what if the second you get up, you start eating and then you have a meal relatively close to bed, then you just have this really long eating window. I’m going use a very, very practical example.
Some people wake up really early, whether it’s exercise, whether it’s do other things, and they might have breakfast at, let’s say anywhere between like 4.30 and 6am but then say they wanna have lunch at the same schedule as everybody else. So let’s say they have lunch at like 12 or 12.30 or one or something like that, maybe even two for a late lunch. They have such a big gap between breakfast and lunch that they might feel a need to have a bunch of snacks in that window or they might feel a need to have another meal and then suddenly they’re having four meals instead of three meals type thing. I’ve seen plenty of people in that scenario.
It creates a bit of a complex thing when we’re looking at like somebody trained super early and then want to pre-workout food and then like it creates a bit of a spiral in some cases as well, but I would say we don’t need to hyper-focus on eating window size, but if your self-reflecting like, okay, my eating window is massive. And I’m struggling to eat like the amount of calories I want to keep going over. It could make sense to shorten your eating window either by stopping food later in the day or starting food a little bit later in the day as well.
Leah:
Other hunger management tools following on from that could be an awesome thing to consider as well. So things like volume eating, for example, can be a way for us to be more satiated with less calories coming in. So that’s essentially going for your high volume, low energy density foods, like bulking your meals up with a ton of non-starchy veg would be a great example of this. And opting for higher volume foods that have lower calories so that you are filling your stomach so you feel satiated but not necessarily consuming as many calories as you would have otherwise.
Also doing things like water before meals or just generally being hydrated and having enough fluids throughout the day seems to be pretty good from an appetite management perspective. And then also just being okay with some level of hunger can be an important part of maintaining a caloric deficit for that longer term.
There is always going to be some level of hunger usually that you kind of have to deal with at a certain point to maintain a deficit for fat loss. So I think just there’s so many things you can do from a hunger management perspective, but also just being okay with some level of hunger.
Aidan:
Yeah. It’s like, we’re trying to make it as easy as possible, but sometimes it’s still going to be hard to still have some level of hunger. And with the water before meals thing, there is some interesting research that’s typically not super long term, finding, there’s one study that comes to my mind, I don’t know if this will be in show notes because we’re basically just doing this all the time and haven’t like prepped a show notes guide for this. But there’s one study where they had people who had 500mL of water before each meal and they were just eating ad libitum. On average they consumed 76, well 70 to 80 calories fewer than the people who didn’t have water before meals.
Over all three meals, so that added up to like 200 and a little bit calories, so they ate less per day. And for whatever reason, they didn’t catch up on snacks. It actually led to people eating fewer calories on average. Using a bit of common sense, do we think that that would work over a 20 week period? Like, no, obviously it would not. Like, I’m pretty big on if you use any hack to kind of like, quote on quote trick your appetite or trick your hunger, after a period of time, it’s just like rebalances like it gets…
Leah:
Your body’s gonna catch on.
Aidan:
Yeah, it is a useful tool being like, if you’re like, hey, I want to do a four to six week mini cut or something like that fat loss phase, tools like this have their place. Another one we’ll go through is, I guess we’ll go through back and forth on some more things. I just want to talk about vague topic of flexibility versus restraint. Figuring out a great balance for yourself with this is super important.
You don’t want to swing the pendulum too far in either direction. If you swing it too far in restraint in that direction, saying no to anything that you deem as quote on quote unhealthy, it’s unlikely to work. How many people around the world do we say who eat 100% healthy 100% of the time? It’s quite rare. And in those cases, then you start looking at stuff like, is there disordered eating involved? Are they happy? Deep questions, right? At the other end of the spectrum, if you are too flexible,
It could also make it difficult. If you say yes to everything all the time, it can be hard to achieve certain goals. And this is not even just in food, in relation to food, like that’s in relation to other things as well. But finding a balance where you are flexible enough that it’s easy to be consistent and everything like that, but also showing enough restraint at times that you can achieve your goals is pretty important too.
Leah:
In a very similar vein, we have the variety versus consistency argument, particularly around eating the same foods or eating a lot of different foods. So we know that a lot of novelty seeking with food. So when we’re constantly eating new and different things that we are more likely to consume more calories in any one meal or with any one specific kind of food. So having some consistency in the foods that we are choosing could make it easier to consume less calories overall than if we’re consistently introducing new foods, particularly ones that are like more highly palatable.
Aidan:
Yeah. And I don’t know if I’ve shared this on the podcast, but greater than 90% of the people who have come to see me for weight loss, where they’ve already lost over 20 kilos before coming to see me, are super similar in the fact that they are super routine oriented. Yes. And they can literally just list out like breakfast is this, lunch is this, my snacks are these things and dinner is like these five things on rotation.
It’s almost to the point that it’s like annoying how consistent and, like the point that’s where I come back with also that like flexibility versus restraint just being like, how many people do we succeed who do that all the way through their entire journey and have no flexibility? Like it’s, very rare to see people succeed that way, but it’s also a very common theme that they have a lot of consistency with their foods as well.
Leah:
I think there’s also so much value in being able to somewhat autopilot your habits. Like just being able to like, I know what I’m doing, I’m just gonna rinse and repeat. Obviously there’s some level of flexibility in there, but it’s routine, routine, routine.
Aidan:
Yeah. So now we’ll talk about, I guess, tracking versus not tracking. We obviously both know you can achieve this either way. Like you don’t have to necessarily do one or the other. Advantages of tracking is you know pretty closely exactly what you are consuming from a calorie perspective, it makes it quite mathematical where you say you have a calorie target, you just hit that every single day or you have different calorie targets for different days.
You can now be flexible with food choices while still hitting that. For example, you could have a set day of eating or whatever, but then you get invited somewhere and you’ve got to get something different. Like say you go out to grilled for a burger, you can go on their website, look at their stuff and then add that burger and then change the rest of the day to make it fit, right? So you can do that.
You can see like a tiny bit of hesitation where I’m like, you know exactly what you’re eating because I know there’s smart people who listen to this who’ll be like, but what percentage of those calories are absorbed? Like what about the nutrition? Like there’s obviously a bit of margin for error, but it gives you a pretty good guide about how many calories you’re consuming.
Non -tracking though. Every now and then I get a question from people being like, it possible to lose weight without tracking? And there are no dumb questions, like historically a large percentage of people around the world who have lost weight have done it without tracking. We do not need to track to lose weight. And what we do need to do is we still need to create a calorie deficit. The classic saying calories count whether or not you track them, whether or not you count them. The trick there is just setting up a bit of a routine where your habits are aligned with you being in a calorie deficit and doing that consistently over time.
And then also adjusting things over time. For example, eating to a certain level of hunger, having some pretty set meals that you kind of do most days, having some pretty set snacks, all of these kinds of things. And then if you’re like, what I’m doing is not working, then adjusting those habits, then move in the direction you want to move.
Leah:
Yeah. If you go down the non -tracking way for fat loss, think again, that routine is such a big pillar to making that successful because then you can easily adjust from your regular routine. And then trucking just adds in this extra layer of being able to do quote unquote flexible dieting.
Aidan:
My next pro tip is something that I have thought about far more deeply than than I care to admit. But it is something that I think is so valuable and I actually talk about with pretty much any every one of my clients and it’s tips on interacting with others people with other people around your journey. Say you want to go on a weight loss journey.
Who do you tell and how often do you talk about it? If you have a partner, do you tell your partner? Do you want their support? Like obviously people will tell their partner to want support, but like in some cases telling your partner makes it more difficult because now there’s pressure and there’s maybe there’s comments every time he eats and stuff. I won’t go too deep down that rabbit hole, but like say you work in a workplace where there’s like 10 other people, do you tell them that you’re trying to look this way?
The big part that I’m gonna get at, so the thing that I’ve talked about, I think about heaps is what I call my polite decline approach. And all that is, is if somebody offers you food that you do not want to eat simply for nutrition purposes, you’ve thought about it, you’re like, can be flexible with food, I can eat anything, I just can’t eat everything. Sometimes I say yes, sometimes I say no. And you’ve come to a conclusion, I wanna say no to this for nutrition reasons. When they offer you that food, there’s many things you could do to decline that.
But the polite decline method, is simply saying something along the lines of, I just don’t feel like that or nah, I don’t feel like that right now. Those are my own words. Anyone who’s listening to this, use your own words. Use how you would normally speak. That’s kind of how I speak. But that saying, even though it’s a few words, I’ve thought about it heaps. Let me use an example. Let’s say somebody offers me chocolate and sometimes when I say yes to chocolate, sometimes when I say no.
If I say no, and then try to explain why. It creates a few issues. Let’s say I say, no, I care about my goals, I’m on a fat loss journey. How could that go wrong? That could push back on them being like, are saying I don’t care about my goals, I wanna eat chocolate? That could then create other issues for down the line. What if I wanna say yes? What if somebody comes to my door and offers me chocolate every day and one day I wanna say yes?
If I say yes, but the first time I’ve said, nah I care about my goals, they’re going to be like, what do you mean?
Leah:
Like, you don’t care about them anymore?
Aidan:
Like you’ve suddenly just put this immense pressure on yourself for no real purpose. And the other thing is if you try to explain why you’ve opened the door. If I say no, it’s because I care about my fat loss goals. What is the response? The first one’s probably going to be like one won’t hurt though.
Leah:
Like you’re open to a rebuttal.
Aidan:
You’re open to rebuttal. But if you say, I don’t feel like it. You’re not open to a rebuttal. Exactly. Like what are they going to do? Just ask again and if they ask again, you just repeat yourself. You’re like, I just don’t really feel like it. And then if they ask again, which has never happened to me, it’s really weird. They’re being weird in that situation. And like the reason I’ve thought about this is obviously because I work with lot of clients who need to say no to stuff at certain times.
But it’s also just a personal thing. Like it’s just a dietitian thing. Like how many times do I eat certain foods and people will make a comment? If I eat something healthy, people are going to comment. If I eat something unhealthy, people are going to comment. The best solution I’ve ever found for all of this is making everything low pressure and just having like a one line response rather than trying to go into a big spiel about why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Leah:
Yeah, not everyone needs to know exactly what your motivation behind saying no is all the time.
Aidan:
Yeah, and there’s no reason to make this any more difficult than it needs to be.
Leah:
Yeah, I love that tip. Another thing that we would find incredibly useful, especially as part of a longer weight loss, fat loss journey is going through maintenance phases or what we call diet breaks a lot of the time. So literally just coming out of that caloric deficit for a period of time and eating at maintenance calories. This is helpful for a lot of reasons. So we’ve talked about diet breaks pretty extensively on this podcast. And what we always come back to is the psychological aspect of a maintenance phase. So when we are dieting, that can be quite psychologically and emotionally fatiguing. So spending some time at this kind of structured maintenance where we’re not constantly dealing with that restriction and that hunger can be a really great way to kind of reset before heading back into a dieting phase.
And then we also have the very physiological effect of reducing our desire to eat, our hunger, which can increase over time as we move through a dieting phase. So if we’ve gotten to a point where no matter what we do, hunger is really high, it’s really uncomfortable, our desire to eat is really high, then taking this maintenance phase or this diet break can be a really useful way again to just reset and then go again.
Aidan:
From that calorie perspective as well, another tip is choosing an appropriately sized calorie deficit. If you go too low calorie, you’ll often feel more hungry, more fatigued, more restricted, all of these things. If you go too small of the calorie deficit, it’ll just take forever. It’s like in a fallow space for a very, very long time. So somewhere in the middle probably makes sense, but what I definitely find, I assume you find this as well, Leah, is that people, when they’re doing things by themselves, go far more aggressive than they need to, and then it doesn’t feel good for a variety of reasons, and then they don’t wanna do it, like there’s many reasons.
Leah:
Yeah, I love that sweet spot of we’re making fast enough progress for motivation to remain high, but we’re not going so fast or have such a large calorie deficit where they’re miserable.
Aidan:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so just paying attention to that.
Aidan:
And even just on like, whenever I Instagram Q &A’s, there are so many people who will say things like, every time I enter a calorie deficit, I just feel like trash. And the first way I think about that is, if you feel good at maintenance calories, what if you had one calorie less than maintenance calories? You’d feel fine, right? And that’s a dumb example, I’d never encourage that to anybody. But there’s obviously a point that if you reduce by 100 calories, 200 calories, where it wouldn’t feel trash, it would feel okay.
Leah:
Yeah, a lot of people just jump straight to a very aggressive approach and you’re like, obviously that’s gonna have its cons.
So another thing that we could look at during this process is liquid calories versus non -liquid calories. So we know from a satiety point of view, when we have whole foods that we actually have to physically chew whole meals that are not liquids, that they are more satiating and better for appetite management than when we’re having liquid calories. So if we take the example of a smoothie that is 600 calories that we finish very quickly. We don’t have to chew. We probably won’t find that that is as satiating or that we are full for as long as if we had the same 600 calories worth of food, even if it was the exact same foods, but we had it in a non -liquid form. So I think that’s just something to consider that if you are in a calorie deficit and you’re finding you’re having like heaps of Up and Go’s and protein shakes and other liquid calories that it might be beneficial to swap to more whole foods.
Aidan:
Yeah and another something along those lines is like the ratio of snacks versus meals. Typically meals are more filling than snacks. And there’s some interesting research on people who maintain weight loss on average have a significantly larger amount of calories come from meals than snacks in comparison to people who if you do not lose weight or do not maintain their weight loss. And I am somebody who often includes snacks in my plans for clients and stuff like that, just to round out the nutritional profile of their diets in many, many ways.
Like there’s a few things we can add in through snacks, but it always has to be conscious about being like, I don’t want to go too far in that direction. Like we don’t want to be quote on quote grazing across the day and everything like that. We still want to have a priority on meals. This is also unrelated to that point, but it’s something that I think about a bit in relation to like, let’s say you have a big lunch out and then you’re like, I want something light for dinner. I don’t want to have a full meal or something like that. But then you start grazing on snacks and it ends up being higher calorie anyway. And obviously usually more nutrient poor anyway. like, well, maybe you could have just had a dinner that was focused on protein and vegetables or something like that.
Leah:
Yeah. And I have a lot of clients that from a snack perspective will be really tied to the morning tea, afternoon tea, supper approach. But especially if you’re someone who is a bit smaller, has less of a calorie like energy output. And let’s say your calorie deficit quantity, like the budget you have is 1600 calories and you’re spending 600 calories across three snacks across the day.
Aidan:
There’s not much room for meals left.
Leah:
Meals are going to be small and they’re not going to be very satiating. So at what point do we feed more calories into meals and reduce snacks?
Aidan:
So we’ve probably got time for a few more. Which ones do we want to go with?
Leah:
I reckon definitely talking a little bit on general activity and exercise worth doing.
Aidan:
Yeah. Do you want to that one?
Leah:
Yeah. So when we’re thinking about ways to make fat loss easier, general activity and exercise is obviously going to play potentially a big role in being able to create a caloric deficit without as much restriction to food intake. So allowing us to have a little bit more budget for food coming in. So from a general activity perspective, this can relate to just the incidental movement we do every day. So if you were someone pre-diet who was doing eight to 10,000 steps per day, okay, that’s probably a pretty awesome thing to maintain during a fat loss phase.
Or if you’re someone who is very little incidental movement, maybe even looking to increase that amount of steps per day just to increase that overall caloric output. Obviously you can also add structured exercise. Exercise has benefits from a variety of viewpoints, from health and just generally, like ideally we’re not all about promoting exercise just to the point of calorie output or burning calories.
But look, it’s probably beneficial regardless, whether you’re in a calorie deficit phase or even just maintaining your fat loss to have some kind of structured exercise as part of that.
Aidan:
Yeah, huge fan of that. The final one that I’m going to do is just a quick one, just being like, probably worth checking your hormones. If you’re concerned about that, like taking a moment, going to the doctor, get a blood test, checking your hormones just in case.
One of the main things to be looking for is a thyroid panel just to see how your thyroid is functioning. We know that if you have hypothyroidism, you likely have lower energy expenditure, but we care about that for other reasons too, because it presents with other symptoms that obviously matter too. But it’s just like, this is a quick thing just to check and just confirm if you’re going down this route, and I encourage it for certain people too.
Leah:
Yeah, so lots of things that we can do to make fat loss and weight loss easier. So hopefully you’ve taken you’re able to take a few things from here. There’s a few things that we didn’t get to, but it’s all kind of part and parcel. We covered the really important stuff. And so yeah, hopefully you can take something away that’s helpful.
Aidan:
Perfect. Well, this has been episode 139 of the ideal nutrition podcast. Thank you once again for listening. And as always, if you have not left a rating or review, we would greatly appreciate that.