E159 | The Fundamentals of Weight Loss

Today Alex discusses the fundamentals of weight loss and sustainable weight management including:

 - How to approach the problem of being overweight or obese

- The role of nutrition, exercise, sleep and alcohol 

- Understanding different phases of weight management

- How to measure your progress

- The psychology of weight loss

- How to get started 

.. and much more.

Disclaimer: This podcast is not appropriate for individuals with a previous history of restrictive eating disorders or extreme body image issues. 

Presented by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

Alex is doing a live event with Rose Cartwright in London on Feb 3rd 2026 - tickets here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/mental-health-reimagined-beyond-the-medical-model-tickets-1978111353307?aff=ebdssbdestsearch

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Transcript

Speaker 2: [00:00:00] When it comes to weight management, there's really only three phases you could be in at any one point in time. And this is what I think is really, really under discussed. It's very important to understand when you're trying to be more intentional about weight management, what phase you're in and why.

That's by far the most underrated skill when it comes to weight management, and it's where most people go wrong.

Welcome back to The Thinking Mind, the podcast all about psychiatry, psychotherapy, and self development. As you guys know, we're in January, late January now. By now, you may have set some New Year's resolutions, maybe you're on track to meeting them, which should be great. Maybe they're long forgotten already.

Usually at this time of year, I do an episode that something. The realm of a New Year's resolution, or talking a little bit about how you might be able to sustain a resolution [00:01:00] Today, I'd like to talk specifically about weight loss, but actually I have a confession to make. I'm not really gonna talk about weight loss.

I'm actually going to talk about weight management of which weight loss is of course a very important component, especially if you are struggling with being overweight. Weight loss is gonna be an important part of weight management, but it's not everything. As we're gonna see later in this episode, I love talking about this subject, and actually this is a subject very close to my heart.

Earlier in my life, I struggled quite a lot with being overweight and I had to learn a ton of stuff, more or less by myself. This was largely before podcasts were around and before you could have a helpful voice inside of your head motivating you and telling you what to do. One of the reasons I love weight loss, weight management is because it's such a powerful entry into self development.

And by self development, I mean this idea that you can learn new ideas, [00:02:00] concepts, mindsets, habits, and you can use those ideas, you can apply them to meaningfully change the quality of your life. And so weight loss is often an entry point for people into the self development world because. For the first time, you realize, wow, I can go against the grain.

Most people might struggle with this problem, but I can really apply myself. I can change how my body works and how my mind works. I can make myself healthier. I can change how my body looks for the better. It can help me with self-esteem issues, it can help me gain a sense of control and agency over my life.

So it's really a wonderful journey for many people. And so if this is an issue that you're struggling with, please welcome. Listen to this podcast. I hope you get a lot out of it, and it can act as a bit of a primer for you to help deal with some of the challenges of maintaining a healthy weight. And of course, we all know this is really important.

'cause it does really affect our health and the [00:03:00] quality of our day to day life. And of course it should be underlying just how challenging it is. We live in a really weird food landscape. I think it's fair to say humans, were never really designed to have access to the kinds of foods that we have access to and certainly in the quantities that we have access to.

So we're in a very strange situation. We also never really have to move our bodies significantly. Thanks to modern technology and similar to many other areas of life, now we're really called upon to be really proactive in how we deal with it. And as we know from the statistics, if a person isn't proactive, we tend to suffer around two thirds of people in any given Western country tend to be overweight or obese.

So I don't really think it's fair to say as many people have thought in the past that it's kind of a moral failing. It's because a person is sort of lazy or undisciplined or [00:04:00] inherently bad that they suffer from a weight problem. When you have people being affected in such large numbers, I don't think it's an individual's failing.

I don't think that's reasonable or compassionate, but at the same time, it is an individual's responsibility to fix it. If you find yourself in this situation, you do have to take certain steps to address it. No one can really address it for you. So hopefully this podcast can act as a nice primer for you and, and help really emphasize a few things, which took me a very, very long time to learn.

Once I did learn them and, you know, made them into habits, now I feel like weight management and my life is relatively easy. Still not a hundred percent, but relatively easy. And so hopefully I can save you a ton of time and a ton of extra research by getting you started on the right track. Emphasizing a few concepts, which I think are really under discussed, and a few of these are really gonna be at the end of the podcast.

So [00:05:00] if you're interested in this topic, do make sure you either listen to the whole thing or if you think you grasp the fundamentals, listen to the parts at the end, because that's where I'm gonna talk about stuff that I think is still pretty under discussed when you're thinking about weight loss and weight management.

Besides doing my own independent research, I learned a lot of this from studying what bodybuilders do. And I think this is useful even if you have no interest in, in being a bodybuilder, and I have no interest in being a bodybuilder, but bodybuilders are the experts in these sorts of things. So when it comes to losing body fat, putting on muscle, or trying to do both in some capacity because they have to do it.

To such an extreme degree. They're the best experts and you don't have to do exactly what what they do, but it's from them that you can learn really amazing principles. So what I would emphasize about this podcast is it's not going to tell you exactly what to do, but it's going to underline principles to create a [00:06:00] plan that's tailored to you and your situation.

And I think it's always more useful to give someone principles. Than to tell someone exactly what to do because principles are much more malleable and you can, you can take them, internalize them, modify them as you see fit, and come up with a plan that's right for you. Just a disclaimer before we start.

Of course, the information in this podcast will probably not be helpful if we have a history of eating disorder, severe body image issues. If your BMI is 20 or less, if you're currently engaging in purging behaviors like intentional regurgitation over exercising, this podcast is intended for the average person whose BMI would be probably 25 or higher.

And who wants to learn more about weight loss and long-term weight management?

Okay, so firstly, as with any endeavor of this kind, it's helpful [00:07:00] to understand what your goal is. So people will have a variety of goals or perhaps a combination of goals. When it comes to weight management, it's important that you understand what is yours. It could be as simple as I'd like to be healthier.

I'd like my body to work better, my mind to work better. It could be an issue of longevity. I want to live as long as possible and as high quality life as possible. It could be all about aesthetics, which is fine too. I want to look really good. Maybe you're in your early twenties, you're interested in dating, and you like your body to be as visually appealing as possible.

Nothing wrong with that. It could be functional. I want to be able to do more with my body, to lift more, to walk more, to be faster, stronger. It could be purely for mental health. I want to improve my mood. I want to be less anxious. We know weight management and all the things that that entails is gonna be really good for mental health as long as you do it in a balanced way.

So [00:08:00] firstly, understand what your goal is, because that's gonna dictate all of the little behaviors that form part of your plan. It's gonna dictate what your eating is gonna be like, exercise, sleep, et cetera. It's also totally fine to have a low resolution plan. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking, I just want to be healthier in some vague way, that's also fine.

And understand that as you go through this journey, it, it might be going through the journey which makes your goals clear to you. So you might start thinking, I just want to vaguely be healthier. And then as you get on and make progress, then you might think, okay, I want to concentrate more on aesthetics.

Or functionality, or if you're a bit older, you might think, oh, I want to concentrate on longevity. That's fine. But even if it is low resolution, just understand that it's low resolution. What I wouldn't want you to do is to have no clear goal because again, that goes tend to be very helpful [00:09:00] for motivation, making a plan, and also measuring progress.

So I think that's gonna be important. Firstly, understand where you're at. And where is it that you want to go and why, and why is that, uh, important to you? Secondly, we're gonna talk about what I call the usual aspects, the main drivers of weight management or weight mismanagement, if you like. There's gonna be a few things which drive most of your progress or most of your problems.

And the usual suspects are as follows, nutrition, sleep. Exercise, alcohol and drugs, and I pretty much put them in the order of importance that I think they should be. Some people might disagree with me, uh, and they might put sleep as number one, and nutrition as number two. In my view, based on my own experience, I put nutrition number one, sleep number two, exercise number three, drugs and alcohol.

Number four. Most of the time, most of the controversy comes with [00:10:00] debating how important nutrition is versus exercise. And people will often fall into the trap of, I'm just gonna kind of eat what I want and out exercise that. I think that's a really, really bad strategy. It's very, very easy to out eat a good exercise program.

So you might have an exercise program that's quite effective that makes you very active. You can out eat that in an hour if you have access to the right foods, because now of course, we all have access to the right foods. We have access to very, very calorie dense foods where you can pack away thousands of calories in a very small space.

So it's very, very important to understand the primacy of nutrition. A lot of weight loss experts will say that nutrition tends to drive 60 or 70% of weight loss and weight maintenance. And I tend to agree with that. Sleep again, you can debate about its importance in the hierarchy. I like [00:11:00] to think of sleep as foundational to physical and mental health.

It's very, very important, however you place it in relation to nutrition. If your sleep is generally good, that's great. If you feel your sleep is poor, if you don't feel, uh, refreshed on waking, if you don't get many hours of sleep a night, if you feel chronically low in energy and you think that's because your sleep is poor.

Definitely take drastic steps to try and improving your sleep and getting it as good as possible. And there's a lot of very easily researchable steps you can take to improve, you know, what's called your sleep hygiene. And again, lastly, drugs and alcohol Generally, I would recommend, as you probably know if you're a listener to this podcast, either avoiding them or using them as little as possible.

Alcohol, of course, which is the drug most commonly used in the uk, is detrimental to weight loss. It itself has a ton of calories in the wrong form. In other words, sugar. Alcohol impairs fat [00:12:00] metabolism in the liver turns off the parts of our brain that's responsible for good judgment, and so we'll make it much more likely, both when we're intoxicated and when we have a hangover that we're gonna go off our nutrition plan and alcohol impairs our sleep, which is going to make this whole weight loss, weight management project a lot more difficult.

The cool thing that I always like to talk about when I mention the usual suspects. Is that they affect each other, right? These things don't exist in isolation, and you can get a really nice compounding effect between them, and that can occur in the right direction when things go well and positively, and it's also applies to when things go badly.

The better you sleep, the more likely it is. You're gonna have the energy to exercise, and the more likely it is you, you'll make good food decisions. The more you exercise, the better you'll sleep. The better you eat, the more energy you'll have for exercise and so on and so forth. So really what you want to do with these usual aspects is try and [00:13:00] create a positive feedback loop or a positive spiral between them.

You don't necessarily have to make huge radical changes in all of these or at once very quickly, but if you make small changes in these simultaneously, they tend to affect each other in a helpful way and makes the whole process a lot easier and helps you generate some more momentum. Momentum, of course, is so important when you're doing something outside of your comfort zone, like trying to lose weight, maintain healthy weight, et cetera.

Again, you will approach some of these differently depending on what your goal is. So if your goal is more about putting on muscle, for example, the exercise part and specifically strength training part will of course be much more important than if your goal is just weight maintenance. If your goal is weight loss, as I mentioned uh, earlier, nutrition is going to be really important.

If your goal is health and longevity, sleep is gonna take on a bit more importance. And also [00:14:00] alcohol and drugs. So again, these are going to be subtly affected by your goal, and that's why it's important to have a quite a clear idea of what your goal is, even if that's relatively low resolution at this point.

So next we're gonna dive into nutrition a little bit more on how you should think about it, what kind of food is healthy, et cetera here. As soon as you start researching this, you find there's this big debate. Is it about calories and calorie counting and calorie tracking, or is it about eating healthy food or whole foods or clean food?

And to be honest, it's a little bit of a false dichotomy. Of course, they're both important. And they actually both lean in the same direction in terms of suggesting what foods you should eat. The people who say, at least when it comes to weight management, that calories don't matter, are wrong, so calories are very important.

It is a case of energy in energy out. Not that that's necessarily easy to track, but in reality it [00:15:00] is about the energy dynamic that you create, uh, in your body. And experiments have been done where people eat, uh, very unhealthy foods, but they eat them in a calorie deficit, meaning they're eating less calories than, than they expand.

And studies have shown that even though those foods are unhealthy, they eat exclusively snack foods or junk foods. They will still lose weight. So the calorie deficit is still going to be the driver of weight loss. That doesn't mean that that's a good diet to follow. Of course. And the people who say that it's all about eating, quote, clean or quote Whole Foods.

And if you do that, you'll automatically lose weight. It can be true, but not necessarily because just because you're eating, uh, what you could call whole or clean foods, it doesn't mean you're gonna necessarily lose weight. It is possible to eat enough of those foods that you're not going to be in a calorie deficit, and therefore you won't lose weight.

Now, the reality, of course, is this. What we think [00:16:00] of as whole relatively unprocessed single ingredient or clean foods, they tend to have a much lower calorie density. So if you think of a meal like salmon, brown rice and broccoli, on average, that's gonna have a lot less calorie density than something like a burger fries and a Coca-Cola, because the form is composed of foods which generally occur naturally and generally speaking.

Naturally occurring foods tend to have a lower calorie density and better micronutrition and artificial foods, which we've started to produce ourselves in modern times. They tend to be a lot more calorie dense, and that's partly to make those foods as addictive as possible. So this debate, while quite interesting and fascinating in a lot of ways, is a little bit of a forced dichotomy.

In general whole or clean foods or single ingredient foods are going to be less calorie dense. And therefore it's going to be easier if you want to lose weight to [00:17:00] establish a calorie deficit. And so if you want to lose weight, these are generally the foods, uh, that you want to go for. Generally, they're gonna help you maintain weight as well.

They're also gonna be the foods you want to choose, even if you're trying to bulk or put on some muscle. And at the end of this podcast, I'm gonna talk about the difference between cutting, in other words, trying to lose body fat, maintaining or bulking, trying to gain muscle, and how you should think about those phases.

But for the purposes of understanding what constitutes good nutrition, yes. In general, whole clean, single ingredient, naturally occurring foods make the most sense. What does that look like in practice? It tends to look like a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, things like brown rice, lean meats, fish, legumes, nuts, seeds, and even hearing those different food groups.

You can probably start to understand what kind of meals we're talking about. People will talk [00:18:00] about making sure your macronutrients are balanced. The macronutrients are protein, carbohydrate, fat. If you want to go really simple. It's totally fine to have your calorie intake being met by a third of each, a third protein, a third carbohydrate, a third fat.

If you want to get a little bit more technical, you could say perhaps 1.2 grams per kilo of protein is probably a good idea if you're trying to lose weight or even just to to remain healthy. You want to have at least 20% of your calories coming from dietary fat because fat is very important for essential bodily processes like producing hormones and things like that.

Carbohydrates are a bit more optional. Some people seem to do better on a diet that's higher in carbohydrates. Some people swear by low carbohydrate diets or the ketogenic diet. I think the carbohydrates are the most optional macronutrient. Most people will probably require some carbohydrates in their diet, [00:19:00] and of course, it's hard to totally eliminate a macronutrient from your diet and still participate in society.

But protein and fat are probably the most essential. You can't really live without protein and fat. You can't kind of live without carbohydrate, but in reality, that's probably gonna still be a reasonable part of your diet. As you start to move your nutrition more from whatever it is now into the direction of these whole foods, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meats, legumes, nuts, and seeds, I want you to start to think not just about how these foods affect your weight, but also how they affect your appetite and feelings of fullness and instantly this is much easier to do with healthy foods.

What I find with junk food is often junk food, highly processed foods. Because they're so calorie dense, they can kind of deceive your appetite. We all understand the feeling of having one biscuit and feeling like that one biscuit really opens up your appetite, or a [00:20:00] few crisps can really open up your appetite and, and they can make you feel like you can eat endlessly.

Whereas what you'll find with Whole Foods is the more you eat them actually, the more you're gonna have a, a healthier sense of appetite and fullness. A lot of people find when they're starting on a weight loss journey, that eating slowly helps because we know that our feelings of fullness. Can be quite slow to respond to eating food.

So good to make sure you eat a meal, let's say over a 20 or 30 minute period to give your stomach a chance to catch up and for those feelings of fullness to take hold. People often report if they eat more slowly, they tend to eat less overall than if they devour a meal very quickly. I think really important as soon as possible to try and find recipes or specific meals that you really enjoy.

So as much as possible, eating whole foods shouldn't be a chore. There's no reason why weight loss has to be unnecessarily hard. [00:21:00] There's definitely no reason why weight maintenance has to be particularly hard. This is gonna be a lifelong thing, hopefully if you're meaningfully shifting your lifestyle. So as soon as possible, try and find out what you enjoy and also understand this will be a dynamic process.

If you've mostly eaten unhealthy junk foods in your life, you're gonna have to take some time to develop a pal for healthy foods. But. Understand this will happen. The more you eat foods which are a bit healthier, the more you'll develop a taste for them. And once you experiment a bit and find out what you really like, the easier this whole process is going to be.

So don't just think about eating what's technically correct, but think about what you enjoy as well. And also try and introspect and consider about how different foods and meals. Make you feel how much energy they give you versus take from you. For example, if you're normally used to eating pasta for lunch [00:22:00] and you have tuna salad, try and take note.

How does that tuna salad make me feel? Do I feel like I have more energy? Do I feel light? Do I feel heavy? Do I feel groggy versus eating the pasta that I might have eaten before? Because, because of course these feelings are intuitive. Indicators of how healthy or unhealthy a particular food is and can also be very motivating as we'll discuss later to start to eat foods that make you feel on balance.

Actually, a lot better. People, of course, will be at different stages of their life and have access to different kinds of resources. And have different advantages or disadvantages. And so this will probably affect their strategy as it comes to good nutrition. One framework I really like is the cheap, convenient, healthy framework for food.

In so far as food can only be two of those. Three. Food can either be convenient [00:23:00] and healthy, but a little bit expensive. Uh, it can be cheap and convenient, but not necessarily healthy. All food can be cheap and healthy, but probably not convenient. And again, this framework can be really helpful depending on where you're at in your life.

If, for example, you're a university student, you probably have a lot of time, but not a hell of a lot of money, so you might take the time to cook a lentil doll, for instance, which is pretty cheap. But will take some time to make, but it's pretty healthy. If on the other hand, you're an entrepreneur, you have access to a lot of money, but you're short on time, then you may use a meal delivery service, which can be convenient and it can be healthy, but not necessarily cheap.

And if you are not planning on following a diet and you don't really care about food, then of course you can have food. That's cheap and convenient like McDonald's. But understand that food is very unlikely to be healthy. So really one task that you [00:24:00] have when it comes to formulating your strategy is, do you want to focus more on convenience or do you want to focus more on cost?

Next, what's a simple, beginner friendly way to think about exercise? So firstly, you want to have a broad way of categorizing the different kinds of exercise, and then you probably want to think about them in terms of order of importance. And again, to some extent, this will depend on your goal. I basically stratify exercise into the following, one, low intensity cardio to high intensity cardio, strength, training, and flexibility.

So low intensity cardio is things like walking or relaxed hiking, high intensity cardio, things like swimming, running, sprinting, rowing. Machine strength training can include body weight exercises like pushups. Body weight, squats, planks, Pilates, lifting weights in various forms [00:25:00] and flexibility. Training is typically something like yoga or mobility and stretching exercises.

What order of importance should these occupy? Again, this will depend slightly on your goals. Foundationally, I think low intensity cardio is very important, so ideally you want to have a lifestyle that involves a lot of walking, if you can. Once you have that covered, I would probably add in some strength training.

Again, body weight exercises, Pilates, lifting, weights, et cetera. And in addition to your strength training, you may consider adding in some flexibility work. That could be stretching exercises after you lift weights or adding in one or two yoga sessions per week. And then once you have those covered. You might consider adding in some high intensity cardio, like sprinting, swimming, using a rowing machine, something like that.

Now, depending on your goals, of course you may alter these. If your goal is to be [00:26:00] really, really good at sprinting, of course you're gonna do a lot more high intensity cardio. If your goal is to increase the size of your muscles, of course strength training takes priority. If you love yoga, by all means dive into yoga.

Similarly, if you love Pilates, make Pilates the majority of your exercise routine. But for general health, that's the order I would follow. Low intensity cardio, strength training, plus or minus flexibility, and then high intensity cardio after that. There's been a myth for a long time that. Weight loss is all about high intensity cardio, running and sprinting, and there isn't really a lot of good evidence for that.

Generally, when people say they want to lose weight, that also means that they want some kind of aesthetic improvement and strength training and muscle building is going to be an important part of that. We know low intensity cardio like walking is pretty foundational for health and longevity and actually doing too much high intensity cardio.[00:27:00] 

Can be damaging to the heart, and we see that with people who do a lot of long distance running marathons, things like that. So again, the key is to be conscious about what kinds of exercise you're doing and why. Just like with food, you want to be thinking about how does exercise make you feel? Do you enjoy it?

If you can find exercise that you enjoy, that's going to make this whole process a lot easier. If you feel your exercise actually gives you a sense of energy and flow in your day, that's gonna make things easier. If you feel exercise helps you with your mood and your anxiety as it does for many people, even though the main.

Subject of this podcast today is weight loss and weight management. Thinking about how all these different activities make you feel mentally can be a lot more motivating and therefore can help motivate you towards your goals because weight loss actually takes quite a long time, whereas just feeling better and improving your [00:28:00] mental health actually can take a surprisingly short amount of time.

So again, as you go about your exercise, give some thought to how you feel after. How that contrasts with how you feel before often, especially if you're new to exercise, right before exercising, you're gonna dread it. There's gonna be a lot of resistance, and then right after, inevitably, people often feel way, way better, and they're so glad that they did it.

Notice that contrast and what an odd feature of our psychology it is that we often really, really don't feel like and have a lot of resistance towards. Precisely the thing that will make us feel really good once we've done it. Okay, so we've talked about the usual suspects, sleep, nutrition, exercise, avoiding alcohol and drugs who've gone a little bit deeper into nutrition and exercise.

Next I'm gonna talk about, obviously something that's I think is quite important, the psychology of weight loss. So what kind of role does psychology play? I think weight loss is [00:29:00] so challenging, not because it's difficult, but because. It takes such a long time. Really, weight loss that's meaningful takes place over weeks to months.

So everyone knows that it's easy to have a successful day when it comes to dieting or exercise. You eat a few good meals. You go to the gym, no big deal. The problem with weight loss is that you need to be successful for quite a few days, not necessarily every single day in a row, as some people might think, but you need to have successful days over and over again with as few mistakes as possible.

You need to be reasonably consistent and adherent to your plan, and after you're done with the weight loss, you need to be able to maintain it, which we'll talk about at the end of the podcast. But again, it's difficult because of, it takes time and consistency and it, if it's one thing that people quite bad at, especially when it, when it comes to combating their instincts, is doing so over longer periods of time.

How long does it take [00:30:00] to lose weight? Typically, one reasonable estimate that most people will give is you can reasonably lose around half a kilo per week. Therefore, in around 12 weeks, around three months, you can expect to lose about six kilograms if you're doing it in a reasonably healthy way. Of course, results do differ.

You may lose more or less than that, but roughly around six kilos in 12 weeks is a good goal to aim for. I think one of the most important things when it comes to the psychology of weight loss is to understand that when you're doing something that you're not used to, and that's out of your comfort zone.

Your mind is going to try and sabotage you. I call this mental noise. Your mind is going to throw up all sorts of really, really unhelpful thoughts and feelings as you go through this process. Those could be thoughts like, this isn't going to work. You're going to be fat forever. There's no point in doing this.

Other people are judging you. Who do you think you are? One thing that [00:31:00] can be really helpful with mental noise is just to write it down. When you write down these kinds of thoughts that occur to us spontaneously, you can see actually how upset they are in the cold light of day. Try and be as aware of mental noise as possible.

Something like a simple mindfulness meditation, maybe five minutes a day can help you become aware of when you're getting lost in mental noise. And treat it as you would treat any form of noise as something that's unhelpful and kind of a nuisance, and maybe not something that you're going to try and repress all the time, because repression, as we know, doesn't often work, but not something that you're going to pay a whole lot of attention to or emphasize instead, try and focus and stick to the plan that you've made.

That plan is going to include a series of actions and a series of results that are more objective. Often people confuse mental noise with results. They think, oh, if I'm feeling feelings of shame. Embarrassment, guilt, [00:32:00] or if I'm having these thoughts like, not, this isn't going to work. That's almost akin to the plan not working.

But actually your plan might be working very, very well, and your mind will still throw up all sorts of unhelpful noise. So try and stick to your plan and try and think about what are the results you're getting in the objective world rather than the random things that your mind is throwing up for you.

Understand social pressure. Not everyone is going to want you to change in the right direction. Some people actually might feel a little bit uncomfortable. When they see you going to the gym for the first time or trying a new diet, understand people will have all sorts of weird reactions. Hopefully people will help you.

Try not to focus too much on how people react to, to your new plans. And again, just try and refocus what are my own goals, how am I gonna get there? And as I mentioned earlier, really important to understand that you will feel better, way faster than you will look better. And that's totally okay. [00:33:00] That's totally normal.

It'll take weeks or months to lose meaningful amounts of weight. When people start eating better and exercising, they can feel better pretty much within a few days. Use that to motivate you and then use other ways to track your progress in tandem with that. And of course, that leads to the next question, which is how should someone measure their progress?

And hopefully you can guess by this point in the podcast that guess what? It depends a little bit on what your goals are. If your primary goal is weight loss, I think using a weighing scale can be very helpful. If your primary goal is aesthetic improvement, I think progress pictures can be very helpful.

If your main goal is to get stronger, measuring how strong you are in terms of how much weight you can lift, and for how many repetitions is a really useful weight to measure that. But with all of these things, you need to understand how to use them. So a weighing scale is famously very bad at tracking progress in the very short term.

So if you weigh yourself regularly, you'll [00:34:00] know that your weight can easily jump a few kilos from one day to another depending on how much you eat, but also fluid and other aspects of your day. Using a weighing scale, therefore is not very useful to track your progress in terms of hours or a few days.

But using a weighing scale is very helpful when it comes to a timeframe of weeks or months. So to use a weighing scale, I would recommend. Weighing yourself at least two or three times a week, and then taking an average of that, and then comparing week to week progress. The more often you weigh yourself, of course, the more accurate that average is going to be.

And I would recommend weighing yourself typically at the same time every day. Fasting in the morning is usually a good start. As I said in the disclaimer at the beginning of this podcast, this is not good advice if you have a history of an eating disorder or being significantly underweight. Or anything like that.

But for the average person, a weighing scale can be super useful. [00:35:00] Similarly, with something like a progress picture for improving your body, aesthetically, not very useful in the short term. Taking a photo of yourself three days apart, that's not going to help you. But taking a progress picture from one month to the next month or across three month periods of time, that can be super useful.

Of course, you can use these kinds of measurements in tandem, and when it comes to tracking your strength. Again, this is something you should be thinking about in the long term. Your strength will vary across the week, but if you're training regularly, lifting weights regularly, you can see how strong you are in one particular ascension, say in the middle of the month, and then you can compare that to another workout about a month later.

Tracking how much you're lifting for how many repetitions, and you can see the progress there. Another useful objective measurement is clothes sizes. So looking at clothes that you used to wear perhaps at the start of this process, at the beginning, at the start before you changed your nutrition and exercise plan, and seeing just how many sizes you've dropped can be a [00:36:00] useful way of tracking your progress.

Of course, there's no shame if you're not making progress as fast, uh, as you'd like, or if you're not making progress at all. All that means is you need to adjust your plan a little bit as we'll talk about at the end. But it's good to have some way of tracking your progress so you can get a sense of whether or not your plan is working.

Subjectively, I think it's good to keep some kind of diary, to keep a sense of how good you feel week to week, how much energy you have, how motivated you are. Those kinds of reflections can be useful as well. Next, I'd like to talk about understanding phases, phases of weight management. And this is what I think is really, really under discussed.

When it comes to weight management, there's really only three phases you could be in at any one point in time. So you can either be cutting, getting leaner, losing weight, typically in the form of body fat, bulking, gaining weight, typically in the [00:37:00] form of muscle, or just maintaining your weight or maintaining your body composition, your ratio of muscle to body fat.

It's very important to understand. You're trying to be more intentional about weight management, what phase you're in and why. So of course you've got these three phases, cutting, maintenance bulking. Many of you will be here because you want to lose weight, in which case it's all about the cutting phase.

And what you want to do is use the information we've discussed so far to create a nutrition plan. Mainly Whole Foods, an exercise plan, and getting your sleep in order, and you want to create a calorie deficit. And if you can sustain a calorie deficit over time, you will gradually lose weight. But really, everyone needs to understand all three phases because they're all important, particularly when it comes to cutting and bulking.

You need to understand that you can't do those indefinitely. Your body tends to resist changes in weight. You [00:38:00] can only cut get leaner for so long before your body fights back and it becomes impossible. You can only bulk for so long before you lose your capacity to gain muscle at. In any one episode, there's even only so much fat a person can put on before that process starts to slow down significantly.

Everyone would do well to learn a lot more about weight maintenance. I think that's the skill that's by far the most underrated skill when it comes to weight management, and it's where most people go wrong. Many, many people are very successful when it comes to cutting or getting leaner over and over again in their lives.

They go through numerous periods where they successfully lose a significant amount of weight, but where they go wrong is they fail to switch from a weight loss plan to a weight maintenance plan. And what happens is towards the end of a cutting period, all of your instincts and hormones and [00:39:00] physiology are going to be geared.

Towards weight gain, your body wants to gain back this weight that you've lost, and so you're gonna have appetite, cravings that are out of control. Of course, you've probably been using a lot of discipline and willpower to lose the weight, and your body on some level wants to get your weight to shoot back up, and so after a period of weight loss, people often relapse Very hard.

They go back to eating the foods they ate before they ever started any of this intentional eating. They eat junk food, perhaps they stop exercising, stop going to the gym, and they reverse all the progress that they've made overall of those weeks and months. Very, very crucial is to start your plan with the maintenance phase in mind.

So even if you primarily want to lose weight, you start that cutting phase or weight loss phase, having a plan, having an end date, at which point you would switch over to maintenance. You might set that date arbitrarily. Say, after two months [00:40:00] of doing my best to lose weight, I'm going to switch to maintenance.

It might set a reasonable weight loss goal, say I'm gonna lose. 3, 4, 5 kilos and then I'm gonna switch to maintenance. But understand maintenance is going to, the need for maintenance is going to come, and you need to have a plan that's as clear for maintenance as it is for cutting. Generally speaking, the foods that comprise your weight maintenance plan should be very, very similar to the foods that comprise your weight loss plan.

The only difference is going to be the amount of calories and having an understanding of calories can come in usefully here. So. You might have meals like your tuna salad, your salmon and brown rice and broccoli, your chicken and vegetables, whatever your meal plan happens to be. Your maintenance plan will look very similar, but probably will involve larger portions and therefore larger amounts of calories and probably a little bit more leeway when it comes to junk food or [00:41:00] processed foods.

Doesn't mean you can't eat these foods entirely, but understand, you still need to be pretty intentional and pretty conscious about what you eat. You're just going to allow yourself to eat more calories. Typically, that's gonna be a few more hundred calories a day. If you were to actually track it, it would probably be between two and 500 calories more per day.

If you don't approach your maintenance plan consciously, the chances are you're going to kind of fall back into how you're eating before and and lose all that progress. So I definitely would not recommend that. And similarly, if you decide you want to bulk that again is going to largely comprise the same foods you would use for cutting.

But you want to be in a calorie surplus rather than being in a calorie deficit where you eat slightly less than you expend. You want to eat slightly more than you expend to promote the process of muscle building, but the the [00:42:00] surplus is going to be mild. Maybe 300 calories, then you might expend or four at the high limits.

Five. If you're training a lot, doing a lot of strength training, you shouldn't do what bodybuilders refer to as dirty bulking, which is just eating whatever you want. I'm thinking because I'm trying to gain muscle and because I'm lifting a lot of weights, that gives me the license to eat whatever I want, including a whole bunch of junk food.

Usually what happens when people do that is they gain, yes, they will gain some muscle. There's only so much muscle you can gain. It is actually quite a slow process, but then they'll gain a whole bunch of body fats as well, which usually isn't desirable. So cutting. As we all know, weight loss, you need to be really intentional and conscious about what you eat.

Maintenance. You need to be just as conscious about what you eat and largely still eat the same healthy foods, but allow yourself a few hundred extra calories. And if you really care about putting on muscle and you want to accelerate that process, [00:43:00] you can bulk. But again, that's just gonna be an extra few hundred calories on top of what you expend largely comprising of healthy food.

Maybe a little bit more leeway for junk food. And still, I would recommend when you're bulking, probably checking your weight regularly. To make sure you're not overshooting, and of course, being conscious about measuring your workouts and your strength to make sure that the extra food you're eating is actually translating into extra strength.

Because if it's not, then chances are you're not bulking correctly.

Okay, so I've already given you quite a lot of information to work with in this podcast. How should someone start? If you want a really detailed episode about this, I would go back to the episode we published on January 3rd, 2025, and that would be how to make a New Year's Resolution, why [00:44:00] Most New Year's Resolutions Fail, and that is a step-by-step guide in depth, guide to behavior change, and you can apply all of those principles to the information we've discussed today.

But I will discuss it briefly here, uh, as well. So firstly, very important to understand what your goal is, and that could be weight loss, just learning how to maintain your weight. It could be building more muscle, it could be aesthetics, it could be health longevity, or it could just be low resolution. And just directionally, you want to improve your nutrition, you want to do more exercise, and that's totally fine as well.

You want to have a plan of some kind. And I would definitely make sure that you write down your plan, open a Google Doc or the Notes app, and actually write down what it is you're going to do and what it is that you're trying to achieve, and what kind of goal you would be happy with. Like for example, you might say, I would be happy with a five kilo weight loss, and then take it from there.

Goals [00:45:00] can change across time and they can evolve, but important to have a goal and have a plan that's written down. You want to create emotional leverage and you can use positive and negative emotions to do this. One very simple way to do this. For example, if you're overweight or obese and you think this really needs to change, write down two timelines, one timeline as to how your life is going to go if you successfully changed this problem.

A one timeline if you don't, so you can say, okay, I've got a weight problem now. If I fail to deal with this problem, I will likely become more unhealthy, more disabled. I may develop heart problems. I may have problems playing with my children or grandchildren. If I do deal with this problem, I will be healthier, have more energy.

I will be able to travel into my old age, and so on and so forth. So lots of techniques like this that can help create some emotional leverage. Telling people, creating [00:46:00] accountability, hiring a nutritionist, hiring a personal trainer, bringing it to your therapy sessions, something that can create a sense of emotional leverage beyond just dealing with it by yourself all in your own head I think can be very helpful.

Definitely start with easy, small, achievable wins. A classic one will be just removing all the junk food from your house or eliminating all the liquid sources of your calories, like soft drinks, alcohol, things like that. Create a basic plan, even if it's not a perfect plan, an imperfect plan beats having no plan at all, and then allow an amount of time for your plan to work.

So say, okay, my plan is. To remove junk food from the house and to increase my step count to 5,000 steps per day and to improve my sleep quality. And I'm gonna give this plan four weeks to work. And I'm gonna measure my results, you know, across the four weeks and see how [00:47:00] well this plan works. And on this point, I think it's really important to allocate time to this.

Weight management is really important. Your health is really important and so don't try and improvise this or do it on the fly. Take it seriously as you would take a work project. Seriously. Allocate time, schedule time if you need to do that, but you know, give it, its due. I importance. Give your plan time to work.

Measure your results on the way, and you might measure your results by keeping a diary of how good you feel, your energy levels, and perhaps using a weighing scale. And depending on your results, at the end of four weeks, then you can modify your plan and you might say, yes, I have lost some weight. Perhaps I lost 0.2 kilograms per week on average.

And that's good. I'd like to improve that and increase to 0.5, and so you might go a little bit harder when it comes to refining your nutrition, or you might exercise a little bit more, or you might decide to track your calories [00:48:00] and so on and so forth. Being mindful, of course, as I said when I talked about phases that you can't cut indefinitely.

You can't bulk indefinitely, and you need to have. Some sense of what you're gonna do when you switch to maintenance. So based on the results and your goals changing over time, that will change your plan, which is fine. You need to allow for identity level change in this process, especially if it's drastic.

You know, I guess at the most extreme, this can look like going from morbidly obese to being in pretty good shape. Although, you know, understand this can take months or years with different phases cycling between. Cutting maintenance, perhaps bulking, but it can happen. And you need to allow for that level of change.

You will become a different person. And that's really the point. And that can be, you know, what's wonderful, uh, about going through a weight loss, weight management journey is you, you can become a very different [00:49:00] person, a more disciplined person, more resilient. You're gonna be changing yourself. At the physiological level, you know, the most basic level.

So it's no surprise that you can change quite a lot psychologically and socially as well, allow for that change to happen. It's a feature, it's not a bug. Uh, I think sometimes resisting that identity level change can be a reason that someone may self-sabotage a bit. They're kind of afraid of becoming. A different person.

See if you can allow for that change to happen. Also, allow for the power of habit. The truth is, the longer you enact a certain pattern of behavior, the more natural it's going to be. Chances are, for most people, most of you. Don't need to be super conscious about brushing your teeth twice a day. You just do it because you've always done it.

And the same is going to be true for any of the things we've talked about today. If you go to the gym three times a week for a month, that's kind of a new habit. It's quite flimsy. It's quite fragile. You can get [00:50:00] out of that habit quite easily. Be aware of that. If you go to the gym three times a week for five years.

That's gonna be a lot harder to shift. Give it time. The more time that you enact these healthier habits, the more firmly they're going to be implanted into your psychology, and the easier all of this is going to be. And that's why you need to allow, you know, depending on what kind of change you want to enact.

Again, if you want to go at the extreme end, from morbid obesity to being in good shape. That's gonna take time, that's gonna take years likely of cycling through different phases, which is totally fine, totally normal. Give it that time. Allow for the power of habit. One more thing I do want to mention when it comes to strategy is of course we now have these new weight loss drugs, GLP one agonists.

You've heard of drugs like Ozempic probably, and Manjaro. I actually think, although they're probably not [00:51:00] advisable for most people, if you've tried, you know, all of the above strategies we've talked about today, tried your best, and they just don't work for you for whatever reason, and you're struggling.

You might consider consulting with a health professional and considering them, there are specific guidelines in which these drugs are prescribed. So typically if someone's BMI is 32 or over, or if they have controlled diabetes, and again, if they've tried conventional weight loss strategies. And they haven't worked.

Then these drugs are indicated and although they don't work for everyone and there's always the possibility of side effects, they might ultimately be a good option for you. Just know that even if you did use these kinds of medications, you want to be doing all the other stuff that we discussed today, because that's going to likely make any recovery you make using these drugs a lot more stable and a lot more sustainable.

In my view, there's no shame in using a medical drug as a tool [00:52:00] when things are difficult. So this is often discussed, for example, in the context of A DHD medication for A DHD. Sometimes people are in difficult situations and they need pharmacological help. And I don't think as a society we should be shaming people for needing that help.

And needing that help doesn't mean that psychological factors and things like discipline and non-medication strategies. Aren't important. I think we just need to be able to have mature discussions as a society where we take into account the full breadth of things, which can be helpful when it comes to difficult life problems like weight management.

I hope you found today's podcast useful. As I said, take a lot of the information that we talked about here and combine it with the information we released last January in our podcast about creating a sustainable New Year's resolution. I am doing more behavior change coaching with clients, and it's some of the most enjoyable and fulfilling work [00:53:00] that I do, so.

If you would be interested in working with me to change some kind of behavior in your life, whether it's something to do with health like this, weight management relationships, career finances, feel free to contact me at Alex Crummy therapy@gmail.com and we can have a conversation as to whether or not coaching would be right for you.

As always, any feedback would be more than welcome and you can reach us at. Thinking Mind podcast@gmail.com, whatever your New Year's resolution is this year, I wish you the best of luck. As always, thank you very much for listening, and we'll see you here next [00:54:00] time.