In this podcast:
02:08 - a lot of people have different views
02:53 – the mainstream media, where people get their views
04:00 – advertising about losing weight in short time
04:36 - if it’s that easy, we’ll all be doing it
05:00 - people busy looking at how they achieve
05:24 – we’re programmed like that
05:48 – “what three wins you have today?”
06:23 - people should focus on what they have achieved
06:33 – if you’re looking at what you haven’t achieved
07:10 – what you focus on expands
07:53 – are we used to having things too easily?
08:18 - people expects so much more now
08:49 – should have progress despite not really doing what’s necessary
09:27 - literally all about consistency
10:15 – because you know that thing will come in the end
10:39 – advertising is saying “everything is super easy”
10:56 – it’s going to take time
11:10 – it will take 18 months for your body to “set” itself to a different weight
11:48 – it also takes 18 months to recover
12:00 – progress is never linear
13:08 - “metabolic pendulum”
13:49 – once you reach the peak of how much muscle you build
15:16 – the more muscle tone you have, the more you’ll be losing fat
15:38 – they don’t go off at the same time
16:42 - it is important that you know what you’re losing
17:25 – Success comes in spurts
19:49 – what is reasonable fat loss progress
20:35 – under 1 pound of fat every week – that’s more than ample
22:25 – come in and get weighed and measured for free
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to another new episode of the TheDVCC.com podcast. I am Mark Gray and sitting next to me is my little brother, Stephen
Stephen: Hello there!
Mark: So we’re once again in our quite little cocoon, which is my car with green tea on the go. It seems to be the quietest place, the best place that we can get these done. It’s kind of easy, it’s quite nice, relaxed to have a little chat. It was effectively just recording what we talked about anyway, isn’t it, really, which is why we find it quite fun to do and quite easy to do because we literally have had these conversations thousands and thousands of time before we actually decided to record them.
Apparently these people find our incessant or is it how to chat like going against each quite humorous sometimes. You should see us in person. Seriously all these scars on my face? We’re much less verbal in person, we’re much more physical.
Stephen: Yeah.
Mark: The scars on my face are from when I lose. Although you know, we’re far more mature than that now, we obviously, didn’t have a proper fight for three years? Four years?
Stephen: Four years maybe?
Mark: Four years.
Stephen: Four years. And that was the last time you…
Mark: Yeah. That was the last time our father told us categorically. It was never going to happen again. Anyway, let’s get on to helping. So we obviously talked about intermittent fasting, the two-day diet last week. It’s got some good debate and debate is really good. I like debate. I don’t want, you know, we don’t want people just to agree with us. So if you disagree, put your point across, because it’s how everyone else, or how everyone gets educated by, you know, understanding the reasons and you might have missed, you might have thoughts that perhaps worth reading, you know 10 years, 15 years ago, because things change, science changes, so we’re always going to be keeping up with the cutting edge stuff. So this week, we’re going to be talking about something that we have to do with quite a lot of, in the sense in Bedford and Milton Keynes and that is…
Stephen: Was that for me to say? We’re going to be talking about what is reasonable progress. So like Mark says we do obviously have to talk about this a lot because a lot of people seemed to have different views or certain views on what they think how their progress should go. So if they’ve lost 2 pounds, they should have lost 4 pounds. They’ve lost 4 pounds, they should have lost 8 pounds or even if they’re gaining muscle, it should be quicker or things like that.
So we wanted to cover first, probably I want to ask the question of you Mark, where do you think most people get their view of what is good progress, because at the end of the day for someone to say that they should have lost more, they have to have a view of what they should have lost, where do most people get that.
Mark: I guess there’s a few different ways that people get these views. Obviously, you got the mainstream media, so TV, you have all these Weight Watchers and LighterLife, these big weight loss ones, so that you know people who have lost 10 stones into two weeks that kind of thing, perhaps not that much, but they’ve lost a hell lot of weight. And you know we’ve talked about this in previous podcast, so I understand why that isn’t the best thing for you even to check back for the Weight Watchers. Just put Weight Watchers into the TheDVCC.com site and it will come up with it. Basically you’ve lost a lot of weight, a lot of fat, a lot of muscle as well, but I don’t know there is always one friend I think that has lost, you know, a load of weight, you know, like in a short period of time. I always find it that it always, you know, someone comes to me, or comes to any of us, would be like you’ve lost 5 pounds of fat, really well done, “then how about my friend who lost as much as 10 pounds in two weeks, why I haven’t lost that?”
Stephen: Often you don’t know what they’re doing. So Mark can mention about a lot of people’s views on how much they should do. When they’re talking of LighterLife doing their advertising, Weight Watchers doing their advertising, Slimming Well, all these different crash diet type company is doing their advertising and they are posting up some enormous amounts of weight being lost in such short period of time. Not talking about how that person is healthy, is not talking about how that person is in a year’s time and so therefore people kind of get the incorrect view that you should lose sort of 10, 12 pounds, 14 pounds a month with ease and that should be nothing and so then if you’re not losing that in total weight, then you’re obviously not progressing as fast as you should do, and that’s the thing isn’t it? That if it was that easy, we’d all be doing it, you know. Like if it was easy to lose 14 pounds…
Mark: and keep it off…
Stephen: ….and keep it off… and do it healthy, yeah, everyone would be doing it. Everyone would be walking around how they want to look, but it’s not the case. So…
Mark: Well I think that we’re just covering, that is the main place that most people get their thoughts from and I think another point is probably to make that often it’s the case of people who are so busy looking of what they haven’t achieved rather than actually looking at what they have.
Stephen: We were just discussing with a lady this morning. I give a shoot out to Lisa. Yeah, she’s talking about progress, and you know, she has dropped a dress size, but talking about what….
Mark: Exactly…
Stephen: Yeah, it hasn’t happened and it’s just a miser. I think this is where we’re naturally programmed to that, aren’t we? You know, I’m just going to say but I have to catch myself off on that. No I might have done something well I’m pleased with but I will just focus on what, you know, I could have done it better or something I haven’t achieved.
Rather than looking at what you have done, I mean, we’ve started implementing where we actually text each other, it’s sounds a bit geeky. We texted each at the end of the day, we’ll ask what three wins we had that day. So for example, yesterday was Sunday, wasn’t it? I worked out in the morning, I’d eaten really well and I had a nice, because it’s Mother’s Day. I hope everyone had a good Mother’s Day, by the way. That’s family day, didn’t we?
Stephen: Mark entertained. First entertaining and it was…
Mark: Myself and my girlfriend entertained.
Stephen: I’m not quite sure…my stomach feels a bit funny today. I’m not quite sure about the food.
Mark: It was a lovely fillet of beef and it was cooked perfectly apparently.
Stephen: It was okay. Not too bad. But that was my three wins. So what I’m trying to emphasize is that people should rather be looking at what they have achieved rather than look at what they haven’t achieved yet and that comes along with what is reasonable progress. If you’re looking at what you haven’t achieved, you’ll never going to think you’ve got reasonable progress.
Mark: Also, you’ve never going to be happy either because you’re literally focusing on the negative all times. So really need to focus on the good and the more you focus on something, the more it will happen. The more it expands and they sounds, same thing, sounds cookie but it’s true, so if you focus on not having any money for example, you’re generally not going to ever have any money or if you focus on, you know, the negatives in your body or whatever, you’re going to be…
Stephen: And Mark is saying this from reading a couple of the same book we’ve read but these are scientific studies where they say that what you focus on expands and if you’re constantly focusing on the negative, what you’re haven’t yet achieved then that will probably come to pass, because realistically it knocks your confidence. You then think, “Oh what’s the point, I’m going to have that rubbish meal now because, Oh I only lost 4 pounds last week,” – that’s rubbish which, by the way, 4 pounds, if he was fat is really, really good…
Mark: Really good.
Stephen: But the point being you’ll never think you’re making reasonable progress if you’re focusing on the progress you haven’t made rather than focusing the progress you have made.
Mark: Exactly. So are we used to getting these….Stephen got little notes.
Stephen: I made some notes today.
Mark: Notes from the newspaper, very small. I’m trying to read. Are we used to having things to easily, Stephen?
Stephen: This was something I always think about when I was thinking about what we are talking about today is that a lot of things in, well, on TV or in the radio, everything is about short fastings and I know if I have a discussion withmy grandparents, they say…when…..they’re talking about different sorts of things but saying how people expect so much more now and they talk about….I remember when I listened to a program where they’re talking about the rights that happened a few years, how all those people just because they expect to have something for them, but it was kind of going along. When I think about this with fat losses, people expect to be able to get things without really putting in the time and the effort and I think when that comes along with what is reasonable progress, people tend to immediately after they, maybe their progress has slowed down, but they immediately think that they should have more progress despite not really doing what’s necessary perhaps.
Mark: Yeah. Or you know, people forget perhaps how long it took them or how long they’ve been at that way at all…
Stephen: Exactly right…Yeah.
Mark: You know, I’ve been, I don’t know, maybe 3 stones overweight for 10 years but I expect to lose that 3 stones in 6 months.
Stephen: …and if I don’t, then you know…
Mark: …then…you know…
Stephen: It’s rubbish.
Mark: Exactly. Yeah. You know what it is. It’s like, I always emphasized to people that it’s literally always, you might work out one time a week and then, you know, because you got busy at work, and then two times a week next week, but then it’s three, then three, then three, but then one. But it’s literally all about the fact if you’re consistent.
Stephen: Consistency.
Mark: Consistency. It’s literally all about consistency. So I would always say, sometimes I’m very busy and you know, I’ll work out one time a week and maybe I have to have a complete week off because of things happening. But I would go back to training the next week and I’ll consistently train. So across the year, I’ve trained more times than, you know, I kind of see it, especially with young or youngish guys, 25 years old or whatever. You know, they’re hitting hard and they’re going five times to six times a week far more than I am and, you know, eating really well, but they do it for short burst and, you know, up for a long, it’s all turtle thing, isn’t it. You know. I’ll keep going. I’ll generally eat healthily or most of the time and you know.
Stephen: And consistency…
Mark: And consistently and then the results will come.
Stephen: Because you know that things come in the end, it’s not the case of doing things short outburst and then…(sneezes)…excuse me…
Mark: God bless you.
Stephen: Excuse me…and then stopping them. So that was my point, I think, to make, you know, I think some people, a lot of the time, can kind of get convinced again by a lot of the advertising that goes on with Weight Watchers, with LighterLife, and things like that, that do say that everything is super easy. I’m not saying it has to be super hard, but I’m just saying that to expect to, like Mark says, being safe for example, wanting to lose 3 stones, but you’ve had that 3 stones for 10 years, it’s not just going to happen in a couple of months or three months. It’s going to take time. For one, because your body doesn’t actually, it’s used to being those 3 stones overweight, so it will constantly be trying to actually get back to that for a while until it actually resets it for a moment.
Mark: 18 months.
Stephen: It will take 18 months for your body to reset itself basically to a different weight.
Mark: …to a different weight…that’s correct.
Stephen: So you basically need to lose, say you lost a stone, you need to keep that stone off for 18 months before your body sets to the kind of weight is to your new weight. Otherwise your body will just automatically kind of ….It’s weird, isn’t it? Apparently it’s just automatically wanting to get that back.
Mark: It’s like a thermometer. It’s like a setting, isn’t it? It’s like a setting where it realizes this is my new weight, this is what I’m normally.
Stephen: So that’s why they say it takes about, I think, it’s 18 months as well for when somebody who just had a baby for your body to recover.
Mark: with the ladies and everything….
Stephen: ….hormones and, you know, it’s quite obviously a relatively traumatic experience and it takes 18 months for you to recover fully as a lady, for them, you know to be ready to have another one.
Mark: So then, I think the next point to make when we’re talking about progress is that progress is never linear. So what I mean to say linear, I mean, it’s never literally a straight line. And so if you look at, for example, if you see any of the podcasts previously, Toni’s podcast, when she has lost 4 stones now?
Stephen: 4 stones.
Mark: 4 stones…
Stephen: Pretty even more now.
Mark: The graph for her would not literally just be a straight line for those 4 stones. It would be nothing like that. So when I say it’s not linear, I mean, it doesn’t just go down straightaway. So sometimes it will go down a little bit, sometimes it will even go up. So it often feels like it is two steps forward and one step back. But the big thing to notice is that, I mean, the reason we got this super expensive body fat machine is because most of time, for example, when you first started exercising… Actually I want to talk about this…. when I’ve learned and new at ‘94. But basically when you first start exercising and often people find that they don’t lose weight, what I’m talking about is total weight to start with in the first four, five to six weeks sometimes, but they may be losing body fat, which is why we’ve got the machine to be able to tell us if they’re losing body fat, but the reason for this is actually something called a metabolic pendulum. Basically when you start exercising, particularly, when you start doing resistance training, you become more insulin sensitive, which means you are able to get more nutrients into muscles that you already have. So even if you weren’t actually exercising but you started eating healthier, you would become more insulin sensitive and be able to get more nutrients into your muscles, which would actually take your weight up and also when you started doing resistance training, you start building some lean muscles, so that’s why possibly your weight goes up. So what we often see is that people’s muscle…
Stephen: Total weight goes up…
Mark: Total weight will go up, because they’ve build some muscle tone and then what happens is once you kind of hit this peak of how much muscle you’re actually going to be able to build, that’s when the fat starts to drop and we’ve seen it time and time again. It literally is this metabolic pendulum where you’re able to put more nutrients into your muscles, they get a little bit more muscle toned and then once that stops, that’s when the fat will start to…
Stephen: Actually it was really…
Mark: Actually just to clarify that. So basically someone’s, let’s go for a lady, she is gradually building muscle tone. Her fat is kind of staying the same but therefore her total weight is going up gradually. This may be three weeks, then suddenly, it will literally go – boom—and she will lose fat because of the muscles that she has built. I think it was Thursday, I’m measuring a lady and that was exactly what happens. So it kind of looked, she has lost a pound of fat, I think, from the start, I think it’s four weeks, and I didn’t really straightaway look at the muscle because she suddenly just drop, I think it was 6.7 pounds of fat, which made her to have lost 7.6 pounds of fat in four weeks, but it was because she had gradually increased her muscle tone, by I think it was 4 pounds or so.
Stephen: ….the first three weeks…
Mark: ….or something over those three weeks, so her total weight drop, you know, after four weeks. But the fat loss, you know, that’s half a stone, over a half of stone of fat, which makes a massive difference and that was because of her gradual increase in muscle tone and then you’re suddenly get a drop. So basically the more muscle tone you have, you can pretty much be sure that you’re going to be losing fat.
And that’s one thing we should mention is that, it seems, I actually don’t know the actual reason why, that very rarely will someone build considerable amounts of muscle tone and lose considerable amounts of fat in that same week. So often they may build some muscle tone that week and then the following week fat seems to come off. They never seemed to be, they don’t seem to both go up at the same.
Stephen: Very rare.
Mark: Yeah, they may both go up over time but one muscle go up one week and then the fat will drop the following week. So they have some reason and that’s being true for years we have noted that.
Stephen: In fact what we constantly trying to do is, you know, when people lose weight/fat, sometimes you can lose muscle and so it’s a constant science for us is keeping people muscles and actually increasing it as they’re losing fat and I was just looking at a chap, Kevin, his weight loss and fat loss here, I think he lost 40 pounds or something, 30 pounds – quite a lot – and he put on a pound of muscle in that time, which is really good like so literally he had lost and you’ve seen a video of what fat looks like, he had lost 40 pounds of fat basically, fat off his body. He maintained his muscle and that’s why he looks so dramatically different and so much better.
Mark: So yeah, that’s just a point is that progress is never linear and it is important that you know what you’re losing because you want to be losing fat. Very few people want to lose muscle and health wise it’s probably not the best thing to lose anyway, but most people want to lose fat and it’s very important that you do know what you’re losing and you don’t think that it’s going to be just one easy straight line down of fat loss because that’s not the way it works. Sometimes it will be up, sometimes it will be down and then it doesn’t just drop equally every single week, it goes in spurts. And actually I read this great quote that I wrote down and it says, and this is true, they weren’t talking about fat loss actually, I can’t remember where it was I saw it, but it was talking about something, I think it was sports. “Success comes in spurts, you’ll do all this work and feel you’re getting nothing and nowhere…nothing…nothing…nothing…and then suddenly – whoosh—success. It comes in spurts. Never give up on what is important to you,” and I think that is a great quote for, actually, anything. I mean people who have children know that when they’re learning they suddenly seemed to click sometimes and they’ll take things in and suddenly they’ll be able to do things they weren’t able to do for, you know, consistently for a few weeks, but it the same with everything and fat loss is no different that it comes in spurts. So I like that quote when it says, “it will suddenly come – whoosh,” but if you stop before then, you’ll never see it.
Stephen: True.
Mark: And that’s what a lot of people do and so when they are used to dropping from one diet to another diet, they expect so much to happen and then when it suddenly stopped because you’re body won’t be able to just continue dropping weight when you are in a low-calorie type diet plan, then they’re on to the next thing. You know, I think that’s why our large percentages of our clients are kind of 40-plus and generally, when they come in and, you ask them, “I’ve tried every diet in the world” and we understand.
Stephen: “I don’t want to do another one”
Mark: “I don’t want to do that again.” They kind of realized that it’s just, it’s not…you know, they’ve done it before, you know, 20 years.
Stephen: It’s not sustainable and health wise, it’s not…
Mark: …and fun…
Stephen: That’s true.
Mark: Fun – that’s the point. Just to feel the point….look it’s snowing right now…
Stephen: I think that’s hail.
Mark: Oh well, it’s kind of cold anyway. Balmy weather in UK. On that also, if you’re around Bedford or Milton Keynes, you’re not a client, I just want to invite you to come and get a measured in our machine because obviously Stephen says, you know, it’s very important to see what you’re losing fat or muscle. So you’re more than welcome to come in for 15 minutes or we’ll measure just to show you, and then show you the make up of your body. We won’t be able to see you all the time because obviously we’re very busy. But just this one time if you’re a podcast listener or on our blog, just comment below and then we’ll invite you in, so no worries, just to let you see what your body is made up of.
Stephen: So I think that we should give an actual number for what we think actual reasonable progress is, saying that was the title of the podcast, what we’re talking about. So in your eyes, Mark, what do you think is reasonable fast lost progress?
Mark: It’s very difficult to say because I will go back to Toni and I’ll say this. So Toni didn’t, we keep going on about this, it’s just kind of more and more people are in the same boat. I don’t think she lost anything in the first year, literally nothing, and then 4 stones in that second year. So 4 stones in two years is amazing…
Stephen: And it wasn’t because she suddenly started to….
Mark: Oh no, it wasn’t actually what she is focused on. She is focused on nutrition from the start, it was just that her body took that long to adapt. So, you know, 4 stones in the two years is amazing. So it’s very hard to quantify.
Stephen: I’m going to throw it out there. It is a tough one because it won’t happened from day 1, but I think on average, reasonable progress is – if you were able to lose 1 pound of fat in a week overall, an average, I’m not saying it happens like that, 1 pound of fat every week, then I think that’s more than ample. I think, possibly it could even be slightly less.
Mark: Yeah. Half that point, 0.7, 0.6, something like that. Yeah, if you took that as a general average you’re not going to go far wrong, but also you want to be looking at increasing muscle tone or, you know, keeping that the same as well, that’s very important.
Stephen: But we’re talking fat loss here or pure fat, not weight fat. Like if I wanted you to lose a stone, say 500 calories for the next week and go running for 60 minutes four times a week, you’d look like a skeleton, you wouldn’t be healthy, you’d put it all back on and we’ll be able to do the rebound diet and see how long it takes you to put it back on.
Mark: But, I think overall, if you’re just under a pound of fat a week on average, then I think you should be more than, more than happy for your progress overall. Because that’s a lot. If you extrapolate that over a year, a small for lot, an awful lot of fat in a year, and don’t forget we’re talking fat here, we’re not talking weight or muscle, we’re talking fat.
Stephen: Yeah.
Mark: Hopefully we’ve given you the answer. We’ve kind of went around and then we actually gave it to you in the end, so we kept you listening all the way through. If you do have any questions, and do make comments below, because it’s quite interesting that, you know, I know there’s going to be 30 people who will listen to this and will still say, “but I want to lose 5, I want to lose 6.” You might just have to really listen to this a few times because it has been sowing grain in most of us.
Stephen: That’s not your fault
Mark: It’s just being lies out there. It’s not your fault, it’s just being put out there by the media all the time. So, yeah, listen to it twice if you need to but comment below and let us know what your thoughts on how much you should lose and how you feel about it when you don’t or when you do. Like I say, I invite you if you’re a podcast listener to come in and get weighed and measured, that’s totally free, obviously, no worries, we just want to help as many people as we can. You’re not going to be pressured into joining us, we’re not like that, it’s not how we roll. Otherwise, we’ll see you all next week.
Stephen: See you.
Mark: Bye-bye. Bye.
