Ep 133 – I Hate Food Tracking

TRANSCRIPT:

Dani

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Dani and I’m Giacomo and this is episode 133. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Giacomo is still in Florida as of us recording this. Hopefully he’ll be home soon because I miss him terribly.

Giacomo

Yes, I miss you too. And there’s something special about when we get to record together. Not just the audio quality, but also just being in the same room. It’s not quite the same, but hopefully you as a listener will get a little bit of enjoyment from the little. The change of scenery over here behind the scenes, because it’s definitely a little

different while we’re working together remotely and getting this episode recorded. For sure. It’s a little hot in this room, actually, because I didn’t want the fans running.

Dani

It’s really hot everywhere right now. Everybody down south is saying that it’s going to be like 110 degrees as of the day of us recording. Recording this. So. Yeah.

Giacomo

Eek.

Dani

Yeah.

Giacomo

Well, it’s better than the rain it’s been out here. So it’s kind of like sunny and clear skies or whatever. It’s Florida. It’s warm, it’s cool. Although something I did not realize is that during the hurricane season, the whole place is swarming with mosquitoes. Like, you cannot. There’s nothing you could do to not get bit.

Like, they’re coming after you all day and night. I can literally feel them coming after me, and I love animals. However, I could do it out. Getting bit constantly by mosquitoes while I’m out here, it’s kind of a nuisance. Something I’m not used to, I guess I should say.

Dani

I mean, the mosquitoes always go for Giacomo anyway. Which we found out yesterday that mosquitoes go for people with O blood types more than other blood types. And Giacomo does have O blood type.

Giacomo

Twice as many times, mind you. Me, I wish that they would maybe go after somebody else like you and split up the bites, but nope, they want my blood for some reason.

Dani

Well, after we dove into, like, certain differences between blood types, because this was a conversation we had last night. Like, what are the pros and cons of each various blood type? That pretty much is the only pro of my blood type other than I’m the universal receiver.

So I guess that’s a pretty big pro. Like, if anything ever happened, I could get blood from anybody. But, yeah, my blood type comes with a lot of health risks, which is. Was kind of one of those things. You read it and you’re like, oh, I wish I didn’t know that.

Giacomo

Hey, not to change the topic too fast here but like what are we, are we going anywhere in September? I don’t think. Oh, vacation. But was the next time we’re going out we’re getting closer and closer to plant build.

Dani

Yep. I like how you just skipped right over our vacation and went right into plant built. Thanks for that.

Giacomo

Well, yeah, I’m, I’m wondering if you’re going to, if we are going to be working on vacation or not. I’m not sold on the fact that we won’t be working there. Although I’m really hoping that we’re going to truly take time off.

Dani

Time will tell. I suppose so. But vegan proteins has something very cool coming up. We are just days

away from our latest fat loss challenge starting. So our 12 week fat loss challenge starts on August 29th and it is always so fun when we do these. It’s 12 weeks. All of your workouts for you, macros calculated for you by us and our coaches. Live coaching calls. Almost every single week of the challenge.

Actually monthly check ins, almost daily video lessons. Like it is really, it’s a pretty powerful challenge. So. And somebody, somebody at the end of it wins three months of one on one coaching which is like our creme de la creme service. So yeah, if you want to join that, there is still time, although not much. So hurry up.

Giacomo

And I will tell you this, every single time we run the challenge, it improves because it’s the both of us. We are rel. Well, the whole team, honestly now it’s, it just keeps growing, especially with Alice on the squad as well. Every time we do something, we figure out how to do it even better for you. So you will be in the next challenge.

You’ll be getting every, all the experience and then some. It is going to be a good one for sure. It will be even better than the last one. And we’ve been running these for a while. I don’t know. Tough of years at least. Yeah. Anyways, what are we talking about today, Danny?

Dani

Today we are talking about one of the biggest complaints that I get from people which is that they hate food tracking. They hate it. They absolutely hate food tracking. And that’s valid. That’s valid. First of all, I understand why people don’t like food tracking, but I just wanted to talk more about food tracking.

You know, the pros, the cons and also some alternatives to just plugging your food into MyFitnessPal or just tracking your calories. So I mean, is this something that you hear a lot from people like, oh, I’m just so sick of tracking food.

Giacomo

Yes. And part of me wants to go for the jugular and be like, that’s an excuse you have to track in some way as opposed to trying to address the problem. And the idea of tracking food as opposed to just eating just because, eating just because I don’t care how routine you are and how set your body has been at wherever your happy place is, if you don’t have to like die down or something like that, or bulk up.

But can you really just take mental notes and just focus on your body’s internal cues and just know that your routine is not going to fail itself because you, you’re in touch with like how you should be behaving and feeling intuitive way, like, is that really going to keep your body the way it needs to be when you’re not trying to change your body and it’s not in flux? That’s my beef with it. And you’re right.

To answer your actual question, Danny. Yes, people, well, it’s also, you hear

what you put out there. And we do talk a lot about how people can move away and should move away from food tracking. So I think there’s bias there. I think people are definitely going to complain for that reason alone. But that reason aside, it’s as, it’s as old as the oldest kind of dieting way of tracking ever. It’s like, okay, I used to do weight trackers when you talk about food tracking instead of my fitness pal. Food tracking has been around forever as a way to control your body.

Dani

That is very, I mean, food tracking certainly hasn’t been around forever. In fact, calories were only sort of discovered about 100 years ago. So definitely, definitely not forever, but you know, 100 years versus several billion years, you know, roughly forever. That said, I would say ever since calories were sort of discovered and sort of learned about. I do think that pretty much since the beginning people have been trying to sort of manipulate that and track food in a way so

that they can change their body one way or the other. But yeah, it certainly wasn’t around forever. In fact, a lot of those, like really, really, really old timey bodybuilders, which are super, super inspiring to look at, existed before calorie tracking ever did.

Giacomo

What do you think life was like for them as they were hitting their body goals?

Dani

Well, I do think about this, actually. I think about this quite a bit. I think about like, wow, how did they do that without access to gyms and Tracking food or even really like understanding a lot of the basics about food in and of themselves. So it does kind of make sense. Like most people did manual labor back then, so people were not sitting at a computer all day, they were working their butts off, like out in the fields or in the mines or wherever people were working.

So there was lots of lifting, weightlifting, one way or the other happening. And then obviously people who specifically wanted to pursue a particular physique, there were, you know, dumbbells and things like that that did exist. But I think a lot of it comes down to food. What was available and what wasn’t available. First of all, food was certainly not as easy to come by as it is now. Let alone highly processed, super dense, hyper palatable food that just didn’t exist back then.

It was pretty plain foods. I mean, even getting certain spices was a big deal, you know, so I think it was just a lot more basic. But in order to build muscle, quite frankly, you had to have the privilege of access to food. So. And like large quantities of it. So anyway, that’s a separate topic entirely. But yeah, I don’t think, I don’t think people were tracking their food back then because that wasn’t even a thing.

Giacomo

And with the evolution of our understanding of how to manipulate your body, there are some cons, there are some pros. Right? Every body of work that, the whole body of work, everybody of work has its pros and its cons. As you learn more, it can come with a set of complications. Right, because now we can get to levels of conditioning that people could dream of achieving back then.

Dani

Correct.

Giacomo

Obviously comes at a cost. It’s also something that wouldn’t have come without the skill of tracking and the understanding of calories and food and just.

Dani

Food science in general. Yeah, that is, but I hear you. I think, I think a lot of people don’t know that, that what even amateur natural bodybuilding is today would have crushed some of the fittest men and women in the world a couple hundred years ago. Like what was considered to be the most muscular sort of godlike physique could easily be crushed at like a local level natural bodybuilding show because of the insane, insane levels of conditioning, which is just another word for

leanness that people are bringing to these shows. That, yeah, that was not happening back then and probably for good reason. Like it’s not healthy to be that lean and you know, people weren’t living as long and didn’t have access to the same kind of medicine we had or have now back then.

So probably good that they didn’t try to get, like, super paper thin shredded, because if they got sick or something, they could have, like, literally died from it. I mean, I guess you technically still could, but it would have been more likely back then.

Giacomo

Yeah, very true. So. But I like where your head’s at thinking about what their quality of life was like, as far as how their eating habits affected their quality of life. Because there’s probably something to be said looking at that and comparing the way things are now. When someone’s trying to change their body and they’re relying on food tracking, or not wanting to do it at all or something in between where they’re doing it and when they’re not doing it, they’re not really

familiar with how that’s affecting them. Right. Because there are all kinds of ways that tracking can play tricks on your mind and how you behave that you may not be aware of or you’re painfully aware of, and you’re like, damn it. And then you start to hate the thing. Like, I don’t. I don’t want to track

anymore. I don’t want to be a numbers person. Or I don’t want to think about my food in terms of, you know, in the utilitarian kind of way. Am I using the right word here, Danny?

Dani

Totalitarian, kind of.

Giacomo

Thank you. I just combined two words, which is classic for me. I apologize.

Dani

Well, utilitarian is a word. It’s just the wrong word.

Giacomo

Right. But using food as a utility to get somewhere as opposed to. I. I find that when people start to try to change their body and they pay attention to what they eat, they forget that they can eat to enjoy. It’s that old saying of eat to live or live to eat. Right. And it’s one thing when you focus on your health, it’s an entirely different story when it’s not just about eating nourishing foods, it’s about trying to lose body fat, for example, or it’s trying to have a certain kind of body

composition by putting on muscle and keeping your. The muscle on your body will be in condition in some kind of way. Like, that’s a whole different ball of wax compared to just say, I’m going to eat healthily and eat more nutritiously. Now we’re dealing with the issue with athletes and tracking and the way that that can affect behavior.

Dani

Yeah. I think we should talk about the pros of tracking food. And the pro, I would say the number one pro, the most important pro, is that it works. Period, end of story. It works. And it works at the most basic level. And I think that is the most important thing to grasp, because we’re going to talk about a lot of other methods somebody could use that are probably less precise.

But the only reason that they work these other methods is because they manipulate the amount of calories, carbohydrates, fats and protein you’re taking in. So even when you’re doing another method, right, at the end of the day, it’s manipulating the calorie tracking and the macro tracking in the first place. So for me personally, I just cut out the middleman.

Like, I would just rather cut out the middleman. Get right to the data. Think about your calorie tracking, macro tracking. That’s a budget, right? That’s the budget. All of these other methods we’re going to

talk about would be like the different ways that you can save money. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to the budget. You know, if you say, oh, I.

I’m just. I’m saving so much more money now that I’m not buying coffee at Starbucks every day. It’s not the coffee at Starbucks fault that you were spending money. It was the, you know, five to seven dollars that you were shelling out every single day, 30 days out of the month. Does. Does that make sense? I know you hate analogies, but.

Giacomo

No, I kind of like it, actually. The analogy is not lost on me.

Dani

Good, Great. So anyway, that’s the. That’s the major pro, is that it works. And I actually kind of. I guess the next pro would be like, there’s an educational element to it as well. Once you’ve tracked for a while, you kind of are much better at guessing what’s in your food after you’ve tracked for a while. Like, you have a rough idea how much you’ve taken in after a certain period of tracking.

Um, and those are two pretty humongous pros, like effectiveness and education that you carry with you for the rest of your life. Those are pretty massive pros. But I would also say, I think that’s where the pros end. Everything else about food tracking is kind of a con. So let’s talk about what some of those cons can be.

Giacomo

Well, I want to preface us talking about what the cons can be by saying it’s only a con if it becomes a crux and becomes a lifestyle. Because it’s not a con if you use it as part of a tool in your kit or as a skill. It’s a con if that just becomes your new normal. And when it’s not that way, you’re thinking about it like that, you know, that’s something. I think it’s a very important distinction to make because it’s all a matter of what you do with what you know.

I feel. As opposed to the fact that, like, okay, well, I know how to track now I cannot know it. And now I’m going to constantly be having an uphill battle of fighting my. My own head because I know how to track and I’m not tracking, what do I do with my life.

Dani

Right?

Giacomo

That being said, yes. Let’s talk about the actual cons here. I don’t want to scare anyone away from tracking. I think it’s a very important thing to encourage people to do.

Dani

Most of the cons are just annoying, but guess what? If you want to get in really good shape, you’re going to have to do a lot of stuff that’s annoying throughout the day. Yeah. So, I mean, the first con, in my opinion, is that it’s time consuming. Right. It takes a while to actually track your food. Now, like anything else, as you get better at it, you get faster at it.

To the point that I’ve told people I can track all of my food in probably under three minutes in my fitness pal at this point. But it was not always like that. It used to take me quite a while to figure out what to eat, make it work, plug it in, change what I plugged in, etc.

Giacomo

And like anything else, once you get better at it, you can find ways to do it without it taking up as much time or as much of your headspace or affecting you in a way where you can’t be present with others. But there is still something there. When you’re tracking where it is going to take a little bit of time, it is going to require a little bit of thought and will take you away from other things that you actually want to be doing well.

Dani

And there’s a learning curve as well. Right. Like in the beginning, you don’t actually know how to track certain things. Like, people are like, oh, do I weigh my tofu? Cooked or raw? People don’t know. So they have to learn how to do things like track their tofu or their rice or their beans out of a can. Like, there’s just questions people have that they have to learn and they’re probably going to do the wrong thing until they get the right thing.

Like, that’s. That’s a normal part of learning anything. But it is kind of a pain in the Butt. Right. The next con, I would say it does require. In order to do this, like, effectively and accurately, you need certain tools. It requires tools. You need measuring cups and spoons and. Or a scale. Yes. You can eyeball things, and there’s lots and lots of instances where somebody might have to eyeball something, but it’s not going to be as accurate, which isn’t the end of the world.

But still, in order to track it requires some tools. Like, people travel and sometimes bring their food scale with them or measuring cups and spoons with them. And that’s just an additional thing that you have to do and think about. So that’s kind of annoying, right?

Giacomo

Or like, say you don’t want to be on your phone, but you don’t rely on paper. You rely on the gadget on

your phone to track. Well, now you’re forced to be on your phone a little more for a said thing. For. For example.

Dani

Yeah. So there’s. I mean, there’s that and then there’s like those. Those are the annoying parts, but there’s also the darker, annoying. Darker, darker cons, I guess, which is kind of what you alluded to at the beginning. It’s when you become kind of obsessed with the tracking and you become obsessed with the numbers and hitting the numbers and nailing the numbers. And that not only is it a con, but it’s also a pretty big red flag that you should be watching out for in yourself.

Giacomo

If it’s not temporary. If it’s temporary, I think it comes with the territory. And even if it’s temporary, I do feel like there are better ways where you don’t have to be obsessive, provided your goal is an extreme. And even with extreme goals, you can be get. You can be better at not being obsessive for as long as possible. It’s definitely an experiment you could run on yourself until it’s proven that, well, okay, gotta bite the bullet.

Time to track diligently. You’re not doing your thing. You know what I mean? So there are ways to get better at not being obsessive, but I think by design, tracking is inherently obsessive. It is an obsessive, neurotic like behavior. And I don’t really think there’s anything any way around that. You and I have both been in this. In this boat, I think.

Danny, I remember when you were prepping for your last competition, and I remember there being times where you just wanted to eat the same thing every day, and you didn’t want to weigh and measure everything. You just need you to have X amount of thing every day without weighing and measuring. It was controlled.

Dani

Right? Well, I’m still like that has nothing to do with prep that just one. I am the type of person that likes to eat the same thing every day. But also it definitely makes it easier, which is one of the strategies we’re going to get to later. I assume it makes it easier. If you know that you’re going to have the same thing today as you had the day before and the day before. Well then you don’t have to track for seven days. You only got to track for one day and then hit copy paste six times.

Giacomo

But the deeper you got into your process, the less you could rely on that part of your process. The more you had to track things just to prove, just to make sure that you are in feeding yourself, so to speak. And that’s, that’s the nature of tracking more or less. In the beginning you could be a little more loosey goosey with it. But as you’re sitting there accepting your harmless signals and also ignoring

them so that you can continue to push your body’s mechanisms into.

Into achieving said goal, you have to wind up track like obsessing over tracking more. There’s just no two ways about it. It gets to that point for everyone. I think everyone reaches a tipping point. I mean you can get better and better at not getting there, but at. I think it consumes us all depending on how far you take it, depending on your goal. At least that’s what I’m thinking.

Dani

I mean, I don’t think that tracking is inherently neurotic and obsessive. I really don’t think that. I think that for a lot of people it is a learning situation, it’s an educational period. I think it’s really eye opening for a lot of people to do it for the first time. I think in competition prep, which is what you’re referring to for me, like competition prep is something completely different.

That is, is every single thing about a competition prep is so obsessive and neurotic that it’s just silly at some point. Right? But I don’t think it has to be that way for most people. That said, there’s a lot of people who are not in contest prep who are behaving like that, who are flipping out if they are missing their numbers or accidentally went over or they have like 6 grams of carbs and 1 gram of fat left at night and they have no idea what to do to fill that

perfectly. There are people behaving like that, that I feel like really shouldn’t. And that’s the con that I’m talking about. That’s the red flag that I’m talking about here.

Giacomo

I like that. That’s 100% true. And then you try to take someone away from being in that state of mind and that process and then they start to worry that they’re not going to get results and they’re not going to keep the results that they earned.

Dani

Mm.

Giacomo

Yeah.

Dani

Which is most of the time not true. Assuming that, you know, along with learning how to track, they’re also learning other really important behaviors, like how to listen to their hunger and fullness, like how to make smart and healthy food choices based on cues from their body. Basically, there’s a lot of

other things that you should be learning while you are also learning to track.

Because if tracking is the only tool that you have to lean on, well, then of course you’re going to be obsessed with it because you don’t have anything else. Right. Like without that, you just flail around not knowing what to eat or how to live. That is not good. There’s more to it than just macro tracking.

Giacomo

Exactly. And when you’re paying attention to your hunger cues, it doesn’t mean, oh, I’m really hungry, I should eat now. It means, oh, I’m really hungry and this is what my body feels like and I’m okay with that. And now I’m going to stick with my routine by eating a certain way throughout the day that prevents me from eating more than I should. Right. Because you live in a world where, like Danny mentioned earlier in our conversation, that food is made to taste delicious, it’s dense,

it’s readily available everywhere. It wasn’t like it was 100, 200 years ago. It’s devoid of nutrients. And just because you’re, if you’re eating plant based or you’re vegan, you’re not immune to this. I mean, yes, plants have the nutrients, but it doesn’t mean that everything you’re eating is going to be nutritious.

Speaker 3

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Dani

So should we talk about some other things people could do if they really do hate food tracking? Which again I get. I’ve gone through periods where I just can’t bring myself. I just can’t bring myself to track and then I also go through periods where I really miss it. I’m super curious about what I’m taking in and I think it can be really, really great to inventory

that way. But let’s talk about some other methods that people could use to make physique change, whether that’s fat loss or muscle building that are not tracking your food.

Giacomo

Well, if you’ve already been tracking, I think trusting yourself to not track and not go off the rails is priority number one. And the first experiment that I’ve tried with people is to take three days and not track. Don’t think about food, don’t weigh it, don’t measure it, not in the back of your mind, not on a paper. And then three days later write it all out and see what you did. Run a little experiment on yourself.

Dani

How are you going to write it out three days later?

Giacomo

How could you tracking every day? Well, I suppose you could, but, but what I’m trying to say, Danny, is if you have, if you’ve been tracking for that long, you’re not going to forget what you were eating. You’d be surprised how much you remember about how you eat because you’ve been tracking for that long. That’s what I’m Trying to say, which in and of itself shows you just how much tracking is routine.

You could trust yourself to do it without tracking, but doing that gives you a chance to prove to yourself that you do not need the numbers, you do not need to write it down. That’s one, that’s one thing I’m thinking. Another thing is to build out a plan without thinking about numbers or calories or even necessarily protein. See if you can do it just, and or even portions for that matter.

See if you could do it without like write it down, write out the foods and then start to prepare foods and, and see what it looks like. You know, these little experiments that you could run on yourself, they may not be your solution in the short, but long term you’re going to wind up having a different way of approaching planning your, and, and making your meals.

And, and you’re going to wind up trusting yourself more, realizing that you don’t need, you don’t necessarily need the things that you thought you needed because you’ve actually learned how to apply yourself. You’ve learned how to, to change your behavior essentially without having to still track or be cat or weigh or measure and, and trust me when I say this, you will surprise yourself. The mind remembers.

And the thing that you’ve been doing with the learning tool, when you stop, when you put away the

learning tool, you’re still going to do it. You may have the fear and you may not do it all the time, but you know what you should be doing. At least that’s the way that I’ve seen over the years of experimenting with others and on myself. What are you thinking? What kind of ideas do you have?

Dani

Oh, I have a lot of ideas, but they’re very different than yours. My first idea is to use kind of like a meal plan template or a meal template is a better way to put it. Having a plate, like a 7 inch dinner plate that is half vegetables, 1/4 protein, 1/4 starch and like a thumb size amount of fat on your plate. And that’s like a full, balanced, well rounded meal.

And then doing that three times a day, that is a way. And I mean, you know, your mileage may vary. Your plate might have to look different than what I just described. But that is one way to build your meals. That isn’t tracking, but there’s still a structure to it. And I think that’s kind of the thing is for everything that I’m about to talk about, except for maybe, maybe mindful eating, everything else, there’s like there is a structure in place with it.

So the meal plate templates I think is a good one. And you can kind of meal template your snacks too, like, or make a list of snacks that, you know, kind of fit what you’re trying to do and just eat from that list of snacks. Another one could be to. And I don’t recommend this. This is why I prefer tracking and flexible dieting. But hey, this will work, right?

This will work. You can cut out like highly processed foods that come in a package. Like, like chips and crackers and cookies and things. Not just I processed, processed foods. That’s a whole separate topic. I get so frustrated when people say I don’t eat processed foods. Have you ever chopped a banana in half and ate it? You ate a processed food?

Because that is the definition. That is one of the many, many definitions of a process. If something has been cut, chopped, blended, frozen, boiled, any. That’s a process. So that’s why I much prefer to say like hyper processed foods or highly processed foods. But hopefully you guys get the gist of what I’m saying. If you cut these out, your caloric intake is going to decrease almost certainly.

And that is, that’s one way that you can do it. Now the reason I don’t love this method is because then it plants this idea in your head that these foods are bad. They’re always bad. They’re always in opposition to your goal. And while yes, we should not build our world around highly processed foods, they’re not inherently oppositional to your goals if you know how to work them in which tracking helps you learn how to do.

But that said, it’s a really easy one. That’s a really easy structure. Just chop them out. And I think that’s why so many people do it. Like, this is a super common one. People say, oh, I’m not going to eat junk food. And they like, are pretty successful with it for a period. And then they’re not. Then they go to a party and there’s a bowl of chips and then they cannot stop eating the chips and then the floodgates are now open and they’re eating

everything. And this is why I personally don’t think it’s a great one. But it’s really easy and you don’t have to think about it very much. And I think that’s why it’s so damn popular.

Giacomo

Those are really practical, sensible food tips. I think having an understanding of foods that are not protein dense, that are going to still get you to your protein goal is pretty helpful. Understanding that it helps you think a little bit less about calories and macronutrients and isolation and get you a little more back to what Danny was saying, where you’re focusing on a plate as opposed to how to build said plate.

Right. And these are. These are, again, that answer that you’re looking for is almost always the most simple thing in front of you. Get in vegetables twice a day, eat something with protein in it four times a day, eat nutritious food. Don’t be afraid to have a snack. Right. These are always the answers. No matter how many times you try to perfect your plan to eat like an athlete and make your body do things it wasn’t meant to do, which, by the way, is the reason why you track and the

reason why you’re paying attention to all this stuff is because you’re looking to get the absolute most out of your body. You’re not looking to just survive. You’re not looking to just live long. You want to live long, be healthy, and use your body as it grows into its age. Like, you want to make sure that your body is wrong because you’re beating it up, because you’re looking for. To get the most out of it.

So it’d be one thing if you were just eating or survive, but you’re not. Right. And that’s where I get a little. I don’t want to say salty, but I get a little judgmental about the dichotomy when it comes to health and fitness. And the difference between the two and where I feel like the two of them need to intersect is because in order to be healthy, in my opinion, you need to be fit.

Dani

Interesting.

Giacomo

I got mindful eating.

Dani

I wasn’t even eating yet. I was going to talk about what you talked about me during prep. My meal plan. You can make a meal plan for yourself and you can just eat that thing every day because then, you know, once you know what’s in it and you know that that works for you, as long as you’re not sick of it, you can just keep eating that every day and you’ll be successful at it.

So it takes a little upfront work, but it does work. And I do this pretty regularly, actually. I almost always have a little meal plan for myself going because I don’t get sick of stuff very quickly. I can eat the same thing for an ungodly length of time, honestly. But even if you just make one every week or every month, that’s cool, and that will work.

Let’s see. So obviously we hear about people doing these things all the time going low carb or going low fat. Again, I don’t recommend either of these, but they will work. But why do they work? They work because they reduce your caloric intake. Period. The end, Full stop. If you are trying to lose weight and you go on a low carb diet, you’re probably going to lose weight because you just decreased your caloric intake.

If you go low fat, you’re probably going to lose some weight, certainly initially anyway, because you decreased your caloric intake. So this kind of elimination style of eating where you eliminate certain foods or certain types of foods, they will work because for fat loss and weight loss, they will work because they decrease your caloric intake. Are they the most balanced? They can be.

I think there are certain foods that somebody could remove without too much fanfare around it. Soda, Right. Like if someone just stopped drinking sugar based sodas, a lot of people are going to lose weight from that alone because they’ve been drinking two or three cans of soda a day, which is like 450 calories. When they swap that out, boom, they will lose a pound a week from that alone.

Giacomo

It’s okay. And so if you want a sugar soda, maybe make it a treat. Like every once in a while when you go out to the movies, you have a soda and maybe not every time you go to the movie. So it’s not like you want to shame yourself for something you enjoy. It’s just that’s not something you’re going to have every day, for example. And that’s where the flexibility and the balance and still being able to just feel joyful about your choices and eating in general come into play.

Because emotions do play a role in how you eat. And it’s not just the emotions you experience life wise and the stress you experience life wise. It’s also what you put onto your plate and how you feel about it and what you think about it that will affect you. Also, we talk a lot about lifestyle stressors and emotions when we work with our clients.

But there’s something to be said about your actual food choices and what you think about that and how you feel about that. That can literally cause you to spiral in the wrong direction.

Dani

Yeah. If you feel too bad about yourself for the thing that you just ate, do you think you’re gonna make good choices now? No, of course you’re not. Because you just basically like shit all over yourself and then you’re just gonna feel worse and do worse things. Like, I know it seems backwards, but that’s just the way that it plays out over and over again.

No one’s shaming themselves into better choices almost ever. I mean, I can think of one instance where the entire nation shamed people into better choices, but I won’t get into that. Anyway. Okay, so lastly, I would say mindful eating. Mindful eating, intuitive eating, however you want to word it. I know they mean slightly different things, but listening to your body is also a strategy.

I don’t think it’s fail proof. I don’t think any of these are fail proof, just to be clear. But I don’t think that

mindful eating or intuitive eating, only because you can track your macros and eat mindfully, but you can’t really track your macros and eat intuitively. Those are different things. But listening to your body. Go ahead, give me your take.

Giacomo

Well, I find that this goes one of two ways. When someone listens to their body, they can realize that they’re denying themselves of feeling hunger, or their feeling of hunger is actually a fear. Like they have a fear of hunger. So they wind up feeling it too much or they don’t feel it enough, put it that way. I’ve seen both and both are. Both are unhealthy in my opinion. So I think just being aware of, actually the fact that you are hungry puts you in touch with your body, doesn’t mean

that you’re not going to be hungry. And I. I feel like removing the fear from that equation as opposed to being like, oh, crap, I’m gonna be aware of my hunger signals now. I’m gonna wind up overeating. It’s not about that. It’s about reconnecting to your body but still making the right choices, depending on what your goals are.

Dani

Yeah, I mean, I always, I will always think that there is a benefit to eating mindfully, regardless of which one of these options you so choose to do. Be mindful. While you’re eating, pay attention. Give your food the attention it deserves. While you’re eating it, eat slowly. Really pay attention to the food in your mouth, the way that you feel like all of that is going to make you just more satisfied by the end of your meal.

Always. Always. So I’m always a fan of that. Intuitive eating is more like choosing what foods to eat based on what your body is kind of telling you. And I feel like. I feel like everybody should try this. I feel like everybody should try it because we are so out of touch with our bodies in the first place. But again, I think we touched upon this in one of our last episodes.

Or actually, maybe it’s an episode coming up that we already recorded. I’m not sure. No, it was one of our last episodes. That sometimes people’s bodies and brains are telling them to eat cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a month. And it can take quite a while to really sort of get the hang of that and start feeding your body not just what it wants, but also what it needs. So I don’t necessarily think intuitive eating is actually a method that can help you change your body if

you’re doing it correctly. But I do think that it can help you change your relationship to food, which in some ways is more important. So. But it’s a longer, longer path. And if you’re hung up on six pack abs while you’re trying to learn how to eat intuitively, you’re going to have a bad time.

Giacomo

Right. And drawing that line in the sand, you obviously know which direction you’re going to take. The safer route for you, however, it could lead to a more painful process. As far as you feeling a little more,

I don’t know if the right word is normal, but a little more hands off with your approach where you just free up your time and your energy for other things in your life.

And if that other thing in your life is, is something that is healthy and related, sure. But it’s just, it doesn’t have to be like that specific thing that you’re doing as far as tracking as opposed to just trying to be a little more, take a little bit more of a balanced approach to tuning back in with your body and your mind. Like Danny said, mindful eating is paying attention.

It’s not like you don’t have to necessarily obsess about how you feel. You don’t have to make changes, be like, oh, I got to be mindful. I have to make sure I’m eating more or less. It’s just about being aware, you know, when you’re overindulging, you know, when you’re maybe depriving yourself a little more than you want to be. Neither is bad. It’s just if you look at the habit and you don’t like it and it’s your routine or it’s happening too often now you’re able to make a change as

opposed to being like, well, it’s a matter of calories in versus calories. Not necessarily. It’s a matter of being more familiar with your eating habits and why you make your choices. And that way you can just. And the benefit to this is when you get to the other side and things are good, you can Just eat.

You know what I mean? You could just have a little bit more of, how do I say, A little bit more of a you’re eating to enjoy kind of approach when you sit down while still eating like an athlete.

Dani

So whichever one of these methods you choose, just consider the pros and cons and consider why something might work or why it might not work. And, you know, none of these are wrong. None of them are wrong. You can try all of them. And I think I would encourage people to do exactly that. You know, if you think you want to try something, try it. What’s the worst that can happen?

It doesn’t work and you go back, no big deal, nothing lost. Like you. You’re the one in your body, you’re the one in your vessel from now till the day it croaks. And you should experiment with it, because why the heck not? You know, like best practices on paper, awesome science, we love it. But at the end of the day, if you’re curious about something, try it and see how it feels for you.

All right, moving on to our question and answer segment. Giacomo, how long did it take before you noticed a difference? I’m on my fourth week of weight training, and there are no changes. I know that it takes time. I just wanted to get realistic expectations.

Giacomo

Well, I think that within three months, you should start to see some significant changes through weight training. Within six to eight months, you should see a new body. And if you don’t, then you should be taking a look at yourself, not in motion, like a still, like take a picture and all the while be tracking. That said, if you’re not seeing changes or if you’re afraid you’re not going to see changes.

And I suggest that you do take a little dose of being vigilant here. Make sure that you’re also doing

things outside of weight training to optimize your body so that it can repair, recover, perform, get healthier, get stronger. Weight training alone, yeah, we call them newbie gains. They will be there. You will change. But if you want to see as much change as possible, you want to make sure you’re eating in a way that will support change.

You want to make sure that you’re staying hydrated, focusing on your. The bottom of your pyramid, the hydration, sleep, getting in the right amount of protein, like, focus on every other things outside of the gym. Take stock of what you’re doing by also paying attention, like taking some measurements or some pictures, especially after, you know, in the beginning, after three months as well. And yes, to give it time to give it time because your body needs a little bit of time to

get used to the training. And then the, and then the, I like to call them gains start to happen when your muscles start to change and grow and take shape. Danny’s question’s for you. I’m going on a trip next month for a week. How do I continue my creatine intake while I’m away from home? I’m not checking any bags. Can I pack an unlabeled seven day supply of powder in my carry on with United feels sketch?

Dani

I love this question. It’s a very simple answer. Like the answer will take me two seconds to give, but we get this question a lot from a lot of people, so I thought it was worth putting on the podcast. Can you take powders, even in unlabeled little baggies, through the security gate at an airport? And the answer is yes. Yes, you can. You could take tubs of protein, you can take baggies of protein, you can take little Tupperwares of protein or creatine or whatever.

I mean, I guess it couldn’t be any powder, right? Because like it can’t be drugs. But, but all of your sports supplements, you can absolutely take them through. There is a good chance they’re going to check your bag. There’s a good chance that they’re going to swab it for explosives. Like just swab the outside of the bag for explosives. But it will.

As long as there’s no explosives on it, it’ll get through. Stuff that won’t get through security are any liquids, obviously, but also any food that is kind of liquid, like so jars of peanut butter, jars of protein, cookie dough. I’m still upset about that one. I have had, sometimes people have taken cooked containers of oatmeal from me, but sometimes they haven’t.

Hummus, same thing. Sometimes they take it, sometimes they don’t take it. I’ve had bags of baked sweet potatoes go through security and sometimes they’re a little iffy about it, but yeah, that’s. You can absolutely take your stuff through security. You don’t have to check it.

Giacomo

Two tips, though. If it’s a sealed container, it’s less likely to get searched and if it’s on the outside perimeter of your bag, they can more easily take a look at it and you’re less likely to get searched, I think. And not that I’m a TSA security person, I just those things I feel like I’ve learned by packing many powders and being the one to hold up the line over the years.

Dani

All right, everybody, thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio. Please feel free to join our 12 week fat loss Challenge. There’s only a few days left. Or if you’re interested in more one on one coaching, go to veganproteins.com and fill out a coaching application there. You can follow us on any socials. Shoot us an email coach veganproteins.com One of us will answer you. And that’s what we got for you this week. My name is Danny.

Giacomo

And I’m Takamo.

Dani

And we will talk to you soon.