The Keane Edge E-Book

Brian Keane

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Brian Keane's philosophy is simple: any diet will work so long as you stick to it. His goal is clear: to help you find the mindset and unique personal motivation that will enable you to stick to your fitness and nutrition plan and become leaner, stronger and healthier. Ireland's leading fitness podcaster has already helped thousands of people lose body fat and change their relationship with food. By getting your mindset right first, achieving your nutrition and fitness goals becomes simple and possible as never before, giving you the edge on real, lasting fat loss for life. 'Full of tips and tools to help you master your mindset and discover what works best for your health and fitness.'Anna Geary 'Inspiring, helpful and full of facts.' Trisha Lewis 'Brian's passion for health and fitness shines through.'Karl Henry

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to everyone in my inner circle.I love you all.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part One: The Basics

Calories 101

Part Two: The Mindset

Why things have gone wrong in the past

Getting your ladder against the right wall

Self-sabotage

Part Three: Nutrition and Training

Nutrition 101

Supplements

Things you should know but shouldn’t focus on

Training

Part Four: Sleep and Stress

Why sleep is important

The facts about stress

Part Five: The Plan and Recipes

How to build your own nutritional plan

Maintaining the Keane Edge

The recipes

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill Books

Introduction

Losing weight is a lot like baking a cake.

Yes, you read that right. I’m starting this ‘healthy eating’ book talking about baking a cake. As you’ll see over the coming chapters, this book is unlike anything you have ever read before. I’m not going to be preaching the fat-burning capabilities of some random food found deep in the Amazon jungle, or selling you on some quick-fix solution that massively reduces your calorie intake by eliminating an entire food group. Nope, you won’t get that here. What you are going to get in the following pages is a mindset shift.

You’re likely going to hear some uncomfortable truths about the sole contributing factor as to why you don’t look the way you want to look. I’ll give you a clue. When it comes to every single diet or nutritional plan you’ve followed unsuccessfully over the years, what has been the common denominator? Have you been too restrictive and then pressed the ‘f*ck it button’ and binged on everything in sight? Possibly. Have you eliminated entire food groups in your desire to lose weight, e.g. six weeks gluten free, no dairy? Yeah, you might have. But none of those is the common denominator. Want to know what is? It’s YOU! Yes, you, or more accurately your mindset and how you approach the diet or nutritional plan. But don’t worry, we’re going to fix that. But first, back to my cake.

Surely cake is off limits if you’re trying to lose weight or reduce your body fat? Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that in Part One of the book you’ll see that calories do matter and food portion sizes are important. Eating a whole cake is unlikely to support your weight-loss goal. Equally though, one slice a few times a week probably has the opposite effect. It gives you the psychological and metabolic boost you need to stick to your nutritional plan over the space of a week, a month or even a year. But that’s not why I bring up cake. The reason I bring it up, apart from the fact that cake is delicious, is the baking element.

If you’ve ever baked a cake (or any other oven treat), you know that you have to follow a recipe. You need to do things in the right order, following a step-by-step process to end up with an appetising baked good. But you also need the ingredient list. Forget the flour and you have a pile of mush, forget the sugar and it tastes horrible, forget the eggs and it doesn’t stick together – you get the idea. Developing the Keane Edge is exactly the same. To lose weight, you need the recipe, and you need to follow a step-by-step process. In Part One, we’ll go through that: how calories work, what you need to know about macros – the foods that make up your calories – and food choices and the order of priority or ‘fat-loss pyramid of prioritisation’ that comes alongside them.

At this point, you might be thinking, ‘Oh God, not another diet book on clean eating,’ or ‘To lose weight, consume fewer calories – been there, done that’ – oh no my friend, that’s just the start of it. Similar to baking a cake, you can know exactly how to make it but it still might taste like crap if you don’t know what ingredients to use. Which brings me on to the meat and potatoes (pardon the pun) of this book – the ingredients, aka your mindset tools.

The educational side of the weight-loss process is broken down into everything from calories, macros and food choices to using the correct metrics to track your progress. Randomly following dietary advice without context or knowledge is a recipe for misery. You might hit your weight-loss goal, but you might not. You always want to be able to replicate what you do. For instance, If you lost 4 kilos to look your absolute best for a wedding or other event, you want to be able to replicate that any time you need to in the future. I only use the word ‘diet’ as an adjective. It’s a skill you acquire to use when you need it. You diet to slim down for a date in the future. And unless you are morbidly obese or seriously overweight and you’ve been dieting for more than a year with no result, you are doing it wrong! Over the course of our journey together, you will acquire the dieting skill but our primary focus will be on the nutrition side of things. That means finding a plan that is specific to your goal and then approaching it the right way. The ingredients come next and the first one on that list is discipline.

THE DISCIPLINE INGREDIENT

When I say ‘discipline’, I’m not talking about gruelling workout sessions in a gym, or even avoiding your favourite foods to hit a weight-loss target. Far from it. What I mean by discipline is building habits that support your end goal, so that you don’t feel like you’re on a ‘diet’.

Being disciplined is about understanding how your daily actions and behaviours determine how well you do on your weight-loss journey. If you tell me how you eat every day, I’ll tell you how much weight you’ll lose or how you’ll look in a year. I’m also going to break down the myth of motivation and the misconception that there are ‘motivated people’ out there. Spoiler alert, there’s no such thing as ‘motivated people’ – there are disciplined people: individuals with good daily habits or people who have educated themselves and conditioned their mindset to find a nutritional plan that works for them. We can remove that unsupportive belief system of discipline here and now because it’s nonsense and only serves as an obstacle to the correct mindset. More on this later. So if discipline is one of our ingredients, what else is there? I’m glad you asked.

THE FAILURE INGREDIENT

Failure is next on the list. Yes, failure is an important ingredient on your journey. But wait, how is failure helpful? Surely that’s a bad thing, right? Nope. Failure is one of the most important ingredients on your weight-loss journey because failure isn’t final: failure is feedback! Feedback on what hasn’t worked in the past. Feedback on how you avoid self-sabotage in the future. In this section, we’ll talk about the concept of ‘pressing the f*ck it button’. You all know what I’m talking about; you’ve eaten poorly all day Saturday and then had a big fry up on Sunday morning, so you say, ‘F*ck it, I’ll start back on my plan tomorrow.’ Yeah, you know the button. If it’s overused, or worse, worn out, we’ll figure out why and put a plan in place around it. Failure also gives us the tool of ‘resetting’, where you don’t let one bad meal turn into two or a bad weekend turn into a bad week. We ‘reset’ after a potential slip and we get right back on plan. That’s failure as feedback and that brings me on to the final ingredient in this recipe: the mindset tools.

THE MINDSET INGREDIENT

This book is ultimately a tool book, and your mindset tools are the most important ones. We’ll go through philosophies such as getting your ladder up against the right wall, or in other words, finding the plan that’s in alignment with your goals, one that includes foods you enjoy and one that you can stick to. We’ll also go over the 0–1 principle on why the start of any new diet is the hardest part, even though it’s usually when you’re at your most motivated (and why that’s normally the problem).

We will go deep on the problem with waiting for Monday if you’re feeling motivated on Friday, and the unsupportive behaviour of having a ‘last supper’ – a ritual that involves bingeing on your favourite foods because you start a diet tomorrow. We’ll also go deep on your ‘why’. Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want to reduce your body fat? Why do you want to look a certain way? Knowing why you’re doing it can be the difference between success and failure on a dietary plan.

You will come to see that it’s not the diet that’s the issue: it’s your mindset towards it that’s been the problem all along. The honest truth is that most diets work if you stick to them. But why can’t you stick to your diet? Is it unsustainable? Does it eliminate your favourite foods? Do you feel rubbish on it – low energy, crap sleep, poor sex drive? We’ll uncover those tangibles and intangibles as we dive deeper into the book, but for now, realise that this book works with any diet. Although the final part will give you a nutritional plan to follow and some recipes with high-quality, nutrient-dense meals, truthfully any plan will work if you stick to it. What tool do you need to help you with this job? Are you self-sabotaging? Cool, read that section and use the tools in there to help you. Do you lack motivation or have bad dietary habits? Great, check out that chapter and pull out the tools you need.

My mission with this book is to make you realise that outside of some fundamental educational principles that everybody on a weight-loss journey should know – such as basic calorie intake – it’s not the diet per se that determines your weight loss success: it’s your mindset towards it that matters. Thinking that the diet is the problem – or what I call ‘the diet mindset’ – is not only flawed, it’s broken and downright wrong. And it’s time to upgrade your thinking. You can leave that ‘diet mindset’ at the door. Now we’re moving to the next level. The level that gets you exactly where you need to be and keeps you there until your goals change. Now we’re talking about the Keane Edge.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

Part One of this book is for absolute beginners. If this is the first book on nutrition that you’ve ever picked up and are confused or don’t fully understand calories, macros or how food choices affect your body composition, then I recommend reading Part One in its entirety. If you are already familiar with foundational nutritional principles such as calories and macros, you can skip to the end of Part One, where I’ve recapped the main takeaways, and then jump into Part Two, which talks about developing the mindset around nutrition. Part Three deals with nutrition itself and training, while Part Four looks at the pivotal but often-misunderstood area of fat loss: sleep and stress.

The book’s final part gives you ‘The Plan’. It’s not the unsustainable kind of ‘one and done’ formula you may have come across in other diet books; I’m interested in mindset, nutrition and how to efficiently lose weight or reduce body fat over time. That being said, the plan will help you get started if you’re feeling motivated right now.

Part OneThe Basics

Calories 101

One of the biggest problems with most diet books is that they don’t address the most fundamental thing when it comes to fat loss: the basic understanding of calories. Put simply, the amount of energy contained in an item of food or drink is measured in calories. When we eat and drink more calories than we use, our bodies store the excess as body fat. If this continues, one tends to put on weight over time. It’s not unlike a bank balance. If you earn €2,000 per month but spend €2,100 every month, you’re going to be broke soon.

HOW MANY CALORIES DO I ACTUALLY NEED?

Since too many calories equals weight gain, it begs the obvious follow-up question: how many calories do I actually need? Generally, the average man needs around 2,500kcal a day to maintain a healthy body weight, and for an average woman, that figure is around 2,000kcal a day. However, these are just ballpark numbers, as individual needs, current goals, activity level and genetics all contribute to how many calories one should be consuming each day.

I’m going to make the assumption that since you’re reading a nutrition book, your primary goal is weight or fat loss. I make this assumption because building lean muscle tissue or improving athletic performance normally require a different protocol for calorie calculation; if you have secondary goals outside of fat loss, it’s worth factoring them into your overall calorie intake. For example, if you want to lose fat but also build lean muscle tissue or tone up, you might need to keep your calorie intake slightly higher than someone who is solely focused on weight loss.

There are several ways to test and track how many calories you are consuming, and the keyword here is ‘test’. A total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) calculator can be extremely useful for addressing the number of calories one needs to consume each day in order to lose weight, but it still needs to be tested. For those unfamiliar with a TDEE calculator, it provides an estimate of how many calories you burn per day, taking exercise into account. It is calculated by first figuring out your basal metabolic rate and then multiplying that value by an activity multiplier. Simply put, it tells you how many calories you need to eat each day, based on your lifestyle, in order to lose fat.

At the end of the day, though, calorie calculators are machine based, and you’re not a machine. You’re a human being, which means that the way your body is physically responding is a better indicator of progress than any calorie calculator you can find either online or offline. However, these calculators do give you a good starting point; just don’t become too obsessed with the number.

I mention this because I’ve worked in the past with people who are obsessed with their calorie intake. They look at the number on the calculator and track every morsel of food that they put into their mouth. From my experience, the understanding of basic calories is essential, but putting all your energy, effort and self-worth into the numbers is a recipe for misery. I advise using a TDEE calculator to start tracking your calories for a couple of weeks, to get a basic understanding of how many calories you are actually eating every day. After that, it’s up to you whether you wish to continue tracking your intake rigorously or take a more lenient approach, such as gauging by eye the amount you are consuming.

THE ONE THING FOR FAT LOSS

After you’ve calculated your TDEE, you need to get into a calorie deficit. Let’s say your individual TDEE number shows up as 1,800kcal per day. This means that any number above this is a calorie surplus, which can potentially lead to fat gain. Conversely, any number below this is a calorie deficit, which can potentially lead to fat loss. I generally recommend testing your minimum effective dose (MED), which in this scenario means that you focus on consuming 1,700kcal every day, which means a deficit of 100kcal per day. Test this out for 10–14 days, see if your body fat has reduced (discussed below), and then based on that feedback, adjust or maintain your consumption accordingly.

Of course, if you want more drastic results, you go into a more drastic deficit, but as Part Two of this book will explore, make sure you can stick to that deficit. Yes, eating 700kcal every day will give you a 1,000kcal per day deficit, and the logic can be that if I multiply the size of my deficit, I’ll multiply results. I’m afraid that’s just not the case when it comes to losing body fat. On top of certain hormonal disruptions that occur with severely reducing calories in general populations, adherence can suffer dramatically in these kinds of plans. Things like your mood and energy levels can also plummet. Personally, I very rarely see the need to go for more than 300–500kcal deficit (depending on the TDEE number, of course). Now you test it.

If your body fat isn’t decreasing, you need to either decrease your number of calories further or you need to move more (i.e. burn more calories). On the other hand, if you’re happy with your progress, just keep doing what you’re doing. Now for the most important thing. Make sure you are tracking the correct metric! In other words, make sure you are losing body fat. Why didn’t I say ‘make sure you are losing weight’ here? It’s simple. Losing weight and losing body fat are not the same thing.

Losing weight is reducing numbers on a scale. The scale is the metric; it’s a unit of measurement. When you step on a scale and it says 50kg, it means you weigh 50kg. If you step on a scale that says 45kg six weeks later, it means you now weigh 45kg. You have lost 5kg of weight. But this may not be 5kg of fat. You may have lost muscle, water weight or even stored glycogen from the carbohydrates you eat, so unless you’re severely overweight to begin with, the scales won’t really tell you how much body fat you’ve lost. Having said that, if you are clinically overweight or obese, then the scale is a good starting point for tracking your progress. I’m also not saying that you need to throw away your weighing scale, as it can still be a useful method to track progress – just make sure it’s not the only way you’re tracking your progress.

Although they are different, for the purposes of keeping it simple and using the language you are most familiar with, I will use both ‘weight loss’ and ‘fat loss’ interchangeably from here until the end of the book; but be aware that they do not mean the same thing.

IS YOUR BODY FAT DROPPING?

Once you have calculated your TDEE and tracked your calorie consumption for a couple of weeks, it’s now time to test if your body fat is decreasing. Although there are many ways to track body fat – from 3D body scanners to hydrostatic weighting (where you get weighed under water) – when it comes to testing body fat reduction, there are four methods that I generally recommend. I’ll start with the two that have a higher level of accuracy but are my least favourite of the four.

1. Skinfold calipers

Skinfold calipers measure the thickness of your subcutaneous fat (the fat underneath the skin) at certain locations in the body.

•Pro: Skinfold calipers are affordable, portable and measurements can be taken quickly.

•Con: The method requires practice and basic knowledge of anatomy. Also, for obvious reasons, some people don’t enjoy getting their fat pinched.

2. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scan

For some, this is regarded as one of the best, most accurate methods for tracking body fat, but as you’ll see, it’s not the most readily available method and can be quite costly.

•Pro: This method provides accurate and detailed information, including a breakdown of different body regions and bone density readings.

•Con: DXAs are often unavailable to the general public, are expensive when available, and deliver a very small amount of radiation.

The two options mentioned above tend to work well for professionals, but what about the person who just wants to look better and check if their fat is reducing or not? This brings me to my two personal favourite ways of tracking body fat. Although neither is technically as accurate as the examples provided above, they are considerably easier to do and cost nothing!

3. Photos

Yes, straightforward and simple. From the first day of my 1:1 personal training journey to now, when I work as an online coach, I always get clients to track their progress from photos. Why? Because the old adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ holds true when it comes to checking whether body fat is reducing. One of the major problems with losing body fat is that we tend not to see our own progress from day to day (or even week to week in some cases), but as with clothing – which I’ll get to next – photos don’t lie.

If you’re maintaining a calorie deficit, you should see a decrease in your body fat as the days and weeks go by. You might not see it in your most stubborn areas: your bum, your stomach, your hips or lower back and so on, but it will be apparent elsewhere: your arms, your chest and your legs. We’ll come back to stubborn body fat later. For now, photos are a great way to track if your body fat is reducing or not.

•Pro: Photos are an inexpensive way to track your body fat. They are also very accurate when it comes to body composition, as the visual representation can make progress (or the lack thereof) easy to see.

•Con: There isn’t a tangible number to work with in the case of photos, unlike the calipers above, and progress can be subjective. So, if you don’t have a coach or trainer to look over the photos, it can be difficult to notice progress over shorter periods of time.

My recommendations for taking photos

•Take three photos: one from the front, one from the back and one from the side.

•Wear clothing that shows your body. For females, I recommend a sports bra and underwear or shorts. For males, I recommend underwear or shorts. Remember these photos are for you to track your own progress, and you don’t need to share them with anyone. Just make sure all your major body parts are clearly visible.

•Keep the conditions the same every week. Take the photos before you have eaten or drunk anything, in the same room and under the same lighting.

•Have a designated day to take your photos, such as every Friday morning when you wake up.

4. Clothing fit

Again, similar to the option of photos discussed above, how your clothes fit can be a great indicator of progress. If you’ve dropped a dress size or a trouser size or two, you know your body fat is reducing. One of the reframes I give my clients who are obsessed with the numbers on a scale is asking them about the size of their clothes.

To this day, I’ve never seen a dress or t-shirt that says, ‘You can wear me if you weigh 45kg or 80kg’. Clothing comes in sizes: 16, 14, 12; small, medium, large; 36cm, 34cm, 32cm and so on. If you currently wear a size 16 or 36-cm trousers and, in six weeks, have dropped to a size 14 or 34cm in the waist, there’s a good chance you’ve lost body fat.

•Pro: This is a very easy way to track progress. If your old clothes are starting to feel loose on you, it’s likely your body fat is reducing.

•Con: Although clothing sizes give you a tangible number, sometimes the accuracy of the progress can be misleading. For example, if you have eliminated certain foods that caused bloating and dropped a pants size as a result, this can skew the results.

CALORIE TRACKING – MAKING IT A HABIT

When it comes to calorie tracking, there are two methodologies that most coaches apply: one is the lenient approach of tracking everything for a week or 10 days and then doing it by eye after that; the other is tracking every morsel of food or drink you consume to further increase your chances of hitting your body composition goal. So which one is better? The answer is neither and, paradoxically, both.

Calorie tracking is like a tool, but similar to any tool, it works great for certain jobs and is terrible for others. Take a hammer, for example. A hammer is a fantastic tool for banging in a nail, however it is not so good if you have a handful of screws. In that instance, a screwdriver is a better tool. I’ll go one step further with this analogy, as calorie tracking can be a fantastic tool to support your weight-loss goal in one scenario, but can lead to disordered eating in another.

Using it to identify how many daily calories you are currently eating can go a long way in helping you to lose weight. Equally however, if you have a poor relationship with food, tracking everything you eat can strain or damage that relationship further; so your starting point is important. We will discuss food relationship later on in the book. For now, just think of tracking calories, like the hammer I mentioned above. Remember, you can use it to hammer in the nail, or you can hit yourself in the face with it. It is not the tool that is the problem, it is how you are using it. Here are my top four ways to avoid ‘hammer in the face’ syndrome that comes with calorie tracking.

Mistakes to avoid and how to track calories correctly

1.Track everything you eat. This includes all food, drinks and snacks – if it has calories in it, it gets tracked.

2.Be disciplined and do not fool yourself. Later in the book, you will see the Seven Deadly Diet Sins and the importance of not lying to yourself about what you are eating. I had a client several years ago who was 14 kilos overweight. She had been dieting on and off for nearly 10 years and was finally at a place where she thought she was making good food choices but still could not lose any weight; so I got her to do me a food diary for the week. She came back to me with a food log that consisted of salad, chicken and two biscuits at lunchtime. This amounted to under 1,000kcal a day. Knowing that something was not adding up, I got her to forensically track every single thing she put into her mouth for the next seven days – and lo and behold, it turned out she was eating closer to 3,000 calories per day. She was indeed having salad at lunchtime, but the dressing that came with it was 600kcal (which she did not include in the log). She was having a good few biscuits, not just the two she claimed; she admitted that she was too embarrassed to tell me this. She was also picking and snacking on nuts and fruits throughout the day. Again, not necessarily ‘bad’ or unsupportive food choices, but all those calories added up, and she was completely unaware of most of it.   Tracking her calories removed the subjectivity, and all that was left were the facts – the actual calories she was eating every day. After that, it was relatively straightforward to address. We switched the salad dressing, reduced the snacking between meals and even left her with several biscuits every day. She went into a calorie deficit diet plan, and the weight started to fall off. This is just an example of calorie tracking as a tool and how failure can be feedback. The food log did not work, so we went to Plan B. The real success secret is to remove emotion from the actual calorie tracking. You are not trying to fool your coach, me or even yourself. Just use it to get the actual facts of how many calories per day you are eating. If you want to keep eating that way, great, but at least now you understand why you are not reducing body fat.

3.Find an easy-to-use app. There is genius in simplicity when it comes to fitness or nutrition apps. Personally, I like MyFitnessPal as a calorie-tracking app, but feel free to search around for one that you find simple to operate. Understand app limitations – calorie-tracking apps are great, but they are not perfect. There can be calorie or brand discrepancies among food labels, so there is always going to be slight chance of error when tracking.1 For the most part though, they are generally accurate.

4.Do not get hooked on it. Unless you are a competitive bodybuilder or a catwalk model, tracking every morsel of food that enters your mouth just is not a very sustainable approach over the long term. Later in the book, I will talk about ‘dieting as a skill’, and calorie tracking is in the same bracket. If you have a wedding or particular date that you want to look your very best for, then follow the ‘what gets measured gets managed’ philosophy and track everything you eat until you hit your goal. Then for the rest of the year, just do it by eye. As we dive deeper into the book, you will see why this is the best approach going forward and knocks you out of the dreaded ‘dieting mindset’ that is so easy to fall into.

PORTION SIZE AND THE ‘RIGHT’ CALORIES

Portion size can be the thing the sets people back on their journey, so I want to address it here. Outside of times when you’re working towards a special occasion, just keep an eye on your portion size – the amount of food on your plate. If your jeans are starting to feel tighter as the weeks go by, reduce back the portion sizes in your meals slightly.

Let’s go into a bit more detail about the calories in the food you eat. Every type of food has calories. A calorie or a kilocalorie (kcal), as we normally refer to it, is a unit of energy. When you hear something contains 100 calories, it is a way of describing how much energy your body could get from eating or drinking it. How calories work when it comes to fat loss or fat gain is pretty straightforward. If you eat too many (calorie surplus), you have taken in too much energy, which your body now stores as excess fat. If you eat too few calories (calorie deficit), your body now has to use stored fat for energy. That is that in a nutshell.

However, when it comes to calories, there are two dominating schools of thought: one says that a calorie is a calorie regardless of where it comes from, and the other that not all calories are created equal, i.e. 100kcal from protein and 100kcal from carbohydrates are absorbed differently by the body.

Like most things, when it comes to nutrition, the truth is somewhere in the middle. True, your body sees calories as just units of energy; so, if you eat 100kcal worth of protein, 100kcal of fat or 100kcal worth of carbohydrate, your body just sees that as 100kcal. In so far as fat loss is considered, this is true. To give you an extreme example, technically, as long as you were in a caloric deficit plan, you could eat only chocolate bars and pizza and still lose weight. Of course, in this figurative scenario, which I do not recommend, the intangible nature of your fat loss would be a cause for concern. Eating this way would lead to low energy levels, poor sex drive and substandard sleep quality, all of which would make the process significantly more difficult to adhere to. Not to mention, your actual body composition would not look as good compared to somebody on a similar calorie plan whose protein requirements and exercise needs were being met.

But just so you are aware, 99 out of 100 people will still reduce fat with this poor-quality diet. How long they’d be able to stick to it with all the intangible negatives mentioned above is another question entirely, but it illustrates the important role calorie intake plays. The other 1 of 100 I’ll get to later in this section. Why do I bring this up? Two reasons. One is to show you the importance of calorie intake. You can eat a very low-nutrient albeit low-calorie diet and still lose fat, which I obviously do not recommend. Equally, you can eat a diet entirely comprised of chicken, broccoli and rice, but if it puts you into a calorie surplus, your body fat is still likely to go up. As you will see in later chapters, I am a massive proponent of building a nutritional plan that is 80 per cent grounded in nutrient-dense, high-quality food – lots of fruits and vegetables, complex carbohydrates, healthy fats, complete protein foods and 20 per cent made up of your favourite foods that help you stay on plan – chocolate, crisps, soda, etc.

Although there are more important things to consider with the thesis of this book, the takeaway from calorie tracking and portion sizes is be aware of them; understand the role they play, but do not overthink or overcomplicate it.

STUBBORN BODY FAT

You know it, I know it, we all know it. It’s that dreaded area where stubborn body fat accumulates. Most people have an area of stubborn fat in their body, an area that has resisted all efforts of weight loss through diet and exercise and just won’t go away. This stubborn fat is usually the fat just under our skin, which you can pinch. It is the subcutaneous fat, as opposed to the visceral fat that wraps around internal organs such as your liver and pancreas. Stubborn fat is incredibly frustrating, especially when you eat healthily and exercise regularly but still can’t seem to affect it in any way.

The reality is that your area of stubborn body fat, as the name suggests, is going to be the last place where your body fat reduces. Over the years, I’ve worked with hundreds of clients who have struggled with their stubborn fat, and their results have normally come from asking two simple questions and understanding the cognitive bias that underpins human behaviour when it comes to fat reduction.

Cognitive bias is defined as a ‘systemic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and affects the decisions and judgements that they make’.2 The two questions that can regularly spark a breakthrough in this area are:

1.Is your body fat reducing everywhere else?

2.Are you focusing on the area that you least like about yourself?

The action bias

If your body fat is reducing everywhere else, then you need to learn one thing: patience, the most unsexy yet the most beneficial skill to acquire when it comes to reducing stubborn body fat. Yes, somebody, somewhere will promise you the ‘quick fix’, the magic pills in the form of supplements or the remarkable formula or strategy that’s being peddled by some online health or fitness guru, but the reality is that all they do is make you feel like you’re doing something and it normally comes at a considerable cost. The action bias, where we tend to think that value can only be realised through action, is a catch-22 of human behaviour. It can be a very useful approach in a lot of cases, for example by reading an educational book on nutrition, getting up to do a workout or preparing your meals in advance. But the action bias that makes you want to jump on to the next diet, supplement or formula that promises extreme results in a very unrealistic time period is totally unsupportive. Understanding the difference can form your foundation to cultivating patience and the mindset of ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is’. We will get to that in Part Two of this book. If you are reducing fat from all over your body, except for your stubborn areas, then you must keep doing what you’re doing. Eventually, you will tap into those stubborn fat stores too.

The negativity bias

This brings me to the second most frequent observation when it comes to your mindset towards stubborn body fat: the question, ‘Is the negativity bias drawing your attention to the area you least like about yourself?’ Alongside the action bias mentioned above, the negativity bias can also set you up for failure. The negativity bias is our tendency to not only register negative stimuli more readily but to also dwell on these events. Also known as positive-negative asymmetry, this negativity bias means that we feel the sting of a rebuke more powerfully than we do the joy of praise. In the context of your body composition, it means that you disproportionately focus on the areas you’re unhappy with more than the areas that are actually improving.

I’ve worked with many clients who struggle to see how well they’re actually progressing because they focus too much on the part of their body that they are not currently happy with. Their clothes might be looser, their body fat lower in their legs, bum, back and arms, but they can’t seem to shift the fat from the front of their stomach and that’s all they can focus on. In reality, what you focus on is what will occupy most space in your mind, so start focusing on the positive elements of your body, especially if you’re progressing in the right direction, and trust the process. As I have mentioned above, if your body fat is reducing everywhere else, it’s only a matter of time before your stubborn area reduces too.

Does exercise choice affect stubborn body fat?

Yes and no. No in the sense that you can’t spot-reduce fat: you can’t do crunches just to lose stubborn fat around your stomach. However, exercise increases the number of calories burnt, and with a calorie deficit, you will lose fat from all over your body, not just the part you are working on. So, while crunches are good for building strength and working out the muscles around the abdomen, they won’t burn off stubborn fat in that area.

That being said, some people will lose fat at a faster rate from some parts of their bodies compared to others, and where the fat melts off first varies from one person to another and, until human physiology changes, there’s not a lot that can be done about that.

Are hormones to blame?

Again, yes and no. Hormones can be a little bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Is body fat high because hormones aren’t balanced or are hormones unbalanced because the body fat is high? It’s a never-ending question for fitness professionals, and from my experience, truth be told, it doesn’t really matter. The reason I even mention hormones here is that a lot of people have the misconception that their hormones are to blame.

In my online programme, I have worked with many people who come to me with ‘I think my hormones are all over the place, and that’s why I can’t lose weight’ or some variation of this sentence. In 99.9 per cent of the cases, those people were not in a calorie deficit. Either they weren’t tracking their calorie intake in general or they miscalculated their requirements based on their activity levels, but as soon as we put them into a calorie deficit, the fat started melting away.

Occasionally, somebody will come to me with a hormonal disruption, sometimes a result of lifestyle choices but, in most cases, due to extreme dietary restrictions adopted in an effort to lose weight. For these people, fat, and stubborn fat in particular, continues to cling to areas of the body even when they are in a calorie deficit. In women, fat primarily stored in the lower body is often due to the impact of the hormone oestrogen. Higher levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) can also cause the body to hang on to fat. The bottom line is, if your waistline is getting bigger while you’re in a calorie deficit and exercising regularly, hormones could be to blame. I recommend seeking professional help with a hormone specialist in this scenario.

The hormones worth knowing about

When it comes to weight loss or fat reduction, there are two hormones, ghrelin and leptin, that are especially important to understand. Knowing about them can be useful in learning why you feel the way you do on certain diets, and why certain diets tend to be more successful or have a higher rate of success than others. Conversely, it could explain why some overly restrictive nutritional strategies are doomed to failure from the get-go, purely from a hormonal and physiological standpoint. For example, most bar, shake or juice diets tend to fall into this bracket.

Ghrelin