A fair concern that has been raised about my weight loss philosophy is that I care little about diet.
And while it is certainly true that I’m anything from indifferent to outright hostile towards much of the prevailing orthodoxy, it’d be inaccurate to say I don’t think what you do (and do not) eat is unimportant.
Quite the contrary, it is of supreme importance to such an extent that, absent a proper diet, you cannot and will not ever look, feel, or perform to even a fraction of your potential.
However.
Where I differ to most is in how I arrive at eating a “proper diet”.
It all starts with the following principle:
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“Everybody with the cognitive prowess to make it through the day without a carer already knows well enough what they ought and ought not to eat.”
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This doesn’t mean they’ve got it all figured out, or that it’s easy to put it into practice.
It just means they know what good food is and what it isn’t (whether they are prepared to admit it or not).
Next, you need some way of making it happen the majority of the time.
Conventional wisdom will have you painstakingly weigh, log, and track every morsel of food (and drink, other than water) that passes your lips. You have to do this otherwise you can’t count calories properly, let alone manipulate your macros and get up to all the other shenanigans required of you to get the diet to “work”.
If that sounds burdensome, you’d be right in your assessment. In my opinion, all this “bookkeeping” is a large part of why most attempts at weight loss fail miserably within a handful of weeks to a few months at most, with those precious few who do hit their goal falling off the wagon and regaining what they lost very quickly in almost all cases.
They’re also behaviours broadly consistent with an eating disorder. Controversial, perhaps. Yet undeniable once you spend any time around the types of people who keep this stuff up long term. For example, a girl PT/influencer I used to know had a full on mental breakdown at the gym reception in front of half a dozen strangers because her weighing scales were broken so she couldn’t have exactly 23.2g of a 100g protein bar after her workout.
And that’s on the milder end of the spectrum. Binging and purging (i.e. literal bulimia), checking labels over and over and over and over again to “make sure” the calories/macros are right (looks a lot like OCD to my uneducated eyes), and even psychotic episodes so severe they require a stay in a mental hospital (not seen this personally but have read some case reports) – all are potential consequences of taking this “diet” thing too seriously.
The alternative is my “Training First” approach.
This involves making it so a sustainable, sensible training regime is such a fixed, firm, feature of your life that you naturally begin to gravitate towards making better choices on the food front.
It’s something you’ll want to do because you can only achieve so much performance-wise on a bad diet and, speaking from experience, looking like hot garbage sucks when you are spending a not-insignificant chunk of time lifting weights and doing cardio every week.
Put another way, it’s not so much a conscious choice as it is a natural progression, hence all of the onerous and potentially dangerous dietary measures I mentioned earlier are wholly unnecessary.
No counting calories, no weighing food, no logging everything into some infernal smartphone app, just using your noggin and exercising a little restraint to make sure your body is properly fueled to do what you need it to do.
Aesthetic and performance improvements are inevitable as a result of that.
The “problem” with my way is that it’s slow to bear fruit. Much, much slower than the alternatives.
You also need the right kind of training routine in place, otherwise it won’t work for more reasons than I have time to go into because this email is already long enough.
But if you’ve got the right programme and you’re patient and genuinely committed to getting your weight under control (and keeping it that way) there’s no better option out there than my way, in my biased opinion.
Anyway, I’m telling you all of this on the off chance you are interested in working with me personally and privately on an open-ended basis to put my “Training First” approach into action.
If so, here’s what to do now:
1. Take the “Training Confidence Quiz” at the below URL,
2. Read your results carefully to see if you agree with my appraisal of your situation,
3. Book a call (calendar is at the bottom of the results page), and we’ll talk.
https://philtyreman.co.uk/training-confidence-quiz/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman