episode 138: how to lose weight without counting calories, macros or points
Episode 138 of The Diet Diaries is all about how to lose weight without counting calories, macros or points.
Many of us have spent decades tracking numbers in a notebook or in an app—you start off the first few days super excited, keep track of every morsel of food that goes into your mouth. Then the first stressful day hits, you forget to track breakfast and suddenly you feel off the rails.
Tracking food intake is another chore, you can’t remember if you had a snack yesterday morning and you feel like you blew it again.
So while tracking can be a great tool to learn how to visualize portions and get your baseline, as a long term skill, for most people, it’s just not realistic.
And if you use tracking the entire time to lose weight, what happens when you stop tracking? You gain it back. Because you never learned how to make choices without the numbers guiding you.
So what is realistic? Plate planning.
Plate planning is all about nutrition and portion sizes which are the foundation of sustainable, long term fat loss.
In today’s episode I’ll tell you exactly how to use this skill and why it works:
What needs to be on your plate and in what portions
How to adapt to meals that don’t fit the template
How this impacts your overall calorie intake to create fat loss
How to use tracking in a way that is actually useful instead of stressful
How long it takes to get results
Check out episode 124 of The Diet Diaries which is all about how to get more protein into your diet to help with fat loss, eliminating cravings and improving your overall health. And this blog post covers the top 5 skills to lose weight without dieting.
Here’s the graphic that is a helpful visual for today’s episode:
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Hi, friends, it's episode 138 of the Diet Diaries. It feels like a while since I've recorded an episode. Summer has been weird with like travel and Ben schedule, so I've been recording. Usually I kind of record and edit just a week in advance, but I've been recording episodes farther in advance. For the next few weeks I'll be back on my one week schedule. So today is Tuesday, july 25th. This episode is going to come out Monday, july 31st. So anyway, just feels like it's been a couple of weeks, I think, since I actually recorded last week's episode, which was about alcohol.
01:06
So first I just wanted to say thank you. There have been a lot of new listeners. I can see that kind of like in my podcast hosting software. I can see the number of downloads and this has been a really big month for the podcast, for June being like super quiet. So thank you. If you are a new listener, thank you for being here. If you've got questions or requests or need support, reach out. I am on Instagram, totally reachable there via email or the two best ways to connect. But I just want to say thank you. I know how many podcasts there are out there. I mean that's like an understatement of the year. So the fact that you are listening to mine means a lot. It's pretty wild. I just want to let you know. I don't take it for granted. So thank you so much for being here.
02:00
One other, just quick thing I'm going to be sending out the link to sign up for the Fall Mini Retreat in the next like either this week or next week. That is, saturday, october 21st, from 10 to five at my house in Westfield. So yes, if you're listening and you live somewhere else probably not going to work for you unless you want to travel in, and I'd love to have you the early in it's going to go out. The sign up is going to go out to the early interest list. I'm only taking five people because that's what makes the best experience, not because I'm trying to create exclusivity or leave people out, but any more than that is going to take away from the experience of the group. That's what I learned from the spring one. I'm super excited to be doing this again.
02:43
This is something that I am planning to do twice a year, so if this date doesn't work for you know that it will happen again in the spring, as long as there's interest, and it seems like there is. So we're going to do two workshops together. I'm still working through what those are going to be, but they are going to be around skills, around eating and body image and just being able to connect in person with five other women. You know so, myself and the four other people who are coming around. All of this is one of the most powerful experiences, and to give yourself this entire day to be about you and for you and prioritize yourself in this way is really incredible, and you can do a retreat in a day. Right, it doesn't have to be a whole weekend, it's not all or nothing. That's something that I learned last spring, when I had originally planned a full weekend, so I'm going to include the link to that in the show notes. So, if you're interested in just having your name on a list and that just gives you the first chance to sign up. So, if you sign up from that list, I'm offering a complimentary one-on-one coaching session. One-on-one coaching session either kind of just before or just after the retreat so that you have a way to follow up, or, if there's things you want to cover going into it, you have the opportunity to do that.
03:54
Okay, let's talk about today's topic, which is kind of a follow up of an Instagram post I made last week that got a bunch of saves and shares, which means to me that there's some good content there, and Instagram is very finite in terms of the volume and level of detail you can get into, whereas this is not and not that I'm going to make this some like overwhelming long, super long episode. It's not going to be that. This is a pretty simple concept, but it is something that bears repeating and having some additional resources with, and that is the idea of how you can lose fat without tracking calories, without tracking macros, without tracking points right, without having to have all of the numerical data around your food. That's how we are all pretty much used to. Losing that right Is through a very numbers-based approach, and here's the thing.
04:51
Does that work? Yeah, it absolutely can work. I have tracked food and counted macros has really been the way that I have done it the most and lost weight. Have I kept that weight off long term? No, and that's why I'm talking about this, because the method that you use to lose the weight needs to be the method that you use to then maintain that fat loss. So if you are losing weight with a method that is not sustainable long term whether that has anything to do with numbers or it's a completely different approach it's not going to work. That's why so many diets fail because they're too restrictive, they're too limiting, they're too extreme that our nervous systems literally can't tolerate that type of life for more than a very fixed period of time. So then you get your quick, short-term result and you can't maintain them.
05:49
So if you use tracking macros or calories or points to lose weight, what happens when you stop doing that? You're likely going to gain it back, because those numbers are what tell you what to eat. They're what tell you how to monitor your intake. They are what tell you how much you need, and without them, you don't really know. You don't have those skills, and so that's what I want to talk about.
06:13
You need to be able to learn to make choices around food without relying on numbers. One, because when you're eating out and you're at other people's homes, you can't weigh and measure your food. You don't know exactly what is in it. And two, because I don't know a single person who is mentally capable or has the capacity to track their food in an app for the rest of their lives. It's just not something. There are some people, I'm sure, who are able to do that, and we can use tracking numbers at different times. It can be a very useful tool, right. This is not tracking numbers as bad and not tracking as good.
06:52
This is talking about looking at the big picture and how we use some of these tools to get where we want to go, and so I will say that at first, if you've never tracked before, sometimes using numbers to track can be very informative to give you a sense of what portion sizes look like, how much nutrition is in a given portion size, whether your body is losing, maintaining or gaining, based on your current intake. Right, there can be a lot of information you can get, but then after that, right, we need to have other skills, other ways of being aware of what and how much we're eating, beyond just using numbers, because it gets old at a certain point to have to constantly put things into an app. I really see that as a short term tool. So then we need then what are our longer term tools? Okay, that's what I'm going to talk about. This is not either or it's a both end. The longer term tool. It's sometimes called plate planning.
07:47
I didn't invent this. Right, I'm not. This is not like me coming up with this idea. This is a very commonly used skill and I'm sharing it with you because it works and it's something that I use. I use it not because I'm not working on fat loss, but I use it to make sure that I'm getting enough nutrition, that my meals are gonna be filling, and to be aware of my overall like nutrient and caloric intake.
08:13
Because I always say this we don't like talking about calories. People are like talking about calories it's like a trigger warning, like no calories are science. A lot of us have a lot of like baggage around calories because we've been traumatized and I use that word probably a little too liberally, depending on your situation and so now we're like any talk of calories stresses us out and, yes, when we start to zone in on that too much, it can absolutely take us back to a disordered eating place. But also, calories are science. They're a unit of energy, that's all they are. We've made them into something scary and stressful and bad and all of that. But your body gains, maintains or loses weight based on how many calories you're eating. That is it's science, it's objective, right? We have assigned all this meeting and all this emotion to it, and it's really important to be able to talk about science without all of that extra baggage that we have and I have this too.
09:10
Like I'm not saying this in a judgmental way, but you do need to have some awareness, not of the necessarily the number, but of how much food you're intaking every day. You just do right, and that doesn't mean, even if you're not trying to lose weight, right If you're just maintaining. Or if you've lost weight and you're maintaining, or that loss has never been a part of your life and you're maintaining. Or, let's say, you went through a gain phase. I've worked with clients who've wanted to gain weight and you wanna maintain that. Whatever all these different reasons are, we're not getting into that. You need to have a sense of what the food is on your plate and how much energy and by energy I mean calories that's giving you, so that you can feel good in your body, right, and take care of yourself the way you want to take care of yourself. So we talk about plate planning and I'm gonna talk about what that is, which is pretty simple and not gonna take much time, and then I'm gonna talk about what some of the benefits of that are. So, essentially, it just gives you a way to kind of quantify your food without weighing and measuring it, and I will put a visual or maybe I'll link to the Instagram post, because there's a visual there.
10:22
You have a plate and basically it's like here this is what it is. You want at least half of that plate to be filled with non-starchy veggies. Non-starchy veggies are pretty much not exhaustively anything except corn, potatoes and winter squash, right, so any types of greens, cruciferous veggies, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions, summer squash, asparagus, green beans, lots Most veggies are non-starchy at least half of your plate. Why? Tons of nutrition and tons of volume for not a lot of calories. Volume matters it's going to fill your stomach and help you feel full, whereas if you fill half of your plate with a starchy carb, that's much more calorie dense food. You're going to intake a lot more calories, a lot more energy by filling half of your plate with a starchy carb. Then you go with filling half of your plate with non-starchy veggies. It is a less calorie dense food and very nutrient dense.
11:25
Okay, then, a quarter of your plate and this is I'm talking about fat loss right now. If you're not trying to lose that, you can bump up. If you're more in maintenance, you can bump up the portion of the starchy carb a little bit. So, again, there's nuance to this. Right, that's what we talk about in one-on-one coaching. I'm generalizing things and then you can work to apply them how you need to for yourself. So a quarter of the plate is going to be your starchy carb bread, rice, pasta, whole grains, quinoa, potatoes, winter squash a quarter of the plate. Then the numbers are not exact, right? You're going to say, well, you did a half and a quarter. That only leaves another quarter, because I'm about to tell you that about a third of the plate I know that makes more than a whole plate. Just, let's be a little flexible here About a third of the plate-ish is your protein, your lean protein, and then I'm going to use.
12:18
I want you to often, I'll say a thumb. A lot of people use a thumb. The thumb is not my favorite. What I actually think is a more helpful measurement for fat, right, we've talked about veggies, non-starchy veggies, talked about carbs, talked about protein. So where's the fat? If you're eating a fatty cut of meat, that's kind of your fat. So if you're eating a leaner protein, which would be lean beef, chicken breast or very lean chicken thighs or in between, you can have a little extra fat with chicken thighs, tuna, almost all times of white fish, salmon is a little bit fattier fish, shellfish, tofu and then low fat and some full fat Greek yogurt and cottage cheese. And I'm going to talk about smoothies and salads and bowls and stuff that doesn't fit on a plate. I'm going to talk about that.
13:02
Same principle applies you have to get a little creative and flexible. So, for fat, make an okay sign with your hand. If you're watching this on YouTube, I'm doing it, and if you're listening, just put your thumb and your finger together so it makes a circle. It gives someone the okay sign. That circle, that's the amount of fat you want to have, right, and you could even kind of use the thickness. If you look at it from the side, like the thickness of your fingers, that's pretty much the height, so to speak, like if you were using salad dressing or cheese or nuts or mayo. That would be about the amount that you would want to have for your fat. So if you're cooking, let's say you want to roast your non-starchy veggies, if you roasted them in oil or put some butter, that would be your fat, right? If you have a salad, if a salad is your veggies and you put dressing on it, that would be your fat. So fat can kind of show up in different ways because we cook with fat and if you are cooking with fat or preparing foods with fat, you are not going to then add additional fat onto your plate, right? That is very calorie-done. So again, for fat loss, we need to be aware of that. So that's what your plate looks like. Get as many of your plates to look like that as possible.
14:14
Lunch and dinner, I'm going to say, are going to be a little more straightforward, because those are meals where we tend to have a lot of veggies. Breakfast tends to be a meal for most people where we're not having vegetables, and that's fine. I don't eat vegetables or breakfast either. I did when I was on a Whole30. It's not really sustainable long-term for me. So I kind of follow the other principles.
14:34
I focus on the protein. I'll add more protein then at breakfast I'll do a lot of Greek yogurt, a lot of cottage cheese. If you're doing eggs like three whole eggs, you could throw in some egg whites. There's fat in eggs. You're cooking the eggs in fats. You're probably not going to add a lot of fat on top of that. And then fruit very often could be your carb at breakfast. Or let's say, if you're having oatmeal, that would be your carb. Add some protein powder and or some collagen into that to get your protein. So we have to get a little creative. Yes, I'm not telling you that you have to eat half a plate of vegetables at breakfast every morning. That's not realistic. If it is for you and you're someone who enjoys that, great, but for a lot of folks it's not. So you're going to follow the other piece and maybe bump up your carb a little bit and bump up your protein to kind of make up for some of that volume and nutrition and calories that you're not getting.
15:29
You want to make sure that you're really full. If you're making a smoothie, you can definitely add greens into your smoothie. You could add like a couple big handfuls of spinach or kale, or some people like to put in frozen summer squash. I tried that for a while. I find that it really waters down the taste. I didn't like it, but, if you like it, great. Some people put in frozen cauliflower for some nutrition. Smoothies are a great way to get vegetables in without, like you know, having to think about preparing them or you know any of that. It's like a really easy way to get some nutrition in. So this is what you want to think about and you can do this when you go out to eat.
16:04
If your meal doesn't come with vegetables, order a salad, order a side of vegetables, you know, and it's just about being consistent. This isn't about perfection. Not every single meal you have needs to look like this. Most of the meals, most of the time, do need to look like this. And here's what happens when you do this when your most of your plates look like this, this is probably a bigger meal than your usual food and it's going to help you move towards that four to six hour window of eating between meals, because you're going to feel fuller, you're going to have more nutrition and hopefully, you're going to have enjoyed it more than you would.
16:40
If you're kind of eating less food or not eating such kind of a well rounded plate, it's going to help you move towards that four to six hour window, which means you're going to snack less. You're going to need to grab food less between meals and constantly snacking is a, for most people, a very big barrier to fat loss. You end up eating more when you're constantly snacking than if you were to eat bigger meals and not need to snack. I know it seems counterintuitive. It works like almost 100% of the time people have success with this. I have clients who have lost fat simply from making that change reducing snacking and eating bigger meals.
17:19
The second big reason why this works and why and what the outcome is you'll be full after eating and you'll have a much easier time making thoughtful choices around portion sizes of dessert. I'm not really talking about dessert as part of this. I'm talking about your main meal, but dessert's still gonna happen. Sweets are still gonna happen. This is not excluding that but you are going to be able to be more present because you are full, because you're not still hungry, you're much less likely to be craving things, so you can be really thoughtful about what you want and how much you want of dessert. And then I kind of already talked about this. The third piece of this is that the larger volume of lower calorie veggies is super filling, which means you won't need to eat as much of the more calorie dense starchy carbs to feel full.
18:06
A lot of us are very used our culture, our society, is very used to loading up on carbs. Like you order pasta, it's this massive amount, or if it's potatoes or rice. And then my local fresh and co, which opened in my town which is kind of like a lunch place and they have hot plates and salads and grain bowls. I ordered a bowl. It was a salad bowl that came with some grains. They put three huge spooks scoops of rice and one scoop of lettuce and I was like no, can you dump out some of the rice and add more greens? Very few people need three giant scoops of rice at a meal, unless you're an endurance athlete or training for something. It's just more calories than we need in one sitting. Again, this is not that rice is bad. Love rice, eat rice all the time. It's the amounts of things that become not in alignment with what our goals are and what we're working on.
19:04
So just be aware, you can feel full by adding more vegetables. Include the carb. The carbs are yummy, they are satisfying and they have nutrition and they have fiber and they have all these wonderful things, but they're also more calorie dense than vegetables. So if you eat more vegetables, you then don't need to eat as much of the carbs. It's just like a simple kind of a swath, in a way, and it makes a huge difference over time.
19:29
Right, and I will say this tracking numbers can sometimes I'm not even going to say sometimes logically will create that loss faster, not like because you're going to get more detailed with your data. But I will say which I said at the beginning it's not sustainable over time. So it might get you quicker results, but it won't get you longer lasting results. So there's quick and there's long lasting and those two things are. Is it? They are mutually exclusive or not mutually exclusive? I don't know. I always get confused by that, saying they don't exist, they don't co-exist. It's either quick results or it's long lasting results, pretty much when it comes to that loss. So pick what you want, you want quick, you know what to do, you want long lasting. I'm telling you, I'm giving you something new to try. So, yes, because there's a little bit more variability with like a plate planning technique, that's okay, because you're going to enjoy it more. You're not going to have to worry about tracking numbers long term and you will get results over a longer period of time.
20:37
And what is the rush? When you give yourself the space and the permission to take away the deadline and the urgency, suddenly it's like, oh okay, this doesn't have to suck. I don't have to write down every morsel of food that went into my mouth in an app and try to estimate, well, how much feta cheese was, you know, in that salad, or like what vegetables were in there, and like, were there chickpeas in there? What was in there? So you can just start to think about how much protein is here, how many non-starchy veggies are here, where's my carb, what's my fat? Right, and I didn't really talk about salads Salads, you know, you can really load up on that non-starchy veggie and then you can add in like some beans or some lentils or some pasta if you'd like to have a carb or a starch in your salad and then you're going to add in your chicken, is it going to look the same as the plate? No, you can just be able to have a little bit of flexibility with that visual and extrapolate it to some meals that don't fit that template, but it fits enough of the templates that it's very practical. And then, as you start doing it in the plate format, you'll be able to then kind of apply it to situations where it's not, where it's like, oh, bowl, because it's a salad or it's a breakfast thing and there's not as many veggies, things like that.
21:51
So I think that this is pretty much what I wanted to talk through today. Again, I'm looking through my notes. Yeah, it's really about learning and actually I know what I want to talk about. The plate right, using kind of those like dividing up the plate into sections or percentages half a quarter and a third, and again, I know the math doesn't add up, but like, let's give ourselves a little bit of leeway here. It gives you like a visual reference right. And again, if you and then on top of that with that plate size but I remember I used the okay, like making that circle for the fat, you can use your hand as well.
22:31
For portions, right For non-star G-budgies, I'm gonna kind of say like it's unlimited. You wanna have like two bags of greens or like three cups of broccoli, like go for it. It's probably gonna be on the high side, like you might feel too full, but you can use your fist. You want at like two fists of non-star G-budgies on your plate right, and if you were to put that it'll take up about half your plate. You want kind of a shallow cup, handful of a star G carb shallow. So I don't mean heaping, I mean shallow like level it off right, that would be your carb, your potato, your rice Bread doesn't necessarily again, some of these foods. Bread doesn't fit in a hand, so I'm gonna say one slice of bread, baked potato, mashed potato, rice, quinoa, farro, whatever your grain is.
23:15
And then for protein, the palm is very commonly used. So definitely at least one palm in area and thickness. Most people need one and a half. One palm is about four ounces. Most people need more than four ounces. But if you're not used to eating a lot of protein, start with one palm, work your way up. So I'm gonna say some of the protein one to two palms, depending on where you're at with your protein journey. I'm gonna use the word right If you're just starting out with focusing on protein or you're kind of farther along, you're used to adding more right, so there's gonna be a bit of a spectrum there.
23:48
You can also add in your fingers right If you wanna think about your entire, like your palm plus your fingers right For your protein. You could do that too. That's probably closer to what I eat. And again, lean protein If you're eating a fattier protein, it's gonna be probably more on the one palm size, just because you do need to be aware of your fat content. This is why lean proteins during fat loss are more helpful, generally speaking.
24:16
It doesn't mean you can't have fattier cuts of protein. It just means you want to use those less frequently. You wanna rely mostly on lean sources of protein so they're really efficient. They're not in order to get your protein eating a lot of fat along with it. So you've got your plate visual, you've got some hand ideas and really what this is doing overall. It's prioritizing protein, it's prioritizing veggies and it's prioritizing fiber, and those are like your bed rocks. From a nutritional, from a what and how much you're eating standpoint, they're gonna play a huge role in fat loss, that this is what really means to be in place. And then these, the outcomes of doing this, like I mentioned, around being full or longer, reducing snacking, being able to make more thoughtful choices around dessert then it helps. All of those pieces kind of come into place. But this is your foundation. So there we go 25 minutes, reach out with questions and I will be back next week. Thanks for being here. We'll see you in the next video.
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