episode 146: can you lose weight without counting calories?
Project Plate Plan opens up for registration tomorrow, so today I’m talking about what it is, why I created it and what you can expect if you’re thinking about joining us.
Project Plate Plan is a 10 day self guided course to learn the four core skills you need to lose weight without counting calories, macros or points. If you’ve struggled to lose weight AND keep it off, this is for you.
How to use your plate to figure out portions that will help you lose fat instead of stressing about weighing/measuring and tracking numbers
How to prioritize efficient sources of protein so you can easily feel full after each meal and stop looking for snacks an hour later
How to include carbs at every meal so you always feel satisfied and aren’t battling cravings every night
How to add more volume & fiber to your meals to so you can have a full plate of food and never feel deprived
So wherever you go, wherever you are, whether it’s at home, on the go, at work, on vacation—you will always have the skills and confidence to eat in a way that feels great and helps you lose weight without counting calories. Click here to sign up for Project Plate Plan.
Check out episode 138 of The Diet Diaries to learn more about plate planning and how it can help you lose weight without counting calories.
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00:31
If you're listening to this live, monday, september 25th, and if you are observing Yom Kippur today, I am thinking about you. We are observing recording this week before, so I'm not exactly sure what our plans are, but I will tell you that I will not be fasting. I do not fast. I tried to do that for many, many years and it became a really big trigger for my disorder eating, so I now let that go, just because it's not in alignment with my values. So if you are Jewish and you are feeling guilty about not fasting, it's okay. You don't have to fast in order to kind of observe and practice and be a part of this holiday. So, anyway, just wanted to share that because it's part of my life. So today I'm going to talk about Project Plate Plan, because registration opens tomorrow and I will tell you right now that if you are listening to this podcast thank you, you're awesome, and so there's going to be a link in the show notes. If you want to sign up today, there's unlimited spots, right? So there's no wait list. There's no early bird fee. I've priced it really affordably. There's no urgency behind it in term of sign up, but if you're listening and you're like I'm in. You can go ahead and just sign up today and get yourself started, just get your welcome email and kind of get. There's going to be a bunch of details in there, kind of about what's going to happen over the course of the 10 days. So I've talked about, I've been talking about this a lot on Instagram. If you follow me, hopefully you've been taking part in some of the quizzes I've been doing. Those have been really fun and, I think, a really good way just to kind of get into some of the topics of conversation and some of the lessons and skills that we're going to learn. And here's the thing. So I created this for two reasons. One, because you guys wanted a self-guided course. I kind of started to have the idea for this and, without fleshing it out too much, I shared a survey with all the folks on my email list and asked what do you guys want? And overwhelmingly people responded they wanted a self-guided course, and so then it made sense to me to offer something like this.
02:41
Fat loss is something that many, many people struggle with, that have a very difficult relationship with, that has caused lots of disordered eating, and my job in this world is to help you find your best weight. For some people that is losing weight, for some people that is maintaining weight, for some people that is gaining weight and I want you to be able to work on fat loss in a way that is in alignment with your values, that feels good, that completely moves you away from disordered eating, that moves you away from dieting, that literally helps you feel like your best self and I know that's like such like an overused term, but that is possible. It is not either or you don't have to choose between feeling great in your body and around food and not wanting to lose weight, like you are allowed to do both of those things, and so that is why I created this, because I want you to have the resources and the skills to do this in a way that just that feels good. We are so used to going after fat loss through whatever cool new diet there is, whatever our friend is doing, whatever we see, like at our gym, our 30 day challenge, or on Instagram, or following a meal plan or, you know, tracking calories, tracking macros, tracking points and I want to say that there can be value in tracking those things. There can be value in tracking calories. There can be value in tracking macros, points I have mixed feelings about, because I don't agree with the Weight Watchers assign zero points to foods.
04:10
All foods have caloric value, whether they're a vegetable or a slice of pizza, so I think that that actually can be a little bit detrimental. That said, if it has worked for you and I'm going to talk about what that means then great. If you have no sense of how much protein or how many calories are in given foods, it can be interesting and helpful to get a sense of that. Now, that being said, you are inherently going to kind of learn that as part of this not the exact number of calories, but you're going to get a sense of how much you need of each type of food, and then, inherently, the calories are built into that, because walking around all day trying to add up in your head, or even an app, how many calories you've had, can work for a short period of time.
04:56
Right, you can lose weight doing these things. I have many times. I have many clients who have done this in the past. People do. That is why people keep going back to Weight Watchers, because it works in the short term, but people then keep going back because it doesn't work in the long term because we regain weight. This happens, I find, with macro tracking too. It works for the time that you're doing it and then, as soon as you stop doing it, you start gaining the weight back because you don't have any other skills to know what to eat. You only know what to do if that app is telling you what you're allowed to have, and so I want you to be able to make the changes you want to make, feel comfortable around food, know what you need to put on your plate for fat loss, to feel full, to enjoy what you're eating wherever you go right. That is why what we're gonna learn in Project Plate Plan works. It works wherever you go, at home, on the go out to eat, at work, in the car, wherever you go. This will work, and that is what creates confidence, right?
05:56
It's really stressful if you're trying to look up something you ate in your app and it's not there or you don't know. You can't figure out how many calories was in that feta cheese and that salad or that roll at dinner or that piece of cake for dessert. It gets really stressful and you start to feel like why don't all many calories were in that I don't know what I ate, like fuck it. I might as well just eat everything and start again tomorrow. No, it doesn't have to be that way. You can eat all of the foods you love and lose fat when you know how to figure out what the portions are and you know how to put together a meal in a way that gets you the nutrition you need, is filling, it keeps you full for four to six hours and that you enjoy. You never have to make sacrifices to what you enjoy when you want to work on fat loss.
06:48
So I wanted to talk about, kind of as part of that before I dive into the next part. I'm gonna talk about the in a couple of minutes the four kind of skills, the four key skills we're gonna work on. But I want to talk about this idea of like, well, what works Right? Because people will say like, oh, weight Watcher's works for me, tracking Makers works for me, right. And I think when we say that, we mean it works in the short term, right, it works for a period of time until it doesn't.
07:13
And here's the thing it is natural and normal for our weight to fluctuate over the course of our lives, probably around in that 10-ish pound range For your weight to fluctuate 20 plus pounds or more up and down, that's a lot, that is there's stuff going on there, right. That puts a lot of stress on your body and it's indicative that there's not really skills around food. These big swings are happening because there's a lot of more extreme behaviors happening, right. So again, normal 10 pounds kind of shifting around over time. That is normal. Our bodies change as we age. During life we go through stressful periods. It's normal to gain some weight sometimes. It's normal to lose some weight sometimes. That is all normal.
07:58
You are not meant to stay the exact same weight all the time, certainly not day to day. If you use the scale, that just never happens, and even in the bigger picture. But those bigger swings are really not. I wanna say they're not normal, because that certainly my intent is never to make you feel bad about that it's not really consistent with the healthy skills around eating. And so when you let's say, you've lost 25 pounds on Weight Watchers and you kept it off for a period of time and then you gain it back and then you go back to Weight Watchers and you lose it again, you keep it off for a period of time and you gain it back. That's not working. It's working in the short term. It's not working in the long term.
08:41
Over a course of a year, two years, five years, seven years, what is happening in terms of your body and your body weight? I want you to have skills that get you to a place where you can kind of maintain A plus or a minus of 10 pounds is maintenance I know it might not seem like that, but it is and 10 pounds it's probably better to think of it in terms of like a percentage of your body weight, because 10 pounds on a smaller person is more weight than 10 pounds on a bigger person. So really we could look at it probably around a percentage of body weight, looking at like maybe like I'm trying to do like some quick math in my head right now maybe like 5% body weight. I think would kind of make sense, maybe the 5% to 7%, so you can like do that quick math. So for me, I'm around 180 pounds, so 10% is 18 pounds, so 5% is like 9 pounds, right, and that happens to kind of line up If you're a smaller person and let's say you're 140 pounds, right, you're. 5% is 7 pounds. If you're a bigger person, right, it's going to be more.
09:47
Anyway, I'm kind of like going off on a tangent here. All that being said, you know, something is working when you're kind of able to stay within that range. If you're swinging way above and way below, that, it's not working. It's just not. It's just not working. And that's what this is about. This is about giving you skills that will work in the long term, forever, because they're not about having to rely on numbers. They're not about having to constantly rely on an app to tell you what you're allowed to eat. It's not about following a meal plan that only works like when you're home or you're not stressed or you have time to make it. It's not about always having to have, like, your shakes or your bars with you. Literally, this works in any situation, wherever you go, because it's using real food and it's about like real life and being a real human. So here are the four skills we're going to cover.
10:33
Number one how to use your plate to figure out portions that will help you lose fat, so that you're not constantly stressing out about oh my God, how much is this weight? I don't know. Was it three ounces and five ounces, I don't know how much it is, and worry about tracking numbers all the time. Oh my God, I forgot to track that piece of bread. Oh my God, I don't know Like did I put butter on that? I can't remember what I had on my plate, because it gets very hard to track after each meal, which is really the ideal way to do it. When you're tracking at the end of the day and certainly the next day forget it. You are forgetting so much of what you eat and then the efficacy of that tracking as a tool starts to go way down.
11:06
Skill number two how to prioritize efficient sources of protein so that you A feel full after each meal and B therefore stop looking for snacks in between meals. Right, a big part of the work we're doing is to learn how to create meals that are filling. Constantly snacking between meals is a big barrier to fat loss. I know you've heard lots of times eat three meals and two snacks a day. That's a problem. It is if you have struggled with losing fat and you've tried that approach. Typically, when we're constantly eating snacks, we're eating more food overall because you never actually get full. There's always this low level hunger that you're living with and you are eating more as a result of that. You need to feel full after a meal, not stuffed. You need to feel full. Are we going to get into hunger and fullness in this 10 days? No, it's a different skill. You can't cover everything in 10 days. And trying to keep this really straightforward and actionable. However, if you use these guidelines and pay attention to how you feel after the meal and you practice these skills, you will start to know what it feels like. So it will come as part of this. Skill number three how to include carbs at every meal so you always feel satisfied and you're not battling cravings Again.
12:18
Cutting out carbs is a short term fix. Will you lose weight? A yes, you'll lose weight because carbs hold onto water, so you will drop a bunch of water weight and be. Any time you cut out an entire food group, you're naturally reducing your overall caloric intake. You will lose weight. Can you cut out carbs forever? There are very few people on this planet Certainly in America and the way in our food culture can do that, and you don't need to. You need carbs.
12:43
Carbs are a really important source of energy. It's the amount of carbs. It's never the food itself, it's the amounts. So, yes, many Americans eat a very carb heavy diet upwards of 300 grams a day. Do you need that many carbs? No, we don't need that much, unless you're like an endurance athlete training for an event. But just because you don't need that many doesn't mean all carbs are bad, like there's like a really false logic that we've started to apply around carbs. It's not the carb itself, it's the amount. So again, we are going to learn about how to incorporate carbs how many you need, what's a starchy carb, what's a non-starchy carb and what's the role of fiber. Right, we get fiber from carbs. Fiber plays a huge role in fullness. That actually brings me to my last.
13:26
The fourth skill had to add more volume and fiber to your meals so you can have a full plate of food and not feel deprived. Let me tell you, in all the years that I spent dying, one of the biggest points of stress for me was looking at my plate and seeing what was on it and feeling so stressed that there wasn't more food that this was it. It brought so much anxiety of seeing whatever small little portions of things that I had and felt like it just felt awful Eating. Being able to eat for volume is a very important part of fat loss. One for the psychological piece and two because you need to fill your stomach in order to feel full.
14:03
Naturally, if you're trying to lose fat, you need to be in what's called a caloric deficit, which means you are eating less calories and your body needs to basically do everything it needs to do in a day. The natural physiological response that is hunger. Your body wants you to stay where you are. Your body wants what's called homeostasis. Your body doesn't want you to lose weight. You want to lose weight and maybe you need to lose weight for health reasons, but your brain and your body don't want that for you.
14:29
We're going back to primal survival and evolution. That being said, your body is going to make you feel hungry when you are eating less than your current baseline. So what do we do to deal with that? We have to eat a lot of protein, because protein is very, very filling and c-shading, and we have to eat volume to fill the stomach right. That helps manage the hunger. How do you eat more food without getting more calories? And, kind of counteracting the whole thing, you use a lot of veggies. We're going to talk about that. So every piece of this is very strategic. Each piece is a skill that you can learn and practice. You're going to create your own customized food lists of proteins, carbs and fats by meal, and then we are going to put them together to create your basically own customized meals.
15:19
Right, following meal plans again works for short term. Great, yep, can you do that six months from now? Probably not. You're probably not following that exact meal plan you ripped out of a magazine I'm dating myself here, or that you pulled off of an online article six months after you started it, but if you know how many proteins, carbs and fats you needed to meal six months from now, you could easily still be doing that. And this works. Whether or not you're working on fat loss.
15:45
Right, the portions that we're going to learn in Project Plate Plan are geared towards fat loss. If you're not working on fat loss, everything still applies, because you still need that nutrition. This is how you get full. This is how you enjoy your meals, but you have a little bit more flexibility on portions. Right, you're not trying to lose fat. You can eat a little bit more food and certainly, if you're someone who's trying to gain weight, you definitely would increase your portions. So it's not like you just eat this way for fat loss.
16:07
You eat in these portions for fat loss, and I think that's what's so key about it is because when you want to lose fat, you don't overhaul what you're doing. You make changes to the portions of things. That might mean decreasing the portions of certain foods and increasing the portions of others, but it's not like oh, I have to cut out all fast food, I have to cut out all bread, I have to cut out all desserts. No, you don't have to do that. It doesn't work. If it worked, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast. I say that all the time. Right, if all this stuff worked, you wouldn't be here right now. I'm good, I don't need you to react. I got this all figured out. I'm cool. So, all that being said, we are focusing on breakfast, lunch and dinner. Towards the end, I am going to talk about dessert and alcohol a little bit.
16:51
Again, I want to keep this to 10 days. I'm thinking about maybe doing a second course, maybe about dessert and alcohol. That'd be a little bit shorter. I'll probably put out a survey after this to see if you guys are interested. I wanted to keep this 10 days, I wanted to feel really doable. You're going to get an email straight to your inbox every morning.
17:09
The lesson and the skill is in that email. I've taken lots of courses, or I've signed up for lots of courses, where you have to go into a separate platform and watch videos and download things, and yet those can be great. But I have paid for things and I have sat in my email and I've never touched them, and I'm sure you've done that too. I don't want that. I don't want this to be like that, so that's why it's right in your email. The lessons are going to take you only a couple of minutes to read Some of them. The first few days are definitely going to be on the longer side because there's more content.
17:39
As we go through the 10 days there's going to be less reading and kind of more doing, so to speak. There is going to be a link to a Google sheet. I decided that's how I am going to, that's the way you're, that's where you're going to input all of your stuff. If you don't want to use the Google sheet, you don't have to. You can do your own thing. You can use pen and paper. You can do the notes section of your phone.
18:00
But I have created a template. It's really easy to fill out. I'm going to tell you exactly how. To you know, make a copy so you have your own file and you can respond to those emails. You can email me. I can't offer one-to-one personalized coaching. That's not what this is but I can answer simple questions. If you're confused about anything, if you need a basic suggestion for something, I'm there for you. That is why we are doing this together, right? So this is a self-guided course in that you get the email and you go through and do this on your own, but everyone who's signed up is doing it at the same time.
18:32
We are starting on October 4th. We are finishing 10 days later, on October 13th. So everyone who signs up is going to be doing this with you. And there's something nice. I decided not to do any type of like a group call or a group page. I really wanted to keep this simple. But there is something nice about knowing there's other people out there doing the same thing that you are at the same time. Even if you don't have a connection to them a physical or a tangible connection there's that, just that more like universe type of connection. There's other women out there and maybe some men I don't know who's going to sign up. I mostly work with women who are also doing this at the same time and I really do encourage you for these 10 days to stay on top of it as much as you can.
19:15
Each lesson builds on the day before, so if you skip day one and still with day two, that's not going to work, that you'll need to like go back and do day one and this isn't super time consuming. Again, I've designed this in such a way that it's one no pun intended bite size piece a day so that it does build easily, so that you don't go overwhelmed, that you do have time to read it and make your food list and start practicing your skill for the day without feeling like, oh my God, I have to dedicate like half an hour or 45 minutes to this. You don't right. In sum, it's a couple minutes to read the email and I would say maybe 10 minutes if that to sit down and work on whatever the food list is for the day, and then we're actually not gonna start kind of actually practicing the skills until about halfway through. Right, we need to get some of this baseline stuff kind of figured out. We've gotta figure out what our personalized foods are and kind of bring some awareness to that before we start practicing. Right, you can't kind of change what you're not aware of. You need to have some of that support in place first. But again, this isn't like tons and tons of time out of your day.
20:25
So I really encourage you, if you're signing up to this, to make the commitment to say, yeah, I'm gonna dedicate 10 or 15 minutes each day to this. That's doable, that is very doable. If you want to change, if you want to make these changes, if you want to learn these skills, right, there has to be a commitment. There has to be some level of discomfort, right. Where's that 10 or 15 minutes gonna come from? It's gonna come from your pie and your time, your pie of your attention and your pie of your time.
20:54
I've talked about this before in email a lot. It's gotta come from somewhere. We all have 10 or 15 minutes that we're using very unproductively in a day that could be put towards this, no question, every single human, me included. So you're gonna get out of this what you put into it. Right, it's a self-guided course, so, and it is priced as such. I've made this really, really affordable. I want it to be a no-brainer for you If this is something you feel like you're ready to do, that you want to learn, I want you to be like yep, I'm in, so I'm trying to think about oh, I guess, the last. I have two more things I kind of wanted to share. Behavior change is a huge part of fat loss and of shifting how you feel around food. There's a lot of behavior change skills, of course, that are not going to be explicitly part of this.
21:47
10 days right, again, we can't cover everything. That being said, when you're gonna create your lists, you're gonna know exactly what you need to eat, right. Very often we're like I need to eat healthier, I need to eat more protein, I know I need to eat more veggies. We'll say these things if we know we need to do them, but then we don't know how to do it. How do we make it happen? Cause we've never stopped and looked at like what am I eating over the course of the day? What do I need to eat at each specific meal? How can I make this simple? We get overwhelmed. I have to cook, I have to food prep, I have to shop, I have to.
22:17
This. This is going to give you a framework that fits your life, your needs, your goals. That's what we're figuring out over the first four days of our 10 days together, so that you are gonna know exactly how to make those kind of bigger kind of pie in the sky changes. I need to eat healthier. I know I need to eat more protein. Well, how do I actually do that? Saying I need to eat protein is the first step, but then making it happen is another step. This is how you make it happen and that is a big part of behavior change. So by the end of the 10 days, you are gonna know everything you need to know. You are gonna be underway with practicing this and then you're gonna need to keep going. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that you're gonna lose fat in 10 days. It's possible, definitely it's possible if you were to kind of start, maybe get a little bit of like a jumpstart and start kind of actively practicing the skills on day one. But this isn't about losing fat in these 10 days. This is about the big picture, about getting these skills and practicing them consistently. These are skills. These are not rules. They are meant to be able to stay with you and go with you in any situation. That's what I said at the top of the podcast Be kind to yourself, be patient with yourself.
23:32
Take away the urgency, take away the deadlines. You don't have to lose weight in six weeks. You don't have to look a certain way at a wedding. You don't have to look a certain way in a bathing suit right, we're coming out of that season right now, so that starts to go away. But there's always something, there's always some deadline we have in mind. When you take that away, you make this whole process a lot easier on yourself. I know it's not easy to do that, but give yourself time. It took a lot of time, a lot of years, for you to kind of get where you are now and feel how you feel about food, which is probably tough and challenging, and on and off of diets. It's gonna take time to kind of move back out of that into a good place.
24:17
I'm doing this as 10 days because I want to give you a very simple, very actionable set of skills that you can go off and running with that you can simply and easily practice without feeling overwhelmed, without feeling like you need months and months and months to make change right.
24:36
You can make change quickly when you have the right skills. So it's what you do beyond these 10 days where you're going to see your fat loss results, and staying consistent with it. And remember, consistency is not perfection, it's not every meal every day, it's most of the time and it is keeping going, even when you have a few days where you don't do it at all. Right, then you keep going, because then you pull back at that big picture and you see that, oh, I just had a few days where I didn't practice any of these skills, but then I kept going. That's consistency. So, again, the link is in the show notes if you want to sign up today or whenever you listen to this. Thanks for being here. I'll be back next week and, yeah, more soon. I'll see you guys next week.
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