476: How To Lose Fat While Traveling with Ted Ryce

Podcast Transcription: How To Lose Fat on a Business Trip (Without Eating Chicken Breast & Broccoli For Every Meal) with Ted Ryce

Ted Ryce: Have you ever been to Mexico City? I was just there over the weekend attending an event for entrepreneurs, and let me tell you, it is such a cool city. It's got history, it's got culture, it's got some of the world's best restaurants because some of the world's best chefs have decided to make Mexico City their home.

I stayed in the area of Polanco, which had some very nice hotels as well. But back to the food, right, the food was just incredible.

Now, a lot of my clients go to business trips and attend conferences. And when most of them are faced with the culinary temptation that I was tempted with, they do one of two things, either, one, they rely on willpower to try to resist all the delicious food that they have access to, or they go on a multi-day binge fest and gain several pounds in the course of several days.

Now, personally, I've tried both approaches. But now I do something completely different. Something where I'm able to go on these business trips, and even travel frequently, and still lose fat. And this is what I teach my clients to do, too.

So, we're going to go into: How to Lose Fat on A Business Trip, the three things that you must do to lose fat on a business trip, without eating chicken, broccoli, and brown rice every meal, because there's no need for that. So, if that's what you're interested in, you're in the right place.

And what is up, my friend, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Ted Ryce, coach to entrepreneurs—well, really coach to business owners and busy professionals. What I do is this, I help people with exactly what we're talking about right now. You don't need me to tell you that some strict diet can help you lose fat; everyone knows that.

What I help people do and what I'm going to help you with today is to shift your mindset about how you can lose fat while still enjoying your life. And the context we're going to be talking about it today is going to be in terms of business trips.

So, listen back to the approaches that most people take. Either they try to order the most bland food possible, so that they don't gain weight, or they just say, “Fuck it, I'm going to eat whatever I want,” and just indulge in every meal and end up gaining several pounds.

But the way I do it, the way I'm going to show you today, or share with you rather, today, is I'm going to I'm going to show you how you can enjoy your life and still lose fat.

So, look, I've tried both these approaches. When I was younger, I used to restrict myself. And I really wanted to try new foods. But I forced myself to say no, because “I wanted to be healthy.” And then I eventually realized this approach led to the diet binge cycle, because after a while of being strict, the floodgates open up, you just gorge on—you're like “I just need a gallon of ice cream, or a box of cookies or an entire pizza”. Can you relate to that?

And then when I got older, I relaxed more, I was doing better financially. And I went on more trips. And when I did that, I used it as an excuse to eat whatever I wanted. That was fun, too. But the issue is, I felt like a stuffed pig afterward and I gained a few pounds; pounds that sometimes didn't come off when I went back home.

And here's the thing: the truth is that neither of these approaches is healthy. The first one is psychologically unhealthy. It's part of that restrict binge cycle or more commonly known as the yo-yo dieting, and the second one's physically unhealthy.

Look, folks, I know we're in this PC world right now, but being fat is unhealthy. If you're obese, take your height and your weight, type it into the search bar in Google or DuckDuckGo, whatever you're into, along with the acronym, BMI. And if you're overweight or obese, the only thing that's getting you there and stopping you from getting down to what is a healthy weight, is your behaviours. Okay, it's not healthy to be fat.

Now look, it doesn't mean you're a bad person if you're struggling dealing with your weight. There's a lot of reasons why that may be, but it's not healthy for you. So, the good news here is that there's a better way.

There are two things that I do—actually, we're going to go over three things, I'm going to give you one bonus tip as well, because there's two things that you must do. But the third one is a bit of a bonus. So, you're going to have to stay till the end to learn that bonus tip.

So, you usually have to sign up with me for three months and pay thousands of dollars for me to teach you this. But today, I'm going to teach it to you for free because I want to hear from you after you listen to this podcast that you got results from listening. So, let's jump right in.

Number one, you’ve got to know your food. And you might be thinking, “Know my food? What does that even mean?”

Great question. You see, most people evaluate their food in terms of healthier, unhealthy. “Oh, this food, this acai is really healthy. It's a superfood from the Amazon. Oh, this egg McMuffin from McDonald's is really unhealthy. It's fast food.” Right?

We have these qualifiers; something from McDonald's, nothing can be healthy there, even the salad. It's just everything that comes from McDonald's is unhealthy, versus something that comes from maybe Whole Foods is super healthy no matter what it is.

But here's the thing, food quality matters. But it doesn't matter as much as you think. And more specifically, it's not as helpful for losing fat as you might think. So, the issue that most people have is they don't evaluate their foods quantitatively.

It's all about the quality, their qualitative analysis, is this food healthy or not? And if it's healthy, I did a good thing for myself and presumably for fat loss. And if it's unhealthy, I did a bad thing for myself. Can you relate to that? Of course, you can. That's how everyone thinks.

So quantitatively, what does that mean in plain English? Well, let's look at some examples. Let's talk about the example that I just gave, in fact. So, let's say you were going to eat some breakfast and you had a choice between Jamba Juice, which in case you don't know, it's a place that we have in Miami, I'm assuming it's a lot of places in the United States and it has juices as you might imagine, but it also has things like acai bowls, and all types of superfoods stuff, superfood dishes, wraps, too.

And let's say you have a choice between Jamba Juice and McDonald's, right. Now, most everybody would say, ‘Oh, yeah, well, yeah, Jama Juice is going to be way healthier than McDonald's.” But right now, I'm going to tell you how you're wrong, or at least how there's more to the story than that type of thinking.

So, let's say you sit down at Jamba Juice and eat an acai bowl. And then when you're ordering your acai bowl, it comes plain. But then you're like, “I want to even make this acai bowl healthier so I'm going to add some coconut that has healthy fats, I'm going to add some blueberries, some strawberries, some granola, that's healthy, right? Granola just has this vibe about it that's so healthy, so I’ve got to add some of that.”

And you end up eating over 600 calories by being healthy, by making healthy choices. And this is where so many people are stuck. And if you didn't even know, you're like, “I don't even know what that means. 600 calories, is that a lot?” That means you have an even deeper education problem. You're thinking still in terms of unhealthy and healthy.

Now, let's use the other example here. Let's say you went to McDonald's and you ordered an egg McMuffin and a black coffee and you're like, “Wow, I'm such a scumbag. I'm eating fast food and this egg McMuffin thing. I'm really a bad person. I did something really unhealthy for myself.” But the truth was, it was only 300 calories.

So, 600 with the healthy acai bowl and the shaved coconut and the blueberries and the strawberries and the granola and only 300 calories for the egg McMuffin from McDonald's along with black coffee. We could even add a yogurt parfait for another 150 calories, and it would still bring you up to 450 calories from McDonald's versus over 600 at Jamba Juice, and you'd still be better off.

Now if you're confused, and/or maybe incredulous, and you're saying, “No, Ted, that's some bullshit, man, what you're saying McDonald's is healthier? Are you trying to tell me that an Egg McMuffin is healthier than an acai bowl with blueberries and granola?” You’re, “I don't know what you're smoking, but I don't want any of that.”

And what I wanted to tell you is this; I used to think that, I used to think only unhealthy choices. But then I learned something really important, the quality of the food, and the quantity of how much we eat is equally important, equally important. The quality doesn't matter more and the quantity doesn't matter more, they're equally important.

And where most people go wrong, is they're all about the quality. All about this is healthy versus this is unhealthy. And they don't understand the quantity at all. They don't understand that that acai bowl is already 500 calories, a lot of it coming from sugar, and some from fat toe, but it's healthy fats. But guess what, if you eat too many calories from any source, you get fat, you put on weight.

And if you cut calories, if you eat fewer calories, again, from any source, even if you're eating every single meal at McDonald's, you will lose body fat. I want to be clear about something. I'm not saying you should eat all your meals at McDonald's. But what I am saying here is that you're missing something huge. And it may be the thing—I mean, it is exactly the thing that is stopping you from losing fat.

Now let's take a less controversial example. A six-ounce ribeye steak is about 300 calories and a 10-ounce ribeye steak is 500 calories. So even though the ribeye steak is a whole food, the size of the steak is going to influence how much energy you get permitted. In other words, how many calories you get from it. So, you might be making a healthy choice and saying, “Hey, I'm going to eat ribeye steak. That's a whole food.” Well, it's actually processed food, but it's minimally processed. It's butchered from a cow and, you know, I just cook it and or have it cooked for me.

But the thing is, you can start to lose fat just by eating a six-ounce ribeye instead of a 10-ounce ribeye. And I'm not going to get into the fat content of ribeye steak, but there are better choices than that, that you can make to lose fat. But the point is, these things matter. The portion size of the food or the serving size of the food, in addition to the calorie content of the food really matters.

Now, hopefully, that's making this a bit more clear. But let's look at something trickier, right? Because it's kind of, “Okay, well, I get that a six ounce versus a 10 ounce that makes more sense. There's more energy in that 10 ounces, there's more food in that 10 ounce ribeye compared to the six ounce ribeye.” But let's take a look again at something a bit trickier. This is something that's hopefully going to help you shift your mindset big time.

So, think about this: I don't know about you, but I like Greek yogurt and it again, has that health halo, it's something that's healthy for you. And you know what, there's a good reason for it. It's full of protein, it's got a bunch of vitamins and minerals in it. We're not going to get into whether dairy is unhealthy or not. That's a podcast for another time. But know that there's nothing wrong with dairy for most people. So, a three-fourths cup serving of a full fat Chobani Greek yogurt is 170 calories. But a three-fourths cup serving of non-fat Chobani Yogurt is 90 calories.

I'm going to repeat that again. A three-fourths cup, in other words, the same serving size for full fat yogurt versus non-fat yogurt is almost double for the full fat. And that's at three-fourths of cup. I don't know about you but if you've ever measured your food, which is something you should do sometime, if you want to really start to understand the portion sizes that you're having, is that you don't need three-fourths a cup of yogurt. It's more like a cup and a half or two cups. And let's just keep the math easy here.

So, what we're really having is 340 calories for a typical serving of full fat Chobani Yogurt, versus 180 calories for non-fat. So, the serving size is the same in this, but the calories are almost double. And I want you to imagine something; imagine you're sitting down with a friend and you're eating the non-fat and your friend is eating the full fat and he's gaining weight, and you're not.

And you know what he says to you, he's like, “Look, we eat the same food and the same amount. We both have our cup and a half serving of yogurt here, but you're losing fat and I'm gaining fat. You have a fast metabolism, you have better hormones, I must have a slow metabolism.” This is why you're stuck. This is why you blame your lack of fat loss on metabolism hormones and other things. It isn't your Hashimoto’s, it's not your pre menopause or your post menopause or your low tea, folks. It's this! You have no idea of what serving size you're eating, and you have no idea how many calories you're eating.

And here's the thing: the truth is that this is so simple to start to remedy this problem. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to download a macro tracking app. Now, I use My Fitness Pal, and that's what I teach my clients to use. But I want you to start looking up your food options. While on your business trip. I'm guessing that you have a few days. So, start in the morning; you don't have to look up everything, it only takes a few minutes, you're going to be staring at your phone anyway, aren't you, if you're not talking to someone.

Now, obviously, you don't do this if you're talking to a potential client, or if you're making an important business connection.

But the point is, take some time to look up the food to learn about it. Start saying now, what portion size is that? I got the scrambled eggs. How many eggs do I think that is? And then look it up. Look up the calorie content of it. Start educating yourself about the portion sizes and calorie content of the foods you eat.

And you don't have to bring a food scale and weigh things. Just look it up and guesstimate it first. Having even a small idea of the portion sizes and calorie counts can get you started because listen, right now, you're probably clueless. If you're struggling with this, I guarantee you, you are missing--this is the information that you're missing.

Now let's get on to part two, like, what's the second most important thing.

Now, this one can change the game for you. I'm going to guess that sometimes you really care about the meals you're going to eat. And sometimes you just need to shove some food in your face to make sure that you can get your work done without getting distracted by hunger. For example, I’ve got a serial entrepreneur client who's been on the yo-yo diet cycle for literally decades.

Now he's gotten as lean as 10% body fat. But he did it by doing extreme sports and strict diets. In fact, he was competing in triathlons. And he was following a low carb diet, which sounds like torture, but he got down to 10% body fat. And now he's away from that. And he wants to find a middle way, find some balance where he doesn't have to take these extreme approaches.

But the thing is: he's really struggling because he loves to go out to steak houses and these restaurants. He's made money, he's done well, and he wants to enjoy his life. And he doesn't want to give up his social life. It's really important to him, and it to be honest, it's important to all of us. And so those meals where he hangs out with his colleagues and his friends, he really cares about what he's going to eat.

If you're going to a special restaurant with the chef's name on the dessert menu, you're going to want to order dessert. But on the other hand, he's got some times where he's super busy for breakfast and for lunch. It's not really about. “Oh, I want to eat this delicious thing,” it’s just, “I need to get some food in me so hunger doesn't distract me from the work that I need to get done.” Does that resonate with you?

So, we sat down and we looked at his meals. And one meal stood out in particular, every day, he was having a salad for lunch. And when we dove deeper into his salad choice, it was clear it was a problem. And when we went over it, it was a chicken salad. So, it had lettuce in it, it had chicken breasts that was grilled in it, so far, so good.

But when I asked him about the dressing, I said, Well, what type of dressing is it?” He said, “Well, It's an olive oil dressing.” And I said, ‘Okay, cool. How many tablespoons of olive oil do you think are in that dressing?” And he said, “Well, I'm not sure.” I said, “Ah, that's a problem, because one tablespoon of olive oil “healthy fats” is 120 calories.” And I said, “If you had to guess, how many tablespoons of olive oil do you think are in it?” He's like, “Ah, probably around two or three, and I'm going to guess three.”

Three tablespoons of olive oil are 360 calories, my friend, 360 calories! Okay, if you remember from one of our earlier examples, a six-ounce ribeye steak is 300 calories. So three tablespoons of olive oil are more calories than a six ounce ribeye steak. And I want to ask you something. Number one, what's more delicious? Number two, which one do you think is going to help you stay full longer, three tablespoons of olive oil?

If you don't know the answer to that, give it a try. Drink three tablespoons of olive oil and see how hungry you are after all. I'll save you the suspense, you're going to be starving because three tablespoons does not take up much room in your stomach. Now here's the other thing. Not only did it have this two or three tablespoons of olive oil, but it had several ounces of goat cheese in it.

And again, he didn't know how many ounces of goat cheese, another important problem. And he didn't know how many calories were in the goat cheese either. Now, here's what I'm getting at. He was eating this salad with the several tablespoons of olive oil and a couple ounces of goat cheese because he thought it was a healthy choice.

And it's not unhealthy. But it's just too many freaking calories. And the thing is he wasn't ordering it because he's like, “Oh my gosh, I love a really olive oily goat cheesy salad. He was doing it because he thought he was making a good choice. But the truth was, it wasn't helping him at all. In fact, it was doing the opposite. He was having about a 500 to 600—because we're not sure, he didn't do the measurements. He was having about a 500 to 600 calorie salad. It wasn't helping. And then he was going out to eat. It was just too many calories.

Now here's the good part. When he started making the shifts, he started saying, “Oh, do I really love this goat cheese? No, I don't really care.” So, get rid of it, or have like half an ounce of it just for little flavour. And olive oil, how about we just have the dressing on the side or even just use one tablespoon of olive oil. And once he started making these changes, he started losing fat. And you can do this, too.

Most people are stuck because they keep making “healthy choices.” But they don't realize that they're just making themselves fatter. And it was such an eye-opening moment for my client. But it was worth the, like, “Oh my gosh, all these years have been doing this and now it's this simple thing.”

But the truth is, now he's able to make better choices and he has more control over his weight than he ever has. And he's able to enjoy his life because we all have a calorie budget. We all have a certain amount of calories that we can say “spend,” or to use the metaphor here, we can “spend” on food every day. And if we eat more calories than we burn, regardless of this source, we gain weight.

But if we burn more than we eat, again, even if you're eating all your meals from McDonald's – if you had three egg McMuffins a day, 900 calories, you would lose body fat, okay? So if you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight. If you burn more than you eat, you lose weight. Now that's the simple part.

The trickier part is to make sure we spend our calories on the meals that matter, because most of us drink 270 Calorie Naked green juices and 500 Calorie acai bowls. Because we think we're doing something healthy for us, not because we love our Naked green juice so much. So how do you do this?

Well, after you start looking up your food in My Fitness Pal, start asking yourself, “listen, is this a meal that I really care about? Or do I just need to put something in my stomach so that I'm able to focus on the things that I need to do?” And then you can start to be more intentional about where you spend your calories.

So you can spend your calories on the meals that matter; sharing a piece of birthday cake with your daughter on her birthday, going out with your wife or your husband for dinner for your anniversary, going out with friends and/or business colleagues, instead of making or choosing a “healthy salad” that's like 600 calories, and thinking that you're doing something good for yourself.

So, I said I also had a bonus tip there. So other thing that I would tell you is commit to doing something in terms of exercise. Now, I'll share with you, kind of a funny story—at least I think it is. I was in Mexico City, it's 7000 feet there. It's the highest I've ever been in my life. Now geographically speaking, right. And the altitude made it really difficult to exercise.

But here's what I did: I made sure I walked a lot, because doing hard exercise was really challenging, I would get out of breath very easily. And also, I was having trouble sleeping— very normal. And I was peeing all the time. All these things I looked up later, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I wish I would have known that about this altitude thing.” Good thing to look up whenever I, or if I ever decide to climb a mountain.

But anyway, the point is, not only was I busy with the event, but I was struggling with my energy levels as well because of these altitude issues. So, what I did was this: I committed to doing 10,000 steps a day, and I committed to doing a little bit in the gym. And I just did two or three exercises, one pushing exercise, one pushing exercise and one leg exercise.

And here's the thing, you can even do one set; so one set of pushing, one set of pulling, one set of legs, and then commit to doing some walking every day. And the other thing that I would say is that if I didn't commit to walking 10,000 steps, then I would go and do 30 minutes of cardio. Very light cardio, by the way, but I would commit to doing 30 minutes of cardio. So, this is something, it’s a bit of a bonus tip, and I'll tell you why. Number one, you only need the first two strategies to lose fat. But number three can really—this one that I'm talking about where you're committing to doing some exercise, even if it's in your hotel room—it can help make this whole process a lot easier. And also, the exercise is good for you, it makes you feel better.

And one thing that I do personally and that I have my clients do is either one, always travel to a place with a gym. But let's say for some reason you're staying in a hotel and there is no gym, bring something to work out with. The two things I recommend are either rings, you can do gymnastic rings, or you can do what I do, which is, I take the bodylastics band set. You can find it on Amazon, the bodylastics band set. Don't have any affiliation with them or anything, but love the product. You can bring it with you. It's easy to travel with. And I travel with it everywhere. I have it with me right now and I'm back in Playa Del Carmen.

And so, committing to doing at least some exercise, it doesn't matter, if you have 10 minutes, commit to doing 10 minutes. If you've got an hour and a half, do that, but commit to doing some exercise. Set a goal for yourself, and don't set a huge goal, set a goal that you can definitely do it.

In other words, if you know you don't have half an hour to exercise, commit to doing 10 minutes. it can be a 10-minute walk, it can be a 10-minute circuit training routine where you run through the three exercises of push, pull, legs, but commit to doing something. It doesn't matter what—well, it kind of does, actually, there are better choices here.

But I don't know your specific situation. So, what I would tell you is commit to doing something and stick with it, schedule it. Do not let yourself off the hook. Because you can commit to doing something, even if it's walking to the hotel or walking places, walking up the stairs, instead of taking the elevator, you can commit to doing something.

So, anyway, let's do a recap now. So, number one, so why are we here? We're here because I want to teach you how you can lose fat, even going on vacations, even eating at restaurants, even eating dessert. Let me tell you, I had a lot of cookies. I eat dessert every day. This works, and you can really enjoy your life. So, number one is to know your food. If you have no ideas about the portion sizes and the calories, then you got to educate yourself. There's no other way around it, you've got to educate yourself.

And the way I like to do it is, and the easiest way that I can tell you to do it is to download My Fitness Pal. Start looking things up on My Fitness Pal, get an idea. Most people are totally clueless here. And the chances are, you're probably pretty clueless too. If you're struggling to lose fat, this is going to help change the game for you.

Now, the second thing is once you get an understanding of the calories of some of the foods that you're eating, start being more intentional about your meals. For the meals that you're just really busy with and you don't care, you just need to have something in your stomach so you can focus because you're not—because intermittent fasting isn't working out for you. Then make sure those meals are low calorie.

And then with the meals that really do matter. Like for example, when I was in Mexico City at this event, we were at the Intercontinental Hotel, very nice hotel, and the restaurant that we ate in, our food was paid for, and it was a three-course meal. It was an appetizer, a main dish and a dessert. I ate the appetizer, main dish and dessert every single day. It was delicious. And they gave croissants, cookies and other things—other unhealthy but delicious things—to us as well.

So, I made sure I tried those cookies, I eat the cookies, I eat the croissants, I tried some of the pastries. And if I didn't like something, if I didn't enjoy the taste, I wouldn't eat it at all. And then for the meals where I wasn't sharing a meal with another person, or whether I wasn't excited about the menu or whether it was just breakfast, I found a way to keep my calories pretty low for breakfast, I would do that.

But that main meal was lunch at the Intercontinental Hotel, and a few times that I eat out in restaurants, and also Chupacabra’s Taco Place. And it's so easy to remember that one, Chupacabra’s Tacos, it's such a funny name. So anyway, the last bonus tip is, commit to doing some exercise, it doesn't need to be a lot, but commit to doing something.

So those are the three things: know your food, then after understanding your portion sizes and calorie content of the food you're eating, be more intentional about your choices, keep the calories low on the meals you don't care about and enjoy yourself with the meals that you do care about.

Then three, commit to doing some exercise, whether that's 8000 steps a day, 10,000 steps a day, 30 minutes of cardio, 10 minutes of some weight training routine, 90 minutes of some weight training routine. It doesn't matter, commit to doing something. And listen, I want to challenge you. If you're one of these “all or nothing people,” commit. Even if you're doing 10 minutes, do it, commit to doing it.

Start to break this self-sabotage where when you're really busy, you just give up exercise all together instead of realizing that doing a set of bodyweight squats still close to failure and doing a set of push ups, which takes zero equipment at all is better than doing nothing.

So that's what I've got for you. I hope you learned a lot but most importantly, what are you going to go do now? Do you have My Fitness Pal? Are you looking things up? Are you starting to be more intentional? What meals do I really care about? Which ones do I not care about? This will change the game for you. Give it a try on your next business trip. Get started now even, and start to enjoy way the results, the freedom that comes from this knowledge.

Hope you enjoyed it. Speak to you this Friday. Talk soon.