Ted Talk 149: How My Entrepreneur Clients Lose Up to 30lbs of Fat in 4 Months Without Strict Diets or Time-Consuming Workouts

Podcast Transcription: How My Entrepreneur Clients Lose Up to 30lbs of Fat in 4 Months Without Strict Diets or Time-Consuming Workouts

Ted Ryce: Today, I’m going to share with you the seven habits my entrepreneur clients use to lose up to 30 pounds in four months. And they do that without strict diets or long workouts. What is up, my friend? Welcome back to the Podcast. I’m your host, Ted Ryce, health expert and coach to entrepreneurs, executives and other high-performing professionals.

And to set the stage on what we’re going to talk about today, I want to tell you this statistic that you probably know. About 80% of people end up putting on the weight that they lose within five years. So, for example, and while don’t pay a lot of attention to people’s weight loss successes, people will say, “Oh, I lost 20 pounds.”

I’m like, “Okay, cool. How long did you do that? How long ago did you do that?”

“Oh, I’ve done it in three months.” “Okay, cool. Have you ever lost 20 pounds before? Have you ever lost weight before?” “Oh, yeah, I have.” Okay. And what happened? “Well, I put it back on.” And then I’m wondering, okay, well, what makes this any different, especially when you hear if they’ve done some type of strict diet, or really intense workout.

And what I want to tell you is this, my personal belief—there are two levels to this and I’ll share both of them my personal belief, from my experience in helping people for over 23 years with this, and maybe even more importantly, my own transformation, not just physically but emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually, is this number one is, if people can’t sustain an achievement of some sort, it’s because they lack habits and routines, they have unsustainable habits and unsustainable routines.

And you see this everywhere. An easy example, would be, people…I know other coaches who don’t make a lot of money, and then they’ll have no money the next month, they don’t have a routine or systems in place habits that lead to consistent clients in their coaching business. And certainly, for fat loss, it’s the same thing. You need to have some type of repeatable system.

And what I mean by that is, you’ve got to be able to do it, if you can’t do it. If you can’t do it for 20 years, you’re not going to be able to keep it up. And that’s a wrap with this episode up with this idea. What I’m trying to say is… I’ll just say it like this. There is something I use called The Sustainability Test with my clients. I asked them is this something you feel like you can keep up?

Now I always encourage them to do more, because that second level of transformation happens at an identity level. And just some preliminary stuff here, I promise, I’ll get to the actionable habits in a second. But am sharing this not because I enjoy the sound of myself speaking. I’m doing it because I really believe these are the things that people miss.

So, to use an example here, if you’ve been listening to this podcast since I started it seven years ago, you hopefully have heard a big change in the way I show up on each episode. In other words, I’m probably a better speaker now. I probably deliver better information now. And that’s because when I first started doing this podcast, I wasn’t a podcaster, I was someone who is new to podcasting.

I wasn’t a public speaker; my heart would start pounding. If you’ve been with me for all these years, when I first started doing some of those interviews, I got super nervous. I never get nervous for interviews anymore. I would hope to get a little nervous, am missing being nervous, because I’m like, “Hey, what’s up? All right, another interview.” I’m going off on a tangent.

But the point is this, we shift our identity, who we believe we are through repetition. And it takes a while for that to happen, maybe even years. And then all of a sudden, it’s just what you do like me getting on this podcast. When I first started doing these solo episodes, I didn’t want to do them. I was like, “Nobody wants to hear me talk by myself. I’m not even good at it.”

But I did it, and I got better at it. And then eventually, I had clients telling me and listeners telling me that they don’t even listen to the interviews anymore because they’ve heard the people on other shows they only come to listen to my episode on Fridays. Whoa, it blew me away when people told me that.

But again, I’m sharing this story to share with you the lesson that it’s about the identity shift. Whatever you think about me now and if you’re new to the show, go listen to one of my earlier episodes, I sucked. And we all suck. We’re not good when we start things.

And that brings me to the first habit that I teach my clients. It’s, always think about this as an experiment and getting feedback, there is no failure. There is no… what am I trying to say here? You have to look at things with a beginner mindset. What is that? Everything is just feedback.

And why is this important? Why do I teach this habit of beginner-ship, or looking at things as a beginner to my clients who’ve all lost weight before, we’ve all been in the gym before, because as they start to learn these new habits, there are times where you fall off track.

And then they take it personal, like there’s something wrong with them, when in reality, everybody falls off track. The difference between the people who succeed and the people who fail is the people who succeed, keep going, the people who fail quit. The only way to mess this up, fat loss up is to quit.

So, adopt a beginner mindset, you’re going to do things that you’re not good at the beginning. So, always look at it from that mindset. And this takes the pressure off. Because I wanted to say something else here because I feel again, I love doing these podcasts because when I write I’m really cranking content out on Twitter right now and it’s being well received.

But it lacks the context, or at least I’m not as good of a writer, as I need to be to convey to properly share the context. And the context is this it’s like, you’re just going to go through these ups and downs, and you’ll have to deal with them.

And the mindset, even though when I say it, if I put up like,”Oh, you need the right mindset,” people are like “Yeah, whatever, man. Just tell me what exercises to do. Tell me the foods. Tell me how much. That’s what I want to hear from you. I don’t want to hear about this mindset garbage.”

And I’ll be honest with you, I used to be the same way when people were teaching me about sales and like, “Hey, we’re going to talk about this sales mindset.” And I’m like, “I don’t care about this sales mindset, just tell me what to do.” That was my attitude. But what, what I came to realize is that, number one, the mindset was what I was missing, when it came to growing my business.

And certainly, it was what my clients were missing. In fact, I had a client come to me all pissed off, not at me, but with the progress, because he didn’t lose a pound in the previous week. And for me, it’s like, well, if you didn’t lose a pound, either you’re not doing the right things, or there might be some shifting in.

For example, if you gain a pound of muscle and lose a pound of fat, there’s no change on the scale. That’s how I look at it. And so mindset is the thing that I have to coach my clients on the most. You might think, “Oh, the coaching program with Ted, is all about macros and protein and how many grams of protein and eat this protein shake and do this exercise. It’s not. It’s mostly about mindset. That’s what the coaching calls are about.

And I’m lucky if I get to talk about exercise, and nutrition. That’s a great coaching call. That means we’re really dialed in. But most of them are about mindset. So, adopt that beginner’s mindset, always look at it. In other words, if something happens, for example, you step on the scale, and the weight didn’t go down, don’t go, “Oh, my God, this doesn’t work. This is a lost cause. I’ll never get this handled.”

Say, hmm, that’s interesting. This is just feedback. So, why is this happening? Why is the scale not moving? Am I doing all the right things? Let me examine that even though I think I’m doing the right things. Let me look closer at what I’m actually doing so that I can get better results next time.

Or do I need to get a body fat test? Because I feel my pants are falling off. In fact, that same client told me and it’s the first thing I ask clients, “Okay, so the scale didn’t move. Have you noticed anything different? For example, are your clothes fitting the same way? Are they fitting looser? Are they fitting tighter?” He said, “Oh yeah, my pants almost fell off the other day.” This is funny, right?

But I was like well, then you’re getting results, aren’t you? Especially and this is something to pay attention to, especially if you’re lifting weights. Especially if you’re lifting weights, this is one of the common things that happens is that people are doing everything right and they are doing everything right and it’s working, and you’re building muscle, or maybe retaining a little bit of water because you inflamed your muscles, through all the hard work that you’re doing in the gym. That’s normal.

But if your pants are falling off, but the scales not moving, you got to be able to see that and most people can’t see that. And then they sabotage themselves. Alright, so that’s what I teach. That’s the habit that I teach my clients to ask those questions instead of react emotionally.

Alright, let’s move on. Number two track calories. Oh, and I want to tell you. I had someone argue about this just the other day – yesterday or the day before. Oh, tracking calories. It’s a waste of time. You know what he did inside? I was like, okay, cool. So, what have you done that gave you results then? And you know what his answer was? He has one meal a day.

That’s the big solution, only having one meal a day. Imagine having a family and this guy is actually a dating coach. I don’t know him or anything. He’s just a “friend” on Facebook. But imagine having a family. I don’t have a family yet. But I could imagine some of my clients and the look on their face, if I said, eat one meal a day.

And so why I’m telling you this is that tracking calories is the way out of strict dieting. Now, he said it didn’t work for him. You got to do it, right, folks. And I have my Episode 445: The Best Diet for Fat Loss. That’s the episode you want to listen to where I tell you how to do it, right. So, track calories.

And I’ll tell you, I didn’t want to track calories. I started tracking calories when I worked with my coach Eric, in 2019. And I told this story before and I’ll tell it again. For three days, I was like, “I don’t want to do this.” I don’t know what you think about me, but I act like a child sometimes. I don’t want to do this. In other words, I don’t want to do this stuff that I know I need to do, especially when it’s new.

Now, I’m very different. I’m less of a child now these days, thankfully. But I didn’t want to do it then. And after kicking and screaming for about three days, I was like, “Wait a minute, this isn’t that bad. In fact, it’s easy and I’m eating the foods that I want.” And in Thailand, where I was, it was very important because I haven’t been back to Southeast Asia in years.

And the food is amazing. Seriously, if you’re a foodie, you got to go out to Southeast Asia, especially the food in Thailand. Cambodia, not so much, although I had some decent food there. But the food in Bali, the food in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, you got to get out there. And while you’re doing it, track your calories. And it just was so freeing, it’s freeing, it frees you.

Now it feels like a constraint. But the big issue with calories is this, people look to One Meal a Day; OMAD, is what it’s called, one meal a day or intermittent fasting, just get breakfast, or low carb diets. Just anything that looks like a carb just don’t eat it. But the problem is this and you really start to see this when you travel. Like you’re going to go to Paris and not have any carbs, you’re not going to have any French bread?

Now, if you’re the type of person who stays home, doesn’t travel, cool, makes me shed a tear for your life. But hey, that’s you, not me. My clients, they all love to travel. And that’s why I like to help. In fact, I’m starting to combine travel with what I do with coaching, in fact.

And when you do that, you start to see wow, these strict approaches break down quite quickly. If you’re outside of America really hard to do. So, tracking calories allows you to eat any foods in any country, eating in restaurants, having alcohol, eating desserts, all the above, as long as you hit your calorie target.

And my clients, they lose 30 pounds doing this and they do it eating the foods they love. I get clients again, had a client Dan—shout out to you if you’re listening— went on vacation, came back half a pound heavier. And he was drinking alcohol and eating out. Although he said he skipped lunch because he wanted to eat his breakfast, but he skipped lunch and ate a big dinner and it worked for him.

I didn’t even tell him, hey, you have to skip a meal. He just did it. Why? Because it worked. And that’s what tracking calories does for you it allows you to choose what works for you. And the same thing happens with me sometimes I only do one meal per day.

I’m in Brazil right now, have you ever been to a Hodizio or Rodizio Brazilian steakhouse? They keep bringing the meat until you flip the coin over from green to red. Or gone to a brunch? Now, I might only eat one meal that day. I might just eat 2000 calories in that sitting. And that’ll be it for the rest of it the day and maybe a protein shake later on. But since I track calories, I get to choose that.

Now the third habit, is this the 80/20 Rule. So, the idea is this, that 80% of the time, you eat whole foods—and most of our meals probably around 80% or 70%, 75%, 80%, maybe even higher 85%, 90% most of our meals, we just got to eat like today lunch because I needed to not be hungry when I recorded this episode. I had breakfast today, actually, just a very light breakfast because I ate a lot of food last night.

And I’m going out to eat tonight at a restaurant again. Since I’m tracking calories. I know how to save my calories, budget them. And what I do is this 80% of the time I eat whole foods, lean, satiating foods. And then 20% of the time I eat what I want. And I had the most amazing pizza. And then had this—I don’t even know, it was a dessert with two scoops of ice cream.

I’m eating some great desserts here in Brazil and I’m losing fat. I’m getting leaner. Now, it’s a little slower I’ll be honest, because of all the restaurant, I’m single, I’m going out on dates and going to restaurants. That’s what the pizza was the other night. Oh, delicious pizza, too.

And because I have this 80/20 rule, I’m able to get things to the point where most of my choices are satiating foods, healthy, clean, whatever you want to call it. But 20% of the time, I’m relaxed, and you know what? It makes my life better when I’m able to do that. It’s easier for me to stay on track and certainly all my clients told me that, too.

All my clients tell me, “This is the easiest thing I’ve ever done.” And what do they all have in common? They all have in common strict dieting, passive strict dieting, where they cut out foods completely. I had a client, Lynn—shout out to you if you’re listening. She wasn’t eating carbs at all. And she was eating such a strict diet. Crazy. But now she is more balanced with her diet, big time changes. I love hearing that. So, the 80/20 Rule.

Number four, hit four weekly workouts. “Oh, but Ted, I thought you said without long workouts.” Oh, I said four weekly workouts. I didn’t say how long they were. And I’ve talked about this previously, the workouts don’t have to be long, you just got to get them in.

And I found this, four 20-minute workouts work better than two or three hour long workouts. There are some reasons why this is. I don’t want to get into it here because I’ve talked about it on other episodes. But basically, this more frequent workouts work better. And so, I’ll do an upper/lower split. So, two workouts repeated twice a week, upper body, lower body.

You could also do total body with a lower rep range, say 8 to 10 reps, then total body with a higher rep range, say 15 to 20 reps, but four weekly workouts. And keep them be 20 minutes to an hour. 20 minutes, probably, six exercises, one set each, that’s fine, or an hour, 3 sets of 12 exercises, whatever it is, but four weekly workouts.

And not all my clients do four weekly workouts, but that’s what we teach them to do. Because I feel like that’s the sweet spot. So, that’s optimal and give it a try. If you’re only doing two or maybe three, split it up into lower body and upper body and give this a try.

The fifth habit is take photos every two weeks. This is super important because when we see our body and see the changes happening, it holds us accountable. There’s even research that shows when you take a photo of yourself, it gives you perspective. And I’ll tell you what, we… I don’t want to say make our clients take photos, but we’re like, “Hey, you didn’t take your photo, you’ve got to do your photo, you’ve got to do your photo.” And every single one of them even the ones who didn’t want to take photos feel good about it because now they can see “Oh, my belly in that first photo has completely disappeared or it shrunk.”

You see the changes and it’s motivating because the reality is this, if I look at myself in the mirror today, I will look exactly the same as I did yesterday. And yesterday, I look exactly the same as I did the day before. Are you with me? So, I see myself every day and I look the same, very hard to notice the subtle changes.

But if I see a photo of myself two weeks ago, and I see a difference, especially if I’m in a hardcore fat loss phase, like all my clients are, it is so motivating for them. And again, there’s even research that talks about this super important.

The sixth habit is weighing weekly. We weigh in weekly, because… now some of my clients weigh more, but we weigh in weekly, because we’re looking for the trend. Some people, if they step on the scale, and it’s down, they’re happy, the next day, it’s up, they’re unhappy.

So, weigh in weekly, if you have this problem, but definitely weigh in. I will give an alternative here, which is actually you know what, I’ve got a bonus, let’s say I have a bonus for you, a bonus habit for you, which is a body fat scan monthly. Why don’t we do a body fat scan weekly, that would be better, right? Yeah, it would be nice to do one every day. But the thing is, it costs $50, $100 or $150 to do it.

So, weighing in is something you can do easily. There are no appointments that need to be made, there’s no extra cost to it in terms of your time, very little in terms of your time. So, we like to weigh in weekly. But body fat tests, monthly. And I’ll tell you a story why this is important.

I’ve had several clients who they’re doing, “everything” right and these are high performing people, they are doing everything right. But the weight isn’t moving, or the weight goes up. Now, for me, that’s not a problem. But for them, it’s a problem. Because they’re new to this. They’re like, “That’s not what I’m supposed to experience, if I’m doing everything right.” I mean, just imagine, put yourself in that situation, you’re working really hard, but you’re actually gaining weight or not losing weight.

And again, this is putting too much emphasis on the scale. And those clients I’m like, “Listen, I understand where you are, why you feel the way that you feel. But what I want you to do is this…” I tell them to get a body fat test right away. And then when they do it, they’re always so surprised. “Oh my gosh, I’ve lost 5% body fat. I was at 24% body fat. Now I’m at 19% body fat.”

Actually, I had a client that happened to you recently, I had another client his muscle mass has gone up every single month, and his body fat percentage has gone down every single month. But the scale doesn’t tell you that. So, it’s something I wasn’t pushing so hard before, because it COVID and everything was shut down. But now we’re really pushing it hard.

I encourage my clients to get a body fat test once a month. It’s like let’s do it once a month, because we can catch a trend. And we can double down on a trend if we see that you’re losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time. Whoa, it gives so much. It demystifies the process. It is like not understanding your bank…. Like, why do I have this money in the bank? It looks low, or maybe it looks high or whatever. And then looking at all the inputs and all the outputs.

And then you’re like, “Oh, that makes sense. Yes, I did write that check.” I didn’t write that check. Who writes checks anymore? I don’t know some people. But I did make that payment. I bought that thing. Oh, I did get that payment, that direct deposit, whatever it is. So, now you can quantify the changes.

And let me give you the eighth bonus habit. It’s is, never miss twice. This is something I teach my clients, never miss twice. What does that mean? If you miss a day at tracking your calories, don’t miss another day. And you can use it in a lot of different ways. “Oh, but I missed tracking a meal.” Okay, don’t miss tracking two meals.

And I want to explain to you the genius of this never miss twice in a second. If you skip a workout, don’t skip a second workout. Force yourself to do it. Force yourself to do something. And now you get it, right? Never have too bad night’s sleep in a row. Never have too bad meals.

So, now you get it. But the thing is this, here’s the genius of this. A lot of people think I don’t have the habit of exercising. I start exercising and then I stop. And it’s like it’s not that you don’t have the habit of exercising, it’s that you have the habit of quitting.

When we talk about habits… I should have maybe even talked about this in the beginning. Habits are a program that you run in your brain to make your life easier. For example, I took a shower today. I brush my teeth. I put on deodorant. I got dressed. It didn’t take a lot of effort. It’s just something I do every day. I Floss. In fact, I’m out of dental floss and I’m feeling anxiety because of it. Can you relate?

So, what I’m talking about is, everything we do is a habit, including skipping workout. So, if you have the habit of quitting workouts, when life gets busy, that’s a habit. If you have the habit of staying up late every night, because you’re watching Netflix, that’s a habit. It starts once and then you do it again.

And then you do it again. And then you do it again. All of a sudden, you have a habit. Same thing. “Oh, I can’t work out today. It’s too busy. I skipped my habit.” But no, it’s not that you just skip the habit, you’re forming a new habit, which is called skipping workouts. I’ve got the habit of skipping workouts.

So, never miss twice, helps to avoid building those habits that work against you. Because I’ll tell you something, if you’ve been doing a habit for a very long time, that’s much harder to deal with than if you build the habit the right way in the beginning. Makes sense, right?

So, if you build the habit the right way in the beginning, or build the habit while your life is less stressful. So, I want to say one more thing about this bonus habit here is that think about a crisis. What does a crisis do? I don’t want to use anything too terrible here. But let’s say someone in your family gets sick. We have a story that we’re super busy. I have used this story.

I had a client super busy with work, his father in-law passed away. Do you think he was still busy with growing his business then? No, probably doesn’t make for a good… you don’t tell your wife, “Oh, sorry, honey, sorry about your dad’s death and everything. Can’t make his funeral, I got a really important meeting.”

So, where I’m going with this is—the point I’m making is this, we say we’re busy, but when a crisis happens, we get super focused on dealing with that crisis. And what I’m trying to say is, the more crises, you just drop everything. Let’s say you have the habit of going to work every day, you drop going to work, you cancel all your meetings, you support your wife and go to the funeral. That’s what he did.

And that’s what most of us will do. I’m laughing, because who wouldn’t do that? But there’s got to be someone. Anyway, most of us will do that. I know, I would. I would drop everything. I would tell my clients, hey, listen, I will add weeks into your program to cover this. But I have to go deal with this right now.

And the point I’m making is this: stress focuses us on that crisis. And the more stress you have, the less you can focus on those new habits that you’re creating. Stress makes you fall back into bad habits, yes or no? Can you relate to that? Of course, you can, we all can.

How many people were doing so well until COVID hit and we all got locked in our homes couldn’t go out, right? So, what I’m trying to tell you is understand that your building habits here, understand the never miss twice rule and why it’s important and understand how stress breaks good habits and encourages bad ones. Because stress is a threat to your survival.

The more higher the stress, the more intense the stress, the more it’s threatening your survival. Even if though it’s really not. Let’s say you got dumpster fire at work that you need to put out, even if the business went under, and you had to declare bankruptcy, it would suck but you’re not going to die.

But it feels like we’re going to die. And what does that mean? Because that’s how our stress system is programmed. And so, what happens is, we start shoving our faces full of food because it makes us feel better. We start drinking alcohol because it helps us deal with stress. And we don’t think about the long-term consequences because that’s what stress does.

It helps you deal with the immediate, but then the problem is, we’re really not going to die from whatever dumpster fire you’re putting out at work. You will be alive in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years and you’ll be suffering from all the consequences from those bad habits.

So, just two bonuses there, the Never Miss Twice Rule and also understanding how stress affects your ability to build new habits and it will always push you back to the old bad habits.

All right, well, that is it for me today. And I would ask you, what is the one big takeaway from this? What is the golden nugget that you can use right away in your life? What are you going to do differently? Are you going to look at something differently? Are you going to take action differently? What is it that you’re going to do differently as a result of having listened to this podcast?

That’s what I want to leave you with. And if you want to keep the conversation going, reach out to me on Twitter, @ted_ryce. Reach out to me. Let me know. Let’s keep the conversation going. Have a great one and talk soon.