Hey, hey ladies. Welcome to episode number 12. So when this episode drops on November 17th, I will be in Las Vegas, Nevada for the WNBF world championships. I'm so excited about this trip you guys. I'm not just excited about this trip to the world, but I'm also so excited to go to the desert and get out of the rainy west coast, fall weather. I have been looking at the Las Vegas weather and dreaming, it's hot and sunny and over 20 degrees celsius every day. It's going to be amazing. I'm so excited. All right. I'm excited about the actual competition too. My athletes look amazing. They're coming in perfectly. Shout out to Michelle Elliott, our WNBF Canadian Champion, our WNBF Bikini Pro Canadian Champion. And to Julie Stanley, our Masters Figure and Grandmasters Figure Champion. All right.
So, let's get into episode 12. Nutrition awareness, this is something I could probably talk about for a few hours, but I'm going to constrain myself. I want to talk about nutrition awareness in two ways in today's podcast. Nutrition awareness ties very closely in with the primitive prefrontal brain battle, let's call it that. So I want to talk about nutrition awareness today in terms of how you can become more nutritionally aware and I want to talk about the four stages of awareness when it pertains to our nutrition.
Okay, so let's start with how you become more nutritionally aware. I teach this to my weight loss clients and my competition lean muscle mass sculpting clients, the same way. Step one, I'm going to give you guys three steps. I like three steps. You guys are down. You've ready. Step one, get a food journal. And I'm a big fan of, like I said in episode 11 manually recording. I have been manually recording my nutrition every competition season for probably the last 15 years. And so I have these lovely food journals that I can look back on and see what my progress was, see what I chose to eat, see what my body fat, my weight was doing, all of the things. I kept really good notes, and it's been extremely helpful to me each time I go to compete to make sure that I do better than I did the season before. What manually recording does, that recording in an app or just following a meal plan doesn't do is that when you manually record what you eat every day and the macronutrients that you're consuming and you add them up and you really force yourself to be aware is you learn the language of nutrition. And I call it a language because it literally is, like learning a language. So if you were to go to Mexico and you wanted to get off of the all-inclusive resort and go into the city and immerse yourself in Mexican culture. If you were to use a Spanish app to translate for you, you would never really learn Spanish. You may learn a word or two, but you wouldn't learn the dialect of it. However, If you were to take Spanish classes for a month and write out all of the Spanish on paper, the way we learned in school and you were to use it every day, you would learn Spanish. This is the same for writing down and manually recording your macronutrients versus using an app or a meal plan. So I highly recommend that if you are trying to achieve a goal, whether it be weight loss, whether it be competition prep, whether it be sculpting, that you start a food journal. And the way that I do my food journal, is I use the left side of, when I open my journal up, I use the left side for my nutrition for the day and my macros and I use the right side as a thought and feeling journal. So I have something I want to write about first thing in the morning that's bothering me, I'll write it there. Or I use it throughout the day to kind of keep track of how I'm feeling and if I'm following along with the food choices that I'm supposed to be. So like, I teach that you premake your protocol on Sunday. We're going to get more in-depth into this over the course of the next 10 episodes. You create your plan and then each day, you food journal it out, the exact way you ate it with the portion sizes and the macros. And if you happen to go off your protocol, if you have that afternoon cookie or something spontaneously arises and you go off it, that's a great opportunity to use your journal, the right half of your journal and talk about why that happened, how you went off, was it by choice? Were you living in awareness or were you in unconsciousness? And you can dissect that down a little bit more so that it's less likely to happen again. So step one, get a food journal.
Step two is to create a plan. We've already talked about this. So once you get your food journal, you can actually create your plan right in your food journal. You can create it on a Sunday And then do your best to follow it all week, but I want you to rewrite it down every day. Now, I know there's a few of you out there that are like Lylas, I do not have time for this. You guys, the first couple weeks, we'll take a little bit of time because you're going to be looking up the macros in everything you eat. However, you can use an app for that. You can look up all of your most eaten foods in my fitness pal or calorie king or any of these fitness apps and put a page in your journal where you record all of that data, or you can go over to my website, lylasleona.com. And sign up for the nutrition creation protocol guide, it's free and you get a bonus macro cheat sheet in there that has all of the healthy foods, macros done up for you. You can print it out. You can put it in your fridge. I make it super easy. You're welcome. Okay. So you're going to create your plan. So you're going to decide ahead of time using your prefrontal smart brain, what you're going to eat. You're going to figure out the macro math, because the more you do that, the more you're going to become aware of exactly what's in the food choices you're making so that when you do make a spontaneous choice, when you are out at a restaurant, when you don't know the exact macro math, you have a really good idea of what you're eating. I know, no matter where I go, no matter what food choices I make, I have a pretty good idea of the exact macro math, because I know the language of nutrition, the language of macros so well. This will serve you. If you're someone who has struggled with your weight, if you're someone who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about nutrition, journaling your macros for three months is going to be transformative for you. In the 16 Week Transformation Program, we do this for four months and everyone who comes out of that program has so much more awareness about what they're putting in their bodies and how their bodies respond to it. Okay.
So step three, test it out. So literally step one, you're just going to get a journal. Step two, you're going to create a plan in that journal. Step three, you're going to test the plan. So you're going to eat that plan every day, writing it all down, writing all the math down, totalling it up at the end of the day, writing some notes about how it felt in your body, your thoughts about what you ate, if you went off protocol, or if you had some cheats, why you did that? What came up for you? How you're going to combat it going forward next time, how you're going to do better next time. This is failing forward. Do you guys remember when I talked about failing forward and mindset? Testing it is the most important part. I want you to test your protocol for a minimum of five days. Right? So a lot of my clients will follow a protocol Monday to Friday, and then we'll have exceptions on weekends where they don't have a protocol, but they do their best to eat healthy. You don't want your weekends to offset all the progress you made Monday to Friday. But it's okay if we can be a little bit flexible, especially if your goal is more maintenance related. If you're really trying to achieve a specific goal, whether that be competition prep or like a very specific weight loss goal, you may want to have just one exceptional meal. So you may want to go beyond protocol six days a week and most of the seventh day, and then just have an exceptional meal on that seventh day. And then at the end of the week, I want you to look back on that test week and actively be aware of what the results of that are. So look at, okay, this is what I ate for the last seven days. This is what the scale did. This is how my energy levels have been. This is how compliant I was. And then decide, going into the next week is that protocol serving you? Is that protocol something you want to try and follow again? Now, if you weren't able to follow it in week one. I'm going to suggest that you don't try it again, I want to suggest that you change it a little bit. I want to suggest that you make it easier for you to follow. So if you found that you, if you had hummus and carrots in your afternoon snack for your protocol week one, and it was just a snack that you weren't having. it's not something that really appealed to you in the afternoon. And in the afternoon you found yourself gravitating towards a latte and a cookie. What I want you to do is create a protocol that includes maybe the latte and a better choice than a cookie, maybe a latte and a protein Superbowl. You can find that at my hidden recipe page, lylasleona.com/kitchen. And then try that protocol for week two and see if you can stick to it a little bit better. You want to find a protocol that you can be compliant with like 95% of the time. That's when the magic happens. And then you're going to test it again. Once you can be compliant to a protocol, then you can start tweaking it to really get the results you want.
Now, the reason why this system is so important for nutritional awareness is because when you make a plan, my friends and you are literally day to day focused on that plan and aware of everything that you're eating that isn't on that plan or is on that plan, what it does is it allows you to really see where you're choosing to go unconscious, where your emotional eating is happening, where your stress eating is happening, where your convenience eating is happening. And all of these things that are happening, that aren't on the plan are literally just the things that we need to clean up so that you can achieve all of your goals. So when you do this work every time you have a little fail or every time it doesn't work out perfectly. This is failing forward. This is showing you, I need to work on this. I need to spend some time figuring this out. And that my friends is progress, it's growth. It does not mean something terrible has happened. It does not mean you can't stick to a plan. It does not mean that you're going to fail and be overweight forever. It just means that you have some work to do. Like the rest of us, we all have work to do.
Okay. So that is your three-step plan to nutritional awareness. I get a journal, get a pretty one. I like to get purple ones. I love getting a new journal. It's so much fun to open a journal for the first time and write in it. I've been thinking about putting together an actual guided journal for this process. I'm gonna work with my team on it. I'll let you guys know when it launches. All right. Keep an eye out. and then you're going to create the plan. You're going to figure out the macro math. And if you're not sure about your macro math, listen to episode 11, we talked about it. Oh, just a quick note about episode 11, the macro math I gave as an example in episode 11 was in regards to a weight loss client, someone who's looking to lose weight. If you're looking to put on mass or sculpting, your macro counts, going to be quite a bit higher, most likely than the examples I gave in episode 11. I'd say 80% of the clients I work with are looking for weight loss, and then once they achieve weight loss, then we go into sculpting and by then they usually know their macro math pretty good.
Okay. Let's get into the second half of nutrition awareness. So let's talk about what happens when you go off the plan. Let's talk about what happens when you decide to have that afternoon latte in a cookie when you were supposed to have hummus and carrots. So there's four levels of awareness. Level one is unconsciousness. This is no awareness whatsoever. This is what most of us naturally moved towards. It's when your brain has it's three o'clock. I don't want hummus. I would rather have a coffee and a cookie. And you don't even really notice the thought process around that. You notice the craving, the urge, the desire for that latte and a cookie, you don't spend any time looking at it or becoming more aware of why it's there. You just head to Starbucks, you get your latte, you get your cookie, you eat it usually a little too fast. Usually it's followed by feelings of guilt or shame or disappointment. And then you decide that you're just going to sweep it under the rug. You're not even going to record it in your food journal. You're going to pretend it didn't happen. And the next day, when you get on the scale, you're surprised that the weight hasn't gone down. Does this sound familiar? Maybe you're not surprised that the way it hasn't gone down, but you don't spend any time looking at what happened at all. And this is a really common reason why people tend to fail on their diets. They pick a diet that is a little bit too strict or a little bit too outside their comfort zone. And then when they fall off that diet. When they stray from that diet, they go unconscious about it, which naturally leads us to feelings of disappointment in ourselves, shame, guilt, and then those feelings don't feel good. And so our brain automatically tries to comfort us by telling us at once another cookie. And this can be a pretty vicious cycle to be in, where you stray from your nutrition protocol, you feel guilty about it. And then to feel better, you stray from your nutrition or to call again, and then you feel guilty about it. And this literally is what causes us to gain weight. It's this primitive brain cycle, this limbic system cycle of eating to feel better and then feeling bad about it. So we eat to feel better again, and then we feel bad about it. And then we eat to feel better again. And then we feel bad about it. And then pretty soon eating is like the only thing that feels good to us because we feel bad about ourselves all of the time outside of that. And this is the exact cycle we're going to try and break with awareness, my friends.
Okay. Awareness level two is where I want you to be, if you are currently in unconsciousness. It's where your goal should be, if you're currently in unconsciousness. What that looks like is what I want you to do is in that food journal, you're going to write down what you had even if it's not on your protocol, even if it wasn't planned, you're going to write down the latte and the cookie. You're going to figure out what the macros in it are. They're not going to be on your cheat sheet. So you're going to have to go to the Starbucks website, figure out what the macros are, write them down. This is taking responsibility for your actions. So this is saying, hey. This is what I did. I'm now aware of the result of that. So now, you know, oh, there's 350 calories in a Starbucks cookie. Oh my goodness, that's a lot. And there's 250 calories in my Starbucks latte or whatever that looks like. So it was a 600 calorie cheat. Even just that awareness could be enough for you to make a better decision next time. But when we choose to go unaware and pretend it didn't happen, not write it in our food journal, not journal for the rest of the day, sweep it under the rug. That awareness never comes. So what I want you to do in level one is after you've had that slip, take responsibility for it. Write it down, figure out the math. And then I want you to write a little bit about why you think it happened, were you stressed, was it habitual, did someone bring you a latte and a cookie and put it in front of you, what was it that caused you to go off of your set plan and make that decision, what that's going to show you if it's emotionally related, was it stress, was it you wanted to feel better for some reason. The more you do this work, the better you get. At first, you may not even know why. You might just be like, I don't even know why I wanted it. And wanting something comes from a feeling of desire and we can desire food for a number of different reasons. We can desire food just because of the commercials came on that were done really well. And the marketing was designed to create desire. Right?
So becoming more aware of what your triggers are, certain emotions for me tend to trigger the desire to eat more than other emotions do. Boredom for me is a really triggering emotion. It's something that I need to spend a lot of time sitting in and purposefully not eating it away. Right? So some people I know really struggle with loneliness. They tend to overeat when they're feeling lonely. Some people overeat when they're feeling stressed or anxious. So find out what your trigger emotions are. You'll start to notice habits within yourself as well. Maybe you always have an afternoon sweet tooth craving. And maybe it's because of what you're doing midday, maybe you're tired midday, which is a sign that you need to change your eating up until mid day, or maybe put something in your midday afternoon, maybe you need to put a latte in your mid-afternoon, maybe that's something that you can do purposefully to re-energize yourself so that you don't eat sugar to re-energize yourself.
Okay. So level one is unconsciousness. Not taking any awareness into effect whatsoever. Level two is post consciousness. So after the slip, we then dissect why it happened, what the result of it was, what the macro math of it was. We take a look at how it affects our weight the next day. And we learn from it. It's a fail forward. Okay, level three. This is when we catch ourselves in the middle of a weak moment or in the middle of a slip. So what this looks like is, in the middle of the afternoon, you have the desire for a cookie and a latte. You go down to Starbucks, you order it, you sit down, you open the cookie and your brain kicks in. And you're like, why am I doing this? And I know that you guys have experienced this, where you have this moment of awareness in the middle of a slip. And you get to choose, you get to choose whether to be unconscious about it. And just be like, well, I bought it, I'm going to eat it, I'm going to write it down, whatever or you allow that awareness to grow a little bit and you decide on purpose to choose to be a little bit better. And what that might look like is eating half a cookie. And putting the rest away for tomorrow and planning to have that second half of the cookie with tomorrow's latte in the afternoon. Maybe you throw the other half of the cookie away. Have you guys ever had that moment of awareness where you're like, I don't need this and you throw it away. That's a great level of awareness. And honestly, I used to feel bad about throwing food away, you guys. And I now have a new belief about this. I have a new rule. If it's junk food, if it's food, that's not going to serve my body or anybody else's. It's okay to throw it away. It is a hundred percent okay to throw it away. You can think of it as throwing money away, but it's still better than putting that sugar and all of that extra junk into your body. Okay.
So in the middle of, is level three. And I still want you to write it down in your journal. And I want you to take note and celebrate on the right hand side of your journal, that you caught yourself in the middle and made a choice. Whether that was you chose to go back to level one and be unaware, or to choose to go back to level two. And eat it anyway, but you wrote it down. Right? Or if you choose to move up to level three and you stopped yourself in the middle of, or I've done this before. I've gone to Starbucks with the idea that I was going to get a fancy sugary beverage and a cookie and I've stopped myself at the actual counter and instead ordered a tea or a coffee with cream and Splenda. Or something that was a much better decision than what I had gone there intending to get. That's actually kind of bordering on level four. We're going to talk about level four in just a minute, but that's a hundred percent amazing. And you should write it down and celebrate that new level of awareness. All right. Level four, this is the goal. This is when you catch yourself ahead of time. So this could be that last example I gave you where at the counter, you order something different that is catching yourself ahead of time, but even more so than not level four is kind of like, when you're sitting at your desk in the middle of the afternoon and your brain is like, hey, it's Starbucks time, latte and cookie. And, you know, you're like, hey I see you brain and that's very tempting. But we've made a plan and the plan is carrots and hummus. So I'm going to pull out the carrots and hummus and I'm going to have them instead. Duly noted that you would like a latte and cookie, but today we're going to pass. Today, we don't need it. Alright. I love using I don't need this when it comes to food for my brain, because it feels like I'm lying when I say I don't want it because I do want it. I'm desiring it at that moment. But do I need it? For me, that's a really honest place to go.
So let's go through these again. I really want you guys to go through your day, go through your eating with these four levels in mind, note where you are with each meal throughout the day. Right? Note when you have a craving, what level you get to with that craving. So level one, unconsciousness. Noting of anything, maybe noting that you're eating something terrible for you, deciding to eat it anyway, and then deciding not to hold yourself responsible for it, deciding not to record it, deciding not to do anything about it. Level two, post accountability, post consciousness, post awareness of it. Taking responsibility for your actions. Writing and recording the macros, looking at the results of it, studying your brain and why it happened. Level three, catching yourself in the middle of that moment and deciding to do something differently. It still involves all the awareness. Level four, catching yourself when the craving or desire hits and not taking action on it. What? That is the golden goal. You guys now know that even when we get to level four, when we can do this, most of the time, we still have slips you guys, even I find myself back down at level one and level two, some days. And when this happens. I know that it's time for me to get back into food journaling and bring myself back in, to more awareness, to greater awareness about what's going in my body. You guys, this is diligent work. It requires commitment and focus and consistency. All right. But it will change everything. I promise.
All right you guys. So that's what I have for you guys for nutrition awareness, to great concepts that will help change the way you look at your nutrition. And literally your nutrition habits. Try these things out. Let me know what you think. Let me know what you discover. I want to know, send me an email. My email is in the show notes. You guys, if you haven't rated and reviewed my podcast yet. Can I please ask you to go over to iTunes? And give me a rating and review. I highly appreciate it. I love, love reading your reviews. I love hearing from you. I want to know how you guys are doing with this. I want to know what you're learning about nutrition so far. Have a fantastic, fantastic rest of your week. And I'll see you next week. Bye for now.
