Jonathan Steedman (00:01.154)

Welcome back food groupies. Today I'm going to talk about making your bad days better. This is a phrase you may have heard me use. It's a phrase we talk about all the time in the group. And it's because I think it is one of the most underrated ways to improve your nutrition and to improve your health and to increase the likelihood of you achieving your goals and maintaining your goals. Because we are really, really good at trying to make our good days better, right? Trying to get more perfect.

And that is the least efficient way to improve at something, right? Think about as a bit of an example, you have an Olympic sprinter who trains insanely hard for four years between Olympics and they might increase their speed by half a second to a second, right? Because they are pretty perfect and they're trying to get perfect up. Now, of course for them, that is the smart move. That's the right thing for them.

do it's what they need to do but compared to say someone like me if I trained even a little bit for three months I could probably take like three or four five seconds off my sprint time because a perfect sprinter trying to get perfect up versus a pretty crappy sprinter trying to get slightly less crappy you can see that the capacity for

and capacity for growth is so much bigger for me and for way less effort, right? And so what does that mean for your nutrition? Now I'm gonna talk numbers. Hopefully listening to numbers doesn't make you fall asleep, but I really, really, really wanna drive this point home because again, so many people focus on, yeah, Tuesday I have a diet coke and that's probably why, but the rest of their day is pretty on point with their nutrition.

And then I'm like, okay, cool. Talk me through the weekend. What changes on the weekend? And they're like, I don't want to talk about it. Right? So we're so focused on that one little bit. Or I have a roll of chocolate for dessert during the week. That's probably why I'm not hitting my goals. And then again, it's like, okay, what happens on the weekend? And it's just chaos. Now I've already done podcasts on your weekend and not needing to look like you're weak. Like that's not what I'm trying to get you to do. Your weekend can still look different, but if we can improve the nutrition of it,

Jonathan Steedman (02:24.46)

or we can at least make your quote unquote bad days. And I don't mean bad days in that you're eating naughty foods. I mean days of like poor fueling, right? Where you're just not really taking care of your body. You you're under eating veggies, you're under eating protein, you're, you know, maybe you don't have decent meal timing. So you're really long time without eating, getting hungry, and then massively smashing other food and feeling awful afterwards because you've overeaten. Like that to me is a quote unquote bad day. I don't mean a day where you've had takeout after.

also fueling yourself well during the day or a day where you've decided to have some ice cream and some popcorn at the movies, as well as having a normal breakfast, lunch and dinner, right? That to me is still a great day because I think you've ticked the health and the fueling boxes and then you've added some joy on top, which is also awesome, right? So I'm not talking about that at all. The example I thought of was let's say that Monday through Thursday, you're grading yourself eight out of 10 and then maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you're like,

two out of 10, right? So if I work really, really hard to get from eight out of 10 to nine out of 10 on those days, because that's again what everyone wants to do, they want to focus on making their good weekdays even slightly better and neglect the weekend days, going from eight to nine, four days a week gets me four points. If I can go from two to five on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, so leaving the weekdays at 80 % or eight out of 10 and getting my

Friday, Saturday, Sunday from two out of 10 to five out of 10. So still not like crazy on point. That's nine points. That is literally double the improvement that you would see by increasing your Monday to Thursday by one point each. So I hope that made sense. I'm definitely going to do a graphic on this to kind of drive the point home. But again, if you focus on making your Monday to Thursday, your regular programmed days,

even more perfect though to go from eight out of 10 to nine out of 10 or nine out of 10 to 10 out of 10, you're going to gain like an extra 30, about three or four points in the scheme of the week. Whereas if you can get your weekends from a two or three out of 10 to a five or a six out of 10, you're gaining another nine points over double the improvement that you would have achieved if you'd focused on your weekdays. So again, making your bad days better quote unquote.

Jonathan Steedman (04:49.878)

having some better structure around your meals over the weekend and still including the fun stuff on top of it, but not dropping the well-portioned, well-fueled meals is going to significantly improve your overall health or progress, probably just how you feel without significantly impacting your enjoyment over the weekend. So please stop worrying about making your good days gooder. Let's get your bad days better.

All right, chat to you next time.