599 - Summer Dieting Tips, featuring a Health and Wellbeing Coach

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Modern Mindset, the show that picks the brains of the world's leading minds to help you unlock yours. Decoding the beliefs and strategies of global experts to give you an updated mindset to make the most of modern life.

**Rory McGowan** (0:21)
This is Modern Mindset, the show that picks the brains of the world's leading minds to help you unlock yours. My name is Rory McGowan, and today I'm joined by a health and wellness coach to talk about the trends behind summer dieting ahead of the change in season. How do our diets change in the summer months and what professional advice is there to help us continue to eat well through the season?
I'm joined by Sarah Stannard. Sarah, it's lovely to have you on.

**Sarah Stannard** (0:47)
Lovely to meet you, Rory. It's great to be here.

**Rory McGowan** (0:50)
Well, thank you very much, Sarah. Yeah, I'm really intrigued because you do this for a living. This is very much your day to day.
How many of us are still doing these kind of summer diets in a world that I'd like to think is beginning to get a bit more body positive?

**Sarah Stannard** (1:07)
Yeah, I agree. It should be a bit more body positive, but unfortunately, people still are dieting and especially around the summer months.
More women than men, it seems. I guess we have events we're going to, we want to be holiday ready. So yeah, the pressure is on and people are dieting.

**Rory McGowan** (1:27)
Do we know how many people are still dieting out there, Sarah? Sadly, it doesn't surprise me that it is more women than men, but do we know kind of what the numbers are looking like there?

**Sarah Stannard** (1:40)
Yeah, there was a recent study carried out by Yazio, and it's around 40% of people do go into diet mode at this time of year.

**Rory McGowan** (1:49)
Now, you're a health and wellness coach. Correct me if I'm wrong, because this is the time of year where the kind of efforts of dieting should be paying off. No, like, if you really want to kind of get ready for the summer, if you want to be beach body ready or whatever it is, how much of a difference does dieting make now, if people started now, if people are thinking about it now?
You know, because again, we're like three weeks away from summer from the recording.

**Sarah Stannard** (2:18)
Yeah, we are. It's not long now, but actually you can do quite a lot in three or four weeks really.
Drop a few pounds. I think there's different times of the year that we focus on our weight around the new year. People have all the new year's resolutions. And then again, during the summer time, there's definitely swaps that people can make, which are small swaps that make a big difference. This recent report by Yazio has pointed out that this time of year, we have a lot of fizzy drinks, we have a lot of iced lattes, that sort of thing, summer drinks.
And these are the sort of hidden calories. They don't really fill us up, they're easy to kind of carry on drinking. If we're at a party or a barbecue or an event, then we're drinking, drinking, drinking away, maybe fizzy stuff or sugary things. And it's just calories that we're not going to burn off. They're just additional calories. So that's one swap that we can make. It's super simple.

**Rory McGowan** (3:12)
And I think it's so interesting, like because it's not something that I think about mainly. And I think a lot of people think about is how much our diets change over the seasons, right? How much of that kind of different food that we're eating. So I mean, people will obviously be having barbecues, as you say, that's going to involve more fizzy drinks. Maybe you're going to the pub more often to sit in a beer garden, for example. How healthy are like, I don't know, barbecue meats, for example, how healthy are these kind of traditional summer foods that we know and love?

**Sarah Stannard** (3:47)
Yeah, with barbecues and things, there's a lot of information in this study that's come up, actually.
It's a little bit of a situation where you are perhaps not really looking at your portion control. That's the first thing, because you might go back after back, you know, plate after plate, which is the first thing. Secondly, there's a lot of hidden sugars. So if you're having things like a burger, the ketchup, the sauces, mayonaise, barbecue sauce, all of that is really laid in with sugar. And as the report states, not really understanding that, sort of most people in the study have said, actually, they didn't realize they have quite so much sugar in ketchup, and they're having quite a lot of that.