Shadowing Practice: It’s Boring, But it Transforms Your Physique - Learn English Speaking with Video

The women I know with the best physiques aren't necessarily the ones doing the most.

They aren't the ones doing the most cardio, taking the most expensive supplements, or cutting out all the foods that they actually enjoy.

And honestly, I've noticed the same thing in my own fitness journey.

The things that changed my physique most weren't the most extreme and they weren't the most exciting, but they were the boring habits that I could actually stick to.

So today I'm going to be sharing with you the easiest and most boring six that you can implement,

because these are the ones that'll get you so much further than any greens powder detox or 30-day challenge ever could.

When I first started trying to eat healthier, I honestly had no idea what that was supposed to look like.

In my head, healthy eating was just eating chicken breast, maybe a sad salad with some soggy leaves, lettuce, cucumber.

Very wet and disgusting looking.

So I'd make what I thought would be a healthy meal, but then I would end up hungry an hour later, craving something sweet and wondering why the healthy eating wasn't working

and I was still nowhere near the progress I should have been making.

And the problem wasn't that I wasn't being healthy per se because I was eating healthy food, it's just that I had no idea how to actually structure a plate to keep me satisfied,

full and moving towards my goals.

And this is actually where our first habit comes in, where I started to break my meals down into components.

First I like to start filling my plate with fibre-rich foods

and foods high in protein because these are the foods that we tend to neglect, by we I mean me, but they're the ones that make the meal more filling and make it as effective as possible.

If we want to actually support the muscle building process and change our body composition as much as possible, we need to prioritise protein.

Not because protein is magic, but because protein supports muscle protein synthesis, helps us retain lean mass when we're dieting, and makes meals more satisfying.

A good benchmark is to eat around 25 to 30 grams of protein per meal, or around 1.4 to 2 grams per kilogram of your body weight on a daily basis,

and then spread this overall goal across your meals.

That could be a decent sized chicken breast, a few servings of 0% fat Greek yogurt, a couple eggs with some egg whites or your favourite protein of choice.

Next, we have fibre rich foods.

This is where fruits, vegetables, beans, lentils, pulses, potatoes with skin, oats and other whole grains come in.

Fibre is basically just a type of carbohydrate that your body can't fully digest.

It adds volume to your meals, supports digestion, helps you feel full and yes, Some sources also bulk up your poop,

which isn't exactly glamorous, but neither is being constipated.

So here we are.

I aim to fill around half my plate with fiber-rich foods.

This usually comes from veg, fruit, or leafy greens.

Then we have carbs and fats.

Now, despite what your mother or anyone online may have told you, carbs are not the enemy.

They're useful for energy, training performance, and actually enjoying your meal.

I'll usually add a carb source like potatoes, rice, oats, subordove bread or wraps depending on what I'm fancying.

Usually for me from a satiation point of view

and from a within meal satisfaction point of view I prefer to have a crunchy carb with my meals

because soggy carbs like noodles just do not do it for me

and I remember reading research on the effect of different textures playing a role in how satiated you feel

when you're eating and how it just makes the eating experience more whole and not just very samey and boring.

Do you know what I mean?

Fats are something that's also demonized in the media, but they're very important, especially for getting in enough calories and regulating our hormones as females.

But they are easier to overconsume.

I think that's why they get demonized so much.

Like, fat makes you fat, but not necessarily.

Only when you overconsume fat because it is higher in calories per gram in comparison to carbs or protein.

That doesn't mean they don't have a place on your plate.

You just need to be intentional.

I like to intentionally add my fats through things like eggs, avocados, nuts, seeds or olive oil, just depending on what I'm fancying and what goes with the meal.

How much of both carbohydrates

and fats I include in one specific meal does depend on whereabouts I'm eating that meal during the day.

For example, if I am eating that meal pre-workout and I'm going to work out relatively soon after I eat that meal, I'll want to have a higher carb but slightly lower fat meal

so it digests relatively quickly and doesn't sit like a brick in my stomach.

On the other hand, if it's anywhere else in the day, I will increase my fats a little bit, maybe decrease my carbs if I'm not really needing that instant energy.

And that way I can give my body what it needs without restricting myself, just supporting myself through my plate and my plate structure.

Thinking about your meals like this and not random

and chaos helps you a lot when not having to track every single gram

or every single calorie that you put in your mouth.

And it's something that you can implement not just at home when you're throwing together a meal very quickly, but when you're eating out, which is especially helpful if you go through a period where you're consistently not at home

or not on your regular eating routine, but if you know how to structure your plate from this perspective, you'll know that you're still hitting your goals and changing your body composition through the fiber,

healthy fats, protein, and your carbs without stressing over it

or having to track or restrict yourself and end up in unhealthy eating habits.

And that, my wonderful friends, is our glorious meal.

We have our fiber filling half the plate there, our protein source, our fat, carb source, and some cheese.

And she's delicious!

Not only is this meal actually enjoyable, but it keeps me full, which helps support my body composition goals.

Go, Jace.

Does every meal need to be structured like this?

No. But as long as most of your meals are structured like this and you're being mindful, it helps.

I used to think every healthy meal had to be different because apparently when you embark on your health and fitness journey, you also need to become a full-time recipe developer.

So I'd end up saving loads of healthy meals, trying a bunch of new different ingredients, and attempt to reinvent the culinary wheel every single mealtime.

But the second life got busy, eating in this way became far too much effort, and something that I did not want to think about.

And that's usually when I would fall back into my old eating habits of just picking up whatever was easiest, which wasn't necessarily the healthiest option.

And the problem here wasn't that I needed more recipes, it's that I needed to give myself fewer decisions.

And that's where habit two comes in.

Default meals.

Unless you genuinely enjoy creating new meals, trying to invent something new every single day just

because you think that's what you need to do when you eat healthy is exhausting.

Instead, using the framework that we built up from habit one, create a rotation of meals that you actually enjoy that you can rotate in the long term.

Not because food variety is bad, but because consistency is much easier when you're not starting from stage one every single time it comes to mealtime.

And research seems to support this idea of repeated meals, suggesting a link between routine eating habits and increases in weight loss.

The results were correlational, so I won't say it's revolutionary, but having some sort of routine eating habit, so it takes the guessing out of what you're eating,

helps a lot when it comes to changing your body composition in the long term.

For me personally, this would be my yoghurt bowls, my egg white oats, my picky plates, which I am currently making another one tonight.

For dinner, even though I did have one for lunch, but do you know what?

It's a default meal for a reason.

The components of each meal

or each default meal typically do change from day to day

just to make sure I'm getting in enough variety in my diet

and I'm hitting a variety of micronutrients on a daily

and a weekly basis

but really the default meals kind of stick the same until I'm sick of them

and then I'll create new default meals and just rinse and repeat.

When I first started my fitness journey I was a full-time uni student

and because I was a full-time uni student with goals to hit I decided

that in order to stay consistent with my eating

that I was going to start meal prepping full meals every Sunday to last me the entire week.

And, shockingly, it didn't take very long before I started to loathe not only Sundays, which was mainly my only day off,

but also Monday to Friday when I had to eat the same disgusting meal prepped meals

that I had made the week before.

It didn't make me eat healthier or stay consistent on my meal plan.

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In fact, it made me go wildly off my meal plan

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and then feel bad because I wasn't sticking to my meal prep or my meal plan, when in reality it wasn't necessarily me, it was just the system wasn't working for me.

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And this is where our third habit comes in.

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Component prep.

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The biggest barrier to eating healthy isn't typically the food itself.

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It's having the time, the energy and the ingredients to actually make the healthy food.

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And this ties in perfectly with habits one and two.

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Habit one gave us the components are proteins, fibre, healthy fats and carbs, whereas habit two gave us default meals.

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And now habit three makes those default meals even easier.

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Oh my god, it's like Tetris in there.

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Because instead of cooking from scratch every single time, you now have the slowest components done and ready to go.

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So instead of prepping full meals and making yourself eat those full meals consistently throughout the week, we'll prep our components, our individual parts of the meals,

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so we can just throw them together into a meal at any point during the week.

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So you'll cook your protein source, you'll wash and you'll chop your fruit and veg, you'll have fats and easy carbs ready and on hand to put into your meals.

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That way you're technically saving time because you're using a lot of the same ingredients, a lot of the same components, but you're pulling them together into meals in different ways during

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the week to trick your brain just enough into thinking you're eating different things, even though they're technically the same.

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Basic, boring chicken and rice and veg can become a chicken rice bowl, can become a burrito, can become a quesadilla,

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can become anything your brain can conjure that's slightly different than the day before.

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It's not necessarily more effort because the slowest parts are already done, but it gives you more flexibility during the week.

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It makes your default meals easier to build

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and it gives you goal supportive options that are ready in the fridge when you're busy when you're tired,

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when you're stressed, when you don't have the energy to think about building a meal from scratch

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and you simply do not want to eat the same stinky Tupperware, Tupperware, Tupperware, Tupperware, Tupperware, chicken and rice that you've eaten every single day for the past week.

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When I first started trying to eat healthier, doing the food shop used to be my worst nightmare.

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I would wander off into that shop with no list, no idea what I was buying, buy a load of things that I thought looked healthy

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and just hope and pray they somehow made themselves into healthy meals during the week.

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But what would actually happen is I would come home having spent far too much money, a bunch of random ingredients and somehow no meals for the week which was very impressive.

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But the problem wasn't that I wasn't buying healthy foods, I absolutely was, but I was just buying ingredients that didn't actually work together to make meals.

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And this is where habit four comes in, keeping the same or very similar weekly food shop.

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Your weekly food shop essentially just predetermines what your meals are going to be during the week.

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Research on grocery lists suggests that they work so well because they act as a memory aid.

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They reduce impulse buying and make your choices less random.

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Now I honestly keep my food shops as similar as humanly possible.

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In habit one we talked a lot about structuring our plates around our protein, our fiber, our carbs, and our fat sources.

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So when we go into the food shop we just use that structure to buy our components.

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Having the list itself has also been linked to better diet quality, more variety in your diet, and lower rates of obesity.

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Not because writing chicken and mince on your shopping list automatically makes you a wellness queen, although it kind of does.

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But because, like I mentioned before, having this list and a plan makes it much easier to turn what you buy into structured meals.

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So I'll give myself a rough plan each week, write down a few sources for each of our categories and that's it.

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Each week is just restock, rinse and repeat.

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The goal isn't to have the most supermarket discipline known to man because believe me, I still go in there and I buy things

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that I probably shouldn't be buying and it is a little bit of a waste of money.

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But it's to have this plan in place to set you up for success as much as possible

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and to fill your house with these options that make it easier to move closer to your goals.

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Because your environment shapes your food choices, if the food that's gonna push you towards your goals is already in your house, it's much easier to stick to healthy eating in the long term,

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which in turn influences our body composition.

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For a long time, I thought being full was simply a product of how much food

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or how much volume I had on my plate.

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So inevitably, after I finished a meal and if I was still hungry, I would go up for seconds.

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15 minutes after going up for seconds, however, I would end up uncomfortably full.

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And then I would sit there

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and I would wonder how I had gone from still hungry

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to absolutely stuffed in such a short period of time without necessarily eating a large quantity of food.

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And then I came to the realisation, maybe it's not necessarily that I'm still hungry, but maybe I'm just eating my food so fast

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that I haven't given myself or my body a second to recognise that I'm actually full.

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And this is where habit five comes in.

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Eating slowly enough to notice your fullness.

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Unfortunately for me, growing up in a household with two older brothers, it was ingrained in me as a habit to eat as quickly as possible.

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Also, unfortunately for me, this was working directly against any physique goal that I had.

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When you eat, your stomach

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and your gut send fullness signals to your brain through things

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like your stomach stretch with the amount of volume of the food

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that you're eating and also the hunger hormones I mentioned earlier.

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But those signals are not instant.

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So if you eat your meal as fast as possible, say within five minutes, it's very easy for you to continue to eat

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and accidentally overeat because your brain hasn't yet registered that your gut is full.

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Research suggests that eating slower at a meal can reduce the overall meal consumption

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and also that faster eating is related to higher body weight.

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Now, I'm not trying to say that eating slowly magically burns fat off your body because it absolutely doesn't, but eating slowly and being more mindful around the quantity of food

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that you're eating does help when regulating your hunger and the amount of food you're consuming overall.

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Eating slowly also helps to improve your digestion because if you think about it, if you're eating as quickly as possible, you're not really chewing your food properly,

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you're swallowing big chunks of food and the digestive process starts in your mouth.

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So if you don't give your mouth the opportunity to start that digestive process, then you're leaving it all to the stomach.

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So it's making the stomach work harder

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and not have to break down the food as much

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or exert as much effort or experience as much bloating

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or gas than if you were to just chew your food properly in your mouth and take your time.

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I'm not saying that every single mealtime needs to be the most zen moment known to man, that you need to take your deep breaths, take a bite, put the fork down,

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chew incessantly, and then repeat the process.

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I'm just saying mindfully chew your food and give your body enough time to register what it's actually eaten.

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I used to think that if I bought healthy food, then I would obviously eat healthy food, which was very cute, very optimistic,

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and very deeply incorrect of me.

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Because there's a very big difference between buying fruit and veg

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and having them somewhere in the house and buying fruit and veg and having them ready to eat when you're hungry.

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If the healthy option is hidden at the back of your fridge and the unhealthy option, the snack is right there in front of you, we all know what you're going to pick.

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Well, I know what I'm going to pick.

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The problem was I hadn't made those choices easy enough to carry out repeatedly.

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These little snack cucumbers are.. oh.

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And this is where habit six comes in.

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Making healthy eating the most convenient option.

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I started to mention this earlier but the most helpful thing you can do

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when you're on your fitness journey is have components

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or foods ready in the fridge or the cupboard or wherever that are easy and that support your goals.

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Unfortunately it's not enough to just buy protein, fruit or veg if they sit somewhere far away,

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unprepped, uncooked, unwashed because if they're harder to consume you're probably not going to consume them

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and you're going to go for the easiest option.

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And this isn't because you're lazy necessarily, it's because you're hungry and you're tired

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and you have limited rational ability to think through what you're about to do because we're human, unfortunately.

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And this is why the environment that you create for yourself matters so much when it comes to changing your physique.

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Research on food environments shows what's available and visible influences not only what we eat, but how much we choose to eat.

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So instead of relying on motivation or discipline to guide your choices every single time you open the fridge or the cupboard.

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We want to make sure these things

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that are promoting the movement towards our goals are right there in front of us

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so we don't even need to think about it.

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Those are the easiest options.

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So what I like to do is I wash

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and I chop my fruit and my veggies

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or my protein sources like I mentioned before on component prep and I just leave that at the front of the fridge.

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I leave that out on the counter.

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This way if you are going into the fridge and you're a little bit snacky or you're looking for something to eat.

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This is the first thing you lay your little eyes on.

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So it makes it much more likely that this is what you're going to eat.

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Now that's not to say that you are going to pick this option every single time, but when it's directly in front of you, it makes it much more likely that this is the choice you're going to make.

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And that's the whole point.

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We want to make eating healthy less effort.

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Not absolutely perfect at all times, but when it's less effort and there's no friction there, it makes it much easier to make the healthier choice.

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And that's it six of the most boring habits that actually work.

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Not because they're flashy or because they are the ones that go viral on TikTok, but because they're easy and repeatable.

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And that's the whole point, your physique changes when you do the right basic things consistently.

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Not when you have one perfect week followed by three weeks of unsustainable habits.

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But nutrition is only one part when it comes to changing your body.

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If you truly want to transform your physique, you also need to train in a way that actually changes your body

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because nutrition and fueling your body is great

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but it also needs something to adapt to and this is where a proper program or a proper training program actually matters.

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A lot of women don't fail because they're not trying and they're not putting in the effort.

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They fail because they're guessing.

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They choose weights that aren't challenging enough, don't progress them properly so they end up wasting months doing workouts

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that they thought were productive but were actually leading them in the wrong direction the entire time.

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If that sounds like you and you want a workout routine that you can rely on that actually builds muscle,

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I'll leave a video on the screen now to the workout routine I use that is lazy girl approved, getting you in and out of the gym in under an hour.

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Let me know down below if you guys enjoyed today's video

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and while you're down there don't forget to like and subscribe to join us pookies.

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Hopefully I will catch you guys in my next one.

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Oh I dropped a leg on the...

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Bye.

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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección

Esta lección de conversación de nivel B2 se basa en el vídeo “It’s Boring, But it Transforms Your Physique”. Las palabras que más se repiten: meal, eating, healthy, habit, eat. Este vídeo tiene 234 frases y 3795 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 17:51. El hablante habla rápido, unas 213 palabras por minuto, así que espera sonidos enlazados y reducidos. Solo el 80 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés, por lo que el vocabulario es exigente.

Vocabulario clave de este vídeo

Las 15 palabras más avanzadas del vídeo, con su pronunciación y significado:

Palabra	Pronunciación	Significado
physique sustantivo		físico
ingredient sustantivo	/ɪnˈɡɹiːdi.ənt/	ingrediente, excipiente
bore verbo	/boɹ/	aburrir
carbohydrate sustantivo	/kɑɹboʊˈhaɪdɹeɪt/	carbohidrato, hidrato de carbono
preposition sustantivo	/ˌpɹɛpəˈzɪʃən/	preposición
chew verbo	/tʃuː/	masticar, mascar
fibre sustantivo	/ˈfaɪ.bə(ɹ)/	fibra, brenca
gram sustantivo	/ˈɡɹæm/	gramo
oat sustantivo	/ˈəʊt/	avena
calorie sustantivo	/ˈkæləɹi/	caloría
consume verbo	/kənˈsum/	consumir
workout sustantivo	/ˈwɝk.aʊ̯t/	entrenamiento
cupboard sustantivo	/ˈkʌb.əd/	armario, vitrina
demonize verbo	/ˈdiːmənaɪz/	demonizar
digestion sustantivo	/daɪˈd͡ʒɛst͡ʃən/	digestión

Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar

Palabra	Pronunciación	Significado
end up verbo		terminar, ir a parar
break down verbo		descomponerse, averiarse
carry out verbo	/ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/	llevar a cabo, llevar al cabo
cut out verbo		dejar de, dejar
go through verbo		atravesar
pick up verbo		coger, asir
think through verbo		cavilar
write down verbo		apuntar, anotar

Gramática en este vídeo

Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:

Estructura	En el vídeo
Oraciones condicionales if + oración, will/would + verbo — una condición y su resultado	if I was still hungry, I would go
“Used to” used to + verbo — un hábito o estado pasado que ya no es cierto	used to think · used to be
Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace	being constipated · be structured · are structured
Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahora	I've noticed · you've eaten · has also been linked

Pronunciación a tener en cuenta

El hablante usa 119 contracciones y formas reducidas, como you're, I'm, they're. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.

Los sonidos de “th”: unhealthy /ʌnˈhɛl.θi/, synthesis /ˈsɪnθəsɪs/
Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: preposition /ˌpɹɛpəˈzɪʃən/, nutrition /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ən/, benchmark /ˈbɛn(t)ʃmɑːk/, friction /ˈfɹɪkʃən/, intentional /ɪnˈtɛnʃənəl/
Palabras largas — cuida el acento: ingredient /ɪnˈɡɹiːdi.ənt/, carbohydrate /kɑɹboʊˈhaɪdɹeɪt/, preposition /ˌpɹɛpəˈzɪʃən/, technically /ˈtɛk.nɪˌkəl.i/, intentional /ɪnˈtɛnʃənəl/

Sonidos difíciles para hispanohablantes:

s + consonante al inicio — sin añadir una “e” delante: snack /snæk/, scratch /skɹæt͡ʃ/
/v/ — no es /b/: los dientes tocan el labio inferior: digestive /daɪˈdʒɛstɪv/, inevitably /ɪˈnɛvɪtəbli/, vegetable /ˈvɛd͡ʒ.tə.bəl/, supportive /səˈpɔɹtɪv/, viral /ˈvaɪɹəl/
/z/ — sonora, no /s/: preposition /ˌpɹɛpəˈzɪʃən/, demonize /ˈdiːmənaɪz/, exhaust /ɪɡˈzɔst/

Cómo practicar con este vídeo

Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como physique, ingredient, bore.

¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?

Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.

Técnica de shadowing: lee la guía completa paso a paso →

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