Rate of Perceived Exertion and Your Nutrition Goals [Ep. 61]

This is the Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well podcast. I'm Lisa Salsbury, and this is episode 61 rate of perceived exertion and your nutrition goals Welcome to Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well; the podcast for women who want to lose weight, but are tired of counting and calculating all the food. I'm your host, Lisa Salsbury. I'm a certified health and weight loss coach and life coach, and most importantly a recovered chronic dieter. I'll teach you to figure out why you are eating when you aren't hungry, instead of worrying so much about what you are eating. Hi everyone. I'm here with you today with a solo episode this week. So a couple of weeks ago, I moved my daughter into her college dorm. So that was all of those, you know, bittersweet kind of emotion, so fun for her. But anyway, I was in another state, far away from home, away from my routine. So. I decided to grab just a little day pass at a local fitness center in order to just get a workout in because there was, you know, a little bit of stress with all of the, all the college things and exercise does help me. Kind of relieve some of that stress. So I went to a local fitness center and took a spin class and I noticed on the wall, they had one of those posters. With the rate of perceived exertion. So this is a scale it's often abbreviated R P E. And this is a scale that you can use to measure you, the exertion you are creating, or, you know, measure your exertion. Without using a heart rate monitor. So instead of just saying, okay, we want to be at 80% of our heart rate, 80% of your max. The instructor might say, okay, I want you to be working at a four to six, or I want you to be working at a nine. So I it's kind of intriguing to me because of course, as you know, I do not use calories as a measure of my food intake, but rather I use a hunger scale. And so I was. Thinking about this rate of perceived exertion as a measure for something that, that we do have numbers for, we could just use our heart rate monitor, but this is a pretty common tool. So I'm going to go over it a little bit with you levels, go from one to 10, with 10 being the hardest. So one is considered very light activity. That's its title. Hardly any exertion, but more than sleeping. Slow walk, et cetera. Then it goes two to three that's light activity feels like you can maintain for hours easy to breathe and carry a conversation. And I'm just reading you what the chart says. So if you're familiar with this, it's going to sound very familiar. Okay. The next one is considered moderate activity and this is between four and six. So this is three numbers in that center section of the one to 10 scale. So four to six is moderate activity. Breathing heavily can hold a short conversation, still somewhat comfortable, but becoming noticeably more challenging. I really want you to remember that one. It's really good. Okay. Seven to eight vigorous activity. Borderline uncomfortable. Short of breath can speak a sentence. Nine is very hard activity. Very difficult to maintain exercise. Intensity can barely breathe and speak. Only a few words. And number 10 is the max effort activity feels almost impossible to keep going completely out of breath, unable to talk. Cannot maintain for more than a very short time. Okay. So chart really helps you to measure your physical exertion. But I got to thinking about the effort that it takes to make changes in your life. How do we measure that effort? And it's funny when you start thinking about something, you start seeing it all over the place. Just like when you're thinking about buying a new particular car, then those are the only cars you see on the road. Right? So shortly after I saw this chart and started mulling over this perceived effort rate of perceived effort, I was listening to the human lab podcast. And it was an episode called goals, toolkit how to set and achieve your goals. He was talking about the effort required to achieve a goal. I listened to it again and took down what he said. So this is basically going to be a quote, right? From that podcast. He said, how lofty your goal is, will impact how likely you are to achieve it. Most people believe that the easier your goal is the more likely you are to achieve it. But the opposite is shown to be true. If a goal is too easy to achieve it, doesn't recruit sufficient amounts of the arousal network that involves the amygdala and a bunch of other brain structures that get people into the necessary actions to continually pursue that goal. This perhaps should not be surprising in order to learn something. We have to shift the nervous system into states that are somewhat uncomfortable. These should be safely uncomfortable states, but they should be uncomfortable. Any kind of successful learning or goal pursuit is going to involve errors. It's going to involve failures. It's going to involve frustration. It's going to involve anxiety. All of those states of mind and body shift the brain into modes of neuro-plasticity. They give it the ability to change. And that should make perfect sense because if you can complete what you want easily, there's absolutely no reason for the neural circuitry to shift in any way. Why would it. Rather those states have discomfort, frustration, anxiety, et cetera, represent shifts in neurochemical states that literally opened the opportunity. For neuroplasticity to occur. So fascinating. Right? This is so fascinating to me because you can liken this directly to exerting effort on the body and the muscular system or cardiovascular system to induce. Change. We have to work our bodies at some level of discomfort. To create change. So if we go back to that RPE chart, if you're working at a one very light activity or two to three light activity, remember that's something you can maintain four hours, you are unlikely to be creating any real change in the muscular system or the cardiovascular system. It's not laying on the couch, but it's also not really working hard. We want to be in that four to six moderate activity at least. To start seeing some changes in the body. But. This four to six moderate activity is also described as Still somewhat comfortable, but becoming noticeably more challenging. If you work at that four to six level every day for several weeks. this level of activity that created this challenge in the beginning is going to start feeling like light activity like that two to three range. So if we shift this to talking about our eating habits, this is where I think it gets really interesting is to use. This rate of perceived exertion. To achieve our goals in changing our eating habits. And of course this could be with any goal that you have, you don't have to just confine it to our eating habits. It's just that. Uh, for me, the most common goal that my clients come to me with is to change the way they are eating in some way, whether that's to eat less because they're tired of constantly feeling overly full or to change the types of foods they are eating. Or they want to have a healthy relationship to food. So they. Are not eating in order to comfort their emotions on a consistent basis. Right. Okay. let's just say the goal is to stop overeating just because that is a simple phrase that encompasses all these types of eating behaviors that you might want to create. So maybe you're thinking I'd like to eat less sugar, or I'd like to go to bed feeling light and not bloated and distended in my stomach or. I want to sleep better. And that means not going to bed with a lot of food in my stomach, because that disturbs my sleep. Maybe you want to stop eating at the end of the day to unwind or decompress as a reward. So all of that, we could just sum up with the idea that we want to stop overeating. Okay. So if your goal then is to not over eat. During breakfast on Thursday morning. That's feeling like a one on the rate of perceived exertion, right? That's very light activity. There's hardly any exertion to do that. Like the definition, it's more than sleeping. But it's just a slow walk. So if you decide, okay, I'm not going to overeat all breakfasts and lunches this week. You're maybe feeling like maybe you're at a three now, typically for my clients, breakfast and lunch, aren't really they're challenging meals. I even have one client last week that she told me she doesn't write down breakfast anymore because she says she's got it on lock. Like, it's so easy for her. It's probably less than a one effort because it's on autopilot. So including breakfast and lunch in this goal. Maybe that's bringing it up to a three. Effort. But if we are needing to recruit that arousal network to work at a rate that feels challenging enough to be worth the effort. We probably want to be working at this goal at a rate of perceived exertion of four to six. Remember how I told you when I was reading the chart, like. Commit this part to memory this moderate activity. I'm going to read you the definition of this again. And of course, this again is for your physical exertion. Breathing heavily can hold a short conversation. Still somewhat comfortable, but becoming more challenging. This is where we want to kind of aim to work at our goal. What is going to feel like that amount of effort it's still somewhat comfortable, meaning it's sustainable for a very long while. But it's going to be challenging enough to incur some amount of neuro-plasticity change. Okay. Now, if we keep going, we get into what I kind of think of as short term diets and bootcamp type efforts. So have you ever done one of those like six week boot camps or diets that are so difficult? You can only do it for a few weeks. These are the type that make you cut out several of your favorite foods or entire food groups. You have to research menus and make all your own food from scratch three or four times a day. You have to shop for special ingredients and make special combinations of food. Does this sound familiar? Is this just me? I may or may not be speaking from experience here. Of course I am. Anyway, this is like, That nine level of hard, very hard activity. It's very difficult to maintain. You can barely breathe or think about anything else. Can you get a sense of what I mean by this rate of perceived exertion? When you're thinking about the way we're approaching the changing or the way we're eating. You may have even tried to change your habits at a full 10 max effort activity feels almost impossible to keep going and you can't maintain it for more than a very short time. These types of monumental efforts on your goals can have some impact on changing your brain. But if you're anything like me, the change that's made on my brain is like, ah, never do that again. It's not maintainable for long enough to create any real meaningful lifestyle change. I pretty consistently coach on the difference between diets. And lifestyle changes. I think the rate of perceived exertion scale could be applied here to determine what you are doing. If your RPE feels like above a moderate activity above a five or a six, you are most likely on a short-term diet that is not sustainable for any length of time. If you are attempting, if what you are attempting is feeling challenging enough to keep your brain engaged and interested. But also doable enough to maintain for the long run. You are most likely creating lifestyle changes. You are probably working somewhere in that four to six range of rate of perceived exertion, depending on the day, depending even maybe on the meal, like breakfast is so easy, maybe for you. It's easier on the effort, but it might be more challenging to listen to your physical fullness cues at dinner. It is okay to be challenged. It's okay. For things to be difficult. We want to feel these things to stay engaged with the goal. but it must feel doable. So in practice for this week, you could experiment with your food journal. If you are planning your meals ahead for the day, you could look at your plan and ask yourself what is the effort on the RPE scale that this plan will take for me today. If it's a walk in the park, you may want to challenge yourself a bit more. If it looks like it's going to be a nine effort, then you likely need to change it up and scale back a little. You also want to take into account your day. And other stressors that you're going to have if you were working on a weight loss school, but today you also have a parent teacher conference, a work presentation, and you need to get supplies to pack lunches for tomorrow because you're completely out of bread, but your food plan looks like it's a two on the RPE. That's perfect. If you already have a really light day stress-wise you could challenge yourself a little more on the weight loss goal part. Anytime you're adding something in though. Say maybe you want to start incorporating new vegetables into your routine. Purchasing a juicer and making a fresh green juice every morning would run me like an eight or a nine on the RPE scale. So that's something I'm unlikely to stick with for very long. But deciding I'm going to try one new vegetable. Each time I go to the grocery store and figure out how to prepare it and eat it. That's more like a five on my RPE that I can do. And to be honest, I did that and now I eat several more types of vegetables than I used to before running that experiment. it was just challenging enough that I stuck with it until I felt like I had tried all the new veggies I could. And I had incorporated several into our regular rotation. The juicer is still in the cabinet. It gets pulled out occasionally, but way less often than I eat Brussels sprouts. So give yourself a break from the nine or 10, very hard and max effort this week. But also keep up the challenge enough to stay interested and create that change. You're looking for. Let me know how this goes for you. If you tend to set easy goals that you can't stay motivated or interested in, or more likely, you're probably setting unrealistically difficult goals. Let me help schedule a free strategy session. With me and see if coaching is the missing piece of your weight loss puzzle link for that, of course, is in the show notes. Have a great week. And thanks for listening to the Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well podcast.