Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Carbs Spike Your Insulin (But That's IDEAL for Muscle Growth) | Ep 437

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Carbs Spike Your Insulin (But That's IDEAL for Muscle Growth) | Ep 437 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: If you've been told that carbs spike insulin, and insulin makes you fat, and you've been restricting carbs because of it, even though you're resistance training and trying to build muscle, this episode is going to change how you think about food.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: Today I'm gonna show you why insulin spikes, spikes in blood sugar, are not the problem, and why, if you're lifting weights, they're actually part of the solution.
• 0:22
  Philip Pape: You'll learn why chronic dieters get this wrong at the metabolic level, why muscle changes what insulin does with your food, and a post-training carb strategy that can improve your recovery within just one day.
• 0:35
  Philip Pape: Carbs spike blood sugar, increase your insulin, that those occur and that they automatically cause fat gain is still one of the most persistent myths in fitness.
• 1:13
  Philip Pape: And it's costing a lot of people, a lot of people, especially those over 40, a lot of women I talked to, peri postmenopause, it's costing you a lot of real progress, healthy living, thriving, longevity, all the things that you're trying to seek by doing it, and you're just cutting into those benefits because we can benefit tremendously from carbs depending on the lifestyle.
• 1:36
  Philip Pape: And the lifestyle that you were talking about is the one that we espouse here in Wits and Weights.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: Now, you've probably heard that keeping insulin low is the key to staying lean.
• 1:45
  Philip Pape: And maybe you've tried low carb, maybe you've tried keto, maybe you're still restricting carbs, even while resistance training three or four days a week, and you wonder why you don't have the energy or your performance feels flat or you're not building muscle or recovery is taking longer.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: The reality is that insulin is not a fat storage hormone.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: Let me repeat that.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: Insulin is not a fat storage hormone, it is a nutrient partitioning hormone.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: And what that means for you and for your body composition and for your muscle building depends entirely on ta-da context.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: Context, guys, what is so sorely missing from short form reels on Instagram.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: Context.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: Your training, your muscle mass, your energy balance, your goals, your lifestyle.
• 2:31
  Philip Pape: When these variables are aligned, then insulin becomes an ally.
• 2:34
  Philip Pape: Now, I shouldn't have to say that any hormone in your body becomes an ally because we are it's a natural part of our human existence.
• 2:41
  Philip Pape: And if we are all living our natural human lives as we should, as opposed to in today's, you know, Western world, with the food supply we have and with the sedentary lifestyle and lack of any form of hard work or heavy lifting, then you know the discussion would go away.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: But we need to understand how to leverage our bodies here and support our muscle development and our energy and our recovery and all of the things that carbs are great for that do not inherently drive fat gain.
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: Now, I want you to also stick around to the end of this episode because I'm going to tie this all together into a post-workout carb timing strategy that I think can noticeably improve your next day's training performance.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: One of the most common problems I see with clients, I'm going to share it with you.
• 3:32
  Philip Pape: Takes about 60 seconds to explain, and then you can start using it after your very next training session.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: But really, let's get into the myth and why it persists.
• 3:42
  Philip Pape: Why is this misconception about carbs and insulin and fat gain so sticky, right?
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: That's the word sticky.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: I don't think people are scared of insulin itself.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: Most people don't even use the word necessarily in these discussions.
• 3:54
  Philip Pape: They're scared of losing control and gaining weight, and they've never been able to successfully lose weight or lose fat.
• 4:01
  Philip Pape: And maybe cutting carbs has worked for them, and maybe the fitness industry has given them a really convenient villain that is very convincing in terms of how it is portrayed.
• 4:11
  Philip Pape: Here's what I hear in the industry, and I many of these things I believe them myself, and I know now not to be true.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: Insulin spikes automatically cause fat storage.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: Wrong.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: Carbs shut off fat burning.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: Kind of wrong.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: And it's wrong and right for the reasons that we need to understand.
• 4:29
  Philip Pape: Low insulin equals better body composition.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: Carbs are fine for athletes, but not for regular people.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: There's some truth there too.
• 4:37
  Philip Pape: So again, we're gonna get into nuance.
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: Notice I didn't just shut all these down.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: There's some truths in these, but you have to understand what they mean and context.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: And I think these beliefs persist because of some things that stick out at me as I was reviewing why, right?
• 4:53
  Philip Pape: First, there's this framing around metabolic health, metabolism, type 2 diabetes, diseases of aging, all of that that has bled into the general advice and insulin resistance.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: And most people have heard the term insulin resistance or insulin sensitivity, but usually we're talking about the negative side.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: And in a clinical setting, this insulin resistance is generally correlated with really bad things.
• 5:17
  Philip Pape: You know, high insulin is correlated with really bad things, but we're looking at people who have chronic metabolic dysfunction rather than necessarily the acute post-meal response in healthy people.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: And I've had several discussions with folks on this, and most notably, Ben Ziel came on.
• 5:35
  Philip Pape: He's a type 1 diabetic, and he all but said, look, if you don't have type 1 diabetes, or if you don't have diabetes, you don't have to worry about this stuff if you're lifting weights and you're eating well and you're active, right?
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: It's not a problem.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: So again, we have to look at what population is being studied when we look at some of this data.
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: Second, the keto and low carb narratives have just so ridiculously oversimplified the role of insulin and treat it as a villain, kind of like people treat cortisol as a villain or no, not or that those are the two that come to mind.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: I'm not thinking of another one off the top of my head.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: But those two people treat as these like boogeymen that we have to just crush and put in their place.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: So that's the second one.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: Keto, low carb, that whole narrative.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: The third thing is that people conflate or confuse acute insulin spikes, right?
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: These are the normal, transient, necessary spikes of insulin that are short-term, like when you eat food and particularly carbs, with, and they conflate that with chronic versions of this, which is called hyperinsulinemia.
• 6:36
  Philip Pape: And that's a different thing entirely when you have chronic spikes in insulin, which again tie to insulin sensitivity and eventually diabetes.
• 6:43
  Philip Pape: And we're going to come back to that distinction because it is critical.
• 6:46
  Philip Pape: And then fourth, fat storage gets blamed on insulin or hormones or carbs or whatever, instead of the context those hormones operate in.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: And that's because people want to scape goat.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: They want to scape goat that maybe relieves them of their responsibility to make better choices in their life.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: Let's just put it that way.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: And I'm not saying it's just about calories in, calories out, even though mathematically it is.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: There's a lot of upstream choices and influences on those choices, including, yes, genetics, appetite, hormones, et cetera, et cetera.
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: But we can't look at it in a vacuum.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: We can't look at it in a vacuum and say, well, so always carbs are going to spike insulin, which is going to cause you to gain weight or fat.
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: So I want to reframe this today.
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: You see, I'm trying to dance around this in a nuanced way because I also do not want to make simplified blanket claims because that is not what we're all about.
• 7:37
  Philip Pape: Insulin doesn't cause fat gain without a calorie surplus.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: Boom.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: That's the thing you need to remember.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: Insulin doesn't cause fat gain without a calorie surplus.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: Another way to put that is the only way you gain fat is with a calorie surplus.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: Fat gain requires excess energy, repeated overfeeding, overconsumption, potentially a poor use of those nutrients, right?
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: How we partition the nutrients because of your lifestyle.
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: And then how, and then low muscle mass or inactivity, right?
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: So it really does all come down to the excess energy, but it's the excess energy in all of that context.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: And that context tends to produce the excess energy.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: Insulin just determines where nutrients go, it doesn't create energy out of nowhere.
• 8:17
  Philip Pape: So that's that's my thoughts on where the Smith comes from.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: Now, let's do a little detour into insulin 101.
• 8:24
  Philip Pape: What does it do in your body?
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: And I'm not gonna dumb it down, I'm gonna simplify it in a way that I can understand it so you can understand it.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: Because I'm not a doctor, I'm not a scientist, but I do self-study all this stuff and I talk to lots of experts and I work with clients on a daily basis.
• 8:39
  Philip Pape: So I consider myself quite educated from spending the time to think about and look into this stuff and also looking at what the actual evidence says.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: So when you eat, especially carbohydrates and protein, your blood glucose goes up, right?
• 8:53
  Philip Pape: Your blood sugars go up.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: And then your pancreas releases insulin.
• 8:58
  Philip Pape: Boom.
• 8:58
  Philip Pape: Then insulin does a few things.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: Insulin shuttles glucose and amino acids into your cells, right?
• 9:05
  Philip Pape: The glucose from the carbs, amino acids from the protein.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: This is how your muscles get their fuel and the building blocks to grow.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: Also, insulin suppresses fat oxidation temporarily.
• 9:17
  Philip Pape: This is your fat burning, not fat loss, just the burning of fat.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: And even the word burn is kind of a layman's term, right?
• 9:24
  Philip Pape: This is where the fear I think comes from, though.
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: And we're gonna get to why this isn't the problem people think it is at all.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: This is not a problem at all, guys.
• 9:32
  Philip Pape: Insulin also signals to your body that energy is available.
• 9:36
  Philip Pape: Because remember, insulin is a hormone, so it's a signaling messenger, chemical signaling messenger.
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: It tells your body energy.
• 9:42
  Philip Pape: Hey, hey, body, energy is available.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: And then that affects other hormones downstream and other metabolic processes downstream.
• 9:49
  Philip Pape: Insulin also reduces muscle protein breakdown, muscle protein breakdown.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: That's the opposite of muscle protein synthesis.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: So muscle protein breakdown, which we don't like when our muscles break down, even though it does always happen, right?
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: We're always synthesizing and breaking down muscle tissue, but insulin reduces it.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: And this is huge for us as lifters.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: You know, we talk a lot about stimulating muscle protein synthesis, but reducing breakdown is the other half.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: And then insulin also enables glycogen resynthesis.
• 10:19
  Philip Pape: So that means after you train, your muscles have to replenish their glycogen stores, and insulin facilitates that process.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: Now, your your brain is like working, like, okay, I see where this is all gonna come together, at least for the most part.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: Some of this stuff needs more explanation, I think.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: Now, here's a clarification about insulin.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: It does not cause fat gain without a calorie surplus.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: Have you heard that before?
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: You probably did a few minutes ago because I said it twice or three times.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna say it again because it needs to land.
• 10:46
  Philip Pape: For you to actually store body fat, you need excess energy, meaning more calories than you burn over time.
• 10:51
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 10:52
  Philip Pape: Insulin might determine whether those excess calories go more toward fat or muscle.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: That is true.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: But if there is no excess, there's nothing extra to store.
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: Okay?
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: So think of insulin as like a traffic cop that's directing nutrients to different destinations.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: It's not the person loading the trucks, right?
• 11:13
  Philip Pape: If the trucks have your calories, have your energy in them, I'm like waving my hand as if you can see me.
• 11:18
  Philip Pape: This is audio only.
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: If you don't have extra trucks, insulin has nothing to direct toward fat storage.
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: So that's insulin 101.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: Now, why is insulin so great for us?
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: Why do we love insulin as a muscle-friendly hormone?
• 11:32
  Philip Pape: Okay, this is the heart of today's episode.
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: Because if you have any designs on improving your health and body composition, you absolutely must lift weights.
• 11:41
  Philip Pape: And assuming you're gonna lift weights and have that kind of lifestyle, especially as we get older, okay, insulin is working for you under those conditions.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: And the conditions have to be the right conditions.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about it.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: You can't just, you know, lift for 30 minutes twice a week and then have a completely terrible lifestyle other way, other than that.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: There's a whole bunch of things.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: But the first big thing we want to talk about is that insulin is what we call permissive for muscle protein synthesis.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: It doesn't alone like maximally stimulate muscle synthesis.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: That that's what your protein does.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: Okay, and that's why we eat protein plus the lifting itself.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: But it it plays a supportive role by reducing breakdown, as we already mentioned.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: That's why it's permissive.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: In other words, it kind of like unlocks or makes the road a little bit bigger.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: So protein's like building the uh the muscle, insulin's preventing it from being broken down.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: That net muscle balance is what determines how much and whether you're gaining tissue over time.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: So you can see already how insulin is helpful for building muscle.
• 12:45
  Philip Pape: Second, carbs and insulin improve your training performance.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: Okay, resistance training is what we call glycolytic.
• 12:52
  Philip Pape: I haven't used that term in a while, but it simply means that your muscles run on stored glycogen when you're lifting heavy or when you're doing high volume work.
• 13:00
  Philip Pape: Just like some forms of cardio are also glycolytic, like CrossFit, for example.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: When you have enough carbs, okay, and we can define what enough means, and it's gonna be highly variable.
• 13:09
  Philip Pape: Excuse me.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: When you have enough carbs, you increase your training volume capacity as a result because training is glycolytic.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: And you improve your bar speed and you improve your power output, and you get better repeat set performance, you know, performance across sets where you don't have as big of a drop-off, you know, as many drop-off in reps.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: And then you would you reduce the how much exertion you perceive, so the same work feels easier.
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: And why does that matter?
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: Well, that matters because mechanical tension and volume are what drive hypertrophy, the building of muscle.
• 13:42
  Philip Pape: It's not the insulin itself, it's that the insulin unlocks this higher level of performance and supports those inputs.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: So if you have reduced perceived exertion, higher bar speed, higher power power output, greater capacity, just think about how all that comes together to a lot more volume and intensity in the gym.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: Third, the glycogen replenishment from insulin means you have better recovery and better signaling of your recovery, which is like an adaptive process.
• 14:10
  Philip Pape: You become a better recovery machine.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: So after you're done training, then you eat it carbs as well, because I'm a huge fan of post-workout carbs, and you get a blood sugar spike, an insulin spike from carbs, that's gonna drive the glucose back into your muscles from your bloodstream.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: That's gonna restore your glycogen.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: That's also then gonna reduce cortisol and improve your readiness for your next session, which by the way, side tangent, this is why I like working out in the morning for a lot of people, because it kind of sucks down some of that stress right at the beginning of the day.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: This is especially relevant if you are a higher volume lifter, which it's all relative.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: Like many of you are probably in that quote unquote high volume realm, even if you're like doing starting strength or something, because it's still, when you take the overall amount you're lifting, it's still pretty darn high volume.
• 14:58
  Philip Pape: You know, if you're older, if you're over 40 and your recovery is just less than it was when you're younger, all of these things help.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: It helps to have more glycogen, period, which come from carbs.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: And then fourth, this is the one that is maybe the most important for some of you and it affects health and longevity and everything else.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: And that is insulin sensitivity.
• 15:18
  Philip Pape: In your now insulin-sensitive muscle tissue, because you lift weights and muscle is insulin, increases your insulin sensitivity, glucose is going to preferentially enter your muscle.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: And that means less of the glucose spills over into fat tissue, and now your nutrient partition partitioning favors lean mass.
• 15:38
  Philip Pape: This is really powerful because this means that even from the same overall, say calories, you're able to more efficiently shuttle those nutrients, that glucose, toward muscle rather than fat, right?
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: And so that's where that's where when you get under the hood, it really does sometimes become more about calories in, calories out at some level.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: And the powerful thing is that resistance training itself, not just the muscle mass, not just the muscle mass resulting from it, but the actual training act of training increases insulin sensitivity as well.
• 16:08
  Philip Pape: I talked about on the, oh, I was on a podcast recently, we talked about this, and I said the research shows 24 to 48 hours you after you lift, you're much more insulin sensitive.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: Like that it, so you're if you're lifting three or four days a week, you're constantly keeping that insulin sensitivity higher.
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: And you're improving something called GLUT4 translocation.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: GLUT4 is G L U T all caps-4, if you want to Google it.
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: This is like little doors that allow glucose to go into your muscle cells.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: And they get triggered by your training.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: They also get triggered by walking, by the way.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: This is why I'm a big fan of being active throughout the day.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: And this happens independent of fat loss.
• 16:44
  Philip Pape: So the more you train, the more you move, the more active you are.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: And I don't mean high-intensity stressful chronic cardio.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: I mean just good low-grade chronic movement, chronic in a good way.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: The more you train, the better you move, the better your body handles carbs.
• 16:58
  Philip Pape: Period.
• 16:58
  Philip Pape: That's what that's my point.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: And so this aligns perfectly with what I've been teaching for years on this podcast.
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: Muscle makes carbs even more attractive, quote unquote, safer, if I even need to use that term.
• 17:11
  Philip Pape: Like you don't have to worry about them making you gain fat or worsen your health.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: They're actually an accelerate, accelerator, right?
• 17:18
  Philip Pape: The more muscle you have, then the more muscles you can eat.
• 17:21
  Philip Pape: And there are not going to be negative consequences.
• 17:23
  Philip Pape: In fact, they're positive.
• 17:24
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 17:25
  Philip Pape: Because you can tolerate them, you have better insulin sensitivity and everything else we just talked about.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: Now remember, I want to remind you, I'm going to share a specific post-workout carb strategy at the end that can improve your performance the very next day that ties all this together.
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: So I do want you to stick around so you get the full picture, guys.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: All right, now if you're hearing this and you're thinking, okay, how do I actually figure out my carb intake?
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: How do I set up my macros for this?
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: I do have something for you I put together a while back.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: It's a free guide called Nutrition 101 for body composition.
• 17:53
  Philip Pape: It's all about flexible dieting and setting up your protein, carbs, fats based on your goals, whether you're building muscle, losing fat, doing both.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: It's the same framework I use with my coaching clients.
• 18:03
  Philip Pape: You're gonna love it.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: It's gonna teach you, even at the mindset level, how to think about food, but also the tactical level, how to calculate your macros.
• 18:10
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash macros or click the link in the show note.
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: I put the link in there.
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: That's witsandweights.com slash macros.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: Now I know what some of you are thinking, okay, Philip, I'm trying to lose fat.
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: So I heard you briefly say maybe maybe insulin does increase fat oxidation.
• 18:30
  Philip Pape: And don't I want to keep the insulin low to do that?
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: Like, or you know what I'm saying?
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: Low insulin and low carb will increase fat oxidation.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: So people get tripped on the up on this.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: I did a whole episode on this in the past.
• 18:43
  Philip Pape: I don't have it with me, unfortunately, but it I've done several.
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: You can look up lose fat versus burn fat.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: It's something like that.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: But number one, yes, insulin does suppress fat oxidation so that when insulin is higher, you're not burning as much fat in that moment.
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: That is true.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: But okay, this is a critical, but that is a temporary effect.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: It lasts a few hours after a meal, and it has nothing to do with your overall energy usage and your energy system and whether you gain or lose fat.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: Whether you gain or lose fat has to do with energy balance, not whether you spiked insulin from your meal.
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: Okay, I want you to remember this.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: You don't lose fat minute to minute.
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: You lose it over days and weeks based on energy balance, not based on insulin in the short term and fat oxidation in the short term.
• 19:35
  Philip Pape: Because guess what?
• 19:35
  Philip Pape: If you're not oxidizing fat and your body needs energy, it's going to use glucose instead.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: So it's either going to use carbs or fat, whatever you have available for it.
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: And the keto folks and the low carb folks are like, oh, all right, but that means we don't have any carbs in our system and we're just burning fat.
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: Well, yeah, guess what?
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: You're eating a lot more fat.
• 19:52
  Philip Pape: You're eating a lot more fat.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: So the equation actually nets out.
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: And there's actually some studies that show people who eat more carbs tend to burn.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: A few more calories from eating more carbs and people eat more fat, but that's a separate topic.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: I'm just gonna leave that to side, just fruit food for thought.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: So if you eat in a deficit, you're gonna lose fat.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: Doesn't matter if insulin spiked after every single meal and by how much.
• 20:14
  Philip Pape: Once it drops, fat oxidation resumes, and your body can use carbs in the meantime.
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: It doesn't matter.
• 20:19
  Philip Pape: The body is constantly switching between fuel sources as it needs, and all that matters are the calories.
• 20:26
  Philip Pape: Fat loss fails when calories are too high.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: It also fails when muscle mass is low, when your training stimulus is weak or you're not training, or when your diet is chronically stressful, not because you had rice or fruit.
• 20:40
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 20:40
  Philip Pape: And that's when we say carbs, by the way, that is what we're talking about.
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: We're not talking about pizza and donuts and muffins, even though they contain carbs.
• 20:47
  Philip Pape: Those are processed carbs that also contain fats.
• 20:49
  Philip Pape: Totally different things.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: All right, so let's talk about one of the other myths that I mentioned, and that is, you know, the acute spikes versus the chronic, the chronic spikes, which is called chronic hyperinsulinemia insulinemia.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: Insulinemia.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: And this is where we don't want to conflate these things because this is also causing confusion, let alone the ability to pronounce the word.
• 21:14
  Philip Pape: Acute insulin spikes that we've been talking about.
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: These are normal.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: They are transient, they're temporary, they're necessary for nutrient uptake.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: We see them in healthy, active people all the time.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: If you wear a continuous glucose monitor, you'll see your blood sugar spike when you eat carbs.
• 21:27
  Philip Pape: Totally normal.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: Nothing wrong with it at all.
• 21:29
  Philip Pape: The amount it spikes is nothing compared to the amount it would spike in a diabetic.
• 21:33
  Philip Pape: You don't have to worry about it.
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: Every time you eat a meal with carbs or protein, you're going to get an insulin spike.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: That's your body doing what it's supposed to do.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: That's why I don't even recommend CGMs for the vast majority of people, almost anybody, really.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: Even if you're trying to get your A1C down, if you start lifting weights, walking more, and eating balanced meals, you're probably going to solve the problem.
• 21:51
  Philip Pape: So chronic hyperinsulinemia is different.
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: That is when insulin stays elevated most of the time.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: And that is often a precursor to diabetes, or that's, you know, pre-diabetes seen in prediabatic patients.
• 22:05
  Philip Pape: Driven by chronic overnutrition, which is a fancy word of a way of saying you overeat, okay?
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: A sedentary lifestyle, a loss of muscle mass, or you know, you never built muscle mass in the first place, but as you get older, especially in your 40s and 50s, you've lost a ton of muscle mass, poor sleep, high stress, high intake of ultra-processed foods, we see it as well.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: There's some corollary factors there that have nothing to do with, you know, necessarily the food itself, so much as the correlation with that and the lifestyle.
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: And so the difference here is kind of obvious at this point that one of these things, the the acute spikes as a normal physiological response, the chronic insulinemia is a metabolic dysfunction.
• 22:44
  Philip Pape: It's a disease driven by lifestyle factors.
• 22:47
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: So what you have to understand is that the problem is not insulin spikes.
• 22:52
  Philip Pape: The problem is not blood sugar spikes.
• 22:54
  Philip Pape: The problem is living in a chronic surplus of metabolic dysfunction without a sink for those nutrients.
• 23:02
  Philip Pape: Muscle is the sink.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: You see that?
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: You see how we come full circle?
• 23:07
  Philip Pape: Muscle is the sink.
• 23:08
  Philip Pape: If you have adequate muscle mass and you're training regularly, your body has somewhere productive to send those nutrients.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: And then the insulin spike just becomes a feature of your life.
• 23:18
  Philip Pape: You don't have to worry about it, it's not a problem.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: Now, real practical, I do like to make things actionable for you guys.
• 23:25
  Philip Pape: Who does benefit the most from embracing carbs and everything that comes with it, including this insulin response?
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: Okay, people who lift weights.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: So resistance trained people like those of you listening to this podcast aspire to be or are doing this already.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: People prioritizing muscle gain or body recomp, lifters who train regularly three to five days a week, midlife adults trying to preserve lean mass, anyone stuck in the uh under-recovering trap and now needs to recover better and eat more carbs.
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: I would also put you in the camp of, hey, you should do it.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: You know, you're lifting, but you're under recovering.
• 23:58
  Philip Pape: Let's get those carbs in.
• 23:59
  Philip Pape: And maybe stop dieting for a while.
• 24:01
  Philip Pape: When are carbs most useful?
• 24:03
  Philip Pape: Before your training to fuel your training session, after your training for recovery.
• 24:07
  Philip Pape: And people get confused on that.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: So we're going to touch on that one more time in our little technique I have at the very end of the episode.
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: Higher volume training days for some people.
• 24:15
  Philip Pape: Some people do like carb cycling, some people don't notice a difference because you're taking it away from your recovery days.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: So that's a little caveat on that one, but you can you may experiment with it.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: During maintenance or a slight surplus, absolutely, right?
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: Like if you have a refeed or you're on a diet break, that's where the carbs come way up, and it's hugely beneficial for recovery and all the things we talked about.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: And then even during fat loss phases to try to keep some of that training quality and recovery in there.
• 24:40
  Philip Pape: I just talked to someone in physics university today, and I said I looked at her fats and carbs in her fat loss phase and I said, why don't we dial the fats down even more to give it to carbs initially so you can really maintain some of that recovery early on?
• 24:52
  Philip Pape: I don't like, even though, even though calories and carbs come down for fat loss, nothing says you have to like follow the book and follow carbs all the way down to an abyss.
• 25:02
  Philip Pape: You can find you can find ways to get more carbs in.
• 25:06
  Philip Pape: Sometimes lowering fats, sometimes lowering protein even is a worthwhile trade.
• 25:10
  Philip Pape: Sometimes it's adding more fiber into your diet, so then you could eat more non-fibrous carbs because you have the extra calories now to work with, things like that.
• 25:17
  Philip Pape: Now, when might carbs be reduced?
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 25:21
  Philip Pape: Well, if you're gonna have a bunch of sedentary days or you know, go on a trip or something like that, you're not training for a while, that might be a time to shift to a little bit of a lower carb diet.
• 25:30
  Philip Pape: Not a low carb diet, just you don't need as much.
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: So low activity periods, sedentary periods, you could do it for short-term appetite management sometimes.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: You know, when you're in a fat loss phase, they're gonna come down.
• 25:42
  Philip Pape: Obviously, people are sedentary, not resistance training, I guess, need to keep their carbs down.
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: And I feel sad for them because they need to be not living that way.
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: But if that's the case, yeah, then carbs are probably gonna make you fat because you're just overconsuming calories.
• 25:53
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: The key theme here is that you're you gain carb tolerance through training and you use them.
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: You use them well, and there we go.
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: All right, now I want to tell you what I'm not claiming here because the nuance just always gets lost in the arguments back and forth online.
• 26:11
  Philip Pape: Okay, I don't want you walking away with a straw man version of this message.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: And by the way, if you heard this on YouTube and you're commenting already because you're a low-carb zealot or a keto zealot, you didn't listen to the episode and you didn't get to this point.
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: This episode is not saying that more carbs automatically equal more muscle.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: No, you have to lift, you have to eat protein, you have to track your metrics.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: It's not saying that insulin is the only growth signal.
• 26:35
  Philip Pape: Remember, insulin is a helper.
• 26:37
  Philip Pape: It is not saying calories don't matter.
• 26:38
  Philip Pape: Actually, the opposite, I've said it multiple times.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: Calories are the main thing at the end of the day that matter when it comes to your change in body mass.
• 26:45
  Philip Pape: It's not saying that everyone should eat high carb all the time.
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: And it's not saying that diabetics should ignore their medical advice because diabetics are a whole different population, not being addressed by what I'm talking about today, even though they definitely benefit from the lifestyle factors we talked about today.
• 27:00
  Philip Pape: What I am saying is that insulin works with your training, your protein, your calories, your lifestyle to support muscle growth.
• 27:08
  Philip Pape: Okay?
• 27:08
  Philip Pape: They all have to be in place.
• 27:10
  Philip Pape: And this is consistent with something I talk about constantly, which is the muscle first philosophy.
• 27:15
  Philip Pape: When you prioritize building muscle, it's not just changing how you look, it's changing your metabolic system for the better for life, for a long, wonderful life.
• 27:23
  Philip Pape: You're increasing your glycogen storage, you're improving insulin sensitivity, you're creating a bigger metabolic buffer.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: So you can eat more food.
• 27:30
  Philip Pape: Come on, raise your hand, you want that.
• 27:32
  Philip Pape: Eat more food, you can recover better, you could diet less often.
• 27:35
  Philip Pape: Yes, raise your hand, you want that too.
• 27:37
  Philip Pape: Building muscle is not just about aesthetics, it's a great, great side effect of it, but it's building a body that handles nutrition more efficiently.
• 27:44
  Philip Pape: And then nutrition comes along for the ride, and you want to eat better and you want to use more carbs because they're fuel, and on and on and on.
• 27:52
  Philip Pape: And then you have less restriction, more flexibility, and it just all flips that mindset from restriction and carbs are the enemy to hey, carbs are a tool that I've I'm using for my training and for my muscle, and I love them, and we're gonna eat them and enjoy them.
• 28:06
  Philip Pape: And then you stop fighting all this and nonsense, fighting all this and listening to all this nonsense.
• 28:12
  Philip Pape: All right, so I want to tell you that post workout carb strategy.
• 28:15
  Philip Pape: Remember, if you do want to dial in your macros and understand how to structure your nutrition for any phase that you're in, go ahead and grab my free guide at witzawaits.com slash macros.
• 28:24
  Philip Pape: That's the nutrition one on one for body composition.
• 28:27
  Philip Pape: It's all about flexible dieting.
• 28:28
  Philip Pape: Go to witzawaits.com slash macros.
• 28:31
  Philip Pape: All right, here is that post workout carb strategy that I promise.
• 28:36
  Philip Pape: It's very simple, but within about an hour and a half to two hours after your resistance training session.
• 28:42
  Philip Pape: Okay, it doesn't have to be 10 minutes.
• 28:43
  Philip Pape: You have a buffer here of an hour to two hours.
• 28:46
  Philip Pape: Consume a meal or shake that includes both protein and what I call fast digesting carbs.
• 28:53
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 28:53
  Philip Pape: And I'm talking for many people, this is 30 to 50 grams of carbs, depends on your size and how many calories you have.
• 29:00
  Philip Pape: Sometimes this is like a one to one to three to one carb to protein ratio.
• 29:06
  Philip Pape: Honestly, the protein's a little bit less important, even though it's helpful because you'll probably need a lot of protein throughout the day anyway.
• 29:11
  Philip Pape: But I like all these carbs because, oh, let me let me tell you how to get it.
• 29:17
  Philip Pape: You could do like a protein shake with banana and oats, right?
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: You could do chicken and rice.
• 29:21
  Philip Pape: You could do Greek yogurt with fruit and honey.
• 29:23
  Philip Pape: Like that's what I mean by fast digesting.
• 29:25
  Philip Pape: I love bananas before and after workouts, to be honest.
• 29:28
  Philip Pape: And the reason that this works is that we talked about how your muscles are primed to absorb glucose after training, where insulin sensitivity in muscle tissue is at its highest.
• 29:37
  Philip Pape: It gets really jacked up and then it starts to fall gradually over the next 24 to 48 hours.
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: Of course, it's still much higher than baseline because you lifted weights.
• 29:45
  Philip Pape: The carbs you eat around the first couple hours after you work out, though, are going to go toward replenishing your glycogen primarily.
• 29:53
  Philip Pape: And you might get a little bit of an edge on that versus fat storage, and it improves your body composition.
• 29:59
  Philip Pape: This is great if you're trying to body recomp as well, because you'll probably notice better performance in your next session the next day or two days later.
• 30:07
  Philip Pape: I mean, it depends on your split.
• 30:08
  Philip Pape: If you're doing like, you know, four days a week or whatever, you have back to back, you're gonna have less fatigue, better work capacity, improved recovery because you ate carbs not too long after your last workout.
• 30:20
  Philip Pape: It sounds counterintuitive, like, oh, that's crazy that the carbs then affect the next day.
• 30:26
  Philip Pape: But try it, try it.
• 30:27
  Philip Pape: By the way, this is also why I think it's good not to carb cycle as a first resort because your recovery day carbs can help your next day's training carbs, but not in the same way we're talking about here.
• 30:37
  Philip Pape: That's just a side tangent.
• 30:39
  Philip Pape: I want you to try after your next training session, have protein and a decent amount of fast digesting carbs within an hour or two of your workout and compare how you feel the following day versus, say, when you skipped the carbs or you delayed them by a lot more or didn't even eat at all.
• 30:55
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 30:55
  Philip Pape: Compare the two and see if there's a difference.
• 30:57
  Philip Pape: All right, that's it for today.
• 30:59
  Philip Pape: This was one of those episodes where I'm just trying to shift your perspective and challenge those deep-seated beliefs about carbs and insulin you may still have.
• 31:06
  Philip Pape: If you're lifting, if you're building muscle, if you're eating appropriately for your goals, insulin is your friend.
• 31:12
  Philip Pape: You don't have to fear blood sugar spikes, you don't have to worry about CGMs, any of that stuff.
• 31:18
  Philip Pape: It's only gonna help you.
• 31:19
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 31:23
  Philip Pape: And remember, the next time someone says they've embraced a low carb lifestyle, I want you to share wits and weights with them.
• 31:29
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.