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Carb Cycling, Workout Carb Timing, and the Menopause Carb Myth · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: What is the deal with carb cycling?
• 0:02
  Philip Pape: Maybe you've been told to load your carbs on lifting days and pull them back on your training days.
• 0:06
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're over 40.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: I want to go through what the research actually says.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: Today I'm answering four listener questions on carbs and carb cycling.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: I'm going to show you why the studies people cite as proof are often testing the wrong thing that they're claimed against, what the evidence says about carbohydrates and menopause, and how to think about pre and post-workout carb timing.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:42
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Ape, and today's episode came from several questions from our community and from our members.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: Sonny, Sonny, shout out to you, Sonny, who is both in our Eat More Lift Heavy dialed in as well as in our Facebook group.
• 0:56
  Philip Pape: And I'm quoting him: How can we use carb cycling in our everyday lives?
• 1:00
  Philip Pape: And is there data on this subject?
• 1:03
  Philip Pape: And I told him as a reply that the short answer is it's always a scheduling and preference thing, more than a physiological thing.
• 1:12
  Philip Pape: But I did want to go and review the research and answer it properly on the show today.
• 1:18
  Philip Pape: So that is what this is.
• 1:19
  Philip Pape: Sonny, thank you.
• 1:20
  Philip Pape: This turned into actually a much better episode than what I expected when you asked it.
• 1:24
  Philip Pape: So stick around to hear it all.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: Uh then he followed up with a second question, which is that he's been hearing that one technique is just include complex carbs on lifting days.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: And then Lisa chimed in.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: Shout out to Lisa in our Facebook group.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: And she said, Hey, what do we eat and when before a workout and after?
• 1:45
  Philip Pape: So I'm kind of combining these all into one episode today.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: I then pulled in a fourth question that comes up all the time, which is whether you should go lower carb on rest days once you're in perimenopause, because you've supposedly become more carb intolerant.
• 2:00
  Philip Pape: Now, many of you listen to the show know that a lot of these carb uh claims are just that.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: They are myths, but there are some that are more persistent than others, and we need to address them.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: So, four questions that all rest on the same premise or the same assumption, which is that number one, carbohydrates are as important as we think they are.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: And number two is that where you put them across the week changes what happens to your body.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: And then I want to want you to stick around to the end because I always leave you something helpful at the end to take away from the show.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna show you how to tell whether eating carbohydrates before you train is actually going to do anything for your performance.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: It's a little bit of a rubric or heuristic you can test on yourself, or whether it's just not worth trying to move things around in that way.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: So we are gonna go through where did carb cycling come from, what the evidence base consists of right now as we know it, then the mechanism, meaning insulin and fat storage, the arguments around that, whether that has any merit.
• 3:03
  Philip Pape: And then the menopause piece here, which is what many of you are concerned about as well because of what's being talked about online.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: And we're gonna give practical answers to all of these.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: All right, let's dive into it.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: Carb cycling.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: If you've never heard of carb cycling, it is the practice of eating more carbohydrates on days that you train and less on days that you don't, usually while keeping protein high and consistent, maybe fats are roughly similar, and staying in some kind of deficit.
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: It often goes along with a calorie deficit, but some versions are whether or not you're in a deficit or maintenance.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: Some of them are the opposite, like for the training and the rest days.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: Some have high, medium, and low.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: There's all different permutations of this, just like there are with fasting and everything else.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: Now, where did it come from?
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: Is mainly from bodybuilding contest prep, where people are manipulating carbohydrates and water, usually in the last week or so, to change how they look on stage.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: Now, that's a real thing that you can do is manipulate your carbohydrates, your sodium, your fluids to change how you look.
• 4:06
  Philip Pape: And a lot of this stuff kind of filters down into the common, you know, vernacular, if you will, or onto forums or things like that.
• 4:14
  Philip Pape: And it gets blended in or confused with other movements, let's say, or tribes in some cases, I say with a little bit of derision, but like the low-carb movement.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: And then it gets combined with, say, the endurance nutrition information about glycogen.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: And by the time it's kind of all put together, it's almost like this big package on here's a diet, dieting protocol you can use, right?
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: And I say it that way with, again, with a little bit of snark, because I've been there.
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: I've been there where I've taken this piece, this piece, this piece, starts to put them together.
• 4:46
  Philip Pape: Now you have a nutrition approach, but the approach is kind of a fra combination of fragmented or disjointed pieces that don't necessarily work together.
• 4:54
  Philip Pape: Or, andor pieces of them that are not supported by actual physiology, like actually how the body works.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: And, you know, if you think about it, we all want structure.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: This is what, this is why diets over the years, why you can go into like a bookstore or online, but it's easier to see physically in a bookstore.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: You go to the section on with like the diet books and you just see tons of them.
• 5:15
  Philip Pape: Each one is promising like the simple structure and approach, right?
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: From keto to carnivore to low fat to weight watchers, all of it.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: And carb cycling is fits really well in that um model of a structured approach.
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: But Sonny asked, does it work?
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: Like, is there data behind using it?
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: So what I did is I went looking for randomized controlled trials, or Lane Norton always jokes, is like human randomized controlled trials that tend to isolate one variable that we care about.
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: In this case, what do we care about?
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: Well, we care about the keeping the calories the same and the protein and fat the same, but distributing your carbohydrates differently.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: Now, I will the caveat here is there is a concept of calorie cycling, but oftentimes we it's a proxy for carb cycling because if you're holding your protein fairly steady, the thing that changes the most is carbs.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: So just to put that on the side.
• 6:09
  Philip Pape: So you have to have a control group that has the same carbohydrates every day versus a group that cycles it in some other way.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: And then you measure what happens, like what happens to body composition or other factors.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: The problem is I can't find studies like this.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: And I think that's actually the case, that there is weak evidence for carb cycling.
• 6:30
  Philip Pape: And what I mean is the studies are often small or short or in the wrong population.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: And in this case, there doesn't seem to be any at all, like no direct trials.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: There's a review from 2025 on carbohydrate cycling for contest prep.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: And I am gonna come back to that one, but it's interesting for a different reason, teaser.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: But there is no randomized trial that tests what we are asking about.
• 6:56
  Philip Pape: Now, does that mean it doesn't work?
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: Of course not.
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: I don't want to be one of those like science-based lifters who, you know, absence of a trial is evidence against this thing working.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: Of course not.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: I don't want to be that guy.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: But it does mean if somebody says carb cycling is evidence-based, you need to ask them, like, what evidence are you talking about?
• 7:12
  Philip Pape: Okay, let's go through the studies that people will bring up because this is kind of the counterpoint that I want to address.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: The biggest one is a trial from Dr.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: Bill Campbell and colleagues in 2020.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: Again, love Bill Campbell.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: I probably say his name like every other episode here.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: He's one of the better science communicators that work in this space.
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: That's why.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: You know, he has he has a whole lab devoted to this kind of stuff.
• 7:33
  Philip Pape: And that study took 27 resistance trained people, average age of 25, and they went into a 25% calorie deficit for seven weeks.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: One group did two consecutive high carb days, followed by five restricted days every week.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: So that's like a weekend refeed, if that sounds familiar.
• 7:51
  Philip Pape: And so if you look at that structure, it is also a form of carb cycling.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: Like it's the closest thing we have to carb cycling in the literature, like that.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: The conclusion that was published was that the refeed group preserved more fat-free mass and more resting metabolic rate.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: And that's a great result.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: And everybody cited it, including myself.
• 8:13
  Philip Pape: But then a group of researchers, Payos and Brown and Vorlin and Allison and Sainsbury, they reanalyzed the shared data and they did it open in the open.
• 8:23
  Philip Pape: And they ran it as a between group analysis.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: When they did that, the difference in fat-free mass disappeared.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: The difference in resting metabolic rate disappeared.
• 8:33
  Philip Pape: All that was left was the dry fat-free mass mass, which is like a component measure.
• 8:39
  Philip Pape: So the original finding didn't really survive the reanalysis.
• 8:43
  Philip Pape: And Campbell, you know, he admitted it, right?
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: So that's awesome.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: And if you go back and look at my uh episode I did a long time ago about the weekend diet, I cited that research as potential support for that.
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: And I believe I equivocated a little bit in the episode.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: I I'm pretty sure I did.
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: I didn't say, like, oh, this is absolutely 100% true.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: It was more of, hey, here's a practical way among many to use a nonlinear approach and switch around your calories for practical purposes because a lot of us like to eat more on the weekend.
• 9:15
  Philip Pape: And so if it helps you stick to your diet, go for it.
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: And it may have this other physiological benefit, which now we've walked back and said maybe it doesn't have that physiological benefit, which is fine because it still may have a practical benefit.
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: And then on recent episodes, we've talked about the matador trial, which is two weeks on, two weeks off, but that's not really the same as like carb cycling where you do it within the week.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: And then the ice cap one as well, that I think I've talked about where they did intermittent restriction versus continuous restriction.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: And again, I mentioned these because the idea of carb cycling is similar to the idea of intermittent restriction, in that some days have higher carbs that are probably close to maintenance, and others are more of a deficit.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: So, in a sense, that is what you're doing.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: Then there's a meta-analyses that pooled 28 trials.
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: They found a body weight difference of 0.42 kilos that favored uh intermittent approach, and it was not statistically significant.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: A small fat mass difference of 0.31 kilos, also not significant.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: And if anything, slightly more fat-free mass laws in the intermittent groups.
• 10:18
  Philip Pape: So you can go through study after study after study and you really don't see any obvious result that says, oh, yeah, you definitely you need to carb cycle for X, Y, Z reason.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: And this is going to give you a benefit in fat mass or lean mass or metabolic rate or any of these things, right?
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: The ones that come closest that to have a result at all tend to be a null result or a, yeah, there's a small difference one way or the other, but it's not statistically significant.
• 10:47
  Philip Pape: So, okay, why does the idea persist though?
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: Like calorie and carb cycling.
• 10:51
  Philip Pape: And when I say persist, I mean I see people ask about it occasionally, and I generally just give a quick answer like, it's yeah, the evidence isn't really there.
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: Go ahead and just use it if it's if it helps you practically, right?
• 11:05
  Philip Pape: But but I can say the same answer to anything that helps you because it's practical.
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: You know, if it feels good, if it helps you stick with your diet, et cetera.
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: So the mechanism is very convincing.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: And this is the thing with mechanistic research and also looking at mechanisms in our body and saying that, oh, well, if the mechanism works, let's extrapolate it to the whole body level or the system level or the person level, and then we can say that that works.
• 11:29
  Philip Pape: But that's not always the case.
• 11:30
  Philip Pape: So the story goes like this carbohydrates raise insulin.
• 11:35
  Philip Pape: Insulin is a storage hormone.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: So if you eat carbs on a day that you're not training, the carb has nowhere useful to go and get stored as fat.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: Whereas on a training day, your muscles are ready to tick it up, right?
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: That glucose sink.
• 11:50
  Philip Pape: And you've heard that a lot.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: And it sounds reasonable, it sounds intuitive, and it's wrong.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: It's wrong.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: We actually have the study that settles this, I think.
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: Kevin Hall, good old Kevin Hall, ran a metabolic word trial of 19 adults with obesity.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: They were locked in a facility, all their food was controlled, their protein was controlled, same calories in both conditions.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: One group, they restricted carbs, the other group they restricted fats.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: Now, if insulin drives fat storage, you would expect the group that restricts carbs should come out on top, right?
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: This is like the essence of low carb.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: Well, the carb restriction group lost 53 grams of body fat per day.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: The fat restriction group lost 89.
• 12:34
  Philip Pape: So cutting carbs under identical calories actually produced less fat loss, not more, less, not more.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: And this is the tightest kind of control you'll ever get in nutrition research.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: These people couldn't cheat.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: They everything was controlled.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: And whether you want to like rely solely on one study, which you never should, it goes the opposite in what people often claim.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: And, you know, my theory on this is that the thermic effect of food is higher for fats and carbs.
• 13:03
  Philip Pape: So if you're eating exactly the same calories, but you're having more fat versus more carbs, you might actually burn a few more calories.
• 13:09
  Philip Pape: In other words, your expenditure is a little higher, putting in you into a little bit bigger deficit, which actually benefits eating more fat than carbs, right?
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: But that argument alone is for me never enough to like alter your entire macro balance.
• 13:22
  Philip Pape: Then there's the leptin argument, which says that high carb days restore leptin and thyroid and bring back your metabolism.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: And there was a real study here by Dyrl Wanger and colleagues.
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: They took 10 lean women with three days of carb overfeeding.
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: Their leptin went up 28%, and their 24-hour energy expenditure went up 7%.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: So sounds great.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: But their basal metabolic rate was not affected.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: So if the effect is real, it's short-lived, it goes away within a day or two of returning to your normal intake, and it doesn't basically change your metabolism at all.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: In other words, it just goes back.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: It's like this temporary thing, and it's probably temporary because you're eating more food for those couple days.
• 14:02
  Philip Pape: So that's all it is.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: It's just literally following your food temporarily.
• 14:07
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 14:07
  Philip Pape: The last mechanism here we have is metabolic flexibility, which says, hey, low carb days, train your body to burn more fat.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: Now, there's a piece of that that's totally true.
• 14:18
  Philip Pape: Your respiratory quotient changes when you have low carbs and you do oxidize more fat on those days.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: But burning more fat is not the same as losing more fat.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: And, you know, I use the word burn loosely here.
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: What matters is net fat balance over the days and weeks, not what fuel you happen to be using at a specific time during that moment.
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: What I mean by that is when you are low carbs, your body's now gonna just use fat, but you're either in a deficit, meaning you're eating fewer calories, and that's the reason you're losing fat, or if you're eating the same amount of calories, it's because you're eating more fat and it all nets out.
• 14:58
  Philip Pape: The point is you're either gonna burn fat or carbs, but at the end of the day, it comes down to calorie balance.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: It really does.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: At the end of the day, it comes down to calorie balance.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: And if we go back to the trial we just talked about by Kevin Hall, it demonstrates exactly that.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: In fact, it showed again the opposite almost that people that burned more fat because they were eating less carbs, they actually lost less fat.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: So whether you want to take that to the bank or just say, well, at the very least, it's equal, you definitely can't go beyond that and say, well, low carb burns more net or causes more fat loss.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: Now, the part I find really funny is that the the 2025 review on carb cycling for contest prep, the one that I said I'd come back to earlier, that's seems to be very favorable toward carb cycling, explicitly says in the review that net energy balance governs fat loss and that carbohydratability just governs performance and appearance.
• 15:53
  Philip Pape: Well, they're basically conceding the argument that people are trying to make with carb cycling, right?
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: Right in the paper.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: So if you want to use structured high days and there are good reasons to, which we're gonna talk about those reasons in a second, mainly for refeeds and diet breaks.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: I have a free guide for you that goes into it.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: And I'm mentioning it now because it could be interesting to download and go through it as we go through the practical stuff.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: Following the next section on menopause, we're gonna get into the practical stuff around refeeds.
• 16:23
  Philip Pape: Specifically, not so much carb cycling per se, but refeeds and diet breaks.
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: So use a link in my show notes or go to witsinweights.com/slash free, and you'll find the refeeds and diet breaks guide in there.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna put the link in the show notes again, and you can just tap it.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: But it's my free refeeds guide.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: Um, and that's a tool that I definitely get behind for the reasons we're gonna talk about in a second.
• 16:44
  Philip Pape: All right, so that's the general state of the literature to my friend Sonny and everyone else who's asking about this.
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: But there is one more question we got about whether you should go lower carb on rest days now that you're in perimenopause, because you're carb intolerant.
• 17:01
  Philip Pape: So I just want to address the carbon tolerance piece.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: And maybe it's not even a perimenopause thing.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's just in general, I'm older and I think I'm less carb tolerant.
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: And it's usually phrased in the context of my hormones have changed, my insulin sensitivity has dropped, so I can't handle carbs the way I used to.
• 17:17
  Philip Pape: And I also see this in the, you know, women over 40 should be going low carb.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: Please, please don't listen to these people because they don't know what they're talking about.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: But let's take the first claim on its own terms.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: Does insulin sensitivity actually decline at menopause, independent of aging and independent of the fat you gained?
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: Well, we have a study on this using the hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamp, which is a gold standard measurement.
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's not a fasting number, it's a clamp.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: 101 postmenopausal women age 57, they found the relationship between esterdiol and insulin resistance was fully explained by body fat mass.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: It was fully mediated, meaning the estrogen change was not causing the change at all.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: The change in fat mass was causing the change in insulin sensitivity.
• 18:11
  Philip Pape: And then Lovejoy and colleagues ran a longitudinal study.
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: 156 women who started out premenopausal, 47 to 52.
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: I've mentioned this study before, and they followed them through the menopause transition.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: And yes, menopause itself was associated with gaining total fat and visceral fat specifically.
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: That's real.
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: I covered that on a recent episode, but they found no menopause-specific effect on insulin resistance.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: Um, and again, you know, I mentioned a longitudinal claps study.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: Look it up so you know what that's about.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: But the driver here appears to be body composition.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: Wow, what else is new?
• 18:44
  Philip Pape: If you've been listening to wits and weights for any length of time, you understand how important the importance we place on body composition driving some of these things, which means it's in our control rather than something like estrogen.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: Now, while we're in the same kind of family of claims, let's talk about your resting metabolism.
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: Herman Ponser's group that I've talked about recently with doubly labeled water, where they see that energy expenditure, your resting metabolism, is pretty stable from the age of 20 to 60 without any change for menopause.
• 19:11
  Philip Pape: And then other research we see that shows that energy expenditure is stable once you account for fat-free mass and fat mass, you basically lose the premise or assumption behind why people suggest you need less carbs, right?
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: Where you're like, well, okay, my insulin sensitivity is lower.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: Therefore, I need to restrict carbs and restrict them on rest days, for example.
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: So you've got like a chain of logic that just doesn't work.
• 19:37
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: The intervention that's actually supported by the evidence for insulin resistance as we get into our 40s and 50s, men and women, is what?
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: Reducing your fat mass and using resistance training and moving more, which we talk about on the show every single episode.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: Now, the biggest problem with all of this is probably there is a gap in population.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: Not one of the trials I've described was run in perimenopausal or post-menopausal women, other than the study, like like I mentioned, Lovejoy looking at pre-to-postmenopause transition.
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: But on this other stuff around cycling, is what I'm talking about.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: You know, in Bill Campbell's group, they were average age 25.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: He works with a lot of college students.
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: Ice cap was 28.7, the women's diet break trial was 23.
• 20:22
  Philip Pape: Matador was men with obesity, right?
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: So all these studies, they haven't even been looked at in that population anyway.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: So, what should you actually do?
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: This is the fun part of the episode.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: We get to the fix.
• 20:35
  Philip Pape: So I'm gonna address each of the four questions quickly as to here's the answer, here's what you do.
• 20:39
  Philip Pape: Sunny's first question how do you use carb cycling in everyday life?
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: My answer, and this is the answer that has the research backing it up, is that you set your weekly calories and your protein first based on your goal.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: Are you in a deficit?
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: Are you at maintenance?
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: Are you building muscle?
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: You keep your fiber reasonably steady, which should be fairly high to begin with.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: If you're not there yet, that's a good thing to work on.
• 21:00
  Philip Pape: So probably 25 grams or more for women, 35 or more for men.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: And then fats and carbs are highly, highly flexible.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: And you can put them wherever your schedule and training want them.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: And I would usually default to the same every day.
• 21:15
  Philip Pape: But then I would start to tweak it based on how you feel, practicality, days that you like to eat more.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: For many people, that's the weekend, has nothing to do with their training schedule.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: Sometimes it's when you're not training.
• 21:26
  Philip Pape: So if it's on the weekend, because that's when you go out to eat, maybe that's when you want your carbs, Sonny, or anyone else listening.
• 21:33
  Philip Pape: Distribution of carbs and fats is a scheduling tool.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: I do like to keep protein steady every day.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: And I don't like people to have more volatility than they need because for some people, having too much volatility, too many high and low days, it in and of itself could be a negative in different ways.
• 21:51
  Philip Pape: It could be a negative in how you feel or your sleep or like your metabolism, things like that.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: But it's very individualistic.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: What it is not, Sunny, and everyone else listening is a lever.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: For additional fat loss, for better recovery, for better performance, for better metabolism.
• 22:05
  Philip Pape: Again, unless you individually respond in a way that it seems to move those things, which I'm not saying it isn't, but the evidence as a whole at a population level doesn't support that.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: Which is actually a good thing because it means we don't have to do all these weird little protocols.
• 22:17
  Philip Pape: Just do what makes most sense practically so your life is as easy as you can make it to still hit your goals and you're not stressing about it.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: Now, Sonny's second question about complex carbs on lift days.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: I'll say there's two parts to that.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: So concentrating carbs on rest on training days versus spreading it evenly at the same intake, you know, has not been shown to change body composition, which we kind of covered that.
• 22:41
  Philip Pape: But the complex versus simple carbs distinction, once you match total carbs and match fiber, doesn't matter either.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: What I think people are usually talking about or or capturing, I guess, when they say complex carbs is fiber and satiety because you're eating more whole foods.
• 22:57
  Philip Pape: And it's not always complex carbs either.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: You can be, you can fill yourself up even on some simpler carbs, depending on what it is, but that conversation is a separate conversation.
• 23:06
  Philip Pape: But if you're eating oats and potatoes and beans, great.
• 23:09
  Philip Pape: That's what I want you to do.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: Just don't believe that the like the structure of the starch, because it's a complex carbs, is moving the needle in any particular way for fat loss, body composition, metabolism.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: It just tends to be that people who have more simple carbs and fewer complex carbs end up eating more calories, for example.
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: Or they end up not being as full and then they eat more calories.
• 23:30
  Philip Pape: Or they're not as full, so they're hungry, so then it makes them stressed and miserable, and then they don't train as well.
• 23:35
  Philip Pape: Like you get what I'm saying.
• 23:36
  Philip Pape: Now, the one place where lifting day carbs I think are defensible is for your training performance.
• 23:43
  Philip Pape: And we do have a systematic review on this from Menno Henslemans.
• 23:47
  Philip Pape: A lot of you guys know Menno and his colleagues back in 2022.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: This is a 49 studies, a review of 49 studies.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: And what they found is very dependent on how hard your session is.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: And that's what I'm gonna cover at the end.
• 23:58
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna give you a tip related to that.
• 23:59
  Philip Pape: So, Sonny, this may be relevant to you and anyone else listening, where there is a practical reason to move your carbs around.
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: Lisa's question is what to eat and when before and after workouts.
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: So this is more about peri workout or pre-post-workout nutrition.
• 24:14
  Philip Pape: My honest answer here is that timing is a much smaller variable than people want it to be.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: Like in our program, Eat More Lift Heavy, we don't even focus on that for a while.
• 24:22
  Philip Pape: I mean, unless you're in our like one-on-one or our direct coaching, and then we'll give you a timing schedule early on.
• 24:29
  Philip Pape: But it's not, it's it's a smaller variable.
• 24:32
  Philip Pape: Get a meal with protein in it within a few hours on either side of your training.
• 24:36
  Philip Pape: Don't train completely fasted, especially if you're doing a long, hard session and you have the choice to not train fasted, and focus mostly on your total protein and total the total calories.
• 24:46
  Philip Pape: Like that's as simple as it is.
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: So I wouldn't train fasted and I would eat some protein before and after, and I would also eat some carbs.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: Did I mention that part?
• 24:54
  Philip Pape: I might have skipped that part.
• 24:55
  Philip Pape: You want, you know, having some carbs before your workout or a few hours before your workout, or if you had a big carb dinner, that could also support into your morning workout.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: Now, there's one other thing that I need to mention.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: There is data, or there are data, on a thousand female athletes that find that the ones who practice low carb diets report disordered eating at about 80% compared to about 42% of athletes that don't have this dietary restriction.
• 25:22
  Philip Pape: Now, again, that's an association.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: It's not causation.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: Those are young athletes.
• 25:27
  Philip Pape: But if you are going to be low carb on multiple days a week, I would definitely keep the protein and fiber up there regardless and have enough energy available to recover from lifting because underfueling your training has other knock-on effects that could affect bone density and recovery and ultimately how well you perform and get out of the process.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: Okay, before we wrap up, I told you I would show you how to tell whether carbs before training is going to be more or less helpful for you.
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: I'll get to that in a second.
• 25:59
  Philip Pape: But before I do, this whole episode exists because you guys asked me questions, Sonny, Lisa, and others over the years.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: And I want more of your questions.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: These are some of my favorite episodes to make.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: So if you have something you're stuck on, training, nutrition, fat loss, reconp, doesn't matter how small it seems or if you've heard the answer before, go to witsandweig.com slash question and send it to me.
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: Witsandweights.com slash question.
• 26:22
  Philip Pape: I'm going to give you a direct reply either way, whether I use it on the show.
• 26:25
  Philip Pape: You get to choose whether you want a shout out in when you submit the question.
• 26:29
  Philip Pape: So go to witsandweights.com slash question.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: Here's how to tell whether eating carbs before you train is going to help you with your performance.
• 26:37
  Philip Pape: So this really goes to Sonny's question, Lisa's question as well.
• 26:41
  Philip Pape: What a lot of people are curious about, it actually depends on how much work you're going to do in the session.
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: And the way to determine that is the number of hard sets for each muscle group.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: This is pretty cool.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: There's that systematic review from Henselman's that I mentioned that looked at carbon resistance training performance across 49 studies.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: They found that if you're training in a fed state, meaning that you've eaten at some point that day before you train, carbohydrate intake itself is unlikely to affect your strength performance in sessions that are up to about 10 sets per muscle group.
• 27:20
  Philip Pape: The actual benefit showed up above 10 sets, or when the comparison group was training fully fasted.
• 27:28
  Philip Pape: So if you look at the number of sets in your program, if you're doing, let's say, six or eight sets for a muscle group, which is honestly what most people are doing, then restructuring your day around pre-workout carbs, you may not need to do it.
• 27:41
  Philip Pape: And even some of my thinking has changed on this over the years.
• 27:44
  Philip Pape: Now, I personally have a banana before I work out.
• 27:47
  Philip Pape: I just like to have a little extra food, a little extra carb, a little extra energy.
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: It makes feel good.
• 27:51
  Philip Pape: But I train in the morning too, right?
• 27:52
  Philip Pape: So take it with a grain of salt at the end of the day, experiment and see what works for you.
• 27:56
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 27:59
  Philip Pape: And remember, carb timing is a schedule, it's a preference, it's about your lifestyle.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: It is not a physiological problem.
• 28:07
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.