Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Eat More Protein & Lose Fat WITHOUT a Calorie Deficit? | Ep 486

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Eat More Protein & Lose Fat WITHOUT a Calorie Deficit? | Ep 486 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: Can eating more protein actually burn more fat without even being in a calorie deficit?
• 0:05
  Philip Pape: Well, protein does something to your body that no other food does.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: It's the most filling macro you can eat.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: It costs you way more calories just to digest it, and it's the one nutrient that protects your muscle when you're losing weight, which means eating more of it can leave you leaner, sometimes even when you're not in a deficit.
• 0:22
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to show you the science behind that.
• 0:24
  Philip Pape: I'll call out the one protein claim that gets oversold, and I'll give you the exact number to hit no matter what your goal is right now.
• 0:34
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:44
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and today we're going after one of the most deeply held beliefs in all of fitness, which is that fat loss is a subtraction problem, that you need to eat less and move more, shrink those numbers, reduce those calories.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: If you're over 40, if you've been dieting on and off for years, hey, we all have.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're even going through perimenopause or menopause right now, and you feel like your body isn't cooperating anymore, you have almost certainly been sold the subtraction model over and over.
• 1:21
  Philip Pape: And it is not that the math is wrong or that calories and calories out is wrong exactly.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: It's that the math hides an input, a very important input having to do with the composition of what you're eating that is a very, very powerful level.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: And that, of course, is protein.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: And when you understand why it's different, and we're going to get into some more nuance today than you probably hear on most podcasts, where there is a lot of discussion about protein today, for sure.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: When you understand these differences, you stop thinking about fat loss as how little can I get away with eating?
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: And you start thinking about it as what do I need to add into my diet, into my nutrition, so my body does the work for me.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: So things are easier.
• 2:06
  Philip Pape: So I feel better.
• 2:06
  Philip Pape: So I perform better.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: So I build muscle.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: So I lose fat.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: So I get leaner, all in a way that doesn't feel like this huge amount of misery and suffering.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: And then I want you to stick around to the end of the episode because after the main content, I'm going to share a 30-second mental model that I use with clients called the two envelope trick.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: And it's a very fast conceptual visual way to understand why the scale is very unreliable, especially when you're trying to change our body composition, but also to motivate you to focus on what we're talking about today.
• 2:39
  Philip Pape: All right, so here's where we're headed.
• 2:41
  Philip Pape: I'm going to show you the three real reasons that protein affects your body fat differently.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: I'm going to be honest with you about a big claim that floats around online today that does not survive what I call skeptical scrutiny.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: And then I'm going to give you the protein floor to set and hold no matter what phase you're in.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: So some of this is going to be a refresher, but there are going to be some surprises today for you in how powerful protein really is.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: So let's start with the belief, because the conventional data that gets shared often creates competing camps that don't necessarily need to be competing.
• 3:17
  Philip Pape: Meaning there's some truth in a lot of what people say online.
• 3:20
  Philip Pape: There are a lot of falsehoods as well.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: And sometimes the truths overlap from two different camps.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: So the conventional model is really about energy balance.
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: Calories in, calories out.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: It's like your body is a calorie bank account.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: You eat less than you burn.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: And you now your body has to withdraw from the fat account, right?
• 3:40
  Philip Pape: If it's a bank account, and therefore you lose weight.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: And at the highest level, that's pretty much true.
• 3:45
  Philip Pape: I'm not a calorie denier.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: Energy balance is real.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: Thermodynamics exists, it's physics.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: Okay, we need to assert that that is a truth.
• 3:54
  Philip Pape: But what the model treats as an assumption that is not true is that it treats every calorie as identical.
• 4:02
  Philip Pape: Now, a calorie is just a measurement of energy.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: So, in essence, the energy piece of it is identical.
• 4:09
  Philip Pape: But your bot the way your body processes calories changes drastically depending on what you eat.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: And of course, we know this because we know that, for example, eating all processed foods versus eating mostly whole foods, you're going to be hungrier and you're going to eat more just naturally because they don't fill you up as much.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: Well, that's because it's affecting your hunger and your hormones related to hunger.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: That is a real phenomenon that's occurring because the calorie source is different.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: So we have to kind of separate calories, which is a real thing, it's a unit of energy, from the practical reality of when you eat foods from different types of macros and nutrients separate from the calories.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: There's other things going on, is my point.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: So a hundred calories of protein, a hundred calories of rice, a hundred calories of olive oil, they all go into your body with the same amount of energy.
• 4:59
  Philip Pape: And yes, but that's not the whole story.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: There's a lot more that's actually far more important, in my opinion.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: In fact, when you only count calories, you often do yourself a disservice because then you start making choices based on calories rather than based on these other factors.
• 5:15
  Philip Pape: When you think about what happens when a chronic dieter, and a lot of you listening are chronic dieters.
• 5:21
  Philip Pape: I say that with love because I've been there.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: When a chronic dieter tries to lose more fat, and oftentimes you talk in terms of weight loss instead of fat loss, which is the first problem.
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: But anyway, what do you do?
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: What's the move?
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna cut calories again.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: I get emails from people who say I've cut down to 900 calories and I still can't lose weight.
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: And they say it as if I should be losing weight because I've cut calories, not realizing that there are other factors involved, both on the calories and in calories outside.
• 5:48
  Philip Pape: Now, where do calories usually get cut from?
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: Well, people cut the thing that's easiest to cut, which is usually whatever the food is on your plate in general.
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: And so protein tends to drop along for the ride, even though, as we're gonna discuss later, protein is one of those things you want to keep anchored at a reasonably high level, but it tends to drop and now you're eating less total and you're eating less protein specifically, and you're hungry, hungrier, and your training suffers.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: And even if a scale drops, part of what you're losing might be muscle because now you're not holding on to that.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: If you're even lifting weights, which many of you are not doing that either, and you have to be lifting weights.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: The older we get, the more this is a problem, especially through periposmenopause, where you're already fighting to hold on to that lean tissue.
• 6:30
  Philip Pape: So the subtraction model, if you follow it, you're going to walk straight into a big cyclical vicious cycle, I should say.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: A big vicious cycle where you're losing muscle tissue, your metabolism's declining, you have to cut more, you stop losing weight, so you cut more, metabolism declines.
• 6:48
  Philip Pape: You get what I'm talking about.
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: It's a vicious cycle.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: So it's not that calories don't count.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: It's that eat less as this blanket instruction results in all of the wrong decisions for protein, for nutrients, for energy, for performance, for muscle that are essentially the opposite of what we're trying to do.
• 7:09
  Philip Pape: Which you're gonna understand why that leads to, okay, why so why some people say eat more to lose weight or eat more to lose fat.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: And even that is overly simplistic.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: You have to explain what you mean.
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: What are you eating more of and why, and in what you know, phase and process are you doing it?
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: But anyway, let's talk about why protein is so different.
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: And the first one is a little bit oversold, but I want to talk about it, and that is the thermic effect of food, T E F.
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: This is that protein burns more calories to digest than the other macronutrients.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: That is true.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: Every time you eat, your body spends some energy just processing what you ate.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: And the macros are very different in how this happens.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: So when you eat fat, it costs almost nothing to process, about 0 to 3% of the calories get consumed.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: Carbs are around 5 to 10%, and protein is around 20 to 30%.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: So if you eat 100 calories of protein, your body's gonna spend something like 20 to 30 of those calories just breaking it down and putting it to use.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: So you net as little as 70 of those 100 calories.
• 8:16
  Philip Pape: Now, this is a real thing that has been measured in humans, but the size of it probably gets oversold a little bit.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: So let's say you're eating 180 grams of protein a day.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: That's a very solid target for a lot of people in this audience, probably above what many of you are eating, to be honest.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: But that's what I eat.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: So I weigh 180 pounds.
• 8:33
  Philip Pape: I tend to eat around 180 grams.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: That is 720 calories from protein.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: So if you're netting an extra, call it up to 20% back compared to eating those same calories as fat, you're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to 100 calories a day.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: Now that is real.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna call it magic, but that is very real, right?
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: 80 to 100 calories, but it's also not massive and you know, 500 pounds a day, a pound a week type of reel, but it's starting to move the needle.
• 9:03
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: It's the smallest of the effects I'm talking about, even though a lot of people fixate on this, but I think it's good to know.
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: Okay, so it's a nice little tailwind.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: Now let's get to the next part that starts to change your behavior and starts to change the result.
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: And that is, okay, that is satiety fullness.
• 9:22
  Philip Pape: Protein is by far the most filling macronutrient per calorie.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: And this has evidence behind it, despite the keto and carnivore folks trying to suggest that fat is the most uh filling, or some people say carbs are the most filling.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: It really comes down to protein.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: Now, protein as a whole, I get it, it's a macro and it contains lots of different foods.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: So we have to look at specifics.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: But there's a classic study from 2005, Weigel and colleagues, where they raise people's protein to about 30% of their calories.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: And then, and this is really important, they let them eat as much of anything they wanted, totally free.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: We call this ad libinum.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: That's what the researchers call it.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: And what happened is people spontaneously ate about 440 fewer calories a day.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: So they were not counting calories, it was purely natural because they were full.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: They just stopped reaching for more food and they ate 440 fewer calories a day.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: And so what happened?
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: Over the study, they lost fat without being told to be in a calorie deficit or trying to be in a calorie deficit.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: So the protein created the deficit for them through their own appetite.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: It's not that they weren't in a deficit.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: This goes back to why I say energy balance is a real thing, but how we get there and whether we get there and whether we stick to that deficit is much more practically important.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: So if you think about that, this flips the whole psychology of dieting.
• 10:46
  Philip Pape: The restriction or subtraction model says you have to fight your hunger with willpower, you've got to be in a calorie deficit.
• 10:51
  Philip Pape: Cut, cut, cut.
• 10:52
  Philip Pape: You've got to starve, you've got to do optavea, you gotta do uh uh what's that called?
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: Weight watchers, whatever.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: The protein model says, hey, just raise your protein high enough, and a big piece of that psychological battle that you've had for years just disappears because your gut is sending the fullness signals.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: Your hunger hormones tend to settle down.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: The food you would have grazed on or licked, tasted bit in the evening no longer is attractive to you, or you don't, you just simply naturally don't reach for it, or you simply feel full.
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: This is the difference between white knuckling a diet and one that is running a little bit on autopilot, which is where we try to get our clients to and what this podcast is all about.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: I want it to be easier for you guys.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: And if you're on GLP1s and you start to do this, you might find that you're too full and you have to reduce the dose or even start to come off of it.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: This is one of the key levers that we use to help people reduce their dosage or potentially come off of it with working with their medical professional, because that is not in my scope of practice.
• 11:55
  Philip Pape: And if the, let's say the evening snacking, that's where you tend to fall into the temptation, right?
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: This is a great lever.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: More protein earlier in the day.
• 12:06
  Philip Pape: We actually see studies where front loading the protein can be even more beneficial, can vastly help than just trying to try harder.
• 12:14
  Philip Pape: And we know this from the evidence.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: So this is a great time to tell you about today's sponsor, True Nutrition, because getting more protein into your day is what they help solve, but in a very cool way, because you get to build it yourself.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: Instead of a one-size-fits-all tub, you customize everything the base, the flavor, the sweetener, and even what they call boosts.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: It just takes a few minutes.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: You pick the base first.
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: There are, I think, over 20 types of protein: whey, plant-based, dairy-free, all third-party tested and then tested again at their facility.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: Then you add the flavor, which is sweetened with stevia or monk fruit, and you set how intense the flavor is, or you go unflavored.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: And then you add what they call boosts, like fiber, probiotics, ashwa ganda.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: They have a whole bunch of those as well.
• 12:59
  Philip Pape: And honestly, I love how it tastes.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: So I have a blend with whey, egg, and casein protein, cookies and cream, stevia sweetened, and it is very smooth.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: None of that chalky aftertaste or chemical aftertaste you get from a lot of proteins, and it doesn't affect my stomach at all.
• 13:15
  Philip Pape: So if you have an intolerance, this is a great way to control what goes in your protein.
• 13:20
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• 13:35
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• 13:42
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• 13:49
  Philip Pape: All right, now we've covered the two effects that do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to protein's magic, the fullness and the digestion.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: But there is a third one that potentially is more exciting, but also more overrated or oversold.
• 14:05
  Philip Pape: And so I want to get into the nuance here, and this is why I saved this one for last, because it requires a little bit of explaining.
• 14:11
  Philip Pape: The idea is called nutrient partitioning.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: And in its, I guess the strongest claim is that when you're building muscle, your body preferentially shuttles nutrients toward that muscle and away from fat storage, so that when you add protein and of course you're training hard in the gym, you can produce muscle gain and fat loss at the same time, what we call body recomposition.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: And there's a good review by Habers and colleagues from 2025 that talks about the mechanisms here, which is that growing muscle pulls in glucose and the muscle growth signals, the signals from that growing muscle, then increase the release of fat.
• 14:50
  Philip Pape: And because building tissue is metabolically expensive, the energy gets quote unquote spent on construction of the muscle instead of stored as fat.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: And so it sounds awesome.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: It sounds like like the holy grail for body recomp, you know, body recomp.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: But in that same review, in plain language, it says this partitioning effect is most apparent in animal models.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: That's in mice.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: And the best demonstration we have in humans comes from a class of drugs called myostatin inhibitors, like bimagrumab, where people gain lean mass and loss significant fat at the same time.
• 15:27
  Philip Pape: But that's a drug.
• 15:27
  Philip Pape: You have to be taking that drug.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: That's not just eating more protein.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: So when you strip it down to what do we really know based on the evidence and what's proven in humans eating food and lifting weights, the effect is there, but maybe it's smaller and slower than we think it is based on the animal work, even though there is a whole set of research looking at myostatin inhibitors that could change the game in the future, just like GLP1s have.
• 15:51
  Philip Pape: So muscle and muscle gain and fat loss can happen at the same time.
• 15:54
  Philip Pape: We have plenty of human recomposition data that I'm gonna get to in a bit, but your body isn't this like magic nutrient partitioning machine that ignores calories, right?
• 16:06
  Philip Pape: You still have to have you still have to have the energy balance accounted for as well.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: So this brings me actually to the biggest online claim for protein.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: And it comes from real studies, as many of these claims do, right?
• 16:20
  Philip Pape: Things get cherry-picked and then they get reinterpreted so often incorrectly.
• 16:23
  Philip Pape: These are the Antonio studies where resistance-trained people ate huge amounts of protein.
• 16:29
  Philip Pape: And we're talking like 4.4 grams per kilogram.
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: So that's hundreds of extra protein calories a day.
• 16:35
  Philip Pape: And then on paper, when we look at their numbers, they didn't gain any body fat.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: And then people took that to mean, hey, protein calories in a calorie surplus are essentially free.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: Like you literally cannot get fat from extra protein.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: And I've heard really good folks like Dr.
• 16:53
  Philip Pape: Bill Campbell talk about this research, not with that language, you know, with the right amount of nuance, where they're like, yeah, there's there's other things going on.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: What it's it seems that you're adding protein in and then not gaining body fat.
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: But what is actually happening?
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: Well, the first of all, there's methodological issues with the studies themselves.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: We could break that down first, and that is self-reporting, which is always a challenge, not, not, not the be-all-end-all, but self-reporting what you eat.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: And we we know this is one of the most consistent findings in all of nutrition research that people are terrible at reporting their intake, especially when you ask them to eat way more than usual.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: And it's honestly right there in the data.
• 17:33
  Philip Pape: I mean, if the subjects didn't gain the weight you'd expect if they'd actually eaten all that extra protein above and beyond their current calories, they probably didn't eat as much as reported, or they unconsciously compensated by moving more and eating less elsewhere.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: And the moving more piece, people want to focus on and say, well, yeah, that's okay, Philip, but it's because their metabolism, their energy out must have gone way up to make up for it.
• 17:58
  Philip Pape: It didn't go up at that much.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: I mean, it probably went up for sure.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: And there's things like the thermic effect of food we've already talked about.
• 18:05
  Philip Pape: But when you actually control for these things, like in a metabolic ward where researchers are controlling the calories that you eat, and by the way, they did this in 2012.
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: Bray and colleagues, these what they call protein overfeeding studies, we do see an addition of body fat.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: So I think there's some contradictions here.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: People love to glom onto something that seems like, you know, the secret, the magic.
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: And you know what?
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: It's close to magic, not as much as some of these people claim, but it's still phenomenal.
• 18:32
  Philip Pape: Eating more protein definitely will result in less body fat added and more lean mass added than overfeeding on carbs or fat.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: So we definitely lean by toward biasing protein, but it still also comes down to energy balance.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: So the the honest like conclusion here is you cannot eat unlimited protein in a big surplus and expect zero fat gain.
• 18:57
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 18:58
  Philip Pape: What does come out of this data that matters to you is because protein is so filling, because it costs more to digest, and because it drives your body to build and repair instead of store fat, then if you build your diet around a high protein floor, it will tend to naturally settle you near maintenance or a mild deficit on its own, even when you're eating what feels like a lot of food.
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: Okay, and your metabolism, your expenditure might be a little bit higher as well, which means you could eat more than you would have otherwise on a purely calorie basis as well.
• 19:36
  Philip Pape: You're not gaining fat because thermodynamics doesn't work, because calories in, calories out doesn't work, but because, or it's not that you're not gaining fat because of those, but it's because all of these things tend to stack together, resulting in you being at maintenance or in a slight deficit while it feels like you're eating a lot more and you're preserving or building muscle.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: So you're getting some body recomp at the same time.
• 19:57
  Philip Pape: So I know you want it to be all flashy and this amazing like eat unlimited protein and you're gonna lose body fat.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: I will say people who jack up their protein do often lose body fat, but it's not because of thermodynamics being broken.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: It's because of all these other things that are that are happening, which guess what?
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: For practical purposes, that matters.
• 20:14
  Philip Pape: Like that's super important anyway.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: So you can say, you can say at a top level, eat more protein, you'll probably lose body fat.
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: And it's probably generally true for a lot of people, which is phenomenal.
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: That's pretty cool.
• 20:26
  Philip Pape: So now when we talk about body recomp, the idea of losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time, we the discussion was always in the past, oh, that's only for beginners or that's for people on drugs, you know, performance and anti drugs or whatever.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: And that's not true.
• 20:39
  Philip Pape: You know, we know a lot more people can experience body recomp, even experienced lifters.
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: Eric Helms, I have a lot of respect for Eric.
• 20:45
  Philip Pape: He put out a great piece recently working through the math of it in mass, uh the mass research review.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: And the bottom line is that whether you gained or lost body energy depends on the relative change in fat mass versus muscle, not the number on the scale, right?
• 21:01
  Philip Pape: Because a pound of fat holds roughly 3,500 calories of energy, whereas a pound of muscle holds only about 800.
• 21:09
  Philip Pape: So the density difference makes a difference here.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: And it it complicates the math.
• 21:13
  Philip Pape: So when people are trying to do the math, they they tend to get lost in it because of those differences.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: So you can hold your body weight the same, like your body weight doesn't change.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: But then if you lose a pound of fat and gain a pound of muscle, that is a massive change in your body composition without a change in your body weight, which is what we deal with all the time when clients are like, oh, my weight did not go down.
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: I was hoping to lose weight, but my inches went down and my lifts going up, and I honestly look a little bit trimmer.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: You might still have a little belly fat that you want to lose.
• 21:46
  Philip Pape: That's fine, but you are getting leaner.
• 21:48
  Philip Pape: So that's pretty incredible.
• 21:50
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 21:51
  Philip Pape: So if protein is this big, close to magical lever, how much do you need?
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: Let's just get that out of the way again, especially if you're new to the show or you need Refresher.
• 22:01
  Philip Pape: The target that I usually go with from the research is roughly 0.7 grams per pound of body weight per day.
• 22:08
  Philip Pape: That's about 1.6 grams per kilo in metric.
• 22:12
  Philip Pape: And there's a really well-known meta-analysis by Morton and colleagues in 2018 that found muscle gains start to plateau around that point.
• 22:20
  Philip Pape: More than that is not harmful.
• 22:22
  Philip Pape: There's no issues with it.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: If you like to eat more protein, awesome.
• 22:25
  Philip Pape: Enjoy it.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: There is a case for going higher up to a gram per pound, especially where when you're in an aggressive fat loss phase and you're trying to hold on to that lean mass.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: And then it's fine to go up just because of preference.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: And if you happen to get benefits that we talked about today, like satiety above and beyond that amount, and that affects your calories overall and makes things easier, go for it.
• 22:47
  Philip Pape: There's newer research, it was a meta regression from Reffalo, Trexler, and Helms that looked at how much protein you actually need to hold muscle in a deficit.
• 22:57
  Philip Pape: And the interesting finding is that pushing protein really high, like around 1.1 grams per pound, only mattered for the leanest people.
• 23:07
  Philip Pape: So for example, women already under 20% body fat and men under 12%.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: But for everybody else, and that's most of us listening, protein explained only a small slice of who was able to hold on to muscle.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: Guess what explained more of that?
• 23:23
  Philip Pape: Well, the size of the deficit and whether they were training hard.
• 23:26
  Philip Pape: So I'm not going to oversell the protein floor.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: I never have, or at least not in a long time since I started doing this podcast.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: I often use the 0.7 grams per pound as adequate for almost everybody.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: And if you want to go higher for other reasons, that's fine too.
• 23:41
  Philip Pape: The last thing I want to mention is the idea of anabolic resistance.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: A lot of the research we have skews toward young men, but anabolic resistance gets more pronounced as you age.
• 23:51
  Philip Pape: It means your muscles respond a little less to a given amount of protein than they used to.
• 23:55
  Philip Pape: And I guess the practical upshot of this is it kind of simplifies things that, hey, you should just make sure to get a lot of protein.
• 24:04
  Philip Pape: Just 30 to 40 grams of protein per meal is usually a way, good, good rule of thumb.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: Don't wait for dinner.
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: If, if anything, front load it if you can and spread it out throughout the day so that you can get that floor.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: All right, before I wrap up, remember I promised you that 30-second mental model at the end, the two envelope trick.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna share that in a second.
• 24:26
  Philip Pape: So stay with me.
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: But if this episode sold you on the idea that protein is the lever and eat less is probably not way the way to go, the next natural question is okay, Philip, what do all my other numbers look like?
• 24:41
  Philip Pape: How much protein should I eat?
• 24:43
  Philip Pape: And then how do I set my carbs and fat?
• 24:46
  Philip Pape: So people ask, what should be my macros be?
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: Well, I put together a free guide a while back that walks you through setting up your macros for different phases and why and the kind of flexibility you have behind it.
• 24:59
  Philip Pape: It's called Nutrition 101 for body composition.
• 25:02
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweights.com slash macros, totally free.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: And it's my whole framework on flexible dieting.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: How to find your maintenance, how to set your protein, carbs, and fats, how to make it sustainable.
• 25:13
  Philip Pape: Just general ideas of setting this up, the basics.
• 25:16
  Philip Pape: Everything we talked about today, put into the actual targets that you can use.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: So go to wits and weights.com slash macros to download that free guide.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: All right, here's the two envelope trick or concept.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: I want you to imagine your body as two envelopes.
• 25:30
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 25:30
  Philip Pape: It's it's just two envelopes.
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: One has all your fat in it, and one has all your muscle in it.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: And they're gonna have very different amounts of energy.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: A pound of fat has 3,500 calories, a pound of muscle has 800 calories.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: But you have different amounts of fat muscle.
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: Let's not worry about that.
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: Now, over a couple months, you lose a pound of fat and you gain a pound of muscle.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: So what happens?
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: You're gonna take a pound of fat out of your fat envelope, you're gonna add in a pound of muscle to your muscle envelope, and so they're gonna balance each other out.
• 25:59
  Philip Pape: What's gonna happen?
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: You're gonna step on the scale, it's gonna read the same.
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: No change in scale.
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: And so if you're only using the scale, you conclude, oh, nothing happened.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: I was trying to get leaner.
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: That means I was trying to lose weight, nothing happened, right?
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: But you just took 3,500 calories out of the fat envelope of your body, and you only put 800 into the muscle envelope.
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: So you've actually gotten rid of some volume and you should actually be leaner.
• 26:26
  Philip Pape: Your clothes should fit a little bit differently, you should feel stronger and look leaner, and none of that is visible on the scale because the scale only measures weight.
• 26:34
  Philip Pape: And yet you just traded a light energy dense tissue for a heavier, leaner one.
• 26:39
  Philip Pape: All right, that's the best I could do it to visualize this on a podcast.
• 26:42
  Philip Pape: The next time the scale doesn't move, I want you to ask a better question.
• 26:45
  Philip Pape: Not, hey, what do I weigh, but which envelope is filling and which one is emptying?
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: Because you want to fill the muscle envelope and you want to empty the fat envelope.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: That is the game.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 26:58
  Philip Pape: And remember, fat loss was never really a subtraction problem.
• 27:02
  Philip Pape: Protect your protein, protect your muscle, let your body do the math for you.
• 27:06
  Philip Pape: And I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.