Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / 8 Fat Loss Strategies if Your Metabolism is Really Low | Ep 305

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8 Fat Loss Strategies if Your Metabolism is Really Low | Ep 305 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: If you've been doing everything right strength training, consistently eating, well walking, 8-10,000 steps daily, managing your stress and sleep yet your metabolism seems stubbornly slower than everyone else's.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: You're not alone and you're not imagining it.
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: Some people genuinely have lower metabolic rates, despite doing everything by the book.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: The truth is that traditional calorie deficit approaches that work for most people might be leaving you feeling miserable, hungry and watching your strength plummet when you're already eating what feels like next to nothing.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: Today, we're going to understand why some people have inherently lower energy expenditure and how to design around this metabolic constraint.
• 0:40
  Philip Pape: You'll learn how to create a fat loss system that works specifically for your unique physiology without requiring extreme restriction or endless cardio.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 1:06
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're talking about a situation that frustrates many of my clients and listeners, and that is having a genuinely lower-than-average metabolism, despite following all the right habits.
• 1:20
  Philip Pape: So this isn't about metabolism myths or misconceptions, or also how to support your metabolism when you haven't done all the things.
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: We actually covered that in episode 302, the one right before this, about why your metabolism declines with age and what to do about it, and that is a very good foundational episode if you're kind of new to this and wondering where to start, but today is okay.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: You've done the things and I still have a much lower than average metabolism, and so what this is about is acknowledging that there are significant genetic and physiological variations between human beings.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: Right, that just genetics alone will cause differences, and some people simply burn fewer calories at rest and during activity than others, even when controlling for body size, muscle mass, what they call fat-free mass and activity levels.
• 2:11
  Philip Pape: What is pretty exciting, though, is that once you acknowledge the reality right, facts are facts, and once we analyze it like an engineer we analyze it systematically, understand what's going on we can design fat loss approaches that work with your body's unique constraints, instead of fighting against them, like I've helped many clients do who've had this exact issue Before we get into it.
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: Of course, if you want to take that first step toward understanding your metabolism and how to accurately track and adjust your nutrition for your unique needs, again, this episode is really a more advanced topic, but if you're trying to take that first step or you want a refresher, download my free Nutrition 101 Guide for Body Composition.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: The link is in the show notes.
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: Totally free, it gives you the foundation you need to implement even the basic two advanced strategies that we'll discuss today.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: It's a game changer.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: So go to witsandweightscom, slash free or just click the link in the show notes to download my Flexible Dieting Nutrition 101 for Body Composition Guide.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: All right, so let's start by talking about why some people have lower metabolic rates despite what I'll call optimal habits.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: And this is crucial because, assuming you've got all the habits in place and that's a big assumption, right?
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: Sometimes people have done all the things and yet they haven't.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: They still have a lot of chronic stress and they don't realize it.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: Or the way they respond to stress is really causing their cortisol to go haywire, and that is what's preventing them from losing fat.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: Assuming you've optimized everything, understanding the why behind the remaining constraints will no-transcript episode.
• 4:11
  Philip Pape: I've identified the five primary reasons why your metabolism might be genuinely lower than average, despite following the advice.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: First and foremost is just genetics, and it's not something we can control, right?
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: Research shows that as much as a 10 to 20% difference can be found in resting metabolic rate between individuals of similar size, age and body composition, and that's not a small variance, right?
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: That's not nothing.
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: That's the difference between someone needing 1,800 calories for maintenance versus, say, 2,200 calories for maintenance versus, say, 2200 calories for maintenance.
• 4:45
  Philip Pape: And these are encoded in our DNA.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: It affects a lot of things.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: It affects our mitochondrial efficiency, which I talked about on the last episode.
• 4:53
  Philip Pape: It affects our hormone sensitivity, meaning like you might metabolically adapt more aggressively as soon as you start going on a diet because of how sensitive your hormones are.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: And if your parents, if your siblings, also struggle with similar issues, there definitely could be a genetic component at play.
• 5:09
  Philip Pape: Not always right.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: A lot of us just have family who they don't know what to do and they've kind of let themselves go.
• 5:17
  Philip Pape: They're sedentary, they don't train all of that and don't always read genetics into that.
• 5:21
  Philip Pape: But you do know that there are differences between individuals just doing the same things and at the same body size.
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: The second factor is adaptive thermogenesis, or metabolic adaptation, we call it, and this is history-based.
• 5:38
  Philip Pape: What I mean by that is, if you've been through periods of significant dieting and calorie restriction in the past, especially chronically restrictive diets or yo-yo dieting your body may have developed a I'll call it persistent, not permanent, that's.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: That's I gotta be careful of my words, but kind of a persistent, long-term, deeply embedded and developed metabolic adaptation.
• 6:01
  Philip Pape: Right, and we know this from the extremes, like the Biggest Loser show.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: That was a game show where contestants lost a ton of weight really fast and their metabolisms adapted and when they went back to eating the normal amount of food for their maintenance, their maintenance calories were way lower than they were before and they persisted for years after the diet ended.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: And so your body essentially becomes more efficient at conserving energy, which is great for survival when there's a famine, right, but it's frustrating when you're trying to get a certain body composition in the modern environment.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: So it's good to understand that your history is going to play into this.
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: You can't change history, it is what it is, but just understand that.
• 6:43
  Philip Pape: The third factor out of five is physiological efficiency, and this means this this is also kind of a genetic thing, right?
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: Some people, um, just extract more energy from food and then they conserve more energy when they're active.
• 6:56
  Philip Pape: Your body might have more efficient digestive enzymes, more efficient mitochondria and less energy wasted as heat.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: Okay, so that means you're like.
• 7:09
  Philip Pape: It sounds great, except the problem is it means you're not going to burn very many calories.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: It is great for survival.
• 7:14
  Philip Pape: It's an advantage.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: It's a disadvantage when you're trying to lose fat, when you're trying to get rid of energy.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: So I guess the positive reframe on that is you're an efficient beast, but unfortunately it makes it a little harder to lose fat.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: I get it.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: The fourth factor is hormonal factors.
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: Right, we never want to blame hormones, but we do want to understand there are variations in people's thyroid function, their insulin sensitivity, their sex hormone levels.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: Some of these are because of your history and because of your lifestyle.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: Others are simply genetic differences.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: And remember that the normal clinical range is not always the best indicator of the optimal range, right, and the optimal range for you might also be different than someone else's optimal range, and that can cause differences in energy expenditure.
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: So if someone, for example, who's at the lower end of normal thyroid function might burn significantly fewer calories than someone at the upper end, whether that means you need treatment or not, that's a medical decision that you want to find a competent expert to talk to about, but it may be genetics as well.
• 8:16
  Philip Pape: And then, finally, your body size is going to matter.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: If you're smaller framed, you're going to burn fewer calories, like you might have smaller bones, smaller organs just be small in general as a person.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: So this is like petite women.
• 8:29
  Philip Pape: Okay, I've had clients or women they tend to be a little bit more challenging clients just because everything is at a smaller level of change.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: Um, the sensitivity is is kind of, I guess, smaller in a way, uh, in that they're already in a light body weight and sometimes a lean body fat, and so, uh, any standard approach or standard calorie recommendation might be completely off the wall for them and have nothing to do with what they really need.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: And you got to be careful and not say, oh, you're at 1100 calories in your diet, that's really, I've heard, that's really low.
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: Well, if you're 110 pound female five, five, two that might be more than enough calories for you at maintenance.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: I don't know Right, and in society where we eat food and we have certain amounts of meals and food, you know, meals are a certain size and all this it can be frustrating for them because they feel like they're eating way less than other people, but really they're eating what their body says they need and it's the size they were born with.
• 9:24
  Philip Pape: So we have to deal with that.
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: Now I want to address a common objection I hear when discussing this topic because often people will say you know, people say, but that violates the laws of thermodynamics, right?
• 9:36
  Philip Pape: Or calories in calories out still applies, and I'm I'm the biggest advocate for acknowledging that energy balance is reality.
• 9:45
  Philip Pape: Right, and both those statements are true that energy balance governs weight loss.
• 9:50
  Philip Pape: But the key uh insight here is that your body's calories outside of the equation is what can be dramatically different from person to person, and it can change a lot even when all observable behaviors are identical.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: Right, and people get hung up on calories in calories out as if it's fixed Obviously calories in is what you eat, but calories out is vastly variable, based on a lot of factors.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: Right, so it's not like energy is appearing or disappearing magically.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: Right, conservation of energy thermodynamics it's recognizing that the, the system, the body system efficiency varies significantly between people.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: Okay, so hopefully I've gotten that message through without rambling too much on it.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: But this is where a systems-based approach becomes even more invaluable.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: The thing that we teach here and that I offer clients and what we work through it is not just cookie cutter diets and just random programs and YouTube influencers and all that that.
• 10:45
  Philip Pape: None of that stuff works for most people, especially people who have to really dial in due to a lower metabolism.
• 10:51
  Philip Pape: And if you think of a system, right, systems have constraints.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: They have efficiencies.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: When we can't change the core efficiency of the system, which is your metabolism, when we can't change that, like the core level of it right, I'm not talking about your overall TDE, the things we can change but when you can't change the core, we want to design around that, we want to acknowledge that and we optimize the other variables and then create what I'll call like redundant systems that don't rely exclusively on the constrained component.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: And you're like what the hell are you talking about?
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: Okay, let me get into it.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: So let me get into how we apply this.
• 11:29
  Philip Pape: All right, we're going to create a fat loss system for someone with a lower metabolism, and for some reason this is the week of eights, because on the last episode, I talked about eight strategies for preventing metabolism decline with age.
• 11:41
  Philip Pape: Today, we're going to talk about eight strategies for a fat loss system for a low metabolism.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: All right, the first four are going to focus on optimizing nutrition without requiring extreme calorie restriction.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: This is a really important topic because what most people do is they just feel like they just have to cut calories to a ridiculous level when they have a low metabolism.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: You don't have to.
• 12:06
  Philip Pape: Strategy number one is high satiety, high volume, low energy density foods.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: I know for some of you that sounds obvious, but a lot of you are not doing this.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: Even if you don't have a low metabolism, this is a game changer.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: This means building your diet around foods that create the maximum fullness signal with the minimum calorie input Lean proteins think chicken breast, white fish, egg whites, shrimp, tuna, those kinds of things, lean pork, et cetera.
• 12:34
  Philip Pape: Even very lean beef are up on this list.
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: High fiber vegetables and fruits.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: High resistant starch foods like white potatoes.
• 12:44
  Philip Pape: One of the most high satiety fruits is orange.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: When you eat the whole orange not the rind, obviously, but don't have orange juice, eat the orange.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: The goal is strategically increase your food volume without increasing calorie intake.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: Think of large salads, vegetables, soups, stews, stir fries you know dishes that take up a lot of stomach space relative to their calorie content.
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: I did an episode on that recently.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: Go hunt for it.
• 13:07
  Philip Pape: It's in the last few weeks or reach out to me.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: It was all about that.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: It was all about it was actually called um when eat eating less.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: Sorry, let me think about this Eating more to lose weight actually works.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: That's what it was, and it was the idea that you're actually eating more volume, you're not eating more calories.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: So I have I have several clients I can think of who are kind of struggling with that low maintenance intake, even after we've bumped it up a bit.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: They're building weight, they're, you know, walking, they're doing all the things, and what we had to do is just acknowledge they needed a lot more high satiety and high fiber foods, a lot more protein as well relative to the normal recommendation.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: And then they and by they I mean men and women.
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: I can think of one woman in particular who was actually on the podcast recently, melanie, you could go check out her episode we're able to and by they I mean men and women.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: I can think of one woman in particular who was actually on the podcast recently Melanie, you could go check out her episode we're able to create this modest deficit and not feel deprived.
• 13:58
  Philip Pape: We can't necessarily create an aggressive deficit because of the calorie levels, or else you get into that point of where the hunger signals really get triggered a lot, but we could at least have a modest deficit and slowly lose fat over time and still feel satisfied, all right.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: So you can start your meal with, for example, a large volume of vegetables and then follow it by lean protein and then have the starchy carbs and fats at the end of the meal, for example.
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: The sequence of how you eat can be really helpful.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: So that's strategy number one.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: Strategy number two is nutrient density, maximizing nutrient density.
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: So this might sound the same as volume and there is mathematically a similarity.
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: But you've got to think about it this way when your calorie budget's limited, you want every calorie to work harder for you.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: So when I say nutrients, I'm actually talking about micronutrients, right, and so if you can select foods rich in micronutrients and high quality protein, it's going to support your training performance, your muscle retention, your cravings, your satiety, just having more nutrients in your diet, because your body kind of knows when it's deficient.
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: It's not as precise and targeted as people think like, oh, I crave vitamin E or whatever.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: Evidence doesn't quite support that, whatever Evidence doesn't quite support that.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: But you do get more satisfied and support many of these hunger signals with more nutrient-dense foods, and that might be introducing things like organ meats, fatty fish, leafy greens, berries, cruciferous vegetables, eggs.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: All of these are what some people call superfoods I don't like that term because there's no good or bad foods, but they are super in terms of their nutrient density.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: So actually, somebody I had on the show, dr Sarah Ballantyne, wrote a book called Nutrivor great book, and she actually ranks a lot of foods based on their nutrient score.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: So that could be another way to look at it.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: All right, strategy number three is I alluded to this already but slightly higher or a lot higher protein intake than the standard recommendation.
• 15:53
  Philip Pape: So my standard recommendation and what the evidence shows is 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: I would shoot that up to maybe 1.2, as much as 1.5.
• 16:04
  Philip Pape: Now the problem with going too high is you leave very few calories for carbs and fats.
• 16:09
  Philip Pape: So it really is a fine dance between the macros.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: And again, all of this is for somebody who knows what they're doing, who's tracking, who can be pretty consistent with this.
• 16:17
  Philip Pape: Otherwise you're going to drive yourself crazy and you really have to go back to the basics first and not even try to lose fat potentially until you've dialed those in.
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: So we know protein is the highest dermic effect of food.
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: Your body burns more calories digesting it.
• 16:29
  Philip Pape: We know that higher protein intake enhances muscle retention.
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: We know it promotes greater satiety.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: All the things you got to get with protein.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: I feel like I've talked about this so much recently.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: If you're listening to even two episodes, you'll get plenty of it.
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: So increasing protein above the normal could be helpful.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: Strategy number four is calorie cycling and refeeds.
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: So normally I would not recommend calorie cycling, carb cycling, even refeeds to newer people following a fat loss plan.
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: Refeeds I might like making Saturday and Sunday a little bit higher days than the other days, but I mean strategic refeeds, like bringing up your carbs so your calories are all the way to your maintenance right, not just a little bit higher, but like a lot higher, literally taking a break, um.
• 17:13
  Philip Pape: But you could also have calorie cycling within the week and kind of line it up with your training, line it up with your hunger signals.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: I've definitely had clients who have to do that just to, because the calories are so low that their body really feels the difference.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: And if you can support your training and recovery the most, the rest of it kind of works out, if you will.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: It doesn't work for everyone.
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: Some people need the same calorie intake every day, but others can alternate between low and high calorie days, usually by changing carbs, and it will minimize I don't want to say it minimizes metabolic adaptation.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: It's going to slow the rate of fat loss down right, unless your low days are even lower, which I don't recommend.
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: But it's going to feel even more sustainable and you'll be consistent and be able to continue getting the result without just feeling like you're kind of crashing all the time.
• 18:06
  Philip Pape: Because the alternative, if you're going to have the same calories every day might be like you're not quite in a big enough deficit but you're also not quite at maintenance and so you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot by not getting movement.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: You know your body adapts to the food and you feel like you're dieting but you're not getting the result.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: It makes sense.
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: So sometimes having the lower and the higher, where the lower is more aggressive and the higher is closer to a refeed or somewhere in between, it's really going to depend.
• 18:30
  Philip Pape: You've got to experiment with it.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: It's going to really help you push forward sustainably.
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: It might look like four to five days at a deficit and then two to three days of maintenance.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: It might be three days in an aggressive deficit and four days of maintenance or no days of maintenance.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: Maybe they're all dieting days, but some are just more aggressive than others.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: And again, usually where the carbs are placed around training sessions.
• 18:57
  Philip Pape: Kind of related to this, actually, as part of the strategy, is structured diet breaks.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: So hold on, let me look at my list, my notes here.
• 19:05
  Philip Pape: Yeah, so I'm including this.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: I'm including this here.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: So diet breaks are like an entire week, or even an entire month, every six weeks, 12 weeks, whatever you need to just recover from the stress of dieting mentally and physically before you continue, just to keep it sustainable.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: It's not going to change your metabolism in any way, but you might have.
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: You know, you're going to have some improvements in your hormones, your energy, your training performance during that phase.
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: So if you can hit it a little bit harder, you actually do get a net benefit for the overall fat loss phase.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: So that's the nutrition side, the first four strategies.
• 19:37
  Philip Pape: The next four are going to be about activity and recovery and some of the psychological factors, so I'm kind of lumping them all together into the final four.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: So this gives us a strategy number five and that is meal frequency and timing.
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: So when you are on these tighter calories with a lower metabolism, the meal pattern is going to really have to line with your natural hunger signals and your energy needs.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: This is a form of intuition, but combined with tracking and measuring that intuition, if that makes sense, right?
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: So in other words, you need to understand when and why you get hunger.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: You need to understand when and why you have high or low energy.
• 20:14
  Philip Pape: It's not just I feel this way and so I'm going to kind of uh, wing it, right You're, you want to journal it, track it, write it down, check it off, whatever makes sense for you.
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: Use a number scale.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: It's a form of tracking for you.
• 20:27
  Philip Pape: When you have the lower metabolism, to compliment your tracking of food in your training, right, my clients all track a lot of this stuff anyway.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: So, again, if you just want somebody to help you do that and give you a plan and say here's what you need to do that's why somebody would work with me or join our Physique University.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: But look, when you have a lower metabolic rate, you've got to get more creative you might find that you need some form of a feeding fasting window.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: I've never, ever said intermittent fasting can't work for somebody.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: I hope you know that.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: I do say that it's not necessary for most people and it creates no different result from a calorie perspective than any other feeding window, but from a hunger signal, satisfaction and consistency perspective, you might need a tighter feeding window because the calories are lower.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: So then you might have, like, your first meal at 11 am and your last meal at 5 pm, with a meal in between.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: Each of those meals can then be bigger.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: Your body adapts to having the fasting window and it's more sustainable.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: So fewer, larger meals feel more satisfied, trigger the fullness hormones and so on, and you're able to maintain your calorie level and feel good about it.
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: Having said that, the fasting window needs to be intelligently aligned with your training, so you're not training fasted.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: That's my biggest caveat on that.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: Now you might be on the opposite extreme and you might benefit from more frequent smaller meals to maintain stable energy throughout the day right, and this is more of the blood sugar control and you might need that little bit of a hit of the meal to kind of just stay satisfied all day.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: What did I want to go with this?
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: So I'm telling you a lot of stuff, but the main thing here is experiment.
• 22:05
  Philip Pape: You can't just track your food, but you have to track hunger, energy, mood, training, performance, right and connect them to your meal patterns to identify what works best.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: You know some clients that have lower metabolisms use fasting and others hate it.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: Right, so, like it depends on what works for you, all right.
• 22:27
  Philip Pape: Strategy number six this is about diet quality and your food environment.
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: So when you have a lower metabolic rate, you have a smaller margin for error when it comes to the highly palatable, ultra processed, the calorie dense foods that can easily lead to over consuming those foods, and so creating an environment that supports adhering to the fat loss phase becomes even more paramount.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: Right, meal prepping, limiting the availability of foods that would tempt you in your house or, at least in eyesight, having a plan for social situations where you're going to have a lot of calorie dense options.
• 23:03
  Philip Pape: Notice, I'm not telling you to not enjoy those foods.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: I'm telling you that you need to be creative with setting yourself up for your environmental success and reducing decision fatigue so you can enjoy those foods on occasion, knowing the ultimate quantity is not gonna be as high as someone else with a higher metabolism.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: It's just the state of things.
• 23:23
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: Strategy number seven has to do with your recovery and training volume.
• 23:28
  Philip Pape: So when your calories are low and I know this from personal experience right now because I'm in a fat loss phase and totally understand my calories are still higher than the people we're talking about in this episode.
• 23:39
  Philip Pape: You can get wiped.
• 23:41
  Philip Pape: You've got to balance your training stimulus with a recovery capacity, and it doesn't mean training less or less frequently, but it does mean making sure that every training session has a clear purpose, gives you a very precise outcome and that your recovery between sessions is prioritized right.
• 24:01
  Philip Pape: What you don't want is excessive fatigue building up from overtraining, which then reduces your other activity levels and then decreases your expenditure even further.
• 24:12
  Philip Pape: You might have to reduce yes, you might have to reduce some volume, but it might be more about focusing on the intensity of that training, the load of the training, the progression.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: Maybe you need to do three instead of four days.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: Maybe you need to do six instead of three, you know and spread out the recovery.
• 24:26
  Philip Pape: It's really going to depend on you at creative ways to increase your need even further.
• 24:37
  Philip Pape: And I know you're like oh, really Like even if you're already getting eight to 10,000 steps every day, can you add another two or three or four in some achievable, sustainable way?
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: Right, that you're not already taking advantage of Now.
• 24:51
  Philip Pape: If you're getting eight to 10,000, that's a meaningful amount, but I know you could push to 12 or 14 with a little extra effort, unless you just absolutely don't have time and no capability to do that, in which case you've got to evaluate whether you should be in a fat loss phase or even trying to do it as aggressively as you are.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: But we're talking short walks after meals, using a standing desk, taking movement breaks during work, even finding ways to be less efficient with your task right, multiple trips to carry groceries instead of carrying everything at once.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: I mean little hacks like that sometimes work.
• 25:22
  Philip Pape: So those are the eight strategies, and I think the thing that's going to be the crucial glue that binds it all together is your mindset toward this process.
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: It has to be.
• 25:33
  Philip Pape: It has to be so.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: I've worked with several clients who have very, very low metabolic rates and I found that their psychological approach is going to determine their success way more than any of the tactics, because sometimes you're doing all the tactics and very little moves on the needle and then it slowly starts to move right and it's like you have to have that.
• 25:55
  Philip Pape: I don't want to call it discipline, but I want to call it a positive mindset that the process is the most important thing and the outcome is going to come from the process, and so this means you have to adjust your expectations.
• 26:05
  Philip Pape: I'm sorry, you just have to adjust your expectations and be realistic, right?
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: You need to recognize that having a lower expenditure does not indicate poor health.
• 26:15
  Philip Pape: It doesn't indicate you're a failure.
• 26:17
  Philip Pape: It just requires you to be more strategic.
• 26:19
  Philip Pape: And so any common fat loss advice out there to cut X number of calories and lose a pound a week or whatever, it might mean an unbearably low intake for you and that's not for you.
• 26:31
  Philip Pape: So you might have to accept a more modest deficit, a slower rate of fat loss, and then you're still going to have better long-term outcomes when you do that.
• 26:39
  Philip Pape: Go listen to the podcast with Melanie.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: She dropped eight and a half percent body fat.
• 26:43
  Philip Pape: The actual pounds loss wasn't that much, but she built muscle at the same time.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: If we were just thinking about weight loss, man, that would have been so frustrating.
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: I would have not wanted to keep working with her as a coach because I would have thought I was a total failure.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: But because we were tracking all the different things and focusing on the process, we got incredible results for what you wanted, right, and it takes time.
• 27:02
  Philip Pape: It takes time.
• 27:02
  Philip Pape: So think about all the things we talked about today Embracing the process instead of the outcome.
• 27:10
  Philip Pape: Right, don't just fixate on the scale.
• 27:11
  Philip Pape: Build your system.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: Are you being consistent?
• 27:14
  Philip Pape: You know at least 80% with the things that you care about, whether that's protein, training, recovery, whatever.
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: Those are the things in your control.
• 27:21
  Philip Pape: Right, the outcome is not in your control.
• 27:23
  Philip Pape: It will result from the things you're in control, but that's what's in your control.
• 27:27
  Philip Pape: All right, let's recap the main points.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: Yes, some people genuinely have lower metabolic rates, even when you're doing everything.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: Right, you are not a failure.
• 27:35
  Philip Pape: It is a physiological constraint period.
• 27:38
  Philip Pape: It is just the facts, ma'am.
• 27:39
  Philip Pape: And if you implement the eight strategies we've discussed high satiety foods, nutrient density, protein higher than average, calorie cycling if needed, meal timing, your food environment, balancing your training and recovery and finding ways to move even more you can create the system that works with you.
• 27:59
  Philip Pape: So, remember, the mental piece is probably as important as all these.
• 28:03
  Philip Pape: It kind of puts them all together.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: Adjust your expectations, embrace a sustainable, lasting approach and focus on process-oriented goals instead of outcomes.
• 28:13
  Philip Pape: Right, it's not a life sentence.
• 28:15
  Philip Pape: I mean, no matter who you are.
• 28:16
  Philip Pape: We don't want to spend that much time fat loss dieting, and by not much time it's going to depend.
• 28:20
  Philip Pape: It might mean six months, it might mean three months, it might be nine months the first time, and then, once you get there, you can maintain your leanness and focus on energy performance, building muscle.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: You're going to you're going to achieve your goals.
• 28:32
  Philip Pape: You're going to achieve your excuse me body composition goals.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: You just have to have a thoughtful, personalized strategy that is more creative than what might work for, say, the average metabolism.
• 28:43
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 28:44
  Philip Pape: So if you enjoyed today's episode and you want to start implementing the basics before you get to the more advanced strategies, download my free guide Nutrition 101 for Body Composition.
• 28:53
  Philip Pape: It's going to help you establish the foundational habits that make these strategies even more effective.
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: Go to whatsoeightscom or click the link in the show notes to get your copy.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember your unique metabolism isn't something to fight against, but a key constraint to design around in your personalized physique system.
• 29:17
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Constraint to Design Around in your Personalized Physique System.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.