Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Ozempic Envy, GLP-1 Microdosing, and the Weight Loss Wars | Ep 355

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Ozempic Envy, GLP-1 Microdosing, and the Weight Loss Wars | Ep 355 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:02
  Philip Pape: your co-worker drops 40 pounds in six months on ozempic and suddenly everyone's questioning whether your two years of lifting and tracking macros really counts.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: Meanwhile, people are secretly microdosing glp-1 drugs, trying to hack their appetite without admitting they're using medication.
• 0:17
  Philip Pape: And then there's the underground resentment brewing between those who did it the hard way and those taking what some see as pharmaceutical shortcuts.
• 0:25
  Philip Pape: Today we're discussing the psychology behind what I call the weight loss wars, why fat loss has become a battleground of moral superiority and how a systems thinking approach can help you navigate this mess without losing your sanity or your gains.
• 0:39
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 0:57
  Philip Pape: I'm your host certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're going to tackle one of these emotionally charged topics in fitness at the moment, and that is the social and psychological warfare happening around the GLP-1 drugs.
• 1:10
  Philip Pape: You know them Ozempic, manjaro, all of them.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: This isn't about the medications, though.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: This is about how we assign moral value to different paths toward the same goal, and why understanding the systems behind our judgments can free us from both the envy and the guilt.
• 1:27
  Philip Pape: So, if you're considering these drugs, if you're avoiding them on principle, if you're secretly resenting someone who uses them.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: I think today's episode will give you a framework for thinking clearly about tools, outcomes and what drives sustainable change.
• 1:43
  Philip Pape: And before we get into it, if you've been nodding along already and thinking, yeah, I need to stop second guessing myself, focus on myself and just build a system that works for me, crowd out the noise, forget about all the nonsense and the distractions.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: I don't want you to just listen and binge my content.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: I want you to take action inside wits and weights.
• 2:02
  Philip Pape: Physique university is where you can do that.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: You'll get the tools to train more intelligently, to eat more flexibly and with clarity, to stop getting caught up in other people's methods and hopping around and getting overwhelmed with all the craziness in social media.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: And we've worked with many, many people who are on these drugs and, again, you may not be taking them.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: You may not wanna take them.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: Today's episode, I think, covers a lot of areas of the psychology around this, but we've definitely worked on people, with people on drugs like terzepatide, helping them build the foundation they need to eventually transition off of them while maintaining the results.
• 2:38
  Philip Pape: Not that you have to do that, but a lot of people want to do that.
• 2:41
  Philip Pape: So if you want a framework for this we just relaunched at a much lower price, more accessible to so many more people.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: Used to be 87 a month, now it's 27 a month and I still have my exclusive link in the show notes.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: If you use it, I'm also going to throw in a custom nutrition plan that I build for you.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: The link is in the show notes.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: I'll see you there.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: But let's talk about today's topic, what we're actually dealing with, because the conversation is already happening.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: It's happening everywhere.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: It's on social media, it's in the office, it's in person, it's everywhere.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: But I think most people don't have the language for what's really going on because it's so new and we're so emotionally charged with this stuff.
• 3:20
  Philip Pape: So I came up with a phrase called Ozempic Envy.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: I haven't even Googled it.
• 3:23
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's trademarked, I don't know.
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: It just came to my head one day, and ozempic envy is what I'm calling the emotional and the social tension between people who lose weight using these drugs the GLP-1 receptor agonists, right and those who do it through what we traditionally think of as lifestyle changes.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: What I'm all about on wits and weights well before these drugs came around, but I think it's more complex, it's more nuanced.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: It's not just the jealousy we're talking about here, because on one side, you have people who've spent years trying to do the quote unquote right thing, the lifestyle changes, mastering their nutrition, grinding through all the roadblocks along the way, learning to to love vegetables, like I did, building the discipline from following a process to hit the gym consistently, to train consistently, to, to do all the behavioral changes involved, and they see that their identity is at least partly built on that effort.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: Right, that that's like a transformation story.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: Many of you are going through that right now.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: Many of you have in fact said, hey, I'm not, I want to do this, naturally, I don't want to go on drugs, right, and it's that mentality and I'm not judging anyone on any side of this equation.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: Please stick with me.
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: You're going to see where this comes out the other side.
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: So that's, on one side, people who've been trying to make the lifestyle changes, and then on the other side, you have people taking the medications inject themselves with some aglutide or trisepatide or one of these, and they might drop 15 to 20% of their body weight in a year with what the outside sees as minimal effort.
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: Right, and we know about the research.
• 4:59
  Philip Pape: The data is there.
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: This is quite a miracle drug.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: At this point the STEP trials are referenced all the time, step that show an average weight loss of about 15% with semaglutide versus maybe 2% with placebo right.
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: So it helps a lot of people who have been struggling, even when they're trying to lose weight, lose fat, get healthy.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: And it's obvious why people might need, want, be prescribed, desire whatever adjective or is that an adjective verb you want to use for these drugs.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: Where I think it gets interesting about this whole Ozempic envy thing is I don't think the envy right and envy comes from different groups here.
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: It's not about the weight loss, but the story that comes with the weight loss.
• 5:43
  Philip Pape: About the weight loss, but the story that comes with the weight loss.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: When someone loses weight through what we'll call the traditional methods, right, they're not just doing the thing they're, they're gaining some sort of narrative and identity shift.
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: Like I'm the type of person who can make choices and stick to hard things, I've overcome my impulses.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: Let's say I've, I've earned this, I've earned this body, and then that becomes part of their identity.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: Now I'm not saying there aren't equally as many unhealthy identities that have come along when someone has lost weight, I'll say the through through behavioral methods, but not necessarily the right way.
• 6:18
  Philip Pape: And that's where it gets really complicated.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: And I'm not even talking about the drugs when I say that.
• 6:22
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about crash dieting.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: Right, crash dieting detoxes all the things that are not sustainable that we talk about, and then when someone gets results of weight loss and they've done the medication, it can feel like that story gets devalued for them, even if they are in parallel doing the lifestyle changes.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: And honestly, I believe it's a crime for a doctor to prescribe the medication and not give any guidance or advice or direction on the weight training or the lifting weights to hold on to muscle, to eating protein, to making sure you don't eat too little, because I've seen this problem where you just don't have an appetite and you really under eat and it doesn't help you.
• 6:59
  Philip Pape: You crash diet, you lose weight fast, but then it's not sustainable unless you stay on the drug.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: And so I want to help everybody through this message.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: And yet somebody who's used the medication, whether or not they've done it the quote unquote right way supporting themselves with lifestyle, they can feel like their story gets devalued and that their effort doesn't matter as much as someone else.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: And that's where all this friction comes from.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: It's like jealousy all over the place.
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: The envy is everywhere, on all sides, right?
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: So I want to start there as the premise and then I want to touch on some side topics related to this that I see in the industry right now and a big one right now is microdosing.
• 7:36
  Philip Pape: Okay, microdosing and it gets fascinating here because I see a lot of rationalization going on and when you think of behavioral engineering, this is a good story.
• 7:47
  Philip Pape: Some people are microdosing these drugs and all that means is you're taking a lower than prescribed dose of the medications and it's not because you can't afford the full dose, right, it's because you, you're deliberately doing that to help with your appetite, your appetite awareness.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: Maybe you are the type of person who feels like I I want to split the difference, I don't want to go all out, all into the drug, but I want to try it and see if it helps my appetite and get that nudge toward better eating habits while improving the lifestyle.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: Okay, again, no judgment on that, but I'm but.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: So the but.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: Here is what I think people are doing in some cases.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: Not everyone is maybe trying to hack their own psychology just a bit, right, it's kind of that building that safety net of reduced hunger, but then they don't want to override their natural signals.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: So I understand that.
• 8:33
  Philip Pape: I understand the trade-off and compromise they're trying to make.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: They're trying to engineer this middle ground between pharmaceutical intervention and, I hate to say, willpower, because we all know we can develop healthy eating habits without willpower.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: That's what we do here when we talk about the tools to change your behavior.
• 8:53
  Philip Pape: But I feel like some people you know they're frustrated.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: They feel like it does take willpower and, I'll be honest, it takes action.
• 8:59
  Philip Pape: There is action that is required, like getting the cookies off of your counter into your drawer that takes action.
• 9:03
  Philip Pape: There is action that is required Like getting the cookies off of your counter into your drawer that takes an action to change your environment right.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: Those little things, those are all actions.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: That is true.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: And whether you want to argue that's willpower or not, I'm talking about the white knuckling like in the moment.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: Stress is high, emotion's high and then I'm going to all of a sudden, just for the first time ever, choose not to eat the cookies, right?
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: We know that.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: That's not how it works, so it's understandable.
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: People want that little bit of a nudge and from a like, a systems design perspective, thinking like an engineer, with data and tools.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: It makes perfect sense, like, if your goal is long-term behavior change, you want the minimum effective, the most efficient intervention that still allows you to build skills and habits.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: If you have too much of that intervention, like the full dose of the drugs, you're probably thinking okay, I'm going to become dependent and I'm not really going to learn the thing because I'm getting miswired signals to my brain, right, just by virtue, by definition of how it works.
• 9:50
  Philip Pape: But if I have too little like or none at all, I don't get the results.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: I need to build momentum.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: So I want a little bit of a kick in the pants for my brain related genes, my appetite, and I guess I guess the challenge here is, right now we don't have clinical data on the microdosing you know to, to know how effective it is really, although we could extrapolate and we could use basic math and like okay, well, if I take half the dose, I might have to have the result, but we can't oversimplify, right?
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: So people are essentially running experiments on themselves and then we have anecdotal reports, we have Instagram posts, we have podcasters, we have whole programs built around micro dosing and again, I don't want to sound judgmental toward that, I haven't tried it myself.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: Heck, if I did it today, if I started it, would I find that, oh, this is actually an amazing tool.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: Now, when I do a fat loss phase, maybe I can micro dose.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: It takes away the appetite and I can more easily control myself, and I can more easily control myself.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: But then the other side of me says no, I really want to inherently build it in to my system, right, not through willpower, but hey, I plan my meals out to have more fibrous foods, knowing that fiber gives me more volume, knowing that that's gonna help with my hunger signals, and then it allows me to eat in a way that I wanna eat for the long term.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: Right, and can you do that while microdosing on GLP-1s?
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: Yes, and I also help people do that while they're on there so that they could transition off of them is kind of the point.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: But, but, but and I'm going to keep saying but, because I want to hedge myself here and there when it comes to psychology and when it comes to judging people, because I want to zoom out and look at why this creates the emotional reactions that we have A lot of.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: It is about us.
• 11:22
  Philip Pape: A lot of it's about us as individuals, not about you, not about others.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: By you I mean the other right At its core.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: It's not about Ozempic, it's how we assign moral value to different types of effort, because we have a deeply ingrained belief we're all human beings that the human struggle, the struggle, equals virtue.
• 11:41
  Philip Pape: Right Sisyphus, pushing the rock up the mountain from Greek mythology struggle equals virtue, that the harder path is the more noble path.
• 11:50
  Philip Pape: And admittedly, I talk about doing hard things all the time.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: But I'm also talking about being efficient and minimum effective dose.
• 11:57
  Philip Pape: So do these reconcile with each other?
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: And so if I'm an engineer and I said let's go with this more complicated solution because it's going to be automatically better than a simple one, because it's harder, that's nonsense.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: That's not how optimization works.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: So it's always tricky when I use language on this show we talk about like smarter, not harder.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: Well, maybe, maybe not more efficient, maybe it might be hard.
• 12:20
  Philip Pape: It might be hard in a different way than something else.
• 12:23
  Philip Pape: Is hard like hard beating yourself against the wall, cracking your skull, not getting a result, is worse than a hard that moves you forward by leaps and bounds.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: And so when someone says, like I did it the hard way.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: What they're really saying is I want credit for the difficulty of my method, not just the outcome.
• 12:39
  Philip Pape: Right, and that makes sense psychologically, because effort justification that's a cognitive bias.
• 12:52
  Philip Pape: We value things more when we worked harder for them.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: Yes, but we've got method and we've got outcome.
• 12:54
  Philip Pape: And what are we actually trying to optimize for?
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: So I'm going to go back to the whole engineering thing about optimization.
• 12:59
  Philip Pape: If the goal is sustainable fat loss and improved health, the quote unquote best method is the one that achieves that goal most reliably for the individual, with the fewest negative side effects, at the lowest cost.
• 13:09
  Philip Pape: Not just financial costs, time costs, stress costs, opportunity costs, all of it.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: And if you're not sure what I mean by opportunity costs, that's the cost of not making a choice, that's the cost of having chosen something different.
• 13:19
  Philip Pape: So for some people that might be GLP-1 medications this is my point.
• 13:23
  Philip Pape: For others it might be structured nutrition and training and for many people guess what?
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: It might be a combination of both, at different levels of both, including microdosing.
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: And so the judgment comes in when we start conflating the method with our character, with our identity, when we start thinking about how the way you lose weight says something about who you are as a person.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: So they're all tools, is my point.
• 13:47
  Philip Pape: If I'm going to give you the TLDR here Now again I mentioned, if you're on a medication like this GLP-1, or you're considering it long term, you're going to need more than the drug to create lasting change.
• 13:58
  Philip Pape: I mean you could be on the drug for the rest of your life.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: I suppose That'd get pretty darn expensive and I don't think anybody wants to depend on anything like that the rest of their life period.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: I take a what do you call it?
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: Biologic for a condition I have and I technically have to be on that the rest of my life because there's not really a way to deal with it Otherwise.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: I don't want to do that, but I kind of have to, barring some extreme or some new cure that comes along.
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: But when it comes to this stuff, we can work with you.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: You can listen to the show.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: You can put in basic principles of food planning, meal planning, meal prep, tracking, food volume right and be successful.
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: But sometimes you need others to help you do that and you need ideas from people and you need to crowd out the noise.
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: We do this in Physique University.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: I just want to mention that one more time.
• 14:48
  Philip Pape: We've helped a lot of folks in there do this exact thing.
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: I can hook you up with some individuals who are on, for example, teresapatide and have come off, and there's a strategic way we do that.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: By the way, that's not just hey, come off and you're done.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: It's how do we align that with the calories you're eating and the phases of training and physique development?
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: So, physique university 27 a month used to be 87.
• 15:06
  Philip Pape: Now it's 27.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: I've got an exclusive link in the show notes where if you use that link, I'll get triggered, not triggered, I'll get notified and then I'll know to give you a custom nutrition plan for free, instead of the add on.
• 15:17
  Philip Pape: Like, if you go through the public link you have to pay for it.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: So it'd be free and I don't want you to just say, like, throw up your hands and say I need to rely on these meds forever If you want to come off, if you want to build your system alongside it for your lifestyle, but still stay on it for a while, or microdose or whatever, we can help you do that.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: So use the link in the show notes for that.
• 15:33
  Philip Pape: So how do we think about this more clearly.
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: Well, I want to propose a framework that focuses on your system, on designing your system, rather than moral judgment.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: And I first need to be clear about something.
• 15:47
  Philip Pape: Okay, if I haven't been already I absolutely support people who choose to use, or need to use, glp-1 drugs.
• 15:55
  Philip Pape: If you have significant weight to lose for your health, if you've spent a lifetime struggling with appetite regulation, emotional eating, which can be genetic, brain-related genes I had Stephan Guine on the show quite a while back talking about that it can also be the result of years of I hate to say, damage, but years of suppressed metabolism and fat gain due to yo-yo dieting and restriction.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: For that type of person, these medications can be life-changing tools.
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: There's no shame in using every tool available to improve your health and quality of life, but and this is crucial the medication is one component of a larger system.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: You still need the lifestyle foundation to make the results sustainable.
• 16:40
  Philip Pape: Even individuals like Dr Spencer Nadalsky, who praises these drugs, says it's the drugs and the lifestyle.
• 16:45
  Philip Pape: It's not just the drug.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: Could it be just the lifestyle?
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: For sure, but some people benefit from having the added tool of the drug, and so, if you think of the whole compendium of fat loss tools, right, your whole toolbox.
• 16:58
  Philip Pape: They're all different components in a system.
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: You have the behavioral components habit formation, meal planning.
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: You've got physiological components, like the strength training, like eating your protein.
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: You have the psychological components, like managing your stress, like eating your protein.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: You have the psychological components, like managing your stress or how you perceive your stress, like sleep, optimizing your sleep, but from a psychological perspective.
• 17:21
  Philip Pape: And you've got and I don't, that's a whole separate episode and now you've got the pharmacological components.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: So behavioral, physiological, psychological, pharmacological and each component has trade-offs.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: That's what it comes down to.
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: The behavioral components require your time, they require developing skills, but they do build long-term resilience and capability.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: Pharmacological components are going to work faster but may create dependency if you don't pair them with skill building.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: So I want to help you build your skills, whether or not using these other tools at the same time.
• 17:53
  Philip Pape: And the question isn't which component is morally superior?
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: Right, that's like there's no good or bad foods.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: We talk about that.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: The question is what combination of components creates for you the most robust and sustainable system.
• 18:08
  Philip Pape: So if you've been dieting for decades yo-yo dieting and you've developed a dysfunctional relationship with your hunger cues, a GLP-1 drug might provide stability, to learn proper portion control and food selection so that the hunger cues aren't so utterly distracting that it prevents you from doing that.
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: It's not a crutch, it's more like scaffolding right, when you see scaffolding on a building it's going to go away, but you can build everything and support everything while you build the building.
• 18:38
  Philip Pape: But you still have to build the building.
• 18:40
  Philip Pape: You still have to build the skills.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: The medication is not going to teach you how to eat for satiety.
• 18:44
  Philip Pape: In fact it overrides those signals, which makes it a little bit more challenging.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: But it gives you the time, the space, to build that skill.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: In fact, I mentioned microdosing Many clients I have.
• 18:56
  Philip Pape: They've reduced the dose as they've increased the food volume and their hunger starts to go up slowly, while their ability to naturally manage hunger signals also goes up at the same time.
• 19:08
  Philip Pape: So the skill is going up, up, up up, the dosage coming down, down, down, down.
• 19:11
  Philip Pape: Eventually the dose is gone and the skill is at its max.
• 19:15
  Philip Pape: That make sense.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: Hopefully you can visualize that right.
• 19:19
  Philip Pape: And so there's your training, there's your sleep and stress, there's all the lifestyle things right, and the medication is not going to create those habits for you.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: So yeah, I get the envy or the jealousy for people who've just taken the drug, lost a bunch of weight.
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: They don't do anything else and they're walking around like look at me, I get the envy for that.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: I also think who cares Like don't worry about them, it's not going to work out for them in the longterm unless they also do the skills.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: And if you're one of those people listening to me, no moral judgment to you.
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: If you've never built the skills and weren't even sure you had to, or didn't know where to go, come talk to us, join us at Physique University.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: This is the positive lens that I'm trying to share here is I'm not going to judge you, I'm going to help you.
• 20:01
  Philip Pape: So the reframe for this episode is fat loss is not a moral issue, it's just an engineering problem.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: It's a an engineering problem.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: It's a biological engineering problem.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: You have inputs like food, activity, training, stress, sleep, genetics, hormones, medication yes, medication, that's an input, right?
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: Because guess what?
• 20:19
  Philip Pape: We're all on all sorts of medications beyond GLP-1 drugs.
• 20:22
  Philip Pape: You might be on a statin, you might be on HRT, whatever.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: Those are the inputs.
• 20:26
  Philip Pape: It's data.
• 20:27
  Philip Pape: You have the outputs your energy level, your body composition, your health markers, your performance, your training, progress, et cetera.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: Your job or our job with you, if you want.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: The help is to design that system that reliably converts the inputs you can control into the outputs you want.
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: And some people need more tools or different tools than others.
• 20:45
  Philip Pape: Period.
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: Some people need more scaffolding.
• 20:47
  Philip Pape: Some people need more intervention and more support.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: It doesn't make them weaker.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: It doesn't make them weaker.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: It doesn't make them less disciplined, it just makes them different.
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: That's it okay.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: So when you see someone losing weight on Ozempic, instead of thinking that's cheating, try thinking that's an interesting solution to a complex problem.
• 21:05
  Philip Pape: I wonder what are the components that they are using to make it sustainable?
• 21:09
  Philip Pape: That's an objective way to frame this Kind of maybe clumsy way to say it too.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: For those of you who are more concise writers than me, feel free to rephrase.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: So when you see someone who's putting in a lot of effort over, say, a two year period to transform themselves, with tracking their macros, with using fat loss and muscle building phases, going to the gym four days a week, you know, instead of thinking, okay, that's the only way to do it, just say, look, that's impressive dedication, you know.
• 21:38
  Philip Pape: I wonder what internal and external support systems made that possible.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: Yeah, okay.
• 21:46
  Philip Pape: So I want to.
• 21:49
  Philip Pape: I want to.
• 21:50
  Philip Pape: I want to share something, just one last thought with you here, because I think the people who are people who are most successful with these drugs long-term are often the same people who would have been successful with traditional methods if they never did the drug and they had the support earlier.
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: I truly believe that.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: I truly believe that I think, having said that it might've been extremely difficult to do so, I'm believe that I think, having said that, it might've been extremely difficult to do so.
• 22:11
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying that, I'm not saying it's not difficult, and I don't think they're using the medication to avoid doing that.
• 22:17
  Philip Pape: I think they're using it to make building those habits easier while they address what are oftentimes very serious health concerns or years of appetite dysfunction.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: Come on, guys, let's have some empathy for people.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: I'm sick of all the moralizing and the judgment out there.
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: Just stop it.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: And if you're following somebody on Instagram who's just hammering these people, unfollow them.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: Just unfollow them.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: Emotional eating since childhood, who tried every diet imaginable, and for them, the GLP-1 meds were not a shortcut.
• 22:53
  Philip Pape: They were a lifeline that gave them just a little bit of breathing room to learn what normal hunger and satiety, feel like I can think of two or three clients right off the top of my head.
• 23:01
  Philip Pape: One person, a woman, who never lifted in her life.
• 23:03
  Philip Pape: She was in her 60s taking Ozempic.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: We got her training, we got her eating more food volume, really loving to throw in vegetables to her lunch and dinner, and it didn't take a lot, but it was enough to get her body recalibrated to where it needed to be so she could come off those drugs.
• 23:16
  Philip Pape: It's incredible.
• 23:19
  Philip Pape: Now the flip side that might maybe it surprises you even more is some of the people who are most vocal about doing things naturally are using their struggle as a form of identity protection.
• 23:30
  Philip Pape: They are so invested in being the person who can do hard things that they'd rather suffer than admit a tool might help.
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: So there's a difference between doing hard things in a productive way and doing them in a way that's just I don't wanna say stupid, but it's holding you back.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: And both patterns reveal the same underlying truth of the universe that sustainable change requires external tools and internal development.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: You can't inject new habits out of nowhere, but you also can't will away decades of biological and psychological programming and so, I think, a really robust system, which is what we're about?
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: Wits and weights.
• 24:26
  Philip Pape: That's what we're about.
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: It combines the best of both.
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: They use whatever tools are available behavioral, pharmaceutical, technological, social that they're comfortable.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: They're about identity, about effort, about what we think we deserve credit for, and the fact that I use the word wars intentionally, because we don't want to be dealing with wars.
• 24:44
  Philip Pape: Do we in this space right?
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: It's a systems design problem.
• 24:50
  Philip Pape: It's not a moral judgment contest, and then the conversation can shift and you can hear a little bit of emotion and passion with me today, and hopefully it's not directed in a negative way, but more in a positive of think of how many more people, think of how many more people we can help if they just understood that it's okay to combine tools and process together like this to to get their result.
• 25:10
  Philip Pape: And it's not whether somebody earns it, it's whether you build the system, you can maintain and develop the skills.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: It's skills.
• 25:16
  Philip Pape: It's skills.
• 25:17
  Philip Pape: Guys, you know, some people are gonna do that with the drugs.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: Some people will do it with macros and progressive overload.
• 25:22
  Philip Pape: Many are gonna do it with a combination of a bunch of tools that we haven't even thought of yet.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: Right, there's more to come.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: Who knows?
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: Maybe, maybe, uh, what is it called?
• 25:30
  Philip Pape: Myostatin blockers are going to become a tool in the future and people everybody's going to be jacked.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: I don't know right.
• 25:35
  Philip Pape: Your job isn't really to judge the tools.
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: I think your job is to engineer the system that works for you.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: Forget all the noise, forget judging other people.
• 25:42
  Philip Pape: Be supportive of people, empathize, right.
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: If you need something, you need something.
• 25:47
  Philip Pape: Stop keeping score of who's doing it the right way.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: Just do it.
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: Just do it for you, have fun, reach out, join Physique University.
• 25:57
  Philip Pape: And if you enjoyed this episode which I admit is a complex issue and I hope I gave it the nuance it deserved I want you to check out a different episode called Eat More to Lose Weight the triangle.
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: Sorry, I butchered that Eat more to lose weight the iron triangle of fat loss.
• 26:11
  Philip Pape: It's episode 204.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna link to it in the show notes, and that episode is about how you can't optimize for everything at once and have to make smart trade-offs, which I think is really apropos for what we talked about today.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: So, episode 204, eat more to lose weight the iron triangle of fat loss.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember the best tool is the one that gets the job done sustainably.
• 26:35
  Philip Pape: This is Philip Pape, and you've been listening to Wits and Weights.
• 26:39
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time.