Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Why Daily Weigh-Ins Help Fat Loss (Even When the Scale Lies) | Ep 276

Transcript

Why Daily Weigh-Ins Help Fat Loss (Even When the Scale Lies) | Ep 276 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: You step on the scale every morning, hoping to see progress from all your hard work.
• 0:05
  Philip Pape: Some days you're elated, others devastated.
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: But what if neither reaction is even necessary?
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: Today we're using an engineering framework that will transform how you look at progress tracking forever.
• 0:17
  Philip Pape: You'll discover why obsessing over daily numbers is rather pointless.
• 0:21
  Philip Pape: Yet tracking them is essential, whether you're trying to lose fat, gain muscle or just maintain a healthy weight.
• 0:28
  Philip Pape: Understanding this one principle will give you clarity and confidence about tracking that you've never had before.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique.
• 0:53
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're exploring how the engineering concept of signal-to-noise ratio can change your approach to tracking and tracking progress and measuring progress.
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: Recent research confirms that daily weigh-ins lead to better adherence and outcomes for fat loss than even weighing five times a week or less.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: Yet we also know that individual daily weights are meaningless due to natural fluctuations in your scale weight.
• 1:22
  Philip Pape: Today, you're going to learn how to resolve this apparent contradiction and apply it not just to weight tracking, but every aspect of your fitness journey.
• 1:31
  Philip Pape: Now, before we get into it, if you're ready to start tracking your weight and your nutrition properly.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: One of my favorite tools is called Macrofactor.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: It is what I use.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: My clients use.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: It's the only app on the market that not only logs your food, it calculates your dynamic metabolism so that it can give you targets for calories and macros each week, unlike other apps that simply allow you to log the data.
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: So if you download Macrofactor from the app store, please use my code, witsandweights.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: All spelled out, all one word, if you want to try that out for free.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: Macrofactor has the most advanced trend weight and expenditure algorithms of any app.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: It's super fast and it does all the complex math that we're going to discuss today.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: It does it automatically.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: So go get Macrofactor link in the show notes.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: Use my code WITSANDWEIGHTS to support me, and here we go.
• 2:21
  Philip Pape: Let's start by addressing something that might seem like a contradiction.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: I mentioned in the intro that there is research.
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: There's a study that was reviewed in the Dr Bill Campbell's research review recently.
• 2:34
  Philip Pape: I actually have a short YouTube video about it if you check out my channel at Wits and Weights and it shows that people who weigh themselves every day it actually compared seven days to five days and it showed that the seven days themselves every day.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: It actually compared seven days to five days and it showed that the seven days was more successful at losing fat and maintaining it long-term, let alone weighing even less than that.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: And yet at the same time and here's where we have to have two thoughts in our head we also know that daily weight fluctuations have nothing to do with actual fat loss or gain.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: So it's kind of fascinating, right.
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: It's like we want to weigh every day for some reason, but we know that the data every day doesn't really matter that much, and there was a review in the Journal of Obesity that found better results, not just during the fat loss, but people who continue after the fact were successful at maintaining their results.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: What's really interesting is that daily weighing does not increase anxiety or obsession, like many people fear or like many people claim.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: In fact, studies often have shown the opposite.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: People who weigh daily report feeling more in control, less fixated on their weight over time.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: Daily report feeling more in control, less fixated on their weight over time.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: They develop a more objective, data-driven relationship with the scale, and the wild thing is that your body weight can easily fluctuate by, on average, two to five pounds or more in a single day, even with zero change in body fat.
• 4:02
  Philip Pape: And so I want to explain why that is, so that you have the context for why, then, the tracking is so important in the context of this signal-to-noise idea.
• 4:11
  Philip Pape: So first, here are the reasons weight fluctuates.
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: One of the big ones is carbs and glycogen.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: Every gram of carbs stored in your muscles pulls in about three to four grams of water.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: So if you load up on pasta one night where you normally don't, that could be an extra 100 grams of carbs means a pound of water weight the next day.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: Right, and that's totally normal.
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: It has nothing to do with fat gain.
• 4:33
  Philip Pape: And then there's salt.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: There's sodium intake.
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: Higher sodium foods cause water retention as your body tries to maintain proper electrolyte balance, and that's why a salty meal can spike the scale temporarily right, think Chinese food or even pizza.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: Your body is just doing its job.
• 4:51
  Philip Pape: It's very sophisticated, it's very smart to maintain homeostasis.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: Then we have, like, what's in your gut, digestive contents gut, what am I trying to say?
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: Gut content, right, are a pretty big factor for some people, because the food and liquid in your digestive system it has mass, and, depending on when and what you last ate, depending on when you go to the bathroom.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: This can vary by several pounds, right, and it's why weighing yourself at different times of day is not a great strategy for consistency, because even just literally after having a glass of water you're going to, you're going to weigh more.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: Um, then we have our hydration status, which is always changing.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: It's not like you're a fixed creature, right.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: You sweat during exercise, you drink more or less water on different times, you might have some alcohol.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: The humidity level in the air can affect your body, body's water balance.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: All of this can cause multi-pound fluctuations.
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: Then we have training, right.
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: Intense training exercise, especially resistance training, especially a leg day, can cause some inflammation and temporary water retention.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: Your muscles are holding more water.
• 5:56
  Philip Pape: It's a good sign that you are adapting and you're getting stronger than happens, but it does sometimes cause a pop in weight.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: Then we have hormonal changes, right, especially relevant for women, but even men experience fluctuations that affect your ability to retain water.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: There's cortisol from stress, reproductive hormones, thyroid function.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: All of it impacts how much water your body holds onto.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: And now people wonder why the heck the scale bounces around.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: Well, there you go.
• 6:22
  Philip Pape: When you understand all these factors, you realize that expecting a linear change on the scale is actually completely unrealistic and not to be expected whatsoever.
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: You actually want your scale weight to look like a huge oscillating up and down line or curve over time.
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: It's never going to be that tight, it's rarely going to be that tight.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: Let's put it that way, right?
• 6:46
  Philip Pape: It's like trying to measure the tide by looking at waves.
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: I mean, that's a decent analogy.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: If you think of the ocean, it's just pointless.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: So this is where the concept from engineering that you probably have heard of before, it's called the signal to noise ratio, where the signal is that meaningful data that we want to measure and then the noise is everything else that interferes with that measurement.
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: Right, and sometimes the noise is a lot more than you want it to be.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: So if I give you a real world example, when you're listening to you, remember radios, remember radio in your car Okay, I'm speaking to my demographic, which is probably a lot of you listening and you're on a road trip and you get closer to the station and it's nice and clear, and then you start to drive away from the station.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: What happens?
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: Right, the music, that's what you want to hear, that's the signal.
• 7:31
  Philip Pape: It starts getting mixed with static and the static is the noise and then, as you get further away, the of that signal to noise gets worse and worse, until you can't hear the music at all.
• 7:43
  Philip Pape: And your body works the same way.
• 7:44
  Philip Pape: Or your body weight, your scale weight, works the same way.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: The trend in your weight, whether you're gaining, maintaining or losing, that's the signal that we want to know.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: But all the daily fluctuations we talked about, that's the noise.
• 7:54
  Philip Pape: And in engineering we solve this using a filter.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: This is a tool, this is a piece of math that you can turn into electronics, and it separates the signal from the noise.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: So for body weight, we can do that using a moving average.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: We can just weigh yourself every day and then use, like a seven day moving average or what I like, which Macrofactor uses, a 20 day exponential moving average.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: And you know, don't let that scare you, it's actually a pretty simple thing.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: You can even do it yourself in a spreadsheet.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: But think of it like this Imagine if, instead of looking at the waves hitting the beach and trying to determine the tide, you look at a time-lapse video over several hours.
• 8:34
  Philip Pape: You ever seen those where now you see the tide clearly moving in and clearly moving out, even though individual waves are always crashing, moving in and clearly moving out, even though individual waves are always crashing right.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: The exponential moving average does that.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: It gives more weight to the recent measurements and smooths out the daily fluctuations, and so, as a result, you get this trend line that actually tells you what's happening with your body composition.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: And I want to get into this, just nerd out on this a bit, because I've looked into this, and I want to get into this, just nerd out on this a bit, because I've looked into this and I even talked to Greg Knuckles a while ago on the podcast.
• 9:05
  Philip Pape: Why 20 days?
• 9:06
  Philip Pape: Right, it's not random.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: It's actually long enough to filter out most noise, but short enough to still be responsive to real changes.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: Because you don't want to wait six months to determine your trend weight.
• 9:17
  Philip Pape: That would be ridiculous.
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: But we also know we can't do it in as short as seven days because it's still too noisy, right.
• 9:24
  Philip Pape: And so you want to balance in between, and that's where the 20 days is really nice.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: And so when I'm working with clients, it's like the first couple of weeks, we're just collecting data.
• 9:33
  Philip Pape: Let's not even worry about what it says.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: And then there's the question of the linear versus exponential.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: If you care about that.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: I mentioned an exponential average.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: A linear average would treat the last 20 days the same, but an exponential average gives more weight to recent days, even though it still considers older data.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: That's a very smart approach, because what's happened to your body recently is more signal than what happened 20 days ago, so that makes it more responsive to the actual change in direction, but still filtering out the noise.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: And so what's really powerful about this is it gives you better data with less perfect adherence.
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: Okay, so if you In other words no, let me restate it If you only weigh yourself occasionally, you're going to get less reliable information than someone who weighs daily.
• 10:22
  Philip Pape: That's what I'm trying to say.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: It's kind of this counterintuitive thing, but the math proves it.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: Just look at how the formula works.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: It proves it mathematically that if you only sporadically weigh yourself, it's not going to work so well and it's not going to give you a great idea of what's going on.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: But if you weigh yourself daily, it will.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: And it's not going to give you a great idea of what's going on, but if you weigh yourself daily it will.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: So again, with my clients, I kind of get on them a little bit when they miss some days of weighing because I don't want to sound like a tracking Nazi here, but it's actually going to help you.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: It's going to help you to know am I actually losing fat or gaining fat, so that I can change my calories appropriately.
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: So how do we apply this in practice appropriately?
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: So how do we apply this in practice?
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: Well, pretty simple.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: We need to collect enough data points.
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: That means you need to weigh yourself every day, and the best, most reliable way to do that is first thing in the morning, after you use the bathroom, before you eat or drink, wearing the similar clothing or preferably none, or, you know, underwear or something like that and using the same scale.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: But this is crucial.
• 11:17
  Philip Pape: This is the crucial part.
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: That's all the logistical stuff.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: Emotionally, you need to detach emotionally from those individual numbers.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: Now, when I say you need to detach, like, can you just flip a switch and do that?
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: Of course not.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: I get that.
• 11:29
  Philip Pape: But over time, as you do it daily, you will detach right, unless something else is going on.
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: You will detach and I see this over and over again as long as you relate it to the why and the trend and are kind of treating the data like it's supposed to be, like it's meant to be like.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: These are just data points.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: They mean nothing.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: The magic happens when you look at the trend, right.
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: And so, going back to macro factor, it handles this for you, right.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: It calculates your trend weight and then it uses that along with your food intake to say okay, based on what you're eating and based on what you're weighing, over a long period of two or three weeks, we know that you're actually gaining weight or you're losing weight and therefore we're going to adjust your intake accordingly.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: Or maybe you're gaining more or less than we thought, so we're going to go up or down with your calories right Now.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: This principle can apply to anything, for example, your calories themselves, your calories and macro targets.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: I don't want you to hit them perfectly.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: That's impossible.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: It's the weekly averages that ends up driving your results.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: So, again, we don't want to obsess over hitting the exact number every day.
• 12:34
  Philip Pape: That's super counterproductive.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: Some days will be higher, some days will lower.
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: It is the trend that matters Now.
• 12:39
  Philip Pape: If you're always over, the trend will be high.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: If you're always under, the trend will be low.
• 12:43
  Philip Pape: But you've got to give yourself some up and down room to navigate, similar in the gym, with your strength.
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: Your performance in a single workout matters far less than your overall volume for the week, your sets for the week, your recovery for the week, the intensity going up session to session.
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: You're going to have bad days, you're going to have great days.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: Neither of them defines you or your strength level in the moment.
• 13:08
  Philip Pape: It's the trend over time.
• 13:08
  Philip Pape: Look at your, the weights, the working weights and the volumes over days, weeks and months.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: I can go on.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: Recovery right.
• 13:15
  Philip Pape: Individual sleep scores, individual things that your aura ring tells you like oh my God, it's terrible.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: Your stress levels through the roof.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: Your HRV is terrible.
• 13:23
  Philip Pape: Don't stress.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: I mean, one bad night's not going to ruin you.
• 13:26
  Philip Pape: One perfect night's not going to fix everything.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: You know, one night of catching up on sleep isn't going to matter.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: It's the patterns over time, right, get those naps in, get the sleep schedule to be consistent, you know, slowly lengthen the amount of hours over time, and I can go on.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: Like progress photos same thing like looking at yourself in the mirror every day can be misleading, but like monthly shots, those show the changes.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: Now, that's kind of a weird example, because I don't want you to take photos every day, because it doesn't work that way with photos, right, it's not like photos average out that it doesn't work that way.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: But for you to see the changes over time, you're going to need data points over time to compare to, and then even subjective metrics, like the biofeedback that I asked my clients to give me to rate their energy, hunger, mood.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: I look at them when they check in, but I really care about the trend, because you're going to have stress, you're going to have soreness, you're going to have issues here and there, you're going to get sick, et cetera.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: It doesn't matter.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: What matters is the trend over time.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: So if you put all this together, what does it look like?
• 14:30
  Philip Pape: You've got to have some sort of tool to track.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: It could be an app, a spreadsheet, a notebook.
• 14:35
  Philip Pape: Have a system that works for you, I don't care what it is.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: Establish the protocol, right.
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: When am I going to track it?
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: How am I going to do it?
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: So, for for weight we already talked about that every day in the morning, blah, blah, blah, um.
• 14:48
  Philip Pape: Commit to doing it regularly, right?
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: If it's daily, that makes sense.
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: Do it daily.
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: Consistency matters the most, so don't beat yourself up if you miss one Um, but also allow yourself to see the benefit of doing it as frequently as you think you need to do it like daily for scale, weight and maybe less for other things.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: And then you're going to review your data weekly or biweekly and spot the patterns.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: You're going to look at the trends.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: That can be a really fun part of it, because now you've got enough data to give you a trend.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: And now you're like, oh, I'm glad I had all that data right, because otherwise it'd be missing and it wouldn't be able to figure out what's going on.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: Same thing with me as a coach.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: It's like if you weren't tracking for the last two weeks, I can't help you as much because I don't have that data.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: And so then you can make adjustments based on those trends, not the fluctuations, and it helps you avoid the obsessiveness and the emotional response, because now you're like, oh cool, like that early bad night I had, whatever it was eating too much or not getting sleep actually is just kind of some noise.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: It's noise in the signal, no big deal, right.
• 15:45
  Philip Pape: And so it helps you reduce anxiety and obsession around tracking.
• 15:49
  Philip Pape: That's the magic of this whole thing.
• 15:51
  Philip Pape: When you understand that the daily numbers are noise, you stop giving them so much emotional power.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: That's all it is.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: It's just a false sense of emotional power over you.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: Then you become more like an engineer or a scientist, right?
• 16:04
  Philip Pape: You're just collecting data points and then you're going to reveal patterns.
• 16:06
  Philip Pape: And this shift in mindset is really liberating.
• 16:09
  Philip Pape: It is really empowering, because suddenly you can enjoy that dinner out without stress you know it's just noise and a larger signal dinner out without stress, you know it's just noise and a larger signal.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: You start to see your fitness journey as a data-driven process rather than an emotional roller coaster.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: So the next time you step on the scale, remember you're not looking at a verdict, a judgment.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: You're collecting a data point that, combined with many others, dozens, hundreds of others, reveals the true story of your progress.
• 16:37
  Philip Pape: And this isn't about weight tracking, right, this is about the mindset the mindset of an engineer, actually.
• 16:43
  Philip Pape: That's why you listen to me, I think, someone who can look past the daily noise and see the signal that matters, all right.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: So if you want to start tracking the smart way, a great way to do that for your food and your weight, which then gives you your metabolism and your targets if you're trying to gain muscle or lose fat, is to download Macrofactor and use code WITSANDWEIGHTS all one word to try it out.
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: You're going to get access to one of the best trend weight and expenditure calculators out there.
• 17:11
  Philip Pape: That's doing it for you as you log your weight, as you log your food.
• 17:13
  Philip Pape: It makes it super easy.
• 17:14
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember, in fitness as in engineering, the signal is in the noise.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: You just have to know how to find it.
• 17:24
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.