Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / How to Become an Intuitive Eater (Without Ignoring Data) | Ep 446

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How to Become an Intuitive Eater (Without Ignoring Data) | Ep 446 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: You probably heard this advice.
• 0:01
  Philip Pape: Stop tracking, stop counting, just listen to your body.
• 0:05
  Philip Pape: Eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: And it sounds liberating, doesn't it?
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: Except for a lot of you, it has not worked.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: And today I'm going to show you why your body's hunger signals are likely giving you bad information, why the research on intuitive eating has a massive blind spot that nobody talks about, and what you need to do first before eating intuitively will ever work for you.
• 0:31
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:41
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and I've been hearing from a lot of you lately.
• 0:47
  Philip Pape: And the question comes up in different forms, but it's basically the same thing, and that is, Philip, I just don't want to track forever.
• 0:55
  Philip Pape: When can I stop?
• 0:56
  Philip Pape: When do I get to just eat normally?
• 0:59
  Philip Pape: And I definitely get that because nobody wants to log every meal or weigh all their food for the rest of their life.
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: Many people think that is kind of ridiculous that you would have to do that.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: And I don't want you to do that either.
• 1:10
  Philip Pape: Now, if you like doing it, if you want to collect data, nobody's stopping you.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: I do it myself, but you don't have to.
• 1:17
  Philip Pape: There is this idea floating around though, and it is everywhere now, that the answer is quote unquote intuitive eating, that you should trust your body, that you just ditch the data, you eat by feels, by vibes.
• 1:30
  Philip Pape: I'm being a little bit facetious, but I think that is often how it's portrayed as this free, free loving thing that's just easy to do.
• 1:38
  Philip Pape: And I think that kind of advice is actively harmful to a lot of people.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: It's almost the worst case advice for a lot of people, especially when you've been through multiple rounds of dieting, you've done a lot of the things like calorie counting, your body composition goals are serious, right?
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: They go, they go beyond just like not having an eating disorder, right?
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: That's a separate topic.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: We're not addressing that.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: They go to, hey, I wanna, I want to conquer the things I've had trouble with in the past.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: And I actually want to lose fat and look great and feel great and understand how to eat in a way that works for me.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: So today we are gonna look at what the intuitive eating research shows and what it doesn't show.
• 2:14
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about why your hunger signals may not be trustworthy.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: They may be lying to you right now, which is why it's hard to go right into something like intuitive eating, especially as your body changes, especially as we get over 40, perimenopause, postmenopause, testosterone, all those hormonal changes that also affect your hunger, especially as life changes and gets more stressful.
• 2:34
  Philip Pape: And then I wanna give you a framework for how to graduate to intuitive eating the right way.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: And I think that's a good way to think about it.
• 2:41
  Philip Pape: You graduate into it by building those skills, by earning, earning it through that structured skill building first.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: And stick around to the end because as you know, I'm gonna have a really good tip for you, like I always do.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: It's a three-question self-test that you can do today to find out whether your hunger signals are calibrated well enough to eat intuitively.
• 3:01
  Philip Pape: So it's it's kind of like you could test out of it and say, look, I'm an intuitive eater, or no, I've got a little more work to do.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: And here's what you're gonna walk away with today.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: First, the specific research gap in intuitive eating that should make you skeptical of anyone who says, Hey, just stop tracking, listen to me, buy my intuitive eating program.
• 3:19
  Philip Pape: Second, the three things that wreck your hunger signals and why they hit harder as your body changes, especially after 40.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: And third, a step-by-step progression from structured eating with tracking to genuine food freedom, where you may not need that app anymore because you've internalized the skills.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get into it and put this popular advice under the microscope like we do.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: The advice is just stop tracking calories, stop counting macros, and eat intuitively.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: Listen to your body.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: And I want to give it fair treatment, right?
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: In any good debate or any good argument, you have to acknowledge the, I'll say the other side and understand what is going on.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: Where is the truth here?
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: There is a real framework behind this when we look at the history of intuitive eating.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: Intuitive eating was developed by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elise Resch.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: Have no idea if I pronounced those correct.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: And this is back in 1995.
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: So it's not even that old of a concept.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: You know, what is that, 30 years?
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: And there are 10 principles behind the formal framework.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: It's been very much studied, a lot of good research behind it.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: And if we go forward in time to much more recently, there's a 2021 meta-analysis that looked at 97 studies and found that intuitive eating is associated with better body appreciation, higher self-esteem, lower depression and anxiety, and less binge eating.
• 4:41
  Philip Pape: Okay, you're intrigued.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: I'm sure you're intrigued.
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: Because like, okay, well, it sounds like intuitive eating is a good thing, right?
• 4:46
  Philip Pape: So why am I pushing back?
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: Why's Philip doing here on wits and weights?
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: Because of how we frame it and the language that we use and what we mean.
• 4:55
  Philip Pape: When most people hear eat intuitively, they don't go read the research and those 10 principles and those frameworks and put them in place, which in and of itself requires structure.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: They hear, hey, I have permission to stop trying all these other things like tracking.
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: Tracking's bad, data's obsessive, and I could wing it, and I could be sick, and I could be successful.
• 5:15
  Philip Pape: And actually, I hear this a lot uh when it comes to diets that are not intuitive eating, but that are, they they make the claim that it's all you have to do is eat certain foods, right?
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: Like keto, carnivore, all of those are attractive in many ways because of how they simplify and tell you you don't need to track.
• 5:33
  Philip Pape: The Instagram version of intuitive eating is what I'm gonna call it, the one that gets shared as a meme, right?
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: Like every food fits and listen to your body and all that, all of those, whatever flavor that is, is very different from the actual intuitive eating framework.
• 5:48
  Philip Pape: Even Tribole or Triboli, again, I don't know how to pronounce her name.
• 5:52
  Philip Pape: I apologize.
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: She has said that using intuitive eating as a weight loss strategy is a misrepresentation of her work.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: That the framework, guess what it was designed for?
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: To heal disordered eating relationships.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: It wasn't designed for, let's say, a healthy mind state without eating disorders who are trying to achieve body recomposition.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: It was not designed to help you build muscle or lose fat in a strategic targeted way, for example.
• 6:17
  Philip Pape: And this is where the research gets interesting.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: Or where the research kind of drops off because there is a big blind spot in the research.
• 6:24
  Philip Pape: So I want to talk about that next because the what I want you to know is that there's a single major intuitive eating study has never ever measured body composition, at least with anything objective, like I don't know, DEXA scans, body fat testing, things like that.
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: The body weight data that you might see in intuitive eating studies is usually self-reported height and weight.
• 6:47
  Philip Pape: We know a lot of that can be inaccurate, or maybe you just don't know.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: Regardless, the outcome they're offering measuring is BMI.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: BMI.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: And that tells you nothing about gaining muscle, losing fat, changing body composition.
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: It's really more about general population health on the BMI scale.
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: We're thinking about overweight and obesity.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: So when someone says, hey, no, the research supports intuitive eating, what they mean is the research shows that intuitive eating improves your psychological relationship with food.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: And that is valuable, but it doesn't tell you anything about whether it helps you build the physique you want or eat in a healthy way for sustainability long term to achieve your goals.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: The evidence for that claim just doesn't exist.
• 7:25
  Philip Pape: It's never been tested.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: And that's the case with a lot of this stuff in the world that we inhabit.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: It's very, it's either difficult to test these things or there's just not enough incentive or money to do so.
• 7:36
  Philip Pape: The studies in the meta-analysis that I mentioned, the vast majority of them, like 89% of them, are cross-sectional.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: And so what that means is they took a snapshot at one point in time.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: And they can tell you that people who score high on intuitive eating scales tend to have lower BMI.
• 7:51
  Philip Pape: They can't tell you that intuitive eating caused it, or you know, whether people who are already leaner find it easier to eat intuitively.
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: And you're like, okay, but if it improves my mental health and it improves my relationship with food, isn't that worth it?
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: And I would say, yes, 100% yes.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: I am not anti-intuitive eating when defined in the proper way.
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: What I am is anti-skipping steps, trying to take shortcuts to get to something you think is intuitive eating that really isn't.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: And the step that most people skip is the one that determines whether intuitive eating will work for them.
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: Okay, now we're now we're building on the logic here.
• 8:28
  Philip Pape: So here's the question nobody asks.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: If intuitive eating means listen to your hunger and fullness signals, okay, I think I think maybe you would agree that's a decent definition.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: How do we know those signals are accurate?
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: So there is a term in the research called interoceptive accuracy.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: Interoceptive accuracy.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: It's just a fancy way, or my kids would say, fancy Nancy would say, it's a fancy way of saying how well you can actually perceive what's happening inside your body.
• 8:58
  Philip Pape: You might have heard the term proprioception.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: This is interoception inside your body.
• 9:03
  Philip Pape: A 2013 study found that interoceptive sensitivity fully quote unquote mediates, okay, mediates the relationship between intuitive eating and BMI.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: What that means is that intuitive eating only works to regulate your weight when your hunger and fold signals are accurate.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: And when they're not, it doesn't.
• 9:24
  Philip Pape: So here's the problem.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: For a lot of you, those signals are what?
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: They're not accurate.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: Multiple things are happening that degrade those signals.
• 9:33
  Philip Pape: All right, and I'm gonna share four things right now that have degraded them, just so you can get the context.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: The first one, of course, is chronic dieting and restriction.
• 9:42
  Philip Pape: If you spent years cycling between restrictive diets and falling off the wagon, okay, yo-yo dieting, we call it, then your hunger regulation system has been disrupted over and over again.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: And we know the extreme of this is individuals with eating disorder histories and also chronic restriction have very large deficits in their interoceptive awareness compared to control groups that don't have such a history.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: So you've disrupted it already just by lots and lots of restriction in dieting.
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: And most women in my audience here that are listening, you will have tried a hundred diets or more in your lifetime.
• 10:18
  Philip Pape: Second is sleep.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: And this is brutal for anyone dealing with, for example, symptoms as we age, perimenopausal symptoms are a big one that I hear about all the time, where it just poor sleep leads to symptoms, symptoms lead to poor sleep, and it's a vicious cycle.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: People with sleep apnea, right?
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: People with a lot of stress, the men with dealing with lots of stress and relationship issues, like the list goes on.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: We know that two nights of poor sleep, where you're getting, say, four or five hours instead of seven or eight, can produce a massive decrease in leptin, which is your satiety hormone, a massive increase, about 28% in ghrelin, that's your hunger hormone, and a 24% increase in subjective hunger.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: This is based on the study that I've talked about a few times in the past when we discussed appetite.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: And that's just from two nights of poor sleep.
• 11:07
  Philip Pape: And these effects tend to be a little more pronounced in women as well.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: So that's the second one is sleep.
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: And we know we as we get older, our sleep tends to get worse, not better, unless we do something about it.
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: The third factor for degrading your signals is your food environment.
• 11:22
  Philip Pape: There was a landmark NIH study.
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: This was a randomized controlled trial.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: So it's it's one of the highest quality pieces of evidence we get.
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: And it showed that people eating ultra-processed foods consumed 508 extra calories per day compared to unprocessed foods, even when the diets were matched for calories, macros, sugar, sodium, and fiber.
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: This is a classic study that shows that we tend to overconsume, we overconsume when we are eating a higher percentage of ultra-processed foods because those foods literally override your satiety signals.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: You eat them faster, you feel full later, you consume more before your body catches up.
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: It's essentially what happens.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: You just don't get full and you eat more.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: We all know this.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: A bag of chips is really easy to eat compared to a whole bunch of potatoes.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: And then the last one here is for women in perimetopause and menopause specifically, there's a hormonal compounding effect.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: As estradiol declines, ghrelin goes up, leptin goes down, or becomes a little more resistant, and GLP1 goes down as well.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: And then your hunger signals increase at the same time that your caloric needs are decreasing a bit by, say, two to 250 calories a day because of your declining metabolism from a loss of muscle mass and from less movement.
• 12:39
  Philip Pape: And telling someone in this situation, okay, listen, you 25-year-old Instagrammers, to just listen to your body is like telling them to trust a, I don't know, let me give you a nerd reference.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: If you had a compass that's been demagnetized in the apocalypse, you're gonna, you're not gonna survive very long.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: So I don't know if that's a good reference or not, but that's what came to mind.
• 13:01
  Philip Pape: So if you're hearing this, if you're recognizing yourself in what I've been talking about, maybe you've been stuck in a cycle of restriction.
• 13:08
  Philip Pape: And then you give up and you eat by feel and by vibes, and then you restrict again, and nothing seems to stick.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: I want to tell you about something really cool that I've been building over the last few months.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: I'm putting together a structured coaching program.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: I say it that way intentionally, it's structured and it's designed for this progression from building your measurement system, right?
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: The tracking measurement awareness system so that you can stop guessing through the real work of eating more food and lifting heavy with real human beings, coaches watching all of this data along the way, all the way to trusting yourself and making decisions independently, of you know, graduating or at least becoming very, very skilled.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: And so to me, that's the way it's done a beginning, a middle, and end to develop those skills.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: It's called Eat More, Lift Heavy.
• 14:02
  Philip Pape: That's right, eat more, lift heavy.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: And it launches at the end of this month.
• 14:07
  Philip Pape: If you want to be first in line and lock in the best pricing we're ever gonna have, go to witsandweights.com slash eatmore and get on the wait list.
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: That is witsandweights.com slash eatmore.
• 14:17
  Philip Pape: The link will be in the show notes.
• 14:18
  Philip Pape: I'll have more details soon.
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: If you're on the list, you'll hear them first.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: And it's something that I wished existed years ago because I do love having week by week.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: Tell me what to do to develop these skills so I can learn them in a very achievable fashion, given that I'm super busy and stressed and I don't have a lot of time.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: And I think that's many of you.
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: All right, witsandweights.com slash eat more.
• 14:39
  Philip Pape: Okay, let's keep going.
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: So, what is the fix?
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: You you can't just flip a switch and eat intuitively, right?
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: If you can't trust your hunger signals.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: So, what do you do?
• 14:48
  Philip Pape: Well, first you have to calibrate things, your signals.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: You have to build the skills that make intuitive eating reliable based on reliable inputs, based on reliable hunger signals.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: And then you graduate into the ability to sustain intuitive eating.
• 15:06
  Philip Pape: I think of this as the four stages of nutritional competence.
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: Four stages of nutritional competence.
• 15:13
  Philip Pape: And you might recognize this from learning theory.
• 15:15
  Philip Pape: I love to borrow from different frameworks and theories out there, not just engineering.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: Stage one is you don't know what you don't know.
• 15:22
  Philip Pape: You think that you're eating pretty healthy, or some of you use words like clean or good or whatever that the word is, but you're never actually looking at the data, or at least not sufficiently enough, to really understand what's going on.
• 15:36
  Philip Pape: And this might be the person, if you're listening, eating 1100 calories with 40 grams of protein, who thinks she's doing fine because she's eating clean.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: So that's stage one.
• 15:45
  Philip Pape: You don't know what you don't know.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: Stage two is you start tracking, sorry, you start tracking, and you realize that, oh, I had no freaking idea.
• 15:55
  Philip Pape: I am way under on my protein.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: I am under eating by 500 calories.
• 15:59
  Philip Pape: My fiber is a measly 10 grams.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: This is where tracking is a diagnostic tool.
• 16:06
  Philip Pape: It is not a punishment, it is not meant to make you feel guilty or judge yourself.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: You are simply gathering information.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: It is a very powerful reframe.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: Stage three, all right, now you can hit your targets, but it takes attention.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: It takes some work.
• 16:22
  Philip Pape: You are logging, you're making adjustments, you're learning what a 40 gram protein meal looks like on your plate, not just 40 grams for the day, right?
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: But in one meal.
• 16:31
  Philip Pape: And this is the conscious competence stage.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: Conscious competence.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: You are building pattern recognition.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: This is a crucial part of that, you know, 45-day window for a habit to stick, for example.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: And then stage four is hey, you don't need the tracking sheet or the app anymore.
• 16:52
  Philip Pape: You naturally know how to portion and select foods, again, almost by feel and by vibes at this point, but it's really a skill that's been trained into your brain because you've done it enough times it's become automatic.
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: And if you shift your goals, you know how to shift those selections accordingly.
• 17:08
  Philip Pape: And this is what real intuitive eating actually looks like, right?
• 17:11
  Philip Pape: It's not that you are ditching the data or getting rid of tracking your data, it's that you've internalized the data into your own brain.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: Your brain has become the data crunching and data gathering tool.
• 17:23
  Philip Pape: And it will never be perfect.
• 17:25
  Philip Pape: This is why people often, who I work with and myself included, will go back to a higher, more precise level of tracking at times, sometimes for long stretches, to retrain the brain or to level up that information.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: It also depends on how aggressive your goal is.
• 17:41
  Philip Pape: If your goal requires a higher level of precision, you might need more data.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: But this is all a far cry from what the Instagram crowd talks about when they say intuitive eating.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: And look, I've had I've had people on my show who they don't use calories and macros with their clients, but they use another form of tracking.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: Even if it's a piece of paper of portions and what's on your plate and how much fiber, it's still tracking data.
• 18:03
  Philip Pape: And that's the important piece.
• 18:05
  Philip Pape: Now, everything I've just told you is supported by multiple lines of research.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: I wouldn't just be telling you out of out of my butt for kicks, okay?
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: I I love I love connecting psychology and engineering and self-determination theory, which we're gonna talk about right now, into a system that really, really works for you and makes this all easier than it ever than you ever thought possible.
• 18:30
  Philip Pape: It's never completely easy, and it's never really about discipline either.
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: It's just a system.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: So self-determination theory, which has been studied a lot across, especially weight loss or weight management studies, shows that autonomous motivation is one of the strongest predictors of long-term success.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: Autonomous motivation.
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: But this is the key part relying on like a rigid external prescription, somebody telling you this is the way you have to eat or this is the diet you follow, it can work temporarily, but then it undermines the development of your own motivational resources.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: So it undermines that very piece that shows long-term success.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: And that's why people fall off when they do stuff like that.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: And so the goal of structure is to build your internal competence, right?
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: That conscious competence we talked about.
• 19:21
  Philip Pape: You don't want to create a permanent dependence on the structure.
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: You want to help internalize, learn from it, and then you move beyond it and you can always come back to it.
• 19:31
  Philip Pape: Now, we had Dr.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: Eric Helms on the show several times, and on one of those episodes, he described this progression from a form of tracking to a form of much less tracking, being that he is an elite competitive, you know, award-winning bodybuilder.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: He's professional.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: He calls it diet autoregulation, kind of like training autoregulation, but this is for your diet.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: And he's he says, look, this is not really the same thing as intuitive eating.
• 19:57
  Philip Pape: So this is where we can start to evolve our terminology, perhaps, in this industry for this nuance.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: He calls it diet autoregulation.
• 20:05
  Philip Pape: It is goal-directed eating.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: So you have a goal that's directing what you do, and it's built on three trainable skills: nutritional competence, introsceptive awareness, and self-regulation, which we've kind of touched on all of these.
• 20:19
  Philip Pape: You know, nutritional competence, right?
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: So that's knowledge of nutrition science, interoceptive awareness, that's the awareness of your inside of your body, what it's doing, what we've talked about, the hunger signals, and then self-regulation, the ability to regulate your own behaviors.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: And his point is that these are not innate things.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: You have to train them.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: You train them, you build them through structured intention and practice.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: And then and only then does that structure become optional.
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: And again, research on tracking supports this thought as well.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: There is consistently in the research a positive relationship between dietary self-monitoring and managing your weight.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: Dietary self-monitoring, what is that?
• 21:01
  Philip Pape: That's tracking.
• 21:02
  Philip Pape: People who track, it's not that they just lose weight, they actually develop the literacy around their nutrition.
• 21:09
  Philip Pape: They learn what portions look like, they learn what their body needs because they're tracking and able to validate the reality of the situation as they go.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: There was one study that specifically tested this.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: They found that training in calorie estimation.
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: So, in other words, training yourself to estimate calories significantly improved portion size accuracy.
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: And then those skills transferred beyond that point.
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: Now, here's the part that matters the most for this conversation.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: The research on flexible versus rigid restraint.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: Flexible dieting or flexible eating versus rigid restraint consistently shows that how you approach structure determines the outcome.
• 21:51
  Philip Pape: What do I mean by that?
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: Well, the structure itself can't be too rigid.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: Rigid control, all or nothing rule.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: Forbidden food lists, clean versus dirty, good versus bad, all of those correlate with higher binge eating, more food cravings, and higher BMI.
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: Like you just don't get the result, even if you do in the short term, not for the long term.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: Whereas flexible control, having a moderate structure.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: So I like to say structure with flexibility, not having a list of forbidden foods.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: Okay, you might have your own personal rules for yourself, but not a big prescriptive list of forbidden foods that don't have a reason behind them.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: Things that have a graduated approach, like a system where you learn more and more till you don't need it anymore.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: All of those things correlate with lower binge eating, fewer cravings, lower BMI, and this is the best part, better long-term adherence.
• 22:46
  Philip Pape: So tracking is not the problem.
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: Obsessive, fear-based, rigid tracking is the problem.
• 22:54
  Philip Pape: Flexible, I'll say curiosity-driven, time-limited tracking, right?
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: When we do fat loss phases, we set a limit, not necessarily that you have to lose a certain amount of weight by certain time, but that we're not going to diet for longer than this amount of time, regardless of the outcome.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: These, this kind of approach is the single most evidence-based tool that we have for building the skills that eventually make tracking unnecessary.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: Now, I want to be clear about what I'm not claiming here because nuance always gets lost.
• 23:26
  Philip Pape: I am not saying that intuitive eating is bad.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: As mentioned earlier in the episode, the framework has psychological benefits and aspects like removing food guilt and recognizing and learning about your hunger and fullness and rejecting the diet mentality are super, super valuable.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying that you should track forever.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: I think I think I've been clear in this episode, that's not what I'm saying.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: Because tracking is a temporary scaffold, and temporary is as long as you define it.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: If you want to track for days, weeks, months, or years, that is totally on you.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: And for many people, that's a helpful thing they want to do and cool.
• 24:01
  Philip Pape: But you build skills when you do that regardless.
• 24:03
  Philip Pape: And then when you take that scaffolding down, you'll find that you have a lot more capability than you did before.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying that your hunger signals are worthless.
• 24:12
  Philip Pape: I'm saying they could be degraded from years of doing these other things and they have to be recalibrated.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: And that's totally, totally doable.
• 24:19
  Philip Pape: You're not lost, you're not broken, it's doable.
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: If you've been a dieter for many years, if you have sleep issues, if you have the hormonal changes, then there's going to be some intention and effort and structure behind it to do this.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: The last thing I'm not saying is that the popular version, the Instagram version of intuitive eating can't work for some people.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: I guess if you've never had a disorder relationship with food, you've never dieted multiple times, you have very solid interoceptive awareness already, your goals don't include specific body composition changes, okay, then eating intuitively from the start might work.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: And again, I'm a little bit sarcastic in how I delivered that, but that's because most of those things are not the things that you listening to this podcast, dear listener, have in place already.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: Like you don't have all of them in place necessarily.
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: We want to build those skills.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: So then what I am saying is for most people, especially as we age over 40 who have specific physique goals, and you've been through years of dieting, and your hunger signals are disrupted by hormones, by sleep, stress, the food environment, the path to food freedom runs through structured awareness first.
• 25:25
  Philip Pape: You have to test the system before you let it run.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: Now remember, I promised you a three-question self-test to check whether your hunger signals are actually calibrated.
• 25:35
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna share that in just a moment.
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: But first, if today's episode hit hard with you.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: If you're nodding your head throughout this episode and realizing what you need is not another diet, it's not more willpower, but simply a system with a structured process that builds real skills and then graduates you to independence.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: That's exactly what Eat More Lift Heavy is designed to do.
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: You stop guessing, you do the real work, eat more lift heavy, and you trust yourself.
• 26:04
  Philip Pape: It is a coached 26 week arc.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: That's six months.
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: It's a 26-week arc planned out for you with a beginning, middle, and a defined end.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandwaits.com slash eat more to get on the wait list.
• 26:16
  Philip Pape: You'll lock in founder pricing that way as well.
• 26:18
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more and enrollment is opening very soon.
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: All right, here is the quick way to test whether your hunger signals are reliable enough to guide you forward without needing the tracking or the data anymore.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: Question one.
• 26:34
  Philip Pape: If you skip a meal, can you tell the difference between actual stomach hunger and just feeling tired, bored, or stressed?
• 26:42
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 26:42
  Philip Pape: We know that research shows hunger has at least 11 distinct dimensions to them, to it.
• 26:49
  Philip Pape: And most people are confusing one for another, like fatigue or irritability for hunger.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: If they feel the same to you, then your signals do need some work.
• 26:59
  Philip Pape: Okay, so again, if you skip a meal, can you tell the difference between real physiological stomach hunger and one of these many other things and these emotions?
• 27:08
  Philip Pape: Question two When you sit down to eat, can you stop at about 80% full and feel satisfied 20 minutes later?
• 27:15
  Philip Pape: Or do you consistently either overeat past fullness or under-eat and feel starving an hour later?
• 27:22
  Philip Pape: All right, if your enough detector, like I've eaten enough and I can tell, it's if if if that doesn't exist or it's off in either direction, again, that's a calibration issue.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: So can you stop at 80% full and feel satisfied 20 minutes later, or are you always overeating or even under-eating and then you're hungry later?
• 27:41
  Philip Pape: All right, question three.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: If I asked you to create a plate, if I asked you to get a plate and create a meal with about 30 to 40 grams of protein and a couple of servings of vegetables, and you don't have to look anything up or go into an app or anything, could you do it and be within 20%?
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: Could you have 30 to 40 grams of protein and and two servings of vegetables within 20% if we then log it in a food log and compare?
• 28:05
  Philip Pape: If the answer is no, then you haven't built the pattern recognition that makes data free eating reliable.
• 28:11
  Philip Pape: And I say 20% because that is roughly the error that experienced nutritionists and dietitians have versus the general population, which is just massive 40, 50, 60, 80% error.
• 28:22
  Philip Pape: So that's the interesting thing is once you develop the skill, you're still gonna be off by 20%, but that's okay.
• 28:27
  Philip Pape: Like that's close enough.
• 28:29
  Philip Pape: If you answered no to any one of these, you're not, you're not broken.
• 28:32
  Philip Pape: Just keep that in mind.
• 28:33
  Philip Pape: That's all what I'm saying.
• 28:34
  Philip Pape: I'm saying that you have some calibration to do first.
• 28:37
  Philip Pape: That's a problem to be solved, and that's okay, right?
• 28:39
  Philip Pape: That is exactly what structure tracking is for.
• 28:41
  Philip Pape: So again, if you want to get on the list for eat more lift heavy, witsandweights.com slash eatmore.
• 28:46
  Philip Pape: Until next time, guys, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 28:49
  Philip Pape: And remember, real food freedom is not the absence of structure.
• 28:52
  Philip Pape: It's what you earn on the other side of that structure when you internalize it.
• 28:56
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.