Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Calorie Counting vs. Pattern Analysis for Fat Loss and Muscle Building Over 40 | Ep 402

Transcript

Calorie Counting vs. Pattern Analysis for Fat Loss and Muscle Building Over 40 | Ep 402 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: For decades, the gold standard for fat loss and muscle gain has been tracking calories and macros.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: The research is clear, it works.
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: But what if AI coaching could analyze your eating patterns, correlate them with your body's response, and provide similar awareness and control without logging every meal?
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: Today I'm breaking down how AI-powered pattern analysis actually works, why it can be just as effective as detailed tracking, and what you need to make either approach successful for building muscle and losing fat over 40.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency.
• 0:50
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and today we're going to examine two very different approaches to the same goal and why one might be far more sustainable than you think, especially since it's kind of a brand new approach.
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: You probably know I'm a big advocate of tracking calories and macros.
• 1:09
  Philip Pape: I use MacroFactor myself.
• 1:11
  Philip Pape: I recommend it to clients and all of you regularly.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: The research is absolutely clear that tracking food intake works really well for fat loss and muscle gain, for changing your physique, for gaining some awareness and control over your food intake and your choices.
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: And when you track properly, when you weigh your food, when you log consistently, when you're honest about what goes in and that you track everything, you do get very valuable data.
• 1:38
  Philip Pape: You know exactly what you're eating.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: You know how much protein, you can make precise adjustments, you can troubleshoot the plateaus that might occur along the way because you have real data.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: And it's been very helpful for me as a coach as well, because I can see your data and quickly do an analysis on what might be happening.
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: And for lots of people, this becomes a simple daily habit.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: It's almost automatic.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: You, as soon as you prepare your food, you pull out the food scale, you weigh it, you log it in your app, right?
• 2:06
  Philip Pape: Or maybe you use the photo the photo AI, or maybe you look it up or use a barcode, whatever.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: It takes two minutes.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: And most people, their screen time for the day is like three to five minutes.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: Not a lot.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: That's not the concern at all.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: And so after a few weeks, you've got this routine, it's not a big deal, and you start to get really good, helpful data.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: And so the power of tracking is the awareness.
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: I've talked about this a lot.
• 2:30
  Philip Pape: I'm sticking to that.
• 2:31
  Philip Pape: That is so, so important.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: Because when you have to log something, anything, right?
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: Whether that's your bank account, that you may you bought something at the grocery store, that's awareness.
• 2:43
  Philip Pape: You bought something online, that's awareness.
• 2:46
  Philip Pape: And then you become conscious of your choices.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: Same thing with the food.
• 2:49
  Philip Pape: You become conscious of choices.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: They don't become mindless anymore, they become mindful.
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: You see patterns that you wouldn't notice otherwise.
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: You discover that the healthy salad that you've been eating has 600 calories of just dressing and nuts, right?
• 3:03
  Philip Pape: And that's healthy in quotes, right?
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: You know, we don't use those those labels here.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: You realize your portions at dinner are 40% larger than you thought.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: You realize that on the weekends you consume three times as much as you thought because you're going out to restaurants, drinking alcohol, and all of that.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: And that's the awareness that drives behavior change.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: Not because hitting your calorie target creates fat loss, but because seeing your intake helps you make the decisions to do that.
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: And the feedback loop is then immediate.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: And by the way, we have to close that feedback loop.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: If you're only logging the food and not doing anything with the data, well, then it's an open loop.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: It's not a closed feedback loop at all, anyway.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: That's a different issue.
• 3:45
  Philip Pape: I'm assuming you are closing that loop.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: So if you eat 2,200 calories a day for a week and your weight goes up, then you know what happened, right?
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: You know that you're eating probably more than your body burns.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: If you eat 1800 calories, your weight trend goes down.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: Well, that confirms you're in a deficit, right?
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: And for people who like structure, who enjoy data, who want clear targets to hit, raise your hand.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: I'm raising mine.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: Tracking is fantastic.
• 4:14
  Philip Pape: It removes guesswork, it builds confidence, it works.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: That is the premise of today's episode.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: So if tracking works this well, why would anyone do something else?
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: Well, that's the question that I used to ask.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: I said, well, if tracking macros and calories work so well, why would you do something else?
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: Isn't it the best tool for the job?
• 4:33
  Philip Pape: I always say macro factor is like the best tool for the job in the app space, right?
• 4:37
  Philip Pape: And honestly, for a long time, I thought that tracking in this exact way was the only serious approach for anyone who wanted results because you're gonna fail without it, right?
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: But then I started noticing something with certain clients who weren't necessarily tracking the same way.
• 4:55
  Philip Pape: I started talking to folks like Dr.
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: Eric Helms and other physique competitors who have a very healthy mind state and at the same time have started to transition themselves and some clients away from that type of tracking.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: And I notice the words I'm using.
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: We are not gonna eliminate tracking.
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: If you want to not track at all, have at it.
• 5:15
  Philip Pape: That's called intuitive eating.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: That's called flying by the seat of your pants, that's called winging it.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: I think you're not gonna be successful if you do that.
• 5:21
  Philip Pape: You have to track something, okay?
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: It's the way that we track that could change.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: I remember having guests on the show who very successful coaches with their clients who didn't use calorie macro tracking.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: Everything from nutrient approaches like Sarah Ballantine, right?
• 5:38
  Philip Pape: She starts with nutrients to Christina McClerkin was on, and she talked about tracking other elements of what you eat other than calories and macros, but you're still tracking something.
• 5:48
  Philip Pape: And I've had several other guests that I've talked to and other coaches that have similar systems.
• 5:52
  Philip Pape: They're just different, but they still track.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: Now, I always, I always kind of said, okay, that's great, you do you.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: And I'm just gonna stick to what I think is simple, which is calories and macros.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: But there's there's another phenomenon that occurs when you're tracking, depending on how you're tracking.
• 6:09
  Philip Pape: Okay, and I'm not talking about disorders, I'm not talking about OCD, I'm not talking about obsessiveness, none of that.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: Outside the scope of today, we know that the research says that if you didn't have an issue already before, tracking only helps.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: It only helps you get the results and maintaining results.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: What I do find is that the type of tracking, right, when there's a lot of data involved, for example, and you have to track a lot of things, even smart, motivated, consistent people would do this eight weeks, 12 weeks, maybe 16, and start to get results.
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: But then a lot of times they fall off and they stop logging.
• 6:43
  Philip Pape: And it's not because they failed to get the results, it's not because they lacked discipline.
• 6:47
  Philip Pape: But a lot of times people say, Look, I've got the awareness.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: I've built the skill, I've built the intuition.
• 6:52
  Philip Pape: I don't need to do this anymore, do I?
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: And you've developed some instincts.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: That is true.
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: You know what your portions look like.
• 7:00
  Philip Pape: You can feel when you're in a deficit or maintenance.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: You internalize a lot of the patterns.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: A lot of these things do become routine.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: Like if you're eating the same way, you just keep doing that and you can maintain your weight.
• 7:12
  Philip Pape: But they then went one of two paths.
• 7:14
  Philip Pape: And again, I'm talking to people that stopped tracking in the original way they were tracking, which is a decent amount of the population here that I'm referring to.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: They either stopped tracking altogether and then started to deviate and basically fall off their habits because they had no other system in place to reinforce what they were doing or to measure or to track.
• 7:36
  Philip Pape: You had others, however, who simply supplanted one style of tracking with another, maybe a looser form of tracking, but still awareness, still some sort of documentation or journaling or a light set of numbers, some way that they continue to track.
• 7:53
  Philip Pape: Do you feel me?
• 7:53
  Philip Pape: Do you feel what I'm saying?
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: And even when you talk to guys like Derek, Dr.
• 7:56
  Philip Pape: Eric Helms, where people get transition away from tracking, they're still tracking something, or they still have an awareness of, say, certain targets.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: Like I'm trying to get a certain amount of protein in a certain number of meals.
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: And even if it's in their head, it's still a target and it's still a number, and there's still an element of tracking to it, right?
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: So, so what does all this mean?
• 8:17
  Philip Pape: Well, uh, maybe the goal isn't permanently tracking in one way.
• 8:23
  Philip Pape: Maybe the goal is developing the awareness and the decision making that skills that tracking teaches, and then be able to maintain results with some lighter version of tracking or a different version of tracking if you so choose.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: And once I realized that, I said, huh, let me explore other ways people can continue to track that are maybe a little bit less time consuming or less stressful.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: I shouldn't say time consuming because tracking calories and macros isn't time consuming, but it does create some weird scenarios like when you go on vacation or when you're eating out or when your wife makes dinner for you and she sees you pulling out your phone every time to track the food.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: It can get a little bit, it can create a little bit of interesting friction or stress in other ways.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: Do you guys feel me on that?
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: And that's what led me to explore what I call pattern-based coaching, not as a replacement for tracking, but as a different path to the same destination.
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: Now, we're gonna get into what pattern-based coaching is.
• 9:22
  Philip Pape: And I will tell you that if a person has to do this, either yourself or a coach doing it for you, it takes quite a bit of learning and training to do it this way up front.
• 9:36
  Philip Pape: And then once you do it, it it's I'll say a lot more natural, intuitive approach that still involves a form of analysis and tracking.
• 9:45
  Philip Pape: All right, fit stick with me here because this is all gonna make sense by the time we get to the end of the episode.
• 9:50
  Philip Pape: So, what is pattern-based coaching or tracking?
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: Well, instead of tracking the numbers via a database of food, you're tracking the eating behaviors that lead to your trends, your patterns, what you choose to eat, and ultimately then the nutrients, the macros and the micros that go into your body that affect your body composition results.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: So, in other words, you're kind of flipping it backward.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: Instead of starting from targets and trying to fit into those targets, you're starting from what really is the root cause of your behaviors that lead to whether you hit those targets.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: Now you could say, well, why don't you do both?
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: Yeah, you can absolutely do both.
• 10:30
  Philip Pape: In fact, a lot of my coaching with clients is filling in the gap of the pattern side.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: That's the point of where how I was able to kind of figure all this out over the years, is that many of my clients are using macrofactor, tracking calories, macros, but then I'm coming from the other end, one-two punch, and trying to figure out these trends and patterns with them and solve the issue from that direction.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: The calories and macros are just kind of telling them the end of the chain for a given day or a given week or given month of their choices, but it doesn't tell them how to solve those choices or you know, those behaviors.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: So, in now, so what if you said, what if I just take out those training wheels?
• 11:07
  Philip Pape: Or what if I just take out the tracking of calories and macros all together?
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: How would you use this successfully?
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: Where it doesn't become winging it intuitive eating.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: The key insight is this your body composition outcomes are determined by your lifestyle and your patterns.
• 11:22
  Philip Pape: They're not determined by whether you strictly hit calories and macros.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: And I say it that way because you might say, wait, wait a minute, energy balance and getting enough protein, that's that's really all you need, right?
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: In reality, if you hit your macros, but you do it in a way where you're hungry, you're eating calorie-dense foods or a lot of processed foods, let's say, the meal timing doesn't work for you, you're training fasted and it doesn't feel good, you don't have enough sleep, et cetera, et cetera, then you're not gonna get your body composition.
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: Strictly hitting the calories and macros isn't gonna be enough, is my point.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: So I want you to think about a different way.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: If your body weight trend is moving down over several weeks, then you know you're in a calorie deficit and what you're doing is working.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: You actually don't have to know your expenditure or your intake to know you're in a calorie deficit.
• 12:12
  Philip Pape: Let me repeat that.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: You don't have to know your expenditure or your intake to know you're in a calorie deficit retroactively.
• 12:19
  Philip Pape: In other words, in hindsight.
• 12:20
  Philip Pape: So if you go three weeks and you've lost a pound a week, then you've averaged a 500 calorie deficit a day, even if you didn't know what your intake was.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: Now you might say, okay, that's great, but I still need to know what to eat to get there.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: Stick with me.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: If your waste measurement is shrinking and your strength is going up, that is also data that's telling you you're doing something right.
• 12:42
  Philip Pape: If you're feeling fairly satisfied from your food and you're not gaining weight, versus if you're always feeling hungry and you're not gaining weight, that's your body telling you something that you need to know.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: And so interestingly, those are still things being tracked.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: And I like to track those things anyway, but I'm tying them into this thought that you may not have to track calories and macros.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: So stick with me here.
• 13:07
  Philip Pape: When I talk about a pattern, I don't, I'm not just talking about food.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: All right, let's break it down.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna break it down into five things.
• 13:14
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 13:15
  Philip Pape: The first thing is body composition trends.
• 13:17
  Philip Pape: If you're tracking your daily weight and then smooth that into a trend line, something like Macro Factor does that.
• 13:23
  Philip Pape: My new app is gonna do that.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: It's a very simple thing.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: It's just math, all right?
• 13:27
  Philip Pape: And that filters out your daily fluctuations from water, from food volume, from glycogen, from inflammation.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: This trend is real data, right?
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: It tells you if you're in a deficit, surplus, or maintenance all by itself, believe it or not.
• 13:40
  Philip Pape: Okay, all by itself.
• 13:41
  Philip Pape: In fact, macro factor uses that to say, am I in a def, are you in a deficit or surplus?
• 13:47
  Philip Pape: Therefore, this is what your expenditure is, therefore, this is how you need to change your calories.
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: But you know what?
• 13:53
  Philip Pape: If macrofactor didn't tell you what your expenditure was, it can still tell you whether your calories should go up or down by a certain amount because of whether you're in a surplus or deficit versus your goal.
• 14:07
  Philip Pape: That's really powerful.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: I hope you guys understand what I'm saying.
• 14:10
  Philip Pape: Okay, these are different variables that play together.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: If you know you're in a deficit and the deficit's not as big as you'd like, then you know you're not eating in as big a deficit relative to your expenditure as you want, even if you don't know your expenditure.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: That's pretty cool.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: Okay, stick with me.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: The second thing, eating behaviors.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: Now, this is super powerful.
• 14:30
  Philip Pape: It's not, it's not what you eat, but how and why you ate it.
• 14:35
  Philip Pape: Were you physically hungry before the meal?
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: Or was it an emotional hunger, or were you not hungry?
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: How satisfied did you feel after?
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: How confident were you in your food choices?
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: These capture your relationship with food.
• 14:50
  Philip Pape: And you know what?
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: I've been, I'll say admittedly, inadequate in dealing with these aspects in my coaching so far.
• 14:58
  Philip Pape: Apologies to all my clients out there.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: I I know maybe I'm being hard on myself because I know physic university has lots of coach, uh lots of modules in the different courses about emotional eating and different exercises and all that.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: I get it.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: But I feel like from a tracking perspective, I could do better.
• 15:17
  Philip Pape: And going forward, I'm going to.
• 15:18
  Philip Pape: In fact, that's where this is all leading to.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: This is all gonna make sense.
• 15:22
  Philip Pape: Number three, meal composition patterns.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: Is there protein at most meals?
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: What does the composition of your plate look like?
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: I think that's really important.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: Now, I didn't used to think it was as important because I thought calories and macros.
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: But no, are you eating mostly whole foods with some flexibility for processed foods in there?
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: Are each me, is each meal fairly balanced, right?
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: They don't all have to be, but in general, how different are your weekends from your weekdays, your training days from your off days, et cetera?
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: Those patterns tell us something as well.
• 15:53
  Philip Pape: You notice what I'm doing, guys.
• 15:55
  Philip Pape: I'm actually giving you a more complex, in a good way, complex as in nuanced or complete picture of things to track than just calories and macros that can lead to the same outcome and maybe even more efficiently.
• 16:09
  Philip Pape: Whoa, mind blowing.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: I know it's my it is mind blowing in my opinion, in my mind.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: I hope it is in yours.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: Number four of the things you're tracking that are not calories and macros are biofeedback signals.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: So we talk about this a lot on the show: sleep quality, energy levels, hunger, cravings, digestion, recovery from training, stress.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: These tell you if your approach is sustainable for you right now in your life.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: Okay, not only is it sustainable, but like the cause and effect of different aspects of what's going on, right?
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: Like if your deficit is not as low as we thought it would be, but you're feeling hungry, which implies you're not eating that much, and you have low sleep.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: Oh, now we could put that together into a pattern that says you're not getting enough sleep.
• 16:55
  Philip Pape: That's suppressing your metabolism.
• 16:57
  Philip Pape: Therefore, you feel hungry and you have cravings while you're also not getting the deficit you want.
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: What do we need to address?
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: Probably need to eat a little more while we fix our sleep and our stress.
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: Boom, right?
• 17:07
  Philip Pape: And again, you didn't even have to know calories and macros.
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: And in fact, the calories and macros could be counterproductive because it can make you frustrated thinking, I'm in a deficit.
• 17:14
  Philip Pape: Why am I not losing weight?
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: And the fifth metric here is of course, your strength progression.
• 17:21
  Philip Pape: Are you getting stronger?
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: Can you do more?
• 17:23
  Philip Pape: How's your recovery with your strength?
• 17:26
  Philip Pape: Because that's an indicator that you're fueling properly and building muscle.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: And of course, it's going to change depending on the phase you're in, if you're in fat loss maintenance or building.
• 17:33
  Philip Pape: So these are all connected in your patterns.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: Now, most people think they need to track calories to develop nutritional awareness.
• 17:43
  Philip Pape: But when you think of tracking, even in something like Macro Factor, it does teach you some skills.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: It teaches you how to use a food scale, how to log, how to think of food in terms of quantities.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: So there's definitely that piece of it.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: And I'm not saying we would we would exclude that altogether.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: There's still an awareness of quantity and calorie density and portion size that correlates with calories that is important.
• 18:10
  Philip Pape: And pattern-based coaching or tracking teaches you the actual underlying skills.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: For example, you learn to identify physical hunger versus emotional eating.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: You discover which meals keep you satisfied for many hours, all through that what used to be an energy crash versus the ones that leave you in that energy crash searching for snacks, like a nomad.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: Where are the chips?
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: You notice that your weekend eating patterns are dramatically different from weekdays.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: And this is actually pretty common, that exact scenario, but it might be different for you.
• 18:43
  Philip Pape: It might have to do with your cycle or when you work or when the kids are over or when you have to take care, you know, go to holiday events or family events.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: And then you can address those specific behaviors.
• 18:56
  Philip Pape: You see that you're great at eating protein at dinner, but it's barely present at breakfast and lunch.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: And now you have a clear area to improve.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm not saying calorie macro tracking doesn't give you some of these things.
• 19:05
  Philip Pape: Of course, it does, because you can visually see, oh, I'm not getting enough protein at breakfast.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: But you do have to go in and look at that data.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: And I do find a lot of people using these apps, like even macrofactor, they don't go look at that part of the data.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: They're only looking, they're kind of myopic and thinking only in terms of, you know, am I losing weight or not?
• 19:23
  Philip Pape: Do I need to go up and down in calories or macros?
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: They're not looking at the patterns.
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: The patterns are there.
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: So again, this is where I think it's not one or the other necessarily.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: And so all of these things help you recognize that, for example, you make poor food choices when you're stressed, but not when you're hungry.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: Hmm, interesting.
• 19:41
  Philip Pape: That's what creates sustainable change, right?
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: We know it's not willpower.
• 19:45
  Philip Pape: We know it's not restriction.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: We know it's not low carb or fasting.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: We know that better self-awareness and decision-making frameworks so that you can get micro wins that are under your control that actually move the ball forward for you is what makes you consistent and ultimately successful.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: Now, pattern-based scooching, I'm gonna say it's not easier or harder than tracking with calories and macros.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: It's just different.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: And sometimes you do both, sometimes you do a little of one or a little of the other.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: It depends.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: You have to be consistent with feedback no matter what you're doing, measuring and getting feedback.
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: If you only log the data and don't look at it, or you log data sporadically and look at it, but it's sporadic, you're not gonna get enough to see those patterns.
• 20:32
  Philip Pape: You also need basic nutrition literacy.
• 20:35
  Philip Pape: That's probably one reason you listen to the show.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: You're you crave information and knowledge, you're curious, you're skeptical, and you don't necessarily need a degree in nutrition science.
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: I mean, you don't, but if you've listened to the show for any length of time, you know there's a lot.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: There's a lot to learn.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: What you do need to know is about how much protein do you need?
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: What does a serving of protein look like?
• 20:56
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 20:56
  Philip Pape: So when you go to a restaurant, you kind of know how much protein there is.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: You understand that the scale fluctuates every day, and that doesn't really matter.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: What matters is the trend over time.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: It's trusting the process.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: It's understanding that your body's response, the weight trend, the measurements, your strength gains, your energy levels, your biofeedback, your hunger signals, all of that becomes your most important guide, not targets, because targets are just reflecting after the fact what's going on with all these other things anyway.
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: And of course, you need patience.
• 21:26
  Philip Pape: Pattern-based coaching reveals issues over time.
• 21:29
  Philip Pape: You know, it's not going to reveal something tomorrow.
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: It's going to take time, several weeks, probably, not just several days, but it doesn't take years.
• 21:38
  Philip Pape: And then when those patterns are revealed, you can then fix the root cause rather than just trying to, let's say, arbitrarily hit a calorie target by white knuckling it even further, by doing what you're already doing, which may not be optimal, even further.
• 21:53
  Philip Pape: Now, quick break here because if you're listening to this and thinking, all right, I want this kind of intelligent coaching that adapts to everything I'm doing, just like Philip's talking about with the pattern-based analysis.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: I just launched my new app.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: It's called Fitness Lab.
• 22:08
  Philip Pape: It came out yesterday.
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: And it's an AI coaching app built specifically for adults over 40 who want to do all these things.
• 22:16
  Philip Pape: They want to improve their physique and their health and longevity.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: They want to build muscle and lose fat.
• 22:20
  Philip Pape: Using this kind of integrative intelligence pattern-based whole body approach is what I'm going to say.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: It's all of you.
• 22:30
  Philip Pape: It's your hormones, it's everything.
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: You get daily coaching briefings that are personalized to your progress and to your struggles, that are based on how you've been logging things.
• 22:40
  Philip Pape: Meal photo analysis that spots behaviors using AI vision, exactly like we're talking about today, as well as adaptive strength training that responds to your biofeedback, an AI chat coach that you can ask questions anytime that's trained on all of my podcasts, my entire coaching philosophy, and then your specific data.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: All of that is in my app.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: It's called Fitness Lab.
• 23:02
  Philip Pape: Download it at witsandweights.com slash app right now through Black Friday.
• 23:07
  Philip Pape: You get 20% off.
• 23:08
  Philip Pape: So take advantage of the deal.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: It's, in my opinion, super affordable for the kind of app that you're going to get.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: A premium, never seen before, game-changing type app that impresses me every day as I continue to use and test it myself.
• 23:23
  Philip Pape: My mind is blown, and I think yours will be too.
• 23:25
  Philip Pape: Go to witwaits.com slash app.
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: It's called Fitness Lab.
• 23:28
  Philip Pape: And I want to now segue into how to make this pattern-based approach work.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: Now, Fitness Lab will do it for you, but I do want to explain how it works underneath.
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: Because if you did want to do it on your own or wanted to design your own system, or if you're a coach listening to this, you're like, well, I don't want to push people to Philips app, but I want to try this with my clients.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: I'm all for teaching you guys how to do that.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: You have to have certain foundations in place.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: Not because I say so, but because this is what determines success or failure.
• 23:55
  Philip Pape: So the first foundation is body composition literacy.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: You can't coach yourself effectively if you don't understand how body composition works.
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: You need to know that the scale is not the best indicator, right?
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: It fluctuates a lot, but it's helpful over time for sure for fat gain and fat loss and muscle gain and muscle loss.
• 24:16
  Philip Pape: You need to know that muscle tissue is denser than fat.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: So you can get leaner while the scale doesn't go down, right?
• 24:22
  Philip Pape: You can get even leaner when the scale goes up.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: That progressive overload and progressing in your training is the critical signal of stimulus for muscle building alongside your weight and your measurements.
• 24:34
  Philip Pape: If you think that clean eating creates fat loss, if you believe the scale is the only metric that matters, then you're already not going to be successful when it comes to the patterns, because that is a restrictive, temporary mindset that is not sustainable and does not correlate well with body composition.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: So you just need to understand the basics of energy balance, protein's role in fat loss and muscle gain, and why all of these data points together are an important metric.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: Foundation two is protein awareness, right?
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: This is where I say this on podcasts all the time.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: If you can just have protein in every meal, that is gonna be 80% of the equation right there for what people are missing.
• 25:17
  Philip Pape: Now, I've heard some people say, I increase my protein, but then I gain more weight.
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: I said, I said, well, then it's not just protein that's a concern for you, obviously.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: You're just overconsuming in general.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: Most people, I'm gonna say, when they meaningfully increase protein, it displaces other things.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: It makes them fuller and they actually eat less in general and fewer calories overall.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: But that's not always true, right?
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: This is why we have to understand our patterns and what's happening to our body.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: Now, you don't, do you have to know exactly how much you're eating?
• 25:42
  Philip Pape: No, but you need to know approximately so that you get in the range that we want to be in, which is 0.701 grams per pound of body weight, right?
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: And maybe a little more if you're in a deficit, a little bit less if you're not, a little bit more if you're older, et cetera.
• 25:55
  Philip Pape: And so then we say, well, what about palm size or palm size serving methodology?
• 26:01
  Philip Pape: Now, I used to kind of frown on that.
• 26:04
  Philip Pape: I know that was like the PMI.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: Am I saying it?
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: Not PMI, what's it called?
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: Precision nutrition.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: I'm thinking of project management, the precision nutrition approach.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: And I think there's merit in understanding visually how much something is.
• 26:17
  Philip Pape: Not necessarily palm, but a palm is something we all have with us at all times.
• 26:22
  Philip Pape: So it could be helpful.
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: Like a palm size serving a chicken breast is like 25, 30 grams of protein.
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: But you could also equate that to say 100 out 100 grams on a scale.
• 26:31
  Philip Pape: Or, you know, if you had a cup of Greek Greek yogurt and you know it's like 20 grams, like understanding, you know, an egg is six grams of protein.
• 26:39
  Philip Pape: It's a helpful, those are helpful proxies to have in your head so that when you're out and about or you're eating on the go, you're eating in a restaurant, you're on vacation, then you know how much protein you're getting.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: And so you could either get there from calorie counting and tracking and learning that way, and or you could just be intentional about how much protein you have in each meal and do it that way.
• 26:56
  Philip Pape: There's multiple ways to roam, multiple roads to roam, right?
• 26:59
  Philip Pape: And so this is part of nutritional literacy.
• 27:01
  Philip Pape: And I think there's a lot more that goes beyond protein, of course.
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: But I think it starts there.
• 27:05
  Philip Pape: If I had to pick one other area, it would be fiber, having enough fiber.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: But then we get into the more comp now.
• 27:11
  Philip Pape: We're gonna get into the more complicated aspects of protein, fiber, having having a vegetable and having some sort of carb on your plate is a generally good rubric for how to eat throughout the day.
• 27:22
  Philip Pape: And then you can scale the quantities up and down.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: And that's where pattern analysis is super helpful.
• 27:26
  Philip Pape: Of course, if you're binging the ice cream late at night, or if you're overeating alcohol naps in the weekend on the in a restaurant, those are also other data points you're gonna have to have, right?
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: It's not just, okay, all my meals are balanced, I'm good.
• 27:39
  Philip Pape: It's I'm a human being and I'm gonna make mistakes or I'm gonna do things that I didn't necessarily want to do, and I need to know what those patterns are.
• 27:45
  Philip Pape: So that's the second foundation.
• 27:46
  Philip Pape: Foundation three, and there's four by the way, that I'm talking about today.
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: Foundation three is closing that loop and getting consistent feedback.
• 27:54
  Philip Pape: Now, by consistent, I mean I do mean at a micro level, which usually means daily, something every day.
• 28:02
  Philip Pape: Not everything every day, but some things every day, and not the same things every day, if I didn't confuse you enough already.
• 28:09
  Philip Pape: And it's being consistent.
• 28:10
  Philip Pape: You're gonna you're gonna miss days, I get it.
• 28:12
  Philip Pape: I always strive to have to do at least one thing a day on my list of things that I'm tracking, if not, you know, the goal is to get all of them done, but if you can get some of them done, right, better than nothing, and that's what consistency is.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: And some of us have minimums, some of us have super minimums, right?
• 28:29
  Philip Pape: There's a whole philosophy behind this, but there are certain things that if you could do them every day and turn them into habits, and by habit, by habit I mean automatic.
• 28:38
  Philip Pape: Now, lifting weights isn't necessarily something that can be a habit, but getting up at 5 a.m.
• 28:44
  Philip Pape: on training days can be a habit.
• 28:46
  Philip Pape: Packing your gym bag at night can be a habit.
• 28:49
  Philip Pape: Going to the gym and doing all the process of that itself is like a massive skill, uh set of skills and habits, if that makes sense.
• 28:59
  Philip Pape: So you really need to break it down to what are you doing every day.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: I would say weighing yourself every day is important.
• 29:05
  Philip Pape: I would say having some tracking or awareness of your meals every day, and not, and this is where I'm gonna differ from what I've talked about in the past.
• 29:12
  Philip Pape: If you have enough of the right technology and analysis or a coach and you could get feedback on your meal patterns on a daily basis, even without tracking all your calories and macros, you could actually get more than enough data to make the choices that get you where you need to be.
• 29:27
  Philip Pape: I know this is controversial, guys.
• 29:29
  Philip Pape: It sounds sacrilegious.
• 29:30
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater.
• 29:33
  Philip Pape: I still think tracking malaries and calories and macros is a fantastic tool.
• 29:37
  Philip Pape: And these can be complementary.
• 29:38
  Philip Pape: In fact, if you use all these tools together, you probably get the best of it all.
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: But if we subscribe to the 80 20 rule, the Pareto principle, find the the things that are the least stress and time and friction that still gets you 80 or 90% of the results.
• 29:53
  Philip Pape: And each of these things you do every day should take like a minute, two minutes, three minutes max.
• 29:58
  Philip Pape: All right, again, working out.
• 29:59
  Philip Pape: Takes 90 minutes for some of us.
• 30:01
  Philip Pape: That is not the habit.
• 30:03
  Philip Pape: The habit is all the microwins and habits that lead to us doing that thing because that's part of our identity.
• 30:08
  Philip Pape: Identity is a whole other topic.
• 30:09
  Philip Pape: I should do another another episode on because it's also embedded in my app of creating your future identity and really having the app push you to realize that.
• 30:18
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 30:19
  Philip Pape: So you need some sort of minimum viable data on a daily basis.
• 30:22
  Philip Pape: There's a lot more than what I just said.
• 30:23
  Philip Pape: Some things are on a weekly basis, like body measurements, for example, photos, stuff like that.
• 30:28
  Philip Pape: If you disappear for weeks and then try to catch up, you're not going to find a pattern.
• 30:32
  Philip Pape: That's not how it works, right?
• 30:34
  Philip Pape: Consistency is basically the trade-off for the price that you pay for wanting to be successful.
• 30:40
  Philip Pape: And it's a price that I'm willing to pay.
• 30:42
  Philip Pape: And I hope you are as well.
• 30:43
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 30:43
  Philip Pape: The final foundation here is trusting in outcome data.
• 30:48
  Philip Pape: What do I mean?
• 30:49
  Philip Pape: This is the hardest one for some people.
• 30:51
  Philip Pape: So with calorie tracking, you have a target.
• 30:54
  Philip Pape: Okay, I'm trying to hit 1800 calories, and that's gonna be my win for the day.
• 30:58
  Philip Pape: Now, and of course, I hope you're having flexibility around that.
• 31:01
  Philip Pape: Okay, 16 to 1600 to 2000 calories or 1700 to 19, you know, you have a range that is still a win for you.
• 31:08
  Philip Pape: And you get that immediate feedback.
• 31:10
  Philip Pape: With pattern-based approaches that I'm talking about, you simply have other wins that you're using instead of hitting specific calories for the day.
• 31:19
  Philip Pape: And those wins are all all have to do with those specific decisions that put your plate together.
• 31:24
  Philip Pape: The things that would allow you to hit those calories anyway, but now you're doing it in a way that also satisfies the other things we talked about: satisfaction, balance, biofeedback.
• 31:34
  Philip Pape: And then as your body responds and you're collecting your data, like your weight train, your measurements, et cetera, you're gonna know what to change.
• 31:41
  Philip Pape: It's really the same thing that informs whether your calories change.
• 31:44
  Philip Pape: So you are still getting daily wins.
• 31:47
  Philip Pape: And rather than trying to hit a target in a way that is not best for your routine and your behavior, you're actually trying to hit those behaviors and those micro wins throughout the day that ultimately lead to consuming the calories, macros, micros that you want.
• 32:01
  Philip Pape: I hope that makes sense.
• 32:03
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 32:03
  Philip Pape: You're focusing on behavior patterns and letting your body's feedback guide you.
• 32:07
  Philip Pape: And so you're still tracking quite a bit of things.
• 32:10
  Philip Pape: And this is a very powerful approach.
• 32:12
  Philip Pape: So let me be clear about when which approach makes the most sense.
• 32:15
  Philip Pape: I think detailed calorie macro tracking is really good when you're working with a coach, especially, so that they have data, but also when you're in a very specific, precise phase, you know, fat loss phase, a muscle building phase, but a more aggressive one, I would say.
• 32:33
  Philip Pape: Because I'm I've found that less aggressive phases, you almost don't need it as long as you are being consistent with and kind of boring with your food choices.
• 32:42
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're not boring, then you need to spend time becoming a little bit more boring, if that makes sense anyway, before you try to go into fat loss phase.
• 32:49
  Philip Pape: That's the whole pre-fat loss thing we've talked about many times.
• 32:52
  Philip Pape: If you've hit a plateau and you need some more data to troubleshoot what's going on, you don't have enough data.
• 32:56
  Philip Pape: If you generally enjoy tracking calories and macros, it doesn't create stress or disordered eating.
• 33:01
  Philip Pape: If you have a history where less structured approaches lead to overeating, under eating, or falling off track so easily.
• 33:06
  Philip Pape: I'm a huge fan of calorie and macro tracking.
• 33:09
  Philip Pape: So notice that that's a lot of scenarios that we deal with.
• 33:12
  Philip Pape: When does pattern-based coaching help?
• 33:15
  Philip Pape: Well, you want a really centered approach in your behaviors that's sustainable to the point where you don't even need to know the calories and macros to know that you've hit your calories and macros, if that even makes sense.
• 33:29
  Philip Pape: For some of you, it's because of the style of tracking.
• 33:32
  Philip Pape: You're very busy, you can't or don't want to weigh and log what you eat.
• 33:35
  Philip Pape: Maybe you don't have control all the time of prepping your food.
• 33:39
  Philip Pape: Maybe you've tried detailed calorie tracking and macro tracking before, and it's a problem for you individually, which could be the case.
• 33:45
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's create stress, anxiety, and unhealthy relationship with food, whatever.
• 33:49
  Philip Pape: Even though I've I've tried to convince people that give macro factor a try and you probably won't have those issues.
• 33:54
  Philip Pape: But I know some people still have those issues, even with an app like that.
• 33:58
  Philip Pape: Also, pattern-based coaching is great if you want to develop better food instinct, better decision-making skills while you're building your plates and doing your grocery shopping.
• 34:06
  Philip Pape: And if you like the thought of your behaviors and your body's body's feedback being the primary guide to your adjustments, rather than just, hey, here's my expenditure.
• 34:17
  Philip Pape: I think pattern-based coaching is pretty cool.
• 34:20
  Philip Pape: Or here's the third option: you combine them, you combine them strategically.
• 34:24
  Philip Pape: You use calorie macro tracking along with pattern-based coaching.
• 34:28
  Philip Pape: And you can dial one in or the other more or less, depending on what's going on.
• 34:31
  Philip Pape: Or you switch between them.
• 34:32
  Philip Pape: And that gives you the best of both worlds, right?
• 34:34
  Philip Pape: You're not trapped in a permanent mode of tracking, but you have the tool available for you that's best when, say, more or less precision matters or a different style of tracking is important to you.
• 34:44
  Philip Pape: So this leads us to a quick discussion of AI today and how it has changed the game and allowed us to do something that's never been able to be done before.
• 34:54
  Philip Pape: It makes pattern-based coaching seamless and almost effortless, which is almost the opposite of what it's been up to this point.
• 35:02
  Philip Pape: Up to this point, pattern-based coaching is a really complicated thing, in my opinion, to get right.
• 35:06
  Philip Pape: It takes a lot of education, a lot of learning, oftentimes working with a coach.
• 35:10
  Philip Pape: And I think AI is a game changer right now.
• 35:13
  Philip Pape: A human coach can definitely look at your food log, they can spot some patterns, but come on, they can't correlate reams and reams of data, thousands of data points about everything you're doing all day, every day.
• 35:26
  Philip Pape: You know, your sleep quality scores, your step count trend, your training performance, your stress levels, all at the same time every day.
• 35:32
  Philip Pape: They can do it kind of to a certain level, and it depends on how much time your coach puts in.
• 35:36
  Philip Pape: The more, the more time that they put in, the more that they do, the more they're gonna cost.
• 35:40
  Philip Pape: That's for sure.
• 35:41
  Philip Pape: And a lot of you, if you're paying for a cheap coach, you're gonna get a cheap outcome in this regard.
• 35:46
  Philip Pape: Trust me.
• 35:46
  Philip Pape: I'm an engineering thinking person, and I can tell you very few coaches think that way or get to that level of detail.
• 35:51
  Philip Pape: They want it to be as easy on themselves as possible.
• 35:53
  Philip Pape: I mean, you can't blame them, right?
• 35:54
  Philip Pape: They're trying to maximize the time they put in for the revenue they earn while still helping you, but that's the truth of the matter behind the scenes.
• 36:01
  Philip Pape: Whereas AI never has to go to sleep, you don't have to feed it.
• 36:04
  Philip Pape: It can do all this stuff, it can calculate data, it can calculate patterns constantly in real time.
• 36:09
  Philip Pape: It can notice that your food choices deteriorate on days when you sleep poorly, that your protein intake drops on high stress days, that your weekend eating patterns are 600 calories higher than weekdays, but only when you eat it out instead of cooking at home.
• 36:20
  Philip Pape: These correlations reveal the drivers of your behavior.
• 36:26
  Philip Pape: And those are what you can change.
• 36:28
  Philip Pape: That's the first advantage.
• 36:29
  Philip Pape: The second one is how real-time and immediate it is.
• 36:33
  Philip Pape: It's personalized feedback based on your data when you want it at 3 a.m.
• 36:38
  Philip Pape: if you want.
• 36:38
  Philip Pape: I hope you're sleeping at that point, but still, it's the point I'm making.
• 36:42
  Philip Pape: And it's adaptive to your patterns, your biofeedback, your response, your weight trend, your adherence, your protein consistency, your weekend patterns, your step counts, your sleep quality, on and on and on and on.
• 36:53
  Philip Pape: And then it can say, here's your recommendation.
• 36:56
  Philip Pape: I just calculated everything going on in your life in 30 seconds or less, and I gave you a recommendation.
• 37:02
  Philip Pape: Your energy tank this week, despite hitting your targets, maybe your deficit's too aggressive.
• 37:06
  Philip Pape: Maybe you need a rest day.
• 37:07
  Philip Pape: Maybe life stress is the real issue.
• 37:09
  Philip Pape: The AI can triangulate from multiple data sources.
• 37:13
  Philip Pape: So that's what I mean by coaching intelligence, not just collecting data and doing a little cursory kind of intelligence on top of it.
• 37:20
  Philip Pape: And then the cool thing is, at least this is what I'm trying to do with my app, is helping you develop the skills while you do this process.
• 37:27
  Philip Pape: While it's helping you figure this out, you're also learning about it and yourself so that you can then maintain the results and you're not dependent on either the app or coaching or anybody else for the rest of your life.
• 37:38
  Philip Pape: You learn to identify when you're eating from stress versus hunger.
• 37:41
  Philip Pape: You recognize your behavioral patterns around weekends, social situations, high stress periods, right?
• 37:47
  Philip Pape: Different food choices, training load.
• 37:49
  Philip Pape: And then after a few months, you've really developed a skill and could see it for yourself.
• 37:54
  Philip Pape: And you develop nutritional competence, not just adhering to someone else's plan that they gave you.
• 37:59
  Philip Pape: That is the goal.
• 38:00
  Philip Pape: I want you to build independence.
• 38:02
  Philip Pape: Now, let's be honest, neither approach is magic.
• 38:05
  Philip Pape: Whether you track calories or analyze patterns, you still need a calorie deficit to lose fat.
• 38:09
  Philip Pape: You still need progressive overload to build muscle.
• 38:12
  Philip Pape: You still need adequate protein and good sleep.
• 38:14
  Philip Pape: The fundamentals are not changing.
• 38:16
  Philip Pape: But what could change is your adherence, your sustainability, your relationship with your food and your body.
• 38:21
  Philip Pape: I've coached people who thrived with detailed tracking.
• 38:25
  Philip Pape: They love data, they found it empowering, they got incredible results.
• 38:28
  Philip Pape: I've also coached people who, as good as the tracking tools are, they still feel like I'm white knuckling it.
• 38:35
  Philip Pape: I'm doing this to make my coach happy.
• 38:36
  Philip Pape: I have to do it.
• 38:37
  Philip Pape: It's this resistance, you know?
• 38:39
  Philip Pape: And maybe they hit a goal short term and then they stop because they don't like the process.
• 38:43
  Philip Pape: And then they don't want to check in because they haven't been tracking.
• 38:46
  Philip Pape: And I say, well, that's when you need to check.
• 38:48
  Philip Pape: And it's this whole thing.
• 38:49
  Philip Pape: And I'm like, how do I solve this for people?
• 38:50
  Philip Pape: Because not everybody is the same, right?
• 38:52
  Philip Pape: And the real, the real question is not then which approach is more accurate.
• 38:56
  Philip Pape: It's which approach is it's which one can you actually maintain yourself long enough to get the results you want.
• 39:03
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 39:04
  Philip Pape: And if detailed tracking in this way or that way feels manageable and you can do it without creating stress or food stress in particular, do it.
• 39:13
  Philip Pape: Like I can track my calories and macros every day, no issues.
• 39:17
  Philip Pape: But at times I've felt, oh, wouldn't it be nice to not really have to do it that way?
• 39:21
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 39:21
  Philip Pape: And should we really have to do that for the rest of our lives?
• 39:25
  Philip Pape: Like that feels a little dependent to me.
• 39:27
  Philip Pape: And I've definitely questioned that in my brain, even though I don't mind doing it and I like data.
• 39:31
  Philip Pape: So it's kind of an odd situation to be in.
• 39:33
  Philip Pape: So I get it.
• 39:34
  Philip Pape: I get it.
• 39:35
  Philip Pape: Now, if tracking of a certain type makes you miserable, and and I put it that way because there should be a form of tracking that works for you, right?
• 39:44
  Philip Pape: You shouldn't just not track anything at all.
• 39:46
  Philip Pape: And the tracking may be super low stress without involving an app.
• 39:50
  Philip Pape: It might be involving just a few things in your head.
• 39:52
  Philip Pape: I don't know, but you're still tracking and aware.
• 39:55
  Philip Pape: Anyway, if it's something you're not going to stick with longer than a few weeks, then another approach might be the answer you need.
• 40:01
  Philip Pape: And I would say that this pattern-based coaching that I've developed for the app is a game changer in that regard because I think it's going to open up for a lot of people a way to do this that's highly precise and informative, but feels extremely low stress.
• 40:17
  Philip Pape: And I think that's a wonderful combination.
• 40:19
  Philip Pape: There's no moral superiority to any of these approaches.
• 40:23
  Philip Pape: It's just what works for you in your life right now with your psychology.
• 40:28
  Philip Pape: Now, remember, calorie targets, targets are great, like KPIs, targets.
• 40:34
  Philip Pape: But in any world, even in like the financial world, calorie, a financial target, it's like an outcome, right?
• 40:40
  Philip Pape: Even if it's a daily outcome, it's not going to teach you how to get to that outcome.
• 40:44
  Philip Pape: It's not calorie targets aren't going to teach you how to eat.
• 40:46
  Philip Pape: Like I think we know that.
• 40:47
  Philip Pape: They tell you what to hit, what to get to.
• 40:50
  Philip Pape: They don't show you that, hey, I'm eating out of stress right now, not hunger.
• 40:54
  Philip Pape: They don't tell you that your portions are 30% larger when you eat with these people over here because they stress you out versus these people over here.
• 41:02
  Philip Pape: They don't identify that, you know, you make great choices at home but struggle in restaurants.
• 41:06
  Philip Pape: The targets don't.
• 41:07
  Philip Pape: Now, the information you track trying to hit those targets do.
• 41:11
  Philip Pape: And that's where I'm saying there's a lot of ways to get there.
• 41:13
  Philip Pape: I think pattern analysis in this way makes the invisible more visible.
• 41:17
  Philip Pape: And once you see the pattern, once you understand what's driving your behavior, then you can fix the behavior.
• 41:22
  Philip Pape: You know, not by tightening the target, right?
• 41:26
  Philip Pape: Or adding more restriction to hit a target, but address the behavior at its source.
• 41:31
  Philip Pape: And we know that is what creates long-term success, better self-awareness, better decision-making frameworks, right?
• 41:37
  Philip Pape: And then you stop reacting to your food environment, you start designing it instead, you stop fighting your hunger signals and instead respond to them the right way, including your emotions instead of just reacting.
• 41:48
  Philip Pape: You get to use those emotions.
• 41:50
  Philip Pape: You stop depending on someone else's rules and you start trusting your own competence.
• 41:55
  Philip Pape: And that is that's transformation, guys.
• 41:58
  Philip Pape: That is transformation.
• 41:59
  Philip Pape: So I know some of you listening are tracking macros.
• 42:02
  Philip Pape: You use macro factor or another app, it's working great.
• 42:04
  Philip Pape: Keep doing it, please.
• 42:06
  Philip Pape: I still use macro factor myself while I'm using my new app.
• 42:09
  Philip Pape: And I would love to see if I can get it to a point where I only need to use one, and that day might be just a short while away.
• 42:16
  Philip Pape: If you're someone who's tried tracking, it didn't stick, or if you don't like the mental overhead, or it's really not helping you as much as you want for some of these other deeper issues, that's where pattern-based coaching could be what you need, right?
• 42:27
  Philip Pape: Not as a replacement for tracking, it's a different way to track.
• 42:31
  Philip Pape: It's a sustainable way and it teaches you skills as well while you're doing it, which is kind of cool.
• 42:36
  Philip Pape: And the goal here isn't just stop thinking about nutrition, right?
• 42:39
  Philip Pape: It's to think about it more effectively, develop awareness, develop decision-making frameworks that serve you, that serve you for the rest of your life.
• 42:46
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 42:47
  Philip Pape: If this approach resonates with you, I built Fitness Lab to deliver exactly this kind of intelligent coaching.
• 42:54
  Philip Pape: I'm very proud of it.
• 42:55
  Philip Pape: I've been using it myself.
• 42:57
  Philip Pape: It's super exciting.
• 42:58
  Philip Pape: It's only going to get better, and it'll get better faster the more people that use it and give feedback.
• 43:03
  Philip Pape: There's all the other fun features.
• 43:05
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to go into them, you know, the briefings, the strength training, the AI coach, all that great stuff.
• 43:10
  Philip Pape: But it's built specifically for those of us over 40, primarily, right?
• 43:15
  Philip Pape: Who have our challenges and we want to know what the heck's going on and what to do about it.
• 43:20
  Philip Pape: We want sustainable fat loss.
• 43:21
  Philip Pape: We want to build muscle.
• 43:22
  Philip Pape: We don't want to guess.
• 43:23
  Philip Pape: Download it at witsandweights.com slash app through Black Friday, November 28th.
• 43:28
  Philip Pape: You're going to get 20% off.
• 43:29
  Philip Pape: That's wits and weights.com slash app.
• 43:32
  Philip Pape: I'd love to have you in there and have you see what's possible when you try something different like this.
• 43:36
  Philip Pape: Witsandweights.com slash app for fitness lab.
• 43:39
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that the best nutrition approach is the one that builds real awareness and fits your life.
• 43:49
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape.
• 43:50
  Philip Pape: This is Wits and Weights, and I'll talk to you next time.