Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The Truth About Historical Weight Loss Fads (Evidence-Based Fat Loss Today) | Ep 360

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The Truth About Historical Weight Loss Fads (Evidence-Based Fat Loss Today) | Ep 360 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:02
  Philip Pape: Keep a candy bar in your pocket and you are committing a moral crime.
• 0:06
  Philip Pape: Light a cigarette instead and you're making a smart health choice.
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: That was America in 1925, when weight loss meant counting calories, resisting sweets and turning to tobacco companies for nutrition advice.
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: Today, you're going to discover in a very fun episode how the first diet bestseller in history revolutionized eating by reducing food to simple math, why cigarette companies waged war against candy manufacturers in the name of slimness, and the bizarre lengths people went to to lose weight from grape-only diets to swallowing parasites.
• 0:39
  Philip Pape: These aren't just quirky footnotes from history.
• 0:43
  Philip Pape: The echoes of 1920s diet culture still shape how we think about food, willpower and our bodies today.
• 1:00
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 1:06
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach and historian, philip Pape, because today we're traveling back to the roaring 20s this is 100 years ago to look at the birth of modern diet culture.
• 1:18
  Philip Pape: I thought this would be fun because I'm a huge fan of history and I wanted to see what has stuck with us till today.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: I'm a huge fan of history and I wanted to see what has stuck with us till today.
• 1:27
  Philip Pape: What has kind of was insane back then.
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: That doesn't exist, and also what practices were used that are still used, just maybe in a different way.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: When it comes to the fitness industry and marketing and diet culture, we go back a century, to when Americans discovered calorie counting, when cigarettes were used as diet aids and the pursuit of thinness first became fashionable and even patriotic.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: We're gonna look at what worked, what failed and why.
• 1:51
  Philip Pape: Understanding history because, as they say, those who understand history, who do not understand history, are doomed to repeat it.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: Why this might save you from repeating the same mistakes when we look at the context and reflect on the choices that are great or great great grandparents made.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: All right, before we get into this, if you want to come into the modern age and understand what does work for nutrition nothing fancy, no tricks, no lose weight quick schemes I have a guide that is really popular.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: It's called Nutrition 101 for Body Composition and it tells you how to set everything up for fat loss or muscle building.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: It gets you started.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: If you've never done this before or you want a refresher, you can get a free copy by clicking the link in the show notes or go to whitsawaitscom slash free for the Nutrition 101 for Body Composition guide.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get into the fun today and begin our story way back in 1918 with Dr Lulu Hunt Peters, a woman who would, unknowingly at the time, reshape how America thinks about food.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: Even that's stuck with us to this day Now.
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: Peters was a doctor or physician in California.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: She struggled with weight her entire life.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: That we can all identify with.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: At her heaviest she was like 220 pounds, and in the early 1900s that we can all identify with.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: At her heaviest she was like 220 pounds, and in the early 1900s that was an outlier that made her stand out dramatically.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: This is a society that was just beginning to shift away from viewing plumpness as a sign of prosperity.
• 3:17
  Philip Pape: We're aware of that.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: How in some cultures, even today, but definitely in the past, saw being heavier as a sign of wealth and prosperity.
• 3:23
  Philip Pape: And Peter revolutionized weight loss 100 years ago by doing something nobody had thought of before.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: She took the scientific concept of the calorie, which researchers used at the time to study malnutrition and make sure people got enough energy, and she reversed the purpose Instead of using calories to help people eat enough, she used them to help people eat less.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: And she wrote a book which you can still find copies of it online.
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: It's called Diet and Health with Key to the Calories, and it was the first diet book to hit the bestseller list.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: We are talking about a woman who sold over two million copies at a time when there were no podcasts, there was no social media, there was no Amazon.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: There was no social media, there was no Amazon, there was no Barnes and Noble, it was just word of mouth, newspaper columns, and her book stayed in the top 10 bestsellers from 1922 to 1926.
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: And it was number one for two years straight.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: Peters turned food into math right, which that appeals to me as an engineer, and it's a lot of what we talk about when we talk about being data-driven.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: Instead of saying, you know, eat one slice of bread, she'd say, eat 100 calories of bread.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: She created formulas to calculate what she called ideal weight and daily calorie needs, where women could eat whatever they wanted as long as they stayed within their calorie budget.
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: So what does that sound like?
• 4:37
  Philip Pape: It sounds like if it fits your macros, doesn't it?
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: And I don't mean that as a criticism either.
• 4:41
  Philip Pape: It's more of okay, interesting, different way to think about it.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: Rather than quantities of food, it's energy levels of food in terms of calories, and that's still what we do today.
• 4:51
  Philip Pape: When we talk about tracking your food with an app like Macrofactor, right, you're just measuring the calories and macros.
• 4:55
  Philip Pape: So Peter's literally invented calorie tracking as a weight loss strategy and, just like today, it worked because it created awareness and accountability around the thing that matters when it comes to gaining and losing weight, and that's energy balance, and we're going to add nuance to this.
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: And why?
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: That's not the only thing, of course, before you get your hackles raised too much, just stick with me.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: So Peters was.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: She was teaching nutrition, but she was also selling what you might call a moral philosophy because of how she framed dieting.
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: She said it was a patriotic duty, and this was during World War I.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: She said that hoarding food in your body was as unpatriotic as hoarding food in your pantry and connected thinness to self-control, to modernity, to virtue, where being overweight wasn't just unhealthy, it was morally suspect.
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: Okay, and that's the part we can question and that is stuck with us to today.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: The moral dimension of dieting, the idea that what you eat reflects your character, started at that time.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: So that is the big black mark that we're going to come back to in this episode.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: You know there's good and bad right, somebody who can do a great thing and also set us up for failure for years to come.
• 6:09
  Philip Pape: So at the time that she was teaching the country to count calories, we have the tobacco industry.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: Okay, and the tobacco industry was all about marketing.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: They saw opportunity in the 20s because the beauty standards were changing.
• 6:24
  Philip Pape: You had the flapper look Go, google it Like the roaring 20s, the flappers.
• 6:29
  Philip Pape: That flapper look, having a boyish figure was more fashionable for women.
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: Women were looking for more ways to stay thin.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: It was all part of a new dieting culture.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: It was not something that started in the 80s.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: This started in the 1920s.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: So we have George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, and he owned Lucky Strike Cigarettes, very famous brand.
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: Back then.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: In 1925, he launched what would become one of the most successful and controversial ad campaigns in history.
• 6:56
  Philip Pape: Quote reach for a lucky instead of a sweet, reach for a lucky instead.
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: We're talking about cigarettes, guys.
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: And so there wasn't subtle marketing.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: It was like they were positioning cigarettes as a diet aid.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: Their ads had slim, elegant women.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: They promised that smoking would help you avoid the temptation of fattening sweets.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: So it's kind of like a, a habit swab, if you will like, instead of a sweet, you can have this cigarette in your mouth.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: They hired celebrities for endorsements.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: They claimed that something like over 20,000 physicians endorsed their cigarettes as less irritating to the throat.
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: Right, we know later on things like menthol and all these positive associations with this.
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: This wonderful cigarette came along in the marketing, but it was really successful because their sales skyrocketed by.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: I think they like tripled in one year because of this campaign.
• 7:44
  Philip Pape: They went from 14 billion cigarettes in 1925 to 40 billion in 1930 and became the number one cigarette brand because of this focus on being slim.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: And then so then we have another health health segment the confectionery industry, the candy industry right, so cigarettes and candy, right, the National Confectioners Association.
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: They threatened legal action, arguing that candy was part of a balanced diet and that Lucky Strike was spreading dangerous misinformation.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: So look, we even had social media wars back then.
• 8:17
  Philip Pape: Before social media, we had candy manufacturers arguing for nutritional balance and you had tobacco companies promoting cigarettes as health aids.
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: And it sounds so absurd today if it weren't so harmful and long-lasting in the history of this country.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: So eventually, the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, they stepped in.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: They forced Lucky Strike to tone down their marketing and by 1930, their ads had disclaimers that said they didn't claim smoking would reduce weight or flesh or whatever, but that, rather than reaching for a cigarette instead of overindulging would help maintain a quote modern, graceful form.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: Lucky Strike had at that point successfully associated cigarettes with weight control in the mind of the public and anybody who's older than maybe a teenager, and probably, if you're a teenager, you're aware of the association between smoking and being thin.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: It's been around for a long time and the percentage of women smokers in America jumped from 6% in 1924 to over 15% by 1929, right, that's millions of new women smokers, probably most of them motivated by concerns about their weight.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: So you see how this is all coming together.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: So while Peters was teaching calorie counting and Lucky Strike was pushing cigarettes, the overall diet industry was getting really creative with their marketing in a way that, like modern influencers, would probably admire, I'll just say, to put it cynically.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: So I'll give you an example the grapefruit diet.
• 9:50
  Philip Pape: It was also known as the Hollywood diet or the 18 day diet.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: It emerged in the thirties.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: It had its root, I guess, in the late twenties, but emerged in the thirties.
• 9:58
  Philip Pape: It required eating a whole grapefruit with every meal and the theory was that grapefruit contained special enzymes that could burn fat.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: But what ended up happening is people would have a very low calorie diet of like five to 800 calories per day of just eating a grapefruit as a meal.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: Right, that was one diet.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: There was another one called that involved tapeworm pills.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: This is crazy.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: Advertisements at the time promoted pills containing tapeworm eggs, gross.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: The idea was that you would swallow the pill, the tapeworm would hatch in your intestines and then it would eat some of your food.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: For you.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: I hope I didn't lose you with how disgusting that is.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: You didn't even have to have portion control.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: You didn't have to have Ozempic, just eat a tapeworm egg and let the parasites do the work.
• 10:43
  Philip Pape: So historians that are looking back at this in my research they debate whether the pills even contain tapeworms.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: Maybe they were just a scam, but the point is people were willing to intentionally ingest, you know, tapeworm eggs and infest themselves with parasites just to lose weight.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: And then you had all the mechanical solutions that we laugh about.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: You had salons that were called reducing salons that popped up and they had vibrating belts.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: They had the electrical muscle stimulation.
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: They had wooden barrel massagers.
• 11:13
  Philip Pape: All of them promised to shake that fat right off your body.
• 11:17
  Philip Pape: Women would pay to be strapped into a contraption that would jiggle them into slimness, all right.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: So when we look back from the modern perspective, what did the 20s get right?
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: Because I think it's important to kind of look at both sides.
• 11:32
  Philip Pape: Hey, this is Philip, and before we continue, I want to talk about cookware.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: We all love to make our own food.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: I love nonstick pans.
• 11:39
  Philip Pape: The problem is I've avoided them for years because when they get scratched, when they get heated, they can release microplastics, pfas small particles that can accumulate over time in the body and some studies have shown them to be linked to health issues.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: If you're optimizing your nutrition and making lots of food for you and your family at home, it doesn't make sense to compromise that with questionable cookware.
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: So that's why I was interested when Chef's Foundry, who is sponsoring this episode, showed me their questionable cookware.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: So that's why I was interested when Chef's Foundry, who is sponsoring this episode, showed me their ceramic cookware.
• 12:08
  Philip Pape: It's called the P600 and uses Swiss-engineered ceramic coating which has no Teflon, no PFAS, no plastic components.
• 12:16
  Philip Pape: It is nonstick, it works on all stovetops, it goes straight into the oven All the things you need if you're trying to cook a lot of your meals at home.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: Right now you can get the P600 at 50% off by going to witsandweightscom slash chefs foundry.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: You'll also get a bunch of accessories with that.
• 12:33
  Philip Pape: There's a whole page that explains what you'll get for that discounted 50% off.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweightscom slash chefs foundry or click the link in the show notes.
• 12:42
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get back to the show.
• 12:44
  Philip Pape: So we go back to Peters, who created the book.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: Her core insight about energy balance that was obviously important.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: That was spot on.
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: Calories in versus calories out is still the fundamental principle of managing weight.
• 12:54
  Philip Pape: And her emphasis on tracking, on awareness that was actually pretty revolutionary at the time and it's still the foundation of a dieting or a food awareness approach today.
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: When it comes to tracking, some would argue that there's many other ways to do it and it comes down to psychology and this and that, but it's an important foundational concept.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: She also understood something many people today forget and that is you have to make sustainable changes you can live with long term.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: Because she didn't ban food groups, she didn't require you to do anything exotic with your recipes.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: She had a very practical and flexible approach.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: So those are good things right Now.
• 13:30
  Philip Pape: What about all the things they got wrong?
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: Because that's pretty much where it ends.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: First is the what I call reductionist approach to nutrition, where you're only focusing on calories right, peter's, only focused on calories and you're not thinking about food quality and nutrient density and adequate vitamins and minerals, where you could technically follow such a plan and eat nothing but junk food, just like the podcast I just did, the all junk food diet versus clean eating right, it's that same thought.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: And you could eat nothing but candy and you could quote unquote lose weight.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: But you're gonna have a lot of other problems, right?
• 14:02
  Philip Pape: And the same mistake shows up today with the misnamed if it fits your macros approaches.
• 14:10
  Philip Pape: And so I want to say it that way, because if it fits your macros itself has been bastardized to mean not what it was originally intended, but we think of it often as just ignoring food quality eating whatever you want as long as it fits your macros, right.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: But we know that nutrition quality matters for your health, for your satiety and for the sustainability of your diet.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: So that's the first one.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: Is that reductionist approach.
• 14:30
  Philip Pape: The second problem from back then that sticks with us today is moralizing food choices, because they turned eating into a moral issue at the time, tying it to the war, where thin represented virtue and self-control, where overweight represented weakness and lack of character.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: And we still see that today.
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: Right, not just the moralization of food I've talked that to death in other episodes and even the idea of cheat meals, but the idea that it's about willpower and discipline and that you are failing if you're not able to do this.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: The third thing is that the willingness to embrace dangerous quick fixes right, the cigarette, the tapeworm examples.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: I know they're extreme, but they were happening, especially the cigarettes.
• 15:15
  Philip Pape: You know that mindset is still with us today.
• 15:18
  Philip Pape: The belief that there must be a hack, a shortcut, a secret that makes weight loss effortless.
• 15:23
  Philip Pape: Right, we see that in detox teas, fat-burning supplements, extreme elimination diets.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: The products change over the years, but the underlying promise is the same that you can bypass the fundamentals of energy balance because that's not going to work for you, right?
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: No, no, no, that's not going to work for you.
• 15:37
  Philip Pape: No, I don't need to change my behavior, I just need the right product, the right shortcut.
• 15:41
  Philip Pape: So what we're really looking at here is the birth of diet culture as we know it today, before this decade we're talking about before the 20s being plump, being bigger, being full.
• 15:53
  Philip Pape: It was often seen as desirable, it was a sign of health and prosperity, and it was the 1920s that created the modern association we still have between thinness and virtue, health, social status.
• 16:05
  Philip Pape: And it happened for a few reasons.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: The first I already mentioned the flapper fashion that required that boyish, slender figure.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: World War I normalized restriction and rationing, and so it became easier to frame food limitation as a noble thing.
• 16:20
  Philip Pape: You had the rise of mass media and advertising.
• 16:23
  Philip Pape: That created new ways to sell products by making people dissatisfied with their bodies what we would call today a pain point.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: And, probably most importantly, the 20s marked the moment when weight became seen as something completely under individual control, this calorie counting that Peters came up with.
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: It suggested if you had enough knowledge and willpower, you could achieve any body size you wanted.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: And although this was kind of revolutionary, it was also problematic, as we see today, because it places the entire burden of weight management on individual choices, ignoring all the things that affect those choices, like genetics, hormones, environment, dozens of other factors that influence your metabolism and ultimately, yes, calorie balance and your body weight.
• 17:14
  Philip Pape: But they might have upstream causes that then affect your, let's say, ability to make those choices.
• 17:17
  Philip Pape: So we're still dealing with those consequences of the mental shift today.
• 17:20
  Philip Pape: When someone is struggling with their weight, right, we assume they're not trying hard enough or they don't have enough information, rather than recognizing this complex interplay of factors involved.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: I mean, consider just genetics alone, brain-related genes and appetite, and how powerful that can be when combined with the modern food environment.
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: So all of these bizarre methods, all of these dangerous products, you know, we can look at them from afar and say, oh, that's insane.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: What were they thinking?
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: But the challenge that people faced back then was the same one we face today.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: Right, we are still human beings and we still want to balance enjoying food and social eating with maintaining a healthy body weight in an environment that makes it very, very easy to overconsume.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: And that's why I think it goes beyond just energy balance.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: Energy balance is the downstream effect of many, many upstream causes.
• 18:08
  Philip Pape: Calorie counting does work, or tracking, I should say tracking your food works because it creates awareness and it creates structure.
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: The cigarette ads were successful because they offered an alternative to food-based pleasure.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: The weird fad diets provided clear rules and a sense of control.
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: Right, and so none of these were perfect solutions.
• 18:29
  Philip Pape: They were attempts to solve a problem that industrialization and food abundance had created, that never existed before.
• 18:37
  Philip Pape: And so what's different today right now, in this moment, in 2025, is we have the scientific knowledge to do this well, to do this much better.
• 18:44
  Philip Pape: We understand protein's role in do this much better.
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: We understand protein's role in satiety and muscle.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: We know strength training increases your metabolic capacity, resilience and health.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: We understand the importance of sleep and stress management, having a healthy relationship with food, how important that is, as well as sustainability.
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: But somehow we are still drawn to the same types of solutions that our great-grandparents fell for.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: We still look for the magic food, the secret supplement, the perfect workout that's going to make everything effortless.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: So the 1920s do teach us something important.
• 19:15
  Philip Pape: That's why I made this episode.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: The desire for quick fixes and simple solutions is deeply human, but also deeply misleading, because when you succeed, it's because you embrace fundamentals and principles that make it sustainable long-term, so that you can keep doing the thing long past getting some intermediate result.
• 19:37
  Philip Pape: Peters, going back to again the author, she succeeded not because of a magic solution, but because she created a system for managing energy balance.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: It was a good start from that perspective, not from the other stuff she did regarding moralizing the food and moralizing being skinny, the people who fell for the cigarette ads and the tapeworm pills.
• 19:57
  Philip Pape: They were looking for the quick fix instead of doing the work.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: And again, I'm not saying any one of these is 100%.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: One way or the other.
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: There's little bits and pieces we can take from history.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: There's lots of it we throw away, and what's left, we see how it holds up through the scientific method and through experimentation.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: So today we still have these magic pills.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: It might be intermittent fasting or keto or a carnivore diet or whatever new detox or other trend that promises to make weight management effortless.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: Obviously, we have now the weight loss medications, which I hesitate to put that exactly in the same category, even though the, let's say, certain type of person that might be seeking it out to avoid doing the lifestyle changes might fall under this category, as opposed to someone who's like you know what I want to do both.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: I understand the value of both, and one is a tool and one is a system I need to put in place.
• 20:47
  Philip Pape: Either way, the underlying appeal is the same that there's a shortcut around the fundamental work of building healthy habits.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: Not that, not that you have to have willpower and make certain choices necessarily, but just we have to find a way to make it so that you can make those choices, if that makes sense.
• 21:02
  Philip Pape: So the problem is, what works is not exciting, it's not exciting.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: I try to make it exciting on the show, maybe you know, and once you get the result you realize how exciting it is.
• 21:14
  Philip Pape: But we're talking nutrient quality, protein training.
• 21:15
  Philip Pape: You know psychological aspects of behavior change, sleep management, stress, all that fun stuff, and it actually works.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: Those work right.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: You don't need tapeworms, thank God, and those things work All right.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: So as we wrap up this journey through history, through 1920s diet culture, just think about the lens of history and how every generation thinks it has discovered the secret, the secret to easy weight loss.
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: Right, the specifics always change, the methods change.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: The fundamentals are the same.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: That's what doesn't change Dr Lulu Hunt-Peters, who wrote the book.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: She got it right when she focused on energy balance and practical tracking.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: She got it way wrong when she ignored food quality and turned eating into a moral issue.
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: The tobacco industry, I think, got it all wrong.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: Right, promoting cigarettes as a health aid.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: But they understood human psychology.
• 21:59
  Philip Pape: People want alternatives to restriction.
• 22:01
  Philip Pape: It's just they provided a really awful alternative.
• 22:05
  Philip Pape: The fad diet promoters, who still exist to this day.
• 22:08
  Philip Pape: They always get it wrong because it's dangerous, it's a quick fix which has other negative side effects.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: But they also recognize people do want something simple and clear to understand.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: They don't want something too complex and confusing.
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: So that's where we come to full circle, here to wits and weights, where we have the knowledge to do better.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: Right, we can sure we can count calories when it's helpful, but we don't have to become obsessive.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: We can improve our body composition through strength training instead of some supplement or whatever.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: We can create sustainable habits, all of that stuff.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: But we can also simplify it at the same time and cut through there and give you the clarity of what to do next.
• 22:45
  Philip Pape: Right, the goal is never to be perfect.
• 22:47
  Philip Pape: It's never to find the one true thing or the one true diet.
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: It's to build a sustainable nutrition approach and training approach that supports you, your health, your physique goals and, of course, your quality of life.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: So if you want to learn how to do that very clearly, to accelerate the results not a quick fix, but to accelerate efficiently how to go on that journey I'd love to help you in Wits and Weights Physique University.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: That is not a quick fix program, I'm sorry to say.
• 23:13
  Philip Pape: It is not a magic solution.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: It is not even a secret.
• 23:16
  Philip Pape: Everything we do in there is talked about on this show.
• 23:18
  Philip Pape: We just help apply it to you specifically to get it done and do it efficiently and get the result.
• 23:25
  Philip Pape: For just $27 a month you will get what amounts to personalized, individualized nutrition planning, training, adjustments, live coaching, community accountability all of that stuff to take a nutrition plan and execute it and get the feedback as you get stuck along the way.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: And if you join now, using the exclusive link in the show notes, I'm going to build your custom nutrition plan for free.
• 23:47
  Philip Pape: That's normally an add-on, but I want to make it easier for you to get started and even further accelerate the process to doing what works.
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: Go to the link in the show notes it's a special link in the show notes and join Physique University.
• 24:01
  Philip Pape: Let's build something together that is sustainable for you.
• 24:03
  Philip Pape: Let's stop chasing all the trends so that you can finally have the result and make it last.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: Keep using your wits, lifting those weights and remember the best diet.
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: Secrets aren't secrets at all.
• 24:15
  Philip Pape: They are just fundamentals applied consistently over time.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: You