Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Fat Loss WITHOUT a Calorie Deficit? (Body Recomp Explained) | Ep 362

Transcript

Fat Loss WITHOUT a Calorie Deficit? (Body Recomp Explained) | Ep 362 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: Picture this scenario you step on the scale for weeks at a time and it really hasn't changed.
• 0:06
  Philip Pape: But your clothes are getting looser, your muscle definition is starting to show, you're hitting PRs in the gym and according to conventional wisdom, this really shouldn't be possible.
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: You have to be in a calorie deficit to lose fat, right, but what if I told you you can burn fat and build muscle at the same time in a process called body recomposition?
• 0:24
  Philip Pape: Today, you're going to discover the specific mechanisms that allow your body to mobilize stored fat for fuel while building lean tissue.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: Who can achieve this seemingly impossible feat?
• 0:34
  Philip Pape: And it's more people than you think and why your weight might be the worst indicator of your.
• 0:50
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 0:56
  Philip Pape: I'm your host certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're talking about one of the most misunderstood concepts in fitness, and that is body recomposition.
• 1:06
  Philip Pape: Body recomp is the process of losing fat and gaining muscle simultaneously, often, but not always, without seeing changes on the scale, and this concept usually challenges what a lot of people believe about energy balance calories in versus calories out.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: Can you do it?
• 1:24
  Philip Pape: Can you not do it?
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: Is it going to take forever?
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: Is it only for beginners?
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: But when you peel back the onion, the science seems to be pretty clear, and understanding how this works can change how you approach physique development.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: If you're the type of person who doesn't always want to or doesn't feel you need to use bulking and cutting which are deliberate and more assertive or aggressive muscle building and fat loss phases, so you might be frustrated by the scale.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: Getting a little bit obsessed with it, you might be afraid of gaining fat when you gain weight, you might not want to go into a big calorie deficit.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: All of those things are perfectly normal and okay, and you might be curious about how to optimize your body composition while just hanging out right Without these traditional cutting and bulking phases.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: Either way, this episode is going to give you the knowledge to make that happen.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: Now, before we get into those mechanisms which I think are really important to understand, or else you can't take the right approach, I want to let you know about something special happening tomorrow that is relevant to this topic.
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: I'm hosting a 90-day body recomp workshop where I'll walk through my system, my approach for transforming your physique without worrying about cutting or bulking.
• 2:39
  Philip Pape: We're going to cover the nutrition setup to optimize this energy partitioning.
• 2:43
  Philip Pape: We'll discuss today training protocols or principles that maximize simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain, as well as a specific training program.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: I actually recommend following and the tracking methods and principles to show you that it's working, even when your scale weight doesn't change, or it could be that your scale weight is changing a little bit, and we're going to talk about how to demystify all of that.
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: I'm going to share some of the mistakes that prevent body recomp from working and how to avoid them Again.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: The workshop is tomorrow, tuesday, at 12 Eastern in physique university.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: It is only $27 to get all of that, to get your free nutrition plan, to get the replay.
• 3:21
  Philip Pape: If you can't make it, go to livewitsandweightscom or click the link in the show notes to register Again.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: Even just for the workshop itself, 27 bucks is an amazing value.
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: So check that out, livewitsandweightscom, or click the link in the show notes, and you're going to get a 90-day body recomp plan, three phases, all laid out for you for how to do this the right way.
• 3:45
  Philip Pape: All right, let me start by defining what we are talking about when we say body recomp, because it sounds obvious, but I think it gets misapplied and misdefined a lot.
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: Body recomp is the simultaneous loss of fat mass and the gain of muscle mass, resulting in improved body composition, even when total body weight remains unchanged, or it could change.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: That's kind of the caveat that I wanted to add, because body recomp a lot of people think of it as just maintaining your weight and getting the result.
• 4:17
  Philip Pape: Not necessarily, and we're gonna get into those nuances, and so this often flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that you have to be in a calorie deficit to lose fat.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: Most people think of energy balance.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: You know, kind of like a bank account, calories in calories out, end of story.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: But your body has a lot that's going on inside.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: Okay, about the distribution of tissue inside your body, not just your body mass and not just the energy, the overall energy, right?
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: So then we get into biochemical mechanisms, right?
• 4:51
  Philip Pape: Biochemistry is what I meant to say about reallocating energy in ways that, at the surface, seem to break the math.
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: But it's not breaking the math, it's just we're using the wrong math premise or we're looking at the wrong type of math when we talk about it.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: So let me explain how this happens.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: At the physiological level, your body doesn't just dump the incoming calories into a single pool and randomly allocate them right.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: It is actively deciding where your energy goes, based on some key signals, some key inputs, and the most important of these by far is the training stimulus from resistance exercise, from strength training.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: And if you're not doing that or don't want to do that, I'm sorry.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: You are not going to achieve body recomp.
• 5:33
  Philip Pape: You're also not going to achieve fat loss If you're taking GLP-1 drugs.
• 5:37
  Philip Pape: You're not going to get fat loss.
• 5:38
  Philip Pape: You're going to lose a bunch of weight and lose a bunch of muscle.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: All those scenarios require training from resistance exercise.
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: So when you lift weights, you create a demand signal for muscle protein synthesis.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: You're telling your body muscle and protein are important to have.
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: Your body prioritizes sending amino acids and energy toward repairing and building your muscle tissue.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: At the same time, if you're eating adequate protein but you're not in a large calorie surplus, your body still needs some energy to meet its overall needs and it's going to.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: At the same time, it's devoting some of that protein toward muscle.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: It's going to mobilize stored fat to meet the energy needs.
• 6:17
  Philip Pape: So this is what I mean by energy partitioning.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: I want you to think of it as like your body's resource allocation system becoming more efficient.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: So, instead of defaulting to just storing fat which is the vast majority of the population because you're resistance training and eating protein, you're going to preferentially fuel muscle growth and you're going to use fat stores for energy.
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: Again, it's going to depend on the overall energy balance as well, but this is just the basic explanation.
• 6:48
  Philip Pape: The second mechanism here is improved insulin sensitivity.
• 6:52
  Philip Pape: Resistance training dramatically improves how well your muscle tissue responds to insulin, and that means the carbs that you eat are much more likely to go toward refilling your muscle glycogen rather than being converted to fat, because your muscles are this metabolic, this glucose sink, as you've heard, and it's pulling those nutrients away from fat storage.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: It's a beautiful thing.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: So when you're in a true body recomp state, you're running two different processes at the same time.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: Right Now, your body's running these things all the time anyway, but you're trying to balance them out, just so.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: Muscle protein synthesis is happening at an accelerated rate because you're training, because you're eating enough protein and you're not in much of a deficit.
• 7:35
  Philip Pape: And I say it that way because you could be in a tiny deficit, you could not be in a deficit at all, or you could be even in a modest deficit which, for a newer lifter, could still allow you to build muscle.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: At the same time, your body is mobilizing fat stores, using what's called lipolysis to provide energy for the process.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: Again, if you're in that window, right, if you're in that window like, you don't like.
• 7:58
  Philip Pape: If we think of the other direction, if you're in too much of a surplus, you just don't need.
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: What am I trying to say?
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: You are intaking so much food that, no matter what your body does, even though it's burning fat, it's not going to burn all the fat and therefore you're going to gain fat, right.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: So we have to be in this window, this kind of slight deficit to slight surplus plus window, which is why I mean you don't necessarily have to be at true maintenance for this to happen.
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: Now, muscle tissue requires relatively few net calories to build right.
• 8:29
  Philip Pape: We're talking like 200 to 300 calories a day for active muscle growth, because it can't build that quickly.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: Even if you're new.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: It's going to be faster than if you're a more advanced trainee, but it's still not anywhere near as fast as the rate that you could lose fat.
• 8:43
  Philip Pape: So if you're eating at maintenance, your body can easily draw energy from stored fat.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: For that slight bit of calories it needs to build muscle.
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: So it's kind of taking from one and give it to the other.
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: It's like the Robin Hood that you want in your body right, robbing from the fat, the rich fat stores, to give it to the poor muscle stores.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: You build a muscle right, and guess what?
• 9:06
  Philip Pape: This gets even easier if you have a little extra fat to begin with.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: So I always say, like, the positive framing on being someone who has extra weight to lose is that that extra body fat on your body is an energy source when you start lifting weights.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: It's kind of a cool thing.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: So this is why the scale can stay exactly the same or it could even go up slightly while you're losing fat and gaining muscle.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: It could even go down slightly.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: I've spoken about these different forms of body recomp in the past and I tend to be biased more toward maintaining or building rather than losing.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: But you can definitely achieve it in all of those scenarios and you're essentially trading the dense fat tissue for denser muscle tissue as you do that, and that's why the math gets a little wonky.
• 9:49
  Philip Pape: So you might be thinking, okay, so who could actually do this?
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: Because that is the big question that gets asked and often answered by fitness influencers in a very simplified way.
• 9:58
  Philip Pape: So not everyone can achieve what I'll say is dramatic body recomp, but everybody can achieve some body recomp.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: So if we understand the buckets of people here and criteria, then you can set realistic expectations.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: So let's start with beginners, newbies, people who are highly detrained I kind of put them all together but we'll separate them.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: For now.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: We'll start with beginners.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: You never lifted before.
• 10:22
  Philip Pape: If you're a beginner, you have among, if not the highest potential for body recomp, because if you're new to resistance training, your body has this huge adaptive capacity.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: The neuromuscular adaptations alone can drive these huge strength gains right.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: You can double, triple, quadruple your strength very quickly in just a few months, while your muscles then also start to grow to support that increasing strength.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: And your body hasn't adapted to the training stress yet because you have a lot of potential.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: So it responds aggressively to whatever calories you give it right, and we're going to come back to that.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: This is why I'm not a huge fan of being in a deficit for recomp or even just at maintenance.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: I like it to be a little bit more aggressive than that.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: But anyway, hey, this is Philip and before we continue.
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: I want to talk about cookware.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: We all love to make our own food.
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: I love nonstick pans.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: The problem is I've avoided them for years because when they get scratched, when they get heated, they can release.
• 11:19
  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.
• 11:27
  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.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: So that's why I was interested when Chef's Foundry who is sponsoring this episode showed me their ceramic cookware.
• 11:43
  Philip Pape: It's called the P600 and uses Swiss-engineered ceramic coating which has no Teflon, no PFAS, no plastic components.
• 11:51
  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.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: Right now you can get the P600 at 50% off by going to witsandweightscom slash chefsfoundry.
• 12:06
  Philip Pape: You'll also get a bunch of accessories with that.
• 12:08
  Philip Pape: There's a whole page that explains what you'll get for that discounted 50% off.
• 12:14
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweightscom slash chefsfoundry or click the link in the show notes.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get back to the show.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: The second subcategory of this first category is detrained individuals.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: They also probably almost as good as beginners, if not a slight advantage because of how the body springs back has a sense of muscle memory because of how you've trained in the past.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: So if you used to lift weights and then took a decent amount of time off, this I'll just call it muscle memory.
• 12:42
  Philip Pape: It's kind of a colloquial term but effectively your, your muscle fibers are going to regain the size that they've previously been programmed to be capable of.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: Right, it's just going to, they're going to balloon right back to that size very quickly while your body again is needing that energy.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: So it's going to burn through fat that that you have on your body.
• 13:00
  Philip Pape: And if I've had clients who the ideal person for this was somebody who had extra fat.
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: So let's say a guy who would normally walk around at 190, slightly muscular, he detrained and he gained a bunch of fat and he's weighing 230, now 240.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: That guy can eat a bunch of food, start training and walking and everybody around him is going to be jealous because he's going to start losing that fat and gaining that muscle at the same time, while losing weight on the scale at a good clip and his metabolism going up.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: So, honestly, a detrained person is rife for this.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: Now, what about people who are overweight or of an obese weight?
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: Right, I would say that those people also have a huge advantage that I've already alluded to.
• 13:39
  Philip Pape: They're gonna see excellent body comp results because you have significant fat stores.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: So look at that as a positive.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: What can I say?
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: Yes, your health is at risk.
• 13:47
  Philip Pape: Yes, you need to bring that fat down, but you can also take advantage of that situation because your body has plenty of stored energy to draw from, to the point where your body perceives this as not even a deficit when you go into one, as long as it's not too big, right.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: And that's the example where actually losing weight slowly can work, but it tends to happen over time even so, because of the amount of fat to lose.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: So when we talk about our 90-day plan tomorrow in the workshop, it's going to apply to anybody, but the amount that you achieve in 90 days is going to depend on your starting point, and your starting point is also going to inform how aggressive you want that to be.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: We're going to talk about that and give you all those scenarios so you can customize it.
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: But the larger your fat stores to begin with, the more readily your body can mobilize that fat for fuel, because it's there.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: Why not?
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: Let's talk about older adults, because that's a massive part of the population listening to this show and in Physique University.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: And that's what I consider myself.
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: I guess I'm 44, but I feel like I'm getting younger every year.
• 14:48
  Philip Pape: That's the point.
• 14:48
  Philip Pape: But older adults can absolutely achieve body recomp as well.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: It's typically a little slower, like everything else.
• 14:55
  Philip Pape: Recovery is a little bit less.
• 14:56
  Philip Pape: There's a little bit more anabolic resistance, where your muscles don't respond as readily to the protein.
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: You should probably be eating more protein, but it doesn't mean you train more.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: That's the only thing.
• 15:06
  Philip Pape: You can't change much because that could actually backfire.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: If you have the right programming, if you have high protein intake, you know, and you're managing your fatigue and your recovery, then yes, again, body recomp is totally possible.
• 15:17
  Philip Pape: And a lot of these categories overlap, right?
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: People are overweight, people are detrained, people are older, these can all overlap.
• 15:24
  Philip Pape: And then we have finally the advanced lifters intermediate, late intermediate to advanced lifters.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: I would say they have the lowest potential for body recomp.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: But again, it's not impossible.
• 15:33
  Philip Pape: It's just a matter of degrees.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: If you've been training consistently for years, your body's already adapted to training more than a newer lifter and you're probably going to benefit from being more aggressive.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: And the extreme of being aggressive, of course, is cutting and bulking.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: But since we're talking about body recomp, it just means pushing the needle a little bit more in one direction, in my opinion, toward the higher building and gaining direction, to be honest.
• 15:59
  Philip Pape: But there is a case to be made for the other direction as well.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: So achieving body recomp, you know it's like, it's not automatic.
• 16:08
  Philip Pape: That's one of the things I want you to take away here, in that we're going to talk about how it happens.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: But you can't just stay at maintenance and it happens, right.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: You have to have these, you have to have specific conditions that are met, and those conditions are the things we're going to cover tomorrow in the workshop, because there are it's like if, then statements, it's like, if this do this, if this do that, right, and it's a lot.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: It's a lot to cover in one episode and I honestly want to give it to you know, the clients who are really going to implement the information, and I want you to implement it.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: I don't want you to just binge this show out for a walk and you're done and you move on.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: I want you to implement it, so I'm going to show you.
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: Okay, how should we train?
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: Should we go toward building or toward losing, to stay in that window?
• 16:48
  Philip Pape: What do macros look like?
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: What does timing look like?
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: What do we track Specifically?
• 16:53
  Philip Pape: What and how often do we track, and how do we do it in a simple, achievable way, in addition to scale weight and food, because you're going to track those anyway, but the scale weight's going to become less important.
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: So what should we pay attention to?
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: And then, what kind of mistakes are people making?
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: So this is tomorrow, tuesday, noon Eastern, only $27.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: You get the replay.
• 17:11
  Philip Pape: You get the custom nutrition plan for free that I put together for you and, by the way, that nutrition plan could be a fat loss plan that you want to use later and then, in the short term, you can do the body recomp that we're going to talk about.
• 17:23
  Philip Pape: Go to livewitsandweightscom or click the link in the show notes.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: Again, that's livewitsandweightscom.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: Sign up for the workshop.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: If you're already in Physique U, you get it included.
• 17:33
  Philip Pape: Hope to see you at noon Eastern.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: Continuing on here, though, as far as conditions, we've mentioned the biggest one of all, and that is a strong muscle building stimulus, and that means progressive overload with a foundational set of movements like compound movements, with some extra volume in there, depending on your training age and your goals.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: Okay, we're going to talk again in the workshop, we'll get into details on that, and I'm going to give you an exact training template that I recommend.
• 18:03
  Philip Pape: That's going to give you massive growth, surprising level of growth.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: You'll see, we're going to talk about it in there.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: Okay, but you need enough volume, you need enough recovery.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: The nice thing about body recomp is, if you listen to what I'm suggesting and bias toward growth rather than toward a deficit, you're going to be in a better position to make all that progress and not be frustrated and really challenge yourself and get that, those adaptations but then also not worry about gaining fat, which I know a lot of you are scared of, scared of right.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: And then we have our protein intake.
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: You know we're not going to get into macros here, that's actually pretty simple.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: I talk about it a lot, but we're going to talk about that.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: And, of course, your calorie intake.
• 18:43
  Philip Pape: This is where it gets a little tricky because are you?
• 18:47
  Philip Pape: Are you aiming for maintenance?
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: Are you aiming to push your maintenance?
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: Are you aiming to be in a deficit?
• 18:51
  Philip Pape: And then, when you do one of those three things, what is your body going to do in response?
• 18:55
  Philip Pape: And how do you keep up with that, knowing that the amount of change is so small?
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: It's it.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: You've got to be very precise in seeing how that tracks right and how you do that.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: So my point is here you just have to be on top of things, and that's why body recomp isn't just something that happens just because you stay at maintenance, because the last thing you want to do is be toggling between a surplus and a deficit and never quite being in one spot.
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, sleep and stress management all of that that are always important that always supports your hormones are going to just be just as important, of course, when you're going for body recomp.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about the tracking side of this, okay, because this is where people get frustrated and give up.
• 19:39
  Philip Pape: They're using the wrong metrics, or they're not patient enough, or they're changing too many things at once, or all the above, all right.
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: Let's start with scale weight.
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: So scale weight is both virtually useless for tracking body recomp, and also completely essential, and I'll tell you what I mean From the useless side.
• 20:01
  Philip Pape: Okay, seeing the scale stay the same or go up or go down is not going to tell you whether recomp is working.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: It's just going to tell you that you've kept your energy balance in a certain range to keep you at that scale weight.
• 20:14
  Philip Pape: That's the useless side, right, because if you're gaining this dense muscle tissue and losing the less dense fat tissue, you could gain, stay the same or lose and not quite be sure what happened, unless you're tracking other things to show you what happened.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: So that's the useless.
• 20:30
  Philip Pape: Where it's essential, though, is you still want to know what your body weight is doing, because that's going to allow you then back into the body fat and muscle distribution.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: It is one of several metrics that go together as a system.
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: So that's scale weight.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: Body fat is the next one, and this one's big right, and you've probably heard me say that there is no way to measure body fat accurately, and that is true, but there is a very good way to measure the change in body fat over time, and you don't have to use DEXA, you don't even have to use an in-body.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: We could do it very simply with simple circumference measurements, correlated with things like photos, how your clothes fit and such.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: And even then you still have to individualize.
• 21:15
  Philip Pape: You have to understand well for you what should we expect to change?
• 21:19
  Philip Pape: Because you may carry fat in a different spot than someone else.
• 21:22
  Philip Pape: You know, a menopausal woman might be carrying a lot more in her belly and it doesn't come off as fast from there but it comes off in other places.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: Maybe waist size isn't the most reliable.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: There are ratios that we can use that will make it a little bit more reliable, correlated with the other stuff.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: The other stuff like photos, okay, and strength progression and how your clothes fit.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: So I'll say circumference measurements do tell a pretty honest story.
• 21:46
  Philip Pape: You know waist, arm, chest, neck, thigh measurements when we're looking at body recomp, but it's, how do you interpret those?
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: Then we have strength progression, another huge variable, another huge condition.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: Of course you should be training consistently, and this is again why I like to be in a slight surplus for body recomp and slight I mean very, very slight, okay, just because you want to be fully resourced for that strength and for that muscle building.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: If you are progressing, that is a great sign.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: No matter what it's a great sign.
• 22:16
  Philip Pape: The more of a deficit you're in, the more under fueled you are, the harder it is to progress.
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: So the more you're able to easily progress and feel energized and less sore and recovered and and more recovered, the more you know, just from that alone, that you're on the right track.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: You're getting stronger, you're maintaining or improving your body composition as expressed in the gym.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: And then I mentioned things like clothes.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: I mean, it's such a simple thing but honestly, it's the biggest mind shift that people have, where the scale doesn't move or it even goes up a little, but their clothes are looser and they're like this is just so weird, right, but it's an important indicator that this thing is working.
• 22:57
  Philip Pape: So you've got all that.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: And then the other thing I mentioned is patience and expectations, because body recomp is, by definition, going to be slower than a focused cutting or bulking phase.
• 23:08
  Philip Pape: Now, I say by definition, what I mean is the end result.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: So if you want to reduce your body fat percentage and increase your lean mass, almost always it's going to be more efficient to do separate cutting and bulking phases.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: But for those who don't want to do them, don't want to recomp over a long period, they want to do kind of a short-term result, without dealing with extra fat gain or going on a deficit and all of the challenges that come along with those.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: Body recomp is a great middle ground.
• 23:40
  Philip Pape: It really is.
• 23:40
  Philip Pape: It's a great compromise, it's a good tradeoff.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: So in a cut you might lose, let's say, a pound a week or even two pounds a week, depending on where you're starting from.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: But of course you have to be in a deficit and you have to be doing all those things right.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: You have to do the dieting piece of it and body recomp.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: However, you might lose, let's say, a quarter pound a week of fat, but be gaining, let's say 0.1 or 0.2 pounds of muscle, right, or something like that.
• 24:07
  Philip Pape: In other words, it's going to be a similar ratio, I would say as being in a surplus, but it's going to be on the top end of that ratio, biased toward muscle.
• 24:19
  Philip Pape: So I just told you the wrong numbers.
• 24:22
  Philip Pape: I should have flipped it around.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: I should have said like 0.3, 0.4 pounds of muscle versus like 0.1 pounds of fat, 0.2 pounds of fat, in other words, more than two to one ratio of muscle to fat.
• 24:32
  Philip Pape: But their numbers are small, right, and in this case the scale might drift or might stay the same, and I say it that way because it depends on how precise you are and how responsive your body is to the different changes in tissue.
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's why we can't completely rely on the scale, but we definitely know if the scale is going up too fast or going down too fast, then that's an overcorrection and that gives us information as well.
• 24:59
  Philip Pape: So over several months, over the three-month period we're talking about in the workshop tomorrow, you're going to get a good physique improvement.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: If you do this right In realistic expectation terms, you are Versus a good physique improvement.
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: If you do this right In realistic expectation terms, you are Versus people who do crash diets.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: They lose a bunch of muscle, they get really gaunt and weak.
• 25:14
  Philip Pape: Then they binge it all back.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: They're back where they started with more body fat.
• 25:17
  Philip Pape: To me that's not body recomp right.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: So most people are going to visually see noticeable changes at about the six to eight week part mark, if they're consistent with their training and nutrition.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: And then by three months the momentum really starts to build and by that point my goal when I give you a 90 day plan is to say, hey, by then you're going to be so excited about this.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: The sky's the limit.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: You can continue recomping for six to 12 months and really get a fantastic transformation.
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: Or you could say, hey, I'm gonna go with.
• 25:47
  Philip Pape: I now have the confidence and the courage that I know how to do this.
• 25:52
  Philip Pape: I can go step on the gas pedal and go build muscle or go lose fat in a more aggressive way.
• 25:57
  Philip Pape: And that's what I like about all of this it's teaching you about yourself and how this stuff works.
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: I would say a lot of influencers out there really oversimplify things.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: They oversimplify energy balance and they also oversimplify body recomp itself and your body is very sophisticated.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: But if you understand the inputs and outputs and then what's happening inside bio mechanical or biochemically, you can definitely gain the system a bit to make it work for you.
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: Energy partitioning, creating the right conditions, reprogramming how your body responds to food and training at the cellular levels what we are trying to do.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: Your muscles will become more insulin sensitive.
• 26:35
  Philip Pape: Your body's going to more preferentially burn energy I'll say fat.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: But then we can get into the whole energy system argument and I don't want to misrepresent this.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: It's not that you burn more fat, it's that you are shuttling more nutrients toward muscle growth and your body has, no, no choice but to find the energy somewhere else, and it's going to find that in your fat, right.
• 27:00
  Philip Pape: So you are actually burning net fat, not just oxidizing fat in general.
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: I hope that makes sense.
• 27:05
  Philip Pape: I did a whole episode about like burning versus losing fat, but I don't want to go down the rabbit hole right.
• 27:10
  Philip Pape: And as much as everybody listening here is like, oh, I want to do this, I'm going to look great, I'm going to improve my physique, that's just a nice side effect.
• 27:18
  Philip Pape: Like physique development is a side effect you are actually becoming metabolically healthier, even in a proper body recomp phase.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: Better insulin sensitivity means better blood sugar control.
• 27:28
  Philip Pape: More muscle mass means better functional capacity.
• 27:30
  Philip Pape: Improved body comp means reduced risk for all the chronic diseases, and so, yes, you can improve your health this way too.
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: And body recomp is the intersection of optimal health and optimal physique development.
• 27:41
  Philip Pape: For those who don't want to really push it, with my goal being that you're going to learn that you might want to eventually push it.
• 27:46
  Philip Pape: But this is a nice, very productive baby step there, really more than a baby step.
• 27:52
  Philip Pape: I don't mean to belittle it in any way.
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: In fact, that's why I'm doing a workshop tomorrow on it because it's one of the most commonly asked things, and I'm not going to come in tomorrow and say so.
• 28:01
  Philip Pape: The secret is you can't do it.
• 28:03
  Philip Pape: No, of course not.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: No-transcript.
• 28:29
  Philip Pape: We want to work with your natural system to achieve something that, for a lot of people, seems impossible but is completely doable getting leaner and stronger at the same time.
• 28:36
  Philip Pape: So it's not magic, guys.
• 28:39
  Philip Pape: Body recomp's not magic.
• 28:40
  Philip Pape: It's not too good to be true.
• 28:42
  Philip Pape: It's not only for beginners.
• 28:44
  Philip Pape: It's a legitimate physiological process that happens when you create this window of conditions through consistent resistance, training, adequate protein intake and patience.
• 28:55
  Philip Pape: Patience is the biggest success factor of all.
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: Well, the other big success factor, I'm gonna say, is accountability and support.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: We hardly talk about that, but we should talk about it more, because that is the number one reason people are most successful reaching their goals is they have support.
• 29:11
  Philip Pape: Again, another thing we have with the workshop tomorrow and with Physique U.
• 29:16
  Philip Pape: The biggest mindset shift, though, is moving away from okay, this is maintenance.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: Right, that's my measure of success.
• 29:22
  Philip Pape: That's kind of boring and it's not going to get you very far, but if you start tracking what matters your strength progression, your measurements, how you feel, your biofeedback, all of that then body recomp becomes kind of an enjoyable gamified engineering system to go after.
• 29:37
  Philip Pape: It's actually kind of fun, and when you figure that out, when you do that well, you can then shift the levers in one direction or another if you want to go there Because your body wants to be strong and lean and you've got to fuel it so we can do body recomp while fueling and not gaining too much fat.
• 29:58
  Philip Pape: That's kind of that sweet spot.
• 29:59
  Philip Pape: I want to get you in right, because the goal isn't to lose weight.
• 30:02
  Philip Pape: It really isn't.
• 30:02
  Philip Pape: I hope you know that by now, or at least listening to this show, and if you haven't, I'm glad you found us, because the goal is definitely not to lose weight.
• 30:08
  Philip Pape: The goal is to get a strong, capable, healthy body that feels and looks good, has muscle definition, is lean, but you don't necessarily have to lose weight to do it.
• 30:20
  Philip Pape: So body recomp is often the most sustainable path to achieving that goal, and a lot it's mentally sustainable for a lot of people as well.
• 30:27
  Philip Pape: So if you want to stop being frustrated with whatever you've tried in the past for recomp or cutting or bulking or dieting, or maybe you just weren't sure what to do and you want complete clarity, a plan for body recomp.
• 30:41
  Philip Pape: Join me tomorrow for the 90-Day Body Recomp Workshop.
• 30:44
  Philip Pape: Tuesday, august 19, 12 Eastern.
• 30:46
  Philip Pape: There will be a replay with all the stuff.
• 30:49
  Philip Pape: If you can't make it, you're still going to get everything.
• 30:51
  Philip Pape: I'm going to show you my approach for achieving simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain setting up your nutrition, training, tracking the mistakes, troubleshooting what to do for your scenario, and we're going to have time for Q&A as well.
• 31:05
  Philip Pape: So it's literally a workshop where you're going to be thinking, hmm, how do I put this in plan in place for me?
• 31:12
  Philip Pape: Okay, philip is walking me through and now let me ask him my specific questions.
• 31:17
  Philip Pape: For my scenario, we're going to answer those in the workshop and if we can't get to everyone's questions, we're going to answer them after the workshop in the community.
• 31:23
  Philip Pape: So so it's tomorrow, tuesday, 12 Eastern.
• 31:25
  Philip Pape: It is 27 bucks.
• 31:27
  Philip Pape: Go to livewitsandweightscom or click the link in the show notes.
• 31:31
  Philip Pape: One of the best values you're ever going to find to get you clarity and result with your physique and health that you'll ever find $27, livewitsandweightscom or click the link in the show notes.
• 31:41
  Philip Pape: I really hope to see you guys there.
• 31:42
  Philip Pape: It's going to be a lot of fun.
• 31:43
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember when your body comp is improving.
• 31:48
  Philip Pape: The scale is irrelevant.
• 31:50
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.