Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Stop Letting a Calculator Set Your Macros and Calories for Fat Loss | Ep 497

Transcript

Stop Letting a Calculator Set Your Macros and Calories for Fat Loss | Ep 497 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you're about to start a fat loss phase, and the first thing you did was plug your numbers into a calculator and then subtracted, let's say, 500 calories, this episode is for you.
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to show you why that very number right from the beginning might not even be correct before you start to change your intake.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: I'm going to explain the roughly seven weeks that I would execute before you actually start a calorie deficit so that it's super successful.
• 0:24
  Philip Pape: And of course, we'll dig into the research of having a phase before fat loss for metabolic recovery.
• 0:31
  Philip Pape: Is it a legitimate thing or does the evidence suggest otherwise?
• 0:38
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:48
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today we're going to evaluate something that maybe feels obvious and lots of us don't question it, which is that if you want to lose fat, you have to eat less, go into a calorie deficit, maybe you train harder, and you gotta dial it in.
• 1:03
  Philip Pape: And I wanna be fair, I wanna be honest as always, because it isn't wrong.
• 1:06
  Philip Pape: Like there are so many of you that reach out and say, hey, I've I've really figured this out.
• 1:10
  Philip Pape: I'm able to, you know, go into that deficit, I'm able to lose fat.
• 1:13
  Philip Pape: I just have to eat like an adult and listen to my body.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: And that works for a lot of people, but it doesn't work for a lot of people as well.
• 1:20
  Philip Pape: And so where's the reality here?
• 1:22
  Philip Pape: A sustained calorie deficit, of course, drives fat loss.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: That's energy balance.
• 1:27
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to tell you calories don't matter.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: So what I'm looking at today is how you set up for success with a calorie deficit.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: Because you see, it is not about, hey, calories in, calories out, just do it.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: It's how do I actually impose that situation where I'm burning enough calories and I'm also eating few enough calories to make this work where I can actually do it.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: And one of the biggest miscalculations is the metabolism side of the number, the calories out part of the number.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: Almost everyone who tries this takes a calculator or uses their watch or an app or tries to calculate it from calories burned, or they're using my FitnessPal and just kind of guessing at it, or use I think I already said an online calculator, but anyway, when you take a number like that, that's just an estimate based on the population, it can be off by at least two or three hundred calories, sometimes 400 calories.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: And now you're trying to do a 500 calorie deficit.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: Well, do the math.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: You might get into a deficit, it might not be as big as you want.
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're not even in a deficit and you start gaining weight.
• 2:30
  Philip Pape: You're like, WTF, what the heck is going on?
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: I just can't lose weight or I'm weight loss resistant.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: And most people make it harder on their themselves because then they start to change a bunch of other things, not realizing that their numbers are a little bit off.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: And now it's month three, the scale has hit a plateau or starts going up, and you have no idea what to change, where the root cause actually is.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: It's kind of like when I post on my Threads account and I say, hey, perimenopause doesn't cause weight gain.
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: You may gain weight during perimenopause, but that's correlational.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: The root cause is buried deeper.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: It does have to do with things like behaviors, but those behaviors may become harder because of perimenopause.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: And at the end of the day, not knowing how that affects your metabolism is probably what's holding you back, you know, among other things.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: So I want you to pay attention because we're gonna solve that for you today.
• 3:19
  Philip Pape: And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna show you the two-week logging protocol that will help you figure out your expenditure, whether you use MacroFactor or not.
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: You guys know I love MacroFactor because it'll do it for you.
• 3:32
  Philip Pape: And if you want to support the podcast, download MacroFactor and use my code Wits and Waits all one word.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: But there is a way that you can do this yourself.
• 3:40
  Philip Pape: So, in between, we are going to talk about how incorrect the maintenance number often is.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: So, maintenance calories when you're trying to figure that out.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna walk you through seven weeks, week by week, and how you can structure this leading up to a successful fat lace.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: I fat loss phase.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: I'd rather you take seven weeks and then execute your fat loss phase as fast as possible, efficiently and successfully, than take, say, zero or one or two weeks, and then you start a fat loss phase that doesn't even end.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 4:11
  Philip Pape: And then at the end, I'll show you which parts of this have some research behind them, which parts of it kind of conflict with some of my advice so that you understand why I'm giving the advice I do.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: Hint, hint, it's based on real-world experience and also human psychology.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: All right, so I'm gonna start with a scenario because I think a lot of you will recognize this.
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: Somebody might come to me in her early 50s, maybe she's been lifting a couple of years, maybe she's frustrated because she, let's say in January, had a New Year's resolution to lose weight, lose fat, started a new training program.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: I don't even know if it's effective or not.
• 4:46
  Philip Pape: Depends on if a like a friend recommended it, something on YouTube she found, or maybe she has been, you know, listening to the show.
• 4:52
  Philip Pape: And then at the same time, she's cutting calories.
• 4:55
  Philip Pape: And the starting calories are based on what she thinks is her maintenance calories, based on an online calculator.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: And then she subtracts, let's say, 500 calories to lose a pound a week.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: And then let's say nine weeks later, she is down four pounds.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: But already I know, hey, you know, two, three, maybe all four of those pounds probably came off in the first week or two of mostly water weight, which a lot of people get excited when they lose weight really quickly on something like keto or carnivore, where they're cutting carbs, they're cutting food, and you lose weight really quickly, but it's not really body fat.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: And then you plateau and you're like, okay, now what do I have to change to keep losing weight?
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: Which is the wrong question.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: Because are you even in a plateau to begin with?
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: And how did you determine your calories besides all the other things you're doing, right?
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: Sleep stress, training, et cetera.
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: So you don't want to be changing all these things and then still fail to lose the weight or lose the fat.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: And now you're just like beating your head on the wall.
• 5:52
  Philip Pape: There could be other things as well, right?
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: Maybe the program you're running has more volume than you can recover from on what you're eating.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're trying to train fasted.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: Maybe the calories that you started with were never really in a deficit, et cetera, et cetera.
• 6:04
  Philip Pape: And so what this all comes down to is you are doing what you think you're supposed to do.
• 6:09
  Philip Pape: You've been listening to podcasts, you go online.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: Heck, we even have a calculator online that gives you some potential estimates.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: Even if you use something like MacroFactor, the first number it calculates for you is based on an estimate.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: Estimate, and then you're disciplined, and then you're consistent, and then, you know, effort, effort, effort, working, working hard, and then somehow it's not giving you the result.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: And that's not a discipline problem, right?
• 6:30
  Philip Pape: It's about the experimental design.
• 6:31
  Philip Pape: That's what I like to call experimental design because our body is always changing.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: The things we do are always changing, life is always changing.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: It's always an experiment.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: We're always trying to figure things out and improve, and nothing is gonna be fixed in place.
• 6:43
  Philip Pape: And so, those of you who are just using a calculator and then you're running ahead with MyFitnessPal and you're not having success, this is probably why.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about the maintenance calories.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: Okay, maintenance calories are the amount of calories you burn every day that if you ate that amount of food, your weight shouldn't go up or down.
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: Now, that's that's a simplified version of it, okay, but it's good enough.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: And when you look at a calculator, they use an equation like online.
• 7:09
  Philip Pape: Probably Mifflin St.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: Jor is a really famous one, really good one that most calculators and apps are doing under the hood.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: That's the one that we use.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: You put in your height, your weight, your age, your sex, and you get an estimate of resting metabolic rate, and then it multiplies by an activity factor that you pick from like a drop-down, and then it gives you your uh total daily energy expenditure, your total metabolism for the day.
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: So, now how accurate is this?
• 7:37
  Philip Pape: Well, at the group level, at the population level, it's fine.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: That's how they got the equation.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: If you run Mifflin St.
• 7:43
  Philip Pape: Jor as an equation on, let's say a hundred people, or a hundred women specifically, the average error is gonna be close to zero.
• 7:51
  Philip Pape: So it is a good equation.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: The problem is, as an individual, you can't rely on being perfectly in the middle of that curve, like the perfect average, right?
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: There's actually a study of, I think there's 125 adult women, and they had different body sizes where they compared the predicted resting metabolic rate or RMR against the measured using indirect calorimetry, which is like when they put your a mask on your face in a lab to calculate your metabolism.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: And the Mifflin St.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: Jor was within 10% for 71% of the women.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: Now, if you flip that around, that means roughly one in three of the women was off by more than 10%, right?
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: And that's before you multiply by the activity factor to get your total metabolism, which actually multiplies the error.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: Now, some of you are thinking, okay, that's why I wear a watch, because then I can measure my activity.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: Well, I wish.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: I wish it was that easy.
• 8:45
  Philip Pape: I wish we can just calculate our total calories in some super direct, measurable way outside of a lab.
• 8:52
  Philip Pape: Well, there's a review, a systematic review by Fuller and colleagues from 2020, uh, and it's huge, right?
• 8:58
  Philip Pape: They looked at 158 studies across nine brands of wearables and concluded, and I'm paraphrasing here, that for energy expenditure, no brand is anywhere close to accurate.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: It's not that some are far better than others, it's that none of them are accurate.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: And the errors go from like 21% under to 15% over.
• 9:20
  Philip Pape: And I've seen bigger numbers than that, but even that is more than enough to be kind of useless, right?
• 9:25
  Philip Pape: It's kind of useless, other than maybe as a trend or relative activity measure, you know, like your rings and things like that on your on your Apple Watch.
• 9:33
  Philip Pape: What bothers me as an engineer is that they found no data on whether these wearables are even consistent with themselves, right?
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: Like internal consistency.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: So even that makes me wonder if you could rely on the trend, let's say.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: If I knew that my watch was always 300 calories high, then I could adjust it.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: But when it could be 300 calories high one day and 300 calories low the other day, again, pretty useless.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: So that's one side of the equation.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: The other is what you are eating.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: So there's a classic study by Lichtman in 1992 in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they took people who were convinced that they could not lose weight on very little food.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: And they self-reported that they were eating 1,028 calories a day, so just over a thousand calories.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: Then they measured them with doubly labeled water, which is the gold standard, just like Herman Ponser and his work.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: And the actual intake was over 2,000 calories.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: And their metabolisms were completely normal, right?
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: Now, this is what something we've seen time and again, and especially back when you go to the 90s, before people even knew what macros were, it kind of makes sense, but it's but it somewhat holds up even to this day, even as much information as we have on social media about fitness and and nutrition.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: If we look at as recent as 2019, a review from Burroughs that looked at 59 studies and 6,300 adults, they found that records self-logging of food underestimated by 11 to 41%, and underreporting occurred more often in women.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: Okay, now that is just a huge amount of error.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: And it's also normal.
• 11:13
  Philip Pape: So, in other words, whenever you feel like an influencer or somebody on social media is gaslighting you because they're like, Are you sure you're tracking accurately?
• 11:22
  Philip Pape: I would say none of us can track accurately.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: However, if you're using an app that can do this better, it takes away the human piece and does help you track more accurately, which is the difference between now and what we had in the 90s, right?
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: Back then it was like paper databases and stuff, if people even use that, like bodybuilders.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: So if your expenditure estimate is off by a couple hundred calories because of the calculators, and your intake of food, your what you're thinking you're eating, because you're not using a good measurement process, like let's say macrofactor, is off by up to 40%, then, and on top of that, you've spent years and years and years under eating and dieting, then your starting point is probably genuinely lower than you think, more often, like it mostly errors on that side, which is why you feel like you can't lose weight or why you think your metabolism is higher than it actually is, because of all these sources of error.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: So then if you start with a higher metabolism than reality and then you subtract and you're like thinking you're in a deficit, but you're not, well, there you go, right?
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: There you go.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: Now, there's a way out of this, and I think it's pretty elegant.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: Instead of predicting your expenditure from an equation, you just measure it from your own body.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: Because if you know roughly what you ate across several weeks and you know how your weight trended across those same weeks, you can work backward to what you burned.
• 12:40
  Philip Pape: Your body's like a black box, we say in engineering, right?
• 12:43
  Philip Pape: The inputs are the food, the output is the energy loss, what's left is your body weight.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: So your body is the calorimeter.
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: That's called the intake balance method.
• 12:52
  Philip Pape: And we've validated that method against doubly labeled water, including a 2015 study by Sangvi and colleagues that tracked 140 people over two years, if you want to look at the research.
• 13:03
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: This is what good tracking apps do for us.
• 13:08
  Philip Pape: I'm a big fan of letting letting you know an algorithm take care of this for me than trying to do it manually through a spreadsheet where there's gonna be all sorts of error because of how you're calculating it there.
• 13:17
  Philip Pape: So, of course, again, that's why I use macro factor.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: I'm an affiliate of macro factor, my clients use it.
• 13:23
  Philip Pape: So weigh that accordingly.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: But if you want to support the podcast, go download macrofactor and use my code all one word, wits and weights, you'll get two weeks free.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: But I'm gonna be straight with you here.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: If you use MacroFactor, it starts with an equation.
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: But then once you start logging your food and weight, ideally every day, it's gonna take about uh usually for most people, three, maybe four weeks before the estimate of your expenditure settles down to reality.
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: So don't just freak out on day one.
• 13:51
  Philip Pape: Oh my gosh, my metabolism's higher or lower than I thought.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: Most people freak out because it's lower than they thought.
• 13:55
  Philip Pape: Now it might be that low, but we don't know for about three weeks.
• 13:58
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: So the method is pretty well validated, but the actual like result of that method takes several weeks because it needs real data.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: That's just the reality of it.
• 14:09
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's it's not, it's because of the noise of the data.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: Your weight can swing one, two, three, four pounds a day up and down from water, glycogen, sodium, inflammation, et cetera.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: Also, your cycle.
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: We know that women can often run a pound or two higher during menstruation, for example, and that's from water, not fat.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: If you start taking creatine, you might have water weight.
• 14:30
  Philip Pape: There's a lot of reasons, right?
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: If you're in perimenopause, your cycles are unpredictable, the noise goes even more volatile, and you might need a little bit longer to see the expenditure settle down.
• 14:39
  Philip Pape: So you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, Philip, I get it.
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: But I still don't trust myself to eat more without gaining fat because you hear me talk all oftentimes about needing to eat more to recover.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: Yes, you need to eat in a slight surplus, potentially build muscle, but I'm not even talking about that.
• 14:56
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about just eating more protein and eating more food in general so that you're up at your metabolism.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: I had uh somebody email me this week and she's like, Yeah, I'm just afraid of gaining too much.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: I really want to build muscle, but I've been going up like one or two hundred calories.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: And she's not using macrofactor.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: And I said, look, you're just delaying the recovery, and that's why you can't gain muscle and you feel not great because you're still technically dieting.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: So in Eat More Lift Heavy, which is the program that I run, it's a 26-week program where we teach you the skills to do this.
• 15:27
  Philip Pape: And in week three, which is pretty early in the program, we just we discuss the fear of eating more.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: We address that with you.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: We help you work through that, which is really, really important early on.
• 15:38
  Philip Pape: And rather than just saying, hey, join us, here's your maintenance calories, here's some Mac, here's a meal plan, go start losing weight.
• 15:45
  Philip Pape: We know that doesn't work for people.
• 15:47
  Philip Pape: We know, we know if you've spent the last 10, 20 years and you've been trying different programs and diets and coaches and you haven't had success, that's probably why, right?
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: That's probably why.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: And then you're under-eating, but not diet, but not losing fat.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: It's just a vicious cycle.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: And then you don't really teach and learn to eat the the right foods for you and to feel fueled and powerful and strong and lift weights the right way and all of it.
• 16:09
  Philip Pape: So in Eat More Lift Heavy, go to eatmore liftheavy.com to check it out.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: We actually explain all 26 weeks of the program.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: And it's for serious people only, because if you're looking for a quick fix, this is not it.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: The first seven weeks are what I'm describing today before you actually start a fat loss phase.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: We get tracking set up, we get your training going, we start building the skills, we help you bring you up to your measured, correct, fully recovered maintenance calories so that by week seven, now you're ready to rock and roll and step on the gas pedal and actually lose fat and then keep it off with the sustainable habits.
• 16:43
  Philip Pape: So eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: And here's the cool thing.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: As we're leading up to episode 500 to celebrate, we have a short-term promo code to get$50 off if you choose the six month program.
• 16:57
  Philip Pape: It's$500 club.
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: That's the code,$500 club.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: I'll include it in the show notes to get$50 off.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: We almost never do promos.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: If you sign up for six months,$50 off with$500 Club.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: So let's go over those seven weeks one at a time here.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: I want to explain the logic so that you know why.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: Weeks one and two are where you start logging things to get awareness and you don't change anything.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: And I mean, really don't change anything.
• 17:24
  Philip Pape: Now you might end up changing things subconsciously, not realizing it, and that's fine.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: That's pretty cool.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: That's in fact part of the process we love to see.
• 17:32
  Philip Pape: But you're not consciously dramatically changing your calories, dramatically changing your training, your steps.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're not training to begin with, that's the one exception we might make in that we're going to introduce a program to you that is effective.
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: And within the first few weeks, you're gonna figure out, okay, where am I training?
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: How do I do this?
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: Let me get going.
• 17:51
  Philip Pape: That's okay, okay, because everybody needs to be lifting weights.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: But this is the hardest part for a lot of people because you come in and you're like, yeah, I gotta lose weight, I gotta lose that last 10 pounds, or I gotta lose the next 50 or whatever.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: And we're telling you, don't change anything.
• 18:03
  Philip Pape: We just take baby steps and start tracking and becoming aware of your behaviors.
• 18:08
  Philip Pape: How many of you actually done that?
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: Okay, so there's like four rules if you're gonna do this on your own.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: Rule number one is that you do wanna start to track your food in a precise way.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: That means weighing your food on a food scale.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: That means using the scanner or the AI photo-based login, whatever makes sense, right?
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: Macro Factor has that, Fitness Lab, my own app, has that.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: And we've actually just upgraded that app to full meal coaching, which it never had before.
• 18:38
  Philip Pape: It may or may not be out by the time this episode comes out.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: But anyway, you need to be tracking your food so that you know how much protein you're getting, how many calories are you eating, what do your macros look like, what do your micros look like.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: Number two is kind of related to this.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: Don't go crazy about it.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: Like, yes, I want you to track everything, but if you feel like it's taking too much time or it feels too obsessive, or like you're trying to be more detailed than you need to be, reach out, right?
• 19:04
  Philip Pape: In our program, we we deal with these issues all the time.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: We have conversations on the calls in the community about how to take out the friction of logging and how to make it super, super easy.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: Because many of you have used MyFitness Panel.
• 19:15
  Philip Pape: You're like, yeah, I just hate tracking.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: I'm like, well, there's a reason you hate tracking.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: Let's just not throw it out like baby with the bathwater.
• 19:20
  Philip Pape: There's a way to make it so frictionless, you're you're doing it for maybe two minutes a day.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: I mean, two minutes a day.
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: Come on.
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: If you can't do that, I don't know what to say.
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: Uh, rule number three is you're gonna weigh yourself every morning and but then you're gonna ignore the number because what you care about is the three-week trend.
• 19:34
  Philip Pape: So again, if you're using MacroFactor and you put it in there, you just do it every day, but then there's a trend.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: And then rule number four is you log every day the same way.
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: Like, who cares if it's Saturday and you're going out for drinks and appetizers, you're going to a party or having birthday cake, whatever.
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: Just log it.
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: Like a lot of people are fearful of being honest in these apps, like MyFitnessPal, because they've judged you or they've given you warnings or they like get on you for missing things.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: Whereas Macrofactor doesn't do that, or if you're doing it on your own, like in a in a notebook, let's say, you're hopefully not judging yourself for it.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: So just log every day, full days, don't leave anything out because that's the only way you're gonna get the right data.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: Now, quickly on the day and daily weigh-ins, I want to mention that there's plenty of research, including a systematic review from Zheng in 2015, of 17 studies where more frequent self-weighing was associated with better outcomes and no evidence of physiological harm.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: And I don't have the research with me, but I know there was a study that compared seven to five days actually, and found that seven days seem to be associated with better outcomes and maintenance of results as well.
• 20:39
  Philip Pape: If you have a history of disordered eating, take all of this with a grain of salt.
• 20:44
  Philip Pape: We're talking about if you're in a mentally healthy state, there's no reason not to start tracking in a detailed way.
• 20:49
  Philip Pape: It's there's no evidence showing that it's gonna make you obsessive or disordered at all.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: So that's the first couple weeks.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: Then the next couple weeks, weeks three and four, is where you start to tweak things.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: Ideally, your food, you're going to for most people, especially a lot of women, you're gonna end up bringing your food up, your intake up to your measure of maintenance.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: You may be really low in carbs because of a fear of carbs and keto and all this.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: You may have to bring those carbs up.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: You probably have to bring your protein up as well.
• 21:13
  Philip Pape: Fat usually comes along for the ride.
• 21:15
  Philip Pape: And by weeks three and four, you're because you've been tracking, you know roughly where to target for that to have a quicker recovery.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: If you've been dieting for a long time, this number may be higher than what you've ever been eating in a long time.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: And then you get a little bit afraid you're gonna gain weight, but you're not going to.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: You may, you're definitely gonna gain a few pounds of water weight.
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: And if you start taking creatine, even more water weight, but it's not body fat.
• 21:38
  Philip Pape: It's not body fat.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: And of course, as you're doing this, the protein's gonna stay high.
• 21:42
  Philip Pape: I always say the the minimum we're gonna aim for is 0.7 grams per pound.
• 21:46
  Philip Pape: Again, if you use macrofactor, it it sets your targets for you based on the evidence.
• 21:50
  Philip Pape: So for a lot of you, it's gonna be between like 120 and 140 grams a day.
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: And then, you know, everyone's gonna have individual challenges.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: Like for some of you, it'll be eating more carbs.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: And you're afraid of, oh my gosh, you associate carbs with, you know, pizza and donuts or sugar or gaining weight.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: When I say carbs, I mean fruits, vegetables, starches, grains, things like potatoes, oats, right?
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: Anything you can tolerate that you enjoy that meets your energy needs.
• 22:17
  Philip Pape: And then weeks five, six, seven are where you kind of hold those new habits in place.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: So notice we're doing we're taking kind of a step change approach.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: First couple of weeks we don't change much, we start logging.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: Second couple of weeks we change a little bit, and then we hold again.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: And that's where you can see your true expenditure and your weight trend and where you really, really are.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: And for a lot of you, three weeks feels like a long time, like you're doing nothing.
• 22:41
  Philip Pape: Again, in E More Lift Heavy, we we are working on skills every week anyway.
• 22:45
  Philip Pape: So you're kind of building on top of that.
• 22:47
  Philip Pape: And there are little things that are changing, things like step count, things like sleep, all very important.
• 22:53
  Philip Pape: But we want to get the noise out of the system so that by the end of week seven, you have something that I bet most of you have never had, which is six weeks of really good, clean data on a very stable set of conditions on how your body works and your habits.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: I mean, that's pretty powerful.
• 23:13
  Philip Pape: You know your maintenance calories, you know your protein intake, you know your eating habits, you know your calorie habits, your weight trend, like all that stuff in a much more accurate way.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: And now you're in a position to run a true calorie deficit and then learn from it.
• 23:26
  Philip Pape: All right, so now we are week seven.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: What do you do?
• 23:30
  Philip Pape: Well, there's three possibilities.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: So this is pretty cool because you may have seven weeks ago thought, I need to lose weight, I need to lose weight, or I need to lose fat.
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: Maybe, maybe not.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: Let's see.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: The first possibility is your expenditure trend is rising.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: You raised your intake, your body responded by burning more calories, becoming less efficient, which is what we want.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: We want to become a gas guzzler.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: And this is more common, dear listener, than you think, might think, especially most people who listen to the show, especially if you came in underfueled.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: Maybe your steps went up and you didn't even think about it.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're a little bit warmer and you're fidgeting more.
• 24:03
  Philip Pape: Practically, though, what it means is you have more runway.
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: It's not that your metabolism is artificially higher, it's that you're recovered and your body is operating on all cylinders, and now you've got a good, healthy place from which to run a fat loss phase in a successful way.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: And it may be at lower calories than you thought originally, and that's okay.
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: The second possibility is your metabolism, your expenditure is fairly flat.
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: And so things have sort of stabilized.
• 24:29
  Philip Pape: You're at maintenance.
• 24:30
  Philip Pape: It's boring, but that's what you kind of want.
• 24:32
  Philip Pape: It's very useful.
• 24:33
  Philip Pape: You know where your maintenance calories are.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: Now you can take a modest cut from those maintenance calories.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: All right, and then you can interpret everything against that stable baseline.
• 24:41
  Philip Pape: The third possibility is hey, maybe your trend is falling.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: You've been eating more, but it's still falling.
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: Now, usually that means that your logging got better and drifted upward as you got comfortable.
• 24:54
  Philip Pape: And now it's saying, okay, you're actually eating more than we thought.
• 24:57
  Philip Pape: So you must be burning less.
• 24:58
  Philip Pape: But it could be your activity has declined.
• 25:00
  Philip Pape: It could be that you're just not at maintenance left.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: It's rarely anything to be scared about.
• 25:06
  Philip Pape: And for oftentimes it means maybe we should continue with recovery before we go into a fat loss phase.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: So all of this gives you really good data so you don't make the wrong decision, right?
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: So you don't get depleted and frustrated and hitting a wall really quickly.
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: Now, notice what all three of these have in common, which is in every case, you know what to do next and you know why.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: You know what to do next and you know why.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: This is, you know, coaching 101 converted into a step-by-step system to do this, which is what we want.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: That is the return on investment for those seven weeks.
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: Not that you're losing fat, that comes later.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: It's that you know what to do now and you can now lose fat successfully and do anything else in the future you ever want to do.
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: Now, there is a separate question of whether you should even do a deficit at all.
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: And that depends on a lot of things, including your schedule.
• 25:55
  Philip Pape: Do you have vacations coming up?
• 25:56
  Philip Pape: Are you having a surgery?
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: Are we around the holidays?
• 25:59
  Philip Pape: What time of year it is, all this other stuff.
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: We're gonna actually talk about that in our next episode 498.
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: Today we're just talking about that pre-fat loss phase.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: Now, I want to talk about some things that I'm not claiming here, even though a lot of people in the industry do claim these about this, you know, recovery phase or pre-fat loss phase.
• 26:16
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying that you're gonna be able to lose more fat by doing this.
• 26:19
  Philip Pape: I'm saying that you'll be able to know how to lose the fat that you want to lose in the right way.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: Energy balance and thermodynamics still apply.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: It's not like an accelerator, so to speak, but it does address a lot of the things that cause people to fail or stop or plateau.
• 26:36
  Philip Pape: The second thing is, I'm not saying you can't change your training and eating at the same time.
• 26:39
  Philip Pape: In fact, many people many of the times we have to encourage that because you're not lifting right to begin with, and we want you lifting the right way.
• 26:45
  Philip Pape: And sometimes they synergistically help each other.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying, and this is really important, that your metabolism is damaged or broken, that it needs to be fixed.
• 26:53
  Philip Pape: None of that.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: None of that.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: Please stop accepting that narrative from the fitness industry.
• 26:59
  Philip Pape: Most people's expenditure across the population are pretty similar, and it's things like your movement and your eating and your lifting and all of and your sleep, et cetera, that affect the day-to-day number.
• 27:10
  Philip Pape: And I guess one more thing I'm not saying is that those online calculators are useless.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: In fact, we have our own at wits of weights.com slash calculators, and they're great as a starting point, but they could be way off, and that's why we actually have to track our intake and our weight over time to get the real number.
• 27:26
  Philip Pape: All right, before I let you go, I promised you the two-week logging protocol.
• 27:31
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna show you that in a second.
• 27:32
  Philip Pape: Before I do, if this episode appealed to you, if you think it's interesting, you're like, I really want to try that because I've never been able to lose fat successfully, and I want to figure myself out.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: I want to understand my body better.
• 27:45
  Philip Pape: I want to understand my hunger signals and how to actually lose fat.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: And I like this engineering approach.
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: You know, there's so much intuitive woo stuff out there that this seems to make a lot of sense.
• 27:55
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmoriftheavy.com and check out what we do.
• 27:58
  Philip Pape: It's a 26-week program.
• 28:00
  Philip Pape: It's one of the ways you can support the show as well, but more importantly, support yourself in gaining this confidence and going through a systemic process.
• 28:08
  Philip Pape: We have the base program, which is where you get your training program, you get a launch plan, you get the monthly calls, there's the community, there's all of this.
• 28:16
  Philip Pape: It's not like set and forget.
• 28:18
  Philip Pape: It is a, we're gonna hold your hand week by week and help you build these skills.
• 28:23
  Philip Pape: But then on top of that, we have something called dialed in, which is where you get a one-on-one personalized coach.
• 28:28
  Philip Pape: Her name is Carol.
• 28:29
  Philip Pape: She is awesome.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: She's a women's and hormones expert.
• 28:32
  Philip Pape: She's also a nutrition expert.
• 28:33
  Philip Pape: She loves recipes and meal plans and all that side of things as well.
• 28:37
  Philip Pape: So she will build you a custom nutrition blueprint that has everything.
• 28:41
  Philip Pape: It has suggested foods based on what you like.
• 28:44
  Philip Pape: It has meal timing, has everything.
• 28:46
  Philip Pape: It's not a meal plan, it's a super flexible blueprint for your nutrition that then you can iterate on together.
• 28:53
  Philip Pape: She reviews her data every week.
• 28:54
  Philip Pape: She does form checks.
• 28:55
  Philip Pape: She's gonna do a monthly video review.
• 28:57
  Philip Pape: So totally up to you of what you need.
• 28:59
  Philip Pape: Go to eMoreLiftheavy.com.
• 29:01
  Philip Pape: And because we're celebrating the fifth 500th episode of Wits and Weights very soon, which it still gets to me a little bit.
• 29:08
  Philip Pape: I'm so excited.
• 29:09
  Philip Pape: I can't believe we're there yet.
• 29:10
  Philip Pape: We're there already, and you've been along for the ride.
• 29:12
  Philip Pape: We have a code, it's 500 club.
• 29:14
  Philip Pape: It takes$50 off the six month options for either tier of eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 29:18
  Philip Pape: That's 500 club.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmore liftheavy.com and use 500 club at checkout.
• 29:24
  Philip Pape: All right, here is the two-week logging protocol.
• 29:27
  Philip Pape: For two weeks, for 14 days, I want you to log every single day.
• 29:30
  Philip Pape: Again, I prefer you use MacroFactor because it takes your intake and your weight trend and works backward to calculate your real expenditure.
• 29:38
  Philip Pape: And you don't have to be obsessive about how you track.
• 29:40
  Philip Pape: You can use photos.
• 29:41
  Philip Pape: It has an AI-based photo logger, you can use barcodes, you can use common database foods, et cetera.
• 29:47
  Philip Pape: And then you log every day exactly the same way.
• 29:50
  Philip Pape: Doesn't matter if it's Saturday or Sunday or whatever.
• 29:52
  Philip Pape: But then what I want you to do is I want you to take the average of your weekdays and I want you to take the average of your weekend.
• 29:58
  Philip Pape: And I want you to compare the two.
• 30:00
  Philip Pape: Okay, for the vast majority of people who have a normal nine to five, like Monday through Friday type job or schedule, I want you to notice the difference between the weekend and the weekdays.
• 30:09
  Philip Pape: Now you're like, oh, I already know the difference.
• 30:10
  Philip Pape: No, I really, really want you to notice the calories, the protein, the nutrients, the alcohol, everything, because that could be your biggest lever.
• 30:19
  Philip Pape: How do I either adjust the weekend to be more in line with the week and that alone gets me the deficit I need?
• 30:26
  Philip Pape: Or do I adjust my targets so that the weekend is accounted for and gives me the freedom and flexibility I already want or need?
• 30:34
  Philip Pape: And then I can go a little bit more dialed in during the week.
• 30:37
  Philip Pape: And that is a very powerful strategy.
• 30:40
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember, you cannot fix what you never measure.
• 30:46
  Philip Pape: And a short seven weeks of measuring is gonna save you at least a year, if not the rest of your life, of guessing.
• 30:53
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.