Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Why Your Body Fights Fat Loss (The Truth About Setpoint Theory) | Ep 491

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Why Your Body Fights Fat Loss (The Truth About Setpoint Theory) | Ep 491 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: Picture this scenario.
• 0:01
  Philip Pape: You've cut your calories, the scale starts to move for a few weeks, and then your body starts to push back.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: You're hungrier, maybe you're a little colder, maybe your workouts feel flatter, and your fat loss slows to a crawl, maybe it stops altogether.
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: Now, the story you've often heard is that your metabolism is broken, or you've hit some fixed set point that your body will defend, maybe to the death.
• 0:25
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to show you what your body is actually doing when it fights fat loss, why most of that fight is not where you think it is, and why the popular fix that people reach for to protect their metabolism doesn't do what they think.
• 0:40
  Philip Pape: Stick around because once you see where the real resistance is coming from, you can plan around it instead of feeling like your own body is betraying you.
• 0:53
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wit 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.
• 1:03
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and the situation for this episode is all about set point theory and metabolism when it comes to your body fighting fat loss.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: So you've dieted before, maybe more than once, probably way more than once, and every time you get a few weeks or even a couple months in, it stops working the way it did at the start.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: And maybe somewhere along the way, you heard on a podcast or read in a book this idea that your body has a set point, a weight that it wants to be, and it defends that weight, kind of like a control system or like a thermostat defends the temperature you set it to.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: You go below that, and then the furnace kicks on, your metabolism drops, the hunger goes up, your body drags you back, kicking and screaming to where it started.
• 1:51
  Philip Pape: It's like it has to end up there, is the way I like to put it.
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: And there is some science behind that idea.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: That's why it's talked about, that's why it has spread so far in the industry.
• 2:02
  Philip Pape: But I think the version that is talked about is oversimplified in a way that leads people to do the wrong things.
• 2:10
  Philip Pape: This is one of my most largest frustrations in this industry is the perversion or cherry picking of science in a way that leads to people going the opposite direction than they need to.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: So today we're going to separate what your body is genuinely doing to defend itself, which is real and predictable, from the fitness industry, fit fluencer version on social media that is, you know, leading you to maybe buy the wrong programs, buy their stuff, do the supplements, go the wrong direction, try to lose fat in an unsustainable way.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: Then I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a two-question check you can run before you start your fat loss to tell you whether you're set up to keep the weight off or it's going to bounce back so you can get ahead of it.
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: Takes 30 seconds and it's all about sustainability.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: So you're going to like that.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: So I'm going to set up today's episode for you.
• 3:01
  Philip Pape: First, we're going to talk about why your body defends its weight and what that means.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: Is that actually happening?
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: Then the part that I think gets misunderstood, which is where is the resistance come?
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: Where do we end up with these plateaus?
• 3:17
  Philip Pape: Why does our metabolism, our body, fight back?
• 3:19
  Philip Pape: It's actually mainly not in your metabolism.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: And that's kind of the teaser.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: So stick around for that.
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: And then what do you do about it?
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: What is the practical steps that you have to take?
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: And what are people talking about that's really popular that I definitely want you to avoid?
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: So I know a lot of teasers in there.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: I'm sorry, it's just to I want to make sure you are listening closely because this is gonna help.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: I want to start with the popular advice.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: That's where there's always a grain of truth, but not necessarily the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: So the story goes like this: your body has a set point.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: When you lose weight, your metabolism slows down to defend it.
• 3:57
  Philip Pape: Sometimes it does so dramatically, you know, many, many calories.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: And then it stays slowed, maybe forever, which is why you regain the weight and then some.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: You'll hear people point to the biggest loser study as proof of this.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: Researchers followed contestants for six years.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: Their resting metabolism was still hundreds of calories a day below where you would predict, even after they regain most of the weight.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: So the takeaway is hey, dieting could wreck your metabolism permanently.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: Your body has a set point, and you can't win the game in the long term.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: Okay, well, we can't look at things in a vacuum, can we?
• 4:33
  Philip Pape: We have to have some nuance.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: So when you lose a meaningful amount of weight, your body does expend less energy than a person who naturally weighs what you now weigh.
• 4:46
  Philip Pape: So when you lose weight, your metabolism goes down.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: That is real.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: Researchers call it adaptive thermogenesis, and it's been measured in studies, you know, randomized controlled trials, human studies going back decades.
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: There was even uh, if we go back to some of the seminal or classic work in this area that came out of Rockefeller University, they took people and changed their weight up or down by 10% under controlled lab conditions and measured what happened to their energy expenditure, their metabolism.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: When people dropped 10% of their weight, their bodies burned a good chunk fewer calories than their new smaller size would predict.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: And then when they were overfed to gain 10%, they burned even more than would be predicted.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: So the body seems to push back in both directions, and that's where this concept comes from.
• 5:38
  Philip Pape: But then, you know, social media said, okay, we're gonna take the biggest loser, which is like the most extreme scenario you could pick, what we call class three obesity, a very brutal aggressive pace of weight loss, hours and hours of daily exercise, it's a television competition.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: And they said, okay, well, that's how the body's gonna work.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: We should learn from that.
• 6:01
  Philip Pape: And the problem is that even Kevin Hall, the NIH researcher who ran the biggest loser study, who I have a lot of respect for because he follows the data even when it contradicts his earlier work.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: He later went back and said that this enormous slowdown the contestants saw in their metabolism was probably driven in large part by the sheer volume of exercise they were doing, not by the weight loss itself.
• 6:26
  Philip Pape: So that's why you don't tend to see this in the average people doing it in an ordinary diet.
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: So the set point, thermostat, body set point, settling point, picture, whatever, definitely has some things we can poke at.
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: Your body doesn't necessarily do it the way it's described.
• 6:46
  Philip Pape: If your body defended a fixed weight in such a rigid way, then the obesity epidemic wouldn't have happened.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: But instead, people drift upwards slowly over the years without much resistance at all.
• 6:59
  Philip Pape: Like, why are we saying it works one direction but not the other?
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: That wouldn't make sense.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: But if you try to drift downward, your body fights you really hard.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: Well, if settling point theory was correct, it would be somewhat symmetrical.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: So if it's not like, let's say, a fixed thermostat defending a fixed number, what is the reality?
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: Well, the model that actually fits the evidence is a bit asymmetrical.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: It's a bit lopsided.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: Your body defends the floor a lot harder than the ceiling.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: It treats weight loss as a threat, but fat gain is, yeah, that's fine.
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: And researchers have a few names for this, but the practical version is that there is a range your body is comfortable in and it barely notices when you drift up and it pushes back when you drop below where you've been.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: So it's not a settling point.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: It's more of a settling floor.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: And the floor gets defended much more aggressively than the ceiling.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: And I think the insight here is when your body defends its weight, what you tend to think about is okay, my metabolism is tanking or my furnace is shutting off.
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: And then it leads to fear about your metabolism being damaged, broken, whatever.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: But the metabolic slowdown in somebody on a normal diet is actually smaller and less permanent than you might think.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: You have one camp looking at extreme cases like biggest loser, and they're like, okay, the slowdown is big and it lasts a long time or maybe forever.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: And then the other camp with researchers like Katia Martins, who went and measured people after their weight had stabilized instead of while they were starving in the middle of the diet, and they found the metabolic adaptation was actually small.
• 8:33
  Philip Pape: It was just a few dozen calories a day.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: Often it disappeared within about a year or two, and it didn't predict who regained the weight.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: So think about that.
• 8:43
  Philip Pape: It did not predict who regained the weight.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: So if metabolic slowdown isn't really the main thing that's holding people back, then what is?
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: Pretty simple.
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: It's your appetite, it's hunger.
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: That's where the real durable defense of why we can't lose weight can be found.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: And it's often ignored by set point theory discussions.
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: In fact, it's ignored a lot, period.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: Fat loss is often so focused on the deficit, on energy balance, on calories, sometimes on protein, but not as much on appetite, hunger, sustainability, adherence, which is really where the success versus failure occurs.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: So there's a landmark study, Summithrin and colleagues, in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they put people through significant weight loss and then they track their hunger hormones.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: And then a full year later, so this is a year after the diet ended, their hunger hormones were still shifted toward eating more.
• 9:48
  Philip Pape: So ghrelin, that's the hormone that drives hunger, was still high.
• 9:52
  Philip Pape: The fullness hormones were still suppressed.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: And then when they asked the people how hungry they felt, they were still hungrier than before they lost the weight, even a year later.
• 10:03
  Philip Pape: Now that is pretty wild.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: Like that is to me, stands out far more than this very subtle effect on metabolism.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: So a bot, your body, which has turned up your hunger signals and stay turned up, think about how much of an issue that is.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: It's also not surprising when you think about just the general population, why GOP1s have become so popular.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: The driver underneath a lot of this is leptin.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: That's the hormone that your fat cells use to tell your brain how much energy you have in storage.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: And when you lose fat, the leptin drops and your brain reads that drop as kind of a starvation alarm, right?
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: I don't like the term starvation mode, but it's it's an alarm that says I need to eat more to make up for this loss of energy.
• 10:47
  Philip Pape: So it cranks up hunger and it makes food more rewarding.
• 10:51
  Philip Pape: Now we're getting to the crux of the matter.
• 10:54
  Philip Pape: Now it nudges your expenditure down a little, but the food cravings, the rewarding, the reward, the noise, even the food noise is often from this.
• 11:05
  Philip Pape: And we know that leptin is driving this because when researchers give weight-reduced people, so people who have lost weight, leptin back to top off what they lost, a lot of the adaptation gets reversed.
• 11:17
  Philip Pape: So the low leptin is the driving signal, and the hunger is your body responding to that.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: So why this matters so much for you, listener, is if you believe that the thing holding you back is your metabolism, you're gonna chase fixes to your metabolism.
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: You're gonna chase supplements, metabolism boosters, protocols that promise to repair or fix your metabolism.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: And you'll be solving the wrong thing.
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: It's not actually the problem.
• 11:44
  Philip Pape: The thing actually pulling you back toward that old weight that you did, and you keep cycling over and over and over is hunger and the drive to eat.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: And it operates for months and months and months after the diet is over, which means the fix is not repairing your metabolism.
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: The fix is planning for the hunger with intention and building eating patterns that keep the hunger manageable.
• 12:07
  Philip Pape: And that's a completely different game.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: You can win the game, you can take control of it, we do it all the time, but that is the game we are playing.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: And that's the thing I want you to plan around because if your body is going to fight the fat loss, then the approach you take to undo that or prevent that or mitigate that obviously matters a ton.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: Now, just as an aside, that is what we built our program for eat more, lift heavy.
• 12:30
  Philip Pape: I mean, it's right in the name in a way.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: The eat more is not about just eating unfettered.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: It's about eating more of the right things, eating enough to fuel yourself, not worrying about the metabolic piece of it, but really about the sustainability and the enjoyment and the satisfaction and the fullness and having just a great diet that's flexible and works for you.
• 12:52
  Philip Pape: And we teach you these skills over 26 weeks.
• 12:54
  Philip Pape: If you go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, you can learn about it.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: Scroll to the bottom, you'll actually see you can expand each of the three phases across 26 weeks and see what you learn every single week.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: But we don't just drop you into a deficit and say, hey, wish you luck.
• 13:08
  Philip Pape: No, in that first phase, we want to get the intake, your food intake and your training dialed in before you ever push hard on fat loss.
• 13:17
  Philip Pape: So when you do, you're losing it from a stable base with some an approach of building muscle and maybe even having more muscle and a slow enough rate of loss, which we talked about on the last episode, that your body doesn't fight back, along with how you eat, what you eat, all of that great stuff.
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: And then we build the transition back to maintenance after fat loss in the right way.
• 13:39
  Philip Pape: So you recover really quickly and you don't do the rebound and you don't do the binging and you don't have the food noise.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: So if you are just done with the crash and burn yo-yo dieting, the cycling more and more and more and re regaining, that's what this is for.
• 13:55
  Philip Pape: Find out more at eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 13:58
  Philip Pape: That's eatmorliftheavy.com.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: So let's get practical now.
• 14:02
  Philip Pape: You know where the resistance is coming from.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: It's coming from hunger and appetite and your body defending its floor, not a wreck damaged metabolism.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: So what do you do with that?
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: Well, there's four things.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: And I'll say that the first three are the boring ones that actually work, all right?
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: Number one is well, expect this to happen and use a slower deficit.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: We talked about this on the last episode.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: If you missed it, go check that one out as well.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: When you, when you know that your body is going to turn up hunger as you lose weight, well, the single single biggest thing you can do is not lose weight so fast that the hunger becomes unbearable and gets ahead of you.
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: A slower rate of loss, something in a range of half to maybe 1% of your body weight a week.
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: But for a lot of you, that's going to be sporty.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: So the half percent is maybe where we start.
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: Tends to preserve more muscle, keeps the hunger signals from spiking, is hard.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: It all depends on your metabolism, your size, all that good stuff, right?
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: That's why we have to personalize this.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: But there's plenty of controlled research on this in athletes, for example, showing that the slower you go, you tend to hold on to more lean mass.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: You might even be able to gain some lean mass.
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: And of course, it's sustainable.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: That's number one, the deficit aggressiveness, how fast you go.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: Number two is of course, keep your protein high and keep lifting.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: I mean, how many times?
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna repeat this on this episode, but if you're listening to this wits and weights for the first time, this is the biggest game changer of all.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: Protein is the most filling macronutrient, it directly fights hunger.
• 15:33
  Philip Pape: Lifting weights is what tells your body to build and hold on to muscle while you lose fat.
• 15:38
  Philip Pape: For the protein, we're looking at 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight.
• 15:43
  Philip Pape: And for the lifting, we're looking at lifting heavy enough with the right movements, with progressive overload, so that you actually get stronger over time and build that muscle.
• 15:55
  Philip Pape: And this is especially true into your 40s and 50s for women into perimenopause and the menopause transition, where lean mass loss, bone loss, fat gain all tend to accelerate.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: Even when the scale doesn't necessarily move, your body composition is getting worse.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: And lifting in protein are how you fight that.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: And I know if you've listened to the show for a while, you're like, all right, move on, Philip.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: We need we got it.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: But it's so important to remember and get motivated to do this.
• 16:20
  Philip Pape: Number three, and I'll say a lot of people don't do this.
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: Number three is to plan the end of the diet before you start the diet.
• 16:29
  Philip Pape: So a lot of people diet until they're tired of it, right?
• 16:33
  Philip Pape: They're just sick of it.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: They're tired, it's not or whatever, and they stop and then they fall off a cliff and they go back to old habits.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: And now your hunger hormones are exacerbated, but you haven't really planned for all this and done it the right way.
• 16:44
  Philip Pape: I'm sure you've done this, right?
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: You, you, you white knuckle it to the goal.
• 16:48
  Philip Pape: Maybe you don't even get to the goal, and there's no plan for what to do afterward.
• 16:53
  Philip Pape: Instead, I want you to decide up front, hey, I'm gonna end this fat loss phase in a deliberate way at the right time, and I'm gonna recover up to maintenance calories on purpose.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna reverse diet and take forever to get there.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: I'm going to plan in diet breaks or refeeds along the way where I spend two days or a week or several weeks at maintenance where I jack up those carbs.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: I have a recovery.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: It's in the middle, but it's allowing me to continue going on, right?
• 17:20
  Philip Pape: And I'm holding on to my lean mass and I'm feeling good in the gym.
• 17:23
  Philip Pape: I'm holding on to my sanity to help stick to the plan, but I plan the end of the diet before I start the diet.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: Now here's the fourth thing.
• 17:33
  Philip Pape: And this is more of a warning.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: This is, I'll say, the popular thing that I want to talk you out of this, okay?
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: And that's reverse dieting.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: And I just mentioned that briefly, but I'm gonna lean into this.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: You've probably heard of reverse dieting.
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: It's the idea that after a diet, you add calories back very slowly, 50 calories a week, 100 calories a week, whatever, over many weeks or months.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: And this supposedly protects your metabolism or restores it or keeps the fat from coming back.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: And it sounds very scientific, and you hear it everywhere.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: And so many people come to me like, well, I tried reverse dieting, or I'm in a reverse diet, or my coach had me reverse diet.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: Um, I hear it with physique competitors as well.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: And it sounds like a nice, careful, a careful conservative approach, and a lot of coaches and apps sell it that way.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: The problem is it doesn't do the thing it claims.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: And we had plenty of research on this.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: There is a controlled study that tested reverse dieting directly.
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: They took people coming off a diet and they split them up into two groups.
• 18:30
  Philip Pape: One group did the slow reverse diet, and one group just went straight back to their maintenance calories.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: Now, when I say maintenance calories, I don't mean their original maintenance calories, I mean their current maintenance calories, which may have declined from when you started the diet.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: One group just ate however they wanted, and the reverse dieting group did not protect their metabolism better, and they did not keep the weight off better.
• 18:52
  Philip Pape: So actually, it was three groups.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: I apologize.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: So the just to clarify what I said before, you know, reverse diet, back to maintenance, and the other one just however they wanted.
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: So, anyway, the least structured group actually regained the least, which actually makes sense when you understand the mechanism we talked about, because the thing suppressing your metabolism is the energy deficit and the low leptin.
• 19:11
  Philip Pape: So the fastest way to reverse that is to eat more sooner and not crawl back up over the months, you know, three months or whatever, keeping yourself in a mild deficit the whole time.
• 19:21
  Philip Pape: So trying to do that slow conservative crawl keeps you in a suppressed low energy state longer.
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: And that's why potentially a group that just didn't care and just ate whatever, they just ate what their body was telling them they needed and they more than overshoots shot their metabolism to make sure they recovered.
• 19:39
  Philip Pape: Now, whether that would lead to additional fat gain, that's a separate discussion.
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: But when we work with clients and eat more lift heavy, that's that's part of the process, is like, let's know where our metabolism is at all times and let's jump right to it and recover as fast as we can without the extra fat gain.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm not saying reverse dieting is totally useless.
• 19:58
  Philip Pape: I think for some people, adding calories back in a structured, gradual way from a practical perspective might keep them from going out of control, like binging as soon as the diet ends.
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: So that's where structure is helpful.
• 20:11
  Philip Pape: It's kind of like why, you know, intermittent fasting has no benefits other than if it practically helps you from a schedule perspective.
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: So, same thing with reverse dieting, if it keeps you kind of grounded, sane, undoing your progress versus trying to jump right up and it kind of disrupts your eating plan overnight and it's hard to adapt to it, it might be superior for you, despite the fact that you are not recovering as fast.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: Do not use it though because you think it is protecting or repairing your metabolism or you're worried about gaining too much fat.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: Because that doesn't hold up.
• 20:44
  Philip Pape: Use it more as a behavioral tool.
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: It just like any of these other things that could be behavioral tools.
• 20:49
  Philip Pape: Because at the end of the day, behavior and adherence, again, is where it's at.
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: And we're actually gonna go deep on this in an upcoming episode on reverse dieting again.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: So keep an eye out for that.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: Hit follow to make sure you get that because it deserves a revisit and a full teardown on reverse dieting.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, I told you at the top that I'd give you a two-question check you can run before you start any fat loss phase to tell you whether you are ready to keep the weight off or you're gonna bounce back.
• 21:19
  Philip Pape: That is coming up in a second.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: But if this got you thinking, hey, the answer is in an aggressive crash diet or keto or carnivore and cutting carbs or intermittent fasting, no, I need to get the foundation right first.
• 21:33
  Philip Pape: I have a free guide for you.
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: It's called a 14-day rapid start fat loss guide.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: It's not a crash diet, it actually walks you through building the two habits that make fat loss work before you get to the deficit, which is I'm just gonna reveal it, hitting the protein floor and getting consistent with strength training, which are, I think, is number two of what we talked about earlier.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: So this guide will help you like a jump start to that.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: Okay, I want you to go to witsandweights.com slash fat loss or use the link in the show notes, witsandweights.com slash fat loss.
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: It's not calorie counting, cardio, none of that.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: It teaches you to read your trends properly, to track a few things for just a couple weeks so that you get started.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash fat loss.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: And if reverse dieting is something you've been curious about or you're even doing it, make sure to hit follow because we're gonna have that full breakdown coming up.
• 22:27
  Philip Pape: So again, for the free 14-day Rapid Start Fat Loss Guide, go to wits and weights.com slash fat loss.
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: All right, here is that check.
• 22:34
  Philip Pape: It takes 30 seconds before you start your fat loss phase.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: I know you're impatient to get it going.
• 22:39
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 22:39
  Philip Pape: Question one when my diet ends, what am I doing next?
• 22:45
  Philip Pape: Sounds simple, right?
• 22:47
  Philip Pape: But think about it.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: I really want you to think about it.
• 22:49
  Philip Pape: I want you to think about the numbers, the eating pattern, what you're going to eat, how it's going to work, even when it might happen.
• 22:56
  Philip Pape: That's a little bit more nebulous because it depends on how it goes.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: But if the answer is, you know what, I'll worry about it when I get there, you are not set up to succeed.
• 23:06
  Philip Pape: Your hunger is going to be high, and just waiting to see what happens is going to set you back tremendously and it's just not going to be successful.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: So you have to plan ahead.
• 23:15
  Philip Pape: Question two is the rate of loss I'm planning for in my fat loss phase.
• 23:20
  Philip Pape: So how many, you know, pounds a week I'm expecting to lose or half a pound or whatever.
• 23:25
  Philip Pape: Could I live at this level of hunger for as long as I think it's going to take to lose the weight I want?
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: If the honest answer is no, then you're already setting yourself up for a problem.
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: Now, you may have heard me talk about starting more aggressively first and then tapering down.
• 23:43
  Philip Pape: You can definitely plan that in.
• 23:44
  Philip Pape: And then you have to answer the question that way.
• 23:46
  Philip Pape: Hey, could I do this for three weeks and then go down to this level and do that for another X number of weeks?
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: Whatever it is.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: You basically want to build in the dot deficit so it's not too aggressive and you know it's not too aggressive right from the start, and be open to changing it as you go.
• 24:02
  Philip Pape: So those two questions.
• 24:03
  Philip Pape: Where am I gonna go with this when it ends?
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: What am I doing?
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: And could I live at this pace for the duration of the diet?
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: And that's it.
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: It's pretty simple, but a lot of people don't think about it and they they screw themselves during the process.
• 24:16
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 24:19
  Philip Pape: And remember, your body is not betraying you when it fights fat loss, it's doing what it's built to do.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: And once you know how and why, you can plan around it instead of taking it personally.
• 24:30
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.