Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Is My Metabolism Damaged From Dieting? (What Your Hunger Is Really Telling You) | Ep 487

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Is My Metabolism Damaged From Dieting? (What Your Hunger Is Really Telling You) | Ep 487 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you've dieted on and off for years and you're wondering, has all that restriction damaged my metabolism?
• 0:05
  Philip Pape: Is that why fat loss feels so hard?
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: This episode is for you.
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: The short answer is no.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: It's almost certainly not damaged, and I'll show you the research behind that.
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: But there is something real going on, and it's often about hunger and how you read the signs of your deficit.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: Some of what you're feeling is what it's supposed to feel like.
• 0:23
  Philip Pape: But oftentimes people quit right when that calorie deficit is starting to pay off or about to.
• 0:29
  Philip Pape: Some of it is a warning sign that maybe you shouldn't push through.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: So today I'm going to show you the difference between those, why your metabolism is more resilient than you've been led to believe, and whether you should push through or stop.
• 0:46
  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.
• 0:55
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pate.
• 0:58
  Philip Pape: And a few weeks back, a couple episodes ago really, I made the case for the satiety diet.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: The idea that you can lose fat without fighting hunger the entire way through.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: And I still definitely stand by that.
• 1:11
  Philip Pape: You should build your diet so it's as comfortable as possible, that it gives you as much satisfaction as possible, because that comfort, at least relative terms, to say a crash diet or a severe deficit where you are not thinking about satiety is what keeps you in the game.
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: It's what leads to what we call adherence, sticking to that deficit so you can make it through successfully, especially when it's going to go on for a longer time because you have a lot of fat to lose.
• 1:38
  Philip Pape: But then I got a question after that episode that drives today's episode.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: And it's something like, okay, Philip, I built a satiety diet.
• 1:46
  Philip Pape: I'm eating the protein and the fiber and the volume, and I'm still hungry sometimes.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: I still have days where my energy is lower.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: Is my metabolism just broken or adapted or downregulated from all the years that I spent under eating?
• 2:00
  Philip Pape: And that question, the is my metabolism damaged from dieting, is probably one of the most common questions even today.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: Even though we've addressed it on this show quite a bit, I don't want to take for granted that we hear that message that you need to fix your metabolism.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: So we're gonna answer that head on.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: The short version is that your metabolism is far, far more resilient than social media might lead you to believe, especially when they're trying to sell you a program or a diet.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: What feels like a broken metabolism is usually two different things.
• 2:31
  Philip Pape: It's either it's the normal discomfort from a deficit, but it's also the way that your appetite and your body pushes back when you lose fat and when you're in a deficit.
• 2:43
  Philip Pape: Now, this is independent of other aspects of metabolism from, for example, muscle loss over the years and things like that.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: We're gonna set that aside for now and just talk about the adaptation piece and the, you know, is your metabolism damage piece?
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: But if you can kind of learn to make sense of this, what's normal, what's not normal, should I finish my cut?
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: Should I push through?
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: Or maybe are these signs things telling me I need to slow it down or maybe take a diet break?
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: That's what I'm trying to help you with because I think that's where we can make the right decisions so that we are successful with our fat loss and can take what I often call the fastest path, which isn't always the quickest path, if you know what I mean.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: Sometimes you have to take breaks and sometimes you have to slow it down so that you can continue and then be successful.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: This matters a lot if you've been dieting for many years, like many of us have.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: Uh, I think the statistic is the average woman diets over a hundred times in her lifetime.
• 3:40
  Philip Pape: And you've probably been told, hey, if diet feels too hard, something is wrong with you or wrong with your metabolism, or you know, there should be an easier way to do it.
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: We're gonna take that apart today.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a 30-second self-check.
• 3:55
  Philip Pape: These are three questions you could ask yourself on any given day within a cut, okay, a fat loss phase, to know whether to keep going or to back off.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: So I love these little kind of self-checks so that you can course correct if needed.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: All right, here's what we're covering today.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: First, why the advice to just fix it when it feels bad backfires and makes people what I'll call serial diet quitters.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: And unfortunately, the message on social media is often, you know, fat loss can be effortless.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna show you how by my program.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about what the research actually says about whether your metabolism is damaged, about hunger during a diet.
• 4:33
  Philip Pape: And, you know, I'll warn you now, the hunger part is maybe not what you would expect.
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: So we're gonna give you a little tease on that.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: And then the part that you are probably listening to this podcast for is how to tell the manageable discomfort apart from the real warning signs and what should you do for each one.
• 4:51
  Philip Pape: We're gonna get practical.
• 4:52
  Philip Pape: So let's start with where most people are right now.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: You let's say you start a fat loss phase and the first couple of weeks feel all right.
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: Maybe even feel great because you're motivated.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: The scale maybe starts to move because of especially the water weight that drops in that first week.
• 5:07
  Philip Pape: You see these stories a lot of time, like, I went on keto, I went on carnival, I started fasting and I lost all this weight in the first week or two.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: And you can see this on any diet, really.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: And then around week three, four, five, let's say, this is when things start to get a little bit hairy, where you're a little bit hungrier between meals, your workouts start to feel maybe a little more sluggish, maybe you're a little bit more irritable, maybe you're shorter with your kids, and then the doubt creeps into your brain, something's wrong, this isn't working, the diet's broken, you know, especially when you don't see the scale move, you know that voice that I'm talking about in your head, right?
• 5:42
  Philip Pape: You know what I'm saying when the scale doesn't move, especially.
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: So what do you do?
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: Well, you fix it.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: You add some food back in and say, okay, I'm listening to my body, that's one approach, or you cut harder, that's another approach.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: Sometimes either of those approaches actually can work, right?
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: Cutting, cutting calories further and or eating more or eating more food volume.
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: But for a lot of people, what happens is they they relax the deficit every time that it starts to feel like a deficit.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: And if a deficit never really feels like a deficit, I guess the way I'm gonna put it, you're probably not in one.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: And so then you never finish the cut.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: Does this sound familiar where it starts to get a little bit hard, or you succumb to maybe emotional eating or binges, or you have all these things come up in your life, and all of a sudden the average calories end up drifting back to where you're not really in a cut.
• 6:36
  Philip Pape: And you're like, well, my numbers say that I'm in a cut, and this feels great.
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: Like, like I've been told it doesn't have to feel that bad if it's a moderate deficit, right?
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: Even Phillips talked about that.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: If I have satiety, uh enough satiety in the diet, but then I'm not losing weight.
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: So what is happening, right?
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: And so this is what I want to get you away from.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: I want you to realize where the rubber hits the road and you have to kind of stick with it and ride things through rather than go in these waves and like quickly react to hunger or conclude that fat loss just doesn't work or your metabolism's damaged or whatever.
• 7:09
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: So I think the trap is that if it feels bad, you need to change something.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: I think that is correct if it's a high level of negative biofeedback, but not necessarily if it's just a little bit of something like hunger.
• 7:25
  Philip Pape: And so we want to talk about the difference today.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: I don't want you to treat every uncomfortable feeling as a red flag when many of them are just a little bit of a warning or a little bit of a signal that maybe things are working and heading the direction you want.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: And many people listening, dear, many of you listening have gone through many diets in the past and you can't trust your body and you feel like you can't trust your hunger signals.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: But that's because they were crashed diets or you were cutting carbs or something like that.
• 7:54
  Philip Pape: If we take a reasonable approach to this, that's under control, under control and with intention, you can then distinguish the difference between these.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: Now, on the other extreme, you have the message that, hey, fat loss, you know, losing weight requires a little bit of suffering.
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: You have to push through, you have to have discipline, and that's garbage too.
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: I mean, that doesn't comport with the evidence or what actually works.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: It just makes pick makes people miserable, it makes them quit.
• 8:17
  Philip Pape: And so we kind of have two sides of the extreme, right?
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: Either that side or, you know, it shouldn't feel bad at all, it should be easy, you need to optimize your diet.
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna show you how to do that if you buy my program, right?
• 8:28
  Philip Pape: So that's why I made the satiety episode.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: But here's the part where I think we should talk about hunger and what the research says, because this is a very important mechanism.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: And it surprised me a little bit as I reviewed the research, because I've heard for many years, and you probably have as well on podcasts, that hunger is the signal that fat loss is happening.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: I've said that before, and I still say it to clients: I'm like, well, if you're having a little bit of hunger, you can expect that.
• 8:52
  Philip Pape: It's just not gonna be, we don't want it to be too high, and we also don't expect zero hunger either.
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: Putting GLP ones aside, because that changes the whole game.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: And that the more you white knuckle it, the more it's working because, you know, you have to have some hunger.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: Now, whether you are talking white knuckling or just a little bit of hunger, you know, I've always said, okay, you have to have some.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: What the research says is that people who report the most hunger and the strongest cravings tend to lose the least amount of weight.
• 9:24
  Philip Pape: There's a study called Beef Wise.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: It's six months of behavioral weight loss.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: And those who came in hungrier and more prone to deprivation lost less weight.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: People who reported more satisfaction with their diet lost more weight.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: Okay, so this kind of aligns with the satiety episode that I did not long ago.
• 9:45
  Philip Pape: There's a big study called Pounds Lost.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: And the the the variable that predicted who actually hit the 5% weight loss target was not hunger, it was dietary restraint.
• 9:58
  Philip Pape: Not restriction, but restraint, meaning the skill of controlling what you eat, right?
• 10:03
  Philip Pape: Which is which is what we try to do all the time when we talk about on the show, like knowing what you want to eat, how much you want to eat, tracking it, et cetera, and being in control of that meal planning, meal prep, and all of that.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: There's also data we have that shows that on times or weeks where people rate their hunger highest, their adherence that same week tends to be lowest.
• 10:24
  Philip Pape: So if you put all that together, hunger isn't necessarily the cost or the price of the progress you want to make to get those fat loss results.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: It's often the thing that makes people stop their fat loss, which you would say, okay, well, then all those people saying you should go through a fat loss phase without feeling hungered, it should be easy.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: Maybe aren't they then on the right track?
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: Well, stick with me.
• 10:46
  Philip Pape: So your body fights back when you're losing fat.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: And one of the ways it fights back is by cranking up your hunger.
• 10:52
  Philip Pape: And people who feel that hunger the most are the ones that are likely most likely to stop their fat loss, to bail on it, right?
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: So if the idea of just feeling hungry all the time means your fat loss is working, it's gonna lead you to chase getting to that point of feeling that hunger.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: However, the evidence shows us that too much of that causes you to stop your diet and get out.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: So it sounds like a catch-22.
• 11:17
  Philip Pape: What do we do?
• 11:18
  Philip Pape: Well, the goal is to feel the least hunger you can, even though you still have hunger while still being in a deficit.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: And that's the fine balance that we're trying to find.
• 11:29
  Philip Pape: Now, this is important, so I don't get accused of contradicting myself.
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: That doesn't mean that a could, a good cut feels like nothing.
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: You cannot reliably lose fat with zero change in appetite.
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: Some hunger is simply what you're gonna feel from a negative energy balance because your body is trying to defend that settling point.
• 11:50
  Philip Pape: It used to be called a set point.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: Now we use the term settling point.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: It's trying to defend that weight, get back to homeostasis because it's getting the sense that you were depriving it of energy.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: It's like, what is going on?
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: We need you to eat more to make up for this.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: So the point is that you shouldn't feel anything, it's that more discomfort doesn't correlate with more progress necessarily.
• 12:12
  Philip Pape: And in fact, a lot of discomfort is more of a red flag that you're gonna end up quitting your diet.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: So that is the difference we're talking about today.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: I hope I didn't take too long to get to that setup.
• 12:23
  Philip Pape: That's where my thought is going.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: So is your metabolism actually damaged?
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: I want to answer this question.
• 12:29
  Philip Pape: If you've been dieting for many years, especially, for almost everyone listening, the answer is no.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: I don't care how many diets you've done, how extreme or restrictive they were.
• 12:40
  Philip Pape: And I want to go through why so that you stop blaming a broken metabolism or listening to anyone who suggests that.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: And then we can see what's actually fixable and in your in your control.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: So people assume that after enough diets, their metabolism has adapted almost not permanently.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: Maybe they know that it's not permanently, but they think it's, you know, look at the big, biggest loser science and how long it took to recover, and they're like, well, my metabolism is tanked.
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: I'm also older, I've done so many diets.
• 13:07
  Philip Pape: That is why I can't lose fat, and that is why the scale is stuck.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: And there is a phenomenon under this, of course, it's called metabolic adaptation.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: Metabolic adaptation is where your body burns a bit less than predicted when you lose weight, both because of the weight loss, but also because of the lack of energy while you're in the deficit.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: Now, in a moderate deficit, okay, a moderate diet where you're in, let's say, less than a 500-calorie deficit a day, the adaptation is something like 40 to 90 calories a day.
• 13:41
  Philip Pape: It's not this catastrophic amount.
• 13:42
  Philip Pape: We've seen that in the literature.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: Of course, it varies from person to person, also varies of how based on how long you've been at the diet.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: But these dramatic numbers you've heard, like the biggest loser study, where the metabolism dropped hundreds of calories below baseline, that was extreme starvation level dieting plus hours and hours of daily exercise.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: And that is not most people, even if you've had trouble dieting, even if you're doing quote unquote too much cardio or whatever, you're nowhere near to the level they were doing it on biggest loser, where they had to be pushed to that extreme.
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: So that is not what I'm talking about.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about more of a moderate cut, where when it gets hard around week four of the cut, which is typically, you know, a month in, your metabolism, it's not like it's breaking, or you're all of a sudden gonna plateau permanently and like that's it.
• 14:30
  Philip Pape: We've seen in studies like the Kevin Hall studies at NIH that even unrealistically large amounts of metabolic adaptation don't really change when your weight plateaus.
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: What changes is the lack of adherence that compounds, that adds up over time.
• 14:50
  Philip Pape: And that's good news.
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: It simply means most people are not in the deficit they think they are.
• 14:55
  Philip Pape: And in their brain, they think they are.
• 14:58
  Philip Pape: So it seems like your metabolism is broken.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: That's pretty cool.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: And I I've seen this in my own data where it's very, very hard sometimes to trust things unless you are tracking, right?
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: Unless you know for sure you've had those taste-licks bites, those extra calories, you've had things that are more calorie dense than you thought, et cetera.
• 15:15
  Philip Pape: And it all does add up.
• 15:17
  Philip Pape: Now, damaged isn't the same as unchanged.
• 15:21
  Philip Pape: Okay, change happens all the time.
• 15:23
  Philip Pape: Transitions are happening all the time in your body.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: If your body has lost weight, then you are running on fewer calories than you used to be from being smaller, and because of that adaptation we talked about.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: And that's why maintenance calories take fewer, fewer calories than people would expect when you've lost weight.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: But that's just normal, right?
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: That's just normal.
• 15:45
  Philip Pape: There's also that this this wall that people hit around four to six.
• 15:49
  Philip Pape: The question is, is this a real wall of weight loss, right?
• 15:52
  Philip Pape: When you you you know, you lose weight pretty quickly in those first couple of weeks, maybe it starts to slow down weeks three, four, and then all of a sudden it seems to stall.
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: Well, there, you know, there's nothing special that happens day 30 of a cut, but there are a few things happening.
• 16:06
  Philip Pape: There's the motivation that was there at the beginning is starting to wear off.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: You know, the whole novelty of the diet is starting to wear off.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: The accumulated hunger from being in a deficit starts to add up.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: The initial fluid weight loss that occurred might have given you an artificial feeling that it was faster than it was.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: So all of these things added together feels like you hit a wall.
• 16:29
  Philip Pape: And it shows up for the vast majority of people who are in a diet.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: And it's often right when people quit, or pretty soon after that, they quit the diet.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: That's where I see the frustration.
• 16:40
  Philip Pape: That's where I see in our program eat more lift heavy.
• 16:43
  Philip Pape: People start to vent in the comments or the community.
• 16:45
  Philip Pape: And that's exactly where we can kind of talk them off a ledge by saying, Well, let's look at your data.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: Let's look at your data, understand what's going on.
• 16:52
  Philip Pape: And this is probably the moment at which you just want to continue doing what you're doing because things are about to take a turn for the better.
• 16:57
  Philip Pape: And here's the other thing appetite doesn't just reset overnight.
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: There's research that follows people after significant weight loss that shows that their hunger hormones still shifted toward hunger even a year later.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: So being in a reduced state comes with elevated appetite and then it lingers, which I would say is just more reason to treat manageable hunger as something you would expect and kind of ride it out rather than try to fix it in a moment of panic.
• 17:25
  Philip Pape: And then you might make things worse because then you might still have hunger and you're eating more food.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: Beyond that, if that makes sense.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: So, what we've established so far, just stay with me here, is some discomfort is normal and unavoidable.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: But more discomfort is not better, and too much discomfort is a red flag that you're probably not long for this diet anymore.
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: But your metabolism is mostly fine.
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: And the hard part of a diet often occurs right around when most people give up.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: So, now what do you do with all that?
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: All right, I'm gonna share the fix in a moment, but if you're looking for a more accelerated way to get there, what we're gonna talk about with support, with personalization for you, if you want someone in your corner to look at the numbers and tell you, hey, what I'm feeling is normal, or am I cutting too hard, or what is the data telling me when my weight stalls?
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: That is a huge part of what we do inside Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: You can learn about it at eatmoreftheavy.com.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: This is the 26-week coached program that we run, real human coaches.
• 18:25
  Philip Pape: And honestly, the single thing people tell us that made the most difference wasn't a, you know, tweak to their macros or something like that, something very tactical.
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: It was having someone in their corner during the hardest parts of these phases.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: Okay, the four or five weeks into the diet doubts that creep in where we could say, you know what, this is normal, just hold the line.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: Or, you know what, your data is telling us maybe you do need a diet break.
• 18:51
  Philip Pape: Maybe you do need to change these variables over here.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: And that is a very hard call to make for ourselves when we're hungry, when we're starting to second guess everything, or when you haven't done this before and you haven't built the confidence yet.
• 19:03
  Philip Pape: So if that is where you are, if you're trying to lose, let's say, eight to 15 pounds of fat and you want a very structured, supportive way to do that, go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: Just take a look.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: All the information is there, the pricing is there, it's completely transparent.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: We've built this for especially people over 40 who are just tired of starting over and over again, who want to sustain their results and will help you get there.
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 19:29
  Philip Pape: All right, so the whole game behind this is learning to sort what you're feeling into the right bucket so that you can act on data versus feelings versus whatever.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: And the the first bucket is I'll call manageable discomfort.
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: It's what you should expect, but maybe you didn't know you should expect it.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: And that's where you generally just ride it out.
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: The other bucket is unmanageable struggles, right?
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: The struggle bus, where something has to be adjusted in your protocol.
• 19:58
  Philip Pape: And it may feel the same.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: And everybody's feelings are different for like, you know, when you go to the doctor and they're like, tell me your pain on a scale of one to 10.
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: I hate that question because I don't know, what is my six compared to your six?
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: How is that objective?
• 20:11
  Philip Pape: So it's kind of the same thing, all right?
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: That's why I think this is more difficult than people make it out to be.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: And I wanted to do a whole episode on it.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: So let's look at both buckets.
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: The first bucket, manageable discomfort.
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: What does that look like?
• 20:22
  Philip Pape: Well, you're hungry between meals, but you can get to the next meal without it really affecting you that much.
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: Doesn't ruin your life, doesn't make you, you know, run for the fridge.
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: It's just this feeling, right?
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: This feeling of a little bit of a gap, a little bit of emptiness, a little maybe, maybe some rumbles.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: And then along with this, your other biofeedback are things like your workouts may feel a little more flat than they used to be, but your strength is still there.
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: Maybe you are hitting more reps still, right?
• 20:49
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're mentally a bit more irritable, but it's kind of a blip.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: It's not like it takes over.
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: It doesn't, you don't obsess about it.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: Your sleep is still pretty solid.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: And then the real key to this, to tell you that it's manageable, is that it is, I'll say stable or slowly getting more familiar to you, like you adapt to it, is my point.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: Like you kind of getting used to it and it's stable rather than getting worse or worse.
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: That I honestly is the biggest indicator is okay, you've had a little bit of hunger, but a lot of people, everybody's gonna experience that.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: The question is, it does it kind of even out and stayed roughly in that zone, which can be indicated if you're trying if you're saying measuring your hunger on a scale of one to 10, and you go from a 10 to a nine to an eight to a seven, and it kind of hovers around six or seven and doesn't keep going down.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: For example, now for you, a six might be terrible.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: I don't know.
• 21:42
  Philip Pape: I'm going back to my earlier comment about the one to ten.
• 21:45
  Philip Pape: But your body, when it's in a calorie deficit, is going to give you a little bit of hunger.
• 21:50
  Philip Pape: It's stable.
• 21:51
  Philip Pape: You can ride it out.
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: You expected it, you looked forward, not look forward, but you expect that to happen.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: The other, the struggle bus piece, the unknown.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: Manageable struggle is a completely different beast.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's something that you don't want to push through because you're going to make matters worse.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: And honestly, a lot of you have been in this situation.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: And hunger that is relentless, that's ravishing, that keeps driving you to binge eat, where you are not choosing to eat more, you're just getting overpowered emotionally.
• 22:20
  Philip Pape: Food noise, along with a lack of performance in multiple areas of your physiology, like your strength is dropping over and over.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: Your sleep is getting worse.
• 22:30
  Philip Pape: Your mood is maybe getting worse and affecting your life.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: You know, for the women listening, this could even affect your period, which that would definitely be red flag potentially.
• 22:40
  Philip Pape: Feeling cold all the time.
• 22:41
  Philip Pape: I mean, when I'm in a big deficit, I actually start to feel cold.
• 22:45
  Philip Pape: And usually it's if it's a big deficit, I'm keeping it really short as well.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: I don't like that feeling of just feeling weak and cold, right?
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: Dizzy, uh depleted.
• 22:54
  Philip Pape: Any of that is potentially a red flag.
• 22:56
  Philip Pape: And the answer here is hey, the deficit's probably too aggressive for you, or you've done it for too long, and you just have to back it off.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: Now, there's a lot of ways to do that.
• 23:06
  Philip Pape: You can slow the rate down, you can take breaks, you can use refeeds, you can go on and off and do intermittent dieting.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: Like there's a lot, not fasting, intermittent dieting, right?
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: You go into the diet or out of the diet across days or weeks.
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: Okay?
• 23:18
  Philip Pape: So that's kind of like your instrument panel giving you the dashboard warning of what's happening.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: Now, how do we be pro how do how are we proactive about this?
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: So you don't even have to overthink any of this stuff.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: Well, it's annoyingly simple, let me tell you.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: That's this podcast is all about giving you the simple fix.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: It's to run a smaller deficit than your brain wants you to.
• 23:39
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 23:40
  Philip Pape: A lot of us pick a deficit based on how fast you want the result.
• 23:44
  Philip Pape: And then you're like, oh, but it feels hard.
• 23:47
  Philip Pape: If we instead aim for something like at most a half a percent to three quarters of a percent of your body weight a week, for a lot of you, that's going to be slower than you want.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: Some of you, that's right in the realm, and you're probably good.
• 23:59
  Philip Pape: And for some of you who are smaller with lower metabolisms, that might be too aggressive.
• 24:04
  Philip Pape: So again, it's highly individualistic, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna shoot around that 0.5% of your body weight a week.
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: And I know that's not a sexy answer, but the slower deficit is gonna produce way less of that struggle bus discomfort, or it shouldn't produce it at all for the most part, which means you're far more likely to keep going and actually make it through.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: And what we know from the research is that people who finish are the ones who lose the fat.
• 24:30
  Philip Pape: Sounds obvious, but if you don't actually finish your diet, you're not gonna get the result of the diet.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: There's even good data in post-menopausal women, specifically, that the more aggressive cut, it's not, it's not just that it feels worse, but it does potentially cause muscle loss and bone loss.
• 24:49
  Philip Pape: I don't want to overpitch that, but there are there is evidence on that.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: And we do know that going too aggressive does risk muscle loss, which is not something we want.
• 24:58
  Philip Pape: Of course, I'm not talking about that level of aggressiveness today.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: I'm really talking about when you're just past the line versus coming under that line and finding out where that line is, right?
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're keeping protein up high enough, somewhere around 0.7 to one grams per pound of body weight, if you continue to lift, those are the important things for holding on to muscle while you lose the fat.
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: They also happen to blunt hunger.
• 25:22
  Philip Pape: Back in January of 2026, we did a whole hunger series on this podcast.
• 25:25
  Philip Pape: Go find those.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: And at least one or two had to do with the link between training, lifting weights, muscle, and hunger.
• 25:33
  Philip Pape: And I do want to make one final comment about the women who are listening who are in their 40s or 50s, peri-postmenopause.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: I am definitely not gonna tell you that menopause makes this hopeless or ridiculously difficult, or your body is uniquely broken.
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: There is research comparing how peri and postmenopausal women respond to a diet versus younger women, but it's very thin, it's almost non-existent.
• 25:56
  Philip Pape: That's one of the problems we have, is we don't have very much data in your specific population, especially not head-to-head trials.
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: But the one direct comparison I could find showed no difference in how much fat they lost or how well they stuck to it.
• 26:11
  Philip Pape: Because if you can get into the deficit, you can lose the fat.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: The other things that are going on are things like your body composition shifts due to a lack of lifting weights, for example, due to a loss of muscle mass.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: And if you are in our audience or you're working with us, we get you lifting weights.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: And so that solves a big percentage of all of these potential issues or even symptoms that you have.
• 26:34
  Philip Pape: I shouldn't say all the symptoms, but many of the symptoms you have during this period once you start lifting weights.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: But if you have rough symptoms, you should be talking to your doctor or therapist or hormone specialist or whatever about all the options.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: You should just always be looking at all the options.
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: And I'm not going to pretend there's like a menopause-specific diet hack because there is none.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: There is none.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: But what I am saying is simple.
• 26:57
  Philip Pape: You should expect some discomfort during a deficit, but learn to read it.
• 27:02
  Philip Pape: Ride it out if it's manageable, respect the warning signs and the red flags, and run the slowest cut that you can stand.
• 27:10
  Philip Pape: And there's many reasons you can or can't stand a slow cut.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: I know you want to lose X number of pounds, so you want to do it a certain amount of time, but you're not going to get there if you go too fast, is my point.
• 27:20
  Philip Pape: If you do that, if you run the slowest cut you can manage and stand, then you're going to finish it.
• 27:25
  Philip Pape: And finishing is the whole thing here.
• 27:27
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, I promise you that 30-second self-check to tell whether you should stay in the cut or not.
• 27:34
  Philip Pape: That's coming up in just a second.
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: But if this episode appealed to you, if it taught you something, if you think someone else would benefit, please just share the episode with them.
• 27:44
  Philip Pape: Text it to them, say, hey, I think I'm gonna like this.
• 27:47
  Philip Pape: It's pretty cool.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: And there's other episodes around this.
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: And if as an alternative, if you'd rather yourself go back and listen to another episode related to this one, I would go listen to the satiety diet episode.
• 27:59
  Philip Pape: Just look for satiety diet in your feed and make sure to follow the show so you can get the whole feed.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: That one is about building a diet that is comfortable in the first place.
• 28:08
  Philip Pape: So that combined with a moderate deficit is really what it's all about.
• 28:12
  Philip Pape: All right, here's a 30-second check that you can run.
• 28:15
  Philip Pape: Anytime you have a hard, difficult day during a fat loss phase.
• 28:20
  Philip Pape: The first one is my strength holding?
• 28:22
  Philip Pape: Like, are my numbers in the gym kind of holding steady?
• 28:26
  Philip Pape: I mean, they could be going up.
• 28:27
  Philip Pape: That's even better.
• 28:29
  Philip Pape: But things aren't dropping.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: I'm not feeling tanked in the gym, really tired, really sore, really weak, or even skipping gym sessions.
• 28:36
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's the first one.
• 28:37
  Philip Pape: If the if the numbers are steady or growing, you're fine.
• 28:40
  Philip Pape: You're probably fine.
• 28:41
  Philip Pape: You haven't been hit by any big energy crash or reds or low energy availability or anything like that.
• 28:47
  Philip Pape: If they're dropping or have any of these other symptoms I just mentioned, that's a flag, a red flag that, you know, maybe you need to take a break.
• 28:53
  Philip Pape: Number two, can I get to my next meal?
• 28:55
  Philip Pape: And what I mean by that is okay, not am I a little bit hungry?
• 28:59
  Philip Pape: Everybody's gonna be a little bit hungry.
• 29:00
  Philip Pape: That's totally allowable.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: The question is, is the hunger in control of you or are you in control of the hunger?
• 29:07
  Philip Pape: If you're losing that fight, especially on a regular basis, if you're binging, that is a big flag.
• 29:11
  Philip Pape: That is a big flag.
• 29:12
  Philip Pape: We don't want to be doing that.
• 29:14
  Philip Pape: And number three is how is your sleep and mood?
• 29:16
  Philip Pape: I'll say across the week.
• 29:18
  Philip Pape: So, like as a trend, not just today, you know, you can have a bad hour, a bad day.
• 29:22
  Philip Pape: I know I've had stressful days and totally changes my mood.
• 29:25
  Philip Pape: That's not what I'm talking about.
• 29:26
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about like an entire week where you're just not getting good sleep or your mood is just in the gutter, that's a red flag.
• 29:34
  Philip Pape: Now, if you have zero red flags from those three questions and you're feeling a little bit of hunger or a little something, that's probably just the cut working and you can ride it out.
• 29:43
  Philip Pape: If you have even one or more of these flags, even just one, I would suggest you probably need to back off on the deficit, at least to allow those things to resolve.
• 29:52
  Philip Pape: Strength, hunger, sleep, mood, very important signals.
• 29:55
  Philip Pape: You don't need a coach to do that check.
• 29:57
  Philip Pape: You can do it yourself, and it's very quick.
• 30:00
  Philip Pape: So I hope that's helpful.
• 30:01
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 30:04
  Philip Pape: And remember, the goal is never to feel nothing, it's to feel just enough hunger and I'll say discomfort to know that it's working and know the difference when it's not.
• 30:14
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.