Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Rapid Fat Loss vs. a Long, Slow Cut (Who Aggressive Dieting is For) | Ep 479

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Rapid Fat Loss vs. a Long, Slow Cut (Who Aggressive Dieting is For) | Ep 479 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: When it comes to fat loss, we often talk about going slow, being patient, using a small calorie deficit, and playing the long game.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: And for most people, most of the time, that is the right call.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: But for some of you, the long game is what is holding you back because you get about six weeks in, maybe you get bored, maybe you start to drift off track, and then you quit.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: And so it becomes an adherence issue.
• 0:22
  Philip Pape: Today I'm making the case that for some, a shorter, stricter, more aggressive cut, aka rapid fat loss, can sometimes beat dragging out a moderate deficit for several months.
• 0:34
  Philip Pape: Who it actually works for, what the research says about sparing your muscle when you are dieting hard, and the line between a smart, aggressive cut and a crash diet, which are not the same thing.
• 0:50
  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.
• 1:00
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and today we are revisiting rapid fat loss.
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: If you've been around this show for a while, or really around any evidence-based corner of the fitness world over the past few years, you've probably absorbed the key message for successful fat loss, and that is slow and steady, use a moderate or small deficit so that you don't lose too much muscle and you can stick with it, lose maybe a half pound to a pound a week.
• 1:27
  Philip Pape: You know, it depends on your size and your metabolism.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: Be patient.
• 1:30
  Philip Pape: You want to build the habits, you want to play the long game.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: And I've said that versions of that myself, right?
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: The long game is sometimes the fastest game because for many, if not most people in most situations, that's the right call.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: Now, recently we did do an episode about mini cuts and mini books where I push you more on the aggressive side to say that some people benefit a little bit from short duration fat loss phases that are a little more aggressive.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: And today we're gonna go even further than that.
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: We're gonna get a little uncomfortable and poke at our own orthodoxy.
• 2:00
  Philip Pape: And in reality, I've I've talked a lot about nonlinear approaches and the fact that everyone responds to different things, both physically and psychologically.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: And so that's why that's why it's good to have a spectrum.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: So the slow or moderate approach, it rests on an assumption, and that is that the hardest part of dieting is sustaining it, right?
• 2:21
  Philip Pape: When we say sustainability, that's what we mean.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: Adherence.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: Can you stick with it to be successful?
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: And so then the move here is well, let's make it a little gentler, let's make it a little longer.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: And for certain types of people in certain situations, that assumption doesn't always hold up.
• 2:38
  Philip Pape: And for those people, going longer sometimes kills the diet or it causes you to bounce back and forth and never really quite get what you want out of it.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: Now, to be really clear up front, because I think this gets highly weaponized online on social media.
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: I'm not here to sell you on crash dieting.
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying that this is at all something a beginner should do.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: I'm not telling you, hey, eat 800 calories a day, even though that that number could be the number for you at a very short duration based on your current maintenance calories.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: But I'm not just gonna make a blanket statement.
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: What I am gonna do is take a protocol that actually exists, that has structure, that has evidence behind it, show you who it fits and who it doesn't, especially for those of you who, hey, maybe you're perimenopausal, post-menopausal, and you have recovery issues.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're on the older side.
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: We really wanna understand what you've been doing in your lifestyle to this point and what you're doing right now to see if it works.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: It's all about context.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: And then I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a simple rule at the end for how to set your rate of loss on any cut.
• 3:46
  Philip Pape: It's a very simple way that I use with clients and our members and eat more lift heavy, where you can get a little creative about how you approach the beginning of the diet and then as you get into it.
• 3:57
  Philip Pape: So we'll talk about that at the end.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: You could use that on your next fat loss phase.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: But for today's episode, here's what we're going to cover.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: The first thing is why slow is usually the default, but then when it stops working for a subset of you out there.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: What an actual structured aggressive cut or rapid fat loss phase looks like, because you've probably heard of lots of folks out there, like Lyle McDonald, for example, and different protocols.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: I'm just gonna keep it simple and straightforward.
• 4:23
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna give you a version that has the protein sparing aspect to it and built-in refeeds, not a let me starve you to death version, because there's a difference.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: Also, what does the research say about losing fat quickly, but not losing muscle?
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: And then I think the maybe the part that matters the most here is when is an aggressive cut a bad idea and how to tell if you are the exception to that rule.
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: So I know it sounds like a lot, but it's all gonna come together.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: I want to start with why slow and sustainable is kind of the default and not create any straw men here, right?
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: The case for moderate fat loss is a really, really strong one that I strongly advocate for a lot of folks.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: And when I start with a person who's never quite done this before, that's generally the approach we take.
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: It, however, the duration itself can still be its own challenge in terms of a variable, even when you are going slowly.
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: So when you lose weight slowly, when you have a smaller deficit, we know that it's much more easy to hold on to most, if not all, of your muscle.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: It's easier.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean it's going to happen.
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: Conversely, going aggressive doesn't mean you're going to lose muscle, right?
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: I want to be clear about that.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: There is a classic study by Garth in 2011 that gets cited a lot where they took elite athletes and they split them into a slow fat loss group, losing about seven-tenths of a percent of body weight a week.
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: So that's 0.7%.
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: And then a fast group losing 1.4% per week.
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: And it was the same total weight loss.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: Both groups are lifting weights, both eating, you know, enough protein.
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: The slow group increased their lean mass by about 2%.
• 6:01
  Philip Pape: The fast group basically flat on that without gaining any lean mass.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: So the slower the fat loss, these the you know, assumption is or the conclusion is that it's more sparing of your muscle.
• 6:13
  Philip Pape: And you might even gain a little bit if you're newer to this.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: And that's not super uncommon when we look at body recomp scenarios.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: Beyond that, slower dieting seems to protect your metabolic rate a bit better.
• 6:26
  Philip Pape: And it's just a function of the aggressiveness.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: It's not like a magical thing.
• 6:31
  Philip Pape: In other words, the math all works out whatever way you look at it, because what you're trading off by going slower is just slower fat loss, right?
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: So if we look at, for example, this 2020 meta-analysis by Ashtari Larkey, they pooled a bunch of the research together and found that when you match total weight loss, the gradual dieters, the those who take it slowly, held on to about 97 calories a day more of their resting metabolic rate than people who went very fast, right?
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: So 97 calories.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: And it's not that big of a difference, maybe, and you know, it depends on how big of a difference the aggressiveness was here, but we tend to see a difference.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: And it kind of makes sense, but again, you're trading off faster fat loss, right?
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: Then there's the behavior part of this, which is probably the most important, almost bar none, the most important from everything I've seen.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: And that is that a moderate deficit is easier for people to deal with with their real life, right?
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: You can go out to dinner, you can practice the skills of eating well, portioning your food, hitting your protein, navigating like the planning for restaurants, restaurant menus, going to parties, social events, all that stuff that you need, those skills that you need forever, those skills that are honestly the bread and butter of what we tend to help people with in our programs as well, because that's what pays off.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: That's what allows you to get that independence and know how to sustain and live at maintenance and have that long game, right?
• 7:56
  Philip Pape: And that is the good argument for this.
• 7:58
  Philip Pape: And then when you want to do a fat loss phase, it's just a matter of scaling some of those things, you know, bringing down the carbs a bit, maybe shifting the nutrition density of the foods.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: So, why am I doing this episode?
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: Well, we've covered rapid fat loss a couple of times in the past, and it comes up a lot, and there's a lot of assumptions and misconceptions about it.
• 8:17
  Philip Pape: If we think of slow and sustainable, it assumes that the binding constraint, right, the thing most likely to fall down in this chain of variables, let's say, is your ability to keep going, your adherence.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: So then the fix is we need to make it easier, make it gentler, make it longer.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: And for a lot of people, that works really well.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: But for some of you, that's not the constraint.
• 8:39
  Philip Pape: For some of you, patience, engagement, interest is the constraint.
• 8:45
  Philip Pape: You start really strong, things start to move, you're very excited and motivated.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: And then usually around week six, I will say, about a month and a half in, the novelty is off, the progress slows down, and you start to get frustrated, you start to drift, your tracking gets sloppy.
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: I see this all the time.
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: People are like, oh, I'm sorry, I actually haven't tracked for the last two weeks.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: Okay, what are you doing, man?
• 9:05
  Philip Pape: Or woman, what are you doing?
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: The weekend bleeds into the week, especially if you're doing the same calories every day.
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: So it gets kind of boring.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: And eventually you're not really dieting, you're kind of uh thinking about dieting, and maybe you're tracking, maybe not, and you're kind of trying to, but you're not quite doing it, and you're sort of at maintenance now, right?
• 9:24
  Philip Pape: So for that person, the long moderate deficit maybe not is not the best choice.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: Also, there's a corner case of folks, like, for example, some women I've I've had as clients, maybe they have thyroid issues, maybe they don't, but they're over-responsive when they go on a diet where their metabolism drops pretty quickly, and then they're like, they have to keep up with it by trying to cut calories again.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: And it's this frustrating thing of, oh my gosh, I can never actually lose weight.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: And it's not that you can't, it's just you have to go more aggressively.
• 9:50
  Philip Pape: Sometimes you have to go way more aggressively, but for a short duration.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: And this actually aligns with some of the research Dr.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: Bill Campbell has done lately, like very recently down in South Florida, putting women on a very, very aggressive deficit with a lot of movement.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: Now, his protocol is extreme, but it's extreme for a purpose.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: It's kind of to prove out whether, you know, a woman who has the menopausal symptoms more severe than other women can actually lose weight.
• 10:18
  Philip Pape: And of course they can, right?
• 10:19
  Philip Pape: Like if you just starve yourself, you're gonna lose weight, but that's not the necessarily the way we want to do it.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: But it gives us a lot of clues as to what might work.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: So the just go slow can can be a problem for a subset of people.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: And again, staying engaged is very important here.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: So ironically, sustainability for some means going faster and then getting out.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: So getting in, getting out, and doing that multiple times over the year or over several years.
• 10:46
  Philip Pape: So now let's talk about the aggressive cut.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: If if longer is a problem, then the alternative is shorter and more aggressive.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: So again, we've got a couple of variables we can play with.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: The duration, how aggressive, like how big of a calorie deficit, which means how how little are we gonna eat technically?
• 11:05
  Philip Pape: And then the the variety within that.
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: So, like, do you shift the calories around and all of that?
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: And we're actually gonna hit on these.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: So I don't mean wing it and starve.
• 11:17
  Philip Pape: I don't mean doptavia, optavia or whatever it's called, 800 calories a day of packaged foods that they ship, like none of that nonsense.
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: I mean an actual structured protocol because structure is the point.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: Planning ahead is the point.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: Being in control is the point.
• 11:30
  Philip Pape: We've talked on this show about how two groups of people who have refeeds.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: So, in other words, they are dieting and then let's say on the weekend they eat more, the people that treat it as a cheap meal will actually be less successful than the people who are completely on top of planning it out.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: Like they plan it as simply a higher day that's a refeed.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: It's not a cheat day, it's not a, you know, let's let's just have fun and eat whatever.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: And we see that.
• 11:55
  Philip Pape: So there is a psychology behind this.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: And this idea has been around in the evidence-based world for a long time.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: Lyle McDonald wrote about it a version of rapid fat loss years ago.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: A lot of people reference him.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: A lot of my clients are into his stuff.
• 12:07
  Philip Pape: He's great, he's very grumpy, grouchy guy.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: You know, you gotta love him.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: And a lot of what he says holds up and are great models for how to do this.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: We've also done our own rapid fat loss challenges and episodes.
• 12:20
  Philip Pape: And I have a guide based on when Dr.
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: Bill Campbell was on here and a settler did an experiment based on one of his protocols.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: So I'm gonna walk you through that today, but it doesn't matter whose protocol you use, the principles are what matter in terms of doing a smart aggressive cut versus like a crash diet.
• 12:40
  Philip Pape: Okay, so let's go through those.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: Let's go through those.
• 12:42
  Philip Pape: Principle one is you're gonna have to go into a very aggressive deficit, yes, which means you're just gonna eat a lot fewer calories, but you are gonna anchor it to a really high amount of protein.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: Okay, protein and fibrous foods is the second piece of that, but it's really about the protein sparing your muscle and then eating in a way that minimizes the hunger, but you can't get rid of the hunger at this level.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: You're going to have hunger, okay?
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: The version that I like is you go into about a 45% deficit.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: So you take your maintenance calories, that's the amount of calories you actually burn, which you need to know that.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: So you have to be tracking ahead of time and be kind of at maintenance for a while before you do this.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: And then I recommend the tool MacroFactor.
• 13:27
  Philip Pape: It's my favorite app.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: Use code Wits and Weights, all one word, get a two-week free trial, try it out.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: You need your maintenance calories and then you go 55% of that.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: So a 45% deficit.
• 13:38
  Philip Pape: So it's about half.
• 13:39
  Philip Pape: I mean, it you could you could say roughly half, but it's a little more than that.
• 13:42
  Philip Pape: So if you burn 2,500 calories, you're gonna be around 1,375 on your deficit days.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: And that's very aggressive.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: Now, a lot of you are starting way lower than that.
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: You're starting at 1800 calories, and now you're gonna go down to something like 950, right?
• 13:58
  Philip Pape: Or maybe even lower than that.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: And that's why you could be at seven or eight hundred calories for an individual, but that that's the point is it's gonna be extremely short.
• 14:06
  Philip Pape: Here's what keeps it from being a crash diet.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: You're gonna set your protein really high.
• 14:09
  Philip Pape: You're gonna set it to at least a gram per pound of body weight, but it could go higher, 1.2, 1.3, 1.5.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: It could be pretty much exclusively protein, things like white fish and shrimp and chicken breast, right?
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: And vegetables.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: And I know it almost sounds like paleo or something like that, but that's the point.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: It's very, very short.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: You're gonna keep those amino acids flooding in, you're gonna keep strength training, and that is going to hold on to the muscle because that's what we want to do.
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: We want to lose fat and not muscle.
• 14:38
  Philip Pape: Principle two.
• 14:39
  Philip Pape: So principle one is the protein.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: Principle two is we're gonna keep the carbs in, but we're going to use it as refeeds for the most part, depending on how many carbs you have to play with during the week.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: You might have some carbs during the week, but you're gonna be eating mostly fibrous vegetables and including a little bit of fruit is what I would recommend.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: So when we look at starvation diets or crash diets, oftentimes they just cut carbs, right?
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: Things like keto, you know.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: And that can be counter-counterproductive.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: We know carbs are muscle sparing, they give you a little bit of energy, but they are gonna be highly limited.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: Let's just admit it, because you're taking up most of the diet with protein.
• 15:15
  Philip Pape: When you run out of carbs, your body's gonna start pulling from other sources.
• 15:18
  Philip Pape: So it's gonna try to pull from fat, maybe a little bit from protein, converting to glucose, and from a it's not going to rebuild muscle.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: In other words, muscle protein breakdown outpaces muscle protein synthesis.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: So it's not that it's like eating your muscles if you are lacking in protein and carbs.
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: It's just that your body will not have what it needs to rebuild the muscle.
• 15:39
  Philip Pape: So we do keep carbs in the picture.
• 15:41
  Philip Pape: They end up moderate to low, just like the fat ends up being pretty low.
• 15:45
  Philip Pape: Protein is taking up the vast majority of a calorie budget.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: And then the principle three we're gonna get to now with refeeds, that's where you're gonna really take advantage of carbs.
• 15:54
  Philip Pape: So principle number three is schedule built-in refeeds.
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: And the way I run it, you go four days in a deficit, then one day in a refeed, four days in a deficit, one in a refeed, four more days in a deficit, and you're done.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: So that's 14 days that include two refeeds.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: Now, there are different protocols.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: Again, Lau McDonald has his protocol.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: You can look it up.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: There's lots of different ways to do that.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: Some people get creative and mix it around.
• 16:17
  Philip Pape: It's fine, right?
• 16:17
  Philip Pape: Some people stretch it out a little bit and they might do four days, two days, or they might do a typical like seven-day period of five days, two days.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: That's that's also pretty common.
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: So on the refeed days, what do you do?
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: Well, you bump your calories back up to maintenance almost entirely with carbs.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: And, you know, I like carbs like fruit and starches, you know, rice and things like that that are pretty easy to just jack up carbs and consume them because you actually might, even though you're probably hungry and you're looking forward to the food, you also don't want to stuff yourself and get distended and feel like really terrible.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: So you tend to go uh and pick, you know, the right types of carbs that kind of balance a sweet spot between satiety and ease of consumption.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: And so your refeed days are up at your maintenance calories.
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: So if you were burning 2,500 calories and you're dieting on, what did we say, 13 something, now you're going back to 2,500 on those days.
• 17:11
  Philip Pape: Now, there are some camps that say, look, if you don't feel like you need all that amount, you know, go part way there, go two-thirds or 80% of the way there.
• 17:21
  Philip Pape: You're gonna have to experiment with yourself to see if that gets you all the benefits or not.
• 17:26
  Philip Pape: For some people, it's like not enough.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: And then they feel like they've never quite had a relief.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: For others, that's actually beautiful because then it actually gives them a little bit more of a deficit as part of the process, right?
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: The goal here is top off your muscle glycogen.
• 17:39
  Philip Pape: It kind of really gives you a little boost for the next training day, but mainly it gives you a psychological breather, a day that you can look forward to, but in a planned way, not in a cheat way.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: Um, and that helps you get through the two weeks.
• 17:51
  Philip Pape: Two weeks doesn't sound like a lot on a podcast, but when you're actually in this thing, this is a challenging thing to do.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: And by the way, you could stretch this out to three weeks in different ways.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: You can have a slightly less aggressive deficit, you can have two extra refeed days in there.
• 18:05
  Philip Pape: You know, there's different ways to do this.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: The fourth principle is the training, the strength training, right?
• 18:12
  Philip Pape: And we've talked about this in the past.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: When you go into fat loss, a lot of people want to train a different way.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: You want to do like lighter, more reps, add a bunch of cardio, et cetera.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: No, you're not gonna have much energy.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: So the best way to burn fat to hold on your muscle is a high stimulus, keeping the intensity or the weight on the bar or on the dumbbells or machines high.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: So, whatever you're already doing, probably just keep doing that because we're only talking about two weeks.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: We're not trying to hit PRs necessarily.
• 18:38
  Philip Pape: So rep range, auto-regulated type programming tends to work well here.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: But for most of you, you're probably already doing something like that.
• 18:44
  Philip Pape: And you might might lose a touch of strength because of the low energy, but you know, you hit it hard, get close to failure like you normally would, even if it's a few reps less less.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: Keep the weight up there, keep the load up there.
• 18:56
  Philip Pape: Don't deload, don't bring it down.
• 18:58
  Philip Pape: In fact, that's the worst time to combine with the delo.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: I always tell people when they're gonna deload in their normal course of their lifestyle, that's actually a good time not to be dying in.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: That's actually a good time to eat more, not the opposite.
• 19:09
  Philip Pape: But anyway, heavy lifting, high protein, keep that muscle and burn the fat.
• 19:14
  Philip Pape: That's the engine that's going on here.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: So, two caveats here so that I don't oversell this to people.
• 19:21
  Philip Pape: The first one is that when you run this, and your scales, your scale is probably gonna drop a lot in the first few days.
• 19:29
  Philip Pape: It may or may not.
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: Like people respond differently, but if it does, most of that it's gonna be water and stored carbs that are leaving your body.
• 19:35
  Philip Pape: The real fat loss over, say, the two-week protocol we're talking about here is more like at most three to five pounds.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: Now, that is excellent for a mere 14 days.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: That really is.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: And that's why you can string together, say, three of these in a year, and now you've got nine to 15 pounds of fat loss within that year just for six total cumulative weeks of diet, and that's not bad at all.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: That's kind of what we're going for.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: The second thing is this is a tool.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: This is not a lifestyle.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: It makes your overall life more sustainable for some people to be able to only have the two weeks of aggressive dieting, but the dieting itself is a very defined, structured block with a start and finish, and then you come back out to maintenance deliberately, you don't extend it.
• 20:20
  Philip Pape: One of the biggest mistakes people make is hey, Philip, I'm feeling okay.
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: I just got you know, some fat off.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: Should I keep going?
• 20:26
  Philip Pape: I'm like, probably not.
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: Probably not.
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: Can you extend it by one week?
• 20:30
  Philip Pape: Maybe.
• 20:30
  Philip Pape: You've got to look at your biofeedback, your performance, all of that stuff.
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: You know, maybe, but don't push it too hard or you're gonna start losing muscle, it's gonna start messing with your hormones, all that other stuff.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: So I just gave you the principles, I just gave you the broad numbers.
• 20:45
  Philip Pape: If you want it spelled out, like exactly what do I eat on each day, how do I do the math, and all that.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: I do have a guide, my rapid fat loss guide.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: I've had it for a while.
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: I'll put the link in my show notes.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: If you go to witsandweeights.com slash free, you can see all of my guides, including rapid fat loss.
• 21:00
  Philip Pape: But I will put the link in the show notes to the rapid fat loss guide.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: This is one of the more detailed guides I have.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: It's Google Doc that actually walks you through everything and it step by step.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: It does the calorie math, it gives you the protein, it gives you the structure, the four four one one-off structure, tells you even how to set it up in macrofactor.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: There's lookup tables, you can find your body weight, maintenance calories.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: There's a whole bunch of really good stuff in there.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: Again, I'm saying that rapid fat loss is not for everyone, but it's it's good to look at it and see what it would take for you to do it.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: And if you are one of the people that is a good fit for this, we're going now to talk about who that is so that you could just be educated and make the right choice.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: So again, go to wit'saways.com slash free if you want to find the rapid fat loss guide or click the link in the show notes.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: So the protocol is very structured, but does it does rapid fat loss work as you would expect?
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: Can you actually hold on to your muscle?
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: Because you probably heard, you know, oh, if I go more than 500 calorie deficit, I'm gonna start.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: Losing my muscle.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: No, there's a dose response factor and there's also a high training stimulus factor.
• 22:05
  Philip Pape: I will say generally, what I've found is if people are really consistent at training hard with the proper effort, okay, just like we talked about, I think it was our last episode about what actually builds muscle.
• 22:17
  Philip Pape: If you are doing that with enough volume and effort, you have a lot of leeway on dieting if you keep the duration short.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: Even if you are a 45, 50-year-old woman with declining progesterone and estrogen, all the fear-mongering out there about menopause, you can't lose weight anymore, and this and that.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: If you do this, you can have very good results.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: And this may be what you need as either a jump start or a little bit of you know boost to get it done if you do it right.
• 22:44
  Philip Pape: There are two things it depends on the protein and the lifting.
• 22:47
  Philip Pape: So it really comes down to that.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: And that can be challenging though.
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: The lifting, not so much if you once you get into it, like you just keep doing it.
• 22:53
  Philip Pape: But hitting that amount of protein when it's mostly just that protein, you've got to be very dialed in.
• 22:58
  Philip Pape: Like you can't be eating ribeye and 80% ground beef for the most part during this phase.
• 23:02
  Philip Pape: You could eat scallops and seafood.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: Seafood's great, like whitefish, you know, chicken breasts, things like that, some forms of pork, maybe.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: But the the reason the protein's so important, we've known this from studies.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: There's one back in 2016 by Longlin, where they took young men, they put them on a 40% calorie deficit, which is aggressive by any standard.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: They did it for four weeks.
• 23:23
  Philip Pape: They did hard resistance training and intervals.
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: And then they split them by protein.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: So one group had moderate protein intake, one had about up to 2.4 grams per kilogram.
• 23:36
  Philip Pape: So the high protein group on the 40% deficit gained two and a half pounds of lean mass and lost 11 pounds of fat.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: So they actually body recomped on a huge deficit.
• 23:46
  Philip Pape: The lower protein group just held on to their muscle and they lost less fat.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: So it's the same deficit, different body composition outcome.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: The only difference was the protein and the fact that they train hard.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: And I will say we're gonna do an upper another another episode soon digging into that whole protein phenomenon about how magic can occur when you increase your protein in terms of fat loss, even when you're in a deficit, or I should say, even when you're in a surplus, and then all of a sudden you start to lose fat.
• 24:12
  Philip Pape: And it's like, this doesn't make sense, does it, based on calories and calories out?
• 24:16
  Philip Pape: It does, but it's kind of a secondary effect that occurs on the energy outside of the equation.
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: So anyway, protein is very important.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: And the muscle loss that everyone is worried about, it's not really about the size of the deficit.
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: It's whether you are lifting hard, keeping the protein high, and keeping the duration short.
• 24:37
  Philip Pape: And there's a whole body of work from Eric Helms that goes back to 2014, so a decade, where he basically, to just to paraphrase, the leaner you are and the more aggressive the deficit, the more protein you need.
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: So in practice, for a lifter, that's where we get to the gram per pound of body weight.
• 24:52
  Philip Pape: Now, the minimum you really need in general is like 0.6.7.
• 24:55
  Philip Pape: It's not nearly that much.
• 24:57
  Philip Pape: But when you're in an aggressive deficit, that's where we need to create a higher floor.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: So the floor I use in the protocol is just one, but I've definitely seen people be more successful jacking that up.
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: Okay, jacking that up.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: It helps with satiety and all the other things as well.
• 25:10
  Philip Pape: And it really does move the needle on body composition for some people in a in a surprising way.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: Now, remember earlier I mentioned the difference between those two groups with the aggressive versus not aggressive, and they were their metabolism dropped faster in the more aggressive group.
• 25:27
  Philip Pape: Well, in that study, the problem is the rapid groups were usually they didn't have very high protein, and in many cases, they weren't lifting weight, lifting weights.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: So of course they're gonna lose muscle.
• 25:38
  Philip Pape: So a lack of protein in training will itself accelerate your drop in metabolism as well.
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: And look, a lot of you when we talk, forget rapid fat loss, just talk about life in general.
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: You get into your 40s, 50s, where like, oh, my metabolism's not what it used to be.
• 25:52
  Philip Pape: That's what's happening.
• 25:53
  Philip Pape: You're losing muscle mass.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: You need more protein as you age, not less, and you probably didn't have much to begin with.
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: You're if you're not even lifting weights, that's the biggest piece of all.
• 26:01
  Philip Pape: That's the biggest piece of all.
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: So whoever you are lifting weights, eating enough, eating enough protein, it solves most of these issues, guys.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: All right, now what about the refeeds and diet breaks?
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: Okay, the the structured higher calorie periods that are in these protocols.
• 26:16
  Philip Pape: Well, I would say the evidence is still mixed.
• 26:18
  Philip Pape: It's really hard to tease things out.
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: There's the famous Matador study where they did the blocks, the intervals that we've talked about.
• 26:25
  Philip Pape: I think it was like two weeks on, two weeks off.
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: And it seems like they had better results, but it could just be an adherence thing.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: We've had studies that compare continuous dieting to dieting with breaks that did not find a difference between fat loss, muscle, metabolic rate.
• 26:41
  Philip Pape: So I think the strongest case for a refeed and why we include them is adherence and the psychology of it, right?
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: Knowing that refeed is coming up in four days, it helps you get through those four days.
• 26:53
  Philip Pape: However, there may be a physiological benefit as well.
• 26:56
  Philip Pape: And this is again where you will have to experiment and see.
• 26:59
  Philip Pape: And this is why you may not need the full maintenance calories.
• 27:02
  Philip Pape: That was my point.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: Like if the only benefit is adherence, then that logic means you don't necessarily have to get fully up to maintenance on those days, right?
• 27:12
  Philip Pape: Because the whole leptin argument that has been debunked.
• 27:14
  Philip Pape: So, where does that leave metabolic adaptation itself in this conversation?
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: Well, it's probably gonna happen, but it's not gonna be that big and it's temporary anyway.
• 27:23
  Philip Pape: So don't worry about it.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: In fact, when I run people through a two or three-week rapid fat loss phase, we're not really even paying attention to what happens to our expenditure during that time because you can't really have that level of precision.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: Even if you are using macrofactor, it's too short of duration, and then you're done with the diet.
• 27:37
  Philip Pape: Well, what can you do with that information?
• 27:39
  Philip Pape: You're not gonna change your calories as a result because you're already doing these big swings anyway, from dieting to refeeds, right?
• 27:44
  Philip Pape: The size of the adaptation on your meta in your metabolism tends to track with the size of the deficit, how much fast you lose, fat you lose, and the duration.
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: But then it's going to bounce back.
• 27:54
  Philip Pape: All of your metabolic rate is gonna come back.
• 27:58
  Philip Pape: And the only change will be if you are lighter on the scale than before the diet, you're gonna burn fewer calories from that.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: But if you have more muscle, you'll burn more calories from that.
• 28:07
  Philip Pape: So I would use the smallest deficit that gets you the loss that you want.
• 28:13
  Philip Pape: But then in this case, what we're talking about today is that deficit being extremely high, but for a short duration for those who have trouble, sticking with a longer, slow diet.
• 28:24
  Philip Pape: That's really what I'm talking about.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: So, who is this for?
• 28:27
  Philip Pape: And who isn't it for?
• 28:28
  Philip Pape: This is very important.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: And as always, I like to be direct here.
• 28:32
  Philip Pape: So knowing that this protocol exists and works in a certain context is different from you should do it, because I know everybody listening, especially if you've heard this for the first time, you're hearing this for the first time, you're like, oh my God, I didn't know this exists.
• 28:43
  Philip Pape: I don't want to do a crash diet, but yeah, I would love to do this rapid fat loss phase.
• 28:47
  Philip Pape: I can drop like five pounds of fat.
• 28:48
  Philip Pape: Let's do it.
• 28:49
  Philip Pape: All right, here we go.
• 28:50
  Philip Pape: So I think this is ideal if, for example, you carry a lot of body fat to start with.
• 28:55
  Philip Pape: So it's kind of like you have fuel in your body already.
• 28:57
  Philip Pape: I think it's great.
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: If you are, you know, quite overweight or even obese, perfect.
• 29:01
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: I would say if you have a deadline, an event, a trip, a specific date, and you're just trying to do a quick cut for that, as much as I cringe a little bit on time-based constraints for these things, for some people, they're like, okay, I have the day, I might as well do it the right way.
• 29:18
  Philip Pape: And assuming you've already done proper, set up your nutrition properly ahead of time and you've been training, go for it.
• 29:26
  Philip Pape: Don't do it though if you've never done a fat loss before phase before and you haven't done all the things you're supposed to do for a fat loss phase, like strength training.
• 29:33
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 29:33
  Philip Pape: If you know yourself well enough that longer diets are really hard, but you actually can do really well for a short duration aggressively and be disciplined and all that, you could be this could be perfect for you.
• 29:43
  Philip Pape: A short block, clear finish line to you might be more sustainable, right?
• 29:48
  Philip Pape: Over the macro period, like over the months, over the years, to have those short bursts in there.
• 29:53
  Philip Pape: And I think the research backs it up.
• 29:55
  Philip Pape: There's actually a study I found by Purcell in 2014 that was kind of counterintuitive.
• 30:00
  Philip Pape: People losing weight rapidly were more likely to hit their target and less likely to drop out than a slow group.
• 30:06
  Philip Pape: And it's because of this psychology of humans love to go after things and like to have events and goals.
• 30:12
  Philip Pape: A clear, fast, defined push toward this goal, it kept more people in the game.
• 30:16
  Philip Pape: And that finish line is motivating, right?
• 30:18
  Philip Pape: So that's not just me theorizing about psychology that we do have evidence for this.
• 30:22
  Philip Pape: And then one more thing on the rate of loss, where coat guys like Brandon DeCruz talk about this a lot.
• 30:27
  Philip Pape: The right rate of loss is not even necessarily fixed across a single cut.
• 30:32
  Philip Pape: Now, a rapid fat loss phase is so short, you're not even worried about the rate of loss.
• 30:38
  Philip Pape: You're just setting up the deficit and doing it and you're done.
• 30:41
  Philip Pape: But if we're talking a little longer, like a mini cut or longer, you don't have to stick to the same thing the whole time.
• 30:49
  Philip Pape: We're gonna touch on this again in the end of the episode because this is where I think people don't think out of the box, and we should, and it would make things easier.
• 30:57
  Philip Pape: Also, though, you should not do an aggressive cut.
• 31:00
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 31:00
  Philip Pape: This is so this is the this is who it's not for.
• 31:02
  Philip Pape: You should not do an aggressive cut or rapid fat loss phase if you have any history of disordered eating, period.
• 31:08
  Philip Pape: Not worth worth the risk.
• 31:09
  Philip Pape: Not worth the risk.
• 31:10
  Philip Pape: I just had a call with somebody yesterday who has a history of very low calorie binge restricted cycles.
• 31:15
  Philip Pape: She's actually in a muscle building phase, which is awesome.
• 31:18
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 31:18
  Philip Pape: And I said, let's let's crank that out for like six months.
• 31:21
  Philip Pape: And then when you're ready for a fat loss phase, we're gonna do it very moderate and we're not gonna do it for that long.
• 31:26
  Philip Pape: And I said, who cares if it's like five pounds?
• 31:29
  Philip Pape: It will prove to yourself you can do this in a sustainable way.
• 31:31
  Philip Pape: So that's a different situation.
• 31:32
  Philip Pape: She's not gonna do rapid fat loss.
• 31:34
  Philip Pape: I would never recommend it.
• 31:35
  Philip Pape: If you're already pretty lean, it's hard as well because I think you have a higher risk of muscle loss.
• 31:40
  Philip Pape: If you cannot or will not hit that protein level while you're lifting hard, obviously you got to do that.
• 31:45
  Philip Pape: It's probably not for you.
• 31:46
  Philip Pape: In other words, you if you already struggle to hit your protein not on a diet, you're not ready.
• 31:51
  Philip Pape: You've got to get there.
• 31:52
  Philip Pape: You have to be ready for it and go to maintenance and successfully build those skills, right?
• 31:58
  Philip Pape: That's something we do and eat more lift heavy.
• 31:59
  Philip Pape: Just to throw my program out there is build that skill, those skills of each of those things.
• 32:04
  Philip Pape: How do we track?
• 32:05
  Philip Pape: How do we eat our protein?
• 32:06
  Philip Pape: How do we solve all the problems in our own lives first?
• 32:10
  Philip Pape: And then we can go to fat loss, whether it's rapid or not.
• 32:12
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're a lady, if you're a woman in perimenopause and menopause, a lot of you listening, you're over 40.
• 32:17
  Philip Pape: I would say for some, the downside risk is higher.
• 32:20
  Philip Pape: And for others, this is exactly ideal.
• 32:23
  Philip Pape: It's really individualistic.
• 32:25
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 32:25
  Philip Pape: When you're concerned about things like bone density and energy availability and stress and holding on to estrogen with lower or holding on to muscle with lower estrogen, all that stuff.
• 32:36
  Philip Pape: As long as you are lifting consistently and with the proper effort and volume, and you can hit the protein like we've already talked about, and you're the type of person who's not really super responsive to longer diets, give it a shot.
• 32:48
  Philip Pape: Why not?
• 32:48
  Philip Pape: Like go for it.
• 32:50
  Philip Pape: However, pushing energy too low is probably gonna have an impact on your hormones, like thyroid output, on your recovery, your sleep, your mood, your cycle.
• 32:58
  Philip Pape: And it happens very fast.
• 33:00
  Philip Pape: So my honest position is be very careful about setting yourself up for success during this, following the protocol the way it's supposed to be, doing the prerequisites.
• 33:10
  Philip Pape: Don't be be honest with yourself that you are ready for it.
• 33:14
  Philip Pape: But it could be a great tool.
• 33:15
  Philip Pape: So the difference between a proper aggressive fat loss phase, rapid fat loss phase that works well is really in this level of precision, monitoring, protein, training, and then just watching how it works for you and tracking whatever you can so that next time you do it, you know what things you want to adjust.
• 33:35
  Philip Pape: Should I go higher on the protein?
• 33:36
  Philip Pape: Should I add another refeed?
• 33:38
  Philip Pape: Should I go shorter or longer?
• 33:39
  Philip Pape: Should I go more aggressive with the deficit, et cetera?
• 33:41
  Philip Pape: So to put the whole thing together, slow and moderate is still the right default for the vast majority of you here.
• 33:47
  Philip Pape: I would say 80%, 90% of the time.
• 33:50
  Philip Pape: Another 10% are probably better off with mini cuts.
• 33:52
  Philip Pape: And then maybe 5% of you, 10% of you are good with these rapid fat loss phases, just as a default.
• 33:58
  Philip Pape: Anybody can do the rapid fat loss phase or experiment with it, of course.
• 34:01
  Philip Pape: But listen through this episode again and go download my guide and just walk through the protocol.
• 34:07
  Philip Pape: Wits and weights.com slash free or use the link in the show notes.
• 34:10
  Philip Pape: Get the rapid fat loss guide.
• 34:11
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 34:12
  Philip Pape: So before we wrap up, I promised you a rule for setting your rate of loss that's out of the box that's going to help you out.
• 34:18
  Philip Pape: And again, the resource today is a rapid fat loss guide.
• 34:21
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash free.
• 34:23
  Philip Pape: Get the link in the show notes.
• 34:25
  Philip Pape: If you need more help than that, reach out, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com and see how we can help you develop the skills needed to get ready for successful fat loss, whether it's done this way or not.
• 34:35
  Philip Pape: That's eatmorliftheavy.com.
• 34:37
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 34:38
  Philip Pape: Here is what I call the descending deficit.
• 34:40
  Philip Pape: And it's something that I stumbled across randomly while working with clients and doing it for myself.
• 34:45
  Philip Pape: And then I noticed folks like Brandon DeCruz and others talking about this.
• 34:49
  Philip Pape: And it is stop picking just one rate of loss and trying to hold it the whole way.
• 34:55
  Philip Pape: Instead, plan out a very, very aggressive rate of loss that then titrates down as you go.
• 35:02
  Philip Pape: Because what's good, what it's going to do, it's going to feel like you're actually eating more food because you are eating more food as you go into the diet, which sounds counterintuitive, but it actually makes a lot of sense.
• 35:13
  Philip Pape: Because at the start of a cut, your motivation's super high.
• 35:16
  Philip Pape: You don't have any diet fatigue.
• 35:17
  Philip Pape: You're carrying the most fat you're going to carry for the phase.
• 35:20
  Philip Pape: Your muscles at the lowest risk it will be for muscle loss.
• 35:23
  Philip Pape: That's when you can push.
• 35:24
  Philip Pape: That's when you can jack it up to say 1% of your body weight a week.
• 35:27
  Philip Pape: Or for some of you that are larger, even more than that.
• 35:30
  Philip Pape: And then as you get leaner and the fatigue starts to build, you ease it off down to 0.75, down to half a percent a week as you're getting lean.
• 35:37
  Philip Pape: Now, these are for longer diets, maybe not a it's not for the rapid fat loss phase, but it's an little tip that I think is super helpful if you're planning a longer diet.
• 35:45
  Philip Pape: It's fat, you're doing it faster when it's easy, when it's safer, slower, when it gets harder and risky.
• 35:50
  Philip Pape: And then you actually, you know, you're eating more food as you go.
• 35:53
  Philip Pape: You're actually increasing the calories up into a smaller deficit.
• 35:56
  Philip Pape: And it's interesting, right?
• 35:57
  Philip Pape: Psychologically.
• 35:59
  Philip Pape: A lot of people do the opposite.
• 36:00
  Philip Pape: They start kind of cautious, they dip their foot in, they're like, I'm gonna go with a moderate deficit because I've heard I need to hold onto my muscle.
• 36:06
  Philip Pape: And then they just kind of like barely get going, right?
• 36:10
  Philip Pape: And then they start to get tired.
• 36:12
  Philip Pape: And, you know, then you try to get more aggressive because you're making up for it, but now you're getting more metabolic adaptation and more diaphysic.
• 36:19
  Philip Pape: It's the wrong way to do it.
• 36:20
  Philip Pape: So try very aggressive and taper off to less aggressive.
• 36:23
  Philip Pape: And by the way, when you start very aggressive, if you find that you can stay there for a little bit longer, go for it, right?
• 36:27
  Philip Pape: It'll kind of tell you where your limits are.
• 36:29
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 36:32
  Philip Pape: And remember, the right speed for fat loss isn't slow or fast.
• 36:36
  Philip Pape: It's the one that matches what you're capable of to stick to it and get the result.
• 36:41
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.