Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / 5 Nutrition Mistakes That Kill Body Recomp (Calories vs. Macros vs. Micronutrients) | Ep 413

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5 Nutrition Mistakes That Kill Body Recomp (Calories vs. Macros vs. Micronutrients) | Ep 413 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: Most people build their nutrition from the top down.
• 0:04
  Philip Pape: Calories first, then macros, maybe micronutrients as an afterthought.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: That approach breaks when your goal is body recomposition.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: You might hit your calorie targets, you might dial in your protein, macros might be on point, but if you're hungry, if your training feels flat, if the mirror isn't changing, something is obviously off.
• 0:25
  Philip Pape: Today I'm showing you why the traditional nutrition hierarchy is often backward and the five mistakes that prevent successful body recomp before it even begins.
• 0:35
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency.
• 0:52
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and creator of the Fitness Lab app.
• 0:57
  Philip Pape: And today we are going to flip around the nutrition pyramid.
• 1:01
  Philip Pape: You've probably been told that there is a hierarchy where calories are on the bottom, they matter the most, then macros, then everything else.
• 1:09
  Philip Pape: And in fact, I've created pyramids just like this because in many cases they make the point that energy balance, if you're trying to control weight, needs to take precedent, or else the other things aren't going to matter.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: You eat in a deficit to lose fat, and then you hit your protein, and the rest of it is less important.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: The problem is what I find people doing when they take that as approach is they go to an extreme.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: And then when they're trying to lose fat and they're trying to build and hold on to their muscle, there's cracks in the model because they are not looking ahead to the other things that are actually more important in the moment.
• 1:44
  Philip Pape: Like, hey, my hunger signals are telling me I'm always starving.
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: What is going on, even though I have my calories and macros on point?
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: So even if you are great at tracking, even if you know how to induce a deficit or maintain or surplus, even if you know how to hit and maintain consistent protein, and yet your body doesn't cooperate or you feel weak in the gym or you're always hungry or your recovery isn't great.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: And then week after week, month after month, things aren't changing the way you expect.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: From a nutrition standpoint, as it impacts your physical results, something is going wrong in that process.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: And that's because your physiology is complicated and it has to be equipped to handle what you are trying to do, your specific goal, which your goal is not weight loss.
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: Your goal is fat loss, building muscle, improving your health, improving all of these things at the same time.
• 2:34
  Philip Pape: And your physiology runs on nutrition, aka micronutrients first, then macros, and then calories.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna explain why today, why that's a different way to think about it.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: It doesn't necessarily up-end the traditional pyramid, but it's complementary to it, or it's a different angle on the same thing that might be more helpful to people.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: So today I'm gonna break down five mistakes that I believe are holding back successful body recomposition, not to add complexity, but about putting the right thing first if you're the type that is struggling when you've tried the traditional approach.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: So, mistake number one is thinking that calories and macros matter more than micronutrients, because after all, they're in the bottom of most of these pyramids.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: Let me start with constraint theory.
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: This is from engineering, and I talk about it all the time in the context of figuring out your root cause.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: In any system, performance is going to be limited by the narrowest bottleneck, right?
• 3:35
  Philip Pape: If you optimize everything downstream of that bottleneck, but haven't addressed the constraint, nothing improves.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: And in fact, you put a lot of effort and work into something for it not to improve, which is even more frustrating.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: Or then you put up your hands and say, this doesn't work, and that's not really the reason why it's not working.
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: And so most people approach nutrition what I'll call top-down.
• 3:55
  Philip Pape: You know, you've listened to podcasts, you've read all the great books, you follow great evidence-based people like I do, and then you conclude, okay, I need to figure out calories for my goal.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: Am I trying to lose weight, maintain, gain?
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: Then I need to set my macros to balance everything out the right way: protein, fats, carbs, and then maybe think about the types of foods and the qualities of food sometimes as an afterthought, because you may have heard people say, well, once you've got your macro, once you're hitting your macros, you're inevitably going to have the right foods.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: Well, this works for a simple weight loss approach, but body recomposition, you know, trying to lose fat, trying to build muscle, whether you're doing it at the same time or over the long term with cuts and bulks, there are a lot more needs and demands that you have to understand metabolically for the most part.
• 4:45
  Philip Pape: But that also includes things like hormones.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: You're asking your body to do two things at once.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: You're asking it to release stored energy, but you're also trying to keep it strong and build or maintain muscle.
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: And they're they're kind of, I'm not gonna say they're contradictory, right?
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: Because we do do both at the same time, but you have to understand how it all works.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: Building muscle, of course, requires protein synthesis.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: This is at the crux of both why we strength train, but also why we focus so much on protein when we are losing weight so that we can hold on to that muscle.
• 5:17
  Philip Pape: Losing fat specifically requires efficient energy metabolism, right?
• 5:22
  Philip Pape: Is what the way the word I like to use.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: It's not just weight loss.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: Recovering from training requires that you repair your at the cellular level, right?
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: You have to repair your tissue and recover.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: All of this actually depends heavily on your micronutrients, your B vitamins, your magnesium, zinc, iron, manganese, copper, and dozens of others.
• 5:43
  Philip Pape: Without them, your body can't run the biochemical pathways needed for recomp or do them efficiently, even when macros are quote unquote perfect.
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: So micronutrients are determining how you feel, regardless of your body weight.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: You might lose some fat and you might gain some muscle, but if you feel terrible, if you are exhausted, if you're irritable, mood swings, bloated, weak, constantly hungry, your biochemical foundation isn't there.
• 6:13
  Philip Pape: And I see this at all different types of goals.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: In other words, I even if someone's in a muscle-building phase with a surplus, just because they're eating enough food doesn't mean they have enough micronutrients.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: When that foundation is missing, then the adherence is the first thing to go.
• 6:29
  Philip Pape: That is where you quit or you binge or you program hop.
• 6:32
  Philip Pape: It's not because you lack discipline, but because your body is fighting you because you're not giving it what it needs.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: So if we were to flip this around and have a bottom-up model, not a reprioritization, understand, but it but ensuring that each of these blocks are accounted for, I think you have a higher chance of being successful.
• 6:52
  Philip Pape: So, what does that look like?
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: Micronutrients first, build that biochemical operating system, making sure you actually have them in there, because otherwise a lot of the other things are gonna hit a wall fast.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: Then your macros, you're gonna fuel your system with the right protein, carbs, and fats, and then your calories, using energy balance to drive the fat loss or muscle gain.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: And the reason I like it in this order now, where I used to be very dogmatic about saying calories come first, is because everything downstream will work better.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: Your hunger will be better regulated, your training will improve, you'll you'll recover faster, and body recomp becomes easier and more frictionless, frictionless while you still have to understand that calories are at the foundation of energy balance, and then macros are at the foundation of things like muscle protein synthesis and hormones and energy and recovery from a macro basis.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: So let me give you some examples because this could be confusing.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: Your body's ability to turn carbohydrates into usable energy, and by the way, we should be eating our carbs.
• 7:56
  Philip Pape: If you found this podcast for the first time and you're like, why is he talking about carbs?
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: Low carb, right?
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: No.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: Should be eating carbs, requires for your body to use it as energy, it requires B vitamins, magnesium, and manganese.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: That's those are examples.
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: If you're low in these, your body can't efficiently extract the energy from carbs, and that'll make you a little bit sluggish.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: Even if you're eating a lot of carbs, that affects your workouts.
• 8:17
  Philip Pape: And it also affects your cravings because down to the cellular level, mitochondria, right, powerhouse of the cells, you're not getting what you need.
• 8:23
  Philip Pape: Fat, what about fat burning?
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: Fat oxidation.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: Well, you have to have B vitamins and carnitine and coenzyme Q10, right?
• 8:29
  Philip Pape: CoQ10.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: And fat oxidation, you know, is a complicated subject because we're not talking about burning fat in and of itself as being some superior thing.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: We're just talking about your ability to burn fat at all in an efficient way in the context of the energy balance that gives you that deficit.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: Protein synthesis requires zinc, magnesium, vitamin D, and of course protein, but we're talking at the micronutrient level.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: So if you're deficient in some of these, and most people are deficient at least in magnesium and possibly vitamin D, you can eat a ton of protein and still struggle to build muscle as well as you think because your body can't use that muscle, that protein efficiently.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: What about thyroid hormone conversion, T4 to T3?
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: You need selenium, iodine, zinc.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: We all know that, right?
• 9:15
  Philip Pape: Like iodine and selenium come up a lot in thyroid discussions.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: And so low levels of those foods can then affect your thyroid conversion and that tanks your metabolic rate.
• 9:25
  Philip Pape: And then you think you have a thyroid issue when in fact you just have a micronutrient issue, micronutrient issue.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: Even if you're eating plenty of food, okay, that's why it's not just a calorie thing.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: Obviously, if you are under-eating and you can fix that, it gets that variable out of the way.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: But you might have a micronutrient deficiency, which we've seen in the evidence can drop your resting metabolic rate by as many as hundreds of calories a day, where you might think you're in a calorie deficit because you're eating, you know, quite a low amount of food that's not satiating you.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: But if your metabolism is kind of keeping down along with that low eating, then you're actually at maintenance, but you don't feel like it.
• 10:03
  Philip Pape: You feel like crap, right?
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: Like you feel like you're not eating nearly what you should be.
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: And that's why people say, you know, my macros are perfect, but I'm always hungry.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: Or I'm hitting my protein, but I don't feel like I have enough energy in the gym.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: Or I'm eating healthy, but I feel terrible, right?
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: The problem isn't the macros in that case.
• 10:19
  Philip Pape: It's that the body doesn't have the micros to run your, you know, metabolic pathways as efficiently.
• 10:24
  Philip Pape: And I'm not one to fear-monger.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying everybody has just massive nutrient deficiencies, but we've had some folks on the show, like Sarah Ballantine, who do talk about this as super important, right?
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: For things like gut health, microbiome diversity, satiety, how you feel, lots of things in your body doing lots of different things.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: And really, it's about diversity here.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: It's not about having to get a specific food or another, although certain foods are powerhouses of certain nutrients, and it's good to be educated on that.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: So making sure every meal includes at least one micronutrient-dense food as a priority is the way to go here.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: It's it's actually quite simple.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: You know, fruit, vegetables, nuts, legumes, root vegetables, whole grains, dairy, eggs, even organ meats and shellfish.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: You notice it's not just fruits and vegetables, not just plants.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: All of these things have a lot of nutrition.
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: And provide and yes, even red meat.
• 11:18
  Philip Pape: I've I've had people comment on YouTube videos being like, oh, did you know red meat?
• 11:22
  Philip Pape: That causes diabetes.
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: I'm like, where are these people learning their information?
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: Diabetes is caused by excess consumption and obesity, and not by sugar or red meat.
• 11:32
  Philip Pape: So all of these nutrient-dense foods provide the vitamins, the minerals, and things that are not on the label, like phytonutrients, right?
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: These are compounds and plants that your body needs to run efficiently.
• 11:43
  Philip Pape: Your metabolism is affected by these guys.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: So even if it's even if it hits you as, hey, I want to increase my metabolism, it could be a lack of micronutrients that's causing you to have a suppressed metabolism.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: Now, that doesn't mean you can't have flexible foods.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: Notice the list I just gave you was a huge list of foods to begin with.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: It just means you anchor your diet with nutrient density and then build flexibility around that.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: And then you're gonna feed that into, okay, how does that meet my macros and my calories?
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: You see, you see this, you see that why this approach makes a lot of sense.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: So this brings us to make mistake number two.
• 12:16
  Philip Pape: Mistake number two is using flexible dieting, but without nutrient anchors.
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: So, what do I what do I mean by this?
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: Well, I'm a huge proponent of flexible dieting.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: And that's the ability or flexible eating is another way to call it, the ability to fit foods that you love into your plan because that is what makes nutrition sustainable, period.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: Like that one rule is near the top of the list.
• 12:39
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean binging on ultra-processed foods, it means having flexibility and not telling yourself that certain foods are quote unquote bad when they are perfectly fine in some level of moderation or context in your dietary pattern.
• 12:54
  Philip Pape: But flexible dieting only works when you build it on nutrient density.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: And I've had episodes in the past where I compare flexible dieting, if it fits your macros, to a more flexible, flexible approach, if that means, where you're really expanding what this definition means, because most people do it backward.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: They start with, oh, I can eat anything as long as it fits my macros.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: But then they feel terrible, they can't recover, they hit a wall, their hormones, all the things, right?
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: And I would say there are three gaps or three problems with this approach, this macro-centric approach only, that affect fat loss, that affect recomp.
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: The first one is that you're just not getting enough of the nutrients, what we just talked about.
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: The second one is that gut issues or low stomach acid, medications, poor digestion, are preventing some of the absorption of the nutrients you do eat.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: So a lot of people have issues with nutrient absorption.
• 13:47
  Philip Pape: We don't talk about that a lot on the show.
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: And I'm remiss if I don't, as obviously a nutrition coach.
• 13:53
  Philip Pape: And then I'll say the utilization gap is the third gap where the inflammation in your body, and I'm talking about blood marker-based, legitimate inflammation, right?
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: The cellular response of your body to stress, including the stress itself, and toxins, which would be things like, you know, smoking, alcohol, drugs, potentially some environmental toxins, although I don't want to overplay those.
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: Maybe missing cofactors that prevent using the nutrients, even if absorbed.
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: It could be some genetic things as well.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: But anyway, the you know, intake, absorption, and utilization of nutrients.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: And so if you have a flexible diet, but you're not thinking about nutrients, you're gonna have big gaps like this.
• 14:33
  Philip Pape: You might hit your protein using just chicken breast and whey.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: And you might hit your carbs with just white rice and bagels, and you might hit your fats with just butter and cheese, and then hit your macros perfectly.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: And you know what's ironic here or not ironic, but you can take a pizza and make the perfect macro-friendly pizza.
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: But think about how you're gonna feel every time if that's all you ate.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: So micronutrient intake is often very poor in what I see.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: And this is why with my own like one-on-one clients, I get all their data.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: Most of them use macrofactor and all the nutrition data is in there, but maybe use chronometer, maybe track yourself.
• 15:06
  Philip Pape: Doesn't matter.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: The the micronutrient, I will see things that are way lower than they need to be.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: Potassium, magnesium, zinc, B vitamins, fiber.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: I know fiber is a weird one because it's it's a kind of a macro or it's part, it's a type of carb, but I consider it a nutrient as well.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: Polyphenols, you can't really track, but if you have diversity in color, this is why I like, I do like color.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: It sounds like old school, but having enough color on your plate often takes care of some of the polyphenol and compound concerns.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: Everything your body needs to feel good, to perform well, to actually build muscle while losing fat.
• 15:36
  Philip Pape: And by the way, this is why fad diets and restrictive diets, any kind, whether it's vegan and vegetarianism on one hand or carnivore on the other, are really missing out.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: You're really missing out on all this stuff.
• 15:45
  Philip Pape: And to claim that you don't need them is really shameful and honestly dangerous.
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: Because micronutrient status is poor in this kind of diet, your metabolism downregulates from that.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: Your hunger then goes up.
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: You're you have the low energy, you have the poor training.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: You see where I'm going with all this.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: It's a repeated pattern.
• 16:03
  Philip Pape: And then you might be craving more of that.
• 16:05
  Philip Pape: We'll just call it junk food, but you know what I mean, ultra-processed foods, because your body is literally starving for nutrients, even though you're eating enough calories.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: So you just go for whatever you can to make up that difference.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: So the paradox of flexible dieting done incorrectly is that you could be overfed on calories but undernourished down in your body at the at the cell, down to the cellular level.
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: So the solution here is nutrient anchors.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: A nutrient anchor.
• 16:31
  Philip Pape: And I by the way, I think I learned this from this phrase, I think I'm taking it from Vitality Blueprint.
• 16:37
  Philip Pape: They're the the company I partner with for performance blood work.
• 16:40
  Philip Pape: I think they, I think the they've used this phrase.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: Okay, but I've also used anchors before in terms of like protein and fiber anchors.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: But this is a nutrient anchor, a high-quality micronutrient dense food that you have in most of your meals.
• 16:52
  Philip Pape: So even if the rest of your diet is flexible, you're always hitting your micronutrient needs and you're kind of rotating through these.
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: So this is actually pretty simple, and a lot of what you want to eat anyway is gonna mat is gonna satisfy you.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: So, for example, Greek yogurt instead of a low-fat processed form of dairy, or potatoes instead of rice cakes, or legumes instead of protein bars, right?
• 17:14
  Philip Pape: Or red meat or eggs instead of only chicken breasts, or fruit instead of some other dessert.
• 17:20
  Philip Pape: Now, some of these swaps are a little, I'll say harder for folks.
• 17:23
  Philip Pape: So you're going from like a really yummy processed food like ice cream, and I'm telling you to eat fruit.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying all the time.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: I'm just saying think about those kinds of swaps.
• 17:32
  Philip Pape: It's not that the calories or macros change, it's that you're picking something with more nutrients potentially.
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: And anything processed is probably just gonna have fewer nutrients, even if it's quote unquote clean or has quote unquote clean ingredients, like some good protein bar that you like.
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: Okay, I get the convenience, but just remember the more that you have, the less you're gonna have of the micros.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: So protein fat carbs are often checked off, but then where are the vitamins, the minerals, the fiber?
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 17:58
  Philip Pape: So it this is not about cutting things out.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: Do you see?
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: This is really anchoring and being intentional.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: So, what is what does a meal plan for this look like?
• 18:06
  Philip Pape: Well, simple breakfast, Greek yogurt, berries, granola, maybe oatmeal, maybe eggs with egg whites.
• 18:12
  Philip Pape: A lot of options there.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: Lunch, a burrito bowl with rice, beans, chicken, veggies, cheese.
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: Snack could be an apple with peanut butter.
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: Simple.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: I love apples for fiber.
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: That's your anchor.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: Dinner, steak, roasted potatoes, a salad, right?
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: Again, you got your potatoes, your salad, your fiber, maybe, maybe a some sort of cruciferous vegetable.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: Dessert, whatever fits your macros.
• 18:33
  Philip Pape: Ah, see what I did there.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: That's the flexibility.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: So you're getting nutrient density at every meal, but you still have flexibility.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: You don't have to eat bland food like chicken and broccoli.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: I mean, chicken and broccoli can be delicious.
• 18:44
  Philip Pape: I don't mean to criticize those specifically.
• 18:47
  Philip Pape: You're not eliminating food groups.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: You are making sure the foundation is there, and then flexible dieting works so beautifully.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: Then you feel good, then you recover well and train well, and the body recomp becomes easier because your body has what it needs.
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: All right, before we get into mistake number three, I want to tell you about something that I think will make this entire process easier because everything we're discussing today micros, macros, training performance, biofeedback, it all comes together in one place, and that is my new app, Fitness Lab.
• 19:15
  Philip Pape: Fitness Lab is an AI-powered fitness coaching app.
• 19:19
  Philip Pape: But, guys, it's nothing like you've seen before when it comes to AI because it is trained on all my podcast content, coaching.
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: And yes, even my personality, I've given a lot of guidance on how to convey things and how to be compassionate and empathetic.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: If you can believe that or not, AI is able to do that.
• 19:35
  Philip Pape: It's now available on iPhone.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: And if if it's not already, shortly it'll be out on Android and it's gonna have full Apple Health integration on iPhone.
• 19:45
  Philip Pape: It's like having a coach in your pocket who understands this nutrition model based on micros, macros, and calories.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: It doesn't just tell you eat less or track your macros, it's a lot more intuitive and nuanced and helps you.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: Build a system.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: It'll look at your specific meals and look for color and micros and fiber and balance and calories.
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: It looks for all these things and gives you feedback so you can nudge your diet in the right direction.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: And as we continue to integrate with Apple Health, it'll be able to pull in things like your sleep metrics and even your nutrition metrics if you use another logger like my macrofactor or my fitness pal.
• 20:20
  Philip Pape: You get conversational coaching.
• 20:23
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• 20:25
  Philip Pape: People are writing in saying, I can't believe it like understands me and can answer my questions.
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: It's like I'm talking to you, Philip.
• 20:32
  Philip Pape: It gives you analysis of your meal patterns.
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: What are you missing nutrient-wise?
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: Training guidance.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: It could either give you your program and form checks, or it can help you reflect on a program that you're already following.
• 20:44
  Philip Pape: So all of this stuff, it's so adaptable and it evolves every day.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: You can tell it what you'd like it to focus on or not, and it will follow that.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: Right now, through the end of the year, you can get 20% off with our holiday promotion.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: Now, I think this episode comes out a couple days before December 17th, in which case I'm gonna include a link in the show note to give all my listeners early access to 20% off.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: It's a different link, it's a secret link I have, but it's the same result.
• 21:09
  Philip Pape: 20% off your subscription to the app.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: All you have to do is click the link in the show notes.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: Don't go to the app store and look for it.
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: Use the special link in the show notes to claim that, get the discount.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: That link will help you walk through a two-minute quiz.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: It'll create a custom plan before you ever pay or do anything to understand if it's right for you.
• 21:29
  Philip Pape: And then you can jump in.
• 21:30
  Philip Pape: And then there's even a refund period.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: So, guys, there's no risk at all.
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: Go to with no, go to the link in the show notes to claim that.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: All right, let's talk about mistake number three, which is mismanaging fiber and gut health.
• 21:42
  Philip Pape: Okay, fiber deserves its own category because too little of it is a big problem.
• 21:48
  Philip Pape: And too much of it can be a problem as well.
• 21:50
  Philip Pape: Most people don't have that issue.
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: I know people who eat a lot of fiber and it just is not too much.
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: So I don't worry about that as much.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: Kind of like with protein, you can almost never have too much.
• 21:59
  Philip Pape: You can definitely have too little, and that's the usual issue, especially if you're on something like carnivore, then you're not getting any at all and you're somehow believing the claims, the false claims that somehow you don't need fiber.
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: And you're gonna pay for that, you know, later on.
• 22:12
  Philip Pape: You're not paying for it this month or next year, but you're gonna pay for it.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: So if you're eating as little as, say, five to 15 grams of fiber, which is shockingly common among this community, even people that lift weights, who are eating lots of protein and focusing on this stuff, you're still not getting enough fiber.
• 22:30
  Philip Pape: I know this for a fact because almost every client that comes in with me, they could have everything else dialed in and still, they don't have enough fiber.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: And you're gonna have issues.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: You're gonna have potentially poor digestion.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: So if you already do have poor digestion and you add a bunch of fiber and you might find that that takes care of the issue.
• 22:44
  Philip Pape: You might have a lot of hunger that you shouldn't have because a little more fiber will make you a lot fuller at your maintenance calories.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: You might have some issues with blood sugar because you're not balancing your meals, so you get all the energy crashes from blood sugar.
• 22:56
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying you need to wear a continuous glucose monitor and keep blood sugar from spiking.
• 23:01
  Philip Pape: No, blood sugar spikes are normal.
• 23:03
  Philip Pape: It's the crashes that happen because you have in unbalanced meals that then cause your energy to energy to fluctuate and make you crave food.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: Okay, and that's really the issue.
• 23:15
  Philip Pape: And then you eat too many calories.
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: On the other hand, if you massively ramp up your fiber because you were low and you went from 10 to 60 grams of fiber with like the wheat starch breads or psyllium husk supplements or something, metamusle, something like that, be careful.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: You might have bloat gas, you might reduce absorption of key minerals.
• 23:35
  Philip Pape: And I sometimes people come see see people complain who've gone from a low carb or carnivore type diet, and then they add in all this fiber, like, oh, I felt horrible.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: It's just all and they did it for like three days, you know?
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: Guys, you've got to let your body adapt.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: You're changing a lot of things physiologically and in your gut.
• 23:51
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 23:51
  Philip Pape: Fiber is so critical.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: Research shows that phytic acid, which is found in high fiber foods like whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, that can reduce magnesium absorption by half.
• 24:03
  Philip Pape: So if you're already low in magnesium and then you eat a ton of fibers, you could make the deficiency worse.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: So this is why I say not to jump up so much in fiber.
• 24:12
  Philip Pape: And this is also some of the critic, the critique of like, oh, too much fiber is bad.
• 24:16
  Philip Pape: No, too much fiber is not bad.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: It's you need fiber and you need other things.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: So when you go from a standard American diet or a Western style diet to quote unquote clean eating overnight, you could feel issues, to be honest.
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: Like you start pounding oatmeal and brown rice and whole wheat bread and beans and vegetables, which are quote unquote healthier, but then your gut isn't ready.
• 24:36
  Philip Pape: And that's where the bloat, the lack, the discomfort, the nutrient depletion comes from.
• 24:40
  Philip Pape: So take that in mind.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: That's that's the reasonable, nuanced approach.
• 24:44
  Philip Pape: For most people, 20 to 30 grams a day is the sweet spot.
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: Women need a little less, men need a little more, but it's really based on your size and how much you're eating.
• 24:51
  Philip Pape: It's enough to support digestion, stable blood sugars, satiety, gut health.
• 24:56
  Philip Pape: Those are the big buckets.
• 24:57
  Philip Pape: And it's not so much that it causes bloating or mineral malabsorption.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: Now, I know people that eat 60 or 70, but they've gotten adapted to it.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: Somebody that really loves apples, you know who you are.
• 25:06
  Philip Pape: She will know who I am.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: And there's nothing wrong with that.
• 25:10
  Philip Pape: It's fine if you can handle that.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: So increase it gradually.
• 25:13
  Philip Pape: If you're at 10 now, you know, add five grams next week every day, and then five a day again, and just get up there.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: And then the other key here really is getting it from food and getting it from variety, diverse foods.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: Don't just eat the same high fiber foods every day.
• 25:27
  Philip Pape: Mix it up.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: Different fibers feed different gut bacteria.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: Different plant foods have different polyphenols and phytonutrients.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: So there's a really cool framework that you may have heard of called the 721 rule.
• 25:41
  Philip Pape: It's seven plant colors a week, two seafood servings a week, and one organ meat or nutrient-dense alternative a week.
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: So the colors are just all the different colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, so that you get your phytonutrients.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: The seafoods would be for omega-3s.
• 25:57
  Philip Pape: So I know a lot of you are taking a fish oil, but really having both, you know, having those fattier fish like salmon, uh, it's a great idea.
• 26:04
  Philip Pape: Selenium, iodine, zinc.
• 26:05
  Philip Pape: You can look up which foods are high in those.
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: If you eat shellfish and things like that, it's great.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: And then the one organ meat or nutrient-dense alternative, you know, like liver, but a lot of people don't like it.
• 26:15
  Philip Pape: I would say chicken liver is milder than beef liver, but have but eggs, shellfish, fortified dairy are all in that category too.
• 26:22
  Philip Pape: And that's very common for people looking at protein anyway, right?
• 26:26
  Philip Pape: So it's it's that rotation of foods that covers your bases.
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: And when you get this right, when you're in that 20 to 30 gram range and you have a lot of variety, you're probably gonna find things improve.
• 26:36
  Philip Pape: You're gonna have better hunger, better blood sugar, better digestion, and you're just gonna feel better, which then impacts mistake number four, which is macros, macro targets that don't support your training performance.
• 26:53
  Philip Pape: All right, so this is setting macros that look good on paper because you're following some rubric, including ones that I might share as like a starting point, but then they're not optimal for you and your performance.
• 27:05
  Philip Pape: And that's frustrating, right?
• 27:07
  Philip Pape: Because a client will tell me, hey, I'm hitting my macros, my protein's high, my calories are where they need to be, but I don't feel great in the gym.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: I don't have energy.
• 27:15
  Philip Pape: I'm losing reps.
• 27:16
  Philip Pape: I I don't, you know, I can't recover as well.
• 27:18
  Philip Pape: I'm feeling sore.
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: And then when I dig into it, I'll I say, okay, you know what?
• 27:22
  Philip Pape: You are hitting your macros very consistently, but it's really not best for you right now.
• 27:27
  Philip Pape: We're gonna need to tweak them.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: And that that's where the self-experimentation and the biofeedback are so important because it isn't, it is, even if it were just about macros, it still has to be the right macros for you.
• 27:38
  Philip Pape: Makes sense, right?
• 27:39
  Philip Pape: Body recomp is highly dependent on your training.
• 27:42
  Philip Pape: You can't lose fat and build muscle without good high-quality training.
• 27:46
  Philip Pape: And that requires energy.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: Yes, energy.
• 27:49
  Philip Pape: We we just don't talk about this enough for whatever reason.
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: I'm not talking about just calories, although that's important, but even in a fat loss phase where you're in a deficit, you could still optimize your energy.
• 28:01
  Philip Pape: And I'm talking about ATP here.
• 28:03
  Philip Pape: That's the molecule your muscles use to contract adenosine triphosphate, triphosphate, ATP.
• 28:09
  Philip Pape: You can't efficiently create ATP without micronutrients.
• 28:13
  Philip Pape: Oh, okay.
• 28:14
  Philip Pape: So here's the pattern.
• 28:15
  Philip Pape: We're getting back to pat to mistake number one: B vitamins, magnesium, manganese, iron, copper, alpha lipoic acid.
• 28:22
  Philip Pape: You don't, again, you don't have to like be a nutrition scientist.
• 28:26
  Philip Pape: It's just understanding that without the right micronutrients, your body will struggle to turn the food into usable energy, and that impacts your training, right?
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: That's where you can't hit the reps and you feel like you can't progress, you can't push hard enough to create the stimulus, you feel tired in the gym.
• 28:41
  Philip Pape: And then if you're not creating that stimulus, you're not building muscle.
• 28:44
  Philip Pape: If you're not building muscle, then you're just potentially losing weight and not, or you know, best case, holding on to your muscle and never quite able to add more and defeats the whole purpose.
• 28:53
  Philip Pape: And you just feel stuck.
• 28:54
  Philip Pape: And that's why people say, hey, my macros are perfect, but X, you know, I feel weak or whatever the thing is they feel.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: So that's the bottleneck, right?
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: If training performance is the thing that really pushes the muscle side of the equation, macronutrients are important and we want to fix that.
• 29:11
  Philip Pape: So make sure, first of all, that you're not just hitting protein, carbs, and fats in isolation, that the foods you choose are nutrient-dense.
• 29:18
  Philip Pape: We've already discussed this a lot today.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: But to break it down by macro, for protein, you want to have a good variety: eggs, red meat, fatty fish, Greek yogurt, not just chicken, breast, and whey.
• 29:29
  Philip Pape: And for those of you who are somehow against red meat or pork or something like that, just for health reasons, okay, I'm taking off the table value-based reasons, the food supply, factory farming, all those moral and ethical issues, because that's outside the scope of what I'm talking about.
• 29:43
  Philip Pape: That's up to you.
• 29:44
  Philip Pape: That's a self-imposed restriction.
• 29:46
  Philip Pape: But from a health perspective, all of these animal products are fantastic, and having a variety of them is great.
• 29:53
  Philip Pape: So, those of you who just eat one type of meat, like chicken breast, heck, try chicken thigh and then expand into some, you know, red meat, turkey, pork, fish, fatty fish, but even white fishes, and then there's Greek yogurt, there's cottage cheese, there's things like that.
• 30:07
  Philip Pape: So that's protein.
• 30:08
  Philip Pape: For carbs, potatoes, love potatoes, fruit, so many fruits.
• 30:12
  Philip Pape: I mean, you could just go to town rotating through all your fruits.
• 30:16
  Philip Pape: Oats, legumes, you know, not just rice, not just bread, quinoa, there's so many things.
• 30:23
  Philip Pape: For fats, oh, there, I mean, pretty much anything you add for a little extra flavor, you know, nuts and seeds, avocado, olive oil, you're probably using with your cooking and through dressings and things like that.
• 30:33
  Philip Pape: Fatty fish, which also checks off the protein, checks off your fats, right?
• 30:37
  Philip Pape: Not just butter and cheese.
• 30:39
  Philip Pape: And I have nothing against butter and cheese.
• 30:40
  Philip Pape: Um, you obviously don't want to be doing bulletproof coffee.
• 30:44
  Philip Pape: Like if you're still doing that, why?
• 30:46
  Philip Pape: You're just consuming tons and tons of saturated fat for no reason whatsoever.
• 30:50
  Philip Pape: It doesn't give you any benefit, and it probably has negatives in terms of risk for cardiovascular disease.
• 30:54
  Philip Pape: And yes, that is well supported by the evidence.
• 30:56
  Philip Pape: So that's the first one.
• 30:57
  Philip Pape: Make sure that the foods you choose, even for the macros, are nutrient dense and have variety.
• 31:04
  Philip Pape: Second, I want you to pay attention to meal timing around your training.
• 31:07
  Philip Pape: This is the big one.
• 31:08
  Philip Pape: For some people, this goes at the top of the list because they are doing pretty well with their food selection, but then they're timing it really poorly.
• 31:16
  Philip Pape: And you don't have to overcomplicate this.
• 31:18
  Philip Pape: If you train fasted or you're on very low carbs and you're always not feeling it, that's probably a signal that your body needs more fuel.
• 31:26
  Philip Pape: Very few people do really well training fasted or on low carbs.
• 31:30
  Philip Pape: That's just the fact of it.
• 31:31
  Philip Pape: Some people might.
• 31:32
  Philip Pape: It's just very rare.
• 31:33
  Philip Pape: And so, a simple pre-workout, my favorite being banana and protein.
• 31:38
  Philip Pape: Banana digests well, it has electrolytes, it's a fruit, has a little bit of fiber, but not too much, lots of nutrients, and then protein, which could be whey protein, could be a food-based protein, depends on how much time you have.
• 31:49
  Philip Pape: It's fine.
• 31:49
  Philip Pape: That can make a massive difference.
• 31:51
  Philip Pape: So that's it for the for the meal timing.
• 31:54
  Philip Pape: Just gonna keep it simple with pre-carbs pre-workout predominantly, even if you can't get the protein.
• 31:58
  Philip Pape: Third, I want you to track your performance in the gym.
• 32:01
  Philip Pape: Are you not doing that, guys?
• 32:02
  Philip Pape: Are you not doing that?
• 32:03
  Philip Pape: If you've listened to the show for a while, you definitely should have already been doing that.
• 32:07
  Philip Pape: Not just your food, but now you have to track your lifts.
• 32:10
  Philip Pape: Are they going up?
• 32:11
  Philip Pape: Are you maintaining reps week to week?
• 32:12
  Philip Pape: Are you hitting your volume targets?
• 32:14
  Philip Pape: Those kinds of things.
• 32:15
  Philip Pape: It doesn't have to be in a spreadsheet form.
• 32:16
  Philip Pape: It could be just the big lifts or the whatever lifts you are focusing on for your program that you are indeed progressing.
• 32:24
  Philip Pape: If performance is dropping, something is off.
• 32:27
  Philip Pape: Nine times out of 10, it's either nutrient nutrient density or recovery, believe it or not.
• 32:34
  Philip Pape: I mean, it's sometimes also the meal timing, like we talked about.
• 32:37
  Philip Pape: And so when you prioritize performance, all these other things we've already talked about on the show today are gonna be important to you because that's you're gonna want to maximize your performance.
• 32:47
  Philip Pape: And, you know, while, yeah, you're gonna lose fat through a calorie deficit, but if you can't train hard enough to create the mechanical tension to hold on to muscle, you're not gonna just lose fat, you're gonna lose muscle.
• 32:57
  Philip Pape: So that's why all this is important.
• 32:58
  Philip Pape: Micronutrients unlock the ability to train hard.
• 33:02
  Philip Pape: Macros fuel the training, and then calories drive the overall outcome.
• 33:07
  Philip Pape: So that's what I mean by bottom up.
• 33:10
  Philip Pape: Even if on a pyramid, calories have the biggest impact, in a sense, when it comes to the outcome, you still need the other things, or the pyramid's gonna be a lot smaller, if that makes sense.
• 33:20
  Philip Pape: All right, let's talk about mistake number five: tracking calories, but ignoring biofeedback.
• 33:28
  Philip Pape: This is a good one.
• 33:29
  Philip Pape: This is a powerful one.
• 33:30
  Philip Pape: I love tracking.
• 33:31
  Philip Pape: I track my own food, I teach clients to track, I tell you guys to track.
• 33:35
  Philip Pape: I now have my own app which tracks in a totally innovative way that works even better when you complement it with your other stuff, especially now that we're gonna be able to pull in data for you guys.
• 33:44
  Philip Pape: Data is incredibly useful, but data without context is useless.
• 33:49
  Philip Pape: Keep that in mind, guys.
• 33:51
  Philip Pape: Data, lots and lots of data is useless without the context to use that data.
• 33:58
  Philip Pape: You can hit your calorie target every single day and still be in a terrible place physiologically if your body is telling you something's wrong.
• 34:05
  Philip Pape: So biofeedback, that's all we mean by that.
• 34:08
  Philip Pape: Bio, biology, feedback is information from your body.
• 34:12
  Philip Pape: Is your robot, it's like your body's report card on whether your nutrition is working.
• 34:17
  Philip Pape: Not just nutrition, but training.
• 34:19
  Philip Pape: But today we're focused on nutrition.
• 34:20
  Philip Pape: So what are those signals?
• 34:21
  Philip Pape: Well, if you're constantly hungry after your meals versus I'm always pretty satisfied, that's a signal.
• 34:28
  Philip Pape: What about digestion?
• 34:29
  Philip Pape: My gut's working fine, or I'm bloated, I'm gassy, I'm constipated, or the opposite problem from constipation that we're not gonna go into graphic detail on.
• 34:40
  Philip Pape: Energy.
• 34:41
  Philip Pape: What about energy?
• 34:42
  Philip Pape: Are you energized throughout the day?
• 34:44
  Philip Pape: Now we all have energy fluxes, or I shouldn't use the word flux in this context.
• 34:48
  Philip Pape: We have energy variation throughout the day, right?
• 34:50
  Philip Pape: Many of us are pretty energized in the morning, not everybody, but some people are dragging by the afternoon.
• 34:55
  Philip Pape: There are going to be subtle differences.
• 34:57
  Philip Pape: The question is to what degree are you lacking energy that you feel you should have?
• 35:02
  Philip Pape: Sleep, oh, huge one.
• 35:03
  Philip Pape: Are you falling asleep easily?
• 35:05
  Philip Pape: Are you staying asleep?
• 35:05
  Philip Pape: Are you waking up a lot during the night?
• 35:07
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 35:07
  Philip Pape: This is more about quality, but of course, quantity matters too.
• 35:10
  Philip Pape: Mood, are you is your mood pretty stable?
• 35:12
  Philip Pape: Are you pretty positive in general?
• 35:13
  Philip Pape: Or are you irritable?
• 35:14
  Philip Pape: You have a lot of anxiety, are you, you know, in a bad mood all the time?
• 35:19
  Philip Pape: And I recognize some of this isn't relative to your, let's say, personality, but I do strongly believe that you can cultivate an optimism bias.
• 35:29
  Philip Pape: You can cultivate a positive psychology by reframing things in a positive way, not delusionally so, but in a what can I do about this?
• 35:38
  Philip Pape: How can we get better and learn from this?
• 35:40
  Philip Pape: Okay, enough about that.
• 35:41
  Philip Pape: What about your libido, your sex drive?
• 35:43
  Philip Pape: Is it there or is it gone?
• 35:45
  Philip Pape: What about your training progression?
• 35:47
  Philip Pape: This is part of biofeedback.
• 35:48
  Philip Pape: You know, are you progressing like we just talked about in the last mistake and maintaining strength or hitting new PRs?
• 35:53
  Philip Pape: Or is it going backward?
• 35:55
  Philip Pape: Are you just stuck?
• 35:56
  Philip Pape: What about your stress response?
• 35:58
  Philip Pape: And I say it that way intentionally, not just stress, period, but your response to stress.
• 36:03
  Philip Pape: How do you handle it?
• 36:04
  Philip Pape: How do you perceive it?
• 36:06
  Philip Pape: Or are you overwhelmed by everything?
• 36:08
  Philip Pape: What about fluid retention?
• 36:10
  Philip Pape: I don't talk about that as much.
• 36:11
  Philip Pape: I do talk about hydration, but are you bloated and puffy?
• 36:15
  Philip Pape: Are you like peeing out water in a normal way and retaining it in a normal way?
• 36:20
  Philip Pape: And the urine looks good and your body feels good from a hydration perspective, right?
• 36:24
  Philip Pape: So if all of this is good, your nutrition's probably good.
• 36:28
  Philip Pape: Who cares what the scale's doing?
• 36:29
  Philip Pape: That's a great place to be, from which you can now do the other things.
• 36:34
  Philip Pape: If your biofeedback, on the other hand, is the opposite, it's terrible, something's wrong with your nutrition.
• 36:38
  Philip Pape: And if it's in the middle, it could be a little this, little that, right?
• 36:42
  Philip Pape: Even if you're hitting your calorie target, even if you're hitting your macros.
• 36:46
  Philip Pape: So the the the kicker, as Chat GPT would say, isn't that funny?
• 36:53
  Philip Pape: Like, we used to say, here's the kicker, like as a just colloquialism.
• 36:57
  Philip Pape: And now I feel like that's one of those things that you know AI would just say.
• 37:02
  Philip Pape: Micronutrient deficiencies will reveal themselves in your biofeedback pretty quickly, even before they show up in, let's say, blood work, which is which is important too, because a lot of you are like, well, I got my labs and magnesium looks good, but this stuff fluctuates all the time.
• 37:18
  Philip Pape: And, you know, if if your sleep isn't great, your stress response isn't great, you've got muscle cramps, you might have low magnesium, you know, migraines too.
• 37:26
  Philip Pape: Some people have migraines because of low magnesium.
• 37:28
  Philip Pape: Uh low zinc might be a sign where you feel it in, you know, you get getting sick, right?
• 37:33
  Philip Pape: And your skin, your sex drive, your recovery, B vitamins usually affect energy, mood digestion.
• 37:40
  Philip Pape: You get the idea, right?
• 37:41
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna go through all the nutrients today, but it's really important because studies do show that micronutrient insufficiency is a form of metabolic adaptation.
• 37:48
  Philip Pape: Isn't that interesting, right?
• 37:50
  Philip Pape: It's not just that your metabolism slows down because you're dieting, it's because your body is not as efficiently producing energy because it doesn't have those raw materials.
• 38:00
  Philip Pape: And by the way, if you do have good nutrient sufficiency, but then you go into a diet and you cut your calories, you may become nutrient insufficient because your calories are low as well.
• 38:08
  Philip Pape: And you have to be more careful about it.
• 38:10
  Philip Pape: But we look at something like zinc deficiency, that's a big one.
• 38:13
  Philip Pape: It can drop your resting metabolic rate by hundreds of calories per day, right?
• 38:16
  Philip Pape: And and that's just zinc holding you back.
• 38:19
  Philip Pape: Crash dieting itself reduces your metabolic rate by something like 15 or 20% within weeks, and then that just delays your fat loss, right?
• 38:28
  Philip Pape: That that's more on the calorie side, but it's worth mentioning.
• 38:31
  Philip Pape: And this is why I like the bottom-up nutrition approach when we're thinking of body recomposition and we're gonna do fat, use fat loss phases and set ourselves up for success to limit how much your metabolism downregulates, even when your calorie targets, your macro targets are on point.
• 38:46
  Philip Pape: So when it comes to biofeedback, you track it just like anything else.
• 38:49
  Philip Pape: Fitness Lab does this for you every day.
• 38:51
  Philip Pape: At the end of the day, you have an evening reflection and it gives you one to 10 rating scales.
• 38:56
  Philip Pape: What I like about those are they're quick, take like 30 seconds, and it will use that data the next day.
• 39:00
  Philip Pape: You get up and it'll say, Hey, I notice a pattern of stress being pretty high.
• 39:06
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna suggest an activity to help you respond better to your stress.
• 39:10
  Philip Pape: Which which one do you want to do?
• 39:11
  Philip Pape: And it'll do things like that.
• 39:12
  Philip Pape: Anyway, that's just a side tangent.
• 39:14
  Philip Pape: You can do it for yourself with a quick mental check in every day.
• 39:16
  Philip Pape: How did I sleep?
• 39:17
  Philip Pape: How's my digestion?
• 39:18
  Philip Pape: What's my energy like?
• 39:19
  Philip Pape: How's my mood?
• 39:20
  Philip Pape: Am I holding extra water?
• 39:21
  Philip Pape: Things like that.
• 39:22
  Philip Pape: You can do it on paper.
• 39:23
  Philip Pape: You can use, we have a tracker in physique university, it does the same thing.
• 39:26
  Philip Pape: And one or two days, no big deal, that's life.
• 39:29
  Philip Pape: But if multiple signals are consistently poor for at least, let's say, a week or more, right?
• 39:35
  Philip Pape: Maybe two weeks or more, something needs to change.
• 39:37
  Philip Pape: Maybe you need more carbs for your training and your sleep and your stress.
• 39:41
  Philip Pape: Maybe you need more fiber for your digestion and your hunger.
• 39:44
  Philip Pape: Maybe you need more nutrient dense foods.
• 39:46
  Philip Pape: You probably do.
• 39:46
  Philip Pape: We all do for every reason we talked about in the show, including energy and your metabolism.
• 39:51
  Philip Pape: Maybe you just need a diet break to get everything back to homeostasis.
• 39:56
  Philip Pape: Listen to your body, guys.
• 39:57
  Philip Pape: It's always giving you real time feedback about.
• 39:59
  Philip Pape: Whether your nutrition is working.
• 40:02
  Philip Pape: So use it.
• 40:03
  Philip Pape: Use it.
• 40:04
  Philip Pape: This is not about weight loss and getting skinny.
• 40:08
  Philip Pape: No.
• 40:08
  Philip Pape: It's about feeling great, performing our best, having a good sex drive, being strong, having muscle, living a long, vibrant life.
• 40:17
  Philip Pape: Isn't it?
• 40:17
  Philip Pape: Isn't it?
• 40:18
  Philip Pape: And so when you have good biofeedback, solid training, smart nutrition management across all three things we talked about today, body recomp is going to happen because now your physiology is super aligned with what you're doing.
• 40:32
  Philip Pape: So we've covered the five mistakes.
• 40:34
  Philip Pape: Now I want to give you a practical framework real quick.
• 40:36
  Philip Pape: You could start using today.
• 40:37
  Philip Pape: I call it the bottom-up recomp plate.
• 40:40
  Philip Pape: This is a nutrition tip.
• 40:41
  Philip Pape: Yes, from me.
• 40:42
  Philip Pape: I know I don't do this a lot.
• 40:43
  Philip Pape: Every meal, every day, includes three things: a micronutrient anchor, a protein anchor, and a carb or fat that supports your training.
• 40:51
  Philip Pape: So the micronutrient anchor, I usually simplify this to just fiber, but I'm expanding that a little today.
• 40:57
  Philip Pape: Anything that brings you vitamins, minerals, fiber, phytonutrients.
• 41:00
  Philip Pape: And so that includes fruits, vegetables, legumes, root vegetables, whole grains, eggs, dairy, nuts, seeds, shellfish.
• 41:06
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 41:07
  Philip Pape: I definitely think a few of those should definitely be fiber focused, but think of it in terms of micronutrients.
• 41:14
  Philip Pape: The protein anchor, animal or high-quality plant protein, if you don't need animal products, eggs, meat, fish, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, tofu, tempeh, legumes, you know the drill.
• 41:23
  Philip Pape: And then a carb or fat that supports your training.
• 41:25
  Philip Pape: Notice I don't say both.
• 41:27
  Philip Pape: In general, if you're focused on hitting macros, you're going to put them in anyway.
• 41:32
  Philip Pape: And so this is again more of the type you select.
• 41:36
  Philip Pape: Is it a starchy carb like potatoes, rice, oats, a fat source like avocado or nuts or olive oil, or both?
• 41:42
  Philip Pape: And that's it.
• 41:43
  Philip Pape: Three components per meal: micronutrient, protein, and carb or fat.
• 41:45
  Philip Pape: It's a framework you can use.
• 41:46
  Philip Pape: Take it or leave it.
• 41:47
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 41:48
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's too much for you right now.
• 41:49
  Philip Pape: Maybe you do it for one meal a day.
• 41:50
  Philip Pape: And then at the weekly level, you kind of want to look back at your food log and ask yourself, did I have enough color?
• 41:57
  Philip Pape: Did I have seafood?
• 41:58
  Philip Pape: And did I have nutrient dense foods?
• 42:00
  Philip Pape: So all the colors, the seven colors, the two seafoods, the one nutrient dense food.
• 42:04
  Philip Pape: Don't overthink it.
• 42:05
  Philip Pape: If you're if you're close enough, that's great.
• 42:07
  Philip Pape: If you're far from it, that gives you data point.
• 42:10
  Philip Pape: So try this for just one week and track your biofeedback alongside it, see how you feel.
• 42:14
  Philip Pape: That's kind of the input output.
• 42:15
  Philip Pape: The input is the plate, the food, the output is the biofeedback.
• 42:19
  Philip Pape: And then I think you're gonna be surprised if you actually take action on this.
• 42:22
  Philip Pape: So let's just recap the five mistakes real quick.
• 42:25
  Philip Pape: Mistake number one, thinking calories and macros matter more than micros.
• 42:28
  Philip Pape: They don't.
• 42:29
  Philip Pape: Micros are the operating system without them.
• 42:32
  Philip Pape: Nothing works as efficiently.
• 42:33
  Philip Pape: Mistake number two, doing flexible dieting without nutrient anchors.
• 42:37
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's not if it fits your macros.
• 42:39
  Philip Pape: You have to have the diversity in the nutrients in there.
• 42:42
  Philip Pape: Mistake number three is mismanaging fiber.
• 42:45
  Philip Pape: Too little is usually the issue, but too much can cause problems, especially if you ramp up.
• 42:49
  Philip Pape: Aim for around 20 to 30 grams per day with tons of variety.
• 42:53
  Philip Pape: Mistake number four, setting macro targets that don't support your training performance.
• 42:58
  Philip Pape: Your training is the engine of all of this.
• 42:59
  Philip Pape: Fuel it properly.
• 43:01
  Philip Pape: Mistake number five is tracking calories but ignoring biofeedback.
• 43:04
  Philip Pape: Your body is giving you tons of amazing real-time feedback that you should be using.
• 43:09
  Philip Pape: So micronutrients, macros, and calories, bottom up.
• 43:12
  Philip Pape: When you do it in that order, everything will become easier.
• 43:15
  Philip Pape: Hunger will be more manageable.
• 43:16
  Philip Pape: Your training should improve.
• 43:17
  Philip Pape: You should have faster recovery and get what you want.
• 43:21
  Philip Pape: If you want to help building this system for yourself without having to think too much about it, with a lot less stress, my app, Fitness Lab, makes it easy.
• 43:29
  Philip Pape: The app walks you through this approach we talked about today.
• 43:31
  Philip Pape: It analyzes your meal patterns.
• 43:33
  Philip Pape: You just upload a photo, that's all you have to do.
• 43:35
  Philip Pape: You don't even have to log it or look it up in a database.
• 43:37
  Philip Pape: Just take a photo and it's gonna identify where you're missing nutrient density.
• 43:42
  Philip Pape: It's also gonna adapt your training based on your biofeedback as well as your nutrition.
• 43:46
  Philip Pape: It's gonna give you conversational coaching that feels like having Coach Phillip in your pocket.
• 43:51
  Philip Pape: It's available now, it's on iPhone, it should be on Android as well.
• 43:56
  Philip Pape: If not, it will be very soon.
• 43:58
  Philip Pape: It should have the Apple Health integration turned on.
• 44:00
  Philip Pape: Again, I'm saying all shoulds because I'm recording these before my surgery, but these are the timelines.
• 44:05
  Philip Pape: So don't hold me to it.
• 44:06
  Philip Pape: But all of these things are gonna be out shortly, if not already.
• 44:09
  Philip Pape: It will be 20% off through the end of the year, starting December 17th through January 2nd.
• 44:14
  Philip Pape: But if you're listening to this before that, use the link in the show notes.
• 44:18
  Philip Pape: It's a secret link to get you the 20% off now ahead of time.
• 44:22
  Philip Pape: And you can take advantage of that.
• 44:24
  Philip Pape: Use the link in the show notes.
• 44:25
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 44:28
  Philip Pape: And remember, build from the bottom up, and your body will cooperate.
• 44:32
  Philip Pape: This is Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.