Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Not Another Thanksgiving Fat Loss Podcast! (Entropy from the Holiday Chaos) | Ep 246

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Not Another Thanksgiving Fat Loss Podcast! (Entropy from the Holiday Chaos) | Ep 246 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: As of this episode, thanksgiving is just one week away and I think the fitness industry is obsessed with giving really bad advice when it comes to the holidays, and it usually involves around tracking or avoiding or using moderation or some other very specific way to maintain perfect control during the holidays, which I think misses the point, because you're going to have chaos whether it's the holiday or not.
• 0:25
  Philip Pape: That's life, and the question is how resilient you are against that.
• 0:28
  Philip Pape: So today we're using an engineering lens to show you why fighting against this type of disorder is what usually backfires, and we're going to show you how to build a system strong enough to handle any amount of holiday chaos, which will then actually accelerate rather than derail your progress.
• 0:43
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique.
• 1:01
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we are using thermodynamics to completely reframe how you think about Thanksgiving nutrition.
• 1:10
  Philip Pape: What the heck am I talking about?
• 1:12
  Philip Pape: Well, in engineering, entropy refers to the natural progression toward disorder in any system.
• 1:19
  Philip Pape: But here's the thing, because well-designed systems can handle temporary spikes in entropy without falling apart, we're not talking about the overall entropy of the universe, where everything is just going to dissolve into nothingness.
• 1:31
  Philip Pape: We're talking about day-to-day entropy, like a skyscraper swaying in high winds or your body maintaining temperature despite extreme weather, and we're going to apply this principle to your holiday nutrition approach.
• 1:45
  Philip Pape: So if you're listening to this a week out from Thanksgiving when it comes out, or in the future leading up to any event, any holiday, any party in fact, where there's a little bit of extra chaos than normal from a food availability perspective, we're gonna talk about the strategy no rigid meal plans, no guilt trips, just a smart system designed to work with reality instead of fighting it.
• 2:10
  Philip Pape: And before we dive in, I just want to say I'm gathering some more questions for our upcoming Q&A episodes, so if you want to submit your question, you can either send a text message in the show notes or reach out to me on Instagram at witsandweights, or just say hello.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: You don't even have to ask a question.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: Just say hey, I love your podcast, or hey, you can do this better in your podcast.
• 2:30
  Philip Pape: Whatever it is, I love to hear from people.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about what most people do during the holidays and why it fails.
• 2:38
  Philip Pape: They approach any holiday, say Thanksgiving, like it's a battle that has to be won, and I hear this a lot of times in the framing right.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: I have a vacation coming up, I have a holiday coming up, what do I do?
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: How do I deal with it?
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: And the premise is that you're trying to maintain some sort of control, and I'm all for being in control of your situation, but there's a level of control we're talking about here that is that's nearing perfection, right?
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: The all or nothing mentality.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: Or even if it's not all or nothing, if, even if it's just hey, I have a plan and I want to keep sticking exactly to it.
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: And so what do I do to do that?
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: Okay, I need to make sure I'm tracking everything I eat, avoiding or including certain foods, stressing about the portions so that the calories don't go haywire, right?
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: And if this sounds familiar to you, then I think that's the approach that is working against you.
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: It comes from a misunderstanding of how a system can work and why we use what we call physique engineering on this program.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: And here's where entropy comes in Entropy E-N-T-R-O-P-Y entropy.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of disorder in a system.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: How much chaos exists in the system?
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: And the second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy always increases over time.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: Always right.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: We fight against this natural tendency.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: It requires massive energy input.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: We're talking on the level of cold fusion, the level of stars, and eventually the system breaks down.
• 4:09
  Philip Pape: So now, this is just an analogy, of course, but think about how this plays out next Thursday, if you're listening to this before Thanksgiving, or just substitute any upcoming holiday or food event, a party, birthday party, heck.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: You start the day determined to track your food, maybe pre-log your meals, maybe front load your protein, maybe save up on some calories.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: And then Aunt Susan brings out her famous pecan pie.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: That wasn't in your plan, or maybe it was, but maybe not quite the amount that you ended up having.
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: Your cousin makes a new stuffing recipe which, by the way, if you have Thanksgiving at my house, you are gonna be blown away, because we make something called the Pape Sausage Stuffing Very simple recipe, but it's full of sausage, it's not bready, it's dense, so good, and it has a lot of fat, it has a lot of calories.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: So you gotta, you know, kinda think about that if you're trying to think about things.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: But anyway, it's super delicious.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: Someone tops off your wine glass when you're not looking.
• 5:07
  Philip Pape: I mean, come on, it happens, you know, maybe throw a little whiskey in your eggnog.
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying we have to imbibe on alcohol, but these things happen in the holidays, right?
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: The more you try to maintain perfect order, the more chaos creeps in until finally the system fails.
• 5:21
  Philip Pape: And you know what I'm talking about.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: You are the system.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: You either end up binge eating and feeling guilty or you become rigid and you can't really enjoy your time because you're trying to make it all work.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: Do the macro Tetris, track all the things and this is coming from me, yes, the guy who says we should be tracking and measuring things Absolutely but there is a flexible way to do it.
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: And this is where most podcasts coming out for Thanksgiving and I admit I am taking advantage of the attention to this holiday, but most podcasts on this topic will tell you you just need to buckle down and try harder with whatever their specific strategies are.
• 6:01
  Philip Pape: Now, to be fair, some podcasts will say, hey, just completely enjoy yourself and don't worry about it, and in my opinion, that's probably the best kind of default strategy.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: If you had to pick one, because it is just one day and generally just one meal, okay, but being that we are engineers here and we know better, and I know you're gonna face situations like this quite frequently, not just Thanksgiving.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: Instead of trying to eliminate entropy right, which is impossible, we just want to design a system that expects and accommodates disorder.
• 6:34
  Philip Pape: So think about how a modern building handles earthquakes I was going to say hurricanes, but that's probably too close to home, given all the tragedy we've seen over the last year or so here.
• 6:43
  Philip Pape: But earthquakes Engineers don't try to make buildings rigid, right, they build in flexibility.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: Have you ever seen a really tall building zoomed in, where they show it just slightly swaying in the wind?
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: You might have even felt it.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: When you're up high in a building or on a bridge or something like that, the structure actually becomes stronger because it can adapt rather than fight against it.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: Right, it's not going to break against that force, and your personal nutrition system needs this same kind of intelligence when you design it.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: We build what's called robust stability.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: Your system can handle perturbations right, as my kids would have said years ago when we read the Fancy Nancy books that's a fancy word for disruptions without falling apart.
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: That is what we're trying to do.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: I talked to one of my clients on this podcast a long time ago and her name is Heather and she talked about actually being in a literal earthquake and her system holding up, her system of training, nutrition and whatnot.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: And it wasn't because of some obsessive level of tracking, it was because of a flexible level of routine, right, and those are very different concepts.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: So I'm going to give you four ways to implement this next week for Thanksgiving, and these would apply in general to really anything that comes up that is like that okay, birthday parties, holidays, vacations, anything going out to eat.
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: And the first strategy is simply to plan for entropy.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: What do I mean?
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: I actually don't want you to say to yourself okay, thanksgiving is Thursday, so I'm going to restrict my calories big time in the days leading up.
• 8:17
  Philip Pape: Now, I used to advise some form of this strategy.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: It's called calorie banking and I still think there is an opportunity to shift your calories around in a given week.
• 8:28
  Philip Pape: But I much more prefer that you plan to do that regularly and weekly rather than do it as a last minute strategy, if that makes sense, because when you do that, it creates unstable conditions, which, ironically, amplifies the chaos.
• 8:45
  Philip Pape: It creates kind of a pressure cooker and instead of maintaining your normal eating patterns leading up to the holiday, you're now forcing yourself into this very unstable eating pattern, which may even lead to some binging and way overconsuming on the holiday.
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: Do you see what I mean?
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: And so we don't want any anything in the way we do things to feel unstable or forced.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: We want to plan it in in a way that is is real to us.
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: Okay Now, if that means that you know every, every weekend, you have a refeed and you increase to maintenance calories and on the weekdays you're in a dieting phase, that's perfectly fine if you plan it in that way consistently and then it becomes your routine.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: But we don't want to add to the chaos by, like, cutting calories and going on a fast or not eating in the morning at all and then going crazy at Thanksgiving.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: It's just really because, think about it Now, you're just giving yourself three or four days of some level of misery.
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: That takes away from the holiday as far as I'm concerned.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: So that's number one is just plan for entropy.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: Like entropy is going to exist, allow it in, allow it in, accept it.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: Okay, accept the entropy and don't try to fight against it.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: Number two the second strategy I have out of the four strategies today, is to create flexible boundaries.
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: This is the.
• 10:03
  Philip Pape: This is the bedrock of flexible dieting that we talk about on the show.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: Whether we talk about minimums or ranges or or boundaries, constraints, whatever you want to call them.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: We want to have minimum standards that allow us to maintain progress no matter what's happening, no matter how chaos it is, chaotic it is, without requiring perfection, and for a lot of us that's something like hitting our protein targets right.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: Getting a minimum level of protein.
• 10:30
  Philip Pape: Now, to get a minimum level of protein.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: Heading into a holiday where there's a lot of food, it shouldn't be a problem, right, like it shouldn't be a problem to eat more than something.
• 10:39
  Philip Pape: It's when we try to cut and restrict where the problems happen.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: So, hitting protein targets, getting in your morning walk right.
• 10:46
  Philip Pape: If you like to walk, get in that walk on Thanksgiving.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: Get in it every day, right.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: Staying hydrated it's your anchors of order, that's what I'm going to say.
• 10:54
  Philip Pape: Your anchors of order that help your system stay grounded, even when all these other variables fluctuate.
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: And I'm sure you can come up with others, but again, we don't want things that feel unnatural to what we normally do.
• 11:07
  Philip Pape: We wanna have minimum standards and ranges that would allow for us to be successful and hit them even when there's lots of chaos, which was number one, the chaos that we've allowed into our lives.
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: Number three is to focus on recovery, and what I mean by this is, if we're gonna use the engineering analogy just like a bridge or anything that has force on it applied to it returns to center after done swaying, or if you think of a rubber band, you stretch it, you let go, it comes back to its original shape If you have a clear strategy to get back to your baseline after the holiday, that's a good thing, right?
• 11:43
  Philip Pape: Not by restricting, not by punishing, not by making up, but simply resuming your normal routine on Friday.
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: Now, friday's Black Friday.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: That may be yet another reason to be a little bit off your routine, and that's okay too, but the goal is we are shifting, we are converging, we are gradually getting back to our baseline as soon as we can, and the quicker you can get there, the less impact the entropy will have.
• 12:07
  Philip Pape: You'll see it in your rear view mirror.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: You'll move on.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: No big deal.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: It is just the noise in the signal.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: And number four, the last strategy, is to measure what matters.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: Okay, and what do I mean by this?
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: If you are the person who is tracking your food and you want to track your Thanksgiving dinner?
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to tell you not to.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to tell you to track it.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: Okay, I'm going to say, when we track at all, we are thinking of things over time.
• 12:33
  Philip Pape: We're thinking at weeklies and monthlies.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: So, because Thanksgiving or a Christmas party are usually a single day or a single meal, most celebrations are right.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: You're rarely feasting for days on end.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: Now, maybe if you go on that week-long cruise, it's a different story, in which case I wouldn't even worry about it.
• 12:52
  Philip Pape: I would go to maintenance and just say enjoy yourself and then come back A single day of this entropy, or even if it's amplified entropy, it doesn't define your progress, right?
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: Any more than that.
• 13:03
  Philip Pape: One windy day determines a bridge's integrity, like if we're going to we're going to take this analogy to the extreme right your system works if you're trending in the right direction over time, regardless of this entropy that you've made room for.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: And so, when we summarize all of this, here's what the people are missing and what a lot of these podcasts are missing about entropy and order.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: It's not about eliminating the chaos.
• 13:26
  Philip Pape: It's about building robust systems that can absorb chaos and return to baseline right.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: Your body does this constantly with homeostasis.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: It regulates temperature, ph balance, whole bunch of other things.
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: When you view Thanksgiving or any holiday this way, as a temporary increase in entropy that your well-designed system can handle, you stop seeing it as a threat to your progress.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: In fact, these periodic challenges listen to this these can make your system more resilient.
• 13:58
  Philip Pape: It's a form of stress that makes you stronger.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: It's just like moderate stress on your muscles when you lift make you stronger because you have foundational habits and now you're strengthening them over time, regardless of short-term chaos.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: And every one of these bits of chaos just teaches you a little bit more about yourself and gives you a little bit more resilience, because you come out of it the other end, back to your baseline, you're confident, you know what you're doing and you make progress over time.
• 14:20
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: So the holidays do not have to be a source of stress, at least in this context.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: There may be other reasons to stress you out having to do with family members or what have you but when it comes to your nutrition, your training, it doesn't have to be a deviation from your goals.
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: It's entropy, it's chaos, it's a little bit off on that day, but it doesn't mean you as a person or with your system has deviated from your goals because you're working with it, you're not fighting against it, and then you could just enjoy the season.
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: Think of next Thursday, think of Thanksgiving or any other holiday.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: And, by the way, if you're listening to this and you're not in the US, I just totally maybe lost you as an audience.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: I'm not sure, but think of it as a chance to test your system's resilience, not as a threat to your progress.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: All right, if you want to learn more about any of these kinds of concepts, follow the podcast, go check them out.
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: My Wednesday episodes usually get into the a little bit of a nerdy kind of engineering lens.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: My Mondays are deep dives.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: My Fridays are interviews.
• 15:17
  Philip Pape: If you didn't like this episode, you'll like another.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: If you don't like any of them, let me know.
• 15:21
  Philip Pape: Hopefully you love them and you'll follow, and you'll give a five-star rating on a review.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: If you took a moment to do that, maybe as a holiday gift to me, that would be awesome.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: I'd be very grateful.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: And that is it.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember, sometimes the best way to maintain order is to embrace a little chaos.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.