Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Why You Can't Lose Weight on 1200 Calories (And What To Do About It) | Ep 387

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Why You Can't Lose Weight on 1200 Calories (And What To Do About It) | Ep 387 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you've been eating 1200 calories, training consistently, doing everything right, and the scale's not budging, your energy is in the tank, and you're terrified to eat more, because the last time you did, you gained weight.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: This episode is for you.
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: I'll show you why your body has adapted to suppress your metabolism, why just eat less and move more stopped working months or years ago, and the precise protocol for escaping this trap without gaining fat.
• 0:28
  Philip Pape: You'll discover what recovery dieting is, why most reverse dieting attempts fail, and the five foundations that determine whether increasing calories will work or backfire.
• 0:39
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency.
• 0:56
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pate, and today we're gonna talk about one of the most frustrating positions you can find yourself in.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: You're eating very little, you're training really hard, and you're getting nowhere.
• 1:06
  Philip Pape: I've worked with lots of people who came to me eating very low calories.
• 1:11
  Philip Pape: This might be around a thousand to fourteen hundred for female, maybe 1500 to 1800 for males, and they're doing a lot of the things right.
• 1:20
  Philip Pape: They're lifting maybe three or four days a week, they're walking every day, they're tracking, eating enough protein in general, but something's stuck.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: And I'm not talking about scale weight, I'm also talking about lifts stalling, feeling exhausted, not having the energy.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: Maybe our blood works okay, maybe it's not.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: But all you're thinking at this point is what do I need to do?
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: Do I need to eat even less?
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: Do I need to add more training or cardio?
• 1:45
  Philip Pape: And also, what's up with reverse dieting?
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: Is that what I need to do?
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: Do I need to eat more?
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: Because last time I tried that, I gained five pounds in a week, right?
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: Stories like that.
• 1:54
  Philip Pape: These are not rare stories.
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: I hear them a lot.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: And I think the online advice about some of this stuff is either useless or actively harmful.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: A lot of people still throw around the terms metabolic damage, that you need to heal your metabolism and or that you need to fix your metabolism.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: Some people just say flippantly, you know, you know, it's you're just eating too much.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: You're probably not tracking.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: You probably don't know how many calories you're eating, you just need to eat less.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: Some people, you know, say that the only way to do this is reverse diet with, you know, five, add 50 to 100 calories per week.
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: That's how you do it.
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: And then there's people that say, okay, just eat at maintenance for a while and everything's gonna kind of work out, which doesn't sound too far from advice I might, I've I sometimes give, which is we need to change one variable at a time and try to stay at maintenance, but there's a different approach to doing that the right way versus just, you know, trying to eat the same calories you've been eating, thinking that that's maintenance.
• 2:49
  Philip Pape: Okay, we're gonna get into some of the nuances here.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: I think a lot of this advice is just missing the most important thing, which is what's happening to you and your body and why just adding calories doesn't always work without certain foundations in place.
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: And I wanna be clear on that.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: Reverse dieting is often not the solution.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: It may be a little piece of it.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: And if you've ever heard my content before, you know that I don't even use reverse dieting.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: We do something called recovery dieting.
• 3:17
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about that today.
• 3:19
  Philip Pape: Before we do, I do want to share what some members of Physique University have been experiencing lately because it connects directly to what we are talking about.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: So, Richard, he said, quote, after six weeks on the program, I found the tools and info quite a game changer.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: Very happy with the empowerment gained and the progress so far.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: So, empowerment, I shared this because of that word and not feeling helpless and actually understanding what's going on inside of you with you as an individual so you can build your system.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: Ajana shared, quote, I've noticed I'm not getting fatigued early in the day, and my energy level has written.
• 3:55
  Philip Pape: Again, I shared this because it's exactly what happens when your metabolic function is working properly instead of being suppressed.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: Notice I didn't say damaged, okay?
• 4:06
  Philip Pape: Suppressed.
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: And then Haig said, quote, winning, feeling better, pain and illness gone, and I'm lifting what I was 10 years ago, now to push harder.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: So when your body has enough energy, when it's recovering enough, everything improves.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: This isn't just about the scale and and often it has nothing to do with the scale.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: And yeah, you can push hard once things aren't where you need them to be.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: So if you're looking for this kind of result and transformation, support, guidance, that's why we have Physique University.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: You can join at witsandweights.com slash physique, get access to our community, form checks with me and Coach Carroll, all the tools you need to build your physique and more importantly, your health system, your fitness system systematically.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: So I just wanted to share those.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: And now I want to get into what the heck is going on when you are stuck at low calories.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna call this the suppression spiral, just because it sounds cool and I like alliteration.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: The suppression spiral.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: All right, this is not about metabolic damage.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: The term gets thrown thrown around a lot, but it is not a real thing.
• 5:09
  Philip Pape: It is not a medical condition, your metabolism can't break.
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: Your metabolism adapts.
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: And adaptation is normal, it happens to everybody, it's okay, you expect it to happen.
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: And it can be reversed as well.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: But understanding how is going to explain why you today might feel terrible and might have trouble losing weight.
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: And again, we don't care about the weight loss in and of itself.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: We care about improving your health and body composition.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: And then weight loss tends to follow as a piece of that, and not always, because you don't always need it to.
• 5:37
  Philip Pape: But in this case, we're talking about people who are trying to undergo some form of fat loss with a calorie deficit, and they are stuck and so they feel like they can't go up or down.
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: Okay, when you eat in a calorie deficit for an extended period, your body adapts and it conserves energy, in addition to your metabolism dropping because you're losing weight.
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: But in this case, we're gonna assume you've stuck, you've gotten stuck trying to lose fat and lose weight on the scale.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: Okay, and what we want to understand what's happening, whether you should care, what you should do about it.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: So your body adapts to conserve energy hormonally at the cellular level.
• 6:13
  Philip Pape: And this happens when you stay in a deficit too long or you eat too little relative to your activity.
• 6:18
  Philip Pape: Here's what happens: first, your neat, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, actually drops.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: A lot of it is unconscious.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: Okay, and this is all the movement you're doing outside of formal structured exercise.
• 6:31
  Philip Pape: Studies show that meat can drop by two to four hundred calories per day.
• 6:36
  Philip Pape: And this is actually very common for what I see.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: I see a lot of people in several months of dieting, their metabolisms will drop several hundreds of calories.
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: Sometimes more than this because of added factors like the weight loss.
• 6:48
  Philip Pape: And it's not that you consciously decide to do this, it's your body does this automatically, sometimes causes you to move less or move with less effort, or there's so many things, even if when you even when you try to keep your step count up that can move this the other direction.
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: Second, your training performance suffers.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: You're not pushing as hard, you're, you know, taking longer to rest because you don't have the work capacity.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're not adding weight to the bar, to the to the lifts, you're not going up in weight.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: Not all of this is bad in a fat loss phase.
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: Like you're expected to not have as much energy, but if it's really stalled out and regressing, this could be a challenge.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: This means, you know, you're not working as hard, you're also burning fewer calories during the workout, right?
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: Even though we don't care about that as a metric, it's an end result of training less, training less hard, getting less of a training stimulus to hold on to your muscle.
• 7:37
  Philip Pape: All of that is happening.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: Third, your hormones downregulate, your thyroid function goes down, testosterone, leptin.
• 7:44
  Philip Pape: When leptin's low, you feel hungrier, you move less, your body becomes more efficient at storing energy, which we don't like, right?
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: Which means it's less efficient at giving it up.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: And all this together means that your actual energy expenditure, your metabolism drops quite a bit.
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: It can drop substantially.
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: If you were, say, burning 2,000 calories a day before you started the diet, you might be down to 1500 or 1300 or 1200 just to maintain your weight as you are right now.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: And it's not because your metabolism is damaged, but because your body has adapted.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: This is a temporary state.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: Most people respond with a gut reaction.
• 8:24
  Philip Pape: They do things that make it worse, such as cutting calories more, right?
• 8:29
  Philip Pape: Adding cardio, trying to push through with more discipline and willpower.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: And this just makes it worse.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: You end up in what I called it earlier, the suppression spiral.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: You eat less, your body adapts, the loss stops, you eat even less, your body adapts more, you're doing more cardio, then you're eating very little, you're feeling terrible, you're making no progress, and and and.
• 8:53
  Philip Pape: And then the psychological toll is huge.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: It is massive.
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: You then feel like a failure, right?
• 8:59
  Philip Pape: It seems to affect your self-worth, your even your self-respect.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: You see other people eating more, looking better.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: You can't understand why don't those rules apply to me.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: I'm different.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: Something is wrong with me.
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: But the problem is not with you.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: The problem is the approach.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: It always is, guys.
• 9:15
  Philip Pape: It's always the approach.
• 9:16
  Philip Pape: And that is really empowering because you can fix it.
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: You can you can't diet your way out of metabolic suppression.
• 9:23
  Philip Pape: Almost by definition, you can't.
• 9:25
  Philip Pape: Because eating less is what got you here.
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: You've got to have a different strategy.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: So, where do we go with this?
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: That's the suppression spiral.
• 9:32
  Philip Pape: Now I want to talk about the foundation, the problem with your foundation, okay?
• 9:37
  Philip Pape: Because it really does come down to basic principles, first principles, foundations.
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: And if eating less isn't the answer, what about eating more?
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: Well, this is where a lot of people jump right to reverse dieting.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: You know, you get a newbie coach who's like, yeah, we just need to increase your calories, right?
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: That's what they learned in their certification, and that's the solution.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: You're gonna increase your calories, you're going to boost your metabolism, and you're gonna have this higher set point, and everything's gonna be hunky-dory.
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: And so we're gonna add, I don't know, 100 calories a week.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: Hope the fat loss will resume.
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: And yeah, that never works.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: Almost, almost never works.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: I mean, there's it pretty much never works.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: And the reason is foundational.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: Your body's ability to handle increased calories without gaining fat depends on five specific factors.
• 10:24
  Philip Pape: And if these aren't in place first, then adding calories will just make you gain weight.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: And you're like, huh?
• 10:30
  Philip Pape: Haven't you talked all the time about recovering your metabolism?
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: Yes, but you have to do it in conjunction with these foundations.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: That's the point.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: It is not just about increasing calories.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: That is the important point I want you to take away.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: So, foundation one, and a lot of people will have this at the base of their pyramid for the for good reason, is sleep quality and consistency, especially consistency.
• 10:54
  Philip Pape: When you're chronically under-recovered, your body is in a stressful, sympathetic state.
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: And that's a big, big problem because sleep is almost like food to your body.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: When you're depriving yourself of sleep, even adding more food isn't necessarily going to mitigate that, because the sleep is another massive source of recovery and energy and taking off that stress that's causing you to have this suppression in your metabolism.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: Foundation two is non-training stress.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: And I say it that way because training itself is a stress, but it's a good stress.
• 11:30
  Philip Pape: If you have stress from work, from your relationship, from major things in your life, maybe with your family, with your finances, you've got this elevated cortisol all the time, right?
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: That plus increasing your calories, your body's gonna say, Oh, give me that energy for fat storage.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: Please give it to me for fat storage.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: And I say it that way because if you gain weight at all, you might think, okay, I'm gaining some muscle and fat.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: You might gain a little bit of muscle.
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: Chances are though, if you don't have these foundations in place, you're gonna gain a lot more fat than you'd like.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: Okay, a lot more fat than you'd like.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: What we're trying to do here is as you eat more, we're gonna, we're gonna tie this all together in the end.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: These foundations allow you, your body to recover your metabolism without gaining much, much, if any, fat at all, or even any weight at all.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: Like you, you might even you might even start losing weight, which again is not the end, not really the goal.
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: It's just the the pleasant end result is a drop in body fat.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: So basic stress management is going to be huge here.
• 12:29
  Philip Pape: Foundation number three is of course your training consistency and progression.
• 12:33
  Philip Pape: It's interesting.
• 12:34
  Philip Pape: Some people, you know, they'll join our program.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: It's not very common, but they'll join our program and when they do the intake, I say, How many training sessions are you doing?
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: They say zero.
• 12:42
  Philip Pape: My brain immediately goes to, oh boy, I'm excited because this is the biggest low-hanging fruit for you right now.
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: You're doing zero.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: If we just go that go to one a week, man, will that just massively improve everything you're doing, your health, your strength, your mouth, even just one a week.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: I mean, ideally it's three or four, but we need to start where you're at.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: And you've got to be following a structured program, a structured program where you are progressing, if not every week, then most weeks.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: And it has to be consistent.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: I think every day you need to be doing something for your physical health in terms of movement, but from a strength training perspective, that's ideally three to four weeks, three, three to four days a week, and at a minimum two.
• 13:27
  Philip Pape: But you know what?
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: One is still better than zero.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: So I we need to make it consistent and then start to build from there.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: The muscle that you have, the stimulus, stimulus you're providing through that strength training, is telling your body what to do with that extra energy in such a good way.
• 13:41
  Philip Pape: In such a good way.
• 13:42
  Philip Pape: If you're not training at all, then all these things are gonna be a problem, are gonna continue being a problem.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: Foundation four is restoring that suppression of your neat, right?
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: Your non-exercise stuff.
• 13:55
  Philip Pape: So if you're barely moving outside the gym, you're still gonna have a lot of issues recovering.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: This is where bringing that step count up, you know, seven to 10,000 steps is a good target.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: But again, bringing it up from where you are.
• 14:06
  Philip Pape: And also getting up off your chair if you're a desk, if you have a desk job and do that multiple times throughout the day, you know, moving, getting outside, walking your dog, you know, going for 30 to 60 minutes of cumulative movement throughout the day, independent of your strength training.
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: And then foundation five is of course, nutrition and nutrition.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: And this primarily is not just the energy overall, which is calories, but the quality of your food, starting with protein and fiber, and then having balanced foods with plenty of fats and carbs as well.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: And carbs are gonna be massive here, guys.
• 14:39
  Philip Pape: Let me tell you.
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: If you've got to suppress your metabolism, suppress metabolism and what you're trying to do is recover, carbs are going to be your friend.
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: Absolutely.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: When combined with training, they're gonna help your hormones, they're gonna help your recovery.
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: Very become very efficient.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: Okay, this is not the time to be doing keto and low carb.
• 14:56
  Philip Pape: Trust me, it's not.
• 14:56
  Philip Pape: I've seen the difference.
• 14:58
  Philip Pape: You're gonna recover your energy much faster this way.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: So nutrition is really important from all of these perspectives.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: And I've seen dozens, hundreds, thousands of people trying to reverse diet without these foundations.
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: All they're doing is increasing calories.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: Well, of course, it's gonna blow up in their face, right?
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: Sometimes they gain weight, sometimes they don't, but then nothing is recovering.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: So they're just eating a little bit more food, and their metabolism is, I'll say, slowly increasing, but they still have the energy problems.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: They are still gaining more fat than they would like, right?
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: Like their physique, their body composition is not improving.
• 15:36
  Philip Pape: And it's kind of a weird state to be in because that's the worst situation, is where you're, you know, recovering your metabolism, not gaining weight on the scale, but also not improving of the things that you really, really care about.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: You know, sometimes people will feel a little better because they're eating more food, but then they're having trouble with the body composition, right?
• 15:52
  Philip Pape: So you get like these weird corner cases when you're not doing all the foundations.
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: But when you are, then the recovery diet works dramatically better.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: And I say recovery, it's recovery from our suppressed metabolism, whether you've just been living that way through lots of restrictive eating, or you've done a fat loss phase intentionally and now are trying to come out.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: Hopefully, if you've done a fat loss phase, you've already done these things beforehand.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: I am mainly speaking to the person that's not even there yet and you're just trying to recover for the first time.
• 16:22
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 16:23
  Philip Pape: And now you can actually add those calories pretty aggressively and feel better even faster and have your body composition stay stable or improve as you're doing that.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: And then when you later on return to a deficit, you're coming from a much better place.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: And honestly, I don't want you even in a deficit for a while until you go through that recovery process.
• 16:44
  Philip Pape: And that's the next problem is that it takes time, it takes focus, it takes patience.
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna use the word discipline, it's consistency.
• 16:53
  Philip Pape: And you can do this in a very manageable, achievable way, one step at a time, two steps at a time, you know, just whatever works best for your lifestyle right now with the low-hanging fruit to fix your sleep, to manage your stress, to train, to move a little more, right?
• 17:07
  Philip Pape: I know sometimes it feels overwhelming because it seems like all these pillars.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: At some point, you do need to get to the point where you're doing something with each of these pillars.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: But right now, pick the thing that is your go-get, as they say.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 17:20
  Philip Pape: So now that we've talked about the suppression spiral, we've talked about the five uh foundations you have to have in place.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: Let's now talk about the recovery diet approach.
• 17:32
  Philip Pape: And I haven't talked about it in a while on the show, and that's why I wanted to make this episode.
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: What is a recovery diet?
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: All right, it is not the same as a reverse diet.
• 17:39
  Philip Pape: A reverse diet is about slowly adding calories to maintain your weight after diet ends, to try to get back to your metabolism, but you're doing it in a random guessing sort of way.
• 17:52
  Philip Pape: That's really all it is.
• 17:53
  Philip Pape: You're doing it with less precision and it takes longer, and you might overshoot, and all of those challenges that you've heard of with reverse dieting.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: A recovery diet is just a very precise protocol to restore metabolic function immediately, as quickly as possible, to where it should be right now.
• 18:12
  Philip Pape: Like, what is your optimal set point right now?
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: We won't know what it is until we get there, but we do know what it is right now, and we know that if we're under-eating to that, we can quickly go back there and not worry about gaining weight.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: You are definitely gonna gain a few pounds of water weight and glycogen, but that is not body fat.
• 18:29
  Philip Pape: Just to put that out there, because that's another fear people have.
• 18:32
  Philip Pape: The goal is to get your body back to firing and burning more calories, maintaining your body composition, feeling better, feeling healthier, feeling stronger, all of those things.
• 18:43
  Philip Pape: So we're talking about going from let's say you're 1200 calories right now and bringing that up to it, might be as high as 2,000 calories without gaining any fat or weight.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: Now, again, you're gonna gain some weight of water weight, but not of fat.
• 18:57
  Philip Pape: Maybe you'll gain a little muscle as well.
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: And then letting that stabilize before you do whatever your next phase is, which might be fat loss, maybe it's building muscle, maybe you want to maintain it there.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: But the point is we need to recover to that point.
• 19:09
  Philip Pape: And you're not gonna do it instantly.
• 19:11
  Philip Pape: It could happen, you could do it in a few days, and then when you start to recover, you may need to go even higher.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: And so there are some parallels to reverse dieting, but it's a lot more precision or a lot more precise.
• 19:23
  Philip Pape: You have to track your intake accurately, weigh your food, log your food, log your weight, and use it uh either a calculation or in my opinion, MacroFactor is the one app on the market that can estimate your expenditure from what you've logged.
• 19:39
  Philip Pape: And then it you will literally know the number to go to tomorrow after you've done that.
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: Now, that's after you've been tracking for several weeks.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: You'll know what metabolism your metabolism is right now and how many calories to increase.
• 19:51
  Philip Pape: Go download macrofactor, use my code WITS and weights, all one word, to get a free trial for that.
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: It's excellent for this because it adjusts your expenditure based on your trend and intake for that accurate recovery diet.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: But you also have to track your body composition, your strength, right, your lifts, all the things you should be doing anyway.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: And then remember, the scale is going to go up during that recovery, especially at the beginning, because of water, glycogen, digestive content, sodium, like you're just eating more, all of that.
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: You should look pretty much the same, if not better, in the mirror.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: It's because sometimes when you fill out the muscles of that glycogen, you end up looking a little bit more pumped.
• 20:30
  Philip Pape: You know, it depends on what you already have there, of course.
• 20:32
  Philip Pape: If you've never lifted weights, you're not there yet.
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: But in general, you're gonna look a little better, actually.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: And then the timeline is really important here because while you can jump calories immediately to get out of the deficit, literally one day, you're gonna need eight to 12 weeks, sometimes longer, depending on how suppressed your metabolism was to get to full recovery.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: So it's kind of like recovery hops.
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: If you were eating 1200 calories for six months, you might need two or three months to get back to your 1800 or 2000 or 2200 maintenance.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: And you don't want, I know you don't want to hear this, but your body doesn't work on the timeline that you want it to work on.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: It's gonna work on what nature's gonna do.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: And you're gonna, I'm not speaking properly here, but you're going to give it the best shot to recover as quickly as possible.
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: So success looks like eating three, four, five, six, up to maybe 800 calories more, maybe a thousand, you know, if you're a bigger guy, for example, than when you started.
• 21:27
  Philip Pape: So I would say probably four to four to six or eight hundred calories is like a nice big window for a lot of people that I see.
• 21:33
  Philip Pape: And then your weight, your body weight has stabilized after that initial water bump and it's kind of stabilized.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's a little bit higher than that, but your measurements should be about the same.
• 21:42
  Philip Pape: You should look the same or better, your energy should be significantly improved.
• 21:46
  Philip Pape: Your training performance should be going up, right?
• 21:48
  Philip Pape: You're adding weight or reps.
• 21:50
  Philip Pape: Your recovery is faster, feels better, your mood should be better.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: For the ladies, your menstrual cycle should be normal again if it was irregular.
• 21:59
  Philip Pape: Now, these aren't claims I'm making, these are just the shoulds that should happen all things equal, you know, not counting any other condition someone might have.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: And then when you return to a fat loss phase later, you're gonna be set up much better for success.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: And you probably won't have to diet to those calories either, because you're eating more fiber and you're moving more, you're burning more calories in general.
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: This is different than those fit fluencers saying, Oh, you gotta do is reverse diet, and then you do a fat loss phase and you could eat more calories than last time.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: Okay, it doesn't work that way, like in that short timeline without doing all the foundational things and without potentially having built a little bit of muscle and metabolic capacity as well.
• 22:42
  Philip Pape: Okay, don't look for quick fixes, it's going to backfire.
• 22:46
  Philip Pape: But if you do this the right way, then when you do have fat loss phase, you're not gonna feel destroyed and you're not gonna be losing muscle.
• 22:54
  Philip Pape: And that's the key, one of the key differences.
• 22:57
  Philip Pape: And then you're gonna have energy for your workouts, your life.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: You could probably do it in a sustainable way, not have to go as aggressive.
• 23:02
  Philip Pape: Now, everybody's different.
• 23:03
  Philip Pape: Everybody has different levels that they start from and end from and different histories.
• 23:07
  Philip Pape: So the protocol has to be individualized, right?
• 23:09
  Philip Pape: Some people can add those calories more aggressively or bigger jumps.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: Others need to go slower because of how it makes them feel or the practicality of it, right?
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: Just trying to eat more food.
• 23:19
  Philip Pape: So the specifics depend on your situation, your foundations, where you are, what you're able to incorporate now, and of course how your body responds.
• 23:28
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: So if what I'm describing so far sounds kind of like your situation.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: If you're stuck at low calories, if you're not sure how to go from where to go from here, if you need a systematic way out and it to improve all of these factors, I'm running a live workshop October 21st called the Recovery Diet Workshop.
• 23:46
  Philip Pape: It's actually called the 10-week recovery diet workshop because I'm going to walk through a full, it's like a 20-page workbook that you're gonna get access to afterward that is gonna help you assess exactly whether you are suppressed, what is the week by week progression to get out of it with a recovery diet as we head to the end of the year.
• 24:07
  Philip Pape: So it's perfectly timed 10 weeks to take you into the new year, and then you're ready to go if you're looking to do a fat loss phase in the new year.
• 24:15
  Philip Pape: And so it walk, we're gonna walk through, you know, how to adjust based on your response, all the pitfalls, all the scenarios, what to do when.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: You're gonna have it all mapped out.
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: And you're also gonna get your first month in physique university as part of the whole thing for no extra cost.
• 24:33
  Philip Pape: So to me, it's a no-brainer because you're gonna have the workbook, the workshop, and of course all the resources and support to get started and get some accountability and feedback, which for many people that's what they need is the accountability to make it happen.
• 24:46
  Philip Pape: So that's 27 bucks October 21st.
• 24:49
  Philip Pape: Go to live.witsandweights.com.
• 24:52
  Philip Pape: That is Tuesday.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: That's next Tuesday, our 10-week recovery diet workshop.
• 24:57
  Philip Pape: So if you're stuck with low calories, if you want a system for improving that and coming out the right way and not these random reverse diets, grab your spot, link is in the show notes, live.witsandweights.com.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: I'll share it again at the end.
• 25:09
  Philip Pape: Now let's talk about some of the common failure points.
• 25:12
  Philip Pape: What makes people fail?
• 25:13
  Philip Pape: All right, because even when people understand this recovery diet concept, and I I know people will parrot it back to me and will define it pretty well, but then there's these three major failure points in reality that prevent people from doing them successfully.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: The first failure point is, of course, impatience.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: You knew I was gonna say this, right?
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: This is hey, I added calories for two weeks, I didn't see things change, or I had that bump in weight that Phillip said would happen.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: It's all fluid, but I freaked out and I cut back.
• 25:43
  Philip Pape: Look, your body's not gonna recover in two weeks.
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: It's just not.
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: I'm sorry, it's not gonna recover in two weeks if you've been doing this for any length of time, right?
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: Because what got you here took many, many months.
• 25:52
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying it's gonna take the same amount of time.
• 25:55
  Philip Pape: It's just gonna take some decent amount.
• 25:57
  Philip Pape: So that's the first failure point is impatience.
• 25:59
  Philip Pape: That's why we have to focus on the metrics that we care about the most, which is increasing our strength in the gym, increasing our nutrition quality.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: Guess what?
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: All the foundations that I talked about.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: The second failure point is guess what?
• 26:11
  Philip Pape: Inconsistency with those foundations.
• 26:13
  Philip Pape: So consistency really is what I mean here.
• 26:16
  Philip Pape: And that is not just sleeping well for two out of the seven days of the week, but sleeping well for four, five, six, hopefully all seven, but more than you were before.
• 26:25
  Philip Pape: Walking, you know, getting your X number of steps every day.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: If you can't get 12,000 steps a day, don't aim for 12.
• 26:31
  Philip Pape: Aim for six or seven or eight or nine.
• 26:34
  Philip Pape: Whatever lets you get that minimum viable product of steps, and then push beyond that when you can.
• 26:41
  Philip Pape: Same thing with training.
• 26:42
  Philip Pape: You've got to get into the gym consistently.
• 26:44
  Philip Pape: Your body's gonna respond to consistent signals.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: So consistency itself is a really important skill that we want to develop here.
• 26:52
  Philip Pape: That's a whole separate topic, but it's very important.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: Not discipline, not willpower, but really habits, behaviors that are ingrained in your life because they're achievable in your life.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: Okay, and then failure point three is trying to diet in the middle of recovery.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: Raise your hand if this is you, okay?
• 27:11
  Philip Pape: You're you're like four weeks in your recovery, you see the scale up a few pounds, and you're like, I'm gonna do a rapid fat loss phase, or I'm gonna just quickly go on a deficit for a week or two, Philip won't mind, you know.
• 27:21
  Philip Pape: And it undermines the whole process, right?
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: It undermines the whole process.
• 27:25
  Philip Pape: You can't simultaneously recover your metabolism and diet, because the dieting itself is what got you here and it's causing the suppression.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: And if you can't mentally handle that, then I don't think you're ready for a recovery diet yet.
• 27:37
  Philip Pape: Although I think everybody should strive to become ready for one.
• 27:41
  Philip Pape: So those are the three failure points.
• 27:44
  Philip Pape: And I think, like, if there's one surprising takeaway today that that you might find is most people who think they need a recovery diet don't actually need one.
• 27:55
  Philip Pape: And what I mean by that is a lot of people who think they're metabolically suppressed are just they're in their calorie deficit and they're impatient.
• 28:03
  Philip Pape: And I say that with a caveat because your metabolism should adapt no matter what.
• 28:08
  Philip Pape: It's probably gonna drop.
• 28:09
  Philip Pape: But I'm talking about the people who've been dieting for like six weeks.
• 28:11
  Philip Pape: And maybe you're not losing weight as fast as you want, but you're losing it gradually and you got past that initial bump that deceives everyone into thinking they're gonna lose weight a lot faster than they do, right?
• 28:21
  Philip Pape: You can't, you kind of kind of ignore those first few weeks of dropping water weight.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: And, you know, things are gonna slow down a little bit, but then they kind of should kind of get in a steady drop.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: And those people who are making that slow but steady progress, even if it's like a quarter pound or pound a week, I often see them think that they are in a plateau or their metabolism is so suppressed they can't make progress, but they actually are chipping away at it.
• 28:44
  Philip Pape: And then it's a matter of going back to my previous things and of patience and consistency and just continuing, right?
• 28:50
  Philip Pape: Actually being suppressed has very specific indicators.
• 28:56
  Philip Pape: Like you're at an ungodly low number of calories for multiple months, and you shouldn't you shouldn't have to do that.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: You know, your weight has been absolutely completely rock solid stalled for like four or five weeks past the initial drop, even though you're doing all the things the right way.
• 29:12
  Philip Pape: Or your energy is in the crapper, or your training performance has declined noticeably, or your sleep quality has decreased, right?
• 29:19
  Philip Pape: It's all the biofeedback stuff.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: Even for women, you've lost your cycle, your sex drive is gone.
• 29:23
  Philip Pape: Those kinds of things.
• 29:24
  Philip Pape: If you're eating in a reasonable deficit, right, there's there's a range of what that means.
• 29:31
  Philip Pape: But like if you're a woman, maybe that might look like 1600 calories you're eating.
• 29:34
  Philip Pape: Like, I'm not gonna freak out over that.
• 29:36
  Philip Pape: And your weight loss is still going down, but it's just maybe not as fast as you want, which is a very common scenario.
• 29:41
  Philip Pape: You don't necessarily need a recovery diet.
• 29:43
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're done, if you're ready to come out, if you don't want to diet, if you want to go to maintenance, that's perfect for a recovery diet, right?
• 29:48
  Philip Pape: But I'm talking about people who think they're not making progress when they are, if that makes sense.
• 29:53
  Philip Pape: And and that's more of a patience thing, a precision thing, a tracking thing.
• 29:56
  Philip Pape: It also an experience thing.
• 29:58
  Philip Pape: If you don't have those, if if You do have the markers of like you things are really suppressed, just not great.
• 30:05
  Philip Pape: Then this is one of the most powerful tools available so that you don't stay stuck for like months, years, or whatever and just feel terrible.
• 30:12
  Philip Pape: We don't want you that way, do we?
• 30:13
  Philip Pape: We want you feeling great and looking great and doing all the things you want to do in your life.
• 30:17
  Philip Pape: So the problem is usually not that you need to eat less, it's this metabolic adaptation.
• 30:22
  Philip Pape: And the solution is, of course, recovery, which means establishing the five foundations we talked about today, and then incorporating that with a recovery diet protocol.
• 30:30
  Philip Pape: And then you're gonna, you know, eat more, feel better, be able to lose fat effectively when you're ready.
• 30:36
  Philip Pape: So again, if you're thinking like this is exactly what I need, please join me next Tuesday for the 10-week recovery diet workshop.
• 30:43
  Philip Pape: I'm teaching the complete system, the assessment process, the week-by-week protocol, the troubleshooting framework.
• 30:48
  Philip Pape: And this is literally a 20, I don't hope this is not overwhelming, but it's like a 20-page document.
• 30:54
  Philip Pape: And I did it that way this time because I literally wanted to give you something to take home where you can then map it out exactly as needed.
• 31:01
  Philip Pape: And then we could help you implement it or give you the support you need along the way as you hit those roadblocks that we all inevitably intend to hit.
• 31:07
  Philip Pape: So you're gonna get all of that.
• 31:09
  Philip Pape: Your first month of physique university, all of that 27 bucks.
• 31:12
  Philip Pape: Registration is open now.
• 31:13
  Philip Pape: Link is in the show notes or go to live.witsandweights.com.
• 31:17
  Philip Pape: And if you found value in today's episode, please share it with someone else who's stuck in low calories, who's complaining about this, who feels like there's no hope or no way to go, because there is.
• 31:27
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that your body is capable of remarkable adaptation in both directions.
• 31:35
  Philip Pape: Okay, the direction that we don't like and the direction we want to recover.
• 31:39
  Philip Pape: You just need the right approach, the right protocol to guide it again.
• 31:43
  Philip Pape: This is Philip, and I'll talk to you next time.