Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / How Long Body Recomposition Takes (Lose Fat & Gain Muscle) | Ep 494

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How Long Body Recomposition Takes (Lose Fat & Gain Muscle) | Ep 494 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: No matter what your body looks or feels like, it seems like everybody keeps telling you the answer is to lose weight.
• 0:06
  Philip Pape: But I want you to hear this before you start the next diet.
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to show you why cutting calories is often the thing that will make things worse that lead to skinny fat, looking soft, having worse body composition, less strength, and a body that you are less happy with, how long it actually takes to see the changes that you are really going for, and why the tools you're using to measure progress probably can't detect things like muscle growth.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: Today is all about the realistic timeline for body recomposition, especially if you're skinny fat, but even if you're not.
• 0:43
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:53
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today's episode is straight from a listener.
• 0:58
  Philip Pape: I love questions from listeners, and this is from Deeran A, who left a comment on Spotify in our episode about how fast you lose muscle.
• 1:09
  Philip Pape: And they wrote, Great podcast as always.
• 1:12
  Philip Pape: Please can you share a podcast on how long it takes to notice changes to your body and more into skinny fat to building muscle?
• 1:21
  Philip Pape: So, Dearren, thank you.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: That's it's a great question because it's actually two different problems inside the question that we want to address today.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: One is about the timeline.
• 1:30
  Philip Pape: How long does it take to notice changes in your body?
• 1:33
  Philip Pape: The other is more of a measurement problem.
• 1:36
  Philip Pape: How would you know if it were working, if going from skinny fat to building muscle?
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: And honestly, this applies to everyone wherever you are on this journey because it all applies in kind of both directions.
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: But a lot of people only ask about the timeline one because they're impatient.
• 1:52
  Philip Pape: Let's be honest, we're impatient.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: We're always thinking lose weight.
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: And today we're really going to talk about body recomposition, what skinny fat is.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: And it does have a real clinical name.
• 2:02
  Philip Pape: I know some people are triggered by the term skinny fat for whatever reason, but it's not a bad term when you think about what it describes.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: It's, hey, you've lost weight and you're like thin in a shirt, but you have, you know, a muffin top or some extra belly fat or whatever.
• 2:14
  Philip Pape: And whatever phrases trigger people, I don't know.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: I'm born in 1980.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: Forgive me.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: Now, we're also going to talk about the what the research says about how fast you can add muscle if you are, especially if you're starting from that place of skinny fat.
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: Why I'll say the advice you hear from most podcasters or coaches often makes it worse.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: We're going to clarify the different pieces of advice and which one might make sense for you.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: And then how we measure muscle growth because things like DEXA and your bathroom scale, whatever, may not be able to do that in the way you want.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: And there's simple things you can do to address that and have more confidence of what you're doing is working.
• 2:49
  Philip Pape: Because one of the most common questions we get in our program is definitely, how do I know I'm building enough muscle?
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: Am I going to the right rate of gain?
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: Et cetera.
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: It's not just about the fat, it's also about the muscle.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: If you stick around to the end, I'm going to give you a number that you can take from your training log that tells you whether you're building muscle as well.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: So I love process-oriented metrics that are leading metrics as well as those lagging metrics that help us measure things after the fact because I'm an engineer.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: Okay, so let's define the thing first.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: We love definitions and skinny fat is like a bro term, a gym term, whatever.
• 3:23
  Philip Pape: There is a clinical version called normal weight obesity.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: So if you don't like the term skinny fat, you could call it normal weight obesity.
• 3:32
  Philip Pape: And that means that your BMI is in the quote unquote normal range.
• 3:35
  Philip Pape: So that's 18.5 to 24.9, but your body fat percentage is high and your lean mass is low.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: Now, a lot of my buddies and friends and the ladies out there listening to the show have the opposite problem because you've been lifting weights and building muscle.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: Your opposite problem is your BMA, your BMI is high, but you actually have a lower body fat percentage and higher lean mass.
• 3:55
  Philip Pape: That's a different issue, and that's not a bad problem to have.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: That's just doctors and the medical system needing to catch up with the importance of body comp versus BMI.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: But for those of you who do have a low BMI, but really have more body fat than you'd like, and you know you're probably not happy how you look and your physique and you don't have much muscle mass and all that, this is a very common, you know, place to be for the vast majority of people.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: There is data that shows if we take the cutoff for men at about 33% body fat, or women, sorry, women for 33% body fat, roughly one in three American women with a normal BMI qualified as skinny fat.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: In other words, they had above 33% body fat, which for men would be like 25% body fat.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: So if you have above that percentage body fat, but your BMI is still normal, then you could say maybe you're skinny fat, right?
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: And it's not a cosmetic thing.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: It's not a cosmetic thing.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: It is really a health thing.
• 4:51
  Philip Pape: Metabolic syndrome shows up in about 17% of the normal weight obesity group compared to less than 5% in folks who have a normal BMI but also low body fat.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: So that's four times the metabolic risk from having that extra body fat, even though your scale weight is normal.
• 5:09
  Philip Pape: Now, that is a huge wake-up call for you guys.
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: Please take this is like the essence of what the show is about, is that it's not about your weight, it's about your body composition.
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: So if you've been walking around feeling, you know, something's off, even though the doctor says I'm fine because my BMI is good, you're not imagining it.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: You're probably understanding that there are other things going on with your body and your health that you want to address.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: And that's totally cool.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: We want to be healthier.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: Now, when we look at the research, a lot of this was built by epidemiologists and it's designed to identify, for example, who's going to get diabetes.
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: They almost never get into strength training programs or even changing your diet.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: Like it's very rare, especially for a skinny fat person.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: A lot of these studies that look at people that are normal weight obesity are looking at prediabetes instead.
• 6:01
  Philip Pape: So it's interesting because the fitness industry loves to throw around skinny fat like it's this unique condition and it has a unique solution and a method, and we're gonna cure your skinny fat.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: Whereas it's just like the vast majority of people are skinny fat.
• 6:14
  unknown: Okay.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: And when you go to a doctor, or even if you go to a personal trainer, you go to a friend, you say, look, I don't like how I look.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: Like, let's say you confide in them.
• 6:22
  Philip Pape: I'm not happy with how I look.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: What do they say?
• 6:24
  Philip Pape: Lose weight, cut the calories, move more, watch the scale, eat better, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 6:29
  Philip Pape: The universal stuff that just is worthless, useless.
• 6:32
  Philip Pape: For the person who is skinny fat, which again is the fast majority of us, then the advice is often gonna make it worse.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: So there's something called the Forbes curve.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: Curve.
• 6:43
  Philip Pape: Forbes curve.
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: The Forbes curve, it comes from research that Gilbert Forbes did several decades ago, and it's been refined over the time, over that time.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: And what it describes is the relationship between how much fat you're carrying on your body when you start losing weight and what fraction of that weight comes off as fat versus lean tissue.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: And so the rule of thumb you hear oftentimes is like 75%, 25% lean tissue.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: But it's not linear, it's like a sliding scale.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: Somebody who has a lot of fat can lose weight and have almost all of it come off as fat.
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: In fact, they might lose a little muscle, but it's just the extra muscle they gained because they gained a lot of weight, if you know what I mean, not necessarily just muscle from strength training.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: So they can they can lose like 90% of their tissue as fat, but as you get leaner, the fraction tends to shift, where a relatively lean person losing weight might give up even more of their weight as lean tissue.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: Now, this is if you're not lifting weights.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: So this could be people on GLP1s, for example, who are not lifting weights.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: Again, not calling you out if you take GLP1s and you do lift weights, different category.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: So, what this means for the skinny fat person is okay, you have a normal BMI.
• 7:53
  Philip Pape: So you don't really have that much fat to give up in absolute terms.
• 7:58
  Philip Pape: Your percentage body fat is higher than you want it to be, but in absolute terms of pounds, it's not very high.
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: It's because you also have very, very low muscle.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: You're just small all over the place.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: And so when you go into a calorie deficit and you don't have that much fat on you at this level, your body might actually burn more muscle.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: I hate to say burn, but you might lose more muscle mass than you even might think because your body's gonna preferentially go to the tissue that you are already short on because muscle tissue is more expensive, but you don't have much of it.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: And now you're gonna be even lighter and smaller, but even worse body fat percentage.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: So the skinny fat problem gets even worse.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: You get even softer and weaker and smaller and worse looking.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: And let's I'm just calling it out.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: I'm stating it like it is.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: And I see this constantly.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: This is maybe the single most common person who reaches out because it's the majority of us.
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: That's exactly who I was for all those years until I started lifting weights and eating more in the right way and having more protein, all the things that I'm trying to share with you and ask you to do along with me.
• 9:05
  Philip Pape: So if you've been dieting many times, which is likely the case, and if you're not carrying the extra, so some of you listening are just overweight.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: I get it.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: But you've probably been in situations where you did lose a bunch of weight, or heck, maybe you took a GLP one now and you've lost a bunch of weight really fast.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: But then you look worse than you did.
• 9:23
  Philip Pape: And I don't even want to go into like Ozempic face and all that stuff, but I imagine that some of that is related to the fact that people are losing a bunch of muscle mass as well, right?
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: Which we're not gonna hammer home that point.
• 9:32
  Philip Pape: We're just talking about why cutting calories over and over again is setting you back further and making things harder, making the underlying problem worse, even though the scale looks like a success.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: And that's why the scale is worthless in so many of these scenarios.
• 9:50
  Philip Pape: So you're not missing weight loss.
• 9:52
  Philip Pape: You probably know how to lose weight.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: You've probably done it many times.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: What you're missing is muscle.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: And we know that lifting in protein supports muscle.
• 9:58
  Philip Pape: So it's always great to come back to that, isn't it?
• 10:00
  Philip Pape: Like just to reinforce it.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: Even if you listen to the show to be like, all right, Phillips reminding me yet again, got to get in the gym, have that routine, gotta eat well, track my food, eat my protein, blah, blah, blah.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: And I mean, eating protein right alone is gonna be a huge game changer, as we've talked about many times.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: So, speaking of protein, I want to give you a quick word about today's sponsor, True Nutrition, because they make protein powder that you can build yourself.
• 10:24
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• 10:25
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• 10:29
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• 10:33
  Philip Pape: And honestly, it tastes like it.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: You often can't find exactly what you're looking for.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: And from my personal experience, I need a lot of protein.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: My target is 180 grams a day.
• 10:43
  Philip Pape: So I'm about 180 pounds.
• 10:45
  Philip Pape: I'm in a fat loss phase right now.
• 10:47
  Philip Pape: I'm going for the high end of the range.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: And it's very difficult to hit that on just food alone, especially with my schedule.
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: And so I will typically have a protein shake before or after, or sometimes both, my workout, because it is so easy to digest, it's convenient, it's very, very protein dense for the calories that you get.
• 11:11
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• 11:14
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• 11:25
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• 11:37
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• 11:41
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• 11:44
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• 11:46
  Philip Pape: So my personal boosts are psyllium husk, gives me a few extra grams of fiber, and then a multivitamin, mainly for the B vitamins and the C.
• 11:56
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• 11:58
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• 12:00
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• 12:02
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• 12:06
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• 12:10
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• 12:12
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• 12:14
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• 12:17
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• 12:18
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• 12:19
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• 12:22
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• 12:26
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• 12:28
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• 12:32
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• 12:35
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• 12:37
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• 12:40
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get back to it because now we are going to dive into the specifics to Darren's question.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: Let's say you do everything right starting Monday.
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: You lift three days a week, you eat enough protein, you stop dieting and eat more to fuel your body right, do this the right way.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: Well, what happens over the next 12 weeks, week by week, in your actual body?
• 13:00
  Philip Pape: This is the timeline.
• 13:01
  Philip Pape: And what happens?
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: Okay, weeks one through six.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: Your strength is going to climb and it's going to climb very quickly, especially if you're new to this.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: You might add 20, 30 pounds to a lift, and that's going to feel amazing.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: That's a real thing.
• 13:15
  Philip Pape: That's strength.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: It's not necessarily muscle.
• 13:18
  Philip Pape: That's your nervous system getting trained.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: That's motor unit recruitment going up from your muscle fibers.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: That's firing rates of your muscles going up.
• 13:27
  Philip Pape: That's your antagonist muscles learning to stop fighting the movements.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: You become efficient.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: Your brain gets better at using the muscle you already have.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: So you had all this sleeping muscle that is now woken up and reactivated like a big monster that's benefiting you and making you super strong.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: It is real strength.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: It is real strength, but it's not necessarily size yet.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: So now the size question.
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: When we say size, by the way, men and women, interpret that how you will.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: For men, they're going to want to think of size as getting big and bulky.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: For women, they want to think of it as tone and lean.
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: Guess what?
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: The answer is yes.
• 14:02
  Philip Pape: It does that to both.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: And it's actually a gender-specific thing when you look at the results.
• 14:07
  Philip Pape: So there's no risk of getting bulky for women.
• 14:09
  Philip Pape: There's only a risk of looking better and feeling better and getting stronger.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: So there's a study from Damas and colleagues.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: I'm probably butchering the name, 2016.
• 14:17
  Philip Pape: It's one of the few studies that looked in the early weeks of a strength training program, right?
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: And in just instead of just measuring start and after.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: So they took untrained people and then they trained them and they measured thigh muscle cross-sectional area at weeks three and weeks, week three and 10.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: At week three, the muscle was up 2.7%.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: And then at week 10, it was up 10.4%.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: Now it sounds like it sounds kind of like a ramp up, like you almost might imagine a line, right?
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: But they also took biopsies and when they looked at the muscle fibers, the fiber cross-sectional area had only increased at week 10.
• 14:55
  Philip Pape: So at week three, there was no fiber growth.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: Instead, what the scan, the body scan was picking up, was swelling, edema from the muscle damage of being new to training.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: So what's interesting is the first three weeks, the gain in strength is real, but you're probably not gaining muscle.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: But the size gain looks real, but it's mostly water.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: So everything you perceive, let's say, in the wind, in the in the in the wind, uh window, I keep saying window, mirror in that window of time is not really representative of what's happening yet.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: Like you shouldn't just trust, trust it based on how you look.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: That's pretty wild.
• 15:33
  Philip Pape: That's pretty wild because people are so in a hurry and so anxious for feedback on like, is this working?
• 15:38
  Philip Pape: But in those first three or four weeks is exactly the point where you can't trust it at all.
• 15:43
  Philip Pape: You can't trust it at all.
• 15:45
  Philip Pape: You can trust that your strength is going up because your numbers on the bar are going up, which is the thing it wants you to lean into here.
• 15:51
  Philip Pape: So then real muscle starts to accumulate from about week three or four onward.
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: And the question is, okay, how fast does muscle accumulate?
• 15:59
  Philip Pape: So I want to give you actual numbers.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: We do have resistance training trials in postmenopausal women, which is actually a lot very relevant to a lot of you who listen to this show when there's almost no other research on this group.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: And it was 10 to 12 weeks of lifting.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: Lean mass went up about 1.2 to 1.4 kilograms.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: So in pounds, that's like two and a half to three pounds of muscle over three months.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: So it's a little bit under a pound of muscle per month.
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: So that's what a good month of strength training and muscle growth looks like.
• 16:31
  Philip Pape: And you don't gain five pounds of muscle, it's just under a pound of muscle.
• 16:35
  Philip Pape: And this is what I often tell clients, you know, in our program who are worried that they're not gaining muscle fast enough.
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: You can only gain muscle so quickly, even if you totally optimize and eat all your food and train as hard as possible.
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: You know, especially if you're a woman of a certain size, you're only going to gain like maybe a pound a month.
• 16:53
  Philip Pape: Not only.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: I mean, that's incredible compared to the alternative, which is not gaining muscle and in fact losing muscle for the rest of your life.
• 17:01
  Philip Pape: So it's it's really flipping that around.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: I wish we could take credit for the muscle mass you are not losing.
• 17:07
  Philip Pape: Because let's say you were going to lose a half pound of muscle otherwise, well, technically the flip, the switch is one and a half pounds of gain, not one.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: You know what I'm saying?
• 17:17
  Philip Pape: Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: So if you took a DEXA scan, this is like the gold standard, you know, you pay, I don't know, 100 bucks, 200 bucks nowadays, and you scan your body for body fat and bone density and all of that.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: It is the most often one used in research.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: And even despite that, DEXA has what's called a measurement error.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: So for lean mass on a DEXA, it's about a kilogram of error, even if you scan on the same exact day.
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: So if you're scanning on different days, which is what you actually do, it's as high as two kilograms.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: That's four and a half pounds of error.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: So the error bar on what we would consider the gold standard best body composition tool we have is somewhere between two and a half, or I'll say two and four and a half pounds.
• 18:05
  Philip Pape: And if a month of genuine everything is going right, muscle growth is under a pound, what does that tell you?
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: That tells you that scanning on ADEXA is not going to see it.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: It's not that it might not see it, you just cannot.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: The signal is multiple times smaller than the noise.
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: It's kind of like trying to weigh an envelope on your bathroom scale, because you know, I'm not talking about a food scale that can weigh in grams, but a bathroom scale where it reads in like at the smallest half pound increments, well, maybe tenths in some cases, but look, an envelope weighs an ounce.
• 18:38
  Philip Pape: That's one sixteenth of a pound.
• 18:40
  Philip Pape: So you wouldn't see your conclusion is the envelope weighs zero based on the bathroom scale, right?
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: Raw, right tool, wrong job.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: The tool doesn't tell you that that's the wrong job.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: It just says, here's your report out, like the DEXA, here's the report out.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: And it might be beneficial for things like bone density.
• 18:55
  Philip Pape: It's definitely beneficial over a longer period, potentially.
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: Depends on what you're trying to measure.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: If you're just trying to measure a couple pounds of lean mass change, it really isn't gonna help you much.
• 19:04
  Philip Pape: It can change by water, glycogen, sodium, where you are in your cycle, all the same things that affect body weight, even if you go in with the same conditions.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: So I guess what I'm trying to get at here for Deeran and for you, dear listener, is when you diet for three or four weeks and you do everything right and you step on the scale and nothing has moved, you haven't learned anything.
• 19:23
  Philip Pape: You have not learned anything because you cannot measure what has changed at that point.
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: But if you do assume that you've learned something, in other words, if the weight is higher or lower and you make a conclusion based on that, now you're gonna make a decision based on that that could be wrong.
• 19:37
  Philip Pape: So it's not that you're failing to do the thing that gets you muscle or fat loss or whatever, it's you're failing to detect the result of doing the thing.
• 19:45
  Philip Pape: And these are two different problems.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: Which is the one that's in your control?
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: Which is the one that's in your control?
• 19:51
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 19:52
  Philip Pape: The thing that's in your control is the process, the leading indicators, not the detection of the outcome, at least to a certain extent.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: So, what do you do?
• 20:02
  Philip Pape: So I'm gonna give you four things.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: These aren't exotic.
• 20:05
  Philip Pape: As always on the show, these are actually pretty simple.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: The question is, are you gonna do them?
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: Number one is to stop dieting.
• 20:11
  Philip Pape: Eat at maintenance.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: Or if you know you're trying to go for body recomp, maybe a tiny deficit, maybe a tiny surplus, depending on which side you're biasing.
• 20:19
  Philip Pape: Are you biasing the fat loss side or the muscle gaining side?
• 20:22
  Philip Pape: I like to bias the muscle gaining side and eat in a tiny, tiny surplus and then still lose body fat because you're really, really close to maintenance.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: But your call.
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: The point is to stay relatively close to maintenance.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: There's good evidence for this because we we've seen studies where they compared slow to fast weight loss in groups that lift weights.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: And those that go slower, even if they are in a slight deficit, sometimes increase their lean body mass, or at the very least, they lose less body mass.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: So that's kind of what we're aiming for here is not just to not lose it, but to potentially gain it, which is why I sometimes biased toward a little bit of a surplus, especially for a skinny, fat person whose whole issue is a lack of muscle.
• 21:01
  Philip Pape: So even if you are dead set on a deficit, keep it extremely, extremely tiny, close to maintenance, if just not staying at maintenance, and really just focus on the building part of it to add what you can't, what you're here to add, which is muscle.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: Okay, number two is of course protein.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: We had that huge meta-analysis from Morton and colleagues, 49 studies that found that the benefit of protein for gaining lean mass with resistance training plateaus around 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: That's 0.7 grams per pound.
• 21:33
  Philip Pape: So a 160-pound person, call it 110 to 120 grams of protein a day minimum, that's the number.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: Now, going way above it isn't gonna do much for you unless it helps more with satiety or your lifestyle preferences.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: If you're in a bigger deficit, it could help, but protein's important.
• 21:50
  Philip Pape: Number three, progressive overload, lifting weights.
• 21:53
  Philip Pape: Now, this is an important one because the primary metric is not the scale or the mirror, it's your training log.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: Weight on the bar, reps completed.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: There's really just a few ways to progress.
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: There's the load and there's the reps.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: Now, you could progress on things like rep quality, I suppose, but that's like a secondary factor.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: What we just covered earlier today in this episode is that your strength is going to move first, and it moves a month or two before your size, your muscle size moves or increases.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: So your earliest reliable signal is is my strength going up?
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: So when the log for your load or weight on the bar, weight on the dumbbells or machines or whatever, and or reps is going up, then you must be getting stronger, which is eventually going to translate to more muscle mass.
• 22:40
  Philip Pape: Now you might be saying, okay, I want to look better.
• 22:42
  Philip Pape: I don't care about my squat.
• 22:43
  Philip Pape: Fair.
• 22:43
  Philip Pape: I hear you.
• 22:44
  Philip Pape: But guess what?
• 22:45
  Philip Pape: The squat is a major movement pattern involving so many muscle groups that you want to look better.
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: And looking better is a result of getting stronger.
• 22:53
  Philip Pape: You don't get one without the other.
• 22:55
  Philip Pape: Number four, and this is the timing piece of it, is I want you to be patient and set your window of assessment at about 12 weeks, which is three months.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: Not three weeks for sure, not four, not five, not six, twelve weeks.
• 23:09
  Philip Pape: And I want you to use three ways to measure this, none of which is the body scale.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: So the first measurement is your log, your training log.
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: The second measurement is your waist.
• 23:19
  Philip Pape: Now you could also measure somewhere else that matters to you, like your biceps, but you could do it once every week, once every two weeks, same time of day, same conditions.
• 23:26
  Philip Pape: And then photos.
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: Same lighting, same clothes, all that jazz.
• 23:30
  Philip Pape: And I know nobody wants to take photos.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: Take them anyway.
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: Take them for yourself.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: In our program, we ask you to take photos, but we don't ask you to share them unless you're comfortable.
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: Because at the end of the day, we just want you to have the data.
• 23:40
  Philip Pape: But then if you have it and we're working through some challenges or some questions you have about muscle definition, we can take a look and say, okay, here's what's happening.
• 23:47
  Philip Pape: Just from an objective standpoint.
• 23:49
  Philip Pape: Not trying to judge anybody.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: We're just trying to look at the objective result.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: And you could just take them and put them away and just keep them on your phone, put them in the hidden folder, whatever.
• 23:57
  unknown: Okay.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: But then in three months, you'll be glad you have them because you can compare.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: Now, our Spotify listener, Dearan, their actual question was how long until you notice the changes?
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: So my honest answer is the subtle changes that you'll actually see yourself if you're looking at month-to-month photos as opposed to the mirror, because the mirror screws up with your head big time, it's probably eight to 12 weeks.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: So two to three months out.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: Now, change that other people notice might even be longer, like four to six months.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: And it depends.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: Men, women, how you dress, what time of year, like if you're going to the beach and taking your clothes off, most of your clothes off, let's say.
• 24:32
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's a new beach, I don't know.
• 24:33
  Philip Pape: Or if you're a man and you know, men tend to have more prominent like traps and delts and back where you might see that in a shirt, for example.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: But a genuinely different looking body, if especially if you're starting from skinny fat, like a genuinely transformed body is probably a one to two year project, if you're honest with yourself.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: If you're starting this from square one at skinny fat, which is really not that time that long in the scheme of things.
• 24:58
  Philip Pape: I mean, scheme of your life, you've probably been dieting for years.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: What's one to two years?
• 25:02
  Philip Pape: I mean, I started lifting weights properly back in 2020.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: It is 2026.
• 25:06
  Philip Pape: I feel like I still have a long way to go, but I'm happy about that because I enjoy the process and I've seen massive improvement.
• 25:12
  Philip Pape: And I saw massive improvement in that first year, too.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: And yeah, it took about a year or two to be like, wow, okay, something is really different now, right?
• 25:21
  Philip Pape: And and I think that's fine.
• 25:22
  Philip Pape: That that's being a human being, that's our body.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: We're trying to shift things.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: Let's be patient about it.
• 25:27
  Philip Pape: That's not a discouraging answer.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: That that's you know what you're signing up for, and you don't quit early.
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: You got to do the hard thing and get the result.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: So I'm not saying skinny fat requires a special method or program.
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: I said that earlier.
• 25:38
  Philip Pape: I kind of made fun of it, even.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: Of course, it doesn't.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: It's the same lifting, same protein, same eating enough food, falling the thing.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: What's different, I think, is your expectation and how you measure it, right?
• 25:47
  Philip Pape: But if if someone's selling you a skinny fat protocol, it just doesn't exist.
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: Just stay away from those guys.
• 25:53
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying don't lose fat.
• 25:55
  Philip Pape: Like if you're carrying enough fat that it makes sense to go in a deficit and go into a deficit.
• 25:59
  Philip Pape: But if you're skinny fat, you probably need to build muscle.
• 26:01
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying the scale's useless.
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: It's it's probably a very helpful tool, especially when we're looking at staying at maintenance and eating the right amount of food for our body.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: And look, if you start building muscle, you're gonna have to eat more.
• 26:11
  Philip Pape: I actually would rather you be logging and understanding your metabolism based on the scale and based on your food with a tool like macrofactor, so that you can actually increase the food over time and stay in the range that you need to be, which is a great problem to have.
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: Now, one final, I guess, positive thought is if you truly are skinny fat and you're untrained and you're listening to this episode, maybe you just found the show, you're probably in the single best position right now from which to build muscle and lose fat at the same time.
• 26:36
  Philip Pape: The only other, I guess, envious position I'll say is someone who has a lot of weight to lose, and they probably wouldn't argue.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: If you if you're carrying a lot of extra body fat, you're probably not gonna argue that that's an envious position because you have certain health risks, right?
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: But it also means you can, if you're at that demographic, you can, like overweight, obese, can go into a deficit and your body won't feel like it's in a deficit.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: So that's also not a bad place to be.
• 26:57
  Philip Pape: So I like to reframe things positively where I can, and those are a couple of places where we can do that.
• 27:02
  Philip Pape: So before we wrap up, I mentioned earlier that there is something you can get from your training log that's gonna help you understand whether you're building muscle.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna share that in a second.
• 27:10
  Philip Pape: But if you're sitting there, you're like, okay, I get it.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: I need a way to see this happening over the next 12 weeks.
• 27:16
  Philip Pape: We do have a free body fat calculator.
• 27:18
  Philip Pape: So I almost never mention these, but if you go to wits and weights.com slash calculators, we have a few free calculators on there.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: One of them it is body fat.
• 27:26
  Philip Pape: And you just take a tape measurement, it takes like a minute and it uses the Navy formula, but it gives you some other cool numbers.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna reveal what those are, just go check it out.
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: We're always updating these tools, but it's gonna be a helpful number to say, okay, this is roughly where I might be starting from, and then go use the trend over time to see how your body is changing.
• 27:46
  Philip Pape: Witsandweights.com slash calculators.
• 27:49
  Philip Pape: I'll include a link directly to that specific calculator in the show notes.
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: All right, so here is that number from your training log that I mentioned earlier.
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: It's called tonnage.
• 27:59
  Philip Pape: Some people call it volume load, uh, but I like tonnage.
• 28:03
  Philip Pape: It takes about a minute to calculate.
• 28:05
  Philip Pape: Many apps do this for you.
• 28:06
  Philip Pape: So check if they're sometimes they just call it volume as well, but pick a lift.
• 28:12
  Philip Pape: It doesn't matter which one, just pick something that you do every single week in your current program.
• 28:17
  Philip Pape: And then for each set, you're gonna multiply the weight by the reps and then add up your sets.
• 28:23
  Philip Pape: So that's our tonnage.
• 28:24
  Philip Pape: That's all it is.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: That's why some people call it volume, but to me, volume is the number of sets where obviously your load might be different.
• 28:31
  Philip Pape: So I know some people don't like that lack of precision if you have an engineering brain like me.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: But tonnage is sets times reps times weight.
• 28:39
  Philip Pape: So you're kind of multiplying all that.
• 28:40
  Philip Pape: So if you had, let's say, three sets of eight of a hundred pounds, then that's a hundred times eight, that's 800 pounds per set times three sets.
• 28:50
  Philip Pape: So that's 2400 pounds, right?
• 28:52
  Philip Pape: So 800 pounds a set times three, 2400 pounds.
• 28:55
  Philip Pape: That's your tonnage on the lift.
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: And what's cool about it is if your weight goes up, it goes up.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: If you add a rep, it goes up.
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: Even if you add sets, it goes up.
• 29:05
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're adding sets, if you're on a set-based progression, it's gonna go way up.
• 29:08
  Philip Pape: And in fact, that's the premise behind a wave-based program.
• 29:12
  Philip Pape: Um, like we have one called Ironclad.
• 29:14
  Philip Pape: If you tracked your tonnage, you would actually see this massive ramp up over three weeks and then it drops way back down because that's the point.
• 29:21
  Philip Pape: But let's say you're doing a normal single or double progression, you're going up in weight, and or you're going up in reps.
• 29:27
  Philip Pape: Tonnage will basically combine the two because you're multiplying it all together.
• 29:31
  Philip Pape: And so some people get confused because they they increase weight one week, but then the next three weeks they increase reps, and they're just not quite sure if it's all working out.
• 29:40
  Philip Pape: Because then what you might do is you might reset the weight.
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: Once you hit the top of the rep range, you might, let's say, reset the weight, but then go higher reps, it gets confusing.
• 29:48
  Philip Pape: You know what I'm saying?
• 29:49
  Philip Pape: Like if things aren't just going up in a line, it gets confusing to do the math.
• 29:53
  Philip Pape: So the tonnage can kind of take that confusion out of it, assuming the sets are the same.
• 29:58
  Philip Pape: Assuming the sets are the same.
• 30:00
  Philip Pape: So if you're a math nerd like me, if you're an engineer, if you like numbers, if you like to take some of the confusion out of progression, it's just an extra way to track that.
• 30:07
  Philip Pape: And again, a lot of apps do that for you.
• 30:09
  Philip Pape: So if anything, just go in your current app that you use, whether it's Boost Camp or Macrofactor workouts or something else.
• 30:14
  Philip Pape: And they may have something like that.
• 30:16
  Philip Pape: They also have other tools in these apps that look at actual volume per muscle group.
• 30:21
  Philip Pape: But again, that's just sets.
• 30:22
  Philip Pape: This is tonnage.
• 30:23
  Philip Pape: Anyway, I hope that was helpful.
• 30:25
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 30:28
  Philip Pape: And remember, when you are starting from skinny fat, you don't have a weight problem, you have a muscle problem.
• 30:34
  Philip Pape: And muscle takes a bit longer to build.
• 30:36
  Philip Pape: So you gotta be patient and put in the work.
• 30:38
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.