Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / 3 Fat Loss Metrics to Track Before Summer (Beyond the Scale) | Ep 467

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3 Fat Loss Metrics to Track Before Summer (Beyond the Scale) | Ep 467 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you're stepping on the scale every morning and using that number to decide whether fat loss is working, you are masking decisions based on one of the noisiest, most misleading metrics you could possibly choose.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: Your scale weight can swing two to five pounds overnight from water, glycogen, sodium, hormones.
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: None of that is fat.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to show you three specific metrics that actually predict whether you're losing fat, preserving muscle, and doing it at a rate you can sustain.
• 0:30
  Philip Pape: You'll learn why a woman in perimenopause can lose half a pound of fat per week and see a three-pound gain on the scale the same morning.
• 0:36
  Philip Pape: Why one measurement predicts your cardiovascular risk better than BMI, and the biofeedback signal that flags an unsustainable deficit before the scale ever catches up.
• 0:51
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 1:01
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: Summer is right around the corner.
• 1:07
  Philip Pape: And if you're in a fat loss phase right now or you're about to start one, you need to know whether your approach is working.
• 1:13
  Philip Pape: For most people, working often means one thing, and that is hey, the scale is going down, and that's it.
• 1:19
  Philip Pape: And that is the entire feedback loop.
• 1:21
  Philip Pape: And if you are over 40, if you're strength training, if you're a woman dealing with hormonal fluctuations, that feedback loop is going to mislead you.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: It is going to cause you to make bad decisions.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: It's going to make you think that you are failing when you're succeeding.
• 1:36
  Philip Pape: Or worse, think that you are succeeding when you're actually maybe not.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: So today I'm going to give you three metrics I want you tracking alongside your scale weight.
• 1:47
  Philip Pape: Not instead of the scale weight, but alongside it.
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: We're going to use the scale weight for one of those metrics actually.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: Because together they will give you a complete picture that the scale alone will not give you.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: Then I want you to stick around to the end of this episode because I'm going to share one specific threshold that tells you your cut is too aggressive and that you need to pull back potentially immediately.
• 2:10
  Philip Pape: It's a red flag that you could miss for a long time until the damage is sort of already done.
• 2:14
  Philip Pape: And I'm going to give you that at the end.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: Here's what we're covering in today's episode.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: First, why the scale is such a terrible standalone metric and how much it actually fluctuates from things that have nothing to do with body fat.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: Second, we'll talk about the three metrics, and I'm not going to reveal those just yet.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: I want you to listen to the episode because I'm going to explain the context behind them.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: But they are very simple things you can do already with nothing special, no special math.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: There's a little bit of math, but it's going to work really well for telling you what progress you are actually making.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about the scale again.
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: Okay, and I say again because if you've listened to the show, we've talked about fat loss versus weight loss.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: If you're new to the show, listen up.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: This is super important.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: You step on the scale in the morning and it's up two pounds from yesterday.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: I'm sure that's happened to you many times.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: What do you do?
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: If you're like most people, you panic a little bit.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: Maybe you panic a lot.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: Maybe you think I need to eat less.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: Maybe you think I need to do some more exercise or cardio.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: Or maybe you're just defeated, deflated because you're doing everything right.
• 3:17
  Philip Pape: And I did everything right yesterday.
• 3:19
  Philip Pape: I didn't even overeat, and the number still went up.
• 3:21
  Philip Pape: Well, the problem here is that your body weight can fluctuate one to two and a half kilograms or two to five and a half pounds in a single day.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: And usually, almost guaranteed, none of it is body fat.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: And it makes a lot of sense when you think about it because every gram of glycogen in your muscles stores three to four grams of water.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: So if you eat a higher carb meal, 500 grams of carbs can add four to six pounds of scale weight from glycogen and water alone.
• 3:54
  Philip Pape: And sodium does the same thing essentially.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: If you have a salty meal, it can cause one to three pounds of water retention that resolves within about one to three days, and none of that is fat.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: Of course, sodium is in a lot of things, it's in processed foods, it's in takeout, pizza, Chinese, you name it.
• 4:09
  Philip Pape: Now, where it gets really important for you is specifically depending on your age and depending on your hormones, there could be some other confounding factors.
• 4:17
  Philip Pape: So, for example, if you're a woman in your 40s, if you're in perimenopause or postmenopause, the scale becomes even more useless, is the way I'm gonna put it.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: When we look at menstrual cycle weight fluctuations, on average they're one pound per cycle, but the clinical range is like one to five pounds.
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: And then during perimenopause, those fluctuations become erratic and unpredictable because estrogen and progestrogen are not following a consistent pattern anymore.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: So you could be losing, say, half a pound of fat per week, and then you see a three-pound spike on the scale one morning.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: And then if you react to that by doing something silly like cutting calories or doing more cardio or changing your whole routine up, you probably made a bad decision based on bad data.
• 4:59
  Philip Pape: The Swan study, it's the gold standard study we've talked about for menopausal body composition research, tracked over 1,200 women and they used DEXA scans over 18 years.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: They found that during the menopause transition, fat mass gain roughly doubled, going from about 1% a year to 1.7% a year.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: Meanwhile, lean mass, right, muscle, lean mass shifted from a slight gain to a decline.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: But total weight gain over the transition averaged only three and a half pounds.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: So because fat was going up and muscle was going down, the scale didn't really change that much.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: So think about that.
• 5:37
  Philip Pape: Think about that a lot.
• 5:38
  Philip Pape: A dramatic shift in body composition, more fat, less muscle.
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: The scare scale barely moves.
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: And this results in a lot of stories I hear from you from ladies who they're just not happy with their body.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: They have belly fat.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: I hear it all the time.
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: They're it's not that they've gained a ton of weight necessarily.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: They could have, but even if they didn't, something is off, something isn't computing, and this is behind it.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: And when we talk about this body composition issue, which is relevant for all of you listening, anyone who lifts weights, listening to this show, you're trying to build muscle and lose fat.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: We see in study after study, trial after trial, that when people are put into a calorie deficit and training and eating enough protein, we see that there are differences in how much lean mass is retained and fat mass is lost.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: And you can't tell the difference between these different groups based on their training and protein, just based on the scale, because the scale weight might stay the same, but one group is actually building muscle, one group is losing muscle.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: And of course, we don't want to do that.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: We want to lose fat.
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: For anyone starting or returning to lifting, especially when you're older, maybe you're detrained, maybe you trained when you were younger.
• 6:47
  Philip Pape: This is also especially relevant because your body is going to respond like a novice lifter and have that high anabolic sensitivity where you are primed for recomposition.
• 6:56
  Philip Pape: And then what happens is you sometimes gain some weight and yet you're gaining more muscle than you're gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time, yet the net effect is you're gaining weight, and that can really mess with your head.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: So I'm not telling you throw out your scale.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: In fact, the scale is something we're gonna use, and it's actually very important.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: You'll see why in a moment, but what you need is context, and that's what these metrics provide.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: So let's get into metric number one, which I call weight trend velocity.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: So if a single daily weigh-in is unreliable, what do we do?
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: Well, we have to zoom out, right?
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: Instead of the trees, we want to have the forest.
• 7:33
  Philip Pape: And so, interestingly or ironically, to do this, we want to weigh ourselves every day.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: Okay, you're like, what?
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: Just stick with me.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: You're gonna weigh yourself every day under standardized conditions.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: The best time to do that is first thing in the morning after using the bathroom before you eat or drink, wearing minimal clothing.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: And you're gonna do this every day.
• 7:53
  Philip Pape: Then if you want to do this by hand, what you would do is calculate a rolling average.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: So seven days is reasonable.
• 7:58
  Philip Pape: I really prefer more like 14 days.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: But let's just say you want to start collecting this now, seven-day average, and then you're gonna compare those rolling averages across time to see the trend.
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: This is not the end of it.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: This is not what this is not the metric we're talking about yet.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: We're gonna use the trend velocity, but we need to have the trend first.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: Now, if you use an app like MacroFactor, okay, I love MacroFactor.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: All of our clients and members use it and eat more lift heavy.
• 8:24
  Philip Pape: If you want to go download the app and use my code Wits and Weights, all one word, you'll get a two-week free trial to try it out for yourself.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: It's the only app that calculates your metabolism to give you accurate targets for calories and macros.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: So go download it, use my code Wits and Weights all one word.
• 8:39
  Philip Pape: But in macro factor, there's something called the trend weight.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: And the trend weight is an exponentially weighted moving average.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: So it essentially smooths out the daily noise and it gives more weight, pun intended, to more recent data points over 20 days.
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: That is something you can do in a spreadsheet as well.
• 8:59
  Philip Pape: But my point is it's over about a three-week period, over 20 days.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: And what's cool about trend weight is it shows you the true direction that your weight is heading based on body fat change, because that's the energy storage in your body.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: And so it smooths out all the other noise from that daily number that's that's influenced by fluid.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: That makes sense.
• 9:20
  Philip Pape: So the trend line is the signal, the daily number is just the noise, and we're trying to reveal the signal.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: But it only tells you, okay, my weight is going up or down.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: You also need to know how quickly that's happening.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: And this is where the rate of loss comes in.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: And it really matters a ton.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: So the consensus at this point is if you're gonna lose weight on a deficit, you should be losing anywhere from like a half to one percent at most of your body weight per week.
• 9:50
  Philip Pape: There are exceptions to that rule.
• 9:52
  Philip Pape: We're not gonna get into those cases today, but in general, you peg the top end at 1% of your body weight per week if you want to avoid losing muscle mass.
• 10:00
  Philip Pape: So for a 160-pound person, that's 0.8 to 1.6 pounds a week.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: If you're 200 pounds, that's one to two pounds a week.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: And again, we've seen studies on athletes, on trained individuals showing that a body weight loss at these percentages of 0.7 versus 1.4 in one study resulted in similar weight, but the slower groups tend to gain more lean body mass or hold on to more lean body mass while they're losing the fat.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: And so that's where we get the confounding issue.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: If you're going too fast and you're losing weight too quickly, and a great example of this is GLP1s, GOP1s, okay?
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: You may be losing muscle mass and it confounds what's actually happening with your body.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: And we don't want to do that.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: We don't want to do it.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: We want to get more muscular or at least hold on to that muscle.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: So when you lose faster than about 1% body weight a week, these bad things tend to cascade.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: Your muscle protein synthesis tends to drop.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: Your body doesn't have the resources to care about preserving muscle anymore when all it's trying to do is find as much energy as it can.
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: Along with this, your testosterone can drop significantly in an aggressive deficit, as well as your other reproductive hormones, your thyroid, and your body starts pulling from lean tissue for energy.
• 11:20
  Philip Pape: So, what I want you to do is actually look at the velocity or the rate of loss of your trend weight.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: And all I mean by that is what percentage are you actually losing per week?
• 11:32
  Philip Pape: Now you may have intended on a certain amount, but what are you actually losing?
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: So if you're doing this by hand, all you have to do is compare this week's rolling average to last week's rolling average and see what percentage of your body weight that is.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: If you use macro factor, all you have to do is go to your weight trend page, scroll down under the insights and data section, and you'll see something called weekly weight change.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: And if that number is faster than the 1%, just watch out.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: It might be too aggressive.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: If the number is flat or slightly positive and you're trying to lose weight and it's been more than three weeks, don't panic.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: That is where metrics two and three come in to tell you whether the approach is working, even if the scale isn't showing it.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: Now, speaking of things that you should be tracking, we are gonna talk about sleep and biofeedback in a little bit.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: And the foundation of recovery, the foundation of everything we're talking about today is sleep.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: So I want to put it in your head now, and then we're going to revisit it later.
• 12:32
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• 12:38
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• 12:50
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• 12:54
  Philip Pape: So not only are they lightweight and comfortable, but I run really hot.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: And temper temperature regulation is really important for me.
• 13:01
  Philip Pape: They don't make me overheat, and that's really, really simple.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: When I overheat, just everything goes wrong.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: My heart rate goes up, my HRV gets worse, my sleep is not as good.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: So really think about the clothes you're wearing at night and making yourself relaxed and really pulling energy back into your body is kind of a way to put it because you get into that parasympathetic state when you're relaxed.
• 13:21
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• 13:28
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• 13:29
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• 13:31
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• 13:32
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• 13:36
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• 13:40
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• 13:41
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• 13:46
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• 13:52
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• 13:55
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• 14:02
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• 14:04
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• 14:07
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• 14:11
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• 14:15
  Philip Pape: All right, now metric two.
• 14:17
  Philip Pape: And I'll say that this is quite underused today, which surprises me because I thought everybody just does this.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: And that is measuring your waist circumference.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: Okay, just your waist circumference, not everything else, just your waist.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: And the reason this matters so much, I'm gonna point to a massive European cohort study in the New England Journal of Medicine, over 359,000 people.
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: So you can't argue about sample size on this one.
• 14:48
  Philip Pape: This found that every five centimeter increase in waist circumference raised mortality risk by 17% in men and 13% in women.
• 14:58
  Philip Pape: And the waist circumference's predictive power got stronger after you controlled for BMI.
• 15:06
  Philip Pape: In other words, BMI often becomes non-significant once you account for waist circumference.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: And that makes sense because where you carry your fat and the fact that you have more body fat matters more than how much you weigh.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: The more muscular you are, the more higher your BMI is gonna be, and it just throws off the number, but your waist really tells a vast majority of the story.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: There was something called the interheart study with 52 countries, 27,000 participants, and it found that the highest waist to hip ratio group had two and a half times the heart attack risk.
• 15:43
  Philip Pape: So if we define obesity by waist to hip ratio instead of BMI, the number of people classified as at risk would roughly triple, roughly triple.
• 15:52
  Philip Pape: This is why I prefer things like body roundness index.
• 15:55
  Philip Pape: This is why our clients measure their waist, along with some other measurements that give you extra nuance, but definitely want to measure your waist.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: It's also why waste is part of body fat calculations typically.
• 16:06
  Philip Pape: So what are the actual thresholds?
• 16:08
  Philip Pape: Well, the World Health Organization has two tiers.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: You have an increased risk above 90 centimeters for men, which is like 37 inch waste, and above 80 for women, which is about a 31 and a half inch waste.
• 16:20
  Philip Pape: That's an increased risk.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: So 37 for men, 31 and a half for women.
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: Substantially increased risk is 40 inches for men, 35 inches for women.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: And for the waist to hip ratio, the threat the thresholds are if you're higher than 0.9 for men and 0.85 for women.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: By the way, we in in Eat More Lift Heavy, we have this amazing physique tracker that will calculate all this stuff for you based on your measurements and tell you whether things are at risk or not.
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: Now, for tracking fat loss specifically, a meaningful change based on interventions from exercise, from training is typically around five centimeters.
• 17:01
  Philip Pape: And we know that waist circumference reductions also correlate with visceral fat reductions.
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: That's belly fat.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: Okay, now we know also it's not just from exercise, that's for sure.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: It's also going to be from your diet and how much body fat you have.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: But this is especially relevant for women in perimenopause.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: The Swan study showed visceral fat shifts from 5 to 8% of total body fat up to 15 to 20% during the menopause transition.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: That's a threefold increase in visceral fat, which is the most metabolically dangerous type of fat.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: It concentrates in the midsection.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: So even if the scale isn't moving, your waist circumference going down is telling you a very important thing that you are losing visceral fat.
• 17:51
  Philip Pape: And that is a big positive for your health.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: That's why I love this metric so much, because even if the scale is not moving, or even if it's going up a bit, maybe you're gaining muscle.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: We don't know.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: If your waist is going down, that's a fantastic sign.
• 18:03
  Philip Pape: Now, here's the nuance waist circumference has measurement error, right?
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: It's a little bit difficult to get it perfect.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: You know, breathing can shift your reading by four to five centimeters, meal timing can make a big difference.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: And if even if you're trained at this of how to do it, there can be an error.
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: And so the protocol, the way you do this is important.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: I would say pick one consistent objective spot.
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: Now, the WHO has the technical definition of the midpoint between your lowest rib and the top of your hip bone.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: But my shortcut is just use your belly button.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: Okay, we all know where our belly button is, right?
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: So just stand in a relaxed state.
• 18:44
  Philip Pape: Don't tense up your abs and don't slouch or like pop out your stomach.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: You know what I mean?
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: Just a neutral state.
• 18:51
  Philip Pape: And that'll be a pretty objective measurement you can do.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: You can use a digital measurement, you can use a normal closed tape measure, you can use the what's it called, accutape, which lets you do a little ratchet.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: It's okay.
• 19:03
  Philip Pape: What matters is the trend over time.
• 19:05
  Philip Pape: That's what matters.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: You'll know.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: I mean, the measurement error isn't so big that you're not gonna detect inches over time.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: You will.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: And so I would track it weekly, but then look at the trend, look at the average, you know, just just like you would with scale weight, but you're not tracking it every day because your waist isn't gonna change that much.
• 19:23
  Philip Pape: But this will tell you whether you're losing fat, even if the scale is staying the same, going up, going down, it almost doesn't matter.
• 19:29
  Philip Pape: All right, so the third metric is a bit different from the first two.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: It is a little more subjective, but the way we track it makes it more objective.
• 19:37
  Philip Pape: Let me explain.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: This is the biofeedback composite.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: Now, you might have heard me talk about rating your biofeedback, things like energy, digestion, hunger, sleep, stress, et cetera.
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: We have seven metrics that we look at in eat more lift heavy.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: By the way, if you you keep hearing me say eat more lift heavy, it's just our our program.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: It's a 26-week coach program where we walk you through building all of these skills, tracking your physique, improving your nutrition and training all together, your whole lifestyle.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: You can go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to check out what that's about and learn more.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: But where I'm going with that is we recommend clients track at least once a week across all seven categories.
• 20:20
  Philip Pape: What I'm talking about today is a more precise measurement you can choose to do, where you track four specific things on a scale of one to ten, and then you just average them up, and we're gonna see if how if it deteriorates or not over time.
• 20:35
  Philip Pape: Okay, those four things are hunger, energy, sleep quality, and training performance.
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: Hunger, energy, sleep quality, and training performance.
• 20:45
  Philip Pape: And you can use a scale of one to 10 to give you a little bit more uh resolution.
• 20:49
  Philip Pape: So where one is the worst, 10 is the best.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: So, like if you're if you're super hungry all the time, that would be closer to a one.
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: If sleep is pretty poor, that's closer to a one.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: If you're low energy all the time, that's close to one.
• 21:01
  Philip Pape: And if your training performance is low, it's close to one, right?
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: And then the opposite, if they're good, closer to 10.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: And you average them out.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: And the reason this works is it gives you a signal of your adaptations and your metabolism during a deficit.
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: And that and that's because it shows up in how you feel, and that's the subjective part, but you know your body best and how you feel is becomes kind of objective because it's relative to how you felt last week.
• 21:29
  Philip Pape: Well, you know how you feel day after day after day, and what's a good direction, what's a bad direction.
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: And we know that your total daily energy expenditure, your metabolism, drops beyond what body mass loss would predict through reduced BMR, through decreased spontaneous movement, through hormonal shifts, especially lower leptin, lower thyroid hormones, higher cortisol, higher ghrelin, right?
• 21:53
  Philip Pape: Appetite, uh metabolic hormones, stress hormones, all of that changes.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: And so your body is giving you signals.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: Very early in the process.
• 22:01
  Philip Pape: And the question is whether you're paying attention to them and they if they are, let's say, appropriate or within the window that's acceptable to you, or if you're working with a coach, that's what we tend to look at is hey, let's let's use this as a proactive measure here.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: So if we look at the individual markers, those four things, start with hunger.
• 22:17
  Philip Pape: Hunger is the strongest standalone predictor.
• 22:20
  Philip Pape: And if if I'm working with a client, I can look at their hunger all by itself and learn a lot about them, not everything, but learn a lot.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: We know that an increase in hunger ratings predicts a decrease in adherence to your diet.
• 22:34
  Philip Pape: And that's the biggest thing.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: It's simply that hunger makes it harder to stick to your diet.
• 22:39
  Philip Pape: And temptation, the level of temptation you have, predicts an even larger decrease in your adherence.
• 22:46
  Philip Pape: So temptation is kind of a subset when we think of hunger and cravings and temptation, right?
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: There's a whole bunch of factors combined.
• 22:53
  Philip Pape: Training performance is kind of like the physiological canary in the coal mine.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: Now I know I mentioned this as the fourth metric, but I I in my notes I had them out of order.
• 23:03
  Philip Pape: It doesn't matter.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: Training performance is interesting because we know that in a deficit, strength gains tend to hold on for a while, but muscle mass starts to drop.
• 23:16
  Philip Pape: And so if your performance in the gym is starting to drop, and performance can be measured in different ways.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: It can be measured with the actual numbers, but also in the effort and in how lethargic you are and how much energy you have and all that.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: Kind of up to you how you do that.
• 23:30
  Philip Pape: Again, in E More LiveTavue, we give you some prescriptions around that.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: But just pick a way, pick a way to track that, either objectively based on your weights or slightly subjectively based on how you feel in the gym, things like that, to know whether you're losing muscle or not.
• 23:43
  Philip Pape: That's how we look at it.
• 23:44
  Philip Pape: Then we have sleep quality.
• 23:46
  Philip Pape: Obviously, we know sleep is super, super important.
• 23:49
  Philip Pape: It is difficult to self-report on sleep.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: But essentially, if you are more restless, if you are waking up tired, like those alone are a big way to track that your sleep is getting better or worse, not just the hours of sleep, excuse me, but basically are you waking up tired or not?
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: Versus, hey, I'm sleeping really well, I'm sleeping like a baby, I wake up on my own.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: It's great.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: And as I mentioned before, you know, there are a lot of factors that affect sleep, including what you wear, what you sleep in, your environment, your blue light, your routine, how consistent you are with sleep times and wake times, all of that.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, the fourth one that I mentioned at the end out of order here is energy.
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: And energy, again, it could be several different things.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: For many of you, this is a sense that you don't have enough energy to get through the day properly.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: And I say it that way because we should all have an energy drop toward the end of the day, just naturally due to cortisol, but it should feel fairly natural and smooth, I guess is a way to put it.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: And it shouldn't feel like you have these massive dips in energy or like you're super tired in the morning and need this huge jolt of caffeine to get going.
• 24:52
  Philip Pape: That's what I mean by energy.
• 24:54
  Philip Pape: And again, it's relative.
• 24:55
  Philip Pape: So when I say relative, what you're gonna do at this state is you're gonna track it all on a daily basis and average it.
• 25:02
  Philip Pape: Now, you're not gonna do this forever.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: I'm not asking you to track biofeedback forever this way, but doing it temporarily as we head into summer, if you're in a deficit, if you're trying to lean out, if you're trying to get shredded, whatever, this is gonna give you a good trend of how your signals are telling you your body's adapting.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: So if your hunger goes from a seven to a three, your energy goes from a seven to a four, your sleep quality goes from a six to a five, you know, your bench press starts to stall, right?
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: All within the same couple weeks, the average is gonna start dipping down, right?
• 25:33
  Philip Pape: Some things go up, some things go down.
• 25:35
  Philip Pape: But if the overall average is dipping down, maybe your deficit is too aggressive.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: And we don't care what the scale says, because if the scale says your weight is dropping, great.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: But if it's at the expense of potential muscle mass or adherence or something else, we want to get ahead of it.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: Now, I mentioned in a recent episode, the Matador study about intermittent energy restriction, the alternating two-week deficit, two-week maintenance, producing greater fat loss.
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: And part of that has to do with your biofeedback and adherence and your metabolism not overadapting, right?
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: So this biofeedback composite can potentially tell you that your deficit is or isn't sustainable.
• 26:15
  Philip Pape: Pretty cool, right?
• 26:17
  Philip Pape: Now, I did promise you a specific number at the beginning of this episode.
• 26:21
  Philip Pape: It's a red flag threshold that tells you that your cut has maybe crossed the line from being productive to somewhat destructive.
• 26:29
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna share that in a second.
• 26:31
  Philip Pape: But if this episode made you realize that you want to track this stuff, but you don't want to use a bunch of spreadsheets or you don't want to manually track them, that's what we designed Fitness Lab for.
• 26:44
  Philip Pape: It's an app that we designed and upgraded this spring and gives you personalized guidance on nutrition, training, biofeedback.
• 26:52
  Philip Pape: It adapts to your data.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: It connects to Apple Health.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: Eventually it will connect to the Google Health and it can suck in all that data to really help you understand what's going on, whether or not you like tracking.
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: But for a lot of people, you don't like it.
• 27:05
  Philip Pape: And ironically, even though this sounds like a tracking app, it is not a tracking app.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: It actually tracks a lot of the stuff for you and tells you what to do with it.
• 27:12
  Philip Pape: And then it's super empowering.
• 27:14
  Philip Pape: So go to wits and weights.com slash app to check it out.
• 27:17
  Philip Pape: That is witsandweights.com slash app.
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: The link is in the show notes.
• 27:21
  Philip Pape: Okay, here's the red flag number, and it's going to be based on that third metric, the biofeedback composite, the average of your hunger, energy, sleep, and training performance.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: If it drops below five for three or more days in a row, almost guaranteed that your cut is too aggressive.
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: So that's the threshold I would look for.
• 27:42
  Philip Pape: If it drops by five two to below a five for three days in a row, it means at least two of those four markers are significantly impaired at the same time, just based on math, based on averages.
• 27:54
  Philip Pape: And that is a pattern that is predicting unsustainable dieting, potential muscle re muscle loss, and a potential rebound where you overconsume and you binge.
• 28:06
  Philip Pape: One single bad number is not gonna get the average below a five for three or more nights.
• 28:11
  Philip Pape: That's why we like this.
• 28:13
  Philip Pape: Okay, but when it does, you have two options.
• 28:16
  Philip Pape: Option one, take a diet break.
• 28:18
  Philip Pape: Eat at maintenance for about a week.
• 28:21
  Philip Pape: Research shows this lowers hunger, it improves your alertness, it preserves muscle endurance, it reduces your metabolic rate being suppressed.
• 28:28
  Philip Pape: It's a great tool.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: Option two, it's just to reduce your calorie deficit a little bit.
• 28:34
  Philip Pape: So stay in the deficit, but increase those calories.
• 28:37
  Philip Pape: So it's maybe two to three hundred calories of a deficit and reassess for a week.
• 28:42
  Philip Pape: This is gonna give you a good idea of whether it was simply a dip a past the line for your deficit and the deficit's okay, or whether just the deficit itself is the problem.
• 28:54
  Philip Pape: You can kind of compare the two, and then if you have to, you can still take a diet break, right?
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: We know that pushing through an unsustainable deficit does not get you to your goal faster.
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: All of the research on metabolic adaptation tells us this.
• 29:08
  Philip Pape: It actually gets you to a plateau faster, and it costs you a ton on the way there and it frustrates you, and then the whole thing kind of falls apart until you do it right again.
• 29:18
  Philip Pape: So tomorrow morning, rate your hunger, energy, sleep training on a scale one to 10, average them out.
• 29:23
  Philip Pape: If you're above, you know, six, if you're six or above, you're in a good place.
• 29:26
  Philip Pape: If you're like five or six, keep an eye on it.
• 29:28
  Philip Pape: But if you're below five for three days in a row, maybe you should pull back.
• 29:32
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 29:36
  Philip Pape: And remember the scale measures gravity, not progress.
• 29:40
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 29:41
  Philip Pape: Your body composition, your waist, how you feel, those tell a much more accurate story.
• 29:46
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.