Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The Slower Cut That Beats a Fast One (Fat Loss Over 40) | Ep 490

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The Slower Cut That Beats a Fast One (Fat Loss Over 40) | Ep 490 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: Did you know that the total fat you can lose is how fast you lose it times the number of weeks you stick with it?
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: Might sound obvious, but most people only optimize the first half of that equation.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: They pick the fastest cut they can stomach, the big calorie deficit, the dramatic first month quick fix, lose a bunch of pounds fast, and they ignore the second half, the number of weeks you can stick with it.
• 0:25
  Philip Pape: And that's the part that actually decides whether you're successful.
• 0:28
  Philip Pape: So today I'm gonna show you why the slower, more moderate approach often gets you to the body you want sooner.
• 0:34
  Philip Pape: Not because slow is something magical, but because it determines whether you make it to the finish line.
• 0:41
  Philip Pape: And then we're gonna wrap it up at the end with a 30-second gut check to tell you whether your current deficit is too aggressive before something like the scale or the mirror tells you that.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that it does.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and back on episode 479, I made the case for the aggressive cut, the short, sharp cut, rapid fat loss, and who it's actually for.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: And I stand by every word of that.
• 1:18
  Philip Pape: There is a real place for a fast cut, and I'm not gonna walk that back at all today.
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: This is the compliment or the companion or the yin to the yang of that episode, because the answer to how fast should I lose weight or how fast should I lose fat is always, of course, it depends.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: And today I want to give you the framework for what it depends on, which may not be what you think.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: So I want you to stick with me.
• 1:43
  Philip Pape: This is one of those fun episodes where we dissect the things that make fat loss successful.
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: So you can go all in on that.
• 1:52
  Philip Pape: It matters because, especially if you're over 40, like me, and you got a lot going on in your life, most people are picking their rate of loss, like how fast they want to lose weight, just based on feels and based on vibes.
• 2:05
  Philip Pape: Let's be honest.
• 2:06
  Philip Pape: Faster, of course, sounds better, doesn't it?
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: So you tend to go fast, often too fast.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: And you run a big calorie deficit, you kind of try to push it right to that limit.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: Like, well, I might as well go as big of a deficit as I can handle.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: That way I'll lose faster and I can get it over with.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: And what happens is very quickly you start to run into issues and start to white knuckle things, and it's very hairy.
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: And somewhere around week four, five, that's when I see these things fall apart and you start to graze, lick, binge, all the things that tends to hold you back.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: Not only that, your energy is going down, your training quality is going down, like something happens in your life.
• 2:46
  Philip Pape: Let's be something is gonna happen in your life and it gets in the way, or you just bail.
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: You're like, okay, this is too much work.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: Or you kind of finish the crash diet successfully, I'll call it, in quotes, and then you rebound, you rebound right back.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: And then you're like, okay, this doesn't work for me, or how do I actually stick with the results?
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: It's not just about the loss, but the sustainability.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: The real problem for a lot of you is just that you picked a speed or a rate that was not sustainable for you.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: And then you get into a pattern, the start and stop and start again, which is why you're not getting to the result and why going slower, going more slowly, can actually be faster.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: And I actually mean faster, not just better, if that makes sense.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna show you the math on that.
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: Now, I want to be straight about evidence always, because there is a version I could have given you today that I'll say oversells the slow approach.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: The head-to-head research, when they look at fast versus slow weight loss, does not say, does not show us that slow wins when it comes to total pounds lost.
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: It mostly says the opposite, believe it or not.
• 3:54
  Philip Pape: So the case for going slower, you're gonna wonder how that compares to the evidence.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: And I'm going to have to add context for you so you understand why.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: This is where the coaching experience and working with hundreds of people, thousands of people at this point is gonna help you because it's not just about, okay, go as fast as you can stomach and you'll lose the weight.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: And that's what the evidence shows.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: So therefore, that's the way I should do it.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: There is more nuance.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: Nuance is what this episode is about.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: And then I want you to stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a 30-second gut check.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: Three questions.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: You know how much I love these.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: The very practical little self-quiz to tell you whether your current aggressive is too aggressive, your current deficit is too aggressive for you specifically before other data starts to tell you that.
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: So here's what we're covering today.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: First, I'll show you why aggressive cuts often fail or break down for most real people in practical real life, and why that makes slower genuinely faster over, say, a year, like a 12-month period.
• 4:53
  Philip Pape: Then I'm gonna walk you through what the strongest research that I could find tells us, including the part that I'll say contradicts some of what I'm telling you today, seemingly, but really doesn't.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: And then a decision rule that you can use to make this simple.
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: We're also gonna look at why a moderate deficit tends to give you room to breathe and take things like breaks or an aggressive one doesn't, and how that helps things like muscle metabolism, bones, all of the stuff.
• 5:22
  Philip Pape: So I always like to play devil's advocate.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: And if let's say tortoise in the hair, you guys know the story.
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: Slow and steady wins the race.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: When it comes to fat loss, if you listen to any other podcast about fat loss, you hear the half a percent a week or one to two pounds a week is thrown out quite often.
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: You know, half a half a percent to one percent of your body weight a week.
• 5:42
  Philip Pape: We actually see that in obesity guidelines.
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: We see it in evidence-based coaching in general.
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: It's kind of a consensus at this point.
• 5:48
  Philip Pape: And we see it baked into apps like Macrofactor, for example.
• 5:52
  Philip Pape: And either you try to follow it and then you struggle due to other reasons, or you try to override it because you're like, well, that's too slow for me.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: I can handle more, my metabolism may be higher, whatever the reason you want to justify or rationalize for yourself, and you want that number to start moving, you want to lose the weight.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: You see your friend on keto or you see your friend on GLP ones or whatever, losing all these pounds, you're like, okay, I gotta do that.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna be the one that can sustain it.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: After all, I listen to wits and weights, right?
• 6:18
  Philip Pape: Or, you know, whatever.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: Like, you know, I eat a lot of whole foods and fiber.
• 6:22
  Philip Pape: So I like to bring this back to math and numbers.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: Let's just take the emotion out of it.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: The total fat that you're gonna lose, of course, equals your rate of fat loss times the number of weeks you stick with it.
• 6:34
  Philip Pape: So rate times duration.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 6:36
  Philip Pape: That's like the very simple math.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: I've written a million charts and graphs for clients showing this.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: Now, if you put all your attention into that, which again, if you're using an app like MacroFactor, that's kind of what you're scoping into.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: What am I trying to say?
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: You're like very myopic.
• 6:52
  Philip Pape: It's very focused on just the rate of loss and then the deficit.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: If you pour all your attention into that, and then consequently how fast the scale is dropping, because that's the feedback loop, then you're gonna think, okay, this is starting to work, or this is the process.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: Now I just need to go as long as possible to get to the weight I want.
• 7:09
  Philip Pape: As if you're gonna be able to keep going that duration.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 7:14
  Philip Pape: But the duration is the hardest variable in all of fat loss, not the aggressiveness, believe it or not.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: Because you could, I mean, think about it.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: You could probably fast for three days if you really had to, and you could do it and eat zero calories for three days, but you couldn't do it for a week or two weeks or three weeks.
• 7:31
  Philip Pape: And again, I'm giving you an extreme, but it's the duration, the sustainability part that's the issue.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: The bigger and more aggressive your deficit, conversely, the harder it is to sustain it.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: So, and and it sounds obvious, but it's a true phenomenon.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: We have to understand the mechanism behind.
• 7:47
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: Think about what a steep deficit demands of you and your body.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: It demands that you're gonna be hungry a lot for a long time and to keep making good decisions anyway.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: Whether you're the type that gets hangry or not, you are going to get some level of hangry.
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: It demands of you precision, okay?
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: When your deficit is small, you have all this margin to play with.
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: If you overeat on the weekend or you go to a party, you're still in a deficit.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's not as big.
• 8:16
  Philip Pape: But when your deficit is very, very aggressive, the margin to hit that deficit is gone.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: Now you're like, wait a minute, isn't that contradictory?
• 8:23
  Philip Pape: Because now I have all this room to play with.
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: The problem is if you have a bad day or you go to a restaurant, whatever, and your deficit is predicated on the fact that you need this huge deficit because of the duration.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: And now you're cutting into that significantly every week, the duration part goes out the window.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: Like in other words, if the deficit is smaller, you're kind of expecting the duration to be longer.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: And in general, things feel more sustainable.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: And so going off track occasionally doesn't meaningfully impact the duration.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: It sounds counterintuitive, but hopefully that made sense the way I put that.
• 8:59
  Philip Pape: Yes, you have more margin on the big deficit, but you're quickly erasing the whole point of the margin, which was to shorten the duration.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: Also, when it's very aggressive, you have to have not just more willpower, but more accuracy, more tracking, more consistency week after week, less room for the normal messiness of you're a human being over 40 with a job and a family and a life.
• 9:22
  Philip Pape: And on top of all of that, it affects your training.
• 9:25
  Philip Pape: So when you're eating in a big deficit, your lifts are going to just feel more sluggish.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: They're going to suffer.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: You're probably going to regress.
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: You're going to have less energy in the gym.
• 9:33
  Philip Pape: Your recovery between sessions gets worse.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: And then the strength you were building starts to regress.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: And now you're hungry and you're tracking kind of obsessively, but you feel weak in the gym and you're doing all of it under all this pressure with less slack and less margin.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: How do you keep that up?
• 9:48
  Philip Pape: How do you keep that up?
• 9:49
  Philip Pape: How long do you keep that up?
• 9:50
  Philip Pape: And for most people, the honest answer is maybe a few weeks, but it's just another form of deprivation, if you ask me.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: So what happens in the real world?
• 9:58
  Philip Pape: Well, in the real world, this is what happens to you when you do this.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: And again, this is not contradictory with my rapid fat loss episode, which is a very, very, very short, like two, two-week deficit.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about a very aggressive deficit where you go really fast, and then right around week or four or four or five, you start to hit that wall.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: You start to crash.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: You take a few weeks off to recover mentally.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: And then maybe you start again and then you crash again and start, stop, start, stop.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: And so the stops are not just like pausing and going to maintenance.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: Oftentimes it's a rebound and you're actually eating more than you probably should, and you're binging, and you maybe not eating the best things for yourself.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: And then you have to relose that same five pounds over and over again for the third, fourth, fifth time.
• 10:39
  Philip Pape: Add up a year of doing that, two years, ten years, raise your hand.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: And the tortoise versus the hare comes in.
• 10:47
  Philip Pape: The tortoise over there, who ran this nice slow deficit that they barely noticed, and they just didn't stop because it was super easy and sustainable.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: They got to the finish line, they lost more fat than you, and they did it through one long phase.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: It wasn't because their diet was better on a given week, but because they were still going on after, you know, four months, six months, whatever the length might be.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: That is why slower is actually faster.
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: And I mean that word actually faster, because over a 12-month horizon, a moderate deficit that you can run continuously is gonna beat an aggressive deficit that keeps getting broken up.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: That keeps getting broken up.
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: That makes sense, right?
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: Slower isn't better just because it is gentler, let's say, or more moderate.
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: It's because you can finish it.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: Now, I have to, I'll say, complicate my own argument here for you and be honest, because if you go looking for studies that directly compare fast weight loss to slow weight loss head to head in in humans, you might find a contradiction in what I'm saying.
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: So I want to walk through that.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: All right, being this is this is part of how we examine the evidence.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: There is a big trial by Purcell and colleagues published in the Lancet Diabetes and Endrocinology back in 2014.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: They took 200 adults with obesity, they randomized them to lose the same amount of weight, either gradually over 36 weeks or rapidly over 12.
• 12:14
  Philip Pape: So that's like a third the duration, right?
• 12:16
  Philip Pape: And then they followed them for almost three years.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: And what they found is the rapid group was more likely to hit the target, 81% of them versus 50% of the other group.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: So the the rapid group was actually less likely to drop out.
• 12:29
  Philip Pape: And then the regain afterward was identical between the two groups.
• 12:34
  Philip Pape: And so they actually ran an editorial that was titled Slow and Steady Does Not Win the Race.
• 12:40
  Philip Pape: Now, I just spent the whole segment telling you Slow and Steady wins a race.
• 12:45
  Philip Pape: Fast fat loss tends to fall apart for a lot of people.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: And here's a study that contradicts that.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: So let me square it for you.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: In that trial, the rapid group wasn't crash dieting and they weren't doing it freewheeling on their own.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: They were on a structured, monitored, total meal replacement program and had a research team helping them out and checking in on that.
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: So if you take someone who struggles with an aggressive diet and you hand them a rigid plan, and but then you remove the guesswork about what to eat and you watch them hold them accountable, well, then more of them are definitely going to finish.
• 13:18
  Philip Pape: That's not who I'm talking about.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: In other words, if you come into our program, eat more and lift heavy, we can guide you through any level of aggressiveness to help you be successful.
• 13:27
  Philip Pape: And there's a much higher chance you'll be successful with a more aggressive diet.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: But if you're trying to do this on your own or there's other complicating factors, which we can get into, you're at home, you have access to your own fridge and your own life kind of get in the way.
• 13:42
  Philip Pape: You're not part of a research study.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: Maybe you don't have coaching, maybe you do, but you still have all this stuff happening that's different than what's in a research study.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: You don't have that level of supervision and accountability, which is the thing that fixes precision and consistency for a lot of people, right?
• 13:55
  Philip Pape: And if you don't have that, you got to listen up to what I'm saying today because it may not work for you.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: So this is not a pitch for coaching.
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: This is just trying to understand the different variables.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: So that trial doesn't prove that fast is easy to sustain.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: It's it proves that fast can be sustainable when somebody removes the roadblocks, helps you out, guides you, tells you what to eat, and holds you accountable.
• 14:16
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 14:17
  Philip Pape: Then there's another trial called the tempo trial.
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: Seyman and colleagues, they ran a severe versus moderate restriction in postmenopausal women.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: The severe group lost about twice as much weight and fat at 12 months without losing more lean mass and with no difference in their grip strength.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: And then in another trial in older women, they are averaged age around 859.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: The faster initial weight losers, not losers, but people who lost weight, were five times more likely to still be down 10% a year and a half later.
• 14:50
  Philip Pape: So if you came to this episode wanting me to tell you that going slow means you lose more fat in a controlled trial, I can't tell you that.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: When someone else is helping you with the diet through coaching, accountability, structure, precision, sometimes meal planning, like if it's a dietitian, then the faster is often the way you do want to go because it's more efficient.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: It's more efficient.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: So we should be honest about that.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: For many people, going faster can be totally successful if you have the support in place.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: So when does going slower win, though?
• 15:23
  Philip Pape: Well, in your real life, unsupervised, the moderate deficit is what I've seen actually works.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: Now, even coaching clients, for many of them, they have so many things going on.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: They have trouble getting sleep, they have a busy job, they can't get their steps in, all these things that that's also a reason to go slower.
• 15:39
  Philip Pape: They're again, they're not in this structured, supervised context, even though they have a coach.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: I still would guide them to go slower.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: The other reason, though, and this holds even for a disciplined person who can finish a fast cut, is just making sure that you're holding on to your muscle mass and maximizing the fat loss.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: And I don't want you being a situation where the pounds are flying off, but some of it or a lot of it is muscle.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: And so a lot of these research trials are optimizing for weight, purely weight loss.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: And if that's your only goal, then yeah, the faster you go, the better.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: We see that with GLP1s, but you know, what tends to happen is you lose muscle mass, you lose lean mass if you're not training and if you're going too fast.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: So if you care about body composition, not just scale, if you care about muscle and how you look and feel, then we have to add that nuance to the equation.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: When you look at studies, excuse me, that hold weight loss equal and then look at the body composition, we actually start to see that slower weight loss is superior.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: There's a meta-analysis by Ashtari Larki and colleagues, and they pooled all the head-to-head trials.
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: And for the same total weight loss, the gradual approach produced about a kilogram more fat loss, a meaningfully bigger drop in body fat percentage, and significantly better preservation of metabolism, of resting metabolic rate.
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: So for the same scale change, they had better body composition and I'll say a metabolism that didn't drop as much or would crash as much because of going slower.
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: And then one of my favorite studies on this, uh, which is relevant to anyone who trains, Garth and colleagues, these were elite athletes, all of them resistance training four days a week, and they split them into a slow fat loss group and or a slow loss group and a fast loss group.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: Both of them lost fat, but the slow group gained lean mass, they gained about 2%, and the fast group was flat, right?
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: They didn't gain or lose.
• 17:33
  Philip Pape: And the slow group gained more strength.
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: So they had the same goal, which was fat loss, but the slower group had more muscle and more strength than the faster group.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: I really love that study.
• 17:43
  Philip Pape: So now you see coming full circle, when we care about body composition and sustainability and real life and muscle mass and all of that, there's a very good chance that going a little bit slower is just the thing you need.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: If you want your body to look good, function well, hold on to your results.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: Very, very important to think about this.
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: So here's the fix.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: And it it really is simple, even though getting here was not because I do love to talk.
• 18:08
  Philip Pape: But hopefully that was helpful context.
• 18:10
  Philip Pape: Pick the slowest cut you can tolerate that still shows you visible progress in about four to six weeks.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: That's the rule.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: The slowest rate that still produces a result that you can see and that you're happy starting to get.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: Not the fastest one you can survive, but the slowest one that still works.
• 18:29
  Philip Pape: And as a side tangent here, you're thinking, wait, I want to lose X number of pounds.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: Stop thinking that way and start thinking about sustainability and let the actual number work itself out for you.
• 18:40
  Philip Pape: Because you may not need to lose 10 pounds.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: You may not need to lose get to X weight.
• 18:44
  Philip Pape: You may find that you feel look what you want to at a different weight.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: Or you might find that, hey, losing five pounds makes a huge difference.
• 18:52
  Philip Pape: Another five pounds would be great.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: You just will know.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: Work on the sustainability piece first.
• 18:58
  Philip Pape: So for most people, that does land somewhere around half a percent to 1% of body weight a week.
• 19:03
  Philip Pape: But I want you to lean toward the slower end of that range, especially the leaner you already are, and the more you care about keeping muscle and getting through this.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: Also, if you have a lower metabolism, if you have more fat to lose and you're fresh and you're a novice, you can start probably more aggressive and it still wouldn't feel that aggressive.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: People who have actually a lot of extra body fat, I say, hey, your advantage is you have those fat stores, you have that energy store in your body.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: A pretty big deficit may not feel like a deficit to you or your body.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: And yet you're gonna drop the fat, right?
• 19:31
  Philip Pape: Now, as you lean out, you can ease off the gas.
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: As you get closer to your goal, you can always ease off the gas because the longer diet goes, the harder it is anyway.
• 19:39
  Philip Pape: So we could always start faster and go slower, things like that.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: Now, we've been dancing around the fact that there's a huge benefit of going with a moderate deficit instead of an aggressive one.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: And it's it's maybe the reason why people finish, and that is it gives you room to be a human being.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: When you're only a few hundred calories below maintenance, you can take a planned diet break.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: You can eat at maintenance for a week.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: You can take a weekend refeed when life gets busy or you your head mentally needs it, when there's friends that you're gonna hang out with, when you're going on a trip, whatever.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: And then you can slide right back into the deficit and you barely cost yourself anything when you do the math.
• 20:16
  Philip Pape: You could even intentionally run it in a wave-like form, like a nonlinear form instead of a straight line.
• 20:22
  Philip Pape: We do that all the time.
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: In fact, in eat more lift heavy, one of the things we love to do is help people non-linearize their diets.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: Instead of saying just do this deficit every day, let's mix it up for you.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: Maybe around your cycle, maybe things like that.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: But when you're already, you know, hitting the gas with a very, very aggressive deficit, you really don't have slack in the sense I mentioned this before.
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: If you take a break, you feel like you're losing a lot of progress.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: It really extends mathematically the end of the cut.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: And it kind of just feels like counter, like it's um, you know, a tug of war.
• 20:56
  Philip Pape: So a slower cut is like a stick that bends without breaking, let's say, like a fiberglass stick instead of a wood one.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: And so it can absorb.
• 21:05
  Philip Pape: So another analogy would be a rubber band.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: You can stretch it and it can come back.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: So it can like absorb, it has buffer for things like vacations, a very stressful time in your life, a bad week, and then you keep going, right?
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: If it's aggressive, it's kind of like the rubber band's brittle and can snap as soon as life pulls on it.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: So we talked a lot about duration and aggressiveness.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: And I'll say that that is really, really important.
• 21:30
  Philip Pape: But the non-negotiable that has to be there anyway is lifting and eating.
• 21:35
  Philip Pape: And by eating, I mean eating enough protein, not eating enough calories, because obviously, if you're in a deficit, you're only eating those calories.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: But eating enough protein that turns a slower cut from, you know, let me just be patient and get through this to, oh no, I'm actively building, I maybe actually gaining strength and muscle even on a deficit because it's a slow deficit.
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: And so you can almost think in terms of I'm not really in a diet, I'm not in a diet.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: I'm not fat loss training.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: I'm just training, training, right?
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: I have a I have pretty close to full energy, not quite there, but pretty close.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: It's not like an aggressive deficit.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: I have plenty of protein.
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: I can get through this and I can train and maybe even hit still hit some PRs and keep growing.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: So for protein, that's 0.71 grams per pound of body weight, spread across your meals.
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: Great rule of thumb, resistance training, two to four days a week with progressive overload.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: We have plenty of other episodes that get into those details.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: And those are the biggest variables that are going to support you no matter what.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: And a lot of people doing crash diets or keto or carnivore or GOP1s or whatever, and they're not doing that, they're not going to be successful.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: And then I want to give you permission that if you've been running an aggressive diet, diet or deficit and you feel like garbage and watching your lifts go backward and you're like, what's wrong with me?
• 22:45
  Philip Pape: I can't do this.
• 22:45
  Philip Pape: Nothing's wrong with you.
• 22:46
  Philip Pape: You picked a rate that is probably too fast for you, not good for your recovery, for your life stress, for your hormones, whatever, slowing down is not giving up.
• 22:55
  Philip Pape: It's choosing a different path that you can finish in the best way possible.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: So I looked in the research and there's a couple other things I wanted to mention about bone and whether the aggressive approach can actually make sense.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: So on the bone piece of this, in the tempo trial with postmenopausal women that I mentioned, the severe restriction group lost two and a half times more bone density at the hip than the moderate group.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: So that's the same study where the fast group won when it came to pounds of weight loss, but the fast, the fast group lost when it came to bone density.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: So bone is important, I mean, in my opinion.
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: It's super important for the rest of your life, especially for women, but really everybody as we get older.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: And that alone is a reason to favor the moderate deficit to lift heavy, which of course loads the bone.
• 23:47
  Philip Pape: We talked about that on our last episode as well, and not be crash dieting your way just to get to a number.
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 23:55
  Philip Pape: So that's really good context.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: And then secondly, I want to clear up, be clear about where my argument maybe doesn't hold up because I'm not saying fast fat loss is bad.
• 24:04
  Philip Pape: We've talked about rapid fat loss many times.
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: I made that case a few weeks ago.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: If you have a hard deadline, if you're carrying a lot of fat, want early momentum.
• 24:12
  Philip Pape: If you genuinely do better with a defined, you know, sprint than like an open-ended, I'll call it a slog.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: It doesn't have to feel like a slog if it's moderate enough.
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: But in that case, a faster approach can be totally the right call for you.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: And the research tells us, hey, it can be effective as well.
• 24:29
  Philip Pape: It's not going to doom you to rebound.
• 24:32
  Philip Pape: They're both true.
• 24:33
  Philip Pape: So they're true in different contexts.
• 24:34
  Philip Pape: And the skill, I think, is just knowing which context you are in and using the right approach.
• 24:39
  Philip Pape: So everything I just described, picking a rate that you can sustain, tapering it as you lean out, holding on to muscle, that is can be difficult to do for yourself because you're inside your head and you're inside your life, and there are a lot of variables at play.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: I get it.
• 24:54
  Philip Pape: It's hard to be objective about your own deficit when you're hungry, maybe when you're impatient, maybe when the scale isn't cooperating.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: And that's why support structures exist.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: However, you get the support, I highly encourage finding what works for you within your budget, within your life.
• 25:09
  Philip Pape: One thing that we offer, and I always want to mention it because it's helped so many people, it's called Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: Coach Carol and I are in there helping people human to human.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: And we also help you build the skills over 26 weeks.
• 25:23
  Philip Pape: We've got a lot of great tools as well.
• 25:25
  Philip Pape: One of those tools actually helps you determine these things like transitions, how fast to go, uh, what phase you should be in, et cetera.
• 25:33
  Philip Pape: We help you pick a rate that fits your life, your recovery.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: We help you adjust as you go and run into roadblocks.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: So if you've done the cycle over and over again, if you've done the cuts, but they're not sticking, we're trying to break that pattern for you.
• 25:47
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, check out the information.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: No pressure at all.
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: Just check it out.
• 25:52
  Philip Pape: And then I'll have a link in the show notes as well.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: EatmoreLiftheavy.com.
• 25:56
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, that 30-second gut check that I promised you, is your diet too aggressive or not?
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: It's three questions.
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: So question one, are your lifts going backward?
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: Like, do you have a trend over and over again where the weights are just feeling heavier and heavier and heavier?
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: That's your body telling you maybe you can't recover at this deficit.
• 26:15
  Philip Pape: Number two, is your sleep getting worse?
• 26:17
  Philip Pape: Is your mood getting worse?
• 26:19
  Philip Pape: Cutting too hard affects your brain and it affects your sleep.
• 26:25
  Philip Pape: Okay, that is a great sign.
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: And then number three, could you keep doing exactly what you're doing right now for another eight weeks?
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: Not could I like barely survive it and hang on by a thread, but could you just live it pretty predictably, even if some things come up?
• 26:41
  Philip Pape: And if the honest answer is, yeah, not really.
• 26:43
  Philip Pape: Not really.
• 26:43
  Philip Pape: This is really, really tough.
• 26:44
  Philip Pape: I don't think I can make it.
• 26:46
  Philip Pape: Then the rate is too fast.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: So if you said basically yes to the first two, lifts going backwards, sleep getting worse, no to the third, no, I can't keep doing it.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: All right, then let's ease up on that deficit.
• 26:56
  Philip Pape: Let's add a few hundred calories.
• 26:57
  Philip Pape: You're gonna do it from, you know, probably mostly carbs, maybe some protein depending.
• 27:01
  Philip Pape: Add the carbs around your training to fuel you best, and then keep going so that you can get through the deficit and get the result.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: It works.
• 27:11
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: And remember the goal is never to weigh less, it's to keep the muscle and the strength and the bone that make that weight loss mean something for you, your body, and your future.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.