Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The Hidden Roadblock That Stalled My Metabolism and Fat Loss (Critical Path) | Ep 321

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The Hidden Roadblock That Stalled My Metabolism and Fat Loss (Critical Path) | Ep 321 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: If you feel like your fat loss is going too slowly or stalled out, or it's harder this time than it was last time, this episode is for you.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: I recently faced the exact same situation during a mini cut.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: Despite doing everything right, or so, I thought, my progress was slower than in previous cuts, and then I realized what was causing it and I thought let me talk to the listener about uncovering the thing that's holding you back, the one thing that could be what's called the critical path.
• 0:27
  Philip Pape: It's a concept from engineering and project management where, if this one thing isn't right, everything is going to take longer.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: So, while, yes, I will share my critical path, I'm also going to teach you to identify your own so you can have much more success going forward.
• 0:41
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 0:59
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're looking at a real-world case study.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: It is my own, my own recent fat loss journey.
• 1:06
  Philip Pape: It was a seven-week mini-cut, and I thought it'd be a great example of how I am not perfect and how I still can run into my own roadblocks, even as a coach and someone who's done this for a long time using a powerful engineering concept that I've used for many years, especially when developing schedules, and it's called critical path.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: And don't worry, we're not going to talk schedules, we are going to talk about how to use this concept to uncover the thing holding you back.
• 1:33
  Philip Pape: Many of you know that I love data, I like to track religiously.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: It's part of my engineering mindset and recently I noticed that, of all the variables in my fitness data, the one thing that changed, and changed quite significantly, was my average daily step count.
• 1:47
  Philip Pape: Now, I kind of knew this inherently and intuitively because I track it every day and I'm like you know, over the over the last year and a half, I'm like man, you know, I've really got to get back to that 12,000 steps I used to have and it's been more in the eight to 9,000 steps a day and I thought, well, it's not a big deal, it's still plenty of steps.
• 2:05
  Philip Pape: I'm still active, I train, I do all the things I eat well, et cetera.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: But that's a 25% reduction in my NEAT, in my non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and you would think, okay, it's not a big deal, but it actually has a big impact on your fat loss and that's just one thing.
• 2:22
  Philip Pape: I don't want to make this episode about walking specifically.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: I really want to make it about how a seemingly minor change in one variable and I know again, 4,000 steps you may say, well, no, that's actually a pretty big change, but kind of drifted over time and I didn't really give it another thought as to how big it was impacting my results.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: But you may have one variable that had has essentially become what engineers call the critical path in your fat loss approach or your journey, and I'm gonna break down what that means, why it matters, how identifying your own critical path could be that breakthrough you need.
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: And I think it's important because you might be saying, well, no, it's obvious, I know why.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: You may not know why, and there's a way to kind of analyze what that might be Now, before we get into it.
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: If you have found yourself stuck in a fat loss plateau, or maybe you're in there one right now and you think you're doing everything right and again by think, I'm not trying to gaslight you, because I was there as well I thought I was doing everything right Um, and sometimes you just need a little bit of insight, a little bit of a extra third party perspective.
• 3:20
  Philip Pape: So, if today resonates with you.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: If this episode is valuable, I just want you to text it to a friend.
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: That's all I'm asking today.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: I'm not trying to pitch you anything else.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: I want you to text this episode to a friend who is struggling with their progress.
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: Anything, I don't care how they, what language they use, if they say it's weight loss, if they say it's their diet, if they say it's their mindset, with all of this said with all, with all of this, with emotional eating, whatever, text this episode to a friend and support them and say, hey, here's a fresh perspective on how to kind of think about this.
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: And and you know, if you're not convinced yet, listen through the whole episode and then I'll ask you again to text it to someone if you liked it.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: But, like sharing, sharing knowledge is one of the most powerful ways that we can help each other succeed.
• 4:01
  Philip Pape: That's what this show is all about, and I hope you will join me in that mission of just texting this episode to a friend.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: Go, hit the share button in your podcast app, or you could take a screenshot, tag me in social media and share it that way.
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: However, you want to do it All right.
• 4:14
  Philip Pape: So let's get into today's topic and define what we mean by critical path.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: So in project management, in engineering, the critical path represents the sequence of dependent tasks.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: Okay, so the things you have to do, like if you're building a house, it might be buying the material, laying the foundation, et cetera, et cetera, and it's that sequence that determines the minimum time needed to complete a project.
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: So, again, if you're building a house, the concrete is absolutely needed before you can build the foundation, but the windows aren't needed till much later.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: So the windows are not going to hold you up at least early on.
• 4:51
  Philip Pape: They might hold you up later on.
• 4:52
  Philip Pape: And so any delay in the tasks along that critical path again the sequence of things that determines the minimum time you need from start to finish.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: Any delay is what is obviously going to delay the whole thing.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: It's going to make the project take longer.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: And then all the other tasks that are outside that critical path have some what we call float or slack, meaning they can delay a bit, they can be a little bit off or less than perfect or less than ideal, without impacting the overall timeline.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: Now, when we apply this concept to physique development, especially fat loss, we are essentially looking for the limiting factor, the element in your system that is constraining progress, right, it is preventing you from moving forward, regardless of how well you execute everything else.
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: And so for lots of people, myself included, we tend to focus heavily on the things that we think matter most, like our calorie intake, our deficit, our training, but sometimes the critical path actually lies elsewhere.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: In my case, I track every day.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: I track my food, I track my measurements, I track my training, I track my steps and I plan everything out and I make sure to really hit the targets pretty darn closely.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: I don my training, I track my steps and I plan everything out and I make sure to really hit the targets pretty darn closely.
• 6:07
  Philip Pape: I don't mind doing that, I love doing it.
• 6:09
  Philip Pape: I have a very stress-free way of doing it.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: It only takes me a few minutes a day.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: I use meal prep, all the things Always hit my protein, always maintain my training, and if I have to miss a day, I'm going to shift it to another day.
• 6:22
  Philip Pape: I get adequate sleep and there's an asterisk on that because I've always gotten around six and a half to seven hours of sleep, which for me, for my HRV, for my stress, for my performance, has been steady state If I got seven and a half or eight.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: Would I perform that much better?
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: Potentially, potentially, but it's always been like that.
• 6:43
  Philip Pape: To me, that is not a variable that has changed.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: I manage stress reasonably well by really all measures.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: I was executing my fat loss phase across the board, the way it needs to be executed, and I've done multiple cuts in the past.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: Under this situation where I had just come out of a bulk, I spent like I don't know six, seven months in a bulk and then I say, okay, I'm going to switch over to fat loss phase.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: I'm not even going to go to maintenance first, I'm just going to switch because I know how to do it and I'm going to do it.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: However, my progress was slower and the problem is I wanted I had a timeline, which is also a different issue.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: We could talk about it in another episode.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: I had a timeline because we're going on a vacation and I wanted to just trim off some of the fat that I gained.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: I was aiming for about 15 pounds.
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: I ended up getting about 10.
• 7:25
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's still 10 pounds.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: I'm thrilled with that.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: I'm thrilled that I could do that, that I still have control over my physique, all the things that we talk about.
• 7:32
  Philip Pape: It just wasn't as fast as I anticipated because my body didn't respond as aggressively or as well as it had in the past.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: And when I looked at everything and I said, man, is there anything that's vastly different, I said, you know, it's the step count.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: It's the step count because the last time I did a cut I was averaging 11, 12,000.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: Now I'm like eight or nine and sometimes I have some even lower days than that.
• 7:53
  Philip Pape: You know I'm a busy guy.
• 7:54
  Philip Pape: This is not an excuse.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: I'm relating to you as the listener.
• 7:56
  Philip Pape: I'm busy, I work all day.
• 7:58
  Philip Pape: Uh, I'm flitting around from call to call meeting to meeting.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: I'm oftentimes having to sit in front of my computer like an actual desktop to get stuff done, and I do have a standing desk.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: So if I use that I get more steps.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: Sometimes I get so immersed in my work I don't do that.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: So there's a lot of opportunities here, easily, I'm going to say, for me to get back to 12,000 on average.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: In fact, recently I've had multiple 12, 13, 14,000 days and it didn't take much effort.
• 8:24
  Philip Pape: It just took some intentionality, which is often what we are missing or we get off track.
• 8:29
  Philip Pape: Anyway, that's what I noticed.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: A big difference was about three to 4,000 steps fewer per day than the last time I did my fat loss phase.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: Now let's put that in perspective 3,000 steps right, just being conservative, that represents about 150 calories of reduced daily energy expenditure.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: That's a little over a thousand calories a week.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: That's 4,500 calories a month.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: That's more than a pound of potential fat loss each month.
• 8:53
  Philip Pape: That may not happen, all things equal, simply because of the reduction in daily movement.
• 8:58
  Philip Pape: Now it was probably more than the 3,000 when we look at the delta.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: Furthermore, I have found that when you are a little bit less active with your walking, you seem to burn even fewer calories than expected from that inactivity.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to dive into why that might be and also everyone's different, but when you think of even one pound a month and I'm talking about a seven-week mini cut that's two pounds.
• 9:23
  Philip Pape: Well, that's two pounds.
• 9:24
  Philip Pape: I didn't account for not losing.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: Now I told you I lost 10 instead of 15.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: Okay, we're talking about a five pound difference.
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: There's water and glycogen differences.
• 9:32
  Philip Pape: There's all sorts of little things in the noise.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: Who knows exactly the point is.
• 9:36
  Philip Pape: I know for a fact that my walking had a big difference.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: I just know because in the past it was easier and nothing else has changed.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: Now this wasn't conscious, right.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: It kind of happened gradually and unconsciously as my work patterns changed more desk time, more online meetings, fewer reasons to move throughout the day and I didn't have, let's say, a fully developed system in place to keep the step count high when those things change.
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: I've talked before about how your environment changes a lot and we can't just sit on our laurels and assume that our current system will apply exactly the same.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: The principles apply, but the methods and the triggers and the habits may have to shift.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: And because my step count had declined gradually in a sense, right, if I look at my curve over the years, it's like average of 12, then 11 and a half, then 11, then 10, right, it just kind of drifted.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: I hadn't registered as a significant change.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: It's like the I hate this analogy but the frog in the boiling water.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: You start cold and you gradually heat it up and the frog doesn't notice it and then it boils to death.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: I know, terrible, gruesome, but you get the idea.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: So here's where the concept of critical path becomes really, really powerful and effective, despite what I'll call I hate to use the word perfect, but dialed in execution, on my nutrition and training and everything else.
• 10:52
  Philip Pape: My walking habit had become a limiting factor in my overall fat loss equation.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: Right, because it directly affects my metabolism, how many calories I burn and thus how much I can eat to be in the same deficit, and I assumed that to get into that deficit I could eat X, but instead I had to eat X minus whatever calories I now wasn't burning, and because I wasn't, of course I didn't lose fat as quickly.
• 11:18
  Philip Pape: Now, no matter how well I executed all of this, the reduction in energy was setting a constraint or upper limit on my potential progress, and so this realization made me think about this and why I'm doing this episode that you know, in a fat loss phase, the critical path isn't fixed right.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: It could actually shift around between different variables, depending on your circumstances, like if we look in engineering, when I deal with like big, complicated schedules, the critical path can change.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: Because what if some other task all of a sudden becomes three times longer than you expected?
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: Right, some supplier says oh, I'm sorry, the part won't be in for three months, we thought it was going to be two weeks, and now all of a sudden, that becomes a critical path.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: Same thing with our fat loss.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: You know, nutrition might be your critical path.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: Maybe sleep becomes your critical path If all of a sudden work gets really stressful and your life is hectic and all of a sudden you can't get enough sleep right.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: Stress, same thing.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: The intensity of your training, your ability to train, where you train right.
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: There's so many things and it's kind of like they jump around like whack-a-mole and hopefully you can do fat loss in a time when things are relatively stable, which is why I like timing your fat loss and muscle gain and maintenance with the seasons of your life and the seasons of the year and finding a relatively quiet time to do fat loss when you can reduce all of this variability.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about, I guess, why this all happens.
• 12:42
  Philip Pape: Right, our bodies are very complex and they adapt.
• 12:44
  Philip Pape: Our bodies are adaptive.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: We've talked about metabolic adaptation or, if you're new to this podcast, it is the idea that your body will respond to the effect of everything that's coming in and it does so to try to maintain homeostasis, stability, survival, right.
• 12:59
  Philip Pape: And when you're in a fat loss phase, you're doing what?
• 13:01
  Philip Pape: Well, you're creating an energy deficit.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: You're burning more energy than you consume and you do that from either or decreasing what you eat, which is inevitably gonna have to happen, and or increasing your energy expenditure, with the caveat that you're not doing it in a stressful way like running, where it could actually backfire and reduce your expenditure.
• 13:22
  Philip Pape: We're talking about general movement, walking, not sitting as much, et cetera.
• 13:26
  Philip Pape: Now many of us focus on the intake side because that is, like, seems more controllable, right?
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: We track our food, we count our calories, we hit our macros and for many of you, this has been the problem for your whole life when you've tried to diet, is you do it on the calorie side?
• 13:38
  Philip Pape: You try to.
• 13:39
  Philip Pape: I don't want to say crash diet Not everybody does that, but everybody tries to cut something.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: You restrict something.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: You're like I just got to get those calories down, that's what's going to do it.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: Or and or you make it even worse by running more and more stress to your body.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: Now what if I told you that for most people, especially if you've been dieting for a while, the expenditure side is probably your critical path right now.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: Okay, not the intake side.
• 14:05
  Philip Pape: I can take anyone and just show them that, with tracking and a little bit of planning assuming you don't have some massive emotional eating issues to deal with, which is a separate topic.
• 14:16
  Philip Pape: Most people can get into some decent control of their food, which is great, because many of us don't even have that right.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: However, it's not enough, because when we diet, our bodies naturally try to conserve energy, and it does so in multiple ways.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: First of all, you're losing weight, so you're just carrying around less mass, so you're going to burn less.
• 14:33
  Philip Pape: Secondly, it downregulates your hormones.
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: That's called metabolic adaptation.
• 14:38
  Philip Pape: You can't do anything about that.
• 14:39
  Philip Pape: And then, thirdly, the big thing you can do something about is non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: When you diet, you oftentimes do less of this unconsciously, not just less walking, but less movement in general.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: And so this goes back to my theory, which is pretty well supported by working with so many clients, and what the evidence says, that during fat loss, you're going to move less.
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: And even if your step count is the same, you might be moving less, but if your step count drops, you might be even moving less, less.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: So kind of what I mean by that is you get in a mode of just you're not as active, it's not as fitness oriented, versus when you walk more, like think about it when you lace up your shoes or when you walk around a lot throughout the day.
• 15:24
  Philip Pape: You just have this mindset of like, moving, of being active, even if you're working.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: If you're doing, it's like no, I got to get up and get moving, and it's just this thing, right.
• 15:33
  Philip Pape: If you're, if you're down from 12 to 8,000 steps or down to even 6,000 steps, and you have some really low days, like three or four, where you're just sitting all day at the computer, you're not in that same mental state and you actually start to downregulate your other movement, your, your fidgeting, your not unconscious movement, the things you don't really count as steps but they might count as steps on your watch, whatever, and all of this is kind of an adaptation to conserve energy, um, and and you're you're basically reinforcing that by your, by moving less consciously, if that makes sense.
• 16:05
  Philip Pape: So simply by moving less, you're almost telling your body like we don't want to be moving here, um, and that's, that's an adaptation.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: So if you're tracking your food, and let's say you are tracking your movement but you're not trying to change it right, or it got worse since the last time you did a fat loss phase and your body's compensating for the reduced intake, reducing energy expenditure that could definitely be causing a stall, right, and that's what happened to me.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: And again, that's specific to walking and NEAT.
• 16:33
  Philip Pape: But it's because NE is such a powerful lever and sometimes your habits can shift without you realizing it.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: Now, the good news is, once you could identify that and, by the way, if you're listening to the show right now, I would like you to do that Like, identify what your critical path is.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: It could be something having nothing to do with movement.
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: Your critical path could absolutely be, on the nutrition side One, for example, many people are very inconsistent with their intake.
• 16:57
  Philip Pape: Even if you're hitting the intended calorie intake for the week, the average daily intake if your intake fluctuates a lot let's say it's 500 up and 500 down day to day in terms of calories, that could cause your body to reduce its expenditure.
• 17:14
  Philip Pape: It's fascinating, right?
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: It's like you're eating the same amount of food as if you distributed evenly, but because of the way you're eating it, your body actually might burn fewer calories, thus putting you in less of a deficit than someone else who ate in a very consistent way, right?
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: How about your sleep patterns If you're not going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, but you used to, even if you have the same hours of sleep, that could cause your body to conserve energy, to ramp up your hunger hormones, et cetera.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: Something is going on that's causing your expenditure to be lower than it was in the past or, for those of you doing this for the first time, just be aware of these affect your expenditure period and could be the reason you're stalling out.
• 17:51
  Philip Pape: Right, it's nothing wrong with the principles, it's just identifying the critical path and then taking action to address it.
• 17:58
  Philip Pape: And so for me, this is okay.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: Now I'm gradually, intentionally increasing my daily step count back to closer to my baseline of 12,000.
• 18:06
  Philip Pape: That is my target.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: And now every day, if I'm less than half that by midday, I know for sure.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: I want to get a walk-in Again if I can.
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: If not, I'm going to get creative.
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: I'm going to get creative.
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: I'm going to use my standup desk with the treadmill or I'm going to pace a lot for my next call.
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: Whatever I can do in a way that feels fairly natural and enjoyable, that keeps me moving, I'm going to do Um, and so that's walking again.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: I'm focusing kind of on my situation, but I'm giving you inspiration to do this, for yourself to say, okay, what is my critical path and what am I going to do to put in place a habit so there's less friction to do it and I'm not telling myself I just have to do it?
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: No, you want to make it where it's almost automatic, right For me.
• 18:52
  Philip Pape: When I do any calls that are on my phone rather than on a computer, I'm going to walk around period, like that is just a thing I do.
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: I don't even think about it Like oh, I got a Zoom call coming up and this is the kind I don't need to share my screen or anything.
• 19:04
  Philip Pape: I'm going to go on my phone and I'm just going to walk around on it.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: Right, movement snacks that's another way to do it.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: When it comes to walking, like always taking breaks and just kind of walking around and just thinking about being on your feet for the vast majority of the time and you know, sitting far less than you're standing and walking.
• 19:19
  Philip Pape: And then there's all the other things that I'm not going to get into related to walking specifically.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: The point is that the relatively small changes that help, that cause my expenditure to drop, are the same small changes that can I get them back up to my previous baseline without some major overhaul in my schedule or lifestyle and in the engineering world, when we'd have a critical path that would start to be threatened or extended, we'd say, okay, what's a big low-hanging fruit?
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: Can we talk to a supplier and negotiate a different approach so that they can get us the hardware sooner right?
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: Or can we go get this more skilled resource or person over here to add to the project, to help shorten our timeline on the software development or whatever it is?
• 19:58
  Philip Pape: So what is that for you?
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: How can you apply this concept to your own physique development journey?
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: Well, I'm going to give you some prescription, prescriptive steps here.
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: The first step, of course, always is data collection and tracking.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: You know I would say this, but even um, let's see, I had.
• 20:14
  Philip Pape: I had a guest on recently.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: I don't know if her episode has come out yet, oh yeah, it did.
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: Christina McClurkin right, she was on talking about how her clients don't even track macros, but they track their meals and like how they feel with their meals and how much protein and fiber they're getting.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: So they're still tracking.
• 20:30
  Philip Pape: At the end of the day, you still have to collect the data somehow.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: The way you do it is going to be, is going to have to fit with your style and desire, and again, with me and my clients and our physique university.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: It's very straightforward.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: You know macros, calories, uh, body measurements, daily movement steps, biofeedback, like sleep and stress levels, perform, performance, recovery, energy, hunger.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: I know I'm listing off a lot of things.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: I'm just rattling them off Progress photos, training, performance, recovery, et cetera.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: We make it really easy to do.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: I make it very simple for my clients to do, but for you it's like what do you need to track that you're not tracking now that could be causing issues with your expenditure or your food and your intake that you're not aware of, because if you're not aware of them, you can't even go to the next step.
• 21:14
  Philip Pape: Now, once you're collecting data across the variables that you want, you'll be better equipped to identify the factor.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: That's your current critical path, and maybe you're listening to this episode thinking OK, that's where I'm at.
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: I've been tracking my data.
• 21:26
  Philip Pape: Now what do I do?
• 21:27
  Philip Pape: Well, next you're going to look for anomalies or changes in your data.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: No-transcript.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: Go into Apple health or Google whatever it's called Google health.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: Go into your spreadsheet, go into your macro factor, like wherever you have graphs or data, and just stretch out the time period back to the right duration and see what the difference is.
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: Actually, apple health has this cool feature where it automatically will notify you hey, we've noticed a trend change in your weight or your steps.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: It will actually tell you that, but it's just kind of ad hoc.
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: You kind of want to do this yourself.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: You could even look at secondary factors like resting heart rate.
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: I mean, if your resting heart rate has jumped by, let's say, five or 10 beats a minute versus where it used to be and you haven't gained weight so that's the caveat, because gaining weight can cause it to go up that could be that you're not getting as much movement as before and it may not be obvious from your step count.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: It may be the type of movement.
• 22:27
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're just taking a lot of casual walks and you used to do more brisk walks or wear rucksack or something like that right, or you used to go on an incline or live in a hilly area.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: Now you live in a city in a flat area.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: Very cool insights you can draw from this stuff Sleep quality.
• 22:41
  Philip Pape: If you have an aura ring or you wear some sort of tracker or wearable, you might see changes in HRV or body temperature or core body temperature, right, of course, step count we've talked about that's a very easy one to track Stress levels.
• 22:58
  Philip Pape: That's like the resilience, the HRV.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: Anyway, the critical path is sometimes where you don't expect it.
• 23:01
  Philip Pape: It's kind of like hiding in plain sight in the data and you're just not looking at the data or paying enough attention to it or you haven't noticed consciously that it's shifted over time.
• 23:09
  Philip Pape: And I help people with this all the time, like again and not to pitch our program all the time, but in Physique University, one thing that we have is a post that says here's how to post all your data so we can help you.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: And it says make sure to have your metabolism, your calorie intake, your expenditure, your deficit over time, whatever some key things your weight trend, and based on that, we can then look at your data and see what's hiding in plain sight that you might be missing.
• 23:35
  Philip Pape: And then, when you said, aha, eureka, I found it right.
• 23:40
  Philip Pape: Now you can test your hypothesis with an intervention.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: That's the next step is experiment on it.
• 23:47
  Philip Pape: If you suspect your reduced movement might be the factor, increase your step count for two weeks by a decent amount, you know.
• 23:55
  Philip Pape: Increase it by like, I want to say like 4,000 steps a day let's say that's a couple miles while keeping everything else constant.
• 24:01
  Philip Pape: Treat it as an experiment, or a challenge, if you will, and monitor the results.
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: Now, it may not change things immediately, there might be a lag, but it might be enough for you to say, hey, I think this is the reason why.
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: Um, I've seen that when I go up, my step count goes up.
• 24:15
  Philip Pape: About a week later I start to see it.
• 24:16
  Philip Pape: Relieve my expenditure a bit.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: My expenditure starts to climb back and again.
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: Remember, critical path is not static.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: It can change as your circumstances change, because what limited you six months ago or a year, that last time you did the fat loss phase, may be totally different than what's limiting you today, and that is why you have to always be tracking and always be reassessing and always be experimenting.
• 24:37
  Philip Pape: All right, and the cool thing about this whole thing listen up.
• 24:40
  Philip Pape: Listen up.
• 24:40
  Philip Pape: Sometimes the thing you need to change requires a lot less thinking, willpower, effort than what you thought you had to change.
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: So, like for me, adding daily steps is not that hard.
• 24:51
  Philip Pape: If I had to go ahead and drop another 300 calories a day on my food, that'd just be a slog.
• 24:56
  Philip Pape: I'd be like, no, I'm not doing it.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: And in fact, guess what happened during my mini cut, as my expenditure was dropping faster than I expected.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: Of course my calories would have to come down to keep me in my intended deficit.
• 25:06
  Philip Pape: I just didn't want to do that.
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: I didn't want to eat that low amount of calories.
• 25:10
  Philip Pape: It would not be good psychologically for my energy, for anything.
• 25:13
  Philip Pape: And so I compromised.
• 25:14
  Philip Pape: I said you know what I'm going to eat, more like what I would normally eat in fat loss phase, which for me is like 1800 to 2000 calories, when I'm going pretty darn aggressively Cause I burned, say, 2800, 3000 at maintenance.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: And I said I'm just going to keep it there and just take the results as they come and work on my step count instead, right, and toward the end of the fat loss phase actually started to pick up a little bit, which was a good indicator that it was working.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: And this can go for any goal that you have, like any leverage point that allows you to get better results with less effort or more efficient.
• 25:49
  Philip Pape: Effort is a good way to put it.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: Is is a game changer, isn't it Like?
• 25:53
  Philip Pape: Think about that.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: Most people attempt to improve everything and then they spend all their willpower and attention across the board where they're getting very little for each bit of effort.
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: It's that 80-20 rule.
• 26:05
  Philip Pape: Instead of focusing on the 20%, that gives you 80% of the results.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: They focus on like 90% of things and put all their effort into that and they still only get a small improvement.
• 26:15
  Philip Pape: So if you can understand critical path, you can be much more targeted and efficient.
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: And in my case, the you know the walking more wasn't just easier than eating less, it was healthier, it was more sustainable.
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: There were other benefits.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: It was like no, this is the energy flux thing that we talk about, where let's eat more to move more.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: Let's not eat less and move more.
• 26:34
  Philip Pape: Let's not eat less and like run ourselves in the ground trying to lose fat and restrict and all that.
• 26:39
  Philip Pape: Let's try to live a higher energy life, moving and training.
• 26:43
  Philip Pape: Not moving in a stressful way, but moving in a very healthy way, like walking, some sprinting, doing your chores, doing things by hand, doing stuff you enjoy, doing hobbies and stuff.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: Reduce your stress, enhance your cardiovascular health, enhance your mental health and cognitive function, have better mood.
• 27:00
  Philip Pape: Like get all the benefits of the thing that you're doing to improve your metabolism rather than cut more calories, which just has negative consequences across the board.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: So you're going to track data, you're going to identify the critical path and then you're going to focus your effort, very efficiently and targeted, on a positive, healthy change that addresses your critical path not more restriction, not more cutting.
• 27:26
  Philip Pape: And this mindset teaches us to look for leverage points in what seems like a very complex system because it is.
• 27:32
  Philip Pape: But then you can vastly simplify it by identifying places where small inputs create large outputs.
• 27:38
  Philip Pape: And then you apply this efficiency thinking to your physique development and you're going to achieve much better results and be less frustrated.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: It's going to be more sustainable and that's what we're all about.
• 27:47
  Philip Pape: So, to wrap up, if today's concept resonated with you, I have a simple request Please text this episode to a friend who might be struggling with something in their lives.
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: It might be fat loss, it might be something else.
• 27:59
  Philip Pape: Maybe they are doing everything right quote unquote and just need a little bit different perspective.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: Sometimes a solution isn't working harder right, it's working smarter, more efficiently, by identifying the critical path in your system, and sharing knowledge is one of the most powerful ways that we can help each other, and this might be something that someone in your life needs to hear right now.
• 28:21
  Philip Pape: So text this episode to a friend.
• 28:22
  Philip Pape: That is all I ask.
• 28:23
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come not from working more, but from identifying the critical path in your system and working more efficiently.
• 28:36
  Philip Pape: This is Philip Pape, and you've been listening to Wits and Weights.
• 28:39
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time.