Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Cut, Maintain, or Build and Still Lose Fat WITHOUT Losing Muscle | Ep 498

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Cut, Maintain, or Build and Still Lose Fat WITHOUT Losing Muscle | Ep 498 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you're trying to figure out whether you should cut, that is, fat loss, maintain your weight, or build muscle right now, I bet you already know what you want the answer to be.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: And that's often part of the problem.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to show you why most people make this decision backward.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: Three situations where it doesn't really matter what you want, it matters what your body is telling you, and the cost of picking the wrong direction.
• 0:28
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:38
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and on Monday, I walked you through the seven weeks that come before a fat loss phase and how to get to your maintenance calories that you can actually trust instead of using, say, a calculator.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: And the very next question every single time is what we're covering today, which is okay, I've got the data now.
• 1:01
  Philip Pape: So what phase am I supposed to be in?
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: You can cut, that is a calorie deficit to lose weight, to lose fat.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: You can maintain your weight or your results, or you can build muscle.
• 1:13
  Philip Pape: And these are three options.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: A lot of you are picking these by feel, by gut, by vibe.
• 1:19
  Philip Pape: There's that's not always wrong, but sometimes it is.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: And that's kind of like from where I sit, what I see a lot of people doing in this very reactionary way.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: But I like to think ahead and do things that make sense.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: And I hope you do too.
• 1:33
  Philip Pape: And you want the result.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a runway question.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: It's going to take about 10 seconds that tells you whether you should even start a deficit right now.
• 1:44
  Philip Pape: I think it's a good culmination of today's episode.
• 1:47
  Philip Pape: But in the meantime, we are going to get into why your lifts are one of the worst signals to use for this, even though a lot of people use them, including me for years, and what a roughly decade of research on bone density says about deficits related to menopause.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: And of course, all the mechanistic details about cutting, maintaining, and building your weight and what to choose and when.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: So most people follow like the first piece of advice they hear on this when you Google, when you use AI, go on social media, is hey, I want to lose fat, and so I've got to go into a cut, right?
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: If I want to go into build muscle, I have to go into a surplus, even if it is a lean gain or not much of a surplus.
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: And you might be tired of this, you might be busy, you might be stressed out, and you might want to sit at maintenance for a while.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: And so what do you have to do there?
• 2:43
  Philip Pape: Well, I have to get myself in a place where I'm not gaining or losing.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: And then there's the calendar that sits on top of that, I'll say, where, you know, a lot of us don't think in terms of the holidays or and thinks think in terms of the months that are better or worse for us.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: And a lot of us want to cut in January because that's like you coasted through the holidays, you gained some weight, and that's the New Year's resolution.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, you want to look great for summer and so on.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: It sounds reasonable, it sounds intuitive.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: Oftentimes the way that people do this though tends to be wrong.
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: And it's not because the categories are wrong for the goal, right?
• 3:17
  Philip Pape: Cut, maintain, build.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: It's the order that you're doing them in is not efficient.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: That's the way I'm gonna put it.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: So somebody comes to me and she says, Hey, I think I should probably cut.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: I need to lose weight, I need to lose fat.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: And then she gives me all the reasons, right?
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: Hey, my weight's been flat for a while, my genes are feeling tight, you know, I'm feeling a little bloated.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: I got to lose that next five, 10 pounds.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: Maybe I'm in menopause and it's the hormones.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: Maybe I have a wedding to go to in October, right?
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: Every one of those reasons is fine.
• 3:42
  Philip Pape: It's perfectly fine.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: And yet I would say not one of those reasons are why she decided she should cut.
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: She probably said, Look, I need to lose weight, and then went on and piled on all the evidence as to why.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: And that's a completely normal thing to do.
• 4:01
  Philip Pape: It's it's something we all do.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: It's also the reason we get stuck, especially those of you who are perennial weight lossers.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: What do I mean?
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: All you think about is cutting, cutting, cutting.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: You never think about anything else and how that's going to help you, even with a cut, like building muscle, for example.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm gonna tell you something that's gonna make you a little bit uncomfortable.
• 4:23
  Philip Pape: That most of you are not picking the phase you want to be in based on your mood.
• 4:29
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying that.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: You're picking it out of fear and then dressing it up as data.
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: And the fear is always, hey, if I eat too much, I'm gonna get fat.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: Let's be honest.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: That is the fear.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: So then you kind of find your way in this serpentine path to a calorie deficit, no matter what the numbers or evidence say you should do, no matter what the biofeedback says, no matter what all this other stuff says, whether or not you're collecting the right data or not, which is a different problem.
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: And that's because a deficit feels like, okay, that's the safe thing I need to do.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: That's what I need to do to get thin, skinny, lean, whatever terms you want to use.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: And then once you've done that, it's what do we call that?
• 5:09
  Philip Pape: Confirmation bias.
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: You're confirming the decision you already made.
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: And I've done this myself so many times.
• 5:15
  Philip Pape: And I have to avoid gut reacting when a client or member or somebody new who reaches out to me says, like, this is what I want to do.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: I have to avoid giving them an answer to what they want to do because what they want to do maybe maybe not what they need to do.
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: Now, inside our program, Eat More Lift Heavy, we have a bunch of tools.
• 5:35
  Philip Pape: And one of the tools I created, I'm very proud of these tools because it takes the coaching philosophy and the evidence and the decision chain and puts it into a tool that you can use.
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: And there's a design choice that inspired this episode.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: So, with this tool called the phase transition tool, we ask you a bunch of questions like what is your current phase?
• 5:56
  Philip Pape: How long have you been in it?
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: What's your weight trend?
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: What's your body composition?
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: How are your lifts?
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: How's your biofeedback?
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: Hormonal context?
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: How's your adherence?
• 6:04
  Philip Pape: How's your stress?
• 6:04
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: A lot of the same things.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: Like if you got on a call with me, I'd probably ask you all these questions to kind of figure out where things are.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: But then the last question I ask is, what do you actually want to do next?
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: And I say it last on purpose, because if you say it first, then it biases all the rest, doesn't it?
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: And you would answer all those other questions to support the conclusion you already reached instead of, and I'm not saying everyone does this.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: Like some of you are hyperconscious of this, but many of you are like, well, I gotta lose weight.
• 6:31
  Philip Pape: So now how am I gonna answer these questions to support that?
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: So that's like the fatal flaw that in our human psychology is this confirmation bias.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: So just sit with that a little bit and think about if that's something you might be doing.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: Now, I want to talk about three situations where what you want, like if you said I want to lose weight, actually doesn't matter.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: And this is empowering.
• 6:52
  Philip Pape: This is not defeating, this is going to be empowering because this is gonna unlock you making a better choice for yourself and then dealing with what it takes to get there, including overcoming some of these fears.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: And the nice thing about these three situations is if any one of these is true right now in your life, then the question of what phase to go into actually comes off the table altogether until you fix this thing.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: And a lot of you aren't gonna like to hear this, but let's let's do it.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: The first one is that your biofeedback is in the crapper and you are in a calorie deficit.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: Okay, listen to me here.
• 7:32
  Philip Pape: So by biofeedback, I mean sleep, energy, hunger, mood, recovery, digestion, libido, all of that.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: Like bio, as in body biology, feedback.
• 7:43
  Philip Pape: What is your body telling you?
• 7:44
  Philip Pape: And I like to break it out into these little categories because, first of all, that's what the evidence shows is helpful.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: And secondly, it makes it more objective.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: Like you can really hone in on those specific things.
• 7:54
  Philip Pape: So if any or most or all of those things are genuinely really, really low or poor for you right now, and I don't mean kind of like, eh, this is my normal, like we all live this way.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: It's it's we have stressful lives and we're busy and all that.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: I mean really poor relative to you.
• 8:10
  Philip Pape: And at the same time, you are in a calorie deficit.
• 8:13
  Philip Pape: Now keep in mind, based on our last episode, you might be in a deficit and not quite realizing it, but let's just say you're in a deficit, then the answer isn't to go to a different phase.
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: It is to take a structured break at maintenance for roughly two to four weeks before you do anything else.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: Now you might say, wait, isn't that going to a new phase?
• 8:34
  Philip Pape: Well, I think of maintenance, I think of the phase of maintenance as more of a longer-term maintenance that you're really setting yourself up for for months and months.
• 8:41
  Philip Pape: This is the diet break version of maintenance.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: This is coming out of a diet-backed maintenance.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: And there is real evidence for this one, especially on the sleep side.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: They have taken people and put them on the same calorie deficit two different times with the same food, but one with eight and a half hours in bed and one with five and a half.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: I've cited this one many times.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: Both times they lost about three kilograms, so same scale weight loss.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: But those who had really short or deprived sleep, only 0.6 kilos of that came off as fat.
• 9:17
  Philip Pape: Whereas in the people had more sleep, it was 1.4 kilograms of the three.
• 9:22
  Philip Pape: So more than double the fat loss came from the same deficit because of the better sleep.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: And of course, the lean mass went the other way, like something like 2.4 kilos lost on the sleep deprived versus 1.5.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: So, and I'm sorry I'm doing um metric, that's what the study's in.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: But if you think about that for a second, that's powerful.
• 9:42
  Philip Pape: Same calories, same number on the scale.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: And sleep alone is what decided how much came off as body fat versus muscle.
• 9:49
  Philip Pape: And we just had someone in our coaching call, our monthly coaching call yesterday, who had this exact thing where she really just needs to address sleep.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: Her sleep has declined quite a bit from something like seven or eight hours to like barely five or six.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: And we see everything starting to tank with nothing else changing.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: And it's it's tanking not because your metabolism just drops, but you're also probably losing some muscle and gaining some fat, et cetera.
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: Now, that that's a small study, but there's a lot of other research that supports that.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: We know how important sleep is.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: The magnitude is big enough.
• 10:19
  Philip Pape: We know that if you're sleeping like five and a half or less hours and you're about to start a cut, then the question isn't should you start a cut?
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: It's you shouldn't start a cut.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: You should fix the sleep problem first.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: So that's the first one is is your biofeedback low and you're in a deficit?
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: You need a break.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: The second one is if you have very high stress plus a deficit now.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: It sounds like stress is a not is part of biofeedback, and it is, but I have to separate this out in and of itself because stress is like the the worst element of stacking going on against you when you are in a deficit, and then you stack it on top of like a genuine life crisis, a job loss, a sick parent, a divorce, financial issues, all of those things.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: It tends to produce the worst version of both things.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: And so here you also need a diet break to come back to.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: So I wanted to call that out separately.
• 11:17
  Philip Pape: And then the third one is that your lifts in the gym are dropping significantly and you're already lean.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: Now, this is an interesting one, but we see it a lot.
• 11:29
  Philip Pape: Uh, I want you to be careful because it gets misused, and I've probably contributed to that.
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: I'll be honest, a lot of coaches will tell you to, hey, watch your lifts as the early warning sign whether your deficit is too aggressive.
• 11:41
  Philip Pape: Like, are you plateauing?
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: Are you regressing?
• 11:44
  Philip Pape: And the problem is here that, like when we look at research, there's Murphy and Kohler had a meta-analysis where they looked at trials of people lifting in a calorie deficit.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: And they found that the deficit reliably halted or impaired lean mass gains, and the threshold started at around 500 calorie a day deficit.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: But strength gains were basically comparable between the deficit and the control groups, which may be backward from what you'd expect.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: You know, I know better, I've looked into this research.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: Now I I frame it the right way for people.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: I have for the last few years, but your body defends your strength while your ability to actually add muscle has stopped.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: And that has to do with the neuromuscular adaptations versus the actual lean mass of muscle, two different adaptations.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: And what that means practically is by the time, but by the time your lifts are visibly decreasing or falling off or regressing, you are actually seeing the lagging effect of things happen, you know, weeks later.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: So you don't just go by how your lifts are doing to pick what phase you should be in.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: And the the convert converse or the opposite of that is don't don't get lulled into a false sense that everything is fine because let's say your bench press is stable.
• 13:01
  Philip Pape: You get what I'm saying?
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: So sometimes we have to have more nuance when we're picking our phases, and those three things are really important to think about.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: Now, you're thinking, okay, this is useful, but you know, I still don't quite know how to make this decision for myself.
• 13:18
  Philip Pape: And because there are so many inputs, and that's exactly why I built the tool I was describing earlier, because I've seen this exact point of friction as a huge like brick wall for a lot of you, where you understand you have to do all the things, like I have to lift weights, I have to eat my protein, I have to get good sleep and stress, but you don't quite know when and why to transition phases, okay?
• 13:40
  Philip Pape: Besides just, oh, I hit my goal, now I'm ready for the next phase.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: So in week 14 of our program, so that's eat more lift heavy, and I'll just give you the website so you can check it out, eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: You could scroll to the bottom and see all 26 weeks.
• 13:53
  Philip Pape: Week 14 is is we teach you about phase transition planning.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: And that's where we have this phase transition tool that takes your weight trend, how long you've been in the phase, what is your body composition, biofeedback, adherence, goal, all in that order.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: And then, like I said, the last question is well, what do you want to do?
• 14:10
  Philip Pape: Just so we have that as well.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: And then it gives you a recommendation with reasoning attached to it.
• 14:16
  Philip Pape: And the reasoning is the point because I want you to learn the framework.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: Why, why am I thinking I need to do this or that relative to what the actual data says?
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: And it when what you want conflicts with what the data says, that's a really powerful thing.
• 14:33
  Philip Pape: That, you know, and by the way, the tool tells you that too, because it says, What do you want to do?
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: And you say, I want to lose fat.
• 14:38
  Philip Pape: And the tool's like, I don't know about that.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: Uh, I don't know about that because here's the other things happen up happening to you right now.
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: So I'm I'm I know I'm always making little pitches for our programming because I'm very excited how much it helps people.
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: And today's episode is all about phase transitions and how to choose how to get it in and out and when to go to each one.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to check that out.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: And to celebrate episode 500 coming up, we have a code 500Club that will get you$50 off the six month commitment to either of our programs in there.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: So go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: So most phase change questions are actually adherence questions that many of you misdiagnose as phase questions.
• 15:24
  Philip Pape: Okay, sit with that just for a minute.
• 15:27
  Philip Pape: It is probably the most useful thing in this whole episode, and it's also a thing that people skip all the time.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: If you are hitting your targets three days a week or fewer and you're not consistent, changing the phase isn't gonna fix that.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: You could go from a deficit to maintenance to surplus, back again, and just get the same result, which basically nothing, or even get worse because you never actually did those phases properly.
• 15:52
  Philip Pape: You think you did, oh, I was in a deficit.
• 15:54
  Philip Pape: Yeah, but you weren't doing all the other things that supported the deficit, right?
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: And so adherence really comes to the top, and it's not a matter of your character or your discipline.
• 16:05
  Philip Pape: It's usually how it's usually a function of having the targets that make the most sense for you and are achievable for you right now.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: Like what's the lowest bar in your life right now to move the needle?
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: Meaning your protein number doesn't have to be a gram per pound.
• 16:18
  Philip Pape: It could be 0.7.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: Or guess what?
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: If you're eating almost no protein, maybe you need to go to 0.5 and then go to 0.7, right?
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's it's a problem in your life.
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: Like the plan you're trying to follow doesn't account for, okay, I travel regularly for business.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: Okay, I'm, you know, taking care of my sick mom.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: Like all of those things.
• 16:37
  Philip Pape: Okay, I have weekends where I always get out, I always go out to restaurants.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: So none of those things, those skills, those competencies and capabilities are fixed by just changing the phase.
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: So that's what I'm saying.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: You're like trying to slap a band-aid on this.
• 16:52
  Philip Pape: Oh, now I need to go to maintenance.
• 16:53
  Philip Pape: Oh, now I need to go into phallus, now I need to go building muscle.
• 16:55
  Philip Pape: And that's not the thing that matters.
• 16:58
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: And what you can do is pull up your last, say, four weeks of data.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: And if you don't have data, that's the problem, right?
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: And I want you to look at the number of days where you hitch your protein target and the number of days where you're in a reasonable range on calories.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: And I said reasonable, I didn't say perfect.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: If the number is like below 20 out of 30, or 28 days, I guess is four weeks, then you're probably not consistent enough.
• 17:23
  Philip Pape: You got to fix that and then come back to the question of what should you do based on the data, which is again why we spend six or seven weeks at the beginning of our program helping you build those skills first.
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: Is this all?
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: I hope this is all making sense and I'm not kind of rambling too much on this.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: So you've gotten past these roadblocks, your adherence is solid, and now we can pick the phase.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: So the first input is where are you with your leanness and your body fat right now?
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: I'm not the exact number, it's very hard to get that.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: I don't care about your exact body fat percentage.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: You kind of know how much body fat you have based on how you look and feel and your waist and all that.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: But, you know, I told you in the last episode that calculators aren't very helpful.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: And I'm not going to turn around and tell you go and get your body fat from a bathroom scale or from an inbody today, either.
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: Just do you have significant amounts of fat to lose?
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: Do you have a moderate amount or are you fairly lean?
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: Or do you honestly not know?
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: And if you don't know, there's ways to start to figure that out.
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: Now, why this matters, it's because it's one of the most quantitative, so numbers-based relationships we have in this in this field, in this industry.
• 18:37
  Philip Pape: If we look at Forbes's work originally and then Kevin Hall, who modeled it, and what we know is that the proportion of what you lose that comes from lean tissue does correlate with how much fat you're carrying when you start.
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: So the leaner you are, the bigger the risk is of losing some muscle mass.
• 18:57
  Philip Pape: If you're carrying more fat, you can run a more aggressive deficit and lose proportionally less lean tissue while you do it.
• 19:03
  Philip Pape: Those of you who are quite overweight, I've seen some almost magical results when you start lifting weights and you don't even have to go into a diet almost.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: Like it's like your body starts to release its own stored fat.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: But if you do go into a diet, it also doesn't experience it the same as someone who's leaner.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: Meaning you, if you keep the deficit reasonable, and even if it's somewhat aggressive, your body may not feel like it's in a deficit because you have all that fat to draw from.
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: And so that's like the positive of being overweight in that your starting point is going to help you there.
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: So the same, say 500 calorie deficit, it's gonna be a different intervention depending on you know your leanness and it's gonna feel different, et cetera.
• 19:41
  Philip Pape: So it's very individualistic.
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: So that's the first one is your body fat.
• 19:45
  Philip Pape: The second input is your expenditure trend.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: So what is your metabolism doing?
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: I covered that on Monday.
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna reteach all of that, but you're basically looking at, hey, is it going up?
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: Is it flat, or is it falling over the past, say, four to six weeks based on my real logged data, not based on a calculator, not based on a wearable, but based on actual food intake and weight change over time.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: If you miss that, go back to episode 497, the one right before this one.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: That is a good foundation for what we're talking about today.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: The third input is that if you are in perioprost menopause, I want to address your bone density real quick here.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: Um, this is more important than you think.
• 20:27
  Philip Pape: There's a year-long randomized trial from Villarreal and colleagues.
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: They took non-obese middle-aged adults and they had one group lose weight by cutting calories, and another group lose a comparable amount of weight through exercise.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: The calorie restriction group lost 10% of their body weight, and they lost some bone mass along the way, around 2% at the spine, roughly the same at the hip, that like the total hip.
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: And then the exercise group lost a similar amount of weight, but they didn't have bone loss at any site.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: So, again, we see where there's one variable that can make a big difference in your body composition, which in this case is exercise.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: Now we can extend that to say what types of exercise.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: And then we look at, okay, lifting weights is probably the most important type, but even just moving in general and being active really helps because you're using your body.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: That makes sense, right?
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: And then there was a follow-up that looked at post-menopausal women and said, hey, what happens to the bone when the weight comes back and it looks like the bone didn't come back?
• 21:27
  Philip Pape: Again, this is, you know, without the exercise, right?
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: So I would love to have seen a study where then they had the same group incorporate exercise and see what happens, but then that adds another variable.
• 21:38
  Philip Pape: So it gets even more actionable than that.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: Listen up, because there's another year long trial from Shah and colleagues in older adults where diet only weight loss reduced only what 2.6% of total hip bone density, whereas diet plus exercise reduced it by only 1.1%.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: So just having exercise.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: Training in there cut bone loss by more than half.
• 22:03
  Philip Pape: And the exercise only group that didn't do a diet, guess what happened to them?
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: Well, their bone mass went up.
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: The only thing that predicted who held on to their bone mass in their hip was their strength, their one rep max.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: So isn't that fascinating, right?
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: Lifting isn't just protecting muscle while you cut, it's also protecting your bone density.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: And I think that's very, very important, depending on who you are, your history, your risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis, et cetera.
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: It's why I bring it up as a special case.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: Now, it's the same story on lean mass.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: There's a big systematic review from Weinheimer that looked at what amount of your weight loss comes off as fat-free mass, like muscle or lean mass.
• 22:47
  Philip Pape: And in groups that do just the dieting by itself, okay, calorie deficit by itself, something like 81% of them lost at least 15% of their weight is fat-free mass.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: But when you add in exercise, that drops to only 39% of them lost more than 15%.
• 23:07
  Philip Pape: I know it's a weird way to put it, right?
• 23:09
  Philip Pape: Because instead of just talking about the amount lost on average, it's the amount of people that lost a certain amount.
• 23:13
  Philip Pape: But either way, it's a huge benefit adding in the exercise.
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: So, what that adds up to that I want you to take away is that for example, a woman in her 50s, if you choose to go in a deficit at the wrong time in the wrong way, and you don't have the skills in place, and especially if you're not lifting or moving, it can massively reduce your bone density.
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: That is very hard to get back.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: And same thing goes for muscle.
• 23:35
  Philip Pape: I mean, you're going to be losing muscle, mass, and bone anyway.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: That's the fear we talk about all the time.
• 23:39
  Philip Pape: It happens to human beings as we age, but it doesn't have to happen, at least nowhere near that extent.
• 23:44
  Philip Pape: And for many of you, you could absolutely build new muscle, that is for sure.
• 23:49
  Philip Pape: So there's a big cost to this.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: Even though you want to lose fat, there's a big, big cost to this, which I think makes this decision very important.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: Now, the fourth input, the fourth and final input is your runway.
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: And this is more like what I'd call a constraint, meaning it doesn't tell you what, like it doesn't tell you what phase you should do.
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: It tells you what phases are available to you.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: And this comes down to how fast you are losing weight, for example.
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: So you want to hold on to your lean mass.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: And when we see like the athlete literature, for example, we know that somewhere around a half a percent to three quarters of a percent of body weight a week is a good target or upper limit for most people to be pretty sure you're gonna hold on to all your lean mass as long as you are lifting weights.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: And sometimes you actually see a gain of lean mass if you keep the deficit small enough while losing fat.
• 24:43
  Philip Pape: So we call that body recomp.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: Whereas people that go faster and faster, they often either only hold on lean mass or lose the lean mass, if that makes sense.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: So do the do the math on yourself.
• 24:56
  Philip Pape: If you want to lose 15 pounds and you're around 160 pounds, you then need somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 18 weeks of relatively uninterrupted fat loss to do it properly, right?
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: At that rate.
• 25:13
  Philip Pape: So if you've got six weeks from now and stuff is gonna happen that will make that very difficult, your life is gonna blow up in some way, or there's some events on the calendar or some change, then that option's not really available to you and you have to think differently.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: Maybe you need a maintenance phase in there and you just need to interrupt the fat loss.
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: Maybe you shouldn't do fat loss at all.
• 25:33
  Philip Pape: You know what I'm saying?
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: So yeah, there we go.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: All right, now I'm not saying that you shouldn't do a deficit.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: Obviously, I'm not.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: Cutting, fat loss, it's all part of the process.
• 25:43
  Philip Pape: You just have to know that you are ready for it and you're doing the right things.
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying you shouldn't be in a surplus, right?
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: Like for women who are over 40, for for anybody who's over 40, really, who lift weights, a real surplus to build muscle is, well, I should say a lean surplus is is often the right call.
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: A big surplus may not be, depending on whether you've done this before and how responsive you are to building muscle.
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: But it's pretty easy to set things up to be in that slight surplus that's more than enough to build muscle and strength and even get some body reconp for the ride, as long as you are lifting, you're eating protein, you're doing all the right things.
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: So I know I threw a lot at you.
• 26:21
  Philip Pape: I would just go back if you have to re-listen to the four inputs I just talked about, will really help, will really hold up for you when you're thinking about what you want to do.
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: All right, before I let you go, I promised you that what I call runway question.
• 26:34
  Philip Pape: It's like a 10-second question of whether you should even start a deficit.
• 26:38
  Philip Pape: Do you have the runway?
• 26:39
  Philip Pape: It kind of ties to what we just talked about.
• 26:41
  Philip Pape: But before I do, if you're listening to this in late August when the episode comes out and you're thinking that, you know, I'm gonna sort all this out by January, I want to give you the math on that.
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 26:51
  Philip Pape: Let's say you started the week of September 7th, weeks one through seven.
• 26:56
  Philip Pape: You just try to build your skills.
• 26:57
  Philip Pape: You don't try to go into a deficit.
• 26:58
  Philip Pape: You do the tracking, do all the stuff we talked about on episode 497.
• 27:02
  Philip Pape: And then now you're at roughly October 25, and now you start your fat loss phase between October 26th, which is my birthday, by the way, and it runs to about say early January.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: You've got Thanksgiving in there, you've got Christmas in there, where you know, you take maintenance breaks or you figure out how to fit those in.
• 27:21
  Philip Pape: And then January first is like week 17.
• 27:25
  Philip Pape: So now you're four months in, you're past the stretch where most people would quit something like this if you've done it at the right rate, and then you can decide what's next.
• 27:34
  Philip Pape: Well, you know what?
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: We can walk you through that exact process to so that you don't stumble, so that you are supported all the way through.
• 27:41
  Philip Pape: We do this in Eatmore Lift Heavy.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 27:45
  Philip Pape: To celebrate the 500th episode, I've got a code for you.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: 500 club, all one word, takes$50 off the six month option.
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: You can join Eat More Lift Heavy or get personalized coaching with the dialed in level of Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 28:00
  Philip Pape: But I'll go let you check that out at eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 28:03
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: So here's the question.
• 28:05
  Philip Pape: Before you start any phase at all, any phase, answer one question.
• 28:09
  Philip Pape: How many uninterrupted weeks do you have between right now and the next disruption?
• 28:15
  Philip Pape: Okay, so how long are you gonna be at relative peace in your life before something like a vacation, a surgery, a big stretch at work or deadline, the holidays, all of that?
• 28:27
  Philip Pape: If it's less than eight weeks, probably not a good time to start a deficit because you don't have the runway to lose meaningful fat before you have to take some sort of break and you're gonna get frustrated and you're gonna feel like it's not giving you the results.
• 28:40
  Philip Pape: I would work on the skills on building your baseline, on going for something like body recomp at maintenance, or even in a slight surplus, if that's the case.
• 28:48
  Philip Pape: And then you can slow roll into that part of your life in a much more fueled state.
• 28:53
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 28:53
  Philip Pape: And then, you know, weeks, if if your stretch of peace in your life is eight to 16 weeks, so that's like two to four months, hey, great.
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: That's probably a good window to run a conservative deficit, but always plan in the disruptions now while you're thinking about it.
• 29:13
  Philip Pape: So you don't have to improvise and react when it happens.
• 29:16
  Philip Pape: Now, if you have well over 16 weeks, you know, four, five, six months, you've got room for pretty much anything you want to do.
• 29:22
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 29:22
  Philip Pape: But again, you still want to plan ahead for the disruptions that may come up.
• 29:25
  Philip Pape: So the mistake isn't, hey, I picked the wrong phase.
• 29:29
  Philip Pape: It's I picked I picked a phase, but then I hit a wall and I couldn't finish it because something happened in my life.
• 29:36
  Philip Pape: And that's the kind of thing we want to plan around.
• 29:38
  Philip Pape: All right, I hope that was helpful.
• 29:39
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: And remember that the phase you want and the phase you need are often two different questions.
• 29:47
  Philip Pape: And only one of them can be answered by your data.
• 29:51
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.