Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Your Macro Tracking App is Too "Dumb" for Real Fat Loss (or Muscle Gain) | Ep 299

Transcript

Your Macro Tracking App is Too "Dumb" for Real Fat Loss (or Muscle Gain) | Ep 299 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: If you've been tracking your food religiously but your weight isn't budging, it's probably not your fault.
• 0:05
  Philip Pape: Most calorie tracking apps use the same static formula, regardless of what's happening with your metabolism.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: They set a number once, or you have to set the number and never adjust it based on how your unique body responds.
• 0:18
  Philip Pape: So today I'm exposing the critical flaw in nearly every popular food tracking app and showing you what actually works if you want sustainable fat loss or muscle gain, because, while tracking itself is valuable as a first step for awareness, most apps fail to close the loop, and once you understand this, you won't want to waste time with those apps ever again.
• 0:37
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today is one of my favorite topics.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: We are looking at an often overlooked aspect of successful body composition change how most food tracking apps are sabotaging your progress by using static formulas that ignore your body's real-time metabolism.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: This is a really important topic because if you are stuck, if you are frustrated and you're tracking your food, there could be a very good reason why.
• 1:30
  Philip Pape: Here's the scenario you are logging everything you eat, you're weighing your food.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: You're using my fitness power lose it or chronometer you never go over your calorie goal but the scale's not budging.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: Or you're trying to gain muscle, but you can't seem to either get past a hard gaining plateau or you end up eating too much and you gain excess fat, and this is frustrating.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: It's demotivating, it makes you feel like your body's broken.
• 1:51
  Philip Pape: But today you're going to learn why this isn't your fault.
• 1:54
  Philip Pape: I will explain why most and I mean most, as in every single one except one food logging apps are based on static, unhelpful formulas how your metabolism actually adapts to what you eat and why a dynamic approach that uses your real data in the right way is the only reliable method to maintain consistent progress.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: Food tracking itself is incredibly valuable for awareness.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: It is step one for most people, but without a system that creates the feedback loop between your intake and your results, you are flying blind with the wrong targets.
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: So if you're trying to lose those last five or 10 stubborn pounds, try to lose a lot more than that in terms of fat loss.
• 2:35
  Philip Pape: You're trying to build muscle but not gain too much fat, or you're just trying to optimize your nutrition and figure out what the heck do I eat for my calories and macros understanding why your app's calorie recommendations may be way off are going to change how you think about this, and you're going to have the secret decoder ring by the time this episode is done, and I encourage you to listen through the entire episode, because I'm actually going to talk about specific apps that you're probably familiar with and I'm going to share the solution that will actually figure this out for you.
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: All right, so I want to start with a fundamental issue that affects virtually every mainstream food tracking app on the market right now.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: Until times change in the future, this is the case right now, and the problem is simple.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: Most apps use a static, one-time calculation of your total daily energy expenditure, or TDEE.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: In fact, some apps don't even calculate that for you.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: For those unfamiliar, tdee represents the total calories you burn in a day.
• 3:32
  Philip Pape: It is your metabolism, and it includes all the components of your metabolism your basal metabolic rate, which is the energy needed to keep you alive, calories burned by digesting food, your daily activity, both formal and informal, and everything you do.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: And when you first sign up for an app like MyFitnessPal, lose it Chronometer and yes, I am naming names so that you know why these apps cannot cut it for what you're trying to achieve.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: When you sign up, they ask you some questions your age, your height, your weight, your sex, your activity level, your weight loss goal things like that which most apps are going to ask.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: Some don't even ask that and then they plug the values into a formula it's typically the Mifflin-St Jor equation or something similar and then it spits out a calorie target and then this becomes your daily goal.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: The app then expects you to consistently lose weight if you stick to the goal.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: But the fatal flaw is that these estimates, these calculations, are the exact kind you can get when you plug your information into an online calculator.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: I even have one on my website, and they're based on the average of the population and wildly inaccurate self-assessments of activity level.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: And yeah, they're the best we can do as far as an average, but they could be way off from your real metabolism up to 400 calories in either direction, and that's assuming you even give it the most accurate information for you.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: For example, the activity level is highly subjective.
• 4:52
  Philip Pape: What does that mean?
• 4:52
  Philip Pape: And even worse, the targets just remain fixed unless you manually update the information, so the apps don't automatically adjust based on what's actually happening with your body and what your eating patterns are.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: So think about this have you ever been diligently tracking your calories and trying to stay under certain targets?
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: Let's say you're trying to lose weight, lose fat, and it just doesn't happen.
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: You just stay there, stay there, stay.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: Maybe you start gaining weight and it just seems like a mystery and you think, okay, it's me, it's my metabolism, and the app keeps telling you you should be losing weight and you're hitting the targets and maybe maybe you missed the target by five calories or two grams of protein.
• 5:33
  Philip Pape: And then it gives you a big red number and it shames you for it.
• 5:35
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: And then your reality tells a different story from what the app says it should be and this creates a disconnect that is really harmful.
• 5:42
  Philip Pape: It is really harmful for lots of things for body image, for your psychological state.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: Through this process, you get to the point where you think tracking is a terrible tool, or it's obsessive or it's not helpful.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: To be clear, tracking your food is still a valuable practice.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: Even if you just track stuff on a piece of paper old school, and saw how much and what you eat, it's going to create awareness of the amounts, how much protein problem areas.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: Are you getting enough fiber?
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: All of that stuff and that gives you data to work with for sure.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: It is extremely important.
• 6:18
  Philip Pape: The issue is not with the tracking itself.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: It's how most apps fail to create the feedback loop between what you track and what actually happens with your body.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: And again, I made this episode and I'm hoping to be able to share this with anybody in the future who wonders about the apps or anybody who says, well, I use chronometer, so I'm good, it should work.
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: No, it's not gonna work.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: And to understand why?
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: To understand why these static calculations fail, we have to appreciate how adaptive and responsive our metabolism truly is.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: Your metabolism is not this fixed furnace burning the same amount of fuel day after day.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: Right, it's a dynamic system and it's adjusting to many, many, many things.
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: It adjusts your calorie intake first and foremost.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: That is probably the biggest factor.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: People don't realize this.
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: The amount you're eating and whether you are losing or gaining weight are the top two.
• 7:12
  Philip Pape: So number one the amount you're eating.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: When you reduce calories, your body becomes more efficient.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: It's going to burn fewer calories to perform the same function.
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: This is an adaptation that occurs because you are starving of resources.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: And the opposite happens when you eat a lot more, your body actually ramps up.
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: That's the big one.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: The second factor is weight loss.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: As you lose weight you have less mass to maintain, so your calorie needs naturally decrease.
• 7:32
  Philip Pape: So you've kind of got this double whammy Adaptation combined with being lighter on the scale, because, just simple math, 180-pound person's gonna burn more calories at rest than 160 pound person with otherwise identical stats, not even counting muscle mass here we're just talking short term.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: Number three is your activity level.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: You know your activity varies every day, just unconsciously, in terms of your steps.
• 7:54
  Philip Pape: Some days you might walk 12,000 steps, other days barely 3000.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: Some days you might do cardio, some days you lift.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: They go all over the place.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: Sometimes you're doing too much cardio and that causes a negative adaptation or you burn fewer calories.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: It's highly subjective to that.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: The number fourth factor and these are really two factors, but I like to combine them as stress and sleep Sleep deprivation, poor sleep, restless sleep and or high stress, chronic stress can absolutely alter your hormone balance and your metabolism and they change how efficiently your body uses energy.
• 8:27
  Philip Pape: And so when you don't get enough sleep, you burn fewer calories.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: When your cortisol is all over the place.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: Because of your stress, you burn fewer calories.
• 8:34
  Philip Pape: And then the last factor here is for women their hormonal changes throughout the month because of the menstrual cycle can also affect your metabolic rate by as much as five to 10%.
• 8:43
  Philip Pape: It's not nothing.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: And even if you don't account for that, you still have all these other factors that cause your metabolism to fluctuate.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: So these create a constantly shifting energy expenditure that a static formula can't capture.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: Even if it's accurate for you on one day, it can be off by 600 calories two months from now.
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: That's how bad it is.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: And the problem is the traditional apps do exactly that.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: They provide a fixed target based on this fixed assumption and they expect that your complex biological system is going to conform to their mathematical model in some magical way.
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: Or they make it even worse by having you input your activity or connect to your wearable, and they count back the calories from activity, which makes it even worse.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: I'll just give you a real world example that I see all the time with clients.
• 9:32
  Philip Pape: I see it with myself in a fat loss phase.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: When someone starts a fat loss phase, they might have a TDEE of 2,500 calories that's your maintenance calories but after you lose, say, 10 pounds over a couple months, the TDEE could have dropped to 2,200 calories.
• 9:45
  Philip Pape: Could have dropped by 300 or 400 or 500 calories.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: I've seen big drops because of the reduced body mass and the metabolic adaptation.
• 9:52
  Philip Pape: And so if your deficit was 500 calories because you wanted to lose a pound a week, well, now you're actually in a lower deficit.
• 10:00
  Philip Pape: You're only in a 200 calorie deficit because you didn't change your calories, but your body's burning fewer calories and so your weight loss is going to slow.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: By what?
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: 60%?
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: And these apps never tell you this is happening.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: You just don't know.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: It keeps recommending the same target or maybe says, hey, what do you want your targets to be, despite clear evidence that your body's adapted right, which the evidence is that you stop losing weight.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: But then it's frustrating because you're saying, well, the app says I should be so, now something's wrong.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: And so you get frustrated, even if you're perfectly adhering, and the same issue occurs in the opposite direction.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to pay too much attention to that here today.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: I want to focus more on fat loss.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: But same thing If your app tells you you've got to eat 3,000 calories for a lean bulking phase, but your TDEE is less, you're going to gain a lot faster or, on the flip side, if it's more, you're going to hard gain and so it's even more precise in muscle gain in terms of the data that you need about yourself, because it's a little bit more sensitive up there.
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: So, without this feedback loop that connects your intake to your results, you are just navigating with a broken compass.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: That is it.
• 11:07
  Philip Pape: So let's look at the actual most popular tracking apps that are on the market today and how their flawed methodology impacts your results, because I have to be honest, I don't like them.
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: I think they are harmful.
• 11:17
  Philip Pape: Not only do I think they're not helpful, I think they are harmful If your goal is to use the data to then accurately change your behaviors to get the goal you want.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: If your goal is strictly to log your food for awareness and that's it fine, they're adequate.
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: But for any more than that which, if you're listening to the show, your goal is to improve your body composition these apps will not do them, period.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: And I want to be crystal clear I don't care about the cost, I don't care about the features, none of that.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: They just don't do it.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: Let's start with the big one MyFitnessPal.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: Myfitnesspal it has a huge food database.
• 11:50
  Philip Pape: Of course, a lot of it's inaccurate because they're user entered, but let's put that aside.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: The calorie calculations are problematic because the app asks you for your information when you set up and it never revisits it.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: It just doesn't consider how your metabolism changes, like we talked about, and then it separates exercise calories from your baseline metabolism, which is even worse, in my opinion.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: When you log a workout, it adds those calories to your daily budget, which encourages you to eat them back.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: This is dangerous.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: This is unhelpful and harmful, physically and psychologically, right?
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: Number one, because exercise calorie estimates are just completely wrong.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: They're inaccurate.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: They're often off by 30 to 50%.
• 12:30
  Philip Pape: Number two it doesn't account for how your body compensates for exercise, which is gonna happen and also the hunger that ramps up.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: And then it treats exercise as completely separate from your energy expenditure, rather than just one of many components of it.
• 12:43
  Philip Pape: Remember, your metabolism is complex.
• 12:45
  Philip Pape: It's comprised of lots of things.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: Activity is just one tiny thing and, by the way, exercise comprises maybe 5% of your metabolism.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: So that's MyFitnessPal.
• 12:55
  Philip Pape: Then we get to Lose it, which is similar to MyFitnessPal.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: It uses a static TDEE calculation based on your user-reported activity level.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: It tells you go ahead and select a weight loss rate and then it gives you a fixed target to supposedly achieve the rate, but it doesn't adjust it.
• 13:09
  Philip Pape: If you're eating exactly what it recommends but you're losing weight slower than expected, the app doesn't say oh, this might not be a big enough deficit for, or it might not be low enough calories for you.
• 13:19
  Philip Pape: It just doesn't recognize that.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: That's a discrepancy.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: It's dumb Effectively, in my title the word dumb here means lacks intelligence, lacks smarts to do anything helpful.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: And then you're left wondering why you're not hitting your targets, despite even perfect compliance.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: And then we have chronometer.
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: Everybody loves chronometer because it has this awesome micronutrient tracking.
• 13:38
  Philip Pape: Fine, it still relies on static formulas like Mifflin, st Jor.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: You manually set your activity level.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: The app does not adjust your calorie targets based on real time weight changes or intake real-time weight changes or intake and so even when you update your weight, it just recalculates using the same formula rather than analyzing the relationship between intake and changes in weight.
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: We have a couple other apps out there that people like to mention.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: One is FatSecret, the other is HealthifyMe, and same limitations one-time calculations, they don't adapt, they require manual updates, they don't incorporate feedback loops from real world data, and so the pattern across these is clear.
• 14:16
  Philip Pape: I mean, that's the extent of the details I want to get into, because this is not a feature comparison episode.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: This is calling out the one thing missing from every single app on the market, except one we're going to get to in a second.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: They rely on a theoretical calorie need rather than your body, so they're good for awareness of what you're eating, but they don't close the loop, so it's good for a few weeks and after that, useless, in my opinion, again, other than just awareness of what you're eating, and that is the key difference between failure and success.
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: So we've established that you don't just need a static calculation.
• 14:50
  Philip Pape: What do you need instead?
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: Well, you need a dynamic calculation, an approach that refines your energy expender estimate based on what's happening with your body.
• 14:58
  Philip Pape: So think of that as the difference between dumb and smart technology.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: A dumb thermostat stays at the temperature you set it right, and that's how thermostats were for decades.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: A smart thermostat will learn your preference, they'll adapt to changing conditions.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: They might even have a schedule, and they'll adjust to the current temperature, time of day and so on to maintain optimal comfort.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: Traditional tracking apps are like dumb thermostats they set a target and they never adapt.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: What we need is a smart tracking app that closes the feedback loop between the intake and the results, between the intake and the results.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: So what would that look like?
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: Well, first, it would analyze the relationship between what you eat that's, your calorie intake and how your weight changes.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: Think about it your body is like a closed loop energy system.
• 15:43
  Philip Pape: You take an energy in the form of food, you expend it in the form of lots of things movement, digestion, training and, as a result of what you do and just how you are, your body burns a certain amount of calories, and that causes your weight to either go up or down, based on how much energy you need to store, based on the net difference of energy.
• 16:03
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 16:04
  Philip Pape: That's the first thing.
• 16:05
  Philip Pape: The second thing it should do is create an algorithm based on your response.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: So not only should it take the data and estimate your expenditure, it should also look at it over time and take your history to even better estimate your expenditure.
• 16:18
  Philip Pape: The third thing it should do is then give you targets based on that data.
• 16:22
  Philip Pape: Sounds simple, right?
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: Here's your calories and macros.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: The calories are what you need to be in the deficit.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: You want to lose the fat that you want at the rate you want.
• 16:31
  Philip Pape: That's what's missing from the other apps.
• 16:33
  Philip Pape: And then it should also become more accurate the longer you use it, as it collects data Like, for example, as you're gaining muscle, as you're gaining weight to build muscle, it can tell the ratio of muscle to fat based on how fast you're gaining, and then it can adjust for that.
• 16:48
  Philip Pape: So what app does this?
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: If you follow this show for any length of time, you know what app it is.
• 16:52
  Philip Pape: It's called Macrofactor, all in word, created by the guys at Stronger by Science.
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: I'm a firm believer in this app because the only tool it's kind of like a barbell it is the best tool and the only tool for the job out there to do this as effectively as possible.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: The only alternative would be to do it on your own in a spreadsheet, which, if you want to, if you nerd out on it, if you can come up with a decent algorithm, go for it.
• 17:13
  Philip Pape: I would rather take years and years of the smartest guys in evidence-based training, nutrition and science, who have analyzed both the physiological side as well as the statistical and algorithmic side, and put it into an app.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: So, macro factor, all one word.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: And here's how it works.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: It doesn't just ask you to pick an activity level and enter your data.
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: You do that initially.
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: It gives you initial estimate, like every other app, but then the magic starts, because it looks at what happens when you eat a certain amount of food over time to your weight.
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: How does your weight respond to your food?
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: And so it is kind of like having an old style macro coach right, the old old nutrition coaches that calculated macros for you and I've talked about this before in negative terms, in that we don't need them anymore.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: You've got apps and you've got AI and everything else that can do that for you.
• 18:03
  Philip Pape: That's easy.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: What you need a coach for is the human part, the psychological part, the supporting accountability.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: We're not going to get into that.
• 18:10
  Philip Pape: I talked about that recently in a bonus episode.
• 18:12
  Philip Pape: But macro factor is like an old school macro coach who's just looking at how your weight changes and saying, okay, you're, you're starting to plateau.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: That means your deficit is smaller than we thought and therefore you're not burning as many calories, so we're going to give you lower calories.
• 18:25
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: It adjusts up and down as your expenditure changes.
• 18:29
  Philip Pape: So a concrete example of how this works in practice let's say, you begin tracking at what you believe is a 500 calorie a day deficit to lose a pound a week and after two weeks the app set notices that you've only lost a half a pound.
• 18:44
  Philip Pape: Now again, this is over time based on averages.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: It's not going to do this very quickly, day to day and over respond.
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: It's going to look at your trends over two, three, four weeks but it's saying okay, you're really only losing half a pound over the past few weeks, should be losing a pound, and a traditional app like MyFitnessPal would have no clue, just keep giving you the same deficit until you change it.
• 19:04
  Philip Pape: But Macrofactor will recognize that your TDEE is actually lower than it thought and now it will adjust your intake to reach your fat loss desired rate of loss.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: And then it's going to update the calories and macros when you quote, unquote, check in with the app.
• 19:20
  Philip Pape: So you check in weekly, usually on a Monday.
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: That's the default and the formula now no longer matters.
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: The estimate, the initial estimate, no longer matters.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: What matters is you, your body, and the beauty of this approach is it works regardless of whether your metabolism is faster or slower, whether you've eaten more or less, whether you're hitting the targets or not, it's going to work.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: And if you are someone who naturally burns way more calories, it's going to detect this, and vice versa If your metabolism is slower, it's going to adjust downward accordingly.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: And so if you've been stuck trying to lose weight for years and years, or maybe you're peri-post-menopause, maybe you're an older dude who's just been stuck trying all the diets, this could be what you're missing Just an understanding of your metabolism, an approach that adapts as you are trying to change your body, because those things are cyclical.
• 20:05
  Philip Pape: As you change, your metabolism changes, but then you need to change again in terms of your eating habits, and so the app detects these changes and then adjust your targets.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: It seems simple, but I'm surprised that no other app does this, and it works in fat loss, maintenance or muscle gain.
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: In fact, macrofactor has some pretty sophisticated algorithms for muscle gain.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: If you're trying to gain weight, it's going to give you a target, but then, if you go faster or slower than it expects, it doesn't just adjust the target blindly.
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: It actually estimates a ratio of muscle and fat to determine how fast you need to go to gain at the rate you want to gain.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: It's pretty cool.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: So that's really all I have to say about dynamic calculation.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: I mean, it's again.
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: It sounds simple Take what you eat and how your weight changes and calculate the number.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: If you try to do this yourself, it's actually pretty sophisticated, because what if you're going from a bulk to a cut?
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: What if you're sick or injured and your metabolism changes drastically?
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: What if you have a period, your period and your cycle changes?
• 21:00
  Philip Pape: There's a lot of reasons our expenditure can change.
• 21:02
  Philip Pape: The app is not going to overcorrect.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: If you try to do this on your own, you're going to find out that there's all these little scenarios that are kind of difficult to deal with and you're going to have to update your algorithm, and so it gets more and more sophisticated.
• 21:14
  Philip Pape: So if you want an effective tracking strategy and this is not just tracking, this is tracking and the right targets, first you've got to select the right tool for the job.
• 21:22
  Philip Pape: If you want to get super strong, you're probably going to select a barbell or at least some effective machines.
• 21:27
  Philip Pape: So in this case, you want an app that uses a dynamic calculation period.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: Right now on the market, macrofactor is the only app that does this, and its algorithm is amazing, and they talk about it openly and transparently and they're constantly improving it.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: So it's going to improve every week.
• 21:42
  Philip Pape: It's going to adjust your metabolism and give you the right targets.
• 21:46
  Philip Pape: Number two you've got to be consistent with your logging.
• 21:48
  Philip Pape: So this isn't all just the app doing the job right.
• 21:51
  Philip Pape: You don't just start using the app and, oh, I lose weight.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: No, of course you have to have accurate data.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: You want to log what you eat every day, whether you go over your target or not.
• 21:59
  Philip Pape: So I have clients who, early on, they'll say, oh, I didn't track for a week because I got sick.
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: And my response is well, assuming the tracking itself isn't stressful and it only takes like two minutes a day to track when you get used to it especially macro factor Cause it's so fast Keep tracking Even when you're sick again, if it doesn't make it worse.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: But again, for most people it's an easy, quick thing.
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: And what's nice about tracking no matter what happens whether you're over or under your targets, not eating doesn't matter is it will have precision and accuracy to show you what happens to your body in those times.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: I actually want you to track in the times that are off plan.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: So quote, unquote, so we can see what happens to your expenditure in those times.
• 22:40
  Philip Pape: You could adjust accordingly and you get honest data to create that feedback loop so that you have confidence on how much to eat, what to eat and when.
• 22:49
  Philip Pape: You also have to weigh yourself consistently.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: So I've talked before about how weighing every day is associated with success and maintaining your results.
• 22:57
  Philip Pape: It is not associated with obsessiveness, because when you weigh every day, you can see the natural fluctuations caused by things that have nothing to do with fat.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: Weigh every day, you can see the natural fluctuations caused by things that have nothing to do with fat, and then you have to take a trend of that over time.
• 23:08
  Philip Pape: So, like macro factor uses a 20 day exponential moving average, you don't have to understand what that means, but if you think of the 20 days, that's about three weeks.
• 23:16
  Philip Pape: That means fat gain, fat loss, is really only estimated with any precision after about three weeks of data.
• 23:25
  Philip Pape: The next thing is you have to understand that there are lots of things other than fat that will cause your weight to change.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: So, again tying into the comment I just made about daily weight tracking, we have water retention, sodium intake, carbohydrate levels, hormonal cycles, inflammation from training.
• 23:41
  Philip Pape: Again, what matters is the trend over weeks.
• 23:44
  Philip Pape: The next thing is you don't want to manually override the calculations.
• 23:47
  Philip Pape: So this is another problem I see is that some people will say, well, it says the expenditure is lower than I like, or I don't think my expenditure is that low and you're like tempted to manually change it.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: Well, once you've been using the app for I'll say, three or four weeks maybe as little as two, but usually three or four weeks of daily food tracking where you log everything you can't do partial days or it'll think you ate less and daily weighing it's going to have a pretty darn accurate assessment of your expenditure and if it's lower than you like, that's a reality you have to face.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: But that's a great thing because it's empowering data and it could explain why you've been stuck trying to lose weight or fat all these years, and then you could decide what to do about it.
• 24:26
  Philip Pape: You also have to give these things time.
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: I've mentioned this a couple of times.
• 24:30
  Philip Pape: Dynamic calculation is going to become more accurate the longer you use it.
• 24:34
  Philip Pape: So the first few weeks you almost can't trust anything because you don't have enough precision, but by, say, four to six weeks, the algorithm is highly personalized and then, of course, course, you would use this as a learning tool.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: That is really my last comment on this is it's not just hitting targets which, by the way, macro factor doesn't judge you on whether you're over or under, it doesn't color code things, it's completely adherence neutral.
• 24:56
  Philip Pape: It's very nice, it's very good for the psychological aspect, but beyond just hitting targets, you can pay attention to how different foods affect your hunger, your energy, your performance and, yes, your expenditure, and tie it all together right.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: The goal isn't just to comply to numbers.
• 25:13
  Philip Pape: The goal is really to understand your body's unique response to what you do, what you eat, and then adjust accordingly.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: And that's why, as a coach, I really love that my clients use it, because we get far more precise and insightful data than a traditional macro meal plan coach would ever have.
• 25:30
  Philip Pape: And then I can go to that next level of being a detective and helping you understand why the data is doing what it's doing.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: And that eliminates guesswork.
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: It eliminates the frustration from using MyFitnessPal, tracking your food and not knowing why you're not getting the result.
• 25:42
  Philip Pape: Instead of wondering and being constantly frustrated, you're going to have a system that reflects your body's reality and creates a continuous feedback loop, and that's how we make progress in life, in fitness, in nutrition, everything the cool thing about tracking in general so just to throw a bone to any of these apps where you've decided to track your food and you weren't before is it will start to change your behavior, sometimes in ways you don't notice.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: Research shows that people who track their food just track tend to move more throughout the day.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: They tend to make slightly better food choices, even when they're not consciously trying to.
• 26:16
  Philip Pape: It's why I love having my clients track from day one, so that they start to change their own behavior.
• 26:21
  Philip Pape: Listen, I have clients reach out to me in the first few weeks and they're like I just noticed this, so I changed this.
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: I just noticed I didn't have no protein, so I did this.
• 26:29
  Philip Pape: I'm not even telling them to do this stuff Right, and that's great, because a lot of this is on you, and I don't mean that in a bad way.
• 26:35
  Philip Pape: I mean you've got the power.
• 26:36
  Philip Pape: It's you've.
• 26:46
  Philip Pape: You take the action.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: But it really helps to have someone looking over your shoulder to understand why the data is doing what it's doing, so you can take the right actions.
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: And then you take this to the next level not just track your food, but track your expenditure so that you can measure your actual response to food while you're tracking.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: It's really a profound shift in thinking.
• 26:58
  Philip Pape: It's from trying to conform to what you think is how many calories you're burning, based on a formula, to actually observing and working with what your metabolism is doing.
• 27:07
  Philip Pape: And if you went back 10 years before Macrofactor existed, the way someone would tell you to do this is to manually track your food and manually track your weight and kind of guess and eyeball how your weight is changing to your food.
• 27:18
  Philip Pape: But it's very rough, it's very imprecise, and so that's why I recommend Macrofactor, which then gives you not a dumb tracking app but a smart system that closes the loop.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: So anyway, we've covered a lot of ground today and just to bring it all together, the traditional apps my fitness pal lose it chronometer.
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: They have static metabolism formulas that remain fixed regardless of how your body responds.
• 27:41
  Philip Pape: So don't tell me when I suggest using macro factor.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: Oh no, I don't need to do that, I already use chronometer, it's free, Like, okay, well, you're, you're tracking food and that's it.
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: You're not going to get the result you want without knowing what's actually happening in your body Period.
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: They ignore metabolic adaptation, they fail to account for how your weight changes.
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: They fail to account for energy changes and exercise changes and all of that.
• 28:01
  Philip Pape: They're dumb in a world where you need smart.
• 28:05
  Philip Pape: So even if you've been following your app's recommendations but you're not seeing the results, it's not because you are doing something wrong.
• 28:11
  Philip Pape: It's because you have the wrong targets.
• 28:13
  Philip Pape: So if you want to experience a difference and this is what the only little sales pitch I'm going to make here is to go ahead and try macro factor for free for two weeks.
• 28:22
  Philip Pape: Link is in the show notes.
• 28:23
  Philip Pape: Use my code wits and weights all one word.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: I personally have used the app since the day it came out.
• 28:27
  Philip Pape: All my clients, everyone in Physique University, use the app.
• 28:34
  Philip Pape: It is highly empowering.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: It's going to change your life.
• 28:36
  Philip Pape: It is a paid app and yet what you get for it is worth multiples upon multiples of the cost.
• 28:39
  Philip Pape: I think it's still $71.99 for a year.
• 28:41
  Philip Pape: Now, that's in US dollars.
• 28:42
  Philip Pape: But try it for free using the code witsandweights all one word.
• 28:47
  Philip Pape: Link is in the show notes.
• 28:48
  Philip Pape: I also have a step-by-step YouTube video that shows you how to set it up properly to find your true maintenance calories the first time.
• 28:55
  Philip Pape: So I'm going to include links to both in the show notes.
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: Grab the app, try it out.
• 29:00
  Philip Pape: You've got two weeks to try it out.
• 29:01
  Philip Pape: If you don't like it, no risk, don't use it and watch my video on setting it up and you're going to be good, you're going to be awesome.
• 29:07
  Philip Pape: Then you're going to be reaching out saying, okay, cool, now I see what you were talking about.
• 29:11
  Philip Pape: Now I understand my true targets.
• 29:14
  Philip Pape: Now I need to put this into the next level, combining it with my training, with my meal timing, making sure it works for me, with my biofeedback and my energy, and really get the fat loss that I'm going for.
• 29:24
  Philip Pape: But step one is to start tracking your food and weight using Macrofactor.
• 29:29
  Philip Pape: Use my code, wits and Weights, Get the link in the show notes and watch the video.
• 29:32
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights and remember successful body composition change, fat loss, muscle gain, whatever it is, comes from understanding how your unique metabolism is changing, not trying to conform to a generic, static, unchanging formula.
• 29:49
  Philip Pape: This is Philip Pape and you've been listening to Wits and Weights.
• 29:53
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time.