Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Metabolism 101 for Fat Loss and Muscle Building After 40 | Ep 421

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Metabolism 101 for Fat Loss and Muscle Building After 40 | Ep 421 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: There's a reason some people eat more and stay leaner, while others restrict constantly and fight for every pound.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: It's not genetics, it's how they've trained their metabolism to behave.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: Today I'm breaking down the actual science of metabolism: how it works, why it adapts, and how to use that adaptation to your advantage instead of fighting it.
• 0:21
  Philip Pape: You'll learn why chronic dieting backfires at the metabolic level, why muscle changes everything about how your body handles food, and a zero-time habit that can add up to 9,000 calories of monthly burn without changing your schedule.
• 0:37
  Philip Pape: Get this foundation right, and everything else, your nutrition, your training, your fat loss, gets easier.
• 0:42
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wit and Weight, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency.
• 0:56
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and the founder of the Fitness Lab app.
• 1:01
  Philip Pape: And this episode comes out at the beginning of the year.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: So if you are setting goals this year around body composition, fat loss, building muscle, getting stronger, maybe you're over 40, this is where we start.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: Not with a specific diet or with a training program, but with understanding the basics, how your body actually works, metabolism 101.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: Here's the problem: most people are not failing at this because they don't understand the basic information, like energy balance and calories.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: They're failing usually because they don't understand how their body is adapting and working within that system, right?
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: The personalized approach to this and how the metabolism changes.
• 1:44
  Philip Pape: Because at the end of the day, all the other issues around diets and hormones and training and everything else often come down to just understanding how your body handles nutrients and nutrition and calories to get it to do what you're trying to do.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: And so if you treat metabolism as static, as one-directional, as something fixed, which I hear all the time in people's language, they'll say, Well, I calculated my metabolism last year and it says I'm 60, I burned 1650 calories, as if that's the end of the story.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: And it's not.
• 2:14
  Philip Pape: It literally changes every single day.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: And a lot of people also think it's outside their control.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: And so when you're shocked because eating less and moving more doesn't work, you think that you're, you know, broken or it doesn't work for you, or there's something else happening with hormones that's exotic or requires some optimization or supplement.
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: And then it gets really frustrating because you're trying to chase that and it still doesn't necessarily fix the problem.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: And there's a lot of people in the fitness industry selling you on those kinds of problems right off the bat instead of the boring basics and understanding the model.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: So I want to replace that broken model with a more accurate one that gives you more clarity, that gives you more confidence.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: And so we're gonna step it back.
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: I know you've probably listened to this or watched the show for a while, or maybe you haven't.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: Maybe this is the very first episode you're ever listening to.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: Either way, we're gonna go over the basics.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: We're gonna cover the four components, the four components of energy expenditure, aka your metabolism.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: Some nuanced differences there, but that's basically what it is, and why the old way of thinking about them doesn't hold today, right?
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: We're gonna make a little more nuanced approach to this.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about why your body compensates when you diet.
• 3:20
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about the research on metabolic adaptation and get into the more valuable aspects about muscle beyond aesthetics related to the metabolism.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: And stick around to the very end of this episode because I'm going to share a zero-time habit that can add up to 9,000 calories of monthly burn to your metabolism.
• 3:40
  Philip Pape: You're probably already doing this thing, but maybe doing it inefficiently.
• 3:45
  Philip Pape: And it takes about 30 seconds to explain.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: You can start doing this today or tomorrow.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: So stick around to the end of the episode for that.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get into it and start with what the heck metabolism actually is, because the word metabolism gets thrown around a lot.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: Most people don't know what it means.
• 4:01
  Philip Pape: Simply, metabolism is the total rate at which your body expends energy to sustain your life, your movement, your digestion, and your adaptation.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: That is it.
• 4:11
  Philip Pape: It's all the things your body does throughout the day to burn calories.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: It is not a number on a calculator of your metabolism.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: It's not a curse or a gift that's given to you genetically, even though people can vary slightly in their metabolisms in general.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: We're all about the same given the same, you know, body composition and size.
• 4:33
  Philip Pape: It is a rate of your energy expenditure, and that rate changes based on a lot of things, including what you do, not just your movement, but other things that you do.
• 4:41
  Philip Pape: It is not just energy expenditure, though.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: What I like to think of a metabolism is is energy allocation under constraints.
• 4:51
  Philip Pape: So it is the energy you burn every day, but it's how all that energy coming in in the form of food, right?
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: That's the only way we get energy as human beings, comes in and how it gets allocated given all of the constraints.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: So let me explain what I mean.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: Your body has a finite amount of energy coming in, again, from food.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: And it has to decide how to spend that energy.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: So some of that goes to keeping your organs running, keeping you alive, keeping your heart pumping, keeping you breathing, some goes to digesting food, some goes to helping you move, you know, uh consciously and unconsciously, and then some goes to building or maintaining tissue.
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: So there's a lot of turnover, there's a lot of metabolic processes going on.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: So when energy is plentiful, when you have plenty of food coming in, your body spends freely.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: When that energy is scarce, such as when you're dieting, your body starts to make trade-offs.
• 5:42
  Philip Pape: It starts to compensate, it becomes more efficient, it cuts back on things that are not immediately essential.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: And this is a survival mechanism that is just built into our DNA.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: It's how we evolved, and that is to protect us during famines, during times of lack of resources.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: You've heard of probably the feast or famine concept from, you know, ancient man, right?
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: The problem is that most people are not accounting for this.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: And it's a bi-directional thing, isn't it?
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: It's like what you eat and your metabolism both affect each other.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: The quantities affect each other, and then all these other things I talked about, digestion, movement, et cetera, affect the equation.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: And that's why people get confused, right?
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: So it's not a simple math equation of calories in, calories out, is my point.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: Even though the end of the stream of thought, the end of the chain results in an equation of calories in, calories out that then decides how you gain or lose weight.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: There is so much happening before we get to that point.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:43
  Philip Pape: And that is the important thing.
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: So it's not just calories and calories out, only because as humans, we have control over many other things that lead to that.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: But then it is calories in, calories out at the end of the day, right?
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: So it's a it's yes and.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: So if we understand this, it changes how you approach things like fat loss and muscle building.
• 7:00
  Philip Pape: And it explains why you can be doing a lot of what you think is the right stuff, but still hit a plateau.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: You it explains why some people seem to eat more and stay leaner.
• 7:12
  Philip Pape: And it gives you some leverage to control the process instead of just hoping, right?
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: Hope is not a strategy, as they say.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: So let's break down these components, the four components of TDEE, which is total daily energy expenditure.
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: And I want to walk through each one because once you understand it, you could say, okay, how do I affect each one?
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: Is it even worth going after that based on how big of an impact it has?
• 7:32
  Philip Pape: So the first one, the biggest one, is your basal metabolic rate or BMR.
• 7:37
  Philip Pape: This is the energy required to sustain your basic physiological function at rest, but even when you're not at rest, even during just during the day, right?
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: There's resting metabolic rate and there's basal metabolic rate.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: So basal metabolic rate is when you're awake.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: That's it, just to simplify it.
• 7:54
  Philip Pape: So we're talking about your organ function, your protein turnover, maintaining your cell membranes, like all the technical fancy stuff that keeps you alive that you don't have to think about, even if you just lay in bed all day.
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: So your BMR is largely influenced by your fat-free mass.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's your body composition.
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: So the amount of but muscle you have and the amount of fat you have.
• 8:13
  Philip Pape: The more of the muscle you have, which is metabolically the most active metabolic tissue, the higher your BMR.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: And BMR usually represents around two-thirds of your total calories, but that that percentage of calories can change based on the proportion of the other stuff too.
• 8:28
  Philip Pape: Going back to body composition, this is one reason why building muscle matters.
• 8:33
  Philip Pape: Very important.
• 8:34
  Philip Pape: We're gonna come back to that.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: And the other important thing here is that BMR is not fixed.
• 8:39
  Philip Pape: It does on average stay the same from your 20s to your 60s, on average, but it adapts downward during energy restrictions, such as dieting.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: It adapts upward when you have more lean mass and also more energy available.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: So if your bulk, if you go on into a calories surplus, you'll see it go up.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: If you diet, you'll see it go down.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: So that and that's one way that it changes independent of the other aspects of what you're doing.
• 9:06
  Philip Pape: So your body's always calibrating due to what we talked about before, this compensation effect.
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: So that's the first component.
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: The second component of your metabolism is the TEF or a thermic effect of food.
• 9:16
  Philip Pape: This is the cost, the energy cost, like the amount of calories burned, digesting, absorbing, assimilating the nutrients that you consume.
• 9:25
  Philip Pape: So, roughly speaking, protein has the highest TEF.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: It's about 20 to 30% of the calories that you eat from protein go toward processing that protein.
• 9:36
  Philip Pape: Carbs are a moderate level, maybe five to 10%, and fat is lowest around zero to three percent.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: And this is a reason why high protein diets have a little bit of an edge, right?
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: It's not a huge edge, like let's not overblow it, but you are actually burning more calories just by eating protein compared to the same calories from carbs or fat, especially fat.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: So I've seen people go from like a low carb, high-fat keto-style diet to a much higher protein diet.
• 10:03
  Philip Pape: And without any other changes, their expenditure rises and they can eat more food or they can lose fat more easily.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: So this is one of the reasons protein can be very helpful.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: TEF also, like BMR, declines when your intake declines, okay, because you're eating less, you're in a diet.
• 10:22
  Philip Pape: That means you are more efficient at extracting energy from food and you're not eating as much.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: So that's essentially another compensation mechanism.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: You're gonna notice that all the components of your metabolism, all four, tend to drop when we're dieting, either due to our own actions or unconsciously because of what's happening with our body.
• 10:39
  Philip Pape: The third component is eat, exercise, activity, thermogenesis.
• 10:43
  Philip Pape: And that's the energy you burn during intentional exercise, which is just anything that you plan in, like your training session, any sort of workouts, any sort of cardio or sports.
• 10:54
  Philip Pape: There's a debate whether walking fits in this category.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: I tend to put walking in the final category we're going to talk about in a second.
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: But eat, exercise activity, thermogenesis, is it varies a lot between people, of course, because some people do exercise, some people don't, some people exercise a lot.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: And it is also highly sensitive to these efficiency gains or losses over time.
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: Because, for example, the more you do the same type of exercise, the better your body gets at it.
• 11:22
  Philip Pape: And that can actually be a quote unquote bad thing when you're trying to burn calories because it'll burn fewer calories.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: It is great for performance, though, because the body adapts and gets really good at something, right?
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: And it doesn't mean you should constantly change your exercise to make up for this, but it does lead to some interesting tips like if you're going to do different cardio sessions, maybe rotate between modalities because you might be less efficient and thus burn a few more calories.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: These honestly aren't the places where I'm looking to leverage our metabolism the most, but they're interesting.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: The fourth component is probably my favorite because it's probably the one you have the most control over short term.
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: And that is neat non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: And this is everything else we didn't talk about.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: So this is your posture, your fidgeting.
• 12:07
  Philip Pape: This is walking around, your chores, your daily tasks.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: And again, some people argue that walking fits under eat, but I think walking is it's something we do all day and we do naturally, and we do it unconsciously, we do it just to live, we walk.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: So there's a logical reason to include it in this category.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: It also doesn't have the same stressful, intense, you know, potentially negative effects of exercise that are possible with, you know, cardio, for example.
• 12:30
  Philip Pape: And neat, therefore, is all the spontaneous unplanned movement throughout the day, plus your deliberate walking, in my opinion.
• 12:39
  Philip Pape: It's also massively underrated because it can vary by not only hundreds, but thousands of calories.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: I mean, there's a study, I don't have the details here.
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: You know, Brandon DeCruz is good at bringing this one up, where like they compared sedentary people in terms of their jobs.
• 12:55
  Philip Pape: They were sedentary or like a shop clerk and then manual laborers.
• 12:59
  Philip Pape: And the said, and there was like a 2,000 calorie difference in neat between the two extreme groups.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: You know, it's like an 800-calorie jump and then a 1200 calorie jump to the manual laborers.
• 13:09
  Philip Pape: And that's just from their job, like how much they move throughout the day, right?
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: And it's low grade movement.
• 13:14
  Philip Pape: So your neat can vary a lot just based on your lifestyle.
• 13:17
  Philip Pape: If you tend to be active, if you tend to move around and walk around and go for those walks.
• 13:22
  Philip Pape: It's also extremely sensitive to your energy intake, to your fatigue, to your biofeedback, like your stress, your sleep, your training load.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: People don't realize this, but this is the first place your body compensates during a diet because it happens pretty quickly.
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: You might not even notice it.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: You just move less, you fidget less, you stand instead of pace, you take the elevator instead of the stairs.
• 13:41
  Philip Pape: You might feel a little bit lethargic at times, tired at times, just move less.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: Even if you are tracking steps and trying to keep that step count up, there's other areas where you just don't notice it and it adds up.
• 13:51
  Philip Pape: So the traditional model then combines all of these components, right?
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: Your TDEE, your total daily energy expenditure, is your BMR, plus your thermic effective food, plus your exercise activity thermogenesis, plus your non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: And each component adds up independently.
• 14:11
  Philip Pape: I'll say in the traditional model, you increase your activity, you increase your expenditure.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: And I'll say that model works in a short-term capacity and it works within reasonable levels, but it sometimes ignores biological compensations, such as when we talk about the constrained energy model, like the work from Herman Ponser at Duke, I know Eric Treklar's working with him now on this stuff, where we see that your expenditure is regulated within a range where the more you do, for example, the more cardio you do, but up to a pretty large amount, not like I said, not a reasonable amount, your body will start to overcompensate and the amount of extra calorie burn gets less and less.
• 14:54
  Philip Pape: It's not that there's a wall or a threshold or a cutoff where beyond that, your body's just not going to burn more calories.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: It doesn't work that way.
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: Essentially, I think what we're seeing is the more you do, the more you burn.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: And then it starts to become diminishing returns.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: That's like a nuanced way to explain it.
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: And we see cross-cultural comparisons.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: We see hunter-gatherer populations like the Hadza compared to Western populations where their activity levels are very different, right?
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: Like we're very sedentary over here and they're moving around all day.
• 15:22
  Philip Pape: And you would think they should burn way more calories, but the total energy expenditure is usually similar when accounting for size and body composition.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: And again, that doesn't mean exercise or movement or training is useless, not at all.
• 15:36
  Philip Pape: I think that's one of the worst takeaways that gets misconstrued from that.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: It simply means that your body is reallocating energy, it is compensating across your systems.
• 15:47
  Philip Pape: And hormones are a big part of that, of course, right?
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: Your signaling mechanism from your thyroid to your reproductive hormones, your hunger signals are a function of this.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: But if you add in a ton of cardio, then you might find that what you thought would be an extra 500 calories a day is only an extra 200 calories a day.
• 16:06
  Philip Pape: If you go too far, you might compensate in other areas where you're actually pushing the needle the wrong direction, right?
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: So again, it's, you know, people are gonna say, well, wait, what about athletes who put in 60 miles a week and they do burn, you know, 5 or 6,000 calories a day?
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: That's my point, is that it does work up to a point, but then there's a diminishing point of return and you have to compensate elsewhere with your recovery, for example.
• 16:33
  Philip Pape: So constrained doesn't mean fixed, it just means flexible within bounds and adaptive and it responds to these chronic signals as opposed to just like one-offs.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: And so we shouldn't think in terms of one-offs.
• 16:44
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 16:45
  Philip Pape: So you can see this usually if you start a new exercise program where if you're tracking your expenditure, you might burn more calories right off the bat in the first few days or weeks, you know, as well as we can calculate this, like something like macrofactor can help us do this, or if you're tracking your weight and your food meticulously to see how this changes.
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: But then as you keep doing it, you might notice that your expenditure, you know, drops a little bit back to not the original level, but something less than it was.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: And that could be both the compensation that happens inside the body, but the compensation you do subconsciously physically outside the body, like sitting more or fidgeting less or taking through fewer steps elsewhere.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: And so your body's gonna reduce energy expenditure in other systems.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: So there's a lot of confusion on that because a lot of people think it's just this mysterious compensation that goes on in your body.
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: No, some of it is actually you're compensating with your activity.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: So it's not fixed.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: I think that's the whole point.
• 17:43
  Philip Pape: And it also explains why some people feel like they're doing more and more and not seeing the results.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: And that's just biology.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: And once you understand it, you can work with it.
• 17:51
  Philip Pape: So this is the big reframe from metabolism 101 today, is that it's not just these four components added together and you can move each one up and down independently.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: It's a bi-directional system where everything you do with every one of these affects the others.
• 18:05
  Philip Pape: And then the things you're doing, like dieting and building, your calorie intake actually affects it as well, and vice versa.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: So if we can simply handle our calories efficiently for most of the year, which my last episode really got into why building muscle most of the year helps this situation, um, we don't have to overthink it.
• 18:30
  Philip Pape: We don't have to overthink it.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: So I want to talk about that for a second, right?
• 18:33
  Philip Pape: If there's one thing I want you to take from this episode, it's that muscle is probably the biggest lever you have long term, fundamentally, in how your metabolism behaves.
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: And there's a lot of reasons for this, so we're gonna just break them down, right?
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: Structurally, structurally, muscle increases your basal metabolic rate.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: More fat-free mass means more energy required at rest because of how active the tissue is.
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: It's about six to nine extra calories a pound.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: And I kind of beat this to death in the past, but it's worth mentioning again that the calories burned from having more muscle is more of a cascade.
• 19:11
  Philip Pape: It's not just the tissue itself, but it's also the fact that you're usually carrying around more body weight.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: Most people that I work with, most of my clients who build five, 10, 15 pounds of muscle, they're not trying to keep a low level of body scale weight with this extra muscle because it's kind of harder to do that anyway.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: But they're leaner at the same or higher body weight, and therefore they're burning more calories just from the extra weight.
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: You also burn more calories because the way you train, and you train really hard, and you're always in that anabolic state, that muscle growth state.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: So all of that tends to burn more calories than you think.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: And then your body has to feed those calories.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: So that's the food side.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: Muscle also increases your glycogen storage.
• 19:52
  Philip Pape: Glycogen is the stored carbohydrate that's your body's preferred fuel for intense activity, which includes training and cardio really.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: Anything glycolytic, we call it.
• 20:02
  Philip Pape: More muscle means more storage space for those carbs, which means you could eat more carbs without them spilling over into fat storage because you're using them more efficiently, right?
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: When we talk about nutrient partitioning, that's what we mean.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: So muscle is massively helpful in that capacity.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: And that affects your metabolism as well.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: It affects how efficient everything is.
• 20:19
  Philip Pape: And then related to this metabolically, muscle improves your insulin sensitivity.
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: When you have more muscle, your body does a much better job of shuttling glucose from your blood into your cells.
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: And that's where it can be used or stored as glycogen, again, not converted to fat.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: At the end of the day, this does come down to energy balance.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: If you have too much energy coming in, you're still going to store fat because you just have too much to use.
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: You're not going to be able to use all that glucose.
• 20:45
  Philip Pape: But there's a nice window here where it's highly beneficial.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: And that window usually is around maintenance calories up into a small surplus.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: Small is a whole separate discussion, but definitely not like a dirty bulk.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: There's also cellular impacts of muscle with mitochondrial density, with the function of your mitochondria, right?
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: Mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, you know, which uses ATP.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: It means better oxidative capacity, where you become better at using fat for fuel.
• 21:15
  Philip Pape: So now you're using carbs and fat for fuel just better.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: Systemically, we talked about this in the last episode.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: Muscle releases myokines.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: These are signaling molecules that influence your liver, your fat, you know, adipose tissue, even your brain.
• 21:27
  Philip Pape: It improves appetite regulation, right?
• 21:29
  Philip Pape: We all want to have better appetites.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: Well, guess what?
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: More muscle, you're going to just feel like eating better food and have less cravings and feel like eating less quote unquote junk food in general when you have more muscle.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: It also improves nutrient partitioning, which is where the food actually goes, right?
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: So muscle is hugely beneficial across the board when it comes to your metabolism and it increases the range of calories your body can handle.
• 21:53
  Philip Pape: I don't want to just repeat last the last episode I dropped, but go listen to that if you want a deeper dive into this.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 22:01
  Philip Pape: So I think the end result from your metabolism is that if you build enough muscle over several years, you're going to be burning several hundred more calories, probably.
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: And that just gives you a lot more flexibility for the long term.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: And you have a wider margin, right?
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: You can eat more, you get more food flexibility.
• 22:17
  Philip Pape: You only need to diet occasionally.
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: We talked about it in the last episode, dieting less than 20% of the year, if that.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: And then when you do, you don't have to go as low with calories, et cetera.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: So this is why I love the muscle first strategies, because they reduce the need for prolonged dieting and building, you know, you're building a body that requires a lot less effort to maintain long term.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: By the way, if you're finding this stuff helpful, I want to remind you that at the very end, I'm sharing a simple neat hack.
• 22:43
  Philip Pape: It's neat also, but it's related to neat that can add up to 9,000 calories of monthly calorie burn without adding anything to your schedule.
• 22:52
  Philip Pape: So for those of you who like time efficient strategies, you're probably already doing this to an extent, but we're going to talk about how to leverage it the most.
• 22:58
  Philip Pape: I want you to stick around for that.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: Speaking of building a body that's easier to manage, this is what Fitness Lab is designed for, guys.
• 23:07
  Philip Pape: I have to mention my app Fitness Lab.
• 23:09
  Philip Pape: It's super exciting.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: We're getting a ton of great reviews on this since it came out in November.
• 23:13
  Philip Pape: We're always improving it.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: It's an AI-powered coaching app that gives you tasks every day, personalized guidance on nutrition, training, biofeedback, sleep, stress, movement, all of it adapted to your goals, adapted to what's actually happening in your body day to day, whether you're building muscle, working through a fat loss phase, just trying to understand why your approach isn't clicking for you.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: The app is gonna meet you where you are right now, which is the most important thing, and then tell you here's what we're gonna do next.
• 23:41
  Philip Pape: Today, as this episode comes out, is January 2nd, which means it's the last day of our holiday promotion where you get 20% off after today goes back to full price.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: So grab that while you can.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweights.com slash app.
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: That's witsandweights.com slash app.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: The link is also in the show notes.
• 23:58
  Philip Pape: This is the easiest way right now with the technology and tools you have available at the cost to put the principles we're talking about today into daily practice and actually do them.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: Actually do them.
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash app.
• 24:12
  Philip Pape: All right, let's talk about what happens when you do not account for the adaptation and complexity of your metabolism because most people approach fat loss in a very simplistic way.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: You're gonna eat less, you're gonna move more, you're gonna repeat until you reach your goal.
• 24:26
  Philip Pape: Tell me I'm wrong, right?
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: And I see people commenting on YouTube videos and uh social media posts, like it's simple.
• 24:34
  Philip Pape: Eat less, move more, you know, just so flippantly and so ignorantly.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: And maybe this is a 25-year-old who has no problems with any of this stuff and their body's responding just fine and they're not overdoing it.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: But that's not you, is it?
• 24:46
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: Progress probably has stalled on more than one occasion when you try this, and then you don't know what to do next.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: Because if that's the only thing that worked in the past and more of it won't work, what can you do?
• 24:57
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 24:58
  Philip Pape: What can you do?
• 24:59
  Philip Pape: And we're that's just like scale weight.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: There's also the low energy, there's the hunger issues.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: And most people are giving up, you know, at some point on this journey, and then they regain more weight than they lost, and then it's just this loss cause, right?
• 25:12
  Philip Pape: And this is a predictable result for many of you because of the lack of understanding of energy restriction of your metabolism.
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: So when you're doing sustained diets, your body is gonna reduce neat subconsciously.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: We talked about that before.
• 25:27
  Philip Pape: You move less without realizing.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: It's gonna down regulate your hormones, reproductive hormones, your immune function, right?
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: People tend to get more sick when they're dieting.
• 25:38
  Philip Pape: Your body decides, you know, these are not priorities right now because I just don't have enough energy coming in to begin with.
• 25:43
  Philip Pape: Your thyroid hormone decreases.
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: This is like your metabolic regulator.
• 25:47
  Philip Pape: So then your metabolic rate slows down further.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: Your sympathetic nervous system output drops, right?
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: You're a little bit more on edge, you feel a little sluggish at the same time and maybe less driven, more lethargic.
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: It's kind of a not a great combination.
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: The efficiency of your movement goes up, oddly enough, meaning your body is gonna learn to do the same things with less energy.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: And that's not what you want because you're trying to burn more calories, you're trying to lose fat here.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: And so all these mechanisms are your body keeping you alive with what it perceives as some sort of famine, right?
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: That's low energy availability, energy restriction.
• 26:25
  Philip Pape: And the math, therefore, by math, I mean calories in, calories out does not stay constant.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: This is the big insight I'm asking a lot of you to understand, to refresh your mind on is that your body's gonna compensate in so many different ways that whatever calories you started with are not the same calories that are gonna get you into that calorie deficit two weeks later, four weeks later, six weeks later.
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: It's gonna constantly change and it's gonna change in almost unpredictable ways.
• 26:53
  Philip Pape: So if you started in a 500 calorie deficit, but your body compensates by 400 calories, now you're only in a 100 calorie deficit, boom.
• 27:00
  Philip Pape: That's exactly why you are seeing a big slowdown.
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: It also explains rebound weight gain because after an aggressive diet, now you're at this significantly suppressed metabolism and your body is primed to store that energy and gobble it up once you start eating.
• 27:16
  Philip Pape: So your hunger hormones get ramped up, especially if you've lost muscle because you're not training.
• 27:21
  Philip Pape: That's a different issue.
• 27:22
  Philip Pape: But you've got metabolism low, an increase in food intake that gets stored more efficiently because your body really wants it.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: And again, we don't like efficient in many of these conversations.
• 27:32
  Philip Pape: We want to be inefficient.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: And so you get into this cycle and you think, okay, the metabol my metabolism never is gonna be in a state where I could actually drop the weight or drop the pounds or whatever, what have you.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: And for I'm I'm speaking to people at all different sizes and different goals.
• 27:47
  Philip Pape: But I mean, even you ladies who are like 120 pounds and you're like, I gotta lose five more pounds, and it just never, ever, ever happens because you hit that wall constantly.
• 27:56
  Philip Pape: That's probably what's going on.
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: It's not that you can't, it's that there's a very strategic way to do it, and everything has to be really dialed in.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: What you have to do here is reverse these adaptations first.
• 28:10
  Philip Pape: Restore your energy availability, rebuild your muscle, reduce your chronic stress, allow your metabolic system to re-expand, allow that pie chart of metabolism to get bigger again.
• 28:22
  Philip Pape: And I know the fear is real of, but I don't want to lose, I don't want to gain weight.
• 28:28
  Philip Pape: I don't want to gain weight.
• 28:29
  Philip Pape: I just got a message from someone on Instagram that listens to the show, and she's like, I'm stalled with my lifts.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: I can't get more reps or weight, but I also know I'm probably not eating enough, but I fear gaining weight.
• 28:42
  Philip Pape: And it's kind of that combination that I think a lot of you are in right now of you know you need to eat more, but you feel gaining weight.
• 28:50
  Philip Pape: And I'm not talking about people who've already gone through this process, they're already at maintenance calories, and then some 25-year-old influencer is like, oh, you just need to eat more to lose weight.
• 28:56
  Philip Pape: No, I'm not talking about that.
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about fueling yourself and recovering so that you can build the muscle and strength and come back stronger in a better position to lose fat from a metabolically healthy standpoint, not I'm gonna raise your metabolism by 100 calories so you can eat more in your fat loss phase.
• 29:14
  Philip Pape: It's not that.
• 29:15
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 29:16
  Philip Pape: But this is why I'm an advocate for what I call recovery dieting.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: Well, I don't, not just me.
• 29:22
  Philip Pape: I'm not the only one that calls it that, but I'm not a big fan of reverse dieting because that's guesswork.
• 29:27
  Philip Pape: Recovery dieting is a strategic maintenance or building phase right after a period of restriction where you jump right to maintenance as quickly as you can, because the best recovery is the fastest recovery, even a slight surplus to help restore that metabolic function versus trying to diet year-round, because that is gonna pay off much more long term, even for fat loss, than constantly restricting.
• 29:50
  Philip Pape: If you've been in a deficit for a long time, even six months, okay, your body has made significant adaptations to that.
• 29:56
  Philip Pape: And I know this for a fact because pretty much every single client that I've helped track their data, they track their expenditure.
• 30:02
  Philip Pape: I see it drop.
• 30:03
  Philip Pape: My own expenditure drops four to 800 calories in a reasonably long but modest diet, right?
• 30:10
  Philip Pape: It'll drop faster, but not as much in a short, aggressive diet.
• 30:15
  Philip Pape: It'll drop less if it's a less aggressive, longer diet.
• 30:18
  Philip Pape: In other words, it will pretty much drop the same for you, give or take, you know, 50 calories or whatever, based on the aggressiveness, based on the aggressiveness.
• 30:27
  Philip Pape: So it's a trade-off.
• 30:28
  Philip Pape: It's a trade-off.
• 30:29
  Philip Pape: And if you try to jump into another diet, which really just means push your restriction down further, that is just gonna push the adaptations further.
• 30:39
  Philip Pape: It's just gonna fight back more and more.
• 30:40
  Philip Pape: It's not like you can quote unquote fix it all in the middle of the diet.
• 30:44
  Philip Pape: But if you spend several months eating at or above maintenance while training, that's gonna help your metabolism recover, increase your neat, normalize your hormones, make your body more responsive.
• 30:54
  Philip Pape: And then when you eventually need to diet again, it's gonna work better because you're starting from a restored baseline.
• 31:01
  Philip Pape: And again, it's not a magic pill of, oh, I can eat way more food.
• 31:05
  Philip Pape: It's that physiologically and psychologically, you're gonna be able to now, you know, push through a strategic dieting phase and actually get the result you're looking for rather than hitting yourself against a wall like you were before.
• 31:18
  Philip Pape: And this is why body recomposition, losing fat, building muscle at the same time, is actually possible for a lot of people.
• 31:25
  Philip Pape: It really is.
• 31:26
  Philip Pape: Okay, don't believe this idea that, well, only new lifters can do this.
• 31:30
  Philip Pape: Only new lifters can do this.
• 31:32
  Philip Pape: If you're giving your body the stimulus and the fuel, it's gonna build muscle.
• 31:36
  Philip Pape: And if it's around maintenance and not in too much big of a surplus, you're gonna have to drop some fat.
• 31:40
  Philip Pape: Anyway, where does this all leave us?
• 31:42
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 31:43
  Philip Pape: Most people are asking the question, how do I burn more calories?
• 31:47
  Philip Pape: And I think that's the wrong question.
• 31:49
  Philip Pape: I think that leads to trying to move the needle, either the wrong needle or do it in the wrong way, through chronic cardio, you know, metronomic cardio, through the extreme diets, through fighting all these compensations we talked about, trying to do somehow the opposite to compensate.
• 32:08
  Philip Pape: Like I'm just gonna get a bigger step count.
• 32:10
  Philip Pape: I think the better question is how do I build my body in a way that it knows what to do with more calories?
• 32:18
  Philip Pape: And just to steal a term from Brandon DeCruz and from the industry, it's energy flux.
• 32:24
  Philip Pape: It's be able to eat more and move more, not eat less, move more to lose weight.
• 32:28
  Philip Pape: It's eat more, move more, build a bigger metabolic capacity.
• 32:34
  Philip Pape: That makes sense.
• 32:36
  Philip Pape: So, what this looks like in practice is I'm sorry, but the boring fundamental basics.
• 32:41
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna be a broken record on this for the rest of the time this podcast exists because it's never gonna change.
• 32:46
  Philip Pape: These are principles.
• 32:48
  Philip Pape: You've got to prioritize strength and muscle.
• 32:50
  Philip Pape: Doesn't matter your age, you have to be resistance training.
• 32:53
  Philip Pape: This is not optional.
• 32:54
  Philip Pape: This is everything about your metabolism right there.
• 32:57
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 32:58
  Philip Pape: Without it, you're operating in a tiny narrow band.
• 33:01
  Philip Pape: And the best you can do is this, these chronic diets that are just miserable and give you very little results anyway.
• 33:07
  Philip Pape: They probably cause muscle loss, just terrible.
• 33:09
  Philip Pape: They don't have any benefit, right?
• 33:11
  Philip Pape: So if you're jumping to a low carb or a keto or a carnivore, and that's all you're doing, you're not lifting weights, you're not doing anything else, you're just gonna be here again, wondering what to do.
• 33:19
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna say, hey, are you resistance training?
• 33:22
  Philip Pape: Are you doing it, you know, three, four, five days a week, whatever makes sense for you, the right volume and frequency?
• 33:27
  Philip Pape: Are you progressing over time?
• 33:28
  Philip Pape: Because that's the most important thing.
• 33:30
  Philip Pape: As far as the dieting side, we talked about this on the last episode.
• 33:34
  Philip Pape: Fat loss phases should be strategic, time limited, and then followed by quickly recovering to maintenance or a slight building phase, right?
• 33:43
  Philip Pape: Where you're doing that part of it like 80% of the year, four to one ratio, let's say, at minimum.
• 33:51
  Philip Pape: Because if you're always in a deficit, you're always compensating, like we've talked about today.
• 33:56
  Philip Pape: Being active, moving, taking the stairs, not sitting all day.
• 34:01
  Philip Pape: You know, when we talked about the differences in neat, that's where a lot of that variance lives.
• 34:06
  Philip Pape: And then sleep and stress, because recovery is also where you adapt.
• 34:10
  Philip Pape: I had a uh person reach out to me and thought that they might be doing too much exercises and how much you're doing.
• 34:17
  Philip Pape: She said, four to five hours a day.
• 34:20
  Philip Pape: And I said, I don't even know, I have to know what you're doing to know that that's too much.
• 34:24
  Philip Pape: You know, unless you're talking about going for a bunch of walking walks, which is not the case here, it's probably too much.
• 34:30
  Philip Pape: You know, chronic sleep deprivation, high stress, all of these are going to slow things down.
• 34:35
  Philip Pape: They're going to increase fat storage when you are gaining weight versus muscle, and they're going to cause extra compensation when you are trying to lose weight, lose fat.
• 34:43
  Philip Pape: So I want you to think in phases going forward.
• 34:45
  Philip Pape: I want you to use what's called nutritional periodization.
• 34:48
  Philip Pape: Build muscle when the conditions are right, cut when necessary, but get in, get out.
• 34:52
  Philip Pape: You maintain in between to solidify what you've got.
• 34:55
  Philip Pape: And when you're maintaining and building, you're going to feel a lot better.
• 34:58
  Philip Pape: You're going to eat more food.
• 34:59
  Philip Pape: It's going to be more enjoyable.
• 35:01
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 35:01
  Philip Pape: And kind of got to fight against that scale obsession and that, you know, last two pounds obsession, because when you lean into those too much, you end up making the wrong decisions to actually solve the real root cause.
• 35:14
  Philip Pape: When you lean into fuel and strength and muscle, you'll see that that problem probably goes away on its own.
• 35:21
  Philip Pape: You may not even have to have a fat loss phase.
• 35:23
  Philip Pape: You'll get a little bit of recomp over time.
• 35:25
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 35:25
  Philip Pape: So when you look at people who have a quote unquote fast metabolism, it's not genetics.
• 35:29
  Philip Pape: They probably either have more muscle or they move more throughout the day.
• 35:32
  Philip Pape: Maybe they have a busier job.
• 35:33
  Philip Pape: Maybe they're not dieting all the time.
• 35:35
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 35:35
  Philip Pape: And I'm not talking about, you know, a 250-pound man versus a 150-pound woman.
• 35:40
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about between two people of the same uh weight and body composition.
• 35:45
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 35:46
  Philip Pape: Well, chances are they don't have the same body composition if one burns more than the other.
• 35:50
  Philip Pape: Probably one has more muscle.
• 35:52
  Philip Pape: That was my point.
• 35:53
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 35:53
  Philip Pape: And you can do that.
• 35:54
  Philip Pape: You can do that.
• 35:54
  Philip Pape: It just takes time.
• 35:55
  Philip Pape: It takes time, guys.
• 35:56
  Philip Pape: This is not a quick fix podcast here.
• 35:57
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 35:58
  Philip Pape: Now, I want to talk about the bi-directional thing that I mentioned before.
• 36:03
  Philip Pape: Because a lot of people think, okay, calories affect your metabolism.
• 36:08
  Philip Pape: And that's true, right?
• 36:09
  Philip Pape: If you eat less, your metabolism adapts down, you eat more and it adapts up.
• 36:14
  Philip Pape: But your metabolism also affects your calorie utilization.
• 36:20
  Philip Pape: Meaning how your body uses the calories you eat depends on the state of your metabolism.
• 36:27
  Philip Pape: So if you've been chronically dieting, your body actually wants to store more energy.
• 36:32
  Philip Pape: And so your nutrients get partitioned more toward fat gain.
• 36:36
  Philip Pape: Now that's blunted, of course, when you're lifting weights and you're focused on strength and muscle.
• 36:42
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 36:43
  Philip Pape: But when you've been chronically dieting, the recovery's not there, the performance is not there.
• 36:49
  Philip Pape: Even if you've been building, or if you've been building muscle, maintaining enough energy, I should say.
• 36:56
  Philip Pape: So if you're not been chronically dieting, then your body's in a neutral state of using food, I'll say effectively, where nutrients will get partitioned toward muscle, your recovery is enhanced.
• 37:05
  Philip Pape: It's not trying to fight and get you back to homeostasis and survive.
• 37:08
  Philip Pape: But it's a really important thing to understand.
• 37:10
  Philip Pape: This is also why, guess what?
• 37:12
  Philip Pape: I'm leaning more toward shorter fat loss phases for a lot of people.
• 37:16
  Philip Pape: And by short, I mean six to 10 weeks as opposed to like 12 to 16, uh, because of some of these issues, where, you know, the calories are the same, but the outcomes are different.
• 37:26
  Philip Pape: This is why calories in, calories out is factually correct, but it's kind of meaningless because the whole equation is dynamic and changes based on you and your activity and everything else.
• 37:37
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 37:38
  Philip Pape: So I think I beat it, beat all that to death.
• 37:42
  Philip Pape: But I hope you understand that eating less isn't always the answer.
• 37:47
  Philip Pape: Sometimes the path forward is eating more, but it's eating more while building the muscle and restoring your metabolism.
• 37:52
  Philip Pape: You know, creating conditions where your body can really thrive.
• 37:55
  Philip Pape: So as we start this year, or whenever you're listening to this podcast, I want you to think about your metabolism differently.
• 38:02
  Philip Pape: Don't ask or stop asking why is my metabolism so slow, or I have such a slow metabolism, or I'm a fully grown man or woman, and yet I only burn this.
• 38:12
  Philip Pape: Ask instead, what have I been doing chronically that my metabolism is adapting or responding to?
• 38:20
  Philip Pape: You may, okay, I'm sorry to say, you may on average have a lower metabolism than somebody else genetically, but there's only things, there's only some things you can control.
• 38:29
  Philip Pape: And that's not one of them.
• 38:30
  Philip Pape: What you can control is the leverage points that we talked about today, the inputs, that will affect your system.
• 38:37
  Philip Pape: Am I saying it's gonna add a thousand calories to your system?
• 38:39
  Philip Pape: Of course not.
• 38:40
  Philip Pape: But you're gonna do your best and forget the rest.
• 38:44
  Philip Pape: So I heard that years ago.
• 38:45
  Philip Pape: Do your best and forget the rest.
• 38:47
  Philip Pape: Build muscles, stop chronically restricting, move consistently, sleep well, manage stress, right?
• 38:51
  Philip Pape: These aren't hacks.
• 38:52
  Philip Pape: These are like the boring basics.
• 38:54
  Philip Pape: They work for any age.
• 38:55
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 38:56
  Philip Pape: So before I let you go, I promised you something at the beginning of this episode: a zero-time habit that adds up to 9,000 calories of monthly calorie burn without adding anything to your schedule.
• 39:07
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna share that in a second.
• 39:09
  Philip Pape: Before we do, if you want to put all this into practice, muscle building, nutrition, daily guidance, that is what my app, Fitness Lab, is for.
• 39:18
  Philip Pape: The app adapts to you, whatever you're doing, whatever exercise or training you do, whatever supplements you take, whatever your age, whatever your diet restrictions, it doesn't matter.
• 39:29
  Philip Pape: It's gonna tell you what to do next based on your data, your biofeedback, and your goals.
• 39:33
  Philip Pape: You literally get up in the morning and it has created the new activities for the day based on overnight analysis of your data.
• 39:39
  Philip Pape: And it says, here are the activities for today.
• 39:41
  Philip Pape: And you can chat with it, you could ask questions.
• 39:43
  Philip Pape: It's awesome.
• 39:44
  Philip Pape: Today is the last day as this episode comes out to get 20% off with the holiday promotion.
• 39:49
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash app.
• 39:52
  Philip Pape: That's witsandwaits.com slash app.
• 39:55
  Philip Pape: All right, here is that habit that I promised this invisible neat multiplier.
• 39:59
  Philip Pape: It is very simple and you're gonna think, this is stupid, but if you reflect on your daily activities, you're probably not doing this.
• 40:07
  Philip Pape: Every phone call, every Zoom meeting where you don't need to be on camera at your desk, every time you're scrolling social media, even every time you you watch streaming on a handheld device, I want you to stand up and pace.
• 40:23
  Philip Pape: That is it.
• 40:25
  Philip Pape: The average person is spending, and you, and you know, this is probably you.
• 40:28
  Philip Pape: This is probably you, whether you want to admit it or not, two to three hours or more every day on these activities.
• 40:35
  Philip Pape: And if you have a job where you're you know on the phone all day, you might be spending many hours a day.
• 40:41
  Philip Pape: But even just doom scrolling social media, catching up on the news, streaming, just phone calls and texting friends, whatever, all of that stuff, you can pace while doing it.
• 40:52
  Philip Pape: Pace around your house, pace your office or wherever you are.
• 40:55
  Philip Pape: Pacing versus sitting is gonna burn an extra hundred calories an hour.
• 41:00
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying you're gonna do this for hours on end, but if you did it for two to three hours a day, kind of add it up throughout the day, that is two to three hundred calories a day, which is up to 9,000 calories a month.
• 41:11
  Philip Pape: And I've seen this in my step count.
• 41:12
  Philip Pape: I've seen my step count go up multiple thousands of steps on a day where I intentionally made sure that I paced with these activities.
• 41:20
  Philip Pape: I know not everyone can do it.
• 41:21
  Philip Pape: Everyone has a different job, a different situation.
• 41:23
  Philip Pape: But if you can, okay, do it.
• 41:26
  Philip Pape: Because here's the thing you're probably already doing some of these activities, but you're sitting down on the couch or you're sitting down on a chair.
• 41:32
  Philip Pape: In fact, that's another way to think about this.
• 41:34
  Philip Pape: Think about every time you're sitting on a chair doing something that, you know, doesn't require a computer or anything like that.
• 41:41
  Philip Pape: Can you just get up and pace while doing it?
• 41:43
  Philip Pape: This is the highest leverage neat hack because it requires zero extra time.
• 41:47
  Philip Pape: It's habit stacking with what you already do.
• 41:50
  Philip Pape: You don't have to remember to go for a walk.
• 41:51
  Philip Pape: You don't have to schedule anything, just change where and what you do, while you do these things you're already going to do.
• 41:58
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 41:59
  Philip Pape: Your phone, scrolling Instagram, you know, the Zoom calls, all of that.
• 42:03
  Philip Pape: Because as I mentioned before, neat is the most manipulable part of your metabolism.
• 42:08
  Philip Pape: And many of you are just sitting all day and not getting up.
• 42:12
  Philip Pape: So tomorrow morning when the phone rings, stand up.
• 42:15
  Philip Pape: When you're gonna go check Instagram, stand up.
• 42:17
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 42:18
  Philip Pape: That's whole habit.
• 42:18
  Philip Pape: Start right there.
• 42:20
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 42:23
  Philip Pape: And remember, your metabolism works for you when you give it the right signals.
• 42:27
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.