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How to Track Macros (When Food Labels Can Be Wrong By 20 Percent) · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you weigh your food to the gram and log every bite and the scale still doesn't do what the math says it should, this episode is for you.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: The numbers in your food log carry far more error than you might think.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: And most of it isn't on the label, it's in the log itself.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: Today you're gonna learn what the 20% rule on food labels really says, where the biggest error in your tracking comes from, and how to track macros so that error stops mattering.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits& Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:42
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape.
• 0:45
  Philip Pape: And this one is for anyone who tracks or used to track or quit tracking because it started to feel like a chore or tedious.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: And if you're over 40 like me, you're probably working with a smaller calorie budget than you had when you were, say, 25 years old, which means that the same mistakes, mistakes you might make in tracking, and we're gonna get to that.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: Hold off, don't get mad at me.
• 1:10
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 1:10
  Philip Pape: We all make them and you'll understand why this is super important for today's episode, why it's a bigger share of the total now that your calories might be a little tighter.
• 1:20
  Philip Pape: Now, the reason your calories are tighter is is a whole separate discussion having to do with metabolism and lifting weights and muscle mass loss and all of that.
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: We're not gonna get into that today.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: I want to help you become a better tracker to enjoy it and to have it be useful and helpful to you.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: So the advice you've probably heard, maybe from me at some point, to be honest, is weigh all your food, log it, be precise.
• 1:43
  Philip Pape: The math's gonna work out because you are tracking, it's going to help you make better decisions.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: And then you learn things like wait a minute, food labels can be off by 20%.
• 1:52
  Philip Pape: Can I not even trust it?
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: Isn't that gonna screw up my tracking?
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: Why bother?
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: What's the point then?
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: And that is a fair question that I've seen a lot.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: And today I'm gonna evaluate those claims, any claim around precision of tracking and labels being wrong because there is right and wrong in all of this stuff.
• 2:11
  Philip Pape: And what I hate to see is when a social media person's like, well, you know, we don't do tracking in our program because labels are so off that it that it doesn't help.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: No, you're making a conclusion, a leap of logic from a premise.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: It may even be a false premise, but even if it's not, there's a whole chain of illogical conclusions that are going on there to get to that point.
• 2:31
  Philip Pape: And I don't want someone to come to me and say, Oh, I tried tracking and didn't work.
• 2:34
  Philip Pape: Or someone said, you know, the labels are have a lot of error.
• 2:38
  Philip Pape: So why would I track?
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: We're gonna deal with that today.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: Now, if you heard episode 510, go back in the feed.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: It's just a few episodes ago.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: Jenny talked about a tracking lesson that took her many months to understand that is gonna tie today's episode.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: So go check that out if you haven't heard it.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: And then the next episode 5-11, you know, I kept telling you to hey, watch your trend weight, watch your waist, watch different data points instead of just one number like scale weight, and it's connected to proper tracking.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: So this episode today is the why behind both of those.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: So they all tie together nicely.
• 3:17
  Philip Pape: So if you haven't heard episode 5, 10, and 11, maybe check those out first and then come here.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: But honestly, you can do it in any order.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: Stick around to the end because I'm gonna share one change to when you log your food.
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: Not what you log, but when you log, that is connected to an increase from 56% to 89% of people reaching meaningful weight loss in a 16-week program.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: And it won't take you any extra time.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: Hmm.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: Okay, first, I'm gonna go through what the FDA rule on labels says.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: So you understand what companies are held accountable to when they make the nutrition label on the package.
• 3:54
  Philip Pape: It's often different than what I hear a lot of people saying.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: A lot of people misunderstand that.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: We're gonna clear that up.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: And also what happened when researchers bought food and tested it in a lab.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: What do they actually see when they test these things?
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: Then we'll look at where the bigger error in your tracking actually comes from, because you're gonna find that the label stuff isn't as much of a concern.
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: We're gonna get a little uncomfortable today.
• 4:14
  Philip Pape: We're gonna face our own demons, and it's gonna help you out at the end of it.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: And then I'll give you uh how to track macros so that the error essentially cancels itself out.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: Ooh, nice, right?
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: Sounds like math, but don't worry, it's not math.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: It's just simple tactics, simple strategies.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: And then also a handful of foods where being more precise is probably worth your time because you don't have to be that precise with all types of foods.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: We're gonna get into all of this today.
• 4:41
  Philip Pape: All right, so let's start with labels.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: 20% error.
• 4:46
  Philip Pape: This this gets repeated constantly and almost always a little bit wrong.
• 4:51
  Philip Pape: The rule is in the regulations for the FDA on how companies label their food packages.
• 4:59
  Philip Pape: And it splits the nutrients into different groups for calories, total fat, saturated fat, sugars, and sodium.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: A food product is out of compliance, that's the term, if it has more than 120% of what the label says.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: So it can essentially go up to 20% over in reality versus what the label says.
• 5:22
  Philip Pape: If it's under what the label says, the the FDA actually calls that a reasonable deficiency and doesn't care.
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: So it's kind of asymmetric, right?
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: In one direction for, again, calories, total fat, saturated fat, sugars, sodium.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: For protein, carbs, and fiber that occur naturally in a food, it goes the other direction.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna come back to protein later because it does matter for one specific group of food.
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: So protein, carbs, and fiber, it can't be under 80% of what the label says.
• 5:52
  Philip Pape: So when you hear labels can be off by 20% either way, yes and no.
• 5:56
  Philip Pape: It's not quite right, right?
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: It depends.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: Calories have a ceiling with no floor, which means the slack only runs in one direction for each nutrient.
• 6:04
  Philip Pape: That's where it gets really confusing.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: Now, you don't have to know all this.
• 6:07
  Philip Pape: I'm just kind of educating you.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: I educated myself through the research.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: It's interesting.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: There are two more details, though, that people leave out.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: The first one is that the FDA tests a composite.
• 6:17
  Philip Pape: A composite is 12 packages pulled from 12 different shipping cases and blended together.
• 6:24
  Philip Pape: So the rule is really related to the average of this batch of packages, not just one package.
• 6:31
  Philip Pape: And like an individual bag of chips can be more than 20% off, and the product would still pass.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: But of course, it, you know, it averages out.
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: That's kind of the point.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: And then the second detail is the 20% is a legal limit.
• 6:46
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's not a measurement.
• 6:48
  Philip Pape: It tells you how wrong a label is allowed to be, not how wrong labels usually are.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: And those are two totally different things, aren't they?
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: Then there's the rounding error, which I I find kind of fun, you know, as an engineer.
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: I'm sorry.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: Calories above 50, round of the nearest 10.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: Anything under five calories can be listed as zero.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 7:12
  Philip Pape: Your your olive, your spray olive oil, be careful.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: It's not, if you use a lot of that, it's not zero calories.
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: And then fat under half a gram can be listed as zero.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: So again, that is why cooking spray can say zero calories when it's oil in a can, which is crazy.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: It's crazy.
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: You know, one quick spray, fine.
• 7:31
  Philip Pape: Doesn't really matter.
• 7:32
  Philip Pape: But if you're like, you know, really spraying that pan or using it a lot, those add up to something.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: You know, you're putting it on your food, on your salad, whatever.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: You know, and the same can apply to really anything where they're rounding it down.
• 7:44
  Philip Pape: Heck, even diet soda.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: Have you ever seen like on a large amount of it, it could actually be a couple calories?
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: I mean, it's it's negligible, but they're rounding down.
• 7:54
  Philip Pape: Now, before I get to what happened when researchers tested it in a lab, I definitely want to tell you about today's sponsor, True Nutrition.
• 8:02
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• 8:05
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• 8:09
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• 8:12
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• 8:15
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• 8:16
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• 8:18
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• 8:24
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• 8:26
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• 8:29
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• 8:34
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• 8:38
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• 8:44
  Philip Pape: And that's what I like for tracking, honestly.
• 8:46
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• 8:49
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• 8:57
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• 9:01
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• 9:05
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• 9:06
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• 9:08
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• 9:10
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• 9:13
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• 9:26
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• 9:28
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• 9:31
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• 9:36
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• 9:42
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• 9:43
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• 9:46
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• 9:48
  Philip Pape: All right, so how wrong are these labels in reality?
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: Well, they can test it.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: They've tested it.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: Uh Susan Roberts group at Tufts University, who do work on energy intake, they bought some food and they put it in a lab.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: And in a 2010 study, they bought 10 frozen supermarket meals and 29 restaurant items that were all sold as low calorie or lower calorie choices.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: The frozen meals averaged 8% more calories than their labels.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: The restaurant items averaged 18% more calories than their labels.
• 10:25
  Philip Pape: Um, and a few of them had, guess what, close to double.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: So that's 100% more calories than was stated.
• 10:31
  Philip Pape: This is the restaurant items.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: So a lot of people cite this study when they say, look, the labels are lying, but it was a small study.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: They picked the, you know, the dieting items on purpose for that was what they wanted to look at.
• 10:43
  Philip Pape: But the same group a year, or not a year later, yeah, a year later, 2011, they used a bigger sample size.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: They got 269 items from 42 restaurants in three states chosen at random.
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: What did they find?
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: On average, the stated calories were almost exactly right.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: They were only off by about 10 calories a portion.
• 11:03
  Philip Pape: That's negligible.
• 11:05
  Philip Pape: But the spread, the variance was actually pretty wide.
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: About one in five items had at least 100 calories more than the menu said, and only 7% were within 10 calories either way.
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: So the average worked out, but the variance was a large variance, which kind of makes sense intuitively, right?
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: Unless you're, you know, I guess using, well, no, they're even if you had a robotic factory.
• 11:32
  Philip Pape: Okay, again, these are restaurants, so you're not doing that.
• 11:35
  Philip Pape: So forget what I was gonna say.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: It's human beings putting this stuff together.
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: Now, for the packaged snacks, a slightly later study in 2013 from the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, they tested 24 popular snack foods and found that they average about seven calories per serving over the label, which is basically nothing.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: So those are actually pretty close too.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: So if we put this together, packaged foods from national brands are pretty close on average, off and off by single digits.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: Restaurant food is right on average, you know, is correct on average, but unpredictable from item to item.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: And the occasional dish is way off.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: And one caveat here I have to note is that those restaurant studies were done before the 2018 menu labeling rule, right?
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: When you started to see menus have the calories all over the place.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: And I couldn't find a newer study that measured restaurant food since then.
• 12:30
  Philip Pape: So take it with a grain of salt, pun intended, I guess.
• 12:33
  Philip Pape: So the label is probably not quote unquote lying to you as much as you know the headlines and social media would like to say.
• 12:40
  Philip Pape: It's a little fuzzy, of course.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: For calories, the fuzz mostly runs in one direction.
• 12:45
  Philip Pape: But that leads me to where the real error comes from then.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: Because if if the labels are kind of canceling each other out, then it's not really that as big of a concern except for here or there.
• 12:55
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna say this as nicely as I can.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: The biggest error is us, us human beings doing the logging.
• 13:01
  Philip Pape: And this is myself included, and it's how we log.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: I'm not talking about gaslighting and dismissing people and saying, oh, you're not even logging, or you don't have no idea how to log.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: Not that at all.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: This is legitimate stuff we have to understand about us.
• 13:14
  Philip Pape: The best way to check what people really eat and measure their metabolism is a gold standard method called doubly labeled water.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: You drink water with tagged hydrogen and oxygen, and then over a couple weeks, researchers track how fast those tags leave your body through excretion, right?
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: And that tells them how many calories you burned.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: If your weight stays the same, then what you burned is what you ate.
• 13:39
  Philip Pape: So it's effectively like a lie detector for all the claims about food logs and metabolism.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: Um, in fact, it's it's it's really detected one of the biggest lies of all in that we think our metabolism declines with age when it does not.
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: In the open study, O-P-E-N, all caps, if you want to look it up, 484 adults in Maryland did exactly that.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: When they reported what they ate over 24 hours, men came in 11% under what they ate, and women came in 17% under what they ate.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: In other words, they reported 11 and 17% less than they actually ate.
• 14:11
  Philip Pape: So they ate more than they thought they ate.
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: About one in five people were clear underreporters, while barely one in a hundred over-reported.
• 14:20
  Philip Pape: So the error almost exclusively runs in one direction.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: We estimate less, sometimes far less, than what we actually eat.
• 14:30
  Philip Pape: Now there's the study I bring up a lot by Lichtman in 1992 in the New England Journal of Medicine, people with obesity who call themselves diet resistant or weight loss resistant, saying things like, I eat almost nothing and I can't lose weight.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: They reported eating about a thousand calories a day, but the doubly labeled water said they were eating 2100 calories a day.
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: So they underreported by 47%.
• 14:54
  Philip Pape: Now, this is people thinking they're eating a thousand calories, which if I eat a thousand calories, I'm gonna be hangry all the time.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna be, I'm gonna feel like I'm starving.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: And I'm guessing these are, you know, people with obesity eating a thousand calories, it might feel even worse.
• 15:06
  Philip Pape: So they underreported half by half, which is insane.
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: Now, their metabolism was normal, nothing was broken.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: They weren't, I don't think they were lying, but their logs were missing some of their food.
• 15:17
  Philip Pape: Uh, you know, it's gotta be that.
• 15:18
  Philip Pape: The logs are missing half the food they were actually eating because of what they were reporting.
• 15:23
  Philip Pape: Either, you know, items of food, quantities of food, or the way it was logged missed on the calories of food, right?
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: It's one of those.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: Now, those are what we call recall studies.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: If you weigh your food and log it as you go, you're probably doing a lot better than a 24-hour recall study.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: Okay, they brought these people back to recall from memory what they ate.
• 15:43
  Philip Pape: Okay, but it's important to understand that because it means we are prone to a certain pattern.
• 15:49
  Philip Pape: And this pattern shows up everywhere when it comes to humans and reporting.
• 15:53
  Philip Pape: A recent analysis of national survey data found under-reporting was more common in people on low calorie diets, and that reported intake lined up worst for people on low carb diets.
• 16:04
  Philip Pape: So, in other words, the people trying hardest to eat less tend to undercount the most.
• 16:09
  Philip Pape: And I think that's just human.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: I think that's just human.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: You you've got the licks and bites, right?
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: The the bite, biting or eating your kids' food, finger foods, a handful of almonds, oil in the pan that we talked about early, cream in your second coffee.
• 16:22
  Philip Pape: Maybe you always log it as one coffee, but you're really drinking two or a third from the pot.
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: You know, all of that stuff.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: And there's a lot of it where it doesn't feel like you're eating something, maybe it doesn't get logged.
• 16:31
  Philip Pape: Or you eat some vegetables and they happen to have some oil and you don't log it, et cetera, et cetera.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: Now, what about when you're doing this in an app?
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: People worry that the food database in a logging app is garbage because anyone can add an entry.
• 16:45
  Philip Pape: Like MyFitnessPal is prone to that.
• 16:48
  Philip Pape: But when researchers have entered the same records in MyFitnessPal and compare them to research grade databases, actually it's not too bad.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: Total calories came out within a few percent.
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: Obviously, you have to pick the right foods.
• 16:58
  Philip Pape: And an app like MyFitnessPal, I'm not a huge fan of just because they have so many extra things that you can pick the wrong things of, but they're getting better at that.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: Macrofactor obviously has a validated food database as well.
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: So they're all kind of catching up.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: And I don't think that's really the main problem for calories.
• 17:13
  Philip Pape: I don't think the database is the main problem.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: Now, protein's a different story.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna get to that.
• 17:18
  Philip Pape: But let's back up and say, okay, we've got three sources of error.
• 17:21
  Philip Pape: We've got labels from food that are off by a little bit, not as much as we like to claim on average, on average.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: So some are gonna be high, some are gonna be low.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: That's always been my argument for many years is that I don't even care about that because some are high, some are low.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: It averages out.
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: We have app databases, which are not as far off as we might think.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: And we have your own logging that can be off by something like 10 to 20% or more, sometimes way more.
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: And so, guess what?
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: The the labels and the app database is not where the thing to focus is, which is great because we can't control those, can we?
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: That's actually a good thing.
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: You see how I like to reframe.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: That's a good thing.
• 17:58
  Philip Pape: So if you've been stressed about those things or thinking that it's affecting your logging, don't worry about it.
• 18:03
  Philip Pape: What you need to worry about is that spoonful of peanut butter.
• 18:06
  Philip Pape: Which, depending on how you log it, if you logged it as a tablespoon instead of grams and it's twice as many grams as you thought, boom.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: That is that times 20 throughout your week could be the issue.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: Now, for some foods, the label error goes the other way, which is kind of cool.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: It's a nice little bonus.
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: USDA researchers ran a controlled feeding study with 18 adults who ate almonds and they measured how much energy the body absorbed.
• 18:29
  Philip Pape: A one-ounce serving of whole almonds gave people an intake of 129 calories, while the label says around 160 calories, and the standard calculation says close to 170 calories.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: Chopped and roasted almonds gave a bit more calories, and nut butter is closest to the label because it's already fully processed and you're absorbing most of it.
• 18:51
  Philip Pape: So interestingly, for more, the more whole food and the least processed it is, this is not going to be a surprise, but it's helpful to remember for something like whole nuts, the label might actually overstate what you end up absorbing.
• 19:04
  Philip Pape: And we see that when you compare whole foods to processed foods, where, huh, maybe I'm simply absorbing less of the calories in the whole foods, and that makes a big difference too.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: The more and more whole foods I eat, even though I'm tracking the same way, somehow I'm actually, not somehow, I'm actually taking in fewer calories than the next guy or gal who's tracking maybe eating the exact same calories on the label, but it's actually absorbing more than you are.
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: So this is where I want the picture in your head to change.
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: If this isn't blowing your mind already and making you rethink this, every number in your food log is an estimate.
• 19:36
  Philip Pape: Of course.
• 19:36
  Philip Pape: Some are high, some are low.
• 19:39
  Philip Pape: The biggest error is any food that you just are not logging at all, okay?
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: By definition, that makes sense, right?
• 19:45
  Philip Pape: That sounds hopeless until you realize what matters is not how precise they are, just how consistent they are, which is a much easier problem to solve.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: It's actually an engineering problem.
• 19:57
  Philip Pape: It's very easy to solve.
• 19:58
  Philip Pape: So I'm really excited about that.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: And I have been for the last few years as I've coached clients through this process and they realize all I have to do is be consistent.
• 20:05
  Philip Pape: Sometimes I don't even have to log things.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: Like I take fish oil every day.
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: I don't log it.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: Why?
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: Because I consistently take it every day.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: It's the same calories.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: Mathematically, it's not going to affect me one iota because what matters is the change over time, your metabolism versus your intake and how it changes over time.
• 20:22
  Philip Pape: I don't truly, truly care the precise amount I'm eating.
• 20:26
  Philip Pape: I just care how much I'm eating relative to last week and this week and my deficit, okay?
• 20:32
  Philip Pape: Or my metabolism.
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: Now, at the very end of this episode, I'm gonna share that one change to when you log.
• 20:39
  Philip Pape: But before we get there, I need to explain an engineering idea called calibration.
• 20:44
  Philip Pape: Very simple.
• 20:45
  Philip Pape: You guys know what I'm talking about.
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: Let's say your bathroom scale reads three pounds heavy every single time.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: Does that mean it's useless?
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: Not at all.
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: Because if it says that you're down two pounds over the last month, even though it reads three pounds heavy, you're down two pounds.
• 21:01
  Philip Pape: A consistent error, what we call bias, doesn't hide change.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: It doesn't hide change over time.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: What hides change over time is noise and drift.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: That is readings that bounce around or that slowly creep over time.
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: Like if that three pounds heavy on the scale became four pounds heavy, became five pounds heavy, et cetera, then it would be less useful, right?
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: And then noise also hides change, things going up and down a lot.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: Your food log works the same way.
• 21:29
  Philip Pape: Let's say you consistently log 300 calories less than you eat because you forget the oil and you eyeball the peanut butter, but you're pretty much eating that regularly.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: Well, if you log 1800 and your weight holds steady for a few weeks, then 1800 logged calories is your maintenance based on what you logged.
• 21:48
  Philip Pape: It doesn't matter that your real maintenance might be 2100 because you're simply forgetting to log 300 calories every day.
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: It will effectively appear like 1800.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: Now, if you want to lose fat, you You're gonna drop the logged number from there, meaning you need to go in a deficit relative to that number, what your perceived or effective metabolism is, not what your true in reality metabolism is that you may not even know because of those 300 calories you're not logging.
• 22:12
  Philip Pape: I hope that makes sense.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: In other words, the the 300 calorie error comes along for the ride and gets canceled out.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: Your weight trend is what's telling you what's happening, if it's working.
• 22:22
  Philip Pape: So this is just energy balance math.
• 22:25
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: The great Kevin Hall, the NIH researcher on energy balance, he published a rule of thumb in The Lancet in 2011, where every 10 calories a day you change your intake for good, eventually moves your body weight by about a pound.
• 22:42
  Philip Pape: So small, consistent changes do add up.
• 22:45
  Philip Pape: They're just slow.
• 22:46
  Philip Pape: And your trend weight tells you which direction you're heading before the actual math works out.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: And that's because of all the noise.
• 22:52
  Philip Pape: You see how this comes full circle?
• 22:54
  Philip Pape: In other words, that's why we care about the trend and we don't care about the sh the noise and why we need time and patience.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: So here's how to track macros so that the error stops mattering.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna keep it to three things, okay?
• 23:08
  Philip Pape: Number one, log the same way every day.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: Ah, okay.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: Now now you see why it's important to log every day, but also log the same way.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: Use the same app, use the same entries for the staple foods that you always eat.
• 23:18
  Philip Pape: You could just copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste.
• 23:20
  Philip Pape: Your oatmeal is always the same entry and not like looking it up manually each time and picking a slightly different oatmeal.
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: Okay, even if you're not sure what cut of meat to pick, whatever you picked, if you eat that thing every time you eat it, you pick that thing.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: That keeps your error consistent instead of random.
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: Okay?
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: Very important.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: Log the same way every day.
• 23:40
  Philip Pape: Number two, weigh yourself often and use the trend.
• 23:44
  Philip Pape: Daily weigh, daily weights.
• 23:46
  Philip Pape: So if you weigh yourself every day, it's gonna bounce around a lot.
• 23:49
  Philip Pape: This is the noise we talked about, the variance because of water, salt, carbs, inflammation.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: If you're a woman who's menstruating, this is your cycle.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: The if, but if you measure it every day, despite that, okay, you measure it every day, you'll have a smooth uh trend over time.
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: Every, you know, I'll say three weeks is a good amount of time to take the average.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: Some people will use a weekly, but I think that's too quick to it.
• 24:12
  Philip Pape: There's still too much noise after one week.
• 24:14
  Philip Pape: You need to look at two to three weeks, ideally, three weeks to compare over time.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: And that's gonna tell you are you really gaining or losing body fat or holding maintenance from which to adjust your target calories?
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: It's what an app like Macrofactor uses, in fact, to give you those target calories.
• 24:32
  Philip Pape: And if you don't know what Macrofactor is, go check it out, download the app, use my code WITSNWAITS, all one word, and you'll get a free two-week trial.
• 24:39
  Philip Pape: I had to throw that in, guys, because you know how much I love the app.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: Number three, put your precision where the biggest payoff is for being precise.
• 24:50
  Philip Pape: So, what do I mean by that?
• 24:51
  Philip Pape: Well, if you're using a food log, which you should or a food scale at home, which you should when you're at home, why not?
• 24:57
  Philip Pape: Takes a few seconds, then you're gonna weigh to the gram, and it's totally worth it for things that have a lot of calories.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: So, calorie-dense foods, oils, butter, nut butters, nut, cheese, dressing seeds, as well as slightly less dense foods that have a lot of calories, like meat, you know, lean meats and various proteins and such.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: A tablespoon of oil is so calorie dense.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: It's 120 calories.
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: So it's worth weighing that because I'll tell you, just like three or four, three going from three grams to five grams, it's like, whoa, there's an extra, you know, 20 calories or whatever.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: It's it's insane.
• 25:30
  Philip Pape: And again, so doing it for those and doing it for your main proteins, I think, are important.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: For protein that's naturally in a food, remember that the FDA rule is inverted.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: The product has to contain at least 80% of what the label says.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: More than that is fine.
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: So a compliant label can actually overstate protein by up to 20% on the 12-package average.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: In the two app database studies, I think I mentioned those, the app's red protein are about 80% or sorry, about 8% low compared with the research databases.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: And the errors point in different directions.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: So on any given day, you can't necessarily count on them canceling out.
• 26:13
  Philip Pape: So if you're aiming for around, let's say, the minimum 0.7 grams per pound, a lot of you aim for more than that, being off by 10 to 15% on your three or four biggest protein foods can definitely add up to real grams.
• 26:26
  Philip Pape: So for those foods, use the actual label or verified entry and weigh them.
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: That's all, that's all.
• 26:31
  Philip Pape: Just weigh them.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: I would just weigh everything.
• 26:34
  Philip Pape: My general rule is if you're gonna have something complicated with a lot of ingredients, pick a common food item that represents the whole thing, or use the AI feature, take a picture and throw in what the ingredients are, and then just go by the grams.
• 26:46
  Philip Pape: It's gonna be pretty close.
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: Now, what about protein powder?
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: The most recent independent US testing I found from Consumer Lab this April 2026 found that every powder they tested had its listed protein, so the protein it said it had, and the products that failed the testing were flagged for things like cholesterol and sodium.
• 27:07
  Philip Pape: So if a protein blend lists free amino acids, glycine, taurine, or creatine, that would be your cue to look closer.
• 27:15
  Philip Pape: I mean, you basically want a well-respected brand of a protein powder that just contains all the amino acids.
• 27:22
  Philip Pape: Popular brands would be like Optimum Nutrition, for example, or Legion, or the one I talk about all the time that I use, which is True Nutrition, which True Nutrition is awesome because you can create your own, you know, and you know what's in there.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: Uh, restaurant meals, this is the tricky one.
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: Okay, this is where the label is probably the least relied.
• 27:38
  Philip Pape: If the if there is a label at all, right?
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: A lot of restaurants, just mom and pop restaurants, aren't going to have any of this stuff listed and depends on where you live, but don't sweat the precision.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: I want you to log your best guess and be conservative, meaning log more calories than you think rather than less.
• 27:55
  Philip Pape: I always put something like 25% more, okay?
• 27:58
  Philip Pape: Maybe 50%, if you know they go really heavy on oils and butter and things like that.
• 28:02
  Philip Pape: And you can tell by looking, tasting, things like that, but you can't always see all the fat.
• 28:07
  Philip Pape: Now, I mentioned earlier, you know, if your metabolism is a little bit on the lower end or if you're in a deficit, something like that, a logging error will have a bigger impact in absolute terms if your calories are tighter, right?
• 28:18
  Philip Pape: So I think chasing grams on everything is maybe the wrong place to place your attention.
• 28:24
  Philip Pape: But calibrating against your trend, like we talked about earlier, and then making sure the main calorie-containing stuff is all weighed and accounted for, and then you're conservative with restaurants, those will go a long way.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: And then there's another little thing about fiber and net carbs and all that.
• 28:39
  Philip Pape: I say don't worry about any of that, just log what it says.
• 28:42
  Philip Pape: The more fiber you have, the fewer calories per gram you're gonna have, and it's just gonna benefit you, but you're still gonna log what the label says.
• 28:49
  Philip Pape: And the labels will already account for that in the calories.
• 28:51
  Philip Pape: Meaning if you have a gram of fiber, it won't count as a full four calories like it would for other carbs.
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: It probably counts as like anywhere from zero to like two and a half, but that's already reflected in the label.
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: So don't try to do the math and say, oh, the math doesn't work out.
• 29:06
  Philip Pape: That's why.
• 29:07
  Philip Pape: The more fiber it has, the more it's not gonna work out.
• 29:09
  Philip Pape: It's just gonna have fewer calories, which is not a bad thing if you're trying to limit calories.
• 29:13
  Philip Pape: So to recap, the 20% label rule, don't worry about it.
• 29:16
  Philip Pape: It cancels out.
• 29:17
  Philip Pape: Consistency handles error the best.
• 29:21
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 29:21
  Philip Pape: And you need to be precise on certain types of food that are more calorie dense.
• 29:24
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, I promised you that one change to when you log your food that might give you more success.
• 29:32
  Philip Pape: Before I do, if you're wondering what I use to do all this calibration, I briefly mentioned it.
• 29:37
  Philip Pape: The app is called MacroFactor.
• 29:39
  Philip Pape: It is not my app, it's from Stronger by Science, but I use it.
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: So does pretty much everybody in our coaching programs.
• 29:45
  Philip Pape: I'm an affiliate.
• 29:46
  Philip Pape: So if you want to support the uh podcast, I get a small, very small cut if you sign up using my code WITS and weights, all one word.
• 29:54
  Philip Pape: Download MacroFactor from your favorite app store.
• 29:56
  Philip Pape: What I like about the app is it takes your logged calorie intake and your trend weight.
• 30:01
  Philip Pape: This is why it helps to do it every day.
• 30:03
  Philip Pape: And it works backward to give you an expenditure number, a metabolism number that is updating in real time.
• 30:10
  Philip Pape: And then every week you check in, quote unquote, you check in with the app and it gives you an updated target for your calories and macros based on your goal.
• 30:18
  Philip Pape: So if you're trying to lose weight at a certain rate, you're trying to maintain, you're trying to gain weight at a certain rate.
• 30:24
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 30:24
  Philip Pape: And it has a good database, it's super fast, all of that.
• 30:27
  Philip Pape: So go to MacroFactor in your app store, use the code WITNWAITS all one word.
• 30:32
  Philip Pape: I will throw a link in the show notes if you want to learn more about it.
• 30:35
  Philip Pape: So if you track your food, when you log might matter more than how carefully you log.
• 30:41
  Philip Pape: What do I mean?
• 30:42
  Philip Pape: In a 2026 study of 449 adults in a 16-week weight loss program, researchers looked at when people log during the day.
• 30:50
  Philip Pape: About 89% of the people who logged two or more times a day reached clinically meaningful weight loss, compared with only 56% of people who caught up on their logging after the fact.
• 31:02
  Philip Pape: Logging right after you eat takes the same time as logging at night, but it's at night.
• 31:07
  Philip Pape: You're reconstructing your day from memory, you're doing the recall thing.
• 31:11
  Philip Pape: All the bites and the splashes and the licks go missing.
• 31:14
  Philip Pape: Food goes missing, food just disappears from your memory.
• 31:17
  Philip Pape: Even the once-a-day loggers hit 71%.
• 31:20
  Philip Pape: So you don't have to be perfect.
• 31:22
  Philip Pape: Although it's much easier to just build a habit of when I eat, I log.
• 31:25
  Philip Pape: When I eat, I log.
• 31:26
  Philip Pape: When I eat, I log.
• 31:27
  Philip Pape: Very low stress, very quick.
• 31:28
  Philip Pape: You get used to it, copy paste, becomes a very simple habit to ingrain in your daily routine.
• 31:34
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 31:37
  Philip Pape: And remember that your food log doesn't have to be perfectly accurate to work for you.
• 31:41
  Philip Pape: It has to be consistent, and your weight trend will tell you the rest.
• 31:44
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits& Weights podcast.