Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The Most UNDERRATED Fat Loss Secret Making You FATTER (and Sabotaging Muscle Gain Too) | Ep 257

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The Most UNDERRATED Fat Loss Secret Making You FATTER (and Sabotaging Muscle Gain Too) | Ep 257 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: If you're afraid to gain weight because the scale might go up.
• 0:04
  Philip Pape: So you keep trying to diet down but never seem to get leaner, and you're frustrated because you feel stuck in this endless cycle of cutting calories without seeing real changes in your body composition.
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: This episode is for you.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: Today, we're uncovering why your fear of gaining weight is actually keeping you at a higher body fat percentage, and how strategic weight gain could be the key to finally achieving a leaner physique.
• 0:29
  Philip Pape: You'll discover the counterintuitive science behind why gaining weight first often leads to better long-term results, and how to break free from the constant cutting cycle that's keeping you stuck.
• 0:40
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're tackling one of those huge mindset blocks that keeps people from achieving their ideal body composition the fear of weight gain, and how it's actually preventing you from getting leaner.
• 1:07
  Philip Pape: Now I also have a companion guide that shows you exactly how to structure your nutrition to build muscle while minimizing fat gain, and if you want to pause the show and grab my free muscle building nutrition blueprint, the link is in the show notes or you can go to witsandweightscom and click free stuff to download.
• 1:24
  Philip Pape: I highly encourage you to download this free guide now so you can take real action based on the information you're about to hear in today's episode.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: Again, the link is in the show notes.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: Or go to witsandweightscom, click free stuff for my muscle building nutrition blueprint.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: All right, let me start by telling you about Jenna.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: She was a client of mine who came to me frustrated after about three years of trying to get lean.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: She weighed about 150 pounds and she was constantly cutting calories.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: She was constantly trying to lose that last bit of stubborn fat, but every time she dropped a few pounds she would end up gaining it back and then her body composition wasn't really changing.
• 2:02
  Philip Pape: We could tell by her measurements how her clothes fit, performance, everything.
• 2:06
  Philip Pape: So this might sound familiar to you, because it's a very common situation.
• 2:10
  Philip Pape: People get stuck trying to cut all the time and never really doing the other side of this equation that we're going to address today.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: Now, what Jenna didn't realize, what many of you might not realize, is that she was stuck in a constant cutting trap, even in moments when it felt like she wasn't dieting per se.
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: It was just always in that under-fueled, under-fed situation, and today we're going to break down why this might be keeping you fatter than you need to be and then what to do instead.
• 2:39
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about why this happened, just to set the baseline.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: When you're always trying to cut calories to lose weight, there are three things working against you.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: First, your metabolism adapts.
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: This is totally normal.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: There's nothing wrong.
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: It's not breaking or getting damaged.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: It's just called metabolic adaptation.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: And I think of men in this case, for example, because I can relate as a man myself.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: I had a client we'll call him John.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: He had gotten down to eating about 1800 calories a day, and that's starting to get a little bit low for an active guy who strength trains and weighs north of 180 or almost 200 pounds and I'm actually kind of in that range where, to me, a pretty aggressive diet is around 1800 calories, worst case.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: So his body had adapted to functioning on these fewer calories because of persistently trying to cut.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: And then what that does is it makes the fat loss incredibly difficult from that point, because you kind of need to reset things and rejigger what's going on or take a completely different approach, such as gain weight, which we're going to talk about and this process of your body conserving energy, of reducing its calorie burn as you lose weight and as you get deeper into a diet and be in a calorie deficit.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: That's called metabolic adaptation.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: The second thing is that without adequate calories period, you cannot build meaningful muscle.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: You need to be in a surplus, or I'll call it a perceived surplus, which for some people means they can walk that fine line between gaining some muscle and losing some fat at the same time, mainly for newer lifters.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: But you have to have some sort of surplus, an energy surplus, for your muscles to grow.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: And this is crucial because muscle is the key to all of this.
• 4:23
  Philip Pape: It's the key, it's a secret weapon for the fat loss itself.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: It's kind of the big twist or the big irony is that the vast majority of you are probably spending years, if not decades, trying to cut, trying to lose fat.
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: You absolutely want to lose the weight, you absolutely want to lose the fat and you're making it harder on yourself just because you don't take a short blip of your time to build muscle.
• 4:41
  Philip Pape: Just to say it like it is, muscle is metabolically expensive tissue.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: It burns calories even when you're not doing anything, and I know other tissue can do that, too, like fat, but it burns the most, and adding muscle to your frame makes so many things easier, all right.
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: Third thing and this is what I see all the time in my coaching practice is people get stuck in a cycle where they are afraid to eat more because they might gain weight, because their history has told them that nothing I've ever done has worked, that I'm always prone to getting fatter or gaining weight.
• 5:15
  Philip Pape: Why the heck would I do this on purpose?
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: That's the thought that goes through our head.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: Why would I do this on purpose?
• 5:21
  Philip Pape: I just had a call today with a client where we talked about how I needed her to eat more.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: She was hesitant to do it.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: It wasn't due to any logistical or behavioral reason.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: It was simply the fear holding her back, and there were a lot of things pointing to why she needed to do that.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: We'll cover some of that today.
• 5:37
  Philip Pape: I don't want to stretch that story out, but it's very common, so don't feel alone if you're listening and think that's you.
• 5:43
  Philip Pape: The irony is, of course, that this fear is what's keeping you from achieving the lean physique that you want.
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: All right, so let me explain how this works, because let's just nail it down for you and talk about the science or the mathematics.
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: It's really math of body composition, and I'm an engineer, I think, in terms of numbers.
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: Not a lot of people do, and so it can frustrate people to go through this exercise.
• 6:07
  Philip Pape: I'm really going to try to simplify it so you understand the big aha moment that comes from this.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: This is where it gets really interesting.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: All right, I'm going to break down the numbers so you think about weight gain and fat loss, maybe in a new way.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: So let's just use a simple hypothetical example.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: Let's say we have a skinny-ish male, a man who weighs about 150 pounds.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: Let's say 5'9", 150 pounds.
• 6:29
  Philip Pape: That's pretty quote-unquote skinny, but he has a little bit of extra body fat.
• 6:34
  Philip Pape: He's got 20% body fat.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: Now, that's not in the obese territory, that's not excessively overweight, but at 150 pounds, this person is going to look what we call skinny fat.
• 6:43
  Philip Pape: I'm using this example because I want you to know that there are all types of body types where you can have extra body fat and not necessarily be big right, and so we're going to start with this example, just for easy numbers.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: So, 150 pounds, 20% body fat, that means he has 30 pounds of fat mass.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's 20% of the 150.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: I'm doing the math for you.
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: Just go with the numbers 30 pounds of fat mass and the rest is 120 pounds of lean mass.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: That's the remaining 80 pounds, or 80%.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: Now, lean mass is not just muscle, it's also your bone, it's tissue, it's all of your organs.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: It's everything other than fat.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: But just keep this simple.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: So when you focus on building muscle instead of trying to cut calories, what can happen?
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: So let's say, over a four-month period, a nice conservative, reasonable rate of gain so you don't gain too much fat, you go from 150 to 160.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: You gain 10 pounds Okay, 10 pounds, not a big deal Through proper training and nutrition, and that is key.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: About six or seven or even eight of those pounds are muscle, especially for a newer lifter.
• 7:51
  Philip Pape: A vast majority of that can be muscle.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: We're going to go with seven.
• 7:54
  Philip Pape: It's about two thirds.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: The evidence is very, very strong in showing us that this is a common ratio.
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: The more advanced you get, the more it trends toward 50-50.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: The newer you are, the more it trends toward 50-50.
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: The newer you are, the more it trends toward 7 or 8 out of 10.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: So we're going to go with 7.
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: Okay, if it's 6, it just changes the numbers a little bit.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: So you've gained 10 pounds, you're 160 pounds.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: 7 of that is muscle, 3 of it is fat.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: So you've gained some fat as well.
• 8:16
  Philip Pape: But stay with me.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: So, after this gaining phase, we do a simple cut to lose three pounds of fat.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 8:23
  Philip Pape: The final result looks like this your new body weight is now 157 pounds.
• 8:29
  Philip Pape: Remember, you started at 150, you gained 10, you lost three.
• 8:34
  Philip Pape: You're at 157 pounds.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: However, your new body fat percentage remember originally it was 20, it is now 19.1%.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: Now, the real thing we care about here is you're going to look leaner and more defined despite weighing more on the scale.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: This is just the math and I may be stating the obvious for some of you, but others you may have your mind blown.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: And the reason you should have your mind blown is you just went from 150 pounds on the scale to 157 pounds on the scale and you dropped a percentage of body fat.
• 9:06
  Philip Pape: And that's just a small, simple example of something extremely achievable in a fairly short timeframe for just about anyone.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: That's why I wanted to use that example.
• 9:16
  Philip Pape: I didn't want to go with 20, 30, 40 pound swings either direction.
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: You know we can get into that.
• 9:20
  Philip Pape: Just keeping it simple, you are now heavier on the scale and leaner.
• 9:23
  Philip Pape: So think about it the same amount of fat mass, because you gained three pounds of fat while you were gaining the 10 pounds, but then you lost it.
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: So same fat mass, but you have more muscle.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: Now you have seven more pounds of muscle, 127 versus 120.
• 9:37
  Philip Pape: And so now you have a lower body fat percentage.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: Now, the bonus here is, of course, you're probably going to have a higher metabolism.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: Now you weigh more, so you have to burn more calories, and the portion of that extra weight is muscle, which is even higher calorie burning.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: Now you can eat more food.
• 9:52
  Philip Pape: Now you're going to have more energy because you're eating more food.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: Now you can perform better in the gym because you have more energy, because you're eating more food, and you can have more restful sleep and be stronger than ever.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: Isn't that cool?
• 10:03
  Philip Pape: Now you might be thinking okay, philip, the math makes sense.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: I get it, but how do we make this happen?
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: Because you say seven out of the 10 is muscle, but I'm still afraid that if I gain 10 pounds, it's going to be fat, and then I'm just worse off and I'm where I started, or worse than that Okay, and this is where we have to understand the science of muscle growth.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: And I want to break this down into practical terms because you, unlike the vast majority of people out there, are going to be doing a few things very differently than most people in terms of food, in terms of movement.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: First, let's talk about why you need a calorie surplus to build meaningful muscle.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: All right, so I had another client I'm going to call him Mike.
• 10:39
  Philip Pape: He was trying to re-comp, do body re-comp.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: He was trying to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, and he was eating at his maintenance calories, whatever those were at the time based on our tracking.
• 10:54
  Philip Pape: He was lifting weights and he was getting frustrated because the changes were coming slowly.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: And why was he doing body recomp?
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: Because he was afraid of gaining weight and the best thing that I could, I'll say, convince him to do was at least not cut right now.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: Let's at least try to hold steady and see what happens with our body composition, even though it's going to take time.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: And I explained to him that, you know, building muscle is a very energy, expensive process.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: Your body needs the extra protein for the actual muscle tissue, it needs the extra calories to support the building process.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: It needs extra energy for recovery from training because you're going to train hard, and it needs resources for all the metabolic processes involved in your body.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: There's a lot going on to build this muscle and this is why research consistently shows that without a calorie surplus, muscle growth is significantly limited.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: And studies that look at natural lifters show that even in perfect conditions, you might gain one to two pounds of muscle per month as a beginner, and a half to one pound per month as an intermediate, and even less as you get more advanced.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: Okay now going back to that one to two pounds a month and the example I gave you of seven months, I think I said the 10 pounds was over four months.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: So what did that come out to be?
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: Seven pounds of muscle.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: Of that, 10 pounds over four months just under two pounds.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: So I was going on a little bit slightly more aggressive side, but again, you could switch the math up, add an extra couple months to the time frame.
• 12:12
  Philip Pape: It all works out.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: The key here is that these rates are only possible in a calorie surplus.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: You're not going to gain at that rate.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: When you're at maintenance or at a deficit, the numbers drop dramatically.
• 12:23
  Philip Pape: Yeah, sure, you might gain muscle, but now stretch out your time frame over years.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: And that's where the frustration lies, cause any little blip, any little interruption in your training or your life which happens all the time, especially as we get older, right, busier lives, more obligations You're just going to sabotage that.
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: And so when people say, can I recomp, I'm like yes, under perfect conditions, or you can give yourself the benefit of life and go into a surplus, right?
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: And that's why this constant cutting approach fails, because you're never giving your body the resources it needs to build the muscle that would ultimately make you leaner.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: So how do we actually put this into practice?
• 12:59
  Philip Pape: You're like okay, what do I do?
• 13:00
  Philip Pape: All right, after the break, I'm going to give you the step-by-step approach that I've used successfully with hundreds of clients.
• 13:09
  Tony: Stick around for that.
• 13:09
  Tony: My name is Tony.
• 13:10
  Tony: I'm a strength lifter in my 40s.
• 13:11
  Tony: Thank you to Phil and his Wits and Weights community for helping me learn more about nutrition and how to implement better ideas into my strength training.
• 13:20
  Tony: Phil has a very, very good understanding of macros and chemical compounds and hormones and all that and he's continuously learning.
• 13:27
  Tony: That's what I like about Phil.
• 13:29
  Tony: He's got a great sense of humor.
• 13:30
  Tony: He's very relaxed, very easy to talk to.
• 13:32
  Tony: One of the greatest things about Phil, in my view, is that he practices what he preaches.
• 13:36
  Tony: He also works out with barbells.
• 13:38
  Tony: He trains heavy not as heavy as me, but he trains heavy.
• 13:41
  Tony: So if you talk with him about getting in better shape, eating better, he's probably going to give you some good advice and I would strongly recommend you talk with him and he'll help you out All right, welcome back.
• 13:53
  Philip Pape: Let's start with how to implement a muscle gaining phase.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: First, you need to know when to start a gaining phase.
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: Here are the best candidates from my experience and from what the evidence shows us.
• 14:06
  Philip Pape: First, people who have been stuck in a cutting cycle.
• 14:09
  Philip Pape: So if you've been going up and down, up and down, up and down, have not had progress, you're probably ready to try a muscle gaining phase.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: Just what's the worst that can happen?
• 14:17
  Philip Pape: You gain a couple pounds of fat that you can cut off anyway.
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: Yeah, but there's much more upside.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: The second thing is those who can, for example, see their abs but they still feel skinny fat.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: There's a lot of you out there.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: You're like I don't want to lose my abs, but you don't have much muscle.
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: What are those abs worth?
• 14:33
  Philip Pape: What are they buying you?
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: What are they giving you?
• 14:35
  Philip Pape: I mean, if you are successful using your abs at something and you love what they give you, then maybe you're cool.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: I'm guessing most people who are listening are like especially younger men, for example.
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: I'd say most people who are listening are like especially younger men, for example, skinny men, but men, women, it doesn't matter who are just clinging on to being what they think is lean, but it's really just.
• 14:54
  Philip Pape: They can kind of see some definition there because they don't have much weight on their body.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: They don't have much fat on their body but they also don't have much muscle right.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: So their body fat percentage is still quite higher than you would imagine.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: Like the original example 150 pounds, 20% body fat and to put that in comparison, when I am about 180, I'm about 20% body fat right, and guys I know are even leaner than that at 180, who've been doing it longer than me.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: So just keep that in perspective.
• 15:22
  Philip Pape: Another person who this is good for anyone who's been at the same weight for months or years and who have not changed their physique All right, so kind of a similar situation, but different.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: Because you might be heavier, you might have a little extra fat and you're scared of gaining weight because you're like I got to lose this fat but maybe you're holding yourself back by not taking that opportunity.
• 15:41
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about the actual process and I'm going to use another client, tom, as an example.
• 15:54
  Philip Pape: I've got so many client stories that I can pull from here.
• 15:55
  Philip Pape: It's a lot of fun really.
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: He started at 170, super common weight for guys that are like 5'8 to upwards of 5'11, even six feet, believe it or not.
• 15:59
  Philip Pape: Some guys on the skinnier end right around there, 170 pounds, fairly quote-unquote lean, not happy with his physique, because really he had some extra body fat and didn't have much muscle.
• 16:08
  Philip Pape: And I said, let's, we got to gain.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: And he was, he was good for it, right, he was cool with that Gaining phase.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: Let's go, let's, let's really push it at about 0.4% of your body weight gain per week.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to do all the math, but it comes out to several pounds a month, right, such that a decent chunk of that is going to be muscle.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: Going back to what I said before one to two pounds of muscle a month-ish.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: We focused heavily on a training program that built his base of strength but also included some hypertrophy, some bodybuilding style stuff, so that he could really train hard and develop his physique at the same time and we can measure the physique as we go along.
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: So that's the third part of this is monitoring his body composition changes, monitoring his bicep and chest size, for example for men, you know, that's a really great indication of body size.
• 17:01
  Philip Pape: Making sure his waist size wasn't like ballooning up right, which it shouldn't.
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: If you're going at a reasonable rate, you're not going to gain that much fat.
• 17:08
  Philip Pape: You gain a little bit, so your waist is going to go up a little bit, but everything else is also going way up in terms of performance and strength and muscle.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: And, by the way, strength and muscle are sometimes proxies for each other, but not always.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: That's why you have to have a good coach and kind of understand how to train.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: And so what did we track?
• 17:25
  Philip Pape: Well, we track scale weight, obviously.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: We look at the trend of weight, make sure that it's trending up at the right rate and not too much, but also not too slowly.
• 17:32
  Philip Pape: Where he's stuck, where he's in a hard gaining phase and we need to eat more, so we track that.
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: We make sure that his strength and his performance and his reps and his volume should all be going up on his program.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: We look at measurements that show, you know, proportional changes, whatever those are.
• 17:52
  Philip Pape: I mentioned the body metrics before.
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: Progress photos.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: Yes, progress photos can be a little deceiving during a gaining phase because again, you have some of the fat coming along from the muscle.
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: So with a shirt on, you should kind of notice, especially as a guy, but even women, you know you've got your arms are starting to pop your delts, your shoulder caps are starting to pop nice back all of that.
• 18:12
  Philip Pape: If you took your shirt off, yeah, you might have a little extra fat covering your abs, right.
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: So that's kind of where we can play mind games with ourselves if we're not careful and having a coach to kind of look at that objectively and be like, no, it's cool, you know, yeah, of course your waist is up a half inch or an inch since we started, but look at all this exceptional growth in other areas of your physique.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: And then there are the things that we want to avoid, the pitfalls that I see all the time.
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: The first one is actually gaining too fast, which is, I'll say, for beginners and intermediates.
• 18:47
  Philip Pape: My current recommendations are up to about 0.4 to 0.5% of your body weight per week max, and some of you might be more comfortable around that 0.3% of your body weight per week.
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: But if you're gaining, like you know, over a pound a week, then that's probably way too much.
• 19:04
  Philip Pape: Like that's just a simple rule of thumb.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: The second thing is not pushing hard enough in your training.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: You don't want to waste the time you're doing in the stimulus.
• 19:14
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying that you should ever not train hard enough.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: That's true you should, but there's something about knowing you've got the calories and the energy coming in that you've got to be dialed in enough where you're not constantly taking breaks, because if you're going on vacations and going on travel and shifting and skipping workouts, then you probably are going to gain more fat.
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: And if you're going to do that, I would want to plan in times of potentially at maintenance instead of in a surplus, to prevent that.
• 19:41
  Philip Pape: The next thing is getting spooked by the normal water weight fluctuations that occur, which includes gaining early on.
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: So your first few weeks you're going to gain a decent pop in weight and it's not necessarily you're gaining too fast, it's because of the water, the fluid, the carbs, and then it normalizes and then you're good to go.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: So the first few weeks, just let what happens happens it's not a big deal and then you can really have the data dialed in after that.
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, that leads to people cutting the gaining phase short at the first sign that they're gaining too much fat or getting uncomfortable.
• 20:14
  Philip Pape: And that could be as short, you know, as long as even three or four months, when we're intending to gain for, say, six or nine, and you're like, oh, it's three months and I'm just not liking it.
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: You've got to stick it out.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: And again, this is where having support and having numbers and having data can really be helpful, because it is very easy to panic when the scale goes up three pounds in that first week, but when you know why this happens, you realize it's totally normal, right?
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: Most of the water weight is, or most is, water weight from increased carbs, glycogen, training, volume, inflammation.
• 20:45
  Philip Pape: Your measurements in that week, you'll notice, probably didn't change at all.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: Even your waist.
• 20:49
  Philip Pape: Even when you feel a little bloated, even when you have a little extra weight, you'd be surprised that your waist measurement didn't even change.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: I mean, if you're a bigger person, it might go up like a quarter inch, if that's even.
• 21:00
  Philip Pape: It's in the noise.
• 21:00
  Philip Pape: Your strength, though, should start to take off.
• 21:02
  Philip Pape: I mean, for some people it's literally the next day after you have that first big meal bigger than you've been eating, and I was like, oh man, my deadlift just shot up.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: I've seen that happen.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: And then, after about two to three weeks, your weight will start to stabilize.
• 21:14
  Philip Pape: So the magic here happens when you stick with the process long enough to get to that anabolic environment and see meaningful muscle growth right.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: Remember the examples from earlier okay, many of my clients who get started on this journey, especially a lot of women, are convinced that the strategy is backfiring about six weeks in.
• 21:35
  Philip Pape: Okay, six weeks, because the first three weeks they got through the waterway Okay, they're good, and then another three weeks in you're like is anything even happening?
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: And yet I'm eating all this food and I'm feeling kind of full all the time.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: Right, there's a lot of mind games that go on, but then by I'm going to say week 12, which is three months in, that's when you're going to start seeing definition, really, that you've never seen before.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: If you're doing this right, even though you're technically heavier and you have a little more body fat, when you're really doing it right, that's where the gains start to pay off.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: And this brings me to a crucial point about patience and mindset, because I think I said it before, the biggest obstacle is not the physical process.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: You get that, you get the numbers, you get that this is important.
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: Hopefully, you've listened to Wits and Weights for a while and if you haven't plenty of episodes in the library about this, it's not that, it's not the physical process.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: I can tell you exactly what to do.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: You can go download my blueprint that I mentioned earlier.
• 22:30
  Philip Pape: It'll tell you what to do.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: Great, it's the mental game of being okay with short-term weight gain.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: To have that long-term success, that ease of carrying around this extra lean tissue, eating more food, having more energy, looking and feeling great and better, even at a higher scale weight, you have to trust the process and the mathematics that we talked about earlier.
• 22:57
  Philip Pape: But yeah, it can definitely be a mental game.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: So here's what might surprise you, because I always like to end with a little bit of a moment at the end of these shows.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: After working with hundreds of clients, I've noticed something and that is that the ones who achieved the most dramatic transformations you know we love the before and after photos, but the ones who achieve the most dramatic ones are not the ones who diet the hardest and are trying to stay lean year round.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: It is the people who embrace the counterintuitive approach of strategically gaining weight to build muscle period.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: The people who are willing to jump into that are the ones that have success.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: It might take some time, it might take working through the mental side, it might take some emotional support along the way, but it will pay off.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: Take Mark I think I mentioned him.
• 23:46
  Philip Pape: He was one of my most successful clients.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: He spent years trying to get below that magical 15% body fat for men by constantly cutting.
• 23:55
  Philip Pape: I think he was doing carnivore.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: He was doing all these diets, you know, trying to like eat the same food all the time rice and broccoli and chicken or whatever.
• 24:02
  Philip Pape: And we're like let's just throw all that out.
• 24:04
  Philip Pape: Man, you can enjoy lots of different foods, you can enjoy a decent amount of calories.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: That out, man, you can enjoy lots of different foods, you can enjoy a decent amount of calories.
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: You've got to commit to a proper, steady and long enough gaining phase and then we can follow that with strategic cut.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: And that's what we did, right.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: So he trusted me.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: He's like all right, I put my trust in your hands.
• 24:19
  Philip Pape: Let's go six, nine months hard out on the gaining.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: We had lots of discussions about like oh man, I'm noticing extra fat and blah, blah, blah.
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: But I said but what is going well?
• 24:30
  Philip Pape: Oh well, my deadlift keeps climbing, my squat keeps climbing, I feel great, my leverages are good.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: Like on and on and on.
• 24:36
  Philip Pape: That's what we need to focus on.
• 24:37
  Philip Pape: And guess what he ended up at the 12% body fat, I think, was the number right.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: He ended up doing better than, I think, most people when they try to do this.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: He just had a propensity for it, but he had never given himself the chance to build the muscle first, and I think what happened is his body just super responded to the stimulus and he just slapped on some meat to his body and then now the fat loss is easy, right, and he could get to that 12% body fat, weighing 10 pounds more than when he started.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: That's the part that's so cool, right?
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: The key isn't just that physical transformation, even though it is amazing.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: It's the mental freedom of no longer fearing the scale going up.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: All right, next week we are going to dive deeper into exactly how to structure your year as we're closing on the end of the year here.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: So, thinking ahead to next year, whenever you're listening to this, it doesn't matter how to structure a 12 month period between your bulking and cutting phases to set yourself up for an incredible 2025 or whatever year.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: You're looking ahead and I'm probably going to give you some different scenarios, but I'm going to try to simplify it and give you a single 12 month period that you can then shift left or right, depending on where your starting point is.
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to break down the timing, how to know which phase to start with, how to transition between phases for the best results, and then you know, we'll talk about that next week, but today I want you to remember that the fear of gaining weight is probably the thing keeping you at a higher body fat percentage than necessary, right?
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: So having absorbed today's episode will set you up well for next week's, next Monday's.
• 26:15
  Philip Pape: I have other episodes before then, but next Monday's episode where we talk, where we help you structure out the cutting and bulking phases all right, because the math doesn't lie.
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: Sometimes you have to be willing to see the scale go up temporarily to achieve the leaner physique in the long run, and that was really my message for today.
• 26:29
  Philip Pape: All right, if you're ready to break free from the constant cutting and you want to learn how to build muscle the smart way, the how-to, the steps, download my free muscle building nutrition blueprint using the link in my show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash free.
• 26:44
  Philip Pape: This guide is going to walk you through exactly how to structure your nutrition for optimal muscle gain and minimal fat gain.
• 26:51
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember sometimes the fastest way to get lean is to gain weight first.
• 27:00
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: Thank you.