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Philip Pape 6/11/26 Philip Pape 6/11/26

5 Signals That Your Body's "Off" Even When Your Labs Are Normal (Dr. Stephen Cabral) | Ep 476

You’re lifting weights. You’re eating well. Your labs look “normal.” So why do you still feel exhausted, bloated, wired at night, moody, or like your body is aging faster than it should Dr. Stephen Cabral helps us decode why fatigue, bloating, poor sleep, and mood swings can show up even when your labs look fine. We talk about the five signals your body sends through sleep, energy, digestion, mood, and skin, plus how they connect to hormone health, metabolism, inflammation, and recovery.

You’re lifting weights. You’re eating well. Your labs look “normal.” So why do you still feel exhausted, bloated, wired at night, moody, or like your body is aging faster than it should?

Dr. Stephen Cabral helps us decode why fatigue, bloating, poor sleep, and mood swings can show up even when your labs look fine. We talk about the five signals your body sends through sleep, energy, digestion, mood, and skin, plus how they connect to hormone health, metabolism, inflammation, and recovery.

You’ll learn why sleep comes first, how digestion can drain energy, why stress and gut issues can affect mood, and how to build a rhythm that supports evidence-based nutrition, lifting weights, and long-term wellness.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build strength, lose fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Learn to eat more and lift heavy with confidence.

Timestamps:
0:00 – Five signals your body sends
2:10 – Dr. Cabral’s personal health journey
8:05 – Foundations before advanced protocols
12:42 – Sleep as the first lever
21:14 – Energy, cortisol, and daily rhythm
27:44 – Digestion, bloating, and gut signals
35:32 – Mood, inflammation, and overwhelm
40:06 – Skin, hair, and biological age
47:00 – The weekly rhythm reset action

Episode resources:

Five signals your body sends
Philip Pape 0:00
Perhaps you have a pretty good training and nutrition routine, you're getting decent sleep, and your blood work is fairly normal. Yet you still feel exhausted, your digestion is off, you have restless sleep or insomnia, perhaps unexplained mood swings, or your hair is thinning and your skin is breaking out. My guest today has run over 300,000 clients' consultations, and he says we need to pay attention because everything I just mentioned is your body sending five specific signals. Many of us have learned to ignore, suppress, or even medicate or supplement away. You're going to learn what the five signals are, what each one is correlated with inside your body, and the order of operations to follow before you spend another dollar on supplements at home lab panels or the next protocol promising to fix you. Welcome to Wits and Weights, where in every episode we put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're discussing the gap between, hey, my blood work is quote unquote normal, and I'm not actually feeling so great. So what is going on? Specifically for active adults like you who are potentially doing the work, lifting weights, moving your body, trying to eat well, maybe getting enough hours of sleep, and yet you still have symptoms like fatigue or bloating, maybe your sleep is restless, mood swings, skin issues, the list goes on, and there isn't a clear root cause. My guest today is Dr. Stephen Cabral. He is a board-certified doctor of naturopathy who has trained thousands of practitioners through the Integrative Health Practitioner Institute. Before that, he's done a ton, he's had quite a career, but he was also a strength coach who ran his own training studio for over a decade. He was an award-winning trainer, and his new book, Personomics, argues that symptoms are signals. They're not problems. And if we can understand them, we can unlock what's next and maybe work on and fix them. So there are five specific signals we should all be paying attention to, and we're going to get into that today. You're going to learn what they are, how to tell which underlying issue each one is correlated
Dr. Cabral’s personal health journey
Philip Pape 2:10
with. Understand kind of the order of operations so we can respond to maybe the most important thing your body's telling you without necessarily jumping into some advanced tests or random supplements. Stick around to the end because Dr. Cabral is going to tell you the single most important thing you can do at home this week to start to better understand and address your health concerns. Steven, welcome to the show.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 2:32
Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.
Philip Pape 2:34
So before we get into the signals, which I know everyone wants to know about, I'm really curious how you narrow down the list to begin with, because I understand that is really the premise of the personalized health paradigm that you talk about.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 2:46
Yeah. So for us, it, I mean, it really started with my own understanding of health and medicine. So when I was 17, I woke up one morning and literally swollen glands over my entire body. My mom takes me to the pediatrician, just like she did, probably a half a dozen other times a year for whatever common cold I would have. And what I didn't realize was this day it wouldn't get better. So it would be a 10-year journey into trying to heal my body. And ultimately, what I ended up having was Addison's disease, an autoimmune issue. I had something called POTS, which is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. So basically, walk up a flight of stairs, heart rate's going like 150 beats per minute. Like you literally are not able to control your vestibular-based system as well. I had high histamine level, so mast cell activation syndrome, and I had type 2 diabetes. So I had a whole host of issues, allergies, insomnia, et cetera. And they kept giving me labels like, oh, you have rheumatoarthritis, you have type 2 diabetes, you have addicts, you have acid reflux, or whatever you want to call it, GERD. And each one of those, all it allowed them to do was put me on another medication. So I was on Prilosec for the acid reflux, fluorinef for the POTS, I was on Cortef for the Addisons, and like it just kept going like that. I was on Benadryl for my allergies and Pseudafed in the morning. And it was, it was just, again, it was a terrible way to live. I felt awful. I had flu-like symptoms every day, brain fog, all sorts of hormonal issues. And what I realized was just over time, I started, especially this is in the later 90s. So I just slowly started to understand more about natural health and meet with other practitioners. What I realized was that diseases are nothing more than a pattern of symptoms we give a name to, so that we can then have a medical code, which can then be given to prescribe a pharmaceutical. And I'm not saying there's not a time and place for pharmaceuticals. They can be life-saving, but they will never fix a chronic health condition. And almost every chronic health condition can be overcome. So it took me 10 years to find the right practitioner. But when I met Dr. Pete, it actually took me 10 years to fail enough to finally be ready to get well. That's kind of partly true. And I meet my mentor, Dr. Pete, and I'm better in six months. No more rheumatoid, no more type 2 diabetes, no more Addison's, no more of any of these things. Allergies took another year or two to solve, but then I was better. So no more diagnosed diseases anymore, which means it's not just your genetics, it's not just the environment itself, it's how we rebalance the body at a fundamental and foundational level.
Philip Pape 5:16
So the body is so complex. And what I'm hearing you say is the best we can do in the medical industry, and this is before we had AI, machine learning, and everything, because who knows if we did it from the ground up today, is we take all of these symptoms and we correlate them to a pattern and then basically try to fix it, fix the end of that chain, let's say, with medication.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 5:37
And it simply masks the symptoms, exactly. So we don't want to fix the underlying root cause because if you come off the medication, the disease is back. So we're just masking the symptoms, not fixing the disease itself.
Philip Pape 5:50
So then you talk about symptoms as being signals, which appeals to me in the term of biofeedback and data from our body. So mechanically, I guess, mechanistically, physiologically, I don't know what word we want to use. Like, what is the body doing as we walk around every day living our lives? That then leads to all of these complicated factors that gives us these signals. If that makes sense.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 6:12
Yeah, it does. And so the second book, personomics, is how to like literally brass tacks, because I am a brass tacks individual. How do we just figure out what's wrong with you? So that comes down to deficiencies and toxicities. Your body has too little of something. So it doesn't have literally the raw material to be able to mount the immune attack or whatever it might be, right? And then toxicities is your body's so overwhelmed with heavy metals, environmental toxins, microplastics, viruses, like whatever it might be. It's just weight, mold, right? It's just weighing on the body. So we have to reduce that toxic load and bring up your deficiencies. Personomics is literally how do we figure that out? Now, the first book, though, the rainbarrel effect is what we're talking about now. I published that eight years ago. It's still prevalent to this day, but it's basically like the prequel. So it's here's how we get sick. And over time, your body's telling you that it's not right. So when I was growing up, I had allergies, I had insomnia, I had brain fog. Like those are signals my body is sending me that something's not right. Like though, that is not a natural human state, it is one of energy in the early part of the day and then less energy at night so that we fall asleep. So cortisol is up and then cortisol comes down in rhythms with the sun, right? We are diurnal beings in a diurnal world. Nocturnal animals come out at night. We are not nocturnal. We better hide at night because we can't see in the dark to it like a nocturnal animal, right? So the signals that I talk about in personomics are what we need to be more aware of. Now, I wear an aura ring. Again, I'm not sponsored by them. I wear different biometric devices that make it a little bit easier to also keep track of these signals. But there are primal signals that we should be looking at and we can break down. One is digestion, the other is overall energy, another one is our sleep, another one is
Foundations before advanced protocols
Dr. Stephen Cabral 8:05
our skin, and the last one is our mood in no particular order. And we can break them down however we want. But you will find over time, typically as children, all of these should be on point. And then things can happen. We took antibiotics. Would this happen? And then they start to go downhill. That is your first sign and signal that your body is not optimal.
Philip Pape 8:24
Now, before we get into that, so yes, we're going to get into the signals and then what to do about it. One overriding factor, I guess it's tied very much to skepticism of this whole industry, as well as the idea of the 1%, the idea that a lot of people are not doing the basic fundamentals for their health. You know, they're sitting around all day with desk jobs, they're not moving, they're not exercising, they're not eating well to begin with. And I'm always curious like this is a bi-directional thing sometimes. How much effort and value should be taken to shore up those things first and rule out 80% of potential issues, I don't know what it is, and then deal with this as maybe the 1%, or is it more integrated than that and kind of there's a parallel approach to it?
Dr. Stephen Cabral 9:08
Yeah, it's a great question. So in our practice, literally forever, over two decades, what we've always done is we said, if you have more than 30 to 40 pounds to lose, we're helping you lose weight. And the reason is this, because I started, just as you mentioned in the intro, I started as a personal trainer and nutritionist. Literally, I just started at 18 with an ACE certified personal trainer and NASM. And then I got my C SCS and then like I just kept going, right? But like that's how I started. And here's what I found I didn't know anything about health. I helped people lose weight, and like all of a sudden they got healthy, like, hey, I don't have a high blood pressure anymore. I'm like, oh, that's I that's cool. I had no idea, right? So the big thing is like what you need to do in order. Again, I don't want to, I'm not talking negatively about GLP1 drugs, but they are not doing the things that got you there in the first place. They are a shortcut, and sometimes when you take a shortcut, again, not speaking negatively about them because we might recommend them in cases where someone's a hundred plus pounds overweight, but we need a long-term plan because we don't want to end up, this person doesn't want to end up with osteoporosis. And I could go on and on, right? Potential thyroid issue, potential vision issues, et cetera. So what we say is this though. What we need to do in order to lose 30 to 40 plus pounds over your ideal weight may just fix all of your health issues, right? But if they don't, and now you don't need to have six-pack abs. That that's not a you know prerequisite. Now we work on wellness. If there's anything left, we're working on the autoimmune issues, the hormone imbalances, et cetera, et cetera. Because we know we can help you lose 30 to 40 pounds, I'm sure, just like you, in six months. Like we we we know we can do that. Okay, so now that's done. Anything left in six months? Yes, there is. Okay, because yeah, weight loss doesn't solve everything. Then we work on that. We run something called the big five labs, or we get more specific. We find out what's this person's deficiencies and toxicities, then we fix that. Now there's one more part, and this is the part where everybody's jumping to too quickly: longevity. They're doing, they're using nicotinamide ribozino, nicotinamide mononucleotide, and spermidine and transveritrol, and all these great things when they haven't fixed the foundation yet. And that's the biggest issue. You need to earn longevity or it's not going to work. So that's that's our model, and hopefully that that answers your question.
Philip Pape 11:24
It does. It does. And it it's it makes a lot of sense. The the losing weight part, given the correlation with metabolic disease and a lot of the other issues people have. Where does muscle mass come into that before we get into the signals?
Dr. Stephen Cabral 11:36
So we would never have someone use a GLP one or start a weight loss program without doing at least two days a week of strength training. It's okay, short-term, like that's, but again, we live in a world of short-term wins. And believe me, when I was sick, I wanted to get well yesterday, not in six months from now. So, like, I totally understand that. However, you you really don't want to go out on a boating trip with a boat with holes in it, right? Like it's like that's a disastrous, it's going to sink eventually. We just don't know how quickly. And so, but inevitably we know it's going to happen. So the strength train strength training twice a week is table stakes. That's for every human. Ideally, when I ran all my practices in person, we still do it to this day, we just make virtual programs. It's three days a week. And the reason is that you could do a Monday and Wednesday, but now it's nothing on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We've got four days off. Metabolically, that's too long to go without stimulating the furnace and the machine. So we like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. And then we'll move in cardio or sauna or other things on top of that. So that's
Sleep as the first lever
Dr. Stephen Cabral 12:42
built into our weight loss programs. And you don't even need a lot besides that, besides your nutrition and your strength training in terms of cardio, just walking, right? But what is really important is sleep. And I don't know if you want to go there now, but like that's critical. Or you could have elevated blood sugar levels, dysregulated testosterone, and et cetera, et cetera.
Philip Pape 13:01
Right, perfect. So that's a segue into the signals. I have them in order of what's in your book, but if we're talking sleep because it's so important, why don't we just jump into sleep and just talk about the main, you know, this is like the dashboard for our body. So people have heard about sleep before, but really, what are they looking for?
Dr. Stephen Cabral 13:16
I think uh myself included, everybody's looking for like that magic number. There is no magic number for how much sleep you need. The more output, and that's not just physical, it's also mental, the more recovery you need. And the older you get, the more that becomes important. So when, you know, I was giving advice even at 22 years old or 18 years old, it's like, well, it's hard to understand someone that's had three kids, two working two jobs and whatever. Like, you can't recover from grueling boot camp style workouts if you're not eating well and getting sleep at night, right? So it's like the the output also needs to match the sleep. And we want strong output. Like we want to be able to do metabolic resistance training. We want to get that body going. But in order to do that, to maximize that, we need to actually start the night before. And so sleep is really the foundation, I would say, which is crazy over nutrition or movement. And it's because if you don't have that, the other two can't be at their maximum. And so seven to nine hours are what most people need, but it's not seven to nine hours in bed. It's actually seven to nine hours of sleep. So if you're tracking it, then it breaks down to okay, like we can really get granular. Are you getting 75 to 90 minutes of deep sleep? That's on an aura. On a whoop strap, they always give you above two hours. It's just way too high. Again, nothing against whoop. I just think it's a little exaggerated in terms of deep. Um, REM should be above two hours, but then there are other factors. Like you actually want to see your heart rates drop within the first four, three to four hours in bed, and you want to see your body temperature come down at least 0.2 degrees. And so these are all really nice factors to look at, or you're recovering. Now, I will give one caveat: nobody's perfect. And that's why I say for me, two nights a month, probably not gonna have a great night's sleep. And that's okay. But the other 28, that's what I need. That's what I'm good. When you start to see multiple nights strung together, that's when we start to get a little bit more worried because inflammation is going to be higher, recovery is going to be poor, testosterone's going to dip in men, and we're going to start to see as the cortisol rises, we're going to start to see blood sugar elevated as well.
Philip Pape 15:26
So, you know, I want to take this from the signal to the fix. And you you jump to the fix, which I love. Like, not just the fix, but you you told us what we want to measure in terms of deep sleep and REM and everything else. Is there something, even if you're not tracking those things, that the signal is ever present, like restfulness, how many times you get up, you know, insomnia, any anything like that, like that that jumps out.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 15:50
Yeah. So I mean, for men, if you're getting up more than once a night to use the bathroom to urinate, you know, there's there's real inflammation there, maybe not just with the prostate, but inflammation in the body. So that's an important one. Now, maybe it is too much fluid consumption within three hours of bed. That's possible, no doubt about it. But we're looking at, you know, kind of the overall picture. And the older you get, potentially the more inflammation, you know, there is and the more swelling in the prostate. Like prostatitis is pretty common in men over 45 years old. Not prostate cancer, but some level of inflammation. But beyond that, for every individual, if you're waking up and you're groggy and you need coffee or you need caffeine, that means you didn't recover. Like there is a definite deficit and you've just become accustomed to it, right? Like you've just gotten used to it. That, well, of course I'm going to be groggy in the morning. It's not in a course. Like within 30 minutes of waking up, you should get the cortisol awakening response. And that should be enough energy that your body gets going. The problem is when cortisol is too high on the other end of the night, it suffers in the morning. So we get this inverse ratio, elevated at night, lower in the morning. And we see that all the time. You know, that's that's one of the biggest ones we test for. It's what we call the stress metabolism test. But again, let's say you can't do any lab testing. So you're looking for grogginess. Caffeine is something that you need to give your body basically a kick, give your adrenals or HP axis a kick to get going. Another one is brain fog in the morning. That's a big one too. So the brain and body don't have the energy they need. Reaction time, people literally, clients of mine, they were like, like, I drop things. I never used to drop things before. And it's like, okay, like the reaction time is part of it, like how quick you are reflex-wise. And I would say then cognitive recall. You know, when cortisol levels are too high or too low, recall and memory suffer. So one is there's brain fog, your cortisol levels are too low. The other one, you're in a heightened sympathetic nervous system straight state, and you just can't literally remember because you have such tenal vision where you put your keys or who the person is that you just met. So those are like my foundational ones. But also in terms of training, if you're sore every day, if you're inflamed every day, maybe you are overdoing the gym, but also maybe you're just not getting enough sleep and especially deep sleep, which happens in the first four hours of the night, typically between like 10 and midnight, 10 and 2 at the latest.
Philip Pape 18:12
Is there any like newer evidence or evidence that you are aware of of the downstream effects of sleep deprivation? We, you know, we don't talk about too much that are pretty insidious.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 18:21
Well, the the first one that I still think is not mainstream is that if you get less than seven hours of sleep per night, real sleep, not just not in bed, you're most likely going to have a higher fasting glucose level than someone, all other variables the same. They just got an hour extra sleep. So now you're battling pre-diabetes or a road to diabetes, type 2 diabetes, just from sleep alone, not carbohydrates, not anything like that. And so that's a really crucial one. The second one is I work with a lot of men that are using TRT, trying to come off, or they're trying to boost their testosterone levels naturally, or they're trying to work on fertility. And I test them, and their free testosterone might be like a 75. And ideally, I want it somewhere around 110 to 140, right, for their free testosterone, naturally. And so when I look at that, I say, okay, you're weightlifting three to four times a week. You're eating, you know, plenty of protein. So like you're you're doing those things right. There seems to be enough vitamins and minerals that your body needs, the zinc, the vitamin C, all the things that your body needs, right, to make testosterone. Oh, but you're sleeping six hours a night. Okay. Can we fix that? And if the answer is yes, great, then we do that. And six weeks later, testosterone's surging again. Like it doesn't take a lot to reboot. Um, so inside of your brain, you have something called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is the master regulator. It then signals the pituitary gland to send out signals to the individual glands. So the master one would be the HPA axis, so sends a signal, hypothalamus pituitary to the adrenals, right? The adrenals, are we stressed or not? Hopefully, we're not stressed all the time. Hopefully we're not in chronic stress, right? And hopefully cortisol is low at night so that melatonin can rise. So if melatonin rises and cortisol is low, then testosterone can then rise the next morning. But that doesn't happen if you don't get good sleep and cortisol stays elevated. So then the next one, though, is the HPT axis. That's the thyroid that's affected. Happens in more women, about double the rate, right, of low thyroid than men, but it does happen in men. And the last one is the HPG axis. That's the hypothalamus pituitary gonad or gonadal axis, ovaries in women, testes in men. So you throw off the first one, the HPA, it throws off the other two, and that includes testosterone production.
Philip Pape 20:34
Great. Yeah, people need to hear this. People need to hear this.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 20:37
So it's a little complex, but the truth is that, but like it's like so those are real underlying root causes, right? Yeah. Elevated levels of stress with not enough sleep being aka recovery leads to low testosterone. And so if you do test low testosterone in your 30s, it's my opinion, but having done this for 26 years, longer with part-time, you don't need testosterone in your 30s unless there is an actual medical condition. And then we could talk about that. Because once you go on it, it's not as easy to come off as people think. You can, but so I'm just saying, use it when you need it, when the time is right, if you choose to, but let's try to stave off that as long as possible if we can.
Energy, cortisol, and daily rhythm
Philip Pape 21:14
Right. Because we're concerned about endogenous production and all that when you start going on it.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 21:18
The root causes as to why it was low in the first place, right? So you can go and test ostolone in your 30s and 40s, and trust me, you will feel better. But you never fix the things that may cause heart disease or type 2 diabetes in your 50s. And guys are susceptible to heart disease in their 50s. That's legitimate.
Philip Pape 21:34
All right. So that's sleep. Now that I get a I guess a good corollary would be one of uh would be energy, because it's kind of some for a lot of people, it's somewhat in the same ballpark or there's a little bit of overlap there. So maybe we let's go to energy. What do we mean by that? Because it's kind of a nebulous term. Do we mean like that afternoon crash? Is it related to cortisol? Like we've been talking. Is there something bigger than this?
Dr. Stephen Cabral 21:53
So when it comes to energy, what we want to look at is that normal diurnal rhythm. So what that means is that cortisol, so that's the Energy hormone produced by our adrenals, sometimes called the stress hormone, but it's really important because when I had Addison's disease, it means you can't produce cortisol. No cortisol, no anti-inflammatory. So when you think of taking pregnisone, which is a steroid, but it's a catabolic versus anabolic, you're basically decreasing inflammation. Well, one of the reasons why I felt like I had flu like symptoms all the time is that I wasn't producing cortisol. So it isn't very necessary. So cortisol is typically produced between six and eight in the morning at its highest peak. And then it just slowly falls through the day. And its lowest point is based on the sun and based on the season, but it's usually around 9:30 p.m., which is a signal to us as to when we should really be in bed, right? So we don't get that second wind as it starts to rise again. So, in terms of energy, we sometimes we have unrealistic energy expectations. So I believe we should have energy all day, but it doesn't mean that at like eight o'clock at night or even seven o'clock at night that we should be rearing to go like we were at seven in the morning. That would be stress-based energy, not natural production of energy. So naturally, we want to start to wind down with the sun. Literally, that is how our hormones are built into nature around us. And it would be very apparent if we still lived outside. So let's say you just say we lived in, you know, tents or anything like that. When sun rises in the morning, cortisol rises, melatonin drops, we're waking up. It's just the way that it is. And then as the sun starts to set, we're getting tired. But also, think about all we have is maybe a fire for light. How much are we really going to do? Not a lot. Work's done for the day, right? So we tell stories, we chat, we commune, then we go to bed, and then we wake up with the sun. That's a normal diurnal rhythm. Now I know some people work overnight, they've got night shifts, they have all those things, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily healthy. So you do that for as long as you need to. And then ideally, if you can start to shift into a more normal routine, we want that. So, yes, no energy post-lunch is not ideal. No energy, brain fog, grogginess, all of that in the morning, not ideal either. We'll talk about the no energy post-lunch, because that then feeds into digestion. That remember, digestion takes like a third of our energy for the day. And if you have weak digestion, even more, which is zapping your energy. So the goal is what takes out our energy, what brings it in? When I work with clients with energy-based issues, I said, I want you to look at your life and all the activities and ask yourself this does it bring in energy, like a walk, a nice conversation, meditation, relaxation, bineural beats, sauna, parasympathetic things. Or is it giving out energy? Hard workouts, maybe even cold plunge, which excites the nervous system, all the different things that gives out energy. And then we say, for right now, we want to do as little of the things that give out energy and more of the things that bring it in while working on the deficiencies and toxicities.
Philip Pape 24:49
I like that concept because there's this additive symmetrical piece to it that I think we don't talk about a lot, which is that bringing in part, where I think oftentimes we think food is energy, but like nothing else brings in energy because we're existing and metabolizing and burning energy all day, even if you are meditating or walking. So tell us just a little more about that, how it brings in energy. Is it a function of the two types of the sides of the nervous system? You know, is it another component related to cortisol? Like physiologically, what are we doing there?
Dr. Stephen Cabral 25:20
So when we look at all the activities that I name, binaural beats, breath work, sleep, walking, those are all parasympathetic nervous system inducing. So you named basically the autonomic nervous system or specifically the central nervous system, which then branches to the sympathetic nerves, that's fight or flight, and the parasympathetic, which is rest, relax, digest, right? Repair. So anything that shifts us away from the fight or flight allows us then in a repair mode, because our body knows how to heal. We need to get there. And that's why sleep is really so important that when you're sleeping, ideally, you're always in parasympathetic nervous system. So that's when you heal. So when you're not feeling as well or you're an athlete that's training for hours a day, like I work with triathletes, I mean, their average race is like 10 to 13 hours with the people that I work with. That they're training for three plus hours a day. You need a lot of sleep. It's not seven hours of sleep for a triathlon for a triathlete.
Philip Pape 26:16
If sleep is dialed in, let's say you're hypothetical, let's say sleep is 100% dialed in, you could still have energy issues, correct? And then what are those caused by?
Dr. Stephen Cabral 26:25
Oh, 100%. So I work actually, I work with a lot of women in my practice. And what we'll see is we'll see lower levels of progesterone, lower levels of cortisol production, lower levels of thyroid production. And all of those are needed in order to have proper energy as well. So they'll end up with estrogen dominance. Low thyroid is basically low metabolic rate. It's not just low metabolism, it's not just weight gain. Your metabolism is so much more than your weight. It's literally your metabolic function, your cellular function. So we look at everything from mitochondrial issues with ATP production to the thyroid itself to estrogen progesterone, low levels of testosterone will lead to low, low energy. So, besides the vitamins, the minerals, if you're low calorie, low carb, you could be low energy. So we look at that as well. I mean, everything goes into energy, right? Like that is how your body's functioning. And if you're depriving it of nutrients or you're zapping it of nutrients because there's too much of the sympathetic nervous system with not enough of the nutrient ad back, that can be detrimental. Meaning, like most people don't do well with a one meal a day diet once they're past their like 20s. They simply don't have the reserve capacity to be able to work all day on fumes. That's a pretty tough one. But I will say at the same time, and I know that we'll eventually get there,
Digestion, bloating, and gut signals
Dr. Stephen Cabral 27:44
some people feel better not eating, and they feel better not eating because their digestion is so bad that they cause an inflammatory event and so much energy being used to break down food. So for them, like, no, I have more energy when I don't eat, right? With no calories coming in. Well, what are you living off of if there's no calories, right? It can't be ketones alone because that's not enough.
Philip Pape 28:04
Let's go to the next one because you did mention post-meal type energy and how it's tied to digestion and maybe elimination. And that brings up the gut and you know, bowel movements and gut health in general. So let's go there.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 28:18
Yeah. So digestion does encompass just what you said right there. So when you eat, you should be able to digest your food without bloating in gas. Like that's a big part to it. You shouldn't be burping, you shouldn't have a lot of gas, you shouldn't have bloating. Now, if you have those things, that's a signal. The signal is there's some breakdown in digestion, not enough hydrochloric acid or acid production in the stomach, right? Not, and we can talk about acid reflux and all that, which is very rarely from too much acid, or unless it's from a histamine-based issue, et cetera. There can be issues with the lower sulfageal sphincter, so not actually closing when you're eating, that can lead to acid reflux. There might not be enough enzymes, there might not be enough bile dropping from the liver, you might poor job food combining. There simply might be too much volume of food at the meal that it's literally overstuffing the stomach. That can be an issue as well. So then, you know, as you said, eliminating, are you having bowel movements at least once or twice a day? If you're not, you're either under-eating or you're constipated in some way, or there's another breakdown again with bile production, et cetera, that we're not getting all of this moving down. There's not enough peristaltic movement potentially from tension, or you're dehydrated. There could be so many different reasons, but you should be eliminating at least once or twice a day. If you eat three times a day, you should be eliminating at least once or twice a day. And so we look at that. And then digestion should not also cause fatigue. If digestion causes fatigue, it could be it could be a food sensitivity issue, it could be an immune issue, it could also be that your body is not balanced from an autonomic nervous system standpoint. You're in fight or flight. All of a sudden you put food in, your body's like, now we need to digest. And it switches gears too much. There's too much of a pendulum swing from sympathetic nervous system to parasympathetic. Now you're in all parasympathetic nervous system. You might even see like more pale color in your face, and you're exhausted. And so that is not a normal functioning HPA axis or even vestibular system, which keeps the body balanced. So that's how we look at overall digestion. You should be able to eat food, digest it well, it's in and out of the stomach in just a couple hours, and you have proper elimination on a daily basis. It doesn't cause acne, it doesn't cause skin rashes. Those are all the things we look for.
Philip Pape 30:36
So that's a lot. If you were just to simplify and say, like, what are most people not doing that's pro or doing that's contributing to that? What have you seen?
Dr. Stephen Cabral 30:43
Well, one of the biggest issues, so there's five main things, and I know five seems like a lot, but it's only five, which is really great, right? Because then you can just do process of elimination. So you can have candida overgrowth in your gut, typically from taking antibiotics. The second one is you can have SIBO, usually from taking antibiotics or high levels of stress. And I can talk about why that might be caused in a second. You can have parasites, very common, like 25% of people have a parasite, right? Could be from salad bars, undercooked meat, sushi, et cetera. And then the next one is H. pylori, very common bacteria that like 25% of the world has as well. Okay. And it's the same place you can get it. And then the fifth is food sensitivities. So food sensitivities, though, usually come after the gut's already inflamed and permeable, where the immunoglobulin A, M, and G can basically come in, start to attack what's inside the gut or the gut wall, or as it starts to move out, when people say 80% of your immune system is around your gut, it's true. That's where the gut-associated lymphoid tissue is that's essentially responsible for everything that comes out of that gut wall. Now, in an ideal world, we're just essentially excreting all the healthy things for the body: amino acids, individual glucose molecules, fatty acids, nutrients, et cetera. And then it's being processed through the liver and other parts of the body. So that's healthy. Unhealthy is that gut's permeable, lipopolysaccharides are coming out, essentially this bacteria that sets off the immune system. The immune system is now inflamed, and that is now where your genetics get set off. That's when the autoimmune issues happen. There are almost no autoimmune issues without gut issues. Almost none. 90% of all autoimmune issues have at least some origin in the gut. Now, there might still be heavy metals and high levels of stress and other things, no doubt about it. But the gut in the immune system, obviously it makes sense, 80% of the immune system there has a level to do with the inflammation and immune system in the body.
Philip Pape 32:35
It makes a lot of sense when you see that often the solution is to do an elimination diet and start to reintroduce certain foods. At least you see that in the simple if this then that kind of medical advice. So candida overgrowth, SIBO, parasites, H. pylori, food sensitivities. So then, as far as like dealing with this, is there is there something, is it diet related or something else, or is it integrated with these other things like stress that a lot of people can benefit the most from as they're trying to address these?
Dr. Stephen Cabral 33:04
Mindful eating is a huge one. So basically, just literally just stop and do three minutes of breath work, usually resonance breathing. So breathing in as you see the circle expand, breathing out as the circle shrinks, best thing that you can do. It's very simple. Free YouTube videos, it's all over the place. Elite HRV app, your Apple Watch, they all have a breath work type thing for bioresonance breathing. So now you already moved to the parasympathetic, and that will allow for better digestion. It still won't get rid of the Candida overgrowth and the SIBO and the parasites and the H. pylori if you have it. So there is no way that diet alone takes care of that. And we know that because people will go on a keto diet or carnivore diet because they do. They can't have carbs because the carbs are feeding the yeast and the bacteria. Not all carbs, but they're, you know, they don't know specifically what ones, right? And so I get it, I totally understand. But once you have carbs again, it's just going to grow back in kind because you didn't repopulate and rebalance. So that is why I tell people so forever, Ayurvedic medicine, 6,000 years old, traditional Chinese medicine, 3,000 years old, and we have other forms of amazing medicine as well. They all use something to help the gut. So you do have to do something. We do what's called something called a CBO protocol, and it rebalances the gut over 12 weeks. It's a gentle approach, it works. What do they use hundreds and thousands of years ago? Oregano, cloves, thyme, uva ursi, like all of these things help to kill pathogenic bacteria in the gut. But again, like you can use those, but it's better to use a protocol that's structured and kind of proven to work. But everyone for the history of time, Amazon medicine, et cetera, have always used herbs to be able to remove what's there. The difference now today is we also use enzymes that remove the biofilm where a lot of these heavy metals and parasites can live as well.
Philip Pape 34:48
That makes a lot of sense. And we're gonna we're gonna leave the T's on that one for folks to check out your CBO protocol, right? When we connect them with you in the interest of talking about the other two symptoms. Because this is just the tip of the iceberg, guys. I mean, there's so much behind all of this, but it starts with education and awareness that I do like, you know, starting with the signals and understanding there's something you can do about this. There's something your body's telling you right there. You don't need special devices. A lot of this, like you said, is grounded in, you know, I'll say ancient medicine, but it's really just human knowledge that that persists to this day, is a better way to put it.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 35:18
So ancient medicine that's now clinically proven on PubMed. Like that's the nice thing. I mean, that's the amazing thing because I have a like I am very much still skeptical and science-minded, but all I do is just look at what do they use? What do the clinical
Mood, inflammation, and overwhelm
Dr. Stephen Cabral 35:32
studies show? Oh, lo and behold, like they work, right? And so, like, that's the great thing is that we're able to now prove these things to be clinically true. Because the alternative is okay, you take rife or you take diflucan or nystatin, right? For these for these yeast or bacterial overgrowth, but the relapse cases are quite high because you never repopulated the gut as well.
Philip Pape 35:51
Yeah. All right, so let's move on. We've got two more signals to talk about. I think the next one, uh, mood and mental clarity is a good one as well, because again, this could be a little bit nebulous to understand what we mean by this. So I'm sure you'll help us uh make it a little more objective and a signal that we can read.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 36:06
So, one of the biggest things I've seen with people, with often with fatigue as well, is that over time it leads to irritability, overwhelm, and usually worry. So, but you don't know why. Just all of a sudden now you're someone that's just more irritable and overwhelmed and anxious, and that's not you. And so when you look at that, you say, why is that happening? A lot of it is from your body being inflamed. There might be gut issues, and there's low energy. So if we kind of step back again, we say, okay, well, what else has its own brain? Well, the gut does, right? And the enteric nervous system. And it sends signals, right, through the vagal nerve to the brain. Now we've got an inflamed gut, an inflamed body with low energy and poor digestion, telling the brain something's wrong. How does the brain register it? It can't get the direct signal. They're not talking, they're sending signals, something's wrong. We react with, okay, I have no low energy, I'm in low mood, right? But now I'm inflamed, I'm irritable, and now everything is overwhelming because you no longer have the same ability to respond to life. And when you can't have the energy, and everything, again, is so much on your body because your rain barrel is overflowing, you're irritable and overwhelmed. And so I see this all the time in my practice, and there isn't a medication for that. The solution is to figure out what caused the overflowing of that rain barrel so that your body, which then your mind can be less overwhelmed. So literally, we're trying to empty the rain barrel, and now there is no overwhelm or overfilling of the barrel. So that's how mood plays in. And it is usually gradual. It's usually not one thing, although we know a lot of people who, you know, got, I'm putting that in air quotes, got long COVID, which is, by the way, been around for decades. It's called post-viral inflammatory syndrome. Like we've already known about it. It's just we gave it a fun name for the media called lone COVID, that immediately leads to low mood, low energy, low libido, all the lows, plus irritability overwhelm because your body's so inflamed. It can't, everything is now too much for the body. When you're in survival mode, you're not focusing then on thriving. And so everything makes the shift. You don't have the same get up and go, the same interest in life. You don't look forward to vacations or set big goals for yourself because all you can do is get through the day. And I was there. I mean, I was literally there for a decade. And so I totally get that and empathize with my clients. There's no hope for the future because the present is so dim.
Philip Pape 38:49
Yeah. And anybody who has any, anybody who has experience with a physical ailment, let's say I have personal experience with shoulder issues where you can't train or you can't do this or you're limited in life, we know that it cascades to mental issues and your mental health. So it totally makes sense. Even when it's deep inside, almost hidden inside you, except it's not hidden inside you because you're listening to this podcast and Steven's telling you how to how to read the signs. So leading to the case.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 39:19
But now that the mind's feeling it, it sends signals back to the body and it makes you even worse. So that's why it's a vicious cycle because your psychology affects your physiology, like your physiology affects your psychology. And so that is why we need to work on both. But if it didn't start in the mind, which most likely it didn't, it started most likely in the nervous system or the proprioception of the body. That is ultimately where we need to figure it out, which will then help the mind. And yes, in the short term, the ashwagandhas, the phospholocerines, the Lthenines for calming, or the rhodiolas and liquor shrub, et cetera, for the getting going, great. You can use those, but they're not underlying root causes, right? Because you don't have a chaga or liquor shrug shortage, right? That wasn't that wasn't the cause.
Skin, hair, and biological age
Dr. Stephen Cabral 40:06
So, but they're good. Don't get me wrong. I definitely, Ayurveda's recommended them, so has TCM for thousands of years. Who am I to go against that? What I'm just saying is we need to figure out what the real issues are in terms of the deficiencies and toxicities.
Philip Pape 40:18
100%. We want to flip that around too and take that vicious cycle and make it a positive upward spiral, which because it goes the other way too, which is great. So the final signal, skin, hair, and nails, it's an interesting one. I was listening to, oh geez, probably it was my wife listening to a podcast with a an aesthetician and talk. They asked her, you know, do guys, most guys you talk to care about anything you you care about? They're like, pretty much no. Like guys will just use shampoo as soap, and they don't most of them don't think about their skin and hair now. So I always see something like this, and I like want to kind of put it to the bottom, but I know it's super important as well as a symptom and a signal. And I want to understand why.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 40:56
Yeah, so it's interesting because again, I'm probably like a lot of guys, I don't have a seven-step face protocol. I like to get in and get out of the bathroom as you know, as quickly as possible. But that doesn't mean that how we appear in the mirror is not a signal for what the inside of our body looks like. Meaning the more inflammation, which by the way, inflammation always has a root cause, and the more degeneration or catabolism taken on inside of the body shows itself on the outside. So if we have, and again, losing your hair is not a sign of poor health. I just want people to know that. It can be, but there are many people due to genetic presusceptibility, androgenic alopecia, which is the specific type of convert, higher conversion to DHT, it doesn't mean that you're unhealthy. But like I said, but it can be that that is something to look at. But when your skin starts to really wrinkle and thin out, and you start to get age spots or skin tags or things like that, they are real signs that inside the body there is damage and you're not repairing it as quickly as you could. Now, do we all get wrinkles? Yes, without a doubt. Does all of our skin get a little bit thinner? No matter what. By the time now, this might change by the time you and I get to 80, but for right now, all of us age and we can't stop it. We can slow it. So what we try to do is just say, well, what does help with collagen production? What does help with inflammation inside of the body? And hopefully then we are not looking our age. That's really about like I don't have a particular issue with people getting older. I'm not one of those individuals. I'm gonna get older and I'm totally okay with that. But I don't need to be older than my time, and it is probably an expression of my biological age because they show people that look older, they have an older biological age than their chronological age or at least a one-for-one. My goal is to always keep my biological age at least a decade younger than my chronological age. I so far have been able to keep it at about 15 years younger. Now, maybe with a viral illness or something like that, it might change for those months or so because that does actually take a hit on the body, but you recover and that's what you want to maintain. So let's say that your skin, sorry, let's say that your hair doesn't grow very quickly, or your nails don't grow very quickly. That's often a sign of catabolic nature, low vitamin mineral potentially content, low protein intake, et cetera. So I do, or even low thyroid. So I like to share with people these are signals, not that we need to, you know, try to, as they say now, look smacks or anything like that, but do things that are beneficial more for the inside than the outside. All the creams and all that are not going to help too much in the long run. What really matters is what's going on underneath the skin.
Philip Pape 43:41
So give us one or two of those, right? You mentioned protein intake. Let's just maybe mention one foundational thing that a lot of our listeners are probably eating enough protein, but maybe not. One of those, and then maybe one that's a little more counterintuitive or people aren't aware of.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 43:54
Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of people are going to get their protein requirements met, and this might be controversial. Commercial at about 0.6 grams per gram of body weight, that will go up the more you train. And it will go up, like you'll do it higher if you're on a low carb diet. And it will go up if you're an athlete. So, like again, I have some people at one gram per pound of body weight. They're athletes, they're doing specific things. Okay. But we do need to make sure that that's at least met. On a 160-pound person, it's still 100 grams. And a lot of people are only getting 50 to 60 grams. So certainly they're not getting enough, right? So we need a certain amount of protein to meet our requirements. And the more we train hard, the more that we need to recover, the more protein we need. That makes sense. Okay. So we have that. Then we do really need not a specific amount of carbohydrates, enough to meet our needs, but we need the brightly colored fruits and vegetables because they provide the polyphenols that ultimately improve overall inflammation in the body. So that's really important. And then fats, fats vary widely, part of it based on genetics, part of it based on metabolism. And that can be anywhere from 10% to 30% of your diet. Again, it varies on some people. Now, of course, if you're on a keto diet, you're at like 70%. But I would say, and I would argue all day long, that that's not a great long-term diet. Maybe you use it in the short term, but not long term. So it is balanced, but it's really healthy, clean proteins, brightly colored fruits and veggies, and then quality fats. And the best quality fats, without a doubt, are olives, olive oil, and avocados. So you can eat other fats, not that you can't, nuts and seeds, great, et cetera. And you'll get fat from meat. You don't need to add more necessarily there. But the mono and saturated fats are one of the best things that we can do for overall heart and inflammation of the body.
Philip Pape 45:33
Yeah. I can't argue with any of that. And we were joking how I first heard you on Mind Pump. And I'm, you know, those guys are all about balanced and macros and everything. And, you know, the it's nice to hear these concepts repeated again just for intake because people tend to be confused. But that 0.6, 0.7 grams per pound of protein, 30% of fats, of calories from fat, you know, mono and polyunsaturated fats, you know, unlimit your saturated fats. And then carbs are great. And we love carbs, especially if you're trying to build muscle, but definitely have the fibrous, colorful fruits and vegetables in there. Love it. Okay. Good stuff.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 46:03
I just want to say carbs are the only thing that cut cortisol. Right. So, like, yes, if you want to look at like if you're stressed and you're low carb, that's a recipe for just destroying your thyroid and further aggravating your adrenals and poor sleep. You have a little carbs at dinner, sleep's already better. So it's like, because it helps produce more serotonin and GABA. And so, you know, all that calms the nervous system. So carbs shouldn't be the enemy. I'm like, I mean you may be on there as well, but like on an island over here being like carbs aren't the enemy, you know? And so, because when you look at like you legitimately unbiased, well, here's the thing: if your main goal is body transformation, I get it. You're gonna go higher protein, higher fat, a little lower carbs. Totally get it. I've been doing that for years with my clients, right? So makes sense. But ultimately, if it's about wellness and longevity and you don't need to be single-digit body fat, we can start to look at it a little bit differently. We say, okay, well, if max fat's about 30% and protein is about 20% of the diet, because like just depending on how many calories you're eating, okay, then what's
The weekly rhythm reset action
Dr. Stephen Cabral 47:00
carbs? Well, we just do the 50%. Oh, 50%.
Philip Pape 47:02
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 47:03
Exactly, right? And then it could just be lower glycemic and it could be veggies, and anyway. So, but yeah, that's that really is. If you just it's I know it's a generalization. Now we're looking at the Mediterranean diet, which is has the most foundation around it, and you can just tailor that for your cut your specific needs.
Philip Pape 47:20
Okay, maybe the last thing here then is you know, people are hearing all this, you've got all these signals. Is there anything someone can start with this week to maybe make it less overwhelmed if they're feeling stressed hearing this, like, oh my God, everything's wrong with my body? It's let's flip it around. No, these are things you can learn about your body. And and and there's these just five things. How can people start this week and take one action that would really benefit them?
Dr. Stephen Cabral 47:41
Well, if we put sleep in the superposition where everything gets better if you get good sleep and everything's worse if you get terrible sleep that night, then we have to talk about sleep first. So, what I say is this, and I'm not the first one to mention it, but three, two, one sleep formula is a great framework. Three hours before bed, no more eating. Two hours before bed, stop drinking any fluids, maybe just a little bit with your supplements if you take any before bed. And then one hour before bed, no more blue light. Blue light blocking glasses, but really you got to turn the lights off unless they're like wrap around blue light glasses. And then, you know, read a good book or something like that, or meditate or breath work, anything to calm the central nervous system is excellent. So, what our clients do is basically in an ideal world, I know we don't all live in an ideal world, stop eating around six, seven if you have to. Don't eat again for 14 hours. Most of our clients, the perfect formula is six at night to eight in the morning. By eight in the morning, you're getting going. You need to fuel the day. They eat at eight, around 12:30, around 5:30. And like it's a nice formula for three meals per day. Glucose levels might rise a little bit, then they fall before the next meal, up, then down a little bit. Now, for me, I do a peri-workout nutrition shake, which is late afternoon, only like an hour away from my dinner, like right before it. But that's then customized for you. That's what I'm saying. You have a framework, like the Mediterranean diet, and then you customize it. Like I follow the Mediterranean diet for the most part, but I don't eat a lot of bread, right? So it's like you don't have to, that doesn't have to be part of your diet, right? You can eat other whole grains if you would like. So that is my biggest takeaway for people is that you need a rhythm to your day. When you eat, when you go to bed, when you wake up, once you start to create a rhythm, your body knows what's coming next. You automatically start to have more energy, even if there's other things still off in the body. So creating a rhythm is my top recommendation.
Philip Pape 49:25
I love that. Yeah, it creates that safe environment, that predictable environment, a routine structure, just so many benefits. Love that. Steven, this has been awesome. I'm glad we were able to get through those. I want to connect people with you in the best way possible so they can then learn more, continue to implement, continue to take action, and improve their lives. Where can they do that?
Dr. Stephen Cabral 49:42
Yeah, I appreciate that. So it's stephencabral.com, just my name, Steven with a pH. You'll find the new book there, the podcast, the Cabral Concept, social media, all of those things. And for me, I just love to teach. So if you can you want to learn more, you can check out the book, you can check out the podcast, and of course, you can let us know if there's any questions where we are here to help. But I appreciate everything that you do in your community and spreading what I believe to be the truth. I think we're on the same page for the majority of things. And I think it's all really backed by science without any hype. You know, there's no real like marketing hype behind us. Like it's not, it's not a special diet, it's not a special workout program. We can customize it for you, but these are the things that we know to truly work.
Philip Pape 50:21
Yeah, education number one, I learned today. So that's one of my goals as well, selfishly. And I'm glad the listener can learn a ton and takeaway today. So thank you again, Steven, for coming on the show. We'll send folks to stephencabral.com, put that in the show notes, and it's a true honor and pleasure.
Dr. Stephen Cabral 50:35
Thank you, Philip. Appreciate you.

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Brain Aging and Barbells (How Lifting Weights Slows Cognitive Decline) | Ep 474

Can lifting weights slow how fast your brain ages? A new study used brain scans to measure exactly that. The results show that resistance training is a uniquely beneficial tool for brain health that works through different pathways than cardio. Lifting weights can make the brain test younger on functional MRI, and the benefits may keep compounding even long after you train.

Can lifting weights slow how fast your brain ages?

A new study used brain scans to measure exactly that. The results show that resistance training is a uniquely beneficial tool for brain health that works through different pathways than cardio.

Lifting weights can make the brain test younger on functional MRI, and the benefits may keep compounding even long after you train.

Learn what brain age measures, why the prefrontal cortex matters for Alzheimer's and cognitive aging, the muscle-to-brain signaling system activated by strength training, and how heavy lifting compares to moderate intensity for protecting the brain after 40. Plus a quick self-check for strength-related dementia risk, especially after 40.

Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to lift heavy, build muscle, lose fat, and stay strong and sharp for decades.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Lifting weights and brain aging
0:47 - Dementia risk and strength training over 40
3:58 - Aerobic exercise and the hippocampus
6:00 - Prefrontal cortex and muscle signaling
7:48 - Recent study and brain age scans
10:21 - Brain age gap and dementia risk
11:30 - Results across both lifting intensities
13:12 - Myokines, irisin, and BDNF
16:57 - How to build skills for lifting weights
18:30 - Lifting protocol for brain health
20:45 - Entry points for new lifters
24:15 - Grip strength and dementia risk

Lifting weights and brain aging
Philip Pape 0:00
If you've heard for years that aerobic exercise is what protects your brain from dementia, a brand new randomized controlled trial might give you a new perspective. One year of lifting weights made people's brains test almost two years younger on a functional brain scan. And then the effect kept growing for a full year after the training stopped. And the brain regions involved are not the same ones targeted by cardio. Today I'm walking you through what is happening inside your skull with your brain when you lift weights, why it works through pathways more associated with lifting weights than cardio, and a dead simple lifting protocol with the most evidence behind it if you're trying to improve your brain age. Welcome
Dementia risk and strength training over 40
Philip Pape 0:47
to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape. And if you are aging, which we all are because we can't go back in a time machine, especially if you're over 40, over 50, you know, I'm 45 years old. My grandmother had Alzheimer's. There's dementia in our family, there's dementia risk in my genetics. And you, maybe in the back of your head, there's a worry about dementia or Alzheimer's. And maybe it's a parent or grandparent that has it. You have personal experience. Maybe it's, you know, just you walk into a room and you forget why you walked in, or somebody asks you a question, and you forget what you were going to say. Maybe it's all the headlines about Alzheimer's and the anxiety behind that. And every time you, you know, hit the Google machine about what to do about it, a lot of the advice is super generic because a lot of this is cutting edge right now. The research into Alzheimer's, and a lot of it is more bio more about the biology and the pharmaceuticals and things like that. Or you see advice like, hey, you've got to just move more, you've got to walk more, you've got to run more. You know, just general, generic, kind of worthless advice, in my opinion. And so I'm all for encouraging people to move. I definitely think the vast majority of the older population is way too sedentary, and it has led to the frailty and the lack of strength and also often lack of function, polypharmacy, you know, all the things we're trying to avoid in general, but it also affects your brain massively. You know, things like muscle mass affect your brain massively. We're going to be talking about lifting weights today, but really the brain is so important. I mean, just doing this podcast and the work I do and being an engineer and all that, having a family, trying to solve problems, wanting to live a long life, wanting to lift weights. I'm like, if I didn't have my brain, where would I be? And the research on resistance training and the brain has been building over the last few years. I'd say the last decade and a half, uh, we've seen some more studies. And there's a study that came out a few months ago that's really strong evidence, yet again, I will say, that lifting weights uniquely does something for your brain that nothing else, including aerobic exercise, can replicate. And it's not just like one area of your brain, like the hippocampus, it's not just memory. It's it's how the front of your brain kind of wires together, the whole, you know, neurostructure of the brain, if you will, if that's even a proper word. Forgive me, I'm gonna butcher a lot of probably fundamental science here for the neurofolks out there, but I'm gonna do my best. So today I'm gonna walk you through that study. I'm gonna show you the mechanisms that make it work, and I'm gonna give you a lifting protocol that is evidence-based that can go along with all of this. And then stick around to the end because I'm going to share a 30-second self-test that might give you a little bit of a read on your own dementia risk having to do with this topic. I'll tell you the muscle metric that we really care about the most, a statistic from one of the biggest cognitive aging studies ever done, a specific stat that you want to care about, and then what to do if you don't like what the information is telling you.
Aerobic exercise and the hippocampus
Philip Pape 3:58
What do we need to do differently, guys? Okay, so I'm gonna give you a little history here because this is one of those situations where I think the advice is probably outdated or there just isn't good advice. So, starting in the early 2000s, a group of researchers led by Art Kramer at the University of Illinois, they ran a series of randomized trials and they showed that aerobic exercise, especially walking, increased the size of the hippocampus in older adults. Now, that's the part of your brain that handles the formation of memories. And then their 2011 study in adults over 60 found that one year of walking grew the hippocampus 2%, which is very meaningful when the typical trajectory with age is a one to two 1 to 2% shrinkage per year. And so that study and a bunch like it became the foundation for the exercise protects your brain message that you hear everywhere now. And that's a good message, right? Walking is great, cardio is great. I'm definitely not anti-any of that. We need to move more. Almost everybody listening to this podcast probably has to move more in the right ways, let alone also lift weights. But where I think a lot of this gets oversold, which could be detrimental, let's say, is that, you know, because it's easy to standardize aerobic exercise and research and it gets more studied than lifting. And because the assumption is, okay, the brain is all about blood flow and oxygen delivery. So of course cardio is going to be aligned with that. I would say the resistance training side just didn't get studied to the same level for a long time. And so, you know, it's it's more of an omission, let's just say, or a lack of study. It's kind of like women's health, you know, where there's a lack of a lot of information because certain populations of women just aren't being studied. So I would say there are three things I want to challenge with some of the research to date so that we can lead into talking about the topic. The first one is the brain is really, really complicated. It isn't just one tissue, right? It's
Prefrontal cortex and muscle signaling
Philip Pape 6:00
a very complex structure that we still don't know a lot about. And the hippocampus is one part of it. And I think, you know, looking at the research, cognitive aging and the hippocampus has been tied together quite a bit. But there's also the prefrontal cortex, and that's right behind your forehead, a different, completely different part from the hippocampus. That part handles decision making, planning, your working memory, it's called, and impulse control. And it's also the part that we look at that tends to fail early and the first thing that goes in Alzheimer's, as well as in just normal cognitive aging. And it responds to different stimulus in the hippocampus. So again, now we we add to some of the nuance. The second thing I want to challenge is that muscle, muscle mass is just incredible and does things to your body that we did not know about 10 years ago. For example, when you contract your muscle against load, against resistance, it releases proteins called myokines into your bloodstream. Now, myokines by themselves are incredible. Some of those proteins cross the blood-brain barrier. Some of them support the growth and survival of brain cells. We have discovered an entire muscle-to-brain signaling system we didn't know existed not long ago. And it's primarily activated by lifting weights and having muscle mass. So, and this is just a tiny scratching the surface. I'm gonna do an entirely separate episode soon, very soon. It's on my list, about why you need to bring build muscle and it and it's gonna cover the holistic view of it, you know, well beyond just general health and fitness. The third thing I'm gonna challenge is, or not challenge, the third thing I want to bring up is that we now do have resistance training studies. And I'm gonna walk you through the new one that I mentioned earlier. So here we go.
Recent study and brain age scans
Philip Pape 7:48
The study is a Danish trial published in the journal GeroScience in February. So February 2026, I'm recording this in late May 2026. It's out of a group called the LISA study. LISA stands for Live, Active, Successful Aging. And I did come across this study again through Bill Campbell's Body by Science Research Review. I love that guy. I love Bill. He was on Lane Norton's podcast recently too. That's a great episode you guys should check out. And if you don't subscribe to his review or really any reviews and you're into this stuff, consider it because it's a good way to get the latest and greatest studies that's kind of filtered through some of the good uh evidence-based academic guys today. So, anyway, Bill Campbell's been on the show. He's a great science communicator, and it was him, his review that turned me on to this. So, what they did is they took 309 adults aged 62 to 70, they randomized them into three groups for an entire year. Okay. Group one had heavy resistance training three times a week on machines, and it was supervised, so they were working in the 70 to 85 percent of their one rep max range. And they did six to 12 reps per set. Okay, so good heavy traditional resistance training. Group two did moderate resistance training, so they did mostly bands and body weight, and it was just one supervised session a week, plus two at home, in the 50 to 60 percent rep range or yeah, one RM. So lighter, right? Light, lighter work. And then group three was the non-exercising control group. They were just told to keep doing what they're doing. And so they did this for a year, they trained for a year, or didn't train for a year, depending on which group, and then they stopped and then they checked everyone again later. Oh no, then they checked everyone a year after that. So it's like a two-year arc to the study. Now, here's the wild part, okay? They didn't just measure strength or body composition, they actually put everyone in an MRI scanner and they ran a machine learning model on their brain scans. And the model had been trained already on over 2,400 other brains. It looks at how different regions of the brain communicate with each other. So the patterns of functional connectivity between the brain, and then estimates how old the brain looks compared to a typical person of that chronological age. And then the difference is called the brain age gap. So I wanted to set it up this way so you guys know this is some pretty serious science. It's not just some random, you know, DNA test or something like that. Now, I want to explain
Brain age gap and dementia risk
Philip Pape 10:21
why this matters. I'm gonna let me slow down on this for a bit. Okay, so first, the brain age gap. Let's just explain that real quick. It's been linked in multiple large studies to dementia risk, to mortality, to Alzheimer's risk. There's a 2025 paper that looked at the UK Biobank. This is over 38,000 people, and they found that every one-year increase in brain age gap was associated with a 16% higher Alzheimer's risk and a 12% higher all-cause mortality risk. So a younger-looking brain is actually a healthier brain when it comes to things like dementia Alzheimer's. Okay, so back to the study. They scanned everyone, they ran the model, you had the two-year time frame. So, what were the results? All right, the heavy lifting group, their brain age dropped by 1.4 years after the first year of training. The moderate group, it dropped by 1.39 years, so almost exactly the same. So 1.4, 1.39. So it's 1.4. And then the control group had no change. So both lifting groups at both intensities, they they
Results across both lifting intensities
Philip Pape 11:30
cut a year and a half of their measured brain age a year later, you know, within a year. And then I would say one of the surprises from the research is that when they checked again a year later, after everyone stopped the formal training, the brain age reductions actually grew. So the heavy group was now even younger with their brain, 1.8, 40 years younger. The moderate group was 2.26 years younger. So the brain kept getting younger after they stopped lifting. This is just so good. I mean, think about that for a second. Okay, it wasn't just the benefits in the moment or right after they were done, but they continued, they compounded. How often do we talk about that principle when it comes to health and how much good you're doing for yourself by starting now? It's never too late. And then there's another piece of data I want to give you for the practical stuff today, in that the researchers looked at which brain regions change the most. The heavy lifting group, only the heavy lifting group, right? Not the moderate, definitely not the control group, only the heavy lifting group showed significantly increased functional connectivity in a big cluster of brain regions, primarily the prefrontal cortex, the exact part of the brain that handles executive function, working memory, decision making. Like we mentioned earlier, the part that tends to degrade first in aging, in dementia, in Alzheimer's. So both intensities of lifting weights helped reduce the brain age. And then only heavy lifting also reshaped the connectivity of the prefrontal cortex. And that's gonna be useful when we come back to the protocol a little bit later in this episode.
Myokines, irisin, and BDNF
Philip Pape 13:12
So let's talk about why this works. I think the mechanisms are really cool to understand. This is where I nerd out, and I hope you enjoy this podcast for this reason. Muscle is an endocrine organ. It's an endocrine organ, something that we didn't even really frame it as like a decade ago. When you do a heavy set of squats or rows or pulldowns or whatever, your muscle fibers contract and release a bunch of signaling proteins into your bloodstream. I mentioned the myokines earlier. And the two that get the most attention right now in brain health research specifically are irisin or ericin, I think it's ericin, I-R-I-S-I-N, and cathepsin B. So iricin is really, again, I don't know if I'm pronouncing these right, guys. So iricin is released from the contracting muscle and crosses the blood-brain barrier. And in animal studies, boosting the levels of iricin in your brain actually retrieves memory or recovers, helps memory recover in Alzheimer's models. And in humans, erizin levels in the cerebrospinal fluid are actually lower in people with Alzheimer's. This was, I think this was published in Nature Medicine in 2019, if you want to look it up. Cathepsin B is another myocine and also crosses the blood-brain barrier. It directs directly supports the birth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. So that's what we call neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells in adulthood, and it's driven by muscle contraction. I mean, that is so cool. I'm smiling as I record this because I just love how we have control over this, guys. We really do. Just by using your body as it's meant to. And I think this paper was from cell metabolism in 2016. So these are legitimate publications, legitimate scientific groups, you know, oftentimes, well, these aren't randomized controlled trials, but they're high quality, let's just say. And then there's BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. You probably heard about this on lots of different podcasts. I've talked about it on the show before. It's like miracle growth for your brain. Other than maybe that's a bad analogy because then we think of pesticides and stuff. Don't think of that. It's like steroids for your brain. That's not a good analogy either. Anyway, it supports the survival of neurons, and it also supports the growth of new connections between neurons. There was a 2024 meta-analysis of 35 randomized trials in older adults, and they found that resistance training raised the resting BDNF levels with an effect size larger than aerobic exercise did. Okay. So the mechanism, like summary, it goes as follows. If we would put all this together, lifting weights tells your muscle to release these chemicals, these myokines. Those chemicals tell your brain to grow. Aerobic exercise, right? Cardio does some of this too, but not all of it and not always to the same degree. And the prefrontal cortex connections and structure, that seems specifically responsive to heavy mechanical load from resistance training. So not only lifting weights, but making sure it's at a high enough level, which is interesting because I've been talking about osteoporosis as well and how some of the benefits of preserving bone density come from higher loads. So it's not just about hypertrophy. If all you care about is muscle size, fine. A lot of this wouldn't necessarily apply. But if you care about the other 90% of things that affect your health and dementia, brain risk, all of this, then lifting heavy occasionally could actually be its own unique benefit. So doing cardio for your brain, no longer the whole picture, right? There's this entire signaling system activated by resistance training and muscle mass. And this is just one study that's a pretty good piece of evidence that lifting weights is good for your brain.
How to build skills for lifting weights
Philip Pape 16:57
Speaking of lifting weights as brain medicine, if you need a little bit of help with lifting, how to lift, how to progress, how to support your lifting with your nutrition and the other things that support your brain and your lifestyle, everything from sleep to stress, whether you're in perimenopause, menopause, over 40, dealing with hormonal changes, you've tried things before and they don't work, or what you did in the past doesn't work anymore. That is what I created Eat More Lift Heavy for. This is our six-month program. It walks you through building skills one week at a time, and we help you hit your goals in a sustainable way so you can maintain them. Not only that, by the end of the program, we will have taught you how to judge your own data and approach so you really never need a coach again. That is the ultimate goal. And if you want to accelerate your results far more than what you can get just by absorbing information on this podcast, I encourage you to check it out. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. The reason I bring it up in this episode is because, you know, the women and men in EMLH are not lifting to look a certain way necessarily. Of course they want to look better and they're going to look better. I mean, they like the muscle, but the deeper motivation is what we're talking about today. They want to be sharpened to their 60s, their 70s, their 80s. They want to read books and play with their grandkids. They want to keep their independence. And lifting heavy, now heavy is a subjective term. We can get into that on another episode, is how we do that. So eat more liftheavy.com. Check it out.
Lifting protocol for brain health
Philip Pape 18:30
Now we're gonna get to the protocol, right? So you've heard the study. What does the research show? What are the mechanisms? Now what do you do? And the answer is pretty simple. You want to lift weights at least twice a week. Three if you can swing it. I generally tell people three is a good solid minimum to get the most of the results, but two will get you a lot of results. And honestly, one will get you far more results than zero as well. But I really hope you strive for at least two, if not three. Anything less than twice a week from the brain perspective, we're just not sure. But in general, I would say you need a bit of frequency to stimulate your muscles to grow, to get enough mechanical tension from the volume, et cetera. Okay, so that's the amount per week. I would say full body sessions are perfectly fine and sometimes quite effective as opposed to splitting it until you get a little bit more advanced. Today we're talking about brain health. So I want something that is, I'll say the minimum you will absolutely do the shortest sessions you could do, again, at a minimum, to get your muscles moving and also to give them the load they need. And so this is where things like compound movements, variations of squatting and deadlifting, you know, hip hinge, pushing, pulling are hugely beneficial. You don't have to do the power lifting variations of those, like the conventional deadlift per se. I'm gonna do another episode in the future talking about why most lifts are safe if you do them right. So that's not the concern here. It's just a function of what you want to do and why. As far as the actual programming, that is an episode in and of itself. But if you're working in, say, the six to 12 rep range and the last two to three reps feel genuinely hard and you are, you know, two or three reps shy from failure, or even as little as zero to one if it's a smaller movement, that's gonna give you the mechanical tension you need to support strength and muscle growth. And so if you could do two or three sessions a week, 30 to 45 minutes, it's a great protocol to start with. And that is the whole thing. Now, obviously, I have lots more resources behind this. If you join Eat More Lift Heavy, we give you
Entry points for new lifters
Philip Pape 20:45
all sorts of training templates. We give you the protocols on breathing and bracing and adjusting programming and all that, but that is the basics. Now, you might be saying, Philip, I am listening to your show. I'm 55, I've never lifted a barbell, or I've never lifted out lifted weights, or I'm really not sure what to do in the gym. It sounds intimidating. All right, two things. First of all, the LISA subjects or the participants in the LISA study were 62 to 70 years old, and the moderate lifting group that still got a benefit from the brain age. And remember, they were using bands and body weight. They weren't even using barbells or going to the gym. So it's still far, far, far better than not lifting weights. That's that's the first thing I'm gonna say is like, what is your entry point? It doesn't have to be barbell squats per se. The entry point is like showing up and getting some load that is difficult for you so that you can grow and difficult in a good way, right? It challenges you and you're gonna get stronger and progress over time. Start where you are. Number two, I'm gonna say that heavy, heavy is relative. Heavy doesn't mean a ton of weight or more than the next the person next to you, or you know, strong for your body size or weight. No. Heavy means it's challenging for you on this day, and for someone. Who's never lifted, you've got to test that out as you get started. It's okay to go too light and then realize, oh, that's too light and easy. And now I get it. I get what Philip's saying. I need to get to where I don't have too many reps left in the tank. Okay. And there's lots of ways to test that and push that and ever. But as long as you're progressing on the same lifts over time, you're going to be able to find where that is and start to hit those walls that make it feel heavy enough where you know you're at that point. All right. Now that said, remember the heavy group got an extra advantage with the prefrontal cortex. All right. So there are definitely advantages to lifting heavy loads, and there's ways to do it safely. And there's a payoff to all that, including bone density, including strength, et cetera. Function, we can go on. But I want you to start where you're at at least two or three times a week, full body, compound movements, make the last few reps hard. Do that for six months. And I'd love to hear how that affects your brain, especially if you're on the older side and starting this out in your 60s, 70s, maybe 80s. I mean, look, people have built muscle mass in their 90s who didn't lift before. We've seen it in some of the literature. Before we close out, I promised you a 30-second self-test for your own dementia risk. I'm going to share that in a second. But, you know, quickly just another reminder: if today's topic landed for you, if you've been hearing me talk about lifting weights for your brain and for your bone health, for body composition, for visceral fat, all of that stuff. And you're like, okay, where do I even start? That is what Eat More Lift Heavy is for. I mentioned it earlier. I mentioned it one more time. Just check it out. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. It's a nutrition and training program that includes human coaching, includes live calls, and includes tons of support and accountability, but it helps you build skills. It doesn't just help you get quick weight loss, it helps you build skills. And that is the point. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, take a look, see if it fits. Doors always open. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. So here is a finding from a study called the Rush Memory and Aging Project. This is this is the thing I promised you, okay? Researchers followed over 900 older adults for four years and they measured their muscle strength at the beginning. And then every one
Grip strength and dementia risk
Philip Pape 24:15
standard deviation increase in muscle strength was associated with a 43% lower risk of developing Alzheimer's. Now, the most, I'll say accessible, the easiest way to measure your own muscle strength is grip strength, in terms of if you're trying to compare it to uh charts and data points and studies and things like that. It's not something that I train. I don't ever, I've never told anybody to train them grip strength. Some old school, you know, factory workers and manual laborers and like our grandpa probably had stronger grips just from their day-to-day job. And it predicts a lot of things, including dementia, mortality, recovery from illness. I know that when I had my, what was it? One of one of the first surgeries I had, they had me test my grip strength later on. I think it was for my shoulder, right? For my rotator cuff, uh, by squeezing this device. And I remember how, you know, the physical therapist is like, okay, we never have to do this again. You've got more than sufficient grip strength. And that's because I had already trained for years before that point. I stayed strong. I started training after I had surgery right. And it's a good, you know, the fact that they're telling me to test that, and there's some expectation that some people will not have good enough grip strength tells you there's a link there. And you don't need a fancy device to do it, though. You can hang from a pull-up bar and see how long you can hold and then kind of like progressively overload that, if you will, which comes with strength. You can, you know, obviously, if you know that it's hard to open a jar or something on a good day, like that gives you a signal as well. There are grip strength little devices you can get, like at Amazon or whatever. But regardless, my point is you're not trying to fix your grip specifically. You're just trying to get stronger generally. And so if you start lifting, if you do it regularly, if you do all the different parts of, you know, exercise all the parts of your body, build that engine, your grip strength will also go up as well. But I'm just telling you that this is a good sign that if you feel like you have a very weak grip, you're probably not very strong and you have a lot of potential. That's that's where I'm going with that. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your muscle strength and muscle mass isn't just about looking good in the mirror, being generally healthy. It protects everything else, including your mind. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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The Satiety Diet (How to Lose Fat Without Fighting Hunger) | Ep 473

What does a fat loss diet look like when you build it around satiety (fullness) instead of restriction or willpower? The answer is based on the biology of post-diet hunger, 5 satiety levers that decide how full you are after a meal, and the targets you can set at your next meal.

What does a fat loss diet look like when you build it around satiety (fullness) instead of restriction or willpower?

The answer is based on the biology of post-diet hunger, 5 satiety levers that decide how full you are after a meal, and the targets you can set at your next meal.

Most fat loss attempts fall apart around week 5 or 6. The reason is rarely willpower. Hunger is a measurable physiological state that intensifies the longer and harder you diet, and most nutrition plans don't account for it.

This episode covers a study on hunger hormones that stayed disrupted a full year after dieting, the five satiety levers, from how calorie-dense your food is to how fast you eat it, and a simple way to audit your own meals for fullness without counting every calorie. It is built for adults over 40, especially women navigating perimenopause and menopause, who lift weights and want to lose fat in a way you can sustain

Ready to build a fat loss diet around fullness instead of willpower? Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to lose fat, build muscle, and manage their physique for life.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Hunger as the price of fat loss
3:11 - Hunger as a biological signal
5:30 - Hormones a year after a diet ends
9:06 - Engineering a diet for fullness
9:54 - Energy density and food volume
12:58 - Protein and spontaneous calorie intake
15:01 - Viscous fiber and gut hormones
17:20 - Eating rate and fullness
19:58 - Hyper-palatable foods and the supermarket
23:09 - How to design your satiety diet
24:45 - Satiety targets per meal and per day
27:18 - 2-to-3 swap rule for your worst meals
32:07 - Bonus: 200-calorie reality check

Episode Resources:

Download my favorite nutrition app MacroFactor and use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for an extended 2-week free trial

Hunger as the price of fat loss
Philip Pape 0:00
You've probably heard that along with fat loss comes some level of hunger, and that you have to sit with it sometimes, sometimes you have to push through, and it is the price of admission. I've seen many fat loss attempts fail because of this willing acceptance for hunger. And today I want to walk you through what a fat loss diet looks like when you instead design it around fullness. There are five big satiety levers that the research tells us can really, really help when it comes to adherence with your diet, which ultimately is the thing that will make you successful. So we're gonna go over that, the specific targets that you can hit at your next meal, and a 200-calorie reality check that's gonna change how you evaluate what is on your plate. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, founder of the Fitness Lab app, and today's episode comes from basically a lot of the misunderstandings I see relative to fat loss phases and appetite. If you're over 40, especially, if you're a woman in the perimenopause or post-menopause transition, you've probably run the following experiment. You decide to lose fat, you of course cut calories to go in a deficit, you have some level of discipline for the first few weeks, you're motivated, and then maybe around weeks five or six, the hunger starts to increase more and more. It gets really loud. You start thinking about or even obsessing about food more than you want to, and then you start to slip. You eat a little bit extra at night, maybe you sneak in a snack here or there. Maybe the foods that you go for are a little bit more calorie dense than you anticipated. And then it starts to stall or push back or slow down your fat loss phase or end it all together. And on one hand, yes, you should have some level of feeling of hunger or some appetite because your body is trying to draw from its energy stores, from its fat cells. And there's going to be hunger that comes along with that. There are a lot of hormonal changes that occur. But also, we shouldn't look at hunger as this like character test, you know, that we like, okay, you've just got to be in this massive level of hunger. That means it's working. That's the thing I hear all the time. It means it's working. This is a measurable physiological state that you should be in that scales with how long and how aggressive a deficit is. And that's fine, but why don't we work with that as best as possible and minimize the effects? Because a lot of you, the way you're eating, whether you're in a fat loss or not, is not really contributing toward the most satisfy or high satiety, I should say, full diet that will make fat loss a bit easier. And by easier, I mean not just that you get through and adhere. That's obviously very important, but you can manipulate the variables, like how aggressively you can go, and maybe you can then shorten the duration because you've made it a little bit easier on yourself, let alone some of the more aggressive experiments like a rapid fat loss phase, which we're gonna be covering in an upcoming episode as we revisit that topic.
Hunger as a biological signal
Philip Pape 3:11
So we're doing three things today. First, the actual biology of post-diet hunger, including a study where people were still hungrier and had altered hormones 12 months after the diet ended. Second, we're gonna talk about the five satiety levers. These are the big variables that research pops up when we think about why do some meals leave us full for many hours and some just don't satisfy us. And then that's when we lead to the midnight snacking or what have you. And then third, we're gonna give you some practical targets that you can set or target or audit for your next meal. I'm not talking about calories, macros, I'm talking about around satiety. And then at the end of this episode, I'm gonna share a 200-calorie reality check. These are just some different foods that are 200 calories each, so you can compare in your head differences in calorie density and nutrient density that will help you with fullness because that's the principle of all of this. All right, so let's start with the framing here that okay, fat loss requires hunger. Eat less, move more, push through the discomfort. You need to be in calorie deficit, energy balance, all that's great. And yet you've heard me talk about the value of behavior change where discipline and willpower are very difficult things to rely on and motivation, right? We don't want to have that. We want to kind of engineer our approach to work with the reality of the situation rather than trying to push through the reality. So when you treat hunger like a thing you have to have and a hat you you have to expect it during fat loss, it also becomes its own moral signal, which is interesting, right? Sometimes we talk about food as good or bad, but also I've heard I've seen on social media talking about hunger as like it's a sign of weakness if you can't outlast your hunger because that's necessary for the fat to come off. Now, this isn't always the framing. A lot of the framing is actually quite the opposite, like, oh, you're not gonna have any hunger at all, and you could lose fat so easily. Well, I think that does a disservice as well. Uh, but but hunger is not a moral thing either. It's just a biological output of your energy state, driven largely by hormones, driven by some other things, but primarily by hormones. And that it gets louder and louder the more that you restrict and the longer you restrict. It's a feedback signal. And for some of you, it's stronger than
Hormones a year after a diet ends
Philip Pape 5:30
others, right? We have brain-related genes. This is why the GLP1s, for some people, when they go off with them, they immediately go back to their prior behavior. And for others, it kind of they can titrate off or even change their behavior while on them. But anyway, I want to share a study with you. Okay, this is Smithran or Sumithran and their colleagues out of the University of Melbourne. And this is published in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 2011, so about 15 years ago. And it's it's a phenomenal piece of work, in my opinion. They took 50 overweight adults, put them on a 10-week diet, and they lost about 13 kilograms on average. Okay, so far, so good. Then they followed them for a full year. And what they found at the 12 months mark after the diet, a year after the diet ended, was almost every hormone that regulates hunger was still abnormal. So ghrelin, the hunger hormone, was still elevated. Leptin, the fullness and energy storage hormone, was still lower, uh, peptide YY, GLP1, cholecysokinin, all the natural satiety signals were all depressed from their previous state. And also the subjective hunger ratings were much higher than they were before the diet started. So that's 12 months after the diet. Now you think about that, the body was still acting like it was being starved, and the hunger wasn't going away. And these were people who were not actively dieting anymore, right? So this is interesting because it's a measurable state of biology, your biology or physiology that could seem to persist after a deficit ends. There's another piece of research I want to share here. It's Rosenbaum and Libel, and this is at Columbia University. And they've been doing some good obesity research for maybe the last three decades. They did some fMRI research that showed that your brain's response to food images literally changes after weight loss, where the reward regions light up more, the prefrontal uh control parts of the brain that say, like, you know, no thanks, I'm full, I'm I'm good, light up less. So when you've lost weight and then you, you know, go back, go past that bakery that you like the cannolis from, and I'm not talking from personal experience, am I? Uh, it's not that you've also be all of a sudden become weaker or something. It's that your brain is processing that smell of those foods with a little bit of a different signal than before. And when in the study they gave leptin to restore the leptin to pre-diet levels, the patterns normalize. So it was the biology, it was the hormones driving the behavior. Now you're like, oh my gosh, that means I shouldn't go into a fat loss phase. I shouldn't diet, I shouldn't lose weight, because then it's gonna be worse. Well, no. What do we do with this information? Obviously, you can lose fat. People do it all the time. I've worked, I've worked with people all the time, clients, people and eat more lift heavy that lose it, and they're actually far better off than when they started, both from a health perspective, but also in managing things like their hunger signals. What I am saying is that just trying to fight willpower is not gonna help you long term when other things are amplifying your hunger all the time, sleep, stress, changes to hormones and things. So I think the best move here is to design your diet so that you trigger less hunger per calorie of deficit in the first place, and you normalize these things and eat in a way in your diet that you would eat not in a diet. The only difference being some of these things are scaled down. Calories are scaled down, maybe a protein scaled up, maybe carbs are scaled way down during a diet, just to, you know, be in the proper energy
Engineering a diet for fullness
Philip Pape 9:06
balance. So if you want to engineer a diet for fullness, the question becomes so this is the title of the episode the satiety diet. What are the variables you have to manipulate? When you look at satiety research from the last 30 years, and I'll tell you, listening to a lot of other experts on this over the past couple years, it's very difficult to tease apart real conclusions. Let's just put it that way. It's it's a mess. Okay. But there are there's been a lot of activity in the last even five years that we can maybe look at. And it seems like five things I'm gonna talk about today really move the needle the most. And those five things are energy density, protein, viscous fiber, the rate at which you eat, and then what we call hyperpalatability. So we're gonna focus on those five
Energy density and food volume
Philip Pape 9:54
things. All right. So the first one is energy density, and this is the calories per gram of food. How many calories are packed in the same volume of food? Barbara Rolls at Penn State, she has been this, I guess, volumetrics person when we talk about volume, volumetrics for decades, really. She built this stream of research, what I'd call the seminal stream of research here. The bottom line is that humans eat to a relatively fixed weight of food per day. Interesting, right? Like we tend to want to eat the same quantity, physical quantity of food. We don't eat to a calorie target. We eat to a volume target, which means, by definition, hey, if you can lower the energy density of what's going in your mouth, what's on your plate, you can eat the same physical amount of food and ingest fewer calories without feeling deprived. Okay. Many of you are like, yeah, I've heard that before, or I know that. That's that seems to make sense. Well, what am I going to do in this modern food environment, right? No. So when we look at specific numbers, very low energy density would be considered less than 0.6 calories per gram. So what is that? Most non-starchy vegetables, that would be broth-based soups. That'd be fruits like melon and strawberries. That's very low energy. That's why I think broth-based soups, for example, are great during fat loss, you know, vegetable soups, fruits like berries. Okay. Then that's a very low. Now, low is 0.6 to 1.5. So that would include fruits, starchy vegetables, low-fat dairy, beans, whole grains, like cooked whole grains, lean meats. So now we're we're expanding to a lot of the wonderful, delicious whole foods we love to eat that include carbs, fats, or carbs and protein primarily, and a little bit of fat in there, but not much. Okay. So then medium energy density, we get up to one and a half to four calories per gram. This would be like the typical Western diet sandwich and meat and cheese zone. Okay. So you're starting to introduce more fats, more fatty forms of the different foods, higher fat dairy, you know, meats, et cetera. Then high energy density is like four to nine calories per gram. Now we're talking about processed foods like crackers, chips, cookies, but also whole foods like nuts and chocolate, which are very energy energy dense. And then the most energy dense is like pure oils, so pure fats and butter and things like that. That's nine calories per gram, which is just fat. Okay. Fat is nine calories per gram. So like a pure fat source is gonna be, by definition, the most energy dense. So if your daily average for your whole meals or your whole uh food log for the day is two to two and a half calories per gram, then you're gonna be eating a small physical amount of food for your calorie budget versus if it's like closer to one to two, right? And hopefully you're if you're and if you're sitting much higher than that, then then you've really got low-hanging fruit, pun intended, to go after here, right? And so these all matter because of things like stretch receptors and your gut hormones. So that's the first big lever, is simply energy density. Lever
Protein and spontaneous calorie intake
Philip Pape 12:58
two is protein, protein percentage. Now I know what you're thinking. You're like, okay, I lift weights, I already eat my protein. This isn't new. I hear about protein all the time. But I want to talk about the satiety data specifically here, okay? Let alone all the other benefits of protein, which we're going to have an episode soon about some counterintuitive aspects of protein, like, hey, you might be able to actually eat more protein, all things equal, and not gain weight or fat and actually lose fat. Anyway, that's beside the point. Let's talk about satiety. So there's a study by Wagel and colleagues in 2005. They took people from a normal diet at like 15% protein. You know, most people don't get very much protein, and they bumped them to 30% protein. But they said you could eat whatever you want, you just have to hit the protein. So all they're tracking is protein, hit your protein. Their spontaneous calorie intake dropped by 441 calories a day without any conscious restriction. The body just said, hey, I don't need as much food. I don't need as much food because you increased your protein. Now, if you look at the average American, you know, at around 15% of calories from protein, that's like the control group that was inadequate. So for many of you, if you're not deliberately upping your protein already, then this is a big lever. Okay. And the practical target we often talk about here is 0.7 to 1 grams per pound of body weight. But 0.7 is more than sufficient for most people, for the average person. If you like to eat more, if you want to eat more, if you can't eat more, go for it. Nothing wrong with it, unless it's so high that it crowds out carbs or fat. But it tends to be kind of on an average diet, eh, 30% of your calories. We don't think percentages for protein. I usually tell you, you know, grams per pound because it's gonna depend on your body size and your goal. But aiming for 30 to 40 grams per meal is usually the way to get there. And we often see that front loading that at breakfast can give you extra benefits. There's also the benefits of, you know, how much leucine you have and hitting muscle protein synthesis and all that. But all I care about here is total protein. Okay, so that's a good one to just to re uh iterate.
Viscous fiber and gut hormones
Philip Pape 15:01
Lever three is interesting. It's viscous fiber, viscous fiber, not just any fiber. Okay, we're talking about a high satiety diet, viscous fiber. Now, this is fiber that thickens the water in your gut. So this would be oats and beta glucan, which beans, legumes, uh, psyllium. You know, some of you actually do use cilium husk as a supplement, chia seeds, flax seeds. Okay. A 2019 meta-analysis by Sally and colleagues looked at the effect sizes of different soluble fibers on subsequent calorie intake. Guar gum had an effect size of negative 0.96, which is actually huge. Beta glucan was negative 0.42, pectin was negative 0.22. So you don't have to understand exactly what that means, just that they are highly correlated with reducing how much you eat subsequently. And when we look at the mechanism, viscous fiber slows the rate at which food empties from your stomach. So it slows gastric emptying, as they call it, and therefore your stomach stays full longer. It also slows the rise of blood glucose. Again, we've talked about eating more balanced meals that include fiber, and that tends to slow down your increase of blood sugar in addition to walking after meals. So as it ferments in your colon, it produces short-chain fatty acids that trigger your gut to release more GOP1, more peptide peptide YY. These are your natural fullness hormones. You know, the GOP1. We know that is the same thing that weight loss drugs are trying to replicate. And again, again, we we don't want to compare them to the drugs. The drugs are far more powerful in terms of the dose. But the average American gets not very much fiber at all, about I think 10 to 15 grams of fiber a day. And we want you at 25 to 40, you know, more for men than women, just due to size and how much you eat. And if you could aim for, let's say, eight to 15 of those from viscous sources, like if you want to be very specific based on this tip in your high satiety diet, look at foods that have higher viscous fiber and make those a per uh a good chunk of the fiber you get every day, not to mention increasing fiber in general. Don't do it overnight. If you get low fiber, don't go from low to super high. That could be not great on your gut. You know, titrate it up over, let's say, a
Eating rate and fullness
Philip Pape 17:20
week. All right, lever four is eating rate, how fast you eat, how fast food enters your body. And this is wildly underrated. And for those of us who love to shovel food down our mouths or love to eat while watching TV or looking at our phone or not eat mindfully, listen up because this could be your biggest lever. Ford and colleagues, they took pooled data across 327 foods and they found that unprocessed foods, so unprocessed foods are eaten at about 35 calories a minute, whereas processed foods are eating eaten at 54 calories a minute. Ultra processed foods at 69 calories per minute. So an ultra-processed meal will be eaten and go into your body twice as fast as a whole food meal. Why does that matter? Probably a little bit obvious, but let's get into it. Your gut takes about 20 to 30 minutes to send a fullness signal to your brain, like a true hey, I am full. Okay. If you front load 800 calories in like 12 minutes, then you're not gonna get that signal until you're already done eating, and now you're thinking of dessert. Okay. So this could this is gonna hit on both mindful eating and calorie density that we already talked about. There's a 2024 crossover trial out of Japan by Habano and colleagues, where they fed people the same calories and macros, same protein, fat, carbs, but in one week the food was ultra-processed, and in the other week it wasn't. So on the ultra-processed week, people ate 813 calories a day. So that's that's a lot of food, just you know, we're talking about the the one meal. And the mechanism behind that was the chewing frequency. There was fewer, there was less chewing, faster eating, and so they consumed more food. So the the lever here for you is really texture, solid versus liquid, intact food versus I'll say pureed or processed food, fibrous versions of food, whole grains and such versus refined foods. And then the mindful eating part as well, like setting your fork down between bites and not being distracted while you're eating. You know, I'm sorry, these are boring, like long-tested pieces of advice, but they're gonna work for slowing down your eating and increasing your fullness just from that. And look, when you're in fat loss and you're not eating very big meals, maybe not even as many meals, wouldn't it be nice to just actually enjoy what you're eating and not just scarf it down and be like, okay, now the hunger starts to hit and I'm trying to lose fat? So it's a very important one.
Hyper-palatable foods and the supermarket
Philip Pape 19:58
The last lever here for a high satiety diet is hyper palatabil hyper palatability. And this kind of overlaps the most of what people think of as junk food and highly processed food, but I want to be careful here because hyper palatable foods, okay, that's a term, I think it comes from Terra Focino at the University of Kansas, based on what I could discover. Hyperpalatable foods are foods that combine fat with sugar, fat with salt, or carbs with salt at specific concentration thresholds, right? Hence they are super palatable. They're so super delicious. Okay, we're we're separating this out from calorie density, which was lever one, even though there can be some overlap here. About 62% of items in the US food supply meet the definition of ult of hyper palatable. Okay, that's 62%, that's like two-thirds of what's in the supermarket, which isn't surprising if you go into a supermarket, but it's still insane. And when we talk about the food environment and engineered foods and the nutrition science and all that behind all this stuff, where the foods are engineered deliberately to bypass your fullness signals. And I think they're trying to even amp that up further since people are eating less on GLP1s, you know, without going into conspiracy theorists, capitalism and the drive to, you know, give people something that's delicious so they buy more of it. I mean, if we buy it, they're gonna make it, is what it comes down to. I'm not gonna blame them. If we're gonna buy it, they're gonna make it. Now, there's been research that that looks at, you know, when you control for energy density, that was lever number one, and then hyperpalatability, hyper palatability, it's not that foods are labeled as ultra-processed that's the problem. It's how it's engineered, one food's engineered versus the other. So, for example, some ultra processed foods are low in energy density and they're not hyperpalatable. And so I put them under the, I'll say, fine condition from a satiety perspective. And then some so called whole foods, whole foods like trail mix or granola are densely caloric. They have a lot of calories and they're engineered for palatability. And they will absolutely get past your fullness signals and you can eat too much of them very easily, which honestly is why people seek them out for going on a hike and having a lot of energy on your hike. It's easy to eat, doesn't fill you up too much, and you get a lot of calories. So if you're trying to lose fat, if you're trying to control for that, you've just got to be aware of hyper palatability in particular, independent of whether it's an ultra-processed food. So those are your five levers: energy density, protein, viscous fiber, rate of eating, and hyperpalatability. Palatability. Now, two meals with the exact same calories can produce wildly different hunger depending on how they score on these variables. A 500-calorie burger and fries versus a 500-calorie, say, chicken, beans, sweet potato vegetable plate are probably going to feel different. You're going to probably be hungry after the burger and fries. I mean, anybody who's ever eaten Chinese food probably feels hungry like an hour later. All right. So before I move into the practical fix here, I want to address something because I know what you're thinking.
How to design your satiety diet
Philip Pape 23:09
You're like, okay, this sounds great, but how do I figure out where my current diet falls on these levers? What do I do? How do I know if my protein percentage is where it needs to be, my average energy density, the hyperballiathy, all that? Well, I do want to mention something that we have. It's a program called Eat More Lift Heavy. It's 26 weeks of skill by skill by skill. And in phase one, we actually set up how you measure these things. Not just calories and macros, but measuring your fiber and energy density and really comparing it to some other things going on, including your biofeedback, like your hunger. And we don't, you don't have to track all of these things and look at all of them. All you have to do is log your food, compare it to how you're feeling, and see where the correlations might be, and then start to tweak the right variables. So that's something we help you with. Obviously, you can do these things on your own if you, you know, apply all these systems, if you have a system, but we give you that system. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. Um, you get human coaching in there. Carol and I are inside providing coaching. There's live calls. There's the one focus per week that you learn and apply and get accountability from. And we help you become independent when it comes to these things. And I'm all about that. That is my mission is to help teach all of you to become independent in this world without having to become a nutrition scientist. So go to eatmorliftheavy.com. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. By the way, when you go in there, you'll see there's something called dialed in, which is closer to a personalized one-on-one coaching experience we have as well. And honestly, I think it's far more affordable than typical,
Satiety targets per meal and per day
Philip Pape 24:45
a typical one-on-one coach because of the systems and tools we put in place. So go to eatmore liftheavy.com. All right, so now we have the five levers. How do you use them? I'm gonna give you some specific targets for these, and then you can decide. You know, do you want to track all of these? Do you want to go after one at a time? That's generally what I would recommend. Do you already know which one is the biggest lever that you could attack right now? So let's talk about the meal level for the targets. I would say 30 to 40 grams of protein per meal, eight to 12 grams of fiber per meal is gonna take you very far. And within that fiber, per today's episode, some of that being viscous fiber, like maybe aim for half of it to be viscous. So that the total energy density is ideally under one and a half calories per gram. You're like, I've got to do math. It's pretty simple. Like log it in your in your tracker. I love to use macrofactor. Please, if you want to support the show, download macro factor and use my code WIT's and weights, all one word, and you get your a nutrition summary there, and you can easily tell how many calories per gram based on the total gram weight of the food. And you don't have to do this every time. I would say do it occasionally to kind of audit yourself. Also, slow the rate you eat and don't have a ton of hyperpalatable foods, even though you can have some, because again, we don't demonize any particular foods on this show. There is no one bad food on the planet, not seed oils, not sugar, not any gluten, none of that. Okay. And we talked about that on a recent episode. Now, what about at the daily level? So that's at the meal level. You know, at the daily level, it really comes down more to your macros. Are you getting enough protein? Are you getting that 0.701 grams per pound? Are you getting enough fat? For many people, that's 20 to 30 percent of their calories, the rest of their calories from carbs. And then specifically within those carbs, are you getting a good chunk of fiber, 25 to 40 grams of fiber, depending on how much you need, and 8 to 15 of those as viscous. So that's on a daily level, which again, you could do it at the meal level, the daily level, whatever makes sense for you. This is something we help help you analyze on an individual basis and eat more lift heavy if you need that kind of support. But you're looking for the average daily energy density of your food, again, in that like 0.8 to 1.5 calories per gram range. And of course, you got to have enough sleep because I know we didn't even talk about that, and I was hesitant to do so, but sleep is gonna actually affect hunger a lot, a lot. All right, so the rule to apply this,
2-to-3 swap rule for your worst meals
Philip Pape 27:18
okay. I don't want you to get overwhelmed and panic that you gotta do this every single meal, every day, all the time. There's something what I call the two to three swap rule. Okay. Two to three swap rule. Audit your current diet, just audit it. Find the two or three meals that score the worst on these levers. So if you if you log for like a week, you've got probably 21 or more meals to choose from. And there's probably a few that you know are just like not as great when it comes to these things, like maybe they have a lot more fat or processed foods or something. And find the two or three worst meals. Heck, you could probably use AI now. Take the macrofactor export, throw it into AI and say, hey, do what Philip just suggested for me. Okay. And for many of you, it's gonna be breakfast where you've got like a granola bar with like the processed yogurt that doesn't have much protein, right? Or a lot of sugar in it or whatever. And again, sugar's not bad. It's just what crowds out what. Maybe it's a snack, right? So, hey, you went for a bag of crackers because they're sitting on the counter. Maybe it's lunch where you have a sandwich. We have our habits, don't we? We have our habits. So find the two or three meals and just replace those with versions that hit these different targets, right? If you're already eating great dinners, like maybe it's fish and some grains and vegetables, it's fine, right? Pick the worst ones and just upgrade them. That's how you kind of slowly shift the whole thing where you want to be. We're adding then the things you want. We're not saying what you have to cut out. So, a concrete example is like if you have this granola bar at breakfast or something equivalent of it, where it's hardly any protein, it's a ton of sugar, it's easy to consume super quickly. Well, swap that one out. Take a couple scrambled eggs with cottage cheese. And when I say with cottage cheese, oh, it's so great to combine them. Delicious, you'll get fluffy, almost like cheesy eggs with a lot more protein, or you can add egg whites, or you can have the cottage cheese on the side. I don't care. However, you want to eat it, and then a piece of fruit, for example. Right? We're talking about swaps here. We're not talking about going perfect and ideal or optimizing. No, we're just talking about swaps. And it's the same amount of calories, but now you've gone from, say, four grams of protein to 30 grams of protein. You've put in something that you have to chew, you've got some fiber from the fruit, the energy density of the meal drops. Now you hit like four of the five levers and you didn't add any calories. Now, sometimes you might add calories. So what? As I mentioned before, sometimes when you add protein, you actually consume fewer calories later in the day because of the satiety. So that's that's a big piece. And then the last thing I want to mention for this is like your mental model each day. Are you comfortably full? Particularly when you're at maintenance calories, like when you're not in a deficit. And then once you've got that set up successfully, I would do that before you ever you do a fat loss phase. Then in a fat loss phase, you probably have some mild hunger per meals between meals, which is fine. That's your biology, but it would be less than it would otherwise. And or it allows you to gain maybe go maybe more aggressively on the on the fat loss phase because now you can handle a little a little bit more hunger, if that makes sense. Right. If you're feeling ravenous though, especially if you're not in fat loss, I mean, let alone in fat loss, go through the questions and ask yourself again about protein and fiber and the you know calorie density and how fast you ate and and then other things like did you sleep enough, et cetera. Okay. All right, before we wrap up, I told you at the beginning of the episode I was gonna give you a 200-calorie reality check. And I'm gonna do that in just a second. But again, if if everything I described today felt useful, but maybe a little overwhelming, that is the problem that we solve with eat more lift heavy. And I'm really serious about this. I'm very genuine about this because we used to have a program where people would come in and be overwhelmed. And I feel like a lot of people working with one-on-one coaches sometimes feel overwhelmed because on day one, they're like, you've got to increase your steps, you have to train, you have to increase your protein, you have to do this, this, this, this. I prefer an approach where each week you focus on one small thing and build it up slowly over time so that the fast approach is the slow approach, if that makes sense. In other words, taking a reasonable skill-building approach results in long-term success and sustaining what you're trying to do. So eat more lift heavy. If you go to eatmoriftheavy.com, you can read all about it. No pressure to sign up, just check it out. It's a 26-week guided coaching program. And in the very first phase, this is where we help you set up the measurement system. Figure out, hey, where does my current diet actually fall across the levers that we covered? Some are relevant to you, some less so. And then you start to execute to that and build and build and build. You start to master your protein, you start to understand your patterns, you know how to get around plateaus, how to get the fat loss, whether you're going for 10 to 20 pounds of fat loss, how to see your muscle definition, and so on. Okay, eatmorliftheavy.com. Go to eatmorliftheavy.com. All right, so here is the 200 calorie reality check.
Bonus: 200-calorie reality check
Philip Pape 32:07
We are going to give you five foods that are all 200 calories, so you can visually in your mind or on a plate compare them so you see the difference in energy density and chewability, okay, which are a couple of the levers we talked about. So, 200 calories, what does that look like? That is a full pound of strawberries or half kilogram of strawberries. Takes you like 15 minutes to chew a pound of strawberries. Okay, I wanted to start right there just to kind of set the baseline. Similarly, broccoli, what about broccoli? What does 200 calories look like? That's five cups of broccoli. I mean, I almost never, ever, ever have 200 calories of broccoli on my plate. If there's broccoli for dinner, if I cook it or my wife cooks it, it's almost hardly hardly any of the calories in there. In fact, more calories probably come from the little bit of olive oil we baked it in. So five cups of broccoli to 200 calories, you probably would distend your stomach and you wouldn't even eat that much. But I'm just, you know, giving you it as an example. Potatoes, three medium boiled potatoes. Now, think about you ever cook potatoes, you know, and you chop them up. Imagine three of those big suckers, you eat them. Okay. By the way, this is the highest scoring food on the satiety index. So you would be stuffed, and that's only 200 calories. Now, what about almonds? Well, okay, 200 calories is only two ounces of almonds. So that's a very small handful. Chomp, chomp, chomp, you're done. All right. Now, I always think about tree nuts and the fact that like our ancestors would have to actually pick them and like shell them and all that, which would slow things down. But we don't do that. We just buy them all ready to go, salted often, sometimes dipped in chocolate, and boom, in your mouth. And you can you can apply that to peanut butter as well. Like 200 calories of peanut butter is just a tiny amount. And then finally, olive oil, tablespoon and a half of olive oil. All right. So that's not a surprise. And olive oil is great, but a little goes a long way. And so you've got to be aware of these calories. Um, and sometimes set things like salad dressings and sauces are full of oils, so they're very energy dense. So that's 200 calories visualized across some very different amounts of uh foods, some that would make you really full, some of them you would hardly notice, like the almonds or the oil. And really that's the premise of the satiety diet in just like a minute. It's the same energy coming in, but it's a way different level of fullness. And that can be the game changer for you when it comes to fat loss. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, hunger is just engineering your diet and working with your signals. It's not a matter of morality or character or gutting it through. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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Philip Pape 5/28/26 Philip Pape 5/28/26

Brain Fitness, Micro-Habits, and Your Health (Thoryn Stephens) | Ep 472

Why is it so hard to stay consistent with nutrition and fitness, even when you know what to do? What if the answer is not more discipline, but better systems? Thoryn Stephens joins me to talk about why adherence is the real bottleneck in behavior change. We cover how to build simple health protocols around nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, connection, and metabolic health without getting buried in data or overwhelmed by tracking.

Why is it so hard to stay consistent with nutrition and fitness, even when you know what to do? What if the answer is not more discipline, but better systems?

Thoryn Stephens joins me to talk about why adherence is the real bottleneck in behavior change. We cover how to build simple health protocols around nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, connection, and metabolic health without getting buried in data or overwhelmed by tracking.

You’ll learn why friction matters, how wearables like Oura and Garmin can help when used correctly, and why recovery, HRV, resting heart rate, and even unitasking can support better performance. We also discuss longevity, dementia prevention, brain training, and how small daily actions can influence long-term health.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build muscle, lose 10-20 lbs of fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Eat more and lift heavy with confidence:
https://eatmoreliftheavy.com

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why consistency breaks down
2:40 - Six pillars of health protocols
5:46 - Connection and longevity benefits
11:58 - Micro habits and adherence
17:11 - Choosing daily non-negotiables
20:48 - Tracking without overwhelm
28:41 - Dementia prevention through lifestyle
33:30 - Brain training and neuroplasticity
40:48 - Unitasking and cognitive performance

Episode resources:

Brain.One
Instagram: @ragearea

Why consistency breaks down
Philip Pape 0:00
You've heard of lifespan, you've heard of health span. There's a third one most people aren't aware of called mind span. It's the longevity and performance of your brain. And it might explain why you keep falling off your nutrition and training plan every few weeks, even when you know exactly what to do. Usually when that happens, your first thought might be, I need to track more closely, get more accountability, plan ahead better, follow a stricter schedule. Any very smart, capable person who is building a career or business, maybe raising a family, that advice seems like it should work. And yet this often works for only a few weeks before you're back at square one. My guest today has a background in molecular biology and knows a lot about the human brain. He's going to tell us what mindspand actually is, how microhabits and cognitive capacity connect to your training and nutrition, and the surprising and counterintuitive fix for inconsistency. Welcome to Wits and Weights, where in every episode we put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape. And if you've ever fallen off your training or nutrition plan and tried to fix it by adding more, adding more structure, more tracking, more accountability, more planning, today's episode is going to challenge that thinking because we're going to talk about something called mind span. The idea that your brain's performance and longevity is an important variable in and of itself, because in fact your brain and your cognitive capacity might be the real bottleneck in your ability to be consistent. My guest today is Thorin Stevens. Thorin started in molecular biology, spent over a decade in data science and analytics. He now runs Brain One, a platform focused on brain fitness and behavioral protocols. He's all about neural performance and how to optimize human health to increase things like focus, energy, resilience. Today we're discussing mind span and why it matters for your physical health and fitness, how things like microhabits and cognitive capacity connect to your ability to accomplish your goals and strategies to make your routine even more sticky and sustainable. Thorin, welcome to Wits and Waits.
Thoryn Stephens 2:15
Thank you so much. Glad to be here.
Philip Pape 2:17
So we often describe consistency as a behavior problem, right? And I think what I've learned from your work is that you might say it's more of a brain-related or cognitive problem in terms of your ability to even execute those behaviors. Is that a fair way to characterize it?
Thoryn Stephens 2:31
I think humans are immensely complicated. And getting a human to do one small thing routinely is very challenging in itself. So I
Six pillars of health protocols
Thoryn Stephens 2:40
believe there's rigor you can put behind how people learn new habits fundamentally. So I think there's definitely opportunity there.
Philip Pape 2:47
So let's let's go a little deeper on that then, because you're all about the brain and brain fitness, right? So when you talk about the rigor of setting up those behaviors, are we talking about a system, a structure? Is it more about I mean, what is it? Yeah.
Thoryn Stephens 3:00
Yeah. So just super briefly on my background, I'm a molecular biologist, went into data science, and then I started doing marathons and Ironman's and were using essentially health protocols to organize how I was training. And that really applies to other areas of my life as well, you know, relative to like my day-to-day health protocol. You know, when you get up in the morning, what do you do? And so when we talk about brain optimization, what we've seen through our own testing and research and also just looking at, you know, thousands of longevity papers and so forth, I mean, you have to really start with the basics. So ours are nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, connection, some sort of metabolic, you know, just optimization as well. Those are kind of like the six pillars that we generally see. So if you're not sleeping, then you're not going to be neurologically active. It doesn't matter what nootropics you're taking or, you know, what magic pills. You really have to start with the foundation. And then from there, layering in a, you know, additional microhabits is what we call them, just small structured, you know, incremental things that you do that then have, you know, bigger sustained game over time.
Philip Pape 4:03
Okay. So I got three things out of that I want to dig in. One is the longevity connection. The two is the sixth or the fifth and sixth piece of those pillars, which you imagine connection and metabolic optimization. And then three is this layering on. So starting with longevity, why is longevity important in and of itself? Because I know there are short and long-term goals. And sometimes, you know, I know when I went through my nutrition coaching, right, you learn that there's these trade-offs between physique and athleticism and longevity. And so why is that important?
Thoryn Stephens 4:34
I think it depends on the human, right? I look at things such as this as a spectrum. And like over here, you have Brian Johnson, who is doing everything he can to optimize his biology to live longer. You know, most humans are kind of over here. You know, they know they want to live for a long time, but you know, maybe aren't making changes. You know, I don't know, maybe we're maybe over here a bit, following some sort of a structured plan. I think it depends on on the human and ultimately their own motivations. Not everyone wants to live forever. And, you know, as you look at these protocols for this, you know, supposedly to add, you know, additional years on that health span, those remaining years of your life, does that impact your quality of life, you know, and the things that you love to do? So it's in my mind, it's always a balance in these these things.
Philip Pape 5:14
And is the balance between health and lifespan or is this extra mind span variable layered in there now?
Thoryn Stephens 5:18
I mean, I think it's kind of all of the above, you know, like again, doing the things that you love, anything that you love that's done in excess generally is you know negative relative to your mind span, health span, all the above. So I think you know, the balance of it is really important.
Philip Pape 5:34
That's a good way to put it, right? Anything in excess, because that's often what we talk about is doing too much handing that back. Putting extra weight, yeah, exactly.
Thoryn Stephens 5:41
Everything of course. So, but yeah, those are some of the principles that
Connection and longevity benefits
Thoryn Stephens 5:46
we really try to, you know, round around, basically.
Philip Pape 5:48
Okay. Yeah. Well, I I like principles. So when you meant you said you start with the pillars and then you lay around microhabits, and we talk ad nauseum on this podcast about nutrition and training and sleep and stress. You did mention though, connection, which I assume you mean like human connection, community, things like that. Is that what you're talking about?
Thoryn Stephens 6:05
Yeah, I mean, I would expand it a bit. You know, so I'm a molecular biologist turned data scientist. So, you know, my life has revolved around data, but you know, I'm not obsessive about these things. And I went and met with the Center for Brain Health out of UT Dallas a couple years ago. I was just starting Brain One and you know, had this vision. And I met with uh one of the founders, Dr. Sandra Chapman, and I was like, you know, Dr. Sandra, we have all this amazing data sets, and I'm looking at my bar markers and my, you know, my my wearable data, and then we're amalgamating it and I'm seeing all these patterns. And she's like, Yeah, Thorin, that's really cool. You know what's really cooler? Connection. And humans that have connection, whether it's to themselves, it's to the higher power, it's to their family, you know, it's to their community, live longer. Like, period. I mean, the data absolutely suggests, you know, how much longer? I don't know, 10 to 15%, depending on the study, you know, but a number of years. And so people ask, like, what is the secret of life? I think it's fundamentally simple. It's waking up and doing what you love. And if you are doing something you don't love, you'll wake up and then you'll be disgruntled and so many impacts there. So as we think about those things, you know, waking up with, you know, a an inspiration or just a desire to do something, you know, whether whatever that is, again, spending time with your family. And community is an integral part of that, you know, quite literally. And then there's other small things. It can be a book club, it could be chess club, it could be, you know, playing soccer with the friends, whatever it is. But there's absolutely a connection both to longevity, but also just neurological optimization relative to community and connection.
Philip Pape 7:35
I think it's underrated. Uh I definitely, you know, because we don't we don't measure it, right? So like you kind of assume there's this black box or this myopic kind of view of wearables and measurement and everything. And it's like, who I mean, I do know people in different spaces who have that as a thing that they track, right? Which some would say, Oh, that's crazy. Why would you track these squishy things like relationships or how often you talk to your wife? But you know, I mean, it's sometimes you have to have targets and goals, right?
Thoryn Stephens 8:00
Uh I think that's very, very interesting. How are they tracking those relationships? Just curious.
Philip Pape 8:04
I mean, there's different approaches. There's, you know, uh a rate yourself on one to ten in a context of like 10 things you care about, those kinds of things, right?
Thoryn Stephens 8:12
Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, there's also the social side of all of this, which I think can be a bit nefarious, how you think about your social circles, connect things. But yeah, so I would say the measurement behind this is what's been the most interesting to me throughout my career when I was in biotech initially, and then I went into user behavior research and you know, so forth. That's really been the thread line, is the measurement of these different attributes.
Philip Pape 8:34
So I'm curious what the on the connection side, because I have a small background in applied psychology, Martin Seligman Seligman, right? And then the follow-on work where they talked about flourishing and happiness and how connection was like the number one related variable to happiness.
Thoryn Stephens 8:47
Yeah.
Philip Pape 8:48
When we think about connection, you mentioned a bunch of different examples, but like when someone is trying to improve themselves, today we have, and you said nefarious, and I don't know if you're talking about like social media and and some of that when you said nefarious, but how does self-motivation theory, I think SMT, right? Which has relatedness as one of its factors, how does that factor into this?
Thoryn Stephens 9:09
Yeah, that's not my area of research, just to be honest, but I can tell you what I've seen anecdotally. Again, you know, people who wake up and have that connection and that spark are more emphatic and generally feel and live longer, ultimately. So what is that based on? I mean, I think that's a great academic uh question. I would also say, you know, going to the prior point, yeah. I mean, we generally think about you know the world in microhabits, small incremental changes, protocols, and then programs that you can build, you know, to reach that desired objective, you know, such as connection. So that's why I appreciate your thoughts around, you know, how to measure that. I do believe on the other side of the coin, when you talk about things like social media, I think that's personally entirely negative. As a data scientist, when I was looking at this user level data, this is back in like, you know, 2012 through 14, 15, back when like Facebook had an open API, Twitter had an open API. And, you know, we could see in the data, you know, which was guised as connection, you know, you're connecting to children from your childhood and you know, people from your past and so forth, but not really the case, you know, and how that data can be used very nefariously to optimize your behavior through an algorithm, you know, which is what we're seeing now. And so all the recent, you know, press around meta being find with you know young adults, you know, this was all known a decade ago. This was not new. I mean, again, the data was already there. It's unfortunate, it's taken this long, an entire generation of humans, you know, to have been so susceptible to this because it's really preying on some of the negative sides of that connection and game theory, and you know, you get like the number of likes and all those pieces.
Philip Pape 10:45
And the dopamine, yeah, yeah.
Thoryn Stephens 10:48
Yeah.
Philip Pape 10:48
Yeah, a friend of mine, you know, was telling me about where he's sending his kid to school. So we homeschool our kids, they used to, but now they're in public school. But it's, you know, he he went out of his way to find a school that didn't use technology because you're seeing that pushback as well among public schools. And one of the anecdotes was that the Chromebooks led to more cyberbullying just because of the easy access to emailing each other and stuff like you're just like, man, the world has changed, and yeah, that stuff is not almost never positive.
Thoryn Stephens 11:15
Yeah. Yeah, but again, it's a balance. You know, we can't expect our children, you know, or community to like live out in the forest be a Luddite. Yeah. Quite literally. So, you know, my feeling I get it asked is constantly, you know, it's like my my feelings on AI, and I feel like you actually need to truly understand it and you need to learn these tools. You need to see what's happening with Claude because it's moving so fast. And otherwise, you know, then you're going to be making your decisions, maybe not based on the most empirical data. So I think it's great to know these things and you know, expose, but again, you know, always in moderation.
Philip Pape 11:48
Yeah. So before I lose the audience with some of the some of these tangents, which I I enjoy academically, but going back to the microhabits, let's get into that because we've had a
Micro habits and adherence
Philip Pape 11:58
lot of guests on here that talked about habit theory. We've gotten in atomic habits and and you know, the how long it takes to build a habit and having either, you know, very hard and fast rules to take you out of temptation from coming off a habit and lots of different approaches. Just what lane are you in that's supported academically by the research you've seen?
Thoryn Stephens 12:16
I mean, we follow a general CBT, so cognitive behavioral therapy type of framework, right? You know, where it's Q reward fundamentally, which is in line with like James Clear and the atomic habits of framing. You know, what I've found in this research is again, it's really about motivation. You know, we have a platform called Brain One. We work with clinicians, we work with individuals, and one of the metrics we track is adherence. You know, you ask a human to do a thing to improve sleep, weight, you know, metabolic health, whatever it might be. Do they do the things that you ask them to do? And I'm sure you've seen this in your training. It's incredible, like so the technology here I find very easy. You know, we can build easy, accessible technology to help support this. The challenge is the human behavior. Like that is the crux of all of this. And getting one human to do one thing regularly as a new, you know, again, microhabit, you know, part of their day is just incredibly challenging. So what I've seen again, it's that cue reward, those are rewards and ultimately those motivations.
Philip Pape 13:12
So let's get into that. Somebody I heard maybe a year or two ago, Dr. Karen Norden. I don't know if you're familiar with her. She's a bit in behavior change, and she was the first one to say, and maybe this is just a contrarian way to present it, you know, when it comes to nutrition or training, let's talk about training and exercise. You know, the act, that whole systemic act of having your exercise routine itself is not a habit because it's at two too large a level, it's too macro. And the habits are the automated things that go down all the way to what you said, the Q reward system. So how do we find that level? If you agree with that, you know, tell how do we find that level that truly is a habit that becomes automatic versus this systemic combination of habits? Yeah.
Thoryn Stephens 13:55
Yeah, that's interesting. I'll definitely check out her research. What we've seen empirically, again, I think humans are more successful if they have a structure behind it, period. So my personal example, I was athletic as a youth. I went to a high school for snowboarding and US ski team, Olympians, and so forth. But then when I went to college, I studied biotechnology. And then after college, you know, I was kind of just debating on what to do next. And long story short, I started running. And it started off with Susan G. Comb and 10K, and then a half marathon, marathon, and then I went to triathlons and Ironmans and so forth. And it was through that experience I began to use what we call a health protocol. And so we'll break down the protocol, which again are just the things that you do, you train, take case of triathlon, swim, bike, run, weights, but then your nutrition. And nutrition is such an integral part of these types of races because you're in real time optimizing your health, you know, using things like heart rate. That's really where I started back when we had these giant chunky garments that were like, you know, the size of your. So generally that's how we think about the world. Again, microhabits, you know, things that you do, nutrition, the building blocks, a measurement, which could be wearables, it could be other different types of measure, you know. And so I think it's really critical to understand in each of these areas, you know, what is your baseline, and then how are you going to improve, and then how are you going to measure that? And, you know, to that regard, like I've been, you know, I came out of biotech and I've been using protocols to synthesize DNA. I've been using protocols to, you know, do these like long distance, you know, triathlons and so forth. Fundamentally, your protocol is just your daily routine. It's the things that you do, you know, when you get up in the morning. And so what we found is putting that into a system can be helpful and it drives adherence. Some people come every day and track, some people don't, and that's okay. Just getting it on paper is the first step, you know, really beginning to understand where you can improve, and then you're layering the data on top of that, and then you can work towards a plan. But, you know, some people will never look at an app, you know, period. So you really have to meet them where they're at.
Philip Pape 16:29
Yeah, and and I'm people know I'm a huge data nerd. I do love tracking, and I do find that on day zero, if you can track the challenge I found for folks is what to track, how to measure it, which you've kind of implied so that you have something to baseline and actually improve. And where my mind goes with that is the body is complex and there are direct things we can measure and there are proxies for things, and then there's things we may not even know quite how to measure. So, for example, nobody's gonna do doubly labeled water tests to measure their caloric expenditure, but we know that you eat food and you gain or lose weight, and therefore your body as a black box burns calories. And then we say, okay, well, now the composition of what you eat is important. So we're gonna measure protein
Choosing daily non-negotiables
Philip Pape 17:11
and on and on, right? So, like, just how do you think about that to not overwhelm somebody who like should they even get to that step before they're doing some of these pillars at a rough level? Or do you need this at the beginning at a very light level to do the pillars, if you know what I'm saying?
Thoryn Stephens 17:28
Yeah, I think it's probably the latter is you know what I've seen in our own research anyway. I think it's really good to, again, starting with the goal of what they're trying to achieve, but what are the non-negotiables? You know, like what are the things that pretty much all of us should be doing every day? An example could be circadian regulation, you know. So we all generally have challenges with sleep. You know, we hear sleep, anxiety, and gut are the three nonstop, right? And so they're all related, of course, but you know, when you talk about sleep, it's not necessarily all your preparation at night, it could be your preparation in the morning. And so, how much direct sunlight do you get? You know, what does that do to cortisol? And then ultimately, you know, really just the your hormone, you know, throughout the morning and then the rest of your day, it's so critical. So that would be like a non-negotiable. And that's hard for some people. I mean, I'm you know, myself included, I live in the mountains in Colorado. We don't even actually get direct sunlight until about nine, obviously up at six, but you do the best you can, you know, and that would be an example is getting as much direct sunlight as you know early in the morning as possible. Another could be a hydration, another could be, you know, prayer gratitude, you know, depending on the human. So we have a set of non-negotiables we try to try to follow, but they also are completely in line with the core pillars of you know, nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, community, metabolic health, and those pieces. So all related.
Philip Pape 18:44
Yeah, they're all related. So you said it starts with a goal, and even that could lead to not an argument, but a discussion I've had with people about, you know, do we even set a goal before we set a timeline? Maybe we have a timeline, then a goal, whatever. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. Actually, you start with a goal. So let's say your goal is just you want to feel and look better, right? Like you're the average person who is generally dissatisfied with the habits they've developed over many years. They're probably in their 30s or 40s at this point because that's when things start to catch up physically and energy-wise, and of course the hormonal decline and all that fun stuff. People listening to this podcast and they're like, hey, Thorne, I just want to look a little better, feel a little better, lose that belly fat, and just kind of maybe live a little longer and be healthy. Like a lot of people just state that as their general goal. Do you work on them to hone that further first?
Thoryn Stephens 19:32
You certainly do. I mean, we have a system that helps support them. Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, we try to be as specific as possible, I guess I would say. You know, are you really like relative to neurological optimization? Is it, you know, your decisioning? Is it your executive function? Is it just memory? You know, what's specifically there? Or, you know, relative to other indications, sleep as an example. And then what's the baseline? How do we measure it? How do we build a plan around it?
Philip Pape 19:57
Okay.
Thoryn Stephens 19:57
Yeah.
Philip Pape 19:58
So then where does the mindspan concept come into this? I didn't have a lot of time to research this, but I understand it's related to cognitive capacity and brain health overall. Like where does that fit in?
Thoryn Stephens 20:09
I mean, it's not so personally, I would say an example of my pursuit of mind span will be three through, like microhabits like consciousness. You know, how are you thinking about consciousness, consciousness expansion? I've spent a lot of time with plant medicines and psychedelics over the years. So that is one of the tools that I personally use, which I don't necessarily advocate. But, you know, if someone's curious, happy to have a conversation.
Philip Pape 20:33
Okay, and that's it. Okay. I was hoping for a little more, right? Like with the whole mind span thing, just because it seemed to be a key piece here with as like a holdup or root cause behind why some people might have trouble executing on these microhabits.
Thoryn Stephens 20:47
Okay.
Tracking without overwhelm
Thoryn Stephens 20:48
Not something in our research, to be honest. That's not something very focused on. But yeah.
Philip Pape 20:52
All right. So yeah, yeah. No, no, for sure. So then we get into the intersection of okay, so you're trying to develop these microhabits. You identified what you want to measure and improve. Now, how do you do it? Like, how do you make it stick? You mentioned Q reward, like what are the practical ways to do that?
Thoryn Stephens 21:05
Yeah. So we have again a structured framework that we follow and that we've developed. Really, at the end of the day, it's a tracker. And it is, again, understanding the high-level goal that you're working towards, and then what are these small microhabits, these incremental changes that you're doing to actually get you to that goal without overwhelming the human? I mean, that's the number one thing that we hear. And that's why so many of these plans, I think, fail, is because people get overwhelmed and there's too many things to do. And just getting one human to do one thing regularly is a massive accomplishment, let alone, you know, a select category. But it also depends on, you know, the types of people out there. Like if you've ever done any competitive, you know, athleticism marathons as an example, then you've probably followed some sort of a training plan. But that type of discipline, and that's another really integral, I don't even call it a microhabit. It's almost like a non negotiable, but you know, following these types of plans that are outlined that have some level of reward. And then I'm also a big believer in In the data without having the person be overwhelmed, or you know, you can also have like analysis paralysis where people get so obsessed with the data that's actually negative. You know, when you wake up in the morning, you look at your phone, you're like, oh my gosh, my readiness score from aura is like it's only a 45, I'm gonna have a horrible day. But you actually could have had a great day if you just took a minute to really, you know, connect yourself and see how you feel.
Philip Pape 22:23
So yeah, those are some of the small things that I'm laughing because I have an aura ring and some days I'm like, I can predict what it's going to say. And I'm like, I don't know how it's helping me. I just you know, I drank I drank last night, I haven't drunk in two months. I know it's gonna be well, but it helps.
Thoryn Stephens 22:36
So you know, I hear that a lot too, and it's interesting, right? Because some people then stop using the wearables because they're like, oh, I already know what it's gonna say, which is true. But even just having that baseline data, I think is absolutely critical because it's something you can measure against. And the old quote, you cannot manage, cannot manage what you can't measure. I mean, I agree with that, you know, and so having at least some understanding, but you know, it also should be intuitive. It's like, how do you feel? You know, you know when you wake up in the morning, the data helps support it. You know, I look at certain metrics regularly, like resting heart rate and HRV. You know, those are kind of my go-to relative to my recovery, my parasympathetic nervous system, and just, you know, all the things going on in my life. I definitely see a direct connection, you know, both on the behavioral side as well as, you know, if I just have a glass of wine, how does that impact, you know, literally?
Philip Pape 23:24
For sure. Yeah, we talk about those all the time. Those are really even just resting heart rate because it's so easy to measure and changes so quickly within days based on your activity. So and there's another one I've been talking to people about. It's just a simple heart rate recovery, like in real time, like an acute heart rate recovery, right? Like if you're if you're exercising, for example, how fast does your heart rate recover? And I don't know if what does your anything you do measure that? No, I'm actually not familiar with that matter. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, where you could you could shorten that time over time and as as a measure of cardiovascular fitness. But anyway, yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned rewards, and and that's another thing that comes to mind is are we talking intrinsic, it's extrinsic, or it kind of depends? I think it depends.
Thoryn Stephens 24:04
Yeah. Depends on the human, depends on ultimately what they're trying to you know achieve. Yeah.
Philip Pape 24:08
Okay. Yeah. Cause the habit thing with the data, you mentioned an so we talk about an aura ring, and I think, okay, what I like about something like an aura ring or step track or whatever is it's automatic. It like zero friction, it's capturing the data for you. How much is friction as a variable to be considered when you're setting up these systems?
Thoryn Stephens 24:27
Oh, I think it's everything ultimately. And again, it really that's where you have to hone in on the persona, age is a big factor. We work with certain clinicians that have an older population. You can build the best app tracker in the world. It doesn't matter, they're not going to use it. So we've looked at other mechanisms, even like just having notebooks and you know, paper trackers people can follow. I think that's interesting. SMS, you know, how do you but truly meet the person where they're at? So that's a really kind of integral part in all of the.
Philip Pape 24:55
Yeah, man. I could I I could relate. I I love spreadsheets, and a lot of people don't. Here, use this spreadsheet. Even like the best.
Thoryn Stephens 25:04
But you know, for a normal human, it actually might not be, you know, ultimately. Yeah, we we've been testing adherence with just a single text message. You know, you get one in the morning, like, hey, these are your three microhabits for the day. If you want more, you can click on it, it takes you to the platform or not, you know, and at least you know, at least you have a framework, you know, and I think there's just there's so much value in that getting it on paper. And again, even if you don't do it every day, and you shouldn't be too hard on yourself, but you know, do the best you can and ultimately have the measurement to try to reach whatever you're trying to achieve.
Philip Pape 25:32
So you just said something interesting there every day. And that that's another argument I've had with folks because let's say you want to lift weights, right? And we know you could train as little as one or two days a week, all the way up to six, or if you're crazy, seven days a week, lifting weights. And and there's like a school of thought that says, well, even if you're gonna lift three days a week, the other four days you have something in that block or something to kind of check off as part of your fitness routine, like a walk or something. What are your thoughts on that theory of like seven days a week theory versus these less frequent things?
Thoryn Stephens 26:05
Yeah, I would say I I now that said I'm a highly aggressive human relative to my exercise. Yeah, I live here in Colorado, try to ski snowboard almost every day, you know, during the winter, in the summertimes, it's trail runnings, it's cycling, it's mountain biking. So I am out all the time. My core routine, I do hot Pilates. So I get the sweat plus weights and then, you know, some cardio and so forth. And that's at least three to four days a week. So personally, I mean, I would say I always listen to my body first and foremost. I mean, I try to do Pilates every single day, but if I wake up and my HRV is dipped because I hit it too hard the day before, I'll listen to my body and just not go to that class, you know, fundamentally. But I think in all things, I mean, again, going back to you know the brain and neuroplasticity, you know, you want to have periods of recovery. I mean, that's absolutely as critical as actually doing the exercise yourself yourself. And as you know, that's literally when you know the muscles actually rebuild is during that recovery period.
Philip Pape 27:00
So absolutely Yeah, true. I agree. Sometimes we talk about recovery as like the overriding variable for all of this, and then it you back into. But kind of what I was really asking very poorly was with brain science and stickiness and discipline, is having the daily habit, whether even if it changes. So like I have a daily movement habit, and it might be training this day, it might be hot yoga this day, it might be walking slowly this day. Does that lead to more success or stickiness with your habit than not?
Thoryn Stephens 27:30
I think we've seen both in our data. Again, I think it depends on the human. I mean, some people do really well with like strong structure, six days on, one day off, you know, whatever it might be. But I I feel that it really does vary. And again, I go back to the motivation of the human, what they're trying to achieve. But yeah, I mean, that's the that's the hardest part in all of this, Philip, is that behavioral piece like period. Again, the rest of this, the plans, the technology, you know, we're in biometrics, biomarkers, we just added face scans. So we get 40 biomark or 30 biomarkers off of a face scan as an example. Interesting, you know, what we can now do with that data to look at the time series. But if the human's not doing the thing that they want to do or whatever their objectives, their goals are, then you know, ultimately we're failing.
Philip Pape 28:12
So yeah, just always curious about this stuff because there's, you know, if if you cherry pick any particular study, then you you go down a rabbit hole where things conflict. Like I remember learning about a study maybe two years ago that looked compared five days to seven days of weigh-ins. So it wasn't even looking at like frequent weigh-ins versus infrequent, it was looking at five versus seven, and it found better, you know, sustaining of weight loss results when it was seven versus five.
Thoryn Stephens 28:37
That's interesting.
Philip Pape 28:37
Right. You see those little things, and I'm like, well, that's an interesting, right?
Dementia prevention through lifestyle
Philip Pape 28:41
The variable changed just a little bit.
Thoryn Stephens 28:43
Exactly.
Philip Pape 28:43
Yeah. So, and I know there's some folks that that subscribe to that, but but maybe it is individualistic, just like study data is based on a population and you can be an outlier or whatever.
Thoryn Stephens 28:51
Yeah.
Philip Pape 28:52
What was the other thing you mentioned about? I'm totally off track of all the original stuff I was going to talk about because it's very interesting.
Thoryn Stephens 28:58
I mean, if you think we dive into a little bit more is again around the concept of these microhabits and behavior change, and that I always come back to so my background's in molecular biology, but gene expression, in that I think this is a really important point people don't necessarily understand, like dementia prevention, right? Everyone listening to this is terrified, maybe for themselves, maybe for their parents, their grandparents. And so there are, there's a paper, uh, it's a Lancet 2024. I might include it or share it with you, but it outlines essentially 14 different behavioral modifications. These are things that you can do, we can do, our grandparents can do to help prevent dementia. And again, there's no silver bullet here. It's not like this is going to help prevent dementia for every single human. I think the statistic was roughly about half of global cases. There's about 55 million globally. So it's a significant amount. And the the thinking behind this is again, you can have a genetic predisposition for something like Alzheimer's. Now, if that's the case, you know, you're not going to, through lifestyle, prevent the onset of the disease. But what you could do is start to stave off some of the impacts relative to the progression, basically. And we've seen this in the data, and I think that's pretty tried and true. But the the overarching point, then something like dementia, where you know, you do have an opportunity to help, you know, really again support, you know, the onset of the disease through some of these microhabits. And like a couple examples. So one, connection, actually, is on the list. You know, that's a very prominent one. You know, it could be things like hearing loss in your old age, it can be education, but all of these things essentially that we have the opportunity to improve. And so from a gene expression perspective, you have your genetic blueprint, you have what's called your proteione. So you have your DNA, and then in between you have RNA, which I think more and more people know about now. And then you have things like methylation or genomics, epigenetics. You know, essentially that's the regulation of your DNA, RNA, and ultimately to proteins. And we are an expression of our proteins or proteome. And so it's just interesting to think that we have the opportunity to optimize, you know, essentially a good chunk of our DNA. What's the number? It depends on the tissue, depends on a number of factors, but maybe 30 to 50 percent-ish, you know, of your DNA, you actually can impact based on your lifestyle and based on microhabits, all the things that we've been talking about. And so, you know, I'd like to think that's a bit empowering. You know, people feel like, you know, this is my DNA. I'm stuck, you know, and this is my life. I can't make changes when, you know, there is a level of optimism and that we can positively change these things.
Philip Pape 31:32
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, epigenetics is fascinating. I I feel like we didn't know. I mean, I was born in 1980. I I know it it wasn't something we talked about growing up. It wasn't until the last like couple decades that the general public became aware of it, but it gives you more power, like you said. The Lancet thing, is that the one that they added like three more items to last year? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. I should do an episode on that because you're right. There are a lot of factors in there. It reminds me almost of there's like 13 cancers that are related to lifestyle as well.
Thoryn Stephens 32:02
100%. Yeah. Yeah, I'd be happy to give you a protocol you can give away to the audience, you know, for these things.
Philip Pape 32:06
Uh, yeah, for sure. We'll throw that in.
Thoryn Stephens 32:09
What these microhabits are, and then the impacts on, in that case, dementia, or you know, in other case it could be cancers.
Philip Pape 32:15
The evidence that would be awesome, actually. Yeah, and I might even rip up an episode kind of going over that for folks. That would be cool. Oh, we could totally do that.
Thoryn Stephens 32:22
Yeah, I'd love to love to partner or support in any way possible.
Philip Pape 32:25
Because again, yeah, go ahead. No, that's fine. You go.
Thoryn Stephens 32:29
No, I it's just, you know, we're an artifact of our behaviors, the people we surround ourselves with, the conversations that we have, you know, and so much that you know, our environment, literally, where do we live? You know, I've lived in big cities, I'm much more happy out in the country. Everyone's different, you know. But whatever that is, and you know, really listening to that, getting a tune, I think is really important.
Philip Pape 32:49
I think you'd you'd like it out here too. We're in Connecticut, like five acres, got the woods in the back. It's really nice. Quiet.
Thoryn Stephens 32:55
Yes, I appreciate the quiet.
Philip Pape 32:57
I remember the first night we moved out here and there was there were no street lights or sound. It was just it was amazing, but it was also a little bit eerie, you know. You could get used to that. And I like reading dystopian fiction too, which has that too, but not in a good way. Yeah. We're in it's like the mass border, so Connecticut Mass border. Yeah. And you're in Connecticut, or you're in Colorado.
Thoryn Stephens 33:15
Colorado, yeah. Cool. Out in the mountains. Got another couple weeks of snow, and then it's officially spring.
Philip Pape 33:20
Are you at risk of wildfires where you are or no? Oh, yeah.
Thoryn Stephens 33:23
Yeah, pretty much.
Philip Pape 33:24
I hear that a lot from friends out there.
Thoryn Stephens 33:26
So California, not good.
Philip Pape 33:27
And yeah, yeah, yeah. And very volatile
Brain training and neuroplasticity
Philip Pape 33:30
politics too, but we won't get into that. We're not so all right. So, you know, we mentioned the Alzheimer's thing, and I think you and I were talking about like brain training. That might have been even before we recorded. And like how much value do you place in some of those? Because I've heard mixed results.
Thoryn Stephens 33:44
Yeah, I think some of them are great. I think some of them are scandalous, you know, which has also been proven out in the data. I don't know if I'll name any companies offhand, but you can probably do the research. I think brain HQ does a great job. I sat down with a founder not too long ago. Again, we would think of brain training as a microhabit as part of your overall protocol. So it's great. I mean, I think everyone really should be doing these types of exercises, especially in your older ages. And they had some great recent paper, I believe it was the neurotransmitter was acetylcholine. They were seeing like a, you know, positive results and a very specific neurotransmitter based on these brain training games. I mean, that's awesome, especially as people are getting older. So I think those, yeah, I think brain training is great as part of an overarching lifestyle and you know behavioral uh protocol.
Philip Pape 34:28
Yeah, and I think that the result you're talking about was a very specific subset of the training. So it's like you really have to know what you're looking at and looking for to potentially get the benefit, I would imagine.
Thoryn Stephens 34:37
I think they hopefully they've made it, they've productized it and made it easy. You know, so you don't even need to think about it. You go, you do, but yeah. I mean, again, even the concept of brain training, and to your point, epigenetics. I mean, these things, brain training's been around for quite a while. Epigenetics has only been around, or at least really studied the last couple decades. So a lot of this stuff is, I would say, generally new. And you know, humans don't think about neuroplasticity or the fact that their brain is an organ just like your bicep. You know, just like your bicep, you need to regularly exercise it, you need to allow it to rest and recover, all of those pieces.
Philip Pape 35:09
So I'm laughing because there was just today. Speaking of social media, Dr. Mike Isertil posted what seemed like a very serious question. He's like, I have a very serious question for you guys. Do you want bigger biceps or bigger triceps? So I'm like, Do you want a bigger brain or bigger? I'm just thinking about that.
Thoryn Stephens 35:24
Yeah, you should add that in there. I mean, exactly. You know, I mean, I guess it's all of the above, but yeah, people generally don't think about their brain as something that they exercise. And I think that's something we're hopefully trying to start to shift.
Philip Pape 35:38
Good, good. Yeah, hopefully we some of the our our podcasts helped do that too, just by making you think differently. So, okay, one question I did have that came back to me was so if somebody's somebody has a specific goal, like, okay, I want to start lifting weights. I know it's good for me. I know I want to lift at least three or four days a week, but I don't do it right now and I never have. Like, where would you start from that point to break down to the microhabits?
Thoryn Stephens 35:58
So they want to work out, I guess, what is their, you know, what are they trying to achieve? I mean, specifically.
Philip Pape 36:02
Let's say they're trying to just get stronger.
Thoryn Stephens 36:05
Yeah. I mean, what we could literally do is we could essentially take their information, run it through our AI, and come up with a protocol and see how it compares, you know, cool. Something we, you know, we've been working on the last year, year and a half. And it's actually pretty shocking how accurate it gets. We had one woman recently who she, you know, created a protocol, re-ran it through it, and she's like, Oh my gosh, honey, look, it's the it's like 10 of the 12 microhabits I just listed on my like last night. And he's like, Oh my gosh, honey, you're correct. So side note, that's one of the mechanisms we can get there. Yeah, I think again, starting small is critical, you know, like they want to work every day, understanding their motivation. What is it about that human, you know, that you can help motivate them relative to the thing, the reward, you know, that they're working towards. Humans love instant gratification, of course, which is why in some of the tech that we're developing, we you know, this new facial scan that we've added, you can actually see changes in your HRV in, you know, like pre and post-breath work as an example. So that's cool. You know, you actually do breath work and you can see how your parasympathetic nervous system is is impacted. But those types of like small wins, you know, I think are are really important. How you look in the mirror. And again, I don't focus as much on the weight training side, but it's all related.
Philip Pape 37:19
So yeah, you know, the thing about the getting the immediate feedback is really helpful. I know that could go awry if it's not the right thing, right? If you're not measuring the right thing, but we hear a lot about gamification and streaks and stuff. And I I just recently dived into that for an episode. And it was interesting how much of how things are gamified isn't effective, right? For changing your behavior. But something like that where there's actual progress seems to be effective. So again, the listener should, you know, should look into this stuff and become curious. I like the idea of starting with a goal and working back not only to what the protocol could be, but what is your motivation and then tying that together. Full disclosure, I have an app, I have a it's called Fitness Lab. And one of the things you do in week one is a future, a future vision exercise. Awesome. Because that's so powerful, right? Because we've seen that so powerful. So I love that you're saying that. When you said that 12 microhabits in the example, would your would the app or protocol then decide what the best three are, or two or one to start with?
Thoryn Stephens 38:20
Yeah, we can. Again, it depends if the human's working with a clinician, they're working with a practitioner, you know, a coach, whatever it is, and then just meeting them really where they're at. You know, most part of that again is like their experience level. So novices, we would never give 12, you know, maybe three to start, maybe even one, just depending on the human, or upwards of you know, a dozen, depending. And that could include things, you know, like peptides, you know, potentially, or people use this as a peptide tracker. We have another use case with like even stem cells. So we're really focused on the measurement, whatever it is. We don't really care the intervention, any of those that I just mentioned. But but ultimately having that baseline and then understanding the you know time series improvement.
Philip Pape 39:01
Okay.
Thoryn Stephens 39:01
Yeah.
Philip Pape 39:02
Yeah. No, that makes sense. And peptides and stem cells, two very controversial areas that have like very polarizing people out there because there's some great stuff, but it gets so muddled by so much junk and slop in in the wellness space. But I love that you mention it because there are some bright spots in there. What was I gonna ask about that? Oh yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Thoryn Stephens 39:23
No, no, go ahead.
Philip Pape 39:24
Totally interrelated. But as you were talking about the microhabits and doing like one or two or whatever, is it do we know for sure it takes a certain amount of time to make a habit sticky? Because it I used to think 21, and I I feel like James Clear mentions that, but then recent research I've seen is 45 because there seems to be two tripping points to the human brain's need to get back to like what it used to do. And like the first one's almost a false success point, and then you could revert easily until you get past the second point. Uh, is that BS what I'm saying, or is there something to that?
Thoryn Stephens 39:56
I think there's something to that. I think we've seen that in some of the data for sure. Yeah.
Philip Pape 40:00
Okay. So is it like six weeks? I mean, is there a number?
Thoryn Stephens 40:03
I don't know if I have a number. Uh we can definitely look at that. I mean, I would say four to six weeks is kind of anecdotally what I've heard, but and it also depends on the microhabit. And then it really depends on the human, you know, like what are you actually asking them truly to do? So I think there's a number of variables there.
Philip Pape 40:17
All right. And then you just a couple of personal questions, like besides mind altering stuff, what's another microhabit that you do like every day?
Thoryn Stephens 40:25
Yeah, I'm again pretty rigorous. So a really big proponent of the sweat. And so whether that's a sauna, you know, we have one here, or I do the hot Pilates where I guess I get both well sweat, I get some cardio and I get weights. So I do heavy weights, like 50 pounders. So that's one of my like non-negotiables. Try to go three or four days a week. And then other microhabits.
Philip Pape 40:46
Do you measure sweat? Do you measure like how much you sweat,
Unitasking and cognitive performance
Philip Pape 40:48
or what do you measure?
Thoryn Stephens 40:49
Well, I measure I actually have water bottles that do have measurement on them. So like per class, I average about two liters of water, you know, at least. So, but again, I'm not that obsessive about it. Like I just always go with how I feel, you know, fundamentally. Another microhabit that we don't talk about a lot, but also is is related to cognition is the concept of unitasking versus multitasking. And again, this kind of goes in that non-negotiable category because it's not something you're like doing every day, but it's one of those things you can kind of put into your protocol that you can just try to adhere to. And so, you know, we're very much caught, you know, like you're you're constantly, you know, in the hustle and you have your, you know, your phone and your laptop and the TV and the kids running around. But when you're trying to focus on very specific, you know, tasks at hand, if you're trying to do four things at once, you're because of cognitive drag, you're actually going to be less neurologically optimized and probably get them done, you know, not only well, less efficiently, we could say. Um, so that idea of again, unitasking versus multitasking, I think is another really interesting one. Is that related to like the Pomodoro technique where you focus on one thing at a time or I don't know the pomodoro technique specifically, but it's probably it's that idea that again, when you're focusing on something and then you shift to another, even if it's small, just like looking at your phone and then going back, you have cognitive drag. And it takes milliseconds, you know, to then reorient yourself on the conversation, whatever it might be.
Philip Pape 42:12
So that is so true, man.
Thoryn Stephens 42:14
That is so true. Well, and you know, where it's like it's kind of the antithesis of what we're taught, you know, in the grind. You know, gotta hustle and like not really. If you just are more efficient with your time, then you actually will be, you know, higher efficiency longer term.
Philip Pape 42:27
Yeah, it makes sense. Okay, so even though you don't obsess about this stuff, you definitely are I know into wearables. And you mentioned the aura ring. Is there another wearable you use that maybe is unique that we we can learn about? Not unique.
Thoryn Stephens 42:37
So I use my favorite actually is aura for sleep and then Garmin for activity, just relative to resolution. I like Aura because it's you know very small. I've been training with Whoop. I don't love it personally, but we and we have integrations with over 300, so we're kind of agnostic. I mean, at some point it doesn't really matter what you use as long as consistently and you're looking at the trends. You know, your HRV in Aura is absolutely going to be different than in your Apple Watch, which is okay. But again, as long as you're looking at the trends, it doesn't really matter. But yeah, those are kind of my my go-tos, you know, on the day-to-days, Aura and Garmin. And then, like I said, we've been doing some interesting testing with facial scanning and then also voice, so voice biometrics, and then looking at your voice. And we've seen high and medium correlations to HRV through your voice, basically. So if you're stressed, you're gonna hear in the voice because it might be a little bit higher pitched and you know, da-da-da. It's all this stuff we kind of inherently know, but now we're actually able to start to see it in the data. And the reason why these metrics are or these you know, outcome measures are important again, whether it's a face scan or a voice, is because if a human doesn't have a wearable, then they could just use the system and then get a biometric from it immediately. So that's really cool too. So those are some of the newer modalities that we've been been testing.
Philip Pape 43:46
I love that stuff, man. And combined with machine learning and AI and everything, it's just insane. Like we had the founder of Spranton, and and they do like, you know, just a quick visual of your body composition, your anode gyneod ratio, all that stuff, literally just. From a photo, right? And none of these suits anymore and special measurements you had to do in the past. It's crazy.
Thoryn Stephens 44:06
Well, I mean, in the inferences as well. I mean, that you can now learn from this data. Like on the face scan, it's measuring the microcapillary fluctuations of your face. And you know, it's just it's pretty crazy. And in what we've seen is it's very, you know, very highly correlative to both like HRV and even blood pressure. So that technology is only going to get better and better. I think where a lot of these companies though fail, and this is something that we're really razor focused on, is what do you do with that data? It's like, okay, your HRV is, you know, whoop, I think is like one of the worst. It's like, oh, your HRV is down 35%. You know, take it easy out there. And you're like, okay, but like really, is there nothing more I can be doing to help support my parasympathetic? Like maybe, you know, a cold plunge, you know, another microhabit that I do, or breath work, you know, another great microhabit that you can do anywhere for free. So yeah.
Philip Pape 44:54
That is a very fair critique. That that's probably where my brain was going when I thought, what am I gonna do? Because it the advice really isn't that high quality there. But it's like, okay, take the data and put it into this other system over here to figure out what to do. Now that's friction, you know. So I know.
Thoryn Stephens 45:09
And that's this is when we're trying to solve the same problems. Yeah. It's and and so to your point, again, it's making it as frictionless as possible. And that's where I think it's also in part meeting people with where they're at. You know, how do you collect the data? That's why we like, you know, some of these scans where if someone doesn't have a wearable, and then ultimately what do you do with it? And how do you drive action from it? You know, that's the most important.
Philip Pape 45:29
How do you drive action? The friction part's interesting with apps because so like my favorite food tracker is macrofactor, and people have heard me mention a billion times because I'm an affiliate and like I use it, my clients use it. But they actually, one of the things they tout as a differentiator is their speed on certain actions, and they've done the testing, and it's like getting everything down to as few taps as possible and as fast as possible. And then when you look at like your time screen time for the day, it's like two minutes, you know, for logging your food, whereas in some other app it might be 10. And that alone could be the difference.
Thoryn Stephens 46:00
Everything 100%. Yeah, no, we we very much agree with that type of optimization methodology. It's nice. What we talk about is actually time to protocol. Like how long does it take for a clinician, practitioner, or just a human to create a protocol, literally? And what does that look like? It could be a list of microhabits, it could be, you know, Taylor Swift's protocol they found online that they want to upload. I mean, whatever it is, and then literally, how do they then have a tracker that they can follow? So make less, especially in this day and age with you know the declining attention deficits, you know.
Philip Pape 46:31
Oh, I know it because people are they can't wait, and it's like, I'm just gonna go to AI and get the answer. It's not always the best answer, depending on how you ask it.
Thoryn Stephens 46:38
Yeah, which is terrifying in itself. That's a whole other episode. Exactly.
Philip Pape 46:42
All right, man. Well, we we've covered a lot of really cool things. You know, I didn't know where this would go, but I definitely think there's a lot of practical lessons, I guess to tie it up in a bow before we tell people where to find you and all that is like given all the data you've analyzed for both issues that people have, you know, the challenges that people have, like sleep you mentioned versus the microhabits, is there a couple that just float to the top all the time with people you see when it comes to like challenges that they're trying to fix and then microhabits they tend to have to use.
Thoryn Stephens 47:12
Oh, yeah. I mean, again, like sleep, you know, gut, which related to nutrition, depending, and then stress. I mean, those are like the three ultimately. I think every one of us, you know, to some degree could improve upon. So, and then from there, you know, getting into yeah, the specifics, you know, so things like again, stress, you know, exercise for me. I mean, that's one of my biggest, that's why I do the hot Pilates so frequently. And then the, you know, cathartic release physiologically that you're getting from the sweat specifically, but from the exercise. So when I come out of that Pilates class, I'm a different human, you know, side note. So again, it and I know these things sound fundamental. It's like, oh yeah, exercise, great. Another exercise recommendation. But how and where, and again, the plan that you follow, I think is also part of the difference. And then further, if you can start to measure it, that really shows the progress. So yeah, I think that's great.
Philip Pape 48:04
No, I you're right. There's like the principle of it and the benefit you get from it, but the how, where, and plan is the tailored to you. Here's your life, here's your schedule, here's you know, your body. I just had two an extra day off from training because of travel, and it wasn't worth like trying to fit in the hotel and all that. So when I worked out today, it was cathartic. Like you said, I just the body, my body was like, Thank you, you know, like thanks for doing this again because you get in that habit. And I think, you know, I was gonna ask you, like, does time of day matter that that? But we're gonna get into detail those are details. Like, I think it could maybe, but it depends on who you are and your schedule and all that.
Thoryn Stephens 48:38
Yeah, I mean 100%. Like, I mean, I get up at five and that's when I do my best thinking. You know, my wife is working until one in the morning, she's more of an artist and creative. So I think it it definitely depends. But, you know, to the prior point, you know, again with exercise, I feel personally I'm more neurologically optimized after the exercise, you know. So all these things are related, you know. And then of course you have like sleep as like the you know, longevity hack. Everyone's looking for like, oh, what can I take to you know live longer and be healthier and look younger? It's like sleep. That's it, like one thing, you know, let alone obviously the other pillars that we discussed. But starting with starting with the big picks.
Philip Pape 49:16
There was an analogy I heard someone you might have heard it. He was talking about like, what did he say? Something like if you went to a college and everybody was doing drugs, you'd be like, these people are insane. Like, but if you went and everybody was not getting sleep, you'd say, Oh, that's normal, but they have the same effect. Or you know what you know what I mean? Yeah, I think something like that. Or something, maybe it wasn't drugs, maybe it was alcohol. I don't know, but it had the same effect, right? Right. But we don't put it in the same category. Okay, man. So I know we're gonna share something that lets people identify some microhabits or a protocol you mentioned earlier.
Thoryn Stephens 49:46
Sure, I'd love to. Yeah, I mean, I have a dementia prevention uh protocol I can share with you that you can disseminate to the audience. That's great.
Philip Pape 49:52
And besides that, where do you want people to look you up?
Thoryn Stephens 49:54
Yeah, so they can check out brain.1. That is our neurological platform. And then we also have peptides.one with an S. And that's what we built around peptide measurement for all of our friends and family that are struggling with measuring if their peptides actually work.
Philip Pape 50:10
Got it. So brain.1, peptides.one, we'll get everybody the protocol. Look for those in the show notes. And this has been awesome. Thank you so much, Thorne, for coming on wits and weights and sharing your wisdom and your knowledge and your energy as well. So thank you so much.
Thoryn Stephens 50:22
Thank you, Philip. Really appreciate it.

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"Broccoli Is Making You Fat!" (Why Single-Food Blame Is Nonsense) | Ep 471

Can broccoli make you fat? Or cause inflammation? What about sugar, carbs, seed oils, dairy, gluten, lectins, fructose, or ultra-processed foods? Why does every fitness influencer blame a different food for your health problems? Learn about the composition fallacy in nutrition, where we blame one food for what the whole diet (or lifestyle) is responsible for.

Can broccoli make you fat? Or cause inflammation? What about sugar, carbs, seed oils, dairy, gluten, lectins, fructose, or ultra-processed foods?

Why does every fitness influencer blame a different food for your health problems? Learn about the composition fallacy in nutrition, where we blame one food for what the whole diet (or lifestyle) is responsible for.

This episode covers the logical error underneath every single-food blame claim, the evidence on the 4 loudest food villains right now, and how to think about food without organizing your diet around fear.

We examine studies on linoleic acid and inflammation, plant oils vs. butter, ultra-processed foods, flexible vs. rigid dieting, and the prevalence of orthorexia. If you're over 40 and navigating fat loss, body composition, and decades of contradictory food advice, learn to avoid rigid food rules, binge cycles, or wellness panic.

Join in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life, WITHOUT restrictive food rules.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Food villain claims
2:57 - Composition fallacy
8:01 - Seed oils, linoleic acid, and inflammation
10:36 - Sugar and the Twinkie diet experiment
13:28 - Ultra-processed food and how fast you eat
16:44 - Celiac, gluten sensitivity, and carbs
18:48 - Skills vs. food rules
19:56 - Energy balance and food quality
22:30 - Sumo wrestlers and Paracelsus
25:10 - 80/20 flexible eating framework
27:30 - Orthorexia and binge eating cycles
29:16 - Bonus: 3-question food villain test

Philip Pape: 00:00
Broccoli is making you fat. I'm not kidding. Eat too much of it, drowned in butter and cheese sauce day after day, and you probably will gain fat. All right. That claim probably sounded ridiculous initially until I added some context to it. But I've actually heard the claim that broccoli is going to be a problem, just like seed oils are a problem, just like sugar is a problem. The list goes on and on. Carbs, you name it, it's the same logical structure as every food villain claim you've heard. Lectins, gluten, dairy, processed food, take your pick. Today I'm gonna show you why this entire category of advice is a logical error called the composition fallacy. What the actual evidence says about the top demonized foods, and a three-question test that you can run on the next person who tells you that a single food is the source of all your problems. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts popular fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape. And if you are trying to lose fat, you're trying to build muscle, you're trying to eat healthy, you've been told for years that some specific food is the reason it's not working. Maybe it was sugar as far back as when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, then carbs in the 90s to the 2000s, starting with Atkins and then later on keto. Dietary fat before that, going way back to like snack well and olestra. And now it's seed oils and ultra-processed food. Every few years, a new villain rotates in. The old one gets a little half-apology, like, eh, we weren't quite right about that one. And then you're supposed to feel like, okay, now I know what's truly right as we move forward. I'm not gonna tell you whether seed oils are good or bad. I'm gonna show you the logical structure underneath these claims. Because once you understand that, you can make the decisions for yourself from an informed position and not listen to a podcaster tell you what is right or wrong. Stick around to the end because then I'm gonna give you a three-question test I call the food villain test. So the next time anyone, usually a podcaster or influencer, tells you that a single food is insert claim here, making you fat, making you inflamed, causing you any sort of issue, whatever it is, you can turn to this three-second test and know whether to take that seriously or not. And hint, probably not most of the time, but it's good to know what questions to ask. All right, so for today, we are gonna talk about the logical error in every food villain claim and why it's so sticky from a psychological perspective. The actual evidence on the four biggest food villains right now, which it's it might surprise you on one of them, so stay tuned for that. And then a model for how food affects body composition.
Philip Pape: 02:57
Okay, so let's start with the logical error. Philosophers call this logical fallacy the composition fallacy. Now, I don't know a lot about logical fallacies other than what I've learned from my own kids because we homeschool our kids. My wife has spent several years helping them learn about logic, and they are always calling out politicians and conspiracy theories and things that sometimes I don't even notice, like in marketing. And that's where these fallacies come from. So the composition fallacy is simple. You take a feature of one component of a system, and then you blame that component for the behavior of the whole system. That's the composition fallacy. So I'll give you an example that is outside of nutrition. Imagine I told you the steering wheel was the reason that a car crashed. The steering wheel is part of the car. Now, was it involved? Of course it was involved. It's part of the car. Could a bad steering wheel cause a crash in some cases? Of course, theoretically it could. But in most crashes, the steering wheel is probably doing what steering wheels do, and the crash happens because of how the car was driven or how another car was driving, or the road, the speed, the brakes, all of it working together as a system. So it would take some investigation to understand if truly the steering wheel was the cause of the accident. Now, food works the same way. Your body's a system. Calories come in, calories go out. You've got your hormones that get modulated, you've got hunger that goes up and down, your sleep, which affects recovery, your training, which affects everything, insulin sensitivity, nutrition, partitioning, whatever you name it. And then the result of all of that stuff coming together is how you look, how you feel, how you perform, right? Your physique. So when somebody points at a single food and says, ah, that's the reason that you're stuck, that's the reason you're fat, that's the reason you're inflamed, that's the reason XYZ, that is the steering wheel thing. They're taking a component and assigning it the behavior of the whole system. Now, sometimes a specific food is truly involved, the way steering wheel sometimes is, but you always have to zoom out and you have to look at it and understand the constraints. And far more often than not, it's more systematic than that or more complex than
Philip Pape: 05:06
that. So, why is this so psychologically sticky, as we say sticky as in it just like something we just latch onto? Well, the first reason is it gives you a villain. We love villains, we like boogeyman, it gives you an answer, it makes it simple. Before you've done anything else, you feel like you have something to go after, right? That you've made progress, you have an enemy to go after. The second thing is it gives you control. So a single food is something you can avoid today. And this is something I've dealt with for many years in the past, right? Cutting carbs, I can control that. Like literally just cut them out, don't buy them, don't put them in the fridge, don't go to the grocery store and get them. It's easy, okay? But it's easy, and it's easy in comparison to the things that actually work, which tend to be harder. Like energy balance is harder to manage, hormones are hard to manage, sleep is difficult. So the simplicity of the action substitutes for the difficulty of the real problem. And then the third piece, which I think is underrated, is it gives you a tribe to belong to. And you know this is true. Like, am I really calling you out? No, I admit myself, I've been in tribes. If I was in the CrossFit tribe and the Zone Diet tribe and the Paleo tribe and the keto tribe, right? All the tribes, the cut the running tribe. Once you are anti-seed oils, oh, you are with the other anti-seed oil people, and all the others are like, man, they don't know what they're talking about. Like, I feel I feel bad for them. I'm gonna pray for them. Or what they say in the South, bless their heart, right? There's a whole community that is waiting to embrace you on villainizing seed oils. And then once you've publicly declared it, whether you're an influencer or even if you're just listening and you've told all your friends and neighbors, hopefully you're not, I don't know if you're talking to your neighbors about this stuff, but walking back from that is very hard to do. As human, we're it's hard to admit that we're wrong and it it costs you what's what's called social capital. And people don't want to do that, right? So it's not, it's not people being stupid. This is a logical error. It's psychologically engineered to feel like it's correct. And calling people out or ridiculing people who fall for the claims. Okay, I'm all for ridiculing people who who push them knowingly for the wrong reasons. That's not what I'm talking about. But ridiculing people who are just subject to them, like all of us, that just makes people dig in even harder. And the way out is to really understand the mechanism so well that the claims of food villain, food villains just stop being interesting anymore. Like at this point, I and many of you who listen to this show, if you've listened to it long enough, you almost don't pay attention when someone says, Oh, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. You're like, Yeah, probably not. Like, you could pretty much eat any food on the planet and be fine as long as it's meeting your goals as part of a flexible dietary pattern, something we've talked about before on this show. So let's go through the four top villains,
Philip Pape: 08:01
all right? The big villain number one is seed oils these days for whatever reason. It's super loud. People are calling it out online. Um, and that includes soybean oil, canola, corn oil, all of that. Supposedly it's driving the obesity epidemic. It causes inflammation because of the linoleic acid or because of the processing or rancidity or whatever, name whatever reason you want. But what the actual evidence says, okay, through meta-analysis of dozens of randomized controlled trials, which is the best quality type of study, thousands of people looking at what happens to inflammatory markers when you increase your linoleic acid intake, which is comes from seed oils, the result is no effect on inflammation, like CRP markers, IL6, interleukin 6, TNF alpha. Those are the three big inflammatory markers that we're all worried about. There's zero effect. And then on the other hand, to further compound the fact that seed oils aren't an issue, and in fact, might be better for you, there is just last year, 2025, JAMA Internal Medicine published a what's called a pooled cohort. 221,000 adults that were followed for up to 33 years. It doesn't get much better than that. And the main finding is that people who consume more plant oils had 16% lower total mortality. People who ate more butter had 15% higher mortality. If you could swap just 10 grams a day of butter for plant oils, there's a 17% lower mortality. So, and this is this is the finding I'm far more inclined to support because of the preponderance of the evidence for it. So, where does the seed oil panic come from? Well, two places that I could identify. The first is rodent studies, where the mice are fed soybean oil for like half their lives in environments that have nothing to do with how humans eat. And the second one is people conflating seed oils, linoleic acid with something called conjugated linoleic acid, which is like a structurally different compound sold as a weight loss supplement, which does increase inflammatory markers. And so the name sounds similar, the molecules are different. I don't know how many people are going with the first one or the second one, but there is no evidence to support that seed oils are the villain that everyone wants to make them out to be. And in fact, there's strong evidence that reducing your saturated fat and supplementing with these types of oils on a one-for-one basis is actually correlated with far-improved health outcomes and actually is in line with the American Heart Association recommendations. So the data doesn't match the narrative. That's the first
Philip Pape: 10:36
one. Villain number two is sugar. All right. You've heard for years and years and years, okay, sugar is the cause or the source of all our fat, especially corn syrup, that, you know, because it's processed, it just bypasses your appetite regulation. It spikes insulin, makes you store fat. So I'm gonna tell you about a guy named Mark Haub. Okay, Mark Haub is a nutrition professor at Kansas State. And back in 2010, he ran a 10-week experiment on himself. Okay, I love this guy for doing this. This time it's fun. I know it's like clickbaiting, it gets attention, but it's it's cool when people do this. So he ate Twinkies, little Debbie snacks, Doritos, Oreos, sugary cereals. Like 60% of his diet was just straight, let's call it junk food. Okay. He took a multivitamin and ate some vegetables on the side, but the bulk of what was going into his mouth was sugar and processed carbs. But the one thing he controlled was calories. He ate about 1,800 calories a day, down from his usual 2,600 calorie maintenance level. So that puts him in what? Do the math, 800 calorie deficit. Well, what happens when you're in a deficit? Well, you lose weight. He lost 27 pounds, but this is the cool thing. His LDL cholesterol dropped 20%. That's the bad cholesterol we call it. His HDL went up 20%, his triglycerides dropped 39%, his BMI went from 28.8 down to 24.9 while eating all of this junk. Now, is the conclusion go eat Twinkies as a diet? Of course not. He himself didn't recommend that. It was the principle of the thing that even on a diet that most would call the most awful diet ever, if you're in a calorie deficit, you can lose not only weight, but lose body fat and improve your health and blood markers because of the correlation between those. All that sugar didn't override physiology and thermodynamics. That's my point. Okay, not to eat Twinkies, but the fact that sugar is not the problem. There's also a 2020 meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that looked at isocaloric swaps, that means one-for-one swaps of sugar for starch. And they found very modest changes in LDL cholesterol and really no differences in body composition. Sugar's role in obesity in the real world, IRL, as they as the kids would say, where it shows up mostly in liquid form like soda, you know, sugary sodas. This is why I recommend diet soda, so you can lower the amount of calories and sugar you get just in general. But it's found in soda, juice, sweetened coffee drinks, you know, those big calorie bombs from Starbucks. The role of obesity there is absolutely real, but it's not because of the sugar. It's not because of the glucose. Okay, it's because of the calories. It's because you're consuming too many calories in too easy a way. And sugar does make it very easy to do that. So let's separate the fact from fiction
Philip Pape: 13:28
there. All right, villain number three is ultra-processed food. I know you're thinking, Philip, are you gonna actually defend ultra-processed food? No, remember, today's episode is about showing you that you cannot name a single type of food as a universal villain. There's a famous study that everybody cites to prove that ultra-processed foods make you fat. And it's the same study I cite all the time, not to prove that ultra-processed food makes you fat, but to prove that having a diet that includes primarily ultra-processed food leads to overconsumption. Those are two different things. So this is Kevin Hall's 2019 inpatient study at the National Institutes of Health. And Kevin Hall is a researcher I do respect a lot. He is a smart guy. He's careful with his data. He doesn't overclaim. And he took 20 people for two weeks on ultra-processed food, two weeks on minimally processed food. So it's a what they call a crossover design. It was matched for calories for macros, sugar, salt, fiber, but people could eat as much as they wanted. And the result was that people ate 500 extra calories per day on the ultra-processed diet, and they gained about two pounds in two weeks. So ultra-processed food makes you fat, right? Let's now let's add the nuance, okay? Which which Kevin Hall did. He looked at the why, he looked at the root cause. And the answer is how fast you eat and the energy density of the food. So on the ultra-processed diet, people were eating 48 calories a minute. On the minimally processed diet, 31 calories a minute. So the ultra-processed food was 50% faster to consume. Makes sense. It's processed, it's like denser, right? It's more calorie dense. And people still felt the same hunger and fullness on both diets. They just ate faster before their satiety signals could catch up. Now that's a behavioral mechanism. It's not a metabolic mechanism. And so the conclusion here is the food environment makes it easier to eat more calories. Okay, so that's different than saying ultra-processed food itself makes you fat. Then we have a 2025 follow-up in Nature Medicine by Dicken and colleagues. And it was the same kind of crossover design over eight weeks, but with a little bit of a twist to it. Both arms of the study had to follow national nutrition guidelines. So that means the ultra-processed side got fiber-rich, uh, high-protein ultra-processed foods, as opposed to what we normally think of, which are hyperpalatable snacks. And both groups lost weight. The minimally processed group lost 2% body weight, the ultra-processed group lost 1%. But but the researchers have predicted the ultra-processed food would gain weight. And they didn't. But they they lost weight just less than the other group. So ultra-processed food isn't something that just automatically causes cat fat gain. It's just a category of food that, in its hyper palatable form, makes it easy to overconsume. That's it. So if you structure your choices toward more fiber, more protein, even with ultra-processed food, it actually causes less of that. Now I'm not telling you go and eat just high protein, high fiber processed food. I'm just saying those are the things that matter, not the fact that they are ultra-processed. Okay.
Philip Pape: 16:44
The last villain is gluten, and I want to keep this short because the data is super clean here. Celiac disease affects 1% of the population. Those are people who absolutely cannot have gluten. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which is that broader category that everyone seems to have these days, for some reason, everyone has a gluten intolerance, apparently. The latest 2025 meta-analysis puts that at 6% of adults. That's it. And then when researchers do what's called double blind challenges, where people get either gluten or placebo and they don't know what it is, only 24% of self-reported gluten-sensitive people actually have reproducible systems, symptoms. So that means 94% of adults have no clinical reason to avoid gluten. And of the ones who think they're sensitive, three-quarters are responding to something other than gluten. It's often FODMAPs. Sometimes the overall improvement they get will come from cutting something like refined wheat products because of the FODMAPs. There's a lot of reasons. This is why people go on carnival and they're like, yeah, I went on carnivore, it solved all my problems. Well, you know what? You just did an elimination diet. You eliminated something that was causing you issues, but it's not all plants. Okay. So, and I feel bad for you if you think it is, and then you live the rest of your life just cutting out so many amazing foods and not getting enough fiber, et cetera. So if you feel worse with gluten or with any other particular food like dairy, don't eat it. Like I'm not telling you to eat it. I'm just saying the universal claim of gluten is making us all fat, all inflamed, causing all sorts of other issues with our gut, whatever. It's not a real thing. There's a very small, small, small effect with people that may have an issue like celiac, but it's being scaled up to apply to everyone, and the evidence does not support it. Okay, I'm very passionate about this episode for some reason. So let me take a pause and let me just take a breather here because a lot of you are thinking, okay, what do I actually do with all this information? How do I structure my eating without falling into these food fear traps? Like, what do I eat? Tell me like what the alternative
Philip Pape: 18:48
is. Well, that's why we have what we have. It's called Eat More Lift Heavy. It's a program, it's a 26-week coaching program. It's mainly for women over 40 who have spent years cycling through all of these diets, all of these food rules, all of these villains. You know what I'm talking about. Cut this, add that. This is poison. That's a superfood. Rinse and repeat. Well, what if we replace all of that with a structured, flexible, much more liberating approach? You track your numbers for awareness and you learn to read your own data, but then you eat in a very, very flexible way, not only in terms of food, the food on your plate, but also how you go through phases of fat loss maintenance and muscle building so that it feels much more sustainable. It's easy to do. You're excited about it, you enjoy it. I want you to go to eatmore liftheavy.com to check it out. It's called Eat More Lift Heavy for a reason. It's a great thing to do. Go check it out. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. And if you're tired of having to cut carbs or cut whatever else it is and feel like you're restricted, we've got the alternative. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. All
Philip Pape: 19:56
right. So if no single food is making you fat, what is? The honest answer is energy balance. Okay, nothing new here, folks. But if you're new to the podcast or you wanted a refresher, let's just get into it. The amount of energy you take in from food relative to the amount your body burns and expense. So if you have a net surplus over time, you gain weight. If you have a net deficit over time, you lose weight. That's it. That's the governing law. Every diet that has ever worked has worked through this mechanism. Whether the people running the diet acknowledge it or not, okay, even the carnivore people, the keto people, anyone selling you the seed oil-free lifestyle. Heck, people that are selling you you don't have to count calories or you don't have to track or whatever, it still comes down to calories. Now, it's not all about calories. Energy balance and losing weight on a pure physics and math basis is about calories, but food quality does matter. Okay. So this is the straw man people use. They hear calories in, calories out, and they're like, okay, so that you're saying food quality doesn't matter. Nope, absolutely not. The actual position supported by what we have in the evidence is energy balance is the boss in terms of weight gained or weight loss. Food quality is helps you with your body composition, how you look, how you feel. See, so they each do a different job for you. So when we talk about food quality, what does it affect? Well, first, satiety, fullness per calorie. So if you're eating more whole foods, vegetables, lean protein, fruit, beans, whole grains, all of these give you more grams, more volume on your scale, right? More fiber per calorie. And by the way, fiber has fewer calories per gram than other carbs. And so they make controlling those calories easier. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Second, micronutrient density. A long term diet dominated by low nutrient processed foods are going to be worse for your health outcomes, even if your body composition stays the same or stays in a good range. You can still be lean and still be unhealthy, is my point. And then third is the rate of eating, which is the research we talked about earlier. Hyperpalatable processed foods make it easier to consume more calories before your brain registers the fullness. But again, food quality doesn't override thermodynamics. You can't eat enough quote unquote clean food, but be in a calorie surplus and stay lean. And you can't eat dirty food in a deficit and gain fat. You're actually going to lose fat. Isn't that interesting? Okay. All things equal, of course. We're not even talking about lifting weights and preserving muscle and all that fun stuff. I love a really good example here. It's sumo wrestlers. Okay, sumo wrestlers. So awesome. I haven't talked about them in a long time. So the staple meal of a sumo wrestler is called chanko nabe. It is chicken, fish, tofu, vegetables, and rice. What is that? Well, that's whole foods. It's some of the most nutrient-dense, traditional type of meals or cooking on the planet. And they eat five to eight thousand calories a day. They are among the heaviest athletes on the planet Earth. So they eat what we'd call clean food in a massive calorie surplus. So they have massive body weight. Just a very simple example. Now, what's interesting is we can go into the fact that they have healthier blood markers than you would expect for their weight because they have a massive amount of muscle. Totally different topic, but worth maybe worth doing an episode sometime, right? And I the the example of Mark Hobb with the Twinkie diet, that was kind of like the opposite of the exact same thing, right? He was eating a totally junk diet and then losing weight. Again, it came down to energy balance. And we're not saying that that's a good thing, depending on your lifestyle and the quality of the food, right? Just what we talked about. So at the end of the day, I would say the dose matters when it comes to these foods. There's a saying from a physician back way back in the 1500s, a guy named Paracelsus. I think it's Celsus or Paracelsus, I don't know. He said, the dose makes the poison. That's where we get that phrase from. Water can kill you if you drink too much of it. It's called hyponneutremia, and people died from that. If you have too much oxygen in too high of a concentration, it can damage your lungs. Right? So nothing is safe at every dose, and nothing is dangerous at every dose. The dose in the context of the system, that's what determines the outcome. So seed oils at say 7% of your calories in a diet rich in vegetables, lean protein, fiber, there is zero evidence of any harm, and there's possibly some benefit if they're replacing saturated fats. Whereas if you have seed oils at 35% of your calories in a diet full of full, you know, fried foods, low fiber calorie surplus, which guess what? That's like the standard American diet. And that's the problem, is we're we're comparing apples and oranges. Okay. Just because you eat a lot of seed oils and you're fat doesn't mean it was the seed oils. You're probably getting them from ultra-processed foods and you're drinking lots of soda and you're over consuming calories, et cetera, and you're not lifting weights. I could go on. Okay? It's not the seed oil that's the cause, it's the dose in the context of your overall diet and your dietary pattern. Same with sugar, same with ultra-processed food, same with everything. And that is, in my mind, very liberating. Like to me, that's the essence of flexible eating. So let's talk
Philip Pape: 25:10
about that. What is the framework that you can use that has worked with the hundreds of clients that I have coached? It's very simple. Roughly 80% of your calories from whole, minimally processed foods that you enjoy, about 20% from whatever you want. Now notice how I said that. The 80% are whole, minimally processed foods, but you're still gonna enjoy them. You're gonna pick the ones that you like. Okay, don't force force yourself to eat quote unquote healthy or clean foods that you don't like. There's plenty of foods that you should or or will like. And then 20% whatever you want with nothing off limits. There is no villain on your list. There's no moral hierarchy of foods. And the evidence supports this. There's a randomized controlled trial from 2021. Conlin and colleagues published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. They took resistance-trained adults, put them on a 20% calorie deficit for 10 weeks, and they randomized them to either flexible dieting or rigid dieting. So the same calories, the same protein. The only difference was the rules around which foods you were allowed to eat. During the diet phase, both groups lost similar amounts of body weight and fat. But then they did something smart in the study. They followed both groups for 10 more weeks of free eating. And that's where they saw differences. The flexible eating group gained 1.7 kilograms of lean mass back. The rigid group lost 0.7 kilograms of lean mass. So flexible dieting ended up with more muscle and better long-term outcomes. And the reason is because rigid dieting predicts binge cycles. Decades and decades of eating disorder research has shown this. When you label foods as bad or forbidden, those foods become psychologically supercharged in your mind. The all-or-nothing mindset kicks in. You're either perfect or you're a failure. And then eventually, guess what happens? You crack, you let go, you binge, you swear off the food again, you start over. It is a vicious loop or cycle. Flexible dieting prevents that loop because you're including the foods you enjoy at a small dose regularly. It is not a moral issue, and it loses its status as this forbidden thing. It becomes just food. That is it. So when I push back on food demonization on wits and weights, the what's underneath it is this idea of like orthorexia, this obsessive preoccupation with eating pure and clean foods, the binge eating cycles, the eating disorders, that's what I'm concerned about for folks. Okay, it increases food fear, it increases social anxiety around eating, it predicts these cycles. So the fix is to lower all of those moral stakes around food, knowing how the human brain works, and instead raise the stakes around the system itself, like energy balance, protein training, recovery, the big levers that you can work around that actually align with your goals. All right, before I wrap up, remember I'm gonna give you the food villain test. Three questions takes 30 seconds, coming right up. But if this episode made you realize, hey, the problem isn't a specific food. It's not carbs, it's not sugar, it's not seed oils, whatever. Maybe you're on carnivore right now and you're like, ah, I can't do this the rest of my life. The problem is really a lack of a structured system that does work for you. That is why we built Eat More Lift Heavy. That is the 26-week coach program. You learn a skill one week at a time. And if you're done cycling through all this food nonsense, if you're done with worrying about what's poisoning you and your hormones and starting over constantly, this is going to fix that with you because it is super sustainable. It's skill building, it's positive. We empower you, we support you along the way. It's very flexible, and you're gonna come out the other side feeling so strong, empowered, able to do whatever you want to do for your physique and health for the rest of your life. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. That is the whole point. I want you to fire us when you're done. Okay, you don't need a coach forever. You need to build the skills and the structure so that food is not ruining or running your life anymore. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com and we'll see you there. All right,
Philip Pape: 29:16
here's that 30-second food villain test. It's three questions. Question one, at what dose? That's it. At what dose? If someone cannot tell you a dose where the food becomes harmful versus a dose that is fine in context, then they don't understand the food. Okay. If they say seed oils is harmful at any dose, sorry, that is not true. Question two, in what context? So if the claimer on the food doesn't account for the rest of the diet around it, calorie balance, training, the individual's health, that's the composition fallacy we started with in this episode. Okay. You're pointing at one thing and blaming it for the whole. And then question three, what human studies support this? Now, I'm not a big fan of like calling people out and saying, tell me the study, link the study. You know, it's more of hey, the preponderance of evidence should be there somewhere. And I'm fine if you, instead of asking the person, because you might be talking to a regular person as opposed to like a quote unquote expert, go ahead and look it up yourself. Like go to scholar.google.com and start looking up. Try to use AI and really do your searches. Try to avoid, you know, you want to avoid cherry picking here, but at least ask for the studies that support it so that you can look into those. If the studies are just like a mouse study over here, a testimonial over here, a case study over here, a documentary on Netflix, okay, that's not really the evidence we're looking for. So those three questions can really help you decide. Which at the end of the day, do you even need to ask these questions? I don't know. I would say probably not, because just about any claim about a single food being a villain is probably false, but it's worth going through the exercise. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that no single food is making you fat, causing you inflammation, or anything else. The dose, the context, the system are where it's at. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

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Philip Pape 5/21/26 Philip Pape 5/21/26

Why "Muscle Confusion" Might Actually Work for Hypertrophy | Ep 470

Is "muscle confusion" just bro science, or does recent strength training research actually back it up? You mighT be surprised... We get into how muscles grow, why exercise selection changes which regions of a muscle develop, and the role of muscle length in hypertrophy. This episode covers the last decade of research on exercise variation and hypertrophy. These include studies on leg press vs. leg extension and on triceps and hamstrings at different muscle lengths.

Is "muscle confusion" just bro science, or does recent strength training research actually back it up? You migh be surprised...

We get into how muscles grow, why exercise selection changes which regions of a muscle develop, and the role of muscle length in hypertrophy.

This episode covers the last decade of research on exercise variation and hypertrophy. These include studies on leg press vs. leg extension and on triceps and hamstrings at different muscle lengths.

We distinguish the original P90X version of "muscle confusion" from the systematic variation (aka periodization and mesocycles) that you can intentionally plan into your strength training programming.

This framing matters most for adults over 40 who've been told to pick a few compound lifts and add weight to the bar forever (sound familiar?).

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Muscle confusion and exercise variation
2:25 - Where "muscle confusion" came from
4:00 - Mechanical tension and progressive overload
5:52 - Muscles as regional structures
7:30 - Regional hypertrophy in the quads
10:24 - Muscle length and hypertrophy
14:30 - Strategic exercise selection
15:45 - Training programming for adults over 40
17:01 - 3 rules for planned variation
20:42 - Caveats on variation
23:35 - Bonus: lengthened-position swap per muscle group

Philip Pape: 00:00
If your training program looks basically the same as it did a year ago, because every coach tells you, just pick your lifts and add weight to the bar, but your muscle growth has stalled in spite of doing everything right. This episode is for you. We're gonna look at research from the last three years in the area of quote unquote muscle confusion, and some of it's gonna surprise you. I'm gonna show you what kind of exercise variation actually does grow more muscle, which ones waste your time, and a simple way to balance all of this along with your progressive overload. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and we're gonna talk about the concept of muscle confusion. It probably sounds like something from the 90s, from P90X, from classic bodybuilding days, you know, random workout, shock the muscle, uh, progressive overload, what's that? Maybe not tracking, you know, none of the good stuff we often talk about these days. And a lot of coaches, you know, even evidence-based for the last decade or two have said, hey, that that that concept is nonsense. Let's focus on just muscular tension and growth and progressing our lifts. And I generally agree. I still generally agree. But honestly, there is there are aspects of bro science that do hold up in a way. And I like to address these because I think it's fun to tease apart reality from myth. And the phrase muscle confusion, I think, covers different things, two specific ideas, and we're gonna separate those. One of those ideas doesn't make any sense at all, complete nonsense. The other, the one that is a real driver of muscle growth, uh, especially the older you get and the more that you train, might give you this extra advantage once you understand it. And then stick around to the end of this episode because I'm gonna give you the single highest payoff exercise swap for each major muscle group. If you only change one thing in your training this week, this bonus at the end is the one that you can incorporate. All right, in this episode, I'm gonna cover why the original P90X version of muscle confusion was indeed broscience and what Tony Horton himself has admitted about it. The actual research from the last two to three years on regional muscle growth and muscle length training, and then a simple rule of thumb to set up your accessory work so you're getting the most out of every
Philip Pape: 02:25
session. All right, let's start with what muscle confusion originally meant, because I think a lot of people argue against it without realizing what they're arguing against. Okay, so the phrase actually predates P90X. We can go back to Joe Weeder. Joe Weeder was writing about something called the muscle confusion principle decades ago in the old bodybuilding magazines, and then it finally hit, I guess, what you'll call the mainstream, is in the infomercials about 20 years ago, the mid-2000s, let's say, Tony Horton. And the pitch was that your muscles get used to exercises and then they stop growing. So you need to constantly shock them with new movements to force adaptation. Monday is Plyo, Wednesday is Kenpo karate, Friday is yoga X with weighted curls. You know, you get the idea you've probably done something like this. Maybe you're laughing out loud right now. And if it kind of sounds like nonsense to you now, especially if you listen to Wits and Weights, you're definitely not alone because Tony Horton has admitted on multiple podcasts that it was a marketing term. Muscle confusion was a marketing term. The team made up the phrase as a label for what was just variety. That's it. And we call this something else generally. It's called periodization. So generally that, you know, labels are mean a lot, especially when we think about the fitness industry and marketing. There was another interview where he said muscle confusion and periodization are the same thing. So again, variety. That's really what we're talking about. And so that's the piece we're gonna say could work for certain reasons. We're gonna get into it. Now,
Philip Pape: 04:00
the bro science piece of this is the idea that muscles, you know, memorize your exercises or they get bored or whatever. Nonsense. Skeletal muscle responds to mechanical tension. That is the primary driver of hypertrophy. And you need sufficient volume with that mechanical tension to induce progressive overload, right? You have to have enough of the stimulus over time and the tension to grow. I mean, you don't want, you can't use mechanical tension today and then skip training for three weeks and hope for it to work because you're going to get detrained. So if you do the same lift week after week and you keep adding load or reps because you are pushing close to failure and inducing muscular tension, your body will adapt and you'll get stronger for next time. And that is the process. Very simple, full stop. You don't need muscle shock or any of this crazy nonsense. Randomly changing exercises, especially if you're doing it every session, that actually destroys the thing that drives long-term growth, which is your ability to track progressive overload and get enough frequency and stimulus on a specific movement pattern. Can you still grow in some ways? Yes, there are definitely programs where they rotate a lot and you still grow, but it's very hard to tell that you're getting stronger on your bench if every Wednesday is a completely different pressing variation drawn out of a hat. And again, it doesn't preclude growth if you're stimulating the same muscles. It just may not be very efficient. So when we push back on muscle confusion, there's a lot of validity to that. And the idea of picking a small set of exercises and just sticking with them is a great way to drive progress. And I would recommend that to all beginners and most intermediate lifters. And I've said that on this show many, many times. It's why I do like programs like starting strength. They're very basic compound lift style programs, especially when you're a beginner.
Philip Pape: 05:52
So we want to talk about some new evidence though in the last few years that addresses a narrower question. Does it matter which exercises you pick? And does loading those same muscle groups from multiple angles because of that variation produce different growth than loading it from just the one angle you get in a single movement pattern? And the answer, surprisingly, maybe, is yes. Yes, it does. And it does so in a way that has some practical implications for your accessory work. And that's where things get useful on this show. We want to tell you how to actually implement this in your real life. Okay, so to understand why exercise selection matters more than we used to think, I want to drop an assumption on you that a muscle is a single object. This is an assumption many of us have, right? That like there is a muscle. That is not true. A muscle is a structure and it has regions. For example, the biceps has a proximal portion near the shoulder and a distal portion near the elbow. So proximal is near, distal is far. The quadriceps, right? The quads of your leg have four separate heads, hence the word quad. Each head has a top, middle, and bottom. The triceps has a long head, a lateral head, and a medial head, right? Tri-three. And they all have different geometric relationships to the shoulder and to the elbow. So when you do an exercise, the load gets distributed unevenly across that muscle, that muscle belly. And it gets concentrated in regions where the geometry of the exercise puts the most tension. The more you understand that, the more you understand why different exercises produce different growth patterns, even when they technically target the same muscle group. So even when you're when you swear in the gym that I'm training my chest, you might be growing different parts of your chest. Case in point, flat bench versus incline. For anybody who knows anything about that at all, you know that they hit different parts of the chest. So I want to share some data because numbers are really helpful. I'm an engineer, I like data, and I always like to tie it back to metrics and numbers. Um, and this some of this stuff might surprise you. So it's interesting. There's a foundational study by Fonseca and colleagues in 2014. They took young men and split them into two groups. One group did only back squat for 12 weeks, another group rotated among squat, leg press, deadlift, and lunge across the same training week. So all back squats versus four different leg exercises each week. But the total weekly volume was matched. The total quad growth was the same between the groups or similar between the groups, but when the researchers looked head by head, so muscle, muscle head, the squat-only group had gaps in certain heads of the muscle, the rectus femoris and the vastus medialis. You don't have to know what these are, those are, you can look them up. The varied group, the group that had multiple exercises, grew all four heads of the quad more uniformly. And so that was kind of the first sign in the literature that exercise selection affects which regions of a muscle grow beyond just how much total growth happens. Now, again, we're talking hypertrophy, we're talking muscle growth. A lot of this growth, a lot of this isn't gonna translate one-on-one with strength if that's your goal, right? There's significant overlap for sure. But if you, for example, have already well-developed heads of the muscle, you may benefit more from the big movement patterns in a systemic way. So that's just a caveat. Anyway, fast forward to very recent research back in 2024, Burke and colleagues, they did an in-person or a within-person study. Uh, and this one's pretty compelling. They had each participant train one leg with leg press and the other leg with leg extension for eight weeks. So within your own body, you're training each leg different ways. Kind of interesting, right? So one leg gets a leg press, the other the leg extension, and then they measured the rectus femoris and the vasus lateralis using ultrasound. So again, two heads of the quad. And what they saw is the leg extension leg grew the rectus femoris more, and the leg press grew the vasus lateralis more. So same person, same effort, different exercise, different regions, different regions growing. And the statistical probability of this correlation was as high as 0.99, which is almost a perfect correlation. So that's kind of the regional heads finding. The second
Philip Pape: 10:24
piece of this mechanism is muscle length. And this one might be even more important because you've heard a lot of talk about the short and long positions of the muscle and lengthened partials, things like that. So now there's a series of studies showing that loading a muscle in a lengthened position produces more growth than loading it in a shortened position for the same number of sets and reps. And just quick caveat before you jump to ah, I see, see, I need to be training lengthened. We're gonna find that it's still beneficial to train the full range of motion for a variety of reasons. But let's just look at this. So Mayo and colleagues 2023, they had their subjects do triceps extensions overhead with one arm and triceps pushdowns at the side with the other arm. So again, this is a within person type of deal. And both arms got the same training volume. So after 12 weeks, the long head of the triceps had grown 29% on the overhead side and only 20% on the pushdown side, the whole triceps grew 20% versus 14%. Now, isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? So in the overhead, now I've always thought or I learned a long time ago that overhead triceps work tends to be, tends to blow up your triceps more, and that it's because of the length and position, because of that extra range of motion. By the way, the overhead group used less weight than the pushdown group. Now, not that it translates directly, but that's just interesting, right? So the length and position was the the real key variable here, not the load. The overarm, the overhead arm grew more despite working with lower absolute weight on the bar. I think I said that right, right? Yeah, the overhead group used less weight but had more growth. So that's interesting. The same lab, they tested hamstrings the same way. So they did a seated leg curl where your hip is flexed, your hamstring is stretched over the hip joint, right? A seated leg curl versus a prone or lying leg curl where the hip is extended and the hamstring is shorter. After 12 weeks, the total hamstring volume grew 14% on the seated side and only 9.3% on the prone side. So it's 50% more growth from the same movement, but done in a different muscle length. So the seated seems better than the prone. And then in 2023, another group looked at the big calf muscle called the gastrosinemius. The group that trained mostly through the bottom stretched portion of the range, remember, this is calf raises. We talk about it all the time, how important it is to stretch at the bottom, have that height, and really have that ankle come down. So you stretch at the bottom, produced more than twice the muscle growth of the group that trained mostly through the top shortened position. Same load on the bar. The difference just where in the range of motion the muscle was working the hardest. So I think you get the picture from all of these studies. The same muscle can respond differently to different exercises and to different parts of the range of motion. And the mechanism here is straightforward. Mechanical tension drives growth, and different exercises apply that tension to different regions of the muscle at different points along the strength curve. So it's not muscle shock, muscle surprise, novelty effect. It's just physics and geometry. That is fascinating. As an engineer who loves to explain things with science, that is so cool. It still comes down to mechanical tension, right? But now you're talking about how you get to apply that tension in the proper way for what your goal is. And this is where the idea of imbalances actually carries some validity, right? Because if you're overdoing it in one region of the muscle, um, you could get an imbalance. Now, I'm gonna go way back to my starting strength days and say, you know, if you're if you're training the full movement patterns, by definition, you shouldn't be as imbalanced because everything's working together as it should. However, because of life, because of injury, because of improper movement, because of, because, because we do still see some level of imbalance. Plus, a lot of you want to do hypertrophy and grow your muscles and look better and all that. And so you might even create imbalances by training too much of the same thing, for example. And that's kind of what we're getting at when we talk about this concept. So that brings us to strategic exercise selection, where you cover different regions and different muscle lengths to drive more uniform growth across the whole muscle. And that is in concert with the major movement patterns, which also, in a sense, do a similar thing, but may hold you back if your bottleneck is a weak area of your muscle and the movement pattern doesn't stress that muscle group. Does that make sense? That's where I think variations can blow you up if you are in that situation. Whereas for others, they may not add anything and they may just add fatigue and volume that are unnecessary. So it's very interesting. All right, now if you're hearing this and thinking, all right, it all makes sense, but I don't want to spend a ton of time researching which exercises go with which heads of my quads. All right. And I get it. And you know, most lifters don't want to be their own programmer. They want to lift, they want to see the numbers go up, they want to know that someone else has thought about the program or the training. And that's why we built Eat More Lift Heavy. This is our program, Eat More Lift Heavy, where the programs are available already to cover a variety of goals, days per week, equipment, and skill level. And we assign it to you on day one based on what's going on with your intake, your life, your equipment, your experience, your goals. Right? We don't just give you a content library of a million templates or an app that has unlimited selection. We actually tell you here's what you can do to make the most out of where you are right now. And typically they're based on compound lifts with accessories rotating on a certain type of schedule. And the more advanced you are, the more of this kind of rotation and variation you might have. So this muscle length and regional growth stuff I'm talking about today is baked into how I like to structure our programs. And Coach Carol, who is also in Eat More Lift Heavy, she has written up some excellent training programs as well. Because many of you, you can't afford to spend hours and hours trying to research this stuff. So Eat More Lift Heavy, it's a 26-week coached program built around these ideas. Eat enough, lift heavy, progressive overload, know exactly what to do, focus on one thing a week. Don't get overwhelmed. You know what to do next. You focus on your biggest constraint, you make progress, you get accountability. It's as simple as that. There's a lot of extra bells and whistles, there's live coaching calls, there's a private community, there's lots of resources. That's all fine and good. But the main thing is that you actually implement the information to make progress. If you want to learn more, go to eatmore liftheavy.com, check it out, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. All right, I want to get practical
Philip Pape: 17:01
now. How do you use this stuff? Okay, assuming you're not, assuming you don't join our program and we just make it easy for you and you want to program your own stuff. How do you do it? I'm gonna give you three rules. If you apply these three rules, you'll get the most benefit from what the research tells us works. And again, it all comes down to mechanical tension, but it's more complicated as always. And you're gonna get the progressive overload that does build your muscle. All right, rule number one anchor your compound lifts. What I mean by that is the main lifts in your program shouldn't change much. Okay, until you get into advanced, like something like conjugate or powerlifting style thing, anchor your lifts, your squat or your hinge variant, your horizontal press, which is usually a bench press of some kind, vertical press, rowing, andor pull downs. Okay. I think I covered them all, or deadlift as well. I said hinge variant, but squat and deadlift. So even if it's a Romanian deadlift, even if it's a JM or an AD press, whatever, the variation is keep them stable for like eight weeks, maybe 12 weeks. Don't rotate them. All right, that way you build the neuromuscular adaptation. Your body learns the movement patterns. It's essentially a skill, and you'll be able to load it heavier from session to session. You're gonna be using your natural movement patterns. I think that's really, really important. All right, don't switch around from leg press to split squat to step-ups and just all over the place. Do not do that for your main lifts. Okay, so that's the first one. That's like your stable platform for the program. Rule number two is to choose complementary exercises, but rotate them on what's called a mesocycle. This is it's not too complicated. A mesocycle is just a long enough period of time, like four or six weeks, maybe eight weeks, where you swap out your accessories to start hitting different regions of the muscle groups. Okay. And you might already be using hitting different regions within your week, like if you do triceps on two days a week and you hit the long and short heads, you may, or the two, two, two of the two or the three of the heads, you might already have that built in, but then you're going to swap things out for slight variations after, say, six weeks, even if the compound lifts stay the same. And that gives you some variety as well, makes it fun. It's something to look forward to, but you need a long enough runway for your biceps, your triceps, your calves, your hamstrings, your delts, you know, direct chest, like pec work, that you actually make progress and then you rotate over these mesocycles, these blocks within the big block. And then rule number three is at least one exercise per muscle group should definitely load that muscle in a lengthened position. Now, if you're doing full range of motion, you are hitting the lengthened position generally, but certain exercises will hit it harder. Right? So if you're gonna pick two to three exercises per muscle group across the week or across your block, make sure one of them stretches the muscle really nicely under load. So for triceps, that means overhead. Like have an overhead thing in there. Oh, I'm always thinking triceps have something overhead. Don't just do press downs. For hamstrings, a movement where your hip is flexed. Okay, where your hip is flexed. For chest, a fly with a deep bottom stretch or press where the dumbbells go below the line of your chest. For biceps, an angle where the arm is behind the torso. So in this case, I love incline bicep curls. So I think you get the pattern, right? I think you get it. And I'm gonna give you a specific swap for each muscle group in the bonus at the end of today's episode. So hang tight for that. That's it. That is how you upgrade your programming to take advantage of this and get a really effective workout. You anchor the compound lifts, you rotate your accessories using a mesocycle, and you hit one lengthened position movement per muscle group. All right. Now I
Philip Pape: 20:42
want to address something that I know you're probably thinking, because I love nuance. We always lose nuance. That's why I like podcasts, long form. Okay. I am not saying that variation is more important than volume or progressive overload. Not even close. Okay, you have to go near failure on enough sets with enough frequency and progressively overload those lifts. You have to eat enough, you have to need enough protein, probably enough carbs. Are you sleeping? These matter way more than exercise selection. I'll tell you that right now. Okay. I'm also not saying that every study tells us this is exactly how it is. There are some studies that suggest maybe the benefit is really in the combination of all these things. And you're gonna get that just from a normal, well-structured program that we've talked about today. And I'm not also not saying you you make this a random variation where you're constantly switching around because that is not gonna help you out either. All right. I would call variation a refinement on top of the fundamentals. That's it. It's a refinement on top of the fundamentals. It's something to think about. One little thing I didn't mention, I'm just throwing it in there right now, is a finisher. This is just a bonus. You can add a finisher at just the lengthened position. Look it up, go to Google or YouTube, check it out, what I'm talking about. Just look up lengthened partials, and you can use that as a finisher, might. Be an extra fun thing to try. So that is where we land on this with the principles. Before we wrap up, I want to remind you that I promised I'm going to give you a single highest payoff swap for each major muscle group in just a second. But if any part of this episode connected with you, if you realize I haven't been running things quite the right way for my program and I'm not quite sure what to do, that is why we built Eat More Lift Heavy. It is going to level you up so much in your skills, which is my mission in life is to help you build these skills so you don't need to depend on another coach again. I'm sorry to all the other coaches listening where I'm ruining your long-term revenue per client or whatever. But I want people to fire me. I want people to learn and be excited. And you know what usually happens is you learn, you get excited, you grow, you build muscle, you lose fat, you look better. You're like, okay, what's next? I want to level up to the next skill. And that's how this thing should work. So eat more lift heavy, eatmore liftheavy.com, a 26-week coach program, primarily for adults over 40, to build the nutrition and strength training skills to build and preserve muscle, lose fat, manage your physique and sustain it and eat well and sustainably eat for the rest of your life. No diets, okay, no cutting carbs, none of that nonsense. You're gonna get a coach-assigned training program, monthly live coaching calls, a community where you can get accountability in addition to just the program itself, which is one skill per week that you focus on. It's very achievable. And it's an incredible program. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. I would love to see you there. You can learn everything about it on the page, eatmoreliftheavy.com. All right. If
Philip Pape: 23:35
you only change one thing in your training this week, swap one accessory per muscle group for its lengthened position version. So here we go. Triceps. Trade cable pushdowns for overhead rope or dumbbell extensions. Hamstrings, trade one set of prone leg curls, that's lion leg curls, for seated leg curls. Biceps, swap a preacher curl for an incline dumbbell curl. Okay, where your arms hang behind your torso. Your arms should be basically straight down when you're sitting. Chest, swap a flat dumbbell fly for an incline dumbbell fly with a deep stretch at the bottom. Alternatively, you can use a pec deck if you have one available. Calves, trade one set of standing calf raises for one where you let your heel drop as deep below the platform as you can. Now, this may be the same exercise, just positioning it differently, getting a higher box or platform or whatever. That's it. I think you can experience some more growth by just making these tweaks and have fun in the gym next time you go train. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, growing more muscle comes down to loading the same muscle well with mechanical tension from more than one angle. Nothing fancier than that. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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Philip Pape 5/19/26 Philip Pape 5/19/26

The 20-Minute Fix for Menopause Belly Fat | Ep 469

Can you target menopause belly fat? The surprising answer is... yes! It involves how metabolism shifts after 40, why visceral fat behaves differently than subcutaneous fat, and THIS time-efficient form of conditioning that outperforms steady-state cardio in the latest postmenopausal research. This episode covers 2026 metabolic chamber research on how the menopause transition independently changes metabolism and substrate oxidation, the visceral fat redistribution that drives the menopause belly experience, and sprint interval research in postmenopausal women.

Can you target menopause belly fat?

The surprising answer is... yes! It involves how metabolism shifts after 40, why visceral fat behaves differently than subcutaneous fat, and THIS time-efficient form of conditioning that outperforms steady-state cardio in the latest postmenopausal research.

This episode covers 2026 metabolic chamber research on how the menopause transition independently changes metabolism and substrate oxidation, the visceral fat redistribution that drives the menopause belly experience, and sprint interval research in postmenopausal women.

Plus how to fit short sprint sessions around lifting heavy, who should start this protocol, and the speed-drop test that tells you whether the protocol is working. Built for women in perimenopause, postmenopause, and adults over 40 working on fat loss, body recomp, and strength training over 40.

Get the free Sprinting for Fat Loss guide by joining my email list and replying to ask for it. The 6-page PDF includes the full protocol, equipment options, and how to fit short sprint sessions around your lifting schedule:
https://witsandweights.com/email

Timestamps:

0:00 - 20-minute fix for menopause belly fat
2:20 - Metabolism drop in menopause
7:06 - Substrate oxidation and fuel preference
9:58 - Sprint research in postmenopausal women
13:08 - Sprint adaptations and visceral fat
15:30 - Sprinting protocol
18:48 - Equipment hierarchy for sprint training
20:12 - Fitting sprints around lifting
24:48 - Bonus: speed drop test

Philip Pape: 00:00
There is a specific fix for the kind of belly fat that shows up in the menopause transition, and it takes about 20 minutes per session, twice a week. In one of the best studies we have on this, that was enough to drop visceral fat 24% in just 16 weeks. You don't have to change your diet. You don't have to have any hours in the gym. Today I'm gonna walk you through what the research shows about menopause belly fat and this one form of conditioning that targets it specifically. If you're under 40 or you're a guy, this still applies. The mechanism is the same. I think you're gonna enjoy this one. Stay tuned. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, founder of the Fitness Lab app. And today I want to talk about something that I'll say surprises almost every woman that I coach who is over 40, and that is that the belly fat you get during the menopause transition, it happens to everyone. Every woman knows what belly menopause belly is about. There is a fix for this that is actually meaningful, that actually moves the needle. And it's not walking more, it's not just losing body fat, it's not abloaded training, it's not the reducing alcohol or having more sleep. All of those things are good. All of those are goodness. It is not chronic cardio, it's not a new eating protocol. It's something that takes 20 minutes per session, twice a week, and it targets the specific kind of fat that gets redistributed during menopause. I'm gonna pull together two pieces of evidence today for you. The first is data from Dr. Bill Campbell. He's a researcher at the University of South Florida. He is awesome. He's been on the show several times before. He runs a monthly research review. It's one of the ones I pay for called Body by Science. We actually, or he actually featured me a while back, ironically, in an article or an issue related to abs and ab training. And his latest issue and a recent workshop he did looked at this finding from the research, which is that menopause independently lowers your metabolism in a way
Philip Pape: 02:20
that aging alone does not explain. It's menopause, it's not aging. It's very interesting because we always say, well, no, it's just the muscle mass, but there is some research suggesting there's something independent going on. The second piece of evidence is exercise research on what reduces visceral fat. That's the belly fat we're talking about when we say menobelly or menopause belly. And this is where a lot of women are headed off in the wrong direction because oftentimes the advice of you just gotta lose body fat, you just have to move more, you just have to lift weights, which again are all great things, it doesn't target this specific problem. So we're gonna talk about that today. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a single question test that tells you whether you're doing this protocol correctly. Okay, so we want to do this right once you know what it is. Here's what we're going to cover. I'm gonna walk you through why the metabolism drop in menopause is a real independent factor and what the best study ever done on this looked at. I'm gonna show you why visceral fat is specifically what is driving the my belly fat has gone up even though nothing changed experience. And then I'm gonna give you the 20-minute protocol that I use with my clients and with myself, along with who should start doing something else first before they do this. Okay, so let's talk about the experience of women that I hear. Obviously, I'm not a woman. There's a lot of things I don't experience, including what men experience. So I have to listen, I have to empathize, I have to hear your experiences. And our women over 40, which is roughly 70 to 80% of our clients and our members of Eat More Lift Heavy, are going along, eating about the same as you always have, training about the same. And suddenly there is belly fat that wasn't there before, right? Your clothes just fit differently. The scale might not even be that different. If you go listen to our last solo episode, all about three metrics before summer. If you're trying to lose fat, we talk about the scale weight there. Your scale weight may not be different, but your body distribution has changed. And it feels like everything that you've used in the past to help with this is are not working. Even dieting, even exercise, even moving. And so the intuitive response, though, is to try those things again. You're gonna eat a little less, move a little more, add some cardio. I appreciate the intuition, right? When something has worked in the past, we feel like it should work again. And energy balance still matters. It's physics at the most basic level. But what the research shows that's happening explains a bit why those don't always produce the same results in this window. Let's talk about that. Dr. Bill Campbell, love the guy. Okay, he's he's just such a great science communicator and educator. And in his March 2026 research review, and then he did a workshop for coaches, he looked at a study. The study he broke down followed 158 women for four years. All of them started pre-menopausal. All of them were at least 43 when they entered the study. And a subset of 34 women spent 24 hours inside a metabolic chamber at the beginning of the study and 24 hours inside the same one four years later. And that's kind of a gold standard for measuring metabolism, you know, as best we can, so we can measure the actual calories burned. Here's what they found. Pretty cool. The women who remained pre-menopausal over the four years, they lost about 150 calories a day of their metabolic rate. That's their metabolism went down by 150. And that's just aging, right? And happens all to all of us as we age a little, likely due to due to the loss of muscle mass. So that's kind of its own factor that affects everyone. The women who transitioned from pre- to post-menopausal over those same four years lost 200 calories a day. That's 50 calorie per day difference. And it was specifically attributable to menopause, not to aging, not to activity differences. They controlled for activity inside the chamber. Now, 50 calories doesn't sound like a lot, but think about what that adds up to. Just do basic math. 50 calories a day over four years equals five pounds of extra body fat from the metabolism drop alone, with no change in eating or moving. Right? So, this is that little tax on menopause that we're trying to understand as really good researchers actually study this population, which we haven't studied women in menopause, let alone women, let's be honest, in much of the research for all these years. The second piece of this data that again is not talked about too much, is what fuel your body is burning. Let me explain. They measured something called substrate
Philip Pape: 07:06
oxidation, which just means are you burning fat, carbs, or protein for energy? Well, the postmenopausal group was burning significantly less fat to fuel their daily life compared to the women who stayed pre-menopausal. And they were burning more protein, which basically means they were losing lean tissue. So your body has shifted its fuel preference away from fat and toward muscle. Less fat burn, more muscle burn, more fat stored. Again, burn is a very loose, unscientific term, but you get the idea. And then guess where you store that fat? In the belly. Belly fat, yes. So that is the setup to this story. You're dealing with a metabolism that's compensating downward, a body that shifted its preference towards storing fat in the belly, specifically. Your body is really good at compensation, and that's the whole problem here. You can you can add 30 minutes of, say, moderate movement and lose a chunk of that back in reduced movement throughout the rest of your day because your body compensates. Millions of years of evolution optimizing for keeping things in homeostasis. What your body doesn't compensate well against is what we're going to talk about today: a brief maximum intensity signal that could potentially do something about your belly fat. Oh, let's talk about it. Okay. The menopause transition, it doesn't just add body fat, right? We've been talking about the fact that it adds specific fat in your visceral, your abdominal area. There's two main places that your body stores fat. Subcutaneous fat is the fat right under the skin. That's the fat that you can pinch and see. It is, I'll say, metabolically calm or quiet. It doesn't do much besides just sit there. Visceral fat is different. That's the fat in your abdomen. It's wrapped around your organs. It is metabolically active. It pumps out inflammatory signals, which we can measure in the blood. It drives insulin resistance. It's the fat that correlates with cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and even cognitive decline. So when we say menopause belly, we're not talking about subcutaneous fat. We're talking about a body-wide redistribution of fat toward the visceral compartment, driven largely by the drop in estrogen. And this is this is not arguable. Like this is not debatable. Menopause research studies have looked at this. We know this happens. Cross-sectional studies, longitudinal, metabolic chambers, they all say the same thing that during menopause, your visceral fat goes up and it goes up quite a bit. So the question is what targets visceral fat? Because if we're going to invest our time and recovery, which is limited, into something, we want it to work on the thing that all of you are frustrated about. So here's where it gets interesting. For about a decade, the research has been pointing to something that now we have pretty good confidence in.
Philip Pape: 09:58
There was a landmark study by a French researcher named Baylard in 2016. He took 17 postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes and he had them do two short cycling sessions per week for 16 weeks. So these are about 20-minute sessions. They didn't change anything else, not their diet, not anything. The result was that their abdominal fat dropped 8%. Visceral fat specifically dropped 24%. 24% in 16 weeks. That's crazy with two 20-minute sessions per week on a cycle. And for today's episode, the the key here is that those sessions were sprint intervals. They weren't steady state cardio. Because we know this, the moderate steady state group in the same study did not see significant visceral fat reduction. Isn't this incredible? And by the way, we're gonna we're gonna touch on this a few times, but you guys know I've been talking about sprinting for a long time. I just hadn't quite been able to connect it to this specific benefit yet. And now we can, and this is just just this is just incredible. A follow-up study from Dupuis in 2020, why'd I say it that way, 2020, extended this to non-diabetic postmenopausal women, and they found the same thing. Sprint intervals reduce their abdominal and visceral fat, whereas moderate cardio didn't change it in the same way. And then when they added resistance training on top of sprinting, guess what? They got fat loss and they got increased muscle mass. And of course, that's the only combination that did that, which makes sense. We've got to lift weights if we want to add muscle. Now, let's all we always have to be honest about research and how reliable it is. The the broader meta-analysis that compared sprint intervals to moderate cardio on total fat showed them as roughly equivalent when you match for total work. In other words, from the thermodynamics perspective, sprints aren't magic, which is consistent with everything I've been talking about, right? Like the type you do doesn't matter. But in this context, the the way they target physiologically the visceral fat is a difference that matters. And there's a practical aspect here, and that is the time efficiency. So let's start with that one real quick. Sprint intervals can produce the same or better results in about a third of the weekly time. When we talk about conditioning and cardio, okay, specifically. Aside from walking, like a lot of us love to walk, and I encourage walking, and honestly, you can walk a lot. And I don't necessarily like to compare walking to sprinting in terms of time efficiency. It's a different thing, right? So for women in menopause whose recovery capacity is getting more limited, this is a really big deal because your limited time, limited recovery, there's a stress component to this. And then if you have these long, frequent sessions of cardio, now you get compensation on top of an already stressed system. That's why we don't like that necessarily. Why I encourage a lot of women to do less, to be more efficient with their time in the gym and outside the gym. So sprint intervals are a really good tool in that perspective. The second one is more specific, and this is the one that's the most interesting about visceral fat, belly fat. Listen up.
Philip Pape: 13:08
In post-menopausal women, specifically, sprint intervals outperform steady-state cardio for reducing visceral fat. Like the Maylard and the Dupuis findings that I just talked about, which are not isolated. The, you know, there's this popular narrative that sprints burn belly fat through a calorie afterburn effect. No, that is not correct. And if I've ever said on this show, I would I retract it and say that I was wrong as well. We call that epoch exercise post-sector, or I never know, I never say this right, but it's like post-uh oxygen consumption. Exercise post-oxygen consumption. And that's burning calories after you do the exercise. It's very minimal. It's like 40 to 50 calories. The real benefit is the chronic adaptation. There is a catecholamine response that occurs over weeks and months. And what it does, this is technical stuff. I had to write it down. It increases the beta, the beta andranergic sensitivity of your visceral fat. All that is, in plain English, it's the receptors that let your body mobilize fat for fuel. That's what it is. So guess what? You're increasing the sensitivity of those. That is awesome. Your skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity goes up. That is awesome. Your mitochondrial function improves. This is energy. That is awesome. These are long-term changes that compound chronically in a good way, in the best of ways. So the summary of this piece is sprinting, it doesn't magically melt belly fat in one session. We don't care about post-exercise consumption or afterburn effect or any of that. You can't just sprint once and boom, there goes your belly fat. What they do is over time, if you do these two sessions, 20 minutes each, there's an adaptive pressure on visceral fat that keeps showing up when we do these studies. And we can't ignore that. That is amazing data. And it's time efficient, so it doesn't affect your recovery. It's actually anabolic when we talk about sprinting as well. It supports your lifting. You can continue lifting heavy in parallel. This is just an incredible combination of things that you can go after as you develop your training and movement routine. Just so good. So good.
Philip Pape: 15:30
Okay. Now, before I walk you through the exact protocol, I do have something that's going to make things a lot easier for you. I do have a written guide called Sprinting for Fat Loss that I try to keep updated with some of this research. In this case, it has the sprinting protocol that I recommend. It's about six pages long, and it has the protocol I'm going to describe now. It has the equipment options in terms of what you should start with, the warm-up, a little bit of a weekly template so you can fit it around your lifting, and even how to track progress. All in a PDF, all free. I've given it to you for free. The only thing I need you to do is join my email list so I can send it to you. So go to witsandweights.com slash email. That's witsandweights.com slash email. Then once you're on the list, just reply to the welcome email and ask for the sprinting guide. If you're already on my list, just reply to any email you get and ask for the sprinting guide. I'll send it right over. And that is it. Okay. Witsandwaits.com slash email. Join the list. Ask for the sprinting guide. Done. I don't have a special link. Sorry, you're gonna have to do it that way. Wits and weights.com slash email. So let's talk about that protocol. All right, the protocol I use with clients and myself, I pull it directly from Brad Kearns, who runs the B Rad podcast. He was on the show back, I think in episode 286. He introduced me to this structure. I've used it ever since. It is awesome. Okay, it's simple. Four to eight sets of all out sprints. Each sprint is 10 to 20 seconds. Never go past 20 seconds, never go past eight sets. Importantly, the rest time is six times the sprint time. So if you sprint 10 seconds, you rest 60 seconds. If you sprint 20 seconds, you're gonna rest two minutes. Make sense? And that's it. Now you can rest longer, but don't rest shorter. So one to two sessions per week, four to eight sets of all-out sprints for 10 to 20 seconds with six to one rest to sprint. If that's confusing, get get the guide. It's all written down for you. So if you do the two sessions, then one of them, in my recommendation, should be flat brown, only one of them should be flat ground sprinting with good minimalist footwear. The other one should be on a low impact machine, like a cycle, a rower, a stair climber. You can do them both on the machine, that's fine. But don't do both as flat ground sprinting until you get adapted to it and you feel like it's appropriate and you can handle that. The progression rule is the most important thing in this protocol, okay? Because just like progressive overload with your lifting, you want to progress with your sprinting. You do not do that by going past the 20 seconds or doing more sets. You do it by getting faster within the same constraints. Now, if your sprints are less than 20 seconds, well, then your goal is to get them up to 20 seconds. If the number of sets is less than eight, well, your goal is to eventually get them to eight. But eventually you're gonna cap out at eight sets, 20 second sprints. Now the goal is just to get faster, more power, more speed, and you'll you'll get adapted and you'll get better, and that's exactly what's gonna happen over time. And that's it. That's it. Now, a lot of people ask me, okay, what do I actually do for the sprinting?
Philip Pape: 18:48
Well, let me give you kind of a hierarchy. If you're brand new, start on a bike, an assault bike, stationary bike, spin bike, doesn't really matter. It's the easiest way to get to near maximum effort without any joint risk. You could just quickly get to those fast sprints. And it's also the type of modality they use in most of the sprint studies. So there's a nice correlation there. And then you can progress to something like an elliptical, a stair climber, or a rower, which are all low impact. They're still anaerobic. They're a little bit tougher. They have a little bit of skill involved. If you want to go to ground-based sprinting, like actual sprinting, you can work up to it using hill sprints or incline sprints, which you could do on a sp on a treadmill, but I really discourage a treadmill at all for sprinting just because of the safety factor and the inability to easily get to full speed as quickly. I would rather you just do it kind of on your own with one of these other machines or outside. The incline reduces your max speed, which preserves your hamstring. That's why it's a good way to build your tissue capacity before you go to flat ground. But again, do not use a treadmill. I know people do it. Again, safety and the ability to accelerate, decelerate is very difficult. And you're also not going to go all out on a treadmill. Some part of your brain knows that you can't bail on it. And so as a result, you clamp down on the effort, if that makes sense, as a safety mechanism. And then that's not sprinting, it's just jogging really hard.
Philip Pape: 20:12
So, how does this fit into your schedule? If you're lifting, all right. I would use a, for example, three, three-day full body lifting split as an example here. Let's say it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Sprinting could be Tuesday and Saturday. Not the morning of a lift day, not right before the lift. Ideally, 24 hours removed from a lower body session. If you're on a four-day upper lower, you can sprint on your upper days or your off days. If you're on a five day, like a bodybuilding, power building type split, you could sprint on your off days or a few hours after upper body training. Two quick rules. One, you have to feel fresh before the sprint session. If you're already fatigued, if you didn't sleep, if you're coming off a hard lifting day, push it to another day, right? Sprinting while fatigued, that is how you get injured and you're not gonna be at your best performance. The second rule is if your speed drops off during the session, like you get to set, I don't know, five, and your speed drops way off, you're done. Stop. Don't just rest longer and keep going. Stop. The session is over. That's the session is over. This is gonna tie to what I talk about at the end of the episode. So I'm gonna come back to it. Also, warming up. Warming up's important. If you're doing machine sprints, you could go say three to five minutes on the machine at a moderate speed. And then you could do some 10-second buildups if you'd like. If you're doing flat ground, you could do again three to five minutes of just light jogging or leg swings or high knees or butt kicks or any of that stuff. And then maybe two or three progressive accelerations and then get into it. Okay. If you're cold, you got to warm up. The more adapted you get to this, probably the less warm up you need. And then the whole session ends up being maybe 15 to 25 minutes, including the warm up, the sprint sets, the cooldown, all of that. Two of those a week, that's 30 to 50 minutes. Of sprinting, excuse me, per week. And that is a fantastic dose for being correlated with a massive drop in visceral fat. So everyone listening, especially ladies, especially in peri postmenopause who have the belly fat, who are writing in about this, who are curious about this, do this protocol and try it out and let me know how it goes. One more thing shout out to Dr. Bill Campbell again, because he said on a recent interview that for menopausal women specifically, he prefers short sprint sessions with fewer total sprints as opposed to a high rep hit because of the recovery burden of the hit. The goal is not to get your heart rate up. The goal is to get a brief maximum signal to trigger the adaptations that we're talking about today and then let your body recover and adapt. That's really, really important.
Philip Pape: 22:49
All right, before we wrap up, I told you at the beginning I was gonna give you one single question test that tells you whether you actually sprinted or if you just ran hard and you're not getting all the benefits. That's coming up in just a minute. But if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, I get the sprinting, but I also know my lifting is inconsistent or my protein's probably too low. And nothing has worked for me in the last two or three years of trying to get leaner, especially if as I get older, maybe I'm over 40, 50, beyond. That's who we built Eat More Lift Heavy for. Eat More Lift Heavy is my 26-week coaching program along with Coach Carol. It replaces our old physique university. It is a huge upgrade. The core premise is that most women over 40 or adults over 40 who are stuck with their physique are under-eating and under-recovering. They're under-eating, under recovering. It's not on you. It's not a discipline problem or will problem. We've got to eat more, especially protein, sometimes carbs, sometimes calories in general. We have to lift heavy with progressive overload. Heavy doesn't mean too heavy or unsafely heavy. It means the right level of intensity to push the strength and muscle growth. So that is what it's about. Eat more, lift heavy. It's structured in three phases. Phase one helps you stop guessing. You set up your measurement system so you know what you're working with. Phase two is the eat more, lift heavy phase, where you execute the plan along with our support and live coaching. And phase three is to trust yourself. You graduate with the skills to manage your own physique with everything you've learned. There are monthly coaching calls, there are training programs. You get one assigned to you on day one. There's coaches who respond in the community within 24 hours. We have a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. All of that go to eatmore liftheavy.com. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com. Let's get you out of this cycle for good. Get you on your way to a wonderful life, a wonderful physique, happiness with who you are in your body. EatmoreLiftheavy.com.
Philip Pape: 24:48
All right, here's a question that tells you did I actually sprint the way Phillips talked about on this show that reduces belly fat? Or am I pushing it hard but not quite getting there? The question is, did my speed drop more than 10% across my sets? And this is where data is helpful that you need to measure. If your first sprint was a 15-second effort, and by the fourth set, you're two or three seconds slower over the same distance, you're done. Do not rest longer, don't push through another set, stop the session. The reason that sprinting works is because of neural recruitment of your fastest fibers. Once those fibers are fatigued, any additional set is just practicing running slower. You're not getting the sprint adaptation anymore. You're actually piling up fatigue. It's kind of like junk volume of running for no benefit. So the test is simple here. You need to time your sets, track your sets. If your top speed is holding, keep going. If it drops more than 10%, the session is over. Go home. You're done for the day. You need to adapt to get a little faster and stronger so you can go further next time. That's cool. That tells you where you are. And that's the difference between training and working out, just like when you lift weights. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, Menopause belly does have a targeted fix, and it's more in your control than you think. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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Philip Pape 5/14/26 Philip Pape 5/14/26

5 Signs You're Insulin Resistant Even If You Lift Weights (Amber Wilhoit) | Ep 468

How can you lift weights, build muscle, and still be insulin resistant? What if your metabolism is sending warning signs before your A1C ever changes? Insulin resistance is often treated like a weight loss or carb problem, but Amber Wilhoit, a registered dietitian and diabetes specialist with 22 years of clinical experience, shows why muscle quality, visceral fat, fiber, sleep, stress, and daily movement all matter.

How can you lift weights, build muscle, and still be insulin resistant? What if your metabolism is sending warning signs before your A1C ever changes?

Insulin resistance is often treated like a weight loss or carb problem, but Amber Wilhoit, a registered dietitian and diabetes specialist with 22 years of clinical experience, shows why muscle quality, visceral fat, fiber, sleep, stress, and daily movement all matter.

We talk about fasting insulin, waist-to-hip ratio, post-meal walks, strength training, and why midlife hormone health can shift body composition even when your effort stays the same. We talk about fasting insulin, waist-to-hip ratio, post-meal walks, strength training, and why midlife hormone health can shift body composition even when your effort stays the same.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week fat loss program for adults over 40 where you learn the skills to improve your insulin sensitivity, build muscle, eat a flexible diet full of protein and carbs, and improve your sleep, stress, and movement... one week at a time so it's sustainable and you FINALLY keep the fat off for good.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why muscle may not fix insulin
2:39 - Visceral fat and waist-to-hip
6:26 - Fasting insulin, the underused test
10:06 - Exercise pathways, stress, and sleep
18:52 - Protecting muscle during fat loss
21:08 - Perimenopause shifts and visceral gain
26:53 - Stop over-restricting nutrition
34:28 - Sexual health as metabolic signal
39:04 - Fiber, gut health, and glucose control

Episode resources:

Why muscle may not fix insulin
Philip Pape 0:00
I've mentioned on this show that insulin resistance is often a muscle problem, that building muscle is one of the best things you can do for your metabolic health, and I truly believe that. But my guest today, a diabetes specialist with 22 years of clinical experience, says you can lift heavy, you can have solid muscle mass, and still be insulin resistant. Today she's gonna walk us through at least five warning signs that your metabolism is in trouble even if you train hard. We get into muscle mass versus muscle quality, how to test for insulin resistance proactively long before A1C becomes a problem, and midlife changes to your body composition and sexual health that have nothing to do with your effort in the gym. Plus, the one thing almost every lifter is undereating that directly affects how your muscles handle glucose. That's all coming up. Welcome to Wits and Weights, where in every episode we put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today's premise that we're going to challenge is build muscle and you'll fix your insulin resistance. It's advice I've given on this show. It's backed by evidence, but it's not quite the whole story. So my guest today is Amber Wilhoit, a registered dietitian and certified diabetes care and education specialist who's spent over two decades working with patients in clinical diabetes care. She's the host of the Diabetes Podcast, which you should go follow right now and check out the episode we did together, the Diabetes Podcast, and the founder of Empowered Diabetes, where she helps adults with type 2 diabetes and prediabetes achieve remission through lifestyle changes. So today, Amber is going to walk us through at least five signs that you might be insulin resistant even if you lift weights, including muscle mass versus muscle quality. We'll talk about proactive blood work. We'll talk about early signs to look for and some tips you can implement this week. Amber, welcome to the show.
Amber Wilhoit 2:12
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.
Visceral fat and waist-to-hip
Philip Pape 2:15
I've said on this show, I talk a lot about insulin resistance and sensitivity related to a lack of muscle, related to a lack of movement, aka fitness, you know, not just as a carb or blood sugar problem, but given that you've worked with diabetes patients for a long time now, right? That's your expertise. How big of a factor in like the pie is fitness when it comes to insulin resistance?
Amber Wilhoit 2:39
Oh my gosh, it's a huge factor because skeletal muscle plays such a predominant role in taking in glucose in the absence of the I think of the way the body takes in insulin, is uh insulin is the key that unlocks the door to this body's cell and lets the glucose get inside where energy can be made. So when you have excess adiposity, especially around the midsection, especially around your visceral organs, which are your lungs, your heart, your liver, your intestines, then you are more resistant to the insulin that your body produces. So then the pancreas gets the signal, we need more, we need more, and it puts out more insulin. But the muscles can act like a sponge and use other pathways beyond, you know, needing that insulin key to the lock, one being the GLUT4 pathway, where it can act like a sponge and take in that excess glucose from the bloodstream. So skeletal muscle is really key in fixing part of that problem.
Philip Pape 3:49
Okay. And that's good to know, right? Because we are on one hand saying like that is important. And on the other hand, I do want to cover what other things are important because that's not the whole story. But two things I want to unpack there. The first is the excess adiposity you mentioned, visceral fat around the organs, which a lot of people want to get rid of for multiple reasons, including aesthetics, but also it's super uh uh important to your health. I like what you said though. You are more resistant to insulin when you have it. So it's almost this vicious cycle. The more you have it, the more you can get until is that kind of how it works?
Amber Wilhoit 4:24
Absolutely. I often refer to it as a snowball effect that one leads into the next, which leads into the next. And and so it's it's also about when we talk about genetics and the role that it plays, it's not as much as most people think. It has more to do with where you store your fat genetically than it does a genetic predisposition because genes take thousands of years to really change, but then you do have something called epigenetics. So you have like a dimmer switch that can be moved up or moved down, but your environment really shapes whether that dimmer gets moved up or down. Yeah. So you could be a person who stores more fat around your hips and butt and thighs. We call that a pear body shape, and your insulin resistance, your diabetes risk would be lower than someone who tends to store more fat around their abdomen that what we call an apple body shape. And we have something called a waist to hip ratio, which is one way to measure that. And typically in women, you want a waist-to-hip ratio that's below 0.85. So you you measure the smallest part of your waist and the largest part of your hips, and you divide one into the other, whichever one makes sense. I'm just kidding, but you you divide the larger to the smaller, and then you get your ratio. And for men, and you want it less than 0.9. So if it's greater than that, you're at a greater risk for cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, diabetes, and so on.
Philip Pape 6:01
So that's important. I love that you went right to data and measurements. I literally just recorded a walkthrough video of a physique tracker that I have, and in one of those things is waist to hip, and then like weight to height and different things. So I have a quick question. Is waist to hit hip ratio like pretty much the simplest, best way to go? Or do you also look at like the body roundness index is one that I've seen that's replacing BMI? Like, do you have any others that you use?
Amber Wilhoit 6:26
I really like waist-to-hip ratio. It's so simple and it it's one of the most researched when it comes to visceral adiposity to look at that. And then if you're if you're really looking at biomarkers like early intervention for things like prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, which I believe people should be looking at because the statistics around this are amazing. So one in two adults in the United States has either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, which is just phenomenal when you think of the greater your age, the more your risk for diabetes. But we're so if you really took another slice of that older population, it's definitely going to be greater than one in two. So one way to know your risk really early on, there are things like your A1C, which if you if you go on the American Diabetes Association website, you can see different like clinical markers to diagnose prediabetes and diabetes. One is your A1C test, which measures the glucose levels that are attached to your red blood cells. And your red blood cells live about three months, so they can measure that and then get an idea of how the sugar's been circulating in your bloodstream for three months. But that's not really going to be elevated until you've already had a great degree of insulin resistance and you've already had a great degree of fasting insulin levels. So that it starts with those fasting insulin levels being higher. So that's another test that's completely underutilized. So back to your question, I like waist-to-hip ratio because it's cheap. You can do it today, you know, you could do it in the next five minutes. But fasting insulin levels are another pretty inexpensive test that you could get done. And if the number is five, if it's under five, you're good. If your number is five to 10, then you've got some level of some early insulin resistance that could be possible. If it's 10 to 20, it would be moderate insulin resistance. And then greater than 20, you've probably got some very significant insulin resistance going on. And that's going to affect your inflammation levels and that avalanche effect.
Philip Pape 8:50
So fasting insulin is that typically tested as part of normal labs that people get, or do you have to ask for it?
Amber Wilhoit 8:56
You have to ask for it. It's not typical, very underutilized.
Philip Pape 9:00
And is it affected by the environment of the study, or you know what I'm trying to say? The situation, like what you've eaten and all that? Because it's fasting, right?
Amber Wilhoit 9:08
Right. So you want to who knew fasting would be like no part of it.
Philip Pape 9:13
That part seemed obvious, but yeah.
Amber Wilhoit 9:14
No, it's okay. No, I think it is important to spell it out because if if people are going to be doing this, it's important that they know what they're asking for and they know how they would show up for the lab test. And so it's a blood draw. And you would want to be fasted for eight to 12 hours prior to that test. And with this one, you actually would not want to do your wits and weights workout before that lab. You don't want to exercise day of. And you wouldn't want to have caffeine, coffee, even though it's no sugar, no cream. You wouldn't want that before that test as well, because that could increase the insulin levels.
Philip Pape 9:49
That actually makes sense, right? Because when you work out, you're changing the dynamics of the insulin in your bloodstream and where they go. And I think that is related to the GLUT4 transporter as well that you mentioned. Yeah, the pathway. Maybe we could dive into that a little bit so people know what that is.
Amber Wilhoit 10:06
Well, it's just essentially an alternate route. You know, if if you think of, I like to use Waze and some people hate it, some people love it. I really enjoy it to get me where I'm going and avoid traffic jams and and the like. So think of insulin resistance as the traffic jam. And Waze is going to divert your path around this. So it's another way to get glucose into the cells, which is what your body needs to have happen, in the absence of, you know, it overcomes that resistance. It is a way to get it directly into the muscle where the energy is needed. Create ATP, you get your all that Krebs cycle goodness that we learned. Whew, huh? I don't want to say how many years ago, almost 30 years ago. But yeah, it's just allows your muscles to get the energy that it needs. And the more the better trained you are, the better that glute four pathway is going to be. The more skeletal muscle you have, the more sponges you have, the more water you're going to be able to soak up.
Philip Pape 11:10
So that's a good point, right? Because sometimes we think about transitory effects and then long-term effects. And I know we talk about training a lot as having both benefits of like while you're training, amazing things happen in the process of when you're in the gym and right after as you're recovering and as you adapt the next few days, and then long term. So when it comes to insulin resistance, you mentioned the GLUT4 is, I guess, amplified when you have more muscle tissue, is because you have just have more of those or or more that are switching on.
Amber Wilhoit 11:41
Yeah, but I think it really comes down to what you see in terms of like for my experience, it's been people who have altered glucose metabolism, who have type 2 diabetes mostly, sometimes pre-diabetes, but in these individuals that you really can more than most see the effect of a response to exercise on blood sugar levels. You see for 48 hours the blood sugars being more level than days where they don't have their normal activity or workout. And it was my very first introduction to this was maybe 19, 20 years ago when I was counseling someone and their glucose levels were just gorgeous. Like morning fastings were in a non in the range of somebody who didn't have diabetes. All the two-hour post-meal glucoses that this person recorded, so two hours would be when you would expect it that the insulin would peak and kind of get out of the system after the meal. So the two-hour post-meal levels you would want to see less than 140 in people who have diabetes. And so all of those were under 140. Beautiful. And then there was this one day where, or like a couple of days in there where the fastings were in were in the 180s, 190s, and then they got up to 220, 280 after meals. And I'm like, what happened here? And he was like, oh, that was a really stressful time, and I wasn't able to get my workout in, and I didn't get much sleep. And it just goes to prove what the research also supports that stress and high cortisol levels and low sleep can really have an impact on your glucose levels and and the way that you utilize, you know, the inflamed nature that you are in that situation. So a lot of outputs and and it's neat to see the proof in the pudding.
Philip Pape 13:40
So the Glute4 thing, just just to nerd out on it one more time, is you know, when you're strength training and using your muscles, uh, it activates those, but also walking does, right? Like just movement in general. How do they compare? Do you know?
Amber Wilhoit 13:52
I don't know offhand. I would say that it has more to do with how you're like your VO2 max and how trained you are across time. Talk about transient effects. Like if you look at, for example, the fats that is in a muscle cell, the fat stored in there, your myofascial fat stores. You can take somebody who is very well trained and they would have more than an untrained person in some circumstances, have more fat in their muscle, but they're not gonna have the typical results you would see with people with a lot of fat in their muscle because they're well trained. So the pathways are just different in how it utilizes it, and they haven't fully extrapolated like what's causing that exactly. But you have in, especially in endurance athletes, they have a lot of fat stored in their muscle. And if you think about it, the liver can store around 250 grams of glucose. And so if you're doing a marathon and you're using massive amounts of glucose both during the race and then even afterwards, as you're repairing and rebuilding from the race, you're using more glucose than you can really kind of eat. And most people eat about 200 to 250 grams of glucose a day or carbs a day, that it makes sense to be able to store it in the muscle and have it directly where it is needed for more endurance base. Now, it's not going to help you in a sprint necessarily because you use a different pathway, but to be able to utilize that, it it just shows that people who are well trained don't have that same negative response to fat storage in and around the muscle cells that you do with people who are not.
Philip Pape 15:38
Okay, this is really fascinating. So you're talking about like fat infiltration in the muscles, which we don't talk about a lot here. And what comes to mind for me is clients I've worked with who are very well muscled and they are, you know, super strong, very well muscled, and their blood work looks pretty good, actually, even if they're carrying a lot of extra body weight, but like they might not have a great resting heart rate because they're not walking or something like that. It's interesting, these different health variables and what they're affected by. So are you saying that? Well, I'm gonna make two assumptions. You could tell me if I'm wrong.
Amber Wilhoit 16:11
The first assumption I will try. I didn't read that study yesterday, but I'll try.
Philip Pape 16:17
Somebody with more muscle, despite having more fat in general, which also means in their muscles, is still gonna have a slight advantage uh for some of the health outcomes we're talking about. That's assumption one. And then assumption two is is there a difference then in someone who's well muscled who has more versus less fat in their muscles?
Amber Wilhoit 16:40
Okay. Yes. So what I was referring to before was sort of the this study I read a while a while ago about like a meta-analysis of looking at people who were endurant well-trained endurance athletes versus lean individuals versus obese individuals, overweight obese individuals. And they found that just in the lean individuals who are well-trained, that excess fat in the muscle was not detrimental to their overall health. In fact, the opposite was true versus the lean and the lean untrained and the overweight obese didn't have those same positive benefits from the fat and the muscle is actually a negative effect.
Philip Pape 17:27
So I was thinking, I've seen data suggesting that total muscle mass isn't significantly different between metabolically healthy and metabolically unhealthy people. And that could be a matter of when you're overweight, you have more muscle, even though you're not going to be able to do that. Right.
Amber Wilhoit 17:43
You're carrying more weight. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
Philip Pape 17:46
Yeah. And then and then there's this muscle quality issue. Is that something that you could tell us more about?
Amber Wilhoit 17:52
The only things I've seen regarding muscle quality, because I am a one-trick diabetes pony. So it for me, it's is the muscle well trained? Can it act like a better sponge to soak in excess glucose? And that's gonna come from in general, it's gonna come better from people who exercise at least 30 minutes, at least five days a week, from people who have less central adiposity, meaning they have less visceral fat and fat stored around their internal organs, and they manage their sleep and stress well. I am a little too removed from all the exercise physiology studies to do a better job than that.
Philip Pape 18:36
That's helpful to know, right? Because you're connecting everything we just talked about with now. I always tell people look, wherever you're starting from, you have some advantage. If you're overweight, your advantage is you have extra body fat to draw from and you'll probably respond better, you know, to certain things, right?
Amber Wilhoit 18:52
Yes. And so speaking to the part that you said about more muscle in in people who are overweight or obese, that is true. And I I agree with what you said to use it to your advantage. And in fact, one little trick up our sleeve that we've used with people that we work with is if you have lost five pounds in the past two weeks, guess what? You're gonna now walk with a rucksack with an extra five pounds in it. If you've lost 15 pounds, you're gonna walk with a rucksack with that, because that it tends to go, it tends to be true that as you lose weight, it's not all fat loss. You lose muscle with it, you lose your bone mass, lean body mass type stuff. So the idea behind that is we wanna keep your brain, keep your body thinking that you're still that same weight muscle-wise. You gotta hold on to that muscle because it still benefits you. But let's let go of the fat, the extra fat, you know. Um, and of course, that comes from the composition of the foods. We look at um processed foods in the diet and trying to increase fiber intake and just the overall quality of nutrition with the exercise. And I know your part of your program also encompasses that, which I think is amazing. So I think you can out-eat any medicine, you can out-eat any exercise, and that's why you have to also pay attention to nutrition on top of the exercise and and movement portion. It's crucial though.
Philip Pape 20:31
Yeah, and I love that hack too. That that's actually a really good hack that people should pay attention to. Of like, even if you're not extremely overweight, anybody in a fat loss phase, what if you just start adding that weighted vest or that rucksack or you know, making things a little bit harder from a load perspective, not going overboard with understanding you have recovery capacity issues and things. But if you are overweight, one of the advantages, you shouldn't have as much recovery sapped from you because you have those fat stores to draw from. At the same time, you know, you you may not have the work capacity or the cardio capacity yet too. So you got to balance it all for the person, right?
Amber Wilhoit 21:08
Yes. And and we we use it more than just for that purpose. We use it, we call it a gratitude pack because if you've lost 10 or 15 pounds and at the end of that walk, you take that 15 pounds off, you feel so light. And it's like, whoa, I used to carry that around all the time. You know, so it's just a shift in perspective. And I think anytime you can get outside of your head and outside of just what you always do and do something different, think of something differently, then you can really experience change for the positive in that space. So that's also helping you so that's awesome.
Philip Pape 21:50
Shifting a little bit here, you know, we talked a little bit about the visceral fat component of it. And I know a lot of listeners, a lot of my listeners are women in their 40s and 50s. And they're dealing with perimetopausin changing hormones that have their own independent effects, especially the decline in estrogen, on that extra, even more fat storage. Um, and they haven't changed anything, right? So they're super frustrated. They're like, and maybe they are training, maybe they're all doing all the things. So what's happening at the metabolic level that's maybe relevant to what you brought up already about adiposity for the hormone stuff? Yeah.
Amber Wilhoit 22:26
Well, I mean, it's definitely estrogen and the way that it shifts where you tend to store fat, you know, it it does have an effect on whether you store fat in your legs and your butt and your hips versus your abdomen. And it is, it is more likely uh around and after menopause to be stored around your internal organs. And that is the most dangerous place to store it. And so unfortunately, it's not enough to do what you've always done and have the same outcomes or look the same way. Unfortunately, you have to think like, what more can I do? What other fine-tuning knob can I adjust here? And sometimes it feels like I'm already doing it all. What more could I add in? So it's you really have to look at what is the impact of stress and sleep. Because if you're fighting against cortisol all the time and stress hormones, you're just gonna be pushing that rock up a hill like Sisyphus, and you've got to find ways to to manage and look at that. And I think a lot of that can come into play. I'm 40, almost 49. So that's I'm at that peri stage. And and it is important about I have to spend more time and attention thinking about what I'm doing to set myself up for success, to get a good bedtime and get good sleep and wake up around the same time every morning to help with the circadian rhythms and in that as well. And just it takes more focus, but not always more effort, if that makes sense. It takes better systems, which I think you're all about and intention. Yeah.
Philip Pape 24:08
Okay. So two things came up in my brain. The first is related to insulin resistance at that age and specifically in that population. So is there an independent increase that we see in insulin resistance because of those hormonal changes, independent of the other factors?
Amber Wilhoit 24:28
So um what I will just speak in general statements is that as people age in general and especially worsened by estrogen and where it causes women to store fat more around the internal organs, that's gonna increase insulin resistance. That's going to increase the shuttling of the triacyl glycerols to the liver. That's gonna put someone at greater risk for fatty liver. And all of those things are are going to be going against blood sugar levels and against metabolic homeostasis where it is now. So it would get worse with age, but mostly because also with age, we tend to lose lean body mass. So it's a couple of factors.
Philip Pape 25:18
Yeah, that that makes sense. So then the trap I think a lot of women have told me they find themselves in is like the weight loss resistance combined with the stress, combined with now I feel more desperate to do something about it. And they all seem like counteracting forces. You know, my program's called Eat More Lift Heavy for a reason because I'm trying to encourage people to think differently, not just to eat more at limitum, whatever, but more of let's support the fuel side of things rather than restricting that side, but then fix the other stuff like training and like you said, sleep. So, like, where would you stack the priority of those pillars? Obviously they're all important, but when you've got sleep, managing stress, food as in eating enough food, or also versus trying to diet and lose fat? Because losing fat and what could also be good for your health, depending. Like, how would you stack those in general?
Amber Wilhoit 26:12
Um, I'm gonna go from bottom up instead of top to bottom, if I may.
Philip Pape 26:15
Like a pyramid, you mean, or or like the least priority?
Amber Wilhoit 26:18
Least priority first.
Philip Pape 26:19
Okay, got it, got it.
Stop over-restricting nutrition
Amber Wilhoit 26:21
I would say because there's only one of those when you were saying, I was like, ooh, I don't really like that one. The rest were fine. Um, but I don't like restrictive eating styles in general. Like most women are over-restricting, at least to some degree. And if they're under-restricting most of the time, then that also can bring about some binge eating at other times. And then you get things like cheat days. And there's a fantastic app. Your app, of course, there's a any app that can track your calories. If you wanted to do that, I would recommend anybody do it for two weeks. It's not really fun, but it's good to just kind of have a marker of where you are. And it's so eye-opening to see, like you could be in a calorie deficit Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and in let's say you were under by 200 calories all those days. So you got a thousand calorie deficit going into the weekend, but then you have a brunch, you've got a baby shower, you've got something sketched, some event scheduled, and you easily eat those thousand calories between Saturday and Sunday and different events. And so you think, oh, it's not I've been so good during the week, and food does not have a moral value. I think it's important to say that. And then you then you've suffered, if you will, this entire week and just to have a little bit of fun on the weekend, if you will, and it just completely came out dead even, which is okay. Depends on what your goals are. You know, your goal might just be keeping it dead even. You know, it might be that I'm restricting here so that I can have this fun on the weekend and eat things that I want. I think where people get into trouble is if they overfocus on everything and they think they have shame within themselves for what they eat, or label different foods as something that they never eat, they don't eat. Um like I said, food doesn't have a moral value. I think that's where people get into trouble. I think also when you have a lot of processed foods in your diet, and by diet I just mean the food that you eat in a day in your lifetime. And processed foods would be anything that you can't go into your pantry and normally find. Like you don't have xanthan gum in your pantry, you don't have kerogenin in your pantry. So that sort of thing. You you just want to keep it with things you you could have in your pantry. And and I don't want to say the less ingredients the better, but as a general rule, that works well too. But really looking of how I can add things, and we talked about this before, and and I'm a strong proponent of looking at where you are, and instead of thinking of restriction and cutting back, and that none of those words are fun, you know, like how do you add in more fiber? How do you add in more fruits and vegetables? How do you add in more color? So nutrition is way up there for me. So in that, I want you to add nutritious foods. I want to take away things that are really stealing joy from your life in terms of restrictive types and behaviors of ways of eating. And I mean, for me, exercise is super important. I'm I schedule in my activity in my week and in my day before anything else. Like that's what I do first thing in the morning because I just want to get it. Not that I want to get it done because I really enjoy it. It's not one of those things like swallow that frog. I want to get it over and done with. I want to move my body. I feel the best when I move my body. I eat better when I think of it in terms that I've moved my body and now I want to fuel my body well. So nutrition, exercise, those are the top two for me. Sleep is important, of course, because I can't move my body well if I'm dragging along, you know, performance-wise. That's and that's also why, you know, the things that I have cut out of my nutrition are, you know, I used to have the occasional drink here and there. And and people, you know, if you enjoy that, fine. But for me, when I would drink the night before and then run, even if it was just a glass of wine, when I would run the night the next morning, my performance would suffer. And it just didn't pass the worth it line for me. So for others, it does. It wasn't when I can notice my performance suffer because of something I've done through sleep or or nutrition, I'm gonna, I'm gonna cut it out. That's my personal preference.
Philip Pape 31:13
I'm gonna requote you right now. Does it pass the worth it line? Does it pass the worth it line? That's so good. Some of this stuff is binary. Like you mentioned training. I would tell no one that zero trainings is acceptable. Like, you know, like you have to train. I would agree. But then it's a matter of degrees and like frequency and all that. Sleep, everybody has to sleep, but then it's a function of okay, now where do you make the trade-off between your schedule for training, for sleep, and then like just fitting fun stuff in for stress? Like, how does somebody make all that work, Amber, when your population you deal with is just like stressed out of their mind?
Amber Wilhoit 31:50
Yeah, no kidding. Uh, because in in general, I work with a group of people who have a lot of stress because there's so many more decisions they have to make in a given day that somebody without type one, type two, pre-diabetes, type C, you know, monogenic diet, any of these types of diabetes has to worry about because they're thinking about, okay, I'm gonna eat how much insulin should I take for that amount of carbs? What's my ratio of insulin to carbs? So if I'm having 45 grams of carbs and I'm on a one to eight, then I need to give this many units, and then my sugar, I need to add those many units in. So I'm giving nine units for that, but then oh, I'm gonna exercise afterwards, and I don't want my sugar to go low, so I have to take it away, which is why um technology has really helped in this space ease a lot of the burden with continuous glucose monitors and automated insulin delivery devices, your GLP1 class of medications, your SGLT2 receptor agonists. So all of these are, I'm sorry, SGLT2 inhibitors, forgive me, GLP1 receptor agonists, all of these help. But you know, I I'm a firm believer in doing as much as you can through nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management. And then if you need the scaffolding to support the other, um, unfortunately, people who have type 1 diabetes, that scaffolding is needed forever. You know, they have to have insulin to survive. But if you could not have it and get away with it, wouldn't you want to do that? You know?
Philip Pape 33:26
What about? I know one thing that you've covered, I think you've covered on your podcast is like sexual health and diabetes, which, you know, erectile dysfunction and uh arousal and all those things that are important. We don't talk about it enough sometimes. I talk about libido in the context of hormones and stress and energy, but where does this connect with the diabetes world?
Sexual health as metabolic signal
Amber Wilhoit 33:47
Yeah, well, I think it's important to understand that in the diabetes world, if you are over age 80, there's something like a 98% chance that you have erectile dysfunction. And if you're over age 70, it's still somewhere like a 75% chance. I haven't looked at the numbers recently, but it is an astounding number of people. So you have this chronic disease that showed up in your life when you're 65. And on top of that, you've noticed your libido is in the toilet and your your quality of life has thus decreased. And so I see so many men, especially, but you know, it's not necessarily just men. Women have some of the same sexual dysfunction issues, but they're like, well, gotta die somehow. And and they're they're just don't always have a lot to live for once the spice of life, if you will, has been taken away. So, but now let's talk about more people in their 40s and 50s. If you think of the the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, so they are ugly best friends, they go hand in hand. And a lot of people who come in with a heart attack are then diagnosed with type 2 diabetes because it's all that metabolic disease process. And erectile dysfunction can be an early sign that something cardiovascular is not firing on all cylinders, that there's some issues there. And so when we talk about insulin resistance and that excess fat shuttling to the liver, it also shuttles to the arteries and can get in the intermedia there in the blood vessel walls, and it makes these foam cells in there that are highly inflammatory very sticky, and people can throw a clot. And so it's very important that cardiovascular health is looked at in this whole picture because heart disease is the number one killer in the United States. And I think it would be real, we would be really remiss to not look at disease risk there and the way that insulin resistance plays a role in that, and the fact that half of all adults have either diabetes or prediabetes, half. So as you age, it's gonna be more. And then if diabetes and heart disease are interlinked and cardiovascular dysfunction and sexual dysfunction are interlinked, you see it's all it all matters.
Philip Pape 36:31
All those are linked with obesity, right? Which is also linked with the upstream root causes of obesity, which is, you know, for whatever reason full of controversy, because there's always talk of the end of the stream, like diet and exercise and nutrition and all that, or or you know, calories and calories out. But at the end of the day, these these diseases of aging, they probably didn't exist at all at a certain point in human history, and now they do, and it's not just a function of longevity because people could have lived to the 90s a long time ago. People, there's a myth about that for some reason. But yeah, it's it's because of the lifestyle, right?
Amber Wilhoit 37:08
I don't know. I think you also need to look at the environment. The environment plays a huge role. And the reason I think the environment is so important is because if you look in the 19, just 100 years ago, just a hundred years ago, but if you look at that time period, you didn't have the prevalence of heart disease and type 2 diabetes that you have now. You know, 11 and a half, 11.7% of the population has diabetes, but in 1920, it was less than 1%. So what has changed the most? I would say it's the environment. Then and then that comes into the food supply and policies and just so many things, industrialization, lots of stuff.
Philip Pape 37:54
At which point in the stream, like when I say lifestyle, I'm thinking the environment affects your lifestyle, but then you could go one step further and say, well, where does this environment come from? And can we do something about it? But okay, to make it maybe a little more positive here, let's switch to nutrition a little bit because there was a note that I had we didn't get to, and that is we talk about protein a lot, but I want to hear your take on fiber because that is super, super important. Yes. And maybe more important for some people, is it? I don't know, you tell me.
Fiber, gut health, and glucose control
Amber Wilhoit 38:23
Yeah. Well, the our national guidelines recommend 25 to 35 grams of fiber a day. World Health Organization guidelines recommend 25 grams of fiber a day. If you have type 2 diabetes, they recommend 30 grams of fiber a day. The average person in the world gets about 20 grams of fiber a day, but then when you cut the United States pie into that, we're looking at 10 to 15 grams of fiber a day. And the studies are robust on the effect of fiber on cholesterol. The greater the fiber in your diet, the better the cholesterol numbers, the less the risk of heart disease, and even all cause mortality. So it's very important to have add fiber into your diet.
Philip Pape 39:12
Wasn't there a very recent big retraction of an LDL study that had to do with some of this stuff in terms of like the carnivore and keto crowd? Because one of the things that really irks me about that crowd is the dismissal of fiber. Like you don't need it, or it's associated with these toxic killer plants that exist in the world. You know, plants kill you and like weird stuff like that.
Amber Wilhoit 39:32
I I say weird, but yeah, when they're talking about plants kill you, most of the time when I see that they're talking about lectins. And and lectins are the plants defense chemicals that that prevent other plants from invading their space. You know, like this is what this is what I need for my roots to grow. Stay away, stay away, you know. But that and then there have been some in vitro studies, test tube studies that that cells can be damaged by these. And then there's also like the anti-nutrient data, but that's really old data. Like I learned that when I took my courses at UF in nutrition. And but thankfully, science evolves and changes. And if you're looking at that, you're looking at like 30-year-old nutrition data, and really it is beneficial, and they're finding more and more benefits of that through roughage. So your intestinal lining has these finger-like projections, these villi, and each one is very important for nutrient absorption. And you need the fiber to be like that, the straw broom to sloth off all the old cells and keep it fresh and vibrant and and able to absorb all the nutrition from the food that you eat, which you do absorb all the nutrition from the food that you eat, but it just keeps it all healthy because if you don't absorb all of your fat, for example, like you can do a fecal fat test, where even if you lose six grams of fat, you have some degree of fat malabsorption, maybe from cystic fibrosis or from um some kind of bowel condition. So fiber is important because it helps with your prosprandial glucose, it helps with the intestinal health, and it feeds the microflora of the gut. And lots of research has come out now regarding the immunity that is in your gastrointestinal system, especially your your small intestine, and that you you get this nutrition that the the bacteria really like you've got your bacteroides and your fermicutes, and and you want more of the good bacteria to proliferate the good colon bacteria that's gonna keep you healthier than the bad.
Philip Pape 41:56
Sometimes I just want to make it a matter of it's gonna keep you more full, it's actually gonna reduce your calories, it's going to be associated with healthier, you know, more nutritious foods anyway, like fruits and vegetables and grains and such. But you point out also the gut health aspects of it that are that cannot be underrated at all. And having a diverse microbiome, uh, you mentioned gut issues, right? There's people with um ulcers of chloritis and all and IBS and all that, where there's a whole gut connection. And then I think my brain went to LDL just because there's also correlation with reduced LDL cholesterol and things like that with fiber. Um so meaning it's important to do that.
Amber Wilhoit 42:34
Yeah, there's so many things. And I and I do believe we haven't even elucidated all of the things, you know.
Philip Pape 42:40
So don't cut carnivore. Okay, so all right, to kind of wrap it up, because we talked about a lot of things, but I think it's the audience also wants to know like, is there something they're not doing, something specific, something actionable related to insulin sensitivity? I know we got some tips today, like test your fasting insulin. I think that's a super easy tip.
Amber Wilhoit 43:04
Yeah.
Philip Pape 43:04
And a few other things. Is there something we didn't cover? Something you're like, yeah, you guys do this thing. It's easy, it's simple, it's gonna help you out.
Amber Wilhoit 43:11
The obvious one would be move after meals. That's gonna increase your sensitivity to insulin for sure. Lifting, because the more lifting you do, the more trained your muscles, the the more sponge effect, if you will, they're gonna have. And the post-meal walking is very research-based, especially in the world of diabetes.
Philip Pape 43:34
Actually, I want to ask you about the movement after meals, because yeah, um, I usually tell people like, you know, step one, move. Doesn't matter when. Step two, move after meals if you can. Like specifically.
Amber Wilhoit 43:45
The timing, yeah.
Philip Pape 43:46
Um, but what about not moving? Uh, in other words, what's the impact? Because I I I've I've seen a few studies on this, but the impact of not moving on insulin resistance.
Amber Wilhoit 43:57
Yeah, it's bad. Don't not move. Like, even if you're training and getting like let's say you got enough steps and you're training, but then you're sitting for hours and hours and hours because your job Yes, you could be you could get your daily workout in, but if you're sedentary the entire rest of the day, it's gonna have deleterious effects for sure. And and that is also backed by research that is just it's your sedentary lifestyle as a whole, even if you've got that time picked out that you run around like a maniac and get stuff done. You know, you still it's cumulative.
Philip Pape 44:35
And does it come down to like the mechanisms like the GLUT4 transporters specifically, or is there a specific mechanism of like sitting for a long time? Do you know what I mean? Like with the blood flow or something.
Amber Wilhoit 44:45
I mean, there's so many different things. You you've got P par gamma, you've got GLUT4 pathway, you've got like I I wouldn't say that's the thing. It it's it's cumulative movement and keeping your body you know, people have used the term keeping your sword sharp, and I love that term personally. I just think it's important to to look at where you are and think, where can I add more? Very much like with our nutrition discussion, where can we refine this and fine-tune it and just be the best you that you can be and do the best that you can with your movement. I think um it's gonna help you with your knees and your back and like we weren't made to sit hours upon hours of the day staring at a screen. I think you and I are both standing and we're doing that for on purpose, you know?
Philip Pape 45:36
Yep, yep. Exactly. So funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I stand all the time. It's great. All right. So as we wrap up, I want folks to know, you know, you've got you guys have a podcast, the diabetes podcast. I was on it, but you've also got fantastic episodes. I think you're up to over 50 episodes now. Is there one that's like a really good one we want to point folks to?
Amber Wilhoit 45:57
Oh, um, I would say I did one that really specifically looks at the environment and its role in diabetes and policy change. I would love for people to take a look at that one because it is out of control. And there are lots of reasons why. And I don't think that it can be fixed by any one thing or any one person, and that's kind of why we moved our role from just consulting to the podcast. Because, like, how do we get the message out to reach the most people that they really understand that it's it's not just personal responsibility? Like, personal responsibility is number 30 on the list of things that got us where we are. So there's that one, and then there's also one that's called pre-diabetes is diabetes, and I think that's a really, really important one, especially for your listeners.
Philip Pape 46:52
What I really like about your podcast uh with Richie is the episodes are like very thoughtfully constructed and really deep into that topic, and you cover like all the things people want to know. And so that's episode 47, pre-diabetes is diabetes, which is a good look at like if you don't do the things, where are you gonna end up? And then episode 51, the diabetes epidemic, um, is probably a really good understanding of we've alluded to the whole pie chart of you talk about fiber and like no PE in schools and screen time and you know, butyrate and inflammation, all the things. So, guys, check that out. There you go. I hear you, I hear you. All right, so check those out. We're gonna throw the links. Any anywhere else we want to send folks to Amber?
Amber Wilhoit 47:35
The diabetespodcast.net is where you can find all the notes, all the other episodes. Um, there's things on fiber, carbohydrates, all sorts of stuff.
Philip Pape 47:45
Great. So if whether you have diabetes or not, it's you guys need to check Amber's podcast out. And Amber, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. Uh time flew by, and thank you for coming on the show. Thank you, Philip.

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Philip Pape 5/12/26 Philip Pape 5/12/26

3 Fat Loss Metrics to Track Before Summer (Beyond the Scale) | Ep 467

The scale can jump 2 to 5 pounds overnight yet you're still losing fat. How is that possible? Scale weight is one of the noisiest signals, and if you’re over 40, strength training, or dealing with hormonal fluctuations, it can push you into the exact wrong decisions: eating less when you shouldn’t, adding cardio when recovery is already limited, or assuming you're failing when you’re actually improving body composition. We walk through 3 metrics that tell a more accurate story about fat loss progress and long-term sustainability, especially for lifters over 40 running a fat loss phase before summer.

The scale can jump 2 to 5 pounds overnight yet you're still losing fat. How is that possible?

Scale weight is one of the noisiest signals, and if you’re over 40, strength training, or dealing with hormonal fluctuations, it can push you into the exact wrong decisions: eating less when you shouldn’t, adding cardio when recovery is already limited, or assuming you're failing when you’re actually improving body composition.

We walk through 3 metrics that tell a more accurate story about fat loss progress and long-term sustainability, especially for lifters over 40 running a fat loss phase before summer.

This episode covers daily weight fluctuations from water, glycogen, sodium, and hormonal cycles, study findings on body composition during the menopause transition, the rate-of-loss range that separates fat loss from muscle loss, the link between waist circumference and cardiovascular risk, and a 4-marker biofeedback approach for spotting an unsustainable deficit regardless of what the scale weight says.

This episode is for adults over 40, women in perimenopause and postmenopause, and anyone running a strength training and nutrition plan before summer.

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Try Fitness Lab, the AI coaching app that tracks your nutrition, training, and biofeedback and tells you what to do next so you can build muscle and lose fat without spreadsheets or guesswork.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Scale weight and the fat loss problem
3:30 - Daily fluctuations from water, glycogen, sodium
5:00 - Perimenopause and menstrual cycle changes
5:45 - Body composition during menopause
7:30 - Weight trend velocity
10:30 - Rate of loss and muscle preservation
12:00 - The #1 foundation of recovery
14:17 - Waist circumference
14:39 - Cohort data on cardiovascular risk
16:30 - Waist thresholds for men and women
17:30 - Visceral fat shifts in perimenopause (menopause belly)
19:30 - The 4-signal biofeedback composite score
26:17 - Bonus: red flag threshold for an aggressive cut

Philip Pape: 00:00
If you're stepping on the scale every morning and using that number to decide whether fat loss is working, you are masking decisions based on one of the noisiest, most misleading metrics you could possibly choose. Your scale weight can swing two to five pounds overnight from water, glycogen, sodium, hormones. None of that is fat. Today I'm going to show you three specific metrics that actually predict whether you're losing fat, preserving muscle, and doing it at a rate you can sustain. You'll learn why a woman in perimenopause can lose half a pound of fat per week and see a three-pound gain on the scale the same morning. Why one measurement predicts your cardiovascular risk better than BMI, and the biofeedback signal that flags an unsustainable deficit before the scale ever catches up. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape. Summer is right around the corner. And if you're in a fat loss phase right now or you're about to start one, you need to know whether your approach is working. For most people, working often means one thing, and that is hey, the scale is going down, and that's it. And that is the entire feedback loop. And if you are over 40, if you're strength training, if you're a woman dealing with hormonal fluctuations, that feedback loop is going to mislead you. It is going to cause you to make bad decisions. It's going to make you think that you are failing when you're succeeding. Or worse, think that you are succeeding when you're actually maybe not. So today I'm going to give you three metrics I want you tracking alongside your scale weight. Not instead of the scale weight, but alongside it. We're going to use the scale weight for one of those metrics actually. Because together they will give you a complete picture that the scale alone will not give you. Then I want you to stick around to the end of this episode because I'm going to share one specific threshold that tells you your cut is too aggressive and that you need to pull back potentially immediately. It's a red flag that you could miss for a long time until the damage is sort of already done. And I'm going to give you that at the end. Here's what we're covering in today's episode. First, why the scale is such a terrible standalone metric and how much it actually fluctuates from things that have nothing to do with body fat. Second, we'll talk about the three metrics, and I'm not going to reveal those just yet. I want you to listen to the episode because I'm going to explain the context behind them. But they are very simple things you can do already with nothing special, no special math. There's a little bit of math, but it's going to work really well for telling you what progress you are actually making. So let's talk about the scale again. Okay, and I say again because if you've listened to the show, we've talked about fat loss versus weight loss. If you're new to the show, listen up. This is super important. You step on the scale in the morning and it's up two pounds from yesterday. I'm sure that's happened to you many times. What do you do? If you're like most people, you panic a little bit. Maybe you panic a lot. Maybe you think I need to eat less. Maybe you think I need to do some more exercise or cardio. Or maybe you're just defeated, deflated because you're doing everything right. And I did everything right yesterday. I didn't even overeat, and the number still went up. Well, the problem here is that your body weight can fluctuate one to two and a half kilograms or two to five and a half pounds in a single day. And usually, almost guaranteed, none of it is body fat. And it makes a lot of sense when you think about it because every gram of glycogen in your muscles stores three to four grams of water. So if you eat a higher carb meal, 500 grams of carbs can add four to six pounds of scale weight from glycogen and water alone. And sodium does the same thing essentially. If you have a salty meal, it can cause one to three pounds of water retention that resolves within about one to three days, and none of that is fat. Of course, sodium is in a lot of things, it's in processed foods, it's in takeout, pizza, Chinese, you name it. Now, where it gets really important for you is specifically depending on your age and depending on your hormones, there could be some other confounding factors. So, for example, if you're a woman in your 40s, if you're in perimenopause or postmenopause, the scale becomes even more useless, is the way I'm gonna put it. When we look at menstrual cycle weight fluctuations, on average they're one pound per cycle, but the clinical range is like one to five pounds. And then during perimenopause, those fluctuations become erratic and unpredictable because estrogen and progestrogen are not following a consistent pattern anymore. So you could be losing, say, half a pound of fat per week, and then you see a three-pound spike on the scale one morning. And then if you react to that by doing something silly like cutting calories or doing more cardio or changing your whole routine up, you probably made a bad decision based on bad data. The Swan study, it's the gold standard study we've talked about for menopausal body composition research, tracked over 1,200 women and they used DEXA scans over 18 years. They found that during the menopause transition, fat mass gain roughly doubled, going from about 1% a year to 1.7% a year. Meanwhile, lean mass, right, muscle, lean mass shifted from a slight gain to a decline. But total weight gain over the transition averaged only three and a half pounds. So because fat was going up and muscle was going down, the scale didn't really change that much. So think about that. Think about that a lot. A dramatic shift in body composition, more fat, less muscle. The scare scale barely moves. And this results in a lot of stories I hear from you from ladies who they're just not happy with their body. They have belly fat. I hear it all the time. They're it's not that they've gained a ton of weight necessarily. They could have, but even if they didn't, something is off, something isn't computing, and this is behind it. And when we talk about this body composition issue, which is relevant for all of you listening, anyone who lifts weights, listening to this show, you're trying to build muscle and lose fat. We see in study after study, trial after trial, that when people are put into a calorie deficit and training and eating enough protein, we see that there are differences in how much lean mass is retained and fat mass is lost. And you can't tell the difference between these different groups based on their training and protein, just based on the scale, because the scale weight might stay the same, but one group is actually building muscle, one group is losing muscle. And of course, we don't want to do that. We want to lose fat. For anyone starting or returning to lifting, especially when you're older, maybe you're detrained, maybe you trained when you were younger. This is also especially relevant because your body is going to respond like a novice lifter and have that high anabolic sensitivity where you are primed for recomposition. And then what happens is you sometimes gain some weight and yet you're gaining more muscle than you're gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time, yet the net effect is you're gaining weight, and that can really mess with your head. So I'm not telling you throw out your scale. In fact, the scale is something we're gonna use, and it's actually very important. You'll see why in a moment, but what you need is context, and that's what these metrics provide. So let's get into metric number one, which I call weight trend velocity. All right. So if a single daily weigh-in is unreliable, what do we do? Well, we have to zoom out, right? Instead of the trees, we want to have the forest. And so, interestingly or ironically, to do this, we want to weigh ourselves every day. Okay, you're like, what? Just stick with me. You're gonna weigh yourself every day under standardized conditions.
Philip Pape: 07:46
The best time to do that is first thing in the morning after using the bathroom before you eat or drink, wearing minimal clothing. And you're gonna do this every day. Then if you want to do this by hand, what you would do is calculate a rolling average. So seven days is reasonable. I really prefer more like 14 days. But let's just say you want to start collecting this now, seven-day average, and then you're gonna compare those rolling averages across time to see the trend. This is not the end of it. This is not what this is not the metric we're talking about yet. We're gonna use the trend velocity, but we need to have the trend first. Now, if you use an app like MacroFactor, okay, I love MacroFactor. All of our clients and members use it and eat more lift heavy. If you want to go download the app and use my code Wits and Weights, all one word, you'll get a two-week free trial to try it out for yourself. It's the only app that calculates your metabolism to give you accurate targets for calories and macros. So go download it, use my code Wits and Weights all one word. But in macro factor, there's something called the trend weight. And the trend weight is an exponentially weighted moving average. So it essentially smooths out the daily noise and it gives more weight, pun intended, to more recent data points over 20 days. That is something you can do in a spreadsheet as well. But my point is it's over about a three-week period, over 20 days. And what's cool about trend weight is it shows you the true direction that your weight is heading based on body fat change, because that's the energy storage in your body. And so it smooths out all the other noise from that daily number that's that's influenced by fluid. That makes sense. So the trend line is the signal, the daily number is just the noise, and we're trying to reveal the signal. But it only tells you, okay, my weight is going up or down. You also need to know how quickly that's happening. And this is where the rate of loss comes in. And it really matters a ton. So the consensus at this point is if you're gonna lose weight on a deficit, you should be losing anywhere from like a half to one percent at most of your body weight per week. There are exceptions to that rule. We're not gonna get into those cases today, but in general, you peg the top end at 1% of your body weight per week if you want to avoid losing muscle mass. So for a 160-pound person, that's 0.8 to 1.6 pounds a week. If you're 200 pounds, that's one to two pounds a week. And again, we've seen studies on athletes, on trained individuals showing that a body weight loss at these percentages of 0.7 versus 1.4 in one study resulted in similar weight, but the slower groups tend to gain more lean body mass or hold on to more lean body mass while they're losing the fat. And so that's where we get the confounding issue. If you're going too fast and you're losing weight too quickly, and a great example of this is GLP1s, GOP1s, okay? You may be losing muscle mass and it confounds what's actually happening with your body. And we don't want to do that. We don't want to do it. We want to get more muscular or at least hold on to that muscle. So when you lose faster than about 1% body weight a week, these bad things tend to cascade. Your muscle protein synthesis tends to drop. Your body doesn't have the resources to care about preserving muscle anymore when all it's trying to do is find as much energy as it can. Along with this, your testosterone can drop significantly in an aggressive deficit, as well as your other reproductive hormones, your thyroid, and your body starts pulling from lean tissue for energy. So, what I want you to do is actually look at the velocity or the rate of loss of your trend weight. And all I mean by that is what percentage are you actually losing per week? Now you may have intended on a certain amount, but what are you actually losing? So if you're doing this by hand, all you have to do is compare this week's rolling average to last week's rolling average and see what percentage of your body weight that is. If you use macro factor, all you have to do is go to your weight trend page, scroll down under the insights and data section, and you'll see something called weekly weight change. And if that number is faster than the 1%, just watch out. It might be too aggressive. If the number is flat or slightly positive and you're trying to lose weight and it's been more than three weeks, don't panic. That is where metrics two and three come in to tell you whether the approach is working, even if the scale isn't showing it. Now, speaking of things that you should be tracking, we are gonna talk about sleep and biofeedback in a little bit. And the foundation of recovery, the foundation of everything we're talking about today is sleep. So I want to put it in your head now, and then we're going to revisit it later. But this is a nice smooth segue into our sponsor for today, Cozy Earth. And I want to talk about their pajamas
Philip Pape: 12:40
and their cuddle blanket because when we talk about sleep and recovery, you might have heard me talk about their sheets, but pajamas is are something I never used to wear, and now I wear them every day. They're made, they're made from a bamboo-derived material. So not only are they lightweight and comfortable, but I run really hot. And temper temperature regulation is really important for me. They don't make me overheat, and that's really, really simple. When I overheat, just everything goes wrong. My heart rate goes up, my HRV gets worse, my sleep is not as good. So really think about the clothes you're wearing at night and making yourself relaxed and really pulling energy back into your body is kind of a way to put it because you get into that parasympathetic state when you're relaxed. The other thing they have is called a classic cuddle blanket, and we have it just available on our couch all the time. It is super, super soft. And if you get chilly, it's a great product. And they have so many more. A lot of them are derived from bamboo to give you, again, this temperature regulation. So go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth to check these out. Check out all their products. I love the company, and I love if you could support the show if you're looking for something like that. Whether it's for a birthday, a gift, or just for your own use, go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. Code wits and weights will give you 20% off. They back everything up with a hundred night sleep trial, which means you could try it for more than three months and still return it if you don't like it. They also have a 10-year warranty. Go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. Automatically the code Wits and Weights will show up when you go there to get 20% off. That's witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. All right, now metric
Philip Pape: 14:17
two. And I'll say that this is quite underused today, which surprises me because I thought everybody just does this. And that is measuring your waist circumference. Okay, just your waist circumference, not everything else, just your waist. And the reason this matters so much, I'm gonna point to a massive European
Philip Pape: 14:39
cohort study in the New England Journal of Medicine, over 359,000 people. So you can't argue about sample size on this one. This found that every five centimeter increase in waist circumference raised mortality risk by 17% in men and 13% in women. And the waist circumference's predictive power got stronger after you controlled for BMI. In other words, BMI often becomes non-significant once you account for waist circumference. And that makes sense because where you carry your fat and the fact that you have more body fat matters more than how much you weigh. The more muscular you are, the more higher your BMI is gonna be, and it just throws off the number, but your waist really tells a vast majority of the story. There was something called the interheart study with 52 countries, 27,000 participants, and it found that the highest waist to hip ratio group
Philip Pape: 15:40
had two and a half times the heart attack risk. So if we define obesity by waist to hip ratio instead of BMI, the number of people classified as at risk would roughly triple, roughly triple. This is why I prefer things like body roundness index. This is why our clients measure their waist, along with some other measurements that give you extra nuance, but definitely want to measure your waist. It's also why waste is part of body fat calculations typically. So what are the actual thresholds? Well, the World Health Organization has two tiers. You have an increased risk above 90 centimeters for men, which is like 37 inch waste, and above 80 for women, which is about a 31 and a half inch waste. That's an increased risk. So 37 for men, 31 and a half for women. Substantially increased risk is 40 inches for men, 35 inches for women. And for the waist to hip ratio, the threat the thresholds are if you're higher than 0.9 for men and 0.85 for women. By the way, we in in Eat More Lift Heavy, we have this amazing physique tracker that will calculate all this stuff for you based on your measurements and tell you whether things are at risk or not. Now, for tracking fat loss specifically, a meaningful change based on interventions from exercise, from training is typically around five centimeters. And we know that waist circumference reductions also correlate with visceral fat reductions. That's belly fat. Okay, now we know also it's not just from exercise, that's for sure. It's also going to be from your diet and how much body fat you have. But this is especially relevant for women in perimenopause. The Swan study showed visceral fat shifts from 5 to 8% of total body fat up to 15 to 20% during the menopause transition. That's a threefold increase in visceral fat, which is the most metabolically dangerous type of fat. It concentrates in the midsection. So even if the scale isn't moving, your waist circumference going down is telling you a very important thing that you are losing visceral fat. And that is a big positive for your health. That's why I love this metric so much, because even if the scale is not moving, or even if it's going up a bit, maybe you're gaining muscle. We don't know. If your waist is going down, that's a fantastic sign. Now, here's the nuance waist circumference has measurement error, right? It's a little bit difficult to get it perfect. You know, breathing can shift your reading by four to five centimeters, meal timing can make a big difference. And if even if you're trained at this of how to do it, there can be an error. And so the protocol, the way you do this is important. I would say pick one consistent objective spot. Now, the WHO has the technical definition of the midpoint between your lowest rib and the top of your hip bone. But my shortcut is just use your belly button. Okay, we all know where our belly button is, right? So just stand in a relaxed state. Don't tense up your abs and don't slouch or like pop out your stomach. You know what I mean? Just a neutral state. And that'll be a pretty objective measurement you can do. You can use a digital measurement, you can use a normal closed tape measure, you can use the what's it called, accutape, which lets you do a little ratchet. It's okay. What matters is the trend over time. That's what matters. You'll know. I mean, the measurement error isn't so big that you're not gonna detect inches over time. You will. And so I would track it weekly, but then look at the trend, look at the average, you know, just just like you would with scale weight, but you're not tracking it every day because your waist isn't gonna change that much. But this will tell you whether you're losing fat, even if the scale is staying the same, going up, going down, it almost doesn't matter.
Philip Pape: 19:29
All right, so the
Philip Pape: 19:30
third metric is a bit different from the first two. It is a little more subjective, but the way we track it makes it more objective. Let me explain. This is the biofeedback composite. Now, you might have heard me talk about rating your biofeedback, things like energy, digestion, hunger, sleep, stress, et cetera. We have seven metrics that we look at in eat more lift heavy. By the way, if you you keep hearing me say eat more lift heavy, it's just our our program. It's a 26-week coach program where we walk you through building all of these skills, tracking your physique, improving your nutrition and training all together, your whole lifestyle. You can go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to check out what that's about and learn more. But where I'm going with that is we recommend clients track at least once a week across all seven categories. What I'm talking about today is a more precise measurement you can choose to do, where you track four specific things on a scale of one to ten, and then you just average them up, and we're gonna see if how if it deteriorates or not over time. Okay, those four things are hunger, energy, sleep quality, and training performance. Hunger, energy, sleep quality, and training performance. And you can use a scale of one to 10 to give you a little bit more uh resolution. So where one is the worst, 10 is the best. So, like if you're if you're super hungry all the time, that would be closer to a one. If sleep is pretty poor, that's closer to a one. If you're low energy all the time, that's close to one. And if your training performance is low, it's close to one, right? And then the opposite, if they're good, closer to 10. And you average them out. And the reason this works is it gives you a signal of your adaptations and your metabolism during a deficit. And that and that's because it shows up in how you feel, and that's the subjective part, but you know your body best and how you feel is becomes kind of objective because it's relative to how you felt last week. Well, you know how you feel day after day after day, and what's a good direction, what's a bad direction. And we know that your total daily energy expenditure, your metabolism, drops beyond what body mass loss would predict through reduced BMR, through decreased spontaneous movement, through hormonal shifts, especially lower leptin, lower thyroid hormones, higher cortisol, higher ghrelin, right? Appetite, uh metabolic hormones, stress hormones, all of that changes. And so your body is giving you signals. Very early in the process. And the question is whether you're paying attention to them and they if they are, let's say, appropriate or within the window that's acceptable to you, or if you're working with a coach, that's what we tend to look at is hey, let's let's use this as a proactive measure here. So if we look at the individual markers, those four things, start with hunger. Hunger is the strongest standalone predictor. And if if I'm working with a client, I can look at their hunger all by itself and learn a lot about them, not everything, but learn a lot. We know that an increase in hunger ratings predicts a decrease in adherence to your diet. And that's the biggest thing. It's simply that hunger makes it harder to stick to your diet. And temptation, the level of temptation you have, predicts an even larger decrease in your adherence. So temptation is kind of a subset when we think of hunger and cravings and temptation, right? There's a whole bunch of factors combined. Training performance is kind of like the physiological canary in the coal mine. Now I know I mentioned this as the fourth metric, but I I in my notes I had them out of order. It doesn't matter. Training performance is interesting because we know that in a deficit, strength gains tend to hold on for a while, but muscle mass starts to drop. And so if your performance in the gym is starting to drop, and performance can be measured in different ways. It can be measured with the actual numbers, but also in the effort and in how lethargic you are and how much energy you have and all that. Kind of up to you how you do that. Again, in E More LiveTavue, we give you some prescriptions around that. But just pick a way, pick a way to track that, either objectively based on your weights or slightly subjectively based on how you feel in the gym, things like that, to know whether you're losing muscle or not. That's how we look at it. Then we have sleep quality. Obviously, we know sleep is super, super important. It is difficult to self-report on sleep. But essentially, if you are more restless, if you are waking up tired, like those alone are a big way to track that your sleep is getting better or worse, not just the hours of sleep, excuse me, but basically are you waking up tired or not? Versus, hey, I'm sleeping really well, I'm sleeping like a baby, I wake up on my own. It's great. And as I mentioned before, you know, there are a lot of factors that affect sleep, including what you wear, what you sleep in, your environment, your blue light, your routine, how consistent you are with sleep times and wake times, all of that. And then, of course, the fourth one that I mentioned at the end out of order here is energy. And energy, again, it could be several different things. For many of you, this is a sense that you don't have enough energy to get through the day properly. And I say it that way because we should all have an energy drop toward the end of the day, just naturally due to cortisol, but it should feel fairly natural and smooth, I guess is a way to put it. And it shouldn't feel like you have these massive dips in energy or like you're super tired in the morning and need this huge jolt of caffeine to get going. That's what I mean by energy. And again, it's relative. So when I say relative, what you're gonna do at this state is you're gonna track it all on a daily basis and average it. Now, you're not gonna do this forever. I'm not asking you to track biofeedback forever this way, but doing it temporarily as we head into summer, if you're in a deficit, if you're trying to lean out, if you're trying to get shredded, whatever, this is gonna give you a good trend of how your signals are telling you your body's adapting. So if your hunger goes from a seven to a three, your energy goes from a seven to a four, your sleep quality goes from a six to a five, you know, your bench press starts to stall, right? All within the same couple weeks, the average is gonna start dipping down, right? Some things go up, some things go down. But if the overall average is dipping down, maybe your deficit is too aggressive. And we don't care what the scale says, because if the scale says your weight is dropping, great. But if it's at the expense of potential muscle mass or adherence or something else, we want to get ahead of it. Now, I mentioned in a recent episode, the Matador study about intermittent energy restriction, the alternating two-week deficit, two-week maintenance, producing greater fat loss. And part of that has to do with your biofeedback and adherence and your metabolism not overadapting, right? So this biofeedback composite can potentially tell you that your deficit is or isn't sustainable. Pretty cool, right?
Philip Pape: 26:17
Now, I did promise you a specific number at the beginning of this episode. It's a red flag threshold that tells you that your cut has maybe crossed the line from being productive to somewhat destructive. I'm gonna share that in a second. But if this episode made you realize that you want to track this stuff, but you don't want to use a bunch of spreadsheets or you don't want to manually track them, that's what we designed Fitness Lab for. It's an app that we designed and upgraded this spring and gives you personalized guidance on nutrition, training, biofeedback. It adapts to your data. It connects to Apple Health. Eventually it will connect to the Google Health and it can suck in all that data to really help you understand what's going on, whether or not you like tracking. But for a lot of people, you don't like it. And ironically, even though this sounds like a tracking app, it is not a tracking app. It actually tracks a lot of the stuff for you and tells you what to do with it. And then it's super empowering. So go to wits and weights.com slash app to check it out. That is witsandweights.com slash app. The link is in the show notes. Okay, here's the red flag number, and it's going to be based on that third metric, the biofeedback composite, the average of your hunger, energy, sleep, and training performance. If it drops below five for three or more days in a row, almost guaranteed that your cut is too aggressive. So that's the threshold I would look for. If it drops by five two to below a five for three days in a row, it means at least two of those four markers are significantly impaired at the same time, just based on math, based on averages. And that is a pattern that is predicting unsustainable dieting, potential muscle re muscle loss, and a potential rebound where you overconsume and you binge. One single bad number is not gonna get the average below a five for three or more nights. That's why we like this. Okay, but when it does, you have two options. Option one, take a diet break. Eat at maintenance for about a week. Research shows this lowers hunger, it improves your alertness, it preserves muscle endurance, it reduces your metabolic rate being suppressed. It's a great tool. Option two, it's just to reduce your calorie deficit a little bit. So stay in the deficit, but increase those calories. So it's maybe two to three hundred calories of a deficit and reassess for a week. This is gonna give you a good idea of whether it was simply a dip a past the line for your deficit and the deficit's okay, or whether just the deficit itself is the problem. You can kind of compare the two, and then if you have to, you can still take a diet break, right? We know that pushing through an unsustainable deficit does not get you to your goal faster. All of the research on metabolic adaptation tells us this. It actually gets you to a plateau faster, and it costs you a ton on the way there and it frustrates you, and then the whole thing kind of falls apart until you do it right again. So tomorrow morning, rate your hunger, energy, sleep training on a scale one to 10, average them out. If you're above, you know, six, if you're six or above, you're in a good place. If you're like five or six, keep an eye on it. But if you're below five for three days in a row, maybe you should pull back. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the scale measures gravity, not progress. That's it. Your body composition, your waist, how you feel, those tell a much more accurate story. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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Philip Pape 5/7/26 Philip Pape 5/7/26

Is "High Protein" Just Another Fad Diet? | Ep 466

Is high protein just another fad diet? Learn about the 3 criteria that define a fad, how protein performs against each one, the research on lean mass and strength training, the mechanisms behind protein's thermic effect and satiety, and why the case gets stronger for adults over 40.

Is high protein just another fad diet?

Learn about the 3 criteria that define a fad, how protein performs against each one, the research on lean mass and strength training, the mechanisms behind protein's thermic effect and satiety, and why the case gets stronger for adults over 40.

This episode covers the fad diet framework, research updates on protein and muscle building, the thermic effect on your metabolism and the satiety research that gives protein an advantage over carbs and fat, findings on muscle protein synthesis, and thedata on lean mass and body composition when postmenopausal women lose fat.

Plus the protein leverage mechanism behind menopausal weight gain and a 3-question test for evaluating any nutrition trend you see on social media or TikTok.

Get the Protein Day Builder, the tool that maps out a full day of meals hitting your protein target based on your schedule, dietary preferences, and the foods you eat every week.

Timestamps

0:00 - High protein fad narrative
3:25 - What defines a fad diet
4:30 - Fad diet examples
5:45 - The (false) link with fat and carb demonization
6:40 - High protein vs. the fad criteria
8:15 - Meta-analyses on protein and lean mass
9:45 - Sustainability and physical activity
11:45 - Hitting your protein target in practice
13:15 - Thermic effect of protein
15:40 - Protein and satiety
17:10 - Muscle protein synthesis and meal distribution
19:45 - Muscle loss and strength after 40
20:45 - Menopause and protein leverage
22:30 - Adequate protein for your goals
24:10 - 3-question fad diet test

Philip Pape: 00:00
Chances are you've been prioritizing protein. And yet, because of all the attention on protein, you might hear pushback in the media or on podcasts that, hey, maybe this is another fad, the high protein fad. So I thought it'd be a good idea to show you three specific criteria that define a fad diet and test high protein against all three, and then explain why this backlash confuses commercialization with science. We're going to revisit topics like protein's thermic effect, its satiety impact, the muscle building threshold, and why the case might be even stronger than you think to get plenty of protein if your goal is fat loss, building muscle, and a long, healthy life. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape. And what I see happening now is there is high protein in everything. There's high protein, of course, in protein bars, but there's also protein cereal, protein water. Everything that they that has even a little bit of protein is marketed as high protein. And when something gets super popular like that, there's often a backlash. I've heard it on mainstream media. I've heard it on like news podcasts that aren't even in our space, where you'll see things like, are we obsessed with protein? And is high protein bad for you? Or are we going far beyond what the evidence says you need to have? Or isn't the level you need for protein only this? And why are people, you know, bodybuilders and fitness gurus recommending so much? And so there's this uh skepticism, I'll call it, which I'm always for curiosity and skepticism. But then there this leap of logic where they're connecting, say, the low-fat craze of the 90s to the keto craze of the 2010s, to proteins today, and they're saying, okay, this is just the next trend. And if you are listening to the show, you're probably trying to eat more protein. And what we would call high protein, now that's a whole separate issue because to me, the protein we need is as a percentage of your diet still totally reasonable. It's just people are eating far too little protein. But that's part of what we're getting into today. Because if you're trying to build muscle, if you're trying to lose fat, and then you hear somebody say, Oh, are we getting too much protein? Is that a fad? And you second guess yourself, I want to settle that today. And then stick around to the end of the episode because I'm gonna give you a three-question test that you can apply to any nutrition trend. So for my skeptics out there who are listening and want to know, hey, is this thing real? Let me examine it a little bit more carefully. And when someone starts talking about anything, even if it's seed oils, let's say, you can apply this test. So today in this episode, you are gonna learn the specific characteristics that make something a fad diet, and why the high protein approach really fails every one of those. You're gonna hear research on how protein builds muscle, burns more calories during digestion, reduces hunger, all the fun stuff about protein to reacquaint ourselves if you've already heard this before, or to learn something new and the value of protein, and why, especially adults as we age, over 40, over 50, especially women, a protein or in menopause, need higher protein, not to check a box, but because it is important to your physiology. All right, so first let's
Philip Pape: 03:25
define what we are talking about. What makes a fad diet a fad? The British Dietetic Association, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and multiple research reviews give us a pretty consistent set of characteristics. A fad diet eliminates entire food groups. And it often relies on a single magic food or a super food or sometimes a supplement. It promises rapid results from some sort of hack or trick of your metabolism, and it is based often on anecdotes and testimonials as opposed to peer-reviewed research. It often involves selling you something proprietary, a special method, a special program, a special approach. And it's unsustainable long-term and often ignores physical activity. In other words, it's in a vacuum as hey, this diet solves everything. So I know I just threw a lot at you, but I want you to think of some real world examples that'll make this concrete. So we have the HCG diet. This is you're effectively injecting a pregnancy hormone and you're eating only 500 calories a day. There was a meta-analysis of 24 studies, found zero evidence that this does anything for weight loss. And it sold for something like over $1,000 a month. Then we have the blood type diet. This is Peter D'Amano's book, sold over 7 million copies, I believe. And there was a study in 2014, University of Toronto, over 1,400 participants. Again, no evidence that supports the diet. Same thing with the cabbage soup diet, the grapefruit diet, the cotton ball diet. That is a real thing, the cotton ball diet. And they're all based on this single magic item approach. And they're all nutritionally inadequate, often lead to malnutrition, they're all unsustainable, and many times they just simply don't work. And even if they work, it's in the short term at a severe cost with all these other things. So if you look at the historical pattern, I think history is worth understanding here, like they say, so you don't repeat it. In the 80s, in the 90s, the villain was fat. If we go back to the late 70s, Senator McGovern had dietary guidelines in 1977 that told us to cut fat and eat more carbs. And so that's when the food industry started creating low fat everything. They replaced fat with sugar. And what happened? Well, obesity rates went from 15% in 1980 to over 40% by 2018. So then we swung the other way and we demonized carbs. And this was starting to kind of overlap in like the 90s. That's when I was a teenager. Atkins, Paleo, keto, and even today, like carnivore, right? All these things are very low carb. And we know Atkins went filed for bankruptcy back in 2005, although I still see the brand, so somebody must have bought the brand to slap on these low-carb items. And now you look, you know, people look at protein and they say, all right, it's the same thing. You know, fat had its moment, carbs had its moment, and now protein is having its moment, but it's not a fair comparison. So let's get into it. Let's run the test. Does high protein meet the criteria of a fad diet? So, first of all, does it eliminate food groups? It actually doesn't. You can eat high
Philip Pape: 06:40
protein as an omnivore, a vegetarian, a vegan, chicken, Greek yogurt, lentils, tofu, eggs, fish, and you're essentially adding something, you're not removing something. This is a key distinction if you think about it. Cutting out or going low carb or cutting out or going low fat is different than saying, no, just eat more protein. That's a different, it's asymmetrical. So that's one distinction. You're not actually eliminating food groups, right? You don't have to cut out carbs or fat to get more protein. You just have to eat in a more balanced way. The second criteria does it rely on a one magic or super food or small groups of food? No, absolutely not. Protein is just a macro. There's no single sort protein source that's really superior. Any high-quality protein works. Plant-based, animal-based, it all works. The mechanism is the nutrient, not something proprietary or special food. The next question is: does it promise rapid results from some sort of hack or trick of the metabolism? Again, no. The recommendation to eat adequate protein for what your body needs alongside resistance training is actually the opposite of a trick or a quick fix because it requires effort, behavior change, consistency. You have to do hard things like resistance training alongside it. So if anything, it's the it's very hard to sell something like high protein from that context. The next question is: is it based on anecdotes and testimonials, or is it based on peer-reviewed research? And here's a very, very clear distinction we have that does not support low carb and low fat. We have tons and tons of studies. But if I were to pick one, there's the 2018 meta-analysis by Morton and colleagues, and this was 49 randomized controlled trials over 1,800 participants, people who consumed higher protein while resistance training gained significantly more fat-free mass. I mean, it sounds kind of dumb to say it out loud, especially if you listen to this show for any length of time. Like, duh, eating more protein, you're gonna gain more fat-free mass. That's lean mass, that's muscle tissue, right? More recently, a 2022 meta-analysis by Noones and colleagues expanded that to 74 randomized controlled trials, confirm the same finding. And we see this over and over again. There's the Tagawa study that's been referenced a lot, the dose response back in 2021. And that was over a that was 105 studies, over 5,400 participants. And when we look at the dose response curve, guess what? You gain lean mass with higher protein intake. And it's across a very, very wide range. So a very wide range, there's a lot of flexibility here. So thousands of participants, decades of research definitely passes that test, whereas low carb and low fat actually do not. Is it sustainable? All right. Well, you tell me if you could eat pretty much any food that has protein, is that sustainable? Like you could eat chicken or eggs or yogurt or beans or lentils or any plant that has protein, oats? I mean, it's again kind of a dumb question. Of course, it's sustainable. You're just adding stuff in and you're giving yourself the bounty of foods available in the world that have protein compared to like Optavia, where they're selling you packaged foods or HCG diets, 500 calorie protocol, or the cabbage soup diet. I mean, it's it's insane that we even do any of these things. And I'm raising my hand because I did them too. I did a crazy diet before my wedding to lose a bunch of weight, where I limited my diet to like 12 foods. I don't even remember what they were. My wife thought was crazy, but she loves me and she was super supportive. So she just kind of looked at me askance and left me alone. But it's insane that we do these two things to ourselves. And then the final question here is here is does it ignore physical activity? This is an important one you might not have considered. I mentioned it already, but the idea that, you know, it's not just about food, right? Food is part of a whole kaleidoscope, I'll say, of behaviors, especially your physical activity and how you move your body, because the whole idea is to fuel yourself. So when we recommend protein and higher protein, we're not saying just sit on the couch and eat more protein, because then you just might have more calories and you gain even more fat, right? Just like carbs or fat. Doesn't matter. They're all energy. It's, hey, you got to be resistance training. And we're seeing more and more of the big industry guidelines even match this. And that's why the levels we give you are far above the RDA. And when I hear the like mainstream media talking about this and they don't even mention resistance training, it's crazy to me because then it implies that there is this corner of the protein world that is like a fad diet, but it's because you're just focusing on the food itself and you're getting obsessed with that, but then you're not resistance training. So I'd say high protein, again, quote unquote high, because most people aren't even eating more than you know 20 or 30% of their diet from protein when it gets up to sufficient levels. It fails all these criteria of a fad diet. Every single one, every single one. The argument that it's a fad relies on the only observation that you could possibly stand on that is, oh, it's popular. It's popular and everybody's talking about it. So we're gonna play the contrarian and we're gonna bash it on, you know, podcasts, and then
Philip Pape: 11:45
people are gonna question it. Okay. So I I thought it was important to talk about this. And if if we're confirming what you already suspected, and your question is less about the why, okay, Philip, I get it. I get it, but more about how do I actually hit my target. I actually built a tool for that. Um, and I haven't talked about it in and of itself, but it's called the protein day builder. You enter your daily protein target, and then things like how many meals you want, and what your lifestyle and eating preferences are and your dietary preferences. And then it maps out a full day of meals that hit your numbers. So, of course, you can use ChatGPT or AI for something like this, but this is all pre-designed specifically for this purpose based on the evidence, based on the right numbers and all that. So it's kind of like creating a meal plan on the fly, but very flexible. You can keep hitting the button and update it over and over again. Uh, and then you can lock in your meals and have other ones rebuild around them. So it's pretty cool. It's actually part of Eat More Lift Heavy, which I've talked about before, but I want to make it available on its own. So if you go to witsandwaist.com slash protein dash tool, witsandwaist.com slash protein dash tool, protein tool, I'll drop the link in the show notes and you can go if you want to get a copy of it by itself. Okay, so we've established high protein doesn't fit the high high fad profile. You're probably not too surprised about that. But if you are, I'm glad you found this podcast. I want to go further. I want to go further. I don't think it's enough to just say that. I want to show you why the science behind protein is qualitatively different from like the the fad diet bubble, let's call it. And there's three specific mechanisms that are measurable, that are reproducible physiological effects. And they're really powerful. They're so powerful that a lot of people I work with, a lot of women, especially over 40, who simply increase the amount of protein they eat, start having a tremendous amount of results and progress in other areas like their metabolism and their body fat distribution and everything else, their energy and so on, especially when it part of balanced meals that also include fiber and sufficient fats and carbs, right? This is the thing. They all go together. So the first one is the thermic effect. I still, I'm still on the fence about whether this is overrated or underrated. So hear me out. Your body burns energy digesting food. Makes sense, right? But not all foods cost the same to process food, that food in your body. And so we call this the thermic effect. Thermic meaning heat heat energy. So fat has a thermic effect of close to zero. Carbohydrates are about five to 10%, and protein is 20 to 30%. Now that's percentage of calories. That's the percentage of the calories that you eat of that macro get burned in the process of processing that macro. So again, fat zero, carbohydrates five to 10, protein is 20 to 30%. And that's a big difference. If you start to scale that up and you you figure you eat 800 calories from protein, your body is gonna burn 160 to 240 of those calories just processing the protein. Right. Now that's 200 grams of protein. You may be eating less than that, but I'm just giving you round numbers. But the same 800 calories from fat, where you know, protein bur can burn 160 to 240. The fat's gonna burn like 24 calories at most. And we've seen this on in studies as well. There is a West WesterTerp 2004 paper you can look up and a 2024 review by Servanini or Seravini, I'm sorry, that's a TZ seravini and colleagues in Metabolism Open that also confirmed these ranges of the thermic effect. And it declined, it seems to decline a little bit with age. So older adults produce about 6.4% total diet-induced thermogenesis compared to 7.3%. It's a small difference, but it also is another reason to just keep cranking up that protein as we get older for the most part. So that's an important one right there. Number two is satiety, fullness. Protein reduces hunger more effectively than any other macro.
Philip Pape: 15:40
So we've got two big wins here, right? We've got the thermic effect, and now we have satiety. There's a 2005 study about 20 years ago by Wagel and colleagues. And they took participants from 15% to 30% protein in their diet, but they kept carbs constant. And no one was told to eat less. Calorie intake dropped by about 441 calories per day spontaneously in the participants who increased their protein. And then they lost about five kilograms, which is over 10 pounds. That's like what, 12 pounds or something, over 12 weeks without trying. I say without trying, but I mean they increased their protein, and that's all they did. That goes back to my earlier comment about how powerful this can be, right? So that's that's from nothing other than being less hungry. There's a scientist, her name is Heather Lady, L-E-I-D-Y, who has a lab where they looked at high protein breakfasts, like a 35 gram protein breakfast, and showed that it reduces evening snacking and it also changes the brain reward signaling when looked at looked at it on fMRI. And that's compared to a normal 13 gram protein breakfast. And I say normal, I mean a lot of people don't even get that much for breakfast. And we've seen other studies that found that higher protein diets reduce daily hunger as well, reduce your desire to eat, increase fullness, all of it. So it kind of all goes together when it comes to managing your hunger signals. And then number three is of course muscle protein synthesis. That's the big one. I mean, your
Philip Pape: 17:10
body is gonna use the amino acids from protein to build and repair your muscle. And there is a dose threshold. Like you need enough leucine. This is a specific amino acid to trigger the pathways that kick off the process. But if you're eating enough protein for the day, you're gonna hit somewhat, you're gonna hit those thresholds. And I always tell people like your first priority is just get your total protein dialed in however you can. And then your next priority is to spread it out. And the spreading out part is a little bit for higher muscle protein synthesis, but that's a that's kind of overblown. The more practical reason is, or yeah, practical it for practical reasons. It's so that you can have the more balanced meals, help with your satiety, and get your protein in in a practical way. That's why primarily I suggest having protein every meal. So, how much are you looking for every meal? Probably at least 20 or 25, ideally 30 to 40 grams. And since you probably need over 100 grams a day, you do the math, three or four meals, 30 to 40 grams. That's how we do the math. Pretty straightforward. And again, you can go grab my tool, wits and weights.com slash protein dash tool, and go purchase that tool if you would like a standalone way to calculate and hit this for yourself. Uh, one last thing, you probably heard that 2023 study by Trommelin and colleagues that looked at the hundred grams of protein, and they saw that eating even a full, that huge amount of protein in one meal could produce a post-exercise response that lasts for many, many hours. So there's not a, oh, you, you know, the rest gets wasted. Like if you eat over 40 grams, you're gonna waste the rest. Well, however many pro however much protein you eat in one dose is going to get used in some way. Like a large bolus, as they call it, especially post-training, can do that. But I would still recommend recognize distributing across meals just for practical purposes. Okay, I want to spend a few minutes on the older population. A lot of you are probably over 40, 50, 60, you know, I myself am 45, because it's even more important the older you get because of the muscle mass decline, because of the need to resistance train and support that. Starting around the age 30, muscle mass declines 3 to 8% per decade. Strength declines even faster, believe it or not, about 1.5% per year between the age of 50 and 60, accelerating to 3% per year after that. This is huge for functionality and for aging. For women, the menopausal transmission, transition, I apologize, tends to amplify these. So postmenopausal women have nearly three times the odds of sarcopenia compared to pre-menopausal women. And we know that there's issues with bone density as well. We see a higher incidence of osteoporosis. Estrogen decline drives reduced growth hormone, reduced IGF-1, increased inflammatory cytokines, accelerates visceral fat accumulation, that's belly fat, menopause belly, we've heard of that, right? And there is even this protein leverage mechanism that we think exists for menopausal weight gain. The idea that increased protein breakdown during menopause gives you a higher appetite through a hormone called FGF21. And so if you don't have enough protein coming in, you're gonna overcompensate by eating other stuff just to get total calories. You're gonna get more fats and carbs and total calories. So a lot of the weight gain women experience during menopause could be partly a protein-seeking behavior that gets misdirected into overconsumption of everything else. Just another reason, whether this is supported long-term or not by the evidence to eat more protein. And then there was the now, take this with a grain of salt, the women's health initiative data, which has its own problems for things like hormone replacement, but we're talking about body fat distribution. And they looked at nearly 4,700 postmenopausal women over a three-year period. And those consuming one and a half grams per kilogram or more lost more visceral fat and more subcutaneous fat and gained lean tissue compared to those at lower intakes. Again, not surprising. Just eat more protein. So I can go on and on about the studies, but protein is not a trend. It's here to stay. I'm glad that more and more people are eating it. And I'm kind of glad that they're putting it in all these foods, to be honest, just to get the attention up, you know, whatever your thought is on processing and ultra-processing, which is its own problem in our Western environment. Now, if you're worried about eating too much protein, I usually tell people there's not really an upper limit unless you already have something like kidney concerns. But the main thing is you just don't need so much more protein. If you like more protein, I have a lot of clients who just love to eat their protein, perfectly fine. As long as you can make it work with work and get enough fiber, nutrients, fats, carbs, depending on the goal, it's gonna actually serve you quite well, especially in a fat loss phase. So, in conclusion, the recommendation to eat at, I'm gonna call it adequate protein, not even high protein. Protein, just adequate protein, 0.7 to 1 grams per pound. I didn't even mention the number until now. 0.7 to 1 grams per pound of your body weight. So that's based on your body. It's for your activity level, it's for your age. So probably more if you are more active or you're training, you're trying to build more muscle, you're in fat loss, you're older, et cetera, right? All of this is backed by plenty of studies. It's endorsed by many, many large organizations now: sports nutrition, geriatric nutrition. And it's clear the mechanistic explanations are totally clear for these benefits. So I think we could put to bed that there's any fad kind of cloud over higher protein or what I'll call adequate protein. All right, before we wrap up, remember that three question fad diet test I mentioned earlier. I think is pretty cool to examine things skeptically. I'm going to give it to you in a second. But if this episode gave you something that's helpful, whether the research, the framework, or say the confidence to keep prioritizing protein and hit your protein, I would love it if you just share this with a friend. That's it. That's all I'm asking you to do. Follow the show and share it with a friend, somebody who's wondering about protein. And again, if you want to make sure
Philip Pape: 23:05
you're hitting your protein or find a way to do it, uh grab my protein day builder at witsandweights.com slash protein dash tool. The link is in the show notes. Of course, if you're an Eat More Lift Heavy, you already get that tool unlocked as part of the program. And that program, by the way, is at eatmoreliftheavy.com if you want to learn more. All right, here's the quick test you can run on anything that is like a trend or you see on social media. It's three questions. Question one, does it eliminate something? That's it. Does it eliminate something? If if you're told to cut out an entire macro or food group, it's already a red flag. I don't care if it's seed oils. I don't care if it's artificial sweeteners. It's still a red flag. Evidence-based nutrition tends to add and adjust and have some flexibility built in. And oftentimes this fear-mongering of single ingredient things is a red flag because things are not that black and white. And often that restriction leads to binging and overconsuming at the end of the day and then not maintaining your results. So just ask that question because if it doesn't eliminate, that at least means it's probably on better footing. Question two does it require buying something proprietary or secret or special or this is my secret one thing? If the only way to follow the diet is to purchase something, a product, a supplement, a membership, that's just really, really good marketing. That's really good marketing. Whether there's a little bit of science behind it or not, that is good marketing. Now, there could be some very science-grounded practitioners who have programs that you pay for. My my question here is is the thing that they're trying to teach you that works only unlocked for you if you pay something? That's what I'm talking about. Like I don't hide information behind a paywall, right? And if I do, let me know. I haven't I don't hide information behind a paywall. What I like to charge for is helping people and where you see the value of being helped implement that information for you. Like to me, that is that is where that is the value of working with a coach or with a group of people that are expert in this to accelerate your results. That's different from locking the actual information behind a paywall. All right. The principles work, they should be free. Question three is could you do this for at least five years, if not the rest of your life? So this is the sustainability question. If the approach is so extreme or rigid or socially isolating that you think of it as a short-term thing, like a quick fix, or I'm gonna do this just to lose weight, that's a big problem. That is not a sustainable strategy. And if you're like, yeah, but Philip, isn't that the only way to lose fat? No, it's not. The way we lose fat is by scaling things up or down, but still having the balanced meals that hit your protein, they keep you full of the right nutrients that fuel your body, that avoid all of this stress and all of this
Philip Pape: 25:55
metabolic dysfunction. And that's the way we want to do it. And if you're like, I don't know how to do that, okay, come join us, eatmoreliftheavy.com. Check it out. That's what we do. And again, that is where I'm not gonna hide information. The information's on this podcast. In fact, if you reach out to me and say, hey, Philip, how do I do XYZ? I'll probably give you an answer and just we'll move on. All right, so if two or more of those are, I guess it's probably a fad. If you could confidently answer in the negative with all of those, it's probably evidence-based. And of course, high protein falls under that category. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, you do not need permission to simply eat enough protein as part of a balanced meal for your goals. Go after it. I'm Philip Pape. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

Featured

Ready for the Next Step?

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week asynchronous coaching program to build muscle and lose fat over 40
Get personalized, adaptive coaching with the Fitness Lab app. 20% off for podcast listeners.
Get the Free Nutrition 101 Guide to set up your macros for fat loss and strength training.
Listen to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or all platforms. You can also Ask a Question to get featured on the show!

Philip Pape 5/5/26 Philip Pape 5/5/26

Should You Fix Your Diet or Training First? | Ep 465

Should you fix your diet or your training first? The real answer depends on which part of your system is the weakest link right now. Learn about the research on resistance training for body recomp, the constraint theory "bottleneck" concept, how to tell whether nutrition or training is YOUR bottleneck, and a practical 5-question framework you can apply this week. If you're over 40 and stuck in the cycle of cutting calories and changing workout plans, you'll know where to start by the end of this episode.

Should you fix your diet or your training first?

You've probably heard that diet is 80% of the results, so nutrition is the obvious place to start. After all, "abs are made in the kitchen" right? The problem is this claim has no basis in science, and for a lot of you, training is the actual bottleneck.

The real answer depends on which part of your system is the weakest link right now.

Learn about the research on resistance training for body recomp, the constraint theory "bottleneck" concept, how to tell whether nutrition or training is YOUR bottleneck, and a practical 5-question framework you can apply this week. If you're over 40 and stuck in the cycle of cutting calories and changing workout plans, you'll know where to start by the end of this episode.

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Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where Phase 1 diagnoses your specific constraint, Phase 2 fixes it with guided adjustments to training and nutrition, and Phase 3 teaches you to run this process on your own: https://eatmoreliftheavy.com

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Timestamps

0:00 - Fix your diet or exercise first?
3:30 - The NEW trial and body composition
6:00 - Resistance training and body recomp
8:30 - Weight loss vs. fat loss
10:30 - Constraint theory and the bottleneck concept
13:00 - Is nutrition the bottleneck?
19:30 - Is training the bottleneck?
22:30 - Sleep and recovery
25:00 - The 5-question framework
33:00 - Strength training over 40 and perimenopause
35:30 - An efficient way to fix nutrition AND training
37:30 - Bonus: the 5-second bottleneck test

Philip Pape: 00:00
Should you fix your nutrition or your training first? You might have heard that diet is 80% of your results and exercise is only 20%. But that has no basis in science. There was one study of overweight postmenopausal women doing aerobic exercise, not resistance training, and they measured scale weight, not body composition. For many of you, fixing your nutrition first is exactly correct. But for others, fixing your training first will produce faster, more visible changes. So today I'm going to show you how to diagnose which one is your bottleneck, a simple framework for deciding where to start, and a five-second test you can do right now to figure out your answer. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and this is a question that I get all the time. Someone sends me a message or asks on a coaching call, hey, Philip, I know I need to fix my nutrition and my training, but I can't do everything at once. So where do I start? Or they say, hey, I just want to lose fat. I'm gonna hold off on the strength training thing you keep talking about. I want to work on my food. Or vice versa. Hey, I just want to build muscle. I'm not gonna worry about the food part right now. And the standard answer is either, hey, diet is the majority of results. This is what I hear a lot. You know, abs are not made in the gym, they're made in the kitchen, those kinds of things, which are great sound bites, and they sound very decisive, like you should start with diet. And it sends a lot of people down the wrong path. In fact, more often than not. So today we're gonna retire that myth. We're gonna replace it with something better, and that is a diagnostic that you can apply to yourself. How do we personalize the answer? Because the real answer isn't a ratio or you have to do both, or you have to go in one order or the other. It depends on what is your weakest link right now. I want to give a quick shout out to Christina R, who wrote in asking how this kind of framework applies when you're in your 60s or 70s, even though this audience or this episode is for everyone. Christina, I just wanted to give you a shout-out because the answer is the same framework, regardless of your age. I'm gonna touch on some age-specific evidence as we go. And I think you'll see that it still holds because I'm all about principles. And then stick around till the end because I'm gonna share a five-second bottleneck test. It's one question that tells you whether diet or training should be your first move. And you're like, Philip, just give it to me now. Well, look, we have to set up the why behind this and the true diagnostic so you understand that even when you get an quote unquote answer, that it truly is right for you. Here's what we're gonna cover today. First, why the 8020 claim is a problem and what the research actually measures. Second, how to identify your personal bottleneck using the signs that you can observe right now. You don't need any lab work, you can do this all with just your body. And then, third, a practical decision framework that you can use this week. All right, let's get into it and talk about this 80-20 myth. And some of you may not have heard of it, I get that, but I've been hearing it for many years: the idea that diet is the most important driver. Diet is 80% of the results. You can't have fat loss without diet, et cetera. It's all kind of related. And it's probably understandable for a couple different reasons. One being that most of us have gained weight or fat or become less healthy with age, often due to our eating patterns and our eating habits, or at least we blame those. And when we look at research, there have been some trials that tried to examine the effectiveness of one or the other's independent variables. There was one in 2012 called the new trial, and that was in the journal Obesity. 439 overweight to obese, post-menopausal women. They're randomized into four groups. There was a diet-only group, exercise only, diet plus exercise, and then the control group. And then 12 months later, the diet-only group lost 8.5% of their body weight. The exercise-only group lost 2.4%, and the combined lost 10.8%. So doing the math, diet accounted for roughly 79% of the combined weight loss. And that's kind of where this idea of 80-20 comes from. Now, if all you care about is losing weight on the scale, that's fine. Then go ahead and get a shot. But we care about fat loss, not just weight loss. We care that diet can create an energy deficit much faster than exercise. That is true, especially when compared to aerobic exercise, which sometimes can backfire and actually cause you to burn fewer calories overall due to adaptation. And there have been studies that go back to the 90s where dieting alone tends to produce quite a bit more pure weight loss versus exercise. But the nuance left out from a lot of these discussions is that, for example, in the new trial from 2012, the exercise only group was the only group that gained lean mass. They actually gained 0.3 kilograms of muscle while losing fat. The diet-only group lost 0.8 kilograms of lean mass. And you see this story over and over again with body composition changes in a worse direction, even though people lost weight on the scale. And that's why we care about fat loss and not just weight loss. So this these big swings of, you know, over a kilogram of muscle tissue between the two groups. I don't want that. And I don't think you do either. And here's the worst thing, I guess, is that the exercise in the study was cardio. It wasn't resistance training. If they had used resistance training, guess what? The gap would have been even wider. So it just goes to show that exercise of any kind does have value. And of course, we know resistance training has even that much more value. Now there was a 2022 meta-analysis by Lopez and colleagues that looked at 116 articles covering over 4,000 participants. Resistance training alone, with no change to diet, reduced body fat by 1.6% and increased lean mass by 0.8 kilograms. That's body recomp, body recomposition. Less fat, more muscle at the same time without even touching your diet. The diet plus resistance training group lost the most fat, about 5.3 kilograms, and they preserve muscle. So they didn't actually gain muscle, which kind of makes sense again when you're in a diet, you stunt your ability to gain as much muscle. And all of this stuff is really, really important, guys, because weight loss and fat loss or body composition are not the same goal. When you lose weight through dieting alone, you're going to lose lean tissue, 20 to 30%. I recently did an episode about GLP1s where they talked about 40%, but in reality, when you count for some different factors, it's probably about 25, right? The quarter rule, 25%. And then what we see in studies is that some form of exercise tends to cut the rate of muscle loss. And I suspect a lot of people, it's because they they were sedentary to begin with, and doing any exercise at all kind of primes your body and gives it a signal that it's important to keep that muscle mass, even if you're not doing what we would call lifting heavy or resistance training. So this 80-20 rule has some merit, but in a very narrow context, especially when we say it's it's really about the scale weight loss in sedentary or a cardio-focused population. As soon as you shift that goal to body composition, which is what most of you listening to the show care about, then the ratio changes a lot. And for a lot of people, especially if you're older, if you're over 40 and you're already eating reasonably well, the training may be the higher leverage fix. I was joking on our eat more lift-heavy coaching call this month. Somebody, I asked her if she eats in a very boring way or a very exciting way, as in tends to go overboard on the weekends, things like that. She's like, oh no, I eat really boring. I'm like, okay, that's actually gonna serve you really well. Somebody like her, the eating isn't the issue, and a higher higher higher leverage fix is actually the training. So I wanted to establish that popular frame of what is this, what does the data say? What are we actually talking about here? And now we're gonna say, what is right for you? So this goes back to constraint theory and the bottleneck concept, really everything that I built my philosophy around based on the evidence here, that you need to find the next biggest constraint and go attack that. Again, you know, I sometimes mention our coaching program, Eat More and Lift Heavy. It's built on that idea of every week we go after the one next constraint, and it works really well for getting compounding results. So if we go back to the history of this, the theory of constraints, it was developed by a physicist named Eliahu Goldrat, that's what two Ts, in the 80s. So I was a little kid back then, I probably wasn't reading uh research studies. And the core idea is very simple that every system has at least one constraint that limits its output. And the throughput of the system is determined entirely by that constraint. So if you think of it as a chain, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So if you can if you improve any other link than the weakest one, it's not gonna help the chain, is it? You have to fix the weakest one, and then the whole chain gets stronger. So Goldrat's big insight was that in the corporate world, most managers spend their time optimizing the wrong part of the system. They might speed up a machine that's already fast as opposed to a machine that's creating some sort of bottleneck. And I think that happens to us in our lives, especially when it comes to health and fitness. And so the analogy that I like is a highway. Imagine a four-lane highway that narrows to two lanes for about a mile. And what happens? Traffic backs up. Well, we all love traffic, don't we? I grew up in Miami, I hated it. One of the main reasons I love living where I do now in Connecticut, in the woodsy area, is the lack of traffic. Anyway, traffic tends to back up, and now you're stuck on the highway. And the question is, would widening the four-lane sections to six lanes fix the traffic? No, of course not. You'd still be bottlenecked at the two-lane section, right? You can change that other part of the highway to 12 lanes. It doesn't matter. You're still gonna be constrained at the two lanes. So, what do you need to do? You need to widen that part of the highway. Now, that's separate from all the arguments about, well, once you do that, you're gonna have a lot more traffic anyway, and it's all gonna catch up. That's a separate issue. That's a throughput issue. So in your body, the highway is really your entire system of training, nutrition, sleep, recovery. The bottleneck is whatever of those is most constrained. And for a lot of us listening, a lot of you, especially those over 40, a lot of women who've been in the diet and restrict cycle for many, many years, the bottleneck, believe it or not, is not your nutrition. Believe it or not, it's not your nutrition. I talked to a lot of you, and the nutrition isn't that bad. And you got to consider the fact that the weight gain has happened slowly over many years. You might be eating vegetables, you might be trying to hit protein, maybe you, maybe you are, maybe you aren't. You might even be tracking all of this stuff. But then the bottleneck is you're doing, you know, three sets of 12 on the leg press and it's the same weight every day in the gym, every time you go to the gym, or you're using the little dumbbells and you you're just not willing to go to a gym or get a barbell or get something heavier. And I don't mean to put the blame on you. I'm just saying either not willing or not able, or you're not sure that's what you need to do. And when you're doing that same routine, as consistent as you might be, you're not gonna have any progression or improvement. You're not gonna have progressive overload, you're not gonna get close to failure, and you're not gonna get the thing that drives strength and muscle, which is gonna help with the fat loss and the belly fat and the energy and all the other things we talk about and make better use of your food and fuel. Now, for a different group of people, I hope I wasn't too harsh. Always tough love. For a different group of people, the bottleneck is their nutrition. Oh, yeah, it definitely is their nutrition. They might be training reasonably well, four or five days a week. Maybe they have a good program, maybe they are doing progressive overlap. I know a lot of the guys I speak to who have just gained a bunch of weight, or ladies are eating 900 to 1200 calories and you don't have the energy to adapt to the training and even build the muscle, even if you're doing the right thing. So it's all over the place when we say nutrition is the problem. It's not just that you're overconsuming per se. And as we've talked about before, anything more than a very moderate calorie deficit of like 500 calories a day can it can very well lead to a loss of lean mass while even while you're resistance training. But if you're kind of within that window, you can probably still get stronger while under-eating, but you're still gonna have a very hard time building much meaningful muscle beyond, say, the first few weeks or months of newbie gains. And so I think the idea of strength and body composition and whether you're making progress or not can very well lie in the nutrition side, even if you're training well. Now, if you're not doing either, obviously the question is, you know, what should you fix first? Not necessarily what you should you do first. There's a subtle distinction. The distinction is I think you need to focus on both, right? To some level. Like you need to train and you need to track as a minimum for your nutrition, but you don't necessarily have to quote unquote fix both at the same time to the same level, if that makes sense. You're gonna prioritize one at a time, get that dialed in, and then work on the other, even though you're doing both at some minimal level. Does that make sense? Like you're still doing the things, it's not not zero. You're doing it, you just might be at a one or a two over here and you're trying to get this to a three or four over here. I hope that makes sense. So the I would say that the opposite pattern can also reveal bottleneck, meaning if you are eating adequately, if you're sleeping okay, but your lifts have been flat for a long time and you don't look any different, then the bottleneck is probably your training, right? Your volume, your intensity, your exercise selection, probably progressive overload is the main thing that's lacking, if assuming your nutrition is okay. So, what is your two-lane highway? That's the bottleneck. What's the two-lane highway? So, what do you look for to figure that out? All right, let's talk about the signs. One sign is persistent fatigue, even if you have enough sleep. So your lifts kind of stall or even regress backward, especially on the main movements, the compound movements. Or if you have constant hunger or on the other hand, almost no appetite, that can tell you that you have an energy imbalance. Mood disturbances, irritability, brain fog, irregularities with your cycle if you're menstruating, frequent illness or prolonged soreness, hair loss, cold hands and feet, right? Guess what? All of these can be symptoms of low energy availability. Now, there is research on how low is too low in terms of energy needs. Let's just say for a 180-pound man like I am, with let's say 15 to 20% body fat, something south of 2,000 calories, maybe 1800, maybe 1500, you know, the exact number is going to depend on the person, is where hormonal metabolic function starts to break down. And this is a normal thing, this is an adaptation when you're in a deficit, but it is very important to understand that low energy availability will cause lots and lots of symptoms that can tell you that your nutrition is the bottleneck. We also know that a lot of female recreational exercises, as many as half, are at risk for low energy availability based on some different studies. So it's not just about athletes, right? When you hear of things like Reds or physique competitors, it's everyday people. And what they what makes this tricky is for those of you who've been dieting for many years, you might not think that you're under-eating. You might think you're maintaining because your body weight is no longer dropping, you're not losing weight anymore. Or you're even eating less than you used to and you're not losing weight. But your body has adapted. Your resting metabolic rate has probably come down, you've probably lost muscle mass. Your non-exercise activity activity has probably decreased subconsciously. And so all of these are a negative for your training adaptations because now you have lower muscle protein synthesis because of the lower reduced or the lower energy availability. So it all compounds. The encouraging thing here is that even one training session with resistance training can jack up your muscle protein synthesis. It's a great stimulant. This is why I'm saying just getting into the gym and getting your workout done can be a great jump start and in and of itself has massive benefits to your body and your physiology, even in an energy deficit. And then if you're adding protein in after you're training, you're eating your carbs, all of that can push these things higher. So the constraint is the energy. So that would be a those would be good signs that energy availability is the problem. Of course, if you're tracking and you kind of know this and you know that you're in a deficit, great, but you may not know it because your numbers may tell you that you're maintaining. You're just so adapted and underrecovered that you're actually well below what your maintenance could be. Therefore, you don't have enough energy coming in. All right. Now, what about training as the bottleneck? What signs tell you that? Well, if you're eating at a reasonable level of calories, you're hitting your protein, your energy is pretty good, your mood is pretty good, and your body's just not changing the way you want, usually indicated that by your lifts have not progressed in several weeks or maybe several months. And this assumes you even were expecting them to go up. And what I mean is a lot of you don't even, aren't even using progressive overload. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, definitely check out more episodes of this podcast or reach out to me. This is very important. But for those of you who are trying to progress but just haven't been able to, you know, maybe you don't have a structured program, maybe you're changing program a lot, programs a lot, maybe you're not actually trying to push yourself. Maybe there's a fundamental misunderstanding of like sets and reps and load and all that. And the reason I put it this way is because in our coaching program and Eat More Lift Heavy, when we have our coaching calls, these questions come up all the time. As much as we provide educational material, the podcast has it, YouTube has all this stuff, you know, we try to spell it out. Not everybody under understands the details about training properly or eating properly that we sometimes talk to on this podcast. If you have a background in, say, nutrition science or you're a personal trainer or something like that, right? We have to acknowledge that there's a learning curve here. So if you're not progressing, if you're not training close to failure, if you're doing too little volume per week, like far less than say five to 10 sets per muscle group per week, the bottleneck, the bottleneck then might be your training. Like if you're only training once a week, even if it's hard, it still might not be nearly enough for what you need to make progress. And we know this because there's plenty of evidence on the dose response of intensity and volume, especially volume, for making progress and building muscle in conjunction with the principle that builds muscle, which is mechanical tension. And the only rate, the way you get mechanical tension is lifting close to failure. Excuse me. And the only way you lift close to failure is as you get stronger each time you go to the gym and you do that same exercise, you need to go a little bit heavier or a little bit more reps, a few more reps or a little bit more load, right? That that's because by definition, you're gonna get stronger and you're gonna be able to do more. So you need to do more to get close to failure. Does that make sense? So it really does come down to progressive overload, but it's it's that because mechanical tension, training close to failure, is the mechanism that drives the muscle growth. So that's training. And speaking of things that you can optimize that you may not be thinking about, but is probably the most important third pillar alongside nutrition and training is your sleep. And even though today's episode is the dichotomy between nutrition and training, I would put sleep into the category of non-negotiable, no matter what. However, it depends on where you are and what your constraint is and what you need to do. One thing that I did to upgrade my sleep is my sheets. I use Cozy Earth's bamboo derived sheets. Smooth segue to our sponsor today. This is a temperature regulating sheet that feels amazing. It's so comfortable. It keeps me cool. Whether it's hot or cold, I stay regulated and I feel very comfortable. And therefore, I'm not waking up as much. I'm sleeping more consistently consistently, getting good recovery, and my aura ring is telling me I have higher scores, better HRV, and things like that. And it's a great company. I love great companies, and I would appreciate your support if you're looking for something like this. It makes a great gift, but it's great for yourself if you want to try improving your sleep via a tool like this. The cool thing about Cozy Earth is they give you a hundred-night sleep trial so you can test them for over three months. And then if you don't love them, you can return them. And they have a 10-year warranty as well. So they really do back up their sheets. And remember how much time we spend in bed, it's a third of our life. It's 2,500 hours a year. So, yes, training and nutrition are super important, but bringing it all together is those ideally eight hours of sleep. And that is a logical place to focus. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. You'll get an automatic 20% discount using code Wits and Weights. Go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. Support the podcast, but more importantly, support your sleep and your recovery. That's witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. Link is in the show notes. All right, let's get back to this decision framework. So we have the concept you got to find a bottleneck, you've got to fix a bottleneck, and you It's either training or nutrition. So you need to ask yourself five different questions. All right. Question one: Are you doing structured resistance training at least three times per week with progressive overload? So that summed up everything I just muddled through a few minutes ago. If the answer is no, then training is the first fix. You notice how I did that. I'm giving you a simple framework. Start there. So guess what? A lot of you, training is the first thing you have to fix, not nutrition. Full stop. This is the single highest leverage change for your body composition. Resistance training alone can help reduce your body fat percent, reduce visceral fat, even when you don't change your diet. It's a tremendous buffer. I've worked with clients who've trained for years and they built a lot of muscle, and their diet is terrible, their walking is terrible, and yet their blood work is pretty darn good because they have that protective muscle. And of course, it gets better now that they start walking, they start improving their nutrition and losing some excess body fat. But the lean mass, the muscle mass, the strength, the bone density, the function is almost more important than anything else for most of you, especially if you're not doing it. So that's question one. Question two, all right, I'm training consistently. Great. Is your training well structured? So you might be doing some progressive overload, which means you're potentially okay, but are you hitting sufficient volume with that progressive overload? At least, let's say eight to ten sets per muscle group per week. And so I'm gonna file this into the training quality. Now, some might argue that if you're able to apply progressive overload to all your lifts, then by definition, your training is well structured. And I could somewhat buy that argument, but some people are muddling the two. And if you've got both of these dialed in, then training is no longer your bottleneck. Question three All right, training solid. Do you know your calorie and protein intake? If you don't, you can't diagnose whether nutrition is the problem. Okay, so start tracking for at least two weeks. Don't change anything, just observe. And I think you're gonna be shocked at how far off a lot of your assumptions might be. Or you might confirm some of your assumptions. Calories alone are always way off for most people. Average self-reported energy intake usually underestimates real intake by at least 20%. I've seen some estimates up to 40%. Question four. So now you're tracking, you know what you're eating. Are you eating enough to support your training? So if your energy availability is low, and you know this from the symptoms we talked about earlier, even if you are quote unquote maintaining your weight, you might have to jack up your food. You might simply have to eat more, help your metabolism recover, get through the fear of the fact that you might gain weight. Yeah, you might gain a couple pounds of fluid and glycogen, but for the vast majority of people that I've taken this through, they're super shocked because they don't get beyond that fluid weight, they don't gain weight. What happens is their metabolism starts to ramp up while they're maintaining weight. So the metabolism goes up, they burn more while they eat more. And that's the principle behind eating more, which then unlocks your training and your movement and your energy and your fuel and your hormones and all the other things. And then question five, so once we've established you're eating enough in general, question five is is your protein adequate? Now, some of you might think, oh, shouldn't you put protein first? Not really. If you're just not eating enough, I almost don't care where it comes from. I just want you to eat more, seriously. And then we can start shifting those macros where they need to be. But then you can focus on protein, where we're aiming for 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of protein. Now you might ask, is that ideal weight? Is that lean mass? Just simplify it. Whatever your weight is right now, 0.7 to 1 gram per pound, start there. You can always optimize further later on. So if all of those are answered, like, no, I'm doing all that and it's super solid, well, now you're looking at secondary factors like sleep quality. We talked about the cozy earth sheets, for example, your stress, your consistency over time with these things. So, like you might think you're doing them, but then in reality you're not actually consistent with them or improving with them. Most people have a clear primary bottleneck in one of the first five questions we talked about. But then a lot of you, as you get into this and more experience, you start to hit those secondary bottlenecks. Now, here's the really awesome thing that I that I get that I get excited about. It's called upward spiraling. Once you fix your bottleneck, it creates an upward spiral, a cascade. When you've been under-eating and then you start eating enough, what happens? Your energy improves and then your training quality goes up. You can push harder, you can get more reps, you can recover faster, you're more excited to go to the gym, and then you build more muscle. And then more muscle increases your resting energy expenditure. And guess what? That gives you more room for calories, which then makes your nutrition easier to sustain. So it's an upward spiral or a virtuous cycle. And the opposite direction is true as well. Okay. The opposite direction is true as well. In a good way, I mean. So, like Lyle McDonald always talks about how when women start properly lifting heavy, they almost always change their diet on their own. And that's something I've observed as well. More protein, more structured meals, the training itself is a catalyst for better nutrition. And we have research that completely backs this up. There was a 2011 review that talked about exercise as a gateway behavior. Isn't that funny? Right, because we talk about gateway drugs like on the negative side. But imagine having a gateway behavior like exercise, like training, that strengthens your brain. It rewires the prefrontal circuits involved in self-control, which translates to your diet and nutrition. Isn't that interesting? So, this is the mental side of doing hard things that I think creates resilience, consistency, self-control, all of those things. So starting with training or exercise may actually make it easier to fix your nutrition later. So if both sides need to work and you're not sure where to begin, a good default is okay, start with nutrition if you're clearly under-eating and you have all those symptoms we talked about because you need the energy to train well, or start with training if you're eating adequately, but not providing the stimulus for that change because the training creates that downstream motivation to eat better. Does that make sense? And this is all consistent with the questions we gave you before. Even though I tend to start the questions on the training side, eventually you're gonna hit where that constraint is. Now, quick note for Christina and anyone else wondering about age-specific considerations. Remember that muscle mass decreases about 3 to 8% per decade after age 30, and then it accelerates after age 60. But a 2021 landmark study in science found that metabolism itself remains very stable from age 20 to 60 when adjusted for body composition. So this, like, my metabolism is slower now that I'm older narrative. It's all about muscle loss and the fact that you're moving less. It's not that your metabolism is truly dropping off a cliff, which is a good thing. It means the fix can actually work when you're 45, when you're 55, when you're 70, you resist and strain with sufficient stimulus, eat enough food, eat enough protein, make you sure your energy, energy intake supports your recovery. Now, for women in perimenopause, the shift in fat distribution toward visceral fat, toward belly fat, menopause belly, the decline in the estrogen that causes that, and then the increased baseline stress and cortisol all point to the same conclusion. Resistance training with adequate nutrition is the most protective intervention you can have for this. Not doing more cardio, not eating less, not low carb, not intermittent fasting. Resistance training, adequate nutrition, which is great because that means you have lots of flexibility to do this. All right, before we wrap up, I did promise you a five-second bottleneck test. It's one question that tells you whether you have to fix your diet or training first. I'll share in just a moment. But if you're listening to this, you're thinking, okay, Philip, I know what my bottleneck is now. Thank you, but I don't know how to fix it on my own. That is what Eat More Lift Heavy was built for. This is my 26-week, week-by-week coach program. We focus on one constraint at a time. You've got two coaches in the program. In the first phase, we diagnose where you are. We set up your tracking, we assess your training, we identify your specific constraint. And then in phase two, we fix it. We fix it together. You learn to read your data, you learn to adjust your nutrition, progress your training, stop guessing. And then in phase three, you learn to do this independently. We give you specially designed tools and exercises to train you to do this for yourself so you never need a program like this again. If you're over 40, especially women who've been going back and forth between cutting calories and trying new workout plans, nothing sticks. This program actually sequences it for you, slowly but surely in the right order, with coaching to keep you on track. If you're looking for a quick fix or a challenge or rapid fat loss, this is not the program for you because those things are not sustainable. You'll end up right back where you started. But if you want the results to stick, check us out. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com to learn about the program. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com. Link is in the show notes. All right, here's the fastest way to figure out whether you should fix diet or training first. Ask yourself this question Have my lifts gone up in the last four weeks? That's it. I thought about this a lot and it really comes down to that one question. Because if they have, then your training is doing its job. You've got the stimulus. But if your body isn't changing, the constraint is on the nutrition side. So you're either not eating enough to support muscle growth, your protein's too low for the muscle growth. Okay, that's an easy way to tell. Now, if that's that's if the answer is yes. If your lifts are going up, but you're not getting what you want, it's probably nutrition. If your lifts are not going up, then there's your answer. That's your answer. The training stimulus is the bottleneck for sure. I mean, the food will help, but it's not gonna help nearly as much as fixing your training. Either your program lacks progressive overload or the way you're implementing it does, or your volume's too low, or you're not recovering because of a different issue. So fixing that is the first thing to do. That's it. One question. Have my lifts gone up in the last four weeks? Start there. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the answer to which I should fix first is not a slogan or sound bite. It is diagnosing your immediate constraint. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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Philip Pape 4/30/26 Philip Pape 4/30/26

Why You Can't Lose Fat "Eating Clean" (Performance Chef Mario Limaduran) | Ep 464

You eat clean, cook at home, and choose whole foods, so why can’t you lose fat? Are your macros and portions quietly keeping you stuck? I ’m talking with Chef Mario Limaduran, culinary director at Trifecta Nutrition, about why food quality matters, but quantity still drives weight loss, muscle building, and performance. We cover how a performance chef builds meals around protein, carbs, fats, satiety, sauces, and real-life meal prep.

You eat clean, cook at home, and choose whole foods, so why can’t you lose fat? Are your macros and portions quietly keeping you stuck?

I’m talking with Chef Mario Limaduran, culinary director at Trifecta Nutrition, who has cooked for UFC fighters, NFL athletes, Olympic-level competitors, and NCAA Division I wrestlers.

You’ll learn why food quality matters, but quantity still drives weight loss, muscle building, and performance. We cover how a performance chef builds meals around protein, carbs, fats, satiety, sauces, and real-life meal prep.

Mario also explains why goal-based nutrition beats rigid named diets, how to cook better at home without becoming a chef, and when meal delivery can support evidence-based nutrition.

Go to witsandweights.com/question and drop the secret code for a chance to win an entire week of free meals from Trifecta!

Timestamps:

0:00 – Why clean eating stalls fat loss
3:03 – Sourcing food for performance
5:35 – Using the exchange system
8:42 – Consistency beats food labels
12:58 – Refeeds and the 80/20 rule
20:05 – Named diets versus goal-based plans
22:06 – Satiety, macros, and smarter sauces
35:58 – Simple weekly meal prep structure

Why clean eating stalls fat loss
Philip Pape 0:00
You know that person who switched to organic everything, cooks at home, eats mostly whole foods, and still can't figure out why they can't lose fat. That might be you. And the problem isn't your food quality. It's how quality and quantity work together or more often don't. Today I'm talking with a chef who's cooked personalized meals for UFC fighters, NFL athletes, and Olympic level competitors. And he's going to explain what he sees go wrong when everyday people try to eat clean without the structure that actually makes it work. Plus, stick around because we're giving away an entire week of free meals. But the catch is you have to listen for the secret word later in this episode. Welcome to Wits and Weights, where in every episode we put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're examining the claim about eating clean and losing fat. It sounds obvious, eating whole foods, eating lean proteins, lots of vegetables. Nobody argues with that, but a large number of my clients come to me already eating well and they're stuck. They're frustrated because they did the thing everyone said to do. It didn't deliver the body composition or fat loss changes that they expected. So what's missing? My guest today is Chef Mario Lima Duran, culinary director at Trifecta Nutrition. Mario has a degree in culinary nutrition from Johnson and Wales University. He spent his career at the intersection of real cooking, but also sports performance. He was a chef at a two Michelin star restaurant in LA. He cooked for NCAA Division I wrestlers at Cornell. He ran a kitchen for NFL, NHL Olympic athletes. Such a resume. He also built and ran the culinary nutrition program for the UFC Performance Institute, cooking personalized meals for fighters during fight weeks around the world. So he's one of the few people around working in commercial meal delivery who has this depth of both culinary training and applied sports nutrition experience. So by the end of this episode, you are going to understand why eating clean without structure might be keeping you from making progress. How a performance chef thinks about building meals that are nutrient dense, protein optimized, and of course delicious. And what practical strategies you at home can use, whether you cook yourself or use a meal service to make the nutrition match your health and physique goals. Chef Mario, welcome to the show, my man.
Mario Limaduran 2:34
Philip, pleasure being here. Thank you so much.
Sourcing food for performance
Philip Pape 2:36
All right. So, you know, we've never had a chef on the show. I was talking about that before we recorded. And I'm just curious about your process, really, to start off. Like when you prep food for someone who is performance-minded specifically, so whether they're an athlete or lifter or somebody listening here, what do you think of first? Like, do you start with macros and micros and then make it fit? Do you look at food quality? Is it taste and preference? Like I'm really curious about your process and the order of operations.
Mario Limaduran 3:03
Yeah, yeah. That's a great question. So when you're cooking for anybody, you got to start with the sourcing of the ingredients, right? You go to the supermarket, you go to Costco. Um, when I was with the UFC, I would use a lot of uh Amazon delivery from Whole Foods and getting the highest possible quality produce, proteins, starch is essential to create a healthy, nutrient-dense meal, right? So uh the sourcing of the food is definitely important. Conventional food, um, mainly protein speaking, tends to yield a less nutrient-dense protein. Conventional and organic produce, there's no difference in the nutrition density. Um, there's some concerns around the um the pesticide use, um, but generally speaking, you can get the same nutrient density from a conventional food or a fruit and vegetable as a as an organic one for half cost too. Same goes for starches. Sometimes it doesn't really make sense to buy organic, you know, but you still want to source fresh produce, you still want to source uh not overly ripe or underly ripe produce, um, otherwise you're not getting the the the bulk of those nutrients there. So we start with that, and then as as a chef, as a cook, um, that's that's definitely a big focus. And also, you know, the care with which the food was grown translates into the plate one way or another. That's very true. So there's some advantages to to you know the the higher end proteins and whatnot. And then we work with the athlete to figure out what their macronutrient needs are. Macronutrients are proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and that translates to calories. And so I typically work with uh registered dietitians who do the intake conversations and the intake interviews, and then they are the ones who help me with that portion, figuring out what their macronutrients are, and then they give me, okay, this is the total daily caloric macronutrient needs. Then we break it down into main meals and then snacks. And so from there, it's very easy to have the profile of a person and understand, okay, this person needs 28 grams of protein, 30 grams of carbs, and five grams of fat, just for easy numbers there uh per meal. And so go ahead and do your magic and play to that way. I follow the exchange system. Have you ever heard of the exchange system, butchins?
Philip Pape 5:35
I don't think I'm familiar with that one.
Mario Limaduran 5:36
Okay, so the exchange system was originally created by dietitians to help diabetic people learn how to use a weight scale, measuring spoons, and measuring cups, and serve their food in a very consistent basis. So essentially, a serving size is equivalent to a certain amount of grams of a micronutrient. So, for example, a third cup of rice is equivalent to 15 grams of carbohydrates. And so there's the fat, the carb, the protein, and this system is very easy to understand. Don't want to give you guys too much information all at once, but I've become very good at understanding that system and have used that system to essentially divide the grams needed per meal into a serving size. And so, for example, in this example that we were just talking about, 30 grams of carbohydrates would be equivalent to two-thirds cups of rice. Five grams of fat would be equivalent to one tablespoon of a fat-based sauce or uh a quarter of an avocado. And you can mix and match with the servings. You know, that's that's where the creativity on my part begins to grow, and I can just mix and match based on the serving sizes of the exchange system.
Philip Pape 6:50
Yeah, yeah, I want to sit on that. You typically draw on food databases. One of the things we talk about is the more you weigh, especially when you normalize it to like grams, the more you can recognize, like in a restaurant, okay, that's 100, you know, 20 grams of whatever. What you're telling me is you essentially have memorized kind of a library of what standard foods and their portions versus the grams. Is that what you're saying?
Consistency beats food labels
Mario Limaduran 7:10
Correct. Yeah. So yeah, first I'll give you a quick example. For sweet potatoes, it's half a cup, but for potatoes or and sweet potatoes is half a cup. For quinoa is a quarter cup. For rice and most of starches and uh grains and legumes is a third cup. That it and that serving is equivalent to 15 grams of carbohydrates. Um, for fat, one exchange is five grams. So a tablespoon of oil would be five grams of fat. But you can interchange and use that serving of fat to make sauces and then and we'll get into that in a little bit, and then serve very easily, just grab you know, a chimichuri sauce and serve one tablespoon, and you know that you're giving them five grams. Of course, I've done a lot of work on this, and in order to prep for cooking for these athletes, I've analyzed a lot of recipes and I've made sure that the recipe that I'm following is yielding the exact nutrition that I need in order to follow this exchange system. So that's pretty much the system that that I follow. And then as far as protein, one exchange of protein is equivalent to three ounces or 21 grams of protein. The the original system calls for one ounce or seven grams of protein being one exchange of protein. But the performance industry has evolved in use that made 21 grams the one one exchange. That way we can give people the basic needs of a high protein meal by just uh by just using the the one equals 21 instead of one equals seven. So it's three times that original serving size. I got it.
Philip Pape 8:42
So then you can have a couple exchanges per meal or whatever to hit that 40 grams. Yeah. Okay. Wow, fascinating stuff, man. So what I like is the level of precision. It also hits on the fact that it isn't just about what matters, obviously, for quality and like you said, sourcing and all of that. But if you're gonna meet some goal, you know, for energy intake and also for macros, and it sounds like even from a health perspective, if you're diabetic and whatever, that you need to be precise in some way, right? And I think the average person listening kind of generally understands that in terms of tracking calories and macros, but you kind of take it to a another level, right? Like with the RD involved and you involved. So let's segue that into the idea of everyone out there who doesn't want to track or isn't tracking or thinks it's obsessive or whatever, but they have a goal and they think they could just eat certain foods. And that might come in the form of a named diet in a book, like we all know them, you know, keto and carnivore and all of the others, or it might come in the thought of like there's good and bad foods, or there's clean and not clean foods. And by the way, we you know, we take a very agnostic approach here of most foods are perfectly fine as long as they meet your other needs, you know, your nutrient, your calorie, and your macro needs. So, like, what are your thoughts on that whole space?
Mario Limaduran 9:54
Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, I'm I'm of I'm very much of that same philosophy. There's no moral weight to to food, it's not good or bad. Um, you know, you can have a fried chicken sandwich. I love fried chicken sandwiches and I have them once or twice a month, and I'm still very healthy because I'm keeping track of my diet 80% of the time, right? So that allows me for that 20% to be a human being and enjoy the sensual experience of having a food that I really like. I also deeply believe that food has a spiritual connection in many ways. Like when you eat a good meal, you're just like so joyful, and it just changed it. There's some energy there that really heightens the experience of just living, you know. So, and then going back to your original question, yeah, I mean, eating clean, um, clean for the lack of a better term, I don't do not like that word, but um, eating healthy and eating, you know, uh high-quality food and healthy meals with vegetables and whole grains and high-quality protein, that's part of the equation. But if your body is not getting consistent energy day in and day out for a long period of time, then it doesn't know what to really do with the body composition. Because if you're not if you're thinking that you're giving the enough protein to your body to sustain and then help you put on more body uh more muscle mass, you're thinking that, but you really don't know. If you think that you're giving your body enough energy through carbohydrates, but really you're over or underdoing it, then that has an effect. Same with fat. You know, fat has a direct effect to hormone levels in satiety for that matter. Um, so if a person is looking to attain a very specific body composition goal, being very consistent with one's diet is an absolute must. And that comes with making sure that you're serving yourself the exact amount of food day in and day out. Our bodies reward us by being consistent and by getting the exact amount of energy that that the body needs. Otherwise, it's gonna stall that progress that that one is is seeking. So it depends how bad you want it. If you want it really bad, then I say, you know, track and and measure and weigh your food because it's it's that that important.
Refeeds and the 80/20 rule
Philip Pape 12:13
Yeah, there's all there's always effort involved. And I like that you said, look, you're either thinking or guessing, but you don't know, or you know. It's pretty clear. And of course, you can develop a skill or an intuition over time doing it over and over and over again, just like you can kind of probably eyeball portions and know, but you're still knowing because you're measuring it in some way. I want to hit on that consistency factor because I've touched on it lightly over the years on this show when it comes to sleep, when it comes to calorie intake. And I've even seen with certain clients where, you know, they try to do this like up and down, either with protein or calories, and average it out for the week, but because of the volatility, something's off, like their metabolism is a bit downregulated. And it's almost like the body's in a dieting state, even when it's not. What do you know about that? Either the science or just from experience?
Mario Limaduran 12:58
Yeah, I mean, I'll talk about my experience first. I have a culinary nutrition degree. I've been in this industry for the last 16 years. I'm about to be 34 years old, and just now have I finally figured out what my body wants. Like it's, you know, even the experts have an issue applying the the knowledge into one's experience. So, and lo and behold, and I hate to admit this, it was consistency. You know, it was actually weighing or measuring a cup of rice and six ounces of chicken and a cup and a half of vegetables, and adding the whatever sauce I wanted that led me to have the best composition of my life to date. I'm the strongest, I'm I it look great. So I'm very proud of that. But what I wasn't doing was being consistent with my measuring, even though I knew I had to be, right? And I wasn't um I wasn't week in and week out. I was being very healthy, then going out and not being too healthy, and then so on and so forth. And that I spun my wheels for years and years and years. Nutrition doesn't have to be hard. It's I think made hard by the amount of over information and disinformation that we have in social media nowadays. But consistency and being very thoughtful and knowing your numbers on what your body needs week in and week out for three, six, nine months will get those results.
Philip Pape 14:27
How does that reconcile with nonlinear approaches like carbon calorie cycling and also weekend refeeds? Because there is some research supporting, for example, a weekend refeed during a fat loss phase or a calorie deficit could actually have a slight advantage for lean mass retention versus not. I'm curious about your thoughts.
Mario Limaduran 14:46
Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, no, I that that's the the science is very sound there. Um, I I wouldn't say, you know, go cold turkey and just be on a calorie deficit for 52 weeks because that's not healthy. I go through refeeding phases, I go through being very strict with my diet, and then one, two weeks I travel and I don't even think about measuring my food, I'm just enjoying food, and then I come back. I read somewhere, I forget the name of the paper, but our bodies don't lose muscle mass or gain fat mass as quickly as we think they do. So two weeks is not gonna blunt your five-year consistency, you know? So going through those motions is also being a human, and again, I mentioned the 80-20 rule. If you control 80% of your input of your intake of food and your diets, your sleep, uh, your stress levels, alcohol intake, you can allow yourself to have those strings, those cheap meals, those days where you're off and you just want to eat something, it's fine. We're all human, we don't have to be perfect.
Philip Pape 15:52
Yeah, and and that's very consistent with like the brain research on how the brain gets used to certain patterns and finds safety in them. And then, like you said, if if you're doing something 80% of the time, the other 20%, your brain sees it as an anomaly as opposed to something to react to. So that's kind of cool. You mentioned the spiritual connection of food, and that's another topic that's fun to get into, whether it's spiritual or enjoyment of food. I mean, I've had commenters on YouTube be like, you know, food's not for enjoyment, it's just to, you know, for nutrition or food's not right. And you get these weird conflating it with right, because it conflates it with like, um, well, if you enjoy food, that's the problem with you know, we obesity and Western diet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So tell us more about the value of just that part of food, like having nothing to do with performance or macros or calories.
Mario Limaduran 16:39
Yeah, I mean, humans are social, right? We're social beings. I think we all can agree that COVID hit everyone super hard because we weren't socializing with people. We're all just alone in our homes, maybe with somebody, maybe not. But I always think about that time because the enjoyment of going out, having beers with the boys, having drinks with the girls, or just going out with the group and enjoying breaking bread is a historically everlasting you see in every part of history of humanity. You know, it's it's just part of who we are. And so to me, I mean, to hear somebody say that they don't enjoy food and it's just for nutrition, and I mean, you're missing a big part of enjoying being in this earth, you know. There's like Middle Eastern food that's delicious, Asian food that's delicious. Like, we are such a rich, I think, race. Earth is such a rich race, and we have so much to explore and so many flavor profiles to see. It's a little overwhelming when I think about it from the culinary perspective, but also I think it's so beautiful because it's again such a social thing to do. And my experience with traveling and going to other countries and eating their cuisine and being part of their culture, it has been very eye-opening in the sense that you know we're really a speck of dust, and it makes me feel more connected with each other, with every other person in the world. So there's that social aspect, but I I also feel like the spiritual side is I don't know. When I eat something, I get this F VF factor. I won't cuss in this podcast, but the FVF factor, that's what I call it. It's there's this inner sense of like, damn, this is so like how is this so good? How can how can you know? And it's just a and maybe it's a chef in me, but it's just a such a joyful thing that just comes up here, and uh, you know, so I think it's just such an important part of being a human.
Named diets versus goal-based plans
Philip Pape 18:39
You make me think of so many memories as you talked about traveling the world, like the first time I had really good gnocchi, I think is how it's pronounced, right? In Italy, right? I know my honeymoon, or when I went to Japan years ago and I was very picky back then, I didn't eat vegetables or anything. And the guy I was with like got me to try everything octopus and like vegetables of all kinds and tempura. And it was just I'm again, I love food. Montreal, I was so surprised. Montreal is only five hours from here. Like the quality of the food there, breakfast, lunch, dinner, you eat a lot of calories because it's just so good. Um, so yeah, yeah, I think I think we need to lean into that and not like judge ourselves for that as conflated with you know the challenges people face with emotional eating and all that other stuff. Let me ask you this. So, you know, just full disclosure, right? You work for Trifecta, we're an affiliate of Trifecta. If you keep listening to the show later on, we're gonna drop a secret word uh that if you if you go to witsandweights.com slash question and give me that word, you're entered for a giveaway for a full week of free meals from Trifecta. But the reason I bring it up is because I know through Trifecta, there's different ways to filter on food. And one of those is types of diets like keto. Um, and I remember when we were setting up our partnership, I said, I don't I don't really want to showcase it that way for me. I want to showcase more about the macros and the foods that are in there and stuff. So is there value or what is the value in these named diets? Like, what are your thoughts on marketing them specifically? Because people want them, I'm sure, um, like versus the value in them.
Mario Limaduran 20:05
Yeah, that's a great question. So uh I'll start by saying that we have moved away from being a diet-specific company and having diet plant or meal plants around a diet like paleo and keto and um Mediterranean, so on and so forth. And now we've moved into what I think is a modernization of the meal delivery industry, a goal outcome meal plan. So now we have uh the performance plan or the the uh I forget the names of it, and we just changed them, so apologies on that. But essentially it's it's a a higher calorie meal plan for people looking to put on weight, the flex choice program, which is for people looking just to eat healthy um and maintain their weight, and then we have uh a low calorie one, which is for people looking to lose weight. We also continue to keep keto uh as part of the rotation and the plan-based, um, since they're so popular, and we've seen we just have a lot of business around this, so it doesn't make sense for us to let go of them. And it seems like people have found um success within that. The keto diet is very good for specific chronic diseases and illnesses, so we continue to support that diet for that reason. And plan-based, you know, it's uh it's here to stay. So we we we support people who are vegan and choose that lifestyle as well. But I'm happy to say that um this move was something that I pushed that we really needed to move away from diet-specific to goal specific because it's it encompasses more people and it helps more people really more clearly understand what we're offering for them. And within that is, of course, every single meal is macro balance, which is the essence of trifecta.
Philip Pape 21:45
Love it, man. Yeah, no, I'm glad you made that move, and I didn't know that it wasn't a setup just so the listener knows it wasn't a setup. I'm looking at it right now and I see what you're talking about, right? The protein build meal, get lean, flex choice, goal based is is really the way to do it, right? Because that's right. To left, like here's my goal. Now let me back up into all the variables for my eat food, my training, my everything else.
Satiety, macros, and smarter sauces
Mario Limaduran 22:05
Yep.
Philip Pape 22:06
All right, cool. So actually, you know, one thing came to mind when we were talking keto was you mentioned earlier about satiety and the fat exchange and all that. I think protein technically has the highest satiety, and yet we hear a lot about fat having high satiety and why it's important for that reason. What are your thoughts on the satiety aspect of those two macros?
Mario Limaduran 22:24
Oh, yeah, great question. Well, yeah, protein 100%. I mean, I just had lunch with six ounces of chicken and I feel phenomenal right now. And I'm in a calorie deficit. So that's been a huge uh part of having that satiety. Also combining it with high volume foods like uh leafy greens and but a lot of vegetables, a lot of like high fiber foods, you know, that helps with uh blunting the hunger cues while when it's in a calorie deficit. Now, to answer your question, fat is very calorically dense. So we talk about high volume foods, meaning that they occupy a lot of space in your stomach, but don't have a lot of calories. They have a lot of nutrients, but not a lot of calories. But fat is very caloric dense and calorically dense. And per gram of fat you get nine calories. Per gram of protein and carbs, you get four. So you're almost getting 2.2, 2.1 times the amount of calories per gram, which means that a very small amount of fat will get you a lot of calories. And it's very easy to overeat if you're not really measuring those correctly, or if you know that you're eating fat. That's why the the fried foods tend to be so unhealthy, right? They're delicious, but it's because they just have so much fat in them that you've been cooked in a fat medium that you're not only eating the carbohydrate that was just fried, you're eating copious amounts of fat as well.
Philip Pape 23:48
Yeah, fat is a classic addition to those who are low calorie, right? To get those calories up, uh, especially when we're bulking. But for that same reason, you know, you've got to watch out. This goes back to the clean or healthy discussion, the fact that you know, nuts and avocado and salmon are all delicious sources of fat, and they're a little more nutrient dense than some alternatives. So it depends on your calorie needs. Let's get into cooking a little bit here. And for those at home, because again, that's your expertise, who are not the greatest cooks on their own, right? Like I think the the majority of people, I'm gonna just put it that way in general, is the majority of people kind of half-ass their cooking or like, you know, they'll look up recipes online, they'll follow them, and maybe over time with lots of cooking, you get better and better at it, right? Do you have like some top tips? Like, let's say your top three tips for people who just want to cook better food at home that they look forward to. They like to prep, they want it to taste good, but it's not complicated.
Mario Limaduran 24:42
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, my mother, bless her heart, most the smartest woman I know, and she just cannot cook a life for her, uh a meal for her to save her life. So um, this is very dear and close to my heart. Um, and unshaveful plug-in here. I I teach this online in my own social media. I teach people how to cook, and this is one of the biggest questions that come to me, you know, like, what do I do? I hate cooking or I don't know how to cook. So, a few tips. Number one, focus on the basics and what you like. You don't need to be a Michelin star chef. Like, there's no need for that. Your cuts don't need to be perfect. If you're just starting, focus on learning a few basics and mastering those. And those basics need to be things that you like to eat. If you are somebody who likes broccoli, rice, and chicken, no shame. Double down on that. Learn how to cook your chicken well, how to season it well, learn how to use stalks in order to add flavor to your rice, and a couple of onions, you know, a couple of chopped onions in there, saute it, mix it in there. You have a delicious rice that doesn't have a lot of calories added to it, or minimal calories added to it. And then your broccoli, you learn how to blanch it, learn how to roast it, learn how to uh saute it and experiment with whatever it is that you can stick for for a long period of time without getting bored. At the point where you get bored, then you learn something new. But by focusing on the basics of cooking, very simple things that you can stick with, that you like, that you enjoy eating, that becomes very simple. Number two, if you don't like cooking vegetables, go to Costco, go to Sam's Club, go to your local supermarket and buy frozen vegetables. I'm a chef and I'm not ashamed to say that I live off of those frozen vegetables. I'm visiting my mom right now in South Florida, and we went to Costco and I bought a whole bag of those vegetables. Being here can get really hectic, and I don't have a lot of time to cook. So that has been a great addition. They have roasted vegetables that have a lot of flavor. Um, they're organic as well, so they're you know, there's that added uh unique salon preposition to them. And that that saves a lot of time because you can just cook, I don't know, potatoes, rice, quinoa, orzo, whatever your preferred starches, and then grab a protein and then drop it in there. Third, I would say proteins is what takes the longest time to learn how to cook well. If you're somebody who doesn't have the means or just don't want to cook proteins, there's a lot of really good uh companies out there that are that are selling ready-to-eat proteins that are sous vide and come sauced. Uh trifecta, we sell proteins a la carte, so you can buy a pound of proteins from chicken to bison to beef, uh, to salmon, and you can just have that and plate it on your own. So we live in a time period where food science is very advanced. You know, we are essentially the result of the frozen meal movement that started in the 1960s. We are the evolution of that, but we've taken a massive step in making sure that the food that we're providing is not high in sodium, is not high in it, doesn't have any sort of um additive um or preservative MSG, anything of that sort. You know, we are a very clean, healthy uh meal delivery. So there's always those options. So yeah, those are the three things that I would advise.
Philip Pape 27:58
Those are great. And uh those first two, especially the making slight additions to what you like to eat. I was thinking of a dinner my wife just made this week, and she's come a long way. Again, she'll she'll admit that she was not a great cook when she started. But you know, she took pork tenderloin, she put some teriyaki soy sauce type sauce she made from scratch. Delicious. She took rice, added coconut milk, you know, and then she took broccoli and she always roasted in a pan with a little oil and and salt, and that's really all you need. Broccoli's so good, you know.
Mario Limaduran 28:26
Sounds delicious, yeah.
Philip Pape 28:27
And there you go, right? Like it doesn't have to be complicated. Exactly. And I yeah, and I always tell people when they're meal prepping, like, go big, you know, like just just just put huge quantities of stuff. Like if you had to prep a protein, what would be your favorite protein or two to prep in bulk?
Mario Limaduran 28:40
Um, I buy the chicken from Costco in bulk. Um like chicken breast or chicken breast. Yep, chicken breast. Chicken thighs, you can go. Uh that's actually, I'm glad you bring that up. Um, if if you're somebody just starting to cook, yeah, I mean chicken thighs is very easy to dry out. So if you're if you want to eat chicken and you want to eat something that's good all the time, chicken thighs is the way to go. I like to change every two weeks and either buy a salmon and just cook the salmon ahead of time, or I buy the steak from Costco and then I just eat steak and that's like my treat to myself. So I also do turkey. So I I like to change again, it's it's the variety that I try to bring to my life, you know. I already know how to cook all these things, so I just experiment from week to week.
Philip Pape 29:26
It's funny with turkey, right? Because at Thanksgiving, they're so inexpensive that I always think, why don't families just buy like 10 turkeys? You know, that'll last, but of course you'll get bored of turkey.
Mario Limaduran 29:35
Yeah, totally and need a space for it.
Philip Pape 29:37
Steak. Oh, I want to ask you about steak because I've had a lot of conversations with people about that. So a lot of confusion over the cuts of steak, the marbling, the tenderness, how to prepare it. You know, people that want to get more protein too and don't want it to be too fatty of a cut, like ribeye, which I love ribeye, but you know, much higher fat content. So, what would be the most, I guess, good balance of economics and leanness that's easy to prepare? Because I know some steaks like are super cheap, but then they're really tough and you need to marinate or slow cook or something like that. Like, what are your thoughts on steak?
Mario Limaduran 30:08
Yeah, um I personally buy skirt steak, and that is the in between your tenderloin and your short rib. You know, um, one's super tough, one is very expensive. The skirt steak tends to be the the middle of the ground. If you can find Terrace Major, which you don't really see that catu uh too often in supermarkets, it's uh mainly used in commercial food manufacturing, and that's what we use at Trafecta for keto meals in our a la carte. It's very tender, surprisingly tender, and it's a very uh economic piece of of meat, also very lean. So those two are my my go-tos.
Philip Pape 30:49
Man, skirt steak with chimichuri, I'm thinking, or uh let's see, uh like uh churrasco, or uh what am I trying to think of? You said you're in South Florida. I grew up in Miami, I grew up in Highland.
Mario Limaduran 30:59
Oh, I'm in Miami.
Philip Pape 31:00
That's a lot of food. Okay, go to Miami, Cuban food, Argentinian food, every every Caribbean uh yeah, so good. Okay. So speaking of sauces, um, I know you know you mentioned sauces once or twice, and that is another tricky area for folks because they can easily add a lot of flavor and even nutrition in some cases, but also a lot of calories. So best maybe maybe the top few sauces people should always like be making for their food or like really easy ones. Like, what are your thoughts there?
Mario Limaduran 31:30
Yeah, yeah. Let me uh let me start by saying this. So when I think of sauces, I I uh classify them in in three categories calorie neutral, carb forward, and fat forward or fat-based. Calorie neutral can be anything like a salsa or a hot sauce. There's sauces that come from peppers and vinegar and tomatoes that don't add a lot of calories. You know, the the serving size is 10 calories per serving in the nutrition label, but it adds a lot of flavor. So if you're looking for a way to if you're in in a cut or if you want to maintain your weight and make sure you're not adding enough a bunch of calories, then uh calorie neutral sauce will be it. Now, if you're on the opposite and you're trying to gain muscle weight, the last thing like you to gain muscle, the energy intake needs to be really high, right? About 500 calories above your your uh maintenance, uh give or take. And so sometimes that can be a lot of food for certain people. If we're talking about linebackers that play in the NFL, like these boys eat a lot. So, how do you give them enough calories so that they can actually meet their caloric needs, but not be overly full and be sluggish in the field? You double down on we kind of touched on this earlier, on liquid calories, but also on carb forward sauces. So your teriyakis, your barbecues, your sweet and sours, those are very carb heavy, sugar heavy for the uh for the sake of this argument or of this conversation, that with one tablespoon you're adding 15 carbohydrates of 15 grams of carbohydrates, or with one cup, you're adding you know a bunch of them.
Philip Pape 33:16
That's 60 calories, yeah.
Mario Limaduran 33:19
And then with fat, fat-based um is a great way, fat-based sauces is a great way to add a lot of flavor, but a lot of add a lot of richness to your meal. And when you talk about fat-based sauces, think about vinaigrette, think about aiolis or mayo, think about any sort of variation from that. For example, if you do chimichuri, like we were just talking, that's really a vinaigrette. It's got a three to one ratio of oil to vinegar, uh, maybe a four to one ratio, and that provides a lot of flavor in itself with a lot of nutrients from the herbs and the peppers that you add to it, but it's also adding a lot of calories from fat, right? So fat is good because it adds richness. So, with those three categories in mind, you know, the most popular, I have a list. I wish I was at home, but I have a list in my wall of the most popular because I'm gonna be making videos about these. But anything that is fat-based, that can be uh an oil, um like uh olive oil and vinegar, like a zoo sauce, which is essentially just a chimichuri but Asian style. You know, it has uh jalapenos, it has cilantro, it has a little bit of oregano and uh coriander, um, whereas chimichuri, it has cilantro, it has parsley, it has a red pepper oil and vinegar. Uh Romesco sauce is another delicious sauce that you can do that's fat-based. Instead of making it with bread, you can make it with nuts, with almonds, toasted almonds, um, and and olive oil, and you have something delicious. Then having your barbecues and your teriyakis, like I mentioned, is something that most households in the United States have. Fat-based, you can also have your ranch. Ranch in, you know, in the United States is super popular. And then your sauces, again, we're gonna go back to that. I personally uh add a lot of hot sauce to my food. I'm Hispanic, so I love I love heat. Um, so that tends to be my seasoning uh when I'm in a rush. Um, so having a variety of those, and it doesn't need to be, you don't need to make these at home. You can if you want to control the the health and and the caloric and added sugar portion of it, but you can buy them in the supermarket. You again, you don't have to do a Michelin star uh chef.
Simple weekly meal prep structure
Philip Pape 35:26
So we've made the rounds through a lot of the aspects of cooking of food, of what's in your food, of why we do it, right? To hit our goals. So, you know, food quality matters, like social connection matters, macros matter, taste matters. You bring all these things together for a typical week. My audience, I will say, is like an average person who has a very busy job, very stressed, maybe they have a family and they're trying to make it all work for the week. Is there kind of a not a template or meal plan, but a structure that's time efficient to kind of think of your whole week and putting it together?
Mario Limaduran 35:58
Yeah, yeah. I'll give you what I do as someone who also lives a very uh occupied life um with a tight schedule. I like to understand what I'm craving for a week. If it's potatoes, I roast a bunch of potatoes, cut them, roast them. I have my my uh vegetables that are bought from Costco, uh frozen vegetables, and then I look at the protein and I typically cook either five to seven days worth of that protein. And within two hours, I can have all my my food portion in my containers ready to cool down. So I just put it in the fridge, cool it down completely, and then cover it. And that's my way of making sure that I have consistency throughout the week. If you want to add a little more variety on a meal, your sauces are going to be the differentiating factor because the sauce is the essence of a dish, right? The sauce is what makes the dish uh a cuisine. So I tend to have a couple of different sauces in my fridge, and I add barbecue to one, I add chimichuri to another one, I add a tabili to another one, and then I just interchange with those three throughout the week until I run out of the sauces. Um, and and and that's that. So it doesn't need to be complicated and that's it, it doesn't need to be fancy, it just needs to work for what you like. And this that's that's essentially you know what I like.
Philip Pape 37:16
That's pretty straightforward. And then for for vegetables, vegetables, it sounds like the frozen veggies are an option, or do you bulk prep starches or vegetables as well, or do you do those more as you go?
Mario Limaduran 37:27
Yeah, no, I I tend to uh to bulk prep uh starches as well, um, with rice and potatoes being the number one that I consume. So I do.
Philip Pape 37:35
Oh, you mentioned potatoes, yeah.
Mario Limaduran 37:36
Yeah, I tend to do five five days at a time because I don't want the food to go bad. And of course, you can adjust this based on what your food beliefs are. If you don't like to put have something in the fridge for more than two days and just prep the food for exactly for two days. Um, if you're okay with five days and prep it for five days. Um adjust is needed. It does, it's it's just a guideline, it's a blueprint, it's not a law.
Philip Pape 37:59
Yeah, yeah. And there's always the freezer, and also some of us have cold spots in our fridge. Like I have a very cold spot in the back top, so like things will last a little longer. Yeah, for sure.
Mario Limaduran 38:09
Absolutely.
Philip Pape 38:10
Um so interesting, two different people asked a similar question recently about resistance starch. So we know resistant starch is naturally in some things like white potatoes, which is considered the top satiety food as far as I understand. But then also when you cook rice and then cool it, it converts some of the starch to resistant starch. And there's this uh theory that some people respond really well to uh an increase in resistance starch for a variety of factors. Is this something you're aware of that you think about or not?
Mario Limaduran 38:39
I I don't have enough knowledge on that, so I can't really speak to it. Yeah.
Philip Pape 38:43
Yeah, it's an interesting thing. Look into it because um there's a few people I know with certain conditions that have responded well to it nutritionally. I'm like, that's and so there's this whole hot carb versus cold carb thing out there that's I thought it was hogwash initially, and I saw some legitimacy behind it. So interesting.
Mario Limaduran 39:02
Yeah, I can't say I've experienced anything with my body, so but yeah, I'll definitely all right.
Philip Pape 39:06
So as far as like the skill of cooking, then what skill or habit like from your experience makes a big difference to learn, whether it's knife skills or using certain equipment or the stove, oven, etc.?
Mario Limaduran 39:18
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um I'll start with two. First, always make sure that your cutting board is large enough and that it's secured with uh damp paper cloth underneath. Always please start with that. That should be your bot baseline safety. You know, you don't want a moving cutting board while you're cutting something because you can chop off your fingers very easily. And if you haven't done so and you haven't been securing your uh your cutting board up to d up to today, then you're lucky. And then number two, organizing your cooking station uh by having a bowl where your waste goes, and then having a bowl or a continuous where your finished product goes, or having the tray where where you're you're gonna be cooking your food in always helps with the flow of your cooking to be better. Uh that way you're not jumping from one place to another, you're not going to the trash, you're not, you know, those micro sidesteps actually take a lot of time in the grand scheme of things in cooking. And I'll add a third one, um, keeping your knives sharp. Like I cannot stress how important this is. Buying a sharpener, either a whetstone or one of those automatic sharpening tools, or taking your knives to be sharpened at your local knife company knife company, is something that I cannot stress enough on how important it is. A dull knife is ten times more dangerous than a sharp knife, because the sharp knife just goes through the vegetable. A dull knife can actually not go through the vegetable, make you stab yourself or make it, you know, cut yourself at the same time. So I would say make those three things part of your cooking ritual, and you'll become a much better cook immediately.
Philip Pape 40:58
Those are good tips. A cutting board, I hadn't heard that, so thank you. And then my dad was a butcher, so I've heard about the knives. What do you think of the the knife blocks that have built-in sharpeners?
Mario Limaduran 41:09
Uh yeah, those are great. Those are great. Yeah, if you can store them, yeah, if you can store them at home and you have a place, yeah, absolutely. I have I have this, I have the whetstones, of course, um as a professional cook, but at the same time, I also have uh cuisine art, the the one-two sort of like pass you kind of pass the the blade from there's there's these little brown stones and that just sharpens uh the blade. So you can get it very affordably in in Amazon, I think, for less than 30 bucks.
Philip Pape 41:36
Cool, man. Yeah, so we've covered a lot today about cooking food and everything else. I mean, at the end of the day, we're all trying to fuel ourselves with our food, and that is the secret word, guys. It's fuel. Okay. Um and but I do want to kind of segue into what you do and the company you represent in the form of a question first, and then we can tell people where to find you. But um, where do when does meal delivery make sense? Because for for years I've had a small section of clients who they're just so busy and so stressed. Money isn't as much of an issue for them as, say, time and convenience and stuff. So there's definitely a place for it. What are your thoughts on like the ideal situation people would consider it?
Mario Limaduran 42:14
Yeah, 100%. Exactly what you just said. Uh it's it's it's a tool that we now have, and we should be, I think it's it's very exciting to have and to be in the United States and have it as an option to have a surveys deliver the food that you want to eat every week to your door. And so if life gets busy, if something is going on where you can't actually cook, then having this uh meal delivery sent to you ensures that you're staying consistent. And it's not something that you need to stay on forever because meal boredom happens, and we see that in our business. You can turn it on and off as you see fit. But for myself, I've been with with trifecta for the last almost eight years, and um I've eaten trifecta for the great majority of those eight years. Um, I get seven meals a week, um, aside from making sure that our kitchens are are producing our food well, um that they're following the recipe. Well, I also eat it for my own um health and uh consistency purposes, you know. Um I have seven meals that I cook at home, but I have seven meals where if one day for whatever reason I woke up late, I'm sick or whatever, and I have no desire to be in the kitchen, I just reheat this meal and I'm ready to go. So it's a beautiful tool to have that helps with convenience, helps bridge the gaps in time and allows you to be consistent over a long period of time.
Philip Pape 43:36
Yeah, and I'll say you could be intentional and plan ahead too without all the time of planning. In other words, you're not going to DoorDash in the last minute and getting some local fast food or pizza. You know, you're thinking about it, and then you guys have the macro balanced meals that people can then log and track and everything. So that's awesome. All right. So people, everybody listening, if you go to wits of weights.com slash question, you can submit a question for the show or For Mario, and you could also drop the word fuel and say, hey, this is the secret word and enter me in the giveaway for a week.
Mario Limaduran 44:06
No, it's so secret anymore.
Philip Pape 44:08
Yeah, yeah. It's secret if you listen to the show, and it's not secret if you listen to it. So um, so anyway, we want to send folks your way as well. I know you have some content online you just mentioned about cooking. Where can people find you? Where do we want to send folks after they listen to this?
Mario Limaduran 44:22
Yeah, yeah, thank you for that. Um, I am uh very present on Instagram at Chef Mario is my page. I teach the basics of cooking. So if you want to improve your cooking and you want to listen to more hacks of this sort, um I I post uh I post weekly. Um I'm starting a YouTube channel, um, Mario Lima Duran, my name, and then I'm also on Facebook uh posting the same reels um as Mario Lima Duran.
Philip Pape 44:46
All right, awesome. We're gonna throw all that in the show notes. You guys go check out Mario, Chef Mario, follow him, look at his stuff. I mean, this he has the kind of content that's not your like typical, you know, influencer stuff. It's like super helpful. And if you're looking to cook better and you just want to look at good food too, um, check him out. So thank you again, Mario, for coming on Wits and Weights. It's been a pleasure, man.
Mario Limaduran 45:07
Thanks, folks. Appreciate the time. Enjoy the conversation, and hopefully your audience also enjoyed it. So thank you for having me.
Philip Pape 45:12
Thanks, man.

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Philip Pape 4/28/26 Philip Pape 4/28/26

Mini-Cuts and Mini-Bulks for Faster Body Recomp After 40 | Ep 463

Bulking, cutting, bulking, cutting. If you've been through that cycle and ended up further from your goal than when you started, there's a reason the yo-yo keeps repeating, especially over 40. Learn about the metabolic adaptation and hormonal changes that make long diet phases more difficult (and sometimes unsustainable), a creative approach called intermittent dieting (not to be confused with intermittent fasting), a very powerful weekend refeed strategy, and the exact structure of a mini-cut and mini-bulk protocol including rate of loss, protein targets, surplus size, and the ratio of building to cutting.

Bulking, cutting, bulking, cutting. If you've been through that cycle and ended up further from your goal than when you started, there's a reason the yo-yo keeps repeating, especially over 40.

Learn about the metabolic adaptation and hormonal changes that make long diet phases more difficult (and sometimes unsustainable), a creative approach called intermittent dieting (not to be confused with intermittent fasting), a very powerful weekend refeed strategy, and the exact structure of a mini-cut and mini-bulk protocol including rate of loss, protein targets, surplus size, and the ratio of building to cutting.

Plus learn the ONE warning sign that tells you to end a mini-cut early, even if you planned to go longer.

Check out Fitness Lab (20% off through May 8), the AI coaching app built for adults over 40 who want daily structure, training feedback, biofeedback tracking, and meal planning that fits real life. Take the free onboarding quiz before you buy. 20% off all plans through Friday, May 8:
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Timestamps:

0:00 - Bulking, cutting, and the yo-yo recomp cycle
5:24 - Metabolic adaptation during continuous dieting
7:10 - Hormonal disruption, testosterone, and estrogen after 40
9:20 - Muscle loss acceleration during longer cuts
10:06 - Large vs. small surplus and fat gain during bulks
12:12 - 2-week intermittent dieting blocks vs. continuous restriction
18:01 - Saturday meal planning for tight-window phases
21:31 - Mini-cut structure, rate of loss, and protein
26:06 - Mini-bulk surplus size and the 4-to-1 ratio
31:32 - Strategic cycling vs. phase-hopping
35:18 - Bonus: one reason to end a mini-cut early

Philip Pape: 00:00
Bulking, cutting, bulking, cutting. If you've been going through that cycle and every time you bulk, you don't like all the fat that you put on, and then you cut for months and your strength and muscle disappear and you suffer through it, there's a reason that cycling might not be working for you. Today I'm covering the research on how shorter diet phases can produce 50% more fat loss with less muscle loss, the exact calorie and protein targets for a mini cut and mini bulk protocol, especially after 40, and the one mistake that turns this strategy into that failed yo-yo trap that hasn't worked for you in the past. We're gonna get into everything about mini cuts and mini bulks today for faster body recomposition. Stay tuned. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and this is a topic that is near and dear to me: body composition and the use of different cycling periods for your cutting and your bulking. Because if you are over 40 like I am, and if you've been trying to improve your body, build some muscle, lose some fat, maybe do both at the same time, you've often heard, hey, focus on one and optimize. I've said that myself. For many people, that is the right strategy. Focus on one for a while and optimize. We call it periodization. You might bulk for a few months. I usually recommend around six months or more. And then cut for a few months. I usually recommend maybe a couple months or even a shorter what we're gonna get into today, a mini cut. Just commit to one at a time. And in theory, it's quite reasonable. In practice, a lot of people end up spending, let's say, those first four or five months in a surplus, and they either they're not doing it effectively enough and they never quite get into a surplus, or they go too fast and they gain more fat than they wanted. And part of it is maybe they're not consistent with their training. Maybe they're not eating enough protein. Maybe they're not eating high quality enough nutrition despite being in a surplus. There's lots of reasons, you know, lack of sleep and so on. And then they're like, okay, I need to cut, and they switch to a fairly long deficit, four or five months in a deficit instead of much shorter that I would recommend. And then they might end up losing muscle and end up kind of where back where they started because of all the inconsistencies. And uh, a lot of this is the sustainability factor. And so this is a yo-yo recomp cycle that I've seen. And it's really, really tough the older you get, because you're more sensitive to these things not working the way you wanted to as they would when you were younger because of hormonal changes, limitations in your recovery, that accumulated frustration of feeling like I'm working so hard, but I don't have anything to show for it. So today I'm going to show you a different approach, strategic mini cuts and mini bulks. These are short focused phases with specific targets to keep your body responsive, to protect your muscle, to get some of that, those wins that compound over time, and ultimately the psychological aspect that allows you to be consistent and sustainable with the process. And I'm a huge fan of non-linear, what I call nonlinear approaches. And that is finding these different creative lengths and aggressiveness of these things that work best for you. So I want to give you all those options. Stick around to the end because I'm gonna share a specific warning sign that tells you that your mini cut needs to stop, even if you plan for it to go longer. A lot of you are impatient, or a lot of you want to keep going because you think you need to do it to get that extra pound off, but there's a warning sign you've got to look for. And it's a really important factor that I get asked about all the time when people are not sure when to end their cut. So here's what we're gonna cover today. First, why the standard long bulk and cut approach often works against you. Not always, but it often does. Second is the research on intermittent dieting, intermittent dieting. So I said nonlinear, but I think intermittent's a better approach that tends to change how you think about this. And then third, the exact protocol, numbers, durations, and of course, that mistake that can make this more of a trap than a benefit. All right, so conventional wisdom is you need to commit to a building phase for at least, I'll say, four or five, six months. In a calorie surplus, you're gonna gain muscle, you're gonna accept a little bit of fat gain, and then you're gonna transition to a cut for, well, fill in the blank. It depends on how much fat you need to lose. If you're already fairly lean, it could be two to three months. A lot of people end up doing it for three to six months, and you're trying to strip that fat off while keeping the muscle you had and then rinse and repeat. And if you are super consistent, if you've got a decent hormonal profile, which for a lot of people that means in your 20s and 30s, high testosterone, everything's good, everything's normal, fast recovery, your metabolism is fairly forgiving, meaning you have some room to work with. And ultimately, psychologically it works, then great, it can work for you. And by the way, when you're past 40, when you're past 50, that approach still works perfectly fine. But for some of the psychology behind it and the reality that life tends to get in the way, especially as we're older, there's there just seems to be more things that interrupt what happens, whether it's injuries and sickness, things with your family, your kids, your job. I just see it all the time. And that's why I wanted to kind of make this more practical for
Philip Pape: 05:24
you. So the first thing I want to talk about is metabolic adaptation, a very common topic we address on this show, but it's very important to understand. Your body will start compensating for a calorie deficit right away at the first week of a diet. And within the second or third week, you can really see it in the numbers. So if you're tracking with, for example, Macrofactor, which is the app we use to track our food because it also helps track your metabolism. You should likely see your metabolism start to tick downward when you're in a diet. And that's normal. That's normal. But after about six to eight weeks of continuous dieting, you might have seen a drop of anywhere from, say, as low as 50 or 80 calories. But for most people, it could be several hundreds of calories. Depends on how large you are. It could be 500 calories, it could even be seven or eight hundred calories per day beyond what the weight loss alone would predict. And of course, you can't tease apart the two things. So, overall, let's just assume it's in the 500 calorie range, for example. That is not your metabolism being broken, right? That's your body doing what it evolved to do, protect you as you uh starve it of resources. And when we look at just the first six weeks of restriction of a diet, the numbers that I've seen generally is 90 to 100 calories per day on average reduction, but with a lot of variation. Some people don't adapt very much at all. And a lot of times that's newer lifters, for example, who are compensating the other direction because now they're having a better lifestyle. Others see drop of 300 calories a day or more. And that's in the first six weeks. When you prolong it beyond that, it can go even more. And that's what I'm talking about here. So that's metabolic adaptation. So keep that in mind because that's going to affect the logic here. Second is the hormonal disruption. So calorie restriction directly suppresses many of your hormones, thyroid, as well as your reproductive hormones, like testosterone, men and women. And of course, in men, we know that testosterone is declining and women, but you know, men, because they have so much, it's a big, meaningful decline. One to two percent per year after 40. For women in perimenopause or menopause, we've got estrogen that drops. The estrogen receptors in skeletal muscle are involved in some of the things that help with regenerating those fibers and building muscle, and it affects fat distribution and fat storage. So you are adding this deficit-induced hormonal suppression on top of the other age-related hormonal things going on, not to mention thyroid, which is your metabolic regulator, and then all of these downstream cascades to affect things like cortisol, and cortisol itself tends to go up because you're more stressed during dieting, and then longer diets mean more exposure to elevated cortisol. You get my drift. So taking those first two together, you've got all sorts of adaptations and compensations going on. All of which is normal, but you've got to understand it and to what degree it could occur based on where you are in life and how aggressive and long your diet is. All right, the third factor here is the muscle loss that accelerates as we get older. And we know that an energy deficit, be just being in a deficit, is going to prevent you from gaining muscle or gaining lean mass mass, even though you're resistance training, it's going to limit it. And the bigger the diet, the more it gets limited to the point where eventually you risk losing some muscle as well. And again, this is if you are resistance training. If you're not resistance training, you're gonna just lose a ton of muscle when you go on a diet anyway. That is not who I'm speaking to. You should be resistance training. And if you're not, honestly, mini cuts and mini bulks are too advanced of a topic to even worry about. Go listen to some of my other episodes, such as your very first cut. Go look that up. It's a great episode. So we know that there's roughly a threshold of 500 calories per day on average of a deficit beyond which lean mass loss may start to accelerate, but it also depends on the duration of the deficit, not just the aggressiveness of it. And sometimes we see that relatively lean people have it even worse. And you have to be a little bit careful on how you do that deficit. Now, what about recovery? Because the older we are, the longer it takes us to recover. We know that older adults take longer to recover to baseline strength because of the stressors on your body, especially after uh intense training. So when you're in extended deficit and you're training hard, and now the recovery is even slower, you're compounding the stress stack on your system. So you've got to remember all of these variables stack up as forms of stress, which
Philip Pape: 10:06
again affects the logic of why we're talking about mini cuts and mini bulks. Now, that's all on the dieting side. What about on the bulking side? Well, the extended bulking side has some own some issues you've got to be aware of. There was a 2013 study. It compared large versus small calorie surpluses in elite athletes that trained the same way. And the large surplus group gained significantly more fat mass, but not significantly more lean mass. And this is consistent with many, many studies to come after that that showed us that a surplus doesn't need to be that big. And if you go too big, you're not gonna gain any more muscle, you're just gonna gain more fat. There was the 2023 study, I think Helms, that was Helms' study and his and his colleagues, compared the 5% surplus, or it compared maintenance to 5% to 15% surplus over eight weeks. And the two surplus groups had similar muscle gain, but guess what happened? The 15% surplus group gained even more fat. So the extra calories went to fat, not muscle. So if your anabolic hormone levels are lower, aka when we're over 40, and the quote-unquote nutrient partitioning shifts more toward fat storage, you may have even more sensitivity to that. Not necessarily, it depends on a lot of factors, but we've got to keep in the right window when it comes to the surplus. So the pattern looks like this. If you bulk too long or too aggressively, you're gonna accumulate excess fat. If you cut too long, you might risk losing muscle and suppressing your metabolism more than you really like, where it's gonna have to recover. And then you tend to be further from your goal than when you started in many cases with a lower metabolism and maybe less muscle mass. That's the trap that I'm talking about here when you're not doing those things right. Now, if you do long duration cuts and bulks with a lot of precision and control, you could avoid these things. But a lot of people have difficulty doing it that way, at least without a coach, without being in a program like ours, like eat more lift heavy, or having some way to double check that your numbers make sense beyond just calories, macros, and scale
Philip Pape: 12:12
weight. Okay, so we covered why the long phase approach could be a risk for you. It depends. Now we're gonna look at when you shorten those phases and then when you alternate them more strategically. This is the fun, creative stuff that I like. All right, so the landmark study, the Matador trial, published in 2018, you've probably heard it many times. If not, look it up. It's pretty cool. They took 51 obese men and they assigned them to either 16 continuous weeks of dieting at a 33% deficit, or the same 16 weeks of dieting, but broken into two-week blocks, alternating with two-week maintenance. So two weeks of dieting, two weeks of maintenance, two weeks of dieting, two weeks of maintenance. And so it ended up taking twice as long, but the same weeks of dieting at the same deficit within that block. Does that make sense? So the only difference was the structure of it. Again, the one group took twice as long, but it's the same deficit over the same amount of dieting days. So the intermittent group that went two on, two off, they lost a hundred or fourteen point one kilograms versus nine point one kilograms in the continuous group. So that's 55% more total weight loss. And the fat mass loss was 12.3 versus eight. And the fat-free mass loss was pretty small, like the amount of muscle mass they lost, and it was similar between the two groups. So the extra weight loss was almost entirely fat. And the intermittent two-week-on, two-week off group, their resting metabolic rate dropped by only half as much, about 86 calories per day instead of 179 calories a day, which that is the crux of this, isn't it? It's not that one group was in a one group, it's not that both groups were actually in the same deficit, even though I kind of said that incorrectly the way I framed it. They were in the same intended deficit. But if your metabolism is dropping faster than the other guy, then your intended deficit just shrunk, didn't it? It just shrunk. You're not actually in the bigger deficit. I think that's where people get confused. And so at the six-month follow-up, here's another interesting fact: the continuous group regained almost everything, while the intermittent group maintained their significantly lower rate. And the two-week blocks was chosen because the rapid early phase of metabolic adaptation tends to happen around the two-week mark. And so they designed that protocol around that. Now, the the big caveat for the Matador study is it was untrained obese men.
Philip Pape: 14:44
So then how does this translate if you are a trained lifter? Well, there was something called the ICE CAP trial that looked at intermittent versus continuous dieting in 61 resistance-trained adults at a similar deficit as the Matador trial, so 34%. By the way, when we say 34%, we mean 34% below your maintenance calories. So fat loss and fat-free mass retention were the similar were similar or the same between the two groups, but the intermittent group said they had significantly reduced appetite. And then there was a secondary analysis that found during the during one-week diet breaks, fat-free mass increased a little bit, 0.7 kilograms, resting energy expenditure increased, and there was no increase in fat mass. So a lot of these studies are interesting. As much, you know, as much as you can question methodology or sample size or what have you, it's it's just very interesting to see that, hey, your metabolic rate can be affected by how aggressively and how intermittently you're dieting. And I've talked about the weekend diet before many times. A lot of my clients do this now. We talk about and eat more lift heavy as well. The idea of going five weeks on your deficit, five days on your deficit and two days at maintenance to create a similar type of interruption and keep that metabolic rate a little bit higher, maybe hold on to a little more lean mass. So intermittent dieting may get you the same or better results, is my point, because primarily of the expenditure not dropping as much, even though the total dieting added up at the end of the day is the same. But of course, you're taking longer as well. So the average rate of loss actually is lower, which kind of comports with logic to me. Like it's not really, you're not really comparing the exact same thing, are you? You're really saying that we're gonna stretch this out and go slower. We're just happening happening to do it in this intermittent way, like full on, full off, full on, full off, instead of half all the way through. Does that make sense? There's also a study from 2020, and it showed that the weekend diet that we talked about, they looked at that, the 25% deficit, and they got two-day carb refeeds every week. And that study showed they preserve fat-free mass, dry fat-free mass, resting energy expenditure compared to continuous restriction. And both groups lost the same amount of fat. So again, refeeds are really powerful. So these are really relevant findings, I think. You have most people don't have as much of a buffer as they would like with hormones, with stress, with recovery. And so your risk of lean mass loss during dieting is probably higher than you think based on just pure numbers, which would then mean, okay, how do we compensate for that? Well, other ways to compensate are higher, you know, higher protein intake, potentially more training volume. But then that affects recovery, maybe more sleep. But are you gonna get more sleep? So shorter cutting phases can keep you more productive, is the way I'd like to put it. Keep your body more in that window before these deep adaptations set in. And then all the side effects like poor mood and psychological effects that just worsen the whole situation, not to mention the cascade against your recovery as well.
Philip Pape: 18:01
So before I get into the exact protocol, I want to mention something that is very relevant to this topic. So a mini cut, it is a tight window. And it could be as short as like a three or four week cut. Anything shorter than that, I would call it rapid fat loss. That's a different topic. I think I'm gonna be doing another episode on rapid fat loss soon. I haven't done one in a while. But for mini cuts, if if you get off track for a week, it's more sensitive to the results, right? Because you're by definition in a bigger deficit, most likely. And so it could actually affect, you know, 25% of the window if you're off for a week of those four weeks, correct? Or if it's a three-week mini cut, it's it's a third of it. Meaning if you fall off track, so to speak, for a week, and maybe you just end up being in maintenance instead of deficit, there is a big is a bigger hit to the result, even though on the other hand, you also have more margin. So there's no way to recover if if you start to get off track, like just you just have to accept that it's now going to take an extra week, if that makes sense. So the difference between people who get the results from the mini cuts and those who don't, usually come down comes down to one habit. And that is you plan ahead. You have your weeks set up, you use a level of precision necessary to do this properly, and you've got your meal planning, your prepping, your groceries, your, you know what you're gonna eat, your tracking, all of that, right? Again, this is not for beginners. So this is where Fitness Lab, this is my AI coaching app, is really, really helpful. This is really helpful. I I have plenty of users that use this app that are doing mini cuts and mini bulks, and they love how the app is just the tool they need for the fact that this has to be more precise. For example, there's a Saturday planning feature. It's a meal planning activity on Saturdays where you spend about five minutes mapping out the week before the week starts, which is awesome, right? And you could tell the app if you want it to happen earlier, like on Thursday, so it's in time for your grocery shopping. The app is very flexible and can actually move things around for you. It's like your own little concierge assistant. So you can plan ahead, look at what's on your calendar, look at the social stuff, any parties, any travel days you know you're not gonna have as much time. And then the app will help you plan your meals, your protein around those realities. You know, not this fantasy version, like my week's gonna be fine and everything's perfectly prepped, and I'm gonna be able to hit everything just like I planned. Okay. No, you walk in with a realistic plan for that week, which is super important. And so during a mini cut, that one habit of preparing for your week properly is the difference between one that works and one that it ends up becoming like any other cut, and you get very frustrated. So if you want to execute these tight window phases and think that the weekly ability to plan your meals is helpful, we are running 20% off right now through Friday, May 8th, for the Fitness Lab app. Go to witsandweights.com slash app. You can learn more. You can take a free onboarding quiz and get your custom plan before you even buy the app. So you can see if it's right for you. So go to witsandweights.com slash app. Link is in the show notes. All right, so we've covered why long phases sometimes break down, why the research supports shorter and alternating phases based on physiology, metabolism, and psychology. Now let's get practical. What does this actually look like? Okay, let's start with the mini cut.
Philip Pape: 21:31
So the mini cut is a short, focused fat loss phase lasting roughly three to six weeks. It could go up to seven or eight, but anything less than three is more rapid fat loss that's just so aggressive. I wouldn't even categorize that as a mini cut. Now, the goal is not to get shredded. The goal is to peel off the accumulated fat from your building phase so you can get back to building in a slightly leaner, more insulin sensitive, more. Metabolic responsive state. And a lot of my clients who get in who've developed a decent amount of muscle mass love the mini cuts because of its short duration. They can peel off some fat, they can get right back to it. Getting shredded is a whole different topic because you want to go deep into even a mini cut, even if it's aggressive, you'll probably have to go deeper than you think or even want. And that's a whole separate topic. So we're talking about getting super healthy and super lean for sure, but it's not the same as getting shredded. That's a different topic. Okay. So what about the calorie deficit? Well, it's it's not going to be as aggressive as you would think. It would still max out at the 1% of your body weight per week, supported by the evidence before you lose muscle mass, unless you have a bunch of extra fat or a bunch of muscle already, right? There's there's categories where you can go more aggressive, like up to 1.2, 1.3% of your body weight a week. Typically, this is people north of 200 pounds body weight who have a high metabolism. Okay. So if that's not you, I would cap it at 1% of your body weight a week. So I don't go by percent deficits. I go by how much weight you're trying to lose per week, because then it's relative to your body weight, right? Not relative to your uh calories. Now, once you've done that, it'll you'll know how many calories you actually need to eat. And if it's too aggressive, you'll know, and you could always titrate it back. So there was an interesting study, this is about 15 years ago in 2011, and it compared slow weight loss at 0.7% per week versus fat weight loss at 1.4% per week. And this was in elite athletes. The slow group actually gained lean body mass while losing fat. So they they experienced body recomp in a diet. The fast group did not. The bench press went up 13.6% in the slow group and only 5.2% in the fast group. So slower is not just, you know, safer for the physiology and the psychology, it's also more productive in many cases, which is interesting because you would think, okay, I'm impatient, I want to get the result, but it's actually backfires, whereas slower tends to be more helpful. Now, protein during the mining cut should be as high as you can get it. So, what I mean by that is usually the upper range I recommend is one gram per pound, but I'm gonna say that's a minimum. So try to get like 1.2. If you can get 1.5, even better, because we're getting into that regime closer to protein-sparing type diets, where the calories are somewhat low, especially if you're going toward that pegged upper limit of 1% body weight a week. Okay, and this is higher than the standard recommendation for protein, and it accounts for the lower anabolic environment and the need to protect muscle mass. And also it's gonna keep you fuller, it's gonna be good for satiety. And it's so it's not necessarily the most exciting diet, but you could make it that way. You could get creative. So that's protein. I would keep it at least one, if not up to 1.2 or higher grams per pound. Training during a mini-cut, well, this is the same advice I would give for almost any fat loss phase. The goal, the key is to maintain your intensity. Intensity is the load, like keeping up to that, those heavier loads that you were already training with. You might have to reduce overall sets or volume based on your recovery. Maybe it depends on how much you were doing in the first place. But like if you were doing 10 to 15 hard sets per muscle group per week, maybe now you go to eight to 12 hard sets per muscle group per week. So you can kind of do the math based on your program. It might mean switching to a different program, or it might be just cutting some sets out. And then of course, you've really got to focus on your recovery. And so that's sleep, right? And that's getting in your nutrition, even though the calories are limited, making sure to get that protein and where you get carbs, get them around your training. So that's really it for mini cut. I can go into a lot more details. This is something we help people with. Or again, we're we're running a promotion on our app Fitness Lab and it can help you with all of this stuff. You can chat with the coach in there and get as personalized a protocol as you could possibly imagine and all the help you need to make this successful, go to witzelweights.com slash app.
Philip Pape: 26:06
Okay, the mini bulk. Now, mini bulks are interesting because normally I would recommend that somebody bulks for at least five or six months to really get into that anabolic environment and really, really build muscle. But a mini bulk is a great entry point. And for many people, it's really just a more aggressive maintenance. In other words, a lot of people I work with will be in maintenance most of the year and they'll crank it up a bit for a while and get into this mini bulk situation and then kind of come back to maintenance. And then they may do a mini cut, they may not, right? So a mini cut or mini bulk is about eight to 16 weeks. So think about that. It's like two to four months. You're still getting up to that four months. It still can be decently long. And this is a very small calorie surplus. And by small, I mean about a quarter to half of your half a percent of your body weight a week. Now, half a percent, you're like, wait a minute, that's that actually could be super aggressive. That is only for the newest of new green lifters who have never done this before. And part of that, in my mind, is psychology. It's a stretch goal to make sure that you yes are getting in that surplus because I know what's gonna happen to you is your body's gonna start adapting upward, you're gonna burn more calories, and you're gonna fall behind very quickly. And you're like, oh, this is too much food. I can't eat all this food. I hear it all the time. And if you're laughing and you know that's you, raise your hat. You know what I'm talking about. So a lot of this is mind games. I get it. But the actual average gain of weight is probably gonna be around 0.2.3% of your body weight per week. So for a hundred seventy pound person, maybe that's a half pound per week. So that's a couple pounds per month. And so that's a reasonable amount to shoot for. If you're gaining much faster than that, then that's much higher risk of gaining too much fat. And then the cool thing about any bulk, especially a mini bulk like this, is well, now you've got this concentrated period of time where you're just gonna push it in the gym. You're gonna push it in the gym, you're gonna be able to handle more volume, you're gonna progress probably better than you have ever before, right? Even it even in an aggressive maintenance where you're eating close to maintenance and stay well fueled, you make progress. But in a surplus like this, even though it seems small, it's all you need, all your body needs to know that it can let loose and grow, grow, grow. And that's the important thing. Now, we've talked about a ratio of bulking to cutting before as something like four to one. The same thing happens here. If you notice the lengths I just gave you, you know, two to two to four months on the building side, no more than a month on the cutting side. So it's the same thing. You're just squeezing the time frame. And you're essentially, instead of doing what we talked about in Matador and Ice Cap of like two weeks on, two weeks off, or two weeks on, one week off, or whatever, you're going straight through, but you're keeping it short, if that makes sense. Now, you could take these and you could double them in length, and you could do two on, two off. You can try that. I wouldn't recommend doing that because that enter that introduces a new variable of frustration because it takes too long. Okay, and that kind of defeats the purpose of the mini piece of this. The hack that you can use is the weekend diet, where on the weekend you have a refeed within this, and then it might extend, like the cut might be a week longer. The bulk, of course, you don't have to do that during a bulk. I'm only talking about the cut, but the four to one ratio of bulking to cutting is kind of how you do the math. And you can just make that work within your, you know, time frame. And then between the phases, I always like between cutting and bulking phases to spend at least a week or two just around your maintenance, right? Coming back up immediately to maintenance that that's calculated maintenance, not estimated, but your actual maintenance based on your tracking, right? Like you should be using something like macrofactor affiliate code wits and weights, all one word. If you want to support the podcast and get two weeks free, macrofactor will calculate that for you. So then you just go right back to maintenance. So if you're coming from the dieting side, this is gonna let your glycogen replenish, your hormones will normalize, your performance is gonna come back. Like this is the recovery piece. Now, when you're going from bulking to cutting, I would also park a little bit in maintenance just to let your body kind of level out where it needs to be before you go into a cut. So let's say you did this for an entire year. What could that look like? Well, it might look like a 12-week surplus, a three to four-week cut, a transition week, 12-week, three to four-week cut, transition week, and then one more short build. So then you're actually building the majority of the year over 52 weeks. You spent up to 40 of those weeks in a productive surplus, and then only like six to eight weeks in short cuts for the whole year. So the net result, assuming reasonable genetics, consistent training, that's important, is six to 10 pounds of lean mass gained at the same or lower body fat percentage than where you started. So, guess what that is, guys? That's body recomp, but done in this nice, sweet spot, efficient way, right? Not so hard that you have those frustrations we led the podcast with, and not trying to do it purely at maintenance where you're just so frustrated because you don't feel like anything's growing. So it might not sound dramatic, but man, six to ten pounds of lean mass at the same or lower body fat percentage, you're gonna look like a completely different person. I mean, a completely different person. And you're gonna love it. So I think it's a great strategy for a lot of you. Now, I have to be honest about something here because mini cuts can be a trap.
Philip Pape: 31:32
It can be a real trap, a real honeypot if you use them wrong. Is that word like have innuendo these days? I think it does, but I'm gonna play clueless right now. Anyway, the distinction here between strategic phase cycling and indecisive phase hopping. Does that make sense? So I like the former. I like being strategic, cycling your phases. You have to have the right data, you have to understand what you're doing. It helps when you have coaching. I'm not saying you have to have a coach. If you like spreadsheets and you like figuring this out on your own, you could do it, right? Strategic cycling means you plan your phases in advance. You know before you start your build when you're gonna do your mini-cut, how long it's gonna last, what your exit criteria are. And you set certain targets. Well, you set a duration and targets. And what's gonna happen is you're gonna start with the duration, in my opinion. Like you pick the dates, and then you see what's gonna work within there and give yourself kind of a range of flexibility. Like, don't beat yourself up if you can't quite get to the optimal. And it really depends on your psychology of how which direction you want to go there. But that is different. So that's very intentional. The opposite is what a lot of you do, which is hopping around, program hopping, phase hopping. You step on the scale, you freak out, and then you start cutting. You know what I'm talking about. Or, you know, you start to feel flat, small, skinny, whatever. You're like, okay, now I gotta build, now it's time to build muscle. I'm good again, and then you feel fluffy again, and then you start to cut. That is anxiety. That is anxiety that you're disguising in some sort of strategy. It's not a strategy, it's just random, right? It's just reactionary. And we know the math shows it doesn't work. The psychology doesn't work, the stress that comes out of it doesn't work. Actual studies on these types of things, comparing going back and forth quickly to not doing that, we see it doesn't work. And a lot of times the changes that you're looking at are just on the scale, and all of it's from water and glycogen. And so you're not even getting the right data. You guys probably know Elaine Norton, better or worse, you know, he's a controversial guy, but he makes a related point here. He argues that his original mini-cut concept was specifically designed for relatively lean males. So it wasn't the general population. So for women with extensive histories of dieting, who already have suppressed metabolisms, repeated short deficit exposures can sometimes make things worse. And then if you don't feel comfortable at your current body fat level, if you're just not comfortable with your body, you're gonna keep defaulting to cutting, and then you never spend enough time building, which probably why I named my program Eat More Lift Heavy, to lean into how valuable that piece can be. So here's the rule: if you cannot commit to at least eight to 12 weeks in a surplus without bailing on it, you're not ready for this. You're not ready for this mini-phase cycling because you're not gonna get the full package. You have to build the psychological foundation first. You have to get comfortable with slow, intentional weight gain because you're not gaining fat. You're gaining muscle. That's a beautiful thing. You're gaining strength. Where in the past, when you gained weight, it was probably body fat because it was unchecked. It was without training, right? You get the difference. So you have to learn to evaluate progress by things like your training performance, your body measurements, your waste, not just the scale. Also your psychology, your biofeedback. And then plan out your mini cut and mini bulk on a calendar before you start and stick to it. All right, as we wrap up, remember that warning sign that I promised to give you that tells you to end your mini cut early. I'm gonna share that in just a second. If you want this data layer that we've been talking about or alluding to, that helps you catch these signals and know what's going on with your body and know how to measure things and track the right things beyond the scale.
Philip Pape: 35:18
Fitness Lab will help you do that. It is my AI coaching app that if you've been listening to this podcast any length of time, the stuff that I love and I'm passionate about helping you with is baked into that app in every respect. And it's gotten so much better even since launch. People loved it when it came out, but now it's faster, it's more responsive. It's got training feedback, biofeedback, pattern recognition. It gives you custom metrics on the fly based on what it realizes that you need. We have this new Saturday meal planning feature. We now have a pre-meal check-in, not just a post-meal check-in. We have daily activities that you need and want, and you can change those activities, like if you need stress reduction or you need to be reminder to go for a walk or drink your water. All of it's in there. And they're 20% off right now. All plans through Friday, May 8th. Go to without com slash app. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash app. I think you're gonna love it. I love the app. I'm proud of it. It's helping so many people. Check it out. Link is in the show notes, wits and weights.com slash app. All right, so here is the number one warning sign that tells you you have to end your mini cut right now. All right, very, very important here. If your gym performance has dropped for two consecutive sessions on the same lift, you could be risking muscle loss. Now, we got to be careful here because one bad day, everyone has those, everyone has an off day, everyone has bad recovery days. But two consecutive sessions where you can't match your previous performance on something that you've gotten progress on before. So, like you're getting fewer reps at the same weight, or the same reps are feeling significantly harder, then your deficit has started to cross the line from being productive to potentially risking things. Now, this is in a mini cut. And I'm telling you this to be proactive, not to scare you. In fact, a lot of coaches might be listening to this thinking, what is Philip doing? Of course, you're gonna lose lose strength during a fat loss phase. What matters is you keep your relative strength. I'm talking about the case where you have been slowly but surely progressing, or at least maintaining, and all of a sudden, two weeks in a row, you drop and then you drop. I've seen that before, and I know when that happens, there's something going on with recovery, sleep, or food. And because you're in a diet, obviously food is probably a big factor. And the question is, is it going to snowball now? Or do we need to adjust something, like slow down the fat loss phase or get out of it altogether? So I just want to put that in your head, not to scare you. You should be training hard and trying to get those reps. In fact, I'm almost hoping it has the opposite effect of make sure you're pushing in the gym, even in fat loss, to get those reps. You might feel a little bit winded or wiped, but get them, get them. And if you just can't at all, then we can look at do you just need a quick diet break? Move to maintenance calories for a few days or a week, get your performance to stabilize, and then decide whether to resume the cut. And I tell you this out of love because what I don't want you to do is start to have this cascade of poor biofeedback and performance and muscle loss. And it really, the muscle loss piece isn't because your performance is going down. It's because that'll lead you to make poor decisions and not go to the gym as much and not push as hard. And then it's just gonna cascade. Does that make sense? So I want you to use these very subtle signals to help you be proactive. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the physique that you want gets built with precision in intentional phases that compound over time, not by grinding it out forever or constantly switching around. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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5 Supplements for Stress, Mood, and Recovery After 40 (Evidence-Based) | Ep 462

What supplements help with stress, sleep, and recovery after 40? The honest answer is a very short list of compounds with clinical evidence behind them, specific doses, mechanisms that matter for body composition, and specific safety profiles. This episode covers 5 compounds with clinical evidence for stress, mood, sleep, and recovery in adults over 40 who do strength training to lose fat and build muscle.

What supplements help with stress, sleep, and recovery after 40?

The honest answer is a very short list of compounds with clinical evidence behind them, specific doses, mechanisms that matter for body composition, and specific safety profiles.

This episode covers 5 compounds with clinical evidence for stress, mood, sleep, and recovery in adults over 40 who do strength training to lose fat and build muscle. Learn about the forms and doses studied, mechanisms relevant to body composition, findings from recent trials, head-to-head comparisons against prescription antidepressants for mild to moderate symptoms, and safety signals that have led one European country to ban one of these compounds.

Plus a 30-second stress audit at the end to check whether recovery is the variable holding your results back.

Join in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Timestamps:

0:00 - 5 supplements for stress, mood, and recovery
1:13 - Where supplements fit after 40
3:53 - Sleep, cortisol, and body composition after 40
6:09 - Supplement 1
9:57 - Supplement 2
12:03 - Supplement 3
15:29 - How to evaluate your supplement stack
16:30 - Supplement 4
18:53 - Supplement 5
22:00 - Bonus: 30-second stress audit

Philip Pape: 00:00
Are you feeling like you are not recovering or you are stressed in your body or your mind, or you're waking up tired, or you feel like you're working harder than results show? Maybe your mood is not where it needs to be. Now, whether you're doing all the things we talk about on the show, like training and dialing in your nutrition, I do want to talk about supplements occasionally, being a nutrition coach. So today I'm gonna give you five specific supplements that target stress, sleep, and recovery in a way that could give you a boost to the training and the diet that you're already trying to put in place to build muscle and to burn fat. And one of these on the list has actually been shown to perform as well as prescription antidepressants for moderate symptoms at a fraction of the cost with fewer side effects. So we're gonna get into all of those today.
Philip Pape: 01:13
Okay, you get a lot of influencers telling you what to take, you get a lot of programs, a lot of high-priced products based on supplements. And I hear from a lot of you that you go straight to these oftentimes, wonder why they don't work. And I ask, are you lifting? No. Are you watching your protein? No. So I kind of want to put those in two different buckets. In other words, you should be doing the basics and see how that goes, see what's left. But supplementation can also be helpful as well. There are some things on the list today I'm gonna talk about that I would recommend to anyone, no matter what. And then there's other things that are really up to you to investigate, potentially talk with your healthcare provider, functional doctor, whatever, if you need to. I'm not here to plug these or give you affiliate links or anything. Okay. I just want to talk about five compounds that have some clinical evidence behind it, which again is mixed at times, and at times it's stronger. What doses have been studied, and how do the outcomes matter to you? As someone who is lifting weights, you want to lose fat, you want to build muscle, but you're stressed or you've got issues with mood or things like that, which is very common in the audience that I'm speaking to. If you are in your 40s, 50s, or beyond, because of hormones, because of lifestyle, there's a lot of reasons that we have these. And some of you are doing all the things and you still have problems with stress, mood, sleep, et cetera. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna share a 30-second stress audit, three signs that your recovery is the thing holding you back. And that can be very helpful for you. I'm a big fan of those sorts of exercises. So here's what we're covering today. First, why stress and sleep are not luxuries. They're really important to your body composition. And you probably already know that, but it's good to understand why again and get refreshed on them before we then connect them to okay, here are five supplements that I might recommend, depending on the person with the form, the dose, the study behind them, and the safety concerns for each, because nuance is important. One of them has been banned in a country. And I want to make sure you listen all the way through the episode to get all the details. And remember, this is not medical advice. I'm not specifically recommending any of these to you. I'm just sharing the information on them. So before I share those supplements, I need you to understand why we're talking about this on this podcast. When we this is a strength training and nutrition podcast, this is not a wellness or functional or supplement-styled podcast. And there are those out there. There are those. I'm kind of sick of them. I'm trying to have, you know, no more guests, for example, who are in that world. Although I just to be fair to my guests, all the guests I've had have been amazing.
Philip Pape: 03:53
There is a study from 2010 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, where it was a small study, 10 participants, age 41, so probably like a lot of you, and they were on the same calorie deficit with the same food and calories, but the only difference was the sleep. This is the one, the study I've mentioned quite a few times, where one group got eight and a half hours, the other group got five and a half hours. Both groups lost the same weight, but the well-rested group lost a lot more fat and less lean mass. And the sleep-restricted group lost a lot less fat and more lean mass. And I always like to mention this study. It's just a microcosm of something that's been seen time and again. And I definitely see this with clients where the sleep is the one thing left holding them back. They're doing all the other things, and for some reason, they still get five hours of sleep. And they're asking me, why isn't it working? Why is my metabolism so low? Why can't I lose weight? I'm like, you're getting five hours of sleep. Okay, but I can't really change that. What else can I do? And honestly, it's worse than that because when you're chronically stressed and your cortisol is high, your body, that is the catabolic hormone where in a short burst, like post-workout, when your cortisol is up, it's great. It helps clear the metabolic debris and all that. But when it's chronically elevated, then it's gonna accelerate that muscle protein breakdown. And it's also gonna increase the visceral fat storage in your abdomen. So more belly fat. And for women in perimenopause, we see we tend to see this compound because of the hormones, the declining progesterone, which is like a buffer for cortisol. So now it's you have less of that. But even for men with testosterone decline, that's a less anabolic environment in your body to counteract these things. So if you are training hard, if you're trying to eat well, but you're chronically stressed and you're sleep deprived, it's like you got holes in the bucket. It's like you got holes in the bucket. You could pour more water in, more volume, more protein, whatever, but they're just gonna keep draining out on the other end. So you're like, okay, Philip, but doesn't that mean I should just fix my sleep? Perhaps. But what if something is lacking, like a nutrient in your body that is causing it, making it harder for you to sleep? Can we address these in parallel? And that's kind of where I think there's a usefulness to this. So
Philip Pape: 06:09
let's get into the five supplements. Supplement number one is magnesium. And so I like to start with one that's super common and effective, and like I have no problem at all recommending to just about everyone. And you want a bioavailable version of this? This could be magnesium glycinate or L-theanate or one of the blends. People always ask, what should I get? Just get something that is highly bioavailable. You can Google it, ask ChatGPT, is this bioavailable? Whatever. And the reason magnesium is important is because about half of adults don't consume enough from food. And honestly, I think it's more than that that just don't get enough, especially as we get older. Um, women between the ages of 51 to 70, two-thirds of them fall below the requirement. And then exercise increases your need for magnesium above sedentary people. So you're you're definitely short on this. Like I know you're short on magnesium. Most people are. It's very, very hard to get enough in the modern food supply and the way most people eat, even if you're trying to eat quote unquote healthy. And the cool thing is we have studies that compare magnesium intake to sleep. And the largest sleep trial to date was Schuster 2025, 155 participants, and they tested magnesium bisglycinate at 250 milligrams daily for four weeks. Their insomnia severity index dropped 3.9 points in the group that took the magnesium versus dropping 2.3 points for placebo, and most of it happened in the first two weeks. And people who had low dietary magnesium to begin with saw the biggest intake, which makes total sense because if you're depleted of a nutrient, repletion of the nutrient works. And for a lot of you who are undereating, underfueling, you probably have some form of malnutrition. In fact, I know you do across many areas. Now, I have notes in here with a bunch of other studies. I think I'm gonna bore you to death. There have been studies of the different types of magnesium that looked at these insomnia scores. And just in general, they see them go down when you take magnesium. We also see an improvement in depression scores and anxiety scores. And again, it's within two weeks, so it's pretty quickly. And I've had plenty of clients who they just started taking magnesium and they're like, wow, my migraines went away. I'm feeling better, I have more energy, I can sleep better. So that's why I put this first on the list. I think it's a really powerful supplement. And the mechanism is that magnesium increases an enzyme that converts active cortisol to inactive cortisol, which is why, even if they directly measure cortisol in the urine, they also see an improvement, right? Now, again, the form matters. So the cheapest one is not the one you want. That's magnesium oxide, like you'll see it in Walmart or whatever. I would say glycinate is the highest among the oral forms and gentlest on your stomach. Feonate is the one that gets into the brain. So some people buy magnesium blends because they're supposed to have all these other benefits. And you may want to experiment with different ones, like take one for, say, a full month and then switch to a different one and try it out. It's worth experimenting if this is a concern for you. And for most people, you're gonna want to take at least two to four hundred milligrams. Most pills are like three to five hundred milligrams of elemental magnesium in the evening. Take it in the evening. I usually take mine a couple hours before bed, so it's after dinner, but not too far after dinner. If you want the cognitive and the brain benefits, you might want to target in on L3N8. And all of these have elemental magnesium, but then they also have these other compounds. And really, the only issue with a too high of a dose could be a GI issue, and probably that's it. Again, this is not medical advice today. I'm not telling you to take this, I'm not telling you what dose to take, I'm telling you what the evidence has looked at. So that is number one, magnesium. Please, everybody consider it. And with all these supplements, it is totally up to you, you with your doctor, you with your medical professional, and your own mind and choices whether you want to experiment with these or not, because they're not FDA approved, yada, yada. Okay.
Philip Pape: 09:57
Supplement number two is omega-3 fatty acids. I didn't think, or you probably didn't think that would be on the list. Maybe, maybe, maybe not. Okay. So you've got one of the most studied things on the list is omega-3 fatty acids, EPA, and DHA. And for mood, EPA seems to be the thing that will help with your mood. Um, and that's been measured through depression scores. Whereas DHA seems to not have an impact on those things. Now, one interesting thing is if you're healthy or if you get enough already, it doesn't make a difference and it doesn't prevent, it doesn't prevent depression necessarily. It treats existing symptoms. So just be aware of all these things. These are important distinctions. Now, inflammation, systemic inflammation in your body, this is one of the big things talked about in terms of recovery, where omega-3s can be helpful. And there have been a ton of studies on how omega-3, like two to four grams per day, which is a little more than you would think. Like you got to be careful when you buy this stuff because you'll see a dose might have far less than that or might not have as much EPA and DHA in there. So you have to just kind of do the math and check for yourself based on your budget. But they found that omega-3s reduce CRP, TNF alpha, and IL6. And these are those three inflammatory markers we talk about a lot on the show that accumulate with age and that do affect a lot of things and your recovery and things like that. And when I say recovery, I mean literally like delayed onset muscle soreness can be reduced because your inflammation is reduced. Now you might say, well, inflammation is a natural response to the body adapting to the stressor, and that's true, but you don't want too much inflammation. So you might hear something like one to two grams of combined EPA and DHA for general health, and that's probably the dose you'll see in a lot of things. I would aim for probably more than that, like double that. However, here's my disclaimer high dose omega-3 is associated with a modest increase in arterial fibrillation risk, about 25% in a particular meta-analysis. And if you have a history of heart issues, definitely talk to your doctor. All of this stuff is not medical advice. Okay. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.
Philip Pape: 12:03
Supplement number three here. And a lot of you are already taking this, it's become more and more popular, and that is Ashwagandha, specifically KSM 66. This is the one that seems to have this pretty massive link to cortisol, but it also has a lot of safety caveats you have to be aware of. So the landmark trial on this was Chandrosikar, I think you say, 2012, 64 participants, and this was 600 milligrams a day of KSM 66. That's the amount that is in something like Legion's version of Ashwagandha. There's 600 milligrams, considered the like optimal clinical dose. And they saw that serum cortisol in these participants dropped almost 28% versus placebo. Their perceived stress scale scores dropped 44%. There have been more recent meta-analysis that confirmed a reduction of cortisol. And then for lifters for strength for muscle, there's a study from 2015 that saw people taking Ashwagandha had better gains in their bench press, their leg extension, their muscle size, their testosterone with lower creatine kinase levels, which suggests they had better recovery. Now, these were untrained individuals, which I always have to say is a huge caveat because you know newbies often amplify the effect of any of these interventions, from what I've noticed. But studies in trained individuals do still show some smaller but meaningful benefits. And then we have sleep. There was a study in 2019, Legade, or Langade, I should say, and they used what's called actigraphy to measure things like sleep onset latency, sleep efficiency, total sleep time in insomnia patients. And the KSM66 Ashwagonda, 600 milligrams a day for 10 weeks, significantly improved all of those. So that is the generally recommended dose that you can buy. And some products have it in there, like the multivitamin I take from Legion has ashwagandha in there. I don't think it's to that dose within the multivitamin, but that's what you would get if you bought it on itself. Now,
Philip Pape: 14:08
let's talk about safety here because there is some data out there that connects liver injury to ashwagandha. And most of these resolved after people stopped taking it, but there were three patients with pre-existing liver disease who did die. And it's typically two to 12 weeks after starting use. So Denmark banned it in April 2023. France, Sweden, and a few other European countries have issued warnings. Now, there's no randomized trial so far that has reported serious liver events, but oftentimes they are excluding people with liver disease, of course, and they don't go for very long, you know, eight to 12 weeks. So my recommendation is if you have any history of any medical issue whatsoever, including liver issues, you're not using this podcast as advice anyway, right? This is just information. Talk to your doctor. Don't just take stuff on your own. If you've got an issue, pre-existing conditions, talk to your medical professional. If you are not concerned and you are trying to, you want to see how it works, consider cycling it like eight to 12 weeks on, four weeks off. I think I've seen anecdotally, sometimes people get tolerant of it and it helps to do that anyway. But there, who knows what the side effects are with something like this, an adaptogen, right? We've heard it can potentially stimulate thyroid function. So I give you this not to scare you, but because you have to make an informed decision.
Philip Pape: 15:29
So speaking of making informed decisions, this is the kind of thing we love to do inside Eat More Lift Heavy. Eat More Lift Heavy is my 26-week coached program. Two coaches in there, Coach Carol and myself, designed to build every skill you need for lasting body composition change. You want to lose fat, you want to build muscle and do it in a structured way. Each week we'll do that. Week six, especially in the program, is just dedicated to sleep stress and recovery, where you learn to use your own biofeedback data to identify, hey, what is limiting my progress? And then week 16 is the supplements and micronutrient review, and we're gonna help you audit your stack of supplements against the evidence so you can make personalized changes for yourself. So if you're tired of all the guesswork, if you want structured coaching to address the whole picture, not just macros, not just training, those are like 5% in the equation. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. I'll drop the link in the show notes. That is eatmoreliftheavy.com. All right, let's get back to the list.
Philip Pape: 16:30
We've got supplement number four is saffron extract. Now, a lot of people haven't heard of this, and it's not for everyone. But there was a study in 2019 of it was a meta analysis of 23 trials, randomized controlled trials, and they compared it to placebo, and it significantly improved depression and anxiety. And then there have been some trials that tested saffron directly against SSRIs, and it actually found that it was similar to several SSRIs. Fluxetine is one in particular, and they found that they were statistically equivalent to SSRIs for depression and anxiety with fewer adverse events. Now, I want to be clear here this applies to mild to moderate symptoms. Saffron is definitely not a treatment for severe major depression. Most of these are small trials. Who knows how good the methodology is? But the most recent one from 2025, Lepresti, had 202 participants. It used 28 milligrams a day of standardized saffron extract and an improved depression scores. And we think this works because saffron contains crocin and saffronol. Crocin inhibits the re-uptake of serotonin, dopamine, and neuro or norepinephrine. You probably recognize those. And so SSRIs target only serotonin. Whereas the saffronol, right, the saffron extract compound, it binds to your GABA A receptors, and that is the same target as benzodiazepines, but at a much milder intensity. So you get this multi-target mechanism from one compound. So I hope I don't, I'm not losing you there. I went a little technical. I had to write that down to say it the right way. But it's kind of crazy. And for the women in our audience, I know a lot of women who take this. I know there have been some studies, specifically with women, that showed it it helped with PMS severity, for example. And there are supplements that combine saffron extract with magnesium, with I think L-theanine, which is amino acid, that also is shown to help with stress and also helps with performance, like in the gym. So you gotta look it up and find the right thing. There is, you know, the safety margin you have to think about, the supplement dose, the toxicity thresholds, all that stuff. And please, please, please look into it yourself. But I wanted to put it on your radar. That's saffron extract.
Philip Pape: 18:53
Supplement number five is Ltheanine, which is what I just mentioned. And I'll say it's probably the gentlest supplement on the list, probably the safest based on the evidence. Again, I'm saying probably as a disclaimer, it's an amino acid. It's found in tea. Its effects are documented on something like EEG because it increases your alpha brain wave activity. And that's associated with alertness or relaxed alertness. So that's like your the state between full wakefulness and drowsiness. So it's like you get relaxed but without getting sedate, getting sedated, which is weird because I also see it recommended for performance in the gym. So it's like it helps you focus and get relaxed, but it doesn't make you tired, right? Like magnesium or you know, magnesium could actually make you a little bit tired or drowsy. So these alpha wave increases that happen pretty quickly after you ingest it, something like 45 minutes, can then do like reduce your cortisol and make you feel more relaxed. And then when we look at sleep, there's some moderate improvements in sleep quality as well, and daytime dysfunction, as they call it. So it's more of a sleep quality thing, not a sleep quantity thing. And apparently there's a really good synergy with caffeine, where when you take it with caffeine, you can improve your speed and accuracy on attention tasks, get less distracted compared to caffeine alone. Caffeine only improves accuracy, but with L-theanine, it seems to also improve speed and attention or speed and lower distraction. It also seems to blunt the jitteriness of caffeine, but preserve or enhance the cognitive benefits. So it's kind of interesting. Again, look into it yourself. There on the on the downside, it doesn't seem to affect people with more severe symptoms of anxiety, you know, like generalized anxiety disorder. So again, this is more for everyday stress, not clinical use. And I think the dosage on here is the sweet spots like 200 milligrams. By the way, the saffron extract, I think it was 28 or 30. So this is 200. And it's also generally recognized as safe, GRAS status with the FDA. It's been approved for unlimited food use in Japan since 1964. And they've looked at doses up to 900 milligrams with no adverse events in trials. So it sounds like a pretty safe supplement and one more to look
Philip Pape: 21:08
at. All right, now remember, I promised you a 30-second stress audit at the end. Three signs that your recovery might be the bottleneck coming up in just a second. But if this episode made you realize, hey, my approach to body composition needs to be more complete. Maybe I'm not thinking about the recovery in stress or the supplementation. Maybe I'm not lifting weights. Maybe my nutrition isn't dialed in. That is why we have eat more lift heavy. That is why I made this 26-week coach program. We walk you through not just nutrition and training, but sleep, stress, biofeedback, supplements, everything else that determines whether the work that you're putting in actually shows up on your body. We do not sell supplements. We don't. We teach you how to make smart decisions about them based on your data. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to learn more and join us. The link is in the show notes. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com. Okay, here's the stress audit that I wanted to share with you. Three signs that your recovery is the bottleneck. Sign number one is that your training performance is declining or stalling, even though it's the same program and your nutrition is on point. All right. And this assumes you're not in a diet, guys. Okay. Because if you're on a diet, that alone is causing the issue. I promise you. All right. So if you were hitting the weights, but now you're stalling, there is some problem with recovery. Now, food is recovery. So if it's just that, it's that. But it could be another issue. Sign number two is you're waking up more tired, regardless of how many hours you slept in bed. Like even if you sleep seven to eight hours and then you feel like you haven't slept, there is a recovery issue there. Okay. And then sign number three is that you're holding on to water and your weight is bouncing around more than usual, especially around your midsection. So this is a relative thing. You need to compare before and after. You're holding on more water than usual and your weight is bouncing around more than usual, especially around your midsection. This could be that you are more stressed and because of the higher cortisol, you're increasing your water retention and visceral fat storage. You may not see this over days. This may take weeks or months to see it, but if you're measuring things, if your scale is erratic, your waistline feels puffy, even in a deficit, could have to do with stress. It's a good sign. So if you said yes to two out of those three, then recovery could be and is probably your constraint. It's not necessarily training volume, it's not necessarily calories, but it is if you're underfed, let's just put it that way. It's really some form of recovery. And hopefully this episode was helpful at least for one tiny piece of that in the supplement world.
Philip Pape: 23:39
Okay, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that the supplements themselves do not do the work. They clear some of the constraints or obstacles to the work you're already doing to help you out as tools. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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Philip Pape 4/21/26 Philip Pape 4/21/26

The Latest GLP-1 Science on Muscle Loss, Fat Loss, and Weight Regain | Ep 461

What REALLY happens when you take a GLP-1 drug? Your fat loss, your muscle, your heart, your inflammation, what happens to your weight when you stop, and long-term safety. This episode covers body composition data from the 2026 semaglutide and tirzepatide trials, cardiovascular outcomes from SELECT and SURPASS-CVOT, inflammation findings beyond weight loss, weight regain patterns after stopping, and a 5-part framework to keep muscle on or off the drug after 40.

What REALLY happens when you take a GLP-1 drug?

Your fat loss, your muscle, your heart, your inflammation, what happens to your weight when you stop, and long-term safety.

This episode covers body composition data from the 2026 semaglutide and tirzepatide trials, cardiovascular outcomes from SELECT and SURPASS-CVOT, inflammation findings that go beyond weight loss, weight regain patterns after stopping, and a 5-part framework to keep muscle on or off the drug after 40. Plus the 2026 safety update and recent Alzheimer's and Parkinson's research for adults considering, taking, or tapering off a GLP-1.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Timestamps:

0:00 - The GLP-1 drug narratives
5:55 - Lean mass loss in STEP 1 and SURMOUNT-1
8:30 - Organ mass, muscle quality, and DXA
10:15 - STEP UP trial and higher-dose semaglutide
11:23 - Cardiovascular outcomes from SELECT and SURPASS-CVOT
13:00 - Inflammation markers and CRP reduction
14:00 - GLP-1s and neurodegeneration research
15:32 - Habits that outlast the drug
17:00 - What happens to your weight when you stop
19:30 - Exercise while taking GLP-1s and natural production
20:48 - 5-part framework for muscle preservation
26:55 - Safety signals and long-term effects
28:12 - 3 high-protein meals when you don't have an appetite

Philip Pape: 00:00
If you're on a GLP1 drug like Ozempic or Monjuro, or you're thinking or curious about it, there are a few different narratives out there. And I wanted to get into all the aspects of the science today, especially the body composition data from very, very recent research. What happens when you stop taking these? The cardiovascular and inflammation findings beyond fat loss, and then a framework to keep your muscle while the drug does its thing. And then for those of you struggling with appetite and eating enough protein, stick around to the end. I'm going to share some tips for that. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and this episode was directly requested by two listeners. And I want to give them a shout out up front. Daryl T wrote in and said, I'm mainly wanting to know if it's safe to take GOP1s and a deep dive into the long-term effects as well as its role in other indications beyond weight loss, like inflammation and heart health. I'm also a nurse practitioner who's worked in urology for 11 years. So, Daryl, we went back and forth a lot, and we're going to get into all of those things today. I know you can evaluate this stuff with clinical eyes. Obviously, I don't give medical advice, but I'm going to go deep on the evidence, and I think you're going to appreciate that. And then our listener, Brianna N, asked for, quote, a podcast about GLP1 weight loss drugs and how to eat enough food and protein while taking them. And so, Brianna, this is definitely a gap, definitely a challenge that I've seen. The practical side of, well, they don't have as much of an appetite, which has seemed to be helpful for losing weight, but now it actually becomes a challenge when you're trying to get things like more protein or higher satiety foods. So we're going to cover that as well. And then stay tuned to the end for three specific high protein meals that I think you could use that are under 300 calories, over 35 grams of protein. One of the challenges is protein density. And this will help, I think, when you don't have quite as much of an appetite. So in this episode, what are we covering? You're going to learn the actual lean mass loss percentages from the major GLP1 trials. You're going to learn about how lifestyle modifies those, because really that's what it comes down to. So we're not fear-mongering. We're not going to say, oh, you just lose your muscle on these things. You're going to learn what happens to body composition, your heart, your inflammation when you take these drugs, and a practical five-part framework to keep your muscle, whether you're currently on a GLP1 or considering one, or honestly, or not, because the principles are universal. All right. So
Philip Pape: 02:42
there are a couple narratives out on social media around GLP1 drugs right now. And one narrative is hey, these are really great. People have food noise. People are using them to lose a lot of weight that were affecting, that was affecting their health and had trouble getting started. We had uh guys like Jamie Sellzer on the podcast where it's been, you know, I mean, let's be honest, it's like a miracle drug. This is not something that's ever existed before. And yet he's doing it the right way by changing lifestyle at the same time. And that's where we get into some of the thorny things here. But that's that's the first kind of narrative, and and often there's a pushback because people want to judge people for taking these and so on. I even did an episode a while back called Ozempic Envy about that phenomenon. And then the second narrative here is hey, you lose all your muscle when you take these things, or it's cheating, or hey, you're gonna gain everything back the minute you stop. And you've probably seen some truths to all of this stuff in a way. Uh, not truths to judge judging people. I'm not talking about that, but really like what happens when you take these drugs. So just to say it up front, I'm definitely not anti-medication. I think if any tool is the right tool for your situation, use it. Use the tool if it helps. Obesity is pretty well established now as a medical condition that has actual physiological drivers, things like brain-related genes and many other things. It's very complicated. These drugs do work. Yes, there is a behavior and lifestyle component, but it's one of many, many components. And the weight loss we've seen from these drugs is not only clinically meaningful, but just real life meaningful, you know, lots and lots of pounds lost. And you know, we talk about it's not always about the scale, but it often is about the scale when you're carrying a lot of excess and dangerous body weight and body fat. The body composition side of that, meaning how much of your weight that you're losing comes from fat versus muscle, this it's not a fixed thing. It's not like you have this side effect and it happens this way. It depends almost entirely on two things that you actually control. Number one is do you lift weights? And number two is do you eat enough? I'll say enough protein, but there's other things you can have malnutrition with when you are in such a huge deficit that's often caused by these. But protein is kind of the leader of all of these. And so the difference between what I'll call unmitigated GLP1 use and optimized GLP1 use is the difference in what we're seeing with some of those numbers, like when you hear the 40% of your weight loss from lean mass, versus I've talked about it recently, losing close to zero from lean mass, just like if you weren't taking the drugs because you're doing the things. And that's a big gap between those two populations. And I guess the problem is today there's so many people taking these drugs that are then not doing the lifestyle thing that we hear about this more and more, and it gets fear-mongered and all that. So I want you to be strong. I want you to be metabolic, metabolically strong and resilient. I want you to be leaner if that's what you want. I want you to be healthier, all of those things together. So that's what this episode is about. It's not whether you should take the drug, that's between you and your doctor and your goals. This is about what the evidence says you should do alongside the drug to get the best possible outcome.
Philip Pape: 05:55
So let's start with numbers because numbers always tell the nuance. They tell us the stuff, the reading between the lines of all these headlines. The step one trial, I've mentioned it several times. This is referenced a lot. It's foundational data on semaglatide, which is the drug behind Wagovi, and Ozempic. And in this study, it was on body composition. Participants lost about 15% of their weight over 68 weeks, and about 39 to 45% of that was lean mass. So just every 10 pounds you lost, about four were coming from muscle. Not something we want to do, right? We don't want to do that. And it sounds scary, but the context always matters. So we've talked about the quarter rule in body composition research, where we've seen for over decades of research when anyone loses weight through any method, about a quarter of the weight loss on average is typically lean mass. And that's your physiology. Your body doesn't just say, I'm only gonna burn fat. It's going to burn whatever it can, and I hate to use the word burn, but it's gonna draw energy from wherever it can. And when we talk about muscle, it's not like eating away at your muscles, it's simply not rebuilding them, it's not preserving them. And that's kind of the way to think about it. So it, you know, this percentage right off the bat is not great, and that affects anyone who's just not lifting weights. For semaglotide in step one, the question in the step one trial, the question has always been recently is it higher than the average? The answer is yes, but you also have to think about the rate of weight loss, also is higher than average. So we're still teasing out the data. We're not 100% sure that there's an independent factor with these drugs, and it really doesn't matter because if you're doing the right thing, you don't have to worry about it. Now, if we look at terzepatide, that's the drug behind Manjaro and Zeppound. There was another study, the Surmount 1 body composition substudy, and that's February 2025. So you can look that one up. Participants lost 21% of their body weight, and lean mass accounted for about 25% of what was lost, which is more in line with other weight loss methods and that held across different doses, different sexes, or both sexes, and all age groups. Now we don't quite know what the difference is between the two. It may have to do with the terzepicide being a dual receptor agonist hitting both the GLP1 and the GIP receptors. And maybe that gives some additional lean mass protection, but nothing is compare the two side by side. They're different studies, different potentially methodologies and populations and all that. Okay. Now, the lean mass includes more than skeletal muscle. I think we forget that in the discussion as well. It includes your organ mass, your connective tissue, your bone, and your water. And the fat tissue you have, what we call adipose tissue, believe it or not, is also 15 to 20% lean mass itself. I don't know if you realize that. It's something we don't talk very often, but there is some lean mass, quote unquote, in fat tissue, and that's water and protein in your fat cells. So when you lose a lot of body fat, you're automatically going to lose some measured lean mass, even if you haven't lost actual muscle. And now, of course, you're like, well, wait, one time I gained lean mass. Well, yes, if you gain enough muscle to offset that during a fat loss phase, like if you're a brand new lifter, that can offset it for sure. A very recent study, 2026, combined pre-clinical data with a human proof of concept trial and looked at lean tissue loss on submagotide, where and they found that liver mass decreased more than muscle mass. So that's an organ, right? So now we're saying, oh, maybe some of that lean mass loss is coming from organ mass loss. Interesting. And then there's a third piece here, and that's what we call muscle quality. So there was a surpass three MRI substudy published last year, 2025, and it found that while muscle volume decreased on tur's epitide, intramuscular fat infiltration. Now that's the fat marbled within the muscle itself, decreased significantly more than you would expect from weight loss alone. So now less fat inside the muscle means better muscle quality, insulin sensitivity, better function. And the researchers called these adaptive changes, not pathological, just adaptive changes. And finally we had the step up trial, and that tested the new higher dose of maglatide of 7.2 milligrams, found the same pattern. And they used MRI instead of DEXA. They measured about 16% of weight loss coming from lean tissue, and then the muscle function as they measured it with sit-to-stand testing was preserved. I don't know what to make of that piece of it, honestly, because it it's a low bar, but I guess it's important. But the the summary is this, right? The initial numbers from the step one, that's like the full-on, unmitigated scenario. First study they did on this, or the first big study that I guess we can rely on. And really, in practicality, the lean mass fraction of the muscle lost ranges from anywhere from you know zero to like eight percent in people who do train and eat protein. Remember that some of that lean mass is good. It's from, you know, fat what what I should say, fat cells. And then some of it is non-muscle tissue anyway, and then some is all the way up to say 45%, and people just don't do anything they're supposed to do, and they're losing tons of weight really fast. All right, so that is body composition. I think we're all caught up. Now
Philip Pape: 11:23
we're gonna shift to what Daryl was talking about, which is the non-weight loss indications. There was a trial back in 2023 called SELECT, over 17,000 adults that had heart disease, a high BMI over 27, but no diabetes. And smagletide reduced their major cardiovascular events by about 20%, with a hazard ratio of 0.8, and it reduced all cause mortality by 19%. And I think from what I can read, the cardiology community was a bit surprised because there was an analysis in the Lancet in 2025 that found a third of the heart benefit, only a third of the heart benefit, was explained by the reduction in waste. In other words, they lost weight, they got a benefit to the heart, but there was more of a benefit than you would expect. And the cardiovascular protection seemed to be consistent regardless of how much weight people lost. And so it's not just, hey, lose weight, help your heart kind of thing. Something else must be going on. So fast forward, or not fast forward, but same year, 2025, last year, for terzepatide, the surpass CVOT trial, compared it to dulaglutide, which apparently already has proven heart benefits. And terzepatide met what's called non-inferiority, meaning it's at least as good. And against a theoretical placebo, they estimated a reduction in major heart events by 28% and 39% reduction in all-cause mortality. These are huge numbers. And then the inflammation data probably explains some of this cardiovascular data. It's all connected, right? So across the STEP trials, going back to those semaglatide trials, they found a reduction in C reactive protein, CRP. That's a key inflammatory marker we can measure in our blood pretty easily. And it dropped by 38% over two years. It dropped 12% at just four weeks, and that's before there was any meaningful weight loss. They only lost like 2-3% of their body weight by that point. So that's really strong evidence for a direct anti-inflammatory effect that's independent of weight change. At least that's my understanding and reading of the evidence. Another review last year in the Journal of Clinical Investigation looked at a neural pathway where GLP1 receptor activation in the brain reduces circulating TNF alpha, and it does so just within a few hours. Just a few hours. This is before really anything else has changed. So that's pretty clear potential cause and effect going on. Now let's talk about the brain. And this is maybe a little bit less exciting than what we know so far. There's some large observational studies where GOP1 users had 40 to 70% lower risk of developing Alzheimer's, and it generated a lot of headlines at the time. But then when Nova Nordisk tested oral semaglitide directly in people who already had mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer's in the evoke and evoke plus trials, it failed to make a difference versus placebo on things like cognitive scores. And there was another trial of laraglide in Alzheimer's that also didn't seem to have an impact, but it did show 18% slower cognitive decline and it preserved brain volume on MRI. There was another study that showed no benefit for Parkinson. So, you know, things are being tested out. Who knows where we're going to end up with all this? I'm not claiming anything here. I'm just sharing what seems to be known so far from whatever studies have been done. And I guess the emerging interpretation here, and for Daryl, our listener who asked about those things, I think it's that GLP1 drugs may help prevent some neurodegeneration through anti-inflammatory metabolic effects. They may not treat the disease, you know, maybe a prevention thing. And honestly, I again, I'm not giving you medical advice here. This is just my reading of evidence as a lay person when it comes to this stuff. So I hope that's helpful and at least gives you a thought to look into some of these things.
Philip Pape: 15:32
So we've just covered why body composition on GOP1 drugs is it's not a fixed static thing. It highly depends on your training, your protein intake. And if you're thinking, okay, how do I actually set up my protein? How do I structure my training? How do I know if I'm losing weight too fast or if my plant is working? That is what Eat More Lift Heavy is built for. This is my 26-week coach program. I created it in conjunction with Coach Carol. So you get two coaches. And it's a three phases over 26 weeks where phase one is where we get your tracking and your baseline dialed in. Phase two is where most of the, I'll say coaching happens because now you have data that you can read and make decisions from for your protein, your progression, your hunger signals. If you're on GLP1s, are you losing weight too fast or just right? Are you holding on to your muscle? How are you training the right way? You know, and if you're on a GLP one, I think it's fantastic. These are the same skills we want to build. And if anything, you really want to come in and learn those skills. So eventually you could potentially titrate off the drugs. And whether or not you do that, you can live with them in a more sustainable way. So there's a lot in there. I'm not going to go over all the things. You know, you've got calls, you've got one focus per week, we've got a community. We've got all that fun stuff. But the key is that you're going to build skills one week at a time so that you come out more confident on the other side. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com. Link is in the show notes as well. All right. So the
Philip Pape: 17:00
next question people often ask is what happens when you get off these drugs? Speaking of stopping, what happens when you stop? And again, we go back to the step one, they had an extension study where at the end of it, after 68 weeks on some magletide, participants lost about 17% of their body weight. And then when they stopped the drug, a year later they'd regained two-thirds of the weight they lost. And also the cardiometabolic improvements in their blood pressure, their lipids, their blood sugar, those all reverted toward baseline too, which kind of makes sense. Obviously, if you're gaining weight and you're not getting the protective effects if these drugs have independent effects, that would you'd be expected to happen. For terzepatide, the Surmount 4 trial had a similar outcome. 70% regained their weight within a year of stopping. And 82% of patients who stopped regained at least a quarter of the weight within 12 months. And then we have a 2025 meta-analysis across 11 different trials that found an average regain of about 5.6 kilograms, which if I do the math in my head is something like 12 pounds or something, multiplied by 2.2. And then even longer follow-up periods showed even larger regain of weight. Now that sounds discouraging, but I'm all about reframing and understanding the context. So think of it this way: no one would take blood pressure medication for a year and then stop and be surprised when their blood pressure went up if they didn't do anything else, especially. That's the nature of a chronic condition. The drug was managing a physiological drive inside your body. You move remove the drug and the drive returns. So GOP1 drugs do the same thing at a minimum with your appetite, let alone with these other metabolic things we're talking about. Your body has this biologically defended set point. Now, I I'm hot and cold on like set point theory, but when you've been doing something for a long time, many years, there does seem to be a reversion to the mean that your body wants to do in terms of your weight and your habits and everything else. And the drugs are suppressing the appetite signals that would have caused you to eat up to that point and then some. And so when you remove the drug, those signals come back, right? And we talked to Jamie Sellsler on this podcast. He was talking about being on this for life in his case. And that doesn't necessarily have to be the case for everyone, it depends on the person. But the the promising thing here is other research. There was a Copenhagen trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2021, and it showed that exercise actually changes this equation. So patients who exercise on laraglide regained five kilograms less than those who just used the drug after a full year after the treatment stopped. And they were seven times more likely to maintain at least 10% weight loss. And it increased the body's own natural GLP1 production. So exercise during taking the drugs, it's not just a, I'll say transient support. It's actually giving you long-term benefits, which really isn't that surprising, is it? And now they say exercise. I like to be specific: strength training, walking, all the types of activity we talk about on this show, especially lifting weights as being a huge game changer for the longer term. But when you stop AGOP1, you are probably going to gain some initial weight anyway, like anyone would when you start to eat more. Your body restores glycogen. That's the stored carbs in your muscle and liver. Glycogen binds with water. So the first like three to five pounds on the scale on average are not body fat. And that's always something when I tell people they're going to gain weight, you know, if they come out of a deficit and go to maintenance, is what's going to happen. So you got to account for that as well. And don't blame it on the drugs. Okay, so where are we now? We've covered body composition data, cardiovascular and inflammatory story regarding the drugs, and the weight regain piece.
Philip Pape: 20:48
Now, how can you use this data? So if you're on or considering a GOP1 drug, there's five things the evidence says you should prioritize. And the cool thing is, these are the same things this show Wits and Weights has always taught. So this is a great refresher if you've already heard it, and it's a great new sense of empowerment and information that you can use if it's new to you. Because the drug is not going to change the principles. What I would say is it amplifies the consequences of ignoring these principles. That makes sense. Okay. So number one is the protein. We've got to have a certain amount of protein. I'm just going to say the number again, at least 0.7 grams per pound, or like 1.2 grams per, or 1.6 grams per kilogram. Some numbers you see out there advise less, but we are we're talking about lifting weights here and having enough, and we're talking about older population, maybe over 40. I would just say going for, you know, 30 or more grams of protein for every meal so that it adds up to around 0.7 grams per pound of your body weight or more is solid. And if you don't have an appetite, which is going to be the case, that's where you have to prioritize protein dense, low volume foods, where we normally talk about the opposite. For most people, trying to have higher volume foods, but this is where you need it to be more uh dense. And I'm gonna give you three specific meals at the end of this episode that do exactly that. So I want you to stick around, but I want to get through these principles first because these are important to have before you go to tactics. So number two is resistance training, non-negotiable. This is the most evidence-supported intervention to preserve lean mass, period, let alone on GLP1 drugs. And we talked about the exercise group in the Copenhagen trial. There's also a case series in 2025 of patients who did resistance training while on some aglitide or terzepatide. And I talked about this in a previous episode. The amount of lean tissue they lost was low. It was something like five to 10%. It's very similar to anybody who would lose weight and hold on to muscle, remembering that some of that lean mass is not muscle. And so your actual muscle loss is quite small. And if you're doing it right, it kind of comes right back when you get back to maintenance or start building again. So all you need at a minimum is two to three sessions per week hitting all major muscle groups with progressive overload. So if you want further numbers than that, I would say try to hit major muscle groups for around 10 sets per muscle group per week. And that could be direct or indirect. That leads to a whole other discussion and many other podcast episodes about training and programming. But heck, going from zero to one a week is itself a massive game changer compared to saying, no, no, I just can't do this and I'm not going to train. You've got to lift weights. All right, number three is monitoring your rate of loss. So the GLP1 drugs, because they suppress your appetite by a lot, like 30 to 40%, it can push you into a very aggressive deficit without even trying. I see it all the time. Clients come in or members come in to eat more lift heavy. And it's ironic because they the eat more in their mind is because they're actually not able to eat more due to the appetite while losing weight. It's a very interesting place to be. And so if your scale is dropping faster than 1% of your body weight per week, you are definitely in that zone where the lean mass loss can accelerate. All right. There's a lot of other variables behind it, like how much weight do you have to lose and how lean are you to begin with, et cetera. But the fix here is just to intentionally eat more, starting with protein. Don't be all excited about this rapid weight loss. Like manage it and get control of it. And this may also let you reduce your dosage of the drug, which I don't know if it's gonna save you money as well, maybe reduce side effects, those kinds of things. Number four is to start early. Now, what do I mean by this? There is a study in 2026, semoline, it was called. It found that lean mass loss was largest in the first three to six months and then it stabilized. And they used hand grip strength and found that it improved. And sarcopenic obesity, so so sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle and function, actually reduced as well. Like there was less of it from 49 to 33 percent. But the loss of lean mass is really front-loaded. So ideally, you're starting your training in protein optimization when you start the medication. But if you haven't, the next best time to start is now, right? That's obviously always the case. Don't use that as an excuse. Then number five is plan ahead for an off ramp. Now, a lot of people aren't doing this. A lot of you taking these drugs, I know it because I talked to you, you're just taking them, you're kind of in the middle, and you're like, all right, I'm just gonna keep taking them. Well, if you plan to eventually stop or want to stop or want to reduce the dose, right? Yeah, many people do, some people don't. And it's okay to experiment and try coming off, seeing what happens, and maybe you do have to go back on. That's fine. The behavioral habits that you build while on the drug, that is the thing, that's the buffer. That's like the insurance policy that will save you later on when you reduce or come off of these. And at a minimum, they'll get rid of some variables that you need to fix anyway, right? Your training and your nutrition, so that you can isolate whatever remains in terms of things like food noise or appetite. So, this would be how do you structure your meal? Do you plan ahead? What are your training habits? Do you get enough protein? All of those things, the things that we teach and eat more live to have exactly those skills. And then for those who are staying on these drugs long term, which is a totally valid option, and some people are probably gonna have to do this. There is now an oral pill for cymagotide that they're starting to study. And I guess it's pretty affordable as well. There's a higher dose injectable somagide, and there are more options now than ever, is what I'm saying. So, meaning you should kind of shop around and always be aware of what's available. Talk to your doctor, of course. This is not me giving you medical advice. This is just be aware of the options as they continue to evolve and change. You might find something that has less side effects or a lower dose or something like that, or it's more convenient to take, et cetera. All right,
Philip Pape: 26:55
last little thing here is I think Daryl asked about safety as well. And this is where I could easily get into the medical side of things too much more than I'm comfortable with. But if you look up, look up the studies, large cohort studies done as recently as 2026, made analysis done as recently as 2025 on thyroid cancer, on pancreatitis, on gastroparesis, on even things like suicidal ideation. There's a lot of mixed data. Generally, it seems like some things are getting overblown. You know, there have been these like what they call like black box warnings that were on and then they were removed from the labels. There's weird conditions like dysesthesia. I don't even know how to pronounce it. It's like an altered skin sensation. So there's all these really weird little side effects and things. And in studies that show some sort of risk increase for like a cancer, oftentimes they're confounded by other things like gallstone formation or the fact that you're losing weight rapidly, all that kind of stuff. So I really don't want to make any claims or even get into that data here today. I'll leave that for more of the medical podcasts. But it's very interesting if you are taking them or thinking about taking them just to be educated on things like side effects and long-term effects, if you're able to tease that out, which is very difficult, I realize.
Philip Pape: 28:12
All right, before we wrap up, remember those three high protein meals that I promised you, each under each under 300 calories, over 35 grams of protein. If you don't have an appetite, I'm gonna share those in just a second. But if you know someone who's currently on a GLP1 med or thinking about starting one or curious about them or talking about them, send them this episode, please. Share this episode. We love to spread the word and get people educated and excited and curious. Text them a link from your app, whatever's the easiest way to do it, because I doubt they're getting a lot of this information from their healthcare professional. I'm just saying, I doubt they are. The odds are low from what I've discovered. And things like protein and training and whatnot, doctors generally are just not talking about those from a prescriptive standpoint because that's not really their job anyway. So text this friend who needs to know, wants to know who you love and want them to know about it. All right, here are some ideas for hitting a lot of protein in a very dense way without having as much volume. So, meal one is take a cup of nonfat Greek yogurt, a scoop of whey protein, handful of berries. I've mentioned this before. This is like the perfect combination of low calorie, it's like 280 calories, 42 grams of protein. And of course, you've got the fiber and the berries, and it tastes great. You could add some cinnamon, add some sweetener in there, you know, either a calorie sweetener, which adds calories, or if you're okay with an artificial sweetener or like a stevia. All right, meal two, let's go with the chicken breast, about four ounces of chicken breast, mixed with a tablespoon of mayo and squeeze a lemon on a bed of spinach. So that's kind of like your chicken salad, if you will. And of course, you could put that on like high fiber wrap or something like that if you want to add more fiber and maybe even a little protein that way. So we're talking 250 to 300 calories and almost 40 grams of protein, super quick and easy, convenient. And you could even use canned chicken. And then meal number three is a protein shake where you've got one and a half to two scoops of whey. You use something like skim milk or almond milk, and some peanut butter powder if you like peanut butter, so you don't get all the extra calories and fat from actual peanut butter. So, again, that is about 290 calories, 43 grams of protein. Just super simple, convenient ideas. Three meals, protein forward, they're low volume. That's the key. They're low volume. They shouldn't make you as full. And you can rotate them through and get your protein. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that the these GLP1 drugs, they definitely can affect your appetite. But regardless of whether you're on them or not, it's the protein and the training and the lifestyle that are really going to make a difference for you in the long term. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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Philip Pape 4/16/26 Philip Pape 4/16/26

Why Lifting Weights 6 Days a Week Won't Help You Lose Fat (Ben Brown) | Ep 460

Exercise physiologist and clinical nutrition expert Ben Brown breaks down why exercise is often a weak tool for weight loss, even when you are lifting weights and doing everything “right.” We unpack metabolic compensation, how stress after 40 changes your results, and why nutrition and fitness habits like protein, recovery, and smarter programming matter more than chasing calorie burn. We also cover GLP-1s, muscle building, hormone health, and how to use cardio strategically for longevity instead of relying on it to build muscle or lose fat.

How much lifting is too much vs. too little? What about cardio? And how hard does your body fight back when you try to out-exercise your diet?

Exercise physiologist and clinical nutrition expert Ben Brown breaks down why exercise is often a weak tool for weight loss, even when you are lifting weights and doing everything “right.”

We unpack metabolic compensation, how stress after 40 changes your results, and why nutrition and fitness habits like protein, recovery, and smarter programming matter more than chasing calorie burn.

We also cover GLP-1s, muscle building, hormone health, and how to use cardio strategically for longevity instead of relying on it to build muscle or lose fat.

Get Fitness Lab (20% off for listeners), the #1 coaching app that adapts to YOUR recovery, YOUR schedule, and YOUR body. Build muscle, lose fat, and get stronger with daily personalized guidance.

Timestamps:
0:00 - Why more exercise backfires
2:14 - What exercise is really for
5:24 - Why calories out misleads
8:38 - How metabolic compensation happens
11:56 - Cardio as a strategic lever
17:34 - Stress after 40 changes everything
24:26 - GLP-1s, weight loss, muscle
32:00 - Tapering GLP-1s and recovery
36:24 - Cardio for longevity and health

Episode resources:

Body Systems Coaching on Instagram: @bodysystemscoaching
30-Day Fat Loss Reset: bodysystems.com/30-day-reset

Why more exercise backfires
Philip Pape 0:00
You're training five, maybe six days a week, showing up to the gym, putting in the work, and yet the scale hasn't budged. So you add more cardio or you push the sessions longer, and somehow you're hungrier, more tired, and still stuck at the same weight. What nobody tells you is your body has a metabolic thermostat, and the harder you push your training, the more aggressively it compensates. Not because something is wrong with you, but because your biology is doing what it evolved to do. Today I'm talking to an exercise physiologist about why exercise is one of the worst tools for fat loss, how your body actively neutralizes extra training before you even leave the gym, and what you should be doing with your workouts instead if you actually want to change your body composition after 40. Welcome to Wits and Weights, where in every episode we put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're gonna put one of the most persistent beliefs in fitness under the microscope. That exercising more will make you lose more fat, lose weight, lose fat, whatever you think it's going to do for you. My guest today is Ben Brown. Ben holds master's degrees in both exercise physiology and clinical nutrition. He's consulted for professional sports teams, including the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Golden State Warriors. He's a professor of kinesiology at Arizona State, and he now runs Body Systems, an online coaching company that has worked with over a thousand clients. He has spent two decades in the exercise science trenches. And now he often tells people they need to train less, not more. Today you are going to learn why your body compensates for increased exercise. It can reduce your calorie burn, it can do other things, and how that compensation sometimes gets worse as you age and why higher quality, focused strength training, among other things, will do more for your body composition than simply training or exercising more. We're also going to get into some of our favorite controversies, including perhaps GLP1 drugs and muscle loss and the nuance behind calories in, calories out. Ben, it's good to see you again and welcome to the show.
Ben Brown 2:14
Thanks for having me, Bud. Great seeing you. Glad to be here.
Philip Pape 2:16
I'm going to ask a very simple but very difficult question here. What is the point of exercise?
Ben Brown 2:23
You know, that is a seemingly simple yet complex question, but I think exercise is necessary for life. I mean, it's part of what contributes to cellular function and metabolic function. And so I would say the point of exercise is to live.
Philip Pape 2:47
Okay, mic drop. Okay, so now let's take it one level deeper. Already the idea that exercise, and we need to define what that is, what type of exercise, or how do we want to define exercise for this discussion?
Ben Brown 3:01
Yeah, again, a really good question. And so, I mean, listen, let's look at physical activity in general. And and I it perhaps it's the classification between overall just physical activity and and just generalized movement, and then exercise as potentially being something that has what could be contributed or uh considered like a higher intensity level. Candidly, like I don't know what how we would necessarily differentiate. And I'm sure we could kind of dig into the literature to get clarity around that, Philip. But at the end of the day, I would say that if we're classifying the two, if we look at just generalized physical activity, that's probably more like activities of daily living and things that we would just do, right? Like walking to and from the house and the car and to work and getting up and getting down and you know, picking up the kids and all of those obligatory things that we need to live versus exercise as being actually something that's intentional, that's strategic, that's in some way, shape, or form structured, right? Around like I am intentionally going out for a walk, or I'm intentionally going to the gym and I'm going to lift weights. And of course, that comes with a different amount of volume and intensity and time. And so exercise in that respect, as we're hashing it out here, I would say comes with some sort of quantification and qualification in terms of the volume load and intensity.
Philip Pape 4:32
That's great. And it also sounds like there are different modes. You you alluded to daily activities and you alluded to intentional structured exercise, which then leads me to think of all the types of fitness or the terms that people use, especially when you, I'm sure working with coaching clients, hear things like mobility, strength, flexibility, athleticism. And there's, you know, it can get overwhelming, it can get confusing. So people think about losing weight and being fit and healthy. They think of things like calories, calories in, calories out. They think of maybe now they're wearable or what the machine is telling them in the gym tells them that they're burning. And there's a lot of misconceptions around that. But where does the math begin here when we start with energy balance, calories in, calories out, and how it links to exercise? And we can set that as a foundation for maybe talking about constrained energy expenditure and all that other fun stuff.
Ben Brown 5:24
Yeah. So we we need to look at it. Um, if I'm understanding the question, is is is basically you're saying what's the difference between or how are we looking at exercise in terms of energy expenditure, right? In terms of expenditure, right? And and so while it is valuable, right, we know when we exercise, we expend calories and there's different forms of exercise, and therefore, and there's different intensity levels, and therefore there's different amounts of expenditure over different periods of time. That's all good and well and valuable. But when we take that model, right, and we take that the physics of caloric expenditure and we apply it to the physics of caloric intake and weight loss, and we all understand, and this is the crux of it, Philip, right, is that we understand the value of calories in, calories out, right? However, when we take that model and we apply to say, well, if I just offset my intake with my output, then theoretically things should come out in the wash. And unfortunately, that's not the way that the human metabolism works for a myriad of reasons.
Philip Pape 6:32
If I burn 400 calories on the treadmill, how much of that shows up as additional expenditure or my metabolism at the end of the day? How does that affect the equation?
Ben Brown 6:42
Yeah, so I think when it comes down to it, it's significantly less than even 50% of what we perceive that caloric expenditure to be. And that's where, you know, the human metabolism functions and the beautiful thing about the human metabolism, right? And so that's the most important component for people to understand when they're undergoing a weight loss program, as an example, of not trying to just leverage physical activity as the prime modality of caloric control. And that's why we always talk about around the value of your intake, not only the amount of food or the amount of calories that you're consuming, but of course the quality of the food and the implications therein, right?
Philip Pape 7:27
Yeah. So you you said something very powerful of not using physical movement as the main lever of calorie control. Very, very important. But just on the calorie out side, right? On the output side, where does that compensation primarily come from?
Ben Brown 7:40
Yeah. So essentially what's happening is we we have these pushback mechanisms at play. It's like, yes, we are earning these calories, but what essentially happens is what's happening the rest of the day, right? And how are our behaviors influenced by virtue of that caloric expenditure? In other words, right, is how does our intake change? How does their physical activity change through the rest of the day? How does our hormonal patterns change? And how do those influence, again, like I said, the amount of caloric expenditure and caloric intake through our daily patterns. So do we end up eating more? Do we end up exercising less? Do we crave more food? Do we experience more hunger? And this seemed to be the primary metabolic mechanisms in terms of how it influences that physical expenditure.
How metabolic compensation happens
Philip Pape 8:38
That's very interesting, you know, listing those things because I know when I first got into this and learned about it, you know, we all subscribe to this additive model, right? The more you move, the more you burn. And then when I started to learn about it, I learned about hormones like you mentioned and cellular compensation. But you mentioned you might move less, you might walk less, you might, you know, exercise less because you exercised, et cetera. Uh, you talked about eating, maybe you eat more, you're hungrier perhaps, or you're eating things that aren't you know serving you as well. And then even what comes to mind to me is things like sleep. You know, I've talked about the impact of cardio on sleep when it's too intense or too much volume. It could reduce your sleep and then lead to a vicious cycle as well. So, should people even consider not exercising a certain way to avoid that? And that's that's ultimately what we're trying to get to is some sort of prescription for living and moving. What are your thoughts there?
Cardio as a strategic lever
Ben Brown 9:29
So here's the deal is you know, mechanistically we can break this down a bunch of different ways, and we could obsess over the X's and O's of well, it says I burned 500, but I only burned 250. And, you know, how does that correlate to this, that, and the other? At the end of the day, it's like I think what most people need to understand, and that's most the biggest takeaway, is like exercise is necessary. Like I said, it's life, man. It's beautiful, it's healthy, it's warranted, we need it. We should be infusing it in some way, shape, or form every single day in multiple different modalities between walking and you know, and strength training and things that we enjoy. So we just need to first and foremost stop thinking about it as offsetting calories. It's valid, but it's not that valid in the grand scheme of things unless we're really in the far reaches of a caloric deficit. And so, you know, when we're having these conversations for people who are maybe hitting plateaus or their significant level of leanness, and we need to use that as a as a switch, right? As a trigger or a lever to kind of really move the needle because we can't get calories a lot lower, sure. But for the vast majority of people that are looking like, I just want to look better, I want to feel better, I want to be healthier, want to have more energy, I want to optimize more hormonal function, great. Like, let's figure out ways for you to exercise every single day. And then beyond that, is like, and now if we're if we're really making a concerted effort to lose body fat, first and foremost, let's figure out what your caloric intake looks like and let's set the precedent that you're going to be training in some capacity, right? Whether we set, you know, say, listen, you're you're going to be getting 8,000 steps a day, you're going to be training three or four days a week. And maybe we won't touch cardio just yet. We'll use that and maybe we'll save that, Philip, as a lever that we apply, right, at some point if and when we need it. Because I think one of the best strategies that we can use over the grand scheme of health and fitness and wellness, especially for fat loss, is to, okay, well, where's the caloric intake need to be to get the needle moving? And then how do we leverage calorie intake and calorie output from exercise? I hope that frames it appropriately.
Philip Pape 11:56
It does. It also creates a priority. So I like to think in terms of pyramids or priorities, you know, what's at the bottom. So then people in their mind, they're like, well, cardio is a tool later. What do you mean by that? Why do we do it that way? Why can't we just be having a high cardio lifestyle? What if I love to do cardio? What if I love, you know, my sports and I love my group classes and all of that? Is this just a stacking approach? Like, what's the purpose of taking that approach, Ben?
Ben Brown 12:20
It's the approach of like just physiologically how the body tends to respond the best. And we talked about the compensatory properties at play. And it's just the way the body works. And there's been research, you know, around the energy constrained model uh by Dr. Herman Ponzer and Hadza tribe in uh Tanzania. And essentially it's suggesting listen, the more we move, it's not the more we burn. The Hadza tribe, they're they're taking 20,000 steps a day or walking up to like 10 miles a day. And when they do, you know, their studies and they have them, you know, doubly labeled water and they look at exactly what they're expending, they're not expending more than that essentially the average American couch potato. And so it begs the question of metabolically, well, what's happening? Because of course they're eating a better diet, they're not consuming nearly as many calories. So, what exactly is happening here? And that's this sort of the way that the metabolism works in terms of keeping us alive, which is fantastic and beautiful, but it's also quite frustrating when you're someone who's like, I love running and I want to go out and run every single day. And it would be awesome if my running and the caloric expenditure that came from running would contribute to me looking fight club shredded. And unfortunately, if you've seen runners in general, like that's just not what happens, right? And so we have to look at the stress on the body. And so we know sort of it's like this this allostatic load, the amount of stress and how it adds up in terms of contributing to the metabolic compensation. So if we if we know, okay, well, more stress, more exercise clearly isn't better, then we have to look at, well, what is the right dose for the person in the situation that they're in? And if you think about human evolution, right, and caloric scarcity and perhaps the way that humans again evolved is like we're not going out of our way to do more physical activity. Like we hunt and we fish and we forage and we did these things that we needed to do. Otherwise, we laid around and we created and we fornicated and we played, right? And we weren't intentionally going out for a run to like to get abs. Like it just, you know, from a human standpoint, it doesn't make sense. And that's the way we have to apply those principles to the body composition and health changes that we're looking for. That's where cardio lines up, especially intense cardio or intense and prolonged cardio, and how it lines up with its prioritization, right, in the hierarchy of fat loss. And that's where it's like calories and strength training and just overall movement and then okay, strategic cardio.
Philip Pape 15:18
Um people have higher appetite, it's probably a normal brain that has a higher appetite because that's what how we evolved in the past, and those people would have survived the most.
Ben Brown 15:26
That's right.
Philip Pape 15:27
And yet it fights back against us. So if anything, they're not, you know, a worse-off uh genetics. They might even have superior genetics, just not for today. So two things come to mind. You mentioned the Hadza Tribe and Ponser and his doubly label water study, and that confuses a lot of folks, not just the compensation piece of it, but when they're thinking of, hey, I'm 45 and perimenopause. I, you know, how could I possibly have the same metabolism if I can't possibly lose weight? And I want to get into that piece. But let's just clarify in that research, I believe when accounted for lean mass, the metabolisms were different. Isn't that the case? Like the more lean mass you had for the same body weight.
Ben Brown 16:05
The more lean mass, the more calories and at rest. Yeah.
Philip Pape 16:09
Yeah.
Ben Brown 16:09
Yeah. I think I think that makes perfect sense. So I so I I think that makes perfect sense. And and I I think there are issues with someone's metabolism when in reality this is the metabolism doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Right. And so your your metabolism quota isn't damaged or broken, and there's nothing wrong with you. And I think actually GLPs are a really good example of how there's actually nothing wrong with your metabolism. You just knowingly or unknowingly were overeating, and we certainly can get into that. But at the end of the day, that's also speaks to you know, the value of lean muscle tissue and the role that it plays in terms of metabolism and function and caloric expenditure and and what have you.
Stress after 40 changes everything
Philip Pape 17:00
Yeah. And so then, you know, to especially like the ladies who are listening, and and you mentioned allostasis or allostatic load. We've used that term here a few times in the past, but just it's kind of the opposite of homeostasis, right? Homeostasis is your body kind of in its safe, regulated pattern, and allostasis is something pulling you away from that, is like I like to think of it. But in say, people in their 40s going through hormonal changes with the lifestyle they have, what is triggering or causing that higher level of allostasis and allostatic load that is then affecting the metabolism?
Ben Brown 17:34
It's such a good question. And it's probably the most relevant thing that people can acknowledge at this stage of life. Um, and it's very much a contributor to why things are different now. They're different in terms of your stressors, your responsibilities, your body weight, your amount of lean muscle tissue, your amount of body fat, which is very pro-inflammatory, your relationships, your social support system, your financial stressors. So your gut health, the environmental toxicity, is that enough allostatic load for you? Right. So, but but that's really important. It's a really important acknowledgement, is we're not 25 with no responsibilities and no kids. We're at a very different stage of life. And with that comes a very different hormonal response, less sleep, more cortisol, which is not a bad thing, right? But it's it's part of how our body functions in terms of stress hormones and the way that all of those contribute to hormonal regulation and blood sugar regulation. And we talked about leptin and ghrelin and brain function and hunger and cravings. Then you take all of that and you compound that, right? You pile all of that on, you say, I'm still an evolutionary brain who thrives off of sugar and salt and fat. And oh, hey, I have all of this food around me that is part of, you know, survival, even though that's not, you know, my main concern from your brain standpoint, it is, especially when you're in a stress response, which we're in 24-7. And this is, you know, it from a 30,000-foot view, this is the major factor at play, you know, for so many of us, that is directly contributing to why we're not responding well in the gym, why more aggressive exercise isn't better, why under eating for an extended period of time isn't serving you. And because of the implications of those things in terms of how it affects your behaviors around alcohol intake, weekend eating, lack of sleep, right? I'm just perpetuating this vicious cycle.
Philip Pape 19:39
Yeah, it's all interrelated. And that maybe is part of the confusion for folks trying to get out of it. So where does someone start thinking about that or prioritizing for themselves, knowing that it's unique, it's a unique thing. It's not everybody, but you as a coach who've coached thousands of people may have seen patterns that emerge time and time and time again. And you could like, you know, hit on the big three that would be most helpful to our listeners.
Ben Brown 20:01
Yeah, well, I think first and foremost, you kind of have to get really clear about what you want and what's holding you back. I had a conversation with a client yesterday. And now she's she's probably about our age. I think she's um early 40s. For her, it very much was like, you know, this is not the trajectory that I see for myself. I'm not happy with what I see in the mirror. I'm not happy with how I feel on a daily basis. And I know that I am in control and I'm the only one who can make these changes. So the first is just the extreme ownership over your situation. It's like, dude, you were in control. It's like if you're unhappy in elements of your life, your social support system, right? Uh the support of your spouse, uh, the way you're showing up, like you have to tackle that.
Philip Pape 20:50
You know, let's sit on that one for uh just a spell. And I think there's that language is is needed, even if it has to be delivered in a compassionate way, right? You're not just gonna say to a new client, yeah, it's all your fault, you're you're you you suck, you need to fix things. It's it's a different type of narrative, but still it's what you're saying. So, what did this client say in her own words to demonstrate that ownership?
Ben Brown 21:11
I think for her, it very much was like, I'm not happy in my skin, I don't feel confident, I don't believe in myself. And for a lot of women, they've been perpetuating this dieting cycle, you know, for their entire life. And it's, you know, their mother was hard on them, and they never had this self-confidence. And so they kept turning to sort of like the weight being the end-all be all of your self-worth. And that's a real deal, man. This is real stuff. So I think once she started to experience the benefits of losing weight, feeling better, looking better, believing in herself more, then it's just the next domino and the next domino. And then it becomes well, we continue to move the goalposts. Like, what's getting in the way of your success? And I think for a lot of people, they Just don't acknowledge. They take the obligatory steps around the X's and O's and say, oh, it's not working for me. But it's not working because you're miserable in other areas of your life and it's contributing directly to the level of stress that's compounding your gut health, your food behaviors and decisions, why you can't quote unquote stick with the diet, all of those things, right?
Philip Pape 22:21
Yeah. And then it sounds like you connected this ownership to awareness, to action, to self-motivation or intrinsic drive, which is the beautiful thing about all of this, because that is the empowerment at the end of the day. Do you find that people who do that are then unlocking a new level of thinking as they go? In other words, there's a level that is a skill base in and of itself, that ability to become more and more aware of certain things that they would never have had a clue about before.
Ben Brown 22:50
I think that that's the most important element of this journey is developing the skill to be able to do that. Right. I think it's developing the skill to constantly be assessing your circumstances and putting yourself in the best possible position to make a better decision. Right. It's it's this just level of forethought that becomes present as you start to go down this road of like what comes next and what comes next, and how am I navigating these circumstances and situations? Right. And that's the the attribute of someone who is changing their identity and genuinely is going to be quote unquote successful, whatever that looks like, because we know that this is one long perpetual journey. You know, we're all dealing it, we're all in different, different layers and and uh places along the road.
Philip Pape 23:46
Yeah, it strikes me as a far more useful skill than just the losing weight or whatever short-term outcome you might have been going after in the first place, because it unlocks any outcome.
Ben Brown 23:56
Yeah, any outcome. And that's what's cool is like that's where we talk about how it permeates over into every area. Because then it's like you start to think differently in business. You start to think differently in terms of the conversations with your kids and how you're teaching your kids to be owners and make better decisions. And it translates into who am I surrounding myself with and what are the types of conversations that we have and what do they do and what are their behaviors relative to what I want to be in my values? And is it something that's worth investing time and energy into?
Philip Pape 24:26
So we well over half of our audiences are right now talking about one of the most powerful tools in the industry, and that is the GLP1 drugs. This is a totally natural segue here, Ben. 100% because it is a something that clearly works physiologically for weight loss, if that's what people are trying to achieve with it. It also seems to impact lots of other things, definitely the brain-related genes, for some people, addiction mechanisms and other things uh related to the liver and metabolism that we're not even quite understanding yet. Given all of that, given that it is a tool or is it a tool versus, you know, some might argue it's something else, where do GLP wands fit into this? Because I would say that that's like an extreme version of any other type of tool that shortcuts the process for better or worse, like say, taking anabolic steroids or like many, many other tools that I'm not saying are right or wrong. If it's right for you and you choose to do it and it's part of the process, but you did a whole episode about this called, you know, why GLPs work until they don't. So I know you have a lot of thoughts on it.
Ben Brown 25:27
I do have a lot of thoughts. And I have a lot of thoughts in terms of, you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly, right? In terms of I've interviewed experts, I have clients who are using them, I have clients who have used them and come off of them. And I think that there's certainly a time and a place. What's most important is that people are informed about and again, just along the line of ownership and take responsibility over the outcomes of utilizing these drugs. And experts who are leveraging GLPs, just not at like clinical doses. So there's a lot of conversation around like microdosing GLPs as being best practices, right? And the reason being that these GLP drugs at clinical doses are completely sabotaging our hunger signals, our you know, the the leptin, the ghrelin, the hormonal signals. And to what end is that potentially uh detrimental around, yeah, around just one, the delayed gastric emptying, never being hungry, and in terms of the role that hunger plays in a healthy diet, right? In a healthy eating environment, in terms of planning and preparation and portion control. It's like you can't do it without acknowledging levels of hunger and cravings and all of those things. And so my one of my big concerns is around what happens when people come off the drugs. We're seeing from the research that there's significant weight gain within the first several months, but the vast majority of weight coming back within 18 months of people coming off of these drugs. And if you consider that a lot of people using these drugs are not strength training and they're not eating enough protein. And so they're likely losing a significant portion of lean muscle tissue along the way. And we know that muscle tissue is a metabolically active and beneficial organ, right? And it's very anti-inflammatory in nature. Uh, and so by losing lean muscle tissue, we're putting ourselves in a very uh metabolically disadvantageous position, to say nothing of what happens when we gain all of that weight back, but as body fat, you know, then it's we've got significantly more pro-inflammatory tissue. So if we can acknowledge that, then you know, what is the question around, well, what is actually effective dosing? If we do just more like uh micro dosing, and it's just skimming the surface of like the metabolic benefits, the hunger benefits, the food noise benefits, the motivational benefits to help you make better decisions, then perhaps is that better? I can't say yes or no, but I do think it's a very important part of the conversation to say it doesn't have to be all or nothing, but perhaps there is a effective dose for the person depending on what they're trying to do.
Philip Pape 28:33
Yeah, you hit on the big points, right? And there's no right or wrong answer, and there's a lot of there's ethics, morality, there's choice involved. The long-term implications might be the biggest unknown or red flag in that as a short-term tool, sure, it works. And then at what dose does it make sense? But when you talked about sabotaging your hormones, maybe we can get into what you mean by that, because I've looked into it too. Like they downregulate your hormones because they're replacing them, right? They're synthetically replacing those hormones. When you come off of it, they come back. Is it no different than then fighting through a deficit and constantly being hungry? And then when you come back and you crave food and you body fat overshoot, or is it more exacerbated because there's like almost a huge rebound effect?
Ben Brown 29:18
That's what I wonder. Right. Honestly, I mean, that that's that's what I'm wondering, and that's what I'm concerned about. Is since we talk about the compensatory effects of exercise, I think it's very much the same thing of like when you quelling this food noise and this hunger by virtue of delayed gastric empty and right for an extended period of time, what is the body trying to do, right? From a brain standpoint, it's like, hey, we want to survive and we've been losing a considerable amount of weight, right? And we have this kind of proverbial set point. And so when you come off, the body wants to do everything it possibly can. And we listen, why is it different than what we see with the biggest loser studies, right? In terms of how quickly these people gain the weight back once they stop white knuckling it. And to their credit, they did all of this stuff without the GLPs, right? But again, why is it any difference once we we stop the you know hormonal disabling, if you will? That's my biggest concern, man. And so if you're using it now and you're seeing benefits, this is your best opportunity. You still have to reinforce all of the foundational principles around physical activity and strength training and resistance training and supporting lean muscle tissue and eating enough protein and right, but even with that, are you eating enough to maintain all of that? Like these are real questions that I think we have to be very objective about. And you should be working with your clinician to be observing lean muscle tissue and doing DEXA scans and actually right taking ownership and responsibility over how are things moving, how much am I consuming? And if I were to come off of this tomorrow, how reasonable would it be for me to continue consuming a thousand, twelve hundred, fifteen hundred calories, eight hundred, whatever it is, probably, you know, would it, wouldn't it? I don't know. But it's what we're seeing that there's a reason people are gaining the weight back.
Tapering GLP-1s and recovery
Philip Pape 31:17
Yeah, is worth thinking about if you listen to our podcasts and are wondering about it. And like you, I've had clients tell me they're gonna start or they want to come off or they want to keep doing it. The question I have for you is with your clients seeing this now, do you have a standard um titration protocol you've seen work? You don't, this is not medical advice here, but like uh you mentioned appetite, you know, I found that people at GeoPo ones or church epidite, all of a sudden they're eating too little. They're like, I can't eat as much as you're telling me, Philip. Like, well, maybe it's time to come down on the dose, talk to your doctor. That's great, right? What is your like titration ramp? Do you get people to come like into maintenance uh as they're doing this or even into a bulk uh to naturally kind of offset it? Like what are your thoughts there?
Ben Brown 32:00
So what we're working on with clients that are on it andor coming off of it is essentially again, least effective dose is uh we'll work with their clinicians to one, start titrating down. So if they're coming in at high doses of you know, trzepatide is a good example, then it simply becomes all right, can you go down in dose andor can you extend the existing dose, right? So if they're on like 10 milligrams per week of uh trzepatide, and maybe you know the doctor's not ready to take them down, or you know, they're committed to that 10 milligram dose or whatever, then it's like can you extend it out for a period of time? So we can start to observe what's happening with hunger and satiety in the later stages of the week, right? And we can start to understand and observe those feelings and appreciate and start to acknowledge and get comfortable with those and what those are like, and then start to titrate on uh on dosing, titrate down. But essentially the the objective, my objective for what it's worth is to get people on the lowest possible dosage while being able to effectively control for calories. And then at the same time, yes, like you said, is okay, but are they where they want to be from a weight and body composition standpoint? And the crux of that, as you as you're well aware, is like, hey, if they're undereating, we're gonna have a really hard time maintaining, if not improving, lean muscle tissue. So how do we get them starting to build up their calorie intake? This is essentially just working up to maintenance, right? How can we get them as close to maintenance as we possibly can while still seeing, you know, some body recompositioning going on? And it's really just playing that game. But with that, is we are seeing some nice changes in terms of continued body composition changes and lean muscle tissue, especially as they train the right way and as they start eating enough.
Philip Pape 33:52
That makes sense. And it also makes sense that the population of people would want to bulk and that that population would by definition be small, given that they were on the GLP1s in the first place to drop weight. And I only ask, is that, you know, oddly enough, the men in my group tend to be experienced lifters with a lot of muscle, like two different populations for the men versus women. And some of them, you know, they used it to kind of get rid of that excess belly fat, that stressed fat that they couldn't, they just had trouble with. And that, and then they're at a point where, you know, they're they're ready to build back. There is one of the little pop corner case that I've noticed, and that is, at least for men, kind of the the super stressful guys, uh, the executives or the guys with the jobs who with the business who like because of the stress, their metabolism is so suppressed, and yet they want to lose weight. So then they go on these drugs, even if they are lifting weights, and it's kind of put you in that window of, man, they're eating like 1200 calories or something. You know what I'm talking about.
Ben Brown 34:49
I do. It's such a great observation. Um, and it's really challenging. You know, this is where I think it really speaks to like, okay, well, what are the stressors at play? How do we control for those as much as possible? And, you know, how do we wean you out of this metabolic dumpster fire, for lack of a better term? That you're that's the scientific term, by the way, uh, that you are currently in by virtue of making sure you're eating enough of the right things. So making sure you're getting a nutrient-dense diet, you're getting enough vitamins and minerals, making sure you're getting enough protein, making sure you're managing your blood sugar levels. This also tends to lend itself to hormonal disruption. And so we definitely do want to look at blood sugar. We want to look at lipid profile, we want to look at sex hormones like testosterone and free testosterone and sex hormone binding globulin and make sure that those are actually being optimized for. Of course, you know, sleep comes into play here. And my experience is that by really starting to shift the focus around those things, then we can start to kind of build back better, if you will. But it's a challenging milieu of stress and pressure and type A personalities and all of the things that go with that.
Cardio for longevity and health
Philip Pape 36:06
Yeah. And you know what came to mind is the your comment earlier about acknowledging the problem and the aware, having awareness of it and maybe having to make some hard decisions in your life, like quitting the job or changing your job or like some massive uh decision in your life. Maybe it's not, maybe it's not. But um a metabolic dumpster fire. Yeah.
Ben Brown 36:24
Like you said, there's absolutely zero judgment. I don't think if you're having a hard time going down this road and you're doing your diligence, and this is something that you feel like is going to be, you know, a positive contributor to the change that you say you want to make, like, why wouldn't you go down that? And to be devil's advocate for GLPs, right, is that the environment that we are in now is very different than humans have ever been in, right? And with the what we're exposed to, the light, the stress, the lack of sleep, the environmental toxicity, physiologically and metabolically, it is very different from what we're meant to thrive in. And if you take that into consideration, then I don't think it's unwarranted to have the candid conversations around how medical intervention can help with this process because there's a lot of people that can't control that food noise, that have unsubstantiated um levels of leptin and insulin dysregulation despite their best efforts, right? And it's not to say you can ever forego the foundational principles that will always reign supreme, but listen, it doesn't have to be one or the other. And the two can absolutely coincide.
Philip Pape 37:43
To end on a positive note, you know, people ultimately want to have a lifestyle that is enjoyable. They want to do this for the rest of their life. You know, when we talk about the S-word sustainability, let's say they've now gone through this process to an extent. They're lifting weights, they are uh finding that minimum effective dose for all the things, not just, you know, uh pharmaceuticals or their schedule or their stress, but also their training, doing what you said, and that is kind of dialing back first and then seeing where you are using things strategically like cardio. Where does the long-term thinking here on not fat loss, not short-term, not weight loss or body composition, but maybe specifically, where does cardio fit into that? If it does, what is a longevity-based lifestyle look like, in your opinion?
Ben Brown 38:29
Oh no, I think absolutely cardio fits into the equation fundamentally in terms of how it influences blood vessel health and aerobic fitness and the role, right, the how important that is in terms of longevity and health. So let's not suggest for a moment that cardio is not important for health and longevity. I'm simply right, cardio oftentimes is sort of questionable with respect to the fat loss process. But in terms of health and longevity, right, this is, you know, we absolutely want to be getting, you know, moderate to intense physical activity every single day, you know, three to five days a week, if not every single day in some way, shape, or form, and figuring out the ways that work best for us. And so that's where we can get a massive benefit in terms of health, terms of blood work, in terms of blood pressure, uh, by ramping up just our cardiovascular fitness. In fact, for you know, some of the guys that I start working with, that's the first place that we start is just adding in some structured, whether it's zone two cardio, whether it's zone three, depending on the time that they have and what we would be paying attention to, obviously, is objectively, like what's happening on scale, but more importantly, like what's happening with blood pressure, with blood sugar numbers, with lipid numbers. And then subjectively, we see massive changes in terms of energy, uh, recovery, sleep quality, uh, brain cognitive function, emotional well-being. And I think that's what people need to be to looking for and leveraging in their health and fitness and exercise journey is like what is the combination that works for them? But are we basing that on not just what feels good, right? And not just what fits within their schedule, but also challenging them to objectively look at the parameters around uh biometric markers, right? Blood work, blood pressure, uh weight, even if it's like VO2 Max, can we make a concerted effort to improve VO2 Max? Like all those things are very valuable for longevity.
Philip Pape 40:38
And that's what this nuance is all about. The right combination that works for you. I think that's well said the right combination that works for you. Uh, let's figure it out together, guys. I want you to follow Ben on his podcast, The Smart Nutrition Made Simple Show, because he's got fantastic episodes. I'd say one of the most aligned guests we've had on the show in terms of the nutrition science. So love your stuff. Is there anything we didn't cover you wished we did cover before we start talking about where people can find you?
Ben Brown 41:04
No, man. It's just uh always, you know, great conversation. We're gonna have to do it again. I appreciate the way that you approach health and fitness. I appreciate the level of education and science and rigor that you apply to your guests and the questions that you ask and the information that you provide. So it really is a pleasure and I'm honored to be here.
Philip Pape 41:23
Likewise, man. And it's always good to have someone with a great mic and a good voice to come on and go back and forth with and chat, you know, maybe next time we'll we'll get more controversial and even challenge each other in some way if we can't. Uh, but I think we agree on most things. So um with that, I know you've got a lot of things going on. Um, what's the next best step we can send listeners to? You know, we'll throw your Instagram and contact information, but like uh, do we have a webinar or resource we want to include?
Ben Brown 41:50
Yeah, so uh we we certainly will have uh some upcoming webinars. Um that's something I'm focusing more on this year. So make sure you follow my social media at Body Systems Coaching on Instagram. And then I've got a couple good resources that perhaps your your audience would be interested in. And you can find those on our Instagram as well, specifically like a 30-day fat loss reset that I put together that applies some of these foundational principles, but it also assesses kind of like the mindset aspect of like what do we strategically want to get done? And how do we start to move the needle without having to or feeling like we need to adhere to just like only eat this, exclude all of this stuff, start killing yourself in the gym. It's a very modest and realistic but effective way of crushing your first 30 days to fat loss.
Philip Pape 42:42
All right. So go to Instagram, Body Systems Coaching. We're gonna throw that in the show notes, and from there you can go to the um you can throw it in there.
Ben Brown 42:51
It's body systems.com slash 30-day dash reset. Yeah, appreciate it.
Philip Pape 42:56
All right, man. We'll throw the 30 day reset in there. And thanks again, Ben, for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us. It's a blast. We'll definitely have to do it again and stay in touch.
Ben Brown 43:04
Pleasure, my friend.

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Philip Pape 4/14/26 Philip Pape 4/14/26

Lifting Weights Builds Flexibility Better Than Stretching (New Research) | Ep 459

Do you need yoga, stretching, or "mobility work" to stay flexible. Does lifting weights make you "stiff" or does it improve flexibility?We examine 3 recent studies that compared resistance training to stretching for flexibility, and their findings challenge everything most people assume about lifting weights and mobility.

Do you need yoga, stretching, or "mobility work" to stay flexible. Does lifting weights make you "stiff" or does it improve flexibility?

We examine 3 recent studies that compared resistance training to stretching for flexibility, and their findings challenge everything most people assume about lifting weights and mobility.

Philip covers the "lifting makes you stiff" myth and a training approach that builds flexibility and strength at the same time.

If you're over 40 and worried about losing range of motion, this one's for you. Stay for the bonus 60-second squat test at the end.

Upgrade your sleep to match your training with Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth's bamboo-derived sheets regulate temperature so you stay comfortable all night. 100-night sleep trial, 10-year warranty. Use code WITSANDWEIGHTS at witsandweights.com/cozyearth for up to 20% off.

Timestamps

0:00 - Lifting weights and flexibility
1:10 - Strength training and mobility after 40
3:00 - Partial range of motion and stiffness
6:12 - 3 recent studies on strength training vs. stretching
8:30 - Bodyweight exercises and flexibility
10:22 - Eccentric training and range of motion
12:38 - 2025 Delphi consensus on stretching
13:31 - The best way to improve recovery
14:49 - Full ROM on compound lifts
16:30 - Exercises that load muscles at long lengths
18:00 - Load intensity and flexibility gains
19:30 - Exercise substitutions for flexibility
21:00 - Olympic weightlifters and mobility
22:34 - Bonus: 60-second squat flexibility test\

Philip Pape: 00:00
If you've ever spent 15 minutes foam rolling and stretching before a workout because you think lifting weights makes you tight, I have some news. Three separate meta-analyses, the most recent from 2025, all found the same thing. Full range of motion strength training produces the same flexibility gains as dedicated stretching. And one type of training, the eccentric or the lowering phase, actually produced bigger improvements than stretching alone. Today I'm covering exactly why the lifting makes you stiff myth exists, what the research says about how your muscles get more flexible under load, and the specific exercises and training approach that build strength and flexibility at the same time. Plus, stick around to the end because I'm going to walk you through a 60-second squat test that tells you exactly where your flexibility stands and how to start building full-depth squats from wherever you are right now. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and this episode is for anyone who's ever avoided lifting weights because they're worried about getting stiff or having more flexibility first, or who spends a chunk of their training time on dedicated mobility work because they assume their strength training maybe is working against their flexibility, or they can't even do it until they're flexible enough. All of those things apply. Maybe you're a little bit on the older side. By older, I mean over 40, and that's me. And you've noticed that your range of motion isn't what it used to be. And someone said, hey, you got to do yoga or you've got to do Pilates or some elaborate stretching machine. And, you know, no judgment. Those things are fine. I have nothing against them. Maybe some things against them, depending on the claim. But the research on this topic has actually gotten more clear in the last few years. And it tells a really good story that I've been talking about for a while, but it's nice to have the evidence to back it up. So you're gonna learn three things today. First, why the belief that lifting weights makes you stiff is based on a specific training mistake, not on what lifting does to your muscles. Second, what three separate meta-analysis have found when they compared strength training to stretching for flexibility, and why the numbers they found are actually quite convincing. And third, the specific way to program your lifts so your training sessions build flexibility and strength simultaneously, and you don't have to do any extra stretching. Now, isn't that nice? And remember, at the very end, I'm sharing that 60-second squat test I mentioned in the teaser. A simple weight that you can figure out where your flexibility is right now and how to progress to build it, even if you can barely get to parallel right now. All right, let's get into it and talk about this myth, which you may or may not hold, but it's gonna lead to the other topics we're covering today.
Philip Pape: 03:00
And it goes like this lifting weights makes you tight and bulky. If you want to stay flexible, you need insert method here yoga, stretching, dedicated mobility work. Or in some cases, you know, you can't even lift weights until you get flexible enough. And this is one of those beliefs that it feels like it has a lot of truth because, you know, you see these, if you see ever seen a very muscled bodybuilder who can like who has trouble scratching their own back, you know, somebody who's jacked in the gym, can bench multiple plates, but can't touch your toes or get into a deep squat or whatever, which I don't even, I don't even think that archetype exists as much as we say it does. But if it did, you know, the conclusion is, oh, lifting did this to him, right? Lifting made him stiff. The solution has to be something other than lifting. Because if you lift weights, if you're just a bodybuilder, if you just do single plane of motion lifting, if you just focus on strength or powerlifting, whatever, you're not gonna have the flexibility. But that concluding that is a leap of logic. It is skipping the question, hey, how was that person lifting? Because here's what I have noticed in that the people that look or act like that, they might have they might have some muscles like show muscles, but they might also they're probably training partial ranges of motion, like quarter squats, like half half-rep benches, you know, curls where they're just cheating and the elbow never extends, or leg presses that never break, you know, past 90 degrees, and and loading muscles to the shortened positions and never working under tension or under long lengths, you know, under full range of motion. And this actually matters because the stimulus that improves flexibility, the thing that actually makes a muscle a little bit longer, more extensible over time is tension at long muscle lengths. Now, I'm not saying just go out and do long length partials. There's plenty of research that backs up that you, you know, having full range of motion, so you cover the short and long length is probably the best move here. But the stretched position, the bottom of a squat, the bottom of a Romanian deadlift where your hamstrings are loaded at their longest, or the overhead position of like a tricep extension, when you train through a full range of motion, you are stretching the muscle under load on every single rep. And that's really important. So people who, for example, get stiff from lifting are probably getting stiff from not going through the full range of motion and avoiding the positions that would maintain or improve their flexibility. And the whole stiff thing, that's just one stand-in for any number of lack of flexibility issues that you might see in someone who otherwise maybe looks a little bit healthier fit. So if you like analogies, I want you to think of it this way: if you get like a door hinge and it never opens past 45 degrees, it just kind of opens part way, partway, partway, partway. It often will get stuck or it'll rust in place and it'll never get past that point. Not because the hinge itself is broken, but because it hasn't been using used through its full range. I don't know if that analogy is helpful. It's what came to mind, but your joints kind of work like that. If you use the range, you keep it. If you don't use the range, you lose it. It's an adaptation. It's an adaptation. So I don't want to just make this me going off on a diatribe.
Philip Pape: 06:12
I want to look at the research. Okay. So I mentioned three separate meta-analyses that have compared resistance training to stretching specifically for flexibility outcomes. And I want to walk through each one just real quickly because I think they build on each other and together paint a really clear picture of what we're talking about. The first is Afonso and colleagues. This is 2021. This is 11 randomized controlled trials with 452 participants comparing strength training to stretching for range of motion improvements. And the result was there was no difference, no statistically significant difference. The effect size was negative, 0.22, which slightly favored stretching, but it wasn't significant. The p-value was 0.206. And there was a subgroup analysis that showed no differences whether they measured active or passive range of motion, whether they looked at hip flexion or knee extension, whether the studies were high or low risk of bias. They all came back the same. Basically, the two were equivalent for flexibility. Now that was a small study, again, 11 studies, 452 people. So we have a bigger study published in sports medicine in 2023 by Aliziday and colleagues. And this is a larger one. 55 studies, over 2,700 participants, and they asked three questions for the study. First, does resistance training improve range of motion compared to doing nothing? Yes, no surprise. There was actually a pretty highly significant moderate effect size, 0.73. Second, does resistance training match stretching? Essentially, yes. The effect size of 0.08 compared the two, p-value of 0.79, no meaningful difference. So in other words, they were about the same stretching and resistance training. Third, does adding stretching on top of resistance training improve flexibility further? No. Effect size was negative 0.001. So if you're already training through full range of motion, adding a stretching program on top of that gives you exactly or approximately zero additional flexibility benefit. There was a very big effect size, it was 1.042. Trained individuals or active individuals still improved a little bit, but it was smaller, around 0.43. So if you've been sedentary, if you start lifting through full ranges of motion, you're gonna have huge gains in flexibility. And if you already train, you're gonna have some moderate gains in flexibility. They also found that bodyweight exercises did not significantly improve range of motion. Only exercises with external load, free weights, machines, resistance bands produced significant improvements, which tells us that yes, load does matter. You need actual resistance pushing you into those end range positions. So that's the second study. The third one, the most recent meta-analysis, was by Favreau and colleagues. It was in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research just last year, 2025. 36 studies, nearly 1,500 participants, and they confirmed the overall finding we've been talking about that resistance training significantly improves flexibility, and they had a medium to large effect size of 0.63 compared to the control group. But they also found something new, and that is related to intensity. That intensity is important. High intensity resistance training produced a significant effect size of 0.75. Low intensity training was only 0.28 and not statistically significant. So that tells us it's not just about going through the range of motion. You also need meaningful load through that range of motion. And by the way, when we talk about intensity, we're talking about load. We're not talking about like sweating or endurance or something like that. All right, now let's
Philip Pape: 10:22
get a little bit more specific because there is a separate body of research on eccentric training. That is the lowering phase of a lift. And when you look at that compared to flexibility, okay, so there's a study by Kay and colleagues, or not a study, but a meta-analysis. I love meta-analysis because they take, they take many, many studies and look at them to give even higher quality findings. And this was in medicine and science and sports and exercise from 2023, and it was 17 studies, 376 participants. They looked at eccentric resistance training and lower limb range of motion, lower limb meaning your legs. The overall effect size was large at 0.86, 86. For ankle dorsiflexion specifically, the effect size was really large, 1.12. Okay, and again, that's compared to that's showing that they improve flexibility. Then there was a systematic review by Vetter and colleagues in 2022 that also found a centric eccentric training improved range of motion by 9% on average. But concentric only training, which is just the lifting phase without controlling the lowering phase, produced no measurable change in range of motion. So the eccentric phase, which is the controlled lowering, where the muscle is lengthened under tension, is the primary driver of the flexibility improvements from resistance training. Right. And this actually makes mechanical sense if you just put a put on your engineering hat. When you lower a weight through a full range of motion, what are you doing? You are stretching that muscle while applying that force, that load. Right. And that is the same stimulus that a static stretch would provide, except you're also getting the strength and hypertrophy benefits under load at the same time. Pretty cool, right? Now the research community issued a consensus statement. This is 2025 Delphi consensus statement. It's from 20 leading stretching researchers across 12 countries. And they said, hey, full range of motion resistance training produces flexibility gains, quote, at least a similar degree, end quote, to stretching, especially when the eccentric phase is emphasized. And they concluded
Philip Pape: 12:38
that, okay, if you're a healthy adult, the choice of method for improving range of motion, quote, can be left to individual preference. So that's pretty cool to see a verbalized scientific consensus that resistance training improves flexibility. So I walked you through the research on how eccentric loading, that controlled lowering phase, drives flexibility adaptations. And then those adaptations, like the fascicle lengthening, the tissue remodeling, to get nerdy about it. It all happens when? That those adaptations happen when? Come on, during recovery, right? During recovery, specifically during sleep. Your muscles are not going to rebuild while you're in the gym. They're going to rebuild when you're resting, which means the quality of your sleep directly affects how well your body responds to training. So here we have another natural, totally unscripted, just kidding, segue
Philip Pape: 13:31
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Philip Pape: 14:49
All right, if you understand the mechanism, you don't have to have a separate flexibility or stretching program. All you have to do is train through full range of motion with meaningful load, emphasize the eccentric phase of your lifts. And some of you are thinking, wait a minute, the eccentric phase, now we're getting into that funky stuff. Does that mean we have to use negatives? Is that no, you're gonna find out that what we're doing here is not different than what I've recommended in the past to begin with, which is great. Great. You don't have to learn anything new, okay? Let me give you the specific principles and then the exercises. So principle one is full range of motion on compound lifts. If you haven't been doing this, do this. If you're an advanced lifter, there's definitely places where you wouldn't use full range of motion. But this is the principle for getting into the full range, both the eccentric and concentric, and also the lengthened and shortened positions. So this means getting your squat below parallel, not a quarter squat, not too parallel, below parallel means the hip crease below the patella, means your butt below your knee. It means if you're doing a Romanian deadlift, you need to have a genuine stretch of your hamstrings at the bottom, which if you're, again, flexible already, could be taking the bar all the way to the ground, or if you're uber flexible, could be standing up on a block or pads so that you can go even further. It means with your overhead press, they're gonna start from your shoulders, not your chin, right? You're gonna come down. It means rows and pull-ups that reach full arm extension at the bottom, right? Not just coming part way. If you are cutting range short on these movements, then you're just leaving the flexibility on the table. So if you complain about flexibility to me and say, like, I need flexibility because I need a lift, I'm gonna say, are your lifts already in full range of motion? Or you know, yeah, the full range. Principle number two is to include exercises that load your muscles at their longest position. So this is where selection gets a little bit strategic. So for biceps, an incline curl, for example, is fantastic because you're at an incline. So when you open up your arm down to the bottom lower position, you're gonna go even wider in terms of a length, a longer length. So for triceps, an equivalent would be an overhead extension, is one of my favorite moves. If you had to do one thing, I would do an overhead extension. That could be with cable, with an easy curl bar, uh, with dumbbell, it doesn't matter, just do it overhead. Um, hamstrings, we've got the Romanian deadlift or a stiff leg death deadlift, you know, from a deficit that'll put your legs under a much greater stretch than, say, a leg curl. Calves, I mean, even the body, even the show muscles and the bodybuilding stuff, standing calf raises from a step where your heel drops way below platform level, where you could stretch at the bottom and load the what they call the gastrosinemius at the long position, any of these exercises will double as both strength and a loaded stretch. And for much of what you're doing, there's an opportunity to do this anyway. But sometimes you have to pick exercises that really maximize it. Principle number three is to control the eccentric. Now, this is the one where I'm going to, I'm not gonna get weird. Okay. So remember we talked about eccentric training that that helps with the improve, it improves your range of motion, having the eccentric in there. Now, by definition, you're gonna have the eccentric in there, but what you don't want to do is just drop the weight or bounce out of the bottom position. And this is important because you know, when I learned the low bar back squat, I learned to use a stretch reflex at the bottom, which is super helpful. And there are benefits to that for sure. And you don't have to pause. I will say, however, adding in a pause could be beneficial, especially if you're trying to get this extra flexibility stimulus, but even just doing it in a controlled fashion. So if you're gonna squat down, you squat down and you bounce out of the bottom, but it's not like a big shock bounce. It's not like a CrossFit thing. You know, it's not like you're banging out the reps. It's still very controlled. And I would say on the way down, you know, a two-second, up to three second lowering phase is fine. You don't have to actually extend it further. We're not talking about time under tension. We're simply talking about the flexibility piece of loading into the full range of motion. So just doing it under control is really important. And then, of course, as always, explode into the concentric. That's a different topic, but it's an important thing to do. Principle number four is you gotta train with real load. You've gotta train with real load, right? Doing stuff at body weight or high reps and never going up in weight, never having load, especially if you're doing partial ranges to begin with, right? But even if you're doing it full range of motion, you're gonna quickly tap out on the benefits until you increase with load. Well, guess what? If you're applying progressive overload, you're gonna do that anyway. You're gonna have to increase the load anyway, right? We're not talking about maxing out and grinding. I'm talking about getting close to failure like you normally would for mechanical tension. Well, the same principle applies here. So you see how it all naturally works together if you're lifting the right weight anyway. So I want to give you a couple substitutions that might help with flexibility while you're building strength. So let's say you're doing leg presses and for whatever reason you're getting limited depth, you could swap in goblet squats or front squats, where they often make it easier to go super deep and then progressively work deeper and then translate that over to something like a leg press. All right. And I I only say this because I know some people have different hip limitations when they start doing some of these exercises. So it's it's a matter of not having an excuse, but rather building that range of motion in an as natural way as possible. It might be bench, it might be belt squats, might be hack squats, but you get my idea. If you're doing something like leg curls, like these isolation movements, I would go to a compound lift like a Romanian deadlift. RDLs are great for hamstrings, let me tell you. They're so good. Also, good mornings. Good mornings can be a little tricky though on the upper body if you're not used to them. So Romanian deadlifts can be loaded super heavy without, you know, with a pretty good form for most people. If you're doing, say, press downs for your triceps, right? Very popular, fun thing to do is take cable press downs and add in or replace them with overhead dumbbell extensions or overhead cable or easy bar extensions. And then if you're doing regular barbell curls, which I do love barbell curls, and I would say when you get to the bottom, stretch them out and wait a second and come back up. Don't just bounce out of the bottom. But inclined dumbbell curls, let me tell you, are awesome. Kind of related to that would be preacher curls or spider curls, either two-handed or even one-handed on the back of an inclined bench where you can really get that angle of the stretch, that long, like that length of position. And then I mentioned the calf phrases before where you really should be up on a step so you can get a stretch at the bottom. It's not the concentric where you're pushing up that's as important as the bottom stretch. So you don't have to overhaul your entire program, just do a couple swaps. I'm I'm a big fan of swaps no matter what. Even when I follow a program that's somebody else's or my coach's, unless it's fully custom, I'm always going to be making swaps anyway, just for different things. I'll add a slingshot over here, a block over here. Thanks, Tony. Shout out to you. I'll do a, you know, I'll do a what am I trying to say here? A different angle, a different variation, a machine versus a dumbbell, whatever. You know, and and just one quick side tangent. If you think about Olympic weightlifting, the snatch. The clean in jerk, these guys are really strong, but they're also really flexible. And they didn't do it through stretching, they did it through the lifts themselves, right? And they're they're putting themselves under load, full range of motion, all the time. There was actually a study in 2022 of master's weightlifters. So this is age 35 to 76, that found that their shoulder range of motion exceeded the general population and functional capacity was greater than age match people who don't lift, but only 5 to 20% of them supplemented with something like yogurt Pilates. So meaning you lift weights, you get
Philip Pape: 22:34
more flexible. All right, as promised, here is a quick test to find out if your squat depth is limited by flexibility, by your motor control, or by something else. I want you to find a box or a bench or a sturdy chair that is about knee height. So not like a tall, what do you call it, stool or something like that, but a short, firm surface about knee height. I want you to stand in front of it with your feet roughly shoulder width apart, knees pointed slightly out. Now sit down to the box slowly, take about three seconds to lower yourself all the way to the box, and then stand back up. If you can do that with your heels flat and your chest up, then your flexibility is not the problem. You have the range of motion. You have it. You just have to start loading it. Okay. And this is problem one that with most people, if I say, can you sit down to a box and get back up? And you can, you're good. You have the range. Now, if your heels pop up or your chest collapses forward or something like that, maybe you have a little bit of an issue with your ankles or hips. You can, you can what you can do is put a rolled towel or a plate, you know, a small like five-pound or 10-pound plate under your heels and try it again. And if you're able to do it, then okay, maybe there's something with your ankles we have to look at, which again is typically resolved just through the squatting itself. But a lot of people have just, you know, poor ankles for a variety of reasons. And and one way to strengthen them is work on calf raises from a deficit or do goblet squats with your heels elevated until you build a range to go flat. You know, I when I started squatting, I was able to squat in, I'll call them normal flat shoes and you know, weightlifter shoes with a heel, but it was a little bit tough for me to do it barefoot, which was an indicator that, you know, I had a little bit of a lack of flexibility, but it very quickly resolved itself just by squatting. Now, once you can sit to the box comfortably, guess what you do? Lower the box height. So this is where if you have a stack of plates or something like that, or if you're lucky enough to you have a plyometric box that's just really low, like 12 inches, but some way to drop it, heck, even if it's big, thick books that you've got to stack up. And you're gonna drop it. And the idea is you want to eventually be able to sit to a low box at about 12 inches, 12 to 14 inches, where you're doing it under control, your feet are flat. That demonstrates you do have the range of motion for a proper deep squat. Again, a lot of you can just already do this. And from there, you have to load it. So you can load it in front with like a dumbbell or kettlebell at your at your chest, like goblet style, and then start building strength of that range. Or you can load it on the back with a dowel or a light barbell or a full-on barbell again, depending on how strong you are, just loading it. I mean, I would prefer the barbell if you're gonna eventually do the barbell squats, but you can do it in really any way you want. So you're gonna control the eccentric, you know, two, three seconds at most, lightly sit on the box, but don't let go of all of your tension. Hold on to that tension and then squat back up with explosiveness. And that's how you get started. Okay, and you're gonna build your strength and flexibility.
Philip Pape: 25:36
You're gonna be just fine. You don't have to do anything extra. All right, anyway, if you know someone who is having trouble with their flexibility, send them this episode, let them listen to it. Maybe it will open their eyes and ears to all the new possibilities. Until next time, keep using using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, lifting is the best stretching tool you already have. You just gotta do it. I'm Philip Pate, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week asynchronous coaching program to build muscle and lose fat over 40
Get personalized, adaptive coaching with the Fitness Lab app. 20% off for podcast listeners.
Get the Free Nutrition 101 Guide to set up your macros for fat loss and strength training.
Listen to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or all platforms. You can also Ask a Question to get featured on the show!

Philip Pape 4/9/26 Philip Pape 4/9/26

5 Ways Intermittent Fasting Backfires for Women Over 40 | Ep 458

Intermittent fasting is still the most popular nutrition advice on the internet. Skip breakfast, shrink your eating window, lose weight. But if you're over 40, this may not give you the results you want. It could even backfire. Learn about the 5 specific ways intermittent fasting can backfire when your goal is losing fat and building muscle after 40.

Intermittent fasting is still the most popular nutrition advice on the internet.

Skip breakfast, shrink your eating window, lose weight. But if you're over 40, this may not give you the results you want. It could even backfire.

Learn about the 5 specific ways intermittent fasting can backfire when your goal is losing fat and building muscle after 40. Philip examines a 2025 meta-analyses comparing IF to standard dieting, the challenge of getting enough protein in a compressed eating window, recent findings on cortisol and hormonal effects that especially affect women in perimenopause, and a surprising 2025 review that challenges one of fasting's biggest marketing claims (hint: it's about inflammation).

Plus, learn a structured meal timing alternative and 3 diagnostic questions to test whether your current eating window is causing issues for you.

Try my favorite Cozy Earth temperature-regulating sheets for better sleep and recovery. Use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for 20% off: witsandweights.com/cozyearth

Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program that builds your nutrition and strength training skills so you don't have to use a restrictive diet or intermittent fasting while still building muscle and losing fat. Go to: eatmoreliftheavy.com

Timestamps

0:00 - Intermittent fasting and fat loss
0:53 - 5 ways fasting backfires after 40
3:44 - #1: Metabolism and fat loss
11:04 - #2: Muscle building and protein
14:28 - #3: Cortisol and stress
17:33 - #4: DHEA and thyroid hormones
20:28 - #5: Fasting and inflammation
25:00 - Eating more to lose fat
27:00 - Structured meal timing
31:22 - 3 questions to test your eating window

Philip Pape: 00:00
If you've been skipping breakfast using intermittent fasting to lose fat, or for some other reason, a 2025 review of 22 trials found that intermittent fasting produces essentially zero additional fat loss when calories are the same. But there are four other things that it doesn't do. It limits how many times per day your muscles can respond to protein. It raises your cortisol during a time when cortisol's probably already jacked up. It may suppress a hormone called DHEA that your body depends on, especially after menopause. And recent research shows that fasting actually increases inflammatory markers rather than decrease them. Today I'm going to walk you through all five and what to do instead without giving up the simplicity you might like about fasting in the first place.
Philip Pape: 00:53
Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and former intermittent faster. And intermittent fasting IF might be still the single most recommended nutrition strategy in the interwebs right now. And I get it, I get why. It is elegant, it is simple to understand. You don't worry about what you eat, you just worry about when you eat. It simplifies your life. It shrinks the window when you could be overconsuming. And then, of course, you control your calories and you can go ahead and lose weight or lose fat. And if you've tried it, just like I have, you probably felt good about it for a while. Your body adapted to the routine. Maybe you lost a few pounds early on or not. Maybe the routine itself felt freeing in some way. Maybe you even have some other benefits that you ascribe to fasting, whether it's mental clarity or something related to inflammation or something else. But if you're over 40, especially if you're a woman over 40 who strength trains and you're trying to build or keep muscle while losing fat, that's what we do here on Wits and Weights. We're about improving body composition. Then intermittent fasting is probably working against you in ways that show up later in longer-term effects, not just short term. We'll talk about both short and long-term. We're going to cover that today. And just so you know, there's no judgment on if you like intermittent fasting and it's working for you in all the ways we're talking about today, then that's your story and you should stick to it and it works for you. In my experience, a vast majority of people don't want to intermittent fast if they don't have to. And that's what we're going to talk about, that you don't have to. And not only do you not have to, there's probably negatives that outweigh any potential positive if there even is one. Stick around to the very end of this episode because after the main content, I'm going to share three quick questions you can ask yourself to figure out whether your eating window is too narrow for your goals. And it takes about 30 seconds. It might save you months of frustration and help you make the right choices for yourself. So here's what we're covering today: five specific ways that intermittent fasting backfires, especially for women over 40 who lived. And I'm sorry to target women, but population-wise, that is who I hear using fasting the most. And it's who we tend to work with the most. But this advice really applies to everyone. So five specific ways we're going to cover. I'm not going to list them here. I don't want to give them all away. I want you to dive in and really hear the context around them. And then I'm going to give you the fix for those, which keeps everything that you might like about IF, but without the downsides. So I know it's a tall order, but let's get into it and see if we can make that
Philip Pape: 03:44
happen. All right. So the first way intermittent fasting backfires is it doesn't actually give you an advantage for fat loss. It doesn't produce better fat loss than a standard calorie restriction by any means. And this is the foundation so many other things rest on because if it had a genuine metabolic advantage, then you might argue the other downsides are worth tolerating in the trade-off, but it doesn't. And the popular version of IF goes like this. And look, I was on IF for a decade. I've tried all versions of it. I've even done full day fasts. Okay, so the popular version is this. You skip breakfast. This is the typical approach people take, because it's, I guess, the easiest to fit into a normal schedule. You skip breakfast, you eat your first meal around, say, noon. You stop eating by 8 p.m. if you're doing the 8 to 16, but it might even be earlier. It might be like 5 p.m. if you're trying to squeeze the window even tighter. And then the fasting window is all that time after you stop eating dinner, all the way to that next midday meal where the magic happens. That's where your insulin drops, your body burns fat. Maybe you get some autophagy, you lose weight without having to count calories. It's not what you eat, it's when you eat. Oh, it's just beautiful. It's just the perfect solution, guys, right? And I know you know that, right? Because you're you're listening to this show and you're like, yeah, intermittent fasting works for me perfectly. Now, I want to be fair because I can be a little facetious, a little sarcastic at times. There is a grain of truth to all this stuff. There's also plenty of anecdotal evidence for anything that can work for people. It doesn't mean that the science isn't there, doesn't mean that there isn't an optimal range of things for the vast majority of humans. It just means that your experience might be an outlier. Intermittent fasting does help some people lose weight, for sure. But the reason has nothing to do with the fasting window. The reason is that when you eat in a compressed window, you spontaneously eat less food. We see this in studies. Okay, so this we're gonna give them that point. Studies show that when you're just like in an ad libitum free living condition, if you're doing time-restricted eating, which is the more science-y term, people consume 350 to 650 fewer calories per day, and they're not being told to restrict, they're not doing anything special or anything different. And that is a very meaningful deficit. So, so yes, people on IF lose weight, but it's because of the calorie deficit. It's not the timing itself. How do we know this? Because when researchers match the calories, a non-IF approach has the same result. So going to all the way to 2025, just last year, Cochrane or Cochrane, it's a systematic review. I love systematic reviews because that is the highest level of evidence synthesis we have, where they looked at 22 randomized trials with nearly 2,000 participants. And they compared intermittent fasting to conventional calorie restriction. The difference of weight loss was 0.33% body weight. Not 3%, 0.33%, which is definitely not clinically meaningful in any way. That is what we would call noise. Okay, so almost nothing, no difference. Also in 2025, there was a different meta-analysis, and this was in nutrition, metabolism, and cardiovascular diseases, if you want to look it up. And they looked at 20 randomized controlled trials that were specifically designed to match calories between IF and standard dieting. And so this was a very direct conclusion that what's called isocaloric intermittent fasting is not superior to calorie restriction for any health outcome. There were no differences in body weight, in BMI, or in lean body mass at any time point. And then if we go a couple years back, there was the big New England Journal of Medicine trial from 2022. 139 obese patients randomized to time-restricted eating plus calorie restriction versus calorie restriction alone for 12 months. And guess what? The results were identical across fat mass, across lean mass, visceral fat, and liver fat. So the first thing to understand is that the mechanism of action for intermittent fasting is simply calorie reduction. It is a behavioral tool to create a deficit, and that is it. There's no metabolic alchemy. You know, we're not converting lead to gold. It's nothing magic that is happening during the fasting window that gives you any sort of edge whatsoever. And when you accept that fact, that premise, then you have a different question, don't you? You have a different question. Instead of saying, look, does intermittent fasting work? The question for you is is intermittent fasting the best way to create a deficit for you, given your specific goals and situation. And here's where I'm bringing it full circle to who I'm talking to on this show. A lot of you are over 40, a lot of you are women who strength train. The answer is almost always no, is what we've found. Almost always no. And that brings me to ways number two through five that backfire for intermittent fasting.
Philip Pape: 08:51
Now, since we're talking about what drives results, which is all I care about, and all you care about, I think, versus the shiny object or the shiny distraction, I'm gonna tell you quickly about one thing that does make a real difference, and that is sleep. Sleep makes a big difference. Recovery is where adaptation happens. You don't build muscle in the gym, right? You build it while you sleep. Of course, you got to go to the gym. If you're waking up hot, tangled in sheets, tossing and turning, you've got night flashes, you've got disrupted sleep, that is all recovery time that you're not getting back. And so this is my smooth segue to introduce our sponsor for today, Cozy Earth. And Cozy Earth makes the most amazing sheets. I'm not just saying that, I am saying it, but I'm saying it because I use it and I bought another pair because I love them. I've had them for a while now, many months since I became a sponsor. And the temperature regulation piece is the thing that initially sold me, but I wasn't sold for real until I actually slept in them. So they're made from a bamboo-derived fabric, and that's what lets them keep you cool, even if you run warm like I do, and it keeps you comfortable even when it's cold. So it's not like it makes you colder. It's it's a nice balance depending on the temperature. And we know that better sleep means lower stress and cortisol, better recovery, better training, and a better use of your food, whether you are intermittent fasting or not. And that was my point with this extremely smooth segue to our sponsor in that getting enough sleep is going to prevent you from having massive cravings that often lead to people saying, Hey, I need a different solution because I can't help but eat. I'm gonna use fasting. You see how that works. All right. Right now, Cozy Earth will give you 20% off with code Wits and Weights. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. The link is in the show notes. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. Check out all of their products. I love this company. If you want to support the show, go check them out. Buy a gift for someone, buy it for yourself. They have some uh amazing warranties that are backing up the product like few other companies have. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth and enjoy. All
Philip Pape: 11:04
right, so the second way that intermittent fasting backfires is how it limits your ability to build muscle. And this is probably the most concrete issue that matters a lot to those of you listening. When you're trying to lift weights, you're trying to build muscle, you're trying to partition your nutrients just the right way. It's just a fancy way of saying, you know, what I eat into my mouth goes toward building muscle as best as I can and also whole, you know, losing fat when possible, right? Because that's what we're trying to do. So your muscles, they respond to a few things. They respond to number one, how much protein you eat total. So you've got to have that minimum, but also they respond a little bit more to the distribution of that protein. Not as much as the total. We've got to hit our total, but they also respond to the distribution. And there is a concept called the muscle full effect. So that is after you eat a protein-rich meal, muscle protein synthesis, that's the process of building and repairing muscle tissue. It spikes. It spikes for about 60 to 90 minutes and returns to baseline within two to three hours. Now, caveat, if you eat a lot of protein, like 100 grams, there is a study that did show it will that tail drags even further out simply because you ate more protein. So you will still get benefit even if you have more protein. There's not really a too high of a level, but there is a problem when you are going long stretches of time without protein and you don't have amino acids in your blood, that can give you a little bit of a disadvantage. And I wanted to mention it here because, again, if you don't have to fast, it's good to know what you're losing when you do fast that you might want to consider in your trade-off. Um, and in this case, I'm not going to go into all the different studies. There is one I found among many that I've referred to before by Aretta in 2013, where they did different patterns of doses for protein and they found that the pattern that had more frequent meals produced more protein synthesis than the others. And again, it depends on how much optimized you want to be here. As long as you're getting your total protein, even when you're fasting, you're going to be in a good place to start, but not the most optimal place, is my point. Um, and I've alluded to the anabolic resistance piece as well. Like if you're over 40, if you're a woman over 40, especially, your muscles become less responsive to protein. So when you're not really flooding your system with a decent amount of protein on a regular basis, you definitely could have a disadvantage, let alone the other issues having to do with satiety and your expenditure and all that fun stuff. So, what does intermittent fasting do to this? Well, you're compressing the eating window to at most six to eight hours, sometimes less, where you can realistically fit two meals, maybe three meals in that time. A lot of people are trying to fit it down to only two, but oftentimes you get three if it's like, you know, noon and then four and then eight or something like that. So let's say you're a 155-pound woman and you need, you know, 125, 130 grams of protein a day, which is a reasonable target. And within an eight-hour window, if you only have three meals, now each meal has to contain about 50 or 60 grams of protein. So you might be missing out on your total protein as a result. Now, I'm not saying you can't solve that simply by getting more protein, but it does create an extra practical issue. And then that entire fasting window, of course, you're not getting protein either, which again could be more or less of a problem depending on your response and also depending on when you train, right? Where when you train, if you're training kind of in the middle of that or late part of that fasting window where you haven't eaten in a long time, um, that could be a challenge as well. So that's way number two. Way number
Philip Pape: 14:28
three about intermittent fasting backfiring backfiring is it can stress you out further than you already are. Now, this is the really important one that we don't talk about a lot. We know that fasting raises cortisol. Cortisol is your stress hormone. And this is this is not debatable, it's a survival mechanism. Your body is without food, and so your cortisol is going to try to mobilize your stored energy. This is great if there's a famine. You want to be stressed, you want your stress level to come up so that you can act on this and seek out food. But it's less useful in our situation where we're just trying to hold on to muscle tissue, we're trying to lose fat, we're trying to make this as easy as we can and not get more stressed out than we already are just from our life. There was a meta-analysis by Nakamura and colleagues back in 2016, looked at 13 studies, and they found that fasting produces what they call a very strong effect, and in quotes, on cortisol levels. Now, what's interesting is that shorter, more acute fasts produce larger cortisol spikes than chronic moderate restriction. So, in that sense, the daily start-stop pattern of intermittent fasting can be provoking your cortisol more than simply eating a bit less across the whole day. Now, there's some longer fasting studies that show even more dramatic effects. There's Bergendal's 1996 study found a 1.8 times increase in 24-hour cortisol production during a five-day fast. Now, again, we're not, I know a lot of you aren't doing full fasts like that, but it's worth understanding the mechanisms here. A more recent study in 2023 by Marciniac, I think that's how you pronounce it, found that even one day of fasting produced an 11% increase in cortisol and shifted the peak of cortisol about 50 minutes earlier. Now, why does this matter? Well, two reasons. First, we think of uh women in particular, the female HPA axis, that's your stress hormone system, which is more reactive than the male axis. Women initiate cortisol responses more rapidly and produce a greater output of cortisol. It's just a biological difference. No, nothing to worry about. But it means that the cortisol hit from fasting can be amplified for women. Second, during perimenopause, the decline in estrogen, it's already increasing your baseline cortisol and this activity of the HPA axis. So now you're layering fasting stress on top of a system that's already running more stressful than it was, say, five or 10 years earlier. And then we know cortisol is catabolic, catabolic. That means it will, it'll break down muscle tissue. It increases the breakdown by upregulating the pathways, the molecular pathways that do this. We're not going to get into a biology lesson here, but it preferentially targets fast twitch type 2 fibers, the ones responsive to strength training. So it's doing all these things that work against the adaptation that you are training for. It's
Philip Pape: 17:33
kind of like when you don't get enough sleep. You just don't build muscle as effectively. All right, so way number four that IF backfires is it suppresses DHEA and thyroid. Now, this one is a bit newer, and this one is also specific to post-menopausal women. This is why the lens today is more toward women with some of these issues. And by the way, it could explain some issues you are having if you're listening to the show and you like to fast, thinking it's benefiting you. A 2022 study from Krista Varedi's lab. This is the first to examine time-restricted eating and sex hormones in pre- and post-menopausal women. It found that eight weeks of four to six hour time-restricted eating, say that's four to six hours of your eating window, caused a 14% decline in DHEA. DHEA, if you spell it out, it's dehydroepyandrosterone. Hard to say, but I wanted to say it because it's in my notes. After menopause, DHEA is the primary precursor that your body uses to produce estrogen and androgens in your tissue. So if you have a drop in DHEA, it's pretty concerning for postmenopausal women who already have reduced estrogen. That makes sense. In parallel to this, there's evidence that fasting can reduce T3. We've talked about thyroid a little bit on the show. T3 is the active thyroid hormone. And there is evidence fasting can reduce it by up to 55% within 24 hours and a corresponding rise in reverse T3 along with it. So for women over 40 who are already at higher risk for what we call subclinical hypothyroidism, this is a down regulation, right? It's a metabolic downregulation because we know thyroid affects a metabolism. And therefore it undermines your fat loss because you're going to burn fewer calories. And we don't want that. We don't want that. So it's interesting that fasting could actually reduce your expenditure, causing you to burn fewer calories, even though fasting and non-fasting can cause similar weight loss if the deficit is the same. That's the big if, though. You're now affecting the output side of the equation, the metabolism side of the equation. Now, the other thing we always have to mention is with this research, perimenopausal women are often not even included in these studies. There are so many studies we rely on in this space, and we talk about perimenopausal women, but then they're not even in the population. And so the lab that I just talked about excluded it, excluded them. There's another study I found that didn't have them. And so the population most likely to experience these effects, we have the least data on. So even though they see these effects in DHAA and thyroid, they're not even looking specifically at the population. That's not to uh say that it won't happen. That's to say we don't know to what if to what extent it's gonna happen. And it could be worse, is my point. It could be even amplified for women in perimenopause. We don't know. The
Philip Pape: 20:28
final number five way that intermittent fasting could back virus, this is a very interesting one because it goes against what is often claimed, is that it can increase inflammation and not decrease it. And it might it might surprise you to hear this because so many of the marketing claims are that it's anti-inflammatory. Fasting reduces inflammation, cleans up your cells, it calms the immune system, blah, blah, blah. It sounds great. It sounds so good to sell a marketing system based on intermittent fasting. But going again to very recent research, very recent, 2025, it was a scoping review and it was published in Aging Research Reviews. The scientist's name is D-Qt. I don't know how to pronounce that, but it's D-E-C-I-U-T-I-I-S, and colleagues looked at this claim directly. They reviewed 14 human clinical trials that examine prolonged fasting of 48 hours or more, and they measured what happens to three inflammatory markers in the blood CRP, IL6, and TNF alpha. We've talked about these before. These are objective ways to measure inflammation in your body. I've had these measured myself due to an autoimmune condition. And you can clearly see these go up when you have an inflammatory response at the cellular level in your body. These are true inflammation, not woo foo foo inflammation that a lot of social media people talk about. These are the markers that a doctor can look at, okay, or a rheumatologist or what have you, you know, a functional doctor doesn't matter. They can look at these and say, okay, you've got some systemic inflammation going on. The majority of studies from this review showed either no change or an increase in these markers during fasting. So we look at CRP, C reactive protein. The levels frequently went up, oftentimes a lot, especially when people are overweight or obese, which just goes to show like inflammation is often amplified when you don't have a healthy lifestyle on top of that. Some studies found increases in the TNF alpha and the IL-6, the interleukin 6. And this is the opposite of what so many fasting proponents claim. Now, some studies did show CRP normalized or dropped below baseline after the refeeding. So in other words, the inflammatory spike might be transient. It might be an adaptive stress response, which in which case we shouldn't overblow the finding and say fasting causes some sort of long-term inflammation, but we shouldn't say fasting reduces inflammation either, should we? You know, the honest summary here is fasting appears to trigger a pro-inflammatory response during the fast itself. And then whether that resolves cleanly depends on you as an individual and also how you refeed. Now, is this a bad thing? I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. It could be like any other transit response, like when your blood pressure goes up when you lift weights. That's not a bad thing. In fact, it has some long-term benefits. And maybe we'll find a long time from now that the short-term inflammation causes a long-term adaptation. But when you're doing it regularly and you're constantly going to this pro-inflammatory state, I think most people would generally agree that's not a great thing to be in, especially when the claim is the opposite. That's really my point here. And it's not that you get a use that you get used to it and that future fasting doesn't increase your inflammation either, right? There was another meta-analysis in obesity reviews, also in 2025, and it confirmed this same thing, but from a different angle. So when they compared intermittent fasting to standard calorie restriction, the intermittent fasting actually intermittent fasting reduced TNF alpha and it didn't have an effect on CRP or IR IL6, while the standard calorie restriction significantly reduced CRP and IL6. So interesting. If reducing inflammation is one of your goals, then guess what? Continuous moderate calorie restriction seems to outperform fasting for that as well. So man, you might even go and say, make the claim now that, hey, a normal calorie deficit can reduce inflammation compared to fasting. Maybe. That's that's basically the point is you can't claim that fasting helps when it comes to inflammation. So for all of this, just to put this in a bow, I don't think this is a major health concern, honestly. I don't think this inflammation thing is a major health concern. I just think it's a a poke in the balloon of the fasting is anti-inflammatory claim. That's it. That's it. And we're looking for nuance here and we're looking for evidence.
Philip Pape: 25:00
All right, so you're hearing all of this. You're thinking, great, Philip, what do I actually do about my meal timing and my protein and all of that? Well, that's what Eat More Lift Heavy is built for. So Eat More Lift Heavy, we just launched this recently. It's my 26-week coaching program. You got me and Coach Carol in there actively involved to help you out. It is designed specifically for adults over 40 who lift. And we've got a lot of resources specific to women over 40, especially in week four of the program, which is our nutrition foundations uh module. We walk you through how to set up your meals, how to hit some level of protein based on how often you want to eat, how to space them to maximize muscle growth, how to structure your pre- and post-workout nutrition, all of that stuff personalized to your life and your schedule, not a meal plan. Like I do not like meal plans. Meal plans are just so static. You can go to ChatGPT and create a meal plan in five seconds. It's not helpful. What's helpful is a framework that fits how you eat and then can adapt as your life changes. And then in that same or in the next phase of the program, phase two, which is kind of the middle of the program, when you're executing everything and you're adjusting based on the data, we have something called dialed in, where Coach Carroll can review your nutrition strategy weekly and monthly and help you troubleshoot in real time. So if you're looking for that extra level of support, you have that option as well. And you can avoid the problems you have today with okay, I'm trying to cram everything into two meals a day, or I'm intermittent fasting, or I just can't get enough protein, I'm wondering why my body composition isn't changing. This is how we fix it. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. You can learn more on that page. No pressure to join if it's not for you. But if you're trying to support us and you want the best results you've ever had that actually stick, this is definitely the way to do it. EatmoreLiftheavy.com, link in the show notes. All right, so those are the five ways intermittent fat intermittent fasting backfires. There's, you know, no advantage of fat loss, fewer opportunity to build muscle, amplified stress, potentially suppresses some hormones, you know, the inflammation profiles know better. It's possibly worse than standard dieting. So if you accept all of that and you're welcome to dig into the research, what do you do instead? Well, the fix is structured meal timing. And the reason I call it deceptively simple is because, well, it is. It gives you all the benefits that people attribute to intermittent fasting, such as appetite regulation, simplicity, reduced decision fatigue, but you're not going to sacrifice these other things like the hormones or the potential for inflammation or just the ability to enjoy food more during the day, if that's something you value. So here's the core of structured meal timing. You're going to eat three to four, what I'll say are protein-forward meals every day, space about three to four hours apart across a 12 to 14 hour window. That means your first meal is within an hour or two at most of waking up, especially if you're going to train in the morning. I mean, that's bar none. If you're going to train, I definitely encourage eating before you train. And then your last meal is about two to three hours before bed. You don't want it too close to bed because it can affect sleep, digestion, et cetera. Each meal should contain at least 30 grams of protein because doing the math, that's probably where it's going to need to be for whatever size you are. You know, unless you're much bigger and you need a lot more protein. For most people, that's going to get you there. And that's a reasonable amount of protein, but it's probably more than you're getting right now, especially for something like breakfast. It's like a palm-sized portion of meat or fish or poultry, or it's a combination of Greek yogurt and eggs. That's a good breakfast thought. Or a protein shake plus a whole food source, right? Any combination of those things, if you're vegan or vegetarian, you've got fewer options, but you still have lots of other things to consider. And the 30 grams is just a nice round number. It gets you the enough protein all day if you have them in each meal when they add up. It also gives you a good amount of protein at once to kind of maximize that muscle protein synthesis, again, without overblowing that piece of it. And it also gets you to make your very first day of the meal have to have that amount of protein, as opposed to waiting and cramming it in the end, and then you forget, and then you fall short. So the biggest single change of all this for people who are used to intermittent fasting is no longer skipping breakfast. And I know that's tough if you haven't done that in a if you've been skipping it for a long time. Getting that 30 to 40 grams of protein in breakfast is a game changer. It is a game changer. It is going to set you up for so much success. You're going to feel better, you're going to feel less hungry. It's going to regulate your hunger signals throughout the day. It's going to get you, you know, a good chunk of the way toward getting your protein. There's so many good reasons for that. And all you have to do is put together a simple breakfast for yourself right now, plan ahead and make it happen. Three eggs and a Greek yogurt, a protein shake with milk, leftover chicken from dinner. Come on, leftovers from dinner. People forget about this idea. It's a great idea. Make extra meat for dinner and then have it for breakfast. Takes five minutes to do these kinds of breakfasts and it gets you going. All right. So if you're worried about losing this simplicity in the routine that appealed to you about intermittent fasting, I think this is just a replacement with a new routine. You're still going to eat at the same time each day. I recommend eating the same time each day, the same basic rhythm to your meals, even the same meals if it doesn't bore you, which for most people, you know, breakfast can be the same. And even lunches for like the whole week can be the same. And then you could do another one the next week based on your meal prep. And that way you get structure without restriction. Structure without restriction. The consistency is the part that helps, whether you're fasting or not, that's the part that's helping you. Right? The fasting, the fasting is causing other things that are potentially problems, but either way work for consistency. So don't force yourself to fast if you don't have to. Now, look, intermittent fasting is not poison. Okay. If you're, if you're hitting your protein targets, it fits your life, it feels good, you have all the performance you want, you're doing getting everything you want, then it does work for you. And I'm not going to tell you it doesn't. But I'll say the vast majority of people over 40 who are lifting weights, who want to improve their body composition, this uh structured meal timing spread throughout the day, kind of in a normal schedule, a more normal schedule. I hate to use the word normal, but you know what I mean, tends to get better results over time and has less friction as well. So the question isn't does IF work? It's is it the best tool for you with your goals at this stage of life?
Philip Pape: 31:22
All right, before we wrap up, remember I promised three quick questions to diagnose whether your eating window is too narrow for your goals, which I'm gonna share in just a second. But if this episode is changing or has changed how you think about meal timing, but you're not sure how to restructure your eating around your training, your schedule, your protein targets, how to get enough protein. That's exactly what Eat More Lift Heavy walks you through. The program is 26 weeks, one focus per week that builds your skills slowly over time. By the end, you're not following a plan anymore. You are owning your own plan. You know how to build one, you know how to adapt, you know how to adjust on your own. That's what we want for you. We call it a graduation model because the goal is to make the original program unnecessary and let you go to bigger and better things for the next level. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. That is eatmoreliftheavy.com. Link is in the show notes. All right, here are three questions you can ask yourself right now to figure out if your eating window is costing you the muscle that you're trying to hold on to or making fat loss harder. Okay, question one How many meals with 30 plus grams of protein can you fit into your eating window right now? If the answer is two or less, it's probably too narrow. You're missing the opportunities to get enough protein, and that's gonna slow you down across the board. It's gonna make everything harder. It's gonna make it harder to hold on to lean mass. And then when you do lose weight, you're gonna lose muscle. We don't like that. Okay. Listen to our last episode where we talked all about how to hold on to muscle during fat loss. That's question one. Question two are you routinely hungry, low energy, or craving carbs in the last two hours of your fasting window? Okay. If so, that is your cortisol talking to you. It is, it is mobilizing that hormone to keep you going. And then when the fat feeding window opens, you are more likely to overconsume or to make poor food choices. That's another thing we didn't even talk about today. I see a lot of people who fast and they don't eat so well during the feeding window because they're just like starving. They're ready to eat and they go hog wild. And this is a physiological thing. This is not your discipline, it's just the situation has incentivized you to do this because of the cortisol. Question three Are you hitting your daily protein but not seeing body composition changes? Now, this is an interesting one because some of you are fasting, you're still hitting it, but it could be that you are underperforming in the fasting window. It could also be a carb situation. It could be when you're training. There's a lot of could be's, but if you are hitting your protein but not seeing body composition changes and you fast, there could be an issue there with the fasting window. All right. So if you answered yes to two or three of these, you may want to experiment with not fasting anymore, widening your window at least by two hours to add another meal with protein in there, for example, or just go all out to a normal eating schedule. Do it for at least two weeks. Track what you're doing and see what changes. Tell yourself, based on the evidence, whether this is a superior choice for you or not. Don't let me try to convince you of it. Do it for yourself. That is the best evidence. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, when you eat matters less than whether your muscles get the signal they need when they need it, and you're eating well for your goals. I'm Philip Hayde, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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Philip Pape 4/7/26 Philip Pape 4/7/26

How to Lose Fat Without Losing Your Muscle Gains | Ep 457

You spent months building muscle, and now you're ready to cut. Or you're on a GLP-1 medication and losing weight but not sure how much muscle your'e also losing. Without getting 3 things right, roughly 25% to 40% of the weight you lose can come from lean tissue. Tune in to learn what they are!

You spent months building muscle, and now you're ready to cut. Or you're on a GLP-1 medication and losing weight but not sure how much muscle your'e also losing.

Without getting 3 things right, roughly 25% to 40% of the weight you lose can come from lean tissue.

Tune in to learn what they are!

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, a 26-week coached program where Phase 2 guides you through exactly this transition, from building to cutting without losing what you built: eatmoreliftheavy.com

Track your nutrition with MacroFactor using code WITSANDWEIGHTS for a free two-week trial

Timestamps

0:00 - Muscle loss during a cut
6:31 - Rate of loss and lean mass
9:56 - Protein during a fat loss phase
13:12 - Per-meal protein over 40
15:01 - Sleep and body composition
17:08 - Eating more and lifting heavy
18:36 - Rate of loss and protein targets
21:25 - Training volume and intensity
23:57 - Diet breaks and refeeds
27:04 - GLP-1 body composition research
33:16 - Bonus: 50g protein meal for low appetite

Philip Pape: 00:00
If you spend months building muscle and you're about to start a fat loss phase, or if you're on a GLP1 medication and watching the scale drop, but wondering how much of that is muscle, this episode is going to change how you approach your cut. Today I'm going to show you the three specific mistakes that cause people to lose muscle instead of fat during a deficit, and a research-backed approach to fix all three. You'll learn about how fast it's too fast to lose weight so that you don't lose up to 60% more lean mass, how much more protein adults over 40 need versus their younger peers, and what a recent case series found when GLP1 users combined resistance training with adequate protein. All that and more in today's episode. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and this episode is coming out during the spring. I know a lot of you are thinking about transitioning into a fat loss phase ahead of summer. Maybe you just finished a building or bulking phase over the winter. Maybe you've been on a GLP1 medication like Wagovi or Manjaro, and you're losing weight, but you're not sure what weight you're losing. Are you losing some muscle along the way or not? Maybe you've been through this cycle before where you dieted down, you lost some fat, but you also lost a bunch of muscle that you work very hard to build. And then when you try to build again, you're basically starting from scratch. And that is the cycle I want to help you break today. Stick around to the end of this episode because I'm gonna share a specific meal structure that helps you hit 50 grams of protein with less than 400 calories with almost no demand on your appetite. If you're on a GLP1 medication or your appetite is pretty crushed during a cut, which is sounds strange, but for some people this does happen. This is definitely going to be useful. All right, today you're gonna learn the three biggest threats to your muscle during a fat loss phase. You're gonna learn the specific protein and rate of loss targets that the latest research supports and why GLP1 users who lift and eat enough protein can have just as good outcome as anyone else and lose very little, if any, muscle
Philip Pape: 02:22
mass. All right, let's get into it and look at the standard advice when it comes to cutting. When you listen to podcasts, when you think about how to plan out fat loss or weight loss, and that is you're gonna cut your calories a certain amount, you're gonna keep training. Maybe you modify your training, but you keep training, and then you ride it out until you're lean. Maybe you have a target, maybe you don't. There's all different ways to approach this. And you're not sure, do I add in more cardio or do I increase my step count? Do I drop my carbs? Well, they're gonna drop naturally, but should I deliberately drop them even further? And then for GLP1 users, you know, you're taking the medication and your appetite is lower, but then you want to do a fat loss phase. It's like, do you still need to force yourself to eat a little bit more than you were, even though you're in a deficit? So the deficit is not too big, right? There's all these questions swirling about cuts that I want to address kind of all together today with concepts coming together. And there's some truth in all these things, right? You have to have a calorie deficit to lose fat. Yes, that's that's the truth. You do have to keep training to hold on to the muscle. But the the problem is what is often not said with the advice that helps you hold on to muscle optimally. So if we just step back a bit and think of two people who lose weight, both people lose 20 pounds, and one of them loses, say, 18 pounds of fat and maybe two pounds of lean tissue, which isn't terrible, right? It's just a little bit of muscle, but mostly fat. The other loses, say, 12 pounds of fat and eight pounds of lean tissue. Well, you're gonna have very different outcomes at the end, which is why we have to stop obsessing over scale weight, because it's a very small piece of the equation. And somebody who loses that much muscle is gonna feel much different. They're gonna have a much different metabolism. The same result on the scale, but very different body composition outcome. And I see the people walking around taking the GLP1s, not doing the training, not eating protein, and they're not happy. They're not happy. Maybe they're a little bit happy on the scale, but it doesn't last because they're not keeping, they're not getting the body that they actually wanted out of this. Maybe they improved their health outcomes, so there's definitely value in that. But there's a lot of research on this now because of those drugs, and it affects everyone. If you're listening and you're not on these drugs or not even considering them, this still impacts you in understanding this. If you don't do things a certain way, then some percentage of the weight you lose is going to come from lean mass. And it's probably about 25% on average, and sometimes even more than that. It's what we call the quarter rule from body composition research: one out of every four pounds as lean tissue. Now, for most people who are just dieting without the resistance training at all, without paying attention to protein, without controlling the rate of loss, which is a lot of people on GLP one meds, but it could be people who are just crash dieting or doing like a keto or carnivore type deal and they're just losing weight really quickly, but they're not doing the other things. That 25% can climb up to 35 or even 40%. If you're on a GLP1 med, again, without a structured plan to change your lifestyle, we've seen DEXA data. DEXA can measure body composition. There were the semaglatide trials showed that lean mass made up about 40% of the total weight loss. That's a lot of muscle to lose. And it's not to me, not to scare you. You've heard this many times on podcasts, because you can actually do something about it. It's not inevitable. This is where the episode is headed. Okay, with the right strategy, you can get that number down to under 10%, some cases zero. And we want to be able to measure it as well. Okay, folks who are, for example, in our program eat more lift heavy. We have a very good tracker to do that. So we can track fat-free mass and lean mass and body fat change and all of that stuff. Anyone can do it. It's just math, simple numbers. But in some cases, people actually gain some lean mass while losing significant body fat, even on GLP1 medications. So there's this huge gap between the worst case and the best case, and the variables that control it are entirely within your hands. So let me walk you through each one. All right, here
Philip Pape: 06:31
we go. These are the three things that are threatening your muscle while you're in a cut, so you know you can do something about it. Threat number one is you're just losing weight too fast. And there is a study I think every everybody should know about who's listening to this. It's it's pretty old now. It's 2011. Researchers took 24 elite athletes and they split them into two groups. One group lost weight at about 0.7% of their body weight a week, and the other lost at about 1.4% body weight per week. So twice as fast. Both groups trained four days a week. Both groups lost a similar amount of total scale weight. What do you think happened? Well, the group that went slower gained lean mass. The fast group didn't gain lean mass. Now you're like, well, aren't you talking about the loss of lean mass? Still, this is incredible because they were in a fat loss phase. And what you're noticing here is that training is a really important variable, even if you're losing quickly, not just to hold on to muscle, but if you can go at the right rate and it's not too fast, you could potentially gain muscle, which is insane, right? It's insane because we're always told, no, you can't do that. When you lose weight too fast, remember what's happening. Your body needs to pull energy from somewhere. It's trying to get back to homeostasis. And so, on one hand, it has some fat stored up that it's trying to pull energy from, but because you're going so fast, it can't even, it's like it can't keep up and it's just trying to take energy from wherever it can, including muscle tissue. And so, if we go to a more recent study from 2022, a meta-analysis that I've referred to quite a bit, it showed that once your deficit exceeds about 500 calories a day, your ability to gain or maintain lean mass during resistance training drops to essentially zero. And then below five, you know, below 500, like losing losing fewer uh pounds, going slower, you can still build muscle in a deficit, you know, if you're training hard and eating enough protein. And then above 500, that ability kind of goes away, right? So that's the first place to start here. And that leads us to a rate of loss target of about a half to 1% of your body weight a week. Or you can go slower than that, of course, but up to 1% of your body weight a week, which is something I've talked about for several years now. So for if you're a 180-pound person, that's around 0.9 to 1.8 pounds a week. If you're 150 pounds, that's up to one and a half pounds, right? It's just one per 1%. Pretty easy math. Now, if you're leaner, I usually suggest aiming for the lower end. If you have more fat to lose, you probably have a little more room at the upper end if you're concerned about muscle preservation or even trying to gain muscle during a cut. Once you go faster than 1% a week, the research shows that you have a higher chance of losing muscle. And again, it's very individualistic. Like I definitely have worked with folks who have a lot of fat to lose, are training really hard, they have a lot of muscle, and they can go a little bit more than 1%. Maybe they can go 1.25%. It also depends on the duration. But again, the relationship is still there. And if you want to avoid that risk, you're going to keep the rate of loss more reasonable. And a lot of people are not doing that, especially on GLP ones, is that they're going faster than they need to. And when they come into our program, we're like, hey, we need we need you to eat more, even though you don't have as much of an appetite and you're still losing weight. It's kind of a weird situation to be in. It also implies that maybe you don't need to be on those drugs if you're doing this the right way, but it depends on the person. Okay.
Philip Pape: 09:56
The second threat to this muscle loss is, of course, protein. And I might be stating the obvious here, but I did want to bang them out one, two, three, just so we are making sure we're doing these things. Because if you're not doing these things, why are you so focused on all the other stuff that just doesn't matter? Focus on the one thing to optimize in front of you. Okay. So protein. Now, training is absolutely essential throughout this discussion. So I'm not even going to mention it as a threat to muscle loss. In other words, if you are not training, you will lose muscle. Let's just get that out of the way in case you're listening and you thought I was going to mention uh not training as one of the three threats. No, not training is an inevitable threat always, by definition. So you have to be resistance training. And if you have been pushing against that for whatever reason, you don't like it, you hate it, you, whatever excuse you're making for yourself, now's the time to stop and find a way to eliminate all those excuses. We help people do this all the time. I just had a chat this morning with one of our uh dialed-in clients in Eat More Lift Heavy, where she's like, all right, I know the first thing I need to do is learn to like lifting weights. Now, it may not be exactly that. It may be finding a way to lift that then gives her the results so that she starts to find joy in it. But the point is you have to train. Okay, I got off on a tangent, but the second risk we're talking about here is protein. The original landmark review by Eric Helms in 2014 recommended 2.3 to 3.1 grams per kilogram of fat-free mass for lean athletes during a deficit. You're like, oh, okay, now I have to do all this weird math. No, I don't want you to do all the weird math. What it translates to is the thing I talk about all the time: roughly 0.7 to one gram per pound of total body weight. A little bit more than that is never gonna hurt. Like more protein is not gonna hurt you. All it does is take away from the other macros, which could be a problem if the calories are really low, but more protein is not gonna hurt you. The minimum, though, you want to get to around, you know, 0.7. Now, there was just last year, 2025, an updated systematic review from the same group that looked at 29 studies instead of the original six, and they found a greater than 97% probability of a dose response relationship between protein intake and lean mass retention during a deficit. And the threshold they identified was around 1.9 grams per kilogram or 0.87 grams per pound as the minimum to prevent accelerated lean mass loss. Now, again, these are just means, these are averages. 0.87 during a deficit, okay? During a deficit. So below that, yeah, you have a higher risk of losing muscle. And of course, you know, it's dose response. So, you know, if you're near it, that's fine. The farther you get from it, the more it increases that risk. And then above it, the benefits continue in a linear fashion up to about 3.2 grams per kilogram. So for practical purposes, here we go. Conclusion During a fat loss phase, if you can get around that upper end of like one gram per pound of body weight, and if you're over 40, I'd really seriously consider doing that and push it at least there, if not 1.1, 1.2 grams, because of the anabolic resistance and all that. You know, as we age, our muscles become a little bit less responsive to protein. So your ability to maximize muscle protein synthesis is a little bit less efficient. So, anyway, you need a little bit more. I don't want to overthink it. I don't want to overthink it. But I, again, going back to the GLP1 discussion, we've got a client in our group that joined this week for eat more lift heavy, and he's on, he doesn't have as much of an appetite and is worried about how to get enough protein. I said, look, don't worry about trying to get the full amount we want to get you to. Let's get you from where you are today, step change up to the minimum, and then you can start to tweak up from there. It's just a function of the math initially, but then it might be a function of how do you do it with your appetite? Like if you don't have an appetite, if you can't eat that much, we need to look at more energy dense foods or protein shakes, things like that. Not all of your protein, but there are little tricks we can do to kind of eke our way there as you learn about energy density and volume and all of that. And also frequency. Like if you're trying to get all your protein in one or two meals, it's gonna be a lot harder than if you distribute it across three, four, or five meals or snacks of you know, 30 to 40 grams each. So, long story short, in a fat loss phase specifically, going for a higher end is more helpful. And if you guys use macro factor, which I use, code wits and weights, all one word, get your two-week free trial if you want to support the podcast. That's macro factor. When you go into a fat loss phase, it actually does jack up your protein based on this science. All right. So, what I what I often see happen is the opposite. People cut their calories. So, of course, their meals get smaller, or they may even have one or two fewer meals a day. And yet they're trying to get they need to get the same or more protein, but it's harder to get more protein when you've already now dropped the calories. And so it takes a shift in your planning. Like you really have to plan well during a fat loss phase to do that because your percentage of calories from protein goes way up. It goes from say 10 to 20% up to like 40 or 50%, maybe.
Philip Pape: 15:01
Okay, the third threat to your muscle growth is you're not sleeping enough. You're not sleeping enough. Okay, and and this one can never get talked about enough. I'm not gonna rehash the study that I've mentioned over and over again, but essentially we've seen time and again in a calorie deficit, if you are sleep deprived, you're actually gonna lose more lean tissue during a deficit. And we're we're talking a massive amount, potentially, depending on how sleep-deprived you are, like up to that 30, 40, 50% range of your muscle as lean mass. And again, this is mitigated somewhat by your training and your protein that we've already talked about. But your, you know, what we call nutrient partitioning, the fancy word to say how much of the nutrients are going to muscle and fat versus how much energy is pulled from muscle and fat, is not the way you want it to be if you're sleep deprived. All right. And we've seen multiple studies where sleep-restricted subjects didn't lose very much body fat because they were losing some muscle as part of their weight loss. So if you are not in a good place with your sleep, it is not a good time for fat loss. And I can't tell you how many people have come to us. They're frustrated because they're trying to lose weight. The calories keep going down and down, but they're not losing it. And they're like, Yeah, I don't get much sleep. Like, okay, let's fix that. Oh, I know I need good sleep, but I want to lose weight. Well, I'm sorry. The mechanism is there. It's your body. Poor sleep increases cortisol, it decreases testosterone, it impairs muscle protein synthesis, it shifts your nutrient nutrient partitioning toward fat storage and away from muscle recovery. Why does it do this? Because your body is looking for any energy it can get. And because you're not giving it sleep, it's like, well, I'm gonna hold on to that damn fat right now. Apologize my uh for my language. That's the worst you're gonna hear in terms of swearing on the show. So sleep, sleep, sleep. So important. If you're doing everything else right, if you're eating enough protein, if you're controlling the rate of loss, you're training hard, but you're only sleeping five hours a night, you are massively holding yourself back from all of that, and it's really not gonna go anywhere. You've got to fix that sleep. Just gotta do it. All right, so we've covered the three biggest threats to your muscle during a cut losing weight too fast, not getting enough protein, and not sleeping
Philip Pape: 17:08
enough. And I want to tell you quickly about Eat More Lift Heavy because what we just talked about is exactly what phase two of this program is designed to guide you through. Eat More Lift Heavy is a 26-week coached program that I created and we recently launched. I run it with Coach Carol, and it's three phases. And the second phase, which is called Eat More, Lift Heavy, is where you learn to execute and adjust your plan with us as the coaches looking over your shoulder. And so that includes navigating your phase transitions, like going from a building phase into a fat loss phase without losing the muscle you just built. And you're gonna learn to read your own data, you're gonna interpret your expenditure, you're gonna adjust your training, you're gonna learn to troubleshoot plateaus in real time with again, coaches who are watching this and giving you the feedback on, hey, is what you're interpreting correct? Let's help you out. So it's not a meal plan, it's not a course, it is a coached experience that builds skills so you can do this independently for the rest of your life. Isn't that what you want? Isn't that what you want? Now, if this topic today is really hitting home for you, if you've been through the cut and lose muscle cycle multiple times, that's exactly what Eatmore Lift Heavy was built to solve because I've seen this problem time and again, and I want to help you guys, but it you've got to do more than just binge podcasts, you've got to put it into action. So if you want to do that, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com and check us out. All right.
Philip Pape: 18:36
So now you know the threats to muscle loss during a deficit. What do you do about it? What does the research say we should do, other than just the opposite of those threats? So step one is okay, if going too fast is a problem, how fast should I go? And we we mentioned briefly the half to 1% of your body weight a week is a really solid range to be in. And you can calculate this manually. Just take your body weight. We said it before, if you're 150 pounds, that upper range is 1.5 pounds. I'm talking to someone on a consult who's about 185 pounds, he's losing over two pounds a week. And his energy is dropping, and there's a reason for that. He might be losing muscle. It might be too fast, especially if you've been on a prolonged deficit. If you're losing fat, if you're losing weight faster than that, you just run the risk of losing more muscle than you need to. And I see it more often than I don't. And all you got to do is increase your calories a little bit. You could also make sure the other things like sleep are really rock solid, and these will also mitigate often the muscle loss as well. But anyway, this is the easiest lever to pull because it's just a number, it's just a rate of loss. And the pushback I see is often like, well, I want to lose weight faster than that. Like I just want to get to a result fast. If that is your mindset, it's not going to serve you long term because that puts you in the 95% of people who are inevitably going to gain it back. If your mindset is, I want to do it the right way and hold on to those results, then please process what I'm saying. All right, step two is setting that protein floor. Um, I mentioned during a deficit, if you can get at least that one gram per pound of body weight or even more, the older you are, the more you probably need. And then you distribute it evenly across your meals, where every meal is like a protein event. Every meal has protein, not just dinner, not just your post-workout, every single meal, just make it a habit. Because it can be really hard to get your protein otherwise. If you go into the office and you don't plan ahead and bring your lunch with enough protein, you end up going to the cafeteria. Good luck. Like good luck getting enough protein that isn't, you know, deep fried or a tiny bit of the meal without doing like a grilled chicken salad, which is fine if you want the same, you know, grilled chicken salad every day. And there is an interesting little thing called the protein leverage effect that I've alluded to before, where if protein drops below a certain percentage of calories, you tend to unconsciously overeat to meet that protein target, and you end up eating even more fats and carbs and still not getting enough protein, and then it affects your hunger. So having the protein is increases your satiety, but not just directly. There's this indirect way that it does so as well. So that's protein. And by the way, in eat more lift heavy, uh, very early on, I think it's week four, we give you a very massively helpful tool called the Protein Day Builder that helps you build out your entire day based on whatever your targets are. And you can keep running the tool as many times as you want, forever, while you're in the program.
Philip Pape: 21:25
All right, step three is maintaining your training intensity. So here I do want to talk about training. A lot of people get this backward, right? A lot of people want to reduce their training during a cut or they want to do more high-rep endurance cardio type like fat burning stuff. Now, we know that when you're in a deficit, recovery is lower, it's compromised. But the hierarchy of how you do things is important. So if you have to reduce something for that recovery drop, I would reduce the volume first, right? Number of sets, then I would reduce the frequency, how often you do the same lifts or hit the same muscle groups. And then last thing I would reduce is the intensity. And I probably really wouldn't reduce the intensity, other than the fact that you might go from, you know, a strength type program where you're doing PRs above 80% of your max to a more mid-range strength/slash hypertrophy, where you're often hitting higher rep ranges, say above 60% of your max, but you're still lifting heavy, quote unquote. Because maintaining heavy loads is the most important signal to hold on to your muscle. We know from research that even when your deficit prevents you from gaining muscle, which once you've are a little bit experienced, that's usually what happens. You're not going to gain new lean mass in a deficit, usually. You're also not going to lose a lot of strength either. Your nervous system can still adapt even when your muscles can't grow. This is that whole interesting dichotomy between strength and muscle. So keep lifting heavy. Keep lifting heavy. You can drop the volume from, say, if you're doing 15 sets a week down to 10. We know it takes a lot less to maintain than to build. So by definition, if you're all you're trying to do is send a signal to maintain muscle, you have some permission to drop that volume to give you more recovery. A lot of this is going to be by feel and by what the data is telling you in the moment. You may not notice much of a difference in the first, say, four weeks of the cut, and then it really starts to ramp up later on. It's also going to be affected by your sleep and how much how fast you're going of a deficit. Again, these all tie together. One last thing about the maintenance thing, I know I've I've looked in the research lately again, and it does seem that the older you get, the higher dose you need to maintain your muscle. And I don't know if that's really just an age thing or it's confounded by other variables. But as long as you're training like a reasonable level of volume, you know, at least those five to ten sets per muscle group per week are good. All right. Step
Philip Pape: 23:57
four is kind of my bonus step today. And that is about diet breaks, using diet breaks as a strategic tool. There's the famous Matador study that found that men who alternated two weeks of dieting with two weeks of maintenance lost a lot more total weight than men who dieted continuously for the same time in the deficit. And that intermittent group that went on and off two weeks at a time showed less metabolic adaptation and maintained more of their weight loss at a six-month follow-up. And I know there have been some pushbacks against this study over the years, but the general principle still applies. And most of it, more of it is psychological. I've I believe this is maybe more anecdotal. The ability to take breaks keeps you more consistent with your diet. So for resistance-trained individuals, which you are trying to be, the the body composition advantage of diet breaks is not like this clear-cut thing, but psychologically it's very helpful. It's very helpful. Really, the only study I can think of that showed some advantage was one of the one that I did called the weekend diet, where you went to a full refeed on the weekends. Like you brought your calories all the way up to maintenance on the weekends, and there showed a slight advantage for retaining muscle, more muscle for that. So I do recommend that approach for a lot of folks, but I mainly recommend it because weekends are where people go off the rails. So if you plan in a break every weekend, it's ah, it's a nice relief. You can go out and enjoy yourself. You know, it's it's just a really good cycle that goes with your natural week for most human beings, social your social calendar. But the big advantage of diet breaks is the subjective well-being advantage. You tend to have less hunger. I mean, you definitely have less hunger the days you take the that you're taking the break, but then it translates psychologically to overall less hunger because you're you're satisfying yourself more often, right? So you have more satisfaction, and then what do you get is better adherence. And you know what? Adherence is the variable that governs everything else. If a diet break every four to six weeks keeps you going, keeps you from falling off the wagon or chasing the next shiny object, then it is worth it, regardless of the math on, oh, it's gonna slow me down a little bit. Well, yeah, but you would have slowed to zero or reverted or regressed if you didn't have the diet break. So, from a practical standpoint, I recommend something like a one to two week diet break at maintenance every, say, four to eight weeks if you're in a longer cut. Almost think of it like a deload for your diet. If you want that more frequent cycle of relief and refeeds than the weekend refeed or the two days per week, one day is often not enough in practical experience. Like the one day it kind of comes and goes real quickly, and it's just not enough. Two days is a really nice compromise because it's two, it's still two out of seven. So five days you're still in a deficit. You can go in a harder deficit on those five days than you would have otherwise, or just keep it, keep it to the same level of calories and accept a slower rate of loss and a slower weekly deficit overall. You can do it whatever way you want.
Philip Pape: 27:04
All right, so everything I just said applies to anybody, including GLP1 users. So I kind of want to touch on this a little bit, these edge cases. So rate of loss, protein, training. The difference, though, is that these medications make it easier to lose weight, but harder to eat enough, especially protein. It's kind of funny. That's what that's what I noticed, which is kind of a clue that protein is a really good thing to have in your diet for a lot of reasons, isn't it? I think it's like this intuitive clue that hey, maybe you should be getting more protein. And the fact that it's harder to eat if you came off or lowered the dose on the GLP1s while you're increasing your protein, does that kind of solve some of the issues you were having with your appetite? Maybe, maybe not. It depends how strong those signals are in your brain. A lot of brain-related genes. So I want to give you some numbers from trials so you can see the range of outcomes. You've probably heard of the step one some magnitude trial. It's a big one that's referenced all the time. And there was no exercise or protein guidance in the trial. And in that one, lean mass was up to 40% of total weight loss, what I mentioned before. And that sounds really bad. Okay. But a 2025 case series looked at GLP1 users who did resistance train three to five days a week and had adequate protein. And in a case series, so these look at case studies. Okay, it's not like a big trial with a huge sample size, it's just case studies, but they're still helpful to understand. One person lost a third of their body weight, but less than 9% of that loss came from lean tissue, which is totally acceptable, I think, when you've lost that much body weight. I mean, seriously. That's the other thing is like if you if you have a lot of weight to lose, getting a little bit of muscle loss is not fine. It's probably fine and probably worth it. And it's probably not all truly muscle loss. It's lean tissue, so it includes fluid and things like that. In which case you're probably gonna be in a better position afterward to build that as long as you've been holding on to a lot of it to begin with. And then two of the three participants gained lean mass while losing significant body weight. Isn't that pretty cool, right? And that happens. And I'm guessing it's because they hadn't been training before. They were new to it. Now there was a bigger study, it's a prospective study of 200 adults who they were educated on resistance training and protein when they started the GLP1s, and they had 13% weight loss with only 3% muscle loss after six months. So this is a massive gap that we need to understand and we need to spread the word. The same class of drug, vastly different body composition outcomes, based entirely almost on whether they lifted and ate enough protein. And then there's a nuance I do want to mention. I want to mention it, okay. A lot of the scary headlines about GOP1 muscle loss come from those DEXA measurements that I mentioned. And remember that there are, there's not really one body fat measurement that is foolproof. There's error in every single one of them. And if you think of DEXA, anything that's not fat or bone is counted as lean mass. So that includes water, glycogen, and even your organs, which can change in size. So it's not just muscle mass. So when you lose a large amount of body fat, you're also gonna lose the water and protein embedded in that fifth in that fat tissue. And about 15 to 20% of fat or adipose tissue mass is water and protein. Not sure if you realize that. So the DEXA is overstating the amount of skeletal muscle you're losing. I kind of said this already, but I'm saying it in a different way. When researchers use MRI, which can directly measure muscle tissue, we see that the lean tissue drops or lean tissue loss drops about 16% of total weight loss. So, in other words, I'm acknowledging maybe it's not as tremendously massive as we think, but there's still a gap between 16% and 3% or 0% or gaining muscle, right? There's still a big difference. So none of this means you should ignore the risk to that and that you shouldn't train any protein. We want to do those anyway. You want to do those anyway. But I gave you some other tips today, like the controlled rate of loss, and I also mentioned those diet breaks. Um, and I think there are there are medical organizations that are now recommending similar rates of protein intake for people on GLP ones, you know, like up to, not up to, but around 1.2, 1.6 grams per kilogram, which gets you around, gets you to that 0.7 grams per protein, which is great. And they're recommending at least, I think, 360 minutes per week, which is what, six hours per week of exercise with an emphasis on resistance training. So if you're training three or four days a week, you're already getting at least three to five hours just from your training and moving around, and then you're probably walking as well, and then you might be getting a little bit more cardio. So you should probably be in that range anyway. Now, I want
Philip Pape: 31:47
to mention retatrotide briefly, because there's a lot of news and buzz around it. It is the next generation, the triple receptor agonist. And it's currently in phase three trials. And I've heard from some of you listeners and some former clients who have taken this, and it is becoming popular in the body composition space, interestingly, with a different, a different judgmental lens on it than things like OZEP. And now, why that is well, okay, so what do we see from it? We see a massive amount of weight loss. I think the most of any of the drug, up to 28% weight loss over the same time periods. And the there's a body composition stuff sub-study that confirmed the proportion of lean mass loss is similar to other GOP1 drugs, which again, I'm not surprised. Same problem, same solution. The mechanism is the same. It's a calorie deficit, it's not the drug itself. And there might be other benefits to all these drugs like retatrotide, might have benefits for liver fat and things like that. And I've seen it used almost as a tool for rapid fat loss or protein-sparing modified fast in a way that the other drugs are not talked about, which is very interesting. I might talk more about that in the future. All right, before we wrap up, remember I promised you a specific meal structure to hit plenty of protein. So in this case, 50 grams of protein with doing it very efficiently, so under 400 calories with minimal demand on your appetite, whether you're on GLP1 drugs or you're just looking to get a lot more protein and you're having trouble from a from a hunger perspective, fitting it in. Like you can't feel like you can't eat that much. I'm gonna share that in just a moment.
Philip Pape: 33:16
But if this episode was useful to you, I do have a favor. All I want you to do is think of someone in your life who wants to start a cut, wants to lose fat, who might be currently on a GLP 1 med. You know, those are two different categories. They might want to lose fat and or they might be on GLP1 med, wanting to lose weight, and they're worried about the muscle loss thing. Send them this episode. Just text it to them from your app or tell them about it, or tag me on Instagram and send it to them. All right, this can change someone's life, just knowing this information on what to do, and hopefully you're giving it to them out of love, out of kindness. People are not hearing this from their doctor. They might not be hearing it from their trainer, or if they even have one, so share it with a friend. All right, here is the 50 gram suppressed appetite meal idea I have for you. It's designed for days when eating feels like it's tough to do. And I know that's not the case for everyone. You might be listening, like, whoa, I would love to be in that situation. But many of you are, okay? Especially if you're trying, I'm asking you to increase calories. Like when you join eat more, lift heavy. The first two words, eat more. We're trying to bring up that metabolism, help you eat more calories. So, this this is for people on a cut, deep into a cut, especially on GLP1 meds, or just one of those low appetite days. I want you to take one cup of non-fat Greek yogurt. That's 130 calories, that's 20 grams of protein as a base. You're gonna mix in one scoop of your favorite protein powder, flavored, unflavored, I don't care, whatever you like, casein or whey or a vegan protein powder with pea and rice. That adds another 25 to 30 grams of protein. So now you have another 120 calories. Now you're gonna fold in a handful of berries, maybe about a quarter cup of berries. That gives you some flavor and some fiber and also a little bit of hydration. I personally love raspberries and blackberries because they're extremely high in fiber. But hey, blueberries, strawberries, they all work. So when you add it all up, you've got about 50 grams of protein, around 280 to 350 calories, depending on the protein powder amount. Takes 90 seconds to make, doesn't require you to chew, it doesn't demand a lot of stomach space, it is cold, it is creamy, it is mildly sweet, it goes down easily, even when you have no appetite. And if you're looking for a pre-bed or late evening snack with enough hours before you go to sleep, this is also a great idea. So, again, that's just non-fat Greek yogurt, protein powder, and berries. Super, super simple. And the reason this works is yogurt and protein powder are the two most protein-dense foods per unit of volume. You're getting 50 grams of protein in the physical space of this small bowl. And you compare that, say, to say eight ounces of chicken breasts when you don't have an appetite and it feels like kind of a chore to get down. It's the same protein but a different experience because of the food density. And I just wanted to share that. It might sound obvious to some of you who are really into making recipes that this is like, you know, child's play 101 stuff, but a lot of people are not thinking of this with intention, how they make this work. And if you put this in your rotation, plant it in, add it to macrofactor or wherever you track, and you could skip it if you need to, but have it in there, pre-plant it, and it can be a really helpful tool. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember the muscle you built is worth protecting. And the way to do that is just simpler than you think if you listen to this episode. I'm Philip Bate, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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Philip Pape 4/2/26 Philip Pape 4/2/26

The Mad Scientist's Guide to Strength Training After 40 (Chris Duffin) | Ep 456

Why does lifting start hurting once you hit 40? Is it really age, or is your body compensating for weak links you cannot see? Chris Duffin joins me to unpack the biomechanics behind strength training longevity, muscle building, and injury prevention. Chris is a world record strength athlete who has squatted and deadlifted over 1,000 pounds while applying engineering principles to human movement.

Why does lifting start hurting once you hit 40? Is it really age, or is your body compensating for weak links you cannot see?

Chris Duffin joins me to unpack the biomechanics behind strength training longevity, muscle building, and injury prevention. Chris is a world record strength athlete who has squatted and deadlifted over 1,000 pounds while applying engineering principles to human movement.

We talk about why many lifters trying to build muscle and lose fat end up breaking down, especially with strength training over 40. Chris explains how breathing mechanics, foot stability, and movement quality determine whether your body adapts or gets injured.

You’ll learn why poor mechanics “detune” your nervous system, how foot strength influences power and metabolism, and why proper bracing unlocks safer muscle building and hypertrophy.

If you care about body recomp, lifting weights long term, and evidence-based training that supports longevity, this conversation is packed with insights.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why lifters over 40 get hurt
2:40 - Adaptation and movement quality explained
9:36 - Detuning, breathing, bracing, and core stability
21:57 - Breathing strategy across rep ranges
34:16 - Why foot strength matters for lifting
39:36 - Barefoot training and footwear choices
43:28 - Shoulder and hip power mechanics
46:17 - Regenerative framework for recovery

Episode resources:

Why lifters over 40 get hurt
Philip Pape 0:00
Most training advice treats your body like a simple machine. More input, more output, add some weight, follow the program, repeat. And that works fine until you're 45 and your shoulder is clicking, your low back is always sore, and you're spending more time warming up than actually lifting. Is this just your age? Are you lifting too heavy? Or what if the problem is your feet or how you breathe? Or that pain in one area might be connected to other points on your body? Today's guest has over 20 years of applied expertise across engineering, biomechanics, and elite strength performance. And he applies this knowledge to the human body. Oh, and he's also a world record-holding strength athlete who squatted over a thousand pounds at age 42. You are going to learn how to engineer your body so it doesn't break down, why the fix starts in the places you'd never expect, and why the interconnectedness of your biomechanics is far more important than the program you're running. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we are talking about your shoulders, your low back, your hips. They're not supposed to hurt every year you train, but for many lifters over 40, we get pain, we get injuries, and we are trying to train for longevity. My guest today is the Chris Duffin, the mad scientist of strength. He was everything from a manufacturing engineer who spent years diagnosing complex systems and why they fail to later becoming a world record-holding strength athlete. He's the only person to have squatted and deadlifted over a thousand pounds for reps in his late 30s and early 40s. He just turned 49. He's still training heavy, still applies principles from engineering and biomechanics and cellular health and all of that we're going to get into today to the human body to help you find that bottleneck and fix the constraint that's limiting your performance. So today we're going to get into training longevity and resilience, the interconnectedness of your body, neurocentric biomechanics, even some surprising things that you need to know about your feet, your breathing, and more to improve how you feel and perform. Plus, maybe a little bit about what Chris does in his own training to keep lifting heavy. Chris, it's an honor to have you on Wits and Weights. Welcome.
Adaptation and movement quality explained
Chris Duffin 2:26
Yeah, thanks. Uh thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation. And the way you did that opening is exactly why I've been looking forward to it because it's a really great way to frame what we need to discuss. So yeah, I'm looking forward to this.
Philip Pape 2:40
Good. I'm glad we hit the mark, at least as a starting point. And it's funny because just the timing of this, a client of mine recently said, you know, I asked him, what do you want to see more in the fitness industry? And he said, I want to see more people talking about how not to get hurt. I mean, that's the way he put it. He's like, he's 45, I'm 45. And he came up in the world of like starting strength and five by fives and the big compounds and this almost epidemic of older guys now who are into lifting but getting hurt. They're breaking down. Maybe there's aspects of their life that compound that, like executives and busy professionals who have a lot of stress and they feel like their training is maybe too limited or dogmatic, or they're not sure what to do. Yeah. So, like, what's the trend or the culture you're seeing?
Detuning, breathing, bracing, and core stability
Chris Duffin 3:25
There's a lot of pieces to dissect within that. And hopefully we can simplify that because this industry always goes in cycles or waves. And there was a big push for a long time around movement quality and cleaning that up. And I was part of that. And now there's a lot of shift more around like the pain science of this and going, you know, we develop, we acclimate, that's the wrong word, adapt to stress. And so whatever movement that you move in is totally fine. And I think that might be causing some issues, even though that messaging is really on point. We don't want people to be fearful of movement. So being afraid, like I'm gonna do squat, I'm gonna hurt my back, or if if I don't do it exactly perfectly, means that I'm gonna hurt myself. Well, that creates fear, and then people are not pushing themselves, which then means they're not adapting, not growing stronger. And a better word for adaptation. It's just getting stronger, more resilient, right? But this is where context comes in, that little magic word, right? Because if we're not trying to improve the quality of our movement, there's an interesting thing that happens here because we adapt nearly any movement or stress that's imposed upon us, but not all of that adaptation is at the same rate. And we can take the back, for example. Like there's a lot of folks getting into lifting, maybe later in life, and they get strong maybe fairly quick, and then all of a sudden their back starts hurting. And it's like, hey, I read X program, and it says I should be able to train, you know, four days a week doing this. And it's like the research, all these science-based influencers are going through this over and over and over again, like scale back, and like, yes, but that's adaptation to muscular tissue and not the adaptation that needs to happen at a skeletal level for your disc to be able to support that load. Which, if you haven't had years of history of training, that adaptation hasn't happened. In this getting complex into the science of things, this piezoelectric, basically bone welding process that happens. That literally is it. That's how bone forms. That takes about a week. So if you haven't trained heavy in the past for you know decades, you may not have those adaptations and you might need to take it a little bit slower. We see this a lot in like female populations where if somebody gets into a strength sport, they don't have a history, and all of a sudden they're close to world-class levels in a few years and then they're gone because they actually didn't have the time that takes longer to develop that. And it might take longer to do that. Now, that's differences between you know processes in our body and how they adapt. We're talking, you know, skeletal adaptation versus skeletal muscle. But we also have our training reserves. If we think about this, if I move in a poor form, let's say I'm really rounded over while I'm squatting, again, you can adapt to that, but it's going to take you longer to recover from that. So you would not be able to, let's say, move as much load. So if we think about the total cumulative experience of your training over a week, for example, the total amount of repetition and load and all of this that adds up. If I work on improving my quality of movement in that, I'm going to be able to handle more volume, more frequency, and more weight, and still recover because I'm more efficient with the use of the tissues moving that load. Which means the more load that I handle within a given period of time stacked up means I get stronger. So you would get more resilient and develop more strength if you improve the quality of your movement. So don't be afraid of movement. If your technique isn't perfect, you go train. But also at the same time, try to make it a little bit better over time as well. And that's going to help you. And then there's some other things that kind of happen in this process too. Why is it? Why don't we recover as well when we're not using, you know, the materials, our biological materials as efficiently? Like our body responds to these, I call it peripheral inputs, where that load is at in space and where your joint is in relation to it actually sends a signal to the brain. So this soreness that you're feeling from squatting, it's like, oh, I have to do more to fix this because I'm I'm getting tight from all this squatting. My hips are getting tight, my back's getting tight. So I gotta add yoga, I gotta add stretching, I gotta add my foam rolling, I gotta add, add, add, add all this stuff. The body is trying to protect you because it's going, hey, we've got a loss of stability. Maybe our foot is unstable and it's shifting around on the ground because we're on an unstable shoe or an unstable surface, or we've just kind of lacked some motor stability issues and the knees wavering around. The body's response to that is to detune you. And so detuning you, one, it actually makes you weaker immediately. So you're not moving as much load as you really are capable of doing. It's literally how you move like thousands of pounds, for example, is to like really refine those patterns. So you're reducing the detuning that's happening in your system. So like all of a sudden, somebody's like way stronger. And it's like, how did that happen? We didn't add strength in 15 minutes, but we clean this stuff up and the signals are clear, and the body goes, You're safe to move now because we've got that in the right position. But on another level, that's why your hips are tightening up. It's not tightening up because you're squatting, it's tightening up because you're squatting like shit. The body's gonna start protecting that joint, and it's gonna start protecting that joint by tightening the muscles around it and starting to restrict the movement. And so I see this as a classic issue in strength training world is like everything is additive. That's not working. So we got to add because I lift, I have to balance that with doing this other thing, and I have to balance it with doing the other. And it's like, well, let's let's look at what we're doing and seeing what's actually driving that. And it might be that you're training too much, like you have too much load and that too much volume, frequency, all the other stuff. But these are all those variables that create that. And if it's a specific area that's starting to lose mobility, it means something with your training or your movement is amiss there. And if you correct that, that shouldn't happen. But being a thousand-pound squatter on deadlifter without stretching my hips, I can come close to doing the splits as, and that was as a 280-pound, you know, five foot ten male, because my movement through my hips was really clean.
Philip Pape 10:30
If you want to be strong and be able to do this a long time, and you mentioned it, quality of movement equals strength, you know, avoiding this detuning because you've become weaker due to the peripheral inputs. But ultimately, what I'm hearing is the quality of movement and your ability to do this and listen to the signals which are telling you something's off, and fix those things. That's how we simplify this to don't add more, fix that. It'll then lead to you being able to lift more. I guess my next question is when you say quality of movement, uh, we need to define that. And then what do you mean? And go on on all the different branches uh very specifically of what that means.
Chris Duffin 11:06
So listen to the signals that they're sending to you, going, hey, there is a gap here, and there's some areas where I can get more efficient. And the more efficient I get, the stronger and more resilient I can get, because then I can handle more load. But with that, spend some time training in some of those other ranges. Now, there is to some level a definition of good quality movement, and that is having the right balance of length tension relationship of the muscles around a joint. So that is joints that are you know balancing that hip, where if I'm popping my chest way up, like all the muscles that are connected to the front of the spine are in a stretch position, and the ones in the back are in a shortened position. If they're constantly like that, the ones in the back are going to be overworked. They're gonna hold a lot of tension and they're going to be less able to get nutrients in, so substrate material in and waste products out. So you're restricting their ability to recover and they're overfatiguing because they are working all the time. So they have a, you know, a chronic level of fatigue that now when I get capacity, so someone that has overactive, you know, erectors because they're trying to uh compensate for something typically has those fail during a movement because they don't have the resilience because they're already working. Uh again, I've got a lack, uh, a little bit of laxity in the muscles in the front that are in this stretched position all the time. They're not turned on in that balance. And this becomes important when we talk about what we call prime movers, which are the main like drivers of force as versus stabilizing muscles, ones that are kind of creating that balance. So I think of this in a global perspective. So the biggest impact to me is the impact of I hate calling it the core because people misapply that to like tight, you know, rigid abs. And it's not what I'm talking about. It's this ability to manage, well, that region of the body, the diaphragm, it's the area between the diaphragm, so your upper rib cage and your pelvis, and having good alignment with that and being able to balance the processes within that, which is happens from it's cued from the diaphragm. There's a lot of other muscles that happen, but we'll talk about that, which has three essential functions respiration, stabilization, and the sphincter. It's why you can't brace 100% if you're running a marathon. You're still braced, otherwise, you'd flop over. So it's this balance, and it's always somewhere on a continuum. So you can think about this, you know, knob that goes to 10 one direction and 10 the other, and you you can choose. Like you go dial it one way, it's less, you know, as you start dialing more towards respiration, you're having less stabilization as you're dialing the other way. And it's it's always a balance in there of what do you need from a respiratory versus stabilization. But that process right there, that alignment and using those resources and getting everything to stabilize the spine has this huge effect throughout the entire system. So number one is the ability to control and manage the breathing and breathing complex. All right. Number two is the foot and ankle complex. Then number three is the big power generation joints, the shoulder complex and the hip complex. All right, then you can get out into the peripheral. And if you think about things in that sequence of like trying to diagnose what's going wrong, it may be counterintuitive. I'm gonna start with that breathing embracing and that alignment uh component. That may sound weird, but if you are lacking that stable base to fire from, that lat that holds that internal rotation of that shoulder while you're benching doesn't have a stable base and it might be flaring out. Fixing this can fix that. Same thing. That lack of mobility, that protection could be happening because, again, a lack there in that area. And so just focusing on that first, like that's the global perspective. I'm not saying the problem's there, but that's the thought process. We go there first. So it's it's about having a good relationship there. And it doesn't mean you can't like be in another area and space, but when I'm trying to maximize my force output, when I'm trying to get more efficient with some base motor patterns, I'm going to try to make sure that I've got that and I know how to be able to inflate my core 360 degrees. So I should have some expansion in my lower abdominals, in my lower obliques just below the belt line, in my low back just below the rib cage. Like I should be able to just sit there and expand all of that while keeping that diaphragm, so that space at the base of the rib cage in parallel to my pelvis, right? Keeping those two in that same frame, being able to expand there, the equality and ability to control that does a lot of things. And then you can move in different ways in different spaces, as long as you can kind of control that. The ability that diaphragm descending down creates pressure on those organs. And that pressure pushes out all the way around, including down in the pelvis, which causes a co-contraction of all those muscles, which is the thoraciolumbar musculature, the pelvic floor, like all these other things that you could think about doing. The I need to do the valsalva move over, I need to do all these things. It's the real simple way to just focus on one thing and get like those processes, the body to say, it is safe for me to be in this position and elicit force without restriction. That's the signal that you are sending to the body when you do that. So being able to learn to do that without breath, because guess what? There's no actual air in your down there. That's organs. It's just the diaphragm is descending down, making space in the lungs. So doing it through the lungs is a compensatory pattern. You could add a little bit more over the top, um, and you can kind of pulse the diaphragm. So you may hear like people doing kettlebells or other things with this like little burst, like that is they already have good stability and they've got right at the peak of contraction, they're hitting that, which causes this micropulse of intense pressure, more intense pressure. Good posture, and then being able to expand all of that all the way around, checking those points. Boom, that's first step in the process.
Philip Pape 18:00
So I really like this breathing bracing nuance that you're gonna get into because we do simplify it often to the Valsal remover, um, just taking one big breath, holding it. There's no spectrum of how big of a breath, the pulsing or anything like that, from a max one RM to just like doing something for reps, people don't distinguish. And I think there's got to be different ways to approach this across that spectrum. So, some of my questions are now gonna be about like the pressure versus the load, about how does this apply to the actual lift mechanics, you know, and then and then things like lifting belts, which we can add tech on afterward.
Breathing strategy across rep ranges
Chris Duffin 18:38
So you'll notice in there that discussion, I didn't talk about like the contracting of the muscles. Like if you're gonna put a weight on your back or in your hands or throw a punch or do these sorts of things, that outer contraction is gonna happen over the top of it. So you don't have to like consciously do that, or again, consciously think about like the Valsava maneuver. If we just initiate, I try to simplify things down into all right, I'm gonna have that outward expansion in those areas, a few touch points and be in good posture. That's it. Bunch of stuff happens. Now, what is the intensity? What is that very one rep max, three rep max, five rep? Uh, I'm doing kettlebell snatches, you know, for time. How do I manage this? And that's why I mentioned that continuum dial. There is no necessarily perfect answer because it's gonna vary on your particular respiratory needs, but it's going to be that balance. And again, like what is your level of strength in those muscles that are creating that stabilization too? So there's gonna be a balance there, and it is a give and take. So with a max true one max rep, there is no breathing during that process. Everything is stabilization, all right. And let's say I'm doing a five rep max, I'm probably pausing in there somewhere to take a reset and take a breath. Maybe it's after the second rep or the third rep. I'm gonna stop at the top where I'm in a good posture, release, another breath in so I don't pass out from last lack of air. All right. But let's say I'm doing a kettlebell snatch. That's for time. That's gonna be pretty continuous, but it's got some peak forces in there where I'm gonna need to be stable, but I'm probably not doing the breath between reps because there's no time. So I'm doing I'm timing that with it, right? So in a non-contractile phase, you know, I'm letting that air out, then I'm bringing it in, and then I've got a period where I'm not uh taking a breath, and it's in that movement. So it's within that continuum and just understanding all right, where's that balance at with this? Right. And so there's no fixed answer. If I'm doing a 20-rep squat, you know, it's gonna be very different and might start becoming part within the movement, but the stabilization demands are a little less as well. But this is also if we go all the way back to the beginning and you talked about how do I not injure myself. This is problematic in this arena when we're dealing with these core compound movements that people don't think about when they're talking about all right, movement quality doesn't matter. That whole initial discussion, let's tie back to this. We are now using the same process for respiration and stabilization. And if we start fatiguing out because of respiration, and now we don't have the strength to handle the stabilization, and I'm doing a CrossFit circuit with wall balls and squats and all of this, and I've got a core movement in there, and I have fatigued my capacity from an endurance respiratory standpoint. And now I've got 200 pounds on my back, but I'm a 400 pound squatter, but you just can't stabilize enough to protect yourself, and you end up hurting yourself. This is good reason to take. Make movements like that and separate those from they shouldn't be part of a metabolic conditioning program because of the failure mode.
Philip Pape 22:10
Yeah, yeah. I'm laughing because I did I did CrossFit for like eight years and I have the injuries to show for it, the long-term issues that are slowly getting resolved from separating the two. You're right. Because you just you get wiped and you're going for you know grace or what are these wads for reps on deadlifts and you're just killing yourself.
Chris Duffin 22:28
You just you got nothing and you got to the end. And that's not a knock-on CrossFit. You can do CrossFit and program it highly intelligently. Um, and you can do like and you can get strong too, like hit boom. But you're gonna come in and you're gonna like, all right, let's hit a squat session, boom, let's roll up. All right, let's now do a metabolic conditioning piece and just not have a movement like that with load that has that potential within that wild. Like it's that simple.
Philip Pape 22:53
So if you were coaching somebody and they're you're coaching them on the deadlift, people are trying to do a set of five, let's say, or even a set of three. Is there a standard default that you'd recommend in terms of like, do you breathe at the top or bottom? And also how do you do it and when do you take a breath? Like if you said, yeah, it's a pretty good protocol, let's say, for a set of three deadlifts.
Chris Duffin 23:12
So it's not one or the other. That's where the continuum, because they can mix and you can be doing the breathing. It's just a so just quick clarification there. But typically on a squat or deadlift or a base movement like that, I'm gonna do it in a position where I'm not holding the weight. And that it does that sounds funny. I'm like, I'm holding the weight with a squat or deadlift all the time. But you can stand with a weight for a really long time because the postures and everything, you're not actually loading and holding that spinal position uh unless you're leaning slightly forward or back or in the corner.
Philip Pape 23:43
Right, you're totally balanced over midfoot in a vertical line. Yeah, exactly.
Chris Duffin 23:47
That's the time to do that if you're doing one of those movements. Reset.
Philip Pape 23:52
Okay, okay, interesting. So on the deadlift, see that that's a good one, right? Because a lot of people breathe at the bottom of the rep or they take a breath at the bottom.
Chris Duffin 23:59
Yes, do not do not do that.
Philip Pape 24:01
Okay, yeah. See, that's yeah, exactly. That's why I'm bringing it up, right? Because I taught I have my lifting buddies and I would are we sometimes argue about this stuff, and a lot of people come to their own conclusion when they realize doing it at the top seems to be more helpful.
Chris Duffin 24:15
A caveat with that, like if you're doing low load and you're doing repetition based stuff, that may make sense because it doesn't require as much to get that off the floor. But you if you are setting the tension and you're already in that down position, you're literally trying to force like how to explain that. Like, you need to create, if you're moving a heavier load, you need to force that level of tension into the bar. And if you start with no tension whatsoever, because if you've let a breath go, your body is completely relaxed and you don't have tension on the bar. That is it, right? So now I'm gonna rebuild that and I'm rebuilding it all just through that and that slacks in that bar. There's some sort of acceleratory thing to get that bar moving and to get that bar moving without some give in the body, it needs to be really light, or you're compromising position. You've got a little bit of loss in position as you're getting into position. So, like for me, I would set that brace before I went down into the deadlift, and I'm driving my hips into position, and the bar is literally bending up to be able to match to give my hips the highest position possible. Because the higher hip position possible gives me the best diaphragm uh to pelvis relationship and the best strength I can elicit from my hips. If I'm loose, if I've let loose that brace, let loose that tension on that bar, the hips are thus lower. And thus I don't have the same efficient power, like just from a mechanical standpoint, as an engineer, you get this like literally change the lever points, and I have less strength. And I'm going to end up compromising position as I let those hips rise and get into position to where I optimize those strengths, but I've done that by compromising the other positions. So you have to have that rigidness, and that rigidness can be created as you're driving into, but it's got to be done before. So, like for me to set up for a deadlift, there used to have to be 500 pounds on the bar. Because if it was less than 500 pounds, the weight would come off the ground during my setup because I knew where my hip position had to be for that to break off and the bar would be bending so much, I owned that position and I wouldn't start from a lower position because it's a different movement.
Philip Pape 26:40
Another thought that goes through my head is if you just bend over right now, if you're listening to this into a deadlift position and then try to take a big breath, it just feels unnatural.
Chris Duffin 26:50
You're not in a good position for the for all that activity to happen. You're in a poor position. You want to be in good position to set that. You can't do that when you're in that position. I mean, that is it is that is a known fact.
Philip Pape 27:03
Like so, when it comes to the respiration versus stabilization, like when we think of lifting belts and people talking about intra-abdominal pressure and all this stuff, like what's your thought on a belt?
Chris Duffin 27:14
Yeah. So a belt can be a really valuable tool for a couple of reasons, but usually it's completely misapplied. All right. So people are using the belt for support. And so they're cranking this belt on. And in fact, what we want the belt to be, and we need to be able to expand to actually get that contraction to happen the way that we want. So you have to be able to expand out into the belt, but then you reach a point of like, all right, once we've written that, I don't want to, I need a rigid force to expand against. And that's actually that co-contraction of that the thoraciolum bar musculature, the abdominals, like all this stuff is your internal belt, but it's not a hundred percent wholly rigid. So it does have some give to it. And so a belt can be valuable by creating that more rigid for handling that maximum load. And it can also be really valuable for you to just from a cueing mechanism to have the tactile feedback. Like, am I pushing out in all these spaces? And just tactily having that. So I found a lot of effect of just having like an expandable kind of belt that allows you to breathe out into it, uh, but has some restriction because it's creating that reactive neuromuscular training, is the technical term for it. But it's like it teaches you to push into it, like a like a nylon instead of a leather. Yes, exactly. So that's another if I'm using from a tactile, if I'm like trying to, um, so if I'm working with an audience that is, you know, not a maximum performance audience, I would use a rigid belt for them, right? But uh, but if I'm teaching, I really like uh that it is that it's got a few pockets where you can put like uh you know balls in massage balls so you can target like specific areas for people to like, hmm, okay, I'm pushing out into that. So I find that really, really valuable. And that's actually what I use today because I don't train for maximal strength. And I just like that little bit of extra resistance, but not too much. So the way to use a belt properly is to have be able to slide at least two fingers between your belly and the belt before you you're expanded. But it's to have it relatively, but like loose enough that you can still slide those in there. So if you've got it too tight, you're actually sucking that in and you can't expand out into it anymore. So that's where the misapplication that I see over and over again is people are looking, they're cranking, and they're they're using it as a passive structure. It needs to be used in an active manner.
Philip Pape 29:47
Okay, and two more questions about breath. One is can you take too many breaths? And and I say that because again, you alluded to holding your breath for multiple reps, and there's different schools of thought on that as well. So if you're doing like a set of five squats, you know, is there a disadvantage to taking a breath for each rep because of now the respiration overcomes the stabilization in some way or tires you out? Or is it like that's too short of a period for it to matter?
Chris Duffin 30:12
That's too short of a period. Uh, so I wouldn't worry about that too much. So, what does this allow? It allows us to move greater load, right? But it also then allows us to push. If we can maintain our technique and we're not stopping because of respiration, I'm not stopping because my low back's fatiguing. Like it is just pure, like my movement's just freaking maximal solid. And I and I'm failing because my quads just can't give anymore, right? That triggers something at a cellular level. So when you're able to push into a deeper state of fatigue, the deeper you go, it pushes further oxygen desaturation of the muscles, it pushes uh changes lactic threshold, it does a number of things at that level. And that's like if anybody ever gets around uh looking at like blood flow restriction or things like that, that kind of forces that mechanism via a whole different pathway by just depriving the body and putting it in that deeper state uh without the load. But the further you actually improve that, so like changing the load in space got people with a squat bar, it was called the transformer bar, put the diaphragm and the pelvis like perfectly aligned and got people in these amazing squat patterns. And all of a sudden, you could go to that level. So it's another way of tapping into this cellular level biology because when that happens, those triggers things like uh PGC one alpha, it's basically this cellular level response triggering uh adaptation at that muscular at that level. And it's truly, truly fascinating. And that's a lot of my thought process through the years was underlying what is the cellular signaling pathways, which is why you saw me dealing with products that like a flywheel, so the Kratos flywheel, like the load starts dropping as you first push into it, like a dumbbell that changed weights as like you could change the leverage as you went because you could just keep pushing. BFR, I was a big proponent of it. I still am uh education around that same thing. It's another pathway into that same modality. And these are actually triggering those responses at the cell level so we can actually grow stronger, more resilient, drive metabolic changes at that tissue. So it's it's really fascinating stuff.
Philip Pape 32:44
Is it just a function of putting you into more variations that then can reach the deeper and more muscle fibers, just like the conjugate method tries to do with rotation through different lifts? Or when you when you say set cellular signaling, is it really just that, or is there some other mechanism you're you're alluding to?
Why foot strength matters for lifting
Chris Duffin 33:01
Uh well, what I was talking about was just truly in that context was cellular, uh cellular signaling. But it has an effect. I mean, your grip position plays a role in that, for example. Like a lot of people grab super, super tight because it creates all this tightness of the upper back, but there's a disconnect where that upper back isn't tied into this really strong, rigid, stable core. So it feels tight and it's great and it's a great shelf. But once we get closer to fatigue, we'll see that at the thoracic lumbar junction, they'll end up rounding out and failing, right? Does that mean a wider grip's better? No, because they lose that strength. But somewhere in there, there's a grip that allows you to stabilize and now use the lats to connect the shoulder into the core. So actually, the best grip is your pull down grip, but you have to pull down. So when you've got that squat bar on your back, you need to have the shoulder mobility to be able to get into that position and then pretend to be bending that bar over your back and into your core. And now you won't feel as tight in the, you know, the upper area, but that's tied to the core, and now you've got this rigid, solid member, and that won't give out when you're going to squat. But sequence is important here too, because if I tighten those lats beforehand, the lats are gonna throw you into extension, and then you won't be able to get. So you have to set this first, then draw the bar over you.
Philip Pape 34:29
Okay. Well, I also want to get into the other aspects, right? Foot, ankle, as well as shoulder, hips. Is that a logical next? So feet and ankle. And I know you're a big barefoot guy, like guys that you can check out other podcasts that Chris has been on, and he goes all into the foot for like hours. It's it's fantastic content. But like footstands, feet, footwear, ankles, all that stuff definitely is another. I mean, you're contacting the ground there, so that's super important.
Chris Duffin 34:53
Yeah, the biggest point here, and and I don't have to argue this anymore because people used to go, where's the science? Where's the science behind what you're saying? And I went, have you ever heard of exercise science? Because the exercise science is about the specific adaptation to imposed demand. And you're telling me that the foot doesn't respond the way the rest of the body responds and doesn't respond to the specific adaptation to imposed demand. So all I'm saying is you need to use and train your foot. And if you don't, the foot is going to get weak. And if the foot gets weak, it's going to have a loss of blood flow, it's going to have mobility uh restriction issues, and then you're on a weak base, and the body is going to compensate and try to protect around that. So that is just fundamentally my position and has been for a long time. And it was most of our footwear today, and it's not a sizing problem. If you've been wearing traditional footwear your whole life, your foot has been deformed to fit the shoe. So it's not going out today and finding the shoe that fits. But that immediately grab your hand in front of you, grab the four fingers and pull them in. Okay. And immediately you can start seeing them turn a little white. All right. The front of your foot is in the front of that shoe, and you're creating a loss of blood flow with that. It's near immediate. Okay. Some certain things happen if we pull that big toe in immediately, which happens in that shoe, versus pulling it out, as far as their ability to engage the upstream musculature. So simple stuff, and I'll base this off of known research right now. And this is with MRIs, it is with uh X-ray, and I haven't seen the research, but I've talked to the doctors that have done the biopsies. And it is around plantar fasciitis. All right. So, but we'll extrapolate this out. Most everyone thinks that plantar fasciitis is an overuse condition. I've overused the plantar fascia. It's sore, it needs uh a passive support and needs rest. All right. All imaging shows it's at least 96% of all cases are an actual atrophy of muscle tissue due to lack of blood flow and the tendon and ligament tissue basically uh degrading in that process as well. It is weakness, it is atrophy of tissue, it's lack of blood flow like from underuse because you haven't been using your foot because you've learned to passively sit on top of this foot, just like stand on this stump of your foot.
Philip Pape 37:38
Just like a block, just a block in a shape. Just like a block.
Barefoot training and footwear choices
Chris Duffin 37:41
Okay. And so that's like the essence of my argument right there is the problem is we have our feet stuffed in these shoes that is allowing our foot not to be used, and it is becoming weak and creating a lot of dysfunction. It happens to be the base of nearly all sports, other than like, you know, any ground-based sport. Um, not swimming, you know, for example, although we could probably argue that too. But power is generated from that force and then applied to a distal end. And we've got weakness there to start with. And I'm just like, you gotta spend some time using that, right? So having the minimalist level of protection from the environment, right? From heat, like the hot pavement, uh, from germs, you know, that's what you want. The minimalist level that still allows your foot to move and then learn to actively stand, actively build your arch and control that. And then it's just with time. And people are like, Well, I do that, and my foot hurts. Yeah. Do you remember the first time you went to the gym and did a squat? It hurt. What do you do? And this is a well the argument. Well, people put um, yeah, there was the big barefoot running craze, and the company that put those shoes out there got sued because so many people got hurt. Like, do you remember the first time you squatted? Did you go into the gym and taught 220 squat 225 for 50 reps? What would have happened if you tried? Because that's what happened, is they said those shoes are better, and all these runners that run 10, 20 miles a day, you started putting them on and just going out and running that. Guess what? If they had weak feet, detrained feet, well, how do I well what what's the progression? I don't know. I can't tell you what the progression for your squat is. What do you do? Oh, you go to the gym, you do some squats, and if it was a little too much, you don't recover as well, do a little less, then you'll find you can build a little bit more and then build a little bit more. It's the same as the rest of your body. And all I'm suggesting is use it and train it and use the same thought process as the rest of how you would train your bench press. Now, the research has come out because the foot is just like fundamentally used all the time. If you switch to a minimalist style footwear, it does as much as a dedicated foot and ankle strengthening program.
Philip Pape 39:58
Just because of how much you use it, right? Yeah, and everything exactly. You don't even have to like try to like get a foot dumbbell or something, right? Like people are thinking of that.
Chris Duffin 40:06
I used to tell people do both, like because I didn't want to be like pitching, like, oh, just go buy the shoes, but yeah, it is the like just do that. Like, and if you do that, then go try lift, squat some and dead lift some weights, do some stuff. Like uh, if you want to build it further, hey, do some lunges or some split legs with uh half of your foot off of a off of a block. Like do some calf raises without shoes on.
Philip Pape 40:30
It makes sense. I mean, the foot has like um the feet and hands have half your bones and muscles of your body, or at least half your bones. I forgot. I don't know about muscles, but yeah, right. They're so complex.
Chris Duffin 40:40
37, I think. It yeah, it's insane. Your foot is an engineering marvel, so it's got the whole windless uh system built in there where with your stride, we've got this uh, you know, basically really flexible like movement of the foot. But as soon as we go to stride, as that big toe raises up, it winds up this windless mechanism that winds up and creates the stiffness of the arch. So all of a sudden, this structure that is like really pliable and can walk over stuff. As soon as you go to sprint or run or take off, becomes this powerful medium that propels you forward and multiplies your force. Like it just the foot is a beautiful engineering marvel, and it's the base of everything that we do from movement. That's why it is. We're not gonna design something better than what it is.
Philip Pape 41:31
That's interesting, right? Because I talk to people about sprinting all the time. I'm like, get the most minimalist footwear you can, and it's gonna feel amazing. Like, you got to adapt into it. So the controversy, of course, is always squat shoes versus flat shoes versus no shoes, and like, oh, you don't want to drop something on your foot, so there's a safety issue. Is it a function of us, you know, some percentage of certain lifts? Go ahead and do barefoot, and then maybe the rest wear what you want, you know, squat shoes, or you're like just go all out barefoot.
Chris Duffin 41:57
Yeah, you got to think about shoes as a tool. Like it's protect from our environment. Like, if you're a logger, am I gonna tell you to wear a minimalist shoe? No, but I'm gonna tell you to find the most flexible one that allows the best that's gonna support you, like in whatever environment that you're in. So it is a balance of trade-offs. That's what it is. I think it's a crux, and maybe it's a mental crux, but it's in the right tool for the job. If you're gonna do an overhead, you know, movement, like that's a weird lift, a an Olympic lift, uh, you know, the Olympic snatch. That is a sport, and you're going to need to be able to get in position to do the sport. And that is an unnatural to be sitting on your heels with weight overhead for us to be in that type of position. So those ones, yes, that shoe makes sense. For basic squatting and deadlifting, it doesn't make sense. There's no need to do it. But if you're competing and you lift more that way, go ahead and do that. But trust me, you will perform better if you do the majority of your training outside of that shoe and get a stronger foot and then put it into that. But the stronger foot and ankle complex you have within that is going to perform better.
Philip Pape 43:08
Train your foot, enhance it with tools as needed, go back and forth and kind of one works with the other. And I know you yourself, I believe, improved your deadlift barefoot, right? Is that right? Yes.
Shoulder and hip power mechanics
Chris Duffin 43:19
So if you go watch my videos of my squat and deadlift, and at the time it was such a this was such an unusual controversy thing. Like if you read through the comments, you'll see people like comments in there. Oh my god, Andy did it with no shoes. Can you believe what he would do with them? And it's like, no, that was actually a performance enhancement, but you know, it's the other way around, is what you're saying. You're implying. But so people did not get that at that time. It was 2016. I did that. Yeah.
Philip Pape 43:45
Okay, so shoulders and hips, I think, is worth some discussion there because I'm really curious to hear about that. I personally have two rotator cuff surgeries.
Chris Duffin 43:53
So those are the power generating units, and it's just like we don't need to look at those until we've checked the box. On those other things. And if you've got, you know, issues at your elbow or your knee, rarely is it that. It's somewhere, you know, in that train. So at that point, you know, if I've checked those boxes, I'm be looking at the hip and the foot to further down figure out what's going on with the knee or the elbow. I'm going to be looking, you know, at the shoulder. And if you've got those signals correct and you can, you know, put that power forth, it is going to change a lot of that. And then it becomes down to, you know, managing those complexes correctly.
Philip Pape 44:34
All the talk of impingement and overhead work and people's anatomies and all that, there's a lot of misunderstanding there. Like what's your general thought? Yeah.
Chris Duffin 44:43
So yeah, I mean, if we're in poor position and uh we're destabilized, there's three muscles that get tight around that hip and they'll pull that hip board in its capsule and create an you know an impingement and it's there. Uh, I've seen it over and over in the shoulder, and I'm not saying all cases, but if we've got lack of tension where it doesn't need to be around that joint, that joint is going to be in a different position. It's not this fixed thing. And because you've got a lack of space now doesn't mean that there is a lack of space.
Philip Pape 45:15
And is there a bias of pulling versus pushing that you have, or is that an irrelevant variable in terms of your overall volume?
Regenerative framework for recovery
Chris Duffin 45:23
I guess that's a good question. And I would say, yes, it does matter. I don't know I've ever put it in that terms just when building training plans and looking at the overall volume and stuff. Uh yeah, that definitely is applied. So context. Generally, yes, there's more muscles on the back. So there's likely if we're developing that all correctly, but you could end up with somebody with a really underdeveloped front. And you so where what's the developmental need as well? So so there's not a ratio that's absolutely perfect. And I think that you're gonna discover that in the training process and just understanding where the gaps are with your movement. But generally, yes, the lats and the rear delts and the traps and all that add up to a significantly more chunk of space than your pecs and your front delts, right? So, but there's some level of variability. But you could say, yes, roughly that thought process is is correct.
Philip Pape 46:21
Cool, cool. You know, I feel like we barely scratched the surface, but there's a lot of practical stuff in there that I think a lot of lifters listening are not thinking about and now are, and that's hugely beneficial for their health. And I want everybody to just really like take notes again if you if you just like were binging this, like people tend to do when they listen to podcasts and take notes. You know, we didn't get into a whole bunch of other awesome stuff you're doing with like, you know, regenerative protocols and peptides and all that. But is there anything we didn't that I didn't ask you, like one thing you're like, this is worth mentioning that that we didn't cover?
Chris Duffin 46:52
Um, yeah. From a general thought process, understanding the larger perspective of so I think about things in this kind of regenerative, I call it the regenerative amplification uh method or framework. We need to think about this, like we need to be able to have a clean space to send those neurological signals, uh component of that. We talked about cleaning that up from a movement perspective. If we get into a broader health perspective, that might be cleaning up inflammatory signaling like in your diet and other stuff, because that's going to inhibit that mechanisms, right? Once you've cleaned up and have a clean terrain to send those signals on, which comes from, again, diet, light exposure, sleep, like all these kinds of uh supplementation. There's a lot of things that you can do to manage that. But we're talking about cardiovascular disease, diabetes, uh, how you're physically like recovering uh tendons, arthritis development, like all of that, right? Like that's all cellular signaling. Then you can move into you know modalities that actually send those signals. And so we'll get to the training, but that would be uh the use of like uh peptides or other therapies. If you do that, we can actually enhance some of that with like alternative modalities. Where does that fit in? You know, red light therapy, shockwave therapy, things like that. Then there's having making sure you have the right like substrate material to work with. Like, hey, I'm sending a signal to repair collagen, joint tissues, things like that. Like, hey, I'm probably gonna want to have some glycine in there for, you know, like what are the raw materials, like protein, the substrate material. And then we've got to reinforce that with the loading and mechanical signals to build and lock in the resilience and adaptations uh piece of that. And so that was a piece of like improving that, and that's a lot of what I'm known for in that work. So, yeah, people want to know more, check out uh Enhanced Executive. That's where I'm at. And I've got a free forum uh for people if they want to join, tons of articles, all my movement videos, stuff like that is uh on there as well. So you can find that on my website. But it's uh absolutely free, amazing resource uh for folks. And check out my YouTube. I'm producing a lot of content there, and I have tons of lectures and videos on all the things that we talked about.
Philip Pape 49:20
Based on the evidence, uh, there's a lot of you know, quacks out there, especially in some of these newer therapeutic areas. Um, and I love your stuff. We're gonna send people to the forum and your YouTube and your other resources. Um, but definitely check Chris out, follow him, listen to him. Like even myocines and inflammatory signals and like what you can see in lab work and machine learning and AI now, looking at all that stuff is it's just amazing. It's incredible.
Chris Duffin 49:43
Great, yeah, story. So I've been just for the audience, like, yeah, be wary of that space because there is a lot of quacks, a lot of information, a lot of people trying to make a fast buck. It is where I my profession is right now, but you will not find anybody that has 23 years of experience with those regenerative modalities. And I'm the guy behind the scenes that does the consulting for some of the top stem cell therapy clinics and regenerative medicine people in the world. And that's so.
Philip Pape 50:11
And if that's not enough, he's one of the strongest, if not the strongest, doing it. So all right, all right, Chris. It's been a pleasure having you on Wits and Waits. Uh, a lot of fun talking to you. I learned a lot. So thanks again, Chris, for coming on.
Chris Duffin 50:22
Check out barefoot, B E A R. That's uh the shoe and boot brand.
Philip Pape 50:27
Sounds good. Thanks, Chris. Talk soon,

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Ready for the Next Step?

Transcript

Ready for the Next Step?

Transcript

Ready for the Next Step?

Transcript

Ready for the Next Step?

Transcript

Ready for the Next Step?

Transcript

Ready for the Next Step?

Transcript

Ready for the Next Step?

Transcript

Ready for the Next Step?

Ready to Stop Guessing?