7 Ways to Lose Fat That ACTUALLY Work | Ep 420
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Most people fail at fat loss not because they lack willpower, but because they're following strategies that don't work (or that backfire).
In this replay of one of our most popular episodes, discover 7 evidence-based fat loss principles from 70 years of research and how to apply them without cutting out your favorite foods or living in the gym.
Whether you're starting fresh in 2026 or breaking through a plateau, these proven strategies will help you lose fat, build muscle, and create lasting results without extreme diets or endless cardio.
The goal is simple: protect muscle, manage hunger, move more, and use a moderate deficit you can sustain.
Deep Dive…
Decades of research have stripped fat loss down to a few principles that always win: energy balance, adequate protein, resistance training, daily movement, adherence, muscle mass, and sustainability. This isn’t about trendy plans or villainizing carbs or fats. It’s about using the same levers elite coaches and researchers return to regardless of the diet brand. When calories are controlled, diet type matters far less than people think. Your body still obeys thermodynamics, and the path you choose should match your life, your culture, and your preferences, so you can keep going long enough to see change and keep it.
The foundation is simple: a calorie deficit is non‑negotiable for meaningful fat loss. Metabolic chamber studies and large trials show matching calories erases most differences between low fat, low carb, and everything in between. That doesn’t mean food quality or macros don’t matter; it means they matter for reasons beyond the scale, like hunger, performance, and health. Hormones and medications can nudge appetite and energy, but they still act through energy intake and expenditure. The practical move is to set a modest deficit, track progress weekly, and adjust with small changes rather than swinging between extremes that trigger plateaus and burnout.
Protein sits at the center because it does three jobs at once: preserves lean mass, tames hunger, and raises the thermic cost of eating. Aiming for roughly 0.7 to 1.0 grams per pound of body weight supports muscle while dieting and makes meals more satisfying. You don’t need perfect timing; total daily intake matters most. Spread it across meals because that’s easier to execute and helps satiety. Combine protein with strength training and you send a clear signal to keep muscle while your body taps fat for energy. Skip either, and you risk shrinking your engine along with your waist.
Strength training beats cardio for body composition. Cardio can help create a deficit and build work capacity, but lifting protects muscle, shapes your physique, and keeps metabolism resilient. Think three to four weekly sessions built around compound moves—squat, hinge, press, row, pull—with progressive overload. You don’t need marathon workouts; you need consistent, challenging effort that nudges performance up over time. For older lifters or tight schedules, two high‑quality sessions can still work if recovery is prioritized and sets are taken close to hard effort.
NEAT—non‑exercise activity thermogenesis—is the stealth lever most people ignore. It’s the stairs you take, the steps you accumulate, the fidgeting you do, the chores you finish. NEAT varies wildly between individuals and often drops when you diet, quietly shrinking your deficit. Counter that by tracking steps and aiming for 8,000 to 12,000 most days. Walk after meals, stand during calls, and bake movement into your routines. A few hundred extra calories burned daily can be the difference between a frustrating plateau and steady progress while keeping your food intake more comfortable.
Muscle is your long‑term insurance policy. Each pound doesn’t torch thousands of calories, but muscle improves glucose handling, nutrient partitioning, insulin sensitivity, bone density, and the ability to eat more while staying lean. Across the year, cycle phases: maintain, build, and cut. Add muscle with a small surplus and high‑quality training, then reveal it with a moderate deficit while protecting strength. You’ll end up leaner at a higher scale weight with more flexibility, better health markers, and less fear of regain because your habits and physiology align.
Finally, sustainability beats speed. Extreme deficits strip muscle, spike fatigue, and amplify rebound. Moderate deficits of roughly 500 calories a day, diet breaks, and maintenance phases reduce adaptive slowdowns and keep training quality high. Skills—meal planning, protein anchoring, daily steps, strength sessions—compound like interest. When you stop chasing hacks and start mastering these basics, fat loss becomes repeatable and maintenance becomes normal life. The result is confidence, resilience, and a body that works with you instead of against you.
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Philip Pape: 0:00
If you're starting the new year ready to finally lose fat and keep it off this time, you need to know what actually works versus what the fitness industry keeps selling you. Because after decades, 70-ish years of research, thousands of studies, science has identified seven principles that determine whether fat loss succeeds or fails. These aren't trends, these aren't theories, they are evidence-based strategies proven over and over in controlled studies, in real-world applications. And today I'm going to break down all seven with a very popular replay from earlier this year so that you can stop spinning your wheels. You can start building the leaner, stronger physique that you want here in 2026. Now, before we get into it, if you're looking for personalized guidance to do this on your fat loss journey, whether that's dialing in your nutrition, tracking your progress, figuring out what to adjust when the scale solves, and really, what do I do today? Check out my fitness lab app. It's like having a coach in your pocket who adapts to your data and tells you exactly what to do next. And right now, through January 2nd, you can get 20% off at witsandweights.com slash app. That wits and weight, that's wits and weights.com slash app. Now let's get into those seven fat loss strategies that actually work. 70 years of fat loss research, thousands of studies, millions of participants, and you could boil it all down to a few key principles that determine whether you succeed or fail. So today we're going to give you seven tips from those 70 years of research, not trends, not theory. It's based on conclusions from major studies, NASA's studies in the 70s, landmark trials published in major journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, metabolic chamber studies. You'll discover why the biggest loser contestants regained all their weight six years later. How one factor can swing your daily calorie burn by 2,000 calories, and why the diet that works best has nothing to do with cutting carbs or even counting macros. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and today we're gonna cut through seven decades of research to bring you the only fat loss strategies that really rise to the top that actually matter. And I get it, the fitness industry loves to overcomplicate fat loss, talk about optimization and new diets, new supplements, new exercise protocols. There's always something promising to be the answer, the shortcut, the magic pill. But when you step back and look at the seven decades of high-quality research from metabolic chamber studies to landmark trials involving thousands of participants that have held up over this entire duration, there are clear patterns that emerge. There are things that we just know work. And today I'm gonna share what those are seven principles that have stood the test of time, that are backed by studies upon studies upon studies. And as much as science can never be perfect, we can never fully prove things. There are things we just know that work because at any level of the evidence, from scientific research to coaching practice to anecdote to individual experimentation, we know that these things go far beyond hypothesis, opinion, theory. They are as close as we could get to what we call facts or truth that are derived from investigating the key questions around fat loss. Now, before we get into these seven tips, I want to give you something that will make implementing them just a bit easier. I have a guide that's been around for a while. It's a really solid, one of our most popular called the Ultimate Macros Guide. It's actually an e-book that breaks down how to set up your nutrition for fat loss, preserving muscle, long-term success, but it also talks about a lot of aspects of nutrition and supplementation and periodization, all of it. It's completely free. It includes the approach that I use with clients and the philosophy we're discussing today that, again, is backed by the evidence. Just go to witzawaits.com/slash free or click the link in the show notes to grab your copy of the Ultimate Macros Guide. And by the way, it's been edited over the years as I've gotten feedback from many of you who have either challenged me on things that were kind of on the edge of evidence-based, or who just wanted their questions answered. So go get your ultimate macros guide today. Link in the show notes. All right, so seven tips from 70 years of research. I'm gonna give you the science, the practical application, and then most importantly, why this matters for your results. So let's start with principle number one or tip number one. A calorie deficit is non-negotiable. Now let's let's talk about the elephant in the room, right? Energy balance, calorie deficits. And I know some of you are rolling your eyes thinking this is obvious, this is simplistic. I've been listening to your show for a while, Philip. Of course, calories in, calories out works, thermodynamics make sense, but there is so much nuance behind that, and it is always worth repeating and understanding what the evidence says over that 70 years of research. So the science behind this was first quantified using metabolic chamber studies in the mid-20th century. If anybody is as old as me, they've been around since that time. I was born in 1980, just for reference. Now we're talking about metabolic chambers are controlled environments, and researchers are able to measure what is eaten. Every calorie that's consumed and burned, they use all sorts of equipment to figure this out. And the first law of thermodynamics, you probably heard about it before from physics, it is the principle of the universe that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transferred. And that's really important to understand because we still have to validate that when it comes to human beings and our food consumption, our energy. There's a study by Hall et al. It was a landmark study in 2011 in science translational medicine. And they took people and put them in a controlled inpatient setting. Think of it like a laboratory for humans. And when calories were matched, low carb and low-fat diets resulted in identical fat loss, identical. And we've seen time and time again where calories are controlled, no matter what the macros look like, we tend to see almost identical results. Doesn't matter if you're fasting, it doesn't matter. When it's controlled for calories, we have the same results. Very important. Why this matters is any argument about this versus calories, hormone, it's my hormones versus calories, are missing the point. In fact, the whole GLP1 Ozempic craze now is proving the fact that it is about energy balance because those medicines cause only one thing, you to eat less. And when you eat less, you lose weight because you go into a calorie deficit. This is just a law of physics. Yes, hormones influence how much you want to eat and how much energy you expend, right? And that's the other side of the equation. We have to think about when we say calories in, calories out, the calories out side is highly influenced by so many complex factors, including calories in. So even what you eat and how much you're taking in it affects how much you burn. And so we can't override thermodynamics. You know, again, the new GLP1 medications reduce appetite, which reduces calorie intake. And that's a great uh modern proof of this principle. So the takeaway is for fat loss to lose fat, you have to be in a calorie deficit. Now, of course, people are gonna say, what about body recomposition where you gain muscle and lose fat? That is a very tiny corner case, which does exist, where you're taking in enough energy to pack on some muscle while also losing fat. But you're losing fat because you don't have enough net energy to support your current fat stores, and therefore your fat is lost. But when we're talking about meaningful fat loss, right? More than a few pounds, you're trying to lose fat, you have to be in a calorie deficit. The method you create that deficit with, whether it's your food choice, your meal timing, how you train, how you move, even medication, that part is far more flexible than people realize. And that's one of the messages of wits and weights is that there are many roads to get there, which is very empowering when you know that your food can be flexible. It's just the guardrails around calories and then macros for other reasons besides weight loss that come into play. So principle one is calorie deficit isn't non-negotiable. Tip number two is that protein preserves muscle and controls hunger. This is an important principle from fat loss research, because if you're not eating enough protein, you miss out on not only lots and lots of side benefits of eating protein, but the very purpose that protein, the that the very reason that we consume protein, which is the metabolic advantage for our muscle building and our muscle preservation while we're losing weight so that we don't lose muscle. Now, there are lots of advantages of protein. One of them is the thermic effect of feeding, meaning that the energy cost of digesting and processing protein is highest of all the macros. It's about 20 to 30% of calories consumed compared to 5 to 10% for carbs and close to zero for fats. So if you eat 100 calories of protein, your body's gonna burn 20 to 30 calories just processing the protein. Perhaps more importantly for a lot of you though, when it comes to fat loss, is how protein affects your hunger hormones. Paddon Jones and his colleagues showed in 2008 that protein suppresses ghrelin. That's your hunger hormone. It then increases GLP1, PYY, and CCK, which are your satiety hormones. You literally feel fuller and more satisfied. So it's kind of the natural GLP1. Never like to overstate the effects compared to very powerful medications, but it's important to understand how protein increases fullness, satiety. Also, this is what I alluded to as perhaps the most important reason we eat protein, is during a calorie deficit, right? Tip number one, your body wants to break down tissue because it needs energy. It's looking for energy. And protein, especially when it's combined with resistance training, is telling your body, let's preserve muscle tissue when you're seeking out those energy sources. Let's not go after that because that's important. Let's pull it from your fat stores instead. If you're not eating protein, if you're not strength training, the body's like, well, I'm gonna take it from where I can get it. And that includes your muscle mass. This is why people on GLP1 lose massive amounts of muscle for the most part when they're not training and eating protein. And they're obviously crashed dieting is effectively the result. Again, when lifestyle is not controlled for. We've said it before, but I'll say it again. Studies show we need about 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight of protein, or about 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. And that's a super optimal, well-supported range for the vast majority of people. Now, Eric Helms, you guys know him, he's been on the show a couple of times, and his research team, they found that lean individuals in extreme deficits might need higher intake, up to, say, three grams per kilogram. But for most of you, the 0.701 gram per pound, and I'm sorry, I'm such a between metric and imperial here, is the sweet spot. So when it comes to protein, it's pretty simple. It doesn't matter when you get it as long as you get your total. It's helpful practically to try to spread it across your meals. It also is good because of the satiety. And there's a tiny optimal effect for muscle building and preservation when you spread it out, but it is very, very small because your body can utilize protein very intelligently no matter how you eat it, even if it's in large, what they call boluses, like you eat a lot at once, but practically it helps to spread it throughout the day. So that's tip number two. Tip number three is that resistance training beats cardio for body composition. Now, this is important because some of you are gonna say, wait, I've heard recent studies that say cardio is actually really helpful for fat loss. And yes, it can be to an extent. Moving your body, increasing calorie burn can help. But we're not talking about just dropping fat. We're also talking about holding on to the muscle while doing that. I should, I should reword what I just said. We're not talking about dropping weight. We're talking about holding on to muscle while dropping weight so that what you drop is mostly fat. And that's where resistance training is by far the perhaps most important principle for how you actually look when you reach your goal weight. Because it's not about the weight on the scale. It's about losing fat, building muscle, becoming fitter, becoming leaner. And so resistance training absolutely is non-negotiable for that. So it is one of the three non-negotiables, besides protein and recovery, for fat loss. Go look up my episode called the three plus three optimal model of fat loss. And that is one of the three non-negotiables. Now, back in the 1970s, NASA was studying what happens to astronauts in space. And they discovered that without the mechanical loading, right, without the resistance training against your muscles, which we get from gravity here on Earth, muscle breakdown accelerated dramatically. I mean, we know this now that in people in outer space, and this is one of the challenges of potentially going to Mars, is the significant muscle loss and what you have to try to do to hold on to that. And it was one of the first major clues that resistance training provides a unique signal that you can't get from cardio. And that's why astronauts are expected to use resistance of some form, right? It's not definitely not going to be a barbell when you're up in the space station. There's there's bands and there's all sorts of rigs that they have for this, but it's a a great way to show how resistance training is necessary. There was a 2015 meta-analysis by Strasser and Schobersberger, and it looked at dozens of studies. This is a study of studies that compared resistance training to aerobic exercise for body composition. And no surprise, they found that resistance training preserved lean mass better than aerobic training every time. And there was a recent study done by Dr. Bill Campbell that I believe showed the same thing. In his study, they showed what some people found surprising, which is that yes, cardio can actually be quite effective for fat loss, but resistance training was better at preserving lean mass. So that's why when we talk about body composition, you need both. You definitely need the resistance training. And then moving through walking and through some strategic forms of cardio help move the needle a bit more on the being able to burn more calories without having to eat less, so to speak. When you're dieting, your body is in an energy deficit, right? Principle number one, it needs to get energy from somewhere. And weight lifting or lifting weights, training, sends what we call an anabolic signal. Anabolic means build. We need to, we need this muscle tissue and we need to build muscle tissue to replace the tissue that's breaking down because we're in this energy deficit. Without that signal, your body happily breaks down the muscle for energy because muscle is metabolically expensive to maintain. And you don't need to live in the gym. You don't. You can train as little as two, and even some approaches you can get in, get away with once a week. But for most people, it's gonna be three to four. For older individuals, let's say over in their 60s, 70s, sometimes I see two being more effective because of recovery. But for most of you, it's gonna be three to four sessions per week focused on the big movement patterns, squatting, deadlifting, pressing, rowing, pulling, right? That's deadlifting, but other types of pulls as well, which work multiple muscle groups, right? We call them compound lifts. They work multiple joints, multiple muscle groups, they give you the biggest bang for your buck. And you are progressing, you're using progressive overload, which is a gradual increase in weights or reps and/or sets over time. You're challenging your body more and more over time. And if you are not getting stronger, if you're not able to push harder, you're not providing the anabolic signal your body needs, with the caveat that while you're in fat loss and potentially losing weight, your relative strength is probably more important than your absolute strength because you don't have as many resources coming in. But what I like to tell people is just train as if you're able to get stronger and build muscle. And that should be sufficient to hold on to that muscle. All right, tip number four is that diet adherence beats diet type every single time. And for those of you newer to the show or to the philosophy we we espouse here, this might surprise you, especially if you're caught up in all the debates online about the right diet, keto versus plant-based versus carnivore versus intermittent fasting. There's something new every day, especially with you know, TikTok and social media, you've got people inventing diets left and right. You know, the sugar diets, I mean, all sorts of things that are all based on a type of diet, like exactly what you eat. But we know that that actually doesn't matter. What matters is are you able to adhere to your diet? Because if you can adhere to it, it's sustainable. And then once it's sustainable, you can tweak the levers to get to the goal you need and actually be able to do it. There was a landmark study called the Diet Fits trial published in JAMA in 2018, and it followed 600 people for 12 months. Half of them did low carb, half of them did low fat. Guess what? No significant difference in weight loss. I alluded to this in principle one, tip number one about a calorie deficit. No difference. The A-Z trial did something similar. They compared Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and learn the same result. No meaningful difference when you look at the big picture and control for calories. The SAC study in the New England Journal of Medicine tested different combinations of macros, of protein, fats, and carbs. So it wasn't really about the food specifically, just different macros. Again, no significant difference in fat loss when calories were controlled. Okay. And you might say, well, wait, what about you talk about protein and this and that? Again, we're talking about what moves the needle versus what's optimal. Yes, you need a sufficient amount of protein, but you don't need massive amounts of protein. Most people are getting too little protein. But when calories are controlled, that alone is going to have the biggest lever when it comes to the rate of weight loss. So what actually matters? Well, it's adherence. Can you adhere? The diet that works is the one you can stick to without feeling deprived or feeling restricted. These elegant, scientifically designed diets, the ones in the beautifully polished books on the shelf or on Amazon or whatever, your Kindle, they're all worthless if you can't follow them. Now, if you can follow them, they can be very helpful tools. They really can be. I'm not arguing that. I'm not arguing that a well-prescribed set of foods and meal plans and recipes that give you some structure and direction that you can stick to because you enjoy it. I'm not arguing that that can't also be successful for you because of the adherence factor. In fact, I was on paleo for years, and part of the reason I was able to stick to it so long is it was flexible enough to have all the foods I enjoyed. It had meats, vegetables, fruits, I think, yeah. It just didn't have grains. It had other forms of carbs, right? Fruits. And it had there was no dairy in there, but there's it depends on the version of paleo you follow. But anyway, I was able to eat a lot of variety of foods, and there were a bunch of great recipes that I would make. And so I was okay with it compared to how I eat now. It wasn't nearly as flexible as how I eat now, because now I can enjoy just about any food, which is awesome. And so this should be liberating. That's my point. You don't have to cut out entire food groups. You don't have to eat foods you hate, and you can eat foods you love. And you can build your fat loss plan around those and around your cultural preferences, your family, your schedule, your lifestyle, your vacations, your travel, all the things that life has for us that are amazing. A lot of them are around food. Just a quick reminder because I don't want to get off too off track here, but if you're finding value in these fat loss principles, I'm willing to grab my ultimate macros guide. Go ahead and pause the episode, go to wits and weights.com slash free, or click the link in the show notes. You're going to see a lot of these philosophies put out into practice, you know, explained in actual step-by-steps of what to do. It's going to help you implement what we're covering today. So you might want to follow along. Go grab the ultimate macros guide, click the link in the show notes, or go to wits and weights.com slash free. All right. Tip number five. Neat can neat. I'm going to explain what that is. Neat. And I'm not saying neat for those of you who are Manipathan fans. Neat can make or break your deficit. What is neat? Neat stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis. It is a component of your metabolism. And I still believe it is the most underestimated factor in fat loss success. There is research by James Levin published in Science in 1999. And I love this study. I love this study because it's eye-opening. It showed that neat can vary, your non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, how much, how much, how many calories you burn from non-structured activity throughout the day can vary by up to 2,000 calories per day between individuals of the same size. And it seems unbelievable, right? That's it sounds like a massive number because some of you are saying, well, I burn 2,000 calories. How is this possible? Because that's the difference between, you know, maintaining your weight and losing two pounds a week, for example, or whatever the math comes out to be. Neat. So what does neat include? It includes everything that's not structured, exercise or training. So it includes, yes, walking. Some people argue that, but it does include walking. It's fidgeting, conscious or otherwise. It's standing, it's doing chores. It's even how much you move your hands when you talk, like I'm doing right now on video if you're watching the YouTube. So it's all your spontaneous movement throughout your day. And yes, even walking, which is not always spontaneous. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. And the I'll I'll say the insidious thing when you are restricting calories and you're trying to lose fat is that your body then does a double whammo and subconsciously reduces your neat to conserve the energy that you're depriving it of. Right? People don't realize that that, oh, I'm in a fat loss phase. I should, the weight should start flying off. And all of a sudden I'm hitting this plateau. And it could be because you're not moving as much in all these different ways. Rosenbaum and Liebl's research from 2010 show that during weight loss, your body implements what is called adaptive thermogenesis. Okay. And I'm just mentioning one study that refers to this term in the last 15 years. This is a concept we've known about for a long time. It is the idea that your total, your metabolism, your daily energy expenditure drops because you of the unconscious reduction in your movement. That's what it is. There's a there are other reasons your metabolism drops during fat loss. One of those being that you're losing weight and you weigh less, and the other being the hormones, the hormone down regulation. But the fact that you're simply moving less due to your knee dropping and much of it is unconscious is also a significant factor, and you might not realize it's happening. You might like take the elevator instead of the stairs. You might sit more, you might fidget less, you might walk slower. And the tiny changes then add up. They accumulate up to hundreds of calories a day, potentially, right? And so I think the solution is awareness of these things and tracking things like step count, right? I think step count is a great proxy because all these things I just mentioned generally are reflected in your steps. And so if you notice your steps go from 8,000 a day to like 7,000 a day, yeah, maybe it's only a thousand steps, but on average, you're now giving yourself, making yourself a little bit harder to lose fat. And if you could aim for around seven to nine or 10,000 steps a day, you know, 10,000 has always been touted in popular media, but it's a good number. It's a good round number to remember. I always encourage clients to go for 10 to 12,000 if they can, really hit that 12,000 mark because that extra 2,000 calories or steps a day, which is like a mile, can make a difference, you know, just the right amount of difference between continuing with your dieting phase and feeling fine versus like feeling like it's you're too hungry and not eating enough, right? It's it's finding that threshold and letting move your little bit of extra steps and movement push you past, push you up into that higher regime where you could eat just a little more and still lose at the same rate. And so if you're tracking your steps, that's great. But then you could also trigger yourself to change your behavior. Walking after meals is awesome. Love it. It's great for blood sugar, right? It's great for recovery, insulin sensitivity, all that great stuff. It's one of the best times to walk if you're gonna pick a time. Using a standing desk, pacing during phone calls, all the fun hacks, and just remind yourself to do it. Set reminders, set yourself calendar notices, things like that. The goal is really just to maintain or increase your movement when you're in a calorie deficit. So if you're able to do this ahead of time before you go into your fat loss phase, and you know, hey, I'm getting 7,000 steps a day, I definitely don't want to drop when I go into a deficit. If anything, I want to try to ramp it up a bit. So that's tip number five is is neat and what a huge factor it can have in your metabolism. Now, just to caveat the 2,000 calories, I believe that that difference was between sedentary people and then the most active jobs you can imagine, right? Construction or what have you. And so realistically, we're not expecting you to increase your metabolism by that much. You're gonna be probably somewhere in the middle and you can bump it up by a few hundred calories, is what I would, the way I would frame this. All right, tip number six out of seven from 70 years of research is that muscle mass is an insurance policy for fat loss, right? Now, we all love muscle for how it looks. We love it for its strength and function, but it also is a huge metabolic insurance policy. I've talked before about how the industry, the fitness industry, overplays the fact that muscle is an expensive tissue and it burns a bunch of calories because it does, but it doesn't. It burns calories, but it's like six to at most nine calories per day for each pound. Now, if you have an extra 10 pounds of muscle, that's up to 90 pounds a day. When you think about it, you're like, okay, that's decent, but it's not this huge game changer that people talk about. Build muscle and you just ramp up your metabolism. But muscle does so much more that then downstream actually does increase your metabolism and make a lot of things easier. For example, your muscle is a huge sink for glucose. It improves glucose disposal. And that means that you can handle carbs better. And I mean better by a mile, by you know, infinitely better to where you can consume massive amounts of carbs and make them go to good use. And you then you open up the flexibility in your diet as well, and all the other benefits that come along with carbs, like reduced stress, better nervous system, more anticatabolism where you hold on to protein or you hold on to muscle tissue, like just so many benefits. Muscle also enhances nutrient partitioning. More calories then get directed toward muscle tissue rather than fat storage. So it's like a virtuous cycle when you have muscle mass. And of course, it provides a huge buffer against sarcopenia as you age, by definition. Sarcopenia is the loss of muscle mass, and that is the root of many of the age-related problems, diseases, frailty, injury, and ultimately pharmacology, which is being on multiple medications, and death. And I don't mean that to sound dire, and yet it is. I'm a huge advocate of a muscle-centric approach to all of this. Yes, we need to manage our body weight for sure, and our body fat, but muscle's part of that equation, so we might as well also try to maximize that. Now, there's a lesson we can take from bodybuilding. Since the 80s, bodybuilders have shown us that muscle can be manipulated pretty tremendously through bulking and cutting. Now, whether they're on gear or not, right, whether they're on anabolic steroids or not, it's a model for the fact that you could eat a lot more food during a muscle building phase without getting that fat. You know, if you eat it at the right rate, you can put on a lot of muscle and not too much fat. And again, I'm even when you're natural, when you're not taking special drugs to gain this system, I've worked with many, many, many clients, and I've done it myself now, probably five times in the last five years, muscle building phases where you are deliberately gaining weight and you're putting on muscle and you don't gain that much fat. You gain some fat, and then you diet down fat loss to lower body fat levels and preserve the muscle mass. And of course, bodybuilders do this to an extreme, right? They have the off-season, the improvement season, they call it. They pack on all this muscle, they might gain 20, 30 pounds, and then they go into fat loss for a pretty long fat loss phase, way beyond what any of us need to do. But again, it's an example of the extremes of what happens, and they go to extremely low, like vascular levels of quite lean body fat levels, and yet they're able to preserve their muscle mass. And that's because they're building this metabolic engine. They're focusing first and foremost on the muscle mass, and then only using the fat loss to reveal that muscle. More muscle means you can maintain a leaner physique, probably at a higher scale weight while eating more calories. Don't we all want all of that? More muscle, more food. And when I say higher scale weight, I know you're thinking, I don't want that. But what it means is you can be leaner at a higher scale weight than you think, which gives you more flexibility regarding scale weight for how to live your life and sustain all of this, and then eat a good amount of food. You have metabolic flexibility, you have better hormonal profile, you have higher insulin sensitivity, you have stronger, denser bones. And what does this all translate to? Right? Not just looking good, better long-term health outcomes, period. Right? All the things we hear people complain about online and wondering what the fix is for, if they were just lifting weights and building muscle, the vast majority of those things would go away or be significantly mitigated, including many, many, many people who think it's their hormones. So this is why resistance training is not optional. It is the foundation of sustainable fat loss. I wish people would not think of fat loss as like dieting. I want people to think of fat loss as having muscle, right? And supporting your metabolic engine. And then you can manipulate your energy stores as needed to reveal your muscle. That to me is fat loss. It's not losing weight. All right, tip number seven, the last tip from 70 years of research is that sustainability beats speed every time. Now, we talked about adherence earlier, how the diet, the adherence of a diet is more important than the type of diet. Well, this is related in a way, but it it also related to the concept of quick fixes and impatience in our modern world and the way things are marketed. And it might be the most important one for your long-term success. There was a study in 2016 by Fothergill and colleagues following up the biggest loser contestants. Now, I did a separate episode just on biggest loser follow-up. You can find it in my feed. But they were looking at what happened six years later, after the biggest loser contestants lost all this weight in this comp, it was a TV competition. And most had regained their weight and had very significantly suppressed metabolic rates compared to where they were before the show. And this is six years later, right? And for sure, our metabolisms can recover, but it's a matter of degrees and how much you've beat it up over the years tells you how long it's then going to take to recover. It's kind of a symmetrical curve here. And the reason here is because they used very aggressive dieting, very excessive amounts of cardio. And that's exactly the opposite of what I've been discussing today that is supported by the evidence. Rapid weight loss is going to increase your adaptive thermogenesis. It's going to increase the muscle loss. It's going to increase your psychological stress. And that creates the perfect storm for the rebound weight gain, right? And then the cardio and the lack of muscle and all of that stuff. Research shows, conversely, that moderate sustained deficits of about 500 calories a day. 500 calories a day, which is a nice round number. It comes out to be a pound of weight loss per week. For a lot of people, that's about a half to 1% of their weight, right? It depends on how much you weigh, of course. That moderate deficits around 500 calories are associated with better long-term outcomes. We know we know smaller deficits than that, the problem is they're not enough to move the needle meaningfully, and your body might even adapt into them. And then we know that much larger calories per day, it's just not sustainable. It ends up causing all the problems we saw with the biggest loser, and maybe not to that extent, but to some degree along that spectrum. And it's it's not just the physical side effects. They're, you know, the when you have a sustainable rate of loss, which I'm a huge advocate of finding out, you know, what's the rate of loss you need to stick to the diet and don't care about the amount of weight you have to lose. Let the rate of loss tell you how much you lose over a certain time frame. And then you can say, okay, at this rate of loss, I'm gonna end up at this weight by this date. And what are you gonna do also when you're at a sustainable rate of loss? You're gonna preserve your muscle mass. It's huge. You're gonna maintain energy for the training itself because you're trying to preserve muscle mass via training. And if you feel wiped out because you're crash dieting, you're not gonna have that energy. It's gonna allow you to have a social life because now you're not saying no to everything that gets put in front of you. You can still enjoy going out to eat and parties and things like that with some self-restraint, obviously. It also helps you to learn skills and habits, sustainable habits. What even does that mean? So many of you are listening. You've never had that in your life. We, you know, I and I feel you because I used to be there. The up and down, the crash dieting, the extreme approaches, the next quick fix. You get to learn sustainable habits. In fact, I just had a call with a client who we we went through a fat loss phase. We did our pre-diet maintenance phase, we did the fat loss phase, and now we're at a sustaining phase. And she's like, I don't even want to do anything different for a while because I realize that it takes skills to even sustain your result. There are skills you have to put in place. And if you're constantly trying to diet, especially do it aggressively, you're never gonna build those skills. And then, of course, you're gonna avoid the psychological stress, the fatigue of the extreme dieting. It's the white knuckling, it's the crash, you know, like I'm in diet mode right now. I have to say no, I'm on a diet. Like all that language effectively goes away when you're only in a moderate deficit. A moderate deficit is just, you know, some good meal planning, some tweaks, a little more protein, more whole foods, it's just some tweaks. A crash diet is a whole game change or a whole change in your entire lifestyle that doesn't make that's extreme. So if you use things like diet breaks along the way, if you use maintenance phases, if you use periodization, if you use refeeds, all of those can reduce the physiological and psychological fatigue, even on top of the fact that you're going at a moderate rate of loss. So think of fat loss as a series of strategically designed phases. It's not a sprint to the finish line, I gotta get, I gotta lose weight. If your mentality is, I gotta lose weight, you're already screwed and you're not ready for fat loss, to be honest. Because the goal isn't to lose weight as fast as possible. It is to lose fat while building the lifestyle where you can maintain that fat loss long term, involving all the tips we just talked about today. So tying all these together, it's really isn't just about fat loss, is it? It's really optimizing the way you live, right? And when you do these things, you don't just lose fat. You start to build a relationship with your body that is based on trusting yourself and rather than punishing yourself, rather than having guilt and a low sense of self-worth. You trust yourself, you have confidence, you develop skills that then compound over time. It is a form of personal growth and development. And you become someone who understands how your body responds to the different inputs. What it's what we're all about. Because you know what? No matter how much science you look at, it doesn't matter until you try it out for yourself and see how your body responds. Because I guarantee you're gonna be an outlier with something. And that's okay. And you figure it out. You'll figure it out doing it. I've worked with clients who've implemented these principles. And for years later, you know, obviously they they eventually fire me because they're like, okay, you just taught me everything I need to know. Not everything I they a lot of them come back because there's there's next levels of knowledge here and optimization. But still, they they have a confidence and a freedom that they can go forward and maintain the results and continue to approve, improve. They may have come to me listening to the podcast, understanding the science, and still not quite getting how to make that work for them. And when you put these all these principles into place, the sustainability, along with yes, the calorie deficit and the training, the protein, and the adherence, all of it, you know, doing at a reasonable rate of loss, et cetera, then you become physically and mentally stronger, you become more confident, and you have sort of a toolkit for your life that's going to carry you forward forever. And remember, the research we've covered today, I deliberately wanted to go back as far as I could and say, how long have we been looking at fat loss? And it's like anywhere from five to seven decades. It's thousands of studies, millions of participants, it's decades of human experimentation, but it's more of a roadmap than anything. It's a starting point. Yes, you're gonna become strong, you're gonna become lean, you're gonna become healthy, that is what it's all about. But you've got to try these things for yourself. And the big irony with all of this, with everything that we talk about all the time on wits and weights, is if you focus on sustainability and principles instead of the next quick thing, you're probably gonna achieve your goal faster, right? Because you're not constantly failing and starting over. So there you have it. All right, seven tips backed by 70 years of research. Your calorie deficit is non-negotiable, but how you create it is very flexible. Protein is your secret weapon for preserving muscle and controlling your appetite. Resistance training is gonna beat cardio for body composition every time. Diet adherence is going to matter more than diet type. Neat can make or break your results, that's your movement. Muscle mass, I'm up to number six, two hands here, is your metabolic insurance policy. And sustainability always beats speed. And these work, guess what? Whether you're 19 or 79, whether you have 10 pounds to lose or 100. Whether you're just getting started or you were advanced, these principles work just to different degrees and different levels of customization to the application. All right. If you're ready to implement these in practice, grab my ultimate macros guide. It covers everything. Witsandweeig.com slash free, or click the link in the show notes, gives you formulas, steps, explanations, the science behind this, all the things you need to care about, I'll say, to put in place what we've covered today and put it into action because knowledge, binging content without implementing it, this is just entertainment, folks. It's just info that's gonna go in one ear and out the other. And I want you to get results. I want you to put this stuff into action. And until next time, I want you to keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that when science speaks, smart people listen, but it's up to you to put it into practice. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
