Body Positivity vs. Healthy Habits (You Can Have Both) | Ep 386
Track your nutrition without shame or judgment. MacroFactor learns your metabolism and adjusts to what's actually happening with your body with no guilt, no moral judgment, just data. Try it free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS: https://bit.ly/philipmacrofactor
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Can you love your body and still want to change it?
For years we've been caught between two extremes: the body positivity camp that says any discussion of weight is harmful, and the traditional fitness world that makes you feel guilty for not being lean enough.
You want to respect yourself, but you also want to get stronger, healthier, maybe change your body composition.
Learn why removing shame doesn't mean removing high standards, how fitness capacity matters more than the number on the scale, and the system for building health while respecting your body right now.
Discover the framework of dignity-first performance engineering that lets you pursue measurable health improvements without moral judgment about your body.
Main Takeaways:
Self-acceptance and measurable health improvements are not in conflict
Stigma and shame actively make health worse
Fitness and strength predict health better than BMI
Use behavior-based data, not moral judgment
Coach yourself with neutral observation instead of criticism and practice self-compassion to improve adherence
Episode Resources:
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Timestamps:
0:01 - The false dichotomy: body positivity vs health goals
5:03 - Dignity-first performance engineering framework
9:06 - What the research actually shows
18:33 - Build your health dashboard
28:19 - Behavior-based nutrition approach
31:49 - Coaching yourself without shame
36:09 - Fit at any size (with caveats)
39:20 - Stop letting weight dominate
Body Respect and Body Change Can Coexist
You do not have to pick a side. You can respect your body today and still pursue strength, health, and physique improvements. The conflict shows up only when we attach moral value to weight or treat one number as the whole story. Here is a clear, practical way to hold self acceptance and measurable progress at the same time.
The false choice that keeps people stuck
One camp says talking about weight is harmful. The other camp pushes weight loss as the only finish line and often wraps it in shame. Both miss the point. Health is behavior driven. Shame does not improve behavior. Progress comes from clear actions that support strength, fitness, and metabolic health, without tying your worth to a scale reading.
What the evidence actually supports
Stigma harms health. Weight stigma predicts worse cardiometabolic risk, higher stress, and more avoidance of care.
Fitness matters at any size. Cardiorespiratory fitness and muscular strength reduce mortality risk across BMI categories.
Behavior focused methods work. Programs that emphasize health behaviors and mindful eating often improve blood pressure, lipids, and eating patterns, even when weight barely changes.
Dignity first, performance engineering
Keep standards high for behaviors and biomarkers, remove shame from appearance. Treat your body with respect while you engineer better performance.
What to track, not just what to weigh
Use a dashboard that blends performance, composition, and health.
Performance
Strength progression on key lifts
Work capacity, set quality, recovery between sets
Resting heart rate, simple pace or power benchmarks
Body composition
Waist circumference
Body weight trend, not day to day noise
Simple methods like the Navy estimate if you want a body fat proxy
Metabolic health
Lipids, A1C or fasting glucose, blood pressure
Vitamin D, magnesium, iron status if relevant
Repeat labs a few times per year if you are changing a lot
Biofeedback
Sleep quality, energy, mood, digestion, hunger patterns
Coaching yourself without shame
Replace self criticism with neutral observation. “I missed two lifts this week. What blocked me, and what will I change.”
Judge the process you control, not the outcomes you do not.
Use approach goals. “Add a protein source and a vegetable to each meal,” rather than “Stop eating junk.”
Practice self compassion. Kind does not mean permissive. It means you stay in the fight without quitting on yourself.
Nutrition that respects your body and drives results
Keep it behavior based, then add precision as needed.
Protein first. Aim for 0.7 to 1.0 grams per pound of body weight per day.
Fiber daily. Roughly 25 to 35 grams from plants and whole foods.
Carbs support training. Center carbs around workouts to refill glycogen and protect performance.
Fats for hormones and satiety. About 0.3 to 0.4 grams per pound is a practical starting zone.
Mindful meals. Fewer screens, slower eating, attention to taste and fullness. Use tracking as information, not judgment.
Training that builds capacity without feeding shame
Strength is the base. Four days per week, 10 to 15 hard sets per muscle group, most work one to two reps from failure.
Cardio supports health. Two to three sessions per week. Mix easy zone 2 with short intervals. Walking counts, swimming and cycling are joint friendly.
Progression with margins. Add small amounts of load, reps, or pace. When life stress spikes, keep the habit alive with shorter sessions.
A simple two month plan to put this into practice
Pick two performance metrics that you will improve. Examples, five rep squat and resting heart rate, or a 1 mile walk test and a push up test. Test now and retest in eight weeks.
Set two daily behaviors. Examples, hit protein and fiber targets, or walk 8 to 10 thousand steps and get seven hours of sleep. Track adherence, not perfection.
Choose one body composition metric for context only. Waist or body weight trend is enough. Look at the trend every two weeks, not every day.
Schedule labs with your clinician in three months if you have not done a baseline in the last six months. Use results to adjust, not to panic.
Practice one self coaching habit each day. Swap one self critical thought for a neutral observation and an action.
The bottom line
Self acceptance and self improvement are not rivals. Respect your body now, train like an athlete, fuel like you value your health, and judge success by the behaviors and markers that predict a longer, stronger life. When you do this, body composition usually follows, without shame and without the all or nothing trap.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
Can you love your body and still want to change it? For years you've been caught between two extremes: the body positivity camp that says any discussion of weight is harmful, and the traditional fitness world that makes you feel guilty for not being lean or ripped or shredded enough. You want to respect yourself, but you also want to get stronger, healthier, maybe change your body composition. And there's a tension between these two worlds where you feel like you have to choose between self-acceptance and self-improvement. Today we're proving that you can have both. You'll learn why removing shame doesn't mean removing high standards, how fitness capacity matters more than the number on the scale, and the system for building health while respecting your body right now. Now, I'm gonna show you why this isn't actually a conflict at all and how you can engineer an approach that honors both self-respect and measurable progress. Now, this episode, I wanted to create it because of multiple listener questions I've received over the past few months, all asking variations of the same thing. Is it wrong to want to change my body? Am I betraying body positivity, right? The concept if I try to lose fat or gain muscle. Now, they didn't say it that way specifically, but I'm kind of paraphrasing because this is a legitimate question. The vanity question, I'm trying to look good, I'm trying to improve my physique. You know, I don't want to have my belly spilling over my genes, however, viscerally you put that into words. And I think they do reveal this big problem today and how we talk about health, bodies, about change, about personal improvement. And I think we're gonna try to solve that problem today using evidence, using clear thinking, and using a framework that you can use. Before we get into it, I want to share a few quick wins from Physique University over the past couple weeks just to show you how positive this can be when we are pursuing health. And the first one is the highlight of my week was that a few people told me I look healthy and vibrant. The biggest one of all is that on Friday night I went to a fancy fundraiser dinner and had my picture taken. When I looked at the picture, I know my body size has not changed yet, but I liked the picture. First time in almost 18 years. Now, again, that's kind of straddling the, you know, how I feel versus how I look dichotomy we're talking about today. The second one, I feel like consistency in getting to the gym and whatever level of diet I've achieved are big wins. I'm proud of my increasing, increasing all my PRs this week. So again, there's more of a focus on improvement from a strength perspective that will translate to physique improvement, and yet that isn't really the point. The third one is I sense your passion for helping people. It comes through in the response time you give us as clients and the attention you're putting into helping us grow. You're really excited about training. I get more excited to train because of your excitement for it. It's infectious. I'm really liking the experience. So I wanted to share all of these because they're really more focused on the process of improvement, and that is gonna be key to what we talk about today with the topic and the framework. So let's talk about this. What is this false dichotomy? Let's name the problem clearly. On one side, you have this body positivity movement. At its core, it is about pushing back against appearance hierarchies, I'm gonna call them, right? Like it depends on where you are on that hierarchy and what kind of social media you use and what age you are and what that means to you. But basically, this movement, in my opinion, is trying to remove moral judgment from the size that you are with your body, right? I think that's a pretty fair definition. And guess what? I think that is a valuable thing. I think that shame doesn't help anybody, it doesn't improve health, it can undermine health, it is not, it's just not helpful to the situation. On the other side, you have, I'll say, traditional weight normative fitness culture, right? Which is irks me the most, I would say, about what I see on Instagram, for example, or in the way coaching programs are framed. And this is where we use weight loss as the primary or only endpoint. I mean, all the all the commercials I see for now for Noom and microdosing, and it's all about weight loss, right? All the GLP ones, it's just what they talk about. And I think that sometimes, well, it definitely works from a marketing perspective, but I think it's not super helpful at all when it comes to how an individual receives this because it is packaged with shame-based messaging. It is usually tied into some sort of rigid rules or system and the implicit message that you are not acceptable until you hit a certain size or number on the scale. And I've talked many times on this show about how I don't even like that phrase weight loss because it doesn't tell you what you're trying to achieve, which is improved health, body composition, you know, mindset that comes from a variety of factors that we measure, not just weight. In fact, weight loss can be a countermeasure if you're using it the wrong way. So here we are, stuck in the middle, and you kind of feel like you have to pick one of these or cozy up with one of these camps. Maybe you don't, okay? Maybe I'm falsely ascribing this to you, the listener, but still you're aware of this dichotomy. And either, you know, on one hand, people are saying just accept your body as it is, which kind of implies that you're giving up on your health goals. It really does, because by definition, if you improve your health, you're gonna improve your physical representation of that health, is the way I'm gonna put it, right? That's so that's on one side. And the other side is, you know, pursuing health goals and then feeling guilty that you care about improving your body or like, you know, somebody makes you feel bad because, oh, now it's all about looks for you, isn't it? Right. And I think this is a false choice because the reality is you can practice self-acceptance and dignity and still pursue measurable health behaviors, right? That's the way I'm gonna put it measurable health behaviors. We had Jamie Selsler on, who lost over 350 pounds, and I realized the framing of that is weight on the scale, but his whole conversation with me was not about the weight on the scale. It was about the process of self-acceptance and self-respect to get healthier so that he can live and thrive in the world for a long time to come. So these things are not in conflict. I think the conflict only exists when we confuse weight with health or when we attach moral value to body size. And so I'm gonna be explicit about the framework we're building today. Uh, I gave it a phrase in my notes. I call it dignity first performance engineering. Maybe that's a mouthful. I don't know if it'll stick, but dignity first performance engineering. It's kind of a mesh between the two in the best way. So, dignity first, what I mean by that is no moral value attached to weight or food, no tolerance at all for stigma. These are just things. They're things you can measure, they're, you know, things that have wide spectra in terms of their judgment or attributes. And why would you tie that into self-worth? You don't earn your worth by hitting a certain whatever, even if it's body fat and body composition, right? It's not tied to your worth. And then the performance engineering piece means we focus on the measurable behaviors and outcomes, right? The process. I've talked about physique engineering before, but I'd really rather use the term performance engineering, with physique just being one of many outputs. So we're talking strength gains, like in the testimonial I shared about getting PRs, personal records. This could be your heart health, your cardiovascular fitness, your blood markers, biomarkers, sleep quality, energy levels. And then even body composition can be among the data stream to give you objective information. And this isn't about, you know, lowering standards, right? Because that's part of the argument people make is that you have to lower standards for the body positivity move bubble. I'm not gonna go there. I think, I think we keep high standards, whatever those are for you, right? Which for you, it may not be nearly as high as someone else because it's relative to where you are right now, you know, start where you're at. So we keep these standards for behaviors and biomarkers, but altogether remove any moral judgment of our body, right? Our physical body. And so, what is the standard then? Well, the standard is you show up consistently, you train and make progress, you hit whatever targets you are setting for yourself, or at least you do your best, knowing that you can't, you're not gonna be perfect, but you're gonna be consistent. And then you track the things you care about, right? And this could be very different from one person to the next, even though on this show we talk about a standard set of these types of metrics. So the standard is not achieving a certain body weight by a certain date, or else you failed as a person. So that's kind of the false dichotomy that I wanted to dispel first. Now, in the second segment, I want to talk about what the evidence shows because I think that's important too. It's not just some guy's opinion on uh a podcast or on YouTube, all right? What does the research tell us? Because I think there's some hard data here. And the first big thing is that stigma and shame simply make health worse. You're like, yeah, that's that's obvious, right? But you know what? The conversation on mental health has changed a lot in the last only 10 years, 20 years. I mean, I'm 44 and I can remember the 90s, and there was a lot of shame and stigma around everything health related, you know, mental health, a lot of it, okay? And things have changed a lot. And and this isn't tough love, right, that I'm asking for or motivating tough love. It's really physiologically harmful when we have stigma and shame. Studies show that experiencing weight stigma predicts higher cardiometabolic risk, disordered eating, elevated cortisol, right? You're just stressed, even higher mortality risk, independent of BMI. Okay, so this mental aspect translates to the physiological aspect. And there are different mechanisms behind this. There's activating your stress physiology, right? The fight or flight, the parasympathetic versus sympathetic. There's people who avoid getting medical care because of the stigma, right? There's behaviors where you compensate with your eating, and that could that definitely includes emotional eating, right? And you're familiar with all of these concepts, I'm sure. So when you shame someone about their weight, and I hope nobody listening to this is doing that, you're not helping them get healthier, right? You are actively making them less healthy. And that's what the data shows. Second, as far as data goes, research, is that fitness and strength do matter at any size. So this is a kind of an interesting concept, right? When we were talking about our fitness as in cardiorespiratory fitness, but also muscular strength, muscle mass, very important things we talk about here, are among the strongest predictors of lower all cause and cardiovascular mortality across all BMI categories. People who are fit and have obesity actually have lower mortality risk than people who are unfit but might be at a normal BMI. This is kind of like the strong with lots of muscle mass but extra fat persona versus skinny fat, but not much muscle mass. I would rather be in general be the person with more muscle, as long as we're not talking about excessively overweight, right? That's like its own category. But this is really crucial. I've had plenty of clients who have been lifters for many years with lots of muscle mass. And they have extra fat, but they're a lot healthier than other people with their biomarkers, even despite that extra fat because of the muscle mass and the fitness. And actually, in some cases, I'll see like their cardio fitness isn't great because they don't walk a lot, and then they start walking, and that improves. Or vice versa. Somebody's really fit in the endurance, but they don't have much muscle mass. They start training for muscle mass and then their markers improve, right? Training improves health markers even before you get any substantial weight loss. That's really, really important. That's really important. A person who lifts weights, who does a little bit of cardio, and that can, yes, absolutely include walking, and ultimately improves their resting heart rate, maybe their VO2 max, I'm not as hung up on that metric, but you know, their general fitness is getting healthier, whether or not, independent of losing any weight. That's really powerful. That's very empowering, I would say, as well. And it's the behavior that drives the benefit here. Okay, that behavior of being an athlete and training. Third, when we look at the data, weight inclusive or health-centric approaches can improve health. This is interesting. Okay. I'm just sharing the data here, whether you like the terms or this hits you right or not. So there's some systematic reviews of the health at every size type programs that do show improvements in lipids and blood pressure and eating behaviors and psychological well-being. The effects on body weight are similar to the what I'll call traditional weight-focused interventions in some of these analyses. This is interesting because you're basically saying this is almost sounds like body positivity, doesn't it? Like, okay, you can be healthy at any size. We're gonna set that as the premise, but now we need to get healthy at your size. That's what strikes me about it, which tells me that behavior change is carrying most of the load, not just the weight loss. And so it moves the needle in the right direction, if that makes sense. All right, the fourth thing I found in the research is that intuitive and mindful eating are very promising for mental health and cardiometabolic markers. Now you're shocked, right? Because I I've blasted intuitive eating on other episodes, but usually what I mean by that is intuitive as in go right in and try to be intuitive and listen to your hunger signals without having developed the skill of doing so through some form of tracking and awareness, right? So I'm not talking about that. I think the idea here is more on the mindfulness piece. Okay. Research links this mindful eating. When we say intuitive, that is what I'm talking about in this context, to a lower BMI, lower waist circumference, better psycho psychosocial outcomes, and mindful eatings associated with improved mood, healthier eating patterns. Now, I love mindfulness and I love developing a skill of knowing what and how to eat, even if it becomes more and more intuitive by using a system to get there. That is the best of both worlds. You've got to be taught, is my point. You've got to be taught, you've got to learn the skill of intuitive eating and mindful eating. They're not magic bullets, right? For a lot of us, they're actually hard. Some apps, based on like psychological behavior, are probably have the right approach there when it comes to the mindfulness piece. Unfortunately, they often lack the data side of things, the numbers side of things. And in my opinion, you can combine the two in a really nice way. But if you've been stuck in like a diet binge cycle, you've got to start somewhere. And I think having mindfulness in general goes a long way. Now, before anyone accuses me of being anti-weight loss or promoting some unhealthy lifestyle, I want to address legitimate criticisms. Okay. Some online body positivity content does cycle back to pure talk of appearance and it can dilute health behaviors. All right. Not everyone thrives with purely weight neutral messaging. Okay. Let me say that again. Not everyone thrives with purely weight neutral messaging. Some people are motivated by body composition goals, and that's totally fine. Some people are motivated by pure vanity goals, and that's totally fine. As long as the process is free of stigma and the metrics go far beyond scale weight. Okay. This is consistent with a lot of things I've been saying over the years that your motivations are yours. They can change. You can have multiple motivations. There are multiple levels of motivation, right? You can have some superficial motivation up here, maybe some external motivation, that's fine. And then you get deeper and deeper and deeper. And ultimately it ties to a what we say is your why, right? Like the deeper reason you want this. You want to be a role model for your kids. You want to be able to not be falling in and breaking your hip when you're in your 70s, right? You don't want to be a nursing home, those things. So that's a legitimate criticism that, you know, when we talk about body positivity, which again, I'm not supporting the traditionally criticized version of it on this episode. I'm trying to add nuance to how we define it or how we think about it. And the issue isn't whether you want to change your body. The issue is whether shame is part of the equation and whether you're using a single metric to define success, right? Because I've met so many people that, you know, they have they have some extra weight on their body. They know it's not healthy. There's no benefit in shaming them. And yet they're not sure whether they can be healthy without losing a lot of weight. And I think it's okay to focus on health and performance and not even care about weight. And guess what? A beautiful thing happens in that your body will start to respond physically and physiologically to that, which often involves releasing stored body fat and building more muscle and partitioning your nutrients where you want them, right? And then the things happen naturally because you're using your body in that way, in that fit athletic sort of way. All right. And I I love data, I love tools. You guys have heard me maybe talk about Macrofactor. It's my favorite nutrition app. I use it every day myself to track my expenditure, my metabolism, my food. But the reason I like tools like that is they are adherence neutral. They do not, they do not shame you for missing a target. So if you can find an app like that or a tracking method like that, where all you're doing is tracking against your goals and metrics, but nothing is like flashing a big red bell at you that says, you just failed because you were over by five calories. That can be very helpful. Now, speaking of metrics and removing shame from the process, anything you can do where you're not judged and you're just adjusting based on what happened and saying, I learned from this. Now I'm gonna do something differently in the future to lessen the impact when it happens again is really, really helpful. All right. That's kind of what an engineer thinks like. An engineer, an inventor, an innovator is gonna fail a lot of times, but they don't even think of it as failure. They think of it as learning from the data. All right. So the next thing I want to talk about is those metrics. In other words, what should you track? And you might be hearing my dogs bark. If weight isn't the metric that matters and body composition is just one of the data streams, what should you track? So think of it like a dashboard, right? What would this dashboard look that paints a complete picture of your health and progress? So we could just stop talking about weight loss. Okay, let's start with performance metrics. This is really where I wanted you to focus most of your attention. One thing you want to do is track your strength progression, your maxes on your key lifts. Now, what this might look like is if you're a beginner, you might only be tracking four lifts. You know, your squat, your bench, your deadlift, your press, maybe. And then you for five reps, let's say, and you're gonna track those. As you get more advanced, you're gonna track more of the lifts and you're gonna track more rep ranges. It might just matter to track what is in your current program. So I'm doing a five-day-a-week program right now where every week I'm doing the same, you know, exercises I did the week before. So what I care about is am I progressing at those exact exercises and reps each week? Whether I go up in reps, whether I go up in weight, do I need to do a reset to kind of you know continue progressing or whatnot? So that's that's strength. Now, cardiovascular fitness gets a little more complicated. There are there are people I'd say more experienced than me in the endurance world. I would say for the average person, for you and me, resting heart rate by itself is gonna be a big indicator, okay? Because you can see a relatively fast improvement when you, for example, start walking more or doing more cardio supportive activities. But if you like wearables and tracking other data, I would say heart rate variability is helpful. Anything on an aura ring or phone or wearable or strap or whatever that can help you is is pretty cool, right? But that's all that's it. I would say resting heart rate is is enough, just to keep it simple. How about your work capacity? Okay, this is also cardio related, but it also is related to your lifting. How many sets can you do before you get winded? How quickly can you recover between them with your rest periods? You know, again, this is tied in a little bit to your step count. It's important to be aware of all that because the amount of cardio and type of cardio you do is going to support how much work capacity you have in the gym. And what you do in the gym with your lifting can also increase your work capacity. So different people have different goals there. And all of these metrics tell you am I getting fitter and stronger? Right? Because they respond pretty quickly to your training. They're very motivating when you see them improve, and then they predict long-term health really, really well, far more than body weight does if you were listening to some of the relationships I mentioned before, like the fact that having more muscle is gonna be super protective, even if you have a little extra weight. So that's performance. Then we get to body composition metrics. We're still gonna track these, but as part of context, as part of a big picture. So your waist circumference, your body weight, but looking at the trend over time. So again, if you use macrofactor, it uses a 20-day exponential moving average. The app that I'm developing also thinks of things in this context of trends and kind of pressure in a direction over time. And you don't have to use like a DEXA scan or anything like that. There are simple ways to track with the Navy formula, for example. We use, I have a biofeedback and physique tracker in physique university we use, where you just put in some simple measurements and it gives you these estimates. But if you look up Navy formula, you just need a few measurements to track it that way. But all of these are lagging indicators and they change more slowly versus the performance indicators, which are more either leading or real-time type indicators. I mean, resting heart rate is a little bit of a lagging indicator, but they change pretty quickly. These body composition metrics are gonna take time to change. So this is where you have to not let a week of no movement, because a week is nothing, seven days is nothing, tell you, hey, this is not working if your performance metrics are improving. In fact, in many cases, the these body composition things aren't gonna change very much at all, but your health and your performance is gonna improve a lot. And then your body composition might start to catch up. So those that's body composition. The third category on your dashboard is the metabolic health markers. And this is getting your labs done, I would say, every at least annually, if not every six months, or even three months if you're really into this stuff. And that's a lot of different things that could be A1C, fasting glucose, your lipids, your blood pressure, inflammant infl markers of inflammation, nutrient, you know, deficiencies and stuff. And these tell you what's happening inside your body, right? Not just what you see in the mirror. This is very, very important. It tells you how what you're eating is affecting what's in your body. Are you getting enough sunlight, right? Those kinds of things. How are your hormones? Right? You can have a six-pack, but still have terrible metabolic health, or you can have a little higher body fat percentage, but have really good metabolic health. And this goes back to why body positivity gets really tricky. We want to know what's actually going on. And of course, we we do a service now called performance blood work. I need to share that with you guys because I have a I have an example, some example reports from clients who've done that recently. You effectively get 85 plus biomarkers measured, and then thousands of calculations and patterns put on top of that to then say, okay, these two markers are low or they're in the normal range rather than the optimal range. How do we get them to be more optimal? All right, you need to be maybe supplementing with omega-3 fish oil over here. And are you training? You know, are you strength training? Of course, that's gonna be on everybody's plan that I put together. But yeah, that those are the kind of things that are can be really powerful. And then you do have subjective metrics, right? Like your biofeedback is kind of subjective, although when you track it over time, it becomes a little more objective, if that makes sense. Kind of the idea of quality, qualitative data becoming empirical, if you will. So energy, mood, sleep quality, how you feel during your workouts, your digestion, your hunger, all this, all those stuff, right? There's a whole list. These matter because if you're, let's say, losing weight, but you feel like garbage, you're not really winning. I mean, you're not you're not gonna feel your best probably when you're in a fat loss phase, but there are optimal ways to do it, okay? And conversely, if you're getting stronger and you feel great, but the scale's not moving, maybe your waist is going down, you're probably doing exactly what you should be doing, right? That's where it gets kind of confusing. So if if the the key here is looking at all of these together. So if your strength's going up, your waist is going down, your energy is high, your labs are improving, and your weight is exactly the same, that is a huge, massive win right there. That's a massive win. You are replacing fat with muscle, or I should say you're losing one and gaining the other, and you're getting healthier and you're getting more capable. And I bet you're feeling better and more confident. If you only looked at the scale, you'd think that nothing was happening and you might quit. So that's a great example. All right, so now let's quickly talk about nutrition in this framework because I think a lot of people get stuck here. We've talked a lot about training and performance, and you're like, well, where does food come into this? Well, the first principle here is make it behavior based, right? Not outcome-based, always. So if you can focus on what to do day to day and then track that and see how you're doing and nudge, nudge, nudge till you get there, it's gonna work out really well. Okay. And that's things like your minimum targets for protein, 0.7 to 1 gram per pound. Hitting that consistently is going to go a huge way. Same thing for fiber, 25 to 35 grams, probably more like 25 for women, 35 for men. Vegetables, fruits, whole grains. If you have to supplement, supplement. Build the meals that you enjoy. I want you to enjoy your food. If you hate chicken breasts and broccoli, don't make that a regular staple in your diet. Find proteins and vegetables you do like, prepare them in a way you do like. Learn how to cook really good food. Use a meal service if you have to, you know, marry somebody who's a great cook. Okay, that was out of line, maybe, or not. I don't know. I got lucky in that regard. You don't want to suffer your way through, you want to build the sustainable behavior. And so, those of you who've been chronically dieting in the past, or you've done multiple rounds of restrictive diets, of carnivore, of keto, of low carb, all that, intermittent fasting, right? Then tracking these things and even some of the mindfulness and intuitive eating things can help. Believe it or not, together, these things can help because then you can learn to recognize hunger, physiological versus emotional hunger, when you're full, removing moral labels from food, eating without distraction, so you can taste your food and take time to let it digest and let yourself fill up before you overeat. Like those skills are gonna reduce the backlash that you would get from rigid dieting. And when combined with hitting some simple ranges and targets and tracking that, that's everything. Let me tell you, that is everything. Now, speaking of tracking calories and macros, I'm not saying, I'm definitely not saying you never track those. In fact, I think anybody listening to this podcast with the goals we have should track these. Okay. If you have a body composition goal at all, if you want to lose fat or gain weight intentionally to build muscle, then you've got to understand at least your energy balance and whether you're in a surplus or deficit so you don't hold yourself back or make it take a lot longer and get more frustrating with plateaus than you want. Okay. Track your intake, practice this neutrality when it comes to food. You know, eat mostly whole foods, hit hit your macros, still honor your hunger and fullness cues. It all works really well, but really just start somewhere. And the difference is the mental side, right? You are not tracking to punish yourself or earn the right to eat from your exercise, right? Your tracking is information. It is data to help you engineer the outcome that you want by focusing on the here and now and the process. Just like when you track training volume. It's a tool. It's a tool, right? And you're gonna go off track. That's cool, that's fine. Everyone does. You don't spiral into shame. You just adjust and move forward. You learn from it. One meal, one day, one week at a time. The trend is what matters. All right. So this is where let's talk about coaching psychology here. So that's it, that's all I have on nutrition. So I think a lot of the approaches with the psycho based on psychology is where things fall apart. So you might be doing all the things we just talked about. You might have great training, you might have a good nutrition plan. But if you have terrible self-talk, if you're always beating yourself up, you are not gonna stick with it. Right. So this really is about coaching yourself without shame. How do we do that? How do we do that? All right. One thought I have is replace criticism with neutral observation. I'm simply observing. So instead of saying, you know, I'm I'm really lazy, I skip the gym again. Just say I didn't train this week. What got in the way of me doing that? What can I do differently next week? You see the difference, right? You're not labeling yourself, you're just observing what happened. Right? Different framing. One shuts you down, one opens up problem solving. Focus on the process, not the outcomes. We've mentioned this already. Instead of I need to lose 20 pounds, I gotta get that last 10 pounds off. It's I'm gonna train four times this week and I'm gonna hit my protein, you know, five out of the seven days of the week, whatever your goal is. You control the process, you don't control the outcome. So if you're gonna judge yourself at all, it's on the things you can control. And it then it tends to be more of an objective rather than a moral judgment. Another thought I have here is to use approach goals, not avoidance goals. In other words, not avoidance goals, in other words, what the approach is. So instead of saying I need to stop eating junk food, say I'm going to include a Protein source and a vegetable at every meal. You know, you're creating a goal on your approach, not something you're trying to avoid. And they're more motivating that way. Another one is self-compassion. I mean, a lot of you I know can probably do better here. And I know I could have in the past as well. This is not the same as self-indulgence. Self-compassion is recognizing that struggle is part of the human condition. And so you're going to treat yourself with the same kindness you would show your best friend. And you're going to commit to do better without the spiral into shame. It's okay to want to do better, but you don't have to shame yourself for it. Self-indulgence, on the other hand, is giving up on your personal standards because you don't feel like meeting them. All right. That there is a difference. I don't want you to do that. Whereas self-compassion improves behavior change. I mean, the research is clear on this. People who practice self-compassion have better long-term adherence to health behaviors than people who rely on self-criticism. If you're a natural optimist, great. If you're not, this is something to work on. All right. Think about it this way. If you had a coach who constantly told you you were garbage, that you never succeed, that you're worthless every time you make a mistake, would you want to keep working with that coach? Of course not. Well, guess what? You are your own coach right now. You would quit, you would fire that coach, you would talk bad about them probably if anybody asks. So why would you treat yourself like that coach? You you shouldn't. All right. So just to wrap this in a bow, I want to tackle some of the objections related to body positivity. And the big one is is it anti-health? No. I think the issue is not acceptance of your body, it's whether the messaging detaches from the behavior and the health marker. So you can respect your body and still work to improve your fitness and your nutrition, your sleep, et cetera. They're not in conflict. Body positivity becomes problematic, in my opinion, when it denies that the behaviors matter or when it shames people for wanting to improve their health. All right, now what about the debate about you can be fat but fit? Well, the research shows that higher fitness attenuates risk, whatever your size is, but it doesn't mean the risk vanishes. Fitness is protective, it's mitigating, but it's not the only thing. Your behaviors will drive reducing that risk because a person with obesity who lifts weights, does cardio, eats well, manages stress, is healthier than a sedentary person who doesn't do those things, even if they're at a normal quote unquote normal BMI. But lower body fat, all else equal, confers quite a few additional benefits. So the point here is to focus on the behaviors because those are what you control and drive most of the benefit. And it's also going to lead to fat loss anyway, if that's what you need. All right. And then one more thing I want to address here is you know, this comment if we stop talking about weight, people will never change. And I think that's backward. I think stigma reduces change. I think shame makes people less likely to engage in health behaviors, more likely to avoid medical care, more likely to binge eat, right? Behavior-first coaching, where we focus on the actions and the markers rather than weight, often works better. So I don't think we need to, I think we can stop talking about weight in the way that a lot of people talk about it, and and it and the world's gonna be a better place, right? So the goal isn't to never talk about weight or body conferences, is to remove the moral judgment from the conversation and use multiple metrics, not just one. So, what do you actually do with all this information from a practical standpoint? All right, I'm gonna give you some simple tips. The first one is pick two fitness metrics to improve over the next two months. Very simple. You test them now, you retest later, and you make these your primary progress measures. Cut out all the noise, just stick with those two over the next two months. For example, hitting your protein and fiber if you're if nutrition's important to you. And then just build your meals you enjoy around those targets until you hit them on a regular basis. And it and it kind of simplifies the process. Or replace a self-critical thought each day with a neutral observation, like we talked about. This is a practice, it takes work, but you have to be intentional about it and say, this is the thing I'm going to do each day. Or track a health marker with your doctor every few months. Obviously, these are going to change more slowly, but being, again, intentional or doing our performance blood work service, for example. So you right now have a baseline and have interventions, and then you can do what I'm talking about right now, focus on one or two. I will put together a performance plan for you that really narrows the list to at most, let's say 12 interventions maximum to help you focus. You know, you use these information to guide your decisions and not the mirror and not the scale weight. And it's defining success more broadly, even though it's more intentional and therefore, ironically, it's more precise. Your training performance, your energy, your sleep, your labs, your measurements, whatever makes sense for you right now. Obviously, if you're working a coach, if you were working with me, we would go all in on multiple measures, but we would do it in a way that was sustainable, where you had me to lean on. If you're doing it yourself, I really recommend focusing on one or two things at a time. And I won't say perfecting those, but making them consistent. And that's how you'd build a system. All right, so I think to wrap this up, what is very powerful about all of what we're talking about today? Why are we even talking about it? I think it to use a cliche flips the script on how we think about body change and body positivity. A lot of people start with the end goal in mind. Maybe it's the physique, the body weight, and then they work backward. And I try to define physique as something more than just the body, let's say, but I understand that that's the standard definition. And people say, look, I want to look like this, so I need to do these behaviors. And then when things don't change fast enough to look like that, they quit, right? You quit. You're like, okay, this isn't working. I got to do something else because you were measuring the outcome. But if you start with, again, this phrase, dignity first, performance engineering, interesting mesh of two concepts. You start with the behaviors and the values. You say, hey, I want to be strong and capable, I want to be healthy. These are the behaviors that can build those qualities, like what are X, Y, Z. And as a side effect, my body will probably change in ways that I like. The physique becomes a bonus, right? It's not the prerequisite for feeling good about yourself or your self-worth. And then what happens when you make that shift is guess what? You're gonna be able to stick to it. Then we have that A word, adherence, which is the foundation of everything. But you don't get to that until you accept yourself right now. You're not waiting for the future version of yourself. You are acceptable right now. You accept yourself, and then you're building on that foundation of where you are right now. And I think the research backs this up. I think, you know, programs and approaches that focus on health behaviors and remove weight stigma are absolutely at least or probably far better long term with their outcomes compared to traditional quote unquote weight loss programs. And more importantly, they have better psychological outcomes. Mental health is so important here, guys. That means you get the same health benefits, who doesn't want that, but less suffering. Who doesn't want that? So great. That's what engineering is all about. You know, performance engineering, maximum output, minimum waste, efficiency. We talk about it all the time. So the question is not, can I love my body and still want to change it? The question is, what kind of change am I pursuing and why? That's it. That is your question now. Obviously, you love yourself and you love your body and you want to change your body because you love it, most likely. You want to improve in some way. And if you're pursuing strength or fitness, energy, longevity, capability, and then the body composition change happens along the way. That is what I mean by dignity first performance engineering. So if you're pursuing a body weight right now because you think it will make you the person you can accept, that is shame-based fitness culture. It does not work. Choose the first one. Okay, choose the first one. And that is dignity, accept yourself now, and then go after the improvement and make it happen. And that is kind of a better approach, in my opinion. So what let me bring my thoughts together because I'm kind of rambling a little bit. I think you can practice self-acceptance and still pursue measurable health improvements, and they're not in conflict. That is the message today. The conflict only exists when we start latching on moral value to scale weight, or we use a single metric to judge success. Whatever that metric is, maybe it's not scale weight, maybe it's something else, but still you lack nuance and context. And removing that stigma is not equivalent to removing the standards. We still keep high standards for our behaviors, for our biomarkers, for the process, right? While removing the moral judgment about our body in the moment. So fitness capacity, I think, is a good term to use here. It's one of the strongest health levers that can exist, regardless of body size. If you can focus on getting stronger, on building muscle and getting fitter overall, the rest tends to follow. The rest tends to follow. And remember that behavior change tends to carry most of the load, not weight loss. The behavior change is what carries the load. All right. Mindful tools, smart training, having structure can all reduce all of that backlash and that yo-yo, you know, what am I trying to say, weight regain that everybody's worried about from rigid dieting, and instead shifted more toward these sustainable habits. You just have to build your dashboard, like we talked about today. Coach yourself with the same respect you chose someone you care about. Be kind to yourself. It's not soft, it's not woo. It's smart, it is effective, it is sustainable. All right. If today's episode clicked for you, I want you to do me a favor and just text this to a friend who needs to hear it. Hopefully, I gave this the treatment it deserved, some nuance, some empathy, not a toxic level of delusion or anything like that, I hope. And it was what you needed to hear. I know I needed to say it, I need to hear it myself sometime. So text this to a friend who's been stuck between, you know, like wanting to respect themselves and wanting to improve their health. It's not a false, it's a false dichotomy. We don't have to have, it's not mutually exclusive, right? So text it to a friend who's tired of the all or nothing. Text it to a friend who needs to hear this. And then if you want to go deeper on any of this, if you want help building your own system with coaching, a community, anything like that, we do have Wits and Weights Physique University, where you can learn more physique.wits and weights.com. That's physique.wits and weights.com. But really just send this to a friend who needs to hear it. And until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your body is capable of amazing things when you give it the right stimulus, the right fuel, and the right respect. This is Philip Pape, and you've been listening to Wits and Weights. I'll talk to you next time.
