Calorie Counting vs. Pattern Analysis for Fat Loss and Muscle Building Over 40 | Ep 402
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We compare traditional calorie and macro tracking with a pattern-based approach that uses eating behaviors, biofeedback, and trends to drive fat loss and muscle gain over 40.
What if cutting-edge AI nutrition and physique coaching could analyze your eating patterns, correlate them with your body's response, and provide a high level of awareness without logging every meal?
Learn how Fitness Lab is the #1 (and only) app that can spot correlations across sleep, stress, meals, and training to give precise daily coaching, especially for midlife adults dealing with issues like hormones and recovery.
This approach requires less mental energy so you don’t fall off track, while teaching you how to "level up" your system to get and maintain results for life.
Episode Resources
Download Fitness Lab AI-powered coaching, 20% off through Black Friday: http://witsandweights.com/app
Timestamps
0:00 - Why tracking calories and macros works (to a point) for fat loss and muscle building
6:45 - Pattern-based nutrition coaching explained
9:50 - The 5 metrics that replace calorie counting for body composition
13:46 - How to track eating behaviors, meal patterns, and biofeedback
18:56 - Building nutritional literacy whether or not you're logging food
22:31 - 4 foundations required for pattern analysis success over 40
25:41 - Protein awareness without counting every gram
29:36 - Daily consistency and minimum viable tracking habits
33:56 - Using feedback vs. hitting calorie targets
37:06 - When to use calorie tracking vs. pattern analysis (or both)
40:41 - How AI makes pattern-based coaching seamless and effortless
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Philip Pape: 0:01
For decades, the gold standard for fat loss and muscle gain has been tracking calories and macros. The research is clear, it works. But what if AI coaching could analyze your eating patterns, correlate them with your body's response, and provide similar awareness and control without logging every meal? Today I'm breaking down how AI-powered pattern analysis actually works, why it can be just as effective as detailed tracking, and what you need to make either approach successful for building muscle and losing fat over 40. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and today we're going to examine two very different approaches to the same goal and why one might be far more sustainable than you think, especially since it's kind of a brand new approach. You probably know I'm a big advocate of tracking calories and macros. I use MacroFactor myself. I recommend it to clients and all of you regularly. The research is absolutely clear that tracking food intake works really well for fat loss and muscle gain, for changing your physique, for gaining some awareness and control over your food intake and your choices. And when you track properly, when you weigh your food, when you log consistently, when you're honest about what goes in and that you track everything, you do get very valuable data. You know exactly what you're eating. You know how much protein, you can make precise adjustments, you can troubleshoot the plateaus that might occur along the way because you have real data. And it's been very helpful for me as a coach as well, because I can see your data and quickly do an analysis on what might be happening. And for lots of people, this becomes a simple daily habit. It's almost automatic. You, as soon as you prepare your food, you pull out the food scale, you weigh it, you log it in your app, right? Or maybe you use the photo the photo AI, or maybe you look it up or use a barcode, whatever. It takes two minutes. And most people, their screen time for the day is like three to five minutes. Not a lot. That's not the concern at all. And so after a few weeks, you've got this routine, it's not a big deal, and you start to get really good, helpful data. And so the power of tracking is the awareness. I've talked about this a lot. I'm sticking to that. That is so, so important. Because when you have to log something, anything, right? Whether that's your bank account, that you may you bought something at the grocery store, that's awareness. You bought something online, that's awareness. And then you become conscious of your choices. Same thing with the food. You become conscious of choices. They don't become mindless anymore, they become mindful. You see patterns that you wouldn't notice otherwise. You discover that the healthy salad that you've been eating has 600 calories of just dressing and nuts, right? And that's healthy in quotes, right? You know, we don't use those those labels here. You realize your portions at dinner are 40% larger than you thought. You realize that on the weekends you consume three times as much as you thought because you're going out to restaurants, drinking alcohol, and all of that. And that's the awareness that drives behavior change. Not because hitting your calorie target creates fat loss, but because seeing your intake helps you make the decisions to do that. And the feedback loop is then immediate. And by the way, we have to close that feedback loop. If you're only logging the food and not doing anything with the data, well, then it's an open loop. It's not a closed feedback loop at all, anyway. That's a different issue. I'm assuming you are closing that loop. So if you eat 2,200 calories a day for a week and your weight goes up, then you know what happened, right? You know that you're eating probably more than your body burns. If you eat 1800 calories, your weight trend goes down. Well, that confirms you're in a deficit, right? And for people who like structure, who enjoy data, who want clear targets to hit, raise your hand. I'm raising mine. Tracking is fantastic. It removes guesswork, it builds confidence, it works. That is the premise of today's episode. So if tracking works this well, why would anyone do something else? Well, that's the question that I used to ask. I said, well, if tracking macros and calories work so well, why would you do something else? Isn't it the best tool for the job? I always say macro factor is like the best tool for the job in the app space, right? And honestly, for a long time, I thought that tracking in this exact way was the only serious approach for anyone who wanted results because you're gonna fail without it, right? But then I started noticing something with certain clients who weren't necessarily tracking the same way. I started talking to folks like Dr. Eric Helms and other physique competitors who have a very healthy mind state and at the same time have started to transition themselves and some clients away from that type of tracking. Okay. And I notice the words I'm using. We are not gonna eliminate tracking. If you want to not track at all, have at it. That's called intuitive eating. That's called flying by the seat of your pants, that's called winging it. I think you're not gonna be successful if you do that. You have to track something, okay? It's the way that we track that could change. I remember having guests on the show who very successful coaches with their clients who didn't use calorie macro tracking. Everything from nutrient approaches like Sarah Ballantine, right? She starts with nutrients to Christina McClerkin was on, and she talked about tracking other elements of what you eat other than calories and macros, but you're still tracking something. And I've had several other guests that I've talked to and other coaches that have similar systems. They're just different, but they still track. Now, I always, I always kind of said, okay, that's great, you do you. And I'm just gonna stick to what I think is simple, which is calories and macros. But there's there's another phenomenon that occurs when you're tracking, depending on how you're tracking. Okay, and I'm not talking about disorders, I'm not talking about OCD, I'm not talking about obsessiveness, none of that. Okay. Outside the scope of today, we know that the research says that if you didn't have an issue already before, tracking only helps. It only helps you get the results and maintaining results. What I do find is that the type of tracking, right, when there's a lot of data involved, for example, and you have to track a lot of things, even smart, motivated, consistent people would do this eight weeks, 12 weeks, maybe 16, and start to get results. But then a lot of times they fall off and they stop logging. And it's not because they failed to get the results, it's not because they lacked discipline. But a lot of times people say, Look, I've got the awareness. I've built the skill, I've built the intuition. I don't need to do this anymore, do I? And you've developed some instincts. That is true. You know what your portions look like. You can feel when you're in a deficit or maintenance. You internalize a lot of the patterns. A lot of these things do become routine. Like if you're eating the same way, you just keep doing that and you can maintain your weight. But they then went one of two paths. And again, I'm talking to people that stopped tracking in the original way they were tracking, which is a decent amount of the population here that I'm referring to. They either stopped tracking altogether and then started to deviate and basically fall off their habits because they had no other system in place to reinforce what they were doing or to measure or to track. You had others, however, who simply supplanted one style of tracking with another, maybe a looser form of tracking, but still awareness, still some sort of documentation or journaling or a light set of numbers, some way that they continue to track. Do you feel me? Do you feel what I'm saying? Okay. And even when you talk to guys like Derek, Dr. Eric Helms, where people get transition away from tracking, they're still tracking something, or they still have an awareness of, say, certain targets. Like I'm trying to get a certain amount of protein in a certain number of meals. And even if it's in their head, it's still a target and it's still a number, and there's still an element of tracking to it, right? So, so what does all this mean? Well, uh, maybe the goal isn't permanently tracking in one way. Maybe the goal is developing the awareness and the decision making that skills that tracking teaches, and then be able to maintain results with some lighter version of tracking or a different version of tracking if you so choose. And once I realized that, I said, huh, let me explore other ways people can continue to track that are maybe a little bit less time consuming or less stressful. I shouldn't say time consuming because tracking calories and macros isn't time consuming, but it does create some weird scenarios like when you go on vacation or when you're eating out or when your wife makes dinner for you and she sees you pulling out your phone every time to track the food. It can get a little bit, it can create a little bit of interesting friction or stress in other ways. Does that make sense? Do you guys feel me on that? All right. And that's what led me to explore what I call pattern-based coaching, not as a replacement for tracking, but as a different path to the same destination. Now, we're gonna get into what pattern-based coaching is. And I will tell you that if a person has to do this, either yourself or a coach doing it for you, it takes quite a bit of learning and training to do it this way up front. And then once you do it, it it's I'll say a lot more natural, intuitive approach that still involves a form of analysis and tracking. All right, fit stick with me here because this is all gonna make sense by the time we get to the end of the episode. So, what is pattern-based coaching or tracking? Well, instead of tracking the numbers via a database of food, you're tracking the eating behaviors that lead to your trends, your patterns, what you choose to eat, and ultimately then the nutrients, the macros and the micros that go into your body that affect your body composition results. So, in other words, you're kind of flipping it backward. Instead of starting from targets and trying to fit into those targets, you're starting from what really is the root cause of your behaviors that lead to whether you hit those targets. Now you could say, well, why don't you do both? Yeah, you can absolutely do both. In fact, a lot of my coaching with clients is filling in the gap of the pattern side. That's the point of where how I was able to kind of figure all this out over the years, is that many of my clients are using macrofactor, tracking calories, macros, but then I'm coming from the other end, one-two punch, and trying to figure out these trends and patterns with them and solve the issue from that direction. The calories and macros are just kind of telling them the end of the chain for a given day or a given week or given month of their choices, but it doesn't tell them how to solve those choices or you know, those behaviors. So, in now, so what if you said, what if I just take out those training wheels? Or what if I just take out the tracking of calories and macros all together? How would you use this successfully? Where it doesn't become winging it intuitive eating. The key insight is this your body composition outcomes are determined by your lifestyle and your patterns. They're not determined by whether you strictly hit calories and macros. And I say it that way because you might say, wait, wait a minute, energy balance and getting enough protein, that's that's really all you need, right? In reality, if you hit your macros, but you do it in a way where you're hungry, you're eating calorie-dense foods or a lot of processed foods, let's say, the meal timing doesn't work for you, you're training fasted and it doesn't feel good, you don't have enough sleep, et cetera, et cetera, then you're not gonna get your body composition. Strictly hitting the calories and macros isn't gonna be enough, is my point. So I want you to think about a different way. If your body weight trend is moving down over several weeks, then you know you're in a calorie deficit and what you're doing is working. You actually don't have to know your expenditure or your intake to know you're in a calorie deficit. Let me repeat that. You don't have to know your expenditure or your intake to know you're in a calorie deficit retroactively. In other words, in hindsight. So if you go three weeks and you've lost a pound a week, then you've averaged a 500 calorie deficit a day, even if you didn't know what your intake was. Now you might say, okay, that's great, but I still need to know what to eat to get there. Stick with me. If your waste measurement is shrinking and your strength is going up, that is also data that's telling you you're doing something right. If you're feeling fairly satisfied from your food and you're not gaining weight, versus if you're always feeling hungry and you're not gaining weight, that's your body telling you something that you need to know. And so interestingly, those are still things being tracked. And I like to track those things anyway, but I'm tying them into this thought that you may not have to track calories and macros. So stick with me here. When I talk about a pattern, I don't, I'm not just talking about food. All right, let's break it down. I'm gonna break it down into five things. All right. The first thing is body composition trends. If you're tracking your daily weight and then smooth that into a trend line, something like Macro Factor does that. My new app is gonna do that. It's a very simple thing. It's just math, all right? And that filters out your daily fluctuations from water, from food volume, from glycogen, from inflammation. This trend is real data, right? It tells you if you're in a deficit, surplus, or maintenance all by itself, believe it or not. Okay, all by itself. In fact, macro factor uses that to say, am I in a def, are you in a deficit or surplus? Therefore, this is what your expenditure is, therefore, this is how you need to change your calories. But you know what? If macrofactor didn't tell you what your expenditure was, it can still tell you whether your calories should go up or down by a certain amount because of whether you're in a surplus or deficit versus your goal. That's really powerful. I hope you guys understand what I'm saying. Okay, these are different variables that play together. If you know you're in a deficit and the deficit's not as big as you'd like, then you know you're not eating in as big a deficit relative to your expenditure as you want, even if you don't know your expenditure. That's pretty cool. Okay, stick with me. The second thing, eating behaviors. Now, this is super powerful. It's not, it's not what you eat, but how and why you ate it. Were you physically hungry before the meal? Or was it an emotional hunger, or were you not hungry? How satisfied did you feel after? How confident were you in your food choices? These capture your relationship with food. And you know what? I've been, I'll say admittedly, inadequate in dealing with these aspects in my coaching so far. Apologies to all my clients out there. I I know maybe I'm being hard on myself because I know physic university has lots of coach, uh lots of modules in the different courses about emotional eating and different exercises and all that. I get it. But I feel like from a tracking perspective, I could do better. And going forward, I'm going to. In fact, that's where this is all leading to. This is all gonna make sense. Number three, meal composition patterns. Okay. Is there protein at most meals? What does the composition of your plate look like? I think that's really important. Now, I didn't used to think it was as important because I thought calories and macros. But no, are you eating mostly whole foods with some flexibility for processed foods in there? Are each me, is each meal fairly balanced, right? They don't all have to be, but in general, how different are your weekends from your weekdays, your training days from your off days, et cetera? Those patterns tell us something as well. You notice what I'm doing, guys. I'm actually giving you a more complex, in a good way, complex as in nuanced or complete picture of things to track than just calories and macros that can lead to the same outcome and maybe even more efficiently. Whoa, mind blowing. I know it's my it is mind blowing in my opinion, in my mind. I hope it is in yours. Okay. Number four of the things you're tracking that are not calories and macros are biofeedback signals. So we talk about this a lot on the show: sleep quality, energy levels, hunger, cravings, digestion, recovery from training, stress. These tell you if your approach is sustainable for you right now in your life. Okay, not only is it sustainable, but like the cause and effect of different aspects of what's going on, right? Like if your deficit is not as low as we thought it would be, but you're feeling hungry, which implies you're not eating that much, and you have low sleep. Oh, now we could put that together into a pattern that says you're not getting enough sleep. That's suppressing your metabolism. Therefore, you feel hungry and you have cravings while you're also not getting the deficit you want. What do we need to address? Probably need to eat a little more while we fix our sleep and our stress. Boom, right? And again, you didn't even have to know calories and macros. And in fact, the calories and macros could be counterproductive because it can make you frustrated thinking, I'm in a deficit. Why am I not losing weight? Okay. And the fifth metric here is of course, your strength progression. Are you getting stronger? Can you do more? How's your recovery with your strength? Because that's an indicator that you're fueling properly and building muscle. And of course, it's going to change depending on the phase you're in, if you're in fat loss maintenance or building. So these are all connected in your patterns. Now, most people think they need to track calories to develop nutritional awareness. But when you think of tracking, even in something like Macro Factor, it does teach you some skills. It teaches you how to use a food scale, how to log, how to think of food in terms of quantities. So there's definitely that piece of it. And I'm not saying we would we would exclude that altogether. There's still an awareness of quantity and calorie density and portion size that correlates with calories that is important. And pattern-based coaching or tracking teaches you the actual underlying skills. For example, you learn to identify physical hunger versus emotional eating. You discover which meals keep you satisfied for many hours, all through that what used to be an energy crash versus the ones that leave you in that energy crash searching for snacks, like a nomad. Where are the chips? You notice that your weekend eating patterns are dramatically different from weekdays. And this is actually pretty common, that exact scenario, but it might be different for you. It might have to do with your cycle or when you work or when the kids are over or when you have to take care, you know, go to holiday events or family events. And then you can address those specific behaviors. You see that you're great at eating protein at dinner, but it's barely present at breakfast and lunch. And now you have a clear area to improve. Now, I'm not saying calorie macro tracking doesn't give you some of these things. Of course, it does, because you can visually see, oh, I'm not getting enough protein at breakfast. But you do have to go in and look at that data. And I do find a lot of people using these apps, like even macrofactor, they don't go look at that part of the data. They're only looking, they're kind of myopic and thinking only in terms of, you know, am I losing weight or not? Do I need to go up and down in calories or macros? They're not looking at the patterns. The patterns are there. So again, this is where I think it's not one or the other necessarily. And so all of these things help you recognize that, for example, you make poor food choices when you're stressed, but not when you're hungry. Hmm, interesting. That's what creates sustainable change, right? We know it's not willpower. We know it's not restriction. We know it's not low carb or fasting. We know that better self-awareness and decision-making frameworks so that you can get micro wins that are under your control that actually move the ball forward for you is what makes you consistent and ultimately successful. Now, pattern-based scooching, I'm gonna say it's not easier or harder than tracking with calories and macros. It's just different. And sometimes you do both, sometimes you do a little of one or a little of the other. It depends. You have to be consistent with feedback no matter what you're doing, measuring and getting feedback. Right? If you only log the data and don't look at it, or you log data sporadically and look at it, but it's sporadic, you're not gonna get enough to see those patterns. You also need basic nutrition literacy. That's probably one reason you listen to the show. You're you crave information and knowledge, you're curious, you're skeptical, and you don't necessarily need a degree in nutrition science. I mean, you don't, but if you've listened to the show for any length of time, you know there's a lot. There's a lot to learn. What you do need to know is about how much protein do you need? What does a serving of protein look like? Right? So when you go to a restaurant, you kind of know how much protein there is. You understand that the scale fluctuates every day, and that doesn't really matter. What matters is the trend over time. It's trusting the process. It's understanding that your body's response, the weight trend, the measurements, your strength gains, your energy levels, your biofeedback, your hunger signals, all of that becomes your most important guide, not targets, because targets are just reflecting after the fact what's going on with all these other things anyway. And of course, you need patience. Pattern-based coaching reveals issues over time. You know, it's not going to reveal something tomorrow. It's going to take time, several weeks, probably, not just several days, but it doesn't take years. And then when those patterns are revealed, you can then fix the root cause rather than just trying to, let's say, arbitrarily hit a calorie target by white knuckling it even further, by doing what you're already doing, which may not be optimal, even further. Now, quick break here because if you're listening to this and thinking, all right, I want this kind of intelligent coaching that adapts to everything I'm doing, just like Philip's talking about with the pattern-based analysis. I just launched my new app. It's called Fitness Lab. It came out yesterday. And it's an AI coaching app built specifically for adults over 40 who want to do all these things. They want to improve their physique and their health and longevity. They want to build muscle and lose fat. Using this kind of integrative intelligence pattern-based whole body approach is what I'm going to say. It's all of you. It's your hormones, it's everything. You get daily coaching briefings that are personalized to your progress and to your struggles, that are based on how you've been logging things. Meal photo analysis that spots behaviors using AI vision, exactly like we're talking about today, as well as adaptive strength training that responds to your biofeedback, an AI chat coach that you can ask questions anytime that's trained on all of my podcasts, my entire coaching philosophy, and then your specific data. All of that is in my app. It's called Fitness Lab. Download it at witsandweights.com slash app right now through Black Friday. You get 20% off. So take advantage of the deal. It's, in my opinion, super affordable for the kind of app that you're going to get. A premium, never seen before, game-changing type app that impresses me every day as I continue to use and test it myself. My mind is blown, and I think yours will be too. Go to witwaits.com slash app. It's called Fitness Lab. And I want to now segue into how to make this pattern-based approach work. Now, Fitness Lab will do it for you, but I do want to explain how it works underneath. Because if you did want to do it on your own or wanted to design your own system, or if you're a coach listening to this, you're like, well, I don't want to push people to Philips app, but I want to try this with my clients. I'm all for teaching you guys how to do that. All right. You have to have certain foundations in place. Not because I say so, but because this is what determines success or failure. So the first foundation is body composition literacy. You can't coach yourself effectively if you don't understand how body composition works. You need to know that the scale is not the best indicator, right? It fluctuates a lot, but it's helpful over time for sure for fat gain and fat loss and muscle gain and muscle loss. You need to know that muscle tissue is denser than fat. So you can get leaner while the scale doesn't go down, right? You can get even leaner when the scale goes up. That progressive overload and progressing in your training is the critical signal of stimulus for muscle building alongside your weight and your measurements. If you think that clean eating creates fat loss, if you believe the scale is the only metric that matters, then you're already not going to be successful when it comes to the patterns, because that is a restrictive, temporary mindset that is not sustainable and does not correlate well with body composition. So you just need to understand the basics of energy balance, protein's role in fat loss and muscle gain, and why all of these data points together are an important metric. Okay. Foundation two is protein awareness, right? This is where I say this on podcasts all the time. If you can just have protein in every meal, that is gonna be 80% of the equation right there for what people are missing. Now, I've heard some people say, I increase my protein, but then I gain more weight. I said, I said, well, then it's not just protein that's a concern for you, obviously. You're just overconsuming in general. Most people, I'm gonna say, when they meaningfully increase protein, it displaces other things. It makes them fuller and they actually eat less in general and fewer calories overall. But that's not always true, right? This is why we have to understand our patterns and what's happening to our body. Now, you don't, do you have to know exactly how much you're eating? No, but you need to know approximately so that you get in the range that we want to be in, which is 0.701 grams per pound of body weight, right? And maybe a little more if you're in a deficit, a little bit less if you're not, a little bit more if you're older, et cetera. And so then we say, well, what about palm size or palm size serving methodology? Now, I used to kind of frown on that. I know that was like the PMI. Am I saying it? Not PMI, what's it called? Precision nutrition. I'm thinking of project management, the precision nutrition approach. And I think there's merit in understanding visually how much something is. Not necessarily palm, but a palm is something we all have with us at all times. So it could be helpful. Like a palm size serving a chicken breast is like 25, 30 grams of protein. But you could also equate that to say 100 out 100 grams on a scale. Or, you know, if you had a cup of Greek Greek yogurt and you know it's like 20 grams, like understanding, you know, an egg is six grams of protein. It's a helpful, those are helpful proxies to have in your head so that when you're out and about or you're eating on the go, you're eating in a restaurant, you're on vacation, then you know how much protein you're getting. And so you could either get there from calorie counting and tracking and learning that way, and or you could just be intentional about how much protein you have in each meal and do it that way. There's multiple ways to roam, multiple roads to roam, right? And so this is part of nutritional literacy. And I think there's a lot more that goes beyond protein, of course. But I think it starts there. If I had to pick one other area, it would be fiber, having enough fiber. But then we get into the more comp now. We're gonna get into the more complicated aspects of protein, fiber, having having a vegetable and having some sort of carb on your plate is a generally good rubric for how to eat throughout the day. And then you can scale the quantities up and down. And that's where pattern analysis is super helpful. Of course, if you're binging the ice cream late at night, or if you're overeating alcohol naps in the weekend on the in a restaurant, those are also other data points you're gonna have to have, right? It's not just, okay, all my meals are balanced, I'm good. It's I'm a human being and I'm gonna make mistakes or I'm gonna do things that I didn't necessarily want to do, and I need to know what those patterns are. So that's the second foundation. Foundation three, and there's four by the way, that I'm talking about today. Foundation three is closing that loop and getting consistent feedback. Now, by consistent, I mean I do mean at a micro level, which usually means daily, something every day. Not everything every day, but some things every day, and not the same things every day, if I didn't confuse you enough already. And it's being consistent. You're gonna you're gonna miss days, I get it. I always strive to have to do at least one thing a day on my list of things that I'm tracking, if not, you know, the goal is to get all of them done, but if you can get some of them done, right, better than nothing, and that's what consistency is. And some of us have minimums, some of us have super minimums, right? There's a whole philosophy behind this, but there are certain things that if you could do them every day and turn them into habits, and by habit, by habit I mean automatic. Now, lifting weights isn't necessarily something that can be a habit, but getting up at 5 a.m. on training days can be a habit. Packing your gym bag at night can be a habit. Going to the gym and doing all the process of that itself is like a massive skill, uh set of skills and habits, if that makes sense. So you really need to break it down to what are you doing every day. I would say weighing yourself every day is important. I would say having some tracking or awareness of your meals every day, and not, and this is where I'm gonna differ from what I've talked about in the past. If you have enough of the right technology and analysis or a coach and you could get feedback on your meal patterns on a daily basis, even without tracking all your calories and macros, you could actually get more than enough data to make the choices that get you where you need to be. I know this is controversial, guys. It sounds sacrilegious. It doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater. I still think tracking malaries and calories and macros is a fantastic tool. And these can be complementary. In fact, if you use all these tools together, you probably get the best of it all. But if we subscribe to the 80 20 rule, the Pareto principle, find the the things that are the least stress and time and friction that still gets you 80 or 90% of the results. And each of these things you do every day should take like a minute, two minutes, three minutes max. All right, again, working out. Takes 90 minutes for some of us. That is not the habit. The habit is all the microwins and habits that lead to us doing that thing because that's part of our identity. Identity is a whole other topic. I should do another another episode on because it's also embedded in my app of creating your future identity and really having the app push you to realize that. All right. So you need some sort of minimum viable data on a daily basis. There's a lot more than what I just said. Some things are on a weekly basis, like body measurements, for example, photos, stuff like that. If you disappear for weeks and then try to catch up, you're not going to find a pattern. That's not how it works, right? Consistency is basically the trade-off for the price that you pay for wanting to be successful. And it's a price that I'm willing to pay. And I hope you are as well. All right. The final foundation here is trusting in outcome data. What do I mean? This is the hardest one for some people. So with calorie tracking, you have a target. Okay, I'm trying to hit 1800 calories, and that's gonna be my win for the day. Now, and of course, I hope you're having flexibility around that. Okay, 16 to 1600 to 2000 calories or 1700 to 19, you know, you have a range that is still a win for you. And you get that immediate feedback. With pattern-based approaches that I'm talking about, you simply have other wins that you're using instead of hitting specific calories for the day. And those wins are all all have to do with those specific decisions that put your plate together. The things that would allow you to hit those calories anyway, but now you're doing it in a way that also satisfies the other things we talked about: satisfaction, balance, biofeedback. And then as your body responds and you're collecting your data, like your weight train, your measurements, et cetera, you're gonna know what to change. It's really the same thing that informs whether your calories change. So you are still getting daily wins. And rather than trying to hit a target in a way that is not best for your routine and your behavior, you're actually trying to hit those behaviors and those micro wins throughout the day that ultimately lead to consuming the calories, macros, micros that you want. I hope that makes sense. Right? You're focusing on behavior patterns and letting your body's feedback guide you. And so you're still tracking quite a bit of things. And this is a very powerful approach. So let me be clear about when which approach makes the most sense. I think detailed calorie macro tracking is really good when you're working with a coach, especially, so that they have data, but also when you're in a very specific, precise phase, you know, fat loss phase, a muscle building phase, but a more aggressive one, I would say. Because I'm I've found that less aggressive phases, you almost don't need it as long as you are being consistent with and kind of boring with your food choices. Now, if you're not boring, then you need to spend time becoming a little bit more boring, if that makes sense anyway, before you try to go into fat loss phase. That's the whole pre-fat loss thing we've talked about many times. If you've hit a plateau and you need some more data to troubleshoot what's going on, you don't have enough data. If you generally enjoy tracking calories and macros, it doesn't create stress or disordered eating. If you have a history where less structured approaches lead to overeating, under eating, or falling off track so easily. I'm a huge fan of calorie and macro tracking. So notice that that's a lot of scenarios that we deal with. When does pattern-based coaching help? Well, you want a really centered approach in your behaviors that's sustainable to the point where you don't even need to know the calories and macros to know that you've hit your calories and macros, if that even makes sense. For some of you, it's because of the style of tracking. You're very busy, you can't or don't want to weigh and log what you eat. Maybe you don't have control all the time of prepping your food. Maybe you've tried detailed calorie tracking and macro tracking before, and it's a problem for you individually, which could be the case. Maybe it's create stress, anxiety, and unhealthy relationship with food, whatever. Even though I've I've tried to convince people that give macro factor a try and you probably won't have those issues. But I know some people still have those issues, even with an app like that. Also, pattern-based coaching is great if you want to develop better food instinct, better decision-making skills while you're building your plates and doing your grocery shopping. And if you like the thought of your behaviors and your body's body's feedback being the primary guide to your adjustments, rather than just, hey, here's my expenditure. I think pattern-based coaching is pretty cool. Or here's the third option: you combine them, you combine them strategically. You use calorie macro tracking along with pattern-based coaching. And you can dial one in or the other more or less, depending on what's going on. Or you switch between them. And that gives you the best of both worlds, right? You're not trapped in a permanent mode of tracking, but you have the tool available for you that's best when, say, more or less precision matters or a different style of tracking is important to you. So this leads us to a quick discussion of AI today and how it has changed the game and allowed us to do something that's never been able to be done before. It makes pattern-based coaching seamless and almost effortless, which is almost the opposite of what it's been up to this point. Up to this point, pattern-based coaching is a really complicated thing, in my opinion, to get right. It takes a lot of education, a lot of learning, oftentimes working with a coach. And I think AI is a game changer right now. A human coach can definitely look at your food log, they can spot some patterns, but come on, they can't correlate reams and reams of data, thousands of data points about everything you're doing all day, every day. You know, your sleep quality scores, your step count trend, your training performance, your stress levels, all at the same time every day. They can do it kind of to a certain level, and it depends on how much time your coach puts in. The more, the more time that they put in, the more that they do, the more they're gonna cost. That's for sure. And a lot of you, if you're paying for a cheap coach, you're gonna get a cheap outcome in this regard. Trust me. I'm an engineering thinking person, and I can tell you very few coaches think that way or get to that level of detail. They want it to be as easy on themselves as possible. I mean, you can't blame them, right? They're trying to maximize the time they put in for the revenue they earn while still helping you, but that's the truth of the matter behind the scenes. Whereas AI never has to go to sleep, you don't have to feed it. It can do all this stuff, it can calculate data, it can calculate patterns constantly in real time. It can notice that your food choices deteriorate on days when you sleep poorly, that your protein intake drops on high stress days, that your weekend eating patterns are 600 calories higher than weekdays, but only when you eat it out instead of cooking at home. These correlations reveal the drivers of your behavior. And those are what you can change. That's the first advantage. The second one is how real-time and immediate it is. It's personalized feedback based on your data when you want it at 3 a.m. if you want. I hope you're sleeping at that point, but still, it's the point I'm making. And it's adaptive to your patterns, your biofeedback, your response, your weight trend, your adherence, your protein consistency, your weekend patterns, your step counts, your sleep quality, on and on and on and on. And then it can say, here's your recommendation. I just calculated everything going on in your life in 30 seconds or less, and I gave you a recommendation. Your energy tank this week, despite hitting your targets, maybe your deficit's too aggressive. Maybe you need a rest day. Maybe life stress is the real issue. The AI can triangulate from multiple data sources. So that's what I mean by coaching intelligence, not just collecting data and doing a little cursory kind of intelligence on top of it. And then the cool thing is, at least this is what I'm trying to do with my app, is helping you develop the skills while you do this process. While it's helping you figure this out, you're also learning about it and yourself so that you can then maintain the results and you're not dependent on either the app or coaching or anybody else for the rest of your life. You learn to identify when you're eating from stress versus hunger. You recognize your behavioral patterns around weekends, social situations, high stress periods, right? Different food choices, training load. And then after a few months, you've really developed a skill and could see it for yourself. And you develop nutritional competence, not just adhering to someone else's plan that they gave you. That is the goal. I want you to build independence. Now, let's be honest, neither approach is magic. Whether you track calories or analyze patterns, you still need a calorie deficit to lose fat. You still need progressive overload to build muscle. You still need adequate protein and good sleep. The fundamentals are not changing. But what could change is your adherence, your sustainability, your relationship with your food and your body. I've coached people who thrived with detailed tracking. They love data, they found it empowering, they got incredible results. I've also coached people who, as good as the tracking tools are, they still feel like I'm white knuckling it. I'm doing this to make my coach happy. I have to do it. It's this resistance, you know? And maybe they hit a goal short term and then they stop because they don't like the process. And then they don't want to check in because they haven't been tracking. And I say, well, that's when you need to check. And it's this whole thing. And I'm like, how do I solve this for people? Because not everybody is the same, right? And the real, the real question is not then which approach is more accurate. It's which approach is it's which one can you actually maintain yourself long enough to get the results you want. Right. And if detailed tracking in this way or that way feels manageable and you can do it without creating stress or food stress in particular, do it. Like I can track my calories and macros every day, no issues. But at times I've felt, oh, wouldn't it be nice to not really have to do it that way? Right. And should we really have to do that for the rest of our lives? Like that feels a little dependent to me. And I've definitely questioned that in my brain, even though I don't mind doing it and I like data. So it's kind of an odd situation to be in. So I get it. I get it. Now, if tracking of a certain type makes you miserable, and and I put it that way because there should be a form of tracking that works for you, right? You shouldn't just not track anything at all. And the tracking may be super low stress without involving an app. It might be involving just a few things in your head. I don't know, but you're still tracking and aware. Anyway, if it's something you're not going to stick with longer than a few weeks, then another approach might be the answer you need. And I would say that this pattern-based coaching that I've developed for the app is a game changer in that regard because I think it's going to open up for a lot of people a way to do this that's highly precise and informative, but feels extremely low stress. And I think that's a wonderful combination. There's no moral superiority to any of these approaches. It's just what works for you in your life right now with your psychology. Now, remember, calorie targets, targets are great, like KPIs, targets. But in any world, even in like the financial world, calorie, a financial target, it's like an outcome, right? Even if it's a daily outcome, it's not going to teach you how to get to that outcome. It's not calorie targets aren't going to teach you how to eat. Like I think we know that. They tell you what to hit, what to get to. They don't show you that, hey, I'm eating out of stress right now, not hunger. They don't tell you that your portions are 30% larger when you eat with these people over here because they stress you out versus these people over here. They don't identify that, you know, you make great choices at home but struggle in restaurants. The targets don't. Now, the information you track trying to hit those targets do. And that's where I'm saying there's a lot of ways to get there. I think pattern analysis in this way makes the invisible more visible. And once you see the pattern, once you understand what's driving your behavior, then you can fix the behavior. You know, not by tightening the target, right? Or adding more restriction to hit a target, but address the behavior at its source. And we know that is what creates long-term success, better self-awareness, better decision-making frameworks, right? And then you stop reacting to your food environment, you start designing it instead, you stop fighting your hunger signals and instead respond to them the right way, including your emotions instead of just reacting. You get to use those emotions. You stop depending on someone else's rules and you start trusting your own competence. And that is that's transformation, guys. That is transformation. So I know some of you listening are tracking macros. You use macro factor or another app, it's working great. Keep doing it, please. I still use macro factor myself while I'm using my new app. And I would love to see if I can get it to a point where I only need to use one, and that day might be just a short while away. If you're someone who's tried tracking, it didn't stick, or if you don't like the mental overhead, or it's really not helping you as much as you want for some of these other deeper issues, that's where pattern-based coaching could be what you need, right? Not as a replacement for tracking, it's a different way to track. It's a sustainable way and it teaches you skills as well while you're doing it, which is kind of cool. And the goal here isn't just stop thinking about nutrition, right? It's to think about it more effectively, develop awareness, develop decision-making frameworks that serve you, that serve you for the rest of your life. All right. If this approach resonates with you, I built Fitness Lab to deliver exactly this kind of intelligent coaching. I'm very proud of it. I've been using it myself. It's super exciting. It's only going to get better, and it'll get better faster the more people that use it and give feedback. There's all the other fun features. I'm not going to go into them, you know, the briefings, the strength training, the AI coach, all that great stuff. But it's built specifically for those of us over 40, primarily, right? Who have our challenges and we want to know what the heck's going on and what to do about it. We want sustainable fat loss. We want to build muscle. We don't want to guess. Download it at witsandweights.com slash app through Black Friday, November 28th. You're going to get 20% off. That's wits and weights.com slash app. I'd love to have you in there and have you see what's possible when you try something different like this. Witsandweights.com slash app for fitness lab. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that the best nutrition approach is the one that builds real awareness and fits your life
