How to Estimate Your Metabolism ACCURATELY (The Best Way to Calculate Calories) | Ep 363
Get your free Nutrition 101 for Body Composition Guide to learn the fundamentals of energy balance, macros, and meal timing for building muscle and losing fat: witsandweights.com/free
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Stop letting inaccurate metabolism estimates sabotage your nutrition goals.
The fitness industry has convinced us that estimating metabolism requires expensive tests, fancy gadgets, or complex formulas, but there's one method that cuts through the noise using evidence, engineering, and efficiency.
Your fitness tracker says you burned 3,200 calories, online calculators recommend 2,400 for maintenance, and your metabolic test shows 1,850 RMR. They're all probably wrong.
Discover the one method gives you your actual daily calorie burn with scientific precision so you can run your next fat loss or muscle building phase confidently and with success.
Main Takeaways:
Your metabolism has 4 components that fluctuate constantly
Online calculators can be off by 300-600 calories per person
Fitness trackers have 27-93% error rates for energy expenditure
The only accurate method is to track calorie intake + trend weight over 3-4 weeks to reverse-engineer your actual TDEE
This approach is self-correcting, personalized, adaptive, and works even with imperfect food logging
Episode Resources:
Try MacroFactor for free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS - the app that automates metabolism tracking using the method discussed
Get Chef's Foundry P600 Ceramic Cookware - 50% off at witsandweights.com/chefsfoundry
Related Episode:
Timestamps:
0:01 - Why most metabolism estimates are completely wrong
6:30 - Online calculators
9:10 - Fitness trackers and wearables
10:43 - RMR testing
12:29 - Measuring inputs/outputs vs. mechanisms/effects
15:10 - How to calculate your real TDEE
23:38 - My favorite app that does this for you
26:08 - Imperfect food logging, water weight, and metabolic issues
30:40 - Why you should start tracking TODAY
31:48 - Becoming the scientist of your own physiology
The Most Accurate Way to Measure Your Metabolism
If you have ever tried to figure out your daily calorie needs, you have probably been met with conflicting answers. Your wearable device might tell you one thing, an online calculator another, and a lab test something completely different. The truth is, most popular methods for estimating your metabolism are off by hundreds of calories, and some can be wildly inaccurate. That inaccuracy can lead to poor nutrition decisions, stalled progress, and endless frustration.
When we talk about metabolism in this context, we are really referring to total daily energy expenditure (TDEE): the total number of calories your body burns in 24 hours. This number includes your basal metabolic rate (BMR), the thermic effect of food (TEF), calories burned through planned exercise (EAT), and the energy you expend through all other daily movement (NEAT).
Because these factors fluctuate constantly, any method that tries to predict your metabolism from static data (like height, weight, age, and activity level) will always be limited. Instead, the best approach is to measure your metabolism directly through your own data.
Why the Common Methods Fall Short
Online calculators use formulas based on population averages. They can get you into a rough ballpark, but individual differences mean you could be off by 300 to 600 calories (or more).
Fitness trackers estimate calorie burn based on heart rate and movement, which studies show can be off by 27% to 93%. Even if they were accurate, they only measure part of the total picture.
Metabolic tests (like RMR testing) may give you a precise reading of your resting calorie burn, but that only accounts for about two-thirds of your TDEE and ignores daily fluctuations in activity, adaptation, and other factors.
The Black Box Approach
Instead of trying to measure each component of TDEE, you can measure its effects. Think of your metabolism like a “black box” in engineering:
Energy In – How many calories you eat.
Energy Out – Reflected in changes to your body weight over time.
If your weight stays the same, your calorie intake is roughly equal to your TDEE. If your weight trends down, your intake is below TDEE. If it trends up, your intake is above TDEE.
By tracking your daily calorie intake and your weight over several weeks, you can reverse-engineer your actual metabolism without expensive equipment or guesswork.
How to Do It
Track your food intake daily, as accurately as you can, using a food log or app.
Weigh yourself every day under similar conditions (like first thing in the morning).
After 3–4 weeks, calculate your average daily calories and your average weight trend.
If your weight stayed stable, your average calories are your current TDEE.
If your weight changed, adjust your calculation using the fact that one pound of fat is roughly 3,500 calories to estimate your TDEE more precisely.
This method works because it accounts for everything (your BMR, your activity, your genetics, your current health, and even daily fluctuations in movement or stress) without needing to measure each one separately.
Why This Method Wins
Personalized – Reflects your actual physiology right now.
Adaptive – Captures changes in metabolism due to dieting, training, stress, or lifestyle.
Practical – Requires no special equipment or lab visits.
Self-correcting – Even with imperfect food logging or a few missed weigh-ins, long-term trends remain accurate.
Turning Data Into Action
Once you know your true TDEE, you can confidently set your calorie targets for fat loss, muscle gain, or body recomposition. For example:
To lose about 1 pound per week, eat roughly 500 calories below your TDEE.
To gain muscle without excess fat, eat a small surplus above TDEE.
You can track this manually or use an app like MacroFactor, which automates the calculations and updates your targets based on your latest data.
The Bottom Line
Your metabolism is not a fixed, mysterious number. It’s a dynamic measure that changes with you.
By tracking what you eat and how your weight responds over time, you can get the most accurate picture of your daily calorie needs. This approach puts you in control, so you can make informed adjustments and stop relying on inaccurate guesses from gadgets, calculators, or outdated tests.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
Your Fitbit says you burn 3,200 calories. The online calculator tells you to eat 2,400 for maintenance. Your metabolic test results say your RMR is 1,850. So which one is your actual metabolism? Here's the truth. They're all probably wrong, and relying on these methods to guide your nutrition is like using a broken compass to navigate. The fitness industry has convinced you that estimating your metabolism requires expensive tests, fancy gadgets or complex formulas, but there's one method that cuts through all the noise and helps you build a strong, healthy physique, using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
Philip Pape: 0:55
I'm your host certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we are going to expose why almost every method you've been told to use for estimating your metabolism has some fundamental flaw and is preventing you from getting the result you want. Most people are walking around with just lots of wrong assumptions about how many calories they burn each day. It's one of the biggest questions I get, one of the biggest sources of confusion and the lack of clarity and confidence, because they are using tools that are simply inaccurate. They are off by hundreds, sometimes even a thousand calories, and then they wonder why their nutrition isn't working. I hear statements like I'm in a calorie deficit, but I can't lose weight. That is a fundamentally untrue statement. If you're in a calorie deficit, you will lose weight. The problem is, you are not in a calorie deficit, but think you are, and this isn't about gaslighting. This is a problem that I had for a long time and a problem that many of you come to me with, and we can quickly solve it, and that's what I'm intending to do today. So by the end of this episode, you are going to know the one method that works, why it's the only practical, practical way right outside of a scientific lab, to get accurate data and then how to implement it yourself, starting today. And the reason we care about this is we want to know how many calories we burn every day, because that is our maintenance calories. That is where we can then start from to build muscle or lose fat and know how much we need to eat on a daily basis, and that fluctuates every day. So you're going to get some clarity by the end of today's episode, but you have to listen all the way through to understand how it works Before we get into it if you want to understand not just this, not just how to track your metabolism. That is the premise and that is the foundation, but then we have to optimize your metabolism to build muscle, to lose fat and also understand how your metabolism changes over time.
Philip Pape: 2:46
Download my free Nutrition 101 for Body Composition Guide. It breaks down the fundamentals of energy balance, macros, meal timing the best tool for the job to calculate your expenditure and then change your targets weekly so that you can hit your goal. So if your goal is fat loss, you wanna download this guide because it's gonna walk you through the exact steps to set it up, to start running and go and start implementing the information you hear today. Go to witsandweightscom, slash free or click the link in the show notes for the nutrition one-on-one guide. All right, so what is your metabolism and why is there so much confusion over this?
Philip Pape: 3:23
Let us start with what we're talking about when I say metabolism on this show most of the time, and definitely today, and that is your total daily energy expenditure, tdee, the total number of calories your body burns in a 24-hour period, and it's made up of four components and I'm sorry if you've heard this before, but it's worth repeating. Your BMR basal metabolic rate that's about two-thirds of what you burn every day keeps your organs functioning, your heart beating, your brain thinking. Number two is a thermic effect of food. Tef, that's another 10%. That is the cost of digesting and processing what you eat. Then you have the two activity components that can vary a lot from person to person. First we have exercise activity thermogenesis EAT, and that is your planned, deliberate workouts, and that can be anywhere from 5 to maybe 10 or 15% of your calorie burn, and that is anywhere from 15 to 50% depending on how much you move throughout the day, how active of a person you are. So when you add them all up and notice, that's a lot of things if you try to track them individually, which spoiler alert we're not gonna do. Okay, spoiler alert because, for example, your wearable tracks a tiny fraction of this. It tracks how much you move and even then it's not even accurate, so it's useless. Fraction of this it tracks how much you move and even then it's not even accurate, so it's useless. So from an engineering perspective, these components, we have to think about them as not just different from person to person but fluctuating constantly within yourself. Your NEAT alone, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, can swing by hundreds of calories based on stress, sleep, temperature, mood, let alone your actual movement, how much you're walking or standing or doing chores and parking farther in a parking lot. So that can change a lot.
Philip Pape: 5:12
Your BMR, your basal metabolic rate, which a lot of people think of as their metabolism. It's only the base of your metabolism. It's that two thirds I mentioned. That actually can shift a lot due to adaptation during dieting or during bulking. It can shift based on how much lean mass you have. And so trying to pin down your metabolism with a single number or an equation is like looking at a river.
Philip Pape: 5:36
Imagine looking at a river and the river's flowing, and you're going to measure the flow rate of that river through a single measurement. Right now I'm just going to stick an accelerometer I don't know what measures flow rate, but a flow rate sensor inside a river and that's the river's flow rate. That's the river's metabolism forever. No, obviously not, because the river is going to constantly change the size, the speed, the conditions, the temperature. Everything's going to change. It's dynamic and it's all happening below the surface. Temperature everything's going to change. It's dynamic and it's all happening below the surface. That is your metabolism.
Philip Pape: 6:10
Okay, so now that we know that, you might be thinking oh, my God, you just made it even harder on me. How do we, how do we even figure this out? Let's talk about the popular methods people use and why they're pretty much all useless. Okay, and I'm sorry, they just are. They don't work. They do not work. They might be a good starting point or they might be a good single flow rate in the river, but that's all they are Okay. So let's talk about those methods.
Philip Pape: 6:30
We're going to start with the online calculators because for many people, that is, I'll say, the easiest or most accessible or the one you hear about most often online. And we have one on our website. If you go to what's the weightscom slash calculators, calculators, yeah, you'll find one there. But I have caveats and fine prints all over it saying that this is just a snapshot starting point and it has a lot of error. But and there's a reason there are times when you might wanna use it and we'll talk about that in a second. But these calculators use equations like the Mifflin-St Jor or the Harris-Benedict equation that were developed from population averages, and actually my website has an updated version of that, where Stronger by Science tweaked it even further, and it's based on things like how much you train, not just this generic activity level, but regardless.
Philip Pape: 7:21
Whatever one you use, they will get you, I'll say, in a very large ballpark and I say it that way because the ballpark, you know, think of a baseball diamond okay, and you've got the two foul lines. Imagine a huge park that goes out 450 yards. You're going to be somewhere in there, okay, but if I said I'm going to hit a fly ball and you have to be in exactly the spot, I'm gonna hit it, the chances of you being right are pretty much random chance, right. So these online calculators are about that level of precision. They can be offered like 300 to 600 calories in either direction for an individual. They don't account for A lot of things. They don't account for your training of things. They don't account for your training history, your genetics, your current metabolic state, but, most importantly, how your body adapts and responds and moves all of it right. Just adding it all together, it's not going to be able to accurately state your metabolism based on that.
Philip Pape: 8:19
So that's the online calculators, and they can be a good, I'll say, starting point. And even then, they're not a great starting point. In fact, when the method that I teach we're going to talk about in a second, you don't even need that. The reason you might use it is because you're impatient to have a number to start from, the problem with that being that you then are fixated on that number as if it means anything, and so then you start with that number and then realize, oh my God, I actually burned 500 calories less. My metabolism just tanked. No, it didn't, the starting number was just not right. Okay, so that's. That's why I don't even think it's good to have a number to start with technically, even though the app that I use, macro factor, does have to start with a number. I'd rather you ignore everything until you've gone through the process that we're going to talk about and then use the real number based on real data. Okay, anyway, that's online calculators.
Philip Pape: 9:10
What about fitness trackers? Okay, what about? Look, I have an Apple watch, I have an aura ring. Study show that wrist worn devices can have error rates of 27 to 93% when estimating energy expenditure. There was a study in JAMA internal medicine. It tested seven devices you all know and love Apple Watch, fitbit, garmin, all the big names and it found they were consistently inaccurate for the calorie burn estimates, because they are using your heart rate and motion sensors and they are just guessing at energy expenditure based on formulas, and then heart rate correlates really poorly with calorie burn anyway, especially when you're resistance training, and then they can account for things like your metabolic state, how your body compensates for exercise later in the day when you reduce your NEAT because you're compensating for exercising in the morning, all of that. So your wearable is useless in terms of its fundamental accuracy to begin with. And even if it were accurate, it only gives you the piece of the pie that's represented by that movement, not all the other pieces I just mentioned, like your arm are and your food, you know thermic effect of food, all of it. So that's, that method is flawed and I don't use it at all, like I just don't. There's no reason to use calorie burned on your watch for any reason whatsoever. Well, okay, I'll take that back. The only reason you might use it is to compare different sessions, if you're trying to compare their intensity. That's about it, all right.
Philip Pape: 10:43
The next method that is flawed is, I'll say, metabolic testing, and this is dangerously flawed because it gives you something that might be reasonably accurate but that doesn't help you. Let me explain. These are the when you go to a gym or a medical facility and you get an RMR test right. Some of them are based on bioimpedance measurements, some are under controlled conditions with a cart and a mask. There's just so many different ways and they might be accurate in that specific moment, but your RMR, as we mentioned earlier, is just about two-thirds of your total metabolism. So it doesn't help. I mean it doesn't help. It doesn't tell you all the other things that stack on top of that, and those other things are the ones that change a lot anyway. So all the other things that stack on top of that and those other things are the ones that change a lot anyway. So it's not going to tell you how your metabolism changes day to day and it's not even going to tell you your total energy burn right now. You know, even if you had it done regularly, which would be expensive, it'd be impractical You're still missing the total energy expenditure. So those are useless. So those are the big ones.
Philip Pape: 11:40
Right, and from an engineering standpoint, if you can't measure something directly, what do you do? You measure its effects, you measure the inputs and outputs, you measure what we call the black box. You think of a control system or just a closed system, and if you're able to tell what's coming in and going out. You can tell how the system is changing. Your metabolism reveals itself through the relationship between energy intake and body weight changes over time. It's very simple and elegant, and this is based on the fundamental principle of energy balance, which balance calories in, calories out which, by the way, if it didn't work, we couldn't do this. So we know it works, we know it's accurate, it's physics and it's simply this If you're eating at the level of your total daily energy expenditure, that big pie chart for the day, if you're eating that exact amount of calories, what's gonna happen?
Philip Pape: 12:29
Your weight is gonna stay the same, because you're bringing in energy that matches the energy going out. And so what happens? Your weight stays the same. If you're eating more than that, your body has to store that somewhere in your fat. You gain weight. If you're eating less, you lose weight. Right, you get the idea. And so this method works because it captures the whole thing, the whole black box, the whole pie chart, the whole total daily energy expenditure. It's your BMR, your activity, your metabolic adaptation, your genetics, your current state, what you're eating, how you're eating, how you're processing, all the crazy stuff that goes inside your body. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to measure it, you just take what's coming in, see what's going out. The change is telling you what your metabolism is right. It's like the best version of a continuous metabolic test that's practical, that's running in the background of your life all the time. It's always there, it's hiding in plain sight, like I mentioned before.
Philip Pape: 13:17
Hey, this is Philip, and before we continue, I want to talk about cookware. We all love to make our own food. I love nonstick pans. The problem is I've avoided them for years because when they get scratched, when they get heated, they can release microplastics, pfas small particles that can accumulate over time in the body and some studies have shown them to be linked to health issues. If you're optimizing your nutrition and making lots of food for you and your family at home, it doesn't make sense to compromise that with questionable cookware. So that's why I was interested when Chef's Foundry, who is sponsoring this episode, showed me their ceramic cookware. It's called the P600 and uses Swiss-engineered ceramic coating which has no Teflon, no PFAS, no plastic components. It is nonstick, it works on all stovetops, it goes straight into the oven. All the things you need if you're trying to cook a lot of your meals at home. Right now you can get the P600 at 50% off by going to witsandweightscom slash chefs foundry. You'll also get a bunch of accessories with that. There's a whole page that explains what you'll get for that discounted 50% off. Go to witsandweightscom slash chefsfoundry or click the link in the show notes.
Philip Pape: 14:28
All right, let's get back to the show. So how does it work in practice? Simple you track your calorie intake fairly accurately okay, and I'm gonna put it that way because it doesn't have to be perfect and then you weigh yourself every day. That's the most precise way to do it and then, over a period of about three, maybe four weeks, you're gonna have a good trend. You're gonna have a good moving average of your weight and your calorie intake. If your average intake, you know your moving average, we can get into complicated algorithms and all that. We don't need to do that. If your average intake was 2,400 calories and your weight stayed the same over that three to four weeks, then 2,400 is very close to your average TDEE during that period, right.
Philip Pape: 15:10
But we can get even more precise. We can, because if you lost one pound over those three weeks eating 2,400 calories, then your TDEE is higher, right, it's higher than what you ate, because you ate less than you needed. So your TDE would be like 2,570 calories and that's based on the idea that one pound of fat loss is equal to 3,500 calories, right? So we know metabolism is dynamic, so you're going to change in some way, even if it's small, like usually people aren't just this exact same weight day after day after day. There's going to be some change or some up and down or some drift, right? So you take the duration, you take how much you ate per day, you take the fact that a fat, a pound of fat, is 3,500 calories, and take how much you weigh and from that you can tell how many, how much, how many calories you're burning every day, knowing that that's going to keep changing every day. It's going to keep drifting every day. I mean, if you look at my expenditure graph, it goes up and down kind of ridiculously, and that's why I track it, because otherwise I would have no idea.
Philip Pape: 16:08
So the key here is not to use the daily measurements. The key is to take daily measurements, but use the trend over time of those measurements. Don't even take weekly measurements for this. Take daily, because if you take them once a week you might be at a high point or a low point. That's not going to tell you anything either. Right? This is simple math. The more data you have, the more you can smooth out the average, because your weight can swing by a lot day to day. Sodium, stress, hormones, glycogen, fluid, gut content. Right, go up two pounds down two pounds up three pounds down one pound up one pound down four pounds, and at the end of the day it might be the same. Right, the trend over time might tell you. You know what? I'm actually maintaining my weight, even though I have a lot of fluctuations, especially if your eating patterns are not stable. Right, if you eat a lot on the weekends and eat less on the weekdays, for example.
Philip Pape: 16:55
So this approach? It just destroys everything else because of its precision and accuracy. Right, it has massive advantages over all those other things that are just junk. I mean, I'm just being honest Like they don't help in any way. They actually make it worse, because you end up trusting a number that is totally far off from reality and making choices based on that is called an uninformed choice.
Philip Pape: 17:21
We want to make personalized, informed choices. So why is that the case here? All right, I just mentioned it. First of all, it's personalized. It accounts for you what's happening. You don't have to know why or all the details, but you have a unique physiology in that moment, on every given day, unique activity pattern, unique metabolism, unique adaptations, unique hormones, unique stress, unique everything. And that makes you different from the average person, but it also makes you different than you yesterday. So it's highly personalized. The second thing is it adapts to you, so kind of segwaying off of what I just said. You're changing every day.
Philip Pape: 17:58
You need something that can be fairly responsive. It can't take six months Practically. We know we can't do it in two days because your weight changes too quickly, your body doesn't respond that quickly, so we have to find a sweet spot that makes sense from a practical perspective. So agile metabolism changes due to dieting, training, stress, life circumstances. This method is going to capture those in a reasonable timeframe. You know a couple of weeks, maybe a week. You know we can't over trust or overemphasize the data, even though it seems highly precise because it's a moving average, because even a moving average remember, you're taking, you're including some of the data points from two weeks ago or three weeks ago. Things have changed since then but you're doing your best to go with the ebb and flow, right, but you are not stuck with some fixed flow rate in the river from six months ago, because that's useless.
Philip Pape: 18:52
The third thing is, this is a very practical approach. It's just so elegant, in my opinion. I use the word elegant in the engineering sense in that it's a very easy design. It's like E equals MC, squared right from Einstein. It's a very elegant formula and, at the same time, it represents something mind-blowingly complex, right, the theory of relativity. But it's elegant because you can express it so simply, express it so simply. Well, this is elegant in terms of how practical it is.
Philip Pape: 19:22
You don't need equipment, right, I mean, other than a way to log your food, which we have apps for that, or to weigh yourself, I mean okay, so you don't need special equipment. You don't need expensive tests. You don't have to pay for stuff other than a subscription to an app, maybe, and the occasional body weight scale when it breaks. You don't need complex formulas or calculations. Now, I say that with this asterisk depends on how nerdy you are and how much into math you are, but you don't when you use, for example, macro factor, which is the app that I recommend. It does it for you. If you're so inclined and you want to make a spreadsheet for all this, you can, and you can make it probably pretty good, but it's not as complex as if you had to measure all of the stuff happening in your body. That would be just insane, right? You need a food scale, a bathroom scale, and consistent data collection is all you need, and make it easy on yourself to do that. Right. Use frictionless methods to do this.
Philip Pape: 20:13
The fourth benefit of this is it's self-correcting. This is huge. If you're not tracking accurately, if you're missing calories here and there, it's still going to work. You know why? Because it is based on the outcomes, not the inputs. So what's cool with this is it has a lot of resilience. You can be off by up to 30% with your calorie tracking as long as you are tracking, and it's still going to be robust enough to cover you. You can skip some weigh-ins and it's still going to be robust enough to cover you. You can skip some weigh-ins and it's still going to be robust enough. That's pretty cool, right?
Philip Pape: 20:43
I recommend tracking daily and doing it as precisely as you can. But if you skip a weight, if you skip a food log, a day of food logged, or if you're having to estimate because you're traveling at a restaurant, whatever, it's going to be good enough to actually work quite well anyway. And I wanted to mention that because that's an excuse for people who say, well, I can't track every day, or I go to restaurants, I can't be precise. You don't have to be Sorry, you don't have to be. You can have a lot of flex here and it's going to be fine. Right, your weight trend is going to reflect your true average intake over time and the weight trend is resilient to a few missed weigh-ins. Your food is resilient to lack of perfection with your logging right.
Philip Pape: 21:22
And then, finally, when you tie this all together, what does it do? It gives you a thing that you can actually act on in an informed way when you know your real TDEE the pie chart. This is how many calories I burn every day, pretty close to reality. Now I can say, okay, I want to lose a pound a week. That's 500 calories a day. I burn 2000 calories, so I need to eat 1500 calories. And then next week, based on my tracking, it turns out that my TDE dropped a little bit. Well, I need to drop calories a little bit or wow, I'm walking a lot. My TDE is actually going up. I need to eat more to stay in that deficit or surplus or whatever it is right.
Philip Pape: 21:58
Whatever direction you want to go, you want to do body recomp as well. We just talked about body recomp. We just had a 90-day body recomp workshop in Physique University. The day this episode comes out, it was the day after we had the workshop. If you want to see the replay and learn how to track not only track your metabolism, but also come up with a 90 day way to use that information to build muscle and lose fat that's what we did in there. More importantly, though, you know what else we do in physique university.
Philip Pape: 22:26
We deal with scenarios when your expenditure goes up or down and you're not sure why. We can talk through that. We have guides on that. We have coaches who can help you understand it. We can diagnose it. We could even get on a live call or hot seat to interpret your data, to see if it's the data itself or something that you've done that you're not even aware of that could be causing the change, so that you can take control of the situation and know what to do next. Whether you're losing fat, you're hitting a plateau, you're trying to build muscle right, and that's that engineering mindset I want us to cultivate. That this is information, and if we can have accurate data, we can make good decisions. So go to witsandweightscom slash physique If you guys want to join us in there, if you want to get the replay of the body recomp workshop, or if you just want to hit it hard and implement a fat loss plan that I build for you and be able to get unstuck when it seems like you're stuck, that's where we do that PhysiqueUniversity, witsandweightscom slash physique.
Philip Pape: 23:21
Now you could do all these calculations manually, like I said, with a spreadsheet, but I think there's a better way. It's called Macrofactor. I am such a shill for this app because I've used it since launch. Yes, I'm an affiliate. Please support me. My code is witsandweights all one word. You'll get two weeks free and you won't look back.
Philip Pape: 23:38
It's made by the team at Stronger by Science, greg Knuckles and those guys, and it's built specifically on this methodology. It is the only app that does this. How does it do it? I'm just going to quickly explain. When you log your weight every day, it uses a 20 day exponential moving average. You don't have to understand it. It's just a moving average to give you a trend weight. Then it looks at how much food you've logged every day and it reverse engineers your metabolism based on that. That's it, and then it updates your metabolism every day as you provide the data and says okay, it is Monday Time to check in. Your metabolism is up a hundred calories this week. Therefore, we're going to increase your targets by a hundred calories. And the protein, fats, carb breakdown are depending on some other factors like what kind of balance you want, how aggressive you want to be with protein, whether you're lifting weights, etc.
Philip Pape: 24:28
By the way, everyone here should be lifting weights, right? Okay? So I love Macrofactor. Again, you can download it from your app store. It's a paid app, but, my God, the the for 72 bucks a year is going to save you probably thousands of dollars in frustration and healthcare costs and probably other programs for the rest of your life. So it pays for itself instantly. Wits and weights or no, go to go to macro factor from your app store and then use my code wits and weights all one word and that's it. It's going to remove the guesswork for you If you want an app, if you want to do it yourself and you're you nerd out on this stuff. Do it share, share with me your experience, how it's going.
Philip Pape: 25:06
All you need is food and weight right and everything else calculates for you, and you don't have to worry about wearables. You don't have to worry about getting a cup using a calculator. You don't have to worry about going to use a machine in the gym right calculator. You don't have to worry about going to use a machine in the gym right. I've been using it myself, all our clients use it, physique University clients, all use it. And I have not found anything else that provides anywhere close to the accuracy of the TDEE estimate than Macrofactor. So that's why I'm such a shill for it. Okay, I'm a fan boy, as they say. All right. So I know some of you are thinking but Philip, what if I don't log perfectly? What if I forget a meal? What if I estimate my portions? And I've already addressed this to an extent. But I want to go a step further and say that that is a strength of this method because of how it's based on the closed system and the outcome right, it's not based on all the stuff under the hood. So you so let me give you an example Some people might be accidentally under logging every day or over logging every day because of whatever they're doing in their life.
Philip Pape: 26:08
As long as the, as long as the under or over logging is fairly consistent no, you know what? It doesn't even have to be that consistent. Again, you can be off by 30% in either direction. It's going to be close enough. When you think of calories, calories are like in the thousands, right? So if you're off by a few hundred calories, when it smooths it out and then links it up with your weight, it's still going to be pretty darn close to reality and you're still going to be able to nudge your diet in the direction you want to go, with some confidence, with a lot of confidence, because that's the thing people are missing, isn't it? They're missing the confidence to know how much do I eat, or I'm eating this much. I think it's gonna do this, but it's not what the heck's going on In my world. I know how much to eat, and so if I'm eating that much, that's not the problem. It's something else, like something's happening with my expenditure. That's not the problem. It's something else Like my something's happening with my expenditure that's causing me to either fall behind or get ahead of the deficit or the surplus. It's not that I'm not eating the right amount. I know how much to eat, right? Obviously, if you're eating way more way below than the target, way below the target, that's an independent issue, right?
Philip Pape: 27:18
And another question to get is okay, what about the fact that your scale weight changes so much? And some people don't realize this, but it does. It changes due to water weight far more than it changes due to fat changes. And that's why I like tracking every day, which, by the way, has been shown in studies time and again to be the most effective means of hitting your goals and maintaining them Weight loss, maintenance, muscle gain, whatever is to track daily. And that's because you get this trend that smooths out all of that noise the noise from the sodium, from the Chinese food and pizza, from the hormones, from the glycogen, from the hard training session, from the inflammation, from your menstrual cycle, all of it. So that's another question that comes up. Another one is what if my metabolism is insert adjective here broken, non-responsive or I have a thyroid condition? Again, the robustness is built in.
Philip Pape: 28:10
Even if you have metabolic issues, legitimate issues, this is going to reveal your actual energy expenditure so that you understand reality. You might discover that, yes, your TDE is far lower than you expected. And the initial response for many of you is I thought it was burning, you know, 2000 calories, but I'm only burning 1600. Now some people will say what's wrong with the app? It says I only burn 1600. Others will say, oh, it's really good to know that I only burn 1600. And, by the way, you can test this out by eating 1600 for a while and notice that your weight stays the same.
Philip Pape: 28:44
But now you have accurate data work to work with instead of guessing right that that. That, to me, is gold. That's gold because if you have a low metabolism, and it's just the way you are, you can do something about it. You can add more neat into the equation. You can use nonlinear dieting. Maybe everything is suppressed and you're under fueled. Maybe you have a hormone issue, like it allows you to separate the variables and figure out what's going on. Or, you know, you just have a lower metabolism than the average person and go listen to my episode on what to do if you have a very low metabolism. Okay.
Philip Pape: 29:20
So the next question I get is like, isn't this too much work? It sounds like a lot of tracking. Well, you're already eating food, I hope, or else you'd be dead. You're probably weighing yourself occasionally anyway. All I'm asking you to do is log daily which every time I've done a poll of my clients or Facebook members and said give me your screen time for macro factor. It's like three minutes a day. It's like three minutes a day Cause you end up copying and pasting. You end up being very quick with the app. It's one of the fast. It is the fastest app on the market. It's been tested to be the fastest. It has a great database, right. It has AI, it has all that stuff. It's fast. So you're taking three minutes a day to log your food and you're taking 30 seconds a day to weigh yourself, and that's it Right.
Philip Pape: 30:02
And then, but the clarity you get for your expenditure priceless To steal from the mastercard commercial right, beyond that right, like once you establish your baseline expenditure. Now you have this data point You've probably never had in your entire life and that alone is going to give you more clarity than you've had before to make decisions with your food, let alone getting into macros and all that other stuff. So you should just start it and try it, just try. You know what, get what's in get. I keep saying that get macro factor and use the two weeks free. In those two weeks, do what we just talked about Log your food and weight every day and reach out to me on Instagram and tell me about your experience.
Philip Pape: 30:40
If it was awful, if it doesn't work, if you think it's not a great app, I want to hear it. I really do, because I want to know why. Because a lot of times it has to do with the learning curve or other aspects. Some people may just not like it, but once you start using it, what I've found is that you realize your metabolism is not mysterious. It is not uncontrollable. Which Metabolism is not mysterious? It is not uncontrollable, which is what all the marketers want you to believe.
Philip Pape: 31:01
I want you to come to me, whether you just check out the podcast or come into our Facebook group, or you want to implement this stuff for you in our Physique University or coaching. I want you to come to me with more clarity you've ever had before, that you can do something about your metabolism and that you can measure it, because then, from that premise, you're going to start to see patterns. You're going to notice how your metabolism responds to your training, different stress levels, your sleep patterns, what you eat, when you eat it right, your pre and post workouts. You see how your walks, you know how your vacations versus work schedule affect your metabolism, and then you become the scientist of your own physiology. That's what I want for people. That is where the power comes from.
Philip Pape: 31:48
I've had clients discover their metabolism was way off from what they thought 400 calories higher, 500 calories lower and explain why they weren't getting what they wanted, why they weren't, say, losing on whatever calories that the last person recommended, or the calculator or coach or whatever right. And we see the other direction, people trying to go into a gain and build muscle, and they find that in reality, their metabolism takes off like a rocket and that's why they can't keep up and they can't eat enough to gain the muscle, and so they're always kind of falling behind and it holds them back from building lean mass. And so it's not just about getting a number, it's getting an understanding of how your body works, and then that is the foundation for all the nutrition decisions you can make. I love that there are people out there that want you to just eat intuitively and monitor your blood sugar, and based on satiety. But we need precision, folks, we need some awareness, we need some numbers Like I'm just, that's just me, I'm sorry, that's me, I'm a numbers guy.
Philip Pape: 32:50
If you're not a numbers person, then maybe this approach doesn't work for you. If you like to track numbers, because you notice it helps you manage your income and expenses so you can be set for retirement and for your family, then that same principle applies to everything else, especially fitness and nutrition, where it is very numerically measurable in many senses. And so you're not guessing, you're not hoping. You're operating from a place of confidence based on your own data. So again, your metabolism is not mysterious. It is not an unchangeable genetic lottery that dooms you to struggle with your weight. It's dynamic, it responds to you, your lifestyle, and you can measure it very simply and very accurately. And every day you wait to start collecting this is another day you're just flying blind right. Every meal you eat, you don't know your TDE. You just can't make informed decisions. If your goal is physique and health, all right. So let's do this together. Let's understand our numbers and use that to make smarter choices. So you stop hoping and you start engineering your results. That is it All right.
Philip Pape: 33:53
This episode opened your eyes to how metabolism works, and I should say that the metabolism itself. I didn't really get into the science of that too much. I really wanted to talk about how you measure it with this episode. So if you do that, the next question might be okay how can I change it? And so I have an episode called four ways to increase your metabolism by 500 to 1000 calories per day. Episode two, three, six, two, 36. I'm going to link it in the show notes. It's called four ways to increase your metabolism 500 to a thousand calories per day, which gives you strategies to boost your TDEE once you know what, what it actually is. Sorry, I'm losing my voice today. So combining today's tracking method with those strategies, that is what's really powerful. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights and remember your metabolism is not a mystery. It's data to be collected. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.
