Can HRT stop menopause weight gain, or is something else going on when the scale keeps climbing?
That's 1 of 9 listener questions I'm answering today, from men and women over 40 in very different situations, from lean lifters trying to recomp to people working around old injuries.
You'll learn:
What dozens of HRT trials found about your weight on the scale
The question to answer before you take a diet break after 22 months of dieting
Whether body recomposition still works when you're already at 13% body fat
How deadlift injury risk compares with squats and with other sports
A finding on salt and blood pressure to know before you buy electrolyte drinks
If you want a straight answer to the question you've been stuck on, hit play!
Get a 2-week free trial of MacroFactor with code WITSANDWEIGHTS. It works backward from your food log and daily weigh-ins to estimate what you burn, and it updates your targets every week:
https://witsandweights.com/blog/macrofactor
Send me your question for a future episode. I reply to every one by email. https://witsandweights.com/question
Timestamps:
0:00 - 9 listener questions for lifters over 40
1:55 - #1: Weight gain on HRT with 5 days of training
5:25 - #2: 22 months in a deficit and diet breaks
8:19 - #3: Tighter clothes, same scale weight
10:48 - #4: Recomp at 13% body fat
13:14 - #5: Weak lifts for your body weight
15:38 - #6: Deadlift injuries after 40
19:29 - #7: Creatine, brain fog, and irritability
21:21 - #8: Daily electrolytes in perimenopause
24:30 - #9: Getting your mom to eat more and lift
28:22 - Bonus: a 10-second morning habit
Episode Resources:
Episode 501: what perimenopause does and doesn't do to your weight
Episode 511: cortisol, HRT, and belly fat after 40
Episode 503: do diet breaks work for fat loss and metabolism?
Episode 489: are the squat, deadlift, and row unsafe after 40?
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9 listener questions for lifters over 40
Philip Pape 0:00
If you're among the, say, older population like me, over 40 and lifting weights, one of today's nine listener questions probably applies to you. You are going to hear why someone on HRT is still gaining weight, whether to drop deadlifts after you get injured, if you can still recomp when you're already lean, and why a two-year diet probably isn't a sustainable diet. I'm also covering creatine and mood, daily electrolytes, and getting your mom to lift. Enjoy. Welcome to Wits & Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today is a listener QA. We're gonna cram nine questions into here from conversations that I've had or been reading about or hearing about or sent my way on menopause, perimenopause, over 40 lifting, all of these communities that I tend to dwell in. And I'm going to paraphrase the questions. I'm gonna leave out names because some of these are personal. I didn't necessarily get permission from all of them, so I'm not going to, you know, use people's actual information, of course. And they come from men and women in a lot of different situations: lean lifters trying to recomp, people working around old injuries, a few of them that build on episode 501 on perimenopause and weight, and last week's episode 517 on testosterone for women. So a lot of different uh topics that might apply to you. And then at the very end, I'm gonna share a 10-second morning habit that in a six-month trial helped people lose about six and a half percent of their body weight compared to the other group which didn't which didn't lose anything. And you probably already own the equipment necessary for this tip, so stick around for that.
#1: Weight gain on HRT with 5 days of training
Philip Pape 1:55
All right, question one. I've been on HRT, that's hormone replacement therapy, for two years. I train five days a week and I'm still gaining weight. What am I doing wrong? All right, so first this is super common. You have symptoms are probably why you are on HRT, right? You wanted to get certain symptoms treated and you're training consistently. You said five days a week. So it feels like, okay, what am I doing wrong? The scale should be going down or I should be losing fat or whatever. And I think uh we're gonna have a popular narrative that we address for every one of these questions so that you kind of see why why is the question being asked in the first place? Because it may be on a false premise. And then what do we do about it? So I think there's two versions of this. One is that, hey, HRT makes you gain weight. The other, which you're gonna see from a lot of telehealth clinics and online pharmacies that sell the actual prescriptions for HRT, they say, oh, it's gonna help you lose weight, it's gonna fix your menopause belly, whatever other claim you make. And I would say both claims are saying that there's a direct cause and effect of hormone therapy on weight, which I think is the flaw. I think that's the flaw. I think the best evidence we have is a uh a review by Cochrane that pooled dozens of trials and tens of thousands of women together, and it found that estrogen therapy with or without progesterone didn't cause weight gain, and it didn't prevent the weight gain that normally happens around menopause either. So it actually cuts both ways. What HRT does seem to do, I mentioned this on episode 511, is it prevents some of that fat distribution to your belly, to the visceral fat. So it affects where fat goes, not how much, which is interesting, right? But it's not the weight on the scale thing. So if HRT isn't the variable here, then what is? Well, it mostly comes down to time and energy balance. What do I mean by that? Well, gaining all this weight, if you do, not everybody does, it's kind of like a misconception that everybody gains weight in midlife, but generally weight tends to climb steadily with age, whether or not you're on hormones, for a lot of different reasons. We've talked about this before. It's being more sedentary, it's more stress, it's less muscle mass, it's, you know, just unconsciously eating more, whatever. And HRT doesn't affect that directly. And remember that just because you train a lot, just because you train five days a week, doesn't guarantee you're gonna be in an energy deficit, which is what affects fat loss. Hard training, in fact, sometimes makes a lot of people hungrier. And most of us underestimate what we eat. So if you're not tracking, if you're not being on top of this stuff, that's that's where it comes from. Now, the fix is simple. I want you to log your food for like three or four weeks using a food scale, just so you know it's accurate. I want you to weigh yourself every day, watch how the trend moves, and I want you to measure your waste every two weeks. So between those, you will have enough data to know am I eating more than I burn? And that's probably the root cause right there, because you're not. If you're not losing fat, it's because you're not actually in a deficit. Now, speaking of trend weight, like what do you mean that mean by that? Well, the app that I use for this, I always recommend it, our clients use it, is MacroFactor. I've talked about it a lot before, but I like it because it's the only app that seems to be able to calculate your metabolism, what you're actually burning by working backward from what you've logged for food and your daily weigh-ins. And then it gives you a target every week. So then within a few weeks, you'd see whether you're logging in your trend line, agree based on whether you're losing weight or not. And then you can go after it and solve the exact problem you just asked about. Just download MacroFactor, use my code WITS and weights, all one word, to get a two-week free trial. Check it out. I'll put a link in the show notes. All right, so question two.
#2: 22 months in a deficit and diet breaks
Philip Pape 5:25
I've been in a calorie deficit for 22 months. Do I need a diet break? All right, I love this one because there is a big, big, big assumption baked into the question. Now, there's a still popular thought that a diet break resets your metabolism. Maybe it resets your leptin. And I covered this back in episode 503. I'll keep it short here. In people who lift, diet breaks did not produce more fat loss and did not protect their metabolism, but they did make people less hungrier and happier with their diet, i.e., it increases adherence for some people. And that is a benefit, but a different benefit than a lot of people claim. But I'm gonna question the 22 months first. A real calorie deficit, even if it's a small one, if you were in that for consistently for two years, it's gonna take away a lot of weight. I mean, unless you're talking about a tiny, tiny calorie deficit, you know, like 10 calories a day or something. But assuming it's a measurable calorie deficit, it you're you probably would have lost a bunch of weight. Now, your metabolism does adapt, but it doesn't adapt like so massively for most people that it's gonna erase a result of being in a deficit. So it, but if your weight has been flat, if that's what you're asking for, you said I've been in a calorie deficit for 22 months that I need a diet break. You didn't mention, like, have you been losing weight? But if it has been flat, then you're very likely eating at maintenance and calling it a deficit because you're eating less than you think you should, probably. Or you're eating kind of in an underfueled state that's slightly metabolically adapted, and also it's keeping you in maintenance, but it's an underfueled form of maintenance that feels like a deficit. It's like the worst place to be because you're not really getting any progress and you don't feel great. Right. And there's a drift that occurs when you're in a deficit where because of the slow metabolism or metabolic adaptation over time, you may need to eat fewer and fewer calories to remain in that deficit. So again, have you truly been in a deficit? Well, look at your trend weight over the last eight to 12 weeks. If you're not even tracking this stuff or if you're doing very sporadic weigh-ins, you're not gonna know. So I know that wasn't quite the question you asked. You said, Do I need a diet break? I guess if you need a diet break, depends on do you feel like you need a diet break, or does your results show that things are adapting so much that you're not really benefiting from the calorie level you're eating and you need to eat more and recover to maintenance for a while and take a break. It's mainly psychological. Mainly psychological. It's for hunger, it's for diet fatigue. That's the main reason for it. All right. So only you can say if you've you've been in it, it's not really a function of time. But I would never put somebody into a two-year diet. I don't even call that a diet. I don't even know what that is, other than the typical person who is underfed for years and years because they're always trying to diet, but they never really do it because they're inconsistent and because they eat a lot more on the weekends, and because they eat at parties and and and and and you're not tracking and all the other things. So questions number one and two kind of connect.
#3: Tighter clothes, same scale weight
Philip Pape 8:19
All right, the next question is my clothes keep getting tighter, but the scale hasn't moved. All right, and I'm paraphrasing because I actually have several versions of that that came in. It's it's super common, right? That body composition is highly misunderstood when compared to weight, scale weight. And although a lot of you have found this show in time to understand that concept, you may be new to the show and being like, what is Philip talking about? Well, I'm talking about the fact that, especially women through menopause, you tend to gain fat and lose muscle at the same time. And what happens is they cancel out on the scale. So your weight on the scale can look like it's staying the same, right? And yet you're getting pudgier and your clothes are getting tighter. Very simple. You're gaining more body fat and you're losing muscle. Same thing happens when you've dieted many times and you haven't been lifting weights and you lose a bunch of muscle mass slowly over time, it gets compounded with age, and every time you gain weight back, you only gain fat. So you're improving, you're increasing your body fat percentage, even without increasing your scale weight. Obviously, some of you also increase your scale weight, and so it's kind of a double whammy. And a lot of the uh marketing is around hormones and cortisol and hormone balancing and all this nonsense. Okay. But no, the the main stimulus you probably need is lifting weights. I hate to, I hate to harp on that over and over again in this show. But the good news is it's totally in your control, right? If you're if you want the opposite to occur, if you want your waist size to go down, you want things to fit better, if you want to have a little bit of muscle definition in your arms and you know, have those traps and nice neck and be leaner, toner, whatever the word is, then we just need to do the opposite. We need to build some muscle and lose fat. You don't have to necessarily drop a lot of weight. So the fix here in terms of like measuring the right thing goes back to my first question, the first question where I said measure your waist at the belly button, say every two weeks, along with your trend weight. Because if your waist is changing in one direction while your weight goes the other, or let's say your weight is flat and your waist is going up, you're probably gaining body fat. Vice versa, you know, we have a lot of clients who they come in and they're like, I gotta lose 20 pounds. And six months later, maybe they've lost five or 10 pounds, or maybe they haven't lost weight, but their waist is down three inches. And like, you know what? I feel way better now eating more food and lifting weights and feeling great and looking great, even though I haven't lost the weight on the scale because I realize that doesn't matter. That doesn't matter. Right. So body composition is a very, very important thing to focus on instead of scale weight. All right. So we covered the scale and the tape measurement stuff, body comp to death. I just wanted to make sure I got those out of the way. The next
#4: Recomp at 13% body fat
Philip Pape 10:48
one is for, I'll say, the leaner folks. There are quite a bit of you, believe it or not. And this question is hey, I'm 42 years old, I'm around 13% body fat. So this is a man, this is a male, 13% is fairly lean. Can I still recomp? Now, there again, there's a popular assumption that recomp only works for beginners or people who are detrained, or people with plenty of fat to lose. And it's partly true, but recomp does happen in lean trained people. It's just a lot slower. And you have to be more dialed in. And it needs that really dedicated, progressive training because at this point you might also not be uh getting PRs as often. You need to have enough protein, right? Age isn't an issue. We know that again from Herman Ponser's work that your metabolism is pretty steady from your 20s to about 60, once you account for body size and lean mass. So what slows down is, you know, what slows down recomp is how advanced you are with your training and how lean you already are, right? Not not really a function of age. Now, the 13% body fat, just real quick here on numbers, for a man, as I mentioned, 13% is pretty lean. It's, you know, toward the top of the athletic range. I mean, if you could be walking around, I usually tell guys, if you could walk around 15%, you're probably where you want to be most of the time. It probably nicely balances leanness with like how much food you're eating and how much you can lift. And so it's a good kind of like threshold, that 13, 15%. For a woman, though, 13% is way down at essential body fat, which is like stage lean, you know, that's not something you should be chasing. So I've got to just always caveat that. You women are like 8 to 10% higher body fat than men. So I would expect a lean woman to be in their 20s uh percent. So if you're standing on like smart scale and it's telling you a number like 13% and you're a woman and you truly aren't like stage lean, be highly skeptical. I I don't like those scales at all. I'd rather use the navy formula to determine body fat. But if you are a man at 13%, what I would do if you're trying to recomp is I would either just keep eating at maintenance and keep just pushing your lifts or even run a tiny surplus, maybe just a little bit above maintenance, what I call aggressive maintenance. And then over eight to 12 weeks, you know, your lifts should be nicely going up and your trend weight, it's probably not gonna move that much. And it's just kind of like that very slow process. It's gonna take months, not weeks. It shouldn't take necessarily years, but it's gonna take time. All right. Next
#5: Weak lifts for your body weight
Philip Pape 13:14
question is kind of the flip side of this. And it goes, quote, my lifts look weak for my body weight. Does that matter if a lot of my weight is fat? So my lifts are okay, interesting. All right, so when you say it looks weak for your body weight, that sounds to me like you're comparing yourself to others, which I get, because like if you listen to, I don't know, starting strength podcast or something, you'll hear all the time, oh, you're this size and this weight. That's really a small deadlift. And there's some truth to that at the very low end. Um, but once you get like a reasonable level of strength, it varies a lot from person to person. So if you're looking at strength charts that say, hey, you should deadlift, you know, one and a half times your body weight, you gotta you gotta remember people have different levels of baseline strength and genetics and you know how much you weigh is also gonna depend on your body composition, things like that. So if we look at, for example, studies, we look at grip strength studies, which is a proxy for this, absolute strength and relative strength both predict how long you'll live. So in other words, they're both correlated with good health and mortality. And these are observational, they're they try to link things. It's not proof, it's hard to prove you can't really prove this stuff. But where it really stands out is metabolic health. In older adults, strength relative to body weight was tied to metabolic syndrome when absolute strength wasn't tied to metabolic syndrome. So, in other words, a low ratio of strength to body weight, so that's relative strength, is less a sign that you are weak and more a signal about body fat. I'll put it that way. So, what I would do is track your absolute numbers and make sure they are going up over the months while not in a fat loss phase, because again, if you're in fat loss, you're now going to hamper yourself from progress and not be able to really gain a lot of strength and size. And, you know, let the ratio improve on its own as you lose fat. Do not diet hard just to fix the ratio, because if you lose strength, you're actually making things worse. In other words, just don't be dieting if you're trying to get strong and build muscle, and then save the dieting phase for a very concentrated, you know, fat loss phase when you are happy with the level of strength you've put on. And look, a beginner program, a novice program, a linear progression, a three by five type program, which is basic barbell lifts, is gonna get you there if you do it consistently and you eat and you sleep. All right. Okay,
#6: Deadlift injuries after 40
Philip Pape 15:38
so continuing on training, the next question is about deadlifts. Most of my injuries have come from deadlifts. Should I drop them now that I'm 40? And this this like kind of irks me a little bit, even though I get it, it's the person's experience. But there is just a huge myth that, you know, deadlifts are gonna hurt you or wreck your back. And I actually love some of the posts by like Lane Norton, for example, hitting his seven, whatever, hundred-pound deadlifts, posting how people keep saying he's gonna break his back, you know, you know, 20 years in, right? And like, okay, well, I haven't yet. I'm still super strong. Strength sports, lifting weights are very low injury activities. In fact, on some charts, it is by far the lowest injury type of sport on the planet. Across the injury researchers, uh research, lifters get hurt far less often per hour than people playing team sports, you know, like soccer or even running, right? And there's not really a difference by age or sex, it's pretty consistent. When power lifters were asked which lift caused their injuries, the deadlift was actually behind about a third of the other lifts, and squat was behind even more. So deadlift is not uniquely dangerous, even based on data. Injuries tend to follow spikes in load where you overreach beyond your capability, meaning not just lifting heavy, but lifting absurdly beyond what you're capable of. And also from fatigue. I mean, I know a few of my tweaks and injuries, when they did occur during the gym, it was because I wasn't paying attention, I wasn't breathing, I was going fast, I was trying to lift too much too fast, I didn't warm up, I was underrecovered, like it was all my fault. And just paying attention to a few simple things will go a long way. Now, your own history is still gonna tell you something. It's probably telling you, you know, about things like your movement patterns and your form and like things like that. But most people get injured outside the gym, outside the gym. I would not criticize. I think we covered this, wow, I want to say episode 49, where we talked about no one exercise is a problem in and of itself. Every exercise can be a great exercise if you train, you know, close enough to failure that there are enough reps left in the tank where you're not grinding or overreaching every time, that you're not just exclusively going after heavy singles all the time, unless you're, you know, again, unless you're a power lifter and competitor, but even competitors aren't always doing singles, right? They ramp up to it, they build up, they do a peaking phase, et cetera. And that you increase your weight in the right jumps from session to session. So any one of those things, poor form, you know, being underrecovered, under over fatigued, not warming up enough, not using variation that suits your body, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, there's a skill involved here. So assuming you put a little bit of a thought into the skill, there is no one exercise that in and of itself is dangerous. And the problem, you know, the biggest problem with that thinking is that if you think, let's say, deadlifts are dangerous and you do something else instead, that other thing has an equal chance of injuring you, i.e., an abysmally low chance, but like it'll injure you for the same reason, if that makes sense. In other words, if you use poor form on deadlifts and then poor form on RDLs, they both are gonna have that same problem, if you will. And what you need to do is fix your form and fix how you learn the skill. Maybe get a coach. Okay, maybe get a coach. So that that's my thoughts on that. On the other side, there are so many people that have benefited tremendously by adding in deadlifts, especially to recover from injury or improve their pain, reduce their pain from low, you know, their low back, etc. So just don't give me that. I mean, I've had low back surgery and I'm lifting more than I ever have from my deadlift, and I've done it for years and years since that time, with in a super healthy way, no issues whatsoever. All right.
#7: Creatine, brain fog, and irritability
Philip Pape 19:29
Next question is a creatine question. Creatine helped my brain fog, but I think it's making me irritable. Is that a thing? It's an interesting one because a lot of brands are pushing creatine really hard right now for cognitive and brain health. And there's some research on memory that has a small effect of creatine. But when some groups, even European regulators, looked at the evidence, you know, they'll say that cause and effect really isn't established, it's more observational or correlational. So there's some promising research. It's not proven, though. It's very nuanced right now, it's very mixed. Regarding irritability, I couldn't find a trial that showed creatine causes irritability or poor mood in, you know, healthy people. Now the depri the trials on depression show the opposite, but now you're conflating variables, aren't you? There is an exception, though. There is an exception that I saw. In a very small trial on people with bipolar depression, two of the people taking creatine switched into hypomania or mania. And that's documented. But again, who knows if it has anything to do with the creatine? And look, if you're in perimenopause, for example, and there's symptoms that are happening, poor sleep, hot flashes, those can cause a lot of irritability too. Don't get irritable at me for suggesting that, but it's true. So, you know, if it's helping your brain fog, great. Keep taking it through three to five grams a day. But if you think it's causing something negative, just stop. For I don't know, three, four weeks, that's about how long it takes to desaturate. I had one client in all the clients I've ever worked with who is allergic to creatine. So maybe you're allergic. There's a tiny percentage of people who are allergic. So if you're listening to this and you're like, yeah, you know, I've had interesting negative effects from creatine. Look, just experiment with not doing it, not taking it for a while, and you figure it out. Now, if you have bipolar or history of hypomania or depression or something like that, I'm that's way outside my scope of practice. All right, please talk to your doctor or your prescriber before you take something like creatine. Okay.
#8: Daily electrolytes in perimenopause
Philip Pape 21:21
So the next question, I want to stay on supplements for a minute, is should I be taking electrolytes every day in perimenopause? Now, it's very interesting combination. This is definitely indicative of how marketing out there is like so hyper-focused on like you're in perimenopause. So you need to do this, this, this because you're in perimenopause. Okay. So I have opinions on this. So any brand that sells like a menopause whatever electrolyte drink, I don't care, and and and and makes a claim tied to that like, oh, every hot flash you get is going to drain hundreds of milligrams of sodium. So you need to replenish your sodium. I don't see any research on that anywhere. I think this is crazy talk. This is like TikTok's. And of course, they're selling you that, right? So take it for what it's worth. I also didn't find any randomized trial of electrolytes for perimenopause or menopause symptoms. So I did look for those. The old, the one like old measurement I could find of whole body sweat during a hot flash, it looked like somewhere between a few milligrams and a dozen milligrams of sodium per hot flash. That's just the estimate, the old measurement I found. And, you know, if you have those drenching night sweats during the night, maybe it's more, but that's far from hundreds of milligrams of electrolytes. And at the same time, think about this. Most of us in our normal diet are already eating far more than the recommended amount of sodium. You know, I think I had, oh, who did I have on the show years ago who suggested that there's almost like an overreaction the other way to, oh, maybe we're not getting enough sodium. And in general, people have plenty, and some people maybe are taking too much. The electrolyte sticks that are really popular that are sold on a lot of podcasts, they have a thousand milligrams in a single serving, which now we got to think about blood pressure. And yes, blood pressure does respond to salt and sometimes a lot more in some people. And there was a study of, you know, women who had the who showed a much bigger increase, or what am I trying to say, increased how much their blood pressure responded to salt from one in five women to half of women after menopause. So in other words, I hope I said that right. So like 20% of women responded before menopause. Seems like more than 50% responded after. But, but, but that was surgical menopause. So I don't know how much we can read into that. So I wouldn't take electrolytes every day by default. I definitely get, you know, sponsors pitching to pitch electrolytes. I personally have taken electrolytes up and down over the years. If I'm doing like a lot of sessions in the heat or if I'm drenched, or you know, I drink a lot of coffee, so sometimes I feel like, oh, maybe I'm getting dehydrated. But I don't know from the studies. You know, if you, if you eat, if you're drinking water, if you're eating potassium-rich foods like fruit, you know, bananas are a great example, beans, the musical fruit. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Of course, if you have high blood pressure, check with your doctor, you know, maybe you need to reduce your salt. Use something like uh, what's it called? Dash, I think, instead of salt. So I didn't give you a very good answer, but I don't think anybody, quote unquote, should be taking electrolyts. It's really highly dependent on why you need them, what you're deficient in, how, what about the opposite concerns about too much salt, et cetera? Okay. All right.
#9: Getting your mom to eat more and lift
Philip Pape 24:30
And the last question, I think this is the last question. I think I covered them all, which is this is my favorite. My mom eats 1200 to 1600 calories a day and won't lift heavy. How do I get her to eat more and lift? Well, I guess my first snarky answer is you don't. Like it's kind of like trying to get your wife or husband, well, to do like get them to do something if they're not willing or not asking for it. And guys, I've been married more than 20 years, happily married, and I've learned, I've learned, you know, you don't coach your wife, but if she asked for help, like one time she asked me to write her program to help with her knees, I did it and she followed it because she asked. Like, I think that's that's great. Guys tend to want to fix things, right? And women just want you to listen. I know, I know the rules. Okay. Now, I love that you're worried about your mom. I have some stories about my mom too, but I don't know if she'd she'd be okay with me sharing here about health and fitness and all that. You know, when when someone is motivated, that's a really great place to be. The popular advice, again, here for for older women is oh, you have to quote unquote lift heavy. And we talked about osteoporosis and bone mass and like how lifting over 85% of your max could help with with bone density, and hey, you have to eat more because of your metabolism and you're underfueled, and the list goes on and on, right? But you got to start where you are. So I would pick one battle first. And by the way, this applies to yourself, guys. Anybody listening, this applies to yourself. If you're not gonna lift heavy and you're not gonna eat enough and you're discouraged about that, you gotta start where you're at. So, on like calories, you said 1200 to 1600 calories. It may not be as low as it sounds for like a smaller, older, less active woman. That that doesn't sound super unreasonable. And because energy needs do send to tend to start to come down after the age of 60. Now, part of that could be because of metabolism and loss of muscle and stuff, and it's kind of a catch-22 because you might want her to be eating a lot more protein, but it could be closer maintenance, you know, if she's maintaining her body weight. I wouldn't necessarily like go after that one for now. Maybe encourage her to think about protein and just start there, right? Just like track, use MacroFactor or even just a plain old log. Maybe she's if she's not comfortable with with apps, and just log like what has protein in it, just in general, like not even the grams, just oh, I eat chicken and I eat fish and I eat this, or you know, maybe I'm just eating sandwiches and crackers and pasta, right? That's on the food side, I would keep it simple, start where you're at, maybe focus on protein. On the lifting side, look, the win here is getting her started at any load, doing the basic, most basic thing, even one day in the gym. Even two set, I mean, two sessions is ideal for an old for an older person, like over 60, 70. I always say two days, two sessions a week on machines, with bends, in a class with a good coach. You know, I don't care if it's a bing dumbbells, you know, start there. It's a great start, and then the weight can come up later once she trusts and has confidence in the process. And I would just frame it around something she cares about, like playing with her grandkids, getting up off the floor, not falling, getting up off the toilet. I mean, just not falling could be super compelling. You know, I don't have the answer on persuading a reluctant, you know, say parent, spouse, whatever, especially well, spouse, that that's a whole separate thing. Let's just focus on parents. I don't have anything good on there because I just, let's just say I know from personal experience, if you try to push, a lot of people will push back and it'll get worse. So if you want one change, if you want to change, you got to start with one thing, make it fun, do it with her if you can, share a resource that's simple to understand, ask her what she wants, ask her what she's worried about and what she wants to improve, and kind of go from there. I know I'm throwing a lot at you, but it's kind of like a coaching process. Okay. So for the food, start with the protein. For the lifting, find something fun that she'll just do that's super accessible to get started, maybe associated with where she lives or a local group or YMCA, or you know, there's a lot of options, right? The senior center, our senior center has programs like that around here. So hopefully that helped.
Bonus: a 10-second morning habit
Philip Pape 28:22
So before we wrap up, I did promise you a 10-second morning habit. Um, I'm gonna share that in just a second. But remember, this episode came from listener questions. I put them all in one episode. And I want your question, I want to cover it on the show. I can give you a shout-out or not, it's up to you. Go to witsandweights.com slash question. I will reply personally to your email. And the habit that I'm about to share, since it involves your scale and weighing, I'm gonna mention MacroFactor one more time here. I've been using it for what, over four years, five years now, since launch, whatever it is. And the way that it can elegantly handle helping you understand your protein, your nutrition needs, and meeting your goals is so elegant and simple and low stress. It's why I recommend it. So go to get MacroFactor and use my code WITNWAITSALL ONEWER. But here's that habit. If you want a habit that helps you control your weight and it takes about 10 seconds, it is to weigh yourself every morning. You're like, really? That's what it is. Well, listen, in a six-month trial, adults with overweight weighed in daily, they saw a graph of their weight and they got a short weekly feedback email. They actually lost six and a half percent of their body weight, whereas the comparison group didn't lose anything. That's it. So they weighed in daily, they saw a graph of their rate weight and they got a short weekly feedback email. So if you weigh in in the morning before you eat, after you use the bathroom, you know, very little clothes on, same thing every day, and then focus on the weekly trend or the three-weekly trend, whatever, instead of the daily number. If you're worried it's gonna make you feel worse about your body, they actually looked at that in the study. The daily weigh in people ended up less dissatisfied with their bodies, not more. So now, if it's a trigger for you, that might be an exception, I don't know. But for most people, they find that it's actually more empowering than not. Um, and the reason I made I tell you this tip is some people are like, okay, uh, why don't I weigh myself three days a week or four days a week or six? Do it every day. Do it every day and see what it makes a difference for in your life. Okay, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that most of today's answers were not try this supplement, try this protocol. They always tend to come back to the boring basics lifting weights, eating enough protein, tracking honesty so that you can measure and manage and improve. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits & Weights Podcast.
