Is 800 Calories a Day Unsafe? | Ep 368
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Why do some people thrive on far fewer calories than others (who might be miserable eating at that level)?
When we talk about whether 800 calories a day is "unsafe," we're asking the wrong question. After all, your size, training, activity level, and energy needs are unique to you and can vary widely among the population.
Learn why there's no universal unsafe calorie number, how to determine your own metabolic limits using biofeedback, and the critical trade-offs between aggressive deficits and sustainability.
Main Takeaways:
There's no universal "unsafe" calorie number
Metabolic adaptation is real but reversible, not permanent "damage"
Use biofeedback (energy, sleep, strength, mood) as your personalized guide rather than arbitrary rules
The trade-offs between speed, sustainability, and metabolic preservation require intentionality
Episode Resources:
Wits & Weights Facebook Community - Connect with others who understand nutrition isn't about universal rules
Timestamps:
0:50 - The obsession with 800, 1200, and 1500 calories
5:18 - The reality of individual energy needs
8:50 - Very low-calorie diets (VLCDs) in clinical settings
10:30 - The Optavia problem
16:14 - Metabolic adaptation vs "metabolic damage"
19:28 - Speed vs. sustainability vs. metabolism
20:44 - Using biofeedback as your personalized compass
24:23 - The non-negotiables
25:29 - Context vs. absolutes
Is Eating 800 Calories a Day Unsafe?
“Is 800 calories a day unsafe?” You have probably seen this question on Instagram or heard it from friends, and the truth is there is no universal answer. Fitness culture loves absolute rules like “never eat below 1200 calories” for women or “never below 1500” for men. These numbers are arbitrary and ignore the huge differences in body size, activity level, and energy needs.
A 105-pound woman might only burn 1500 calories in a day, while a 300-pound man can burn over 3000. The same 800-calorie intake has completely different effects depending on who we are talking about. That is why context matters more than any magic number.
The Real Definition of a “Very Low-Calorie Diet”
In clinical nutrition research, a very low-calorie diet (VLCD) is defined as 800 calories per day or less. These protocols are not everyday lifestyle diets. They are temporary, physician-supervised interventions designed for severe obesity or type 2 diabetes.
Studies show that when they are done with medical oversight, these diets can:
Produce rapid weight loss (3–5 pounds per week)
Improve blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol
Reverse pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes in some patients
But they also include safeguards that commercial programs skip:
High protein intake to preserve lean mass
Supplementation for vitamins and minerals
Regular medical monitoring
A defined timeline (usually no more than 12–16 weeks)
Where Diet Programs Go Wrong
Programs like Optavia often take the concept of very low-calorie diets and turn them into a one-size-fits-all solution. Everyone gets the same 800–1000 calories, usually from processed meal replacements. Exercise is discouraged, protein is too low, and there is no plan for what comes after.
This combination is why so many people regain the weight. They lose muscle along with fat, their metabolism adapts, and they never learn sustainable nutrition habits.
How to Think About Safety
Instead of asking “Is 800 calories unsafe?” ask these three questions:
What is my current energy expenditure?
A petite, sedentary woman might maintain on 1500 calories. For her, 1000–1200 could be a moderate deficit. For a larger, active man, 800 would be a starvation-level intake.How long am I doing this?
Aggressive deficits can be safe if they are short. A rapid fat loss phase of 2–3 weeks with high protein and resistance training is not the same as eating 800 calories indefinitely.What does my biofeedback say?
Numbers only tell part of the story. Energy levels, sleep, training performance, mood, recovery, and hunger are all signs of whether your body is handling the deficit.
Metabolic Adaptation vs. Metabolic Damage
Crash diets often spark fear of “metabolic damage.” In reality, what happens is metabolic adaptation—a temporary slowdown in energy expenditure beyond what you would expect from losing weight alone.
The more aggressive and longer the deficit, the stronger the adaptation. But it is reversible, especially if you preserve muscle through protein and strength training. Permanent “damage” is not what is happening, despite what marketers want you to believe.
Trade-Offs You Need to Understand
Every fat loss phase involves balancing three competing priorities:
Speed of results: Larger deficits mean faster fat loss.
Sustainability: Smaller deficits are easier to stick to long term.
Preserving metabolism and muscle: Requires resistance training, enough protein, and not dieting too aggressively for too long.
You cannot maximize all three. Instead, you choose your trade-offs based on your goals, life circumstances, and biofeedback.
Practical Guidelines
Do not blindly follow calorie rules you see online. Your maintenance calories are unique to you.
Short aggressive diets can be safe if you are prepared, fueled with protein, and consistent with strength training.
Long-term diets should be moderate to preserve adherence, energy, and muscle.
Always prioritize protein and resistance training no matter how aggressive your deficit.
Use biofeedback as your compass. If your strength drops, recovery tanks, or you feel miserable, you are pushing too far.
Final Thoughts
800 calories is not inherently unsafe. It can be appropriate for certain individuals in tightly controlled contexts, or completely unsustainable and counterproductive for others. What matters most is the context, duration, structure, and your body’s feedback.
Instead of chasing one-size-fits-all numbers, build the skills to understand your own energy needs, create a plan that matches your goals, and adjust based on biofeedback. That is how you diet safely and sustainably.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
Is 800 calories a day unsafe? The answer might surprise you because it depends entirely on who we're talking about. A 105-pound woman has vastly different energy needs than a 300-pound man, yet programs like Optivia push 800-calorie diets on everyone. Today, we are going to cut through the confusion around very low-calorie diets. You'll learn why there's no universal unsafe calorie number, how to determine your own metabolic limits using biofeedback and data, and the critical trade-offs between aggressive deficits and sustainability.
Philip Pape: 0:50
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 tackle one of those highly debated questions in fitness Is 800 calories a day unsafe? And I picked 800 on purpose, because sometimes people say 1200 or 1500, and we're going to get into these nuances. But I picked a really low number because the question comes up all the time. Given our cultural obsession with magic numbers, with universal thresholds and set points, we act like 800 or 1200 calories is the universal floor for women and 1500 for men and that anything below that for everybody is automatically dangerous. But the reality is, as always, more nuanced than any arbitrary threshold and it depends on context, constraints and individuality, and I love the fitness industry and I say that sarcastically. You know Instagram. They love to exploit confusion, confusion across the board.
Philip Pape: 1:52
Companies, weight loss programs they market things that are ridiculously extreme, to be honest, and they do so via fear. They spread fear about things like metabolic damage. We still hear that term. Your metabolism is broken or damaged, not a thing. And then you are left wondering if that lower calorie target is going to help you reach your goals faster or it's going to sabotage your metabolism. Why can this program do this? But then this influencer over here says that's way too low, and I made this episode because one of our Physique University members actually asked the question said like I've heard that X number of calories is too low. Is that true? And I wanted to address this because it's a very relevant topic. There is a rise in rapid weight loss and, yes, rapid fat loss too, but sometimes they get interchanged incorrectly.
Philip Pape: 2:42
We know about Optivia, which has been around a long time, and I have clients that constantly come to me saying, yeah, I tried Optivia in the past. It was miserable. I was down 800 calories and you weren't supposed to exercise and it was just arbitrary, regardless of your size, your activity level, your metabolic needs, not even the very basic quote, unquote personalization. And then we're also seeing more research on physician supervised very low calorie diets for obesity. And then we're also seeing more research on physician-supervised very low-calorie diets for obesity. And we're seeing, with weight loss medications, very low-calorie diets, intentional or not. We're seeing research on diabetes reversal, pre-diabetes. And that adds all this complexity to the discussion where you're like, well, what's the thing that I'm supposed to go with? And, by the way, it's actually quite simple. What's hard is implementing it for you. We're going to get into that.
Philip Pape: 3:28
But before we get into the specifics, I do want to share something that Julia from Physique University recently told me. She said quote I joined WWPU and finished the onboarding today. I'm glad I'm here. Before I thought it's just more information and better organized as is possible to soak up in the podcast, but I started to feel that the community and support are really the resources which will finally move the needle for me. Now this, I'll say, perfectly captures things that obviously I'm not marketing as well myself, and that is that it's not just about the information, it's how we implement it right. Individualized approaches matter so, so much.
Philip Pape: 4:09
And Julia realized shortly after joining. Because, again, apparently the way I market it isn't good enough to show you this that generic information, even if it's helpful, even if it's evidence-based, like we talk about on the show, is not enough. She needed personalized guidance to find what worked for her unique situation. So if you're ready to do that, let's say you've been listening to the podcast for a while and you want to stop guessing about all these things, including calorie needs. But that's just scratching the surface. You really are looking for a system designed specifically for your body, for your goals, for your constraints, for your preferences, right? These are all important things. Physique U is where we make that happen, where we help you determine your metabolic needs, your hormonal situation, your training situation, and create a sustainable plan that preserves muscle while achieving your physique goals. You can learn more about that at the special link in the show notes, because only that link is going to give you a free nutrition plan that I will build for you, because you're a podcast listener and I love to give stuff away. So go to the special link in the show notes to join Physique U, get the free plan and we'll see you in there.
Philip Pape: 5:18
All right, let's talk about why this question about calorie levels and whether 800 calories or 1200 or whatever is unsafe, even matters, right, it comes down to fitness culture. We're obsessed with magic solutions, formulas, the one best fit answer, right? The one thing you know. You've probably heard again that women should never go below 1200 calories or 1,500 calories, and these often get thrown around as if they're universal laws of physics, but they're completely arbitrary. Here's the reality. Okay, let's get into numbers.
Philip Pape: 5:52
A sedentary 105 pound woman Okay and I've worked with some clients that are in that range might only burn 1,200 calories per day at rest. That is her total metabolism, not even RMR or BMR. We're talking about her total daily energy expenditure. You add in, you know, even more neat walking movement on top of that. Maybe she pushes it up to 1500. She had some muscle mass, right, she does all the healthy lifestyle things and she's still burning 1500 calories. So for her, at 15 or 1600 calories, even eating 1200 calories is just a very moderate deficit, like 25% deficit. Right, it's small, it's not going to even feel like starvation. I mean, I've worked with these clients before and I've had them on the show before, in fact, where they'll say you know what? This is what my body needs it feels okay. And so if you're 105 pounds and you burn, you know, between 12 and 1600 calories, then eating a thousand calories may be totally reasonable for your deficit.
Philip Pape: 6:51
Now eating 800, even at that level tends to be pushing it for most people. It doesn't mean it's unsafe. It depends on the deficit and how long you go, and the reason I wanted to start with that question for this episode is to suggest that there really is no good answer to that. I would say unsafe is relative to how aggressive your deficit is, how long it is and how it is affecting you right Now. Compare that to. On the other extreme, we have people that are 300 pound plus, who might be burning 3,000 calories at rest. A male, for example, who burns 3000 calories is not uncommon at all. Somebody who lifts weights in fact doesn't have to be 300 pounds, it could be 225, 250 burning that much. So for him, 800 calories, like actually an actual intake of 800, would represent a massive, ridiculous, extreme. Yes, unsafe deficit. It would be like 70, 75%, okay, and that would be extremely difficult to sustain outside of clinical supervision. And having said that, I recently onboarded a client who weighs about 250 and he had done Optivia at 800 calories and told me how miserable that was. And it's not like he died, right Like.
Philip Pape: 8:01
When we say unsafe, we also have to qualify and define what we mean by the word unsafe. To me, unsafe is more about the totality of the context, right Like if we're driving. If you said, is driving 65 miles an hour unsafe? Well, it depends on the road conditions, the weather, your car, the driving experience. 65 miles an hour in a school zone is extremely unsafe, but on the Autobahn you're probably going to get honked at for going too slow, right? So same thing applies to calories. In that the context really matters. In fact, 800 calories is not far from where a lot of people might hit when doing a rapid fat loss phase for two weeks with protein modified fast. Right, and it wouldn't be unsafe in that context. It'd be highly controlled, highly structured, exactly what they're intending to do. That's why I think it's important not to blanket statement anything.
Philip Pape: 8:50
So when we talk about very low calorie diets and defining our terms, there's actually a term VLCD very, very low calories per day, I think. Or very low calorie diets, right, vlcds. And they are actually defined as 800 calories a day or less. But these are not like lifestyle diets. These aren't rapid fat loss phases. They are clinical interventions, typically under medical supervision, for people who have severe obesity or diabetes, and there's actually a lot of robust research on properly supervised, very low carb diets or low calorie diets, not carb Icalorie diets. When you look at those studies, we see rapid weight loss of about three to five pounds a week and a lot of the blood markers improve. Blood sugar, blood pressure, lipid profiles make sense because we know that there's a high correlation with reducing excess body fat.
Philip Pape: 9:43
Notice that what I said in this these are properly supervised, clinical, very low carb, very low calorie diets, have somebody monitoring. They have high quality protein which is gonna preserve your lean mass. They have vitamin and mineral supplementation, regular checkups with the medical provider, and they're temporary no more than, say, 12 to 16 weeks, which to me is actually quite a long time for 800 calories. If you weren't in a medical situation, at most you might do it for two or three weeks and then they transition back to higher calories. So either way, you're recovering afterward, which again doesn't mean it's unsafe. No, for these people it's actually what they need to survive and live a thriving life again and have healthy blood markers so they don't die. That's the opposite of unsafe. Now life again and have healthy blood markers, so they don't die. That's the opposite of unsafe. Now do they have to do it that way? I don't know. That's a whole different conversation.
Philip Pape: 10:30
I think the problem comes when the commercial, highly marketed weight loss programs take a number like that and then they give you the food Optivia, anyone. They give you processed bars and shakes, they send it to your door, they tell you not to exercise and then they send you away for months at a time and like good luck. Well, we know how that ends. That ends with crash and burn and even if you lose the weight, you're going to gain it all back because you don't know how to sustain that right. And I'm sorry to pick on Optivea specifically, but it comes up time and time and time again Cl and time and time again, clients and students every day who I talk to have tried this in the past and I wish I had met them before they tried it. But hey, it's a good learning experience, if nothing else. Right, it puts everyone on a really low, sub-thousand calorie diet using pre-packaged foods. That's gross, I mean, I think that's gross. I don't want to live that way.
Philip Pape: 11:22
You know what I did slim fast a long time ago when I was like 20 for maybe two months, hated it. It was miserable. Every time I knew I was going to have lunch I'm like, what am I doing? I think I actually eventually snuck Chinese food with my slim fast, thinking that well, I'm still having the slim fast. Like, seriously, I think that's what I did because I was so craving more food and obviously, okay, look, there's a lot of problems with this approach. It's not like I'm telling you something that is surprise, but the big one is the one size fits all calorie target, regardless of body size, activity level, metabolic rate. And it ties to this topic because people will say the 1200, the 1500 calories, the less than 2000 calories, whatever is, quote, unquote this or that for everybody. You just can't make statements like that. Again, 120 pounds versus 200 pounds, sedentary person versus active person, somebody lifting weights with lots of muscles, somebody who's who's sedentary, right, big differences. So that's the big one.
Philip Pape: 12:19
The second one is that for the programs that push these things, sometimes the macros are all screwed up or the protein is low and I know there's a whole movement toward you know protein is dangerous or like stop protein maxing or proteins crowding out all this other stuff. Folks, we do not get enough protein on average in this country or in the world in general. Most people are far deficient just getting enough protein. We're not talking about 300 grams a day of protein. We're talking 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of your body weight. So if you're 150 pounds, that's no more than 150 grams of protein. It's not a massive amount of protein. And if you do it as a percentage of your diet, it's also not massive. It's like 15, 20%, right, it's not that high. So if you're on an aggressive deficit, you have to have high protein by default. So as soon as you lose the connection between those two, you're going to have problems.
Philip Pape: 13:08
And then the other thing here is that something like Optivia discourages exercise. I don't understand that and I'm not going to waste my time reading the Optivia and the Manjaro and the Terzepatide or Wegovi and all that, where people are giving these things or maybe they get them themselves without any guidance on lifestyle, and they're not lifting weights and they lose muscle as a result, right, not because of the drugs, but because of the aggressive deficits, the low protein and all of that, and it leads to worse body composition outcomes, which is not what we're trying to do right Now. The programs that give you foods that are prepackaged I mean just that's a whole separate issue as well. You know, being dependent on these, it's really quite the racket, isn't it Like? Just, instead of learning how to structure your own nutrition, just make your own food. Or even if you want to buy prepared food from like a service and choose the foods that meet your goals, that's fine. It's this idea of them sending it to you and locking you into that. So now compare all that to what we talked about on width to weight, which is an evidence-based approach where we calculate your energy needs, we make sure you have enough protein, we emphasize resistance training consistently and, most of all, we use flexibility with your food, with really, really the whole process is got a lot of adaptability and flexibility built in, because it should conform to your constraints and your life, your ability to adhere and maintain beyond just a short-term dieting phase and actually be able to eat for life. And so this is why context matters so much in nutrition and why I love to help people get to that next step of.
Philip Pape: 14:52
Okay, I've listened to the podcast, or I listened to a bunch of physique. You know fitness podcasts and I know the science and I know the general idea here. But how do I do that for myself, right? So that's why I created Physique University. We don't use arbitrary numbers. We actually help you determine your actual needs based on your body size, activity level, biofeedback. We then work backward to create the plan that has the right aggressiveness for you.
Philip Pape: 15:18
So, again, it's not just here are my calories and macros. It's what is your goal? Is your goal moderate fat loss or body recomposition? Is it a bit more aggressive? Are you actually trying to build muscle? And then, what is the right lever? And then, beyond that, should you be eating the same calories every day or should you cycle? Should you have more on the weekends, right? All that's what I'm talking about when it comes to making it fit your life, so that the numbers are the same, but the way that it's structured might vary drastically, right? So it's not just. Here's a template. So, anyway, if you're looking for something like that, check out Physique U, use the special link in the show notes. I'm going to keep mentioning this because that link is going to give you a special bonus. You're going to get a free nutrition plan from me and that's going to unlock an accelerator that'll help you get even faster to your goal. Not quick fix, fast, but efficiently fast to your goal to lose fat, to build muscle, for your situation.
Philip Pape: 16:14
So let's address the elephant in the room metabolic adaptation. Right, you've heard me talk about this, or, if you're new to the show, I want to contrast metabolic adaptation with terms like metabolic damage or starvation mode that are used by people to claim that either aggressive deficits are harmful and permanently so, or that you are permanently harmed because of something you did in the past, and I'm sorry, but we're going to have to fix that, and here's my special protocol to do it. The truth is more nuanced and also more empowering, I would say, in that metabolic adaptation look at the word adapt. Adapt is something that is flexible, right, it can adapt one way and then it could adapt back. It's a real thing. It's a real phenomenon where, when you eat less, your metabolic rate decreases beyond what you'd expect, just from losing weight. So if you're losing weight, if you're in a deficit, the fact that you weigh less is going to burn fewer calories, yes, but beyond that, your metabolism goes down due to what's called metabolic adaptation. It's kind of a protective mechanism. It's an efficiency mechanism.
Philip Pape: 17:23
We've talked about the biggest loser study and I know there's a big Netflix documentary about it I haven't seen it yet but they had massive metabolic adaptation. It persisted years later and it's recoverable, but it's recoverable only on a similar timeline as it was adapted in general right. And in that study they had extreme deficits combined with excessive cardio, combined with inadequate protein. They had muscle loss and they had metabolic adaptation. So part of their metabolic decline became permanent, not because of adaptation, but because of things like muscle loss that they're going to have to build back.
Philip Pape: 17:58
When we talk about just run of the mill metabolic adaptation, this is driven by a few different things. Now, if you're losing lean mass, to me that is not a source of metabolic adaptation. That is a source of burning fewer calories due to having less muscle. That's different. But the hormonal changes that come in from metabolic adaptation, like a decrease in thyroid and reproductive hormones, those are real and they cause you to burn fewer calories and that's normal.
Philip Pape: 18:27
And the more aggressive you go, the more that's gonna happen, to the point where you're also getting the lean mass loss. You're getting the hunger that gets ramped up. You're getting the fancy terms like hyperphagia, which is just massive hunger, but if you're in the right window, you're gonna have some metabolic adaptation. But you're going to have some metabolic adaptation, but you're also going to preserve your muscle by eating protein, by training, and the adaptation is much less severe and more, I'll say, reversible in a short period. That's the way I'm going to put it. It's always reversible. It depends on how aggressively you did the diet.
Philip Pape: 18:58
And again, this connects to this topic of like 800 calories or whatever. So I guess the silver lining of that is that an aggressive deficit, in some ways it's reversible. And because the time is short, the reversibility is also short. But if you go aggressive for a long time, then that's where the problem comes in. You're not gonna permanently damage your metabolism, which is the thing that could sensationalize. Okay, I hope all that made sense. So I like to think like an engineer.
Philip Pape: 19:28
Right, every diet involves trade-offs between three main factors the speed of your results, the sustainability of the process and, I'll say, preserving your metabolism, that's. I'm not talking about the cost schedule, quality triangle, the iron triangle, fat loss that's a different thing that I talked about in another episode. This is more of a the three things that are going to get impacted the most when you do a diet and how you can optimize. So you can optimize for speed and you can go very aggressive with a deficit, but you're going to sacrifice sustainability and that's where you have to keep the time short. Right, you're going to increase the risk of muscle loss. If you don't, you're going to increase the risk of severe metabolic adaptation. So that's one thing. You could also optimize for how sustainable it is, how much you can adhere to it, by making it more conservative, but of course, your progress is going to be slow. And then you can optimize for preserving your metabolism by going at a reasonable level of aggressiveness, but also having diet breaks and refeeds, and that's going to extend your timeline. Extend your timeline. You're not actually on the net increasing your metabolism, you're just taking breaks along the way and it's going to take longer, but it's going to feel more sustainable while still being somewhat aggressive, if that makes sense.
Philip Pape: 20:44
So the key here is to understand these trade-offs and then to choose intentionally, consciously, not accidentally, falling into usually what's an extreme approach because someone said you know these are the amount of calories you should or shouldn't go above or below. So let's talk about biofeedback for a second, because that's another thing I had in my notes here. That is extremely helpful as a guide. All right, we fixate a lot on numbers and, when it comes down to it, numbers like your expenditure, like how many calories you have to hit, like your macros, are just starting to scratch the surface, right? What's really below all of that is what's in your body. It's your biofeedback, it's the constant information that you get about whether your approach is actually working or you're pushing too hard.
Philip Pape: 21:33
Now, it's hard for many people to read those signals when they first do this, because they're so screwed up, they're so misaligned and miscalibrated from years of doing this the wrong way, and that's okay. When you start to do things intentionally, you also start to regulate your biofeedback signals. Your energy levels, your sleep quality, your strength in the gym, your recovery, your hunger, your mood all of that starts to get more regulated and then therefore more trustworthy. So it's kind of a chicken and egg, right. So that's why it helps to not be pushing anything too hard initially, to not be in a diet and to let things regulate while you're improving your sustainability part of the equation and improving your food quality and things like that, and then you can challenge yourself. And then, once you challenge yourself with something like a diet, the goal is not to feel miserable. Right, we don't want to be miserable, and so the warning signals will be there in addition to the numbers.
Philip Pape: 22:29
The numbers are one thing, but if I say, go and eat 800 calories and you do it and you actually feel great during the process, who am I to tell you that that's unsafe or too low? But if I tell you to eat 1500 calories for a diet and you're you know you normally burn 3000 calories chances are you're going to get fatigued from that pretty quickly. You're going to have trouble sleeping, you're going to have potentially a loss in your strength and muscle. You might you might be in a bad mood, you might get hangry or actually lose hunger, you might lose hair. I mean I don't know. There's going to be a lot that happens in women. There's a lot of hormonal impacts, right with not only thyroid but, you know, menstrual cycle. I mean everything.
Philip Pape: 23:06
So when you get that kind of biofeedback, that indicates you're pushing beyond what your body can handle sustainably, and that's where it gets into the word potentially unsafe. You know again, what does safe mean? That's questionable. Now, the beauty of biofeedback is it is completely personalized to you, by definition. Right, the more petite woman eating 1200 calories, she might have excellent biofeedback, being in this moderate deficit, and the weight just comes off, no problem done with, the diet moves out. But then you got that bigger man, let's say the 200 pound man. He's eating 1800 calories. My show warning size For me. My biofeedback can fluctuate, and so that's another, more advanced way to handle those signals, in that you can push sometimes and pull back other times. So, regardless of your calorie target, two factors are critical that we've mentioned already no-transcript, very low calories.
Philip Pape: 24:23
Maintaining those priorities of training and protein is going to dramatically improve your results and reduce the negative consequences that come from aggressive dieting. All right. So I had some other things. I had some other things to talk about it, but I think we're going long winded here.
Philip Pape: 24:39
My, my message to you if you're considering a very aggressive approach, obviously if you have underlying health conditions, if you're taking medication, something like that, working with a health provider, right, that's outside my scope, that's medical. If you're considering it for something like rapid fat loss and I get people come to me all the time. Hey, I want to follow your rapid fat loss protocol and I'll say, okay, are you training? Are you tracking? Are you eating enough protein? Do you have a good body image? Do you have a good relationship with food? If any of these answers are no, sorry, don't do rapid fat loss, because that's just recipe for disaster, you know, is your stress high? Is your right sleep bad? All that stuff has to be dialed in right. So if you're considering a very aggressive approach, it is perfectly safe, if it's right for you, if it's controlled and structured and if your biofeedback is solid for the duration of that deficit.
Philip Pape: 25:29
So I want to leave you with what I consider the most important insight from today, and that is that the fitness industry, they've conditioned us to think in absolutes, and maybe conditions not the right word, I mean, I think it is, but it could just be that they have, you know, blasted the message that there are dichotomies, that there are false dichotomies. I should say, you know, safe versus unsafe, you see it all the time Fear mongering all the time, good versus bad, right versus wrong. But your body doesn't operate that way. Right, it has context, it has constraints. So it's not whether X number of calories is inherently safe or unsafe. It's whether a specific target makes sense for your unique combination of all the things your body size, your activity, your goals, your life circumstances.
Philip Pape: 26:13
So, instead of asking what should everyone do which is, by the way, a very common question to podcasters is what? What is the answer to this? What should I do here, without the context? It's what makes sense for me right now. Okay, what makes sense for me right now? In fact, I was just thinking in our, our Facebook group, which you can join for free anytime, which, in which Facebook group, we actually have an Ask Philip thread that I do once a month, and the whole point of that thread is for you to ask the question what makes sense for me right now, right.
Philip Pape: 26:42
And then you stop being a victim of arbitrary rules Yep, I said it trigger word victim and you start being the intelligent I was going to say designer, but isn't that referred to a creationism and stuff, the engineer of your own approach, right? And this is the mind-blowing shift in your brain that I think separates people who actually get this thing, that make it last, that sustain those results that they're walking around one year, five years, 10 years from now, having lost the fat, having improved their body composition and they're living an enjoyable life from those who bounce and yo-yo between the extreme approaches, hoping that the next solution is going to work for them. So the next time you hear someone online say that a specific calorie number is universally safe or unsafe, number one, unfollow them. And then number two, you'll know that you're missing the bigger picture, or that they're missing the bigger picture, I should say, because of everything we talked about today. Right, and you know better. You know better. So, instead of searching for the magic number, focus on developing skills, skills the skills to understand your energy needs, your biofeedback structure, your nutrition for your goals. Make informed trade-offs based on what matters most to you right now, which only you know, only you know, and if you need to share it with someone else to get some accountability and some help, that's what we're here for. That is how you make it sustainable. That is how you achieve your goals.
Philip Pape: 28:04
And look, if you want to connect with others who understand this. You don't want to join Physique University yet. You're not ready to take the plunge there and accelerate your results to that level. You can still join our free Facebook community. I that level, you can still join our free Facebook community. I already mentioned it once. You can search for it on Facebook or click the link in the show notes, and that is where we share experiences, we ask questions, we support each other without judgment, without oversimplified advice that you're going to find everywhere else. All right, until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember your physique is built through evidence, not arbitrary rules. This is Philip Pape, and you've been listening to Wits and Weights. Talk to you next time.
