Is My Metabolism Damaged From Dieting? (What Your Hunger Is Really Telling You) | Ep 487

Has years of dieting on and off damaged your metabolism? It that why fat loss feels so hard now?

This is one of the most common fears I hear, and the short answer is almost certainly... no. So what is going on?

Most of what feels like a broken metabolism is one of two things: either the normal discomfort of a deficit or the way your appetite pushes back as you lose fat, preventing a consistent deficit (where you feel like you're dieting but can never lose weight).

If you look at weight loss studies, those reporting the most hunger and the strongest cravings tend to lose the least, implying that too much hunger isn't by definition "necessary" for a successful deficit.

Learn about metabolic adaptation in a moderate diet, the "four-week wall" when most people quit a fat loss phase, and the difference between the discomfort you should "ride out" and red flags where you should take a break or change something about the diet (like the speed/aggressiveness).

The people who finish are the ones who lose the fat!

Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, body recomposition, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Is your metabolism damaged from years of dieting?
1:46 - The satiety diet question
4:10 - Why relaxing your deficit turns into serial quitting
8:31 - Why more hunger predicts less fat loss
12:24 - What metabolic adaptation means in a moderate deficit
19:29 - Hunger and discomfort you ride out vs. true red flags
23:27 - Why a slower cut is what gets you to the finish
25:33 - A straight answer on fat loss for women over 40
28:12 - Bonus: 30-second self-check for the toughest days in a deficit

• Transcript

  Is your metabolism damaged from years of dieting?

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've dieted on and off for years and you're wondering, has all that restriction damaged my metabolism? Is that why fat loss feels so hard? This episode is for you. The short answer is no. It's almost certainly not damaged, and I'll show you the research behind that. But there is something real going on, and it's often about hunger and how you read the signs of your deficit. Some of what you're feeling is what it's supposed to feel like. But oftentimes people quit right when that calorie deficit is starting to pay off or about to. Some of it is a warning sign that maybe you shouldn't push through. So today I'm going to show you the difference between those, why your metabolism is more resilient than you've been led to believe, and whether you should push through or stop. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pate. And a few weeks back, a couple episodes ago really, I made the case for the satiety diet. The idea that you can lose fat without fighting hunger the entire way through. And I still definitely stand by that. You should build your diet so it's as comfortable as possible, that it gives you as much satisfaction as possible, because that comfort, at least relative terms, to say a crash diet or a severe deficit where you are not thinking about satiety is what keeps you in the game. It's what leads to what we call adherence, sticking to that deficit so you can make it through successfully, especially when it's going to go on for a longer time because you have a lot of fat to lose. But then I got a question after that episode that drives today's episode. And it's something like, okay, Philip, I built a satiety diet.

  The satiety diet question

  Philip Pape 1:46

  I'm eating the protein and the fiber and the volume, and I'm still hungry sometimes. I still have days where my energy is lower. Is my metabolism just broken or adapted or downregulated from all the years that I spent under eating? And that question, the is my metabolism damaged from dieting, is probably one of the most common questions even today. Even though we've addressed it on this show quite a bit, I don't want to take for granted that we hear that message that you need to fix your metabolism. So we're gonna answer that head on. The short version is that your metabolism is far, far more resilient than social media might lead you to believe, especially when they're trying to sell you a program or a diet. What feels like a broken metabolism is usually two different things. It's either it's the normal discomfort from a deficit, but it's also the way that your appetite and your body pushes back when you lose fat and when you're in a deficit. Now, this is independent of other aspects of metabolism from, for example, muscle loss over the years and things like that. We're gonna set that aside for now and just talk about the adaptation piece and the, you know, is your metabolism damage piece? But if you can kind of learn to make sense of this, what's normal, what's not normal, should I finish my cut? Should I push through? Or maybe are these signs things telling me I need to slow it down or maybe take a diet break? That's what I'm trying to help you with because I think that's where we can make the right decisions so that we are successful with our fat loss and can take what I often call the fastest path, which isn't always the quickest path, if you know what I mean. Sometimes you have to take breaks and sometimes you have to slow it down so that you can continue and then be successful. This matters a lot if you've been dieting for many years, like many of us have. Uh, I think the statistic is the average woman diets over a hundred times in her lifetime. And you've probably been told, hey, if diet feels too hard, something is wrong with you or wrong with your metabolism, or you know, there should be an easier way to do it. We're gonna take that apart today. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a 30-second self-check. These are three questions you could ask yourself on any given day within a cut, okay, a fat loss phase, to know whether to keep going or to back off. So I love these little kind of self-checks so that you can course correct if needed. All right, here's what we're covering today.

  Why relaxing your deficit turns into serial quitting

  Philip Pape 4:10

  First, why the advice to just fix it when it feels bad backfires and makes people what I'll call serial diet quitters. And unfortunately, the message on social media is often, you know, fat loss can be effortless. I'm gonna show you how by my program. We're gonna talk about what the research actually says about whether your metabolism is damaged, about hunger during a diet. And, you know, I'll warn you now, the hunger part is maybe not what you would expect. So we're gonna give you a little tease on that. And then the part that you are probably listening to this podcast for is how to tell the manageable discomfort apart from the real warning signs and what should you do for each one. We're gonna get practical. So let's start with where most people are right now. You let's say you start a fat loss phase and the first couple of weeks feel all right. Maybe even feel great because you're motivated. The scale maybe starts to move because of especially the water weight that drops in that first week. You see these stories a lot of time, like, I went on keto, I went on carnival, I started fasting and I lost all this weight in the first week or two. And you can see this on any diet, really. And then around week three, four, five, let's say, this is when things start to get a little bit hairy, where you're a little bit hungrier between meals, your workouts start to feel maybe a little more sluggish, maybe you're a little bit more irritable, maybe you're shorter with your kids, and then the doubt creeps into your brain, something's wrong, this isn't working, the diet's broken, you know, especially when you don't see the scale move, you know that voice that I'm talking about in your head, right? You know what I'm saying when the scale doesn't move, especially. So what do you do? Well, you fix it. You add some food back in and say, okay, I'm listening to my body, that's one approach, or you cut harder, that's another approach. Sometimes either of those approaches actually can work, right? Cutting, cutting calories further and or eating more or eating more food volume. But for a lot of people, what happens is they they relax the deficit every time that it starts to feel like a deficit. And if a deficit never really feels like a deficit, I guess the way I'm gonna put it, you're probably not in one. Okay. And so then you never finish the cut. Does this sound familiar where it starts to get a little bit hard, or you succumb to maybe emotional eating or binges, or you have all these things come up in your life, and all of a sudden the average calories end up drifting back to where you're not really in a cut. And you're like, well, my numbers say that I'm in a cut, and this feels great. Like, like I've been told it doesn't have to feel that bad if it's a moderate deficit, right? Even Phillips talked about that. If I have satiety, uh enough satiety in the diet, but then I'm not losing weight. So what is happening, right? And so this is what I want to get you away from. I want you to realize where the rubber hits the road and you have to kind of stick with it and ride things through rather than go in these waves and like quickly react to hunger or conclude that fat loss just doesn't work or your metabolism's damaged or whatever. Does that make sense? So I think the trap is that if it feels bad, you need to change something. I think that is correct if it's a high level of negative biofeedback, but not necessarily if it's just a little bit of something like hunger. And so we want to talk about the difference today. I don't want you to treat every uncomfortable feeling as a red flag when many of them are just a little bit of a warning or a little bit of a signal that maybe things are working and heading the direction you want. Does that make sense? And many people listening, dear, many of you listening have gone through many diets in the past and you can't trust your body and you feel like you can't trust your hunger signals. But that's because they were crashed diets or you were cutting carbs or something like that. If we take a reasonable approach to this, that's under control, under control and with intention, you can then distinguish the difference between these. Now, on the other extreme, you have the message that, hey, fat loss, you know, losing weight requires a little bit of suffering. You have to push through, you have to have discipline, and that's garbage too. I mean, that doesn't comport with the evidence or what actually works. It just makes pick makes people miserable, it makes them quit. And so we kind of have two sides of the extreme, right? Either that side or, you know, it shouldn't feel bad at all, it should be easy, you need to optimize your diet. And I'm gonna show you how to do that if you buy my program, right? So that's why I made the satiety episode.

  Why more hunger predicts less fat loss

  Philip Pape 8:31

  But here's the part where I think we should talk about hunger and what the research says, because this is a very important mechanism. And it surprised me a little bit as I reviewed the research, because I've heard for many years, and you probably have as well on podcasts, that hunger is the signal that fat loss is happening. I've said that before, and I still say it to clients: I'm like, well, if you're having a little bit of hunger, you can expect that. It's just not gonna be, we don't want it to be too high, and we also don't expect zero hunger either. Putting GLP ones aside, because that changes the whole game. And that the more you white knuckle it, the more it's working because, you know, you have to have some hunger. Now, whether you are talking white knuckling or just a little bit of hunger, you know, I've always said, okay, you have to have some. What the research says is that people who report the most hunger and the strongest cravings tend to lose the least amount of weight. There's a study called Beef Wise. It's six months of behavioral weight loss. And those who came in hungrier and more prone to deprivation lost less weight. People who reported more satisfaction with their diet lost more weight. Okay, so this kind of aligns with the satiety episode that I did not long ago. There's a big study called Pounds Lost. And the the the variable that predicted who actually hit the 5% weight loss target was not hunger, it was dietary restraint. Not restriction, but restraint, meaning the skill of controlling what you eat, right? Which is which is what we try to do all the time when we talk about on the show, like knowing what you want to eat, how much you want to eat, tracking it, et cetera, and being in control of that meal planning, meal prep, and all of that. There's also data we have that shows that on times or weeks where people rate their hunger highest, their adherence that same week tends to be lowest. So if you put all that together, hunger isn't necessarily the cost or the price of the progress you want to make to get those fat loss results. It's often the thing that makes people stop their fat loss, which you would say, okay, well, then all those people saying you should go through a fat loss phase without feeling hungered, it should be easy. Maybe aren't they then on the right track? Well, stick with me. So your body fights back when you're losing fat. And one of the ways it fights back is by cranking up your hunger. And people who feel that hunger the most are the ones that are likely most likely to stop their fat loss, to bail on it, right? So if the idea of just feeling hungry all the time means your fat loss is working, it's gonna lead you to chase getting to that point of feeling that hunger. However, the evidence shows us that too much of that causes you to stop your diet and get out. So it sounds like a catch-22. What do we do? Well, the goal is to feel the least hunger you can, even though you still have hunger while still being in a deficit. And that's the fine balance that we're trying to find. Now, this is important, so I don't get accused of contradicting myself. That doesn't mean that a could, a good cut feels like nothing. You cannot reliably lose fat with zero change in appetite. Some hunger is simply what you're gonna feel from a negative energy balance because your body is trying to defend that settling point. It used to be called a set point. Now we use the term settling point. It's trying to defend that weight, get back to homeostasis because it's getting the sense that you were depriving it of energy. It's like, what is going on? We need you to eat more to make up for this. So the point is that you shouldn't feel anything, it's that more discomfort doesn't correlate with more progress necessarily. And in fact, a lot of discomfort is more of a red flag that you're gonna end up quitting your diet. So that is the difference we're talking about today. I hope I didn't take too long to get to that setup. That's where my thought

  What metabolic adaptation means in a moderate deficit

  Philip Pape 12:24

  is going. So is your metabolism actually damaged? I want to answer this question. If you've been dieting for many years, especially, for almost everyone listening, the answer is no. I don't care how many diets you've done, how extreme or restrictive they were. And I want to go through why so that you stop blaming a broken metabolism or listening to anyone who suggests that. And then we can see what's actually fixable and in your in your control. So people assume that after enough diets, their metabolism has adapted almost not permanently. Maybe they know that it's not permanently, but they think it's, you know, look at the big, biggest loser science and how long it took to recover, and they're like, well, my metabolism is tanked. I'm also older, I've done so many diets. That is why I can't lose fat, and that is why the scale is stuck. And there is a phenomenon under this, of course, it's called metabolic adaptation. Metabolic adaptation is where your body burns a bit less than predicted when you lose weight, both because of the weight loss, but also because of the lack of energy while you're in the deficit. Now, in a moderate deficit, okay, a moderate diet where you're in, let's say, less than a 500-calorie deficit a day, the adaptation is something like 40 to 90 calories a day. It's not this catastrophic amount. We've seen that in the literature. Of course, it varies from person to person, also varies of how based on how long you've been at the diet. But these dramatic numbers you've heard, like the biggest loser study, where the metabolism dropped hundreds of calories below baseline, that was extreme starvation level dieting plus hours and hours of daily exercise. Okay. And that is not most people, even if you've had trouble dieting, even if you're doing quote unquote too much cardio or whatever, you're nowhere near to the level they were doing it on biggest loser, where they had to be pushed to that extreme. So that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about more of a moderate cut, where when it gets hard around week four of the cut, which is typically, you know, a month in, your metabolism, it's not like it's breaking, or you're all of a sudden gonna plateau permanently and like that's it. We've seen in studies like the Kevin Hall studies at NIH that even unrealistically large amounts of metabolic adaptation don't really change when your weight plateaus. What changes is the lack of adherence that compounds, that adds up over time. And that's good news. It simply means most people are not in the deficit they think they are. And in their brain, they think they are. So it seems like your metabolism is broken. That's pretty cool. And I I've seen this in my own data where it's very, very hard sometimes to trust things unless you are tracking, right? Unless you know for sure you've had those taste-licks bites, those extra calories, you've had things that are more calorie dense than you thought, et cetera. And it all does add up. Now, damaged isn't the same as unchanged. Okay, change happens all the time. Transitions are happening all the time in your body. If your body has lost weight, then you are running on fewer calories than you used to be from being smaller, and because of that adaptation we talked about. And that's why maintenance calories take fewer, fewer calories than people would expect when you've lost weight. But that's just normal, right? That's just normal. There's also that this this wall that people hit around four to six. The question is, is this a real wall of weight loss, right? When you you you know, you lose weight pretty quickly in those first couple of weeks, maybe it starts to slow down weeks three, four, and then all of a sudden it seems to stall. Well, there, you know, there's nothing special that happens day 30 of a cut, but there are a few things happening. There's the motivation that was there at the beginning is starting to wear off. You know, the whole novelty of the diet is starting to wear off. The accumulated hunger from being in a deficit starts to add up. The initial fluid weight loss that occurred might have given you an artificial feeling that it was faster than it was. So all of these things added together feels like you hit a wall. And it shows up for the vast majority of people who are in a diet. And it's often right when people quit, or pretty soon after that, they quit the diet. That's where I see the frustration. That's where I see in our program eat more lift heavy. People start to vent in the comments or the community. And that's exactly where we can kind of talk them off a ledge by saying, Well, let's look at your data. Let's look at your data, understand what's going on. And this is probably the moment at which you just want to continue doing what you're doing because things are about to take a turn for the better. And here's the other thing appetite doesn't just reset overnight. There's research that follows people after significant weight loss that shows that their hunger hormones still shifted toward hunger even a year later. So being in a reduced state comes with elevated appetite and then it lingers, which I would say is just more reason to treat manageable hunger as something you would expect and kind of ride it out rather than try to fix it in a moment of panic. And then you might make things worse because then you might still have hunger and you're eating more food. Beyond that, if that makes sense. So, what we've established so far, just stay with me here, is some discomfort is normal and unavoidable. But more discomfort is not better, and too much discomfort is a red flag that you're probably not long for this diet anymore. But your metabolism is mostly fine. And the hard part of a diet often occurs right around when most people give up. So, now what do you do with all that? All right, I'm gonna share the fix in a moment, but if you're looking for a more accelerated way to get there, what we're gonna talk about with support, with personalization for you, if you want someone in your corner to look at the numbers and tell you, hey, what I'm feeling is normal, or am I cutting too hard, or what is the data telling me when my weight stalls? That is a huge part of what we do inside Eat More Lift Heavy. You can learn about it at eatmoreftheavy.com. This is the 26-week coached program that we run, real human coaches. And honestly, the single thing people tell us that made the most difference wasn't a, you know, tweak to their macros or something like that, something very tactical. It was having someone in their corner during the hardest parts of these phases. Okay, the four or five weeks into the diet doubts that creep in where we could say, you know what, this is normal, just hold the line. Or, you know what, your data is telling us maybe you do need a diet break. Maybe you do need to change these variables over here. And that is a very hard call to make for ourselves when we're hungry, when we're starting to second guess everything, or when you haven't done this before and you haven't built the confidence yet. So if that is where you are, if you're trying to lose, let's say, eight to 15 pounds of fat and you want a very structured, supportive way to do that, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. Just take a look. All the information is there, the pricing is there, it's completely transparent. We've built this for especially people over 40 who are just tired of starting over and over again, who want to sustain their results and will help you get there. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com.

  Hunger and discomfort you ride out vs. true red flags

  Philip Pape 19:29

  All right, so the whole game behind this is learning to sort what you're feeling into the right bucket so that you can act on data versus feelings versus whatever. And the the first bucket is I'll call manageable discomfort. It's what you should expect, but maybe you didn't know you should expect it. And that's where you generally just ride it out. The other bucket is unmanageable struggles, right? The struggle bus, where something has to be adjusted in your protocol. And it may feel the same. And everybody's feelings are different for like, you know, when you go to the doctor and they're like, tell me your pain on a scale of one to 10. I hate that question because I don't know, what is my six compared to your six? How is that objective? So it's kind of the same thing, all right? That's why I think this is more difficult than people make it out to be. And I wanted to do a whole episode on it. So let's look at both buckets. The first bucket, manageable discomfort. What does that look like? Well, you're hungry between meals, but you can get to the next meal without it really affecting you that much. Doesn't ruin your life, doesn't make you, you know, run for the fridge. It's just this feeling, right? This feeling of a little bit of a gap, a little bit of emptiness, a little maybe, maybe some rumbles. And then along with this, your other biofeedback are things like your workouts may feel a little more flat than they used to be, but your strength is still there. Maybe you are hitting more reps still, right? Maybe you're mentally a bit more irritable, but it's kind of a blip. It's not like it takes over. It doesn't, you don't obsess about it. Your sleep is still pretty solid. And then the real key to this, to tell you that it's manageable, is that it is, I'll say stable or slowly getting more familiar to you, like you adapt to it, is my point. Like you kind of getting used to it and it's stable rather than getting worse or worse. That I honestly is the biggest indicator is okay, you've had a little bit of hunger, but a lot of people, everybody's gonna experience that. The question is, it does it kind of even out and stayed roughly in that zone, which can be indicated if you're trying if you're saying measuring your hunger on a scale of one to 10, and you go from a 10 to a nine to an eight to a seven, and it kind of hovers around six or seven and doesn't keep going down. For example, now for you, a six might be terrible. I don't know. I'm going back to my earlier comment about the one to ten. But your body, when it's in a calorie deficit, is going to give you a little bit of hunger. It's stable. You can ride it out. You expected it, you looked forward, not look forward, but you expect that to happen. Okay. The other, the struggle bus piece, the unknown. Manageable struggle is a completely different beast. Okay, that's something that you don't want to push through because you're going to make matters worse. And honestly, a lot of you have been in this situation. And hunger that is relentless, that's ravishing, that keeps driving you to binge eat, where you are not choosing to eat more, you're just getting overpowered emotionally. Food noise, along with a lack of performance in multiple areas of your physiology, like your strength is dropping over and over. Your sleep is getting worse. Your mood is maybe getting worse and affecting your life. You know, for the women listening, this could even affect your period, which that would definitely be red flag potentially. Feeling cold all the time. I mean, when I'm in a big deficit, I actually start to feel cold. And usually it's if it's a big deficit, I'm keeping it really short as well. I don't like that feeling of just feeling weak and cold, right? Dizzy, uh depleted. Any of that is potentially a red flag. And the answer here is hey, the deficit's probably too aggressive for you, or you've done it for too long, and you just have to back it off. Now, there's a lot of ways to do that. You can slow the rate down, you can take breaks, you can use refeeds, you can go on and off and do intermittent dieting. Like there's a lot, not fasting, intermittent dieting, right? You go into the diet or out of the diet across days or weeks. Okay? So that's kind of like your instrument panel giving you the dashboard warning of what's happening. Now, how do we be pro how do how are we proactive about this?

  Why a slower cut is what gets you to the finish

  Philip Pape 23:27

  So you don't even have to overthink any of this stuff. Well, it's annoyingly simple, let me tell you. That's this podcast is all about giving you the simple fix. It's to run a smaller deficit than your brain wants you to. Okay. A lot of us pick a deficit based on how fast you want the result. And then you're like, oh, but it feels hard. If we instead aim for something like at most a half a percent to three quarters of a percent of your body weight a week, for a lot of you, that's going to be slower than you want. Some of you, that's right in the realm, and you're probably good. And for some of you who are smaller with lower metabolisms, that might be too aggressive. So again, it's highly individualistic, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna shoot around that 0.5% of your body weight a week. And I know that's not a sexy answer, but the slower deficit is gonna produce way less of that struggle bus discomfort, or it shouldn't produce it at all for the most part, which means you're far more likely to keep going and actually make it through. And what we know from the research is that people who finish are the ones who lose the fat. Sounds obvious, but if you don't actually finish your diet, you're not gonna get the result of the diet. There's even good data in post-menopausal women, specifically, that the more aggressive cut, it's not, it's not just that it feels worse, but it does potentially cause muscle loss and bone loss. I don't want to overpitch that, but there are there is evidence on that. And we do know that going too aggressive does risk muscle loss, which is not something we want. Of course, I'm not talking about that level of aggressiveness today. I'm really talking about when you're just past the line versus coming under that line and finding out where that line is, right? Now, if you're keeping protein up high enough, somewhere around 0.7 to one grams per pound of body weight, if you continue to lift, those are the important things for holding on to muscle while you lose the fat. They also happen to blunt hunger. Back in January of 2026, we did a whole hunger series on this podcast. Go find those. And at least one or two had to do with the link between training, lifting weights, muscle, and hunger.

  A straight answer on fat loss for women over 40

  Philip Pape 25:33

  And I do want to make one final comment about the women who are listening who are in their 40s or 50s, peri-postmenopause. I am definitely not gonna tell you that menopause makes this hopeless or ridiculously difficult, or your body is uniquely broken. There is research comparing how peri and postmenopausal women respond to a diet versus younger women, but it's very thin, it's almost non-existent. That's one of the problems we have, is we don't have very much data in your specific population, especially not head-to-head trials. But the one direct comparison I could find showed no difference in how much fat they lost or how well they stuck to it. Because if you can get into the deficit, you can lose the fat. The other things that are going on are things like your body composition shifts due to a lack of lifting weights, for example, due to a loss of muscle mass. And if you are in our audience or you're working with us, we get you lifting weights. And so that solves a big percentage of all of these potential issues or even symptoms that you have. I shouldn't say all the symptoms, but many of the symptoms you have during this period once you start lifting weights. But if you have rough symptoms, you should be talking to your doctor or therapist or hormone specialist or whatever about all the options. You should just always be looking at all the options. And I'm not going to pretend there's like a menopause-specific diet hack because there is none. There is none. But what I am saying is simple. You should expect some discomfort during a deficit, but learn to read it. Ride it out if it's manageable, respect the warning signs and the red flags, and run the slowest cut that you can stand. And there's many reasons you can or can't stand a slow cut. I know you want to lose X number of pounds, so you want to do it a certain amount of time, but you're not going to get there if you go too fast, is my point. If you do that, if you run the slowest cut you can manage and stand, then you're going to finish it. And finishing is the whole thing here. All right, before we wrap up, I promise you that 30-second self-check to tell whether you should stay in the cut or not. That's coming up in just a second. But if this episode appealed to you, if it taught you something, if you think someone else would benefit, please just share the episode with them. Text it to them, say, hey, I think I'm gonna like this. It's pretty cool. And there's other episodes around this. And if as an alternative, if you'd rather yourself go back and listen to another episode related to this one, I would go listen to the satiety diet episode. Just look for satiety diet in your feed and make sure to follow the show so you can get the whole feed. That one is about building a diet that is comfortable in the first place. So that combined with a moderate deficit is really what it's all

  Bonus: 30-second self-check for the toughest days in a deficit

  Philip Pape 28:12

  about. All right, here's a 30-second check that you can run. Anytime you have a hard, difficult day during a fat loss phase. The first one is my strength holding? Like, are my numbers in the gym kind of holding steady? I mean, they could be going up. That's even better. But things aren't dropping. I'm not feeling tanked in the gym, really tired, really sore, really weak, or even skipping gym sessions. Okay, that's the first one. If the if the numbers are steady or growing, you're fine. You're probably fine. You haven't been hit by any big energy crash or reds or low energy availability or anything like that. If they're dropping or have any of these other symptoms I just mentioned, that's a flag, a red flag that, you know, maybe you need to take a break. Number two, can I get to my next meal? And what I mean by that is okay, not am I a little bit hungry? Everybody's gonna be a little bit hungry. That's totally allowable. The question is, is the hunger in control of you or are you in control of the hunger? If you're losing that fight, especially on a regular basis, if you're binging, that is a big flag. That is a big flag. We don't want to be doing that. And number three is how is your sleep and mood? I'll say across the week. So, like as a trend, not just today, you know, you can have a bad hour, a bad day. I know I've had stressful days and totally changes my mood. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like an entire week where you're just not getting good sleep or your mood is just in the gutter, that's a red flag. Now, if you have zero red flags from those three questions and you're feeling a little bit of hunger or a little something, that's probably just the cut working and you can ride it out. If you have even one or more of these flags, even just one, I would suggest you probably need to back off on the deficit, at least to allow those things to resolve. Strength, hunger, sleep, mood, very important signals. You don't need a coach to do that check. You can do it yourself, and it's very quick. So I hope that's helpful. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the goal is never to feel nothing, it's to feel just enough hunger and I'll say discomfort to know that it's working and know the difference when it's not. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.