Metabolism 101 (The Science Behind Fat Loss and Muscle Building) | Ep 421
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Why do some people eat more and stay lean while others diet nonstop and still struggle? Is your metabolism actually slow, or have you trained it to fight you?
I dive into the real science of metabolism, body recomp, and why most weight loss strategies fail long-term. The focus shifts away from eating less and toward building a body that can lose fat, build muscle, and handle more food without constant plateaus. I explain why chronic dieting backfires, how strength training reshapes metabolic behavior, and why metabolism is adaptive, not fixed.
I cover the four components of metabolism, why NEAT quietly drives fat loss, and why muscle is the biggest long-term lever for fat loss, muscle building, and strength training over 40. You’ll also hear about a zero-time habit that can add up to 9,000 calories of monthly burn without changing your schedule.
If you want evidence-based nutrition that actually works, this is where it starts.
Today, you’ll learn all about:
0:00 – Why metabolism isn’t genetics
3:02 – What metabolism really is
7:20 – The four components explained
11:55 – Why NEAT drives fat loss
18:34 – How muscle changes metabolism
24:19 – Why dieting backfires long term
28:12 – Recover before cutting
32:13 – Build metabolic capacity
39:03 – The zero-time calorie burn habit
Episodes mentioned:
Why Building Muscle Beats Weight Loss for Body Recomp | Ep 418
The Body Recomposition Blueprint (Recomp to Build Muscle and Lose Fat at the Same Time) | Ep 166
Most people think of metabolism as a fixed number from a calculator, a mysterious score that decides whether fat loss will be easy or brutal. The truth is far more useful: metabolism is dynamic energy allocation under constraints. Your body constantly distributes incoming energy across survival, movement, digestion, and adaptation, adjusting on the fly to scarcity or abundance. That means the popular “eat less, move more” advice breaks down as soon as your biology starts compensating. Understanding those compensations—where they happen and how to work with them—can turn plateaus into predictable phases and give you control over the process rather than chasing hacks.
A clear way to see this is through the four components of total daily energy expenditure. Basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the largest share and scales with fat-free mass, especially muscle, so a stronger physique raises resting burn and widens your calorie budget. The thermic effect of food (TEF) is the cost of processing what you eat, with protein demanding the most energy and providing a small but real advantage. Exercise activity thermogenesis (EAT) changes with how you train and adapts as you get efficient, which is great for performance but reduces burn per session over time. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) is the dark horse—posture, fidgeting, walks, chores—and it can vary by thousands of daily calories depending on lifestyle, fatigue, and diet history. These levers are interdependent; pull one, the others shift.
When you diet hard and long, compensation shows up fast. NEAT drops without you noticing, hormones downshift, movement becomes efficient, and the same intake produces different results week to week. That’s why chronic deficits hit a wall and rebound weight gain is common once hunger surges and your body tries to refill energy stores quickly. Rather than doubling down, restore energy availability with a structured maintenance or slight surplus, train hard, sleep well, and let your system re-expand. This “recovery dieting” approach beats perpetual restriction because it normalizes NEAT and thyroid output, improves performance, and makes future fat loss responsive again. Shorter, sharper cuts—followed by maintenance—often work better than endless lukewarm deficits.
Muscle is the long game lever that shifts everything. It raises BMR directly and indirectly by increasing total body mass you carry through the day. It expands glycogen storage so carbs are used instead of stored, improves insulin sensitivity, and upgrades mitochondrial capacity so you’re better at burning both carbs and fat. Myokines from active muscle influence appetite and nutrient partitioning, nudging calories toward repair and growth. Over years, this adds hundreds of calories to your sustainable burn, widens your margin for error, and lets you live at a higher energy flux—eating more and moving more—without chasing extremes. Practically, prioritize progressive resistance training, periodize nutrition across build, maintain, and cut phases, and protect recovery. Then use a zero-time NEAT habit—stand and pace during calls, scrolling, or off-camera meetings—to layer on hundreds of effortless calories per day. It’s not glamorous, but it’s how physiology and consistency quietly stack wins.
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Philip Pape: 0:01
There's a reason some people eat more and stay leaner, while others restrict constantly and fight for every pound. It's not genetics, it's how they've trained their metabolism to behave. Today I'm breaking down the actual science of metabolism: how it works, why it adapts, and how to use that adaptation to your advantage instead of fighting it. You'll learn why chronic dieting backfires at the metabolic level, why muscle changes everything about how your body handles food, and a zero-time habit that can add up to 9,000 calories of monthly burn without changing your schedule. Get this foundation right, and everything else, your nutrition, your training, your fat loss, gets easier. Welcome to Wit and Weight, 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 the founder of the Fitness Lab app. And this episode comes out at the beginning of the year. So if you are setting goals this year around body composition, fat loss, building muscle, getting stronger, maybe you're over 40, this is where we start. Not with a specific diet or with a training program, but with understanding the basics, how your body actually works, metabolism 101. Here's the problem: most people are not failing at this because they don't understand the basic information, like energy balance and calories. They're failing usually because they don't understand how their body is adapting and working within that system, right? The personalized approach to this and how the metabolism changes. Because at the end of the day, all the other issues around diets and hormones and training and everything else often come down to just understanding how your body handles nutrients and nutrition and calories to get it to do what you're trying to do. And so if you treat metabolism as static, as one-directional, as something fixed, which I hear all the time in people's language, they'll say, Well, I calculated my metabolism last year and it says I'm 60, I burned 1650 calories, as if that's the end of the story. And it's not. It literally changes every single day. And a lot of people also think it's outside their control. And so when you're shocked because eating less and moving more doesn't work, you think that you're, you know, broken or it doesn't work for you, or there's something else happening with hormones that's exotic or requires some optimization or supplement. And then it gets really frustrating because you're trying to chase that and it still doesn't necessarily fix the problem. And there's a lot of people in the fitness industry selling you on those kinds of problems right off the bat instead of the boring basics and understanding the model. So I want to replace that broken model with a more accurate one that gives you more clarity, that gives you more confidence. And so we're gonna step it back. I know you've probably listened to this or watched the show for a while, or maybe you haven't. Maybe this is the very first episode you're ever listening to. Either way, we're gonna go over the basics. We're gonna cover the four components, the four components of energy expenditure, aka your metabolism. Some nuanced differences there, but that's basically what it is, and why the old way of thinking about them doesn't hold today, right? We're gonna make a little more nuanced approach to this. We're gonna talk about why your body compensates when you diet. We're gonna talk about the research on metabolic adaptation and get into the more valuable aspects about muscle beyond aesthetics related to the metabolism. And stick around to the very end of this episode because I'm going to share a zero-time habit that can add up to 9,000 calories of monthly burn to your metabolism. You're probably already doing this thing, but maybe doing it inefficiently. And it takes about 30 seconds to explain. You can start doing this today or tomorrow. So stick around to the end of the episode for that. All right, let's get into it and start with what the heck metabolism actually is, because the word metabolism gets thrown around a lot. Most people don't know what it means. Simply, metabolism is the total rate at which your body expends energy to sustain your life, your movement, your digestion, and your adaptation. That is it. It's all the things your body does throughout the day to burn calories. It is not a number on a calculator of your metabolism. It's not a curse or a gift that's given to you genetically, even though people can vary slightly in their metabolisms in general. We're all about the same given the same, you know, body composition and size. It is a rate of your energy expenditure, and that rate changes based on a lot of things, including what you do, not just your movement, but other things that you do. It is not just energy expenditure, though. What I like to think of a metabolism is is energy allocation under constraints. So it is the energy you burn every day, but it's how all that energy coming in in the form of food, right? That's the only way we get energy as human beings, comes in and how it gets allocated given all of the constraints. So let me explain what I mean. Your body has a finite amount of energy coming in, again, from food. And it has to decide how to spend that energy. So some of that goes to keeping your organs running, keeping you alive, keeping your heart pumping, keeping you breathing, some goes to digesting food, some goes to helping you move, you know, uh consciously and unconsciously, and then some goes to building or maintaining tissue. So there's a lot of turnover, there's a lot of metabolic processes going on. So when energy is plentiful, when you have plenty of food coming in, your body spends freely. When that energy is scarce, such as when you're dieting, your body starts to make trade-offs. It starts to compensate, it becomes more efficient, it cuts back on things that are not immediately essential. And this is a survival mechanism that is just built into our DNA. It's how we evolved, and that is to protect us during famines, during times of lack of resources. You've heard of probably the feast or famine concept from, you know, ancient man, right? The problem is that most people are not accounting for this. And it's a bi-directional thing, isn't it? It's like what you eat and your metabolism both affect each other. The quantities affect each other, and then all these other things I talked about, digestion, movement, et cetera, affect the equation. And that's why people get confused, right? So it's not a simple math equation of calories in, calories out, is my point. Even though the end of the stream of thought, the end of the chain results in an equation of calories in, calories out that then decides how you gain or lose weight. There is so much happening before we get to that point. Okay. And that is the important thing. So it's not just calories and calories out, only because as humans, we have control over many other things that lead to that. But then it is calories in, calories out at the end of the day, right? So it's a it's yes and. So if we understand this, it changes how you approach things like fat loss and muscle building. And it explains why you can be doing a lot of what you think is the right stuff, but still hit a plateau. You it explains why some people seem to eat more and stay leaner. And it gives you some leverage to control the process instead of just hoping, right? Hope is not a strategy, as they say. So let's break down these components, the four components of TDEE, which is total daily energy expenditure. And I want to walk through each one because once you understand it, you could say, okay, how do I affect each one? Is it even worth going after that based on how big of an impact it has? So the first one, the biggest one, is your basal metabolic rate or BMR. This is the energy required to sustain your basic physiological function at rest, but even when you're not at rest, even during just during the day, right? There's resting metabolic rate and there's basal metabolic rate. So basal metabolic rate is when you're awake. That's it, just to simplify it. So we're talking about your organ function, your protein turnover, maintaining your cell membranes, like all the technical fancy stuff that keeps you alive that you don't have to think about, even if you just lay in bed all day. So your BMR is largely influenced by your fat-free mass. Okay, that's your body composition. So the amount of but muscle you have and the amount of fat you have. The more of the muscle you have, which is metabolically the most active metabolic tissue, the higher your BMR. And BMR usually represents around two-thirds of your total calories, but that that percentage of calories can change based on the proportion of the other stuff too. Going back to body composition, this is one reason why building muscle matters. Very important. We're gonna come back to that. And the other important thing here is that BMR is not fixed. It does on average stay the same from your 20s to your 60s, on average, but it adapts downward during energy restrictions, such as dieting. It adapts upward when you have more lean mass and also more energy available. So if your bulk, if you go on into a calories surplus, you'll see it go up. If you diet, you'll see it go down. So that and that's one way that it changes independent of the other aspects of what you're doing. So your body's always calibrating due to what we talked about before, this compensation effect. So that's the first component. The second component of your metabolism is the TEF or a thermic effect of food. This is the cost, the energy cost, like the amount of calories burned, digesting, absorbing, assimilating the nutrients that you consume. So, roughly speaking, protein has the highest TEF. It's about 20 to 30% of the calories that you eat from protein go toward processing that protein. Carbs are a moderate level, maybe five to 10%, and fat is lowest around zero to three percent. And this is a reason why high protein diets have a little bit of an edge, right? It's not a huge edge, like let's not overblow it, but you are actually burning more calories just by eating protein compared to the same calories from carbs or fat, especially fat. So I've seen people go from like a low carb, high-fat keto-style diet to a much higher protein diet. And without any other changes, their expenditure rises and they can eat more food or they can lose fat more easily. So this is one of the reasons protein can be very helpful. TEF also, like BMR, declines when your intake declines, okay, because you're eating less, you're in a diet. That means you are more efficient at extracting energy from food and you're not eating as much. So that's essentially another compensation mechanism. You're gonna notice that all the components of your metabolism, all four, tend to drop when we're dieting, either due to our own actions or unconsciously because of what's happening with our body. The third component is eat, exercise, activity, thermogenesis. And that's the energy you burn during intentional exercise, which is just anything that you plan in, like your training session, any sort of workouts, any sort of cardio or sports. There's a debate whether walking fits in this category. I tend to put walking in the final category we're going to talk about in a second. But eat, exercise activity, thermogenesis, is it varies a lot between people, of course, because some people do exercise, some people don't, some people exercise a lot. And it is also highly sensitive to these efficiency gains or losses over time. Because, for example, the more you do the same type of exercise, the better your body gets at it. And that can actually be a quote unquote bad thing when you're trying to burn calories because it'll burn fewer calories. It is great for performance, though, because the body adapts and gets really good at something, right? And it doesn't mean you should constantly change your exercise to make up for this, but it does lead to some interesting tips like if you're going to do different cardio sessions, maybe rotate between modalities because you might be less efficient and thus burn a few more calories. These honestly aren't the places where I'm looking to leverage our metabolism the most, but they're interesting. The fourth component is probably my favorite because it's probably the one you have the most control over short term. And that is neat non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And this is everything else we didn't talk about. So this is your posture, your fidgeting. This is walking around, your chores, your daily tasks. And again, some people argue that walking fits under eat, but I think walking is it's something we do all day and we do naturally, and we do it unconsciously, we do it just to live, we walk. So there's a logical reason to include it in this category. It also doesn't have the same stressful, intense, you know, potentially negative effects of exercise that are possible with, you know, cardio, for example. And neat, therefore, is all the spontaneous unplanned movement throughout the day, plus your deliberate walking, in my opinion. It's also massively underrated because it can vary by not only hundreds, but thousands of calories. I mean, there's a study, I don't have the details here. You know, Brandon DeCruz is good at bringing this one up, where like they compared sedentary people in terms of their jobs. They were sedentary or like a shop clerk and then manual laborers. And the said, and there was like a 2,000 calorie difference in neat between the two extreme groups. You know, it's like an 800-calorie jump and then a 1200 calorie jump to the manual laborers. And that's just from their job, like how much they move throughout the day, right? And it's low grade movement. So your neat can vary a lot just based on your lifestyle. If you tend to be active, if you tend to move around and walk around and go for those walks. It's also extremely sensitive to your energy intake, to your fatigue, to your biofeedback, like your stress, your sleep, your training load. People don't realize this, but this is the first place your body compensates during a diet because it happens pretty quickly. You might not even notice it. You just move less, you fidget less, you stand instead of pace, you take the elevator instead of the stairs. You might feel a little bit lethargic at times, tired at times, just move less. Even if you are tracking steps and trying to keep that step count up, there's other areas where you just don't notice it and it adds up. So the traditional model then combines all of these components, right? Your TDEE, your total daily energy expenditure, is your BMR, plus your thermic effective food, plus your exercise activity thermogenesis, plus your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And each component adds up independently. I'll say in the traditional model, you increase your activity, you increase your expenditure. And I'll say that model works in a short-term capacity and it works within reasonable levels, but it sometimes ignores biological compensations, such as when we talk about the constrained energy model, like the work from Herman Ponser at Duke, I know Eric Treklar's working with him now on this stuff, where we see that your expenditure is regulated within a range where the more you do, for example, the more cardio you do, but up to a pretty large amount, not like I said, not a reasonable amount, your body will start to overcompensate and the amount of extra calorie burn gets less and less. It's not that there's a wall or a threshold or a cutoff where beyond that, your body's just not going to burn more calories. It doesn't work that way. Essentially, I think what we're seeing is the more you do, the more you burn. And then it starts to become diminishing returns. That's like a nuanced way to explain it. And we see cross-cultural comparisons. We see hunter-gatherer populations like the Hadza compared to Western populations where their activity levels are very different, right? Like we're very sedentary over here and they're moving around all day. And you would think they should burn way more calories, but the total energy expenditure is usually similar when accounting for size and body composition. And again, that doesn't mean exercise or movement or training is useless, not at all. I think that's one of the worst takeaways that gets misconstrued from that. It simply means that your body is reallocating energy, it is compensating across your systems. And hormones are a big part of that, of course, right? Your signaling mechanism from your thyroid to your reproductive hormones, your hunger signals are a function of this. But if you add in a ton of cardio, then you might find that what you thought would be an extra 500 calories a day is only an extra 200 calories a day. If you go too far, you might compensate in other areas where you're actually pushing the needle the wrong direction, right? So again, it's, you know, people are gonna say, well, wait, what about athletes who put in 60 miles a week and they do burn, you know, 5 or 6,000 calories a day? That's my point, is that it does work up to a point, but then there's a diminishing point of return and you have to compensate elsewhere with your recovery, for example. So constrained doesn't mean fixed, it just means flexible within bounds and adaptive and it responds to these chronic signals as opposed to just like one-offs. And so we shouldn't think in terms of one-offs. Right. So you can see this usually if you start a new exercise program where if you're tracking your expenditure, you might burn more calories right off the bat in the first few days or weeks, you know, as well as we can calculate this, like something like macrofactor can help us do this, or if you're tracking your weight and your food meticulously to see how this changes. But then as you keep doing it, you might notice that your expenditure, you know, drops a little bit back to not the original level, but something less than it was. And that could be both the compensation that happens inside the body, but the compensation you do subconsciously physically outside the body, like sitting more or fidgeting less or taking through fewer steps elsewhere. Right. And so your body's gonna reduce energy expenditure in other systems. So there's a lot of confusion on that because a lot of people think it's just this mysterious compensation that goes on in your body. No, some of it is actually you're compensating with your activity. So it's not fixed. I think that's the whole point. And it also explains why some people feel like they're doing more and more and not seeing the results. And that's just biology. And once you understand it, you can work with it. So this is the big reframe from metabolism 101 today, is that it's not just these four components added together and you can move each one up and down independently. It's a bi-directional system where everything you do with every one of these affects the others. And then the things you're doing, like dieting and building, your calorie intake actually affects it as well, and vice versa. So if we can simply handle our calories efficiently for most of the year, which my last episode really got into why building muscle most of the year helps this situation, um, we don't have to overthink it. We don't have to overthink it. So I want to talk about that for a second, right? If there's one thing I want you to take from this episode, it's that muscle is probably the biggest lever you have long term, fundamentally, in how your metabolism behaves. And there's a lot of reasons for this, so we're gonna just break them down, right? Structurally, structurally, muscle increases your basal metabolic rate. More fat-free mass means more energy required at rest because of how active the tissue is. It's about six to nine extra calories a pound. And I kind of beat this to death in the past, but it's worth mentioning again that the calories burned from having more muscle is more of a cascade. It's not just the tissue itself, but it's also the fact that you're usually carrying around more body weight. Most people that I work with, most of my clients who build five, 10, 15 pounds of muscle, they're not trying to keep a low level of body scale weight with this extra muscle because it's kind of harder to do that anyway. But they're leaner at the same or higher body weight, and therefore they're burning more calories just from the extra weight. You also burn more calories because the way you train, and you train really hard, and you're always in that anabolic state, that muscle growth state. So all of that tends to burn more calories than you think. And then your body has to feed those calories. Okay. So that's the food side. Muscle also increases your glycogen storage. Glycogen is the stored carbohydrate that's your body's preferred fuel for intense activity, which includes training and cardio really. Anything glycolytic, we call it. More muscle means more storage space for those carbs, which means you could eat more carbs without them spilling over into fat storage because you're using them more efficiently, right? When we talk about nutrient partitioning, that's what we mean. So muscle is massively helpful in that capacity. And that affects your metabolism as well. It affects how efficient everything is. And then related to this metabolically, muscle improves your insulin sensitivity. When you have more muscle, your body does a much better job of shuttling glucose from your blood into your cells. And that's where it can be used or stored as glycogen, again, not converted to fat. At the end of the day, this does come down to energy balance. If you have too much energy coming in, you're still going to store fat because you just have too much to use. You're not going to be able to use all that glucose. But there's a nice window here where it's highly beneficial. And that window usually is around maintenance calories up into a small surplus. Small is a whole separate discussion, but definitely not like a dirty bulk. There's also cellular impacts of muscle with mitochondrial density, with the function of your mitochondria, right? Mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, you know, which uses ATP. It means better oxidative capacity, where you become better at using fat for fuel. So now you're using carbs and fat for fuel just better. Systemically, we talked about this in the last episode. Muscle releases myokines. These are signaling molecules that influence your liver, your fat, you know, adipose tissue, even your brain. It improves appetite regulation, right? We all want to have better appetites. Well, guess what? More muscle, you're going to just feel like eating better food and have less cravings and feel like eating less quote unquote junk food in general when you have more muscle. It also improves nutrient partitioning, which is where the food actually goes, right? So muscle is hugely beneficial across the board when it comes to your metabolism and it increases the range of calories your body can handle. I don't want to just repeat last the last episode I dropped, but go listen to that if you want a deeper dive into this. All right. So I think the end result from your metabolism is that if you build enough muscle over several years, you're going to be burning several hundred more calories, probably. And that just gives you a lot more flexibility for the long term. And you have a wider margin, right? You can eat more, you get more food flexibility. You only need to diet occasionally. We talked about it in the last episode, dieting less than 20% of the year, if that. And then when you do, you don't have to go as low with calories, et cetera. So this is why I love the muscle first strategies, because they reduce the need for prolonged dieting and building, you know, you're building a body that requires a lot less effort to maintain long term. By the way, if you're finding this stuff helpful, I want to remind you that at the very end, I'm sharing a simple neat hack. It's neat also, but it's related to neat that can add up to 9,000 calories of monthly calorie burn without adding anything to your schedule. So for those of you who like time efficient strategies, you're probably already doing this to an extent, but we're going to talk about how to leverage it the most. I want you to stick around for that. Speaking of building a body that's easier to manage, this is what Fitness Lab is designed for, guys. I have to mention my app Fitness Lab. It's super exciting. We're getting a ton of great reviews on this since it came out in November. We're always improving it. It's an AI-powered coaching app that gives you tasks every day, personalized guidance on nutrition, training, biofeedback, sleep, stress, movement, all of it adapted to your goals, adapted to what's actually happening in your body day to day, whether you're building muscle, working through a fat loss phase, just trying to understand why your approach isn't clicking for you. The app is gonna meet you where you are right now, which is the most important thing, and then tell you here's what we're gonna do next. Today, as this episode comes out, is January 2nd, which means it's the last day of our holiday promotion where you get 20% off after today goes back to full price. So grab that while you can. Go to witsandweights.com slash app. That's witsandweights.com slash app. The link is also in the show notes. This is the easiest way right now with the technology and tools you have available at the cost to put the principles we're talking about today into daily practice and actually do them. Actually do them. Go to wits and weights.com slash app. All right, let's talk about what happens when you do not account for the adaptation and complexity of your metabolism because most people approach fat loss in a very simplistic way. You're gonna eat less, you're gonna move more, you're gonna repeat until you reach your goal. Tell me I'm wrong, right? And I see people commenting on YouTube videos and uh social media posts, like it's simple. Eat less, move more, you know, just so flippantly and so ignorantly. And maybe this is a 25-year-old who has no problems with any of this stuff and their body's responding just fine and they're not overdoing it. But that's not you, is it? Right? Progress probably has stalled on more than one occasion when you try this, and then you don't know what to do next. Because if that's the only thing that worked in the past and more of it won't work, what can you do? Right? What can you do? And we're that's just like scale weight. There's also the low energy, there's the hunger issues. And most people are giving up, you know, at some point on this journey, and then they regain more weight than they lost, and then it's just this loss cause, right? And this is a predictable result for many of you because of the lack of understanding of energy restriction of your metabolism. So when you're doing sustained diets, your body is gonna reduce neat subconsciously. We talked about that before. You move less without realizing. It's gonna down regulate your hormones, reproductive hormones, your immune function, right? People tend to get more sick when they're dieting. Your body decides, you know, these are not priorities right now because I just don't have enough energy coming in to begin with. Your thyroid hormone decreases. This is like your metabolic regulator. So then your metabolic rate slows down further. Your sympathetic nervous system output drops, right? You're a little bit more on edge, you feel a little sluggish at the same time and maybe less driven, more lethargic. It's kind of a not a great combination. The efficiency of your movement goes up, oddly enough, meaning your body is gonna learn to do the same things with less energy. And that's not what you want because you're trying to burn more calories, you're trying to lose fat here. And so all these mechanisms are your body keeping you alive with what it perceives as some sort of famine, right? That's low energy availability, energy restriction. And the math, therefore, by math, I mean calories in, calories out does not stay constant. This is the big insight I'm asking a lot of you to understand, to refresh your mind on is that your body's gonna compensate in so many different ways that whatever calories you started with are not the same calories that are gonna get you into that calorie deficit two weeks later, four weeks later, six weeks later. It's gonna constantly change and it's gonna change in almost unpredictable ways. So if you started in a 500 calorie deficit, but your body compensates by 400 calories, now you're only in a 100 calorie deficit, boom. That's exactly why you are seeing a big slowdown. It also explains rebound weight gain because after an aggressive diet, now you're at this significantly suppressed metabolism and your body is primed to store that energy and gobble it up once you start eating. So your hunger hormones get ramped up, especially if you've lost muscle because you're not training. That's a different issue. But you've got metabolism low, an increase in food intake that gets stored more efficiently because your body really wants it. And again, we don't like efficient in many of these conversations. We want to be inefficient. And so you get into this cycle and you think, okay, the metabol my metabolism never is gonna be in a state where I could actually drop the weight or drop the pounds or whatever, what have you. And for I'm I'm speaking to people at all different sizes and different goals. But I mean, even you ladies who are like 120 pounds and you're like, I gotta lose five more pounds, and it just never, ever, ever happens because you hit that wall constantly. That's probably what's going on. It's not that you can't, it's that there's a very strategic way to do it, and everything has to be really dialed in. What you have to do here is reverse these adaptations first. Restore your energy availability, rebuild your muscle, reduce your chronic stress, allow your metabolic system to re-expand, allow that pie chart of metabolism to get bigger again. And I know the fear is real of, but I don't want to lose, I don't want to gain weight. I don't want to gain weight. I just got a message from someone on Instagram that listens to the show, and she's like, I'm stalled with my lifts. I can't get more reps or weight, but I also know I'm probably not eating enough, but I fear gaining weight. And it's kind of that combination that I think a lot of you are in right now of you know you need to eat more, but you feel gaining weight. And I'm not talking about people who've already gone through this process, they're already at maintenance calories, and then some 25-year-old influencer is like, oh, you just need to eat more to lose weight. No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about fueling yourself and recovering so that you can build the muscle and strength and come back stronger in a better position to lose fat from a metabolically healthy standpoint, not I'm gonna raise your metabolism by 100 calories so you can eat more in your fat loss phase. It's not that. Okay. But this is why I'm an advocate for what I call recovery dieting. Well, I don't, not just me. I'm not the only one that calls it that, but I'm not a big fan of reverse dieting because that's guesswork. Recovery dieting is a strategic maintenance or building phase right after a period of restriction where you jump right to maintenance as quickly as you can, because the best recovery is the fastest recovery, even a slight surplus to help restore that metabolic function versus trying to diet year-round, because that is gonna pay off much more long term, even for fat loss, than constantly restricting. If you've been in a deficit for a long time, even six months, okay, your body has made significant adaptations to that. And I know this for a fact because pretty much every single client that I've helped track their data, they track their expenditure. I see it drop. My own expenditure drops four to 800 calories in a reasonably long but modest diet, right? It'll drop faster, but not as much in a short, aggressive diet. It'll drop less if it's a less aggressive, longer diet. In other words, it will pretty much drop the same for you, give or take, you know, 50 calories or whatever, based on the aggressiveness, based on the aggressiveness. So it's a trade-off. It's a trade-off. And if you try to jump into another diet, which really just means push your restriction down further, that is just gonna push the adaptations further. It's just gonna fight back more and more. It's not like you can quote unquote fix it all in the middle of the diet. But if you spend several months eating at or above maintenance while training, that's gonna help your metabolism recover, increase your neat, normalize your hormones, make your body more responsive. And then when you eventually need to diet again, it's gonna work better because you're starting from a restored baseline. And again, it's not a magic pill of, oh, I can eat way more food. It's that physiologically and psychologically, you're gonna be able to now, you know, push through a strategic dieting phase and actually get the result you're looking for rather than hitting yourself against a wall like you were before. And this is why body recomposition, losing fat, building muscle at the same time, is actually possible for a lot of people. It really is. Okay, don't believe this idea that, well, only new lifters can do this. Only new lifters can do this. If you're giving your body the stimulus and the fuel, it's gonna build muscle. And if it's around maintenance and not in too much big of a surplus, you're gonna have to drop some fat. Anyway, where does this all leave us? All right. Most people are asking the question, how do I burn more calories? And I think that's the wrong question. I think that leads to trying to move the needle, either the wrong needle or do it in the wrong way, through chronic cardio, you know, metronomic cardio, through the extreme diets, through fighting all these compensations we talked about, trying to do somehow the opposite to compensate. Like I'm just gonna get a bigger step count. I think the better question is how do I build my body in a way that it knows what to do with more calories? And just to steal a term from Brandon DeCruz and from the industry, it's energy flux. It's be able to eat more and move more, not eat less, move more to lose weight. It's eat more, move more, build a bigger metabolic capacity. That makes sense. So, what this looks like in practice is I'm sorry, but the boring fundamental basics. I'm gonna be a broken record on this for the rest of the time this podcast exists because it's never gonna change. These are principles. You've got to prioritize strength and muscle. Doesn't matter your age, you have to be resistance training. This is not optional. This is everything about your metabolism right there. Okay. Without it, you're operating in a tiny narrow band. And the best you can do is this, these chronic diets that are just miserable and give you very little results anyway. They probably cause muscle loss, just terrible. They don't have any benefit, right? So if you're jumping to a low carb or a keto or a carnivore, and that's all you're doing, you're not lifting weights, you're not doing anything else, you're just gonna be here again, wondering what to do. And I'm gonna say, hey, are you resistance training? Are you doing it, you know, three, four, five days a week, whatever makes sense for you, the right volume and frequency? Are you progressing over time? Because that's the most important thing. As far as the dieting side, we talked about this on the last episode. Fat loss phases should be strategic, time limited, and then followed by quickly recovering to maintenance or a slight building phase, right? Where you're doing that part of it like 80% of the year, four to one ratio, let's say, at minimum. Because if you're always in a deficit, you're always compensating, like we've talked about today. Being active, moving, taking the stairs, not sitting all day. You know, when we talked about the differences in neat, that's where a lot of that variance lives. And then sleep and stress, because recovery is also where you adapt. I had a uh person reach out to me and thought that they might be doing too much exercises and how much you're doing. She said, four to five hours a day. And I said, I don't even know, I have to know what you're doing to know that that's too much. You know, unless you're talking about going for a bunch of walking walks, which is not the case here, it's probably too much. You know, chronic sleep deprivation, high stress, all of these are going to slow things down. They're going to increase fat storage when you are gaining weight versus muscle, and they're going to cause extra compensation when you are trying to lose weight, lose fat. So I want you to think in phases going forward. I want you to use what's called nutritional periodization. Build muscle when the conditions are right, cut when necessary, but get in, get out. You maintain in between to solidify what you've got. And when you're maintaining and building, you're going to feel a lot better. You're going to eat more food. It's going to be more enjoyable. Right. And kind of got to fight against that scale obsession and that, you know, last two pounds obsession, because when you lean into those too much, you end up making the wrong decisions to actually solve the real root cause. When you lean into fuel and strength and muscle, you'll see that that problem probably goes away on its own. You may not even have to have a fat loss phase. You'll get a little bit of recomp over time. Right. So when you look at people who have a quote unquote fast metabolism, it's not genetics. They probably either have more muscle or they move more throughout the day. Maybe they have a busier job. Maybe they're not dieting all the time. Right. And I'm not talking about, you know, a 250-pound man versus a 150-pound woman. I'm talking about between two people of the same uh weight and body composition. Okay. Well, chances are they don't have the same body composition if one burns more than the other. Probably one has more muscle. That was my point. Right. And you can do that. You can do that. It just takes time. It takes time, guys. This is not a quick fix podcast here. All right. Now, I want to talk about the bi-directional thing that I mentioned before. Because a lot of people think, okay, calories affect your metabolism. And that's true, right? If you eat less, your metabolism adapts down, you eat more and it adapts up. But your metabolism also affects your calorie utilization. Meaning how your body uses the calories you eat depends on the state of your metabolism. So if you've been chronically dieting, your body actually wants to store more energy. And so your nutrients get partitioned more toward fat gain. Now that's blunted, of course, when you're lifting weights and you're focused on strength and muscle. Okay. But when you've been chronically dieting, the recovery's not there, the performance is not there. Even if you've been building, or if you've been building muscle, maintaining enough energy, I should say. So if you're not been chronically dieting, then your body's in a neutral state of using food, I'll say effectively, where nutrients will get partitioned toward muscle, your recovery is enhanced. It's not trying to fight and get you back to homeostasis and survive. But it's a really important thing to understand. This is also why, guess what? I'm leaning more toward shorter fat loss phases for a lot of people. And by short, I mean six to 10 weeks as opposed to like 12 to 16, uh, because of some of these issues, where, you know, the calories are the same, but the outcomes are different. This is why calories in, calories out is factually correct, but it's kind of meaningless because the whole equation is dynamic and changes based on you and your activity and everything else. All right. So I think I beat it, beat all that to death. But I hope you understand that eating less isn't always the answer. Sometimes the path forward is eating more, but it's eating more while building the muscle and restoring your metabolism. You know, creating conditions where your body can really thrive. So as we start this year, or whenever you're listening to this podcast, I want you to think about your metabolism differently. Don't ask or stop asking why is my metabolism so slow, or I have such a slow metabolism, or I'm a fully grown man or woman, and yet I only burn this. Ask instead, what have I been doing chronically that my metabolism is adapting or responding to? You may, okay, I'm sorry to say, you may on average have a lower metabolism than somebody else genetically, but there's only things, there's only some things you can control. And that's not one of them. What you can control is the leverage points that we talked about today, the inputs, that will affect your system. Am I saying it's gonna add a thousand calories to your system? Of course not. But you're gonna do your best and forget the rest. So I heard that years ago. Do your best and forget the rest. Build muscles, stop chronically restricting, move consistently, sleep well, manage stress, right? These aren't hacks. These are like the boring basics. They work for any age. All right. So before I let you go, I promised you something at the beginning of this episode: a zero-time habit that adds up to 9,000 calories of monthly calorie burn without adding anything to your schedule. And I'm gonna share that in a second. Before we do, if you want to put all this into practice, muscle building, nutrition, daily guidance, that is what my app, Fitness Lab, is for. The app adapts to you, whatever you're doing, whatever exercise or training you do, whatever supplements you take, whatever your age, whatever your diet restrictions, it doesn't matter. It's gonna tell you what to do next based on your data, your biofeedback, and your goals. You literally get up in the morning and it has created the new activities for the day based on overnight analysis of your data. And it says, here are the activities for today. And you can chat with it, you could ask questions. It's awesome. Today is the last day as this episode comes out to get 20% off with the holiday promotion. Go to wits and weights.com slash app. That's witsandwaits.com slash app. All right, here is that habit that I promised this invisible neat multiplier. It is very simple and you're gonna think, this is stupid, but if you reflect on your daily activities, you're probably not doing this. Every phone call, every Zoom meeting where you don't need to be on camera at your desk, every time you're scrolling social media, even every time you you watch streaming on a handheld device, I want you to stand up and pace. That is it. The average person is spending, and you, and you know, this is probably you. This is probably you, whether you want to admit it or not, two to three hours or more every day on these activities. And if you have a job where you're you know on the phone all day, you might be spending many hours a day. But even just doom scrolling social media, catching up on the news, streaming, just phone calls and texting friends, whatever, all of that stuff, you can pace while doing it. Pace around your house, pace your office or wherever you are. Pacing versus sitting is gonna burn an extra hundred calories an hour. I'm not saying you're gonna do this for hours on end, but if you did it for two to three hours a day, kind of add it up throughout the day, that is two to three hundred calories a day, which is up to 9,000 calories a month. And I've seen this in my step count. I've seen my step count go up multiple thousands of steps on a day where I intentionally made sure that I paced with these activities. I know not everyone can do it. Everyone has a different job, a different situation. But if you can, okay, do it. Because here's the thing you're probably already doing some of these activities, but you're sitting down on the couch or you're sitting down on a chair. In fact, that's another way to think about this. Think about every time you're sitting on a chair doing something that, you know, doesn't require a computer or anything like that. Can you just get up and pace while doing it? This is the highest leverage neat hack because it requires zero extra time. It's habit stacking with what you already do. You don't have to remember to go for a walk. You don't have to schedule anything, just change where and what you do, while you do these things you're already going to do. That's it. Your phone, scrolling Instagram, you know, the Zoom calls, all of that. Because as I mentioned before, neat is the most manipulable part of your metabolism. And many of you are just sitting all day and not getting up. So tomorrow morning when the phone rings, stand up. When you're gonna go check Instagram, stand up. That's it. That's whole habit. Start right there. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your metabolism works for you when you give it the right signals. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
