Should You Fix Your Diet or Training First? | Ep 465

Should you fix your diet or your training first?

You've probably heard that diet is 80% of the results, so nutrition is the obvious place to start. After all, "abs are made in the kitchen" right? The problem is this claim has no basis in science, and for a lot of you, training is the actual bottleneck.

The real answer depends on which part of your system is the weakest link right now. 

Learn about the research on resistance training for body recomp, the constraint theory "bottleneck" concept, how to tell whether nutrition or training is YOUR bottleneck, and a practical 5-question framework you can apply this week. If you're over 40 and stuck in the cycle of cutting calories and changing workout plans, you'll know where to start by the end of this episode.

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Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where Phase 1 diagnoses your specific constraint, Phase 2 fixes it with guided adjustments to training and nutrition, and Phase 3 teaches you to run this process on your own: https://eatmoreliftheavy.com

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Timestamps

0:00 - Fix your diet or exercise first?
3:30 - The NEW trial and body composition
6:00 - Resistance training and body recomp
8:30 - Weight loss vs. fat loss
10:30 - Constraint theory and the bottleneck concept
13:00 - Is nutrition the bottleneck?
 19:30 - Is training the bottleneck?
 22:30 - Sleep and recovery
25:00 - The 5-question framework
33:00 - Strength training over 40 and perimenopause
35:30 - An efficient way to fix nutrition AND training
37:30 - Bonus: the 5-second bottleneck test

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 00:00

  Should you fix your nutrition or your training first? You might have heard that diet is 80% of your results and exercise is only 20%. But that has no basis in science. There was one study of overweight postmenopausal women doing aerobic exercise, not resistance training, and they measured scale weight, not body composition. For many of you, fixing your nutrition first is exactly correct. But for others, fixing your training first will produce faster, more visible changes. So today I'm going to show you how to diagnose which one is your bottleneck, a simple framework for deciding where to start, and a five-second test you can do right now to figure out your answer. 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, Philip Pape, and this is a question that I get all the time. Someone sends me a message or asks on a coaching call, hey, Philip, I know I need to fix my nutrition and my training, but I can't do everything at once. So where do I start? Or they say, hey, I just want to lose fat. I'm gonna hold off on the strength training thing you keep talking about. I want to work on my food. Or vice versa. Hey, I just want to build muscle. I'm not gonna worry about the food part right now. And the standard answer is either, hey, diet is the majority of results. This is what I hear a lot. You know, abs are not made in the gym, they're made in the kitchen, those kinds of things, which are great sound bites, and they sound very decisive, like you should start with diet. And it sends a lot of people down the wrong path. In fact, more often than not. So today we're gonna retire that myth. We're gonna replace it with something better, and that is a diagnostic that you can apply to yourself. How do we personalize the answer? Because the real answer isn't a ratio or you have to do both, or you have to go in one order or the other. It depends on what is your weakest link right now. I want to give a quick shout out to Christina R, who wrote in asking how this kind of framework applies when you're in your 60s or 70s, even though this audience or this episode is for everyone. Christina, I just wanted to give you a shout-out because the answer is the same framework, regardless of your age. I'm gonna touch on some age-specific evidence as we go. And I think you'll see that it still holds because I'm all about principles. And then stick around till the end because I'm gonna share a five-second bottleneck test. It's one question that tells you whether diet or training should be your first move. And you're like, Philip, just give it to me now. Well, look, we have to set up the why behind this and the true diagnostic so you understand that even when you get an quote unquote answer, that it truly is right for you. Here's what we're gonna cover today. First, why the 8020 claim is a problem and what the research actually measures. Second, how to identify your personal bottleneck using the signs that you can observe right now. You don't need any lab work, you can do this all with just your body. And then, third, a practical decision framework that you can use this week. All right, let's get into it and talk about this 80-20 myth. And some of you may not have heard of it, I get that, but I've been hearing it for many years: the idea that diet is the most important driver. Diet is 80% of the results. You can't have fat loss without diet, et cetera. It's all kind of related. And it's probably understandable for a couple different reasons. One being that most of us have gained weight or fat or become less healthy with age, often due to our eating patterns and our eating habits, or at least we blame those. And when we look at research, there have been some trials that tried to examine the effectiveness of one or the other's independent variables. There was one in 2012 called the new trial, and that was in the journal Obesity. 439 overweight to obese, post-menopausal women. They're randomized into four groups. There was a diet-only group, exercise only, diet plus exercise, and then the control group. And then 12 months later, the diet-only group lost 8.5% of their body weight. The exercise-only group lost 2.4%, and the combined lost 10.8%. So doing the math, diet accounted for roughly 79% of the combined weight loss. And that's kind of where this idea of 80-20 comes from. Now, if all you care about is losing weight on the scale, that's fine. Then go ahead and get a shot. But we care about fat loss, not just weight loss. We care that diet can create an energy deficit much faster than exercise. That is true, especially when compared to aerobic exercise, which sometimes can backfire and actually cause you to burn fewer calories overall due to adaptation. And there have been studies that go back to the 90s where dieting alone tends to produce quite a bit more pure weight loss versus exercise. But the nuance left out from a lot of these discussions is that, for example, in the new trial from 2012, the exercise only group was the only group that gained lean mass. They actually gained 0.3 kilograms of muscle while losing fat. The diet-only group lost 0.8 kilograms of lean mass. And you see this story over and over again with body composition changes in a worse direction, even though people lost weight on the scale. And that's why we care about fat loss and not just weight loss. So this these big swings of, you know, over a kilogram of muscle tissue between the two groups. I don't want that. And I don't think you do either. And here's the worst thing, I guess, is that the exercise in the study was cardio. It wasn't resistance training. If they had used resistance training, guess what? The gap would have been even wider. So it just goes to show that exercise of any kind does have value. And of course, we know resistance training has even that much more value. Now there was a 2022 meta-analysis by Lopez and colleagues that looked at 116 articles covering over 4,000 participants. Resistance training alone, with no change to diet, reduced body fat by 1.6% and increased lean mass by 0.8 kilograms. That's body recomp, body recomposition. Less fat, more muscle at the same time without even touching your diet. The diet plus resistance training group lost the most fat, about 5.3 kilograms, and they preserve muscle. So they didn't actually gain muscle, which kind of makes sense again when you're in a diet, you stunt your ability to gain as much muscle. And all of this stuff is really, really important, guys, because weight loss and fat loss or body composition are not the same goal. When you lose weight through dieting alone, you're going to lose lean tissue, 20 to 30%. I recently did an episode about GLP1s where they talked about 40%, but in reality, when you count for some different factors, it's probably about 25, right? The quarter rule, 25%. And then what we see in studies is that some form of exercise tends to cut the rate of muscle loss. And I suspect a lot of people, it's because they they were sedentary to begin with, and doing any exercise at all kind of primes your body and gives it a signal that it's important to keep that muscle mass, even if you're not doing what we would call lifting heavy or resistance training. So this 80-20 rule has some merit, but in a very narrow context, especially when we say it's it's really about the scale weight loss in sedentary or a cardio-focused population. As soon as you shift that goal to body composition, which is what most of you listening to the show care about, then the ratio changes a lot. And for a lot of people, especially if you're older, if you're over 40 and you're already eating reasonably well, the training may be the higher leverage fix. I was joking on our eat more lift-heavy coaching call this month. Somebody, I asked her if she eats in a very boring way or a very exciting way, as in tends to go overboard on the weekends, things like that. She's like, oh no, I eat really boring. I'm like, okay, that's actually gonna serve you really well. Somebody like her, the eating isn't the issue, and a higher higher higher leverage fix is actually the training. So I wanted to establish that popular frame of what is this, what does the data say? What are we actually talking about here? And now we're gonna say, what is right for you? So this goes back to constraint theory and the bottleneck concept, really everything that I built my philosophy around based on the evidence here, that you need to find the next biggest constraint and go attack that. Again, you know, I sometimes mention our coaching program, Eat More and Lift Heavy. It's built on that idea of every week we go after the one next constraint, and it works really well for getting compounding results. So if we go back to the history of this, the theory of constraints, it was developed by a physicist named Eliahu Goldrat, that's what two Ts, in the 80s. So I was a little kid back then, I probably wasn't reading uh research studies. And the core idea is very simple that every system has at least one constraint that limits its output. And the throughput of the system is determined entirely by that constraint. So if you think of it as a chain, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So if you can if you improve any other link than the weakest one, it's not gonna help the chain, is it? You have to fix the weakest one, and then the whole chain gets stronger. So Goldrat's big insight was that in the corporate world, most managers spend their time optimizing the wrong part of the system. They might speed up a machine that's already fast as opposed to a machine that's creating some sort of bottleneck. And I think that happens to us in our lives, especially when it comes to health and fitness. And so the analogy that I like is a highway. Imagine a four-lane highway that narrows to two lanes for about a mile. And what happens? Traffic backs up. Well, we all love traffic, don't we? I grew up in Miami, I hated it. One of the main reasons I love living where I do now in Connecticut, in the woodsy area, is the lack of traffic. Anyway, traffic tends to back up, and now you're stuck on the highway. And the question is, would widening the four-lane sections to six lanes fix the traffic? No, of course not. You'd still be bottlenecked at the two-lane section, right? You can change that other part of the highway to 12 lanes. It doesn't matter. You're still gonna be constrained at the two lanes. So, what do you need to do? You need to widen that part of the highway. Now, that's separate from all the arguments about, well, once you do that, you're gonna have a lot more traffic anyway, and it's all gonna catch up. That's a separate issue. That's a throughput issue. So in your body, the highway is really your entire system of training, nutrition, sleep, recovery. The bottleneck is whatever of those is most constrained. And for a lot of us listening, a lot of you, especially those over 40, a lot of women who've been in the diet and restrict cycle for many, many years, the bottleneck, believe it or not, is not your nutrition. Believe it or not, it's not your nutrition. I talked to a lot of you, and the nutrition isn't that bad. And you got to consider the fact that the weight gain has happened slowly over many years. You might be eating vegetables, you might be trying to hit protein, maybe you, maybe you are, maybe you aren't. You might even be tracking all of this stuff. But then the bottleneck is you're doing, you know, three sets of 12 on the leg press and it's the same weight every day in the gym, every time you go to the gym, or you're using the little dumbbells and you you're just not willing to go to a gym or get a barbell or get something heavier. And I don't mean to put the blame on you. I'm just saying either not willing or not able, or you're not sure that's what you need to do. And when you're doing that same routine, as consistent as you might be, you're not gonna have any progression or improvement. You're not gonna have progressive overload, you're not gonna get close to failure, and you're not gonna get the thing that drives strength and muscle, which is gonna help with the fat loss and the belly fat and the energy and all the other things we talk about and make better use of your food and fuel. Now, for a different group of people, I hope I wasn't too harsh. Always tough love. For a different group of people, the bottleneck is their nutrition. Oh, yeah, it definitely is their nutrition. They might be training reasonably well, four or five days a week. Maybe they have a good program, maybe they are doing progressive overlap. I know a lot of the guys I speak to who have just gained a bunch of weight, or ladies are eating 900 to 1200 calories and you don't have the energy to adapt to the training and even build the muscle, even if you're doing the right thing. So it's all over the place when we say nutrition is the problem. It's not just that you're overconsuming per se. And as we've talked about before, anything more than a very moderate calorie deficit of like 500 calories a day can it can very well lead to a loss of lean mass while even while you're resistance training. But if you're kind of within that window, you can probably still get stronger while under-eating, but you're still gonna have a very hard time building much meaningful muscle beyond, say, the first few weeks or months of newbie gains. And so I think the idea of strength and body composition and whether you're making progress or not can very well lie in the nutrition side, even if you're training well. Now, if you're not doing either, obviously the question is, you know, what should you fix first? Not necessarily what you should you do first. There's a subtle distinction. The distinction is I think you need to focus on both, right? To some level. Like you need to train and you need to track as a minimum for your nutrition, but you don't necessarily have to quote unquote fix both at the same time to the same level, if that makes sense. You're gonna prioritize one at a time, get that dialed in, and then work on the other, even though you're doing both at some minimal level. Does that make sense? Like you're still doing the things, it's not not zero. You're doing it, you just might be at a one or a two over here and you're trying to get this to a three or four over here. I hope that makes sense. So the I would say that the opposite pattern can also reveal bottleneck, meaning if you are eating adequately, if you're sleeping okay, but your lifts have been flat for a long time and you don't look any different, then the bottleneck is probably your training, right? Your volume, your intensity, your exercise selection, probably progressive overload is the main thing that's lacking, if assuming your nutrition is okay. So, what is your two-lane highway? That's the bottleneck. What's the two-lane highway? So, what do you look for to figure that out? All right, let's talk about the signs. One sign is persistent fatigue, even if you have enough sleep. So your lifts kind of stall or even regress backward, especially on the main movements, the compound movements. Or if you have constant hunger or on the other hand, almost no appetite, that can tell you that you have an energy imbalance. Mood disturbances, irritability, brain fog, irregularities with your cycle if you're menstruating, frequent illness or prolonged soreness, hair loss, cold hands and feet, right? Guess what? All of these can be symptoms of low energy availability. Now, there is research on how low is too low in terms of energy needs. Let's just say for a 180-pound man like I am, with let's say 15 to 20% body fat, something south of 2,000 calories, maybe 1800, maybe 1500, you know, the exact number is going to depend on the person, is where hormonal metabolic function starts to break down. And this is a normal thing, this is an adaptation when you're in a deficit, but it is very important to understand that low energy availability will cause lots and lots of symptoms that can tell you that your nutrition is the bottleneck. We also know that a lot of female recreational exercises, as many as half, are at risk for low energy availability based on some different studies. So it's not just about athletes, right? When you hear of things like Reds or physique competitors, it's everyday people. And what they what makes this tricky is for those of you who've been dieting for many years, you might not think that you're under-eating. You might think you're maintaining because your body weight is no longer dropping, you're not losing weight anymore. Or you're even eating less than you used to and you're not losing weight. But your body has adapted. Your resting metabolic rate has probably come down, you've probably lost muscle mass. Your non-exercise activity activity has probably decreased subconsciously. And so all of these are a negative for your training adaptations because now you have lower muscle protein synthesis because of the lower reduced or the lower energy availability. So it all compounds. The encouraging thing here is that even one training session with resistance training can jack up your muscle protein synthesis. It's a great stimulant. This is why I'm saying just getting into the gym and getting your workout done can be a great jump start and in and of itself has massive benefits to your body and your physiology, even in an energy deficit. And then if you're adding protein in after you're training, you're eating your carbs, all of that can push these things higher. So the constraint is the energy. So that would be a those would be good signs that energy availability is the problem. Of course, if you're tracking and you kind of know this and you know that you're in a deficit, great, but you may not know it because your numbers may tell you that you're maintaining. You're just so adapted and underrecovered that you're actually well below what your maintenance could be. Therefore, you don't have enough energy coming in. All right. Now, what about training as the bottleneck? What signs tell you that? Well, if you're eating at a reasonable level of calories, you're hitting your protein, your energy is pretty good, your mood is pretty good, and your body's just not changing the way you want, usually indicated that by your lifts have not progressed in several weeks or maybe several months. And this assumes you even were expecting them to go up. And what I mean is a lot of you don't even, aren't even using progressive overload. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, definitely check out more episodes of this podcast or reach out to me. This is very important. But for those of you who are trying to progress but just haven't been able to, you know, maybe you don't have a structured program, maybe you're changing program a lot, programs a lot, maybe you're not actually trying to push yourself. Maybe there's a fundamental misunderstanding of like sets and reps and load and all that. And the reason I put it this way is because in our coaching program and Eat More Lift Heavy, when we have our coaching calls, these questions come up all the time. As much as we provide educational material, the podcast has it, YouTube has all this stuff, you know, we try to spell it out. Not everybody under understands the details about training properly or eating properly that we sometimes talk to on this podcast. If you have a background in, say, nutrition science or you're a personal trainer or something like that, right? We have to acknowledge that there's a learning curve here. So if you're not progressing, if you're not training close to failure, if you're doing too little volume per week, like far less than say five to 10 sets per muscle group per week, the bottleneck, the bottleneck then might be your training. Like if you're only training once a week, even if it's hard, it still might not be nearly enough for what you need to make progress. And we know this because there's plenty of evidence on the dose response of intensity and volume, especially volume, for making progress and building muscle in conjunction with the principle that builds muscle, which is mechanical tension. And the only rate, the way you get mechanical tension is lifting close to failure. Excuse me. And the only way you lift close to failure is as you get stronger each time you go to the gym and you do that same exercise, you need to go a little bit heavier or a little bit more reps, a few more reps or a little bit more load, right? That that's because by definition, you're gonna get stronger and you're gonna be able to do more. So you need to do more to get close to failure. Does that make sense? So it really does come down to progressive overload, but it's it's that because mechanical tension, training close to failure, is the mechanism that drives the muscle growth. So that's training. And speaking of things that you can optimize that you may not be thinking about, but is probably the most important third pillar alongside nutrition and training is your sleep. And even though today's episode is the dichotomy between nutrition and training, I would put sleep into the category of non-negotiable, no matter what. However, it depends on where you are and what your constraint is and what you need to do. One thing that I did to upgrade my sleep is my sheets. I use Cozy Earth's bamboo derived sheets. Smooth segue to our sponsor today. This is a temperature regulating sheet that feels amazing. It's so comfortable. It keeps me cool. Whether it's hot or cold, I stay regulated and I feel very comfortable. And therefore, I'm not waking up as much. I'm sleeping more consistently consistently, getting good recovery, and my aura ring is telling me I have higher scores, better HRV, and things like that. And it's a great company. I love great companies, and I would appreciate your support if you're looking for something like this. It makes a great gift, but it's great for yourself if you want to try improving your sleep via a tool like this. The cool thing about Cozy Earth is they give you a hundred-night sleep trial so you can test them for over three months. And then if you don't love them, you can return them. And they have a 10-year warranty as well. So they really do back up their sheets. And remember how much time we spend in bed, it's a third of our life. It's 2,500 hours a year. So, yes, training and nutrition are super important, but bringing it all together is those ideally eight hours of sleep. And that is a logical place to focus. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. You'll get an automatic 20% discount using code Wits and Weights. Go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. Support the podcast, but more importantly, support your sleep and your recovery. That's witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. Link is in the show notes. All right, let's get back to this decision framework. So we have the concept you got to find a bottleneck, you've got to fix a bottleneck, and you It's either training or nutrition. So you need to ask yourself five different questions. All right. Question one: Are you doing structured resistance training at least three times per week with progressive overload? So that summed up everything I just muddled through a few minutes ago. If the answer is no, then training is the first fix. You notice how I did that. I'm giving you a simple framework. Start there. So guess what? A lot of you, training is the first thing you have to fix, not nutrition. Full stop. This is the single highest leverage change for your body composition. Resistance training alone can help reduce your body fat percent, reduce visceral fat, even when you don't change your diet. It's a tremendous buffer. I've worked with clients who've trained for years and they built a lot of muscle, and their diet is terrible, their walking is terrible, and yet their blood work is pretty darn good because they have that protective muscle. And of course, it gets better now that they start walking, they start improving their nutrition and losing some excess body fat. But the lean mass, the muscle mass, the strength, the bone density, the function is almost more important than anything else for most of you, especially if you're not doing it. So that's question one. Question two, all right, I'm training consistently. Great. Is your training well structured? So you might be doing some progressive overload, which means you're potentially okay, but are you hitting sufficient volume with that progressive overload? At least, let's say eight to ten sets per muscle group per week. And so I'm gonna file this into the training quality. Now, some might argue that if you're able to apply progressive overload to all your lifts, then by definition, your training is well structured. And I could somewhat buy that argument, but some people are muddling the two. And if you've got both of these dialed in, then training is no longer your bottleneck. Question three All right, training solid. Do you know your calorie and protein intake? If you don't, you can't diagnose whether nutrition is the problem. Okay, so start tracking for at least two weeks. Don't change anything, just observe. And I think you're gonna be shocked at how far off a lot of your assumptions might be. Or you might confirm some of your assumptions. Calories alone are always way off for most people. Average self-reported energy intake usually underestimates real intake by at least 20%. I've seen some estimates up to 40%. Question four. So now you're tracking, you know what you're eating. Are you eating enough to support your training? So if your energy availability is low, and you know this from the symptoms we talked about earlier, even if you are quote unquote maintaining your weight, you might have to jack up your food. You might simply have to eat more, help your metabolism recover, get through the fear of the fact that you might gain weight. Yeah, you might gain a couple pounds of fluid and glycogen, but for the vast majority of people that I've taken this through, they're super shocked because they don't get beyond that fluid weight, they don't gain weight. What happens is their metabolism starts to ramp up while they're maintaining weight. So the metabolism goes up, they burn more while they eat more. And that's the principle behind eating more, which then unlocks your training and your movement and your energy and your fuel and your hormones and all the other things. And then question five, so once we've established you're eating enough in general, question five is is your protein adequate? Now, some of you might think, oh, shouldn't you put protein first? Not really. If you're just not eating enough, I almost don't care where it comes from. I just want you to eat more, seriously. And then we can start shifting those macros where they need to be. But then you can focus on protein, where we're aiming for 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of protein. Now you might ask, is that ideal weight? Is that lean mass? Just simplify it. Whatever your weight is right now, 0.7 to 1 gram per pound, start there. You can always optimize further later on. So if all of those are answered, like, no, I'm doing all that and it's super solid, well, now you're looking at secondary factors like sleep quality. We talked about the cozy earth sheets, for example, your stress, your consistency over time with these things. So, like you might think you're doing them, but then in reality you're not actually consistent with them or improving with them. Most people have a clear primary bottleneck in one of the first five questions we talked about. But then a lot of you, as you get into this and more experience, you start to hit those secondary bottlenecks. Now, here's the really awesome thing that I that I get that I get excited about. It's called upward spiraling. Once you fix your bottleneck, it creates an upward spiral, a cascade. When you've been under-eating and then you start eating enough, what happens? Your energy improves and then your training quality goes up. You can push harder, you can get more reps, you can recover faster, you're more excited to go to the gym, and then you build more muscle. And then more muscle increases your resting energy expenditure. And guess what? That gives you more room for calories, which then makes your nutrition easier to sustain. So it's an upward spiral or a virtuous cycle. And the opposite direction is true as well. Okay. The opposite direction is true as well. In a good way, I mean. So, like Lyle McDonald always talks about how when women start properly lifting heavy, they almost always change their diet on their own. And that's something I've observed as well. More protein, more structured meals, the training itself is a catalyst for better nutrition. And we have research that completely backs this up. There was a 2011 review that talked about exercise as a gateway behavior. Isn't that funny? Right, because we talk about gateway drugs like on the negative side. But imagine having a gateway behavior like exercise, like training, that strengthens your brain. It rewires the prefrontal circuits involved in self-control, which translates to your diet and nutrition. Isn't that interesting? So, this is the mental side of doing hard things that I think creates resilience, consistency, self-control, all of those things. So starting with training or exercise may actually make it easier to fix your nutrition later. So if both sides need to work and you're not sure where to begin, a good default is okay, start with nutrition if you're clearly under-eating and you have all those symptoms we talked about because you need the energy to train well, or start with training if you're eating adequately, but not providing the stimulus for that change because the training creates that downstream motivation to eat better. Does that make sense? And this is all consistent with the questions we gave you before. Even though I tend to start the questions on the training side, eventually you're gonna hit where that constraint is. Now, quick note for Christina and anyone else wondering about age-specific considerations. Remember that muscle mass decreases about 3 to 8% per decade after age 30, and then it accelerates after age 60. But a 2021 landmark study in science found that metabolism itself remains very stable from age 20 to 60 when adjusted for body composition. So this, like, my metabolism is slower now that I'm older narrative. It's all about muscle loss and the fact that you're moving less. It's not that your metabolism is truly dropping off a cliff, which is a good thing. It means the fix can actually work when you're 45, when you're 55, when you're 70, you resist and strain with sufficient stimulus, eat enough food, eat enough protein, make you sure your energy, energy intake supports your recovery. Now, for women in perimenopause, the shift in fat distribution toward visceral fat, toward belly fat, menopause belly, the decline in the estrogen that causes that, and then the increased baseline stress and cortisol all point to the same conclusion. Resistance training with adequate nutrition is the most protective intervention you can have for this. Not doing more cardio, not eating less, not low carb, not intermittent fasting. Resistance training, adequate nutrition, which is great because that means you have lots of flexibility to do this. All right, before we wrap up, I did promise you a five-second bottleneck test. It's one question that tells you whether you have to fix your diet or training first. I'll share in just a moment. But if you're listening to this, you're thinking, okay, Philip, I know what my bottleneck is now. Thank you, but I don't know how to fix it on my own. That is what Eat More Lift Heavy was built for. This is my 26-week, week-by-week coach program. We focus on one constraint at a time. You've got two coaches in the program. In the first phase, we diagnose where you are. We set up your tracking, we assess your training, we identify your specific constraint. And then in phase two, we fix it. We fix it together. You learn to read your data, you learn to adjust your nutrition, progress your training, stop guessing. And then in phase three, you learn to do this independently. We give you specially designed tools and exercises to train you to do this for yourself so you never need a program like this again. If you're over 40, especially women who've been going back and forth between cutting calories and trying new workout plans, nothing sticks. This program actually sequences it for you, slowly but surely in the right order, with coaching to keep you on track. If you're looking for a quick fix or a challenge or rapid fat loss, this is not the program for you because those things are not sustainable. You'll end up right back where you started. But if you want the results to stick, check us out. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com to learn about the program. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com. Link is in the show notes. All right, here's the fastest way to figure out whether you should fix diet or training first. Ask yourself this question Have my lifts gone up in the last four weeks? That's it. I thought about this a lot and it really comes down to that one question. Because if they have, then your training is doing its job. You've got the stimulus. But if your body isn't changing, the constraint is on the nutrition side. So you're either not eating enough to support muscle growth, your protein's too low for the muscle growth. Okay, that's an easy way to tell. Now, if that's that's if the answer is yes. If your lifts are going up, but you're not getting what you want, it's probably nutrition. If your lifts are not going up, then there's your answer. That's your answer. The training stimulus is the bottleneck for sure. I mean, the food will help, but it's not gonna help nearly as much as fixing your training. Either your program lacks progressive overload or the way you're implementing it does, or your volume's too low, or you're not recovering because of a different issue. So fixing that is the first thing to do. That's it. One question. Have my lifts gone up in the last four weeks? Start there. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the answer to which I should fix first is not a slogan or sound bite. It is diagnosing your immediate constraint. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.