Stop Letting a Calculator Set Your Macros and Calories for Fat Loss | Ep 497
Your app or online calculator is likely wrong about calories for fat loss.
It can be off by a few hundred calories, and your wearable is even worse.
We challenge typical advice by showing how inaccurate maintenance calorie estimates can derail your fat loss before it even starts.
I share my 7-week runway that uses consistent tracking to measure your real energy needs so you can execute a calorie deficit with confidence instead of guesswork.
Why calculator-based maintenance calories can be off by hundreds
How activity multipliers and wearable calorie burn estimates amplify the error
Why self-logged intake commonly gets underreported
The intake-balance method to back-calculate true energy expenditure
A 7-week pre-fat loss structure
Protein and carb adjustments that support recovery and better training
What to do if expenditure trends up, stays flat, or trends down
If you want your next fat loss phase to be the first one you don't have to "guess" your way through, hit play!
Join Eat More Lift Heavy, my 26-week coached program for 40+ to build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage your physique for life:
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Why your fat loss calories are wrong before you start
4:32 - 9 weeks of effort with nothing to show for it
6:50 - What a calculator knows about you vs. what it doesn't
8:38 - Why your wearable or watch is terrible at estimating calories
10:01 - What food logging research says about calorie intake
12:24 - Measuring your expenditure from your own body
14:47 - Working through the fear of eating more
17:10 - Weeks 1 and 2, logging without changing anything
20:56 - Weeks 3 and 4, bringing your intake up
22:21 - Weeks 5 through 7, holding it steady
23:29 - Reading your expenditure trend at week 7
29:22 - Bonus: 2-week logging protocol and the weekend gap
Episode Resources:
Try MacroFactor - the app I use for expenditure tracking. Use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for two weeks free
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Why your fat loss calories are wrong before you start
Philip Pape 0:00
If you're about to start a fat loss phase, and the first thing you did was plug your numbers into a calculator and then subtracted, let's say, 500 calories, this episode is for you. Today I'm going to show you why that very number right from the beginning might not even be correct before you start to change your intake. I'm going to explain the roughly seven weeks that I would execute before you actually start a calorie deficit so that it's super successful. And of course, we'll dig into the research of having a phase before fat loss for metabolic recovery. Is it a legitimate thing or does the evidence suggest otherwise? 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 Pape, and today we're going to evaluate something that maybe feels obvious and lots of us don't question it, which is that if you want to lose fat, you have to eat less, go into a calorie deficit, maybe you train harder, and you gotta dial it in. And I wanna be fair, I wanna be honest as always, because it isn't wrong. Like there are so many of you that reach out and say, hey, I've I've really figured this out. I'm able to, you know, go into that deficit, I'm able to lose fat. I just have to eat like an adult and listen to my body. And that works for a lot of people, but it doesn't work for a lot of people as well. And so where's the reality here? A sustained calorie deficit, of course, drives fat loss. That's energy balance. I'm not going to tell you calories don't matter. So what I'm looking at today is how you set up for success with a calorie deficit. Because you see, it is not about, hey, calories in, calories out, just do it. It's how do I actually impose that situation where I'm burning enough calories and I'm also eating few enough calories to make this work where I can actually do it. And one of the biggest miscalculations is the metabolism side of the number, the calories out part of the number. Almost everyone who tries this takes a calculator or uses their watch or an app or tries to calculate it from calories burned, or they're using my FitnessPal and just kind of guessing at it, or use I think I already said an online calculator, but anyway, when you take a number like that, that's just an estimate based on the population, it can be off by at least two or three hundred calories, sometimes 400 calories. And now you're trying to do a 500 calorie deficit. Well, do the math. You might get into a deficit, it might not be as big as you want. Maybe you're not even in a deficit and you start gaining weight. You're like, WTF, what the heck is going on? I just can't lose weight or I'm weight loss resistant. And most people make it harder on their themselves because then they start to change a bunch of other things, not realizing that their numbers are a little bit off. And now it's month three, the scale has hit a plateau or starts going up, and you have no idea what to change, where the root cause actually is. It's kind of like when I post on my Threads account and I say, hey, perimenopause doesn't cause weight gain. You may gain weight during perimenopause, but that's correlational. The root cause is buried deeper. It does have to do with things like behaviors, but those behaviors may become harder because of perimenopause. And at the end of the day, not knowing how that affects your metabolism is probably what's holding you back, you know, among other things. So I want you to pay attention because we're gonna solve that for you today. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna show you the two-week logging protocol that will help you figure out your expenditure, whether you use MacroFactor or not. You guys know I love MacroFactor because it'll do it for you. And if you want to support the podcast, download MacroFactor and use my code Wits and Waits all one word. But there is a way that you can do this yourself. So, in between, we are going to talk about how incorrect the maintenance number often is. So, maintenance calories when you're trying to figure that out. I'm gonna walk you through seven weeks, week by week, and how you can structure this leading up to a successful fat lace. I fat loss phase. I'd rather you take seven weeks and then execute your fat loss phase as fast as possible, efficiently and successfully, than take, say, zero or one or two weeks, and then you start a fat loss phase that doesn't even end. Does that make sense? And then at the end, I'll show you which parts of this have some research behind them, which parts of it kind of conflict with some of my advice so that you understand why I'm giving the advice I do. Hint, hint, it's based on real-world experience and also human psychology. All right, so I'm gonna start with a scenario because I think a lot of you will recognize this.
9 weeks of effort with nothing to show for it
Philip Pape 4:32
Somebody might come to me in her early 50s, maybe she's been lifting a couple of years, maybe she's frustrated because she, let's say in January, had a New Year's resolution to lose weight, lose fat, started a new training program. I don't even know if it's effective or not. Depends on if a like a friend recommended it, something on YouTube she found, or maybe she has been, you know, listening to the show. And then at the same time, she's cutting calories. And the starting calories are based on what she thinks is her maintenance calories, based on an online calculator. And then she subtracts, let's say, 500 calories to lose a pound a week. And then let's say nine weeks later, she is down four pounds. But already I know, hey, you know, two, three, maybe all four of those pounds probably came off in the first week or two of mostly water weight, which a lot of people get excited when they lose weight really quickly on something like keto or carnivore, where they're cutting carbs, they're cutting food, and you lose weight really quickly, but it's not really body fat. And then you plateau and you're like, okay, now what do I have to change to keep losing weight? Which is the wrong question. Because are you even in a plateau to begin with? And how did you determine your calories besides all the other things you're doing, right? Sleep stress, training, et cetera. So you don't want to be changing all these things and then still fail to lose the weight or lose the fat. And now you're just like beating your head on the wall. There could be other things as well, right? Maybe the program you're running has more volume than you can recover from on what you're eating. Maybe you're trying to train fasted. Maybe the calories that you started with were never really in a deficit, et cetera, et cetera. And so what this all comes down to is you are doing what you think you're supposed to do. You've been listening to podcasts, you go online. Heck, we even have a calculator online that gives you some potential estimates. Even if you use something like MacroFactor, the first number it calculates for you is based on an estimate. Estimate, and then you're disciplined, and then you're consistent, and then, you know, effort, effort, effort, working, working hard, and then somehow it's not giving you the result. And that's not a discipline problem, right? It's about the experimental design. That's what I like to call experimental design because our body is always changing. The things we do are always changing, life is always changing. It's always an experiment. We're always trying to figure things out and improve, and nothing is gonna be fixed in place. And so, those of you who are just using a calculator and then you're running ahead with MyFitnessPal and you're not having success, this is probably why.
What a calculator knows about you vs. what it doesn't
Philip Pape 6:50
So let's talk about the maintenance calories. Okay, maintenance calories are the amount of calories you burn every day that if you ate that amount of food, your weight shouldn't go up or down. Now, that's that's a simplified version of it, okay, but it's good enough. And when you look at a calculator, they use an equation like online. Probably Mifflin St. Jor is a really famous one, really good one that most calculators and apps are doing under the hood. That's the one that we use. You put in your height, your weight, your age, your sex, and you get an estimate of resting metabolic rate, and then it multiplies by an activity factor that you pick from like a drop-down, and then it gives you your uh total daily energy expenditure, your total metabolism for the day. So, now how accurate is this? Well, at the group level, at the population level, it's fine. That's how they got the equation. If you run Mifflin St. Jor as an equation on, let's say a hundred people, or a hundred women specifically, the average error is gonna be close to zero. So it is a good equation. The problem is, as an individual, you can't rely on being perfectly in the middle of that curve, like the perfect average, right? There's actually a study of, I think there's 125 adult women, and they had different body sizes where they compared the predicted resting metabolic rate or RMR against the measured using indirect calorimetry, which is like when they put your a mask on your face in a lab to calculate your metabolism. And the Mifflin St. Jor was within 10% for 71% of the women. Now, if you flip that around, that means roughly one in three of the women was off by more than 10%, right? And that's before you multiply by the activity factor to get your total metabolism, which
Why your wearable or watch is terrible at estimating calories
Philip Pape 8:38
actually multiplies the error. Now, some of you are thinking, okay, that's why I wear a watch, because then I can measure my activity. Well, I wish. I wish it was that easy. I wish we can just calculate our total calories in some super direct, measurable way outside of a lab. Well, there's a review, a systematic review by Fuller and colleagues from 2020, uh, and it's huge, right? They looked at 158 studies across nine brands of wearables and concluded, and I'm paraphrasing here, that for energy expenditure, no brand is anywhere close to accurate. Okay. It's not that some are far better than others, it's that none of them are accurate. And the errors go from like 21% under to 15% over. And I've seen bigger numbers than that, but even that is more than enough to be kind of useless, right? It's kind of useless, other than maybe as a trend or relative activity measure, you know, like your rings and things like that on your on your Apple Watch. What bothers me as an engineer is that they found no data on whether these wearables are even consistent with themselves, right? Like internal consistency. So even that makes me wonder if you could rely on the trend, let's say. If I knew that my watch was always 300 calories high, then I could adjust it. But when it could be 300 calories high one day and 300 calories low the other day, again, pretty useless. So that's one side of the equation.
What food logging research says about calorie intake
Philip Pape 10:01
The other is what you are eating. So there's a classic study by Lichtman in 1992 in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they took people who were convinced that they could not lose weight on very little food. And they self-reported that they were eating 1,028 calories a day, so just over a thousand calories. Then they measured them with doubly labeled water, which is the gold standard, just like Herman Ponser and his work. And the actual intake was over 2,000 calories. And their metabolisms were completely normal, right? Now, this is what something we've seen time and again, and especially back when you go to the 90s, before people even knew what macros were, it kind of makes sense, but it's but it somewhat holds up even to this day, even as much information as we have on social media about fitness and and nutrition. If we look at as recent as 2019, a review from Burroughs that looked at 59 studies and 6,300 adults, they found that records self-logging of food underestimated by 11 to 41%, and underreporting occurred more often in women. Okay, now that is just a huge amount of error. And it's also normal. So, in other words, whenever you feel like an influencer or somebody on social media is gaslighting you because they're like, Are you sure you're tracking accurately? I would say none of us can track accurately. However, if you're using an app that can do this better, it takes away the human piece and does help you track more accurately, which is the difference between now and what we had in the 90s, right? Back then it was like paper databases and stuff, if people even use that, like bodybuilders. So if your expenditure estimate is off by a couple hundred calories because of the calculators, and your intake of food, your what you're thinking you're eating, because you're not using a good measurement process, like let's say macrofactor, is off by up to 40%, then, and on top of that, you've spent years and years and years under eating and dieting, then your starting point is probably genuinely lower than you think, more often, like it mostly errors on that side, which is why you feel like you can't lose weight or why you think your metabolism is higher than it actually is, because of all these sources of error. So then if you start with a higher metabolism than reality and then you subtract and you're like thinking you're in a deficit, but you're not, well, there you go, right?
Measuring your expenditure from your own body
Philip Pape 12:24
Does that make sense? There you go. Now, there's a way out of this, and I think it's pretty elegant. Instead of predicting your expenditure from an equation, you just measure it from your own body. Because if you know roughly what you ate across several weeks and you know how your weight trended across those same weeks, you can work backward to what you burned. Your body's like a black box, we say in engineering, right? The inputs are the food, the output is the energy loss, what's left is your body weight. So your body is the calorimeter. That's called the intake balance method. And we've validated that method against doubly labeled water, including a 2015 study by Sangvi and colleagues that tracked 140 people over two years, if you want to look at the research. And guess what? This is what good tracking apps do for us. I'm a big fan of letting letting you know an algorithm take care of this for me than trying to do it manually through a spreadsheet where there's gonna be all sorts of error because of how you're calculating it there. So, of course, again, that's why I use macro factor. I'm an affiliate of macro factor, my clients use it. So weigh that accordingly. But if you want to support the podcast, go download macrofactor and use my code all one word, wits and weights, you'll get two weeks free. But I'm gonna be straight with you here. If you use MacroFactor, it starts with an equation. But then once you start logging your food and weight, ideally every day, it's gonna take about uh usually for most people, three, maybe four weeks before the estimate of your expenditure settles down to reality. So don't just freak out on day one. Oh my gosh, my metabolism's higher or lower than I thought. Most people freak out because it's lower than they thought. Now it might be that low, but we don't know for about three weeks. Okay. So the method is pretty well validated, but the actual like result of that method takes several weeks because it needs real data. That's just the reality of it. Okay, it's it's not, it's because of the noise of the data. Your weight can swing one, two, three, four pounds a day up and down from water, glycogen, sodium, inflammation, et cetera. Also, your cycle. We know that women can often run a pound or two higher during menstruation, for example, and that's from water, not fat. If you start taking creatine, you might have water weight. There's a lot of reasons, right? If you're in perimenopause, your cycles are unpredictable, the noise goes even more volatile, and you might need a little bit longer to see the expenditure settle down. So you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, Philip, I get it. But I still don't trust myself to eat more
Working through the fear of eating more
Philip Pape 14:47
without gaining fat because you hear me talk all oftentimes about needing to eat more to recover. Yes, you need to eat in a slight surplus, potentially build muscle, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about just eating more protein and eating more food in general so that you're up at your metabolism. I had uh somebody email me this week and she's like, Yeah, I'm just afraid of gaining too much. I really want to build muscle, but I've been going up like one or two hundred calories. And she's not using macrofactor. And I said, look, you're just delaying the recovery, and that's why you can't gain muscle and you feel not great because you're still technically dieting. So in Eat More Lift Heavy, which is the program that I run, it's a 26-week program where we teach you the skills to do this. And in week three, which is pretty early in the program, we just we discuss the fear of eating more. We address that with you. We help you work through that, which is really, really important early on. And rather than just saying, hey, join us, here's your maintenance calories, here's some Mac, here's a meal plan, go start losing weight. We know that doesn't work for people. We know, we know if you've spent the last 10, 20 years and you've been trying different programs and diets and coaches and you haven't had success, that's probably why, right? That's probably why. And then you're under-eating, but not diet, but not losing fat. It's just a vicious cycle. And then you don't really teach and learn to eat the the right foods for you and to feel fueled and powerful and strong and lift weights the right way and all of it. So in Eat More Lift Heavy, go to eatmore liftheavy.com to check it out. We actually explain all 26 weeks of the program. And it's for serious people only, because if you're looking for a quick fix, this is not it. The first seven weeks are what I'm describing today before you actually start a fat loss phase. We get tracking set up, we get your training going, we start building the skills, we help you bring you up to your measured, correct, fully recovered maintenance calories so that by week seven, now you're ready to rock and roll and step on the gas pedal and actually lose fat and then keep it off with the sustainable habits. So eatmore liftheavy.com. And here's the cool thing. As we're leading up to episode 500 to celebrate, we have a short-term promo code to get $50 off if you choose the six month program. It's $500 club. That's the code, $500 club. I'll include it in the show notes to get $50 off. We almost never do promos. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. If you sign up for six months, $50 off with $500 Club.
Weeks 1 and 2, logging without changing anything
Philip Pape 17:10
So let's go over those seven weeks one at a time here. I want to explain the logic so that you know why. Okay. Weeks one and two are where you start logging things to get awareness and you don't change anything. And I mean, really don't change anything. Now you might end up changing things subconsciously, not realizing it, and that's fine. That's pretty cool. That's in fact part of the process we love to see. But you're not consciously dramatically changing your calories, dramatically changing your training, your steps. Now, if you're not training to begin with, that's the one exception we might make in that we're going to introduce a program to you that is effective. And within the first few weeks, you're gonna figure out, okay, where am I training? How do I do this? Let me get going. That's okay, okay, because everybody needs to be lifting weights. But this is the hardest part for a lot of people because you come in and you're like, yeah, I gotta lose weight, I gotta lose that last 10 pounds, or I gotta lose the next 50 or whatever. And we're telling you, don't change anything. We just take baby steps and start tracking and becoming aware of your behaviors. How many of you actually done that? Okay, so there's like four rules if you're gonna do this on your own. All right. Rule number one is that you do wanna start to track your food in a precise way. That means weighing your food on a food scale. That means using the scanner or the AI photo-based login, whatever makes sense, right? Macro Factor has that, Fitness Lab, my own app, has that. And we've actually just upgraded that app to full meal coaching, which it never had before. It may or may not be out by the time this episode comes out. But anyway, you need to be tracking your food so that you know how much protein you're getting, how many calories are you eating, what do your macros look like, what do your micros look like. Okay. Number two is kind of related to this. Don't go crazy about it. Like, yes, I want you to track everything, but if you feel like it's taking too much time or it feels too obsessive, or like you're trying to be more detailed than you need to be, reach out, right? In our program, we we deal with these issues all the time. We have conversations on the calls in the community about how to take out the friction of logging and how to make it super, super easy. Because many of you have used MyFitness Panel. You're like, yeah, I just hate tracking. I'm like, well, there's a reason you hate tracking. Let's just not throw it out like baby with the bathwater. There's a way to make it so frictionless, you're you're doing it for maybe two minutes a day. I mean, two minutes a day. Come on. If you can't do that, I don't know what to say. Uh, rule number three is you're gonna weigh yourself every morning and but then you're gonna ignore the number because what you care about is the three-week trend. So again, if you're using MacroFactor and you put it in there, you just do it every day, but then there's a trend. And then rule number four is you log every day the same way. Like, who cares if it's Saturday and you're going out for drinks and appetizers, you're going to a party or having birthday cake, whatever. Just log it. Like a lot of people are fearful of being honest in these apps, like MyFitnessPal, because they've judged you or they've given you warnings or they like get on you for missing things. Whereas Macrofactor doesn't do that, or if you're doing it on your own, like in a in a notebook, let's say, you're hopefully not judging yourself for it. So just log every day, full days, don't leave anything out because that's the only way you're gonna get the right data. Now, quickly on the day and daily weigh-ins, I want to mention that there's plenty of research, including a systematic review from Zheng in 2015, of 17 studies where more frequent self-weighing was associated with better outcomes and no evidence of physiological harm. And I don't have the research with me, but I know there was a study that compared seven to five days actually, and found that seven days seem to be associated with better outcomes and maintenance of results as well. If you have a history of disordered eating, take all of this with a grain of salt. We're talking about if you're in a mentally healthy state, there's no reason not to start tracking in a detailed way. It's there's no evidence showing that it's gonna make you obsessive or disordered at all. Okay. So that's the first couple weeks. Then the next couple weeks,
Weeks 3 and 4, bringing your intake up
Philip Pape 20:56
weeks three and four, is where you start to tweak things. Ideally, your food, you're going to for most people, especially a lot of women, you're gonna end up bringing your food up, your intake up to your measure of maintenance. You may be really low in carbs because of a fear of carbs and keto and all this. You may have to bring those carbs up. You probably have to bring your protein up as well. Fat usually comes along for the ride. And by weeks three and four, you're because you've been tracking, you know roughly where to target for that to have a quicker recovery. If you've been dieting for a long time, this number may be higher than what you've ever been eating in a long time. And then you get a little bit afraid you're gonna gain weight, but you're not going to. You may, you're definitely gonna gain a few pounds of water weight. And if you start taking creatine, even more water weight, but it's not body fat. It's not body fat. And of course, as you're doing this, the protein's gonna stay high. I always say the the minimum we're gonna aim for is 0.7 grams per pound. Again, if you use macrofactor, it it sets your targets for you based on the evidence. So for a lot of you, it's gonna be between like 120 and 140 grams a day. And then, you know, everyone's gonna have individual challenges. Like for some of you, it'll be eating more carbs. And you're afraid of, oh my gosh, you associate carbs with, you know, pizza and donuts or sugar or gaining weight. When I say carbs, I mean fruits, vegetables, starches, grains, things like potatoes, oats, right? Anything you can tolerate that you enjoy that meets your energy needs. And then weeks five, six, seven are
Weeks 5 through 7, holding it steady
Philip Pape 22:21
where you kind of hold those new habits in place. So notice we're doing we're taking kind of a step change approach. First couple of weeks we don't change much, we start logging. Second couple of weeks we change a little bit, and then we hold again. And that's where you can see your true expenditure and your weight trend and where you really, really are. And for a lot of you, three weeks feels like a long time, like you're doing nothing. Again, in E More Lift Heavy, we we are working on skills every week anyway. So you're kind of building on top of that. And there are little things that are changing, things like step count, things like sleep, all very important. But we want to get the noise out of the system so that by the end of week seven, you have something that I bet most of you have never had, which is six weeks of really good, clean data on a very stable set of conditions on how your body works and your habits. I mean, that's pretty powerful. You know your maintenance calories, you know your protein intake, you know your eating habits, you know your calorie habits, your weight trend, like all that stuff in a much more accurate way. And now you're in a position to run a true calorie deficit and then learn from it. All right, so now we are week seven.
Reading your expenditure trend at week 7
Philip Pape 23:29
What do you do? Well, there's three possibilities. So this is pretty cool because you may have seven weeks ago thought, I need to lose weight, I need to lose weight, or I need to lose fat. Maybe, maybe not. Let's see. The first possibility is your expenditure trend is rising. You raised your intake, your body responded by burning more calories, becoming less efficient, which is what we want. We want to become a gas guzzler. And this is more common, dear listener, than you think, might think, especially most people who listen to the show, especially if you came in underfueled. Maybe your steps went up and you didn't even think about it. Maybe you're a little bit warmer and you're fidgeting more. Practically, though, what it means is you have more runway. It's not that your metabolism is artificially higher, it's that you're recovered and your body is operating on all cylinders, and now you've got a good, healthy place from which to run a fat loss phase in a successful way. And it may be at lower calories than you thought originally, and that's okay. The second possibility is your metabolism, your expenditure is fairly flat. And so things have sort of stabilized. You're at maintenance. It's boring, but that's what you kind of want. It's very useful. You know where your maintenance calories are. Now you can take a modest cut from those maintenance calories. All right, and then you can interpret everything against that stable baseline. The third possibility is hey, maybe your trend is falling. You've been eating more, but it's still falling. Now, usually that means that your logging got better and drifted upward as you got comfortable. And now it's saying, okay, you're actually eating more than we thought. So you must be burning less. But it could be your activity has declined. It could be that you're just not at maintenance left. It's rarely anything to be scared about. And for oftentimes it means maybe we should continue with recovery before we go into a fat loss phase. So all of this gives you really good data so you don't make the wrong decision, right? So you don't get depleted and frustrated and hitting a wall really quickly. Now, notice what all three of these have in common, which is in every case, you know what to do next and you know why. You know what to do next and you know why. This is, you know, coaching 101 converted into a step-by-step system to do this, which is what we want. That is the return on investment for those seven weeks. Not that you're losing fat, that comes later. It's that you know what to do now and you can now lose fat successfully and do anything else in the future you ever want to do. Now, there is a separate question of whether you should even do a deficit at all. And that depends on a lot of things, including your schedule. Do you have vacations coming up? Are you having a surgery? Are we around the holidays? What time of year it is, all this other stuff. We're gonna actually talk about that in our next episode 498. Today we're just talking about that pre-fat loss phase. Now, I want to talk about some things that I'm not claiming here, even though a lot of people in the industry do claim these about this, you know, recovery phase or pre-fat loss phase. I'm not saying that you're gonna be able to lose more fat by doing this. I'm saying that you'll be able to know how to lose the fat that you want to lose in the right way. Energy balance and thermodynamics still apply. It's not like an accelerator, so to speak, but it does address a lot of the things that cause people to fail or stop or plateau. The second thing is, I'm not saying you can't change your training and eating at the same time. In fact, many people many of the times we have to encourage that because you're not lifting right to begin with, and we want you lifting the right way. And sometimes they synergistically help each other. I'm also not saying, and this is really important, that your metabolism is damaged or broken, that it needs to be fixed. None of that. None of that. Please stop accepting that narrative from the fitness industry. Most people's expenditure across the population are pretty similar, and it's things like your movement and your eating and your lifting and all of and your sleep, et cetera, that affect the day-to-day number. And I guess one more thing I'm not saying is that those online calculators are useless. In fact, we have our own at wits of weights.com slash calculators, and they're great as a starting point, but they could be way off, and that's why we actually have to track our intake and our weight over time to get the real number. All right, before I let you go, I promised you the two-week logging protocol. And I'm gonna show you that in a second. Before I do, if this episode appealed to you, if you think it's interesting, you're like, I really want to try that because I've never been able to lose fat successfully, and I want to figure myself out. I want to understand my body better. I want to understand my hunger signals and how to actually lose fat. And I like this engineering approach. You know, there's so much intuitive woo stuff out there that this seems to make a lot of sense. Go to eatmoriftheavy.com and check out what we do. It's a 26-week program. It's one of the ways you can support the show as well, but more importantly, support yourself in gaining this confidence and going through a systemic process. We have the base program, which is where you get your training program, you get a launch plan, you get the monthly calls, there's the community, there's all of this. It's not like set and forget. It is a, we're gonna hold your hand week by week and help you build these skills. But then on top of that, we have something called dialed in, which is where you get a one-on-one personalized coach. Her name is Carol. She is awesome. She's a women's and hormones expert. She's also a nutrition expert. She loves recipes and meal plans and all that side of things as well. So she will build you a custom nutrition blueprint that has everything. It has suggested foods based on what you like. It has meal timing, has everything. It's not a meal plan, it's a super flexible blueprint for your nutrition that then you can iterate on together. She reviews her data every week. She does form checks. She's gonna do a monthly video review. So totally up to you of what you need. Go to eMoreLiftheavy.com. And because we're celebrating the fifth 500th episode of Wits and Weights very soon, which it still gets to me a little bit. I'm so excited. I can't believe we're there yet. We're there already, and you've been along for the ride. We have a code, it's 500 club. It takes $50 off the six month options for either tier of eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's 500 club. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com
Bonus: 2-week logging protocol and the weekend gap
Philip Pape 29:22
and use 500 club at checkout. All right, here is the two-week logging protocol. For two weeks, for 14 days, I want you to log every single day. Again, I prefer you use MacroFactor because it takes your intake and your weight trend and works backward to calculate your real expenditure. And you don't have to be obsessive about how you track. You can use photos. It has an AI-based photo logger, you can use barcodes, you can use common database foods, et cetera. And then you log every day exactly the same way. Doesn't matter if it's Saturday or Sunday or whatever. But then what I want you to do is I want you to take the average of your weekdays and I want you to take the average of your weekend. And I want you to compare the two. Okay, for the vast majority of people who have a normal nine to five, like Monday through Friday type job or schedule, I want you to notice the difference between the weekend and the weekdays. Now you're like, oh, I already know the difference. No, I really, really want you to notice the calories, the protein, the nutrients, the alcohol, everything, because that could be your biggest lever. How do I either adjust the weekend to be more in line with the week and that alone gets me the deficit I need? Or do I adjust my targets so that the weekend is accounted for and gives me the freedom and flexibility I already want or need? And then I can go a little bit more dialed in during the week. And that is a very powerful strategy. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember, you cannot fix what you never measure. And a short seven weeks of measuring is gonna save you at least a year, if not the rest of your life, of guessing. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
