Stop Making These 3 Weight Loss Mistakes if You Want Fat Loss | Ep 407
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If you're tracking food, stepping on the scale, pushing hard in the gym, but hitting a wall with fat loss, this episode is for you.
Maybe scale isn't moving, or you're making panicked decisions like slashing calories or adding more cardio, and nothing's working.
Discover the 3 weight loss traps that derail motivated people trying to finish 2025 strong, and learn exactly what to do instead to build a leaner, stronger physique heading into 2026.
Learn to use evidence-based strategies that work with your body's adaptive system, not against it, so you can lose fat while building muscle and maintaining your metabolism.
Episode Resources:
Fitness Lab App - AI-powered coaching for tracking signal weight and progressive training. Exclusive 20% off link for podcast listeners.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Hitting a wall with fat loss despite tracking and training
2:09 - Trap 1: Reacting emotionally to daily scale fluctuations
9:29 - Trap 2: Overcorrecting with extreme calorie cuts and restriction
20:13 - Trap 3: Thinking strength training is not required
24:52 - How muscle building transforms metabolism and body recomp
28:52 - Debunking "bulky" fears and "waiting to lift" myths
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Philip Pape: 0:00
If you're in the mode of trying to lose weight, maybe you are tracking your food, stepping on the scale, pushing yourself in the gym, but you hit a wall. The scale isn't moving. Or worse, you're making panicked decisions like slashing calories or adding more cardio and it's still not working. This episode is for you. Today I'm breaking down three weight loss traps that derail even motivated people right when they're trying to finish the year strong, and how you can avoid each one so you can actually build a leaner, stronger physique heading into 2026. Welcome to Wits and Weights, a 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 creator of Fitness Lab, and we are in the final stretch of 2025. I know a lot of you are determined to make progress on your body composition before the new year. Maybe you started strong this year, you hit some bumps along the way, and now you're trying to figure out what is working versus what is all the noise out there. So today I'm going to cover three specific traps that I see people fall into this time of year. And in my teaser before the music, I mentioned the phrase weight loss. I think I mentioned it twice. And I did that for a reason because a lot of you are in that mode of weight loss. And in the past, we've talked about the difference between weight loss and fat loss and body composition, which we're going to touch on that a little bit. And I'll say that these are not obscure edge cases, edge cases. These are the mistakes I'm talking about today are the big ones that kill momentum for the majority of people that are trying to do this, that are trying to improve their health, lose fat, improve their physique. And then I'm going to give you what to do instead. So if you're trying to just lean out, lose that last few pounds of fat, or you're getting started right now on your fat loss journey, stick around because avoiding these three traps could be the difference between continued frustration through the holidays and entering 2026 leaner and more confident than you've been in years. All right, trap number one is misreading the scale and then making emotional decisions as a result. This is the biggest one for sure. It probably causes the most, I'll say, unnecessary stress. And that is treating every single time you step on the scale like it's a performance review. Okay, you step on the scale, and what happens? You look at it's a number, it's up two pounds from yesterday. And immediately your brain goes, I gain fat, I'm bigger, I'm heavier, why can't I lose the weight? I'm gaining weight, my metabolism's slowing down, my diet stopped working, I need to cut calories, I need to add more cardio, whatever thought goes through your head in that moment. And maybe take a pause and think about what that is for you right now. The trap here is the big misunderstanding of the difference between signal and noise when it comes to scale weight. Scale weight is tough, guys, because on one hand, I very much encourage using it as a tool. On the other hand, it gets highly misused as something far from a tool. So if you've listened to this show, you've heard me talk about this before, but I want to drive it home because it trips people up constantly. Your body weight fluctuates a lot, a lot. And almost none of that day-to-day fluctuation is actual fat gain or fat loss. And I want you to think of it this way. Okay, if you to gain two pounds of fat overnight, you would have to had eaten roughly 7,000 calories above your maintenance. I talked about this on the last episode, I believe, right before Thanksgiving, about the numbers and the math behind this. Did you actually eat 7,000 calories more than your maintenance yesterday? No. So what's actually happening? Water. That's it. It all really comes down to water in all its different forms. I know we like to have these long lifts, lists, but it really is fluid. It's water. Water can shift a lot due to things like stress, from stress or poor sleep, uh, higher sodium intake. So you had the Chinese food or pizza last night, training fatigue and muscle inflammation, right? Draws in fluid into your muscles, changes in your step count, even, where you are in your menstrual cycle, if you're a woman, carb intake, if you've been low carb, now you're eating more carbs or you're going from fat loss to maintenance. If you started taking creatine, if you're digesting less or more and there's more or less food in your gut, so many things. And it all comes down to water. And these things can swing your scale weight by multiple pounds in a single day. This is the tough thing. None of that is fat, and yet we're trying to use the scale to measure fat along with some other things. So, what do you do instead? Well, from a weight perspective, you've got to look at some sort of trend. And where a lot of people get this wrong is they'll take individual data points, like every Sunday they weigh themselves. That's not a trend that is, I'll say, responsive enough to give you good data. In fact, that could be even more misleading because every Sunday maybe a high point or a low point. What if you're slowly losing fat over time? But this Sunday it's a low point, and next Sunday is a high point. It looks like you gained weight. It's the opposite of what's actually happening fat-wise, even though that is reality of hey, you've got some more fluid in your body next Sunday, so you look heavier, but you're not really, but you don't actually have more body fat. So this is where an app like Macrofactor uses a 20-day exponential moving average. And this is a publicly known, you know, equation. It's it's super simple. I like moving averages, and I especially like this version of it. This is over three weeks. It's exponential, meaning the most recent data points matter the most. So it takes your daily weights, it smooths them out. You could see the actual direction and the pressure, I like to say, over time. And by pressure, it means, again, whatever's happening most recently gets more weight, pun intended, I guess. Rather than getting whipped around by every daily number, you're looking at that over time. So if you're using that app, or if you're using my app fitness lab, I basically steal the same concept for exponential moving average. In fact, here, this might be frustrating for some folks using the app. In the first 20 days, I've designed the app to be smart enough not to even tell you a number yet because it can't be relied upon. It'll say, hey, good job entering your weight. We're still processing your signal weight. It's what I call it, signal weight. And so stick around. After 20 days, we're gonna have good data to work from, which kind of reinforces the patient part of this process, the fact that this takes time. And if you're too impatient to do that, if you're trying to just lose weight quickly, go ahead, lose water weight, cut carbs. You're not losing any fat, you're not improving your body composition. So what's the point, right? If you want to do this the right way, you've gotta, you've gotta take a trend. Now, if you're not using an app, you could do this yourself on a spreadsheet, or you can take just even a regular moving average over time. I would still take at least, let's say, seven to 10 days worth of weights in a row and average them at least, and then compare that to the ongoing average, and that's the signal in the noise. That's why I call it signal weight, by the way. And when I work with clients, I'm always telling them, hey, the scale's data, it's not a verdict, it's information you're collecting collecting, just like your training log or your food log. You don't emotionally react to how many grams of protein you ate yesterday, do you? I mean, usually not, right? Like, okay, I ate this many grams of protein. It's not like, I only ate 20 grams of protein. It's like just data. You you just note it and then you adjust if needed, and you treat the scale the same way. Now, why does this matter so much? Because when people make emotional decisions based on anything, but especially based on a weigh-in on the scale, they do things that hurt their progress. Then they're they cut calories impulsively, they add in more unnecessary, stressful movement like running or cardio like that. They jump to another diet because this one isn't working. And all of that creates instability in your system. And when I work with clients, this is tough because in the first few weeks, you know, I'm promising some sort of results if you do the work, right? Which is which you will get. The problem is that result doesn't come immediately. And sometimes individual markers like scale weight can give you the impression of the opposite happening. We have to kind of talk off the ledge and use these numbers. And as an engineer, I think of metabolism like a control system. If you keep jerking the inputs around based on this short-term noise, the system's never gonna get stable. You need consistent inputs over time. It's the same thing with your strength training. You're not gonna get jacked in a week, right? It takes time. You make small deliberate adjustments based on the data and you look at the data as just that. Hey, information. So here's your action for this one. For the next two weeks, I want you to weigh yourself every day at the same time under the same conditions. That's usually in the morning, after you use the bathroom, before you eat or drink, and try your best. Okay, I know it's easier said than done. Try your best to not emotionally react to the individual number and just record it. Okay, if you're using Fitness Lab, you do that in the morning metric log. If you use another app, they have a different way to record it, or you can just record it on your own. At the end of the week, I want you to calculate the average and compare it to the previous week. Okay, so again, we're doing it at least two weeks. So you have two kind of after the after seven days, you have like a seven-day moving average, if you will. And then seven days after that, you have a new seven-day moving average. See what the difference is. And you'll see that they're not, they're probably not that much different, to be honest, because your weight's not going to change that much in two weeks unless you're drastically off with your you know energy balance. All right, so that's trap number one, reacting to scale noise instead of waiting for the signal. Trap number two is actually connected to this because it's often what happens when people do react emotionally. All right. So it's important. We're like, okay, let's say we do react emotionally, then what? Well, trap number two is overcorrecting with restriction instead of adjusting the system. And this again, I see constantly because it's it's it's a sneaky thing because you feel like you're being disciplined and taking control and doing something to solve a problem, right? It's this false sense of productivity. When progress slows down or stalls, our immediate instinct is that I need to do more. I need to cut the calories more. I need to cut one of my macros, but usually carbs, I need to fast longer, I need to eat cleaner, quote unquote. Try to add even more steps when you're already exhausted, jumping to a new program or new diet, because this one is clearly not working. And I get it, I get it. When you're not seeing results, doing more feels like the logical answer. You're checking a box, you're changing something, you're solving a problem. But that is the trap because doing more often destabilizes that system rather than optimizing it. So that now you can see why it's kind of connected to the first trap. I want to explain what I mean. When you aggressively cut calories beyond what's sustainable, which many of you are doing, and you might be in that prop mode right now, especially with the holidays. You're like, I need to cut or I need to be on a diet. A few things happen when you cut calories beyond what's sustainable. Your training quality drops off a cliff because you don't have the fuel to push hard. Your neat, that's non-exercise activity thermogenesis, basically, all the movement you do outside the gym goes down because your body conserves energy. Your hunger hormones get off track and they go haywire. You start to get hungry, cravings, starving. Your recovery tanks. So then it's even harder next time to get into the gym. You might start losing muscle if now the calories are so low, you're not only training poorly, you're not getting enough protein, and it's a vicious cycle. The irony is that all of that can make your scale weight stall even more because your body's now more stressed holding onto water, and you've compromised the very things that drive fat loss in the first place. So for all of you reaching out to me on Instagram or email who are like, hey, I've cut calories, I'm eating as little as I can and I'm still not losing weight. There's a problem behind that that's not about the calories. It's probably about the approach. You're probably doing too much and doing too much of the wrong things, and now you've destabilized and stressed the heck out of your system. Because your body's adaptive. That's the important thing here. It's not a fixed machine. It's adaptive. It is not a simple input-output. When you push too hard in one direction, it pushes back. So what you have to do instead for this trap is make small, measured, very boring adjustments. Don't be a hero. And this is where sometimes, again, my clients they get frustrated because they're like, that's all you want me to change that one thing, but I want to do more. I need to do more of this, more that, more that. And actually, the coaching part comes into saying, let's not do those because you've done that in the past. You see how well that worked for you. Let's do this very deliberately. And it's kind of like in Fitness Lab and my app. I had people, you know, sign up, and then literally in one day the cancer, like, oh, this is not, this is not doing for me what I expect. Well, yeah, it's been one day. Like that's the whole point, is you have to have the patience to do the daily boring things that are really going to pay off well. And that's the point of this trap. If fat loss has stalled, let's say for two or three weeks, based on the trend weight we talked about in trap one, right? Not based on one weight in that you had that you popped two or three pounds, but based on the trend, then you look at the data and you make a small change. Maybe you do drop calories. There's nothing wrong with dropping calories if you're in that sustainable range of a deficit. And many times you have to do that because your metabolism adapts a bit and things get a little tougher in terms of your deficit, tougher as in, you know, your body's not responding as well and you drop calories, maybe 100, 150 calories. Maybe you do add a little bit of walking in, an extra mile of walking, that walk after lunch or dinner that you weren't doing. You add those 2,000 steps in. Maybe you do look at whether protein is where it needs to be, because sometimes when you're in a deficit and calories are low, people let the protein slip. And really, you probably need more protein than when you're not in a deficit. And that alone can cause some issues, right? Because then you're more hungry, maybe you're not retaining as much muscle mass. The point is that one variable at a time, a small magnitude of change, and then you wait and see what happens over another, say, two to three weeks before you make another adjustment. So if you're out there saying, I'm gonna start creatine, I'm gonna start supplements, I'm gonna change my training, I'm gonna increase my protein, I'm gonna go in a deficit, stop right there. You're going to hit an issue. You're going to run into a wall because you're going to have no idea what's causing what, and you're going to definitely get frustrated. A good, a good metaphor here for those of you who play guitar, for example. I don't play guitar, but I can still relate to this. It's like tuning a guitar. You ever hear someone who's like ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding? They're trying to tune the guitar, right? You don't, they they turn the little tuning pegs at the top. You don't crank it all the way around, right? You make that a little bit adjustment, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, to try to get into tune. And I would think of that as your body. You're just trying to make that slight adjustment without snapping the string, right? To get in tune. I don't know if that helps you guys, but there's another version of this same trap that I did want to mention, which is the plan hopping mentality. Any kind of plan or program, right? You're on a program for three weeks. Maybe it's your training program, maybe it's a nutrition or a lifestyle plan, maybe it's using my app, whatever. And you don't see these dramatic results. And you're like, the program doesn't work. So then you switch to a different program. Three weeks later, same thing, switch again. And maybe it's not three weeks, maybe it's three months, maybe it's one month. It doesn't matter. You haven't made those minor adjustments along the way to actually make sure it really works. And you're not giving it time, time. Okay. I remember a South Park episode from years ago where Cartman was in the hospital and his mom asked the doctor what's wrong. He said, He just needs more time. She's like, Yeah, but what's wrong? He needs more time. He needs a time transplant. I thought that was hilarious. So sometimes you need a time transplant to make sure you're giving it time to work because the physiological adaptation, that's your body changing. It takes time. Fat loss takes time. Every time you switch, you're essentially restarting the clock. So a good rule is as follows commit to a structured approach for at least eight to 12 weeks before making major changes. How's that? Eight to 12 weeks. I just gave you a protocol. And within that time frame is where you make those little adjustments as needed. That's important, based on data. You're not doing it for the whim or the heck of it. You're doing it because data tells you it's worth experimenting. And you don't know for sure that that change is going to do what you expect. You might have a certain level of confidence because let's say you listen to wits and weights, or you're using my app or working with a coach, or you just uh have learned enough about this, but you're not gonna blow up the whole approach because you're impatient, right? Small, measurable, boring adjustments are always gonna beat these drastic swings every time. That's how you work with your body being so nuanced and adaptive instead of fighting against it. All right, before we get to trap number three, which might be the most important one, because it's the thing most people are underestimating. I want to mention a free resource that ties directly into what we've been talking about. I love to give free things away all the time. I have lots of fun, helpful guides. If you're trying to lose fat, if you want a structured starting point, if you're like, I don't even know where to start, right? I don't want one of Philip's like huge 30-page guides that give you the whole thing. I just want to know where to start. I have a free guide I recently created called the 14-day rapid start fat loss guide. Notice this is not rapid fat loss. This is a rapid start fat loss guide. And it simply gets you started. It walks you through how to set up your nutrition and training for effective fat loss within a 14-day window to get you going with this approach, without the extreme restriction and all that other nonsense out there. The very uh subtle, nuanced, patient but effective approach. Go to witsandweights.com slash fat loss. That's witsandweights.com slash fat loss or click the link in the show notes to grab it. It's free. It's free. It'll give you a clear starting framework so you're not guessing, you're not doing more than you need to. Again, that's witsandweights.com slash fat loss. All right, so we've covered reacting to scale noise and overcorrecting with restriction. Now let's talk about the trap that I think is the most underdiscussed in the mainstream end of year, like let's finish the year strong type content. And it has to do with where you're putting your effort. So trap number three is treating strength training as optional instead of the central driver of fat loss. Now, if I've I'm losing you already because you listen and you lift and you lift all the time, you are far ahead of the vast majority of people. You still may need to hear this message. If you're listening and you don't lift weights regularly or consistently, you're not doing it in a way that you feel is giving you results, listen up. What most people believe fat loss requires, or let me take that back. Most people think in terms of weight loss, losing weight. I don't do that. I think I like to talk about fat loss because what are you trying to do? Drop body fat. You're not trying to drop muscle too, are you? No, you're trying to drop body fat and get leaner and healthier, not just get skinnier and weaker and lose muscle. So a lot of people believe you need diet, cardio, willpower, and maybe some supplements. Notice in that list is not strength training for a lot of people, again, a lot of people out there. That is often an afterthought. I see it in articles. I see it when people talk about heart health. I see it on commercials for weight loss medications. They may not even mention it, or they'll say, like, I'm doing everything. I'm in the gym. I'm hitting it hard in the gym. And they'll mention that one time. And you're like, what are they actually doing in the gym? And I'm not saying that they don't need the medication. It's just always an afterthought. It's something you do if you have extra time, right? It's like the phrase when see, well, walking is enough. At least get moving, right? At least get moving. Walking should be enough. No, it's not. No, it's not. And a lot of people will think, okay, I need to go strength training because I want to bulk up or tone up or get muscular. It's not about that either. Or I'm going to wait till I've lost the weight, then I'm going to start strength training. All of that, that belief is the big trap here because strength training is not a supporting element of fat loss. It is the primary metabolic lever of fat loss. Period. You could be deficient on protein, even carbs. You can be not walking very much. You could have a lot of stuff not going super well. But if strength training is in there, that is the massive anchor for fat loss. And you can still be moderately successful, even if all those other things are suboptimal. But if you're not strength training, all those things can be optimal and you're not going to lose fat. That's my point. You're going to lose muscle. You're just not going to lose fat. You have to be strength training. And it's not just about muscle and fat loss, it's metabolism and metabolic health. And if you're not treating it that way, you're leaving a massive amount of progress on the table. It affects your health span, your lifespan, your mind span, all of it for the rest of your life. Let me explain why. Just let's let's revisit this together, guys. When you lose weight without strength training, a significant portion of that weight is going to come from muscle. Your body simply doesn't need it because you're not using it. You might see the scale go down, but you end up softer, weaker, more frail with a slower metabolism than when you start it. Skinny fat is a term, you may not like it, but sometimes called that, or you're lighter on the scale, but you're not leaner, you're not healthier. When you strength train while losing weight, you send the signal to your body, hey, this muscle is important, don't break it down for energy. Go after the fat stores instead. That's what it does. And then your body listens. You preserve and even potentially build muscle while losing fat. If you're newer to this, that's body recomposition, which means you end up looking like you've transformed, which is what we all want, rather than just shrinking. But as I've alluded to several times, the benefits go far beyond just preserving muscle during a diet because muscle tissue, it's metabolically active. The more you have, the higher your resting metabolic rate. So that's pretty cool. You burn a few more calories just existing, and you're probably gonna be able to carry more scale weight at the end of the day and still be lean, and that burns more calories. You also burn more calories because you're training more and you're using your muscle and you're moving all day or most of the day. Over time, this is gonna make fat loss even easier and allow you to eat more food while staying lean. It's kind of like having your cake and making it and eating it and having it again too. I don't know if that makes any sense. It's not about the cake, it's a metaphor, guys. Okay. Muscle also improves insulin sensitivity, which is a hot topic these days, probably for good reason. It means your body handles carbohydrates better. It stabilizes your appetite hormones, your hunger hormones. It shapes your physique in ways that cardio never will, never, never, never will. Don't think that running is a thing that makes you lean and muscular or toned or whatever. It doesn't. The definition in your arms, the curves of your shoulders, those delt caps, the strength in your legs, that defined back. None of that comes from running. Strength training also enables you to eat more food during fat loss and then afterward during maintenance, especially. Some people are surprised at how much food they can eat now. In fact, they feel like they have to eat more food than they really want. And there's tricks for that. It's called calorie density, because you have more muscle driving your metabolism and you don't have to live on a lighter metabolism like you used to. Now, I'm not saying it's gonna go up by hundreds and hundreds of calories necessarily, but you should be able to feel like a normal human being when it comes to your food and not be dieting most of the year. Now, a lot of you have these misconceptions or quotes in your head, like I don't want to get bulky or just try to lose fat first, then I'll lift. I want to address both of those especially. Okay, the first one, you're not gonna actually accidentally get bulky, guys and ladies. Building significant muscle takes years of dedicated training. Eating in a surplus, many of those years, optimal programming, somewhat, right? But it's really the time put into it. It doesn't happen by accident, especially not for women, and especially not while you're constantly dieting. What will happen is you're going to look tighter, more defined. You're gonna look stronger when you add muscle. That's it. And I always joke that as a man with a decent amount of testosterone in my 40s, I have a very, very hard time trying to quote unquote bulk up. Second is waiting until you've lost weight to start lifting. And that is totally backward. Like lifting should be number one. So I still hear health professionals, a lot of this is in the wellness space, people that aren't really experts on strength and lifting. Maybe they don't even do it themselves as much as they should. And they they somehow imply that lifting isn't like the most important thing. Or, you know, you could do Pilates or you could do yoga. It's not true. The lifting is what ensures that you lose fat and not muscle. It's what shapes the body you're revealing as you get leaner. And if you wait, you're just gonna end up at your goal weight looking nothing like you imagined because you lost the muscle, as we've said several times already. Now, I would go so far as to say that for people over 40, and you know, that's not a magic number. It's just around the age when, you know, things start to go downhill for people. And so honestly, for anyone who wants sustainable results, strength training is the single highest ROI that's return on investment. It's the highest return activity you can do for your body. Far higher than cardio. In fact, cardio could have a negative return in some cases, far higher than any diet trick, even though nutrition and calorie balance does control how much fat you're storing. Still, I would say strength training is a higher return than anything. Definitely higher than any supplement. Supplements are way down there for return. So if you're only doing two or three things for your health and body composition, strength training should be one of them. Full stop. And you don't have to live in the gym to see these benefits. Three days a week, even two if you have to, I would say three is a good minimum. Just focused, progressive resistance training. Right? The main lifts, it could be a home gym, it could be, you know, you're going to the gym. It doesn't matter. I just mean you don't have to live in the gym. You could do it with a fairly minimum effective program to build significant muscle and transform your physique, maybe three to four hours a week total. And compare that to the hours people seem to spend on cardio machines or obsessing over their diets. I think strength training is going to give you more return per hour invested than almost anything else in life you can do. And it will pay back financially, confidence-wise, career-wise, relationship-wise, everything else as well. Not to mention long-term health and longevity. So let's connect these three traps because they are all related. Trap one is about reacting emotionally to short-term data instead of making decisions based on trends. Trap two is about overcorrecting when you see a stall and making drastic changes that destabilize your progress. And trap three is about misallocating your effort, putting energy into cardio and diet hacks when the real lever is strength training. And when you fix all three, then you get a great system that works for you. You can collect data without the emotional attachment. You can make small, smart adjustments when needed. And then you can prioritize the very activity that builds the metabolic foundation for long-term. Leaness, that is how you finish 2025 strong and set yourself up for 2026. Now, before we wrap up, I want to leave you with one more thought that might reframe how you're thinking about all of this. Most people approach fat loss as something they need to survive. Like you're, it's a period of deprivation that you have to get through so that you can enjoy your life after it. Like a period of suffering. But what if it wasn't? What if fat loss is something that you use, that it's a very powerful tool? Think about it. A fat loss phase is a period where you're in a calorie deficit, your body's primed to tap into stored energy. And that is creating conditions for change. So the question is, what kind of change are you what you used to think of as suffering through? But in this case, we're going to reframe that. If you're just cutting calories and you're doing more cardio, the change is that you get smaller, probably weaker, and your metabolism adapts downward and probably doesn't come back until you, you know, do something different. If you're strength training, eating enough protein, managing your recovery, the change is different. Now you are, for lack of a better phrase, sculpting your body. You're revealing muscle that you've built. You're teaching your body to be efficient and strong. And fat loss becomes a tool for transformation instead of a period of restriction that you have to endure. And it doesn't have to be very long either. So when you approach it that way, the experience changes, right? It's not the white knuckling, it's not a quote unquote diet. I'm dieting, I have to be hungry, I have to be fatigued. No, you're still training hard, you're eating well, you're recovering, you're doing this in a moderate way, and you're watching your body change in ways that excite you and motivate you to keep going for the short period that it is. That's the mindset shift I want you to make heading into the end of the year. I don't necessarily want you to be doing a fat loss phase going into the end of the year. That's your call. But stop thinking about how much you have to take away and start thinking about what you are building. All right. So if you want help putting all this into practice with structured training, education, support, accountability, I really have two options for you. I'm gonna today talk just talk about physique university for a second. That's the community-based program that we have. So people have been asking, what's the difference between the app and physique university? Well, Fitness Lab, the app is, you know, it's on your own, but it's a lot of support and prompting via AI, where it gives you your training, your nutrition support, it gives you daily activities, it gives you an AI coach to talk to, all of that. Whereas Physique University, what I'm talking about now, is community based, right? We have Coach Carol and I are in there responding to you, you know, human beings responding directly through not only the community itself, but also live coaching calls and workshops and challenges. We actually have a challenge starting December. 10th. I'll be talking about that more in the next few episodes. But it's a strong finished challenge to keep you accountable for the final hardest three weeks of the year. But if you're looking for some strength training templates or workout programs, tools to track your physique, you know, how much muscle am I building, how much fat am I losing? You want to reach out to other students going through the same process. You want to reach out to coaches and join live calls, plus check out some of our curriculum. That is what's in there to help you lose fat, lean out, get stronger, feel great, and put in place a sustainable system for you. So go to wits and weights.com slash physique and learn about it. I'm not saying you have to sign up. Go check it out. We've got a demo video there. We've got videos from other members. It explains everything. So I would just go check it out. Witsandweights.com slash physique. Link in the show notes. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that your body is capable of incredible transformation when you give it the right signals and time to respond. I'm Philip Pape and this is the Wits and Weights Podcast. I'll talk to you next time.
