The 26-Week Plan to Build Muscle and Lose Fat After 40 | Ep 453
Yet again, you're motivated to make a change. You've given yourself 6 months, you pick a program, cut calories, and go after it!
Then (inevitably) the whole thing falls apart about 1-2 months in (maybe even sooner).
Most people over 40 who want to lose fat and build muscle start with the wrong first step. They jump straight into a calorie deficit before they even know what their body is doing.
This episode lays out a complete 26-week body recomp roadmap with three phases that build on each other:
Stop Guessing
Eat More. Lift Heavy.
Trust Yourself
You'll hear why the first 7 weeks should involve almost zero changes to your diet, how to read your own metabolic data so you stop relying on guesses, and the one skill most people never develop that determines whether results actually stick for the long term.
If you've been lifting and tracking but your body still doesn't reflect the work, THIS is the plan to follow.
Start the Eat More Lift Heavy program and follow this exact 26-week roadmap with the help of two coaches, a training program matched to your unique situation, monthly live coaching calls, and a community built for accountability. Founder pricing locks in through March 29: eatmoreliftheavy.com
Timestamps
0:00 - Why most 6-month transformation plans fail
3:30 - The house-building analogy for body composition
5:42 - Undereating, protein, and hormonal challenges
8:31 - Three phases: Stop Guessing, Eat More, Trust Yourself
10:10 - Phase 1: tracking, training, and building awareness
13:12 - Baseline measurements and biofeedback tracking
14:15 - The fear of eating more after chronic restriction
16:40 - The Phase 1 milestone and reading your data
19:30 - Phase 2: making decisions with real numbers
20:48 - Weekend eating, social situations, and alcohol
24:58 - Phase 3: building independence after 40
27:29 - Teaching yourself and hormonal awareness
30:10 - Troubleshooting without a coach
32:43 - 60-second protein audit for your gap meal
Episode Resources
Download MacroFactor (use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for a free two-week trial) to track your actual metabolic rate (and get accurate calorie and macro targets)
Join Eat More Lift Heavy before pricing goes up on March 30
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Philip Pape: 00:00
If you've been saying, I will give myself six months to really change my body, and you're planning to just pick a workout plan, cut some calories, and hope that it sticks, I want to be honest with you. That approach has about a six-week shelf life. Today I'm walking you through a 26-week plan. That's six months to build muscle and lose fat after 40, broken into three phases that build on each other. You'll learn why the first seven weeks should involve almost no changes to your diet, what actually happens when you start eating more instead of less, and the specific skill that determines whether your results last or just evaporate the moment you stop following a plan. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and this episode is coming out just a few days before the start of spring. A lot of you are thinking about the next six months. Maybe you want to look different by fall, maybe you want to feel strong and lean and confident at the beach this summer. Maybe you have a wedding to go to, or maybe you just want to feel better in your own clothes. And if you're over 40 and you've been lifting for a while, but your body doesn't quite reflect all that work that you've been putting in, I think this episode is a good roadmap to plan out the next six months. So I'm gonna walk you through a complete 26-week plan. 26 is weeks is exactly half a year from start to finish. I'm not gonna give you a list of exercises. I'm not gonna help you calculate macros. I'm talking about the process, the phases that build the right skills in the right order, so that by the end of the six months, you know how to manage your own body composition without needing someone to tell you what to do. Because you guys, you probably like this podcast, or maybe you just found it and you can binge all the information you want. But the real goal here is to actually make the change, to take the action to make the change. And then stick around to the very end because after the main episode wraps up, I'm gonna share a 60-second protein audit that you can do tonight at dinner. It's the simple, single, fastest way to find out if protein distribution is the bottleneck holding back your results. So today you're gonna learn why the very first phase, where you change almost nothing, I know it sounds counterintuitive, is the most important phase of any transformation. Then you're gonna get a specific week-by-week structure for all 26 weeks across the phases. And I'll show you one diagnostic skill that separates people who maintain their results, right? The 5% of people who maintain their results from the 95% of people who just bounce back and do it all over again. All right. So, first of all, why we have to understand why things don't work for a lot of people. What does a typical six-month transformation look like for most people, especially over 40, and just doesn't work? And I'm gonna tell you because I've coached hundreds of clients through this situation and I see what has happened and burned them in the past, and I don't want that to happen to you. It usually starts with what? Motivation, the new year, right? New Year's resolution, or maybe it's a birthday, or maybe a photo that you see of yourself and you're like, ugh, I gotta, I gotta change. Like this is the time, right? Or maybe you finally rated that candy drawer one last time, raising my hand here, and like I've got to change things. And then your plan looks something like this. I'm gonna find a workout program, I'm gonna get some sort of calorie tracker or app, I'm gonna go ahead and, you know, cut some calories, set a deficit, or maybe I'm gonna eat a certain diet, right? Maybe I'm gonna go cut carbs or go keto or something like that. And I'm going to get more steps. I'm gonna work out, you know, three, four, five days a week, and then I'm going to just just push through. I'm gonna push through as long as I can. And that's how I used to do things. I mean, leading up to my wedding way back in 2006, I did this weird diet with a restricted list of foods, and I was starving all the time and it felt miserable. But I had this date, I had this wedding, and so it was very, very uh extrinsically motivating. And I pushed through it, but it was miserable. And of course, what happened? I gained everything back afterward, starting with the honeymoon. So when this happens, right, the first week is great. You're fired up. Maybe you're meal prepping, you go to the grocery store and get some new healthy foods. Maybe you're hitting the gym, you know, all three or four days that week, you know, you go in regularly, you're good. Maybe week two, you're still solid and you know, you're getting this going. Like, yeah, I've got this. Week three, you miss a day, you know, schedule gets in the way, you feel guilty about it. Maybe you have a, you know, somebody invites you out to dinner, or you just, you know, you have some alcohol, whatever, and things start to fall off. Week four, you're looking at the scale and it hasn't moved like you expected, or then it or it moved, but it bounced back up, and now you're confused. You're like, no, maybe this isn't working by week six. You've you're done with your willpower, the willpower is gone. And now you start making all of those little exceptions where okay, I'm not gonna track today because of this, or I'm gonna go, my my workout's gonna be shorter today, or I need to skip my workout today, but I'll make it up for for tomorrow. You know what I'm talking about. It's these little excuses we make to ourselves that just start to build up like a thousand little cuts. And then by month three, what happens? You're back where you started. Except now you're also frustrated and a little more convinced that your body doesn't respond the way it used to and that you can't do this. Does that sound familiar? I hope I'm hitting you really hard where you recognize this pattern in yourself because I see it a lot and I used to be this. Okay, I used to be this. It's not, it's not you. It's not by you, I mean it's just not, it's not discipline, working harder, doing more, all of that, right? You didn't fail because you're lazy. It's not because you lack motivation, it's because of the approach, and it actually is skipping the most important part of any transformation. I want you
Philip Pape: 05:42
to think of it like building a house. Okay, analogies are really helpful here. All right. Most plans for transformation, and I know this because people come to me having worked with a coach, gotten a result, and then they go right back to where they were before. So even working with a coach or with a structured program isn't always enough, right? It's got to be uh long-lasting after that. Most transformation plans, it's like if you were building a house, it's like they gave you cans of paint and they gave you the furniture, right? And that's like the calorie deficit and the workout plan. But there's actually no foundation. Like you literally are putting a plot of land on some dirt, and you have a pan of a can of paint and a couch. Okay. And here we go, right? And you never understand, you know, how much you're actually eating or why you're eating it or how your body is responding to your food and your training and what your stress and sleep look like or what your actual metabolic expenditure is. I can't tell you how many programs people never really learned their metabolism. I don't understand that. If you go through six months with a coach, how did you never really know your metabolism? I don't understand it. And you could say, well, because I'm not calorie counting. Well, yeah, but if you don't have any understanding at all, how can you make any adjustments that make sense with any level of precision? Right. And then every decision you make is based on guesses. Half the people I've worked with come into me thinking that they are overeating. And it's understandable why, right? Because we gain weight over many years of a certain lifestyle and we think it's simply because of overconsumption. Or people like to simplify it. Hey, it's just calorie balance, just calories in, calories out. That's the obesity problem. But a lot of people are actually undereating and not necessarily calories per se, but it is calories for a lot of people. But it's also protein, right? Nearly 50% of people cite protein as their number one struggle, not because they don't know it matters. They hear it all the time, like too much on podcasts, but because they haven't figured out how to hit it across full-day meals. And that's a very simple problem solution set. But yet if you haven't solved that problem, it's going to cascade into all the other problems that you also haven't solved. About half of people say they have problems with their hormones, especially peri postmenopausal women, a huge demographic that we speak to on this podcast, especially now that I see how impactful it is and how frustrating it is that affects your nutrition and training. So if you don't account for those variables, then you're just fighting everything from day one. So I think the hidden flaw in the advice to like you just need to be in a calorie deficit and you just need to train the right way, isn't the deficit or the training. It is the sequence of how you put those skills in place so that they work for you and not executing before you understand the system you're trying to change, not taking action on a lack of a plan, if that makes sense.
Philip Pape: 08:31
So I think the fix is a phased approach. We've talked about periodization in the past. We've talked about phases and structure. We're gonna go over that today. And I'm gonna split it into three phases over 26 weeks with a very specific progression. And I've given them names. They're called Stop Guessing, Eat More Lift Heavy, and Trust Yourself. Okay, stop guessing, eat more lift heavy, which yes is also the name of our program that walks you through all of this and trust yourself. So I'm gonna walk through each one. And by the way, if you do want to go check out that program, which opens on March 30th, just go to eatmore liftheavy.com. That's eatmoriftheavy.com and you can learn all about it there. We've got lots of cool information available for you to check out. But let's walk you through this today. All right, phase one is stop guessing. This is the first seven weeks. This is the phase that feels the most counterintuitive because the goal is not to change your body, the goal is to understand your body. All right. And I know you want to start losing fat immediately, or many of you use the term lose weight, which if you're new to the podcast, we differentiate between weight loss and fat loss. Fat loss is really what you want. You want to lose fat and hold on to muscle. You don't want to just lose muscle and fat. Everybody wants to lose fat. Most people come into the program, even if they want to build muscle, they also want to lose fat. But if you start a calorie deficit in week one before you actually know what your calorie needs are, then you're guessing. And guessing is probably why the last plan didn't work. Even if you were working with a coach who is who you were dependent on to tell you what to do, but you were still guessing as to your own data of what to do. So here's what the first seven weeks look
Philip Pape: 10:10
like. Week one is where you start setting things up just for tracking. You start tracking your food and weight every day. Now, I would recommend using Macro Factor. MacroFactor is the only app on the market still, I'm surprised about this, but it's the only app that calculates your metabolism, your daily expenditure based on your food and weight. All the other apps, MacroFactor, I mean MyFitnessPal, Chronometer, Lose It, they're trackers, but they don't calculate with an algorithm your metabolic needs to give you the right targets. So then you're not actually trying to hit the right targets. You're using a calculator, and that's not good enough. That can be off by hundreds of calories. So start tracking your food and weight every day and ideally use a tool like MacroFactor. Use my code WITS and Waights, all one word, to get a two-week free trial. You don't have to. That would support the podcast. You don't have to, but it's wits and weights all one word. Download MacroFactor from your app store. And what that'll let you do when you just start logging, don't worry about the target yet. Just start logging. You're gonna see what's happening. What are you eating? How much are you eating? How much protein? How does your weight fluctuate day to day? Oh wow, it goes up and down, you know, three pounds some days. You're building a measurement system, and that system needs about six weeks of consistent data before you can get an accurate picture of your true calorie expenditure. And some people will say, well, it's only two to three weeks, but really, you know, at least a month to six weeks before it's really dialed in. And then you also need training programs. So to me, it's it's the food and weight side, and then the training side are the two big buckets. All right. So the food, the tracking food that we just talked about, that's just tracking, that should take you three to five minutes a day. You're not changing anything. You're just tracking three to five minutes a day. That's it. Super, super easy. For training, you gotta be careful here, right? There are a ton of things online. There's a lot of free programs online, there's apps that have free programs, and that's cool, but you can't just pick a random program. You have to have one that's matched, first of all, to you know what will work for you to actually show up and do it regularly. So that's how many days a week you can realistically train. If you want to train four, but really you're only gonna get in three on most weeks, go for three. Your equipment. So do you have a well-equipped home gym or not? Most people don't, although that's a great aspirational goal. But if you don't, you're probably gonna go to a commercial gym in the area that's within a short driving distance so that you make sure you get to it. But it has to have enough equipment to get the job done. There's also your experience level, and there's of course your goal. A lot of people over 40, especially, are running programs that are not designed for them for one reason or another, having to do with their joint health or the movement patterns or the strength levels or whatever, or even the equipment. So if you are, you know, a woman who is training three days a week and you have a barbell in a rack, your program is gonna look different from someone training five days a week with a full commercial gym setup, for example, right? All right, so that's that sounds like a lot for week one, but really all it is is you're starting tracking food and weight and you're identifying how you're gonna train, getting a training program. Okay. Week
Philip Pape: 13:12
two is now you're gonna take baseline measurements. So you don't even do that in week one, just get things set up. Week two, you're gonna take measurements like you could take photos, you could take some circumference measurements, you can start tracking biofeedback, things like sleep, energy, stress recovery. We have a very simple tracker in Eat More Lift Heavy that does this all in one place once a week. Yeah, again, it takes you five minutes. So it takes you five minutes on a Sunday, you're done. And this data is going to become incredibly valuable in phase two when we start making decisions, but only if you have a baseline to compare against. I mean, wouldn't it be great to see your trend for your sleep and your stress and your mood and your energy and your recovery and your hunger, and then know where the dials are, where the bottlenecks are, that is really, really powerful. We're able to coach people tremendously well when we have that kind of data. All right, then week three is where things get interesting, and it's one of the most important weeks because this is where we tackle some of those initial fears that I know are in a lot of your heads, especially the fear of eating more.
Philip Pape: 14:15
Okay. If you're, for example, a woman over 40 who's been dieting on and off for years, maybe decades, this is genuinely a scary thought. Eating more food, right? Because you've you've been told your whole life that less food equals less body fat, or you know, you need to eat less, move more to lose weight. And I think that false belief is the single biggest barrier to changing your body composition right now. It's the single biggest fear I've seen. So in this week, you're gonna understand why people are not helped by this undereating. And it's a metabolic argument about chronic restriction having to do with a lower expenditure and metabolism over time. And there's a psychological case as well related to diet trauma, to food fear, the belief that eating more is gonna make you fat. And really what eating more looks like in practice. It's not cheap meals, it's not free-for-all, it's not just eating uninhibited, it's actually strategic. It's protein first, it's food volume and fiber first, it's nutrition, you know, quality and quality, quality and quantity coming together combined with the enjoyment of food as well. And we want to address this before making changes to your nutrition because if you skip that mindset piece, everything is gonna feel like a resistant, you know, like friction as you try to change your nutrition habits. And then the next few weeks of the first seven weeks, this is where you start to introduce some of the specifics. Nutritional foundations and meal timing, for example, protein. Protein is super, super important. How much protein you need per day, how much protein you should get per meal. You know, per day, we're gonna talk about the evidence-based target of 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight. And per meal, it's really more of a practical thing. And relative to when you're training and pre- and post-workout nutrition and just general distribution per your schedule. And then in the next few weeks, as you're setting all this up and establishing your baseline, you want to look at things like how many steps you're getting, what kind of movement you're doing outside the gym, your sleep, your stress, and then as you go along, how to read this biofeedback data that you've been collecting, right? So this is by weeks five and six, I would say you're starting to collect and learn about this data. And it's really not a lot that you're changing each week. You're just slowly putting the pieces together. And then now look, if I work with a one-on-one client, we're we're fast tracking this process a
Philip Pape: 16:40
little bit. But if you're doing this on your own, or if you're doing this as part of our eat more lift heavy program, where we want you to to, we want the habits to stick and to teach you the skill, then you you want to be methodical about it and do it the right way. And then week seven, now you get to the culminating milestone of your first big week. And this is you're gonna assess how your training's been going. You're going to look at the data of your biofeedback, your recovery, your food, and your expenditure and put it all together and say, what's been going on without me trying to change things. Without me trying to change things, what is my body doing? What is its, what are its tendencies? Okay. What is it telling me? What are the signals it's telling me? And then you're ready to go into phase two and set some targets based on actual data. That's what's at that, that's what's happening. And that's why we call this first phase stop guessing. Because now you're ready to stop guessing. So I know seven weeks sounds like a long time to just set things up, but you can tell there's actually a lot of little pieces in here. And every client I've coached who goes through this tells me the same thing. Like, I wish I had done that in the past. As frustrating as it first seemed, because it seemed like I wasn't doing anything. I actually, it was actually the most powerful thing I've ever done. Because for the first time, I understand my body and I know what to do now. I've got confidence. Boom, huge.
Philip Pape: 18:01
Now, everything I just described, this phased approach, the week by week structure, building this foundation before making changes, that is exactly what Eat More Lift Heavy is designed to do. I am really proud of this. This is a new 26-week coaching program that launches March 30th in just a few days. You get a phased program, an experience, I like to call it, with one focus per week. You get a training program matched your situation from week one. There are monthly live coaching calls with me and Coach Carol, and there's a community where you get questions answered. And so it's a really powerful way to combine your training and nutrition needs and how to build those skills. It combines both. Eat more lift heavy gives you both coached together because they are not separate things. It's very hard to take a training thing over here and a nutrition over here and smoosh them together. These work together with a defined endpoint of 26 weeks where you have the skills now to manage your own physique. That is the goal. And if you're a woman over 40 who lifts and is tracking, but you're not seeing results, this is gonna help you get those results finally and have the skills to keep them. So you don't go afterward and say, oh, I worked at Philip and now I've gained all the weight back. That's not gonna happen. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. We have what's called founders pricing. If you're listening to this podcast, available through March 29th, and it locks in permanently as long as you stay enrolled. Go to eatmorliftheavy.com. All right, let's get to phase two. Phase two is where the real work happens, I'll call it eat more lift heavy. This is weeks roughly eight through eighteen, so that's 11 weeks. And by real work, I don't mean suffering or being miserable. I mean this is where you make decisions with your data and you learn to read the signals your body is sending you. So by the beginning of this week, your data is somewhat dialed in and somewhat consistent. And I say somewhat because it'll never be perfect, and that's fine. So for example, if you're using macrofactor, your expenditure should be very well known at this point because it's been learning your metabolism for seven weeks. And now you could know is it going up, down, is it stable? And how many calories can I work from for a fat loss phase? Right. So if you're in a fat loss phase and your expenditure is relatively stable or it's starting to decline slowly, you know, we would expect that, right? We expect a little bit of metabolic adaptation, but you need to start from the right baseline to begin with. And then you can decide later on, do I need a diet break, this and that, all the decisions you have to make. So you're no longer flying blind because you have the starting data. And then as you move into the next few weeks of this phase, there's some different things that unlock. All right. So if we were to tie it to the way we designed our program, if you're doing this on your own, let's say, week nine is going to try is going to tackle
Philip Pape: 20:48
things like weekend and social eating because that is what trips up roughly 40% of people. So what we do in this program is we start from the biggest hitter problems and we work our way down the list and unlock them for you so you can deal with all the issues life throws at you. So things like alcohol, eating on the weekends, going out. And the fix here is simpler than most people expect, and it has to do with structure and planning. You don't want to make decisions when your willpower is low. You want to make them when it's high. Well, where when's the willpower low? Well, when you go to eat at that restaurant, you're all excited, the passions are high, the emotions are high, the hunger is high. You're gonna make the worst decisions at that point. So the act of planning actually changes the outcome because it shifts you from reactive to intentional to when you have the most willpower, which is earlier in the week. Earlier in the week. All right. Now, in our program, we also talk about alcohol and the research about its effects on fat loss and recovery and things like that. It's a separate little piece that's important. But, you know, the step one here is to plan ahead for whatever you're doing. This is a very important thing. All right, then you get to week 10, and now you have eight weeks of training data, eight plus weeks of training
Philip Pape: 21:56
data. This is usually a good time to diagnose your training. Are your lifts stall? You have recovery issues. How does the volume look? How does the intensity look? Is the program right for you? This is a great time to decide. Do you need to switch your training whole in what am I trying to say? Switch the whole training program or just make adjustments, right? And then we're gonna tick through the next few weeks pretty quickly. So week 11, we're gonna go deeper into protein because most people at this point, they've now truly understood what they're able to hit and what they're not able to hit. And now you can build a fix for all the meals that fall short and get you to where you need to be consistently. Weeks 12 through 16 are really about biofeedback pattern analysis, adjusting your program, you know, continuing to adjust your program, planning for phase transitions. So, like what are you gonna do when your fat loss phase is done in a moment, you know, in a few weeks? How are you gonna come out of that? How are you gonna deal with plateaus? What about supplements, right? So notice that we didn't try to solve all this in week one. What I'm saying here is that as you go, each of these things unlock in the right priority. Like supplements, I don't even like to deal with them until you're maybe 10 or 12 weeks in, because by then you'll understand where some of the deficiencies might be. You might even have some lab work. You might find that you know energy is a problem, but you've solved everything else. So now it could come down to like a sub a nutrient deficiency, maybe you're low in magnesium or something like that, and so on, right? So you've got all of this data pretty mature by now. You've got things like photo before and afters to see and motivate you as you go. You see the change in your trend weight probably having moved significantly at this point, or you know, at least meaningfully. You've also collected physique data to tell you whether you're building muscle and losing fat and body recomping, right? So weeks 12 through 16 are the sweet spot for that. And within that is, I mentioned, a point where you need to know: should I change phases? What do I do when I change phases? Should I keep cutting? Should I switch to maintenance? Should I start a recovery diet? Should I take a diet break? Should I switch how I distribute my calories? Again, notice these are advanced things that come later on. Once you see how things are moving for you, don't you do these from step one. And so this decision-making framework is methodical and it's based on your signals and your signs and your biofeedback. And if all this sounds very complicated and confusing, it's because we've thought about it over years with hundreds of clients and have broken it down to something that's actually doable and actionable. Okay. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com if you want to jump on the program to help you do that. This podcast episode is really just to lay it all out for you and let you decide, okay, is this something I want to try on my own? And then I could deep dive into Phillips' podcast and do it, or do I want to get some help doing it? All right. And then we get to the final couple weeks of this phase where we go a little bit deeper on training. Okay, we look at D loads, we look at block periodization, we look at
Philip Pape: 24:58
evaluating whether your program still fits your goals. We want to make you really autonomous when it comes to strength training. So you're not like tied or dependent on, say, a personal trainer or a coach. And then finally you get to your milestone for phase two, where you do a full review, you update your targets again, clear set of goals for the next and final phase. So let's do that. Phase three, the final phase is called trust yourself. This is weeks 19 through 26. And this also, I think, is very different from almost any other program because the goal here in these final eight weeks is independence. Independence and sustaining your results. By the end of this phase, you should be making most decisions about your nutrition and training on your own with decreasing reliance or dependence on a coach or program. And all the coaches listening to this are like, Philip, what are you doing to us? You know, we want to keep, we want to keep clients locked on forever. That's not the way I work. I actually want you to feel so independent and powerful that you can go coach this stuff yourself. But you know what usually happens is you then, if you have a more advanced goal, I'm here to help you do that as well if you'd like, right? That's that's that's an authentic, I'll say trust-based way to coach, in my opinion. So think about what you've built at this point. You've got five months of body weight data, biofeedback trends, training cycles with progression on your lifts. You know what your PRs are. You've probably gone through one phase transition at least. Well, definitely you went from the first phase to the second phase, you know, probably for maintenance of fat loss, for example. You know your expenditure, you know how your expenditure changes, you know your protein gaps, you've practiced eating around social situations and weekends, so many skills. You're super proud of yourself at this point. So now what do we want to do? Well, now we want to step it up one more level to the final bottlenecks and points of friction that people face. So, for example, week 19, we look at travel and disruption strategies, right? What happens when life gets in the way and you have vacation, business travel? How do you keep a minimum effective dose? How do you maintain protein without getting too obsessive at like restaurants and eating out? How do you get back on trap track when a trip throws you off? Right. And by the way, the answer to that one is you just start again. Like I'll just give you that answer. It's you start again. But a lot of this has to do with planning ahead for those types of situations. Week 20 is one of my favorite weeks. Uh, we call it in our program teaching yourself. It's an exercise. And what you do is you write out your current
Philip Pape: 27:29
approach, your system, your fitness, your training, all that, as if you were explaining it to a friend. Have you ever done that before? If you've never done that before, it's powerful. You're writing down your system, how you eat, how you train, how you make decisions. Kind of like into a little manual for yourself. And this exercise is going to reveal gaps because anything you can't articulate, especially you can't, especially if you can't explain why you do it, you don't quite understand or own it yet. There's still some mystery that we need to unlock so you truly, truly understand it. So I really love this one. Um, and you can do that exercise for yourself as well. The next week, we're getting up to week 21, we start to talk more about hormones. You're like, why don't we start talking about hormones at the beginning? Well, in our program, we will deal with hormones early if they are relevant to you individually. But in general, this is one of those more advanced things where I say, look, get the basics in place, do it for these, you know, two to four months, right? Get through this second phase and then see what's left and see what you have to deal with from a hormone perspective. If you're in peri or postmenopause, now you've got five months of data showing how your cycle and hormonal shifts are affecting things independent of the lifestyle changes because you've already made those. So now, how exactly are hormones affecting your weight and your energy, your recovery, et cetera? And now you can see the patterns and make those tactical adjustments. And that might be, you know, seeking out hormone therapy or some other form of treatment or, you know, therapy that you might need or supplementation. All right, then we get to weeks 22 and 23. And this is where we talk about maintaining your maintenance and using long-term periodization. So these are skills that really coaches learn, people into nutrition science like myself learned. And a lot of, I'll say, people doing this for themselves don't think too much about this stuff, I'll be honest. But they're very important skills. Most people are jumping from one program to the next. But what's important is how do you transition between phases, not programs, but between phases without regaining all the weight or without losing what you've lost? How do you map out the next six to 12 months of your training and nutrition when it might look different than the last six to 12 months? You're not just going to keep doing the same thing, even though the underlying skills are the same. When do you cut versus build versus maintain? What triggers those changes? So I think at this point in your journey, you are thinking about these things and maybe stepping it up to that level of awareness and knowledge. And we we teach people to do that for themselves. We're getting to the end here. Okay, week 24 is learning to troubleshoot things without a coach as well. So we actually give you scenarios and you work through them. You know, you practice
Philip Pape: 30:10
scenarios like, okay, what if your weight jumped three pounds overnight after restaurant meal? What do you do? Like, tell us why that happened and what do you do? Your energy tank this week, what do you check? You've been in a deficit for 12 weeks and progress all of a sudden stalled. Well, what are your options? Right. And these are the diagnostic questions I would ask to get to an answer to help someone on a coaching call. But we actually have exercises to help you do that for yourself. And then week 25, you're gonna take your measurements, you're gonna compare everything to your starting point, you're gonna write a story about your own transformation. So, this is how did your identity reveal itself to what it is today? What changed? What did you learn? What surprised you? Actually, writing it down. So again, these are all things you could do on your own, guys. I'm explaining our program, but also telling you the roadmap so that any of these things that resonate, like, oh my gosh, I've never actually written down my story of success to learn something from it and then and then also motivate myself. And then finally, the final week is you're gonna choose what's next. You can choose, am I going to you know implement more of this phase? Am I gonna go to a new phase? Do I need to step it up to a new goal? Do I want to compete? You know, all those kinds of things. Like there is really no endpoint, there's just a next level, a next level and a next level after that. All right, before I share detail, share details on how to get started with this plan, I do want to remind you stick around because I've got a 60-second protein
Philip Pape: 31:36
audit that I promised you. But if you want to follow this exact 26 roadmap, 26-week roadmap today with the exact instructions and exercise and guidance, as well as automated tools and of course human coaching. That is what Eat More Lift Heavy is for. So you'll have two coaches, you'll have a 26-week phased experience. Each week unlocks, I'll say teachable moments, but also specific actions to take that are achievable week by week. You're gonna get a training program assigned from day one, monthly live coaching calls, and the community that can help you with that accountability. It's not a Facebook, it's not a social media thing. It is a let's get the work done thing. The program starts March 30th. Founder pricing is still available right now through March 29th. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. And if you lock it in, you're gonna have that price forever. It's quite a big discount from the public price. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmorliftheavy.com. We also have spots available in the dialed in tier, which is a little bit higher tier that includes personal coaching from me and Coach Carroll, a private telegram chat, uh, form checks,
Philip Pape: 32:43
weekly and monthly reviews of your data. So it's asynchronous, very personalized coaching in that tier, but we have limited spots. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. If you see the option to select dialed in, that means we have some spots left. So go ahead and select that if you want it. Eatmoriftheavy.com, link in the show notes. All right. Here is the fastest way to find out if protein is the thing holding back your body composition. Tonight at dinner, I want you to look at your plate visually and estimate how many grams of protein are on it. Okay. Then I want you to think about your breakfast and lunch. Are any of these meals below 30 grams per meal? Are any of them below 30 grams per meal? Not because that's a magic threshold, although there is some evidence related to muscle protein synthesis, but because that's a practical limit where you need about that much each meal to get the protein for the day for most people's goals. Now, most people who are tracking protein are not even hitting their daily daily total, let alone people who aren't tracking protein. And usually it's because you're loading it into one or two big meals, usually dinner and maybe lunch, and then falling short at the others. You'll see like, you know, 10 grams of breakfast, if that, maybe 20 at lunch, and then you try to make up for it at dinner with the 60 grams. And it just doesn't work well from a consistency standpoint, from a hitting your protein standpoint, but then there's other factors like it affects your hunger, and you often miss your protein by doing it this way, especially if you miss a meal or you don't get quite enough in the earlier
Philip Pape: 34:13
meals. So, simple audit. I want you to check your last three meals and just find the one that is consistently the lowest. It's usually breakfast. That's your gap meal that you start with. I want you to fix that one meal, find the swaps to get it over 30 grams. I think you'll see a huge difference in recovery, in satiety, in body composition when you do that. And again, for most of you, that's gonna be breakfast. That's it. Simple protein audit, just to remind you, let's start with the weakest meal and jack that protein up, then go to the next one, jack it up, and pretty soon you'll be, you'll be rolling. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the best transformation isn't the fastest one. It's the one that teaches you how to never need a transformation again. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
