The Body Recomp Advantage for Appetite and Fat Loss After 40 | Ep 432
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If you're over 40, cutting calories to lose fat can backfire.
Why? Because if your approach is too aggressive or your stress is too high, your hunger spikes, training suffers, and you often regain everything you lost when you increase calories again.
Body recomposition (losing fat while building or preserving muscle simultaneously) can avoid this. It's not just a physique strategy but also an appetite strategy.
In this finale of our 8-part appetite series, you'll learn why body recomp avoids the hunger cascade that derails most fat loss attempts.
Discover my Recomp Ladder framework that prioritizes your levers in the right order.
Get 3 ready-to-use body recomp plans: aggressive maintenance for efficiency-focused recomp, small deficit recomp for faster results without hunger, and the build-then-mini-cut approach for breaking plateaus.
You'll also learn who recomp works best for (hint: if you're over 40 with an inconsistent lifting history, you're in the sweet spot), the 5 most common recomp pitfalls, and a simple 2-metric check to know if your recomp is actually working (no scale weight required).
Timestamps:
0:00 - Do you actually need a deficit to lose fat?
3:20 - What body recomp really means (and what it's not)
5:22 - Recomp as an appetite management strategy
7:10 - 3 reasons recomp works better after 40
11:32 - Who body recomp works best for
14:43 - When recomp gets harder (and what to do instead)
15:53 - Appetite support during recomp
18:05 - The Recomp Ladder (5 levels)
21:42 - 3 specific plans for body recomp
25:04 - 5 common recomp mistakes and how to fix them
30:35 - Bonus: Quick 2-metric body recomp check (hint: NOT the scale)
Most diets tell you to eat less and move more, then act surprised when hunger, cravings, and fatigue knock you off track. A more practical strategy for many people over 40 is body recomposition: losing fat while building or at least keeping muscle, without the constant stress of a big calorie deficit. Recomp lowers the demand on willpower because you avoid the hormonal backlash that comes with aggressive dieting. Instead of chasing the scale, you work a system that nudges body fat down and strength up. The payoff is steadier energy, better training, and a physique that looks sharper even if weight barely changes.
To make recomposition work, anchor everything to a simple hierarchy I call the Recomp Ladder. At the base is progressive strength training because muscle is the engine of your metabolism and the tissue that shapes your body. Next comes protein and meal structure: build meals around 30 to 50 grams of protein, then add fiber and food volume to stay full on fewer calories. Only then do you set energy targets, choosing maintenance, a small deficit, or a small surplus. After that, keep daily steps high to support calorie burn without crushing recovery. Finally, use optional tools like GLP1-activating supplements, mindset strategies, and accountability to smooth out cravings and habits when life gets messy.
Who benefits most from recomp? Beginners, detrained lifters coming back, anyone with higher body fat, low historical protein intake, or inconsistent training quality, and especially folks over 40 who find deficits drain recovery and amplify hunger. At this stage, muscle is often the limiting factor due to years of yo-yo diets and stop-start training. Gaining three to five pounds of muscle while dropping five to eight pounds of fat can transform how you look and feel at virtually the same scale weight. Because appetite signals often recover more slowly after decades of dieting, keeping calories near maintenance or only slightly below helps performance, mood, and adherence.
Choose from three practical paths. Plan A is aggressive maintenance: train hard, keep protein high, and hover 50 to 100 calories above your usual maintenance so you stay fully recovered and capable of building muscle while your body taps into stored fat. Plan B is a small deficit recomp, roughly 100 to 200 calories under maintenance, ideal for those who still build quickly and want more visible fat loss without the backlash of a deep cut. Plan C pairs short lean-gain phases with brief mini-cuts to create clear wins in both muscle and fat loss without long, draining cycles. All three plans succeed when you respect recovery, avoid excessive cardio, and push intensity in the gym.
Measure what matters and ignore the rest. A low-stress, two-metric check can tell you if you’re actually recomping: waist circumference at the navel and one key lift tracked weekly. If your waist trends down while your chosen lift trends up, you’re on target. If waist stalls, fat loss is lagging; if strength stalls, muscle gain is lagging. Skip body fat gadgets and accept that scale weight can rise while you look leaner. Common pitfalls include chasing the scale, cutting too hard, undertraining intensity, inconsistent protein, and overdoing cardio classes. Keep steps high, lifts progressive, meals protein-forward, and patience steady. The slower, steadier route often becomes the fastest path because it’s the one you can sustain.
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Philip Pape: 0:01
Here's a shocking thought. What if you don't need to be in a calorie deficit to lose fat? For most people over 40, the conventional approach, cutting calories, adding cardio, fighting through hunger, tends to create more problems than it solves. Your appetite spikes, your training suffers, you end up regaining what you lost and going in a vicious cycle. But body recomposition offers a different path. And it's not just for your physique, it's also an appetite strategy. So today I'm gonna show you the exact conditions that make body recomp work. A hierarchy I call the recomp ladder that puts the levers in the right order, and three implementation plans based on where you are right now. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, Philip Pabe, and today is episode eight of our appetite series. It's the finale. If you missed any of these, these are episodes throughout January 2026 where we've covered hormones that drive hunger, how sleep and stress affects cravings, protein and fiber for fullness, how your body changes in terms of appetite after 40, and where strength training fits into helping manage hunger compared to cardio. Today, I'm gonna show you how body recomposition, aka body reconf, pulls all those levers at once. And I'm trying not to repeat what we've already covered. Today I'm gonna give you more of a framework to make fat loss dramatically easier to stick with over time. The core idea is that body reconf reduces your need for aggressive deficits. Smaller or sometimes no deficit means less issues with hunger hormones, better training over the long term, you don't have as many cravings. And so a lot of these things tend to just solve themselves when you're not constantly trying to diet. Some of you have tried so many diets and you keep trying to diet and you keep trying to even lose fat the quote unquote right way, and it just is like hitting a wall. Okay. And I'm not saying nobody can, I'm not saying not everybody can do a fat loss phase. We don't necessarily need to, and there's sometimes a better way. Also, I've been giving you lots of really cool tricks at the end of these episodes lately, and I have another one for you today. It is a two-metric check on your body reconp. All right, so you forget about the scale, forget about things that don't make sense. I'm gonna give you two numbers that tell you if it's working to keep it simple. All right, let's get into it. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by CalloCurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Callocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. CallowCurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. Let me start by clearing up what recomp is. We've done episodes on recomp before, but there's a lot of noise around this. Body recomposition is simultaneously losing fat while maintaining or gaining muscle. And that's it. A 2024 editorial in a sports nutrition journal described it exactly this way and also talked about the scientific literature and how robust it is in examining this for decades, right? It's a set of conditions where your body gets pushed to allocate nutrients toward muscle while drawing energy from stored fat. So it's totally real, it's documented, it's a real thing. Okay. But we have to know what it is not. It is not losing 20 pounds in six weeks. It's not dramatic changes on the scale. If you're doing recomp well, your weight might barely move or move slowly or even go up while your waist shrinks, your clothes fit differently, you get stronger, and you look visibly leaner in photos. And this is what we're trying to get to with body recomp. But it's also where a lot of people get frustrated because they might step on the scale and not see a change and then think nothing's happening, even when it is. And sometimes the scale is changing, but it's not in the way we want, even if it's going down. Does that make sense? Right? We're not just trying to measure the mass of your body, we're trying to measure how you're actually successfully reshaping your body. So there are metrics that we track to do this, right? Is your waist going down? Is your strength going up? Are your steps and activity staying reasonably consistent? Are you hitting your protein targets? Is your sleep and stress relatively stable? And is your trend weight fairly stable? It might be slowly declining, it might be slowly decreasing. It depends on what direction you're pushing it. And a little bit later, we're going to give you the three plans for which direction you want to go and still call it recomp. So if you're checking the boxes of all those things I just mentioned, right? You know, your waist is going down, your lifts are progressing, then you're probably recomping and the scale's noise that really isn't that important. And here's why this matters for appetite, okay? This is for today's episode on appetite and recomp. Recomp lets you avoid aggressive deficits, and that tends to cause all the appetite problems in the first place that most people experience, okay? Both in the deficit and even afterward when they're trying to recover. Because when you try to lose fat with a large calorie deficit, and I'm large is relative, right? So I don't necessarily mean a crashed diet, it could just be, you know, a percent of your body weight a week, which is pretty aggressive. You adapt and you tend to get more hungry and you tend to move less, you compensate, your training tends to regress a bit or stall out a little bit, right? You end up hungrier than you've ever been in some cases, depending on how aggressive it is. We covered all this in the recent episodes, but body recomp is a nice, elegant sidestep for all of that cascade of issues because you're never really in a big deficit. You might be at maintenance, you might be in a small deficit, you might even be in a small surplus, but you're nowhere near the truth the threshold that triggers the pushback. And you might have heard of terms like lean gaining, maintaining, main gaining. And we're kind of playing on those concepts. We're not going to make any claims that those that this is going to just completely transform you in the fastest amount of time because it's not about that. It's avoiding the other issues that throw people off and prevent you from adhering to this. I would rather you rather you take the slower approach to get the result than the faster approach that you rebound from. Obviously, think about the logic. That means the slower approach is actually the fastest approach because it's the one that sticks, right? So for today, I don't want you to think of recomp as a physique strategy, even though it is. I want you to think of it as an appetite management strategy that keeps you out of diets and happens to improve your physique. Okay. Now, why am I emphasizing this for people over 40 specifically? Because I know that sometimes I throw that into these episodes and I get some pushback like, well, doesn't this work at 25 and 30 and 35? I'm I'm putting it in here because at this time of life, this is when I see the I guess spinning of wheels when it comes to all these diets. And because it tends to get a little bit harder because of life issues and stress and stuff like that, it's not always the best solution for you. So I'm going to give you three specific reasons, though, this is important. Okay. So even if you are under 40, if this affect is affecting you, this is highly relevant. First, muscle becomes the limiting factor. All right. Because of the decline in muscle mass starting in your 30s and ramping up in your 40s and 50s, and you've had years of inconsistent or no strength training, probably multiple diet cycles that have cut mass even further, your lean mass even further. You've lost even more muscle doing these diets, your body's just going to respond differently than when you were 25. And so the fastest way for someone experiencing these things isn't necessarily to lose a bunch of weight. It is to build the muscle while gently losing fat. Okay, gently, gently, guys. It's really to focus on that muscle side. And of course, if you heard some of our recent episodes, I think I did another one that was called Build Muscle First Cut Later. It's that concept, but we're not talking about going into a big surplus today. We're talking about recomp. Okay. Here's another way to think about it. All right, if you're carrying, say, 25% body fat, so this is would be for men. For women, just add 10%. And you diet down aggressively and you lose weight, but you and you end up with 22% body fat, but you've lost a little bit of muscle and your metabolism's a little lower, you're gonna look a little smaller, but not necessarily more defined, and you're not gonna have a better physique. And you might even be less healthy depending on the loss of muscle. If you recomp, let's say you add three to five pounds of muscle over an extended period of time and you lose five to eight pounds of fat, where you weigh almost the same, but you've completely changed how you look and how your metabolism functions. For many, that is a really nice outcome to get, even though you have to be patient, it takes time. The second reason this is relevant is, and we talked about this, I think, in episode 428. After 40, your hunger and satiety signals are just not recovering as quickly from aggressive dieting. And it's probably just a matter of the time you've spent in dieting, not your age, but just the time. So we we talked about ghrelin and leptin sensitivity and how your body fights back and adapts and all that good stuff. But recomp avoids that issue, right? You're not creating the same conditions that trigger that response. You're not going into metabolic adaptation, or even if you're doing a very, very slight deficit, your body hardly notices. So you could still maintain your performance and you could still walk and maintain your movement. You don't compensate, you're not exhausted, you're not running out of energy, you could still eat enough carbs and overall calories and enjoy life. You avoid binge restrict because you're not binging, or you're not restricting, right? So, and I can go on. The third important reason here is recovery and joints. Let's be honest, guys, those of us who are older, after 40, 50, 60, you probably, you know, you can't outcardio your appetite because that's going to create all sorts of recovery issues that we talked about, I think, on the last episode. And if you don't have enough calories coming in, if you're always trying to diet, you're just not supporting the joints and the recovery, which may be, you may have more pain these days. You may have a harder time recovering, you may have more connective tissue issues. And I like older folks to be even spending less time in a diet, if that makes sense. And that's another reason to do it. All right. So if you're in your 50s, men, ladies, and you're trying to lose fat, be honest with yourself on how you feel and how you perform when you're in a deficit. And if you'd rather maybe not be in a deficit and take this other approach of slowly building muscle and slowly building fat, but then feeling great throughout the whole process. And then life is great. And that's what makes it really, really sustainable. So coming up, I'm gonna give you what I call the recomp ladder. It's a five-level hierarchy that puts the levers in the right order so you're not randomly adjusting things and hoping it works. But before I introduce that, I want to make sure you know whether it's even right for you. Hopefully, you already have an idea based on what I've talked about, but I'm gonna be very specific. So, who does it work best for? It's not for everyone in every situation, okay? It's likely to work when at least one of the following is true. Okay, I'm gonna give you six things. If you can say yes to any of these, it's probably gonna work. So you got a lot of options, ready? Number one, you're a beginner, you're a noob to strength training, or you're highly detrained and coming back after a long layoff. Great, beautiful time to recomp. Number two, you're detrained from an injury or some other reason, which is kind of tied to number one, right? So it may not even be that long of a time, but because it was an injury, you probably experienced some atrophy and some setbacks, and now you're trying to get back to it. Number three, you're at a higher body fat percentage. Okay, that's probably a decent time to recomp because your body has its own reserve that will experience as energy, even if you go in a little bit of a deficit, your body won't feel like it's in deficit. Number four, your protein intake has been historically been poor, and now you're gonna jack it up to what it should be. You might respond really well to a recomp. Number five, your training quality has been inconsistent or suboptimal. And therefore, why would you go into a deficit and lose more muscle? Let's recomp. And then number six, you're older and you have an inconsistent lifting history or concerns about your your joints or recovery, and the idea of dieting just does not sound palatable. All of those are great reasons to recomp. Okay. Notice nobody's really excluded from this. Anybody can be successful. It's just to what degree? So if one of those hit really hard, you're in the sweet spot and your body has room to build muscle, probably responsive, very, very responsively, even while in a slight deficit, definitely at maintenance, okay? And absolutely at a slight surplus. So even if you're not in the sweet spot, everyone listening can do probably one of my three, two, two of the three directions that I'm gonna give you in a bit, right? Now, when does recomp get harder, but but still possible because it's always possible? Well, when you're already pretty lean and you're already pretty advanced as a trainee and you've already built muscle. This that's the first one. The second one is that you have a small margin for error. You know, what I mean by that is you have an all or nothing mindset and are not ready to track things in the right way to know that you're recomping and you you give in very easily to like scale issues and whatnot. I'm not saying that recomp won't work. I think in that case, you have to work on yourself and just being at maintenance and not worrying about recomp in the first place. It's more getting the mindset right. And then I would say the third thing is if your life stress is super high and recovery is compromised, recomp's gonna be harder just because your body's not gonna respond as well, even if you're in the right caloric degree or caloric situation, if you will. So even if you're a slight surplus or a maintenance, the life stress, the lack of sleep could be offsetting that a bit to preventing you from getting everything you want out of it. Right. And even so, recomp still might work. It's just gonna be slower. You have to be a little more precise with your nutrition, your training. But in that case, you might need to alternate between building phases and like mini cuts. And this is where the big, this is where the confusion comes from because some people, like if I have a female client who's in her 50s and her metabolism is over-responsive, meaning it drops really fast. Maybe it's a thyroid issue or hormone issue. Sometimes it's just, you know, her own individual response. A recomp may be kind of frustrating because it's gonna take a lot longer for her than someone else, maybe. And so we might want to do bulks and cuts to get the visual and the physical transformation to occur, but that's with more support. That's usually under a coaching situation. I still think recomp can work for a lot of people. And the key is to being honest about where you are. Okay. If you've been lifting consistently for a bunch of years and you're already super lean, you've probably done it a different way anyway. And recomp is going to be kind of a grind to actually see anything come of it. Maybe I would consider that more sustaining or maintaining your results. But if you're coming back after a few years off, or if you've never really dialed things in the right way, you're definitely in prime recomp territory, and then we have everything in between. All right, before we continue, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, CaloCurb, C-A-L-O-C-U-R B. Please don't skip forward to the next section. If you haven't heard about them, because I truly believe in this company and this product, I'm using it myself. I'm using it myself right now during a fat loss phase. If you've been following this appetite series, or even if this is the first time you're hearing us, managing hunger is one of the biggest challenges in a fat loss phase. We all talk about calorie deficits, we talk about training, but honestly, a lot of people have trouble just sticking to a low number of calories if they're not used to it. And that's especially true when you're trying to do body recomp and trying to keep a small deficit, but still preserve your performance. And that's one of the plans we're going to talk about in a second. You're still in a deficit, you're still gonna have some hunger. And the issue is that even a moderate deficit can trigger things like late-day cravings that then throw your consistency off, and all of a sudden you're no longer really in that deficit. You start snacking at 8 p.m. So, Callocurb, I like it as a tool. It is 100% natural appetite support. It triggers your own GLP1. It's a supplement that has a marasate. You can Google this, A-M-A-R-A-S-A-T-E, and it's a hops flour extract developed over 15 years of research by the New Zealand government, funded by them, not by a private company. And it works by activating your body's natural GLP1, the gut brain access. It helps you feel satisfied faster and stay in control. Basically, you take these a little bit over an hour before you eat, and it triggers those signals so you start to feel full before you even eat. And that's why the studies show it reduced cravings by 40%, hunger by 30% within an hour of taking a capsule. That also leads to a reduction of 18% calorie consumptions. Now, what I appreciate is that it is not a stimulant, okay? It's not a pharmaceutical, it's just hops. So you don't need a prescription. It's a great tool to support the fundamentals we talk about on the show. It's like a compliance lever for your recomp phase because we are trying to dial in and be so precise. Try it out at witsandweights.com slash calocurb. The link is in the show note. You get 10% off when you use my link. Go to witsandweights.com slash callocurb. All right, let's talk about the recomp ladder framework. And I want you to stay stay tuned till the end because I'm gonna share a two-metric recomp tracking system that is super, super low stress. For some of you that don't like to track a lot of things, I'm gonna very, very much simplify for you. All right, here is the recomp ladder. It's a hierarchy of priorities that put your levers in the right order. And I came up with a ladder because I think that was inspired by Jeff Nippard. He has like something, the muscle ladder or something. And I keep using pyramids, but I think ladder is the right metaphor. Anyway, so level one is at the bottom. This is the training stimulus. Okay, you have to have the training stimulus or your body won't build a preserve muscle. This is where you need progressive overload, adding weight, weight reps or sets over time. You have to have enough volume, enough sets per week, but not so much you can't recover. And of course, you have to be consistent with it. Now, a lot of the details on all these levers are covered in other episodes. It's also how we help people in uh physique university and with my app, Fitness Lab. So if you prefer kind of going it on yourself with some help of a coach in your pocket, you could use the app. If you'd rather join a group that helps you out with coaches in the group, including myself, Physique University, those links are in the show notes. I'm not gonna pitch those beyond that. I just want to mention that the details of each of these steps could each be their own episode. And level number one on the ladder is definitely your strength training. If you're not strength training, none of the other stuff matters. I've got people who come into physique university and we do an intake and they say, I ask them how many days a week are they training? And they say zero. I actually start smiling then because I'm thinking, wow, this is the biggest opportunity you're not taking advantage of, and it's the easiest thing to give you the most growth. It's the highest ROI. I'm not saying it's easy, but as far as the return you get on your investment, if you're not strength training, all the other stuff doesn't matter. It really doesn't. Yeah, you can lose some weight, and maybe you'll lose some fat. You might, you're gonna lose some muscle as well, but it just doesn't matter. You're not gonna be able to change your physique. It's not gonna help your appetite. You're just gonna be worse off if you're not training. So that's level one. Level two is on the nutrition side, it's the protein and meal structure, right? Protein becomes that next lever. You have to have meals that are anchored in high protein, probably 30 to 50 grams of protein at big meals. And then fiber and food volume supports satiety as well. So that's that's my if I had to explain nutrition in one sentence is protein, fiber, and food volume. It's not cutting carbs, it's not cutting out foods, or it's not even calories. Calories tend to follow once you start to improve the quality and composition, excuse me, of your meals. And we cover protein all the time on this podcast, but you want to be getting at least 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight. Okay. So training first, then protein, then on the ladder we have the calories, which is your energy target. Now, you might hear calories are at the bottom of the pyramid. It depends on what we're talking about here. So, in terms of recomp, I'm trying to give you priorities that are going to set yourself up for success. So training, then protein, then energy, because you have some flexibility here. All right. In a fat loss phase, like a more aggressive fat loss phase, you really have to be in a very decent intentional deficit. And in a muscle building phase, a very decent surplus. For recomp though, you're gonna want to be around maintenance or a small deficit or a small surplus. And we're gonna talk about that in a second. I'm gonna give you the three different ways to do this. The key thing to track, though, is are you actually building muscle and getting stronger while you're losing fat? And you have to be able to measure that the right way, which, you know, spoiler alert, is not the scale. Okay. So that's level three on the ladder. Level four out of five is movement, movement and steps, general activity. This is appetite-friendly movement, like we talked about on, I believe, the last episode, that keeps your meat up, keeps your calories up without creating hunger and stress from more high-intensity metronomic cardio. All right. So this is the seven to 10,000 steps a day-ish. Maybe a little bit more for some of you. I wouldn't go less than 7,000. That is that is a good minimum. And again, one of the highest leverage changes you can make, again, once you've put in place the other three parts of the ladder. And then level five of the ladder is I'll say optional appetite tools, right? So this is where looking at how to optimize and tweak what you're eating to support your hunger signals, to make eating a little bit more automatic. Because at recomp, yeah, of course you can track calories and macros. I'm a huge fan of that. But even if you don't, recomp should be the easiest kind of phase to eat, I'll say intuitively in, but intuitive with a big asterisk as in a skill you've developed because you've tracked before. And this is where optional tools can come in. Supplementation, up callow curb, like I mentioned before, could be helpful. And it's something you don't even have to worry about until you've got the other things dialed in. Levels one through four, right? If you have levels one through four dialed in and now you're still struggling with some cravings or hunger, emotional eating, then there's different tools. There's also mindset tools, psychological tools, you know. So all of those kind of fit in this piece of the ladder, and that's why I put it at the top: supplementation, mindset, psychology, support, accountability, like all of that can go here to ramp things up further and optimize. So that's the recomp ladder, training, then protein, and energy, the movement, then tools, right? Now I want to give you those three plans I talked about so you can start applying body recomp. All right. Plan A is honestly my favorite. I'm just gonna say it right out the gate. Plan A is aggressive maintenance. Okay, this is all about efficiency. It's my preferred method. I've talked about it before. In fact, there was an episode that I think was called Build Muscle Without Bulking. Oh, yeah, build muscle without bulking if you want lean gains. And that was episode 384, where I believe uh I talked about this in detail. But the philosophy is the efficiency of the approach rather than the throughput of the approach. So instead of like throwing more fuel at, you know, your body, doing more, hoping for more on the other end, you're optimizing how your fuel gets used. You're turning the nutrient delivery, your recovery, your mechanical stress to direct what are still somewhat limited resources. I mean, you're you're above maintenance here, but you want to direct them toward muscle. They're they're limited in the sense that you're not in a big surplus. So here's why this works: your body can only synthesize so much muscle at any given time, right? You can't just add more calories to it. We've talked before about upper limits of building muscle. You don't want to go into a dreamer bulk. But and many of you are listening to this episode on recomp thinking, well, I'm not even gonna go close to that because we're talking recomp, aren't we? Yes, yes. But you have to understand the principle that your body needs a certain threshold to build muscle, and of course, it has a limit as well. With aggressive maintenance, okay, you're keeping your protein high as usual, you're training as normal, and you are in a slight surplus. So what you're trying to do is aim for maybe 50 to 100 calories. It's probably similar to what the bros would call lean gain or main gain or something like that, to make sure that you stay ahead of the fact that your body's metabolism will probably start to ramp up and you don't want to fall back into the state, the stress state of a deficit, right? Your body can still pull some energy from stored body fat because you're not in a deficit and you're feeding it enough to build muscle at the same time. Pretty cool. So that's that's kind of where we're trying to get. And secretly, guys, you know what it ends up doing for a lot of you? For a lot of you, it puts you into a surplus like you've never been in before. And what I mean by that is not that it's huge. You've never been in a surplus before, but it avoids some of the fear of going into a surplus because it's I call it aggressive maintenance. So I'll be honest, I'm kind of tricking you into doing a surplus, but it's a very lean surplus. And you get massively good results from it. That's really my point. Because your goal over about eight to 16 weeks is you're gonna see your waist go down, you're gonna see yourself get stronger, scale weight either stays relatively flat or goes up a tiny bit. What happens when people go into aggressive maintenance is their body starts to burn more calories at the same time. And in many cases, their weight does not go up, and it's a perfect place to be. It's what a lot of more advanced folks on social media, when they say build muscle at maintenance, they actually mean true, true, true, fully recovered, energized maintenance. And most people don't get there because they're afraid to push the calories. So I think this works really, really well. All right, that's all I'll say about aggressive maintenance. Plan B is the other direction, small deficit recomp. And this is, I guess, the more traditional recomp you hear about, which kind of appeals to people who want to have a little more meaningful fat loss versus the muscle gain, but they still want to gain muscle. So you're kind of trying to have everything uh at the same time. I think for some people it doesn't work as well because they don't build as much muscle. But for those of you who are newer to training or detrained and very responsive to the muscle building side, it could still work quite well, right? And and protein's still high, lifting intensity is still high, you're still moving, you don't feel super stressed because the deficit is small. You know, maybe a 200-calorie deficit, right? Something like that, or 150 or 100. It's just a small deficit, enough to just chip away at the body weight loss and maybe even give you a little bit of that win on the scale that you're probably looking for psychologically, invisible progress, but without triggering all the hormonal and metabolic adaptation appetite issues that tend to derail more aggressive diets. So, you know, it's questionable whether you can call that body recomp or just a mild deficit. And then plan C is really this is kind of this is maybe a cop-out in terms of calling it recomp, but I really think it is. And this is doing like eight to 12 weeks of a little bit of more of a push into a surplus and then a six-week more aggressive mini-cut to strip fat. And this really is a slight combination of bulks and cuts, but in shorter phases that might be even more efficient for you and be more meaningful to give you those wins, right? Because you are meaningfully pushing up the muscle and then meaningfully moving down the fat, but you're doing it over a short period. So maximum, you know, 18 weeks, which is like four months, like the whole thing, the up and down. Whereas normally I tell people to bulk for like six to nine months and then maybe cut for you know two months, something like that. Right. And then each building phase makes the next cut easier. You're bulking and cutting. So again, this is kind of a cop-out version of recomp. I mean, technically, bulking and cutting in the long term is recomp, but I wanted to give you an option that's like somewhere in the middle that still uses bulks and cuts. All right. So there we go. Flexibility, choice. I know you guys love that. And then I would be remiss if I didn't mention some of the myths that that hold people up when it comes to recomp that makes it not work, and then they come back and say, hey, reconp's not working for me. Okay. So five, five pitfalls that I see. Number one, chasing the scale. The scale's a tool, but really you've got to use the waist measurements, strength markers, and other measurements if they are helpful for body recomp, including the mirror and your clothes and photos and all that. Pitfall number two is cutting too hard where you actually are getting into a deficit. You're just so impatient to lose the fat that now you've gone past recomp into a deficit, and now you're going to cause issues with energy and training and hunger and all the things that happen in fat loss, which aren't necessarily a bad thing. They're things you should expect. They're the trade-off you make. But if you're not willing to make that trade-off, that's why you did body recomp, this can be a pitfall. Pitfall number three is not enough training intensity. And for whatever reason, you know, sometimes people, if they're not in a bulk and they're not thinking like build muscle, they don't push as hard as they need to do. And this is where having a coach or getting a form check or using my AMRAP trick that I gave you a few episodes ago, you're gonna have to go hunt for that if you don't know where it is, it can be very helpful. Pitfall number four is inconsistency with their food, especially protein. Okay. If I see protein all over the place and you're constantly dropping low, that is gonna hold you up big time. That could backfire, especially if you're trying to recomp. You just may not get the result you're looking for. And then pitfall number five is too much cardio. This is always a pitfall. For those of you doing too many, you know, group classes, F-45, Pilates, whatever. Replace a lot of that with walking and see what happens to your body recomp, because that could be stressing you and compensating your body where you don't get what you want out of it. All right. So that was the ladder and the three plans and the pitfalls. Now remember that two-metric recomp check that I promised. Stay with me. I'm going to show you how to use two things to know if you're recomping without stressing over anything else right after this. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, CaloCurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CalloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callocurb. All right, here is that simple recomp check that I promised. If you don't want to track a lot of things, and you don't want to track body fat, you don't want to use spreadsheets, you just need two numbers. Two numbers, waist circumference and strength. Now, this is not rocket science. You've heard me mention this, but I wanted to simplify it to just two things. And and not when I say strength, I don't mean everything. Just bear with me. Once a week, measure your waist at the navel, the belly button. Okay. Just relax, don't suck it in, do it at the same time of day. I like in the morning, just like when you weigh yourself. That's it. Waist. Easy, waist. Everybody can do their waist. Then you're gonna track one key lift that you care a lot about right now. And that might be your squat, your deadlift, your bench, some variation of those. Maybe it's an isolation movement, but I'd rather you focus on a strength-focused movement. And are you adding reps or weight over time? And that's it. So between point A and point B, is your waist going down and is your strength going up? If that is happening, you are recomping and keep doing what you're doing. If your waist is stuck, you're probably not losing very much body fat. If your strength is stuck, you're probably not building muscle. It's that easy. Your waist is where you store the most visceral fat, which is why it's like a decent approach now. Some people make it more complicated and they do like three different points of their waist. But again, I'm trying to simplify it for you. All right. So you don't have to calculate anything. Don't, by the way, don't use an in-body or like smart scale for this. Because even that adds complication and variability and error that you don't want. Just use your waist and one lift. And there you go. You'll know if your body recopy, right? The scale can't tell you this. So if you come to me and you're like, I've gained two pounds, so what? What if you gained two pounds of muscle? Or what if you gained four pounds of muscle and lost two pounds of fat fat, two pounds of fat, so your net change is two pounds higher on the scale. Guess what? You're leaner. You're leaner even though you're heavier. So that's very important. And you can start this right away. Pick your measurement day, pick your key lift, track those two things for the next month if you're doing recomp. And that's your low stress recomp check. All right. I really, really appreciate you listening to Wits and Weights. I'm grateful for you sticking around with me for this appetite series. A lot of more fun, cool, different episodes to come. I'm not going to talk about appetite for a while. So I think I've done that to death. So until the next time, I want you to keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember you don't have to starve to get lean. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.
