Why You Can't Lose Weight on 1200 Calories (And What To Do About It) | Ep 387
Ready to escape the low-calorie trap and eat 400-800+ more calories while maintaining your body composition?
Join the 10-Week Recovery Diet Workshop on Tuesday, October 21st at 12pm Eastern and get the complete protocol workbook plus 30 days in Physique University for just $27: https://live.witsandweights.com
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Are eating very low calories, yet the scale won't budge, your energy is in the tank, and you're terrified to eat more?
Discover what's going on with your metabolism, why "just eat less and move more" stopped working months ago, and the precise protocol for escaping this trap without gaining fat.
Learn why reverse dieting doesn't work plus the 5 foundations that determine whether increasing calories will succeed or backfire.
Main Takeaways
Metabolic suppression isn't "damage"
How eating less leads to fewer calories, reduced training performance, and hormonal downregulation
5 critical foundations must be in place before increasing calories
Recovery dieting vs. reverse dieting and how long it takes to truly recover
Episode Resources
Join the 10-Week Recovery Diet Workshop – Tuesday, October 21st at 12pm Eastern ($27, includes replay, 20-page protocol workbook, and your first month in Physique University) at https://live.witsandweights.com
Timestamps
0:00 - Why eating less stopped working
0:49 - Recovery vs. reverse dieting
4:56 - The Suppression Spiral explained
8:17 - Five foundations you must fix first
19:12 - How a recovery diet actually works
24:33 - Common failure points to avoid
27:55 - Do you really need recovery?
30:16 - Workshop invite and final takeaways
Why 1200 Calories Isn’t Working (and How to Fix It)
If you’ve been eating around 1200 calories a day, training consistently, tracking everything, and still not losing weight, you are not broken. You are adapted. Your body is protecting itself from a chronic energy shortage by slowing down how much energy it spends. This is not metabolic “damage.” It is metabolic adaptation, and it can be reversed—but only if you rebuild your foundation before you eat more.
Here’s why “just eat less” stopped working and the precise system to recover your metabolism without gaining fat.
The Suppression Spiral
When you stay in a deficit too long, your body defends itself. The process looks like this:
NEAT drops. You subconsciously move less throughout the day. This can cost you 200–400 calories or more.
Training quality declines. Lower intensity and effort mean less stimulus to keep muscle, less calorie burn, and less progress.
Hormones adapt. Thyroid, leptin, and sex hormones decrease. Hunger increases. Your body becomes more efficient at storing energy and less willing to give it up.
Energy and recovery collapse. You feel exhausted, moody, and stuck.
At this point, cutting calories again only makes things worse. You enter a feedback loop: eat less, adapt more, lose nothing, feel worse. You cannot diet your way out of this. The solution is recovery, not restriction.
Why Reverse Dieting Often Fails
Most people try to solve this by adding 50–100 calories a week, hoping metabolism “catches up.” That rarely works because calories aren’t the problem—your foundations are. Without recovery in place, increasing calories simply adds fat.
Your metabolism can only use new energy properly if five specific foundations are in place.
The Five Foundations Before Increasing Calories
1. Sleep quality and consistency
Sleep is recovery. Inconsistent or poor-quality sleep keeps you in a stressed, sympathetic state. Restoring 7–9 hours per night, with the same bedtime and wake time, is step one. Until you fix this, extra calories will do little besides raise cortisol and water retention.
2. Non-training stress
High work or life stress keeps cortisol elevated and pushes your body to store energy. Basic stress management—breathing, walks, sunlight, and downtime—creates the hormonal environment where recovery can happen.
3. Structured strength training
Your muscles are the engine that burns energy. Without regular progressive strength training, new calories are not directed toward muscle repair and growth. Even two consistent lifting sessions per week make a big difference. Three to four is ideal.
4. Daily movement
Outside the gym, you need movement. Aim for 7,000–10,000 steps per day or at least more than you do now. Movement signals your body to stay metabolically flexible and active between workouts.
5. Nutrition quality
Protein and fiber are your anchors.
Protein: 0.7–1.0 g per pound of body weight
Fiber: 25–35 g per day
Add balanced carbs and fats from whole foods. Carbs are especially helpful for recovering suppressed metabolism and restoring thyroid and hormone function.
How the Recovery Diet Works
Once these foundations are solid, it’s time to bring calories back up—quickly, not in tiny reverse-diet increments. The goal is to restore your metabolism to its actual maintenance level, not to creep there over months.
Steps:
Find your current maintenance. If you’ve been at 1200, your true maintenance might be 1800–2200 depending on size, sex, and activity.
Jump calories to the estimated maintenance. Expect 2–4 pounds of water and glycogen gain in the first week. This is not fat.
Hold steady for 8–12 weeks. Track strength, energy, sleep, mood, and performance. When they improve and weight stabilizes, your metabolism has normalized.
Use precise tracking. Tools like MacroFactor can estimate your actual expenditure in real time so you can adjust accurately. Use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for a free trial.
During this period, expect gym performance and recovery to skyrocket. Mood, libido, and sleep improve. If you lost your cycle, it often returns. When your body is running well again, you can safely pursue fat loss later from a stronger baseline.
Common Failure Points
Impatience. Recovery takes 8–12 weeks, not two. Stick with it.
Inconsistency. Sleep, training, and movement must happen most days, not occasionally.
Sneaky dieting. Do not cut calories mid-recovery because of short-term scale fluctuations. Water and glycogen changes are not fat gain.
Signs Your Recovery Diet Is Working
You can eat 400–800 calories more per day without fat gain
Strength and work capacity rise weekly
Mood, focus, and digestion improve
Resting heart rate drops, and you wake up rested
Biofeedback markers like energy and hunger normalize
Who Actually Needs a Recovery Diet
Not everyone stuck on the scale is metabolically suppressed. You truly need recovery if you’ve been on extremely low calories for months, weight has not changed for at least four weeks, your training performance is dropping, and you have clear symptoms like fatigue, low libido, or disrupted sleep. If you’re simply losing slower than expected, you may just need patience and precision.
Your metabolism is not broken—it’s smart. It adapted to protect you. You can restore it by addressing the foundations first, then applying a structured recovery diet. When you do, you’ll eat more, feel better, and eventually lose fat again, this time without destroying your energy or your relationship with food.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:00
If you've been eating 1200 calories, training consistently, doing everything right, and the scale's not budging, your energy is in the tank, and you're terrified to eat more, because the last time you did, you gained weight. This episode is for you. I'll show you why your body has adapted to suppress your metabolism, why just eat less and move more stopped working months or years ago, and the precise protocol for escaping this trap without gaining fat. You'll discover what recovery dieting is, why most reverse dieting attempts fail, and the five foundations that determine whether increasing calories will work or backfire. 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 Pate, and today we're gonna talk about one of the most frustrating positions you can find yourself in. You're eating very little, you're training really hard, and you're getting nowhere. I've worked with lots of people who came to me eating very low calories. This might be around a thousand to fourteen hundred for female, maybe 1500 to 1800 for males, and they're doing a lot of the things right. They're lifting maybe three or four days a week, they're walking every day, they're tracking, eating enough protein in general, but something's stuck. And I'm not talking about scale weight, I'm also talking about lifts stalling, feeling exhausted, not having the energy. Maybe our blood works okay, maybe it's not. But all you're thinking at this point is what do I need to do? Do I need to eat even less? Do I need to add more training or cardio? And also, what's up with reverse dieting? Is that what I need to do? Do I need to eat more? Because last time I tried that, I gained five pounds in a week, right? Stories like that. These are not rare stories. I hear them a lot. And I think the online advice about some of this stuff is either useless or actively harmful. A lot of people still throw around the terms metabolic damage, that you need to heal your metabolism and or that you need to fix your metabolism. Some people just say flippantly, you know, you know, it's you're just eating too much. You're probably not tracking. You probably don't know how many calories you're eating, you just need to eat less. Some people, you know, say that the only way to do this is reverse diet with, you know, five, add 50 to 100 calories per week. That's how you do it. And then there's people that say, okay, just eat at maintenance for a while and everything's gonna kind of work out, which doesn't sound too far from advice I might, I've I sometimes give, which is we need to change one variable at a time and try to stay at maintenance, but there's a different approach to doing that the right way versus just, you know, trying to eat the same calories you've been eating, thinking that that's maintenance. Okay, we're gonna get into some of the nuances here. I think a lot of this advice is just missing the most important thing, which is what's happening to you and your body and why just adding calories doesn't always work without certain foundations in place. And I wanna be clear on that. Reverse dieting is often not the solution. It may be a little piece of it. And if you've ever heard my content before, you know that I don't even use reverse dieting. We do something called recovery dieting. We're gonna talk about that today. Before we do, I do want to share what some members of Physique University have been experiencing lately because it connects directly to what we are talking about. So, Richard, he said, quote, after six weeks on the program, I found the tools and info quite a game changer. Very happy with the empowerment gained and the progress so far. So, empowerment, I shared this because of that word and not feeling helpless and actually understanding what's going on inside of you with you as an individual so you can build your system. Ajana shared, quote, I've noticed I'm not getting fatigued early in the day, and my energy level has written. Again, I shared this because it's exactly what happens when your metabolic function is working properly instead of being suppressed. Notice I didn't say damaged, okay? Suppressed. And then Haig said, quote, winning, feeling better, pain and illness gone, and I'm lifting what I was 10 years ago, now to push harder. So when your body has enough energy, when it's recovering enough, everything improves. This isn't just about the scale and and often it has nothing to do with the scale. And yeah, you can push hard once things aren't where you need them to be. So if you're looking for this kind of result and transformation, support, guidance, that's why we have Physique University. You can join at witsandweights.com slash physique, get access to our community, form checks with me and Coach Carroll, all the tools you need to build your physique and more importantly, your health system, your fitness system systematically. So I just wanted to share those. And now I want to get into what the heck is going on when you are stuck at low calories. Okay. And I'm gonna call this the suppression spiral, just because it sounds cool and I like alliteration. The suppression spiral. All right, this is not about metabolic damage. The term gets thrown thrown around a lot, but it is not a real thing. It is not a medical condition, your metabolism can't break. Your metabolism adapts. And adaptation is normal, it happens to everybody, it's okay, you expect it to happen. And it can be reversed as well. But understanding how is going to explain why you today might feel terrible and might have trouble losing weight. And again, we don't care about the weight loss in and of itself. We care about improving your health and body composition. And then weight loss tends to follow as a piece of that, and not always, because you don't always need it to. But in this case, we're talking about people who are trying to undergo some form of fat loss with a calorie deficit, and they are stuck and so they feel like they can't go up or down. Okay, when you eat in a calorie deficit for an extended period, your body adapts and it conserves energy, in addition to your metabolism dropping because you're losing weight. But in this case, we're gonna assume you've stuck, you've gotten stuck trying to lose fat and lose weight on the scale. Okay, and what we want to understand what's happening, whether you should care, what you should do about it. So your body adapts to conserve energy hormonally at the cellular level. And this happens when you stay in a deficit too long or you eat too little relative to your activity. Here's what happens: first, your neat, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, actually drops. A lot of it is unconscious. Okay, and this is all the movement you're doing outside of formal structured exercise. Studies show that meat can drop by two to four hundred calories per day. And this is actually very common for what I see. I see a lot of people in several months of dieting, their metabolisms will drop several hundreds of calories. Sometimes more than this because of added factors like the weight loss. And it's not that you consciously decide to do this, it's your body does this automatically, sometimes causes you to move less or move with less effort, or there's so many things, even if when you even when you try to keep your step count up that can move this the other direction. Second, your training performance suffers. You're not pushing as hard, you're, you know, taking longer to rest because you don't have the work capacity. Maybe you're not adding weight to the bar, to the to the lifts, you're not going up in weight. Not all of this is bad in a fat loss phase. Like you're expected to not have as much energy, but if it's really stalled out and regressing, this could be a challenge. This means, you know, you're not working as hard, you're also burning fewer calories during the workout, right? Even though we don't care about that as a metric, it's an end result of training less, training less hard, getting less of a training stimulus to hold on to your muscle. All of that is happening. Third, your hormones downregulate, your thyroid function goes down, testosterone, leptin. When leptin's low, you feel hungrier, you move less, your body becomes more efficient at storing energy, which we don't like, right? Which means it's less efficient at giving it up. And all this together means that your actual energy expenditure, your metabolism drops quite a bit. It can drop substantially. If you were, say, burning 2,000 calories a day before you started the diet, you might be down to 1500 or 1300 or 1200 just to maintain your weight as you are right now. Okay. And it's not because your metabolism is damaged, but because your body has adapted. This is a temporary state. Most people respond with a gut reaction. They do things that make it worse, such as cutting calories more, right? Adding cardio, trying to push through with more discipline and willpower. And this just makes it worse. You end up in what I called it earlier, the suppression spiral. You eat less, your body adapts, the loss stops, you eat even less, your body adapts more, you're doing more cardio, then you're eating very little, you're feeling terrible, you're making no progress, and and and. And then the psychological toll is huge. It is massive. You then feel like a failure, right? It seems to affect your self-worth, your even your self-respect. You see other people eating more, looking better. You can't understand why don't those rules apply to me. I'm different. Something is wrong with me. But the problem is not with you. The problem is the approach. It always is, guys. It's always the approach. And that is really empowering because you can fix it. You can you can't diet your way out of metabolic suppression. Almost by definition, you can't. Because eating less is what got you here. You've got to have a different strategy. So, where do we go with this? All right. That's the suppression spiral. Now I want to talk about the foundation, the problem with your foundation, okay? Because it really does come down to basic principles, first principles, foundations. And if eating less isn't the answer, what about eating more? Well, this is where a lot of people jump right to reverse dieting. You know, you get a newbie coach who's like, yeah, we just need to increase your calories, right? That's what they learned in their certification, and that's the solution. You're gonna increase your calories, you're going to boost your metabolism, and you're gonna have this higher set point, and everything's gonna be hunky-dory. And so we're gonna add, I don't know, 100 calories a week. Hope the fat loss will resume. And yeah, that never works. Almost, almost never works. I mean, there's it pretty much never works. And the reason is foundational. Your body's ability to handle increased calories without gaining fat depends on five specific factors. And if these aren't in place first, then adding calories will just make you gain weight. And you're like, huh? Haven't you talked all the time about recovering your metabolism? Yes, but you have to do it in conjunction with these foundations. That's the point. It is not just about increasing calories. That is the important point I want you to take away. So, foundation one, and a lot of people will have this at the base of their pyramid for the for good reason, is sleep quality and consistency, especially consistency. When you're chronically under-recovered, your body is in a stressful, sympathetic state. And that's a big, big problem because sleep is almost like food to your body. When you're depriving yourself of sleep, even adding more food isn't necessarily going to mitigate that, because the sleep is another massive source of recovery and energy and taking off that stress that's causing you to have this suppression in your metabolism. Foundation two is non-training stress. And I say it that way because training itself is a stress, but it's a good stress. If you have stress from work, from your relationship, from major things in your life, maybe with your family, with your finances, you've got this elevated cortisol all the time, right? That plus increasing your calories, your body's gonna say, Oh, give me that energy for fat storage. Please give it to me for fat storage. And I say it that way because if you gain weight at all, you might think, okay, I'm gaining some muscle and fat. You might gain a little bit of muscle. Chances are though, if you don't have these foundations in place, you're gonna gain a lot more fat than you'd like. Okay, a lot more fat than you'd like. What we're trying to do here is as you eat more, we're gonna, we're gonna tie this all together in the end. These foundations allow you, your body to recover your metabolism without gaining much, much, if any, fat at all, or even any weight at all. Like you, you might even you might even start losing weight, which again is not the end, not really the goal. It's just the the pleasant end result is a drop in body fat. So basic stress management is going to be huge here. Foundation number three is of course your training consistency and progression. It's interesting. Some people, you know, they'll join our program. It's not very common, but they'll join our program and when they do the intake, I say, How many training sessions are you doing? They say zero. My brain immediately goes to, oh boy, I'm excited because this is the biggest low-hanging fruit for you right now. You're doing zero. If we just go that go to one a week, man, will that just massively improve everything you're doing, your health, your strength, your mouth, even just one a week. I mean, ideally it's three or four, but we need to start where you're at. Okay. And you've got to be following a structured program, a structured program where you are progressing, if not every week, then most weeks. And it has to be consistent. I think every day you need to be doing something for your physical health in terms of movement, but from a strength training perspective, that's ideally three to four weeks, three, three to four days a week, and at a minimum two. But you know what? One is still better than zero. So I we need to make it consistent and then start to build from there. The muscle that you have, the stimulus, stimulus you're providing through that strength training, is telling your body what to do with that extra energy in such a good way. In such a good way. If you're not training at all, then all these things are gonna be a problem, are gonna continue being a problem. Okay. Foundation four is restoring that suppression of your neat, right? Your non-exercise stuff. So if you're barely moving outside the gym, you're still gonna have a lot of issues recovering. This is where bringing that step count up, you know, seven to 10,000 steps is a good target. But again, bringing it up from where you are. And also getting up off your chair if you're a desk, if you have a desk job and do that multiple times throughout the day, you know, moving, getting outside, walking your dog, you know, going for 30 to 60 minutes of cumulative movement throughout the day, independent of your strength training. And then foundation five is of course, nutrition and nutrition. And this primarily is not just the energy overall, which is calories, but the quality of your food, starting with protein and fiber, and then having balanced foods with plenty of fats and carbs as well. And carbs are gonna be massive here, guys. Let me tell you. If you've got to suppress your metabolism, suppress metabolism and what you're trying to do is recover, carbs are going to be your friend. Absolutely. When combined with training, they're gonna help your hormones, they're gonna help your recovery. Very become very efficient. Okay, this is not the time to be doing keto and low carb. Trust me, it's not. I've seen the difference. You're gonna recover your energy much faster this way. So nutrition is really important from all of these perspectives. And I've seen dozens, hundreds, thousands of people trying to reverse diet without these foundations. All they're doing is increasing calories. Well, of course, it's gonna blow up in their face, right? Sometimes they gain weight, sometimes they don't, but then nothing is recovering. So they're just eating a little bit more food, and their metabolism is, I'll say, slowly increasing, but they still have the energy problems. They are still gaining more fat than they would like, right? Like their physique, their body composition is not improving. And it's kind of a weird state to be in because that's the worst situation, is where you're, you know, recovering your metabolism, not gaining weight on the scale, but also not improving of the things that you really, really care about. You know, sometimes people will feel a little better because they're eating more food, but then they're having trouble with the body composition, right? So you get like these weird corner cases when you're not doing all the foundations. But when you are, then the recovery diet works dramatically better. And I say recovery, it's recovery from our suppressed metabolism, whether you've just been living that way through lots of restrictive eating, or you've done a fat loss phase intentionally and now are trying to come out. Hopefully, if you've done a fat loss phase, you've already done these things beforehand. I am mainly speaking to the person that's not even there yet and you're just trying to recover for the first time. Right. And now you can actually add those calories pretty aggressively and feel better even faster and have your body composition stay stable or improve as you're doing that. And then when you later on return to a deficit, you're coming from a much better place. And honestly, I don't want you even in a deficit for a while until you go through that recovery process. And that's the next problem is that it takes time, it takes focus, it takes patience. I'm not gonna use the word discipline, it's consistency. And you can do this in a very manageable, achievable way, one step at a time, two steps at a time, you know, just whatever works best for your lifestyle right now with the low-hanging fruit to fix your sleep, to manage your stress, to train, to move a little more, right? I know sometimes it feels overwhelming because it seems like all these pillars. At some point, you do need to get to the point where you're doing something with each of these pillars. But right now, pick the thing that is your go-get, as they say. All right. So now that we've talked about the suppression spiral, we've talked about the five uh foundations you have to have in place. Let's now talk about the recovery diet approach. And I haven't talked about it in a while on the show, and that's why I wanted to make this episode. What is a recovery diet? All right, it is not the same as a reverse diet. A reverse diet is about slowly adding calories to maintain your weight after diet ends, to try to get back to your metabolism, but you're doing it in a random guessing sort of way. That's really all it is. You're doing it with less precision and it takes longer, and you might overshoot, and all of those challenges that you've heard of with reverse dieting. A recovery diet is just a very precise protocol to restore metabolic function immediately, as quickly as possible, to where it should be right now. Like, what is your optimal set point right now? We won't know what it is until we get there, but we do know what it is right now, and we know that if we're under-eating to that, we can quickly go back there and not worry about gaining weight. All right. You are definitely gonna gain a few pounds of water weight and glycogen, but that is not body fat. Just to put that out there, because that's another fear people have. The goal is to get your body back to firing and burning more calories, maintaining your body composition, feeling better, feeling healthier, feeling stronger, all of those things. So we're talking about going from let's say you're 1200 calories right now and bringing that up to it, might be as high as 2,000 calories without gaining any fat or weight. Now, again, you're gonna gain some weight of water weight, but not of fat. Maybe you'll gain a little muscle as well. And then letting that stabilize before you do whatever your next phase is, which might be fat loss, maybe it's building muscle, maybe you want to maintain it there. But the point is we need to recover to that point. And you're not gonna do it instantly. It could happen, you could do it in a few days, and then when you start to recover, you may need to go even higher. And so there are some parallels to reverse dieting, but it's a lot more precision or a lot more precise. You have to track your intake accurately, weigh your food, log your food, log your weight, and use it uh either a calculation or in my opinion, MacroFactor is the one app on the market that can estimate your expenditure from what you've logged. And then it you will literally know the number to go to tomorrow after you've done that. Now, that's after you've been tracking for several weeks. You'll know what metabolism your metabolism is right now and how many calories to increase. Go download macrofactor, use my code WITS and weights, all one word, to get a free trial for that. It's excellent for this because it adjusts your expenditure based on your trend and intake for that accurate recovery diet. But you also have to track your body composition, your strength, right, your lifts, all the things you should be doing anyway. And then remember, the scale is going to go up during that recovery, especially at the beginning, because of water, glycogen, digestive content, sodium, like you're just eating more, all of that. You should look pretty much the same, if not better, in the mirror. It's because sometimes when you fill out the muscles of that glycogen, you end up looking a little bit more pumped. You know, it depends on what you already have there, of course. If you've never lifted weights, you're not there yet. But in general, you're gonna look a little better, actually. And then the timeline is really important here because while you can jump calories immediately to get out of the deficit, literally one day, you're gonna need eight to 12 weeks, sometimes longer, depending on how suppressed your metabolism was to get to full recovery. So it's kind of like recovery hops. Okay. If you were eating 1200 calories for six months, you might need two or three months to get back to your 1800 or 2000 or 2200 maintenance. And you don't want, I know you don't want to hear this, but your body doesn't work on the timeline that you want it to work on. It's gonna work on what nature's gonna do. And you're gonna, I'm not speaking properly here, but you're going to give it the best shot to recover as quickly as possible. So success looks like eating three, four, five, six, up to maybe 800 calories more, maybe a thousand, you know, if you're a bigger guy, for example, than when you started. So I would say probably four to four to six or eight hundred calories is like a nice big window for a lot of people that I see. And then your weight, your body weight has stabilized after that initial water bump and it's kind of stabilized. Maybe it's a little bit higher than that, but your measurements should be about the same. You should look the same or better, your energy should be significantly improved. Your training performance should be going up, right? You're adding weight or reps. Your recovery is faster, feels better, your mood should be better. For the ladies, your menstrual cycle should be normal again if it was irregular. Now, these aren't claims I'm making, these are just the shoulds that should happen all things equal, you know, not counting any other condition someone might have. And then when you return to a fat loss phase later, you're gonna be set up much better for success. And you probably won't have to diet to those calories either, because you're eating more fiber and you're moving more, you're burning more calories in general. This is different than those fit fluencers saying, Oh, you gotta do is reverse diet, and then you do a fat loss phase and you could eat more calories than last time. Okay, it doesn't work that way, like in that short timeline without doing all the foundational things and without potentially having built a little bit of muscle and metabolic capacity as well. Okay, don't look for quick fixes, it's going to backfire. But if you do this the right way, then when you do have fat loss phase, you're not gonna feel destroyed and you're not gonna be losing muscle. And that's the key, one of the key differences. And then you're gonna have energy for your workouts, your life. You could probably do it in a sustainable way, not have to go as aggressive. Now, everybody's different. Everybody has different levels that they start from and end from and different histories. So the protocol has to be individualized, right? Some people can add those calories more aggressively or bigger jumps. Others need to go slower because of how it makes them feel or the practicality of it, right? Just trying to eat more food. So the specifics depend on your situation, your foundations, where you are, what you're able to incorporate now, and of course how your body responds. All right. So if what I'm describing so far sounds kind of like your situation. If you're stuck at low calories, if you're not sure how to go from where to go from here, if you need a systematic way out and it to improve all of these factors, I'm running a live workshop October 21st called the Recovery Diet Workshop. It's actually called the 10-week recovery diet workshop because I'm going to walk through a full, it's like a 20-page workbook that you're gonna get access to afterward that is gonna help you assess exactly whether you are suppressed, what is the week by week progression to get out of it with a recovery diet as we head to the end of the year. So it's perfectly timed 10 weeks to take you into the new year, and then you're ready to go if you're looking to do a fat loss phase in the new year. And so it walk, we're gonna walk through, you know, how to adjust based on your response, all the pitfalls, all the scenarios, what to do when. You're gonna have it all mapped out. And you're also gonna get your first month in physique university as part of the whole thing for no extra cost. So to me, it's a no-brainer because you're gonna have the workbook, the workshop, and of course all the resources and support to get started and get some accountability and feedback, which for many people that's what they need is the accountability to make it happen. So that's 27 bucks October 21st. Go to live.witsandweights.com. That is Tuesday. That's next Tuesday, our 10-week recovery diet workshop. So if you're stuck with low calories, if you want a system for improving that and coming out the right way and not these random reverse diets, grab your spot, link is in the show notes, live.witsandweights.com. I'll share it again at the end. Now let's talk about some of the common failure points. What makes people fail? All right, because even when people understand this recovery diet concept, and I I know people will parrot it back to me and will define it pretty well, but then there's these three major failure points in reality that prevent people from doing them successfully. The first failure point is, of course, impatience. You knew I was gonna say this, right? This is hey, I added calories for two weeks, I didn't see things change, or I had that bump in weight that Phillip said would happen. It's all fluid, but I freaked out and I cut back. Look, your body's not gonna recover in two weeks. It's just not. I'm sorry, it's not gonna recover in two weeks if you've been doing this for any length of time, right? Because what got you here took many, many months. I'm not saying it's gonna take the same amount of time. It's just gonna take some decent amount. So that's the first failure point is impatience. That's why we have to focus on the metrics that we care about the most, which is increasing our strength in the gym, increasing our nutrition quality. Guess what? All the foundations that I talked about. The second failure point is guess what? Inconsistency with those foundations. So consistency really is what I mean here. And that is not just sleeping well for two out of the seven days of the week, but sleeping well for four, five, six, hopefully all seven, but more than you were before. Walking, you know, getting your X number of steps every day. If you can't get 12,000 steps a day, don't aim for 12. Aim for six or seven or eight or nine. Whatever lets you get that minimum viable product of steps, and then push beyond that when you can. Same thing with training. You've got to get into the gym consistently. Your body's gonna respond to consistent signals. So consistency itself is a really important skill that we want to develop here. That's a whole separate topic, but it's very important. Not discipline, not willpower, but really habits, behaviors that are ingrained in your life because they're achievable in your life. Okay, and then failure point three is trying to diet in the middle of recovery. Raise your hand if this is you, okay? You're you're like four weeks in your recovery, you see the scale up a few pounds, and you're like, I'm gonna do a rapid fat loss phase, or I'm gonna just quickly go on a deficit for a week or two, Philip won't mind, you know. And it undermines the whole process, right? It undermines the whole process. You can't simultaneously recover your metabolism and diet, because the dieting itself is what got you here and it's causing the suppression. And if you can't mentally handle that, then I don't think you're ready for a recovery diet yet. Although I think everybody should strive to become ready for one. So those are the three failure points. And I think, like, if there's one surprising takeaway today that that you might find is most people who think they need a recovery diet don't actually need one. And what I mean by that is a lot of people who think they're metabolically suppressed are just they're in their calorie deficit and they're impatient. And I say that with a caveat because your metabolism should adapt no matter what. It's probably gonna drop. But I'm talking about the people who've been dieting for like six weeks. And maybe you're not losing weight as fast as you want, but you're losing it gradually and you got past that initial bump that deceives everyone into thinking they're gonna lose weight a lot faster than they do, right? You can't, you kind of kind of ignore those first few weeks of dropping water weight. And, you know, things are gonna slow down a little bit, but then they kind of should kind of get in a steady drop. And those people who are making that slow but steady progress, even if it's like a quarter pound or pound a week, I often see them think that they are in a plateau or their metabolism is so suppressed they can't make progress, but they actually are chipping away at it. And then it's a matter of going back to my previous things and of patience and consistency and just continuing, right? Actually being suppressed has very specific indicators. Like you're at an ungodly low number of calories for multiple months, and you shouldn't you shouldn't have to do that. You know, your weight has been absolutely completely rock solid stalled for like four or five weeks past the initial drop, even though you're doing all the things the right way. Or your energy is in the crapper, or your training performance has declined noticeably, or your sleep quality has decreased, right? It's all the biofeedback stuff. Even for women, you've lost your cycle, your sex drive is gone. Those kinds of things. If you're eating in a reasonable deficit, right, there's there's a range of what that means. But like if you're a woman, maybe that might look like 1600 calories you're eating. Like, I'm not gonna freak out over that. And your weight loss is still going down, but it's just maybe not as fast as you want, which is a very common scenario. You don't necessarily need a recovery diet. Now, if you're done, if you're ready to come out, if you don't want to diet, if you want to go to maintenance, that's perfect for a recovery diet, right? But I'm talking about people who think they're not making progress when they are, if that makes sense. And and that's more of a patience thing, a precision thing, a tracking thing. It also an experience thing. If you don't have those, if if You do have the markers of like you things are really suppressed, just not great. Then this is one of the most powerful tools available so that you don't stay stuck for like months, years, or whatever and just feel terrible. We don't want you that way, do we? We want you feeling great and looking great and doing all the things you want to do in your life. So the problem is usually not that you need to eat less, it's this metabolic adaptation. And the solution is, of course, recovery, which means establishing the five foundations we talked about today, and then incorporating that with a recovery diet protocol. And then you're gonna, you know, eat more, feel better, be able to lose fat effectively when you're ready. So again, if you're thinking like this is exactly what I need, please join me next Tuesday for the 10-week recovery diet workshop. I'm teaching the complete system, the assessment process, the week-by-week protocol, the troubleshooting framework. And this is literally a 20, I don't hope this is not overwhelming, but it's like a 20-page document. And I did it that way this time because I literally wanted to give you something to take home where you can then map it out exactly as needed. And then we could help you implement it or give you the support you need along the way as you hit those roadblocks that we all inevitably intend to hit. So you're gonna get all of that. Your first month of physique university, all of that 27 bucks. Registration is open now. Link is in the show notes or go to live.witsandweights.com. And if you found value in today's episode, please share it with someone else who's stuck in low calories, who's complaining about this, who feels like there's no hope or no way to go, because there is. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that your body is capable of remarkable adaptation in both directions. Okay, the direction that we don't like and the direction we want to recover. You just need the right approach, the right protocol to guide it again. This is Philip, and I'll talk to you next time.
