5 Steps to Overcome Menopause Weight Loss Resistance | Ep 335

Grab your free Menopause Fat Loss Over 40 Guide to get the complete evidence-based strategy for navigating fat loss during this transition

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Struggling with unexplained weight gain during perimenopause or menopause? You're not alone, and it's not just "hormones and aging."

The menopause transition triggers a perfect storm of metabolic changes that go well beyond simple hormone fluctuations. Research shows us that during a specific 3.5-year window, women experience accelerated fat gain and muscle loss that can dramatically alter body composition, even when the scale barely moves (though in many cases it does and you seem to always gain weight).

Learn the real science behind why your body composition changes during this transition (including the surprising protein leverage effect that's sabotaging your efforts) and discover evidence-based strategies that actually work to improve your body composition and support fat loss.

Main Takeaways:

• The menopausal transition uniquely accelerates fat gain and muscle loss in a specific 3.5-year window (it's not just normal aging)

• Body composition can shift dramatically even when the scale doesn't move (you lose muscle while gaining fat, especially belly fat)

• The "protein leverage effect" drives overconsumption when muscle protein breakdown increases your appetite for protein

• FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) affects metabolism independently of estrogen, starting before estrogen significantly declines

• Strategic lifestyle, nutrition, and training adjustments can prevent or reverse these changes

Episode Resources:

• Try MacroFactor for free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS - Track your food and let the app calculate your metabolism

• Lifting Weights vs. Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for Fat Loss Over 40 | Ep 278

Timestamps:

0:01 - Why the scale keeps creeping up and jeans keep getting tighter
2:50 - Body weight vs. body composition
6:45 - Beyond estrogen (the role of FSH in metabolism)
9:27 - The protein leverage effect (affects overeating)
12:17 - Menopause myths (age and inevitable weight gain)
16:45 - Evidence-based solutions
18:22 - This 1 behavior gives you more confidence and control
21:32 - The role of chronic stress in exacerbating metabolic changes
24:42 - Reframing the menopause transition as an opportunity

Why You’re Not Losing Fat in Menopause (and 5 Things That Actually Work)

You’re eating the same. You’re moving the same. But suddenly the scale won’t budge—or worse, it’s creeping up. Your clothes feel tighter. That stubborn fat around your belly won’t go away. If you’re in perimenopause or menopause, this probably sounds all too familiar.

You’ve been told it’s “just your hormones,” that weight gain is inevitable, or that you just need to eat less and move more. But here’s the truth: yes, hormonal changes are real. But they’re not the full story, and they’re not a death sentence for your goals.

In this episode of Wits & Weights, I laid out the science behind menopause-related fat gain and gave you five actionable strategies to fight back with confidence. Let’s dig in.

Why Body Composition Shifts During Menopause

The number on the scale doesn’t tell the whole story. Many women maintain their weight but notice more fat and less muscle. That’s because menopause drives significant changes in body composition, not just total weight.

Here’s what the research shows:

• Fat mass increases while lean mass decreases, even if weight stays the same.

• Fat is redistributed to the trunk and abdomen, with postmenopausal women gaining 36% more trunk fat and 49% more intra-abdominal fat.

• This change starts before estrogen drops. A hormone called FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) rises early in perimenopause and alters fat storage and metabolism.

So no, you’re not crazy, and it’s not just “aging.” There’s a clear hormonal shift happening, and it’s driving these changes.

The Protein Leverage Effect (a Hidden Trigger for Fat Gain)

One of the most underappreciated drivers of weight gain in menopause is something called the protein leverage effect.

As you lose muscle mass during menopause, your body starts craving more protein. But if you’re eating the same diet you always have—without increasing protein—you unconsciously eat more calories from carbs and fats just to meet your body’s need for protein.

In other words, low protein intake drives higher total energy intake, which leads to fat gain. This happens even if you think you’re eating “healthy” or “light.”

The solution? You need more protein now than ever before. A good target is at least 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, and up to 1 gram per pound. Track your food and hit that number consistently.

Common Myths That Sabotage Progress

Let’s bust a few myths that keep women stuck:

Myth 1: It’s just aging, not hormones

Not true. Aging plays a role, but menopause causes a unique and accelerated shift in body composition. This is backed by large cohort studies like SWAN, which show a steep increase in fat mass and loss of lean mass during the three-and-a-half-year transition window.

Myth 2: Weight gain just means fat gain

Also false. You’re likely losing muscle at the same time. This changes your body shape and metabolism, even if the scale stays the same.

Myth 3: It’s hopeless after menopause

Nope. The most dramatic changes happen during the transition. Once things stabilize, your body becomes more predictable. That’s the perfect time to implement the right strategy.

Myth 4: You just need to eat less and move more

This one is the most damaging. Eating less without a strategy can make things worse by increasing stress, slowing your metabolism, and accelerating muscle loss. You don’t need to starve yourself. You need to train and eat smarter.

The 5 Things That Actually Work

Now that you understand what’s happening in your body, here’s what to do about it. These are the five most effective strategies to support fat loss and strength during perimenopause and beyond.

1. Consider Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)

If prescribed and monitored by your healthcare provider, HRT can:

• Preserve muscle and bone

• Reduce visceral fat

• Improve metabolic health

• Reduce cardiovascular risk

It’s not for everyone, but when appropriate, it can be a powerful tool.

2. Increase Protein Intake

As we discussed earlier, protein is essential to:

• Preserve lean mass

• Improve satiety

• Control appetite

• Counteract the protein leverage effect

Track your food. Measure your intake. Add more lean protein sources like chicken, beef, fish, eggs, dairy, and even plant-based options if needed.

3. Strength Train. No Exceptions.

Resistance training is the non-negotiable for menopause fat loss. It:

• Reverses sarcopenia

• Boosts resting energy expenditure

• Enhances insulin sensitivity

• Reduces visceral fat

You don’t need to do anything extreme. But you do need progressive overload, proper recovery, and consistency.

4. Stop Chronically Dieting

Being in a constant deficit wrecks your stress response and recovery. You may need to spend 8–12 weeks eating at maintenance and focusing on building strength before cutting again. This “priming” phase is crucial if you’ve been dieting for years.

Use this time to reset your energy balance, eat enough food, and regain metabolic flexibility.

5. Manage Stress and Recovery

You can be doing everything right with food and training, but if your stress is through the roof, your body won’t respond. High stress keeps you in a sympathetic state, makes recovery harder, and worsens hormonal symptoms.

Ways to reduce stress:

• Get outside and walk regularly

• Sleep at least 7 hours

• Strength train instead of endless cardio

• Eat enough carbs and total calories

• Use data (like MacroFactor or a simple journal) to give you confidence

Reframe This Chapter of Life

Instead of seeing menopause as the end of your body goals, reframe it as the beginning of a new, empowered chapter. You’re more capable now than ever to understand your body, track meaningful data, and take action based on evidence.

With the right inputs—protein, strength training, recovery, and smart nutrition—you’ll build a stronger, more resilient body than you had in your 20s. It’s absolutely possible. I’ve seen it over and over again.

And if you want help putting this all together, grab my free guide Menopause Fat Loss Over 40. It breaks down exactly how to plan your macros, train smart, and take control of this new phase of life.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

Let me know if this sounds familiar. The scale keeps creeping up. Your genes keep getting tighter. That stubborn belly fat seems to have taken up permanent residence around your midsection. If you're in perimenopause or postmenopause, you've probably been told it's just your hormones, that weight gain is inevitable and you should just accept it. But what if I told you that's not the whole story? Today, we're exposing the real mechanisms behind perimenopause and menopause weight gain. Yes, hormones play a role, but there are surprising factors at work you may not know about. You'll discover why body composition changes even when the scale doesn't move the protein leverage effect that's sabotaging your efforts, and tips and strategies based on evidence that actually work to improve your body composition and fat loss.

Philip Pape: 0:56

Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're tackling one of the most frustrating and misunderstood topics in women's health why you keep gaining weight during perimenopause and menopause and I get more questions about this topic than almost any other, and for good reason, because if you're a woman in your 40s or 50s, you've likely experienced this yourself, despite maintaining the same diet and training routine that might have even worked for years, for decades. Suddenly your body seems to be working against you, and conventional wisdom, the industry, the fitness influencers out there tell you it's hormones, it's aging. There's a lot of fear mongering around this that you need to eat less and move more, or some other advice that you may have tried that still doesn't seem to be working. And when we look at the research, there's a more complex and interesting picture. That's also an empowering one, and that's really the point of this episode. There are specific mechanisms at play during this transition that create a perfect storm for weight gain and body composition changes, and what's important is that if you understand those, then you have the power to work with those changes instead of wondering what's going on and being frustrated for years to come or just throwing your hands up Now, before we get into the science. If you want a practical, evidence-based guide for women navigating fat loss during this time perimenopause and menopause I do have a guide called Menopause Fat Loss Over 40, and it breaks down how to adjust your nutrition and training, specifically the nuts and bolts. It's totally free. You can download it using the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash free. Again, that's the Menopause Fat Loss Over 40 guide, and it's really fairly comprehensive in covering all these details so that you can customize it for yourself and come up with an action plan.

Philip Pape: 2:50

So let's start with what's happening and changing in your body during perimenopause and menopause, because it's not what most people think. There are a lot of assumptions out there, myself included. I made them for years. Obviously, I'm a man, I'm not a woman. I'm not going to go through these personally, but I've studied this extensively and worked with lots and lots of clients. Probably two-thirds of my clients are women in this age range and I absolutely love helping them to figure this stuff out, because it can be challenging. I will admit that it can be challenging. You have to really know what's going on.

Philip Pape: 3:20

So I want to start with talking about the basics body weight versus body composition. When we look at studies, whether they're cross-sectional, longitudinal, high-quality studies we see a pretty consistent phenomenon of weight gain steady weight gain of about a half a kilogram or a little over a pound a year. That is correlated with age more than it has to do with menopause itself. But there's definitely conflicting evidence out there and that's where it gets confusing. At the start of the menopause transition, we see the rates of fat gain double and lean mass decline. Now, those are just averages, but these gains and losses continue throughout this whole hormonal transition, which is what's exacerbating the challenge for women in this period. And we have to acknowledge that. You know, even though at some point these trajectories tend to level out and match anyone you know men, women, any any age at after that point, the transition itself is what's calling, causing this acceleration. That's making things challenging.

Philip Pape: 4:20

So what's happening is your total weight, your body weight might not change dramatically. You might, in fact be intentionally preventing it from changing with dieting, cutting calories, with trying to do more cardio, things like that. But your body composition metrics, they have reduction in fat-free mass, increase in fat mass, and these opposing changes that result in weight changing very little still cause lots of other things to go awry. Let's just say and that's why the scale can be so misleading during this time because you think maybe nothing's happening because the weight is stable and, by the way, I know for many of you the weight is going up. So that's why the scale can be so misleading during this time, because you think maybe nothing's happening because the weight is stable. And, by the way, I know for many of you the weight is going up, so that's just compounding it when there's additional body fat accumulation. But for many of you you might maintain the same weight, but underneath you're losing muscle, you're gaining fat, and it's not just any fat. Post-menopausal women gain about 36% more trunk fat right Ab, 36% more trunk fat right Abdominal in the trunk area, 49% greater intra-abdominal fat and 22% greater subcutaneous abdominal fat than premenopausal women.

Philip Pape: 5:36

So when we talk about menopause belly and things like that, there is reality to those experiences. For good reason, there's something called the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation, or SWAN study. It followed over 3,000 women through the menopause transition and it revealed that the transition itself, not mere aging, the transition itself uniquely accelerates fat gain and lean loss in about a three and a half year window. So that's that transition I was talking about. It is not just the gradual aging, or else you would see it be fairly linear or fairly consistent. I should say it's a specific biological transition that dramatically accelerates these changes during a short window of time.

Philip Pape: 6:11

So women who come to me frustrated it's funny I've actually had some clients that worked with me who reached out maybe a year or two prior and were starting to have some challenges. And they said you know what? I'm not sure I'm ready for coaching or it's too expensive. I'm going to try to go it alone and do what I've been doing. And then things get worse and worse and harder and harder and they're like what is going on? And it's probably because these changes are kicking in and it's during that time when you've really got to lock down and figure out what you need to do for yourself personally, and that's what I'm trying to empower you to do here with this episode.

Philip Pape: 6:45

So you've probably heard that the reason for this is the declining estrogen, and that is partially true. Excuse me, but I think the real story again is more nuanced. It involves multiple players with hormones. Estradiol, which, yes, is the primary form of estrogen, declines. But there's another hormone that people don't talk about and that is FSH, follicle stimulating hormone, and the early menopausal transition shows a sharp rise in serum FSH levels, even when serum estrogen levels remain within normal limits.

Philip Pape: 7:17

And that's important because FSH, it's not just for reproduction, it also directly affects your metabolism Through something called high affinity receptors, some of which are variants of the ovarian FSH receptor, called FSHR. Fsh regulates bone mass adipose tissue, the function of your fat mass, energy metabolism and cholesterol production, and that's in both sexes, men and women. And so the SWAN study found that FSH was correlated with bone resorption. That's effectively the way bones release byproducts that maintain what's called calcium homeostasis. Basically, it has to do with your bone health. Let's just put it just to simplify it. And other studies in addition to the SWAN study found that the hormone regulates body fat and energy homeostasis. So it's very important.

Philip Pape: 8:06

And so as it rises, which happens before the estrogen drops significantly in menopause, it's already starting to change how your body stores and burns fat, and this explains why some women start noticing changes in early perimenopause, when their periods are still regular. So for all the gaslighting out in the world of, oh, you're too young, no, you're not, there's obviously still things happening as a precursor to the final. You know that three and a half year menopause transition. Where it gets more interesting is that genetics you know even race and ethnicity, body mass index all of these affect the trajectory of estrogen or the estradiol and FSH changes over the transition. So your genetic background, your current body composition, influence how dramatically these change, which explains why some women experience way more severe symptoms than others.

Philip Pape: 8:53

I've had clients who you know got into their fifties and said you know, I've had absolutely zero issues whatsoever, everything's been just the same as it always was. And others that are like what the heck is going on? This seems hopeless, everything is just going haywire. What do I do? Right? And these are all real experiences and they're biologically supported and they're largely due to genetic differences and lifestyle and behavior and your history and all of that. So here's where the research gets fascinating, if it isn't fascinating already, and that is what can be the game changer for you and how you approach your nutrition during this time.

Philip Pape: 9:27

There are researchers from the University of Sydney discovered something called the protein leverage effect that happens during menopause. When we look at analysis of nutritional changes during the transition, we see that there's enhanced protein breakdown as a trigger for weight gain via a mechanism called the protein leverage effect. All right, so enhanced. Now you might have heard, kind of at a surface level, that women seem to need more protein as they age or they have more rapid loss of muscle and things like that. Yeah, unfortunately, it compounds the weight gain and the way it works is that when the progressive loss in your protein occur, it causes an increased appetite for protein.

Philip Pape: 10:15

And if there's not a corresponding increase in your dietary protein, then the consequence is you have extra intake of energy from non-protein sources. You have extra intake of energy from non-protein sources, and so as you lose muscle mass during menopause, which gets accelerated by the declining estrogen and the rising FSH, your body develops a stronger appetite for protein. But if you're eating the same way you always have and you're not getting enough protein, you're also not getting nearly enough of the concentration you need now, and so your body keeps driving you to eat more food until you hit your protein target, and then those extra calories come from carbs and fats and chances are you're eating more calories in general because you don't have enough protein and satiety and blah, blah, blah, right. So it's like this vicious cycle. So, without increasing the proportion of protein in your diet, the body's drive to reach its protein target is going to make you hungrier and continue to eat unnecessary calories until you do so, and this is unique to menopause. So very important to understand one of the reasons why we like to up our protein for everybody, but especially women, during this time, and the researchers calculated that weight gain and fat mass adiposity, we call it, as well as the loss of your lean tissue, including the loss of muscle, might be mitigated or even prevented just by adding in a little more protein. I think they estimate around 16 or 17% of the daily value, something like that, or up to 20% something, but anyway, we are trying to get way more protein in that. Anyway, we're trying to get around 0.7 to 1 grams per pound of body weight. So if you're listening to this saying, yeah, I know all this, philip, I've already increased my protein. I'm still having issues. This is just one of many things going on, and the solution here isn't that you should eat less, right, it's eating smarter. It's eating more food volume, it's eating more protein and that's a common theme for everybody. It's a very effective way to eat, in a flexible way that doesn't cut complete macros, like you're not just cutting carbs, you're not just cutting sugar or cutting anything, right, you're eating more protein and more nutritious things and more filling things.

Philip Pape: 12:17

So let's get into some of the myths about menopause weight gain that I think are causing confusion, and then this leads to some of the other tips that I have today. The first myth is that it's not aging or it's not menopause, it's just aging. So you'll hear some fitness influencers, especially like 25 year old men, saying you know, it's not your hormones, it's not menopause, it's just because you're getting older. And that's incorrect, because while aging drives some changes for everybody, menopause adds unique shifts that we already referred to the accelerated fat gain and muscle loss, and it's for a decent amount of time. So that's myth number one.

Philip Pape: 12:53

Myth number two that weight gain means only fat gain, and this is dangerous because it's not just that you're gaining fat, you are also losing lean mass, and so you're gaining even more fat than you think. Does that make sense? So you're actually fat, you are also losing lean mass, and so you're gaining even more fat than you think. Does that make sense? So you're actually losing some lean mass, gaining fat, and even if your weight on the scale doesn't change, you've gained body fat and body fat percentage, and so that's why a lot of women get frustrated. They're seeing their bodies change, becoming more fluffy, frumpy. You know the muffin top, all the trigger phrases that we use, even when the scale doesn't move, and then, of course, it gets even worse when the scale does move.

Philip Pape: 13:32

Myth number three is that post-menopause means you can't stop gaining Like you're just going to. It's inevitable, like no matter what, unless you eat, you know 700 calories. It's inevitable. But actually, after the transition that the three and a half year average transition, the composition stabilizes and that gives you a new milestone where you can intervene If you're already there, for example, the good news is that the most dramatic changes only happen during a certain window, and after that window you have a little bit better environment going on. You have a little bit better environment going on, which is why I encourage you starting as soon as you can, cause the sooner you can get in place the proper lifestyle for you, uh, the easier it'll be and you might even get additional gains than you that you didn't expect. When things get, quote unquote easier which, again, every woman's different, some, for some women, women, that's a obvious improvement and for others it may be more subtle.

Philip Pape: 15:13

And then I'll I'll have one more myth for you here, the one that really bothers me of all this that you need to just eat less and move more. Right, and I can't stand it, because I see Facebook posts, youtube videos, whatever, and people try to get into nuances about this stuff and people. Somebody will reply and say you just need to eat less and move more, like that's it. No, no, this ignores the metabolic and hormonal changes happening in your body and if you just eat less, you're probably going to exacerbate them because of the stress you know. The mechanism of developing obesity in menopausal women is clearly a distinct phenomenon, a mechanism driven by the things we've talked about related to hormones, leading to muscle loss and fat gain and fat gain in certain areas that we don't necessarily want them right muscle loss and fat gain and fat gain in certain areas that we don't necessarily want them Right. The reality is, your body's metabolic landscape is basically shifting into a completely different identity and the approaches that you had in your 20s and 30s are not going to work now. They may not work now. It depends on your history.

Philip Pape: 16:07

So now we understand what's happening, let's talk about what works, and I want to be clear. This isn't about a detox or a quick fix or something you're going to fix in the next month or two. This is working with the new realities, having the right expectations and patience, and if you do, you can be absolutely successful. This is the common theme when I talk to my clients or we look in our physique university I actually just asked the question at last week's check-in. What's the one thing you would tell somebody who's just starting this journey? And the recurring theme is to be patient and follow the process. And I know we don't like to hear it, but as long as you have the right process which we're going to talk about here you will be successful.

Philip Pape: 16:45

So first I want to talk about hormone replacement therapy and kind of get that out of the way. We know that estradiol-based hormone replacement therapy does slow fat gain, it does preserve muscle and bone health, it does reduce cardiovascular risk and the benefits are greatest when started early in the transition. So I'm not against HRT at all if that is something you need. I'm not a medical doctor. This is not medical advice. The decision about HRT is between you and your healthcare provider. It may not be estradiol, maybe other forms of hormone replacement. So that's really not my area of expertise in terms of prescribing or recommending or anything like that. And I work with clients who have a team of professionals including usually a hormone specialist, who decides what makes sense for them. Maybe it's thyroid, maybe it's progesterone, something else, but research shows that when it is appropriate, hrt is incredibly beneficial for body composition during this transition. So I wanted to mention that first, I did a previous episode that compared HRT versus strength training and basically the conclusion was they're both great and they're both contextual Strength training. Everyone should be doing HRT. Not everyone should or needs to do it necessarily. Maybe, maybe not. Again, that's where it's very personalized. So that's HRT.

Philip Pape: 17:56

Secondly, is nutrition Based on the protein leverage research and what we know about the importance of protein period. It's just a far gone conclusion that we have to increase protein and I recommend at least 0.7 grams per day, getting up to one gram per pound per day. So per pound per day. So whatever you're eating now, it's basically trying to get to that new level. The best way to do that is to track your food and know what the heck is going on, know what is going into your mouth.

Philip Pape: 18:22

That is often the biggest missing thing here. That creates a massive level of confidence for women who are frustrated because they simply don't know how much they're eating. They think they're eating, you know, 1500 calories a day or 1200 calories a day, but they're actually averaging 2000, 25, maybe 3000 calories a day and just don't know it right. Don't know it and I'm not asking you to cut things out right, I'm not asking you to cut things out. I'm asking you to add in high quality animal and plant protein into your diet and as well as high fiber foods. That alone is going to make a massive difference. But you've also got to track to understand where the calories come into play. The calorie density comes into play, the food volume, all of those things. If you're not sure about all this I do have other episodes on it. You can just reach out. I'm happy to send you a link on that. So that's the nutrition. Protein fiber is the focus. And then, third, we have resistance training. That is absolutely non-negotiable.

Philip Pape: 19:12

Strength training is going to preserve your lean mass. It's going to counter sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass. It's going to boost your metabolism in many, many ways. It's going to boost your hormones. It's going to help in just every way imaginable, even mental health. Muscle loss that happens during their transition is pretty much all prevented with proper strength training. So if I were to put a bow on this whole episode, it would be simply adding in and doing consistent. Strength training is going to mitigate significantly many of these issues because you're holding onto your muscle and you're building new muscle, and that is going to reverse your body composition into a positive direction. As far as your diet, overall, we want to have a flexible diet that's focused on satiety and eating without guilt and supporting your nutrients being nutrient-dense, high-volume foods, a diverse diet full of yes, all the macros, protein, fats and carbs really good carbs. Having plenty of energy, eating enough food for your goals, not constantly dieting. Again, that's an entire different topic we can dive into, but that is really, really important when you're in menopause to potentially take a pause and forget about losing weight on the scale for a bit and instead focus on building a resilient, strong body that supports building and holding onto muscle, which will then make fat loss so much easier.

Philip Pape: 20:34

And the last thing I really want to mention here, which I was I was wondering if I should or not because it's its own unique topic that affects everyone, but it exacerbates the situation during this time of life, and that is, uh, being in a high alert, chronically stressed state all the time. And this is a challenge no matter whether you're in the menopause transition or not, whether you're a man or a woman. It's the life obligations, it's the stress from raising or supporting a family. It's the stress from work, financial stress, all of the things that are going on around us and the way we live, with screens and our schedules and being on the go right All of that perceived stress physical stress, psychological stress is going to make things harder, and some of this stress is caused simply because you're trying to diet a lot, and some of this stress is caused because you are worried about the whole situation.

Philip Pape: 21:32

And I find that once you have some modicum of control over this, with regular strength training, with tracking what goes in your mouth, however you want to do it, my preferred way to do that is macro factor, because that app will calculate your metabolism for you and give you accurate targets, and that gives you confidence to then maintain your weight and then lose some fat, if that's what you're going after. All of these things create confidence. That then counteracts some of that stress. But being in this high alert state all the time itself is something that affects your metabolism, um, and it just exacerbates everything going on. So I did want to mention that, um, because the you know, the nutrition strategy, the training, the HRT, will definitely cover a big piece of the pie, but for some some of you out there, some of you women, the stress itself is so high that it can counteract almost anything, and some of that stress comes from the fact that you're just not eating enough, and so they play hand in hand. Right, all of this plays together. So this is why I like spending about two months initially dialing in those habits for lifting, for eating enough food, for eating enough protein and carbs yes, both and kind of seeing where you are with the numbers and with maintaining that high energy state, and then you can decide okay, from this point I'm in a really good stress situation training and nutrition situation, hormone situation to go after the fat loss, and even then you may need a more aggressive or less aggressive fat loss approach, depending on where your metabolism stands. So that's, those are my takeaways for like the big picture of what to do.

Philip Pape: 23:16

What's the solution framework here for women in perimenopause? Once you understand why this is happening and that it's primarily due to the loss of muscle mass, primarily and I would look at this transition as if we can reframe it for you as just the perfect time, just the perfect opportunity to develop more metabolic resilience and metabolic flexibility, because when your body is forced to adapt to new hormonal conditions. It can become more efficient and more resilient when you have the right strategy and you can end up with improved metabolic health, much more improved than you might have had even in your 20s and 30s and we sometimes neglect this aspect. But the health, the longevity, the metabolism because you have a better body composition, because you have more energy, because you're stronger than what you had in decades past and you're working with this new reality of your body, this transition could be just a completely new identity for yourself as a strong, functional, athletic person in life. And remember, your body is not broken during menopause. It's far from it. It's adapting to a new reality and you just have to give it the right inputs right the adequate protein, the resistance training, proper recovery, not constantly dieting, setting yourself up for fat loss in a more efficient, effective way. And that's a really, really positive thing when you can do that.

Philip Pape: 24:42

It's what I love helping women do, because it can be very challenging. The first, I'll say, few months of this process are a lot of discoveries happening, education along with patience, and that's the real challenge for a lot of you is that without that patience, all the learning and information in the world is not going to matter because you're not going to be able to apply it. And so knowing that this can be the beginning, just the very beginning, of the strongest, healthiest phase of your life, when you have the information but then you implement it with the patience, is going to pay off big time. It's just going to be amazing. So I want you to remember that the weight gain, the body composition changes during peri and post menopause are not inevitable. They are not right. They are not from just getting older, they're not just because of hormones. They're a sign that your body, or they're not a sign that your body's failing or you're doomed to struggle with your weight for the rest of your life.

Philip Pape: 25:36

When we look at the research research peel it back and when I look at real experience with many, many different clients across the spectrum of menopause and different situations, we see that the interplay between the declining estrogen, the rising FSH, the muscle protein breakdown, the protein leverage, all of that is understandable, it is objective. And then it shows us what works Strategically increasing the protein, strategically adding in progressive overload-based strength training and, in many cases, yes, hormone replacement therapy. It's all of those things. Now you may not want to have medications or therapy or whatever, and that's fine. I've worked with clients who said you know, I want to go all natural with this, and then we again have to have the realistic expectations for what that means. You can still have incredible progress, absolutely Okay, absolutely.

Philip Pape: 26:26

The women who thrive during this transition are those who understand what's happening in their bodies, their personal own bodies. That's what I mean, not just the science, that's great, but they actually collect the data, they measure things, they track things Not in an obsessive way, not in a way that's highly convenient or takes a lot of time In a very efficient way, measuring the right things, making it a habit, and not trying to fight physiology by doing it too quickly or being impatient or throwing up your hands saying no, no, no, this doesn't work, I'm done. Or I tried this for a week and I got frustrated. My scale weight popped up. It doesn't work. Those attitudes are not going to serve you well, but an attitude of patience and ownership and positivity, of hey, I know this can work. I'm going to take the philosophy and the steps that Philip just talked about and figure out what the low-hanging fruit is for me and for many of you.

Philip Pape: 27:17

It might be that you're not strength training or doing it in a way that progresses, or maybe you're not strength training or doing it in a way that progresses, or maybe you're not tracking your food. You're not even sure how much you eat. Maybe you're not eating enough, maybe you're not eating enough protein or carbs. All of that and it's just updating your strategy objectively to match your phase of life, and then you're going to be amazed at what's possible. You really are All right.

Philip Pape: 27:36

So if you're ready to take some action with an evidence-based approach that we talked about for women navigating fat loss during peri and post-menopause, the guide that I put together lays out the key steps that we talked about today so you can personalize it for yourself. It's called Menopause, fat Loss Over 40. It includes everything we discussed how to plan your calories and macros, how to train, all of it. Go to witsandweightscom, slash free or click the link in the show notes. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember this transition isn't the end of your fitness journey. It's the beginning of a new, empowered chapter of life where you understand your body better than ever before. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

The Biggest Training Mistakes After Novice Progression (Starting Strength CEO Nick Delgadillo) | Ep 334

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Why did your strength gains stall, and what can you actually do about it? Are you overtrained or just under-recovered? And when is it time to change the program, not your goals?

I’m joined by Nick Delgadillo, CEO of Starting Strength Gyms and host of the Stronger Is Better podcast. We break down what really causes lifters to hit that dreaded wall after the novice phase and how to break through it with intention and sustainability. Nick explains why small tweaks, not full overhauls, are key to continued gains and how your form, food, and follow-through matter more than fancy programs.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

2:38 – The psychology of the post-novice wall
5:25 – Why recovery outside the gym matters
10:23 – Novice vs. intermediate isn’t black and white
13:11 – How to troubleshoot your progress
17:21 – Three-part self-check before changing programming
28:26 – Training through tendon pain safely
34:59 – Returning to strength after surgery
50:15 – How mindset shapes long-term success
53:20 – Starting Strength Gyms and the future of lifting

Episode resources:

• Starting Strength Podcast

• Stronger is Better Podcast on Spotify / Stronger is Better Podcast on Apple

• Website: startingstrengthgyms.com

• Instagram: @liftfightwin 

Why Most Lifters Stall After the Novice Phase (and What to Do Instead)

You’ve followed the plan. You ran your linear progression. You’ve built a decent strength base. But now the weights aren’t going up like they used to, and suddenly you’re stuck. This is where most lifters either stall for years, burn out, or start program-hopping. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In this episode of Wits & Weights, I talked to Nick Delgadillo, CEO of Starting Strength Gyms, about the real reasons people hit a wall after their novice phase and how to transition smoothly into intermediate training without overhauling everything or spinning your wheels for years.

Why Linear Progression Eventually Fails

During the novice phase, progress feels almost magical. You add weight to the bar every session, your muscles grow, your technique improves, and life is good. But this phase doesn’t last forever. Typically within 4 to 7 months, progress slows and motivation starts to dip. Here’s why:

• Strength gains require more recovery, more food, more sleep, and more consistency.

• Training gets hard quickly. Especially with aggressive linear programs like Starting Strength, the intensity ramps up fast. If you’ve never done hard physical things, this can be a shock.

• Distractions creep in. Life gets in the way. You miss sessions. You question the plan.

This is the point where you either double down or drift away. And for most lifters, this is when they need to shift their mindset, not their program.

The 3-Part Self-Assessment for Stalled Progress

Before you blame your genetics or age, Nick recommends a simple framework to troubleshoot your progress:

1. Form Check

Are you lifting with good enough technique to keep progressing? Not perfect, but efficient enough to avoid energy leaks, joint stress, or form breakdown at heavier weights.

Even experienced lifters benefit from a coach’s eye. Many issues like elbow pain, knee discomfort, or hip shifts come down to bar path, grip width, or back tightness. It’s not always a matter of needing more rest or switching exercises.

2. Compliance

Are you actually doing the program? Not your interpretation of it. Are you missing sessions? Changing rest times? Adding unnecessary fluff or skipping important sets?

One of the most common reasons lifters stall is because they aren’t being honest with themselves about consistency.

3. Recovery

Are you sleeping enough? Eating enough? Getting enough protein and carbs to fuel adaptation?

As Nick said, you can’t have an intelligent programming discussion unless you’re recovering well. Most of the time, the issue isn’t overtraining. It’s under-recovering.

Programming Changes Should Be Small and Strategic

Moving beyond novice training isn’t about scrapping your plan or jumping to a new program. It’s about making the smallest possible change to continue progress.

If your deadlift stalls but your squat and bench are fine, only adjust the deadlift. Maybe it needs more rest. Maybe the frequency needs to drop. But leave the rest of your program alone.

In fact, Starting Strength's own "advanced novice" programming recommends this tweak-as-needed approach, but most people skip past it and jump programs.

Progress after the novice phase should look more like this:

• Slowly increasing volume or intensity

• Adding light days to support recovery

• Introducing backoff sets or rep variations

• Spreading training stress more evenly throughout the week

All of that depends on collecting feedback, being patient, and keeping things simple.

Strength Training Is a Long Game

Strength is a lifelong pursuit, not a six-month challenge. If you want to keep lifting into your 50s, 60s, and 70s, your training has to be:

• Sustainable. You can’t go all-in all the time.

• Goal-oriented. If you don’t know what you’re working toward, training loses meaning.

• Adaptive. Life happens. Injuries, stress, and schedule changes will force you to pivot. Don’t quit. Just adjust.

When Injuries or Pain Show Up

Tendonitis, shoulder pain, low back tweaks — these happen. But most of the time, they’re not a reason to stop training altogether. Nick’s advice:

• Start by checking technique. Most chronic pain comes from small but fixable form issues.

• Don’t deload right away. Instead, keep the load heavy but use variations like paused or tempo reps to avoid aggravating the injury.

• Drive healing. Don’t just wait to feel better. You need to apply stress to stimulate adaptation and recovery.

Even post-surgery, strength training can be the recovery tool when approached correctly.

Grit Is the Real Secret

Some lifters are wired for delayed gratification. Others aren’t. When they don’t see instant results, they give up. But if you can push through the discomfort and uncertainty, that’s where long-term success lives.

You don’t need constant motivation. You need a reason to keep showing up. A plan. A coach. A community. A reminder that doing the work is the goal.

As Nick put it, if you believe you can’t succeed, you won’t even try. But if you participate in the process, even without guarantees, you’ll grow.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

you've put in the work, you follow the program, you've built a solid strength foundation, but now your progress has hit a wall. That linear progression that works so well in the beginning isn't delivering results anymore. Today, starting Strength CEO Nick Delgadillo reveals why lifters get stuck after the novice phase and what to do about it. You'll discover the biggest mistakes that halt your progress when it's time to change your program and the principles to keep getting stronger for decades, not just months. If you're wondering why your strength gains have stalled, stop blaming your genetics or age. This episode will help you build your skills as an intermediate or advanced lifter.

Philip Pape: 0:47

Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.

Philip Pape: 0:53

I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we are tackling one of the most frustrating challenges in the strength world why progress stalls after your novice gains and what to do about it.

Philip Pape: 1:05

My guest today is Nick Delgadillo, the CEO of Starting Strength Gyms and a starting strength coach with tons of experience over a decade of experience guiding lifters through this exact transition. He's also host of a new podcast, stronger is Better. Go follow it, go check it out. He goes into very specific and useful detail on really the principles, which I think are important, but also the details on the methods. So today we're going to discuss the post novice period, after linear progression starts to slow down and that's where all the complicated questions start to pop up the critical errors that lifters make in their training after that phase, and then how to structure your approach to have a long lifting career, given the challenges of life, the injuries, the circumstances we all face as humans who just want to be strong until we die of a deadlift in our nineties. Nick, it is an honor to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on.

Nick Delgadillo: 1:56

Absolutely. Thank you very much, philip. That was a fantastic intro man. I appreciate it.

Philip Pape: 2:01

That's what it's all about, man. I mean and it's great to have somebody on who is deeply embedded in the world that I care most about, which is strength training in general, the word strength being extremely important there, but also from a practical standpoint people can definitely get confused when they starting strength, they go through the basics, they get newbie gains. It's kind of almost easy for a lot of individuals. Let's just oversimplify it and then they start to hit a wall, sometimes very early, and we'll talk about when that is. But, in your experience, what separates the people who keep making progress from those who don't around that?

Nick Delgadillo: 2:37

period.

Nick Delgadillo: 2:38

Yeah, there's a combination of things that happen and you're exactly right. The beginning is exciting and it's easy. It really is easy because there's a lot of things going on. You're learning a new skill, you're learning a new way of moving, you're actually getting stronger and that happens very rapidly and you start to make a lot of progress and there's even some depending on who you are and how your brain is wired you may actually start to see some uh, some aesthetic benefits as well, even if you're like lying to yourself, it's to some extent. But there's a lot of uh, positive feedback occurring in the novice program and it's uh, it's kind of like this compounding process. That is pretty exciting and it's really cool.

Nick Delgadillo: 3:19

Pretty soon, uh, after you know, after, depending on on how young you are and how well you recover and all the things that we always talk about you're looking at four to six months, maybe a little bit longer than that, typically for that kind of exciting novice period where you're just doing the most basic version of strength training and making a lot of rapid progress. A few things happen. Number one just from like a psychological slash, emotional standpoint. Stuff gets to get, starts to get really hard all of a sudden and it goes from like easy to like a little bit hard and you're still enjoying it to really, really hard and you have to, and that happens sooner because of how aggressive the starting strength program is and how quickly you're making improvements. That happens fairly quickly and sometimes, especially people who haven't done really hard things physically before, it's kind of a wake up call and that's one of the factors that makes people stop progressing or shift their goals, or shift their goals away from strength training or find some other hobbies, some other, some other physical thing to do, right. So there's that. There's also the the physiological situation, which is that, uh, you know, everything follows the law of diminishing returns and your, your body, is the same way. Strength adaptations are expensive, they're metabolically difficult to achieve and you're coming up on that reality at about the four to seven month mark. So the key to continue through that and to continue progressing forever is actually slow, heavy reps, and that's the key to strength training.

Nick Delgadillo: 5:00

People who are predisposed to enjoying strength training. They thrive off of that, they enjoy it. That's not the case for most people walking around and they can learn to enjoy it sometimes, but it's really just, is really hard work. So there's that aspect of it. There's the recovery aspect of it in terms of needing more resources in order to continue progressing, needing more food, needing more protein, better sleep, all the things that happen outside of the gym.

Nick Delgadillo: 5:25

And that's difficult. That's very difficult because that involves you extending training, extending the hour or 90 minutes that you're in the gym into the rest of your life and thinking about the next training session. What are you going to do in order to be able to add more weight to the bar in the next training session? And then there's also the time commitment. There's the time commitment. You know the workouts are taking a little bit longer.

Nick Delgadillo: 5:48

And then there's also just the human nature is to is to get distracted right, especially as things are getting things are getting more difficult. You start questioning what you're doing, and then other other uh, ideas, methods, concepts start to become really, really appealing. So one of the things that I really try to do is get people to understand the fundamental concepts and the basic principles so that they at least have a guide on their path, because it's totally understandable to not wanna be a strength athlete. That's a little bit insane, and our contention isn't that everybody should be a strength athlete, but that you should pursue strength training for probably the rest of your life. And so what does that look like?

Nick Delgadillo: 6:26

Going forward and that's a question that each individual trainee and each individual lifter will have to answer for themselves and that happens again at like, the four to six month mark is like. What do I want this to look like? My opinion is that it should be sustainable and that you should incorporate strength training into your life, because it's absolutely necessary If you want to. I mean just as a human walking the earth right.

Philip Pape: 6:53

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I personally love it. I know people who get into lifting and think about principles like you're talking about in that way are much more it seems, much more adaptable and open to learning and growth. You know, mentally and physically, as their body changes, the situation changes, the circumstance changes, but the principles remain the same. Um, just just my story, real quick, right.

Philip Pape: 7:09

It was back in the pandemic. You know I hadn't even learned much about proper strength training. I did CrossFit for like eight years and then, having to be at home with hardly any equipment, I just started diving into books and podcasts, including starting strength, and I learned about go mad as well and I knew that wasn't the right diet for a 40 year old. But I will say I drank probably a half go mad diet for a few months and gained a ton of weight, but it helped tremendously Right and I was. I was gaining cause.

Philip Pape: 7:37

You talk about resources, gaining a ton of strength and, as well, muscle, but I didn't care at the time about the muscle side of things yet and the things you mentioned about it being easy, because almost anything works. So we need to understand the principle that makes it work and then carry that forward is missed on a lot of folks in my opinion. And then the how it's physically expensive and you need to keep up with that, uh, is also important, and I'm more of a nutrition guy now because of that, because I see that's often a missing piece for folks. It's just eating plenty of food and carbs and getting the energy, but anyway. So when we look at this arc of someone's lifting journey, when do they hit that first wall? And when they do so, are they intermediate at that point, and I know the answer or are there things that maybe give them feedback, objective feedback, that they should take to continue their novice phase before we get to the intermediate phase?

Nick Delgadillo: 8:29

Yeah, people tend to think of it as an achievement or an endpoint or some kind of like a hard transition from one phase into another. I really, really would like for people to stop thinking about things in this sort of rigid paradigm of novice, intermediate and advanced, because it's all very squishy. The only one that's really an actual category that I can point to somebody and say this is your category and this is the process that you're going to embark on is the novice phase, because that's really simple. All it means is that you can add weight to on is the novice phase, because that's really simple. All it means is that you can add weight to the bar every single time. And even like the novice nomenclature is a little bit, I hardly use it, like in practice it's good. I think it's good for coaches to have this language, to be able to discuss programming and be able to discuss these concepts, but in practice, like if I'm talking to a client or a member at a gym, I will rarely, or if ever, use the word novice, because novice carries some uh, some implications, uh, connotations, and then I have to explain myself. Really, all I want you to know is that you can add weight to the bar every time you come to the gym and we're going to do that, and that's what a novice is and not that's all, and it doesn't matter. Like it could be 65 pounds on the bar, it could be 315 on the bar, so beyond that, it's kind of like a joke at the seminars. It's like some of your lifts are in a novice program, some of your lifts are in an intermediate program, some of your lifts are in an advanced program. So what are you? I mean, pick one right. I tend to look at it as like the squat, because that's the sort of the in my view. It's kind of, or the way I think about it. It's kind of the driver of the of the program, but it does. It doesn't matter ultimately, right? So anyway, point being, it's not, it's not like this, this end point, it's not this smooth or not smooth, it's not this hard transition from like one day you're, you're novice and then two days later you wake up in're intermediate.

Nick Delgadillo: 10:23

I understand that in starting strength and practical programming there are references to an approach where you run the novice program until you stall and then you take a deload and then you run it again and then you take a deload and then you run it again and then you switch into an intermediate program that works in a demographic of trainees who are actively growing and getting bigger, which pretty much narrows it down to young males, and that's it. That's the only demographic that should really be following that approach, because literally between like this week and next week, that kid may have grown a little bit or their body said better. Their body is in a position to grow rapidly and aggressively and respond to an aggressive program. That approach is not well-advised for almost anybody else. So unless you're a 25-year-old guy or under 30-year-old guy and under, and maybe needing to gain some weight, don't do that. So what you're going to do instead is a gradual approach which follows just solid principles.

Nick Delgadillo: 11:29

For anything that's process-based, you have a process that's working. Something in that process is not working anymore, meaning like your press stops going up or your deadlift stops going up, whatever. So what you do is you look at your process and you say, okay, what pieces of this are not working for me anymore? And then I make adjustments to just that piece of it and then let everything else continue the way it's working. So that's kind of the magic. This is referenced in practical programming in the advanced novice chapter. But I and every single person who's done starting strength ever has managed to miss that part of practical programming because we don't actually read the book. You just look at the programs and then I really started to hammer on that with my own thinking and with my own clients and with my programming lectures. And that's actually where the magic is.

Nick Delgadillo: 12:19

It's like understanding how to make small changes. And people have taken this concept and like rebranded it and renamed it, other things, but just making a small change, the smallest possible change to affect the least number of variables, because you have a process that's working. Let's not change everything at one time. Just change one thing and then see what happens and then reassess. You're on a short enough timeline at that point that you'll know if something's working or not within a week generally, but even within a couple of weeks you'll know whether or not you made the right programming change. And that's the key to the whole thing. It's small changes to continue progressing. So there's never this like go, go, go, stop and then switch programs. It's always like go, go, go, go, go and then, rather than stopping, it's just throttling back. You know, just just take the foot off the gas and then take the foot off the gas a little bit more, and that's, that's the. That's the way it looks forever after that.

Philip Pape: 13:11

Yeah, yeah. So you hit at the heart of the systems thinking that I love to talk about too, as an engineer. I'm an engineer by background of controlling the variables, getting the feedback. I just had a client who, for the first time, is eating a pre-workout Right and and he's like what should I eat? He said, try a banana. He's like well, how much? How you know how many? I said just try a banana, you know, so he ate a banana.

Philip Pape: 13:32

A couple of days there he's like man, I feel stronger. I got more reps in the gym. Should I double it, like how many grams? I said, well, that worked. Now double it and see if it works better, and if it doesn't, you're good. You got your answer. So I think it can be quote unquote, simplified in that way. But where the challenge might come in for people listening is what if it isn't the programming? What if it's all the other things outside the gym which I know you also like to talk about? How do we normalize those, at least even if they're not optimal, just kind of make them stable enough or identify what those are so that we can identify programming as the concern?

Nick Delgadillo: 14:04

That's a great question, man. You cannot have an intelligent programming discussion and you can't make a wise programming decision in terms of continuing to progress if you don't have all the other variables controlled, and, just like you said, they don't have to be optimized, but they do have to be controlled. So, uh, that includes things like, uh, nutrition, for sure, it includes things like sleep, and then, uh, you know, all the other things like rest times and appropriate weight jumps, all the things that rip a toe covers in the first three question article. So, um, the things that you have the most control of, probably in order, is your nutrition and then, secondarily, is your sleep. Uh, so, you know cause, depending on the situation, you may or may not be able to sleep, you may have small kids in the house, you may have a crazy work schedule or whatever, but a variable that you definitely can't control is is what you put in your mouth, right? So, uh, and and that's a thing that that almost doesn't matter too much, especially in the beginning oh well, it does matter. But people, uh, you can get a lot of progress without thinking about it, right? So you can do a shortcut or a hack, like GoMad, as a smaller guy and take care of a huge chunk of your nutrition needs just by drinking milk, but that's not sustainable and a lot of times it's not a good idea for who's doing it. So, yeah, that's another aspect that needs to really be looked at at that. Uh, at that critical point, at the four to four to seven month mark, it's starting to look at all the all the habits and things outside of the gym, right? So first step, it's the same kind of systems, uh, thinking that you're you're talking about First thing is just to get a handle on what's going on.

Nick Delgadillo: 15:48

People start wondering it's like what, what's happening? Like, why isn't this working? And then they, and then they, and then they start consuming information and worrying about detail when, like, the big stuff isn't taken care of. I think you know my, my wife the other day said something about it was like genius, but it was, and people have heard this before. But it's like worrying about the pebbles or the sand instead of the boulders Right. Like, get the boulders right and then you'll have bandwidth and room for everything else you need. So it's like, do you even know what you're eating every day and you don't have to tell me a number? But like do you have an idea of how much protein you're eating? And people will say something and it's like it's probably wrong, right? So it's like maybe just write it down, put it in an app, whatever, and let's get a handle on what's going on.

Nick Delgadillo: 16:34

And again, optimizing isn't the first step, because optimizing, especially from a lifestyle standpoint, which includes nutrition and sleep, is a big ask for people. You're now affecting potentially social situations, emotional stuff and just comfort and lifelong habits at that point. So step one isn't like let's figure out exactly your macro split that you need, because you won't even know, right? So it's like somebody could tell you, but that may not be right. Let's establish your macros and then let's start tracking. You're asking somebody to rearrange their entire life. That's not sustainable. Again, sustainability is important. So let's get a handle on it, see what's going on, and then let's make small incremental changes, exactly like we would do for programming, and see what's happening.

Nick Delgadillo: 17:21

But to answer your question, I think I got a little sidetracked there. To answer your question, you cannot have, in the context of continuing to progress your strength training, you can't have a good discussion without making sure that you have control or that you have a good idea of what's going on with your recovery, and it's just that simple. And form is another one. Like, your form has to be close enough that you're not causing massive inefficiencies in the lift that are holding you back, and that can happen in stuff like the deadlift, that can happen in stuff like the overhead press, for sure, and, to some extent, the squat. So the way I describe it is before you make a programming change, we need to do like a self-assessment, and the first step in that self-assessment is is my technique good enough? All, right, and when I say good enough, like, these lifts aren't hard guys, so like, within 90% of what we at starting strength, um, have spent a lot of time thinking about the uh, the most efficient way to do these things, meaning that they allow you to lift the most weight and they, they uh, produce the least amount of wear and tear on your joints because of the lack of extraneous movement during these, during these movements, right, joints because of the lack of extraneous movement during these, during these movements, right? So is your technique close enough, right? In other words, are you not causing any issues that are that are leaving weight off the bar?

Nick Delgadillo: 18:44

Second thing is um, are you compliant? Uh, and that's probably even more important than form and nutrition, anything else is are you actually doing the program like a program and are you actually showing up? So if you go on your training log and you've got a month's work of worth of a training scheduled and you've missed two or three workouts in that month, I would say you're not compliant. I would say that that the first step is like okay, in this case, let's take a little bit of a reset and let's make sure we don't miss a workout for X amount of time and see what happens. That may, in and of itself, take care of the problem for you.

Nick Delgadillo: 19:12

So it's form, it's compliance, and then the third thing is recovery. Am I doing the things that I need to do outside of the gym? And the answer may be yes or no for each of these things. So the next step in that self-assessment is what do I do? Do I get compliant? Do I get my form checked? Do I meet up with a coach and fix that issue? And if it's a recovery issue, then okay, what do I need to do from a nutrition standpoint? Because you're not going to be able to uh, effectively progress and really like with any of your goals if you don't have at least the nutrition side of it, uh, taken care of. And when I say taken care of, it's just like we've been saying, it's like get a handle on it and then start making progress towards optimizing. Yeah, we're dealing with physiology, we're dealing with bodies and we're dealing with improving structural and metabolic adaptations, and that requires a level of attention to your nutrition situation that may be a little bit uncomfortable and you've got to be moving towards that all the time.

Philip Pape: 20:10

Yeah, everything you said is it provides a great framework to kind of check off the boxes and in priority, uh order, the form and the technique. I can't stress, re-stress what you just said as to how important that is, not to the extent that you prevent trying to progress in your lifts, cause that's a whole other excuse people make, like oh, I'm looking at my form but that I mean I'm not a starting strength coach, I'm a nutrition coach.

Philip Pape: 20:35

But I do provide form checks and a lot of it is based on what I've learned from starting strength and I'll tell you, somebody who's been lifting for 20 years can still have pretty bad form until they get it checked against the proper biomechanics and bar path and all of that and you can fix it very quickly within a couple sessions. I went and saw Cody and Nino here in Connecticut after applying starting strength on my own and I'm the type of guy man that reads the book. You know three times highlights it, take notes. I did all the exercises from the pictures. You know, empty bar, everything, and still I had a ton of stuff that had to get fixed and that's great. That's why you need that third-party perspective and happy promoting starting strength for that purpose, cause there's a lot of great guys and gals out there that can do that. So getting that will help you progress more efficiently with less injury.

Philip Pape: 21:20

We'll feel better for your joints and actually do the program you mentioned doing the program where if somebody is doing these things, so let's say they got their form checked, they got their, they're being consistent in the gym and their recovery is unchanged. Let's call it. Is there a sense of uh, when we talk about stalling out right People? When they stall because they they went in for a session, expected it to progress and it didn't. On a weekly basis, let's say, for intermediate programming, what's your normal recommendation? What do you look at? Once all these things are checked off. That makes sense.

Nick Delgadillo: 21:54

Yes, my goal as a coach is to not have anybody stall or fail. So I think, if you're paying attention, I think if you are well, it's always a good idea to be anticipating issues right. And again, if we're thinking of just handling processes well, handling systems well, you need to be anticipating issues right. And again, if we're thinking of like, just handling processes well, handling systems well, you need to be ahead of problems. You can't be reactive, you have to be proactive. So a good strength coach will do that. A good strength coach will be proactive and not let you get to the point where you're pushing at the limit because there's multiple things going on. Part of it is like, you know, it's like the stress the stress is going up, but your recovery ability is going up and you're kind of reaching all these inflection points at the same time. So, in a situation where you have lots of variables that are being controlled, the failure point, it represents a situation where you have not accounted for certain things and now you've got some potentially uncontrolled variables that you have to deal with. So I don't want to. I don't want to get there, in addition to the psychological problems that come along with like failing, especially with something like a squat it's, it's, it's too much. It's too much to at one time to deal with, right? So I want to be proactive. I want to make programming changes, not early, but proactively, while at the same time making programming changes reluctantly. So that's kind of the way I think about it the programming changes should be proactive, but they should be reluctant. So I'm not changing programs just because, because what we're doing is working, I am changing programs ahead of when I think there's going to be a problem. Because if I'm looking at a lifetime of training, even if I have a client or a member for two years, I'm looking at the long game, and this week of training or this session represents a very small chunk of the next two years of training. So I would rather have success, I would rather have progress, even if that means slowing down a little bit, if that means that we're going to be successful for another three months, another another year, another two years. You know what I'm saying.

Nick Delgadillo: 23:58

So, um, so yeah, as soon as, as soon as I and, by the way, the way I'm doing it is I'm looking at at the bar speed, I'm looking at what's happening under the bar, along with the things that the lifters reporting right. So if they're starting to feel aches and pains, they're starting to feel like they're getting, they're having trouble going to sleep at night, we're going to. We're going to talk about nutrition, we're going to talk about sleep, we're going to have all these discussions about recovery factors. And if, if I'm satisfied that there's nothing that they can do or that they're willing to do right. So that's two different things there's nothing they can do or they're willing to do in order to fix that situation, then we'll make a programming adjustment and it's going to be a small adjustment. It might be taking a light day on a squat, it might be progressing the training early into intermediate programming because we can spread stress out rather than having these large doses of stress multiple times throughout the week. So, yeah, first thing is like because I probably didn't screw up the loading, I probably didn't screw up the rest times or anything like that.

Nick Delgadillo: 24:55

As a coach, I've been doing this for a while, so usually it's something that the lifter is doing outside of the gym that's causing problems. So we're going to run the assessment, see what's going on, see if we can make any adjustments there and then, if not, we'll make a programming adjustment. The lifter may very well just not want to continue doing the things that they need to do outside the gym. That's okay, like that's cool. There's going to be lifts that you can continue to drive up. There's going to be lists that are going to have to take a little bit of a backseat, and that's on me to to make it work for them, right, while at the same time doing like the Jedi mind trick coach stuff in the background to try to get them more compliant, more to what they need for their own good, right. So yeah, I don't know if I've answered your question, but-.

Philip Pape: 25:36

Yeah, no, you're always answering the question. There's no. We go on tangents here that are great, and the fact that your immediate answer was well, you basically shouldn't miss reps. I mean, let's just simplify it, you shouldn't miss reps and if you did, there's some reason for it, and we try to anticipate those reasons, like if, then what is the strategy? Again, same thing, like I think, with nutrition, is you know things are going to happen and you know your life looks a certain way, so let's account for that, and it may not be perfect and, like you say, you may not things, and you're just going to accept the trade-off. But you've talked about on other shows being undernourished versus overtrained. You've kind of addressed the undernourished piece. Have you seen people get overtrained or overreach at this level?

Nick Delgadillo: 26:20

No, I don't think that's actually the thing. It's under-recovered for sure. I mean, your body can do amazing things. So I think the idea that someone training for five months is over-training is not the deal. That's not happening. A guy who's been training for two to three years, who's squatting 500 plus, pressing near 300 pounds, benching near 400 pounds and deadlifting 600 plus yes, that guy can overdo it Absolutely. So it's like people at that level.

Nick Delgadillo: 26:49

My job as a coach is almost to hold them back. Um and and hold them back. It's like the wrong, the wrong word, but like I think you understand what I say. It's like like manage their stress, right, literally manage their stress. For almost everybody else, my job is to figure out how to help them manage their relationship with the high stress. So that doesn't always work out, because this is like, like I said at the beginning, is really hard work, right, so, but that again, that's okay. So, no, it's not overstressing, it's under recovering is the way to think about it. So we can either address that through better recovery habits outside of the gym, but then you have all these things that we've talked about in terms of lifestyle. Stuff doesn't always work out. So it's like what can I get out of the trainee in order to help themselves? Along with, what small changes do I need to make to the program at this point in order to continue making it work for them? So it's just going to be slower progress, right, and that's just the reality of the situation.

Philip Pape: 27:51

Yeah, yeah, no-transcript burned out, that's kind of colloquial. But more specifically, uh, things like tendonitis, right, like physical, what might seem like an overreach injury, it could be a form issue, it could be many things could be things outside the gym, we know, and given your programs to produce some sort of it's intended to produce some sort of output, do you switch priorities? Do you manage that in a certain way and get back to it? I know it's a huge topic, but shout out to Dustin Lambert he's a host of Working Weights LLC and I wanted to pass that question along to you because he wanted to know you know, how do you manage that? Things like tendinopathy?

Nick Delgadillo: 28:26

Yeah, okay, yeah, great question. So first thing is and this is something I missed talking about originally, but the novice phase. So, as you're running through the novice program, you have one objective, you have one goal and that's to get stronger. Because you're doing this with the realization that getting stronger will improve all of your physical attributes. It'll improve your health in various ways, right. It'll improve your blood sugar, your metabolic panel, all these things. It'll just improve your physical existence, right. So there's no discussion, there's no need to do anything other than just get strong during the novice phase. That's not the case once you are moving into intermediate and definitely when you're moving into advanced programming. It's not that you have to have this deep discussion about goals, but at the point that the novice program starts to slow down, it's time to start thinking about and, as Andy Baker says, declaring a goal. You have to have a goal in mind because it orients your training, it keeps you focused and you can have an intelligent discussion with yourself or with your coach about how what you're doing fits into that goal, because lifting in and of itself is not a worthy goal for most people, especially when it gets hard because all of a sudden you're waiting. It's like is it worthwhile? Why am I doing this? I'm going to go to hot yoga instead, because that's like easier and more fun, but still hard, you know. So what is the goal? What do you want to do?

Nick Delgadillo: 29:54

I've actually advised people to find another hobby. Like lifting is not, like you're very strong, but lifting is driving you insane. Like you need to go find a physical hobby where you can use your strength and see how much progress you've made. Um, because you, being in your garage gym by yourself driving yourself crazy over, like missing this, this 410 pound rack pull as a woman is nuts. Like don't do that. You're, you're, you're driving yourself crazy, right? So anyway, that's a, that's a sidetrack, but anyway, the answer to the question is you have to know, as a coach, what your lifters goal is at that point, and, as a lifter, you have to know what your goal is, and then you have to decide that continuing to strength train and drive the weight up on the lifts is going to get you to that goal, and that's where a good coach can help you.

Nick Delgadillo: 30:45

So, in the context, so the question was about tendinopathy or some kind of an overuse injury or something like that. I almost always default to assuming that it's an inefficiency issue. It's a technique issue. So and you can almost like pinpoint it's like if somebody's knee hurts at a certain point, you're like, okay, well, yeah you're, you're knee sliding at the bottom of the squat, their hip flexor hurts. Uh, yeah, you're slamming into the bottom of your squat, their elbow starts to hurt. On the bench press, for example, yeah, you're doing something with the squat grip, you're collapsing at the bottom of the press, right? So these are these kind of like common injuries that are, yeah, common overuse injuries that people get, and sometimes they'll blame recovery, which may be true, but a lot of times it's just that they're doing something in the gym to cause that to happen, or outside of the gym also. So I would assume one of those things first.

Nick Delgadillo: 31:36

So first thing to do is check technique. If there's an obvious technique error that's occurring, fix that first and then see if it resolves. If that doesn't fix it or you can't identify a technique error, then the next thing to do especially with tendon stuff, tendonitis, you know any, any tendinopathy is to not reflexively deload the bar, because all you're doing is like there's a threshold right and there's a threshold for pain and there's a threshold for the tissue and all you're doing is just kind of hovering back and forth or at that threshold and it never gets better, or it gets better very, very slowly, uh, and you're just in pain the whole time. Right? So the key to doing this and shout out to will morris for for opening my eyes to this many, many years ago the key to doing this is to stay heavy and keep driving the weight up. And then you have to figure out how to do that, right. So, through pause, like let's just take a knee pain in a squat, for example, somebody develops a knee tendonitis.

Nick Delgadillo: 32:34

So fix technique first. That doesn't work. Okay, let's figure out where in the squat does it hurt. So maybe you slow down and you keep the bar as heavy as you can, but you do tempo work instead of just normal squats. Or you do paused work, right. So you pause just right before the, the, the, the knee's going to hurt, and then you hold it there for two or three seconds and then you stand back up. But the key to that is to load it as heavy as you can tolerate, rather than the typical approach was like okay, we're going to keep squatting, because squats are a great exercise and we're going to take 50 pounds or a hundred pounds off the bar and then run it back up. It doesn't actually work Like you have to. The stress recovery adaptation deal applies to injuries as well, and you have to drive healing. You have to make it heal, not let it heal. That's a quote from Rip, which is awesome. Right, you have to make it heal, not let it heal.

Philip Pape: 33:21

That's a quote from Rip, which is awesome right, you have to make it heal, not let it heal. Yeah, that's a great concept. I've worked with John Patrizzo on some of my own things because I had rotator cuff surgery and it is so true that sometimes you just need a tweak here or there. But actually going heavy, you often surprise yourself when you're like you know, actually it doesn't hurt and it feels great and I'm getting stronger despite the injury. You're like you know, actually it doesn't hurt and it feels great and I'm getting stronger despite the injury. It's a whole mind shift. Speaking of Jedi mind tricks, it's like it makes you realize that there's power in what you talked about to drive healing and use the tissue and break up scar tissue and all the fun stuff. What about the more extreme case where somebody has had an injury that got to the point of of surgery? Is is just a function of get the surgery recover, come back to it, or is there more to it?

Nick Delgadillo: 34:04

yeah, come back to it, but come back to it gradually and slowly, right so, you're yeah, anytime you have you have a situation like that. First of all, you know, depending on the injury, uh, there are some things that you might not be able to do or that are not a good idea, right so. And then also, the other part of it is the the timeline for when it's a good idea to start again. So, you know, when I'm dealing with with somebody who's in a situation like that, I'll ask for advice. I'll ask Patrizzo or Will or Nick D'Agostino or Rory or one of these, one of these physical therapists for their opinion. Make sure that the lifter has at least had a discussion with their orthopedic surgeon about what they intend to do and at what point. Right, so you at least get their opinion. So it has to be up to the lifter whether or not they're going to follow the guidelines that the surgeon sets or recommends, or disregard them.

Nick Delgadillo: 34:59

Now, in my experience, most reasonable orthopedic surgeons are in favor of people getting back to lifting pretty early. So that's, that's good news. In practice, like when they send them off to physical therapy, that actually doesn't occur. Uh, but either way, that's kind of a separate discussion so you won't get too much uh, uh pushback from, from, uh, from orthopedic surgeons. In my experience at this point about people going in and doing stuff like this, it's just like you want to have a reasonable expectation of when it's a good idea and they may say and this is a thing that's happened, I've heard people say you won't be able to lift that amount of weight in a year for over a shoulder surgery, like a Mumford procedure, and it's like dude, that's just not true. But that's okay, like if, if, if. That's just something you're saying, like you're not saying don't lift for a year, you're saying that's how long it's going to take. All right, it's going to take two and a half months.

Nick Delgadillo: 35:50

So, anyway, but there are some injuries, some. There are some some procedures that need're cleared. We're good to go. We're going to start training. Um, it's the, the. My general approach is going to be to get range of motion back and then start loading Right. So, and range of motion may be no weight, maybe a little bit of weight. It may be just like a wooden dowel or a PVC pipe. Um, it may be like. Ripito has this excellent video on shoulder rehab where we're using the rings. You know he's using the rings and showing you?

Nick Delgadillo: 36:24

Yes, it's good, fantastic stuff, right so, and that's the same, that's the same concept Range of motion first and then, and then loading and I've used that protocol at least three times now with people coming back from shoulder surgery, and it works. It works phenomenally well. Like people go to their follow-up appointments and their doctors are just surprised by how well they're doing, right. So, yeah, that's the general concept. It's it's range of motion first and then loading after, right?

Nick Delgadillo: 36:51

So the main thing to understand, though, is that, because these lifts are, are, um, they're, they're totally natural movements, right, so, it's, it's just you're moving your body through normal ranges of motion, through normal joint angles, um, you're able to use them as the tool to rehab effectively. So you don't have to, you don't necessarily have to modify anything other than maybe, like range of motion, loading, but you can basically just take people through the squat progression or the deadlift progression might have to be a rack pull rather than a deadlift, um, you might have to press off of pins or something like that bench press off of pins, but you just take the fundamental movement and you use that to rehab people, and you know, as you know, that's what John, that's what John does, and that's the good physical therapists who are associated with us do Uh and it works great good physical therapists who are associated with us do, and it works great, yeah.

Philip Pape: 37:48

And I guess the final thought about this is is there an anatomical situation, or multiple that could occur that would prevent somebody from doing a main lift like the overhead press? When we're talking about shoulders, there's something I just learned about the type three acromion, which is like a very hook, like acromion that where you could have much more easy friction on the rotator cuff.

Nick Delgadillo: 38:06

Right.

Philip Pape: 38:07

Would something like that require alterations? And if you say this is like outside your scope because it's more of a medical thing, I understand.

Nick Delgadillo: 38:13

No, it definitely is outside of my scope. But I'm pretty confident in assessing whether or not I can proceed with somebody. And, uh, you know, the way I look at it is if, if I can get the person to move unweighted through the complete range of motion without causing them pain or severe discomfort, they're good to go Right. Um, so yeah, I think in the instance of, like, a hooked acromion, they're going to experience pain when they put their arm up over their head Right, and they'll be like, oh, okay, we let's. Uh, maybe that's not a good idea, we'll come back to it and I don't like I don't need to send them off to an x-ray or MRI or anything. It's like, okay, we're just not going to do that. Uh, let's go to the bench press. But I know, okay, look, if I can't get your Probably full range of motion bench, not a great idea. So we're going to do some partial, partial benching and go pretty, go as heavy as we can without compromising the stability of the shoulder and putting them in a in like an extreme range of motion, and I'm totally comfortable with that. I'm also thinking, okay, it might be a challenge to get them under the bar in the squat. So it's like, let's try low bar. And if you, if you get under there, and it's just like you gotta tell me if it hurts, and I'll be like, okay, we'll try high bar, if that works, you can do it without any pain, great, all right. But then even high bar hurts. So we're gonna go to a Mars bar, we're gonna go to a safety squat bar, right, and then I just know that that's gonna be the deal with them, and then we're gonna drive the hell out of the deadlift, right, and we're going to make the deadlift kind of the main thing.

Nick Delgadillo: 39:39

So, as a coach, I have all the tools that I need in order to know whether or not somebody can, can, can do something or not, just based off of really based off of the teaching methods that that, that Ripto, starting strength, have developed, and they're they're super, super useful as assessment tools as well. It's just, it's just kind of almost common sense If something hurts, like if somebody comes in and tells you I got a bad shoulder, and you start putting them through something like, oh, that really hurts, I believe them and I'm going to say, okay, well, let's adjust it or skip it, and then we'll come back to it. Right, if I have an actual diagnosis from somebody and they tell me, like, whenever people say I can't do something, like I want to see, right, I want to like just put your arm up over your head real quick. And if they just like throw it up there, I'm like, well, let's look. And I won't dismiss anybody. I'll say, hey, come over here, let's take this wooden dowel, let's run it up the rack and tell me how it feels.

Nick Delgadillo: 40:32

And then you know, I'm kind, the minute this starts to hurt, we'll stop and we'll do something else. So don't, don't worry about it, I just want to see. And then that tends to work out pretty well. But you know, if somebody does this and they go like this, like all right, we're going to or something from a physician, an orthopedic surgeon, or something I'm going to ask, I'm going to ask people, I'll ask Rupert Till, or I'll ask Will, or I'll ask somebody like, hey, what do you think about this? And just just see what they say. So we have enough resources now that I don't have to. I'm not in the in the dark by myself, right.

Philip Pape: 41:23

So it's a good combination of common sense, experience, yeah, finding a way to train despite what's going on, I mean and I had, I used a harness for one arm, deadlifts with a sling back when I was recovering Cause I was just so I had cabin fever of not doing deadlifts, you know.

Tony: 41:32

My name is Tony. I'm a strength lifter in my forties. Thank you to Phil and his wits and weights community for helping me learn more about nutrition and how to implement better ideas into my strength training. Phil has a very, very good understanding of macros and chemical compounds and hormones and all that and he's continuously learning. That's what I like about Phil. He's got a great sense of humor. He's very relaxed, very easy to talk to. One of the greatest things about Phil, in my view, is that he practices what he preaches. He also works out with barbells. He trains heavy not as heavy as me, but he trains heavy. So if you talk with him about getting in better shape, eating better, he's probably going to give you some good advice and I would strongly recommend you talk with him and he'll help you out.

Philip Pape: 42:16

Actually speaking of that. That brings me back to the statement you made earlier about finding a goal to orient your training, to focus yourself. It seems like there's a small percentage of people who actually do love lifting for its own sake. Is that a problem? You just love doing it for its own sake? I know you said you think everybody should have a goal. That's not a problem at all, those are the easiest people to work with. Okay, yeah, yeah.

Nick Delgadillo: 42:38

Yeah, because I don't have to convince you of anything. Right, it's like you're, you're down and you love lifting, you love feeling heavy weights, you love grinding through reps, you love hitting those, uh, those, those PRS. Um, again, those are the people that usually I need to, um, I need to, uh, put the brakes on, put the brakes on them Right, yeah, cause they'll cause they'll do too much.

Nick Delgadillo: 42:56

So, yeah, those are, but those people are easy. I love coaches that will tout and present their strongest and most successful athletes, people who are competing at the highest levels, and show them off as like, essentially, you didn't create that that person would be successful, no matter who they're working with. And I've, I've, I've been lucky to work with people like that, and I've, I've, as I think is like an honest assessment. It's like what did I actually do? It's like, you know, I actually just I actually told you, hey, don't do that, that's a bad idea. Like, do this instead, chill out a little bit, slow down, and and you're, you're essentially like keeping those people from being their their own, their own worst enemy.

Nick Delgadillo: 43:40

But they're going to be successful because they're driven, they're motivated, they have, they have exactly their goal in mind and they're going to do whatever it takes to make it happen Right. So, um, it's for them. It's more about like, helping them think about things in an intelligent way rather than like just just, uh, screwing themselves up, cause it's hard for people who are super high performers like that to look beyond, like what's in front of them, um, so so you gotta, you gotta, keep that, that perspective in in there for them. Um, but, dude, training, training people who, who are uh, who are super motivated and super uh, who are athletic and are, um, very strong. That's, that's easy, man.

Philip Pape: 44:17

That's all you gotta do is not screw them up yeah, and you alluded to the. I think you call it something like the high performance coach bias or something that bias where like high performance? Um, you know, I wonder about this. This makes me think of, like you and your, your history of lifting. Um, do you work regularly with a coach yourself and have you had, like, parts of your life that have been super stressful where you had to massively adapt your training?

Nick Delgadillo: 44:41

Oh, absolutely, yeah, Uh, I don't, I don't have, I don't use a coach now. Um, will Will Morris was my coach for two years and I hired and he was actually the first coach I uh I actually ever worked with. So I'm uh, I'm very much I think I think you mentioned it very much like a figured out myself kind of kind of dude. Um, so I picked up the book through well, I picked up the videos in the book through CrossFit when Rip was the barbell guy for CrossFit and then started doing it myself, started doing it with my clients and then went to a camp a three lift camp it was squat, bench, deadlift with a starting strength coach and then quickly learned that I was doing everything wrong and then I had been coaching for a while then. So I went back and just like fixed everything, um, and then I went and did the certification. But in that whole time I've the only coaching I have received myself was at that camp and then at the, at the starting strength seminar that I went and certified in 2011. So, other than like just being around rip or being around other coaches when we're lifting together and they'll like say something, you know, give me some feedback.

Nick Delgadillo: 45:48

But, yeah, my first actual coaching relationship as a lifter was with Will, after I injured my back. So I had a really really severe back injury. This would have been 2022, I believe. Really severe back injury. This would have been 2022, I believe. And uh, yeah, it, uh, it knocked me on my ass pretty bad. I was, uh, I was in bed for a while. I was on a Walker for or not a Walker on a cane for I think two months. Um and um, yeah, talking to Will afterwards, he thought I was uh going to have to go have, uh, some kind of a surgery on my on my low back. So, yeah, it was pretty severe and then he coached me through that. I was convinced at the time that it would take me, that I would never be like back to normal, so to speak. But uh, three months later I was, I was training again. Um, four months later I was back on like a novice linear progression. Uh, a year later I had uh, or not even. A year later, I think it was like seven, seven months later, I had uh, rack pulled 500 pounds, which was uh, which which you know I thought would would. I really thought would never happen again, like based on how I felt, but yeah, so I would say, to answer your question, that was a pretty life-changing event for me, because it's one of those things that makes you realize how shitty your lifestyle is and reorients your priorities. So, yeah, a lot came of that in terms of training and how I approach training and how I think about training.

Nick Delgadillo: 47:20

Up until that point it was very much like a lift heavy, even if things were pretty insane during that time period because it was like lockdowns and I stopped flying. So I was driving all over the country in a car, in a little tiny car. I was driving a Nissan 370Z and I was at the time I was like a little tiny car, I was driving a Nissan 370Z and I was I'm a at the time I was like a 330 pound man. So that's probably what screwed up my back, cause I would like go and drive and go and drop into the gym and lift, uh, after not after sitting for hours, and then, um, and then I would go do jujitsu stuff and, uh, not take care of myself. I wasn't eating, well, I was. I was training really inconsistently, still trying to lift as heavy as I could, and then it, it all just kind of accumulated and, and I think, just culminated in that, in that situation. So, anyway, yeah, so that that that made me realize how important being consistent was, made me realize how important everything, especially at the age of 42, 41 at the time.

Nick Delgadillo: 48:16

Like you, you have to take care of yourself. Like you have to, you have to uh to put it, to put it as simple as possible Like you have to move, like lifting by itself is not enough. Like you gotta, you've got to move. Initially, lifting takes care of all your needs. But when you've been at it for a while, and especially if you're going to do other hard physical hobbies, like, um, I do, I, I, uh, I do a lot of Brazilian jujitsu, it's not enough. Like just going to jujitsu, just going to to lift weights three, four times a week is not enough. Like you have to intentionally uh take care of your, your joints. You gotta, you gotta move around, you gotta even just walking, whatever, like any, anything that that uh gets you moving, where I'm not sitting for six hours and then going to lift and then sitting for another three hours and then going to jujitsu, it's a terrible idea.

Philip Pape: 49:01

Yeah, yeah, those make or break moments I mean I can relate to it. I'm sure lots of folks listening can where you know, when I had back surgery, what now, four years ago and I wasn't much of a walker before that and then the thing they want you to do right Day one of you know, recovering your back is to start to walk and I significantly increased my walking and actually started to love it because of what it? You know that feedback loop of how it helped me feel and for your health and everything. And I think some people will give up and there's moments where you give up because it's too hard or because you think you can't do it. You can do again.

Philip Pape: 49:34

And that goes back to what you talked about earlier grit, persistence. It's maybe the number one driver of success. Honestly, when they do studies on even children, you know, and how, their lifelong success. So when you talk about jetty mind tricks, for example, as a coach, if somebody's listening, who has a higher propensity to give up, and we see those folks like, well, I did this, it didn't work, I got frustrated, I stopped, I moved to the next thing and you just want to shake them and be like, no, there's something on the other side, man, that you're missing out on, but it's their personality or how they're raised or conditioned. Do you have something to tell them that would help unlock that? Or like a different way, a mind trick, anything that would? I know it's a big question to get them moving forward.

Nick Delgadillo: 50:15

Yeah, that's tough. I don't know, outside of no, there's not a single thing you can say to somebody like that, and I've dealt with many people like that and it's. I mean, this is one of those situations where you become not only someone's strength coach but also their sort of therapist, right? Yes, for sure. Yeah, it happens probably in all coaching. But, uh, the yeah, man, it's just you. You, you got you got to get them to trust you.

Nick Delgadillo: 50:44

Um, you'll have lots of like sort of arguments about just random things, uh, and, and essentially what what's going on is that they're sort of their own worst enemy. Right? The difference between an individual like that versus an individual who performs at a really high level and let's set aside anybody who was genetically predisposed to be really athletic and successful, I'm talking about normal people who do really impressive things the difference is that the other person just believes that they can do it, it, and, as cheesy as that is, that sound, it's like if you, um, yeah, that's not something you can, you can uh instill in somebody. So, as as a coach, my job is just to kind of take it day by day and uh and de-conflict their own brain, like where they're just like everything is, everything's a problem, everything's the end of the world, I'm not good enough, type stuff. It's like, uh, you, just, you just find small opportunities to um, uh, and, and with some people I just ignore it, you know, that's sometimes just yeah, if they're, if they're being hard on themselves, it's just like I won't even respond, cause, cause, cause, maybe sometimes it's like they, they, that's that's how they get like the, the, the feedback, right, it's a positive feedback. So I'll just disregard, like somebody just says, oh, this, uh, I'm such a shitty squatter or something I just won't, I'll just ignore it, right, and I'll just be like great job, you know, and just just move on. Uh, looks good to me, you know, Uh, and I won't even acknowledge it. So I guess that's kind of the, the, uh, yeah, man, I don't know, there's not a single thing you can say.

Nick Delgadillo: 52:15

I will, uh, I guess, as a piece of advice, it's just like don't shortchange yourself, because whatever you believe is what's going to happen. So if, if you think that, um, you can't do something, um, why would you, why would you not try? Uh, it doesn't make any sense, like, why would you just attempt it, right? And because even even in just attempting it. Um, you can learn a lot, right? So it's not the. The fundamental problem is like looking at an end goal rather than rather than enjoying the process, and that's almost, that's almost cliche at this, cliche at this point. But it's like enjoying the process, enjoying the journey. Um, that's, that's actually not even enjoying, but just participating is what matters, right, participating in the, in that, in that process of doing something hard is profound, uh, so you can choose to just uh not participate, but uh guarantee that there's no good outcome from that.

Philip Pape: 53:06

Agree, a hundred percent certainty you will fail. Yeah, a hundred percent, right, that's good. Yeah, make the attempt. That is, that is, uh, that is a good principle of all of this. So I know we're short, I know we're almost out on time here. What's, what's exciting? You now in the world of starting, strength, going forward.

Nick Delgadillo: 53:20

Oh man, a hundred percent starting strength gyms, that that, that, that's, that's the. Yeah, it's very exciting. Um, people are really interested in this. You know rips rips been talking about uh uh on his podcast, about, uh, about gym ownership.

Philip Pape: 53:35

Yeah, he's been doing the advertisement at the beginning. I'm like cool man.

Nick Delgadillo: 53:38

Yeah, so we've got lots of people interested in owning gyms. We've got lots of passionate gym owners, We've got awesome coaches, and it's cool to be bringing starting strength to the world, like in a retail setting, in these beautiful gyms. So, yeah, it's really exciting. We've got a lot. We've learned a lot. We've got a lot, we've learned a lot. Um, we've got a lot of work to do to make this work. Uh, at scale, which you know, we're getting to that point where it's like things are going to start growing. So we're just we're going to get better at all of this stuff. So, uh, yeah, that's that. That's it, man. It's really, really exciting. It's becoming, if it's not already, it is part of the popular culture, so to speak, Like people know, people understand that strength is important. And, yeah, I feel like we've done this at exactly the right time and we intend to be the sort of the gold standard for how strength is delivered to the general public.

Philip Pape: 54:35

Yeah, man, I think it's exciting. I mean, the kernel of your ideas started like 20 years ago but you're just getting going now with really expanding and you're right about the timing. You know what would be a cool topic for your podcast would be like the culture of lifting over the decades, you know, and how, because we had the Arnold culture and right you have. You fast forward all the way. You had the CrossFit culture 10, 20 years ago and you're right, like in on podcasts and in just the general lexicon, there's way more acceptance for this.

Philip Pape: 55:03

A lot of the myths about you know, bulking and injury and all that are starting to be dispelled and it's really exciting.

Nick Delgadillo: 55:09

Yeah, hardly even have those conversations anymore. And, and you know, one of the things that we've learned from the starting train gyms is you get. You get a 58 year old woman walking in the door into a barbell gym and uh, and, and she knows that she needs to get. She doesn't know how, she doesn't know what, anything, she's never done a squat before, but all she knows is that, yeah, I need to be, I need to be strong you need to be doing it that tells you everything you need to know, right there, right, and also the kids.

Nick Delgadillo: 55:30

the kids, like I was just thinking. I've just been thinking about this recently, but the kids want to be jacked and they didn't grow up with Arnold and Dolph Lundgren and Sylvester Stallone and these action movie stars that were huge. They grew up in a different cultural environment than I did, for sure, but right now, in 2025, the teenagers want to be jacked. So that's great.

Philip Pape: 55:54

Yeah, and my daughters are starting to think about getting into it. I mean, I have a 13 and 11 year old, so I told 13 year old when she's 14, I think it's a good age to start training with daddy in the gym regularly. But make it fun, you know just make it fun. Uh, cool man. Where do you want folks to reach out to you? Do you want the podcast or website? What's the best place?

Nick Delgadillo: 56:12

IG, ig there's a few places. Yeah, my instagram is, uh, nick d, underscore ssc. Um, if you want to, if you want to check out the podcast, it's on youtube, uh, starting strength gyms youtube. Uh, rip, and I well, I mean rip, but I'm on the show. We've got the starting strength radio podcast on the starting strength youtube channel. Um, we've got a podcast at um ssgymscom. If you, uh, if you want to email me and uh, yeah, I think that. I think that pretty much covers it.

Philip Pape: 56:40

Cool man. Yeah, I'll include that, all that in the show notes, and I've gladly promote your stuff because I think it comes from a good place and very sound principles, and we're all about efficiency, engineering systems here as well, and why not use the most efficient tools and process for, you know, to get the job done? That's kind of makes a lot of sense.

Nick Delgadillo: 56:55

Thank you, man. I love efficiency too. I came from the logistics world. I love efficiency. It's my favorite thing in the world.

Philip Pape: 57:01

It's awesome. It's awesome. All right, man Well, thanks so much for agreeing to come on and having this conversation. It was a lot of fun.

Nick Delgadillo: 57:07

Absolutely. Thank you very much.

Is Fiber Useless? The Carnivore Diet Thinks So | Ep 333

Grab your FREE Nutrition 101 Guide for Body Composition to build a flexible, evidence-based approach to eating that supports your physique goals without restriction or dogma:
https://www.witsandweights.com/free/nutrition-101-guide

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The carnivore diet community claims fiber is unnecessary, even harmful. But what does the science actually say?

Learn why fiber does far more than "keep you regular," how eliminating it affects everything from muscle building to longevity, and how to make evidence-based decisions about fiber intake for your goals.

Main Takeaways:

• Fiber produces short-chain fatty acids that reduce inflammation and enhance muscle protein synthesis

• Going zero-fiber may provide short-term symptom relief but creates long-term health risks (15-30% higher disease rates)

• The carnivore claims about fiber being "non-essential" ignore massive benefits for satiety, hormones, and gut health

• Smart approach: Address root causes of digestive issues rather than eliminating all fiber permanently

Related Episode:

• The Blue Zone Hoax (and Other Diet Myths That Won’t Make You Live Longer) | Ep 330

Timestamps:

0:01 - The fiber war (Carnivore vs. mainstream nutrition)
4:30 - What fiber actually does beyond BMs
5:51 - How fiber affects muscle building and hormone production
8:33 - The carnivore honeymoon period and what happens long-term
11:56 - Gut bacteria changes and health consequences
14:58 - Debunking carnivore claims about fiber
19:53 - 15-30% lower all-cause mortality with higher fiber
21:37 - How to optimize fiber intake
24:56 - The surprising link between gut bacteria and protein synthesis for building muscle

Why Fiber Still Matters More Than Carnivore Advocates Want to Admit

There’s a growing corner of the internet convinced that fiber is not just unnecessary, but possibly harmful. According to the carnivore crowd, removing all plant-based foods, including fiber, is the path to solving digestive issues, inflammation, fat gain, and chronic disease. The pitch is simple: meat is clean fuel, plants are toxic, and fiber is just unnecessary bulk.

But there’s a problem. That viewpoint completely ignores decades of nutritional science and a huge body of research showing fiber’s positive effects on body composition, disease prevention, satiety, gut health, and even performance.

This episode is not about fearmongering or nutrition tribalism. It’s about examining what the evidence actually says so you can decide what works best for your goals.

Why This Isn’t Just a Pooping Debate

The mainstream association between fiber and digestion (“keeps you regular”) is a fraction of the full story. Fiber influences nearly every system in the body, from inflammation to blood sugar regulation to muscle protein synthesis.

When fiber reaches your colon, your gut bacteria ferment it into short-chain fatty acids like butyrate. These aren’t just waste products. They improve insulin sensitivity, reduce systemic inflammation, support immune function, and even influence how effectively you build muscle from protein.

That’s right. Fiber could help you use protein better.

The Carnivore Honeymoon

Many folks experience initial relief on a carnivore diet, especially if they previously struggled with gas, bloating, or IBS. But this is often just symptom suppression. Cutting out all fiber might eliminate discomfort temporarily, but it doesn’t resolve the underlying root cause.

If anything, removing fiber over the long term may worsen your microbiome. Beneficial gut bacteria starve without it, and less desirable species (some linked to inflammation) start to dominate. Over time, this shift may increase the risk of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular issues and metabolic dysfunction.

But Is Fiber Essential?

Technically, no. There’s no established RDA for fiber, which is one of the talking points from the anti-fiber side. But neither are carbohydrates technically “essential,” and yet we know they’re critical for training, recovery, and body composition.

Just because you can survive without something doesn’t mean you’ll thrive.

Population studies tell us that people with the highest fiber intake (typically 25–40g per day) have a 15–30% lower risk of all-cause mortality than those consuming the least. Those are massive effect sizes—especially when you consider how easy it is to include fiber-rich foods in a flexible diet.

Practical Reasons to Eat More Fiber

• Satiety: Soluble fiber forms a gel in your stomach, slowing digestion and helping you feel fuller with fewer calories. This is a huge win during fat loss phases.

• Blood sugar control: That same gel also slows glucose absorption, reducing spikes and crashes in energy.

• GLP-1 production: Fiber naturally increases this hormone (the same one targeted by Ozempic), which helps regulate appetite.

• Hormone health: Research links higher fiber diets to better testosterone levels in men and more stable hormone profiles in women.

• Muscle growth: Fiber supports the gut bacteria that help regulate insulin sensitivity in muscle tissue, which can improve muscle protein synthesis.

Reintroducing Fiber After Carnivore

If you’re coming off carnivore or just dealing with gut issues, fiber doesn’t need to be reintroduced all at once. Start small. Pick a single low-FODMAP, high-fiber food (like oats or fruit) and give it time. Monitor your response. Then try another.

This method not only helps rebuild your microbiome but also reveals which foods actually cause issues and which don’t. It's the opposite of restriction. It’s about expanding your diet intelligently.

If you find over time that you can’t tolerate any sources of fiber whatsoever (and I mean after reintroducing dozens of foods slowly and systematically), then yes, you might be one of the rare exceptions. But the default should be inclusion, not exclusion.

Final Thoughts

The idea that all fiber is bad, or that carnivore is the default human diet, isn’t supported by anthropological or scientific evidence. It's based on anecdotes and short-term benefits that ignore long-term consequences.

Fiber may not be sexy, but it works. It’s a quiet performer that supports your gut, your metabolism, your hormones, and your gains in the gym. And it does all that while making your diet more flexible, not less.

You don’t need to moralize food. You don’t need to obsess over fiber. But you probably shouldn’t ignore it.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

The carnivore diet community has declared war on fiber. They claim it's completely unnecessary, even harmful, that humans evolved to thrive on meat alone and plants are just making us sick. Meanwhile, mainstream nutrition science treats fiber as one of the most important dietary components for health and longevity. So someone has to be wrong. Here Today, we're cutting through the noise with actual data. You'll discover what fiber really does in your body beyond keeping you regular, why eliminating it might be sabotaging your goals, and how to make an evidence-based decision about fiber that's right for your situation.

Philip Pape: 0:49

Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're going to settle one of the most heated debates in nutrition Do you actually need fiber, or is it just an outdated piece of dogma from the plant lovers? The carnivore movement is growing really fast, and I think this is an important topic, because people are claiming that eliminating all plants, including fiber, has transformed their health, and they may not say you need to eliminate fiber, but they may say it's no big deal to eliminate it. And then, on the flip side, we have decades, decades of research that link fiber intake to everything from weight management to disease prevention, to improved gut health, which happens to be linked closely with a lot of these positive outcomes. And what bothers me about this debate is that both sides are making claims without looking at or describing the complete picture of what fiber does to your body. And of course, I lean more heavily on criticizing the carnivore camp because they're just outright dismissing evidence. But sometimes the other camps will go a little bit overboard on why we want fiber or maybe they'll miss parts of the picture. So today, with this episode, I want to examine the evidence, the biological mechanisms in our body, and then figure out what approach makes sense for you, because you may need more or less fiber and you will thrive on a certain level for your goals. Before we break down that controversy, if you will just want a simple approach to your nutrition that is flexible, that doesn't cut things out but rather includes the things you need, that sets the right calorie and macro goals, fat loss, muscle building phases, without any hype, without any claims, without any restriction, just practical strategies, download my free nutrition one-on-one guide. This has a focus on flexible dieting and body composition. It's a roadmap to build something sustainable, something that you can live with and enjoy while still getting your results. It's just simple no fluff. Based on the evidence. Click the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash free to grab your copy of my Nutrition 101 Guide for Body Composition.

Philip Pape: 2:59

Okay, so let's start with the fiber debate. What is really going on? I think it is not about fiber. I think this is really about how we approach nutrition decisions in general. Do we make choices based on short-term feelings and I mean feeling in the objective way, like how you feel, or the anecdotal short-term results, short-term being as little as a few weeks or month, but as long as one to two years in some cases? Or do we look at longer-term data five, 10, 20 years, lifetime data? Do we consider the isolated effects? Or do we think about how everything connects, because our bodies are guess what a system?

Philip Pape: 3:36

Fiber itself, in fact, touches almost every aspect of your health and physique in ways that you might not even realize. That even I'm learning more and more about. It's fascinating your ability to build muscle, to lose fat, to maintain energy, to be fuller, to prevent disease and have long-term health yes, longevity. All of this is influenced by what's happening in your gut gut health. Now, this is not a gut health episode per se, but you are massively changing what's going on down there when you eliminate fiber, and it takes a while for that to happen, and we don't have a lot of research that shows all of the negative effects that are probably going to be realized down the road. We do have research on all the positive outcomes from including it. So, just to make an assumption, there's probably an opposite effect when you get rid of something that helps. We'll see, we'll see. That's part of the conversation we're going to get to today.

Philip Pape: 4:30

The carnivore folks are going to tell you that the fact that fiber is so impactful on everything in your body is exactly why it works to eliminate it. They're going to say you eliminate the problematic component, you eliminate your problems. But let's talk about what fiber actually does, because most people are thinking of fiber first and foremost as like the scrub brush Sorry to be gross. It cleans you out, right, keep things moving, bms, all that jazz but that's maybe like 20% 10 to 20% of what's really happening when you eat fiber, and this is what I used to believe too, that it was just for being regular. But it's a lot, lot more than that when you consume fiber, it travels through your digestive system unchanged until it reaches your colon and then something remarkable, something fascinating, happens.

Philip Pape: 5:15

The bacteria there that are living in your gut and you have trillions of bacteria they use that fiber as fuel to produce compounds. Those compounds are short chain fatty acids. And these aren't just waste products, right? People say, oh, they're waste products of your digestion. They are molecules that go into your bloodstream, they travel throughout your body and they have an impact on your inflammation, on your immune function, even on how your muscle tissue responds to protein responds to protein. Yeah, fiber intake can potentially affect your muscle building and I've worked with a lot of lifters who have strength trained for many years.

Philip Pape: 5:51

A lot of them went on carnivore because they couldn't quite figure out how to control their body fat, their belly fat, all that stuff. And we gradually reintroduced plants and a more diverse diet and their gains started to take off like they hadn't in a long time. Part of it was carbohydrates, for sure. Part of it was fiber, and it all worked just fine. In fact, they felt better, they had better outcomes. But I don't want to anecdotally say well, just because you feel better in the moment, that means it works. That is not what I want to say, because that's exactly the claim carnivore folks make, and it's misleading, because short-term results may belie long-term results.

Philip Pape: 6:25

There's more, though, beyond this right Soluble fiber. That's the one that creates like a gel in your substance. It's like a gel-like substance in your stomach. That's what slows down the absorption of nutrients, and so that is what's really awesome for blood sugar control. People talk about eating balanced meals, managing your blood sugar. It does that, but not only that. It dramatically increases your satiety signals, helping you feel satisfied with fewer calories. Now you might say, well, protein does that, and I have lots of meat in my diet. Great, I agree. Like increasing your protein in your diet does help tremendously with satiety, but fiber also has a huge impact on satiety, to a level where, when you're going after some aggressive fat loss, for example, it could be the difference between being able to sustain your diet and not being able to really stick with it for long enough.

Philip Pape: 7:15

There's also something really fascinating about fiber in today's context. You guys heard of GLP-1, the hormone targeted by the weight loss drugs like Ozembic. Well, guess what fiber does? It increases the production of GLP-1, the hormone targeted by the weight loss drugs like Ozembic. Well, guess what fiber does? It increases the production of GLP-1. It's kind of like a small micro, natural version of what people are paying all this money for, not to the same dosage, absolutely it's not going to have the same degree of impact. Let's be nuanced about it. But just by eating plants like eating what you should be eating a diverse diet you're going to actually improve your production of GLP-1. By the way, you know what else can improve. It Is strength training. This is not about strength training, but I always have to slip that in.

Philip Pape: 7:53

Another thing is related to hormones. We've seen that fibers link to higher testosterone levels in men, better hormone balance in women and the cascading effect of all of that, like affecting your sleep quality and your mood and your cognitive function. It all occurs through the gut brain axis. You know some people call the gut the second brain. That is what we are talking about. That's why I said initially fibers interwoven in almost everything that's going on. So when someone says is just about pooping, they're missing like 80%, 90% of what fiber actually does, and to kind of frame that, then what does it do?

Philip Pape: 8:33

We actually want to talk about what happens when you get rid of it when you go, say, full carnivore and you eliminate fiber completely. And this is where we have to be careful, because the effects build on each other over time and they're not all obvious at first. And, to be fair, we don't have a lot of long-term studies about the negative effects, of the potential negative effects of these diets long-term. We just haven't studied them long enough, like we've studied other diets, like, for example, the Mediterranean diet, which is chock full of fiber. And guess what? People have incredible long-term longevity outcomes on that diet. They're high in carbs too, by the way. So there's this honeymoon period.

Philip Pape: 9:11

We have to address this because this is where, like, for example, the YouTube hater comments every time I talk about how great carbs are and they say, no, I went carnivore and everything got solved and you don't need fiber. Well, many people initially do feel better when they eliminate fiber, especially if they had digestive issues. It's almost like a confirmation bias the bloating stops, the gas goes away and they're like yeah, see, fiber plants, those were the problem. But what's really happening is that you're eliminating the immediate symptoms, but you're not addressing the underlying cause. How do I know this? Well, I know this because I've worked with so many clients to reintroduce fiber-containing foods and carbs without the issues recurring, and I've said this on a previous episode you cannot use an anecdote to prove a claim, but you can use an anecdote to disprove a claim, and what I would like to disprove here by saying I've seen many people who went carnivore and eliminated their symptoms and then reintroduced plants and carbs in the right way and the symptoms did not come back.

Philip Pape: 10:16

Well, right, there disproves the claim that it was carnivore and carnivore alone that that solved the underlying root cause. No, the root cause in their case was certain foods didn't work for them, period, and we just eliminated those foods and reintroduced the rest. That's all it is. And I hope for anybody listening who's doing carnivore and, like you, know what I really miss my sandwiches, or I miss my fruit, right, or I miss my rice or my oats or anything. Man, I just had a client he knows who he's talking about he's going to laugh because I've mentioned him a few times who just started eating oats and he's like man, where has this been my whole life? It's amazing. Anyway, we've got to not make universal claims that, okay, I went on carnivore, cut out plants and fiber, therefore, and felt better. Therefore, it's because of all plants and fiber. That is a false correlation, or it's a correlation, but it's not cause and effect, it's not causality.

Philip Pape: 11:06

So let's talk about your gut bacteria. What happens here then, when you don't have the fiber in there? Well, they start starving without their fiber fuel and the beneficial species that produce, for example, anti-inflammatory compounds start to die off. Really good species of bacteria we want in our gut the kind of things that they put into probiotics and you know that you supplement with those are dying off because you're not feeding them and they get replaced by bacteria that do thrive in low fiber environments. And we've identified many of these species of bacteria and found that those tend to be more inflammatory and less beneficial. But again, it takes quite a while for this effect to accumulate. We're talking not weeks or months, but potentially years and as your microbiome shifts, certain things are going to start to weaken or break down.

Philip Pape: 11:56

You know you've heard of leaky gut. I still think the evidence is out on that being fully the way it's described. I think it's described in a colloquial way where, like, inflammatory compounds leak into your bloodstream and then you have an immune response. But there is a connectedness between your gut and your bloodstream. That is real. And when you don't have beneficial bacteria and all you have are these I'll call them harmful or less beneficial bacteria then it makes sense that this is going to accumulate over time in terms of the response on your body. So long-term is where what we have to look at. Studies that have been following people on very low fiber diets do show increased rates of cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, metabolic dysfunction, over time. We are talking about 15% to 30% increases in disease risk, based on large population studies.

Philip Pape: 12:52

And what concerns me is that the carnivore success stories or anecdotes those are all short-term. The people that comment on my YouTube videos and say you're full of it, I did carnivore, I feel great, and they've been on carnivore for two months or maybe six months or maybe a year, but it's nowhere near long enough to tell what's going on. It doesn't mean it's not a fantastic elimination diet I don't discount that that's the case to eliminate something that's causing you issues and then reintroduce, one at a time, things that don't. We just don't have good data on what happens to people who eliminate all plants for decades. And if you want to participate in a massive uncontrolled experiment and roll the dice on. Eh, maybe it won't be so bad for me, even though I know a diverse diet that includes fiber is great for me. You go right ahead and do that.

Philip Pape: 13:37

I'm just giving you the warning bells with this episode that there are long-term consequences potentially to those actions, Um, let alone the diet just not being sustainable or enjoyable. I mean, if you can only eat three foods, like a little kid, and not eat your fruits and vegetables and I'm sorry to be snarky, cause that's honestly what it amounts to Um, and be happy that way that I'd like to meet you, because the vast majority of people I've met who are in carnivore will say, yeah, they miss their ice cream or they miss their pizza or they miss, you know something, some whole foods like fruit or oatmeal or something like that. Again, I'm throwing out anecdotes too, so maybe I'm falling prey to the same problem that other people have, but again, to me, the anecdote is disproving the universal claim that carnivore is the bee's knees by saying, no, you know what? There's plenty of people that thrive on a plant-based or not plant-based, but a diverse diet. Not only that, we have good evidence, like the Mediterranean diet, for example I think I already mentioned that that show phenomenal long-term outcomes from having a diverse diet, which makes a lot of sense, and I understand the appeal to carnivore approach. It has some level of elegance and simplicity, right. It's attractive that you just eat these foods, and there are a lot of foods that many of us love, like animal products. Yeah, who doesn't love that, except vegans and vegetarians? And many people, yes, do report initial improvements, right.

Philip Pape: 14:58

But what I want to do now is analyze, or examine the arguments against fiber. The first claim is that fiber isn't essential. It isn't essential, meaning you don't have to consume it to survive, and there's no RDA. Yeah, that's technically true, that's technically true. You know what else? Carbs technically aren't essential, and yet we know there are massive benefits of carbs. And so just because they're not essential or there's not an RDA for it, doesn't mean that it is not extremely beneficial and almost necessary to have a really solid approach to your nutrition and your health.

Philip Pape: 15:32

The second claim is that fiber causes digestive problems. Well, sometimes it does, especially if you increase it too quickly or if you have underlying gut issues, or if you find certain foods that happen to have fiber inflammatory. Right, you may have IBS, you may have some other bowel condition and then, absolutely, you're gonna be more sensitive to certain types of fiber not necessarily all fiber, though. I know plenty of folks with IBS who they just have to be aware of what fiber works for them and so I think the solution here again isn't just eliminate everything and move on with your life. It's maybe eliminate and reintroduce or identify what's causing you problems. That's the second claim. You can't just say all fiber causes digestive problems.

Philip Pape: 16:15

Claim number three is that you can get everything you need from animals. This is maybe one of the worst claims of all of these, and I think this ignores just some very obvious nutritional gaps, and I don't know how you get around these except potentially with lots and lots of supplementation. But then your argument kind of falls flat, because then you're saying that you need those things. You're just going to get them from a different source. You know where's your vitamin C, your folate, your magnesium, the thousands of beneficial plant compounds that protect against cellular damage. You know that aren't necessarily listed on the nutrition label, right? Yeah, you're not going to develop scurvy, but we're not optimizing for not dying of deficiency diseases. We're optimizing for peak performance and longevity, right, the word thrive always comes to mind in this context. So that's the third claim, that, yeah, you can get everything from animal products. Not true at all. There are so many beneficial things in plants that you're probably gonna be sorry you don't have long-term, especially for the gut health.

Philip Pape: 17:12

The fourth claim is that humans evolved eating mostly meat. These ancestral arguments you know, I used to fall for them when I was back in my paleo days and people would cherry pick the anthropological evidence. It doesn't support it. Our ancestors were opportunists. They ate whatever was available, and that includes significant amounts of plant matter in most environments, just like there's no plant-only environments. I did that episode on the Blue Zone hoax and how just about every society on the planet eats a diverse diet based on what's available to them. Some may eat a lot of honey, some may eat a lot of goat's milk. It really depends. And what we evolved eating isn't necessarily optimal for modern life and modern goals. Or else you know what? You probably wouldn't be eating nearly the amount of protein you need. Let's just be honest. If you just naturally ate, you probably wouldn't have enough protein. And of course, I know what the carnivore guys are saying. They're like see, that's why you need carnivore. No, that's a false argument that we're making segment uh segment.

Philip Pape: 18:56

The next segment that I have in my notes is to talk about the uh what the research shows for studies with people eating fiber. So if you look at large long-term studies involving millions of people, there is a pattern and that is that higher fiber intake is consistently associated with lower rates of chronic disease, with better weight management, with longer lifespan. And if all the claims fall on their face, why wouldn't you just allow yourself to eat fiber which gives you more options for food? Like to me, that is the simplest argument. It's like now you've um re, you've given your permission to actually enjoy many, many more foods in your diet. If you truly and absolutely a bore, you hate all forms of carbs and plants or anything with fiber. You just absolutely hate them all and you're not willing to include them for any reason, even though it could be beneficial to get over your pickiness and train yourself to like them which you can do, by the way then I don't know what to say.

Philip Pape: 19:53

I don't know what to say that doesn't seem to strike me as the vast, vast majority of people. I think the vast majority of people have normal lives where they go to parties, they travel, they go places where the food isn't in their control and they just want to enjoy themselves, not in a hedonistic way, but in a flexible way, what we talk about here all the time. If we want to talk about specific studies, there's a 2019 meta-analysis in the Lancet. All right, a meta-analysis is a study of studies and it found that people consuming the most fiber I mentioned this, I alluded to this earlier had a 15 to 30% lower risk of death from all causes it's called all cause mortality compared to those eating the least fiber. That is a massive effect size that shows up across different populations and different study designs. You hear what I just said People consuming the most fiber had way lower risk of death than people who consumed the least fiber.

Philip Pape: 20:49

And what's most important is that the amount isn't that much. It doesn't mean you need to eat 50 grams of fiber daily. It means that most people are going to benefit from adequate fiber intake. What is adequate? Well, because there's no RDA, as the carnivore people will tell you. We've seen from, we've had to extract this from research comparing these different levels, and it suggests that it's around 25 to 40 grams, and I've used a formula before of 14 grams for every thousand calories you eat.

Philip Pape: 21:18

And now I tend to simplify. I say look, if you're a woman, go for 25. If you're a man, go for 35. You'll be golden. If you're higher than that, great, no big deal. There is such a thing as potentially too high digestively or hunger-wise. You know, you might not even be able to eat enough things like that, but for the vast majority of people their fiber is probably too low.

Philip Pape: 21:37

So what's really the point of this whole thing? The point here is not to choose extremes of anything, even how much fiber you eat. It's to optimize it for you. Optimize. Look at your situation. If you're dealing with digestive issues, you can work with a practitioner. You can work with a medical professional, functional medicine folks there's some good ones out there that work on this Nutrition coaches of course I'm going to plug my own work as well and you can address the root causes. And part of that might involve reducing or eliminating fiber temporarily, absolutely, as in elimination diet, because you may not know what you have and you need to get down to the root cause. But I will tell you what the root cause is.

Philip Pape: 22:12

Not gonna be all fiber, just eliminate fiber or eliminate plants. The goal should be to eventually include beneficial plant foods as your gut health improves and why not? That's great, that's really empowering, that's freeing, that's flexible. And when you do so, you're going to focus on fiber variety, because different types of fiber feed different bacterial species to the level of it could be beneficial to eat different types of apples, different types of oranges or whatever fruits you like, because of all the different compounds in the different species or breeds, or whatever the word is for those, because they all feed different species of bacteria. You want soluble and insoluble fibers from different plant families and guess what? You monitor how you feel and you adjust it gradually. You don't do it all at once, you do one at a time. You could do carnivore for, say, a month or two as an elimination diet. It's a great elimination diet.

Philip Pape: 23:02

And then add in something you think is very easy on your stomach, right, a fruit, for example, that has fiber, maybe it's oats, something and give it a week, give it two weeks, give it a month, give it as long as you need to evaluate. Hey, you know what? Actually, I can eat this food just fine, no issues whatsoever. Now, if you spend five years and you, one at a time, introduce every source of fiber and every single one causes you problems. I'll eat my shorts that all fiber is an issue for you, but we can never make the claim that all fiber is an issue for most people. And then, as far as wanting to include fiber, leaning into the benefits you get from it can be very helpful as a driver to do this. The satiety effects make fat loss easier, the metabolic benefits support muscle building, recovery all of it.

Philip Pape: 23:48

I'm going to give you one more thing to think about with fiber that I learned from some of the guests that I've had on and some of the latest research happening, and that is the compounds that are produced when your gut bacteria ferment fiber. Right, because, remember, it's great to eat fermented foods, but you also ferment fiber yourself in your body. The body's amazing, it really is. It can enhance get this okay the compounds produced when that happens can enhance muscle protein synthesis, mps. That's the rate at which we build muscle, because when the good bacteria, the beneficial bacteria, break down fiber, they produce something called butyrate, and the butyrate goes in your bloodstream and has been shown to improve insulin sensitivity, specifically in muscle tissue. And that means fiber isn't just supporting digestive health. It's literally helping your muscles use protein more effectively. What other great reason is there than that? For those of us who are lifting and trying to build muscle, it's not the only reason, but it's a cool one. There's also some emerging research showing that certain fiber types can increase the absorption of amino acids, right Again broken down from protein, and that improves the muscle building response to your training.

Philip Pape: 24:56

So the carnivore community's argument that you can optimize muscle growth with meat alone, I think ignores some of these pathways right that are tied to the gut, which a lot of you there might be even surprised in this episode that that is the case. I used to kind of ignore gut health, say, okay, that's a side thing over there. More people I talk to, the more I look at the literature and the more I work with clients, I realized that the pathways involved in gut health and having the right gut bacteria in your body, coming from diverse fiber consumption, produce compounds that are beneficial in many, many, many ways. And you're making this anthropological or ancestral argument. Maybe we should turn that around and say you know what? We probably thrive as humans because we can handle a variety of foods and maybe we should be eating a variety of foods for that very reason. Not necessarily these specific foods, but just diversity in general. And that's why I like looking at the complete picture at the system, rather than getting caught up in dietary dogma. Because that is what it is these diets. They are dogma. They are rigid, restrictive forms of thinking that allow for no disproof of their hypothesis whatsoever, even though the counter arguments and evidence is all around them.

Philip Pape: 26:13

So fiber is not just staying regular, it's not just preventing disease, even though those are great things Trust me, I know when I don't have enough fiber. I'm not gonna go into details but it's also a performance enhancer. It's like nature's natural performance enhancing drug right. It's a GLP-1 producer. It's great for your physique goals and I think there's a lot of mechanisms we're only beginning to understand because gut health is still in its nadir, to use a fun word. Or is nadir the right? I think that's the beginning. Now you got me thinking. Does nadir mean the peak? I meant to say fiber is in its nascent period of research? Anyway, I'm being a total grammar snob right now, forgive me.

Philip Pape: 26:52

The carnivore versus fiber debate. I don't even know why there's a debate, but I think we need more evidence-based thinking and not ideological extremes, to the point where I would say that an ideological extreme is, by definition, not evidence-based. It just has to be, because nothing is that black and white. Everything's individualized at the end anyway, right? So you can't make those types of claims.

Philip Pape: 27:16

Eliminating fiber might provide short-term relief, especially if you have digestive issues. But if I'm going to take an analogy, we've had some water issues in our house issues. But if I'm going to take an analogy, we've had some water issues in our house, right, if I have a problem in the toilet or speaking of pun intended fiber episode, or problem with the sink or whatever, if I shut the water off to the house, it's going to eliminate that issue, isn't it? But it's not fixing the root cause. I mean, that's just a simple analogy that comes to mind. So I don't think I have to reiterate the details.

Philip Pape: 27:44

But immune system, hormones, muscle building, disease risk, longevity it's all improved by having higher fiber in your diet and you don't have to choose a side. Just look at the complete picture and give yourself flexibility and figure out what works for you. That's it. Just don't be extreme, don't restrict unnecessarily. I'm trying to give you some power back here. That's where I had to go. That's a journey I had to go through.

Philip Pape: 28:05

I used to do paleo, I used to do keto and all that, and it was always like cut, cut, cut. What can't, can't, can't I eat? You don't have to do that right. Your gut bacteria have been waiting millions of years for you to feed them properly. They're way older than us. Don't starve them. Don't starve those little buggers. They need to eat. All right, all right, if you want a nutrition approach for you, just the simple steps that goes along with this to create a flexible approach that still meets your goals.

Philip Pape: 28:33

Download my free guide Nutrition 101 Guide Link in the show notes. Totally sustainable, science-based approach. It's personalizable. It doesn't tell you here's a meal plan, here's what you have to eat. No, it says let's figure this out together for you. Let's use the right tools to figure it out. Go to witsandweightscom slash free to get your free copy of the Nutrition 101 Guide. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember, when it comes to nutrition, the best approach is usually the one supported by the most evidence, not the loudest voices or dogmatic camps. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Can You Spot Reduce Belly Fat (and Other Stubborn Areas) After All? | Ep 332

Submit a question for the podcast (and get a personal reply plus a shoutout). Just go to witsandweights.com/question

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Tired of hearing "spot reduction is impossible" while still struggling with stubborn belly fat, love handles, or other problem areas?

Spot reduction (the idea that you can target specific fat deposits through isolated exercises) has long been dismissed as physiologically impossible. Yet many of us continue desperately doing endless crunches hoping to melt away belly fat, or countless tricep exercises trying to slim our arms. 

The frustration of seeing minimal results leads many to either give up or search for increasingly exotic solutions.

So...is there a way to actually "spot reduce" after all?

Discover why the traditional approach fails and the 3 factors that actually create the results people want from spot reduction (hint: it's not targeting those areas directly).

Main Takeaways:

• Recent research suggests limited spot reduction might be possible, but it's not the solution to stubborn fat

• Stubborn areas have more alpha-2 adrenergic receptors and poor blood flow, making them resistant to fat loss

• Real "spot reduction" happens through strategic muscle building and fat loss cycles over years (not weeks or even months)

• You can't sculpt a pebble, but you can sculpt a boulder - build the foundation first

Related Episodes + Resources:

• Your Very First Cut (Lose 10-30 Pounds of Fat) | Ep 197

• The 3+3 Model of Optimal Fat Loss | Ep 326

• Grab your FREE Muscle-Building Nutrition Blueprint

Timestamps:

0:01 - Stubborn belly fat and "trouble areas"
4:14 - New research on limited spot reduction
6:17 - Why stubborn fat is actually stubborn
7:45 - Common mistakes when targeting problem areas
10:50 - The real way to "spot reduce"
11:34 - Factor #1: Building the foundation (you can't sculpt a pebble)
14:00 - Factor #2: Strategic fat loss phases vs crash dieting
16:19 - Factor #3: Time and patience (the 90% psychology factor)
18:22 - Why muscle building is the game changer
20:13 - How your body becomes a fat-burning system

The Truth About Spot Reduction and Stubborn Belly Fat

You've probably heard it for years: “You can’t spot reduce fat.” Do a thousand crunches and you’ll still have belly fat. Hit the triceps hard and the back of your arms will stay soft. But what if the truth is a little more nuanced? What if you can achieve what most people want from spot reduction… just not in the way you’ve been told?

In this episode, we dig into real-world experiences from two listeners and break down the science behind why certain areas seem to hold fat forever. More importantly, we talk about what actually works if you want to reveal definition in those areas.

What Spot Reduction Gets Wrong

Let’s get this out of the way: traditional spot reduction (the idea that working a muscle will burn the fat sitting on top of it) doesn’t really work. Yes, a 2023 study did show that ab training combined with cardio resulted in slightly more fat loss from the trunk area. But it was a very small difference, not enough to explain the kind of stubborn fat issues most people are trying to solve.

Instead, what people really want is to see more definition in specific areas: the abs, the thighs, the arms. And you can absolutely do that, just not by isolating those areas through exercise alone.

The Real Problem: You're Trying to Spot Reduce Without Changing Body Composition

One listener, a 58-year-old man from the Philippines, had hit his goal weight and was happy with his muscle-to-fat ratio, but he still had a noticeable amount of lower belly fat. He didn’t want to lose more weight and started doing targeted ab exercises, hoping to trim the area. Nothing changed.

What’s going on here? There are three key possibilities:

1. Not enough ab muscle to reveal
   You can be lean, but if you haven’t built enough abdominal muscle, you won’t see much definition. This is where hypertrophy-focused ab training matters.

2. Still carrying too much fat overall
   Lower ab fat is usually the last to go, especially in men. You often have to get below 12% body fat (sometimes closer to 10%) to see this area lean out.

3. Fear of losing muscle in a cut
   With the right training, protein intake, and a smart fat loss phase, muscle loss can be minimized. This fear is valid, but it’s also solvable.

The takeaway? Changing your body composition systemically is what gets results, not just shrinking a specific area.

How Spot Reduction Does Work (Just Not the Way You Think)

Listener Aubrey, 41, has been cutting and building muscle strategically for years. She wrote in to share that, only recently, she started seeing glute definition she never had before… because her body had finally “worked its way” through the more stubborn fat stores.

She didn’t do this through special exercises. She did it by following three key principles.

1. Build a Solid Foundation of Muscle

You can’t carve detail into a pebble. But a boulder? That has potential. If you want to see shape and lines, you need something there to reveal. This means training with progressive overload, using proper volume, and consistently eating enough to support muscle growth.

Compound lifts like squats and presses go a long way, but targeted ab work or glute work with overload can help if there’s a specific aesthetic goal. The key is that this happens during phases of maintenance or surplus, not while dieting.

2. Use Strategic Fat Loss Phases

If you’ve built muscle and now want to see it, fat loss phases are the next tool. The more muscle you carry, the easier it is to get lean and look defined at a higher scale weight. And each cut can reveal a bit more, especially in those stubborn areas.

Just don’t crash diet. Controlled deficits, high protein, consistent resistance training, and strategic use of diet breaks are what preserve muscle and keep fat loss sustainable.

3. Give It Time

This is the part most people ignore. Aubrey has been doing this for over four years. Every year, she’s gotten leaner, stronger, and more defined, at a higher body weight. That’s what recomposition looks like. It’s not a six-week fix. It’s a multi-year project of cycles: build muscle, lose fat, maintain. Repeat.

And with each cycle, your body gets better at partitioning nutrients, managing insulin, burning fat, and building muscle. This is why those areas that used to be stubborn finally start leaning out.

So Can You Spot Reduce?

Not in the traditional sense. But you can absolutely look leaner and more defined in specific areas by:

• Building muscle that you can eventually reveal

• Getting lean enough through smart fat loss phases

• Repeating the process over time and accepting that this isn’t a sprint

If you’ve been training, eating reasonably well, and feel stuck with one particular area, ask yourself: Have I built enough muscle to see anything there? Have I gotten lean enough to reveal it? Have I given my body enough time to respond?

If not, now you know what to do.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

You've been told for years that spot reduction is impossible. You can't do crunches to lose belly fat, tricep exercises to lose arm fat or squats to lose thigh fat period. But what if there's actually a way to spot reduce, just not how most people think? Today we're examining what's really happening when people finally lose stubborn fat after years of struggle, why the traditional approach fails and the three factors that actually create the results people want from spot reduction. The answer isn't in targeting those areas directly. So what is the answer? Tune in to find out.

Philip Pape: 0:46

Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're tackling one of the most persistent questions, or myths, in the fitness world, and that is can you actually target stubborn fat areas? Now, the short answer is no, at least not how most people think Traditional spot reduction, where you work one area and the fat just melts off. The long answer, though, reveals a different approach that does deliver the results people want from spot reduction, but without the frustration that most people experience. And before we get into this, this episode is actually based on two different listener questions that I've smushed together into one topic and if you want to send your question in and get it featured on the podcast whether it's training, nutrition, mindset, building your physique, any of it just go to witsandweightscom slash question and you'll get a personal response by me by email and potentially get it featured on the show and a shout out if you'd like. And again, that's witsandweightscom slash question. So that's what we're doing today. We're going to share two listener questions. They're almost stories about these listeners that capture what most people experience with stubborn body fat, and you might definitely relate to this.

Philip Pape: 2:04

The first one is a 58 year old guy from the Philippines, uh, who wrote, quote I've been training for a little over six months now and I've achieved both my target weight and target muscle to fat ratio. I've even developed visible muscles on my upper abs. My problem is that my lower abs still protrude with a healthy dose of belly fat. I can't seem to get rid of it. And then he continued. He said I don't want to lose more weight as I'm happy where I am, so I'm hesitant to go on extended calorie deficits. I'm also concerned that I may lose muscle if I go on extended calorie deficits To try to lose the belly fat. I started to do targeted exercises leg lifts, sit-ups, side pulls, russian twists to try to focus on losing the belly fat, with no visible progress. And I picked out this one in particular because here's a person who has done a lot of the right things. He's achieved the weight he wanted and the muscle mass and body comp, except he has a stubborn area of belly fat, and men and women relate to this in different ways, but definitely starts to occur more and more as we get older. So if this sounds familiar, I think that's because it captures what most of us experience.

Philip Pape: 3:08

The other listener and I'm going to address both all of this together in one topic. The other listener is Aubrey, who is 41, and she wrote me on Instagram. She said, quote I would love to hear your take on trouble areas leaning out more with each cut phase. I think it has to do with continued leanness from adding muscle and maintenance through the year and then just having less fat overall, and then when I go to cut, it impacts my trouble areas. It takes time, so I don't think people understand that things can keep improving and body shape can change for the better as years pass on. And then she added, quote I am in a cut now and I'm seeing muscle definition in my butt that I know I've never had before. It's like my body said okay, she's mastered the leanness up top, let's start hacking away the lower. Finally, now, these are two completely different experiences, different stories, but they all link together in a very amazing way that we're going to address today and kind of look at what the key is to all of this. And you want to listen to the whole episode because we're going to take you through the story of what the research says, what's actually going on, what approach most people take and why it doesn't work, and then the actual way to do it. So you're going to want to listen all the way through if you want to understand the full context and what to do for your own situation.

Philip Pape: 4:14

So let's address the elephant in the room, and that is that there is recent research suggesting some limited spot reduction might be possible. Ooh, shocker. You didn't know. I'd say that, did you. There was a study in 2023, I think it was actually reviewed in the May 2020, may or March, I forget which one 2024 issue of Body by Science by Bill Campbell that I had the pleasure of contributing to as an expert contributor and it talked about ab training, but I want to talk about the study itself. The study found that combining ab exercises with cardio led to slightly more trunk fat loss over 10 weeks, and it's a very tiny bit, but it's interesting Now why this misses.

Philip Pape: 4:57

The point is that even if you can achieve some small amount of localized fat loss, it's just not enough to solve the real problem people have with those stubborn areas, and that's why our first listener question he was doing everything and still, even after targeting those areas, it didn't seem to work. And the real issue is not that you need to target them directly. The issue is most people are missing the requirements for accessing stubborn fat stores in the first place. What do I mean? All right, let's get a little sciencey here, because here's what's happening when you have stubborn fat. Okay and I'm just using that word a little bit loosely, but we all know what it means it's the areas of fat that seem to be the last to come off, or maybe they don't even seem to be able to come off. They're just like if we lost all the fat in our body, somehow the stubborn fat's still going to be there. Well, what it is is they have more what's called alpha-2 adrenergic receptors that inhibit fat breakdown, and they have poor blood flow. This is very reminiscent of visceral fat around our organs, for example, and this makes them resistant to fat loss, even in a calorie deficit. All right, there's a big caveat on that, because we're gonna talk about ultimately what it takes. A calorie deficit is gonna be part of the solution, potentially, but they are more resistant during a calorie deficit.

Philip Pape: 6:17

So for men, it's typically the lower abs and the love handles I feel like. For me it's my butt, so that's just me. For women, it's my butt, so that's just me. For women, it's often the hips, the thighs, the lower body. But and this is the big but pun intended fat loss is still primarily systemic. It's system-wide. Your body mobilizes fat from throughout your body, based on your overall energy balance, your hormones, your muscle mass and your genetics.

Philip Pape: 6:47

And the reason people get obsessed with spot reduction is they're looking for a shortcut around the fundamental requirements of fat loss. They want to keep their current body composition and just target the problem area. And I'm not calling you out to our 58-year-old caller. He didn't want me to use his name, so all cool. I'm not trying to call you out as if you're not-old caller. He didn't want me to use his name, so all cool. I'm not trying to call you out as if you're not trying to do the right thing.

Philip Pape: 7:08

But it may require more fat loss than you believe and that's one of the issues. What have I told you if there actually is a way to spot reduce? But it requires a different approach that works with your physiology and it takes time. It's not just a one-and-done thing. So let's talk about. Let's talk about the different approaches. All right, our 50 year old, 58 year old guy from the Philippines is experiencing exactly what happens when you try to spot reduce without addressing the underlying issues. He's addressed a lot of them, so congrats, kudos to him. For sure, he is a far ahead of where most people are right now. So congrats on that big win to be celebrated.

Philip Pape: 7:45

He's achieved his target weight is muscle to fat ratio, but he called in, or he wrote in with lower belly fat that he's frustrated with. He doesn't want to lose more weight and he's trying to target the fat, but the problem is he may not have enough muscle mass in his core to reveal the definition, even at his current body fat level. That's one thing, because if you don't train your abs properly and that's a key word, properly, we'll get to that. They won't be developed enough to show, even when you're lean right. And that's independent of genetic differences, because we all have different. Not everybody has a six-pack under there, some have, you know, eight packs, four packs, different kind of shapes.

Philip Pape: 8:22

So that's the first thing. He may not have enough muscle mass. Some people think you do. You said you're at your ideal muscle-to-fat ratio, but usually it's a lifelong process and you want to keep adding muscle. Second, his overall body fat might still be too high, and that's probably actually where I'd go first in his case, potentially, knowing that he has trained for a while If you're brand new, I would definitely lean more toward the muscle side of the equation. But his body fat might be too high for lower ab definition, even if his total muscle to fat ratio looks good from his perspective. Lower abs, the lower section of the abs, are typically the last place that men lose fat and you usually have to get down to something like 10% to 12% body fat or lower to see them clearly.

Philip Pape: 9:03

So again, not wanting to lose weight piece of it comes into here with his fears because then we have to understand okay, well, how do we get to that level of leanness if it's not strictly through losing more weight or fat? The third thing here is he's afraid of losing muscle in a deficit, but I think this fear could be preventing him from doing what might be necessary. So if the reason you and I say you, because I wish I could use your name but if the reason he doesn't want to lose more weight is because he thinks he'll lose muscle, well that's an easy problem, right. A strategic cut with the proper training to hold on to muscle, with enough protein, that's an easy problem. We do it all the time. That's the very definition of a fat loss phase, when done properly, is you're going to lose very little to no muscle. So if that's the only thing holding you back, then that's great, because you're gonna be good if you're training, eating protein, doing all the right things, right. And so I think overall, this actually represents maybe the most common mistake people make is trying to solve a body composition problem without changing body composition. And again, I know he's saying he wants to improve body composition but without losing weight. And you can do that. You can do that by building more muscle and then losing fat. That's what I alluded to already. But the targeted exercises that he's doing, um, yeah, they might build some muscle, done properly, but they're not going to spot reduce the fat. And I did allude to training abs, and of course you want to do that, but it's not going to be the only thing you know. Plus, you have to be progressively overloading and actually building that muscle, which we have to confirm that you're doing. So that's that's the big uh takeaway in terms of why things don't work. It's if your your body fat's not low enough, you haven't had enough muscle or you're afraid to lose weight to reveal the muscle because of other reasons, like in this case, um, losing muscle in a deficit, uh, but that's, and that's that's the one. That's one listener.

Philip Pape: 10:50

Now let's look at Aubrey, our other listener, who wrote in because she's discovered a, the real way to spot, reduce, so. So in her case she's not asked, calling in at a frustration. She actually wants to share the fact that this can work and I think that's that's awesome. Um, and she's done it by improving body composition systemically over time. That's how you actually get the results people want, but it's through a different mechanism. So let's talk about the um. I'll say three factors for doing this, because this is really the. The money here is what do you do? So the first factor is you have to have a foundation. I've said before and I stole this from someone years ago you can't sculpt a pebble, but you can sculpt a boulder, and you need to become that boulder first that you can then sculpt down.

Philip Pape: 11:34

Aubrey mentioned adding muscle and maintenance through the year. She said that in her quote in her message to me adding muscle in maintenance through the year and I think this is crucial because you can't reveal what isn't there. If you want to find abs, you have to build abs. If you want a shapely lower body, you have to build those muscles. There's nothing to show otherwise, right. And this means training your target areas like any other muscle group, with progressive overload, sufficient volume and consistency. And, yes, you're going to hit your abs, like, let's say, abs. Specifically, you're going to hit your abs with big compound lifts. But then you also want to have some special ab work in there once or twice a week, like, like they say, 10 to 20 hard sets per week per major muscle group, using exercises that allow you to add weight or reps over time, like a a loaded ab crunch, for example, or if you did hanging leg raises, it's increasing your reps.

Philip Pape: 12:24

But here's the key you have to do this during periods where you're eating enough to support muscle growth. You cannot build muscle in an aggressive deficit or even a moderate deficit. Unless you're totally new to this, you're not going to build much muscle, and the amount of muscle we want to get this lean shredded look that I think you guys are going for when we talk about spot reduction does take at least one or two cycles of truly building muscle. And Aubrey mentioned, you know, doing it at maintenance, like being in maintenance throughout most of the year. That's a great strategy If you're willing to actually gain weight and go into a surplus. That could be even more optimal short term, especially if you're on the younger end of the training spectrum younger as in, newer to training, not young in age. End of the training spectrum. Younger as in, newer to training, not young in age. So that's the first foundation is building the foundation becoming the big granite of muscle that you can sculpt down rather than being a skinny pebble that has nowhere to go?

Philip Pape: 13:18

Factor two is then strategic fat loss phases, not crash dieting, not cutting super aggressively. Again, going back to Aubrey, she talks about each cut phase impacting her trouble areas more each time she does it and I've seen that myself. I've seen that with clients, and that is you have to actually lose enough fat to reach those stubborn areas and the first time you do a fat loss phase you just may not have enough muscle and then you may not get lean enough. But first time you do a fat loss phase you just may not have enough muscle and then you may not get lean enough. But each time you add muscle it's easier to get lean in terms of you don't necessarily have to cut down to as low of a body weight to get lean. So more muscle, cut fat, more muscle, cut fat. That's why we like bulking and cutting generally as an optimal way to do this.

Philip Pape: 14:00

Again, for most men, lower abs they're not going to show until you're around 10 to 12% body fat. I don't like living at that percentage. I usually get down around 14% when I'm pretty lean, like for the summer, and I have a little bit of, not a little bit. My abs are showing but they're not like super cut because I don't want to, I don't want to diet down to 10 to 12%. Generally. Some clients I have love living around you know 8% body fat as men, or and to the point where some of them are even afraid to gain weight, and that's a separate issue.

Philip Pape: 14:29

For women, lower body definition is going to require getting quite lean. I'm just sorry to say it, to tell you the truth, but it's usually somewhere around 16 to 20% body fat, or potentially lower for women. And again, percentage body fat doesn't directly correlate to scale weight. It correlates to how much muscle and fat you have. So of course, if you have more muscle, you can be at the same percent body fat at a higher scale weight. And that's what Aubrey, and that's what we're trying to get at here.

Philip Pape: 14:57

It's easier, each cut phase, each bulk, each cut to get there, and that means accepting that you might need to lose more total weight than you initially wanted the first time and maybe less the next time and the time after that, not because the scale number matters, because that's what it takes to access those fat stores. Listen, your body's going to run out of places to get fat and then it's eventually going to go to that trouble area and it may just require getting a lot more lean than you've ever been. It may also let's be honest about it require getting more lean than you want to be, or that is super sustainable for you, and part of that is genetics. It's just genetics, but that's okay. Anybody can do it.

Philip Pape: 15:33

However, so it's a very strategic thing and to me, fat loss needs to be done intelligently, moderately and keeping the protein high, continuing to strength train, planning in diet breaks or refeeds all of the things we talk about a lot on this show and recently have covered in other episodes, like the three plus three model of optimal fat loss. You can go find that one. I did an episode quite a while ago called your very first cut, which you can search in the feed. So that's. The second factor is doing strategic fat loss, knowing that in between you're going to be building muscle and kind of going back and forth. And then the final factor here maybe this is the biggest one for all of you is time and patience, and I know you're rolling your eyes like oh, here he goes again, but you know how much of this is just psychology. 90% of it is psychology.

Philip Pape: 16:19

Now, aubrey's been at this for four and a half years. Okay, I've been at this for four or five years four or five years myself and I have a long way to go to where I could really be at the place where I feel like super lean and it's easier and I can carry a lot more body weight. But if I drew a graph for you up and down with body fat, with weight, with all the things you would see it trending toward being leaner at a higher body weight and therefore being easier to see my abs or get the fat off my butt or whatever. It doesn't mean that I always live that way. I live many times with more weight on my body because I love to lift and make progress and feel great as well. Aubrey said quote things can keep improving and body shape can change for the better as years pass on, and that is what most people miss.

Philip Pape: 17:02

Real physique transformation happens through multiple cycles of building muscle and losing fat over years, not weeks or months. I'm sorry. I know you want the quick fix. I know you think I've got to lose the weight. It's not about that. It's about building muscle and losing fat. You have to be training that is a non-negotiable and then each time you go through one of these cycles, you build muscle for, in my opinion, six to 12 months and then you cut for maybe eight to 16 weeks right, that's two to four months. And then you maintain for a period. That's improving your body composition at a fundamental level and being able to see more of your definition the more you do it. So the muscle you build. How many times do we have to talk on the show about the benefits? But it does, it's everything. It raises your metabolism, it improves your insulin sensitivity, it changes how your body partitions nutrients right, and that's what muscle gets you. Fat loss phases will get easier and more effective because you have more of this metabolically active, what we call expensive muscle tissue. Right, and you notice. I didn't even get to things like specific exercises, because at the end of the day, if you simply do basic strength training with progressive overload, you get stronger, you build muscle generally systemically over your body and then you use nutrition to cut fat, you probably can get to the leanness you want doing that alone.

Philip Pape: 18:22

Some of you, because of genetics or because of a look you're going for, will definitely want to specialize and train certain muscle groups more. You just will. There are phenomena that occur with the body and how it stretches skin, how it stretches the layer of fat on top of those stubborn areas that we're not even getting into here because it's in the weeds, it's in the noise, it's very individual and genetically specific, no-transcript. The one little trick with some of these areas like the abs is, for some people, they do need to have loaded ab work, whether that's hanging, leg raises, reverse crunches, ab wheel rollouts, what's the other thing? You know, loaded ab crunches, like there are plenty of ways to load your abs and make sure to focus on the area that you care most about developing, but all you're doing is you're potentially increasing the muscle mass a little bit, a little bit, like we're doing is you're potentially increasing the muscle mass a little bit, a little bit, like we're talking. You know, millimeters or centimeters, like it depends on which one we're talking about where the real game changer is going to be how lean you get. That's just it, I'm sorry to say, but if you have overall more muscle mass, you could be overall more lean at a higher body weight, and that's what makes it really cool over time.

Philip Pape: 19:37

So I think what people really want from spot reduction is to see definition and shape in specific areas, and the secret? The secret is that you can achieve this, but not by targeting those areas directly. So when you build muscles systematically, when you lose fat strategically over time sometimes years, I'm sorry to say it, it just is going to take time you create what looks and feels like spot reduction. Your trouble areas will eventually lean out, not because you targeted them, but because you've built the foundation that allows your body to access those fat stores effectively. Because your body is a system, it is integrated.

Philip Pape: 20:13

When you build muscle, you're not just building that specific muscle, you're improving the entire metabolic profile of your body. When you lose fat, you're not just losing fat from one area. You can't even control that. You're changing your hormonal environment, your insulin sensitivity, your body's entire energy management system. And that's why Aubrey, for example, can see changes in her fourth year. She couldn't see in her first year. She hasn't just lost fat, she's systemically upgraded her whole body's operating system, for lack of a better phrase.

Philip Pape: 20:41

Every training session, every meal, every recovery period is programming your body for that long-term lifestyle, as whatever phrase works for you athlete, lifter, healthy, person and when you understand this, then you're going to stop looking for the quick fix, the shortcut, which isn't going to work anyway. It's just not going to work, and then you can start building that foundation and that's the lasting change you're going for. It's going to take time and the irony is, when you stop trying to spot reduce and you start focusing on body composition, your trouble areas are going to start responding, not because you're targeting them, but because you've created the conditions to access those fat stores and that's really all it is. So can you spot reduce belly fat? No, not in the traditional sense of targeting directly, but you can absolutely achieve the results you want from spot reduction through building muscle and losing fat over time. For our 58-year-old guy from the Philippines, this might mean accepting he needs to either build more muscle or yes, lose more fat, or do both in strategic cycles.

Philip Pape: 21:38

For Aubrey, she's discovered the real secret here patience and consistency over the years, not quick fixes over weeks. Your stubborn fat areas are not stubborn because you need better exercises okay, it's not that. They're stubborn because you have to give yourself the time and patience to build muscle and lose fat. That's it. Many people haven't even taken time to build muscle and if you're one of those, listening everything else I talk in this episode, almost doesn't matter until you do that, all right. If you have any questions about building muscle, losing fat, applying any of these strategies we talked about, or you have follow-up questions about specifics, submit them at witsandweightscom slash question. You'll get a personal response from me and we'll potentially feature it on the show, if it makes sense. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember your best physique is not ever built using shortcuts. It is engineered through patience, consistency and an understanding that real transformation takes time. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Is THIS the Ideal Protein Bar for Lifters and Athletes? | Ep 331

Join Physique University (free for 2 weeks) to get a custom, flexible nutrition plan so you can enjoy foods that feel good!

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How do you know what’s actually in your protein bar? Could sweet potato be the secret ingredient that changes the game?

I had a conversation with Tony and Lori, the husband-and-wife team behind Muscle Up Bars, the protein bars born from a dream and built for real performance. We talk about what sets their bars apart in a crowded market: a clean ingredient list, balanced macros, and the power of simplicity. 

Whether you’re a CrossFitter, busy parent, or just someone trying to fuel smarter, this will help you understand what to look for in your supplements and why quality matters.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

2:29 – Dreaming the first recipe
5:00 – Why sweet potato is the star
9:11 – Breaking down the sugar-to-protein ratio
13:16 – Why texture makes it taste real
20:32 – Disrupting the market with simplicity
23:02 – When and how people use the bars
26:28 – Scaling up without selling out
39:15 – Handwritten notes and customer love

Episode resources:

• Website: muscleupbars.com

• Instagram: @muscleupbars 

How to Choose a Protein Bar That Actually Supports Your Training Goals

Protein bars are everywhere, and for good reason. They’re convenient, portable, and (sometimes) tasty. But if you’re trying to build muscle, improve body composition, or just hit your protein targets consistently, not every bar is going to be the best tool for the job. Some are closer to candy. Others lean ultra-high protein but sacrifice taste and digestibility. So how do you choose the ones that actually support your training goals?

In this episode of Wits & Weights, I talked with two athletes-turned-entrepreneurs who created a bar they couldn’t find in stores… one focused on quality protein, balanced macros, and real-food ingredients. While their approach may not be for everyone, it sparked a broader conversation about how to evaluate the bars you keep in your pantry.

Why the Protein to Sugar Ratio Still Matters

If you’re using a bar to support muscle building or recovery, protein needs to be the star. One quick metric I like to use: does it have at least twice as much protein as sugar?

For example, the Muscle Up Bar we discussed has 15g protein and 7g sugar, which fits that guideline nicely. This isn’t about demonizing sugar. Some quick carbs can be helpful depending on the context. But if a “protein” bar has more sugar than protein, it may not be the most efficient tool for fueling your goals.

Whole Food Ingredients Aren’t Better, But They May Feel Better

Some folks prefer bars with minimal ingredients because they tend to sit better digestively, especially pre-workout. In this case, the base is made with things like sweet potato, almond flour, and coconut nectar, which gives it a subtly sweet, almost cookie-dough-like texture.

That doesn’t mean bars with sugar alcohols or artificial flavors are bad. I still eat plenty of those, and they can absolutely fit into a flexible diet. But if you’ve ever noticed that some bars leave you feeling bloated or overly full, it might be worth experimenting with options that lean more toward real-food ingredients and simpler macros.

Why Whey Protein Still Reigns Supreme

From a quality standpoint, whey protein concentrate remains one of the best options for building muscle. It’s complete, easily digested, and high in leucine. Some bars blend multiple protein sources to increase the grams per serving, which can work well depending on the goal, but it’s worth paying attention to how your body responds to different protein types.

Some brands also lean heavily on collagen or plant-based sources. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s something to be aware of if you’re counting on the bar as a primary source of complete protein.

Texture, Flavor, and the “Real Food” Experience

One thing that stood out in this conversation was how much texture can impact enjoyment and satiety. If a bar feels like dense taffy or melts into a chalky paste, it might be hard to stick with consistently. A more natural texture, like the soft, slightly grainy bite you get from almond flour and cacao nibs, can make it feel closer to eating real food than a supplement.

And yes, flavor still matters. You don’t need every bar to taste like birthday cake, but if it’s a chore to eat, it’s not going to become a regular part of your routine.

When (and Why) to Use Protein Bars

Here’s how I like to use protein bars in a flexible diet:

• As a pre-workout snack when I’m short on time

• As a midday option when I’m behind on protein

• As a dessert replacement when I want something sweet but still want to hit my macros

• Occasionally split in half to keep calories lower while staying full

Could you get the same protein from whole foods? Sure. But sometimes convenience wins. The key is knowing what you’re getting and how it fits into your overall nutrition plan.

Ingredient Preferences Are Personal, So Let the Goals Guide You

Some people prefer to avoid artificial sweeteners, colors, or gums. Others don’t mind them at all, especially if it means more flavor or lower calories. There’s no one right answer here. But it’s worth knowing what’s in your food, how it affects you, and whether it supports your goals.

If a bar keeps you full, helps you hit your protein, and you enjoy it enough to eat it regularly, that’s a win.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you're trying to build muscle and build that strong, lean physique, protein bars can be a hugely convenient tool in your nutrition arsenal. But there are tons of options on the market, so how do you choose ones that actually support your training goals as well as your values? Today I'm talking to two athletes who turned their quest for better nutrition, a better protein bar, into a business. You'll discover the science behind protein quality and absorption, why thoughtful ingredients and sources matter for performance, and how to evaluate macro ratios to align with your fitness goals. You're going to walk away understanding how to make more informed choices about the protein supplements you use to fuel your training and recovery and recovery. 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 Pape, and today's going to be a lot of fun because we are discussing protein bars and the supplementation industry. We're talking ingredients, macros, quality, flavor, how to choose all of it, and my guests today are Tony and Lori, the founders of Muscle Up Bars right here in Connecticut.

Philip Pape: 1:14

I am a personal consumer of their bars I just crushed one chocolate chip right before this interview and I've been a customer since pretty much, I think the first year they launched, and Tony is a certified financial planner by day. He's a dedicated CrossFit athlete, an Olympic lifter in his free time, and Lori is a doctor of audiology who's also a certified personal trainer, or was a certified personal trainer, is currently a coach, and together they've created protein bars designed with athletes and lifters in mind that are focused on the optimal macro ratios, I'll say, but also, and maybe more importantly, quality ingredients, and, from my personal experience, they're very delicious and my wife and kids agree as well. So today we're going to get into that. We're going to discuss the science behind effective protein supplements, how to evaluate ingredient quality when you're looking at a label because this is the bar for people who read labels and some tips to incorporate convenient foods like protein bars into your diet. Enough talking, tony, lori. Welcome to the show.

Tony: 2:11

Thank you.

Philip Pape: 2:12

Thanks for having us. All right, I hope I got everything right in the intro, but I just want to let people get to know you and really get to the root of the story behind your success and the bar that you create. What made you think way back when, when we can make a better protein bar there's so many on the market, but we can do something different.

Tony: 2:29

Well, I think it all started out of frustration. I'm a little bit picky about what I eat and I like to read labels, even going back a number of years. So I couldn't find a bar that I liked because I was reading the labels and I was finding either too much sugar or too many chemicals or a lot of weird ingredients. So you know, I just knew I had this, this frustration about finding one that I liked. So I literally one night had a dream that I was making protein bars in my kitchen with the ingredients I had in my pantry sweet potatoes, protein powder, chocolate chips, almond flour. And I woke up and I said, lori, I just had a very strange dream. I was making protein bars and I saw all the ingredients and she said that's weird.

Lori: 3:20

Yeah.

Tony: 3:21

I said, yeah, I don't know why I'm having this dream, but I couldn't get the idea out of my head and I literally saw all the ingredients and I saw myself making it. So after about a month of thinking about it, I said you know what? I'm just going to try this. And I tried the recipe that I dreamt of, with the sweet potatoes and the whey powder and the almond flour, and threw some bars together and they tasted delicious. I brought them to our local CrossFit gym for people to try and they said these are great. Where'd you get them? I said, well, I made them at home and that's really how it started. And I thought well, you know, if I'm frustrated, other people must be frustrated, and I know I can make a good bar. I made one first try. Maybe we can turn this into a little business. And we didn't really have any aspirations about becoming a big brand or anything. We just really I want bars for myself that I was comfortable eating.

Philip Pape: 4:13

Yeah, so I'm curious more about that, because I don't know if you're naturally impulsive and just the type of person just does something, or this was very different for you. Start there, because that's the first question.

Tony: 4:24

I don't know. Am I impulsive? I do. I like to do things. I like to cook, like to tinker in the kitchen, I like to do projects. I'm a bit of a do-it-yourselfer and I do like to cook. So I think all that together just spurred me on and gave me the inspiration to give it a try. Why not try it?

Philip Pape: 4:44

So I mean sweet potato. We can get into some of the ingredients that are fairly unique and, I'll say, unusual. As far as protein bars go, and some of the things I love about it, Was there like one thing you said look, no protein bar that I ever eat has this. Was it the taste? Was it the ingredients? What was it for you?

Lori: 5:00

Well, most of the protein bars that were out there, you know they, oh, this is great protein. And we'd look at the back and it would really be a candy bar. There would be more sugar than protein. At the time we were really involved in CrossFit and sweet potato and protein was just what we ate. So we didn't see any other bars out there that had sweet potato and we thought this is a great binder, a great carb. I mean, it's nature's best carbohydrate, I think. So there was nothing like that and we decided that we wanted to always have at least twice as much protein than sugar, and if there was any sugar, it was going to come from something natural. But yeah, there just wasn't anything out there like that. And bad ingredients, bad taste a lot of sugar.

Tony: 5:52

I don't know if we're trying to be different with the sweet potato. It was just the magic ingredient that allowed us to have some natural sweetness without adding a lot of sugar and without having to use sugar substitutes, without having to use sugar alcohols. A lot of bars have sugar alcohols. In fact, when we, when we found a manufacturer to make the bars for us because we couldn't do mass production in our little kitchen we told them what we wanted and they came back with us to us with a recipe that had all kinds of fake sweeteners in it and we said what is this stuff? Why? Why is this in here? Do we have to have this? They said, no, you don't have to have it. It's just the way we do things.

Tony: 6:31

It was for everybody else yeah and we said laurie kept saying, well, take this out, take that out. We went through probably a dozen different recipes, eliminating, yeah, ingredients that the manufacturer wanted us to put in but we didn't want, and we ended up with something that's just very simple, minimal number of ingredients. It's not super sweet, which I think most consumers are used to, it's just naturally lightly sweet, and that's what we wanted. It's not a dessert, it's a protein bar.

Philip Pape: 7:04

Oh yeah, but you can eat this for dessert, let me tell you. Let me tell you Okay. So let me give my personal thing, cause this is just so the listener knows. I invited Tony and Lori on. I love the protein bars. They always send these really sweet, like personal notes with their packages. There was actually a little I don't know if it was a manufacturing defect or somebody had opened the package, it doesn't matter and they sent me a new box because there was one small bar in there that was a little bit off and that's like the kind of stuff that good business owners do.

Philip Pape: 7:33

But I wanted to bring you on because literally, the bar itself is just so tasty. It does have a great sweetness. My kids will say you know, it tastes like real food. It doesn't taste chemically and I'll admit I have. I have six different brands of protein bars in my pantry and I'm sure a lot of your customers do, because they.

Philip Pape: 7:51

It depends on what you're looking for. Are you trying to get super protein dense? Are you trying to have you know, very sugary candy bar style? You know we do it right, but but this is the only one that I. I eat it and I'm like wow, it's, it's like, it's like you just made it in your kitchen and it reminds me you talked about the sweet potato. I used to be big into paleo. Now I have more flexible diet but and CrossFit as well. I was in CrossFit and I. One of my favorite recipes was a pumpkin pie type custard. We did them in these ramekins and pumpkin puree was the base. It wasn't the sugary pumpkin pie mix, it was just pumpkin puree and it's like my wife makes butternut squash, doesn't have to add much to it, not even add butter, and it just has a great taste. So I'm just kind of promoting you guys and the bar for making that choice, even if it was unintentional. And why don't more? Why don't more bars have these kinds of ingredients? Is it the taste profile? Is it cheaper?

Lori: 8:42

they didn't even have it. Yeah, they had to order it in for us. You know here this was this manufacturer that all they do was make bars.

Tony: 8:50

So they had never heard of it. They had to source it for us specifically. As far as we know, no one else uses it at this point. I don't know why, because to us it just seemed to make a lot of sense. I'm always staying on top of what's new in the bar market. As a matter of fact, I have a couple of our competitor bars right here.

Philip Pape: 9:07

Oh, I see David there. I know you posted about David, yeah, yeah, and even today.

Tony: 9:11

I mean, these are relatively new to the marketplace and if you look at the ingredients list they are loaded with all kinds of different weird sweeteners.

Lori: 9:20

And the artificial colors too, which is just crazy, you would think, with all the talk, now this one is even has a laxative warning on the back.

Tony: 9:28

Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't want to eat before you work out hey, what was popular when yours came out?

Philip Pape: 9:33

it was quest bars, right wasn't that rx bars and quest has like definitely gives people some digestive issues right.

Tony: 9:40

Rx bars were interesting because they didn't have the sugar alcohol. But when you look at the sugar to protein ratio, they have more sugar than protein yeah, yeah, you're right.

Philip Pape: 9:51

They call them a protein. That's the other thing is you call it a protein bar. It's got to have at least at least 10 grams of protein, in my opinion, if it has more sugar than protein.

Tony: 9:59

To me that's a candy bar, it's not a protein bar. So we want, we wanted our ratio to be at least twice as much protein as sugar, and the sugar has to be natural and just a light, light amount just to make it a pleasant bar to eat, not a candy bar or dessert.

Philip Pape: 10:13

Yeah, and I would hope you know again those listening. We talk about shifting your diet toward mostly whole foods with some indulgences in there. You generally, in my experience, your sweet tooth gets resensitized when you're eating more fruit and when you're eating more whole foods and sweet potato, like you said. So it actually does taste, to my opinion, rather sweet in a good way, like in a good natural way, or you could eat it for dessert, just so people know. This one bar, at least what I have a chocolate chip. It's 230 calories. It's 12 grams of fat, including only three grams saturated. It is 22 grams of carbs and 3 of those are fiber, probably from the sweet potato, and maybe I think you might add some probiotics or something else that has fiber. We can talk about it. And then 7 grams of sugar, but only 4 grams added. So that's mostly from the fruit right or from the vegetable, from the sweet potato.

Tony: 11:00

Sweet potato and coconut nectar.

Philip Pape: 11:02

And coconut. Coconut nectar oh cool, yes, I used to drink that stuff and 15 grams of protein, so that, like the, I was teasing everybody. How much protein does it have? So, while there are bars that have like a lot more density of protein, I would call this a more balanced, good source of, like overall energy and that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. So, but the two to one protein to sugar ratio tell us about that. Where did that? Was that just your challenging?

Lori: 11:32

yourself versus what was out there. I, you know I had found a yogurt that was on the market um cities and they used to promote that when it was right on top. I think they ended up having to change that. Maybe someone else had copyrighted that, but it just really made me think that's a good way of doing things. We need to have at least twice as much protein than sugar. If we could have the sugar even lower, we would, but we really hate to change anything because they are super delicious and it is natural sugar when we first made the bar, my number one priority was good ingredients and clean.

Tony: 12:17

My priority wasn't a great taste, right? So I said, even if the sugar is low, if it doesn't taste great, I'm gonna eat it because it's good and it has good ingredients. Turns out they they taste great and they have good ingredients as well. But we were really trying to push the sugar down.

Philip Pape: 12:33

It's a good combo, yeah yeah, where I think most.

Tony: 12:36

most bar companies probably design their bars for taste first, because that's how consumers evaluate the bars if, if you read a bar review, they're always talking about oh, this one tastes great. But to me it's more important what are the ingredients and what are the macros? That's the taste good, but it has to have good macros first.

Lori: 12:54

They definitely do. I mean this one here is birthday cake.

Philip Pape: 13:00

Natural. Why would I want to do?

Lori: 13:01

all this working out and turn around and eat birthday cake what's?

Tony: 13:04

funny is, this one is called cake batter. They go after taste first.

Philip Pape: 13:10

And you know what's sad is. I know the difference between those flavors. That's funny.

Lori: 13:16

You talked about really eating whole foods and not having a lot of packaged things, and that was another thing. We both were so busy and on the go. You know, at the time I was running around seeing clients coaching at different gyms and you know, when you stop somewhere you're starving because you've been going all day long. What are you going to grab? If you walk in a convenience store, it's going to have all the sugar, alcohols and all that. That was another reason we just needed something.

Tony: 13:48

That was good if we had to grab and go yeah, and 100 when you're starving, I mean you're going to grab whatever you can and we had young kids that we were taking to sporting events and the kids, you know, needed something quick and you don't want to feel guilty as a parent giving your kids something that's not healthy, you know. So we have this as an option for our kids as well. And, like you said, kids it's amazing. Kids love these bars. We have kids two years old, five years old, right, and the parents have to hide the bars from their kids because the kids just love them.

Philip Pape: 14:19

That's true, and I my favorite is the chocolate chip. But they're all good, but that's just. I'm a huge chocolate fiend and just having it broken up by that occasional chip, that surprises you, You're like oh, it's so good.

Lori: 14:29

Also kind of took the philosophy, you know, like Ben and Jerry's, in regards to texture. We wanted a bar that had texture. So you know, you've got the cacao nibs, you've got the chunks of chocolate, all that. It's just like a nice little surprise each time you take a bite.

Philip Pape: 14:47

It is, it is. And again, I like people are probably listening like wow, you're going to have a whole episode about protein bars but we're going to get into some more of the ingredients and science behind it. But sometimes when you find something, it's just unique. The texture is not to be underrated. It's like how do I describe it? It's got a little bit of um I don't want to say graininess, cause that sounds bad. It's like uh. It's like uh how do I? How do I describe it? Like almost like cookie dough, a little bit texture right when there's a little bit of roughness in there and it feels good on your tongue, and then it's smooth at the same time.

Philip Pape: 15:17

You know what I mean yeah, and it sort of melts in your mouth.

Tony: 15:20

Yes, texture mouth. Yes, texture is really important when it comes to food. People don't realize, but you know, even when you're eating a meal, texture in a restaurant is very important. You want you have some crispy, some crunchy, some?

Philip Pape: 15:32

salt and sprinkle the mouthfeel from the fat, like the fat, I imagine the mct oil and some of the things in there. Give it that mouthfeel. Are there like? When we look at some of these separate things, we some of these strike me as back in the day with keto and paleo. When I see MCT oil, for example, is that bulletproof coffee right, which I don't do that anymore, but still is it a hangover from that, or is there a benefit to it?

Lori: 15:56

It is because that's how we started. We really started thinking about everything in 2015, 16. That was still really big Right. So you know that helped us kind of craft it in the beginning and then, like I said, we hate to change too much.

Tony: 16:14

It's in there. It's going to stay there, yeah.

Philip Pape: 16:17

Yeah, and then the whey protein itself, of course, that's. You know, people are generally thinking protein bar, so what does it have? And it's just whey protein and whey protein concentrate. Is there anything you look for there in terms of sourcing, in terms of how it's filtered or processed, anything like that?

Tony: 16:33

We work with again a co-packer who produces the bar for us and we do rely on them to make sure they're sourcing good, clean ingredients for us. We wanted a whey protein bar. A lot of bars will use whey protein but then supplement with other proteins egg whites or soy or pea. They try to get the protein numbers up, but correct me if I'm wrong. I believe whey is a full protein.

Philip Pape: 17:02

It's complete protein. It's the highest quality in terms of like leucine content.

Tony: 17:05

Yeah, Right, so we can maybe on our label, boost our protein gram number up by adding some supplemental proteins. But to me, what's the point?

Philip Pape: 17:15

I agree, and the sneakiest one is collagen. When they add collagen, I mean sometimes it's in the form of gelatin, which makes sense. You might even have I don't know if you have gelatin, but you don't have gelatin. No, gelatin, I mean that I can get it, I can get as a binding or whatever. But when they just add collagen to get the numbers up, I'm like, oh, collagen is like two amino acids, you know. So that's good, okay. So I mean some of the evidence is still out on whether any of that is is, um, actually correlated. I do know collagen is good for joint health and connective tissue, with its specific type, which if you don't have that type in your bar, it's still not that it's kind of useless. Go back to the sweet potato. Are there specific benefits? You like to tout about having that in there, like the fiber or the nutrients or anything like that.

Tony: 17:57

Again, we didn't put the sweet potato in.

Lori: 18:00

On purpose. On purpose because we thought it was a I know what you mean. It was in your dream.

Tony: 18:04

It was in my dream. But you know, in doing research we know that sweet potato is. It's a great carbohydrate. It has some sweetness to it, some sugar, lots of vitamins and minerals. It's just a. It's just a great overall carb and vegetable to eat. It works really well in our bar. You know, there's really no more science behind it than that.

Philip Pape: 18:25

Yeah, yeah. And you know, when I think of potatoes and sweet potatoes, there's the carb sources, the fiber, and there's also the satiety.

Lori: 18:32

So between, like, the fat and the carbs, yeah, Fun fact I don't like sweet potatoes, so I don't want people to think that the bars even taste like sweet potatoes.

Philip Pape: 18:42

True, true.

Lori: 18:43

I mean, I've had a few people that say I can taste that and I'm thinking, no, that's psychological.

Tony: 18:50

And we also go back and forth on should we be promoting the sweet potato or not? Because you have people like Louie, who don't like sweet potatoes, and say I don't want that bar because I don't want something that's going to taste like sweet potato. Interesting, yeah, so tastes like sweet potato. Uh, interesting, yeah, so it's. It's sort of a catch-22. It's, you know, adds a lot of positives to the bar but also may turn some people away, which we don't want to do. But again, it doesn't. You can, you can vouch for this you don't taste sweet potato no, you don't.

Philip Pape: 19:17

It's not like the. Uh, what is it? Larabars with the dates. Where you like, taste right yeah you know.

Philip Pape: 19:22

so if you don't like dates, you're not gonna going to like it, all right. So I know your protein sources or protein types have changed over time. I mean, how does the market drive some of your decisions? I know you mentioned the David Barr. Maybe you didn't mention it, but it was. You were showing it. I don't know if you like to mention competitors, but everybody knows, and they recently changed, I think they went from some sort of natural to artificial sweetener in there, which, again, as part of your overall diet, you can have a Diet Coke, you can have this and that, but if you're going to be pounding protein bars a lot, you may want different ingredients, especially when they don't taste great. So how does the market drive these decisions for you?

Lori: 19:58

Yeah, I'm going to be perfectly honest. I mean, for us we've kind of steadfast in trying to stay with the ingredients that we have. The more natural things are, the more expensive they are.

Philip Pape: 20:10

Yeah.

Lori: 20:13

So I think there are companies that say we want to save money and make more, so we're going to use cheaper ingredients. I mean, it's just a fact.

Tony: 20:25

I think, rather than reacting to the market, I think we're in a position where we're trying to influence the market, maybe change the market and upend the market and be a little bit of a disruptor in the bar market.

Tony: 20:32

I think we're in a position where we're trying to influence the market, maybe change the market and upend the market and be a little bit of a disruptor in the bar market. I think we've been sort of ahead of the whole make America healthy again movement. I think people are starting to catch up with us. So, rather than adjusting to what the market wants, we're trying to educate the market on what they should be eating. So we do funny little posts. We take some shots at the other bars that are out there because we read the ingredients and unfortunately we know that a lot of people don't turn the bar over and read what's on the back. They read what's on the front of the label. So we're out there trying to educate the marketplace and drag people along with us, and I think educating a marketplace is difficult and it takes a lot of time, but we're in it for the long haul.

Philip Pape: 21:15

Yeah, I love it and hopefully this podcast does its tiny piece pimple on the whale toward doing that. But yeah, so that's interesting. You met, yeah, you mentioned the mom movement and the politics of it. I just spoke to a an alcohol-free lifestyle gentleman, james Swanick uh, who probably be on the show right before, right after, this episode, and, um, he's talking about how alcohol free has is becoming more and more acceptable. Right, and I do see a healthy lifestyle and lifting weights and quality food. It's great Like that's a wonderful move direction that we're going in.

Tony: 21:48

Yeah, it is. Yeah, we haven't gone an alcohol free yet.

Philip Pape: 21:51

Well, you know, I just it's one thing at a time, you know. Whatever's important to you, all right, so like, what's your favorite way to actually incorporate these, either yourself or like your typical customer? I'm sure you post these on stories too, but how do people incorporate them in their, their diet?

Tony: 22:09

Well, again, when I started doing this and incorporate them in their diet Again, when I started doing this, I was working in an office nine to five. I'd have lunch at noon, I worked till five-ish, drive an hour home, go to the gym at six or 6.30. That's six hours since I had anything to eat and I would always stop and say I need something in my stomach before I work out and I'd go to the convenience store, the CVS, the gas station, where I'm trying to find something quick to eat and that's where my frustration just kept building. So for me, you know I eat one if I've worked all day on my way to the gym, so I have some energy to work out. Lori, you might use them a little bit differently.

Lori: 22:47

Yeah, I had one this morning driving to work. I wanted to get there early. I didn't want to spend any time. You know, um didn't have a lot of time to make breakfast, so I had her on the way to work. Once I got to work I was able to make a little more to eat.

Tony: 23:02

She didn't have one for lunch.

Lori: 23:03

I didn't have one for lunch too, but also for me. A lot of times I will eat half before, like a lifting session, kind of halfway through the session, eat the other half Right To keep myself going, but because they're filling. But you know when, when you're lifting heavy, you want that.

Tony: 23:25

So I think you know people can eat them as a quick, convenient source of energy for working out, but they're also either protein're protein bars, right, so we are. We're always looking to supplement our protein. We can never get all the protein that we need. So for me, you know, midday snack, if I'm looking for something to grab real quick while I'm working, you know I'll grab a protein bar, cause I know I need extra protein because I'm not getting all the protein.

Philip Pape: 23:49

Love it, okay, yeah. No, I just want to give people options. I mean pre-post-workout convenience option you talked about the convenience store option Mid-afternoon snack that's my favorite use of it. It is a dessert. Let me just give it to you guys. A dessert Now granted you could maybe.

Tony: 24:03

People often ask us can we use this as a meal replacement, can we? This is a meal replacement. I always say no. I say eat your meals, take a third of them and eat this in between.

Lori: 24:15

But I know a lot of you know, women people are looking to lose weight or or you're just on the go with the kids right and you know, a lot of people aren't going to do what I used to do, where I would just take, you know, grab a chicken breast put. You knew that it would drive you crazy, put in a ziploc and off. I'd go and just munch on my chicken breast, you know, um, but a lot of people don't want to do that. Um, yeah.

Philip Pape: 24:39

So what about adding to recipes? Do you guys? I like I haven't looked too into it. I'm not a big recipe guy. There's some people, including someone on my team she's the opposite. She like loves planning her whole week out with like fancy recipes. I opposite, she like loves planning her whole week out with like fancy recipes. I have a ninja creamy, though I could see potentially adding this somehow. But uh like, maybe as the thing the mix in afterward. But yeah, do you guys?

Lori: 25:02

do recipes where people like break these up and put them in something. Not necessarily, but we we had someone that took little pieces and put them in her oven and turn them into little cookies. You know, just kind of melts it all a little bit, yeah, but we used to do that with quest bars cause they turned into cardboard and you have to stick them in the microwave.

Tony: 25:19

Yeah yeah, I don't know. I've actually ever eaten a quest bar. I was a two. I was too afraid.

Philip Pape: 25:23

After reading the label, it's it's yeah, yeah, I used to eat them just like it was. It was. You didn't have a lot of options back then. Yeah, exactly, so now we've got options. So you guys are. Obviously. You have day jobs, and this is not the only thing you do. How does that work? Just give us a peek into your life.

Tony: 25:41

How does it work? It's pretty difficult. We're up early in the morning writing notes and fulfilling orders. We're up late at night preparing for orders for the next day. Um, I was out at lunchtime, um, restocking our inventory, you know. So it's wherever we can squeeze in it was. You know, it started off as sort of a um, a weekend side gig, but it's, it's almost become a second job. Um, yeah, so you know we we definitely have to squeeze it in where we can. I work from home so I have a little bit more flexibility. But, yeah, we're in the we're making it work.

Tony: 26:18

We're making it work, yeah.

Philip Pape: 26:20

Yeah. So I hope people listening try these out. Just buy a few boxes. Try them out because you won't be disappointed. Get you some new clients.

Tony: 26:28

I have some interesting statistics if you're interested. I've been doing some research, please do. We're actually looking at bringing on some investors, so I'm putting some decks together. What's interesting about our bar is that if you come back for a second order means you like the first order. You come back for a second order. The average person buys nine times.

Philip Pape: 26:49

Awesome, awesome. They do that on like a subscription. The average person buys three times because they Awesome. They do that on like a subscription.

Tony: 26:52

The average person buys three times because they just get sick of the bars. Nice Right. So we have a very high return customer rate. Our retention rate is super. We have a subscription program. We have a lot of clients on subscription where they give us a box or two or three automatically every month. That's a great piece of business for us and really convenient for the consumers.

Philip Pape: 27:18

So with the investors, are you looking to scale or go to physical locations, things like that?

Tony: 27:24

We're looking to scale. I mean, we sell bars all over the country. We've hit every one of the 50 states and we've also hit puerto rico, uh, yeah, um, and hawaii. It's kind of one of the 50 states.

Tony: 27:39

We don't ship outside of the united states at this point because of sorry, friends in australia yeah, just to get them we have people asking from canada all the time we get them in canada. We have people from Europe asking if they can get them in Europe. So we haven't gone that route yet, but we're looking to scale the business. The thing about the protein bar business is it's really a volume business. There's not a lot of profit, there's not a lot of margin in the bars. People are very price sensitive, so we have to keep our prices as competitive as possible, and the only way to make a real living off of this is to scale and drive your unit costs down. So that's our next move, I think.

Philip Pape: 28:18

Yeah, and I don't know how price sensitive I am. I definitely shop around for a lot of things, but I will say this is one of those that I've subscribed to and I honestly didn't care what the price was because I love them so much, so that's a great product to have. Seriously, because there are some things I'm like do I still need this? Oh, and the price just went up again. Uh, yeah, I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit, but what's like the biggest complaint you get, even today that maybe you're working on what it what keeps you up at night that you're trying to improve? Complaint from customers or Customers or, yeah, customers.

Tony: 28:49

We don't get any. Okay, okay, every once in a while, like you said earlier, maybe someone gets a bar where the wrapper is open, so the bar dried out. That's a manufacturing thing or a wrapper, so we'll replace the bars. Someone got like a half a bar for some reason in their box, so we send them a new box of bars. No one ever complains about the taste, the, the, uh it's very it's very rare.

Lori: 29:15

I think we could. Since 2016, we definitely could count on just one hand how many like low star reviews we've gotten, and when we get them, we actually put them on our instagram because we want to be very transparent.

Tony: 29:33

But it's almost kind of funny you know, because when someone said all these bars don't taste good, so we posted that, and someone said well, I'll take them, she doesn't want them.

Philip Pape: 29:40

I love them.

Lori: 29:41

That's great yeah, so we really is remarkable people want more flavors.

Tony: 29:46

We've had. We have two flavors. Right now, with the peanut butter, we have the chocolate chip. Yeah.

Lori: 29:50

Yeah, so more requests than complaints.

Tony: 29:52

Yeah, looking for different flavors. People want us to make something that's dairy-free.

Philip Pape: 30:00

Oh, yeah, okay.

Tony: 30:02

Probably fruity too right.

Philip Pape: 30:03

They want something fruity yeah something fruity.

Tony: 30:09

Sometimes someone will say, oh, oh, the bar has too many calories.

Lori: 30:14

Well, I know, I know so, but so you know actually, you know what, you know what.

Philip Pape: 30:18

That is an interesting one. Let's, let's, let's head on that just real quickly, because I suspect it's the fat that's giving the most calorie impact, right, because fat's so dense. Is that something you've thought about of like stripping that back and have a lower fat, higher protein, carb version? No?

Tony: 30:34

No, we're happy with the balanced macros, and if you don't like a balanced macro bar, there are other bars that you can purchase.

Lori: 30:41

Or you can do like me and have half or half half. Have the other half later.

Philip Pape: 30:45

And you know what? 200 calories is only 10% of your day. So guess what, folks? You get the rest of the day to choose what you want. It's not that hard.

Lori: 30:52

You know, it's kind of like you're only eating it at home because of the convenience. Um, you know, hopefully you are eating real foods the rest of the day. So you know, and you're going to feel nice and full.

Philip Pape: 31:05

So yeah, I like it. For that reason I will say that, of all the years, now that I've had protein bars, protein powders, you know things like that like, unless you're going to go with a whey protein powder, which is pretty efficient, you're not trying to get a bar to give you all your protein. It's like, well, I need protein and you know I need to get a lot of it every day, so why not have something that has more protein than other things and it happens to be great in all these other ways? I mean, that's just kind of my logic on it, right, yeah, I agree.

Philip Pape: 31:38

Okay, so, and we talked about the consumer awareness, about ingredient quality. I mean, how do you think that's going to? I know you're trying to inform the market, but then you're also trying to meet the market where it's evolving. What are, like, the top two or three things? Are they related to specific ingredients, like when people got all upset about red dyes for a while and, of course, seed oils has always been a villain and things like that. Is it that or is it more just general quality?

Tony: 31:59

Well, we've never had any of those things in our products, so we never had to worry about those things. But as those become more prevalent in the news, then we'll promote those as well. So we did a post recently about the birthday cake bar that had all the different red dyes and so forth in it. Um, you know we do posts about sugar, alcohol all the time. So again, we're. The market is evolving and I think they're catching up with us and we're trying to educate them at the same time.

Philip Pape: 32:25

So, um, yeah, I'm just curious, it's fine, yeah, I'm, I'm. I asked lots of questions, guys, so don't you know what I mean? Um, I'm just very curious. So, all right, it sounds like you know. It started with a dream, which I love. I like when. When I said impulsive, you know I meant that almost as a compliment, cause I tend to empathize with that idea of the more you do, the more you hustle, the more movement you make in your life, the more serendipity finds you, and you're not going to know until you put yourself out there.

Lori: 33:02

So is there something along the way you've tried and didn't work out regarding either the bar specifically or just business in general? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know espresso bar. Yeah, so we did try to cater to the non-dairy folks and used collagen. We actually had a double chocolate espresso bar Delicious, but you either loved it or hated it. So it was definitely it was our least sold. We still have people that will ask are you going to bring that back? But, um, perhaps if we had made it not double chocolate espresso, because we had, it had espresso beans in it, like it was delicious.

Tony: 33:43

So, again, that texture that I love salsa covered espresso beans and, at the time, like actual bean that's crunchy and everything. Yeah, yeah we actually had those in the bar. So you know, I guess that was catering to a certain, uh, taste bud yeah plus collagen is very difficult to work with, as you know.

Tony: 33:59

It's sort of gluey. Yeah, yeah, for sure, it's hard to get the right texture for us. We worked really hard on getting the right texture. I thought we had it. You know we hit it pretty well, but it was still a little gluey. So yeah, we had that part for like a year or a year and a half, and we had to discontinue it because it just wasn't selling fast enough it.

Lori: 34:18

Yeah, it was a lot like the um rx bars, where you felt like it kind of got stuck in your teeth oh, you know what like built bars too. Maybe you know you haven't even tried it.

Philip Pape: 34:30

No no okay, there's a whole thing there because built bars. They're very gluey, some people hate them, some people don't protein.

Lori: 34:37

You know we just couldn't. So you know it would kind of seep out. And if the oil is seeping out and then it's coming through the, we don't want you to that was the collagen yeah, like it would. It was oily, yeah, so I say, yeah, it was kind of a no, that's good, but the concept just didn't work.

Tony: 35:11

So we got really lucky with our first two, and the third one was kind of a dud, but that happens.

Philip Pape: 35:16

Keith, are you still experimenting with some things, even if you can't talk about them Always?

Tony: 35:22

Well, we can talk about it, okay, I don't know what he's going to say.

Tony: 35:27

I have grand visions for this company being more than just a protein bar company. I don't think that there is a trusted protein supplier out there where I can go and feel good about what I'm buying in terms of all the different ways that we eat protein other than meat, so I make my own yogurt at home. I would love to have a protein yogurt that people can trust that has great ingredients. I'd love to have a, a, um, a protein powder that people can trust even maybe a protein drink and be like the trusted protein company I don't think that's where you're going?

Tony: 36:02

I don't think that, uh, yeah, is uh. That doesn't exist in the marketplace at this point.

Philip Pape: 36:08

Yeah, what do you think of companies like um, like Fairlife, like fair life. You know who has the, the filtered milk. I'm thinking of a couple that people tend to find are cleaner.

Tony: 36:20

Ish, right, because they're mainly milk, but they have other stuff in there there are good companies in each silo, but there's no company that says we're we're covering all the protein sources protein stuff.

Philip Pape: 36:29

Yeah, be your trusted protein company yeah, you're right, because some the companies like first form, which I'm an affiliate for them, but honestly, a lot of their stuff has tons and tons of you know these ingredients and they they spend a lot of time trying to educate on protein and how it's filtered, but not really talking so much about all the other ingredients in there. So you know, cool. Yeah, now what about a? What about a vegan option? And again, I don't I eat meat, but I do have a lot of clients that are vegetarian, vegan, and they're always asking for that kind of stuff. So, on the whey protein side, pea and rice is a great option. Are you ever looking to that?

Tony: 37:01

We've had people ask for that. I'm just not sure that the vegan consumer is a large enough percentage of the entire population to make it worth it for us at this point. We still have 300 million plus non-vegans that we have to sell to and convince before we try to go out to the vegan market, and that's not really where our expertise lies. So after having the lack of success with the collagen bar, I'm probably a little hesitant to try something unusual again, not having any expertise in that area.

Stephanie: 37:37

The most value that I got from this was the fact that I had someone that I could talk to about anything and that there was going to be no judgment. It was just well, here are your goals, here's the best way that you're going to achieve it, and then let's work together to help you feel inspired and motivated to do that and there's a lot of people out there trying to be coaches and not all of them have done the work and also just be a genuine person that is positive and coming from the heart in terms of wanting to help, and Philip really embodied all of those qualities. I would recommend him to just about anyone that's looking to achieve goals in that realm of their nutrition and building new habits.

Philip Pape: 38:23

So do you have a way that people get to you with feature requests or ingredient requests or new product requests? Is it just on your website?

Lori: 38:30

Sometimes they'll just email us, you know, and ask.

Tony: 38:33

Email. We have a lot of instagram messages, facebook messages through our website. We have chat bot on our website that you know comes straight to us. Even though it's a chat bot, we can answer. We answer chats pretty much.

Philip Pape: 38:48

Almost feels like 24 7 yeah um yeah, no, I can tell you guys have a feel of of a. You know the direct to consumer. You care, you listen to people, you talk to people and again, just for anybody watching the video, these notes are great and I can't imagine how much time you put into them. But what was the genesis of this?

Tony: 39:15

Delorey, I said you know, even though we're selling protein bars, I believe that we're in the relationship business, so we have to treat this like we're building relationships because, really, ultimately, that's what we all do. You do it, we do it as audiologists and financial planners. That's what we do. So why not do it with a food or a protein bar? We're in the relationship business. So Delore already started writing these handwritten notes and it's just become like, uh, um, you know, a signature deal for us.

Lori: 39:41

People always comment on the handwritten notes I just think it's really important for people that it is a relationship and we want people to know that we appreciate that they're doing business with us. So I feel like I can take the time as long as I can take the time to write the note, like I love writing the note that says thanks for a second order. Right, and I want people to know that we know they're getting a second order. I just think it's important.

Tony: 40:09

Or thanks for your 20th order. We got an order today from someone. I think it was their 109th order.

Philip Pape: 40:16

Wow, is that like a record, or who did you? Know, that's great. That's great. Um, yeah, no, this one said Phillip, thanks again, Looking forward to the podcast. You know, just, it was great, you know it was nice.

Tony: 40:28

Um, I think that was me.

Philip Pape: 40:31

I haven't learned to distinguish your handwriting. Yeah, yeah, you can tell, you can see man it's handwriting. Yeah, all right. So I mean, what are you excited about now going into the future?

Tony: 40:42

Well, this idea of scaling, of becoming a bigger brand, of becoming the trusted protein provider I mean, again, I make my own yogurt at home. I love the idea of homemade yogurt knowing exactly what's in it, which is, you know, basically just one ingredient or two ingredients milk and, and uh, the protein bacteria, if you want to call it that. You know, I just growing and becoming. You know, you know we have these.

Tony: 41:09

I have a grand vision, right, we started as a mom and pop thing, just so we can have something that we trusted. Um, and I want it to be something, just so we can have something that we trusted, and I want it to be something that everyone can trust and something that everyone can feel good about. I think that in the supplement space, if you want to put us in the supplement space, I think if you ask people what's the first thing that comes to mind when you say supplements, they probably say I don't really trust them, I don't know what they are, what's in them, they're not regulated. I don't you trust them. I don't know what they are, what's in them, they're not regulated, I don't know where they're coming from. I want to be a trusted provider of good products for people and then having that relationship mindset as well, I think we can take this and turn it into a fairly large organization.

Philip Pape: 41:54

I mean there's tremendous value in that fairly large organization. I mean there's tremendous value in that Is part of that strategy connecting with athletes or influencers or business owners or podcasters. I'm just curious.

Tony: 42:04

Yeah, for sure We've. You know, we've worked with athletes, We've worked with Olympic weightlifters, we were Olympic rower, we had an.

Tony: 42:12

Olympic rower. You know people are reaching out to us all the time from you know, not with nil right. A lot of college athletes are reaching out to us looking for um products. Um nascar reached out to us recently. So there's a lot of opportunity to partner, uh, with different athletes. But you know we're pretty picky. We don't want just any athlete just for the name. If we're going to partner with someone, we want it to be someone who shared the same values as we do and can help us grow the company, rather than just piggybacking on what we do.

Philip Pape: 42:52

It's a fascinating industry. I don't envy you because I understand how hard it is and it sounds like quite the hustle, but you're also doing what you can to really grow and make an impact. I don't know if you follow Mike Matthews right. He's the owner of Legion Athletics. They're a massive, massive supplement company and he just ended his podcast after many years because his supplement company is finding success now, after getting to $65 million of revenue. You know what I mean. Like it took that long before you said okay, now I'm independent. And I'm not trying to make you guys put pressure on you guys. I just think it's a fascinating industry for sure. Very much like most of retail in the food industry, I imagine, when it comes to the competitiveness and the margins and things like that.

Lori: 43:32

Yeah.

Tony: 43:33

We used to work with a food group where we had we were with a granola company, a yogurt company, a chocolate company, all different, all different, um, direct-to-consumer types of food companies and all small startups and they were, all you know, all had the same issues. So, um, yeah, it's, it's the food industry, the supplement, the protein. They're very competitive, difficult businesses to survive in.

Philip Pape: 44:02

I feel like you guys should be in Whole Foods, you know, but I'm sure you hear that a lot because that's a hard business to get into.

Lori: 44:07

Yeah, and then there's and again, it's what you said, so we're in our the local, all the you know Carol Luzzi's around here, big Y right.

Tony: 44:17

Yeah, we have a handful of local markets that we service here in western Connecticut. We decided not to expand that as much and really focus more on the direct-to-consumer through our website, so we can just reach more people.

Lori: 44:37

Yeah, higher margins, more scale. Yeah, there's also the issue of we have a nine-month shelf life because it's natural ingredients. So if we try to do something like a whole foods, it's just constantly we'd be having to replace bars if they didn't sell out or whatever and, like you said, the, the margins and what they want and you know how much they want to pay for something. So, yeah, yeah, it just doesn't work.

Philip Pape: 45:03

That's important Sticking to the values. That's why. That's why we buy the product. So is there anything else, as we wrap up, that you wish I had asked that we didn't cover?

Lori: 45:12

I don't think so. No, I can't think of anything.

Tony: 45:20

So, from your perspective, as someone who eats the bars, who understands the ingredients, how would you describe this to one of your clients? How would you describe the benefits of the ingredients, and not so much the taste of the bar, but the benefits of the ingredients, and not so much the taste of the bar but the benefits of the ingredients?

Philip Pape: 45:38

Well, I do lead from the taste, though. Yeah, I mean I mean most, most folks I work with or listen to podcasts. You know they have body composition goals, athletic goals, performance goals and, um, pretty much understand energy, balance and macros, or they're learning about it. So I'm going to start there and say you know, you need protein supplementation Great bar for that. It has a balance. That a macro is great for that. But it also is a source of energy.

Philip Pape: 46:04

As far as the ingredients, well, and it tastes great that you guys can't discount that, let me tell you. And then, as far as ingredients, for sure, like I always struggle to find, I don't even use the word clean. I know you guys use it. That's just me. I just use like whole foods, like I almost think of this as a whole foods bar. You know what I mean. Like a protein bar, energy bar. A lot of people are looking for that, and with 10, 20% of your diet made up of some sort of indulgences, you're probably going to spend your processed food budget on pizzas or donuts or something like that, right?

Tony: 46:36

So we do pizza.

Philip Pape: 46:38

Yeah, you know, I mean, you know whatever, and so this fits squarely in the. This is nutrient dense, it's, it's delicious, it's got fiber and it could actually fit in that side of the equation rather than be considered like processed food. So I think that's a differentiator for you guys for sure. Yeah, I don't know if that was a good explanation, think that's a differentiator for you guys for sure.

Lori: 46:59

Yeah, I don't know if that was a good explanation, but that's what comes to mind.

Tony: 47:02

Yeah, yeah, it's good, thank you. And we're so busy talking about the bar all the times ourselves. It's nice to hear what other people think about it, especially people in the industry. You know, experts like you, like yourself.

Philip Pape: 47:09

Yeah, it's hard to find when people say okay. I actually rely on clients and group members, people in the Facebook group, to kind of tell me what are you finding out there in the world? That's what you consider clean or minimal, and usually it's fewer ingredients.

Lori: 47:23

Yeah, things you can pronounce.

Philip Pape: 47:24

Things you can pronounce.

Tony: 47:26

Things you can find in your pantry.

Philip Pape: 47:27

Yeah, it does it Pretty much. Most people will find that it tastes good when it's like that, in other words, like a bar like this. Unless you don't like an ingredient, you're going to find that it tastes good, whereas you find that the bars with artificial sweeteners and sugar, alcohols and what there's always some segment that say like something's off Taste McTallick does something when I go to the bathroom. No thanks, right. So you know. And again, I eat those bars. Other people do as well, we all. We're not. I don't want you to say perfect Cause there's, there's no such thing.

Tony: 48:01

We're not all eating a hundred percent whole foods, but this is definitely a great option in my opinion. Yeah, I appreciate that, so again, and again for the listeners I've.

Philip Pape: 48:05

I invited them on. So this is not like an infomercial paid, nothing like that. I'm paying them for the bars and there's no affiliate thing, nothing like that, and I'm happy to do it and I hope everyone looks you guys up and buys the bars. So what is the best way to do that?

Tony: 48:18

Let's check out our website muscleupbarscom. It's, you know, really consumer friendly website. We have right on the front page the homepage. If you don't want to dig in, you know it's all the different pages behind. You can buy our three box pack, which is two boxes of peanut butter and one box of chocolate chip. You get three boxes. Or, if you just want to try the bars, we also have a what's called a score for a four pack sampler right on the homepage. Just hit the buy button. You don't have to dig through the website to find that. So you want to try and get the four pack. If you want to jump right in, there's a three pack Well, three boxes which is 36 bars, right on the homepage.

Tony: 48:58

And you know we have blogs, we have nutritional information. If you want to check out our label, our nutritional label, it's in there on every product page. So all the information, we're very transparent. Everything's out there. A lot of times when you go to a protein bar webpage which I do a lot to look for the ingredients, I can't find them. Really have to dig for them. Right? Ours are right there, you know. Read the label. It's there for you to read and if you like what you see. Give them a try. Phillip believes they taste good. I think they taste good.

Lori: 49:31

And I think most people think they do. I do also want to say that we do wholesale. So if anybody's listening and they have a gym or whatever a small store, we do wholesale.

Tony: 49:41

We sell to gas. We don't promote to the gas stations but we have gas station scholars who want to sell our bars. We ship bars out to a gas station in New Jersey and Arizona recently. So yeah, we do wholesale on direct to consumer on our website yeah, love it.

Philip Pape: 50:00

I mean, yeah, like you said, there's a, there's a comparison table there, there's a whole blog reviews, all of that stuff, amazing.

Tony: 50:07

All right, muscle at barscom, I'll throw it in there which we try to be better about doing, and we're putting some fun posts up on instagram. Yep bars, you can find us there as well.

Philip Pape: 50:15

Cool, I'll put the links in the show notes which we try to be better about doing, and we're putting some fun posts up on Instagram.

Philip Pape: 50:18

Yep, you can find us there as well. Cool, I'll put the links in the show notes and thanks so much for doing this. It's been a pleasure to meet you guys in person again, I think again and um, share your story and talk about this, this awesome food product that is, uh, going to help you make gains while sticking to good quality ingredients and enjoying a snack that really does taste great. Thanks, Thanks, guys.

Tony: 50:40

We appreciate you inviting us. Thank you, and I appreciate the opportunity to chat with your listeners.

Philip Pape: 50:46

Thanks for coming on.

Tony: 50:47

Thanks, bill, appreciate it.

The Blue Zone Hoax (and Other Diet Myths That Won’t Make You Live Longer) | Ep 330

Join the Wits & Weights Facebook Group for evidence-based support and community, plus live Q&As and exclusive content

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Learn about one of the biggest nutrition hoaxes of our generation - the famed Blue Zones, where people supposedly live extraordinarily long lives due to their traditional diets and lifestyles.

When demographer Dr. Saul Justin Newman examined the data behind these celebrated longevity hotspots, what he discovered was shocking. Those regions with the most reported supercentenarians (people over 100) weren't the healthiest places. They were areas with poor record-keeping, poverty, and weak documentation systems. What's going on?

You'll also discover how regions celebrated for plant-based eating actually consume meat daily, and get a data-driven framework for spotting diet deceptions.

Main Takeaways:

• Blue Zone supercentenarian claims are largely based on fraudulent data and poor record-keeping

• Many "plant-based" Blue Zone regions actually consume animal products daily

• Extraordinary health claims require extraordinary evidence - use the 5-point framework to evaluate nutrition advice

• Real longevity factors are simple and well-established by the evidence without the need for "secrets," supplements, or hacks

Timestamps:

0:01 - The Blue Zone data fraud
8:17 - The plant-based diet deception in Blue Zones
10:10 - Other diet myths: alkaline diets, detox cleanses, dietary extremism
14:20 - 5-point framework for spotting nutrition nonsense
25:53 - What actually contributes to healthy aging
29:05 - Healthspan vs. lifespan

Why the Blue Zones Don’t Hold the Secrets to Longevity

The truth behind the myth

For years, we’ve been sold a story. A handful of remote regions across the globe—Okinawa, Sardinia, Nicoya, Ikaria, and Loma Linda—where people routinely live past 100, supposedly thanks to their clean, plant-based diets, strong communities, and healthy lifestyles. The so-called Blue Zones have spawned best-selling books, coaching programs, and enough recipes to fill an entire aisle at Whole Foods.

But here’s the problem: the foundation of this entire narrative is built on incredibly shaky data. In fact, once you actually examine the records, the story unravels faster than you can say “centenarian.”

Fake numbers, fabricated ages

Let’s start with the numbers. When demographer Dr. Saul Justin Newman analyzed Blue Zone data, he discovered massive inconsistencies. The highest reported concentrations of supercentenarians weren’t in places with excellent healthcare or low crime—they were in regions with poor record-keeping, widespread poverty, and high rates of pension fraud.

Take Japan, for instance. An audit in 2010 found over 230,000 “missing” centenarians—individuals supposedly alive on paper but either long dead or untraceable. Italy and Greece showed similar patterns. In Costa Rica’s 2000 census, after correcting age errors, the number of centenarians dropped by 90%. That’s not a typo.

You can’t base longevity advice on people who didn’t actually live that long.

But what about their diets?

Even if we (generously) ignore the sketchy records, the dietary narrative doesn’t hold up either. The popular Blue Zone pitch is that these populations thrive on a near-vegan diet, with meat being a rare treat. But in practice, meat and animal products are part of daily life in these regions:

• Sardinia: Shepherds consume goat’s milk, cheese, and pork regularly.

• Okinawa: Pork is central to the cuisine—every part of the pig gets eaten.

• Nicoya: Beef and pork are dietary staples.

• Ikaria: Lamb, fish, and dairy are common.

• Loma Linda: Adventists follow a largely plant-forward diet, but many still consume dairy and fish.

So when people cherry-pick the “plant-based” bits and ignore the rest, it’s not science—it’s marketing.

Other myths that sound good but don’t hold up

The Blue Zones are just one example of how a compelling story can overshadow real evidence. Here are a few others:

• Alkaline diets: You can’t change your blood pH with food. If you could, you’d end up in the ER.

• Juice cleanses and detoxes: Your liver and kidneys do the detoxing. Starving yourself on green liquid doesn’t help.

• The one-true-diet trap: Whether it’s vegan, carnivore, keto, or Mediterranean, any diet claiming to be the only solution is a red flag. What matters most is whether it’s sustainable, nutrient-dense, and personalized for you.

Most of these myths follow the same formula: take a small truth (like “vegetables are good”), blow it up into a universal law (“only eat plants”), and wrap it in a story designed to sell you something.

A better framework for evaluating diet advice

So how do you sort through the noise? Here’s a five-part checklist I use:

1. Watch for red flags: Any one-size-fits-all diet claim is probably wrong. Biology is complex and personal.

2. Evaluate evidence quality: Anecdotes and testimonials are not proof. Look for randomized controlled trials and, most importantly, your own results.

3. Consider the source: Are they selling something? Do they have actual expertise? Just because someone has a million followers and a lab coat doesn’t mean they’re legit.

4. Understand the mechanism: Can they explain how the diet works beyond buzzwords like “toxins” or “inflammation”?

5. Seek nuance and balance: Good advice sounds like “it depends.” It acknowledges trade-offs and context, not absolutes.

What actually contributes to a long, healthy life?

Despite all the pseudoscience out there, we do know a few things for sure—because they show up over and over again in quality research:

• A diverse, balanced diet with both plants and animals.

• Regular physical activity (especially resistance training).

• Good sleep, stress management, and community support.

• Consistency over perfection.

You don’t need to live in a remote village or cut out entire food groups. You don’t need to chase 110 years on paper when 90 strong, healthy years would be a much better goal.

So instead of falling for feel-good longevity myths, focus on what’s real, practical, and doable. Train hard. Eat well. Sleep deeply. Build muscle. Spend time with people you care about. That’s the real longevity plan—and no fake census data required.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

What if I told you the so-called Blue Zone longevity secrets might be more about bad record-keeping and pension fraud than actual science that many of those 110-year-olds never existed in the first place? Today, we're exposing the truth behind one of the biggest nutrition myths of our time. You'll discover why the Blue Zone diet narrative is built on shaky data, how regions famous for plant-based eating actually consume meat daily, and the warning signs that reveal when diet advice is more marketing than medicine. We're also tackling other diet deceptions that promise weight loss and longevity but deliver disappointment instead, so that by the end of this episode, you'll have a data-driven framework for spotting nutrition nonsense and focusing instead on what actually works for your health and body composition. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.

Philip Pape: 1:04

I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're applying that engineering mindset to one of the most persistent nutrition myths of the past two decades the blue zones. If you've never heard of these, they've been celebrated as proof that certain diets and lifestyles can dramatically extend human lifespan. There have been books, documentaries, media that have promoted these regions as having cracked the code of longevity. But what happens when you examine the data behind these claims, what we find is a cautionary tale about how poor record-keeping, selective storytelling and even confirmation bias can create very compelling narratives that just fall apart under scrutiny. And I know this was talked about recently on, I think, the Mind Pump podcast. I originally heard about it on a news podcast a few years ago and I wanted to revisit this today to talk about not just the blue zones themselves, but overall. How do we spot these kinds of problems out in the industry? Before we get into the myths, I want you to know if you're looking for evidence-based support for your health journey and want to talk to others who have the same level of skepticism and curiosity as you do. Join our Wits and Ways Facebook group. It's totally free. A community of like-minded people who value critical thinking over clickbait. We regularly discuss how to separate the legitimate health advice from some of these other things, and we often have people coming in asking about things like carnivore or longevity or things like this. Just search for Wits and Weights on Facebook or click the link in the show notes and join us in the Facebook group. We recently exceeded the 1,000 person mark, so it's a very vibrant and growing community you're going to love. Click the link in the show notes or search for Wits and Weights on Facebook.

Philip Pape: 2:45

All right, let's start with what blue zones claim to be. You may not have heard of these and if you haven't, they are five regions around the world where people supposedly live very, very long lives. Okinawa in Japan is the one often spoken about, sardinia in Italy, nicoya in Costa Rica, ikaria in Greece and Loma Linda in California, and the story is very, very compelling, as many stories are. These places allegedly have very high concentrations of centenarians and super centenarians, so people who live beyond 100 years, who attribute this long life to their traditional diets, to active lifestyles, to strong communities, and the story has been so powerful that it really has actually spawned an entire industry of cookbooks, of supplements, of coaching using the phrase Blue Zone. And here's where my mind kicks in, because, as extraordinary as the claims are, any extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence, right, and when Dr Saul Justin Newman he is a demographer who won an Ig Nobel Prize for his work he examined the data behind the Blue Zone longevity claims, he found something that's pretty shocking, and I was shocked to learn this just a few years ago or maybe it was last year, actually, that the regions with the highest reported numbers of supercentenarians supercentenarians were not the healthiest places. They were actually correlated with poverty, with poor record keeping, with higher crime rates and with very weak documentation systems. So, in other words, the places claiming to have the most 110-year-olds were exactly the places where you'd expect to find errors in data and fraud. And Newman found that birth rates of the supposed supercentenarians were oddly clustered on days ending in zero or five, suggesting that many dates were approximated or made up when exact records weren't there.

Philip Pape: 4:38

So this is like a classic red flag when it comes to data analysis that anyone would recognize as not what I shouldn't say. Anyone like an engineer or mathematician looking at the data, I would say, would recognize it as a non-random distribution. Um, and honestly, if you saw this in a list and you're like, well, what's up with all the you know tens and 25s and tens and 25s, it doesn't make sense. Um, you'd probably notice that pattern. But it gets worse than that because in Costa Rica's 2000 census, 42% of people age 99 and above had misstated their age and after correcting the errors, the centenarian population of Nicoya that's the region in Costa Rica, right, that's a blue zone it dropped by 90%, and so the elderly life expectancy ranking fell from world leading to near the bottom.

Philip Pape: 5:27

And this is just a really shocking example of what happens when we accept these feel-good stories and don't validate the data. And then they persist for years and years and you might think these are just like innocent record-keeping errors, but sometimes there's something more nefarious at play, and Newman discovered that many of the supposed centenarians were victims of pension fraud, and that's where families don't report death, so they keep getting benefits. They get benefits from the loved ones Even though they've died, they think they're alive. They keep getting pension benefits. Japan is a really dramatic example of this.

Philip Pape: 6:01

There was an audit by the government in 2010 that found more than 230,000 listed centenarians were unaccounted for, so they were either missing or long dead, and that's a lot. That's 82% of their presumed centenarians were either missing or dead, some of them for many decades, and their families collected pensions. There's a particular case with a Tokyo man who was thought to be 111 years old and he was found mummified in his home. I know it's awful. He had actually died 32 years earlier, in 1978, and Newman said quote the secret to living to 110 was don't register your death. Kind of some very dark humor there, but that's what was going on, and this isn't unique to Japan.

Philip Pape: 6:43

Italy also discovered about 30,000 dead pension claimants in 1997. In Greece, at least 72% of the reported centenarians were dead or non-existent. And what this means is that all the data, the foundational data that supports blue zone claims is just totally unreliable. But now what if we set aside the age verification issues for a moment, although I mean honestly, that loses me right there. When I hear that amount of fraud and misinformation, I can't, really I don't even want to look at the data. I mean, I don't even want to like discuss the veracity of any of the dietary claims. Why would you? However, even when you do, it's problematic. So that's kind of.

Philip Pape: 7:22

The next turn I wanted to take for the show was the blue zone narrative. You know, from a nutrition standpoint, the story goes like this these regions follow primarily plant-based diets, with meat as a very rare indulgence, and that that explains their longevity, and this narrative has been used to promote plant-based eating as the key to long life. But when you look at, you know what these people in the regions actually ate rather than what the marketing materials say they ate. A different picture emerges right. In Sardinia, goat's milk, sheep's cheese, pork are common staples. The shepherds, who supposedly exemplify the blue zone longevity they consume animal products every day. In Okinawa, pork has been like the center of their traditional diet for centuries. They eat virtually every part of the pig, including organ meats, and seafood is consumed regularly. No surprise if you've ever been to Japan. I haven't been to Okinawa, but pretty familiar with Japanese culture and diet and yeah, there's plenty of meat there.

Philip Pape: 8:17

In Nocaya, costa Rica, beef and pork are widely consumed. In Icaria, greece, fish, dairy products, lamb are eaten. Loma Linda, california, there's one exception there the Seventh-day Adventists. They follow a largely plant-based diet, but they also consume dairy and sometimes fish, and they also abstain from smoking and alcohol and they exercise regularly and they have strong community. So you can say well, maybe that's why they live a little bit longer there.

Philip Pape: 8:45

No-transcript presentation of dietary patterns and that's what we see all the time in the industry today with what we call confirmation bias. Right, it's like the blue zone, the people promoting the blue zone diets. Again, aside from the whole data fraud issue, they emphasize plant foods and then downplay, or they cherry pick or ignore all the animal protein consumption because it doesn't prefer fit the narrative. What's so funny about this whole thing is they've done that, thinking that the blue zones actually have the output or the outcomes that they're claiming to have, and they don't. So it kind of like makes the whole thing fall like a house of cards.

Philip Pape: 9:20

So this blue zone myth is one example of how nutrition advice gets distorted, but I wanted to look at some other deceptions that promise weight loss and longevity but will make you disappointed if you try to follow them, let alone them being in many cases restrictive or unsustainable. Let's talk about something like the alkaline diet, which is that you can change your blood pH by eating certain foods, and that prevents disease and promotes longevity, and this is physiologically impossible. Like, your kidneys and lungs regulate your blood pH, and if food could alter it, you'd be in the emergency room. You wouldn't be living longer. And the reason some alkaline foods, like vegetables, are beneficial doesn't have anything to do with pH. It's because they're nutrient dense, they're high in fiber and they displace less healthy options. Right, that's just one example, and, by the way, you'll not I'm not going to hit on some of the big ones like carnivore in this episode.

Philip Pape: 10:10

I've done that a lot lately. I could definitely have included some of those and I'm going to do some future episodes on specific topics like fiber. I have an episode coming up on uh, whether fiber is necessary because carnivore diet claims it is not. Um, another example that comes to mind is detox cleanses, juice fasts that promise all sorts of things to reset your metabolism, to flush toxins, and this I always love to talk about detoxification, because the best detox fires your own body right your liver, your kidneys. They're detoxing your body 24-7. They don't need any help from anything else like a juice cleanse. And in fact those level of extreme approaches usually have the opposite effect long-term. They end up slowing your metabolism, they cause nutrient deficiencies, they cause muscle loss, all the things just because you're not getting in the things you need the protein, the nutrition, the fiber, whatever right.

Philip Pape: 11:01

And then there's the marketing war between low-carb, vegan diets, plant-based, which all claim that their approach is the secret to longevity. And again, all of these can work when they are, I'll say, well-planned out, well-thought out, structured and and here's the key word sustainable for you. If you can stick to the diet, it's good for you. I've heard the argument made lately that well, even if it's hard to stick to. That's not the point. Isn't health more important than anything? And therefore you'll do what it takes? Well, no, human psychology would beg to differ, because anybody who's tried not anybody, but the vast majority of people who've tried any diet that restricts things that they would otherwise eat, is going to be a problem, because you're going to binge on that later. You're going to miss it, let alone potentially unnecessarily cut things out that you could, uh, benefit from. You know, nutrient wise, fiber wise, taste wise, everything, um, what matters overall, I think?

Philip Pape: 12:01

I think the takeaway here is the dietary pattern is going to matter a lot more than the specific uh ratio of these things, and what I mean by that is like low carb is focused on what Lowering your carbs? Vegan is focused on just having plants, carnivore is just having animal products. In every single case, you're like flipping these ratios around to an artificial imbalance, let's call it, rather than having a balanced dietary pattern. You know, the funny thing is what your grandma said about eating in moderation actually holds up pretty well. Now there are some ways that you want to nudge that balance based on your goals. Right, like, most people aren't eating nearly enough protein, so when you eat quote unquote in moderation you're not really thinking about it you still might not have nearly enough protein for what you need as a lifter, as an athlete, as an aging person who's worried about muscle loss right. So there are ways to nudge it, but we're not talking about wholesale obliteration of one part of your diet, like carbs or plants or animal products, and so the pattern here with all of these is that any of these approaches.

Philip Pape: 13:06

What they do really well is they take a kernel of truth. They take a kernel of truth Like I did an. I just did an episode I think it was last week on fat loss versus fat burning, and the kernel of truth is that if you eat a low carb diet, you're going to burn more fat Guess what? That's actually true, but you're not going to lose more fat because you're actually eating more fat. So it all nets out and see, that's where you take the kernel of truth and you expand it and you say so it all nets out and see, that's where you take the kernel of truth and you expand it and you say okay, if you're burning more fat, it means you're going to lose more fat. No, that's not true. It just means you're burning more fat versus glucose. Somebody else is burning more glucose versus fat. It's all energy and all that matters is calories and calories out. And so they blow it up into a universal solution, right, some kernel of truth.

Philip Pape: 13:45

They take, for example, some compound in a plant is toxic at like massive levels and they say, well, that that means plants are toxic and all plants are toxic and therefore you get rid of plants, you solve all your issues autoimmune conditions, gut health, everything else. Go ahead and eat carnivore, and it just massively misses, um, the evidence. It also ignores individual differences between people. So anytime someone makes a claim that this is the one true diet, you're, you've got your skepticism. Hackles have to get raised because everybody's different your metabolism, your genetics, your lifestyle and there is no one true diet. So how do we protect ourselves from all of these deceptions?

Philip Pape: 14:20

Here is kind of an engineering-based framework, I would call it for evaluating nutrition claims. I'm going to give you five things to think about. Okay, this is for nutrition nonsense. First, you want to look for any red flag, and this sounds generic. So what I'm talking about is what I just mentioned Claims that a diet is one size fits all. That's the big red flag. Human biology is complex, it's individual. What works for one person may not work for another. So right there, right off the bat, if someone says this is the way to do it for everyone, boom, be suspicious. That's probably not true. Second, you want to examine the evidence quality. So not just the evidence, because evidence-based, science-based, gets thrown around a lot.

Philip Pape: 15:01

I use the term, and at this point it's become almost meaningless, because anecdotes and testimonials are not data. In fact, let me tell you something I was thinking about the other day. I'm all for anecdotes and stories. When they are used to disprove a one-size-fits-all claim, I'm all for that. In other words, if you say carnivore is right for everyone and then I say, well, what about these people over here who are not eating carnivore and they're thriving? Well, right there, you've just disproven that carnival's right for everyone. But you can't flip it around and say, well, this person, all his autoimmune conditions, gut health and brain fog went away because he went on low-carb diet. Therefore it's right for everyone. No, so you can't do that. You can't use one anecdote to make a universal claim. You can use an anecdote to disprove a universal claim, though. Right In general, in general. In other words, that's how the scientific method works is you make a hypothesis, you test it. If you find any evidence that doesn't support the hypothesis, well, your hypothesis is disproved and you need to adjust it right. You need to adjust it.

Philip Pape: 16:02

So when we talk about evidence quality, you know you want to look for, if you're looking at scientific literature, controlled studies, I mean some of the best would be randomized controlled studies, which are randomized controlled trials, rcts, which are very hard to find in the nutrition world. Usually we have observational studies that show correlation, not necessarily causation. That's where we get into real sticky wickets here we talk about, for example, people used to say look, diet Coke causes obesity because look at the correlation in the observational studies. Well, it turns out that people who have weight to lose will drink more Diet Coke because they're trying to lose weight. It's not because drinking Diet Coke causes weight gain. And we see those kinds of correlations all over the place. All over the place and everything you look at weight loss, you know well, they went on low carbon, they lost weight. Therefore it causes weight loss. Well, no, turns out that they cut their calories because they got rid of a bunch of processed foods and they were able to better manage their hunger signals etc. Right, so we have to be careful about evidence quality. Honestly, the best evidence I always say is N equals one. The N equals one sample size of one. You, you are your own best evidence. So I love starting with the foundation of what the science might suggest for you and giving you a ballpark or framework or guardrails, but then you need to try it out right.

Philip Pape: 17:18

I have clients all the time. I have one client in particular I can think of right now. He used to do fasted training and I said well, let's try eating some carbs before you train. He's like how much should I eat? I said let's try 20 grams. Okay, how did that feel? Wow, I felt like more energized. I was able to get more reps. I wasn't winded by the end. He's like should I eat more? I said what do you think? I'm like why don't we try double and tell me what you think? He tried double? He's like well, you know what? That was even a little bit better. And now that my training volume is increasing because I have the energy, I need more energy and that's what works for him. And now he might even try 60 grams and find out that that's optimal, and then 80 grams is too much or not necessary, right?

Philip Pape: 17:54

So your best evidence is yourself, and evidence quality to me is a hierarchy. You've got yourself in there. You've got, um, very controlled studies in there. You've got, you know, people you trust. I'll say then that that's kind of a thorny one. It's like I don't know if you trust me, right, if you just started listening to me, you don't trust me yet. But if you've listened to me for a long time and you've applied what I've said to your life and it works and I tried to come across, as I'll call it, sensible or flexible, if you will. I call out people all the time, but it's because they're trying to be restrictive and make universal claims, and I'm trying to counter that narrative by saying that nothing is universal, that it depends on you. So if you start to trust me and listen to my show, you're going to then give more weight to the evidence that I try to present in the future and which means I have a very large responsibility to deliver that to you. So that's evidence quality.

Philip Pape: 18:48

The third way to protect ourselves from diet deceptions is consider the source. So I kind of just started talking about this already in my last few statements. But is the person making the claims trying to sell you something? Do they have relevant credentials, relevant expertise? You know they don't necessarily have to have a degree per se or a certification. It really depends right, like in the medical field, they might need to be licensed and stuff, for you know legal and liability reasons, but it's up to you to kind of decide whether it's the appropriate level of credentials. I know lots of strength coaches who don't, who never got a personal training certification, but they're far more experienced and helpful than the vast majority of people who have personal training certifications. You know what I mean. Just just cause I know what it takes to. You know, get a cert is super easy. It's, it's a test, it's easy, whereas to become an actual, effective strength coach takes years of working with clients and you might do that without certification. So you just have to understand the source.

Philip Pape: 19:40

You look at the big scandal with the liver King and steroids and Paul Saladino and the supplements and all those guys out there. Generally people have millions of followers. You got to watch out like the ones that have the biggest followers I'm the most skeptical of. It's not, again, not necessarily the case, right? This is just a correlation that I'm making for you. Um, I'm just saying that the ones with the MDs behind their names and 2 million followers, you've got to got to make sure that they're saying what they're saying for a reason and it's not for trying to sell something, right? And having said that, the vast majority of people educating online probably have a business tied to that education in some way. So of course, they are trying to make a living. They might have a business. They're trying to make money. Guess what? That's what I do. I provide coaching, right. But I don't make claims that are not true to try to get you to sign up for coaching. You know that wouldn't work too well because if that worked you would sign up for coaching and then all of a sudden I wouldn't be able to deliver on the result because it doesn't line up with the evidence, right? So, again, you have to. You know I'm thinking more like people trying to sell supplements or, you know, rapid weight loss programs or something like that.

Philip Pape: 20:47

The fourth sign on spotting nutrition nonsense is you want to ask about the mechanism or the method, or the what should I say? The physiological means by which the intervention actually works in the body. Can they explain how it works? Vague claims about boosting your metabolism or alkalizing or diet cleansing, detox, whatever, or even inflammation that's the big trigger word these days, guys inflammation.

Philip Pape: 21:14

I think I'm going to do a whole episode just about inflammation how it is misused as a label, but also how it is misunderstood biologically, because inflammation can be measured in blood markers in some ways and in many ways it can't. But inflammation is directly tied to lifestyle and there are a lot of influencers that scare you into thinking that inflammation is tied to specific foods. That's just one example and no matter how hard you try, you can't find anything anywhere in the evidence that would support their claim, for example, seed oils being inflammatory. The evidence does not support that claim and I bring that one up specifically because it is so often repeated that it's inflammatory, it's inflammatory, it's inflammatory. What's inflammatory are dietary patterns and movement and sedentary behavior and stress and smoking and alcohol and lack of sleep and so on. There's a lot of things. I'm going to do a whole episode about it, but the point is you have to be able to understand the mechanism. Again, going back to last week's episode fat loss versus fat burn or lose fat versus burn fat. I tried to explain the mechanism behind how we store and lose fat on our body and how we actually burn fat in the moment, and how these are different mechanisms that lead to understanding the language we use around them.

Philip Pape: 22:32

Okay, and then the last thing here, number five, is look for balance and nuance. I think I've alluded to this several times, but legitimate nutrition advice is probably gonna start with something like it depends or multiple approaches can work, or individual factors make matter, or this is personal. You know those that kind of I try to use that language. Now, sometimes I get on my high horse, I get on my rants, my rambles, and I might make a statement with a lot more confidence and definitiveness than I intend to get across, or maybe I do intend to get it across, depending on what I'm talking about, but I try not to make a claim about something that is universal to everyone other than what's universal is that nothing is universal, right, in other words, that I'm definitely confident about that, that multiple approaches work. Yes, human physiology is universal, but your lifestyle and all the other epigenetics and phenotypes and all the other things that come into play as you live your life are what causes us to diverge and requires a much more nuanced application of the info.

Philip Pape: 23:34

Like, let's say, we're talking about training, not even diet. We're talking about strength training, and someone says how should I train? Oh, that is such a huge discussion. There's so many aspects to that. I can throw out generalities. I do all the time on podcasts, like you know, hit the big muscle groups two times a week using compound lifts and train like three or four days a week, like that would be a nice way to say it. That's just general, general principles right, principles, that's a good way to put it. Principles are universal, methods are what change.

Philip Pape: 23:59

And if someone doesn't talk in that way, if they talk, if they instead go into the grocery store on their Instagram reel and say you see this food, don't eat this food. It's got all this stuff. This is inflammatory, it's going to kill you, it's toxic. They don't know what they're talking about, right? They have no balance, no nuance, they don't put it in the context of your dietary pattern, they don't know who you are, what you eat, what you do. If I'm an athlete eating 4,000 calories, I could darn well eat 100 calories of just about anything, I don't care how quote-unquote toxic it is. You know, other than alcohol and, frankly, even alcohol if you just want to reduce it to calories there are other problems with alcohol, of course and have great results. Live a great life, feel great, thrive, live a long life. All of that right, because in the context of my 4,000 calories, or 3,000 calories or whatever, it's a tiny fraction of an overall dietary pattern. That's nuance, that's balance, right.

Philip Pape: 24:48

It's not promising miraculous results or claiming to discover the secret that thousands of researchers somehow missed, right. And the blue zones are really a great example, because they've become something that everybody just clings to and it's become quote unquote, common knowledge. And even that was completely wrong. Now you might be wondering if the blue zone claims are exaggerated, does that mean we should ignore everything out there about healthy aging and be very skeptical that the data is correct? I wouldn't say that. I would say this is where the mindset. When you examine what actually contributes to healthy aging, we do find consistent patterns that don't require believing in the kind of logic that the blue zones would have you believe, and these are very well supported by the things I talked about earlier, like randomized, controlled trials. We know these things, so I'm going to share them in a second. But my point is, if something new comes along and says here's the secret to healthy aging, you've never heard before boom red flag. Probably not true, right? Yes, we're discovering new things all the time, probably not true?

Philip Pape: 25:53

The real common factors among long-lived, healthy populations are very straightforward they eat nutrient-dense foods, including both plants and animals, so a diverse diet. Think about something like the Mediterranean diet, for example, which has lean meats, seafood, whole grains, seeds, nuts, fruits, vegetables, all of it. They stay physically active throughout their lives, they manage stress effectively, they get adequate sleep and they maintain strong social connections. And that last one is probably underrated. I don't talk about it as enough as I probably should, because we don't often think about that as health and fitness, right, the health of it, but really relationships, social connections, community is a big part of health, happiness and wellbeing, and I mean the the uh scientific term wellbeing used today in psychology literature, happiness and well-being. You know, self-reported happiness and well-being is highly correlated with strong social connections being the top factor. So nutrient-dense, diverse diet, which means a very flexible diet that gives you a lot of choice physically active, managing stress, adequate sleep, strong social connections.

Philip Pape: 27:00

Notice that none of these require any extreme dietary restrictions, expensive supplements, following the exact eating pattern of a village or an ancestral diet or whatever. They're principles that can be adapted to virtually any food, culture or lifestyle, which is beautiful, right, because food culture. Think about it as human beings. Food is part of our culture, it's part of the social experience, it's part of the social connections, in fact, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying food and having it be part of our ethnic culture, our religions, our spirituality, just our fun, our everyday fun, all day here. Getting to grill some meat with the family becomes an experience. My daughters love to help out, season the food, figure out how to cook it just right, how do we all like it, enjoy the meal together. It's wonderful.

Philip Pape: 27:51

And of all the blue zones, I would say the Loma Linda blue zone is a really good example of this, where there is reality, there is some truth there. It's the Seventh-day Advent is there and they don't have unusually high numbers of very old folks like super centenarians, but they do have higher average life expectancy overall. And if you look at their lifestyle, they don't smoke or drink, they eat a balanced diet with plenty of protein, they stay active and they have strong community support, and that's what longevity looks like. Right, it's not magical 120 year olds, it's not people reaching their eighties, but it is people reaching their eighties and nineties in good health. I always joke I want to die doing a deadlift in my nineties, maybe in my hundreds. That would be great, and that's actually far more achievable and valuable than trying to chase these extreme longevity things. And I didn't even talk about all of the longevity and biohacking podcasts out there that make claims using devices and supplements and talk about telomeres and all of these crazy things. Right, maybe I'll get proven wrong and some of those people will be here and they'll all be walking around at 120 years old, but I doubt it and I wonder how great of a life they lived, you know, and and whether they actually enjoyed it.

Philip Pape: 29:05

And by enjoy I don't mean the opposite extreme of being a heathen, a heathen right, where you're over consuming, you know, ultra processed foods and smoking and drinking and all that. I don't mean that at all. I mean having a thriving, healthy life where you're lifting weights, you're being active, you're getting off your butt every day, involved with your family, with your community, you know, making social connections and just being positive. I mean, it's kind of the way to put it. Put it so, by debunking these myths and having your own skepticism checklist, then you actually get more clarity on what works, because it gets rid of the noise when I talk about the BS and the noise in the industry, that's what I mean. Instead, you can just focus on the simple things at work building muscle with strength training, eating adequate protein from yes, both plant and animal sources. Eating your fiber, eating your carbs, your plants, your fruits all of that good stuff in a reasonable balance, whatever makes sense for you, whatever your goal is, maintaining the calorie balance appropriate for your goals. So, yes, even if you're trying to lose weight or fat, you got to understand that you need to eat less than you burn. Prioritizing sleep and stress management two of the biggest factors in all of this, including things like visceral fat accumulation as we get older, hormones, et cetera and then cultivating meaningful relationships.

Philip Pape: 30:19

And the problem is, these are not sexy marketing messages. They're just not. They're not. They're based on solid evidence. They actually work, but they're not sexy marketing. So I hope those of you who listen to this podcast appreciate where I'm coming from when I talk about this and that you'll share with others who need to hear a similar type of message and just take a more reasonable, sensible approach and do the thing that works. And guess what? The thing that works sometimes takes effort. No, it does take effort. It can be hard, right, but it pays off in the end. The hard of doing the right thing now is far less than the hard of not doing it later.

Philip Pape: 30:52

So if you're going to evaluate health advice in today's very, very much information saturated world, just remember that the very compelling stories, the viral content that spreads really fast, is often not accurate. Let's just put it that way. It's the careful science and the evidence takes time and it tends to be more simple in terms of the ultimate solution. And then it blinds us to red flags in the data because we want to latch onto these amazing stories, us to red flags in the data because we want to latch onto these amazing stories. So when you apply these principles to nutrition claims, when you demand good data, when you look for consistent patterns, when you question extraordinary claims, the picture emerges that the secret to healthy aging is not in remote villages in the blue zones, which have obviously questionable birth records. They're found in the well-established principles that have already been validated across multiple populations and studies over decades, and we have it right in front of us, right.

Philip Pape: 31:49

And that doesn't mean we should become cynical about all health advice. I don't want you to go the other extreme and just never trust anything. We just have to become critical thinkers. Question the data behind any claim that is a bit too impressive. Look for balanced, evidence-based approaches that have nuance, rather than this is the one true diet or way to work out, and if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is Like that is a time-tested adage and I don't know about you. I want to optimize my health span. I want to optimize the years that I spend healthy, strong, capable. You know not just my lifespan, I don. I want to optimize the years that I spend healthy, strong, capable. You know not just my lifespan. I don't want to just live a long time, I want to optimize my health span, and that is totally achievable when you have the right approach, all right. So if you want to connect with others who share this thinking, this evidence-based, critical thinking for health and nutrition, you want to learn and you're curious and you're willing to put in the effort, you're not just binging content, you're willing to do what it takes to, yes, lose the fat, build a muscle, look better, feel better all the things you want.

Philip Pape: 32:48

Join our Wits and Weights Facebook group Totally free. That's where we discuss how to separate legitimate science from hype. There's a lot of engagement there. There's fun questions being posted. I do live Q&As. There's sometimes early podcast drops all sorts of fun stuff. You're gonna find a supportive community. That's the best part about it is the other people there that value critical thinking over quick fixes. Just search for Wits and Weights on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember the best health advice isn't exotic or complicated. It is nuanced and personalized. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Lean Bulk to Gain Muscle at 68 Despite Shoulder Issues | Ep 329

Join WWPU (Wits & Weights Physique University) to get a tailored nutrition and training system to lose fat and build muscle (at any age) - first two weeks free:
https://witsandweights.com/physique

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"You're too old to build muscle." 

"With injuries like that, you should stop lifting weights." 

Have you heard these discouraging statements from doctors, trainers, or well-meaning friends, either yourself or older adults in your life?

We are shattering these harmful myths through the journey of my client Beth, who at 68 years old is successfully building muscle despite dealing with a significant shoulder injury.

If you've been told that age means you can't build muscle anymore or that injuries mean you should abandon your fitness goals, this episode will change your perspective.

Beth reveals exactly how she's adapting her training around medical limitations, why prioritizing muscle growth before fat loss has been revolutionary, and the specific techniques allowing her to gain muscle despite challenges that might sideline others.

Main Takeaways:

• Why building muscle is not only possible but essential after 60

• How to adapt training around injuries without sacrificing progress

• The mindset shift needed when transitioning from years of dieting to muscle building

• Why strength training becomes more important, not less, as we age

• How to balance strength training with other activities like cycling

Timestamps: 

0:01 - Building muscle after 60 despite shoulder injuries  
4:50 - History with "traditional" dieting (Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, etc.)
6:53 - How thyroid medication changes affected her metabolism 
15:49 - Dealing with shoulder injuries (SLAP lesion and rotator cuff issues)
19:21 - Training modifications for shoulder limitations 
24:44 - Psychological benefits of being strong at any age 
26:56 - How she gained mostly muscle and dropped body fat without having to lose weight 
31:01 - How strength training enhances her cycling performance 
35:02 - Strategies for balancing strength training, biking, and recovery 
46:54 - Advice for older adults hesitant about strength training 
47:58 - Beth's 94-year-old mother who lifts weights

Join WWPU (Wits & Weights Physique University) free for 2 weeks!

Over 60 Lean Bulking (Even After an Injury!)

Most people assume muscle growth stops after 40. Some push it to 50, but 60? Forget about it. And if you’ve got an injury on top of that, you’re expected to sit down, slow down, and give up.

That’s exactly why this story matters.

In this episode, I talk to Beth, a 68-year-old member of my coaching program, who’s doing the opposite of what most people her age are told to do. She’s not cutting calories. She’s not overdoing cardio. She’s not trying to get “toned.” Instead, she’s lean bulking. Purposefully adding calories. Training with structure. Working around a shoulder injury. And most importantly, building muscle.

If you’ve ever questioned whether it’s possible to change your physique later in life or thought your medical limitations were a hard stop, this one will change your mind.

The power of a lean bulk (yes, even postmenopause)

Beth didn’t start from scratch. She was already active. She had tracked macros. She’d used MacroFactor. She’d done P90X. She’d ridden bikes, run races, and counted Weight Watchers points in the past. But she hit a wall. Despite everything she “knew,” her weight kept creeping up and her metabolism felt like it was in freefall.

That’s when she reached out and we changed the strategy.

Instead of cutting, we focused on muscle. Instead of lowering calories, we raised them. That’s when things shifted.

Her lean mass increased. Her energy returned. Her lifts improved. And her body looked and felt stronger than it had in years—even though her body weight was technically the highest it had ever been.

Why? Because she finally had the inputs aligned for growth. Not just physical growth, but metabolic, mental, and emotional growth. She was doing something most women her age are never told is even an option.

What if you’re injured?

Beth’s shoulder pain wasn’t minor. We’re talking SLAP tear, tendinopathy, and osteoarthritis. Her ortho told her no overhead pressing, no lat pulldowns, no reaching behind her back.

But she didn’t quit.

Instead, we modified. Machines replaced barbells. She discovered the safety squat bar. She limited bench range of motion and used a Smith machine to find pain-free angles. She took the pressure off perfection and focused on consistency.

That decision alone is something most people miss. Training around pain is better than not training at all. It’s not about what you can’t do. It’s about what you can do.

And Beth is living proof of that.

Her results speak for themselves

• Body weight: up 3 pounds

• Lean mass: up 4 pounds

• Strength: steadily increasing

• Confidence: through the roof

• Lifestyle: more active than ever

Even with shoulder limitations, her leg strength is better. Her biking feels easier. She can lift her own bike, carry a case of water, and do things she couldn’t years ago. She’s prepping for a biking vacation this fall and training like someone half her age. And she’s doing it all with intention and control.

Why this matters for YOU

If you’re over 40, 50, or 60, it is absolutely still worth chasing strength. You can build muscle. You can reshape your body. You can avoid the trap of yo-yo dieting and the long-term consequences of constant restriction.

Beth’s story is a reminder that lean bulking is not just for young guys. It’s for women. It’s for older adults. It’s for anyone who wants to regain control of their health and performance.

And yes, there’s always a way to work around your limitations if you have the right mindset and coaching.

If you want to join a community that supports that kind of transformation, where the people lift each other up (literally and figuratively), check out Physique University. You’ll find people like Beth who aren’t interested in the latest fad—they’re interested in what works.

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Then hit “Follow” and you’re good to go!

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you think it's impossible to build muscle after 60, or 50, or even 40, or injuries mean you have to abandon your fitness goals, think again. My client, beth, has not only embraced a lean bulk at 68 years old, but is succeeding despite a complex shoulder injury. In today's conversation, you'll discover how she's adapted her training around medical limitations, why prioritizing muscle growth before fat loss has been a game changer for her results and the exact strategies that are working when other approaches failed. If you are dealing with age-related concerns, recovering from injury or tired of yo-yo dieting, beth's approach proves it's never too late to transform your physique with the right strategy. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.

Philip Pape: 0:58

I'm your host, philip Haith, and I've got something special for you today, because I'm sitting down with Beth, a member of our Physique University community who is challenging conventional wisdom about fitness after 60. At 68 years old, she is navigating a significant shoulder injury while purposefully building muscle mass, and that is a strategy that contradicts much of what she'd been told throughout her life and many of you have probably heard. Today we're going to talk about how she's adapting her training around those limitations, the mindset shifts that have been critical to her progress, and the specific techniques that are allowing her to gain muscle despite challenges that might have sidelined others. We'll also get into some real-time coaching to optimize her approach going forward and give you some takeaways to apply regardless of your age or your limitations. Beth, very excited that we can do this together, so thank you for joining me.

Beth: 1:49

Thank you for having me Excited to do it.

Philip Pape: 1:52

Yeah, yeah, no, it's great. I'm excited for the listeners to learn about how you've done this, because there are definitely a lot of naysayers and there's a lot of frustration out there, and you've experienced some of that. Right, you've spent most of your life trying different diets, weight loss approaches and now, at the young age of 68, you are focused on building muscle and not just necessarily cutting calories. What made you decide to pursue muscle building at this stage, instead of focusing on what you did before or on weight loss or anything else?

Beth: 2:25

at this stage, instead of focusing on what you did before or on weight loss or anything else. Muscle building is actually not totally new to me. I actually used to lift weights in my 20s. I've always been very active, but then I switched, I suppose like a lot of people, and did more cardio. I suppose like a lot of people, and did more cardio, and I say I've always been active. It's. It has changed and evolved over different times. I've been a runner. I did some triathlons in my thirties. I do a lot of bike riding right now and I'm planning for a bike riding vacation and that's part of my decision-making in in trying to put on some muscle and to do a building phase versus um dieting. But uh, also did P90X about 10 or 15 years ago when that was on the phrase.

Philip Pape: 3:23

I remember that that was so much fun.

Beth: 3:26

I've done a lot of different things and I've been listening to Philip on the just following the hard details of what's going on and trying to figure out what's going on versus just cut calories, yeah, so very interested in following all that, so decided to join. But I, of course, was wanting to lose some fat. I had previously, was about 10 or 15 pounds lighter and I've had some changes in thyroid medications and some different things and the weight has accumulated and I wanted to knock it off and I wanted to knock it off.

Philip Pape: 4:25

Cool yeah, all right, no, we're going to. I want to get into each of those, because listeners are like Ooh, thyroid, let's talk that. Oh, you did P90X, and what are you talking about? Following the details and doing the science? So, uh, you know, you and I know what it is. But let's, let's walk through one at a time. Um, I, I, we've talked in the past and I know you've done I think you've done Weight Watchers, nutrisystem, all of that in the past. When was that? And then, from there to now, how did you, how did you get where you are today?

Beth: 4:50

Weight Watchers was, probably has has been, a part of my life. I've never been grossly overweight, though, but you know, like everybody, you're always especially women we want to be thin and lean, um and um. I always thought Weight Watchers was very healthy, but I also learned there's ways to, uh, to get around that, and I'm tired of the. I didn't like the whole point system and tired of the. I didn't like the whole point system and and doing all that, and I've tried to educate myself on on being healthy. I want to be my healthiest as I age and, um, I've been I've actually been counting macros for a few years now. Um, so I know how to do that and I kind of liked it.

Beth: 5:46

But, like all people, it's like I feel like I know how to do it and what I'm supposed to be doing, but it was still the weight. The weight gain was still getting away from me, and I don't want to throw the thyroid out again, but with the change in thyroid medicines and I've used macro factor, I was just seeing my expenditure go crashing down. So you know, I was eating 1900 calories a year ago and biking and doing things. I was lifting weights a year ago, but maybe not as consistently or following a plan as well as I am now, and I can't eat 1900 calories without gaining a lot of weight. And I just watched that expenditure a macro factor coming down and watched my weight going up and it's like things are changing and I need to get a hold of this.

Philip Pape: 6:53

Yeah, so awareness is the first step, right, and that leads. That makes me think what, when you were tracking macros in the past and you were still gaining weight and that wasn't what you wanted, were you? I assume you weren't using macro factor or you weren't aware of your expenditure, perhaps such that you were at maintenance or in a surplus without thinking you were, or you thought you were in a deficit and you weren't.

Beth: 7:15

I was not. I was at macros that had worked for me in the past Um and I was using a different app Um and um when I started getting into Macrofactor and seeing what was going on. You can see just this downward slope and I think it's mostly related to the thyroid issues and I know women like to blame thyroid for a lot of things, but I've been hypothyroid since the 90s, so I've been on medication for a long time and what was working just changed. I started having actually some heart issues. I was having tachycardia with exercise that was beyond what it should have been, with exercise that was beyond what it should have been, and the weight gain and some hot flashes that were beyond menopause hot flashes. So it turns out.

Philip Pape: 8:20

I was hyperthyroid, got it Okay. I mean, at least you found this out Because of the meds yeah, because of the meds.

Philip Pape: 8:24

Yeah, because of the meds and and um, and I know, working with other clients on on synthetic T3 and other thyroid meds, that there's a lot of tweaking sometimes involved to find the right levels for you. So here's the thing. A lot of people are going to be listening and they're saying, oh, so your expenditure was crashing down. You know, on one hand you could throw up your hands and say like that's, that's the end of it, like there's nothing I can do. On the other hand, you can say you know what? It's great that you have the data to show you your expenditures crashing, like whatever app you use or however you calculate it. I mean, we use macro factor because it's the only app that can give you that information.

Philip Pape: 9:00

It's not the app's fault, right, that the expenditure is going down, and it's not yours either. It's just the reality of what's happening. So, um, what did you decide to do at that point? I mean, I know the answer here, beth, but just for the listener, what did you decide to do once that pattern occurred? Quit, be more specific, you mean quit trying to lose fat, lose weight.

Beth: 9:22

No, I just I was doing the trial of Whitson Waits University and I absolutely love all the information and I love the way that you're data driven and I love all of that. But I was like all of that. But I was like this is just. This is just me crashing my my medicines and I need to get this under control before I can move on to, um, losing weight, and this is not the time to be trying to lose weight. And you were very kind enough to come to my rescue and talk to me very kindly and help me out there.

Philip Pape: 10:10

Yeah, I appreciate that, because it's just as not just as it's almost as frustrating for me to see you go through that and then now be in the position of we've got to figure something out. And sometimes that decision is like you decided to do is, let's focus on recovery and um, a different goal in the short term, or maybe in the medium or long-term, while potentially addressing other things, which is a great strategy. I mean, anyone listening if, if you've got and we're going to talk about your physical injuries too, but if you've got things going on you've got to recover from, why add more stress to the situation with dieting and fat loss? Now, if you were burning 3000 calories and it was like a moderate deficit you could do easily. That's a different situation, but that wasn't the situation. So, um, you decided then to come out of fat loss and figure out what to do next, right, and that was potentially build some muscle.

Beth: 11:02

Yes, yes, um, I did finally find my maintenance in um in macro factor and it was much lower than what I would have liked, but it is what it is. Um and have to deal with that. So, um, we discussed it and decided to do a somewhat of a lean build, to add in a little bit calories and try and put some muscle on um, try and preserve my metabolism. If not, maybe keep it a little push up Um, and so this is a. This is brand new. I have never tried to. I've always wanted muscle, but I've never tried to purposefully add in calories and put a build on in that way. So it's new.

Philip Pape: 12:05

And is that because of fear of gaining weight? Is that just because it is new and you're not sure what it's going to come of it?

Beth: 12:15

Yes, it's a fear of gaining weight. You spend your life trying to. You know, I've said that I've never been overweight. This is my highest weight non-pregnancy weight that I've ever been. But honestly, I do feel like I have more muscle than the last time that I was here. I have been here before and it looks different. It looks different. I got to say it's, it's. It's not quite as devastating as it has been in the past and I also know that my metabolism is doing a little better. And I want to just throw one thing out. I'm going to throw out about wits and weights. That was very nice.

Beth: 13:06

You were on vacation.

Beth: 13:09

I started this whole lean bill and it was just interesting because my expenditure did start going up but my weight trend started going down and it was just doing some strange little things there to begin with and you were on vacation, so I didn't want to bother you on vacation and I knew you would answer it when you got back. But I reached out to another member. I just got into the build part of Wits and Weight and found someone that had been through this before and looked like they kind of did the same thing and I won't mention names, but she very generously answered me and reassured me, and so don't be afraid to tweak it a little bit. You know, up your calories just a little bit if you need to. You may need to make a little jump and it just feels like a family, is, I guess, what I'm trying to get at. You were not there, I know you would have been, but you were on vacation, well-deserved vacation, and I just reached out and I got an answer very quickly and very kindly and it was great.

Philip Pape: 14:28

Yeah.

Beth: 14:29

I I just wanted to give a shout out to the community. It's a great community. It feels like. It feels like you get to know people and that they are family.

Philip Pape: 14:37

I love that you said that, because I remember seeing that message come through. I don't know if you can hear my dogs, but we both have dogs. Um, I saw the message come through cause I still monitor that stuff, even when I'm on vacation just on the back end, and then I saw someone chime in and I'm like this is the power of numbers. Obviously, I take one vacation a year for a week, and that's when you needed the help, but I'm glad that you saw the power of having others have gone through the same experience. That's why I made this for us and I say us myself included, because I like to have others to bounce ideas off and learn from too.

Philip Pape: 15:12

Um, not everybody is, I guess, as public or wants to share in that way, right, that's why there's different ways to do this for people. Some people want to keep things private, uh, but by doing that you could leverage the, the, the learning from someone else. So, um, yeah, that's great. Thank you for mentioning that. Thank you for mentioning that. Um, so let's talk about your current situation then, right now, because you're also dealing with shoulder issues, right, and you've got an injury, a slap to lesion, I think was the specifics, some osteoarthritis, tendinopathy and your rotator cuff. Um, what's what's going on there, your rotator cuff. What's going on there?

Beth: 15:49

I don't know what's going on there. I've been very lucky. I haven't had joint issues in the past or any kind of injuries. It was not from strength training, it was from newly being retired and taking up golf Very dangerous sport. Didn't know it was a dangerous sport.

Philip Pape: 16:13

You'd be surprised all those sports.

Beth: 16:15

Yeah, I've done triathlons, I've done horseback riding and I get injured playing golf. So anyway, it's just a nagging injury and my orthopedic surgeon has suggested not doing any kind of overhead presses, not doing any lat pulls. I have not been in physical therapy, although I'm exploring that right now because I want to get back to doing overhead presses and whatever, and it's not a severe pain but it's not very hard to get it hurting. It'll be good for a week and then I can reach the wrong way and something happens. So every time I look at different exercise plans and we're going to talk about that perhaps later or perhaps now, I don't know. You know, everything includes doing some lat pulldowns or doing some overhead press. Overhead press is a normal part of compound exercise that you expect to do. I've also changed my doing a bench press. I do a bench press but I have started doing it on a Smith machine and I set the pins where my elbows can't come down further than my chest.

Philip Pape: 17:50

So partial ROM, partial ROM or spotto press kind of a few inches high.

Beth: 17:54

Just a few inches high, because it does hurt to come down and it also affects before this actually happened back early September. It's been going on and off for since then, um, but it's affected being able to do uh, a squat. My arm does not feel comfortable being pulled back in that kind of position and so I've been doing leg presses, um, and just recently started doing hack squat because I can do those easily. So I've moved more towards machines. I was previously doing a lot with the barbell, but I'm not doing very much with the barbell anymore.

Philip Pape: 18:44

Let's talk through this now, because I have personal experience with this myself having had rotator cuff surgery and also literally just went to my surgeon yesterday just to relate to your story, and found I have, because of my anatomy, my supraspinatus, which is the top part of the rotator cuff tendon, is much more prone to friction from I don't know if it's like the clavicle or the scapula that hits it and he's like, yep, so you might have this your whole life, where there's just a chance that you're going to tear your tendon. I'm like, oh, that's great. So, first of all, there is a great physical therapist I know who's a barbell trainer. His name is John Patrizzo. Shout out to him.

Philip Pape: 19:21

He was on the show a long time ago. He and I chat occasionally. He will do, he will do some coaching for me with regards to this. So if you ever want a connection, um, I know he'll do a free zoom call just to talk to you about it and give you some suggestions. But as far as a few things, a squat, totally understand what you mean. Do you have access to a safety bar?

Beth: 19:41

I do I've never used it, but I do that will solve the problem.

Philip Pape: 19:45

For that then, you could squat normally for the rest of your life, because your hands will be in front of you. Neutral position, no big deal. You don't have to extend your shoulder. Okay, that's check. Okay, now you can squat. Okay.

Beth: 19:58

I will try it next time.

Philip Pape: 19:59

Yeah, yeah, safety bar and anybody listening, that would be the one with the big yoke on it. It has some handles that stick in front. Um, a little bit of a caber bar, what's that? Are they heavier than the traditional bar? Usually, like mine is 65, um, but it depends on the specific one. There's also different brands, like the kabuki transformer bar is another one where it's actually got adjustable angles and stuff to it. Um, yeah, so just check it out they. Maybe there's a what they would call woman's version, which I know it's like insulting these days, but there's a woman might be a woman's version that's lighter, kind of like a lighter barbell.

Beth: 20:34

Okay.

Philip Pape: 20:35

Yeah, and then for the pressing um, I'm definitely not against. Like machines have their place. For sure it can be a huge tool. Um, with pressing use, I think you said you could do incline right, Incline pressing. With pressing, I think you said you could do incline right, Incline pressing.

Beth: 20:48

I was not told. No, I actually have an appointment with my surgeon after this this afternoon. Oh, cool Okay.

Philip Pape: 20:56

Because what comes to mind is there's grip, so neutral grips, and I know you're doing some of this. There's grip, there's changing the range of motion and so even if you do an incline dumbbell press or even a barbell press, you could do a very narrow grip or a neutral grip with the dumbbells. And a lot of people don't think about that. They're like I'm just going to press them, just rotate into a neutral grip and try that out. Um, do it as long as it, as long as you feel no pain, because correct me if I'm wrong when you do, when you tweak it cause you're doing the wrong thing, it happens pretty quickly, right?

Beth: 21:29

It does, and I was told not to do overhead presses that it would impinge on the tendon. However, I don't feel any pain with doing overhead presses, and that's one of the things I'm going to talk to him about. What hurts me more is internal rotation, like taking a shirt off or reaching back.

Philip Pape: 21:54

Yep Internal like as if you pulled your back. You pulled your hand behind your back and tried to clamp it to your back right. Yes, internal rotation Yep.

Beth: 22:03

That's what really bothers me.

Philip Pape: 22:05

Okay, One of the best stretches for that is to lay on the ground on your back, put your arm, you know, put, put your, put your arm at 90 degrees and then just push your forearm forward down to the ground. Okay, that's a great stretch for that. Um, it's also why you're you can't squat. That's why you have discomfort squatting. Is the internal rotation Right? Um?

Beth: 22:26

right, that's, that's. Yeah. Well, that's more external. Have discomfort. Squatting is the internal rotation.

Philip Pape: 22:28

Right, right, that's what that's. Yeah, well, that's more external rotation, but still same idea, um, but anyway. But you're going to talk to him and then and then we can connect you with John If you need to. The point is, for the pressing um, as long as you don't feel pain, and training sessions with that movement over the next couple weeks that it doesn't start to accumulate. You just want to stay far away from that so you don't get inflammation, you don't jack up the inflammation.

Philip Pape: 22:58

So partial ROM, like you're doing with the Smith, is great. You can do that with a traditional bar where you literally just stop annually two inches above. That's called a spotto press. You could put pins. You could also do a very close grip kind of like people do for close grip bench, and just make that your own, your normal bench. You know, tuck, tuck your elbows in and you'll notice that should feel a lot different because your shoulders are hardly getting involved. Gotcha, tuck them in. Um other than that you can get crazy with like multi bars and lots of other things. But if you just find like three or four substitutions and just stick with those, you know it should work.

Philip Pape: 23:34

We can go over more specifics outside of this call. If you want, like, what can I do for this, what can I do for this, I can give you options. That would be awesome, yeah, so the good thing is, you continue to train, like a lot of people would just give up, and you're continuing to train. I actually love it. You love it, yeah, cause you get. You get the result.

Beth: 23:54

Well, I just feel so good when I come out. It's it's a kind of a non-negotiable Good. Monday, wednesday, friday it's to the gym.

Philip Pape: 24:02

Yeah, it needs to be. It needs to be a non-negotiable. It's like eating protein it's got to be a non-negotiable. And you, you actually shared some data with me. You shared a lot of data, which I love. Data and no, no, no, it's great. I mean I cause a lot of. It was like yesterday and I haven't even had time to process all of it, but what I did notice a few things. One is your body fat has gone down and you've gained lean mass, which is body recomposition, and you kind of alluded to that earlier when you said I was, you were uncomfortable gaining weight, and then you said but it's not, the sky's not falling and in fact, maybe that's given you the stimulus and the growth anabolic environment you needed all these years. Potentially, what do you think? Because I have been lifting weights.

Beth: 24:44

I'm not new to lifting weights, but I'm definitely putting muscle on and the whole reason we're doing this podcast is doing the protein challenge. So I'm getting lots of good protein and extra calories about 100 extra calories over what my expenditure is and it definitely seems to be working.

Philip Pape: 25:09

Tell us more when you say seems to working what? Let's get into some specifics.

Beth: 25:14

Um, I had not been changing a lot with strength grains and getting PRS and I'm not making amazing changes in lifts, but it's going up steadily, um, so I'm going to a new level with the lifts, um, and I have good energy um to do it. Um, I'm in the gym for an hour hour and 15 minutes and um feeling good about that, um, but I mean I could just feeling good about that, but I mean I could, just I can see the muscle and I'm looking forward to down the line when I take off some fat and can actually see it a little more. But I'm definitely just I'm feeling stronger, I can see the muscle and it's all good.

Philip Pape: 26:09

Yeah, Not only is it good, it's phenomenal. Let me tell you why, Cause you did send me your data. I'm looking at it right now. You went from a body weight of 142 with 91 pounds of lean mass to 145 at 95 pounds, and I'm just rounding numbers. Basically, you gained like almost pure muscle, effectively, is what you did, which is like like 80% of the now, just to put it in perspective, we know some of that is that's lean mass, which includes muscle, bone, water and organs. So the other thing that changes is water and everybody gains a little bit of fluid when they start gaining from carbs and such. But honestly, to gain that much um, in terms of lean mass because of your measurements, the way we do it here we use the Navy formula and all that is phenomenal, Like that's.

Philip Pape: 26:56

That tells me something there's. There's almost like a newbie gains that you're getting, even though you have lifted your whole life, that you didn't get to experience until now, which is crazy. That are not crazy. It's wonderful. I mean, you're 68. And again, people are hearing this like Whoa, you could still build muscle at 68. You can do it at 78, 88, 98. Honestly, it's great. I'm just saying it's, it's amazing, yeah.

Beth: 27:15

And I mean, I have to be honest, I love being able to be strong. It's, um, we've talked about I'm training for a bike vacation and you know I'm able to, you know I'm able to, you know, lift my bike easily out in and out of the truck and putting it up on the wall. And um, you know, we were over at a friend's house and she asked me to go get my husband to carry in a case of water and I'm like, well, I'll go get it. No, no, no, no, no, you don't need to be doing that. It's like it's not anything I can do that.

Philip Pape: 27:48

Love it.

Beth: 27:49

Um, and I love it. I don't, I mean I like, I like being strong, I want to stay strong. My mother lived to be 98. So I hope, um, I'm hoping, up carrying in the case of water when I'm 98. Um, maybe, maybe not I don't know you should be.

Philip Pape: 28:05

You should be able to, you should be able to.

Beth: 28:07

You should be able to.

Philip Pape: 28:08

I've talked to bodybuilders in their eighties. Who you're like? They're like 55, right.

Beth: 28:14

No, they're not, I am, I like, I like being strong, it's. You know, my husband is just like can you pick up that end of the couch? My daughter recently moved and we have a sleeper sofa and it's like I got it. I'm okay Picking it up and go and it's a good feeling, yeah.

Philip Pape: 28:33

Yeah, sorry, I'm letting you speak, but it's a good feeling. I mean, when people are thinking, why do I do this? Is there something that? So now it's a good feeling, it feels great to be strong, that alone probably motivates you. But is there anything along the line that you've actively sought to get better at, or you've done this for a reason?

Beth: 28:53

let's say Um, just want to live a long, strong life. Um, I just want to. Um, my husband and I like active vacations. We're usually, we're usually biking and hiking, and I don't know if I would know what to do just to sit on the beach all day Not that I don't like to do that, I do but I like being able to do other things too. Um, that's great. I like being active. I don't. I don't want to sit around for my life and yeah and we talk about.

Philip Pape: 29:31

it's funny because some people put themselves in a box with these things, like, when it comes to strength, physique development, whatever, um, where they're, they're almost focused too much on, too much on the process, and I say that in a way. What I mean by that is they're focused too much on I have to do protein, I have to have calories, I have to lift weights, as opposed to leaning into that bigger picture of how it fits your life. And early on when you joined, I remember you talking about biking and, um, sometimes people think, oh, we're the no cardio people, right? Like, like we, we talk about lifting and walking and maybe sprinting, but we're not about endurance athletics.

Philip Pape: 30:11

But for you, that is something you enjoy and it's part of your activity. It's a sport that you, uh, lean into and it helps you thrive and live your active life. So the strength training and the diet and everything supports it, um, is is from my perspective. So what are your thoughts on? What are your thoughts on that in general? Like, why do you love to bike? How does this help with your biking, and so on.

Beth: 30:33

Oh, it absolutely helps with the biking. Um, I actually went out. I, I uh, I'm a fair weather biker. I like a beautiful day and being out on my bike and, um, it's, it's, it's good for the mind, it just makes you feel good to be out on a beautiful day and to be doing something physical and the strength.

Beth: 31:01

We went out the other day and I live in Kentucky, it's been a little windy and weather here, if you ever catch the news and we went out the other day and it was 18, 19 mile an hour winds with gusts up to 35 or 40. And I'm like this is crazy, we don't need to be out here. But we decided to go. We just did 11 miles, which is not going that far, and I felt good, I had the strength to do it. We've got lots of hills and hills and wind and, um, my legs are just a lot stronger. Um, it was, it was actually could make it enjoyable, um, on a not so great day. But, um, uh, the the strength is definitely helpful on the bike, but the strength is definitely helpful on the bike.

Philip Pape: 31:50

Yep, yep, that's what I hear, yeah.

Beth: 31:52

If it was just a little flat road and we're just going slow and tottering around, it wouldn't matter that much. But we've got a lot of hills and we are trying to do some distance We'll be building up here. Right now we're just doing my longest ride is about 20 miles, but we'll be working up to 30 or 40. Probably is all we will, but that's still a couple hours out riding hours yeah, I mean it makes.

Philip Pape: 32:21

It makes a lot of sense. We we hear time and again dealing with athletes or people who have a sport, that strength is a foundation, such that it, like it's an amplifier for everything else. You know it's it, it makes everything else easier. And so when you talk about pumping your legs in a concentric fashion over and over thousands of times, it makes sense that if you can produce more force than the next person who weighs the same, that you'll have an easier time of it. Right, right, just to put it in pure math.

Beth: 32:49

Yes, Just bringing out the engineer in you. Yeah, yeah yeah.

Philip Pape: 32:52

No, it's important to know, though. Yeah.

Beth: 32:55

But it also prevents injury.

Philip Pape: 32:58

That is true, yeah.

Beth: 33:00

Less likely to get injured, whether it's biking or doing anything else. 100%, but I'm thinking in the biking world it's good to have that muscle strength.

Philip Pape: 33:13

Yep, and you'll find this with sports, with BJJ, I have a client who's a competitive rifle shooter. Oh, wow, I have a client who's a competitive rifle shooter Pretty cool and she, for the first few months we worked together, she was doing kind of a group class because we didn't want to touch her training. We wanted to focus on diet. First she had quite a bit of weight to lose, let's say, plus 300 pounds and we then recently switched her to lifting more, like you're doing right, focus on strength, focus on progression, and she's like wow, this is just making the sport my rifle sport so much easier all of a sudden, within within weeks. And I think it's again.

Philip Pape: 33:51

Another thing is the things you want to do in your life, whether it's biking or a sport, or soccer or even walking. You know, walking upstairs, depending. If you're 85 and frail and you've never lifted, and then you start lifting, you can walk upstairs. That's, that's an amazing, uh, life transformation for someone. So you're very inspiring, beth, because people are hearing this and hopefully think, wow, I can. You know, age is not a factor, honestly, if you do this.

Beth: 34:17

It's. It's really not. I mean I do have the shoulder ache and I've never had that before, but it's okay, um, just work around it and and not that big a deal. But I don't want to say that I don't feel that different than when I was 40, but I really don't. I mean I can't. There's nothing that I can't. There's nothing I can't do if I want to, um, and it's great.

Philip Pape: 34:42

So I know you're always focused on what to do next and how to continue optimizing refining. You and I talked back and forth before this recording about your lifting, your workouts, a little bit about your nutrition in your next phase. Where do you feel like you need the most help at the moment? What's the number one thing you're focused on that you have questions on.

Beth: 35:02

My biggest questions are going to be on just balancing everything, because it's very hard. I am taking a total rest day today. I biked over the weekend. I lifted weights yesterday. Thyroid's been cut a little bit so it takes me a little time to adjust to those and tired and learning to take a rest day. And maybe I talked to you a little bit about maybe cutting. I hate to cut back on the strength training. I don't really want to cut back. I want to be more efficient with it so that I can fit everything in and have the energy to do everything. So I'm looking for balance and scheduling it all getting it all in but also getting the rest. I need to do it.

Philip Pape: 35:58

Okay, tell me, let's break down the big blocks of time throughout your week. So start with training. How many days and how long are your sessions?

Beth: 36:25

it's on the treadmill and, um, I usually do a little bit. The first set of exercises I usually do warmups. Um, for whatever I'm lifting, If it's like press, I'll do warmup sets is my warmups. Um, I don't do a lot of stretching.

Philip Pape: 36:38

Okay, so a little over an hour that's. That's totally reasonable. Most people train between an hour and hour and a half. If you're doing, you're doing four days. Right At the moment I'm doing three days. You're doing three Okay. However, I could add in a fourth day and just do it at home with dumbbells Um wait, we're trying to, we're trying to take stuff away here, beth, right, I know, and that's a hold.

Beth: 37:00

And that's my problem. I get it.

Philip Pape: 37:03

We want to do it all we want to do it all. Okay, so you've got three sessions a week. Those are on weekdays. Those are on weekdays. I go Monday, wednesday, friday.

Beth: 37:14

Could you do one on the weekend? How would that work with your schedule? Um, I could.

Philip Pape: 37:16

And I only bring that up as a lot of people don't even think about it. They're like, oh wait a minute, I can make one of my training days a Saturday or Sunday, and that solves a whole bunch of issues for some people. Some others have like tons going on on the weekend and it doesn't work.

Beth: 37:28

Um, but I like the. There's no reason why I can't do it on the weekend.

Philip Pape: 37:32

Yeah, just an option. It's an option Like so I've I've worked with folks, and myself included, who've had, let's say, four day or even five day programs and you always think Monday, tuesday, thursday, friday, but nothing prevents you from doing like Monday, tuesday, thursday, saturday. Or you know like, if you're doing a five day program, you can make Tuesday and Wednesday your days off. You know what I mean. So that's one option. Um, so you've got your training blocks and then those are at a gym, so it's an hour, an hour 15 plus commute.

Beth: 37:59

Yes.

Philip Pape: 38:00

Which is like 15 or something.

Beth: 38:02

It's 15, plus commute, yes, which is like 15 or something. It's 10 minutes.

Philip Pape: 38:04

It's nowhere all right. So it's almost two hours. And then you got your shower and your prep, your bag, gym bag and all that. So almost two hours on those three days. Um, what's the next big block that you have throughout your week where you're doing it regularly and it takes time?

Beth: 38:18

um, so t usually, uh, we go to a track it's a motor speedway track that's open, so we have no cars to worry about that's open to bikers and runners, um, and my husband loves to do that. So we go on Tuesday nights to do that. We're not going tonight cause we're getting weather again tonight to do that. We're not going tonight because we're getting weather again tonight, and that's usually a big block of time. We're trying to get in about 30 miles, which is a good two hours, and it's about a 40 minute back and forth, so it's about an hour and a half of commute. Also.

Philip Pape: 39:03

Okay, but that is that a non-negotiable right there at that one.

Beth: 39:06

That's pretty non-negotiable Okay.

Philip Pape: 39:08

So it's in there, All right, Um, cause you're you're talking about balance and I mean it's. It is. It is a function of priorities and not only priorities, but, um, is there anything you can eliminate? That's like the bottom of the list where I go. Can you, can you eliminate, can you delegate, can you automate? And then the other stuff just stays like it is today, Cause it's optimal, Like your training is probably the only way you could save time potentially is have a full gym at home. You know, I don't know if that's even an option to have, like a barbell gym with some machines and stuff at home.

Beth: 39:39

I don't have a barbell at home. Um, I don't have a barbell.

Philip Pape: 39:47

I do have power blocks that go up much higher than I will ever use and a bench yeah, you said that that's right, so you could yeah, you could take one of your instead of adding a fourth day. Take one of your three days and make them at home and now. So that would save you what 30 minutes from commute, okay yeah, I have time.

Beth: 40:00

It's more energy, is what? Okay, I'm thinking to be honest okay, so you're training you. You train monday, wednesday, friday, with the tuesday biking yes, and then I've got to get in a couple more days of biking. For sure, this isn't a bike race that I'm training for, it's a vacation, but it still will be you or 30 miles of biking in the mountains.

Philip Pape: 40:25

Okay, this is where I'm thinking. So one of two options that come to mind, one is is potentially, um, either cutting out a lifting session altogether and I always hate to say that but if it's short term cause, when is your, when is your vacation?

Beth: 40:38

September. We've got a long time to go.

Philip Pape: 40:41

Okay, You've got four months. I wouldn't do that just yet. Um, that's one option. The second option would be you could split your training into four or five much shorter days, since time isn't the problem and recovery, recovery is the issue. Some people recover better with smaller sessions. Right, If you're doing, are you doing? I know you sent me your workout, but it's um, is it a push-pull legs or is it a full body?

Beth: 41:04

It's more full body. Yeah, it's what I had been doing, and then I started playing with it this past week and I'm not sure I'm happy with where it's at, so we'll talk about that later.

Philip Pape: 41:16

Yeah, because you could do a four-day where the sessions are like a half hour and you do three lifts. You know something like that. Um, that's the second option. The third option is just moving the days around and make it work better, because the biking day is smack dab between two training days.

Philip Pape: 41:34

And that's where I would rather almost like if you were training Monday, wednesday, friday and could put the biking day wherever you want. The long one, I'd put it on Saturday. So since you don't have that situation, it's like what? If Tuesday is like your Saturday and then you would do, your training week would be Thursday, saturday, monday or whatever. You could do the math, but you know what I mean. You'd have, you'd have Tuesday, and when you do, wednesday would be off.

Beth: 41:57

So take a rest day on Wednesday.

Philip Pape: 41:59

Yeah, and just shift it so it's like Monday, thursday, thursday, saturday, something like that. You know what I mean. Right, you can flip it around in your head do Thursday, saturday, monday, but you don't have the same idea. Um, what about what? What about the other days? What, how much? What kind of activity are you doing?

Beth: 42:16

Um, I am walking. Is is up around 9,000. I think it was averaged 8,800 for the week and I'll have to get out and walk. I've got the dogs to walk and usually in the summertime that picks up too a little bit. I know last summer I was doing more around 11,000.

Philip Pape: 42:39

Well, that's reasonable, Beth. So 8,000, it's not even taxing. It's fine. How's your sleep?

Beth: 42:45

Sleep is good.

Philip Pape: 42:46

Sleep is good Stress.

Beth: 42:48

Stress is pretty good Okay.

Philip Pape: 42:52

So let's get deeper then, when you talk about energy. When is it worse? During the week, and what does it feel like?

Beth: 43:01

I guess I was exhausted last night and today and so it's like today is just an enforced rest day. I'm not even doing a lot of walking today, um, because we had a big bike ride on Sunday, um, and also biked on Saturday, but it was that short, windy one, but that was still a hard bike ride, even though it was short, and then lifted weights yesterday and yesterday afternoon I was beat and I should be. I mean, it was. I don't know that anything is happening, it's just that I need to. I just want to make sure that I get like a couple of rest days, which means I'm going to be biking on days that I'm lifting too.

Philip Pape: 43:45

Yeah and that's not the worst thing in the world, it's just if you're doing full body. That's where the challenge could be, so that's where I was going to go next with you, beth, is the split makes even more sense where you have two light upper body days and then two lower bodies, and the lower bodies are very far removed from your biking.

Beth: 44:04

And I kind of like that. Okay, I like a little bit shorter, maybe a little bit shorter lifting days.

Philip Pape: 44:10

Yeah, cause if you're okay with the commute time and all that, it's not a big deal. Some people like to go to the gym almost every day, so, um, that's. I think that would work for you. It's like just a typical four day split where your heavy biking day comes after potentially an upper body day, and then you get a rest day after that and then a lower than an upper, than a lower meaning wait, upper or no, then lower, upper, lower. I have to figure that out, but yeah, there's a way to do that to make it work. Okay, we'll get into specifics. Yeah, that would work, and then you could just follow a traditional kind of like you're training now pretty much any four-day split would work, and you might just have to cut off some movements if it's too much and then substitute the movements for your shoulder. That's what I would do.

Philip Pape: 45:04

Do? I know you use Boost Camp, right? I do so. I often recommend programs in there from other coaches for people because I'm just like pick the best program for you right now. I followed my own and others and you can kind of mix around when you need to. But, um, maybe filter through there on the different things, say four day and this and that and then, or I can find one for you as well. There's I'm pretty familiar with them by now, by now. Or you can just use one of my four days in the Physique University as well. Okay, all right. Anything else that we didn't cover so far?

Beth: 45:31

I don't think so. I think we've covered it. The only thing maybe, is doing periodization that at some point in time here, doing periodization that I'm at some point in time here. I'll go into a and go into a fat loss phase, and I'm actually kind of looking forward to to doing this and and think about doing this again, you know, doing a building phase here get addicted to it in a way right, and then get back into a building phase and then maybe get into a maintenance phase.

Beth: 46:07

I don't know. We'll have to, we'll have to talk and figure that all out.

Philip Pape: 46:10

But we'll talk. I mean the. The one piece of advice on fat loss is just pick a quiet time of year, you know like. Don't pick it when you know you'd want to eat all the foods, right like holidays. Be careful gotcha, gotcha.

Beth: 46:22

That's probably the good building phase, I would guess.

Philip Pape: 46:24

Exactly, exactly.

Beth: 46:25

Thanksgiving or Christmas is that build time?

Philip Pape: 46:28

Exactly it is. It's how you line it up. It works out really well, all right. So I guess my last question or two here One is if let's say there's really anybody listening, but say, older adults who might be hesitant to prioritize building muscle, yeah, maybe they have injuries or medical conditions like you're facing a bit, maybe they don't, maybe it's just a hesitation, like you had. What advice would you give them based on your experience?

Beth: 46:54

To do it. Jump on in there, get started. Go to the gym, start lifting. My biggest recommendation, seeing my friends that don't lift and um, whatever is to, to take it slow. You don't have to. You don't have to go in and lift a hundred pounds to start with on the barbell. You go in and and you know, lift that five or 10 pound dumbbell, whatever you can do and and build from there. Um, it's not, it's not a sprint. Unveil whatever you can do and build from there. It's not a sprint, it's just take your time and just start.

Philip Pape: 47:29

Just start, take your time.

Beth: 47:31

Be patient. It's a wonderful feeling.

Philip Pape: 47:33

It's a wonderful feeling. Yeah, definitely lean into that. There is a lot of misinformation or misunderstanding from people who don't lift. I see it as well. My parents live in the villages there. You know people there in the seventies, eighties, nineties and it's these things, these ideas about I'm going to get hurt, or that's too heavy, or my doctor said not to do this, or blah, blah, blah, like you've heard it all, and it's never too late to start.

Beth: 47:55

So um, please, please, please do. That was an inspiration and I found was absolutely hilarious.

Beth: 47:58

That was an inspiration and I found was absolutely hilarious. My mother lived to be 98 and she was good most of the time. She lived in a house for a long time with steps and we're like do you need to get out of the house? She goes no, that's my exercise, that keeps me going. If I have to go up the steps to go to bed, then that keeps me going. But she moved to Florida eventually and I was going down to visit her one time and I hadn't seen her in several months and I said well, do you want to do lunch? I'll be there by lunchtime and she goes I would love to do lunch but it's going to have to be after one o'clock because I'm going to be in the gym. And I was like and I think she was about 94. Then I was like, okay, that's great.

Philip Pape: 48:44

That is awesome, I love it.

Beth: 48:46

And she did not lift weights all her life but she did walk and she did stay active in her own way At 94, she had her personal trainer and I'm peeking in the window and she's got a dumbbell in her hand and she was going to town and I was like, yes, I like it. Yes, no excuses people, if you're listening for lunch.

Philip Pape: 49:12

That's so inspirational. Um, yeah, yeah, please, please do guys. I mean, the older I get, the more I see it with with that generation and I don't want to be there and, heck, I even have shoulder issues at the young age of my forties or whatever it happens. All of us. So what you keep training, you find a way, you keep moving, keep learning. So if you're listening and Beth's journey has sparked something in you which I hope it has and you want to take a smarter approach, which is just getting started, like she just said, getting started working around whatever limitations you have we're all different, we all have things.

Philip Pape: 49:47

It's no reason not to do it. Maybe you're navigating the hormonal changes. Maybe you're tired of the social media craziness and misinformation. Then try out Physique University like jump in, there's a free trial. You can say hi to Beth. You can see what's going on. We do challenges all the time. A free trial you can say hi to Beth. You can see what's going on. We do challenges all the time. She actually won our protein challenge, which is one of the reasons Her reward is getting grilled on a podcast, you see. So, yeah, just check it out. I'm not going to pitch it any more than that. We'll include the link in the show notes. But, beth, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you for sharing the experience. People need to hear this because it's very important, so thank you.

Beth: 50:23

Thank you for giving me the chance. Appreciate it.

Can You Eat "Clean" Without Food Guilt in an Ultra-Processed World? (Alana Bonnemann) | Ep 328

Join Physique University (free for 2 weeks) to get a custom, flexible nutrition plan so you can enjoy foods that feel good!

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Are you stuck in a cycle of guilt every time you eat something “off plan”? Do food rules make grocery shopping feel like a minefield? 

Alana Bonnemann, a naturopathic nutritionist and host of the Health After 30 podcast, joins me to talk about the rising culture of food fear and how to escape it. 

We unpack why our relationship with food often feels so complicated, the role of diet culture and childhood conditioning, and how to replace guilt with trust. Together, we explore what it actually means to “feel good” after eating, how to eat with intention (not obsession), and why a little cake won’t wreck your health goals.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

2:36 - Childhood food rules and guilt
4:16 - What eating without fear looks like
6:02 - Why body awareness matters
11:01 - Can healthy food taste good
14:31 - The truth about eating cake
20:13 - Diet culture vs true health
29:54 - How to know what feels good
41:05 - Change your default eating loop
47:32 - Outro

Episode resources:

• Health After 30 Podcast

• Website: alanabonnemann.com

• Instagram: @naturopath.alana 

• Youtube: @alanabonnemann 

Stop Feeling Guilty About Food and Start Trusting Your Body

Why clean eating can backfire

Let’s talk about the food rules in your head. You know, the ones you never agreed to but somehow feel guilty breaking. Don’t eat after 7 PM. Sugar is evil. Finish your plate or no dessert. Ultra-processed = ultra-toxic. These rules didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They’ve been conditioned into us through a mix of diet culture, childhood habits, and social media hysteria.

In today’s world, where Instagram health gurus and fear-based food headlines are louder than ever, people are afraid of food. Not just fast food or soda, but even fruit if it’s not organic, or bread unless it’s sprouted, or yogurt if it’s not raw and homemade. But this kind of moral judgment about what you eat isn’t helping your health—it’s probably hurting it.

If you’ve ever felt ashamed for eating a slice of pizza or guilty after enjoying dessert with friends, it’s time to challenge the “clean eating” narrative and build a healthier relationship with food.

The food guilt cycle

Here’s how the cycle usually goes: You stick to a perfect, clean diet for a while. You’re “being good.” Then something happens—stress, a vacation, dinner out with friends—and you deviate. You eat the cookie, or the burger, or the donut. Cue the shame spiral. You tell yourself you’ll do better tomorrow. The cycle starts again.

This pattern is common, but it doesn’t actually lead to long-term change. Instead, it wires your brain to associate certain foods with failure and morality rather than nourishment and choice.

But what if food wasn’t good or bad? What if eating cake didn’t mean you “fell off” your plan, but was simply part of a normal, flexible approach to food?

Your body already knows what to eat—if you listen

The key is getting in touch with your body’s feedback loop. When you eat something, how do you feel afterward—not just emotionally, but physically? Energized, clear-headed, satisfied? Or bloated, sluggish, and tired?

Most people never pause to reflect on that. We’re so used to eating based on rules or restrictions that we’ve lost the ability to tune into how food actually makes us feel. But when you start paying attention to your energy, digestion, sleep, mood, and even cravings, patterns emerge. You learn what foods truly nourish you, and which ones don’t.

This doesn’t mean you never eat the “fun” foods. It means you do so intentionally, without guilt, and with awareness of how they impact your body and your goals.

Redefining healthy eating without restriction

So, what does eating well look like when it’s not driven by fear?

• It’s diverse. You’re not eating the same five “safe” foods every day. You mix things up and experiment.

• It’s functional. You eat to feel good—not to hit arbitrary macros or check a “clean” box.

• It’s enjoyable. You actually like your food, because flavor and pleasure matter too.

• It’s intentional. You know why you’re eating what you’re eating, whether it’s for recovery after training, a special event, or simply because it sounds good.

In my own life and with my clients, I’ve seen how adding foods in—especially nutrient-dense, high-protein options—automatically crowds out the less nourishing stuff without needing to restrict. You don’t need a “cheat day” if you don’t feel deprived in the first place.

The power of language and how it shapes your habits

If you catch yourself saying, “I was bad last night,” or “I deserve this,” or “this food is clean,” stop and think. Food isn’t moral. Burgers aren’t dirty. Kale isn’t virtuous. These labels create invisible walls between you and your goals by tying your identity to what’s on your plate.

Let’s drop the labels and get specific instead. “I chose this food because I was tired and needed something quick.” Or, “I ate this because I wanted to enjoy dessert with my family.” These are honest reflections. And they help build trust in yourself—a far more powerful motivator than guilt.

Navigating restaurants, vacations, and the real world

Yes, most of us want to eat in a way that supports our physique, strength, or longevity goals. But life happens. Social events, travel, holidays—they’re all part of it.

Rather than white-knuckling your way through these situations, reframe them. You’re not “off plan.” You’re just making a conscious choice to participate in life. You can still be mindful: eat slowly, stop when full, skip the food that doesn’t taste that great. And maybe bring the leftovers home to enjoy later.

The goal isn’t perfection—it’s confidence. Confidence that your next meal will nourish you. Confidence that a few drinks or slices of cake don’t erase your progress. And confidence that you’re building habits that will actually last.

The 80/20 rule done right

I often talk about the 80/20 rule, and it applies perfectly here. Aim for 80% of your food to be nutrient-dense, whole, and aligned with your goals. The other 20%? That’s where life happens. Enjoy it. Don’t overthink it. And don’t apologize for it.

If you’re not tracking, focus on habits like adding protein, eating more plants, and tuning into your fullness signals. If you are tracking, be honest and include the “fun” stuff in your totals. Either way, the point is to build a pattern that’s sustainable—and that you enjoy.

Because if you can’t enjoy the process, what’s the point?

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you've ever looked at your grocery list and wondered, am I buying the right foods? And you've read every ingredient label, or you feel guilty about enjoying meals of friends because they don't fit your clean standards, this episode is for you. The rise of social media gurus has created a culture of fear around food, where everything seems potentially harmful, from anything in a package to even fresh fruits and vegetables. Potentially harmful from anything in a package to even fresh fruits and vegetables. My guest today reveals why this fear-based approach to eating might be worse for your health than the occasional indulgence. You'll discover what's more important than perfectly adhering to your diet, how to navigate grocery shopping without paranoia and some tips to enjoy eating again without sacrificing your health and fitness goals. Stop letting food fear control your life and learn how to build sustainable, enjoyable eating habits that actually improve your health long-term. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.

Philip Pape: 1:03

I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're discussing how to make food choices in our modern world without falling prey to fear, guilt and obsession. In a food environment dominated by processing, by ultra-palatability hard word to say and with social media constantly bombarding us with confusing and conflicting nutrition advice. Many people are scared of their food choices. My guest today is Alana Bonneman, a naturopathic nutritionist who specializes in helping women reconnect with their bodies and find sustainable approaches to nutrition, which is what we're all about here as well. She guides clients away from restrictive diets and toward nourishing foods that support abundant energy, balanced hormones and optimal health, and she is the host of the Health After 30 podcast, so give that a follow, because there's a conversation with us on there as well. Today, you'll learn why your relationship with food matters more than perfect adherence to clean eating, how to approach processed foods without fear, and some tips to make food choices that work for your lifestyle and health goals. Alana, good to see you again. Welcome back. Welcome to the show.

Alana Bonnemann: 2:09

Yeah, thank you, Welcome back yeah we just had a wonderful episode on the Health After 30 as well, so it's really good to be here.

Philip Pape: 2:16

So on that show we talked about lifting, we talked about nutrition and lifestyle and all that. Today, I really want to dig into the topic of food fear and the environment and kind of how people make choices. The first question that comes to mind then is, like what is going on when people are afraid of food? Like why is that even a thing? Let's start there.

Alana Bonnemann: 2:36

Well, I mean, that's a learned behavior, right. Why are we afraid of food? And that comes down to, perhaps, the psyche of things. Also, perhaps we could even go into the food rules that we've been taught. So this comes not only from society and Instagram and all the rest of it, but also what we've been taught at home. If you've ever heard or maybe you might even say it yourself no, you probably don't, but it's something that I definitely heard when I was growing up up that you need to finish all the food on your plate in order to get dessert. You know things like this, or yeah, you have to. What's another?

Philip Pape: 3:12

food rule yeah, clean your plate. No, you're right yeah, yeah.

Alana Bonnemann: 3:15

My grandmother would always say you know, if you leave any rice on your plate, that's the amount of holes that your partner's going to have in their face when they're older, like terrible, why that's so arbitrary. So we kind of grow up with these understandings of what food is. And also, you know, finishing a plate in order to get dessert, that means it's also putting this dessert and sweet stuff on a pedestal as well. So this distorted idea of what food is and how it serves us and how we should be eating it, rather than what we think we should be eating, becomes really, really difficult.

Philip Pape: 3:50

Yeah, yeah, and there's a should in there that I think is important, the word should and rules, and that really hits me hard because you and I were chatting, I think, off the record about just our history with that. So then the converse of this is like what would a world look like where people didn't have fear, guilt, morality related to food? Like what is that ideal vision If there was never any of this conditioning these food rules, anything else, what would that look like to you?

Alana Bonnemann: 4:16

The thing is you know what you feel good on. If you pay attention, you will know what foods make you feel light and agile and focused and full of energy and vitality. And you know the foods that don't make you feel that way. It's just that in today's society, when that's set up, the foods that don't make us feel so good, so that means perhaps sluggish, constipated, bloated, sedative you know, in a way they're just really delicious and they're designed to be delicious and that's not with your health in mind. That's obviously in the minds to make, make money or make business or, you know, just to basically sell things that are delicious.

Alana Bonnemann: 4:57

This is not to say that those things are bad. Food is food. It comes down to okay, how much should can we, how much do we thrive on of that? And that comes down to the ability to be able to listen to your body. So when you say how does an ideal world look like? It's different for everyone, because everyone needs different things. How much do you exercise? How much do you move? How's your stress levels? Where are you at in what stage of your life depends on how much we need to be eating. But knowing what foods you thrive on and what foods you don't, and if you went a little bit there then you would get a good understanding of what you should be eating.

Philip Pape: 5:36

Two corollary questions come up from this Cause. I love. I love how you got into that, like you know what you feel good on. The first question that comes to mind people might wonder is what if someone has been eating a certain way for so long that, at least in their own narrative or their mind, they don't feel that that's true, that they can't claim that they know what they feel good on, perhaps because they haven't given themselves the opportunity to see the difference? Is that a thing?

Alana Bonnemann: 6:02

So they've been following dogmatically we talked about as well a certain way. So perhaps what's their goal there and why are they doing it and are they feeling their best? And it's often funny if you ask people like how are you, how is your life, we usually will answer oh well, as an Australian, we answer yeah, great, everything's good, I feel well, I feel productive. But if you start to strip things back and you dive into well, how are we sleeping for women? How are you menstruating? How are your bowel movements? How is your energy? Do you need to rely on coffee to get through the day?

Alana Bonnemann: 6:41

If you start to kind of dig into that, then you might get some clues into what's working and perhaps what's not working as well. So a lot of the time when checking into your body which I think it really comes down to understanding what you need is getting in contact with your body, which is, let's be fair, a lost art. We don't know how to do it because it's kind of been drummed out of us or you know, just basically forgotten is our mind takes over.

Alana Bonnemann: 7:09

So if we're reading all the literature which I know is important and we need to know we need to know what's happening and how our bodies function and how different things work in our bodies.

Alana Bonnemann: 7:16

This is why the academic side of nutritional science is so wonderful, but if we just rely on that and we believe or we kind of put ourselves into that statistic of what that certain research says, it takes us away from us knowing what we need, what you need, what the individual needs. So I think at the base of this, it comes down to trust, understanding and feeling how to trust yourself and to be able to let go of things that you think might be serving you, perhaps are serving you but also might not be serving you. What you said really nicely on my podcast was you know you can take everything away but then reintroduce things, start to bring things in and see, you know if your world crashes you didn't say that, but you know. Basically, see if things crumble and I I really agree with that approach and if you've been living in a restricted, start to bring things in and see how it works and then you can go from there.

Philip Pape: 8:19

Yeah. So what you're saying, from what I hear, is being intentional and taking a moment to breathe and think and reflect on your life, because I think people do make the excuse, maybe about their food choices or their habits, and that's okay, right, like people, that's human behavior. But then to say, okay, I need to look at how, when I eat that protein bar, when I eat this food or drink this at this time of day, what is the cascade of data? I'll call it data is what you're telling me.

Philip Pape: 8:50

It's funny Cause we we joke about, like me being the sciencey guy and you being more fluid, but at the end of the day, we're still being intentional and observing and at the end, that's that's what data is right. So, to trust yourself, you want to define yourself and your identity and what's happening in this moment, and then it sounds like you can make changes from there. Let me ask you this you mentioned how food science and the food industry makes food so delicious, and does that mean that the foods that are good for you can't be delicious? Now, obviously it's a leading question, but let's address that.

Alana Bonnemann: 9:21

Yeah, well, you know Michael Pollan right? He's an American-based author. He has a little book called Food Rules, which I mean I find food rules to be a funny name, but he says which will kind of segue into my answer he's got these different rules and one of them is when you go shopping, it's to shop the periphery of the supermarket, so you walk in and you walk into the fresh produce and then on the peripheries it's usually freezers. That's how it is in Australia, that's how it is in Germany, I assume in the States and basically everywhere that's how it is. In the middle of a supermarket is aisles of canned, packaged foods. They're foods with additives. They're there to basically have long shelf lives, emulsifiers and lists that go quite long, and you know they need to be able to hold flavor and they need to be able, yeah, to be palatable. So they do these foods taste good, but they might not feel good also just because of the different ingredients that are in them as well.

Alana Bonnemann: 10:25

I think your question was can healthy foods taste good? Is that what you're alluding to? I mean, the thing is and I will be honest here when I first got into the health space, when I first started studying nutrition, I remember learning about all of the different benefits that nutrition can have. You know whether it was anti-inflammatory, for cardiovascular, for skin, for gut, for mood, for like, all the different things that tricks and tips that you could do in order to have a good diet. And I was not eating for the joy of eating, I was eating for the benefits of eating. So it didn't matter if it tasted good or not. Like, for example, a protein bar, do they taste that good? Like they do the trick to get a bit of protein in, but are they like? Do they taste that good? So you know whether we need this amount of protein or this amount of fiber.

Alana Bonnemann: 11:18

I think making sure that you're getting the right things, but also enjoying what you eat does play a huge like. It plays a huge part on it. Eating, like in cultures, it's such a huge part of what we do. We do it several times a day. It connects people. It connects with yourself. You know it is. It's the first thing we do. When we are like bottle fed or breastfed in a nurturing situation by our primary caregiver. You know they're there with us. So eating is a huge part of what we do and to some extent. Yes, it should be enjoyable and it can be enjoyable.

Philip Pape: 11:54

And I love that. And, of course, I ask a lot of leading questions or a lot of kind of questions from a place of skepticism for the person listening. I love food, I'm a huge foodie. I love to prepare nutritious foods and make them taste good and, honestly, if I'm trying to eat something like, let's say, brussels sprouts, because I know they're cruciferous and they have these nutrients and I heard they taste good, and yet my whole life I've had exposure to only boiled, canned Brussels sprouts that make me gag. And then I try fresh, roasted Brussels sprouts with a little bit of salt and they're divine, like this totally different food.

Philip Pape: 12:29

I think that's important. Like I've seen people comment no, it's not about enjoying your food, it's about fuel or it's about nutrition, and it's not, it's a human experience. So I think that's why I wanted to ask that early in this episode, so that people, you know, give themselves the permission to enjoy food, to actually seek out delicious ways to prepare, to purchase the ingredients, everything, but also understand when we say tasty or delicious or whatever. What do we mean? And if you eat Oreos and they spike your dopamine but then you know you got some rumblies in your tumbly right, like Winnie the Pooh would say maybe there's something off that doesn't work for you Now. Granted, I personally I could eat an Oreo every now and then when I'm in a bulking phase and it's whatever, but I'm actually thinking of it then as just fast sugary nutrition for a lifter in a tiny, tiny percentage of my calories.

Alana Bonnemann: 13:13

That's so interesting. So you see food in that respect, and I guess that's it. You're seeing food as serving a purpose for gain or loss.

Philip Pape: 13:24

It's a carve out. It's a carve out for if I have to eat 4,000 calories, I literally am not going to enjoy all 4,000 calories. Probably that's a different topic for a different day.

Alana Bonnemann: 13:35

Some people will, some people will eat all whole foods and it's more power, I mean, but I would I mean, yeah, I guess I would maybe put honey, or that's interesting because, yes, if you start to see just the calorie impact of the from an Oreo, of what you can get compared to, I never thought about that, to be honest. So I've never bulked, so it's never been, it's never been something that I've had to think of. And even for those who I work with, you know it's like feel good weight, sometimes it is weight gain. Okay, then how can we do it? And I usually do it with whole foods, but I never thought to, never crossed my mind.

Philip Pape: 14:09

Yeah, so, okay. So now I have another question for you, then. Do you think people should be striving for a 100% whole food diet, or that there should be some carve out or allowance or whatever term you use for whatever you know ice cream, baked goods, donuts, pizza, whatever.

Alana Bonnemann: 14:31

Yes, I, I straight up, I say eat cake and feel great, like not. I mean, you're on the same page. It's not about restrictions, but I think the difference between eating a food like an Oreo in order to get a result is different to I shouldn't eat this food. Go back to your first question, because the whole point is like, because that's bad and I can't eat this cake, it's not the cake. You know, if you eat cake seven days a week, your body's going to feel it. Your body's probably going to ask for something like a salad. But likewise, if you're just eating salad seven days a week, your body's going to ask for something like a cake.

Alana Bonnemann: 15:02

So no, and when you eat this cake, you want to not feel bad. You don't want it to be a terrible experience If your whole purpose is to lose weight, build muscle, whatever it is that you're trying to get with nutrition and then you're having a piece of cake or whatever it is, and you feel bad for eating it. You quickly smash it down and then you feel bad for eating it, or you quickly smash it down and then you feel bad for eating it. That's actually equally going into that diet cycle of like I want to get to a certain goal, I'm doing it, I'm motivated, I had a weak point, I feel guilt, I feel shame, I'm pathetic. Okay, I'm motivated again to lose weight again. And it's just, that cycle isn't helpful for anyone and it will usually keep people stuck in their let's call it a weight loss journey or in their health journey in order to get to a certain result.

Philip Pape: 15:51

Yeah, yeah, so so then, how does the language change when you work with somebody? And they are, you know, let's go, let's reverse engineer it. Somebody who's who's been successful and gone through this transformation and used to think of foods as good or bad, or had guilt or shame around certain foods. This binary thinking or moral thinking what does it look like when you don't have that anymore? What is the language someone will use around, say, a processed food that they just eat it because they want to eat it and it's?

Philip Pape: 16:20

not there's no moral judgment.

Alana Bonnemann: 16:21

Yeah. So in order to get to that place of no moral judgment, we need to actually address the language that we're using towards the foods. The whole industry and I get caught up as well doing it. Sometimes we will call it food good or bad, healthy, unhealthy, super junk food. And just by doing that like I went to a cafe the other day and it had clean like the cafe is like clean food, like acai bowl, like whatever it was there and I was just, I just observed that because that meant at this cafe that was clean, which meant the burger across the world. That's not clean, that's dirty. So even if you are perhaps not fully aware of like that clean or not, just the idea that it's not healthy, it's not clean.

Alana Bonnemann: 17:05

I'm going to have a burger, I'm doing something bad. Oh, like, I'm doing something naughty. I often hear that, oh, I deserve a piece of cake. It's something naughty. It's not naughty to have a piece of cake or a burger. If you do it intentionally, as the one-off thing, and you enjoy it, I think that's going to hit more dopamine than eating it and then feeling stress and guilt and shame afterwards. That's probably adding more to the stress and the imbalance of your health in general if you're seeing those foods as bad. So you can start with the language and this is you know. When we say healthy, healthy food, everyone kind of knows what healthy is or unhealthy is, but by just labeling those foods it really puts that judgment on the foods and then also the people eating them get that judgment whether it's yourself eating it or if you're judging other people for eating those foods as well.

Philip Pape: 17:58

Yeah, a hundred percent, it does, it does. And I even have deep seated in my brain when someone themselves declares that they're not eating something because it's quote unquote, unhealthy, and I'm there choosing to eat it. I think, wait a minute, what are you saying about me? But then you know, it's like back in your brain we want to belong, we want to be part of that group and it kind of isolates and singles people out. So with this diet culture because that's really what it is, this conditioning, the guilt and shame on food choices what are the signs that people should look for about themselves, to kind of reflect?

Philip Pape: 18:36

on themselves with this unhealthy food guilt and maybe how it connects with their well-being.

Alana Bonnemann: 18:38

I know we've talked about this a little bit, but just so someone is more aware of when and why they're doing this. Yeah, so I mean the diet culture like I grew up I I was born in the 80s, grew up in the 90s and this is when I think I mean diet culture's been around for ages, but it really hit home. Today we have more of this body positivity, but back in the 90s heroin chic was in and people you know this thin was almost synonymous for healthy. So it wasn't get healthy at any cost, it was get thin at any cost. And I've heard stories of women who used to just drink orange juice and eat cotton balls to get healthy.

Alana Bonnemann: 19:17

Not to get healthy, obviously, to get thin, and so like just the idea to do that and this is perpetuated. So we're trying to get thin, so we hop on any crazy diet to then get a certain result and that's that's backwards. That is not what we should be doing. The goal is to have energy. The goal is to have a functioning menstruation. You know a monthly, not you know painful bowel movements, hair, skin and nails strong. You know focus in your eyes and when you go to work you're feeling productive and you're feeling vital. That's the goal, I think, and also for me, that's again like with this feel good weight.

Alana Bonnemann: 20:00

The weight is actually a by-product of all of those things. I'll also throw sleep in there as well, you know, cause that's obviously important one, but that's, you know, that's, it's a by-product of you optimizing each area of those of that life and diet culture didn't do that. It didn't do any of that because it was all for getting thin. So the first thing is to kind of perhaps be aware of is it about my body or is it about my health? You know, I mean, you put you work with people in weight loss and weight loss. You know making these transformations. So what is it about in the end? What's their true, what's their true calling that they're coming to you to work with? And it usually is about the health, it's not about how they look, although that is the catalyst for people coming in. So that's, I think, the first place to be aware of it.

Philip Pape: 20:50

Yeah, that is huge, because if you're chasing the wrong goal, the feedback loop is not going to align.

Philip Pape: 20:56

In other words, what you do may reinforce that misaligned goal and then you're going to keep going down that path rather than the path you choose to go down. And you're right when it comes to weight loss or even body composition. When it's more physical, some of the most inspiring stories I hear from clients and just people in the general when they start down the path of doing what you're doing is the language around how they feel, the language around how other people perceive them, not physically, but like their energy and their showing up in their health and their confidence, and that can be more inspiring than anything, in my opinion. And then if you happen to have the byproduct of the physical side, that's great. Now, what about something like we talked about strength training on my show? What about somebody who does have a legitimate goal where they're trying to add weight to the bar and they're trying to get stronger and therefore some of these goals need to align with that? But that is physical, not so much about how they feel. What are your thoughts on that?

Alana Bonnemann: 21:53

Well, it's interesting, Cause when we chatted, you were like, okay, this needs to happen. People have to do weights, and you know and I was like, oh, that's so interesting Is that?

Alana Bonnemann: 22:01

okay, you know it's a similar thing, different approaches, so it's crazy. So I take a very holistic approach, very fluid approach, as I said, I will often work with. What is your resistance? What is your resistance to getting to a certain result? Okay, I would just give an example. It's actually the opposite. So it's the like losing rather than putting on.

Alana Bonnemann: 22:23

But, for example, someone who cannot start to get moving a client of mine comes to mind. It's a story of, yeah, I want to do it, but I can't actually do it, like I'm not starting, they're not taking action. It's like what's the resistance there? I get people to literally get a pen and paper and every morning, few pages writing down what's your resistance and writing down into the point where it gets uncomfortable and like why am I even writing about this? Keep writing, you will find the reason to what's resisting.

Alana Bonnemann: 22:58

And so, for example, with this client, she came back to me. She's like oh my gosh, when I was in primary school I was in a sports lesson and I was running and the PE instructor kind of slapped her on the ass and from then on, like for her that was just, it was so violating, and she just shut down and from then on she just stopped doing movement. So to get back to this point of okay, what's at the root cause of you not taking action and you not making change is a really important factor to kind of get through that, understand that and break, kind of break through from that as well, and I think you could kind of see it. Yeah.

Philip Pape: 23:38

Yeah, so resistance. So and the word I use for that is friction it's the same idea of like what is in the way, whether it's some short-term thing you're struggling with or the deeper what you suggested. I had a guest on not long ago Adam Badger was his name, and he talked about stress, and he was talking about how, a lot of times when something happens to us outside of us, we react in a way that ramps up our stress, but that reaction is rooted in something in our life that causes us to act that way where someone else might not. And so I love these ideas of getting further and further, deeper into potential root causes, without driving ourselves crazy, trying to like unpackage our entire psyche on day one right Cause it's a process.

Stephanie: 24:20

It's a process.

Philip Pape: 24:22

But I think that's really important. So let's talk about you mentioned. When we think of foods right, I think there's a spectrum of processing. Is is how a lot of people put it. Do you ascribe to that idea of categorizing foods that way of like, from minimally to ultra processed, and then alcohol needs to be in there too, being a toxin and kind of a unique thing. What are your thoughts on that for people?

Alana Bonnemann: 24:45

listening. Yeah, so there, I mean I think it's generally understood that there's whole foods, processed foods and then these highly ultra processed foods. And to kind of reference Michael Pollan again, because I really like his work, I think he even calls it food-like substances.

Philip Pape: 25:02

Okay, Just to make it sound gross, right? Yeah, a little bit.

Alana Bonnemann: 25:06

But so like, while I do see it like that, I think you know logically I see it like that but in the end food is food, like everything that's being sold at the supermarket is kind of food. So if you can imagine, like I have two children, I'm trying to raise them up to not have highly restrictive diets but to understand that you are going to have everything at your fingertips, like once they're 16 or even like even earlier, like I don't. We're not going to be able to control whatever they're eating. So it's the same for an adult as well. You have access to everything. And if you kind of see it all as food, and again it's actually getting back into your body and understanding what actually makes you feel good, versus the highly processed stuff which, while it tastes good, chances are it's not going to be making you feel good or function well. So yes, and then also on a biochemical level, obviously, when we've got all of these ingredients in these food-like substances, they're not benefiting the body in the way in which whole foods benefit the body as far as macro and micro nutrients go. So I mean, is it even a question to ask if it's out there? No, because they're obviously all available. It's how we kind of associate ourselves with all of them.

Alana Bonnemann: 26:22

Again, I would I try not to call them good or bad, because then it puts you back into the oh, like this is bad, I'm doing something bad. That is elevating that stress level which we want to kind of not, you know, like yeah, and it's also when we call salads good as well. It's just I'm just thinking about it because, like when stress, when stress is involved, stress elevates every single condition, whether it's a skin condition, whether it's a bowel condition, whatever you have, any type of stress is going to exacerbate that. So it's the same thing when you're thinking about nutrition, because so many people we can control our nutrition, we eat several times a day. That's something that we can control. So when we're controlling our nutrition, we eat several times a day. That's something that we can control. So when we're controlling our nutrition and we're not, we're doing things that we think are bad for us, then again this stress is spiked and that's what's going to cascade with every health concern in our body.

Alana Bonnemann: 27:14

Nervous system regulation is huge. So I think, just be aware and be mindful of the foods that are out there and again, and it's hard because they're all delicious and they're all advertised to us in very delicious ways. But understanding what it is that you want and understanding what your body thrives on, and also, if you're on a journey and you want to get there, then you have to be diligent. Motivation discipline can only push you so far. Well, discipline can actually get you probably a bit further than motivation. But you need you need to challenge yourself as well. In that space of challenge you do grow. And I think if you've just been used to kind of having all foods at once, it's going to be challenging to change that. But in that challenge you'll grow.

Philip Pape: 28:02

And this is where we have a lot of overlap right Is the idea that you are creating a sense of awareness, intention. I like the word diligence because it strikes me as an intentional perseverance and intentional decision-making, informed decision-making. It doesn't necessarily mean it requires massive mental energy, especially if you're reducing your resistance, your friction, like it can all come together in a way that's just pushing that comfort zone slowly over time and always improving, just like in the gym where you don't jump to a 400 pound deadlift on day one, you start with the empty bar and you move slowly you mentioned. I want to get back to the feeling good part and get more objective and dig into that so that the listener understands. What does she mean by feeling good?

Philip Pape: 28:47

A little story about my daughter. We have two daughters, 11 and 13. And my oldest daughter, for a while there had some anxiety about going to restaurants and I think the reason was she had a few experiences where it just didn't work well for her system, whatever she ate at a restaurant, because we eat so much prepared at home and my wife is just a great cook and she doesn't use many ingredients and you know we go to a restaurant like once every two or three weeks and it's like all the oils and sugars and fats, and again it's not the good or bad, it's just how do you feel Like. So she would do that and it would get.

Philip Pape: 29:20

She eventually had a little bit of anxiety. We said, hey, why don't we go out? And she just wouldn't enjoy it at all, no matter what it was. And eventually we started to become more intentional, like you said with her about hey, we are going to a restaurant, let's look at the menu, let's figure out together what might make sense and then understand that it's, you know, pretty close to what mommy makes at home. So, you know, give it a shot and then kind of see how you feel afterward. So I think that's a relevant story, but I want to understand from you for the listener how do you know what feels good?

Alana Bonnemann: 29:54

Yeah, well, it's interesting because her that level of anxiety is an indication, like I don't want to say red flag, but it's a, it's a big, it's an obvious sign that something is not going okay. So this can come in, like I mean, yeah, emotional things can come up stress and also we know that our brain and our gut are tight, like the brain access, like we know it's affected and what comes first. If your gut balance is also like your microbiome is out, then it affects your mental health and vice versa. So we know that mood or mental or emotional aspects do play into it. We also need to think about the physical effects that we get, like are we getting digestive cramps afterwards or reflux or just lethargy? You know what's happening with what we're eating or are we getting like super excited from like a bag of Oreos or whatever it is, like the sugar hits? So I think understanding how you're feeling because, okay, like I'm going to put this back down to a very basic thing the body has a life force that like flows through it and you can feel this life force, like if you clap your hands together, force that like flows through it and you can feel this life force, like if you clap your hands together, your hands start to tingle and you'll feel the life force dropping into your body to feel those feelings.

Alana Bonnemann: 31:15

And I don't want to bring it back to emotions all the time, but I think, like a lot of the times I'm working with people, it does come back to how they're feeling, whether they are stressed, whether they have anxiety. Those feelings also have a certain vibration in our body as well. They're not something to suppress and it's really good that you kind of talk through with your daughter. Okay, how can we do this? Because they're there telling us something Anger, for example. We need to listen to our anger. Or, if we're having guilt, listen to that. And what anxiety? What is it trying to tell us and why is it trying to tell us that?

Alana Bonnemann: 31:45

So I've totally diverged, but I think when, like when you, when we want to think about what feels good, you can have the mental side or the physical side of it. Sometimes they're conjoined and then you want to also tap in and listen to that and also perhaps honor that as well, because I think sometimes in your body it'd be like I don't actually want that. For example, if you've eaten breakfast and then you're going out for brunch and you're not hungry but you're eating, to be polite, because it's brunch. Then, even though your body's saying, but I'm not hungry, you kind of override it and then eat anyway. Even though your body's saying, but I'm not hungry, you kind of override it and then eat anyway. So in what ways can we kind of honor our body and listen to what our body's saying?

Philip Pape: 32:35

I think that's the core of it. That piece is actually very powerful in my opinion because if you go, if you extrapolate it to something like alcohol, which is so socially conditioned and, I'll say, twisted in terms of how it's portrayed right as this wonderful thing, and you think of the pressure people put on themselves just to imbibe because they're with people, because of the social whatever, that's kind of the extreme case of it, but I do like the idea that your hunger cues for example you alluded to your context of where you are with people is a variable, it's a very strong variable in your environment and you have control. You don't have control over that, but you have control over what you do within that situation. So understanding why you're making your decisions is really important. Speaking of why, when you go to the grocery store, because now we can get a little practical, get a little more practical.

Philip Pape: 33:24

This is all practical, I shouldn't say it's not, it's all right. They go to the grocery store now and that's a powerful place to be, because that is where you're purchasing all the things that are going to go in your body over the next week or so. Potentially if you cook a lot at home, which I recommend, but to each his own. That balances the. We'll say nutrition quality, cause we don't want to say good or bad, we don't want to say healthy, we want to say like the quality of the food for what you need, and feel with the enjoyment, with the practicality, with the indulgences, like how do we make it all work?

Alana Bonnemann: 33:56

We go to the grocery store. Yeah, I love that. Well, I find, to be honest, I find the grocery stores to be a rather depleting and depressing place. I mean, in Germany I feel like when I go to the fresh produce, all year round I have capsicums, paprika I'm not sure what you call them cucumbers, tomatoes and salad. I feel like the whole year these things are on offer and that is very like. That is a very limited amount of food.

Alana Bonnemann: 34:23

So if you want to kind of get the most out of what you're eating, you need diversity. You need to have diversity. I like to follow the. I like to follow the kind of what do you call it? I guess, let's say, rule If I have eaten it yesterday, don't eat it again today.

Alana Bonnemann: 34:39

So this way you're just changing up what you're eating, and there's some people who don't like having a lot of variety. But this means if you're eating apples like, just change the type of apples that you're eating. I guess, when things are in season, to also kind of eat with the seasons as well. But this is also really difficult. I mean, you can't. That means, you know, for us in Germany, probably in the States as well six months of the year it's winter and you can't have a lot of diversity. There's like potatoes and cabbage. So you need to get kind of clever and see how you can perhaps it's frozen stuff, you know to kind of bring in that diversity. And then when you are thinking of diversity, because you still want to have fun, you don't want it to just be fruits and veggies.

Alana Bonnemann: 35:22

You can't just live on fruits and veg and a good quality protein. You want to be able to kind of have fun. So I don't follow like a cheat day or a certain time, but it comes back to that, really said over and over again, this 80-20 rule. You want to make sure that the foods that you are eating they are as whole and fresh as possible but then also have room for fun. And I think if you've strictly followed something, a high regime, then it might be hard to relax a bit, and if you've strictly just always relaxed, it's hard to have a good regime. But with practice and it does take practice, practice is the progress in this you find a way of what I thrive on and what I can kind of add to.

Alana Bonnemann: 36:10

I think, with the foods that, let's say, less nutritious, the ones that are at least highly processed, the food like substances, why are we eating them? We need to kind of strip back to okay, how did we sleep? Do we need energy? Are we grabbing them for quick energy fixes? Are we coming back from a week of complete, you know, hard work? We're exhausted, we're stressed. Okay, we're eating them to kind of, you know, put down that feeling, or are we feeling sad? Or are we bored and therefore eating those foods? I think it's not necessary. It's what I tried to allude to before. It's not the foods, necessarily, but the reasons why we're eating them play a bigger part in the problem of them. Everyone knows how to eat healthy. If you say eat healthy, people know what that means. But actually doing that is the difficult step, like the actual act of doing it is what makes it hard. So yes, variety is number one, diversity variety and diversity.

Alana Bonnemann: 37:08

uh proportion so 80, 20, and then yeah, with also like moderation it's you know, yeah, moderation is everything as well.

Stephanie: 37:20

The most value that I got from this was the fact that I had someone that I could talk to about anything and that there was going to be no judgment. It was just well, here are your goals, here's the best way that you're going to achieve it, and then let's work together to help you feel inspired and motivated to do that and there's a lot of people out there trying to be coaches and not all of them have done the work and also just be a genuine person that is positive and coming from the heart in terms of wanting to help, and Phillip really embodied all of those qualities. I would recommend him to just about anyone that's looking to achieve goals in that realm of their nutrition and building new habits.

Philip Pape: 38:06

It's simple, but we do like to complicate things and until you've done it intentionally, you don't know what you are capable of. I mean, that's the way I see it is that right now, as we talk about food, I'm thinking of different foods because it's about lunchtime here. But I also thought what came to my head is the more I personally have gone toward this, you know, nutrient-dense, whole food, diverse approach, and I have a long way to go. Like we all do, we have things that we want to improve with the more I those foods and actually don't crave or want or need the quote unquote indulgences as much to the extent that, like, I can think of a bowl of frozen shrimp with some cocktail sauce as a really tasty, delicious afternoon snack that I would crave and that's awesome. Like, for me, that's great because I consume protein and some taste and whatever. It satisfies the all the things.

Philip Pape: 38:53

So the 80, 20 rule we use it a lot in this industry because I think it is effective. I think the idea of 80, 20 permeates a lot of things. Actually, there's the Pareto principle where, like, 20% of your effort leads to 80% of the results and I think same thing here is that 80, 20 is a good split. But when we say that, how does someone concretely do that? And I ask because we have different approaches. If I had a client who's just tracking their food, it literally is math. It's just like, let's make sure the calorie, like 10, 20% of your calories effectively are, you know, you're not crazy, like half and half like processed foods. Let's say, how do you do it when you're tracking in other ways or not tracking, or however you'd like to do it with clients?

Alana Bonnemann: 39:34

So I focus on what we add in first, like what can we add into your diet? Like when I first start working with someone, I don't ever strip anything away. Like, similar to you, I don't want to restrict anything and usually when you add things into the diet and that becomes a new way of how you do things, it just naturally pushes things out. And while you don't necessarily see that, I mean you like, sometimes with my clients I keep like a food and mood journal what are you eating and how do you feel? So they're writing it down. There, is that awareness there and that assertiveness. But, yes, it's not what you see to be like, oh, I've done this and tick, it's kind of done. It's more of a okay, like I realize that this week I haven't, yeah, eaten this, that and the other.

Alana Bonnemann: 40:18

But in saying that, while we're bringing in foods, I'm also working on the reasons that they would grab for those 20% rule, you know, in the first place Because, again, if your way of dealing with boredom or exhaustion is to go for food, that's always going to be your default, no matter how, how hard you try to stay disciplined at some point you can do it now. For a few months. You can even do it for a year, but if then something happens that just makes you break, then you're going to default back to that. So we need to change that default loop, and so it kind of works. You're working in two ways we're working to break the cycle and also just add in things that are then going to make you also not want them to.

Philip Pape: 41:05

Love it. Change the default loop that hits it right on the head with that phrase. Right, Because it's what is the thing you're always coming back to when life throws its worst at you, right that's the habit you want.

Philip Pape: 41:18

It's not what do you deviate from because of life. So that's powerful In that case. One of the things that many people face regularly is all the social things right, going to restaurants, being asked to go to happy hour, wanting to go to a party, vacation, travel, all the things. And you know there's so many like download my you know travel eating guide, download my travel training guide, and it's like all the traditional things like plan ahead and look at the menu and all that. But how do you get people to become comfortable in their default while maybe doing having that kind of lifestyle?

Alana Bonnemann: 41:53

To honestly, to start off, I don't.

Alana Bonnemann: 41:55

People are like I'm going on holidays to Italy, I'm like enjoy Italy. So at the start it's like that. At the start it's like that, and that's the thing is, on holidays your 20 becomes your 80 and your 80 becomes your 20. And if you're on holidays for longer than three weeks, after some point you probably get constipated and then realize that you need to change and kind of go back to the ways that you're doing things. But as people become more understanding that this way of living, living aligned with their health and I also call it your higher healer Once you tap into something which makes you feel completely different from inside to out, you are unapologetically kind of show up for yourself.

Alana Bonnemann: 42:39

The drinking culture is a huge one, because to go to a bar I live in Germany to go to a bar and everyone's drinking beer and you kind of ask for like a water, sparkling water you know people will say you know like what's, what's wrong with you?

Alana Bonnemann: 42:52

Or oh yeah, you're the healthy and you know at some point, like I stopped caring, like I care what you. Or oh yeah, you're the healthy and you know at some point, like I stopped caring, like I care what you think, but I care about what I think about myself more and I'm living my life in a certain way because I, like, this is how I want to live. So I think you know, when you start, you know in your perhaps not fully committed, then, yes, go on holidays and enjoy it and go to the bar every now and then and live that life, that's totally fine. But for the people who are then aligned with their authentic way of living and say, no, this is what I stand by and this is how I do it, you can then also, but to do that, you have to find what your truth means to you, and that is I'm packing all that uncomfortable stuff that you don't want to do in the first meeting.

Philip Pape: 43:39

For sure, and you want people to fall on their faces sometimes and, like, I saw this funny meme that says, even if you fall on your face, you're still moving forward, right, which is the truth of it.

Philip Pape: 43:51

And since they have a guideline and a structure they're trying to follow. And again, I always come back to engineering words, but effectively, what you're saying right is be intentional. Then you know when you're deviating, because you're being more aware of what's happening in your body. So, let's say, you do go to a restaurant and I say restaurant because that is where some people struggle, right, because it's easy to just over-consume and over-indulge with, even if you are thinking I'm going to have lean meats and vegetables because those taste good, and I'm gonna do this, and that you've got, of course, the alcohol is its own thing You've got the appetizer flowing, you've got all the salads and then the food and the dessert, potentially there for the taking, and you're trying to enjoy this social experience. It's like people are thinking, okay, great, like five days, six days out of the week, my default is this wonderful thing where I'm in tune with my body, and yet I go to a restaurant, and how do I still do that? Right, that's kind of what I'm getting at. People are wondering about.

Alana Bonnemann: 44:43

Yeah, that's a good question, because when you go to the restaurant, like at the end of the day, like when you see food as calories in, calories out, so to say, or I have to eat this many or I can't eat that many it becomes really difficult. Because then you know it's like oh, a beer, is this mention? Okay, but I'm also having this meal. Oh, I don't want a dessert too, and then you kind of it becomes stressful. But if you eat till satiation, like and again honoring your body, I don't want to eat anymore. Or like you know, I'm listening to your hunger cues then do you eat just to like stuff yourself?

Alana Bonnemann: 45:24

And that might the answer might be yes, because it tastes good and like. No judgment there. But you know, if you are living the life where you're like I'm eating because I'm hungry and I'm stopping when I'm full and you're aware of that, then that actually changes the whole entire meal eating out experience. So I think that's kind of how I. Yeah, because listening to our hunger cues and our satiation cues are one of the biggest parts of tapping into our bodies. So I think that's one of the largest parts there.

Philip Pape: 45:54

And that's very consistent with everything you've said today, which is being in tune with that and letting that drive decisions in the moment and not having to artificially constrain yourself via whatever it is right. It's funny you say that because I think of going to an Italian restaurant around here where it's almost all pasta dishes with rich sauces and things, and of course, you can choose to have different, you can choose other things on there, and I know if I have a Alfredo sauce it's probably not going to feel great. So right there I'm thinking okay, my body tells me maybe I want a lighter sauce just to begin with, but even if I do choose to have it, half of that's going to go in the takeout box, Like for sure, because you're right.

Philip Pape: 46:39

You, unless you're mindlessly eating, which is another piece of this is intention.

Stephanie: 46:40

My wife, my kids and I we all have. We have four boxes Every time we go to the restaurant.

Philip Pape: 46:41

This is lunch tomorrow, which is great, because then you save money and you have more food ready to go for the next day.

Alana Bonnemann: 46:44

Yeah, but it comes down having this intention and tapping in with your body, like what we first started talking about. Why is there so much fear around food? And I think, when you're not sure what you should be eating and how you should be eating it, which is aligned with you know, how much exercise are you doing, depending on how much you need? Are you listening to your body's cues? Am I hungry, am I full? Is it appetite?

Alana Bonnemann: 47:08

Appetite's the psychological want for foods, like you walk past Subway and you're like, oh, actually I do want a Subway. That's your appetite, that's not hunger, hunger is. You know you might be lightheaded, your stomach has like some pains in it, like that's the hunger. And so when you yes, when you kind of align with what your goals are and why you're doing this whole transformation, aligning it with exactly how you feel in your body, you become perhaps like more convicted in your food choices and you know I'm making these right choices and there is less of that. Oh, like carbs are bad, I'm scared of carbs. Can't have a cake because, oh, it's bad, and that all will then kind of fall away.

Philip Pape: 47:49

Yeah, I'm hearing that you become confident in your choices, you own them, you become the, you know, the master of your own, your own choices, which is a great place to be. So, as we wrap up cause I think we covered, we covered a lot of great things at all, interconnected ultimately, which is wonderful, and that happens. Is there anything you wish I did ask and if so, what is your answer?

Alana Bonnemann: 48:09

Oh, that's a lovely question. I think perhaps is there and you also touched on this the word holistic. Is there a more holistic approach to self-mastery, optimizing ourselves, getting in contact with our own self, and how can we do that? I think a holistic approach, which is the movement, the strength as you talk about, is one aspect. The biochemical, the toxins, also the nutrition that we put into our body, is the second. The mental and emotional aspect is the third and then I think all encompassing in that is also perhaps I almost want to say spirituality to it, to understanding that our bodies I mean people call our bodies temples you always hear this like your body's your temple.

Alana Bonnemann: 49:00

I feel like your bodies are actually inherited, like a lifelong inherited mansion that you kind of get from your forefathers, and it's filled with habits, these cycles and the way that, the things that we triggered us, perhaps even why we are the way we are, and we need to do some deep work on that first, or at some point to do some work there, because this connects you with a higher version of yourself, a higher, a higher power, which which really then drives you to make the choices, not because you think you should or not because society says you should, but because you genuinely want to be at that place.

Alana Bonnemann: 49:45

I think, yes, you didn't have to ask that question. But when I think about the underlying basis of why I do what I do and how I do everything, I think that is also it, because ultimately, in the end of the day, I would love to see in everyone like a healer in every home. I would love to have a space, a space and a healing area in your house where you have the ability to heal. My dad's a chiropractor and the chiropractic philosophy is the power that made the body, is a power that heals the body, and I genuinely stick by that. And of course, food and of course movement has something to do with that. Of course our mental health does, but then again also the spiritual too.

Philip Pape: 50:22

I love that. I love that. Yeah, I'm definitely open to many of these ideas and to me it comes down to purpose and something deeper and philosophical that we can't necessarily explain. And I love how you said we're connected to our forefathers because we are, I think, physiologically and like genetically, but also there's something that's passed through us culturally and and in some other ways we can't explain potentially. So it's great, the mysteries of the universe, beautiful, all right, we love that.

Stephanie: 50:51

We love that.

Philip Pape: 50:53

So, all right, all right, we want people to find you and I'll definitely be including a link to your podcast, since, um, you know, again, we have another conversation where you interviewed me there. But where do you want folks?

Alana Bonnemann: 51:02

to reach out. Come to alannabonnemancom. I mean that's, if you want to reach out. I guess that's where I hang. Instagram is also there, youtube, linkedin, they're all there, um, but I think the hub of everything I do is at alannabonnemancom.

Philip Pape: 51:17

Cool, We'll make it simple. Podcast alannabonnemancom. You can find all of your resources. You're a very special person, Alanna. I've had lots and lots of interviews, but this was so positive, so much energy and enthusiasm, and I love the fact that we are different in so many ways but also care about the same thing and have purpose and spirituality in abundance. I think so. Thank you again for coming on.

Alana Bonnemann: 51:40

Thank you as well for having me. I also very much enjoy that we have similar outlooks and work in very different ways, but get the same result and also have the same approach. We're always learning.

Philip Pape: 51:53

We learn from each other, so thank you so much for coming on. Likewise, we're always learning, yeah, and we learn from each other, so thank you so much for coming on.

Alana Bonnemann: 51:58

Likewise. Thank you, Philip.

Lose Fat vs. Burn Fat (Randle Cycle, Low-Carb, and Fasted Training) | Ep 327

⭐ Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts (by May 31) for a chance to win a free protein supplement in our monthly giveaway!

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Confused about "fat burning" versus actual fat loss? Learn why you can be "burning fat" during workouts while not losing body fat.

Today I break down the difference between fat oxidation (using fat for fuel) and fat loss (reducing stored body fat) that most people misunderstand.

You'll discover how the Randle Cycle affects metabolism, why fasted cardio isn't the magic bullet you've been told, and what really determines whether your body sheds fat... regardless of what fuel you're burning in the moment.

We clear up some misunderstandings about low-carb diets (keto and carnivore), being fat adapted, and what's actually most important for fat loss.

Main Takeaways:

• Fat oxidation (burning fat for fuel) and fat loss (reducing stored body fat) are completely different physiological processes

• The Randle Cycle explains why carbs temporarily suppress fat burning, but this doesn't make low-carb diets superior

• Low-carb diets increase fat oxidation but don't produce better fat loss results when calories and protein are equated (in fact, sometimes the opposite is true)

• For successful fat loss, focus on what directly influences body composition

• Adopting an engineering mindset means optimizing for outcomes (fat loss) rather than processes (fat oxidation)

Timestamps:

0:01 - Why burning fat doesn't always mean losing fat
 3:14 - Fat oxidation vs. fat loss
5:09 - The Randle Cycle and fuel selection (glucose vs. fatty acids)
9:36 - Low-carb diets and fat loss
13:42 - Any benefits of fasted cardio (beyond fat burning)?
15:04 - What actually determines fat loss
16:25 - Optimize for outcomes, not processes
17:55 - What you measure vs. what matters = more freedom

Why Fat-Burning Workouts Don't Always Burn Fat Off Your Body

If you're doing fasted cardio or a low-carb diet because you think it's keeping you in "fat-burning mode," this episode is going to clear up a massive myth and save you a lot of time, frustration, and spinning your wheels.

There’s a huge difference between burning fat for fuel and losing fat from your body. Most people confuse the two, and that’s why they aren’t getting the results they expect. They’re told to do things like low-carb diets, keto, fasted workouts, or fat-burning workouts and assume these things directly lead to fat loss. But that’s not how physiology works.

Fat oxidation vs. fat loss: they’re not the same

When you burn fat during a workout (technically called fat oxidation), your body is simply using fat as a fuel source in that moment. That doesn’t mean it’s pulling fat from your love handles or belly to do it. Fat loss happens over time when you consistently eat fewer calories than you burn (a calorie deficit), forcing your body to mobilize and reduce stored fat.

In fact, it’s entirely possible to burn a lot of fat during the day and still gain fat if you’re overeating fat at the same time. Low-carb diets increase fat oxidation, yes, but they also increase fat intake so it nets out. It’s not about what fuel you’re burning right now, but whether your body is consistently dipping into its fat reserves overall.

What the Randle Cycle actually tells us

The Randle Cycle (aka the glucose-fatty acid cycle) explains how your body chooses which fuel to burn. If glucose (from carbs) is available, your body burns that first. If it’s not, it turns to fat. But just because your body is burning fat doesn’t mean you’re losing fat. You’re simply using the fuel you gave it. If you ate a bunch of fat, your body will burn fat. If you’re fasting or low-carb, your body will burn fat because that’s what’s left. It says nothing about the fat stored on your body.

This is the trap a lot of folks fall into. They go low-carb, see high fat oxidation, and think they’re melting fat off their bodies. But if calories are equal (as shown in tightly controlled studies), low-fat diets actually result in slightly more body fat loss than low-carb ones. Why? Because calories and energy balance matter more than momentary fuel usage.

Fasted cardio isn’t a fat-loss hack

Fasted cardio is often touted as a way to torch more fat. Yes, you burn more fat during the workout if you haven’t eaten. But again, that doesn’t mean you’re losing more body fat. Over a 24-hour period, total fat loss is the same as with fed cardio when calories are equated. Multiple studies back this up.

Fasted training might feel good for some, be more convenient, or improve fuel flexibility, but don’t confuse burning fat in a session with actual fat loss. The long-term effect is what matters.

What really drives fat loss

If you want to lose fat and keep it off, stop chasing "fat-burning mode." Instead, optimize for the actual outcome: a better body composition. That means:

• Creating a calorie deficit you can stick to

• Prioritizing high protein to preserve muscle

• Strength training with progressive overload

• Recovering well (sleep, stress management, hormonal health)

• Making it sustainable for your lifestyle

These are the same principles I covered in the previous episode on the 3+3 Model of Optimal Fat Loss. You’re engineering a result, not chasing a metabolic label.

Train for strength, not just fat burning

Your workouts shouldn’t be about how many calories you burn. That’s short-sighted. Instead, use training to preserve muscle mass, drive performance, and shape your body. Cardio is fine, and walking is a great daily movement habit, but don’t fall into the trap of treating the gym like a fat-burning session. It’s a stimulus for change, not a punishment for what you ate.

Optimize for outcomes, not fuel types

From an engineering perspective, this all comes down to inputs and outputs. Your body needs energy. If you give it less than it needs, it has to pull from somewhere, usually stored fat. Whether it burns fat or carbs in the moment doesn’t matter. Focus on the systems that produce the result: sustainable eating, proper training, and consistent recovery.

Once you understand this, you can stop obsessing over being "fat-adapted" or timing your meals around workouts. You’ll get to your goals faster, with less frustration, and with strategies you actually enjoy.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you've ever been confused about why you can burn fat during a workout but not actually lose body fat, or why low-carb diets promise to keep you fat-adapted in fat-burning mode, yet sometimes fail to deliver results, this episode is for you. Today, we're uncovering the difference between fat oxidation and actual net fat loss that almost everyone misunderstands. You'll learn how the Randall Cycle affects your metabolism, why fasted cardio might not be the magic bullet you think it is, and what really determines whether you lose fat, regardless of what fuel your body is burning in the moment. 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 Pape, certified nutrition coach, and today we're looking at one of the most misunderstood concepts in fitness, and that is the difference between fat burning, or the technical term oxidation, and fat loss, which is literally losing fat from your body generally by losing weight and holding on to muscle. This confusion is often led to questions that come up on a daily basis, especially when I write or do an episode about carbs or low-carb diets, where people say, well, I'm fat-adapted or I burn more fat because I'm low-carb, and it's a complete misunderstanding of what's actually going on, and so people chase down ineffective diets, potentially restrictive diets that are miserable. They waste their workouts by not training the right way and then they get frustrated. They can't figure out why they're not seeing results despite doing the things you're supposed to do. To quote unquote burn fat. The reality is that fat burning and fat loss are two completely different physiological processes. It's unfortunate that they sound very similar, but if we can understand the distinction, it will help you improve your body composition because you'll be informed on whether you're putting your energy in the right place. So by the end of the episode, my goal is to help understand why things like low-carb diets, fasted cardio, other popular quote-unquote fat-burning strategies might not be working as promised. They might have some misdirection in there, and what you should focus on instead if you really want the results.

Philip Pape: 2:27

Before we dive in, I do have a quick favor to ask If you enjoy today's episode. Take a moment to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Each month, I'm randomly selecting one reviewer and they're going to receive a free protein supplement of their choice. This is my way of saying thank you for supporting the show, and the reviews help other people discover this show, why people like it and how it might help them to escape the sea of confusion, of misinformation that's out there. So again, go to Apple Podcasts, submit a five-star review, do it on your iPhone or Apple device, and if you don't have that device or don't use an Apple podcast, feel free to throw in a rating on Spotify, or just shoot me a message and say, hey, show's great, thanks for doing it, and that'll make my day All right.

Philip Pape: 3:14

So let's get into the topic and start by defining what we're talking about. The confusion between fat oxidation and fat loss is, honestly, at the heart. It is at the root of so many popular strategies today that are misguided, oftentimes because of this very thing. So what is the difference? Fat oxidation when we say fat burning, right, that is a metabolic process where your body breaks down fat molecules to produce energy, and that's what typically mean when they talk about burning fat during exercise or following a diet or in any situation, fasted training, etc. It's essentially the use of fat as fuel, which is great. We want to do that. We want to use our fat, especially if you're trying to lose it, which leads me to fat loss. See, fat loss actually is the reduction of stored body fat over time, and this is what most of us are actually trying to achieve. When we say we want to lose fat, it's not that we want to just burn fat in a vacuum. We want to lose the net fat stored on our body and we want to add more muscle. We want to lose fat right. We want to look better, leaner, more fit, we want to be stronger, more healthy, more athletic all of the things. So I think what most people miss is that these two processes burning fat for fuel in the moment versus reducing stored body fat over time don't always go hand in hand. In fact, oftentimes they don't go hand in hand. They're different, independent things going on. You can oxidize plenty of fat during your workouts. Going on, you can oxidize plenty of fat during your workouts, but not lose body fat from your body. Conversely, you can be primarily burning carbohydrates during exercise, yet still lose significant amounts of body fat over time, and so this disconnect leads to confusion, especially around low carb diets, keto carnivore, fasted training all sorts of strategies you know, fat burning workouts that promise to maximize fat burning. So that's why I'm creating this episode.

Philip Pape: 5:09

Now let's take a look at the physiology first. I think that's a great place to start and there's something called the Randall cycle. Now I heard about this a long time ago. I kind of forgot about it, specifically by name, until a YouTube commenter mentioned it and they said hey, if this is all true, if low carb diets might not be beneficial for a lot of people, um, why, what about the cycle? Why, why? Why isn't that the reason low carb diets would be so beneficial?

Philip Pape: 5:35

So the Randall cycle it's also known as the glucose fatty acid cycle. It was first described by Philip Randall in the sixties 1963. And it describes the relationship between carbohydrate and fat metabolism in our bodies. So essentially it explains that when your body has both glucose and fatty acids available right, glucose from carbs, fatty acids from fats available as fuel they compete with each other. So when glucose levels are high, your body's going to preferentially burn glucose and suppress fat oxidation right, so it's burning glucose because it's there instead of fat. When glucose levels are low, your body's going to shift to burning more fat.

Philip Pape: 6:15

Now, before I move on, notice what this means. This means when someone says glucose is the body's preferred energy source. That is a true statement, meaning it will burn that if it's available first, then it will burn fat. But of course, if you deprive yourself of carbohydrates, it has no choice but to burn fat. So let's continue. So this is kind of a reciprocal in a way, but it is a little bit asymmetric. Your body's designed to use whatever fuel's most readily available, but it's going to go for glucose first if it's available. That's why it's slightly asymmetric. But it's going to preserve whatever's in shorter supply effectively for when it might be needed later. And that's why the low carb advocates and the fasted cardio enthusiasts where they come in, because they on one hand correctly note that high insulin levels from carbohydrate consumption suppresses fat oxidation, but then they conclude that to lose body fat you should minimize carbohydrate intake to stay in that fat burning mode as much as possible.

Philip Pape: 7:11

But here's the flaw Very important what matters for fat loss isn't the fuel you're burning at the moment, but your overall energy balance over time. That's the key distinction here. So guess what's happening on a low-carb diet? You're eating more fats. In other words, you are taking in the same amount of energy. You're just burning a different type of energy because you have more of it. That's all you're doing, right? Whereas a person with moderate to high carbs is eating less fat. So they're burning more carbs. It all nets out to the same thing in terms of energy balance, and the Randall cycle simply addresses the fuel selection. You know you have a fuel selection dial. Am I going to burn glucose or am I going to burn fat? It's not the chronic change in your fat mass on your body.

Philip Pape: 7:57

So if I gave you a concrete example, let's say you're eating a low carb, high fat diet, right, keto, carnivore, we know them. Your insulin levels are gonna be relatively low and you'll be primarily oxidizing fat for fuel throughout the day. And if you're on keto, you might be to the point of past ketosis where you are what people call fat-adapted, where you just that's always what you're doing. So that's great. You're burning fat, right, you're burning fat right. But if your total calorie intake exceeds your expenditure, you're still going to gain body fat, even though you're primarily using fat as fuel, because the dietary fat you consume but don't immediately burn is going to get stored. So you're just eating more fat and that all that extra fat is now going to get stored, whereas with the other guy who's eating a balanced diet, the extra carbs are going to get or the fat's gonna get stored while you burn the carbs, it doesn't matter. The energy nets out, right. So again, conversely, if you eat a higher carb diet but you maintain a calorie deficit, right? So this is a lot of the people I work with who want a more flexible diet, more balanced, where they can enjoy their carbs, but then we put them into a calorie deficit, guess what? You're still going to burn glucose, primarily during and after meals because of the carbs, which suppresses your fat oxidation, but over a 24-hour period, your body's still going to need to tap into those fat stores once it runs out of glucose to meet its energy needs, resulting in net fat loss, just because you don't have enough energy period Total energy coming in. And that happens even though you're not maximizing fat burning. Right? Fat oxidation at every moment. And this distinction becomes important when we look at how this applies to specific strategies.

Philip Pape: 9:36

Let's start with low carb diets. I know I've already hammered it a little bit, but I want to go one level deep. And then there's absolutely no question that reducing carb intake shifts your metabolism toward greater fat oxidation. We know that. I'm not going to dispute that. That's a fact. Studies consistently show higher rates of fat oxidation both at rest and during exercise in people following low-carb diets, and that is what the Randall Cycle would predict, but it does not translate to better fat loss outcomes, because when calories and protein are controlled, the answer is an emphatic no, there is no difference.

Philip Pape: 10:14

A meta-analysis by Hall and Guo in 2017 found that low-fat diets actually produce slightly more fat loss than low-carb diets when calories were equated. Now, part of the reason for that could be because, guess what? Your body requires more energy to digest carbs than it does fat, just like it requires more energy to digest protein than carbs or fat. So that could be one of the reasons why. There's probably other reasons behind there we're not going to get into today, like anti-catabolism, supporting your training, et cetera. Similarly, and also your stress and metabolism. Okay, enough of that. But similarly, there was a study. It was a highly controlled metabolic ward study. Everybody locked in one place and fed a controlled diet. This is by Hall in 2015,. Found that a low-fat diet led to slightly more body fat loss than a low-carb diet, despite the low-carb diet showing increased fat oxidation.

Philip Pape: 11:06

Now, my point isn't to say that low-fat's better than low-carb diet showing increased fat oxidation. Now, my point isn't to say that low-fat's better than low-carb. It's to say that there's no advantage to low-carb when it comes to fat oxidation and fat loss. Right, yes, you have more fat oxidation, but you're not going to lose any more fat. Now it doesn't mean low-carb diets can't be effective for fat loss either. That's what I want to say. They can be, but not because they maximize fat oxidation.

Philip Pape: 11:29

They work for most people because, number one, you're going to increase your protein intake, which is something everybody needs to do to preserve muscle mass. Number two, it can improve appetite control in some people. Some people actually get hungrier on higher carbs. So having the higher fats and protein helps with satiety Totally true phenomenon that happens. Number three, you reduce water retention, and this is just the appearance of much more rapid progress early on. So when somebody says I went on keto and I lost 10 pounds, yeah, most of that's water weight. And then, number four, it makes your diet, I'll say, simpler in terms of food choices, which will have the illusion of making it easier to adhere, and actually does so for some people, but for most people it actually makes it harder long-term because you're avoiding things that you might otherwise want to enjoy. But again, there are exceptions. There are some people who are like, yeah, I'm happy as a clam on my very limited set of food choices, that's fine, okay.

Philip Pape: 12:20

The point here is the effectiveness of a low-carb diet for fat loss doesn't have to do anything at all with increased fat oxidation and has everything to do with energy balance. Always comes back to that, and the same principle applies then to fasted cardio. I want to talk about fasted cardio. This is an interesting one, because it is true that exercising in a fasted state, especially first thing in the morning before breakfast, results in higher fat oxidation during the workout. And if you have not recently consumed carbs to raise insulin, your body relies even more heavily on fat. So if you never eat carbs, of course you're fat adapted. It's just going to be burning a ton of fat. But this again acute increase, right? This energy selection process toward fat burning doesn't translate to greater fat loss over time, for all the reasons we've already discussed, but I'll just throw another study at you by Schoenfeld, a guy I very much respect in the space. This was from 2014,. Found no difference in fat loss between women performing fasted cardio versus fed cardio when total calorie intake was controlled. So what matters is total energy deficit if you're going for fat loss and not whether that deficit comes from fat or carbohydrate oxidation.

Philip Pape: 13:42

Right Now, that's not to say fasted cardio, has no benefits at all. Again, I love nuance and individualizing here. The first thing that comes to mind is it's more time efficient. For some people. You get up in the morning and you go right. The other thing is it might improve your ability to switch between fuel sources, and then this is an interesting one. Whether that's beneficial in any other way is, I think, still up for debate, but it does do. It does potentially do that it might help you feel better if you don't like exercising, you know, with food in the morning or you don't have time to eat food, you know there's lots of like logistical and preference reasons for this. And then it might have benefits for certain populations with certain metabolic disorders. I never disclaim that that's a possibility.

Philip Pape: 14:26

But if you're just trying to lose fat, you know you have to focus on creating a sustainable energy deficit, and our last episode was all about that. It was all about fat loss. So go listen to that if you missed it. And this happens through your new training. New training this is the combination of nutrition and training called new training, through your nutrition and training approach. Your lifestyle is going to be way more impactful than worrying about whether you're maximizing fat oxidation, and by way more I mean like all of it. In other words, extra fat oxidation from low carb or faster training, whatever is going to make not a lick of difference in your overall fat loss relative to what the other lifestyle changes will.

Philip Pape: 15:04

So if acute fat burning, fat oxidation, is not the key to fat loss, what is Well? Again, it comes down to basic thermodynamics and energy balance. To lose body fat, you have to create an energy deficit where you consume fewer calories than you expend. That is it, and that forces your body to mobilize whatever energy is stored and available right, preferentially from fat tissue, to meet its needs. And again, if you don't have enough calories coming in and you're still consuming carbs, it's going to go to carbs and then it's going to go to fat, but the net effect is the same, right. So the key factors here are then the total calorie intake versus your expenditure, your protein intake, resistance, training and the ability to adhere to your diet. Of course, recovery is massive as well All the things I spoke about in the last episode, the three plus three model of fat loss.

Philip Pape: 15:52

So go for, listen to that, for a deep dive. And none of these things depend on maximizing fat oxidation at any given moment. That is just energy systems. That is just your body saying hey, I'm efficient, you need energy, I need to give you energy. Let's see what's on the menu today. Is it glucose or is it fat? It doesn't matter, it's all energy to your body, right. And at the end of the day, the deficit and the energy balance is what matters. Which brings me to an important engineering principle that applies perfectly here Optimize for the outcome, not the process.

Philip Pape: 16:25

Now, you might be confused when I say this, because I talk all the time about how important the process is. But if we think of engineering where we focus on the end result, the product, the system, the service, the software, we then reverse, engineer and work backward to determine the most efficient way to achieve it. We don't get caught up in optimizing I'll say, individual steps if they don't materially affect the final outcome. We care about an efficient process that gets us to the outcome right, and then we focus on the process, but we optimize for the outcome and for fat loss. This means focusing on the factors that directly influence body composition over time, not on momentary metabolic processes that have little impact on the end result, like I'm not going to tell you to drink more coffee because it might have a slight thermo thermic boost in your metabolism. That's not an efficient way to optimize the process. Think of it like this If you're trying to save money, what matters is the difference between your income and your spending right, not whether you pay for a purchase with cash or credit. That's effectively what this is Glucose or fat, cash or credit doesn't matter. It's all coming from your energy budget. So, with fat loss, what matters is the difference between your intake and expenditure, not whether you're burning fat versus carbs at a given moment. And now I want to address one more aspect of this topic that causes a lot of confusion, and that is the difference between what we measure and what matters. And this goes back to what I just said about optimizing for the outcome.

Philip Pape: 17:55

When people follow low-carb diets or they do fasted cardio or any of these fat-burning tricks, they often point to indicators of increased fat oxidation as proof that they're working. They might mention ketones Look, look at all the ketones in my urine or blood work. They might mention a lower respiratory quotient RQ during exercise oh, I'm burning more fat because my RQ is lower. They might say that they are fat adapted. Oh, I feel great. I have steady energy, I don't have crashes, all my inflammation has gone away. You guys seen these posts by people. I went on carnivore and everything got solved. Well, these measurements do indeed confirm something they increase. They confirm increased fat oxidation. They might even confirm that you have um, eliminated something that didn't work for you and then you just never added, added back the things that do. That's fine, that's cool.

Philip Pape: 18:42

You start where you're at, but they don't predict better fat loss outcomes. They're measuring individual, independent aspects of the process rather than the result. And once you see that they don't actually produce fat loss and you reverse engineer it, you say maybe it's not necessary to focus on fat oxidation. In the end, what I actually focus on is measuring and tracking progress toward the end goal by optimizing the process. For that you know my change in body composition over time, your, your, your trend, weight, your measurements, your photos, your, maybe even body fat.

Philip Pape: 19:14

I'm not a big fan of measuring body fat, but there are ways to do body fat trends that are helpful. Um, has your strength gone up or down? Have you? How are your energy levels, your hunger, your well-being? And yeah, these are outcomes. And by outcome I don't just mean at the end of the day, did you lose 20 pounds six months from now, I mean all the things that come from your day-to-day actions in optimizing the process. Are you adherent to your calorie and protein targets? That is an outcome of the process of being consistent in hitting your targets. So, anyway, I can go on, but I think it's important to understand that difference Fat burning, fat loss two different things.

Philip Pape: 19:51

And this gives you more freedom once you understand that, with your nutrition, with your training or with your new training, just kidding. And that's what matters, right, what matters is your energy deficit. It makes it simple. It actually makes it really simple, and I'm kind of hitting again on some of the messages from the last episode which, again, I highly recommend listening if you didn't. But when you know that what matters is the energy deficit, it actually frees you in a lot of ways. It frees you with your meal timing. You could eat when your schedule and preferences match. You can include carbs I mean, that's the big one that comes to mind If you enjoy them, if they fuel your training, if you tolerate them absolutely. It informs your training.

Philip Pape: 20:34

You're not going to be choosing movement or training for fat burning. You're going to do something that supports your real goal, which is strength, muscle, athleticism, whatever, and then you can find a diet that works for you, not based on some metabolic theory that doesn't actually produce the results, it doesn't optimize for the result and that's much more enjoyable, in my opinion and they're going to produce better results because you're going to sustain them. That's what we're going for, right? The most optimal diet for fat loss is that one that you can stick with. I can say that to the cows come home.

Philip Pape: 20:59

Some people won't accept it. They want to cut their foods. They want to claim that fat adapted makes them superior in some way for fat burning, and it doesn't right. Energy balance is where it's at. All the other things are important for other reasons for health, for strength, et cetera. But today we wanted to talk about the difference between fat loss and fat burning, right? So, to recap, fat oxidation burning fat for fuel and fat loss, which is reducing stored body fat, are distinct physiological processes that don't necessarily go hand in hand. The RAND cycle look it up if you'd like explains why carb intake suppresses fat oxidation, but it doesn't prevent fat loss, because it's the energy balance that matters. Low-carb diets, fasted cardio they do increase fat oxidation, but they don't produce any more fat loss and some studies show they actually produce less.

Philip Pape: 21:48

For successful fat loss, you're going to focus on the factors that influence body composition over time. That's what's important for fat loss. Go listen to my last episode, the three plus three model of fat loss, for details. And then adapting an engineering mindset like we do here, means optimizing for the outcomes over days, weeks and months rather than optimizing for the process itself. The bottom line is that I don't want you to get caught up in chasing fat burning, because what's going to happen is you're going to do restrictive, weird, cult-like approaches. I'm sorry to put it that way, but you are. You're going to fall into a tribe. That's all about fat burning and you're actually not going to lose fat. And I want you to lose fat right. I want you to lose fat doing something that works for you, that feels great, that's good for your body, your preferences, your lifestyle, that's it All right.

Philip Pape: 22:32

If you found today's episode helpful, please take a moment to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and be entered for a random selection of one winner each month to receive a free protein supplement of their choice. And it means a lot to me when people let me know what they think of the show, and it means a lot to others when they understand what they're getting into, for better or worse. Just go to Apple Podcasts on your Apple device, search for Wits and Weights, click ratings and reviews and leave your feedback. Takes about one minute, but it makes a huge difference, so I really appreciate it. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember, when it comes to fat loss, it is not about burning fat in the moment. It's about creating the conditions for your body to lose fat over time. This is Philip Pape and you've been listening to Wits and Weights. I will talk to you next time. Bye.

The 3+3 Model of Optimal Fat Loss | Ep 326

Download my free Nutrition 101 for Body Composition guide to implement these principles with exact calorie and macro targets:
https://www.witsandweights.com/free/nutrition-101-guide

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Tired of regaining the weight or losing muscle every time you diet? Sick of feeling like garbage during fat loss phases?

Today I'm breaking down The 3+3 Model, a science-based framework for optimal fat loss that separates what you absolutely need from what's just nice to have.

Learn the 3 foundational elements you must have in place for effective fat loss (the non-negotiables), plus 3 powerful enhancers that can take your results to the next level (the optimizers).

This isn't about suffering through chicken and broccoli or earning your carbs with cardio. It's about engineering a fat loss process that preserves your hard-earned muscle, maintains your metabolic rate, and actually feels sustainable.

Main Takeaways:

• The 3 Non-Negotiables form the foundation of effective fat loss

• The 3 Optimizers enhance your results once the foundation is in place

• Weight loss is not the same as fat loss – this model ensures you lose fat while preserving your hard-earned muscle

• A properly executed fat loss phase can actually improve your body's future muscle-building capacity through enhanced insulin sensitivity and nutrient partitioning

Timestamps:

0:01 - Weight loss vs. fat loss and The 3+3 Model
4:12 - Non-Negotiable #1
7:41 - Non-Negotiable #2
11:02 - Non-Negotiable #3
15:05 - Optimizer #1
17:55 - Optimizer #2
20:56 - Optimizer #3
24:36 - How to put everything together
27:42 - Why a proper fat loss phase improves future muscle gain
29:11 - Final recap and tips to implement

The Fat Loss Framework That Actually Works Long-Term

Why most weight loss methods fail

Too many people jump into a diet with good intentions, drop weight quickly, and end up looking and feeling worse: skinny-fat, tired, hungry, and frustrated. That’s because most fat loss approaches don’t actually prioritize fat loss. They just cut calories and hope for the best. That means losing muscle, tanking your metabolism, and almost inevitably regaining the weight (plus some).

This episode breaks down the 3+3 Model of Optimal Fat Loss, a framework I’ve refined over years of coaching, research, and helping real people get results that stick. It’s simple, evidence-based, and scalable. We’ll cover the 3 non-negotiables you need in place before any fat loss phase, and 3 optional optimizers that can take your results to the next level.

The 3 Non-Negotiables for Fat Loss

1. High Protein Intake

You’ve heard this before, but it bears repeating: protein is the cornerstone of a successful fat loss phase. Aim for 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight. Here’s why:

• Preserves lean muscle while dieting (anti-catabolic)

• Reduces hunger and cravings (high satiety)

• Increases calorie burn due to its high thermic effect

If you’re not tracking your intake, chances are you’re not getting enough. Most people overestimate how much they eat. Start tracking and aim for protein in every meal.

2. Resistance Training with Progressive Overload

If you're not lifting, you're likely losing muscle. And that means your weight loss isn’t fat loss. Your body will only keep what it’s told to keep. Send the signal to preserve muscle by lifting 3-5x per week, emphasizing compound movements and pushing for progressive overload: more reps, more weight, more intensity over time.

During a deficit, you might not always make gains, but you need to train as if you are. That effort is what tells your body to retain muscle while burning fat.

3. Recovery

Recovery often gets overlooked, but it’s the glue that holds everything together. You can’t build or preserve muscle, control hunger, or keep stress in check without it. Prioritize:

• Sleep: Aim for 7-9 quality hours

• Stress management: Avoid overtraining, manage work/life stress

• Rest days and light activity (like walking)

Even a perfect diet and training plan will fall apart without proper recovery. Fat loss is a stressor, and too much stress means your body clings to fat and sheds muscle.

The 3 Optimizers to Enhance Results

1. Refeeds or Diet Breaks

Strategic refeeds (1-2 days at maintenance) or diet breaks (1-2 weeks) can:

• Improve diet adherence

• Replenish glycogen for training performance

• Temporarily support leptin and thyroid hormone levels

This is especially helpful for leaner folks or anyone experiencing mental fatigue or stalled progress. You don’t need them all the time, but used wisely, they make dieting more sustainable.

2. Creatine Monohydrate

Creatine is a well-researched, effective supplement to support:

• Strength and performance in the gym

• Muscle cell hydration (which may reduce breakdown)

• Cognitive benefits over the long term

Take 5g per day, every day, and let your body stabilize before your fat loss phase to avoid scale confusion from initial water retention.

3. Fiber and Micronutrient Density

Most people think about calories, protein, and maybe carbs. But if your diet lacks fiber and micronutrients, you’re making fat loss harder than it needs to be.

• Fiber (25-35g/day) improves satiety, digestion, and blood sugar regulation

• Micronutrients support metabolism, energy, and hormonal balance

Start by adding colorful fruits and vegetables, legumes, and whole grains (as tolerated). If you're afraid of carbs or plants because of what you saw online, reconsider. Real food works.

Final Thoughts

Most people start with hacks, gimmicks, or extreme diets and skip the actual foundation. The 3+3 Model flips that: start with what matters most (protein, training, recovery), and only then layer in the extras if needed. That’s how you make fat loss work without misery.

And remember: fat loss is just a phase. When done right, it sets you up for long-term success, better muscle gain afterward, and a more resilient metabolism.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

Have you noticed how most people lose weight but they end up looking skinny, fat rather than lean and athletic? Or maybe you've tried to lose weight yourself and felt weak, exhausted, constantly hungry. You gain the weight back. That's because there's a massive difference between just losing weight and losing fat while preserving muscle, and most people get this wrong. Today I'm breaking down what I call the 3 plus 3 model. This is a science-based framework to simplify fat loss so it's effective and sustainable. You're going to learn three foundational elements you absolutely need for fat loss and then three enhancements or optimizers that can improve your results. It is about working with your body's physiology to shed fat while maintaining your strength, energy and sanity.

Philip Pape: 0:58

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 Pape, certified nutrition coach, and today we're tackling a topic that confuses and frustrates a lot of people Fat loss, just fat loss in general, not weight loss, but specifically fat loss while preserving lean muscle tissue. Because here's the problem Most fat loss approaches or I should say weight loss approaches focus on creating a calorie deficit without any regard for body composition, metabolic health or long-term sustainability. Meaning, can you stick with this diet for a long time, and that's why so many people end up losing muscle along with fat, whether they're doing this naturally or with weight loss medications, and that tanks their metabolism. It ultimately results in regaining everything that they lost, plus some extra, and having higher body fat in the end. But it doesn't have to be this way. By understanding the science and implementing a framework, you can optimize fat loss for the results you want with less suffering, and that is what we're covering today with the three plus three model of optimal fat loss a way to simplify three things you must do and three things you can do to optimize. For the folks who are brand new to this, or even if you need a refresher and wanna do it the right way Before we get into it, if you wanna take a deeper dive into nutrition for yourself and set up your calories, your macros, your meal timing and all of that, I created a free guide that complements today's episode perfectly.

Philip Pape: 2:30

It's my Nutrition 101 for Body Composition Guide, again totally free, gives you a breakdown of how to set all this up, whether you want to lose fat or build muscle. Download it using the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightscom. Slash free to get a copy of that and many, many other guides, but the easiest way is to click the link in the show notes to get my nutrition one-on-one for body composition guide. All right, let's break down the three plus three model of optimal fat loss. And this is just a fancy name for a framework that I've refined through the years of coaching clients and studying the literature and making this podcast. So I'm hoping this ends up being kind of a definitive episode for hey start here when it comes to fat loss.

Philip Pape: 3:11

So what makes this different is it isn't just a list of tips. It isn't, you know, random workout recommendations. It is a hierarchical framework that distinguishes between what's absolutely necessary versus what can enhance your results. So, right off the bat, I'm trying to simplify it for you so that you don't get bogged down in all the confusion, all the information out there, and you can stick with what matters the most. So I've got two categories.

Philip Pape: 3:35

First, we have the three non-negotiables, and these are the foundational elements that must be in place for optimal fat loss. If you skip these, you are setting yourself up for failure, regardless of what else you do, and you will not lose fat. You might lose weight, but you'll lose muscle too. So that's the important distinction. Second, we have the three optimizers. These are strategies to enhance your results once you have the foundation. Some people jump to these first. Do not do that. Wait till you have the three non-negotiables in place. These aren't even required, these optimizers, but they can improve, sometimes significantly, the outcomes for most people.

Philip Pape: 4:12

So let's start with the non-negotiables. The first one is maintaining a high protein intake throughout your fat loss phase. Now, you thought I was going to mention resistance training, but honestly, if you can't get your nutrition dialed in early on, you're going to get frustrated when you start training due to some lack of energy or a feeling like you're not making progress building muscle. So, even though I often go on podcasts and say everyone should be strength training, that's the thing people are missing, I think.

Philip Pape: 4:42

When you are setting yourself up right now for fat loss from step one, one of the most accessible and important steps is increasing your protein, and that means consuming between 0.7 and one gram of protein per pound of body weight. You can go above that, for sure. There's diminishing returns above the one gram per pound, but I would try to get within that 0.7 to one If you're very lean, or if you're deep into a deficit, or if you're training really, really hard, you might want a higher end of that range or even above that. Or if you just love protein, you can eat more than that. It's fine.

Philip Pape: 5:15

But getting that minimum of 0.7 is so crucial during fat loss. And it's crucial for three reasons. The first reason is that protein is anti-catabolic. It is, of course, anabolic, meaning it helps build muscle, but it's also anti-catabolic. It sends a signal to your body to hold onto the muscle tissue you have when you go into that calorie deficit. This is why you often eat more protein in fat loss than when you're not in fat loss, and it sounds counterintuitive to people and it makes it a little bit more challenging to hit your fats and carbs. But it's so important for your body to tell it hey, go ahead and burn through your fat stores, don't burn through the muscle, right? Because we're trying to avoid that. We're just trying to burn fat.

Philip Pape: 5:59

The second thing is protein is very satiating. Research consistently shows high-protein diets reduce hunger. They increase feelings of fullness. Anybody who's doubled their protein knows this. When you're eating fewer calories in fat loss which is where we're trying to go with this, managing hunger becomes one of the most critical things to stick with the diet, and protein is your best ally here. Besides fiber, I mean protein is it? Third, protein has the highest thermic effect of feeding of all the macronutrients. What that means is your body will burn more calories simply because you're consuming more. Protein burns about 20 to 30% of its calories just to be digested and processed, compared to only about 5 to 10% for carbs and close to 0% for fats, and this gives you a bit of a metabolic advantage and it adds up over time. So, again, we want to get that protein up to a reasonable level before you hit fat loss, so that during fat loss it's much easier to hold on to muscle.

Philip Pape: 6:55

And you know I can't tell you how many times I've met people who thought they were eating quote unquote plenty of protein. And then they track their intake, they use macro factor or really any way to track, and you see that you are probably dramatically overestimating how much you consume. And if you think they're getting enough, just log food for a week and get back to me and let me know what you found. Also, don't forget about distributing your protein throughout the day. It's not, I'll say, required for fat loss, but it slightly optimizes your results. But again, this is not required for most people. They're going to want to have protein in every meal anyway, for the satiety, for the balance, for the blood sugar, for everything else. So that's non-negotiable Number one is get that protein up to at least 0.7 grams per pound of your body weight.

Philip Pape: 7:41

Non-negotiable number two, of course, here it is Resistance training with progressive overload. All right, this is the second non-negotiable. And that means lifting weights three to five times. I mean you could lift six times a week too, but at least three to four, but up to five times per week, with an emphasis, initially at least, on compound movements like squats, hinges, presses, pulls, tracking your performance and striving to maintain or increase your strength over time. Now you're going to be doing this at first not in a calorie deficit, but then, when you are in a calorie deficit, you are still going to intend and train hard to do this, to increase your numbers, even if eventually they potentially stall out because of the lack of resources. That's okay. You're basically giving your body the signal to hold onto muscle, whereas if you were sedentary and not training, your body is going to say, well, fat protein or fat muscle doesn't matter, it's all energy I'm going to burn what I need to burn to lose the weight you're asking me to lose.

Philip Pape: 8:44

Muscle tissue is metabolically expensive for your body to maintain when you're in a calorie deficit. Your body is trying to conserve energy right. It downregulates everything down to the cellular level, including your hormones, and it will happily shed muscle if it doesn't perceive a need to keep it. So for those of you thinking, ah yeah, I train, it's not consistent, whatever, I just want to lose weight, you're going to be in a world of hurt because you're going to just get skinny, fat, fluffy. You're going to have more body fat. That's not what we're trying to do.

Philip Pape: 9:09

Resistance training provides that signal that muscle's necessary and should be preserved. But it is not enough to just go through the motions. Please listen to me on this. So many of you are not training properly or hard enough or consistently enough. Progressive overload is the term we use. Whether you like the term or not, whether it's a misnomer, what it means is the continuous challenge to increase weight, reps and or volume. So something is going up that represents the increase in strength, and I say strength even though we're trying to build muscle. Hold on to muscle whatever. Ultimately, it's expressed through the ability to do more in the gym and that will keep the signal strong.

Philip Pape: 9:48

One of the mistakes I see people doing during a cut, during weight or fat loss, is reducing their training intensity. They think, well, I have less energy, so I should lift lighter. This is exactly wrong. It's exactly wrong. While you might need to reduce overall volume for your recovery, if your recovery is compromised, and that's okay maintaining the load, maintaining the intensity, the signal to your body, high enough percentage of your max is absolutely needed, because your goal isn't to burn calories during fat loss with your training, it's to preserve your muscle mass and strength. That is the main goal. We use the diet to manipulate the calories right, it's an input and output side of the equation and we don't want to become weaker and weaker and then we still have to eat less anyway. Plus, we lose muscle right, and I've had clients who were surprised to find they could actually gain strength while losing fat. And if you're newer, that's not unusual to gain strength, to gain muscle while you're losing fat, especially if you keep the deficit reasonable just by maintaining that training intensity and ensuring adequate protein intake right, your body is very adaptable when you give it the right signals. That's what we're doing. We're telling it to adapt in the way we want, not the way just on a whim. All right.

Philip Pape: 11:02

So the third non-negotiable is recovery. Now, this is a big topic because it includes, I'll say, all the other things that I work with clients on Sleep, stress management, hormonal health, and I find that these are even more individualized only because everybody's lives are so different that, compared to, say, training and food, these have a lot more variability. Compared to, say, training and food, these have a lot more variability and that's why it's important to personalize this. So what we mean by recovery is getting enough high-quality sleep, managing stress to a level that doesn't overwhelm you, that doesn't wreck your sleep Actually, they go hand in hand or wreck your cortisol, make it harder to lose fat because your metabolism is lower than it could have been. It's avoiding overreaching and overtraining by monitoring feedback like, um, I should say, soreness, right, your energy, how does it feel when you go into the gym and come out of the gym, recovery days, et cetera. Right, and of course it should be obvious why this is important.

Philip Pape: 12:06

But just to jump into the science of it, we start with sleep right. Poor sleep is going to dramatically increase your hunger hormone, ghrelin. It's going to decrease your satiety hormone, leptin. So this is a perfect double whammy for cravings, for overeating. You're going to seek out high energy foods with lots of fat, sugars, carbs and not the beneficial kind for you, generally very calorie dense foods usually, and then it's going to be harder to stick to your diet. Or you're going to be sticking to it with lots of willpower and then feeling very, very hungry. Either way is not great. So that's sleep right and the hours of sleep. There's a lot of research on that. It varies significantly by person. Usually you hear seven to nine. Some people can do okay as low as six and a half. Some people need that eight or nine hours of sleep. But then the quality is important and that's a whole other topic.

Philip Pape: 12:57

Stress is the other thing. Chronic stress and your perceived stress is going to elevate your cortisol. Cortisol is great signal for your body to try to hold onto fat, especially around your midsection, and so where's your body going to get the energy from Breaking down muscle tissue? So even if you are doing the other things, if stress is really high and you're trying to lose fat, you can still potentially lose muscle because of that stress.

Philip Pape: 13:25

And then hormonal adaptation is a real thing. That happens during fat loss, and it gets, I'll say, more exacerbated the longer you go or the more aggressively you diet, because your body's really smart. It's going to adjust your hormone levels to fight back against what it perceives as starvation. You know the effect of what you're doing to it. You're depriving it of resources to maintain where it was, and so something's going to have to give. So your body says you know what? Let's save some energy here, let's save some energy there. Downregulate your thyroid, downregulate your reproductive hormones things that aren't as important, let's say. And there you go. So proper recovery helps protect against these to the greatest extent you can, knowing that some of this is inevitable. No matter what, even in a perfect situation, you're still going to have metabolic adaptation from hormones.

Philip Pape: 14:07

The key here is, though, we're trying to mitigate those. So in all of these I would say, if you had to pick one, it would be sleep. It's probably the most underrated factor in the entire fat loss equation, even training and protein, because I've had clients who've made more progress just by improving sleep quality than any other dietary invention or modifying their training. Now, they're usually already training consistently and they're eating reasonably well, but the reason here is that the sleep directly affects your hormone regulation, which directly affects your hunger, your energy for your training and then your recovery, and it all viciously or beneficially cycles together. So those are the three non-negotiables protein, training and recovery. Those are the three non-negotiables protein, training and recovery. Those are the foundation for fat loss. Honestly, you could end the podcast right here, if you've never done this before, and focus on those. Pick one, start with it, roll in the rest, keep going. That is how I help clients in the first couple months of our journey together, before we actually go into a diet.

Philip Pape: 15:05

Okay, now, once you then are in your fat loss phase, or preparing for it, and you've done this before, or you've got the foundational habits dialed in and you want to optimize further, I'm going to give you three extra things to consider. Okay, optimizer number one is strategic refeeds or diet breaks. Now, a refeed is just usually a one or two day period where you eat up to your maintenance by increasing your carbohydrates. A diet break is just a longer period of doing that, usually one to two weeks or even longer. I mean, it could be indefinite and then you're just at maintenance. And these strategies while, yes, they do mitigate some of the hormonal adaptation to your leptin, your thyroid hormones, your reproductive hormones, those are just temporary. More importantly, they reduce your perceived mental fatigue, which helps you improve adherence right, be able to adhere to the diet, and they can help you restore some of your training intensity during that refeed.

Philip Pape: 16:07

We also see that research like well, there was the Matador study and there's also a study that Bill Campbell did that I talked about recently on the show called I think it was called the Weekend Diet. Look for that in the podcast feed, very recent. It suggests that again, not the Matador, but that particular study suggests that your lean mass preservation may actually increase if you use two-day refeeds every week, the catch being you're going to eat even fewer calories on the other five days to stay in the same deficit or you can go to slower weight of loss. So anyway, just to simplify this whole optimizer, think about whether you would prefer to have the same calories every day and that would help you be consistent and adhere, or if you want to have a little bit lower calories on the weekdays and come all the way up to maintenance on the weekends Great strategy. You want to learn all about it? Go check out my recent podcast, the Weekend Diet.

Philip Pape: 17:02

This can be really helpful for leaner clients who are pushing into lower body fat. This can be helpful for high-stress periods when adherence is a little more challenging. These are not cheat days. This is a controlled, structured approach that can be really important. Now that's refeeds.

Philip Pape: 17:16

Diet breaks is the longer breaks you might need. Like someone posted in the Facebook group hey, I've been dieting for 15 months. I've had these great results. Should I take a break? And my immediate response is just a yes, not even a well, it depends. It's kind of she's reaching out with a little bit of a cry for help, saying how she feels fatigued. I'm like okay, that's your sign. Let's just take a break. There's no reason to be miserable and suffer and push it for longer than you need to just to get to a number, when the more sustainable way to do that is to take a break right now. So that's optimizer number one is refeeds or diet breaks. Optimizer number two is creatine monohydrate.

Philip Pape: 17:55

Now, creatine is a supplement and I was hesitant whether this would be in here, because to me, supplementation is just the very tippity top 1% after you've done everything else, and very individualized. But creatine specifically is helpful to just about everybody for training and almost everybody might benefit long-term from cognitive health as well, according to the latest research. And it's very easy to do. Most people have no symptoms or almost everybody is symptom-free. There's a very tiny percentage of people who are actually allergic to it and then there's some people that just don't respond like 10 to 20% of people don't respond. But it's worth attempting, it's worth trying. And this is taking five grams a day of creatine monohydrate starting trying. And this is taking five grams a day of creatine monohydrate starting basically now and just continuing to take it for the rest of your life.

Philip Pape: 18:45

Creatine is supposed to support strength and power output and that could be even more helpful when you're in a calorie deficit so you can maintain your intensity. It increases muscle cell hydration, right. That's why your muscles fill up a bit at first and you gain a couple pounds on the scale of fluid weight, which is totally normal. But that muscle cell hydration can actually reduce muscle breakdown, catabolism, and might help preserve fat-free mass and improve your recovery during fat loss. And that's why I wanted to throw it in here, because creatine does all these things, it may give you an advantage during fat loss and then, finally, it may give you some advantage during fat loss and then, finally, it may give you some improved mental clarity during the cut, usually on higher doses though that's the caveat usually up in the 15 or even 20 gram range.

Philip Pape: 19:29

It is safe. It is inexpensive. It's one of the most well-researched supplements out there. If you're not taking it already, it is definitely worth considering, but do so long before you start your fat loss phase so that you can experience the bump in weight early. Let things normalize, get through any minor bloating or issues with hydration early on, because you should drink a lot of water with your creatine and kind of. Let it normalize and now you're in a good place to know where you truly stand with your maintenance calories to go into the fat loss phase.

Philip Pape: 19:58

And, by the way, just another shout out to the guide that I have, because this episode is not about, uh, setting up your fat loss phase. This is more about the foundational habits you need for fat loss, the actual numbers like how do you determine your calories, macros, all that. I call that the easy stuff, even though some people, people, reach out every day saying I have no idea what to eat for my fats and carbs. I'm like well, it's because you need to track and become aware and then know what your goal is. And there's a way to get that. So download my guide attached to this episode, the Nutrition 101. That will walk you through those.

Philip Pape: 20:32

Today is the non-negotiables and the optimizers. Okay, optimizer number three fiber and micronutrient density. And I left this for last so that you remember it in your head as this podcast will wrap up afterward. It's the most fresh thing in your mind of the optimizers. So this third optimizer is getting enough fiber intake and micronutrient density in your diet.

Philip Pape: 20:56

Okay, and I'm sorry, carnivore and low carb folks, you are not optimizing for fat loss or for long-term health, longevity or performance on a extremely low carb diet generally and I say generally because the vast majority of people will improve, not in those restrictive diets. A tiny percentage of people might thrive on those diets because they have all sorts of intolerances or inflammation from eating those foods. But I'm saying in general that if you are fearful of consuming fiber or vegetables or plants, don't be. Don't be fearful for any of the claims you hear on social media. Don't avoid them just for that reason, avoid them, because it would make sense for you. If that makes sense, all right. So what does this look like? I would say females consuming at least 25 grams of fiber, males consuming 30 to 35 grams of fiber a day, keeping in mind that that gets more challenging when you're in fat loss because the calories are lower, but it also becomes even more effective and helpful in doing so.

Philip Pape: 22:00

Now let's talk about how and then why. So the how is just filling your plate with colorful, high-volume foods, all sorts of vegetables, berries, even legumes, even whole grains. Yes, grains are fine if you can tolerate them. You know, being aware of the calories and the calorie density for your goal, fiber. So the why? Fiber promotes satiety, keeps you full, but it also supports smooth digestion. It reduces issues like bloating that can make a deficit feel worse than it is.

Philip Pape: 22:33

Micronutrients found in all sorts of variety of foods, especially plant-based foods and, by the way, I'm a big meat eater. I love my protein and animal-based products. I'm not vegan or vegetarian, but I love my plants as well, because the diversity is where it's at Magnesium, b vitamins, iron, potassium all the things that support thyroid function, your metabolism, your energy. Yes, you can supplement, of course. I mean vegans and vegetarians often have to supplement with things like B12. People on carnivore often have to supplement. In my opinion, everyone should supplement with magnesium, most likely because we're deficient no matter what you eat, given today's food environment. So if you can focus on nutrient-dense foods, it can reduce.

Philip Pape: 23:13

It can help with other things like food noise and decision fatigue, making your adherence easier. It can actually help with emotional eating and guilt and shame over foods. Believe it or not? Yes, it can, because what you're doing you're adding in things that make your body just feel so good and your digestion smooth and you feel full and satisfied on these whole foods. And this is in addition to the protein we already talked about. And, of course, fats are in there as well, naturally, as you're eating whole foods.

Philip Pape: 23:43

And when I talk to clients, they often report feeling initially hungrier after they go from a junk food type diet to a I shouldn't even use the word junk food. See, there's a label that we try not to use, but a food predominant with ultra-processed foods as opposed to whole foods, and then they switch to more whole foods, and that transition is important because you've got to give it a little time. What's actually happening is they're becoming more aware of their true hunger signals, because processed foods can mask your natural satiety cues the way they're designed and when you return to whole foods it's going to bring back your body's natural regulatory mechanisms. So do it before you go into fat loss. Again, a lot of this is prep work for fat loss. That's the irony of this whole thing is it is to make fat loss easier so that when you go into that deficit, all the things are dialed in to make it sustainable.

Philip Pape: 24:36

So how do we integrate all these components of the three plus three model? Remember the hierarchy. First, ensure you have the three non-negotiables in place High protein intake, resistance training with progressive overload, proper recovery. These must be consistent, and I'm going to say consistent every day. Obviously, you're not going to train every day and you're not always going to hit your protein. You're going to have some days that are less than others, but you want to do something every day for these. And again, training. You might only train three days a week, so the days you're not training, you're gonna focus on recovery in terms of getting enough sleep or walking enough, et cetera. But they've gotta be consistent. Then you're gonna layer in the optimizers as needed for your individual circumstances, your preferences, your biofeedback. Not everyone needs all three. I do have clients that don't take creatine. They're just fine, but they're nice tools to have in your arsenal.

Philip Pape: 25:29

And there's a few insights I want you to take away from this model that probably challenge the conventional wisdom. You've heard the first one. If you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, you've heard this. But if you're new to it, it's important. Weight loss is not the same as fat loss period. You can lose weight and lose muscle, which is not the goal at all. This is what happens when people go on Ozempic and they don't have any guidance with regard to training and protein and they just lose a ton and ton of muscle up to 30, 40% of the weight lost as lean mass or muscle. And so this model, this three plus three, is just a simple way in your head to say hey look, my goal is to protect against this scenario. I'm trying to lose fat, I'm not trying to lose weight, I want to look better, I want to feel better, I want a better body composition.

Philip Pape: 26:13

Second is you don't have to do traditional cardio to lose fat unless you enjoy it or you need it to create the well no, I shouldn't say it unless you enjoy it. That's all I'm going to say. Resistance training provides the extra, the stimulus you need for body composition. Walking provides the overall movement. Right, we didn't even really talk about that in detail, but getting your steps, walking, moving, is the priority when it comes to quote unquote cardio. And then only after that would I consider something like sprinting once or twice a week, if needed, if needed. The third thing here in terms of challenging conventional wisdom is that muscle retention is a skill, like many of the things we talk about. It's a skill, it's a process of personal improvement that's going to be developed over time.

Philip Pape: 27:00

Your fat loss phase does not have to feel like a collapse in your performance and health. It doesn't have to feel like a switch. When most people go on a diet, they think of it as this period of suffering. I'm going on a diet, I'm saying no, I can't do this, I'm not going to eat quote unquote bad foods. It's all these labels, morality behind it, judgment, guilt, fear, shame. But in reality, if you do it right, this can be an enjoyable process that doesn't feel like suffering at all, can be quite reasonably done, and you have to be patient, of course, but it's a strategically engineered period in a year or in a two-year period or whatever, where you're prioritizing fat loss.

Philip Pape: 27:42

Okay, the cool thing about fat loss itself, when you do it right, is it improves your body's future capacity to build muscle and maintain leanness. This is what I have seen and what I believe the evidence shows. When done properly, a well-executed fat loss phase, it yeah, it changes how you look, for sure, but it also rewires your metabolic machinery, for lack of a better phrase. There's research into muscle memory, for example. That shows that the neurological, the epigenetic adaptations from maintaining muscle during a deficit actually makes subsequent muscle building more efficient. You ever heard about that? It's pretty cool. Your body essentially becomes better at preserving and building muscle because you challenged it with fat loss the right way, and that's why I often see clients achieve their best muscle building results in the phase immediately following a properly executed fat loss phase. And if you have some excess weight to lose, I'm totally cool if you want to go with fat loss first, after you've prepped a few months for it, and then build muscle afterward, as opposed to because you know me, I talk about how everybody needs to spend time, at least once in a muscle building phase, but it might be best done after your fat loss phase, depending on where you're starting from. So we have things like improved insulin sensitivity, enhanced nutrient partitioning, optimized hormones. All of it will actually help in your muscle building phase coming up. So let's recap Three non-negotiables high protein resistance, training with progressive overload, proper recovery.

Philip Pape: 29:11

Three optimizers are refeeds or diet breaks, creatine and fiber slash, micronutrient density, and the overall picture here is we don't want to suffer. We don't want to suffer through bland, boring meals. We don't want to punish ourselves with cardio. We don't want to just cut out all these foods so that all we're thinking about are the foods we cut out. This is a physiological process that you can engineer to be efficient when you understand the requirements, and then you leverage what we know, the science that we know, and personalize it to you, and today's model provides you that approach to do that.

Philip Pape: 29:44

All right, if you found this valuable, if you wanna take your nutrition knowledge further, put this into practice and set up your fat loss phase, download my free Nutrition 101 for Body Composition guide. It expands on many of the principles we discussed today. It gives you the step-by-step practical approach to do it, and it also, I think, talks about fat loss and muscle building. Although if you're specifically focused on muscle building, go to witsandweightscom, slash free and get my muscle building blueprint. But if you're going to do fat loss, next, download the guide in the show notes for nutrition. All right, until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights, and remember fat loss doesn't have to be a mystery or a misery when you approach it with intelligence and strategy. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

The 98% Success Method to Go Alcohol-Free and Get Lean (James Swanwick) | Ep 325

Join Physique University (free for 2 weeks) to engineer your best physique using our science-based fat loss and muscle-building blueprint.

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Do you feel like alcohol helps you relax? What if it’s quietly sabotaging your fitness, sleep, and focus? 

I welcome James Swanwick, former ESPN anchor and founder of Alcohol-Free Lifestyle, and we talk about why so many smart, health-focused people still drink, even when they know it’s holding them back. James breaks down the hidden impact alcohol has on your sleep, metabolism, hormones, and mindset, and why willpower alone isn’t the answer.

He also shares how to reframe your relationship with alcohol using science-backed tools from his book “Clear” and his 90-day program. If you’re serious about building a strong body and a clear mind, this might be the shift you didn’t know you needed.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

2:07 – How alcohol became culturally normal
5:07 – One drink a day still harms your brain
9:42 – The smiling assassins in our lives
13:14 – Alcohol vs food: the real cost
20:29 – The hormonal and metabolic toll
25:50 – Why “don’t drink” backfires
33:02 – Rewiring your environment and cues
38:19 – When to try non-alcoholic substitutes
42:34 – A glimpse into the alcohol-free life
47:32 – Outro

Episode resources:

• James Swanwick’s book: CLEAR

• Alcohol-Free Lifestyle podcast

• Instagram: @jamesswanwick

Why High Performers Struggle to Quit Drinking (And How to Fix It)

You eat protein. You train. You track macros. You even hit 10k steps before breakfast.

But Friday night rolls around and somehow a few drinks sneak in again.

The truth is, you probably already know alcohol isn't helping. It hurts your sleep, tanks your workouts, and delays fat loss. But knowing that doesn’t make it easier to stop. Especially when it’s been baked into your lifestyle for decades—work dinners, parties, wind-downs after long days, and those smiling friends who hand you a drink before you can say no.

In this episode, I sat down with James Swanwick, former ESPN anchor and founder of Alcohol-Free Lifestyle, to talk about why smart, health-conscious people still drink—and what to do instead.

This isn’t about white-knuckling sobriety. It’s about building a better lifestyle, one that aligns with your goals, energy, mindset, and physical performance.

The 98% Method: Why Willpower Fails

Most attempts to quit drinking rely on willpower. But James explains that this is like fighting a battle with no armor. It’s not sustainable, and it’s not how our brains work.

The root of the problem? Your brain’s reward system.

We’re conditioned from childhood to associate alcohol with celebration, relaxation, and connection. It becomes so embedded in our identity that we don’t even question it. But alcohol doesn’t reduce stress—it creates it. You're drinking to numb the stress that alcohol caused in the first place.

And because the body prioritizes detoxing alcohol, it shuts down fat burning, slows metabolism, disrupts sleep, and alters hormones like testosterone, estrogen, and melatonin. Even one drink affects your performance, hunger, mood, and motivation for 24–48 hours afterward.

That’s what James calls “death by a thousand cuts.”

Why Your Fit Lifestyle and Alcohol Can’t Coexist

Even “moderate” drinking—the kind your doctor or friends might call harmless—erodes progress in subtle ways:

• It delays muscle recovery

• It stalls fat loss by slowing your metabolism

• It disrupts your sleep architecture

• It increases cravings for carbs and sugar

• It lowers testosterone and increases estrogen in men

• It raises breast cancer risk in women

• And it turns social events into environments you associate with drinking, making it harder to break free

Here’s the deal: you can’t optimize your physique and drink regularly. At some point, the tradeoff just doesn’t make sense.

So how do you actually stop?

James’s Alcohol-Free Lifestyle method uses neuroscience, habit design, and positive psychology to break the cycle. Here are a few key principles:

• Stop saying “don’t drink.” The brain doesn’t process negatives. Instead, say “I choose to drink soda water with lime tonight.” Tell your brain what to do, not what to avoid.

• Eliminate cues in your home. Remove the liquor cabinet, the wine glasses, the “just in case” bottles. Replace them with visual cues for hydration, health, and vitality.

• Reframe the identity. Don’t call yourself “sober” like it’s punishment. Say “I live alcohol-free.” Own it. Be proud of it. It’s not a limitation. It’s an upgrade.

• Practice gratitude. Write down 20 things you’re grateful for every day. This reduces cravings by more than 30%, and helps fill the emotional gap alcohol used to mask.

• Surround yourself with the right tribe. People who support your goals. People who don’t pressure you to drink. James calls them “smiling givers,” not “smiling assassins.”

And if you’re not ready to go alcohol-free forever, start with 90 days. But don’t just “survive” it. Enjoy the process. You’ll be shocked how much better you look, feel, and perform without it.

What to expect after quitting

• Better sleep (the kind that actually restores your body)

• More consistent energy

• Faster fat loss with less effort

• More visible muscle definition

• Sharper mental clarity

• Less bloating, water retention, and inflammation

• Higher self-confidence and drive

• Improved relationships and conversations—without numbing yourself

And yes, you’ll probably get better looking too. Just saying.

If you’ve built a strong foundation for fitness and health but alcohol still has a seat at the table, this is your chance to remove it for good—and get results that finally match your effort.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

You want to cut back on alcohol. You've even tried a few times, yet somehow Friday night rolls around there you are, glass in hand, making the same old excuse about just want to relax, or I just enjoy the beer or the wine. What if I told you alcohol isn't actually helping you unwind at all? Today, my guest is a former ESPN anchor and the founder of Alcohol-Free Lifestyle, and he's revealing the neuroscience behind why smart, successful people continue drinking, despite often knowing better. You'll discover why willpower fails, how alcohol sabotages your fitness goals, even a little bit of drinking, and a practical approach to breaking free without depriving yourself. If you want to stop letting alcohol rob you of mental clarity and physical results, this conversation is for you.

Philip Pape: 0:53

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 Pape, and today we're discussing a topic that affects nearly everyone pursuing better health and fitness, and that is our relationship with alcohol, with drinking. We all know that alcohol isn't great for our health goals, but many of us, especially high achievers, continue drinking regularly despite knowing better. And why is that? And can we approach this in a way that doesn't feel like deprivation? To answer these questions. I'm joined by James Swanick, a former SportsCenter anchor on ESPN, host of the Alcohol Free Lifestyle podcast and author of a new book, clear, which gives you a neuroscience-based method to quit drinking, based on root causes and not on brute force or willpower. Today, you'll learn why smart people keep drinking even when they want to stop, the false beliefs we construct around alcohol, how drinking affects your fitness goals and, of course, some tips to break free from alcohol without feeling deprived. James, thank you so much and welcome to the show.

James Swanwick: 1:54

Thank you very much. Great to be here, Philip.

Philip Pape: 1:56

So, rather than jump into the topic of why people drink, I'm curious about when alcohol became so normal, like, why and when did it become so normal in society?

James Swanwick: 2:07

It starts when we are little kids and our parents say to us or the adult figures in our life say to us oh no, no, little Philip or James, you can't drink now. You can drink when you're older. And so our parents or the adult figures in our life implant this idea that drinking alcohol is something to aspire to, it's a rite of passage, you get to do it, it's something to savor. I would submit that is a nonsense. It's just attractively packaged poison, but that's where it starts. Also, there's this conditioning that in order to create romance, in order to create camaraderie, in order to create celebration, we must have attractively packaged poison present, which, of course, is a ridiculous notion.

James Swanwick: 2:48

However, that has been passed forward through generations after generation, and now we're in this. What I submit is this ridiculous cultural society where we have just normalized drinking, this poison which, as you reference, can be so damaging. And I don't mean so damaging because you're waking up in a ditch or you're drinking excessively. I mean so damaging that you only have one or two seemingly innocent drinks per day. That can still be damaging, and I call that death by a thousand cuts. It's not the waking up in a ditch, getting arrested, doing anything too crazy, but over many years and decades it catches up with you.

Philip Pape: 3:33

Attractively packaged poison. I like it. Okay, so we know where we're going with this show. You know I want to pull on a thread there. When you talk about conditioning from a young age, I definitely see that my dad drank beer pretty much regularly, like all his friends and all his peers, and I drank quite a bit most of my adult life. What about cultures where it is not as aspirational and I don't know if those exist, like people think of France, kids start drinking from a young age, or whatever age, and it's not as taboo. Are there any differences there that we see, or is it pretty much the same thing, just at different ages?

James Swanwick: 4:07

I would submit it's the same thing. Different ages. I mean, there are some cultural differences where, like you referenced, in France, people kind of build this idea of connection and family we must drink this poison. But I'm saying you can build connection and family without drinking the poison. And you know, the French may feel like, oh, this is a great way to create family ties, et cetera, but at what cost? And that's what I really try to do in my book, clear, and what I try to do with my work, which is we're so focused on normalizing this alcohol and we justify it. Oh yeah, it's fine to give kids 15, 14, 15, 16 alcohol in France. You know, as long as they're not getting drunk, it's just a little thing, it's fine. But what we're doing is we're setting them up for a lifetime of drinking habits.

James Swanwick: 4:52

And again in 2022, there was a study out of the UK of 35,000 middle-aged adults which showed that even one seemingly innocent drink per night was enough to cause some level of gray and white matter destruction in the brain, in other words, some level of brain degeneration.

James Swanwick: 5:07

And yet, culturally, we hang on to this idea that drinking is fine. It's fine, it's fine, it's no big deal. I'm not an alcoholic. I'm not getting arrested, it's fine. It's not fine and all of the new studies are showing that like the, the strain it puts on our heart, on our our liver, on our sleep, on our gains that we want in the gym, the additional calories we're consuming that we ordinarily would not if we weren't drinking, which can lead to a loss of confidence, which can lead to craving more sugary foods, which can lead to overeating, which can lead to obesity, which can lead to irritation and stress and frustration. I'm trying to really articulate to people that the death by a thousand cuts are often silent cuts, invisible. You don't see them. But if we trace it all back, we can trace it back to starting drinking at age 14 or 15.

Philip Pape: 6:05

Yeah, and I would love the listener to come out of this episode even if they're skeptical or objective in terms of the cost benefit. A lot of people do the cost benefit trade-offs of any of this stuff. I mean, obviously nobody says here's a little Oxy, it's okay, here's a little heroin, it's okay. And there's a cultural difference in how we treat alcohol as a premise. Right, that we have to break through. But then if we could get to the point where someone says, look, even one drink a month is a problem and or here's the trade-off I'm making, that would be helpful.

Philip Pape: 6:36

You mentioned gains. That's like the key word, man, for everybody listening. They're like, okay, you got my attention. Now, james, let's talk about how it hurts my gains. But really I want to go back to why people then defend it, besides the generalities that we talked about, why specific people rationalize it even when they know that it's bad, and we're going to get into why it's not great and why it's death by a thousand cuts. But most people know let's be honest, right, and those in my community who listen to this podcast we definitely have talked about the hormonal impacts, the fat loss impacts, excessive consumption, sleep impacts, all of that. We'll get into that, but why do people defend it in your practice?

James Swanwick: 7:14

People have been using it to relieve themselves of stress and anxiety, and they become addicted to that way of relieving themselves of stress and anxiety. They become addicted to that way of relieving themselves of stress and anxiety. The irony is is that we're drinking it to relieve ourselves of the very stress and anxiety that drinking itself is creating in the first place, and then we get stuck on this vicious stop-start cycle. This vicious cycle we're also in our reptilian brain, if we go back hundreds of thousands of years and if you understand the concept of Dunbar's tribe. Dunbar suggested that we used to be in tribes of about 160 people when we roamed. The earth happened that meant almost certain death, because a rival tribe would kill you, or the saber-toothed tiger would chase you and eat you, or the bear would get you, or the wolf would get you, or you'd die of isolation somehow. Now the reality is in the modern world, we're not going to die from being kicked out of a tribe, but nevertheless, that reptilian fear that we have still exists, and so that shows up with oh, if I'm not drinking, my friends will kick me out of the tribe, society will kick me out of the tribe. It's this irrational fear in the modern world, a rational fear in the you know, years and years and years and years ago, centuries ago, but an irrational fear in today's world. So we keep justifying it because it makes us feel safe. We keep justifying it because it temporarily numbs us from the pain of being ourselves, because reaching for a drink is really only reaching for the pursuit of feeling something different in the moment.

James Swanwick: 9:04

In most cases, people with a drinking problem, let's say, are drinking to relieve themselves of an uncomfortable feeling. And so if you then remove this thing that they've been trained to go to when they feel discomfort of any kind, well what are they left with? Discomfort, discomfort, and that feels awful and unsettling, which is why people defend it so much because it does give them that temporarily, because it does numb themselves from the pain, because it does allow them to procrastinate on key strategic decisions in their life. And also, addition, there are smiling assassins all over the world, and a smiling assassin is someone who's smiling as they offer you a drink or as they're drinking with you.

James Swanwick: 9:52

It's the waiter or the waitress who says hello, mr Pape, can I get you started with a glass of 10 pounds of unwanted body weight? Hello, mr Swanwick, can I get you started with a bad night's sleep and some shame and regret in the morning. That's essentially what they're saying when they show up and they're like oh, hello sir, hello ma'am, I'll be your waiter tonight. I'll be your server. Can I get you started from the drinks menu. And then our friends are smiling hey, phil, can I get you a drink? James, can I get you a?

Philip Pape: 10:20

drink.

James Swanwick: 10:20

And they try to be hospitable hosts. That's very nice of them offering me a drink, but they're offering me attractively packaged poison, and so if everyone, as they're consuming this alcohol, is smiling and portraying this image of camaraderie, then the idea that you would stop drinking, unconsciously or consciously, means you are now rejecting the camaraderie, you're rejecting the tribe, You're rejecting culture, yeah, fear of getting kicked out of the tribe, hence commercials that portray huge parties and a grand old time when drinking.

Philip Pape: 11:00

It's interesting because, philosophically I don't know if you found this to be true in your life, not even with alcohol, but with anything it seems like the thing everyone doing, often not the, not the thing we want to be doing. Do you notice that? Okay, so there's a little carve out in there. I want to address, because people are going to say well, what if I'm the type of person who I drink one beer every three weeks and it's at home, by myself or with my family because I like the taste of beer, right, those kinds of? I'm trying to dig into some of the rationales people have and I'm curious about those.

James Swanwick: 11:29

If they're drinking one beer every three weeks, you know, candidly, I don't see there's any real issue with that. If you generally like the taste and you're drinking a beer or two every three weeks, that's not going to cause too many problems, from my research and from what I have read. But then the question really is are you sure that it's only three weeks? Are you sure it's every three weeks? And most people, if they're honest when they dig into it, maybe it's not, maybe I'm drinking a little bit more consistently than I would like to admit. In that scenario, philip, there's no real challenge, no real problem.

James Swanwick: 12:03

Long-term health consequences? Short-term, sure, because if you're drinking beer anywhere close to bedtime, that's going to compromise your sleep. And when you have a compromised sleep you wake up just a little bit irritable, just a little bit more fatigued, a little bit more tired. Your body stores a little bit more fat. You don't lift as heavy in the gym, you're not as motivated to go to the gym in the first place Because you're tired. You might then reach for a sugary food to give you a little bit of an energy boost. So ordinarily you wouldn't eat the chocolate bar or the muffin, but now you reach for the chocolate bar and the muffin, or the Gatorade instead of a soda water, and now you're drinking some more sugar and you know what I mean Like.

James Swanwick: 12:37

So these kind of things can really happen, and most people are drinking close to bedtime. That destroys your sleep. What you're essentially doing when you drink close to bedtime is clocking in for a night's work at a time when you are supposed to be clocking out from the day's work. Your body wants to be resting, it doesn't want to be working. So again, coming back to it, look, a drink on occasion here and there, as long as you don't feel like it's compromising your life, no problems. But be aware even that is going to compromise your sleep, which is going to compromise the following day.

Philip Pape: 13:14

Yeah, and I think people will compare. Sometimes they'll compare alcohol to say poor food choices. And I'm all about flexible dieting, right, like if you're eating 80%, 90% whole nutritious foods, then indulge in the rest, you're probably in the top 95% as far as diets go. But what are your thoughts about that when people compare the allowances they give themselves for that flexibility on the food side versus the alcohol side? Because I feel like there's zero benefit to alcohol, whereas the food at least has contextual benefit.

James Swanwick: 13:48

I mean, why are we negotiating with ourselves over this? Like, why are we still clamoring on how can I have a drink? Can I have a drink? I'll just drink on weekends. I'll just drink on special occasions. What is it about it that's so special? It's piss in an attractive bottle, like.

James Swanwick: 14:06

I really challenged this. The first time anyone had a drink probably you were 12, 13, 14, you had a sip or something. Did it taste nice? Nope, of course it didn't. I remember my dad gave me brandy and I spat it out. I went ugh. So it naturally doesn't taste good. We've acquired the taste as we've gone along again.

James Swanwick: 14:26

Why are we just so in love with this damn thing? Do you remember the movie raiders of the lost ark with, yeah, of course, indiana jones? You know in that in the first scene where he's got the idol and he's running away from the, the, the boulder, and then he kind of escapes the boulder but then the nazi is there with the tribes and then the tribes andmen are all got their bows and arrows pointed at him and he has to hand over, reluctantly, the idol to the nazi sympathizer and the nazi sympathizer holds up the idol and all the tribesmen quickly stop pointing the bow and arrow at indiana jones and start bowing down and saluting this idol, this golden, golden idol, and that enables Indiana Jones to make his escape. That's what we're doing with alcohol. We're bowing down and worshiping the idol of alcohol.

James Swanwick: 15:15

And I say why? I say why are we worshiping this false god? Because it's like a toxic friend. It doesn't want you to leave it, it doesn't want you to break up with it, it doesn't do anything good for you, it doesn't serve you. And yet you're staying in this toxic relationship. You're choosing to stay in this toxic relationship while simultaneously bowing down and saluting it. So we're frustrated by the consequences of the relationship, yet we're still, like in the raiders of the lost ark movie, bowing down and worshiping it. So just stop worshiping it, stop clinging to this idea like oh, but I can just drink on a special occasion. Why is drinking worthy of being referred to as a special occasion? The special occasion is health, joy, clarity, focus, a good night's sleep, great connection, fun, laughter, movement, connection, gratitude. That is the special occasion. And you can have a special occasion every damn day of your life, living alcohol free.

Philip Pape: 16:23

Yeah, I love it and I think, at least in my personal experience, the relationship with alcohol for me and I've seen this for a lot of people evolved as I embraced a healthy lifestyle elsewhere. Right, and I think that's at least those listening to this show. I'm hoping that you know this, this episode I can share with them to say, look, you care so much about lifting, moving, eating right, mental health, walking, sleeping. Why is this special, is what you're saying, and so maybe we hit on the top couple reasons, one you already mentioned, which is that we think it relieves stress and we think it's going to help us unwind, and it's even worse when we do it at night. But why isn't that the case? Why does it not actually relieve stress and what's happening physiologically? Yeah, well, it actually creates more stress.

James Swanwick: 17:06

And what's happening physiologically? Yeah well, it actually creates more stress Temporarily. When we drink it, it gives us this temporary, illusionary sense of relief Right, so it does provide this feeling of relief for a little while 20 minutes, 45 minutes an hour but then the consequences of that relief then create more stress and anxiety. That leaves you craving, wanting to then create more stress and anxiety. That leaves you craving, wanting to relieve yourself of stress and anxiety. And it's this perpetual vicious cycle. It's this merry-go-round that you just are unable to get off.

James Swanwick: 17:39

When we drink, the body straight away recognizes it as a foreign poison and the body then goes to work to try to rid itself of the poison. We're consuming toxins. The body doesn't like these toxins. The body's then saying how do I get rid of these toxins? So you're now putting undue strain, unwanted, undesirable strain on the body. The liver goes to work, the heart rate increases. That puts pressure on the heart. The enzymes liver enzymes go up. It also has us increasing our appetite. So we end up eating more food than we might ordinarily eat just because we've drunk a glass of red wine or a beer or a scotch or whatever. All of a sudden, because it's turning into sugar. It leaves our body going oh okay, I want more of this. Let me get more of this. You know, you haven't eaten carbs for a while and then you start eating carbs and then you just really desire more carbs. That's what happens.

Philip Pape: 18:39

Deprivation amplifies desire. Yep.

James Swanwick: 18:41

Yeah, and think about it Like you go to a restaurant and you sit down and you're trying to do a cut and you're trying to watch your calories, you're trying to lose some weight, and you say I'm not having the dessert tonight, no way. And the smiling assassin comes over and says oh, can I get you a glass of wine? Oh, just have a glass of Riesling or one glass of white wine. Okay, you're just drinking 300 calories in that white wine, same amount of calories as a donut or a packet of crisps, but more than that, because the drink now increases your appetite. Now, when the dessert menu comes over, the smiling assassin goes oh, can I get you some desserts, some cake? Would you like the cookie? And you're like all right, okay, who do you want to split it with me? All right, all right, okay, we'll have it after all. And then you have that cake half a cake, a few bites, maybe the whole damn thing. And then you get that cake half a cake, a few bites, maybe the whole damn thing. And then you get in the taxi or the Uber and you go home and you go to sleep. And then you wake up in the morning and you go oh man, I wish I didn't have that glass of wine and that piece of cheesecake last night, right, and now you've undone all the good work that you had.

James Swanwick: 19:43

So, look, it causes the body to go to to work. But you don't want the body to go to work, at least not in that way. You want the body to go to work when you're in the gym and you're looking for gains. You want to build some muscle, you're looking to burn so bad, that's when you want the body to work. But guess what a great night's sleep is where the repair from that work happens. But when you are looking to rest to grow the muscle, to get the gains, you're now saying oh no, we're not going to rest, I'm putting you to work again. The body's unable to do what you want it to do from the intention that you have from going to the gym in the first place so does it also impact hormones?

Philip Pape: 20:29

my understanding is that moderate, almost daily drinking does have a really insidious impact on hormones lowers libido in men, raises the risk of breast cancer in women, slows down the metabolism.

James Swanwick: 20:48

So if you're looking to burn unwanted body weight, for example, it's not going to happen if you're drinking, or it's not going to happen as effectively if you are drinking. You're just literally pouring more calories in and also slowing down the process. There's a couple of studies out. I'll have to dig in a little bit more into those studies but they found that one or two drinks the night before is enough to slow down your metabolism to the point of a few pounds a week. I'd have to dig into that a little bit more, but I know that your listeners here are particularly interested in lifting weights and gains and losing weight, muscle and things like that. So if, if you're if, let's just say, fat loss is your goal, that can slow down your metabolism enough to have you leaving.

James Swanwick: 21:33

Have you feeling frustrated that you're not losing as much weight? I'm actually on a cut at the moment. I'm tracking all of my food with MyFitnessPal and I'm walking 16, 17,000 steps a day at the moment and I'm trying to do like under 1650 calories a day and I've been tracking it. In the first seven days I lost a lot of money, not a lot of money, I'm sorry, a lot of pounds. Six pounds in in a week and then it kind of stalled and I got a bit frustrated. What's going on?

James Swanwick: 22:04

And then when I kind of dug it, I realized I wasn't entering a couple of drinks, not alcoholic drinks, but I wasn't adding electrolyte drinks and some coffee into the app. I was just putting the food, not the liquids. And when I looked at like the electrolytes how many calories and stuff were in the electrolytes, I was like, oh my God, there's like 100 there. And oh my God, the coffee there. There's like a 50 or 100 there, depending if it's a latte or not.

James Swanwick: 22:28

And all of a sudden I'm like, oh, that's two, that's 200, maybe 300 calories a day over seven days. That's 2100 calories. Like to have that? Yeah, yeah, at least that's enough for you not to lose that weight. So the same thing with the alcohol, right, not only is it additional calories, but it's the slowing down of the metabolism, it's's the disruption of the hormones your melatonin release. Melatonin is an important hormone for sleep that doesn't release in the way that nature intended it to release when you drink destroys sleep. So, yes, there's massive hormonal effects if you drink even innocent amounts of drink, of alcohol.

Philip Pape: 23:04

Yeah, people need to understand this because there's cascading effects. There's the stoppage of fat oxidation because the toxins have to be metabolized first. There's all of that and the last question I guess I have before we get into the neuroscience and then how we break this habit, because ultimately people are like, okay, now what do we do? Is there anything else you would put at the same level as alcohol, assuming someone is not smoking or taking drugs? Is there anything else you would put equivalent to alcohol or near it, or is it in a class of its own?

James Swanwick: 23:34

That's a great question. There's a couple of studies that have come out over the past five or six years, so just before the pandemic hit. There was a study that I referenced in my book, clear, which showed the damage and harm to individuals and the damage and harm to society and listed the whole lot of drugs. Would you be shocked to learn that alcohol is actually more damaging to society than cocaine? Like that's extraordinary. It's something like I have to reference the book a little bit better here. But there's like heroin, crack, crack, cocaine, meth, alcohol, and then there's like cocaine and things and it goes down from there Right and ketamine and things like that society either slightly above or slightly under consequence significance than meth and crack and heroin. Like crazy in terms of the damage to society. The fact that alcohol would even be close to heroin and the impact on society is astounding. And yet it's legal, it's on every corner. We smile when we consume it.

Philip Pape: 24:53

It's just because it's death by a thousand cuts and we don't see it so obviously in front of our eyes until years, decades have passed yeah, many people are opting into this and, like you said, even as a society we've opted in and I'm sure it's a function of scale too right, just the fact that that's the case, it means it's just pervasive everywhere. Okay. So if someone says, all right, I get it. It's not great, there's no benefits, it's a poison death by a thousand cuts. What do I do about this? I know you, you know in your book, which when we were, when we scheduled this, I don't even think it was out yet, and it came out pretty recently. I believe.

James Swanwick: 25:30

Yeah, it did. Yeah Came out in March of 2025.

Philip Pape: 25:33

Yeah, yeah, exactly Just a couple of months ago. So you definitely talk about the neuroscience there, dopamine and the reward centers and all of that. Where's the best place to start so that someone understands, like, how they're altering their brain and how they can then use that information to change their behavior?

James Swanwick: 25:50

Stop saying to yourself you need to stop, I have to quit, don't drink. Because the mind doesn't understand the negative command. It just hears the word alcohol. So a lot of us are walking around saying, geez, I need to quit, I hope I don't drink. Don't drink tonight.

James Swanwick: 26:14

And there's a bundle of nerves in the brain called the RAS, which stands for reticular activating system, and those bundle of nerves are like a laser seeking missile, which is it will focus on whatever it is that you are repeatedly thinking about. So if you are repeatedly thinking about alcohol, even if you're saying don't drink, need to quit, you're thinking about alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. So it's a lot easier for you to drink alcohol. It's harder for you to stop right. On the flip side of that, if you say to yourself what you will do, I'm easily going to drink soda water, ice and a piece of lime tonight. I'm easily going to walk up to the barman and say you know what? Give me a soda water, ice and a splash of cranberry. Now, that's very easy. The mind and the reticular activating system understands that positive command. We're telling ourselves what to do as opposed to telling ourselves what not to do. And when we tell ourselves what to do. It's a lot simpler and a lot easier for us to achieve and accomplish that very thing.

Philip Pape: 27:04

You know, I was thinking about how we're titling this episode and when I look at your content and everything, I think we start from the quit and the stop and the have to not drink alcohol, right, because that's how we reach someone who's thinking that way. I don't know if you agree with that, but like you see it in the marketing side, and then I imagine you have to then do the switch and say let's. It's kind of like I talk to people and they're like I've got to lose weight and I say, well, really we're not trying to lose weight, we're trying to build muscle and we're trying to add in nutritious foods and we're trying to add in protein and we want to.

Philip Pape: 27:33

So I love, that it's directly tied to our brain in that way. So what are your thoughts on that then? The language we use, the marketing, the whole kind of journey that people go through from the initial recognition to the switch.

James Swanwick: 27:48

People are always saying sober, sobriety, recovery, clean. We don't use any of that language. In our organization, at Alcohol-Free Lifestyle, we use the phrase alcohol-free, we're choosing an alcohol-free lifestyle. The name of my coaching organization is called Alcohol-Free Lifestyle and the key word there is lifestyle. It's the style of life, life. It's not needing to be sober and white, knuckling it and trying to be like sober, sobriety, recovery, clean, surrender to a higher power.

James Swanwick: 28:18

We dismiss all of that verbiage. It's been used for 75, 80 years and that's why aa, who really uses that language, has a seven percent success rate and a 93% failure rate if you judge success over long term. So we instead say we get to be alcohol free, we choose to be alcohol free as opposed to I need to be sober, I'm sobriety, I'm three years sober, I'm like three years sober means that you've probably been white knuckling it for three years, whereas we get to be alcohol free, I get to choose this lifestyle. That's the kind of verbiage difference and instead of using phrases like I need to, I have to, which feels very draining and heavy and tough and implies friction, we say I choose to, I get to, I want to, and it might seem you know, minor, a minor thing, but we arise in language, we are language, and so the subtle changes there can have profound generational impact.

Philip Pape: 29:18

Yeah, I totally agree. I think there's parallels with positive psychology. Not sure how familiar you are with that field, but it's only about 20 years old, right, where traditional psychology focused on the negative of the syndromes, of the disorders of our brain, and then positive psychology came along and said well, positive isn't the opposite of negative, positive is its own, it's its own thing, it's independent of negative. The more positivity we add in, you know, to simplify it, it crowds. It can crowd out the negative, I guess, is one way to put it. I see the same thing with nutrition or a fitness lifestyle. Right, we choose to train three days a week because X? Right, Because it supports our goals, and you then find out how you're going to change your schedule around that which then ends up getting rid of your Netflix binging here or your unproductive activity over here, whatever.

Philip Pape: 30:08

So I think that is powerful, james, I'm glad you brought that up because there's a lot to be said for language. So if someone's listening and saying, okay, I'm a casual drinker, right, I'm not speaking necessarily to alcoholics here, but I'm a casual drinker, I still think I want to drink because of the social experience. But now I understand why that's just a false belief. Let's say uh, I still love the taste of beer, or I still love the taste of wine or whatever. Again, rationale. What's the first step? Is it what they tell themselves, or is it coming up with a behavior that replaces it?

James Swanwick: 30:42

Well, first step is is identifying that you can have a better and more fun and a preferable lifestyle being alcohol-free and choosing alcohol-free. Once you believe that, then it becomes very easy to live an alcohol-free lifestyle. But while you are maintaining this, what I would submit mistaken belief that alcohol equals fun and not drinking alcohol equals deprivation and pain it's going to be very, very challenging, which is why these 30-day challenges are mostly ineffective over the long term, because people are going in there trying to get to 30 days, white-knuckling it, depriving themselves, and what do they do on day 30, philip? They celebrate with the drink and they return to the same level of drinking that inspired them to want to stop in the first place. So the first thing is trying to rewire the mindset, and this is what we do in our 90-day stop drinking process, which is called Project 90, in which we outline in the book Clear, which is we try to rewire your mindset, and that is taking it from drinking equals fun and pleasure and connection and romance, and not drinking equals pain and suffering and deprivation, to drinking equals pain and suffering and not drinking equals joy and ease and calm and relationship and romance and fun and celebration. So that's the first step. It's that mindset and that's why people come to us. We try to help them rewire their mindset around that.

James Swanwick: 32:06

And the second thing is kind of what james, who wrote the book Atomic Habits, talks about, which is setting yourself up to win with your environment. So that is removing the cues that gets you to drink in the first place in your home. So, for example, a lot of people have bottles of wine and a liquor cabinet and wine glasses and corkscrews and posters with beer things on it and all these kind of shrines to alcohol. My invitation is remove that, because all of those cues those visible cues are making you think about alcohol and so then you're more likely to go and drink alcohol. In other words, just get it out of the home. Now, this is not about trying to remove yourself from all circumstances in life where alcohol is present, because that's unrealistic. Alcohol will always be there, it will always be flowing, it will always be colleagues, always be friends, families, parties, bars, restaurants. But in your own home you can remove it right, get it out of the home and then replace it with visible cues of health and vitality.

James Swanwick: 33:02

I suggest to our clients you buy yourself a bouquet of flowers, whether you're a man or a woman, you put, you get glass mason jars and you strategically leave them around the house. So when you see the glass mason jars, you think about drinking water. You go and you fill up water with some purified water. You drink the water. The flowers are a visible representation of health and vitality and color and scent. Think of those flowers as your own body. The flowers need sunlight. The flowers need water, needs water replacing. Look at those flowers each day and go, oh, I need sunlight, I need water replacing. Let me go outside, let me go for a walk.

James Swanwick: 33:38

The other thing is there's a lot of studies that suggest that you can reduce cravings for any drug, including alcohol, by just having a daily gratitude practice. So a lot of the things that we do with our clients in our Project 90 Stop Drinking process is we have them for 90 straight days, write down 20 things that they are grateful for. We call it the Daily 20. And just that exercise alone living a life of appreciation instead of expectation, is enough to reduce cravings by an incredible 30% plus. In addition to that, the way in which you share with friends and family and colleagues that you're not drinking is more important than what you actually say.

James Swanwick: 34:17

A lot of people mistakenly think they've got to come up with some logical reason as to why they're not drinking. But there's a lot of studies of human behavior and psychology and influence that shows that to influence anyone, it's only 7% what you say and 93% how you say it. And how you say it is body language, tonality, pacing, facial gestures. So instead of going into a situation where someone's going why aren't you drinking? Instead of oh, I wish I could. No, I'm doing this 30-day challenge, I'm sober and you're implying that not drinking is boring and dull, instead you go oh no, I'm alcohol-free at the moment.

James Swanwick: 34:54

I'm like 90 days. I've been six months. I'm feeling pretty good. I lost a bit of weight, I'm sleeping better, I'm owning it and we can just relax and have a good time. You drink your drinks. I'll drink my alcohol-free drinks. Now, everyone can have a good time. So they would be some of the things that I would get people started with. And most importantly, I think, is just own the fact that you love being alcohol-free. Love it, feel good about it and people will relax and they won't judge you.

Philip Pape: 35:29

This is so good, this is gold. It's funny you were saying that because it works with other things. We homeschool our kids and sometimes you'll get a lot of cynicism from people like, oh, what are you going to do about high school? Oh, how are they going to get this and that? And some people try to defend themselves and we're like yeah, thanks for asking, like we love it because of this. So almost like toxically positive, but not really. I mean people will say I'm a positivity bully. I'm a big fan of reframing, like you just suggested. You also mentioned the cues, which works well for food as well. We talked about your food environment. We just went to Disney World and there's a lot of opportunities to see alcohol at different bars and restaurants and one of my kids said well, isn't that pretty? And I said what are you talking about? She said all the bottles up behind the bar. I'm like we do glamorize the beauty of it through the packaging, through the liquor bottles, the vodka right, you know what I'm saying when even my little 11-year-old thinks it's pretty.

Jerry: 36:25

I just wanted to give a shout out to Philip.

Jerry: 36:33

I personally worked with Philip for about eight months and I lost a total of 33 pounds of scale weight and about five inches off my waist.

Jerry: 36:37

Two things I really enjoy about working with Philip is number one he's really taking the time to develop a deep expertise in nutrition and also resistance training, so he has that depth. If you want to go deep on the lies with Philip, but if also if you want to just kind of get some instruction and more practical advice and a plan on what you need to do, you can pull back and communicate at that level. Also, he is a lifter himself, so he's very familiar with the performance and body composition goals that most lifters have. And also Philip is trained in engineering, so he has some very efficient systems set up to make the coaching experience very easy and very efficient and you can really track your results and you will have real data when you're done working with Philip and also have access to some tools likely that you can continue to use. If all that sounds interesting to you. Philip, like all good coaches, has a ton of free information out there and really encourage you to see if he may be able to help you out. So thanks again, Philip.

Philip Pape: 37:38

All of this is great. So, anyway, I'm just sharing some personal anecdotes Just to recap for the listener. The first thing you said was embracing this as a lifestyle, as a positive. Being proud, being positive, saying like being alcohol-free, is the thing I want to be. It's aligned with my goals. Of course I'm not ashamed of it. Of course I'm going after it. The second thing you mentioned was removing the cues. We just touched on that a little bit. And then the third thing being the gratitude Does that work for emotional eating as well? And the third thing being the gratitude, does that work for emotional eating as well? Because you said it in a study it reduced cravings.

James Swanwick: 38:10

So yeah, I would think. So yeah, cravings. Yeah, for any vice, but I mean, I'm specifically talking about drugs, including alcohol, but it can be for any vice, yeah.

Philip Pape: 38:17

What are your thoughts on non-alcoholic options? Because part of my brain says well, they're mimicking alcoholic beverages, with all the packaging and marketing to go with it, but they don't have alcohol. So what are your thoughts on those?

James Swanwick: 38:29

I think when someone's trying to rewire their mindset, initially in the first 90 days, three months, and trying to create a long-term mind rewiring, I would invite people to refrain from even drinking alcohol-free alternatives. But once you've got to at least 90 consecutive days alcohol-free and you've successfully rewired your mindset and now you get to have power over alcohol alcohol no longer has power over you that would be the stage where you could start introducing some alcohol-free alternatives. The challenge with drinking alcohol-free alternatives as a direct and immediate substitute for alcohol is that the correlation is still there. And so you know. You go there, say hey, can I get a heineken zero? Oh, I'm sorry, we don't have any. Any heineken zero? Oh, okay, let me have a heineken.

James Swanwick: 39:14

And so that association and that correlation is still there again after 90 days, assuming that you have gone through our process, you've rewired your mindset, you now realize that you get to be alcohol-free and that a special occasion is every day that you're alcohol-free. Then you can. I'm okay with that, I'm comfortable with that. But again, I know I'm repeating myself. People can convince themselves oh yeah, I'm just going to drink 0% beers. Well, what happens if there's no 0% beers? What are you going to do.

Philip Pape: 39:44

Chances are you're probably going to order a beer and then the slippery slope is very slippery I understand yep, because you're still seeking out something about that experience or taste or flavor that was associated with the alcoholic version of it?

Philip Pape: 39:55

yeah, that makes sense, I guess what you know. You work with a lot of people, so what would you say is the biggest in that first phase, that 90-day phase, the biggest thing that people do still struggle with? Maybe it's with the people around them. That's. One thing that comes to mind is just how you deal with your friends and your family, but what do you see?

James Swanwick: 40:14

What is the biggest struggle that people have when they're trying to quit? Yes, yeah, it's cultural conditioning. It's not a physical withdrawal. I mean, I know that that's a real thing for a small percentage of the population, like a chemical dependency, but for most people, who might consider themselves a gray area drinker, where they're not deemed bad enough to be an alcoholic uh, but it's bad enough that it's causing consequences, there's no real physical withdrawal. I mean, look again, I'm I'm not a doctor, but it's very much a psychological and habitual challenge that someone has. It's just they're so used to drinking this poison for years and decades and because they're unaware or uneducated or haven't tried an alternative lifestyle, it just seems so challenging and so tough.

James Swanwick: 41:03

And again, smiling assassins are everywhere friends, colleagues, staff, everyone. They're all smiling're all smiling. Hey, have a drink. That's never going to stop. It's going to continue for years and decades and even though there is a cultural change happening right now and people are increasingly turning their back on alcohol, it's not going to stop. People still smoke cigarettes today, even though we've known for three decades. That is not good for us, so it's never going to change.

James Swanwick: 41:25

So you know, you, we really got to get comfortable being alcohol free not comfortable, but like euphoric, that we're alcohol free and once we are, other people see that and more people get on board. Then our social circle becomes smiling not assassins, but like smiling givers, like that. They're giving joy, they're giving pleasure, they're giving experiences. And we're seeing that so much now, like there's a tidal wave of change happening across the world. Alcohol-free drinks have exploded. In australia, my native country, they have these like sunrise raves now, where there's no alcohol present. People show up an hour before the sun gets up and they have a dj and they start dancing, going crazy, and then they celebrate the sun rising or drug and alcohol free, and then they're going for a swim and a run and they're healthy and they're connecting on a health level and a human level, not on a drug-fueled level. So you know, once people can get over that kind of social kind of obstacle that they're fearing and break through that, wow, then life gets to be just glorious.

Philip Pape: 42:33

Do you find that people who then go through that? Is there a correlation with that and a health and fitness lifestyle, or a cause and effect, even?

James Swanwick: 42:42

Yeah, I mean, I haven't drunk since 2010 and I spend time with a lot of very healthy people and most of them either don't drink at all or drink sparingly. And, most importantly, alcohol isn't a necessity for social lubricant, you know, or for connection or fun. For example, a staff member of mine who works with me at Alcohol-Free Lifestyle, it's his 41st birthday on Monday and we're going out to a Japanese restaurant on Saturday night. I asked him who's coming. He told me and I thought about it. I went okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

James Swanwick: 43:18

I think there's maybe two out of 12 people who I know will drink and when they drink they won't be drinking excessively. They'll have like a drink or two. But the other 10, 10 out of 12 people don't drink alcohol-free. And I look at them and I go. They're measured, they've got good conscious communication at least they appear to. I mean, who knows what goes on behind closed doors, but they seem like good people.

James Swanwick: 43:40

They're good morals, they're not prone to irritability, they're not prone to reacting. They respond versus react. They look good, they're in the gym. I see them working out, they go for walks, they get sunlight. The conversations that I have with them is about nutrition and weight loss and weights and mindset and conscious communication and trying to be the best father or mother and trying to be the best leader and trying to be a great colleague, like that's the kind of conversations that you have, and I always, you know, I often say that how you look on the outside is often a reflection of how you feel about yourself on the inside. And so just a warning you do get better looking when you stop drinking alcohol.

Philip Pape: 44:23

That's the selling point, man. That's so good. I mean. This is why I love talking to you guys on, you guys like you on the show, because it is infectious to be around folks like that who share those goals. It made me think, though, because you mentioned you mentioned cigarettes and I I was thinking about, like, the deal makers and people in sales and a lot of the high achievers you probably deal with, who do dinners, lots of dinners, or they go on the golf course or whatever. Is that culture any more challenging, because of just how competitive it is and the deal making and kind of all of that, or is this just a madman fantasy that I have?

James Swanwick: 44:56

I mean, I haven't drunk since 2010. I would consider myself a pretty successful businessman. I've done deals, hired people, done joint venture deals, generated millions of dollars in sales across two different businesses. I guess society might say, oh geez, that would be tough for you to do business because you can't entertain clients or you can't do deals, you can't soften people up with a few drinks. I've been doing it 15 years. Things have worked out okay for me.

James Swanwick: 45:28

And then this whole idea about the golf buddies and stuff and going to the clubhouse of the 19th hole I get it Like the culture's drinking. Let's go back to the clubhouse, have a couple of beers. Ho, ho, ho, how about that? Like eagle, you shot. Oh geez, that double bogey was a nasty one. Great, have one. Great, have all that friendly banter, but do it while drinking a soda water, ice and a piece of lime doesn't make you any less manly. In fact, it makes you more manly. Because, I'll tell you, drinking alcohol destroys your testosterone levels, especially beer. Beer's got so much estrogen producing crap in it. Men are like oh, beer, the irony, right? The irony is that beer is associated with masculinity and testosterone and yet it's a product that destroys your masculinity and testosterone.

Philip Pape: 46:12

And it gives you a big gut to boot over time it gives you a big gut.

James Swanwick: 46:16

yeah, a lot of calories. In fact, just on that, can you have a guess on which two alcoholic drinks generally have the most toxins in it in them? Drinks generally have the most toxins in it.

Philip Pape: 46:28

In them the most toxins, Mm-hmm, Is it? It's not mixed, some sort of mixed drink? It's?

James Swanwick: 46:33

red wine and beer.

Philip Pape: 46:34

Okay.

James Swanwick: 46:35

Most toxins. The least toxins is tequila.

Philip Pape: 46:40

It's also gluten-free. That used to be its selling point, yeah.

James Swanwick: 46:45

If you're going to drink tequila and if you're, you know if you're gonna drink that crazy dealer. And if you're, you know if you're gonna drink, drink tequila, that's the least bad for you, right? But worst in terms of toxins. If you measure toxins, red wine and beer yeah, no, because you mentioned the cigarettes.

Philip Pape: 46:59

And I know guys who everything they do is health focused, except they'll pull out a cigar, you know, every now and then to celebrate. Right, it's just celebrate, it's just the thing. It's just like with alcohol and the culture, all right, well, is there anything? I know there's a lot we could have covered. I wanted to touch on the main points of why we do this. You gave us a great framework for that initial transformation away, not away from alcohol, but embracing an alcohol-free lifestyle, embracing what it is to be a healthy person. Is there anything I didn't ask that you wish? You want to get out there for the listener.

James Swanwick: 47:31

No, I don't think so, other than just a call to arms, so to speak, which is, you know, like culture is going to want to keep you stuck in mediocrity. And in my view and this is my life's work the mediocrity is created through the drift, and the drift is created through consistent, socially acceptable drinking Socially acceptable drinking, but drinking nonetheless and I would just invite you to re-explore your relationship with alcohol. I write about this in my book, which is called Clear. It's available online wherever any books are sold. There's an audible version as well, where you can put me on two speed if you like and get through the book in four hours instead of eight hours at normal speed.

James Swanwick: 48:15

And, you know, start to embrace this new identity. Look, I get that. Not drinking is a threat to your current reality and your current identity, and the fear is that who will I be if I'm not a drinker? Who will I be? I won't be the fun guy, I won't be the romantic guy or the girl, I won't be the cool host anymore. This is such an identity threat and I get that.

James Swanwick: 48:37

But really, if you explore, what's it giving you, if it's giving you mediocrity, and you're stuck in the drift of life and you're meandering and you're floating and you don't like it and you've got less time on this planet than you've already lived. It's time for a change, and change can feel scary I get that. So I really acknowledge those who take the leap and take the plunge. And if you'd like more details, you can go to alcoholfreelifestylecom slash clear and that'll give you details about the book. Or just go to alcoholfreelifestylecom and there's some details there about our 90 day and year long stop drinking processes. And I'm on Instagram at at James Swanwick lots of free tips and tricks. And we've got a podcast as well Alcohol-Free Lifestyle. You can dig into that a lot deeper as well.

Philip Pape: 49:19

All right, so I'm definitely going to include all of those in. By the way, if you're Amazon Unlimited which I am you can get the book for free. Um, hopefully you get a cut of that, even those. I don't know how that works, but, uh, the the book clear your Instagram and also the podcast. We'll include all those in the show notes. And if you are looking to take the leap and get out of the mediocrity and the drifting through life, uh, this is the way to do it. Thank you so much, james, for coming on the show.

James Swanwick: 49:43

Philip, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

How the "Weekend Diet" Accelerates Fat Loss and Preserves More Muscle (Strategic Refeeds) | Ep 324

Download the FREE Precision Fat Loss Guide to choose one of 6 strategies designed for your experience, goals, and lifestyle:
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What if shifting WHEN you eat could accelerate your fat loss results?

Most of us tackle dieting by reducing calories evenly each day, but research suggests there may be a more effective approach (and it's easy and even fun to implement).

Learn about a fascinating study that tested weekend refeeds against traditional daily restriction... with surprising results for muscle preservation and how your metabolism slows down during weight loss.

You'll discover how restructuring your weekly calories could significantly impact body composition outcomes, despite creating the same total weekly calorie deficit.

Maybe it is about calorie timing after all!

Main Takeaways:

• Traditional daily calorie restriction works, but research suggests strategic timing may offer muscle-preservation advantages

• The "Weekend Diet" approach maintains the same weekly deficit while distributing calories differently

• Targeted carbohydrate increases on specific days could help minimize metabolic adaptation

• Practical implementation requires careful calculation of weekly weight loss targets

Episode Resources:

• Download my FREE Precision Fat Loss Guide

• Try MacroFactor for free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS

• Link to 2020 study by Campbell et al.

• Previous episode: The #1 Reason to Eat More Carbs

Timestamps:

0:00 - Traditional dieting vs. the "weekend diet" (carb refeeds)
7:39 - Findings on fat-free mass preservation
9:23 - Metabolic impacts beyond muscle preservation
10:22 - Carbs, insulin, and muscle protein synthesis
12:02 - Anabolic signaling pathways
13:03 - Glycogen replenishment (training hard on Monday!)
15:44 - Psychological factors
16:38 - How to implement the Weekend Diet
21:32 - Leptin, refeeds, and hormones 

How the Weekend Diet Could Unlock Better Fat Loss and Muscle Retention

What if simply rearranging your weekly calories—not changing the total amount, not cutting more food—could help you keep more muscle and minimize metabolic slowdown during a fat loss phase?

That’s the idea behind what I’m calling the Weekend Diet, based on a 2020 randomized controlled trial by Dr. Bill Campbell’s team. This isn’t about crash diets or gimmicks. It’s a structured, research-backed strategy using carb refeeds on the weekend that may give you an edge in preserving lean mass while dieting—especially if you’re resistance training and already doing the fundamentals right.

If you're in a fat loss phase, lifting consistently, and wondering how to make it more effective without feeling drained, this might be a game-changer.

What Did the Study Actually Show?

Let’s start with the setup.

Dr. Campbell’s team took 27 resistance-trained men and women, gave them the same weekly calorie deficit (~25%), the same protein intake, and the same four-day-per-week lifting program. But they split them into two groups:

• Group A (Traditional Dieting): 25% daily calorie deficit every day for 7 weeks

• Group B (Weekend Diet): 35% deficit Monday through Friday, then ate at maintenance on Saturday and Sunday (mostly via increased carbs)

Both groups lost a similar amount of total body weight and fat mass. That’s expected, because the calorie deficit across the week was identical.

But here’s the kicker:

• Lean mass retention (fat-free mass):

  • Traditional group lost 1.9 kg of dry fat-free mass

  • Weekend Diet group lost only 0.2 kg
    That’s a 10x improvement in lean mass retention.

• Resting metabolic rate (RMR):

  • Weekend Diet: dropped 38 kcal/day

  • Traditional Diet: dropped 78 kcal/day

Less muscle loss. Less metabolic slowdown. Same fat loss. That’s why this approach is worth considering.

Why It Works: 4 Likely Mechanisms

1. Insulin’s anti-catabolic effect
   The high-carb days bump insulin, which helps suppress muscle breakdown. Even though you’re in a deficit most of the week, the weekend could help “reset” some of the catabolic effects of dieting.

2. Re-activating anabolic pathways
   A constant deficit suppresses muscle-building signals. A short break to maintenance calories may bring those signals back to baseline temporarily—especially important when you’re lifting hard.

3. Glycogen replenishment
   Carbs refill muscle glycogen stores, which improves your training intensity and potentially boosts the mechanical tension you’re applying to your muscles. Better training = better muscle retention.

4. Psychological relief
   Let’s be real: dieting is mentally draining. Knowing you get to eat more on the weekends (guilt-free) can make the whole process feel more sustainable. That alone might improve your adherence and long-term results.

How to Apply the Weekend Diet

Step 1: Know your maintenance calories.
Track your food and weight for at least 2–3 weeks, or use an app like MacroFactor that dynamically calculates it based on your data.

Step 2: Choose your rate of loss.
For most people, 0.5–1.0% of body weight lost per week is a good range. In this example, we’ll use 0.75% per week for a 180 lb person (~1.35 lbs/week fat loss), requiring a weekly deficit of about 4,725 calories.

Step 3: Break up the week strategically.
Instead of a steady 675-calorie deficit every day, do:

• Weekdays (Mon–Fri): ~945 calorie deficit

• Weekends (Sat–Sun): eat at maintenance
  (and bump the majority of those calories from carbs)

Example:
If your maintenance is 2,500 kcal/day, your weekday intake is ~1,555–1,600 kcal/day. Then on the weekend, you jump back to 2,500 kcal/day.

Step 4: Keep protein high
Stick with at least 0.8 g/lb of body weight (~145 g/day for a 180 lb person). Fat can stay around 25–30% of your calories, and the rest goes to carbs. On refeed days, carbs make up most of the added intake.

Step 5: Train hard, especially Monday–Friday
This method aligns well with a M-F training split. You’ll enter Monday with full glycogen stores and likely perform better in your lifts.

Bonus: It fits real life.
Most of us already eat more (or want to eat more) on the weekends due to social events, family meals, and less structure. Now it’s part of the plan, not a deviation from it.

But What About Leptin?

Yes, leptin—the satiety hormone—drops during dieting. High-carb refeed days have been shown to temporarily increase leptin, which may signal your brain that “we’re okay” and reduce diet fatigue or excessive metabolic adaptation. It’s not a magic fix, but another potential benefit.

Just don’t get carried away with the idea that two high-carb days will permanently reset your hormones. It’s more of a short-term adaptive relief.

Should You Try the Weekend Diet?

If your training performance tanks during fat loss, you’re losing more muscle than you’d like, or the mental grind of dieting is wearing you down, this could be a smart approach. The science is compelling. The strategy is simple. And it aligns with how real people live.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

One of the primary goals of fat loss is to preserve your hard-earned muscle while you lose weight, and traditional daily calorie restriction absolutely works for this. But there is research that shows how a simple adjustment to the timing of your calories during the week can potentially take your results to the next level. So if you are concerned about losing strength and muscle while dieting or want an edge, this episode is for you. Today, we're looking at a study that demonstrates how restructuring your weekly nutrition pattern preserved significantly more lean mass compared to continuous dieting, despite both approaches creating the identical calorie deficit. We'll go over the evidence, understand why and give you a blueprint to make it happen.

Philip Pape: 0:59

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 Hape, and today I'm excited to dig into a research-backed strategy that could give you an edge in your fat loss journey and that is strategically timed. Carbohydrate refeeds, essentially using your weekend, two days a week, to jack the carbs up so that you are eating at your maintenance calories, to potentially give you an edge when compared to having a consistent calorie intake throughout the week. Now, most of us approach dieting with that simple approach at first, which I think is a great place to start, and that is, you reduce your calories to create a deficit and you spread it out, so it's the same every day and then you do that week after week until you reach your goal, and this method absolutely works. But research suggests there could be room for optimization. And if you are in this camp of wondering how do I make this even more effective, today's episode might have you covered. Because what if restructuring the distribution of those calories throughout your week could lead to better muscle preservation and less metabolic slowdown? So today I'm looking at a fascinating study led by my good friend Dr Bill Campbell at the University of South Florida. He's been on the show several times, I had the pleasure of contributing to his research review and we go back and forth a lot on some of these topics. His study with his colleagues was called Intermittent Energy Restriction Attenuates the Loss of Fat-Free Mass in Resistance-Trained Individuals a Randomized Controlled Trial. So I know it's a mouthful. I will have the link to the open access full text of the study in the show notes. And what this research tested is whether a specific pattern of calorie distribution throughout the week could improve body composition outcomes compared to traditional daily restriction, and I kind of brushed this off because we're not brushed it off, but I'll say I brushed off the study and when I heard Bill talk about it on Karen Martell's podcast and it's from 2020, but it is worth revisiting because it still holds up and it's a very powerful potential conclusion for you to experiment with and see if it works for you.

Philip Pape: 3:05

Before we get into it, I do want to make sure you have access to my precision fat loss guide. This is a free guide I created a few months ago and I tweaked it a bit for today's episode to account for these refeeds. This guide complements everything we're discussing today. It walks you through the different ways you can set up your fat loss plan to make it work, based on your personal goals, lifestyle preferences and level of experience, and so it includes all of that. It also includes a whole link, a list of links to relevant episodes on fat loss, depending on where you're coming from. So if you want to download your free copy, use the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash free. Again, it's the Precision Fat Loss Guide link in the show notes, usually at the very top of the show notes. All right, let's look at the science behind this approach, and then we're going to talk about the potential mechanisms as to why it happened, why the results occurred the way they did, and then we'll talk about how to apply this practically to your own fat loss phase.

Philip Pape: 4:06

So the study in 2020 was published in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, and this was not a study on sedentary or obese populations. It specifically examined resistance trained men and women. So it's directly relevant for those who are tuning into this podcast and focused on physique development, body composition, actually losing fat, because, remember, the premise here is to lose fat. You have to lose body weight, but you need to do it while holding on to muscle. And if this concept is new to you, I have other episodes that will go over the basics. And, again, if you get my precision fat loss guide, the links at the bottom, at the last page are will set you in the right direction.

Philip Pape: 4:47

So back to the study. The researchers recruited 27 participants with an average of five years of resistance training experience, and it was a pretty simple and elegant design, I would say, in my opinion. Uh, participants were randomly assigned to one of two diet interventions, both lasting seven weeks. The first group followed a continuous energy restriction approach. That is essentially the standard method most of us use when dieting, where you have the same deficit every day, and they used a 25% calorie deficit every day of the week.

Philip Pape: 5:18

The second group followed what I'm calling the weekend diet. This is the premise of today's episode, which is you reduce calories more aggressively Monday through Friday so in this case 35% and then increase calories back to maintenance on Saturday and Sunday. And again maintenance. What is that? Maintenance calories are the calories that you burn and therefore, when you are eating to those calories, you're not in a deficit or a surplus, you're just eating to maintain. And the important thing here is those additional calories on the weekend came exclusively from carbohydrates. Now, when you do this in practice we'll talk about this a bit later you don't have to be so precise with having just carbs. Some, some fat, some protein might sneak in there, but predominantly it's from carbohydrates, and there's a reason for that.

Philip Pape: 6:00

And then both groups followed a supervised resistance training program four days per week. They both consumed the same high protein intake of 1.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, which is about 0.8 grams per pound of body weight, which is in the current recommendations for preserving muscle during fat loss phases. I usually give a range of 0.7 to one gram per pound. So it's right in there. And what makes this study extremely valuable is that both approaches created the same weekly deficit. So that is a controlled variable. It's very important that that is controlled.

Philip Pape: 6:35

The only difference was how the calories were distributed across the week. So same training, same protein, same weekly calories, different distribution, so that you can isolate the impact of that distribution as a variable. So what did they find? Well, after seven weeks, both groups lost a similar amount of body weight and fat mass. The weekend diet group lost 3.2 kilograms of weight and 2.8 kilograms of fat kilograms of weight and 2.8 kilograms of fat. The continuous or traditional diet group lost a little more body weight, so 3.6 kilograms, but less a half kilogram less of fat at 2.3. And statistically there were no significant differences in these measures. So our first important insight from this is that restructuring your weekly calorie distribution doesn't necessarily lead to more total weight loss or even more fat loss in the short term, because the basic principle here of energy balance calories in, calories out is still gonna apply. If you create a deficit, you will lose weight. So that's important, right, we're not throwing that premise out at all by any means.

Philip Pape: 7:39

But here's where the data gets interesting. When the researchers measured fat-free mass, which is all of the non-fat tissue you have, so that does include muscle, but it also includes bones, organs and water that's where the significant differences were apparent. So the weekend group lost only 0.4 kilograms of that fat-free mass. The continuous dieting group lost 1.3 kilograms, so that's more than three times as much lean tissue loss in the traditional dieting group. And critics might say, okay, this probably just reflects water retention from the higher carb intake, right? And the researchers anticipated this.

Philip Pape: 8:21

They then measured dry fat-free mass, which excludes total body water. So very, very intelligent here to do that. And the results were actually more pronounced when they did that. The weekend group lost only 0.2 kilograms of dry fat-free mass Very little to no dry fat-free mass, whereas the traditional group lost 1.9 kilograms of fat-free mass. So it actually is even more pronounced when you look at only dry I should say dry fat-free mass. I mean, if you just multiply it, that's 10 times better preservation of lean tissue if you're to use a multiple. But even just in absolute terms, it's close to zero for the weekend group and it's around two kilograms for the continuous group. It's a big difference, right? Two kilograms is almost a pound of fat-free mass loss, and so that is potentially, right there, a substantial advantage if your goal is to maintain muscle and strength during fat loss, right, instead of just looking at the fat loss piece of the equation, looking at the fact that muscle was very well preserved.

Philip Pape: 9:23

Now the researchers also measured resting metabolic rate RMR, right, a component of your total daily energy expenditure and they found that the weekend diet group had only half the reduction of the traditional group. Their RMR decreased by about 38 calories a day. The continuous group reduced by 78 calories per day. Now, neither number is huge in absolute terms, but we're talking only about seven weeks and I have frequently seen in my clients and myself large swings in expenditure, especially a drop during fat loss. If you could do anything to make that less, that means you could eat more food and lose the same amount of weight per week, or you can create a bigger deficit with the same amount of food, right? Either way it's an advantage and, again, both approaches are shown to be effective for fat loss. But the weekend diet strategy seems to have advantages, with preserving muscle mass and minimizing the slowdown in your metabolism, and that is huge. That is actually very huge.

Philip Pape: 10:22

So we want to understand why this is happening and if so, we have to look at the physiological mechanisms behind them. Why the heck would restructuring your weekly calories while maintaining the same deficit lead to such different body composition outcomes? The first mechanism, I think, involves the carbs and the insulin and how that impacts protein metabolism. When you consume carbs, insulin levels rise. I think many of us know that. Right, blood sugar spikes, insulin spikes, whatever you want to call it, and A lot of people think of insulin as a bad thing.

Philip Pape: 10:54

They think of it as in terms of fat storage, right, and in sedentary people it can be a problem. It's often associated with prediabetes, diabetes et cetera. But when you are building muscle, when you're active, when you're lifting, it has very powerful anti-catabolic properties. I had a whole episode on this in the past about the benefit of eating carbs specifically for that purpose, which is reducing the breakdown of muscle tissue, and it's because of the insulin. So during a calorie deficit, what's happening? Well, muscle protein synthesis is happening, but also breakdown is happening, and it shifts toward net breakdown right, greater breakdown than synthesis If you can strategically bump up your insulin with these carb refeeds this weekend diet. It might create this window of reduced breakdown that is more pronounced than the increased breakdown during the week from having slightly more restrictive calories and doesn't compromise fat loss. So your net shift for the week is potentially toward a little bit less breakdown of muscle. Okay, following me on that. That's the first mechanism.

Philip Pape: 12:02

The second mechanism is the impact of the continuous, prolonged energy restriction with the traditional approach on your anabolic signaling pathways. Because in extended deficit we know that it suppresses your muscle building machinery. We know this happens over time. It's why you start to lose strength, you start to lose muscle mass. It just makes it harder to maintain tissue. It's not the end of the world, right? That's why we use reasonable deficits and reasonable durations to minimize that. And you can still do that and have great results. But by periodically returning to maintenance, even for just two days a week, this weekend diet might temporarily normalize these anabolic pathways and give you a little relief from the opposite catabolic pressure that's occurring. So it gets you into I think Bill mentioned this phrase himself. He called it a neutral anabolic state as opposed to a catabolic state. Right, and that difference on just those two days again could make a difference for the week compared to the continuous group and you're taking a break.

Philip Pape: 13:03

The third mechanism is the effect of muscle glycogen. We know that, of course, while you're dieting, your carbs are lower and you are depleting your muscle glycogen more than you would if you weren't restricted. That impacts your training performance. It reduces your energy available for the high intensity contractions from our lifting. And then that lower training intensity simply means less of the mechanical tension you're looking to get on your muscles, which is the primary stimulus for maintaining muscle. Long story short, fewer carbs, harder to train is hard and get as much muscle stimulus.

Philip Pape: 13:37

And the weekend carb refeed effectively replenishes those stores. Right, it's like you're refilling the battery, whereas in the traditional approach it's always a little bit depleted. Well, now you're refilling it once a week and because it's on the weekend, most people train on the weekdays, right, most people, again, traditional kind of calendar approach and therefore you're really jacking up your fuel stores right before your first hard training session of the week, which sets you up maybe for more success and progress that if you're just constantly slightly depleted. And this this also brings up in my mind the idea that the weekend doesn't have to be Saturday and Sunday. You may have a shift type shift type job where you work on the weekends. It might be another two days of the week. I do think it's probably important to have the two days to be contiguous.

Philip Pape: 14:23

I'm not sure the study tried to compare that, but that would be my thought. Now, the study I don't think it directly measured workout performance, but it's probably an indirect result of what was going on. It is that replenishing the glycogen on the weekend supported higher training intensity and created better conditions for muscle preservation, leading to the last component which frankly underpins everything I just said, and that's the psychological piece, the mental piece. Both study groups maintained really good adherence, over 90% completion. But if you think about the real world that we live in, knowing that you can eat more on the weekends is probably going to improve your long-term compliance and I've seen this with all types of nonlinear dieting where the variety and the ability to eat more on some days it just creates mental relief and it reduces diet fatigue and that mental relief from having the higher planned weekend refeeds makes the process more sustainable. You can stick with it long term and, granted, that doesn't speak directly to the weekly muscle preservation and metabolic slowdown, but it does allow you to stick with the diet and it's a great reason to consider this anyway reason to consider this anyway. So that's, that's, in my opinion, the main mechanisms.

Philip Pape: 15:44

And notice, I didn't mention leptin in there. I'll get back to that a little bit later because there's some, I'll say, myths about leptin replenishment and how effective that is, but we'll get back to that. I want to talk about now how you apply these to your fat loss approach and make it practical. So the very first thing we always have to do during fat loss is prepare for it, and I'm going to assume you've done that. That's outside the scope of today's episode, but effectively, you've started training consistently, you're tracking your food, you're eating sufficient protein and you know what your maintenance calories are.

Philip Pape: 16:11

Now how do you know your maintenance calories? Well, you've been tracking your food and weight for at least two to three weeks. Now. You can do that on your own or you can do that in Macrofactor, which is my favorite app. It's the only app on the market that does this Chronometer, myfitnesspal none of those apps can actually estimate your expenditure and give you real targets each week based on that. So download Macrofactor from your app store. If you don't have it already, use my code, witsandweightweights. All one word for two weeks free and it's going to change your life.

Philip Pape: 16:38

But that's what you need to start with is knowing what your maintenance calories are. Once you know that, you can say okay, what rate of loss do I want to go after? For most people, a half a percent a week is really solid, but up to 1% of your body weight per week, which is kind of the upper end for most people outside of advanced populations that I work with, which might go more aggressively, but usually that's the max. And that's because you want to balance the meaningful progress right. You don't want to just take two years for fat loss, you want to do it in a fairly decent timeframe. But you also want it to be sustainable, mentally sustainable, right? Not just with the weekend diet approach we're going to talk about, but just in general the amount of calories that you eat and keeping in mind that the weekend diet approach is going to reduce your weekday calories even further. So you might not want to go as aggressively because of it.

Philip Pape: 17:29

So I'm going to use a I'll call it moderately aggressive number in here of 0.75% just to crunch some numbers for you and give you an idea of what it looks like. So let's say you weigh 180 pounds and you're saying, okay, I'm going to lose 1.35 pounds a week. And since a pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, roughly this translates to a weekly deficit. Okay, for the whole week a deficit of 4,725 calories, so a little over 4,700 calories. So instead of distributing that evenly, which would be a 675 calorie a day deficit, the weekend diet is going to concentrate that deficit into the five weekdays. So now you're going to divide that calories by five and that gives you a weekday deficit of 945 calories.

Philip Pape: 18:14

So if your maintenance intake, your maintenance calories, are 2,500 a day right, that's how many calories you burn, and if you ate that you would maintain your weight you would now want to consume around 1,555 calories during the weekdays. Let's round it to 1,600, so the numbers aren't too complicated. So you would be eating 1600 calories a day Monday through Friday, but then on Saturday and Sunday you jack it up to your maintenance at 2500 calories, with the increase coming primarily from carbohydrates. So if you do some math, it comes out to like an extra 200 something grams of carbs on Saturday and Sunday, which is a decent amount of carbs, and the resulting glycogen flooding your system. And so what this does is it creates the same weekly energy deficit as if you spread it out across seven days. But now you have these structured periods of higher energy availability that, according to this study, might better preserve muscle mass and metabolic rate, and potentially to a really nice degree. So for optimal results here, you are going to have sufficient protein, which is again about 0.8 grams per pound in this case, and for our 180 pound example, that means 145 grams of protein a day. Your fat is going to be pegged at some reasonable amount, usually around 30% of your calories, and then the rest come from carbs.

Philip Pape: 19:38

Now, when you go on the weekend side of the diet, right when the weekend comes around, you want to add in the extra calories from mostly carbs. But again, naturally, you might increase your fats and proteins, because a lot of the food we eat is a blend of macros, it's not just carbs. Now, granted, if you just add more rice or add more potatoes, you're going to have mostly carbohydrates, you know. Add more fruit. Those are the sources of carbs that I would generally recommend are whole food sources of carbs, but of course you can have some indulgences in there, like we discuss.

Philip Pape: 20:09

When it comes to flexible dieting, and here's the cool thing about the weekend diet it aligns really well with how most people live their life. Right, most people have the. They go out on the weekends, they have the social situations, the parties, the travel. All of that happens on the weekends generally, again, unless you have a different schedule, and so these higher calorie days are perhaps more enjoyable, more practical to implement. Because of these real world lifestyle constraints and because you've planned it in, it becomes even less fatiguing and less of a strain on your ability to feel successful, right, like every week is a win because you've planned in all this food. And, by the way, let me tell you, when you do this and you get used to your weekly structure and then Friday comes along and then you get to Saturday, it might actually feel like a lot of food to bump up those carbs on Saturday and Sunday. So that's where deciding how to do it and how to adjust your timing and meal planning appropriately for the Saturday and Sunday, treating them as different than the rest of the week, is going to be really important here. So the Campbell study did measure leptin I wanted to talk about leptin real quick leptin levels and they found that they predictably decreased during the diet in both groups, which is expected, and past research has revealed something about carbs and leptin specifically that I wanted to cover today that, I think, adds another dimension to this weekend diet If you think of leptin.

Philip Pape: 21:32

Leptin is your body's satiety hormone. It signals that you have enough energy coming in. It tells your brain I've got enough energy coming in and so I'm fine, I'm full, I'm satisfied. When you're in a diet, when you're dieting with restricted calories, the leptin goes down and that's what triggers increased hunger. It also is tied to your metabolic rate. You have an adaptive response we call it metabolic adaptation which is tied to multiple hormones, including thyroid, insulin, cortisol, et cetera.

Philip Pape: 22:01

But leptin's a very, very important one. It's the primary trigger for this adaptive response and that is why many of us have trouble prolonging our diets for too long, because your calories just drop, drop, drop, drop and you have to drop the calories along with them, or you just don't lose as fast when you think of carbohydrates, especially when you consume them in high amounts above your daily energy requirements. So in this case we're jacking up to maintenance which potentially is even slightly above your true maintenance at the moment. When you do that, we know that it can rapidly increase leptin on those days. And this is a temporary thing, right, it's just temporary. It doesn't permanently increase your metabolism or anything that some of the influencers try to convince you of with reverse dieting and all that. No, it's a temporary hormonal response and it might attenuate or mitigate some of the adaptive mechanisms from the dieting, from the energy restriction, even if it is just for a few days. But it gives you, yes, physiological relief, because the leptin is higher and you've got the energy flooding your system, but also mental relief from the stress of dieting.

Philip Pape: 23:06

And this is what it effectively does, is it turns your weekend into a, an advantage, and that's why I like this approach. And also, you don't view you don't view going higher on the weekend, like when you go out to eat and you have the appetizer and you have the dessert as this failure, as this all or nothing thing. You're actually optimizing, planning it in, structuring it in. It's pretty cool. It's not cheating either. It's not a cheat weekend Because you're not just going hog wild with unfettered access to whatever. You are strategically bumping up your carbs and, by the way, we do this in a very micro level. When we do rapid fat loss, we'll do like four days of very severe restriction and then one day of refeed, and again, we're not cheating on those days, we're strategically bringing up the carbs. So this weekend diet recognizes that your body's not just a calorie calculator. It is a very complex adaptive system and it responds to all the inputs how much you eat, when you eat it, how you move, how you train, all of it. And so we're kind of making this work with our natural rhythms instead of fighting against them, and so it makes it super sustainable.

Philip Pape: 24:13

I'm actually going to be telling, uh suggesting more of my clients consider this than I have in the past, specifically because I re-reviewed what the evidence has said and I think there is a lot of validity to this. So, to summarize, dr Campbell's research which again shout out to him for doing this work in his lab down at USF suggests that the weekend diet reducing calories more aggressively Monday through Friday, and then increasing carbs to maintenance on weekends, could give you advantages for preserving muscle and mitigating some of the metabolic slowdown. Remember, it's the same fat loss but it's more muscle retention. So, effectively, it's more fat loss, because now maybe you could go a little more aggressively and hold on to muscle and lose a little more fat, or you could simply stay where you are, eat more food, potentially have better training performance, better psychological adherence all of those things we talked about and it naturally aligns with most people's lifestyle patterns, which we're all about here. We're all about, like, making it work for your lifestyle rather than white knuckling it and pushing through.

Philip Pape: 25:19

So if you've tried fat loss in the past and you had, say, more muscle loss than you wanted, or your performance dropped faster than you wanted and or even just psychologically it felt like a slog, try this out. Right, try this out. It's the weekend diet. It couldn't be simpler. If you're using macro factor, I suggest doing it this way. I suggest setting the deficit to the Monday through Friday deficit and just distributing the calories evenly, but on the weekends, just manually increase your carbs. I think that's the easiest way to manage it in the app. Alternatively, you could use the collaborative mode to adjust the macros a little bit manually, which I believe you could also make it work that way. So, whatever works for you, if you're working with me as a client, I'll tell you exactly how to do it.

Philip Pape: 26:05

Anyway, last thing I'm going to leave you with is again download my free Precision Fat Loss Guide, and I'm asking you to do that because it does contain all of the possible flexible and creative approaches to fat loss that you might consider how to do them, the speed, the duration, who it's good for, who it's not good for, and they've got check boxes and Xs basically in these tables to tell you like this is probably the ideal dieting approach for you right now and then that can set you off on a chain of discovery and learning and setting up your fat loss phase for success. Just go to witsandweightscom, slash free, or just click the link in the show notes at the top to get your copy today. All right, Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember that sometimes the smartest approach isn't doing the same thing every day, but finding the right rhythm that works for you. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Why Perimenopause Fat Loss Feels Harder After 40 (Brooke Davis) | Ep 323

Get the other side of this powerful conversation on Brooke’s podcast ”Fitness Simplified,” where she interviews Philip on the muscle and metabolism side of perimenopause fat loss.

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Are you over 40, doing everything right, but the belly fat won’t budge?

You’re not crazy. Perimenopause changes your entire physiology, and the old rules no longer apply. In this episode, Brooke Davis, founder of Elysian Women’s Wellness and host of the  ”Fitness Simplified” podcast, joins Philip to unpack the real reason your body is resisting fat loss and how to finally reclaim your results.

Don’t miss part two of this episode on ”Fitness Simplified,” where Brooke interviews Philip about building muscle and boosting metabolism during this critical stage.

Main Takeaways:

• Perimenopause creates hormonal chaos that impacts fat storage

• “Move more, eat less” is outdated advice for midlife women

• Stress, blood sugar, and undernourishment stall results

• Muscle is essential for fat loss, hormone health, and aging

• Nutrition timing and quality matter more than restriction

Timestamps:

2:51 – Hormonal chaos and your shifting physiology
6:13 – Vital reserve and burnout from your 20s
8:33 – Cortisol, estrogen, and weight gain
14:20 – Blood sugar, insulin, and fat storage
15:57 – How to eat to support hormones
19:19 – Simple habits to stabilize blood sugar
23:12 – The truth about fasting and low-carb diets
29:02 – Carbs, cortisol, and unlocking fat loss
33:09 – Lifting heavy and building muscle in midlife
35:54 – Smart cardio and stress recovery
36:39 – Where to start without another “diet”

Get the other side of this powerful conversation on Brooke’s podcast ”Fitness Simplified,” where she interviews Philip on the muscle and metabolism side of perimenopause fat loss.

Why Fat Loss Feels Harder in Perimenopause and What to Do About It

If you’re a woman over 40 who’s doing “all the right things” and still can’t lose stubborn body fat, this episode is for you. We’re talking about the frustrating reality of perimenopause and how it affects fat loss, hormones, and your overall metabolism. More importantly, we're sharing what to actually do about it.

For years, you may have gotten results by cutting carbs, doing more cardio, or simply “eating clean.” But now those same strategies don’t work. You’re dealing with poor sleep, higher stress, energy crashes, and a body that feels like it’s resisting everything.

This is the hormonal transition known as perimenopause, and it’s not your imagination. Your physiology is changing, and so should your approach to fat loss.

Hormonal Shifts That Change the Game

Perimenopause involves a gradual drop in estrogen and progesterone. But it’s not a smooth ride. Estrogen in particular becomes erratic, rising and falling unpredictably. This hormonal instability can make you more sensitive to stress, impair insulin regulation, and increase fat storage—especially around your midsection.

On top of that, testosterone and DHEA also decline, which affects your ability to build and maintain lean mass. And since the adrenal glands become your body’s backup system for sex hormones, chronic stress can compound everything. It’s a hormonal double whammy.

Why Your Old Fat Loss Strategies Backfire

Back in your 20s and 30s, you probably got away with high-intensity exercise and low-calorie diets. But your body had more “vital reserve” then. In midlife, that same approach backfires.

Here’s why:

• Chronically under-eating leads to poor recovery and muscle loss.

• Too much cardio without strength training drives up cortisol and burns you out.

• Fasting and skipping meals may worsen insulin resistance and cortisol spikes.

It’s not about trying harder or having more willpower. It’s about doing things differently.

How to Support Your Body for Fat Loss After 40

Let’s get practical. Here are some of the most effective lifestyle and nutrition shifts that support hormones and metabolism during perimenopause:

1. Strength Training Is Non-Negotiable

Build muscle. Maintain muscle. Prioritize muscle. Resistance training two to four times per week can improve insulin sensitivity, stabilize blood sugar, and increase your metabolic rate. Use challenging weights, progressively overload, and train with intention.

2. Eat Enough (Especially Protein and Carbs)

Stop starving yourself. Most women are under-eating by hundreds of calories a day, which drives up stress and slows fat loss. Your body needs fuel to thrive, not just survive.

• Aim for 0.8 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight.

• Include fiber-rich carbs like oats, rice, beans, fruit, and potatoes.

• Don’t fear carbs—they regulate cortisol and support your nervous system.

3. Manage Blood Sugar with Meal Timing and Composition

You don’t need a CGM to get this right. Start meals with protein and fiber, add some healthy fat, and finish with carbs. Try walking for 10 minutes after meals to help shuttle glucose into muscle tissue. Little things like this reduce energy crashes and support hormonal balance.

4. Sleep, Stress, and Symptom Awareness

Sleep is the secret weapon of body composition. Track how foods affect your sleep and mood. Learn to recognize the difference between “I’m hungry” and “I’m depleted.” Support your nervous system by reducing caffeine, managing stress, and doing things that bring you back to center.

Why “Eat Less, Move More” Is a Trap

Women often double down on the “calories in, calories out” mindset when progress stalls. But if your hormones are out of whack, pushing harder will only make things worse. A better approach is to build muscle, eat more to fuel your body, and focus on quality nutrition, not restriction.

There’s a huge difference between being in a calorie deficit and being undernourished. The latter leads to more stress, poor sleep, and fat gain. The former, when done right, leads to sustainable fat loss with preserved muscle mass and better energy.

The Key Is Flexibility, Not Rigidity

Perimenopause is not the time to commit to another rigid diet or go “all in” on fasting, keto, or another quick fix. Instead, think of your nutrition and training as tools to support your physiology, not fight against it.

Start with muscle. Add in carbs. Reduce stress. Eat enough. Sleep deeply. Be patient. You can lose fat in your 40s and beyond, but it requires a smarter approach built around who you are now, not who you used to be.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you're a woman over 40 who's been doing all the right things but can't seem to lose stubborn fat around your midsection, you're not alone and you're not crazy. The strategies at work in your 30s suddenly seem useless and no matter how much you cut calories or increase cardio, the scale refuses to budge. What's worse, your doctor might have told you this is just what happens after 40, without offering any real solutions. Today, I invited on a women's health expert to reveal why perimenopause creates the perfect hormonal storm for fat gain, why eat less, move more actually backfires during this life stage, and the specific nutrition and lifestyle adjustments that can help you reclaim your metabolism without sacrificing your sanity. 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 Pape, and today I'm bringing you a collaboration with Brooke Davis, founder of Elysian Women's Wellness and host of the Fitness Simplified podcast. Make sure to follow her podcast, because we're dropping two episodes simultaneously for different parts of the conversation.

Philip Pape: 1:15

Today on this podcast, we're talking about a very hot topic fat loss during perimenopause. What is really going on with your hormones, your metabolism, body composition during this transition? How to shift what you do your nutrition, your lifestyle, without quick fixes, without detoxes, cutting carbs, any of the other nonsense you might hear all over the internet today. Brooke has spent over a decade helping hundreds of women navigate midlife fitness. She's a certified nutrition coach, personal trainer, women's health specialist. She's done it all. She's developed protocols that address the specific hormonal shifts of peri and post-menopause to help women transform their bodies when other methods have stopped working. So today you are going to learn why the usual fat loss advice won't cut it for women over 40. The true non-negotiables during this phase and the best nutrition and lifestyle behaviors to support your hormones.

Philip Pape: 2:09

Last thing, before we get into it, if you want to hear the other side of this conversation, make sure to follow the Fitness Simplified podcast. Brooke is interviewing me on the muscle and metabolism side of this during fat loss for perimenopause. It's all. There's a lot of overlap anyway, isn't there? And that dropped the same day as this episode. So Fitness Simplified Podcast or click the link in the show notes. Brooke, enough of me talking, welcome to the show.

Brooke Davis: 2:31

Hello, hello, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to chat today.

Philip Pape: 2:42

So let's get right into the topic, which is why the heck is it so hard for women as they get older, whether it's because of hormones or something else? You tell us to lose fat, or perhaps you gain body fat. What is going on?

Brooke Davis: 2:51

There are so, so, so many factors, you know, and, as you mentioned, uh, hormones. That is one of the biggest things that is changing right. Uh, literally women's internal chemistry, that is changing right, literally women's internal chemistry, their physiology, is shifting majorly. Hormones that you know have kept us steady throughout our entire life are at a major decline, along with fluctuations throughout this time, and you know, a lot of women are like oh I just, you know, need to have more willpower, my metabolism is failing, things like that. But you know, the reality is that a lot of times, it's nothing that they're doing wrong per se. It's just that the things that they need to do now, versus when they were 20, do have to be different, because they themselves are different. They're like I said, their whole physiology is actually shifting in a pretty big way, and so those strategies that used to work don't really work anymore. Yeah, long story short.

Philip Pape: 3:57

Yeah, yeah, no, no, great, Please. It's good to get into these and I'm always champing at the bit with follow-up questions, because you said some really neat things there. One thing you mentioned and I want to pull the thread is things have changed. Your physiology has changed. The thing you did in your 20s isn't working. But let me ask you this honestly how many people are doing even the right things in their 20s? Because I want to set the stage and how are they getting away with not doing the right things? Let's be honest.

Brooke Davis: 4:18

Yeah, so, like you mentioned, most people in their 20s when you put it like that, they're not doing the optimal things. Right, they might do things that produce results in terms of fat loss, but they're not necessarily doing the things that are going to bring them optimal health. And you know this is why, like you said, there's a lot of overlap, because the reality of it is that the things that bring you optimal health in your 20s will bring you fat loss and optimal health in your 40s, but most people in their 20s don't care about optimal health, they don't care about the rate at which they get the fat loss results that they're looking for, and so what tends to happen is they're taking really extreme, really ultimately stressful measures you know, stressful on their bodies to reach the goals that they want. You know they're exercising way too much. You know they're usually it's high intensity, which there's nothing wrong with that. That's great when that's all you're doing, and a lot of it.

Brooke Davis: 5:11

They're under nourishing or under eating in general, and you know they're really not, like I said, focused on nutrients, not focused on nourishing their body. Everything they do is really extreme. So that is, I mean, the biggest kind of shift that needs to occur is that your body doesn't now, in your 40s, even honestly 30s, like I'm 34, I'm going to be 35 next year, so you know your body doesn't have the resilience for it anymore. And one of the things I'm a functional diagnostic nutritionist and one of our like kind of coin terms is vital reserve. And when you're 20, right, you have that vital reserve. Well, some people do, some people don't, right. But when you're 40, and you've been doing those things for, you know, 20 years, maybe stressing your body out, undernourishing, right, burning the candle at both ends, not getting enough sleep your body doesn't have the vital reserve to continue to function well, or well enough that you don't notice it in your 40s.

Philip Pape: 6:13

Yeah, there are some nuances there that I think are lost on some people. Because I wanted to ask it that way, because I can think of my 20s like I got away with a lot of things. Now I wasn't into fitness, I was definitely doing lots of weird diets, going back to Slim Fast and Atkins and all that stuff. That's how old I am. I'm in my 40s, so about 10 year difference. But it's like the thought that in your 20s the things you can do, your body just can mitigate them significantly, Like you suggested.

Philip Pape: 6:41

That's more resilient, the vital reserve. It's like you can get away with it and you learn these bad habits, Like you just end up learning or thinking that this works and that's the best way to do it. Uh, overexercising, like you said, under nourishing, which is a great substitute word for under eating, because then it implies it's not just about food in general or energy in general, it's nutrients, it's vitality, it's support of your body. And then what about? Let's get into the physiological changes? It sounds like there's a double whammy going on of accumulation you mentioned accumulated stress, for example of just bad habits, so that starts in your twenties and then the physiology changes on top of that. So maybe we focus on that piece of it.

Brooke Davis: 7:23

Yeah, so I mean hormonally speaking. Right, we'll start in physiologically and perimenopause, the first thing to go is estrogen and progesterone, which are, you know, our two main sex reproductive hormones, and so with that, progesterone is usually at a pretty steady decline, and that is what tends to kind of cause issues initially. And then what happens is the estrogen is doing this like along the way, so it's drastically increasing and tanking, increasing tanking, which is putting you into, you know, estrogen dominance, not zero estrogen dominance, and that is what causes a ton of the symptoms that women probably have the most complaints about, which is like weight loss resistance, the accumulation of fat around the belly, the hot flashes, night sweats, things like that are. Those are, those are the most common complaints, and that is caused by those massive fluctuations in estrogen. So it's not just about that these hormones are declining, it's that they're erratic and that in and of itself is really stressful on the body, as one can imagine.

Brooke Davis: 8:33

And then, on top of that, those fluctuations, quite literally, you have estrogen receptors throughout your entire body, from your brain, your joints, your muscles, and so every system in the body is then impacted by that. And then going into cortisol, your cortisol is, you know, you're against sensitivity to these things. Uh is really elevated, and so cortisol then is impacted. Uh, so your adrenal glands and your adrenal glands what a lot of people don't know are like your secondary sex hormone producers, so they're basically all you have left after your ovaries are done, which I think if people knew that, they would pay more attention to stress management, like going into this, because that is a major, major factor. And so those are, I mean, some of the main like impacted uh hormone systems and that go on during perimenopause.

Philip Pape: 9:27

Yeah, that's. That's really well described, because sometimes it gets oversimplified with like well, progesterone, estrogen, testosterone they all drop. Like okay, is it? It's more than that. What you talked about the estrogen erraticness, the scarcity versus the dominance and it's relative to the other hormones too is what you implied, plus the fact that your body's sensitive to estrogen. You know it's funny because I believe men are as well. But right, we don't have that variance. So we can't get what's going on with the ladies in this time of their life.

Philip Pape: 9:57

And then, of course, the downstream of cortisol, which cortisol is a boogeyman for lots of things. But what you're suggesting it's like downstream, it's an indicator of what is going on your HP axis, your adrenal glands, so it's all tied together and I like that you brought up symptoms as well, because I think that's a good source of biofeedback. And listening to your body of like okay, you've got the hot flashes, you're building excess belly fat, you're not able to lose weight, something's telling you and hope is not all lost, right, like it's not the end of the road. So, before we get into the like, what to do and more details, what about testosterone and DHEA? Where are they coming to the picture?

Brooke Davis: 10:32

Yeah, um, so testosterone is also declining, unfortunately. That's a. That's a big one. Dhea, right, that's kind of like uh, your again your backup, right, it's made in the adrenals and so that, um, the supporting your adrenal health and making sure that stress management is a really big part of really like as much of life as you can make it, from as early as you can make, it is really powerful, like I just funny backstory. So my grandma, she's 91 this year and she's been taking this supplement for like a really long time. It's called unforgettable, so it's like a brain health supplement. But I looked at it, I was looking at the ingredients and there's phosphatidylserine in it and that is a like cortisol, regular decreases cortisol in the body and I'm like and she was talking about how like menopause like really wasn't a thing for like it wasn't an issue. She's always just been like cruising a lot and she like she still has horses, she lives almost on her own, like she's very independent, and I was like I wonder if that's like your secret weapon, right?

Brooke Davis: 11:33

here, this you know cortisol management, grandma, like that's. You know how powerful that is and not that obviously that's.

Philip Pape: 11:39

It's not a causation, or you know to end the podcast right there and say call it action, go get your. Here's your affiliate link, by the way. Yeah.

Brooke Davis: 11:48

No, I don't, I don't sell that product but um, but no, it was just really cool Cause I'm like interesting Um so so so wait, is it?

Philip Pape: 11:56

is it acting? Is it acting like a nootropic or adaptogen kind of like Ashwagandha?

Brooke Davis: 12:06

Um, um, no, foster, no, it's just, uh, it just helps manage, uh, cortisol and, like I said, it just makes it less impactful on the body, right, and so it actually lowers your cortisol in general. But, um, so it's not actually indicated for everybody, like if you already have, you know, whatever adrenal quote-unquote, adrenal fatigue is that like, it may not be for everybody, so don't don't go run out and get your phosphat. Um, but it was just like, it just was funny that you know that's like a big thing and my grandma and my day and you've one-year-old grandma is like crushing it over here.

Brooke Davis: 12:31

So um but yeah so. So, dj, like I said, in the adrenals, the adrenal glands are really, really powerful and they are your backup engine basically to hormone production and, um you know, less symptoms through perimenopause. Uh, there have been studies to where, um, you know, women whose nervous system was more regulated, right, they were more in that parasympathetic state. They experienced less to no hot flashes. Um, throughout, you know, despite estrogen levels equaling and being the same as other women right At the time of testing, cause it's all erratic. But despite similar estrogen levels equaling and being the same as other women right At the time of testing, cause, it's all erratic. But despite similar estrogen levels at the time of testing, women who, uh, you know, said that they were in you know more of a person, but they said they had a better HRB, that kind of thing. They actually had less, uh, like Bixomotor motor symptoms than the other groups. So it's really, really powerful.

Philip Pape: 13:28

Yeah, it always. All roads seem to lead to stress, no matter who I talk to, having been in this business myself, and there's a lot of angles to it. Right, there's a lot of ways to attack the ultimate getting into that nervous system state you want to be in. Do you watch TV, like, have you seen the new White Lotus? Do you watch that show at all? Okay, so in the latest season, um, they go to this meditation center and there's like a monk, basically I don't know if it's Tibetan, but this is in Thailand, I think. And it made me think like if we were just out of civilization in general and back to, like hunter gatherers, just living the life, the stress would be so much lower. Right, like that's the root of all our problems.

Philip Pape: 14:02

Anyway, I think that's not like let's just get rid of it, all, right, but you mentioned so cortisol, and then there's insulin, right. So there's a connection there. I don't know if you had mentioned it yet, but maybe we get into that. Then I want to ask about HRT, and then, finally, let's get into lifestyle. So insulin, yeah.

Brooke Davis: 14:20

Yeah, so insulin regulation is a it's really disrupted. You become more insulin resistant during perimenopause simply because of the hormonal shifts estrogen, progesterone, cortisol that impacts your blood sugar. So you know throughout that that is definitely one like really simple shift that women can make. I don't know if we're gonna get into that yet, but that is. You know, insulin resistance leads to metabolic disease. That is part of, you know, the decline of metabolism in the system overall, and so that is absolutely a consideration during perimenopause that can be addressed really easily with nutrition and lifestyle.

Philip Pape: 14:58

Yeah, so you're such a tease Like what is the super secret sauce to doing it? And actually, before we do that, is it HRT.

Brooke Davis: 15:05

No no. Um yeah, no, uh, I mean it. It can potentially help for sure, but yeah, as far as you know, nutrition, I don't, I don't want to take your, your glory, that's on, that's what your podcast, but muscle there's overlap, there's lots of overlap.

Philip Pape: 15:20

It's all good Jump into it, you can't just separate them. You can't separate them.

Brooke Davis: 15:23

First and foremost is muscle Um. The more muscle you have, um you know, the less impact all of that is going to have on the body. Um more you know glycogen gets shuttled into the muscles, the less um insulin sensitivity. Um. So, as far as um nutrition goes, managing blood sugar, making sure that you have balanced meals, first of all, um making sure that you know each meal starts with a fiber fat, um, and then ideally going to protein and then your carbohydrates, so, um that slows down the digestion and reduces the impact on blood sugar.

Philip Pape: 15:57

Um, okay, hold on, let's. Let's break it down for people. Let's do blood sugar, cause there's there's a lot of misinformation about blood sugar. Yeah, a lot of CGM stuff out there as well, like the, the glucose monitors, for better or worse. There it's a tool, uh, and I just had actually Christina McClurkin was just on recently. You know her from our group as well, yeah.

Carol: 16:15

Right and blood sugar is like one of her pillars.

Philip Pape: 16:17

There we go. Yeah, so we all understand the value of fiber and stuff, but you just said um start with a fiber. I think you said fiber and then fat and then protein and then vegetable or carbs. Is that like the sequence of building your plate you're thinking, or the sequence of how you eat with your plate? What are you referring to?

Brooke Davis: 16:34

How you eat. I mean, you could do it to build your plate as well. Uh, absolutely, but yeah, the order in which you actually eat your food.

Philip Pape: 16:41

Good, okay, sequencing, yep, cool.

Brooke Davis: 16:44

Yes.

Philip Pape: 16:44

All right, all right, continue. I just wanted to touch on the blood sugar piece.

Brooke Davis: 16:49

Blood sugar. Okay. So, yes, the order in which. And then, of course, making sure that overall, I mean, you're not eating a ton of processed sugar, processed carbohydrates. That is like, first and foremost, that I tend to skip that because I'm like that's a given right, but it's not. So you know, reducing sugar, reducing added sugars, even if you have, you know fruits are, generally speaking, okay If you have, you know, type two, whatever type one, diabetes or whatever already, then that is something you want to manage and make sure that, even you know, with your fruit, maybe everyone is different and this is the crazy thing, like there have been studies to where you know one person might react to a sweet potato, you know their, their blood sugar might go through the roof and another person might be totally fine, like that, they don't have that much of an impact.

Brooke Davis: 17:32

So that is one reason where one one time, uh, or one reason why CGMs can actually be really powerful, continuous glucose monitors for those who are familiar with that. But because you know, and it's not only food that spikes your blood sugar, uh, stress, right, periods of stress, if cortisol is being pumped in your system, then you know that can impact your blood sugar. And so managing that first and foremost? Uh, but that is where, like I said, if you have access to a CGM, I really think and especially through premenopause, it's just data not to confuse the fact that your blood sugar should stay in a straight line all day long. No, but there may be things impacting your blood sugar that you don't realize, that do have more of an effect on you than even other people. So that can absolutely be a powerful tool just for information and making you know small shifts that help support your body.

Philip Pape: 18:29

But why is it? Why is blood sugar important?

Brooke Davis: 18:32

I mean it's stress on the body is the reality of it, and the more you know your body has to work to produce insulin, to regulate it. It's just having to work overtime.

Philip Pape: 18:43

Okay, that's a good one. I'm glad you said that, because a lot of people have a different angle they come to when they talk about blood sugar. For some people, it is the insulin where I think that's overplayed if you're lifting, if you're living the right lifestyle, and others say it's the energy crashes. But I think that's because of the inconsistency in your cortisol, which is your stress, and what you're implying is that, overall, you're saying that chronic stress can be pushed up if you have erratic blood sugar. Is that right? Yeah, important, important to know, like, like all the different things that cause it. It's the same thing with, like, inconsistent sleep and wake times and inconsistent eating patterns, and so your body wants to be safe and secure and that's one way to do it. Okay.

Brooke Davis: 19:19

Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. Um, and, like you mentioned, like, yes, energy levels, um, cravings, for sure you know, for fast energy if your blood sugar is spiking and then tanking. So I mean, those are all. Again, it's a stressor on the body overall, but uh, impacts how you feel and how you perform. And then, uh, going on walks, as far as managing, you know, uh, blood sugar after meals, um, you know a 10 minute walk, um, there was also a really recent study that came out. It's, I mean, it's all over, but um, if you it was 10, 10 squats every 45 minutes actually managed blood sugar better than a 30 minute walk after meals. Uh, but just that, like, um, you know consistent input of glucose into the muscles and you know, utilization of it throughout the day, um, like I said, it just helped manage blood sugar and I'm sure, as they went I don't know how long the study actually was, but I'm sure they built muscle and it improved everything.

Philip Pape: 20:15

Hold on. So that's cool. I hadn't heard about that one. Did they at all compare it to one long training session in the day?

Brooke Davis: 20:23

No, it was compared to walks.

Philip Pape: 20:24

Yeah, cause I was wondering if you know cause. Again, I always make the anecdotal argument. I think it's supported by evidence, but that, like a nice solid training session, hard training session in the morning is great for your stress for the whole day. It might have a similar effect of like the micro doses of movement, just wondering.

Brooke Davis: 20:41

Yeah, um, no, there's actually. So the studies I mean this wasn't specifically on blood sugar, but I mean the the studies on exercise stacks. There are some studies, especially, uh, based on like strength, that I've read that, um, you, they actually were able to improve strength performance better by breaking up sessions because of the recovery piece of it, right, um, and then exercise snacks, you know as far as the benefits of it are equal to, you know, if not potentially better than one like long training session, um, so I think, I think it, and it makes sense to me that you know the consistent, again, utilization and and input of glucose into the muscles throughout the day would be more beneficial than even just a single like bout of exercise. But that would be an interesting study. Maybe someday I'll do that.

Philip Pape: 21:29

It's food for thought. Look, I mean, at the end of the day, you got to make it work, so you do something right, like do one of those things. But if you're like I could do either. Which do I do. It's nice to know which one's a little more optimal for some folks.

Brooke Davis: 21:41

Yeah, but I mean one thing we do like with kind of is like every time you go to the bathroom like do 10 extra squats like you, especially for, you know, those who sit at a desk, like you know, can you set a timer for the hour and just stand up and do 10 squat, right, it takes 10, maybe 15 seconds, right, to do 10 squats. Like who doesn't have time to do that?

Philip Pape: 22:00

Oh yeah, people will say they don't have time for a lot of things right brook, that they do. So all right, so continuing on with like we're. So ultimately, we're trying to support hormones for women in perimenopause and again people are thinking okay, where blood sugar comes into this because of the stress we mentioned before, the logical chain here of stress Affecting hormones, affecting fat storage, the ability to lose fat. I want to make sure that the listener continues to have that like what are the cause and effect of all this and where do I ultimately have the biggest impact with my actions, rather than like getting frustrated and thinking I have to get treatment or supplements or something like that.

Brooke Davis: 22:35

Yeah, uh, like I said. So biggest thing, like simple shifts with nutrition, that would be, you know, making sure, like I said, you're getting enough protein, you're getting enough high quality, nutrient dense food, enough fiber right, 25 to 35 grams per day of fiber, and then, in the order that you eat your meals, fiber, fat, protein, carbs and and then you know again if you strength training, of course, strength training two to three times a week, uh, making sure you have that muscle if you can do walks and your squats throughout the day. I mean those are some of the most impactful things you can do.

Philip Pape: 23:12

as far as blood sugar is concerned, so maybe the other angle on this is what not to do, because I'll tell you and you, I'm sure, a hundred percent agree with what you hear online all the time fasting, low carb. What are the other?

Brooke Davis: 23:28

ones Like we could just knock them down right now. Let's go. Okay, okay, uh, so fasting, um, I actually also have a whole podcast on this.

Philip Pape: 23:34

Um, but do you know what number it is, what episode, or is it recent?

Brooke Davis: 23:38

If we.

Philip Pape: 23:38

If we connect, we could drop it in later.

Brooke Davis: 23:40

Okay, okay, yeah, uh, it's, it was semi-recent, um, if they, you know, if they scroll through there, find it, I only have 40 episodes, so it's not like it'd be awesome.

Philip Pape: 23:48

I'm sure they're. They're super high quality. 40 episodes so good. That's easy. People can binge the whole thing yeah.

Brooke Davis: 23:53

Um, but so fasting? Um, there are. There are a ton of benefits to fasting, actually. Uh, most people, especially women, are doing it wrong. The reality of it is that, you know, not eating under nourishing, um, that is a stressor, and most women are already not eating enough, and so you cut off, you know, you give yourself a six hour time window to shove 2000 calories in, like I mean I love to eat, but like that's going to be hard for even me, Um and so, and then most women, you know, aren't getting, like I said, enough as it is and so.

Brooke Davis: 24:27

But you know, within that then we have cortisol and that is again a blood sugar regulator. So if you wake up in the morning, you, when your cortisol should be right, the highest, that's normal, we want it to be high, that's what wakes you up and it helps stabilize your blood sugar through the night because we're not eating overnight. So in the morning, right, it's. Waking up, it's high. If you continue to not eat right, instead of breaking that fast and allowing you know the food that you're eating to then stabilize your blood sugar, your cortisol will continue to remain elevated.

Brooke Davis: 24:59

So that's problem number one and most women, they're not cutting off their eating window at night, because that is the most difficult for most people, but they, so they take it off the morning and so when they're doing fasting, they're not eating until you know 12, one o'clock, on top of which they're usually, you know, having coffee, which also caffeine can be a major stressor can increase your cortisol, which and I and I have to like just clarify this because cortisol, there's nothing wrong inherently with cortisol.

Brooke Davis: 25:28

We need it, right. It is a natural hormone that has plays a role in, you know, every function of our body, but especially in perimenopause, it can actually really impact fat loss efforts and you know the way that your body continues to produce hormones. So, because too much cortisol will actually take the energy from other sex hormones, and so you know that you'll see, not not influencers, but like a lot of people being like cortisol doesn't matter. Like you know, people are pushing it too much and it's like, okay, there's a, there's a line, like I don't want you to just stress over cortisol, but you have to know that there are physiological, like implications to these actions that you're taking, um, and they can impact your fat loss efforts.

Philip Pape: 26:17

So many, many rant there, um no, no it, it makes sense, especially when you're like it's an indicator, it's biomarker, biofeedback, of what's going on. It's not that you want to go out and get a cortisol blocking supplement and just put a patch on this downstream thing. You want to lift and eat for your blood sugar and balance your food and don't fast at the wrong time, et cetera. Yeah, okay, totally, totally.

Brooke Davis: 26:38

So so, yeah, that's your food, and don't fast at the wrong time, et cetera.

Brooke Davis: 26:40

Yeah, okay, totally, totally so. So, yeah, that's, um, those are, I mean, two of the major like issues with fasting is they're they're not getting enough food, um, because it's really hard to eat in that window. And then that extended morning, you know, fast is does impact blood sugar, cortisol, et cetera, um, and then if they're not planning, you know what they're going to eat, if it's not quality, right, they're not only undernourishing, they're not getting a protein, which causes muscle loss, they are, you know, not getting enough fiber, which causes, you know, backup and detox and bowel movements, and then you know, so that's, those are the major issues with it. But, honestly, having a having an eating window and stopping eating, like six, you know, seven, maybe even at the latest, I think, honestly for everybody, not just perimenopausal women, but there's a reason that you know we have this overnight, uh, fast, and it gives your body a chance to actually regenerate, right, fasting it does actually have a lot of benefits, but it has to be done in the right way, for pregnant and postulant women specifically, I mean everybody.

Carol: 27:46

Before I started working with Philip, I had been trying to lose weight and was really struggling with consistency, but from the very beginning, philip took the time to listen to me and understand my goals. He taught me the importance of fueling my body with the right foods to optimize my training in the gym, and I lost 20 pounds. More importantly, I gained self-confidence. What sets Philip apart is the personal connection. He supported and encouraged me every step of the way. So if you're looking for a coach who cares about your journey as much as you do, I highly recommend Philip Pape.

Philip Pape: 28:26

No, that makes sense. That's a great approach, right? Like we're not trying to black and white everything here and say there's you know, only one way. There's the way to do it. And, as everybody's fasting, when they sleep, right, they're fasting. So now it's a matter of like okay, at the end of the day, listen to your body. How's your food impacting your sleep and your biometrics? If you shifted your time window, would you be more consistent with it? Could you align it with your energy during the day, like all the things? Right, yeah, so how does? Where do carbs come into this as well, cause recently I've been digging in. Did I come out with the episode? Yet? I don't know. There might be one coming out about the connection between carbs and cortisol, which I think is pretty cool.

Brooke Davis: 29:09

Yeah, yeah, I mean carbs help manage cortisol output is the reality of it, and that is one reason why low carb diets one reason are an issue. The other side of that, there are actually some studies that short-term, especially for perimenopausal women, short-term lower carb, higher fat diets, um do actually help, you know, stabilize blood sugar, decrease stress in the body, help with hormone production, especially from women who, like this is it's like a generational thing. So, like the generation before me, they were like low fat right, eating the low fat dairy low fat milk, that kind of thing.

Brooke Davis: 29:40

And then my generation, I feel like, is low carb. We're like, all right, we're going to do keto or low carb. So it kind of depends on like, and some people are kind of in the middle of that. So I get, I get, you know, different one coming to me but but the, you know, getting enough quality fats most importantly, which is we're not on keto yet. But that is the biggest, uh, you know, issue, and because hormones are made with B vitamins and cholesterol and so without that fat, that those quality fats, um, you're going to struggle to make hormones and so, and then carbohydrates, I mean carbs, are body's main and preferred source of energy, is the reality of it. Um, they also have a ton of fiber. So, you know, we're not just looking at cortisol in terms of regulation, but, um, detoxification, you know, digestion, the fiber in foods feed our gut microbiome, which is a whole nother aspect of perimenopause that, uh, you know, comes into play, and so carbs are a necessary part of life and so carbs are a necessary part of life.

Philip Pape: 30:42

Yeah, I agree. And you didn't even have to, like, make the case for all the other benefits for performance and energy and recovery. Now, just saying that, that alone I've seen it. I'm sure you've seen it. Women come to you having undernourished but also eating too few carbs, and just adding carbs can all of a sudden unlock a whole bunch of vitality. You know, it's like whoa, I have energy.

Brooke Davis: 31:06

I have my hormones, you know, whatever. So, before we wrap up, yeah, go ahead and fat loss, yes, yes, I know we're over time, but, um, that is one of the biggest things. Like you know, people come to us, they're eating low carb, low calorie I mean, I've literally doubled some women's calories, and you know and they lose weight and they're like what is that? It's like this is what happens when you nourish your body, right it? Because then it comes back to the nervous system, I think largely. You know you're in that fight-or-flight state when you're starving, basically, and so your body's like no, we're hanging on to. You know, everything we got right now.

Brooke Davis: 31:37

And you know, yes, like when it comes to starvation, right, if you are vastly under eating for a long period of time, yeah, you're just, I mean, you're gonna lose weight and waste away to nothing. But that's not usually what happens. People, you know, eat low carb, low calorie all week, and then they have one day that they eat a ton, to try, you know, because their bodies are trying to make up for it all, and so they're not actually like starving, but they would be if they ate how they do during the week, like all the time. So, yeah, it's a. It's an interesting phenomenon to witness. Yeah, I think.

Philip Pape: 32:13

I think you hit on some of the really big points today, like, just to recap right, we came into this with the premise why are women struggling to lose fat, or why are they gaining more fat during perimenopause?

Philip Pape: 32:24

And what I heard from you is it is the hormones, but it's not necessarily the hormones, in that what you're doing about it supports your hormones and it's not like you're trying to just therapy your way out of it. Right, you supplement your way out of it and it's really so. It's both. It's all of it together, and you have to understand the change in physiology and that you can't act like you were in your twenties, that you've got to eat enough food and nutrients, enough fiber. You have to have balance. You have to think about your blood sugar. It sounds like a lot, but at the end of the day I think you hinted multiple times eating a variety of whole foods, nutritious foods and like not under eating is a great start. It's a great start and just to kind of segue into ending this episode and then teasing into the other conversation we're having how do cardio and lifting then play into this? Because it's not just about nutrition, right?

Brooke Davis: 33:09

Absolutely yeah. So I mean, I mentioned muscle. That is a huge supporter of not only blood sugar but of bone health, of longevity, quality of life, which, you know, people in their 20s aren't usually too worried about. But I feel like once you get into your 30s and 40s, you it's at least in the back of your head being like, okay, you know, I don't want to be in a wheelchair or have to be in a walker or have somebody else taking care of me when I'm, you know, 60, 70 years old. So you know, strength training at least two to three times a week, um, you know, 30 minute sessions and we want to lift heavy. This is, this is I'm going to put heavy in quotes heavy, heavy for you. Um, people hear heavy and they get really intimidated. Uh, women, women here.

Philip Pape: 33:52

I have quotes too.

Brooke Davis: 33:53

I have a pair of quotes in my pocket too for heavy, just like you do. Okay, yeah, um, but you know, this is uh studies were done on strength training and um is uh studies were done on strength training and um, you know, 75% of your warm rep max, for you know, four to six reps is going to be kind of the optimal range for uh, building muscle but also reducing um, or reducing inflammation, um, basically, longevity markers. There was a bunch of longevity markers tested with these uh ranges and those were the ones that improved the stats the most essentially. And so, um, uh, so, strength training in that capacity, um, plyometrics, those are all going to impact bone density, which vastly decreases as estrogen declines. Um, you know, after age 30 for women, um, and that is. And then, speaking of, you know, quality of life, right, you break a hip after age 65, you, the 30% of people, die within a year. 60% die within five years, like it's, it's gnarly. So those are really powerful tools and really important tools for again maintaining not just fat loss and metabolism, that kind of stuff, but also quality of life as you age.

Brooke Davis: 34:59

And then cardio, cardio gets, I'm going to say, really bastardized but, and so you absolutely need it. You need it for heart health. High intensity exercise, even, is great for even women in perimenopause. But we do have to manage it right. You can't go to boot camp six days a week, you know, for an hour long high intensity class and think that your body is going to be stoked about it. Um, not only are your joints probably not going to love it, um, but also, if that's a major stressor, um, you're probably not eating enough to support that kind of activity as it is. So, um, you know, usually I recommend, um and I mean science recommends you know to to at most usually true high intensity, and that's the other thing is that an hour long class is not true High intensity work shouldn't last usually more than 15, 20 minutes, yeah, if you're, if you're pushing like you're not lasting more than you know 15, 20 minutes doing something like that.

Brooke Davis: 35:54

And then uh, zone two is another really powerful heart health, cardiovascular supporting way to support your overall fat loss and just longevity through perimenopause.

Philip Pape: 36:10

Love it, love it. And if you're listening and you're like, okay, I'm struggling, I'm frustrated, I can't lose weight, even though we're ultimately talking about fat loss, even though we're ultimately talking about fat loss, setting things up the way Brooke talked about today, without stressing yourself with another diet, is a great start, before you then say, okay, now I've got things dialed in, now let me go for some little more aggressive, say fat loss. At that point you know there's an order of things we want to do. So, all right, if you like what you heard in this episode, everyone, um, you're going to want to listen to the second half of this. We kind of hinted and teased at it.

Philip Pape: 36:39

Brooke interviews me on Fitness Simplified podcast. It's in your feed right now. Same time, different podcast, of course, fitness Simplified. We're going to talk about muscle metabolism. She explained the hormones really well here, the lifestyle, the nutrition side. So we're going to talk about body composition, muscle metabolism. Search for Fitness Simplified podcast or click the link in the show notes. Brooke, it has been a lot of fun. It's been a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for joining me again yes, thank you.

Brooke Davis: 37:05

Thank you, this is awesome, great combo.

My Escape from Low-Carb Diets to More Energy, Muscle, and Fat Loss | Ep 322

Join our FREE Wits & Weights Facebook group to connect with other listeners who are applying these evidence-based approaches to their fitness journey (or search “Wits & Weights” on Facebook)

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Have you tried to eat more freely, but old low-carb rules keep creeping in?
What if the real issue isn’t carbs at all, but your identity?

I share the raw truth of my journey from strict keto and paleo to happily eating over 300 grams of carbs a day without guilt, without bloat, and with better results than ever. You’ll learn how I confronted disordered thinking, broke free from nutrition dogma, and rebuilt my beliefs around food and performance. If you’ve struggled with all-or-nothing dieting, this one’s for you.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

01:01 - Why I stopped fearing carbs
05:14 - First experiences with low-carb diets
10:50 - My paleo obsession and food dogma
14:36 - When training didn’t match my nutrition
18:05 - The breaking point that changed everything
23:45 - How I overcame my fear of carbs
29:06 - The identity shift behind better eating
32:30 - What actually changed when I added carbs
40:42 - Do carbs need to be high or low?
45:19 - Travel and tracking without a food scale
58:55 - Outro

Episode resources:

• Try MacroFactor free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS – Apple/iPhone or Google/Android

How I Finally Let Go of Low-Carb Diets and Found Food Freedom

Let’s be honest—if you’ve ever gone low carb, keto, or paleo, you probably didn’t do it for fun. You did it because you thought it was the only way to finally lose fat, feel healthy, and control your eating. I used to believe that too. But here's the truth: the problem wasn’t the science. It was identity. It was habits. It was fear.

This episode is my full story—how I went from ultra-restrictive low-carb zealot to eating 300+ grams of carbs per day without guilt, while gaining strength, building muscle, and losing fat more effectively than ever. If you’ve been curious about carbs—or afraid of them—this might be the permission you need to rethink everything.

Why I Clung to Low-Carb Diets for So Long

Like many of you, I started dieting to feel better in my body. I was carrying extra fat, I wasn’t training consistently, and I had zero understanding of nutrition science. Atkins was my gateway. Then came keto, paleo, primal—you name it.

Why? Because:

• I saw fast scale drops (water weight, mostly)

• I had no clue what calories or macros were

• I thought carbs were the enemy

Over time, it wasn't just about food. It became part of my identity. I believed I was doing it right by avoiding carbs. That I was smarter and healthier because I could “resist temptation.”

The Hidden Damage of Carb Avoidance

But here's what really happened over the years:

• I felt tired and drained, especially during workouts

• My performance stagnated

• I obsessed over food, especially at social events

• I binge-ate candy in secret, followed by guilt and restriction

• I convinced myself I “wasn’t the kind of person” who could handle carbs

Worse, I thought the answer to feeling better was more restriction. Until one day, the mental exhaustion and lack of results forced me to ask: Is this really sustainable?

The Shift That Changed Everything

In 2020, I started training for strength—real strength—with barbells. My coach told me to stop worrying about calories and just eat more to support training. So I did. I started fueling like an athlete. I had zero nutrition structure at first, but one thing was clear: carbs were helping.

I felt more alive. I recovered faster. I wanted to train again.

Eventually I discovered macros and flexible dieting. I learned that:

• Protein is king for fat loss and muscle retention

• Fat and carbs are fuel, and the ratio depends on your goals and preferences

• Calories still matter, but you can manipulate them to gain, maintain, or lose

Suddenly, I wasn't scared of food anymore. I was using it.

Reintroducing Carbs Without Guilt or Bloat

This wasn’t an overnight shift. I had to gradually retrain my mind and body:

• I stopped labeling food as “clean” or “dirty”

• I added carbs with intention—especially pre- and post-workout

• I expected temporary water weight gain (glycogen and water), and didn’t panic

• I reminded myself: carbs don’t cause fat gain—calorie surplus does

Now, I eat 300–500 grams of carbs per day depending on the phase I’m in (cut, maintenance, or bulk). And I’ve never been leaner, stronger, or more at peace with food.

Breaking the Mental Chains

So what held me back for so long? Fear. Fear of losing control. Fear of being judged. Fear of undoing “all the work.” And that fear was rooted in old identity patterns—who I thought I had to be.

The turning point was realizing that restriction was causing the food obsession. When I let go of the diet labels and gave myself permission to explore a new approach, everything changed.

Food became fuel, not morality.

Answering Common Questions About My Transition

Did I gain weight when I added carbs back?
Yes—but only a few pounds of water weight. Glycogen holds water. Fat didn’t increase because calories were still controlled.

Did I notice a performance difference?
Absolutely. Strength, pumps, recovery, and mood all improved. It was night and day.

Do I still track macros?
Yes, but I focus on consistency, not perfection. I pre-log meals. I plan my carbs around training. I enjoy the freedom that structure provides.

Do I time my carbs?
Mostly around workouts and dinner (for sleep quality). Otherwise, I eat them when I want—fruit, rice, oats, potatoes, pasta, you name it.

Do I avoid “high glycemic” foods?
Nope. Once you understand total meal composition and context (protein, fiber, fat), glycemic index becomes irrelevant unless you’re diabetic.

The Takeaway: You’re Not “Bad at Dieting.” You Just Need the Right Framework.

The real magic isn’t in keto or paleo or macros or any method. It’s in principles.

• Understand your body’s needs

• Use structure, not restriction

• Prioritize performance and recovery

• Make your nutrition sustainable and enjoyable

If you’re still stuck in low-carb thinking, ask yourself:
Is this still serving me? Or just something I’ve been afraid to question?

And if you're ready to build a better relationship with carbs, food, and your goals—know that you're not alone. I've been there, and so have hundreds of my clients.

Click here to learn more about nutrition coaching.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you feel like you are stuck eating low carb, even though you know deep down, carbs might not be evil, this episode is for you. Today, I'm sharing my personal journey from strict keto and paleo to eating hundreds of grams of carbs daily. You'll learn exactly how I overcame the biggest obstacle to change, which wasn't information. It was really about my identity. I'll reveal the physical changes I experienced as I reintroduced carbs, the mental obstacles I had to overcome and the practical strategies that finally helped me break free, so you can do the same. 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 Pape, and today's episode's a bit different because I am actually interviewing myself, which I'm always hesitant to do in terms of sharing my personal journey. But people are always asking and I think it's important to understand that we all struggle with the same things, just in different ways. I personally used to have very strict diets. I've done everything from SlimFast and Atkins way back in the day to strict keto, paleo, various low-carb diets and even other weird diets that are probably outside the scope of today's episode, and today I eat easily over 300 grams of carbs every day, with better performance, with more muscle, with zero guilt. I love to eat food now and I can enjoy it and make progress, and I've worked with hundreds of clients who are able to do the same, some of whom were very, very hesitant to introduce carbs, some of who even introduced more carbs and said whoa, what is going on with you? On with bloating or quick weight gain, or things that are explainable but very frustrating and hard to wrap your head around until you understand how carbs work in those transition periods, and I want to try to touch on those different things today. But what I did is I posted in our Facebook community, which is free. You guys can join it, use the link to join anytime. And I asked you all hey, what would you ask me? Facebook community, which is free. You guys can join it, use the link to join anytime. And I asked you all hey, what would you ask me if this was an interview about that topic? And you sent me a ton of questions and effectively going to ask myself those questions today and answer them more or less off the cuff, as if it was an interview.

Philip Pape: 2:17

I would be remiss if I didn't say this episode wasn't inspired by one person in particular and that was a listener, alex B, who asked a really insightful question that resonated with me and I actually sat on it for a few months before I recorded this episode, because it sounded like a heavy topic for me to tackle and she wrote about struggling to bridge that gap between knowing the science behind carbs right, many of you know the science, or you've heard the show and you know it. Many of you don't. You're new to the show, or you're new to evidence-based nutrition and maybe still think there's a problem with carbs they're evil, they make you get fat, whatever and kind of having that knowledge, but then still finding it difficult to break your old habits or let yourself give into it and experiment with these because of these old habits, whether it's keto, paleo or something else and honestly, this could apply to any restrictive diet carnivore, veganism, vegetarianism, whatever that you've imposed on yourself because you think it's the right thing to do from a health perspective Not from a values-based perspective that's a different topic but just from a health perspective because of what you've heard or read. Or maybe you've gotten some short-term results or others have gotten some of those results, and so today isn't about spewing more information at you. I have plenty of shows that do that. It's actually about how you change your behavior despite the fear, despite the identity you've built, despite years of conditioning. Sometimes we condition ourselves, sometimes our upbringing and society and the content we consume has conditioned us, and so that's what we're going to do today. Right, and again, I reached out to our Facebook group and they sent me some fantastic questions. We're going to cover those.

Philip Pape: 3:58

So, before we get into it, if you enjoy the show in general, if you want to connect with people who like these sorts of topics and really to dig in and understand their identity, who want to know what works for them, who want to personalize in and not just be given macros or templates, that's what we do in our community. It's a free community. It's called Wits and Weights. In Facebook I will give you the link to click in the show notes, and that is a place where we have these conversations. We support each other through our transitions of nutrition experience right, we share our wins, we get our questions answered, we deal with some tough, vulnerable topics as well and in a I hate to use the word safe space, but effectively it's a nonjudgmental place where you know anybody who's negative and doesn't need to be, generally gets the boot. So if you're looking for a supportive place, that's it. If you want to get away from the politics and the negativity, that's where it happens and that's where this stuff came from for today's episode. So just head to Facebook and search for Wits and Weights, or just click the link in the show notes request to join, and I'd love to see you in there. All right, so we're going to start with the origin story. Right? Every hero's journey and I'm not calling myself a hero, I just love the idea of the hero's journey from, for example, star Wars or really any great story arc starts with the origin story.

Philip Pape: 5:14

What first attracted me to low carb diets and there are a lot of them out there. When we say low carb, what do we mean? We mean that control for calories, or maybe maybe sometimes you have no idea what the calories are. You're trying to reduce the amount of carbs you eat and increase your protein and or fats. Right, the three macros carbs, protein, fats was throw it on the wall and see what sticks and see if it works.

Philip Pape: 5:49

Based on the content I was consuming, which tended to be in the early days, you know, diet books from Barnes and Noble or random forums on the internet, maybe some influencers here and there, although I was never really into social media, so that wasn't a thing for me. You know, five, 10 years ago we're talking, we're talking from the early two thousands to like the late 20 teens, and I also I never really had a concrete goal, other than I'm unhappy with my body. I'm a little bit fluffy at times or skinny, fat, frumpy. Didn't like how I looked in, you know, at the pool without my shirt on and I just had a bunch of insecurities around that, and so I would primarily be focused on losing weight. Let's just put it that way. Like many of us are, I didn't think about energy, health, any of that, especially when I was younger and so in the early 2000s, the first diet experience I could remember is during college, on my internship.

Philip Pape: 6:40

This is around the year 2000. I was, I believe now in hindsight, emotionally eating due to some things that happened that I'm not going to go into details on some personal relationship things that happened at a young age, and I wouldn't say I was depressed, but I was definitely finding comfort in food and it would be things that had a lot of calories, like uh, you guys know friendlies there. They started up here in Massachusetts, I'm in Connecticut, and they have these, um, ice cream Sundays. Right, I love ice cream still to this day and I now I still enjoy ice cream. But I would get these massive Reese's peanut butter cup Sunday things, which you look at the calories Now, they're probably like 1500 calories and I would have that just about every day.

Philip Pape: 7:18

I like I'll put it this way, I couldn't help myself, right? You guys know that experience and I gained a lot of weight, let's just put it that way. I went from about averaging 165 at 5'9 to about 210 pounds. Okay, totally unchecked, no training, no exercise, none of that. And a lot of the gurus I had been following at the time were around the Atkins community, and so when I got back to college for my junior year, I said I'm going to do this thing and I out all fruit, vegetables, anything that was a carb. I basically ate meat without a bun and, oh man, I can't even remember it was like literally just meat. Okay, it almost reminds me of carnivore.

Philip Pape: 7:57

And what would happen is I started to lose a lot of weight. Of course you do, because what happens when you cut out carbs. What happens when you cut out most processed foods, you lose a lot of water weight because of the carbs, but you also cut your calories significantly and so I lost a lot of weight, but I also had some very unpleasant digestive side effects, let's just say. And the other thing is, when you have a higher fat diet, we do know that it can help with satiety, even though today I recommend using protein and fiber for satiety. That is fullness. We do know from the keto community, for example in carnivore, that fat can be satiating as well, and so I was able to go through my day not feeling too hungry, suppress my appetite, I had a lot of water, weight loss, a lot of scale drops due to the lack of calories and, you know, I gradually brought it down to where my scale weight was maybe in the 170s again and I definitely felt better about myself, finding that something could work and I knew something was behind it.

Philip Pape: 8:53

But I never. I didn't know calories, I didn't know macros, I didn't know any of that stuff back then. And also, um, the other thing that comes to mind is how we defined the carb. So back then, to me any carb was bad right, like carb equated to sugar, equated to bad, equated to, that's how you get fat. I believed it to the extent that I didn't even know about calories or energy. Right Now we're much more educated on that, given social media, and people will still say, oh no, it's not about energy balance, it's about the types of calories or it's about carbs specifically, regardless of energy balance, and that's just false. Like we know, energy balance is behind whether you gain or lose weight. Macros and nutrients come into play with a lot of other factors like body composition, energy, digestive health, all the other things, right. So that was my first foray into low carbs. I didn't know why it worked, I just know it worked and I probably sustained that for a couple of years and then I realized I didn't like to eat just hamburger patties right, and I'm kind of oversimplifying, but effectively was that simplistic of a diet, which means it was that highly restrictive of a diet.

Philip Pape: 9:54

Going into my twenties and even thirties, new diets started to pop up. Okay, and I want to say, for about a five to 10 year period, I didn't even diet at all, I just ate whatever. And I gained a bunch of weight. And this was into when I got married in the mid, that was 2006. And then around 2000, I want to say eight, nine I discovered paleo. I think that was around the time I discovered primal paleo and I just jumped in whole hog into that world, the idea of ancestral health, of, okay, well, our ancestors didn't have access to grains or dairy, so of course they couldn't eat those things they also ate. They were opportunists. So they hunted and gathered and they they had this feast or famine approach and I basically went all in on no grains, no dairy, which basically means little to no carbs. Because, yeah, you can can quote, unquote eat fruit, but I didn't eat a lot of fruit or veggies at the time.

Philip Pape: 10:50

I was very picky, see, that's the other part of this but I did, I did that's what they say I did paleo and I did that for probably five to 10 years and that was the most dogmatic, I'll say religious zealotry that I got into when it came to a diet. I had probably like 20 books on paleo. I had all these recipe books and I have to say you can make a lot of great meals when you're thinking paleo, because it's a lot of meat and vegetables. During that time my wife helped me get past my pickiness when it came to vegetables, let's say, and that's a whole other story, but it was helpful that I was incorporating those and I was eating a lot of whole foods and it was.

Philip Pape: 11:29

There was a lot of things I was adding in as a result of payload. That, I would say, is a good thing. I would say it's a good thing that is lean meats and vegetables and fruits, you know, whole foods uh, eggs, I believe, but I wasn't eating dairy and I wasn't eating actually I forget about eggs, but I know it wasn't eating any grains whatsoever which, in my mind, was carbs. And I want to take a little side tangent here, because carbs are highly misused as a term. Carbohydrates are found in apples and they're also found in Snickers, but you know, what else is found in Snickers Is lots of fat and sugar. Now, you could say, well, sugar is a carb, yes, but lots and lots of added sugars in a form that has been engineered beautifully to look good, to taste good, to have a multi-sensory, time-based, almost orgasmic experience when you eat it. And I'm serious, you guys know what I'm talking about.

Philip Pape: 12:22

Pick your most favorite delicious, indulgent thing, I don't care how processed it is. Okay. I use Snickers as an example, because of the way it's designed. The way it's designed with layers of chocolate and caramel and peanuts nugget I don't even know that's in there, maybe not, but different layers to and it's pre-processed. Now, this is the disgusting thing about a lot of ultra-processed foods is they're effectively ground up ingredients that are smushed together in an engineered way to be highly palatable, delicious and easily consumed, and then you're still hungry and you want to eat more, and hence the slogan you can't have just one.

Philip Pape: 12:55

So when you think of carbs, do you think of pizza and ice cream and donuts and Doritos, or do you think of oats and rice and apples and potatoes? Big difference, right? However, the anti-carb groupthink lumps them all together, and when people say I cut carbs, I'm like what do you mean? So I want you to ask yourself that question what do you mean? So for me, they were all poison, they were all lumped together, they were all like sugar in my mind, including fruits, and we know that's not the case today. So I did that and at the same time, I started CrossFit.

Philip Pape: 13:27

I've talked about CrossFit before early on in one of my earliest podcasts. I did that for about eight years, from like 2010 to 2018. And throughout that, most of that time, I also stuck with some version of paleo or low carb, eventually getting more into the keto side of things, which there's not a lot of differences, I'll be honest. It's basically a high fat approach that didn't really account for protein or calories. It was just what can't you eat, what can you not eat, what do you have to cut out? And so I, and throughout this whole time I more or less maintained my weight, but I was also doing CrossFit and a lot of cardio and I was kind of stressed out from the workouts a bit, didn't really look forward to them usually and it didn't do anything for my physique at all. Right, like I could lift. When I started, I probably could squat, you know, 95 pounds or something small like that. And then by the time I was quote unquote done with CrossFit, I was only up to 225 on my squat. That. And then by the time I was quote unquote done with CrossFit, I was only up to 225 on my squat.

Philip Pape: 14:20

And I hear stories like this all the time Unless you focus on strength, you're not going to get it up. You know, currently my squat is over 300. My deadlift is over 400. My bench is well over 200, right, just the numbers you would expect from even average strength for somebody who's doing strength training, and I wish I started earlier, but I didn't. But that's a whole different thing.

Philip Pape: 14:36

When we talk about training, however, it's important because I wasn't training the right way and therefore I wasn't thinking of eating to train the right way, and I never knew that carbs could be beneficial, nor was I training in a way where they were going to be that beneficial, if that makes sense. In other words, the vast majority of the population is either sedentary or they're active, but not in a purposeful way, such that they're not utilizing carbs in the way that carbs can be highly effective, which we're going to get into in this episode and why I wanted to do this. So that brings me to the next part of the story, which is the breaking point, and here's my first question from a listener, where Tony asked, after essentially being anti-carb, what cracked that shell? So in late 2019, I would say the breaking point is ironic. And it's ironic because it happened around Halloween, which is around the same time as my birthday, and I decided yet again to go cold turkey from carbs, and I did it by avoiding the candy drawer.

Philip Pape: 15:37

So I had gotten into a habit of I don't want to say sneaking, but those of us who understand emotional eating, you do it in a way that you feel guilty, right, you feel like I know I shouldn't be doing this, but I'm going to do it anyway. I can help myself F it, I'm already doing it. And then each day it's like you think you're going to reset and you don't right. Can you relate? So for me it was all sorts of snacks, but especially candy, which you know people say that's like eating like a kid. Well, yeah, a lot of us. That's what we're doing, the way we eat, right. So I would take the candy out of the candy drawer and of course that means I was deliberately going out and buying it to put there.

Philip Pape: 16:15

I didn't have the restraint like my wife did in terms of eating, just eating anything in moderation. She's great at that, she's really good at that. Just, I'll say, naturally she's always been that way and I'm not, so I can overeat. And that Halloween slash birthday. I said, okay, I'm done, I'm not going to have the candy for Halloween, I'm going to go cold turkey. And I did that for about two or three months Again thinking I need to cut out carbs. That is going to be the solution. But oh, did I feel miserable, did I feel awful not being able to eat all the things during the holidays. I didn't have energy, I didn't feel like doing my CrossFit, like the whole thing.

Philip Pape: 16:51

And so the turning point came and this is to answer Tony's question. It took time, right, it wasn't like a black and white is, with the mental fatigue and the performance stalls and being unhappy about my body and the social rigidity and like all of this stuff. I said, man, there's got to be something better, because I see people out there succeeding. I even see guys in what was the CrossFit gym and now is more of a strength and conditioning gym with great physiques. They seem energized, like maybe it's just genetics. I had always thought that to that point, like it's just genetics.

Philip Pape: 17:20

So I asked my trainer again. I've I've talked about this story before, so I'm not going to get too far into it, but I asked my trainer, andrew, like what do I need to do to get a better physique? And kind of figure this out. And that's when he turned me on to. He's like you just need to lift for strength, big lifts, progress over time. Let's forget all the wads, you know the workouts of the day, forget all the conditioning, just go for strength. And that got me down the path of going to Google and YouTube and podcasts and learning about strength. And it turned me on to guys like Eric Trexler and Annie Morgan with their muscle and strength pyramids, to starting strength, of course, and to that whole world, eventually into the nutrition side of it about a year after that, which I'm getting to. So what shifted is I started to train for strength.

Philip Pape: 18:05

The pandemic hit. That's kind of a almost an afterthought at this point, but it did cause me to have to build my home gym for the first time instead of go to the gym, which is cool because to this day, that's what I have. I got a power rack, I got a bar, I got a plate it's all that fun stuff and started to train Squats, deadlifts, presses, overheads, just cranking the numbers up, and I heard that you had to eat a lot of food. So I just said forget this low-carb stuff, forget any diet, I'm just going to try to gain weight. It sounded really liberating actually to just gain weight and not care about it, because I thought, well, now, this is a purposeful gain, even though it was not done optimally by any stretch of the imagination. So, yeah, a lot of whole milk in there.

Philip Pape: 18:45

I started consuming a lot more protein because that was part of it was oh, I actually need that much protein. You guys know what I'm talking about. You know that one gram per pound, or even 0.8 grams per pound, when you are not paying attention to your protein your whole life, you realize you are woefully under eating that stuff. So, adding more protein, in adding more, I had more whole milk, more fat, more carbs, more everything, and I started to gain. I started to gain, gain, gain started to grow, but my girth started to grow as well. Okay, and I always tell this story on other podcasts but, like after, I gained a bunch of strength and muscle during that first newbie phase of about a year.

Philip Pape: 19:22

That's when I realized well, now I really need to understand even more about nutrition, because there's got to be a way to lean out. And that's where I learned about macros, flexible dieting and the fact that we don't eat to lose weight. We eat to support our energy, we eat to support our metabolism, we eat to perform, to feel great, to manipulate our physique, at times right To lift optimally in the gym all of that stuff. And so again, shout out to you, tony, because you were there from early on when I got into the coaching side of things and to this day, push me and also and you will admit this are one of the people who are a little bit afraid of carbs yourself, and it took a while even to convince you right that they would be helpful. You had to experiment with it back off a bit and then experiment again back off until you realize wait a minute, when I have more carbs I tend to perform better.

Philip Pape: 20:14

They're the body's preferred fuel under load. They're the body's stress reliever. They provide you the glycogen you need. They are anti-catabolic, they prevent the breakdown of muscle tissue All the wonderful benefits of carbs that I've talked about on multiple episodes. Just go search my podcast feed for carbs and, like once I realized that I could eat and lose weight on the scale, which I still was fixated on early on.

Philip Pape: 20:40

I didn't quite understand fat loss versus weight loss and body composition. It wasn't until I read a book by Elaine Norton I think it's called Fat Loss Forever where I learned all about body fat overshooting. You looked at the studies about the biggest loser, all of it started to come together. I said, oh wow. So now that I'm strength training and focused on muscle and strength, now that I'm eating for fuel and for how I feel and perform, and now that I know calories are the dial to gain and lose weight, it all came together. Keep the protein high, manipulate the carbs lower, because carbs do get pretty low depending on your calories and fat loss and that is how I could get the physique that I want and I started to improve.

Philip Pape: 21:26

I'll say quickly but don't be misled that you can totally change your whole transformation in six months. It doesn't work that way. It does take time. I would say your first year, though, you're going to see a meaningful change, but then the real like kind of looking a little bit jacked or having that six pack, whatever that starts to happen more in the years two and three, like just to be realistic, unless you already have a good starting point or you have a history of this. You know you're pretty lean, whatever, so kind of answer the question.

Philip Pape: 21:52

The aha moment took me a year and a half to realize that carbs were just a great tool and they were useful and they were helpful, and it took me like two or three more years of doing this podcast, researching and coaching clients, to be able to express that right, to be able to talk about it in a way that made sense. So that's why a lot of you are listening and I wanted to do this podcast, because it's not necessarily easily accepted by society or even by you listening right, and I'm not here to convince you, I'm just trying to hear it tell my story. So then this brings me to the next part of the story, where I'm going to answer Alex's original question to me, and she said hi, you've mentioned our previous, or your previous keto paleo adherence and how you've since learned better and, more importantly, done better. My question is how you bridge the gap between knowledge and implementation. I'm someone who knows the science behind carbs, but I still really struggle to break my old keto paleo habits and include anything more than non-starchy vegetables and a little fruit. So there's a lot in that question, alex, and this is why I wanted to talk to you and everyone today, and I kind of answered it somewhat already.

Philip Pape: 23:02

But I would say first of all, the habits that were hardest to break were thinking of food with like a moral judgment that anytime I saw anything with carbs that was a no-no right, that I had to avoid it. And so I think the biggest game changer for me and this helps a lot of people that I work with is the idea of additive nutrition, of adding in the things you need along with the things you want. So both In other words, being intentional In the past and many of you listening you're not intentional about it, and by intentional I don't mean you're intentional about cutting out a bunch of foods. No, I mean you're intentional about it. And by intentional I don't mean you just you're intentional about cutting out a bunch of foods. No, I mean you're intentional about why you eat what you eat and including those in, and so for me that was okay.

Philip Pape: 23:45

I know that I need to eat more carbs before and after I train, along with protein, because that's going to support my training. I'm going to feel better. I know it might help to have carbs at dinner because it's going to help me sleep better, and I know that I only need so much protein and fat, and if the rest of the calories come from carbs, then carbs may be a lot higher than I used to eat. And now I have to find how to get them right, like it's those kinds of anchors, I would say. And I still had anxiety around carbs for a while, I would say, because I had gained all that weight while lifting properly. I was wondering how much of that was associated with carbs. And I hear guys still on podcasts say well, you just got to cut out carbs, that's how you eat better. And again, they're not talking about carbs, they're talking about carb, sugar, fat combinations, like processed foods, like pizza and whatnot, and but instead of thinking that I have to cut them out, I think what do I need to add in? And then what's left? And I can still enjoy other foods.

Philip Pape: 24:43

And so where I'm going with all this, alex, is you know you said it's hard for me to break my old habits, including anything more than non-starchy vegetables and little fruit. I would reflect on your like, the psychological flexibility and your identity around that. For example, what are you avoiding? What are you avoiding and why? So? When I think about your struggle to break old habits, what comes to mind is things like habit loops. I don't know if you're familiar with Atomic Habits by James Clear, but the reward, the trigger, reward type cues, the loop, the habit loops and instead of thinking of carbs as this generic blob of a thing out there, be intentional. Ask yourself first, alex, what is it about keto and paleo that you are still sticking to? Like, think about the habit that you are still doing Because you said you don't want to include more than non-starchy vegetables and a little fruit.

Philip Pape: 25:34

So like, excuse me, does that mean grains? That you don't want to include grains for some reason? And I had to break that loop when it came to paleo because I always thought grains. And then I would tie it into this whole rationale or justification about how ancestors didn't have access to that. And they have phytonutrients and they have anti-nutrients, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I had to slowly learn about the science of carbohydrates and the fact that consuming grains is perfectly acceptable if you can tolerate it. Some people can tolerate gluten, some can't, some people tolerate other grains, some can't, right, and that for me, when I consumed those things, I didn't seem to feel any worse, like didn't seem to affect my digestion, but it gave me an extra flexible source of energy that I needed for my goals.

Philip Pape: 26:14

So part of the cue or the trigger could be like not about eating more carbs, but you know I'm a person who values evidence-based training and sources of energy. I know that carbs give me the glycogen I need to train really hard and rice is a great source of carbs. I like rice, I like to prepare rice in this way and that way and therefore I'm going to include half a cup of rice with my next meal. And again, I'm just kind of spitballing it here with you about how to approach this for you. Like when I work with clients, alex, everybody's a little bit different and I know you and I talked about having accountability meal planning, meal prepping, pre-logging.

Philip Pape: 26:54

For some people it's just like doing it, just saying, okay, I'm going to plan these things into my diet and I'm going to give it a shot and see how I feel and then, if I notice that I actually feel better, that's a good reinforcement of that loop guilt. Right now, you may feel guilty when you grab something else that's not on your list of approved things that you used to think were bad with keto, and it might require just adding one of those things in and seeing what happens and noticing that the sky doesn't fall and, if anything, you'll realize, ooh, I really enjoyed my food a little more because I had this extra ingredient. Ooh, it gave me some more energy, you know, better sleep. Some people report better hormones or less stress, like all of those things. If you can lean into usually the non-scale victories they call them and tie them to these choices, you can gradually break the loops and build them in again. Working with a coach can be helpful because they can be someone you fall back on and you can transfer some of that emotional stress over. Um, and I love, I love to help people do that, because they might just not do it on their own and they need that push. But I'm hopefully giving you that little bit of a push here and you could always jump into our Facebook group and just post your experience, say, look, I brought this up with Philip. He had the podcast. It wasn't a good enough answer, so I'm posting for you guys to help me out and be specific and we could do that. So that's just kind of my thoughts on habits. Right, like any habit, you're going to have to break it, but you break it in a positive way by adding in the thing you need and then tie it into a loop of a reward.

Philip Pape: 28:29

Which leads me to the next question, which is from Christy L, and she said what part of your identity or belief system did you have to confront or let go of when you shifted away from keto, and how did that affect your relationship with food and your body? So the thing I didn't realize for years, christy, was that I basically had disordered eating, without admitting it or knowing it right. It was disordered. It wasn't to the point of like, like orthorexia is an obsession with clean food. Obviously there are. There's eating disorders, nothing like that, but more of a disordered eating of tying so much of who I was with what I ate.

Philip Pape: 29:06

And the irony, as you know, is I talk about this stuff all the time. Now I talk about food all the time, I track my food and everything, and yet I feel free from food, if that makes sense. In other words, I know the fact that I have dietary and psychological flexibility now is so empowering and it gives you this sense of confidence knowing that you can manipulate your health, your physique, your activity, your whatever, get a result you want and do it eating anything and I say anything with quotes because, again, this is not licensed to just literally eat anything whenever right. It's in a controlled, structured way. So again, your question what part of my identity or belief system that's part of it is the moral judgment on food, the disordered eating, the fact that there's a right, there are good and bad foods, the fact that science somehow supports that you can't eat a whole and bad foods, the fact that science somehow supports that you can't eat a whole class of foods, like to this day and you know this from Dustin's work as well. He talks about it all the time.

Philip Pape: 30:07

It's like seed oils and artificial sweeteners. There are so many boogeymen out there and the general default response I have to any of those, until proven otherwise, is no, the dosage makes it the poison and almost anything can be consumed in moderate amounts without any. You know negative effects and therefore I don't worry about those. What I do think about is how do I feel myself as an athlete? So I guess my identity and my belief system was that I could even be an athlete, that I can perform and lift weights and, heck, look good. I mean honestly, and I'm still working on it. Like we all have insecurities, it's not really about that, so much as I see the result from it.

Philip Pape: 30:49

And once the food freedom kicked in and I was doing the right things, which is important, right, because some of us are not training the right way, or training at all, or training consistently, and that's a big piece of it. Once I was doing that, it all started to click and then my relationship with food became very objective, I'll say like it's not emotional anymore, right, even hunger. Now, when I experienced hunger and a fat loss phase, it's like an objective feeling of, okay, I understand what that is like physiologically, physically, psychologically. I understand what it is now and it takes work to get there. Right, it takes a lot of work for some of us, myself included, and this is what I work with clients every day, and I'm sure you've experienced that yourself. And then it translates to your relationship with your body Because, let's be honest, when you actually get a result, when you start, when you're able to lose fat and build muscle and, like, improve your physique, your hormones, your metabolism, it gives you tons of confidence and it makes you walk upright, it makes you have less anxiety among people, let's say, if that's your thing, it makes you more confident to take action throughout other areas of your life, and all of that is tied up to our identity. So that's kind of what comes to mind for me. Hope it answers that question. So shout out to you, christy, for that.

Philip Pape: 31:56

I think I addressed what you were asking. And then, when we get to the practical side of things, I love these questions as because they're kind of easier for me to answer. But Jimmy Q asked how many carbs did you go from and to? So how many carbs did I go from and to, and was there an immediate weight gain, even if superficial, like water weight or glycogen? Let's see. He had other questions too how long did it take to regulate and get used to high carb? How much more energy did you end up having at the gym, assuming you were strength training during both diets in similar fashion? Good question, so. The first one once I learned about macros and energy balance, it was actually pretty easy.

Philip Pape: 32:30

Number one anchor my protein. Okay, 0.8 to one grams per pound. Number two peg my fats at around 30% of calories, give or take 10%. Number three the rest goes to carbs. So by definition, you are now anchored by calories, protein and a little bit by fat. I mean, the fat is flexible, right. So you're kind of anchored by calories and protein, meaning trying to gain weight versus lose weight, you're going to have much different level of carbs or much different level of calories, but because the protein is anchored, the fats and the carbs are going to swing around a lot.

Philip Pape: 33:00

So, in actual numbers, if I'm at maintenance, eating, say, 2,800, or it depends on what my maintenance is at the time, but 2,600 to 3,000 calories, I'm still going to be eating 350 grams of carbs. Maybe If I'm gaining, I'm going to eat a lot more than that. So, like crazy amount, maybe 500. And if I'm losing for me most of my diets I'm eating around 2,000 calories, maybe 1,800. Then I'm down to like a couple hundred grams, maybe less, which, as you know, none of those are low carb. Now, having said that just caveat I have plenty of clients who have much lower metabolisms. They're smaller, or you know a petite female or somebody who just happens to burn fewer calories, and they might burn, let's say, 2,000 calories as their maintenance and when they go to a diet they're at like 1,400 calories. Well, their carbs are now probably going to drop to 120 grams, 100 grams, maybe less than 100, maybe 80 grams, maybe even 60.

Philip Pape: 33:56

And then we get into what we think of as low carb or even VLC, very low carb or keto, right. So it's going to depend on the calories and then the protein, where trade-offs can always be made, and that gets into the nuances we're not going to get into today. Trade-offs can be made Now, the keto and carnivore worlds when they think of carbs, they think of just making it as low as possible because they care about being fat adapted and they care about ketosis and all of that, none of which matters, because the glycogen is the first source of energy your body's going to seek. If it doesn't, it's going to go to fat. At the end of the day, calories are calories, like, based on how much you consume and how much you burn. You're going to store energy, whether it's consumed from glycogen, glucose or fat, right, and I've talked about that many times as well.

Philip Pape: 34:41

So the caveat is, if you've been low carb for a long time and I did the math recently if you've been like, say, 50 grams of carbs for the last two years, you know keto and all of a sudden you jump to 300 grams of carbs or 400 grams of carbs, right, and I don't recommend doing that overnight, you know. Take take a week or two to do it regularly. I mean incrementally. When you make a jump like that, every gram of carbs results in almost a gram of glycogen stored in your liver and your muscles, which draws in about three to four grams of water. So if you did the math, you could easily gain two to five pounds with a big jump in carbs just from water weight. And that's like at almost like any body weight. So a lighter person will see that as a massive weight change and get freaked out.

Philip Pape: 35:30

Conversely, when someone goes on keto and they had been consuming lots of carbs, whether it was on purpose or not, they'll say oh my God, I just lost five pounds in the first week. Water weight, it's all water weight. It's water weight Because the only way you lose fat is to be in an energy deficit, a true energy deficit. Okay, a pound of fat, roughly 3,500 calories of an energy deficit. Now, to be fair, if someone goes on keto, they probably are cutting out a whole bunch of foods and a whole bunch of processed foods and thus a whole bunch of energy or calories, and they might lose fat as well as water weight. And they're probably also going to lose muscle, because most of those people are not lifting weights. Some are. That's a whole separate discussion.

Philip Pape: 36:09

Now, as far as how long it took to regulate and get used to high carbs, it took me like a day, you know. And no, I say that in jest, but remember, when I talked about how I started lifting, I started following starting strength and I started just eating whatever. I switched my mind at that moment to saying, look, I'm a lifter right now and I need to fuel myself and I don't know, I don't care what it takes. And so I actually didn't put any governors or regulators on how much of whatever I was eating and I tolerate foods. Well, like I'm lucky Maybe is that the word Like, no matter how badly I've eaten in the past, my gut seems to be, seems to handle things. Well, I don't seem. I don't have any allergies, I don't have any intolerances.

Philip Pape: 36:51

Now a purist or a functional doctor or somebody might say well, you don't know, until you go on a elimination diet and like, get all those toxins out of your system to see what you really tolerate. Well, guess what? I've done that before and I didn't notice much of a difference. So we're not all the same folks Like some of us can tolerate a lot of these foods and, by the way, the science says most of these foods are perfectly edible, perfectly healthy, in moderation. So going back to the dosage is the poison. So how long it takes to regulate and get used to high carbs, I would say within a few weeks for most people. That's my short answer.

Philip Pape: 37:21

If I have a client who all of a sudden needs more carbs, it doesn't take long before they do it and they start to enjoy it and they start to say, whoa, like you're right about this stuff, like I have more energy, I can lift more, I got, I got. I was stuck on my bench for months or years and all of a sudden I'm up. You know, five pounds on my bench last week, or 10 pounds, whatever. Same thing happened to me. I mean, I did them both at the same time. So it's kind of tough to tease out the variables. But because I was actually eating more on purpose and for years and years and years I had been like restricting, restricting, restricting. I did that combined with strength training exactly what I do with my clients now when they get started and it was just like oh, everything started to take off like never before. Right, all my lifts just went up five, 10 pounds every time for a few weeks and then it kind of leveled off a little and then kept going for a while after that before I had to go to more intermediate programming.

Philip Pape: 38:09

So, yes, you'll get an immediate weight gain. It's all fluid because energy balance is the only thing that should be taken account when it comes to fat and you can do the math and you can see that if you're eating your maintenance calories, then anything you're gaining is probably not fat, it's probably fluid period. Same thing when you take creatine. So, jimmy, thanks for the question Shout out to you I'm trying to see if I missed anything. You get a better pump. You get a much better pump in the gym. I mean you will lose that altogether. If that's important to you and for a lot of us that's like a great feeling. What else you? What else you get? Better energy, sleep, mental clarity. In many cases I did a whole episode recently about cortisol, the connection between carbs and cortisol. Like so many things improve just because of the increase in carbs that you wouldn't realize until you do it, let alone the performance in the gym for sure. I mean I know this because as soon as I go on a diet, even if the calories aren't that low. The carbs come way down. You know I take a hit. Or if I forget to not forget to, let's say, I don't have as much or any pre-workout, for whatever reason because of my circumstances, I'll notice it. Right, don't get enough sleep, you'll notice it. I think I covered your question, so I'm going to move on to the next one.

Philip Pape: 39:18

The next one is from Luke P. He says what benefits do you get from low carb versus high carb? High carb is not always better, I'm assuming. So I was thinking of how to answer this question. I already talked about how the carbs are the main thing that changes when you go from gaining to maintaining, to losing, right. So my approach, my philosophy, is as long as you've got your protein, the fats and carbs are pretty flexible and there's no reason to lower the carbs just to lower carbs. Does that make sense? In other words, even when you are in a fat loss phase, we don't lower the carbs because low carbs better. We lower them because we don't have space for enough carbs, right, we're having. We need our protein and our fat. In some cases I actually want somebody to slightly lower their protein and increase their carbs if it gives them just that burst of energy they need. I guess what I'm saying is that all things equal. I would generally never want to lower carbs for the sake of it for any reason, but I would want to increase carbs for many reasons.

Philip Pape: 40:19

So when we say low carb and high carb, it's kind of like protein. It's very misleading. Like people talk about high protein. Well, most people are eating extremely, extremely low protein and I want people to eat moderate protein, but it looks high compared to the average population. I mean, whoa 25% of your calories has protein. That's huge. Well, it's only 25%. So is that really high protein or is it just much higher than the population?

Philip Pape: 40:42

Similarly, with carbs, like to me, if I'm getting a lot of protein and plenty of fat and then I'm eating 400 grams of carbs, is that high carb or is it just what I need and like filling in the rest of the energy equation right? So when you say high carb is not always better, I would agree with that statement when we are talking about the context of other macros. So if the carbs are taking away from your protein or fats in a detrimental way, then it's not better, but there's no case where I would say you need to lower your carbs, just to lower your carbs? Does that make sense? So hopefully I answered that the research definitely supports higher carbs for muscle building across the board.

Philip Pape: 41:21

Any study we see comparing low carb, comparing a low carb to a moderate high carb the moderate high carb wins out for sure when it comes to muscle building. So like that to me is not a question anymore and I see it anecdotally all the time. Having said that, if you just don't like to eat a lot of carbs, and it doesn't hurt you to lower the carbs and it gives you more protein because you're a big protein eater, that is a scenario I can get behind, and I know plenty of lifters like that who want to eat 250 grams of protein or 300 grams of protein and kind of moderate carbs. I like 200 something grams of carbs. I'm like, yeah, you got a lot of flex there and that's okay, that's okay. So that's my thoughts on that is, what are the trade-offs? What are your goals?

Allan: 41:58

Hi, my name is Alan and I just want to give a shout out to Philip, pape of Wits and Weights, for being a huge part of the foundation for my continued health and well-being. Philip exemplifies a nutrition coach who demonstrates how much he cares. Philip works tirelessly and with dedication to provide coaching, support and major content for us to use. He creates a practical approach from research and Philip empowers all of us to use food as quality for our health. He is skilled in how to assess and direct nutrition. Philip creates a community full of wisdom, support and camaraderie. In summary, philip Papers the real deal. He knows how to assess and direct nutrition and he continues to steer me in the right direction. Thank you, philip.

Philip Pape: 42:50

Emily asked a question about timing and travel. She said timing overall. What is your timing of carbs? Do you eat more in the am or pm? So I'm going to answer her questions one at a time.

Philip Pape: 43:02

So, timing of carbs carbs, I distribute them evenly when I'm not Dieting. When I'm in fat loss, however, I shift them to the morning because that's around my workout. If it's a Non-training day, I tend to eat them spread out evenly as well. Simple, right, it's as simple as that. Now, if you are the type of person who trains first thing in the morning and doesn't want to eat which there's a small percentage of people that do that you want a lot of carbs with your dinner. If you're the type of person that sleeps better with carbs at your meal, you want them at dinner. If you're the type of person that needs the carbs after your workout to recover from being drained of your glycogen, you might want more carbs after your workout. Get what I'm saying Depends. So me personally, distribute it evenly, except on training days, then, or except during fat loss, in which case more percentage of it like up to 50% of my carbs are going to be around training, and that's what I recommend.

Philip Pape: 44:04

When your carbs are tight. Put more of them are your go-to pre or post-workout snacks and or meals. I am super boring and simple. I eat a banana and a protein shake beforehand, and then I have some oatmeal with peanut butter afterward, and then lunch is not far behind to get more of my protein. I like to have a lot of protein with my lunch and dinner and because I'm having a nice big protein shake before my workout, I don't need a lot of protein right after it. Right, there's no such thing as the anabolic window anymore. You could distribute your protein however you want. The carbs are a little bit more important. So when we're talking carbs specifically, I love fruit before the workout because I can have it as close as like half an hour before my workout, very fast digesting, and then after my workout I like something a little more fiber, a little more tasty and comfort food style which is where the oatmeal comes in and plus a little bit of fat and taste from the peanut butter. I will say if I am gaining, I need even more calories. I will also add in HBCD, highly branched cyclic dextrin. It is a extremely digestible, very easy on the stomach form of carbs powder form that pretty much anyone can tolerate and it is a great intro workout as well. You can sip it or have it before your. I actually put it before, during and after when I'm gaining and trying to eat like 4,000 calories Carbs on travel, you asked.

Philip Pape: 45:19

This is still, emily. It's so easy to lose track when working and not controlling meals. Also, buffets at meetings tend to be carb heavy. What are your strategies? And, socially, how do you track without a scale next to your boss? Okay, there's a lot of questions here.

Philip Pape: 45:34

I guess it could be a whole topic on its own, and it's funny because I think, emily, you and I just talked about this on a group call in Physique University and I think that was about going to track meets or something right, where you didn't have enough time between traveling and everything to to have the food you wanted, um, and it was like four hours and they had hot dogs and other stuff staring you in the face, right. So it really does come down to meal planning, meal prepping and the logistics of it all. So you've got to just think ahead, use if-then strategies. If you know this is going to happen twice a week, then what is your strategy? Is it to have a cooler, ready to go, and then you pop it in your car. Is it to have snack-type foods in your purse? That is it For me. I know what you're talking about.

Philip Pape: 46:16

Buffets and meetings tend to be carb-heavy and they're not always the carbs that we want. They're often like muffins and stuff, maybe they're bagels or something. So if you know you're going to eat the meaty food, just again you got to plan for it and say maybe I'm going to bring my you know first four meat sticks or something for my protein or protein bar or something to go along with it. If they don't have meat options, you know sometimes there'll be sandwiches and you can like grab a bunch of the cold cuts and maybe eat half the bread. If you don't, if you're not trying to get that much, that many carbs, but it's it's planning. It's planning and like having if, then strategies. That's really all it is.

Philip Pape: 46:53

Your last question about tracking without a scale and next year boss. So two options. One is just take a picture or eyeball it and estimate. I mean, I do that all the time now. It's a skill that you build over time. You're like okay, this is a turkey sandwich and this is pasta salad, right, or whatever the buffet food is, or if it's just a lunch you packed and you didn't pre-measure it, which you could pre-measure it if it's at home, but if somebody cooked for you. Again, just estimate each of the main ingredients that have calories and put them in as grams. Macrofactor has a new AI feature where you can take a picture and it'll do it for you. It's like 90% accurate, which is plenty good enough for most people and you could. There's a text box so you can tell it generally what's in there, like no-transcript, all right.

Philip Pape: 47:40

Next question this is from Alan F. All right, mr Alan, everybody knows him from the Facebook group, for sure, and also Physique University. He says did you give thought to the glycemic index of the carbs you were utilizing? And then another question did you have a priority list of carbohydrate foods you were incorporating? I'm going to answer that one because it's easier. My priority list is just the simple list of foods that I like. That's it. So like if I were to provide some nuance on that, because this could be why you're asking somewhat is different foods have different levels of macros, right?

Philip Pape: 48:13

So rice is pure carbs, just like shrimp is pure protein, essentially. Beans, however, are carbs and protein. So if I were to prioritize, if I'm absolutely trying to have pure carbs, I'm going to have things like fruit and oats. Well, oats have protein too, but never hurts that protein. You know, rice, simple starches they could be refined, whole grains, but I mean simple, you know, like breads and pastas and whatnot. And I'll just, basically, it's just like I would do if I was trying to have dairy that was more protein than not. I would look at the protein density. Same thing with carbs what's the carb density? And then I don't stray from that. I'm fairly boring. I like to explore occasionally in the grocery store, but usually I just stick to okay, here are my five favorite fruits, here are my five or six favorite vegetables. I like oats, I like rice. Keep it simple. And I know you are. You are very, um, I'll say you love to explore the variety of foods out there and do lots of fancy recipes, um, just like Carol does in the group, and that's awesome too. Right, that's what you love to do.

Philip Pape: 49:12

But going back to your first question, did you give thought to the glycemic index of the carbs? Uh, the answer is no, but I used to. So I'm glad you brought that up, because I fell prey to a lot of these silly little things. Like I say silly, like I was going to say blood sugar and that's going to offend a lot of people. I think blood sugar is important but I don't think I don't think it takes a lot to do it right and then not have to think about it. In other words, like if you eat balanced meals and you have a lot of fiber, you're going to take care of your blood sugar as long as you're training right, as long as you're lifting weights and walking, so I don't want to give too much thought to it. I know some coaches and some folks even I've had on my show like they focus on that and and it can be a valuable tool for people who aren't aware of it, because then it says, okay, how do I, how do I improve that? But glycemic index has to do with you know as well. That's why I bring this up Insulin sensitivity, all of that it doesn't matter.

Philip Pape: 50:08

Once I discovered through learning the science that if you're lifting weights and you're walking inactive, that you're going to be highly insulin sensitive, it didn't matter. I could even eat a carb meal. My blood sugar will spike and it's fine when I'm low on calories. I don't do that, though, because what will happen is I'll get like an energy crash, and many of you listening if you feel that like 3 pm energy crash. Sometimes you go for a high energy food, like a candy bar, right, or chips or whatever for that reason, because your body's craving the energy.

Philip Pape: 50:34

But if you have balanced meals that are always protein and fiber first, you don't have to worry about glycemic index at all, and for anybody who knows GI, you know that it's like averaged out for the meal. So if you're having protein and fiber in there and some fats or whatever, it's going to bring the whole GI down for the meal. If you're diabetic, it's a different situation. You may have to be more conscious of it. So the answer is I didn't really. I went down those rabbit holes sometimes, but I was just trying to avoid carbs in general. I wasn't like oh, give me the low GI carbs, not the high. Now, I didn't do that. If that's a concern for you, I'm not the guy necessarily to talk to, because I don't think it's necessary for most people. Or if you're training, walking, eating, balanced meals, yeah, and then nutrient density, yeah.

Philip Pape: 51:14

So I think that's it. I think glycemic load is what we call it, right, the context of the whole food matrix. That's more important. Okay, next question is from Alex B.

Philip Pape: 51:22

So this is going back to the original listener who wrote in and this is another part of her question. She said I think it's a combo of habit and learn, fear or anxiety response from years of indoctrination. I know better, but knowledge only gets you so far. I've done the prepping, but not logging ahead. There are basically always potatoes, beans and bread ready to go. In any case, I think you're right. I don't have a knowledge gap, but an accountability one, and I and many others default to maladaptive habits and systems even when we know better. So I wanted to throw this in and kind of close the loop on all of this, because for many of us, myself included, no matter how much we know, the right thing is to do. We need that accountability, and accountability comes in so many ways, right, you can even build self accountability by using an app, like I use macro factor initially for my first year and a half of nutrition. I just use that. Then my accountability came in the form of getting a coaching certification, having clients and I have worked with coaches, like informally, for my nutrition as well. I haven't actually worked one-on-one with a nutrition coach for a period of time. I've been thinking about it for some of the advanced things, but, at the same time, I'm confident in my nutrition and this is the thing you got to assess. Like, if you really enjoy something and you love learning about it and you're able to be consistent with it, then you're good. You're good. If, however, something like strength training, you're constantly missing your training sessions, constantly moving things around, never sure what to follow, like you just have all this uncertainty and lack of confidence around it, or you feel frustrated and inconsistent, that's where you need something, whether that is a free Facebook group, a friend or accountability partner, a coach, a community, paid free, it doesn't like they're all different forms. Obviously, I provide various forms of this because everyone has different budgets and needs and whatnot, and some people can shift between them, right? I've had folks that came into the Facebook group link in the show notes totally free. They saw what things were about, they started to learn, they started to listen to podcasts and they're like okay, interesting.

Philip Pape: 53:20

Well, I had this really big goal and I'm kind of struggling to get there, even though I know what to do. Let me join Physique University and get motivated by people, but also be able to reach out to Philip and get some more personalized guidance. You know, have a plan, have a way to diagnose issues along the way, and they'll do that and they'll get a great result. Or they'll do that and they'll say, all right, I'm getting a result, but I had these very specific issues for me related to my hormones, my thyroid medications, my age, my equipment access. Maybe I'm kind of shy and I don't want to be sharing everything with a group, right, like there's different reasons and they'll say, okay, I want to work with you one-on-one. Or, again, there are things in your life where you may be able to hold yourself accountable. It's all different, it's a spectrum.

Philip Pape: 54:07

So why I brought this up Alex is because she acknowledged that she has the knowledge but has a lot of habits and they're hard to break sometimes without that accountability. So I just signed up a couple of clients, this week in fact, who are very much like that. They are advanced clients. They have been training and learning and applying nutrition and tracking macros and everything for years and have gotten great results. Some of them have competed. You know bodybuilding and stuff like that, but they know that they can learn more. There's always subtle things that they need to to reach out to someone else for. Okay. Anyway, behavior changes is is is so important in this space. The role of like cognitive dissonance where what we believe doesn't match what we're experiencing and we're trying to resolve that when it comes to shifting our diets is really, really important, along with the role of community and accountability.

Philip Pape: 54:53

All right, I think this episode is way past the time I wanted it to be. Hopefully, I'm able to edit it to be shorter, but I think the big thought from all of this and I don't even know if I covered half my story, to be honest is that what I finally learned around 2021, when I launched the podcast, was that the sustainability and the flexibility are the main driver of all of this, like your ability to adapt and go with the flow and go with life, and if what you're doing does not have that flexibility, it's going to be a problem at some point. It's going to be a problem I guarantee it If you're following strict keto or any other highly restrictive approach. And don't tell me carnivore is like just wonderful and it works for you and it solved all your problems and I could do this the rest of my life. Maybe, 0.1% of people maybe. But in reality you come to me a year later and tell me that you're still eating only these three foods and I'm using a little exaggeration, I realize, but it's kind of what it is. You know, it's kind of like a kid who only eats like six things, right, doesn't eat their fruits and vegetables. That's carnivore.

Philip Pape: 55:59

But any of these approaches are highly restrictive and when you're living that way, you know what it's stressing you out. You are in this state of like, constant vigilance, like what can I eat? What's the next poison or toxin lurking around the corner that I have to avoid? Man, isn't that stressful? Doesn't that sound awful, like an awful way to live? And if you're living right that way right now, why do it to yourself, right, every single time you eat? You're like it's this Machiavellian calculation combined with extreme discipline and willpower. You know, social events are these minefields where it's all temptation. Like every social event, all it feels like is constant temptation and saying no, and the mental bandwidth that you have to have to maintain that is just enormous. It's enormous.

Philip Pape: 56:41

So I'm getting my soapbox here, because it's a call to action to anyone listening that you can have it all. You can balance your approach to all of this. You can include carbs, you can get nutritional freedom. You just have to have the flexibility and you can still track macros, prioritize protein, make whole food choices, but without rigid rules that govern every bite. It's guardrails, it's structure, it's targets, it's ranges, it's not eat this, not that it is very different. If you want to argue with me that it's the same, I'd like you to try them both out and tell me that they are the same, and if they are to you, then that's your experience. And even with that, I would say that there are other ways to have those guardrails and flexibility, just with a slightly different approach or method that doesn't require cutting foods out.

Philip Pape: 57:30

And so, instead of thinking, okay, I need to follow this diet, think how do I build a sustainable lifestyle that supports my goals, that enhances what I'm doing? Doing? Quality of life is so important, it's so important, and you got to live with what you're doing and be happy with it. You don't want to just tolerate with misery what you're doing. Think about it. Are you just tolerating your diet right now? Are you miserable or are you living with it happily? You know, I don't mean the roses and sunshine and it's perfect every day, of course. I don't mean that. I mean you're satisfied, you're like, yeah, I can do this the rest of my life. There's always a little effort involved with everything, of course, but this is way more freeing and flexible than the other approaches.

Philip Pape: 58:10

So I guess, as we wrap up this self-interview but I guess it ended up being a Q&A what I want to emphasize is that I was looking for a diet like the one true diet for years Keto, atkins I didn't even mention SlimFast, but I did that Paleo and at the end of the day, it wasn't about the right diet, it was about the right approach for me, which means your diet itself evolves. So it's principle-based rather than method-based, and that means you can have multiple nutritional approaches, not only for different people but for you, at different stages, for different times of the year, for different contexts and objectives and goals. That's the power of all this, because now you're not fixed into one approach. So let's say you're currently thriving on a low-carb approach and it aligns with your goals Fantastic, like. I'm not going to judge you for that, but if you're staying low carb because of fear rather than like preferences or results, even, I hope this gives you the permission you want to experiment, to evolve your approach.

Philip Pape: 59:11

That's what we are all about, because the social media world, the nutrition world, is just full of zealots who promote their preferred diet as the only way to eat. They do it for views, for clicks, for engagement and for money and I'm not against money. I'm a capitalist through and through. I love money, just like you but I wouldn't do this shameful self-promotion and something that actually harms people for that. Now, I've been the person who talks people's ear off about how great low-carb is. This was before it ever became a business for me and in hindsight it was exhausting and isolating.

Philip Pape: 59:50

And I think there's tremendous freedom in letting go of dogma of any kind dietary dogma, training dogma and embrace the idea of flexibility. Not that we're all special snowflakes or anything like that. We're all like super, super, super unique that what works for you doesn't work for me. The principles are there. Principles are universal. It's the dogma of fixed methods and approaches.

Philip Pape: 1:00:13

I think that your relationship with food should be a great part of your life, like it should just be a good, fun part of your life and something you enjoy, not constraining. Your diet serves you. It's not the other way around. Your knowledge is going to continue to grow as your experience grows, as you listen to podcasts, get involved in communities, learn, learn, learn. The evidence is going to keep changing as well. You know what we know about the evidence, I should say, and that's to me very exciting.

Philip Pape: 1:00:41

So if you found value today, if you stuck through this long, if you want to continue the conversation, just join our Facebook group. That's all I'm going to ask today. Just search for it in Facebook or click the link in the show notes, and that is where questions like the ones we covered today get discussed. All the time you can share your journey with carbs or any other diet you want. You know some people are there who are doing carnivore and they're like yeah, I love it, that's great.

Philip Pape: 1:01:04

Come in there. We're not going to judge you. We're going to present all the evidence and let you decide for yourself. As long as you experiment, promise me that you will try, that you will make an attempt and not just assume something will or won't work until you've tried it. And if you haven't tried it you. You're going to find support there, you're not going to find judgment. That's my point. So Wits and Weights Facebook group link in the show notes and I look forward to seeing you there. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember the best diet isn't the one with the most zealous following. It's the one that works for your body and your goals and your life. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

The Hidden Roadblock That Stalled My Metabolism and Fat Loss (Critical Path) | Ep 321

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If you're struggling with fat loss that's slower than expected despite doing "everything right," this episode helps you figure out why.

I discuss my personal experience in my recent 7-week mini-cut and how a seemingly minor change in daily habits became the limiting factor, resulting in slower fat loss than in the past.

Text this episode to a friend who might be struggling with their progress!

Learn to identify your own Critical Path... the one thing currently constraining your progress regardless of how well you execute everything else.

Main Takeaways:

• The Critical Path concept identifies what's truly limiting your progress

• Small changes in daily habits can significantly impact your results

• Data tracking is essential for uncovering hidden roadblocks

• The most effective intervention often requires less willpower than you think

• Your limiting factors shift over time as circumstances change

Timestamps:

0:01 - What is critical path and how does it relate to fat loss?
 6:50 - Philip's personal fat loss case study
11:59 - Why limiting factors change throughout your fitness journey
18:00 - Creating solutions for your specific situation
21:14 - How to identify your own Critical Path
24:51 - Working smarter and more efficiently for fat loss

Text this episode to a friend who might be enjoy it!

The One Thing Holding Back Your Fat Loss Isn’t What You Think

Most people who hit a fat loss plateau assume they need to push harder: drop calories, train more, or overhaul everything. But what if you’re already doing most things right—and something smaller, less obvious is the real reason your progress is stalled?

That’s exactly what happened to me. I just finished a seven-week mini cut, and despite years of coaching experience, meticulous tracking, and dialed-in habits, my results were slower than usual. So I did what any engineer would do: I ran a system check. And what I found was a single variable that had quietly shifted over time and was stalling everything else.

This is what I call the critical path—a concept from project management that explains how one weak link can hold up the whole operation. Let’s talk about how it applies to fat loss—and how you can find your own.

What Is the “Critical Path” in Fat Loss?

In engineering, the critical path is the sequence of tasks that determines how long a project takes. If anything on that path gets delayed, the entire project gets delayed—no matter how well everything else is going.

Your fat loss journey works the same way. There are multiple variables in play—calories, protein, strength training, movement, sleep, stress, digestion, adherence—and most of them can flex a bit without completely derailing progress. But one of them is probably the constraint that’s holding everything else back.

Identify that, and everything else becomes easier. Miss it, and no amount of perfect macros or extra gym sessions will fix the problem.

My Critical Path

Here’s what I discovered: My step count had dropped from around 12,000 a day (during my last fat loss phase) to more like 8,000. That 4,000-step drop may not sound like much, but it equates to 150 fewer calories burned per day. Over a month, that’s 4,500 calories—more than a pound of fat that wasn’t going anywhere.

Why did this happen? I’d been working more at my desk, shifting into a more sedentary daily rhythm without realizing it. My training, nutrition, sleep, and stress management hadn’t changed—but this one habit had. And it mattered a lot.

Once I got back to averaging 12,000 steps, fat loss picked back up. But not because I worked harder—just because I removed a constraint.

Your Critical Path Might Be Something Else

Here are common “hidden” roadblocks I see in clients:

• Inconsistent calorie intake: Even if your average is on target, wild swings day-to-day can impact metabolism and satiety.

• Poor sleep timing or quality: Not just hours of sleep, but inconsistent bed/wake times can disrupt hormones and increase cravings.

• Low daily movement (NEAT): Especially during dieting, when the body tries to conserve energy. You might move less without realizing it.

• Stress: High life stress can raise cortisol, impact recovery, and cause water retention, which skews the scale.

• Training effort: Not pushing hard enough (or going too hard too often) can blunt stimulus and adaptation.

And sometimes the roadblock is psychological: perfectionism, fear of failure, or believing you're “just stuck” can keep you spinning your wheels.

How to Find Your Critical Path

1. Track the Right Variables

You don’t need to log every single thing, but you do need consistent data. I recommend tracking:

• Calories and macros

• Daily steps

• Body weight and measurements

• Biofeedback: sleep, stress, hunger, recovery, performance

Even if you're not using a full macro tracker, jot down meals, protein/fiber levels, and mood. We need inputs and outputs to identify constraints.

2. Look for Recent Changes

Review your data and habits over time. What’s different now vs. when things were working better? Did you stop walking as much? Has stress gone up? Has your bedtime shifted? Look for gradual drifts—the frog-in-boiling-water stuff you didn’t notice happening.

3. Run an Experiment

Once you suspect your critical path, test it. Pick one variable to change (like increasing steps by 3,000/day) and hold everything else steady for 2 weeks. See what happens.

The key is small, controlled inputs—not blowing up your whole plan.

4. Reassess Frequently

Your constraint can and will shift. As you lose weight, your TDEE drops. As seasons change, your schedule changes. Maybe it’s NEAT now, but next month it’s your training intensity. Stay curious and stay data-driven.

Less Effort, Better Results

The beauty of this approach is that your “stuck point” often isn’t the thing that requires more restriction or discipline. It’s usually something simpler and healthier—like getting outside more, sleeping better, or walking during calls.

For me, fixing my critical path meant I didn’t have to slash calories to keep losing fat. I got to eat more, feel better, and still make progress. That’s energy flux in action: move more, eat more, burn more, feel better.

This is what engineering mindset is all about—working smarter, not harder.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you feel like your fat loss is going too slowly or stalled out, or it's harder this time than it was last time, this episode is for you. I recently faced the exact same situation during a mini cut. Despite doing everything right, or so, I thought, my progress was slower than in previous cuts, and then I realized what was causing it and I thought let me talk to the listener about uncovering the thing that's holding you back, the one thing that could be what's called the critical path. It's a concept from engineering and project management where, if this one thing isn't right, everything is going to take longer. So, while, yes, I will share my critical path, I'm also going to teach you to identify your own so you can have much more success going forward. 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 Pape, and today we're looking at a real-world case study. It is my own, my own recent fat loss journey. It was a seven-week mini-cut, and I thought it'd be a great example of how I am not perfect and how I still can run into my own roadblocks, even as a coach and someone who's done this for a long time using a powerful engineering concept that I've used for many years, especially when developing schedules, and it's called critical path. And don't worry, we're not going to talk schedules, we are going to talk about how to use this concept to uncover the thing holding you back.

Philip Pape: 1:33

Many of you know that I love data, I like to track religiously. It's part of my engineering mindset and recently I noticed that, of all the variables in my fitness data, the one thing that changed, and changed quite significantly, was my average daily step count. Now, I kind of knew this inherently and intuitively because I track it every day and I'm like you know, over the over the last year and a half, I'm like man, you know, I've really got to get back to that 12,000 steps I used to have and it's been more in the eight to 9,000 steps a day and I thought, well, it's not a big deal, it's still plenty of steps. I'm still active, I train, I do all the things I eat well, et cetera. But that's a 25% reduction in my NEAT, in my non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and you would think, okay, it's not a big deal, but it actually has a big impact on your fat loss and that's just one thing.

Philip Pape: 2:22

I don't want to make this episode about walking specifically. I really want to make it about how a seemingly minor change in one variable and I know again, 4,000 steps you may say, well, no, that's actually a pretty big change, but kind of drifted over time and I didn't really give it another thought as to how big it was impacting my results. But you may have one variable that had has essentially become what engineers call the critical path in your fat loss approach or your journey, and I'm gonna break down what that means, why it matters, how identifying your own critical path could be that breakthrough you need. And I think it's important because you might be saying, well, no, it's obvious, I know why. You may not know why, and there's a way to kind of analyze what that might be Now, before we get into it.

Philip Pape: 3:05

If you have found yourself stuck in a fat loss plateau, or maybe you're in there one right now and you think you're doing everything right and again by think, I'm not trying to gaslight you, because I was there as well I thought I was doing everything right Um, and sometimes you just need a little bit of insight, a little bit of a extra third party perspective. So, if today resonates with you. If this episode is valuable, I just want you to text it to a friend. That's all I'm asking today. I'm not trying to pitch you anything else. I want you to text this episode to a friend who is struggling with their progress. Anything, I don't care how they, what language they use, if they say it's weight loss, if they say it's their diet, if they say it's their mindset, with all of this said with all, with all of this, with emotional eating, whatever, text this episode to a friend and support them and say, hey, here's a fresh perspective on how to kind of think about this. And and you know, if you're not convinced yet, listen through the whole episode and then I'll ask you again to text it to someone if you liked it. But, like sharing, sharing knowledge is one of the most powerful ways that we can help each other succeed. That's what this show is all about, and I hope you will join me in that mission of just texting this episode to a friend. Go, hit the share button in your podcast app, or you could take a screenshot, tag me in social media and share it that way. However, you want to do it All right.

Philip Pape: 4:14

So let's get into today's topic and define what we mean by critical path. So in project management, in engineering, the critical path represents the sequence of dependent tasks. Okay, so the things you have to do, like if you're building a house, it might be buying the material, laying the foundation, et cetera, et cetera, and it's that sequence that determines the minimum time needed to complete a project. So, again, if you're building a house, the concrete is absolutely needed before you can build the foundation, but the windows aren't needed till much later. So the windows are not going to hold you up at least early on. They might hold you up later on. And so any delay in the tasks along that critical path again the sequence of things that determines the minimum time you need from start to finish. Any delay is what is obviously going to delay the whole thing. It's going to make the project take longer. And then all the other tasks that are outside that critical path have some what we call float or slack, meaning they can delay a bit, they can be a little bit off or less than perfect or less than ideal, without impacting the overall timeline.

Philip Pape: 5:23

Now, when we apply this concept to physique development, especially fat loss, we are essentially looking for the limiting factor, the element in your system that is constraining progress, right, it is preventing you from moving forward, regardless of how well you execute everything else. And so for lots of people, myself included, we tend to focus heavily on the things that we think matter most, like our calorie intake, our deficit, our training, but sometimes the critical path actually lies elsewhere. In my case, I track every day. I track my food, I track my measurements, I track my training, I track my steps and I plan everything out and I make sure to really hit the targets pretty darn closely. I don my training, I track my steps and I plan everything out and I make sure to really hit the targets pretty darn closely. I don't mind doing that, I love doing it. I have a very stress-free way of doing it. It only takes me a few minutes a day. I use meal prep, all the things Always hit my protein, always maintain my training, and if I have to miss a day, I'm going to shift it to another day. I get adequate sleep and there's an asterisk on that because I've always gotten around six and a half to seven hours of sleep, which for me, for my HRV, for my stress, for my performance, has been steady state If I got seven and a half or eight. Would I perform that much better? Potentially, potentially, but it's always been like that. To me, that is not a variable that has changed. I manage stress reasonably well by really all measures.

Philip Pape: 6:50

I was executing my fat loss phase across the board, the way it needs to be executed, and I've done multiple cuts in the past. Under this situation where I had just come out of a bulk, I spent like I don't know six, seven months in a bulk and then I say, okay, I'm going to switch over to fat loss phase. I'm not even going to go to maintenance first, I'm just going to switch because I know how to do it and I'm going to do it. However, my progress was slower and the problem is I wanted I had a timeline, which is also a different issue. We could talk about it in another episode. I had a timeline because we're going on a vacation and I wanted to just trim off some of the fat that I gained. I was aiming for about 15 pounds. I ended up getting about 10. Okay, it's still 10 pounds. I'm thrilled with that. I'm thrilled that I could do that, that I still have control over my physique, all the things that we talk about.

Philip Pape: 7:32

It just wasn't as fast as I anticipated because my body didn't respond as aggressively or as well as it had in the past. And when I looked at everything and I said, man, is there anything that's vastly different, I said, you know, it's the step count. It's the step count because the last time I did a cut I was averaging 11, 12,000. Now I'm like eight or nine and sometimes I have some even lower days than that.

Philip Pape: 7:53

You know I'm a busy guy. This is not an excuse. I'm relating to you as the listener. I'm busy, I work all day. Uh, I'm flitting around from call to call meeting to meeting. I'm oftentimes having to sit in front of my computer like an actual desktop to get stuff done, and I do have a standing desk. So if I use that I get more steps. Sometimes I get so immersed in my work I don't do that. So there's a lot of opportunities here, easily, I'm going to say, for me to get back to 12,000 on average. In fact, recently I've had multiple 12, 13, 14,000 days and it didn't take much effort. It just took some intentionality, which is often what we are missing or we get off track.

Philip Pape: 8:29

Anyway, that's what I noticed. A big difference was about three to 4,000 steps fewer per day than the last time I did my fat loss phase. Now let's put that in perspective 3,000 steps right, just being conservative, that represents about 150 calories of reduced daily energy expenditure. That's a little over a thousand calories a week. That's 4,500 calories a month. That's more than a pound of potential fat loss each month. That may not happen, all things equal, simply because of the reduction in daily movement. Now it was probably more than the 3,000 when we look at the delta. Furthermore, I have found that when you are a little bit less active with your walking, you seem to burn even fewer calories than expected from that inactivity.

Philip Pape: 9:14

I'm not going to dive into why that might be and also everyone's different, but when you think of even one pound a month and I'm talking about a seven-week mini cut that's two pounds. Well, that's two pounds. I didn't account for not losing. Now I told you I lost 10 instead of 15. Okay, we're talking about a five pound difference. There's water and glycogen differences. There's all sorts of little things in the noise.

Philip Pape: 9:35

Who knows exactly the point is. I know for a fact that my walking had a big difference. I just know because in the past it was easier and nothing else has changed. Now this wasn't conscious, right. It kind of happened gradually and unconsciously as my work patterns changed more desk time, more online meetings, fewer reasons to move throughout the day and I didn't have, let's say, a fully developed system in place to keep the step count high when those things change.

Philip Pape: 10:02

I've talked before about how your environment changes a lot and we can't just sit on our laurels and assume that our current system will apply exactly the same. The principles apply, but the methods and the triggers and the habits may have to shift. And because my step count had declined gradually in a sense, right, if I look at my curve over the years, it's like average of 12, then 11 and a half, then 11, then 10, right, it just kind of drifted. I hadn't registered as a significant change. It's like the I hate this analogy but the frog in the boiling water. You start cold and you gradually heat it up and the frog doesn't notice it and then it boils to death. I know, terrible, gruesome, but you get the idea.

Philip Pape: 10:38

So here's where the concept of critical path becomes really, really powerful and effective, despite what I'll call I hate to use the word perfect, but dialed in execution, on my nutrition and training and everything else. My walking habit had become a limiting factor in my overall fat loss equation. Right, because it directly affects my metabolism, how many calories I burn and thus how much I can eat to be in the same deficit, and I assumed that to get into that deficit I could eat X, but instead I had to eat X minus whatever calories I now wasn't burning, and because I wasn't, of course I didn't lose fat as quickly. Now, no matter how well I executed all of this, the reduction in energy was setting a constraint or upper limit on my potential progress, and so this realization made me think about this and why I'm doing this episode that you know, in a fat loss phase, the critical path isn't fixed right. It could actually shift around between different variables, depending on your circumstances, like if we look in engineering, when I deal with like big, complicated schedules, the critical path can change. Because what if some other task all of a sudden becomes three times longer than you expected? Right, some supplier says oh, I'm sorry, the part won't be in for three months, we thought it was going to be two weeks, and now all of a sudden, that becomes a critical path.

Philip Pape: 11:59

Same thing with our fat loss. You know, nutrition might be your critical path. Maybe sleep becomes your critical path If all of a sudden work gets really stressful and your life is hectic and all of a sudden you can't get enough sleep right. Stress, same thing. The intensity of your training, your ability to train, where you train right. There's so many things and it's kind of like they jump around like whack-a-mole and hopefully you can do fat loss in a time when things are relatively stable, which is why I like timing your fat loss and muscle gain and maintenance with the seasons of your life and the seasons of the year and finding a relatively quiet time to do fat loss when you can reduce all of this variability. So let's talk about, I guess, why this all happens. Right, our bodies are very complex and they adapt. Our bodies are adaptive.

Philip Pape: 12:46

We've talked about metabolic adaptation or, if you're new to this podcast, it is the idea that your body will respond to the effect of everything that's coming in and it does so to try to maintain homeostasis, stability, survival, right. And when you're in a fat loss phase, you're doing what? Well, you're creating an energy deficit. You're burning more energy than you consume and you do that from either or decreasing what you eat, which is inevitably gonna have to happen, and or increasing your energy expenditure, with the caveat that you're not doing it in a stressful way like running, where it could actually backfire and reduce your expenditure. We're talking about general movement, walking, not sitting as much, et cetera.

Philip Pape: 13:26

Now many of us focus on the intake side because that is, like, seems more controllable, right? We track our food, we count our calories, we hit our macros and for many of you, this has been the problem for your whole life when you've tried to diet, is you do it on the calorie side? You try to. I don't want to say crash diet Not everybody does that, but everybody tries to cut something. You restrict something. You're like I just got to get those calories down, that's what's going to do it. Or and or you make it even worse by running more and more stress to your body. Now what if I told you that for most people, especially if you've been dieting for a while, the expenditure side is probably your critical path right now. Okay, not the intake side. I can take anyone and just show them that, with tracking and a little bit of planning assuming you don't have some massive emotional eating issues to deal with, which is a separate topic.

Philip Pape: 14:16

Most people can get into some decent control of their food, which is great, because many of us don't even have that right. However, it's not enough, because when we diet, our bodies naturally try to conserve energy, and it does so in multiple ways. First of all, you're losing weight, so you're just carrying around less mass, so you're going to burn less. Secondly, it downregulates your hormones. That's called metabolic adaptation. You can't do anything about that. And then, thirdly, the big thing you can do something about is non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

Philip Pape: 14:45

And guess what? When you diet, you oftentimes do less of this unconsciously, not just less walking, but less movement in general. And so this goes back to my theory, which is pretty well supported by working with so many clients, and what the evidence says, that during fat loss, you're going to move less. And even if your step count is the same, you might be moving less, but if your step count drops, you might be even moving less, less. So kind of what I mean by that is you get in a mode of just you're not as active, it's not as fitness oriented, versus when you walk more, like think about it when you lace up your shoes or when you walk around a lot throughout the day. You just have this mindset of like, moving, of being active, even if you're working. If you're doing, it's like no, I got to get up and get moving, and it's just this thing, right.

Philip Pape: 15:33

If you're, if you're down from 12 to 8,000 steps or down to even 6,000 steps, and you have some really low days, like three or four, where you're just sitting all day at the computer, you're not in that same mental state and you actually start to downregulate your other movement, your, your fidgeting, your not unconscious movement, the things you don't really count as steps but they might count as steps on your watch, whatever, and all of this is kind of an adaptation to conserve energy, um, and and you're you're basically reinforcing that by your, by moving less consciously, if that makes sense. So simply by moving less, you're almost telling your body like we don't want to be moving here, um, and that's, that's an adaptation. So if you're tracking your food, and let's say you are tracking your movement but you're not trying to change it right, or it got worse since the last time you did a fat loss phase and your body's compensating for the reduced intake, reducing energy expenditure that could definitely be causing a stall, right, and that's what happened to me. And again, that's specific to walking and NEAT. But it's because NE is such a powerful lever and sometimes your habits can shift without you realizing it. Now, the good news is, once you could identify that and, by the way, if you're listening to the show right now, I would like you to do that Like, identify what your critical path is.

Philip Pape: 16:47

It could be something having nothing to do with movement. Your critical path could absolutely be, on the nutrition side One, for example, many people are very inconsistent with their intake. Even if you're hitting the intended calorie intake for the week, the average daily intake if your intake fluctuates a lot let's say it's 500 up and 500 down day to day in terms of calories, that could cause your body to reduce its expenditure. It's fascinating, right? It's like you're eating the same amount of food as if you distributed evenly, but because of the way you're eating it, your body actually might burn fewer calories, thus putting you in less of a deficit than someone else who ate in a very consistent way, right? How about your sleep patterns If you're not going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, but you used to, even if you have the same hours of sleep, that could cause your body to conserve energy, to ramp up your hunger hormones, et cetera. Something is going on that's causing your expenditure to be lower than it was in the past or, for those of you doing this for the first time, just be aware of these affect your expenditure period and could be the reason you're stalling out. Right, it's nothing wrong with the principles, it's just identifying the critical path and then taking action to address it. And so for me, this is okay.

Philip Pape: 18:00

Now I'm gradually, intentionally increasing my daily step count back to closer to my baseline of 12,000. That is my target. And now every day, if I'm less than half that by midday, I know for sure. I want to get a walk-in Again if I can. If not, I'm going to get creative. I'm going to get creative. I'm going to use my standup desk with the treadmill or I'm going to pace a lot for my next call. Whatever I can do in a way that feels fairly natural and enjoyable, that keeps me moving, I'm going to do Um, and so that's walking again. I'm focusing kind of on my situation, but I'm giving you inspiration to do this, for yourself to say, okay, what is my critical path and what am I going to do to put in place a habit so there's less friction to do it and I'm not telling myself I just have to do it? No, you want to make it where it's almost automatic, right For me.

Philip Pape: 18:52

When I do any calls that are on my phone rather than on a computer, I'm going to walk around period, like that is just a thing I do. I don't even think about it Like oh, I got a Zoom call coming up and this is the kind I don't need to share my screen or anything. I'm going to go on my phone and I'm just going to walk around on it. Right, movement snacks that's another way to do it. When it comes to walking, like always taking breaks and just kind of walking around and just thinking about being on your feet for the vast majority of the time and you know, sitting far less than you're standing and walking. And then there's all the other things that I'm not going to get into related to walking specifically.

Philip Pape: 19:24

The point is that the relatively small changes that help, that cause my expenditure to drop, are the same small changes that can I get them back up to my previous baseline without some major overhaul in my schedule or lifestyle and in the engineering world, when we'd have a critical path that would start to be threatened or extended, we'd say, okay, what's a big low-hanging fruit? Can we talk to a supplier and negotiate a different approach so that they can get us the hardware sooner right? Or can we go get this more skilled resource or person over here to add to the project, to help shorten our timeline on the software development or whatever it is? So what is that for you? How can you apply this concept to your own physique development journey? Well, I'm going to give you some prescription, prescriptive steps here. The first step, of course, always is data collection and tracking. You know I would say this, but even um, let's see, I had.

Philip Pape: 20:14

I had a guest on recently. I don't know if her episode has come out yet, oh yeah, it did. Christina McClurkin right, she was on talking about how her clients don't even track macros, but they track their meals and like how they feel with their meals and how much protein and fiber they're getting. So they're still tracking. At the end of the day, you still have to collect the data somehow. The way you do it is going to be, is going to have to fit with your style and desire, and again, with me and my clients and our physique university.

Philip Pape: 20:41

It's very straightforward. You know macros, calories, uh, body measurements, daily movement steps, biofeedback, like sleep and stress levels, perform, performance, recovery, energy, hunger. I know I'm listing off a lot of things. I'm just rattling them off Progress photos, training, performance, recovery, et cetera. We make it really easy to do. I make it very simple for my clients to do, but for you it's like what do you need to track that you're not tracking now that could be causing issues with your expenditure or your food and your intake that you're not aware of, because if you're not aware of them, you can't even go to the next step.

Philip Pape: 21:14

Now, once you're collecting data across the variables that you want, you'll be better equipped to identify the factor. That's your current critical path, and maybe you're listening to this episode thinking OK, that's where I'm at. I've been tracking my data. Now what do I do? Well, next you're going to look for anomalies or changes in your data. No-transcript.

Philip Pape: 21:41

Go into Apple health or Google whatever it's called Google health. Go into your spreadsheet, go into your macro factor, like wherever you have graphs or data, and just stretch out the time period back to the right duration and see what the difference is. Actually, apple health has this cool feature where it automatically will notify you hey, we've noticed a trend change in your weight or your steps. It will actually tell you that, but it's just kind of ad hoc. You kind of want to do this yourself. You could even look at secondary factors like resting heart rate.

Philip Pape: 22:10

I mean, if your resting heart rate has jumped by, let's say, five or 10 beats a minute versus where it used to be and you haven't gained weight so that's the caveat, because gaining weight can cause it to go up that could be that you're not getting as much movement as before and it may not be obvious from your step count. It may be the type of movement. Maybe you're just taking a lot of casual walks and you used to do more brisk walks or wear rucksack or something like that right, or you used to go on an incline or live in a hilly area. Now you live in a city in a flat area. Very cool insights you can draw from this stuff Sleep quality. If you have an aura ring or you wear some sort of tracker or wearable, you might see changes in HRV or body temperature or core body temperature, right, of course, step count we've talked about that's a very easy one to track Stress levels. That's like the resilience, the HRV.

Philip Pape: 22:59

Anyway, the critical path is sometimes where you don't expect it. It's kind of like hiding in plain sight in the data and you're just not looking at the data or paying enough attention to it or you haven't noticed consciously that it's shifted over time. And I help people with this all the time, like again and not to pitch our program all the time, but in Physique University, one thing that we have is a post that says here's how to post all your data so we can help you. And it says make sure to have your metabolism, your calorie intake, your expenditure, your deficit over time, whatever some key things your weight trend, and based on that, we can then look at your data and see what's hiding in plain sight that you might be missing. And then, when you said, aha, eureka, I found it right. Now you can test your hypothesis with an intervention.

Philip Pape: 23:45

That's the next step is experiment on it. If you suspect your reduced movement might be the factor, increase your step count for two weeks by a decent amount, you know. Increase it by like, I want to say like 4,000 steps a day let's say that's a couple miles while keeping everything else constant. Treat it as an experiment, or a challenge, if you will, and monitor the results. Now, it may not change things immediately, there might be a lag, but it might be enough for you to say, hey, I think this is the reason why. Um, I've seen that when I go up, my step count goes up. About a week later I start to see it. Relieve my expenditure a bit. My expenditure starts to climb back and again.

Philip Pape: 24:21

Remember, critical path is not static. It can change as your circumstances change, because what limited you six months ago or a year, that last time you did the fat loss phase, may be totally different than what's limiting you today, and that is why you have to always be tracking and always be reassessing and always be experimenting. All right, and the cool thing about this whole thing listen up. Listen up. Sometimes the thing you need to change requires a lot less thinking, willpower, effort than what you thought you had to change. So, like for me, adding daily steps is not that hard.

Philip Pape: 24:51

If I had to go ahead and drop another 300 calories a day on my food, that'd just be a slog. I'd be like, no, I'm not doing it. And in fact, guess what happened during my mini cut, as my expenditure was dropping faster than I expected. Of course my calories would have to come down to keep me in my intended deficit. I just didn't want to do that. I didn't want to eat that low amount of calories. It would not be good psychologically for my energy, for anything. And so I compromised. I said you know what I'm going to eat, more like what I would normally eat in fat loss phase, which for me is like 1800 to 2000 calories, when I'm going pretty darn aggressively Cause I burned, say, 2800, 3000 at maintenance. And I said I'm just going to keep it there and just take the results as they come and work on my step count instead, right, and toward the end of the fat loss phase actually started to pick up a little bit, which was a good indicator that it was working.

Philip Pape: 25:39

And this can go for any goal that you have, like any leverage point that allows you to get better results with less effort or more efficient. Effort is a good way to put it. Is is a game changer, isn't it Like? Think about that. Most people attempt to improve everything and then they spend all their willpower and attention across the board where they're getting very little for each bit of effort. It's that 80-20 rule. Instead of focusing on the 20%, that gives you 80% of the results. They focus on like 90% of things and put all their effort into that and they still only get a small improvement. So if you can understand critical path, you can be much more targeted and efficient.

Philip Pape: 26:20

And in my case, the you know the walking more wasn't just easier than eating less, it was healthier, it was more sustainable. There were other benefits. It was like no, this is the energy flux thing that we talk about, where let's eat more to move more. Let's not eat less and move more. Let's not eat less and like run ourselves in the ground trying to lose fat and restrict and all that. Let's try to live a higher energy life, moving and training.

Philip Pape: 26:43

Not moving in a stressful way, but moving in a very healthy way, like walking, some sprinting, doing your chores, doing things by hand, doing stuff you enjoy, doing hobbies and stuff. Reduce your stress, enhance your cardiovascular health, enhance your mental health and cognitive function, have better mood. Like get all the benefits of the thing that you're doing to improve your metabolism rather than cut more calories, which just has negative consequences across the board. So you're going to track data, you're going to identify the critical path and then you're going to focus your effort, very efficiently and targeted, on a positive, healthy change that addresses your critical path not more restriction, not more cutting. And this mindset teaches us to look for leverage points in what seems like a very complex system because it is. But then you can vastly simplify it by identifying places where small inputs create large outputs. And then you apply this efficiency thinking to your physique development and you're going to achieve much better results and be less frustrated. It's going to be more sustainable and that's what we're all about.

Philip Pape: 27:47

So, to wrap up, if today's concept resonated with you, I have a simple request Please text this episode to a friend who might be struggling with something in their lives. It might be fat loss, it might be something else. Maybe they are doing everything right quote unquote and just need a little bit different perspective. Sometimes a solution isn't working harder right, it's working smarter, more efficiently, by identifying the critical path in your system, and sharing knowledge is one of the most powerful ways that we can help each other, and this might be something that someone in your life needs to hear right now. So text this episode to a friend. That is all I ask. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come not from working more, but from identifying the critical path in your system and working more efficiently. This is Philip Pape, and you've been listening to Wits and Weights. I'll talk to you next time.

Strength Training with Back Problems (Lifting "Heavy" in Midlife) | Ep 320

Submit a question for the podcast (and get a personal reply plus a shoutout) at witsandweights.com/question

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If you have back issues, you might think heavy lifting isn't for you. 

Millions of people struggling with back pain believe they should avoid challenging exercises - especially heavy lifting. 

But what if avoiding heavier weights is actually keeping you from building the strong, resilient body and back that you need? 

Today we're answering a listener question from Kristen (a 51-year old woman with chronic back problems) about strength training with back issues and challenging conventional wisdom about what's actually good for your back.

Main Takeaways:

• Understanding the counterintuitive relationship between strength training and back health

• Why most people's approach to back problems may be making things worse

• The critical mental shift needed for successful strength development

• How to build confidence through proper technique and progression

• The surprising connection between rehabilitation and strength training

Timestamps:

0:01 - Strength training with back problems
3:22 - Common back issues with age
4:47 - 3 key principles for training for a stronger back
12:30 - How to start training effectively
16:09 - Fears of re-injury
22:18 - The surprising overlap between rehab and training

Why Avoiding Heavy Lifting Might Be the Worst Thing for Your Bad Back

If you’ve got a “bad back,” the last thing you’re probably thinking about is picking up a barbell. The word “heavy” might trigger visions of tweaked discs, shooting pain, or being stuck in bed for days. But what if I told you that avoiding strength training is likely making your back worse—not better?

That’s the myth I’m busting in this episode, based on a listener question from Kristen, who asked: Is strength training with a back problem even safe—especially if you're over 50?

Let’s unpack the science and real-world experience that says YES, not only is it safe, but it’s exactly what your spine needs.

The Strong Back Paradox

When most people hear “bad back,” they assume they’re fragile. So they opt for light weights, machines, or walking. But here's the paradox: a weak back is more likely to get injured than a strong one.

When you don’t train your back with resistance, it stays unstable, uncoordinated, and vulnerable. Ironically, it’s not strength training that puts most people out of commission—it’s doing everyday tasks without strength, like awkwardly picking up a heavy box or bending over to tie your shoes.

The research backs this up. A 2016 systematic review in the Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine found that progressive strength training reduces pain and improves function in people with chronic low back pain. I’ve seen it firsthand with clients who were afraid of deadlifts—until they started doing them, pain-free, with good form.

Progressive Overload Is Non-Negotiable (and Doesn’t Mean Maxing Out)

If you want a stronger back, you need to challenge it. That doesn’t mean loading 300 pounds on the bar on day one. It means slowly, intelligently adding weight as your body adapts.

The mistake I see all the time? People doing the same exercises, at the same weight, for months. Your body has zero reason to get stronger if you don’t nudge it beyond its comfort zone.

This is especially important as we age. Without intervention, we start losing 3–8% of our muscle per decade after 30—and the decline accelerates after menopause. Building strength isn’t optional. It’s the best tool we have to hold onto muscle, improve function, and protect our backs into our 50s, 60s, and beyond.

Movement Patterns > Muscle Isolation

Machines are fine for hypertrophy, but they don’t train your body to move well. What your back really needs is integrated movement—the kind you get from compound lifts like squats and deadlifts.

These movements:

• Teach your body to brace and stabilize under load

• Train your glutes, hamstrings, lats, and erectors—all critical to spinal health

• Build real-world strength that transfers to daily life

If you’re dealing with back issues, the goal isn’t to avoid these movements—it’s to master them. That might mean starting with bodyweight or very light resistance. But learning proper hip hinging, bracing, and bar path can be a game-changer.

Modifications Are a Bridge, Not a Crutch

If you’re thinking, “But I can’t do a barbell deadlift yet,” that’s fine. Start with:

• Goblet squats instead of back squats

• Kettlebell or dumbbell deadlifts

• Trap bar deadlifts for a more upright posture

• Seated presses if overhead pressing hurts

The key is starting with what you can do and building from there. Your back doesn’t need babying—it needs proper stress and adaptation.

Breaking the Fear-Pain-Avoidance Cycle

Here’s what holds most people back: fear of re-injury.

And I get it. I’ve had back surgery. I’ve been laid up from a disc herniation after a sloppy lift. That kind of experience makes you cautious.

But if fear leads to avoidance, and avoidance leads to deconditioning, you end up trapped in a cycle of fragility. The only way out is to start moving—slowly, smartly, and progressively—and prove to your brain that your body can handle it.

Every clean rep is evidence that you’re capable. Every extra 5 pounds is proof that your back is stronger than it was last week.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let’s say you’ve got occasional flare-ups. Here’s a framework to rebuild strength:

• Start with the movement pattern, not the weight. Learn to hip hinge, squat, and brace.

• Use light loads—even a broomstick or 15 lb bar is fine.

• Progress slowly with 5–10 lb jumps weekly or biweekly.

• Film your lifts or work with a coach for feedback.

• Train 2–3x per week, not daily, to recover and adapt.

• Focus on technique over ego.

The goal isn’t to hit new PRs. It’s to be able to lift groceries, play with your kids or grandkids, and live your life without that nagging back pain controlling your choices.

Stop Waiting for the “Perfect Back” to Train

You don’t need to be pain-free before you get stronger. Getting stronger is how you become pain-free.

I’ve worked with women in their 60s who started with nothing but chair squats and went on to deadlift more than their body weight, all without flaring up their back.

You don’t need a senior-friendly workout. You need a smart, progressive strength plan that treats you like the capable human you are.

So the next time you think, “Strength training isn’t for me because of my back,” flip the script:

“Strength training is exactly what my back needs.”

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you are experiencing back issues of any kind a little bit of back pain and fatigue all the way up to more significant back problems or a quote-unquote bad back that leaves you either sitting or even in your bed or on the couch for stretches at a time, and then you hear phrases like heavy lifting. You might think that that is not for me. I'll stick to my walking, my lighter weights, my machine work, but what if avoiding the heavier weights is what's keeping you from building the strong, resilient body and back that you need? Today we are talking about the counterintuitive thinking behind building strength with back issues. That will change the way you approach strength training when it comes to your back. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.

Philip Pape: 1:01

I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're answering a fantastic question from a listener named Kristen that I think perfectly captures the concern shared by millions of people women, men of many ages, especially over 40, over 50, and beyond. And Kristen wrote, quote I'm a 51-year-old woman who is overweight and I need a great program and tips for strength training for a strong, healthy future in my body. I have a back problem, so when I hear heavy lifting, I'm not sure this is a great fit for me personally. What are your thoughts Now? I did get back to Kristen with a lot of details specific to her, but today I want to answer the crucial thing that I think this question hits on that there's a massive disconnect between what many people believe they should do for their bodies, especially as they get older, and what the evidence actually supports. The truth is that not only can most people with back issues safely perform strength training with barbells and heavier loads, but it might be exactly what they need for long-term back health. The one caveat is I am not a medical expert. I'm not a doctor. I'm not dispensing medical advice, so, when in doubt, always seek the help of a professional or a physical therapist. I know some great ones in the industry, in fact, and I've worked with them myself, but today we're going to break down the principles and specific approaches in general that can help Kristen and everyone in a similar situation build the strength that they need for this vibrant, active future for decades to come, no matter what age you are.

Philip Pape: 2:40

Now, before we get into specifics, if you have a question that you'd like me to address on a future episode, just like I'm doing today, featuring Kristen's question. And you want a personal reply from me? Just go to witsandweightscom slash question or click the link in the show notes. And I love these questions because they allow me to address the real concerns that are holding you back, that preventing you from reaching your potential, that you're curious about, that are holding you back, that preventing you from reaching your potential, that you're curious about, that are very specific and contextual to you and I'd be happy to tackle your question or situation in an episode. Usually it's going to be featured all on its own and I'm going to give you a shout out, just like I did today for Kristen. So go to witsandweightscom slash question to do that.

Philip Pape: 3:22

All right, let us start by understanding what the problem is. After I got Kristen's question, I followed up. I asked her some more details because it always depends right and she shared with me that she had injured her back in her 20s. She has very weak core muscles, she occasionally has flare-ups where she could be bedridden for up to a week, and she mentioned specifically that poor form had caused a severe episode where she couldn't even get out of bed for five days. Now I can definitely relate to this.

Philip Pape: 3:51

I've had back surgery and it was exacerbated when I had a herniated disc while I was lifting with poor form. I remember specifically I forgot to put on my belt not that you need to have a belt, but I forgot to put on my lifting belt for the final set. Not that you need to have a belt, but I forgot to put on my lifting belt for the final set of really heavy deadlifts. I was in a gym talking with people getting totally distracted and I just went after it just in a very sloppy way. This is, this is before. I knew better and I could just feel that I pulled something, but it was just an exacerbated, um uh injury from years and years. That probably happened when I was in CrossFit and or snowboarding, you'll never know, but in this case it sounds like she, you know, lifted improperly and she said she walks one to two times a week, uses machines at the gym one to three times a week doing chest press rows, pec, fly seated leg presses, and she gave me some specific numbers and reps and you know I again I gave her specific advice.

Philip Pape: 4:47

But what I want to talk about today are are three key principles that will change how you think about strength training with back issues, and this is especially true for men and women in midlife, over 40, over 50, when these things really start to catch up with you. So principle number one is the stronger back paradox. All right, this is where most people believe that having back issues means you should avoid challenging your back through heavy lifting. But the evidence points in the opposite direction, because a weak back is more vulnerable to injury than a strong back. When I say it that way, you're like yeah, okay, that makes intuitive sense. But when you avoid training your back due to fear of injury, then you're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, aren't you? Your back, then, remains weak. It's unstable. It is prone to exactly the injuries you're trying to avoid. Most people are going to get their back injured doing something stupid, like trying to lift something up into the back of a truck and twisting their body, and they lift it up with a massive amount of back curving. You know those kinds of things Very rarely, but occasionally somebody might injure themselves in the gym, but again, it's usually because of very poor form or trying to do too much too quickly.

Philip Pape: 6:07

The research shows us that progressive overload, progressive resistance, training right. This is where you continue to get stronger over time actually reduces back pain and improves function in most individuals who have chronic back issues. A 2016 systematic review in the Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine found that strength training led to significant reductions in pain and improvements in physical function for individuals with chronic low back pain, and I've seen it directly with so many clients clients who were hesitant to lift weights. We got them doing deadlifts and, all of a sudden, the pain starts to go away and they're shocked, they're surprised, but they're super happy and pleased. Um and I've seen this time and time again start deadlifting.

Philip Pape: 6:50

Now, this paradox applies to Kristen situation perfectly, because, by limiting yourself to light machine work, I think she's missing out on the training stimulus that can make her back more resilient, and I told her this. You know she I'm not calling her out here, she knows. You know I said the thing that I first learned through starting strength right it's better to have a strong, bad back than a weak bad back, and, of course, bad back is a subjective thing that we like to label, but the strong back is going to serve you far better in daily life. The key, though, is leading me to principle number two that progressive overload is non-negotiable. So when you think, okay, what does it mean to have a strong back? Well, you actually have to challenge it. You have to adapt your body to increasing demands over time. If you keep lifting the same weights, the same you know loads, the same exercises forever, your body has no reason to build more strength or muscle and it's going to stay at its current level. And I would say that this is even more critical for older folks, people over 40, 50, 60.

Philip Pape: 7:51

I did an episode specifically geared toward the over 50 crowd where I talked about the importance of the big compound lifts specifically for the back and for bone density and for like those functional things that we really care about. Take women, for example. After menopause, women can lose 3% to 8% of their muscle mass per decade. Of course, men lose muscle mass as well, but for women it increases at an accelerating rate because of the hormones. So in your 20s and 30s you had a let's call it good enough, quote unquote strong back and you had some muscle. Just that came along for the ride. Well, now you're losing that muscle. So unless you do something about it, it's just going to get worse.

Philip Pape: 8:45

So when Kristen mentioned that she increases weight when it feels too easy, which was one of the replies when we were discussing this. We talked about how our perception of difficulty some people call it RPE, or just you know how it feels is pretty subjective. It's influenced by a lot of things on that day that you go into the gym, your sleep quality, your stress, your nutrition, you know whether you're gaining or losing weight at the time, or in a calorie deficit or not. And this is why I like a structured plan that takes the guesswork out and does not depend on how you feel for the day until you get much more advanced and and can really rely on that. And so for all of us whose bodies are going to be forever aging and you're worried about that muscle loss, the principle of progressive overload has to be applied, and applied intelligently. You know, small, consistent increases over time, not dramatic jumps, not taking lots of time off from the gym and also not just staying at the same weight. Right, it's okay, if you're doing 30 pounds now, go in the next session or the next week and try 35. And your body will continue to adapt and stay strong when you do that.

Philip Pape: 9:55

And then, principle number three I just slightly alluded to this already, but I'm a big fan of focusing on movement patterns over isolated muscle groups when the concern is a strong back. Kristen said she was using machines. I think that's great. It's definitely better than nothing, and certain machines can definitely give you similar results for hypertrophy, for building muscle, but it's not going to develop the coordinated function of multiple muscle groups working together for that overall stability and posterior chain, which is what your back needs. It needs those very strong rope-like attachments that go up your spine to become strengthened, and that is best accomplished through, you know, a systematic multi-joint, multi-muscle compound lifts. Because back pain here's the thing it usually stems not from a single weak muscle but from not moving the right way.

Philip Pape: 10:54

Right, doing again, I said doing something stupid right and the fact that you don't have very good coordination between your muscle groups. You are just not neuromuscularly adapted to it and training on machines might feel safer, but it bypasses the development of these neuromuscular connections. Think about it Functional movements like squats, deadlifts. They train the body as an integrated system. They teach your bodies or your muscles to work together and they develop what we're going to call useful strength. Right, useful strength, not just big muscles, not just size, not just higher load for the sake of it, but the actual strength that translates to daily activities lifting and carrying your groceries, moving furniture, playing with your grandchildren all the things that actually end up pulling people's backs right. Even just the fact that you have to sit in front of a computer for your job potentially could cause back issues. But having a stronger back through coordinated, functional I hate the word functional, but the compound movements is going to mitigate that significantly. And again, this doesn't mean machines have no place.

Philip Pape: 11:59

So, kristen, I'm talking to you as well. I don't want you to feel bad with some of the stuff I'm saying in this episode. They can be extremely valuable for building specific muscles, for working around limitations. In fact I'm going to do an episode soon about building muscle despite injuries and limitations, so you might actually like that one as well. But the machine should complement right. They should complement and not replace the compound movements. I think those should be the foundation right, especially deadlifts when it comes to back health.

Philip Pape: 12:30

And if you're not doing them yet, kristen, you can start with a light, empty bar and work your way up from that. If you can pick something off the ground for a set of five with very little effort, then you could, of course, pick something slightly heavier for a set of five and heavier for a set of, and eventually you're gonna hit a point where it starts to feel heavy and your body will then adapt by building more connections, neuromuscular connections, as well as building muscle over time, and that's what's going to make your back really, really strong. Now let's talk about putting this all together for a, you know, application of the principles. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds about, like specific programming, um programming, prescriptions, I should say, and it also doesn't mean you have to jump straight into, like super, what you would consider heavy barbell deadlifts If you have back issues. Of course, again, as I said before, caveat, this is not medical advice. If it's something that is surgically indicated or requires physical therapy, that's really up between you and your doctor.

Philip Pape: 13:38

What I would suggest, however, from a training perspective, is starting with the movement patterns using body weight or very light resistance. Yeah, that could be bands, that could be an empty bar, an empty light bar. Right, there are light barbells, there are women's barbells that are 35 pounds, and then there's even 15 pound bars or even just like a broom handle. So if you can learn how to brace, how to breathe right, stabilize your spine and have a neutral spine during the movement, learning the squat and the deadlift pattern properly. I can't tell you pretty much every client that I start working with when they send me their first video of them doing a deadlift, it's always got some major issues the bar's way too far from the legs, they're rounding their back. There's something that's off that I know you're going to get injured by, and this is also why working with a trainer or coach can be really helpful.

Philip Pape: 14:24

I know I mentioned, you know, physique University. In there you could post a video and get a form check from me. I will break it down either in text or on a screen share video and I'll say look, here are the, here are your, here's your low hanging fruit and here are the cues that you can use to improve your movement pattern. Um, so it's. It's. It's the hip hinge right, the foundation of the deadlifts. It's the uh core stability that you get through doing squats and deadlifts and progressing them over time. It's modified versions of those movements. If you need them. Like, let's say, you carry a lot of excess weight and you can't get into a squat, maybe you could do a leg press, all right. But let me tell you, I work with clients who are in excess of 300 pounds on the scale and they can generally do all of these movement patterns. They just have to be taught the right way to do it and start light and work your way up right the.

Philip Pape: 15:13

The key here is we're not avoiding the movements that challenge the back. We are introducing them in a controlled way that builds strength and confidence. And if you could do it light with good form, then eventually you could do it heavy with good form and your body will adapt to it. So again, if you need modifications, like if you have to do goblet squats, initially really light, with a kettlebell or dumbbell, then that's fine. Start with goblet squats. If you had to do kettlebell deadlifts instead of just full up deadlifts, or if you have to use a trap bar I'm not going to, you know, get dogmatic here, criticize you for that I think it's great If you have to do seated overhead presses instead of standing overhead presses, right, like. As long as you're doing the movement patterns and then you have the appropriate load on your spine, establish you know proper technique and then start to progress. You're going to be able to adapt to it as you go, and that is the best way not to get injured.

Philip Pape: 16:09

So I think perhaps the most important thing when it comes to the back is actually not the physical, it's the psychological, it's the fear of the re-injury, and I get this. At the same time, I was so excited to want to get back to lifting, because I had done it for several years before my back surgery that that building of the habit and the strength actually got me through without nearly the amount of fear I suspect I would have had if I wasn't a lifter and I wasn't already in shape. And so I've talked here and there before about the importance of being strong leading into a surgery. And again we're talking about injury. But, like, a lot of people get injured and then they have to do something about it, they have to recover, and then they're afraid that they're going to get injured again. And then what pain specialists call this is fear avoidance behavior, right, and that's where you limit your movement to avoid the pain. So, kristen, if you're listening to this, and that's the thing that is going on um, you know, recognizing that is a good step one, for.

Philip Pape: 17:11

And then we're going to talk quickly about breaking the cycle. But what does the cycle look like? Well, you have fear, then you avoid the movement, then, when you avoid the movement, you get deconditioned, you get weak, weakness increases vulnerability to injury and then the injury reinforces the fear. Right, so that's the vicious cycle. Fear, right, so that's the vicious cycle. And so it requires this mental shift in your psychology from seeing your back as fragile and so so fragile right, you think it's fragile, it's breakable instead to thinking of it as adaptable, flexible and adaptable, but in a in a positive way. So this is a reframe that I'm asking you to consider right now instead of thinking your back as this fragile thing, think of as an adaptable thing, right, and that doesn't mean you ignore pain or you push through injuries. It means that you work with your body, doing the things we talked about putting it in controlled movement patterns and expanding the capability and the competence over time, by getting stronger as your body gets stronger mentally and physically.

Philip Pape: 18:14

Right, instead of accepting that this is some sort of limitation, because, let me tell you, every single person over 30 has a back quote, unquote issue, and if they got an MRI, it would show something in their spine that an orthopedic surgeon would say, yeah, we need to go in there and cut you open, okay, um, and I had back surgery and it took me a while before I got to the point of saying, no, I actually need the surgery because I had an impinged, uh disc impinging on my nerve, so it was literally sending a shooting pain down into my nerve continuously. Um, and as soon as the doctor just removed the material, I was fine and I was able to walk. And I've been great ever since lifting PRs for my deadlift. I mean, I just did a new PR recently. Um, and I know for a fact I've seen people who are engineers cause I know a lot of engineers who are like, oh, my back hurts so much. I'm like, yeah, you're sitting down all day. Oh, my back hurts so much. I'm like, yeah, you're sitting down all day. Of course it's going to work. What do you do for activity? It's like not much. Or I try to do this stretching, or these cobras. I'm like, let's get you deadlifting. Your body will respond to that Right and successfully implementing this strength training program.

Philip Pape: 19:15

It's. It's not just about the physical piece. You're going to build confidence through small, consistent wins as you accomplish this hard thing, but do it in a controlled way. Every successful training session you have. Every little increase in weight or reps, it becomes evidence to you that challenges the narrative that you're vulnerable because you're not. Your back has so much potential and capability to be strong. It is not fragile at all. It is highly adaptable, whatever age.

Philip Pape: 19:45

You are right, and this is why having proper guidance, proper coaching, is so valuable. Just get the form right. You've got to get the form right, even if it's spending one hour with like a starting strength coach or knowledgeable coach or talking to me and we can do a console, we can do a free call or you can jump into our program and get some um, you know, for the first month or two, as you're figuring this out, send videos and really rapidly skill up or level up your knowledge and ability. And, uh, you know, a good expert will help you distinguish between what we'll call harmful pain and the normal discomfort of training, although if you've had pain, you kind of will know the difference. Right Between that and some soreness and the way that I'm asking you to train, where it's fairly heavy, compound lifts, not a lot of reps.

Philip Pape: 20:31

There is a lot of rest period. You're only doing it three days a week actually doesn't involve much soreness. It shouldn't hurt. You're actually just going to feel stronger and stronger over time and then you're actually going to notice the pain going away. That's the really cool thing that I want you to get to, all right. So this is all a long-term thing, but the change can happen quickly. You know, building strength is is a process. It takes time, right. It's measured over months and years. However, I've seen pain relief come in as little as a few days, like just a few sessions. Right, and again, you don't have to start super heavy.

Philip Pape: 21:10

The goal is not to address the back pain. The goal is not to lose weight with your nutrition right, like all those things. The goal is not to hit PRs. The goal is to have a foundation of strength that supports your active, independent lifestyle that is pain-free. Now are you going to have a little bit of pain in certain areas for the rest of your life? Maybe, I don't know. I'm not here to help you with that right? I know that there's aspects with me, for example, my shoulder, where I'm dealing with what to do to work around it, to keep it strong despite a little bit of pain, but I think that's different than what we're talking about today with the back right, I think we're talking about the chronic pain that a lot of people have, and they have a fear and they stay stuck in that fear because they're not taking the time to strengthen the back and then prove to themselves that they can do it, thus breaking through the fear cycle. So if we can get a consistent, structured progression, compound lifts, gradually get heavier, build that strength, you're gonna be good.

Philip Pape: 22:18

Now, before I forget, there was one last thing in my notes, and that was rehab and training. Right, people think of these as two different buckets strength training and then rehab. Um, my, my good. Uh, I'll call him a friend, but he was my physical therapist for a bit and we still stay in touch. John Petrizzo, he was on the show. He combines the two as if they are basically one in the same, in in just the right way. What I mean by that is, the exercises that strengthen a bad back are the same ones that build an impressive physique. They're just at different points on the intensity spectrum.

Philip Pape: 22:50

Like, you may have to make certain modifications, but you don't have to choose between healing your back and building a strong body. I don't want you to go and just do quote, unquote mobility and band and stretching work. That is not enough. You have to train, and a barbell is one of the most effective ways to do that. Obviously, you could use dumbbells and such, but when it comes to deadlifts, a barbell is a really effective tool for the job.

Philip Pape: 23:13

And I've worked with so many clients in their forties, their fifties, their sixties who came to me with back problems and an assumption that they needed some sort of watered down program or senior friendly program or old person program. Right. And we're like no, let's get in the gym, let's get that power rack and bar set up and go after it. We'll just start light and we'll work up to it and it won't take long before you get super strong and then you get this pain-free strength that you never thought possible. I've started clients in their 60s, women in their 60s, never lifted before. Maybe they have trouble bending over to tie their shoes without pain, maybe they have trouble getting off the couch and we start with, say, chair squats and then we go to box squats and then we go to full squats and we're talking. Within weeks they're starting to get super strong.

Philip Pape: 24:02

So if you're listening to this and you're thinking that can't be me. I want you to question that right now. The human body at any age, has a remarkable capacity to adapt and grow stronger at any age. Again, I just said any age twice. But it's important right. Your back is not fragile. It's not destined to be a liability. It can become one of your greatest assets for your posture, your strength, your function and a pain-free life, if you just give it the opportunity.

Philip Pape: 24:27

So let's wrap it up. What's the key point? Strength training isn't just safe for most people with back issues. It's essential for back issues to improve your back health. Start where you are, focus on proper technique, follow a progressive plan that evolves through the capabilities, be patient and the rewards will absolutely follow, because your body's capable of far more than you might currently believe and the limitations you perceive are just that. They are perceptions, they're not physical realities. All right, if you have a question you'd like me to address on a future episode, go to witsandweightscom slash question or click the link in the show notes. Maybe it's about strength training, nutrition, mindset, consistency, anything. I'd love to help you overcome whatever's standing in your way and absolutely feature it on the show and give you a shout out as well, if you'd like that Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember, when it comes to back pain, the solution isn't to avoid strength, it's to build it. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

How She Lost 100 Pounds in Perimenopause and is Building Muscle Over 40 | Ep 319

Join WWPU (Wits & Weights Physique University) to learn evidence-based approaches to building muscle and losing fat at any age. From strategies for women during peri/postmenopause to step-by-step systems for body composition... all designed to help you achieve your goals without confusion or misinformation. Learn more:
https://witsandweights.com/physique

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"You can't build muscle during perimenopause." 

How many women have heard this discouraging statement from doctors, trainers, or social media? 

Today's episode shatters this harmful myth through the journey of my client Cynthia, who not only lost over 100 pounds but is now successfully building quality muscle during perimenopause.

If you've been told that hormonal changes during perimenopause mean you can't build muscle anymore or that muscle gain automatically means gaining excess body fat, this episode will change your perspective.

Cynthia reveals exactly how she's avoiding excessive fat gain while increasing muscle mass, and why the common advice about hormones and muscle building after 40 is entirely wrong.

Main Takeaways:

• Why building muscle is possible (and essential) during perimenopause

• How to distinguish between muscle gain and water weight fluctuations

• The mindset shift needed when transitioning from fat loss to muscle building

• Why tracking measurements matters more than the number on the scale

• How strength training becomes your most powerful tool against hormonal changes

Timestamps:

0:01 - Why muscle building during perimenopause matters
2:50 - The multiple benefits of building muscle after weight loss
8:49 - What finally worked for Cynthia's 100+ pound transformation
12:17 - Key mindset shifts she learned in Physique University
16:35 - Overcoming the fear of gaining weight during a bulk
21:41 - The importance of strength training during hormonal changes
28:53 - Optimal training frequency and exercise selection
33:33 - Targeting specific muscle groups effectively
45:04 - Pre-workout nutrition strategies that work
49:33 - Tracking progress beyond the scale
53:36 - The encouraging truth of muscle building at any age

Join WWPU (Wits & Weights Physique University) free for 2 weeks!

How to Build Muscle and Burn Fat During Perimenopause (Yes, It’s Possible)

If you're in your 40s or beyond and feel like your body isn’t playing by the same rules anymore, you’re not alone. The scale moves slower. Fat sticks around longer. And the whole muscle-building thing? The fitness industry would have you believe it’s “impossible” during perimenopause.

But Cynthia’s story proves otherwise.

She lost over 100 pounds, tackled her sugar addiction, and is now building lean muscle in her 40s—with better strength, confidence, and body composition than she ever thought possible. In this episode, we unpack how she did it, how you can do it, and the mindset shift that made it all sustainable.

From Fat Loss to Muscle Gain: A Strategic Pivot

Like many women, Cynthia started her journey hyper-focused on the scale. But after hitting 249 pounds and working her way down with a more balanced approach (not crash dieting), she knew she needed a new focus: build muscle.

Why?

Because muscle improves skin elasticity. It protects your joints. It makes long-term fat loss easier. And it reshapes your body in ways cardio and dieting alone never could.

Instead of clinging to the calorie deficit grind, she transitioned into eating more, lifting heavier, and finally seeing her body change in the ways she had wanted all along.

Protein Was the Game-Changer

Early on, Cynthia tracked calories—but not macros. Once she started prioritizing protein and hitting a consistent target, her body began to transform. And while it wasn’t easy at first (especially after years of relying on processed carbs), her hunger and cravings shifted as protein took center stage.

“It took about 4-5 months to see real results,” Cynthia says. “But once I committed to protein and strength training, my body changed fast—and for the first time, I wasn’t starving or gaining it back.”

Building Muscle in Perimenopause

Let’s cut through the noise: you can build muscle in perimenopause. Hormonal changes don’t shut off your body’s ability to adapt. What holds most people back is:

• Lack of progressive training

• Chronic under-eating

• Inconsistent habits

• Misleading beliefs about what’s “normal” after 40

Cynthia ignored the gaslighting. She trained consistently, lifted with intention, ate enough to fuel her progress, and stayed curious. The result? Real, measurable muscle gain—even while holding onto her smaller clothing sizes.

Facing the Fear of Weight Gain

One of the biggest hurdles for women who’ve lost significant weight is the psychological challenge of gaining weight again—even if it’s mostly lean mass. Cynthia felt it too.

She set a goal of gaining ~12 pounds over 6 months (from 138 to 150), but admitted it made her nervous. After all, she’d worked hard to get where she was.

“I had to remind myself—I’m not going back to old Cynthia,” she said. “This is about building. This is about the next version of me.”

By tracking lean mass vs. fat mass and leaning into non-scale victories (like how her clothes still fit or how her arms looked more defined), she stayed focused on what really mattered.

What Worked for Her (And Can Work for You)

• Progressive strength training 3–4 days a week, with focused attention on quads, glutes, and shoulders

• Consistent protein intake (~0.8–1.0 g/lb body weight)

• Macro tracking with flexibility

• Body composition monitoring (to track lean mass vs. fat gain)

• Using a modest surplus (~0.2–0.4% bodyweight gain per week) for lean muscle gain

• Maintaining high daily step counts (including post-meal walks)

• Creatine, magnesium, vitamin D, and omega-3s to support recovery and performance

• Dates and protein pre-workout for better energy than caffeine-based powders

Mindset Was the Biggest Transformation

Losing weight taught Cynthia discipline. Building muscle taught her patience and resilience.

“It’s not fast, but it works. You have to show up, even when you don’t feel like it.”

She created a vision board, tracked her data, and replaced self-doubt with a growth mindset. That’s what carried her through the tougher parts—like cramping triceps, frustrating scale shifts, or slow muscle gain.

You Can Build Muscle After 40—Even in Perimenopause

If you take one thing away from Cynthia’s story, let it be this: your body is still capable of amazing things. Don’t let outdated myths or hormone fearmongering hold you back.

With the right tools—strength training, proper nutrition, intelligent tracking, and a coach or community for support—you can build the body you want.

Muscle after 40? Possible. Fat loss without suffering? Absolutely. Feeling strong, empowered, and confident in your skin? Non-negotiable.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:02

If you're over 40 and you've been told that hormonal changes mean you cannot build muscle anymore, or that muscle gain automatically means piling on body fat, this episode is for you. Today I'm talking with my client, cynthia, who's not only lost over 100 pounds, but is now successfully building lean muscle during perimenopause. You'll discover the exact approach she's using to avoid excessive fat gain while increasing muscle mass, why most people are misinformed by the industry about hormones and muscle building, and how to structure your training and nutrition to maximize your body's natural muscle building ability at any age. 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 Pape, and today I'm really excited to introduce you to one of my Physique University students, cynthia. Cynthia has achieved remarkable like incredible results over her fitness journey, both before and as she's worked with us Over that time, losing over 100 pounds, and now she's focused on building quality muscle during perimenopause, and she's taking some of our systems and strategies and applying them to overcome the challenges that a lot of women face as they experience hormonal changes, and I wanted you guys to hear from her the process she's following, the things that have been moving the needle for her, and then how you can apply some of these lessons to your own journey, no matter what age or stage you're in, because it's never too late, it doesn't matter how old you are.

Philip Pape: 1:42

You can make this happen for for yourself. So we're going to spend some time diving into cynthia's current goal as well and providing some live, real-time coaching there. There's been no preparation, uh, between us on that, so it's going to be totally seat of the pants here, um, with her goal to add muscle while minimizing fat gain in a transition period. So, cynthia, thank you so much for agreeing to do this and chat with me today.

Cynthia: 2:02

Thank you for having me here. It's it's an honor to be here.

Philip Pape: 2:05

to be honest, oh, I appreciate it. It's an honor to have met you and to work with you, um, and learn about your, your journey, but also see how much you, um how do I say this Like in the community. Every time you checked in and every time you spoke up, it was like a positive, can do attitude. It's like, no matter what the challenge is, I'm going to find a way. You just strike me as the type of person to do that. And look, you lost over a hundred pounds. Most of that was on your own, before we ever met. I'll just be totally honest about that. And now you're tackling muscle building during perimenopause, which is, like many women believe, it's not possible, right? So what made you decide to pursue muscle gain at this stage instead of continuing to focus on weight loss?

Cynthia: 2:50

Well, I noticed that people who actually build muscle especially because I started off at 249 pounds that's the farthest that I've ever recorded and I noticed that if I wanted to make this long term like a forever thing, I had to build muscle, especially for the elasticity of my skin, so I didn't have that like hanging skin, loose skin, and so I figured that building muscle was the best option. And then when I found out that building muscle actually helps you burn more calories not by a lot, but it's something I'm like well, let's build the muscle then, and that really encouraged me. And now, entering menopause or perimenopause, actually I realized the importance of building that muscle. And it's not just to look good or feel uh yeah, it's just honestly to to build strong bones, strong skeletal muscle and everything and just be able to last longer and not injure myself as easily, um, as I grow older.

Philip Pape: 3:57

Yeah, no. So you mentioned a few really powerful things there. One is the skin elasticity. That's a. That's a cool insight because people don't think about that. But when you have a little extra weight, you, you know, either have some stretch marks or extra skin or loose skin, especially the more overweight you may have been, and people think like none of that's going to go away. How, how has that improved from your journey? It?

Cynthia: 4:18

has improved a lot, uh, surprisingly, um, and I do consume a lot of collagen along with my protein, um, but it's not. At one point it was a little creepy, but it has. Now that I'm seeing the results and building the muscle with it, it doesn't look as as bad as it once, and it's. It's not absolutely perfect and, to be honest, I don't ever plan to have surgery on it because I'm just not that kind of person.

Cynthia: 4:48

I don't do medicine, to be honest, other than just the supplements and you know, vitamin D and all that collagen protein. But it has improved drastically by a lot.

Philip Pape: 5:00

So that's great. Yeah, you know that's great because Cause people, people want to know right, Like just that you don't necessarily have to do surgery. Obviously, it depends on how, what level of extreme you want for, and you know if you're if you were 400 pounds, it might be a different story, who knows? Um, the other thing you mentioned is the idea that it burns more calories and more fat just having the muscle, and so why not make what I'm reading between the lines, why not make fat loss easier by focusing on that part of it?

Cynthia: 5:27

Yep.

Philip Pape: 5:27

Yeah, so yeah, I don't know if you want to comment on that.

Cynthia: 5:31

Yeah, definitely For me. When I found out that at that time, when I started lifting weights, um, I started off with the adjustable dumbbells and I at that time, probably three or four years ago, I had found out that you can burn about, uh, four to five pounds um once you gain that muscle and I'm like, okay, well, if it helps me burn more and you know you work um, not as hard, to be honest, work smarter, not harder, kind of a thing. Um, I decided to do that.

Philip Pape: 6:02

So I think, uh, building muscle is the best choice for me personally yeah, no, for for sure, and I mean there's there's pretty much no reason not to right like that. That's one of so many benefits. And the other one you mentioned, perimenopause, right, which obviously any woman listening knows what it is, but maybe for those who don't right, it's like the time when your hormones start to shift toward menopause, which could take take 10, 15 years, some women.

Philip Pape: 6:24

It starts as early as their mid-30s. But I just saw an Instagram reel posted today by actually it was a post by Lauren Colenso Semple. She was on the show from Mass and she's been posting these claim versus science and the claim is that perimenopause hormones are going to cause muscle loss, or more muscle loss than not being in perimenopause, and the reality is that's not really true. What causes it is you're not training, yeah, and you, like, are doing the opposite, right?

Cynthia: 6:56

Yeah, yeah, and I'm one of those that I've always liked to prove people wrong Not, not in a snobbish way, but I'm like, okay, you say I can't, like, let me just show you there is a better way. You know, yeah, and that's one thing. I have heard a couple of your podcasts with, uh, like the most recent one, the Holly Baxter one, and then also the Nikki Sims, the Adam Badger and you were talking about perimenopause during that time and just being able to build muscle during, like, because one of the things that I would hear often is you're not going to be able to build muscle and you're going to like all the gaslighting, just the lies that doctors promote, and I'm like is there even hope for me? I just started building, you know, my body just recently, and then when I heard your, your courses and also you talking to Holly and Nikki and Adam, I'm like there is hope. You just have to do the work. You just have to lift the weights, eat enough protein, get enough rest. Basically, it's the same thing that I'm doing right now.

Philip Pape: 8:03

And yeah sorry, I'm not trying to cut you off.

Cynthia: 8:08

But yeah, that encouraged me, so yeah, yeah, no, again.

Philip Pape: 8:11

you're just saying things people need to hear, because it makes me sad to think that there's women that are told they literally cannot build muscle, like that's really shameful, that any and I bet it's by a doctor who themselves doesn't lift weights or something you know probably, but it's, it's that it's so. It's even worse than saying you're going to lose a bunch of muscle because of the hormones. It's saying not only that you can't do anything about it and we want to empower people like that. Ultimately, what you're saying is I want to prove you wrong because I have the power. It's on me to do it, and you can either see that as oh geez, now I have to do this work or I get to do this, like I get to train and build muscle.

Cynthia: 8:47

Right, so that's awesome, yeah.

Philip Pape: 8:49

Yeah, I know there wasn't a question there. I'm sorry. I like to talk, so I want to. I want to rewind the clock just a little bit, so so folks understand the context here. You lost all that. You lost a bunch of weight too, because people are always looking for weight loss and really we're going to focus more on building and growth and how that helps fat loss. But the a hundred pounds, like, what approach got you through that? And I know you tried things in the past and I, if I recall correctly, didn't you lose weight in the past several times and then gain it back or something, and then right, and now you did it successfully. So what was successful this time?

Cynthia: 9:20

Well, um, definitely implementing the weightlifting and eating more protein. Protein does satisfy you, which is at first. When I started, I'm like it doesn't. It doesn't satisfy you.

Philip Pape: 9:33

But it was because I was so addicted to carbs and other bad nutrients that it was almost kind of going into a withdrawal of carbs for me because I chose the poor foods a withdrawal of carbs, like for me, because I chose the poor foods and I was so hold on that when you say carbs, you mean like processed foods that have carbs and fat and sugar yeah, yeah, I just want to be clear for the not apples no, not apples okay yeah, so like the, the doritos, the takis kind of a thing, and so it's like eating processed, very processed foods and but when I started implementing the protein because when I started the my weight loss journey, I did start tracking, but I wasn't tracking macros, I was just tracking calories and then I started learning about macros.

Cynthia: 10:22

And when I started learning about macros I realized I was under eating, way under eating protein. When I changed that and I started eating more protein, probably like in six months, my body started changing and quick, and that was like the fastest I've ever seen it change and shift. And yeah, just eating enough protein, enough fats, enough carbs, like personally, I love being balanced. I think they are all good and beneficial for the body, um, but it's not just uh. For me it's not just tracking the calories, it's all of it.

Philip Pape: 10:59

That's, that's huge. What you just said is it wasn't about the calorie deficit, even though the end result is a calorie deficit. It was what you were eating, the composition, what you're eating, eating things that nourished you. And it's funny you said protein. You're like, oh, they tell you it's satisfying. It's not Obviously when you're coming from a world of like the dopamine hit of carbs and sugar. It's like having a sweet tooth and then someone says, well, go eat an apple. And you're like, yeah, that's not the same as a Snickers and you kind of have to desensitize and there's a transition period. But then there's also the fullness piece of being satisfied, where it sounds like you didn't focus on cutting stuff, you focus on adding in the right things and then it resulted in more volume, more satisfaction and then lower calories. You weren't trying to necessarily, but it resulted in that. Is that a fair assessment?

Cynthia: 11:45

Yes, yeah, okay.

Philip Pape: 11:46

Okay, which is great, because a lot of people I taught you do talk about calories a lot and I do talk about calorie deficits, um, but I I also talk about doing in conjunction with these things. So what now I'm curious about when you join physique university? I feel like there's two types of folks that join us, um, on hand, you have folks who are kind of new to all this. Maybe they listen to the podcast and they're just trying to figure it out, and they jump in a little frustrated. They're like things haven't worked. I'm looking for guidance and help, and so we give them that, like step by step, and the support You're in the other camp of.

Philip Pape: 12:17

You've leveled up your education. You've tried things already. You've gotten to a point that's a little more advanced and I love I love both groups of people honestly, because they both, like, thrill me in their, the level of knowledge that they can get to from that point. So I think of you as a more advanced person, but you still probably had some things you didn't know and that you learned, and I'm curious about what those might have been.

Cynthia: 12:39

Yeah, for sure, one of the biggest things that I learned was, um, not having to diet for a full year, because before I thought I had to be on a deficit for a long period of time to lose the weight and gain muscle. So basically I was kind of starving myself, but not really. You know, it's just I didn't have to put myself through through that deficit and just knowing that you could be on a deficit for three to four months and that's enough, and then go on maintenance and then go on a bulk for the rest of the year and then start again next year. You know, um, that definitely helped. And another thing was, um, just eating. I love eating apples, so just eating different kinds of apples and getting the different kinds of benefits, that's one thing that I learned from from Physique University. And, and then just measurements.

Cynthia: 13:34

It's another one, like before, I never, when I would measure my biceps, like I would never, I would always measure it with my arm down, and then you, you know, talk about, you know, just make sure you flex, and I'm like, well, then I'm, I have a bigger bicep, of course, if I do that. But a lot of the things that you were teaching in the courses is a lot of things that I had learned, and so when I had found out about you through the macro factor app, a lot of people were, you know, vouching for you, saying that you're a good coach, and I'm like, okay, well, I have to check this guy out and see what he has to teach, and so it was pretty legit to me.

Philip Pape: 14:16

I'm like, I'm sold, this is good information yeah, and I appreciate you putting a sales pitch on for me, even though I sometimes get uncomfortable and folks listening are like, oh no, this is Philip, turning this into a sales pitch. But what I think is important is just understanding whether you work with me or not work with me or you seek out information that there are things to learn. There are always things to learn. We should always be seeking out the information, and that if you're struggling in any way, um, there's probably an easier, a more efficient way, and that that's kind of where the curiosity piece comes in. So you mentioned number one, periodization. Right, you didn't say the word, but that's effectively. What you're talking about is where and this is one of the first things I learned as a coach and we talk about is, um, aligning your dieting and your and some people don't even like the word dieting but your mild fat loss, calorie deficits and your muscle building phases and maintenance with the year, with the seasons, with how you feel and your stress and your lifestyle, like just whatever makes sense, and knowing that you can ebb and flow between them and that if you diet too hard, too long, it has a negative impact on your long-term results. Right, it keeps you stagnant.

Philip Pape: 15:25

You mentioned the apples. It's funny because I actually stole that idea from one of my guests oh my gosh, and I can't even remember now. This is terrible, but he was talking about gut health and the diversity of compounds and lectins in apples. And if we have different types of skins, you get different food for your bacteria, different strains of your bacteria, and then you have a more diverse gut microbiome and we know the gut is like the second brain and connected to everything. And then the measurements. It's so funny you say that because the little things like oh, you should flex your bicep are just the kind.

Philip Pape: 15:51

Cynthia, I get questions by email every day with these little things like, uh, macro factors telling me 0.7 grams per pound of my protein. But I read it's supposed to be one and I'm like, okay, here we go again. Like it's one of those things people have heard stuff through the grape vine and let's just help them out anyway. Um, okay, so let's talk about some of the some of the other mindset shifts that I think are important for people to get into that you mentioned to me before. One thing was, um, cutting versus maintenance and bulking, which we just touched on a little bit. But since you're going to enter, or you have entered, muscle building phase, did you have any like fear about gaining weight? Was there uncertainty, anything like that? Since you were so good at dieting, was it kind of scary to you or were you pretty confident going into it?

Cynthia: 16:35

Well, with the muscle building, that was easy, but with the increase in calories that was scary.

Philip Pape: 16:42

Okay, okay. So that you mean okay. So you mean the lifting weights to build muscle is easy. Everybody loves that. It's the eating.

Cynthia: 16:48

More weight was hard, yeah it's like I don't know, especially coming from 250 pounds, you know, rounding um, I'm like I don't know if I want to go back there. There. It's that kind of thing like what, if I gain a lot of fat and because I was, this is honestly my first real bulk Um, I've never tried it before. It was just normally um deficits and maintenance. Um, I was, I was afraid of increasing the calories and gaining weight.

Philip Pape: 17:19

Um, but yeah, Well, okay, so I think you started out. You don't mind me sharing some numbers. Right, you started at, I think, one 38 in February, which is two months ago, your goals, one 50 by July, which for a lot of women hearing that level of weight, that is scary to some. I imagine it's 12 pounds. It's totally normal in my mind, cause I've worked with people that are bulked and like men will typically gain 15 to 25 pounds and women will gain like 10 to 15, unless they're very afraid to put on weight, and then it's like, okay, we'll dial it back, go really lean and do like five or 10 pounds, just to kind of put your feet in the water. Um, how has the process been going physically and emotionally so far?

Cynthia: 17:58

It's actually been good. To be honest, when I first started, cause when you first gave me the recommendations and everything, I'm like I don't know if I want to do this 150?, are you sure? But then when I started it, I haven't really. I don't feel swollen, I don't feel pudgy and I have been seeing results, especially in my arms, my shoulders. I feel like I've been gaining more muscle and, um, I'm actually liking what I'm seeing. Um, that's great, did you?

Philip Pape: 18:32

have you been tracking your measurements like Navy body fat percentage or using the physique tracker?

Cynthia: 18:37

Yeah, yes, I have.

Philip Pape: 18:38

What has it shown?

Cynthia: 18:40

Um, it from February. Well, I'll start it since January, because I started like I'm like I'm going to start January. Since January until now so far, I've gained about I don't know if it's fast enough, but about four pounds of muscle and not too much fat. That's incredible.

Philip Pape: 18:59

Yeah, that's incredible, that's great.

Cynthia: 19:00

Oh, I'm actually liking the results.

Philip Pape: 19:04

Yeah, I think actually actually. No, now that I have I do have your I should have looked at my notes. I think you said like five pounds of lean mass and three pounds of body fat, something like that, something like that yeah you do the math.

Philip Pape: 19:13

Five out of eight is right, exactly where we would expect someone to be. Like two-thirds, you know, 50 to 75 percent, that is good. If you're gaining less than 50 muscle and more fat, um, that's a little bit less effective. But look, any muscles, muscle. You can cut off the fat.

Cynthia: 19:30

So yeah, yeah, that's awesome. With some of the fat. It's like I still put on my jeans when I was smaller, a little smaller before the bulk. I'm like they feel loose still. So I'm I'm. It looks good on my clothes, my clothes look good on me, so I'm not disappointed.

Philip Pape: 19:47

Good and you can definitely lean into that. We talk about like the non-scale victories and stuff. I know some women, and men too, are concerned about um, gaining the fat gaining part and how that's going to affect them and like having to deal with that for a time, and I think you mentioned, when we were preparing for this, how it messes with your head, like as a woman. You were saying specifically, can you just talk more about that, like how you worked through it if you had to, or advice for others.

Cynthia: 20:13

Um well, it does mess with your head. I don't know how to explain it. It's just for me, because of my past history, my only concern was going back to being obese and in a way, I've trained my mind to just like. I would envision myself digging my heels on the ground and being like I'm going to keep pushing through it and I'm not going anywhere, like I'm not going back to old Cynthia. This is new Cynthia and this is going to be a forever thing. And so it's just determining, making that determination and even with the weight loss when I first started it about four years ago, is this there comes a period where you have enough. You're like I'm done, I quit, like I don't want to look like this, I don't want to feel like this. And I even did a like a vision board and I put images of myself when I was heavy, but I also put images of people that I wanted to look like muscular, and I would just look at that vision board and just encourage myself through that and I'm like that will be my reality. And I would often tell myself that is going to be my reality and just just trucking through and trying to make it happen.

Cynthia: 21:33

And I mean because people can always make excuses and I was tired of the excuses. I'm like I can say this you know, I have five kids, I have to homeschool, I have to clean house, I have to go shopping and you know I have to be a wife. But when it comes to your health and you're getting older, it's like it's better to be healthy. I also had like issues with hives. Sometimes I would get hives in my body and certain um blotches on my skin. I'm like I don't, I don't like this. I don't like having feeling the love handles. I don't like you know, and just calling things out for what they really are, you know and being like I don't want this, this has to go now.

Cynthia: 22:16

what am to do? And at first it was tedious. I remember when I first started doing a back lunge I'm like, oh boy, I'm bad, I can't even do a back lunge. This is embarrassing, but I'm like it's better than nothing. It's better than nothing. And I kept encouraging myself like, start small, but start somewhere. And probably it took about four or five months to see real results not as quickly, but it took. It took some time. It's just being patient and doing the right thing and just not quitting.

Philip Pape: 22:49

You, you, you just said, like every key point that I wish people understood about this, like patience to change. You have to change, you have to accept some discomfort. It's going to take time, like the first week, month, three months might not show you all the results you want, but it's going to chip away at it. And then you just said, like look, I wasn't taking it anymore Like I have. I have this identity inside me and now I want to physically manifest that identity, like that's what I'm getting from you. And you're right, no excuses. You've got a busy life, you've got a family to take care of.

Philip Pape: 23:22

We were talking about that before. We recorded just how much is going on. And, like you know, you're looking forward to summer. You're, you're honest with yourself, right, you're looking forward to kind of a little more relaxing season of the year before you go after it again. Um, so potentially that's really good for muscle building too, is the low stress, so that's really good. Let's dig into your current goal a little bit, because I'd love to tease out any refinements or optimization or anything, just to make sure you're on the best track you can be. You're trying to build muscle with minimal body fat during perimenopause Impossible, right?

Cynthia: 23:53

You're doing it.

Philip Pape: 23:55

Are there any specific challenges you're facing right now that you want to talk about?

Cynthia: 23:59

Well, I guess I'm still learning about perimenopause, and so I want to know if there are certain foods or supplements, I guess, to prevent waking Like well, besides muscle, I guess, what are common hormonal shifts that I can expect during this time, and what can I do about it? To you know, prevent it, to get ahead of it in a way?

Philip Pape: 24:29

Yeah, yeah. So it's really good timing too, because one of my private clients sent me a message today. She went to the doctor and got hormone, some hormone replacement therapy going on right Progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, dhea those are the big ones. Sometimes people need thyroid meds. My general philosophy on this again, I'm not a woman, but worked with a lot and talked to a lot of professionals on this is obviously your number one supplement is strength training, like that's my answer, that's your number one. Big time, big time. Because again, this client called me and she's like the doctor was surprised at how far better my numbers were than she would expect for someone of her age.

Philip Pape: 25:10

Okay, everybody cringes when they hear that, right, cause it's like come on, um, and the doctor's like, keep doing what you're doing. And she's like, how's your food? She's like, well, I eat a lot of carbs and I eat pretty balanced. And she's like, well, your blood sugar is perfect too. So keep doing what you're doing. And she's.

Philip Pape: 25:24

And yet she still needs a little bit of hormone therapy for, um, testosterone and progesterone and estrogen. Progesterone and estrogen decline, right, um, testosterone declines as well. The funny thing about testosterone, cynthia, is, like you know, women have like one. What is it? 110th or 120th the amount of men, but it's still the largest amount of hormone in your body, you know, compared to all the like. A lot of women don't realize that, and so guess what stimulates it the most? Strength training, like strength training, stimulates testosterone and IGF-1. And then you can't do anything about the decline of your hormones in perimenopause, into menopause it's being a woman. What I do understand, though, is that the lifestyle things that you're doing and anyone listening can incorporate with lifting and just eating to nourish your body and not dieting all the time. That mitigates a significant portion of, let's say, symptoms from the hormones.

Philip Pape: 26:22

Having said that, I'm a big fan of hormone replacement therapy if you need it. So working with not necessarily a GP, usually it's like a hormone specialist, sometimes functional doctors even though I have a little skepticism of functional medicine in general, I think the hormone area of it they probably are a little bit ahead of some of the conventional medicine. It depends where you get your panels checked. It's not just blood work. You get urine metabolites, maybe saliva, like all the stuff. You know the free, the floating versions of the hormones, and not just the bound versions of the hormones, all of that right, um, sex, binding sex. You know what I'm trying to say.

Philip Pape: 27:00

Shgb, I can't think of it right now. Globulin, right, get all that checked and just be sure that you're doing the lifestyle and then whatever's left gets treated. So that's kind of like my big answer to all that. As far as foods and everything, I think that's kind of I don't think there's really an answer. I don't think there are hormone supporting foods. I don't think there are hormone-supporting foods. I think eating enough fiber, protein and balance is the answer.

Cynthia: 27:25

Does that answer the question? Yeah, so basically yeah, because that's the same thing that I've been hearing from you and from some podcasts that I heard from you Just keeping it the same and just don't believe the lie of there's no hope for you.

Philip Pape: 27:41

Yeah, and I would encourage, like, if you're interested, uh, cynthia, definitely check out. Be careful, cause there are a lot of hormone podcasts and not all of them are like legit or fully evidence-based. Um, karen Martell she's been on the show a couple of times. Um, and I've been on hers. Hers, all her hormone stuff is really sound Like she brings on a ton of experts, talks about it all the time. I, you know her nutrition and training stuff is not always aligned, but that's fine, you know she, she has her approach, but her hormone stuff is great. So if you can find a few people and there's other folks I've had on who really know their stuff, like a lot more than I do with about hormone therapy Definitely listen to a bunch of people and like make critical, you know, use critical thinking and apply it for yourself and do the research.

Cynthia: 28:24

But yeah, yeah for sure, cause I'm I'm one of those with a more natural approach. The more natural the better, and especially my husband being in the medical field. There's just a lot of side effects to to medicine and I'm like I I, if I could do it more naturally, then that's the way to go. But if, if not possible, we'll see, we'll see, you know, I think you could do it vastly naturally.

Philip Pape: 28:53

Um, if you have the way you're doing, it is setting yourself yourself up for the best outcome period. Um, if anything, you're in a good position to maybe get some of the at least get your panels checked, like, if you haven't yet get it checked, just so you know. Like I get my testosterone checked, I just want to know, I'm like, if it drops at some point despite doing everything, and there's a medical solution, at least I know that option's available, right, if I want to do it. What's the other thing about supplements is I think you know my philosophy on this, but just for folks listening, be very careful with all the supplement recommendations out there. I think there's a core small set of supplements that most people should consider. We've got multivitamins to potentially fill in some gaps in your nutrition, but if you eat a lot of whole foods, you should be covered there. Magnesium is really good. Um, most people are deficient in magnesium. I know you take it right.

Cynthia: 29:43

I take it every day. I love it yeah.

Philip Pape: 29:45

It's great. And then, um, you know creatine, absolutely, I think everybody from like two years old to 98, you know like everybody should take creatine, especially now that we're discovering cognitive benefits and like zero downsides, unless you're a tiny fraction of people who get allergic to it. Okay, sorry, or you just don't respond to it. And even if you don't respond to it, you might want to take it for the cognitive benefits, right, oh?

Philip Pape: 30:08

cool yeah Um fish oil if you don't need enough fatty fish. You know for the Omega threes, we know there's health protective benefits for for oxidative stress and things like that for your um inflammatory process. And again, inflammation is another trigger words, india. Because, like, if you're training and eating properly and being active like you're, you're giving yourself a pro inflammatory, counter inflammatory environment, right, like a low inflammation environment. Uh, what else did I forget anything? Is there anything else you take?

Cynthia: 30:38

Um, well, definitely the vitamin D, but I get that from the sun, so I always one of the things that also helped me, besides the steps, getting a lot of steps done Um, after every meal, I walk for 15 minutes, like right after, just to just to get myself active, and um, most days I like being outdoors at least for 30 minutes. Um, just to get that vitamin D from the sun and fresh air. I feel like there's healing properties and just getting sun and fresh air and it's just relaxing.

Philip Pape: 31:11

I agree I have a sheen of sweat right now because Connecticut has been like 45 degrees one day, 70 degrees the next, 40 degrees. So I'm like I'm like hot and cold, but I just went out for a walk, the next 40 degrees. So I'm like I'm like hot and cold, but I just went out for a walk and I got in here and I'm like it's gonna be nice and cool in the house. No, the sun's kind of anyway. Um, vitamin, but vitamin D is a good one. Some people do need to still supplement if they don't have enough of their super pale, like us. Um, okay, so so that's supplements. What about? Is there any aspect of? Is there any aspect you feel needs more refinement? Or you're like experimenting with and not quite sure yet with, like the muscle building or the training or anything like that?

Cynthia: 31:46

I guess, because right now I'm training mostly three days a week and I don't know if I should increase it to four or five. I guess one of the things that I've been learning, especially from your podcast with Adam, it was patience, having patience Because I didn't realize, because I remember in the past people would say that if women lift weights they're going to bulk and be like She-Hulk, and obviously it's not true. Building muscle for women. I don't know how it is for men, but for myself I'm like this ain't so easy and I would like to get bigger shoulders. I just I like the bigger shoulders. Personally, I wouldn't be ashamed of that.

Philip Pape: 32:33

Okay, awesome, awesome. So I hear a couple questions I want to answer. I'm going to go backward and start with the shoulders because, um, a friend of mine just sent me a link to a real I think it was actually Dr Mike Israel. He's got some really funny stuff out there, but he was doing um, wasn't him doing it? I think? No, no, no, it wasn't him. It was actually Alex Hormozy, who's like a marketing expert, he's also jacked and he like got his start in the gym industry and he was showing lat raises. Do you do lat raises? Yeah, okay, so you probably do them the traditional way, where it's like pour the cup and bring it above your shoulders.

Cynthia: 33:08

Okay, yeah, yeah. Is that how you normally do it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for the most part, yeah.

Philip Pape: 33:13

Yeah, and the theory being that's like full range of motion. But think about the biomechanics. The lengthened portion is actually at the bottom, not at the top. The top is actually you're contracting, you know. It's the shortened version. The length is actually kind of in the middle to the bottom and you notice we usually just kind of fly through that position and we go up to the top.

Philip Pape: 33:33

Well, he said look what if you overload, you know, go really heavy right when you can barely get them past like 45 degrees and just go to failure and see if it doesn't completely build your outside lateral caps here on your shoulders. And I'm like I I had the rotator cuff surgery, so like I can't even do lat raises without a little bit of pain. So I kind of do other stuff instead, like front raises and pressing and other. But I'm going to try those and you might want to try them the shoulders are a thing for you and just throw them in, like at the end and, due to failure, three or four sets of really really, really heavy but only like half range. Now people are listening to me, like the bros are listening like, oh, my God, you can't do that. You're supposed to come all the way up. That's not proper form. Depends on the purpose. If you're literally just trying to hit this small outside part and you can overload it in a partial and that partial is the lengthened see what happens, try it out.

Cynthia: 34:23

Yeah, I did. I heard Jeff Knipred talk about that lengthened partials and that piqued my curiosity. I'm like, oh, so you don't have to do full range of motion.

Philip Pape: 34:33

Then I'm like, okay, yeah, and the jury's out on like, should you do it only length and partials? I think the consensus is is you know, do full range of motion and then some length and partials. The benefit of the length and partials is depending on the advantage of the biomechanics of the lift. You can overload it and hit it harder, right, and that that's the advantage. It's, it's you know, right. It's kind of like when you do a close grip bench press, people are like, well is well, is that for the shoulders or the chest? It's like, yes, it's actually for both, and if you think about it, you're overloading the triceps quite a bit because you're helping it with the chest.

Philip Pape: 35:07

So there's a part of the motion that's getting really, really hit with a high load and there's some magic in that, okay, so, going backward into the other two things you mentioned, you mentioned um. To the other two things you mentioned, you mentioned um three days a week. And then there was one other thing you mentioned I wanted to make sure not to forget. You said three days a week and you said um, patients or something bulking oh, the bulking piece. Yeah, yeah, I've talked that to death in this podcast. Look, I have trouble building muscle. Any woman listening, don't worry about it. I think she Hulk's pretty sexy anyway. But listen, between completely thin like rail thin supermodel and she Hulk, it's all beautiful. Build the muscle is my take on it.

Cynthia: 35:47

Let's be healthy and strong.

Philip Pape: 35:48

Yes, Be a healthy, strong human and you will be beautiful inside and out. All right, Um so three days a week. So here's my question to you is, um, what is your goal right now? Not just building muscle, but I mean you said you wanted to specialize on your shoulders. Is there anything else you're focused on?

Cynthia: 36:05

Uh, I definitely the quads and the glutes.

Philip Pape: 36:11

Why am I not surprised? Um, okay, so in that case, and your three day a week, is it full body or is it like push pull? Yeah? They're all full body they're all full body, okay, yeah, all right, and are you doing primarily the same movements all three days? Are you rotating?

Cynthia: 36:26

no, rotating, it's a different um. I actually got a workout program from marcus philly okay, yeah sure yeah, and so he changes it fairly frequently and my husband is the one that got it. I'm like, well, you paid for it, I'll just I'll just use that, hey it never hurts to try things out.

Philip Pape: 36:45

I'm all for that. Does it? Does it at least um repeat some of the same exercises for at least a few weeks, so you can progress, yeah?

Cynthia: 36:52

Yeah, so he normally gives it like for six increments, but throughout the weeks, like there's conventional deadlifts and bench presses and you know different things, yeah.

Philip Pape: 37:02

Okay, are you trying to push your numbers and build like a peak of strength and get super strong on on the lifts you know for function, for bone density, for ego, whatever. Or are you trying to just like build your physique Both?

Cynthia: 37:18

Both, because I actually I mean, I have been pushing myself and doing lifting heavier. There are days that I just I don't feel as strong, so I do lower the weight a little bit, but then there are other days you can't do that.

Philip Pape: 37:33

You can't do that, I'm just kidding. No, no, that's good. Listen to your body, okay. So here's my thought is in general. I'm just I'm throwing out a bunch of generalities, cynthia, you're going to have to try it yourself.

Philip Pape: 37:46

In general, once you get past that novice stage, which I think you are, um, a four or even five day split can be more effective, usually because you can get more frequency and more sets, like it's just more volume. Um, unless you're doing like two and a half hour sessions on the full body days I suspect they're not that long Then four days of like an hour of training maybe up to an hour and a half, depending on what you have time for can be potentially more effective, just because you're getting a little more volume. We know that 10 to 20 sets per week is like the sweet spot, pushing toward the upper range if you really want to be optimal. So like if you're only getting 10 or eight, then you're kind of right on that hairy edge of like you could push it more and get more results. I never want you to go to so far that you can't recover or it's not sustainable for you. But because you're eating and in a surplus, you've got the resources, you've got the calories. So a four day split instead of doing three day full body where you did upper, lower, upper, lower.

Philip Pape: 38:41

And if you're trying to build glutes and quads, I don't think you need to do like three lower body days and one upper. You don't have to like bias it that much. Two and two is good. You can obviously do a five-day program and then have an extra leg day, but as long as you're hitting it hard in the two lower days with squats and with with squats and um, extensions and curls and you know variations on deadlifts and all that just the classic stuff you should be able to build your glutes and quads. Now I have a lot of great ideas for quad development that people don't think about, um, and one that I haven't even done myself but I'm sharing from my coach, andy Baker. He mentioned it once on the podcast. Is the Cambridge bar squat. You go to a gym or is that at home? Home, okay, so you probably don't have that. Okay, then in that case, do you have a safety bar squat or just a traditional barbell?

Cynthia: 39:29

Um a safety bar. Yeah, Okay.

Philip Pape: 39:32

So, with a safety bar, what you could do? Do you have a way to raise your heels Like um wed?

Philip Pape: 39:39

I do have a wedge yeah you have a wedge, okay, so do that while wearing squat shoes, because that'll raise your heel even more. And put it a little bit narrow stance and just do safety bar squats. They're effectively going to be like a front squat, because you're going to have to be really upright to to stay balanced and that is going to slam your quads like nothing it's. It's almost like doing a sissy squat, but in a more controlled, loaded way, gotcha, so that's one. It's kind of like a plat squat, but on steroids. Um, so that's one thought.

Philip Pape: 40:09

And then for, and then glutes. I mean you know what for glutes you could do cable pull throughs, you could do rate, hip bridges and glute raises and hip. You know all that stuff, right? Um, I mean, basically squats are your number one friend for that as well, and deadlifts too, uh, to be honest. But you could do like, um, you know lateral stuff, you know split squats and step ups and lunges, whatever you like to, to kind of bring in the glutes and the hammies together as a system and then really load the glutes that way. Um, where am I going with all of this is the four days and then making sure you're specializing in the specific muscle groups you want, while just hitting the main lifts. The main lifts once or twice and then all the other stuff for bodybuilding should be good.

Philip Pape: 40:49

Yeah, yeah, okay, as far as an actual program, I mean, that's, we're not gonna, I'm not going to give you that here, but we could talk.

Cynthia: 40:56

Yeah, oh, awesome and normally um here. But we can talk yeah, oh, awesome and normally um. What is the normal rate for me to gain muscle, let's say monthly, or for women in general, like what's, what's what's considered normal to 20 pounds a month?

Philip Pape: 41:08

20 pounds a month Just kidding.

Philip Pape: 41:12

You know how much you'd have to eat. Okay, so I generally say one to two pounds a month for women. That's like super general ballpark. I generally say one to two pounds a month for women. That's like super general ballpark. Um, you weigh one 40, around one 40, one 43 right now, and I just did the math for somebody else today for a lean gain at 0.2% and that was like a pound a month. So double that is 0.4%. That's two pounds a month. That's pretty good Cause then over a six month period you would gain like 12 pounds, which is what you're trying to do. Yeah, yeah, perfect.

Cynthia: 41:40

That's what you're doing. Yes, yeah.

Philip Pape: 41:42

Okay, we were just confirming.

Cynthia: 41:43

All right, good yeah, is that funny how we get.

Philip Pape: 41:46

I do this math all day. It's like plate math in the gym, you just know it's. You know one 35, one 85 to 25, right, yeah, okay. So we talked training, um, we talked body composition and and fear of gaining recovery. Pretty good, now anything, any symptoms from perimenopause or anything like that affecting you no, not really recovery has been really good.

Cynthia: 42:10

um, no issues there. There are times that I am sore but not too bad, Like within a day or so it's pretty good From your lifting.

Philip Pape: 42:20

Yeah from lifting In specific muscle groups or just in general. It could be anywhere.

Cynthia: 42:24

Like mostly the triceps. The triceps get sore a lot easier.

Philip Pape: 42:28

They cramp up a little bit, or what.

Cynthia: 42:29

Yeah, they do. Where you're like trying to lift something and it's like ah yeah, that happens a lot to my, my, my calves, my calf muscles, oh yeah. And that's one thing my husband noticed this week. He's like, oh, you're building calf muscles, I see them now. I'm like, good, and you're doing like calf raises, yeah.

Philip Pape: 42:48

Standing seated.

Cynthia: 42:49

Standing. Is it with your?

Philip Pape: 42:51

safety bar, or how do you do those With safety bar? Or how do you do those with, uh, just uh, with dumbbells. Okay, with dumbbells, because the calves, if it's working for you, great and and again you're you're not that heavy body weight. So, like a heavier person, like and I'm not that heavy, but like bigger guys, usually have to load up the calves a lot to get them to respond, which would, since you have a squat, safety, safety, squat bar, you could get in front of your power rack, get a calf block, you a block, a little low block of some kind, like uh no, yeah, actually I do, yeah, yes.

Philip Pape: 43:21

Or even a box. Even a box, as long as you're safe about it and you basically just you put one arm on the rack and just get up on the blocks and cause, the safety bar has a yoke, you don't really have to hold it, you know, it kind of just sits there and then you could really load it up, like I could probably calf raise, you know three something or four something. You could probably get up to the two hundreds pretty quickly, cause they're, you know, the calves are pretty strong when you're just it's like this little, almost like an isometric, and then, um, really getting the squeeze and then coming down very deep, uh, with the height of your heel, so you have enough height, um, to bring the heel down. You know what I'm saying yeah, yeah.

Philip Pape: 43:58

Yeah, you know is is super effective. Also, donkey, calf raises are great. That was Arnold made those famous and you could um rig up this whole thing with like spotter arms and stuff. That's a lot more complicated to do that. Anyway, where I was going with that is um calves can definitely cramp when you do the plat wedge, uh squat, it might like you might cramp up just getting in that position.

Cynthia: 44:24

Yeah.

Philip Pape: 44:25

Yeah, but you'll adapt, like you work through it and you work through the soreness and you adapt and then you won't cramp as much yeah.

Cynthia: 44:31

Yeah, I remember when it would happen. I'm like I'm taking magnesium. Shouldn't magnesium be helping with that?

Philip Pape: 44:38

Electrolytes, hydration, I mean some of these. You just cramp because you just worked out of your muscles and you worked hard it's okay, it's okay, okay. And then what about food in terms of? I know you're good on macros, you understand all that, but timing energy in your workouts? I know you talk about on macros, like you understand all that, but like timing energy in your workouts? Um, I know you talk about eating dates and protein. I love dates. Um, yeah, dates are good.

Cynthia: 45:04

Dates are yummy. You ever had bacon wrap dates? No, okay, okay.

Philip Pape: 45:06

Next time you host a party, Okay, you just get strips of bacon and the big you know seeded dates. That's probably how you buy them, like the major dates that have no seeds in them, and you just wrap like I think a whole strip of bacon is what you want, or maybe a half, maybe a half strip of bacon, just wrap it, put a toothpick in and roast it. And you can Google like temperature and time, and it's so good because the bacon gets crispy, the dates get soft, warm and gooey.

Cynthia: 45:32

It's just so good. That's one thing I was telling my husband. I'm like these dates. They taste like caramel to me.

Philip Pape: 45:38

I love it, Good Cause it's like they're caramelized. It's like they're caramelized just naturally, Like that's how they taste right.

Cynthia: 45:43

Yeah, and it does. Um, I know we've talked about this before pre-workouts and so I finally bought. Well, my husband bought the Legion, one Legion.

Philip Pape: 45:53

Pulse. Did he use my link? I'm just kidding.

Cynthia: 45:59

No, sorry, I'm just kidding.

Philip Pape: 46:01

I think my link gives me like points or something. It doesn't even give me money, so I'm like I hardly ever tell people that.

Cynthia: 46:06

I completely forgot about it. To be honest, I'm just kidding, my husband bought it. Sorry, but I'm still iffy about it because I know that when you recommended bananas, I'm like I could eat bananas but I'm not much into it. And then someone had recommended dates. I'm like, oh, I love dates and I tried the pre-workout Legion Pulse recently and I I feel like I was crashing, still like I was.

Cynthia: 46:38

I was yawning the one with uh caffeine no, the non-stimulant okay, yeah, it's stem free and I I wasn't impressed with it. So I'm like, this morning I took my normal, just the coffee protein. I do a coffee protein, um, with electrolytes as well, chocolate electrolyte, uh, and the creatine powder and touring. But when I eat the dates, um and the magnesium, I feel energized. I'm like I think for me, uh, the food pre-workout works better for me versus the powders.

Philip Pape: 47:15

What are you doing? Doing the powder without food or protein? Yes, oh, okay, yeah, that's going to cause. Yeah, even with. Yeah, I don't see. Yeah, you definitely want to, because you were basically fasted then at that point. Okay, yeah, yeah, and I'm not saying that the pre-workout would work well for you, even when you did it with food.

Philip Pape: 47:35

The way I do it personally is I have my banana and then I have whey protein and then I have the pre-workout and then, I go work out like 10 minutes later, um, the banana and the protein, like half an hour 45 minutes before, and then the pre-workout like 15 minutes before, um. But some people don't respond or some people have side effects because there's betaine, there's beta alanine, there's L-citrulline and there's one other thing, um plus the one that has caffeine. That's I like that one cause. That's I'm not drinking coffee that early, I drink coffee later. If you did it with the food first, I'd be interested to know if there's a difference.

Cynthia: 48:09

Yeah, I'll try that tomorrow, cause I was planning on doing that tomorrow. I'm like I'm going to try it with my food, basically, and see how that works.

Philip Pape: 48:18

I mean pre -workout, it's just a tiny boost potentially from the effects of the compounds that are in there. I mean they have been studied in the evidence to like help with with your oxygen, nitrogen oxygen and also, um, just giving you some a boost in performance. Use some a boost in performance, uh, when you're in the gym so that you get like an extra rep. You know it's not like it's like creatine, it's not like a huge game changer, um, so it's really take it or leave it. Cynthia, honestly, you know, as long as you're progressing, you're good, um, all right. So let's see you're. You're headed toward, like the one 50 pound mark, which I know sounded psychologically like Whoa, um, it's funny you say that Cause just today in physique university I posted a lean gain plan for someone who's weighs 144, but it's her first lean gain, so she's afraid of gaining too much.

Philip Pape: 49:05

So I said let's go up to 149. I did that on purpose because of the psychology. I didn't want to say one 50, you know what I mean. What, what are, um, what are like the most meaningful things that you're tracking now, just so the audience understands. Like how do you know you're making progress?

Cynthia: 49:33

And tracking my macros, calories, but the measurements really does encourage, because it helps me see how much lean mass I have and how much fat mass. And that's another thing that I had learned from you that there was a difference with the type, because when it said lean mass I always thought it was muscle.

Cynthia: 49:54

Right, right, a lot of people think that I disregarded the bones, the organs, liquid. I'm like, yes, I gained five pounds of muscle and then the next week, wait what happened to my muscle. But yeah, just tracking, that was very informational, and just doing the same, I'm one of those that, I'm just a creature of habit, unfortunately.

Philip Pape: 50:20

That gets you the result. That does it, like you said it earlier, taking the baby steps, and you also said, like, just doing something, like that was a good statement, because consistency is just doing something. Yeah, like, keep doing it, you're going to get there right.

Cynthia: 50:34

Yes, so it's just being consistent with my meals and just showing up and even if you don't feel like it, and, of course, listen to your body, because there's times like I've talked to you about it One time I was not feeling good and I took a break. I'm like my body saying rest. So I'm going to rest and I'll make up the workout week somehow. I'll figure it out. But I'm going to rest and I'll make up the workout week somehow. I'll figure it out, but I'm going to do it.

Philip Pape: 50:57

Just like the kids need the summer off and they come back mentally stronger sometimes, you need the rest. It's going back to the lean mass thing. I think that's an interesting one, right? Because I don't want to leave that in the listener's mind, like, what are they talking about? And also you, I want to make sure we clarify Um, yeah, it is everything except fat, right, so it's your muscle, your bone, your organs, your water.

Philip Pape: 51:23

At the same time, when you look at the change in your lean mass, your, your organs aren't going to change. They might change a tiny bit, but they're not going to change. Your bone's not going to change in terms of, like, the mass. Um, so what's left? Well, what's left is muscle and water and fluid, glycogen, all that. And then you can say, okay, well then, at least we ruled out the bones and the organs for the change. And so people then are like, well, how much of it is fluid? Because you could get overly exuberant. Like you said, I gained five pounds, so therefore, it's all muscle, and it only might be three pounds of muscle and two pounds of fluid. And what we usually see happen right, as you're done with the bulk, you start to cut and all of a sudden you have fast weight loss at the beginning. Cause that's the fluid coming right back off.

Philip Pape: 52:05

And when you just start doing the numbers and measure your body fat percentage trend and you use that times your weight, it gives you your you know fat versus lean mass. You'll find that your lean mass all of a sudden drops fast, right. And so when you gained five pounds, when you go back into your cut it might drop two pounds and what's left kind of gives you an indication of how much muscle you gained.

Cynthia: 52:26

Gotcha Okay, that's kind of where I'm going with all that.

Philip Pape: 52:30

All right, and it almost doesn't matter Like do you feel good, are you strong? Do you look good? Do you like yourself in the mirror? Like, at the end of the day, that's what we're going for right, not all the numbers, even though they're fun. Um, okay, all right, so is there? Is there any other thing that you need help with? We'll start there. That's it. That's my question.

Cynthia: 52:50

Um, well, I need a million dollars, and I'm kidding. Well, you do that by getting strong and fit and then going after your dreams. Yes, no, it's just the patience part of it and just building the muscle and just being consistent. One of the things that I do feel encouraged by you is the fact that I can still gain muscle and lose fat even during perimenopause, and that's one thing that I really enjoyed learning from you, because you do hear outside sources saying it's not possible, and to actually hear someone say no, it is possible For me, it's like a breath of fresh air, you know, or however you say, it.

Philip Pape: 53:36

Yeah, no, that's perfect, beautifully said, and I hope people listening, women listening or men supporting women all take to heart what you just said. It's possible. We see it, you did it, you're doing it. Many, many other people are doing it and we get that excuse off your plate or that doubt off your plate. Then you could go after it. So you could go after it. So that's great advice to leave it with everyone listening.

Philip Pape: 53:57

And if you're listening and you're inspired by Cynthia's story, I'm sure she could connect to you, maybe in our Facebook group. Maybe it would be a good place to check Cynthia out, because I don't want to share all her personal information. But if you guys want to basically follow the same approach, we've got all that in Physique University. This is the only pitch I'm going to give you today. That is where we have the courses that Cynthia mentioned and the step-by-step system, the tracking, the strategies, and she mentioned a few times like she reached out, and that's what you do in there.

Philip Pape: 54:26

You just post or you say, hey, philip, I got an issue, what do I do?

Philip Pape: 54:29

And I'm going to chime in within like, same day, probably I'm going to come in and say here, same day, probably I'm going to come in and say here's the plan, I'll send you a video, I'll do something and then everybody else in the community learns from that. So if, like, if, you jump in and you're brand new and you want to know about training, you could search training and you could see all the discussion about training. Um, and so you want to go to what's on weightscom slash physique to learn more about that or click the link in the show notes. But, cynthia, thank you so much for doing this, for joining my sales pitch today, for doing this coaching session together. We actually did this because you won our first challenge. I forgot to mention that it was a walking step challenge and Cynthia was, like, super committed to increasing her step count and being engaged and the community voted her the winner and we said let's do a coaching session for everyone to kind of celebrate this. So thank you very much for doing this.

Cynthia: 55:17

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me and thank you for everyone who voted for me as well. It was awesome.

Philip Pape: 55:23

And they're all going to hear this. I know they are. So all right listener. Thanks for tuning in to Wits and Weights and hearing Cynthia's story. I hope everybody was inspired and takes heart in the ability to do whatever you want to do for your muscle, for your body, even in perimenopause, no matter if you're a man or woman of any age. Go after it.

How to Build Muscle Despite Injuries and Limited Mobility | Ep 318

Submit a question for the podcast (and get a personal reply plus a shoutout) at witsandweights.com/question

--

Ever feel like your strength training goals are slipping away because of nagging injuries or mobility limitations? 

That persistent shoulder pain during pressing, the foot injury that flares up when walking, or those mobility restrictions that make certain movements feel impossible can be incredibly frustrating. But what if these challenges aren't roadblocks but redirections?

Today we're answering listener Tom's question about training with shoulder pain, foot issues, and mobility limitations. 

The truth is, everyone who lifts weights long enough will encounter physical limitations. The difference between those who continue making progress and those who stagnate isn't about genetic luck or perfect health—it's about mastering the art of training around limitations.

Learn the powerful mindset principles that allow you to continue building muscle and strength despite injuries or limitations, and why the most successful lifters aren't those with perfect bodies, but those who master the art of training around their constraints.

Main Takeaways:

• Why "adaptation, not abandonment" should be your fundamental training principle

• How constraints can actually accelerate your progress by forcing smarter training

• The expanded definition of progression beyond just adding weight

• Why compensatory patterns matter and how to become aware of them

• The importance of redefining what "progress" means when working around limitations

Timestamps:

0:01 - The challenge of training with limitations
2:16 - Why this affects lifters of all ages and experience levels
4:34 - The adaptation mindset vs abandonment
6:30 - Constraint as a catalyst for better training
10:13 - The primacy of progression principle
12:52 - Holistic adaptation management
15:39 - Compensatory awareness
17:06 - Deliberate variability in exercise selection
22:49 - Redefining progress beyond PRs
27:26 - Why limitations are redirections, not roadblocks

Submit a question for the podcast (and get a personal reply plus a shoutout) at witsandweights.com/question

Strength Training with Limitations Isn’t a Setback, It’s a Shortcut

When you’ve been lifting consistently but injuries, pain, or limited mobility keep getting in your way, it’s easy to feel stuck. You might start questioning whether it’s even worth it anymore. But I want you to know something most lifters overlook: your limitations are not a dead end—they're actually the fast track to becoming a smarter, stronger, and more resilient lifter.

This episode was inspired by a listener named Tom, who at age 60 is navigating a desk job, shoulder pain, and a healing foot injury—all while trying to keep strength training a core part of his life. But this isn’t just about older lifters. If you’ve been training for a while, you will run into obstacles. And how you respond determines whether you keep making progress… or not.

Let’s break down the 6 principles I covered in this episode to help you adapt and thrive—even when your body isn’t cooperating.

1. Adaptation Over Abandonment

The most important shift is mental: stop seeing injuries as reasons to quit. Instead, ask: How can I modify this movement to challenge myself safely? Whether it's pressing with a neutral grip, switching to incline work, or ditching the barbell altogether, your options are endless—if you're willing to explore them.

Think of it this way: there’s always a version of a movement that you can do pain-free. That’s your new baseline. From there, you build.

2. Constraint Is a Catalyst for Progress

Injuries force you to train smarter. They push you to improve technique, tighten up your programming, and explore movement patterns you’ve ignored. That limitation? It might actually be the thing that forces your breakthrough.

When I had rotator cuff surgery, I couldn’t press for months. But it forced me to refine my squat form, dial in unilateral work, and rebuild from the ground up. The end result? Better balance, better proprioception, and yes—more muscle.

3. Prioritize Progression, Not Perfection

Progressive overload is still the game—but it’s not always about slapping more plates on the bar.

Here are ways to progress without increasing load:

• More reps with the same weight

• Better range of motion

• Improved tempo or control

• Rotating through variations that reduce pain but still challenge the same muscles

Progress is personal. If you're recovering from injury and can move pain-free through a deeper ROM than last week, that's a win.

4. Manage Recovery Holistically

If you’re dealing with pain or injury, your recovery capacity is already compromised. That means sleep, stress, and nutrition matter even more.

Don’t diet aggressively during recovery. Don’t overdo cardio (especially high-impact). And don’t ignore sleep quality.

Training while healing means understanding the full stress-recovery-adaptation equation and being more strategic than ever.

5. Watch for Compensation Patterns

When you favor one limb or shift your mechanics to avoid pain, you risk creating new problems. This is where compensatory awareness comes in.

Film yourself. Use mirrors. Ask for feedback. Look for asymmetries that creep in when you’re working around an injury, and address them early before they turn into chronic issues.

For example, shoulder pain can lead to overloading the opposite side or tweaking your wrist angle, which then becomes its own issue.

6. Use Variability to Stay Stimulated and Safe

A limited movement repertoire can lead to stagnation—or worse, repetitive strain. When you're dealing with pain or mobility issues, deliberate variation becomes a strength-building tool.

Rotate exercises week to week. Use different bars, grips, and angles. If a movement irritates you, swap it out for something similar. For pressing, think landmine, floor press, or neutral dumbbell work. For legs, maybe belt squats instead of back squats.

Just make sure your variations are repeatable enough to track progress. Random doesn’t work. Structured variety does.

Redefine What Progress Means

When we’re injured, we tend to define progress too narrowly. But here’s what real progress can look like:

• Less pain during movement

• Greater range of motion

• Maintaining strength during recovery

• Better form, tempo, or control

• Improved mind-muscle connection

I’ve had clients who couldn’t squat due to knee pain—but we found a variation that worked, and months later, not only were they pain-free, they’d added muscle they were never able to build before.

Training around limitations isn’t a concession—it’s a skillset. One that, frankly, makes you a better lifter than someone who’s never had to think about it.

So if you’re in a season where your body isn’t cooperating, I challenge you to stop asking if you can train—and start asking how.

Because there is always a way. You just have to be curious enough to find it.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you're committed to strength training but you feel like you've hit a wall because of nagging injuries or mobility limitations, you're definitely not alone. When shoulder pain makes pressing nearly impossible, when that foot injury flares up after a few thousand steps, or when your body simply doesn't move the way it used to, it can feel like your options are disappearing. Today we are addressing the real challenges of strength training with physical limitations. Today, we are addressing the real challenges of strength training with physical limitations. You'll discover why injuries are not roadblocks but they are redirections, how constraint breeds creativity in your training and the mindset shift that transforms limitations from frustrations into opportunities. 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 Pape, and today I'm tackling another question from a listener, tom, who's been training for decades but still feels like he has not achieved his goals. Tom is 60, he works a desk job. He has some specific challenges, such as shoulder pain during pressing movements I can relate to that a recently healed foot fracture and mobility limitations. But the principles we're going to get into today apply to really anyone that is dealing with injuries or mobility issues, regardless of age. It's just some of these things start to pile on the older we get, so it makes total sense that oftentimes we focus on older populations here. Before we get into this, if you have a question that you want me to answer just like I'm doing today for Tom and you want a personal reply as well and, by the way, I give very detailed, very helpful, specific replies when I do this and then I give you a shout out on the show, like I am today for Tom, if you want that on a future episode, or just to have a question answered, go to witsandweightscom slash question or click the link in the show notes Again, witsandweightscom slash question. I personally read and respond to every single one. All right, let's start by addressing the core of Tom's question and probably what's on the minds of many of you listening, and the situation is this you have been consistently training, so again, this is geared toward.

Philip Pape: 2:16

Folks who have gotten into lifting are trying to do the right things. If you don't even lift weights yet, that's a different situation. You might actually like my recent episode about back pain and how lifting can help with that, because for a lot of folks they're avoiding lifting for certain reasons. Right now we're talking about people who have been lifting. And then you want to build muscle, you want to improve your physique, you want to get stronger, but your body is giving you feedback in the form of pain or limitations right, a very normal response for your body. Sometimes, in fact, most of the time, we have to listen to that and do something, or else it's not gonna change.

Philip Pape: 2:51

And this is a universal challenge that affects lifters of all ages and experience levels. Let me repeat that it affects everyone. Okay, if you think you're unique, you're not. I'm 44, it affects me, I know. You know 25 year olds, 30 year olds, once they get into lifting and it's not the lifting itself, it's more of the accumulation of the fatigue and sometimes things that need to be corrected, like form.

Philip Pape: 3:16

Um, it could be injuries outside the gym that then affect your lifting. There's a lot of reasons for it, so we never want to oversimplify, especially given that weightlifting lifting weights is listed often as the safest form of activity in the world compared to any activity. When you look at injury rates, now you could be 25 and recovering from a sports injury, you could be 45, with some accumulated wear and tear just from life or maybe a lack of lifting for many years that has made you weaker and has made you prone to injury, or 60 and over, like Tom. The principles of working around injuries and still making progress are the same. So that's the key for today's episode is how do we keep going, how do we keep making progress without quote unquote pushing through or injuring ourself and making it worse? So I want to first share what I believe is the most fundamental principle when it comes to training with limitations, and that is adaptation and not of finding that positive not delusional but realistically positive shift in how you view this to open up new possibilities, and that alone can transform your approach.

Philip Pape: 4:34

If you're making excuses, if you're the type of person that goes into a Facebook group and says, well, I want to do the things you guys are suggesting, but I can't because I have this issue, it's like you know what we all. I can't because I have this issue. It's like you know what. We all have issues, we all have physical limitations. I talked to a guy who was paralyzed from the waist down and he still lifts weights. All right, I had rotator cuff surgery. My arm was in a sling, totally immobile, immobile. I still lift weights. I know somebody in our group who had hernia surgery and as soon as she could, she still lifted weights.

Philip Pape: 5:05

So most people make mistakes one of two mistakes, I'll say. I'm going to narrow it down to two mistakes, one of two when they encounter these limitations, either they try to push through the pain, they potentially cause more damage Now those are the go-getters, right. I can appreciate that. I can appreciate that type of person who wants to keep going or they completely abandon certain movement patterns or even training altogether, which is really really sad for me. And they're both extremes of a spectrum Okay, both extremes. I almost feel like training through it and potentially causing more damage is somehow better than just not training at all, because you're going to get weak and frail and probably die younger. But neither of them are great, okay.

Philip Pape: 5:49

So what does the adaptation mindset say? It says how can I modify this movement to work within my current limitations while still challenging myself? That's really it, because we're trying to. Not only are we trying to adapt our mind, we're trying to adapt our bodies through strength and training for muscle. That's really it, because we're trying to. Not only are we trying to adapt our mind, we're trying to adapt our bodies through strength and training for muscle. That's why we do it, and so we need to find a way to continue doing that find that sweet spot between avoiding movement and aggravating the problem. So for Tom specifically and I did give him a very detailed reply, but you know for his shoulder pain right During pressing, I can relate to that a hundred percent personally this does not mean never doing pressing movements again.

Philip Pape: 6:30

It means finding variations that don't cause pain. This could be neutral grip presses, close grip presses, using a slingshot, using an incline instead of flat, traditional benching, using a landmine press instead of overhead, using floor presses. I could go on. I mean I can't actually give you all the list of things you could do because it's practically unlimited the way you can vary things through grips and bars and equipment and machines and body angles, so many ways. And so if you say just no, I can't do it, that is not an adaptation or a growth mindset.

Philip Pape: 7:09

The second principle is what I call constraint as a catalyst. I know there's a lot of alliteration in here, but hey, the show is called Wits and Weights. So constraint as a catalyst, and this is. I love counterintuitive ideas. This is one of them. Okay, this is the. I love counterintuitive ideas. This is one of them. Okay, this is the idea that limitations can accelerate your progress by forcing you to train more intelligently. And I fully embrace this, wholeheartedly, because it's happened to me time and again. Every time something happens, whether it's an injury or a something in my life that interrupts my training and I have to figure out a way around it. You've heard of the phrase and the book. In fact, obstacle is the way. The obstacle is the way. That's exactly. The philosophy here is that the more obstacles and roadblocks and bumps you face along the way, the more you're going to learn better strategies. It's going to make you smarter and more adaptable.

Philip Pape: 8:00

All right, when everything feels great, when you have no limitations, when it's just ho-hum, here we go, it's easy to fall into complacency. You know patterns of convenience and that may not even be effective. That's the interesting thing is, you may not be effectively training when you do that. You might gravitate toward exercises that you're good at or you enjoy, but you're neglecting areas that need attention. But when constraints into the picture and this is where my engineering mind just goes gaga over this right. When constraints into the picture, you're forced to experiment, you're forced to try new movement patterns, to pay closer attention to form and mind-muscle connection and where you have pain, versus, oh, if I do it this slightly different way, I'm not going to have any pain at all. Wow, that's, that's an incredible revelation for me. Now I can make progress and now I can use this variation of the squat instead of this variation and I could just progress the hell out of that squat and I'm still going to build muscle and strength Right.

Philip Pape: 8:59

And then this leads to more balanced development, better, um, being in better tune with your body, your proprio reception, as they call it, your muscles, how they respond, et cetera. You just become really, really dialed in on the feel, part of it, but from an objective way and because you had to alter the path, and I've seen this with just so many clients. Look, most, if not all, clients come to me because they haven't been able to Be successful 100 on their own and in fact, I would say that's everybody like I. I hire coaches because there's aspects that I need to learn more of or figure out a different perspective on. And when I look at someone who has a knee issue and they say, well, I can't back squat because I have a knee issue. And they say, well, I can't back squat because I have a knee issue. Or like, well, let's look at belt squats and let's look at split squats and hack squats and all of that, and just find the thing that doesn't hurt your knee, because there is something right, like presses, whatever. And then three, six months later, not only is their knee feeling tons better, but now their leg development has improved, because now they're hitting the muscles from angles that they neglected before and they're, you know, getting well-rounded, uh, in terms of what they they push for for the exercise selection. So that's the second principle.

Philip Pape: 10:13

The third principle is what I call the primacy of progression. So this is just going all out on the alliteration here. Primacy of progression, all right, despite injuries and limitations, progressive overload, still guess what? It's still the driver of adaptation, your physiological adaptation. It's the thing that challenges you to grow and get stronger, build muscle. The difference is just the method, just the how. How do you implement it right? And guess what, even without injuries, you're going to implement it slightly different than somebody else anyway, but the principles are the same.

Philip Pape: 10:51

Now most people think of progressing in the gym as a very limited thing, like just adding weight to the bar right, especially if you come from the starting strength world, like I do. Sometimes we get fixated on that, and that is great for a beginner, but when you're more advanced or you're working around injuries progression, you have to open up your definition of how progression occurs, because at the end of the day, you're just trying to apply neuromuscular adaptation and mechanical tension to your body so that you challenge itself, right, so this could be removing the pause at the bottom of a movement, like a bench press. So it doesn't, so the stretch reflex doesn't exacerbate your shoulder right, just or not removing the pause, what did I just say? Adding a pause, removing the bounce, adding the pause at the bottom of a bench right, okay, and then you can start to progress, or adding reps instead of load until you can add so many reps that you need to increase the load. It could be improving your range of motion within the pain free boundaries that you're starting to explore Right, and that could be, for example, doing a pin press and gradually dropping the pins lower and lower until they're gone. That's what I did when I was recovering from rotator cuff surgery. It could be playing around with rest periods. It could be adding sets Like there's so many ways.

Philip Pape: 12:14

I did a whole episode on progressive overload a while ago. You can search for it If you go to podcastwitsandweightscom. You can search all my episodes but we have to expand our idea of how to accomplish progressive overload that respects the limitations you have. This is the principle, the first principles approach, the primacy of progression that allows you to continue making gains when what you think of as traditional or the only way is not available to you Because in reality there is not the only way, is not available to you because in reality there is not an only way. I've tried so many different approaches and they all work, as long as they respect the principles.

Philip Pape: 12:52

Speaking of principles, the fourth principle today that I want to talk about is I'll call it holistic adaptation management. So this is not alliteration, couldn't do it for this one. Holistic adaptation man. I'm not talking about alternative medicine and holistic wellness. I'm talking about that when you're training with limitations, your body's recovery capacity could be compromised right, you may not be able to recover as quickly or in the same way you did when you were healthy or when you were not injured not with these limitations and you have to more intentionally manage the stress recovery adaptation cycle and really be conscious of it.

Philip Pape: 13:28

And that means you have to pay closer attention to sleep quality, right? Not just sleep duration, but quality. Are you going to bed and waking up at the same times every night, for example? Are you avoiding screens before bed, those kinds of things? You know? How are you sleeping? Your mattress, your pillow, that stuff, right? Sleep apnea? Whatever your nutrition, right? You probably shouldn't be dieting all the time, or very often at all.

Philip Pape: 13:50

I usually say that once you have developed your goal body composition, you should only diet for maybe two months out of the year, right. And if you're dealing with a recovery from an injury, right. Or you're sick or you had surgery, you definitely shouldn't be dieting after that at all. That's just going to add too much stress and sap you of energy. And the same thing goes for stress, perceived stress, chronic stress, all of that. And so you may have to have more deliberate deloads or vary your intensity or change the volume, right, and just be strategic about it. And I can't tell you which one it is for you. That's where advanced or not even advanced, but like smart programming, comes in and working with a coach, or really understanding how programming works, but also listening to your body through biofeedback, not just subjective, feel, day to day, but also objectively, over time tracking it.

Philip Pape: 14:40

So, for example, tom, who wrote in the question, he said that his foot gets sore after about 10,000 steps. Well, that is valuable, precise feedback from his body about his current recovery capacity and rather than pushing through saying, well, I need to get more steps, I'm trying to lose fat or whatever, and then you cause a setback because your foot is sore and now you can't do other stuff, he can use the information to modulate his training and activity levels, and what I suggested for in his case was, if you still want to get the metabolic equivalent of those steps, do something that doesn't involve walking right. Use an elliptical or a bike. Something like that is a very simple solution to avoid what could be causing your foot to get sore. Now, we didn't get into, like footwear. Is he wearing barefoot versus healed shoes? Does he have? Is he flat footed, like I'm flat footed, so I have to wear slightly wider box shoes, things like that as well. You know, is he doing a lot of uh up and down versus flat, et cetera? So that's the the.

Philip Pape: 15:39

The fourth principle is really this holistic adaptation management, managing your recovery, managing the whole thing. The fifth principle is what I call compensatory awareness. Compensatory awareness okay, this is, I talk about awareness all the time here. Like you track your food, you get aware. Right, we have an injury or limitation. Well, we're aware of the injury, but then we often unconsciously develop compensations or patterns that can lead to issues everywhere. And so then now we have to be deliberately aware of these compensations. So when I say compensatory awareness, that's what I'm talking about here, is awareness of the compensations that you're making because of your injury that could be causing other issues. For example, here's a good example Shoulder pain often leads you to alter your mechanics during the pressing movements, and then these will place some stress on your elbow, your wrist or maybe the opposite shoulder, your foot injury.

Philip Pape: 16:37

That could affect a lot. It could change your gait, your squat mechanics, it can cause knee, hip issues, right, and you may have to approach these movements with extra awareness of your body. Maybe take video of yourself, right. Work with a coach, say, hey, does something look off here? Symmetry-wise, you may need different footwear, you may need different equipment, right? There's just a lot of possibilities here. So, compensatory awareness how are you compensating? All right.

Philip Pape: 17:06

The next, the sixth and final principle is deliberate variability. Now, this is just the variation on the theme, no pun intended variation, but the variation on the theme of variation, of of deliberately making things change. So, when you have limitations, this is often the best time to have different exercise variation in there, not just to work around the pain but also to have, I'll say, more robust adaptations that you need because you're not able to push with a lot of the main exercises that you wish you could. If you take a traditional strength programming, we want to be very consistent with our exercise selection because we want to be able to progress on those movements right, and this is always important, like I don't want you doing YouTube workouts where you're just jumping around all over the place with random exercises. No, but when you have limitations, it helps to have a broader repertoire of exercises available so you can rotate the stress around and then avoid overloading a single joint or tissue, and I think it's. I think this is important in general for lifters.

Philip Pape: 18:12

We talk about the West side conjugate method, or we talk about um, building a base versus building a peak, and how you rotate around to different movements and not. You know, you don't want to be back squatting every single session forever, or else you both have too much stress for the movement, plus you're missing your weak spots. But when you have a limitations it just opens up that uh, capacity, ability or necessity. I should say even more, and that goes back to my earlier principle about how this is going to make you a more intelligent lifter and actually help you grow faster, as in both creative and application areas of lifting, in that you need to figure out other movements and there's so many creative things out there.

Philip Pape: 18:55

Um, my friend Tony he's probably listening introduced me to the Omni bar. Introduce me to the Omnibar. It has these grips that can rotate 360 degrees from any level of neutral, not like the width of the grips, but they actually rotate in a circle. They have ball bearings and so you could push or pull with a neutral grip that's comfortable for your shoulder, for example. Or you might use other aids, like I use a slingshot when I do bench pressing to take some of the load at the bottom.

Philip Pape: 19:28

For Tom, who wrote in the question, this might mean having three different pressing variations, that he rotates between his sessions and kind of comes back and forth to them so he might do two of them or three of them across three weeks and then in week four he comes back to the first variation again and he's still progressing them, but he's rotating through and avoiding irritating tissue that even though you've modified to avoid pain, you still could be hitting something a little too much, and now you get more time to recover between exposures to those different stressors, right? So thinking more about Tom's situation got my notes here. He has a push pull leg split and fundamentally, fundamentally, that's like a perfectly sound split. You guys have heard of that. That's a normal type of training split. But if we were to adjust it for his situation and limitations, I would say number one for the pressing issue we would probably do more neutral grip presses, landmine presses, maybe floor presses I mentioned a bunch of these earlier.

Philip Pape: 20:27

Find shoulder-friendly variations. There are a lot and a lot of them. You don't realize until you go exploring and go look it up. Like, let's say, you want to do dumbbell, incline presses, right, a great accessory for your chest press, for your bench press. Well, most people think, okay, I need to hold them perpendicular to my body and push up just like a bar. Well, they're dumbbells. So you have one in each hand Guess what? You can rotate it so they're neutral, so they're in parallel. See how that feels. I just did those this morning and they don't bother my shoulder at all. Right, so that's for pressing. Again, you can use pin presses. There's a lot of ways to do that while you still press.

Philip Pape: 21:00

For the foot issue, he has, I kind of mentioned before reducing step volume but adding in non-step volume for movement like biking or an elliptical. You could even do something like pressing prowlers, where you make it a lot harder form of cardio but you're not getting a lot of impact on your feet. And then he also mentioned mobility concerns and my my response to the mobility concern was more of is there a form of the movement that you can still do for a full range of motion to develop the mobility? It sounds like chicken and egg, right? Some people say, well, I have, my ankles aren't very mobile, my hips aren't very mobile, whatever. And I say, hey, here's a box, can you squat down to this 12 inch box? And they have no problem doing that, just without any bar or anything else Like if you can get fully down below, parallel onto a box, you could do it with load on your back, and then you can do it with heavier load on your back, and guess what that is? Mobility.

Philip Pape: 22:03

Now you may have mobility issues that are more severe, like, for example, I do with my left shoulder where it's just so tight with the external rotation, and in that case I use the squat safety bar oftentimes instead of the a normal bar for my squat, and that way you're just kind of working around them. You can still develop the mobility through, you know, physical therapy, stretching, stretching into the movement, et cetera. For example, with a back squat you can stretch into the bar as part of your warmup and kind of open up yourself, so you have better mobility. But if it's more severe than that, you may have to just do other movements. So this is the framework. If you're listening, you're trying to navigate your own unique challenges, whatever they are. Again, they're they're unique to you, but there are not unique in general. Everybody has challenges, the. I hope these frameworks and these principles can help you think through it.

Philip Pape: 22:49

One more thing I want to emphasize is that when you train with limitations, you have to, you have to shift your perspective about what constitutes progress. Okay, because I think we've been conditioned to measure ourselves through PRs. I think I'm going to do a whole episode on this. I think sometimes we treat PRs kind of like we treat weight on the scale, like if it's not going in the direction we want, constantly we're a failure. And that's not true at all. Right, you know, maybe when you're a rank beginner and nothing is going up in load, there's something going on for sure. But once you get a bit strong and have a bit of muscle, there's other ways we progress, kind of like we talked about earlier. And so in this case, in this context where you have injuries or limitations, what I'm talking about specifically is having things that you can celebrate as wins, besides just the pure training progress. For example, being able to move through a greater range of motion without pain. I mean, that's a huge one. Until you don't have range of motion, you don't realize how valuable this is.

Philip Pape: 23:51

When I recovered from my shoulder surgery, I obviously couldn't even I could barely lift my arms above parallel, let alone get into an overhead press. Are you kidding me? And so my dream then became to get to an overhead press. Are you kidding me? And so my dream then became to get to an overhead right, and there's a process, and now you have to progress over time to get closer and closer to the overhead. So I would take video of myself pushing this bar hanging from straps from a pull-up bar, pushing it out and getting it higher and higher and being hugely excited when it would add another inch to the height. That's progress, right? Or what about just maintaining your strength when you're healing from an injury or surgery? Have you heard of the crossover effect when, let's say, your left arm is in a sling? Well, you could still do some, say, bicep curls with your right arm. There's going to be a crossover, a transfer through cellular and hormonal mechanisms in the body it's not really fully understood that maintains strength on the injured arm. It's incredible Instead of it atrophying, instead of the muscles wasting not wasting but instead of muscle decline, you'll hold onto it and that's progress.

Philip Pape: 24:57

What about the quality of your movements, right? Maybe before you were injured, you didn't really think too much about your form and your squat or your deadlift, and now that you have been injured you have to be really, really careful. So it's gonna force you to say you know what I really need to go back in that book, go watch those videos. Go listen to Phillip, go do a form check and really dial this in so I get the movement quality correct. It's better lifter. Also, better fatigue management. Right, again, that's a form of progress.

Philip Pape: 25:24

Are you able to manage your fatigue, your recovery, where you no longer have those really sharp pangs in your lower back because you've been deadlifting too much. Right Just was too much volume, for example, and you never gave it another thought, you just pushed through. Well, now you need to manage it and you're like, well, I'm going to get in some Romanian deadlifts, that I'm going to get in some other poles, some rows, maybe do some rack poles and then do some deadlifts. I'm going to rotate through, I'm going to keep the volume reasonable, the intensity high, and I'll be much better off, and so you can grow from that. And then, finally, I would say mind-muscle connection.

Philip Pape: 26:03

As much as it gets criticized in some circles, I think there's huge value in understanding the neuromuscular connection there between your brain, your thoughts conscious and otherwise, your muscles, how they move, what you're feeling when you move them and how that translates to growth, injury prevention, fatigue management and working around your limitations. So these are all valid, meaningful forms of progress that are going to contribute to the long-term success. You see, this isn't a cakewalk. This isn't something you learn in a day. This is a lifelong process of growth and learning and I take that as a really amazing, fun, exciting thing.

Philip Pape: 26:37

If that sounds like a negative to you, it's time to reframe this whole thing. Why are you doing this right? Are you doing this because you want to get strong and be able to get off the toilet when you're 85 and be able to pick up kids and grandkids and go play outside and play sports, to walk with an upright posture, to avoid bone brittle, bones and frailty and breaking your hip when you fall right. Like what is that for you? Just revisit that and why it's important, because I don't I don't know about you. I do not want to be weak and frail when I'm get older, where other people, including my family and kids, have to take care of me. I just don't want to be there, and I guess I guess the last thought I'll leave you with is going full circle to one of my earlier statements that everyone who lifts is going to have some limitations or injuries at some point.

Philip Pape: 27:26

You're just going to accept it, except that you're going to and the most successful lifters aren't the ones who didn't get injured. They're also not the ones who have any sort of genetic advantage or perfect health. They're the ones who master the art of training around limitations. That's a powerful statement. Think about it Almost every long-term lifter eventually encounters injuries or limitations, and not even long-term, I'll be honest, like it won't take long before something happens. And again, it's not always caused by lifting, but it's going to happen in your life. It's just practically unavoidable if you train for decades, if you're a human living in the world. And the difference between those who continue to make progress and those who stagnate, it's not their programming, it's not because this person had this injury and this person had this. It's how they respond to the limitation.

Philip Pape: 28:11

Do they embrace this constraint as catalyst principle we talked about? Right? That fuels innovation, creativity, growth. The blessing of constraints, these limitations that force you to experiment, to adapt, ultimately to build that resilient, balanced physique that we're going for that's going to actually accelerate the process. Isn't that great, isn't that amazing? Your limitations will get you to the result you want faster, right?

Philip Pape: 28:36

You just have to be curious. I hope that's why you're listening to this podcast in general, and I hope you listen to lots of other episodes, because the recurring theme is always, yes, skepticism, but also curiosity. And all of that goes beyond physical training. I hope you guys know that I'm more of a philosophical type thinker. Here I try to understand where this all fits in the world, in the arc of human history, in my own life, in my relationships, in how I interact with other people, in being positive, in my psychology and mental health. It's all connected.

Philip Pape: 29:08

And the principles today of adapting rather than abandoning, of looking at constraints as a catalyst, of always trying to progress, of making everything work holistically, of being aware of how you compensate to things and deliberately varying things up so you can keep making everything work holistically, of being aware of how you compensate to things and deliberately varying things up so you can keep making progress these can be applied to any area of life where you face limitations. Just change the metaphor to apply to whatever the thing is right Adapting to a new job where you have restricted resources, navigating a challenging relationship, pursuing a goal where you don't have much time I mean, that's all of us right. These provide a framework for continued growth despite the constraints. So the obstacle is the way. The limitations aren't roadblocks, they're redirections. They don't determine whether you can progress, only how that's it, just how that's it. And so, once you know that you just have to find the how, have the right mindset, have that growth mindset, continue building muscle and strength, regardless of whatever cards you've been dealt, because you can and you will.

Philip Pape: 30:10

All right, I'll get off my soapbox, but I hope that resonated with you and Tom, I kind of went all over the place off of your question, but I think this is an important topic that you were the catalyst for.

Philip Pape: 30:21

So thank you, anyone listening. If you have a question for the podcast and you want a personal reply, and then you want me to go off and ramble like this and get deep and philosophical into the answer, or potentially I'll just answer it very practically and simply. We'll see. And then you want me to shout you out or not. Either way, go to witsandweightscom slash question or click the link in the show notes. I will personally read and respond to every question that comes in, and I think your question can then help lots and lots of other people who all face similar challenges like you. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember the most impressive strength isn't found in how much you can lift, but in your ability to adapt and thrive despite the inevitable challenges. This is Philip Pape, and you've been listening to the Wits and Weights podcast and I will talk to you next time.

Using Data to Break Free from Emotional Eating Patterns | Ep 317

Ever wonder why you keep eating when you're not actually hungry? 

The battle between emotions and rational decisions plays out most visibly in our eating habits, causing you to go "off track" (and sometimes way "off the rails"). Sound familiar?

Today's episode explores emotional eating through a completely different lens... using data and structure to identify patterns and solutions so you can stop flying blind and finally conquer emotional eating.

You'll discover why tracking certain metrics reveals surprises about your eating behaviors, how meal timing dramatically affects your psychological relationship with food, and tips to bridge the gap between analytical approaches and emotional intelligence.

Main Takeaways:

• Understanding patterns through tracking creates awareness without becoming obsessive

• Strategic meal timing and composition significantly influences emotional eating behaviors

• The powerful "if-then" approach creates a framework for managing challenging food situations

• Consistency in eating patterns helps your body develop safety signals that reduce stress eating

• Creating a balance between structure and flexibility is key to sustainable habits

Episode Links:

• Follow the Don't Call Me Skinny podcast for more great content from Sarah Krieger

• Listen to the companion episode about the psychological side of emotional eating: The Hidden Triggers Making You Overeat Without Realizing It

Timestamps:

0:01 - Emotional eating through a data lens
8:36 - Using data without becoming obsessive
15:43 - What to do based on your data
23:36 - Powerful "if-then" strategies when life trips you up
27:08 - Meal timing -> emotional eating patterns
31:11 - Macros for managing hunger
36:32 - Hunger vs. cravings
42:11 - The solution after years of dieting

Mastering Emotional Eating by Tracking the Right Data

Emotional eating is often framed as a purely psychological issue, and while that’s certainly part of it, there’s a much more objective tool most people overlook—data. When you feel like your emotions are steering the wheel with food, that’s actually the perfect time to bring in structure, not more willpower.

In this episode, I dive into the concept of emotional eating from a data-driven lens.

This isn’t about turning into a robot who lives by macros and spreadsheets. It’s about identifying real, trackable patterns behind your behaviors, so you can make changes that stick.

Why Emotional Eating Needs More Than Mindset Work

Many of my clients—especially those who've tried intuitive eating or pure mindset work—feel like they understand why they eat emotionally but still can’t seem to stop. That’s because awareness without feedback doesn’t lead to behavior change. You need measurable variables that act like breadcrumbs leading to the trigger.

For example:

• Meal timing

• Hunger levels before and after meals

• Training sessions and recovery

• Sleep quality

• Food composition (protein, fiber, processed foods)

When you track these, you begin to connect the dots. You realize that skipping lunch leads to late-night snacking. Or that undereating on rest days leads to low energy and cravings the next.

Track First, Interpret Later

One of the most common mistakes is assuming that the numbers themselves are the solution. But the power of data lies in what it tells you about your behavior. That’s why I don’t push clients to track everything at once or get obsessed with every little detail. Instead, I help them track just enough to get the right signal from the noise.

This often starts with:

• Protein intake: Are you getting 0.7 g/lb or more?

• Meal structure: Are you eating consistent meals, or just grazing all day?

• Training quality: Are your lifts progressing, or are you running on fumes?

Start there, and you’ll quickly see why that random bag of Goldfish at 9 p.m. isn’t about discipline—it’s your body screaming for energy after missing breakfast and skimping on lunch.

The Emotional Cost of Ignoring Structure

The irony is that the less structured someone is, the more anxious and emotionally reactive they tend to feel around food. Chaos breeds overthinking. Structure breeds peace of mind.

In the episode, I talked about how emotional recovery is just as much a part of the process as physical recovery. That means having go-to strategies when obstacles hit:

• If/Then planning: “If I go out for dinner, then I’ll order my go-to protein/fiber combo and skip the appetizer.”

• Meal timing rules of thumb: “Never go more than 4 hours without food.”

• Minimum effective tracking: Track hunger before/after meals and your meal timing for a week. That alone reveals so much.

This creates what I call structured flexibility: a framework where you don’t have to rely on willpower because the system supports your goals.

Why Overreliance on Tech Can Backfire

Not every piece of data is helpful. Your Fitbit telling you that you burned 647 calories in your HIIT class? Irrelevant. Trying to match food intake to a wildly inaccurate “calories out” number is a dead-end.

Instead, track output by results. If you’re losing fat, maintaining muscle, and feeling energized, your intake/output balance is probably in a good place. Trust the system—not your smartwatch.

Optimizing Macros for Hunger, Not Just Fat Loss

As calories drop during a fat loss phase, hunger becomes more of a challenge. This is where macro tweaks come in:

• Some clients need more carbs pre-workout to offset fatigue.

• Others need more fat to stabilize energy and mood.

• Some benefit from redistributing protein across the day, especially at breakfast.

This isn’t about perfection. It’s about tinkering just enough to feel good and keep momentum going. And yes, emotional eating will decrease when your body is better fueled.

Your Data is a Window into Your Behavior

If you take one thing from this conversation, it’s this: Data and emotion aren’t enemies. They’re two sides of the same coin. Tracking a few simple things—not obsessively—can give you the insight you need to finally feel in control.

So, if you’re stuck in the same “I know what to do, but I’m not doing it” cycle, maybe it’s time to stop guessing and start measuring. That’s how we move from emotional chaos to confident action.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

Emotional eating is a struggle for many of us, even when you know exactly what to do with your nutrition. There's an interplay between our emotions and habits that derail even the most meticulously planned nutrition approach. But today we're going to explore emotional eating through the lens of data and structure. You'll learn how tracking certain metrics can reveal your emotional eating patterns, why meal timing affects your psychological relationship with food, and how to use data as a tool to create those sustainable habits you want, without becoming obsessive. This is all about balancing emotional and logical aspects of nutrition to transform your relationship with food.

Philip Pape: 0:50

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 Pape, and today I'm sharing a recent appearance on the Don't Call Me Skinny podcast with registered dietitian Sarah Krieger. Now you might remember her because she was recently on the show discussing emotional eating from a psychological perspective. Well, in case you didn't catch this on her show, today I'm replaying the flip side of that conversation, where I joined her podcast to explore the data-driven approach to understanding and managing emotional eating. Many of you know me as the data guy. I love engineering, I love using systems and as someone who naturally gravitates toward structure and numbers, I've found that tracking certain metrics can provide really good, really invaluable insights into our eating patterns. But I've also learned that this approach needs to be balanced with awareness of our emotional triggers and our psychological responses to food, and not everybody responds the same way to using numbers, so it has to be very, very useful.

Philip Pape: 1:57

Now, during this conversation, we talk about how being an engineer influences my approach to nutrition coaching, how to interpret hunger cues versus emotional cravings, and then some strategies and tips to bridge the gap between data and emotions when it comes to food choices. Now, before we get into the episode, if you like what you hear today, all I ask is that you hit follow on Wits and Weights so that you catch every episode when they come out. They come out on Mondays, wednesdays and Fridays, and then I want you to go follow Sarah's podcast Don't Call Me Skinny wherever you listen to this, all right. So let's jump into my conversation with Sarah Krieger about approaching emotional eating through a data lens.

Sarah Krieger: 2:39

Welcome to another podcast of Don't Call Me Skinny. I'm super excited to be with you here today. We have a really great little collaboration that we are doing. I was a guest on a podcast with Philip Pate, wits and Weights and we talked about emotional eating from the emotional side, and today he's coming on my podcast today to talk to you guys about the emotional eating through data specifically, which I love because he is such a data guy. I'm not a data girl. I mean, I am a little bit, but not like he is. So check the link in the show notes If you want to take a listen. My version is on his podcast today. It's going out. We're doing it the same day so you can hear both sides at the same time, and so, yes, philip, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to have you on here with me today.

Philip Pape: 3:33

I am so excited to be on again. I want to see you again on your show, so thanks.

Sarah Krieger: 3:38

Yes, of course, of course. What I want to do first is just can you give my listeners a little bit about who you are, where you're from and how you ended up in this and what makes you like I call kind of you the data king, like I literally listen to his podcast because he has these amazing guests on and it's all just so much about data, data, data. So can you go ahead and tell us a little bit about who you are, where you're from and how you got here.

Philip Pape: 4:05

Yeah, I suppose the data side comes from being an engineer. So I've been an engineer for more than 20 years, a software engineer, which is even more like nerdy and data centric, and so I get very annoyed when I can't figure out why something works. And so my whole life, through fitness, through nutrition, I was always a bit fluffy or overweight or always on diets. I mean, I'm old enough to have been on SlimFast and then Atkins. So we're, you know right about that generation in my mid forties and and I love being in my forties now, because I've kind of started to figure it out, you know, just starting to figure it out and uh, I did all the things right. I did, um, crossfit for about eight years. Eight years stressed myself to death doing CrossFit and doing all the diets.

Philip Pape: 4:47

But, having been an engineer and trying to figure it out, it wasn't until things got bad enough, let's just put it that way when I had a kid in my 30s, or my first daughter, and I kept getting more out of shape, the dad bod. It starts to hit you in your 30s and 40s where you can't make excuses anymore, or, for those of you with a fiery metabolism, in your twenties. It's going to. It's going to slow down eventually if you don't do something about it, right? So around the time I was going to turn 40, I just got fed up with it. I'm like, why isn't this working? Why isn't all this CrossFit and these cleaning jerks and like cutting carbs and doing keto? Why is it not working for me?

Philip Pape: 5:28

And I just dove headlong into or dived is the right way to say it, dived headlong into evidence-based nutrition and training and a lot of my early inspirations were the Muscle and Strength Pyramids by Dr Eric Helms and I think Andy Morgan was a coauthor.

Philip Pape: 5:45

A ton of podcasts, ton of videos, and this was a lot of. This was during the pandemic, so while people during that time were probably going the other direction in many cases with their fitness, I was starting to figure it out. I was putting together my home gym, I started strength training and about a year later I got into nutrition and then, almost a year after that, I started my podcast. I'm giving you the short version, but basically took a lot of learning and experimentation and a lot of that was learning how to track food and biofeedback and training and like how I felt to just see what worked and what didn't, along with the science, kind of like merging the two together, because if you're, if you fly in blind, or if you don't have a coach or help, the information is just overwhelming out here in the industry.

Philip Pape: 6:29

Even when you have three different people telling you and you trust them all, they're contradictory, right. So you finally like kind of started to figure it out. And then, just to make this story not longer than it needs to, be A guest on my podcast who was a power lifter and she was a coworker. She asked me to take over her nutrition coaching, like a few months later when her coaching was going to expire. So to get ready for that, I got certified and started working with free clients and then, through that process, figured out my systems, which are largely unchanged. They're definitely more efficient and effective, but they're very data centric systems, whereas I know you get a lot into also emotional and psychology. That, for me, came much later. It wasn't my strength, but by working with clients I became a lot more of an expert in those areas. So there you go.

Sarah Krieger: 7:21

No, I like that and it's interesting because, being an engineer, I mean really that's kind of what we do almost when we create our processes or when we are coaching a client. It's really it's very, it is very structured. Even though I do a lot of the mindset work, the emotional side of that, that's still kind of that's a structured element of this process, Right. So I think it's cool how it kind of like you're parallel, like you said, like I'm an engineer, but like that's kind of like what we do for wellness, essentially Like we're wellness engineers.

Philip Pape: 7:54

I don't know that's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah, I use physique engineering, wellness engineering. I think engineering comes down to systems, right and and structure. You said it great. I love the word structure because that's usually the word a lot of clients will use. They're like oh, it wasn't until I had this structured approach, even if the structure is around emotions, right, like it doesn't matter.

Philip Pape: 8:14

It's just awareness. We were talking about this on on my show. It's having awareness through some method, some framework, some step-by-step process that takes the stress off of you, that gives you some clarity, that gives you confidence that I can control my physique and I can control even my mental health, because they're tightly linked in many cases. So that's kind of where I come from with the show and with working with people.

Sarah Krieger: 8:36

Yeah, I love that. That's what I love. And speaking of this part of this, right, let's take that piece where we're talking about structure. Um, I know that we, we can see things go really the other way. Uh, I was actually watching. I don't do you ever follow, like jordan syatt I follow him okay I love him and he just did a whole mini, uh mini podcast.

Sarah Krieger: 8:58

He calls it yeah oh yeah, the pot, yep, uh. And he just did a post today on his Instagram about how he went so far the other way with all of this data that he had. You know, oh, I can be this lean and I can look like this and I can train like this and I can do all that stuff with all of this data. And how? From zero to 150? Because we can use data and it's great to have, but how do we prevent ourselves from going so extreme with it? I have to keep getting progress, I have to keep going. I have to keep losing weight. How do we find a balance with using the data that we get?

Philip Pape: 9:41

Yeah, that's a really great question. I think it comes down to it depends we were laughing about this on my my show that there's a spectrum of people's like propensity to do this. So naturally people will seek you out as a coach because you're a certain way Right. So people listen to my show will be like I'm so nerd, I love data. Give it to me. Like let's track everything at the same time, like biohacking and things like that.

Philip Pape: 10:03

I'm not track everything at the same time, like biohacking and things like that. I'm not. I'm not very much into that. Like I don't go overboard with the HRV tracking with your aura ring. I talk about it.

Philip Pape: 10:09

I think it's cool, I think it's a nice little side thing, but it does come down to the fundamentals. I'm like I don't care how much you're eating over here, doing over here, if you're not strength training, or I don't care how much you know um, or I don't know how many calories you have, until we understand your protein right. Like there's a certain priority that we start with to keep it simple, despite having the data. So when I tell my clients like we're going to collect a bunch of things, but I'm going to reduce the friction as much as possible for you and, as a coach, that's the way I take stress off of them and and I'm basically give them the emotional support it's like. Here's a couple things you need to do Track your food, track your workouts.

Philip Pape: 10:46

A lot of stuff's going to come through your watch, but don't worry about it. Like, at the end of the day, what happens in the first couple of weeks and you've seen this too, sarah is self-awareness starts to change their own behavior, and then the tracking doesn't become a chore. It's actually reframed as this thing's really helping me out. As far as the extreme you're talking about, there's a pocket of people who really like that, who like understanding oh, how much muscle am I gaining versus fat and how efficient is it? And like I've got a client, sarah, who wants to experiment with all the crazy Lyle McDonald diets, like the protein modified fast and the rapid fat loss, and I roll with him because that's what he wants and he's cool, he gets it and he loves data. Most, most people are not like that. Most people, it's like what are you eating? How much are you eating? You got protein, you're training, you're growing. We don't have to overthink it. So don't overthink it is my point.

Sarah Krieger: 11:34

Yeah, and I think that's where I think a lot of people get caught up, as you're talking about, like the Oura ring and the fitness watches, right? So here we are. We're all like. We are data driven, right. Oh, I'm going to get an X amount of steps. I'm going to get in.

Sarah Krieger: 11:50

You know, all this stuff, or my sleep, how I'm curious as to. I mean, you're talking about how you, how you help your clients, like, ok, we don't have to pay attention to all those things. We don't have to pay attention to all those things. What would you say, especially to those? We talked a little bit about this on your podcast when you were interviewing me, which was, like you know, making sure how many calories we're burning. Why Can we talk about the data there, about calories burned and why that might not really translate into actual burning of calories? Like this is something that I'm seeing a lot, where we think that we have to go exercise to work off the piece of cake, or I have to go go on the stair master for 45 minutes to burn 254 calories Exactly. I'm not really sure how people are getting that, but can you talk a little bit about how there's a disconnect here?

Philip Pape: 12:40

Yeah, that's a good one. Um, where do I start? So where do I start? So, first of all, when I work with folks and I use, there's an app that I like to use. It's called Macrofactor. You don't have to use it, but so far, unless you know differently, sarah, it's the only app I've found that isn't just a food logger, but it also estimates your rate of calorie burn. Rate of calorie burn.

Philip Pape: 13:06

And when people start using that, they say, well, where does it take your activity data? And I'm like it doesn't. I'm like let's think of your body as a system, as a black box. Energy comes in, energy goes out and, however, that energy changes based on weight, on the scale, over time not just the daily fluctuations, but over time, based on what you're putting in your mouth tells us really well what you're burning. Then the question is what do we do?

Philip Pape: 13:29

And what you're getting at is people try to burn more calories and eat less, and they burn more calories and eat less, and usually they're eating less in the wrong way, right, they're cutting the wrong things, or they're eating a lot of processed food, they're starving, they cut even more, they go on crash diets and then they're doing all this chronic metronomic cardio that honestly nobody likes, right, like only a tiny percentage of people really love doing quote unquote set, you know, steady state cardio. So I do love to explore, at least with my clients and on the podcast, how we use the data to get insights into how what we're doing affects our energy levels. And at the end of the day, I want you to feel energized and perform and be able to hit all the reps in the gym, be able to recover, get lots of stimulus from your lifts but not feel like it's wiping you out or making you super sore, and it's like this beautiful balance between it's called energy flux actually is the term people use. It's like I want to eat more and move more, but move more in the right way, by lifting, by walking, maybe a little bit of sprinting here and there and some play. And when you have that in the right proportions, you're feeling satisfied and potentially weight starts to come off anyway, because you're serving your body's needs and you're serving your satiety signals, your hunger signals, all of that and emotional eating.

Philip Pape: 14:44

It sounds like a side piece to all this, but it's actually super important, right? Because it controls you know what you eat, how you eat it, your patterns and everything. But people who are tracking and have this data tend to know what the heck's going on and then, if they don't change, the data continues to tell them that. So, anyway, I went off on some tangents. I don't know if you have specific questions related to that.

Sarah Krieger: 15:05

No, I mean, I like that because I feel like we get really caught up in the numbers, right, well, I have to track my data or I have to. I've used macro factor before. Um, I love Jeff Nibird and I love that and all those guys like he promotes it hugely. Uh, and it, it, it wasn't for me. I chose to stop using it, right, uh, because I would get really hung up. The the, not the data would actually make me then emotional and I was like I just really need to focus on what the protein is, what the fiber is and what my overall calories are, because it almost was like almost too much data coming at me. Um, personally, right, that's for me.

Sarah Krieger: 15:43

Um, so I'm curious then, leading out of that, like how do let's, let's talk about how, when we have so much like data coming at us, how then do we know what decisions we're supposed to make? How are we supposed to know what do I do with this data? Now, obviously, with that data, your clients have you right, but a lot of people don't know what they're supposed to do. Okay, so now I am feeling wiped after my workouts. I don't have any energy, I'm sleeping like absolute dog crap. Like what do I do now and how do? How do I know where I'm supposed to go from there?

Philip Pape: 16:18

I mean, I do think there's a bit of skill involved in understanding patterns of the data and that's why or data, or data, you know, data on Star Trek always got people for not calling them data. Anyway, are we British, are we American? It doesn't matter.

Sarah Krieger: 16:33

Well, it's funny because I started out saying data and now I'm saying data and I don't know.

Philip Pape: 16:37

I do that too. I do that too. So, which is plural for datum, which nobody uses, datum. We always say data as if it's singular. Anyway, that's me being a nerd. Um, so, yeah, I, here's a good example.

Philip Pape: 16:49

If someone like, say, listens to my show or goes into my Facebook group and I can tell they're completely lost, right, like, total babe in the woods, you know the type, right, like and this is no insult to anybody If you're listening and you're like, I don't know what to do, but I try to think of an education process. Like when you learn a new instrument, you don't start by playing Mozart, right, you start by playing a single note. And so what is their single note? Well, their single note is going to depend on what they do know already, or do not know, what they're willing to do, what they will, what's accessible, dah, dah, dah, dah dah. So I, you know, I'll do these like free calls with people and get on, and they're like I want to talk about training, I want to talk about nutrition, I got to do this, I got to do this, I got to do this, like, take a breath. Take a breath Like what's the, what's the gap of awareness you have right now. That would be easiest to solve as low hanging fruit. So ask yourself that question.

Philip Pape: 17:36

I think food is a good place to start nutrition, and that doesn't have to be calories and macros, like my fitness power macro factor. It could just be protein. How are you eating protein with every meal, right? Super simple eating protein fiber. Um, if it's your training, are you training? Like, honestly, this sounds crazy, but if you're not training your three days a week or whatever your you know goal is, even if it's one and you're not doing that consistently, I almost don't even care about how you're training. Let's figure out your time management. Let's figure out the space in your schedule. Let's figure out, like, how important this is to you, what's your why? So long story short, it doesn't have to be obsessive if you start small and then just build into that and get to the point of data that makes sense to you. You know, sarah, though, you have to be tracking something to measure it. Yeah Right, you have to track it to measure it.

Sarah Krieger: 18:28

Yeah. So you have to know and I think that you make a really good point there Like people are so worried about all the how much am I supposed to have? How many? How many minutes a day should I be? You know, training, how many minutes a day? Well, all this stuff. And you're like can we just make sure? And you said like can we just make sure we're eating protein at every single meal. Sometimes I have clients where I'm like do you know what a protein is?

Sarah Krieger: 18:54

Fair point, yeah, you know. Like, do you know what? Where there's fiber that's not in Metamucil, like we have to sometimes, it goes that far back and I say that because it's okay not to know those things, like so many people that I know they're like. Oh, I talk about this all the time, but peanut butter it's a protein and I'm like it's not a protein, guys.

Sarah Krieger: 19:14

Okay, it's a fat source, and that's what I hear all the time. Oh, but I'm eating eggs and sausage for breakfast Awesome, egg whites or whole eggs and turkey sausage or pork sausage, because that's going to determine what we shift, if we need to shift. So I think that you make a really good point. It's like, again, it doesn't have to be as complicated as what I think that this industry has made it to be, yeah, and like moving on from that, you know it's. I think that how do you, how would you say?

Sarah Krieger: 19:45

This is leading to another question, though but how would you say that? That the over, the overconsumption of all that information, how, how does that tie into? How do you, how do you kind of go for I don't know what I'm trying to say here the data versus the emotional, like, how do you get somebody to move from, like, okay, this is what we need, this is what the data says we need to do? But they're like I can't, I can't, I can't get through that, I can't move past this, or I can't, I can't eat more food, or I can't get to the gym, like you're talking about, like time management, like, how do you get somebody to take that data that you're receiving from them, but they have this really big emotional block. Are you able to get them to look logically at this or like how do you tie in that piece of it?

Philip Pape: 20:30

Yeah, that's a great question too, because the I joke with people that I, my brain goes to logic initially, but a lot of people's don't, and, like you're, what you're suggesting is that you have the data, you've measured the thing, you've got some awareness and now it's telling you something has to. You've measured the thing, you've got some awareness and now it's telling you something has to change. There's the what has to change, there's the how and there's the how. For me, Like, what's the thing blocking me?

Philip Pape: 20:53

And I'm definitely big into understanding roadblocks, challenges, anomalies and normalizing the fact that life is just naturally chaos in a good way, Like it's naturally unpredictable, and if you're kind of that stoic philosophy that the vast majority of things are actually out of your control, and if you realize that and just control the things you can, I think mentally that's an easier way to tackle life right, Like the obstacle is the way, so to speak. So, if a client now I keep talking about clients, obviously if you're listening and doing this for yourself, you have to go through this reflective process and be intentional. But it's like identify the one thing this week that was the obstacle, Because if you wanted to do certain habits and you didn't, something prevented you. Don't blame yourself. Don't say that I just need to do it, Like we joked on my show just, I don't need to do?

Philip Pape: 21:43

I just need to do it. No, that's not it, that's not enough. Okay, otherwise there'd be a million things I would never do if it was just up to willpower, trust me. Yep. So what is the obstacle? And then you just have to be a detective and go back to root cause. What's the root cause? And it you know. Sometimes it's deeper than others and sometimes you need a tool or process like, let's reduce decision fatigue.

Philip Pape: 22:02

If the issue was your friend keeps asking you to go out to dinner or to drinks at night, you have a lot of options. You could say no, or you can know that it's going to come and have your backup plan, your meal plan for that type of day, or you're going to the restaurant strategy or your whatever your posted note of how many drinks you're going to have. You know, like it's just thinking ahead with your past self, because we were talking about identity on my show. You talked about how your past self helped your current self. Well, everything you do today to plan ahead is an act of self-care for your future self. Meal plan, meal prep, strategizing and if, having, if then statements or if then strategies for these things is the way, in my opinion, to solve it, because they're going to happen. They're going to happen.

Sarah Krieger: 22:46

Yeah, I do that a lot. If this happens, then I'm going to do this, and I think that the if-then is really powerful, because the if-then can change if you need it to change. Right, if my friend asks me to go out, then I can tell them this. Or if I say yes, then I can do this. But even in the moment it's like okay, if I have another one, then what happens? How do I, what do I do now? Right? So I think that that one's so versatile because you can literally flip it right, right then and there like okay, if I get another drink, then this is going to happen. If I say no to another drink, then this is going to happen. Or this is how I feel, or this is what other people might say. Like, people might have comments about me not having another drink or just taking water. Um, so I think that if, then is super powerful. Do you find that your clients do have a really good like response to that?

Philip Pape: 23:36

technique. Oh sure, yeah, my clients are perfect and and and they just, they love me and every you know um no, I mean, but like honestly no no, I'm being honest too.

Sarah Krieger: 23:47

I love that.

Philip Pape: 23:47

I love that I do like on my show I joke about the coaching industry and myself and like we're not perfect, you know, and you should never claim to be. Yeah, I mean again, everybody's different. I tend to generally attract the person who is more like into the data and kind of side, but I will occasionally have a client who's like never heard of me and that's it. That's always interesting because I haven't like educated them through the podcast or through the basics yet and have to take them through that.

Philip Pape: 24:13

Look, I think you mentioned on the other show you have to have a conversation, you have to understand the person, understand their emotions. How can you be there for them non-judgmentally and take the emotional stress off? I think emotional recovery is a type of rest. It's a type of rest and recovery. And if, if a client, if I can be like look, don't stress, don't stress. I mean you can stress, but like I'm here for you, let's, let's go through this one step at a time. Uh, I can think of a client right now, sarah, who's fairly new to my program. She came in through a launch that I had and so it wasn't quite like seasoned with my stuff yet and there you can sense the impatience early on.

Philip Pape: 24:49

There's a lot of impatience of like I got to lose the fat, I got to lose the weight Right, and I'm slowly chipping away and finding her the parts that resonate with her, after realizing certain approaches were not working like the logical approach didn't work, and then the using data combined with emotion still didn't work, and I had to kind of slowly chip away at myself as a coach and learn about her to see what would help her feel like this is going to work for her, you know.

Sarah Krieger: 25:16

Yeah, and I think we talked we talked a little bit about this as well on the other episode, which was allowing yourself that space to say, okay, that didn't work. And I think again, as you just mentioned, we're all perfect, right, us coaches, we're just, we're amazing, you know right, even us as coaches have go, oh, that did not work with that client. Like, okay, now I know, like this potential type of person this might not work with, and stay away from it, like, okay, nevermind, and we move on from that. And then we're like, but again, we try again. We keep going after that next thing Be like, okay, well, let's try this instead.

Philip Pape: 25:52

So also taking that pressure of like this has to work or this is your only option, there's lots of options for lots of people, I think you know so yeah, I think I think if you are looking for a coach, look for somebody who's like a total, I'll say, bulldog or whatever, but very persistent, curious, skeptical, uh, growth mindset Like I. I try to convey through the pod One of the reasons I do the podcast to just like lay it all bare and let people know I take this stuff personally for my clients and for people even they're not my clients, you know they could just reach out for you know a Facebook message and I like want to help them. You know I want to. I don't want you to sit there frustrated and stewing and now the next 10 years you still don't have the result you want. Because there's a way, like there's always a way, and just know that that there's a way. Yeah, I think that's important.

Sarah Krieger: 26:39

I think it's huge, um. So I kind of want to talk about this part of it. We hear a lot of times, you know again, social media. I'm going to say this because it inundates us with all the things Meal timing, how can this meal timing we hear a lot about it and, oh, you have to eat 30 minutes or your protein synthesis is all this. It's not good, you're not going to grow muscles and all these things. Right, how does that work? When it comes, how can meal timing, or more meal structure, benefit the emotional side?

Philip Pape: 27:07

of the eating piece.

Philip Pape: 27:08

Oh, that's actually that's a great question, because it's it's tremendously helpful, especially when people come from a world where they think they have to eat a certain meal timing structure, like intermittent fasting Come on, folks, you know who I'm talking to or they have to eat three meals a day, or six meals a day, or snacks are bad, because snacks can be a great tool.

Philip Pape: 27:27

So it it does come down to the tracking of awareness of your hunger signals and your emotional triggers Kind of what we talked about on my show as well, where sometimes the simplest thing is to reduce that four hour gap in the afternoon where you're not eating and just put a snack in there. It might be Greek yogurt with some berries, right, where you try to check off all the boxes of I've got protein. It tastes good, it takes the hunger away, it fits with my calories, right, it serves all the things and it's not a chore. So, um, when I talk to clients about meal timing, I like to ask about training first. So if you're strength training or you should be strength who's not strength training listening to this?

Sarah Krieger: 28:06

I don't want to talk about that. There's a lot of people.

Philip Pape: 28:10

I know so well. That's where I start, because if you can fuel your training, it sets things off well for everything you're trying to accomplish with your body composition. It also sets yourself up for hunger signals elsewhere in the day, because we know training is linked to cortisol. How you eat is linked to recovery and cortisol and stress. Same thing goes for having like a good protein centric breakfast. You know, there's something to be said for what your grandma said about breakfast being the important meal, most important meal, because there is evidence that eating earlier in the day, again partly linked to cortisol, is going to make you less hungry later in the day.

Philip Pape: 28:49

Interestingly, even though your calories are kind of shifted to the front, doesn't sound intuitive, but it's true. Um, but it's different for everybody, right? So just tracking your hunger and then saying, okay, is it a meal timing thing? Am I eating at seven and then at four? Right, and I'm like starving in between? Well, that's an obvious solution to me when I see that. Or, or are you eating tiny meals and so you're never satisfied and you're eating like six tiny meals? Are you eating inconsistently? I think consistency of both calories and protein? And then, um, meal timing is actually telling your body. Things are safe and predictable, and that actually helps both with your calorie burn and your hunger signals. So yeah, there's a lot more where that came from.

Sarah Krieger: 29:32

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's important. Again, we touched on this on the other episode. I have a client we talked about this client who eats like 700 calories of snacks, but her lunch and dinner are like 250 calories maybe at times. Right, this would be a case that I say that the snacks need to go. The snacks are happening because we're not eating a proper meal 250 calories in my opinion, for an 1800 plus calorie person, that that's what we're intaking. 250 calories is nothing. And so I've advised this particular client to increase those meals and kind of, there's a couple of snacks that she has in the cottage cheese and fruit. I think that's great, like that's a great snack and that's a great snack, like you said, between that lunch and dinner, where it might be four to five, maybe even six hours who knows, depending on your schedule right, I think that can be really beneficial.

Sarah Krieger: 30:22

I've had another client who I worked with a while ago and she was very successful on my program and she realized that if she could get in about 600 calories at breakfast and it'd be about 40 plus grams of protein, so typically she would have some Kodiak cakes with some additional egg whites and some yogurt and some fruit and things like that. Like she really beefed up her breakfast. She was like that was a game changer for me for the rest of the day. And I think people underestimate the process of try it, see what happens and just go from there Like it's all you're going to do is get more data and more feedback of this went well. This did not go well.

Philip Pape: 31:03

Yeah, I mean, this is where the dichotomy between having the information and knowing what to do with it is is a good one, and again, where coaching can help.

Philip Pape: 31:11

But even just being educated, um, I can think of clients who, in a fat loss phase, for example, where things get a little more tight, right, the tolerances get tight, the numbers get lower, and all that where the macro composition, combined with the timing, is very sensitive for that person, where if, like, exchanging some protein for carbs could be exactly what she needs to have all the energy that, the opposite being, she's constantly feeling like in a low energy state, which then leads to emotional eating, even though the calories are the same.

Philip Pape: 31:43

So, like thinking about that composition and it isn't always protein, right, if you get enough protein, you've got flex now to say, okay, protein, fats, carbs, which one goes up and down and toggles around, and it does come down to experimentation. So if you, if you're in fat loss, you're starting to lose fat at a decent rate, you know, at a normal, consistent rate, and then the hunger starts to ramp up, don't think you have to continue the same eating pattern throughout the fat loss phase. It's always dynamic. You know not just the calorie level, but even the timing and the macro proportions, because, think about it, as the calories come down, with metabolic adaptation, every the protein tends to stay the same and the fats and carbs come down. Well, that starts to hit your energy and your hormones.

Philip Pape: 32:26

And if you have more than enough protein, I might say, just give some of that protein to carbs and do it before you work out and all of a sudden, boom, game changer. I can do another four or five, six weeks in the fat loss phase and feel roughly the same amount of hunger, and then I don't have binges. You know binging episodes. So it is all tied to emotional eating from a tool and data perspective in that way.

Sarah Krieger: 32:47

Yeah, I was going to ask about about the macro side, right, cause we were talking about the meal timing side, but how does the macro specifics play into? And I think that's. I just recently did a whole podcast on calorie calculators with, like the rate, and we have all these formulas and all these calculations and these are wonderful and they're amazing, but like they're not the Holy grail, like you have to also intuitively be able to go these are not my numbers or this is what's happening, and I need to flux this a little bit or raise this, lower that. Um, I think that that's a huge piece to this that a lot of people again, coaching is. This is why coaching is beneficial and, uh, because you already don't know what to do when you're already inundated with with information overload and you don't, like I know I'm supposed to eat better or more protein. How.

Philip Pape: 33:35

Yeah, I agree, I agree. And also when you're, when you're in fat loss, like and I know you probably do this as well you don't just jump right in Like you've got to get everything stable and dialed in and know a little bit about the calories and macros and then understand that macros can affect calories, can affect your metabolism and can affect like it's a big vicious cycle or maybe a virtuous cycle. I'll give you an example right, we know protein burns a lot more calories when you digest it than carbs, and carbs burn more than fat. So if you're, if you double your protein, if you just do this in a spreadsheet, you'll see. But like the same 500 calories with much more protein, you're going to burn more of those calories, meaning your, your actual metabolism is slightly bumped up, even though the calorie intake's the same. And now you can be in the same deficit and eat more, or you can be in a bigger deficit and eat the same, which is a game changer. Now if you again, if you have too much protein, now you're eating into fats and carbs, that could be a problem.

Philip Pape: 34:31

So when you talked about macros, sarah, I think of minimums. I like minimums. So a protein minimum and then fats and carbs also should have a minimum for, but you need to figure that out. And then now, anything above that has a lot of flexibility, and you're good to go. And then the cal. Here's the thing, though. If you are barely hitting your minimums, whatever calorie level that is, you probably don't ever want to go below it, even if you quote, unquote need to to lose weight faster. No, you're going to be miserable forever. You just won't do it.

Philip Pape: 34:58

You're better off eating a little more yeah.

Sarah Krieger: 35:00

Yeah, you won't be. It won't be sustainable, right, you're not going to be able to stick to it. You're going to end up eating your arm off. And then you're like, oh, I did it again. I fell back into the same pattern. And here we are again on the same cycle that we've been on for 25 years, and that's the patience piece.

Philip Pape: 35:14

It's like it's not going to happen as fast as you think. Just assume it won't and that's okay. Weight, in my opinion, don't even have a target. I mean, clients will come to me with the target weight and I slowly chip away. You know, at the mindset of all we can control is how much we eat and the calories and the macros we eat and what we do. Our body's going to do, what it's going to do. We can optimize as much as possible, but given that, now tell me how long it's going to take to get to a certain weight, that's you can't control that part. You can't. You can only control what you're doing here now in the process. So it's empowering and it's liberating when you realize that.

Sarah Krieger: 35:48

Yeah, it is, um. So one of the last questions that I have for you, before we start wrapping it up, is I'm really curious about, um, the our hunger cues, right, I? This is one of the first things. Again, if somebody comes to me and they're like, oh, I never eat breakfast, I'm never hungry, that's not normal. So we need to change that. Like, never being hungry is not normal, guys, ladies, gentlemen who listen, which is not a normal thing. So I'm curious how do we determine hunger cues, fullness cues Like how do I know when to stop eating, how do I know when I'm actually supposed to be hungry? Or what that feels like. And it's relationship to emotional eating, like what does the scientific research say? Versus like how does that play a role in being emotional person?

Philip Pape: 36:32

human being. That's a big question, sarah. That's a loaded one because the the simple. I guess the simple answer is you. You will have to figure out the difference between psychological and real hunger, um, through some level of tracking or awareness. I mean again going back to that um, I have like a journal or it's not, yeah, I guess it's a diary with a scale in it that says, like here's your hunger scale. It's based on some of the validated hunger scales. Sometimes they have the different happy face down to the grumpy face.

Philip Pape: 36:59

Yeah, love that, love that, and it's like okay when you're hungry.

Philip Pape: 37:04

You go to this scale and you see what the threshold is Like. Be honest with yourself, and if it's below the threshold then it's potentially psychological hunger. And there's some like little tricks like go get a glass of water right or take a pause I know we talked about that on my show as well Just to kind of resolve whether it's physical or not. The problem is, people are eating in such a shitty way for so many years that the hormonal milieu, as they call it, are like so screwed up between their thyroid and their cortisol and their gut hormones, semaglutide all of that's involved, like the stuff you hear in the weight loss drugs. You've got those and it's all involved to just make it go haywire.

Philip Pape: 37:42

Honestly, I would go back to lifting weights as like the thing I would shoot to the top of the list for people, as if you wanted to pick one activity that would, quote unquote, solve a lot of issues, probably magically, in pretty short order. It'd be lifting weights, including peri post-menopause women who are worried about hormones and everything else lifting weights. And if you can do that for a while and then see what's left and then start dealing with it, cause it affects your hunger signals as well, I'm not doing too much. Cardio affects your hunger, right. So I would like put the behaviors in place that you know make hunger worse Like sleep deprivation makes hunger way worse and address those. If you're not doing those, come on like that's what we got to do. Do those things and then whatever's left you can potentially address. That's a little bit different than starting from emotions, which could be necessary for certain people as well. It's just my. It's my approach with most of my clients.

Sarah Krieger: 38:35

Okay, no, I mean and I think that's the thing is like it really truly is a complex situation. No-transcript was, say, doing a leg day versus an upper body day, versus. Because I was like man, leg days, you're moving so much more, should be moving so much more weight. That was like I feel like I am, I can't get full in it and I'm eating the same things that I do. You know, I'm a pretty consistent like.

Sarah Krieger: 39:23

I like, I like my stuff. I keep it simple. So I was like I'm eating the same things and I don't know what's happening until I realized, like I'm looking at my data in my logger for all my, all my lifts and I'm like, oh, this man, that's a lot more weight than I lifted yesterday, or, man that's, I'm lifting way more weight than I'm lifting on leg day, than I am lifting on, uh, you know, a press day or a pole day, even depending on if I have deadlifts right. Or even noticing on those kinds of days where I'm doing more of my core lifts that it's like, wow, this, I'm significantly more hungry. So it's like we're afraid to learn about what our body is trying to tell us.

Sarah Krieger: 40:01

It's constantly talking to us and we're like shut up, just shut up. It's true, it's true. I think we're so afraid to listen to it.

Philip Pape: 40:09

Yeah, and there's interesting situations like gaining weight to build muscle, where I have a client who's like gaining, gaining, gaining, and they're like why am I hungry now? I, where you know, I have a client who's like gaining, gaining, gaining, and they're like why am I hungry now? I'm up at 3,500 calories, why am I hungry? That's actually your body telling you something legitimate. Still, it's because you're about to hit a hard gaining plateau.

Philip Pape: 40:26

I've seen it over and over again and if you don't jack up those calories, my man, you are going to stop right now and you need to eat maybe another 300 calories, right.

Philip Pape: 40:41

So it is your body telling you what to do and your example of training. It's interesting because there's a lot of talk about calorie cycling, carb cycling, stuff like that, and people want to overthink this stuff before they got the basics down. Generally, for most people, I found, if you like eat before your workouts, if you eat consistently, if you get enough calories, the hunger signals generally work out for themselves to where you don't have to do all this optimization, manipulation. The caveat is then, once you've done that, your body, your unique body, may have patterns of hunger that you want to listen to beyond, within that, and so I'll see this in client data, where they're always eating more on these two days of the week it might not even be the weekend and I'm like what's going on here? And they're like, I don't know, I'm just hungrier or especially women with their cycle, some women are a lot more sensitive. I've learned that, something I didn't know before I got into coaching the, the there's four phases, not just two, and like how they, how they all interact with.

Sarah Krieger: 41:27

Yeah, it's called crazy and non-crazy, right.

Philip Pape: 41:31

Yeah, Somebody said the different, the different people she are. She is during the month, but yeah, even with that, and then what you got to do is say don't fight it. Like lean into it and say, okay, I'm going to plan ahead so that those days are the ones that have more food and that generally solves the problem. Like, stop fighting it If you're eating mostly whole, nutritious foods. Um, yeah, those are my thoughts on that.

Sarah Krieger: 41:52

Yeah, I think you know, kind of back to the, the hunger cues, kind of like we've like I don't know. I also I'm 41. So I grew up in this. You know, slim fast. I remember seventh grade I told my mom my volleyball coach told me I needed a slim fast before practice. No, no, no, that was just me trying to lose weight, like for real. That's what I did, so, but anyway.

Sarah Krieger: 42:11

So I feel like that we have spent so much time again not listening, suppressing you're not hungry, you don't need to eat. You just ate 27 minutes ago. What's wrong with you? Or you already had breakfast, you don't need anything else. And that's something I, you know my kids drive a lot of, why I do what I do right now, and it's something I'm trying to teach them like we need to listen to what it what our bodies are telling us. They're constantly talking and we have spent so much time suppressing our hunger cues no, you're not hungry, or then we don't listen. It's like, well, I was full about four donuts ago, but I'm just going to keep going, so the donuts aren't a problem tomorrow.

Philip Pape: 42:54

Yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, go go. No, it's a little bit like no. And also, if you think of our evolution, like we are wired to seek out energy, like we're wired for it to survive, and but the environment has changed massively, right? So we are now wired to get obese. We are we're wired to get obese in this environment. So the whole nutritious, whole foods, nutrient density thing is not anything to be taken lightly.

Philip Pape: 43:17

It is extremely important to look at the industry ultra processed foods, everything happening with weight loss, drugs not not to judge any of that, but to look at your own choices and say look, how do I get the flexible approach? Because and we're at why I say that, sarah, and you know this just as well I, I use your hunger signals are highly manipulated in the wrong direction When're eating food that's effectively been discombobulated into its ingredients. A bunch of ingredients that never exist in nature are put together and they're pre-digested for you, just to make it gross for people. Not that I don't love my Oreos like you do, and we can have them. We can have it.

Philip Pape: 43:54

In fact, when you're gaining muscle, you could include more of those in. But yeah, it's just not going to make you full, because it shouldn't. It's already been digested. It's bypassing a bunch of your gut. You know, your gut goes from mouth to your ass, right, and there's steps, and you're skipping a whole bunch of steps and those steps involve hormones and saliva that keep you full. So you're skipping it all, right. No wonder we have a problem with obesity and all that.

Sarah Krieger: 44:18

So yeah, yeah, it's interesting. You're talking about how things are kind of put together, already processed for you. Again, I love jordan. Jordan did a thing about how, like, even the way they stack a snickers bar together like create like specific things and triggers that happen in the brain that make you want more of the thing, because you have the nugget, then you you have the peanuts, which is salty, the chocolatey, the caramel.

Philip Pape: 44:42

I can taste it right now. Yeah, right.

Sarah Krieger: 44:44

So it's like it's wild, but it's a real thing that I think again, people aren't, they're just awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness. So I appreciate all your time.

Philip Pape: 45:10

Is there anything else that, like, we didn't touch on that. You're like, man, I really want these people to hear this. I got to say this and collect a little bit of data. Don't obsess about it. Just if you're not sure, ask Sarah, ask me, and we'll give you a tip on like maybe what's the best thing for you to look at right now and that'll just massively change the game for you versus the other 95% of people who are just wandering through life without a clue. Without a clue.

Sarah Krieger: 45:32

And there are so many. Don't be one of them, don't be one, don't be one, don't be the one, without a clue. So thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. You guys, make sure you go check out Phillip's podcast Again. I call him the data king data king, whatever you want to call him and he's got some incredible, incredible guests on so many people in this industry that are just so fucking knowledgeable. So I again thank you so much for coming on here. I really appreciate you guys and I'll catch you on the next episode.

Philip Pape: 46:02

All right, and that was my conversation with Sarah Krieger about using data to understand emotional eating patterns, and what I love about these collaborations is they highlight how there's never just one approach to solving nutrition challenges. It's highly individualized, and while I naturally gravitate toward data tracking systems, sarah brings some other aspects about the psychology behind a relationship with food, and I think the most powerful approach honestly just combines the best of both perspectives using data to identify patterns while developing the emotional intelligence to understand what drives those patterns intelligence to understand what drives those patterns. As we discuss, something as simple as tracking your hunger levels or meal timing can reveal some surprises, possibly about when and why emotional eating occurs, and unless you have that, you just don't know. These data points they're not just numbers, by the way. They're sort of windows into the soul, into our behaviors, that can help us create meaningful and sustainable changes. That's what we're going for.

Philip Pape: 47:03

So, whether you personally are naturally more analytical like me or more intuitive about your nutrition, if you combine these, you're going to get a let's call it a complete toolkit to manage emotional eating. So I would say, be open to both. Be open to both because they can help you along the way. All right if you found value in today's episode. All I ask is that you hit follow on Wits and Weights right now to catch every episode when they come out Again Mondays, wednesdays, fridays and then go follow Sarah's podcast Don't Call Me Skinny in your podcast app because I believe she has some insights about nutrition and body image and other things that are really valuable to hear. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember that data and emotions are not opposite forces. They are complementary tools in building a sustainable approach to nutrition. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Can You Prioritize Health & Longevity and Still Build a Strong, Lean Body? (Anna Clough) | Ep 316

Get the other part of this conversation on Anna’s podcast “Get Strong and Healthy” where Philip breaks down how to train for aesthetics without sacrificing your health.

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Are you healthy just because you look the part? Strong from the outside but running on empty? Chasing steps, supplements, and skinny without feeling your best?

If you’ve been chasing surface-level goals, it might be time to rethink what true vitality looks like.

Today, Anna Clough, founder of Strong and Healthy and host of the “Get Strong and Healthy” podcast, unpacks what it means to pursue health and longevity. We’re talking about energy, vitality, muscle, metabolism, and how to build a strong body that lasts, without falling into diet culture extremes or burnout.

Don’t miss part two of this special collab—head over to Anna’s podcast to hear Philip break down the aesthetics side of the conversation.

Main Takeaways:

• Looking fit isn’t the same as being healthy

• Strength training is essential for longevity, bone density, and vitality

• Building muscle supports hormones, insulin sensitivity, and metabolism

• Crash diets and restriction backfire on long-term health

• You can look and feel great without sacrificing your well-being

Timestamps:

02:40 – Why you can’t chase every goal at once
05:38 – Biohacking vs. basics: what actually matters
09:31 – Muscle mass, injury prevention, and aging
11:25 – The “bulky” myth and strength as empowerment
14:47 – Bone health, lifting heavy, and real progress
18:33 – Dumbbells, barbells, or machines?
20:40 – Nutrition for health vs. diet culture extremes
23:01 – The danger of crash dieting and rapid weight loss
26:39 – Can you be too lean? What real health feels like
30:09 – Using blood sugar tracking to improve vitality
33:22 – Best ways to improve cardiovascular fitness

Get the other part of this conversation on Anna’s podcast “Get Strong and Healthy” where Philip breaks down how to train for aesthetics without sacrificing your health.

Building a Strong, Lean Body Without Sacrificing Health and Longevity

There’s a huge disconnect today between the image of "fitness" and actual, lasting health. If you’ve ever felt frustrated chasing lower scale numbers, grinding through gym sessions, and eating less and less—only to end up feeling worse—you’re not alone.

Looking fit and being healthy are not the same thing. And if you want to feel strong, energized, and vital for decades to come, it's time to rethink the way you train, eat, and live.

Today, we're digging into how you can absolutely build a strong, lean physique without giving up your health—or your sanity.

Is Your Goal Health or Aesthetics?

First, let's get clear: when we talk about health and longevity, we’re talking about more than just avoiding disease. We're talking about thriving:

• Stable energy and hormones

• Physical strength and resilience

• Strong bones, joints, and cardiovascular health

• A sustainable body composition that supports function and performance

Meanwhile, aesthetics—how you look—can be a valid goal too. But pushing too hard for extreme leanness, too fast or for too long, can backfire on your metabolism, hormones, and long-term well-being.

Good news: you can have both. You just have to prioritize wisely over time and understand that sustainable results don't happen through extremes.

Why Strength Training is Non-Negotiable

If you want real health and longevity, resistance training is the cornerstone.

Strength training isn’t just about looking good—it’s your anti-aging superpower. Here’s what lifting does for you:

• Preserves and builds muscle mass, which improves insulin sensitivity, metabolism, and hormonal health

• Strengthens bones and reduces the risk of fractures and osteoporosis

• Improves joint stability and injury resilience

• Supports better posture, mobility, and balance as you age

In other words, if you're not lifting weights, you're leaving health on the table.

And no—you won't accidentally get "too bulky." Building serious muscle is a slow, intentional process, even when you're doing everything right.

Methods vs. Principles

It’s not about following the latest trendy workout. It’s about applying the right principles:

• Progressive overload (gradually lifting more weight or doing more reps)

• Full range of motion to support joint health

• Heavy enough loads to stimulate bones and muscles

• Consistency over years, not weeks

Whether you use dumbbells, barbells, machines, or cables is less important than actually progressing over time. Free weights offer more bang for your buck in terms of coordination and joint stability, but any well-designed program that challenges you will move you forward.

If you're new or limited by equipment, start with dumbbells and bodyweight work. Machines are fine too if they allow you to push safely and effectively.

Smarter Nutrition for Health and Strength

The typical “diet culture” advice—eat less, cut carbs, lose weight at all costs—is the opposite of what you need for real health.

Instead, focus on fueling your body:

• Prioritize protein with every meal to support muscle maintenance and satiety

• Build your meals around colorful, whole foods for micronutrients and fiber

• Stay well hydrated for digestion, energy, and recovery

• Think fueling, not restricting

If you need fat loss for health reasons, do it intelligently:

• Use reasonable calorie deficits (not starvation)

• Take diet breaks and practice maintenance phases

• Recognize that crash dieting destroys metabolism, increases cravings, and tanks hormones

The goal is never to just get smaller. It’s to improve body composition—more muscle, less fat—while maintaining high energy, good recovery, and hormonal balance.

How Lean is Too Lean?

Yes, you can get "too lean" for health.

For most people, there's a sweet spot where you’re lean enough to feel fit, energetic, and confident without tipping into exhaustion, food obsession, and hormone disruption.

Getting peeled for a bodybuilding show? Probably not healthy long-term.
Walking around lean, strong, and well-fueled? 100% achievable and healthy.

Also remember: the method matters. If you got lean through smarter eating, strength training, and managing stress, you'll feel much better at a lower body fat percentage than if you crashed your way there.

Blood Sugar, Cardiovascular Health, and Longevity Tools

If you want a simple longevity cheat code: build muscle, walk a lot, and eat for blood sugar stability.

A few specific strategies:

• Walking and low-intensity movement keep resting heart rate down and metabolic health high

• A little high-intensity cardio (short intervals) improves cardiovascular fitness without high wear-and-tear

• Managing blood glucose through meal timing, balanced macros, and fiber can enhance how you feel and how you age

You don’t need biohacking gadgets or red light therapy. You need consistency on the fundamentals—and maybe a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) if you’re curious and want extra data, but it’s not required.

The Real Secret (Sustainability)

At the end of the day, none of this matters if it isn't sustainable.

Extreme diets, ultra-aggressive training, or chasing short-term aesthetics usually end badly. Instead:

• Build habits that fit your life (habit stacking is your friend)

• Strength train consistently

• Eat foods you enjoy that fuel you

• Prioritize sleep, stress management, and movement

If you do these things, you will be strong. You will be lean. And you will be healthy—not just for a season, but for decades.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you've been told that looking fit is the same thing as being healthy, it's time to question that premise. Maybe you've tried cutting calories, hitting the gym harder or chasing a lower number on the scale, only to end up more tired, more frustrated and still wondering why you don't feel better. The truth is real health isn't about those extremes. It's about having energy, balanced hormones, strength that you can use and a body that supports you for the long haul. Today, we're exploring the difference between training to look fit and training to live well. You'll learn why the obsession with aesthetics can sometimes backfire, what sustainable health actually looks like and how you can still build a strong, lean body without burning out or giving up your long-term goals. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.

Philip Pape: 1:01

I'm your host, philip Pape, and today I'm bringing you a special collaboration with Anna Clough, founder of Strong and Healthy and host of the Get Strong and Healthy podcast. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on, philip. Yeah, no, it's awesome because I know our missions are pretty well aligned. I know your mission is to help women step out of self-sabotage, get a sustainable, strong, vibrant life, and today we're going to talk about a big piece of that right, which is health and longevity how to train, eat and live for energy, for vitality, however we define it, even when you might have aesthetic goals, and so we're going to get into that in a second.

Philip Pape: 1:37

But I do want the listener to know that we've actually covered this from two topics, two angles. The other angle is the aesthetic side, and I want you guys to check out Anna's podcast where she's interviewing me about that. It's Get Strong and Healthy. Look it up in your podcast app or click the link in your show notes and again you get two halves of the same conversation. So it's two for the price of one right, even though it's free. So go check out Get Strong and Healthy, but right now let's dive into health and longevity. Anna, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Anna Clough: 2:07

Yeah, thank you again, and I'm excited to dive into this topic today for our listeners, and I thought the best way to kind of kick this off is let's define what is health and longevity versus aesthetics. And to me, I feel like this is very, you know, oh, it's so obvious type of thing. But we have to remember we've been in the industry for, you know, however, many years, and not everyone is knows what maybe aesthetics means and so kind of. What we're talking about is training and eating in terms of how we want to feel, how healthy we want to be in the long term of life, versus there's kind of another goal we can have which is how can we look the best that we can possibly look right now, type of thing. And there's a ton of overlap within both of these of how we get to these goals, but they are very different and there are different nuances within how we can go about reaching the optimal place of these goals, and so that's what we're going to be talking about today, and it's also something where, when I'm working with a client, when someone comes to me and they're like I want to, I want to optimize my health, but you know, I want to get.

Anna Clough: 3:24

You know, say shredded, for lack of a better word coming to my mind and they have all these goals at once. It's something where you kind of have to have that conversation of love that I'm the same way. I want it all, but especially in a short-term sense, we do kind of have to have the maybe like phases of prioritizing one over the other. If we're going to try and go for maximum aesthetics, there's going to be a little bit of sacrifice within your health, and if we're trying to go for optimizing our health, there probably is going to be a little bit of sacrifice when it comes to our aesthetic goals. And so that's a really good question for you listeners to sort of reflect on right now is what is most important to me right now and where are you at with that? There's no right or wrong, there's just different considerations to both, and I think both of our episodes are gonna be really, really beneficial to just help give you some clarity on how to reach these goals.

Philip Pape: 4:24

So I like that. You added the time component, right, Because that is so critical. When we think of a goal, some people get overwhelmed, right? They're thinking well, by the time I die, when I'm 100 or whatever age, like I want to live a long, healthy life, right, Don't we all? And I want to look good, Don't we all? And what you said is well, there's a time component, there's a phase or periodization component to it and you have to prioritize. At the end of the day, would you say, can you have it all long-term?

Anna Clough: 4:50

I would say, yes, you can. I think where a lot of the issue goes is especially when we're so excited about a fitness journey or a health journey we're getting into this world. It's very exciting when we start to see progress, see results, and then we kind of want to have it all at once. I think that's where we need to really set expectations of okay, like what's our focus right now, but in the longterm, maybe we do a ton of work on your health, we maybe overcome some internal issues that we might've had going on, we get you to a really amazing place. And then we can get you to a really amazing place aesthetically, where you feel amazing, but maybe talking in the sense of like maximum aesthetics, in terms of like bodybuilding I don't know Olympia type level, probably not we can't really have it all there but I would say that for most people who are general population, they want to look really good, they want to feel really good you can absolutely have it all, especially in the long term. Okay.

Philip Pape: 5:47

So maybe we should scope what we mean by health and longevity specifically, because there's a lot of misnomer or misunderstanding, I think, around both. Longevity is definitely a trigger word and a buzzword in the marketing industry. We were joking about the 200 supplement for longevity and people that talk about how they're smashing, you know, age related, uh, their chronological health or whatever. You know this 80 year old who's really like he's 40, you know all this. I'll call it nonsense in the industry, let's be honest. But it's the idea that you need all of these protocols and all this biohacking and the 1% solutions, the red light therapy. Is that what we're talking about or is it something else? Leading question, I know.

Anna Clough: 6:27

Yeah, definitely not what we're talking about. There's a lot of extremes within just you know the craziness of just like why you said all the supplements, all the crazy biohacking things which you know a lot of might have some merit to it. A lot of it might not, and even if things do have merit to it, it kind of comes down to what's really worth it in terms of you know, a time investment or energy investment, when it's maybe a marginal return that we're getting, and so definitely being skeptical of just the extremes on with anything really. But yeah, when it comes to just being healthy, having long-term health, it's going to really come back to you know, as unsexy as it is, the, the foundations and the basics of you know, strength, training of nutrition, of all right let's, let's talk about all these things and we'll talk about how we can, you know, optimize those things.

Anna Clough: 7:23

And then maybe the fun, fun biohacking tool here or there, the things that you feel make a great impact for you, those can be absolutely amazing, but as kind of like a cherry on top type of thing.

Philip Pape: 7:35

Okay, perfect. So then let's dive into specifics, starting with training, because again, there's confusion as to how to train, and also what I've observed you probably have as well is like the idea of the principles of training supported by the evidence versus all the different methods of training, right, like how many days per week and how do you train and what equipment and all that. Is there a difference between how you train for longevity versus aesthetics, and are those differences more of the methods, or are there principles that actually differ? What are your thoughts?

Anna Clough: 8:05

Yeah, great question. I think that overall, when it comes to longevity, when it comes to just like anti-aging strength training and resistance training I mean they're same thing, but training for strength versus training for gaining muscle, both are going to be absolutely incredible and I would say that you probably want to do a mix of both. And then, when it comes to you know you're going to talk more about aesthetics, but I would say it's probably the same kind of thing if we want to have those phases of you know all things, and so that's sort of what I would say there. But overall, strength training is honestly your like anti-aging superpower. So, when it comes to health, when it comes to living a long, healthy life of vitality, this is definitely what you want to be having as your foundation of how you train.

Philip Pape: 8:59

Yeah, and let's pull on that right. So someone says, well, do I really need to resist? You know preaching to the choir here, so I know we both know the answer. But someone says, do I really need to strength train? Because I heard longevity was more about, like you know, you want to have healthy joints and mobility. You don't want to get injured. So what about the yoga? And let's not even get into cardio, because that's a whole separate thing, but just some of the mental health practices and mindfulness stuff. Why is it? And when walking, why is that not enough?

Anna Clough: 9:28

Yeah, I have a lot of yogis who come to me and it's always really fun when you know all they know is yoga and calm and stretching. And then I introduced them to strength training resistance training it's it's a whole nother world. That is extremely necessary and you want to have just that combination. A lot of the times is going to be best, because if you're super into yoga, you might cause yourself some issues in terms of injury, in terms of just not strengthening your body in the way that it needs to, and it's unfortunately something I see a lot. And so we really want to be strong in terms of for, you know, our joints, for our just muscle, especially if we're thinking long, long term preventing falling, preventing, you know, injuries as we age.

Anna Clough: 10:21

There's some people that think, oh, I don't want to lift weights, you know I'm going to injure myself. It's like, no, you actually that's the total flip. You want to get strong, lift weights safely, because that's what's going to prevent injury in the longterm. And also after about age 30, the science is very clear that we start to naturally lose muscle mass every year if we're not actively working to maintain it, and so you know that is going to affect everything from your posture to your mobility, to your metabolism, to your hormones, metabolism to your hormones, and so there's really nothing more important or maybe that's an extreme way of saying it, but it's extremely important to really make sure that you are resistance training, you are actively working to build muscle, get stronger and, overall, just pursuing this as a part of your lifestyle.

Philip Pape: 11:19

We need more people to hear this, anna. That's why I don't mind talking about it every single episode till this podcast dies. What you just said is the flip of what people think. Sometimes, oh, I'm going to get injured or I have back pain or knee pain and so I don't want to lift weights, and it's like no, you start deadlifting. Watch that back pain go away if you do it the right way. And your phrase extremely necessary. I like that because it really is a non-negotiable. For all that, and then the falling and the aging and the frailty it affects a lot of us. I don't know about you. I have in-laws and grandparents and parents and all that that I see just decline fast when they get old because of the lack of muscle. It's the lack of function, but also lack of muscle. So, since you brought that up, why is muscle mass so critical beyond the physical you mentioned you hinted at, like metabolism. I know there's things like insulin sensitivity and whatnot, but like what are the big hitters there for health and longevity?

Anna Clough: 12:15

Yeah, so the more muscle mass you have, the more efficient your body is at handling blood sugar. So when you eat, you know, carbs, your body's going to know how to handle those carbs. It's going to have the muscle mass to be able to, you know, shuttle those that glucose into your muscles and be able to utilize that for energy, versus just kind of like letting it sit in your bloodstream, and so it's going to be better at handling blood sugar, insulin and also, just overall, it's going to help with inflammation, you know, preventing too much inflammation in the long run, and so all of those things are extremely important when it comes to our health, and so muscle mass is really going to be the core piece to just make all of that much better, do you?

Philip Pape: 13:04

still get the pushback that I don't want to be too muscular, or like it seems like it's just about vanity, things like that. Obviously it's the bulky thing with women, but what do you get on that front?

Anna Clough: 13:15

Oh yeah, totally. I hear that here and there. I feel like society is getting a little bit better at just, you know, overcoming that misinformation. But I always like to just tell people upfront, like you, don't have to worry about gaining too much muscle too quickly. A lot of us have been trying to do that, for you know, I tell people I've been trying to do that for 10 years and it hasn't worked. I'm not there yet. You know, I I don't um, it's not very easy to get bulky. It's very, very intentional, and you're not going to wake up one day and be like oh my God, I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger, what do I do? So you'll be okay.

Philip Pape: 13:53

I joke about it all the time because I'm like guys, I'm trying to chase physicals. I didn't get started until I was like 40, but it works. But it takes a lot of work, you know, in a good way, cause it's a process. It's a process, so you didn't mention injury risk. The other objection that I hear from folks that we kind of alluded to is like I want to have more mobility, flexibility or, um, maybe I don't want to lift heavy because I think that can be a problem and there are some risks versus benefits of heavier versus lighter training. Like, what are your thoughts on somebody who's just focused on longevity? They're like I don't care how I look at all, I just want the best thing for me, efficiently, for my time.

Anna Clough: 14:30

Oh yeah, like, in terms of you know what kind of, what kind of training routine to implement? Yeah, yeah, like do you like like.

Philip Pape: 14:37

Do you like lifting heavy Like I do, but not everybody says you have to? Do you like lifting heavy Like I do, but not everybody says you have to? And the evidence supports? There's a lot of flexibility right In terms of both strength and hypertrophy. So is there one that you lean toward with like newer clients who are, say, 40s, 50s?

Anna Clough: 14:51

Yeah, yeah, great question. I would really, at the start, lean towards strength. I really love building a foundation of strength with clients. I really love building a foundation of strength with clients. I think that for one, it's a little bit more rewarding at the start to really show clients whoa, like I'm lifting objectively this much more than I was six weeks ago and I'm blown away and showing. You know, especially I work with women most of the time but showing women, showing people how strong they can get and how we can like sort of unlock, that is really amazing from a psychology lens versus you know, we can, we can build a good bit of muscle.

Anna Clough: 15:37

But especially when I'm working with high achieving women, we tend to be a little bit critical on ourselves and I noticed that women will be like, oh yeah, I don't know, maybe it's there, I don't know, maybe it's not, and they'll kind of like downplay when we are making progress or maybe it's just a little bit harder to tell. So that's why I would say from one lens, why I really love strength training, but also thinking about when we are like lifting heavy and we're, we're really pushing, that's going to be extremely beneficial for also our bones. That was one thing that I meant to mention previously is our bone health is also really important to think about, and it's something that I don't think a lot of people do think about. And so knowing that resistance training, lifting heavy this is going to prevent our bones from degrading.

Anna Clough: 16:32

And I have a woman that I met a few weeks ago. She's in her early forties and the doctor told her she has osteopenia and she, she, uh. I asked her first question. I asked her do you resistance train? She said no, I don't work out. I hate. I hate working out.

Philip Pape: 16:53

Of course, I hate working out.

Anna Clough: 16:55

And I was like oh yeah, me too I don't like working out. Um, I try to, like you know, really make sure I can relate with that sort of stuff, but just it goes to show the importance of lifting, the importance of training for our bones, especially in the long term. So that's going to be a huge thing there piece of it.

Philip Pape: 17:23

I mean I personally believe, like when you're older and you've never lifted before, like that probably is the most efficient and best use of your time anyway because of all these benefits. Plus you're going to build muscle anyways from doing it. The idea of not liking working out, I mean you just mentioned what potentially is the fix for that is, when you make progress and you get that reward of feeling stronger, more functional, you're going to start liking working out more. Maybe it's still hard, right, maybe it's still hard, but there's just a deep satisfaction from that. That you don't get from YouTube workouts where you're just sweating with 10 pound dumbbells and there's like no progress, right, just to put a little imagery on that that's another thing to note is actually specifically this woman too.

Anna Clough: 18:03

She's like I think I'm going to start with some doing some YouTube workouts again and kind of had to come in with like want to make sure that that's actually enough, right, because a lot of the times the workout videos or just you know something like that where you're just exercising, maybe like a class where you're lifting the same weights every week, like that's really maybe not going to so much do it for you, and it's going to be something where we want to make sure we are resistance training properly, progressing you week after week, that we're really challenging your body in the way that we need to challenge it, and so that's just.

Anna Clough: 18:37

Something else to note is that you know, not all methods are created equal. However, we love any form of exercise. I'm not saying not trying to discourage anyone from exercising, but making sure that if longevity is really important to you, if aesthetics are, you know, of importance to you, it's going to be really important that you maybe skip the the um, the YouTube workout and you get some real good programming in your life. I can see why you're a great coach, anna. Right YouTube workout and you get some real good programming in your life.

Philip Pape: 19:03

I can see why you're a great coach and all right, cause you have that level of empathy and like I'm going to meet you where you are. But let's use some logic, some your goals that you have and shift you toward. Hey, if you want to get from A to B, this is the most effective tool for the job real quick. Do you have a preference for like barbell training versus machines, cables and some blend of free weights?

Anna Clough: 19:23

Yeah. So personally, I prefer really focusing on more dumbbell work, especially when someone's a bit newer, and just really being able to build some stability, being able to learn different movements before we can get into using a barbell, which is going to be starting at a little bit heavier weight, and so that's typically really starting with dumbbell work. However, if a client is dealing with maybe some sort of pain or some sort of specific issue, sometimes it might make more sense to really lean into machines for a bit and just utilizing a little bit more stability slash. Maybe I'm working with an older client who you know, maybe they're not able to see me in person and I'm maybe writing workouts for them. That's that's a time where I might utilize machines more so.

Philip Pape: 20:15

So it's a very I'm kind of all over the place with that answer, but no, that's good Cause, you're right, a lot of it can work, and you've got to meet them where they are. And if a client doesn't even have access to X or Y, what you know it's either do it or don't do it, then that's, that's not a good. That binary is not a good option, right? You want them to do something that gets them there.

Anna Clough: 20:35

Yeah, and I love like a little bit more of just a functional training style where you know a lot of the people that I'm working with they don't have you know five plus days in the week where they're able to get their mix of you know lack of stability training you know through like dumbbell work and things like that and then also doing machines. It's something where it's like what's going to be the most bang for our buck type of thing, and so I think that I would definitely say leaning towards free weights um, barbell, slash dumbbell is going to be where I'd want most people to be.

Philip Pape: 21:07

Yeah, it makes total sense. So then then let's segue into nutrition, cause that's the other big piece, and we could spend a lot of time talking about that and longevity and health. Let's see, do we start with the fueling that aligns with your training and how that can also support health, like I'm not sure. Or do we start with, like, restrictive dieting versus flexible dieting? You take it away, like, what makes the most sense here when we're thinking health?

Anna Clough: 21:30

Yeah, yeah, there's so many angles to come at this from. I totally agree. I'm like, where do we start? But what I would say first off is, when it comes to vitality, when it comes to feeling really good now and in the long term, it's really about less of restriction and eating less, and more about eating smarter, such as having protein with every meal, having you know colorful whole foods in your diet, making sure you're staying hydrated to really you know colorful whole foods in your diet, making sure you're staying hydrated to really you know support your hormones, your energy and your recovery, and just also like thinking of eating to fuel, right.

Anna Clough: 22:13

I see so often people are maybe just really under eating during the day or even around their training and then maybe are leading to so many cravings or just overeating later and in the long run, we're gaining weight due to that.

Anna Clough: 22:27

And so, just overall, trying to find a way to eat that's gonna support your body during the day, that's going to be balanced, that's going to not be such a maybe extreme of okay, we're yo-yo dieting, we're crash dieting, really hard, putting all that stress on your body, and then we're rebounding right, like we see a lot of people do, and so if the goal is fat loss, making sure that you're approaching it the right way, we're not eating way too little and that's going to just put you in a worse spot long termterm. I know that that's how I started my journey of just eating way too little. I was an athlete at the time and I think I set myself at 1500 calories and no wonder I had like binge eating tendencies coming out from that and that swung me in the other way, leading me to even worse health, and so we really want to sort of avoid those extremes with things and make sure that we're just taking the right approaches to nutrition to make sure that we're not affecting our health.

Philip Pape: 23:29

Yeah, I can get on board with that. I mean smarter and not being extreme. It's antithesis to how everything's marketed with the weight loss industry, where people want results now but the result now. Maybe tell the listener why. Is going after like rapid weight loss or weight loss at all costs or not a smart way to weight loss not good for your health and longevity?

Anna Clough: 23:51

Yeah, oh, that's a great question, cause, again, there's so many, so many components to that. I think that, first, from a just a physiological stance, your body's going to really fight you in terms of that, when you crash, diet so quickly, you lose a ton of weight. Your body's going to be under so much stress and, at the end of the day, your body doesn't want to change like that, it wants to stay the same, it wants to feel safe, it doesn't want to have all this. You know this stressor. And so if you put that big stress on your body, you, you know, change really, really quick. You're going to have your hunger cues really fighting you. You're going to have your probably like food, noise and cravings really starting to fight you there.

Anna Clough: 24:43

And then, overall, like your hormones might, you know, tank your metabolism, those different things that you know, just from that stress, your body's like I don't care about producing optimal hormones right now. I'm trying to survive with whatever this person's doing. I don't know why I'm not getting fuel. I'm trying to survive with whatever this person's doing. I don't know why I'm not getting fuel. I'm going to start, you know, kind of shutting down and conserving whatever energy I can.

Anna Clough: 25:05

So that's how you can kind of think about, like, what your body's doing and why it's so important to come at things from a, you know, periodized sort of long-term lens of. Maybe you have a big goal of losing a lot of weight. Amazing, maybe, instead of going really hard, really fast, doing it all at once, we make sure to add in some diet breaks in there, to add in you know, a proper reverse, add in some just maintenance days and making sure that we can give your body that those feelings of safety, first and foremost, just helping boost your metabolism. And so, um, yeah, definitely not crash dieting, not going on those crazy fad diets, is going to be really important to overall, just, uh, maintaining good health.

Philip Pape: 25:53

Yeah, I think you tied a couple of concepts there really well. First, I think, is the idea that, yes, we many people need to drop some excess body fat from a health perspective, but the way that they do it is extremely important, and you're talking about being reasonable, taking the right glide path or the rate of loss, and not just because it avoids, like you said, the metabolic effects, but it does help along the way with getting it done successfully, like not having the hunger and the food noise and the cravings which is tied to sleep and recovery and stress. It's so interconnected. And you just mentioned safety, which is like the fifth time in the last month I've had a guest on where we got into that and I don't know if I'm hearing it more or just like the word is getting around, cause I'm sure you've talked about it a long time. I'm just saying I noticed, anna, the more more discussion around that and like homeostasis, safety, giving your body some love, let's say, someone figures that out, they work, they hire you and figure it out or they listen to the podcast, and where do they want to end up?

Philip Pape: 26:55

What I mean by that is, yes, we have periodization, but one of the confusing aspects people say is well, I kind of want to end up lean right and I want to look good and feel good and also live a long life, but can you get too lean or it's not healthy. And also, what am I trying to say here, ed? I'm trying to say here's my experience. When I get too lean and it's difficult to do that it's not a place I want to necessarily sustain. I actually want to like come back up a little. That makes sense, like I want to have a little bit of fat on my body and kind of be in that walking lean. Like what are your thoughts on that whole concept of what's the long game here for health?

Anna Clough: 27:29

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Lisa: 27:33

Hi, my name is Lisa and I'd like to give a big shout out to my nutrition coach, Philip Pate. With his coaching, I have lost 17 pounds. He helped me identify the reason that I wanted to lose weight, and it's very simple Longevity. I want to be healthy, active and independent until the day I die. He introduced me to this wonderful little app called Macro Factor. I got that part of my nutrition figured out. Along with that is the movement part of nutrition. There's a plan to it and he really helped me with that. The other thing he helped me with was knowing that I need to get a lot of steps in. So the more steps you have, the higher your expenditure is and the easier it is to lose weight. When it's presented to you like he presents it, it makes even more sense. And the other thing that he had was a hunker guide and that really helped me. So thank you, Philip.

Anna Clough: 28:21

There's, I think, a lot of what we're seeing online, especially nowadays. There's a lot of glamorization just about being ultra shredded and 10 pack yeah.

Anna Clough: 28:31

Yeah, and just as a good reminder for everyone, it's something we always have to remind ourselves is just because someone is really really lean does not mean that they are thriving or they're really healthy. And I've been this myself. I've seen women do this a lot, where you know they're under eating, they're overtraining, they're constantly fatigued and they look really fit on the outside. But just remembering that true health is internal. It's how you're sleeping, it's how your digestion is working, if your cycle is regular, if you have energy, if you feel strong, if you feel grounded, all that sort of stuff, and so you can absolutely get lean and be healthy. But just remembering that it doesn't always, they don't always equal each other, but I would say that, especially for women, but also for men, being totally peeled, meaning like bodybuilding stage ready, that's not going to be a healthy place to be for anyone. And so, yeah, just making sure you do have a healthy amount of body fat, we're not too, too lean. But also just remembering that, like I'll give a personal example I was at this weight that I am now a few years ago and I felt extremely hungry, I felt cold all the time. I felt so many cravings and this hyper fixation about food. It felt very unhealthy for me and so, you know, I gained weight, was able to, you know, get past some of those issues and I just thought to myself I guess I'm just not meant to be that lean. But recently I've been able to get this lean and not have those issues that I did before because of the methods that I've been taking. And so that's a little caveat just to like think about is try and not have that like fixed mindset about. Oh, just cause I felt this way when I was lean means I have to feel that way next time, because just where your body's at hormonally, where your body's at in all the ways, the methods that you take to get there, are going to matter a ton. And what I've done now is being able to really work on my blood sugar regulation, which, oh my gosh, if you guys have it, that's a nice like um, you know a little bit more in like the biohacker world type in my eyes, but it's just a really amazing health tool to be able to track your blood sugars. And how you can do that is take a fasted blood sugar reading with a little uh blood sugar reader device first thing in the morning and you can see what your fasted blood sugars are. And then also, you want to get some readings post-prandial, so two hours or so after you eat actually after your last bite of food set a two hour timer, take your blood sugar and see where it's coming to, for you know people who are really stressed. You know you're training really hard. Like me, I've been an athlete for a long time and I, you know, put pressure on myself in terms of business and all that you know, fun stuff. Um, that really led me to just having dysregulated blood sugar, and I think probably for a while, and I didn't even know it, and that was a really big key for me to say, all right, I need to heal this, and that's what's gotten rid of so many cravings for me, helped me just come to a much better place, and so that's a really nice tool to use. If you'd be interested in trying that out, I highly recommend.

Anna Clough: 32:20

I actually just got a CGM continuous glucose monitor to try out. I hear a lot of conflicting things about the accuracy. However, I'm kind of looking at it as okay. Even if it's not accurate. You're going to be able to see the differences and see. You know the changes. So you know, my coach told me we're going to add five to 10 points to each reading. Just, you know that's what we typically do. So that's what. That's what I'm currently doing and that's just been a big catalyst for my journey, but I'm so off track from what the question is.

Philip Pape: 33:00

And we don't need to pick it back up. It's okay Just to pull on that thread a bit. I do love the idea of okay, if the advice is to eat more fiber and balance your macros and balance meals, because the result is it helps with your blood sugar, just one way to do it. It's nice to have data and trends that kind of correlate. Okay, this is what happens when I do this. Not get freaked out because I eat potatoes and my blood sugar spiked, right.

Philip Pape: 33:22

So, um, in fact, holly Baxter was on the show, right, ifpp bikini pro. She's awesome, and she talked about using the calories burned from your wearable and exercise, which originally I was like, oh no, what's she going to say? She's like using the trend of that over time and how it changes to see how active you are and how much volume you may have. I'm like, oh, that's cool. Like the number is not accurate at all, but like, for you, the trend over time could tell you something, so it's the right way. So, in the interest of time cause I know we're trying to keep these two episodes like reasonable Can I do like three rapid fire questions for you? Yeah, go off, all right. So the first one, which is kind of a big side topic, but what's the best way to improve cardiovascular health and markers, like you know, resting heart rate.

Anna Clough: 34:02

Ooh, yeah. So walk, do some sort of cardio that you enjoy If that is biking, that is some hiking, if that is, you know whatever that might be for you and then potentially some interval type training, some high intensity type training. Even just a few minutes per week is an amazing way to improve your cardiovascular fitness Cool, Just don't overdo the cardio right. Yeah, don't overdo it. It's a great compliment to strength as being your base.

Philip Pape: 34:37

How do you lower cholesterol? So people are that's, that's a marker of health Everybody and their doctor knows to look at. How do you do that? Lower your lipids, your LDL?

Anna Clough: 34:45

Yeah, great question. So, first off, nutrition is going to be huge Overall. Just, I mean, improving all of these different factors is going to lead to that, like such a holistic approach is going to be really what's going to help with that.

Philip Pape: 35:02

And what is your favorite habit framework.

Anna Clough: 35:05

Habit framework who, like as in building, building habits there's so many ways to approach it, yeah absolutely so. My where my brain went immediately was habit stacking love, habit stacking love. Taking a habit that you already do every single day and pairing that with something you're trying to build. That is going to make it stick. That's going to make it so much easier. So, if you're trying to implement something, find something you already do and just do both same time.

Philip Pape: 35:35

Love it, love habit stacking. That's a great tip for folks, just if they say I don't have time for that, no, you're doing something else that you can stack, all right. So, kind of to recap, it sounds like if you do the right things for your body in terms of taking a reasonable approach, strength training, eating nutritious foods and protein, keeping the stress management there, getting enough sleep guess what? All the things we you and I talk about all the time it's going to give you health and longevity and it's probably gonna make you look good too. So I know, if you love today's conversation, um, again, go check out Anna's show get strong and healthy. What a simple, easy to remember name for a podcast where we're going to talk about the aesthetic side of this, and you're going to hear some overlap, for sure, but there's always little differences. Is there any last thing about health and longevity that you really wanted to cover that we didn't get to?

Anna Clough: 36:23

Yeah, I think really just making sure you're coming at your journey from thinking about building a sustainable lifestyle. At the end of the day, we can take some fun you know short-term strategies but we also need to make sure that we are showing up for these different values we have of taking care of ourselves, eating well, working out, training, whatever in the long run and making sure that you can just keep this up so that you can be strong and healthy today and for the longevity.

Philip Pape: 36:57

Sustainability, the underlying glue that binds all of this. Ask yourself if what you're doing is, if it isn't, something might be able to change and do everything Anna's suggesting. It doesn't take a lot to incorporate those and get a massive result for your effort. So thank you again, anna, for doing this. Again, I'm excited for the collaboration. Glad we got to talk through at least the basics. It's a big topic, I know. Go find Anna's podcast. Get Strong and Healthy. Use the link in the show notes. And, anna, thank you for coming on.

Anna Clough: 37:26

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.