Are Your Fitness Goals in Conflict? (Fat Loss vs. Muscle vs. Longevity vs. Endurance) | Ep 441

Are you strength training, watching your nutrition, doing cardio, and still not seeing the fat loss or muscle gains you expected?

The problem isn't effort. It's that your fitness goals are in conflict, physiologically fighting each other, and every week you train this way, you're getting further from all of them.

Philip breaks down exactly why fat loss and muscle building require opposite nutritional environments, whether the interference effect from concurrent training can reduce your strength gains or hypertrophy, and why chasing peak performance can actually work against longevity. 

You'll learn the specific conditions where body recomp can work and the evidence-based approach that gets you to every goal faster.

Take the free Fitness Lab quiz for a custom plan built around your primary goal (20% off with the link in the show notes:
https://bit.ly/fitness-lab-pod20

Whether your priority is to build muscle, lose fat, improve your endurance, or increase your longevity over 40, this episode gives you the framework to stop stacking goals and start making real progress.

Philip also walks you through a 2-minute "Goal Audit" exercise you can do tonight to identify your primary focus for the next 12 weeks and put everything else on maintenance mode.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Stop chasing every fitness goal simultaneously
1:02 - The SAID principle
5:13 - Why you can't lose fat and build muscle at the same time (and when you can)
9:04 - How real is the interference effect (does endurance training blunt strength gains)?
12:03 - When strength training and longevity goals conflict
17:41 - A 12-month plan for faster results
19:58 - How little training do you need to maintain your gains?
23:59 - The compounding effect of using nutrition phases and training blocks
28:40 - How to include cardio and other goals without hurting your primary focus
32:19 - Why recovery and sustainability are "meta" goals
38:10 - When body recomp and concurrent training actually work

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:02

  You might be strength training, watching your nutrition, doing cardio, doing all the things, and still not seeing the fat loss or muscle gains you expected. And the problem might not be your effort. It might be that your goals are fighting each other. And every week you train this way, you're getting further from all of them. Today I'm breaking down exactly how fat loss, muscle building, endurance, and longevity conflict at the physiological level, why the popular do-it-all approach produces mediocre results and a simple sequencing method that gets you to every goal faster. If you keep stacking goals without a plan, you could spend the next 12 months working hard and ending up right where you started. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, founder of the Fitness Lab app. And you have probably been told, or maybe you just assumed, that a good fitness routine should cover all the bases at once. You're gonna lose fat, you're gonna build muscle, you're going to improve endurance, you're gonna live longer, and if you're eating well and training consistently, all of those should just happen together, right? And it sounds reasonable, sounds intuitive, and it tends to be wrong. Not entirely wrong, right? It puts you well above the average population doing some of those things, but wrong enough to keep you stuck or frustrated or plateaued for a pretty long amount of time, sometimes months or years, if you don't understand why. And this is one of the most common patterns I do see in people my age who are over 40, who come to me frustrated and doing all the right things, but they're just doing all the things at once. And that tends to be the problem. Their body has no idea which signal to respond best to, and they're kind of mediocre at everything. Not only are they mediocre, I think it actually sets all of it back even further. So today I'm gonna walk you through why these goals interfere with each other at the cellular and metabolic level. And then I'm gonna give you a straightforward sequencing approach that gets you to every one of those goals, just not in the exact same training block. And then stick around to the end because I'm going to walk you through a 60-second exercise I call the goal audit. You could do it tonight with a pen and paper. You'll know which goal to prioritize and which ones to put on maintenance for the next three months, but you're gonna want to listen to the whole episode to understand how to get the most out of that exercise. All right, let's get into it and talk about the advice that sounds logical, but isn't always. And that's all often the case in this fitness world, isn't it? Something that sounds like it should work doesn't necessarily work. And that is, you know, train for all the goals at the same time, eat quote unquote clean, be consistent. The results are gonna come if you just have a fitness lifestyle. And you hear it in things like the boot camp marketing, the boot camp classes or hybrid training programs, which is really are really popular right now. I hear from a lot of listeners about, you know, how do I combine endurance with lifting? And that's why I'm doing more episodes like this. By the way, our next episode is going to be about how to combine the two. But the promise is that one lifestyle or one routine that you just continue to follow is going to make you leaner, more muscular, better conditioned, healthier all at once. Now, I've used some of that messaging myself when I talk about, for example, lifting weights, which was in our last solo episode about how powerful it is for really checking off all the boxes of fitness, but it doesn't maximize specific goals depending on what those goals are. So if you're not getting results, you know, rather than hitting your head in a wall and just working harder and thinking you need more discipline or I just need to do better, it's probably more about the physics and you're not efficiently going after the right goal right now. And this brings up the concept of periodization. Your body is going to adapt specifically to the demands you place on it. Okay, this is specificity. The idea of specificity is really, really important. And I hope you understand it and really listen carefully. In exercise science, they call it the said principle: specific adaptations to impose demands. You get better at exactly what you train for, right? Heavy squats don't necessarily improve your 10K. Now, there's always little caveats relative to other variables like how much you weigh and what skill how fast you are and your muscle fiber types and all of that. But we know that people trying to maximize a long distance running outcome, their number one priority isn't heavy squats, even though squats can be helpful or helpful, especially in the offseason. Just like marathon training is not going to build your strength or your deadlift PR. Now it's obvious when you compare very different things. So that's easy. But when it gets, I think, costly for you as an individual, like the time you invest, is when your goals actually need to have opposite conditions to succeed. And then you're trying to provide both at the same time. So think about what that looks like in practice. Let's say you want to lose fat, so you're in a calorie deficit, but you also want to build muscle, which works better at maintenance or a slight surplus. That's a very simple one, right? So, you know, let's say you're lifting four days a week for strength for hypertrophy, but you're also running three days a week for endurance and heart health. And maybe you're, you know, you want to compete in endurance sport. I've worked with bikers and runners, for example. Your legs in that case may not be recovering the way they need to, which then stalls your strength and then also stalls your endurance. And then your body fat barely changes in the first scenario because the deficit is too mild to drive fat loss, but too aggressive to support muscle growth. And you kind of get this slow, wonky, half-assed body recomp, right? And by the way, listen to my other episodes on body reconp. There's there's a more efficient way to do body reconp that, in my opinion, involves the very slightest of surpluses. So most people respond to this by just doing more, doing harder, you know, stricter dieting, whatever. They think they just need to ramp up one of those dials, like that it's not strong enough, but you actually haven't addressed the root cause, right? You're pouring more effort into a system that's not working for you. So, what I want to look next is what's happening under the hood. Like, why do your goals fight each other and address the three biggest conflicts that we tend to have so that we can attack them? Okay, the first one is fat loss versus muscle gain. This is the most common one. To lose body fat, you have to have a deficit, a sustained calorie deficit. And for a lot of people, that's gonna be in the say three to five hundred calories below maintenance is a good sustainable deficit for a lot of people, right? Depends on your body weight, depends on your expenditure. And what does your body do? Okay, it doesn't have enough energy coming in, so it pulls from your stored energy, your fat cells to make up the gap, and you lose fat. To build muscle optimally, though, you need enough calories to support that new tissue that's being generated, right? The amino acids from your protein combine to form new skeletal tissue, new muscle mass or skeletal muscular tissue. And for most people, that means not being a diet, and that means being at least at maintenance, if not a little bit above that, or even more above that, right? Like 100, 200, 300 calories above. And so these are opposite nutrition environments. Now, can you do both at the same time? Yes, you can do both at the same time. It's called body recomposition. We talk about it all the time. We've seen studies that support body recomposition. A 2020 meta-analysis by Barricat, Barricat, great research source if you're looking for good citations. Barricat and colleagues found that untrained individuals can gain muscle in a deficit. A 2021 study by Campbell showed that train lifters can recomp under very tight conditions. You have to have high protein, around a gram per pound, progressive overload, and only a very, very mild deficit. And when I say mild, I mean as much as 10, 15, 20% below maintenance. It's not nothing. But the rate of change is slow, very slow in some cases. Maybe, maybe a half a pound of muscle gain a month alongside a pound or two of fat loss. Now, for someone, for many of you, that might be perfectly fine way to live. And we again we talk about that. I have a body recomp workshop in physique university where we go over all these scenarios. But once you've been lifting consistently for even a couple of years and you got to a kind of healthy body fat, then you're you're barely gonna notice these kinds of changes if you keep trying to recomp, in my opinion, from my experience. Whereas if you have a focused 12-week cut and a focused four to six months, let's say six month building phase, the visible change is gonna be more dramatic and in a shorter period of time, even though you're doing two different things and you have trade-offs that come along with that. Right. That's why I assume I'm a big fan of bulking and cutting, but it doesn't have to be extreme. It just has to be precise and focused. So that's one. The second one is strength and muscle versus endurance. Okay, a lot of you are asking about this these days. Uh hybrid training, concurrent training comes up. People are kind of getting more into cardio again. I shouldn't say again, but like lifters are more interested in cardio because they know it doesn't really interfere as much as we used to think. And this one runs really deep. It's called the interference effect. We're gonna talk about this in detail in the next episode. It was first described by Hickson in 1980. That was the year I was born, by the way. Classic days. When you combine heavy resistance training with high volume endurance training, the interference effect says you're gonna blunt your gains in both. And there's there's still some truth to it, although it's been overblown. The mechanism is that resistance training activates one pathway, it's the mTOR pathway, and that drives muscle protein synthesis. Endurance training activates the AMPK pathway, and that improves your mitochondrial density and your energy efficiency, right? These are like different energy systems and different uses of nutrients. So these pathways kind of suppress each other a little bit. A 2012 meta-analysis by Wilson and colleagues found that concurrent training reduced strength gains by about 15 to 20% and hypertrophy gains by about 28% compared to resistance training alone. Now that's an older study. In the next episode, we are actually gonna get into how to combine lifting with endurance in a way that doesn't cause that effect. Okay, so I think again, you have to take it with a grain of salt and look at how the cardio and lifting are being put together, the amounts of it, the volume, the order, all of that, there's definitely a way to have a decent amount of cardio alone with your lifting and it not be an issue. We're gonna talk about that in the next episode. But as far as the actual practical nature of this, when you have those two different goals, you're trying to build strength over here or you're trying to build for endurance over here, it's kind of a practical recovery problem. Because if you're running, say 25 or 40 or 50 miles a week on top of squatting and deadlifting, your legs might not be recovering. Okay. And again, it's it's the volume, the volume matters. Training quality will drop when that happens, then you're gonna accumulate fatigue, and then you're gonna work really, really hard. And the numbers may not go the way you want because you're trying to do two goals. Now, a few moderate cardio sessions a week, they're not gonna wreck your gains. Also, some more rigorous endurance work won't wreck your gains if you're trying to maintain, like if you're not trying to just go all out and build PRs. So that's why I think it matters like what degree to each goal you have. And we know certain modes like running is gonna cause a little more issues for people than say cycling, and it has to do with the eccentric use of your muscles, right? And the tearing and the fatigue and all that. So, again, we're gonna talk more on the next episode about that specific topic, but it is important, and I am covering it today, kind of at the goal level. The third conflict is performance versus longevity. And this is more subtle because muscle mass is one of the strongest predictors of longevity and healthy aging. And so maintaining and building strength and lean tissue protects against falls, protects against metabolic disease, helps with insulin sensitivity, so it protects against resistance, protects cognitive against cognitive decline, right? So, in that sense, strength and longevity actually do align really, really well. But once you start chasing a more extreme level of performance, it could work a bit against longevity. So, for example, trying to keep very stay very shredded with a really low body fat percentage, well, you're probably causing some adaptation, if not some disruption to your hormones and your sleep, your immune function, all of that, right? We you you probably heard horror stories of physique competitors having a very unhealthy situation when they're right at around showtime, you know, and combine that with something like chronic overtraining, which is endemic in people who are trying to chase performance. You know, you think elite athletes and CrossFitters and even powerlifters and whatever, which can drive things like inflammation if you're doing it too much. Extended calorie restriction also adds stress to this whole thing. And you may be doing that because of a performance goal, but it can lower your metabolism, it can compromise things like bone density or whatnot. And so the the path to living well for decades to come is has got to include some level of, I'll say moderation and recovery or balance or whatever word you want to use as an essential variable of the whole thing. So recovery is a good word for it. I, you know, not just hard training, harder and harder training. And those of us over 40 notice this because we have a lower ability to recover and we have, you know, it's harder to come by sleep because of our lives. And also joint what joint pliability and and our synovial fluid and all that stuff seems to be less responsive. We're less resilient physically than we were when we were younger. That's no excuse not to still train and still perform and improve. But most people conflate peak performance with optimal health, and they're related, but they're not the same thing. Okay, so those are the the mechanisms and the conflicts, and they're they're pretty much physiological, right? What I just talked about, they're not psychological conflicts, they're actually physiological. What do you do about it? What do you do about it? All right. So the fastest way to reach all your goals is to stop chasing them simultaneously. And the fix to that is to sequence your goals combined with periodizing your goals. So periodization is the word I would encapsulate this whole thing with sequencing or periodization. You pick one primary goal for a defined period, let's say eight to 16 weeks. You have a set period in mind, not because you're trying to chase the scale by a certain date, but because that period of time makes sense for the goal. And then you design your training, nutrition, recovery around that one goal. Your other goals are go into a maintenance mode and then you rotate through them. So any one goal comes to the top. That's your priority. All the other goals are maintenance mode. And what's cool about this is the maintenance mode stuff is still gonna need some attention to maintain them, right? But not nearly as much as to push them forward or to improve. And then you rotate through them. And by the way, we're gonna go through this step by step right now, real quick. I'm working on a relaunch. You guys have heard me talk about physic university. I'm gonna re-launch soon something called Eat More Lift Heavy. Pretty cool. Because after all these years, I realized what people really need is this exact approach of sequencing and periodization, essentially written out for them over a six-month period. And I think even the best one-on-one coaches have trouble doing that. So I'm actually put creating a whole system for that. Stay tuned. I know it's a tease. I don't actually have there's no way to sign up or anything like that. Of course, if you're interested, you could always reach out. Or if you come into physique university now and join, I'm gonna give a really nice deal to people who are already in. So you can come in, start getting the courses and the help and support to hit your goals now, and then check that out when it comes out. Anyway, here is the step by step. All right. Step one is to pick your primary goal. Okay, sounds obvious, but it it it's it's something people skip. They just go and they assume, okay, I'm gonna get fit, and here we go. If you could only improve one thing about your body composition or fitness over the next four months, what would make the biggest difference? So answer that question right now. That's your focus. If you could only improve one thing, okay, don't say I want to build muscle and lose fat. That's two things. Say one thing. And it could be specific, it could be I want to reduce belly fat, I want to get a my first pull-up, I want to deadlift PR, I want to compete in a powerlifting meat, I want to compete in that endurance race, that 5K, 10K or ultra marathon, whatever. That's your one thing. One thing, start there. Step two, you're going to put everything else into maintenance. And this is where people resist because it feels like they're giving something up or they're gonna slow everything down, but it's not. Maintaining anything is dramatically easier than building it. And for example, research shows muscle mass can be maintained on as little as, I'll say one third is like the absolute risk-free, but I've heard as little as one eighth the volume used to build the muscle. So it's somewhere in that range, meaning a lot less, as long as you keep the intensity high, the the stimulus high, right? Like the weight on the bar, you know, you're training close to failure, you're still trying to use progressive overload. So if it normally took you 15 hard sets per muscle group per week to build, you could probably maintain that with as little as like five sets a week. And then you can switch up your training schedule accordingly to save all that time and recovery capacity for your primary goal, if if if that's not your primary goal. So if let's say fat loss is the priority, then of course you're gonna be in a moderate deficit. We're not trying to body recop, we're trying to go all out into a deficit, but keep that protein high, keep lifting to preserve the muscle, keep the cardio at like the low intensity stuff like walking, easy cycling, maybe a little sprinting that kind of is very recoverable, even if it still bumps up your calorie burn a little bit, if that's what you're going for. You are not chasing PRs on your lifts. You're not training for a race. If muscle building is a priority, uh if fat loss is the priority, you're in a deficit holding on to muscle. Now, if muscle building is a priority, you're gonna eat at maintenance or slight surplus. Train harder and with the idea to get PRs. And the cardio, you have maybe a little more capacity for some cardio, but it's still more easy type of sessions versus a ton of miles, let's say, because you're trying to be an endurance athlete, athlete. Right. And I can go through this list. I could say, okay, if you're an endurance athlete, you've got to put that number one, figure out your easy days, your medium days, your long days, if that's something you have, make it very recoverable. You got to have a build-up training plan both on the cardio side with the like miles per week and sprints and all that, as well as on the food side where you might be going a little bit lower protein and a little bit more carbs as you get closer to an event, let's say. So, but and while you're doing that, you might only train two days a week, and it might be a very minimal program to maintain your muscle and strength. So you get the idea, right? Now, the if longevity is the goal, that that gets a little trickier because really, really the thought there is to optimize everything you're doing so that it's sustainable for decades to come, which means you're not necessarily chasing PRs or huge amount of fat loss or a huge endurance output. And it's a, I think of longevity as a little bit more of a balanced approach where everything is kind of being maintained. And maybe you focus on some things like your diet and your nutrition, your nutrient sufficiency, hormones, those kinds of things, if that makes sense. All right. Step three then, once you've got your primary goal and then what's in maintenance, is to plan the sequence across your year. I like to think of a 12-month period. It's a nice bit of time to plan things out and think of it in phases. So if I were working with a client over a year and we're thinking of body composition change, I'm probably gonna plan a month or two of prep work for fat loss phase, probably 12 to 16 weeks of fat loss at most, and then like six to nine months of muscle building. Now, it might not be in that order, right? It might switch around based on what the immediate goal is, but you would plan it over the whole year. Now, if they have an endurance focus in there, well, you'd have to fit that in somewhere, maybe an eight-week block. If they have a powerlifting meet, maybe a block there, and then they're not dieting. You know, where do you put your maintenance and diet phases in there? All the phases have to be building on each other, and that's where the compounding happens because whatever you did in the last phase now gives you a higher foundation for the next phase. Now, when you, for example, build muscle in a surplus, you're probably raising your expenditure and you are also adding muscle mass. So that's gonna make your next fat loss phase easier because you can now eat more calories and you're just healthier overall. Let's say when you improve your cardiovascular fitness in an endurance phase, well, that's gonna give you bigger work capacity to recover in the gym, and now you can maybe lift heavier. You know, maybe a phase of fat loss resensitizes your body to nutrients and hunger signals and eating more fiber and eating from fullness. So when you shift back to building, you're gonna have a better time of eating and using that nutrition. See what I mean? It's pretty cool. So each focus block creates advantages for the next one, and you end up progressing faster over that year by doing one thing at a time than you would by doing three things at once. And this is a huge revelation for me when I got into learning about nutrition science and doing it the right way, because I had sort of inadvertently done these types of things on my own without realizing it. Like the time when I built a ton of strength and drank whole milk and ate a bunch of food and knew, hey, I have to gain weight while I'm doing this. I can't be trying to lose fat. I did it kind of out of control without structure, but I at least in my mind had the idea that you had to do this. And then once I got into coaching and got my certification and started learning more about the evidence and the science, I realized oh, this is this is the what we need to do. We need to specify and be very intentional and then set up structure with flexibility to get there. All right, step four is to integrate all. Of these goals without them competing. So having a primary goal doesn't mean zero attention to everything else. It doesn't mean you just drop it all. Like, okay, I have an endurance sport, come endurance race coming up, so I'm just gonna not lift weights at all. That's the worst decision you can do. It does mean that the secondary work supports or at least doesn't interfere with or like sabotage the main goal. So in a muscle building phase, the cardio is as much as it needs to be without interfering with your building muscle. And that that could be a wide range depending on your capacity, capability, and desires, and also depending to the degree which your primary goal is taking priority. You know, so in that case, you know, walking and easy cycling might come before running, let's say, and stuff that aids recovery without taxing your legs. Whereas if you are going after endurance goals, then as I mentioned before, maybe you still only live twice a week. Or if it's if it's three or four times, it's very short sessions, very little volume to maintain that muscle. Now, you may you may titrate these things, right? Where, okay, 16 weeks out, I have this bike race, and right now I'm just lifting weights for muscle mass and I'm eating. How do I transition? Well, the transition can occur as one thing slowly coming down and one thing slowly coming up. It doesn't always have to be abrupt. There could be a transition phase in between these. And that's sometimes a really smart thing to do with something like nutrition, let's say. Okay. And then the last step, step five, is keeping it sustainable, right? It always still has to be sustainable in a way. Now, there's a the caveat on that is how we define sustainable. So what is not sustainable is like a very extreme version of each thing constantly, thinking that that's like you can sustain that. Like, so I'm gonna go on a dreamer bulk, then I'm gonna go in a massive fat loss phase, it's super aggressive. And then, you know, there's a having said that, there's a certain amount of aggressiveness you can handle that's still sustainable depending on the phase. So, for example, some people can handle a big deficit really well, but only for a certain duration. And then when they go into a muscle building phase, it's very conservative. Some people go the opposite way. They want to go very aggressive on the muscle building, but then they want to go very conservative on the fat loss. So that's what I mean by sustainable. Each phase should be moderate, or the the phases that need to be more extreme, you've got to know that that you can do them at that extreme level with the appropriate trade-offs. And the trade-offs might be the duration or the recoverability in other areas or whatever, right? Okay, I hope that was clear, right? Sustainability is always a challenge and it's a very personal thing. Like when we work with our clients or members, the sustainability piece is really what comes up almost all the time. Because at the end of the day, we need to understand what the feedback is telling you, what's your body telling you, what is your data telling you, so we can keep iterating on that and find your level of sustainability. So we've been talking about how all these goals compete for the same recovery budget. At the end of the day, I really think it comes down to recovery, especially if you're over 40. And the one thing I keep coming back to is that recovery is actually the only goal that never conflicts with anything else. So this is kind of interesting. It's like a meta goal that sits on top of everything. Right? You can argue about whether I should cut or bulk, whether I should do cardio versus lifting. But nobody in the history of mankind has ever said that you should sleep more poorly to help with any of it. Now, I take that back because there has been a in business circles and like entrepreneurship and CEOs over the years, like, hey, I'll sleep when I'm dead, or I only need four hours of sleep. But I think we're finding that that's not the case, that even those people need more sleep to perform their best. Which is my very smooth segue into our sponsor today, Cozy Earth. I know, I know, hear me out, hear me out, because I am a convert, a genuine convert about this company. Um, I really like high quality products. And by high quality, sometimes it comes with a price, sometimes it doesn't. It really depends. I would say Cozy Earth is right in that sweet spot of price and quality. And last year I talked about their sheets, which we use all the time now, and I would never give those up. I bought a second pair, but right now I'm wearing their pajamas and using their blanket because thankfully, as a sponsor, I get to try these things out before I tell you about them because I don't want to sell you junk. So you think about the recovery aspects of sleep and what you sleep in and your environment and keeping it cool and dark and all of that stuff. Well, how do we help with those things? Well, sheets are one, but what you wear is another. And I don't usually give it a second thought because I tend to sleep in just shorts or underwear or whatever TMI. But then I tried the Cozy Earth Bamboo Pajama set, and now I actually like wearing them. Whether it's winter or it's warm because they keep you cool. And maybe on a super hot day, I don't know. But for now, I think they're awesome. I think they give me that signal that it's actually the nighttime and it's time to wind down and it's this weirdly effective thing for something that's just close. And so they make a lot of things like that. Cozy Earth makes things derived from bamboo that have that breathability and that temperature regulation. And that's what I like about it. Um, and so their blanket has a similar concept, but of course, a blanket you're trying to keep yourself warm. You're not trying to cool yourself down, but you want it to be comfortable. And this thing is really, really heavy. And I've been using it every morning. Before I work out, I sit on the couch, I read a book, usually fiction, usually science fiction or post-apocalyptic dystopian novel or a legal thriller. Those are the general categories I've been liking lately. Just to kind of chill out in the morning and start to wake up, relax with this very thick, soft blanket, which my kids say feels softer than their hamsters, which tells you how soft it is. And you're just not getting up once it's up. And I think that's a good thing. And then, you know, you can get recovered with a really comfortable blanket. So they back up their products, Cozy Earth does. They have a hundred night sleep trial to test it, which is a massively long amount of time to try something out. They have a 10-year warranty, and you'd be supporting me if you check out the product. So go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. Code Wits and Weights will give you 20% off. When you go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth, it'll actually show you the code in case you forget it. Go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. All right, let's get back to this and keep talking about conflicting goals. And remember, when we get to the end, I'm gonna walk you through your goal audit that's gonna put all this together so you can actually map them out. So let's talk about quickly when doing two things at the same time can work. And I mentioned body recomp. There are specific scenarios where body recomp, losing fat, and gaining muscle at the same time is reasonable. And I I've done entire episodes about this, but just at a high level, if you're a true novice, a true beginner to strength training, your body's gonna respond rapidly to the signal from your training. Your body's gonna adapt. Neuromuscular and muscular, like physical stimulus is going to allow you to build fat, build muscle and lose fat almost at any kind of level of a deficit or surplus. So in that case, you may be fine just sitting around maintenance and doing the thing and working hard. I really wouldn't encourage just a diet right off the bat if you're strength training for the first time, because I really want you to get the most out of the training piece and be fully fueled and recovered. And then you can get in a good position for fat loss phase. You know, in all these cases of body recomp, it's going to be not too far from maintenance. It's either gonna be a slight deficit, it's gonna be at maintenance, or it's gonna be a slight surplus. And really that's it. Now, someone who doesn't really fit into that category, who maybe is an experienced lifter, you're already at a healthy body composition, and you want to do these simultaneously, it's just gonna take a lot longer and it's gonna be hard to measure the changes. They're just so slow. And I see people comment on my stuff all the time about this who are like, well, it took me, you know, 12 months to see a change. And then I ask more about the details. And, you know, either they're they're doing it in a very modest way that's going to take a long time, or they have some experience in their past and it's gonna slow it down. So the same principle applies to hybrid or concurrent training. If you want to do some running or other endurance alongside your lifting because you enjoy it, it supports your health, awesome. Two or three moderate sessions a week, if they're low impact, even better, separated from your lifting by at least six hours. Those kinds of things, those little rules that help that we're gonna talk about on the next episode. But if you're training for a marathon or ultra marathon or a big, you know, like a 10K or whatever, and you also want to get a squat PR, something has to give. Most likely, something has to give. I mean, I guess there are exceptions. You know, there's definitely people talking about trying to do both with some massive level of recovery. Maybe you're sleeping nine hours a night, you have no stress in your life. But for most of us, they're not going to happen together. And you have to go back to the steps that we went through of what's my primary goal? Can I do the secondary thing at a maintenance without it draining my recovery? And the other steps. And I guess, I guess the final thing is psychological because I think most people operate in this space with what I call a simultaneous mindset. The assumption is that, hey, I need to be progressing on everything all the time. Philip talks about all the pillars, right? Lifting and walking and eating and everything, sleeping and stress. And so I feel like I need to make progress on all these things. And then I'm failing if I'm not. And that's a very exhausting mindset and it creates guilt. It creates guilt when you're not doing enough of whatever it is, cardio, you know, your lifts aren't making progress. You get all this anxiety, you send me a message on Instagram. Why am I not building muscle? Why don't I see muscle definition? You get frustrated when your weight goes up more than you thought it would during a building phase, or you're feeling fluffy, and you're like, is this even working? You know what I'm talking about. Right now, the alternative to that would be a sequential mindset focused on the process. And that's what we've been talking about today. In any given phase, you're pushing one thing forward and maintaining everything else. And I don't want you to think of that as a compromise or a trade-off. That's actually on the net going to give you more results. That's how you solve this complex system that we're trying to work with, which is our body. You don't optimize everything at once. You identify the constraint, you focus resources on that constraint, low-hanging fruit, whatever phrase you want to use, and then you move to the next one. Even if that's constraint is deeper, like hormonal or nutrients or whatever, focus on that and go all in on it and fix it and improve it. And guess what? It's gonna help everything else anyway. And then when you truly do that, you remove the internal friction that was draining your energy and draining your willpower. Because now you know exactly what you're doing and why it actually takes the stress out of the process. And now you can measure things clearly because there's one metric that matters. Maybe there's submetrics, but you know, there's this one set of metrics that matters for the next, say, 12 weeks or six months or whatever. And that mental clarity by itself can accelerate your results more than any physical tweak. Lastly, don't forget that fitness is a lifelong project. And I mean that in the best way. I mean that in the best way because you don't have to be your leanest, strongest, fastest, most enduring self by next Tuesday. You just want to be making consistent, measurable progress on the thing that matters right now, and you're gonna feel great for it. You're gonna feel great because you're making progress and improving. And the human struggle is a process of improving until the day you die. I mean, to me, that's a positive thing. It means I can always improve. I'm never gonna hit the finish line because if I did, why be alive? Why be alive anymore? All right, before I let you go, I'm gonna walk you through that quick goal audit that I promise it'll take you two minutes. I want you to grab a pen and paper because you're gonna walk away knowing exactly what to focus on next. And instead of pausing, I'm just gonna talk quickly about something else that might be helpful while you grab that pen and paper. Because if this episode made you realize you've been stacking your goals without a clear priority, my lab, my my lab, my app fitness lab, I believe truly and honestly can fix that based on the feedback we're hearing. It's an AI coaching app that I built. I trained it. It's built on my stuff. It's not just Chat GPT giving you whatever it wants based on all human knowledge. It's very specifically trained on the evidence and what to do. And the very first thing it does is ask about your goals, your body, your lifestyle, your training history, all of this stuff in a free two-minute quiz. And then based on your answers, it gives you a custom plan around your primary goal right now, not every goal at once. And guess what? It's periodized, just like we're talking about today, because I've trained it to do that. So whether your focus is fat loss or muscle building or getting stronger or endurance even, Fitness Lab is going to adapt your nutrition and training plan, your daily activities to get to that goal specifically and forget all the rest. Not forget as in they're not important, but it's gonna help you prioritize and maximize for the thing that matters. And then as your goals shift, it's gonna shift with you and you can tell the coach in the app, hey, my goal is different now. This is what I want to do going forward. Help me out. You know what? We're gonna change our activities now to match that new goal. So go to wits and weights.com slash app to take the free quiz. And actually, depending on when this comes out, if you still want the 20% off because you follow the podcast, I'm gonna include a special link in the show notes for that in case our promotion is done for the winter. So you still get the 20% off. So use the link in the show notes to absolutely make sure you get that. All right, here is the simple exercise that takes two minutes and can save you months of wasted effort in the gym. Grab a pen and paper, write down every fitness goal you're currently working toward. Not the one, not the one you care most about. I want you to write them all down. I want you to write, hey, I want to build muscle, I want to lose fat, I want to get faster, I want to improve my heart rate, I want to live longer, I want to improve my testosterone, anything you can think about, right? Stream of consciousness, write them all down. You could even come back to it, add more later. You got it? Okay, write down every goal you're working toward. Now, circle the one that if you achieved it in the next three months would change dramatically how you feel about your body and your training the most. All right. If you achieved it in the next three months, that one thing on the page, I want you to circle and be like, yes, yes, this is the thing. And then look at all the other ones you wrote down. For each of those, write the word maintain next to it or a little M or whatever makes sense. And that means you're still gonna train for it, but at the minimum effective dose, right? Whatever that is, like we talked about, two lifting sessions to hold on to your muscle, some easy walks for cardiovascular health, whatever. Then look at the one you circled again. So you've got one circled and all the other ones say maintained. That is your primary goal for the next 12 weeks. So every decision about nutrition, training, recovery gets filtered through that goal first. First. If a choice supports it, you do it. If it competes with it, you save it for the next phase. And if you're not already doing things to maintain the other stuff, then don't worry about it yet. Don't worry about it yet. Just focus on the one thing. You're gonna build this up over time. Because the next time, three months from now or six months, whatever, you're gonna do this exercise again and switch to your next goal. All right, do it tonight. Put it somewhere you'll see it, put it on the fridge, put it on your nightstand. And when you feel that pull to add more, look at the piece of paper and don't do it. Don't do it. Focus on the thing that you circled. Your future self is gonna thank you for that. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember the fastest path to all your goals isn't doing everything at once, it's doing one thing at a time and trusting the sequence and process to get you there. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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How Lifting Weights Improves Cardiovascular Health (Better Than Cardio?) | Ep 440

You've been told cardio is for a healthy heart and lifting weights is for building muscle. But what if strength training is itself a form of cardio?

What if you're ignoring one of the most effective tools for lowering blood pressure, improving cholesterol, and reducing your risk of heart disease?

Philip breaks down the evidence showing that strength training lowers blood pressure on par with first-line medication, improves HDL and LDL cholesterol, enhances insulin sensitivity, and reduces visceral fat, all independent of cardio. 

You'll learn why your muscle tissue functions as a metabolic organ that regulates blood sugar, why adults who lift have up to 17% lower cardiovascular disease risk, and how to program your lifting sessions to get a real cardiovascular training effect without adding time on the treadmill. 

Philip also answers listener Jack R.'s question comparing cardio and lifting head-to-head for fat loss, muscle building, and long-term sustainability after 40. Whether you're already strength training over 40 or still treating the weight room as optional for heart health and longevity, this episode gives you the evidence-based case for making lifting your foundation.

Try Fitness Lab to get personalized daily coaching on nutrition, training, and biofeedback that adapts to how you want to train, whether you're focused on lifting, endurance, or both. Get 20% off through February 17:
http://bit.ly/fitness-lab-pod20

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why "cardio for your heart" is incomplete
1:43 - The 2023 AHA statement about lifting weights and heart health
5:28 - How strength training lowers blood pressure as much as medication
7:11 - Nitric oxide, arterial stiffness, and improved blood vessels
9:27 - Cholesterol, triglycerides, and ApoB improvements
13:17 - Why muscle is your most powerful metabolic organ for insulin and blood sugar
15:20 - Cardio vs. lifting for fat loss and building muscle after 40
18:01 - Visceral fat, inflammation, and menopause
19:47 - Can lifting weights improve VO2max?
22:01 - Longevity data and the minimum dose of strength training for heart health
23:57 - How to get cardiovascular benefits WITHOUT extra cardio
26:04 - Rest periods, compound movements, and rep ranges for heart-healthy lifting
28:59 - Weekly template combining strength training and walking
30:59 - Physical reserve and why strength protects your heart all day
33:04 - Bonus: 10-second heart rate recovery test you can do between sets

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you've been told that cardio is the only way to protect your heart and that lifting weights is just for building muscle looking good, you are operating on outdated science, and it could be costing you years of your life. Today I'm breaking down the research showing that strength training lowers blood pressure on par with medication, improves your cholesterol profile, and reduces your risk of dying from heart disease by up to 17%. You'll learn why your muscles are secretly your most powerful cardiovascular organ, how to structure your lifting to get a real cardio effect without stepping on a treadmill, and at the very end, a 10-second heart rate test you can do between sets that predicts cardiovascular health better than most labor. Find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're gonna hit on conventional wisdom about cardio. Cardio is for your heart, and lifting weights is for your muscles. Two separate buckets, right? And if you're over 40 and you're thinking about longevity, the default advice is go for a walk, go for a jog, get on an elliptical, get your cardio in, do your heart healthy exercise, and then maybe lift a little on the side for bone density or whatever benefit, if it's even mentioned. I mean, I still see many, many articles that don't even mention lifting weights. They use the general term exercise. And the real problem with that framing is it is incomplete in a way that fundamentally limits your results. Because the research we have now, lots of research over the past decade, including a 2023 scientific statement from the American Heart Association, now confirms clearly that resistance training is safe, it's effective, it is an essential part of cardiovascular disease risk reduction. It's not optional, it's not secondary, it is essential. And yet, only 28% of adults meet the recommendation of strength training at least two days per week, which means that most people concerned about heart health, which we all should be, are ignoring one of the most powerful tools available. And as a side note, this tool is the most powerful for almost anything related to your health. So you kind of get the benefits regardless across the spectrum when you're lifting. The fix is almost too simple. You don't need a separate cardio program. You just have to adjust how you already lift to get those benefits. And you might not even have to do that. Now, as a quick tangent, one of our upcoming episodes, in fact, it might be as early as next week, is going to get into strength training along with endurance. Because we've had quite a number of listeners write in concerned that they shouldn't be doing cardio because there's some negative to it. And that is not the case either. So stay, you know, follow the show. We're going to talk about that next week. How do you incorporate both endurance if you enjoy it or you're competitive or whatever, along with your lifting? But today, this episode was inspired by a listener, Jack R, who said, quote, I'm a huge fan of the show and I listen to it on every run I go on. So what I want to hear is the differences between cardio and lifting in the long term. Which one overall can burn more fat? Which one is good for building more muscle? And how do they hold up over time? So, Jack, that's a great question. And again, you are also gonna want to listen to the upcoming show called something like strength training and endurance, you know, putting them together, something like that, because I haven't recorded it yet. But this one is dedicated to you, Jack. So we're gonna go over that and more. I'm gonna walk you through what lifting does for your heart, your blood vessels, your blood pressure, your cholesterol, your insulin sensitivity, and your longevity. We're gonna compare cardio and lifting head to head for fat loss, muscle building, and long-term sustainability, which is kind of what Jack asked about. And I'll show you how to program your training so you get the cardiovascular benefits from lifting without sacrificing your strength gains. So whether you are currently lifting or you're on the fence, I wanna change how you think about what heart healthy exercise actually means and really have lifting near the top of that list in your programming. And then if you stick around, I always have a cool tip at the end. Today I'm gonna share a simple 10-second test that you can do between your sets in the gym. And it's gonna give you a real-time snapshot of your cardiovascular fitness. You have to do it while you're working out, but then you can use it to track your heart health over time and see how it's improving. Super simple. I love stuff like that. All right, let's start with the single biggest risk factor for heart disease. And by the way, heart disease is the number one killer for men and women. So it's super important. The single biggest risk factor is actually blood pressure. This is where the evidence for strength training is strong enough that I wish it changed how every doctor talks to us about exercise, but you know, that's that's wishful thinking at the moment. So blood pressure, let's talk about it. Multiple studies, and these are meta-analysis, okay, big studies of studies, now confirm that regular strength training reduces resting blood pressure. Okay, now anybody who lifts weights has seen this happen. All my clients have seen this happen. It's pretty cool. In people who have hypertension, we're looking at systolic blood pressure drops around five to 10 millimeters of mercury and diastolic, so systolics on the top, diastolics on the bottom, of I think I have that right, of two to five milligrams or millimeters of mercury. So five to ten for systolic, two to five of diastolic. And a 2022 systematic review of 14 different trials found that lifting lowered systolic blood pressure by about nine and a half and diastolic by about five in hypertensive adults. So adults who have high blood pressure already, who have a mean age around 60. So older adults around 60 with high blood pressure. Now, to put that in perspective, that is comparable to what you would expect from a first-line blood pressure medication. And then younger adults in the analysis saw even larger improvements of around 13 systolic. Right. And this, so this is meaningful. This is important because it's meaningful. This could be the difference between needing your meds and not needing it. And again, I've coached many, many a client who got to come off their blood pressure meds because they're lifting weights now. And, you know, yes, they're doing the other things, but we're talking about lifting today. And certain types of resistance exercise are especially effective. And those aren't necessarily, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to incorporate them, but it could be that the way you lift efficiently includes them. And what do I mean? Isometric holds are one of the most effective methods for lowering blood pressure, but you also do isometric holds all the time when you're just lifting weights. So you don't have to do like wall sits or hand grip exercises per se if you're doing deadlifts. I mean, a deadlift is one of the most powerful isometric holds we have. And if you're using, you know, decent tempo and sometimes you're using pauses and things like that, you get plenty of isometric work. Now let's talk about blood vessels and endothelial function. All right. This is where this is the part a lot of people don't hear as much about when we talk about lifting. If you are using the way we like to lift, moderate to higher, you know, moderate rep ranges, but even up to higher rep ranges, like in a hypertrophy program, and you get this extra blood flow, it creates shear stress on the vessel wall. So your blood vessels have walls and there's stress on the walls. And that shear stress stimulates your endothelial cells to produce nitric oxide. And that causes your blood vessels to relax and dilate. And by the way, nitric oxide, you might have heard of that in the context of like pre-workouts and performance enhancers over the years as well. So this is a natural way to make your arteries more flexible and responsive, which is the opposite of arterial stiffness, right? Stiffness is one of the drivers of, again, heart disease, which the fancy term is atherosclerosis, and heart attacks. By the way, I'm not a doctor. This is not medical advice. This is this is what the evidence is telling us, and I'm sharing you what those relationships are. I'm not giving you medical advice here. The American Heart Association's 2023 statement I alluded to earlier recognized that resistance training has positive effects on endothelial function. And then a couple years later, since it was last year, 2025, there was a meta-analysis on older adults that found that circuit-based resistance training significantly reduced arterial stiffness alongside improvements in blood pressure. So, putting this together, your lifting sessions, yeah, they build muscle, but they also train your blood vessels to be more compliant and more efficient, which is not a surprise because lifting is a hermetic stressor that causes a lot of adaptations, right? We know it adapts bone and muscle, but it's also adapting your blood vessels. Your cardiovascular system is adapting to those demands. And it does so the same way it does with aerobic exercise, but just through a slightly different mechanism. You know, and honestly, if you do heavy deadlifts, let's say, and watch your heart rate, you'll see that you are also getting some cardio, even though it's a much shorter bursts and small amounts of time. So that covers sort of the plumbing, the pressure, the pipes in your body. Now let's talk about what's flowing through them because strength training changes the chemistry of your blood in ways that help reduce heart disease risk. So this is pretty cool. Let's talk about that. All right. Cholesterol and lipids. So there is, there's still this perception that the only way you can improve your cholesterol is through cardio or also through food, right? And we do know that reducing saturated fat, for example, seems to be correlated with that, maintaining a healthier body weight, et cetera. But there's also evidence related to lifting. There was a systematic review in diabetes patients specifically that found that regular resistance training increased by quite a bit the what we call the protective or good cholesterol HDL. It reduced LDL, the harmful cholesterol, and then it lowered triglycerides, which is also a good result. And again, they were statistically and clinically meaningful. And we know that in older adults, which have been studied quite a bit when it comes to blood pressure, there are significant HDL increases on the order of like two to five milligrams per deciliter. Right. So that's two to five. It's not huge, but it's meaningful. And LDL drops of five to 10 after a few months of consistent training, independent of other variables. Aerobic training, so this is like what we traditionally call cardio, probably does have a slight edge in raising HDL if you do it a lot. But if you combine lifting with some cardio, that tends to produce the best overall lipid profile. So this is one of the my nods to the fact that we don't want to just not do cardio, but that lifting needs to be part of the equation. Some of the other things we find improve in studies about resistance plus resistance training plus cardio when adults are overweight is the lowering of Apo B, right? That's a marker, marker of lip light lipoproteins. And the improvement was more than either of those by themselves, either cardio or resistance training. Right. So that's cholesterol and lipids, you get a benefit. Then insulin sensitivity, we've talked about a lot in the show. And this is where lifting really, really is a huge signal. The value of having and building muscle, right? And stick with me because this one is just so important. When you think of your muscle, can when you contract skeletal muscle, it's a sink for glucose. Having the muscle is a sink for glucose. So when you lift in the gym, your muscles are pulling that sugar out of your blood, essentially, and using it for fuel. And because lifting builds more tissue over time, you're increasing your baseline capacity to handle carbohydrates. And we had a whole episode about carbs just recently. A meta-analysis found that adding resistance exercise to your routine, this was in middle-age and older adults with type 2 diabetes, led to significant drops in HBA1C. That's the long-term blood sugar marker. And that's compared to no exercise, significant drops, independent, at least partly independent of weight loss. And I say partly because a lot of these studies, the problem is once you start having lifting weights and living a better lifestyle, you end up losing some weight, oftentimes not on purpose. So it's hard to tease apart the variables sometimes. But regardless, this is a huge deal for us, especially the over 40 population, because insulin resistance is one of those things that creeps up with age. It's one of the central drivers of metabolic syndrome, right? That's like pre diabetes, where we have high blood pressure, poor cholesterol, elevated blood sugar, extra abdominal fat, and just one hour of strength training per week, even that minimum dose was associated with a 29% lower risk of developing metabolic syndrome. So again, your muscle tissue isn't just there for strength and physique, it is a metabolic organ. I love, I want you to think about that. It's a metabolic organ. It's also kind of an endocrine organ, which is hormones. It regulates your blood sugar, it regulates your insulin levels, your inflammation. The more of it you have, the more resilient your metabolism is. All right, so now all this ties into body composition and visceral fat, which is a pillar of everything we discuss on this show. And this is where we can directly answer Jack's three questions. Thank you, Jack, for the questions. Another shout out to you. The first one, which burns more fat? All right, in the short term, cardio burns a few more calories per session than lifting. In the short term, like if you just take a session in isolation of let's say 30 minutes or an hour. But resistance training changes your body composition in ways that makes fat loss more sustainable over time. And you tend to burn more calories, having more muscle, and you tend to carry a little bit more body weight with more muscle, all of which burns more calories that far exceeds what you're burning just from doing cardio. Not to mention the adaptations you could have with cardio. It's a separate topic. There was a 2024 systematic review of people with overweight and obesity that found that resistance training during a calorie deficit preserves lean mass with moderate certainty and improves fat loss with high certainty. Now, none of that's a surprise to us, but it means that when you're in a deficit, lifters lose just as much or more fat as cardio-only exercises, but they keep their muscle. And that matters massively because that is what we want to keep. We don't want to lose muscle. More muscle means all the things we talk about: higher resting metabolic rate, burning more calories, uh, better health, better everything else. And so, going back to what I said earlier, if you can combine some aerobic and resistance exercise, you're probably gonna have the best combination of fat loss and fitness gains than either alone. And when we talk cardio, by the way, we're gonna talk more about it in the next uh episode in the episode about endurance. Walking is a fantastic form of cardio. So you can be highly successful with all of this if you just move and walk a lot, which is honestly a thing that many people lose as they age. You know, it's often not hormones and perimetabas and all this other stuff. It's you're not moving enough. And I don't mean exercise or cardio, I just mean walking. Okay, so that's one question about which burns more fat. So I hope I answered that for you. So over the long term, you're probably gonna burn more fat having muscle, but doing both training and endurance. All right, now which builds more muscle? That one's really straightforward. Obvious answer resistance training, of course. Just cardio does not provide mechanical tension. It doesn't provide stress on your muscle skeletal system and beyond, you know, beyond a beginner doing it for the first week who doesn't move or something like that. It doesn't provide progressive overload, nothing that you need to stimulate muscle growth. All right. So a cardio-only approach, you are going to lose lean mass, and that is just not good. So never ever would I recommend cardio only. I do recommend lifting predominantly with complementary cardio, which is strategic and it depends on your goals and what you like. The other question Jack asked is how do they hold up over time? And this is more of a sustainability thing, and it looks like lifting does have an advantage. There was some research in Harvard that found men who did 20 minutes of daily weight training gain less abdominal fat over a multi-year period than men who did the same amount of cardio exercise. And that's because lifting prevents the loss of muscle, which helps keep your fat gain at bay. It dampens your fat gain and it maintains your metabolic rate as you age. So then when you look over five, 10, or 20 years, strength training helps build a body that's easier to maintain. That's what I mean by sustainability. When we think long-term, the best exercise routine is the one you can follow for life. And because lifting builds such compounding returns, we often see people stick with it for life as part of their identity. Whereas cardio kind of ebbs and flows and it depends. It depends. Even walking, I find some people struggle to do that and make it part of their identity as easily, I'll say, as lifting. But of course, it depends on the person. So, Jack, the short answer for fat loss, you want to combine both, but definitely make sure you're lifting. For muscle, you want to lift. And for the long game, you want to lift as the foundation, but be always moving to keep your health. So, doing both is obviously an important conclusion here. Now, we often associate fat loss with cardio, but resistance training is really effective at improving your body composition and helping with your visceral fat, the abdominal fat, that's the dangerous fat around your organs, that also tends to drive inflammation and insulin resistance. And many of us don't like it visually either. There's a study in midlife women that found that 15 weeks of strength training curbed the increase in visceral fat that would come with perimenopause and menopause. That's pretty cool. All right. So when you can reduce your visceral fat, you're gonna lower the inflammatory cytokines that are circulating in your body. That's worse one source of inflammation. You're also gonna reduce free fatty acids that then damage your blood vessel walls. And now you improve the metabolic markers we've been discussing. All right, so we've covered blood pressure, blood vessels, cholesterol, insulin, visceral fat, all improved by lifting. But what about actual cardiovascular fitness? What about VO2max, the metric that predicts how long you live, supposedly? Can weights improve that? And the answer is yes. Yes. But how you program your sessions determines how much. And of course, it depends on why you're trying to increase your VO2 max, because a lot of people think you have to increase it way more than you do necessarily to get the benefits. And there's some issues with VO2 Max on the calculation side that we can get into. Now, speaking of programming, if you're trying to prioritize lifting or add in endurance work or combine both, or even prioritize endurance but still lift, and you're doing it for whatever reason heart health, body composition, longevity, enjoyment, that's exactly what Fitness Lab is designed to handle. Fitness Lab is my AI-powered coaching app. It gives you personalized daily guidance. Like it tells you what to do every day under your nutrition, your training, your biofeedback, your sleep, your movement, all of that adapted to your goals and what is happening to your body. And what I mean by that, this is super powerful. The app adjusts to how you want to train and what you want to train. So if you want to add circuit style sessions or endurance or runs aside alongside your lifting, it can account for that and it can create activities for you. If you're recovering from an illness or surgery or you just want to focus on building strength, it will meet you at where you are and change your program mid-stride for that. And right now, through February 17th, the day after this episode is out, I believe, you can still get 20% off with our winter sale at witsandweights.com slash app. After that, it goes back to full price. That's witsandweights.com slash app. The link is in the show notes. Check it out. All right, I want to talk about now cardiovascular or cardiorespiratory fitness. Here, this is this is like the true cardio fitness that we often talk about. And before we do, just a reminder, I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you real quick heart rate recovery tests. It takes 10 seconds that you can do starting with your next gym session and start tracking that, in my opinion, is going to help you assess your cardiovascular health. And you won't even need a lot of what we're going to talk about in this section anyway. But some of you really like a lot of data, and I get it, I'm a nerd like that too. So let's do it. All right. VO2 Max. VO2 Max, this is your body's maximum oxygen uptake. And it it is, it does seem to be a very strong predictor of heart health and all-cause mortality. And yes, aerobic training cardio is still the most, I'll say, efficient way to improve it, especially if you want to get a really high number. And and I've done a VO2 max test and it's brutal. So I know you have to have really good cardiovascular fitness. A 2024 meta-analysis of 38 RCTs, that's randomized controlled trials, in middle-aged and older adults, showed that aerobic training raised VO2 max by about 1.8 milliliter per kilogram per minute. That's the unit. Okay. It's if you want to dissect that, it's the volume relative to your weight, relative to time, more than resistance training. So 1.8. Okay. So if you're trying to maximize VO2 max, then classic endurance training does have the edge. There's no argument there, and I'm gonna give Cardio a point on that one. But resistance training improves VO2 max in a way that we don't often hear about. A meta analysis in adults over 60 found an average VO2 max increase of about 1.9 from resistance training alone. And in middle-aged diabetic patients, resistance training significantly improved VO2 peak alongside other health markers. And this is mainly because when you are doing a moderate amount of volume, maybe shorter rest periods, you're working on that work capacity, you're getting your heart rate up as you lift, you're still lifting your heart rate. You're still placing intermittent cardio demand on your body. And over time, that repeated stimulus is going to enhance your heart, its ability to pump efficiently, your muscles' ability to use oxygen, your VO2 max is going to go up. Period. The clear winner, though, and you're going to hear me repeat myself on this, is combining both. A randomized control trial in overweight adults found that 12 weeks of combined aerobic and resistance exercise improved VO2 max by 13%, way more than either alone. And it concluded that a combination of aerobic and resistance training is probably optimal for comprehensive fitness and body composition improvements in aging populations. So again, no surprise there that a hybrid approach could be helpful. Now, some people are doing it without even realizing it, like some of the circuit weight training where you do exercises sequentially with minimal rest, that ends up being like an endurance exercise, right? It ends up being a form of cardio and then it boosts VO2 max. So it doesn't matter how you're doing it, is the point. If you're building strength as a priority and holding muscle as a priority, there are ways that you can work out and things you incorporate in your lifting sessions that will already boost your cardio fitness and your VO2 max when combined with walking that are more than you ever need, but not necessarily as much as you want if your goal is to get that number even higher. So that's the nuance. Now, for longevity, all right, the big picture on this, if blood pressure and cholesterol improve, and that's super convincing that we've already talked about. We also see just the big number of mortality that adults who do strength train have a 15% lower risk of dying from any cause. That's all cause mortality, and a 17% lower risk of cardiovascular disease events compared to those who do not use resistance training. And much of that reduction kicks in at as little as 30 minutes of lifting per week. So there is a minimum effective dose that is like a step change versus not lifting at all. That's why it's so powerful to just start where you're at and do it, right? Just because you're not lifting two or three or four days a week, lift 30 minutes a week versus nothing, you're gonna get a lot of benefits. And then when you combine that with aerobic exercise, it's additive. It's additive. So there was an NIH study where older adults who did both had more than 40% lower 10-year mortality than those who did neither. And then they outperformed those who only did one or the other as well. And the reason is the two forms of exercise, they affect your health through some overlapping but distinct pathways. It's kind of like a Venn diagram where you have two circles slightly overlapping. So there's different mechanisms, and the thing in the middle benefits from both. Well, cardio builds your cardiac efficiency and your ability to transport oxygen. Lifting, of course, preserves muscle mass, strength, and functional independence. And that's independently linked to survival. And then muscle strength is a predictive mortality as well, sometimes more than aerobic fitness. And the only way to increase that, of course, is resistance training. So now the question becomes practical. How do you set up your lifting to capture these benefits in the most efficient way? So you don't feel like, oh my God, I have to lift four days a week and I have to do four sessions of cardio week or something like that. Because that is not the case. Or else I'd have no clients and I myself would not enjoy this. So we've spent three segments putting the Cardios King advice under the microscope, showing you the ways that lifting improves your cardiovascular system, your blood pressure, blood vessels, cholesterol, insulin, visceral fat, VO2 max, mortality, just such overwhelming evidence. All right. Share this episode with anybody who needs to hear this, by the way. The fix is almost annoyingly simple. You don't need a separate cardio program. You don't. And I say need because there's want is a different thing. You don't need to add 45 minutes on the treadmill after your lifting session. You have to adjust how you lift and make sure you walk. And then beyond that, it's kind of a bonus, or depending on what your goals are. And I'm an engineer. I think of it as like you've got one system, that's your body. You could either run two or three programs to improve it, which takes two or three times the amount of time, or you can modify one thing to hit everything simultaneously. So we're gonna do that. So the first and simplest lever is honestly rest periods. Now, this is interesting because I I have two, I'm of two minds. All right. I would say traditional strength programs where you're purely trying to build strength with big compound lifts like squats and deadlifts, you're gonna want to rest enough to get all those reps. We're talking three to five minutes per set between sets. And sometimes you don't get much of a cardiovascular stimulus doing that, doing it that way in terms of total volume of cardiostimulus, right? You you might, your heart rate might spike when you do the rep, the reps, but then it drops. So one of the hacks is once you're going to a more of a hybrid like strength and hypertrophy program, getting some exercises in there that limit your rest intervals to a shorter time period, like 60 seconds, or even using supersets and rest pause and things like that. Now, you don't want to do with everything, but what I'm suggesting is that for some of your exercises in a workout, usually more the isolation stuff toward the end, using short rest periods could be a way to jack up your heart rate and get a little bit of endurance and cardio in while you're lifting weights. Why not? Right? It's super efficient. It's super efficient. Now, we've talked about conjugate on this program before, where you have two of your four days are dynamic effort. And when I've done conjugate before without bands or chains, but just with a bar, the the way that you do it is through very explosive, concentric movements and very short rest periods. So, and and you, so and part of it is because you're trying to build work capacity, right? So even powerlifters do do this. Powerlifters do want to have higher work capacity as well. And powerlifters today are much more fit that I'll say than they used to be, and a little bit leaner, right? They don't carry as much excess weight, et cetera. Um, and there have been studies that look at like the circuit protocols with short rest, and they they definitely improve VO2 max. And of course, it's kind of obvious now based on what we talked about, because it becomes an aerobic exercise. Now you know what you're thinking, right? If I cut my rest periods, my strength will suffer. And that is kind of true if you're doing heavy compound work near your max, but that even then you can periodize. You can have days for heavy work and you can have lighter, I'll say circuit style or superset style or hypertrophy style work. In fact, I have a program or two in physics university that's designed on that rotational structure. You might have a strength and a hypertrophy and kind of a hybrid day all in one week, which kind of serves these other goals at the same time. They're very efficient. And then you're not choosing between strength and cardio, you're scheduling them both in pretty efficiently. So rest periods is definitely an easy hack to think about. The second thing is actually compound movements themselves, right? The big squat, deadlift, press, rows, exercises that use large muscle groups and multiple joints are going to spike your heart rate the most. They just are. I mean, I used to do CrossFit and my heart rate would get way up, you know, like to 160s, 170s, whatever. The spikes came down over time as I got more fit, of course. But when I do really heavy deadlifts at 80% of my max, same thing happens. Same thing happens. Now, I might not be doing 20 of them for 10 minutes, like in CrossFit, right? And that's the difference of the volume, but you get a spike. If just look at your next, do a heavy set of squats and measure your heart rate and see what kind of demand you're getting for that. It's massive. And anybody who's done a decent amount of reps on heavy squats knows what the heck I'm talking about. In fact, it's why we sometimes fear doing like a set of eight when you get really strong and you're using heavy weights. A lot of people are like, oh yeah, I'd rather do eight than five. No, no, no, you wouldn't. Not always, trust me. Right? And then you're gasping, your heart's pounding, and you're you haven't even done any cardio, but it feels like it. So you definitely build work capacity that way because of the mechanisms we talked about, it we talked about. So if you're just lifting in a sort of traditional way with the big movements and then using isolation exercises to complement it with the dynamic work, with the superset stuff, with the short rest periods, you're gonna get a really big benefit for that. All right, the next one I want to mention is kind of related to what we already talked about, and this is more of the rep range. So if you use moderate or higher rep ranges, you're just naturally going to have a little bit more endurance training built in. That's just what it comes down to. It doesn't have to be a circuit training or superset per se, but just the fact that you're doing a little bit lighter work for, let's say, 15 or 20 reps. I mean, if you're leg pressing for 15 to 20 reps, you're gonna get a cardio benefit as you do that. And then you could add finishers to that. You can add, I don't care, kettlebell swings or sled pushes, farmer carries, those kinds of things people like to do, rather than a separate quote unquote cardio session. If you've never done a 50-yard sled push, I recommend it. It will feel like a sprint and your quads are gonna remind you about it the next day for sure. Okay. Then we have frequency. You don't have to just start going to the gym way more than you do to get the heart benefits. I still am a firm believer of find the minimum effective dose, increase the volume a little bit if you can fit it in. And, you know, not much more than that. In other words, for the most of us that have regular lives with busy lives, and we're not trying to compete or anything like that, I would say three full body or four or five split style program, you know, uh sessions a week for most people are gonna work and where you mix in some of the elements we've already talked about. Okay. When you do have off days, that is where extra walking or cycling or some form of cardio like that, or even sprinting, can add to your cardiovascular load without competing with your lifting. We're gonna do a whole episode about this coming up very, very soon. So remember to follow this show so you get that episode. So a very practical template would be three days of training a week, say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that have this built-in cardio stimulus, two to three days of longer walks. You're you should be walking every day anyway, but I'm saying, like on the days when you don't lift, have something more intentional built in. It could be rucking with a rucksack, could be going for a hike, could be going for a bike ride, things like that. Could be putting a sprint or two in there as well. And that will cover your strength, your cardio, your daily movement, and you don't even have to add extra cardio per se, right? Like even in the off days, it could just be walking. So if you're time constrained, this is a really efficient approach. So I want to kind of wrap up here by talking about a concept called physical reserve. I want you to think of it like the gap between your maximal capacity and the effort required by your daily activities. Climbing stairs, carrying groceries, playing with your kids or grandkids, getting off the floor. Right. When you have a low physical reserve, those everyday tasks are gonna be closer to your max. And that's where, and you look, some of you that are listening that are heavier, that are overweight, or maybe used to be, maybe you aren't GOP1s, it doesn't matter if you how you've lost weight, but you know what it is, right? You just out of breath, your heart rate spikes, your blood pressure goes up, you're just under stress from basic living. I don't want to see you living that way. I don't want to see people living that way. It's it's very sad. I see it all the time. It's it's a huge percentage of our population. And that is a cardiovascular risk factor that is just right there hiding in plain sight. And it's visible, it's visible, right? I'm not judging somebody because they're overweight. I am sad for them because I know that they care about their own their ability to do the things they want to do in life. And I think this all correlates with each other. And and what we talk about on the show will absolutely get you there. When you build muscle and strength through lifting, you expand that reserve. Right? That's why I think it's so important. It's not the cardio loan, isn't necessarily gonna do that. The things that used to tack your system, tax your system that are physical become easier. And your heart then isn't working as hard during your daily life, your blood pressure stays lower throughout the day. You're giving your heart system more margin. Okay, it's like over-engineering your body so it handles loads without the stress. That's what we want. And so, and then this matters more as we get older. Once you hit 40, 45, 50, you're the default, the default is losing muscle and losing strength and gaining fat and gaining belly fat, watching that reserve shrink until normal activities then are constantly stressing your heart, which is why people get heart disease and why heart disease is the number one killer for men and women. So the investment you make in training isn't just about the superficial things or the time in the gym. It's one of the most important investments in your life. So, whatever time it takes, which it shouldn't take very long if you listen to this show, we want you to be efficient about it, it could be the most important time you invest, other than say, though, the time in your relationships and maybe your sleep. Right? So then your heart doesn't have to work as hard to support you through everything else you do. And that is, I'll say, the real argument for lifting as cardiovascular medicine, along with the other forms of movement we talked about. All right, so that's like the main thrust of this episode. Now I'm right after this, I'm gonna share that 10-second heart rate recovery test I mentioned. It's a really practical tool to give you immediate feedback. You could start tracking it as you train. If you want to put that into practice, anything we talked about today, with personalized guidance, but without hiring a one-on-one coach, check out Fitness Lab. This app is so powerful, guys. We're getting amazing feedback on how it listens to you, helps you through hard times, adapts to your goals. What whether that's building strength, losing fat, improving your blood markers, all of the above, it gives you tasks to do every day and it gives you coaching on exactly what's going on so you don't guess. And it pulls in your data to help with that. So it's 20% off now through February 17th. Go to witsandweights.com slash app. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash app for 20% off. All right, here's the 10-second heart rate recovery test. Here's a simple test. It takes 10 seconds and tells you more about your cardiovascular fitness than your resting heart rate does. At the end of your heartest set in the gym, that set that leaves you breathing really heavy, check your heart rate. So if you have a wearable, you could do that, or you can do it manually by counting your pulse for six seconds and multiplying it by 10. Then I want you to be totally still. Sit or stand still for one minute and check it again. So check your heart rate right after the heavy set, check it again a minute later. That difference is your heart rate recovery, your HR. So if your heart rate drops by 12 or more beats in that minute, that's considered normal. If it's less than 12, then based on research, this is a marker of reduced cardiovascular fitness and increased mortality risk. So you want it to be at least 12. And then over time, as your fitness improves from lifting and moving and being, you know, having this lifestyle, you're you should see that number go up. You might start at 15 and eventually get to 25 or maybe 30. It is one of the most responsive fitness markers available. I don't think I've ever talked about it on the show. It's so easy. You don't need equipment, you don't need blood work. It's called heart rate recovery. Just try it at your next session. Pick the most demanding set, measure your peak heart rate, wait a minute, measure how much it dropped, write it down, do it again every few weeks and see what the trend looks like. All right. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, every rep you do isn't just building muscle. It is building a stronger heart, healthier blood vessels, a longer life. I'm Philip Cape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

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Does HRT Cause Weight Gain or Help Fat Loss After 40? (Dr. Maria Sophocles) | Ep 439

Are hormones making you gain belly fat? 

Is menopause really breaking your metabolism, or is something else going on? And does hormone replacement therapy help or hurt body recomp after 40?

Body recomp, weight loss, hormone health, and women’s fitness all collide in this conversation with Dr. Maria Sophocles, a board-certified OBGYN and nationally recognized menopause expert with 30 years of clinical experience. 

We break down why women lose muscle, gain abdominal fat, and struggle with metabolism during perimenopause and menopause even when nutrition, macros, and strength training are dialed in.

We unpack what estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone actually do for fat distribution, muscle building, insulin sensitivity, and longevity. We also tackle the biggest fear head-on: does HRT cause weight gain?

If you care about lifting weights, strength training over 40, and sustainable weight loss, this episode brings clarity instead of confusion.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

0:00 – Menopause and weight fears
5:33 – Why belly fat increases
9:15 – Hormones vs metabolism myths
13:56 – Muscle loss and calorie needs
20:18 – Does HRT cause weight gain
27:13 – Estrogen and fat distribution
28:24 – Progesterone and sleep effects
31:24 – Testosterone and muscle building
34:16 – Labs and doses
38:31 – Health risks and best time to start HRT
45:30 – Four HRT takeaways

Episode resources:

• Instagram: @mariasophoclesmd 

• Website: mariasophoclesmd.com 

• Book: The Bedroom Gap: Rewrite the Rules and Roles of Sex in Midlife

• TED Talk: What happens to sex in midlife? A look at the "bedroom gap"

• YouTube: @drmariasophocles 

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you're a woman approaching and going through menopause, who's been afraid to consider hormone replacement therapy because you've heard it causes weight gain and you've been watching your body composition shift, more belly fat, less muscle, a metabolism that feels broken, wondering if hormones are part of the problem or part of the solution, this episode's for you. Today I invited on a board-certified OPGYN, nationally recognized menopause specialist with 30 years of clinical experience to separate fat from fiction on HRT and body composition. When you understand what the research shows about estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, their effects on fat distribution, metabolism, and muscle preservation, then you can make an informed decision about your health and physique. 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 going to tackle one of the most common fears that women have about hormone replacement therapy, and that is weight gain. Dr. Maria Sophocles is a board-certified OBGYN and certified menopause practitioner. I'm thrilled to have her on the show. She's been a visiting professor and NIH researcher. She spent three decades helping women navigate perimenopause and menopause. She's a TED speaker, author of the upcoming book, The Bedroom Gap: Rewrite the Rules and Roles of Sex in Midlife. Today you're going to learn what the latest research says about HRT and things like body weight, estrogen in your metabolism, fat distribution. We might get into testosterone therapy and muscle preservation and just how to think about hormones as part of an evidence-based approach to body composition and health after 40. Maria, thank you so much for joining me here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 1:56

  Philip, I am so glad to be here. This is so much more fun than what I've been doing all morning.

  Philip Pape: 2:01

  Oh, glad. I love it. I love it. Let's bring the energy. And our listeners are going to love this too because they know I like to frame these discussions with like the basics and stepping back a bit. And what I would love to explore a little bit is we think of perimenopause into the menopause transition and postmenopause starting as early as mid-30s, you know, all the way through when that time occurs. And there's a lot of misconceptions about weight gain and body fat distribution. Now, I've talked on this show about some of the under our understanding of expenditure and metabolic rate, how most people on average have the quote unquote same metabolism from their 20s to their 60s. And yet women are experiencing all of these issues with weight gain and body fat into as early as their 40s and 50s. And so let's reconcile what's actually happening, even when there's no HRT involved with the average population, knowing many of them are not resistance training and a lot of our audience are, but let's just talk about the average to start.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 3:01

  Yeah, of course. I think that the first thing to know is let's let's do a super basic definition of what menopause is. It's our ovaries age more quickly than other organs in our body. That's how we're built as humans. And there's a lot of cool biotech companies looking into actually slowing or stopping ovarian aging, which is just mind-blowing if you think about it, because it means potentially women would be fertile for their whole lives. Uh also means you could have periods your whole lives, but it also means that you wouldn't have this aging out. You wouldn't have this loss of what we call ovarian sex steroids, which we know are worth a lot of gold. They're a lot more than just being able to be pregnant. Keeping estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone in your body affects bone health, brain health, heart health. We call it preservation of function. And all of those functions take a big hit when menopause occurs. So if menopauses, if that definition is sort of the cessation of function of the ovary, what that really means in terms of hormone production is you get a drop in estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, those three big ones. I'm sure your listeners are smart and they all know that because they've been listening to your 400 episodes and you've got a whole following of bright, informed people. But for anyone who isn't sure, that's what menopause is. It's from when that happens, the average age in the United States, about 51 and a half. But women are living longer. So now you are gonna live as a woman if you're healthy and you do things right, a third of your life without the benefit of those ovarian hormones. And yep, you can get around that somewhat with uh strength training and you know, all kinds of exercise and and being perfect diet and all kinds of stuff. But the bottom line is those effects are going to begin. The effects on bone, on heart, on brain, on muscle. And we know that estrogen has effects on all of those things, plus joints, plus the synovial fluid that keeps our joints, you know, lubricated, plus our skin, plus our hair. I I could go on and on.

  Philip Pape: 5:12

  Pretty much every muscle mass plus muscle, right?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 5:15

  Uh and and and the unsexy stuff too, like eyes and teeth, dental health, gums, ears, it's pretty hard to find something that isn't impacted. Our heart, our heart rhythm. Um, so it's um it probably our gut microbiome, our vaginal microbiome, our bladder. Like I could go on and on. And I don't, I'm not being Debbie Downer. I'm just saying, you know, if you're a woman out there and you haven't had a urinary tract infection since you were a teenager and now you're getting two, three a year, don't kid yourself. It's because there's not as much estrogen making blood vessels around the bladder to keep things clean and healthy, and and making the vagina keep bacteria that keeps the bad bacteria out. So it's all very related. So that's kind of what menopause is. And people ask me pretty much every day, because I run a menopause practice that's virtual. So patients from different states call in, we have consults. They say, What why am I gaining weight and why is it all in my belly? Those are probably the two most common questions I get. Because everyone knows why they're getting hot flashes. There's not a woman in America that doesn't know that a hush is related to menopause, but they didn't expect the weight gain. And this really makes people frustrated when they are already health conscious and they're already doing all the things well. Yes. They're like, they they literally put their hand up and go, Don't tell me to stop going to Burger King because I don't. Don't tell me to stop eating cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory, because I don't, you know, and I'm like, I'm sorry.

  Philip Pape: 6:45

  This is where you see the comments on Instagram under like some 25-year-old, you know, male uh personal trainer, right? And you see the comments like, Don't talk to me about this. I'm doing all these things already.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 6:56

  Yeah, but for midlife women, it is super frustrating because they they often truly are eating and drinking correctly and they've done their reading and they're listening to all the right podcasts, like wits and weights. So people always say, Why? Why? What did I do wrong? Why? Well, first of all, it's not like just you. 85% of all midlife women get have unexplained and undesired weight gain in menopause. 85%. So if you're gaining a little men know tummy, you're actually in the norm. Not that we want it. And society does not is not very forgiving. You know, no Hollywood directors like, I'd really like to cast someone with a belly hanging out over the bikini. I mean, we live in a society that doesn't accept that that's the norm and we don't want it. I don't want it either myself. So I feel you, is what I'm saying. But 85% will have undesired and unexplained weight gain in the abdomen. So if you want to understand the science behind why, because I do think, Philip, you and your followers seem to really want to know the science. This is a one I've I'm on zillions of podcasts, and some people actually don't want to know. Yours is pretty brainy, I find your followers kind of know. Yeah. So let me explain why. When those ovaries go to sleep in menopause, both the estrogen and the testosterone are decreasing, and but it's oversimplification to think they both just shut off and go to zero. They don't. The ovary stays alive and keeps making hormones, but a tiny little amount. And for most women, the estrogen drops more than the testosterone does. So if you look at my hands and they're both dropping, the testosterone drops less, so that metabolism sees something it hadn't seen before, which is a relative up of prevalence of testosterone relative to estrogen. And you haven't seen that as a woman your whole life. That's part of being a woman. That's why we don't have super high testosterone in your mom's uterus when you're a fetus growing, all these little things happened uh when you had two X chromosomes that quieted the testosterone. Whereas if you were an XY fetus becoming a male, you had a whole lot more testosterone made. So since you were as a female fetus, you've had this testosterone pretty suppressed. There, we've all made it. We make it for sure. But the estrogen kind of zoomed ahead and was sort of the dominant hormone. Now you're in menopause, they both drop, but the estrogen drops way more. So suddenly your body sees testosterone. Well, what does it do metabolically with that? Metabolically, with that picture, where fat is deposited is what changes. It doesn't make you fat, it changes where the fat goes. So it is preferentially deposited on the abdomen. How do we know this is the case? This isn't a Maria Sophocles idea. This is people way smarter than me who figured this out. They looked at male fat deposition. And if you look at a male who gains weight, they don't get heavy thighs and a big bottom. They don't get it on their hips, they get it on their belly.

  Philip Pape: 10:13

  That's right.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 10:13

  You know, look at those like German guys at Oktoberfest, right? Their little butts and their legs are skinny, but their bellies are huge.

  Philip Pape: 10:20

  And we kind of accept it, right? Like, okay, you expect men to have big bellies, even in their 20s and 30s. Yeah, yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 10:25

  Yeah, I'm a male. This is where it's gonna go. And you and I know it doesn't have to be that way, and we know you can be more fit than that. But if you just leave it to wherever your metabolism wants to put fat, and you give it enough fat or calories, it's gonna put it on your belly preferentially as a male. And as a menopausal female, there is this shift. It doesn't mean you can't gain weight in your butt and your legs, but there's a shift towards a preference or uh to deposit in the belly. And man, does this piss women off to be living the same life you've lived for the last 10 years as a woman and suddenly you're getting a belly? And I think there's shame behind it, Philip. I think women see the belly and they think, man, everyone's gonna think I sit up all night and eat Cheetos, binging Netflix, and I'm not. I'm going to Pilates, I'm doing yoga. You know, there's a lot of psychology behind this belly fat that is devastating to women. I mean, you know, it's easy to be like, oh, come on, you're only 10 pounds overweight. But it really bothers them because they're trying to do the right thing. Their own metabolism is betraying them based on what's happening in the ovaries.

  Philip Pape: 11:32

  Does that make sense? It makes total sense because I hear it from women who are in that age and they're asking for like training advice where they've already gotten pretty lean and now they're like, my triceps and my abdomen, and they still, you know, want to work on the butt, right? That's always there. But it's like the uh the abdomen, you know, the belly area and the triceps and some odd areas that I hear over and over again. I don't again, I don't know where the try the arms come into it, if that's related as well. But definitely.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 11:57

  I think it's that we see it. Like the reason people women care about the triceps, because they all ask me the same thing. Like, how do I do this? It's because when we wear a sleeveless top, right, we know that if any fat deposits there, it's seen. You can see it. And so it's limiting, it's wardrobe limiting. I know that sounds so vain, but it it is wardrobe limiting, you've got something jiggling there. Whether you have a nice bicep or not, if you've got something jiggle there, that's it, it's like, oh, rats, you know. So midlife weight changes. So let's also do a real basic statement that menopause itself doesn't cause the weight gain, it causes a redistribution and a change in body composition. So weight changes are driven by I'm gonna give you like four or five points that we could list or we could, you know, declining estrogen, loss of muscle mass, because we need that muscle mass, because muscle mass requires more calories than fat does to maintain. So if we lose muscle mass, it's simple math, and keep the same calories, we're gonna gain weight. So you either have to really cut those calories down, which no one tells you, or you need to build muscle mass. Ideally, you actually do both, you know, and and this is why the GLP ones work so well. But GLP ones work well if you combine them with building muscle mass. You know, I didn't want to, I don't work for the GLP one company.

  Philip Pape: 13:18

  So don't worry, we talk about it a lot.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 13:20

  Okay, good, good, good. So I've been I've been prescribing them for 10 years, so I'm I'm in it's old hat in my office. So declining estrogen, loss of muscle mass, reduced resting metabolic rate. Our metabolic rate does drop down. Another reason why menopausal women need about 250 calories less a day, which by the way, Philip, no one tells you that. You know, there is no such thing as, you know, we have sex ed for teens. Well, in my opinion, we need a sex ed for menopause, but we also need a health and fitness ed for menopausal women. And there isn't that. So they're thank goodness they're learning it from people like you and me.

  Philip Pape: 13:57

  Can we hit on that one real quick? Because that's the one that I think has a lot of confusion, right? There's like all the new research from Herman Ponser about the constrain versus the additive model of expenditure. And there's, you know, we look at population studies that show pretty stable RMR, but then when it counted for body composition, we see the differences. And so I'm wondering if number two and three are just kind of linked, or is this specific to the hormones, you know, as an independent variable?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 14:24

  I think it's specific to hormones as an independent variable because if we take away any hormone factor, then what I said, it flies in the face of what you said. They're opposite, and they're not opposite. They're right, if resting metabolic rate stays the same, none of this should happen. But is that reminds some change?

  Philip Pape: 14:40

  Yeah, what I'm saying is the RMR dropping by 250 calories, is it part of the loss of muscle mass causing that?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 14:48

  Yes, yes.

  Philip Pape: 14:49

  They're all right as well as like, I mean, I always wonder how how often we're teasing out things like uh chronic stress in that population and stuff like that, because that also exacerbates.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 14:59

  I mean, you know, I'm making these big, giant generalizations. You understand that, right? There's individual variation and a lecture I gave this week on wellness. Uh, so cool. If any of your listeners uh belong to the Noom app, they can find the live stream of Noom's first Art of Wellness Summit that was done in Princeton, New Jersey day before yesterday. Incredible lectures on that. And one of the things we talked about, um, this is a little tangent, but then I'll come back, was that loneliness and not being socialized decreases your oxytocin even oxytocin decreases with age, but if you're lonely and isolated, it decreases even more. And the the kind of mic drop thing I brought to the lecture was that oxytocin actually relates to our ability to build and maintain muscle. So when you get old people living alone, their muscle wasting is even faster than old people who live in groups or go to church or a bowling league or whatever their book group, they're socialized, their oxytocin goes up, and we see they're better at building and maintaining muscle. Isn't that wild?

  Philip Pape: 16:07

  Yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 16:08

  You know, so don't be alone. Go join a book group or something. Get your oxytocin.

  Philip Pape: 16:13

  I think it's also correlated with it's like the with happiness, like you know, social uh connection is the number one rated correlation with happiness and well-being, and you know, meaning in life.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 16:23

  Totally, totally. And my lecture was on sex and longevity and health and why being sexually active releases dopamine, releases oxytocin, you know, and actually is part of a pillar of health because when you're releasing those, you feel more pumped to exercise, to tackle your life, to go out and socialize. So kind of cool how it's all related, right?

  Philip Pape: 16:44

  It is all related. It's funny. I know we're not going to get into, well, we could talk about sex because I know it's an area of expertise, but like that also is a big frustration with women. You know, I work with a lot of clients one-on-one and we get into these more private conversations, but it's like, now you don't have your libido, now you don't have the desire, now you feel like you're not desired, and then that all exacerbates not having sex. Exactly.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 17:03

  Mike, tell them what Google TED Talk Maria Sophocles, and they'll see the TED Talk. We'll throw it in there.

  Philip Pape: 17:08

  We'll put that in there.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 17:09

  We'll throw it in there. So let's go back. Midlife weight changes. I kind of wrote this down so I wouldn't forget them. Driven by declining estrogen, loss of muscle, reduced RMR, resting metabolic rate. And there's also an increased insulin resistance. So so many factors. And again, I think that's also why, you know, people gain and they feel like they're not doing anything different. The same uh few snacks of licorice, which, you know, okay, we're all allowed to cheat and have something, uh, and and they're gaining weight and they feel like I'm not sinning any more than I used to. But if you have increased insulin resistance, you this is a different metabolic picture, you know.

  Philip Pape: 17:48

  Do we know if like things like leptin resistance are also part of the equation, which causes worsening in appetite from like usually it's from chronic dieting, but yes, but I think I gotta check that.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 17:58

  I don't want to misspeak. Oh man, you caught me. I gotta check that. And I got asked that a few months ago and I had to look it up. And my my poor little menopause brain, it leaked out. But that's a great question. And now I'm not gonna forget because I've been asked twice. But don't forget about lifestyle factors too. Midlife for men and women is often a time of sleep deprivation. People are peaking in their careers, you know. I need this report, I need this. Their parents are aging, their kids are older. They they tend there tends to be sleep deprivation and sleep sleep disruption because we know that hormonal changes cause sleep disruption. Lack of estrogen really affects sleep in multiple ways. So women are sleeping less, they're not going to bed at the same time every night, and their sleep is very disrupted, a lot of light sleep. So that massively affects. There's a study out that showed that women with sleep disruption consume 350 calories a day more than women who have, you know, perfect steady sleep. So that is such a bummer because the sleep disruption is so common. So you're getting all this stuff stacked against you. So I just want women out there to know this isn't just you. You're not just lazy or overeating cheetahs, or you know, this is really a lot of cards stacked against you. And it doesn't mean we can't help them. It just means it's not something you're necessarily doing wrong. During the menopausal transition, women gain on average, I think, five to ten pounds. But you know, the average height of a American woman's five, four. So I'm five, two. I can tell you five to ten pounds on me, it's a big deal. For sure. And sadly, some women saying it's 30, you know. Um, and that's also because of COVID.

  Philip Pape: 19:44

  Remember, we're coming off COVID where they might have gained, and then that I was wondering how far does that weight gain outpace male weight gain during the same age range? I'm curious about that. I'm guessing men gain weight just in general. Everybody gains weight as they get older because they're not doing certain things.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 20:02

  They gain waist circumference for sure, because remember, it's all getting deposited in the waist, but I know that women catch up in the waist circumference. They they start getting the waist circumference ads, but I don't know the absolute, like how many pounds men, because I don't treat men.

  Philip Pape: 20:18

  Oh, yeah, I was just curious the relative in terms of relative body weight, because I definitely know what you mean with the great question. Yeah. Okay, so that so this is good because you you listed some major factors. Fortunately, we we do discuss a lot of that here, and so it's very relevant, but it's also bidirectional, right? Because number one, you listed was the estrogen, and we started this conversation with framing around hormones, and we don't want to say like hormones are the root of every problem, right? Like any of these things, it's nuanced and multifactorial, and yeah, one supports the other. Yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 20:48

  No, it's exactly stress, sleep, you know, a lot of things, uh, self-esteem, you know, a lot of these things, sexually active. I mean, all those things. We know that women who are sexually active actually have fewer menopausal symptoms. That doesn't mean they gain less weight, just means fewer and more mild menopausal symptoms. But estrogen therapy, can we switch to that for a sec?

  Philip Pape: 21:07

  Yes, because we're gonna talk about HRT and like there's fears of weight gain on HRT, which I actually didn't realize that was a big fear personally, because I'm in a different population where like people have heard good things about HRT. But yeah, we want to address this.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 21:22

  Well, anything that could be weight gain is a fear for women. They really hate it. Any med, if I put someone on medication that has nothing to do with weight or whatever, people's first question is like, Am I gonna gain weight?

  Philip Pape: 21:32

  Does it cause weight gain? Yes.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 21:33

  Don't you want to know if it like causes cancer or something? No, they just want to know if it causes weight gain. So, no estrogen therapy does not cause weight gain. Okay, that's happy. So, anyone out there who's staying off estrogen because they worried it causes weight gain, that's not. Does it mean we all don't know someone? Sure, there's always someone who says, Well, my aunt gained 30 pounds. We don't know. Was she gonna gain those 30 pounds? Was she did she quit smoking? Which can, you know, I'm glad she quit smoking. It's healthier, but some people who quit smoking start snacking. And so it's you know, who knows if it's the if it's the estrogen therapy. No, estrogen therapy itself, it also doesn't cause weight loss. So I don't want to mix that up, but it does reduce visceral fat. It does reduce, I mean it does improve insulin sensitivity, and it does preserve lean muscle mass. So those are all good things, and it may slightly increase resting energy expenditure. So I I don't want to sound like an estrogen salesman, but that's I but I also don't want people to think, okay, I'll go on estrogen therapy and I better lose all this weight. No, that's that's not why you go on. You go on estrogen therapy either to control menopause symptoms or to preserve function of brain, heart, bone, or both.

  Philip Pape: 22:49

  Yeah, but that's not sexy, Maria. I know, but no, no, that's I'm speaking for my listener, right? They're like, Yeah, yeah, okay, that's fine, but you know, I really need need a good reason to go. And and those are good reasons. I'm just joking.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 23:00

  Yeah, no, I know. Sexy is take this and you'll melt away all the fat, your legs will get longer and all your wrinkles are go away. And that that's a mistake, you know. I mean, even now women put estrogen on their face, and there's, you know, they're as long as you're not overdoing it, it's probably not dangerous. But we don't really have great data to say that if you put estrogen on your skin, the wrinkles are gonna go away. We know that the best thing that you can put on your face to is sunblock to prevent wrinkles, or retinoids, which uh have been shown to create new collagen. And there are some small studies that do look promising for estrogen on the face. So, you know, you're welcome to buy it and do it. I'm never gonna tell you not to, but you know, even things like that, we we don't have 10-year studies or anything. So, buyer beware. There's a lot of stuff out there, you know, it's it's probably it's probably harmless, but we, you know, and same thing with systemic estrogen therapy. We have tons of data on that, on cancer reduction risk. We know that's very strong. Dementia prevention, a little weaker, uh, cardiovascular benefit, pretty strong. Bone health, super strong, super strong. The best thing you can do to be a strong 75 to 95-year-old woman is regular exercise and using estrogen in your 50s and 60s systemically to slow the decline of the loss of bone.

  Philip Pape: 24:25

  So let's talk about then that who should be using it. If if you had a thousand women walk in your office, you know, taking out any conflict of interest for services, or like obviously, and they were in their 40s and 50s, like, are we saying 100% of women would benefit at some point because you're gonna lose it no matter what? You live till you're 80 or 90?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 24:43

  Close to 100%. Uh, the only women who absolutely should not are women who currently have a cancer that is dependent on estrogen, a breast cancer or an ovarian cancer. That said, that's stating the obvious, but I better state it. Otherwise, it's pretty hard to find a woman. Uh, we used to say no women with heart attacks or strokes because estrogen can make clots, but that was the old formulations that were oral. Now we don't use oral, we use transdermal gel, patch, spray. Because it goes through the skin, it doesn't go through the liver, and you don't have the clotting issues, you don't get the cholesterol bump, and they're so, so much safer. So now it's very rare that I have to look a woman who wants it in the eye and say, I'm sorry, you just can't do it. And it's usually someone who already has a cancer. We know the genetics of that cancer. And of course, those are the women that come in with a million hot flashes saying, please, please put me on it. But we do have non-hormonal things for those women, FDA-approved non-hormonal things. We have we have herbal supplements that actually work quite well. So we have non-prescription and prescription things. We have devices like this little bracelet, the ember wave. This was invented at MIT by two scientists. It goes on your wrist. The little bracelet part goes on the inside. It actually senses hot flashes in the brain and it cools the wrist in this funky uh on-off kind of pattern, and it stops the hot flashes. So plenty of things that are not estrogen if you need help.

  Philip Pape: 26:14

  Okay, I know I know some women that would like to know about that lot, that uh that jewelry there.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 26:19

  EMBR wave, embr wave.

  Philip Pape: 26:23

  Ember, like like on a fire. That's cool. Okay, yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 26:25

  It also heats. Like if you're someone who's always cold, it's a different button you push and it'll warm you. So it's pretty cool. Ember Labs is the company. And uh I think I love it, it's interesting. Yeah, I love tech too. I mean, look at all the cool data we can get now, right?

  Philip Pape: 26:40

  It's right, that's right.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 26:41

  I think it's gonna help us be able to be better patients because we can advocate for what we have. And I hope that the medical education system will catch up. So when you walk in with an aura ring or whoop, your doctor will have it downloaded and your doctor will be able to say, Hey, right now, no, they're behind.

  Philip Pape: 26:59

  Right now, my two doctors a mile apart can't even get the same information.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 27:02

  So you know that we're embarrassed by where it is now. That's why people like you and I have to kind of own it ourselves. I think.

  Philip Pape: 27:10

  Yeah, I think it's great.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 27:12

  That's okay, it's just where we are. Um, but on the central fat accumulation kind of one last thing. Yeah, no, for sure. Women who are on estrogen therapy tend to have less central abdominal fat accumulation compared with those not on HRT. So that is a kind of sexy thing to say.

  Philip Pape: 27:33

  That's good.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 27:34

  That's as sexy as I might be able to get today. I don't know.

  Philip Pape: 27:36

  No, I mean we've established that most women probably could benefit other than via a specific population that that just can't. We've established that it helps with a lot of these things you talked about before, including maybe a resting metabolic rate, definitely your the symptoms, and gives you resistance, and gives them resistance, resistance, gives you physiological replacement, all of that. Uh and then like and the root, the root matters.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 27:59

  The transdermal A is safer, B, it's good for everyone, and C, you get less fluid retention, which is what a lot of people perceived as weight gain from the olden days when it was oral, and you get less impact on cholesterol and triglycerides in a negative way. And so if you prefer if weight gain's an issue for you or metabolic concerns, you want to make sure you're transdermal.

  Philip Pape: 28:23

  Transdermal. And then that segues into the other two hormones you mentioned. And I know there are others, there maybe thyroid and DHAA, but let's just focus progesterone and testosterone. Yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 28:33

  Yeah. So progesterone is weight neutral. There's no effect on weight from progesterone. I have had patients tell me, I swear to you, I gained weight on progesterone. I I believe them because I believe my patients. But if you look at a thousand women and you look at the science, it's it does, it's not supposed to put any weight on you. I think if you treat enough people, you're gonna have someone for whom that's not true. But in general, weight neutral and progesterone, I call it proslee because it can have positive effects on sleep. If you take it orally, it releases something called GABA in the brain, which is almost like a whiteboard for your brain. So when you've got too much, your brain's gonna explode. It helps you sleep. And so what we said before counts. If you sleep better, you eat better, you exercise better, your outlook for the day is better. So I would say progesterone, if you have a uterus, you need progesterone. Remember, if you've had a hysterectomy, you do not need progesterone. You could take it if you wanted, but you don't need it. When we give it as hormone replacement therapy, we give estrogen for symptoms and preservation of function, and progesterone to protect the uterus from estrogen growing tissue. And you know, estrogen has great effects everywhere except the breast if you have cancer. Uh, if you don't have cancer, it doesn't have negative effects on the breast and on the uterus where it'll cause tissue to grow. And after menopause, you don't want any tissue growing there. That's why we give the progesterone. As far as weight, there are different types of progesterone. Okay. There's a micronized progesterone, and that is the most natural progesterone we have. The brand of that, I don't know if we're allowed to say brands, is called Prometrium, P-R-O-M-E-T-R-I-U-M. That is probably the best one in terms of no issues for weight. It's very natural. The more synthetic stuff, when you get into synthetic progesterones like MPA, madroxy, progesterone, acetate, those are more likely to cause an increased appetite. So now it may not be weight neutral, more likely to cause fluid retention, more likely even to cause mood changes. So let's just say the flavor. The flavor of progesterone you are given matters. Um, so do ask for micronized progesterone.

  Philip Pape: 30:50

  Micronized.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 30:51

  Yeah, it doesn't have to be made by a fancy compounding pharmacy. You can pick it up at CVS or Walgreens, but the type of progesterone matters much more than whether it's used or not.

  Philip Pape: 31:01

  Is that a cream as well?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 31:03

  Uh no, there are progesterone suppositories and creams, but those creams on the market are not FDA approved or anything. I'm not saying they don't work. I'm saying if you want to go with something with a lot of nice data behind it that's safe, you want a prescription for the prometrium or the generic of prometrium called micronized progesterone. Okay. Um testosterone. I want to do test progesterone because it's kind of short and sweet.

  Philip Pape: 31:29

  Right. I like it.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 31:31

  Yeah. So testosterone is kind of all the rage. I've been using it in women for 20 years. So I'm like, oh, everyone's just figuring this out. But it is made in women, as I said, even in little babies and young girls make testosterone. When the ovaries stop making it, we do have a deficiency in it. This can affect our libido. This can affect our ability to build lean muscle mass. So low dose testosterone in women. And I have to use the word may because it's not because there aren't studies or data, because again, we live in a country where we have to discern between something that's FDA approved or not. And we do not have an FDA-approved testosterone for women. We do for men. So I'll say may. It may increase lean muscle mass and improve insulin sensitivity, and it may enhance energy and motivation. So that's my textbook. If you were my med student, how I would teach you. What do I see with my patients? I see that in the right ranges, it definitely improves energy, outlook, lean muscle mass. It's been phenomenal and libido. The kicker is the levels, right? The levels in a postmenopausal woman are pretty low. They're close to zero. The levels in a pre-menopausal woman, 30 to 40. If I just give you enough, Philip, if you're my female patient and I give you enough to get you back to your pre-menopausal level, most of my patients don't feel much of anything. I have to really get a little higher than that. And that's where we're walking a little tightrope of we have data from trans women. You know, that's where the data comes from. Because when trans women choose to take testosterone to get a beard and stuff, they're taking huge doses.

  Philip Pape: 33:20

  To masculinize, yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 33:21

  Yeah, to masculinize. So, and they're pretty safe. So, so I feel comfortable sneaking up a little above that normal range, uh, into like the 90 to 100, 120 range. And at that range, women come in and they're like, first of all, I want sex again, which is fun. I initiate, which is fun. I go to the gym and work and work and work and get nothing. But now that I'm taking the testosterone, I actually see some definition and that feels good and it makes me feel happy. One woman told me, My world is like, uh, what did she say? It's like a rainbow now or something. It was some corny phrase, but I knew what she meant. She had energy and a good outlook. And so I, you know, I use it. It does not cause weight gain, you know, when we dose it correctly. I never have anyone come in and say the testosterone caused weight gain. Um, so I think, you know, those those are your three. Um, but I want to hear what you want your listeners to hear more about.

  Philip Pape: 34:21

  I mean, two questions on testosterone. One, you mentioned earlier the ratio of testosterone to estrogen increases uh naturally. And so are you doing them in conjunction or is it just you get the labs and the testosterone is just really low. Yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 34:34

  Well, let's talk about the labs, okay? I use labs for testosterone because I treat people all according to their symptoms. How do you feel? But also with testosterone, I follow the labs because I don't have an FDA-approved thing where I know this has been tested on 10,000 women and we don't need to check the labs. It's always between X and Y. So, and women metabolize it differently. They have a protein in their blood called sex hormone binding globulin. So, if anybody out there is getting testosterone therapy, your clinician should be checking your total testosterone and your sex hormone binding globulin, because if it's super well, I don't want to overkill it, but that that's important. So I treat according to subjective needs, but also within the parameters of safe levels for testosterone. For estrogen and progesterone, we actually don't treat levels, we treat symptoms, right? So if Mrs. Smith is on an estradiol patch and her hot flashes are totally gone away and she feels great, I don't need to increase her estrogen dose. If she comes in and says, Wow, you put me on this patch and my breasts feel huge and swollen and tender and I'm miserable and I'm spotting now, well, I probably aimed a little too high and we need to go down. It's kind of that simple. So a lot of clinicians who get money from labs are now charging a lot to do a lot of labs. And I would urge people to be very cautious about anyone who's ordering a hundred estrogen labs on you. Same with breaking the estrogen down into estrone and estradiol and estriol. Estradiol is the dominant estrogen. It's what we replace, it's bioidentical, even though you can get it at CVS and Walgreens, and you don't need it from a fancy compounded pharmacy. You don't need it in pellets. You can use the patch or the gel safely. It's been well vetted. The doses are very consistent and it's covered by your insurance. Um, and it's all you need. The others just morph into estradiol anyway. So people have made entire careers off of this many labs, stacks and stacks of labs, convincing people they're estrogen dominant or they need some weird form of estrogen. It's really you're spending money, you don't need to spend.

  Philip Pape: 36:50

  Yeah, it's kind of a wild west with functional medicine out there today.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 36:54

  And some of it's great. I'm not, but some people have taken it to such an extreme that patients come in with 50 pages of lab work and they say, I am so confused. I don't know what I'm on, I don't know what I need. And we usually can really simplify it down. So they're getting the true health benefits without eight different things.

  Philip Pape: 37:15

  Okay. And then the testosterone is also transdermal. I know you caution against like the pellets. I've never heard good things about those, but I'm not sure.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 37:22

  Oops, I caution against them, but but because they can be super, super high doses, but in the right hands, people tracking them, that's okay. You know, I just caution against um when people are having you know crazy high stuff and then their voice changes or the clitoris enlarges. Some of those things don't reverse.

  Philip Pape: 37:42

  And you can't do anything about it because the pellet is there, right?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 37:45

  Yeah, and it's stuck for the next few months. So I just I think at least I would say maybe baby step and start with the lower dose and come in and have a good clinician where you can face to face say, Hey, I know you're trying to be safe with me, but I don't feel any benefit. Okay, all right, we'll go up. But if you start wham, high and you've got acne and chin hair, and you're moody and you're raging and you have road rage, because I've had people come in with that and they say, get the pellet out of me. Somebody put that in, and I want to kill my husband, and I'm screaming at everyone, and I have acne. And I'm like, I I can't do anything for you, you know. Um, go to go to Bali for three months and do meditation. Like, so you gotta, you just gotta be careful of who's treating you and what's their ethos and stuff. I I think safety is a great place to start, you know. But I also have testosterone be so helpful for women.

  Philip Pape: 38:38

  I think this is great the way you're simplifying it today. And I know speaking of safety, maybe we should just put to bed in case anybody isn't already the any cancer risks, you know, from like the women's health initiative, you know, and also the synthetic versus the natural, if there's any differences there, yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 38:54

  Yeah, yeah. So cancerous, that's so smart. And it it we could say it a hundred times. We could do a hundred episodes of it because in case anybody misses it, it's one of the single biggest sadnesses in women's health for the last 25 years. 23 years ago, a study came out and they evaluated the data incorrectly and they announced at the FDA hormones, estrogen causes cancer. It increases the risk of cancer. The whole world went crazy. Everyone stopped using it. When the data was redone and properly statistically analyzed, the fearful stuff did not make statistical significance. It didn't, it's like if I'm in the NCAA championships and it's tied and there's one second left, and I throw a three-pointer and it hits the rim and then falls out. I don't get a point for that. I lose. You only get it if it goes in the hoop. And this the data did not meet, did not go through the hoop, but they announced that it did because they kind of thought it was trending that way. And that oops has cost, we believe, 150,000 lives, premature deaths of women. Isn't that stunning? Wow. Stunning. Yeah, we've a Yale study now showed how many women have died prematurely because of that incorrect news because they got their estrogen prescription and then got scared and threw it out. The data since then, and there's a ton, has shown quite the opposite. Women on HRT, which is estrogen if you have no uterus, or estrogen and progesterone if you have a uterus, have a reduced rate of cancer. When they use that HRT between 50 and 60, probably even early 60s, it's a in the 30%, 30-something percent reduction in breast cancer, about a 40% reduction in colon cancer. I mean, there isn't enough fiber on the planet to lower your colon cancer risk that much. Massive reduction in osteoporosis development, which women my age, you know, 25, just kidding, I'm much older than that, don't think about osteoporosis yet. But believe me, when you're 70 and 75 and 80 and all your friends are falling and going to assisted living, you wish someone had told you this. So the best thing you can do to be a healthy 75, 85, 90-year-old is to slow the bone loss now. The most rapid loss of bone is in the first five years after menopause. That's your magic window. And so to get estrogen then and put the breaks on the bone loss then pays you dividends. It's like putting money in a savings account when you're young. It grows so much by the time you're old. So I think the WHI, by telling people it was dangerous, it caused a lot of harm. Now we recommend uh HRT for all women, with the tiny exceptions I mentioned, immediately when they become menopausal. In some women, we start in perimenopause just to relieve the symptoms they're having. But for bone health, we want everybody on it, you know, for 10 years. And some of us, like myself, I will stay on it forever because I have really strong family history of heart disease. So I don't want those plaques in my arteries to get a chance, you know, to grow. Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of women. So if you have extra risk for that, just like if you have extra risk for osteoporosis, let's say you're on chronic steroid use or your mom and aunts all had osteoporosis, you may want to stay on estrogen for the long duration. Because guess what? Once you come off it, the bone health starts to deteriorate. So the key thing is to individualize it, is to go to a good menopause, educated, and trained clinician. And you can find them on menopause.org and put your zip code in and find someone and say, Hi, here, here's my life. Here are my risk factors. I smoke or I'm omit osteoporosis or breast cancer, whatever it is, and let them tell you, oh, I would, I think, you know, but they're if you're 50 to 60, they're gonna mostly suggest you be on it because the benefits so far outweigh the risks.

  Philip Pape: 43:02

  Yeah. And so that I guess the last question then related to that, when to go on it, what about women who are early perimenopause and the really only recourse they go to right now is maybe their GP or OBGYN? And I hear stories almost every day, Maria, about like I went to my OBGYN and she said, you know, some silly thing. No, there's no way you need to consider hormones ever. You know, it's like these blanket sandings you still get. Yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 43:26

  So the other bad news, and in in my book, I talk about how we have to revamp sex ed for kids to be more inclusive and updated, but we also have to revamp medical education. Those doctors were not trained in menopause at all. I mean, you realize I got no menopause training in medical school. I did. And so if I got no menopause training and one of the country's top menopause experts, you know, all the rest of the doctors got nothing. And what did they read in 2008, 2010? The WHI. So If your doctor says boo poo-hoo on menopause HRT, you just thank them and you go find another doctor. Now, what you can do for yourself if you're in perimenopause and you're having symptoms, a boring old birth control pill is a wonderful gap closer. We used to sell, oh, you can't be on the pill after 35. That myth is old and disproven. We use the pill now from age like 40 to 50, just like uh I'm a Philadelphia girl, like the Phillies would use their eighth inning closer to bring in for the eighth and the ninth inning. You know, you need a change of picture. And same thing. The pill will smooth the fluctuations of perimenopause. Perimenopause is almost harder than menopause because the hormones are there, but they're going like this. And it makes crazy mood stuff. Periods go crazy. Women get really frustrated, and their doctors are like, You're not in menopause because you're still having a period. Maybe uh you need wine at night. You know, they get dismissed, really badly dismissed. But a simple little low-dose birth control pill can do a lot. Don't think of it as a birth control. Think of it as a, here's what I call it, a perimenopausal smoother, right? And if you're doing that from 47 to 50 or something, and then periods stop altogether, okay, you're probably in menopause now. You can get your blood drawn, look and see if your FSH is elevated. Yep, you're in menopause. Or no periods for a year, yep, you're in menopause. Now change from the birth control pill to the little patch and you're good to go.

  Philip Pape: 45:33

  All right, great. This has been a really good, you know, tour of the the big relevant. No, I I don't think so at all. No, this is perfect because I feel like you've simplified some things. We've definitely had some functional folks, and I've talked to a lot of people who are hormone experts, and sometimes it does get overly confusing or complicated. So it's really nice, you know, you you narrowed down how these relate to the symptoms we wanted to talk about, as well as uh sources and and testing and kind of how to take them. And I think this will be great for the listeners.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 46:02

  So I'm so glad. I I actually put I honed it down to four take-home points for your listeners. Want to hear them?

  Philip Pape: 46:08

  Yeah, let's hear them. There we go.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 46:10

  Number one, HRT does not cause fat gain itself, it changes where the fats uh well, HRT, if you get on it, you're not causing gain with weight gain. Number two, estrogen therapy often improves body composition. Number three, weight gain during menopause is driven by a hormonal decline, not driven by the HRT itself. So some people confuse that. They think the HRT is causing the weight gain. It's actually the decline in hormones that's causing it. And number four, transdermal through the skin, estrogen, and micronized progesterone is the most weight neutral approach to HRT.

  Philip Pape: 46:54

  Perfect. All right.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 46:56

  Yeah, four Thomas. You can you can punch them out or you know, whatever you want.

  Philip Pape: 47:01

  But yeah, no, those are great. Um, yeah, listeners, I hope you really enjoyed this one with Dr. Maria Sophocles. We're gonna include, you know, her TED Talk, the menopause.org website, her website. But where do you want people to reach out to you?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 47:14

  Um, I think Instagram's easiest. Maria SophoclesMD.com. Um uh or website, same website, Maria SophoclesMD.com is the website at Maria SophoclesMD is the Instagram. I got it backwards. Um so it's all the same. And um yeah, and to check out the book, I think the book deals with all this so nicely, and then it delves into uh sex and sleep and health and oh, all so much in there people will will love. And that's um, that's actually it's already on Amazon if and other places, uh, The Bedroom Gap by Maria Sophocles. I I think they'll get a kick out of it. And Philip, thank you so much for giving me this time.

  Philip Pape: 47:55

  Thanks so much for coming on. We're gonna include all that for the listeners, and uh, I learned a lot, so I know they did as well. I really appreciate your time on Wits and Weights.

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7 Natural Testosterone Boosters That Actually Work (Evidence-Based) | Ep 438

Struggling with low T?

The testosterone supplement industry wants you to believe your T levels require exotic herbs, pills, and "testosterone booster" powders.

The TRT industry wants you to believe your hormones are the root cause.

Many men over 40 with suboptimal testosterone don't have (primarily) a hormone problem.

They have a lifestyle problem. Chronic under-sleeping, chronic dieting, and chronic stress suppress testosterone far more than you might think.

Learn the 7 evidence-based lifestyle factors that affect testosterone levels in men, why strength training is non-negotiable for hormone health, how chronic calorie restriction backfires (even if you're trying to lose fat), and the BIGGEST factor that is lowering your testosterone by 10 to 15 percent.

You'll also discover why popular supplements like ashwagandha and tongkat ali are the last thing to focus on, and how to reframe testosterone optimization as a natural byproduct of doing the fundamentals right for building muscle and losing fat after 40.

Get your free 14-Day Rapid Start Fat Loss Guide to set up a sustainable approach that protects your testosterone and performance instead of the chronic restriction that tanks your hormones. Go to:
https://witsandweights.com/fatloss

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why testosterone boosters fail and what actually works
3:39 - Testosterone as a signal of how you treat your body
7:19 - How the HPG axis regulates hormone production
9:31 - 7 natural, evidence-based testosterone boosters
11:31 - Strength training as the foundation for hormone health
15:30 - Chronic dieting vs. strategic fat loss for men over 40
19:11 - Sleep deprivation and the testosterone crash study
22:23 - My 14-day rapid start fat loss approach
23:12 - Body fat, aromatization, and when losing fat helps vs. hurts
26:19 - Stress, cortisol, and the recovery connection

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you've ever Googled testosterone boosters, you might have seen the landmine of pills, potions, powders promising to skyrocket your T levels. Most of it is expensive, worthless garbage, but your testosterone levels can actually be influenced and significantly by specific behaviors you control. Today you'll learn the seven evidence-based factors that genuinely affect your tea levels, why the supplements you're probably considering are the last thing to focus on, and one common habit that can slash your tea by 10 to 15%, which you want to avoid. Plus, stick around to the end because I'm going to share a counterintuitive insight about dietary fat and testosterone. That's a simple fix you can make today. Ironically, as I recorded, as I record this, just recently was an episode on Mind Pump about natural testosterone boosters. And I had prepared this episode a few weeks ago. I didn't listen to that episode. I have no idea how ours compares to theirs, but I'm just mentioning it in case you guys think I ripped it off because I did. Here's the uncomfortable truth. Most of us, especially men, but you know, testosterone affects women as well, who are over 40, who are walking around with suboptimal testosterone. We often don't actually have a problem with the hormone itself. It's an input problem. How many times have we talked about on the show? It's the behaviors, it's the inputs that affect the hormones downstream. And rather than try to put a band-aid on the downstream effect, we have to look upstream and say, what's going on? Are we chronically undersleeping, chronically dieting, chronically stressed, and then wondering, oh, why don't we have the energy and the recovery and the strength gains and the libido and all these things that we want? You know, why am I having trouble building muscle, et cetera? And so the testosterone supplement industry takes advantage of this. It's a multi-billion dollar machine. It's built on that confusion, just like many things in the fitness industry. And they want you to believe your T levels require intervention as a default. And some of the best people in the industry, you know, we had Ali Gilbert on, and I've spoken to folks that are in the HRT space, will even they will say, look, get your life in order as you take TRT if needed, but let's look at the symptoms, let's look at the blood work, let's look at all that. But if your lifestyle is not there, that alone could be the main issue. Your testosterone is a downstream signal of how you treat your body. That's what it is. So that's where I'm starting from from this podcast, hence the episode title about natural testosterone boosters. And I'm not going to tell you it doesn't matter. Testosterone is absolutely critical for muscle protein synthesis, for bone density, for body composition, energy, mental clarity, sex drive, obviously all of that. But the path to healthy testosterone isn't through definitely any of these supplements, most, if not all of them, and also isn't necessarily through TRT if you don't also address these issues. And in fact, I know many men and the evidence will demonstrate this that just because you're on TRT doesn't mean all of these other issues go away if they're not supported. So we're gonna talk about that today, and I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to share an insight about a food pattern that a lot of people are talking to me about, thinking it's gonna help with testosterone, and it might be an easy fix for you to implement. So let's start with a quick overview of testosterone, what it is, how it works in your body. You have something called the hypothalamic pituitary gonatal axis, the HPG axis. And it responds to signals from the environment, from your training, your nutrition, your stress, your sleep. And so when those conditions are all favorable, your testosterone production goes up. When your body perceives some sort of load or stress or energy scarcity, it goes down. And this is just deeply programmed into our survival programming, like many of our other things, just like with food cravings, you know, our brain-related cravings for food in an environment that doesn't really support it too well because of how food is manufactured, et cetera. And the reason that most quote unquote testosterone boosters don't work very well, usually on the supplement side, is because they don't contain bioactive compounds. Some of them do, but they're trying to override a highly stressed system that you cannot supplement your way out of. You just can't. So if you want to take the lazy approach and give them a shot, who am I to tell you not to? But I hope you're here because you want to do it the right way. Think of testosterone less like a tank that you fill up and more like a thermostat. Okay, that's my engineer brain. I go to control systems. If your body has threat signals like you're not eating enough or you're not sleeping enough, or you have all this stress, it's gonna dial the thermostat down. If you want to dial it up, you have to change those signals. That's all it is. That's what I'm saying. It's like a control system, like anything else with our lifestyle. So today I'm gonna give you seven factors with the strongest evidence for affecting that thermostat. And I wanted to pick ones that are supported by recent research, that have decent effect sizes, right? That can sometimes far outpace and dwarf anything you can get from a supplement. They all stack as well. So if you can implement multiple factors, it's gonna create a compounding effect. And I'm going to cover them in order of impact. I'm gonna tell you what quote unquote boosters you could probably ignore and not waste money on. And I'm gonna give you a few honorable mentions that could be helpful. So let's start. Lever number one, the first natural testosterone booster, is no surprise, progressive resistance training, strength training, especially compound multi-joint lifts at moderate to heavy loads. This creates one of the best acute and chronic testosterone response. The acute response, that temporary spike during and after your training, it doesn't matter as much as you think. And some people can overblow it, okay? What matters is the adaptation to that that occurs as you sleep, and then you train again and then you sleep again. So then it's the consistent resistance training over time, which increases your insulin sensitivity. It reduces your body fat, which is a huge impact on testosterone. It helps you build that beautiful metabolic active tissue we call muscle, and it improves your body to regulate hormones across the board. When you regularly tell your body, hey, I need to lift heavy things, I need to be strong and capable, I need to be functional for what out what's out there in the real world, it adapts by providing or improving the hormonal environment that supports adaptation. That is it. This is a foundational first principle. If you're not resistance training at least three days a week in general, I mean, it could be two, but three, if not four, with progressive overload, then you're leaving a lot of that testosterone growth on the table. And you might be living with suppressed testosterone. Here's the thing, the thing about today's episode: it's not all about increasing testosterone as much as eliminating things suppressing your testosterone, which is amazing. Um, and I know since I've started lifting weights, you know, just to share some numbers, I'm now 45 years old. My total testosterone is somewhere in the 600s. So it's not like gloriously amazing, you know, super anabolic, but it's quite healthy and in a decent range for my age. But it used to be down close to 400. And the only thing I changed was getting healthier and lifting weights over those years and doing some of the other things we talked about today. The thing that a lot of people overlook is that train resistance training seems to blunt the natural age-related decline in testosterone. So we can't stop the clock, but we can kind of slow it down, right? So it strength training is not optional. It's not optional, optional, no matter your age. And if you're not doing it, start now, it's gonna make a big difference, including for your testosterone. Okay, number two, the second testosterone booster, is not undereating. Stop the chronic dieting. I talk about this so much now that I am of the mind most people over 40 should be rarely dieting. Should be rarely dieting. By the time you're going into a fat loss phase and an intentional deficit, you should have checked all the other boxes for supporting your lifestyle and be lifting weights and maybe even build some muscle. Okay. There are some edge cases of people who have a lot of weight to lose, and that's a different thing. But for the vast majority of you listening to the show, health conscious, wanting to get in shape and all that, this is a big one. This is a big one. Now, you would think, okay, I get leaner though when I go in a deficit, so that's going to improve my testosterone, right? And actually to some extent, it does, especially if you have excess body fat, and that's where that edge case comes in. But if it's a chronic, if you're chronically dieting, if you're always in a deficit, prolonged energy deficits all the time, well, your body is suppressing a bunch of things. It's suppressing your LH, that's your luteinizing hormone, that signals testosterone production. And that's something you can see in blood work. Your body is saying, hey, now is not the time for things that require a lot of energy, like building muscle or reproduction. And this is we see this in athletes and chronic dieters and physique competitors and people who are, you know, older men, especially who are like always cut and shredded, they don't have great testosterone, right? And so if you've been in a version of a calorie deficit for many, many months or years, and really years, you know, a few months here or there is not a big deal, probably. But if your recovery is a problem, you you can't get stronger, you feel like you're running on empty, just look at that. Are you just under-eating? And this is men and women, but yes, even men for testosterone this is a big deal, right? So your testosterone also is gonna adapt downward, even in a short dieting phase. But again, that's more temporary, and that's where a recovery, a recovery diet to come out of it is gonna be the best thing you can do for your hormones if you don't need to diet anymore. Okay. Number three natural testosterone booster is sleep. Now, I'm going through this list, and you guys are probably like, snore, we hear this all the time, we know these other things. But if you're not doing any of these things, don't go to the supplements and the necessarily TRT. Again, TRT, it depends on your medical professional and where you are in life and all that. I'm not telling you not to do that. I'm just saying that's not the be-all-end-all solution. You have to do both. So I've got some really cool data here. A University of Chicago study found that sleep restriction of five hours a night for just one week reduced T by 10 to 15%. And this was in young, healthy men. That's in young, healthy men. And when we look at the curve of what happens with T over age, that's like aging them by 10 to 15 years, right? So one week of poor sleep can make your testosterone look like a much older person. And if you're always getting poor sleep for years and decades, ah, that there you go. That could be a very simple solution, even though it takes effort to change your behavior, I get it, to address testosterone. The majority of our testosterone secretion, this is, and I say our as in men, occurs during sleep. And it especially occurs during slow wave sleep, which occurs in the first half of the night. So if you're fragmenting that sleep, if it's interrupted, if you've got a racing mind with lots of stress and anxiety, if you've got insomnia, if you've got sleep apnea, the list goes on and on, and then you just really don't get enough hours of that kind of sleep, you're cutting short that window for hormone production. And then sleep fragmentation is very important. If you are getting enough hours, but you're waking up a bunch, you're you're also getting less of the benefits. And I mentioned sleep apnea briefly, but that has a major testosterone suppressor. And I would say that it is massively undiagnosed or underdiagnosed in men over 40. So if you snore heavily, I mean, ask your ask your significant other if you have a partner and ask them if you snore all the time. You probably know by now. If you wake up tired all the time despite having enough quote unquote hours in bed, if you have headaches in the morning, all of those, you might want to do a sleep study. Just consider a sleep study. And then the target is that seven to nine hours of quality sleep. We're not gonna go through all the sleep hacks today, but this is another non-negotiable that could be a big lever for you. Now, as we go through this, you're gonna be wondering, okay, how do I get started with some of this stuff? If you're looking to dial in the first couple behaviors that it really takes to kickstart your journey, if your goal is fat loss, but you also want to preserve your hormonal health and your performance, grab my free 14-day rapid start fat loss guide. Go to wits and weights.com slash fat loss. Now I have other guides. I have one for muscle as well. You can go to wits and weights.com slash muscle if you're in the muscle building mode. But either of those are gonna walk you through how to set up your nutrition, your training, your next steps to get started. So again, go to wits and weights.com slash fat loss for the 14-day rapid start fat loss guide, or wits and weights.com slash muscle if you want the muscle building nutrition guide. Now, we're gonna get to number four here. And this is body fat reduction if you are what's considered over fat. And I know you don't might not like that term, but that's like the technical scientific term. So if you before you think I'm contradicting myself, right, I just recently said chronic dieting suppresses testosterone, and now I'm telling you fat laws can increase it. I want to clarify if you're carrying excess body fat, especially visceral fat around the midsection, so that's belly fat, the adipose tissue, that actively converts testosterone into estrogen in a process called aromatization. And this is why overweight men often have lower T and higher estrogen levels and things like man boobs and all the other stuff that come with it, then losing body fat from that perspective, especially visceral fat, can very meaningfully increase both your total and your free testosterone. It has, however, it has diminishing returns once you get to a healthy body fat range. And that's a pretty wide range. It's up to you know 15 to 20 percent. We're not talking about being cut or shredded, just a healthy body fat range. Then the benefit of getting leaner on on getting leaner for testosterone is minimal. And then it could backfire because now you're aggressively dieting and stressing yourself out. Which you know what computes the idea that we should be living in a healthy state of body composition, not super shredded, not over fat. And that's generally a good place to sustain things. So my guidance is this if you're significantly over fat, then a moderate, time-limited fat loss phase is probably gonna help you with your testosterone quite a bit. And then if you're reasonably lean, say you you've gotten under 25%, maybe you're in that 15 to 20 percent, I wouldn't chase lower body fat just for tea, right? It's it's the chronic restriction might actually suppress it. And I've again experienced that myself, kind of maintaining around that 15 to 20 percent is a really nice place to be. All right, step number five to boost testosterone naturally is to manage a chronic stress and your cortisol, right? And again, you knew this would come up on the list. And this one always often gets dismissed, you know, as the woo kind of advice with the stress and the mindfulness and everything, but physiology very highly backs this up. Cortisol and testosterone have an inverse relationship. That means they move in opposite directions. If you have chronic psychological stress, chronic psychological stress, so that could even be perceived stress, it suppresses the HPG axis we talked about, the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis. And so when cortisol, a stress hormone, is chronically elevated, and that could be your work stress, relationship, conflict, financial pressure, lack of recovery, maybe overtraining, your body downregulates testosterone production. So, you guys that are just living stressful lives, you executives, I had a lot of clients like this, we've got to get that stress off your system at least a little bit. Every little bit helps. And if you don't, you're just making a trade-off. You are basically prioritizing the short-term survival from these stressors, right? Your body trying to be in this fight or flight mode over the long-term benefits of not having that state. So, do you want long-term health, longevity, strength, function? You want to be a strong, healthy man far into your golden years, or do you want to just keep chasing what you're chasing today and then see that decline and maybe a heart attack, maybe some sort of issue down the road? You know, I don't mean to be a fearmonger, but that is the reality of it for many men. So I'm not asking you to be a Zen monk. I couldn't do anything like that. It's recognizing that this unmanaged, crazy stress in your life is physiologically affecting your endocrine system. It is disrupting you. All right, way more than any quote unquote toxins in the environment or EMI waves or any of this nonsense you hear on social media about these minor things. And nothing against, you know, there are toxins in, you know, there are microplastics and all that stuff. But this is chronic stress is dwarfs a lot of those for most guys. The practical tip that I have is get outside, move, make sure you're resting between your training, make sure you spend good time with people you love and care about. Make sure you set boundaries on your work hours. I have a client who has been stressed out of his mind all year, runs a business with his wife. And as much as he wanted to like get more steps and do a few of the things we talked about, he just literally had no time. And I'm talking about you guys know what I'm talking about. It's like 100 plus hour work weeks, go, go, go, go, go, go, go with kids, trying to help out with everything. And there was just no time. And he finally realized, you know what, something's got to give. I've got to jettison some things for my life. I've got to delegate, I've got to hire some people, I've got to just accept, you know, maybe less business over here or doing things in a different way. If I'm going to salvage my health, salvage my relationship with my wife, not salvage, I mean, in his case, it's not a bad relationship, it's just prioritizing them, right? Prioritizing them. And so if you're working 12 hour days, and then on top of that, maybe you're training six days a week because you love being in the gym, and then you're sleeping poorly and you're like, I wonder why my tea is still low. It's not a testosterone problem. It's it's a recovery problem with your stress. All right, lever number six, and this one, this one is a favorite of mine because low carb and keto are so popular still for some crazy reason. But we know clearly by now from the research that low carb diets, chronically low carb diets, not just low carb during a deficit for a short while, but chronically, can reduce testosterone levels in resistance strained men. So carbs have to be under consideration here, guys. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis found that low-carb diets were associated with lower testosterone compared to high carb, period. And they proposed the mechanisms include elevated cortisol that comes with carb restriction, and impaired recovery that comes with carb restriction. Two of the biggest topics I always talk about when it comes to eating more carbs is let's recover, let's perform, let's reduce our stress by increasing our carbs. I did a whole episode on carbs and stress. So it's so important. Now, does that mean you have to eat four or five, six hundred grams of carbs? No. But if you're training hard and you're trying to get your sleep and you're trying to stay, keep that stress low, like we just talked about, and you want more higher testosterone, your body needs carbohydrates to fuel your training, to manage your stress, to support testosterone production. And I'm just saying don't go down into the sub-100s or the low 100s for a long stretch of time. And I say, you know, the numbers change based on your size, but that's generally the threshold for the vast majority of men. So if you're getting on its lowest end, 100, 150 in a diet, but then up to maybe in the 200s, 300s, 400s when you're not dieting, you're probably fine. It's where you are deliberately just cutting out all carbs because you think it's somehow helpful and it's not gonna be helpful. It's just not. All right. So I have a lot of episodes that talk about it. Just type in carbs into my library and you'll probably find it. All right. So carbs are your friend for testosterone. That could be the thing you're missing. Number seven is alcohol reduction. Oh, yes. I'm not gonna lecture you on drinking, guys. I'm not, I know I see it every day. Oh, I love my bourbon. Oh, I love my IPAs, whatever. If we're talking about what the evidence says on testosterone, then alcohol is one of the clearest dose-dependent suppressors of testosterone. And we also know it creates a lot of visceral adipose tissue and belly fat. So there's probably a correlation there too. Alcohol is directly toxic to your testes, to your testicular tissue at higher intakes. I mean, alcohol is a toxin, but if you flood your body with it, it's going to get to other areas of your body we don't want. Even moderate regular consumption can matter if you already have borderline low testosterone. If you're consuming alcohol multiple nights a week, you've got to consider this as a factor. And the relationship is pretty linear. The more alcohol, the more it gets suppressed. So if your testosterone is a priority for you and your health is a priority for you, reduce or eliminate regular alcohol consumption. And that's the way I'm gonna put it reduce or eliminate regular alcohol consumption. I'm not saying don't occasionally have a beer or mixed drink or at a party have a glass of champagne. Whatever. Okay, that's that's that's not gonna hurt you. As much as I know alcohol is a toxin and has no benefits, having it once every three, four, five months here or there, not gonna be a problem. It's the regular consumption that's really the big problem. Just to give you a little bit of wiggle room, okay? And I know this isn't what people want to hear sometimes, right? But sometimes we have to have this level of structure and commitment when things are just not helping us out. And if you're spending a bunch of money, by the way, on supplements and then you're drinking four nights a week, well, you're just offsetting things. So we've covered all the seven natural testosterone boosters. Stick around. Because I'm gonna share something about dietary fat and testosterone that I hear. There's popular advice that's getting around. I don't know if it's on TikTok or where, because I'm not on TikTok, but I want to address it. Before we do, some honorable mentions. All right. There are some compounds that have legitimate evidence, but only if you are deficient. Only if you are deficient in these supplements, in these compounds or in these nutrients, that might be why you have some lower testosterone. So vitamin D is huge. Vitamin D, it's on my short list of pretty much everyone should consider taking vitamin D, get your levels tested. There is correlational. There's also interventional evidence that links vitamin D deficiency to lower testosterone. And many of us, myself included, are in northern latitudes or we work indoors. And I take it, I take it because if I didn't, it would be low, right? And so maybe that has also contributed to a decent testosterone level. All right. But if you already get enough, well, supplementing is not going to help. Zinc. Zinc is the next one. Same principle. Um, zinc deficiency clearly lowers testosterone. And so you can supplement if you eat enough protein from animal sources, you might probably get you're probably getting enough zinc, which a lot of men are. Obviously, if you're not omnivorous, that could be something to look into. If you restrict a lot or you have a lot of training and stressed out, that could be have less zinc in your body. So get that checked. Sleep apnea, we already mentioned, believe it or not, like having a CPAP and not obstructing your sleep anymore, and you get treated for it. This is a massively underappreciated for men over 40. Get a sleep study and figure it out. So the the frame I want you to adopt is not that these are testosterone boosters per se. We already talked about the seven boosters. These are things to prevent suppression when you are deficient. Now, what can you what's a waste of money potentially for testosterone? All right. Ashwaganda, very popular. I think there's benefits for certain symptoms like stress and anxiety, for example. Um, I take Legion's Triumph, men's multivariate. It has it in there. I don't think there's anything wrong with taking it, although I have heard some people reference like long-term use could be an issue in some in a study here or there. But I think the effect size is pretty small, regardless, and it's likely mediated by the stress reduction of the ashwagandha. That could then help with the testosterone, but you don't want to rely on that. And I've seen people get build up a tolerance to it as well. Then there's Tongat Ali, which is very popularly mentioned. And the data is that weak there, I think. I think there's a lot of issues with dosing as well and quality control depending on where you purchase it. Uh fenogreek is another one, mild effects, mixed quality. I wouldn't rely on it. Diaspartic acid, tribulus, boron, you've probably seen those as well. I again, I wouldn't say there's any meaningful data. A lot of these are just a waste of money, I'm gonna be honest. And then there's all the multi-ingredient test booster blends, right? And most of these are complete garbage. There was actually a study that looked at these in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition. It found that less than 25% of the ingredients in the most popular testosterone boosters had any supporting evidence at all. So that's less than 25% of the ingredients in all of them. And about 10% had evidence of decrease testosterone. So be very careful with those. If they'd worked, I would love it. I would tell people to use it, I'd be telling my clients to use it, and they don't. The seven boosters we talked about before are your biggest lovers. And then fixing any of these important deficiencies that are evidence-based. So we want to reframe the fact that you may not have a testosterone problem. You may have a problem with the inputs, and your testosterone is low because you're not training, or you're not eating enough, or you're not sleeping, or your stress needs to be fixed, or you're drinking too much. And if you know this is the thing for you, acknowledge it right now. Admit it to yourself, be honest with yourself and say, hey, I've got something to go after. That's a positive thing I just learned about myself. Okay. That is, I don't need to chase supplements. I may not need TRT. Again, I'm not telling you one way or another on that, because that's gonna depend on you know, physiological levels versus where you should be given your lifestyle. I would fix the lifestyle stuff and do some before and afters on your labs, though. I think that's a great way to look at it. And that's it. So uh before we wrap up, I rem I told you I'm gonna share this thing about dietary fat. So I'm gonna do that in a bit. I do want to remind you again, grab my either fat loss guide at wits and weights.com slash fat loss or my muscle building guide, wits and weights.com slash muscle. If you're looking for a way to jumpstart some of this stuff on a practical level, because we didn't have time in this episode to get into all of it, these are free. Wits and weights.com slash fat loss or wits and weights.com slash muscle. All right, here we go. One of the most common pieces of testosterone advice you're going to hear is you should eat more fat. And I've heard it more with especially the carnivore crowd and the keto crowd, and maybe just low carb in general. And it is it is true that extremely low fat diets where you've got well under 20% of your calories from fat, can test they can suppress testosterone. But I think the type of fat matters less than the adequacy of fat. And there's no evidence that loading up on extra fat beyond adequate levels does anything for testosterone. So, for example, if you as long as you're getting at least, let's say 20, 25%, closer to 30 is the the default that I use with people from fat, you're getting everything you need. And going beyond that, like the 35, 40, or 45% fat, like you might see in carnivore or keto, up to 50% fat, isn't going to move the tea anymore. It should, I mean, you can prove it to yourself, but that's what we understand from the evidence. And and what's nice about that is you don't then need a high-fat diet. You don't have to be on carnivore or keto or something like that for your testosterone, right? You also don't have to be on an extremely low-fat diet. So guess where that leaves us? A reasonable balanced diet with plenty of protein, all the great protein sources we like: eggs, meat, fish, dairy, nuts, olive oil. Well, olive oil is not protein, but olive oil has a fat source, nuts as a fat source. I'm mixing the two, but a balanced diet, right? And not trying to increase your tea by just eating more and more fat or thinking the carnivore crowd has some sort of advantage for testosterone. And I think hopefully the the liver king situation and the fraud that that that was exposed there, when the fraud with Saladino and all those crackpot crazies out there is has has settled this kind of nonsense once and for all. And not like I have a strong opinion on it, do I? All right. So if you're tracking your macros, if you're around 20 to 35% of your calories from fat, that's fine. That's it. That's fine. Focus on your energy, focus your energy on the seven levers we talked about already. Focus on those. All right, you don't have to fix everything today, guys. Just pick one or two to get started. Just pick one thing. Pick one thing to get started on, commit to the next 45 days to move the needle just a little bit, one step at a time, in an achievable way. Set the bar low, right? Set the bar low. Reach out for help, use my resources, and that's it. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember your hormones work for you when you give them the right symbols. I'm Philip Pape, and I will talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

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Carbs Spike Your Insulin (But That's IDEAL for Muscle Growth) | Ep 437

Do carbs make you fat?

Are spikes in blood sugar and insulin a problem for health or weight loss?

Maybe you've been cutting carbs or tried keto or carnivore, yet your strength training progress has stalled, your recovery feels sluggish, and you're still not seeing the body composition results you want. 

The problem isn't your discipline. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what insulin actually does (especially if you lift weights).

Insulin is not a "fat-storage hormone" but a nutrient-partitioning hormone whose effects depend entirely on context: your training status, muscle mass, and energy balance. 

Learn how resistance training changes the way your body handles carbs, why lifters over 40 actually benefit from strategic insulin spikes, and how muscle tissue acts as a "sink" for glucose that determines where your nutrients go. 

It's not about eating unlimited carbs but understanding why carb tolerance is built through strength training and how to use that to your advantage, and to stop fearing spikes in blood sugar.

Whether you want body recomp, trying to build muscle while losing fat, or wondering why your low-carb diet isn't working despite consistent strength training, this episode gives you an evidence-based framework to rethink your nutrition strategy. 

Plus, get a simple post-workout protocol that can improve your next-day training performance.

Download my FREE macros guide: Nutrition 101 for Body Composition. Learn exactly how to set your protein, carbs, and fats for muscle building and fat loss using a flexible approach that works long-term: witsandweights.com/macros

Timestamps

0:00 - Why carbs and insulin don't automatically cause fat gain
3:20 - How training context changes what insulin does with your food
7:25 - The real reason lifters fear carbs (and why it's misguided)
11:55 - What insulin actually does (nutrient partitioning explained)
18:40 - How carbs support muscle building, recovery, and strength training performance
24:20 - Fat loss and insulin (why energy balance matters more than spikes)
29:20 - Acute insulin spikes vs. chronic dysfunction (the critical difference for body recomp)

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you've been told that carbs spike insulin, and insulin makes you fat, and you've been restricting carbs because of it, even though you're resistance training and trying to build muscle, this episode is going to change how you think about food. Today I'm gonna show you why insulin spikes, spikes in blood sugar, are not the problem, and why, if you're lifting weights, they're actually part of the solution. You'll learn why chronic dieters get this wrong at the metabolic level, why muscle changes what insulin does with your food, and a post-training carb strategy that can improve your recovery within just one day. Carbs spike blood sugar, increase your insulin, that those occur and that they automatically cause fat gain is still one of the most persistent myths in fitness. And it's costing a lot of people, a lot of people, especially those over 40, a lot of women I talked to, peri postmenopause, it's costing you a lot of real progress, healthy living, thriving, longevity, all the things that you're trying to seek by doing it, and you're just cutting into those benefits because we can benefit tremendously from carbs depending on the lifestyle. And the lifestyle that you were talking about is the one that we espouse here in Wits and Weights. Now, you've probably heard that keeping insulin low is the key to staying lean. And maybe you've tried low carb, maybe you've tried keto, maybe you're still restricting carbs, even while resistance training three or four days a week, and you wonder why you don't have the energy or your performance feels flat or you're not building muscle or recovery is taking longer. The reality is that insulin is not a fat storage hormone. Let me repeat that. Insulin is not a fat storage hormone, it is a nutrient partitioning hormone. And what that means for you and for your body composition and for your muscle building depends entirely on ta-da context. Context, guys, what is so sorely missing from short form reels on Instagram. Context. Your training, your muscle mass, your energy balance, your goals, your lifestyle. When these variables are aligned, then insulin becomes an ally. Now, I shouldn't have to say that any hormone in your body becomes an ally because we are it's a natural part of our human existence. And if we are all living our natural human lives as we should, as opposed to in today's, you know, Western world, with the food supply we have and with the sedentary lifestyle and lack of any form of hard work or heavy lifting, then you know the discussion would go away. But we need to understand how to leverage our bodies here and support our muscle development and our energy and our recovery and all of the things that carbs are great for that do not inherently drive fat gain. Now, I want you to also stick around to the end of this episode because I'm going to tie this all together into a post-workout carb timing strategy that I think can noticeably improve your next day's training performance. One of the most common problems I see with clients, I'm going to share it with you. Takes about 60 seconds to explain, and then you can start using it after your very next training session. But really, let's get into the myth and why it persists. Why is this misconception about carbs and insulin and fat gain so sticky, right? That's the word sticky. I don't think people are scared of insulin itself. Most people don't even use the word necessarily in these discussions. They're scared of losing control and gaining weight, and they've never been able to successfully lose weight or lose fat. And maybe cutting carbs has worked for them, and maybe the fitness industry has given them a really convenient villain that is very convincing in terms of how it is portrayed. Here's what I hear in the industry, and I many of these things I believe them myself, and I know now not to be true. Insulin spikes automatically cause fat storage. Wrong. Carbs shut off fat burning. Kind of wrong. And it's wrong and right for the reasons that we need to understand. Low insulin equals better body composition. Carbs are fine for athletes, but not for regular people. There's some truth there too. So again, we're gonna get into nuance. Notice I didn't just shut all these down. There's some truths in these, but you have to understand what they mean and context. And I think these beliefs persist because of some things that stick out at me as I was reviewing why, right? First, there's this framing around metabolic health, metabolism, type 2 diabetes, diseases of aging, all of that that has bled into the general advice and insulin resistance. And most people have heard the term insulin resistance or insulin sensitivity, but usually we're talking about the negative side. And in a clinical setting, this insulin resistance is generally correlated with really bad things. You know, high insulin is correlated with really bad things, but we're looking at people who have chronic metabolic dysfunction rather than necessarily the acute post-meal response in healthy people. And I've had several discussions with folks on this, and most notably, Ben Ziel came on. He's a type 1 diabetic, and he all but said, look, if you don't have type 1 diabetes, or if you don't have diabetes, you don't have to worry about this stuff if you're lifting weights and you're eating well and you're active, right? It's not a problem. So again, we have to look at what population is being studied when we look at some of this data. Second, the keto and low carb narratives have just so ridiculously oversimplified the role of insulin and treat it as a villain, kind of like people treat cortisol as a villain or no, not or that those are the two that come to mind. I'm not thinking of another one off the top of my head. But those two people treat as these like boogeymen that we have to just crush and put in their place. So that's the second one. Keto, low carb, that whole narrative. The third thing is that people conflate or confuse acute insulin spikes, right? These are the normal, transient, necessary spikes of insulin that are short-term, like when you eat food and particularly carbs, with, and they conflate that with chronic versions of this, which is called hyperinsulinemia. And that's a different thing entirely when you have chronic spikes in insulin, which again tie to insulin sensitivity and eventually diabetes. And we're going to come back to that distinction because it is critical. And then fourth, fat storage gets blamed on insulin or hormones or carbs or whatever, instead of the context those hormones operate in. And that's because people want to scape goat. They want to scape goat that maybe relieves them of their responsibility to make better choices in their life. Let's just put it that way. And I'm not saying it's just about calories in, calories out, even though mathematically it is. There's a lot of upstream choices and influences on those choices, including, yes, genetics, appetite, hormones, et cetera, et cetera. But we can't look at it in a vacuum. Okay. We can't look at it in a vacuum and say, well, so always carbs are going to spike insulin, which is going to cause you to gain weight or fat. So I want to reframe this today. You see, I'm trying to dance around this in a nuanced way because I also do not want to make simplified blanket claims because that is not what we're all about. Insulin doesn't cause fat gain without a calorie surplus. Boom. That's the thing you need to remember. Insulin doesn't cause fat gain without a calorie surplus. Another way to put that is the only way you gain fat is with a calorie surplus. Fat gain requires excess energy, repeated overfeeding, overconsumption, potentially a poor use of those nutrients, right? How we partition the nutrients because of your lifestyle. And then how, and then low muscle mass or inactivity, right? So it really does all come down to the excess energy, but it's the excess energy in all of that context. And that context tends to produce the excess energy. Insulin just determines where nutrients go, it doesn't create energy out of nowhere. So that's that's my thoughts on where the Smith comes from. Now, let's do a little detour into insulin 101. What does it do in your body? And I'm not gonna dumb it down, I'm gonna simplify it in a way that I can understand it so you can understand it. Because I'm not a doctor, I'm not a scientist, but I do self-study all this stuff and I talk to lots of experts and I work with clients on a daily basis. So I consider myself quite educated from spending the time to think about and look into this stuff and also looking at what the actual evidence says. So when you eat, especially carbohydrates and protein, your blood glucose goes up, right? Your blood sugars go up. And then your pancreas releases insulin. Boom. Then insulin does a few things. Insulin shuttles glucose and amino acids into your cells, right? The glucose from the carbs, amino acids from the protein. This is how your muscles get their fuel and the building blocks to grow. Also, insulin suppresses fat oxidation temporarily. This is your fat burning, not fat loss, just the burning of fat. And even the word burn is kind of a layman's term, right? This is where the fear I think comes from, though. And we're gonna get to why this isn't the problem people think it is at all. This is not a problem at all, guys. Insulin also signals to your body that energy is available. Because remember, insulin is a hormone, so it's a signaling messenger, chemical signaling messenger. It tells your body energy. Hey, hey, body, energy is available. And then that affects other hormones downstream and other metabolic processes downstream. Insulin also reduces muscle protein breakdown, muscle protein breakdown. That's the opposite of muscle protein synthesis. So muscle protein breakdown, which we don't like when our muscles break down, even though it does always happen, right? We're always synthesizing and breaking down muscle tissue, but insulin reduces it. And this is huge for us as lifters. You know, we talk a lot about stimulating muscle protein synthesis, but reducing breakdown is the other half. And then insulin also enables glycogen resynthesis. So that means after you train, your muscles have to replenish their glycogen stores, and insulin facilitates that process. Now, your your brain is like working, like, okay, I see where this is all gonna come together, at least for the most part. Some of this stuff needs more explanation, I think. Now, here's a clarification about insulin. It does not cause fat gain without a calorie surplus. Have you heard that before? You probably did a few minutes ago because I said it twice or three times. And I'm gonna say it again because it needs to land. For you to actually store body fat, you need excess energy, meaning more calories than you burn over time. That's it. Insulin might determine whether those excess calories go more toward fat or muscle. That is true. But if there is no excess, there's nothing extra to store. Okay? So think of insulin as like a traffic cop that's directing nutrients to different destinations. It's not the person loading the trucks, right? If the trucks have your calories, have your energy in them, I'm like waving my hand as if you can see me. This is audio only. If you don't have extra trucks, insulin has nothing to direct toward fat storage. So that's insulin 101. Now, why is insulin so great for us? Why do we love insulin as a muscle-friendly hormone? Okay, this is the heart of today's episode. Because if you have any designs on improving your health and body composition, you absolutely must lift weights. And assuming you're gonna lift weights and have that kind of lifestyle, especially as we get older, okay, insulin is working for you under those conditions. And the conditions have to be the right conditions. We're gonna talk about it. You can't just, you know, lift for 30 minutes twice a week and then have a completely terrible lifestyle other way, other than that. There's a whole bunch of things. But the first big thing we want to talk about is that insulin is what we call permissive for muscle protein synthesis. It doesn't alone like maximally stimulate muscle synthesis. That that's what your protein does. Okay, and that's why we eat protein plus the lifting itself. But it it plays a supportive role by reducing breakdown, as we already mentioned. That's why it's permissive. In other words, it kind of like unlocks or makes the road a little bit bigger. So protein's like building the uh the muscle, insulin's preventing it from being broken down. That net muscle balance is what determines how much and whether you're gaining tissue over time. So you can see already how insulin is helpful for building muscle. Second, carbs and insulin improve your training performance. Okay, resistance training is what we call glycolytic. I haven't used that term in a while, but it simply means that your muscles run on stored glycogen when you're lifting heavy or when you're doing high volume work. Just like some forms of cardio are also glycolytic, like CrossFit, for example. When you have enough carbs, okay, and we can define what enough means, and it's gonna be highly variable. Excuse me. When you have enough carbs, you increase your training volume capacity as a result because training is glycolytic. And you improve your bar speed and you improve your power output, and you get better repeat set performance, you know, performance across sets where you don't have as big of a drop-off, you know, as many drop-off in reps. And then you would you reduce the how much exertion you perceive, so the same work feels easier. And why does that matter? Well, that matters because mechanical tension and volume are what drive hypertrophy, the building of muscle. It's not the insulin itself, it's that the insulin unlocks this higher level of performance and supports those inputs. Okay. So if you have reduced perceived exertion, higher bar speed, higher power power output, greater capacity, just think about how all that comes together to a lot more volume and intensity in the gym. Third, the glycogen replenishment from insulin means you have better recovery and better signaling of your recovery, which is like an adaptive process. You become a better recovery machine. So after you're done training, then you eat it carbs as well, because I'm a huge fan of post-workout carbs, and you get a blood sugar spike, an insulin spike from carbs, that's gonna drive the glucose back into your muscles from your bloodstream. That's gonna restore your glycogen. That's also then gonna reduce cortisol and improve your readiness for your next session, which by the way, side tangent, this is why I like working out in the morning for a lot of people, because it kind of sucks down some of that stress right at the beginning of the day. This is especially relevant if you are a higher volume lifter, which it's all relative. Like many of you are probably in that quote unquote high volume realm, even if you're like doing starting strength or something, because it's still, when you take the overall amount you're lifting, it's still pretty darn high volume. You know, if you're older, if you're over 40 and your recovery is just less than it was when you're younger, all of these things help. It helps to have more glycogen, period, which come from carbs. And then fourth, this is the one that is maybe the most important for some of you and it affects health and longevity and everything else. And that is insulin sensitivity. In your now insulin-sensitive muscle tissue, because you lift weights and muscle is insulin, increases your insulin sensitivity, glucose is going to preferentially enter your muscle. And that means less of the glucose spills over into fat tissue, and now your nutrient partition partitioning favors lean mass. This is really powerful because this means that even from the same overall, say calories, you're able to more efficiently shuttle those nutrients, that glucose, toward muscle rather than fat, right? And so that's where that's where when you get under the hood, it really does sometimes become more about calories in, calories out at some level. And the powerful thing is that resistance training itself, not just the muscle mass, not just the muscle mass resulting from it, but the actual training act of training increases insulin sensitivity as well. I talked about on the, oh, I was on a podcast recently, we talked about this, and I said the research shows 24 to 48 hours you after you lift, you're much more insulin sensitive. Like that it, so you're if you're lifting three or four days a week, you're constantly keeping that insulin sensitivity higher. And you're improving something called GLUT4 translocation. GLUT4 is G L U T all caps-4, if you want to Google it. This is like little doors that allow glucose to go into your muscle cells. And they get triggered by your training. They also get triggered by walking, by the way. This is why I'm a big fan of being active throughout the day. And this happens independent of fat loss. So the more you train, the more you move, the more active you are. And I don't mean high-intensity stressful chronic cardio. I mean just good low-grade chronic movement, chronic in a good way. The more you train, the better you move, the better your body handles carbs. Period. That's what that's my point. And so this aligns perfectly with what I've been teaching for years on this podcast. Muscle makes carbs even more attractive, quote unquote, safer, if I even need to use that term. Like you don't have to worry about them making you gain fat or worsen your health. They're actually an accelerate, accelerator, right? The more muscle you have, then the more muscles you can eat. And there are not going to be negative consequences. In fact, they're positive. Okay. Because you can tolerate them, you have better insulin sensitivity and everything else we just talked about. Now remember, I want to remind you, I'm going to share a specific post-workout carb strategy at the end that can improve your performance the very next day that ties all this together. So I do want you to stick around so you get the full picture, guys. All right, now if you're hearing this and you're thinking, okay, how do I actually figure out my carb intake? How do I set up my macros for this? I do have something for you I put together a while back. It's a free guide called Nutrition 101 for body composition. It's all about flexible dieting and setting up your protein, carbs, fats based on your goals, whether you're building muscle, losing fat, doing both. It's the same framework I use with my coaching clients. You're gonna love it. It's gonna teach you, even at the mindset level, how to think about food, but also the tactical level, how to calculate your macros. Go to wits and weights.com slash macros or click the link in the show note. I put the link in there. That's witsandweights.com slash macros. Now I know what some of you are thinking, okay, Philip, I'm trying to lose fat. So I heard you briefly say maybe maybe insulin does increase fat oxidation. And don't I want to keep the insulin low to do that? Right? Like, or you know what I'm saying? Low insulin and low carb will increase fat oxidation. So people get tripped on the up on this. I did a whole episode on this in the past. I don't have it with me, unfortunately, but it I've done several. You can look up lose fat versus burn fat. It's something like that. But number one, yes, insulin does suppress fat oxidation so that when insulin is higher, you're not burning as much fat in that moment. That is true. But okay, this is a critical, but that is a temporary effect. It lasts a few hours after a meal, and it has nothing to do with your overall energy usage and your energy system and whether you gain or lose fat. Whether you gain or lose fat has to do with energy balance, not whether you spiked insulin from your meal. Okay, I want you to remember this. You don't lose fat minute to minute. You lose it over days and weeks based on energy balance, not based on insulin in the short term and fat oxidation in the short term. Because guess what? If you're not oxidizing fat and your body needs energy, it's going to use glucose instead. So it's either going to use carbs or fat, whatever you have available for it. And the keto folks and the low carb folks are like, oh, all right, but that means we don't have any carbs in our system and we're just burning fat. Well, yeah, guess what? You're eating a lot more fat. You're eating a lot more fat. So the equation actually nets out. And there's actually some studies that show people who eat more carbs tend to burn. A few more calories from eating more carbs and people eat more fat, but that's a separate topic. I'm just gonna leave that to side, just fruit food for thought. So if you eat in a deficit, you're gonna lose fat. Doesn't matter if insulin spiked after every single meal and by how much. Once it drops, fat oxidation resumes, and your body can use carbs in the meantime. It doesn't matter. The body is constantly switching between fuel sources as it needs, and all that matters are the calories. Fat loss fails when calories are too high. It also fails when muscle mass is low, when your training stimulus is weak or you're not training, or when your diet is chronically stressful, not because you had rice or fruit. Okay. And that's when we say carbs, by the way, that is what we're talking about. We're not talking about pizza and donuts and muffins, even though they contain carbs. Those are processed carbs that also contain fats. Totally different things. All right, so let's talk about one of the other myths that I mentioned, and that is, you know, the acute spikes versus the chronic, the chronic spikes, which is called chronic hyperinsulinemia insulinemia. Insulinemia. Okay. And this is where we don't want to conflate these things because this is also causing confusion, let alone the ability to pronounce the word. Acute insulin spikes that we've been talking about. These are normal. They are transient, they're temporary, they're necessary for nutrient uptake. We see them in healthy, active people all the time. If you wear a continuous glucose monitor, you'll see your blood sugar spike when you eat carbs. Totally normal. Nothing wrong with it at all. The amount it spikes is nothing compared to the amount it would spike in a diabetic. You don't have to worry about it. Every time you eat a meal with carbs or protein, you're going to get an insulin spike. That's your body doing what it's supposed to do. That's why I don't even recommend CGMs for the vast majority of people, almost anybody, really. Even if you're trying to get your A1C down, if you start lifting weights, walking more, and eating balanced meals, you're probably going to solve the problem. So chronic hyperinsulinemia is different. That is when insulin stays elevated most of the time. And that is often a precursor to diabetes, or that's, you know, pre-diabetes seen in prediabatic patients. Driven by chronic overnutrition, which is a fancy word of a way of saying you overeat, okay? A sedentary lifestyle, a loss of muscle mass, or you know, you never built muscle mass in the first place, but as you get older, especially in your 40s and 50s, you've lost a ton of muscle mass, poor sleep, high stress, high intake of ultra-processed foods, we see it as well. There's some corollary factors there that have nothing to do with, you know, necessarily the food itself, so much as the correlation with that and the lifestyle. And so the difference here is kind of obvious at this point that one of these things, the the acute spikes as a normal physiological response, the chronic insulinemia is a metabolic dysfunction. It's a disease driven by lifestyle factors. All right. So what you have to understand is that the problem is not insulin spikes. The problem is not blood sugar spikes. The problem is living in a chronic surplus of metabolic dysfunction without a sink for those nutrients. Muscle is the sink. You see that? You see how we come full circle? Muscle is the sink. If you have adequate muscle mass and you're training regularly, your body has somewhere productive to send those nutrients. And then the insulin spike just becomes a feature of your life. You don't have to worry about it, it's not a problem. Now, real practical, I do like to make things actionable for you guys. Who does benefit the most from embracing carbs and everything that comes with it, including this insulin response? Okay, people who lift weights. So resistance trained people like those of you listening to this podcast aspire to be or are doing this already. People prioritizing muscle gain or body recomp, lifters who train regularly three to five days a week, midlife adults trying to preserve lean mass, anyone stuck in the uh under-recovering trap and now needs to recover better and eat more carbs. I would also put you in the camp of, hey, you should do it. You know, you're lifting, but you're under recovering. Let's get those carbs in. And maybe stop dieting for a while. When are carbs most useful? Before your training to fuel your training session, after your training for recovery. And people get confused on that. So we're going to touch on that one more time in our little technique I have at the very end of the episode. Higher volume training days for some people. Some people do like carb cycling, some people don't notice a difference because you're taking it away from your recovery days. So that's a little caveat on that one, but you can you may experiment with it. During maintenance or a slight surplus, absolutely, right? Like if you have a refeed or you're on a diet break, that's where the carbs come way up, and it's hugely beneficial for recovery and all the things we talked about. And then even during fat loss phases to try to keep some of that training quality and recovery in there. I just talked to someone in physics university today, and I said I looked at her fats and carbs in her fat loss phase and I said, why don't we dial the fats down even more to give it to carbs initially so you can really maintain some of that recovery early on? I don't like, even though, even though calories and carbs come down for fat loss, nothing says you have to like follow the book and follow carbs all the way down to an abyss. You can find you can find ways to get more carbs in. Sometimes lowering fats, sometimes lowering protein even is a worthwhile trade. Sometimes it's adding more fiber into your diet, so then you could eat more non-fibrous carbs because you have the extra calories now to work with, things like that. Now, when might carbs be reduced? All right. Well, if you're gonna have a bunch of sedentary days or you know, go on a trip or something like that, you're not training for a while, that might be a time to shift to a little bit of a lower carb diet. Not a low carb diet, just you don't need as much. So low activity periods, sedentary periods, you could do it for short-term appetite management sometimes. You know, when you're in a fat loss phase, they're gonna come down. Obviously, people are sedentary, not resistance training, I guess, need to keep their carbs down. And I feel sad for them because they need to be not living that way. But if that's the case, yeah, then carbs are probably gonna make you fat because you're just overconsuming calories. All right. The key theme here is that you're you gain carb tolerance through training and you use them. You use them well, and there we go. All right. All right, now I want to tell you what I'm not claiming here because the nuance just always gets lost in the arguments back and forth online. Okay, I don't want you walking away with a straw man version of this message. And by the way, if you heard this on YouTube and you're commenting already because you're a low-carb zealot or a keto zealot, you didn't listen to the episode and you didn't get to this point. This episode is not saying that more carbs automatically equal more muscle. No, you have to lift, you have to eat protein, you have to track your metrics. It's not saying that insulin is the only growth signal. Remember, insulin is a helper. It is not saying calories don't matter. Actually, the opposite, I've said it multiple times. Calories are the main thing at the end of the day that matter when it comes to your change in body mass. It's not saying that everyone should eat high carb all the time. And it's not saying that diabetics should ignore their medical advice because diabetics are a whole different population, not being addressed by what I'm talking about today, even though they definitely benefit from the lifestyle factors we talked about today. What I am saying is that insulin works with your training, your protein, your calories, your lifestyle to support muscle growth. Okay? They all have to be in place. And this is consistent with something I talk about constantly, which is the muscle first philosophy. When you prioritize building muscle, it's not just changing how you look, it's changing your metabolic system for the better for life, for a long, wonderful life. You're increasing your glycogen storage, you're improving insulin sensitivity, you're creating a bigger metabolic buffer. So you can eat more food. Come on, raise your hand, you want that. Eat more food, you can recover better, you could diet less often. Yes, raise your hand, you want that too. Building muscle is not just about aesthetics, it's a great, great side effect of it, but it's building a body that handles nutrition more efficiently. And then nutrition comes along for the ride, and you want to eat better and you want to use more carbs because they're fuel, and on and on and on. And then you have less restriction, more flexibility, and it just all flips that mindset from restriction and carbs are the enemy to hey, carbs are a tool that I've I'm using for my training and for my muscle, and I love them, and we're gonna eat them and enjoy them. And then you stop fighting all this and nonsense, fighting all this and listening to all this nonsense. All right, so I want to tell you that post workout carb strategy. Remember, if you do want to dial in your macros and understand how to structure your nutrition for any phase that you're in, go ahead and grab my free guide at witzawaits.com slash macros. That's the nutrition one on one for body composition. It's all about flexible dieting. Go to witzawaits.com slash macros. All right, here is that post workout carb strategy that I promise. It's very simple, but within about an hour and a half to two hours after your resistance training session. Okay, it doesn't have to be 10 minutes. You have a buffer here of an hour to two hours. Consume a meal or shake that includes both protein and what I call fast digesting carbs. Okay. And I'm talking for many people, this is 30 to 50 grams of carbs, depends on your size and how many calories you have. Sometimes this is like a one to one to three to one carb to protein ratio. Honestly, the protein's a little bit less important, even though it's helpful because you'll probably need a lot of protein throughout the day anyway. But I like all these carbs because, oh, let me let me tell you how to get it. You could do like a protein shake with banana and oats, right? You could do chicken and rice. You could do Greek yogurt with fruit and honey. Like that's what I mean by fast digesting. I love bananas before and after workouts, to be honest. And the reason that this works is that we talked about how your muscles are primed to absorb glucose after training, where insulin sensitivity in muscle tissue is at its highest. It gets really jacked up and then it starts to fall gradually over the next 24 to 48 hours. Of course, it's still much higher than baseline because you lifted weights. The carbs you eat around the first couple hours after you work out, though, are going to go toward replenishing your glycogen primarily. And you might get a little bit of an edge on that versus fat storage, and it improves your body composition. This is great if you're trying to body recomp as well, because you'll probably notice better performance in your next session the next day or two days later. I mean, it depends on your split. If you're doing like, you know, four days a week or whatever, you have back to back, you're gonna have less fatigue, better work capacity, improved recovery because you ate carbs not too long after your last workout. It sounds counterintuitive, like, oh, that's crazy that the carbs then affect the next day. But try it, try it. By the way, this is also why I think it's good not to carb cycle as a first resort because your recovery day carbs can help your next day's training carbs, but not in the same way we're talking about here. That's just a side tangent. I want you to try after your next training session, have protein and a decent amount of fast digesting carbs within an hour or two of your workout and compare how you feel the following day versus, say, when you skipped the carbs or you delayed them by a lot more or didn't even eat at all. Right? Compare the two and see if there's a difference. All right, that's it for today. This was one of those episodes where I'm just trying to shift your perspective and challenge those deep-seated beliefs about carbs and insulin you may still have. If you're lifting, if you're building muscle, if you're eating appropriately for your goals, insulin is your friend. You don't have to fear blood sugar spikes, you don't have to worry about CGMs, any of that stuff. It's only gonna help you. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the next time someone says they've embraced a low carb lifestyle, I want you to share wits and weights with them. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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She SMASHED the Raw Squat World Record at 515 lb with THIS Training Program (Steph Mager) | Ep 436

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How does someone smash a 515-pound raw squat at 181 pounds bodyweight? 

What separates elite strength training from the way most people lift weights? And are deloads quietly sabotaging your body recomp progress?

Body recomp, strength training, and lifting weights look very different when world-record powerlifter Steph Mager joins me on this episode. Steph holds the all-time raw squat world record at 181 pounds bodyweight, and she breaks down how a personalized conjugate system helped her build muscle, protect her metabolism, and avoid burnout. 

We unpack why most lifters misunderstand deloads, how evidence-based training balances max effort with volume, and how nutrition and macros shift between off-season and meet prep.

We also dig into women’s fitness, hypertrophy, recovery, and mindset, including how elite lifters manage stress, fuel muscle building, and approach weight loss without sacrificing performance. 

Tune in to learn more.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

0:00 – World record squat context
2:35 – Athlete mindset and ego
9:02– Conjugate training explained
11:58 – Max effort vs dynamic work
26:01 – Deloads most lifters misuse
38:53 – Nutrition and protein targets
50:39 – Learning from failed meets
54:06 – Developing an athlete mindset

Episode resources:

• Instagram: @stephm.fit

Elite strength looks effortless from the outside—a perfect squat, smooth lockout, white lights—but the real story lives in structure, recovery, and restraint. Steph Mager’s world-record raw squat at 181 pounds didn’t come from random hard work; it came from targeted hard work, guided by a personalized conjugate system and a mindset that treats failure like feedback. The conjugate method can sound cryptic, but it’s straightforward when you watch it done well: rotate variations to attack weak links, train max effort for intensity, and use dynamic effort for speed, volume, and technical practice. Steph cycles rack pull heights, swaps specialty bars, and layers bands and chains for overload, making each week a precise exposure rather than a repeat of last week. That variety keeps progress moving while protecting joints and building skill under different constraints, a crucial advantage as you advance and need new stimuli to grow.

Max effort days are the backbone but not the whole body. Steph spaces heavy upper and lower days across the week to respect nervous system fatigue, fueling bigger lifts with sleep, food, and intention. Dynamic effort work bridges the gap: more sets, crisp reps, strict technique, and a pace that builds power without frying recovery. If you don’t have chains, bands, or a Duffalo bar, you can still win the day with tempo work, pauses, long isometric holds, and smart substitutions. Heavy holds at the top of a squat or bench, deficit deadlifts for speed off the floor, and simple barbell variations will carry most lifters farther than chasing the perfect tool. The point is exposure—frequent, high-quality practice that grooves the movement and teaches your body to be efficient.

The most misunderstood piece might be deloads. Many lifters “deload” at 75 to 80 percent and wonder why they feel wrecked. Steph’s approach is clearer: protect the CNS, move away from the barbell, and let your body heal while keeping muscle active. That can look like dumbbell work in the 8 to 10 range, mobility, and low-impact conditioning like the StairMaster, with intensity capped around 60 percent effort. Nutrition shifts with it—more protein, steady calories, hydration, and sleep to rebuild. A good deload isn’t a retreat; it’s a bridge to the next productive block. Program it before you feel destroyed, keep communication open with a coach or training partner, and come back hungry.

Peaking for a meet brings it all together. Steph runs a 10-week prep that reduces band tension over time, rehearses openers, and includes reverse bands for strategic overload without trashing recovery. Personalization is everything: deficits if you’re slow off the floor, raw work if you need confidence under a straight bar, rotation based on what moves your numbers. Weight class strategy is practical, not extreme—small, gradual cuts in early summer; maintenance through prep; no risky water manipulation. That keeps performance reliable and training quality high. Crash cuts, severe dehydration, and rushed peaking might look hardcore, but they gut your performance when it counts.

Underpinning all of it is mindset. Steph doesn’t chase wins; she chases better. She treats “ego” as conviction—bold goals, clean execution, and the right to clap for yourself after months of work. When she missed a world record, she didn’t spiral; she signed up for the next meet, tightened habits, and focused on what she could control: showing up, sleeping, eating, lifting, reviewing. You don’t need a lifetime of sport to build that mindset. You need a crew, accountability, and goals that “build themselves” as your skill grows. Train hard and smart, recover like it matters, and fuel like progress is a choice you make daily. That’s the quiet system behind loud lifts.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  A 515-pound raw squat at 181 pounds body weight. That's the all-time world record for women. And my guest today hit that lift using a personalized version of the conjugate method, which many people have heard of, but may not understand why or how to apply it to their training. She also thinks D loads are one of the most misunderstood aspects of training, and most of you are doing them wrong. So we're gonna break down exactly how conjugate training works, what she does for recovery given the massive stress from her training, and how her nutrition shifts from off-season to meat day. Whether you compete or you just want to get stronger without overtraining, this one's for you. 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 be joined by Steph Mager, a power lifter who squatted 515 pounds raw at 181 pounds body weight, an all-time world record. She trains at Hellbent Barbell, right here in Connecticut. So we're in the same state. Funny story about how we connected, we'll get to that. And she uses a conjugate style system. If you guys are familiar with Westside, uh Louis Simmons and some of that, or even Andy Baker, who I've talked about. And she's competed across multiple federations, including USAPL, IPA, PLU. And we're gonna get into the conjugate method, what it actually is, how it differs from, say, a percentage-based or traditional split-based program, what a D-load should look like for lifters and strength athletes, how her nutrition changes between meat prep and off season, which could be relevant for anybody who's trying to use periodization, and what she's learned from bombing out of meats and coming back stronger. Steph, it's great to meet you and welcome to Wits and Weights.

  Steph Mager: 1:54

  Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

  Philip Pape: 1:57

  So there is a little funny story about how we met. Your mother is a healthcare professional who is helping me with my MRI. Yes. And somehow we got talking about powerlifting. She said, Well, my daughter is a power lifter and she has the world record for squad. I'm like, what? I gotta look that up and reach out to her. So, and I'm glad you didn't see like who's this creep contacting me.

  Steph Mager: 2:18

  Seems like she told me right away. She like called me and she's like, Oh my god, I have this networking thing that I'm just doing. I'm just talking. Like her thing is like she just likes to ask people what they do for a living, and then we'll bring us up, any of her children up in any conversation where it flows.

  Philip Pape: 2:36

  She's a great mom. That's looking and it led to this opportunity for both of us. So exactly. Yeah, so I mean, you're like, I would say among the elite now in terms of the world record. And I think what I'd like to know, most of my questions come from a selfish perspective because I know the listener is thinking the same thing, is what like what does it mean to train to win at that level versus just train for fun or train to get stronger? You know, are the what are the differences?

  Steph Mager: 3:00

  That's a good question. It's not really training to like win, it was more of like I have goals for every single meat that I do. And that's just something that I have as like an athlete mentality. I was a gymnast growing up. So all through, you know, middle school, high school, and I competed at the collegiate level for gymnastics. And it wasn't really thinking about winning, it's what we can do better from meet to meet. And I knew I was in the range of getting the world record. And the meet before, I actually didn't do my best. And it's just kind of like gauging where you're at and making goals for each and every meet that you do. I feel like I didn't fully answer that question, but no, no, you did.

  Philip Pape: 3:46

  And I'm glad you reframed, like you, you challenged me on how I worded it, which is great because I always ask the leading questions, and you're like, well, it's not really to win, it's to to beat myself and to get better and learn. Do you feel like if you went back in time, if you if you weren't in spitting distance of like actually being competitive, would it have made a difference?

  Steph Mager: 4:03

  I think, yeah, I think it would have. If I wasn't competitive and I didn't have that mindset, I think that is like the biggest thing you can have as an athlete, as like a competitor, is just mindset is over everything. And if I wasn't close or if I didn't have the eagerness and the ego that I have, I don't think I would have even tried or attempted. And I have tempted it twice.

  Philip Pape: 4:28

  So and the eagerness or ego, oh, I I like to pull on that string uh because you know, the word ego is an interesting one we can unpack. Eagerness, I could totally understand, like passion and desire. And, you know, some people when we talk about lifting weights to when people are trying to improve their fitness. One of the questions I get is like, well, how how do you get into lifting if you don't enjoy it? Right. Like, and I feel like there is an eagerness you have to have, even if it's cultivated. Did you love this from like the young, like really young age, or did you have to cultivate it?

  Steph Mager: 4:58

  Um, we didn't really do any of like like compound movements in college for gymnastics. It was mainly like calisthenics, like pull-ups, push-ups, dips, certain things like that, um, which makes sense, right? I wish we did a little bit more compound movements. I wish we squatted more. I wish we did certain things, but I kind of just got into it and I was just naturally strong. I worked at the edge and a couple people were like, oh, you should do a powerlifting meet. Like you're really strong. Like I was like squatting like 315, but I had like really terrible form. I like had no idea what I was doing. I was like, yeah, it's fine. I'm just lifting with the boys. Like, I don't know. It kind of just fell into my lab because I was a personal trainer. And then I lifted every day, and I just started to like it more and more. And I had these like goals. Okay, like if I can do three plates, I'm gonna do three and a quarter, and then okay, I want to do four plates. Like, there are certain things that like it just builds like goals for you, if that makes sense. Like I didn't love it at first, and then I was like, oh my god, I like this is great. Like, I'm good at it, and like I'm gonna continue to like take this home.

  Philip Pape: 6:04

  Okay, this is this is genius. Let me tell you why. You just said something, build goals for you. It builds goals for you. And what made what that made me think of is you know how so many people are trying to force their behavior change, they're trying to like force force a new habit as opposed to be a person who then the behavior is an expression of that. And and what you just said is like, you know, as you get better at it, because you're doing it, you're doing things that are achievable in the moment that maybe you fell into, like you said, uh, but then it you start to see the success as like evidence of your ability, and then you do it more and more, and now you start to believe it. Exactly, exactly, and then you put funnel that into a goal, which then pushes you even more. So you mentioned ego, though. I do want to touch on that piece of it. What do you mean by that?

  Steph Mager: 6:48

  So I feel like as soon as you get to like a higher level, you know, everyone says like if you lift heavy, like you're ego lifting, and it's not it's not that's not what I'm talking about. It's more of like the form of like I want to hit a certain number and I want to do it well enough where it's like I can not shut people up, but kind of do that and be like, hey, like listen, like I did it, like this is my number, and I achieved it. And it's more of like a like a proud statement rather than like ego. It's I'm not trying to be egotistical with it. I'm trying to be like, I'm bold and I'm gonna tell you how it is. And it just that's how I feel like my lifting comes across.

  Philip Pape: 7:28

  Yeah, I think that I think that's great. I think, you know, we use the term external validation sometimes. I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day, and some people seem to be motivated by external validation as they go. Like they're doing it to please somebody. Others do it to please themselves, but then are proud of it and like shout it to the rooftops when they're done. Is that is that kind of what you're getting at?

  Steph Mager: 7:49

  Um, yeah, I mean, kind of, like, right? Like you, and that's exactly kind of how I felt. But it wasn't even for like everybody else. It was once you hit something like that extraordinary, I feel like people don't realize like you hit a world record and people are like, Are you gonna be in the Guinness World of Records? And I'm like, no, it's just like I wish, that would be cool. But it's an extraordinary feeling. You know, like you're you did it for yourself, and it's that's an internal, you know, validation that I needed. And like it's like an ego for myself. Like it's not like, yes, I posted it and I was very proud of myself. And I'm clapping for myself. Like a lot of I don't know if you saw, I'm gonna go into a tangent. I don't know if you saw the new rules for the new federation, like the very I am not an expert in those rules, trust me. Well, you can't like clap for yourself now and certain things like that. And I'm like, that's like so it's just like so backwards to me because like you should want to clap for yourself. Like you just did like 12 weeks of like prep plus whatever you did to build all of that.

  Philip Pape: 8:50

  So you can't even like like just involuntarily when you get a lift, be like, all right, you know, just a couple of things.

  Steph Mager: 8:55

  Like you can't you can't even clap. Like it like that's certain federation, but anyways, that's like the most popular savvy one. But um, hell no, I'm gonna clap for myself and I'm gonna be proud of what I did.

  Philip Pape: 9:07

  Yeah, we won't even get into like federation rules and and and like white white light white light rules and form rules on barbell, because there's a lot of criticism on some of that. And I get it, I get it. They're trying to be objective, but okay, so so this is a good, like we've we framed, you know, the mental side of it, and I think people are like, okay, Steph, let's talk about how you got there. Like, you know, what are the nuts and bolts of how you got there? And maybe we start with the your training programming and you know, talk about conjugate a little bit because I'm a big fan of that, the max effort, dynamic effort days. Um, one of my coaches is Andy Baker, who co-wrote uh practical programming, you know, the sequel to starting strength. And and he's a big fan of that. And then Louis Simmons and the West Side guys, that's like old school, you know, equipped lifters, you know, it was a whole different beast back then. And I know you personalize and you work with a coach. So let's start. How would you explain conjugate training in layman's terms to the listener?

  Steph Mager: 9:59

  Yeah, so it's different than obviously linear. Linear, you're progressing like week by week, and you're like you're changing a percent and you're going up and probably going down in reps. Um, conjugate, for an example, where I'm doing it right now, I'm rat pulling at like um like above my knee, like this week, and then the next week I'm going a little bit lower, and then eventually I'll pull from the ground. Like so week by week, like what we're doing is changing. It like the form of um the compound movement itself is changing a little bit, but there's certain like he does it in a way where it's conjugate but linear at the same time. So it's kind of a crossover, which I really enjoy, but I think it works better and like my body responds to it well. He'll throw in different movements week by week. So if we're doing like SSB, like safety squat bar, like the next week it might change or transition to something else the week later and attack a different muscle move or um muscle group. I did notice like your body, it's very taxing. It's very taxing on your body, but it helps build and I think it helps grow from a linear periodization. I think that's completely different because your body's already used to those kinds of movements and then just changing those movements week to week. I think you're just exposing yourself to more muscle growth. And I think it's super beneficial. I also train with a lot of equipped lifters as well, and they all do that similar. Um they do conjugate as well. And I'm with like thousand-pound squatters and I'm like side by side with them, which is like crazy to even say. And they're like benefiting from it too. So it's kind of wild to see, you know, people who do equipped lifting, and then I do raw lifting, and we have similar program, and obviously not the same, but we're both growing. So like I think it works either way.

  Philip Pape: 11:59

  All right. There's a couple things I want to ask about because just to simplify for the listener, the conjugate method, there's upper or lower upper max effort and lower upper dynamic effort. So it's a four-day split, right? Just so they know. Sorry. No, no, it's okay. It's okay. And we did do an episode a couple in the past about conjugate, so you guys can search the feed for that word and you'll probably find them. Uh, but what I like that you mentioned, so where I've seen one version of conjugate I've seen is kind of the traditional you rotate over like four, six, eight, ten weeks, whatever, through different variations of, let's say, the squat or the deadlift. What you're telling me is there might be one variation of the deadlift, in this case the rack pole, right? Again, which for the listener, just in case they're a little bit newer, is you have pins or spotter arms or pads or boxes or whatever, and and it's it's a partial range of motion uh deadlift from some height off the floor, right? And you're saying that you will do a certain height and then a lower height and then a lower height, and that's the way you rotate through instead of totally different variations of the deadlift.

  Steph Mager: 12:58

  Yes, yeah. So he'll go in, like these are just different weeks and splits and everything like that. But sometimes like that's just an example for what I have going on this week. Um, and that's kind of the end game of just um having more load at the top. But yeah, we do do a max effort and dynamic um effort as well just to get the volume in. But I've noticed that my body responds better to those max effort days.

  Philip Pape: 13:27

  Um honestly.

  Steph Mager: 13:30

  I mean, because I'm looking at it low reps.

  Philip Pape: 13:33

  Yeah, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 13:34

  Yeah. And low reps, it's either like you're doing a one RM, two RM, like a three RM, whatever it might might be, and you're just training at like a high intensity. So like those days before you're gonna have to eat better, like just really focus on what you're um doing for your body, like the night of, like a couple days before, um, and just mentally prepare um as well. And you can't have those two days back to back. So if you're doing a like a uh max effort bench day, you're not gonna want to do a max effort deadlift day, let's say the next day. Like you those have to be spaced out in the week. And a lot of times um people don't realize like, yes, there are two different body parts, but you're also like you're taxing your CNS to like the max. So like they have to be like completely like three, four days apart.

  Philip Pape: 14:22

  So oh, that's interesting. Okay, great. Let's let's talk about that. Because you mentioned a few things about really being intentional preparing for these days, how you eat, how you sleep, right? Which is probably why like a Monday is a good day for some people. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly, yeah. So what are so you do up upper first or lower first for the max?

  Steph Mager: 14:40

  Um, usually I do upper and then because I I squat with the crew on Friday. So usually I do a max upper day on either Monday or Tuesday, um, usually Monday, and then Friday I'll do my max lower day, um, and then go from there. But the nights before, like I have to really prioritize my sleep, what I'm eating the night before, what I'm eating beforehand. Otherwise, you're not going to set yourself up for success there. And sometimes it really does show during those days. And then I get frustrated.

  Philip Pape: 15:14

  So yeah, yeah, it makes sense, right? Because like you said, it's so stressful taxing on the nervous system, and people don't realize that. I do like the split we're talking about, though, because I'm more familiar with like a traditional Monday, Tuesday max effort, and then Thursday, Friday dynamic, and the way you're doing it. Again, we're talking elite level, super heavy. You space those apart. So when do the dynamic effort days fall?

  Steph Mager: 15:34

  Yeah. So either I'll go Monday, Tuesday, so I'll go max effort, and then I'll do a dynamic like lower, and then Wednesday, Thursday, I'll be off. And then Friday, I'll do my another max effort day for my legs and go from there. And then Saturday or Sunday will be my other, my other day. Um so it it just is, I mean, obviously I travel for work. I I'm a gymnastics coach. So I really do have to like strategically place all these different days. Um, but yeah, he definitely does not want me to go back to back with max effort days just because like if I'm banging up my body on Monday, like I'm not gonna be prepared and ready to go for, you know, deadlift on or whatever I'm doing, squat the next day. It's just not gonna, it's not feasible. So you're just doing so much. And maybe a novice definitely could do that. I just definitely don't think that I could do that with just the weight that I'm moving.

  Philip Pape: 16:29

  Let's go on a tangent. You said a novice, right? And there's always confusion about how we define novice, beginner, early, intermediate, intermediate, advanced. And I know it's it's very dependent and sometimes it's lift dependent, even not even just your overall. What are your what are your thoughts on that?

  Steph Mager: 16:44

  Um, I yeah, I mean, I definitely think there's different categories. Um, novice meaning you're newer to the sport, you're newer to like one to two years in. Um intermediate, yeah, I think you've done a couple meets under your belt. If we're talking about powerlifting in general, not just like the average person that goes to the gym and is on a powerlifting split or whatever. Intermediate, I think you've done, you know, a couple meets you have under your belt. Advanced side would say that like you put, you know, years under your belt with powerlifting, you kind of have a good, you have experience, you know what you're doing. Not to say that you are handheld as a novice, like some certain things that I still need to be handheld. Um, but that's just, you know, I like to learn, I like to absorb whatever my coach is telling me and then making sure that I'm understanding his feedback. So when people say, yes, I'm an elite lifter, I I am, but I I still, there's so much, so much to learn. And then it's it's not a bad thing ever to be a novice or intermediate. And I think that's where people are like, they're intimidated or whatever. And it's like, there's so much things that I don't even know. And I wish like I just keep going because you know, Hellbent is great because you you learn something new every day. You know, you learn how to, you know, put someone into briefs, you learn how to hold a board, you learn how to, you know, properly do an overload. Like there's just certain things that I'm like, wow, like wouldn't have thought of that. So I've learned so much.

  Philip Pape: 18:14

  And that's what that's what it's about. I love I love that you said that, right? That wherever you are, wherever you are, listener in your journey, like you're both a novice and you're advanced at some things, and you're always gonna be learning. And and I like stuff you're I I could just sense your energy of like you could teach some of this stuff, but you have a humility of I don't know everything and I want to learn more, and I want to learn more, and it's great. And I'm not and I could also sense that you're not like closed-minded, like even when you've learned something, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the only way there could be other ways to no, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 18:41

  I think there's so many ways. I think I think um if me and you were to work out, like we would if like you're taller than me, if you know, I don't know how tall you are, but like do you know what I'm saying? Like there are certain things that would be like nine and a quarter of your strength.

  Philip Pape: 18:57

  Let's go with that.

  Steph Mager: 18:58

  There would be things that were more beneficial and catered to me rather than you know, some things might look different in your program. And I think that's just how it's going to have to be for the person. It's for the lifter.

  Philip Pape: 19:11

  Yeah, that is true. It's highly personalized, which is one of the things you mentioned when we first connected is you know, how you you take what it is, but you've been successful at personalizing. And personalized isn't just like a coach saying, Here's a personal program. It's actually having to learn about you as you go and see how you react, right? And see how you uh respond. We we talked, we touched a little bit on the max effort stuff. I just want to talk about the dynamic effort really quick because there's confusion about the purpose of it, right? Is it to build like speed and power is to keep the volume in and just like maintain strength? Like, what are your thoughts on the main purpose of dynamic work?

  Steph Mager: 19:45

  I mean, I think it's more for like the volume purpose for sure. I I think it it could be go both ways, but like I look at as it as more volume and getting more reps done. Um making sure that I'm maintaining that same technique that I'm doing for the max effort. Like they go hand in hand. Right. Because like you want to make sure that your technique, yes, let's say we're benching like 135 or whatever, and we're doing it with good form, we're pausing, we're doing all that on like a dynamic day, and then max effort, they should really look this like very similar. So just making sure that we're staying with the same technique, and it's just to build more muscle, and I think speed and power for sure, but um, I think it's just more volume.

  Philip Pape: 20:31

  And that's important. I think sometimes volume is like a bad word for some rip people, even when you talk powerlifting, which is which is so weird because you see the best of the best, like know how to maximize that volume. And you know Alex Bromley? He's good uh he's got a YouTube channel, he's he's really nerdy kind of uh powerlifting guy. He's like a more strong man. He has a program called Bull Mastiff that I ran like last year, and the principle is lots and lots of exposure to the lifts and lots and lots of set-based progression, and you're almost you're almost always submaximal in the program until you peek out later on, as if you're if you're gonna do a meet, right? Just which I'm sure is similar to what you do. We could talk about peaking and tapering, but uh until I did that personally, I didn't realize the val how valued just the skill exposure is because it's neuromuscular, even if you're well past newbie gains, you still keep reinforcing that more and more. And I think some of the strength comes from your body's ability to just be efficient. Do you like what are your thoughts on that?

  Steph Mager: 21:28

  Yeah, I mean, we're you know, I I think you're like you're you hit the nail on the head there. Like, I just think that's like totally accurate. You're you want to make sure that you're hitting, you know, volume. You can't just hit max effort days and expect growth. That's especially for a female, like we've learned, and um, there's been a lot of studies with um volume for bench. Um, and my coach has kind of like digged a little bit deeper into that, where we usually, if I'm on an off season, I might do five days where I Three upper days and two lower days just to hit a little bit more and gain a little bit more strength, especially like triceps and back. But just the more volume you're doing and the more exposure to like the technique, the compound movement itself, like the better you are going to be and you're setting yourself up for success on those next ever days.

  Philip Pape: 22:20

  And do you use uh like accommodating resistance or do you more just do it with the the set sets and rep scheme? Like do you use chains and bands? Sorry. I love to use the big words. Yeah, I'm like the technical terms, I know. I know.

  Steph Mager: 22:35

  Um yeah, no, we use chains, um, chains, bands, um, we do deficits, we do, we do like every everything you know, West Side has done. We do that. Um, like right now, I'm going into like just recently I hit um with 80 pounds of chains. We do that on per bench. Um trying to think what else I do. Yeah, I'm using like the Mars bars today. Like there's just certain things that um, you know, it's terrible torture, but it's fine. Um yeah, I think those help with just like the overload at the top. Um, a lot of people sometimes are against that. I personally think that it's helped me, especially going into prep. Um, and we do a lot of reverse bands um as well going into prep and in prep as well. So if we're doing like a max, you I think it's three or four weeks out, we do um like what we were supposed to hit at the meet. So if I was supposed to hit 515, I would hit it with a reverse band just for a little bit less um strain. Um, so you're not killing your CNF.

  Philip Pape: 23:45

  And that's and that's where the bands hanging from the top. Yeah, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 23:49

  I mean, they really don't take that much off, you know, because you're it's a band with 500 pounds on it. You know what I'm saying? Like it's like a little micro band, like the little orange ones. Like they're really not doing much, but it gives you a little bit of leeway. Uh yeah, and at the top, like it's giving you the most. So once you hit it at the bottom, it's it you can't feel anything.

  Philip Pape: 24:10

  So that's interesting. And what would you recommend to people who have either a home gym or a you know, kind of a typical gym where they maybe don't have all the bells and whistles for dynamic? Like what's you know, should should they should they use the tempo, like just slow eccentric expenses?

  Steph Mager: 24:26

  I mean, yeah, tempo, pause squats. I think I I think tempo is a great, great one. Um, just to build up that. It's very similar. Um, a lot of the time I honestly bought my own bands when I went to like the edge and stuff, and you can just buy that off of the lead. And I did that. So I and you can usually hook them up just fine with any other bench. Um, but I think tempo, pausing, um, and a lot of these gyms don't have like specialty bars, so like you won't have like the duffalo bar or anything like that. But you can still do heavy overloads at the top, even if you're just holding, like if you're benching and you're, you know, let's say you're 225 bencher, if you you know, overload 285, 275 at the top and just do heavy holds. That's a good one too that I've done. Um, and same thing with you're doing like back squat heavy holds as well.

  Philip Pape: 25:19

  Nice, nice. No, this is good because uh we we we always want to give people options because otherwise they'll make excuses like, oh, I have to, you know, Steph said this is the way you do it, right? And I don't know. Yeah, right.

  Steph Mager: 25:28

  No, yeah, there's definitely like you've got you gotta get creative.

  Philip Pape: 25:31

  Yeah.

  Steph Mager: 25:32

  Um, and you know, especially with like if I'm going on, you know, travel, travel gyms and I'm going down to Vegas this weekend. Um, so it's like, how am I gonna get my my lift done if it's not my home gym? Um, you gotta get creative. So certain things like that, I'll I'll ask my coach and be like, and he usually is the brainst behind it, and he's like, okay, do this instead, or like, let's sub this for this. So if I don't have like an SSB, like I'll I'll be doing something else, probably a front squat, whatever.

  Philip Pape: 26:02

  Yeah, and I encourage everyone listening. If you have a it's good to have a training partner, if you don't have a coach, having a training partner who's kind of right around your level of knowledge, who can like challenge you to think creatively, right? I've got a I've got a friend we could message each other and he's like, Okay, I got a pec deck revert, and I'm doing reverse rear delts. I'm like, well, try it this way, you know? And okay, you know.

  Steph Mager: 26:22

  Absolutely. I think well, it just makes it easier, and you're like, oh yeah, I wouldn't have thought of that. Like, okay, and maybe I can add this. So it just it it makes it easier because I mean, he'll he can just come up with things on the fly, and I'm like, I don't know how you thought of that.

  Philip Pape: 26:36

  I know, I know.

  Steph Mager: 26:37

  Thank you. Yeah, yeah.

  Philip Pape: 26:39

  All right, so I know D-loads is one thing we wanted to talk about as well that you know have a lot of misunderstanding around it. And maybe just start maybe we start by what aren't people doing wrong with D loads, and then how do you use D-Loads?

  Steph Mager: 26:52

  Yeah. Okay, so my D load I think looks a little bit different than a f a regular power lifting person. Um, I think it's just I it works better for me, so I don't touch a barbell during a D load. I don't do any like thing that's like he wants to completely like make sure that my CNS is recovered. So when I do go back, and I think that's when I go go back to lifting the next week, I think that goes hand in hand with like those max effort days. Like he wants to make sure that I'm prioritizing how I feel, how my body's, you know, handling all of this stress. But that's that's my way of deloading. I think a lot of deloads I've seen, people are still struggling and doing like 75%, 80% of their max and calling it a D load. And I'm like, I don't know what we're doing here. Um, like you're still you're you're still struggling. Like that's it, you're you're not doing what your body needs you to do. If you continuously stress and stress and tax your body repeatedly for, you know, eight weeks, however long your program is for, like there's you're doing yourself a disservice, basically. And by week seven or eight, like the end of your program, you're really not gonna see a lot of change because you didn't have you know a fresh CNS to like be like, okay, like a D-load supposed to help you, and you're supposed to like it's like it's not like a band-aid, but it's something to help you get prepared for the next week to come. And a lot of people abuse their D-loads and don't take it seriously. And I'm like, no, it's it's like I love my D-Load week. I'm like, let's go. I can I don't feel you know, sometimes I do feel still sore because the program changes in itself. So it's if I'm not doing barbell movement, I'm still pushing heavy weights, just more dumbbell. So I still feel a little bit sore, but it's not a sore where I'm not squatting 500 pounds.

  Philip Pape: 29:01

  Okay, I love this, right? Because it is true there's a lot of confusion about D loads. For some people, it's like, okay, I'm gonna drop everything by 10% load. Okay, but you're still doing everything. Or I cut out some exercises or cut out some movements, or go down from four days to two days, or whatever. And and and granted, if it's less than you were doing before, it is some less stress, but it may not be enough to over to recover everything from the accumulation of fatigue. I like that you said I don't touch a barbell, I do some heavy dumbbell work, and people abuse their deloads. Like right there, you just hit on all the myths of D-Loads. So, what does it look like for somebody, just the average person principle-wise, they don't have to be like give specific protocol, but like if they're doing traditional powerlifting style or strength style lifting, what would they change to during a deload for lifting? But and then also maybe for their lifestyle and or nutrition.

  Steph Mager: 29:50

  Yeah, I mean, I think the you're saying what would what does it tip?

  Philip Pape: 29:55

  What are your principles? What are your rules of a good deal d a good deload for somebody?

  Steph Mager: 29:59

  Well, I think it should be 60% is like the highest. I'm almost positive that's what it is, and lower. And I'm not seeing that being relayed on the social media platforms that I follow. So a lot of people kind of just go into the gym and I think coaches get confused or they are. I think a lot of it has to do with not with ego lifting, but if they're trying to hit a max, let's say by the end of the program, they're trying to hit like a 600-pound squat or whatever, and they're just increasing their number. So I think a lot of that is just miscommunication between athlete and coach, where they're um not doing the numbers they're being prescribed. And maybe that's where like the D-load is like not being translated well, and they're doing a heavier D load than the coach anticipated it. But that's that's my hope is that they're like they're not being like the coach isn't providing them with like a 75% or 80% um deload. I think personally that the way that I do it, I think it's the best way for my body could be, you know, like my husband has like still does deloads, he's a power lifter as well, but he still trains with a barbell. That's like the very typical um way to do it. And you just go down to a certain percentage. And I think your your nutrition does change, I think, during that time. Um, it's kind of like a recovery, but you're still I I personally eat a little bit more during that time. And amen.

  Philip Pape: 31:38

  That's uh listen up, people. It's not the time to be dieting more just because you're taking off a little bit of a break. You gotta recover. Yes.

  Steph Mager: 31:46

  Yeah, you have to recover. And um, so yeah, my maintenance calories is like at 2,000 or something like that. I try to up it a little bit. I up my protein. I'm really more focused on, you know, my water intake during this time. And like instead of switching it over to powerlifting, you know, on the lifting side, I'm more focused and geared towards what I'm eating, what I'm putting in my body, how I'm stretching, how I'm like the just mobility at that, at the end, at the core of it all.

  Philip Pape: 32:14

  So and do you do you do any more of anything? Like, do you do more walking or anything like that?

  Steph Mager: 32:19

  Yeah, we he does, yeah. He makes me do um, yeah. Uh he makes me do a stare master like three times um during that week. So certain things like that. Yeah, a little bit. And then the when I say heavy dumbbells, it's not like I'm not doing for like max effort. It's usually like for 10s, like it's like, you know, three by ten, you know, during that time, but enough where I'm like kind of straining at 10, but not like I'm not just using 20s. Do you know what I'm saying?

  Philip Pape: 32:48

  So like of course, yeah, and you're still hitting that um sub-max, but still heavy load. Yeah, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 32:53

  Right.

  Philip Pape: 32:54

  Yeah, cool. No, no, that's good. It's funny because I I'll be recording an episode, a solo episode about D loads. I think it'll come out around the time this comes out. Um, and and uh probably address our conversation here because you know, you're obviously you're a pro at this and you're trying to recover maybe more than some because you are constantly peaking and you're not just trying to slow roll it like many, like many of us might be. And it's important to understand that because myths are like uh how do I eat? I I know some people complain who who have like not body image issues, but like that could be weird changes during a deal of the week. Like, do you notice anything with your fluid retention or your physique or anything like that, or do you not care about that stuff?

  Steph Mager: 33:32

  Um, I don't really see a huge difference with any of that. Maybe I like I feel a little bit different and I just think that your bot your body's constantly changing, I feel like, especially in how especially for me at least. Maybe I feel a little bit more bloated during a D-load week, but that's because I'm just trying to, you know, pound in as much water as I possibly can and just to recover. But I'm not really like analyzing it, you know, every day. I just am like, this is this is the step to be successful and the next week I'll feel better. So yeah, I try to kind of ignore that um and just kind of know that it's it's the process of the process.

  Philip Pape: 34:14

  Yeah. And do you uh program in the D loads or are they dependent kind of on certain biofeedback or like how you feel or anything?

  Steph Mager: 34:22

  He's I mean, he still programs what I'm supposed to be doing. I definitely if there's something that's like hurting me more, or if I'm like really, like really abused, like something's like really not feeling great, he says, okay, like let's nix that and let's sub zit for this. Like we just kind of it's basically communicating with your coach and just kind of figuring out what you know works best. So I think feedback between one another is like oh in open communication is like super beneficial.

  Philip Pape: 34:53

  Cool. And is there um because some people say, you know, only use a D load when you think you need it, but then I think that's sometimes too late, you know? So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 35:02

  No, no, no. It's definitely programmed in. Um usually the D load is like every four weeks or um, usually, and I usually get one in every eight week span. So like usually the fourth week is my D-load week. Same with meet prep as well. Like we'll have a you know, a D-load week going into meet prep in meat prep as well. So before I get into meet prep, it's usually the week before, and then during meat prep, there's at least one or two.

  Philip Pape: 35:29

  Cool. So when you back when you reverse engineer from the meat all the way back, is there a certain set of uh a couple different cycles in there, like building the volume and then peaking? Uh, how does that look like for you?

  Steph Mager: 35:42

  So he yeah, he has a whole we have a usually it's a 10-week meat prep, and it's we I follow the same ones that like the equip lifters are using right now. So like, and obviously it works, right? Like the system works. And so we do like a what do they call it? Um basically you're just doing like a it's called a circumax, and you're doing like heavy overloads, you're doing um, and every week it looks a little bit different. You're either going heavier, you're reducing band tension, you're and then you're eventually going into like openers, and then like last final warm-up, and then a deload, kind of just doing mobility, and then you're at meat.

  Philip Pape: 36:27

  Okay, yeah, just as easy as that, and then you get a world record.

  Steph Mager: 36:30

  And then you get a world record. No, uh no, it just, I mean, I've been doing that kind of that style for I don't know, I've been with him for three or four years now. So I think every meet it looks a little bit different. There are certain things that he's like, okay, like you benefit a little bit more from like deficit deadlifts than you do from the floor. And honestly, the last meet prep I've I did only did deficits to like just help build it and be faster off the floor. And I didn't even, I think maybe at my opener I used, I didn't use the deficit, but there are certain things that I use that was a little bit different from like other athletes and other clients that he had.

  Philip Pape: 37:10

  So and that's the personalization, right? You find out what helps you move. Um, and that you know, encourage the listener, right, to be able to finally understand your body, but also look at the numbers, right? I know Steph, you're you're bigot probably into measuring everything and understanding, you know, how things progress. I mean, how did you determine that specific one, for example, that you responded better to the deficits?

  Steph Mager: 37:33

  I mean, they're just they're just faster off the floor. Um, he even said he was like, wow, you're like, it's weird that you're like so good at like in a deficit then. And I'm like, everyone says that. Um, but off the floor, I think that it's just like a little bit harder. You have to be a little bit more patient rather than deficits, like it's just a little bit easier. I can get into the position a little bit better. But like rack pulls, I'm like terrible at. And like people would think that's like easier for you know anybody because you have more overload. You're already like, you're already above the above the knee, like you have to stand up with it. And it's like, nope, it's not that simple for me. I'd rather just take it lower than it has to be.

  Philip Pape: 38:13

  I know I've seen that. I've seen some people where their rack pull can't even exceed their deadlift. And I don't know if you know, and people, oh no, that's not possible. It should, because here are the biomechanics, and it's like you said, overloading. Everybody's biology is a little different, your ratios are different, where you're stronger is different, right?

  Steph Mager: 38:27

  Yeah. So I think he just kind of sees what works, what doesn't, um, how I respond better to it. Even when I so I didn't do my best meet, I think it was six weeks before, and I was planning to hit the world record at that meet, and I obviously didn't, I didn't do very well at that meet. Um, and I signed up that night for the one in October. And the way that he programmed, he was like, Okay, we're gonna change this, we're gonna change. Like, I don't like, I don't think we did a lot of reverse band stuff. He wanted me to just like make sure that I was hitting like a raw squat without any bands, just so I could kind of mentally and physically feel what 500 pounds feels like on my back and just like hit it and be confident. So I think there are certain things that we did in those six weeks where it was like, okay, let's let's game change, let's like fix what's you know, what's the issue and let's go and attack it.

  Philip Pape: 39:26

  So attack it. All right. And as you're attacking all this stuff, you need to fuel to do that attacking. I think that's a segue into nutrition because I think where we can start maybe start from stuff is like what your schedule looks like, periodization, like what you know, you have your meat, you have the 10-week prep. Is it is your off-season right before that? And you meet you do like three meets a year, or how many meets a year do you use?

  Steph Mager: 39:49

  Usually I only do one meeting. Oh, just one meet a year. Okay. Yeah. Sometimes I mean more novice lifters will do more. My body can only really handle one meet. Um, you're just building so much. And if whenever you really feel strong enough for you, you're like, okay, like I I'm at my strongest peak, I can I can handle it. And usually I compete around September, October. For some reason, that's where my body feels like the most strong. Um, you're coming, you're coming off of like summer where you're, you know, I feel like in the summer, especially for for women, I think we lean out a little bit and you're eating more fruits for more vegetables. Everything is a little bit more, it's just easier. I feel like in the summer or the winter, it's kind of the opposite, especially with the holidays, we're we're not um as mindful, I guess. Um, food's everywhere.

  Philip Pape: 40:38

  Yeah, it's a good time to bulk.

  Steph Mager: 40:40

  So it's a great time to bulk, yeah. Um, but yeah, no, I mainly focus on um, especially when it comes to nutrition, at eating over 185 grams of protein a day. And that's like my main, if I'm not really I eat basically the same thing every day just to keep it easy. Um, I know that's boring, but it's what it what's what works. And if we're just maintaining like it's just super easy, and then I cut back on like certain certain things going into meat season. So if I am, let's say if I'm 184 or 185, like I know how to easily transition that to 181. So I'm I can weigh in and it not be a problem. So yeah, usually in the summer though, I'm it's not a problem. Usually I'm weighing at 175, anyways. Um but the more that I eat and like especially protein, the more full I am anyways. So and I don't ever have a problem with feeling hungry or wanting to I I don't know, I'm not trying to cheat or doing anything like crazy. It's not like I'm I'm not against like eating ice cream any other day, like whatever. It's just being mindful of like, okay, where are we at with my protein? And like that's my main concern. I'm not concerned with like the calories as much until we're in meat prep. Yeah. And then it's just mostly like how, how am I benefiting myself every day? How am I setting myself up for success every day? If especially if I don't hit what I'm supposed to hit for my protein goals, like I I feel like I'm doing myself like a disservice because I'm not growing my muscle. I'm not, you know, that's just how I feel.

  Philip Pape: 42:25

  And it makes sense. And and at your weight, like, so funny thing is, I'm I'm about your weight, but with way less, you know, muscle and strength. Uh but hey, I'm 45. I started this when I was 40, I'm working on it. Um but and and I try to get around 180 protein a day, too. And we talk about the target of like, you know, 0.701 grams per pound is kind of your minimum for most people. And the so two questions I have that came to mind. One is you mentioned hunger. We just did a whole series on hunger, and the most recent, one of the most recent episodes was about how strength training helps with your hunger signals, and also having muscle mass helps with your hunger signals. Do you find that that is partly what's going on here because you're athlete an athlete? Yeah.

  Steph Mager: 43:06

  Yeah, I'm sure. I'm I can't like I ate probably at like nine or ten this morning. I had probably 50 to 60 grams in my breakfast alone, and I'm like, I'm ready to go. I'm gonna probably fuel up, have like a yogurt um and something before the gym today, but like I'm not like overly hungry. I'm not like, oh my God, like I I could eat, but I'm not, I'm not starving to the point where I don't know, I like I need food. And I think that just comes alone with like fueling your body right. If you're fueling it with like fast food and things that aren't very nutritious, like I think that it's very easier, it's easy to be more hungry. And that's just how your body I think works. If you're eating full and nutrient dense foods, you're you're setting yourself up for success, but you're also like your body handles it better.

  Philip Pape: 43:55

  And how have you noticed your metabolism change? Like, so you're 28, is that right? And so let's say from the time you were 18 to now, have you noticed?

  Steph Mager: 44:03

  Oh my god, it's so much different.

  Philip Pape: 44:05

  How is it different?

  Steph Mager: 44:07

  Um, I think as an athlete, I think, especially when I was 18, like I was eating whatever I wanted and I just thought it was like fine. I was like, I'm gonna burn it off. Like I would eat like Nutella and a banana before practice. And I was like, yeah, this is fine. Um, and I but I would eat like a lot. And um I think once I was like 22, I was like, wow, like I'm not, I'm not handling this well. I'm very tired or like going into practice. I was, I I felt like I was crashing like during practice. Um and I was like, okay, like I have to change what I'm eating. And as soon as I changed a little bit of what I was eating, I didn't feel as tired. I felt like I was I had more energy. I my skin looked better. There, there's so many benefits to eating better and healthier that I wish I, you know, realized when I was an athlete in college, because probably would have helped. But um, you know, especially like the dining hall food there, like there's just, you know, certain things that I couldn't even, I couldn't buy food if I wanted to. So um it was limited, but I could have made like healthier choices. So I wasn't crashing out during practice. So are you saying that now that you're eating better being older, your metabolism seems more efficient or um, I I think my metabolism obviously slows like slowed down. Like I think it's harder for me to get back on track. I think that's just women in general. I think if we we hold on to like a lot, like a lot of fat, and especially after the holidays, I think it's really hard for our bodies to like continuously work the way that they used to when we were younger. So it's it's definitely hard. So I that's why I eat the same thing every day. So I don't have to worry about that. Um and it's just I've noticed that my metabolism works better the way if I'm just at this the same maintenance calories and I'm doing everything the same. Um, otherwise, if I kind of change that, I do notice a little bit more fat or I notice like the, you know, my weights going up, certain things like that. And even though I am lifting heavy, uh, it's not a huge difference, but I I notice it. So I think it's still hard, but it's not something that you can't dial back, you know.

  Philip Pape: 46:20

  So yeah, no, we want to be realistic about it. And I know there's a lot of listeners, especially women who they've they've done a lot of dieting, right, in their life and and probably haven't had the same exact trajectory as you. Maybe they want to get into lifting and building muscle. And I'm and I ask these questions to kind of balance like the benefits of it as well as the realities of it, right? And it's you still have to be intentional and strike, it's not like it solves every problem, but you still have to Right, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 46:44

  I mean, lifting's not gonna solve all your problems. Like you can't eat like a McDonald's cheeseburger and then go lift 400 pounds and expect to be like skinny and fit or have abs or whatever. It's really about what you're eating in the kitchen and how you're setting yourself up, and it actually helps you lift better as well. So it kind of goes hand in hand.

  Philip Pape: 47:04

  That and that's important, right? Going back to the identity thing we started with, it's like you eat well because you want to and it feels good and like helps you. It's not that you're forcing yourself very miserable, and like you said, you can still enjoy indulgences like like flexibility. Yep.

  Steph Mager: 47:18

  Yeah.

  Philip Pape: 47:19

  So then what about your periodization? Like you mentioned, you mainly focus on protein and then you kind of maintain your weight. Do you do intentional building or cutting phases at all, or is it just kind of in that window?

  Steph Mager: 47:30

  Um, it's I'm mostly in that window of where if I'm I'm not really bulking or cutting, I feel like I'm I like a maintenance, and then if I have to cut a little bit, May, June, July is kind of the time where one of those months I'll you know be more focused in on, okay, let's cut back here. There's a little bit like and it's not like a huge cutback, which like a lot of people, like if you're at a 2,000, you know, maintenance calorie, some people think you have to make these major jumps and go and cut down to 1,500. That's not how that's not realistic. And you're you're hurting yourself by doing that. So it's just small, like very small, um, like 50 to 100 calories a week is what we're working with if we're chipping things away. And that might look like just reducing the amount of rice intake at lunch or dinner, just certain things like that. So yeah, I would say my resting weight is usually 185. And then going into meat season, if I'm if I'm heavier than I'm, you know, anticipating, I'll definitely be a little bit more um just measuring a little bit better and being more focused and dialed into what I'm eating so that you know it reflects that I'm I'm losing a little bit more each week. And after just doing those small little tweaks, it works.

  Philip Pape: 48:53

  And then for the listener, if we put this on your calendar, you're saying you do that around the summer months and then your meets usually in the fall. So now you're set up to kind of maintain or even slightly build and support your peaking, right?

  Steph Mager: 49:06

  So exactly. And that's and that's the main thing too. It's not like I'm not rushing and I'm not doing this in a in a crazy way.

  Philip Pape: 49:12

  Water water cuts and stuff like that, right? Yeah.

  Steph Mager: 49:14

  And and people do do that. And it's but certain people who I've I've noticed if you're water cutting, you know, 10 to 15 pounds, like I was at a I was at a meet in Chicago and we're on weigh-ins. I just had like a burrito bowl before I before I weighed in because I was at 175. So I'm like, I can handle this. Like I I have like six pounds. I'll eat a burrito. I'm ready to go. There's people shaking, there's people looking like pale. And like John Hack was there, and he was like, you couldn't even recognize like him at all. Like, even my husband was like, who, like, he does not look like well at all. And then the refeed he did, so like, you know, there was you know, IV bags and like the lobby and stuff. It was crazy. It was wild. I was like, I can't believe this is real life right now. But I'm like glad it really can deteriorate performance too. Like if you're taking all of that weight off and then you know, refeeding the next day, it can alter how you're, you know, you perform. And I don't want to even, you know, think about that. So I I just make sure that I'm, you know, doing it week by week, losing whatever I need to, the four or five pounds that might alter my performance. So uh week to week I just make sure that I'm prioritizing it in May, June, or July. And so I guess I'm set for September.

  Philip Pape: 50:39

  Yeah, I'm glad you're doing it the right way, because we do hear a lot of stories these days, like both in powerlifting and in uh physique, you know, competitors with like sodium manipulation and you know, deaths from people like just putting their body to the extreme limit that's not healthy. It's good that you do it that way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, so I I did want to ask you right before we wrap up, is like I'm sure you've had some difficult times, and you know, you've talked about bombing out of a meat. Like, I guess what what's the hardest moment you had, but then also what did you learn from it?

  Steph Mager: 51:10

  I would say the hardest moment I had uh was not hitting the world record the first time, and that was in September. So that was, I don't know, six months ago now. I I oh I was I was a mess. I was crying, I was, but I was I wasn't mad about how I did. It was it was more like I built this up in my head, like, oh, I I had it, you know, I was so confident I was gonna hit it. And I think it needed to happen because, you know, there are certain things in training that I could have done better. I wasn't prioritizing certain things, um, like sleep and how I was eating. There was a lot of mental warfare going on in my head as well. And I constantly kept thinking, like, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if I let this person down? And I think once I shifted how I was feeling and being like, okay, I failed, like it, it just wasn't there that day. I signed up that day and I said, I'm not finished. There's I'm going to get it. And, you know, I had this conversation with my coach and he was like, Are you sure? Like, is this something that you like? He's like, I don't know if it's a great idea, you know, to, you know, go from one meet and then six weeks later, like go into another. He's like, but if you're if you're sure, then I said, I'm 100% sure. I'm 100% locked in. And I was like, you just like I was dialed in. I I showed up to the gym on time. I I didn't leave until I was finished. Like there were certain things that I was just, I was hungry for to win. And that's I think, you know, losing and feeling some, not something being taken away from me, but like there was a opportunity that I didn't I didn't hit. And I kind of left it out there for others to take. And I was like, no, like that's mine, I'm gonna take it. And so just being dialed in, I think, and that locked in for those six weeks, I think just made me more competitive. And um I definitely learned a lot from that experience. And I am going to take what I learned and build it for the next, you know, world record or um the next attempt.

  Philip Pape: 53:21

  So I think that's awesome because when you said six months ago, the listeners like, oh, that's that's nothing, right? It's only six months ago, right? And and yet it was this devastating moment. And I think I think of the the analogy of like when you fall on your face, you're still moving forward or something, or like you know, failing forward, I think you you call it. Uh the idea that you're just you're hungry. And even though you said you do one meat a year, I like that you're like, no, this this time I'm doing the second one as soon as I can, because I can't wait, right?

  Steph Mager: 53:47

  Yeah, I I was I was so dead set. I was like, nope, like you're not taking this away from me. I'm signing up. I just knew I had it within me, and it was just like a like a mental game for myself. And I think losing and and failing just taught me how to be more resilient and to come back.

  Philip Pape: 54:06

  So resilient, yeah. And I bet just doing all the hard things you do every day, also making resilient stuff. We we are inspired by that. So, anybody listening, like, think about some of these lessons, you know, not just doing the hard things, but maybe setting for yourself a goal, setting for yourself up if it is competitive and if it's a meet, but even if it's just something else that's like, all right, now I gotta make it happen, right? Six weeks from now, ten weeks from now, whatever it is, as as long as it's not like unrealistic extreme, you know, like trying to lose 50 pounds or something.

  Steph Mager: 54:33

  Yeah, exactly.

  Philip Pape: 54:35

  All right, so this has been awesome. I I always like to ask this of some of our guests, and that is, is there anything you wish I had asked? And if so, what's your answer?

  Steph Mager: 54:44

  I don't think there's anything specific that I think you do. I think we kind of hit on all of the topics. I think maybe the only thing is having an athlete mindset going into like a sport like powerlifting, let's say bodybuilding or anything like that. I think just having that mentality kind of drives the sport a little bit harder. So, you know, my coach is was a former baseball player, I was a gymnast. There are certain mentalities that, you know, coexist from how we played as an athlete, and we're like, okay, we're gonna take that same mindset and like of winning and of just prioritizing the sport itself. And I think that's like a little bit different compared to someone that didn't have that growing up. But you can still have that same mindset. It's just a little bit harder because I think there's things that we've learned as like athletes and growing up and like just failures and all of those things, um, failures, winnings that have can kind of just made us successful and just who we are as athletes. So I think that just the mindset thing.

  Philip Pape: 55:57

  The mindset thing of being an athlete. So if somebody isn't doesn't have the athlete background, like you said, is any thoughts on how they could start to cultivate that?

  Steph Mager: 56:05

  Yeah, I mean, I think um being in a group setting. So especially in like the gym, if like you have someone that is like you rely on like a gym partner, a coach, I think just being in a group setting is like the best thing that you can rely on one another, you can push each other. You're there for each other when you know one's having a great day, you're not having a great day, you kind of lift each other out and you equal each other out. Um, I always lift with either my coach or like the team, and like we just cultivate this energy to make sure we're pushing each other harder.

  Philip Pape: 56:38

  I love that. Uh, no truer words have been spoken. I mean, guys, I wouldn't be where I am without coaches, mentors, teachers, um, therapists, uh, doctors, like like the whole team behind you, training partners, groups, Facebook groups, whatever, seek it out. Be among people that are like eager and have a positive ego, like Steph. Yes. Bring it full circle for whatever your goal is. So, all right, love it. So, Steph, uh, where can people find you, look you up, or reach out to you?

  Steph Mager: 57:08

  Yeah, they can look me up on my Instagram. It's um Steph M Fit. Yeah, but I mean, I Facebook doesn't have, I'm not like as updated on my Facebook, but um my Instagram for sure.

  Philip Pape: 57:22

  At Stephm.fit. And with that, Steph, this has been awesome. Like it was a surprise even meeting you, so it was great to have you on the show to talk about your training. And I'm wishing you the best with everything to come. I know you're gonna continue to be successful.

  Steph Mager: 57:37

  Thank you so much for having me.

5 Signs You're Building Muscle (Even When the Mirror Says Otherwise) | Ep 435

Upgrade your sleep and recovery with Cozy Earth's bamboo pajamas and blankets. Temperature-regulating, lightweight, and designed to help you fall asleep faster. Go to witsandweights.com/cozyearth

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You're training consistently, eating enough protein, doing everything you're supposed to, but when you look in the mirror or step on the scale, nothing seems to be changing.

Or worse, you look softer than last week. What's going on?

The mirror and scale are terrible short-term indicators of muscle growth. 

They're influenced by glycogen levels, water retention, inflammation, and your nervous system, none of which reflect actual changes in muscle or fat tissue. If you're judging progress by how you looked this morning vs. last week, you're setting yourself up for frustration and bad decisions.

Learn the 5 reliable signs that you're actually building muscle. You'll also hear the common scenarios where feedback gets confusing (deloads, building phases, body recomp, and post-diet maintenance) and exactly what to expect during each one.

Plus, we answer a listener question about what to track during a deload week.

Whether you're focused on strength training over 40, working on body recomp, or just trying to build muscle without the mental games, you'll get a framework to trust your process.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Why the mirror and scale are misleading when building muscle
3:28 – How glycogen and water create short-term visual fluctuations
5:32 – 5 reliable signs you're building muscle
10:48 – Strength progression and recovery as leading indicators
14:32 – Changes in your clothes and performance
18:10 – Biofeedback markers (sleep, energy, hunger)
20:29 – Sleep and recovery tools for better adaptation
23:07 – What to expect during a deload week
28:20 – Reading your data correctly early in a building phase
31:23 – Body recomp and post-diet maintenance pitfalls

Many lifters grind for weeks, step on the scale, and feel deflated by numbers that swing like a weather report. The truth is that visual changes and daily body weight are lagging, noisy signals. Glycogen shifts, water retention, inflammation from training, and even your nervous system state can make you look fuller one day and “flat” the next with no real change in fat or muscle. That’s why progress often hides in plain sight. Instead of chasing the mirror, you need reliable leading indicators that coaches use to guide programming and reassure athletes they’re on track even when short-term feedback is confusing.

The first leading indicator is strength. If you’re adding weight to the bar, getting more reps at the same load, or performing better within your core lifts over training cycles, your muscles are adapting. Strength and hypertrophy are not identical twins, but they’re close companions; sustained strength gains demand tissue growth. Track a handful of key lifts consistently and evaluate progress over four to twelve weeks, not days. Advanced trainees will see slower trends, but trends nonetheless. Think of this as your financial ledger: a steady rise confirms your deposits of effort are compounding, even if the mirror statement hasn’t arrived yet.

Recovery quality is the second signal, and it flips a common myth. Less soreness does not mean less progress; it usually means your body has adapted to the stress and is repairing more efficiently. When you notice fewer nagging aches, faster bounce-back between sessions, and more stable joints after similar or slightly increased training, growth is underway. During a deload, you may even feel “softer” as inflammation drops and glycogen shifts, but improved sleep, calmer nerves, and renewed motivation to train mark a successful reset. Resist the urge to cut calories during this week; fueling recovery accelerates the return to productive training.

Third, examine performance beyond raw strength. Can you handle more total work in a session without feeling wrecked? Are you hitting the top of your rep ranges more often, keeping rest tight without losing quality, and maintaining bar speed deeper into sets? Those are hallmarks of improving work capacity and neural efficiency supported by more contractile tissue and better energy system function. These changes often appear sooner than dramatic physique shifts and set the stage for future hypertrophy by allowing you to tolerate greater training volumes safely.

Fourth, consider how your clothes fit, not just whether your waist shrinks. Body recomposition often shows up as shirts getting snug in the shoulders and sleeves while pants loosen at the waist yet tighten through the thighs. Early in a building phase, the waist may tick up slightly from glycogen and a small surplus, which is normal and productive. Interpreting these signals requires context: phase, nutrition, and training volume. A tighter chest and sleeves paired with stable or modest waist change is classic recomposition—even when the mirror looks unconvincing on any single day.

Finally, watch biofeedback: sleep depth, energy, mood, libido, digestion, and hunger signals. When these stabilize or improve, your system is handling stress and adapting. Poor sleep, brain fog, erratic appetite, and constant fatigue point to recovery or nutrition gaps. Biofeedback is the dashboard for your physiology; if the lights are green, push. If they’re flashing red, adjust volume, calories, or protein and carb timing. This matters during transitions like deloads, early surpluses, refeed weekends, body recomp, and post-diet maintenance when visual cues get especially messy.

Misreading short-term feedback leads to three costly mistakes: slashing calories because you “look soft,” adding reactive cardio to chase water weight spikes, and program hopping before a plan has time to work. All three undermine adaptation and stall gains. Instead, commit to cycles of six to twelve weeks, fuel recovery, and let strength, recovery, performance, clothing fit, and biofeedback guide you. The mirror will catch up. Treat these leading indicators as your compass, and your physique will become the inevitable byproduct of consistent, focused work.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  You might be training hard and eating right, but when you look in the mirror or step on the scale, it feels like nothing's happening, or worse, like you're going backward. If you've ever thought, I'm doing everything right, so why don't I look like it? This episode is for you. Today I'm breaking down five signs that you're actually building muscle that have nothing to do with how you look. These are the markers that experienced coaches track, that research supports, and that most people are ignoring while they obsess over the scale or over the mirror. By the end, you'll know exactly what to pay attention to and what to stop letting mess with your head. She is in a coaching program, she's doing all the right things, and her coach had her take a deload week, which is a planned reduction in training volume, which is which is to let your body recover. And she wrote me this quote, I'm used to being rewarded for consistency and effort and pressure, so my nervous system is like scanning for threats because I'm not getting immediate feedback. I look softer, my veins are almost gone, and I feel like something's wrong, even though I know intellectually that this is supposed to happen, end quote. And actually, she sent me a lot more details behind that. And the message really stuck with me because this is a microcosm of a bigger challenge that I hear from a lot of people, right? She isn't alone. I hear versions of this all the time, whether you're in a building phase or a fat loss phase, but oftentimes it's you're trying to build muscle and you're watching the scale climb up, you might be panicking, people doing body recomp, wondering if anything's happening, people in maintenance after a diet who feel like they're losing their progress. And I think the common thread here is that you're relying on feedback that's either delayed, it's like lagging indicators, or it's misleading, or it's the wrong feedback for the phase that you're in. So today I'm gonna give you five reliable signs that you are building muscle and making progress that do not depend on the mirror or the scale doing what you want. And I'm gonna answer Aaron's specific question a little bit later as well about what to actually expect during a D-load, because I don't think many people talk about that either. Then stick around to the end because I'm gonna share three of the most common ways that people blow up their own progress by misreading short-term feedback. And you've probably done at least one of them for, so stick around for that. Now, before we get into the five signs, I want to explain why the two metrics that everyone is obsessing over, the mirror and the scale, are rather terrible indicators, especially of short-term progress. How you look on any given day depends on a bunch of factors that have nothing to do with actual muscle or fat changes. We've got to think short-term versus long term. So, short-term, what is happening way overrides the long term, and this is where it throws us off mentally. So you've got your glycogen levels. This is the carbs stored in your muscles. Those are gonna fluctuate a lot based on your training, your carb intake, your hydration status. When glycogen is high, you're gonna look fuller and tighter. And when it's low, you tend to look flatter and softer. And this is one of the reasons why if I take someone through a fat loss phase for a specific event, I actually want them to refill with their glycogen a few weeks before so they look fuller and tighter. And neither of these reflects actual change in fat loss or fat gain either way. So that's glycogen. Then we have our hydration and water. Water distribution shifts all the time. After you train hard, like a heavy leg day, you're gonna hold water from the inflammation. If you're in a D-load or you're in a rest period or vacation, sometimes that inflammation drops away, and now you look less, look less lean, even though you might be recovering and growing. So it really messes with your mind, and the body can change how hydrated or dehydrated it is as like an adaptive response to a lot of things like alcohol and fluid intake and stuff like that. Then there's your nervous system, which affects how you look as well, believe it or not, right? When you're in a stressed, ramped up state from even if it's from a good thing, like a heavy training session, you carry yourself differently physically in response to that. Your blood flow is a little different, your muscle tone might look a little different. And then when you recover, that changes, you might look softer. So all of that affects how you look on a short-term basis. And then the scale is even worse for short-term tracking, guys. It measures the gravity pulling you down to earth. That's it. How much mass you have, that's your muscle, your fat, your water, your glycogen, organs and skeleton, food in your gut, everything in your body. And so day-to-day swings of between, say, two to four or even five pounds are extremely normal and also meaningless. Even though I encourage people to weigh every day, actually using that daily point is meaningless. So if you're judging your progress by how you look this morning versus last week, you're just trying to read the tea leaves. It's it's it's meaningless, guys. These metrics matter only over at least weeks, but more likely months when we're talking about building muscle and body recomposition, not days or just a few weeks. So, what should you track instead? That is what the rest of this episode is about. Let's go over the five signs that you're building muscle. So if you know these signs, then you know what to track. So, sign number one is that your strength is going up. It's as simple as that. This is the most reliable indicator that muscle growth is happening. Muscle is strength, strength is muscle. If you're getting stronger over time, adding weight to the bar, getting more reps at the same weight, progressing on your lifts overall, your muscles are adapting to give you that extra strength, and therefore your muscles are getting bigger. Strength and muscle size, they're not perfectly correlated. It's not a one-to-one, but they're closely linked. You can't keep getting stronger forever without building muscle tissue. And then, and the muscle has to grow to support the increased force production. So tracking your key lifts, and these could be as simple as the big three or big four, like the powerlifting moves, deadlift, squat, press, overhead, or and or it could be a whole bunch of other lifts that are part of your programming. And you want to track them over your cycle, or not, you know, over your uh training cycle. Maybe that's four weeks, maybe that's six, eight, twelve, whatever. Are you progressing, even if it's slow, right? The more advanced you are, the more slowly it might progress, but that is the signal in the noise, not what you see or the weight on the scale. So sign number one is that if you're not doing that, that's a big game changer. Sign number two is that your recovery is getting better. And it kind of trips people up because it feels counterintuitive. As your body adapts to training, you often recover faster being between sessions. This is where when I start working with people and they express that they don't have much soreness and they're surprised about that, I have to have that conversation that, you know, because we're progressing using the same lifts, your body adapts, you're not gonna have soreness. It's not like those YouTube workouts or the F-45 or the Pilates, whatever, where you're just doing random stuff and a lot of eccentric work, and it's really not producing any gain in muscle and you feel beat up. But if you are actually adapting to your training, you're gonna feel more recovered in some ways and less beat up day to day and bounce back quicker, which is incredible, which is an incredible extra side benefit. A lot of you start to realize. Now, a lot of people think this means their training isn't working because they're not as sore. And that's backward. It means your body's getting better at handling the stress and repairing the tissue, which is which is literally what adaptation is. All right. Pay attention to how you feel about 24 to 48 hours after you train. If you're recovering better than you were two months ago, that's a really good sign that you are adapting and getting stronger. Interesting, right? And you're getting more athletic, you're getting, you're just getting better and stronger. Sign number three is that your performance is improving. So this is beyond just strength, just those numbers. I want you to look at your overall training quality. Can you do more total work in a session? That's your work capacity. Is your endurance within the sets getting better? And mind you, this could occur without having extra cardio. This is why I love lifting weights. It checks so many boxes. Are you hitting the higher end of your rep ranges more consistently? Are you more efficient, which means now you can express even more strength and grow even more? These performance markers reflect your body's increased capacity overall, not just muscle, but your energy system, your neural efficiency, and of course, more muscle tissue supporting the work. So if your training's getting better, your body's adapting. Sign number four is that your clothes fit differently. Now that's the key word, differently, not just that your pants are looser, because again, it depends on what phase you're in. You might be gaining weight and your waist might be going up on purpose because you're gaining some fat with the muscle. We're not talking about this. This is about where body recomp kind of shows up before the mirror tells you that it's there. And you might notice that like your shirt's a little bit tighter in the shoulders or chest and your arms in a good way. Your pants fit a little looser in the waist, but maybe tighter in the thighs. And maybe they're not looser in the waist, maybe they're the same, but it you've got to understand how to put all the data together. And this happens because you're gaining muscle and you're either losing fat at the same time if your waist is going down, or you're not really gaining that much fat, but the muscular areas of your body are outpacing the fat gain areas of your body, if that makes sense. And again, this can be very difficult psychologically because if your waist is going up, that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. It definitely can happen. But if you're doing like a lean gain or aggressive maintenance or body recomp, generally you wouldn't expect much change on your waist, but you would expect bigger circumference in other areas, maybe your neck, your biceps, your chest, your, what am I trying to say, your thigh, your hip thighs, not necessarily your hips, but your thighs. So if your clothes are fitting in this slightly different way, again, trust those before you would necessarily look at the scale or even the mirror, because the mirror could be a very cruel mistress because of the subjective interpretation. Sign number five is that your biofeedback is solid. All right. And this is another one people, a lot of people I meet who haven't listened to this podcast or are very much into you know evidence-based fitness, aren't aware that, hey, all these physiological expressions of your body give you really good information. How's your sleep? How's your energy level? How's your mood, your libido, your digestion, your hunger? Right. There's like a good list of between six and eight measures that are helpful for most people. For some of you, you may have other things that that are helpful as well, but but that's those are the big ones. When your body's adapting well to training and nutrition, these also tend to be stable or improving, right? You tend to sleep a little better, a little more energy for your workouts. You're not constantly starving or battling cravings either, because you're managing your hunger sick hunger signals better, probably because you're also fueling better. And conversely, if you have poor biofeedback, right? Your energy is constantly low, your sleep is inconsistent or bad or just disruptive, you're always hungry or you have just erratic hunger, brain fog, all of this kind of stuff, then there's something off with your recovery, maybe your nutrition, your calories, protein, carbs, maybe your training load, your volume, your approach, how much cardio you're doing, et cetera. So good biofeedback means your system is handling the stress and adapting. And notice not all of these are direct measures of hypertrophy, but they're corollary measures of a body that is thriving, growing, building, getting more functional, and performing better. All right, so quick reminder at the end of this episode, I'm gonna share the three most common mistakes people make when they misread their short-term feedback. And these tend to stop people from making progress. And we're gonna help you not do that. Now, we've been talking about biofeedback. All right, these are the markers that tell your you your body is adapting well. And I would put sleep by far at the top of that list. And what helps recovery happen even faster is if you can have a really cozy, indulgent, helpful, calm environment for sleep. Not just more hours, but better quality sleep, deeper REM sleep, deeper deep sleep. And I want to talk about today's sponsor because this is super aligned. Cozy Earth came to me a while back. I wanted to sponsor the show. I said, I need to start using your products for a while, and I did, and I love these guys. The quality is extremely high. You get what you pay for, but you also get the recovery. I have talked before about their bamboo derived sheet set, but now I want to tell you about their pajamas that I've been wearing for a while. I'm not a pajama person, and usually because they're too hot and they're they're not comfortable. These, like their sheets, are extremely lightweight. They regulate temperature because of the material. And I've joked before that I wear box, I wear briefs that are made from a similar material, and and I can't, I would wear everything bamboo-derived if I could, probably. And now I fall asleep faster. I just am super comfortable when I get under the sheets because I normally run hot and they just don't trap heat. So that combined with the sheets is great, but even just the pajamas are awesome. And then another product I've been using because we love throws in blankets in our house, and my wife basically took this for her own. It's called the classic cuddle blanket, and it lives on our couch. Now, this is a super heavy blanket in a good way. It's it's I you could almost call it a weighted blanket, but it's got like a very plush, soft feel. My kids fight over it because they say it's like as soft as their hamsters or softer than that. And we kind of fight over it because it's really, really warm. Even when we have the fire going or the heat on, it keeps you warm. So those are the kind of things I really like. I love Cozy Earth. They have a ton of products, they're all super high quality. If you like to support the podcast, this is a great way to do it, right? We don't bring in much income from the podcast itself. So it really helps us make more of these episodes. Go to wins and weights.com slash cozy earth and you'll get 20% off. Now, if you don't see the 20% off, use our code Wits and Weights, but it should auto-apply. Go to wins and weights.com slash cozy earth because it's it's just another tool in the toolbox and they back up their products. They have a hundred night sleep trial. And I've talked to people who have gotten nicks and scratches on their own fault, and they'll still return and give you a replacement. Uh, they have a 10-year warranty. So if you don't love it, you can send it back and I think you will. I love it. I I need to get more sheets and I need to get more pajamas so I have enough to rotate through. Go to witzawaits.com slash cozy earth, support the podcast, check out Cozy Earth's amazing products to help with your sleep and comfort. Witzawaits.com slash cozy earth. All right, let me walk you through some specific situations where the mirror and the scale can be misleading. And then they you can recognize when they happen to you. All right, scenario number one is during a deload or rest week. Now, this is what listener Erin H, who wrote the original question that spurred this episode, this is what she was experiencing that during a deload, you're reducing your training volume. You're doing this on purpose to try to recover and get rid of some of the fatigue. And so a lot of things will happen. This is like a transitionary period, just like when you start on a diet or get out of a diet, or you start a new training program, you're effectively turning a big switch down on your training. And so the turnover, turnover in your like glycogen will slow down, inflammation should go down. Your nervous system, nervous system, your CNS, should be far less stimulated. In fact, I I spoke to all-time world record holder in the 181 women's raw squat, Steph Mager, here on the podcast. And she said for her D-Load, she doesn't even use a barbell that week in to deliberately force her from being able to stimulate your nervous system too much. She switches to dumbbells, it's still pretty heavy, but she reduces the overall volume. So during a D-load, you might look a little flatter, softer, less pumped because you don't have that constant stimulus coming in, especially if you've got a hypertrophy program going on. And this doesn't mean you're regressing. It's just you're recovering, you know, your muscles aren't shrinking away. You're not gonna lose your gains. We want this, we want to do this. You're still gonna train that week, right? You're not just taking it off altogether. And even if you were, that's not gonna set you back. You're getting a better chance to repair and grow and reduce some of that fatigue, that nervous system stress. And so there could be visual changes that you don't like during a delo. And guess what? They're gonna reverse within a session or two once you resume normal training. So, since Aaron asked a very specific question that nobody ever talks about on these podcasts, I want to address it today. And that is what should you expect during a deload week? What metrics matter? What feedback's normal? How do you know it's working? Just gonna take like a couple minutes to answer this real quick and then we get back to the main topic. But here's your answer, Aaron. Okay. What you'll probably see is that the scale weight might go up a little bit because of water distribution, or it might go down from reduced inflammation, could go either way, right? Because you've disrupted your training patterns. I'm not gonna read into that because I never read into a few days or a week or even two weeks anyway. I always say think about a three-week average when you think of scale weight. Visually, you might look a little softer, flatter, less pumped. Your veins might not be there if you normally look vascular, right? Some people don't have that, you know, that look anyway, but depends. And this is all the glycogen and water shifts we talked about. And then probably some reduced muscles tone, you don't have the same pump, your nervous system's calmed down. And this is temporary, it's gonna reverse within one or two sessions. So I would forget the mirror. I would pay attention to your recovery markers during that week as the most important thing that you care about. That's all that matters. Is your sleep getting better? Are those nagging aches in your joints, like your low back or shoulders or knees or wherever that is, starting to go away? Are they fading away? That to me is really important, especially for those of us over 40, achy joints. You want to listen to that. Is your digestion a little better? Do you feel less mentally fried? Because that's also very important. And then I guess here's the big one because by the end of the deload, you should start feeling a genuine desire, like psyched up to train hard again. Like, okay, I missed training, I gotta get back to it next week, right? Real eagerness to do it, that pull toward the gym. And that tells you that's a really good message to tell you you're recovered. And don't forget the food side of this. During a deload is not the time to go into a deficit if you weren't to begin with. I mean, if you're already dieting and you just want to continue diet, great. But I would say a delo, if anything, you want to increase calories. And even if you're dieting, this might be a great week to take a maintenance break because you're trying to help the recovery, and that's only going to accelerate it. So a successful deload, I would say doesn't always feel productive in the moment. It kind of feels lazy to some of us, right? Like so, like you and me, Aaron, who wire to think that like our effort means we're making progress and you don't want to rest on your laurels. So you're not going to get the same feedback. You know, the pump isn't there, the mirror may not look like you want. But if you feel better by the end of the week than you did at the start, you're sleeping well, aches are gone, you're looking forward to training more than you were before, those are good signs. And then when you come back to normal training, you'll know the D load work. That's the other thing. You have to have that feedback of okay, the weights might feel a little lighter, uh, you're Pumps are going to come back immediately if you care about that. Your motivation should be a little higher. So there's all of these aspects that we get from a D-Lo, whether they're programmed in or done a little bit more auto-regulated fashion. That's a whole other episode. Like, how do we do Doads? All right. So sometimes, Aaron and everyone listening, you do have to change what you measure based on the phase, even if it's a week-long special phase like this. Same thing goes for when you travel, same thing goes for if you take a diet break or a refeed or anything else, just has to change. I'm on my refeed weekend in the middle of a fat loss phase. So during the weekend, I'm tracking things a little different than I do during the week. I know my weight is gonna pop a little bit and then it's gonna drop back down, but I kind of ignore it for a few days, knowing that happens. I take it, I measure it, but I ignore I ignore it mentally more than I would otherwise. So that's that's the first scenario is the is a D load of rest week. The second scenario for when feedback gets a little bit confusing is early in a building phase. So when you go into a building phase, you're gonna eat more than you were before, probably in a small surplus. And I know there's more info now about how big of a surplus do you have to be. Maybe you don't have to be in that much of a surplus. Doesn't matter. You're eating more, you're eating enough to build muscle. The scale is probably gonna go up a little bit. And you might look a little softer in the midsection, and then you might panic. Okay. And you might stop. And this is this is a lot of my clients and those of you in physique university or using my app. It's like you have to commit to it and understand what's happening. What is actually happening is you're holding on to more glycogen and water from the increased food and training. That's it. You're gonna gain some weight just from that. You might even gain a little bloating initially because your body's not used to the extra fluid, has to adapt before it releases some of it. And there might be a tiny bit of fat gain as you go along during the building phase because most of what you're trying to gain is muscle. But to gain that muscle, you're in a little bit of a surplus, and therefore you might gain a little bit of fat. Now we do it in a very efficient way these days. I often don't push people too hard on the amount of a surplus. More with men than women tends to be the case. And if you're open to adding gaining a little more fat, but you might gain even more muscle, you've got to see what works for you in that regard. I've been through very, very aggressive phases and very, very lean phases. And now I know what works well for me. For me, it is somewhere in the middle. For some people, it might be on either end. All right. So early on, your muscles are gonna fill out with fuel. It's kind of like when you start taking creatine, people are like, oh my God, I gain weight on creatine and I feel bloated and this and that. Well, it's usually a good sign your muscles are filling up with more fuel. That's what allows you to perform better. And then your body adapts to the fluid change and will look better once it adapts. And so I would I say, I say wait eight to 12 weeks, like like two to three months into a building phase before you really judge anything. Because the building side is slower than the fat loss side. So everything's just kind of stretched out. It's a process, guys, but it's a process that's so worth it. So that's scenario two is the early building phase. Scenario three, where the feedback gets a little weird, is body recomp. In fact, all of it. Now, I recently had a whole episode devoted to body recomp. I've had several of those. And a lot of people want to do it, but a lot of people don't want to accept how the measurement gets a little wonky and precise and difficult. Okay, you're eating around maintenance, maybe a little higher, maybe lower. You're still training, you're doing all the things, but a lot thing a lot is not going to change. The scale is probably not going to change that much. Even what you see in the mirror, it's going to take time to change. And that's the hard part about body recomp. As much as everyone thinks it's a holy grail, it's slow and it's hard to see week to week. And yeah, you might be losing fat, gaining muscle at the same rate, and your weight stays sable. So that kind of throws you off. So the signs show up, and guess what? The five signs we talked about earlier: strength progression, how your clothes fit, those kinds of things. Now you can take things like photos and compare them. You don't want to look at your mirror every day or any day, really, and try to compare that because you just, it's not possible for our human brain to comprehend from you know three weeks ago in the mirror to today in the mirror. Our brains just don't work well with that kind of memory. Photos, though, are a more objective way to do that, especially if you're if you get to share that with a coach or even in our community, if you were to share the photos in appropriate clothing, and we can help you identify before and after. And then scenario four where it gets confusing is post-diet maintenance. So after a fat loss phase and you bump your calories back up to maintenance, a lot of things can like look worse, quote unquote, qualitatively in the short term because you're going to gain several pounds of fluid, glycogen, water. You're losing the inflammation-driven hardness that dieting creates. Dieting creates this kind of hardness, if you will, that some people like, I have to, I have to say, but it also is counter to performance and building muscle and everything. So all these changes are transitionary. A lot of them stabilize or the body adapts and return to a normal state instead of a depleted one. And then we'll start, you know, kind of looking quote unquote normal again. So these are the things you have to deal with. In all these scenarios, the five signs I gave you earlier, five signs you're actually building muscle, still apply. And so I want you to check those as you go. So I want to leave you with something that I think matters here about visible progress and transformation, because we think that if we're working hard, we should see it, that the mirror and the scale should tell it. And the whole fitness, wellness, dieting, weight loss industry is built on quote unquote transformations that are visual, before and after photos, right? Before and after photos. And even I have to use that sometimes in my marketing materials because it's the only thing people see to kind of get them in the door before you're like, no, it's not really about that. But those of us who are experienced doing this, or those of you listening who are experienced, coaches, things like that, visible progress is at best a lagging indicator. It shows up after the real work has been done. And even then, it may not be what you expect because we all have different body types, different goals, different genetics, et cetera. The gain in strength, recovery, performance markers, these are the leading indicators, right? Leading versus lagging. They tell you progress is happening before you can see it. It's like tracking your bank account as you go is your financial leading indicator versus the bank statement at the end of the month is the lagging indicator, right? The person who can trust the leading indicator without needing constant validation of the visual progress is the person who stays consistent long enough to get the visual progress and results they want. Ah, that's that's the gold right there. So when you're a little bit frustrated with what you see in the mirror, ask yourself Am I getting stronger? Am I recovering better? Is my performance improving? Do my clothes fit better differently? Is my biofeedback solid? If the answer to most of them is yes, you're probably building muscle, the mirror is gonna catch up with you. All right. Remember, I promise you those three common mistakes people make when they misread short-term feedback that's coming up in a second. Quick message though, if you want help tracking these metrics and knowing what to actually pay attention to, check out my Fitness Lab app. It tracks your biofeedback and your training data and your recovery markers. If you have iPhone, it now connects to Apple Health. And then it gives you a simple set of daily tasks, including an educational briefing based on what is happening. So the briefing you get is based on you. If you had trouble sleep, it'll say, Hey, I just saw from your sleep data you only got five and a half hours of sleep. Let's talk about it. I'm gonna help you out in a very low stress way. All right, so whether you use the data integration or not, it works that way. It adapts to you. You can chat with it. It's like having a coach in your pocket. And as always, podcast listeners get an exclusive 20% off using the link in my show notes. You've got to go to that link. You'll take a free quiz, learn what it's all about, get a custom plan before you even buy the app to see if it's right for you. Again, that's Fitness Lab. Go to the link in the show notes. All right, here are the three mistakes I promised. These are the things people do when they misread short-term feedback, and then it holds you back even more. Mistake number one is cutting calories because you look soft. If you're in a building phase or you're in a delo, which is usually like a week, you look, you know, you might look less lean than last week. And so you drop your food, you drop your calories. And this could be a gut reaction because you feel like you're getting fat in a building phase, or it could be because what you talked about about a deload. Oh, I'm deloading and I'm not working out, so I'm not burning as many calories, so I need to drop my food. Well, you're just killed, you killed your recovery right there, and you killed your muscle building potential for no reason, just because water flu is fluctuating in your body. That's it. Don't do it. Don't just cut calories reactively, ever, ever, ever, ever. Mistake number two is adding cardio to try to fix whatever issue you think is there. Okay. And I say it that way because if you've listened to this whole episode, you know there may not be an issue. If the scale went up three pounds and then you throw in extra cardio to burn off that, then you're in a very dysfunctional, unhealthy mental state of mind. I am telling you that right now. Because that weight of three pounds is absolutely 100% glycogen and water, not fat, because the only way to gain three pounds of fat is to overconsume by well over 10,000 calories in one day. And I know you're not doing that. So you just added more stress and fatigue to your body by adding cardio just for that purpose. And if you're doing it just like as a one-time thing, it's it's just gonna be kind of useless unless you're doing it because you like it and it's part of your training and you're doing it in a non-stressful way, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about the reactive, I need to do cardio to burn off calories. Mistake number three is program hopping. Okay, program hopping is one of the most common things I see. And people will do a program for two weeks, they don't see the changes they want, they think it doesn't work, and they change, right? For whatever reason, they make an excuse. I'm bored, I wanted to do something different, whatever. But you never gave it enough time to produce results. All right, building muscle takes months, not weeks. I usually recommend people follow a program for at least six weeks minimum, but ideally eight, 10, 12, and you can have deloads in there, or you can just run the same program several times, or you can run the same program and swap out some of the exercises. So, all three of these mistakes cutting calories, adding cardio, program hopping, really they come from the same place. And that is that you're giving too much trust to the short-term visual feedback as if it means anything, and that could be the scale as well, instead of the leading indicators that matter that we already talked about. All right, that's it for today. The core message is very simple. The mirror, the scale are generally terrible short-term progress indicators, and they lag as well. They lag behind what you're really working on and focused on. So if you want to know whether you're building muscle, look at strength, recovery, performance, close, and biofeedback, and those will help you a lot more than the mirror or the scale. Thanks to Aaron H for the message. Shout out to Aaron for your message on Instagram. You guys can reach me on Instagram at Wits and Weights if you have a question, or you can go to witsandweights.com slash question. Easy way to do that. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember progress is happening even when you can't see it. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Stop Blaming Menopause for Muscle Loss (Here's What's Really Happening) | Ep 434

If what worked in your 30s isn't working anymore, it's not your fault. Your body and life have changed. The Fitness Lab app adapts to your sleep, recovery, and stress so you can actually build muscle and lose fat over 40. It also now syncs with Apple Health (iPhone version only).

Podcast listeners get 20% off at bit.ly/fitness-lab-pod20

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Does menopause cause muscle loss or make it harder to build muscle?

The fitness industry loves to blame hormones for everything. Wellness gurus want to sell you special programs, protocols, and supplements for perimenopause and postmenopause.

But the research shows that postmenopausal women build muscle and gain strength with resistance training just as effectively as younger women. The stimulus-response relationship doesn't break after 50 (or 40).

So what's really happening? 

Learn why the "menopause steals muscle" narrative is mostly a timing coincidence, and what's actually driving the decline. 

We break down the 5 factors that "drift" during midlife, where hormone replacement therapy (HRT) fits into the picture, and specific strategies that work for women over 40 regardless of hormonal status.

If you've felt like your body stopped responding, this episode offers both the evidence and the practical framework to test that assumption. Building muscle after menopause isn't about fighting your biology, it's about adjusting your inputs.

Episode Resources:

• Take the free 2-minute quiz to see if Fitness Lab is right for you

Timestamps:

0:00 - The dangerous menopause muscle loss narrative
3:50 - What the research shows about strength training after menopause
7:30 - Life changes vs. hormones (correlation vs. causation)
10:52 - 5 factors that actually drive midlife muscle loss
18:45 - How to train for muscle building over 40 (not just "staying active")
22:10 - Protein targets and meal distribution for women over 40
24:55 - Why sleep and recovery become non-negotiable in midlife
28:05 - The body composition feedback loop and metabolism myths
31:15 - Where HRT fits
38:15 - How negative messaging creates the outcomes it predicts
41:20 - Weekly training structure for building muscle

Many women over 40 are told that muscle loss is an unavoidable result of perimenopause and menopause, but the research paints a different, more empowering picture. Muscle can be built at any age when the right inputs are in place: progressive resistance training, adequate protein intake, sufficient daily movement, and consistent, high-quality recovery. The idea that hormones alone switch off your ability to respond to training creates a nocebo effect that discourages action, weakens consistency, and leads to lower protein, easier workouts, and fragmented routines. This mindset becomes a loop: you change inputs because you believe change is futile, then the outcomes confirm the belief. Breaking that loop starts with evidence-based habits and clear targets that you can control day to day.

The science on postmenopausal training is encouraging: resistance exercise reliably improves strength, muscle mass, and physical function. Studies comparing responses across hormonal statuses show that, on average, adaptations to training are not significantly different. That means the stimulus still works; muscles remain sensitive to progressive overload. What changes in midlife is often everything around training: heavier life stress, caregiving duties, career demands, and disrupted sleep. These shifts reduce training volume and intensity, lower daily movement, and erode recovery. The net effect resembles an age or hormone problem, but it’s largely behavioral and environmental. This is good news because behavior can be shaped, measured, and improved without waiting on perfect labs, exotic supplements, or specialized protocols that overpromise and distract.

Five drivers explain most midlife muscle loss: lower training volume or effort, inadequate protein, decreased non-exercise activity, compromised sleep and stress recovery, and body composition drift that raises inflammation and reduces training tolerance. Each driver is actionable. Training must be hard enough and progressive: about 10 hard sets per muscle group per week, performed 1 to 3 reps shy of failure, using mostly compound lifts like squats, hinges, presses, and pulls. Protein intake needs to rise to overcome mild anabolic resistance: aim for 0.7 to 1.0 grams per pound of body weight per day, distributed across meals with at least 25 grams at breakfast and lunch to spark muscle protein synthesis and control hunger. Daily movement targets of 7,000 to 9,000 steps improve insulin sensitivity and recovery capacity, helping you handle harder training sessions.

Recovery quality often decides whether your training pays off. Hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, and sleep apnea can fracture sleep architecture, blunting progress even when workouts look perfect on paper. Tackle the specific disruptors: a cooler bedroom, consistent wind-down routines, evaluation for apnea, and scheduling heavy sessions with enough days between to restore performance. If you are actively dieting, be conservative—keep protein high, avoid aggressive deficits, and remember that under-eating is under-recovering. Body composition also feeds back into performance: extra fat mass can raise inflammation and lower energy, which makes training feel harder and encourages inactivity. Addressing nutrition quality, steps, and strength work together reverses this loop without defaulting to “slowed metabolism” as fate.

Where does hormone replacement therapy fit? Think of HRT as a modifier, not the foundation. The foundational inputs are training, protein, movement, and sleep. HRT can improve quality of life and may nudge some markers in the right direction, but evidence for consistent, direct muscle or performance benefits is mixed. When combined with resistance training, training drives the change while HRT can be additive for symptoms that hinder recovery. If symptoms are severe, work with a qualified clinician and make decisions based on how you feel, not just labs. Either way, the path to more muscle still runs through progressive overload, adequate protein, daily activity, and deep, regular sleep.

Adopt a simple weekly operating system to create momentum. Train two to three days per week with focus and progression. Eat 25 to 40 grams of protein at each meal and front-load it at breakfast. Walk daily and park farther away. Guard your sleep window and schedule deloads or lighter days when life gets heavy. Then audit your week with three yes-or-no questions: did you progress a lift, did you hit 25 grams of protein at breakfast and lunch, and did you sleep at least seven hours? If two answers are no, you’ve found your next lever. This is not about perfection; it’s about regaining agency. Your muscles still listen. Give them a clear signal, and they will respond.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:00

  If you're a woman over 40 who's been told that muscle loss is caused by peri and postmenopause, this episode is for you. Menopause is real, of course, and the symptoms are real. The frustration is real, and I'm not here to dismiss any of that. But what I am going to show you is that the story you've been sold, that your body has stopped responding, that building muscle is now close to, if not impossible, is not supported by the evidence. And believing that it is maybe the thing holding you back. You're going to learn five hidden factors that drive mid-life muscle loss. Most of them you can control. Why post-menopausal women respond to resistance training just as well as younger women, and the exact protein and training targets that work at any hormonal status. The women I see who build muscle in their 50s and beyond, they're not biologically advantaged, they're just doing specific things differently. I'm your host today, Philip Pape, and I want to start by acknowledging something. Yes, I'm a man, to state the obvious, and I'm talking about menopause. I'm aware that I've not lived this experience. I haven't had hot flashes at 3 a.m. I haven't had the brain fog or the feeling that your body has suddenly become unfamiliar to you. And these are real things I hear from women and they matter. But what I can offer is the research and the patterns that I've seen working with women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and hopefully a perspective that feels empowering rather than dismissive. I've been accused of being too positive, but I hope that comes into play today to benefit you. Because this is what I've observed. Many women are being told a story, a narrative about menopause and about muscle that is making things harder. It's not making it easier. The story goes that once your hormones shift, your body stops responding, right? The drop of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, that building muscle becomes close to impossible or, you know, at least dramatically harder, and that you're now fighting your biology. And that, you know, when you believe that story, and I get that the industry thrives on negativity, uh, often to sell products and services, you often then stop doing the things that would actually help. It kind of becomes a scapegoat, and your training might become something that you feel is not as beneficial. Your protein, you know, you may not feel like you have to eat as much protein and like all the little things add up. And then because all these inputs change, the outputs tend to get worse. And then it's a vicious cycle that seems to confirm the story. So today I want to offer a different narrative. Not one that dismisses what you're experiencing, of course, but that separates what is genuinely caused by hormones from what is actually changeable. Because there is more in that second category than many of us are being told or sold. So I'm breaking it down into five factors that actually drive midlife muscle loss. Where HRT fits into that, right? Hormone replacement therapy, spoiler alert, it's not the first thing you're necessarily having to do. And then specific practical things like training protein targets that work for really work for everybody, but specific to postmenopausal women because there might be some subtle differences that might be helpful. And the research here is extremely encouraging. And then at the end, I've got three quick yes or no questions you can ask yourself to tell you exactly where to focus this week. Takes like 30 seconds. So stay until the end for that. All right, let's get into it. And I want to talk about the narrative, right? The menopause narrative, post-menopause, pre-menopause, whatever. It's it's it's a common pattern out there. You know, many of you women are in your mid-40s, 50s, and you notice some changes, right? This is perimenopause can start as early as mid to late 30s and goes all the way the time you hit menopause, which is one year without uh period, and all the time in between, there are changes that happen with hormones and then the symptoms that occur from that, like lower energy, like all the other symptoms that some of which I mentioned in the in the teaser, maybe your scale has gone up. Resistance to weight loss is a big, widely reported frustration, right? Your clothes fit differently because of the different body fat distribution, right? Maybe more belly fat. And right around this time, you know, simultaneously, all the other symptoms are happening along with the physical changes. And so it's easy to say that menopause causes these changes. And I understand why that's very appealing because it does provide an explanation that, okay, it's not your fault, it's your hormones. And we don't want to say any of this is your fault, right? It's it's not about fault, really. It's just about understanding what how things work. Where I think it gets complicated is that the fitness industry, the wellness industry, that to me is kind of a dirty word these days, has taken this and run in a very harmful and dangerous direction because now there is kind of a Wild West, you know, cowboy or cowgirl or whatever set of functional doctors and hormone panels and menopause-specific workout programs and supplements targeting all your hormones that may or may not be safe or do what they they purport to do. And we're all chasing lab work instead of symptoms. It's just kind of a mess. And at the same time, you have a lot of great people, doctors, professionals, healthcare people, uh coaches that are trying to do the right thing and do it in the right way, but it's hard to separate the signal from the noise, let's say. And so the implicit message is this is where I think it's a problem. Your body is broken now, and you need some sort of expensive, complicated intervention to fix it. And I'm the only one that can help you. And that's where you sell products and services. But I think it also strips away agency, all right? Agency, self, you know, efficacy, as we call it, which self-efficacy combined with self-regulation is the way that we do things and get consistent with the lifestyle changes we're trying to make occur. When you look at the actual research, it tells us something different, as you would expect, something a bit more subtle. There's more nuance, and we have to understand that. Okay, so what is the reality from the research? First, yes, muscle loss does occur, roughly three to eight percent per decade after age 30. I actually bring that up a lot on podcasts, not to scare people, but to let you know what's going on with your body so we can do something about it. This is sarcopenia. Now, sarcopenia is not just loss of muscle mass, it's also loss of the function from muscle mass. That's a different topic. But just in general, we start to lose our muscle mass. We've known this for many years, since probably the late 80s in the research. The nuance that we leave out is that this decline is not just driven by age or and or by menopause. It's associated with the changes in behavior, the five factors we're gonna talk about, that tend to happen during this time of life. And they happen to men as well. For women, it does get exacerbated because of some of the hormonal changes, and that's where the reality is, right? We're gonna look at that. And there's a lot of things that are happening as we get older through our 30s, into our 40s and 50s. A lot of them are because life gets complicated, right? It's not just because of hormones. And when we look at studies on resistance training in postmenopausal women, we find always that guess what? Resistance exercise increases skeletal muscle mass and strength and physical performance. And this is in postmenopausal women, okay? Their muscles responded perfectly fine to the stimulus. One of the things I love sharing on podcasts, especially geared toward women, is that women can increase their muscle mass at the same rate as men and at the same rate, regardless of age. And that's really empowering if you're aware of that. There was a study just last year, 2025, that looked at training outcomes across different menopause statuses. And they found that training adaptations were not significantly different based on hormonal status. So, again, the stimulus response relationship still works. And I know a lot of things are not working as we get old. Our joints get a little less pliable, right? We have a little more aches and pains and some other things happening, but this is one thing that continues to work. Your muscles don't forget how to grow in response to that stimulus. So, what is actually happening is more of a correlation causation problem. Okay. Menopause happens to arrive around the same time as a lot of other changes. For example, tell me if any of these sound familiar to you. Career and job demands are often getting super complicated and stressful in your 40s and 50s, especially for those of you who have professional careers. This is where you're really hustling to get, you know, climb the ladder. Maybe you're in leadership and management positions, you have a lot of responsibility, you're negotiating, you're trying to find jobs, trying to take interviews. Like all of that stuff is happening much more at this time of life than it probably did in your 20s and 30s when you were a little more entry-level and just getting into it and had more energy for it. Kids, kids, kids, guys, kids maybe, first of all, having kids, right? You're in your 40s and 50s. I'm 45, a dad of two daughters, and this it takes a lot of your time, devotion, energy. I love it. I love being a dad. And I wouldn't have it any other way, but it is an important part of my life, and it could be part of yours. And then depending on your age, kids may be leaving home, going to college, going to their jobs, living on their own, or they are hitting their most demanding years. Or you had an oops baby, as we call them, where your kids are many years apart, and now you have a younger kid. So there's kids. What about your own parents are starting to get older and maybe need care and attention in your time? Maybe you have to be driving around, traveling, housing them, maybe assisted living, like all that stuff, medical care. What about sleep? Sleep tends to become more fragmented as we get older. Oftentimes it's linked to all these other issues, including stress. Some of you have sleep apnea, insomnia, you know, supplementation medications interfere with it. Maybe your drink, whatever. And then we, of course, we have exercise that tends to become less consistent or training becomes less consistent because life is just harder and you're trying to fit everything into your schedule. So that might be just the tip of the iceberg for a lot of you, but I hope I hit on the big reasons why life may be different in your 40s, 50s, and kind of this age range. Now, let's talk hormones because I'm not saying that estrogen doesn't matter. That's a very important hormone that we should be talking about. It does. Estrogen decline can modify quite a few outcomes. Your recovery, your connected tissue health, some aspects of body composition because of the redistribution of fat. Of course, it creates a bunch of symptoms, but for most women, it's not the primary driver of muscle loss. And that's that's the key for today's episode. The primary drivers are the things that you can actually influence. And that's great news because if it were purely hormonal, you'd be stuck, or at least like everybody would have to have, you know, estrogen replacement just to avoid muscle loss. And that's not the case. That's not the case. There's nothing wrong with saying, you know what, it could be hormones and lifestyle, just like GLP1 meds, it could be medications and lifestyle. These things don't have to be mutually exclusive. Now, if it is mostly behavioral and environmental, right? If if you take a pie chart and one slice has hormones, but all the rest are behavioral and environmental, that gives you a ton of options, right? So what are these five factors that I've been mentioning? Because if you identify which have shifted for you, that's like the first, that's the first step toward reversing course, which is probably why you're listening to or watching this podcast. All right. So we know the menopause steals your muscle narrative, is at best incomplete. It's not that hormones are irrelevant, right? They are part of the picture, but they're usually not the main driver. Now, what is? All right. So I'm gonna list these factors, and the goal isn't to make you feel guilty, right? Life in your 40s, 50s, beyond is legitimately harder for many to manage than in your 20s. And so a lot of it's circumstantial or evident environment based, but you still need to recognize them. So factor number one is your training volume and intensity. And this happens gradually. Now, if you don't even exercise at all, well, that's your biggest low-hanging fruit right there. By exercise, I should have said train. If you don't use resistance training in your life, ladies, right now, you probably haven't been listening to this podcast, I'm guessing. So definitely we have a whole library on training, but that's gonna be your probably your biggest lever for many of you, other than maybe sleep and stress, because that is how you build and hold on to muscle, period. Now, many of you have exercised in one way or the other, or you have trained, or you go to the gym. And now it's a matter of are you doing it the right way? Are you training the right amount of time? You know, are you lifting heavy enough? Are you progressing and all of that? Are you doing it in a way where you're you're not avoiding it because you think it's gonna injure you? Or, okay, you have back issues, so that's why you don't train, not realizing that training can help with your back issues. And there's all of that going on. There's also a subtle psychological shift that happens for some women where the menopause symptoms, fatigue and joint aches and disrupted sleep, and there's a lot of symptoms, right? And they they tend to make hard training itself then also feel less appearing, appealing. It seems exhausting, it seems like not something you want to do, you don't like it, so you unconsciously back off. And of course, that's understandable. This is the human condition, right? Responding to those things. But then the result is, of course, you don't have what you need to hold on to build muscle. And again, your muscles don't know your age, they don't know your hormone levels, they will respond. If you go into the gym, train hard close to failure, get that mechanical tension, okay? You know, not just the pink dumbbells for 10 reps every time. You have to adapt and force your body to grow. That's the biggest factor is training, volume, the approach, whether you're doing it or not is a huge deal. And we're gonna touch on this again when we get to the practical tips on what to do. That's the biggest one. Uh, the second factor is your nutrition, especially your protein intake. I just had an interview with Steph Mager. She's an all-time world record squat holder, and she doesn't really track macros and calories, but she does make sure she gets enough protein. She weighs around 180, and so she gets around 180 grams of protein every day, right? One gram per pound. And so this is this is kind of sneaky, right? Because if you haven't been tracking it before, you probably didn't have enough to begin with. And even if you have, the same what you had before may not be enough anymore. This is one thing that can change as we get older, and that we get something called anabolic resistance, where you have a slightly blunted response to the muscle building signal from protein. So it just means you might need a little bit more. Think of it like your muscles becoming a bit harder of hearing. They need a louder signal from the the amount of protein that you eat. But if you have enough protein intake, you know, gram per pound, let's say, or even less than that, 0.8, 0.7, it's it should be more than enough to give you that signal. But for many of you, you're eating even less than that. So if you're a 150-pound woman, that means let's say 100 to 120 grams of protein, you know, on the on the lower end. More than that is fine. It's great. And many women I start working with, you know, they're getting like half that and they don't realize it because they're not tracking. And then also they might try to shove all that protein into dinner. And I always encourage distributing it throughout the day because it's gonna help you with your fullness throughout the day and also help you get the protein. You're not trying to catch up and you're not binging and things like that. Factor number three is just your daily movement. So again, this time of life, we tend to get more sedentary. You know, all the all the movement outside of your workouts tends to decline around this time of year. It's not that you're lazy, it's because we have desk jobs, less physical housework, you know, things are more convenient now with uh ordering things online and driving instead of walking. And we don't, you know, we always try to find the closest parking spot. And, you know, we're not maybe not chasing our kids around anymore, right? There's a lot of reasons for it. Whatever reason it is is personal to you. But you know what? Your muscle and supporting your muscle mass and your strength and recovery and your health and longevity are all affected by your overall activity. It affects your recovery, recovery, your insulin sensitivity, how your body processes nutrients. So we're trying to get up in that seven to nine thousand steps a day minimum, minimum. This is one place where I do like to set a threshold for people, find a way to get there. And if you haven't checked your step count recently, that's step one, just to find out what it is with your phone or wearable. But if you're down in the three, four, five thousand steps a day, that's a big lever for you. All right, then factor number four is recovery, all right, especially sleep. This is where hormones do play a direct role because this it's a chicken and egg, right? For you ladies and peri and postmenopause, sleep often gets more fragmented and difficult to come by because of the hormone changes, or you have hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, racing thoughts, all of these things might, they might prevent you from falling asleep or wake you up. Maybe you have sleep apnea, lots of things, reasons, right? And this is genuinely a difficult thing. It's it's a challenge, and I don't want to minimize it. But I also want to frame it as another problem that we can solve, right? Rather than just an inevitability that we can't control that we have to accept. Because all of this stuff is in your control. The stoic philosophy of what can I do, not what can't I do. When recovery is compromised in any way, and that could be the amount of sleep, the amount of deep and REM sleep, interrupted sleep, too much stress, too much training and fatigue and not enough rest or deloads or whatever, then your capacity to build muscle is just reduced. It's reduced. You could do all the things right in the gym, and you're not gonna see the results you want if you're chronically under-recovered. By the way, not eating enough is also a form of under-recovery. So simply stop dieting for a while and fix on fix these things when you're in peri postmenopause. That could be the solution. And there are interventions, there are hacks, there are tips, there are strategies. Having a cool bedroom, having a wind-down routine. You know, some of you may need medical support for severe symptoms or a CPAP machine, right? Whatever it is, the point is that poor sleep is a direct constraint on your muscle building activity. Factor number five is actually the body composition changes themselves. Now, this is another kind of interesting chicken and egg situation because fat gain is probably happening as you get older, right? Because we gain a little bit of weight, it drifts up over the time for most people, because you're not not, I'm not gonna explain why you're doing it. You know why. It's it's overconsumption combined with the lifestyle changes and everything else. And then it creates a feedback loop that makes it even harder. Now, for women in perimenopause, for example, the changes in estrogen will change body fat distribution and could make it more difficult to, you know, you have more body fat than than you'd like. And this is this then leads to it's harder to lose weight and et cetera, et cetera. And then having more body fat, and for men, this might be like you've got the beer gut, maybe you drink too much, you've just had, you know, more sedentary lifestyle. This then increases your inflammation and your insulin resistance. And Might reduce your tolerance to training, right? You just can't do as much and it's kind of a vicious cycle. It also makes you less motivated, you have less energy, you're down on yourself, maybe talking bad about yourself and you don't like how you look, right? It all adds up. This factor, though, it often gets blamed on a slowing metabolism. But that's not really what it is. These are cause correlation, not causation. The slowdown in people's metabolism is largely caused by the lack of muscle mass and the lack of movement, uh and all like a lot of the things we just talked about. Because if those things were held steady, we know that people's metabolisms are also pretty steady from the age of 20 to 60. Okay, and so the loss of muscle caused your metabolism to drop, the the loss, the lack of movement, et cetera. Okay, but so those are the five factors. Now, here's what I want you to notice. Every single one of those five factors is something you can address. It's not necessarily easy. I'm not pretending that fixing your sleep during menopause is simple, ladies. But it's possible. You're not powerless, you can get help. There are tools. Some of this is just a matter of intention, and some of it is a matter of understanding how do we get friction out of the path. All right. So the question now for you becomes which of these five factors has shifted the most that you want to start with? And we'll get back to that self-check at the end that might be helpful. But first, I want to talk about HRT. All right. Now, before we talk about HRT, I do love tools that can help you track and hold yourself accountable with less friction. All right. And I have an app called Fitness Lab that is like having a coach in your pocket. It's like having an intelligence layer that takes all of this stuff happening in your life, your training volume, your recovery, your biofeedback, how you're sleeping, your hormones, everything. And it gives you a few simple tasks to do each day. It helps you breathe, helps reduce some stress so you know what to do, what things are drifting in the direction we don't, and the app will gently nudge you back. We recently added the Apple Health integration. It was in beta. Now it's out to the public, so it's in everybody's version if you want it. It can pull in your sleep data, your steps, your workout history. So again, that also reduces your stress because you don't have to think about that stuff. It pulls it in. The app is available on Android. We don't have the health stuff integrated on that yet, but I thought I'd mention it. And the thing about the five drifting factors in midlife that I just mentioned is a lot of us are just not aware of them. They are accumulating over months, but probably over years. And it's great if you can catch them by measuring the right thing. So my app Fitness Lab, I think, helps with that tremendously. A lot of women have been reporting how helpful it's been as an assistant for them in taking off the stress and allowing them to finally make progress. And it's built on these principles and the evidence and body composition, you know, thinking about how do we get your training and nutrition to give make this the best time of your life. So there is a special link exclusive to podcast listeners in the show notes. Click that link to check out Fitness Lab and get a nice discount for listeners. All right. So let's talk about the hormones. Hormone replacement therapy specifically. And I know this is a charged topic today, right? This is a lot of a lot of controversy, a lot of opinions on it. I've had guests talk about it here. I've gone on podcasts about HRT. My own thoughts have been coalescing over the years. Many of you are on HRT, or TRT is specific testosterone for men, for example. Maybe you're considering it. Maybe you have strong opinions about it one way or another. Okay. This isn't going to be an HRT episode. I think HRT hormone replacement, especially the big three, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, in a few limited ways, right? Creams and patches and things like that. There are some methods that I'm not a big fan of from what I've learned from healthcare professionals and how they work. But again, we're not going to solve that here. I think if you need it, it can vastly improve your quality of life. It can reduce all the symptoms. I think it should be symptom-based primarily, not just lab work-based. You can have labs that are a little off, but if you don't have the symptoms, you may not need as much treatment. But if you have the symptoms, who cares what your lab says? You may need help with that. And I think really good menopause professionals will focus on the symptoms. So we're talking hot flashes and night sweats. And then, of course, you've got osteoporosis you're worried about. And then, of course, you're concerned about weight gain, weight loss, body composition, muscle, all of that stuff. There's a million other symptoms I'm not even going to go into. There's libido issues, all of that. And if your doctor has recommended it or the professional you're working with and it's working for you, right? Thyroid Medicaid, there's so many, then that's awesome. Like I want you to pursue those things and be very in control of your destiny and very educated on this and talk to enough people. And look, if you're not sure who to talk to, please reach out to me. One easy way to do that is on Instagram at Wits and Waits. And I can point you to a few professionals I really like, some of whom helped me and people in my own family. And I trust them to do that. So you know that I'm giving you a good recommendation. But it HRT is not a replacement, right? It's not a replacement for doing the lifestyle. And the best hormone experts I've talked to on the show have the same message. It is an additive thing, it's not foundational. You need the tools to support you along with the lifestyle changes. And don't roll your eyes at that, please, because if you're not doing the lifestyle changes, the hormones are just going to have a very minor impact. Maybe they'll reduce some of those symptoms, but they're not going to help with the big things, with the muscle mass and the strength and the function and the health and longevity long term into your 80s, 90s. You know, what you want to be your golden years is when you're older. And when we look at studies on HRT and outcomes for muscle mass, for grip strength, for physical performance, it's kind of mixed. Right? You thought I was going to say, oh yeah, everything improves. It's kind of mixed, right? Some markers improve in some studies and some in others or go the other direction or don't improve at all. I'd say there's currently today the body of evidence doesn't say, hey, HRT itself reliably improves strength or physical performance. All right. It helps with many, many other things. But also there are methodological issues and variability and how these hormones are given during these studies. So it's just hard to say. And so if something's hard to say, you can't make a claim. That's my point. There's uncertain benefit for muscles specifically. There was a randomized controlled trial last year that combined estrogen replacement with a resistance training program. And that's a very useful combination. It sees it lets us see how those two things interact. And what they found is that resistance training drove the improvements. The HRT was additive for some markers, but training was doing that heavy lifting, pun intended. Okay. So here's how here's let me tell you how I think about it and my mental model, so to speak. Think of your muscle building capacity as having a foundation and then it has like modifiers on top of that. So the foundation is, of course, your training, your protein, your recovery, your movement. So those are the like the big rocks. HRT is a modifier, optimizer, right? It can nudge certain outcomes in a positive direction for some women in this area, in this area. But if the foundation isn't solid, if you're not training with progressive overload, not eating enough protein, not sleeping well, the modifiers kind of like on a squishy pit of slime, in that it has not nothing to work with. I don't know how good of an analogy that is, but you know, here's another one. If you have a car and you put gasoline in your car to get it to run, but you have never changed the oil and never changed the tires. And I actually know somebody I'm thinking of who had that. So of course her car didn't get as nearly as many miles as it could have because she ran it into the ground despite putting gas in. It's like the gas is not the problem and it's not the solution, right? So I think of HRT that way, where if you're taking it, but you're still having issues with your physical self, with your body fat and your muscle mass and everything else, it's probably not more hormones or different hormones, probably the five factors we discussed earlier, which is again where I'm trying to go with this episode without too many words. I hope. I do want to say something about the the menopause fitness space. Okay. Some of the content out there is it functions as a nocebo. You ever heard of the term nocebo? You've heard of placebo. A nocebo is like doing nothing. And I think it makes women afraid to train hard sometimes. And I hear it in the language of like, I'm worried about training too heavy for whatever reason. Now, some of it is about getting bulky, some of it is about injury or safety or thinking that you don't need to or whatever. I don't know, I don't know the exact reason it is for you if that if you've told yourself that, but you know, your body, just because it changes in that way, it can still respond quite incredibly. And by saying that it can't, it's a very discouraging message, and then it creates the outcome that it describes. Because if you believe something, then it's true. You've heard of that, right? If if you believe you can or you believe you can't, you're true. It's true. So if you believe you can't build muscle, that's your identity, and you're not gonna train in a way that's gonna build the muscle. You're not gonna eat in a way or live, live that way. And that's the identity shift that we talk about here. It's not a woo-woo thing. It literally is like I can do this, so I'm gonna act the way that expresses who I am, as opposed to I'm gonna try to force behaviors on myself to get an outcome. That that's not sustainable. What is sustainable is yeah, I can build muscle, I want to get stronger, I want to be athletic as I as I age. So I'm gonna do the things that that need to be done to get there. Obviously. Like, obviously, I'm gonna eat better now because it feels better to eat better, and I train better when I eat better. So that that that's like the menopause space, it just drives me crazy. The principles, the principles don't change. I'm all about principles, first principles. Like how you get it done can change, but the principles don't. You know, do you have enough mechanical tension when you train? Do you have progressive overload? Do you have enough protein? Do you have enough recovery? Right, all of that. I'm kind of repeating myself, but they work after menopause, just like they did before. The margins might be a little different. You might be a little night might need a little more protein, a little bit more recovery, more attention to sleep, right? But that's just adjusting the inputs, which is very different from oh, my body's broken now. All right, so enough about what doesn't work as well as advertised. Let's talk about what does work practically. All right, I'm gonna give you some just specific things. Talked about these before on the show. It's worth repeating, and they work as well for post-menopausal women, pre-menopausal women, men, anyone. Okay, it's just gonna work. That's the great thing about it. So training. Minimum effective dose for training is probably at least two, if not three days a week. And you're using resistance training of some kind, whether it's barbells, dumbbells, machines, probably around 10 hard sets per muscle group. Anywhere from five to 15, depends on your responsiveness and whether you're in a fat loss phase and all that. But say around 10 hard sets per muscle group per week, and then go up or down based on your recovery. And you're gonna prioritize compound lifts, ideally, especially when you're a newer lifter. That would be some sort of squat pattern, a deadlift style pattern, could be Romanian deadlift or even hip thrust, but you know, a hinge type pattern, a press, benching, and overhead. I like both. And then maybe a rowing pattern eventually or pulling pattern, like pull-ups. Some people also like loaded carries and core work and all that. I think that gets more on the hypertrophy side, but we can we can have that argument. Execution of this is training within two to three repshive failure. Now, you might have heard me say two to four, one to three. Training pretty darn close to failure. Okay. Don't leave gains on the table and make sure you go up in weight, reps, or sets over time. Something needs to progress. So that's the first fix. Protein, we already talked about it. I'll just give you the range again 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight. Don't overthink lean mass, target body weight, all that stuff. Just 0.7 to 1 grams a pound of your current body weight, and then work from there and really use your biofeedback and experience to adjust. And this is where, by the way, other people, whether it's coaches, communities, training partners, can be really helpful. I mean, you guys should be talking to and thriving in and among a group of like-minded people are trying to do the same thing. It's gonna accelerate your results. So that's protein. And then I think I mentioned before, like distributing your protein throughout the day, it can be really helpful for hunger. And yeah, it's helpful with for muscle as well, but it's really more about the practicality of making sure you get enough protein. Well, you have recovery, and that's just getting enough sleep and good sleep. If you're disrupted because of hot flashes or night sweats or something, you're gonna have to address those things. Now, there are a lot of over-the-counter and supplement and herb-based solutions to some of these things, like hot flashes, night sweats, even like vaginal dryness. And I don't know why I threw that in because it has nothing to do with sleep, but I'm just thinking of all the conversations I've had with the menopause experts. There's a range of potential solutions. You've got to go with the symptom and try to address that and then do before and after. If it doesn't help your symptom, then it probably isn't the right solution, regardless of what your blood work says. Okay. So you have to address all the things that are disrupting your sleep. Don't just accept it. You know, I have a client who like thought she says she snores a lot. And I said, Well, that may be sleep apnea. You should probably get it looked at. She did, and she's like, Yeah, that's what it was. CPAP machine, boom, so much better sleep, right? Little things like that can go a long way. You just have to address them. And stress management, you know, rest days, deloads, they all are part of this whole recovery thing. Stress is its own thing. I did a whole article, a whole episode recently about sleep and stress in the context of hunger hormones. But really, what we're talking about is how do you get yourself to get into that rest and digest mode on a regular basis, whether that's breath work and meditation, walking, therapy, some sort of relaxing movement or practice. Okay. And then, of course, rest days. You have to have the right balance of training days and recovery days. And if you really train hard, you know, you may have to be creative about your training schedule. I spoke to Steph Mager, powerlifter, and she was talking about how she puts her heaviest days on like Monday and Friday, so they're far apart, and then two lighter days Tuesday and then like the weekend. You kind of have to get smart like that to maximize your recovery. Now, if you're dieting, if you're in a fat loss phase, just be extra conservative about all this stuff. Don't assume you can't do them. Don't like give up or use it as a cop-out or excuse, but just understand that that's an extra stressor to all of the other things we've talked about. Protein needs to stay higher. You don't want to cut too aggressively. And, you know, you have to be smart about how often and how aggressively you're in a fat loss phase. Okay, here's what I want you to take away from this episode. I started by acknowledging that I have not lived the menopause experience. But what I have seen through working with women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, through the research, through hundreds of conversations, is that the defeatist narrative isn't going to serve anyone. It's not helpful other than the people making the money off of it. Yes, of course, menopause is real, perimenopause, all the symptoms. I would I have people that are close to me who I love who are dealing with these kinds of issues, and it's hard to find the support you need. It's getting better. Some of the research is getting better. Women's health, though, is still somewhat in the dark ages compared to just general health. I'm not even gonna call it men's health, just general health, just women haven't been studied as much for a variety of reasons. And so I totally acknowledge all of these things as being a frustration, right? The symptoms and the challenges that result. And I'm not dismissing it, but the other thing that's real is your capacity to build muscle. And the research showing post-menopausal women that gain strength and lean mass because they're training are right there to look up yourself. The evidence that protein, progressive overload, recovery, they work no matter your hormone status. And so don't worry about your genetics or your biology or your metabolism or anything else. All right. Test the narrative. Ask, may say that I'm gonna see if my body still responds by trying it out. That's the best thing you can do, okay? Because you're gonna discover that it does. Uh, we had Lauren Calenzo Semple on the show quite a while back. I love her work. Check her out because she's been making the point for years that the fitness industry profits from complexity. Telling women that menopause requires new approaches, special protocols, specific supplements, cycle-based training and food, which I get questions on all the time. It sells products and programs, but what matters is the principles and how you, as an individual, need to apply the principles, right? Your menstrual cycle may be erratic or maybe extreme and cause you to have to change the way you do things. And that's true for you, but it's not necessarily true for the next woman. The principles, though, are the same. What changes is the method and the margin for error, right? You may have to be more intentional about certain things, like how much protein you have, how much recovery you have, how consistent you are with training, all those. You may have to be more intentional, but that to me is an empowering thing related to self-efficacy. It doesn't limit you. It means you have levers to pull. It means you are not at the mercy of your biology. So the question isn't can you build muscle after menopause? The research says yes, absolutely. The question is whether you will do the things that make it happen because you have the power to do it and I know you can do it. And before I share one final thing, I've got I've got three quick yes or no questions that will tell you where to focus this week. And we're gonna get to that in a second. But I will say, if this episode resonated with you, if you like my message here, if you agree with it, if you think it's positive and empowering, and you're looking for a tool to help track these things and help you before they accumulate, and you want the same voice and style that I bring to this and the evidence-based nuance that I'm trying to inject into this process, check out my app Fitness Lab. Use the link in the note show notes. You can take a free quiz to see if it's right for you. It's one of my favorite tools available because of how it works. You get daily briefings and tasks that are unique to you. You and the next person using the app will have completely different tasks because it's like having a coach who is watching your training and your biofeedback, your recovery. If you have Apple, it's now integrated with Apple Health as well. So it can pull all that data in sleep steps, resting, heart weight rate, activity data. Um, and and I'm but I'm behind the design elements of it. So I'm continuing to add features, and then we have a great support team in case there's any bugs or things like that. We're getting great feedback on it. You don't have to manually log a bunch of this stuff, and you don't have to guess at what to do next. It tells you what to do next. It says, today is your day. Here are the few things you've got to do to be successful. Let's get them done. If you don't, no judgment, but we're gonna talk it through and figure out how to get it done. So go use the link in the show notes for 20% off, exclusive to you, the podcast listener or viewer on YouTube. All right, here is that quick check in. I promise it's three questions yes or no. One, did your last training session include at least one exercise where you added weight or reps from the previous session? Two, did you eat at least 25 grams of protein at breakfast and lunch yesterday? Three, did you sleep at least seven hours last night? Very simple questions. Okay. Did you have an exercise where you added weights or reps? Did you eat at least 25 grams of protein at breakfast and lunch yesterday? Did you sleep at least seven hours? If you answered no to two or more of those questions, you found your starting point. Okay. Pick one of those and fix it this week. And I know it's easier said than done, but you've got to start from awareness. And I don't want you to fix all of them. Just pick one. That's it. That's it. That's where you know your support for this lifestyle is going to come from. Just those. All right. I want you to run those questions over each week if you want to stay honest with yourself. Obviously, there's a lot more you can track and you can think about. If you don't want to think about, grab my app, link in the show notes. The bottom line is that menopause does change things. That is true, but it doesn't close the door completely on building muscle because the principles are still going to work for you. Margins might be tighter. You might have to be more intentional. That's it, right? More intentional doesn't mean impossible. It just means more intentional. And honestly, we could all be more intentional about things. That's probably what got us here in the first place. Just, you know, even besides things like menopause, age, and whatnot, if we are truly honest with ourselves. So I hope this episode gave you the evidence, but also the encouragement to test this theory out for yourself. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that your body is capable of building muscle at any age. It just needs the right inputs. My name is Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Can Electrical Stimulation Build Muscle and Speed Recovery? (Garrett Salpeter) | Ep 433

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If you train hard, want to build muscle, and still lose fat, how do you actually recover faster without breaking yourself down? Can electrical stimulation really support body recomp and strength training, or is it just another shiny gadget?

Garrett Salpeter joined me to connect the dots between neuroscience, rehab, and performance. We break down how early strength gains are driven by neural adaptation, why pain and restricted movement are often software problems not hardware ones, and where most recovery tools fall short.

You’ll learn why traditional TENS units underdeliver, how direct current stimulation works differently, and what the research shows for muscle building and rehab without excessive joint stress.

If you care about evidence-based fitness, smarter recovery, and training hard without burning out as you get older, this conversation will challenge how you think about recovery. Tune in to learn more.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

0:00 – Electrical stimulation myths
3:49 – Nervous system and strength
7:10 – Pain, protection, adaptation
15:08 – Fatigue and central governor
20:19 – Direct vs alternating current
31:40 – Muscle growth without load
35:45 – Real-world bodybuilding results
40:12 – Clinically designed recovery tools
50:40 – Regulation and real-world use

Episode resources:

• Website: neu.fit 

• Instagram: @neufitrfp / @garrett.salpeter 

• YouTube: @NeuFit 

Strength, pain, and recovery are often framed as “hardware” problems: torn tissues, worn joints, and weak muscles. Yet the nervous system sits above all of it, acting as the body’s control software that decides how far you can move, how hard you can push, and when to hit the brakes. In this conversation, we unpack how protective reflexes, inhibition, and threat perception can limit output and slow healing long after tissues are “fine.” By focusing on the software first, you can often restore range of motion in minutes, reduce pain, and build a foundation that lets training finally stick. The goal isn’t to ignore structure; it’s to recalibrate the control system that governs it.

A central insight is that the brain prioritizes survival over performance. Stretch reflexes, Golgi tendon organs, and fatigue governors exist to prevent damage, but modern sedentary life and past injuries push these thresholds too low. The result is guarding, inhibition, and hypersensitivity that restricts range and feeds chronic pain. When you return to sport, your muscles act like poor shock absorbers, shunting load into cartilage and tendons. Break that cycle and progress compounds again. The sweet spot after injury isn’t maximum rest or maximum grind; it’s optimal input that stimulates healing and relearning without crossing a re-injury line. That’s where targeted electrical stimulation can create high-value neural input with less mechanical load.

Not all stimulation is equal. Traditional alternating current (TENS, interferential, “Russian”) can pump fluids and blunt pain, but it often co-contracts opposing muscles and teaches stiff patterns. Direct current behaves differently: it favors sensory afferent input for mapping protective hotspots, reduces unwanted co-contraction, and creates electric fields that influence healing—what classic research calls the “current of injury.” Historically, DC burned the skin at meaningful intensities. Modern pulsed DC waveforms solve that, delivering a net DC field that penetrates tissue without sting, enabling both neuromuscular re-education and regenerative signaling in a tolerable way.

Evidence matters. In a 150-person diabetic neuropathy study, TENS reduced pain but did not improve function. Pulsed DC not only reduced pain but also improved sensation, EMG amplitude, and nerve conduction velocity—signals of real regeneration. In performance contexts, lab work compared traditional resistance exercise to low-load training with DC-assisted recruitment. Acute results showed similar muscle cell swelling, a proxy for hypertrophy stimulus, at lower perceived exertion. Over eight weeks, quad growth under the electrodes matched heavy training using light external loads. Think of it as “digital load”: higher motor unit recruitment without the joint stress of heavy weights.

How do you use it? For rehab, clinicians “map” the body to find guarded zones, then layer movement on top of stimulation to retrain efficient patterns. Unlike passive TENS, this is active learning—exposure therapy for the nervous system. For athletes, DC can target weak links, build lagging muscles, and maintain or grow tissue when joints won’t tolerate high loads. You’ll likely lift lighter, do controlled volumes, and manage soreness carefully, because recruitment is potent. Ratings of perceived exertion are often lower, but the physiological stimulus remains high, so dosing and recovery still matter.

The broader promise isn’t a magic shortcut; it’s precision. By addressing the software that governs hardware, you can speed safe range recovery, reduce pain, and keep training momentum through setbacks. Whether you’re a seasoned lifter aiming to bring up quads without beating up knees, or a forty-something trying to stay consistent despite recurring pain, targeted DC stimulation paired with smart movement may unlock capacity you already own—hidden behind conservative neural brakes.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you're someone who trains hard and wants to recover faster, or you've dealt with nagging injuries that seem to take forever to heal, and you've heard about electrical stimulation devices that claim to re-educate your nervous system, build muscle, and accelerate recovery, but you're not sure what's actually supported by research versus what's just marketing, this episode is for you. My guest today is an engineer turned neuroscience researcher who's developed one of the most talked-about electrical stimulation devices in the rehab and performance space. We'll get into what the evidence actually shows, where the claims might outpace the science, and the practical ways that you can use this technology for recovery and performance. 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 joined by Garrett Salpeter, founder and CEO of NewFit, creator of the newbie device, and author of the NuFit method. Garrett brings a background that we don't often see here. He is trained in physics, engineering, and neuroscience, and he's applied that to developing electrical stimulation technology used by hundreds of clinics, dozens of professional sports teams. And you probably heard about electrical stimulation in various forms. It's been around for decades. There's definitely a lot of claims around newer devices that sound too good to be true. So we're going to discuss the mechanisms, the evidence, maybe some of the science in the context of movement, of pain, of rehab, and those kinds of topics. So, what does the research show? What remains unproven? How can you benefit from targeting the nervous system as part of your training and recovery? So, Garrett, welcome to the Wits and Weights podcast.

  Garrett Salpeter: 1:48

  Thank you, Philip. I love that introduction. I like the three E's that you there. That's that's good.

  Philip Pape: 1:55

  It's a filter, you know, if you're not interested in nerding out and how to engineer your life and lifestyle to and do it by saving time and getting the result, then it may not be the right show for you. But you're uh you and I, I think are kindred spirits in that regard. Because, you know, with some of your story, I know there's an aspect of curiosity and hey, how does the nervous system fit into all of this? Because it connects everything in our body. But, you know, I want to define like neural adaptation and physiology and things like that with the nervous system, how they relate to strength training, to rehab, to our body. And then maybe from that we use it as a jumping off point into okay, how can these devices or this technology be used to take advantage of that? So I guess the question is where does the nervous system fit in to us as humans?

  Garrett Salpeter: 2:42

  That is a big question, a big topic. And there's there's a lot of different pieces that we can put together to start to build a picture here. So the nervous system is literally the control system of our bodies. It is, you know, our brain and spinal cord and nerves send electrical signals to control all of our organs, of course, our muscles for movement, and then our our heart, you know, for our heart rate and heart beating and blood pressure, right? There's neurological control of constriction and dilation of the blood vessels. And then going further down the viscera, there is neurological control of all the digestive organs. The stomach and gut motility is regulated by the nervous system. There's stimulation from the vagus nerve is really relevant there. And then it also controls the organs of elimination and reproduction. So if you think about issues that people have with blood pressure, you know, think about the amount of blood pressure medications people take, the amount of you know, medications people have to take for various digestive ailments, the issues we have with infertility, you know, if you think about these, these are all issues in in organs of the body that are controlled, we just listed off, are controlled by the nervous system. So it's super relevant. Also, of course, for our energy state, how we feel, how we move, uh, there's emotional affect, that's all you know in the brain, which of course is part of neuroscience, part of the nervous system, you know, big picture overall. And you know, it's super relevant to everything. So I think if we're trying to look at an approach for helping someone improve their fitness, their health, their body composition, their vitality, you know, the nervous system, because it is the underlying control system of the body, is a very attractive and you know reasonable target or you know, place to really focus our efforts. And then also, you know, I do a lot of work, and our our company does a lot of work in the physical therapy realm, you know, chiropractic, physical medicine, helping people recover from pain and injury and surgery or restore function if they've had MS, neuropathy, stroke, spinal cord injuries, you know, that sort of thing. And, you know, of course, that seems broad. The common thread in all of that is the nervous system. And that's that's why I talk about all those different areas. And one of the big breakthroughs in terms of the nervous system is that so many times when people are injured or have pain, we are operating in this hardware-based paradigm where we're so focused on the tissue that's been injured, thinking that that that needs to heal. And yes, of course, you know, we want it to heal. However, so many times, you know, I've I've just seen over and over again, and now our network of you know, hundreds of clinics and thousands of practitioners have reported the same thing, where there's so many times where some you know someone will come in with some sort of injury and they think that, oh, because the ankle's sprained or the shoulder has a grade two separation, or because the disc is herniated, they're not able to move past a certain range of motion, or they're not able to, you know, to exert force or do this without pain. And then in the span of you know, 10 minutes of neurological stimulation directed appropriately at the right amounts, in the span of 10 minutes, all of a sudden, someone's range of motion. If you're just listening, you can't see me, but if you if you could if you see the camera, you say, I'm gonna bring my arm for just from my side, you know, from here, and eight to ten minutes later, it's all the way up overhead. It's like, well, how does that happen? You know, in 10 minutes, no one's ligament is literally you know being sewn back together, right? Or it's not just naturally just mending back together. So the the change is not in the hardware, in the tissues and structures of the body, the change there is functionally in the software in the nervous system. And there's so many times where it's not as much about that initial injury or insult as it is about the neurological response, the guarding, the inhibition, the hypersensitivity, the perception of threat that leads to pain. And so many times working at that level allows us to have these breakthroughs to help people feel significantly better, significantly faster. And yes, there's times where you don't get as much of that, you know, that type of home run, wow moment, what you know, type of effect. And that's when we know that it is more of a hardware issue. Oftentimes, there's a significant component of it that is in the software in the nervous system. And so you can kind of tell how much of the issue is more hardware-based versus how much is more software-based by applying this type of neurological stimulation. And I think just to kind of put a bow on it, yes, that is sort of the breakthrough is that often by working with the nervous system, even for things that we think are more structural issues, we can often have these really incredible breakthroughs.

  Philip Pape: 7:25

  Man, you you just encapsulated it so well and you and you spoke a lot of my language there with the hardware and software too, because my engineering background's in control systems and and working with electronics, and I always love the beauty of the math of the human body and how many of these layered systems there are. And we take them for granted and do try to simplify sometimes things down to what we see or you know, a physical limitation. And of course, there's the mental side of it too. But as I like to define things in scientific terms, the idea that there's an electrical connection that is connected to guarding and maladaptive, you know, patterns that you get stuck in after injury. And like you said, the perception of threat when we talk about when we oversimplify and talk about flight or fight versus like the parasympathetic nervous system. It's very, very fascinating. And there's three things that came to mind, like in my personal experience that I think will relate to what we're talking about and the listener. You know, years ago, I had uh herniated disc and avoided for a long time having surgery. I did have surgery, and whether it was necessary or not, I remember reading a book about uh a gentleman who thought that like 90-95% of back issues could be treated with mental or psychological approaches. And I've always found some solace in that because I've seen that with folks who kind of apply a positive mindset and then try to use the tissue and strengthen, and then the pain goes away, and you're like, that's very interesting, right? And so, and it's not a woo thing either. It's it's it's connected to the nervous system. Another is the idea that strength training, which we talk about on the show all the time. I'm always telling new beginners, you know, you're not gonna build a whole bunch of muscle in the first two months, but you're gonna get a lot stronger. And there's a neural component to that that I think is tightly connected to all this, that if you can understand it, it explains some of these other areas we're gonna talk about. And then lastly, is I just had a follow-up for my rotator cuff surgery, and the doctor's like, your range of motion is much farther than I expected. He's like, I think it's all, I think a lot of it is in your head in a good way. Like he wasn't trying to gaslight me. He was saying, you know, I think it's, I think it's uh, you've been through it before, your body's like has muscle memory and this and that. And I'm like, that's interesting. I gotta talk to Garrett about that too when we have our talk today. So having said all that, like when we talk about the nervous system limiting someone in some of the ways you just alluded to, whether it's strength or recovery from an injury or thinking they have a limitation, what specifically are you referring to, like in a way that's measurable, if that makes sense? Like, what is actually happening? And is this dependent on the person's you know, thought process and their psychology of it? Or is there something else that's going on if if that makes sense?

  Garrett Salpeter: 9:58

  You brought up some great topics there. We're talking about we're talking about the the book about you know the the psychoemotional kind of underlying factors in contributing to back pain. Is that Dr. Sarno?

  Philip Pape: 10:10

  Is that Yes, there you go. Yeah, like the 80s or 90s, something like that. Yeah.

  Garrett Salpeter: 10:14

  Yeah, it was really good. So so then the underlying neurological phenomenon here, I think the first piece that we have to understand to start to build this narrative here is to understand that our brain's number one priority is survival and protection, right? Our brain cares far more about making sure we live to see tomorrow than it does about us looking good in a swimsuit or jumping a few extra inches in the air on the vertical jump or throwing a baseball a few extra miles per hour farther. So our brains are really set up to do more, you know, it's more like a break than the throttle. Our brains limit us. There's a lot of governors, a lot of inhibitory pathways. There's, you know, if you look at, I love your you know, talking about control systems and your perspective there, Philip. When you know, when you look at the control system that is the nervous system, there's just as many inhibitory pathways as there are excitatory pathways. And there's uh actually, in many ways, more you know, like when people talk about they get drunk and they lose their inhibitions, these different things that behaviors that they wouldn't you know normally let the safety mechanisms are gone, yeah. So inhibition is is that process of limiting function. And so, from the perspective of movement and maybe athletic performance, and just in this realm, what happens there is that the brain and nervous system have these built-in mechanisms like a stretch reflex. You know, if you stretch past a certain point, it makes your muscle contract to protect itself from tearing. You have a the Golgi tendon organ mechanism that senses force or tension in uh the junction of the tendon and the muscle. And the idea there is that if it goes past a certain point, it's gonna shut down the muscle to make sure it doesn't contract too hard and rip the tendon off the bone, right? There's these these mechanisms that are there for a reason, it makes sense. We don't want to get rid of them, but I'm just just sort of laying the foundation of understanding that there's these mechanisms in here that limit our output. They're there for a reason. Okay, so number one priority is survival and protection. So our brains, another part of that is that our brains, you know, evolved in over you know millennia where food was scarce, and and one thing that our brains often do that you and listeners may relate to is you know, our brains often will cause us to feel a little bit lazy, to want to want to not do something, want to conserve energy in case there's a famine tomorrow. So, another way in which our brains actually hold us back. Fatigue, there's some great work. Uh, Tim Noakes was the lead scientist who sort of proposed this idea, some work on fatigue actually being a central mechanism in the brain, where the brain actually creates fatigue as an emotion to prevent us from overheating or exerting too much energy, kind of proactive feed forward, protective mechanism like that. So, so all these pieces I introduce in order to say that our you know, brain and nervous system are interested in in kind of holding us back. And so oftentimes the use it or lose it framework is really applies here because if we are not stretching past a certain point or not exerting force through a certain range of motion or past a certain threshold, those mechanisms are just gonna gradually, gradually default towards narrowing, allowing less stretch for the stretch reflex, allowing less force for the Goldie Tin organ, allowing less energy production, metabolically speaking. So we're gradually going to be going towards that conservation of energy and that protection. And so it takes work just to maintain effort. And then so because of sedentary lifestyles and and you know poor habits and things like that, a lot of these mechanisms get set too conservatively. And then on that backdrop, if you add in injury, if you, Philip, have a shoulder surgery, you know, hypothetically, I know you literally just had a shoulder surgery, but you know, if if someone has a has an injury, an insult, you know, a surgery, of course, is like an injury, but you know, even more traumatic, in response to that injury, these same mechanisms kick in to try to limit movement. You create tension and guarding in some muscles, inhibition shutting down weakness in other muscles, and hypersensitivity and pain, all of those with an eye towards preventing movement so that you don't move that freshly, acutely injured area and hurt it worse. And then the problem happens when you don't effectively rehabilitate and restore and recalibrate those, and you end up getting left with these various protective and compensatory patterns where those that tension and that weakness, you never quite get back to baseline after an injury. And so then you go back out into life and you're at a little bit of a diminished level, and then you know it happens again, and then there's the sedentary and bad habits mixed in, and that sort of compounds to reducing function over time, and that's where you get to you see these pictures side by side. It's like both of these people are 70 years old, one of them looks like 90, and one of them looks like 50 and is super quick, and right, and so it's you know, things are our habits and activities can compound for us in a positive way or in a negative way. And that in terms of the underlying you know neurological mechanisms, does that start to build some of the pieces there?

  Philip Pape: 15:40

  Oh, fan, yeah, fantastic. No, no, that really hit directly on it. Uh, because it sounds like it's an it's an adaptive response, just like anything else we do, and you have to train the nervous system essentially in all these different ways. I was thinking when you were talking about um rehab and and limiting, there's always this conflict when you hear layman advice, but even surgeons and doctors, where it's like take it easy and rest versus use the tissue and heal. And some people are like, oh, you you go too hard and and don't go too fast, and and others are like, but you're not going fast enough, right? And and nobody ever knows like what the right thing is to do. Uh, and that's part of the confusion here, right, in those situations, versus when you're kind of healthy and and nothing every everything's good, and then you kind of feel confident to take it to that next level. So I I briefly thought of like the David Goggins Navy SEAL mentality out there around, you know, when you're 40% or when you think you're at your limit, you're only 40% there, and then you have another 50%, and then there's this mental thing. Um, can you touch on that real quick before we get into like AC versus DC current and and the device technology and all that?

  Garrett Salpeter: 16:44

  So there, yes, I definitely want to touch on that. I also want to touch on uh something else you said there. But so in terms of the, you know, when you're when you think you're done, you're really only 40%. That speaks to that central governor of fatigue. When our brain causes us to feel like we need to stop, that often is a protective mechanism that is set too conservatively. And by learning to push ourselves, by leaning into that, by learning to push ourselves over time, we can expand that capacity and do more before the brain starts to trigger that. And then we can all, of course, learn that that even though it feels like I might die, I'm actually, if I push through that, I'm gonna be okay on the other side. There's a component of that. And then the other thing that you mentioned, which I think is a great insight, is this whole question of after an injury, after a surgery, you know, do I push it? Do I rest, ice, compress, elevate? Like what do I do? And so there is this old paradigm of rice, right? Rest, ice, elevation. And that is based on looking at things through the hardware lens. It's it's coming from the perspective of, okay, the issue is that this tissue is damaged and we need to just give it time to heal. It's not looking at what happens neurologically, what happens physiologically within the body, because when we rest, you know, the body is always wanting to conserve energy, the body's always responding to the signals that we're giving it. And so if if we're just resting, activity, various activities in the body metabolically and in terms of rebuilding and repairing structures, those activities are going to diminish. You see that people who are uh, well, an extreme example would be astronauts in space when they don't have, when they don't experience gravity, they begin to lose muscle mass, bone density in the span of you know a day, it starts. When people are in hospitals and are uh have you know have a leg raised or are unweighted or just you know totally sedentary, they start to atrophy very, very quickly. So the body's responding to the signals that we're giving it. And of course, if we're trying to recover from an injury or surgery, we want our body to be working at its maximum capacity internally to accelerate and optimize the healing and regenerative and repair processes. And so, to your point there about what do I do? Do I just sit there and raster? Do I really go David Goggins at it? What we have to do is it's not minimum or maximum, it's it's optimal, it's in between. And it's like many things in life and in engineering, it's about creating as much healthy, productive input as we can without crossing that threshold where we overload and cause re-injury. And you know, if you think about it, like like I talked about how a lot of these mechanisms are evolutionarily over millennia. You know, if you think about one of our you know, Paleolithic caveman ancestors, you know, think about someone who gets injured. They're not gonna be sitting around watching TV, they're gonna have to sort of like move on it. And they're, you know, they're gonna, they might be hobbling around, but but there's there's some benefit to within reason just getting after it and moving because you're gonna be signaling the body to start working again to to upregulate all the underlying processes that control the the healing result. And so what we want to do is find ways to do. That, not necessarily being, you know, with the average person, the David Goggins, you know, just suck it up. But using uh technology, like you know, like of course we have and are passionate about sharing at NewFit, by using technology like that, we can create neurological input just the same as if you were really moving and loading that tissue, but without creating the same mechanical loads that might otherwise put you at risk of re-injuring the tissue. So that is a very you it's a great insight, and it that balancing act is the thing. If you want to optimize the overall recovery, you basically want to spend as much time as you can on that that point.

  Philip Pape: 20:37

  Yeah, that's a great segue. You're right, because there are other technologies and folks I've had on the show too, when we talk about blood flow restriction, for example, where that's the similar philosophy is how do we give you enough stress to, I'll say, progressively overload your healing, right? While without going to the level of overload or overtraining, you know, because when people are pretty healthy, most people probably don't train hard enough. I joke about that on the podcast because I get questions like, how do I avoid overtraining? I'm like, I bet you're not even training hard enough next, you know. But but when it comes to injury, right, there's a little finer line. So electrical stimulation. I honestly don't know much about it. I did some research, of course, for this show. I have a little bit of an electrical engineering background as well, like circuits. We're not going to get into that and everything, but I know there's, you know, the two types of current, AC versus DC current, come into the equation here. And using, like you said, stimulation as an aid for recovery to give you extra inputs to kind of take the load off of your own body is a very interesting concept. So help us understand, you know, why I brought you on the show to begin with. It's like I want to get into some of this technology and why it works.

  Garrett Salpeter: 21:42

  At the most fundamental level, what we're doing with electrical stimulation is we're we're using an outside influence to stimulate the same signals that happen inside of our body anyway. So it's sort of like the first domino. You know, if you have a bunch of dominoes set up and I tap the first domino with my finger, or you tap the first domino with your finger, the same thing is they're all going to knock each other down, right? So the rest of that, after the first domino, the rest of the cascade is the mechanoreceptor, the sensor out in the body, and then the neuron going to the spinal cord, and then the spinal cord up to the thalamus and into the brain, and the various processes that happen as a cascade in response to all of that. So what we're trying to do is create that, use an external stimulus or source to trigger that process that would happen naturally in the body anyway. And that's the same process, that cascade of neurological activity is the same process that happens in response to load, to movement, to stretch, to force, all these other things that we were talking about earlier. So that probably gives you a little sense of how we can start to use electrical stimulation to start to optimize that balance of creating input to drive positive changes or improvements and upregulation and processes in the body, start to trigger those, but without having to get as much of the mechanical load. So we're starting to start to hint at that. So then the question becomes sort of what type to of electrical stimulation to use and how to apply it. And what we're probably best known for is using direct current, this kind of more modern paradigm of electrical stimulation. So there's benefits to direct current that I'll get into just a quick aside. The history is actually very interesting, where a lot of these benefits that that we'll talk about momentarily, a lot of these benefits were known back in the 1960s, 1970s. The Soviet sports scientists were experimenting with all types of electrical stimulation as part of their effort to prove that their political system was superior and they were trying to assert athletic dominance. And so a lot of what we get today, periodization, plyometrics, a lot of these principles that we use in sports performance training came from that era of Soviet sports science. And so they knew a lot of the benefits, but there was always this really big hurdle, this really big problem, where when you turn direct current up to a high enough level to create progressive overload and neuromuscular reeducation, it would literally sting and burn the skin. You'd get positive charges gathering around the negative terminal or electrode and vice versa. And that creates resistance, leads to heat dissipation, and then ultimately burning, stinging, burning, discomfort. And so direct current totally fell out of favor. And in its place, filling that vacuum came the various alternating current devices that we're familiar with. Most people probably think of the tens unit, yeah. Then there's also interferential, there's quote unquote Russian STEM, which even though the Russians use different types, they're what we think of as like sort of the trade name Russian STEM is alternating current. And so alternating current came became the standard in the subsequent decades, the standard in this field, because you could get the current into the body without stinging and burning the skin. You send these impulses in, you can get some you know muscle contraction in a way that can help you pump blood and lymph and other fluids. So there's some benefit there with the tens unit. You get some of this blocking or masking or distracting of particular neurological signals that can help reduce pain temporarily, like an electric aspirin. And so there's there's some benefits to that. However, they're also limited, and that's why a lot of you know insurance companies, for instance, stopped covering or dramatically reduced the amount at which they cover or reimburse electrical stimulation. A lot of clinics stopped using it. You know, there's these old STEM units in clinics around the country just collecting dust because there's just you know significant limitations in what you can do.

  Philip Pape: 25:53

  Real quick, so like if you had dry needling with stimulation, that's probably tens, it's probably AC current type stimulation.

  Garrett Salpeter: 25:59

  That usually, yes. And that that's a little more mild, and that's just getting that mechanical kind of twitching and pumping. So a little bit of a you know, in that sort of narrowly defined limited use case there, yeah. Uh typically, yes. I mean, you can use our device for that, but most of the time it's it's that sort of thing, yeah. And so so direct current has two main benefits, which are the reasons why you know we've put a lot of effort into engineering this product that allows us to get direct current into the body without burning the skin. And so the first is the functional effect on the nervous system. When we're doing uh I would normally I would often say software programming, but for you, Philip, I'm gonna say when we're doing systems engineering, attempting to get you know, optimize these patterns within the nervous system, there's a there's a really powerful effect there. And then there's also, because of these direct current electric fields, powerful effects on the underlying processes of healing and repair. And so I'll just share each of those uh a bit on each of those individually. So, in terms of the process of neuromuscular education and communication and precision of signaling within the nervous system, when you have an alternating current device, the signal literally is going back and forth, positive, negative, positive, negative. And so when you turn it up again, when you turn it up to a high enough level to really make a difference within the neuromuscular system, you're signaling this contraction of both sides of the body. It's like your bicep and tricep fighting against each other, hamstring and quad fighting against each other. It's like if you're driving your car, hitting the throttle and the brake pedal at the same time. So that's the signal, and that becomes the limitation in how much you can take and it and it locks you up, and it ends up training these inefficient movement patterns, which can, you know, yes, make the body less efficient and also create a lot of internal resistance and tension that that could exacerbate problems, or at least not make the improvements that we seek. And so with direct current, we can bypass a lot of that. You know, one metaphor that that I like that often lands with people is you know, imagine you have a highway, you have all your cars going northbound, right? And so, you know, northbound could be from the body up to the brain or northbound on a highway. You have all your cars going northbound, then all of a sudden you have a car just going the wrong way. It's like, oh shit, there's a, you know, that that's that's a that's a problem. So that's that's sort of what's happening there. And and with direct current, we can bypass a lot of that. So we don't get the protective contractions, and we get a lot more of this sensory afferent input signaling into the nervous system, which allows us to do things like scan around on the body and find where it's guarding and protecting against these various sensory inputs, which means uh that's actually where the body's gonna be compensating around and resisting movement in real life, too. You know, allows us to find those and allows us to do this sensory input that's kind of like a form of exposure therapy to drive input to allow the nervous system to recalibrate and down-regulate the various protective or inhibitory responses and allow greater function. And so that's a big part of why in some cases we see those five-minute miracles, or in 10 minutes, we have the person who can all of a sudden lift their arm up overhead or all of a sudden can bend down and touch their toes for the first time in 10 years. And you know, again, not that that you have that every single time, but we see that often enough that it's it's worth talking about. So those effects on the nervous system happen in large part because of the effects of direct current. And then there's also the effects of these direct current electric fields on the body. Uh, you know, cells in the body have various charges. There's really interesting research. Like there's a great book, book recommendation, The Body Electric by Robert Becker, and he talks about the research showing that when animals and humans, also, of course, we're we're animals, when whenever when there's an injury, the body actually creates electric fields. He calls it the current of injury. The body creates electric fields inside that do things like summon inflammatory cells to start to clear out the debris and then further act as messengers to summon the next level of growth and repair uh cells that actually rebuild the structures there. So we have these electric fields, and there's really cool research. It had been mostly in animal models until a study we did that I'll tell you about, had been in animal models looking at the effects of direct current on the underlying processes of healing and repair and regeneration. And then we did a study, the first comparing in humans alternating current versus direct current. And for this, we worked with diabetic neuropathy patients. So patients' average age was 74. And this is an interesting population because it's been written off that they can ever really heal in any meaningful way, that they can ever really restore function. And for it was 150 patients, so really statistically powerful. 75 of them got traditional tens unit. And with them, what happened is what most people expected little to no meaningful, significant functional improvements. There was, however, some reduction in pain. It's about symptom management. That's kind of the standard of care. So there was some benefit there. With the direct current of the newbie, however, there was not only the same or more reduction in pain, but there were improvements in sensation and function and EMG amplitude when we're actually measuring the electrical activity inside of the nerves and the nerve conduction velocity. So we're seeing improvements and healing and regenerative changes in the axons, in the myelin of the nerves. And again, that speaks to these benefits of direct current. So a long way of coming back to that conclusion of we care about the type of current because of the effects that it has, both functionally on the nervous system and on those underlying processes related to healing within the body.

  Philip Pape: 31:42

  Yeah, I was gonna ask about that study, so thanks for getting ahead. There's another one I'll mention in a second. But direct current, I imagine the safety aspects, I mean, are those addressed because it's a pulsed form of direct current versus continuous? Because continuous would seem to like be a problem. But how does it work in that sense?

  Garrett Salpeter: 31:58

  Yes, you're exactly right. So if it were continuous, past beyond a certain period of time, you are going to get that charge buildup that we talked about, that is the reason why you get resistance and heat dissipation and burning. And so what we're able to do is have this pulsed direct current, and there's actually multiple waveforms. So in between the primary pulses, there's another waveform that comes in and sort of you know moves around the charges a little bit so they don't accumulate, so you can get that next pulse through. And it allows us, therefore, to get the net electric field delivery of direct current, but with the comfort and the ability to penetrate through the skin and all the layers of uh capacitance between skin and fatty layers and connective tissue and all that, it allows us to get the benefit of that net direct current field, but with the sort of penetrating ability of alternating current.

  Philip Pape: 32:54

  That's cool. That's cool. All right. I think he did a study in the University of South Florida. I don't know if that was with Dr. Campbell's lab or if it was something else, because I I know Dr. Bill Campbell down there.

  Garrett Salpeter: 33:03

  Bill Campbell, oh brilliant guy. So yeah, so one of his associate professors is a guy named Sam Buckner, who uh was the lead researcher. It was it was in his lab, and his lab is part of Dr. Campbell's program. Yeah, so I got to meet Dr. Campbell when I was there, but his name is not on the paper because it's his uh, you know, kind of Sam Buckner, I think is is in his department or whatever the whatever the right word is, but they certainly work together, yeah.

  Philip Pape: 33:28

  Yeah, and I think I think this one for the listener was uh there was an exercise protocol along with the newbie device, and they found more swelling or similar swelling and soreness, I think, to lifting, but with less effort. But I don't know if it showed better outcomes. Is that the same study we're talking about?

  Garrett Salpeter: 33:45

  Yeah, so there's actually two. One okay one was the acute study, which is looking at fatigue and soreness and and yes, muscle cell swelling immediately after a traditional resistance exercise, like traditional weightlifting, and then immediately after a session with the newbie and you know, little to no external load. And the reason that muscle cell swelling is interesting, as you know, Philip, and as you know, many of your listeners probably know, you know, you get that, you know, when you're lifting and your muscles are swollen, you get that the pump. The pump, the pump, the pump is actually a thing because what happens when your muscle cells are depleted of energy, and perhaps there's microtrauma, not not necessarily, it doesn't have to be soreness and damage, but when they're depleted enough, they actually start to start to slurp in or suck in the blood plasma, the extracellular fluid there, because the blood plasma, right? We have our red blood cells, then our plasma carries a lot of things, including amino acids and proteins. So the blood the muscle cells start to suck in that fluid so that they can get the proteins and the raw materials and glucose and energy and stuff like that. And so part of the process of hypertrophy, one of those early steps is muscle cell swelling. And so being able to look on an ultrasound and see the amount of muscle cell swelling is an important precursor for the hypertrophy, the processes of hypertrophy and muscle building. And it's sort of functions as a proxy to know that you got the job done in your training, and you can expect, assuming all the underlying health processes are viable, you can expect that you're you're on the road to hypertrophy. So there was the the effects were virtually the same using the newbie with little to no external load versus you know traditional higher resistance exercise. And then there was a second study looking at muscle growth over a full eight-week training cycle.

  Philip Pape: 35:42

  Okay, no, yeah, and well, and I was wondering about so the first study was immediately measurable, but not necessarily longitudinal, like that hypertrophy actually did occur over time, or you're saying the outcome was the same as the heavier load traditional group?

  Garrett Salpeter: 35:55

  So for the first study, yes, outcome was approximately the same. And then for the second study, you know, in the area of the electrode, the muscle growth over eight weeks was approximately the same using little to no external load plus the newbie for muscle recruitment was approximately the same as traditional resistance exercise using heavier weights. Uh I think it was twice a week for eight weeks, or something like that. Yeah.

  Philip Pape: 36:17

  And were these untrained or trained individuals?

  Garrett Salpeter: 36:19

  These were uh that's that's a good question. It's an important question. Um and I I knew that detail at one point.

  Philip Pape: 36:29

  It's all right, it's all right. No worries. I'm not gonna, it's not a quiz.

  Garrett Salpeter: 36:33

  They were they were you know college students in the lab, and one of the interesting things is that they were, you know, each individual subject served as their own control because they did one leg, it was knee extension and looking at quad muscle growth, and they flipped a coin for which one was right leg, which one was left leg. So they did the traditional you know resistance exercise, you know, something like 70 to 80 percent, one rep max, multiple sets on one leg, knee extension, and then you know low to no external load with the newbie on the other leg. And so in the area around the electrodes, it was uh uh similar muscle, so in that quad muscle, uh similar muscle growth.

  Philip Pape: 37:12

  Okay, and and are we so when you look at populations that benefit the most, the least, where it's not worth or whatever, are we talking about so uh what comes to mind for me is somebody who trains regularly, is this an enhancer? Somebody who trains regularly and is recovering, I could definitely see see an application there, and then people who don't train regularly, and I guess in that context, it's either recovery or just is it okay. Let's start with this. Is there a population where they want to build muscle and take it easy and not have to train as hard? Like, does that work with the with the with their device?

  Garrett Salpeter: 37:49

  So, you know, there's there's no there's no easy button that Yeah, okay.

  Philip Pape: 37:54

  I want to get that out of the way because BFR is this has the same conversation. People are like, yeah, just use BFR. You never have to lift heavy again. I'm like, you know, BFR is kind of hard to do, uh, and you have to do a lot of reps. So I I'd actually prefer to just lift heavy. But yeah, well, give a I guess lay out for us the main segments and use cases.

  Garrett Salpeter: 38:10

  So I think, you know, of the of the use cases you you mentioned there, I guess I have a slight inclination to just start at the top, which is someone who's extremely well trained. What can we do for someone who's a professional bodybuilder, for example? Like, you know, someone who's already gotten the muscle definition, you know, just like the what seems to be the maximum a human could possibly achieve. And there's you know, dozens or perhaps now hundreds of professional bodybuilders who have been using the newbie for a variety of reasons. You know, one interesting example that stands out is Dexter Jackson, who won Mr. Olympia in 2008. And it was when you know Jay Cutler won a bunch of them. He won a few, and then Dexter won, and then Jay won again. It was during that era. And so uh Jay also uses and unlikes the newbie now at uh at his gym out in Las Vegas. So so Dexter, when he was he was either 49 or about turn for he had just turned 50 because it was Mr. Olympia during COVID and it got delayed. So he's either 49 or 50 years old. So let's say he was 50. So when he was you know 47, 48, 49, he was still competing in bodybuilding, but everyone said he started to lose his legs, his legs are getting a little smaller, a little bit less defined. And once you lose your legs, you're done. And he started working with the newbie, he did one leg day per week for 16 weeks leading up to this Mr. Olympia. You know, should have been the 2020, but it was in 21 because of COVID or what you know, whatever year that was. So he started using it. And if you look at the before and afters, you can actually see holy crap, this guy built his legs at 50 years old, doing one day per week for 16 weeks on the newbie, and he With a guy named Brad Rowe at the the Gold's Gym Mecca, the original Gold's Gym in Venice Beach. And he went out and he won uh he won uh achieved fourth place at age 50 when he hadn't been top 10 in you know years. It was this amazing, amazing transformation.

  Philip Pape: 40:18

  So you're saying he got newbie gains.

  Garrett Salpeter: 40:20

  He got newbie gains.

  Philip Pape: 40:21

  All right, I'm sure you've heard that before many times.

  Garrett Salpeter: 40:24

  Gains with a Z.

  Philip Pape: 40:26

  Yes.

  Garrett Salpeter: 40:26

  And so he um, you know, is just just one example. But there's a there's a lot of examples in bodybuilding where the benefits are either something like Dexter's experience where you need to really create load in a specific area to get to get more precise, targeted growth. You know, for someone, maybe it's calves, maybe it's biceps. For him, it was his you know, quads, that lateral vasculateralis quad sweep and some VMO definition, you know, stuff like that. Uh so sometimes it's that, it's sort of bringing up, you know, in air quotes, I'll say weak links. You know, uh sometimes it's being able to rehab or train around injuries or be able to have a sustainable way to continue training even in the background, uh, even when there's these you know significant joint degeneration or injuries in the background, because a lot of these you know high-level bodybuilders, the volume of training they've done, they've beaten themselves up. Look at you know, Ronnie Coleman now is one of the strongest guys in the sport and you know, Mr. Olympia level, and you know, now he's wheelchair bound because he just beat the crap out of himself, you know, just so he's super debilitated. So being able to train to get that deep muscle recruitment effect so you can can maintain or even continue to build muscle without having to get as much mechanical load and wear and tear on the joints and the connective tissues. So that can be a big part of the value proposition there.

  Philip Pape: 41:55

  So let's stick stick on that population for a second, right? Because we talk about muscle fiber recruitment and like how different loads have a different impact in that regard, right? 80, 90% load, more on that strength regime tends to work on the deeper muscle fibers and the larger muscle fibers, and that versus 30 to 60 percent is like your hypertrophy regime of percentage of your max. So for a guy like that, or even somebody who is just an advanced trainee, I think your device requires a professional to it's like FDA cleared and you can't do it on your own. Is that correct?

  Garrett Salpeter: 42:25

  Yeah, it's an FDA device, you know, so it's it's either used by you know a physical therapist, chiropractor, licensed medical person, or under their supervision. So there are people who use them for fitness, don't themselves have credentials, but they're either under the supervision of or the business run by a medical professional, stuff like that.

  Philip Pape: 42:42

  And so if you were going after your quads specifically, how would that look as far as like dosing protocol now that like practically what does that look like?

  Garrett Salpeter: 42:52

  So in terms of kind of understanding why this matters, I think it's it's worth going back to what you said. You know, you're talking about like these higher percentages of your one-rep max, typically being more lower rep, more strength oriented, a little bit lower load, higher rep is typically more hypertrophy oriented. So for hypertrophy, what you essentially need to do is stimulate mechanically and deplete as many motor units, as many, as many muscle fibers as you can, which means you need to activate neurologically as many motor units as you can. And that's part of why pushing past some certain threshold of fatigue is required, because as some motor units fatigue, you're gonna start calling on more and more and more. And so the volume of muscle fibers that you're gonna stimulate or hit is gonna be great enough that you're gonna get more of a muscle growth and muscle building effects.

  Philip Pape: 43:44

  Right. You're you're saying just naturally, like that's how we have to train, right? You have to train close to failure. You're not talking about with the device, you're just the premise being this is mechanical tension, that's how we get hypertrophy.

  Garrett Salpeter: 43:54

  Yes.

  Philip Pape: 43:54

  Yeah, yeah. Just so the listener knows, that's yeah, that's why we say train close to failure and why you could do it at a low percentage of your your max, but you you know, I always say, you know, bodybuilding and physio or um hypertrophy is like a physiological adaptation versus strength, which is a specificity or performance adaptation.

  Garrett Salpeter: 44:10

  Yes, that's right. That's a good more of a hardware versus more of a software adaptation. So the key to extrapolate here is setting the stage for what we're gonna talk about next. The key is, of course, muscle fiber activation, you know, maximizing that. You need as many motor units. The motor unit is the neurological structure that's gonna control multiple muscle fibers. So you want to activate as many of those as you can. And we can do that then with this external signal. We can use this external signal. So, what I talked about before in the rehabilitation realm, where we're getting more of the sensory input, there's certain settings, especially has to do with changes in frequencies and the and the use of direct current generally that allow us to get more of that. We can also change the settings to where we actually get more motor unit output. Now, it's not as much of that back and forth muscles fighting against each other because of the direct current, it's more targeted more directly on the target muscle that we're stimulating. And by changing the settings, we can preferentially get more relaxation or contraction. So, for this context, we're of course going to the settings where we're going to get more contraction. These are the settings that were used in that study with Dr. Spock Buckner and Cam Campbell at the University of South Florida. And what this does is it increases motor unit recruitment just the same as you know, increasing resistance, like it's like digital weight. You know, if you think about what happens, if I just curl my arm, if I just flex my elbow here with nothing in my hand, I might be using 10 or 20% of the motor units in my bicep. If I get a moderate weight, maybe I go up to 30 or 40. If I get a heavy weight, maybe I'm going up to 60 or 70, right? A really average person can only activate maybe 40 or 50%. A really well-trained athlete can maybe activate 70 or 80%. You know, no one's really getting to 100. 100 is like in the electric chair when you get so overloaded with electricity that you literally tear your tendons off your bones. You go through a bypass all those protective mechanisms that we talked about. So weight is causing me to increase the number of motor units and muscle fibers that I'm activating. So we can put the pads on at these certain settings and electrically stimulate. Remember, we talked about that first causing the same electrical signal to go in now to the motor units that's going to cause those neuromuscular activation, create more contraction there. And even with a relatively light weight, we can still get that, you know, 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 percent of the motor units to contract. And so you can do, you know, you could be curling your arm here without any weight, you know, 20 times, but if you have the machine on, it's almost as if each one of those 20 reps was like a one-rep max or a three-rep max or a five-rep max. So each one, you're getting more activation, and so that allows you to get more volume of work and to touch or stimulate or affect more muscle fibers, and that's how you can have uh you know a greater per unit time, like a faster effect in that realm of hypertrophy, because you're going to be getting more stimulation on more muscle fibers in a shorter period of time.

  Philip Pape: 47:16

  So when you do that, does the effort feel the same? And is it like you're pre-fatiguing where now you can't do as many reps because you're you're effectively getting to that failure point sooner, or because you don't feel it, you're getting past the point you normally would?

  Garrett Salpeter: 47:30

  Part of that is the you know how it feels, the rating of perceived exertion or RPE, which you know you're Yeah, RPE or I R I R the inverse, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So R I R being reps in reserve, is that right?

  Philip Pape: 47:43

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I the industry's moving I see more toward just using RIR now, but RPE is is totally cool. Yeah, it's what bodybuilders know.

  Garrett Salpeter: 47:50

  In the first study, they actually looked at RPE. And even though the effects you know on muscle cell swelling and and fatigue and soreness and stuff like that, even though they were they were similar for both, there was less RPE with the machine. So it did feel easier. And so I mentioned there's there's you know, there's no easy button in the sense that there's no shortcut, you do still have to work, but it is a bit easier, subjectively easier than lifting that heavy. So it does feel a little bit easier when you're doing it like this. And so the way that we commonly implement this in practice, like if you're if you're in this example, you know, just following along with wanting to grow the quads, you know, if Dexter Jackson or you listening to this would normally have to do, you know, say you're doing uh five by five, you're doing five sets of five with 500 pounds on a squat. Just easy numbers.

  Philip Pape: 48:46

  Yeah, yeah. That everybody who listens does that easily. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  Garrett Salpeter: 48:50

  Well, not not easy to lift, but easy numbers just because they're all fives.

  Philip Pape: 48:54

  But yeah, got it.

  Garrett Salpeter: 48:55

  Easy to keep in our minds. So now you might do, you know, the you might do five by five with the machine on, but you might only do, you know, 20% of that weight would be 100 pounds, or half of that would be 250 pounds. You're you can use a much lower amount of weight, so you're not gonna have to have as much load on your spine and as much, you know, torque on your knee joints and stuff like that. So you can get that, and you can still get similar muscular recruitment effect. So it's sort of like digital load there. So it it's you know, it doesn't feel totally easy. It's not like you're doing nothing. There's some discomfort of you know turning the machine up and stuff like that. So it's a different type, you know, generally does feel a little bit easier. And then there was another there was another part to that question, too. That can you remind me?

  Philip Pape: 49:42

  Uh I was talking about, oh yeah. So I think the other part was then can you bang out a few more reps before you feel the before you get to failure, in which case you're effectively going to a higher level of close to failure than you would otherwise.

  Garrett Salpeter: 49:55

  You yes, you can. And so uh you can do more reps. You know, if you're if you only have 100 pounds on your back instead of 500, because you have the machine, this like you know, digital weight helping you increase recruitment, you'll be able to do more. And so that's where you know this whole notion of having uh you know a trained professional working with you comes in because you will often have the experience of feeling like, oh yeah, I could do more reps, I could do more reps, but we actually want to want to stop, want to limit that until we see how someone responds. Because you can have you know significant muscle soreness after this because you're getting so much recruitment. So we have to, you know, it's with great power comes great responsibility. We have to uh sort of titrate up, dose appropriately this because it is such a potent stimulus.

  Philip Pape: 50:40

  Okay. I'm having a lot of fun because this is uh fun. I'm nerding out with you. But okay, so then that's really interesting. So now the next, I guess, category was okay, maybe you do lift and now you're dealing with injury, or like in my case, a surgery or something like that, what that looks like for uh for recovering or you know, how it compares. Because let me let me tell you, Gary, you're probably aware there are so many schemes and products and devices out there now. I mean, you have peptides that are becoming all the rage, and I have so much skepticism about those, even though some people swear by them. There's the BFR has been around for years. There's the electrical simulation, which I honestly don't hear talked about as much, and I think it's because the tens like really didn't blow anybody out of the water, you know, like anybody uses like eh, I don't, whatever. So the recovery rehab thing is huge, especially for our listeners who tend to be over 40 and dealing with these kinds of things. So let's let's deal with that uh scenario now. It's a good one.

  Garrett Salpeter: 51:34

  This is, I think, one of the real sweet spots of this type of technology because like we talked about back at the the towards the beginning of this, when people have injury and limitation and pain, it often is this compounding effect of diminished neurological function. Of course, there's a structural corollary of that, you know, with connective tissues and you know, need needing to strengthen and maintain range of motion and stuff like that. But a lot of it really is neurological. And so if you are you know a 40-something year old man or woman and you haven't been training for a while, or you attempt to train and then your back starts to hurt, so you take some time off, then you go back out again, your knee hurts, then you try to go do something else, maybe you know, play tennis and your elbow starts hurting, you're in this situation. The reason that those injuries happen, and the reason that you can't sustain that practice for a long enough period of time to accumulate the progress and achieve the results that you wish to achieve, the reason is because your muscles aren't working properly, they're not doing the job to support and stabilize your joints through the full range of motion. There's a simple metaphor, again, another oversimplification, but a useful one is to talk about how muscles are sort of like shock absorbers of a car. And when they're working right, they keep, they they protect a lot of the joints. So it's like shock absorbers protect the chassis of the car. They they, you know, they they protect your joints, whereas when they're not working as well, you know, torques and forces concentrate in certain areas of of cartilage in your knee joint or in in other certain connective tissues, and you end up irritating those and eventually damaging them. And so a lot of it comes down to yes, how the muscles are working, which as we talked about also, is the control under the control of the nervous system, right? The muscles, there's there's really no such thing as you know, muscle memory. Muscles don't do muscles just blindly follow the neurological commands they're given, right? So ultimately it is the nervous system. And so, so by working at this level, by finding, and you can do this sometimes really, you know, a week or two of this re-education type work can lay the foundation where you can go out and train you know for months or years just by sort of hitting the reset button, by recalibrating, by resetting that foundation of healthy movement. Sometimes it you know certainly takes longer, but in you know, that that type of use case, someone who's struggling to get back to a routine or or maintain a more sustainable uh you know, fitness, training, sports, hobby, recreational element, this this is super helpful for those types of people. And you know, if anyone's interested, what I would encourage you to do would be you know, you don't have to work with me, I have no financial incentive in this, but you know, find one of our practitioners. You know, we have a website directory and stuff like that. So I would encourage people to go find, you know, it's mostly physical therapy clinics, chiropractic offices, some gyms. You know, there's many hundreds of locations around the country. And you know, for international listeners, we have you know some in the in the UK and Australia, we have other distributors coming online with our product in other countries, you know, now, but uh as of early 2026, you know, just you know active distributors in those countries so far. So I you know I would encourage you to try it out because if you can get rid of, you know, it's sort of like we want we want to get to the root cause of why people are experiencing these pains and injuries and limitations. And you know, if we if we really keep digging, you know, you as an engineer, Philip, know the the five whys. You keep asking why, keep asking why until you get to the root cause. And oftentimes it is that you know dysfunction within the nervous system, and this allows us to really get to that root cause where you can make more meaningful change.

  Philip Pape: 55:19

  And is it when working with a like a physical therapist, is it often applied on its own in many therapy sessions, uh, or is it off always with uh a form of movement, you know, like bands or exercise of some form?

  Garrett Salpeter: 55:34

  So the it can be applied in you know a variety of settings. There's a couple of things that we do that are more like you're sitting there, like we have the like the neuropathy study was actually a foot bath where one of the electrodes is floating in a bucket of water, your feet are in there, you're kind of sitting there. You know, we have a vagus nerve protocol where you lie down in sort of our quote unquote electric meditation or master reset. And then there's, you know, sometimes you can connect it to an electric glove and people do manual therapy work. You actually work on you know trigger points for certain areas, mobilizations there. And then, yes, you know, what we're probably best known for is this mapping process where you scan around, find where there's neurological dysfunction that would you know correlate to compensatory and protective movement patterns, like we talked about. So probably best known for this process where you scan around, and you know, virtually everyone that you would go to see who's offering new fit treatments or training sessions would do this mapping process with you and then have it on while you're doing different movements and exercises. And the the reason that's so valuable, well, one traditional alternating current tens unit treatments are typically passive. You lie there and just let it work you. So that's a big difference. And the reason it's so important is that it allows you to relearn, to incorporate the appropriate muscles back into movement patterns. So it accelerates, it fast tracks that process of re-education, of relearning, you know, efficient movement patterns, healthy movement patterns.

  Philip Pape: 57:01

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, that definitely appeals to my mindset of trying to trying to move and use the tissue and load and and all of that. So, all right, this is good stuff. I mean, I know there's a lot more we could cover. Uh, you know, we've pretty much hit on the big parts here, how it works, why it works, why it's different than the AC devices out there, different use cases. Is there any any other big blind spot we haven't covered that in this context you think the listener wants to know about?

  Garrett Salpeter: 57:27

  You know, I don't I don't think so. I mean, of course, there is the because we're working so neurologically, you know, there are the use cases. I mentioned the neuropathy study, you know, we've we have studies also look you know with functional recovery in MS patients. We have a a case study on an ALS patient published in the Journal of Integrated Medicine. So, you know, those types of things. Only reason I mentioned that is that, you know, if if you're listening to this and you have a you know, friend or relative with some complex neurological condition or injury, you know, there there could be hope of you know harnessing the power of neuroplasticity for longer-term adaptations and changes. So I just share that because we've seen some really you know, as cool as it is to work with you know, professional athletes and and the bodybuilders and the Joe Rogans of the world, he he talked about us on his body, you know, he has come in here and helped them a lot. So uh you know, as cool as that is, you know, the the people that that we've helped get out of wheelchairs and regain their autonomy, those have been just the most inspiring and wonderful transformations. So that's you know, that's why I mentioned that.

  Philip Pape: 58:31

  That's incredible. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I'm glad you came on because I learned a lot. And ultimately, if that happens, hopefully the listener learned a ton today about this potential tool. I'm definitely gonna look more into it and even uh talk to some PTs I know and see if they're already in your network or not, or you know, maybe look you guys up. So, with that, where would you like the listener to reach out to you or learn more about the product or the technology or anything like that?

  Garrett Salpeter: 58:55

  So our website and social media are probably the two best places. Website is newfit uh www.new.fitne-e-u like neurological.fit. Uh and then on on Instagram and Facebook, we're most active at newfitrfp for rehab fitness and performance. I also have a personal Instagram if uh want to chat at all in there. It's just my first and last name, Garrett.sallpeter.

  Philip Pape: 59:17

  So new.fit, that's N-Eu.fit at newfitrfp, you said?

  Garrett Salpeter: 59:23

  Yeah, for rehab performance.

  Philip Pape: 59:25

  Yeah. And at Garrett Saulpeter, and we will put that in the show notes. All right. Sorry, just getting that in my notes. All right. Yeah, this is awesome. Thank you so much for coming on wits and weights, telling us all about this uh really cool tool. We love tools, tools in the toolbox, especially when they work. And guys, go check out the studies. I'm gonna see if I can find a couple of the ones that I've found on my copious notes and pull it in there as well. But Garrett, thank you so much for coming on.

  Garrett Salpeter: 59:47

  Thank you, Philip, and all the witty waiters out there. Appreciate you.

  Philip Pape: 59:52

  Well, good one. I haven't heard that one before. All right, take it easy.

The Body Recomp Advantage for Appetite and Fat Loss After 40 | Ep 432

Try Calocurb, a 100% natural appetite support supplement that activates your body's GLP-1 signals to reduce cravings by 40% and hunger by 30% within one hour. It's a helpful tool for your next recomp or fat loss phase. Get 10% off at witsandweights.com/calocurb

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If you're over 40, cutting calories to lose fat can backfire.

Why? Because if your approach is too aggressive or your stress is too high, your hunger spikes, training suffers, and you often regain everything you lost when you increase calories again.

Body recomposition (losing fat while building or preserving muscle simultaneously) can avoid this. It's not just a physique strategy but also an appetite strategy.

In this finale of our 8-part appetite series, you'll learn why body recomp avoids the hunger cascade that derails most fat loss attempts. 

Discover my Recomp Ladder framework that prioritizes your levers in the right order.

Get 3 ready-to-use body recomp plans: aggressive maintenance for efficiency-focused recomp, small deficit recomp for faster results without hunger, and the build-then-mini-cut approach for breaking plateaus.

You'll also learn who recomp works best for (hint: if you're over 40 with an inconsistent lifting history, you're in the sweet spot), the 5 most common recomp pitfalls, and a simple 2-metric check to know if your recomp is actually working (no scale weight required).

Timestamps:

0:00 - Do you actually need a deficit to lose fat? 
3:20 - What body recomp really means (and what it's not)
5:22 - Recomp as an appetite management strategy
7:10 - 3 reasons recomp works better after 40
11:32 - Who body recomp works best for
14:43 - When recomp gets harder (and what to do instead)
15:53 - Appetite support during recomp
18:05 - The Recomp Ladder (5 levels)
21:42 - 3 specific plans for body recomp
25:04 - 5 common recomp mistakes and how to fix them
30:35 - Bonus: Quick 2-metric body recomp check (hint: NOT the scale)

Most diets tell you to eat less and move more, then act surprised when hunger, cravings, and fatigue knock you off track. A more practical strategy for many people over 40 is body recomposition: losing fat while building or at least keeping muscle, without the constant stress of a big calorie deficit. Recomp lowers the demand on willpower because you avoid the hormonal backlash that comes with aggressive dieting. Instead of chasing the scale, you work a system that nudges body fat down and strength up. The payoff is steadier energy, better training, and a physique that looks sharper even if weight barely changes.

To make recomposition work, anchor everything to a simple hierarchy I call the Recomp Ladder. At the base is progressive strength training because muscle is the engine of your metabolism and the tissue that shapes your body. Next comes protein and meal structure: build meals around 30 to 50 grams of protein, then add fiber and food volume to stay full on fewer calories. Only then do you set energy targets, choosing maintenance, a small deficit, or a small surplus. After that, keep daily steps high to support calorie burn without crushing recovery. Finally, use optional tools like GLP1-activating supplements, mindset strategies, and accountability to smooth out cravings and habits when life gets messy.

Who benefits most from recomp? Beginners, detrained lifters coming back, anyone with higher body fat, low historical protein intake, or inconsistent training quality, and especially folks over 40 who find deficits drain recovery and amplify hunger. At this stage, muscle is often the limiting factor due to years of yo-yo diets and stop-start training. Gaining three to five pounds of muscle while dropping five to eight pounds of fat can transform how you look and feel at virtually the same scale weight. Because appetite signals often recover more slowly after decades of dieting, keeping calories near maintenance or only slightly below helps performance, mood, and adherence.

Choose from three practical paths. Plan A is aggressive maintenance: train hard, keep protein high, and hover 50 to 100 calories above your usual maintenance so you stay fully recovered and capable of building muscle while your body taps into stored fat. Plan B is a small deficit recomp, roughly 100 to 200 calories under maintenance, ideal for those who still build quickly and want more visible fat loss without the backlash of a deep cut. Plan C pairs short lean-gain phases with brief mini-cuts to create clear wins in both muscle and fat loss without long, draining cycles. All three plans succeed when you respect recovery, avoid excessive cardio, and push intensity in the gym.

Measure what matters and ignore the rest. A low-stress, two-metric check can tell you if you’re actually recomping: waist circumference at the navel and one key lift tracked weekly. If your waist trends down while your chosen lift trends up, you’re on target. If waist stalls, fat loss is lagging; if strength stalls, muscle gain is lagging. Skip body fat gadgets and accept that scale weight can rise while you look leaner. Common pitfalls include chasing the scale, cutting too hard, undertraining intensity, inconsistent protein, and overdoing cardio classes. Keep steps high, lifts progressive, meals protein-forward, and patience steady. The slower, steadier route often becomes the fastest path because it’s the one you can sustain.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

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

How Strength Training (Not Cardio) Suppresses Appetite and Burns Fat | Ep 431

Struggling with hunger during your cut? 

Try Calocurb for natural appetite support that activates GLP-1 to help you feel satisfied. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. Get 10% off at witsandweights.com/calocurb

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Hungry after every workout and stuck in an endless “eat less, move more” loop? 

Strength training is actually one of the most powerful appetite control tools you have, but most people only think of it as a muscle-building tool.

Learn the science behind why lifting suppresses hunger hormones like ghrelin while boosting satiety signals like GLP-1 and PYY. We cover why cardio often backfires through energy compensation, leaving you hungrier and more fatigued without the fat loss results. And discover the behavioral shifts that make strength training superior for long-term body recomposition.

Plus, get a template for building an appetite-friendly training week, cardio structured to avoid spiking your hunger, and a specific post-workout timing strategy to eliminate overeating at your hardest meal of the day.

Timestamps

0:00 – Strength training for appetite control
3:38 – How cardio triggers energy compensation and stalls fat loss
7:42 – The gut hormone shifts that suppress hunger after lifting
12:31 – How protein cravings and reward substitution change your eating
16:27 – Building a training week that supports fat loss and controls appetite
20:12 – How to adjust cardio to lose fat without spiking hunger
23:47 – 3 myths keeping you stuck (cardio, calories, and willpower)
27:12 – Bonus: post-workout timing trick to stop overeating at dinner

Most people assume fat loss comes from burning more calories through long cardio, yet the missing piece is appetite. What you do in the gym changes your hunger signals, your food choices, and your ability to stick to a deficit without losing muscle or sanity. Strength training often suppresses hunger after hard sets, while cardio tends to trigger compensation: you eat more, move less, and feel “earned” calories tug at you. This difference matters more than the treadmill display’s estimate. When your workouts help you feel satisfied on smaller portions and keep non‑exercise movement steady, the deficit finally holds, and results show up without white‑knuckling every meal.

Under the hood, appetite is a symphony of hormones and signals. Lifting hard turns up sympathetic activity and floods the system with metabolites like lactate, which blunts ghrelin while nudging PYY and GLP‑1 upward for a temporary, yet powerful, appetite dip. That window can last one to two hours for many lifters and is long enough to strategically place the meal you usually overeat. Contrast that with moderate, longer cardio sessions that leave you depleted and reward‑seeking. You might consciously justify extra food or subconsciously move less the rest of the day, shrinking your true deficit. The science increasingly treats resistance training and endurance work as different tools for appetite management, not just calorie math.

Behavior and identity layer on top of biology. Many of us use food as relief after stress, which is normal but unhelpful when goals demand consistency. Strength training offers “reward substitution”: chasing PRs, tracking progress, and feeling capable becomes a new source of satisfaction. That shift nudges food choices in line with your identity as a lifter. Protein goes up to support recovery, which further increases satiety and protects lean mass. Instead of punishing yourself with “eat less, move more,” you fuel training, maintain muscle, and run a purposeful deficit to reveal it. When setbacks happen, the gym pulls you back on track because progress is tangible and motivating.

To harness these effects, structure an appetite‑friendly week around three to four lifting sessions focused on compounds—squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, pull‑ups—with moderate volume. Aim for roughly 10 to 15 hard sets per muscle group per week, near failure, while managing recovery so fatigue doesn’t drive hunger. Add isolation work as needed for joints and aesthetics, but keep sessions efficient. Walk daily to elevate low‑grade movement without spiking appetite. Include limited cardio if you enjoy it, prioritizing short, easy sessions two to three times a week, 20 to 30 minutes, at conversational pace. Keep sprints minimal and strategic if desired; they rarely worsen hunger.

Finally, use timing as a lever. Train before the meal that tends to spiral—often dinner—so the post‑workout suppression window helps you feel full on less. If afternoon snacking is the trap, schedule training to bridge that gap. Fuel cardio deliberately with protein and carbs if it otherwise makes you ravenous, and avoid long, moderate sessions that trigger compensation. Remember, willpower is the smallest slice of appetite control. Hormones, sleep, stress, training intensity, protein, and meal timing do the heavy lifting. When you align these inputs, hunger stops fighting you, adherence climbs, and fat loss becomes the by‑product of a system designed to work with your biology, not against it.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  How does lifting weights connect with hunger? Today I'm going to show you three mechanisms that make your strength training a powerful appetite control tool, not just a muscle building tool. You'll learn why hard lifting sessions tend to suppress hunger hormones often for hours, how your training changes your food choices without the need for willpower, and a strategic little trick that uses your post-workout appetite window to eliminate overeating at your toughest meal. Most people don't realize that their training is already doing half the work for them when it comes to hunger. They just need to understand how to use it. I'm your host, Philip Pate, and today we're gonna talk about lifting weights versus cardio versus hunger. Most people think that cardio is a fat loss tool, and lifting is for building muscle. Or even if they understand that diet controls fat loss, they think that cardio is a way to, you know, ramp up your metabolism, burn more calories. And I get it, right? You burn more calories during, say, a 45-minute run than a 45-minute lifting session, but it's not just about math. And honestly, those differences aren't very meaningful because I think the math is incomplete. Fat loss isn't just about calories burned during exercise. In fact, it's not at all. It's about what happens to your appetite, your meat, your food choices, your ability to stick to a deficit for weeks and sometimes months without losing your mind, because we have to stick to it, but also not losing your muscle. And when you look at those variables, strength training comes out ahead by a wide margin. And you're like, why am I talking about this? This is weird. This is episode seven of our eight-part appetite series for January, because appetite and hunger is a huge part of this. And I wanted to cover the mechanism that brings this together in terms of how your training, how your workouts actually shape your hunger and your cravings and your body composition results, bring it all together. We've been talking a lot about, you know, food and sleep and stress and hormones, but today it's really more about how training connects with that. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a really cool uh trick, if you will, a hack, a tool, protocol related to pre-workout meal timing and post-exercise appetite suppression to reduce overeating. A lot of you guys have a problem with overeating, and we can actually take advantage of our hunger signals related to training to offset that and potentially save you tens, if not hundreds, of calories without changing anything else. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by Calocurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, CallowCurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. CallowCurb is a natural appetite support made from a marisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callocurb. All right, let's start with why the cardio for burning calories or fat loss approach is a problem, why it backfires, even when it might look impressive on paper, and how that connects to hunger as well. Because it's not just about compensation, it's also about hunger. We're gonna address those topics. So when researchers study exercise and fat loss, you know, they tend to see something that we've talked about more and more lately called energy compensation. And in fact, the not extreme of this, but one of the best examples of this research is Herman Ponser's research on how our metabolisms are pretty steady from the age of 20 to 60, at least our BMR, and that doing more exercise doesn't necessarily burn as many calories as you think. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do exercise or train or move. It's a comp compensatory effect, and it depends on the type, the modality, and the quantity, right? And this is the tendency that for your body to offset the calories that you burn through exercise by either eating more or moving less the rest of the day. There are some compensatory mechanisms at the cellular level as well in terms of your metabolism, but a lot of this is other things like just you're compensating by eating and the types of food you eat and you're moving less, et cetera. And so cardio tends to trigger more compensation than strength training. That's the important takeaway today. There's a systematic review on training or exercise and energy intake in adults with overweight and obesity that found that exercise can improve appetite regulation, but the degree of compensation varies dramatically based on the type of exercise, the duration, and individual factors. So that's what I'm talking about. Now, what does this mean practically? Well, let's say you do a long cardio session, let's say you do 45 minutes or an hour of, you know, moderate intensity, right? On the bike or treadmill, pretty common type of uh exercises. And maybe you burn 400 calories and you may not have, to be honest. You know, that's what the machine says. Um, and now you're pretty tired, you're pretty wiped, you feel kind of depleted. And what happens afterward is your body compensates in a couple ways. First, the, you know, I earn this and I'm gonna earn it back type of eating. Now, this is both conscious and subconscious, you know, because after cardio, you may feel justified in eating more at a psychological level, right? But it's also real in that the body is craving these things, right? So then you have a smoothie right after you go for that run, or you have a larger dinner, and you may not even notice it, right? It depends on how how much control or structure you have over your meals to kind of offset that. But this happens a lot more after cardio than after lifting, for sure. Secondly, your neat tends to drop neat is non-exercise activity thermogenesis, all the movement you do outside the gym, right? Walking, fidgeting, taking the stairs, standing while you work, chores, all that. And after you have a cardio session that's a bit exhausting, especially if it's longer, people unconsciously move less the rest of the day. They sit more, they skip taking the stairs, they're wiped out, they make little excuses or rationales in their brain continuously every time there's a decision point. And again, a lot of it's unconscious. So it's not like, you know, don't blame yourself for this. A lot of this is unconscious. So then if you truly did burn 400 calories during that exercise bout, you know, maybe you eat half of it back, 200. Maybe, maybe you have another 100 or 150 of calories you don't burn later because you're not moving. And so your net, you know, if you're in a if you're in a fat loss phase, your net deficit just got smaller, right? Because your metabolism is essentially lower while while your intake is higher, right? So again, even if you control for the intake intentionally, you might feel hungrier and you still might have a slightly lower metabolism than you thought, if that makes sense. Now compare this to strength training, where the session itself might burn a fewer, a little bit fewer calories, let's say 200 to 300, it's still more than you might think. But the compensation pattern's different because lifters often experience temporary appetite suppression after training. And they're not as likely to feel depleted in that reward-seeking way. And then because the fatigue is more localized, right? Maybe your legs are tired from your squats, maybe your overall energy is still decent, but you're not totally wiped like you would from a cardio session, then your neat tends to stay more stable because you still, your body kind of feels like, you know what, I have there's still more things I can do. I still have some energy, you know, I haven't gone for my walk yet, which is different than my lifting session. So there's like, again, psychologically and physiologically, a little bit of a difference there. And there's research to back this up. A 2024 review specifically examined resistance training and appetite-related variables because researchers they noticed that the lifting produces different appetite outcomes than endurance work. And I think the research world is starting to treat lifting and cardio as different, you know, tools for appetite, not just calorie burning, and also for body composition and trying to look at what causes what. Now, I'm not trying to trash cardio at all. Trust me, there's lots of forms of cardio from walking to sprinting that I'm a big fan of. And cardio definitely can be a big tool. It also is not going to reduce your metabolism just because you're doing cardio. It's again the matter of the type and the quantity. And I think the compensation piece is only part of the story. So now, what is happening in your gut hormones after you lift? Okay, now we're bringing back to some of the stuff you learned on the previous episodes in this series. If you haven't heard those, go back in our January episodes and look for the different ones about your gut hormones. So let's get into the mechanism. So this is this is post-exercise appetite suppression. So, what does strength training do that cardio doesn't? A 2023 review on acute exercise and appetite control showed that moderate to vigorous exercise often produces transient, right? That's temporary appetite suppression. And these are the your gut hormones. Acylated ghrelin, ghrelin goes down, that's your hunger hormone. PYY and GLP1 goes up, those are your satiety signals that help you feel full. And a 2024 update review confirmed that exercise-induced appetite suppression exists, and ghrelin is the consistent variable here in terms of the hormones. Now, this is temporary. It doesn't mean that you're going to eat less forever, right? But the window helps us because we can use that strategically, right? We're going to get into that. We can use that window strategically. So, what makes strength training potentially superior here? Well, it comes down to intensity and metabolic byproducts. So higher intensity work, and that means, you know, hard sets of strength training, higher loads, basically just lifting hard and heavy, and heavy doesn't have to be low rep, just getting close to failure and doing it the way you're supposed to do anyway, to build muscle, it produces these metabolites in your bloodstream. You're accumulate lactate, hydrogen ions, other byproducts of working hard and fatiguing those muscles. And then this creates a sympathetic nervous system activation, right? Your CNS, your central nervous system gets activated, the fight or flight response, all of that. And when you're in that state, your appetite gets suppressed. Your body is focused on performing and recovering as opposed to digesting and eating. Because you might have heard fight or flight versus rest and digest. Well, you're not in the rest and digest. So ironically, as much as we sometimes call this a bad thing, it's it's an acute, it's a hormetic response, a stress response from lifting weights that will suppress appetite. And that's why post-lifting, lacking having no hunger or having a lack of hunger is very, very common. Where you finish a hard session of, you know, lower body work, but upper body, I don't care. A hard session. And oftentimes the last thing you want is a big meal. You might want like a protein shake, you might want some water, you might want a little bit of carbs or something right after, but it you don't have that like I have to devour everything in sight feeling that you do often get after a cardio session. It's it's usually absent. Again, this is these are generalities based on populations, based on studies, based on general observations all coming together. It may not be you, but this is generally something we could take advantage of. Another paper from 2024 made a really cool observation that acute exercise, okay. I'm just using the words from the study, acute just means in the moment, a small amount of it, right? Like an exercise session, can elevate um appetite perceptions, meaning you might perceive yourself as hungry in some ways and yet not translate into increased energy intake because your gut hormones are powerful enough to override the subjective feeling. So that's an interesting one. And then there's something a lot of people don't realize too, that strength training, because it supports having higher protein intake, right? You're in other words, you tend to do both. You train and then you also eat more protein. And we know higher protein is one of the best satiety tools. It keeps you really full. When you lift, you naturally want to eat more protein because you want to recover, you want to support your muscle building. It just all supports each other, you know? And again, you could definitely eat more protein without lifting more if you do it intentionally, but these tend to be corollary things that happen, okay? And and all of these make the hunger management and food priorities easier, like less friction, you know, with less friction. All right. Now remember, I promised you a specific timing trick at the end to use this knowledge, to use this post-workout appetite suppression. We want to eliminate overeating, and we're gonna build with that, build toward that. So definitely I want you to stick around. Before we do, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Calo Curb. That's C-A-L-O-C-U-R-B. We've been talking about how strength training naturally suppresses appetite by shifting your gut hormones, especially GOP1. Well, Callow Curb works through the same pathway but a different mechanism. It's a 100% natural supplement, and it has something called a marisate, which is a patented hops extract developed over a bunch of research by the New Zealand government, okay, not by a private company. It's actually funded by New Zealand and it activates your body's natural gut brain axis. So your satiety signals, so you feel faster or you feel full faster. So if you take this at least an hour before you eat, and I've been taking it myself now that I'm in a fat loss phase, aside from occasionally a little hops burps, I'm sorry about that. I know it's gross, it does cause you to eat less. So if you're trying to, if you, you know, have a plate of dinner and you would normally eat the whole plate, you may end up eating two-thirds of it or half of it. And the studies show that. Clinical studies reduce show to reduce cravings by 40%, hunger by 30%, calorie intake by 18%. You have to wait at least an hour after taking the capsule. So put a reminder in your phone, take it like an hour or two before dinner or lunch. And what I appreciate about appreciate about Calicurb, you know, it's not, it doesn't purport to do more than it does. It's actually pretty simple ingredients. It's a hops and it triggers a hormone that makes you a little bit more full. That's it. It's and it's your own hormone. So it's upregulating your hormones, it's not replacing that with a synthetic, for example. So it kind of falls in between, you know, using nothing or just food and the GLP1 medications. It's kind of in between those. It's a great tool that works alongside lifting weights, hitting your protein, managing your training nutrition, eating your fiber, and timing your meals. And it can be an additional lever for those times when appetite is working against you, which is often, I'm raising my hand now, during a fat loss phase or mini-cut where your calories are cut down. So, ladies, if you're down in that 140, 13, 1200, 1100 calorie range, men down at 18, 17, 16, 1500 range, that's when things get a little bit hairy. And this could be an extra tool in the toolbox. You don't need a prescription. It's just a single little capsule. You can go on and off, use it whenever you want. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash callocurb. The link should auto-apply my code Wits and Weights for 10% off. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. Link is also in the show notes. And now I want to get back to the training appetite connection, right? We've covered the hormonal and physiological side. Now let's talk about the behavioral and psychological stuff because many people use food as reward, right? After a hard day, after stressful meeting, after putting the kids to bed, after you know, dealing with a tough boss, whatever. Food often is the thing that makes you feel better. And that's emotional eating, stress eating, reward eating. We've all been there. You might be struggling with that right now. Maybe it's something you've dealt with in the past and have sort of put tools in place to move past it. And you know, we don't always 100% get away from it. It's always going to be there in our heads. We're human beings. We have parts of our brain that crave energy in that way. Strength training can become a reward instead. So I love this. I love pivoting so that we can swap one reward with another and satisfy that itch and satisfy that emotional need and that gap in a very positive way. So think about what happens when you're following a solid training program and you're tracking your lifts, your PRs, your sets and reps, your exercises, your loads, and you're seeing progress over time. You hit some new PRs on the big lifts, small lifts, whatever, and you notice changes in your body, maybe your arms felt your sleeves a little, you get a little tone or cut or built or whatever the word is. You're feeling more competent, competent, uh competent and confident, but also capable now. It builds, it builds lots of confidence in your skills. And that feeling, that feeling becomes its own reward. I've talked about on this show, you know, folks who come into physique university or clients of mine who all they want to do is lose weight initially, but there's something inside them that says, no, I really want to look better, feel better, show up for my kids, you know, show up for myself, really, and live a long, healthy life. And we switch to focus from focusing on weight to focusing on lifting and performance and recovery and progress, and that becomes extremely rewarding. It starts to compete with food for that reward space in your brain. And that is a thing that exists called reward substitution. So remember that phrase: reward substitution. You're not fighting cravings, you're giving your brain a different source of satisfaction, right? You're swapping it out. So you don't have to, you know, you don't have to get through that friction uh with willpower, right? You can swap it out and actually seek out the reward now. And there's an identity piece here. When you see yourself as a lifter, someone who trains, you know, three days a week, four days a week, whatever it is, someone who builds strength and muscle, your food choices will line up with that. They're gonna start to line up with that. Maybe not on day one, but you're gonna be constantly trying to solve that problem for yourself in a good positive way. Like you want to solve it. It's not that somebody's forcing you to do it or you're trying to diet or lose weight. You know, you're not just trying to eat less either. Oftentimes you have to eat more. You're someone who's building a physique. And that mindset often protects you from crash dieting because you know it'll hurt your training. You know that it makes you value protein because you want to recover and it makes a calorie deficit, if you decide to do that, feel like it has a purpose. And it can be, it can be short term or it can be a little longer. But the point is it has a purpose. It's not just punishing yourself or thinking I have to lose weight. It's like, no, I want to reveal this muscle. And that's the narrative I see with folks, you know, for example, who recently came into our program from the uh get lean in 45 days workshop, who said, you know, I want to reveal the muscle I've built. And if you haven't done it yet, that's fine. Build the muscle and then you can reveal it. But compare that to the cardio for fat loss, eating less for fat loss, eat less, move more mindset, you know, running to burn off what you ate. You feel like you're doing it because you have to. And then food is an enemy, right? Food is a bad, and you call yourself bad. And I didn't do good, and you know, I made bad choices. When I hear that language, I know you're in that mental state, and we can get you out of that. When you're lifting, food becomes fuel. Eating supports what you're trying to do. It doesn't work against it, it supports it. You know, you're seeking out the fuel, but you can still enjoy the food too. And this is very psychological, I get it, but it's it's so important. People who build their fat loss phase around strength training, which by definition you have to do, or else you're gonna lose muscle anyway. They stick with it longer. They stay more consistent, they don't spiral as hard when something goes off. They're like, no, I'm gonna pick myself up and go the next day. That relationship with food and exercise works together. So I hope that's a place you want to be. All right, that's so that's the that's the brain stuff. I want to get a little more practical now. How do you set up your training to get these benefits for your appetite? Okay, it's because you might be thinking, okay, well, I already lift weights, so am I good? Well, there's there's a a way to optimize it. Let's put it that way. So let's talk like a template here. I I know some of you like systems and templates. If you want appetite control plus fat loss while keeping muscle, we know that strength training is the foundation. Walking is very important as well. Other forms of cardio are optional and the dose matters. So here's what like an appetite-friendly lifting week might look like. I would say three to four days a week, probably not five or six, because that's where you could jump into the, you know, too much fatigue and too much volume, which can drive compensation. The exception is if you are really intentional about keeping those sessions very short, if you are doing five or six days a week, in which case, for some of you, that might actually work better. Mostly compound movements, okay? So the big lifts, squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, pull-ups, they hit multiple muscle groups, create the metabolic stress, build the most, you know, muscle per hour invested, are probably gonna have the best impact on your appetite because it's kind of like low and slow, and you're not doing all of this volume and all these different exercises, you're very efficient with your time, et cetera. Moderate volume. So this is like 10 to 15 hard sets per muscle group per week for most people, which is honestly where you generally want to be anyway. Now, if you go less than that, it's probably gonna help hunger even more, but it may not be enough volume for you. If you're in a severe fat loss phase or severe deficit, I should say, you may find you need to do fewer sets, but keep the intensity high, right? Keep the intensity high. You want to get challenged, but you don't want to destroy yourself because recovery is important here. If you're not, if you're not recovered enough, just think of this. If you're not recovered enough, that also makes you hungry because your body is seeking those resources. And then of course, you still want isolation work in there if you're working on hypertrophy, if you're trying to, you know, work on your physique. But of course, if you're in fat loss, you're you're you're mainly maintaining your muscle mass, you're not really building it. So it depends on if you're in a deficit or not. And that would be, you know, whatever supports your joints and the aesthetics that you care about to support those compound lifts. So all the variations, all the isolation work, all the cable work, machine work, stuff like that. And, you know, that's basically it. You know, we we we talked about sleep and stress on a recent episode. You can go visit that because that's a whole other pillar that exists that affects appetite. But today we're talking about the training side. And I think if if you simplify it to just what I talked about, I think it becomes more sustainable. You can focus on progress and it creates the hormones and also the behavioral environment that helps with appetite control. And you can measure your biofeedback and say, is this working for me? Now, if you want to include cardio, that's fine. Here are some quick rules I have related to appetite and cardio. I would say two to three sessions per week maximum. Okay. And keep the, keep it if you if you like zones, I would keep it, you know, upper zone one or lower zone two, that easy conversational pace at most to kind of build that extra little bit of cardiovascular fitness that you're going for potentially, and also maybe burn a few more calories, sure. And 20 to 30 minutes maximum. Don't make these like hours-long sessions. So two to three days a week, maybe 20 to 30 minutes. Avoid these long sessions because that will tend to trigger that compensation and the hunger. And you know, sprinting is a whole different beast that I love. You know, one or two sprints a week. And we're talking my specific protocol, which we can make available to you, and we had a previous episode on that. But sprinting can be great because it's really not going to make you hungry at all, most likely. And fuel your cardio days appropriately. So think of deliberate cardio sessions as a form of training where you have, you know, protein and carbs around your training, especially carbs. Not training fasted if it makes you really hungry afterward. Obviously, there's a compensation mechanism there as well, potentially. And the point is, cardio is not bad. It has benefits for cardiovascular health, for mental health, for recovery if you enjoy doing it, but it's obviously not the primary fat loss tool. That is your deficit. And then strength training is really important here for holding muscle and also it can help with appetite. Okay, so if you're doing a lot of cardio and you're like, I'm always hungry and I'm not losing fat, that could be your answer. I would get rid of most of that cardio, just do training and walking and see what happens. So I want to clear up a few myths before we wrap up. I have three myths that I come up with that I think are important and I hear all the time. Myth number one is that cardio burns fat. And we kind of address this. A lot of you are like, yeah, I know that. But the reality is the fat loss, the release of energy from your fat cells is purely become of because of a calorie deficit. That's it. It's not any specific exercise. If cardio adds some calories to your metabolism, then it's part of the equation, but it still has to do with being in that deficit. And the training, the strength training determines whether you lose fat or you lose some fat and muscle. We don't want to lose muscle, right? Training is what protects your muscle math, your metabolic rate, all of that. And then cardio can contribute to the deficit, maybe by keeping your expenditure a little bit higher. But if the trade-off is you're a lot hungrier, more fatigued, not as recovered, that could be like taking two steps forward and like one and a half steps back or even three steps back, depending on how much you're doing. Myth number two is that, well, lifting doesn't burn many calories, so it's not really contributing to fat loss. But the reality is it's not about how many calories you burn, it's all the downstream effects where muscle mass, you know, raises your resting metabolism long term. Appetite suppression that we talked about in this episode will make your deficit easier, protecting your meat because now you might move more generally throughout the day with low grade movement because you're not compensating for it. And then being able to adhere to this and stay consistent, right? So we have to think the long game and think the whole equation here. And then myth number three is that you know, appetite really comes down to how well you can handle hunger and how well you can push through it. Appetite's way more complicated than that. It's it's got a bunch of inputs, right? Your hormones, brain, your brain-related genes, let's be honest, everybody's got different levels of appetite. Your gut signals, your sleep, your stress, your training, your protein, the food volume is important, behavioral patterns. So willpower is a tiny, tiny piece of that big pie. And it's not the one that you want to have to rely on. So why don't we focus on the other inputs? How do we improve those, which are gonna far outpace the willpower piece, right? So the if you're white knuckling through your diet, something has to change. The system isn't set up to support you. And it could be just a matter of food volume. It could be a matter of the deficits too aggressive. There's some answer there for you, okay? All right, let's bring this home. Fat loss isn't punishing yourself in a submission. It's really revealing the muscle you have in a targeted way. And strength training is one of the best tools in that toolbox versus anything else that I know of. All right. It's also massively helpful for appetite because of the way it shifts your hormones, because of insulin sensitivity, how it protects your meat, but also mentally, how it how you think about yourself. You're doing hard things and you're building and you're working towards something in a positive way, and then your food supports that, right? So this is episode seven of the eight. When you combine this episode, the training, with the nutrition cuff stuff we covered previously, like protein, fiber, meal timing, energy density tools like Calicurb and others that might be helpful. You end up with the system to have hunger work support you. And we're just trying to chip away at that and use that engineering mindset to make the behavior you want the actual easier path of least resistance, if that makes sense. All right, remember I promised you a specific timing trick that uses post-workout appetite suppression to eliminate overeating. That's coming up right after this. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, Calocurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out Callocurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callocurb. All right, you made it to the end, and here is the bonus I promise. We talked about how strength training creates a window of appetite suppression. It's usually one to two hours after a heart session where your hunger hormones are blunted and your satiety signals are increased. And here is how you can use that. I want you to train before the meal you most often overeat at. Okay? Now I know this could be a change in your schedule. If you train in the morning, but the meal you most often eat at is dinner. And that is the case for a lot of people, where the portions get out of control, where stacking continues after the meal, where the day's stress catches up, food becomes that release valve. Try scheduling your training late afternoon or early evening. Now, this goes contrary to some advice that I give, probably the majority of the time, for many people to shift their training to the morning to try to help out with their stress and their appetite and their consistency. So take it with a grain of salt because this is specific to out-of-control over consumption in the evening. And it's an experiment. All right. It's an experiment to go ahead and train late afternoon or early evening, not too late, you know, lift hard, then come home, eat dinner during that one to two hour window afterward. And you're, you might find that you naturally eat less, that the meal feels more satisfying with a smaller portion just because you're you got that blunted appetite, right? You just I can't eat that much. I'm not like ravenous like I would have been otherwise. Now, if dinner isn't your problem, maybe it's late afternoon snacking, try mid-afternoon training session, finish around like, you know, 2 p.m., 3 p.m., whatever makes sense, to carry you, carry you through that danger zone, so to speak. And just try a schedule change in your training. Some of you may need to do the opposite. Move it to the morning and then have a decent size post-workout. But some of you need the opposite. You need a nice big meal in the morning. That'll set you up for better hunger signals throughout the day. Then you train later in the afternoon. At the end of the day, you have to find the thing that works for you. But I wanted to mention this as an option. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that that very lifting could be the key to helping with your appetite. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Why Your Metabolism Is Stuck at 50% and How to Fix It Without Biohacks (Jenn Trepeck) | Ep 430

Get Fitness Lab (20% off for listeners), the #1 coaching app that adapts to YOUR recovery, YOUR schedule, and YOUR body. Build muscle, lose fat, and get stronger with daily personalized guidance. Now with Apple Health integration.

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Are biohacks keeping you stuck instead of helping you lose fat and build muscle? Why does body recomp feel so hard even when you are doing all the “right” things?

Body recomp, build muscle, and lose fat come up constantly on fitness podcasts, but I keep seeing the same mistake. People chase cold plunges, red light therapy, peptides, and supplements while ignoring the basics of nutrition and fitness. I sat down with Jenn Trepeck, author of Uncomplicating Wellness and host of Salad with a Side of Fries, to flip that script.

We break down her concept of biostacking and why most people are operating at 50 to 60 percent capacity. We talk protein, fiber, hydration, sleep, stress, connection, and why metabolism only improves when the basics are in place. This conversation ties directly into Wits and Weights, evidence-based fitness, and evidence-based nutrition for sustainable weight loss, strength training, and long-term health.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

0:00 – Why biohacks fail most people
3:00 – Biohacking vs biostacking explained
6:00 – Metabolic health reality check
9:30 – Building a real foundation
13:30 – Nutrition basics that matter
18:00 – Movement and muscle building
24:00 – Stress, sleep, and recovery
31:00 – Connection and longevity
38:00 – Where to start practically

Episode resources:

• Jenn's Book: Uncomplicating Wellness: Ditch the Rules. Quiet the Noise. Reclaim Your Life.

• Website: asaladwithasideoffries.com

• Podcast: Salad With a Side of Fries

• Facebook: @Saladwithasideoffriespodcast 

• Instagram: @saladwithasideoffriespod

• YouTube: @jenntrepeck 

The wellness world loves shiny fixes. Cold plunges, peptides, and red light therapy promise an easy jump to better health, but most people are still stuck at half capacity, tired, hungry, and wondering why nothing changes. The truth is simple: optimization only works on top of a strong base. Before reaching for a 10% improvement, you need habits that lift you to 80 or 90%. That’s the power of biostacking—layering simple, accessible practices so your body actually responds to nutrition and training. Think sleep before supplements, protein before peptides, and real stress relief before yet another wearable. When the foundation is solid, any “hack” finally has something to amplify.

Start by reframing health as a spectrum from negative to positive, not a binary on or off. Many people sit near zero—no diagnosis, but low energy, poor sleep, high stress, and inconsistent habits. Move right on the spectrum by focusing on seven biostacks: food, fuel, movement, hydration, sleep, stress management, connection, and mindset. You don’t need to overhaul your life; you need small, strategic changes that compound. A protein-forward breakfast (30 to 40 grams), fiber at every meal, and smart hydration with minerals shift blood sugar, cravings, and energy quickly. A consistent bedtime builds resilience, while a simple wind-down routine lowers cortisol. Stack habits where possible: group training can hit movement, stress relief, and community in one hour.

Resistance training is non-negotiable for healthspan, metabolism, and fat loss. But it doesn’t have to mean barbells on day one. Bodyweight, bands, machines, or even “drink water, do squats” throughout the day can build muscle and confidence. Muscle is expensive tissue—it requires effort to gain and effort to keep—but it pays you back through higher metabolic rate, better glucose control, stronger bones, and independence as you age. Pair strength work with adequate protein and micronutrients, and your body starts to feel and look different. Add walking for recovery and glycemic control, and you’ve covered most of what flashy devices try to shortcut.

Mindset quietly drives every result. All-or-nothing thinking keeps you stuck, so trade perfection for capacity. Build plans for your most hectic day, then scale up when life allows. Run weekly experiments: delay caffeine until after breakfast, increase protein across meals, or set a bedtime alarm. Notice how you feel, then iterate. This approach turns “rules” into feedback, moving you away from guilt and back toward agency. You become the expert on your body, not the algorithm or the latest trend. As capacity grows, stress lowers, sleep deepens, recovery improves, and you finally have room for thoughtful optimization that actually matters.

Connection might be the most underrated biostack. We’re wired to thrive with people. Hugs, laughter, and shared effort drive down stress chemistry and lift mood through oxytocin and dopamine. If your social world is thin, start small: a weekly class, a group walk, or a call with a friend. Curate your digital feed to spark joy and learning instead of comparison. If crowds drain you, choose one person who fills your cup. A 20-second hug can lower stress; a consistent group can change your life. Stack this with movement or recovery rituals and you’ll feel momentum quickly.

Once the foundation is in place, optimization finally makes sense. Lab testing, wearables, or cold exposure can add a layer of refinement, but they’re not substitutes for sleep, strength, protein, and purpose. Biostacking is the roadmap: simple, human, and sustainable. Start with the habit you resist the most, make it easy, and keep your floor high. In weeks, your energy and confidence rise; in months, your health markers follow. That’s real progress—quiet, durable, and yours.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you've been chasing the latest biohacks, cold plunges, red light therapy, peptides, supplements, thinking they'll finally unlock fat loss and energy, but you're still struggling with body composition, still feeling stuck at 50 or 60% capacity, this episode is for you. My guest today is going to explain why most people don't need a 10% optimization. They need to build a foundation that makes optimization useful through biostacking instead of biohacking. You'll discover the seven biostack categories that help your body respond to training and nutrition. Why trying to biohack without these in place will keep you stuck in place. And practical tips for protein, fiber, hydration, micronutrients, and more that will start building your metabolism for easier fat loss and body recon. 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 gonna look at why the wellness industry has it all backward. Most people are chasing biohacks when they haven't even built their foundation. They're trying things like cold plunges and peptides, but not having protein at breakfast, or they're investing in red light therapy, but averaging five hours of sleep. My guest today is Jen Trepik, returning to the show for the second time. Jen is the author of the new book, Uncomplicating Wellness, and host of the Salad with a Side of Fries podcast. She spent over 20 years helping people cut through wellness noise to build those sustainable habits. She's here to teach us why most people are functioning at maybe 50% of their capacity because they're chasing biohacks when what they really need are what she calls biostacks. You're going to learn the seven biostacks that create conditions for your body to actually respond to what you eat and how you move, some strategies for nutrition and lifestyle, and how to diagnose whether you're ready for optimization or whether you need to build your foundation first. Jen, my friend, welcome back to Wits and Weights.

  Jenn Trepeck: 2:08

  Well, thank you so much. I'm so excited for this.

  Philip Pape: 2:11

  I'm excited too, because you know, we had you on not too long ago and collaborated, you know, on our two podcasts. And a lot of what you talk about is really important for people to hear over and over again because it is common that the shiny object syndrome is there, right? We have things like, yeah, ice baths, which you can put under biohacks, but I'm I'm not sure that many people are actually doing that. But you have things like fasting and special diets, you have all these interventions based on like wearables and genetic testing, and even supplements are in that, can be in that category. So for sure. I want to frame from your perspective, what do we mean by biohacking? Why is it not necessarily the place to start, but still so very appealing? And then we'll go from there.

  Jenn Trepeck: 2:54

  Yeah. So, and there's so many pieces in that, right? So when we talk about the biohack, I think it is like that shining object, the way you describe it of like, you know, the fad diet, the peptides, the, you know, red light therapy, the cold plunge, whatever it is. And by definition, a biohack is an incremental improvement. Like, we're talking like 10% improvement. So, and I say this with love, but when all the tech bros in their elite universe decide to dedicate every ounce of their being in life to longevity, and then they add a peptide, and then they add a cold plunge, you know, maybe they're starting at 90% because they've already done all of these things. So a 10%, like if we go 90 to 99%, I mean, that is unreal, right? But statistically, for the rest of us who have lives and other things going on, at our health is just one of the many things that require our attention every day. And we don't necessarily have a full staff of people making all of those decisions to create that environment, you know, like statistically, the average American is not metabolically well, right? If 12% of the US population is metabolically well, then odds are eight out of 10 of us are not. So if we're not metabolically well, does that put us at 30% health, 40% health? Right. And then if if that's where we're operating and we add a 10% improvement, well, we're not moving the needle. And we're not, maybe we notice the difference of the thing for a couple hours or a couple days, but we're not dramatically changing our health outcomes with an incremental improvement.

  Philip Pape: 4:59

  Yeah.

  Jenn Trepeck: 5:00

  Our objective is to, as you mentioned, the biostack to get us to that 80, 90% baseline, then we can add the biohack and go from 80 to 88 or 90 to 99 and notice that level of like unreal potential that we never even thought was possible.

  Philip Pape: 5:23

  Yeah. Unreal potential. Yeah, yeah. That, you know, and the reason, of course, is why do people chase these? You know, and I I off the top of my head, I could imagine a few big reasons. One being people don't want to put in the work, and I hate to say it, uh, some of these things are going for a shortcut, maybe not. But another could be, you know, misinformation. Another could be they tried the foundational things and it hasn't worked for them because maybe it's not the right approach. If you know you had to do um family feud and like the top five answers on the street of a hundred people, what would it be?

  Jenn Trepeck: 5:52

  For sure. So I think they are appealing because they are marketed to us as the magic pill.

  Philip Pape: 6:00

  The answer.

  Jenn Trepeck: 6:01

  Okay. The answer, the easy button. And we all want things to be easier. Like nobody wins for making this the hardest. We want the easy button. And that's sort of human nature, also. So I think that's one piece. I think another piece is the wellness world is really just today's diet culture. And so if we start to think about things from that perspective, then it becomes this piece of if we're not doing these things, we're failing. There's something wrong with us if we're not choosing these things or doing these things. So I think there's another piece at play there. I think you know, the name of the book is Uncomplicating Wellness, because I think this whole space has gotten so convoluted and it is so confusing that these seemingly simple, you know, one thing and that's it, is even more appealing because it cuts through the noise. It's like, wait a minute, I don't have to think about 20 things, I can just think about one. You know? So I think there's a lot of appeal in there because the marketing side says, I'm gonna sell you this and I'm gonna make you think that this is all you need.

  Philip Pape: 7:26

  You know, it's interesting. You said two things. One, you said wellness is today's diet industry, which is great. Because I the word wellness, yeah, it's kind of a trigger for me too, in that context, even though obviously it's in your book and there's a way to define it. But when you talk about it being one thing being attractive, there's an irony there, right? Because if I said to someone, hey, I want you to do one thing, it's lifting weights. Now, granted, that one thing has a lot loaded underneath it, but it is one thing. And even if I ignored all the other biospects and things we're gonna get into, I know for damn sure that that would make a massive improvement in their life versus any of the biohacks. Right. And it is one thing, and it is uncomplicating it too. And I know you're gonna get there. But if we did look at the biohacks that are available today, I know we mentioned things like cold plunges. I don't know why anybody's willingly going into ice baths as much as we think versus social media.

  Jenn Trepeck: 8:16

  Well, that's the so by that token too, the other thing that I think a lot is like SIBO and like random parasites. Like the internet will have you believe that every single person has worms eating their insides.

  Philip Pape: 8:32

  And coffee enemas, everything. Right. Right.

  Jenn Trepeck: 8:37

  But like it's so interesting because there is an irony to simplifying, and yet simplifying is saying we need all of these things. But there is a piece of understanding that it doesn't have to be a wealthy man's game. Like part of what I think has evolved in all of this is with our health insurance, with our medical system, with our food supply. It's like if you can't afford all of these other things, then you're screwed. And that's really not the case. So when we talk about the biostack, a lot of this is also stuff that is accessible to everyone across the board, no matter what. And it just becomes a function of our choices and our intention and the actions that we're taking.

  Philip Pape: 9:33

  Would you put certain things in the category of biohack, though, that some people might say are quote unquote legitimate and other some need more than others? For example, hormone replacement therapy. Is that yeah, where do you put something like that?

  Jenn Trepeck: 9:44

  Great question. And this is like the least satisfying answer, but it depends on the person, right? There you go. It depends on the person. Now, I would also say that there comes a point where we could do, and this is where I do almost put it more in a biohack piece, because we could give somebody all of these hormones, right? Exogenous hormones, but if their body is not in a place to be able to use them and eliminate what they don't need, it could be doing more damage than help. And so I put it in that other category because it doesn't take the place of the other pieces, if that makes sense.

  Philip Pape: 10:33

  Oh, it makes total sense. And, you know, I actually just thought of, I think you just did an episode similar to one that of mine coming out soon about focusing on micronutrients, because we often forget that forest for the trees. And it makes me think of that in that you can be perfect with your calories, but be totally nutrient deficient. And now you're you don't have the foundation for the calories to make much sense for you. Exactly. It's exact, even though the calories can be a wonderful thing to have in there at the right level. So then, okay, I want to talk about the biostacks, but when you talk about people not functioning up to that percentage, I know we're trying to simplify things, but like when people are at 50% capacity, what does that mean? Is that are people talking about how they feel, their energy? Are they talking about, you know, weight loss? Are they talking about their physique? Are they, you know, what is it that you see when you say 50%?

  Jenn Trepeck: 11:18

  Yeah. So I come back to thinking about health on a spectrum. Okay. So when I implement wellness programs in doctor's offices, we give them a poster and then it's also like on a handout that they can give their patients. And it's a scale that goes from minus 10 to plus 10. And it's where would you rank your health? And every person has their own framework for deciding what their number is. But the way that I typically talk about it is that our Western medical system is focused on the minus 10 to zero. Those disease processes, right? Zero is the absence of sickness, illness, and disease. Which is having the energy and capacity every single day to do all the things that I want to do in this life. And that to me is more than just not being diagnosed. And by that token, too, I did an episode this year called Everybody Is Pre-Diabetic Unless. Because if you're letting the world around us, the food supply, you know, restaurants, and I eat out more than most, you know, but like all with if we're letting all of these other systems dictate our choices, it's only a matter of time till we get that diagnosis. So technically, every single person eating the standard American diet, which I know is not your listener, you know, or my typical listener either, but it I think it provides a framework for basically saying, unless we're intentional about it, we're already pre-diabetic because the inherent outcome of this world that we're living in is that disease state. And when we get a diagnosis, it is based on the organ system that failed first. But any disease process is system-wide because you can't separate your heart from your liver. It just means that this organ failed before the other one. But everything in the body is connected. So if we're having blood sugar issues, it doesn't mean that our heart's fine, that our cholesterol is fine. If we have been diagnosed with, you know, kidney disease, it doesn't mean that the liver is fine, right? It's and so I think for me, understanding it in that spectrum and saying there's this disease side versus this wellness side, then we go even in the spectrum of wellness, where am I? And you've thought about energy. So I think one of the things that I recommend my clients do to assess their daily wellness is to look at their energy, their sleep, their stress, and their confidence. That's how on a daily basis I recommend people check in with their wellness to say, if I'm, you know, even just use like zero to five, right? Like if my sleep was a two or a three last night, my energy is obviously going to not be as great as it could be. Then I get to make choices in this day to adjust for that. Okay, you know what? Maybe the workout that I had originally planned to do isn't the one that's gonna serve me best right now. Maybe I need one that's a little less intense because I didn't sleep well, or whatever it is. And so I think it allows us to have autonomy and choice versus feeling like we're doomed, like we don't understand what's happening in our body. And I sort of think, you know, you're asking about this like 50% piece. There isn't a hard, fast rule for what that number is. It's more of like, are you working on the same team as your body? Do you understand what it's telling you? Are you frustrated by every craving? Or do you look at the craving and go, thanks, body? I hear you. Right? Like, do we know, are we in a dialogue and kind of working together? Or are we constantly fighting and feeling frustrated? And that's where I start to see people really move the needle and learn those pieces by putting the biostack in place.

  Philip Pape: 16:02

  Yeah, that's beautiful. Actually, the negative-positive spectrum resonates with me a lot because it's hard to frame for individuals how to think about this. You know, the percentage thing is like relative to your own standards at the moment, and you might be 80, you might be 25 in very different like life circumstances. You know, I did some training in positive psychology not long ago, and when I learned about positive psychology, it was a not an opposite to negative psychology, but a positive side of the spectrum. So, what I mean by that is psychology looks at the mental disease and how do we, you know, get rid of it and get you back to zero. Positive psychology is what how do we add meaning and purpose in our life? Health-wise is what you're talking about, the quick there. Like you're going to decline. And I imagine, you know, when you're born, you come out of the womb, maybe you're at eight, nine, or ten, maybe you have some issues as a baby, whatever. But let's say you're up there, and then through your teenage years, you know, you really get a lot of influence from your parents and lifestyle, maybe that number starts to tick down, or maybe it holds, depending. And then we all know that it's like, okay, the human lifespan is what it is, other than those tech bros that think they're gonna live to 120 without lifting weights. What? Uh and by the time you get in, let's say, your 30s and 40s, maybe you're trending toward that zero. And then this is a good frame to say, like, look, the muscle loss is gonna pick up and the degeneration is gonna pick up, the bunk bone loss, and that's gonna get you further and further into that. In it's inevitable unless you do something about it. Like you said, and that's where the autonomy, self-efficacy, self-regulation, all that comes in, and that's what we are about. So that's a great segue into the biostacks.

  Jenn Trepeck: 17:32

  Yes, okay. So there's really six pieces of this biostack, right? So we have food, fuel, nutrition, whatever you want to call it, movement, hydration, which is more than just water, sleep, stress management, and connection. All of those pieces, now we can talk about each one individually, but the piece that I also want to come back to in terms of what does this end up looking like and how can this six things be less complicated than the one, right? When we start to put this into practice, we can recognize that maybe one activity in our day ticks a whole bunch of boxes. So, for example, I do group fitness, so I get my movement, stress reduction, and community and connection all in that hour. But it's something that's built into my day and it's ticking a bunch of boxes. So sometimes it's even just our awareness of you know where we are with some of these things, and then just even recognizing that group fitness is also community and helps us with that, it puts it in another place mentally in our, you know, in our approach and that. So, you know, it doesn't have to mean that your full-time job becomes all of this stuff. And frankly, that would be the opposite of uncomplicating it, you know. So I always like to say too, I mean, maybe this is a spoiler, but this book is not a how-to. There are ideas and things that you can play with in every chapter, but it's more about a new lens through which we can then evaluate all of the things coming at us and start to make choices that we know work for us based on what we know to be true for our bodies and our lives and our reality versus you know, whatever's happening on social media. So we can go through each of these and Talk about some tips and ideas and things to play with there. And I also want to preface this by saying if anything we say does not ring true for you, ignore it because you are the expert in your body. And that's another piece of this. Like we outsource all of these decisions to the doctors, to the restaurant, to the food supply, to the influencer, to everybody who's telling us that they have the answer. And the beginning of the book is A, to find wellness for yourself. And B, you are the magic bullet that you are looking for elsewhere. You are the expert in your body. So no matter what we talk about, if you know that whatever it is doesn't work for you, don't do it.

  Philip Pape: 20:49

  Yeah. I think if, and if someone, if someone is reaching out for help, I imagine they're doing so for a reason to begin with, right? Or are we to say, no, it's not that, it's this. So you mentioned one powerful thing is the stacking your stack. I mean, I know you call it a biostack, but you also imply that you can knock two or three of these out with one type of activity that speaks to the time efficiency aspect, which is important for us because that's one of our finite resources. And also probably that it takes a stress off, right? Because now you're thinking, okay, what can I do that does check off some of my low-hanging fruit now? And maybe I can add more in later as I get into it. Real quick, because it's gonna bug me. I have an advanced copy that had seven of these. Did it become six in the final copy?

  Jenn Trepeck: 21:32

  No, it's become I thought it was just me. There's really two chapters on food.

  Philip Pape: 21:37

  Oh, okay. Food and fuel, but then there's also mindset in there. Yeah.

  Jenn Trepeck: 21:41

  Um, yeah, well, that's the BioStack over biohack kind of mindset piece. But yes. Okay, okay. Yes.

  Philip Pape: 21:46

  All right.

  Jenn Trepeck: 21:46

  Okay, just because of the intro, I say we'll make it seven. We're gonna make it seven and put the mindset piece in there for sure.

  Philip Pape: 21:52

  Okay, no problem, no problem. What yeah, it's it's all good. It's all good. I could have edited out if no changes look, whatever.

  Jenn Trepeck: 21:58

  Don't leave it all. There's seven. Do you want me to redo the seven?

  Philip Pape: 22:02

  No, no. I mean, you said it for uh yeah, you said food food, hydration, activity, sleep, stress, connection. And then we're saying mindset's also technically in there. And that's fine. Whatever. I don't think people get too hung up over it. Um, so where do we take it from that? Because I one thing that comes to mind is you said, look, your body's your own. The thing you need to do is probably best known to you. Yes. And so how do you find that gap? Like when I became a nutrition coach, step one was help a client figure out their red flags. And I wonder if some people are listening say, I'm not really sure. Like I do know the thing that I'm I feel deficient in, but I also know there's certain things that I don't do now that I think I should do or want to do. They just are so far from where I am today, and I'm willing to do that. You know what I'm saying? So where does someone start with that process? Yeah.

  Jenn Trepeck: 22:46

  So there's two pieces. One is as you go through each piece of it, you might go, oh, that's a tweak that I haven't played with yet. Let me see what happens if I do that. So we can find small things that maybe we haven't yet explored, even in a category that feels like we're already making progress. But the question of where do I start? I often recommend starting with the one where, like, when you heard it, you had a visceral reaction. You were like, oh, right? Like the one that you've probably been avoiding, the one that you were like, I know.

  Philip Pape: 23:31

  Right. The Bulgarian split squats of the seven. Yeah. Okay.

  Jenn Trepeck: 23:36

  And to start with that also doesn't have to mean completely uprooting your life to add that piece into the equation. And so that's where each one of these can be maybe just a tweak. Maybe it starts with just that awareness. Okay, now the sun is coming in through the window, and I look like I'm striped. Do you want me? I can tell me what you're doing. I'm good. All right.

  Philip Pape: 24:06

  This is cool. It's it's uh it's authentic, as they say.

  Jenn Trepeck: 24:09

  I mean, I have a screen I can put up, but um it's like zebra cat eye. It's cool.

  Philip Pape: 24:16

  It's all good, it's all good. It's fine with me. You do what you're comfortable with, I'm good.

  Jenn Trepeck: 24:20

  Okay. Um so you're gonna start with the one that I think gives us that visceral reaction, but starting with it also doesn't mean that it becomes our entire focus at the expense of the other pieces. And I think that's also maybe a challenge that tends to come up for people we think that like when we start to add one more thing in, it has to come at the expense of something else. And I would say if that's the approach, we need to find a different, we need a different tweak because we actually have a lot more capacity. And I'm like trying to get my eyeballs in the light. Um we we have more capacity than we realize, and adding these things in can increase that capacity. It's I think again, part of uncomplicating is figuring out the things that work for us in our real lives and creating the plan based on reality, not based on some textbook perfect day that only exists like once or twice ever in a year. So I also recommend like create your plan for the most hectic, chaotic, stressful day. And then on the days that aren't like that, we can up the ante a little, maybe do a little bit more. If we're making that more the baseline, we will always feel like we're falling short. We will feel like we're never making any progress. And that to the mindset piece actually does more harm than good.

  Philip Pape: 26:09

  Yeah. I was gonna ask about the baseline thing too, because there is people can get hung up on that perfectionist and completionist. I'm raising my hand. Same, zing. And and by the time this episode comes out, we would have done a challenge at the end of the year that was based on the sim similar principle of having like, this is your optimal, this is your minimal, and here's your bailout, by the way. And it's like there's different degrees, and some people need those extra tiers. So if you take your six or seven, you know, yeah, IO stacks, and it's gonna be an ongoing joke, Ken. I love it. Um, and and you take one of them, let's say food and fuel, because you obviously you talk about it all the time, so do I, and you talk about protein and fiber and then stacking on veggies, and then you have a couple more things in there. Like, would somebody basically look at that paragraph in your book and say, okay, what's the thing that I'm not really doing that I can just start tomorrow? And if their protein is abysmally low and you're saying get 40 grams of protein with breakfast, that could be like a huge jump for someone. Totally. So and I'm sure you talk about it elsewhere in the book. What would you say, hey, titrate it up or create some number that's lower than that? Like, don't take these as hard and fast rules necessarily, or is 40 grams like really you got to get there quickly?

  Jenn Trepeck: 27:20

  I see, again, it's like so unsatisfying. Like it depends on the person. Yeah. And you know, if you're the kind of person who's like, I need to work my way up, or if you're the person who's like, boom, the answer is this protein shake is how I'm gonna get the 40 grams first thing in the morning, and I'm gonna do it and call it a day. The other thing that I also suggest is do it for a week and notice how you feel and let that be what carries us through to the next week instead of creating our own hard and fast rules that then have us in a different version of on, off, good, bad, black, white. You know? So it might be the protein at breakfast. It might be the I'm gonna lay off the caffeine until I eat food. It might be, hey, I feel like I'm constantly craving sugar. Okay, great. We're gonna up the protein throughout the day. Or it might be that like I've always been challenged by nighttime eating. I feel like, you know, I'm fine. And then at night it's like that old Garfield cartoon where like he opens his mouth and like all the food comes in, you know? Great. Let's focus on what's happening in the first half of your day. Breakfast, snack, lunch, and then just notice what's happening with those nighttime eating cravings and things like that. And so we can decide what we want to play with. And I use the words play with very intentionally because I think we can, like I said, just get to this place where we've just created more or different rules for ourselves. And if we can look at it as experimenting and observing, it brings back the power to us and our autonomy to choose and to design our plan for health in a way that we feel competent works for us versus some prescription that somebody has handed you.

  Philip Pape: 29:33

  And that's important what you just said for the listener. Like Jen is saying you're not, you don't have a plan on day one that just does all of this, right? And neither is your book, like you said, a how-to. It isn't. It's here are a bunch of guidelines from what we know. Now you experiment, maybe do it one thing at a time, do it at an achievable level. That's for the worst case. And then that becomes your plan. And then you can build from there. And that that's gonna get you from your 50 or 60 percent to 80 or 90 percent pretty quickly. I would argue you don't have to get to 100, really. Like, I mean, that that's the cool thing about it. Most of us are operating far less than that.

  Jenn Trepeck: 30:07

  Well, and that's the thing too, is like, even when you get to that 80, 90 percent, you might be like, I'm good. I'm gonna live here. That means that we continue to do the things that got us there in order to stay there. But I think the beautiful thing about that too is it allows us to then hear what's coming at us, hear what the tech bros are doing, hear what somebody on social media is doing, and go, love that for you. I'm good. And be able to feel confident that we're good, that we don't need to add on every single thing that then comes at us on social.

  Philip Pape: 30:47

  Yeah, 100%. Um, I don't know how much we want to go into each biostack because honestly, there, if people listen to our podcasts, they know like they're getting it all. You know, the top level. I mean, you essentially listed them. Obviously, the act, the activity one is one we talk about a lot. And you did say in there in parentheses, muscle's expensive tissue, you have to work for it. How much of a message is there here that resistance training is important, right? Like, versus I definitely I see a lot of scapegoating or a lot of excuses made, or I'll have people, I had someone just join our group and say, like, look, I'm having issues, X, Y, Z. And one of the questions I always ask is, what does your training look like? Well, I'm not lifting weights, and I don't plan on lifting weights anytime soon. And I'm like, okay, well, where do I go from so resistance training has to exist?

  Jenn Trepeck: 31:31

  It doesn't have to look like lifting weights. And that's where, again, like we have these ideas of what things mean. Resistance training to me means build muscle. I don't care if you do that using your own body weight. I don't care if you use that, if you do that with, you know, a band. I don't care if you use it, do it, you know, with imaginary weights that are actually air, that you just pretend like you're holding something in your hand and think about it and create resistance in your muscle. Like, I don't care if you're using laundry detergent. Anything that's resistance can build muscle. And so what does it look like for you? One of my favorite things is what I call DWDS. Drink water, do squats. Right? So drink water, we're gonna drink more water, which means that we're gonna need to go to the bathroom more often. Every time you go to the bathroom, hold on to the sink and do 10 squats. Stand up and sit down from the toilet 10 times after you go. Talk about longevity. P. A squat is what is required to get up off the toilet in your ripe old age years. So if we want to live on our own, if we want to have independence, we have to be able to do a squat. If you want to get up off the toilet, so little things, right? But imagine, you know, 10 squats when you go pee, you don't have to change your clothes, you're not getting sweaty. Like it kind of happens in pockets of time that you don't even notice it's taking up time. And maybe over the course of the day, now you've done, you know, 50, 60 squats. Well, what does that look like over the course of a week or a month? And now all of a sudden, we're really building muscle and changing our metabolism at that, right? So muscle is expensive tissue because we have to work for it. And if we don't work for it, it doesn't just magically appear. And if we don't continue to work for it, we can lose it because, you know, for a variety of reasons, aging, you know, typical weight loss approaches, all that kind of stuff can lead to muscle wasting and whatever. But you can decide what that looks like. It doesn't have to look like the thing that you don't want to do.

  Philip Pape: 34:02

  That's a good mic drop there on that one. Because that that is 100% true. There's a lot of conflation with, okay, I I know I I need to do resistance training, or you know, and I say lifting weights colloquially, and I know what you're saying because where you start, and eventually I feel like most people end up having to lift weights eventually, but I get it. Where you start.

  Jenn Trepeck: 34:21

  Well, a client said to me the other day, she was like, So what's your opinion? Like, I joined the gym, I'm going with my husband. So, like the machines or free weights. And I just replied, yes. Yes.

  Philip Pape: 34:36

  It's true. Start there. And but in and you said, you know, not doing the thing you hate. That's something to unravel too, because we can kind of tie it to the mindset piece where you allude to the different ways we frame, you know, reframe all or nothing thinking, beating yourself up, etc. So when someone has a thought like that in their head for any of these things, like, well, Jen said on one hand, the thing that you're kind of resistance to maybe is one of the things you need to look into doing. And I said Bulgarian split squats, right? As a joke. Yeah. And then on the other hand, don't do the thing you hate. How do those reconcile?

  Jenn Trepeck: 35:11

  I really do. I'm just I love this. Yeah, I love this. The thing that we have resistance to is more of the thing that, like, of those bios, right? Of those pieces, it's like, I know, right? It's the thing I'm resisting doing because I just don't feel like it. It's not really where I want to put my energy versus, and by the way, even choosing any of those things, once we're in there, does not mean doing the thing that makes you miserable. Like, we don't want to be miserable. And so I there's a difference between saying, okay, I know I need to make sleep a priority, and saying, I love television, but I'm never gonna watch television ever again because I need to make sleep a priority. Like, what? That was a mental leap of it like doesn't have to exist. And so that's where I think those things can reconcile because we can say I know that something is missing. How I add that in is doing it in a way that I will enjoy, or at least not loathe at the beginning.

  Philip Pape: 36:30

  Yeah, and you just the premise that something requires something, immediately ask yourself if it's false right out the gate. Right. Like, and and and you may not know that because it your worldview is such that I hate squats because I hate squats because I hate squats. Like, I don't know any different because I have one thought of what that means. Right.

  Jenn Trepeck: 36:49

  So, okay, think about it as getting up off the toilet.

  Philip Pape: 36:52

  Or you may not even have to do squats per se. I guess what I'm saying is like if somebody says, like, have you considered you know resistance training? And somebody's like, No, I don't do that because I hate the gym. No, I don't do that because X. It's like uh an immediate block that just it sets the frame for the whole thing, like with your example you just said. Anyway, guys, I had surgery three days ago.

  Jenn Trepeck: 37:11

  So mean, you are amazing. I'm so impressed.

  Philip Pape: 37:16

  Uh my exercise now is pendulums, which is letting my arm hang down and swinging it around for like three degrees. Um, because that's amazing. Anyway, so okay, I like all of this. So obviously, mindset threads through all of this. And then connection was one more piece of your biostack I thought is really cool. Uh, talk to us about that because it is really powerful. Connection is, I believe, the number one uh factor in happiness, for example, like evidence-based happiness, you know, in studies even have sound found that connection is number one. Exactly. So when you say, you know, hug your kid or we're biologically wired for connection. Maybe a lot of people need to do that today with social media.

  Jenn Trepeck: 37:57

  We all need to do it.

  Philip Pape: 37:58

  Being so isolated, yeah.

  Jenn Trepeck: 38:00

  It's um so the title of this chapter is called Just Hug a Person. Like, I don't care, just hug somebody. What that does, talk about like killing two birds with one stone, what a hug can do for our stress is unbelievable. Like I was even doing research on holding hands. The physiology of holding hands signals to our body that this person is taking our stress, they are sharing the burden of that stress, and it lowers our own physiological stress response. How unbelievably simple. Like we can make all of this so complicated, and all of this, like the whole biostack, comes back to what is foundationally human, and part of that is connection. When we look at the blue zones, when we look at longevity, blue zones, by the way, being the places in the world where people live the longest but have the longest health span also, connection, community, and purpose are pieces of that that I think we overlook a lot. You know, it's age is revered. The older generations live in the house, they are part of the child care, they have purpose and connection, they are so valued in the community that we lose that from such an early age. You know, if we think about how often kids laugh versus how often we laugh as adults, unless we intentionally seek out things that make us laugh.

  Philip Pape: 39:59

  You know.

  Jenn Trepeck: 40:00

  So the physiology of what happens when we hug someone, you know, the dopamine, the oxytocin, like all of these hormones and neurotransmitters that send happiness and health and healing and joy are missing. And then we think that something's wrong with us. And it's like we just need to come back together, like spend some time away from our phones. And you know, the phones are an interesting thing because social media can give us the feeling of connection with certain people, but it's about and can give us that laughter. Like I laugh out loud a lot when I am scrolling my feed. But to some degree, like I've curated my feed to create that. And so you can also reset your feed. Every app, you can Google, but every single one of the social media apps has a way to reset your feed. So if it is sending you messages that are keeping you frustrated or feeling like you're always chasing, or feeling like you're not good enough, or whatever it is, reset it. Start over. Seek out a couple of accounts that get you some of those things and then build on that. And you know, the hug thing that I love about that too is like you can hug a pillow, you can hug a stuffed animal. And it's frankly even the same as hugging another person. I also always say like consensually hug a person, right? But you know more is more when it comes to that. And so get a stuffed animal, get a pillow, make it part of your routine, smile at yourself in the mirror, fake laugh until it becomes a real laugh. Like these things that seem so silly are so fundamentally human and transform our health more than we could possibly imagine.

  Philip Pape: 42:11

  I have a lot of thoughts. Uh sorry. No, no, thinking of like the old ladies who aggressively hug you without asking. And it's like, I'm I'm cool with it because you know it's a generational thing. But I hear what you're saying. Uh I saw a Facebook ad or Facebook commercial the other time. I I showed my kids. I'm like, do you think this makes sense to you? And it was people getting together in real life situations, but it was an ad for how Facebook does that. I'm like, this doesn't make any sense to me, you know, because Facebook isn't like known for getting people together in person necessarily. Right. But yeah, I I think this is such an important one that we lose. And I know everybody, everybody's so stressed. And speaking of the stacking, right? Like stress is a big part here to this, but I also know everybody's different in their level of social introversion and whatnot. And we'll maybe use that as an excuse or not. But like I like seeing family and I I'm with my own immediate family every day because we homeschool our kids, which is awesome. We we love that. But if I'm with groups of people for too long, you know that drains me, right? So you have to know where you are. But then if I don't see people for a long time, that's a problem too, right? Right. So how like in today's social media world and everything else, what do you think of online communities? Like, where does that tick a box in this area? Look at me, I'm the completionist. Tick a box. You know what I'm saying? How does that create connection? Do we know like um psychologically and physically, does that, is that not quite good enough, right, compared to physical social connection?

  Jenn Trepeck: 43:43

  It's a yes and.

  Philip Pape: 43:44

  Yeah.

  Jenn Trepeck: 43:45

  You know, there is a difference because our physiology starts to match the physiology of people that we are in proximity to. That doesn't happen as well when there's a screen in between. So there can be a piece of connection. Like I think about um people who live further, you know, maybe more rural communities or people who are further away from other people or whatever, and especially kids feeling isolated, or you know, like being able to find a chat room. Now I sound really old, but like but being able to find people like them somewhere. So that does help in some scenarios, and it doesn't necessarily help as much with those physiological changes from being around other people. But I think that's part of why I like hugging a stuffed animal or hugging a pillow or just hugging yourself because we can get some of that physiological change. Like the holding hands thing doesn't seem to work if you hold your own hand, but the hug does. And so as with all of this, it comes back to know thyself, right? Like there is that fine line between too much peopling and not enough. And it's also just like your arm exercises, a pendulum swing. A pendulum doesn't stand straight either. We are always in this bob and weave back and forth, noticing and adjusting. That's living in the gray area. And I think that applies to all of this connection stuff too, of knowing I need to recharge, I need some quiet time, or I need to recharge, I need time with this person. And today that might look different than what it looks like tomorrow. And it's all a yes and versus what we typically get of a plan or a rule, and it's on, off, good, bad, black, white. You know, it's just not so binary, and that's okay.

  Philip Pape: 46:28

  Yeah. Lots of things about Jen with with these. No, no, there is, right? Like that's why we do these podcasts and and try to reach people over lots and lots and lots of hours of conversation, because we have to build what you call capacity. And I guess that's a good kind of to wrap it, wrap it up in a bow here. You are talking about capacity, baseline, having a foundation, you know, and not creating, I think you mentioned not creating dependency either in the book, if I recall. Um, what does this all mean at the end of the day? Like somebody listening who's looking for some hope, looking for some motivation, wants to take that next step. Obviously, we're going to recommend your book to them. You kind of already mentioned where to start. It's just figuring out what you know you need to do, right? So what you know you need to do. But what's next for somebody who really wants to live a long, healthy life, have that health span, have that mind span, and build that capacity.

  Jenn Trepeck: 47:21

  Yeah. I think it's even taking a step back because what we didn't talk about is a lot of the first half of the book, which is how we got here. And I think it's important for us to recognize of course, this is where we ended up because look at what's happening around us and all the things that are in play, and recognizing that our current beliefs and approach came from somewhere. They served us up to a certain point. They may not be serving us anymore. And if we're in a place of saying, I'm looking for something else, I'm not where I want to be, then we can open up and say, What's something that I want to play with? What do I know is already missing? How can I figure out how to add that in to my life in a way that serves me versus takes away from all of the other things that I want to do? And how can I also do this in a way that helps keeping me coming back to what I know to be true for me versus following what everybody else tells us is the prescription and working on the same team as your body, because part of what's also in here that we didn't talk about is sort of the signs, right? The ways our body is communicating us to us and with us that most of us are probably ignoring. And so then we can start to tune back in and create our own plan. And so, like I sort of say to people, like before you buy any other book to figure out your plan for 2026, or you write whatever you're gonna do for this new year, read this one to help it create the evaluation process for all of the things that you may choose to do.

  Philip Pape: 49:20

  That makes a lot of sense. And in I'll I'll call it an inside out approach instead of an outside in. Like outside in is calories and macros and lifting weights. You need to do this and you do that, do that, and uh inside out being how are you feeling and what's driving you to not sleep as well. And you know, the social connection, all the pieces um from where where we got. And I know in your book you cover that at a, I'll say a macrocosm, right? Like the big world, how we got here, but also the individual, how we've gotten prescriptive. And I know social media is trying to sell an outcome, right? That is marketing one-on-one. You're trying to sell a result. When to get to that result could be a very, very serpentine, interesting and enlightening process for you as an individual. It doesn't have to be complicated, as Jen is saying here. It's just you've got to start from that evaluation point. So I really like that of starting from looking inside where you are, setting the foundation before you then experiment one step at a time. And that experimentation eventually turns into your plan, not your. Here's my new year's plan, let's go do it. Exactly. Exactly.

  Jenn Trepeck: 50:23

  And I also think, like, in evaluating all that stuff, like, because when somebody says that to me, I admittedly like just kind of roll my eyes. So it, but like what's here helps guide you through that internal conversation so that we can actually evaluate it for ourselves and be like, wait a minute, when did I start thinking that the only thing that mattered was the scale?

  Philip Pape: 50:46

  It's true. It's true. And and you, I'm sure you got this from talking to lots of people. Like if you, you know, yeah, after working with lots of people myself, I talked to somebody recently who, you know, still makes me realize what I don't know, right? And and she said something to the effect of um, you didn't ask me about whether I'm training for other sports with this series of questions here. This is about something else, another thing I'm working on. Yeah. And um, and I'm like, well, you're right, but like it's because 90% of people that didn't matter, but for the 10% like you, it did, and so that this is what we mean, right? I think when you say um evaluating yourself one by one and where you need to be. Anyway, I'm rambling again. I'm not on payments, but I'm totally on. It's been a weird week. Okay. Um I'm totally with you. Good, good, good, good. All right, Jen, you're awesome. I love it. I know we're just scratching the surface. I had the pleasure, guys, of getting an advanced copy of Uncomplicating Wellness. It's a really good read. I'll say it's like a quick-ish read, but it's just the right length to get you what you need and get you some steps to go. And of course, you know you can reach out to Jen uh with questions, and we're gonna tell you how to do that. So, Jen, where can people go? We're gonna include a link to the book. Is it best to go through your website or Amazon or what either wherever you like to purchase?

  Jenn Trepeck: 52:00

  So, like my website has a bunch of options there, but Amazon, Barnes and Noble, bookshop.org. Sure. If you're in Canada, I think it used to be called chapters, now it's called Indigo or something like that. But wherever makes you happy, go for it. You can just search uncomplicating wellness. My website is a salad with a side of fries.com. And podcast is Salad with a side of fries. So wherever you're listening now, pop over. We have a couple episodes with Philip. So it's awesome. Love being here, love chatting with you. Thank you. I hope everybody finds this helpful this new year as you're thinking through what does 2026 look like for you?

  Philip Pape: 52:44

  What does it look like for you? Uncomplicating wellness. That's what we're trying to do. Jen, thank you so much for everything you do. Go check out Salad with a side of fries. And we'll catch you next time. Thank you again, Jen, for coming on the show.

  Jenn Trepeck: 52:54

  Thank you, Philip.

Build Muscle First, Cut Later for Easier Fat Loss and Less Hunger | Ep 429

Try Calocurb natural appetite control (40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger). It's prescription free, affordable, and fast acting. Get 10% off:
https://witsandweights.com/calocurb

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If all you've done is diet, every cut will be harder than the last.

More hunger, less energy, slower results. There's a reason, and it's not just your age or metabolism.

Learn why building muscle first makes cutting (fat loss) dramatically easier, how more lean mass directly reduces hunger per calorie of deficit, and why chronic dieters sabotage their own results by skipping the building phase. 

Discover the specific rate of gain, timeline, and nutrition setup to maximize muscle while minimizing fat, plus how resistance training affects appetite hormones like GLP-1 and ghrelin differently than cardio. 

Whether you're focused on body recomp, strength training over 40, or finally breaking the diet-regain cycle, this is a practical blueprint to stop fighting your body and start cutting from a position of strength.

Episode Resources:

• Try Calocurb for natural appetite support: witsandweights.com/calocurb (10% off first order)

• Download the free Muscle-Building Nutrition Blueprint: witsandweights.com/muscle

• Join Wits & Weights Physique University: witsandweights.com/physique

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why dieting without building muscle makes every cut harder
2:43 - The muscle-first approach to easier fat loss
6:40 - The chronic dieting trap and how to escape it
10:54 - How building muscle reduces hunger and increases calorie burn
13:48 - GLP-1, satiety signals, and why strength training beats cardio for appetite
19:36 - The psychological advantage of building before cutting
25:13 - Practical build plan: rate of gain, duration, and nutrition
29:41 - Training, cardio, and when to transition to a cut
33:11 - Metabolism is a skill you build
36:45 - Bonus tip to know if you're training hard enough

Most people try to diet their way into a better body, only to find each cut gets harder: hunger rises, energy drops, and results slow. The core mistake is sequence. When you start lean dieting without meaningful lean mass, you lose a little muscle each time, lower your baseline metabolism, and sensitize your appetite in the wrong direction. A muscle-first strategy flips the script. By investing months into building strength and lean tissue, you increase daily energy expenditure, improve insulin sensitivity, and create stronger satiety signals so your next fat loss phase is shorter, less hungry, and more effective. Think of muscle as metabolic hardware: it raises your capacity to train, recover, and eat more while still progressing.

Mechanistically, adding muscle has a compound effect beyond the six to nine calories per pound per day that tissue burns. Stronger lifters typically move more, train harder, and handle higher volume, increasing non-exercise activity and session burn. Better insulin sensitivity smooths post-meal blood glucose, reducing crashes and cravings. There’s emerging evidence that more muscle improves GLP1 responsiveness, the same satiety pathway targeted by popular medications and natural GLP1 activators. Resistance training itself suppresses ghrelin for hours, often lowering immediate appetite compared to cardio. All of this means a lifter with more muscle can maintain a bigger deficit with less discomfort and fewer dietary gymnastics, making adherence far more manageable.

The psychology matters as much as physiology. In a build, food becomes fuel, not a threat. You chase performance, stack PRs, and watch shape changes that outpace the scale. That identity shift—from dieter to lifter—reduces food anxiety and restriction fatigue. When it’s time to cut, you approach it from abundance: more muscle to reveal, higher maintenance calories, and confidence from months of consistent training. Contrast that with chronic dieting, where every deficit feels like a grind and the results never “look” like you hoped, because there wasn’t enough muscle to show. Building first turns leanness from a temporary outcome into a sustainable state.

Set up your building phase deliberately. Commit to six to twelve months of steady progress. Target about 0.3 to 0.5 percent of body weight gain per week for most, translating to roughly one to two pounds per month for women and two to three for men. Use a mild surplus—about 2,500 calories per planned pound per month above maintenance—and hit at least 0.71 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily. Train three to five days per week with progressive overload, track lifts, and push sets near failure. Keep steps high and cardio moderate so recovery stays on track. Judge success by performance, recovery, and visual changes more than the scale. Then, when you cut, run eight to twelve focused weeks or a six-week mini-cut, supported by high protein and hard training to keep what you built.

Treat metabolism like a skill, not fate. Strength training, adequate protein, and consistent recovery teach your body to partition nutrients toward muscle, raise your basal burn, and reduce the perceived pain of a calorie deficit. This matters more with age, when sarcopenia and bone loss accelerate. Every year spent dieting without building is lost ground. Start now, increase your metabolic capacity, and make future fat loss phases a precision operation instead of a slog. To calibrate your training, try an AMRAP on the final set of a big lift once in a while. If a programmed set of five turns into twelve, you’re undercooking your effort—use that data to load up next week. Build first. Cut from strength. Stay lean by design, not by constant deprivation.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:00

  If all you've done is diet and you've never spent time building muscle, then every diet will make the next one harder. More hunger, less energy, slower results. Today I'm going to show you the muscle-first approach to fat loss. You'll learn why more lean mass means less hunger per calorie of deficit, how chronic dieters sabotage their own metabolism, and a timeline to set yourself up so your next fat loss phase actually works. This is how you stop fighting your body and start cutting from a position of strength. 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 founder of the Fitness Lab app. And I want to talk about building muscle versus losing fat because most people approach fat loss in a backward sequence. They are desperate to lose weight or to lose fat, and they say, eventually I'll build muscle once I'm lean enough. And on the surface, it makes just logical sense, I suppose. You get lean, then focus on performance. But it creates a compounding problem that a lot of you never get out of. Because every time you cut without adequate muscle mass, you're just making the next cut harder. You might lose a little lean tissue, your metabolic rate, your metabolism might drop slightly, your hunger hormones are always adapting to try to fight that deficit. And then the next time you try to diet, you're starting from a slightly worse position. You're in this tiny window that is highly unproductive. And you've got to get out of your head and just go for building that muscle. Women, men, a little extra weight to lose. It doesn't matter. It's actually gonna pay off tremendously. You know what? My own story was the first time I finally did a bulk, it was a crazy bulk. I wasn't really trying to. I actually gained a ton of weight and I was a little bit down on myself because I had gained some fat. And then when I cut it off, I realized, you know what? That was the only thing I could have done in my entire life that actually allowed me to build muscle. And of course, I'm gonna teach you how to do it much more efficiently than that. So you don't gain a lot of weight, and and it's gonna be a game changer. I want you to get out of this chronic diet or trap. It's why some people feel like every time they try to lose fat, it's just this hard thing. They don't quite get the result they want. Maybe they lose a few, maybe they gain it back. So we're gonna flip that around. Today is episode six of our eight-episode appetite series for January. And you're like, appetite, aren't we talking about building muscle? Well, I wanted to make the connection where a muscle-first strategy, if you spend time building that metabolic capacity before worrying about your next cut again, when you actually do it, when you actually do a calorie deficit, you're going to have less hunger, you're going to have better adherence, you're going to eat more calories, and you're going to retain more muscle. And at the end of the day, that's just going to make all those fat loss faces in the future so much easier. So it's a little bit of investment now for a massive payoff later and for the rest of your life. Then at the end of the episode, I'm going to give you a simple test that you can do in your next workout to tell you whether you're actually training as hard as you can train. This is pretty cool because again, we're talking hunger, but we're really talking about building muscle. And it's a little trick that I've found, especially with newer lifters, who I know a lot of you are not training hard enough. Well, if you're going to go and spend time building muscle, I want you to do it effectively as well. So stay tuned for that. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by Calocurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Callocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. CallowCurb is a natural appetite support made from a marisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calllocurb. All right, let's start with the pattern that I see, just so you can kind of put yourself into the shoes of this avatar of clients, questions from listeners, the fitness community at large, a lot of you are doing this. You're desperate to lose weight. Let's just be honest. You want to lose 20 pounds. You'll want to lose 10 pounds, 20, 30, whatever. So what do you do? You start a diet and you eat less. Maybe you add some cardio, maybe you track your calories and macros, maybe you're doing it all quote unquote the right way, and you lose weight and you lose some fat. You know, obviously there's some water weight loss in there. And maybe some of that is muscle because you're not quite in that mode of knowing how to hold on to the muscle as effectively. Because you've never really spent time truly training for building muscles. So it doesn't translate either into your fat loss phase. Regardless of how you did it, that that you go through, you might lose five, 10, 15, even 20 pounds, and then life happens, and then you stop tracking, then you go back to normal eating, then you regain some weight. Six months later, you try again, same approach, same results, but maybe it feels a little harder. And if you've been trying to diet your whole life, okay, I know you know the women out there on average try over 100 diets in your lifetime. That this is the statistics we see. It just gets harder and harder and harder. You're hungrier on the same calories, your energy is lower, your progress is slower, your metabolism is dropping. We don't like that. We don't like that. And what's happening is very well-documented phenomena, repeated dieting with, I'll say, mixed or lack of adequate resistance training and protein, you lose muscle. But even if you're doing those things, you don't really have much muscle to hold on to. And so you have a lower metabolism as a baseline, right? And it just means you don't have the capacity to make that fat loss phase as effective. And at the end of the day, once you lose the weight, even if you did lose just fat, there's not much muscle to reveal either. So it's kind of both of those pieces. And I'm tying it more to the appetite and hunger side because of our series, but it really is all of that, right? And speaking of hunger, there's the hormonal piece. Now I've beat to death the hunger and appetite hormones over the last several episodes. So please go back and check those out. But because your appetite system adapts to being in a deficit, all of these hormones, you know, leptin that makes you full, ghrelin that makes you hungry, and your body's sensitivity to these signals trend in the wrong direction or they're staying down regulated just a bit because you're always in that dieting state. Okay. Also, people who've repeatedly dieted have stronger responses to the negatives of these than people who haven't. So we don't want to keep doing this and compounding the issue as we get older. So, in practical terms, of course, two people eating the same calories in a deficit, while they might lose the same weight, might have different hunger levels. And to be in that deficit, you might be in different calorie levels too, because you might have a higher metabolism. So to be in the same deficit, you can eat more than someone else, right? And that affects hunger. So building muscle is going to be really important. This is the trap, though, this chronic diet, always have to diet, always have to lose weight, always afraid of gaining weight and gaining fat. And that's why you're not building muscle or you're afraid of getting bulky or some nonsense like that. And I'm sorry to say that is exactly what it is because, ladies and men, it takes a lot of work and time to actually build decent size. And ladies, you're not gonna get bulky. Your bodies don't do that, you know, unless you you're on performance-enhancing drugs. Men, we want to get bulky, and it's hard to do that. So let's put that aside. All right, so how does building muscle change this whole equation? What does it do mechanistically? Well, first we have the calorie side. Muscle tissue is gonna burn more calories in a lot of different ways. I did an episode a while back about how muscle burns more calories than you think. And it's not just the tissue itself. The tissue burns six to nine calories per pound a day. So it's more than fat, and you're going to thus add, if you had 10 pounds of muscle over time, you might increase your calorie burn up to say 100 calories a day. That's not nothing, right? But it also increases how much you train, how hard you train, how much weight you can carry around. You tend to move more. All of these things kind of compound on their, on their, you know, on themselves. And then you're more efficient with your nutrients. So you have better insulin sensitivity, right? It all actually, at the end of the end of the day, gives you a higher metabolism, right? And that burns more calories, which means you can eat more calories. So that is very important that a person who's more muscular just burns more calories because of the muscle and because of the weight, and because they're doing, they're burning more calories, doing activities, and because they tend to be more active anyway, given their lifestyle, right? So your deficit's gonna be more forgiving. And then so that's the muscles or the calorie side. And then we have the appetite side, which gets really interesting for this episode. We know that muscle tissue affects insulin sensitivity. Well, when you're more insulin sensitive, your blood sugar stays more stable after meals. You're gonna have fewer blood sugar crashes, and that means fewer hunger spikes, fewer cravings, and less of that desperate need to eat something immediately after a meal. And I think we spoke about this on the last solo episode, how muscle just seems to make people less hungry. And I've seen this anecdotally as well, right? People just have a little more muscle mass. I don't know, they just don't have as many appetite issues, as many hunger issues. And that alone could be the reason you want to do this, right? I've seen a lot of clients and our physique university members, mostly women, I'm gonna be honest, who are like, you know what? I'm finally gonna let it, I'm finally gonna listen to you, Philip, and I'm gonna build muscle, and I'm gonna just I know there's fear of gaining fat and gaining weight, but I've got you in my corner. You know, we talk them through it. And it just opens up all these doors because they can eat more food, they have more flexibility, they start to feel great, biofeedback normalizes, better sleep, start getting new PRs. Everything just turns out for the better. And six months later, they're like, oh my God, that was awesome. You know, I gained like six pounds on the scale, but five of them were muscle. You know what I mean? And it's like that was a great result, you know, and they're almost looking at scale weight gain as this huge positive because it allowed them to gain muscle and they're leaner. They have less, you know, even if they haven't gone through a fat loss phase yet, because they did it in a kind of a lean way, they have smaller waist size, right? More muscle definition. And that's what I want for you. And it's gonna make all these things easier. All right. There's also emerging evidence that muscle mass influences your incretin hormones like GLP1, which we've talked about a lot throughout the series. That's a satiety signal that drugs like semaglantide, you know, manjaro, terzepatide, wagovi. I'm mixing brand names and chemical names, but you get the idea. And it's the same pathway that like the calllocurb we've talked about is the sponsor of this episode, addresses, right? And some research suggests that people with more muscle mass have a better GLP1 response to meals. So this is a funny one because I was I was responding to somebody in our community in in physique university who said, Hey Philip, have you actually used Callocurb? And I said, Yeah, I think I'm a super responder because when I use it, it actually like dampens my hunger quite a bit. Now, I'm not in a fat loss phase, but I I thought, oh, I seem like a super responder. And it could be because I have some muscle mass, right? Like, and and I wonder if people who are more trained will over-respond to something like that, which means it could be a really powerful tool and you don't even have to take very much of it, just as a side thought. So more muscle, greater satiety signal per meal, less hunger and a deficit. I mean, it all compounds in a good way on itself. And then, of course, there's the training itself. Like when you resistance train, you tend to be less hungry, especially versus something like cardio, especially the chronic, stressful, high, you know, intense cardio or lots of it, high volume cardio. Resistance training, on the other hand, makes you less hungry. It suppresses ghrelin, usually for a few hours after your workout, right? And so people who strength train tend to feel less hungry compared to cardio sessions, which is great, which I love it. So when someone says build muscle first, then cut, which is what I'm telling you today, it's not just about like building muscle. It's it's it's changing the difficulty of the fat loss that comes afterward, making it easier. So I just I just briefly mentioned the sponsor for today's episode. I want to talk about them for a second, Callocurb, because I'm I've become a big fan. I've become a big fan of this. I didn't realize this would happen until I learned about them. We had Sarah Kennedy on the show last week to talk about the science behind it. And we've been talking about GLP1, right? GLP1 and how it affects satiety, how that tells your brain to gut brain access that you're satisfied after eating. Well, Callowcurb is a natural supplement that upregulates your own GLP1. So your endogenous GLP1 that your body produces, when you take callocurb, it basically triggers that to increase by about 600%. Whereas when you eat food, it goes up by about 300%. And so you take it about an hour before your meal, and it effectively has a mechanism that makes you start to feel fuller and you haven't eaten anything. And that's why it tamps down the amount you eat during the meal. And it does that through bitter hops extra a bitter hops extract called amerisate. So the bitter hops gets down into your lower gut, time release, and then it triggers your bitter taste receptors, and that causes your body to not want to eat as much. And there have been randomized controlled trials, clinical studies showing a big reduction in cravings by 40%, hunger by 30%. Now notice that's cravings and hunger. So cravings has to do with food noise and emotional eating and stuff like that. Hunger, just general hunger by 30%, and the end result being average calorie intake reduced by 18%. And this is on top of the tools that you guys are using already: macro tracking, eating whole foods, eating more fiber, they compound. And if you take GLP1s, you could potentially take a lower dosage while taking these or even come off of them altogether because these upregulate your hormones, they don't replace them. It's right, so it's not a stimulant, you don't need a prescription, it's not a drug, it's just a really good tool that I think a lot of people can benefit from. So Calicurb's awesome. You go to wins and weights.com slash calicurb and get 10% off. Link is in the show notes. I would say that if you are in a building phase and eating in a big surplus, it may not be the best tool for you, right? Because you're not trying to tamp down hunger. But when you are at back in maintenance or in a deficit and transitioning to a cut and the hunger signals ramp up, having something that supports your natural satiety can make a huge difference in the amount of deficit you can sustain, right? And that's why I like it for myself. And I'm actually using it in my fat loss phase in a few days that I'm about to start, along with our get lean in 45 days workshop and course in physique university. We're gonna do this together. And so I'm definitely recommending this as a tool for some people because I use it myself or I'm going to because I know how powerful it is. I seem to be a super responder. So go to witsandweights.com slash callocurb, C-A-L-O-C-U-R-B. Get 10% off. Just try it out. Like, I can't tell how well it's gonna work for you until you try it. But the science is really solid. It's owned by the New Zealand government, not a company. It's pretty cool. Witsandweights.com slash callow curb. All right, so let's talk about the psychological advantage as well of building, because of building muscle first. Because a lot of you think it's a psychological disadvantage. You're worried about gaining weight, you're worried about gaining fat of bulk, you know, whatever the whatever the situation is, or maybe you're afraid you're not gonna be able to lose it or something like that. But but let's reframe this, okay? When you're in a building phase, food is your friend. You're eating at or slightly above maintenance, you're fueling your performance. You are hitting PRs in the gym constantly. You're watching your strength increase, you're seeing your body composition change in a positive direction, even when the scale's going up a bit. This is a very common story, and it's surprising for people, but you don't know until you do it. And you're like, whoa, I see my shoulders are starting to pop. I'm actually might even see a little bit of abs popping through, you know, the the tiny, the little layer of fat you have that, you know, we can get rid of that later. Let's build, build, build right now and give ourselves the capacity. And this, here's the cool thing: it creates a completely different relationship with food than chronic dieting ever does. Because in a deficit, food is restricted, right? You are restricting something. You're managing portions, you're saying, I'll say you're saying no to things. Hopefully you're building in your flexibility, though, but you are dealing with some hunger. And even with all the satiety strategies and food hacks and tools in the world, there is an inherent psychological tension when you're eating less than your body wants. There's something there that you're gonna just notice, right? And some people notice it a lot more. But when you're in a muscle building phase, now you're eating to perform, carbs become fuel for your workouts, protein is the material that's building, building, building all these muscle cells. You're not constantly thinking about what you cannot have. You're focused on what you're building, and this really, really matters. But when you finally end the build and decide to transition to a cut, you approach it from a position of psychological abundance. Think about that. You've spent months not obsessing over food, but you've built a positive relationship with your training. Your identity isn't as a dieter, it's I'm a lifter who's now temporarily gonna cut my fat. That's it, right? I'm just I'm cutting it off, and then I get back to it. So compare that to the person who constantly diets, always feeling restricted, always dreading being hungry, always thinking, here we go again, same deficit, different experience. Okay. And the the I the thing that I think people flip in their head, I mentioned this before, is they think, I'm gonna cut first, and then I'm gonna have the body to enjoy my building phase. But that never happens. Nobody's ever pleased with that smaller body before they start the building phase. They might be mildly like, oh, okay, the scale's down, but don't really look much better. And that was a lot of work, and that kind of sucks. So now what? And and and sometimes you get obsessive about it where you're like, well, now I have to stay at this weight because now I've achieved this weight and that was my goal. And what's the point of all that, right? Then then you then you just start a cut. Then you just, if you do your next cut, let's say you gain weight back and now you cut again, but you didn't do it by gaining muscle. It's just it's a cyclical, never-ending, you know, hellscape, just to put it like mildly or whatever. And you just get these long ruling fat loss phases, right? And we just have a whole community in physique university of folks who are doing the opposite. And I love to see it. They're just thriving, they're building, they're cutting from abundance, and the deficit feels easier because you earn that ease. All right. So keep keep listening because look, at the end of this episode, you're you're like, okay, you're talking a lot about building muscle. Well, I'm gonna get into that in a second, and then later on, I'm gonna give you a technique you can use in your next workout to find out if you're training hard enough. This is a way to calibrate mentally whether you're training hard enough. It takes just one set and it's gonna give you data. Okay, trust me. This is this is a really cool technique. All right. Of course, when someone says trust me, you're not supposed to trust them, right? So I shouldn't have done that. All right, what does this look like practically to build muscle? Now that's a huge topic, but just a practical framework. And I'm gonna give you some numbers here, all right? How long should you build? I would spend six months in a building phase or more, six to 12 months, even. I mean, you may really enjoy doing it for a full year, just putting dieting in your rear view for a while, depending on the mental side of this and depending on the how it aligns with holidays and things like that. And I know it sounds like a long time, but it's not. If you're doing it at a lean level of gain, you're not gonna gain a lot of weight on the scale, but you're gonna invest in that capacity and infrastructure and the psychology and recovery that you need. It's gonna make fat loss easier. You're gonna learn a ton about yourself, trust me. And that whole time is gonna be a learning experience. It's gonna be amazing. How fast do you go? All right. Well, this is where there's there could be some controversy because you'll hear some influencers say you could you could build muscle maintenance. You hear others say like you really need to push it if you're a new newbie. The evidence says anywhere from 0.2% body weight a week to like 0.8% body weight a week. It's pretty big range. When you do the math, you realize even at that upper range, it's not a lot of weight. It's it's not a ridiculous amount of weight. I would say one to two pounds a month for females, two to three pounds a month for males, if if you just want to go with simple round numbers. From a percentage basis, if you are my client or if you're in physique university, I'm gonna push you a little bit toward that 0.4, 0.5%, only because we're really helping you look at the data and adjust and everything. But if you want to be more conservative, 0.3 is decent. Now there's a whole other experience that's like a very lean gain where you can go as low as 0.1, 0.2. It's just not gonna be optimal. It's not gonna, it's gonna take a while. You're you may not notice as as many results. That's more of a special use case. Most of you I'm talking to probably need to push it a little bit up to that 0.3 to 0.5% body weight a week. So if you're let's say 160 pounds, that's like a half pound a week. Like I said, about two pounds, a little over two pounds a month. So that'd be like a kind of a thin male, a skinny male, or kind of an average female, whatever. I mean, people are all over the place. But for a 160-pound person, that would be like 12 to 20 pounds over six months. And if you think about it, 12 pounds, but more than half of that is muscle. That's six, seven, eight pounds of muscle. That is so worth the three, four, five pounds of fat because you're actually gonna look leaner even before you go through the fat loss phase, most likely. If not, you're at least gonna look more muscular, you're gonna be stronger, you're gonna be so recovered that when you cut it off, it's just gonna be beautiful. All right. How do you set up your nutrition? Well, you're gonna have a mild surplus because if you're aiming for a body weight increase, you're gonna have an increase, you're gonna have a surplus. Now, two ways to do this. You can use an app like Macrofactor, or you can calculate 2,500 calories per pound. Not 3,500, 2500. This is my the special rule that I use when you're gaining, because muscle is denser than fat, and remember you're trying to gain a bunch of muscle along with the fat. When you lose fat, you're trying to lose mostly fat. So when you gain, use 2,500 calories per pound that you're trying to gain. So if you're trying to gain two pounds a month, then that's 5,000 calories a month above maintenance divided by, you know, 30 days in the month. So it's not that much. It might be like a couple hundred calories a day at most for most people, but it might be a little more than that. So that's nutrition. Proteins, protein, protein. 0.71 gram per pound, always my rule of thumb, no matter what phase you're in, for most people, most of the time, with some small exceptions that we don't need to get into on today's episode. So 0.71 gram per pound spread throughout the day because of practicality. All right. Training is just train your butt off, use progressive overload. Almost any program is going to work as long as you are adding weight, reps, volume over time, track your lifts, you know, get those compound movements and those big movement patterns in there along with isolation, and train three to five days a week. That's it. You know, get close to failure most of the time. The typical rules, again, we're not gonna explain all of that today. I've I have full episodes on that topic. Cardio, I would keep it, you know, low to moderate. Get get your eight to ten thousand or more steps a day. And then, you know, beyond that, totally optional cardio, depending on what your goals are. And then mindset, you know, your metric is not the scale, even though you need the scale to know if you're gaining, right? It's the performance, though. Are you getting stronger? Are you recovering well? Are you hitting your protein? Are you is your biofeedback all training like you would? I don't want you to accidentally dip into diets as you're trying to build. And then after this six to nine to 12 months of progressive, continuous growth, really stable body composition, solid nutrition, and now you're ready to cut, right? And then that's when you enter a deficit with more muscle, higher baseline metabolism, better insulin sensitivity, better psychological framework. It's gonna be awesome. And then the cut itself, you may have heard this me tell you this before, but I like eight to 12 weeks for most people. But we are doing a workshop, let's say, I don't know when this, we already did it when this episode comes out, I think, on getting lean, get lean in 45 days. You can come into physique university, witsandweights.com slash physique, and you can still get the replay. And also when you join now, immediately when you join, you get access to our eight-week course that will walk you through a mini cut. So a mini cut is more of a six-week, slightly aggressive fat loss phase. So if and when you're ready for that, hop on in. Okay, $27 investment, wits and weights.com slash physique. It's $27 a month, and you get access to all that stuff. The goal is never to be in a deficit forever. It's to be in a deficit maybe a fifth of the time, at most a fourth of the time for the rest of your life, until you get to your goal, you know, leanness, and then you probably never have to use a deficit ever again. Okay, now I want to close this episode with a reframe to tie this all together. Most people think of metabolism as something that happens to them as they age, right? Or genetics. You have a fast metabolism, metabolism, slow metabolism. You're lucky, you're not lucky, it's hormonal, it's menopause, whatever. And I think that holds people back. I think that's holding you back because your metabolism is something you have a huge amount of control over and that you can build. Starting however old you are, it doesn't matter. And the the best metabolisms are the result of years of training, of recovering, of having solid nutrition, the decisions you make about how you treat your body. And when you build muscle, you are literally increasing that capacity, right? And your ability to eat more food, maintain your body composition, support the tissue that drives growth in your body. Anabolism is what it's called it. Tissue growth, right? Thriving, growth, repair, abundance. Doesn't that sound so much better than the opposite? So when you train hard, when you recover well, you're reinforcing those adaptations. You're training your body and your nervous system. You're training your nervous system to function at a higher level, to use more of your muscles, to put nutrients where they're supposed to go, instead of being a lazy grifter floating on the couch, aim, aim, you know, wandering mean mean meaninglessly and aimlessly through life. Okay. Tried to string together a poetic sentence there and I couldn't do it. A faster metabolism is not a gift, it's a skill. It's a skill. And you could develop that skill. You can develop that skill. So a building phase is a huge investment in what I'll call sustainable leanness. Sustainable leanness. When I talk about lean, I'm not talking about skinny. I'm talking about having muscle, upgrading your operating system, your hardware, and your software, which is your nervous system, and now, you know, being able to draw from that bank account for the rest of your life, if you will, to mix metaphors here. Right. So for those of us that are getting older, if you're over 40, over 50, over 60, it's probably most of this audience. This matters even more to start this now, right? You're at a point where muscle loss starts to accelerate if you don't actively fight it, fight it, sarcopenia and all those issues, osteoporosis, et cetera. So every time you, every year you spend just trying to cut off a few pounds, you're losing ground. You're losing ground. Building your muscle now, it's not just about looking better in six months, even though ironically, you probably will. You probably, you're not gonna actually look fatter, you'll probably look stronger and better. It's it's it, but it's preserving that functional capacity for the for the rest of your life, right? So stop trying to earn the right to build by just, I just need to get to this weight. I just need to lose weight first. Don't just stop. Just get that out of your head right now and start building such your cuts. Cuts don't cost you everything you work for and you actually can do this the right way, right? And and just one last thought I have just I'm sorry, indulge me. It is my podcast. It is more fun. It is more fun to build first, right? And I know it sounds trivial. We're talking about science and hormones and metabolic adaptation, but the reality is the people I know who do this, they have so much fun. I kind of mentioned that already. We have so many awesome people in physique university who are just like sharing every day how much fun it is to eat more and work out and feel better when you work out and set PRs. I mean, I see wins all the time now about PRs from somebody who was focused on losing weight when they join, and now they're focused on getting stronger. Their mood is better because they're not chronically underfed. They're building something visible that can be measured, you know, in multiple ways than just the scale, right? And then and then you could do your cut from a position of strength and do it pretty efficiently and do it pretty easily almost. And that again is where I do love my six-week mini cut for people who have done this the right way. So if you're there sitting thinking, I need to lose 20 pounds and then I'll focus on muscle, I want you to mix that around, flip it around, and tell yourself I'm gonna build muscle first, build a better machine before you ask it to run on less fuel, if you will. Right. And then the cut will be easier, the results will last longer, you'll enjoy the process of getting there. And before I let you go, remember I did promise you a way to find out are you actually training hard enough to build muscle? And this is a technique you can use in your very next training session right after this. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, Calocurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CaloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. All right, here is that quick tip you can use in your very next workout to make your building phase more effective to figure out if you are training hard enough. All you have to do is pick one compound lift. Might be your squat, your bench, your deadlift, pick a heavy one. In this case, I'm asking you to pick one of your hard, heavy lifts. And instead of stopping at your programmed reps for the last set, I want you to do an AMRAP. Amrap means as many reps as possible. And you're like, what the f this guy who who who taught who who tears down CrossFit and is all about training low and slow, and I'm telling you to do an AMRAP. Yes, this is something I learned from Alex Bromley, who's very much a volume and set-based progression type guy. And one of his programs, I did amraps on the last set. Now that was every major exercise. Well, it wasn't every single one, but it was all the big ones. And by doing an MRAP, you can tell how many more reps you're actually able to do. So let's say you programmed in three by five squat. Now, this isn't something to do on a like starting strength style program where you're just trying to get sets across and then going up in weight. This is more of a hypertrophy type program when you're an intermediate or even a late beginner, but you can do this anytime as a test. Three sets of five. On set on the third set, instead of doing five, you just keep going. Six, seven, eight. If you could do 12 or 13 or 14, you know that you were nowhere close to failure on that fifth, on that, on those previous two sets. A lot of you think you are and you're not, right? And so if you programmed, you know, six to eight reps on the last set, keep going past eight and see how far you get. If you get to 15, 16, 17, hey, you were nowhere close. If you could barely do nine, you're probably pretty darn close. Not only does it tell you if you're training hard enough and how many reps were in the tank, right? R-I-R, reps in reserve, it will give you the confidence to know how much you can jump next time. Like if you only hit an extra rep, you're probably right where you need to be, right? If you could easily do double the reps, well, then it was way too light. And you can convince yourself with data right in the moment, oh, well, that was way too light. I need to like jump up by, you know, 15% next week instead of just say 5% or 10%. So try that out. Do an amrap on your final set of a particular lift to give you objective feedback on whether you're actually pushing hard enough to build muscle, and then make sure to go up the next week to close the gap. And then you can start progressing in a more normal line from that point on, right? Try this, try it this week on one lift. Do it, do it. All right, that's it. I want you to keep using your wits. I want you to keep lifting those weights. And remember, the best time to build muscle is Ollie right now. Talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Why Appetite Changes After 40 (And How to Still Lose Fat) | Ep 428

Register for the Get Lean in 45 Days workshop at live.witsandweights.com to learn exactly how to drop 8-12 pounds of body fat in 45 days while managing hunger the right way.

Try Calocurb natural appetite control (40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger). It's prescription free, affordable, and fast acting. Get 10% off:
https://witsandweights.com/calocurb

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Hunger hits different after 40. 

You might feel like your body is actively fighting against fat loss: cravings show up more often and deficits feel harder even when you're doing everything right.

This episode breaks down what actually changes with appetite and metabolism as you age (spoiler: it's not your metabolism crashing) and what you can do about it. 

You'll learn why muscle loss affects hunger more than you think, how hormonal shifts in men and women specifically impact appetite regulation, and the practical midlife realities that compound the problem.

Plus, learn an evidence-based swap that can improve fullness without changing what you eat, just how you eat it. 

Episode Resources:

• Register for the Get Lean in 45 Days workshop: live.witsandweights.com

• Try Calocurb for 10% off: witsandweights.com/calocurb

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why hunger feels harder to manage after 40
1:36 - The metabolism myth and what really changes with age
4:06 - How hormones affect appetite differently for men and women
8:38 - Recovery, NEAT, sleep, and life complexity in midlife
16:09 - 4 tips to manage appetite over 40
22:31 - Why building capacity before a deficit makes fat loss easier
25:37 - Bonus tip based on new research

Midlife appetite can feel like a moving target, and if you’re over 40 you’ve likely noticed hunger hits harder, cravings pop up more often, and old tactics stop working. The surprising truth is your metabolism itself remains relatively stable through midlife when adjusted for muscle mass, yet muscle loss changes the equation. Losing 3–8% of muscle each decade shrinks your body’s fuel tank, reducing glycogen storage and pushing you to feel hungry sooner. Add lifestyle shifts—less movement, more stress, and worse sleep—and total daily energy expenditure dips, making deficits feel like a grind. Understanding this system is the first leverage point: fat loss difficulty at midlife is far more about appetite regulation than a “broken metabolism.”

Hormonal changes layer on top of muscle loss. In men, testosterone declines about 1% per year after 30, correlating with reduced muscle, increased abdominal fat, and shakier insulin sensitivity that can drive energy crashes and hunger. Women face perimenopause and menopause shifts in estrogen and progesterone that disrupt leptin, insulin sensitivity, mood, and fat distribution. Meanwhile, higher visceral fat blunts leptin and reduces satiety signals like GLP1 and PYY, so the same meal satisfies less. None of this is destiny. With the right inputs—strength training, protein strategy, sleep hygiene, and movement—you can restore signaling, reclaim satiety, and make a deficit tolerable without relying on constant willpower.

Practical realities matter. Recovery takes longer, so trying to match your 25-year-old training volume spikes stress and cortisol, sabotaging sleep and appetite. NEAT tends to drop from desk time and life demands, yet those steps are your buffer that keeps the deficit humane. Sleep disruption—night sweats, apnea, racing thoughts—can push 300–500 extra unconscious calories the next day by raising ghrelin and lowering leptin. The fix is not a single hack but a system reset: train smarter, walk more, and protect sleep with consistent wake time, a cool dark room, and medical support when needed. When your base is stable, hunger becomes manageable, not a daily fight.

Four high-leverage strategies make the biggest difference. First, resistance training is non-negotiable. Heavy compound lifts build and preserve muscle, improve insulin sensitivity, enhance leptin signaling, and release myokines that help suppress appetite. High-intensity strength work beats endless cardio for hunger control, which is why lifters often report steadier appetites. Second, prioritize protein timing. Aim for at least 30 grams at breakfast and include protein in each meal to suppress ghrelin, stimulate GLP1 and PYY, and leverage a higher thermic effect. Third, fix sleep like your results depend on it—because they do. Address symptoms, keep consistent sleep-wake times, and reduce pre-bed screen time to stabilize appetite hormones. Fourth, raise NEAT: an extra 1,000–3,000 steps is often easier than cutting more calories and keeps your margin of error wider during a cut.

Build capacity before you cut hard. Most plans jump straight to a deep deficit and then try to white-knuckle the hunger. A better approach is to increase your ability to tolerate the deficit first: add muscle, normalize sleep, raise steps, and tighten protein and fiber habits. Then, when you actually reduce calories, hunger is lower, energy is higher, and adherence improves. One compelling new finding supports a simple, practical swap: choose solid foods over liquid equivalents. Emerging research shows solids trigger a surge in LAC-Phe, a natural appetite suppressant, while liquids with the same calories do not. During a fat loss phase, swapping shakes for solid protein like Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, eggs, or lean meat often increases fullness without changing your macros. Put it together and the path is clear: train heavy, front-load protein, sleep like it’s your job, walk more, and favor solids. Midlife hunger can be tamed when your system works for you, not against you.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you're over 40 and you feel like hunger has become harder to manage, like your body is actively fighting against fat loss, you're not imagining it. Today I'm covering three things. First, the biological shifts in hormones, muscle mass, and appetite signaling that change after 40, and why these shifts make calorie deficits feel harder even when you're doing everything right. Second, the practical realities of midlife that compound this problem, from recovery changes to a decline in neat to sleep disruption that sabotages your appetite. And third, targeted strategies that address these specific mechanisms so fat loss becomes manageable and not so miserable. 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, founder of the Fitness Lab app, and today I'm speaking to those of us who are in our 40s, 50s, and beyond, where you've noticed that fat loss feels different now, that hunger tends to hit harder, that cravings tend to show up more often, and the things that worked maybe in our 30s or in our 20s do not work anymore. It's not just about the weight loss, it's not just about the hormones. There's a system, systematic level of things happening with age that are important to acknowledge. And once we understand that, we could do something about it. Now, you've probably heard that your metabolism, well, okay, let me do two things. First, you may have heard metabolism crashes when you get older. I think that's a lot of the fear marketing. In reality, your metabolism stays stable between the age of 20 to 60. When accounting for muscle mass, that is a true statement. But what actually happens, and this is why people think it's crashing, is that most of us are experiencing lower energy expenditure because of the loss of muscle mass and the changes in our life that cause our total daily energy expenditure to decrease from stress, from lack of movement, and things like that. And so if we can connect that to how we eat, to our cravings, to our hunger, we can find out exactly where the problem is so that we can address it. And I've supported hundreds of clients, I'll say at this point, if not thousands, through the podcast as well, who have been able to conquer what was always, you know, binge restrict cycles, emotional eating, uncontrollable hunger with just some simple tools and understanding the science and engineering their own physique around that. And that's what we're going to address. So this is episode five in our January appetite series of eight episodes, where we're connecting the dots between everything we've covered hormones, sleep, protein, fiber, metabolism, and we're applying it to what happens specific to aging and appetite, right? So after 40, what is really going on? And 40 is just an arbitrary number. 35, 45, doesn't matter. This inevitably happens to all of us, but we can do something about it. And then stick around to the end because I've got a simple swap based on brand new research that can improve your fullness without changing what you eat, just how you eat it. So stay tuned for that. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by Calocurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Callocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. Calllocurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calllocurb for 10% off your first order. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calllocurb. All right, so what actually changes as we get older when it comes to appetite? All right. So let's talk about muscle mass and metabolism, metabolic capacity. Because starting in your 30s and accelerating after 40, you lose roughly 3 to 8% of muscle mass per decade if you're not actively resistance training. You may have heard the stat before. This is called sarcopenia. And it's not just about the muscle mass, it's the function that goes along with that muscle mass. And so it creates a cascading problem. Muscle tissue, it's not just sitting there looking pretty, right? It's very metabolically active. It affects how well you store glycogen, how your body responds to your carbs and insulin, how quickly you feel fueled versus depleted after meals. Yep, you heard that one right. Less muscle means you have a smaller G tank, smaller tank of energy. And so you get hungrier sooner because your capacity to store and utilize fuel has decreased. Think about that. Normally I talk about muscle mass as this like gas-guzzling engine, but it's also kind of a storage mechanism for nutrients, where if you don't have as much muscle, you might get hungrier more frequently and sooner. So just having more muscle can make you less hungry. Isn't that interesting? It's very interesting. It's why some of us who actually gain a lot of muscle have trouble sometimes not being able to eat enough sometimes because we don't have as big of an appetite. So the reality is that when you're losing muscle, it reduces your BMR, it increases your hunger, and your total output drops because there's less tissue. And so this is the biggest variable as to why your metabolism really isn't stable, because we say stable relative to muscle mass, but you've lost muscle mass. So this is one of the things that's misleading for people. And then it gets compounded for certain situations like the drop in reproductive hormones for women and the overall reduction in movement in general, that we're going to address a little bit later in the episode. Now, on the hormone side, for men, testosterone declines around 1% a year after 30. And we know lower testosterone correlates with less muscle mass, increased abdominal fat, worse insulin sensitivity, and the swings in blood sugar that result can drive more hunger. I'm gonna say it over and over on this podcast: spikes in blood sugar aren't the problem. It's what those spikes in blood sugar can drive in terms of hunger and energy crashes, and your long-term blood sugar based on your insulin sensitivity and your overall health. Healthy people who lift weights and have muscle can have large blood sugar spikes throughout the day, and it's no big deal. That's my point. So these are important to understand. For women, perimenopause and menopause shift estrogen and progesterone, also testosterone, but those are the big ones in ways that disrupt the leptin signaling, your insulin sensitivity, your mood regulation. And this leads to more hunger, more intense cravings, especially for carbs, and then body fat redistribution toward the midsection. Um, just as a side tangent, you're gonna love my conversation with Dr. Maria Sophocles in February, which is all about estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone for women. Okay, and then the other piece of the hormones here is the thing we've been talking about a lot lately, the hunger hormones. So when your body fat goes up, especially your abdominal or your visceral fat, your belly fat, your leptin sensitivity goes down. And then your brain thinks that you are running on empty even when you're eating enough food, supposedly, right? You you're supposed to be eating enough, but your brain doesn't think so. And this is one of those disconnects people have. And, you know, your GLP1 and your PYY, which are hormones that tell you you're satisfied after eating, also show reduced secretion or sensitivity. So you feel hungrier and feel less satisfied from the same amount of food. Now, none of these changes I just talked about are inevitable. They are inevitable if you're not doing certain things, but we're gonna do the right things, aren't we? We're gonna give you the right inputs for this, you know, aging body that we have. We can't help what we can't control, but there's a lot of things we can control. So I want to now talk about some of the practical realities of being older. That many of our 20-year-old brethren are the boys and girls out there, I'm sorry if that belittles you. Um, if you're younger and listening to this, please keep doing so. You're gonna learn a lot to be prepared for when you're in your 30s and 40s beyond. But there are practical realities, guys. This is no surprise to those of you listening to this show. The first one is that recovery takes longer, period. Your ability to recover from training is not what it was at 25. Okay, this affects your appetite management because if you can't recover, you're more stressed out, and that affects your cortisol, that affects your sleep, and it just gives you a higher level of systemic stress that tells your body we need to get more energy somewhere, so I'm gonna make you hungry. And so if you're trying to train with the same volume and intensity that you used in your 30s, and yet you're feeling more fatigued and you can't recover and the sleep's not there, you're probably creating a stress load that is making appetite harder to manage. So keep that in mind, okay? Those of you doing all the cardio, keep that in mind. Okay, the next thing is that the decline in NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, tends to drop, or I said the decline tends to drop, but neat tends to drop in midlife. And a lot of this is just our lifestyle, right? Career demands, family obligations, more time sitting at a desk. Part of it is also biological. Your body naturally moves less as you age unless you're consciously counteracting it and being active and walking and getting up off your butt and going in strength training. And all of this matters for your appetite because lower neat means you're burning fewer calories. And that just means tighter margins when you're in a deficit, and then everything feels harder because you can't eat as much and that buffer is not there. This is why I always tell people an extra thousand steps is gonna be a lot easier than cutting another 50 calories for most people. And then finally, not finally, I'm gonna say the next thing is sleep disruption. We covered this in episode 426, but it bears a quick repeat in that sleep quality often declines as we get older. And a lot of us have specific issues like night sweats, hot flashes. We have the extra stress that keeps us up, and you know what, you know that those thoughts on your mind that keep you up. Some of us have insomnia, some of you have sleep apnea. By the way, if you suspect at all you have sleep apnea, definitely look into it, get a diagnosis, and consider a CPAP machine. That's been a game changer for a lot of folks. Even if you're of a healthy body size, you may have a little extra muscle around your neck that's causing sleep apnea. And then all of this, the sleep deprivation increases your ghrelin, decreases your leptin. Right, we talked about all that in the last few episodes. I'm not gonna hammer it again. But but the important fact we discovered from research is that you may consume up to three to 500 calories more unconsciously just because you lacked as much sleep. So if you're waking up unrested most mornings, your appetite management is absolutely compromised before you even start to think about the food side of the equation. The last thing here about our practical nature of us old folks, older folks, because I know many of you are far older than me and you're crushing it, is the life complexity. This is just natural as we get older. We have our career demands, parents that are getting older. A lot of you have parents who, you know, maybe in a nursing home or you're trying to care for them. Teenagers, financial pressures, trying to think about running your business or get ready for retirement or just pay the bills. Each of these adds what I call behavioral noise to the food noise. And then they exacerbate each other. Because then the mental bandwidth required to stick to a deficit gets even smaller, but the demand gets larger. So your ability to like to push through stuff is just so small, but the demand to do it is getting larger because of the other factors. And that's a resource allocation problem. Again, it comes down to math. You guys know I'm an engineer, I always bring it down to the numbers. That's ultimately where it comes down to. Now, before we continue, I do want to tell you about our sponsor for the episode. I hope you guys caught Friday's interview with Sarah Kennedy. It was phenomenal, all about the genes in our gut or the not the gene, well, genetics as well as hormones in our gut and how that affects appetite. Because everything we've been discussing today, leptin resistance, blunted GLP1 signaling, appetite dysregulation that makes fat loss harder as we get older, over 40. Callocurb, who's sponsoring this episode, addresses these mechanisms directly in a tool that is really, really powerful. And I would say falls between doing nothing and doing it all through lifestyle and something like the GLP1 medications. So if you're looking for a 100% natural supplement that can really help here, give Callowcurb a shot. It uses what's called a marisate. It's a patented hops extract. And it was developed with the New Zealand government, okay, not a profit-making enterprise, but actually funded by the government in New Zealand over 15 years, $30 million in research, randomized controlled trials. And they were looking for a plant extract that could naturally activate your gut brain signals. And they found one in bitter hops. It activates your natural GLP1, right? These are the same things that become blunted as we get older and are related to food noise and, of course, are tied to the weight loss meds that we've heard so much about, so that you can feel full, faster, and stay control in your appetite, especially when you're in a fat loss phase. The studies are really powerful. They show that callocurb reduces cravings quite a bit. 40%, hunger by 30%, and average calorie intake by 18%. If you take it at least an hour before you eat. And I like that it doesn't require prescription. It's very simple, it's just oral capsules. And I think it complements the strategies that we're covering today really well, rather than replacing them. And I'm going to be using this myself for my upcoming mini cut. If managing appetite has become the hardest part for you when it comes to fat loss, especially now that you're over 40 and this is just getting harder and there's a lot of stress in your life, I think Calo Curb is worth trying to take the edge off and help along the way. Go to wits and weights.com slash callow curb for 10% off. That's witsandweights.com slash calllocurb. That's C-A-L-O-C-U-R-B. The discount should apply automatically. Link is in the show notes again. Go to witsandweights.com slash calllocurb. All right, so now let's get into some of the strategies that work. And again, I just talked about our sponsor, but I think it's important to understand that lifestyle along with tools can be a really powerful combination. So given everything we've covered, what actually helps? I'm gonna give you four tips. Tip number one, resistance training is non-negotiable, which is something I say constantly because it's the foundation. And if you're new to the podcast, welcome. Sear this into your brain. If you're not new to the podcast, continue to keep it seared in your brain. It's not just about building muscle, guys. It's protecting your entire metabolic and insulin and appetite regulatory system. When you lift weights, you improve insulin sensitivity. That means less blood sugar volatility, ups and downs, fewer hunger spikes. You improve leptin sensitivity because you shift body composition toward more muscle and less fat, and you release myokines, which are signaling molecules that come out of your muscle tissue and they communicate with your brain and your gut. A study in 2024, so this is just a couple years ago, in the journal of the Endocrine Society, found that high-intensity exercise also suppresses ghrelin significantly more than moderate exercise, and that women may be overly responsive to this effect. And so when we say high intensity, though, we want to balance it out with the negatives of certain types of exercise. And so strength training and heavy compound lifts actually fit this role. They are doing all these things for you, killing two, three, four birds with one stone. They're helping you build muscle. They're also suppressing appetite because they meet the qualification of high intensity in this context because of the myokine signaling. And they really, really help with hunger. I mean, they it really does. People that I've worked with who lift weights find that it tremendously regulates their hunger signals. Whereas those who do a lot of cardio find they are a lot more hungry and they eat more. They overeat very often. So if you're over 40, if you're not doing progressively progressive overload-based resistance training, right? Strength training, lifting weights at least twice a week, but ideally three, if not four, this is your highest leverage intervention. All right, tip number two is protein timing. Now, you'll hear a lot of stuff online that, well, we know that the amount of protein is more important than the timing. And that is true from a muscle protein synthesis perspective. But from a hunger perspective, having protein at every meal can be extremely helpful. Okay, from a practical standpoint, it's going to reduce hunger through multiple mechanisms with the hormones that we've talked about in the last few episodes. But just for a quick rundown, it suppresses ghrelin, stimulates GLP1 and PYY, and it has a higher thermic effect, right? It burns a few more calories. But the other thing we talked about was front-loading your protein to improve your appetite because GLP1 secretion tends to be stronger in the morning. And this aligns with circadian biology, right? Your day-night cycle. And for a lot of people, it sets a better tone regarding your hormone regulation for the rest of the day. It may not be foolproof for everyone. You've got to experiment with these things. But I would aim for at least 30 grams of protein at breakfast to get started as my tip for today. Okay, that's like four eggs or you know, Greek yogurt with protein powder, something like that. Tip three is really about sleep. If sleep is your biggest problem, whether it's from the hormones, from stress, from poor habits, from sleep apnea, as we mentioned, I think fixing this will do more for your appetite than anything else if you're already like training and you're already eating well and eating protein. I would say, like for women in perimenopause, dealing with things like night sweats. Okay, I hear it, ladies. I know the night sweats of hot flashes can be brutal. Just talk to your doctor or your, you know, specialist, functional doctor, whatever, about the options. It doesn't necessarily mean you need hormone replacement. There are, you know, there are ways to deal with the symptoms of hot flashes and night sweats. There's a lot of options, both over the counter and supplement. There's even some interesting devices like the ember bracelet, stuff like that. And so for everyone, no matter your man or woman or whatever age, having consistent, I think we talked about it before, a consistent wake time. Bedtime, yes, but wake time is super important. A cool dark room, limiting screens before bed, all that stuff is gonna help. All right, and then strategy four or tip number four is really about your neat. If you are not getting a decent amount of steps, this is another high leverage piece. Where if you're getting like three or four thousand steps, that's a huge red flag. You've got to jack that up to at least seven or eight, and ideally in the eight to ten range. I'm sorry, I've seen comments on YouTube. Somebody's like, well, not everybody can get that many steps. And I've talked to clients who are like, my life is too difficult to get that many steps. You know what? We find a way. We find a way, there's ways to do it where you're multitasking, or you make the steps a little harder, so you don't need as many quantity of steps, right? But you still get the benefit of the steps. You know, there's there's stand up desks, there's walking treadmills, there's treadmills in your house, there's pacing around, there's, you know, I can go on and on. You know, finding the time, getting up a little earlier, tacking it on to workouts. I could do whole episodes just about how to get more steps. All right. Just a quick tangent. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, I really want to implement. A fat loss phase and have better hunger management. I love everything you're saying. What do we do about it? All right. I wanted to tell you this because it's happening tomorrow. This episode comes out January 19. Tomorrow, January 20th, I'm hosting a workshop called Get Lean in 45 Days. It's a live workshop, but a replay will be available. So you can get the recording. If you can't make it live, but you have to register. I'm going to walk you through exactly how to drop 8 to 12 pounds of body fat in 45 days, but doing it the right way, managing your hunger the right way, including some interesting tips in there about refeeds and flexibility. So you can, again, do it without feeling as hungry. So if you sign up at live.witsandweights.com, you're going to get the guide, you're going to get the workshop, the replay, a week-by-week execution roadmap, the training template I talked about earlier this week called Chisel. Look for that in your feed if you didn't hear if you didn't see that. It's very, it's like a five-minute episode about my fat loss workout program. Troubleshooting frameworks for plateaus, hormones, life, all the stuff we've been talking about in the series. And then here's a surprise. As of this week, I've also dropped a companion guided course that goes along with the workshop. It's actually going to come out, actually, no, it's today. It's live today. So if you're in there, if you sign up, you'll get instant access to that and chisel, as well as the workshop itself to support the cut. All right. The workshop is tomorrow, January 20 at 12 noon, and spots are limited, so go to live.witsandweights.com to grab your spot. Link is in the show notes. Go to live.witsandweights.com. All right, let's bring this all together now. Okay. The conventional approach to fat loss looks like this. You create a deficit, you battle some hunger until you reach your goal. Honestly, that's what it is. And if you listen to some of the best of the best, you listen to the RP guys, if you listen to Mass, if you listen to, you know, Stronger by Science, all those guys, arrowchelms, they'll say, look, when we work with physique competitors, they have hunger. Like you can't get away from hunger. It's the amount of hunger and what you're doing to mitigate it so that it's reasonable and you're not just relying on, you know, willpower or resisting your hunger or just feeling ravenously hunger all the time. Right. And most of you listening are not trying to compete in physique sports. You're just trying to lose some fat. So when you are hitting these walls, right, you tend to do these cycles, the yo-yos, the losing weight, the regaining it, losing to get regain it again. And because a lot of you aren't holding on to your muscle and you're losing muscle, that also makes you hungrier. The better capacity is to, or the better approach is to build your capacity to handle a deficit before you use or at least maximize the actual deficit, right? And so that means building muscle first. It means optimizing your sleep and stress, using protein, fiber, all these tools, these evidence-based tools, even appetite suppressant if you need it, before relying on just, okay, I'm going to gut it through. So in the in the next episode, just as a teaser, we're going to dive deep into this concept, why building muscle first makes not only fat loss easier, but it actually helps with your appetite. Again, we're going to this is this is an appetite series. For now, I want you to understand that the difficulty of fat loss that you're going through, it's not primarily about your metabolism. It's about how you're regulating literally every day as you live life. What do I mean by that? It's your system that governs how much you want to eat, how satisfied you feel after eating, how much willpower is required to maintain a deficit. Those things, to me, if you can figure them out, right? Then it gets around issues with your metabolism because the metabolic issues are often a result of these issues. I hope I didn't just ramble too much on that. All right. Before I share my closing thoughts, I did promise you a simple swap based on new research that can improve your fullness during a fat loss phase. And it's a really powerful, simple idea, but you may not have thought of it. That's coming up right after this. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, Calocurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CalloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calllocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. All right, here's that bonus I promised. It comes from research published just last year. Scientists at Trinity College in Dublin discovered something that explains why liquid calories make fat loss harder. They found that solid foods trigger a surge in a molecule called LACF. That's L A C P H E. And it's a natural appetite suppressant that your body produces. If you eat sugar-rich dates, for example, there might be an immediate and large LACFE surge. But if you drink a sugar-rich beverage that has the exact same calories, we don't see that surge. And so this could explain why liquid calories drive overeating independent of the fact that they are processed. Does that make sense? Like I my argument has always been, well, liquid protein, it doesn't take as much to digest, so it's not going to fill you up as much. But that's not the only mechanism that's going on. This this surge in this molecule that normally would suppress your appetite is not getting triggered when you're having a liquid version of food. So the practical tip here is just to, especially during a fat loss phase, look for places to swap your liquid sources for solid equivalents. And for many of you, that's your liquid protein shakes. All right. And from that might be your whey protein, or it might be a more complicated, like whey and yogurt and this and that, all blended together. So instead of that, think about a hard, solid food option. By hard, I mean as soft as something like yogurt or cottage cheese, but it could also be some chicken or eggs or something like that. And make sure you're looking at the fat in the eggs and having some egg whites. So instead of a pre-workout shake, for example, have some lean meat. Now I know that might take a little extra prep, a little extra thought, but I would just experiment with that for like four weeks. The same exact calories and the same macros, but swapping out liquid for solid during a fat loss phase and see what happens. I just want you to try, even try for one week. Notice if you feel more satisfied between meals. If you come back and you're like, I didn't notice a difference, fine. But I've had clients who do this and they're like, oh my God, that's the exact change I needed because I've done all the other things. I've increased my fiber, I'm eating plenty of protein, I'm pretty much eating whole foods, but changing that liquid shake to solid protein, you know, maybe it's shrimp. All right, there's so many ideas I can come up with. You can use AI to figure it out too. You get the idea. All right, and that's my tip. That's my tip. Try it out. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your body just needs the right inputs for where you are now. That's the thing you can control. This is Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

Can THIS Plant Extract Activate GLP-1 Like Ozempic? (Sarah Kennedy) | Ep 427

Try Calocurb natural appetite support backed by clinical research. Get 10% off your first order at https://witsandweights.com/calocurb

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Why does hunger sabotage weight loss even with perfect macros? Is appetite control really about discipline or hormone health?

Body recomp, weight loss, and building muscle get complicated fast when appetite refuses to cooperate. I dug into the real biology behind hunger with Sarah Kennedy, founder and CEO of Calocurb, to explore how the gut and brain regulate appetite through GLP-1 and other hormones tied to metabolism and nutrition. We unpacked why calorie deficits trigger powerful biological pushback, how bitter compounds can naturally influence appetite signals, and where these strategies fit alongside lifting weights, protein intake, and evidence-based nutrition.

This conversation reframes appetite as a physiological signal, not a personal failure, and shows how strength training, nutrition, and smart tools can work together. If you’re navigating fat loss, women’s fitness, or strength training over 40, this adds a missing layer most fitness podcasts ignore. It’s a practical lens on appetite control.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

0:00 – Why hunger overrides willpower
4:10 – Appetite hormones explained
8:45 – GLP-1 beyond weight loss drugs
13:30 – Bitter compounds and gut signaling
18:55 – Appetite control during fat loss
23:40 – Women’s hormones and cravings
28:20 – Using tools without dependency
33:10 – Long-term appetite strategies

Episode resources:

• Website: calocurb.com/witsandweights 

• Email: hello@calocurb.com

• Instagram: @calocurb 

• Facebook: @calocurbglobal

• Youtube: @calocurb 

Real hunger is not a character flaw. It is a biological signal rooted in evolution and governed by hormones like ghrelin, GLP1, CCK, GIP, and PYY. When we cut calories, the hindbrain pushes back to protect us, often doubling hunger over months and derailing most diets. Our modern food environment only amplifies this pressure: fast meals, low fiber, and constant cues lead us to overeat before our gut can send fullness signals that typically arrive 45 to 60 minutes after eating. Understanding the timing and pathways of these hormones reframes appetite as a system we can influence, not fight. High protein, slower eating, and fiber help, but for many people, a targeted nudge to gut receptors can shift behavior in a meaningful, repeatable way.

The surprising key lies in bitter taste receptors that line the gastrointestinal tract from stomach to colon. These receptors evolved as a defense against toxins: extreme bitterness in the mouth prompts spitting, in the stomach can provoke ghrelin to dilute the perceived threat, and in the small intestine triggers a powerful satiety cascade to stop intake. New Zealand government-backed research mapped these receptors with 300 human biopsies and screened over a thousand compounds. Only two families meaningfully activated the satiety pathway; the safe and effective winner was a specific hop extract. Delivered to the upper duodenum in delayed-release form, this extract super-stimulates L-cells to release CCK quickly, GLP1 next, and PYY later, creating a 4 to 6 hour arc of fullness signaling without relying on synthetic hormones.

Clinical data makes the case concrete. In a cannulated human trial, the hop extract boosted post-meal GLP1 roughly 600 percent above baseline signaling and produced an average 18 percent reduction in ad libitum calorie intake compared to placebo. That is below the 25 percent average seen with semaglutide but achieved by amplifying the body’s own hormones. A women-only study synchronized to the menstrual cycle found striking results during a 24-hour water fast: no rise in reported hunger by hour 24 compared to hour 16, a 120 percent reduction in cravings, and a 14.5 percent drop in rebound calories when food returned. Because women appear more sensitive to GLP1 signaling, this suggests tailored potential across cycle phases and life stages, including the luteal phase and menopause when appetite and energy needs shift.

Mechanism and delivery matter. If bitter compounds release in the stomach, they can raise ghrelin and backfire. The delayed-release capsule ensures the extract reaches the duodenum, where it engages receptors to send fullness signals to the hindbrain. The extract is produced with supercritical CO2 to remove phytoestrogens, leaving alpha and beta acids plus a trace of essential oil, and shows minimal systemic absorption in bioavailability studies. Less than one percent reaches blood, and only a fraction of that is metabolized in the liver, minimizing drug interactions and focusing action in the gut. Most users take one to two capsules an hour before a main meal; some “super tasters” find one capsule enough, while a transient laxative effect signals an excessive dose.

Positioning this tool within the broader landscape is crucial. Lifestyle still leads: protein-forward meals, fiber, resistance training, and slower eating increase endogenous satiety signaling. The hop extract can serve three roles. As a natural alternative for those avoiding injections, it reliably reduces food noise and portions within an hour. In combination with GLP1 agonists, it can help patients remain on the lowest effective dose and blunt midweek breakthrough hunger. As an off-ramp after discontinuing injectables, it supports the reactivation of the gut-brain axis when endogenous GLP1 is downregulated, reducing the fear and rebound appetite many report. Practical timing helps: morning dosing supports intermittent fasting, while midafternoon dosing curbs evening cravings for sweets or ultra-processed snacks.

Beyond numbers, the psychological relief matters. Many listeners describe calmer meals, less fixation on treats after dinner, and fewer urges for alcohol, likely because the appetite center sits near the addiction center in the hindbrain. While formal trials on alcohol intake are pending, the anecdotal pattern is encouraging. Most importantly, this approach restores a sense of agency. Hunger does not vanish, but it softens into a manageable cue rather than a command. In a world engineered for overconsumption, working with physiology—rather than white-knuckling against it—may be the most sustainable way to eat less without feeling deprived, whether you are navigating a cut, stabilizing at maintenance, or simply seeking peace with food.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you've been struggling with uncontrollable hunger, whether you're at maintenance or a calorie deficit to lose weight or body fat, but your appetite keeps winning, maybe you've looked into GLP1 drugs like Logovi or Mandaro, and for some people, they're a great fit. But maybe you're curious about whether there's another way to work with your body's own appetite signals without a prescription. This episode is for you. Today we're breaking down how your gut controls hunger at the hormonal level, what happens when you stimulate GLP1 naturally versus pharmaceutically, and how one particular plant extract is showing results in clinical trials when it comes to meaningful appetite control. Welcome to Wits and Weight, 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 continue our series on appetite with a conversation about something that most people don't realize that real physiological hunger is closely related to specific hormones, and there are more ways to address it than you might think. My guest is Sarah Kennedy, the founder and CEO of CaloCurb, who is sponsoring our appetite series. And Sarah is a veterinarian by training with over 20 years in animal and human nutrition, an MIT slone fellow, and she led the development of a natural appetite compound backed by over 30 million in research and 15 years of clinical study. We're going to get into details behind that in a bit. Her product works by stimulating your body's own GLP1 production through bitter receptors in your gut. These are the same hormones targeted by weight loss drugs, but through a completely different mechanism. Today you're going to learn why hunger is a biological signal that you can actually influence how bitter compounds trigger a powerful hormonal cascade that reduces appetite and how to think about the full landscape of appetite tools from lifestyle strategies to natural supplements to pharmaceuticals so you can make an informed decision about what fits your situation. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on the show today.

  Sarah Kennedy: 2:11

  Thanks, Renew. It's great to be here.

  Philip Pape: 2:13

  And I'd love to jump straight into the science just to set the stage for my audience of, you know, what is happening in the gut when someone is really hungry or just hungry in general. And then I want to connect that to why bitter things, why compounds related to hops and specifically can connect to that and then affect our appetite. And then we can get into the research as well.

  Sarah Kennedy: 2:35

  Sure. You know, it is, as I said, I loved your introduction because there are so many things that affect us. And, you know, Calicobe, like many other things, is a tool in the toolkit for you. So hunger, what most people don't realize is our appetite control center is in our hind brain. So this is our primitive primal hindbrain, really important through evolution, because this is what made us get out of the caves and go and hunt. So I love this fact. If you reduce your calories by 25%, your hunger will double over four months. And as I said, that is the way to get us out of the caves and to go and hunt something. Because we'd all be lying in our caves going, oh, you know what, it's raining, I'm not going out. So this was driving us forward. So this is why 99% of diets fail. You know, you're really good for a week, maybe two weeks, maybe more, but that primal urge to eat, which is driven by griolin. So grielin is a hormone we call it your hunger hormone. And then when you eat, you know, the grielin goes down. And what most people don't realize is 45 minutes later, when you've eaten, um it your digestion goes into your um upper digestive tract, into your diet out of your stomach, and that's when it signals these receptors to release appetite-suppressing hormones. And there is more than one, uh, in fact, I think, well, there's a lot more, but the ones we know are CCK, which is cholycystokinin, which is a very powerful but short-acting GLP1, so we all know that, GIP and PYY. And these all go to the brain and say, you know, you've eaten, it's okay, you're full. But of course, what happens in a lot of well, all of us really, is we actually eat on the run. How many of us eat on the run? Uh, you know, we eat too fast because that takes 45, at least 45 minutes to an hour to signal your brain. So you eat on the run, you're throwing food down, and of course you eat more, and suddenly you go, oh, I'm full, right? So you remember how your mother used to say, chew 10 times, you know. So those are those things. Uh so you know, and then high fiber foods will give you more of those signals as well. So we don't sit down and eat that much. I look, I'm just as bad as anyone else, always grabbing something sitting at my desk. I'm not listening to my body. So your appetite is actually in your hindbrain. It drives you to go and get something to eat, which was important in evolution, but it is a bit of a liability for us now, uh, because we're so, well, in modern-day developed worlds, we're surrounded by food.

  Philip Pape: 5:30

  We are indeed surrounded by lots of calorie-dense foods. And a lot of the stuff you just mentioned, if the listeners go check out two episodes ago, we got into some of those hormones. But I love how Sarah, how you brought up the evolutionary reason for this and the fact that when we are trying to diet, our body's essentially pushing back, saying, wait a minute, something is lacking. Exactly. Which unfortunately, many of us, you know, we've gained the weight over several decades, most likely, especially around the holidays, right? We gain the weight, and it's like all of a sudden we look at ourselves and we're like, wait a minute, I need to do something about it. And this is where the challenge becomes, okay, crash diets can set you back. Also eating on the run, also just rushing and not being mindful about it, and then not having enough fiber. And I know there's other things like protein that trigger these gut signals as well. So once we understand that, we start to say, okay, there may be some tools we can put in place, which you've already alluded to, like, hey, maybe if we don't rush and we chew our food, potentially. I want to connect that to bitter hops specifically, because I've mentioned to my audience like all the hacks, you know, drinking water before you eat, eating spicy foods, like beyond just the fundamentals. And now that I've met you guys and invited you on the show and we did this appetite series, I looked a lot more into it and was pretty excited about how it works specifically with receptors in the gut. So tell us about that. Where does bitterness come in?

  Sarah Kennedy: 6:55

  Yeah, so um, I'll just go back to the start. So it was 2009, 2010, a group of very talented scientists in New Zealand. So just to give you a little background, all primary research in New Zealand is sponsored by the government. So this is so we get what we call blue sky research. So about 15 years ago, a group of talented scientists, but employed by the government had a hypothesis that they would find a plant-based extract that suppressed appetite. Now, why did they have that? They had that because of historical reasons. Historical reasons were in the um in the times of famine in the Scottish Highlands, Scottish people chewed very, very bitter berries, heath berries, to suppress their appetite. Also, interesting enough, in the Kalahari Desert, our tribesmen will chew very, very bitter cactus before they go hunting to suppress their appetite. That was in fact the origin of Hoodia. So they had this and a few other, and then there'd been some recent work on uh washing mouse stomachs with bitter substances to reduce appetite. So they had this hypothesis, they put into the government a grant called, it was called Foods for Appetite Control, and got $20 million back for a six-year program to look at this. Just some extraordinary work. So what they did was first of all, they took 300 biopsies, 300 human biopsies, to show that we actually have uh we actually have taste receptors in our stomach and guts. Now, no one had actually proven that before. And when these taste receptors are stimulated, they will release different hormones. So these little taste receptors sit in the L cells and they are our receptors. So they literally map from the stomach right down to the lower colon, these bitter taste receptors, and then could show what they released. Hilarious story getting these human biopsies because Dr. Edward Walker, the senior scientist, had to go and hang out in hospital for about two years and go and approach people and go, hey, because you actually needed someone with a normal physiology who was either having an inter a colonoscopy, or I always get it wrong, an interoscopy. And so finally they got these samples, but you know, hanging out in hospitals to get them, uh and showed them all. So once it showed that we do, they mapped them right down through the gastrointestinal tract. They then and what they expressed, they then tested over a thousand extracts, uh natural plant and some and some pharmaceutical ones to test what expressed what made these express when um when something was put on them. Not surprisingly, only two things did. One was a potato oxalate, which is fantastic, but it's poisonous, so you'd be thin and dead. But the other one was hops. And um, because they're plant and food research, they then tested another 50 varieties. Why I say not surprisingly, this is a secondary evolutionary mechanism to protect us. So if you ate something very, very bitter, you would spit it out. If it went to your stomach, you would probably vomit it up, or if it wasn't so much, it would encourage you to release ghrelin because that would say eat more and you will dissipate that potential toxin. But if it goes past the stomach into the upper duodenum or the upper intestinal tract, it's too late then. So what it does is it stimulates these bitter taste receptors to release these appetite-suppressing hormones to go to your brain to say, you're full. So stop eating, you're full. So basically, what they were trying to do is super stimulate these bitter taste receptors. So we're telling the brain, you're full. Only one was the the sort of what they called the eureka, and that was this hops. And then they found the specific hop, which was really the one that was the strongest and the best. Then they did a whole lot of things like dose dependency and so on, like that. So that was sort of the background, which I think everyone skips over, but so incredible to map this whole thing in our physiology and to explain why we had it.

  Philip Pape: 11:45

  Yeah, that is incredible. I I do love understanding evolutionary biology and how the context because we're in a different environment today, as you mentioned before. And if we can kind of leverage, take advantage of, in some cases, quote unquote hack, you know, our own bodies to our benefit, which in an artificial world, sometimes you have to do things that are a little different, you know, just to give yourself an advantage. I wonder how how does so you said bitter and then the hops specifically, and that these super stimulate um the appetite or super stimulate appetite suppressant, I guess, right? Where do other compounds fit relative to this? And before we recorded, I mentioned things like capsicin and saffron, because there's other things people talk about for appetite suppressant. Is there kind of a spectrum of how stimulant stimulating they are?

  Sarah Kennedy: 12:29

  Yeah, um, so what I will say is some of them will stimulate. It's more likely to be in the stomach, um, and that's when you'll get the ghrelin. So with our beta hops, we deliver them to the upper duodenum. So they're delayed release capsules, and they go down to the upper duodenum where they release, and that's where we get this super stimulation. If they released in the stomach, we'd be more likely to get ghrelin. The other thing is a lot of things will say they stimulate GLP1, and yes, they will, but unless you stimulate GLP1 and the other appetite-suppressing hormones over 400%, you will not get a behavioral change. You might get a drop in blood glucose, but you will not get a behavioral change. We stimulate GLP1 and or CCK and GLP1 at 600%, and that's why. So, going on with the story, they then knew that they could get this, they could stimulate these in the lab, but then they took it into a human clinical trial, so the first human clinical trial. And uh it was 20 males, which doesn't sound a lot, but it is what you needed for this clinical, and they cannulated, so they had blood coming out of these people, I think it was like every 20 minutes. So it was a very expensive trial, and they cannulated them and they gave them uh calicurb, it was in those days, it wasn't called calicurb, it was um they gave them the capsule, uh, an hour before an ad libutin or an eat till you full lunch and an eat till your full dinner. Sorry, eat till full lunch and eat and snack. And then they measured the bloods over the next um, I think it was two hours, and they measured these hormones in them. Um, and what you see is this enormous, you see placebo, where when you eat, you will release your own GLP1, and then you see this huge spike where we have super stimulated it to get this 600% increase in GLP1, or twice what we call the postprandial amount or post-eating amount, and then we got an average of an 18% reduction in calorie intake. So the control group ate 18% less than the placebo group. Now, just as a comparison, a semiglutide, which is like an ozempic, will give you around about a 25% reduction. So you can see the difference 18% or 25%. So there is nothing, and I, you know, and I look all the time, but there is nothing in the world that super stimulates like americate, the active ingredient, all this hop stars at 600%.

  Philip Pape: 15:25

  Okay, so that answers a question I had about the threshold and the quantity of how these get stimulated. Related to that compound, americete, what makes it unique? Like, is it regarding what you can tell us? Because I know it's patented, what makes it unique versus just me going and finding these hops in the wild and just crushing them up and eating them?

  Sarah Kennedy: 15:44

  Yeah, well, there's two, there's actually quite a few things with it. It is a specific variety, it is very high in what we'd call alpha and beta acids. So, but what most people don't realize, this is what we use to flavor beer. It was actually used as a preservative and to flavor beer. So very high in that. The other thing we do is we extract it using supercritical extraction, CO2 supercritical extraction. So we take all of the flavonoids, so um, all of the um phytoestrogens. So you're left with no phytoestrogens because we often get asked, well, what about the phytoestrogens? They're all gone. All you're left with is the elferin beta-off acid and a small amount of essential oil. So guys don't really mind that because if they get a burp, it'll be like a beer burp. And they're like, oh, I just had a beer. So um, so that's sort of it's how it's it is it is the variety, it is how it's extracted. The other thing is we put it in a delayed release lycat. Um, so a delayed release catch that does release in the upper duodenum or the upper gut. So it releases 45 minutes later. So you wouldn't want to crush it up, you wouldn't want to eat it. And um, yeah, so there is a number of things that go into it.

  Philip Pape: 17:01

  Right, because like you said, if it gets digested too early in the tract, it actually can release ghrelin, and then you actually get hungrier to try to uh dilute the the poison, the toxic. I get it, cool. That that's explaining a lot. So what about, and by the way, I'm not a big fan of IPAs, I don't drink much at all anyway, because you know, alcohol's not great for you, but uh now they have a good use for those hops, it sounds like, uh, other than IPAs.

  Sarah Kennedy: 17:24

  We always get asked, well, if I drink beer, will I get the same? No, because when you put hops in beer, you actually isomerize them. So you actually cook them, so you've taken away that activity. So unfortunately, beer won't do it either. Might make you.

  Philip Pape: 17:42

  Always looking for that angle to drink. Um, what now, are there other hormones that are triggered through this process besides GLP1? Is it all the other uh appetite-suppressant hormones as well?

  Sarah Kennedy: 17:52

  Yeah, so what's fantastic about it? It first of all releases CCK. Now, CCK, as I said, is a very potent but short-lived uh appetite suppressing. So it does that first. That's the first part of the gastrointestinal tract. Gastroenterologists love it because it actually squeezes the gallbladder. CCK squeezes the gallbladder. So often on the synthetic GLP1s, um, you'll get stasis or your gallbladder won't squeeze, which can lead to gallbladder stones. So gastrointestinal, um, on the gastrointestinal, they love it. The next part it goes down, it releases GLP1, which is your appetite suppressing as well, and much longer lived. And then lastly, in the lower, in the lower part, it releases PYY. So, and that is so you're getting three gastrointestinal hormones, you're getting three appetite suppressing hormones, literally three for the one pill, uh, and it's it has a persistency, so it lasts for four to six hours. So a lot of people say, hey, these hormones get broken down in two minutes. Well, they do, but the thing is, as it travels down, I kind of liken it to a pinball machine, you know, in a pool, it's going down, it's banging against these taste receptors, and it's activating them as it goes down. So it lasts for four to six hours. And I will tell you about the following clinicals, which we know why it lasts for four to six hours with it. So think of this pinball machine. The other thing we get asked a lot was, well, do I have to keep taking it? You know, am I doing this? What we're actually doing is we're upregulating your brain, your gut brain access. So if you think about it, when you inject yourself with a DLP1 um injectable, so the synthetic, and nothing wrong with those. But when you inject yourself, you are down regulating your hormones because your hormones go, ah, you know what? I don't need to do anything. I'm going on holiday now. And you know, we know that. Happens and you know, if you think of it like testosterone, if you inject testosterone, your own natural testosterone goes down. So whenever you use a synthetic hormone, your own hormones decrease. So they go on holiday. So this is why when people come off the injectables or the synthetics, they get this intense hunger because they don't have any natural left and and you know and often regain the weight. So a marisade or calicurb is upregulating. So we like to say we're actually improving your gut brain access. And as we get older, your gut brain access is less because your little taste receptors die, you know, everything we've done to our bodies over the years, uh then so we are improving that gut brain access.

  Philip Pape: 20:50

  Yeah, that's incredible. Upregulating hormones, we're talking, like you said, the GLP1, the CCK, the PUIY. Oh, and and then just to reiterate for the listeners what Sarah was saying, you know, just normal eating increases those roughly, it sounds like 300%-ish, and these double that, and you get 18% reduction in calories consumed versus 25% for GLP1, or zero for placebo, right? Roughly, or maybe it's a little more if you think you're in the study. I think one of the trials, correct me if I'm wrong, showed that females had a stronger response than than men. Is that true?

  Sarah Kennedy: 21:25

  Yeah, that was a fascinating trial, and I'm really proud we did it because less than 30% of clinical trials are done on females, and literally because females have hormones. And I was a bit grumpy. I was a bit grumpy when we had to do it. I was registering in Australia, and if anyone says I've got an Australian accent, I'll be very, very upset. It's New Zealand. No, no, but um, we had to do it for registration, and so it's it was an appetite, it was on hunger and craving. And interesting, when we did it on men, uh, we needed 30 men, it probably took six weeks, right? In females, it took 18 months. The really the and and it was a quarter of a million dollars. The reason is that you had to sink women on exactly the same day of their menstrual cycle, uh, on the same day of their menstrual cycle each month, uh, and on the same day of the week. And you had to do three times with the same woman because, and it was over COVID, because we did placebo, low dose, high dose. So this was a huge trial, and I'm really proud we did it, but I was a bit grumpy at the time, but I'm so proud of it because women are more sensitive to GLP uh stimulation, and they think we don't know, but they think once again it's evolutionary because it protected the fetus, if you could have potentially protected the fetus. So this is sort of the the suggestion behind it. But what we did was a 24-hour fast, so no a water-only 24-hour fast, and we gave calicurb at 16 hours into the fast and 20 hours. So these are the times when you'll be the hungriest in that last eight hours, and we measured hunger, craving, and then rebound eating. So in that last hour, uh eight hours, we got a hundred percent decrease in increased hunger. So at 24 hours, they were no more hungry than they were at 16 hours, and we got a 120% decrease uh in craving. So they were craving less at 24 hours than they were at 16 hours, and then we um we also gave a rebound eating, which was once again an ad libitin, and they ate 14.5% less calories, and that was after 24 hours. So you can actually equate that to, you know, we say a 30% reduction over 24 hours. You can say a 30% reduction in hunger, a 40% reduction in craving, and you know, an average of an 18% reduction in calorie intake. So yeah, it was a superb, absolutely superb response in the woman, and you know, and and leads it on to how it can be used. It doesn't always have to be used for weight. Certainly, you know, in a woman in a menstrual cycle in her luteal phase uh will on average eat 200 calories more a day. And and really, it's normal, it's natural. Your body is preparing in case you're going to implant an egg. So it's preparing and doing all of that. So women can eat up to 600 calories more a day, and you know, it's like that calling PMS, I just want chocolate. So incredible, you know, in that week um of the menstrual cycle. And the wonderful thing about Calicoop, you can come in and out of it because it works in an hour. You know, you don't have to build up a dosage, you don't have to do anything like that. So, yeah, you can say, I'm just gonna take it then. Of course, the other thing is in um menopausal women, uh, just so not fair, is it? I mean, and not only, you actually have to eat 200 calories less a day just to save the same size, because you'll do up an estrogen. So lower metabolic rate.

  Philip Pape: 25:30

  Yeah.

  Sarah Kennedy: 25:30

  Yeah. So, and as I said, you can come in and out of it. So, yeah.

  Philip Pape: 25:36

  No, that that's power. Yeah, I was curious about that, right? Because I mean, I have a lot of clients, women, and I know it individual variation is is large, you know. Some women don't notice much of a change, and others big cycles with their training, with their recovery, and with their um appetite. And that's really powerful. Like you said, it's not just to lose weight and be in a deficit, it could just be to offset periods of hunger. I could see this being a tool when you have specific moments or events where you can use it as well. I've been telling my audience that I'm gonna use it for my next fat loss phase as well to show them what it how it can be used as a tool. And then uh the other thing is I was gonna ask you, have there been any uh long-term cohorts studied with like calorie deficit, you know, or weight loss phases or extreme approaches of that? Like, have there been anything like that?

  Sarah Kennedy: 26:24

  Oh my god. So I'm just smiling at that. And I can't say too much, but um, I raised $3 million three years ago for our largest human clinical, which was a long one. Uh, and it was just done blinded in November, and the results were amazing. And I'm not allowed to say them yet because it has to be published, so we're waiting for it to be published in April, but yeah, I'm over the moon, and um, and that's a long term. So it was 150 patients, men and women, BMI between 25 and 35, uh uh six months, and very little intervention. So they had a group, um, this is what the scientist told me, they have a group tutorial once a month by Skype. So that was the only intervention. No diet, no exercise, no nothing. So yeah, it was unblinded, and I got the top line in um December. So very, very new, and um you really promising result, amazing results. So I'll be able to talk about them in April.

  Philip Pape: 27:34

  What a tease. Uh and of course, and of course I ask, right? Because everybody knows the numbers from the GLP1 agonists, where it's anywhere from I think uh the the basic semaglitide, something like 15, 17% or something, up to like terzepatite and the new retratite, I forgot to pronounce it's like up to 30. Yeah, up to 30 percent. You know, and so the kind of range I think in people's heads are like 15 to 25 percent ish. And so whatever your number is, if if it's even five or ten percent, it's still an improvement. So uh it sounds like you're optimistic. I'm excited for that. Maybe we have you on back again when that happens. I love it.

  Sarah Kennedy: 28:08

  It's it's an amazing result, and I'm not allowed. I'll be absolutely flat, but I can say it's so promising, and I'm over the moon. But you know, it's really interesting. Anecdotally, we get thousands of people coming back and going, this has really helped me. I've lost weight, I've done this, and you know, we know anecdotally uh it's um amazing, but however, to have this long-term cohort and it to be published uh in April uh is is fantastic. So that was it was worth, you know, for three years I'm going, yeah, we're doing it, yeah, we're doing it, and I'd raised all this money and yeah, we're doing it. And then suddenly it was like a month away, and I'm like, oh my god, oh my god. But anyway, yeah, so uh all good.

  Philip Pape: 28:55

  So so the natural next question is will there then have to be a follow-up on uh what happens when they come if they stop using Calicrum for a while, just like when you stop using GLP1s, and you know, we talked about the weight regain and you talked about upregulation of hormones. Is there gonna be a study for that as well?

  Sarah Kennedy: 29:10

  Yeah, we we did, yes, we did. We did a three-month follow-up, and that was um a great result as well. So, but that's all I'm allowed to say.

  Philip Pape: 29:21

  No, it's okay. Listeners, I don't know anything about this. I'm totally asking questions that I'm curious about, so obviously you're you're trying to answer them and they'll be answered shortly, so you guys just have to wait.

  Sarah Kennedy: 29:30

  Everything we do at Calico, we have four values, and the first one is uh we are we are science-led. So everything we say and do uh is science led, and we have a US regulatory consultant that we consult in every well, we have our own scientists here, but we have a US regulatory consultant, so everything we say is legal and backed by a clinical study. Our second value is customer success because if they're not successful, you know, we're not successful. So we always get this little whoop in the office if we get an amazing email back. Um, the other one is simplicity. We literally use all of our money for science. We don't try and expand our product range, we don't try and do anything like that. We are about Calicurb. So, you know, I always say we're a tool in the toolkit. And like you said, protein, protein, protein. You know, I can't talk more about that. Those are other tools, but we don't expand on that. So yeah, we have pretty um, and then our last one is uh passion, but with integrity. You know, it's such a sensitive product, it's such a sensitive area that you, you know, you we have to, and you know, my own story is why did I get into it? Um, you know, I'd battled with food my whole life, and you know, yo-yo dieting always on. And, you know, I don't think I was ever, you know, I'd sort of go in and out. I was never terribly overweight, but just battled that food noise, loving food but hating it, this love-hate relationship. And then I um calico came along, so obviously it resounded with me, and then um I took it for the first time, and I'm like, this is incredible. So now uh what we've been around six years, I can say I've got this absolute um I'm I'm at peace with food. I can eat, but I just don't eat as much. I mean, I still take calicurb. I we used to say, you know, gin is mummy's little helper. I say it's not gin, it's um calicurb because it doesn't matter what you're doing, as I said, you are surrounded by food every day. So you just want to you want to eat it. You just want to eat less of it. You don't want to not eat, you just want to eat less of it and have that control mechanism.

  Philip Pape: 31:51

  Yeah, you mentioned food noise, and and that has become more of a topic of conversation with the GLP ones. When they first came out, um, many of us in this industry were, you know, either skeptical or kind of jumped on that bandwagon of judgment and criticism of, hey, this is a shortcut, this is a quick fix kind of thing. And I think the nuance has come into the equation over the last, you know, couple of years. Obviously, Ozempic came out 30 years ago, people don't realize that or something like that. But but the more recent ones, and we had a I had a guy on this um show, his name is Jamie Sellsler, and he he was 650, approaching 700 pounds. Wow. He just recently got under 300, and he talked about how he needed to cut out that food nose. Now he he didn't he went the pharmaceutical route as he needed to. It was so extreme of a situation. He was at death's door. But I think you bring up an important point in that there's body image, uh, there's the weight loss industry, there's the whole spectrum of like, do you do this naturally? Where do supplements fit in and where does all that fit in? And I'm a big fan of looking at these things as tools, um, not look using them as a crutch necessarily. So having said that, you said you still take Calicurb. What are the experiences of some people taking Calicurb in conjunction with lifestyle changes? And maybe that's from an education standpoint on your end or something else.

  Sarah Kennedy: 33:11

  Yeah, look, there's a number of ways to use Calicurb, but you know, the first one is if you want to use it as an alternative. You know, you just want to go that natural route. You don't want to inject yourself, you can't take the side effects. So absolutely. But once again, as you say, you've got to put lifestyle changes in. You know, I say if you go from eight donuts to if you go from ten donuts to eight donuts, it's really not going to make a lot of difference other than two donuts. But so, you know, you want to be thinking about that, you know, your diet, whole foods, protein is a fabulous, fabulous thing because it does fill you up, particularly as you're getting older, because we do our muscles degrade by 0.5% a year. So absolutely, and and exercise, strength exercise. So as an alternative, just quieting that noise down, allowing you to eat less. A lot of physicians are using it in combination, and that's a really interesting one because they actually interesting, they will start them off on calicurb, and if they're not getting the exact result, they'll then put them onto an injectable so they can start at the lowest dose, but stay at the lowest dose. Because if you think about it, when you're injecting your synthetic hormone, right? But you're using calicurb at the same time, so you're stimulating your natural hormones, so you're getting both. So you don't need because you have to keep up in your dose on the injectables because you're desensitizing your body. You know, you're bathing your body in this high, high, high, high synthetic hormones 24 hours a day for seven days. So you want to keep it lower if you can and increase. And what they're finding is in day five, that it stops that breakthrough hunger. So use it in combination, really great usage like that. And then the third one I say is not an if, it's a must. When you come off an injectable, remember, I said your own natural GLP1 levels are at zero. You know, they're like, hey, I'm still on holiday, I'm not coming back. So T-Trate off using Calicurb and stay on Calicurb until that brain access keeps work, it starts working again. And this is why you just see this enormous rebound, because you know, the hunger comes back. So you've got to restart or kickstart that gut brain access. And interesting, I read a study the other day, um, you know, because we look at the physiology, and I talked to you about the physiology dampening down that natural GLP one or making that go to zero. But there is a there, that's a physiology, but there is a psychology as well. You know, they did this um um measurement on people coming off GLP1. A hundred percent had um fear. Um, fear and hopelessness coming off. You don't want your patients to feel that. You don't want people to feel fear and hopelessness because they've come to depend on them. So, yeah, three alternative uh in combination uh and and absolutely, absolutely coming off.

  Philip Pape: 36:28

  Yeah, I didn't even think about the fact that you could use them in combination, but that makes total sense. And it makes me think of, you know, when we've had members in our in our group who come in on turzepatide, for example, and they're lifting weights and they're walking and they're eating better than they have before, and they want to titrate off of it. And and I have seen that situation where even if they slowly do that, uh the hunger's really ramping up. And I can see Calicurb as a solution, even because one of the solutions I've had to offer is let's just eat more and get back to maintenance or even shift into a bulking phase timed with you coming off because now you're gonna eat more, or doesn't necessarily address the root cause with the hunger. So that's that's fantastic. Speaking of food noise, then I know with the medications, some people have other types of noise and addiction reduced at in the brain. Does it does it have a similar effect because it comes down to GLP1 or is that another mechanism happening in those?

  Sarah Kennedy: 37:25

  Well, no, once again, um we think it does because your appetite center is right by your addiction center, really, in your hind brain. And so we have had a lot of people coming to us and going, you know, I just drink less alcohol. You know, I just drink this. So we think it does, but we haven't done any clinicals on it. So I think it's gonna help. And of course, um, you know, if you feel fuller, you know, um I do know it takes away that sweet craving. So many people say that after dinner treat, you know, when I'm watching television or something like that, I eat less. But yes, we have heard about it with alcohol.

  Philip Pape: 38:01

  Well, now you that brings up another question. You mentioned the the craving. So on GOP1s, some people find like fattier, ultra-processed foods kind of repulsive or they get sick. Uh, do we see again? Do you see some of that as well? Even if it's anecdotally, I appreciate your nuance that we haven't studied all of these.

  Sarah Kennedy: 38:16

  Well, we do, you know, we do know the craving. You know, we did do that clinical in woman. Uh, we were showed 120% less in craving, and it was actually a sweet craving. So we do know that. Um, so yes, and absolutely what we're finding is a lot of people say to us, hey, you know, after dinner I would always sit with my husband and I'd have, you know, some chocolate or something like that. It's sort of a reward for the end of the day. Um, they're like, I don't need it. So I always say, you know, if that's when you're getting your worst cravings, remember with Kilacoube, you must take it at least an hour before a main meal. The reason being is nothing particular, it's just got to go into your, it's got to get past your stomach and go into your upper duodenum. So take it with water. It doesn't matter if it's two hours, it doesn't matter if it's three hours. We only say an hour to make it easier. Like eye intermittent fast. So I take mine about eight or nine o'clock in the morning, and then I can go through till 12 or 1 o'clock, and you know, and I'm I can walk past that muffin, I can walk past that, and I'm fine. But you know, you can take it. But if you're trying to reduce your cautions, take it at least an hour, an hour and a half. And how do you remember that? I always say, look, you know, 10:30 in the morning, you know, if that's when you get your cup of coffee, we get your morning tea. Um I'm very English in saying morning tea, isn't it? That's what we have in um have our morning tea is have your calicurb then. And in the afternoon, you know, about three o'clock, you'll get that slump or you're a bit tired, take your calicurb then with a large glass of water.

  Philip Pape: 39:55

  So that's that's the protocol. And and it make the timing makes sense because you mentioned before it takes about forty five minutes. And it's with the time released to get in there. And then it lasts four to six hours, meaning you have a big window. So I like that. My man is already going to not just a typical like calorie deficit type fat loss phase, but sometimes I'll run with more advanced clients, something called rapid fat loss, which there's different forms of that out there, right? Like protein modified fast. Uh Lyle McDonald has his version of that, kind of this evidence-based, you know, two-week or three-week approach where you're eating almost exclusively protein for like four days and then you refeed, you know, back all the way up to your maintenance calories for a day, kind of recover some leptin and get a little psychological boost and all that. This could be a really powerful tool for that as well. Because now you're talking about slashing calories by like 45% from your maintenance just for a short duration, but some people can't even handle that and they want to give it a shot. So it's in my head, uh, Sarah, as a possibility.

  Sarah Kennedy: 40:49

  It would be fantastic for that. And that's why I say, you know, people use it for all, you know, like people use it when they're going on holiday. Um, you know, because you're on a cruise and they just don't want to eat too much. You know, they use it, but you know, you can come in and out of it. That's what I love. If I've gone to a degastation dinner or something like that, uh, I'm like, I'm not gonna take my calico, you know, because I want to eat my dinner. So, you know, these are these, um, you know, the ways you can use it. Uh, we do say when people start on it, just start, um, there is a a ramp up like and really like everything. Remember, this is a biologically active product. You, um, some people, around 5% of people are what we call super tasters, so super gut tasters. So they will just need one capsule. So we just say start low and slow and build up over two to three days. The the the dosage is two capsules, you know, before a main meal, uh, before lunch and before dinner, if you're reducing calories, but you may be one of the super tasters, the five percent, and you may only need one. And you will know if you've had too much because you'll get a laxative effect. That's all. You will get, you know, it'll be an hour after you've taken it, and it's a laxative effect. So nothing to stress about. The other thing we could ask is to just to let you know, it's incredibly safe. We did some human biome bioavailability trials, and less than one percent is absorbed, well, one percent is absorbed in the bloodstream. So, and of that one percent, less than five percent of that one percent, so 0.001, is metabolized in the liver. So really important because people go, well, I'm taking other drugs, you know, and sometimes supplements can either speed them up or slow them down. We don't do any of that. We work exclusively, we're exclusive to the gut.

  Philip Pape: 42:47

  I'm glad we have this conversation because you covered, I think, all the bases, but I want to give you the opportunity, Sarah. Is there a base that we haven't covered that we should address before we uh before we sign off about Calicurb or about hunger or anything we talked about today?

  Sarah Kennedy: 43:02

  No, I think, you know, I'm I'm terribly proud of it. As I said, it's it came from and it's still owned by the government. Most people don't realize that, and we have the worldwide license to it. Uh so everything we do has to be totally um correct, uh, is because they own the technology uh and they veto um, you know, all well, they do all of the clinical trials and so on like that. So there's no um uh yeah, it's it's really above board. So I'm very proud of it. Uh as you can imagine, I think what it does, it assists us in the modern world. We have a primitive brain that hasn't evolved with the modern world. So it is, it is just really, and once again, to your point, a tool in the toolkit. You have to do other things with it. But you know, these are all things that are controllable if you take that noise out of your head, which remember is evolutionary. It was driving you to hunt. So don't blame yourself. It is it is what we were designed to do.

  Philip Pape: 44:09

  Well, thank you, Sarah. Um, yeah, I think it's a powerful tool with a lot of upsides. And if you're listening or if you're watching on YouTube, feel free to comment below. If you have questions, we'll get them to Sarah. And I will include a link in the show notes to get 10% off CalloCurb, by the way. You guys can go to witsandweeights.com/slash calocurb to try it out. Definitely just give it a shot. You don't even have to subscribe, just grab one, try it out, and you'll know pretty quickly, I think, if it helps you out. So, Sarah, besides that, where can people reach you or the company to kind of learn more about this or just say hello?

  Sarah Kennedy: 44:39

  Yeah, just go to our website, which is www.calacurb-c-a-l-o-c-ur-b dot com. So calacurb. Uh, and look, people always say, why did you name it that NAF name? But the thing is, when you go to name something, it's really, really hard to get something that you can trademark globally. So um, anyway, so Calicurb, or you can just go hello at Calacurb and we'll literally answer your questions um the same day.

  Philip Pape: 45:10

  When I first mentioned this to my wife, she's like, Oh, like curbiocalories. I'm like, Yes, exactly. Because I didn't even notice it the first time. She's just like, boom.

  Sarah Kennedy: 45:18

  Yeah, she's well, because we call the hop extract a marisate. And as I said, never ever let scientists name anything. Because it was named that when they brought it to me, an a marisate, meaning um bitter in Latin and satiation um in Latin, so bitter satiation. But of course, no one in the world can pronounce it. And and but the scientists still love it. They're like, oh yeah, it's such a good name. So I'm like, look, you guys stay with the science.

  Philip Pape: 45:48

  I I hear you. The hormones are hard to pronounce, they're all hard to pronounce. At least I think of my country, America, and I'm like, America America. There we go. That's how I remember it. Okay, cool. That's how I did it. After I listened to like three other podcast episodes and make sure it's said the right way. All right, Sarah. Well, this has been a pleasure. Um, I learned a ton, which is is my first goal because then I know the listeners are gonna learn a lot. And um, thank you again for being on and and thank you for this partnership as well. I'm looking forward to using the product myself personally and then maybe experimenting with different ways that clients and um listeners can use it as well. So thank you, Sarah.

  Sarah Kennedy: 46:19

  I can't wait to come back and talk to you about the um the longer. Yeah, I can't wait to.

  Philip Pape: 46:25

  Yes, yes, yes. That's a great hook. That's a great hook. We're gonna be dying to hear about that. All right, Sarah, been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on, Wits and Wait, four, four, four, four, five, five, and then, four.

2 Biggest Causes of Belly Fat, Sugar Cravings, and Constant Hunger | Ep 426

Try Calocurb natural appetite control (40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger). It's prescription free, affordable, and fast acting. Get 10% off:
https://witsandweights.com/calocurb

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One bad night of sleep can increase your calorie intake by up to 500 calories.

Chronic stress drives fat specifically to your belly. 

And both of these hijack the exact hunger hormones that control whether you feel satisfied or ravenous, even when your nutrition looks perfect on paper.

Discover how sleep deprivation tanks leptin, spikes ghrelin, and reduces GLP-1 (the hormones behind appetite control and fat loss). Learn why cortisol from chronic stress promotes visceral belly fat storage, increases insulin resistance, and amplifies cravings for calorie-dense comfort foods, plus the biological mechanisms behind "food noise" and hedonic hunger.

You'll hear 6 tips to improve sleep quality and 5 to manage stress.

Stick around for a bonus 10-minute pre-sleep protocol you can use tonight to start shifting your metabolism and hormone health in the right direction.

If you've been stuck in a fat loss plateau despite doing everything right with strength training and nutrition, this episode reveals the hidden factors that could be holding you back.

Timestamps:

0:00 – How sleep and stress sabotage fat loss
4:24 – How poor sleep crashes leptin and spikes ghrelin
8:48 – Why sleep deprivation triggers sugar cravings and overeating
12:24 – 300-500 extra calories from one bad night
15:00 – How chronic stress elevates cortisol and NPY
20:44 – Why cortisol drives belly fat storage and insulin resistance
28:18 – Appetite tools that offset poor sleep/stress
33:02 – Understanding food noise and hedonic hunger
37:15 – 6 tips to improve sleep for fat loss
43:30 – 5 tips to manage stress
49:12 – Bonus: 10-minute pre-sleep protocol you can use tonight

Sleep and stress don’t just nudge appetite; they rewire it in ways that make dieting feel impossible. One short night tanks leptin, spikes ghrelin, and suppresses GLP1, so the same meal leaves you less satisfied while cravings get louder. Add the hyperactive reward centers seen after sleep restriction and the quieter prefrontal cortex, and you’re primed to say yes to calorie-dense foods you’d normally pass. Blood sugar swings worsen as insulin sensitivity drops, so you chase quick energy and end up in a loop of spikes and crashes that feels like “weak willpower.” The truth is simple and uncomfortable: when nights get short, biology pushes you to eat more, sooner, and sweeter.

Chronic stress layers on an equally powerful hormonal script. Cortisol elevates neuropeptide Y, driving comfort-food seeking, and directs more fat to the visceral depot around your midsection, which is both stubborn and risky. It also nudges insulin resistance upward, making it harder to access stored fat and easier to store more of it. Over time, stress can blunt leptin signaling so fullness cues don’t land, even at higher body fat. Stress also disrupts sleep, compounding the appetite cascade. That’s why white-knuckle calorie cuts and marathon workouts backfire when life is chaotic: you’re stacking stressors and training your body to fight you while you diet.

Cravings, emotional eating, and the rising “food noise” many people describe are predictable outcomes of this biology. When you’re tired or tense, food cues hit harder and control drops. Advertisers know this; vivid, moving images of pizza, cookies, and burgers tap the hypersensitive reward system and prompt impulsive eating. Over time, this becomes a conditioned loop: stress → eat → relief → guilt → more stress. Some people benefit from GLP1 medications to dampen this signal; others find lighter-touch tools, like bitter-hop GLP1 activators, reduce cravings enough to regain control. But even with these aids, addressing root causes pays the biggest dividends.

Start with sleep. Aim for seven to nine hours and anchor a consistent wake time, even weekends, to tighten your circadian rhythm. Create a wind-down window: dim lights, park screens, quiet stimulation so melatonin can rise. Cut caffeine after midafternoon and keep alcohol low; it fragments REM and deep sleep and inflates next-day hunger. If late-night hunger wakes you, a small protein snack like Greek yogurt or casein can steady ghrelin. These changes shift hormones within days, often cutting snack urges and sugar cravings before lunch. Treat sleep as energy, not a luxury; it’s the lever that makes everything else easier.

Then lower stress load and reactivity. Daily low-intensity walking—especially outdoors—moderates cortisol and boosts mood. Short bouts of breath work, like box breathing, activate the vagus nerve and tilt you into a parasympathetic state you can feel in minutes. If your training volume is high while life is hectic, scale back sets or intensity temporarily; you need enough stimulus to keep muscle, not to bury your recovery. Practice flexible dieting to strip out food rules that spike stress; use ranges, include carbs strategically, and plan for foods you love so decisions feel lighter. Finally, tackle fixable stressors at the source—workload, finances, relationships—because sometimes the best “diet hack” is a cleaner calendar and a better night’s sleep.

To make it practical, try a 10-minute pre-sleep protocol tonight: shut down screens, dim lights, then do four rounds of box breathing (inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4) and sit quietly until lights out. It lowers cortisol in minutes and smooths sleep onset. Do it for a week and watch cravings drop, food noise quiet, and appetite feel less chaotic. When biology stops fighting you, effort starts working again.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  One bad night of sleep can increase your calorie intake the next day by up to 500 calories. Chronic stress drives fat specifically to your belly. And both of these hijack the exact hunger hormones that control whether you feel satisfied or ravenous. Today I'm gonna break down the two biggest hidden disruptors of appetite: sleep and stress. You'll learn exactly why these shift all of your hunger hormones against you and practical fixes that can break the cycle. 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, also the founder of the Fitness Lab app. And on the last episode, we covered the hunger hormones themselves: Graylin, Leptin, GLP1, all those other supporting players that control whether you feel full, you feel satisfied, or you're still hangry. But here's what I didn't tell you that you can understand these hormones perfectly, but still hold back or sabotage your fat loss if two specific lifestyle factors are working against you. And those, of course, are sleep and stress. And stick with me here. I know these aren't sexy, but I really want to dive in here and help you improve these because they are a big struggle for a lot of us. I'm not talking about them as vague wellness concepts. I mean the direct, measurable disruptors of these hormones that we discussed, that you can improve everything else. You can make hunger far less, which means fewer cravings, which means, you know, less belly fat storage and overconsumption, all of this stuff. Because poor sleep has a lot of negative consequences to your hormones specifically, which starts that cascade. They they tank your leptin, they spike your ghrelin, and they do this all very quickly. They do this overnight when you're deprived of sleep. Chronic stress, which we're gonna see, there's a lot of overlap between these, floods your system with a higher level of higher level of cortisol, which not only drives your cravings, but then tells your body, hey, we need to store fat around your midsection. So this is episode four of my eight-part appetite series for January. Obviously, you can listen to any of these in isolation, but if you've missed the first three, go check them out on the feed. If the previous episode was about understanding hormones, today's is about understanding why those hormones might be working against you even when things like nutrition are dialed in. Now, I'm also gonna give you a practical tip at the end that you can use tonight, literally tonight, to start shifting these hormones in your favor. Very simple tip, and I want you to stick around for that. But first, let's talk about why poor sleep might be the real reason you can't stick to your diet. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by Calocurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Callocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. Calllocurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. And I want to start with sleep because this is probably the most underrated factor in fat loss. Here's what happens inside your body when you don't get enough sleep. And I'm not even talking about chronic sleep deprivation. Even one night of, say, four to five hours of sleep can start to shift your hunger hormones significantly. Now, if you're getting one bad night of sleep and that's it, maybe it's not an issue. If you get multiple single bad nights of sleep, even if they're not consecutive, it can definitely start to be an issue. So let me break down this cascade. First, we have leptin. Remember, leptin is your satiety hormone, tells your brain you have enough energy stored that you're feeling satisfied. When you're sleep deprived, your leptin levels decrease. So even if you're not on a diet, remember, this is a lot of these studies are on people who aren't even dieting, that they're actually eating in a surplus in some cases, not on purpose always. For example, the studies had looked at where where fat gets stored when you are sleep deprived. You know, when you're sleep deprived, it goes more to your belly, for example. So one of the things that happened is leptin goes down. Your brain interprets this as an energy deficit, even if you're eating plenty of food. So that's why I mention it, because there are things that cause your body to feel like they are under-resourced, and sleep deprivation is one of them. It's like you're putting your body in a diet without being in a diet. And who wants that, right? And so it responds by making you hungrier. And then, of course, we have ghrelin, which goes up. That's your hunger hormone, the one that goes that goes up before meals and then triggers the growling stomach that makes you want to eat, right? We talked in the last episode about a trick to sit with that between meals and create some intention and awareness. So if you missed that, go listen to the last episode and it's near the end of the episode. But sleep deprivation causes ghrelin to stay elevated for longer and spike higher than it should. So it's not that you're just hungrier, but you're hungrier earlier and more intensely. And some of you are like waking up starving, this could be part of it. You didn't have enough sleep. Of course, there's other issues if you're actually under-eating or you're not eating enough carbs or something like that. But if you're, let's say you're eating enough calories and you're still really hungry early and more intensely, it could be because of a lack of sleep. And then GLP1 decreases as well. GLP1 is this satiety powerhouse, makes you feel makes your meals feel satisfying, right? This is behind appetite, it's behind the weight loss medications. And then when you're tired, when you don't have enough sleep, your body just produces less GLP1. You have the same meal, same macro, same calories, but it doesn't fill you up the way that it should. And then insulin sensitivity drops. Okay, we we know insulin sensitivity is affected by all of these lifestyle factors, by your training, by your diet, by your sleep, by your activity. So when you're sleep deprived, your blood sugar swings become more pronounced. And so when you eat something, your blood sugar might spike higher than it otherwise would. And then you have a bigger crash in your blood sugar, especially if your meals aren't balanced, if you're not walking, things like that, right? They all exacerbate on top of themselves. And when this happens, when you have that crash, that's when you feel that craving for some quick energy, right? Sugar, carbs, anything to bring it back up. And the when all of this is going on, when you lose sleep, when you're sleep deprived, your brain's reward centers become more hyperactive. We see this in brain imaging studies, where after sleep restriction, these reward areas they light up more intensely when you see food. So if the food is like a high calorie, high sugar food, for example, again, none of this stuff is good or bad. We want to put this in context. It's not a good or bad thing, it's evolution. It's what your body is going to seek out when it feels deprived. Because again, sleep deprivation is like being in a deficit and your body's trying to get more energy. While that's happening, you're looking at this food, you're like, oh, I gotta eat that, you're drooling. Your prefrontal cortex, the part that handles decision making and impulse control, we see reduced activity there. So it's like your impulses are taking over. And this is the uncontrollable nature, the emotionally driven nature of, I shouldn't say emotionally driven. In this case, it's it's sleep deprivation, right? It's hormones. So you're hungrier, you're less satisfied by food, you're craving sugar, you're less able to say no. And studies have quantified this. There's one that found that young men restricted to four hours of sleep for just a few nights, saw an 18% increase in leptin and a 28% increase in grillia. I think I mentioned the study last time. They reported significantly increased hunger, especially for calorie-dense, carbohydrate-rich foods. And that's because there's energy in those foods. Another study showed women who slept only four hours ate 300 calories more the next day compared to when they slept nine hours. And there's been many sleep studies that look at that show just ad libitum eating, that means eating without control, increases by hundreds of calories when you're sleep deprived. Right? So is it really about willpower and decision making? Of course not. It's your biology responding to sleep deprivation the way that it's designed to, just like when you deprive it of any other source of energy. And I almost I really think we need to think of sleep itself as like uh it's just another form of energy, right? Along with your food. Now, if if sleep deprivation does this in the short term, imagine what happens when it's chronic. And that brings us to how stress amplifies all of this. Why cortisol might be the reason you're storing fat around your belly. And before I even get into this, cortisol is not a bad guy, it's not a boogeyman, it's not the root cause. It is just a symptom, right? Your cortisol is responding to what you're doing. So I do want to get that out of the way right now. There's a lot of marketing and messaging around trying to control cortisol. Well, that's just putting a band-aid on a symptom. We need to do the things up front that will allow our cortisol to be regulated properly for us. But cortisol gives us a signal of what's happening. So let's talk about stress. Okay, so cortisol is the hormone that connects stress to appetite and body composition. They're all linked because cortisol is released by your adrenal glands when you have physical or psychological stress. That includes the way you perceive stress. Even if someone else would perceive the same stressor as no big deal, if you freak out, if you respond in a way that's much more triggering because of your history, emotional baggage, context, whatever, that also appears to your body like high stress. And it follows your adrenal glands, the cortisol follows a circadian rhythm. It peaks in the morning, tapers off throughout the day. And that's normal, that's healthy, right? This is going back to our evolutionary discussion in the last episode about day-night cycles. The problem here is the chronic stress. When cortisol stays elevated for extended periods, that's when it creates this cascade effect of effects that, for our purposes, are gonna make it much, much harder to lose fat. In some cases, I don't want to say impossible, but honestly, that word comes into play because if all you're doing is cutting calories as much as possible and trying to move as much as possible and you're stressed out of your mind and not sleeping, and your metabolism therefore has tanked, none of that's gonna actually work to lose fat. You're just making everything worse, right? So, how does this work mechanistically? Well, first, cortisol increases NPY in your brain. NPY is neuropeptide Y. We mentioned it on the last episode. One of the most potent hunger-promoting signals in your hypothalamus. Okay, when this is elevated, when NPY goes up, it's not that you know, you don't just want food, you want calorie-dense, comfort food, things like sugars, fats, salts. And this is the biological basis of stress eating, right? It's it's not a deep-seated weakness that you have. It's your cortisol activating NPY makes high-calorie food feel incredibly rewarding. Second, cortisol promotes visceral fat storage. This is the belly fat piece. And I'm sorry to kind of hook you on this in the title, but we a lot of us do care about this, and a lot of us are experiencing a significant amount of belly fat accumulation that we don't like. And for many of us, it's vanity, but there's actually a health reason for it, right? Cortisol tells your body how to distribute your fat. And so if you have excess fat to store, it's gonna store it in the visceral fat around your organs. That's your midsection, your belly fat. This is the most metabolically dangerous type of fat. And one reason that chronic stress correlates so strongly with abdominal obesity. Third, cortisol increases insulin resistance. Okay, higher cortisol means your cells respond less effectively to insulin, and then you have higher circulating insulin in your bloodstream, and that promotes fat storage, makes it harder to access stored fat for energy. And it also contributes to the blood sugar sugar swings that we talked about with poor sleep. And you can't always offset that just because you are lifting weights and you're walking, right? There's or you know, moving around. Fourth, cortisol can cause some leptin resistance. People who have chronically elevated cortisol sometimes still have high leptin levels, which are supposed to tell you you're full, but then they still feel hungry. And it's just because your brain's less responsive to that signal. So even though your fat cells are saying, hey, we have enough energy, the message isn't getting through, right? And here's the connection that ties all of this together chronic stress disrupts sleep, which then amplifies this hunger hormone cascade even more. And this is why I see so many clients or members in Physique University who they hit this wall with fat loss early. Maybe they come to us with having tried different diets or fat loss approaches, maybe working with coaches on like what you're doing all the things and the macros look good, but let's say they're highly stressed at work. I mean, I definitely have a lot of clients who are just super busy go-getter hustlers, entrepreneurs, they work in the news industry, you know how stressful that is today, or they work in IT or you know, customer service or whatever. Maybe they're executives, and they're just not getting that much sleep. And of course, there's this messaging around, you know, the most busy, productive, successful people, you know, get by on five or six hours and then they're up and they're working. Guys, this is a serious impact on our health, on our long-term health. And I need to take this message myself because I often get six and a half, seven hours of sleep, or I probably should be getting eight. And, but some of you are getting six, five, you know, four and a half hours of sleep. Cortisol's elevated, leptin's not as sensitive as it should be, ghrelin is going up, and then you're like wondering why you can't stop thinking about food. Of course, you probably shouldn't be in a fat loss phase if you don't have the sleep dialed in. That goes back to the idea of being ready for fat loss and not adding too much stress to your body. But I know a lot of you aren't gonna listen, so just understanding this is actually a first step, this awareness, right? It's the hormonal environment that we're exacerbating. Now, remember, I mentioned at the top of the episode I'd give you a practical tip you can use tonight. We're still gonna get to that. We're also gonna get to specific fixes for both sleep and stress. But before we do, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Callow Curb, because we've been talking about how poor sleep and stress dysregulate your hunger hormones. They spike ghrelin, tank leptin, they make GLP1 less effective at helping you feel satisfied. And I think this is where Callow Curb comes in, that's C-A-L-O-C-U-R-B, like curb your calories. It's a 100% natural supplement featuring something called a marisate. Now, this is made from hops extract, okay, bitter hops. It activates your body's own GLP1 signaling to help you feel fuller faster. Now, here's the cool thing. This Friday, we've got Sarah Kennedy on. She's the uh CEO. And one interesting thing about Calicurb, it's actually owned by the government of New Zealand. So there's a lot of the conflict of interest type stuff isn't there as you would normally see in a, you know, a profit-based enterprise. And we really nerded out in that episode, you're gonna hear it next, about how when you consume calicurb, it's got a time-release formula, it works its way into your lower part of your intestine. And that is where the bitter hops extract triggers bitter taste receptors that increase your GOP1 almost, I don't want to say almost as much as weight loss medications, but significantly more than placebo, to where the clinical randomized controlled studies show reduction in cravings by 40% and hunger by 30%. And then that leads to consuming 18% fewer calories, and that's within an hour of taking it. You have to wait about an hour so it gets through your system, but then you're good to go and it lasts about four to six hours. There are no side effects, no stimulants, you don't need a prescription. What I love about call curb is it works with your biology, it actually upregulates your hormones. So it kind of offsets some of this stuff that's going on. Even if you do have a little bit of stress and poor sleep, even though I don't, you know, I want you to work on those, but those are pushing your hunger hormones and the hormones in the wrong direction, calllocurb kind of pushes them back. In fact, some people take the GLP1 meds at a lower dose along with call curb or use it to get off of GLP1s. So for those of you who are just trying to control your appetite a little more effectively, I think this is a great tool. I'm using it myself in an upcoming fat loss phase, recommending it to clients and also going to be using it during rapid fat loss. So go to wits and weights.com slash calllocurb and use my code Wits and Weights for 10% off. It actually should automatically apply if you go to that link in the show notes. Witsandweights.com slash callocurb. Okay, let's get a bit deeper into what is happening when you experience intense cravings. We're gonna talk about cravings, emotional eating, food noise. All right, these are the cravings that come out of nowhere. They smack you in the face, they smack you in the brain, in your stomach, they feel impossible to resist. And both sleep deprivation and chronic stress are potentially behind these without even having to go further. This is where I want you to do some self-diagnosis. Because sleep deprivation, chronic stress amplify hedonic hunger. That is the drive to eat for pleasure and reward, not because you physically actually need energy. It's it's the feeling of wanting food desperately, even when you're not actually hungry, almost uncontrollably. Like I'm just gonna go let my body take me, and I'm gonna grab the ice cream or grab the chips or tortillas or whatever. So here's the mechanism of how that works. When you're tired or stressed, your brain's award system becomes hypersensitive to food cues, right? If you see a commercial for pizza, and and I always tell my daughters, like, look at how they market food on visual ads, right? Commercials and ads. The food's always in motion, right? The pizza is bubbling and melting over. You know, the cookies are have the gooey chocolate being broken apart, the burger, it's like the piece of the burger falling one at a time as they layer it up. And I'm sorry if you're listening to this and I'm triggering you right now, but I think it's a visceral way to think about how food is visceral. And even the memory of a food you enjoyed makes these signals, it triggers these signals. And then at the same time, the logical part of your brain, your prefrontal cortex, which normally helps you pause, take a breath, make rational decisions, it is now suppressed because of the sleep deprivation. This is again, this is your body saying, we're gonna do everything we can to get you to eat. So you have this double problem. You have a higher reward drive and you have reduced self-control. And for some people, it's a lot worse than others. And for many of you, it's like almost programmed in from years and years of dieting, hence why the GLP1 meds have become so powerful for some people to reduce this. So this is why you can't stop at just one cookie, right? It's your brain literally operating in a state where high calorie food feels more rewarding and your ability to regulate intake is compromised. And so this creates a conditioned loop over. Over time. Stress leads to eating. It provides temporary relief, right? It fills the void for you, the relief, then it reinforces the behavior because it's a reward. But then often comes the shame or the guilt that creates more stress, which then drives more eating. And that is the cycle of emotional eating. And it's maintained by this hormonal environment that we've been discussing this whole time. Now, the term food noise, I think is has become, I don't know if it was like one of the words of the year for 2025, but it's become really popular, especially with the rise of the GLP1 meds. And it's a legitimate thing that refers to constant mental chatter about food. You know, thinking about what you're going to eat next, planning meals, fantasizing about certain foods. For people who are sleep deprived or chronically stressed or both, the food noise is amplified. Your brains are literally spending more mental bandwidth on food because the hormonal signals are telling them to prioritize eating, which is why, just as an aside, some people do need GLP1 medications. Absolutely, because it's just so massive of a signal. No matter what they do, even if they try to sleep better and lift weights and everything, it's there and they need that. Then there's solutions in between, like Calicurb that I just talked about. I'm a huge fan of that tool, by the way. There's actually a new study, a blind-controlled study, that I can't share the results of that I spoke with Sarah about, where the results are actually surprisingly good in terms of weight loss and maintaining weight loss. So any tool you can use to reduce food noise that helps you get over that hump, I'm a fan of in the toolbox. Okay. The good news is, even despite those, or in addition to those tools, you can help quiet that noise by addressing root causes if they're related to sleep and stress. That's why I think today's episode is so powerful. So this is the actionable part, okay? I'm gonna give you some specific strategies for both that can shift the hormonal environment. All right. And I want you to just start with the biggest low-hanging fruit based on what you know about yourself. So for sleep, I'm gonna give you six tips. I know there's gonna be a lot in here, okay? But hopefully you can you can go back to the timestamp and re-listen to this if needed. For sleep, first, pure quantity of sleep is a problem for many of you. That seven to nine hours of sleep, I know you've heard this before, but if you're getting six and wondering why you have problems with snacking, emotional eating, everything, that that could be the simple answer. And I say simple, easier said than done, right? But an extra one or two hours, don't think of it as this luxury that you can't possibly have. Think of it as like the solution to many of your ills. Okay. And it's an I'll say quote unquote easy solution compared to lots of other possibilities. So that's the first one. Second, I want you to have a consistent wake time. So this hits on circadian rhythm and consistency that I've touched on in the episode series. And the wake time is actually more important than the consistent bedtime, believe it or not, because your circadian rhythm anchors to when you wake up. So pick a wake time that you can maintain all seven days of the week, including weekends. I know that sounds weird, disruptive. Some of you like to, you know, you get up at 5:30 on the weekdays and you like to sleep until eight on the weekends. Just try it for me. Try the same time. So ideally, you combine this with number one, and you kind of shift and add a half hour, an hour to your wake time on the weekdays, and then maybe come back a little on the weekends and make them match within, say, 30 minutes. And then your body will start naturally getting tired at the right time in the evening. That's the goal here. Third, I want you to create a wind down routine. This can be a lot of different things, and we're gonna touch on something at the end of the episode that's just that can that can apply to anybody and that's super simple because I think with this gets kind of this gets confusing because people are like, what the heck do I do? It seems like a big change. But dimming the lights, you know, an hour before bed, not scrolling on your phone, it's not just about the blue light, it's also the stimulation, right? Telling your brain it's time to downregulate, lower light exposure to trigger your melatonin, all of that. Okay, so having some sort of wind-down routine with the lights and the stimulation. Four, I want you to limit caffeine after 2 p.m. Okay. This is an easy one as well. I know if you love coffee, it doesn't sound easy, but look, there's decaf coffee, there's brewed hot, what do you call it? Brood chocolate. There's like different ways you can still have that oral fixation in the hot beverage. There's tea, of course, you know, all by British and New Zealand, Australian folks, Canadian who are into you know, afternoon tea, there's tea, but go with decaf, right? Because caffeine has a big half-life. It's like five or six hours. So even if you drink as if you stop drinking at 3 p.m., that's still 50% active at 9 p.m. And of course, if you're more sensitive to caffeine, you want to cut it off even earlier. So if you don't drink as much caffeine, it's even more important you stop earlier before 2 p.m. Number five is please watch the alcohol. I would recommend you limit as much as possible, if not abstain from alcohol as much as possible, because there's really no plot positive to alcohol in any way, shape, or form. But again, we're not about restriction and trying to eliminate everything here. It's got to work for you and be sustainable. Alcohol, a lot of people think it helps them fall asleep, but it actually fragments your sleep architecture. Anybody who tracks your, you know, your deep in REM sleep, it reduces those. And I mean, I've seen this. I don't, I almost never drink. I might have a drink once a month. And when I do, if it's late enough, I go to sleep. Everything's off according to my aura ring. I get way less deep in REM sleep. That's anecdotal, I get it, but the evidence also supports this. And that's even just a couple simple drink drinks in the evening, like a couple beers or whatever. So watch the alcohol if you care about good sleep. And then number six, if hunger is keeping you up, think about a pre-meal bed that has some protein, like Greek yogurt or like a casein protein shake that will kind of even out the ghrelin spikes and then not disrupt your sleep due to hunger. Okay. I would say that's a little more of a hack because it could suggest other problems throughout the day. And of course, if you're in a calorie deficit, that could be part of it, but this could be helpful. So those are my six tips for sleep. Now, for stress, I have five tips. I know, again, I know it's a lot. I I hope this is not too much, but maybe you can grab one of these and run with it. For stress, first, I want you to incorporate daily low intensity activity. Just walking is a game changer, especially outside in natural light with vitamin D. This will modulate your cortisol. And we're only talking 10, 15, 20 minutes, one time at least. Now, I obviously encourage lots of walking and walking after meals and getting certain step counts, but this is really just about stress management. Sunlight exposure in the morning also helps regulate your circadian rhythm. In fact, I love training in the morning and I love sunlight exposure in the morning. And a lot of those help with your sleep later on and your stress, of course. Number two is try breath work. Okay. I'm not a meditator, but I do occasionally use breath work. And now we have apps that can help you out with it, even just for five minutes, for two minutes, right? Of deep breathing, a simple box breathing practice. This is where you're gonna activate your vagal nerve, and that shifts your nervous system from sympathetic, fight or flight, to parasympathetic, which is rest and digest. And for some, doing this just once a day, they report significant improvements in their overall ability to handle stress. Number three, I want you to watch your training volume. Okay. A lot of you love to train. I know, I do too, but evaluate your volume. Okay. Overtraining could be amplifying your cortisol. Like if you're pushing really hard in the gym, but then you're dealing with high stress in life and poor sleep, and now you're aggressively dieting as well. You're kind of stacking one stressor on top of another. And training volume is kind of a big nebulous term because you know you need enough to hold on to your muscle, but you don't need nearly as much as you think. And especially if you're doing this higher rep endurance style training for sure, scaling that back while addressing sleep and stress can accelerate the whole thing that you're trying to do here in a good way, right? So look at volume. Number four is if you're not already doing this, practicing flexible dieting rather than rigid dieting is going to help tremendously with the psychological stress around food. Every time I talk to a client or physique university member or somebody who started using my app, and they're like, you know, I've always been low carb, but I understand from listening to you or talking to you, like it's okay to eat carbs, and carbs are good for you. Carbs help with muscle, with recovery, with everything else. So I'm gonna give it a shot. And they start to change that mindset, and they realize that their calories can be flexible. It doesn't have to be nail on exactly this many calories or this much protein. It helps with cortisol and reducing those negative associations with eating. Because now you're like, okay, I really can eat anything I want. It's more of having structure and having ranges and allowing for variability, including foods I enjoy. Then I don't have all that stress and decision-making fatigue, right? So don't discount the power of that flexibility. If you're listening and that's the thing for you, that you're still stuck in the carbs are bad or this is bad, that can be a big lever for you that really doesn't take. I mean, if anything, it's it's a fun thing to start incorporating more foods, in my opinion. And then number five for stress is to address the source of the stress. Okay. Again, some of you are gonna be able to do this, some not. It depends on your situation. But if there's a life stressor that you can actually change or mitigate a situation at work where, you know, a relationship issue where you have to have a conversation with your spouse or loved one or friend, a financial concern in your life where it's it's time to sit down and figure out what to do about that or get an advisor or whatever, consider whether working on that is the biggest choice for your fitness right now. Isn't that interesting, right? Because it's all connected. If trying to get a different job or a different role at work or out of like an oppressive manager or whatever, is the thing that's gonna have benefits for your sleep and stress and appetite, and therefore your body composition, and therefore how you feel, and your confidence and your you know physical appearance and all that, sometimes the best diet intervention is actually reducing your stress or eliminating a source of stress in your life. So we talked about a lot today. I want to tie this all together with the bigger picture. If you've been struggling with constant hunger, stubborn belly fat, sugar cravings, and you're doing the other things right, I do want you to look at sleep and stress. They are not just minor factors. I would put them at the top for many of you. At the top, even above strength training, believe it or not. They are primary regulators of the hormones that control your appetite, right? So they affect your psychology and also physiology when it comes to fat loss. But it's more than about fat loss. I know we taught we we connect this to fat loss, but it's really everything. It's your health, it's how you feel, it's the upward spiraling that you get once you start to fix these, where the other things get easier. That's where the hormones are tied in. And it's not that your hormones, like you need to get hormone labs and fix your hormones and get hormone therapy. Maybe you do, but that's beside the point. It's the hormones are symptoms telling you what's going on. The good news is fixing these for lots of you listening is often the low-hanging fruit, right? Many, many of the people I work with hit breakthroughs and it has nothing to do with macros or cardio or training. It's they got one more hour to sleep every night. Or they started box breathing. Seriously. Okay, your body responds to signals that you have some significant control over. I want you to remember that. Think like the stoic philosophers of ancient times, right? The Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, who, you know, ask the question, not what can't I control, but what can I, what can I change? Okay, what can you do based on what we talked about today? So you can quiet that, those cravings and that food noise and make some progress. The encouraging thing is that they happen fast. They happen fast. Just sleep a couple good nights in a row. And I believe you're gonna notice the difference in your biofeedback and your appetite and your cravings. Right? Implement some stress management practice we talked about today for a week or two and watch how it affects your relationship with food. All right, so before we wrap up, I did promise you a specific tip that you can use tonight. Something simple that addresses both sleep and stress simultaneously. Stick around because I'm gonna give you that tip in just a second. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, Calocurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CaloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash callowcurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. All right, here is that tip I promised you. It is called the 10 minute pre-sleep protocol. Because we talked about having a wind-down routine, we talked about all this other stuff for sleep. But here's a very tactical thing to do. 10 minutes before you want to be in bed, that's it. 10 minutes, do this. Turn off all screens, dim the lights in your room as much as possible, sit or lie down somewhere comfortable, and that could be right in your bed, and do four rounds of box breathing. Box breathing simple. You breathe in for four seconds, you hold for four, you breathe out for four seconds, and you hold for four. That's it. Four in, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. Then do four rounds. This is gonna take three minutes. Then just sit or lie there quietly for the rest of the time. You could do some light stretching if you want, but for many of you, just sit there and lie down. You're in the dim lights, which trigger your melatonin. They are preparing your body. The box breathing activates your parasympathetic nervous system. That very acutely in the moment lowers your cortisol. In the screen free time, it gets rid of the stimulation that keeps your brain in that alert mode, right? So you're simultaneously improving the onset of sleep, reducing your stress, setting up your hormones for a better night. Do this consistently for just one week. Notice how your appetite and cravings shift the very next day. That's it. I hope that helped. I want you to use it tonight. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the path to fat loss is not always about eating less or training more. Sometimes it's about sleeping better and stressing you less. This is Philip Pape, and we'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

Hunger Hormones Controlling Your Fat Loss (Ghrelin, Leptin, and GLP-1 Explained) | Ep 425

Try Calocurb natural appetite control (40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger). It's prescription free, affordable, and fast acting. Get 10% off:
https://witsandweights.com/calocurb

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Your body is fighting your fat loss, and it's not a willpower problem.

When you diet, ghrelin spikes to make you hungrier, leptin crashes so your brain thinks you're starving, and GLP-1 drops so meals stop filling you up. Understanding these hunger hormones is the difference between white-knuckling through every deficit and actually working with your biology.

In this episode, you'll learn the science behind the hormones controlling your appetite... not just the big three (ghrelin, leptin, GLP-1), but also lesser-known players like PYY, CCK, NPY, and amylin that you rarely hear about.

Discover why fat loss gets harder the leaner you get, what causes metabolic adaptation at the hormonal level, and specific strategies to support satiety naturally through protein, fiber, meal timing, sleep, and stress management.

Plus, stick around for the Hunger Wave Check protocol, a simple 15-minute tool to distinguish physical hunger from psychological hunger so you can stop reacting on autopilot and start understanding your own appetite signals.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why fat loss feels harder the longer you diet
3:21 - Ghrelin: why this hunger hormone spikes during fat loss
7:06 - Leptin: how losing fat makes your brain think you're starving
13:42 - Natural GLP-1 upregulation to take the edge off your hunger
15:17 - GLP-1: the satiety hormone behind Ozempic and natural alternatives
20:31 - PYY, CCK, NPY, and amylin: the hormones nobody talks about
26:42 - Bonus: 15-minute protocol for hunger awareness

Hunger during a fat loss phase often feels like a moral battle, but the story starts in your biology. When calories drop and weight comes off, ghrelin rises and leptin falls, while GLP1 and PYY signal less fullness than before. That shift primes your brain to notice and crave high-calorie foods, amplifies the reward of eating, and edges your metabolism lower to conserve energy. Understanding this response matters because it replaces blame with strategy. You can’t opt out of physiology, but you can direct it: eat protein and fiber at every meal, keep a consistent meal schedule, avoid aggressive deficits, and protect sleep to blunt ghrelin’s spikes and support satiety signals.

Ghrelin is your hunger alarm, rising before mealtimes and surging higher in a deficit, especially as more weight is lost. It also lights up reward pathways, which is why ultra-tasty foods feel magnetic when you’re dieting. You can counter with higher-protein meals, consistent meal timing, and better sleep; even a few nights of short sleep can elevate ghrelin and trigger snacking. Avoid crash diets that keep ghrelin elevated long after the cut ends. Leptin, produced by fat cells, drops faster than fat loss alone would predict, making you hungrier and lowering metabolic rate. Strategic refeeds can provide short, useful bumps, while resistance training helps preserve lean mass and soften leptin’s decline, and a higher energy flux—eating more while moving more—can improve leptin sensitivity over time.

GLP1, the satiety powerhouse, slows gastric emptying, improves post-meal fullness, and supports better blood sugar control. Its response wanes during fat loss, so meals that once satisfied may not hit the same. You can nudge it naturally by emphasizing protein and fiber, front-loading more calories earlier in the day, and prioritizing whole foods over liquids and ultra-processed choices. Bitter compounds and spicy foods can also stimulate GLP1-related pathways, which explains why some supplements provide an extra edge without replacing fundamentals. PYY and CCK add to fullness by responding to protein and fat in the gut, while amylin promotes meal-ending satiety if you slow down enough to notice it. On the flip side, stress pushes NPY up, steering you toward fast energy. That’s the biological core of stress eating.

Because these signals move together, a plan that works with them is more sustainable than one that fights them. Think like an engineer: set conditions that favor satiety and consistency. Keep protein high and evenly spread, add fiber-rich plants to every plate, and include some dietary fat to recruit CCK. Build meals around whole foods that take longer to digest and chew. Use resistance training to protect muscle and performance, then consider refeeds to ease the psychological and physiological strain of extended deficits. Match your meal times to your routine so ghrelin’s waves arrive when you plan to eat, and get serious about sleep and stress hygiene to prevent needless spikes in hunger.

To separate physical hunger from impulse or habit, try the hunger wave check: rate your hunger from one to ten, set a 15-minute timer, sip water or tea, distract yourself lightly, then rate hunger again. Ghrelin often peaks for 20 to 30 minutes and then subsides even without food. If your score falls, you likely rode a wave and can delay the snack. If it holds or rises, eat your planned meal or a protein-forward option. Log these moments to map patterns—times of day, stressors, or meal gaps that predict your cravings. The goal isn’t to suppress biology but to channel it, turning hormones from obstacles into feedback. With a few targeted levers—food quality, timing, movement, sleep, stress—you’ll create an environment where appetite works for your goals, not against them.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you've ever hit a wall during a fat loss phase, felt constantly hungry despite eating enough protein and fiber, or wondered why your body seems to fight you harder the longer you diet, the answer might be in your hormones. Today I'm breaking down the hormones that actually control your appetite. Not just Ghrelin and Leptin, but also GLP1, PYY, CCK, NPY, and others you've probably never heard of that are quietly running the show. You'll learn why dieting makes some of these spike and others crash, what that means for your hunger and metabolism, and some strategies that work with these instead of against them. 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 here is what is actually happening inside your body when you try to lose fat. Your stomach pumps out more ghrelin, and that screams at your brain, I need to eat. Your fat cells release less leptin, so your brain thinks you're starving even when you're not. Your gut produces less GLP1 and PYY, which means meals don't fill you up the way they used to, and stress hormones trigger NPY in your brain, making you crave high calorie comfort foods. This isn't a willpower problem, as we've said many times on this podcast. It's really your biology. And we have to work with that. We have to understand it. Think like an engineer. Understanding these hormones is that difference for many of you, many of us, between fighting against things and trying to, you know, just cut calories or just do more and actually making this a little bit, if not a lot, easier. So this is episode three of our eight-part appetite series for January. We're going beyond the basics of just protein and fiber. We covered a little bit of that already. And now we're going to get into the deeper mechanisms that control whether you feel satisfied or ravenous. Because let me tell you, uh, the more I've been in this business, the more I realize a lot of this is comes down to brain-related genes, it comes down to hormones, it comes down to signals that are, I'll say, outside our control, but the upstream chain is somewhat in our control. And we're gonna wanna understand how we do that. I'm gonna cover a lot of science today, but I'm going to keep it practical. And then I want you to stick around until the end because I'm going to share a simple protocol for handling hunger to separate your physical hunger from your psychological hunger. And it takes about 10 minutes to use. It's a super powerful tool that I think is gonna help a lot of you. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by Calocurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Callocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. Calllocurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calllocurb for 10% off your first order. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calllocurb. All right, let's start with ghrelin. This is your body's hunger alarm. It's the hormone that makes you feel hungry. And it is produced primarily in your stomach lining. It does what you'd expect. It tells your brain, hey, it's time to eat. And it rises before meals and it drops after you eat. So that's pretty straightforward. But where it gets more relevant for fat loss is that when you're in a calorie deficit, the ghrelin goes up. And it's not just a little bump, it goes up a lot. A 2025 meta-analysis that pulled data from 127 studies found that weight loss consistently increases your fasting ghrelin levels. And the more weight you lose, the higher your ghrelin climbs. Now think about what that means. It's not just about the deficit itself, it's if you're actually getting leaner, if you're doing what you're trying to do, which is lose weight, the louder your body is going to scream at you to eat. And this is why the last 10 pounds, quote unquote, often feels harder than the first, let's say, 20. And so it's not a mental thing, okay? It's not just psychological. There is literally a hormonal change that is ramping up. And it's not just that it makes you hungry. Ghrelin also activates the reward centers in your brain, which makes high-calorie foods seem more appealing. So not only do you want to eat more, you actually crave the stuff that is going to more easily get you out of your deficit. So it's this vicious cycle. Now, what can you do about it? All right, we've talked about protein before, always worth mentioning in case you're not doing it. High protein meals will suppress ghrelin more effectively than a high carb or high-fat meal. And that's one of the reasons we emphasize protein at every feeding, right? It's not just for the muscle piece, but also for appetite control. You should still have balanced meals, right? It's not about just eating protein, but making sure you have the protein is important. The second thing is your meal timing consistency. Okay, not just the meal timing in general, but the fact that it's consistent because ghrelin operates on a rhythm. And we've seen this before. Your circadian rhythm is more important than a lot of us realize. Where if your body feels safe, let's use just a colloquial expression, it will it will tend to be more comfortable burning calories and not trying to make you eat more. And ghrelin will spike at times when you normally eat. So your normal schedule, your normal habits, the ghrelin's gonna go up. So if you're constantly changing your eating schedule, you're creating unpredictable spikes in your ghreline throughout the day. And you kind of know this intuitively, don't you? If you eat in a normal pattern and then one day things are off, and all of a sudden you get hungry at the same time you would normally eat, even if you're not really hungry, it's your body saying, Hey, you normally eat now. What is going on? Let's go find that food. So sticking to a pattern kind of gets ahead of that. And I'm a big fan of consistency, which leads me to the third one, sleep. Okay. Not only sleep consistency, but just having sufficient, good quality sleep because having low amounts of sleep, so sleep deprivation, will cause your ghrelin to spike as well. One study showed that restricting sleep to four hours just for a few nights increased ghrelin by 28%. So if you're sleeping like five or six hours and then wondering why you can't stop snacking and where what the root causes of your emotional eating, that could just be it, which is a lot simpler answer than having to go through the hard work of processing your triggers and your emotional baggage, let's say, even though there could be issues there to work on. And we're gonna cover this more in the next episode. And then fourth, don't crash diet. Don't use an overly aggressive, prolonged deficit because that is gonna cause ghrelin to stay elevated even after your diet ends. And this is part of why rapid weight loss often leads to rapid regain, right? Moderate deficits are your friend, a moderate deficit, which is anywhere from 0.25 to up to 1% of your body weight a week, which is still pretty aggressive, but it's controlled. That combined with strategic refeeds, usually ends up giving you a longer-term sustainable fat loss phase that blunts some of that ghrelin response to the extent that you can. So that's ghrelin, that's your hunger alarm. When you diet, it gets louder. When you lose weight, it gets louder. And that's it. So now we're gonna talk about the other side of the equation. The second hormone today is gonna be leptin. And by the way, we did cover this tangentially or at a surface level in one of our in our first appetite episode, but we're going in deeper here. So leptin is like the thermostat for your body fat, where ghrelin was like, hey, let's hit the gas for your hunger. Leptin is like putting on the brakes because it's produced by your fat cells, and the more fat you carry, the more leptin you produce. And in theory, this should signal to your brain you have all this energy on your body stored and you don't have to eat as much, right? It's it's supposed to help you feel full. The problem is that when you diet, when you lose fat, your leptin also goes down. And again, quite a bit. So it's like the opposite direction of ghrelin, but it also has the opposite effect. So it's the same, it just exacerbates it, right? And it drops faster than you would predict, that then fat loss would predict. Again, just like ghrelin seems to be on an exponential accelerating curve, not a linear curve. So even a little bit of a weight loss of, say, 10% of your body weight can cause your leptin to drop by, say, 50%, right? So it's even more extreme than the ghrelin change. And then when your brain senses this, it interprets it as a signal of starvation, of, hey, I don't have food coming in. And then it responds in two ways that are gonna make fat loss harder. It's gonna make you hungrier and it's gonna decrease your metabolic rate. Okay. This is one of the important causes or levers of metabolic adaptation or thermal adaptogenesis, just a fancy way of saying your body burns fewer calories, right? Because your body is trying to conserve. So it makes things more efficient. And that's not a good thing when we're trying to lose fat or lose weight. It's why many people hit a plateau and it doesn't take that long, you know, three, four, five weeks into a fat loss phase and they're already hitting the plateau. Once we get it past the initial water weight loss, which for many also looks like a plateau, that's a different issue. But even like six, seven, eight weeks in, many of us hit a second real plateau, and that real plateau is because of this adaptation, and they're not, they don't realize their calories are dropping like a rock. I mean, for me, and I'm I feel like I'm doing everything right all the time, I might have a drop of six, seven, eight hundred calories over the course of a fat loss phase. But because I'm tracking and I know that I can adjust for it or I can plan for it, both physically and psychologically. And then there's another layer to this. If you've been overweight for a while, you may have developed a little bit of resistance to leptin. That means your brain doesn't respond to the signal even when the levels are high, meaning you have all this stored energy on your body, but your brain acts like you still need more energy. Kind of sounds like the it kind of sounds like insulin resistance, doesn't it? Right? It's effectively a form of lowered tolerance, lowered sensitivity because of the way you've treated your body to that point. You know, it's it's not your fault, but it's just how your body responds because of what it's conditioned to. Now, what can you do about this? Okay, diet breaks and refeeds, you probably may have heard they can temporarily increase your leptin. All right, it used to be believed that this was more of a not permanent thing, but like you could you could really restore your leptin and then continue the fat loss phase from a much higher position. It's not quite like that, it's only temporary. But like a higher carb day, which I like refeeds where the carbs come all the way back up to your maintenance, it can bump leptin up for that period, for that day or the next day or so. And it gives you, if nothing else, a psychological break. But there is a little bit of a physiological break that we see that may ramp up your performance for like a day. And it takes the edge off, right? It's not a magic fix, but it definitely helps. And that's why, like a two-day refeed could be a really nice way to fit it in to a seven-day week, where every five days you're doing your diet and then two-day refeed. I'm a big fan of that, but of course, you could do any different interval. You could do, you know, two weeks and then two days, or three weeks and one week, you know what I mean? That's the nonlinear fat loss approach. So resistance training, okay, first time I mentioned it all episode, which is crazy, I know, helps preserve, which helps preserve lean mass, you know, when you're in fat loss, helps preserve your muscle so you're not losing it. It can reduce the severity of leptin decline. So another reason to be training, besides the obvious, of holding on to your muscle mass. And then, of course, having more muscle keeps your metabolic rate a little bit higher as well, which partially offsets some of this adaptation. The other thing is energy flux. Energy flux matters. This is the concept of eating more while moving more instead of eating less while trying to exercise more or even move less. So higher, higher energy flux, eating more to move more, it tends to improve leptin sensitivity as well because your brain kind of hears the leptin signal better when you have more of these resources flooding in. I almost think of it like you're trying to release energy, but you need to bring the energy in, and your body likes that turnover rather than this restriction mindset. If that makes sense. So I think one of the insights for leptin is this your body has kind of a set point that it wants to defend. Yes, there is validity to that concept. Set point theory might have heard it called, you know, not quite to the extreme that some might claim. But when you lose fat, leptin does drop. Your body pushes back to try to regain that fat. And that is why going recovering to maintenance after a diet is super critical. It's also why we shouldn't be dieting for too long. And, you know, we're gonna talk about rebound hunger in a later episode of this series because I think that's an important concept. But leptin is important to understand. All right, so let me remind you where we are. We covered ghrelin, which rises during fat loss, it drives hunger. We covered leptin, which falls during fat loss, makes your brain think you're starving. Now I want to talk about the hormone that is all the rage right now, and that is GLP1. But before we do that, I want to tell you about today's sponsor because it's very relevant to this GLP1 conversation before we get into it. GLP1, as we're gonna talk about, is a key hormone that signals fullness to your brain, or when it's higher, you feel satisfied when it's low, like it often is during fat loss, meals just don't fill you up the same way. And I'm a big fan of tools, especially natural tools that can help in addition to the other things we're doing. Callow Curb, who is sponsoring this episode, C-A-L-O-C-U-R-B, like curb your calories, is a natural appetite support. It's a tool that works by activating GLP1 and other gut brain signals. It's a made for it's made from a marisate, and that's a patented bitter hops extract developed in New Zealand over 15 years with 30 million in research behind it. Has very solid clinical data, it is science-based, it reduced cravings by 40%, hunger by 30%, and calorie intake by 18% within one hour. So it can help you feel fuller, faster. It's just one of those nice tools that take the edge off. Doesn't replace the fundamentals, it supports the other things you're doing. But if hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when things like protein and fiber are dialed in, it's definitely worth checking out. Go to wits and weights.com slash calllocurb for 10% off your order. The link is also in the show notes. In case you have trouble you know spelling it, it's C-A-L-O-C-U-R-B. That's wits and weights.com slash calllocurb. All right, now let's talk about GLP1, which I would call the satiety powerhouse, something that wasn't talked about nearly as much before the new weight loss medications came out, like Ozempic and the others. GLP1 stands for glucagon glucagon like peptide one. It is produced by cells in your intestines after you eat, and it does three important things. One, it increases satiety, it helps you feel full. Two, it slows gastric emptying. That is, food stays in your stomach longer, so you feel satisfied longer. And three, it enhances your insulin secretion, and that of course helps with blood sugar control. And of course, you've you've heard of GLP1 because of Ozempic, Wagovi, Manjaro, all of these drugs, which are GLP1 receptor agonists, right? The the semaglitides or zepatide, those are the more chemical names. They mimic the hormone and then they amplify the effects of the hormone and they work really, really well, right? They're super powerful. We've got a lot of clients and members of Physique University who are taking these as a tool to help them. We had guests on the show and we've had experts on the show talking about how powerful these are. And I know there's a lot of controversy around them, but it is a legitimate mechanism that's being targeted by these. Now, for those of us, whether you're on the medication or not, understanding GLP1 is helpful, I think, because GLP1 rises naturally after you eat a meal, especially a meal that's rich in protein and fiber and certain compounds, including the bitter compounds. We mentioned calllocurb, which is a bitter compound. That is why it tends to spike and trigger your GLP1, not to the level of these pharmaceuticals, of course, but that's why there's a spectrum from, you know, totally food-based to medication to everything in between and every combination of those. So during your fat loss phase, your body's GLP1 response tends to decrease. Sound familiar? Sounds like, again, leptin and ghrelin, kind of how they operate. They go in the opposite direction where you'd where you'd want them to be. So meals that used to fill you up don't trigger as much of that satiety signal anymore. And that's another piece of the puzzle for why fat loss just gets harder over time the more you push it. Ghrelin goes up, leptin goes down, GLP goes down as well, or GLP1, you know, your body fighting you on all these hormone fronts, which is why I'm doing this episode. So, can you support GLP1 naturally? All right. If you do the fundamentals the way we talk about here, protein, fiber, meal timing, the things we've already talked about that we keep coming back to, you're still you're it's going to stimulate more GLP1 release than not having enough protein, then having too little fiber, than you know, not spreading out your meals. In fact, like front loading calories, we think might actually enhance GLP1 response. I mentioned on the last episode a study of a big breakfast versus a smaller breakfast where the calories were the same and how the big breakfast seemed to better regulate some of these hormones, right? To what extreme will it do that for you? I couldn't say. I think it's worth experimenting, though, and seeing how your hunger signals change. Of course, consistency is super important, as we mentioned before as well, right? A lot of people's bodies, though, seem to respond better to a substantial breakfast versus a massive dinner. And again, there's some circadian rhythm and cortisol and like day-night cycle stuff going on there because of our human biology in the context of you know Earth rotating relative to the sun. Okay. That's how we evolved on this planet. But then there's other compounds, and I mentioned Callocurb, who sponsored this episode. It's very fascinating the how something like a bitter food, or we talked about capsaicin, right? Spicy foods, how they, these different compounds activate receptors in your gut that then stimulate the release of GLP1, even if you're not eating the corresponding food. So this is kind of one of those ways we can trick our body a little bit. And it's the mechanism behind some of these supplements, like callow curb that I mentioned earlier. And then when we think of whole foods versus processed foods, you know, solid whole foods that take time to digest also tend to stimulate more GLP1 than liquid calories or rapidly absorb processed foods. I just had a call with a client who is in a fat loss phase now and he loved to have his protein shakes and but is experiencing a little bit of hunger. And he eats mostly whole foods. And I said, look, you know, that protein shake is probably an opportunity to swap it out with some really solid whole food, like a lean meat, for example. But even something like eggs with egg whites, you know, something that will take a little Longer to digest because it's just going to make you feel a little folder. Yeah, you're getting your protein, but you might be missing out on these other opportunities. So the GLP1 can be your friend during fat loss as long as you support it through your food choices, your meal timing, you know, targeted supplementation if that's what you need. And again, this is for people not on medication. Even if you're on those medications, you still want to do these things, if nothing else, than to amplify the process. And also, if you're planning to come off the drugs eventually and supplant those with natural alternatives. All right. So we've covered the big three: ghrelin, leptin, and GLP1. But there are some other hormones and some peptides. I'm talking about natural in your body, right? No supplements here, no nothing external, that support appetite regulation that we never talk about and are hardly ever talked about. So these are pretty cool. All right. Nerd out with me for a second. The first one is called peptide YY or PYY for short. And this is a peptide released from your gut after you eat. Sound familiar? This happens, seems like there's a lot of things that happen based on how we eat, which makes sense because that's our energy source. Especially when you have a meal that is high in protein and fiber. Again, same thing as GLP1. It works alongside GLP1. When PYY is high, you feel satisfied. When you lose weight, it tends to increase. Again, familiar pattern, isn't it? So this is another reason that hunger after a diet is often so intense. Why we like to recover very quickly after a diet. The next one is called CCK, colosysteokinin. And I talked about this in the first episode, I think two episodes ago, two solo episodes ago. This is released when fat and protein get into your small intestine. And this is pretty cool, right? Your whole uh digestive tract gets triggered at different points. And and, you know, you don't have to understand all this necessarily, but it all works together to explain this. So when CCK or when fat and protein go to your small intestine, it releases CCK, it slows down the gastric emptying. In other words, it prevents stuff in your gut from emptying out of your gut, which then makes you feel a little bit fuller, right? Because there's more stuff there, just to simplify it. And these are all signals to your brain. It's one of the reasons that meals with a little bit of fats in there tend to be more satisfying than those without. And a lot of you on keto are like, yeah, I know that. Like high fat meals tend to fill me up. Just so you know, protein is the most satisfying, followed by fat and then followed by carbs. So having the protein and the fat is a fantastic combination for that very reason. The next one is NPY, neuropeptide Y. This is a hunger stimulating signal. Notice we have a little bit on the hunger side, and we have a few of these on the satiety side. They kind of go hand in hand. So when leptin drops, right? Leptin, which is triggered by your fat cells, or when you're stressed, NPY goes up and it drives you to seek high calorie foods. And this is the biological basis of stress eating. Cortisol increases NPY, and then suddenly that ice cream in the freezer, for me, the peanut butter cup ice cream, what the fudge, is calling your name. So that's NPY. And then we have amylen, A M Y-L-I-N, amylen. This is released with insulin and it promotes meal ending satiation, a very specific mechanism. It slows gastric emptying at the end of a meal and it helps you stop eating when you've had enough. So it may not be the end of your meal in your head, but it's the concept of if you eat mindfully and take your time, you give your body enough time to trigger this and feel full when you actually are full rather than overconsume because you're just scarfing down the food. So what's interesting is amylen doesn't cause adaptation, metabolic slowdown, like other appetite suppressing mechanisms too. Whether that's relevant or not, I don't know, but I'm just mentioning that something I learned. So, how does all this connect? Well, when you're in a fat loss phase, almost every one of these signals shifts in the direction that makes you hungrier. Ghrelin up, leptin down, GLP1 down, PYY down, NPY up. Your body is mounting this massive war, this coordinated defense to prevent you from losing more weight. That's what it's trying to do. Okay, that's it. It's not your age, it's not your, you know, perimenopause hormones, it's not any of these other things. Those things may have other factors involved, but this is a massive piece of weight loss resistance, of hunger, of all of these things going on. So if you understand this, it's not meant to discourage you, right? But to empower you because when you know what's happening, you can take actions to counteract it. What are those actions? We've pretty much alluded to them already, but I'm gonna list them real quick. High protein and fiber at every meal to stimulate GLP1, PYY, and CCK, and to suppress Ghrelin. So you gotta keep that protein and fiber high during fat loss. Adequate sleep keeps ghrelin in check. Stress management prevents your NPY from spiking. Resistance training, pretty much for everything, but specifically, it also really helps with leptin sensitivity. Using strategic refeeds can be helpful to temporarily boost your leptin. And then, of course, having consistent meal timing, likely with a decent sized breakfast, to help again with your rhythm of your ghrelin so you don't feel hungry just because you're habitually eating at a certain time and now one day you don't eat at that time. So, okay, it's a lot, but I think it's also super consistent with the fundamentals that we talk about. Quick reminder: I do want you to stay around for a few more minutes because I want to share a protocol you can use the next time you feel hungry between meals. Okay. Really helpful tool that I've developed over time with clients, and I think it's gonna be helpful for you. I do want to leave you with something to reframe all of this. I'm a big fan of the the psycho, the behavioral psychology of this stuff, okay? Because a lot of you, be honest with yourself, you think of these hormones as another thing in the way, another obstacle, another, maybe it's an excuse, another thing to blame. And I know a lot of marketers on social media love to blame hormones for everything, okay? And you can, you know, personify these things, like say, oh, ghrelin is this the I think uh Dr. Oz back in the day called it the gremlin or something, right? The enemy that's making you hungry. Leptin is the enemy that prevents you losing weight, you know, GLP1, whatever. So here's how I want you to think about it. Okay, these hormones are super valuable and super important in keeping you alive and helping you thrive as a human being. And and therefore, we can use them as signals, as data, in when we think like an engineer and have curiosity about them. Ghrelin makes sure that you eat enough to survive. Leptin is kind of like your energy status to help your body allocate your resources the right way. GOP1 helps you stop eating before you overdo it, hence why the drugs work so well at preventing you from eating as much. So the problem is in the hormones. Hormones are not the problem. Okay. The problem, in my opinion, is that the modern food environment, your stress, your lack of sleep, the aggressive dieting strategies, and how this is all pushed and marketed, and all of this bad information online telling people to do these things are pushing the hormones into a state that is on the edge or into an extreme that they weren't, I'll say designed for. I mean, they would design is a bad word. We've evolved to have these hormones, they're doing what they do, but you're living in a state where they are stressed to the max and pushed to these extremes. So the solution, of course, isn't to, you know, try to fight against that, but create the conditions, create the environment where these things are at least working, if not optimally, not to that level of an extreme. Does that make sense? So we already mentioned those things. I'm not going to repeat them with the protein, fiber, sleep, stress, all of that stuff, resistance training, all of that is fantastic. But the reframe is that your hormones aren't the problem, that they're a source of feedback to you. That when we talk about listening to your body, that is a big piece of it. And it's not like you have to measure the hormones, right? It's the symptoms that come from the hormones that are telling you what's going on. And then you understand, okay, when I'm in this phase and I feel this way, this is why. And this is what I can do to either dial it back a little bit or, you know, psychologically deal with it in the way I need to. All right. Remember what I promised at the beginning: a simple protocol for handling hunger that helps you distinguish physical hunger from psychological hunger. I'm going to walk you through exactly how to do that in just a moment. So stick around. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, Calocurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CaloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. All right, here is that hunger protocol that I promised. I call it the hunger wave check. Okay, hunger wave check. The next time that hunger hits you between your meals, okay, which is very common during fat loss, instead of just reaching for food, I want you to do this. So this is this is intention, this is mindfulness. First, I want you to rate your hunger in the moment on a scale of one to ten. That's it. Just whatever that means to you. One is the least hungry, ten is just ravenous crazy hunger, right? Because most people don't even stop to think about it. Most people don't quantify it. They just feel hungry and they react. We're not going to do that. We're going to put a number on it. One to ten. Second, I want you to set a timer. Go on your iPhone or Android, open the timer app, and set a timer for 15 minutes. And after you set that timer, I want you to go drink some water or drink some tea or do something mildly engaging, a distraction. Answer some emails, play your ukulele, take a short walk, whatever. It's only 15 minutes. Okay. Third, when your timer goes off, I want you to reach your hunger again. Did it go up? Did it stay the same or did it drop? That's it. Now, here's why this works. That's all I'm telling you to do. This is a this is why it works. Ghrelin, your hunger hormone, operates in waves. We talked about meal time and consistency. So you can take advantage of that. Graylin peaks about for for like 20 to 30 minutes when it's trying to tell you to eat. And then it subsides even if you don't eat. So if your hunger dropped significantly because you did this exercise, okay, and you may need to do 20 minutes instead of 15, whatever. If your hunger dropped based on your rating before and after, that was a ghrelin wave. That's what I mean by wave. And therefore, it it was physical, but it was also temporary and just hormone-driven. But if your hunger stayed the same or went up, then your body's like, no, I actually really need to eat right now. And it could be because you normally eat at that time and you seriously do. You should be eating, which goes back to, hey, let's keep our meals consistent. This also interrupts the autopilot that drives many of you with emotional eating, with boredom-based eating. Okay. There's many causes of emotional eating, but these are big ones. Because the pause itself creates awareness. And I'm all for awareness across the board. Now I'm going to give you a bonus tip. A bonus tip is to log these moments on a piece of paper, in your phone, whatever, in a diary. Just a quick note. You say 3 p.m., I started at seven, hunger, and it dropped to three after 20 minutes. That's it, like before and after. Now you could add other things like how you felt, what emotions are going through your head, because maybe there are other triggers going on. But over time, you're going to see patterns. It's like logging your food. It's like logging your training. It's that's that's what we do, guys. That's what engineering is all about. So maybe 3 p.m. every day is always a Grayland spike, but maybe it correlates with stressful meetings. And that date is just a gold mine to understand your own hunger signals. So I want you to try it this week, see what you learn about yourself. And that's it for today's episode. On the next one, we're gonna take everything we covered today and look at the two biggest external factors that disrupt these hormones, which then cause things like extra belly fat and sugar cravings and lots of other things that none of us like. And if you've ever noticed that you eat more when, for example, you're tired or you're stressed, we're gonna talk about why and what to do about it. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And the next time hunger hits hard in the middle of a dieting phase, you'll know exactly what's happening and what to do. This is Philip Ape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

The Forgotten Thyroid Hormone That Supercharges Fat Loss and Metabolism (Dr. Amie Hornaman) | Ep 424

Want to drop 8-12 lbs before summer without crash dieting or losing muscle? Join the Get Lean in 45 Days Workshop on January 20th. Includes replay, fat loss workout program, custom macros, and complete 45-day protocol.

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Are you lifting weights, tracking macros, and still stuck with stubborn fat? What if your labs look “normal” but your metabolism feels broken?

Body recomp is supposed to feel simpler when you train hard and eat well, yet many people chasing weight loss and muscle building feel stuck. I brought on Dr. Amie Hornaman, known as the Thyroid Fixer, to challenge the way we think about metabolism, hormone health, and strength training. We explored T2, a lesser-known thyroid hormone that acts directly at the mitochondria to help burn fat, boost energy, and protect lean mass.

This conversation matters if you care about nutrition and fitness, longevity, and strength training over 40, especially for women’s fitness and anyone frustrated by slow progress despite doing “everything right.” We connected evidence-based fitness, evidence-based nutrition, and smart supplementation, without hype or shortcuts.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

0:00 – Why metabolism feels broken
4:20 – The forgotten thyroid hormone
9:45 – T2 vs T3 and T4
15:30 – Fat loss without muscle loss
22:10 – Mitochondria and metabolism
28:40 – Appetite vs energy expenditure
35:55 – Strength training and thyroid health
44:30 – Hashimoto’s and lab myths
52:20 – Practical next steps

Episode resources:

• Thyroid Fixxr T2 Supplement - get 10% off with code WITS

• The Thyroid Fixer Podcast - follow to get Philip’s episode soon!

• Free 7-Day Thyroid Healing Kickstarter

• Just Fix Your THYROID Facebook Group

• Website: dramie.com 

Most people chasing fat loss and steady energy hit a strange wall: their thyroid labs read “normal,” yet they feel tired, puffy, and stuck. That mismatch is often a testing problem, not a willpower problem. Conventional panels lean on TSH and T4 and miss how hormones actually work in your cells. This conversation with Dr. Amy Horneman shines a light on T2, a lesser-known thyroid hormone with outsized impact on mitochondria, thermogenesis, and metabolic health. Unlike T3, which can raise energy expenditure but risks muscle loss if misused, T2 acts locally in the mitochondria to increase ATP and fat oxidation without suppressing your own thyroid output. The result is practical: higher energy, better fat burning, and fewer trade-offs for lifters who want performance and body composition to improve together.

Understanding the thyroid family clarifies the confusion. T4 is inactive and must convert to T3; that conversion is fragile and blocked by stress, nutrient gaps, insulin resistance, and sex hormone imbalance. T3 is the active hormone with receptors across the body, but it’s a blunt tool that can burn both fat and muscle when overdone. T2 is different. Research suggests it increases thermogenesis, reduces oxidative stress, improves lipid profiles, and may even “brown” white adipose tissue, making it more metabolically active. Early findings hint at gene-level shifts that discourage fat storage. While the evidence base includes animal studies and emerging human data, clinical experience and mechanistic plausibility paint a consistent picture: better mitochondrial output, steadier energy, and improved metabolic flexibility.

The GLP-1 wave taught the world that appetite is one lever, but it also highlighted an uncomfortable side effect: meaningful lean mass loss for many users. T2 approaches the same problem from the other side—expenditure and cellular efficiency—without crushing appetite or signaling the brain to idle the thyroid gland. That matters for long-term health because muscle is a primary organ of longevity. If you care about strength training, recovery, and metabolic resilience, you need your interventions to preserve lean mass while trimming fat. T2 appears to do exactly that, and users often report a clean energy lift thanks to higher ATP rather than a jittery stimulant effect.

Where does T2 fit in a smart plan? Think of it as targeted support layered on top of first principles: lift heavy, eat enough protein, sleep well, walk daily, and manage stress. If you’re hypothyroid, get a full panel including free T3 and reverse T3, and correct obvious blockers like low vitamin D, selenium, magnesium, and iodine intake where appropriate. For weight-stable folks with good energy, T2 may be optional or used seasonally—during holidays, travel, or mini-cuts when you want to defend muscle and keep fat gain at bay. For those with the classic “normal labs, bad symptoms” story, T2 can provide a bridge toward better energy flux, allowing you to eat and move more without the scale punishing you for it.

Safety and expectations still apply. T2 isn’t a hall pass for ultra-processed diets or chronic sleep debt, and it won’t erase the effects of being inactive. Some sensitive users may feel “amped” at first as ATP rises, which can simply reflect a shift from low-and-slow physiology to normal function. The broader lesson remains: if your plan respects muscle, prioritizes recovery, and uses nutrition with intent, T2 can be the missing lever that transforms “stuck” into steady progress. Add curiosity, patience, and data—track strength, steps, protein, and labs—and you can finally align how you feel with what your “normal” numbers should have shown all along.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you're someone who's been doing all the things with your nutrition and training, and your goal has been to lose fat, build strength, and finally feel like your metabolism is working for you, but your labs come back normal, and your doctor tells you everything's fine, even though you feel exhausted, can't lose weight, and something just feels off, this episode is for you. My guest, Dr. Amy Horneman, is going to reveal the forgotten thyroid hormone. One that most doctors never test, but that directly impacts your ability to burn stored body fat, boost your energy, and increase your metabolic rate. You'll learn what this hormone is and what it does at the mitochondrial level, and how optimizing thyroid function can help you burn fat more efficiently, recover faster, and have the energy to live and enjoy life to the fullest. 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 going to discuss why so many people, especially those over 40, are told their thyroid labs look perfectly normal, yet they struggle with stubborn fat, low energy, and a metabolism that seems completely stuck. My guest today is Dr. Amy Hornman, known as the thyroid fixer. She's a thyroid and hormone optimization specialist who's built her practice around helping the people who fall through the cracks of conventional medicine, the ones who get dismissed despite very real symptoms. Today we're going to focus on T2. T2 is an often overlooked thyroid hormone that plays a direct role in mitochondrial function, fat oxidation, and metabolic rate. You'll learn what T2 is and why it matters for fat loss, why standard thyroid panels are usually inadequate, how thyroid dysfunction shows up differently than you might expect, and what steps to take if you suspect your thyroid is holding you back. Because, dear listener, Amy and I are all about helping you understand what's happening with your body so you finally have the strong, lean, high-energy lifestyle you've been working so hard for. Amy, it's a true pleasure. It's an honor to have you on the Wits and Weights podcast. Welcome to the show.

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 2:11

  Oh, well, thank you so much. It's an honor to be here.

  Philip Pape: 2:13

  Now you've covered T2 on your show quite a few times lately, including on a recent episode, it was called How to Lose Nine Pounds in 28 Days. Right. Right. Great title, right? It brings you in. Like, what is she talking about? And it clearly positions this hormone as a fat loss and energy performance enhancer. It's also available over the counter. So the obvious question is if T2 is so incredible, why the heck haven't haven't we been talking about this all along?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 2:39

  I know. Seriously, Philip. So, okay, let's let's start with a little bit of history and then we'll take it into the present, what we're kind of dealing with right now in present-day fat loss uh efforts. So if we go back 30 years, well, now it's it's around like 35 years. There's been 35 years of research done on T2, but it just hasn't been released out into the general public. It's not common knowledge that this molecule, this hormone, is so powerful when it comes to increasing our baseline metabolic rate. So literally the amount of fat that you're burning just sitting here, just listening to the podcast, just sitting on your couch watching Netflix. That's our resting metabolic rate. So that's without exercise, without movement. T2 has been shown over and over and over again in multiple studies to increase fat burning, increase our metabolism, decrease inflammation, turn on a gene that literally prevents fat from accumulating on our body. It reduces oxidative stress, it improves our lipids, it improves our cholesterol, and it only targets body fat and not muscle. Now, why I say that is because that brings us into the present day of this obesity epidemic. We now have GLPs. They have taken the stage, they have taken the forefront. And everybody and their brothers on a GLP right now. I used to call them the Beverly Hills Soccer Mom Drug of Choice for weight loss, because if you had 10 pounds to lose, you pop on a GLP, you lose the 10 pounds, and then you know you're good. But the issue is that we're seeing with GLPs over and over again is that they are burning lean muscle. You know, Peter Atia told us that four years ago. Hey, 40% of the weight loss that we're seeing with these GLPs is lean muscle tissue, that precious muscle that we need to keep on our bodies. It's our organ of longevity. And we're also losing fat. We're getting Manjaro phase. People are looking 10 years older than they are. And the other issue is it's just killing our appetite, and we're not actually changing the way that we're eating. So, in my opinion, now this could be a whole other podcast rabbit hole, but why haven't we heard about T2? Because it's not a drug, it's not a pharmaceutical. Eli Lilly doesn't own it, Pfizer doesn't own it, just like they do the GLP. So we're not hearing about it in mainstream as a true potential answer for the obesity crisis that we're in, because it does so much, because it would wipe out statins, because it helps with insulin resistance, because it actually decreases inflammation and helps fatty liver disease. Well, there's five drugs right there that can't be prescribed anymore. They start healing you. And then there's the big elephant in the room drug of choice, the GLPs. So I think really that's why it's not getting the spotlight that it deserves.

  Philip Pape: 5:41

  Yeah, that's a viable answer that that I've thought about myself, because you look at, for example, just simple herbal supplements we've known for thousands of years, like Ashwagandha. Ashwagandha is massively helpful to people with anxiety and stress. And, you know, you get it over the counter and it's actually put into some multivitamins today and things like that, but it's not patentable, right? It's not patentable like these drugs. Um, same thing, like you said, hormone replacement therapy, peptides come to mind there. And I know peptides are just at the verge of where we are with that. So, in that case, I guess let's look at the science first. Like, what makes it functionally different from T3 and T4? And then I would like to understand, you know, access and dosing, and like what should people think about if they even want to consider T2?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 6:23

  All that fun stuff, yes. Okay. So, first of all, when we look at all the thyroid hormones, your thyroid gland does produce T1, T2, T3, and T4. Now, T1 we can set aside, it's totally inactive, it doesn't really play a role, it doesn't convert. So we'll just push that over here. Then we'll look at T4 next, because that's the other inactive thyroid hormone. When our bodies produce T4, it has to go through a conversion process where one iodine atom is removed and it literally becomes T3. There's no receptor site anywhere in your body for T4. So that's important to remember because many of your listeners might be on something of a medication for their thyroid called syntroid or levothyroxin, levoxyl, tyrosin. That's only T4. So it's really important for everyone with a thyroid problem that is on this medication to recognize the fact that it is inactive. Your body has to take that T4 and convert it. Now, the problem with that is conventional medicine assumes that, well, the body just does that. It'll convert it, no problem. That's all we need to do is give you some T4 and you'll be fine. The reality is that that conversion process, I attribute it to running 10 tough mutters in a row. It's really hard for your body to do. If you have insulin resistance, vitamin D deficiency, selenium deficiency, uh iodine deficiency, magnesium deficiency, if you have excess cortisol, if you're under stress, if you're estrogen dominant, if your hormones aren't balanced, if you have a genetic snip, all of those things can interfere with that T4 to T3 conversion. So just, I mean, that that laundry list alone, you go, well, yeah, that kind of does sound like a hard job for the body to do. So T4 has to convert. Doesn't easily do that. So let's move on to T3. T3 is the active thyroid hormone. And yes, there are medications that are T3 based. That's liothyrinine, cytomel, and there is 20% T3 in the thyroid medication called natural desiccated thyroid. It kind of comes under that umbrella. That would be your armor or your NP thyroid. Those medications are 80% T4 and 20% T3. So we get a little bit of a sprinkle in there. But it does have to be prescribed. Now, do we have receptor sites on our cells for T3? Yes. Yes, everywhere in our body, we have a receptor site on every single cell. So I always say from head to toe, the thyroid runs the show because literally the growth of your hair down to whether or not you poop every day is dependent on your thyroid functioning and you having enough of that active thyroid hormone T3. Now, T3 is great in that, yeah, it will absolutely increase our metabolism. However, it does not differentiate between muscle and fat. It will burn both because it just is increasing the overall fire. It's increasing your energy expenditure. It's not sitting back saying, okay, that precious lean muscle over there, I mean, very similar to a GLP. That precious lean muscle over there, we're just gonna leave that alone. No, no. It's going to burn fat and it's going to burn your muscle at the same time. Now, if it's properly dosed, if you're managed by someone who knows what they're doing with the thyroid, you're not going to be over-medicated on T3 and you will have just enough to optimize your thyroid, optimize your body where it's not burning muscle, but you do have a decent metabolism. The problem is not many people know how to dose T3 properly. Even functional practitioners, I have seen them give these little baby doses of T3 that do nothing for a person, or they're not paying attention to whether or not that person is converting their T4 to T3. So we do run into some issues there. And a quick story, because this will lead us into T2. When we're looking at the power of T3, we always have to go back to bodybuilders because bodybuilders were the OGs of biohacking long before Asprey came along. Love you, Ben Greenfield. I know you were a bodybuilder too. But again, let's go back to like Jay Cutler and you know that literally like 30 years ago and look at what they were doing. Okay, well, when I was competing, yes, um, people were using and abusing T3 to get ready for a show because it burned body fat. The problem was, and I and I saw uh one of the trainers to the pros being interviewed, and I loved what he said. He said, here's the problem I don't give my athletes T3 to get ready for a show because it's going to burn their muscle that they've worked so hard to build and maintain. And number two, they're gonna come out the other side of a show with a thyroid problem because there is that negative feedback loop. Anytime we take a medication hormone, there's going to be a message sent to our brain, our hypothalamus and pituitary that does all the talking to the rest of our body. And it's going to tell our brains to just quiet down the production of that hormone. So, in the case of thyroid, it's telling our hypothalamus and our pituitary to like, you know what, you can just tell the thyroid gland that it can step aside and go take a nap. It doesn't need to produce its own hormone anymore because there's enough going on in the body. Well, then that's why you see competitors gain 40 pounds in two weeks after a show because their thyroid has totally crapped the bed and now they legit have a thyroid problem. So this trainer goes, you know, I only use T2 because it leaves the muscle alone, it only burns body fat, and it does not have a negative feedback loop on the thyroid because it's only working at the mitochondria level. And he is right. When I dove into the research, now I've been studying T2 for about 15 years, and looking at all the research, it does not have a thyrometic effect, meaning it's not going to come back and suppress your TSH. It's not going to tell your thyroid, hey, you don't have to work anymore. It's not going to change your numbers to where your doctor's going to go, oh my gosh, Philip, what have you been doing? You're hyper thyroid now. No, it does none of that. It literally works at that mitochondrial level to produce ATP and to increase thermogenesis or increase the amount of fat being burned. And then we're seeing other benefits as well.

  Philip Pape: 13:10

  Oh, okay. I want to get into that. Before we do, I just want to clarify something related to T3. And I guess it affects GLP1s as well, because you mentioned muscle loss. And of course, our listeners understand the value of strength training, and there's going to be differences between populations who lift and don't. If you don't, you're absolutely going to lose a ton of muscle. If you do, though, let's say if you do, and you're talking about bodybuilders, obviously they do, is it that the T3 ramps up the energy expenditure such that you're in a much more aggressive deficit and that's why you're losing muscle, or is there an above and beyond impact going on?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 13:41

  So yeah, I believe with the GLPs, there's something else. Because even anecdotally, when I've been playing with even microdosing GLPs, or when we're, and I am not anti-GLP, by the way. I do believe that if you use a tiny dose in some populations doing that microdose, we see a decrease in inflammation. And obviously, if someone is full-blown type 2 diabetic, I mean, I've had patients with A1Cs of uh 13. Yeah, let's get some GLPs on board because that excess weight and that inflammation that goes along with having type 2 diabetes is way more detrimental than losing a little bit of muscle. You know, you have to weigh your pros and cons here. But I think, you know, what we're seeing with the GLPs, there's something we don't know. And we're still seeing muscle loss despite adequate protein intake and despite lifting heavy. So with T3, we don't see that as drastically. I mean, that really is it is more manageable when you are lifting, when you're eating adequate amounts of protein, when you're feeding your muscle appropriately, getting in amino acids. We don't see as much muscle loss with T3 when used appropriately. But when we're talking about like kind of looking at the performance enhancer area. You know, you're you're talking about higher doses in a shorter amount of time, specifically designed to rev the metabolism to burn as much body fat as possible in those eight to 12 weeks of contest prep. You know, you're probably going to be looking at a little bit of muscle loss there too, despite the lifting and the eating, because those people, that subset of the population is already in a caloric deficit in preparation for the show, possibly a little bit of a nutrient deficit. I know I've been there. And then you're going to have a little bit of muscle loss when you're using T3 in that population.

  Philip Pape: 15:35

  Yeah, it's always interesting to break apart the energy expenditure side from the physiologic, like what are these other effects going on? So then that leads us to T2, because you said, okay, it works at the mitochondrial level. It doesn't have the same phenomenon of muscle loss, and then it doesn't negatively affect your own thyroids production. So all of that sounds great, especially if I think you've talked about how it's over the counter and doesn't need to be prescribed or even used if you have thyroid disease. It could just be something we use as an enhancer. So let's get into T2. Like, what does it mean? How does it work? Um, what's going on? Like, lay it on us.

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 16:11

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, so how I was exposed to T2, like I said, about 15, well, maybe 20 years ago now. Yeah. 20 years ago, I started looking into it because it was available over the counter in supplemental form, but only kind of in that bro science population. So there was a company that had had a really angry name and literally, I kid you not, had like a gorilla with claw marks on the front of the bottle. So here I am meeting with 45-year-old women, needing to lose weight. And I'm like, um, yeah, you're just gonna have to trust me here. You're gonna want to go to this really angry, chaotic, painful website and order something with a gorilla claw on it. And they'd be looking at me like I had five heads, like, really, I'm gonna take this. Is this safe? I'm like, trust me. So anecdotally, I was using it on myself, on my patients, and seeing tremendous results. And this was even in the subset of patients who didn't have an open-minded doctor. So at the time, I didn't have my team where we could prescribe to all 50 states. So I was working with people trying to advocate for them to their doctor, hey, this person's on T4 only. It's not working, they've gained 30 pounds, they can't lose it. Can we please like change up their thyroid medication, add in T3? So obviously we hit a lot of roadblocks there. And a lot of the patients were on T4 only, and it just wasn't working. So that's where I would say, you know, hey, Susie, just trust me, add this in. And then we were seeing weight loss, we were seeing changes in their body, we were seeing inflammation go down. And that's what really piqued my interest, and that's where I dove deeper into T2. So then we started looking at the studies on it and seeing, oh, look, in 28 days, we're seeing a drop of 4% body fat, which is huge. We're seeing a drop of an average of nine pounds. Some lost less, some lost more, an average of nine pounds in a month when using T2. And it became really interesting to me to look at all of the other benefits as well, like the improved fatty liver, improved cholesterol panels. We're seeing a decrease in insulin, improvement in insulin sensitivity. And then most recently, the study that came out within the last year or so is that it's actually turning off a gene that allows fat accumulation. So that's huge. I mean, if you're someone that you're like, I look sideways at a brownie and I put on five pounds, this can help because it's literally going to improve your metabolism and it's going to, if you are one of those easy gainers, it's going to stop that fat from easily accumulating on your body. Now that does it's not a license to go eat what you want. But if you are one of those people where you're like, I can't enjoy anything. Like, I can't even go out to eat with my husband and have an appetizer or a glass of wine because I'm going to pay the price and be five pounds heavier tomorrow. That's huge to be able to have that social life, have that enjoyment again without being worried about the scale going up all the time. So that's how I was introduced to T2 and how I started studying it. And then fast forward to four years ago, when I was starting the fixer line of supplements, I knew that that was going to be the forefront. That was the first product to come to market, the first thing on the shelf is going to be T2 because of all the years of studying that I did and how beneficial it was. I knew it needed to come to market, not in an angry broscience form with a gorilla on the front. So we are today.

  Philip Pape: 19:59

  I'm not even uh you know attracted by those things anymore, like my 25-year-old self might have been. That's kind of funny. So two things I want to ask about then. You mentioned some of the biomarkers, uh like lipids improving. You mentioned insulin sensitivity and then this gene for fat storage. So what I'd like to separate out is on one hand, um, what is being improved simply by virtue of this higher energy flux or the weight loss? And what is being improved with true like nutrient partitioning and things like that. Because when you mentioned the gene for fat storage, my brain always goes to the numbers, like the math and like, okay, so if you had that extra brownie, are you now burning a few more calories and therefore it's just netting out or are you like shuttling that into a little more repair and building of muscle tissue instead of storing of fat. You know what I mean? That that's where my brain goes.

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 20:50

  Oh yeah. I like how your brain works actually. So I'll work backwards. The the gene study is so new I haven't seen anything other than that one that came out. So I'm still waiting for more research to be done. And that is an area that I just don't know if we're going to see it or not because it's not a pharmaceutical. And I I think we've seen that a ton if you look on PubMed NIH, it's really hard to find studies on nutraceuticals, on herbals, on things like ashwagandha because you can't patent it and you can't turn it into a medication. I mean that's just the reality of it.

  Philip Pape: 21:30

  So real quick on that, I totally know what you mean. And then you get the criticism that the few studies you do find are funded by the supplement companies as if that's the be all end all of why they're poor studies. And some of these are very good studies. And I I hate that for them because sometimes there is really good research but it's only paid for by one company because that's in their interest, right? So anyway, yeah.

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 21:54

  No, that's true though, because on that note I have thought about like ooh I wonder if we could run you know a double one placebo control a study. But but the money that it takes to run that I mean you would basically have to be Pfizer in order to have that kind of cash to run that kind of study. So there's a barrier right there is when you are a an individual owner of a supplement company, I mean number one, those are the companies that you can really trust. I've been saying that since my days of competing I I was I I remember telling my nutrition clients like hey when you buy protein powder buy it from Gaspari or Labrata because those dudes still own the company like small businesses and but the issue is that we don't have that kind of money to run those kinds of studies. So when you do an kind of like an of let's say 10 study it gets a little bit more criticism because oh well it wasn't controlled all of that but I got to tell you we we actually did it was called the fixer transformation we took 15 ladies 11 of them made it through and they were all taking T2. They were taking thyroid fixer metabolism fixer from my lime and I actually met with them but not as patients. I met with them beforehand I looked at their labs and like some of these women have thyroid problems. Some of them have low hormones and need hormones some of them are on T4 only and I remember thinking I don't know if this is going to work for them. Is it going to break through that metabolic barrier that having low thyroid function that being on T4 only that having low hormones puts you in and it did. I mean that was the big thing was like okay and that woman on T4 only she lost 11 pounds in four months and this one lost 35 pounds in four months. I mean it was incredible but it's not publishable because it wasn't double blind placebo controlled. So I think that's that's definitely one of the barriers.

  Philip Pape: 23:51

  Well you addressed the gene one and then the other one was about the weight loss if that's really the cause behind improved lipids and biomarkers or if there's again other benefits kind of like we're seeing with the what's the latest GLP one starts with an R that they're looking at yeah and they're looking at like fatty liver how it directly impacts liver fat potentially. So anyway is that the case here or is it multiple variables going on or what?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 24:14

  So multiple variables um number one we do see just a general increase in thermogenesis. So they you know obviously before the human studies they did multiple studies on rats and what they found was when the rats were when they were even given high fat diets which would be the equivalent to us as humans eating around 2000 grams of fat, which is unfathomable. But if we did I think we could all agree we're probably gonna gain weight like I don't care if you're keto or carnivore, if you eat 2000 grams of fat, you're going to put on fat. Like that's just the bottom line. So these rats were put on a high fat diet, given T2, and they still increase thermogenesis or the burning of stored body fat and still lost weight. We also are seeing a browning of white adipose tissue. So that's why we jump into cold plunges right we want to ultimately brown the white squishy fat that we grab and we say I don't want this anymore and we want to turn it brown and that becomes brown fat is more metabolically active brown fat improves our insulin sensitivity. So there's that mechanism going on as well and then the third is that there is mitochondrial uncoupling. So we would see that again going way back to the OGs of biohacking the bodybuilders do you remember clen butyroll? Do you remember when when the bodybuilders were using Clen to also burn body fat there's mitochondrial uncoupling there. And basically what that means is that your body is is increasing the fat burning while leaving the muscle alone so they term it in these papers they term it as an exercise mimetic because when we look at exercise we're building muscle we're burning body fat we're improving our lipids we're improving our insulin obviously we're we're moving fat out of our liver to a to a point uh during exercise and T2 does all of those same things so while it's not a a a green light to not exercise and just sit on the couch and take T2 it does produce the same benefits of exercise. So it's kind of working on a on a multitude of different layers and then again at the mitochondria level we're seeing ATP production so it's also producing steady energy. And that's what I've also seen in my in my hypothyroid people using it when you have a thyroid problem sometimes you have it's this indescribable low energy. It's like this you can't get going and you don't even know why you're like oh why am I so tired? It's noon it's two it's three it's four I'm still dragging and literally you just drag through the day. Well instead of taking a stimulant because there's nothing stimulating about T2 it's not like a you know the fat burners of old where you felt like you were having a heart attack it just increases ATP so you have that like steady energy through the day. Yeah life is so much better now. So yeah it it's working on a a multitude of different levels. Now to answer your question about the the shuttling of nutrients that I haven't seen. I don't know I can't answer that if it shuttles things differently I'm not sure.

  Philip Pape: 27:45

  I mean one thing that does come to mind though if you have just increased thermogenesis in general and you could eat more, that leads to a host of positive effects in that you could have more carbs for recovery, you could have more nutrients, you know, all those things people underestimate like you know Brandon de Cruz and others are big into energy flux discussion of like eat more and move more. So obviously if thyroid's working against you you can't eat more because you're going to gain a bunch of weight. So once you resolve that now you could eat more move more. I was looking up um trying to find one of these studies you were mentioning. I think I think I found one it was on rats. I'm sure a lot of these on rats because like you said we we don't have the a lot of human trials yet that was talking about mitochondrial integrity including fusion fission and mitophagy. And it it basically it talks about the exchange of contents routine damage and healthy mitochondria and counteracting the effects of hypothyroidism as well. So it is kind of interesting this is comparative effects of I'm not even going to pronounce it the whole compound for T25 diado al thyroid knows 35 diado with two eyes the L thironing yes and 353 triado L thyroid which that's is that T3 okay on mitochondrial damage and sea gas sting driven inflammation in liver of hyperthyroid rats. That's probably one of the ones on the list that you've maybe looked at anyway just trying to nerd out on this stuff. Okay so then is this something somebody should just go try it out or and and I ask this seriously because do you measure for T2 in the blood or do you just or not?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 29:13

  Well we can't because they they do have a T2 assay for the studies that we saw in humans but there it's not available at Quest and Lab Core. It's not like we can order it for you. However, based on all of the research and the safety profile of it if you have to lose weight now where I wouldn't use T2 if you are an ideal weight if you are underweight if you are hyper thyroid if you have an eating disorder like no but outside of that little list it's safe for everyone to use I mean you're decreasing inflammation you're reducing oxidative stress right there bonus bonus. And obviously if you're improving your metabolism that's another bonus if you're losing excess body fat, improving lipids, improving your insulin sensitivity, bonus, bonus. And it's like longevity bonus. It's not just aesthetic of course we don't want excess fat on our bodies we want to have that body composition that we're we're confident and we're comfortable and we love getting dressed and we feel good. But then there's the longevity aspect too like I said earlier the the detriments the health detriments of carrying excess body fat far outweighs a little bit of loss of muscle. So like in the case of my one patient with an A1C about 11, yes, we're going to use a GLP1 on her because we want to reverse her diabetes and she needed to lose about 150 pounds. So in that case okay let's bring in the big guns but if we can just improve someone's A1C, improve their insulin, improve their lipids that might just be a little bit off not dramatically, but just a little bit off well then that's huge for longevity. We know inflammation affects or all cause mortality you know from Alzheimer's to cardiovascular disease to cancer to anything that's going to kill us basically or make our life shorter stems from inflammation and stems from excess body fat, high insulin. I mean really the fastest way to age keep your insulin high, right? So if we can improve all of that beneath the surface, then you get the aesthetic benefits and the longevity benefits at the same time.

  Philip Pape: 31:33

  Got it. So moderate weight loss, not an eating disorder, not hypothyroid, potentially other issues that might interfere and I'm a big advocate of like the whole body approach you need to figure out your immediate constraint and kind of attack them one at a time. For many of you it's just you're not active and not lifting weights start there. For many of you you're doing all the things and still struggling so I think this is helpful. It then brings up more questions. This episode drops in the middle of a whole series on appetite that I'm doing and I wonder this is kind of attacking from the other side right like GLP1's attack from the appetite I feel like this attacks from the expenditure side but does it affect appetite?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 32:10

  No T2 doesn't now in my metabolism fixer I added suppresa which is a saffron extract that's been shown in studies to reduce cravings reduce appetite reduced cravings by about 67 to 69%. But we're not seeing the complete crushing of an appetite like we are with the GLPs where literally I mean I am speaking from experience I experimented on myself. So I'm not just going by what people told me I felt it and it is wild where you are looking at this beautiful ribeye and you literally take a bite and you go, I just can't anymore. I I can't even take another bite like you just can't no suppressa is not going to do that. It's going to take the edge off so that you don't overeat so that you're not snacking so that you eat the ribeye but you don't need the chocolate chip cookie afterwards. Yeah. But T2 alone like that what what is in thyroid fixer I don't have suppressor in there, there's no appetite suppression at all.

  Philip Pape: 33:12

  Yeah and and for many they may not need it right for many, I mean I've worked with women who when I first started coaching it was very frustrating when a woman in her 40s or 50s just plateaued very quickly during a fat loss phase doing all the right things and it was like what the heck's happening and we would track their, we would calculate their expenditure right I know a lot of people don't still don't do that today, which baffles me. It's like you've got to figure out roughly how many calories you burn beyond just using a calculator and it was a thyroid, it was usually a thyroid issue. And it wasn't that they were eating too much. It's just that they couldn't burn as much as they needed to eat a reasonable amount which I think is this solves. So then that raises the question what if you're not dieting what if you are at a reasonable weight for yourself, you know, decent body composition is this a good thing to do when you're at maintenance does it still provide those other benefits that are worth taking T2 long term and I guess that's a side question is do you take it long term or is it like a short term thing?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 34:07

  I mean you can really kind of personalize it. So how I take it because I am I'm I'm at a decent weight I'm good staying right here don't want to lose anymore. What I do is I'll add it in let's say coming up next week during the holidays where I know I'm eating the cookies Philip I'm I'm eating the damn Christmas cookies. So I'm not gonna deprive myself but I'm gonna have a little bit of fun but I know that you know weight gain can happen during that time. So in order to keep my metabolism up a little bit more I'll take it during that time or if I'm going on vacation or you know just adding it in bringing it in and out for that purpose. But I would say yeah if you are at a decent weight and you're like I'm good then you don't need it. Now if you have low energy if you're at a decent weight but you're like oh I got that energy drag through the day that she's talking about then yes that is a a beautiful way to maintain nice steady energy. And then at the same time I would say to everybody still have your thyroid check. Look at your hormone function because just like anything T2 is going to work better in a primed body. So you know we hear that a lot with peptides any peptide especially the GLPs they will not work if let's say you're you're so hypothyroid and you're not even being paid attention to or tested or treated or your hormones are in the toilet you're not on bioidentical hormone replacement you have no testosterone whatsoever your estrogens in the in the basement um it's either not going to work or it's going to take a really long time or if you're eating like garbage and you're not moving like that's hard to overcome. Now in the in the fixer transformation ladies we saw T2 overcome some of those blocks but in general I would say to the listener like please don't think that you're going to put T2 on a dumpster fire and have it work.

  Philip Pape: 36:05

  It's just not yeah that that's important in the pyramid right like supplements are are the icing on the cake they can be super powerful and they're accelerated when you're doing the other things right you'll I'm sure you've gotten reviews like oh this thing doesn't work at all and and it's somebody who just their lifestyles it's either that or they'll use it for like three weeks and it's like man this is not a GLP drug.

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 36:27

  Yeah it's not going to work in three to four in fact you can and for those people I go when you take vitamin D, do you think your vitamin D is going to go from a 20 to an 80 in three weeks or you think it's going to take a couple of months when we give hormone replacement therapy we are prescribing hormones I still tell my patients now hormones take about three months to build up and to get to those optimal levels where we know what your dose is going to be where you can coast. If hormones take three months do you think a supplement is going to work in three to four weeks so it's yeah it's it's about expectation too as as well as not putting it on a body that is wrecked.

  Philip Pape: 37:09

  Something we struggle with all the time in this industry is like balancing realistic time patience expectations for if you want something that sticks long term, you're gonna have to be a little patient but listeners, come on, you've been struggling with for 20, 30 years what's another six months to do it right like that's what I always say what's six months to do it the right way what about side effects?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 37:28

  We haven't seen any yet the only reports that we've gotten from some customers is that they certain really sensitive people can feel a little bit of that amp. You know so when you push ATP some people be like whoa I felt a little bit jacked up like did I drink a Red Bull like my heart started palpating a little bit. Now sometimes it's the matter of if you are in that hypothyroid state like you truly do have a thyroid problem or you're on T4 only a lot of times and I hear this from patients as well when we start treating them, they'll say oh my gosh my heart rate is high. I go what is it? They go it's like 65. I'm like okay so that means that you were really low before like you actually got used to a 50 beats per minute heart rate not that you were Lance Armstrong, but that you were just hypo low and slow. And now we're bringing you into a normal range and you feel like it's high and you feel like it just got jacked up. Now that's totally different than somebody that's like oh I'm sitting here at my desk and my heart rate's 130. Okay, but like let's let's back off something if that's happening. But a lot of times people will just feel that little bit of ATP production and feel amped but they're really kind of coming into normal.

  Philip Pape: 38:43

  Interesting. So in in the totality of someone's like regimen or protocol, right? Like somebody who is not who doesn't have any hormone issues, where does this all fit? And what I mean by that is you know we usually talk about the pillars like you've got lifting and maybe your steps and your sleep and you know where where does all this fit and then how would it what other supplements do you are you big on along with T2?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 39:07

  Yeah absolutely so I think it fits into just like you said a couple minutes ago that that that pillar of supplementation support targeted therapy for what your body needs. So you okay you need to lose weight you need better energy okay here it is that's that target in addition to the lifestyle and the sleep and the nutrition and the movement you have to have all of that. And then the the baseline supplementation support so I call that the no duh list meaning of course duh of course you're gonna take these every day. So my no duh supplement list is vitamin D, magnesium, selenium in a small amount in the form of selenomothionine I like using a hundred micrograms, not 200, not 400. Side note the problem with some thyroid patients is they get so desperate And they do want results yesterday that they read a blog that selenium helps your thyroid, and then they start popping it like candy.

  Philip Pape: 40:07

  And I'm not eating a lot of Brazil nuts, right?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 40:09

  Oh, like a bag of Brazil nuts every day, or they'll take like a 400 microgram or 200 microgram uh selenium supplement. I'm like, that's too much. That can actually increase your reverse T3. So you want kind of the Goldilocks sweet, sweet spot. And I love iodine. And I know that's a whole other controversial topic, but for me, that is part of my no dah supplement list as a baseline supplement in the proper amount because our thyroid needs it to produce T4, T3, and T2. Our thyroid gland needs it to convert that inactive T4 to T3. And it's antiviral, antifungal, antibacterial, and it helps detoxify our bodies from chlorine, bromide, and fluoride, which are very toxic halogens to your thyroid as well. So I like iodine as a baseline too.

  Philip Pape: 40:58

  So selenium and iodine, right? I mean, the argument always is why not get those from food? I know magnesium, it's almost impossible to get enough from food, let's be honest, in the food supply, but it does the same apply to selenium and iodine?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 41:10

  You know, I used to say, ah, you know, just eat a Brazil nut or two every day. But then kind of looking more into that, the again, we kind of come back to what's wrong with our food supply, where was it grown? Was it exposed to pesticides? Was it exposed to heavy metals in the soil? Um, how much selenium is actually in each Brazil nut? There are different sizes. So it became too much of the Wild West just telling people to eat Brazil nuts. I mean, while it's beautiful to get nutrients from food whenever you can, unfortunately, in the time that we're living, that's getting harder and harder to do because of the soil depletion and just everything that we're using on our crops. So I just say, you know what, go ahead and supplement with it. It's just, it's steady, it's easy. You know, you're getting it in and call it a day.

  Philip Pape: 42:00

  Yeah, I kind of agree. I mean, uh, same thing with multivitamins or um vitamin C or like uh what's another creatine, obviously, but creatine is its own thing. You can't get enough from food. I guess you could, but that'd be a lot of meat. A lot of meat. Yeah, that'd be a lot, a lot, a lot of meat. Yeah, like five times as much. So, okay, that's that's good to know. The the dud list sounds totally reasonable. Um, and then, you know, one thing I wanted to ask you, because we did talk about strength training a couple times, that I'm always curious about is how it affects your thyroid. Obviously, we know dieting affects your thyroid temporarily, you know, downregulates it, just like all your other hormones, but then it recovers. You know, strength training can be really stressful for some people who have done the wrong way or if like they overtrain. And I just wonder like, where's the line of how beneficial it is to your thyroid as a natural thing to do versus not?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 42:47

  The big thing we see impact the thyroid are more so the cardio queens. It's and and I get it because when I was being misdiagnosed and my body literally laid down in excess of 25 pounds in a short amount of time. Yeah, I did cardio. I cardioed my ass off in hopes that maybe that would help me take off some of the fat that was coming on my body so rapidly. But unfortunately, that produces an excess of cortisol, which downregulates your thyroid. And we just know that strength training is so much better. Actually, I don't even do cardio anymore. My cardiovascular system gets a workout from lifting heavy because if you lift heavy enough, you will be out of breath. Or I'll do some, you know, HIIT training like the infinity rope or something like that that gets my heart rate up. But I no longer do a machine for cardio and I certainly don't run. I just focus on doing strength training. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's very, very rare that someone will overdo strength training. I mean, you and I talked a little bit about CrossFit before we jumped on. Okay, there's that subset of the population that maybe that's a little bit overdone. But I think even that has changed through the years, and we're not seeing the same like crazy intensity that we once saw, where people were really like going into rhabdo and really crushing their bodies. But I really believe that we need to get away from this hour-long cardio session, the Peloton, the even just the 45-minute, like long steady state cardio or running. You know, you just can't. You you just can't do it. And I my husband was a runner. Quick story, because this impacted him from the beginning when I told him this. He used to be a runner. Now he would lift weights too, but he would always run. And I would say, Han, let me just tell you something. Just get this picture in your head. First of all, I want you to picture what a a sprinter looks like, an Olympic sprinter. The the guys that maybe do a quick hurdle or a sprint, they are jacked. They could step on a bodybuilding stage the same day that they're in the Olympics and win. They have muscle and they're tight and they're lean. And I said, now I want you to picture your typical marathon runner. And what do they look like? They're a skinny fat, they're they have no muscle, they're lanky, they're sick looking. In general, now, if you're a marathon runner out there and you're jacked up and you're awesome, that's fine. I'm talking in general, when you look at these marathon runners, they look bad. And he goes, Right. And he will still he will still reference that conversation to this day because that totally changed his workouts and he stopped pounding the pavement because he was really doing nothing except wearing out his joints.

  Philip Pape: 45:37

  We are totally on the same page. I I recommend sprinting, like anabolic sprinting, very short, like one to six work to rest ratio. Learned it from Brad Kearns actually, not long ago. Um, that walking and lifting, like is pretty much all you need to be and and getting up throughout the day. I think that's super important too. There's um, Amy, there's some really cool studies about like getting up a couple times every hour and walking in terms of how much it swings your muscle protein synthesis and insulin sensitivity. So that combined with all this other stuff is really great. All right. I have two listener questions from someone. Her name is Carol. Um, she's also an assistant coach who knows a lot about thyroid from her personal experience. She has Hashimoto's. And so she wanted to challenge you a little bit with some more advanced questions that I'm hoping we can answer. You want to give it a shot?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 46:19

  Yes, let's do it.

  Philip Pape: 46:20

  Okay. The first one is I would love to know more about thyroid peroxidase antibodies and thyroglobulin antibodies. If someone's levels of those are very low, mine are one and two, for example, does this still mean they have Hashimoto's or have I successfully put it into remission?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 46:36

  Amazing question. Okay. So first we have to think about those antibodies as soldiers that are going out and beating up your thyroid gland. Right. So if we if we if we just start there and we think about every number that you see next to your TPO and your TGA is a little soldier that is confused and thinks that your thyroid is a bad guy and likes to go out and regularly attack it. So if you have two soldiers, okay, I mean, it's not something to dismiss, it's something to pay attention to. But at that point of time, you could go, okay, well, maybe I can do things here naturally to support my body and push it into remission. Adding in things like black human seed oil is amazing. I mean, we we have seen, I have, I added it to my line, it's Hashimoto's fixer, but we have seen people go into full remission when they add in black human seed oil. Um, going gluten-free, controlling your stress, all of that. Very beneficial to even push those down to zero. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is that antibodies often come back as a false negative. So it's good to retest those on a regular basis or anytime you're testing your full thyroid panel, go ahead and add those in just so you can double check, especially if you are getting those low markers. You know, you want to keep an eye on it, where they're okay, the soldiers are present, but they're really, really, really low right now. The other component to that is that if you have symptoms, then we want to look at your thyroid values. Like, okay, we can say TBO and TJ, yeah, the present. Let's put those over here now. How's your free T3 and reverse T3? Are you diagnosed with hypothyroidism? Are you on medication? Is that medication actually optimizing you or are you just normal per conventional medicine standards? To which I always tell people listen, don't hang your hat on your antibodies. So the flip side would be what if your antibodies were a thousand, but you felt amazing, your free T3 is optimal, your reverse T3 is optimal, you have zero symptoms. Okay, then we do some work on the antibodies. We add in black human, we go gluten-free, we do those things, but we don't freak out. But this the flip side is what if your antibodies are zero, but your free T3 is in the toilet, your reverse T3 is high, your body is in survival mode, you're gaining weight like it's no tomorrow, and you are losing hair like crazy. It's time to do something about that. Like we don't care that you have zero antibodies or one or two. We need to fix this over here. So it really comes back to the most important question that anyone can ask you how do you feel? And if you feel like you have symptoms, then we need to do something about it.

  Philip Pape: 49:15

  So if you don't have symptoms and those are low, to answer her question, like, is there a way to tell you put Hashimotas into remission?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 49:22

  Only if those are zero. You put Hashimoto's into remission. Got it. If there's any antibodies present, then no, but I would say she's pretty darn close. Maybe she just needs to push it a little bit more and it'll go into full remission. But then just keep an eye on it because those antibodies respond to stress, they respond to an infection. I mean, if you get a cold over the winter, your antibodies can bounce back and appear again. So you just have to keep an eye on them.

  Philip Pape: 49:48

  Well, Carol's a rock star. She does all the things that you tell people to do. And so even somebody like that who, you know, struggles with thyroid issues like this, it's it's the reality, right? And so understanding all this is important. Her other question is related to TSH. She's wondering how low is too low for it to be suppressed when on T3 and T4 meds. Um, her main concern is how it might contribute to osteoporosis.

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 50:12

  Got it.

  Philip Pape: 50:12

  So, how do you keep TSH in a good range while on the meds?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 50:15

  Oh, Carol, I love your question. Okay. So whenever you are taking a thyroid hormone replacement containing T3, you are going to get TSH suppression. And we even see TSH suppression on people that are on T4 only. Now, if we think about it, I want I want to back up, think about it from a thyroid cancer standpoint. And this is where I question the conventional medicine rhetoric of not suppressing TSH in your average hypothyroid patient when it's okay and actually targeted to suppress TSH post-thyroid cancer. So, why is it that we're purposely suppressing TSH in this population and we're freaking out and putting and using fear mongering in this population? It doesn't even make sense. On top of that, Carol, that whole osteoporosis, tachycardia, aphib thing, both of those have been completely debunked. We we do not see loss of bone when you are doing all the other things to protect your bone. Now, if you're a 75-year-old sedentary woman who doesn't eat enough protein and doesn't lift or even take a walk, and we suppress your TSH, you might get a little bit of bone loss there. Yeah, absolutely. But if you are healthy and you're doing all the things like it sounds like you're doing, Carol, then that's not really something that we worry about whatsoever. My TSH has been a 0.0007 for decades because I am on T3 only at a very high dose. And I get my DEXAs every year, almost just to kind of prove it to myself and to my audience. I mean, there's nobody else that'll listen to me out there in the scientific world. I'm like, hey, I got bones of a 25-year-old. I my TSH is non-existent. So yeah, you just have to take care of yourself there.

  Philip Pape: 52:11

  I love it. And I like the myth busting, right? When you you some of these things persist, especially, you know, the big myths we kind of all have heard now, but something like that where it's just lurking and women are concerned about not taking treatment options because of the symptoms. It's really a relief, I'm sure, for them to hear that. So thanks for answering those, Dr. Amy. And I guess the last thing I would ask is is there anything you wish I had asked, especially in the T2 world? Because I know it's a big topic and a hot topic now. Is there anything we didn't cover you think we should?

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 52:38

  Oh, goodness. No, I think you covered everything. We hit all of the important points, all the studies. I I love it. I love it. And really what I would just say to your listeners is if you are struggling with weight loss, I that I mean, that's just it's it's huge, especially if you're a woman. You know, guys, I know you care about your body composition too, but man, us women are so hard on ourselves. And and we really like we get impacted where it starts affecting our social life and our bedroom life because we don't really want to get naked, because we don't feel good about ourselves, you know. So it starts creeping into other areas of our life. And I don't want people to think that you need to be in this skinny culture, but we need to be a healthy weight. So if you are struggling, just know that there is hope. There are things that you can do. And even if you are being medically gas-lit by your conventional medicine doctor, you don't have to buy into that. You don't have to believe that. You know, block that out and just have hope and know that there are things that you can do to change.

  Philip Pape: 53:42

  Know that there are things you can do to change. That's the message right there. Dr. Amy, this has been awesome. I think T2, I mean, you I always try to bring people on who will teach me something and because I know the listener will learn something. And I will be looking into this myself as well. Right now, my biggest uh metabolism booster is I had surgery, so the recovery is actually boosted my metabolism. But after that, check it out. So, where can listeners find you? We can throw those in the show notes for people to uh to reach out and learn more about your work.

  Dr. Amie Hornaman: 54:10

  Absolutely. So you can go to just dramey.com, D-R-A-M-I-E.com, and that's where you'll find anything. You can you can book a call on that page if you're interested in working with us and coming into the clinic where we prescribe to all 50 states. You can also find the podcast, the thyroid fixer podcast that Philip's a guest on as well. We have over 590 episodes, so tons of information there. And then I'll encourage all your listeners to join my just fix your thyroid Facebook group. So this Facebook group is, in my opinion, one of the best out there because we give real advice. I'm in there answering your questions. I'm in there once a week doing a live QA answering your questions. You can post your labs in there, you can post your symptoms in there, my nurse practitioners are in there, my coaches are in there. Like it is a free community full of love and support and to really kind of unpack what you're dealing with if you are dealing with a thyroid problem, low hormone problem, and what you can do about it.

  Philip Pape: 55:13

  Awesome. So, drAmy.com, the thyroid fixture podcast, and the Facebook group, we will throw the links in the show notes for the listener. Dr. Amy, thank you so much for doing this with me. I'm excited to be on your show as well. We'll we'll share that with everyone when it comes out. And um, we're recording this before the holiday, so you know, I wish you the best. Thank you. Happy holidays.

Lose Fat Without Hunger Using Protein, Fiber, and Appetite Control That Works | Ep 423

Try Calocurb natural appetite control (40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger). It's prescription free, affordable, and fast acting. Get 10% off:
https://witsandweights.com/calocurb

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Can you lose fat without all the hunger?

Maybe you're eating fewer calories than ever but somehow hungrier than ever, and it feels like a vicious cycle that prevents you from losing weight or stalls out your metabolism.

Discover the satiety hierarchy that explains why some foods keep you full for hours while others leave you raiding the pantry within minutes. 

Learn the specific protein and fiber targets that suppress appetite at the hormonal level by triggering GLP-1 and PYY release, plus evidence-based meal timing strategies that can cut evening cravings in half. 

Philip shares 4 practical (and natural) appetite control tools that work with your body's natural hunger signals.

This is 2 of our 8-part Appetite Series, and it's all about making fat loss feel less like a fight. Whether you're focused on body recomposition, building muscle while losing fat, or just trying to stick to your nutrition plan without white-knuckling through every meal, you'll walk away with tips to manage hunger naturally.

Plus, stay until the end for a pre-meal protocol that can reduce calorie intake by nearly 20% and takes just 30 seconds to implement!

Timestamps

0:00 - Why managing hunger matters more than hitting your macros
2:53 - The satiety hierarchy
7:28 - Energy density strategies to eat more food on fewer calories
12:10 - How to activate natural GLP-1 and satiety signals
14:02 - Front-loading calories and why breakfast size affects evening cravings
19:54 - 4 natural appetite tools
24:22 - Connecting satiety strategies to strength training and body recomp
27:18 - Bonus: 30-second pre-meal protocol to reduce calorie intake by 20%

Dieting fails most often when hunger overwhelms willpower, not when the math on the tracker is wrong. The good news is appetite is not random; it’s governed by clear signals you can influence. Start with a satiety-first framework: prioritize protein and fiber at every main meal, then use low energy density foods to load your stomach with volume for fewer calories. Protein triggers peptide YY and GLP-1 while suppressing ghrelin, which is why evenly spreading 25 to 40 grams across meals steadies appetite and supports muscle. Fiber adds mechanical fullness and, once fermented, produces short-chain fatty acids that further stimulate satiety hormones. Combine both with simple patterns like half your plate vegetables, fruit or legumes for carbs, and a lean protein anchor.

Food volume is where you “eat more to lose more” without actually eating more calories. Your stomach responds to stretch, not arithmetic, so meals built around high-water, high-fiber foods—salads, broth-based soups, berries, non-starchy vegetables—fill you up fast. Compare an apple to pretzels: same carbohydrate headline, very different fullness effect. Start meals with a big salad or a light soup and you’ll often eat 10 to 15 percent fewer calories without noticing. The sequence matters too: load the plate with greens, add protein, then whatever carbs fit, and test whether starting with vegetables or protein works better for you. None of this bans foods; it reorders and proportions them so your biology works for you.

Meal timing can curb the cravings that strike hardest at night. Studies show that front-loading calories—bigger breakfast, lighter dinner—raises diet-induced thermogenesis and lowers hunger through the day while reducing appetite for sweets in the evening. If late-night snacking sabotages your deficit, shift protein and calories earlier. Consider early time-restricted feeding, such as 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., if your lifestyle allows, since aligning with circadian rhythms improves insulin sensitivity and may blunt ghrelin later. You don’t have to force breakfast if you truly dislike it, but test a protein-rich morning and a fuller lunch to see if evenings get easier. Track hunger, cravings, and adherence to find your personal timing sweet spot.

Tactical tools can layer onto the fundamentals for quick wins. Water preloading—about 16 ounces 15 to 30 minutes before meals—adds volume and corrects thirst mistaken for hunger. Caffeine from one to two cups of coffee modestly suppresses appetite if you avoid loading it with calories. Capsaicin from chili peppers can reduce subsequent intake for some people and is easy to incorporate with hot sauce or spicy dishes. Bitter compounds—especially delayed-release hops extracts—activate gut bitter receptors that boost GLP-1, CCK, and PYY, amplifying the same pathways triggered by protein and fiber. These aren’t magic bullets; they align with physiology to make a calorie deficit feel less like a fight.

All of this supports the real goal: lose fat while protecting muscle. A sustainable deficit paired with resistance training and adequate protein preserves lean mass so more of the weight you drop comes from fat. Front-loading energy helps training quality and recovery, while lighter dinners often improve sleep and digestion. The pre-meal protocol ties it together: about 15 to 20 minutes before your toughest meal, drink a full glass of water and take in 25 to 30 grams of protein via shake, Greek yogurt, or cottage cheese. The water stretches the stomach, and the protein sparks satiety hormones in minutes, often reducing total intake by close to 20 percent. Use this consistently for one week, note changes in hunger and portions, and keep what clearly works. Appetite is a system; design meals and timing to guide it, and the deficit becomes manageable and repeatable.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:00

  If you're eating fewer calories than ever, but somehow hungrier than ever, and you're wondering what the heck you can do about it, this episode is for you. Today I'm gonna show you exactly how to structure your nutrition so that fat loss happens with less effort because you're actually satisfied, not starving. We're gonna talk about natural appetite control today. How can we suppress appetite at the hormonal level through both food and other means, as well as a counterintuitive food hack that activates your gut's natural foldness signals within minutes? 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 we're talking hunger again today. We're talking appetite in episode two of our eight-episode series. And the reality most people will not tell you about fat loss is the deficit itself is not the hard part. Okay, hitting a number in your tracking app or with your macros is just simple math. What is hard is managing the hunger that comes with it. And if your current approach has you fighting hunger all the time or dreading meals because they're not what you want or losing control in the evening, I think you're doing it wrong. I think there's a better way. Not because you lack discipline, but because you're working against things that could be easier, like we alluded to in the last episode. So we're gonna fix that today. I'm gonna give you some more specific strategies backed by the research on satiety, on appetite hormones, to lose fat without feeling as much like you're so hungry, right? We shouldn't feel like we're starving and miserable. There's always gonna be a little hunger. This isn't about tricks, this isn't hacks, this isn't anything that promises a miracle or ramps up your metabolism, you know, like CLAN or something like that, or steroids or anything weird like that. We're not talking GLP ones either. It's understanding how your body regulates hunger and then trying to structure both your nutrition and using natural means to leverage those systems. And then I want you to stick around until the end because I'm going to share a specific pre-meal protocol that can reduce how much you eat at your next meal by nearly 20%, and it only takes 30 seconds. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by CaloCurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Calocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. Calocurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel satisfied. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash callowcurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callowcurb. All right, let's start with the foundation, the satiety hierarchy, right? Why do some foods fill you up and others don't? Because this is really the crux of a lot of this. If you want to lose fat with less hunger, you have to understand why some foods leave you satisfied for hours, maybe all day, and others have you immediately hungry minutes or if not seconds later, right? And we're not talking about just ultra-processed foods either, although that's part of the equation along the spectrum. So I think I like to think of it as a satiety hierarchy or spectrum. At the top of the hierarchy, or I well, if we look at it as the hierarchy being the best thing at the top, at the top is the protein, right? Which is hands down the most filling macro per calorie. When you eat protein, your gut releases the hormones we talked about in the last episode, like peptide YY and GLP1, that signals fullness to your brain, suppresses graylin, your hunger hormone. And this is a very pronounced effect. It measurably increases your satiety versus higher carb or higher fat meals. It's also why I like protein to be distributed throughout the day, not because it gives you some far superior muscle protein synthesis. It's a tiny benefit to that, but it's really more the satiety side of the equation, the practical side. There's also something called the protein leverage hypothesis where your body has a built-in drive to consume a certain amount of protein. And so if your diet's low in protein, you're gonna want to eat more until the protein need is met, even if it means overeating, which, you know, shouldn't be a problem if you're deliberately aiming to get the amount of protein we talk about. But I think this is one reason why modern ultra-processed diets, which are obviously very low in protein, right? They dilute the protein or have very little in it, and instead use a lot of cheap fats and carbs, lead to overconsumption. Your body is chasing the protein. That's not the only reason, but it is one of the reasons. So protein's at the top. Then we have fiber. Again, talked about this in detail last episode, or not in detail. We alluded to it. We're gonna get into some more detail today. But there's different types of fiber. There's soluble fiber, the kind you find in like oatmeal, in beans, fruits, some of the carbs I really love, which also have fiber, and that absorbs water and that forms a gel in your digestive tract tract. That physically then slows down your digestion, it stretches your stomach, and it triggers mechanical satiety signals. By mechanical, I mean there are little receptors, physical receptors that get touched by these things by what you're eating that get triggered to say, hey, you're more full. But also, fiber gets fermented in your gut by your gut bacteria. And then it gets fermented into short chain fatty acids, which themselves stimulate the release of the same appetite-suppressing hormones, GLB1 and PYY. So, you know, you hear gut health talked generically, you hear fiber talked about generically. There are direct mechanical and physical implications of eating fiber that will help this whole process and will help with your fat loss. It is, it is such a game changer that it's one of the first things I start with with one-on-one clients is looking at their fiber. If it's not high enough, I'm like, let's jack that up. Yes, protein, I know you get it. But a lot of people, they, the fiber for some reason seems like this afterthought, like, well, it's for my health or for some other nebulous thing over here. But no, it's for the appetite, it's for the gut health, it's for the gut bacteria, it's all of this stuff. Hormonal suppression of hunger, mechanical fullness from volume, delayed gastric emptying that keeps you satisfied longer are super, super important in terms of the hunger side of the equation because so many of you are struggling with things like emotional eating, and there are tools along the way that will reduce the triggers and the circumstances in which you would succumb to emotional eating. And I think helping with your hunger signals is one of them. So the practical application here is simple. Every main meal should include a substantial protein source and at least a couple servings of fibrous vegetables or other high fiber foods. I love fruit. Fruit's super convenient. So fruit's great, but if you like beans, legumes, things like that, lentils, where there's a little bit of fiber and carbs in there and protein, that's great too. So we're talking for most people, it's gonna be somewhere like 25 to 40 grams of protein per meal, right? It's gonna be something like that, depending on your size, plus vegetables that are like half your plate. It's not complicated, but it's kind of a non-negotiable if you're not doing it already and you're trying to improve the situation for fat loss and hunger. All right, so the next thing I want to talk about is energy density, because that's where you can kind of game the system and eat more without more calories. This is where a lot of the uh mantra of eat more to lose weight, I like to, I guess, steal that phrase. When most people say eat more to lose weight, they're talking about literally eating more calories to try to increase your metabolism, which we know is a farce. There's no such thing, right? You can recover your metabolism, but it's not going to make allow you to eat more and lose weight at the same clip. Okay. Different topic. I like to say there is a way to eat more and lose weight, and that's to eat more food with the same amount of calories. And that's energy density. How many calories are packed into a given weight of food, right? A pound of pizza can contain 1200 calories. A pound of mixed vegetables and grilled chicken might be 300 calories. Big difference. You could even go to the store right now in the grocery store, look at two bags of popcorn, one that's like kettle corn with butter and sugar and salt, and one that's just a simple salted popcorn. And look at the serving size on the back. And what you're gonna see is they both have the same weight, right? Usually one ounce, 28 grams, but one's gonna have more cups for that weight, right? One's gonna allow you to have, say, three and a half cups of popcorn for 28 grams. The other one's only gonna give you like a cup and a half of popcorn because it's so laden with calories, right? And I'm not saying good or bad here, just saying those are the differences you can see when it comes to energy density. Your stomach doesn't count calories. That's the important thing. Your stomach, I think a lot of people misunderstand this. A lot of people think your body responds to just the energy level. It doesn't. It actually responds to physical stretch and volume. So if you fill your stomach with low energy density foods, you're gonna trigger your folded signals faster while consuming far fewer calories. Again, this isn't like a new diet trick for 2026. It's basic physics combined with how your gut works. I do think it's important to understand gut health because of these kinds of things, not the mysterious stuff that you know about the gut brain axis that people don't quite get that that gets a little bit technical, but just these very practical things. So, the what foods should you eat to help out in this situation? All right, non-starchy vegetables, like or yeah, non-starchy vegetables, leafy greens, berries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, awesome. Soups, I like vegetable soups, but even obviously soups with protein like chicken and salads. Okay, that's a basic setup in your kitchen because all of these foods have high water content, high fiber, which means they take up a lot of space without many calories. I mean, if you think of just a carb, you think of a fruit, an apple versus chip uh pretzels. Let's go with pretzels because pretzels are almost pure carbs, right? Just like an apple. Which one's gonna fill you up for far fewer calories? It's gonna be the apple because of all the water, right? The the pretzel's been processed because you have flour, and it's basically just flour, right? It's it's bread, effectively. And again, not good or bad. It's just comparing the two, you can see why this would happen. So, like carbs that have water, if you just think about what you're eating, is it a natural carb that hasn't been processed that has water? That's probably gonna be a lot more filling than something that has been processed. So, again, it's not about the carbs, is it? It's about the food volume. We do know from quite a few studies that like starting a meal with a large salad or a broth-based soup, so having that first can reduce your total meal intake in terms of calories by something like 10 to 50, 10 or 15%. And that's meaningful, right? Because over time, those kinds of reductions are going to add up and you're not gonna feel like you're restricting anything. You just switched around what and when you ate something. So a trick here is before your main meal, eat a big bowl of vegetables or broth-based soup, for example, right? Or load your plate with leafy greens and non-starchy vegetables first, and then add your protein, and then whatever else fits your macros, and kind of eat it in that order. Now, some people argue eat your protein first. I mean, it depends. Try both. Try them. That's all I can say is experiment. Not do your and notice none of this is eliminating foods. It's changing the order in proportion and then also adding in things that are gonna help. And yeah, I grew up in the 80s where you had to like clean your plate, but I almost never clean my plate. Even when we eat at home, my wife's totally cool with it because none of us do. We're all used to just starting with like a salad, maybe a soup, something like that, and then digging into the protein and the vegetables, maybe a little bit of the carb, and you have some left over. You know, and I generally might encourage my daughters, hey, I would encourage you to maybe eat that, finish the broccoli and the chicken before you go on to the quinoa, but it doesn't really matter as long as you are managing your hunger signals well. All right, we're about halfway through. I'm going to be talking about meal timing strategies next, some appetite control tools, and the pre-meal protocol that I mentioned at the start. Before we continue with meal timing, I do want to tell you about today's sponsor, Calicurb, because this is highly relevant to today's topic. We've been talking about how protein and fiber trigger the release of appetite hormones like GLP1 and PYY. And these are the same pathways that, for example, GLP1 medications target. It turns out there is a natural way to enhance these signals. And that's why I like Calicurb. Calicurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate. Okay, go Google it if you'd like, nerd out on it. It is a patented hops extract developed over 15 years in New Zealand, and it works by activating the bitter taste receptors in your gut. Remember, we talked about mechanical activation of gut receptors. These, it's it's like you've eaten something bitter, and that bitterness triggers the release of the same satiety hormones we just discussed: GLP1, CCK, PYY. And clinical data shows a 40% reduction in cravings, 30% reduction in hunger, and 18% fewer calories consumed all within one hour of taking it. So I think of calllocurb as another powerful tool in the satiety stack. It doesn't replace protein and fiber and all the fundamentals we're discussing today, but it does amplify them. You know, you're still doing the work. This just massively helps your gut biology cooperate so you can eat even less if that is your goal. So if you want to try it, go to wits and weights.com slash calllocurb for 10% off your first order. I've included the link at the top of the show notes as well. Try it out for yourself before you commit to a subscription. Again, that's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. That's C-A-L-O Curb C U R B. All right, let's get into meal timing because I think that can meaningfully impact your hunger levels throughout the day. Again, I'm hammering home some of the things that I've mentioned in the first episode. And as we go through this eight-episode series, you're gonna hear things repeated and from different angles so that they really stick with you. Okay, this is part of the education I want to get across. There's a robust study that I want to highlight here where researchers compared two eating patterns: a large breakfast with a small dinner versus a small breakfast with a large dinner. Same total calories, the exact same foods, just distributed differently. And this is a cool one. I've heard others, I think like Brandon de Cruz talk about this one. It's it's been around the block. The large breakfast pattern produced two and a half times higher diet-induced thermogenesis. So that means more calories were burned just from the digestion. But I think more relevant to today's conversation, it also produced significantly lower hunger ratings throughout the day, especially in the evening. Ah, interesting, right? Even more interesting, I would say, is that the small breakfast pattern, right? So small breakfast, large dinner, increased appetite for sweets later in the day. So if you're someone who struggles with evening cravings, raise your hand, that's many, if not most of us, or you have late night snacking, then skimping out on your breakfast could be exacerbating this or even causing this. You know, or I don't want to say causing it, but you know, it exact it basically ramps up your cravings such that you are eating more because of it. And I think this aligns with what we know about circadian rhythms, where again, your body's more metabolically active in the morning and in the afternoon, your insulin sensitivity is higher, your nutrient partitioning favors muscle over fat storage, and kind of eating in alignment with these rhythms a bit and front loading your calories earlier in the day can possibly reduce your overall hunger, especially for those cravings later, while of course you're trying to improve your body composition. And here's here's something you're gonna find shocking for me to say. If you're thinking of intermittent fasting, many of you are doing it where you skip breakfast and potentially lunch and you kind of squeeze the window into the afternoon. What about trying early time restricted feeding where you can find your meals to an earlier window of the day, like 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.? And I know it's weird for you for a lot of people because we try to have dinners with our family and you know, maybe it doesn't work for you. Okay, fine. I mean, I think intermittent fasting in general for a lot of people is is is it's kind of forced. You're trying to force into it anyway, and it throws off like the typical meal schedule. But if you want to try it, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., I believe there's research that shows a correlation with what we just talked about, where it like lowers ghrelin, it increases the evening, that PYY hormone, where you have less hunger at the times when people struggle the most. And you may actually consume, you may, you may, again, I'm not promising this, you've got to try it for yourself. You may actually more easily consume fewer calories in that time restricted window than in a later time restricted window. Now, I'm not saying you have to eat breakfast if you generally don't want to, okay? Everyone is different. Some of you are like, I just can't eat breakfast, I just don't feel hungry. Okay, I get it, I get it. And I know if you tried it for a while, you might adapt to it anyway. What I'm saying is that if you've been struggling with evening hunger, experiment. Just try shifting more of your protein and calories to earlier meals. Have a nice big protein-rich breakfast. Maybe make your lunch the largest meal and then keep dinner lighter and then see what happens to your cravings. All right, so let's talk about some appetite control tools because I like to get tactical sometimes beyond just the general philosophy of macro and timing. There are tools that you can use to actively suppress appetite. This is these are hacks, these are gaming the system, whatever you want to call them, but they work with what we know about biology and psychology, or mainly biology in this case. The first one is water preloading. And you've probably heard this one before. It's almost too simple. It's drinking like two cups of water, which is 16 ounces, a pint of water, a big glass of water, about 15 to 30 minutes before a meal has been shown to reduce food intake at the meal. And part of that is physical volume. Part of it is that we're often mistaking our thirst for hunger. So it's one, the other, or both. So if you feel hungry, it helps to have a glass of water when it's not mealtime. And then when it's coming up to mealtime, having that glass of water beforehand, totally free, easy, hack, save at works. The second one is caffeine. Coffee is a mild appetite suppressant. Research shows about one to two cups can reduce hunger for a few hours. It's probably suppressing your ghreline. Of course, if you're not compensating with tons of calories like sugar and milk or something, cream, not that I'm, again, against any of that stuff, just you have to account for it. But black coffee with a splash of almond milk or half and a half or something like that, if you're trying to keep it light, is a good thing to try. I wouldn't be surprised. I know caffeine, I know caffeine itself is a mild appetite suppressant, but the fact that you're drinking water as well has the physical stretching effect too. All right, then there's capsaicin. This is the compound that makes chili peppers spicy. And it has a modest appetite suppressing effect as well. A study found that adding chili peppers to meals reduced the subsequent calorie intake by 25% in some participants. That was just one study that I found. Again, you can cherry pick these things easily enough, but you've probably heard this before. If you like spicy food, easy win. Adding hot sauce or cayenne pepper or fresh peppers to your meals or cooking with them, a nice spicy chili, you know, really clears up the sinuses. Great, great idea. And the last tool I want to mention is bitter compounds. And this I've researched a lot lately. It's where things get interesting because certain bitter plant extracts, especially from hops, can stimulate the gut receptors that trigger the release of satiety hormones. It is why I took on Callocurb as a sponsor for this series. I think it's a really cool tool. That's kind of in between totally food related and the GLP1 medications. So it's appropriate for a lot of you. There have been quite a few independent studies on this that are legitimate. They're evidence-based that show that a delayed release hops extract can reduce hunger and cravings compared to placebo. And again, you've got to just try it out for yourself. The mechanism is similar to what happens when you eat protein and fiber, but it's activated through a different pathway. And I'm not going to go into all the biology. I think we're going to do that with some of our other episodes. So the theme here is these tools work with how your body works. They're not like magic or some special drug or special supplement. They're just natural things that go along with how your body works and then can respond to those. All right. So the last section here is I want to connect back to what we really care about here, which is building and maintaining muscle while we lose fat, right? How does this all align? Everything we discussed today is not just managing hunger for its own sake, but creating conditions where you can sustain a reasonable calorie deficit long enough to see real results. That might be for you 10 pounds of fat. It might be 30, 40, 50 pounds of fat. It might be that you need to lose 100 pounds and need a series of fat loss phases and a way to control appetite to get there without losing muscle, without tanking your performance, right? Without weird side effects. When you're in a deficit, your body wants to break down that muscle for energy, it's fighting back, it's doing all the things we talked about in the last episode. And the two defenses against this that are the biggest defenses are sufficient protein and resistance training, especially the resistance training. Okay, don't think that the protein is the most important thing. If you are not resistance training, you're gonna have a problem with all of this. That has to be in there. I'd rather you be resistance training and not quite getting enough protein than being perfectly fine on protein and not resistance training for sure. I would make that trade in a heartbeat. And we've covered protein's role in society, but the consumption of protein is, of course, also helping with your muscles, right? With the amino acids you need to resist the breakdown of those muscles so that when you lose weight, you're losing mostly fat. We don't want to lose muscle, we want to lose mostly fat. The fiber and the volume strategies we discussed also help you stay in the deficit without feeling deprived. So don't discount those as well because adherence is everything, right? The best diet's the one you can stick with. You've heard it before. You can't stick to the diet that makes you miserable and hungry all the time. That is what traditional dieting is. We're not doing traditional dieting, crash diets. We're doing it more sustainably. The meal timing piece also supports your training. Notice how this is all connected. If you front load your calories, it means you have energy for your workouts. Now it depends on when you train, right? Most people or a lot of people train in the morning, some people train in the afternoon. I mean, I think it's it helps to train fed regardless. But front loading those calories, having plenty of calories throughout the day is usually helpful. Keeping dinner somewhat light can often help with your sleep quality, with your digestion, things like that. So this is a satiety-focused nutrition approach that's gonna help with all of this. All right, now before we end the episode, remember that I promised you one specific protocol that can reduce your calorie intake at your next meal by nearly 20%. I'm gonna break that down in just a second. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, CaloCurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CalloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callocurb. All right, here is that pre-meal protocol that I mentioned. Before your most challenging meal of the day, the one where you tend to overeat or where hunger is the highest. Do this about 15 to 20 minutes beforehand. Remember how we talked about drinking water beforehand can be helpful? Well, I want you to add a twist to this. I want you to drink a full glass of water with about 25 or 30 grams of protein. So for many of you, this is gonna be like a protein shake, but it could be a little bit of Greek yogurt or cottage cheese. Think of this as a little bit of a pre-meal appetizer, okay? Not salad, not bread. And the reason this works is you got the water stretching your stomach, which begins triggering the mechanical fullness. We already talked about that. Then the protein combined with that, which takes a little time to digest, it's gonna start releasing the GLP1 and the PYY almost immediately, so that by the time you sit down to eat, you've already significantly activated your satiety response. And this combination, water plus protein before a meal, can also reduce your calorie intake quite a bit. And you are, of course, you of course are adding calories with the protein, but you'll probably end up eating less total, again, unless you assuming you don't try to clean your plate, right? Because the pre-meal dose is far more satiating than what it displaces. And the bonus is it's a way to help you get to your protein goal if that's another thing that you are struggling with. This is really powerful before dinner, if that is when you tend to overeat, because dinner tends to be the biggest meal for most people as well. And this is just a good way to reduce those calories without even noticing you're doing it. I mean, just try it for a week, pick your toughest meal, do the protocol 15 minutes before, watch what happens, let me know. All right, that is a wrap for today. This was episode two of eight in our January Appetite series. So make sure you're following the show to get the next one. Until then, keep using your wits, lifting your weights, and remember you don't have to starve yourself through a diet just to lose weight. You can lose fat sustainably while managing hunger naturally. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

Why You're Always HUNGRY on a Diet (7 Mistakes Killing Your Fat Loss) | Ep 422

Try Calocurb natural appetite control (40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger). It's prescription free, affordable, and fast acting. Get 10% off:
https://witsandweights.com/calocurb

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Are you constantly HUNGRY? Battling cravings, feeling like your body is pushing back hard?

You're in a calorie deficit, doing everything right (tracking your food, hitting the gym, staying consistent), yet you're ravenous and not sure what to do.

This episode kicks off our 8-part Appetite Series with the most common question I hear: "Why am I always hungry on my diet?" 

The answer usually comes down to one of these 7 mistakes that trigger your hunger hormones, tank your energy, and stall your results. You'll learn exactly why (and how) your body fights back during a diet through hormones like leptin, ghrelin, and GLP-1, and which mistakes you're likely making without realizing it.

Whether you're trying to lose fat, improve body recomp, or just stop white-knuckling through every diet, learn the evidence-based fixes to work with your biology instead of against it.

Plus, stay until the end for a counterintuitive 2-week protocol you can start tomorrow to make hunger management dramatically easier, before you even cut a single calorie.

Timestamps

0:00 - Why your body triggers hunger during fat loss
3:11 - The hormones that control your hunger
6:50 - Mistake 1: Not eating enough protein to feel full (or build muscle)
9:48 - Mistake 2: Low fiber and food volume sabotaging satiety
14:00 - Mistake 3: How poor sleep and stress spike your appetite
18:27 - Mistake 4: Why too much cardio increases hunger
22:05 - Mistake 5: Chronic extreme deficits and metabolism adaptation
27:42 - Mistake 6: Meal timing mistakes that trigger overeating
32:04 - Mistake 7: The all-or-nothing mindset killing your fat loss
36:11 - Bonus: 2-week prep protocol to reduce hunger before dieting

Hunger during fat loss feels like sabotage because, biologically, it is. When you cut calories, leptin drops, ghrelin rises, and satiety peptides like GLP-1 and PYY decline. Your brain reads “famine,” slows metabolic rate, and nudges you to move less and eat more. That internal pushback is predictable, but it’s also workable. The goal isn’t to overpower these signals; it’s to design your plan so biology is an ally. Start by understanding the levers you control daily: protein, fiber, sleep, stress, training, meal timing, and mindset. Each lever influences appetite in a different way, and adjusting a few can transform adherence without harsher calorie cuts.

Protein is the highest-impact lever. It reliably reduces hunger, boosts satiety hormones, and helps you keep muscle in a deficit. A simple target of 0.7 to 1.0 grams per pound of body weight, front-loaded earlier in the day, smooths cravings and makes evenings calmer. Pair that with fiber and food volume: leafy greens, crucifers, watery fruits, hearty soups, and even humble popcorn. Volume slows digestion, fills the stomach, and engages gut receptors that amplify fullness. Contrast a calorie-dense snack with a big, colorful salad topped with lean protein and you’ll see why “eat more to feel less hungry” isn’t a paradox; it’s strategy. Most people underuse this lever and end up chasing snacks instead of building meals that do the work for them.

Recovery is another quiet driver of appetite. Short sleep and chronic stress push ghrelin up, leptin down, and your cravings toward high-reward foods. You’ll eat more without noticing, then blame willpower. Flip the script: prioritize sleep routines, protect rest days, and swap some “more cardio” for walking, lifting, and actual downtime. Cardio has its place, but long, frequent sessions often suppress appetite early and boomerang it back at night. A better pyramid is steps and lifting as the base, with optional, recoverable cardio and brief sprints as the tip. This keeps hunger steadier, preserves muscle, and maintains the energy to train hard.

Diet pace matters. Living in a deep deficit for months invites stronger adaptations, lingering hunger, and a mindset spiral. Moderate, time-bound phases with maintenance breaks guard against that downward drift. You’ll lose steadily, feel human, and maintain performance. Meal timing adds another layer: many people do better distributing food across the day, front-loading protein and volume, and avoiding the “skip breakfast, raid dinner” pattern that wrecks adherence. It’s not dogma—experiment for two weeks at a time and map hunger to your schedule and training.

Mindset ties it all together. Rigid rules fuel rebound eating; flexible structure sustains results. Plan treats, pre-log events, and remove guilt so decisions aren’t made at peak hunger. To kickstart momentum, try a two-week “add, don’t subtract” protocol before cutting calories: protein at every meal, a massive vegetable portion at lunch and dinner, and a 10-minute walk after those meals. Appetite settles, decisions get easier, and you’ll need less restraint when you finally lower calories. Fat loss gets simpler when meals do the heavy lifting and your plan respects how your body actually works.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:00

  If you've ever been in a fat loss phase, in a calorie deficit, trying to lose weight, but you're constantly hungry, battling cravings, and feeling like your body is working against you, it probably is. Today I'm breaking down the seven most common mistakes that trigger your hunger hormones, tank your energy, and sabotage your fat loss results, even when you're doing everything else right. You'll learn why your body fights back during a diet, which mistakes you're probably making without realizing it, and exactly how to fix them so you can lose fat without feeling like you are constantly white-knuckling it. Miss even one of these, and you could be stuck in a cycle of hunger and frustration for months. 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 Hate, and founder of the Fitness Lab app. And today we're kicking off a special eight-episode series. I'm calling the Appetite Series. Eight episodes throughout January focused entirely on understanding and managing hunger so you can finally take control of your fat loss without the constant struggle. This is one of the most common issues that I hear from listeners and clients more than anything else, because we talk about going into fat loss and then you start to execute. And then the pushback is I think like I'm doing all the things right, but I'm always hungry. What am I doing wrong? Because the hunger itself is affecting your adherence and often preventing you from successfully completing the diet. The answer is usually one or more of these seven mistakes I'm gonna cover today. And once you understand the physiology behind why your body creates very powerful hunger signals during a calorie deficit, we're talking hormones like leptin, ghrelin, GOP1. And by the way, we're gonna dive into those hormones in a future episode in more detail. You'll see exactly why certain approaches backfire and others tend to work. Now, before we get into these, I want to give you a reason to stick around until the very end. I've started to include really cool tips at the end that are very practical and actionable and sometimes surprising. So after I cover the seven mistakes, I'm gonna share a tactic that can help you starting right away to make hunger easier to manage before you even cut a single calorie. These are the kind of tricks I really love because they help with hunger without having to increase or reduce calories. It's something I've seen transform how a lot of people approach this from a psychological perspective, and it's a real simple tip that you can use. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by Callocurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Callocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. Callocurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel satisfied. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callocurb. Now, before I get into the seven mistakes, you have to understand why hunger happens in the first place during a calorie deficit. Because once you understand the mechanism, the solutions become more obvious. So when you restrict calories for fat loss, your body doesn't just sit there and let you burn through your fat. That would be awesome, right? If you just said, I'm gonna cut calories, my body's body's gonna pull that from fat, I'm gonna lose. It's very it's purely mathematical. Calories in, calories out, we're done. No, your body is going to push back, it's going to respond with very powerful hormonal changes designed to get you to eat more. And they're also designed to get you to move less, believe it or not. And this is this is that survival programming we've hit on in the past. Your body doesn't know that you're trying to fit into your old genes, you know, and reduce your waste size. It thinks that there's something wrong with your food supply, that there's some sort of famine going on. So here's what happens physiologically. Okay, the first thing is your leptin drops. Leptin is the hormone produced by fat cells and it signals fullness to your brain. So when you diet, leptin levels decline in proportion to the aggressiveness of your fat loss and how much fat you've actually lost. Less leptin means less satiety signaling. Satiety is a word we're gonna use all the time. It means fullness. And so with less of that fullness signaling, you actually feel hungrier. Then to top it all off, we have ghrelin. Ghrelin goes up. Ghrelin is your hunger hormone. So you have leptin, which is your fullness hormone, goes down. Ghrelin's your hunger hormone, which is produced by your stomach. And that tells your brain, hey, it's time to eat. So during calorie restriction, ghrelin goes up and then stays elevated even after you eat, right? Because your body's trying to get you to eat more. You haven't eaten enough. You need to eat more. One study found that overweight participants who lost about 30 pounds had significantly higher ghrelin levels a full year after their weight loss. And then, so, so even a year later, there was some adaptation going on. Now, I'm not saying this is gonna happen. There's a separate issue we need to discuss with the aggressiveness of your diet and how you do it. But in general, this occurs when you die. Other satiety hormones also decline. So we don't talk about these a lot, but there are there's there's peptide YY, there's GLP1. Everybody knows GLP1 now because of the drugs that are the antagonist drugs or the agonist drugs for those, the weight loss medications. Colocystokinine or yeah, kinine, I think is how you pronounce it. These are all hormones that normally help you feel full after eating, and they decrease again when you're in a deficit to try to get you to eat more. So you're getting hit from both sides, more hunger signals, fewer fullness signals. And then to top it all off, your metabolism adapts, and this is correlated with the leptin. So as your leptin falls, your brain down regulates your metabolic rate to conserve energy. It's saying, okay, well, you're less full, so we need to use less energy and compensate. This is adaptive thermogenesis at its core. It's your body trying to defend its energy stores. It's trying to keep, it's not trying to keep you fat, it's trying to keep you from losing energy you've got and try to make the most of it. So now you're hungrier and you're burning fewer calories. And so that's when we talk about the biology that you're hitting up against, and it's very confusing for many, that's what we're talking about. The good news is you can work with these systems once you understand them. You can, yes, hack around them a little bit, but even legitimately work with them to minimize their effects somewhat, not completely, of course. But this whole episode appetite series we're doing, including today's episode, is we're gonna start with the mistakes, and then we're gonna dive into all the science and other strategies as we go for you to get better and better at understanding the complete picture. So let's get into mistake number one: not eating enough protein. This is the most common mistake I see. It's the one with the biggest impact on hunger, and for a lot of you, it is a game changer. If you're already eating enough protein, you can probably skip to the next one. This is so important. Protein is the most satiating macro. Okay, way more satiating than fat and carbs. There, there's definitely some mythology around fat being more satiating, but it's actually not true. Protein stimulates the release of satiety hormones like GLP1 and colocystokinin, and simultaneously suppresses ghrelin. So it has an opposite effect, the opposite effect that we want on these hormones that I just talked about, where higher protein intake leads to lower hunger and better diet adherence. But many of you are eating 50, 60 grams of protein, right? And there's a lot of discussion about low protein diets today and how you only need a minimum and people are eating too much protein. Look, if your focus is body composition and health, longevity, building muscle, holding on to muscle, and heck, just being more full in a diet, protein is going to be extremely important. And it can be harder for some people than others, depending on your diet. If you are have a higher fat diet and prefer that, or if you're vegetarian or vegan, or you're you just don't prioritize protein earlier in the day at breakfast and lunch and try to cram it all in later, there's a lot of reasons people don't get enough besides simply not being aware they need more or how much they're taking. So it's all important. And I'll say the fix is simple, but none of this is ever simple. I'm gonna tell you, hey, get 0.701 gram of protein per pound of body weight. That's your daily target. And practically it helps to just distribute it across your meals and usually front load it in the day. For other reasons we'll we'll hit on when we talk about hormones in this and other episodes. Because you want to keep those satiety hormones nice and happy so that your body at least thinks it's fairly full, which then of course prevents cravings and eating later on, which is what we're trying to do here, isn't it? It's not so much the hunger, it's what we do when we get hungry, right? So, you know, if you weigh, let's say 160 pounds, you're aiming for like 115 to 160 grams of protein a day. So you have a nice wide range. It doesn't have to be the full 160, but you shouldn't also be getting just 60, right? And it helps if you're an omnivore where you can get it from meat, fish, eggs, dairy, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese. But there's, you know, plants have uh plenty of protein too if you have the right types of plants, and soy-based products have a lot of protein, and you can get it from whey powder and other plant-based powders. So there's so many ways to do it. That's not an excuse. There's a way to plant it in and get that. Um, I have a client who's doing my rapid fat loss protocol, and she's she's at a very, very low calorie level, like sub 1000. She's very small, and again, this is a this is more of an extreme protocol that only takes two weeks, and she's still getting like 120 grams of protein. You're like, well, how's that possible? It's totally possible. If you do the math, it's possible. So that's mistake number one. All right, so if you're not doing that, put that at the top of your list. Mistake number two is then neglecting fiber, and the corollary to fiber is food volume. And I think these go hand in hand with protein to the extent that I sometimes put them side by side. Like, make sure you get enough protein and fiber. If you get both, you're solving a lot of issues. And again, that same client I was just talking about, she was wondering, well, how do I keep my fiber higher when the calories are really low? And we again we did the math, we looked at the foods, and there's ways to keep fiber, even in a very low calorie diet, right? And we're not talking about rapid fat loss today. We're talking about a reasonable fat loss diet where you're still eating something over a thousand calories. For many of you, it's closer to 2,000. But either way, it we're trying to get, you know, a certain amount of fiber in there to add bulk to your meals without adding significant calories. Higher fiber foods take longer to chew, they take longer to digest, they physically fill your stomach, and all of those send fullness signals to your brain. When we talk to Sarah Kennedy in a few episodes, one of my interview guests, you're gonna learn some really cool stuff about receptors we have along the lining of our gut, not just our stomach, but our entire digestive lining, that interact with our hormones and send these signals to our brain. It's it's pretty cool. And we know that high fiber diets increase satiety and reduce calorie intake as a result. And that's aside from all the other longevity and health benefits, which if you listen to the carnivore crowd, it's almost like they they somehow think you don't need fiber, which is extremely dangerous. We we know for a fact that higher fiber diets are correlated with better health outcomes than lower fiber diets. So that alone should be a good enough research. But we also know it has these other helpful effects, including the GI things that it resolves in terms of bowel movements and putting bulk in your stomach, et cetera. The mistake, however, with fiber, it's actually similar to protein. People are trying to save calories by eating small calorie-dense meals, for example, or eating small meals, but they tend to be calorie dense and more processed, and they don't have fiber. So it might be a 500-calorie smoothie, it might be a protein bar, maybe it's some nuts, and they don't really fill you up. And there's a time and place for those, and I'm not saying exclude all of that stuff, right? Nuts are fantastic for micronutrients. But you compare that to like a massive, what they call big-ass salad, right? With grilled chicken, a bunch of vegetables, you know, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, all that kind of stuff, cruciferous vegetables in there, maybe some raw broccoli, and some reasonable dressing that's a low calorie dressing you like. It's the the if when you look at these side by side, and I'm sure you've seen this on social media, you'll have this tiny handful of something versus a massive bowl. And it's like the bowl of salad has the same or fewer calories. And it seems crazy, but it's true. And that is what's going into your stomach. And now your stomach is physically full. That's all that, that's all it's doing. It's so full that it is, you know, you you've got fiber slowing digestion, you've got water adding volume, you've got protein triggering your satiety hormones, and you've got other compounds and the fact that there's this much food in there also triggering hormones that say, hey, I'm full and I don't need more food, right? And so the fix for this one is, of course, to emphasize those things, to add in those high volume, low-calorie foods to your diet. And this is the kind of thing you can almost just add it without consequence, without even worrying about the calories. You know, again, unless you're trying to count 20 calorie differences. But for most of you, adding in leafy greens and broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, berries, melons, soups, like vegetable soups, even popcorn, guys, like don't like just salted popcorn, believe it or not, can be a nice hack for some people. Yeah, there's some calories in there, but it's very bulky and it's got fiber. So all of these things are options to give you a satisfying quantity of food, you know, while still having the other more nutrient-dense things in there that you enjoy, while still having some indulgences in there. And it won't make your diet feel this small, skimpy bit of food that like you're starving like a little rabbit. Okay. That is a recipe for hunger. But if we add in fiber and food volume, which is essentially eating quote unquote more and still losing the weight or losing the fat, because you're not adding calories, you're adding bulk. Okay. Mistake number three is surprise under recovery. All right. Now you're like, well, we're talking about hunger, right? Well, yes, poor sleep and high stress are massive variables when it comes to hunger that people underestimate. We're gonna do an entire episode just about those, all right? They because they affect belly fat, which I know a lot of you are concerned about as you get into peri and postmenopause, ladies and men, you know, especially those of you who drink and maybe don't get enough sleep. And they affect hunger, they affect lots of things, as well as cravings, not just hunger, but like cravings for things like sugar and high density foods. Sleep deprivation is a itself a metabolic stressor and it drives overeating. This is clear. Research from 2023 showed that sleep restriction reliably increases the drive to eat, and people consume 250 or more extra calories per day on average. I've seen some studies that say 400 or 500. It's just a lot more calories inadvertently, simply because you had a poor night's sleep, because guess what? Your ghrelin rises, your leptin falls, and now your willpower, you either need more willpower, which we we talk about is not a thing you should ever rely on, your willpower to resist high calorie comfort foods is even further down because of this these hormonal pressures. Chronic stress does the same thing, just through a different pathway. We we know cortisol, right? The stress hormone, it's it stays elevated. It should be cycling and it should essentially fall throughout the day. But for many of us, it stays elevated because of our life stress, physiological stress, and perceived stress, work, finances, family, road rage, whatever it is. It increases your appetite. Okay, that ongoing highly elevated cortisol is gonna make you want high fat, high sugar comfort foods, just like a lack of sleep. Because your body is essentially preparing to refuel because it's in this uh sympathetic mode of your your nervous system is amped up, it perceives a crisis, and your body tries to respond by getting energy. That's it. That's what's going on. It's actually quite simple when you step back, but it's more complicated when we try to do something about it. I understand. The mistake, I think, is trying to push through a fat loss phase and beyond five to six hours of sleep while you're stressed out of your mind. And then you come to me and you say, Why can I not lose weight? I'm in the right calorie deficit. Do I just need to cut calories? I'm like, no, you just need more sleep and less stress, or, you know, at least one of these, at least make an improvement somewhere, right? And trying to push harder in a fat loss phase is just going to exacerbate it. The whole thinking is backward. Your hormones are working against you, and now you're just pushing them to work against you harder. So, of course, the fix for this mistake is to prioritize super high quality sleep when you can get it, building in your rest days from your training, right? Not over-exercising. For some of you, it just might be going from five days a week to three days a week and getting more hours of sleep on those other two days. Or adding in activities that reduce stress instead of more quote unquote exercise. Even if it is strength training, you might be doing too much and not giving yourself enough time to walk or meditate or breathe or just relax and play a video game. I don't care, just relax. Sometimes the fastest way to lose fat is just to improve the recovery and stress side of the equation, not cut calories further because remember, there's two sides of the equation calories in, calories out, and the calories out gets affected by both calories in and your life stressors. So when you're well rested, your hunger hormones stay more balanced and you can stick to your plan without feeling like you're constantly fighting it. Hey, this is Philip, and before we continue, let me tell you about today's sponsor, Callow Curb. I hear from listeners all the time who are doing everything right. They're hitting their protein, they're training consistently, they're prioritizing sleep, but hunger and cravings keep getting in the way. You know what to do, you just can't stop wanting more. Callowcurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate, a patented, evidence-based hops extract developed in New Zealand over 15 years. It works by activating gut brain signals like GLP1 to help you feel full faster and stay in control. Based on clinical data, Callocurb can reduce cravings by 40%, hunger by 30%, and calorie intake by 18%, and it acts within one hour. And of course, you know I love science-backed tools that support everything else you're doing. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash callowcurb for 10% off your first order. Try it out for yourself before you commit to a subscription. Use a link in the show notes. Again, just go to witsandweights.com slash calllocurb. All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, let's talk about mistake number four, overdoing cardio. So this is a little bit of a segue from mistake number three, sleep and stress, because cardio is another form of stress. Doing more cardio is a common tactic people use to try to burn more fat or accelerate fat loss. And, you know, in a vacuum, more movement, more cardio burns calories. That's true, but it can backfire badly when it comes to hunger, let alone the adaptation from doing too much cardio. But let's talk about hunger. Because here's what often happens you do a long cardio session, like an hour of running or cycling or swimming or whatever. Right after that, right after that, your appetite might be suppressed. Many of you know what I'm talking about, right? Because exercise can blunt hunger temporarily. Strength training often does this for a lot of people as well. But then later in the day, your hunger hormones are going to surge up to compensate for all of that energy you expended earlier through the cardio session. And then you find yourself ravenous. And often it happens at night, and then you eat back all the calories you burned. And I hope you're not doing it on purpose, thinking that you're this is some sort of equation that makes sense. You eat them back, and then some most likely. And that's a huge problem. And we don't see the same result with people doing, you know, low and slow heavy resistance training, but we do see it with the chronic cardio. Overdoing cardio, also, as we mentioned before, the same thing as stress. It elevates your cortisol if you're, especially if you're not recovering properly, right? I'm not gonna say all cardio is bad. Short bouts of intense cardio can be amazing. Sprinting can be amazing. You know, medium intensity cardio, when done with plenty of recovery, can be amazing. But for many of you, you're doing so much of it and you're not recovering properly. And that ties back to mistake number three about the stress. The other issue is that too much cardio without enough resistance training. Well, now you're not prioritizing the right thing for muscle loss, and that has its own negative impacts on your fat loss phase. So don't just think in a fat loss phase, okay, I just need to do a ton more cardio, I need to do a lot of high rep strength training. No. You you still want to lift heavy, you still want to get that muscle stimulus, and you still want to have a reasonable recovery in there with the cardio if you if you need that much cardio at all. So I think the fix here is include cardio in a tiered pyramid, okay, where the the biggest part of the pyramid is walking, and then the next part of the pyramid is a little bit of cardio for enjoyment, if that's what you like, or if you play sports or something like that. And then the tip of the pyramid is for optimization, is sprinting. And we've talked about sprinting in the past. You can look it up in our library. The sprinting protocol, it's not hit, it's a very anabolic way to train for very short bouts of sprinting. And all of that is recoverable, especially if it's balanced with strength training and you have plenty of sleep. If this is eating into your sleep, that's going to be a problem. Now, if you notice your appetite shoots up on certain days, look carefully at how you're moving on those days. Look carefully at your activity. Ironically, being completely sedentary can also make you hungry. That's almost like the other side of the equation. So being generally active, moving, getting off your butt, walking a lot, and strength training is what I prefer for most people, with a little of extra cardio sprinkled in as needed to burn some more calories, that's fine. But too much of it can be a problem, right? And so pay attention to your body's signals and correlate it with your movement. Of course, you're also looking at your protein and fiber, like we talked about before. All right, mistake number five is staying in a chronic extreme deficit. Okay, this is not doing an aggressive deficit for a short period and getting out. I'm talking about people who often are highly motivated and highly disciplined and they have a decent amount of weight they want to lose. And they're like, well, if a moderate deficit is it is good, then an extreme deficit must be better, or an aggressive deficit, even if it's not so aggressive that I'm gonna lose muscle mass. And then I can gut it out. And I know people like this who could just gut it out. The problem is that the more aggressive the diet, the longer the period of the diet, that's gonna provoke the strongest adaptive response. Now that is a trade-off for sure. If you're okay with the response and eating less and less and still doing it and white duckling it and finally coming out the other end with the fat loss you wanted, that's your call. But for many of us, that's that's a miserable experience that is not sustainable. Your metabolism is gonna slow down significantly. Your hunger hormones are gonna go ramped up way more than they would otherwise. And then the problem here is also that a lot of these changes persist after the diet ends. Yes, you can recover. We talk about recovery dieting, bringing those calories back up to maintenance as quickly as you can, and you'll recover. But I do see these effects linger, especially for those of you who've been dieting for years. I have clients who get frustrated because they're like, I expected my metabolism to recover more than this. Why am I only burning, let's say, 1400 calories or 1600 calories? And for many of you, it's because of how long you've dieted in the past, which just means you need to spend more time not dieting for a while. That's the solution there. Rather than worrying about the metabolism, just stop doing the things that suppress your metabolism for a while and give it that time to recover. So we when we look at studies that have followed people on aggressive diets, there's one study that that looked at participants who lost 30 pounds and a full year later, their leptin was still suppressed, their ghrelin was still higher, and their appetite was 20% higher than before they started. Now, the caveat when I see studies like that is if you lost 30 pounds, you're gonna be burning fewer calories. You're a lighter version of yourself. And a lot of times we don't know if these people are resistance training. Many times they're not, and they've actually lost some muscle as well. If you hold on to your muscle and it's purely from fat, you're still gonna have some impact from being lighter on the scale. Like you're gonna burn up fewer calories, but you're probably you're gonna be in a much better position for body recomposition, building muscle and all of that. That's still gonna help a lot with the hunger and the fat loss, right? But the rebound weight gain, I think occurs in this population because aggressive diets, lots of weight loss, you throw off your hormones, the hormones don't recover that fast, and then you start to overeat and you body overshoot. Okay. So this is that spiral, that suppression spiral. Constant under-eating causes your body to conserve energy, your fat loss slows down, you feel terrible the whole time you're doing it, you're developing an unhealthy relationship with food because now you start obsessing over food, right? And dreaming of food, and none of that is healthy mentally or physically. So the fix here is a simple one. It's stop living in deep deficits for very long and definitely not forever, right? Don't always be dieting for sure, but even don't do deep deficits if you've had a history of dieting like this, if they go beyond, you know, a few weeks or a few months, right? You can do a rapid fat loss phase here and there. I've I've helped people do it, even people who've had a chronic history of dieting, but it's done in a very controlled way. And again, the duration is proportional to the aggressiveness. The more aggressive, the shorter duration. For most people, it's more effective to diet moderately and then do it in phases. Use a moderate deficit of, you know, half a percent of your body weight a week. And that's not even that moderate. I mean, that's a decent clip still. You're still gonna lose, you're still gonna see the pounds fly off. It's just not gonna be as fast as you want in your head, which is not sustainable. But then you do that, you incorporate diet breaks, you go back to maintenance for a while, and then you spend another, let's say, six, eight, 10 weeks in, you know, fat loss phases. Um, and let me see. This episode comes out in early January, closer to January 20th. I'm gonna be talking about a workshop we're doing in physique university called Get Lean in 45 Days. If you want to get ready for that, you can join, go to wits and weights.com/slash physique. We're gonna talk about the six-week mini cut. It's one of my favorite ways to lose fat that is a trade between both of these when we know that hunger is a big issue for a lot of you. So if you do it this way, moderate fat loss phases for short durations, and most of the time you're not dieting, that's gonna keep your leptin closer to normal, your other hormones closer to normal, give you a psychological breather, make each of the phases more effective and more desirable to do and then get out, right? So a slightly less aggressive deficit. I'm not saying you have to take years, but a slightly less aggressive deficit that you can stick to is always gonna beat a more aggressive deficit that you're gonna abandon or cause these other issues. Now, quick reminder, we're about halfway through the seven mistakes, or I guess we're more than that, right? I just gave you mistake five, so we've got two more. I've been saving something from the end of this episode. So after I cover the last two, I'm gonna share a simple two-week protocol that you can start tomorrow to make hunger management dramatically easier. And that's before you even start cutting calories. So it's kind of like a little bit of a prep for your hunger signals. So don't skip out before we get there. All right, mistake number six is poor meal timing and skipping meals. And for some of you, this is like mistake number one. Okay. You might be trying to get enough protein, fiber, and do all the other things. But when you eat can influence your appetite significantly. And don't listen to anyone that tells you it's this way or that way. It's going to be very dependent on you. Okay. I hope this is why you listen to wits and weights. Because of that nuance, I want you to understand everyone is different. We're not unique, special snowflakes, but there is a difference. There are different categories of people and how they respond to meal timing. The most common mistake I see is skipping breakfast and sometimes lunch to save calories. And then you're absolutely ravenous by evening. Now, some of you are saying, oh, that's intermittent fasting. I do it on purpose and it works great. You know what? If it works great for you, then that's your answer. It works great for you. For many people, they do it thinking there's some other benefit. There's not. There's not, guys. Intermittent fasting is only beneficial in that it helps with someone's schedule and adherence. That is it. That is it. There's no other benefits metabolically, longevity, you know, cell turnover, none of that stuff. Don't believe it. None of that is supported. The main thing is a tool for adherence. Okay. When we think about your day and the fact that we are 24-hour creatures with circadian rhythms, your willpower tends to be the lowest at night. Tell me that's not true for most of you, right? You have more energy in the morning and more willpower and more go get them in the morning, and it tends to decline at night. And there is a correlation with that and the fact that you've been doing things all day, you're tired, your cortisol has declined as it should by the end of the day. You should be winding down, but then you're hungry and you make food decisions while you're hungry, and that's when you overeat. Okay. And that's again when you are saving up calories, thinking you're going to eat less, and you end up eating more. That's the counterintuitive thing I'm talking about here. A 2022 randomized trial found something interesting that identical meals cause more hunger when eaten late in the day versus earlier, where eating the same calories four hours later than normal decreased leptin levels and slowed the metabolic rate. So it's interesting. For a lot of you, your body's gonna handle food better earlier in the day when you're more active than late at night. Now, again, I'm not saying that this is the be-all end-all. I already said that. You may be different. You may have a different work schedule that it throws it off. You may have different lighting, be it in a different hemisphere or latitude that affects some of this. I don't know. If you train in the afternoon or at night, it may also affect these things versus training in the morning. So the fix here isn't, oh, eat more during the day necessarily. It's to distribute your calories in a way that prevents extreme hunger swings. That's the principle. And so for most people, most people, that does mean probably three meals and like one or two snacks spaced throughout the day. Just spaced throughout the day, a little bit after you get up, all the way to a couple hours before you go to bed. And many people do find that front loading calories, eating more earlier in the day, which should be including protein and fiber anyway, and then less at dinner does lead to better satiety and fewer eating cravings. It's a very, very common pattern. So if you're not sure, guess what? Guess what I'm gonna say? I want you to try it out. I want you to experiment before and after. Do it one way for two weeks, or maybe the way you're already doing it, you you already know your body, right? And your hunger signals. Then keeping the same calories and food, shift it. Either get more frequent small meals, eat earlier in the day, whatever. Shift it and see how that affects your hunger patterns. Because if you're telling me that, oh, I like to intermittent fast, but I'm always hungry at three or whatever the situation is, maybe it's not intermittent fasting, but you know, I skip breakfast and then I can't get all my protein, but then I'm really hungry at you know, 5 p.m. That's a good indication that it could be a timing issue, assuming you're not under-eating, right? Undereating, of course, is gonna make you hungry too. All right, the last mistake I have here is on mindset. Okay, this is a psychological mistake. So maybe this is the most important one for some of you, and that is the all-or-nothing mindset, which usually means rules that are over-restrictive or or that are restrictive, right? Cutting out entire food groups, swearing off treats, thinking you have to be perfect on your diet every single day, viewing foods as good and bad, feeling guilty when you eat something off plant, all the things that are my boogeyman that I think are sabotaging a lot of you. And if you can't eat and not feel guilty, if you can't eat a little bit more or less calories than your goal and feel fine with it, if you can't eat carbs and know that you're actually gonna be fine, and they're probably better for you than not eating carbs for most of you trying to build muscle, then there's a problem there. And that could be your issue. So the reason this is, think about it, it's the forbidden fruit syndrome. Forbidden fruit, forbidden food becomes everything you think about, right? You're then you're then you have cravings for the thing you've told yourself you can't have. I can't have ice cream ever. So all I think about is ice cream. I can't ever have pizza, so I'm just dying to have that next slice of pizza. Maybe on my quote unquote cheat day, which you know, anybody who listens to this show know I can't stand that term. Uh, we don't do cheat days, okay? We plan, we plan ahead and we eat calories as we need them and we distribute them appropriately, okay? But life is gonna happen, guys. It happens every day. You're gonna eat something off plan, you're gonna be in a situation that you couldn't plan for potentially. And because your mindset is all or nothing, you feel like you failed with every single one of these little decisions. And that triggers the okay, might as well eff it effect. I already blew it, so I might as well keep eating and start over tomorrow. You know, I missed my training session, so I might as well just not train this week and start Monday. And we we have so much research that confirms this that I feel like I'm a broken record when I go on podcasts and I'm like, look, rigid versus flexible dieting, clear winner between those two. Rigid dieting is associated with more binge eating and less success in long-term weight management, period. Right? Because of the psychology, it leads to short-term weight loss for most people, right? Just like any calorie deficit will, but then the gains disappear. This is why 95% of people can't maintain the results. Whereas flexible dieting or flexible restraint is an is a term from the literature, which is where you have flexible flexibility and structure to maintain some level of restraint, but it's allowing in there plenty of indulgences or treats or things you like without being guilty about them and still hitting your goals and still sustaining your results. And it is one of the strongest predictors of sustained weight loss and fat loss. So the fix to this mistake is to work on that mindset. Easier said than done. I get it. It takes work. No food is truly off limits if you plan for it and account for it. And that's really what it comes down to is planning in the piece of chocolate, the weekly dinner out, the party with your friends, the birthday party coming up, the vacation, the business travel. Planning ahead. Okay. I have a client that I'm working with who her son, you know, loves treats. And when they go to a family event, he's going to have them. And she's like, what do I do? How do I get them not to eat them? Or, you know, whatever the question was. And I'm like, you plan them in and assume you're going to have this slice of cake and these chicken wings and this slice of pizza because that's probably what's going to happen. Right. Kind of plan for the worst case. And I don't even like to use the term worst. It's just, this is likely what's going to happen, assuming no control whatsoever. So if you plan them in, you know what you've done? You've just put a sense of control on there that makes it super flexible. And then you can plan the rest of the day and week around that. Right. And again, easier said than done. But when you think ahead, when you pre-log, when you use an app, when you use a piece of paper and think ahead and write it down and plan it in, then you're going to not have decision fatigue, emotionally driven decisions, and you're going to respond with curiosity when things don't go your way. And you're not going to be guilty about it. You're going to say, what did end up triggering this? And how can I adjust it next time? And then I'm going to move on. So that's the flexible approach that I really like that keeps your stress down. So this affects number mistake number three with your stress. It reduces your cravings over time. It dramatically improves your adherence. Whereas the opposite approach is just an ineffective, miserable way to live. Okay, so we've covered all seven mistakes, but I did promise you one more thing, and that is a counterintuitive two-week protocol that makes hunger management easier before you even start your calorie deficit. And honestly, if you're in a calorie deficit right now, you could even do it. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, CaloCurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CalloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calllocurb. All right, here is the tactic I say for last, and you can start this today or tomorrow. Most people begin in a fat loss phase by cutting things out. And if you are currently in a fat loss phase, you probably have done this. You say, okay, I need less food, I need fewer carbs that because your protein stays high and the fats don't come down that much, so the carbs come way down. I'm not gonna have desserts, I'm gonna have smaller portions, right? And that psychology is already triggering your body's scarcity response, the hormones that we talked about, where your cravings go up and you start fighting them, even before there's any adaptation going on. So instead, I want you to do the opposite. What do I mean? I want you to start by adding things in. Before you subtract a single calorie, I want you to add three things. Okay, and if you haven't started your fat loss phase, take two weeks to do this. If you have started it, you can you can try that even during the fat loss phase. But spend two weeks, make this a plan that you follow. Protein at every meal, a massive vegetable portion at lunch and dinner, and a 10-minute walk after your meals, after your main meals, probably lunch and dinner. All right, that's it. I don't want you to think about anything else. And I don't want you to cut anything out. So if you're not in a fat loss phase, this is really powerful because the extra protein is gonna trigger your satiety, the vegetables are gonna fill your stomach with volume and fiber, the walks are gonna improve your insulin sensitivity, your digestion. And then without even trying, you're gonna naturally eat less of the other stuff. The snacks, the second helpings, the mindless eating, because you're satisfied. So I think it's really helpful before you start your deficit. If you're in one, you can come out of it for a while and be at maintenance and try this, or try to do it while you're in it. It's only gonna help, regardless, right? But this is what we talk about when we say habits that are sustainable and training your appetite and hunger signals. So at least give yourself more of an advantage psychologically and hormonally before that adaptation kicks in, and then see what happens to hunger levels. I think you're gonna be surprised. And again, I I've I've pitched my app before, Fitness Lab. I know we're past the holiday promotion, but one of the great things that that app can do is help analyze what you're eating and give you meal plans and give you advice to make these changes. So, again, the three things protein at every meal, a massive vegetable portion at lunch and dinner, and a 10-minute walk after lunch and dinner. All right, that's it for today's episode. I know we covered a lot, the physiology of why diets make you hungry, the seven mistakes that make it worse, and then some solutions along with along for the ride to help you out. I want you to remember that body recomp and fat loss, they're not achieved by starving yourself. They're achieved by setting up a structured, sustainable approach that works with your body and your biofeedback. And so everything we talk about here is intended to do that. If you can do them, fat loss, it's not just a thing that will happen, but a thing that can be done. Over time, repeatedly as needed in a much more sustainable way. So, this is episode one of the appetite series. On the next episode, we're gonna go a little bit more into ways to control appetite, including some that you may not even be aware of and may want to try. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that your body is capable of incredible things when you give it what it needs. My name is Philip Hape, and I will talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.