Are you tired of either not being able to get through an entire fat loss phase? Or even worse yo yo dieting back and forth with little to show for it. What if I told you there's a smarter way to get lean one that works with your body and not against it. Today I'm pulling back the curtain on my personal stair step fat loss process that I'm going through right now the exact method I'm using to lose fat and get lean, while continuing to deal with life, such as recovery from my shoulder surgery last year. And this approach might just make you rethink your approach to fat loss so that it can finally work for you. Whether you're dealing with an injury, a sluggish metabolism that doesn't want to respond, or you just want a more sustainable path to your dream physique. This episode is the kick in the pants you need to think and act differently. To shake things up. Get ready to climb your way to a leaner healthier you one step at a time. Welcome to wit's end weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, Philip Pape. Picture this, you've been dieting hard for weeks. Sometimes you make progress. Sometimes things don't seem to budge the scale weight, the trendweight just plateaus, or your metabolism is dropping faster than you'd like. So the calories keep dropping to keep pace. Your energy's in the gutter. Your Workouts feel like a slog. Perhaps you're not always in the best mood. Maybe the cravings are kicking in the hungers ramping up. Sound familiar? Well, what if I told you there's a way to lose fat without feeling like you're constantly fighting an uphill battle, a method that allows for more flexibility, better recovery. And, dare I say it as always when it comes to fat loss, actual enjoyment and even personal growth during your fat loss journey. That's exactly what we're exploring in today's episode, my stair step fat loss process to get lean and ripped. Now before we dive in, if you're enjoying the show, if you want more content from deep inside my quirky brain on doing things a bit differently, to unlock smarter, more efficient fat loss and building muscle hit that follow button right now, that helps more people find the show. It helps with the almighty algorithm. But it also more importantly ensures that you never miss an episode. So please hit the Follow button. And I just wanted to share a couple of quick reviews we got recently from people that do the same thing who love to listen and follow the show, such as Camille in New Hampshire who wrote quote, Phillips podcast is full of solid practical advice for navigating fitness and nutrition. Yes, it's backed by science, but he doesn't drag us through the weeds. He provides just enough detail along with how to apply it to our real messy, busy lives. It also helps that he's very relatable and a nice guy. Thank you, Camille, that is what we're going for here. Or D h s b Yes, you 991 wrote, quote, Philip knows what he's talking about. And that's so refreshing in this industry. It's hard to get easy access to strong information, who I like that adjective strong about nutrition and health. But his podcast is super accessible and does the job. And I shared those two quotes just to highlight the fact that this really is about accessibility. It is backed by science. But we don't want we don't want to get so in the weeds that we kind of get lost, right. And that's what we're going for. And I want to thank you for those who submitted those and many other recent five star reviews that help others find the show. And if you're listening you already follow you want to take that next step and help us reach more listeners, please take five minutes and write a five star rating and review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. This helps us build trust and awareness in the show. And you're doing your part to help change even more lives. So I'm grateful if you've already done that. And if you haven't, go ahead and submit a five star review on Apple right now. I won't have my feelings hurt if you pause the show because after all, I've already recorded it. Okay, let's get into today's topic about my stairstep fat loss process. Now I want to build help you build some of our mental muscle today with this topic, right? And by mental muscle. I mean, let's continuously stretch the bounds of how we think about dieting, fat loss, nutrition, all of this not just what the evidence says. But our unique approach. So today we're covering three things. First, the problem with traditional fat loss approaches, and why I personally had to find a new way over the last year or so, really over the last six to nine months. Number two, the stair step method, what am I talking about and why does it work? And number three, a step by step guide dad joke guide to implement this process yourself. Alright, so let's kick things off with my background. My story, as some of you know, I had shoulder surgery about almost exactly 12 months ago as I recorded this episode. And I actually just recently had another MRI And we're gonna see what it shows. If it's clean, I just need to keep rehabbing. There's a retailer or something like that it could explain some of the challenges I've had lately, but we'll see. Now, if you've ever had surgery, major surgery, especially rotator cuff surgery, it's tough to recover. And my biggest advice always when having surgery is before you even have the surgery to get as strong as you can. Even if you have to work around some pain and injury, and not exacerbate whatever it is that leads to the surgery, being strong is going to make recovery easier. And it is really true. I've gone through now three surgeries, I had a back surgery, an appendectomy that was more of an emergency thing. And then this shoulder surgery. And when you're as passionate about training about fitness as I am, it can throw you for a loop, it can discourage you, right? My usual routines were just off the table, like I wanted to do a certain thing, but I couldn't. And that was just reality I had to accept. And my activity level over the last, you know, 12 months or so was lower than it had been in the past. For whatever reason, not whatever reason, it was a choice. But also because my training couldn't be as hard. So my overall calories burned, my expenditure wasn't as high as I had been in the past. And so my metabolism took a little vacation along the way, versus previous phases, previous building phases, cutting phases. And suddenly, my tried and true approach that I had done like six times like clockwork, was not as effective as it could have been. And if I were to rewind back, let me just set some context here. I had gone through a building phase for about nine months, up until early 2024. And then I decided to do an aggressive fat loss phase. And for me, aggressive is the full on 1% of my body weight a week, you know, I start from metabolism of around 3000 calories, so I'm able to die it on like 2200, or maybe 2000 calories, it gets some decent fat loss. But it wasn't quite working this time this this sustained, aggressive calorie deficit, my body wasn't having it because of the shoulder. And so my energy levels would tank, my ability to train effectively, especially when it involves pressing movements. benchpress overhead press, lateral raises, really anything involving the shoulder was just harder and harder, especially when I cut calories. Okay. And so caught between two goals here, one, treat my shoulder with the love that it needs to recover. And two, I wanted some fat loss because I kind of reached that peak of my bulk. And I wanted to go the other way. And I wanted to do it in time for summer. But that wasn't gonna happen. And that's the reality I had to accept. So I reassessed right, I said, Okay, what do I tell my clients here, usually, when I work with my clients, we personalize fat loss in a number of different ways. Sometimes we shift calories around, we do various nonlinear approaches, like I talked about on a recent episode, right? Sometimes we take diet breaks, we incorporate refeeds, we go into more or less aggressive rate, all that fun stuff. Whatever you do, whatever we end up doing, it's something that has to respect your body in your mind, current state, and work within your limitations and your recovery process. If that is part of the equation. This is why I always suggest if you're recovering from an injury or rewrite after surgery or something like that, do not die, it do not be in a deficit. Now in my case, I had recovered I had I had gone nine months post surgery, things were getting better, better, better. I had gained a bunch of weight on purpose to build muscle. And I wanted to cut, but it wasn't going to work for me because my shoulder didn't like the fact that I didn't have as many calories coming in. And my metabolism wasn't as high as it needed to be, which necessitated even lower calories to continue to rain a lot. So I'm like scratching my head thinking what do I do here? Do I take diet breaks? And then, you know, keep going aggressively and take diet breaks? Yes and no. Right? So instead what, what I did is I said what if I take long periods of maintenance was short periods of dieting and make the short periods of dieting, moderate, right. So it's kind of like the inverse of diet breaks. With diet breaks, we tend to diet for like two or three months maybe and then you maybe take, you know, a few weeks off for a month at most. And then you keep dieting This is usually for people who have a lot of weight to lose. Or sometimes on a shorter schedule, you'll go for weeks, and then you'll take one week, then four weeks one week. But let's imagine it's the other way around. Imagine you're climbing a staircase. And each step represents progress along your fat loss phase, okay? And instead of continuing to go up those stairs, which get harder and harder as you climb, and you're running out of breath, and every step is the same amount of progress, but it feels like harder and harder and more effort, right? We have a landing, right? Imagine going upstairs in an apartment building. You go up like half a floor, there's a landing, you turn around you go up the other half and now you're at the next floor. So imagine you have a staircase with landings, and the landings can be pretty long. All right. I don't know if this is a perfect analogy, but this is where I'm going with this, those are your maintenance phases, and they are diet breaks. But what we're talking about here is intentionally having a fat loss phase, I would rather be fairly aggressive. You do it less aggressively, and you punctuated with very long diet breaks. So let's break it down. Number one, you take a small step, right? This is your day to day deficit, maybe it's a half a percent of your body weight per week. And you plan that out for, let's say, six weeks, okay, I'm not going to calculate all the numbers, that doesn't really matter. The point is, it's moderate. It's not too aggressive, because again, you're dealing with something like, like I am, or your metabolisms kind of sluggish, or some other reason where you just can't go on super aggressive calories, okay. And you know, who you are out there. I have clients, I have people in physique University who, you know, coming in, they have a much lower metabolism, we want to get that up over time, we want to tune their metabolism, so to speak, but it's not there yet. So they can't just cut massively. So we set that up. And then we decide where our landings are, our landings are our maintenance phases, our diet breaks, right. But rather than one or two week long diet breaks, these can even be longer than the fat loss phases, right. So if you want to think of it as stairs, you can think of it as stairs with landings, you could also think of it as like, you know, each step, the horizontal part is your maintenance phase. And then the vertical part is when you go back to fat loss, whatever, I don't care, maybe this wasn't the best analogy to use. But I think you get what I mean. All right. So every time you get to maintenance, all you do is you stop dieting, give it at least four if not six weeks, every time and then rinse and repeat. That's really all you do. Right? And you're like, Well, that sounds great in theory, but why would you do it that way? Isn't it gonna take a long time? Why does it work, I'm gonna give you some reasons to consider as to why this specific approach might be best for you versus the linear approach. Okay, the first thing is always, always always, we talk about sustainability. Well, I've really enjoyed doing it this way. At first, I was frustrated because I thought, Oh, I'm not going to lose fat as quickly. But then I went into my app, I use macro factor, of course. And instead of setting a weight loss goal of, say, 20, or 30 pounds, I might set it for five or 10. And just a nice little chunk. That's my goal. And I don't know how long it's going to take me to get there, I'm going to set a reasonable rate of loss half a percent a week, let's say, maybe even gentler for you. Okay, and then I'm gonna go for about six to eight weeks, and then I'm going to stop for about six to eight weeks is really all I'm doing. And then I'm gonna go to six, eight weeks, and I'm gonna stop for six to eight weeks. So it's actually sustainable, because you want to find it have these very long stretches, where you're not worried about food, you're not obsessing over food, you're not dieting, you're fully recovered, you're sleeping nicely, you get all the energy in the gym, and you can really make a lot of progress. It's almost like mini building phases. And then mini mini cuts, but they're gentle cuts. Okay. So the sustainability aspect is really cool, because it's almost like living in a maintenance phase over a long term. And you just happen to also drop some fat along the way. It's kind of how it feels like, like, I'm never in a dieting phase for too long, or I start to get that tired of it. And when I'm ready to get back to it after my maintenance phase, I'm like, Okay, I'm ready to go, like I'm recovered and I'm mentally fresh. It's pretty cool. Actually. The second thing is it is going to be a little bit gentler on your metabolism in terms of you, obviously your metabolism is going to adapt when you go into a diet, it's going to start dropping. But because you're spending these long periods of maintenance, you should fully recover. And then when you get back to dieting, it's like it's like you've completely refreshed back to the beginning again. Again, you can never change metabolic adaptation. And the net result is the same when you add it all together cumulatively, but from a psychological perspective and living life and enjoying a higher metabolism. It's awesome. Hey, this is Philip and I hope you're enjoying this episode of Whitson weights. I started with some weights to help ambitious individuals in their 30s 40s and beyond, who want to build muscle, lose fat and finally look like they lived. I noticed that when people transform their physique, they not only look and feel better, but they also experienced incredible changes in their health, confidence and overall quality of life. If you're listening to this podcast, I assume you want the same thing to build your ultimate physique and unlock your full potential whether you're just starting out or looking to take your progress to the next level. That's why I created wit's end weights physique University, a semi private group coaching experience designed to help you achieve your best physique ever. With a personalized done for you nutrition plan, custom designed courses, new workout programs each month, live coaching calls and a supportive community. You'll have access to everything you need to succeed if You're ready to shatter your plateaus and transform your body and life, head over to Whitson weights.com/physique. Or click the link in the show notes to enroll today. Again, that's Whitson weights.com/physique. I can't wait to welcome you to the community and help you become the strongest, leanest and healthiest version of yourself. Now back to the show. Third, it's as flexible as all get out, right. I mean, we talked about the nonlinear approach, in the last episode, how life happens. And you can adjust your days or your weeks around, you know, your holidays, and your travel and your social events, your weekends, going out all that. But what if you just have, you know, if you have six weeks of dieting, and then six weeks of maintenance, while you're doing the dieting, you can kind of occasionally have these social events, and it's no big deal, you know, it might slow you down a bit, but then you know, you're gonna have this long phase where you're not even dying in at all. So gives you huge stretches, that can kind of work with your busy periods at work, you know, the vacations, a period of recovery, like for me, those periods, those landings on the staircase, are where I would go all out on recovery, whatever that was, whether that's, you know, modifying my training, getting more sleep, just the fact that I'm eating more food, whatever, it's recovering, I really focus on that. And it's a lot harder to quote unquote, fall off the wagon, right or get off track when you have that kind of flexibility. And the last thing here, which we kind of touched on in different from different angles, but I'm gonna mention explicitly is better long term results, in terms of both, you're probably going to maintain your lean mass pretty easily, because I've had clients who go aggressively and maintain their lean mass, as long as they have the protein and the strength training, right. But because you're just dieting moderately, and then you're not dieting for like, 5050, it's gonna be I'm not gonna say impossible to lose lean mass, but you really shouldn't, if you're doing things even just reasonably correctly, okay, so gives you that tolerance as well. And then the cool thing is, as you're going along, you get to adapt to your slightly leaner version of yourself, each time you hit that landing, each time you get to maintenance, you're now learning to maintain it every time. And so by the time you get to the last one, it's like you've done this before, no big deal, like I know how to maintain my results, right. And the cool thing is, it lets you experiment with those maintenance phases along the way, what it's like to come out of a fat loss phase and in the maintenance, and not regaining all the weight. If anything, your pressure is toward the losing fat side. So even though you're at maintenance, you don't even have that much time to gain weight. Let's just put it that way. Unless you're massively over consuming, which is not what we're going to do. We're going to know what our expenditure is, right? We're going to know what our maintenance calories are. That's what we're going to eat. When we get back to maintenance. It's gonna be a bunch more carbs, which we all love. And then when we get back into fat loss, we'll know how to maintain our results by the time we're done. All right. And now I know what some of you are thinking, Philip, this sounds so slow, isn't going to take forever to see results. And I recently posted a funny video on Instagram, go check out go follow me on Instagram, if you don't already, because I'm gonna put more reels like this tongue in cheek sarcastic. And I said, like, here are my three favorite fat burning supplements. And one of those is patience, right? All three of them were not actual supplements. But one of them was patience. And I see this theme come up over and over and over again. We live in a world of instant gratification. And almost always when someone says I'm stuck, I'm having trouble. It's like, did you give the thing long enough? Not really, right? I'm impatient. I had a guy reach out to me, he wanted some help with his programming. And I said, Look, there's a million ways I can rewrite your program, I could give you a template like, it doesn't seem like the program is your issue. It's you're not sticking with the program for longer than like two weeks. All right. So of course, the programs are going to work because you're not actually running it. I mean, how many times have you lost weight quickly, only to gain it back? That is like the typical story here, right. And that's often a sign of, you know, a lack of patience, not just that it's many other things. It's the approach and everything else. So the stair step method might be exactly what you need to actually get results and have them stick, especially because I just mentioned, you're going to spend these nice long periods of maintenance. So I hope I was clear enough on describing how this works. I mean, it's very simple. But there are some critical reasons to think about implementing this for yourself. So if you want to do that, now I'm just going to share how to do that right. Step one is to assess your current situation and be brutally honest about where you're at right now. This is really about expectations about the realities of life, about how stressed you are with a family work and financial obligations, your current weight, your current body fat, you know, any factors that can affect you along the way your injuries, your recovery processes, all of So your starting point, and if any of the things I've said today resonate with you, it could be, hey, my metabolism is just not that high at the moment, I want to get it there. I do want to build muscle. But I'm in a period now where I need to get some fat loss for whatever reason that is for you. Okay, and I'm happy to have a chat with you, you know, you can book a free 15 minute rapid nutrition assessment, and I will quickly help you figure out like, what is a realistic expectation? And maybe what direction should you be going. But let's say you said, Look, I want to lose fat, my metabolism is not that high, I can't go that deeply on the calories. And so when you tell me, you know, you need to cut for 12 or 16 weeks, and I'm doing it at a reasonable rate. And I'm really not going to lose that much. That sounds kind of discouraging, maybe I'd like the idea of thinking a little bit longer term for like a year. And having small, reasonable fat loss phases with these maintenance phases in between for a year. Knowing that that way, I'm not going to push my metabolism down even further, right, to a point where I feel like, I have to yo yo constantly out of it, that can be a perfect context where this would be appropriate. Alright, so that's number one, assess your situation, your context, number two, plan, the rate of loss, so that you can do that during the fat loss phases over a long period. So you're going to do, let's say, one year, and let's say do them in six week chunks, 52 weeks in a year. So what does that come out to? Oh, man, so, so bad at this, I'm good at math, but doing it on the fly, that's like eight cycles or whatever, that's like eight cycles for the year, meaning you would be in fat loss, maintenance, fat loss minutes, on off on off for, and I'm not saying that yo, yo, daddy, right? Sounds like it for eight cycles over an entire year. And you can line up the maintenance phases with the times of year when you think you're gonna eat more. But you know, you're dieting for a whole year, you're not bulking at all during that year, right. And again, this has to be appropriate for you. But at the end of the year, you're going to get the result. And you're going to have done it in a nice experimental sort of personal growth type of way, which is kind of interesting. And you can remember that you heard the idea here on Whitson weights, and you can tell your friends about it. All right. So that's it, you're gonna plan is the appropriate deficit, okay? To make it reasonable. So that might be a half a percent a week, it might be as low as, say, point 3% A week for you, it might be a little more aggressive. If your metabolism is isn't that low, it might be point seven, five, chances are, it's not going to be super aggressive, or else you would just go all out with like a normal fat loss phase. And then the next step, of course, is to implement it, and implementing fat loss as a whole separate podcast episode. And I promised I wouldn't be getting into the weeds of the how to, because I don't want this to be overwhelming. I've got other episodes that you can check in the back catalogue about how to do fat loss. One of them is classic, I think it's episode 40. Everything you need to know about fat loss. And I believe in that episode, I break down the phases and the various behaviors you want to put in place. Right? The big one of the big rocks, the big rocks is high protein strength training, and eating in a flexible way that keeps you full and satisfied. Like those are the big rocks, right? There's a lot of little rocks, getting enough sleep stress management, you know how you train all of that, that I'm not going to cover today. But you're going to implement it. And here's the thing, whatever you do during fat loss, you'll probably just continue doing that and maintenance. And that is another benefit of this approach. In that you're not thinking of fat loss as this totally separate thing, I want you to think of fat loss and maintenance is really the same thing, just with slightly different calories. That's it. And if you've never thought of it that way before, this could be the perfect way to give that a shot, right. And so you've got your fat loss phase setup, you're doing all those things. And then after about six weeks, you're like, Alright, I'm gonna crank that sucker back up to maintenance. And if you're using an app like macro factor, you can either have short weight loss cycles, and then when you hit the number, you go to maintenance, or you're gonna have the broader cycle, like a six month or 12 month, you know, I'm gonna lose 30 pounds or whatever. And then simply slow down the rate of loss when you get to maintenance to almost zero. And then really, just make sure you're fully eating at your maintenance and helping your metabolism recover. And enjoy it, like enjoy it. I'm in one of those maintenance phases. Right now. I've been here for maybe two weeks. And it only took like, four days for me to start getting super satisfied and not have any hunger because you know, I'm like, hum feeding back up. I'm feet. I'm not going to delete a sucker. I'm just going to throw those carbs up. I'm going to feed up I'm going to actually overshoot a slight bit because I know I'm not going to gain a whole bunch of weight. I also know the first week I'm gonna have a bump and stay away from water. That's all it is. Then it's gonna level out. All that happened as expected. And now I'm just kind of sitting pretty for a few weeks I can already feel how I'm really recovered, my weights are going up in the gym even faster. You know, it's like being in a bulk in relative terms to the fat loss phase, which is cool. And so in another, I don't know, three weeks, I don't want to rush it, I want to give patients to the maintenance phase, I want to really sit through it, right and do what I'm suggesting here. I'm going to be totally fresh recovered, ready to go mentally, physically, metabolically for the next fat loss phase, and then I know I'm gonna get through it, and it's gonna feel just fine. It's a pretty sweet place to be. And I've never done it before quite like this, which is why I wanted to make a whole episode about it. Alright. So yeah, I think you know, the other things we always talk about, like assessing, adjusting, you know, making sure you track your biofeedback and your, you know, you follow the calories to the metabolism, though, all those things are still apply the same thing. But the key difference here is these long, moderate fat loss phases punctuated by long maintenance phases, and all the unique benefits that come from it. Alright, here's something that might surprise you, as we close out this episode. Because if you haven't figured it out, the real magic of this method is not the fat loss phases. It is in those maintenance periods, right? Most people think of maintenance is just kind of a holding pattern, like treading water or just, you know, hoping to hold on to your results. But maintenance is the place where you can build the habit, you can build the mindset, you can build the lifestyle, that's the place where you've kind of take a break, you take the stressor off your body from the fat loss, and you just work on the skills. And you say, Foom, I just finished a fat loss phase and I learned something about myself, I learned that I get super hungry through PA or I learned that sleep is a little bit harder to come by or I learn whatever, you know that I respond to this much volume better than this much volume in my training. Well guess what? Now that you you're not in fat loss for a while, why don't you slowly do the one step at a time changes that resolve those issues and those roadblocks, where the friction is low. And then when you get to the next fat loss phase, guess what, now you've got another testbed, another experimental lab to try those things out in and get more feedback, it's pretty cool. It's actually a kind of a rapid personal growth experiment that you're gonna go through. The irony being that it takes longer to lose fat. But at the end of the day, the benefits far outweigh just the fact that you've pushed the scale that you're not just losing fat, you've actually becoming the kind of person who knows how to stay lean naturally. And that's why the stair step method is so powerful, I think it's not just about changing your body. It's about changing all the things that give you joy, changes your relationship with food, it changes your relationship with your body, it changes the whole concept of dieting. And this approach truly embodies that idea of working smarter, of working more efficiently of making steady progress and being sustainable living your life. Adapting to challenges, knowing that injury, busy schedule, whatever comes your way you can handle it, no problem with total clarity. That's what a habit is. Actually, that's what a strong solid habit is. It's something that you do even when the stressors are at their highest, you do it anyway. And my dear listener, that is actually the key right there to lasting transformation. So the next time you're tempted by the quick fix diet, or you're feeling discouraged by slow progress. Remember, this lasting change comes from thoughtful, well engineered approaches, it is always always about the long game, the long game is the fastest path to success, believe it or not, the long game is actually the fastest game. And you're using your wits as much as you thought I was gonna say your weights, but your muscles, which we use weights to get so tempting. And that's how we build better bodies, but also become more informed we become more capable. We find sustainable, enjoyable ways to reach our goals, maintain them for life, and hopefully inspire everyone around you to do the same or ask you Hey, what did you do to get to look like that? Awesome. So if today's episode resonated with you, and you are ready to take your fat loss journey to the next level, I want you to reach out, reach out and book a free 15 minute rapid nutrition assessment, something I just started doing. Again, I used to do these 30 Minute Calls. And now I have these very fast paced calls, where all we do is we talk about what's going on, what's the number one thing holding you back, I'm going to help you identify that. And I'm going to give you three actions that you can take right now to start getting results like simple actions you can take literally that week. And yeah, maybe we decide a stair step approach or something that could make sense for you. But there's obviously a lot of paths we could possibly take. That's what we mean by personalization so, to book your free rapid nutrition assessment, click the link in the show notes, or go to Whitson weights.com and click the giant button at the top. Again, go to Whitson weights.com. Click the button at the top of the rapid fitness, what is it called? Rapid nutrition assessment or click the link in the show notes. And we'll have a 15 minute chat. It is not a sales call whatsoever. It's me trying to meet and learn about as many people as I can and help you out on your fitness journey. Sometimes the difference between spinning your wheels and making progress is just having the right approach and having support and so I want to connect with you and make sure you are on the right path for you. Alright, until next time, keep using your wits. Keep lifting some weights and remember, in the stair step method every landing is a victory. I'll talk to you next time here on the wits end weights podcast.