[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits and Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:26] Welcome to episode 13 of Wits & Weights. The last episode covered why gaining weight while training hard is an effective way to get lean by packing on muscle increasing metabolism and making it easier to lose fat later today, we're tackling the losing fat part of.

[00:00:53] If you haven't listened to episode 12, go back and do that first. If you're a new lifter who is not extremely overweight, your best gains will come through hard strength, training and eating at maintenance or in a slight surplus to improve your body composition. I recommend focusing on building muscle before you worry about losing.

[00:01:15] However, if you're a late novice or intermediate lifter who has spent time in a building phase and is ready to lean out through a fat loss phase, this episode is for you after all, most of us want to maintain a healthy weight and we can't keep packing on muscle along with some fat. The body adapts muscle building slows down, and sometimes we need to rev the engine, so to speak by taking a break, cutting some weight and resetting ourselves for the next building.

[00:01:48] The challenge is losing weight at a reasonable pace while retaining as much of that hard, one muscle as possible through appropriate training and nutrition choices, just as we want to maximize muscle size and growth while gaining weight, we want to minimize muscle loss and maximize fat loss while losing weight.

[00:02:09] In this episode, I cover when it makes sense to enter a weight loss phase, how fast you should lose. Training and diet strategies to retain as much muscle as possible metabolic adaptation and taking diet breaks, listening to biofeedback, especially as you get really lean. And my recent successful 12 week weight loss phase, and the current cut that I'm going through.

[00:02:38] Right. The first thing I want to address is the question. When does it make sense to enter a weight loss phase? It seems obvious. Well, I just want to lose weight don't we all? And if you are skinny or average or slightly overweight and you are a newer lifter. I would say you want to build first if you're not extremely overweight and you're a newer lifter work on building muscle, don't worry about losing weight or losing fat.

[00:03:08] You could go on a maintenance diet for awhile to try to get some body recomposition or go into a surplus. Doesn't really matter that much, but it is not the time to lose weight. If you are very overweight, then losing weight could be a good idea to prioritize. Overbuilding muscle, even though you're going to continue lifting hard to at the very least preserve what muscle you have and still possibly engage in body recomposition, especially if you're newer, where fat loss and weight loss makes complete sense is if you're you've been lifting for a little while you're in late novice or an internal.

[00:03:47] Lifter or, or more advanced and you have some amount of weight to lose then this episode and these strategies definitely apply to you. So then the question is how fast and how much weight do you lose first? Let's talk about the goal weight. So I always recommend setting a target weight, not a body fat percentage target.

[00:04:12] And this is for a few reasons, a weight on the scale is object. It's just a number and, you know, when you get their body fat percentage, it would be objective. It could, if it could be measured objectively, but the problem is most forms of measurement have error. And unless you're very good with calipers or tracking really, really closely, which is definitely possible.

[00:04:35] And we've talked about doing that with tape measures and calibers, unless you're doing that, it's a much harder target to hit. And to really know that you've got. So you want to set a weight target to get down to however, I wouldn't set a goal that's insanely low for a single phase. I'd go for no more than say eight to 10%.

[00:04:57] At one time before you then might take a diet break or a maintenance break for awhile has meant as long as a few months. And then continue if you have a lot of weights. But if we take our an example, 200 pound male, I would target getting to no less than 180 pounds. So that's 20 pounds of weight loss in one continuous phase.

[00:05:20] Now the actual target weight you're going to hit depends on your personal goal is your goal just to get to. Quote unquote, healthy weight, which we'll talk about in a second, or is it to get really lean for a specific goal? Like a physique competition, bodybuilding, a vanity goal, like looking good on the beach or even a photo shoot.

[00:05:42] Those are very different goals. We're just going to assume that your goal is to get to a healthy weight. And I realized that that is a somewhat subjective thing. There's something called the BMI, the body mass index, which is often used to determine whether someone is healthy, overweight, or obese. Now, if you don't have much lean mass, if you're sort of the average American who doesn't lift, it's a pretty reasonable reflection of whether you are at a healthy.

[00:06:09] But the more lean mass you have, the more body fat itself becomes a better proxy for quote unquote healthy and take myself as an example, I currently weigh 1 75 and I'm five nine. If I plug that into a BMI calculator, it says that I'm. But I have a pretty lean body composition of probably around 13 to 15%, which I would consider healthy from all aspects.

[00:06:34] But if you were say skinny fat at 1 75 and five nine, you very well could be at a, maybe an unhealthy weight. So I would keep all those in mind based on where you are today. If you're a newer lifter, you haven't put on much muscle BMI's. Window to look at, to decide if I want to get to the lower end of the overweight range or down into the quote unquote healthy weight range.

[00:06:58] So that's the target. Then we want to target how much weight we want to lose per week. And the generally recommended range is 0.25 to 1% of your body weight per week. The newer lifter you are the higher you can go. And any more than that is just too aggressive. It would probably lead to more muscle loss, more hunger.

[00:07:22] You have fewer calories to work with, which makes it hard to hit your protein probably makes you miserable and it could cause more rapid metabolic adaptation. All of these things, you can do it if you're, if this is the very first time you're doing this and you're overweight or very overweight and you just want to be very aggressive and you just started with.

[00:07:41] You might be able to go a little higher, but generally the range is 0.2, five to 1% of your body weight per week. Even just, if you think about a 200 pound person, half a percent is still one pound per week, which is still 52 pounds per year. So if you have 50 pounds to lose, you can lose. Approximately a year and chances are, you're going to go a little bit more aggressive than that at that weight, which would speed up the process.

[00:08:08] But remember, we want to take a break. If it's any more than roughly 10% of weight loss, we want to take a break. Once we get to 10% and then we're going to continue later on. So if we take a 200 pound male who wants to lose 1% body weight per week and lose 20 pounds, that's going to be up to two pounds per week loss, and it's going to take 10 weeks.

[00:08:29] So using the 3,500 calorie per pound rule of thumb, the very rough rule of thumb that's 7,000 calories deficit per week, 3,500 times to 7,000 deficit calories of deficit per week. You divide that by seven days and that's a thousand calories per day below maintenance as a very rough. Frame of reference to start.

[00:08:53] So if this person's expenditure, if his total daily energy expenditure is currently 3,200 calories, he would target 2200 calories per day for the diet. And then you would try. Your weight on a regular basis. I recommend every morning, I've said this before, but you can do it a few times a week. It's gotta be enough to get a moving average so that you're not beholding to big swings, big fluctuations in scale weight that naturally occur due to changes in glycogen and water in your body every day.

[00:09:27] So we need to have something to smooth it out. And then after a week, and then another week we'll know whether we're losing that two pounds per week. The problem is. Total daily energy expenditure is very dynamic. You cannot just set it and forget it. This is why it's extremely important to log food and weight.

[00:09:48] So you have objective data to tell you how the calories in affects your change in weight week to week. So I would consider using an app. I said this before an app, like macro factor. Which I'm a big advocate of, I use it myself, a discount code, Whitson weights, macro factor uses an advanced algorithm that adjusts your calories.

[00:10:12] Individual goals that you put into the app based on your food intake and a predicted change in your body composition. And if I'm going to share my current macros as an example, my current calories, a macro. So you get an idea of what this looks like when your weight loss phase. I currently weigh about 1 75 and my target right now is pretty aggressive at 2,130 calories a day.

[00:10:34] And that's made up of 185 grams of protein, 70 grams of. 190 grams of carbs. Now that 185 grams of protein you'll notice is a little bit more than a gram per pound, sort of the gold standard we've talked about. And it's been constant even when I was gaining weight, it was that. And when I'm losing weight, it's that, but when I'm losing weight, I'm cutting the calories quite a bit.

[00:10:58] So the fats and carbs have had to drop IX extensively as the calories have dropped. So as not to touch the. You can see at 190 grams of carbs, it's still okay. Amount. It's roughly a gram per pound of carbs and in 70 grams of fat. So I have to be really careful to get my protein in, but make choices that limit the other macros so that I can get my protein while hitting my calories.

[00:11:24] So to summarize this section, choose a target. Don't try to lose more than 10% of your weight in one, go and choose a target rate of loss per week between a quarter to 1% of your body weight and use that to drive your calorie and macro plan. All right, next, I want to talk about training and diet strategies so that you can retain as much muscle as.

[00:11:50] For people who aren't lifters, which has many of us, myself included for much of my life, weight loss is often seen as a way to get thin. And you just do it at all costs. In other words, typically you do it by. Eating less and you might do it by following a fad diet, keto, or carnival or whatever, but at the end of the day, you're cutting calories, but you often don't care where the calories come from and how much protein you're getting, because you're not really lifting and muscle.

[00:12:21] It doesn't seem that important to you. But now that we are focused on being healthier, being fit, gaining muscle and improving body composition, the training and diet strategy is very important when we're losing weight. So when we talk about training, we have to continue lifting heart. It's really, as simple as that, what I recommend is whatever you're doing today for your programming, whether it's starting strength or a four day split or an intense bodybuilding program, continue the same program into your diet.

[00:12:55] Recognizing that progress may eventually start to stall and that's okay. Because as we get deeper into our diet, we're going to lose strength and we may lose some muscle mass and you're not going to have the same performance. Now that's a small sacrifice that we make, but by continuing to provide a strong muscle building stimulus, usually in the form of intensity, meaning we're lifting heavy weights, high weights on the bar, but not necessarily variety of programming styles.

[00:13:27] We are preserving as much muscle as we can now do not expect strength or muscle gains while losing weight, unless you're in that small sweet spot of a new lifter, who's undergoing body composition, but that is a very short window. So if you get that, that's a bonus. Don't expect it instead. We're focusing on minimizing muscle loss.

[00:13:50] So that's for training. It's pretty simple. Just keep training hard and be consistent. Consistency is the most important. And of course recovery. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you.

[00:14:15] And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again. An incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the. Now for diet protein on a fat loss phase will be even more important than when regaining weight. And by more, I don't mean you're going to eat more protein, although some suggest that as a strategy, but the fact that you still need as much protein as when you're gaining weight means that you're going to have to sacrifice the fats and carbs, which takes some rebalancing in what you eat.

[00:14:50] So you're still going to target around one gram per pound or whatever you were doing on your weight gain. That makes sense for you. And that's going to help preserve that hard one muscle as you lose weight, but carbs and fat are going to come way down. So to make sure you have sufficient carbs for recovery and for training, you may want to cut more of the fat than you do the carbs, which can be a sacrifice for some of us, depending on what we like.

[00:15:17] I also recommend trying to get lots of your carbs Perry workout that is in the window before, during, and after your workout. It doesn't, we're not talking about this crazy anabolic window where you have to do it precisely half an hour for up to precisely half an hour after or anything like that. Just roughly around your workout window, three, four hours around that window.

[00:15:39] Try to get a lot or most of your car. Also focus on satiety, promoting foods by society. I mean, things that fill you up that are less calorie dense, and this might require adding more greens, salad, fruit, vegetables, instead of calorie dense foods, it might mean eating leaner cuts of meat. Maybe a little more chicken, even chicken thighs, instead of say beef, occasionally staying hydrated, you know, drinking water can help you stave off hunger, fill you up and maybe even spacing your meals in a way that minimizes hunger.

[00:16:19] I know when I was gaining weight, I could eat six times a day and each meal would have quite a few calories and that was heaven. But when I'm losing. I need to be judicious about having say four strategic meals or even three meals with a strategic snack. So that there's just enough time between meals where I can have a big meal, but not get too.

[00:16:44] And I would say that because protein, the need for protein is still high thinking your mind protein first when constructing your meals. So for example, if you want an afternoon snack consider cottage cheese, which is pretty high in protein, in moderate to low in fat and carbs, where on a bulky, you might've had a bagel with cream cheese, you know, more carb.

[00:17:07] And if you're only going to have, say three big meals, each meal has to have sufficient protein so that the total adds up to your needs. So if you're shooting for 180 grams of protein for the day, and you're going to have three meals, then that means an average of 60 grams of protein per meal, which is quite a bit.

[00:17:26] So this is where you might end up supplementing with the occasional protein. All right. So I want to talk now about this concept of metabolic adaptation and then what we can do about it. If it becomes an issue for you, as you lose weight, your TDE, total daily energy expenditure will inevitably decline.

[00:17:46] It just will. The longer you go through a weight loss phase, it's going to start to drop for a number of reasons. Some of the. Include the fact that you simply way less, you have, you're carrying less mass around, which reduces your BMS. You might see a natural reduction in meat, non exercise activity, thermogenesis.

[00:18:07] And that often comes with just being on a diet. You tend to move around less. You just don't have as much energy. You might have a reduction in eat exercise, activity, thermogenesis, because you simply can't train as hard. So when you're not performing as well. You're not burning as many calories. And also finally, the body's stubborn desire to survive will cause you to conserve calories and adapt, you know, so you don't starve and the leaner you get, the more aggressive this quote unquote metabolic adaptation might become.

[00:18:42] So it's very individual. Some people don't experience experience this until they're extremely lean while others get hit right away. As soon as they start going on. And I've experienced both. In fact, it seems to change based on your individual circumstances at the time. Are you coming off of a big bulking phase or are you coming off of maintenance that might affect it or have you been a lot more active for the past few months or not versus a different time than you went on a weight loss phase?

[00:19:12] There are a lot of conditions that can change this. Now, one way to offset this reduction is to intentionally increase your active. But you have to do it intelligently and strategically. So the best way to do this, in my opinion, this is just me is low intensity cardio, like walking, walking, especially I've talked about the benefit benefits before it is low stress.

[00:19:37] It can be. Right. Especially if you go outside with fresh air and sunshine, um, it's spring now, it's almost going to be summer. I'm really looking forward to a lot of those outside walks. It doesn't interfere at all with your lifting. And in fact, it can have the opposite effect and improve your recovery, your mobility, your joint.

[00:19:57] Uh, and of course it's great for your cardiovascular health, your resting heart rate, and your overall markers of, of health. Now you can also incorporate two or three moderate to high intensity cardio sessions throughout the week. Just don't overdo it, especially when you're losing weight, because your ability to lift hard and preserve muscle is still the primary.

[00:20:19] But a bit of extra cardio can increase your TDE and give you a little more room to either eat more or increase your rate of weight loss without eating less. So for example, a lot of bodybuilders, when they get deep into their cut, you see them trying to get a ton of steps, trying to get 20,000 steps a day, for example.

[00:20:40] And I'm not saying go that. But if you can increase from what most people get today, which is like maybe four or 5,000 steps and increase up to 10 or even 12, most days, you will see a big difference. It's going to add a few hundred calories to your material. Every day, which gives you extra room in your diet.

[00:20:59] Now, the last thing related to this metabolic adaptation concept is the idea that as our body adapts, it gets harder and harder to lose weight. We have to reduce our calories more and more, and we're just kind of pushing against a wall to break that wall. We can take a diet break and a diet break is just a fancy term for eating at maintenance for a while, maybe a few days to a few weeks.

[00:21:26] Could even be a few months. If we're talking about a very, very long fat loss phase, and then you continue your diet and there's some evidence that this could help your TD E recover, restore your glycogen, your energy, give you a psychological break from the incessant deficit and the hunger from. Now, this could slow down your diet a little bit, or it could give you a jumpstart that you need to continue.

[00:21:51] So I just suggest trying this out. If you're on a longer, more aggressive diet to see if it helps. All right. The next topic is biofeedback. As you lose more and more weight, your body's going to give you information through biofeedback, things like hunger, fatigue, loss of strength. When you train all of these little things are clues to what's going on and hints that you may or may not need to adjust.

[00:22:19] Now, if you also take body measurements, As I've recommended, you should see things like your waist circumference declining, and that's a good sign. That's a sign you're losing body fat, but you might also see a decline in your other measurements, like your chest biceps, thighs, calves, et cetera. And that could indicate a combination of fat and muscle loss.

[00:22:41] Hopefully mostly fat if you're doing this right, but you can't know entirely. Now just because you have a particular weight target. So let's say you're 200 pounds. You want to get to 180. It doesn't mean that you should just keep pushing and pushing and pushing toward that goal. If the experience has become too negative, right?

[00:23:01] If it's getting harder and harder, if your metabolism is dropping like a rock, if you're having a cut in your calories, if you're super hungry and you're miserable, you might just need a diet break or it might be time to end the cut and get back to me. For awhile or even a building phase because we're in this for the long-term folks, we're in this for sustainability over the long-term.

[00:23:21] We're not talking crash diets here. We're talking reasonable. I'll call it slow weight loss to preserve muscle until you get to your goal. But it has to be something you can sustain for the rest of your. All right. The last thing I want to cover here is the 12 week cut that I went through last year. And then the cut that I'm undergoing currently, which is roughly an 18 week cut with some breaks.

[00:23:49] So talking about the 12 week cut, going back to early August of 2021, I had just finished a muscle building phase and my weight was 180 7 point. And when I ended the cut in late October, my weight was 1 67 0.8. So that was a total decrease of 19.4 pounds, which was 1.6 pounds per week. So that's roughly 0.8, 5% of my starting week, weight per week.

[00:24:22] Right in that range of half of quarter to 1% that we talked about, it was 0.8, 5%. So moderate to moderately agree. Now I also did calculate my body fat percentage. I use two methods. One is the Navy method with the neck and. Measurements with tape. And the other was the three site caliber measurements. And then I would average them because they're pretty far off from each other most of the time, but the average gives you a reasonable number and then the trend is what's most important.

[00:24:54] So I started. 18.6, 2% body fat. And I ended at 10.69. So fairly lean. In fact, it was probably the leanest I had been ever before. Um, and now I'm actually on track to try to beat that. I basically lost 17 pounds of fat and I lost 2.4 pounds of muscle, which isn't too bad. So I preserved most of my muscle. I lost a little bit of lean mass and not all that.

[00:25:23] Is necessarily muscle, but some of it is now when I started my cut, I had a fairly moderate expenditure in the low to mid two thousands. And actually my expenditure increased somewhat during the cut and then it leveled. And what happened there is I had actually started this not long after recovering from surgery.

[00:25:47] So I was not coming off of a big muscle building phase immediately. I'd actually taken quite a bit of a break and my metabolism had come down. So if anything, I was actually training more than before during this cut. So you see that everybody's situation is different and everybody's going to respond differently.

[00:26:04] What I did notice is that deep into the cut, the expenditure leveled out. My nutrition was. Around 2200 calories. And the important thing here is how did I know when the cup was ready to end? Because I did have a target in mind and I just met the target, but I could also tell it was ready to, I was ready to be done with this.

[00:26:27] First of all, is the increased appetite. Very common increased appetite. Now. I definitely had a loss of muscle mass from my measurements, but definitely because of my loss of strength. So that was an objective way to measure that things had declined my press and my bench press started to backslide. My squat was feeling super heavy.

[00:26:49] I think my deadlifts stalled also, I had spent 12 weeks in this cut, which was a nice duration and the trend. Sort of my average weight fell below what was originally my goal of one 70 and I was happy with that. So then I said, well, it's time, time to bulk again, time neither, go on maintenance and take a break or time to bulk again.

[00:27:08] That's what I did. And in the last episode, episode 12 is where I talked about that recent building phase. But now I want to talk about my current cut because I think that's more representative of what a lot of people see after they've gone through a building. And for the current cut. My goal is more or less to get as lean as I've ever gotten before.

[00:27:29] Just for fun to see if I can do. Ahead of a big event on the beach with the family in June and the summer months, where are you going to be wearing shorts and sandals, all that kind of vanity thing that lots of us have. And the goal is to do that before I then go out on a nice long building phase. So for this time around, because I have about 18 weeks to get it done, I could have taken a few different approaches.

[00:27:53] I could have just done a linear approach and just kind of time to that. But what I wanted to do instead, I wanted to be more aggressive at the beginning for about eight or nine weeks. So I'm targeting 1% per week for that. Then take a diet break for a week, then go in a more moderate cut for about six weeks and then go back on to maintenance for a couple of weeks before the event.

[00:28:17] So I could sort of fill in with carbs, get my diet back up before I go on vacation and eat my heart out and not track and not care about how much. So the first few weeks of the phase actually went really well. This is the aggressive 1% per week. Cut my trend weight decreased from where I started around 180 2 and got down to 1 77 and for about three weeks.

[00:28:41] So I was actually overshooting. Now I ascribed that partially to coming off of a bulk, probably losing some of that waterway, that glycogen as well as some fat, my body fat started to drop a bit from about 15 to about 13. Now, initially the scale weight didn't move very much during the first week or two.

[00:28:59] And then there was a big whoosh, and this is one of the things people experienced. The whoosh for me, it was about five pounds from one day to the next. And this highlights, the fact that scale weight is. Volatile and you can't necessarily trust it without smoothing it out by averaging the weight over time.

[00:29:17] My metabolism started to steadily declined from about 34 50 to a little over 3000 calories kind of bottomed out, but it has since started to decline. My macro plan. I think I mentioned earlier is around 2130 calories. Now, after the first few weeks, it was up around 2,400. Now it's getting closer to 2100 and that's because my metabolism has been declining.

[00:29:42] So my protein is stayed in the one eighties, but the fat and the carbs have come quite a bit down as I've been cutting my deficit. I started at around 900 calorie deficit and it's been. I'm still lifting six days a week, trying to get about 12,000 steps a day. Maybe on the weekend. I get half that, but on the weekdays with the treadmill and I take lunch walks when I can I get the 12,000.

[00:30:07] So the first three or four weeks of the cut were great. Then I started to see a big drop in my expenditure, and then I saw it climb again. And the problem was the weight started to stall. So I think the app was probably maybe overshooting or undershooting. Based on my inputs because my metabolism is dropping, but I have a big fluctuation in activity some weeks, you know, I'm lifting hard and my diet is changing.

[00:30:33] So all of these variables interacting together, I've seen my metabolism effectively declined to. Roughly where it was during my last cut. So that might just be more or less my set point for metabolism when I'm at roughly the same level of activity, which kind of makes sense. Right. Just intuitively the point is it's changes all the time and you have to track food.

[00:30:59] You have to track weight. If you're going to more precisely keep your calories where they need to be to stay. X pounds per week of reduction. You know, for me, it's around 1.7, 1.8 pounds per week. And some weeks I don't lose any weight. And then other weeks I lose way more and it kind of averages out. But if it's not hitting that target, that I'm going to adjust my calories accordingly.

[00:31:21] So I'm looking forward to a maintenance week pretty soon when I hit my interim target of 1 68. And then the plan is to kind of. Gradual glide path in less aggressively, hopefully allows my TDE to recover. And then coming in around the low one sixties. Now notice that I'm not targeting any specific body fat, but I know where I was last time at one 70.

[00:31:49] So I'm going to be something more lean than that below one 70. And yet I also have about five pounds more muscle, some of which I'm also going to lose. So that's a lot of information I threw at you, a lot of lessons that I've learned, um, some tips and strategies that I hope will help you. It's all about losing weight so that you burn fat without losing muscle.

[00:32:13] You keep lifting hard. Keep your protein high, follow us on these other basics. And then I hope you can take these, apply them to your own situation as you strive for a better healthier you for the long term. 

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Thank you so much for joining me today. 

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