Philip Pape 0:00

This is a microcut of two weeks, very aggressive rate of loss, and it's probably gonna come out to be about 1.2 to 1.4% of your body weight per week. Welcome to the Wits and Weights Podcast. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and this twice-a-week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self-mastery by getting stronger, optimizing your nutrition, and upgrading your body composition. We'll uncover science-backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle, and mindset with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry so you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in. Wits and weights community, welcome to another bonus episode of the Wits and Weights podcast. This episode is a recording from the kickoff call for our Shred Tober 14-day fat loss annihilation challenge in the Wits and Weights Facebook community. The challenge is already underway as you get this episode, so it's too late to join. But definitely if you want to join future challenges, come check out our Facebook community. Link is always in the show notes. Now, this rapid 14-day fat loss protocol is not for everyone. It's intended for lifters who know how to build muscle and get that high training stimulus and understand how to track and log their food, how to get sufficient protein, how to modify fats, carbs, and their food selection. It's also for people who have not been dieting recently. So you've been at maintenance calories or you've been in surplus calories for a while, because this places a massive short-term stress on the body. And it really is all about pushing the limits, seeing what you're made of, seeing what kind of results you can get while holding on to all your muscle to balance the aggressiveness with the short duration. So in this recording, you are going to learn the exact things that I shared with the challenge group that we are following and that I am following personally, such as what are the two most important things to get right if you're going to do rapid fat loss? What are the exact steps to determine your calories and macros so you know how to eat on each day of the protocol? And then as a bonus, how to set that up in macro factor, what to do each day of the 14 days, because it is not just a linear approach, there's some uh variation in there, so that you can hold on to as much muscle as possible, recover, and lose fat successfully, and then some nutrition strategies toward the end that you can use to make it easier. And of course, I actually have the full guide for this protocol available now, um, including the macro tables that I mentioned in the recording, so that you can easily determine your targets, just a quick lookup. And so if you want that exact guide, just click the link in my show notes and you'll get instant access. All right, now on to the episode. Let's talk about the microcut, or Carl calls it the hypercut. Uh, I'm calling it a microcut, but either way, the same idea. Um, most fat loss phases are usually around 12 to 16 weeks or longer when you have some decent amount to lose, let's say 20, 30 pounds or more, and you go at a moderate rate of loss, something like a half percent a week. So if you're 200 pounds, that might look like a pound a week. If you're 150, that would be like three quarters of a pound a week. And that's because we're balancing duration with aggressiveness to get through the cut, because adherence is the biggest um thing that that people are that people struggle with. And and that's what we give with crash diets. They're very hard to stick to, you know, fad diets are hard to stick to. So we do that at a moderate rate of loss. A mini cut is something that more advanced trainees might use. Um, or I've had clients who are very experienced lifters, even though they've never been through a cut per se, but they have a lot of muscle mass and they have a high expenditure. And so we can shorten it and go more aggressive, and they don't feel it as much because the calories are still at a decent level, right? So if you're a more advanced trainee, that might be familiar to you. The challenge uh here is really all out. If you ever saw what's that uh movie, um was it Space Balls back in the 90s? What was the um what was the speed? Ludicrous speed. Okay, that's what this challenge is, ludicrous speed. This is a microcut of two weeks, very aggressive rate of loss, and it's probably gonna come out to be about 1.2 to 1.4% of your body weight per week. So if you want to do the math on your own and take your weight and assume something like, you know, 1.3% of your body weight times two, that's how many pounds maybe you can expect to lose. And that's pure fat. The idea is that this is just fat and not any muscle. Um, and this has been supported by multiple trials in the research. I'm not going to go into those here, but um, I am happy to send those another time. Okay, so there are two things that matter most over anything else. The first is training stimulus, the second is protein. Training stimulus, what we mean is you have some form of high intensity or stimulus on your muscles with your programming. Um, and your volume is reasonable so you can recover and actually do it again, right? So if you're a three-day-a-week program, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you're gonna have a big energy drop on Monday. It's not gonna, you're not gonna feel it on Monday because Monday's the first day. But within a few days, you're gonna have a really high drop in your energy and you may feel it, and it may be hard to push or even progress on your lifts. It shouldn't be because the whole point of this is two weeks is short. And at least in my experience personally and with my clients, the first few weeks of a diet, you don't feel it too much, and then it starts to catch up in the strength department. So the beauty of keeping it to two weeks is I would expect you to continue with your existing programming, don't change it if you've been progressing and see how it feels. If you run into a brick wall on that, reach out in the chat, say, Hey, what do I do? How do I modify my my reps, my sets, my load to make this work? If you're looking for a quick plan A, if you hit a wall, I would recommend one of two things. Either cutting the intensity, the load on the bar by about 10% and keeping everything the same, or cutting out sets or movements, meaning if if you do three or four sets of everything, cut out the last set. Or if you do four or five movements, cut out the last movement, which usually is direct isolation work for most people. It's kind of the fun, small stuff at the end, and see if that helps with your recovery and your progress. That's training stimulus. Um, protein has to be high. And I'm actually gonna change this here and say it's gotta be one gram per pound. So you may have heard me talk about a range of somewhere between 0.7 and 1.2 grams per pound uh for most phases, even on a fat loss phase. But for this, and if you look at Bill Campbell's protocol, they always are at least a gram per pound, if not slightly more than that. The challenge is gonna be your calories are cut. So there's gonna be this fine balance between protein, fats, and carbs that we're gonna talk about. Um, and and the the point of that is to preserve muscle, obviously. The point of that is to preserve muscle, it's to tell your body that I've got a muscle building stimulus and I have the nutrition to support it. And so the energy is gonna come from my fat cells. That's the idea. Okay. I don't think I'm missing any questions in the chat. So so far it's crystal clear for everyone. Okay. The science. Um, a lot of people think when you go into a fat loss phase, you need to increase your reps, increase your volume, right? Do more, do more cardio. But that is the opposite of reality because the more of that you do, the more you stress your body, and the more your body wants to conserve calories. That's counterproductive. So we don't want to do that. We want to hold on to muscle. And the only way to do that is tell it that muscle is important with our training stimulus and giving it the nutrition. Um, so it's more even more important during fat loss that the intensity is high. And again, intensity being the load on the bar, the weight on the bar. Um, you might again lose a little bit of strength in the toward the end of week one, perhaps. So it what matters is the relative um, the relative intensity. So if that's why I said 10%, uh you could drop it by 10% if you have to, it's still gonna feel like the full intensity when you were not in a fat loss phase. Uh yeah, relative stimulus. There we go. And you're training heart, heart, heart AF. Okay. You need protein to uh replace and preserve the muscle, and and there we go. Okay, so we talked about all that. Now, carbs. So everybody wonders, okay, now what does that do for carbs? So a few things. First of all, carbs are muscle sparing. And the way this works is pretty simple. Your body looks for energy, it's either gonna get it from your fat or from your carbs. If you have carbs coming in, it's gonna use that immediately as glycogen, which is awesome when you're trying to build muscle, awesome when you're trying to train in the gym. But if you don't have enough carbs, it's gonna go to protein and it's gonna convert protein into glucose and then glycogen. And that is why we want to have high protein and high carbs and have this fine balance. But in a deficit, you are keeping the protein high and don't have much room for carbs. So you need some minimal amount of fat as well. So, what do we do here? Um, I'm gonna give you tables at the end of the document that give you an idea of where we can target your fats and carbs. But if you're feeling like you're completely drained and you have no energy at all, make sure the protein isn't going too high where it's where it's cutting into your fats and carbs. Also, make sure your fat is not too high. So, believe it or not, in a short period like this, the fats can go as low as 10 or even seven grams. And I know that sounds crazy because we know that the fat is there's an essential minimum you have to have, but we're talking duration. These are one of the trade-offs that we can make. Um, training fasted versus pre-workout. Um man, it I I say keep doing what you're doing, Carl. Like if you're already training fasted, keep doing it. If not, I don't want you to change too many variables on this program. Um, but hey, that's an interesting part of the experiment. So if it if you're feeling just awful when you do that, throw it in the chat. We'll we'll talk about it. Um, and so and then so the other option is to trade some fat for carbs, is where I was going with that. So make sure the protein is where it needs to be, and you can lower and lower and lower the fat to get the carbs higher to give you that muscle sparing and energy, uh higher energy effect. Okay. And if this sounds complicated, it doesn't have to be. We're gonna we're gonna get down to the numbers pretty soon here.

unknown 10:29

Okay.

Philip Pape 10:30

All right. So here is the starting protocol. All right, it all hinges on your expenditure. So if anybody doesn't know what that is, put it in the chat. Please don't. There's no judgment here. If if there's things you don't know that then then that's awesome. Say that you don't know it so you can learn. Your expenditure is your metabolism is your calories burned every day. That's all it is. I'm not gonna go through a whole detail on that, but it's the amount of calories that it that you require to not gain or lose weight. Um 1950, that's your expenditure. Cool. So yeah, so we all we all of us probably have expenditures anywhere from 1500 to 3,500. That's that's you know, kind of covering the full range of most people. You're gonna start with that number and then develop your protocol from that. And I have tables at the end of the document that are going to give you a lookup. Okay. So take your expenditure and you're gonna multiply it by 0.55. The protocol here is that we want to be in a 45% calorie deficit on all of the deficit days. And I'll explain the which days we're in a deficit versus which days we're not in a moment, but we want to be in a 45% deficit. This is big. Normally you would be somewhere around 20, maybe 25%, something like that. Now, if you're using macro factor, it doesn't think in terms of the percent deficit, it thinks in terms of the percent rate of loss, right? So when you set it up in macro factor, you're gonna manipulate it when you first set it up for the deficit. And then whatever the rate of loss is, is what it is. It's probably gonna be, like I said before, around 1.2 to 1.4% per week. But I'll be interesting to see where everybody's falls when we get to that point. So I'm giving you an example here of somebody whose expenditure is 2,500, which is kind of reasonable in the range of of a lot of folks, um, especially people who've been training. You know, mine is around 2,900 right now. A bigger guy might be in the low 3000s, smaller females are gonna be the low 2000s to upper 1600, or I shouldn't say just females, but just lighter people, or if you haven't been training a long time, et cetera. Um, this is a reasonable number. So if it's 2500 multiplied by 0.55, your intake would be 1,375 calories. Okay. So right off the bat, that's when I see that, I think that's getting pretty tight. That's getting pretty low. And that's the whole point. This is very aggressive. Then we're gonna set our macros based on that. So the protein is gonna be set to one gram per pound of your target body weight. And the simple way to say that is what are you, what are you targeting in the challenge? It's not gonna be very far from where you are now. Uh, but for me, I weigh 185 and I expect to be around 180. So I'm gonna use 180. Simple. Just get it close. Then you're gonna set your fat next. And I would use 20 to 30 percent. Normally I'd use 30% right off the bat for my clients, but that's also when we're dealing with more calories. When you have fewer calories, if you set it to 30%, you're gonna find that the carbs end up becoming really low. Sometimes they go negative, which is not possible. So you're gonna have to make trade-offs. So, example, if you're gonna use 25% of your calories from fat, 1375 calories, right? That's this number up here, times 25% gives you 344 calories. We divide that by nine grams per calorie or nine calories per gram, and that gives you 38 grams. And then the carbs are the rest. So I know it's a lot of math here. Again, I have a lookup table for you, but you take the 1375 calories, you subtract the 720 calories of protein and the 3454 calories of fat, and it leaves you 311 divided by four calories per gram, 78 grams of carbs. Am I losing anyone? Please throw in the chat if I'm losing you. It's a lot of math. Okay. And so we have tables at the end of the document. I'm gonna scroll down real quick so you can see what they look like. Okay. So these will be helpful. What I've done is I've created six tables sorted by weight, um, incrementing by 25 pounds each. So if you weigh everywhere from 125 all the way up to 250 pounds, you should be able to find a number. If you're more or less than that, I I don't have a table in here for that. So if we take, let's just say 150 pounds, probably a lot of folks are in that range. Um, and your expenditure is 22,500. The the example I just gave you, you can see that the numbers line up with what I just mentioned, right? 150, well, no, this is 150 grams of protein, not 180. Okay. So 150 leaves you 38 grams of fat, 108 of carbs. So what I did with these tables is the you'll notice that the top and bottom expenditure shift larger for each increase in body weight. And that's just because you know, bigger people tend to have bigger expenditures. So I'm trying to kind of move it along. I also don't want the bottom, the the lowest expenditure, folks, to be lower than like seven or eight hundred calories, rock bottom. So if you do this exercise and your expenditure is on the low end and it gets you to be to a crazy low number of calories, I wouldn't recommend doing this protocol, period. I just don't think it's safe or healthy for you to do that. Again, let us know if that's the case. Reach out to me privately if that's a concern, and we'll talk about your options. Okay. Okay. And then here's how you're gonna set up in macro factor. You can do it now, but you're not gonna be following it till Monday. Between now and Monday or now and Sunday, I want you to just eat at your maintenance, eat like you normally are. Don't try to get a jump start on this. And then on Monday, you're gonna set your goal and start following it. It's pretty simple. In the strategy tab, you can set a goal to lose weight. Um, set your target weight. I'm gonna change this actually. Set your target weight to 20 pounds below your current weight. I want it to be just so far away from where you are now that there's no way you're gonna hit that during the challenge. And that's because I don't want it to trigger early. We're not using Macrofactor to actually hit the number. We're just using it to drive the um the targets and the tracking. And then you're gonna select all these options coached, balanced, low calorie floor, cardio and lifting, distribute calories evenly, and then highest protein. Well, here's what's gonna happen. I know there's gonna be a lot of questions. You're gonna do this, and it's not gonna look anything like the table. And that's because macrofactor has a bunch of fail-safes built in. It has like a minimum fat, it has a minimum calories, uh, it tries to kind of get the protein in the right spot. So there's a couple of workarounds. The first is gonna be just ignore the targets in macro factor and use the ones that you calculate here and just use macro factor as a way to log and get your expenditure as we go along. Because at the end of the day, we're doing this for two weeks. You're not really gonna change your targets in those two weeks. You might in week two, which we'll talk about, but probably not. The other option is to use instead of coached or you can set or use collaborative or manual if you really want the exact targets. Okay, and that way you can manipulate the numbers and see them that see them in there as targets. I personally am not even gonna do that. I it's just I want to keep it simple. Okay, if you're using macrofactor for months like you normally would, sure. Um, and do this on Monday morning. So, questions so far, throw them in the chat. We're gonna have an open QA in a bit. Okay, trying to fly through this here. Nutrition plan. Here we go. This is what it looks like. Um, and I'm gonna let me add a bullet here. Uh no, I'm not gonna do that. So it's gonna be four days on, one refeed, four days on, one refeed, four days on. So four days on, meaning four days in a deficit, one day refeed, four days in a deficit, one day refeed, four days in a deficit. That's 14 calendar days total with 12 dieting days in those calendars in those 14 days. It's pretty straightforward. Um, and the whole purpose of this is to give yourself some recovery from the diet twice during the two weeks. So the first four days, starting Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you're just gonna aim for your targets. So you're gonna aim for your, you know, in this case 1375 with your 180 grams of protein. So exactly, yeah. Okay, I'll I'll address Carl's comment in a minute. Um, so what I want you to do is plan out your day one this weekend. This is work. So you notice this is work, like this this thing takes work for all of us. But that's the point because it's it's we're pushing the limits and we're trying to get a really good result in a short period. Plan out your day one, whatever that looks like to you. You can use macro factor and actually plan out the exact day just to understand how it's going to be successful. If you don't already intuitively know that, you can um use this opportunity to do some bulk cooking on Sunday, to go to the grocery store and get what you need, to do kind of a mix and match for the whole first week, thinking about the fact that four days are in a are in the diet and then the next day will be refeed. Um, if you want to check out, I did a uh video about meal planning in the Wits and Weights Facebook group, and it came out yesterday. So go check that out if that if you'll find that helpful. But I think most people following this protocol have some experience with this. So you're gonna prioritize your protein, right? When you plan out your day, you're gonna think, how do I get all my protein first and then start filling in the rest? And then you're gonna say, well, now I've all got all that protein, what room is there for the fats and carbs to then stay below my calorie target? Parties, occasions that do not console coincide with the refeed days. So is there flexibility? Not really. Um, the refeed should be done in this um in this order and with these days. Now, if if there's a one-day difference, like let's say it's you got three days, let's say it's Saturday. Um, can you do one extra dieting day and then move the refeed day out? I mean, if you want to personally experiment with that and just make sure to document it, I'm not stopping you. I would look at this as an opportunity to pre-plan for the partying occasion, even being on the deficit. I think that would be fun. It's like a way to say, how do I make that successful uh by planning the rest of my day to make it work? Um make sense, Carl? Yeah. Okay. So day five, which this week is going to be Friday, is a refeed. So what you're gonna do is increase your carbs. Some fats may come along for that, but mainly carbs. And we're thinking rice, fruit, um, starches, right? Kind of more pure carbs, if you will, even if you liquid forms of carbs, if you want, um, so that the calories equal the expenditure. So, in this example that we've been talking about the whole time, where your expenditure is 2,500 calories and your dieting target is normally 1375, on the reefee day, you're gonna add the difference of 1125 calories so that what you eat equals your expenditure. And so if you did that purely from carbs, let's say you just ate a whole giant bowl of white rice, excuse me, that'd be 281 extra grams of carbs, which may sound like a whole bunch to some of you, but again, that's this scenario. It may not apply to your scenario. Um, if you go to the tables that I provide at the bottom, I actually have the refeed days on the right. So I don't know, let's say you weigh 175 pounds and you your expenditure is uh 2500, you know, on your refeed day, it's gonna be a ton of carbs, 364 grams. And the idea here is to refill all of your glycogen stores to give your hormones a boost, give your leptin a boost, recover your hunger signals, you know, all of that. Uh So that you can preserve muscle. And this is this is what uh Dr. Campbell uses it in all his different protocols is these refeed days. Okay, so that's that's the first Monday through Friday. Then Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, back in the deficit. Wednesday is another refeed, and then Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Now, maybe I should have started this on a different day. So the refeeds were on the weekends, but I didn't. So like Friday is your first refeed. If you're gonna go out to dinner or enjoy something and you have control over when that happens, Friday's a good time to do it. You know, if you if you have to have pizza or Chinese food, Friday's a good time to do it. Okay. And by the way, you can eat whatever you want on this, and you're gonna find that some of the things that we often talk about during fat loss may not apply as much. For example, yes, you're gonna be hungry, but it's only two weeks. So you make the choice if you still want to have some indulgences in there and experiment with including those even on an aggressive fat loss phase, knowing that it may not, um, you may be hungrier as a result. I uh I would encourage you not to do that if you can avoid it. I would encourage you to stick to mostly whole foods because it's just gonna make it uh easier to get through. But that's that's the 14 days. And when you add up the numbers, that's 12 days in a deficit, two days at a refeed. And so if you if you take all that together, what it comes out to be is for this example, an average of 964 calories a day or a 1.9 pounds per week in a reef from the um full diet. So that's just an example yours, maybe higher or lower. Okay. Keep going, keep going. Let's do it. So, nutrition best practices. This is very high-level guidance, and this is where I want you to use the telegram chat as we go along to ask questions like how do I do this? How do I do this? I'm facing this issue. Help, help, help. We're gonna help you out. Protein frequency is king here. Have as much frequency as you need to get your protein because if you need 150 grams and you only eat twice, you're gonna have to have 75 grams of protein each. That may not sit well with your digestion and it may not make for the most enjoyable meals that you construct. So get enough frequency, even if it's one or two snacks of a whey protein shake or cottage bowl of cottage cheese or something like that. Um, you definitely probably will need at least one protein shake in there each day, unless you're just all whole foods, which is perfectly fine too. Um, otherwise, always think of density, meaning how many, how much protein do you get for the calories? Um, I sent, I put a document in the chat a few days ago. Uh, I I forget what the title is, but it has a page in there with foods sorted by protein density. So if you want steak, sirloin's gonna have a lot more protein for the calories than ribeye, right? Chicken breast more than chicken thighs, white fish more than salmon. Um, low-fat dairy more than high fat dairy. It doesn't mean any of those are off limits. It's just about making trade-offs and decisions for your goals here. Um, egg whites mixed with whole eggs or all egg whites, if you can stand the taste, etc. Okay. Carbs, I would I would definitely lean toward whole hype whole and high fiber sources. So, like grains, um, you could do white rice, but I would I would lean toward brown rice just so that it's more filling, right? Again, more volume for the calories, calorie, uh nutrient dense, low calorie density. Fruits and vegetables are awesome for this purpose. Fruits are great because they have a lot of water, they have electrolytes, they're filling, they have fiber, and they they um hit your sweet tooth if you have that. Grains would be like quinoa, brown rice, whole grain pasta, and so on. If you could even fit them in, I mean, honestly, you may not have a lot of room for carbs and maybe cutting back on the grains in favor of vegetables and so on. So I have some ideas in here. Uh, hunger, I have a laundry list of strategies. These are just a few that I wanted to throw in here. Vegetable soups, big ass salad, things where you add a lot of volume, but very few calories. So for lunch, take your protein, take a giant bowl, fill it with greens, with spinach, with broccoli, with peppers, with cucumbers, whatever you like that has almost no calories and fills you up. So, same rule applies, any high fiber, high volume greens to any meals, lunch, dinner, snack, anything. And then harder and denser foods rather than softer foods. And this could apply to whole foods as well, whole foods that take you more to chew. Um, like I don't know, I think of meat, like sausage is really soft and it doesn't fill you up because it's it's pre pre-digested, so to speak, um, besides being potentially processed and all that. Whereas like a sirloin is going to take a longer, a lot longer to chew. Uh, more to come. Okay, I'm flying through. If you have questions, throw them in the chat. Training and activity, we kind of touched on this already. Keep your training high intensity, keep doing what you're doing. Uh, don't make any major changes, and then um stay active. I would just continue doing what you're doing, but a high step count can help with the fat loss phase. Maybe you'll get a little more of a maybe your expenditure will go up and you'll get a little more results that way. Um, but I would stay away from very high stress type of cardio unless you're already doing it and adapted to it, and it's just part of your routine. So again, I'm not dogmatic about this. These are just some general guidelines. And then what to measure, we kind of alluded to that already in terms of the to complete the challenge, but you're gonna weigh your you're gonna weigh yourself every day, first thing in the morning, after you relieve yourself, before you eat or drink. Um, you're going to track all your meals. Do not enter partial days. Always estimate if you're within 30%, that's fine. Um, to be serious in this protocol, you definitely have to log everything. Step count should be automatic if you're using a wearable, and then definitely track your training so you can see what happened to your lifts, what happened to your progress during this fat loss phase. Um, body circumference measurements on day one, and then the day after the last day. And then optionally, you could do progress photos before and after. I know Carl mentioned before we recorded like what is your physique change even going to look like with that amount of fat loss? Good question. It's gonna be different for everyone. And so, depending on how lean you are to start or not, um, it might help to have photos just for your own records. And then the in-body scan we talked about. All right, there you have it. That is the protocol laid out in detail. Again, if you want this the guide where I've written all of this out in very easy to understand, step-by-step form, uh, please use the link in my show notes to request that. I will also be doing at least one, if not two or more episodes on this topic of rapid fat loss or aggressive dieting in the very near future, because I would like to share uh what I experienced during the initial parts of the fat loss phase and then how it ended and what the results look like, as well as the aggregated, anonymized results of the participants in the challenge. So that's gonna be a very exciting. Stay tuned for future episodes where I cover that uh as well for rapid fat loss. If you want the guide, again, just use the link in my show notes and check it out. Otherwise, stay strong and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Wits and Weights. If you found value in today's episode and know someone else who's looking to level up their wits or weights, please take a moment to share this episode with them. And make sure to hit the follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode. Until then, stay strong.