Philip Pape: 0:00

Hey, it's Christmas week and I'm taking some time off to be with family, but I didn't want to leave you hanging, so I've selected three of our most powerful episodes from 2024 to share with you this week. These aren't just random replays. They're episodes that consistently get mentioned in DMS, in our Facebook group, in reviews, and people reaching out to me as the game changers for people's approach to fitness, to fat loss and everything else. Out to me as the game changers for people's approach to fitness, to fat loss and everything else. And we're going to start with this one today, which is about metabolic health. And what's fascinating about this is the more we learn, the more we realize how oversimplified most fat loss advice really is. Now this episode became one of our most downloaded of 2024 because it challenges the tired eat less, move more mentality and reveals what actually drives sustainable fat loss. Whether you're stuck in a weight loss plateau or if you're tired of your metabolism working against you, the comprehensive approach that we explore in this episode might change how you think about fat loss, and that is really the goal with this podcast. Let's revisit this discussion about metabolism, hormones and a smarter path to lasting results. Are you tired of hearing the same old advice to eat less and move more when it comes to fat loss. In this episode, we're going to dive into the science behind metabolism and hormones, revealing why this oversimplified approach fails to give you sustainable results. You'll learn how to audit your own metabolism for improved hormones and fat loss.

Philip Pape: 1:32

I'm basing my notes off today, the free metabolism audit that I have on my website, which you can access by going to witsandweightscom, and you click the free audit button the big blue button at the top right and you can take this very quick audit and you will get an assessment from me and my team as to what exactly it means. And if you wanted to go through that now, while you're listening to the podcast, the details that I'm sharing today are going to align with those questions, so that you understand why I'm asking you them, and I'm gonna be totally transparent. If you listen to this show and you follow along with the audit, you could almost do your own assessment. I encourage you to submit it anyway, because we go into a little bit more detail than that and clue in on the specific things that are opportunities for you, let's say, or strengths for you, and so if you want to get that free audit. Just have to go to witsandweightscom and click the free metabolism audit in the top right or click the link in the show notes. Always in these episodes I have a section called episode resources right below the text that gives you a concise bullet list of resources that you can go to that we talk about here. So before we get into the whole metabolism discussion and I think it's going to be very comprehensive today Sometimes I get into metabolism and we cover one specific area. Today it's kind of the whole ball of wax and will allow you to decide what's important to you and where are the areas that potentially you fall short, that you want to improve.

Philip Pape: 2:59

Before we do that, I wanted to share three more recent five-star reviews from Apple, and I'm always grateful for these because not only do they give me good insight into how people perceive the show, but they also help others who are browsing judge the value of it and whether they should listen Like is it for them. And if you are listening right now and you haven't ever submitted a review, this is one of the best ways you can support me honestly. Just head over to whatever app you use Most of you that's Apple and Spotify and just submit a rating if it's Spotify, or a rating and review If it's Apple. Just take you three minutes. If you need any help on what to write or how to write it, I can let you know. But, honestly, if you just sent me a testimonial, it'd be that. Put that in the review and I would really appreciate it. Okay, so the three reviews. The first one is from number two always helpful and insightful. Always learn from this gentleman, good presenter of good info. And I just wanted to include that because I rarely get called a gentleman from somebody who calls themselves number two. Pretty cool, all right. The next one is to the point and helpful.

Philip Pape: 4:05

I really like Philip's approach to the whole body fitness, from muscles to mindset. He's a great podcast host, energetic and thoughtful about the content at each episode, great show. That term, whole body fitness, that's great. I don't know that I've ever used that. Some people use the term holistic, which I'm I'm not a huge fan of, just because it has some baggage. That goes with it, I guess. But whole body fitness, including your mind, is a great way to put it. And then, oh, and that's from Lin Sol Sorry, I didn't include the name and the last review is from Symphonix Excellent info. I appreciate Philip's no-nonsense delivery of the facts. As someone looking to lose weight but retain muscle, I feel like I'm in the right spot. Great podcast, easy to listen to, etc. Awesome. Appreciate those reviews. Concise, to the point. They tell me how you feel and what you get out of the show and continue to inspire me and the listeners to keep producing these episodes.

Philip Pape: 4:59

All right, let's get into today's topic. Why eat less, move more is terrible advice for your metabolism, hormones and fat loss. All right, let's be honest. For years, for years and even to this day in the diet industry, in the fitness industry, we've been told that the key to losing weight and getting healthy all right, and we can question whether even losing weight is the right goal. We can go there, but the key to this is just eat less and move more. I see it all the time. I see people posting on I don't know social media and they ask for some advice and occasionally you'll get commenters in there and they're like eat less, move more. It's that simple. Like, just do that. You know like all these other commenters are just going on and on and you just got to eat less and move more.

Philip Pape: 5:42

The problem is this advice, besides being simplistic, like any bad advice, it overlooks the role of your metabolism and your hormones in regulating body composition and overall health, because both the eat less and move more sides of the equation can backfire big time. We'll get into the details why you know, piece by piece here we are going to break it down, but just at a very high level, and I get asked about this on podcasts too, where they talk about why doesn't that work? Like what's the biggest misconception? And one of the biggest misconceptions is that, number one, weight loss is a worthy goal and number two, weight loss via a lot of running or cardio and then cutting your calories dramatically is the way to go. The problem is, the body is very good at adapting. The body's very good at saying, okay, you wanna run a lot, we're gonna get really good at running and very efficient and burn as few calories as possible because you like to run and your metabolism goes down. And then you have to run more and more and more if that's the method by which you're trying to lose weight. And then the eating less side well, the less you eat, the more your metabolism adapts downward metabolic adaptation and the more your hormones downregulate and the more your body fights back by being conservative and causing you to eat less and less. So both sides of that equation actually do the opposite of what we're trying to do.

Philip Pape: 7:05

But, rather than just hype on that theory or principle or idea, the reason I created this metabolism assessment is to help you understand your individual metabolic health, because you might be doing 10 out of 20 things perfectly fine to help your metabolism, and then the other 10 things are the opportunities. You might not know what those are and why they are contributing to an inability to lose weight. And again, we don't want to just lose weight, we want to lose fat. So that means we want to lose weight while lifting weights. Separate topic, though, and throughout this topic, we're going to tie the concepts from that metabolic assessment to the theme of why eat less, move more fails to address all of these complexities. So let's get into some some of the science behind it, you know, behind metabolic health, and we're going to see what's more. Uh, I'll say, a comprehensive approach, which, by the way, none of this can be explained in a 30 second reel on Instagram. So you know, keep listening to the podcast.

Philip Pape: 8:01

Okay, so the first, uh part of the of the assessment, and I might jump around a little, but questions one, four and five focus on the concept of the importance of muscle mass for metabolism. A few things we have to understand. First, muscle tissue is metabolically active and all that means is that it burns calories, even at rest. Right, that's not something that fat tissue does, adipose tissue and so the more muscle you have, the higher your resting metabolic rate will be. And this is why building and maintaining muscle is crucial for fat loss and metabolic health, because it gives you that higher baseline of metabolism. Now, before you say, okay, I'm just going to build muscle and that's all I have to do, and now I'm going to burn 500 more calories a day, it doesn't quite work like that. The evidence shows us that maybe six to nine calories per pound of muscle that you add. So if you added 10 pounds of muscle, you would burn up to, say, 90 extra calories a day. Now that's not nothing. But where that gets compounded is that by having more muscle mass, you're probably able to eat more and live at a higher scale weight, because the muscle is denser, you look lean, you look great and healthy and you can carry more weight on the scale. That burns more calories on top of the muscle. And being stronger and fitter means you're healthier to be able to go to the gym more often and push and not be as ill and injured, and the list goes on. And all of that also helps with your metabolic health and even just calorie burn because you're active and more active. Okay, so that's, that's covered by questions one, four and five. Now to support that muscle growth and maintaining your muscle during fat loss, we have have to consume adequate protein Very common thing we talk about a lot, but if you're new to the show, it's always good as a refresher.

Philip Pape: 9:52

And this is covered by question two of the assessment. It's about protein. You know protein is the building blocks for muscle tissue. It prevents muscle breakdown and here we are just supporting that by including as much protein rich food as we can. Simple rule of thumb is eat protein every time you eat If you didn't want to track step, whether it's animal products like meat, dairy or plants like legumes or even protein powder, totally cool with all of that. Include lots of protein-rich food in all of your meals and snacks and you'll help your metabolism tremendously for a variety of reasons. Protein is more satiating, it burns more calories, it helps with body composition, it helps with muscle All right, so these all work together synergistically.

Philip Pape: 10:48

In addition to protein, of course, the big thing that we all want to be doing and hopefully that's one of the reasons you're listening to the show or will stick around is engaging in regular strength training, resistance training, putting a load on your body, and the best approach to that, the principle that we care about here, is proximity to failure combined with progressive overload, and, if you want to make it even more simplistic, I call this training hard or lifting heavy, is really all it is. It's lifting heavy, enough weight for enough volume, as close to failure as you can, and by close means anywhere from like zero to three reps from failure, and then progressing in one of those training variables over time. That's it Okay.

Philip Pape: 11:37

And questions four and five focus on the frequency and progression of strength training. That is so important. It's not enough to say am I strength training? It's do I have the proper frequency and progression of strength training? Frequency is necessary to give you the stimulus to adapt and then go into the gym again and push to the next level. If you don't have the frequency, for example, if you go to the gym on Monday and you don't go again for six more months, well, you're not going to be able to progressively overload because you wouldn't have maintained that adaptation. But if you go Monday and then Wednesday, there's a very good chance that that's the frequency you need as a beginner to progress and get stronger each session. So if you don't have enough frequency, you're not going to do it, and then, if you don't actually progress, you're not going to build muscle, and then the gym time is effectively going to waste and becoming more of exercise or more of just, you know, cardio. And so if I were to give you a simple rule of thumb here, I would say most people would do well to resistance train at least three times a week and then challenge yourself by gradually increasing the weight and or the reps over time. Simple, okay, simple, but not easy, as are many of these concepts.

Philip Pape: 12:51

Now let's talk about the advice eat less, move more again, because what it usually leads to is muscle loss If you are just moving more in form, in the form of cardio, and you're not training, or you're not training effectively and you're eating less. And you know, I've heard people say who lift weights. I'm going to go into a fat loss phase and now I'm going to stop lifting weight so that I can burn more fat, and that is ass backward. Okay, that is the opposite, because you're just going to you're just going to lose muscle and get skinny fat, right. So eat less, move more often leads to muscle mass loss, and then that slows down your metabolism, because when you drastically reduce calories and you increase your exercise volume, your body is probably going to break down that muscle tissue for energy. It needs the energy, right, and this lowers your metabolic rate. It also makes hard to maintain fat loss in the long run, right, it makes you live at a lower metabolic rate, and so, instead of focusing on this, let's prioritize building and maintaining muscle through adequate protein and regular strength training. Okay, I'm beating a dead horse on that one, but it's got to be the top priority for most people here.

Philip Pape: 13:56

All right, so then we get to the next section of the assessment. And, by the way, I'm not sharing this. So even if you're watching on YouTube, I'm not like showing the questions. But again, if you go to whatsonweightscom and you click the big button at the top right free metabolism audit you could see the 20 questions, just 20 questions, a scale of one to five and you can take the whole test in like three minutes. So now let's talk about the importance of fueling your body properly and staying active for metabolic health, which is different than eat less, move more. We're talking about fueling and we're talking about activity in general, not necessarily moving more at all costs and for all modalities.

Philip Pape: 14:34

So question three in the assessment talks about carb intake, carbohydrate intake, and I'll just say it again, if you're new to me, if you've never heard me before I love carbs. I believe and I believe the evidence supports that they are essential for energy, for recovery and performance in your workouts. If you're sedentary, if you're not training, yeah, carbs aren't going to do you a lot of good, just like most calories aren't going to do you a lot of good, and you're just going to have to try to maintain your weight as best you can, keep the protein high and avoid losing as much muscle as you can. That's not a great place to be. That's surviving. I want to thrive. I want to be strong and fit until I'm 95 and I croak doing a deadlift, something like that. That's my dream. So carbs are going to help you do that because most of the time you should be spending building muscle, not losing fat, because that is going to pay off big time and carbs are going to help you do that. All right.

Philip Pape: 15:26

Contrary to popular belief and I don't know why it's so popular, other than lots of great marketing cutting carbs to extremely low levels is not necessary at all for fat loss and it can hinder your progress even during fat loss. So when I work with clients and we get down to you know kind of tight calories and fat loss, the carbs definitely come down. And if you're a female who's at like 1200 calories or something like that, the carbs can be around a hundred grams or less, maybe. Uh, but it's a temporary state of of being and it's still higher than they probably would have been if they were doing keto or low carb. If your metabolism is much higher than that which is, I'll say, two thirds of people it's going to be higher than that Then you're up in the mid 100s or higher for carbs, which most people wouldn't say is low carb, and that's during fat loss. While you're building muscle, you could be up in the 200s, 300s, 400s or more. You know, big guy might be more than that, and you know, the more the merrier. As long as you've met your protein minimums and your fat minimums, all the rest goes to carbs, all right.

Philip Pape: 16:26

Having said that, people will say, well, so are you advocating for high carb? No, I'm advocating for what I'd call moderate carb. It's just most people are used to low carb. Same thing with the protein equation. Are you advocating for high protein? No, it's actually moderate protein. When you look at percentages of this kind of balanced approach, they're actually all reasonable. They're just different than what we're used to.

Philip Pape: 16:45

So aim to include a balanced amount of carbs in your diet if you want to support your workouts, especially around your workouts, and this could include everything from fruits to grains to vegetables to starches and, like plant you know, legumes and things that have carbs as well. Anything, any carbs. You know I'm not asking you to consume a bunch of added sugar or anything like that. So that's where you know people get into these straw man arguments. I'm talking about mostly whole foods. All right, so that's how you fuel your body. You fuel your body with what it needs. We talked about protein and we talked about carbs, and then, in addition to proper oh, by the way, I don't even know if I cover this in the assessment. But step one for most people is just eating more so that you're not accidentally dieting, and that's part of fueling your body as well is knowing that to perform and to build muscle you cannot be dieting. All right, all right.

Philip Pape: 17:38

So, in addition to proper fueling, daily movement and low intensity cardio with a little bit of medium and high intensity sprinkled in, can support metabolic health. This is very different from thinking I need to go on the treadmill seven days a week and run for an hour, all right. So questions six, seven and eight in the assessment focus on this concept. And while high intensity exercise can be beneficial, for sure, if your priority is lifting and building muscle and overall metabolic health, I think it's important that it becomes almost like third on the list after training and low intensity cardio, and by high intensity I mean both medium and high intensity. So, for example, medium intensity would be like jogging and high intensity might be sprinting right. Medium might be going for a slightly vigorous bike ride, um, whereas high intensity would be like spinning. You know, super intense, um, medium intensity. So I think the less intense the cardio, the more the body's ability to do more of it, you know, higher volume of it during the week without it interfering with the other priorities.

Philip Pape: 18:46

Simple scale. So if you talk about walking, you could pretty much do as much of that as you want, right? Is there a limit to that? Even potentially at like 30,000 steps or something, where now it's eating into everything else you're trying to do? But for most people you can walk as much as you want. Then you scale up to medium intensity and I would say you could do several hours of that a week with no issue. And if you're in great cardiovascular health, potentially up to like eight hours a week or even 10 hours a week, if it's like truly just medium intensity where you can do it for a sustained amount of time. And then I would say high intensity, which is like HIIT training, interval training, tabatas. You know, I would limit that to like an hour at most a week. So those are kind of the upper limits.

Philip Pape: 19:26

A lot of people are doing too much overall anyway and you've got to listen to your body, you've got to listen to your recovery capacity. If you're in fat loss, it's probably going to be less of the medium intensity and more of the low intensity, and then the high intensity kind of stays in that same range of up to an hour a week, and so it's a matter of balance, right? The activities, all of this movement definitely helps you to cardiovascular health. Okay, no doubt about that. They can also increase your energy expenditure, which is why a lot of people think they need to do it right to burn more calories, and that's true to an extent. Again, if you do it too much, your body will adapt. This is why I like modes of cardio that change up and where your body doesn't really get used to a particular mode for too long and become efficient at it. The other thing is cardio can support your recovery from workouts, so don't always think of it as this bad thing. Cardio is going to kill your gains. We've got to get out of that old school mindset and think about a nice balance of having it in there.

Philip Pape: 20:23

The other thing I want to mention here and I'm talking about it more lately is not being sedentary. That's different from moving, and here's why it's different. Think about your typical day or week. If you're a lifter, you might go to the gym three or four days a week for an hour, hour and a half. All right, great, you got that covered, then you might walk a lot. Right, you go for a walk after lunch, go for a walk after dinner, you got that covered. But now how many hours are you sitting in between those activities? Probably quite a bit. Most of us who have desk jobs or work remotely are working at a desk sitting, even standing, like I'm standing recording this podcast. But I'm in one place and I know I need to fidget and kind of move around and otherwise my back will start to irritate me just standing in one place for too long. So there's evidence that says not being sedentary is independently beneficial of being active and, of course, strength training. So I think of them as three different modes. There's kind of all the cardio modes, there's strength training and then there's not sitting around for too long at a time.

Philip Pape: 21:25

Okay, the eat less, move more. Let's tie it back to that, that approach. One of the reasons it's so destructive is it leads to under fueling, which you just talked about. How detrimental that is just to building muscle. And also over training, right, and so over training disrupts your metabolism and can lead to burnout and can lead to injury. It can inflame your joints you know inflammation and on and on, you know tendin, all of those things. So when you don't consume enough calories to support your activity levels, your body becomes catabolic.

Philip Pape: 21:59

Catabolic is the state of breaking down muscle tissue for energy. Protein is anabolic, right the process of building tissue, and carbs are anti-catabolic. Let me say that again. Carbs are anti-catabolic. They prevent breakdown. They don't necessarily contribute toward building muscle, but they prevent the breakdown of muscle. So that is why I think carbs are almost as important as protein.

Philip Pape: 22:27

This catabolic state, it holds you back in a few ways. It holds back your performance and recovery. It means when you go to the gym you feel drained, you feel like you can't get another rep. Worse than that, it may cause you to have bad form and get injured. Right, but it also leads to hormonal imbalances. It could also lead to metabolic adaptation and it makes it harder to lose fat in the long run.

Philip Pape: 22:49

Now, metabolic adaptation I've talked about it before. It exists, you cannot do anything about it. It exists, it's fine. But you don't want to be causing that adaptation, unless absolutely necessary, because you are on a deliberate fat loss phase and a lot of you listening to this are in a metabolically adapted state perpetually, for months and years, without really getting the benefit of being in that state, and the benefit would be fat loss and doing it as quickly as you can and getting out, knowing that one of the trades for that is well, you're gonna have to eat a lot less and even less than that because of adaptation, but it's quick. Quick meaning a month, three months, even six months could be quick if you have a lot of weight to lose, but it's not years.

Philip Pape: 23:31

We wanna get back to the maintenance and back to muscle building. So, instead of pushing yourself to extremes with excessive cardio and calorie restriction, I want you to focus on fueling your body, to take a positive approach If it feels like it's a negative, like you are having to do this, or I have to cut or I have to say no, question it. We want to fuel our body. We want to have a balanced, flexible diet incorporating a mix of protein, carbs, fats and a mix of low and high intensity activities. Right, that's kind of what an athlete does. They balance all these things to train, perform and feel your best and then, ultimately, you're going to look your best as an outward expression of that fitness. So, metabolic health, energy, sustainable fat loss they're all tied to these concepts. All right. Then we get to the next section of the assessment, which focuses on some of the less sexy things, yet they could be the most important for you Hydration, sleep and stress management.

Philip Pape: 24:29

Okay, so question nine is about hydration, and we know that being adequately hydrated regulates body functions and that supports metabolism. Just think about if you were depriving all of your cells of a little bit of water and they all felt a little bit dehydrated. Just imagine they're turning into like little raisins. Okay, this is not a real thing, but just as a metaphor. How well would those cells perform? Right? They would probably say, hey, I need to stop doing certain things until I can get more water, just like we as humans.

Philip Pape: 25:04

At the macro level, if you're in the middle of the desert and you're dehydrated you don't have any water you're going to start to slow down. You're going to crawl, you're going to find shade and you're going to just hunker down. Imagine to slow down. You're going to crawl, you're going to find shade and you're going to just hunker down. Imagine your cells doing that. And now that is your metabolism. Those cells are the things that are converting your energy and using it, and the more you go into that dehydration mode, even mild dehydration. You are going to slow down your metabolic rate. So people don't think about that. But hydration is not just, yeah, get your water and get hydrated, like this ambiguous concept. It's because all of your cells need that water and if they don't have them, they are going to start shutting down, and I don't mean that in a dramatic way, but they're just going to be more efficient. The mitochondria becomes more efficient. This has been shown in evidence They've studied this in petri dishes that these things they just produce. They exchange less energy.

Philip Pape: 25:55

Okay, so aim to drink plenty of water and electrolytes throughout the day, especially during and after exercise, after training. The more I learned about this, the more I realized the benefits of not as much during I mean during is important, but especially after and the electrolytes I don't like to make it too complicated Like the supplements are. Most of them are not that great or even worth the money, even though I've recommended them in the past and occasionally take some myself. A lot of them, like elements, have mainly salt. Some, though, have more of the other things, like potassium. I'll tell you what, though a banana has a lot of electrolytes, like just look at the nutrients, look at the minerals in a banana. Go log it in Macrofactor and take a look and you'll see why I love a banana as a pre-workout now or a post-workout. Okay, so enough about hydration.

Philip Pape: 26:45

Questions 10 and 11 address the other two big ones here sleep quality and quantity. Right, and I have them separate because they're two different dimensions, but both are essential for particularly hormonal balance, which then again leads to metabolic function. Everything's tied to your metabolism. When you don't get enough restful sleep restful, okay, deep sleep, rem sleep you don't get up more than at most once a day, once a night, and usually that's just because you have to go to the bathroom, like. For me, it's actually kind of annoying If I go to bed at 10 and my alarm set for six like clockwork, my body will wake me up at like 545 to use the bathroom right, and I'm like no, I had 15 more minutes, but then I might as well just get up. So I'm talking about more like closer to insomnia.

Philip Pape: 27:33

Or you get up multiple times a night and you're not really sure why, and all of that is disruptive to your circadian rhythm, to your hormones. They lead to increased appetite and cravings as well. We know that sleep deprivation makes you hungrier, but it's compounded by lowering your metabolic rate as well. It's compounded by lowering your metabolic rate as well. So it's like two things happening at the same time in the wrong direction. One is you burn fewer calories and the other your body's telling you to eat more calories. Now, poor sleep also elevates cortisol levels. Right, and this goes back to circadian rhythm, like if you're waking up in the middle of the night and then if you're, on top of that, exposed to blue light in the middle of the night. All of these things can elevate your cortisol and when you get up in the morning and you haven't had enough sleep, you're just your stress level's higher.

Philip Pape: 28:32

So stress and sleep to mention yeah, I've said this before, but it causes greater fat storage in the visceral fat around your organs, which is belly fat. So if you don't want as much belly fat, two big things for that are going to be alcohol and sleep. Seriously, just those two things. Right, there are massive for the belly fat. So what's the rule of thumb here? Try to get seven to nine hours quality sleep each night. Quality sleep meaning no blue light before bed. You know, no screens before bed for at least 30 to 60 minutes have some sort of calming ritual, make it cool, make it dark, use a sleep mask. If you have to use a cooling mattress Like there's so many hacks, I'm not going to go through the whole list, but identify the one for you that might be the lowest low-hanging fruit.

Philip Pape: 29:16

Stress is the other critical factor here, big time. Okay, and these are addressed. I have three separate questions related to stress Question 12, 13, and 14. We know that chronic stress, life stress elevates your cortisol over time and this just wreaks havoc on your metabolism. It promotes more fat storage. It impairs immune function. So all you ladies, but also men, out there who have had weight loss resistance, you've had trouble losing fat. You feel like you're on super low calories and you've already tried bringing up the calories above maintenance and training and all the other things.

Philip Pape: 29:52

Stress and sleep are probably the things that are still holding you back. Honestly and you may not even notice it because you are used to it You're used to so much stress in your life being a caregiver, a spouse and by caregiver I mean could be your children, could be your elderly parents or older parents. It's work, it's obligations, it's finances, it's all the things. And again, sleep and stress go hand in hand. So this is where finding even 30 minutes a day to yourself for relaxation, for mindfulness, meditation, deep breathing heck. Even just a nap. If you have a one hour block and you got six and a half hours of sleep last night, maybe the best way to reduce your stress is to sleep more. It's just get a 30 minute nap. Set the, put your sleep mask on your headset in or your earplugs in, set an alarm for 45 minutes, probably take you 10 minutes to get to sleep and then you get a half hour nap.

Philip Pape: 30:53

All right, all of this will lower your stress levels and support your wellbeing, and this is translated into your metabolic rate. It means you could eat more food. If I could just say this whole list is do this and you could eat more. Do I have you? Do I have you there? Tell yourself that with this entire list, any of these things improve, you could eat more food. If any of these things improve, you could eat more food.

Philip Pape: 31:15

So the eat less, move more often overlooks the importance of these as well. Because when you're chronically underfed and you're overexercised, how can you prioritize these? You're just kind of dragging. How do you even prioritize these things? Right, and so neglecting hydration, sleep, stress can definitely sabotage your fat loss efforts and have other health consequences that we touched on All right. So I think those lifestyle factors are just as important as nutrition and training. I mean, they're all. Important is what we have to say, and it's going to come down to what's most important for you right now, the lowest hanging fruit. That's why I encourage you to go to witsandweightscom. Click the button at the top right free assessment. Take the assessment. What you'll get is by email. You'll get a rating of your metabolic assessment and you'll get an understanding of why, and then you can go from there Decide what you want to do about it.

Philip Pape: 32:07

Okay, so the next section is about nutrition or food quality, as well as alcohol. So now we get into more of the food stuff. Questions 15 and 16 focus on the importance of consuming whole unprocessed foods. Now, the importance of it means the majority of your food, like 80 to 90%, is whole unprocessed foods. It doesn't mean you're 100% clean, quote unquote, or you are cutting everything out that's processed. It doesn't mean that at all.

Philip Pape: 32:38

In fact, most people in the standard American diet consume something like 70% of their food from processed sources, ultra processed sources. This could be everything from fast food to packaged foods, to like cured meats and the list goes on to like cured meats, and the list goes on. And unfortunately they're the population that we get a lot of our data from, that where we correlate with, say, for example, red meat. When you see studies that you know there's this persistent myth that red meat is quote-unquote bad for you. And yet when you tease it apart from the standard population who eats a lot of processed red meats, you realize no, actually, if it's part of a healthy dietary pattern, it's perfectly fine. If anything, red meat is highly nutritious. So we get into these dichotomies in our brain and we start cutting out foods or food groups and that can be actually detrimental.

Philip Pape: 33:26

Also, from a practical perspective, any living and enjoying life perspective. To be so ascetic, monk-like about this and requiring the sheer discipline and willpower to do that, is definitely a massive problem, because it doesn't align with just living and enjoying your life and feeling like food is fuel. Instead, you're feeling like you're punishing yourself in some way, anyway. So when I say the importance of consuming a whole and unprocessed foods, it's like 80%, which doesn't take a lot of effort Once you think about it and if you're tracking your food, just, you go to the grocery store, you buy some things around the edge of the store animal products, plant products, and starches and grains even and you start to mix them together in some meals and you enjoy yourself, and then, hey, I want ice cream for dessert. I'm going to have ice cream for dessert. That's my. You know, processed food allotment or whatever, and by allotment it's a pretty big allotment, 10 to 20%. So I wanted to get that out of the way.

Philip Pape: 34:25

But going back to the importance of whole foods, these are foods that are just minimally processed or not processed. So we're talking, you know, meat, vegetables, fruit, seeds, nuts, grains, all of that. Now some people might argue that grains are processed, and so this gets into the whole subjective argument of what do we mean by processing? There's levels of processing and people would say, well, protein powder, that's processed, yeah, no-transcript, mill it into flour, and then you bake bread, that is all processing, but you haven't really altered, you haven't altered it chemically. And then people are like, well, yeah, but they enrich it and this and they bleach it and this. Okay, I get it. So I'm never going to win the argument 100%, but I think you know what I mean. A piece of bread is probably less processed than a Dorito. Okay, that's what that's where I'm getting at. Right, dorito comes from corn that has to get mixed with other ingredients and it's a bunch of macros thrown together from different sources. Okay, all right, I can go on and on and on. I better shut up about this.

Philip Pape: 36:00

Whole foods why do we like them? They are rich in nutrients, they're rich in fiber and they're rich in other compounds, other compounds that are not on the food label, folks. Okay, if you look up nutrition facts for an apple, there's a whole bunch of stuff in an apple that's not on the nutrition label. Don't forget that. I was talking to my wife the other day about it, because we were saying how it's so great to have a variety of these fruits and vegetables in your diet, even though many of them look the same nutritionally from a macros perspective and even a micros perspective. But then they have specific compounds that complement each other, and it's nice to have that variety, because you just never know what's going to be great for you. You know, have the blueberries, have the apples, have the bananas, have the kiwi, like have it all in there and then, of course, the fiber and the nutrients are really important as well.

Philip Pape: 36:46

So we want to aim to have at least 80% of our diet consist of whole, unprocessed foods. So that's fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, healthy fats. But I am going to throw in dairy and grains in there, folks, I'm sorry. You know anti-gluten folks and anti-dairy folks. If you can tolerate those things, have them in your diet. That's my position.

Philip Pape: 37:06

Now, if you notice issues with digestion, with gut health, with your skin, with anything, and you can pinpoint it to a specific food, then great, that's information for you that you can act upon. I'll be honest, I probably have some mild intolerances to things that I eat, and I may not even be aware of it because I haven't done the elimination diet to get that down in detail. But it also hasn't prevented me from enjoying my life. Now I also have an autoimmune condition. So could somebody argue that if I cut out a whole bunch of foods, that would go away? Maybe, do I want to make that trade off? Probably not. So you got to decide for you what makes sense.

Philip Pape: 37:41

All right, now, ultra processed foods if you have too much of them, they are definitely going to disrupt your metabolism, disrupt your hormone balance for a number of reasons. The main reason with ultra processed foods is just because they're so, uh, calorie dense and devoid of nutrients that you're just you're consuming a bunch of macros, so a source of energy, but not getting any other benefit out of it, and they tend to not fill you up. So you over consume. Even if you're tracking and you don't over consume, you're going to be then hungry. You're either going to over consume or you're going to be hungry. Right, it's one or the other. The reason we over consume is because we're hungry. So the more whole foods and nutrient dense foods, the less hunger becomes an issue.

Philip Pape: 38:22

And then alcohol is the other thing I want to talk about, because that definitely there is no positive to alcohol. Okay, I'm not saying that to shame you. I still drink alcohol, even having talked to experts over through the podcast about you know how? Again, there's no positive to alcohol. Why do we do it? And there's a lot of social stigma. There's, um, there's a lot. I have clients who I've had these conversations with and and they're like I just can't do it. I have to have a drink with my friends and get that buzz and that's part of the enjoyment and I'm like okay, that's your choice, do it, I'm not going to judge you for it at all. Can you still meet your goals with drinking alcohol? Yes, and all I want you to do is evaluate how it makes you feel and achieve those goals and experiment with the alternative. Experiment with not having alcohol in your diet for a few weeks, just from a health perspective, with not having alcohol in your diet for a few weeks, just from a health perspective, even if it's just for fat loss. Just try it out. That's all I'm saying.

Philip Pape: 39:21

Obviously, alcohol has a bunch of what some people call empty calories, which is kind of a misnomer, because there's both carbs and alcohol. The alcohol gets metabolized, it does create energy, but guess what? That energy just gets stored as fat, which can of course be offset if you're just in a negative energy state, if you're in a calorie deficit. So it's not like you can't lose weight while drinking alcohol. It just doesn't help that much. And then it also causes other hormonal disruptions that do affect fat burning and fat storage, your sleep, your hormones.

Philip Pape: 39:49

That is the part of it that is, I think, more serious. If you want to make fat loss as easy as possible and have the healthiest life possible. A few drinks a week, though you can probably get away with it. Okay, one or two drinks on occasion. Make it a very small part of your diet, make it something you really, really, really enjoy, so it's worth it, and then just live with your decision. That's all it takes. But if you've never tried it, I would experiment with different types and levels of alcohol, including none at all. Okay, and I think those were covered by questions 17 and 18.

Philip Pape: 40:22

So the other thing I want to address about eat less, move more is, if you think of the eat less part, it's focused on quantity rather than quality. It's focused on quantity rather than quality and so tied again to the whole foods versus processed foods. If the worst of the worst is now, you cut your calories and you're doing it mostly with processed foods because you're going by points in Weight Watchers, for example. Right, you think of Weight Watchers. It's a point system and effectively, the points are a proxy for calories. Well, calories aren't enough. Like if I were telling you to track one thing, I would actually have you track protein, not calories, to get enough protein. And so Weight Watchers tells you to track calories. And so what do you do? You just pick foods based on calories and that's a pure quantity decision. And now you're cutting, you're eating processed foods because Weight Watchers says it's so many points and I can fit those in right and you are now hungry.

Philip Pape: 41:19

You don't get the nutrients, you don't get the fiber, your quality goes down, it disrupts your appetite, it causes you to have more cravings, your metabolism adapts even more, and the list goes on and on. So this is why, before you even go to a fat loss phase, upping your protein, making sure at the 80% whole foods level you're tracking, are great foundations for then increasing, reducing the quantity later on, knowing that the quality is taken care of. So instead of fixating on eating less, please, please, please, focus on improving quality and eating more. First, get to that point. Limit your ultra-processed items and alcohol, if you'd like. Like. When I say limit, again, I'm not talking about cutting out, just saying the balance shifts as you add more of the protein in the whole foods. When you add those in, it tends to crowd the other things out, and now you will have the nutrients you need to function optimally. And a lot of people underestimate the value of micronutrients in body composition and fat loss. Excuse me, fat loss, but trust me, it's going to make you feel so much better to have those nutrient gaps filled in.

Philip Pape: 42:24

Okay, then we get to the final section of the assessment, which is the role of hormones in regulating metabolism, metabolism, body composition. So I've mentioned hormones a lot today, more as a an effect than a cause. So our hormones respond to what our body is doing and what we feed it and how we move. But the hormones themselves also play a very critical role in our metabolic health. Hormones like insulin, of course which, by the way, insulin resistance and sensitivity are big topics these days, and I'm a firm believer that the best lifestyle decisions you can make for insulin are going to be adding muscle mass, which increases your insulin sensitivity, because muscle is a sink for glucose. And movement movement like walking, walking after meals, regulating your blood sugar. That way, if you do that, you can eat as many carbs as you want. Honestly, you can eat carbs. Carbs aren't an issue at that point. So insulin is one.

Philip Pape: 43:33

Thyroid lots of discussion these days about thyroid. I have an expert coming on the show specifically to talk about thyroid and your health, and now I know my audience. A lot of you listeners want to know a lot about the supplementation, which will be a tiny piece of that, but mostly it's going to be about lifestyle, which is, I think, what we have the most control over. And who wants to be on a bunch of meds, right? So we're going to talk about thyroid.

Philip Pape: 43:51

Other hormones that affect your metabolism are, of course, cortisol, the stress hormone and your reproductive hormones, and all of these need to be in some sort of balance, and oftentimes that balance is driven by the stress you place on your body Stressors like under eating, like overtraining, right. And then those hormones not only do they affect your weight management and inability to lose fat, they cause fatigue, they cause mood swings and who knows what else. There's many other symptoms, right? So muscle mass nutrition, sleep, stress, et cetera. All of these contribute to your hormone balance. And the hormones themselves, right. Of course, if you have a hormone imbalance because of a medical condition that needs to be looked at I'm not a medical provider, I don't dispense medical advice, but if you've got everything else dialed in and you know for a fact that you're just, your lifestyle is on point, there may be a medical situation under there that needs to be addressed as well.

Philip Pape: 44:51

The point with this whole thing is. We want to address the factors that cause our metabolism to go up or down in a comprehensive way, because that is going to directly correlate with hormone function and your ability to regulate your metabolism and live a fun, fit life where you get to eat a bunch of food, train, feel great and be the fittest person on the block for decades to come. It's what we all want, all right. So eat less, move more. I hope you have gotten the message that it's oversimplified and it's also totally ineffective. It is terrible advice. Right, building and maintaining muscle mass, fueling your body properly, staying active, managing stress, prioritizing sleep, focusing on nutrition quality these actually make the big difference in optimizing your metabolism and your hormones.

Philip Pape: 45:40

So the metabolism audit, or the metabolism assessment that I've referenced throughout the episode it's going to help you identify areas for improvement and create a personalized plan for you, which, I think, is where the rubber meets the road. It's taking this information on this podcast and applying it to you directly, and so I want you to go to witsandweightscom, click the button at the top for the free metabolism audit and you're going to answer the 20 questions. This is going to help you gauge your metabolic health. This will help you identify specific strategies for you. The cool thing is, if you want to do it while listening to this podcast, you can then think about your answer.

Philip Pape: 46:14

Still, be honest with yourself about where you are. You know, be brutally honest. That's the only way to get help. But now you can put it in the context of what I was sharing today. Okay, I think that covers it again. Go check out the metabolism audit by going to which weightscom, clicking free metabolism audit at the top right or click the link in the show notes, and, as always, stay strong and I'll talk to you next time here on the wits and weights podcast. And that does it for today's bonus replay. I wish everyone a happy holiday. And, hey, if you're looking for more content to listen, to check out my new podcast. It's called Nutrition Science Daily. Click the link in the show notes, check it out and I'll see you next time.