Philip Pape: 0:01

If you're afraid to gain weight because the scale might go up. So you keep trying to diet down but never seem to get leaner, and you're frustrated because you feel stuck in this endless cycle of cutting calories without seeing real changes in your body composition. This episode is for you. Today, we're uncovering why your fear of gaining weight is actually keeping you at a higher body fat percentage, and how strategic weight gain could be the key to finally achieving a leaner physique. You'll discover the counterintuitive science behind why gaining weight first often leads to better long-term results, and how to break free from the constant cutting cycle that's keeping you stuck. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're tackling one of those huge mindset blocks that keeps people from achieving their ideal body composition the fear of weight gain, and how it's actually preventing you from getting leaner. Now I also have a companion guide that shows you exactly how to structure your nutrition to build muscle while minimizing fat gain, and if you want to pause the show and grab my free muscle building nutrition blueprint, the link is in the show notes or you can go to witsandweightscom and click free stuff to download. I highly encourage you to download this free guide now so you can take real action based on the information you're about to hear in today's episode. Again, the link is in the show notes. Or go to witsandweightscom, click free stuff for my muscle building nutrition blueprint.

Philip Pape: 1:39

All right, let me start by telling you about Jenna. She was a client of mine who came to me frustrated after about three years of trying to get lean. She weighed about 150 pounds and she was constantly cutting calories. She was constantly trying to lose that last bit of stubborn fat, but every time she dropped a few pounds she would end up gaining it back and then her body composition wasn't really changing. We could tell by her measurements how her clothes fit, performance, everything. So this might sound familiar to you, because it's a very common situation. People get stuck trying to cut all the time and never really doing the other side of this equation that we're going to address today. Now, what Jenna didn't realize, what many of you might not realize, is that she was stuck in a constant cutting trap, even in moments when it felt like she wasn't dieting per se. It was just always in that under-fueled, under-fed situation, and today we're going to break down why this might be keeping you fatter than you need to be and then what to do instead. So let's talk about why this happened, just to set the baseline.

Philip Pape: 2:42

When you're always trying to cut calories to lose weight, there are three things working against you. First, your metabolism adapts. This is totally normal. There's nothing wrong. It's not breaking or getting damaged. It's just called metabolic adaptation.

Philip Pape: 2:58

And I think of men in this case, for example, because I can relate as a man myself. I had a client we'll call him John. He had gotten down to eating about 1800 calories a day, and that's starting to get a little bit low for an active guy who strength trains and weighs north of 180 or almost 200 pounds and I'm actually kind of in that range where, to me, a pretty aggressive diet is around 1800 calories, worst case. So his body had adapted to functioning on these fewer calories because of persistently trying to cut. And then what that does is it makes the fat loss incredibly difficult from that point, because you kind of need to reset things and rejigger what's going on or take a completely different approach, such as gain weight, which we're going to talk about and this process of your body conserving energy, of reducing its calorie burn as you lose weight and as you get deeper into a diet and be in a calorie deficit. That's called metabolic adaptation.

Philip Pape: 3:53

The second thing is that without adequate calories period, you cannot build meaningful muscle. You need to be in a surplus, or I'll call it a perceived surplus, which for some people means they can walk that fine line between gaining some muscle and losing some fat at the same time, mainly for newer lifters. But you have to have some sort of surplus, an energy surplus, for your muscles to grow. And this is crucial because muscle is the key to all of this. It's the key, it's a secret weapon for the fat loss itself. It's kind of the big twist or the big irony is that the vast majority of you are probably spending years, if not decades, trying to cut, trying to lose fat. You absolutely want to lose the weight, you absolutely want to lose the fat and you're making it harder on yourself just because you don't take a short blip of your time to build muscle. Just to say it like it is, muscle is metabolically expensive tissue. It burns calories even when you're not doing anything, and I know other tissue can do that, too, like fat, but it burns the most, and adding muscle to your frame makes so many things easier, all right.

Philip Pape: 4:58

Third thing and this is what I see all the time in my coaching practice is people get stuck in a cycle where they are afraid to eat more because they might gain weight, because their history has told them that nothing I've ever done has worked, that I'm always prone to getting fatter or gaining weight. Why the heck would I do this on purpose? That's the thought that goes through our head. Why would I do this on purpose? I just had a call today with a client where we talked about how I needed her to eat more. She was hesitant to do it. It wasn't due to any logistical or behavioral reason. It was simply the fear holding her back, and there were a lot of things pointing to why she needed to do that. We'll cover some of that today. I don't want to stretch that story out, but it's very common, so don't feel alone if you're listening and think that's you. The irony is, of course, that this fear is what's keeping you from achieving the lean physique that you want.

Philip Pape: 5:51

All right, so let me explain how this works, because let's just nail it down for you and talk about the science or the mathematics. It's really math of body composition, and I'm an engineer, I think, in terms of numbers. Not a lot of people do, and so it can frustrate people to go through this exercise. I'm really going to try to simplify it so you understand the big aha moment that comes from this. This is where it gets really interesting. All right, I'm going to break down the numbers so you think about weight gain and fat loss, maybe in a new way.

Philip Pape: 6:19

So let's just use a simple hypothetical example. Let's say we have a skinny-ish male, a man who weighs about 150 pounds. Let's say 5'9", 150 pounds. That's pretty quote-unquote skinny, but he has a little bit of extra body fat. He's got 20% body fat. Now, that's not in the obese territory, that's not excessively overweight, but at 150 pounds, this person is going to look what we call skinny fat. I'm using this example because I want you to know that there are all types of body types where you can have extra body fat and not necessarily be big right, and so we're going to start with this example, just for easy numbers. So, 150 pounds, 20% body fat, that means he has 30 pounds of fat mass. Okay, that's 20% of the 150. I'm doing the math for you. Just go with the numbers 30 pounds of fat mass and the rest is 120 pounds of lean mass. That's the remaining 80 pounds, or 80%. Now, lean mass is not just muscle, it's also your bone, it's tissue, it's all of your organs. It's everything other than fat. But just keep this simple. So when you focus on building muscle instead of trying to cut calories, what can happen?

Philip Pape: 7:29

So let's say, over a four-month period, a nice conservative, reasonable rate of gain so you don't gain too much fat, you go from 150 to 160. You gain 10 pounds Okay, 10 pounds, not a big deal Through proper training and nutrition, and that is key. About six or seven or even eight of those pounds are muscle, especially for a newer lifter. A vast majority of that can be muscle. We're going to go with seven. It's about two thirds. The evidence is very, very strong in showing us that this is a common ratio. The more advanced you get, the more it trends toward 50-50. The newer you are, the more it trends toward 50-50. The newer you are, the more it trends toward 7 or 8 out of 10. So we're going to go with 7. Okay, if it's 6, it just changes the numbers a little bit. So you've gained 10 pounds, you're 160 pounds. 7 of that is muscle, 3 of it is fat. So you've gained some fat as well. But stay with me.

Philip Pape: 8:18

So, after this gaining phase, we do a simple cut to lose three pounds of fat. That's it. The final result looks like this your new body weight is now 157 pounds. Remember, you started at 150, you gained 10, you lost three. You're at 157 pounds. However, your new body fat percentage remember originally it was 20, it is now 19.1%. Now, the real thing we care about here is you're going to look leaner and more defined despite weighing more on the scale.

Philip Pape: 8:50

This is just the math and I may be stating the obvious for some of you, but others you may have your mind blown. And the reason you should have your mind blown is you just went from 150 pounds on the scale to 157 pounds on the scale and you dropped a percentage of body fat. And that's just a small, simple example of something extremely achievable in a fairly short timeframe for just about anyone. That's why I wanted to use that example. I didn't want to go with 20, 30, 40 pound swings either direction. You know we can get into that.

Philip Pape: 9:20

Just keeping it simple, you are now heavier on the scale and leaner. So think about it the same amount of fat mass, because you gained three pounds of fat while you were gaining the 10 pounds, but then you lost it. So same fat mass, but you have more muscle. Now you have seven more pounds of muscle, 127 versus 120. And so now you have a lower body fat percentage.

Philip Pape: 9:40

Now, the bonus here is, of course, you're probably going to have a higher metabolism. Now you weigh more, so you have to burn more calories, and the portion of that extra weight is muscle, which is even higher calorie burning. Now you can eat more food. Now you're going to have more energy because you're eating more food. Now you can perform better in the gym because you have more energy, because you're eating more food, and you can have more restful sleep and be stronger than ever. Isn't that cool? Now you might be thinking okay, philip, the math makes sense. I get it, but how do we make this happen? Because you say seven out of the 10 is muscle, but I'm still afraid that if I gain 10 pounds, it's going to be fat, and then I'm just worse off and I'm where I started, or worse than that Okay, and this is where we have to understand the science of muscle growth. And I want to break this down into practical terms because you, unlike the vast majority of people out there, are going to be doing a few things very differently than most people in terms of food, in terms of movement.

Philip Pape: 10:33

First, let's talk about why you need a calorie surplus to build meaningful muscle. All right, so I had another client I'm going to call him Mike. He was trying to re-comp, do body re-comp. He was trying to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, and he was eating at his maintenance calories, whatever those were at the time based on our tracking. He was lifting weights and he was getting frustrated because the changes were coming slowly. And why was he doing body recomp? Because he was afraid of gaining weight and the best thing that I could, I'll say, convince him to do was at least not cut right now. Let's at least try to hold steady and see what happens with our body composition, even though it's going to take time.

Philip Pape: 11:10

And I explained to him that, you know, building muscle is a very energy, expensive process. Your body needs the extra protein for the actual muscle tissue, it needs the extra calories to support the building process. It needs extra energy for recovery from training because you're going to train hard, and it needs resources for all the metabolic processes involved in your body. There's a lot going on to build this muscle and this is why research consistently shows that without a calorie surplus, muscle growth is significantly limited. And studies that look at natural lifters show that even in perfect conditions, you might gain one to two pounds of muscle per month as a beginner, and a half to one pound per month as an intermediate, and even less as you get more advanced. Okay now going back to that one to two pounds a month and the example I gave you of seven months, I think I said the 10 pounds was over four months. So what did that come out to be? Seven pounds of muscle. Of that, 10 pounds over four months just under two pounds. So I was going on a little bit slightly more aggressive side, but again, you could switch the math up, add an extra couple months to the time frame. It all works out.

Philip Pape: 12:13

The key here is that these rates are only possible in a calorie surplus. You're not going to gain at that rate. When you're at maintenance or at a deficit, the numbers drop dramatically. Yeah, sure, you might gain muscle, but now stretch out your time frame over years. And that's where the frustration lies, cause any little blip, any little interruption in your training or your life which happens all the time, especially as we get older, right, busier lives, more obligations You're just going to sabotage that. And so when people say, can I recomp, I'm like yes, under perfect conditions, or you can give yourself the benefit of life and go into a surplus, right? And that's why this constant cutting approach fails, because you're never giving your body the resources it needs to build the muscle that would ultimately make you leaner. So how do we actually put this into practice? You're like okay, what do I do? All right, after the break, I'm going to give you the step-by-step approach that I've used successfully with hundreds of clients.

Tony: 13:09

Stick around for that. My name is Tony. I'm a strength lifter in my 40s. Thank you to Phil and his Wits and Weights community for helping me learn more about nutrition and how to implement better ideas into my strength training. Phil has a very, very good understanding of macros and chemical compounds and hormones and all that and he's continuously learning. That's what I like about Phil. He's got a great sense of humor. He's very relaxed, very easy to talk to. One of the greatest things about Phil, in my view, is that he practices what he preaches. He also works out with barbells. He trains heavy not as heavy as me, but he trains heavy. So if you talk with him about getting in better shape, eating better, he's probably going to give you some good advice and I would strongly recommend you talk with him and he'll help you out All right, welcome back.

Philip Pape: 13:53

Let's start with how to implement a muscle gaining phase. First, you need to know when to start a gaining phase. Here are the best candidates from my experience and from what the evidence shows us. First, people who have been stuck in a cutting cycle. So if you've been going up and down, up and down, up and down, have not had progress, you're probably ready to try a muscle gaining phase. Just what's the worst that can happen? You gain a couple pounds of fat that you can cut off anyway. Yeah, but there's much more upside.

Philip Pape: 14:23

The second thing is those who can, for example, see their abs but they still feel skinny fat. There's a lot of you out there. You're like I don't want to lose my abs, but you don't have much muscle. What are those abs worth? What are they buying you? What are they giving you? I mean, if you are successful using your abs at something and you love what they give you, then maybe you're cool.

Philip Pape: 14:43

I'm guessing most people who are listening are like especially younger men, for example. I'd say most people who are listening are like especially younger men, for example, skinny men, but men, women, it doesn't matter who are just clinging on to being what they think is lean, but it's really just. They can kind of see some definition there because they don't have much weight on their body. They don't have much fat on their body but they also don't have much muscle right. So their body fat percentage is still quite higher than you would imagine. Like the original example 150 pounds, 20% body fat and to put that in comparison, when I am about 180, I'm about 20% body fat right, and guys I know are even leaner than that at 180, who've been doing it longer than me. So just keep that in perspective. Another person who this is good for anyone who's been at the same weight for months or years and who have not changed their physique All right, so kind of a similar situation, but different. Because you might be heavier, you might have a little extra fat and you're scared of gaining weight because you're like I got to lose this fat but maybe you're holding yourself back by not taking that opportunity. So let's talk about the actual process and I'm going to use another client, tom, as an example. I've got so many client stories that I can pull from here. It's a lot of fun really.

Philip Pape: 15:56

He started at 170, super common weight for guys that are like 5'8 to upwards of 5'11, even six feet, believe it or not. Some guys on the skinnier end right around there, 170 pounds, fairly quote-unquote lean, not happy with his physique, because really he had some extra body fat and didn't have much muscle. And I said, let's, we got to gain. And he was, he was good for it, right, he was cool with that Gaining phase. Let's go, let's, let's really push it at about 0.4% of your body weight gain per week. I'm not going to do all the math, but it comes out to several pounds a month, right, such that a decent chunk of that is going to be muscle. Going back to what I said before one to two pounds of muscle a month-ish.

Philip Pape: 16:36

We focused heavily on a training program that built his base of strength but also included some hypertrophy, some bodybuilding style stuff, so that he could really train hard and develop his physique at the same time and we can measure the physique as we go along. So that's the third part of this is monitoring his body composition changes, monitoring his bicep and chest size, for example for men, you know, that's a really great indication of body size. Making sure his waist size wasn't like ballooning up right, which it shouldn't. If you're going at a reasonable rate, you're not going to gain that much fat. You gain a little bit, so your waist is going to go up a little bit, but everything else is also going way up in terms of performance and strength and muscle. And, by the way, strength and muscle are sometimes proxies for each other, but not always. That's why you have to have a good coach and kind of understand how to train.

Philip Pape: 17:22

And so what did we track? Well, we track scale weight, obviously. We look at the trend of weight, make sure that it's trending up at the right rate and not too much, but also not too slowly. Where he's stuck, where he's in a hard gaining phase and we need to eat more, so we track that. We make sure that his strength and his performance and his reps and his volume should all be going up on his program. We look at measurements that show, you know, proportional changes, whatever those are. I mentioned the body metrics before.

Philip Pape: 17:55

Progress photos. Yes, progress photos can be a little deceiving during a gaining phase because again, you have some of the fat coming along from the muscle. So with a shirt on, you should kind of notice, especially as a guy, but even women, you know you've got your arms are starting to pop your delts, your shoulder caps are starting to pop nice back all of that. If you took your shirt off, yeah, you might have a little extra fat covering your abs, right. So that's kind of where we can play mind games with ourselves if we're not careful and having a coach to kind of look at that objectively and be like, no, it's cool, you know, yeah, of course your waist is up a half inch or an inch since we started, but look at all this exceptional growth in other areas of your physique.

Philip Pape: 18:31

And then there are the things that we want to avoid, the pitfalls that I see all the time. The first one is actually gaining too fast, which is, I'll say, for beginners and intermediates. My current recommendations are up to about 0.4 to 0.5% of your body weight per week max, and some of you might be more comfortable around that 0.3% of your body weight per week. But if you're gaining, like you know, over a pound a week, then that's probably way too much. Like that's just a simple rule of thumb.

Philip Pape: 19:07

The second thing is not pushing hard enough in your training. You don't want to waste the time you're doing in the stimulus. I'm not saying that you should ever not train hard enough. That's true you should, but there's something about knowing you've got the calories and the energy coming in that you've got to be dialed in enough where you're not constantly taking breaks, because if you're going on vacations and going on travel and shifting and skipping workouts, then you probably are going to gain more fat. And if you're going to do that, I would want to plan in times of potentially at maintenance instead of in a surplus, to prevent that.

Philip Pape: 19:41

The next thing is getting spooked by the normal water weight fluctuations that occur, which includes gaining early on. So your first few weeks you're going to gain a decent pop in weight and it's not necessarily you're gaining too fast, it's because of the water, the fluid, the carbs, and then it normalizes and then you're good to go. So the first few weeks, just let what happens happens it's not a big deal and then you can really have the data dialed in after that. And then, of course, that leads to people cutting the gaining phase short at the first sign that they're gaining too much fat or getting uncomfortable. And that could be as short, you know, as long as even three or four months, when we're intending to gain for, say, six or nine, and you're like, oh, it's three months and I'm just not liking it. You've got to stick it out. And again, this is where having support and having numbers and having data can really be helpful, because it is very easy to panic when the scale goes up three pounds in that first week, but when you know why this happens, you realize it's totally normal, right?

Philip Pape: 20:38

Most of the water weight is, or most is, water weight from increased carbs, glycogen, training, volume, inflammation. Your measurements in that week, you'll notice, probably didn't change at all. Even your waist. Even when you feel a little bloated, even when you have a little extra weight, you'd be surprised that your waist measurement didn't even change. I mean, if you're a bigger person, it might go up like a quarter inch, if that's even. It's in the noise. Your strength, though, should start to take off. I mean, for some people it's literally the next day after you have that first big meal bigger than you've been eating, and I was like, oh man, my deadlift just shot up. I've seen that happen. And then, after about two to three weeks, your weight will start to stabilize. So the magic here happens when you stick with the process long enough to get to that anabolic environment and see meaningful muscle growth right.

Philip Pape: 21:25

Remember the examples from earlier okay, many of my clients who get started on this journey, especially a lot of women, are convinced that the strategy is backfiring about six weeks in. Okay, six weeks, because the first three weeks they got through the waterway Okay, they're good, and then another three weeks in you're like is anything even happening? And yet I'm eating all this food and I'm feeling kind of full all the time. Right, there's a lot of mind games that go on, but then by I'm going to say week 12, which is three months in, that's when you're going to start seeing definition, really, that you've never seen before. If you're doing this right, even though you're technically heavier and you have a little more body fat, when you're really doing it right, that's where the gains start to pay off.

Philip Pape: 22:07

And this brings me to a crucial point about patience and mindset, because I think I said it before, the biggest obstacle is not the physical process. You get that, you get the numbers, you get that this is important. Hopefully, you've listened to Wits and Weights for a while and if you haven't plenty of episodes in the library about this, it's not that, it's not the physical process. I can tell you exactly what to do. You can go download my blueprint that I mentioned earlier. It'll tell you what to do. Great, it's the mental game of being okay with short-term weight gain. To have that long-term success, that ease of carrying around this extra lean tissue, eating more food, having more energy, looking and feeling great and better, even at a higher scale weight, you have to trust the process and the mathematics that we talked about earlier. But yeah, it can definitely be a mental game. So here's what might surprise you, because I always like to end with a little bit of a moment at the end of these shows. After working with hundreds of clients, I've noticed something and that is that the ones who achieved the most dramatic transformations you know we love the before and after photos, but the ones who achieve the most dramatic ones are not the ones who diet the hardest and are trying to stay lean year round. It is the people who embrace the counterintuitive approach of strategically gaining weight to build muscle period. The people who are willing to jump into that are the ones that have success. It might take some time, it might take working through the mental side, it might take some emotional support along the way, but it will pay off.

Philip Pape: 23:45

Take Mark I think I mentioned him. He was one of my most successful clients. He spent years trying to get below that magical 15% body fat for men by constantly cutting. I think he was doing carnivore. He was doing all these diets, you know, trying to like eat the same food all the time rice and broccoli and chicken or whatever. And we're like let's just throw all that out. Man, you can enjoy lots of different foods, you can enjoy a decent amount of calories. That out, man, you can enjoy lots of different foods, you can enjoy a decent amount of calories. You've got to commit to a proper, steady and long enough gaining phase and then we can follow that with strategic cut. And that's what we did, right. So he trusted me. He's like all right, I put my trust in your hands. Let's go six, nine months hard out on the gaining.

Philip Pape: 24:23

We had lots of discussions about like oh man, I'm noticing extra fat and blah, blah, blah. But I said but what is going well? Oh well, my deadlift keeps climbing, my squat keeps climbing, I feel great, my leverages are good. Like on and on and on. That's what we need to focus on. And guess what he ended up at the 12% body fat, I think, was the number right. He ended up doing better than, I think, most people when they try to do this. He just had a propensity for it, but he had never given himself the chance to build the muscle first, and I think what happened is his body just super responded to the stimulus and he just slapped on some meat to his body and then now the fat loss is easy, right, and he could get to that 12% body fat, weighing 10 pounds more than when he started. That's the part that's so cool, right? The key isn't just that physical transformation, even though it is amazing. It's the mental freedom of no longer fearing the scale going up.

Philip Pape: 25:18

All right, next week we are going to dive deeper into exactly how to structure your year as we're closing on the end of the year here. So, thinking ahead to next year, whenever you're listening to this, it doesn't matter how to structure a 12 month period between your bulking and cutting phases to set yourself up for an incredible 2025 or whatever year. You're looking ahead and I'm probably going to give you some different scenarios, but I'm going to try to simplify it and give you a single 12 month period that you can then shift left or right, depending on where your starting point is. Today I'm going to break down the timing, how to know which phase to start with, how to transition between phases for the best results, and then you know, we'll talk about that next week, but today I want you to remember that the fear of gaining weight is probably the thing keeping you at a higher body fat percentage than necessary, right? So having absorbed today's episode will set you up well for next week's, next Monday's.

Philip Pape: 26:15

I have other episodes before then, but next Monday's episode where we talk, where we help you structure out the cutting and bulking phases all right, because the math doesn't lie. Sometimes you have to be willing to see the scale go up temporarily to achieve the leaner physique in the long run, and that was really my message for today. All right, if you're ready to break free from the constant cutting and you want to learn how to build muscle the smart way, the how-to, the steps, download my free muscle building nutrition blueprint using the link in my show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash free. This guide is going to walk you through exactly how to structure your nutrition for optimal muscle gain and minimal fat gain. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember sometimes the fastest way to get lean is to gain weight first. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast. Thank you.