Weight Loss Myths Upended

Philip Pape 0:02

There was a day when everything we thought we knew about losing weight got turned upside down . For decades , the advice was simple Eat less , move more . If you hit a plateau , eat even less and move even more . And if that didn't work , well , you just weren't trying hard enough . But then scientists started asking a different question . Instead of blaming people for their failures , they started studying why weight loss always seemed to get harder over time . What they discovered changed everything . They found that your body isn't just passively losing weight . It is actively fighting back , slowing your metabolism , cranking up your hunger and defending every pound you're trying to lose . Today you'll learn exactly when this shift happened , why it matters for your own fat loss journey and the three game-changing strategies that emerged from this research that can finally help you lose fat and keep it off .

Philip Pape 0:58

Welcome to Wits and Weights , the show that helps you build a strong , healthy physique using evidence , engineering and efficiency . I'm your host certified nutrition coach , philip Pape , and today we're exploring one of the most important paradigm shifts in the history of weight loss science , and what better topic for our landmark 350th episode ? I love history and understanding where the modern thinking came from over time , and today's episode isn't just another basic mechanics or fat loss or calories in , calories out episode . This is a story of how a handful of researchers completely rewrote what we know about fat loss , about metabolism , and why so many people struggle to keep the weight off and , more importantly , how you can use this knowledge to break free from that cycle that we're so used to , that cycle of losing and regaining the same 20 pounds over and over again . Now , if you've been nodding along today thinking , yeah , that's exactly what I need to fix , then don't just listen , please . I want you to implement the information . I want you to build your system that works for you . And if you want a little extra help with that , that's what we do inside Wits and Weights Physique University , where we give you all the tools , the methods , the system to train smarter , to eat with clarity , to stop second guessing yourself and really quicken that process . Not a quick fix , not fast weight loss , but get to what works for you efficiently . We don't want to burn you out . We just want to give you a framework so that you can look like you train , look like you lift , feel confident doing it . We just relaunched it . It's $27 a month If you join now using the exclusive link for podcast listeners in the show notes . I'm going to throw in a custom nutrition plan for free and build that out for you .

Philip Pape 2:44

All right , let's start with the old model , when simple seemed like the answer

The Old Model: Eat Less, Move More

Philip Pape 2:52

regarding fat loss . Let's go back to the 90s and early 2000s . Now , I know that doesn't seem like that long ago , but that's sort of when a lot of the big shifts started to happen . When you look back in the history , it took a while , it took decades of research to even get us to that point . But around this time the 90s , early 2000s the weight loss world was , I'll say , simple in terms of how it was marketed Energy , balance calories in calories out , create a deficit of 3,500 calories for the week and lose a pound of fat . Eat clean , avoid junk food , do your cardio , do your running and the weight comes off . And if it stops working for you , if you hit a plateau , then you're probably not working hard enough . You're either cheating on your diet , or you're not tracking your food , or you're not working hard enough . And the solution is still the same . Hey , the principle is you've got to cut calories to be in that deficit , you've got to add more movement to increase how much you burn , and one of the best ways to do that is just eliminate this food group or that food group or use a point system or use some clearly delineated set of rules based on what foods you ate , and it made a lot of sense . It sold a lot of books .

Philip Pape 3:59

I was on that train for a long time and as much as thermodynamics and basic energy math do work , that is the very end of the root cause chain of why we have issues . The energy balance . Just because it's a fact of nature doesn't mean we can take that back and say , okay , great , I'm just going to , I'm going to cut calories and remove more . It's going to solve the problem because everything is interconnected . And that's one of the major problems with this thinking is that people would do this .

Philip Pape 4:30

You would start strong in a diet Like I'm going to diet on Monday , I'm going to , I'm going to lose weight , I'm going to just crank up the movement , I'm going to go on that treadmill , I'm going to cut calories . And then you hit a wall . The scale stops moving , even though you're eating even less , even less than you think was humanly possible or for your size or your age or your weight . Right , we understand this language right . I should be able to lose weight at this level of calories . But I'm not right . You're exhausted , you're moody , it hits your energy . You feel like you're always dieting . You can't sustain that extreme restriction . And then what happens ? Well , what do you go back to ? You go back to what you're doing before , or you just eat more , even if you are trying to restrict foods , and the weight comes flooding back , often few extra pounds as a bonus , more body fat , your physique looks even worse even at the same weight , et cetera , et cetera .

Philip Pape 5:17

And what got me thinking about this topic recently ? Because if you guys listen to Wits and Weights for a while , while you know I've covered body fat overshooting and the five percent of people who actually maintain their weight and fat loss versus weight loss . But I wanted to kind of put the whole history of it together here so you understand the chain of where we got to today and why I even created my podcast and why I personally finally found success in my 40s when it comes to fat loss . And I thought about this recently because a client told me , you know , she's been stuck in this cycle for 15 years and it's the same story I always hear and I don't mean to belittle what the clientele , if anything , I'm trying to suggest that we've all been there . So many of us have that common story of 15 years losing the same 25 pounds , regaining it , starting over with an even more restrictive approach .

Philip Pape 6:05

Then you exacerbate it with age , with stress , with okay , now it's my hormones , or menopause , and you think it's your problem , right ? Or it's unique to you , or you cannot possibly , without starving yourself , get the result that you want . And that's what the old model teaches us that hey , if the system didn't work , it's your fault , right ? You don't have the willpower , or you're cheating on your calorie intake . I see this all the time on Instagram , right ? The first thing is , oh , you're probably not tracking accurately and you know what . There's probably some truth with that , but the vast majority of people I talk to they're informed , they're educated , they're intelligent , they've listened to the show , they've read stuff , they may even be tracking their macros and their calories and no , they know what they're eating and still it's not working for them . So , is it the discipline ? Is it the consistency ? Is it all these things we talk about you know , when I have guests and everything else ? Or what if it's the system itself that was flawed . So that leads us to what I'll call the , the , the first scientific revolution of this century .

The Scientific Revolution in Fat Loss

Philip Pape 7:04

In the early 2000s , researchers at Columbia University started asking a different question . Instead of assuming people were doing something wrong , they decided to study what was happening inside their bodies during weight loss . So we have Dr Rudy Label and Dr Michael Rosenbaum , who conducted studies between 2001 and 2008 , took people , put them in metabolic chambers , measured exactly how many calories they were burning before , during and after weight loss , and a lot of their findings upended things . And it kind of shocked people , and you know we take this for granted today , but this stuff wasn't really well understood until the last couple decades . What they found is , when people lost weight , their metabolism didn't just drop by the amounts you would expect from being smaller which , by the way , it does . It does do that . Okay , if you're not even aware of that the fact that when you lose weight , you're going to burn fewer calories just because you're smaller it actually dropped way more than that An additional 200 to 500 calories per day beyond what the math predicted Right . And it's because your body was basically hitting the brakes on burning calories , because you were depriving it of resources , right ? We understand this now as metabolic adaptation or adaptive thermogenesis , and it gets even more fascinating when you look at how it happens , because the researchers found the metabolic slowdown happens very quickly , within two to three weeks of starting a diet . We know this later on , when they look at thyroid , how it can drop by an average of something like 6% in a 500-calorie deficit , and it happens very quickly , and so it's not just about burning fewer calories , it's really the body going into this coordinated defense mode with your hormone cascade .

Philip Pape 8:47

Let's start with leptin . Leptin is your satiety hormone , right . It keeps you full . Well , that drops massively . Now you're constantly hungry . Grelin , your hunger hormone that goes way up and that makes everything you look at look delicious . Your thyroid hormone I just mentioned T3 , drops . That slows your metabolism . That's like the metabolic regulator . Your nervous system , even down regulates , and that makes you fidget less and move less . Your non-exercise activity thermogenesis goes down unconsciously , without even realizing it .

Philip Pape 9:15

So this isn't about broken metabolisms . This is about what some people call survival mode . I don't like that term . I think it's not really scientific or accurate . But you kind of get the idea , though , that your body's doing what it evolved to do , and that's protect you from what it's perceives as a lack of energy , which you could say is like starvation , right , except we're not at quite at that point yet . It's just a down regulation overall in your resources and your calorie burning , down to the cellular level via hormones .

Philip Pape 9:48

And , by the way , as a quick aside , I mentioned our Physique University . One of the things we love to do in there is give you education on metabolic adaptation . We've done live calls the replays are in there in perpetuity about , hey , when my expenditure , when my metabolism does drop , what the heck is going on and how can I tell what that might be for me . Because we're not going to be going and doing blood work and analyzing our hormones and everything during a diet . No , we are going to want to understand the inputs and outputs and what things we have control over , what things we don't , what things we unconsciously have control over but we don't realize we're losing control like the fidgeting , and what can we do about it ? Right ? So , just just as a quick aside , I mentioned physique university . We've just relaunched with a new lower price tier . It used to be 87 a month , now it's 27 a month , and I have an exclusive link in the podcast show notes where , if you use that link , I'm going to give you the nutrition plan for free which normally is an add-on and that'll help you get there and start to deal with all of this stuff with metabolic adaptation .

Philip Pape 10:47

All right , so let's continue with the story here

How Your Body Fights Weight Loss

Philip Pape 10:50

. Right , as metabolic adaptation research started to explode in the scientific community , a new approach started emerging on the practical side that was no longer being pushed by the big diet companies and the big book publishers right , you think , like Weight Watchers , for example , back in the day , atkins . Right , there's entire ecosystems built around these very influential brands , but the new approaches or methods were coming from researchers and coaches who are paying attention to the science and applying it . It definitely wasn't coming from the healthcare industry . We know to this day we have a huge dearth in nutrition and training education among healthcare practitioners . Hopefully that will improve .

Philip Pape 11:32

But on the ground , boots on the ground , coaches , researchers , trainers , and so here's where we get the idea of flexible dieting , and I know what you're thinking Like if you've never heard that term before . You're thinking , oh , is that just another diet Like the flexible diet ? No , flexible dieting is not a diet , it's just a philosophy based on being a little bit more precise and having ranges and guardrails , but eating whatever you want within that very flexible structure , right . In other words , you can still have restraint and control and knowledge about what you're eating , but you don't have to exclude foods . You don't have to judge foods . You can eat for your goals in a much more flexible way , but you still have to have guardrails in place , which is an important concept , because sometimes people think of flexible diet as just eat whatever you want . No , that's not what it is . There's still a level of control and Dr Lane Norton pretty much everybody who listens to this probably knows about Dr Lane Norton .

Philip Pape 12:29

He started popularizing concepts that we talk about a lot today , like reverse dieting , diet breaks , fat loss , body fat overshooting . Eric Helms and the team at 3DMJ love those guys . Eric's been on the show a few times . They began teaching evidence-based physique coaching . Eric partnered with Andy Morgan and wrote the muscle and strength pyramids , which I think the new revision is coming out very soon , so I'm excited for that . It's one of the books that changed my life back in the year 2000 , or I mean 2020 , I should say 2020 . I'm not that old 2020 .

Philip Pape 13:00

Alan Aragon , you know wrote basically came up the term flexible dieting and a lot of it came out of the bodybuilding forums where they talked about if it fits your macros right , which is kind of a bastardization or a subset of flexible dieting , because it's not just about that . And coaches like Sohee Lee started combining behavioral psychology with macro tracking so that you could say , look , we can have tracking , we can track our calories and macros , we can be precise and have flexibility in how we do that and combine it with behavioral psychology , with habit formation , with self-efficacy , with self-motivation theory all of that stuff combined together to kind of get out of that restriction binge cycle where you don't have the control , where you are just cutting and you don't have any skill development . Right , you can follow keto and probably get some pretty good results if you know why you're doing it and you carry those principles forward . But that's not what happens . People follow carnivore , keto and fasting and they're basically following a set of rules that may apply in the short term to get a specific goal , but then they don't know what to do afterward . They don't develop skills from that . Why are we doing this ? You know I can use intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding with myself or clients in a very intentional way , knowing why we do it . We're not doing it to lose weight . We're doing it to control our schedule for our meals , for example , or to control our hunger signals . We're not doing it to lose weight . And so , anyway , all of this really cool research that was coming out at the practical level , which we still carry forward to today in this ethos that I espouse as part of wits and weights , is what made the approach revolutionary .

The Rise of Flexible Dieting

Philip Pape 14:37

Instead of eliminating foods , you just track them , you just get awareness , you measure , you track . It's like a budget for your food . It's actually a pretty simple concept that , for some reason , people get really hung up with being , you know , obsessive or too much or too hard , and it's actually very , very simple and easy to do and you can make it flexible for you . So , instead of like eating clean , which sounds simple on its surface but in reality , you're making hard choices every day in situations that are out of your control , like restaurants and travel , and it just gets so stressful and fatiguing mentally , instead of that , you just have guardrails . Okay , I'm going to try to hit this much protein , stay within my fats and carbs , get some fiber and micros and I've got the whole plethora of the bounty of amazing animal and vegetable . You know animal and plant products to choose from , based on all the other things that I care about , like my social life , my ethnic . You know eating cuisine my how delicious it is , my recipes that I like right , where you're not constrained anymore by someone else's list . And so , instead of suffering through endless restriction style diets , you plan strategic periods , periodization periods of higher calories to be fueled and energized and nourished for your lifting and your muscle growth , and lower calories to release some stored energy in the terms of fat loss , and doing it while other lifestyle practices are in place which are a little bit outside the scope of today's episode , but not completely , because we can never get away from the fact that you have to be resistance , training and being an active person for all of this to work together really well for your health .

Philip Pape 16:18

But the key here is that the focus shifted from moral judgments about food to data about food , no more good and bad foods . And , by the way , I've heard podcasters and some that I really respect , some whose probably shows I'm probably going on soon , so hopefully I frame this the right way Say both sides of this equation . Oh no , but there are good and bad . Let's stop saying that there are no good and bad foods . There are bad , there's processed and junk food , blah , blah , blah . And then others who you know will say like absolutely you shouldn't label foods good or bad because of the moral judgment .

Philip Pape 16:48

I think that dietary patterns , everything you eat as a whole , can be healthy or not healthy , and can serve your goals or not serve your goals . But , like a Snickers bar , itself has no label associated with it other than here's what it contains , here's how it's made , here's what it does in your body . Now you go and make your informed choice of whether that is good or bad for you . That is my opinion . But at the same time , I understand that we want to classify foods in a way that bucketizes them for us . So , for example , I'm going to put a Snickers bar in the indulgent , highly processed , ultra palatable treats part of my diet , which means it's going to be relegated to a very , very small set of situations and a very small percentage , right ? So if you looked at my overall dietary pattern , you would say , okay , you're kind of treating that Snickers like a pariah over here , and isn't that mean it's bad ? Well , yes , except it's not bad in the sense that I feel bad if I eat it because I've chosen to eat it . Because it's bad . Well , yes , except it's not bad in the sense that I feel bad if I eat it because I've chosen to eat it , because it's within that context . That makes sense . I hope that makes sense . So , instead of it being a moral judgment , you're just picking foods that fit your goals and getting rid of foods that don't . That's really it , and there's many goals . I acknowledge that not just gaining and losing weight , but also your health and your blood sugar right and taste preferences and like avoiding things that maybe you would binge on , et cetera .

Philip Pape 18:17

Now I remember when I first started implementing this back in with clients . What was that Like four or five years ago ? Where I quickly realized that this wasn't a physical thing . Yes , it's physical on its surface , but it is far more psychological . For the first time when someone does this , when someone shifts their approach from the moral judgment to the flexibility , people feel like they have control . Now that's liberating , right . The food is not controlling them . Now you can go out to dinner with friends and still hit your goals , or you can plan around it . You can still include foods you enjoy without being guilty about it or feeling shame over it , like that's the power in all of this . So we went to flexible dieting and all the fun things that come around that , with periodization , with meal timing , with refeeds and fat loss and all that fun stuff . And then what came out of this revolution which , again , is pretty recent it's only the last 15 years or so we get some fat loss strategies that help us approach this in a much more liberating and effective way , and I've covered this ad nauseum on other episodes , but I'm just going to give you three of my favorite takeaways here .

Three Game-Changing Fat Loss Strategies

Philip Pape 19:35

The first one , from all of this science , from all of this evolution of the research , is that basically , tracking macros is a good foundation for this flexible way of eating . Now I'm not going to . I have some more things to say about it , but before I do and you think , oh , but what about intuitive eating ? And what about people who don't want to track macros but they want to track other things ? I think macros are a proxy right . They're a proxy for the types of energy you're going to put in your mouth that support your goals . And there are other ways to track that are proxies for macros . So I'm not excluding completely the ability to do , say , portion-based tracking . I'm going to track these portions of fats , protein , carbs it's still macros or micronutrient-based tracking . You know what the micros still get up to the level of macros , no matter which way you cut it right . And so what I'm trying to compare or contrast macro tracking to is really the alternative of not tracking it but instead excluding foods . Right , and we're not talking about obsessively counting to the gram if that is not appropriate for you , which , by the way , the research shows that tracking doesn't make you obsessive . People who are inclined to be obsessive may exacerbate that with certain forms of tracking , but it has nothing to do with the tracking itself .

Philip Pape 20:50

But when we talk about tracking and awareness of food now we can be very strategic about targeting our nutrients and I say nutrients to capture macro and micronutrients . It's basically all the energy sources coming in . That includes protein , where we want a certain minimum to preserve and build muscle mass . Right , we want to hold on to muscle mass during fat loss . We want to build it while we're building . We know that it keeps us full , adequate fats for hormone production , carbs for energy , performance and sanity . And then you drill down to the micros . We need fiber for satiety , for a bunch of health reasons , all the micronutrients , of course . And when you track your food , your macros , whatever you want to say that you're tracking , you are effectively monitoring the quality of your nutrition , where you can change the levers up and down right , not based on cutting out whole foods , whole , entire food groups , but by shifting the balance of different foods that you like to eat . So that's really important as a foundation .

Philip Pape 21:53

The second strategy or game changer from this revolution is metabolic adaptation and understanding it and understanding how to work with it and not against it , like acknowledging that it exists , that you can't do anything about it existing and therefore we have to control what we do to work around it to lessen its impact . Right , because , for example , simply eating in a smaller deficit will lessen the severity of the metabolic adaptation , although you're making the trade-off of taking longer to lose the fat . So it's understanding those trade-offs . It's using planned diet breaks , whether it's a two-day refeed , weeks of eating at maintenance or months at maintenance , or even going into muscle building phases understanding that that is a break from dieting as well to support your hormones , to give you a psychological break from any form of restraint or restriction or deprivation . You know , even if it is a calorie deficit with flexible dieting , you're still restricting something . Right , you are restricting the amount you eat and that can give you a psychological fatigue . And then it means , when you are done , you know how to sustain that , you know how to recover right .

Philip Pape 23:03

Reverse dieting is a famous term or a popular term in the industry . I don't like reverse dieting , I call it recovery dieting , because we use macro factor , where you know what your metabolism is at the end of a diet and therefore you can recover very quickly without worrying about gaining extra fat . So it means doing that strategically after a fat loss phase to increase your calories and with the knowledge that you know how much to eat now to maintain and recover . And then , third , we finally understood with all of this data that strength training was a big missing piece for everyone and notice , I didn't even talk about it the whole episode until just now . But it is your metabolic insurance , both the active training and the building of strength and muscle . And the only way you're going to lose fat when you're losing weight is to preserve and build muscle through training and that supports your metabolism and that also makes all of this other stuff work more effectively and efficiently and more aligned with what you're trying to do .

Philip Pape 24:03

Not just having muscle to burn calories . That's a tiny piece of it . It's the training stimulus that tells your body that building and holding muscle is important . Then it cascades to all the things we've been talking about on the show recently , like reducing inflammation , increasing insulin sensitivity , allowing you to better dispose of glucose so you can eat more carbs to build more muscle , and so on , and to kind of take all this information into something that's , I think , very powerful about how we look at our bodies . Right , it didn't just change how we talk about weight loss and I would argue it still hasn't changed it in everybody's mind . Only a small percentage of people really get it right now , and that's the purpose of wits and weights is to really spread that message , and I hope you share this podcast with others too , so that they can start learning and get those aha moments of oh my goodness , wow , you're right , it's not about scale , weight and weight loss , about all these other things . It's incredible .

Philip Pape 24:58

For the first time in decades , we stopped treating the human body like this broken machine that needed to be fixed and punished , right . That's very prevalent in the 80s and 90s this ethos of punish and sweat and sore and pain , right ? Some of you that are younger may not even have seen that , but it's still in our culture . Instead , think of your body like an intelligent adaptive system that responds to the signals we give it through our food , our training and our lifestyle . It's beautiful , it's a wonderful thing . It's why I like applying this engineering lens to the body , and everyone we work with whether that's one-on-one or in Physique University who applies this systemic approach and is patient doing it , will lose the fat that they're trying to lose . They're going to keep it off and they're going to keep it off as long as they want . Many of them , of course , go ahead and they say you know what I want ? To build muscle now , and then they get into a whole new phase of growth , and then your body and you are on the same team and that's a

Working With Your Body, Not Against It

Philip Pape 25:54

real victory here , right ? It's not about weight loss . It's about changing your relationship with food , which is something you interact with multiple times every day for your entire life . It's so important to being human , your body itself , which is the thing you're with all the time and the entire process of transformation so that you work with your physiology .

Philip Pape 26:14

So I thought it'd be cool to kind of take a walk down the memory lane here today with this episode and talk about this . You know what happened quietly in research labs and practical coaching sessions , as these studies and the client transformations occurred over years and years and people stopped asking you know , why are we all failing and so horrible as people and awful at doing things and sticking with things ? And instead , why is the system not working for us ? Are we just fundamentally not doing this the right way ? And I think that is where it got us to a better understanding of sustainable fat loss that we talk about today . And the beautiful thing about this revolution is it's still happening . It's still happening . That's why we need podcasts like this to start to drown out the ridiculous noise that's still stuck in the old world , because every day , people are discovering they don't have to choose between enjoying food and achieving their goals . I still see so many people jumping into carnivore .

Philip Pape 27:09

I'm like , guys , what are you doing , unless you're using it as an elimination diet to see what doesn't work well for you and then adding the food back in ? What are you doing ? You don't need to do that . What's the point ? There's no need to do that right . Just have a flexible diet and lift weights and do the things we talk about . Be consistent , for sure . You don't need to be perfect . The data is going to beat the emotion , and working with your body is going to be way more beneficial than wondering why you're broken and trying to fight this through more restriction .

Philip Pape 27:41

All right , if you enjoyed this episode , I think you should check out a classic episode . I'm going to call it classic . It's episode 104 , called fat loss versus weight loss . I think it's a perfect follow-up to today's discussion . It goes deeper into why these distinctions matter and then some practical strategies to prioritize fat loss over weight loss . So I would pick that as your next episode , episode 104 , fat loss versus weight loss . I'll include the link in the show notes . Until next time , keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember the day everything changed wasn't when we discovered new ways to restrict ourselves . It was when we finally learned to respect the incredible adaptive machine we call our body . I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast .