The Case Against Diet-Only Weight Loss

Philip Pape 0:01

If you are trying to lose weight and you're focused on steps, your macros, your carbs, your sleep, your cardio, but you're not lifting weights, you're not just leaving results on the table, you are actively making things worse. Today I'm going to explain why skipping strength training during weight loss massively suppresses your metabolism, wrecks your body composition, and almost guarantees you'll regain the weight and probably more body fat. You'll learn why muscle is your metabolic engine, why diet alone leads to looking lighter but softer, and the minimum dose of lifting that protects everything you're working for. 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 creator of the Fitness Lab app. Today we are addressing one of the most common and damaging mistakes I see in attempts at fat loss, and that is people who focus on diet, cardio, and steps, but they skip the weight room. I alluded to this in the third trap of Monday's episode of our last episode about the three weight loss traps. And I want to dive in deep on this one. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. If you're trying to lose fat without lifting weights, you are actively sabotaging your results. You're not just leaving gains on the table. I think you are digging a hole that becomes harder to climb out of with every pound you lose. So listen up. Whatever age you are, you've got to start this. This is a wake-up call. This episode is for anyone who's been told that weight loss is just eating less and moving more. For anyone who wants to strength train but hasn't been doing it consistently, for anyone who hears mixed signals in the fitness industry about whether you need to lift weights, all of these theories have some tiny bits of truth where they're coming from, but they're mostly dangerously incomplete. Because how you lose weight determines whether you end up lean and strong or skinny, weak, and fighting your metabolism and making all of this more and more frustrating. So let's jump into it. And let me set the stage here with a scenario that I see a lot, and that is that someone decides they want to lose weight. Probably the most common scenario in existence right now, right? I gotta lose weight, I gotta lose 10 pounds, 20, 40, 50, 100, whatever. And they do something, they dial in their nutrition, whatever that means. Dial in could be calories, maybe they're cutting and restricting, but in their mind, they're dialing it in. Maybe they're eating quote unquote clean whole foods, whatever. Maybe they're walking more, maybe they add some cardio, and then the scale goes down, and then you think you're making progress.

Muscle Loss And The Regain Trap

Philip Pape 2:50

But what's probably happening with the vast majority of people who lose weight, which is accelerated today because of the weight loss medications, is that without the stimulus of lifting weights, your body has zero reason to preserve muscle. So as you lose weight, a significant portion of that loss is lean mass. How much? Well, research shows that without resistance training, up to 30% of weight loss during dieting can come from muscle. It's the classic biggest loser effect. And now we see it as the GOP1, somagatides, terzepatite, all the weight loss drugs affect as well. I mean, I've seen numbers up to 40% even. And I think it has to do with how fast you're losing weight. It's not the meds, it's not about the medications, it's about the approach, right? And this is where the math turns against people because muscle is so, so valuable, and we're already starting to lose it in our 30s and beyond. And now you're just making the problem even worse. And you get things like body fat overshooting, where when you regain the weight, which 95% of people apparently do, you're actually gaining more fat than you had before. And you end up at the same or higher scale weight with even more fat and less muscle, which is just the opposite of what we're trying to do. Muscle is an engine, it definitely is like the amount of muscle you have in your body. Think of it as your engine. We want a massive gas-guzzling engine, is what we want. Super big, powerful engine that also burns a lot of calories. Okay. But, you know, physiologically, it does burn calories, but also handles glucose. It also oxidizes fat. People forget that like the muscle itself translates to the fat loss side of the equation as well, and to the insulin sensitivity and how you, you know, handle your carbs. When you lose that wonderful tissue of muscle, a lot of things happen in the negative direction that lead to the ultimate decline and frailty of aging that we are, I guess, used to, unfortunately, seeing in the world. That is, but that is not inevitable. So, yes, your expenditure drops, right? Your maintenance calories, that's one thing, one small thing that happens. It's not the worst thing, though, even though it does make mean you know, you don't have as much room to eat while you're in a deficit, for example. But worse than that is when your diet is over after you've lost weight and muscle, let's say you've lost 20 pounds and your metabolism has adapted downward, right? Now what happens is because your metabolism has dropped even more than you probably expected, you're more ravenous, you're hungry, you're craving food. Now you start to eat back the calories, right? And and that's okay, right? We want to get back to maintenance. And even if you go just to maintenance, the problem is now you're what you're regaining once you start gaining more weight back, is fat, almost exclusively fat. And it's usually more than what you lost because if you lost 20 pounds, and let's say five of those pounds were muscle and 15 of those pounds were fat, but now you gain 20 pounds back, you're gonna gain back 20 pounds of fat. And so the net effect is you've lost five pounds of muscle. This isn't hypothetical. This is what happens to most dieters who do not lift weights. And the cool thing is it's totally preventable. That's why you're listening to this show. That's why you're looking for the help and support on this journey. It's what I had just couldn't discover until my 40s. I always wondered why during my CrossFit days and doing paleo and doing diets and all that, lots of cardio, why I would lose weight and and look worse and worse. And I thought, ah, it's genetics. It's my age. Like I'm skinny, fat, and then I'm fat. And then I'm skinny, fat, and like, how do I actually look the way I want to look? I don't, I don't get it. So here's the piece that matters, even more than what I just talked about,

Look Lighter, Feel Weaker: Composition

Philip Pape 6:30

is you are not trying to lose weight. Like I thought I was trying to lose weight and that was the goal. No, you're trying to look better, aren't you? It's not just about the physique, but let's start there. Let's let's be honest with ourselves. Let's start there. You want to see muscle definition. You also want to feel strong and quote unquote functional. That word is kind of a buzzword today, but you know, you want to function in your daily living at any age. So maybe you're in your 60s or 70s and listening to the show, having trouble getting off the couch, right? And that's a real thing that happens. Okay. And you want to be able to do that, you want to spring off that couch and have no problem with it. And you want to also look like you put in the work, right? You don't, you kind of look around and you see what happens with aging. When your friends, when you get into your 40s and 50s, you see them on Facebook, you're like, wow, what has happened to them? And it's not a matter of judgment and saying, oh, this person's fat. No. It's a matter of, are you doing the things that support your health and your body because you love yourself? You do, right? We all love ourselves. So we want to give ourselves the best shot in this world. We also don't want people to depend on us when we get older. And so that outcome, as much as it somewhat depends on maintaining a healthy level of body fat, for most people, that end result of managing body fat is helped tremendously and almost exclusively by being able to build muscle, at least over the long term. In the short term, you can drop a bunch of body fat with energy balance alone. You're gonna lose muscle. You might be in a healthier state than you were before because you had a lot of fat. I'm talking about people who have a lot of weight to lose, right? But once you get to that point, you've got to build muscle. Body fat percentage is like it's more like geometry, whereas scale weight is like arithmetic, right? We need to focus on the geometry of the body. Geometry as in like the the space, the spatial distribution, because if you lose a pound of fat, but you also lose a pound of muscle, that's not a win. You've lost two pounds on the scale, but that's that's setting, that's going backward. That's becoming a smaller version of the same shape. Lighter on the scale, but softer in the mirror. It's it's that deflated look that happens when people diet without lifting. You see it with the weight loss meds when people aren't lifting. You're like, whoa, they lost a lot of weight, but they don't look great, right? It's just the instinct we have in our head. You might not say that out loud. I'm saying it out loud for you. And let's be honest, that's what we're thinking. And we see them shrink, but they're not, they don't look healthier. And healthy is a good word for this, I think. Vibrant, healthy, right? We don't have to say, not everyone's gonna be chiseled, jack toned. We all have different body types and body shapes, right? I'm kind of devolving a little bit into the whole body image thing here. But when you do maintain or build muscle while losing fat, then your body composition changes. So from an objective standpoint, that's what I'm talking about. And objectively, what this looks like is hey, your waist gets smaller because you're not carrying as much of that visceral abdominal fat, which is not healthy for you. Your shoulders look broader, your arms have shape, you know, you weigh the same or more than someone who just dieted, but you look dramatically different. You look healthier. And if it does, even if it is about vanity and physique, which again is fine if that's what one thing that drives you. Most people's ideal physique, believe it or not, requires 10 to 20 pounds more pounds, 10 to 20 more pounds of muscle than they currently have. Let that sink in. That's a that's like a really good number. 10 to 20 more pounds of muscle. So if that's the case, your goal really isn't to get smaller, is it? It's to reshape. And you can't reshape without resistance training. All right. So let's talk about another layer here that gets overlooked. The hormonal consequences of dieting. Dieting is a stress. Your body perceives a calorie deficit as a threat and it responds accordingly. Your hunger goes up, your neat goes down. I know you're you're like, hey, Philip, no, I'm getting more steps and fat loss. Yeah, you might be getting more intentional steps, but you'd be surprised at the unintentional, unconscious movement that goes down, even

Hormones, Adaptation, And Why Lifting Matters

Philip Pape 10:24

inside your body. Your leptin drops, your recovery gets worse, your whole system starts pushing back against the deficit. It's a stress. You may do it intentionally, yes, but it's a short-term stress. And that's called metabolic adaptation. That's why fat loss gets harder over time. And if you're not strength training, these adaptations will hit harder and faster. I've seen it in people's numbers. Your body has less reason to hold on to metabolically expensive tissue like muscle, so it dumps it. And so even those of you doing the UTAL YouTube workouts or the P90 or those types of workouts, Pilates, and you're not making any, you're not progressing, you're not increasing in weight or reps over time, you're not actually getting stronger. And then you go into a fat loss phase, you're not really doing much for yourself. You may, if you're lucky, hold on to some of your muscle, but you're still probably gonna probably gonna lose some muscle. At best, you're never in a period where you're gaining new muscle tissue, if that makes sense. And going back to my comment where most people need to gain 10 to 20 pounds of muscle, and that's beyond a baseline that I would say is when you're 30. So if you're already 40, 50, 60 years old, you've lost some of that muscle too. The goal is to get it back and then add those 10 to 20 pounds. When you lift, you blunt the compensatory mechanisms. Okay. Resistance training signals your body that muscle is essential, that it's being used, that it should be preserved. You keep your need higher, you maintain strength, you support insulin sensitivity, you stabilize your mood and sleep. Yes, even during fat loss, it makes it a little bit easier, and you're doing the most important thing, which is holding on to that muscle. And I definitely have seen stark differences between people who are not lifting properly or at all. They they try to lose weight, and it's just this fight. Whereas people who lift, they're like, we're gonna go in a moderate deficit, I'm gonna do all the right things, I'm gonna eat a high satiety diet, plenty of protein, and I'm gonna train. And it actually feels, I'm not gonna say it feels easy, but it doesn't feel that bad at all. You got a little bit of hunger, a little bit of stress, and you get through it in six, eight, 10, 12 weeks. And now you've lost fat and you move on to the rest of your life being at maintenance or above. This is a big distinction that changes how the whole process feels and how sustainable it becomes. Now, before I keep going, I want to mention something for those of you who are ready to take action on this as we end the year. If you've been putting off strength training or you know you need more structure heading into the new year, we are starting, we are running a three-week finish strong challenge designed to help you build that momentum and end the year strong instead of waiting until January. It's not, hey, let's do a diet at the end of the year or let's do a fat loss phase at the end of the year. That's gonna self-destruct, isn't it? No, this is about getting the fundamental behaviors like strength training in place now and also having a flexible framework for doing so, no matter how stressful or chaotic the holidays get, or any time of year. Because if you could get through that time of year, the rest of the year is gonna seem like a breeze. It's building that foundation that protects your metabolism, your metabolic health, sets you up for real progress in 2026, even if, yes, even if you want to have a New Year's resolution to lose fat. So you can sign up right now for that challenge. Go to live.witsandweights.com. The kickoff is on December 8th, but the challenge starts a couple days later. So December 8th is a Monday at 5 p.m. Eastern. It would be great if you could be on the live kickoff, but if you're not, it's okay. The replay will be available shortly thereafter. And you'll have about a day and a half to watch it, to download the guide, to download all the wonderful resources that Carol has made for dealing with the holidays and all the situations you find yourself in, like at the airport, at the gas station, at the hotel, to download our minimum and bailout workout templates for hotel gym travel. If you don't have access to a full gym, all of that stuff is included, as well as the replay. Go to live.witsandweights.com. Link is in the show notes, so that you can join the challenge and get started for the final three weeks of the year. That's live.witsandweights.com. All right, let's zoom

Minimum Effective Dose For Muscle

Philip Pape 14:26

out for a second because this isn't just about looking good at your goal weight, is it? Right? I I kind of have alluded, I've danced around the fact that physique, which by the way, I define physique as much more nuanced than a lot of people do. To me, physique is everything about your body and mind. But still, even if it's a vanity goal, we need to couple that with something more meaningful about our future self, our identity, so that we have it all, we have the whole package. And that will really drive you to want to do this. This is about the rest of your life. Without lifting, sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass, accelerates. And I recently heard a podcast, gosh, I think it was Docs Who Lift. They talked about, or was it barbell medicine, talked about how sarcopenia, we we often talk about it as a loss of muscle mass, but really it's a loss of function with our muscle, loss of strength. And I think that's just as important, if not more so, than the muscle itself, because there's there's a reason we want to have that muscle. And it's not just the look of it or to say we have more muscle, right? So when we go through this age-related, but also functional muscle loss after 30, and that occurs because you're not doing something about it, it doesn't just affect how you look, does it? It affects things like your bone density, your risk of falling, your ability to carry groceries when you're 65, to get up off the floor when you're 75, to live independently when you're 80 and above. So at the end of the day, today's episode is a longevity episode in disguise. Because there is no healthy aging without strength. That's the statement I want you to remember. Quote it. Put it on Instagram, I don't care, put it on your post-it note, share it. There is no healthy aging without strength. Your quality of life in your 60s, 70s, 80s, beyond depends on the muscle and strength that you build and preserve now. And I say now, I was gonna say in your 30s, 40s, 50s, it doesn't matter. Now, starting now. If you're already 70, start now. If you're already 80, start now. Testosterone, growth hormone, IGF 1, all of these track and they correlate with muscle mass. When you let muscle go, your hormonal health spirals with it. Whereas when you build and you maintain muscle, you support that hormonal environment that keeps you healthy and functional. And I know there's a lot of talk about hormones today and hormone replacement therapy, but really it has to start from lifestyle. I mean, the lifestyle has to be there regardless, is is is the way to think about it. So this isn't just vanity, it's about remaining capable, remaining independent, remaining alive in a meaningful sense for as long as possible. Lifespan, health span, and mind span. Now, you know I think about this from an engineering standpoint. I talk about engineering in the intro. Some of you guys that are new to the podcast are like, where does engineering fall into all of this stuff about fitness? I think it's a really important lens to use when we think about our body and how it ages over time. For example, cardio. It gives you some benefits today. You burn some calories, you get some cardiovascular conditioning, but then it's done. It's short term. Tomorrow you have to do it again to get the same benefit, right? Cardio is very short term. Muscle is gonna give you benefit today, tomorrow, and the next decade once you add it. That's incredible. If you add 10 pounds of muscle in your 40s, that tissue continues to burn calories, support your metabolism,

3-Week Strong Finish Challenge

Philip Pape 18:27

keep you strong for years. You can kind of coast for a while and still be far better off than someone who never built it. I know people who've built a lot of muscle through their lives, and just about everything they're doing is suboptimal. They may even be sitting all day. And still their health markers, their biomarkers, based on their blood work, are far superior than the average person their age simply because they have extra muscle. And then when we work on things like walking more and a little bit of cardiovascular health on top of it, they get incredibly superior numbers without becoming an endurance athlete, right? Just by a little, a little walking. Now, the opposite is a pretty horrible situation. If you lose 10 pounds of muscle because you're not lifting, then you're gonna spend the rest of your life fighting your body. You're not gonna be able to eat as much. Every time you want to do something that's physical, it's gonna get harder and harder. Every time you do try to lose weight, it's gonna feel harder because you're not doing the right way and you're losing muscle. Muscle compounds like interest. Nothing or not lifting is like pulling money out of the stock market at age 40 and then wondering why you can't retire. I always think it's a great analogy to think of muscle as like a retirement fund for your body. Right? That investment you make now is gonna pay dividends for decades. Investment's not just financial, it's just lifting and eating the right way, et cetera. Right? So this is the uncomfortable truth about diet-only fat loss, which isn't even fat loss, it's just weight loss. It creates more hunger, worse cravings, higher dropout rates, more weight regain, less satisfaction with your appearance. When you diet without lifting, you're stripping away everything that makes the diet sustainable, believe it or not. Like the lifting is almost exclusively what makes it sustainable in that it drives everything else around it, right? You don't, because without it, you're not gonna have that food flexibility, you're not gonna use the nutrients in the best way, and you're gonna end up at a body weight that requires eating less and less just to maintain. Whereas with strength training, you're building a buffer, you create the physique you want to maintain, it changes your relationship with the whole process, you feel progress every week, and it reframes what lifting is. And when people say, Well, I don't like to lift, we've got to change that somehow. We've got to change honestly, getting the result from it tends to be enough to tell somebody this is something I've got to do that's part of my identity that I want to do. And so that's a good segue into the next thing, which is that some of you are thinking, you know, I'm busy, I don't have time for a routine, or I'm worried about doing too much. I guess most people aren't worried about that last one necessarily, but I want to push back on all of this gently. Most people listening to the show are probably undertrained, not overtrained. I'm gonna repeat that. Most people listening to this show are probably undertrained, not overtrained. What you're actually doing is probably less than the minimum effective dose. So you're worried about doing too much when you haven't even started. Now, the too much might be in the form of cardio running, cardio endurance machines, but from a strength training perspective, three to four sessions a week is pretty much all it takes to preserve every ounce of muscle during fat loss. Even two sessions is dramatically better than zero. So the minimum effective dose to preserve muscle is actually shockingly

Strength As Longevity, Not Vanity

Philip Pape 21:32

low. It's it's a quarter to an eighth of what it takes to build muscle. It's pretty low. So even starting there is a great place to be. That's what I'm saying. Better than zero infinitely. So that's 45 minutes to an hour, three or four times a week. You probably spend more time than that scrolling, doom scrolling, watching TV, Netflix, right? The barrier for most people is not time. I know if you're a busy mom, single mom, you've got kids, still, I found that there are plenty of other things that are far less effective than strength training that you're doing that takes a lot of time that can be supplanted by this wonderful thing of lifting weights. And a home gym can be a really helpful thing for that for a lot of you. It should be the priority because once you understand what's at stake, the priority itself becomes obvious. And I hope today's episode is helping you frame that, right? What message are you sending your body? Without lifting, you're sending the message that your muscle is expensive and apparently I don't need it. Let's dump it, let's hold on to the fat. You're getting fatter. When you lift, the message changes. This muscle is important. It's necessary for my survival, it's essential. And when I need extra energy, I'm gonna pull from fat instead. You're telling your body what to do and keep and how to reshape itself through your actions. So that's the game. Resistance training is the signal, it's communication with your own physiology. And if you're not sending that during fat loss or really any time, your body's gonna make the wrong choice, or it's gonna make the natural choice, the one that you don't want. All right, I have one more angle today, and this one is psychological. When you show up in the gym, let's say three days a week, you start to see yourself differently. You're not just someone on a diet, you are someone who trains. You're an athlete, or at least you're becoming an athlete. That identity shift is what changes everything else outside the gym. You make better food choices because guess what? Athletes fuel their training. You prioritize sleep because athletes recover. You think long term because athletes build over years, not weeks. Whereas not lifting weights totally removes that anchor from your life. Without the gym, you're now relying just on willpower, on restriction, on low-carb diets, on fasting, on all the gimmicks, all the supplements, all the things that are shortcuts. And then willpower, of course, is gonna run out. Restriction is gonna create all sorts of backlash that you're not gonna like. Whereas with that training, with the gym, you have a practice, a ritual. I will say it's a habit, but not really. A habit is something automatic automatic. This is more part of your identity, an identity-based set of behaviors which stick. They're very sticky. All right, they stick a lot longer than something that's goal-based or outcome-based. This is process-based, identity-based. And I see this again and again. Those who lift consistently are not just getting the physical result. They're transforming their self-concept, right? And that and that is what makes the results last. And by the way, in my app fitness lab, I worked really hard to incorporate this idea of identity transformation from day one. After you onboard and start within a day or two, you're gonna get an activity that helps you develop the vision of your future. Very simple. A few simple prompts. And the app is gonna use that to reinforce this meaningful drive that you have for your identity, which is a really cool part of the process. All right, I'm gonna close with this. After about the age of 35, things change, don't they? Right? Anabolic resistance increases, which means you need more protein. Muscle protein synthesis slows down, recovery definitely becomes more important. You know, your connective tissue is a little bit less pliable, life is a little bit more stressful, neat tends to drop,

Engineering View: Muscle Compounds, Cardio Expires

Philip Pape 25:07

hormones start to shift in your 30s and 40s, don't they? And lifting weights is the antidote to every single one of these, at least partially, if not completely. It's not that you're getting older, it's that your training has to match the physiology of aging. You might need more deliberate stimulus and more intention to build and maintain muscle. You might need more attention to recovery and your protein. You might need a system that works a little more subtly with nuance for your body, which means you have to have a feedback loop. All of the things we talk about on the show, that's what the engineering side is. The good news is that it works. People in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s can still build muscle. You can still get stronger, you can still transform your body composition. The research is quite clear on this at this point. But this is the big butt. It doesn't happen by accident, right? It only happens because you show up and you lift weights and you send the body the signal that muscle actually matters. So the conclusion, of course, is lifting is not optional. It is the infrastructure that makes everything else work. So here are your actions from today. First, if you're not lifting at all, just start with two sessions a week, which is dramatically better than zero. I would encourage you to have three sessions. But if two is the bare minimum that you could possibly get and you're gonna just utterly fail trying to go in for three, start with two. Second, if you're already lifting, making make it make sure that you're training, I'll say hard enough. And that's a whole topic. I've done multiple episodes on this, but basically it's getting within a few reps shy of failure so that you get the appropriate mechanical tension and that you're going up in weighted reps each week to stay in that regime so you actually build the muscle. Third, I want you to prioritize protein. Your muscles need the materials that you get from protein. So you've got to have that to go along with your training, aiming for 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight. Fourth, progressive overload. I kind of alluded to this already in my training hard enough. But not only do you have to train hard enough, you have to lift a little bit more over time to be able to train hard enough, or else it'll start getting easy and you'll stop making progress. That's the adaptation that your body gets. And then fifth and finally, be consistent. And so this is the identity-based behavior change. This is where uh something like a system or an app or program that keeps you consistent can be helpful. Speaking of, if you want personalized guidance that adapts to your training and goals, helps you create the identity, helps you create those behaviors through daily activities, and has a coach built in in your pocket who can answer all your questions, check out the fitness lab app at witsandweights.com slash app. This is like a coaching intelligence layer that I built based on my years of coaching and my content and the podcasts to help you navigate exactly what we talked about today. How to structure your training, your nutrition, your phases over time. It gives you personalized recommendations, it adapts every day. If you're having trouble in some area of your life, it will notice that and it will start adapting the activities for that. And that is how it helps build the behaviors without replacing whatever other tools you already use. It complements other tools quite well. So Fitness Lab is great whether you're starting out or you've been at this for years, whether you need a workout program or are following your own, whether you're tracking your own food or want the app to do it for you. It helps you make those smart decisions faster. Go to wits and weights.com slash app or click the link in the show notes. That is Fitness Lab, witsandweights.com slash app. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your body is capable of incredible things, but it needs that signal of

Identity Shift: Become Someone Who Trains

Philip Pape 28:57

lifting weights to do it. Send that signal by showing up in the gym and getting your training done. I'm Philip Bates, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.