Flipping The Nutrition Pyramid

Philip Pape 0:01

Most people build their nutrition from the top down. Calories first, then macros, maybe micronutrients as an afterthought. That approach breaks when your goal is body recomposition. You might hit your calorie targets, you might dial in your protein, macros might be on point, but if you're hungry, if your training feels flat, if the mirror isn't changing, something is obviously off. Today I'm showing you why the traditional nutrition hierarchy is often backward and the five mistakes that prevent successful body recomp before it even begins. 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. And today we are going to flip around the nutrition pyramid. You've probably been told that there is a hierarchy where calories are on the bottom, they matter the most, then macros, then everything else. And in fact, I've created pyramids just like this because in many cases they make the point that energy balance, if you're trying to control weight, needs to take precedent, or else the other things aren't going to matter. You eat in a deficit to lose fat, and then you hit your protein, and the rest of it is less important. The problem is what I find people doing when they take that as approach is they go to an extreme. And then when they're trying to lose fat and they're trying to build and hold on to their muscle, there's cracks in the model because they are not looking ahead to the other things that are actually more important in the moment. Like, hey, my hunger signals are telling me I'm always starving. What is going on, even though I have my calories and macros on point? So even if you are great at tracking, even if you know how to induce a deficit or maintain or surplus, even if you know how to hit and maintain consistent protein, and yet your body doesn't cooperate or you feel weak in the gym or you're always hungry or your recovery isn't great. And then week after week, month after month, things aren't changing the way you expect. From a nutrition standpoint, as it impacts your physical results, something is going wrong in that process. And that's because your physiology is complicated and it has to be equipped to handle what you are trying to do, your specific goal, which your goal is not weight loss. Your goal is fat loss, building muscle, improving your health, improving all of these things at the same time. And your physiology runs on nutrition, aka micronutrients first, then macros, and then calories. And I'm gonna explain why today, why that's a different way to think about it. It doesn't necessarily up-end the traditional pyramid, but it's complementary to it, or it's a different angle

Why Micros Drive Recomp

Philip Pape 2:52

on the same thing that might be more helpful to people. So today I'm gonna break down five mistakes that I believe are holding back successful body recomposition, not to add complexity, but about putting the right thing first if you're the type that is struggling when you've tried the traditional approach. So, mistake number one is thinking that calories and macros matter more than micronutrients, because after all, they're in the bottom of most of these pyramids. Let me start with constraint theory. This is from engineering, and I talk about it all the time in the context of figuring out your root cause. In any system, performance is going to be limited by the narrowest bottleneck, right? If you optimize everything downstream of that bottleneck, but haven't addressed the constraint, nothing improves. And in fact, you put a lot of effort and work into something for it not to improve, which is even more frustrating. Or then you put up your hands and say, this doesn't work, and that's not really the reason why it's not working. And so most people approach nutrition what I'll call top-down. You know, you've listened to podcasts, you've read all the great books, you follow great evidence-based people like I do, and then you conclude, okay, I need to figure out calories for my goal. Am I trying to lose weight, maintain, gain? Then I need to set my macros to balance everything out the right way: protein, fats, carbs, and then maybe think about the types of foods and the qualities of food sometimes as an afterthought, because you may have heard people say, well, once you've got your macro, once you're hitting your macros, you're inevitably going to have the right foods. Well, this works for a simple weight loss approach, but body recomposition, you know, trying to lose fat, trying to build muscle, whether you're doing it at the same time or over the long term with cuts and bulks, there are a lot more needs and demands that you have to understand metabolically for the most part. But that also includes things like hormones. You're asking your body to do two things at once. You're asking it to release stored energy, but you're also trying to keep it strong and build or maintain muscle. And they're they're kind of, I'm not gonna say they're contradictory, right? Because we do do both at the same time, but you have to understand how it all works. Building muscle, of course, requires protein synthesis. This is at the crux of both why we strength train, but also why we focus so much on protein when we are losing weight so that we can hold on to that muscle. Losing fat specifically requires efficient energy metabolism, right? Is what the way the word I like to use. It's not just weight loss. Recovering from training requires that you repair your at the cellular level, right? You have to repair your tissue and recover. All of this actually depends heavily on your micronutrients, your B vitamins, your magnesium, zinc, iron, manganese, copper, and dozens of others. Without them, your body can't run the biochemical pathways needed for recomp or do them efficiently, even when macros are quote unquote perfect. So micronutrients are determining how you feel, regardless of your body weight. You might lose some fat and you might gain some muscle, but if you feel terrible, if you are exhausted, if you're irritable, mood swings, bloated, weak, constantly hungry, your biochemical foundation isn't there. And I see this at all different types of goals. In other words, I even if someone's in a muscle-building phase with a surplus, just because they're eating enough food doesn't mean they have enough micronutrients. When that foundation is missing, then the adherence is the first thing to go. That is where you quit or you binge or you program hop. It's not because you lack discipline, but because your body is fighting you because you're not giving it what it needs. So if we were to flip this around and have a bottom-up model, not a reprioritization, understand, but it but ensuring that each of these blocks are accounted for, I think you have a higher chance of being successful. So, what does that look like? Micronutrients first, build that biochemical operating system, making sure you actually have them in there, because otherwise a lot of the other things are gonna hit a wall fast. Then your macros, you're gonna fuel your system with the right protein, carbs, and fats, and then your calories, using energy balance

Constraint Theory And Bottlenecks

Philip Pape 7:12

to drive the fat loss or muscle gain. And the reason I like it in this order now, where I used to be very dogmatic about saying calories come first, is because everything downstream will work better. Your hunger will be better regulated, your training will improve, you'll you'll recover faster, and body recomp becomes easier and more frictionless, frictionless while you still have to understand that calories are at the foundation of energy balance, and then macros are at the foundation of things like muscle protein synthesis and hormones and energy and recovery from a macro basis. So let me give you some examples because this could be confusing. Your body's ability to turn carbohydrates into usable energy, and by the way, we should be eating our carbs. If you found this podcast for the first time and you're like, why is he talking about carbs? Low carb, right? No. Should be eating carbs, requires for your body to use it as energy, it requires B vitamins, magnesium, and manganese. That's those are examples. If you're low in these, your body can't efficiently extract the energy from carbs, and that'll make you a little bit sluggish. Even if you're eating a lot of carbs, that affects your workouts. And it also affects your cravings because down to the cellular level, mitochondria, right, powerhouse of the cells, you're not getting what you need. Fat, what about fat burning? Fat oxidation. Well, you have to have B vitamins and carnitine and coenzyme Q10, right? CoQ10. And fat oxidation, you know, is a complicated subject because we're not talking about burning fat in and of itself as being some superior thing. We're just talking about your ability to burn fat at all in an efficient way in the context of the energy balance that gives you that deficit. Okay. Protein synthesis requires zinc, magnesium, vitamin D, and of course protein, but we're talking at the micronutrient level. So if you're deficient in some of these, and most people are deficient at least in magnesium and possibly vitamin D, you can eat a ton of protein and still struggle to build muscle as well as you think because your body can't use that muscle, that protein efficiently. What about thyroid hormone conversion, T4 to T3? You need selenium, iodine, zinc. We all know that, right? Like iodine and selenium come up a lot in thyroid discussions. And so low levels of those foods can then affect your thyroid conversion and that tanks your metabolic rate. And then you think you have a thyroid issue when in fact you just have a micronutrient issue, micronutrient issue. Even if you're eating plenty of food, okay, that's why it's not just a calorie thing. Obviously, if you are under-eating and you can fix that, it gets that variable out of the way. But you might have a micronutrient deficiency, which we've seen in the evidence can drop your resting metabolic rate by as many as hundreds of calories a day, where you might think you're in a calorie deficit because you're eating, you know, quite a low amount of food that's not satiating you. But if your metabolism is kind of keeping down along with that low eating, then you're actually at maintenance, but you don't feel like it. You feel like crap, right? Like you feel like you're not eating nearly what you should be. And that's why people say, you know, my macros are perfect, but I'm always hungry. Or I'm hitting my protein, but I don't feel like I have enough energy in the gym. Or I'm eating healthy, but I feel terrible, right? The problem isn't the macros in that case. It's that the body doesn't have the micros to run your, you know, metabolic pathways as efficiently. And I'm not one to fear-monger. I'm not saying everybody has just massive nutrient deficiencies, but we've had some folks on the show, like Sarah Ballantine, who do talk about this as super important, right? For things like gut health, microbiome diversity, satiety, how you feel, lots of things in your body doing lots of different things. And really, it's about diversity here. It's not about having to get a specific food or another, although certain foods are powerhouses of certain nutrients, and it's good to be educated on that. So making sure every meal includes at least one micronutrient-dense food as a priority is the way to go here. It's it's actually quite simple. You know, fruit, vegetables, nuts, legumes, root vegetables, whole grains, dairy, eggs, even organ meats and shellfish. You notice it's not just fruits and vegetables, not just plants. All of these things have a lot of nutrition. And provide and yes, even red meat. I've I've had people comment on YouTube videos being like, oh, did you know red meat? That causes diabetes. I'm like, where are these people learning their information? Diabetes is caused by excess consumption and obesity, and not by sugar or red meat. So all of these nutrient-dense foods provide the vitamins, the minerals, and things that are not on the label, like phytonutrients, right? These are compounds and plants that your body needs to run efficiently. Your metabolism is affected by these guys. So even if it's even if it hits you as, hey, I want to increase my metabolism, it could be a lack of micronutrients that's causing you to have a suppressed metabolism. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have flexible foods. Notice the list I just gave you was a huge list of foods to begin with. It just means you anchor your diet with nutrient density and then build flexibility around that. And then you're gonna feed that into, okay, how does that meet my macros and my calories? You see, you see this, you see that why this approach makes a lot of sense. So this brings us to make mistake number two.

Carbs, Fat Oxidation, And ATP

Philip Pape 12:16

Mistake number two is using flexible dieting, but without nutrient anchors. So, what do I what do I mean by this? Well, I'm a huge proponent of flexible dieting. And that's the ability or flexible eating is another way to call it, the ability to fit foods that you love into your plan because that is what makes nutrition sustainable, period. Like that one rule is near the top of the list. It doesn't mean binging on ultra-processed foods, it means having flexibility and not telling yourself that certain foods are quote unquote bad when they are perfectly fine in some level of moderation or context in your dietary pattern. But flexible dieting only works when you build it on nutrient density. And I've had episodes in the past where I compare flexible dieting, if it fits your macros, to a more flexible, flexible approach, if that means, where you're really expanding what this definition means, because most people do it backward. They start with, oh, I can eat anything as long as it fits my macros. But then they feel terrible, they can't recover, they hit a wall, their hormones, all the things, right? And I would say there are three gaps or three problems with this approach, this macro-centric approach only, that affect fat loss, that affect recomp. The first one is that you're just not getting enough of the nutrients, what we just talked about. The second one is that gut issues or low stomach acid, medications, poor digestion, are preventing some of the absorption of the nutrients you do eat. So a lot of people have issues with nutrient absorption. We don't talk about that a lot on the show. And I'm remiss if I don't, as obviously a nutrition coach. And then I'll say the utilization gap is the third gap where the inflammation in your body, and I'm talking about blood marker-based, legitimate inflammation, right? The cellular response of your body to stress, including the stress itself, and toxins, which would be things like, you know, smoking, alcohol, drugs, potentially some environmental toxins, although I don't want to overplay those. Maybe missing cofactors that prevent using the nutrients, even if absorbed. It could be some genetic things as well. But anyway, the you know, intake, absorption, and utilization of nutrients. And so if you have a flexible diet, but you're not thinking about nutrients, you're gonna have big gaps like this. You might hit your protein using just chicken breast and whey. And you might hit your carbs with just white rice and bagels, and you might hit your fats with just butter and cheese, and then hit your macros perfectly. And you know what's ironic here or not ironic, but you can take a pizza and make the perfect macro-friendly pizza. But think about how you're gonna feel every time if that's all you ate. So micronutrient intake is often very poor in what I see. And this is why with my own like one-on-one clients, I get all their data. Most of them use macrofactor and all the nutrition data is in there, but maybe use chronometer, maybe track yourself. Doesn't matter. The the micronutrient, I will see things that are way lower than they need to be. Potassium, magnesium, zinc, B vitamins, fiber. I know fiber is a weird one because it's it's a kind of a macro or it's part, it's a type of carb, but I consider it a nutrient as well. Polyphenols, you can't really track, but if you have diversity in color, this is why I like, I do like color. It sounds like old school, but having enough color on your plate often takes care of some of the polyphenol and compound concerns. Everything your body needs to feel good, to perform well, to actually build muscle while losing fat. And by the way, this is why fad diets and restrictive diets, any kind, whether it's vegan and vegetarianism on one hand or carnivore on the other, are really missing out. You're really missing out on all this stuff. And to claim that you don't need them is really shameful and honestly dangerous. Because micronutrient status is poor in this kind of diet, your metabolism downregulates from that. Your hunger then goes up. You're you have the low energy, you have the poor training. You see where I'm going with all this. It's a repeated pattern. And then you might be craving more of that. We'll just call it junk food, but you know what I mean, ultra-processed foods, because your body is literally starving for nutrients, even though you're eating enough calories. So you just go for whatever you can to make up that difference. So the paradox of flexible dieting done incorrectly is that you could be overfed on calories but undernourished down in your body at the at the cell, down to the cellular level. So the solution here is nutrient anchors. A nutrient anchor. And I by the way, I think I learned this from this phrase, I think I'm taking it from Vitality Blueprint. They're the the company I partner with for performance blood work. I think they, I think the they've used this phrase. Okay, but I've also used anchors before in terms of like protein and fiber anchors. But this is a nutrient anchor, a high-quality micronutrient dense food that you have in most of your meals. So even if the rest of your diet is flexible, you're always hitting your micronutrient needs and you're kind of rotating through these. So this is actually pretty simple, and a lot of what you want to eat anyway is gonna mat is gonna satisfy you. So, for example, Greek yogurt instead of a low-fat processed form of dairy, or

Nutrient-Dense Food Diversity

Philip Pape 17:11

potatoes instead of rice cakes, or legumes instead of protein bars, right? Or red meat or eggs instead of only chicken breasts, or fruit instead of some other dessert. Now, some of these swaps are a little, I'll say harder for folks. So you're going from like a really yummy processed food like ice cream, and I'm telling you to eat fruit. I'm not saying all the time. I'm just saying think about those kinds of swaps. It's not that the calories or macros change, it's that you're picking something with more nutrients potentially. And anything processed is probably just gonna have fewer nutrients, even if it's quote unquote clean or has quote unquote clean ingredients, like some good protein bar that you like. Okay, I get the convenience, but just remember the more that you have, the less you're gonna have of the micros. So protein fat carbs are often checked off, but then where are the vitamins, the minerals, the fiber? Right? So it this is not about cutting things out. Do you see? This is really anchoring and being intentional. So, what is what does a meal plan for this look like? Well, simple breakfast, Greek yogurt, berries, granola, maybe oatmeal, maybe eggs with egg whites. A lot of options there. Lunch, a burrito bowl with rice, beans, chicken, veggies, cheese. Snack could be an apple with peanut butter. Simple. I love apples for fiber. That's your anchor. Dinner, steak, roasted potatoes, a salad, right? Again, you got your potatoes, your salad, your fiber, maybe, maybe a some sort of cruciferous vegetable. Dessert, whatever fits your macros. Ah, see what I did there. That's the flexibility. So you're getting nutrient density at every meal, but you still have flexibility. You don't have to eat bland food like chicken and broccoli. I mean, chicken and broccoli can be delicious. I don't mean to criticize those specifically. You're not eliminating food groups. You are making sure the foundation is there, and then flexible dieting works so beautifully. Then you feel good, then you recover well and train well, and the body recomp becomes easier because your body has what it needs. All right, before we get into mistake number three, I want to tell you about something that I think will make this entire process easier because everything we're discussing today micros, macros, training performance, biofeedback, it all comes together in one place, and that is my new app, Fitness Lab. Fitness Lab is an AI-powered fitness coaching app. But, guys, it's nothing like you've seen before when it comes to AI because it is trained on all my podcast content, coaching. And yes, even my personality, I've given a lot of guidance on how to convey things and how to be compassionate and empathetic. If you can believe that or not, AI is able to do that. It's now available on iPhone. And if if it's not already, shortly it'll be out on Android and it's gonna have full Apple Health integration on iPhone. It's like having a coach in your pocket who understands this nutrition model based on micros, macros, and calories. It doesn't just tell you eat less or track your macros, it's a lot more intuitive and nuanced and helps you. Build a system. It'll look at your specific meals and look for color and micros and fiber and balance and calories. It looks for all these things and gives you feedback so you can nudge your diet in the right direction. And as we continue to integrate with Apple Health, it'll be able to pull in things like your sleep metrics and even your nutrition metrics if you use another logger like my macrofactor or my fitness pal. You get conversational coaching. If you've never done that before, it's it's incredible. People are writing in saying, I can't believe it like understands me and can answer my questions. It's like I'm talking to you, Philip. It gives you analysis of your meal patterns. What are you missing nutrient-wise?

Flexible Dieting With Nutrient Anchors

Philip Pape 20:36

Training guidance. It could either give you your program and form checks, or it can help you reflect on a program that you're already following. So all of this stuff, it's so adaptable and it evolves every day. You can tell it what you'd like it to focus on or not, and it will follow that. Right now, through the end of the year, you can get 20% off with our holiday promotion. Now, I think this episode comes out a couple days before December 17th, in which case I'm gonna include a link in the show note to give all my listeners early access to 20% off. It's a different link, it's a secret link I have, but it's the same result. 20% off your subscription to the app. All you have to do is click the link in the show notes. Don't go to the app store and look for it. Use the special link in the show notes to claim that, get the discount. That link will help you walk through a two-minute quiz. It'll create a custom plan before you ever pay or do anything to understand if it's right for you. And then you can jump in. And then there's even a refund period. So, guys, there's no risk at all. Go to with no, go to the link in the show notes to claim that. All right, let's talk about mistake number three, which is mismanaging fiber and gut health. Okay, fiber deserves its own category because too little of it is a big problem. And too much of it can be a problem as well. Most people don't have that issue. I know people who eat a lot of fiber and it just is not too much. So I don't worry about that as much. Kind of like with protein, you can almost never have too much. You can definitely have too little, and that's the usual issue, especially if you're on something like carnivore, then you're not getting any at all and you're somehow believing the claims, the false claims that somehow you don't need fiber. And you're gonna pay for that, you know, later on. You're not paying for it this month or next year, but you're gonna pay for it. So if you're eating as little as, say, five to 15 grams of fiber, which is shockingly common among this community, even people that lift weights, who are eating lots of protein and focusing on this stuff, you're still not getting enough fiber. I know this for a fact because almost every client that comes in with me, they could have everything else dialed in and still, they don't have enough fiber. And you're gonna have issues. You're gonna have potentially poor digestion. So if you already do have poor digestion and you add a bunch of fiber and you might find that that takes care of the issue. You might have a lot of hunger that you shouldn't have because a little more fiber will make you a lot fuller at your maintenance calories. You might have some issues with blood sugar because you're not balancing your meals, so you get all the energy crashes from blood sugar. I'm not saying you need to wear a continuous glucose monitor and keep blood sugar from spiking. No, blood sugar spikes are normal. It's the crashes that happen because you have in unbalanced meals that then cause your energy to energy to fluctuate and make you crave food. Okay, and that's really the issue. And then you eat too many calories. On the other hand, if you massively ramp up your fiber because you were low and you went from 10 to 60 grams of fiber with like the wheat starch breads or psyllium husk supplements or something, metamusle, something like that, be careful. You might have bloat gas, you might reduce absorption of key minerals. And I sometimes people come see see people complain who've gone from a low carb or carnivore type diet, and then they add in all this fiber, like, oh, I felt horrible. It's just all and they did it for like three days, you know? Guys, you've got to let your body adapt. You're changing a lot of things physiologically and in your gut. All right. Fiber is so critical. Research shows that phytic acid, which is found in high fiber foods like whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, that can reduce magnesium absorption by half. So if you're already low in magnesium and then you eat a ton of fibers, you could make the deficiency worse. So this is why I say not to jump up so much in fiber. And this is also some of the critic, the critique of like, oh, too much fiber is bad. No, too much fiber is not bad. It's you need fiber and you need other things. So when you go from a standard American diet or a Western style diet to quote unquote clean eating overnight, you could feel issues, to be honest. Like you start pounding oatmeal and brown rice and whole wheat bread and beans and vegetables, which are quote unquote healthier, but then your gut isn't ready. And that's where the bloat, the lack, the discomfort, the nutrient depletion comes from. So take that in mind. That's that's the reasonable, nuanced approach. For most people, 20 to 30 grams a day is the sweet spot. Women need a little less, men need a little more, but it's really based on your size and how much you're eating. It's enough to support digestion, stable blood sugars, satiety, gut health. Those are the big buckets. And it's not so much that it causes bloating or mineral malabsorption. Now, I know people that eat 60 or 70, but they've gotten adapted to it. Somebody that really loves apples, you know who you are. She will know who I am. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's fine if you can handle that. Okay. So increase it gradually. If you're at 10 now, you know, add five grams next week every day, and then five a day again, and just get up there. And then the other key here really is getting it from food and getting it from variety, diverse foods. Don't just eat the same high fiber foods every day. Mix it up. Different fibers feed different gut bacteria. Different plant foods have different polyphenols and phytonutrients. So there's a really cool framework that you may have heard of called the 721 rule. It's seven plant colors a week, two seafood servings a week, and one organ meat or nutrient-dense alternative a week. So the colors are just all the different colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, so that you get your phytonutrients. The seafoods would be

Fiber And Gut Health Done Right

Philip Pape 25:56

for omega-3s. So I know a lot of you are taking a fish oil, but really having both, you know, having those fattier fish like salmon, uh, it's a great idea. Selenium, iodine, zinc. You can look up which foods are high in those. If you eat shellfish and things like that, it's great. And then the one organ meat or nutrient-dense alternative, you know, like liver, but a lot of people don't like it. I would say chicken liver is milder than beef liver, but have but eggs, shellfish, fortified dairy are all in that category too. And that's very common for people looking at protein anyway, right? So it's it's that rotation of foods that covers your bases. And when you get this right, when you're in that 20 to 30 gram range and you have a lot of variety, you're probably gonna find things improve. You're gonna have better hunger, better blood sugar, better digestion, and you're just gonna feel better, which then impacts mistake number four, which is macros, macro targets that don't support your training performance. All right, so this is setting macros that look good on paper because you're following some rubric, including ones that I might share as like a starting point, but then they're not optimal for you and your performance. And that's frustrating, right? Because a client will tell me, hey, I'm hitting my macros, my protein's high, my calories are where they need to be, but I don't feel great in the gym. I don't have energy. I'm losing reps. I I don't, you know, I can't recover as well. I'm feeling sore. And then when I dig into it, I'll I say, okay, you know what? You are hitting your macros very consistently, but it's really not best for you right now. We're gonna need to tweak them. And that that's where the self-experimentation and the biofeedback are so important because it isn't, it is, even if it were just about macros, it still has to be the right macros for you. Makes sense, right? Body recomp is highly dependent on your training. You can't lose fat and build muscle without good high-quality training. And that requires energy. Yes, energy. We we just don't talk about this enough for whatever reason. I'm not talking about just calories, although that's important, but even in a fat loss phase where you're in a deficit, you could still optimize your energy. And I'm talking about ATP here. That's the molecule your muscles use to contract adenosine triphosphate, triphosphate, ATP. You can't efficiently create ATP without micronutrients. Oh, okay. So here's the pattern. We're getting back to pat to mistake number one: B vitamins, magnesium, manganese, iron, copper, alpha lipoic acid. You don't, again, you don't have to like be a nutrition scientist. It's just understanding that without the right micronutrients, your body will struggle to turn the food into usable energy, and that impacts your training, right? That's where you can't hit the reps and you feel like you can't progress, you can't push hard enough to create the stimulus, you feel tired in the gym. And then if you're not creating that stimulus, you're not building muscle. If you're not building muscle, then you're just potentially losing weight and not, or you know, best case, holding on to your muscle and never quite able to add more and defeats the whole purpose. And you just feel stuck. And that's why people say, hey, my macros are perfect, but X, you know, I feel weak or whatever the thing is they feel. So that's the bottleneck, right? If training performance is the thing that really pushes the muscle side of the equation, macronutrients are important and we want to fix that. So make sure, first of all, that you're not just hitting protein, carbs, and fats in isolation, that the foods you choose are nutrient-dense. We've already discussed this a lot today. But to break it down by macro, for protein, you want to have a good variety: eggs, red meat, fatty fish, Greek yogurt, not just chicken, breast, and whey. And for those of you who are somehow against red meat or pork or something like that, just for health reasons, okay, I'm taking off the table value-based reasons, the food supply, factory farming, all those moral and ethical issues, because that's outside the scope of what I'm talking about. That's up to you. That's a self-imposed restriction. But from a health perspective, all of these animal products are fantastic, and having a variety of them is great. So, those of you who just eat one type of meat, like chicken breast, heck, try chicken thigh and then expand into some, you know, red meat, turkey, pork, fish, fatty fish, but even white fishes, and then there's Greek yogurt, there's cottage cheese, there's things like that. So that's protein. For carbs, potatoes, love potatoes, fruit, so many fruits. I mean, you could just go to town rotating through all your fruits. Oats, legumes, you know, not just rice, not just bread, quinoa, there's so many things. For fats, oh, there, I mean, pretty much anything you add for a little extra flavor, you know, nuts and seeds, avocado, olive oil, you're probably using with your cooking and through dressings and things like that. Fatty fish, which also checks off the protein, checks off your fats, right? Not just butter and cheese. And I have nothing against butter and cheese. Um, you obviously don't want to be doing bulletproof coffee. Like if you're still doing that, why? You're just consuming tons and tons of saturated fat for no reason whatsoever. It doesn't give you any benefit, and it probably has negatives in terms of risk for cardiovascular disease. And yes, that is well supported by the evidence. So that's the first one. Make sure that the foods you choose, even for the macros, are nutrient dense and have variety. Second, I want you to pay attention to meal timing around your training. This is the big one. For some people, this goes at the top of the list because they are doing pretty well with their food selection, but then they're timing it really poorly. And you don't have to overcomplicate this. If you train fasted

Macros That Power Training

Philip Pape 31:20

or you're on very low carbs and you're always not feeling it, that's probably a signal that your body needs more fuel. Very few people do really well training fasted or on low carbs. That's just the fact of it. Some people might. It's just very rare. And so, a simple pre-workout, my favorite being banana and protein. Banana digests well, it has electrolytes, it's a fruit, has a little bit of fiber, but not too much, lots of nutrients, and then protein, which could be whey protein, could be a food-based protein, depends on how much time you have. It's fine. That can make a massive difference. So that's it for the for the meal timing. Just gonna keep it simple with pre-carbs pre-workout predominantly, even if you can't get the protein. Third, I want you to track your performance in the gym. Are you not doing that, guys? Are you not doing that? If you've listened to the show for a while, you definitely should have already been doing that. Not just your food, but now you have to track your lifts. Are they going up? Are you maintaining reps week to week? Are you hitting your volume targets? Those kinds of things. It doesn't have to be in a spreadsheet form. It could be just the big lifts or the whatever lifts you are focusing on for your program that you are indeed progressing. If performance is dropping, something is off. Nine times out of 10, it's either nutrient nutrient density or recovery, believe it or not. I mean, it's sometimes also the meal timing, like we talked about. And so when you prioritize performance, all these other things we've already talked about on the show today are gonna be important to you because that's you're gonna want to maximize your performance. And, you know, while, yeah, you're gonna lose fat through a calorie deficit, but if you can't train hard enough to create the mechanical tension to hold on to muscle, you're not gonna just lose fat, you're gonna lose muscle. So that's why all this is important. Micronutrients unlock the ability to train hard. Macros fuel the training, and then calories drive the overall outcome. So that's what I mean by bottom up. Even if on a pyramid, calories have the biggest impact, in a sense, when it comes to the outcome, you still need the other things, or the pyramid's gonna be a lot smaller, if that makes sense. All right, let's talk about mistake number five: tracking calories, but ignoring biofeedback. This is a good one. This is a powerful one. I love tracking. I track my own food, I teach clients to track, I tell you guys to track. I now have my own app which tracks in a totally innovative way that works even better when you complement it with your other stuff, especially now that we're gonna be able to pull in data for you guys. Data is incredibly useful, but data without context is useless. Keep that in mind, guys. Data, lots and lots of data is useless without the context to use that data. You can hit your calorie target every single day and still be in a terrible place physiologically if your body is telling you something's wrong. So biofeedback, that's all we mean by that. Bio, biology, feedback is information from your body. Is your robot, it's like your body's report card on whether your nutrition is working. Not just nutrition, but training. But today we're focused on nutrition. So what are those signals? Well, if you're constantly hungry after your meals versus I'm always pretty satisfied, that's a signal. What about digestion? My gut's working fine, or I'm bloated, I'm gassy, I'm constipated, or the opposite problem from constipation that we're not gonna go into graphic detail on. Energy. What about energy? Are you energized throughout the day? Now we all have energy fluxes, or I shouldn't use the word flux in this context. We have energy variation throughout the day, right? Many of us are pretty energized in the morning, not everybody, but some people are dragging by the afternoon. There are going to be subtle differences. The question is to what degree are you lacking energy that you feel you should have? Sleep, oh, huge one. Are you falling asleep easily? Are you staying asleep? Are you waking up a lot during the night? Right? This is more about quality, but of course, quantity matters too. Mood, are you is your mood pretty stable? Are you pretty positive in general? Or are you irritable? You have a lot of anxiety, are you, you know, in a bad mood all the time? And I recognize some of this isn't relative to your, let's say, personality, but I do strongly believe that you can cultivate an optimism bias. You can cultivate a positive psychology by reframing things in a positive way, not delusionally so, but in a what can I do about this? How can we get better and learn from this? Okay, enough about that. What about your libido, your sex drive? Is it there or is it gone? What about your training progression? This is part of biofeedback. You know, are you progressing like we just talked about in the last mistake and maintaining strength or hitting new PRs? Or is it going backward? Are you just stuck? What about your stress response? And I say it that way intentionally, not just stress, period, but your response to stress. How do you handle it? How do you perceive it? Or are you overwhelmed by everything? What about fluid retention? I don't talk about that as much. I

Meal Timing And Performance Tracking

Philip Pape 36:12

do talk about hydration, but are you bloated and puffy? Are you like peeing out water in a normal way and retaining it in a normal way? And the urine looks good and your body feels good from a hydration perspective, right? So if all of this is good, your nutrition's probably good. Who cares what the scale's doing? That's a great place to be, from which you can now do the other things. If your biofeedback, on the other hand, is the opposite, it's terrible, something's wrong with your nutrition. And if it's in the middle, it could be a little this, little that, right? Even if you're hitting your calorie target, even if you're hitting your macros. So the the the kicker, as Chat GPT would say, isn't that funny? Like, we used to say, here's the kicker, like as a just colloquialism. And now I feel like that's one of those things that you know AI would just say. Micronutrient deficiencies will reveal themselves in your biofeedback pretty quickly, even before they show up in, let's say, blood work, which is which is important too, because a lot of you are like, well, I got my labs and magnesium looks good, but this stuff fluctuates all the time. And, you know, if if your sleep isn't great, your stress response isn't great, you've got muscle cramps, you might have low magnesium, you know, migraines too. Some people have migraines because of low magnesium. Uh low zinc might be a sign where you feel it in, you know, you get getting sick, right? And your skin, your sex drive, your recovery, B vitamins usually affect energy, mood digestion. You get the idea, right? I'm not gonna go through all the nutrients today, but it's really important because studies do show that micronutrient insufficiency is a form of metabolic adaptation. Isn't that interesting, right? It's not just that your metabolism slows down because you're dieting, it's because your body is not as efficiently producing energy because it doesn't have those raw materials. And by the way, if you do have good nutrient sufficiency, but then you go into a diet and you cut your calories, you may become nutrient insufficient because your calories are low as well. And you have to be more careful about it. But we look at something like zinc deficiency, that's a big one. It can drop your resting metabolic rate by hundreds of calories per day, right? And and that's just zinc holding you back. Crash dieting itself reduces your metabolic rate by something like 15 or 20% within weeks, and then that just delays your fat loss, right? That that's more on the calorie side, but it's worth mentioning. And this is why I like the bottom-up nutrition approach when we're thinking of body recomposition and we're gonna do fat, use fat loss phases and set ourselves up for success to limit how much your metabolism downregulates, even when your calorie targets, your macro targets are on point. So when it comes to biofeedback, you track it just like anything else. Fitness Lab does this for you every day. At the end of the day, you have an evening reflection and it gives you one to 10 rating scales. What I like about those are they're quick, take like 30 seconds, and it will use that data the next day. You get up and it'll say, Hey, I notice a pattern of stress being pretty high. I'm gonna suggest an activity to help you respond better to your stress. Which which one do you want to do? And it'll do things like that. Anyway, that's just a side tangent. You can do it for yourself with a quick mental check in every day. How did I sleep? How's my digestion? What's my energy like? How's my mood? Am I holding extra water? Things like that. You can do it on paper. You can use, we have a tracker in physique university, it does the same thing. And one or two days, no big deal, that's life. But if multiple signals are consistently poor for at least, let's say, a week or more, right? Maybe two weeks or more, something needs to change. Maybe you need more carbs for your training and your sleep and your stress. Maybe you need more fiber for your digestion and your hunger. Maybe you need more nutrient dense foods. You probably do. We all do for every reason we talked about in the show, including energy and your metabolism. Maybe you just need a diet break to get everything back to homeostasis. Listen to your body, guys. It's always giving you real time feedback about. Whether your nutrition is working. So use it. Use it. This is not about weight loss and getting skinny. No. It's about feeling

Biofeedback Over Blind Tracking

Philip Pape 40:10

great, performing our best, having a good sex drive, being strong, having muscle, living a long, vibrant life. Isn't it? Isn't it? And so when you have good biofeedback, solid training, smart nutrition management across all three things we talked about today, body recomp is going to happen because now your physiology is super aligned with what you're doing. So we've covered the five mistakes. Now I want to give you a practical framework real quick. You could start using today. I call it the bottom-up recomp plate. This is a nutrition tip. Yes, from me. I know I don't do this a lot. Every meal, every day, includes three things: a micronutrient anchor, a protein anchor, and a carb or fat that supports your training. So the micronutrient anchor, I usually simplify this to just fiber, but I'm expanding that a little today. Anything that brings you vitamins, minerals, fiber, phytonutrients. And so that includes fruits, vegetables, legumes, root vegetables, whole grains, eggs, dairy, nuts, seeds, shellfish. All right. I definitely think a few of those should definitely be fiber focused, but think of it in terms of micronutrients. The protein anchor, animal or high-quality plant protein, if you don't need animal products, eggs, meat, fish, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, tofu, tempeh, legumes, you know the drill. And then a carb or fat that supports your training. Notice I don't say both. In general, if you're focused on hitting macros, you're going to put them in anyway. And so this is again more of the type you select. Is it a starchy carb like potatoes, rice, oats, a fat source like avocado or nuts or olive oil, or both? And that's it. Three components per meal: micronutrient, protein, and carb or fat. It's a framework you can use. Take it or leave it. Okay. Maybe it's too much for you right now. Maybe you do it for one meal a day. And then at the weekly level, you kind of want to look back at your food log and ask yourself, did I have enough color? Did I have seafood? And did I have nutrient dense foods? So all the colors, the seven colors, the two seafoods, the one nutrient dense food. Don't overthink it. If you're if you're close enough, that's great. If you're far from it, that gives you data point. So try this for just one week and track your biofeedback alongside it, see how you feel. That's kind of the input output. The input is the plate, the food, the output is the biofeedback. And then I think you're gonna be surprised if you actually take action on this. So let's just recap the five mistakes real quick. Mistake number one, thinking calories and macros matter more than micros. They don't. Micros are the operating system without them. Nothing works as efficiently. Mistake number two, doing flexible dieting without nutrient anchors. Okay, it's not if it fits your macros. You have to have the diversity in the nutrients in there. Mistake number three is mismanaging fiber. Too little is usually the issue, but too much can cause problems, especially if you ramp up. Aim for around 20 to 30 grams per day with tons of variety. Mistake number four, setting macro targets that don't support your training performance. Your training is the engine of all of this. Fuel it properly. Mistake number five is tracking calories but ignoring biofeedback. Your body is giving you tons of amazing real-time feedback that you should be using. So micronutrients, macros, and calories, bottom up. When you do it in that order, everything will become easier. Hunger will be more manageable. Your training should improve. You should have faster recovery and get what you want. If you want to help building this system for yourself without having to think too much about it, with a lot less stress, my app, Fitness Lab, makes it easy. The app walks you through this approach we talked about today. It analyzes your meal patterns. You just upload a photo, that's all you have to do. You don't even have to log it or look it up in a database. Just take a photo and it's gonna identify where you're missing nutrient density. It's also gonna adapt your training based on your biofeedback as well as your nutrition. It's gonna give you conversational coaching that feels like having Coach Phillip in your pocket. It's available now, it's on iPhone, it should be on Android as well. If not, it will be very soon. It should have the Apple Health integration turned on. Again, I'm saying all shoulds because I'm recording these before my surgery, but these are the timelines. So don't hold me to it. But all of these things are gonna be out shortly, if not already. It will be 20% off through the end of the year, starting December 17th through January 2nd. But if you're listening to this before that, use the link in the show notes. It's a secret link to get you the 20% off now ahead of time. And you can take advantage of that. Use the link in the show notes. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, build from the bottom up, and your body will cooperate. This is Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.