The Calorie Deficit Paradox

Philip Pape 0:02

You cannot be in a true calorie deficit and still fail to lose body fat over time. It's physiologically impossible. So if you're convinced you're eating less than you're burning and nothing's happening, one of three things is going on. Either you're not actually in the deficit you think you are, you are losing fat but the scale's hiding it, or your deficit disappeared because your body adapted. Today we're identifying exactly which bucket you're in, why it matters, and the specific fix for your situation. 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 tackling one of those very frustrating statements that I hear often. Quote, I am in a calorie deficit, but I'm not losing weight. This phrase gets thrown around all the time on social media, and it creates confusion because on the surface, it seems to defy basic physics. But what is actually true is that you cannot maintain a genuine calorie deficit and not lose fat. It's impossible. And the problem isn't that thermodynamics suddenly stops working. It's that somewhere in the chain from what you think you're eating to what your body is doing, there is a disconnect. When someone tells me they're in a deficit but not losing weight, I approach it like a detective. I want to debug the system for you. I want to trace the inputs. I want to look at the outputs. I want to find where the data doesn't match reality because that's going to give you the power you need to push through and to break through that issue. And then the fix becomes obvious. So today we're going to systematically work through each scenario so you can identify yours and then exactly what to do about it. And I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to show you a simple weekly calorie strategy that will let you enjoy your weekends and make fat loss so much easier. So again, I'll share that at the end of the episode. All right, when someone says that I'm in a calorie deficit and not losing weight, they're making a claim about energy balance. And I love how people on social media they make assumptions or they immediately go to the gaslighting, like, well, you're not tracking your food and you're not actually eating the calories you think you're eating. And I'm gonna give you more credit than that. I'm gonna give you credit as an intelligent person who has thought through this at least to some extent. Maybe you've listened to this show, maybe you haven't, but you know that there's more nuance to any of these things. And after working with hundreds of people stuck at this kind of plateau, I found that every single case seems to fall into one of three buckets. Just three buckets. Okay, I'm gonna simplify this for you today. And they are mutually exclusive. So you're probably in one of them, not multiple. And even if there is some overlap, focusing on the biggest one for you right now is probably gonna help you get unstuck. So bucket one, and we're gonna go into these in detail, but just at a high level, bucket one is that the claimed deficit doesn't actually exist, right? The numbers you think you real aren't think are real are not matching reality. And it's not about, again, saying that it's your fault. It's more of an accuracy issue that we're gonna get into. Bucket two is that the deficit is real and fat loss is happening, but you may not think it's happening. It may be masked by other things. And then bucket three is that you were in a deficit, but the deficit has disappeared because you've adapted and your expenditure has reduced to match your intake. And that's it. Those are the three buckets. But obviously, there's a lot of detail under the surface. So everyone who says I'm in a deficit but not losing weight is probably in one of these. No one person is maintaining a true deficit long term without losing fat. That's impossible. And that's empowering as well. So that's a good thing to know. And you know what? Let's just before I continue, the extreme of this would be if you just stopped eating altogether, where you're absolutely in a deficit and you starve yourself, you would eventually die. Now, I hate to I hate to use an extreme like that, but it's it's evidence, I guess, uh that that thermodynamics exists between where you are now and where the extreme is, and we're trying to find that middle ground that actually works for you. So let's work through each of the three buckets, and we're gonna start with the most common one where probably 70 to 80% of people land. And this is basically that you think you're in a deficit and you're just not in a deficit. And it's

Reason #1: Tracking Accuracy

Philip Pape 4:31

not about your willpower, you're not trying hard enough. It's really measurement precision, and it's also a lot of human psychology around food tracking. The average person is going to underestimate their calorie intake a lot, 20 to 40%. And I a long time ago, I learned that even nutrition experts, nutritionists, dietitians, people who've tracked for a long time, if they were to just estimate on their own, they would still be off by 20%, even with lots and lots of training. And that's well documented in the research. It's not that you're intentionally lying to yourself, it's just the cumulative effect of tracking errors that add up and just the human's brain's inability to estimate this stuff. So even if you are logging calories, but you're not, say, weighing your food, or you know, if you're estimating, or you are using, let's say, cups and teaspoons and tablespoons instead of grams, you are logging what you think you're eating, but your intake is higher. And there's a lot of ways that this happens. Even when you're tracking with something like macrofactor, chronometer, whatever, you know, if you don't weigh the peanut butter, but instead you use a spoon and you call it a tablespoon, but it ends up being two tablespoons, right? Or if you put oil in the pan to hook up some vegetables and you eyeball it, or here's a mistake I see people make the spray oil will say zero calories because it falls under the threshold for rounding errors. But if you use enough of it, you actually have 20, 30, 40 calories. Or you graze or you eat handfuls of this or that throughout the day, handful of almonds here, a bite of your kid's plate over here, or you forgot the third glass of wine. You get what I'm saying, right? And this is not, again, this is not that we're doing it intentionally. This is something we all do, and it's easy to get wrapped up in it. And then there's an error that accumulates. And if it's like a 50 calorie day error, that's not a big deal. But if it's five or six hundred calories, which I have seen a lot with folks, here's another example. You do log, you do weigh, but the entry that you select in your food app is not the right entry. You selected, let's say, a turkey burrito instead of a chorizo burrito. And maybe that's too far off, but something close to that where there's a lot more fat in what you're actually eating than what you actually than what you logged. Or you do a raw versus cooked version or what have you. And I see this all the time. And then what happens is you cut is you copy and paste and you just keep propounding the error over time. And so you might be off by a few thousand calories for the week, right? And a fat, a fat's worth of energy, a pound of fat's worth of energy is 3,500 calories. So if you're off by, you know, half of that for the week, that's a half pound that you're off, where if you thought you were at maintenance, you're actually gaining a half pound. Or if you thought you were in a half pound deficit, you're just maintaining. So it can easily happen to any of us, to the best of us. Okay. And if you add in the fact that most people also overestimate how much how many calories are burning. And if they're not using something like Macrofactor, they're just thinking they're they're using estimators or calculators, or they think they burn more than they are. And maybe you eat back some of those calories, even, which is an awful thing to do. I would never recommend that. But a lot of people are in that mindset of like, oh, I just burned 500 calories according to the treadmill machine in the gym. And so I can eat that 500 calories, but you're actually compensating for a lot of that activity and not burning nearly as much as it says. At the end of the day, what matters is your total calories for the day, right? Not all these little activity things that you have going on. And then the airs, the air adds up on that side as well. And I know some apps, I think like MyFitnessPanel and others, actually allow you to eat back your activity, which is, again, a terrible, terrible precedent because they shouldn't be linked. The two things shouldn't have anything to do with each other. I do get questions all the time, like, does my app use activity to calculate your calories? No, because you don't want it to. All you want to do is say, hey, am I gaining weight or am I losing weight over time? Or fat, I should say, but scale weight is the easiest way to tell. Am I gaining or losing over time? If so, I'm either in a surplus or deficit, and now we could adjust how much we eat accordingly. So, how do you know if you're in bucket one? Well, you're gonna have to audit your tracking and think about the things I've just mentioned today. Are you weighing and measuring everything? I would do that. Weigh and measure everything with grams on a scale. Don't use ounces, don't use tablespoons, don't use cups, just use a food scale, log everything, including if it's a spray oil, condiments, every bite that goes in your mouth. And what's what's nice about this is sometimes it will get you into an awareness mode where, well, let's say you have kids and you tend to graze and you're thinking, I need to log this, you're gonna start either not eating those extra things because you really realize you don't need them, or you'll put them in a little bowl and you'll log them and then you'll start controlling your portions as well. Same thing, you know, if you have alcohol, if you have just random snacks. So that's the first thing is to really audit and start weighing and measuring everything if you're not already doing that. I'm also as part of that audit as you weigh and measure and then log it, is double check the entries in your food app to make sure it passes the sniff test. You know, reach out, use AI, use my app, go to our our Facebook group and just ask the question like, does this make sense? So that's the first thing is really just auditing all of that for at least seven days, if not two weeks. The second thing is don't use exercise calories from wearables at all as part of this whole calculation. Okay, first of all, the error is tremendously large, up to 80 or 90%. So it's not even trustworthy data, but also it's not something you eat back anyway, and it shouldn't be part of that connection. The third thing is I want you to be tracking your weight every day and looking at the average over time. I like a 20-day moving average, which takes three weeks to get to, but even after a week or two, if you are truly not actually dropping body fat or dropping even scale weight over time, okay, not the day-to-day. It's gonna go up and down a lot, but over time, then you aren't in a deficit. That's just the fact of it. That's more like your maintenance. Okay. So the fix for bucket one is straightforward. Tighten your tracking precision, stop guessing things, guessing, double check, you know, what you're logging, be honest about what you put in your mouth and track everything. Because if you if you don't track certain things, that's the problem right there. And a lot of you do that, I know, uh, including your weekends, including your alcohol, all this stuff. And just double check it all. And if you find out that, hey, I've been tracking 1800 calories a day on average, and now I double checked everything, and it's guess what? It's still 1800 a day on average, then that's not your issue. The issue isn't the calories itself, but what but what that lets you do is confirm, oh, I'm tracking 1800 calories and I'm not losing or gaining weight. So I actually am burning 1800 calories then, right? And now you know to go in a deficit, you would just have to eat less than that. All right, bucket two, so that's bucket one. Bucket two, let's say that you are tracking accurately and all that's good. You've done the audit, your numbers are tight, and you now know that to be in a deficit, you have to eat, you know, 300 calories less than that maintenance value. And or let's say 500 calories if you want to lose a pound a week, but the scale isn't moving. All right, this is bucket two, where you are in a deficit and fat loss may be happening, but it's being massed. Now, when I say the scale isn't moving, I'm talking short term, okay, because over a three or longer week period, it will be dropping by a pound a week on average if you're in a 500-calorie deficit, going back to bucket one, or just the general principle of this episode. What I'm talking about here is in the short term, we get a lot of issues that are happening with water retention. Water retention can mask as many as two to four pounds of fat loss. If you're a woman, hormonal fluctuations during your cycle can swing a water weight by five pounds or more. If you started a new training program or you increased your volume, your muscles are holding water and glycogen for recovery. If you had a high sodium meal, if you're stressed and your cortisol's up, if you didn't sleep well, if you're dehydrated, all of these drive water retention that hides fat loss on the scale. So over two weeks, let's say you might have legitimately lost two pounds of fat, but then you're holding three pounds of extra water and the scale shows a one-pound gain, you think nothing's working, but it is, and it just isn't showing up yet. So this is more of a time factor. Okay. Now, that's that's just if you were purely losing fat. Now, body comp recomposition is the other major factor as part of this bucket because you know, if you're lifting weights, you're eating enough protein, especially if you're newer to training or you're really doing this right for the first time with progressive overload, you can simultaneously lose fat and gain muscle. And again, the scale's not gonna move. So, what's weird here is that you may start to eat less to try to induce, you know, you're you're like, here's my maintenance, I'm gonna eat less to lose fat. But then you also start training at the same time, and now you start to build muscle. The muscle offsets the fat loss, the scale doesn't move. That's super frustrating because you're looking at the scale, you're like, okay, this Phillips line, like energy balance doesn't work. But what what you have to do here now is look at other things. How do you your clothes fit? Is your waist going down? Is your strength going up? Are you able to infer your body fat percentage from these to see that it's actually dropping even while the scale stays the same? And I have this challenge with a lot of clients who come to me and they want to lose weight, they want to lose that 20 pounds. And at the end of four or six months working together, they've lost, let's say, 14 pounds, but it looks like, but they've actually gained like five or six pounds of muscle. And so they've actually dropped 20 pounds of fat, but they've gained five or six pounds of muscle. So their net loss is only 14.

Reason #2: Body Recomp

Philip Pape 14:00

But they're thrilled because they look great, they feel great, they're stronger. That's the whole point of not being fixated on the scale because you're gonna miss all of those wonderful wins. Now, how do you know if you're in this bucket? Well, first you've got to be tracking things beyond the scale. You've got to take your body circumference measurements, take your photos, track your strength. If all of these are improving, but the scale is flat, then you're probably in a recomp phase and we're not as worried about the calorie deficit, at least right now. Now, this is usually not gonna happen to such an extreme that you just directly offset fat and muscle. If you're in a big enough deficit, you should still have a gradual trend down, but it might appear like you're not burning as many calories because your scale is being offset, and then eventually you should break through that over time as your body adapts to that and you no longer have such massive muscle gains and the scale will start dropping. Now, also you want to look at this over time. You want to look at your trend over four or six weeks, not day to day, and not even over, say, two weeks. We really have to go past that. And this all assumes that you've done your audit from bucket one, and now you're focused on, okay, over time, is this actually working? Because the water fluctuations are gonna smooth out, and the trend will show fat loss if you're in fat loss. And it might come in weird bursts. You might have a drop of like three pounds one week and then it flatlines for two weeks and then drops again. The third thing here is your biofeedback because the biofeedback can change the whole equation of how many calories you're burning and how your body utilizes your nutrients. Are you recovering well? Is your energy stable? Are you sleeping okay? If yes, you're probably in a legitimate deficit. You just need the patience for the scale to catch up. But if not, any one of those things could have just slowed you down, which is actually gonna be related more to bucket three, we're gonna get to in a second. So the fix for bucket two is guess what? It's patience and it's better metrics, like more metrics. Something that, for example, Fitness Lab can help you with. That's my app. I'm always gonna plug it because I've designed it with all these things in mind. And I think it could be really helpful for you if you're looking to do that. There's a weekly check-in where you calculate and enter these things. And then it helps you figure out, okay, this is what's really happening. Like, hey, your scale might be flat for the last couple of weeks, but guess what? Your waste has gone down an inch. That's awesome. Like that's what you want. So stop obsessing over the daily scale weight, even though you want to track it and you want to track the trend of the weight, and then trust the process, keep doing what you're doing, keep lifting, getting your protein, and give it like four to six weeks, and the scale will reflect what's happening underneath. All right, just a quick reminder. I want you to stick around to the end because I've got a really practical tip on how to build weekend flexibility into your deficit, which I know is one of the biggest challenges for many of you. That way you don't have to white knuckle it. It's one of the most powerful tools that I've found people are using to make their fat loss phase so much easier so they can stick with it. All right, bucket three. This is this is where things get interesting from a physiological perspective, right? What's happening in your body? Let's say you were in a real deficit, you were losing fat, the scale was moving, but now you hit a plateau. It's stalled for several weeks, and nothing is budging despite all the other things we talked about being solid, right? You're adhering to everything, you're tracking everything, and you know, lifts are going up, all of that. Well, this is probably adaptation going on, metabolic adaptation, which we've talked about on the show quite a few times, and it often gets misconstrued, but it's a completely normal thing. Your body doesn't want to lose fat, it wants to hold on to fat because it's a nice reserve of energy. It's stored energy, and your body's directive in existence is to survive, right? You're a you're a living being who wants to survive. So when you reduce food intake, when you increase energy demand with your training, with your walking, with everything else, your body essentially fights back by compensating, by reducing your energy expenditure. It sucks, right? Because it's like just when you're trying to take advantage of energy balance, your body is gonna make it harder. Well, it does this through a combination of mechanisms. One is the fact that you're just losing weight. When you lose weight, your basal metabolic rate, your BMR, right, that's like your resting or your baseline metabolism that represents roughly two-thirds of your metabolism every day. It's just gonna be

Reason #3: Metabolic Adaptation

Philip Pape 18:15

lower because you need fewer calories just to exist. It's it's it's one of those like harsh realities of if you lose 20 pounds and now you're gonna be lighter for the rest of your life, you're just gonna burn slightly few calories from that. Beyond that, however, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, your neat, also drops unconsciously. You fidget less, you might make unconscious choices, like taking the elevator instead of the stairs because you feel a little more tired. Maybe you sit more, maybe you move less throughout the day without realizing it. And a lot of people argue this and like, well, but I increased my step count, right? I increase my step count. The step count is a pretty good proxy, but it doesn't necessarily capture everything. It's pretty good, though. I mean, it is pretty good. So I definitely agree with that strategy, but there's so many other ways internally, even within your body, where you're just doing less. You're that's so that's the second one. Now, your body also becomes more efficient at exercise, at training, right? And this happens in general. This happens in general, but just keep in mind that as you're getting into a routine, if you're also coinciding that with fat loss, you may start burning a fewer calories because you've adapted to the moving movement pattern. Now, this is not an excuse to hop around and to constantly change the way you move. It is an interesting phenomenon though, because there are things like if you're doing a little extra cardio, I I've talked before, I think Brian Borstein introduced this concept of you know rotating through some different modalities of cardio to make your body a little bit less efficient so it burns a few more calories. I don't know how big of an impact that has, but it's an interesting thought. And then there's the fact, and this is the big one prolonged dieting, especially aggressive dieting, can suppress your thyroid function. It reduces your sex hormones, it increases your cortisol, it of course affects your hunger hormones as well. But all of those, the Thyroid, the reproductive hormones, and your cortisol, this is going to reduce your metabolic rate. And this could be the biggest factor for a lot of people, especially if it's a very aggressive diet. And the result is that the deficit you had four weeks ago when you started doesn't exist anymore because your calorie intake is the same, but your expenditure has dropped to match it. And now you're at a new maintenance level and you haven't changed your diet or training. And it's awful. I know people don't like it. It's one of those things you have to deal with and understand. But when you understand it, then you can make a choice, a fork in the road, let's say. So how do you know if you're in this bucket? Well, the first way you know is you have a history of fat loss. You know, the last few weeks, let's say, I don't mean like years ago, the last few weeks you've been losing fat, but then it's stalled for a few weeks and you haven't really changed anything. Like biofeedback's good, everything's the same, right? That's a good way to know. Secondly, your biofeedback is off. So this is where your biofeedback is the effect of the diet, not the cause. In other words, your diet itself is now making you a little more tired, giving you lower energy, maybe interfering with your sleep a bit. It's causing you to lose some absolute strength in the gym. Maybe you're feeling more cold. I find this when I'm dieting, I'm cold, right? I don't, I'm hot when I'm eating in a surplus and I'm colder when I'm not. And and so that's a really good sign of adaptation. And third, your activity levels have dropped without you noticing, and your step count might be down if you're not intentionally trying to keep it up. The fix for so those are three things, right? That you can tell. Really, hunger is is probably one of the biggest ones for for many. The fix for this is to get back to the deficit you need to be at. But the problem is, how do you do that? Do you do it by eating even less? Well, maybe, maybe, if you're not already in an aggressive deficit, if you're, let's say, 300 calorie deficit and you increase it to 500 or 600, or you're already at five or six and you go to seven. As long as you're not going past the 1% body weight per week, you might be okay eating less, depending on where the total calories are. And that depends on your metabolism. Because if you're down at like 800 calories, that could be a problem in general for anyone. But if you're still up at like 1800, it may not be a big deal. However, for a lot of people, eating less is gonna dig you deeper into adaptation and make it go faster. So I would say you have two primary options here besides that. The first one is just take a diet break, raise your calories back up to maintenance for one to two weeks, let your metabolism recover, your hormones normalize somewhat. Again, it's not maybe not all the way. Your neat might come back up, you're just gonna feel better, and then you go back into a deficit. Okay. Now, people are like, people, people think this is magic. It's not magic. It's not like you're gonna raise your whole metabolism, but psychologically you're gonna help yourself out. And then there will be some physiological recovery that probably allows you to, you know, push a little bit further into your deficit when you get back to it. Option two is to increase your activity. And I always hesitate on this one because there's some of you out there where you're already doing a lot and you're trying to do a lot of cardio and running and hiking and just tons and tons of activity, especially in fat loss. And that could be a problem and make it harder and actually make you compensate, make you more stress. I'm talking about adding some more steps. Let's say two to three thousand steps a day. So if you're getting eight, go to 10. If you're getting 10, go to 12. That can be really helpful. That can burn an extra 50, 100, 150 calories a day, which could be just enough to take the edge off and help you get back into that deficit. So walking more, moving more, getting off your chair more, this is gonna increase your expenditure without adding stress. Now, you can also optimize recovery. If your biofeedback is low because it's just on you, right? Remember, I mentioned that biofeedback could be an effect, but it could also be a cause. If it's the cause, like you're just not sleeping enough, or you don't have a good sleep ritual, or are not managing or reacting to stress very well, these are the kind of things that can restore some of that energy, right? And hormonal balance and your improve your metabolic rate. So the key here for bucket three is it's not permanent damage. It's not a broken metabolism. It is a normal adaptive response that can be recovered by removing the stressor, which is chronic dieting and restoring homeostasis equilibrium. And if you don't want to remove it because you want to keep losing fat, that is a trade-off you make. And then you have to take into account the various factors we just discussed.

Bonus: Simple Calorie Strategy for Weekend Flexibility

Philip Pape 24:28

Now, if you're trying to figure out which bucket you're in and you want some coaching in your pocket that adapts to your real life and all these things, check out my lab, my app called Fitness Lab. It's an AI-powered coaching app. It's trained on all my content. Almost it's trained on my personality, honestly. And it helps you navigate fat loss without guessing on a daily basis. So whatever's happening in your life, you can talk to it and say, this is what's happening, and it's gonna adjust. I just had surgery and I told the app, hey, I'm having surgery. And every day after surgery, it's focused on recovery and like taking things in just the right measure to get back to it. So right now through January 2nd, you can get 20% off at wits and weights.com slash app. You just go straight to that link and the discount's gonna be there. It's a holiday new year promotion, wits and weights.com slash app. And with Fitness Lab, you get personalized guidance on everything, on your nutrition, your training, your recovery, mindset, sleep, stress, movement. You can tell it what you need and it will create new activities for what you need. It is incredible, all in one place, like having a coach in your pocket for far less, who actually understands your schedule, your lifestyle, your goals, totally on demand. Go to witsandweights.com slash app. All right, before I let you go, I promised you that simple weekly calorie strategy to give you weekend freedom without killing your deficit, without killing your deficit. And I want to show you how this works. Instead of trying to hit the exact same calorie target every single day, think in terms of weekly averages. So let's say your daily deficit target, okay, your target is 2,000 calories. I don't care what the deficit is, but that's your target. And so that's 14,000 calories for the week. Now, the strategy I recommend starting with is called a weekend diet. You simply eat slightly lower Monday through Friday. So maybe you're eating 1,850 calories instead of 2,000. That's 150 calories per day for five days that you're effectively banking up for the weekends. And that gives you 750 calories for the weekend. And then you split that across Saturday and Sunday, and now you've got an extra 375 calories each day to enjoy your meals out. You know, if you enjoy drinking, whatever makes your weekend feel normal to you while staying in your deficit. An alternative for this is to go all the way to maintenance calories on the weekend and then see how many calories are left and distribute those across five days. This is a little bit more extreme strategy, but it actually might feel less extreme because you are totally refueling on the weekend. So either of those strategies can work. You'll still be at your target for the week, which in this example was, for example, 14,000 calories. There's a little math to be done, but it's not that big a deal. You figure out what you want on the weekends, you give the rest of the weekdays. And I actually covered the weekend diet strategy in episode 324, where you can learn all about this. Because I don't think flexibility has to mean that you have a cheap meal or you sabotage yourself or you make it unfettered access to food. You actually plan it in. And again, if you want personalized guidance on implementing strategies like this, along with training, recovery, everything else, check out Fitness Lab at wits and weights.com slash app. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your body isn't lying to you, but your assumptions might be. So figure out which of the three buckets you're in, and you'll be successful. This is Philip Payne, and you're listening to Wits and Weights. I'll talk to you next time.