Why Diets Fail Long Term

Philip Pape 0:00

Here's what nobody talks about when it comes to fat loss. Losing weight is easy, easier for some than others, but keeping off the weight is where everyone fails. And then within losing weight, losing the right weight, body fat and not muscle, while actually keeping those results long term, very few people get that right, in my experience. And I think it's because most fat loss approaches have two fatal flaws built in from the start. The first one is there's no clear finish line, no end date, no way to exit out of the end of the fat loss phase. That's the first one. And secondly, is the process itself doesn't optimally protect muscle and lose fat. I want you to think about when you started your last diet. Did you know when it would end? Did you have a clear plan, not a kind of quick fix or an event to shoot for, but an actual planned out strategy where you would be successful in this many weeks or this many months? Or were you just trying to eat healthy or eat clean, be good, you know, track your food, hope that it worked out, diet indefinitely. You know, I've talked to people who've diet been dieting for a year or more, and I wonder what's going on because is your goal trying to hit a number on the scale? Is it to go until you're tired of it? Is it until life gets busy and you drift back to old habits and you're thinking that most of the time I need to be losing weight? And the problem is that is not a plan, right? That is just hope. And we know that hope is not a strategy. So when there's no defined endpoint, no exit strategy, and no way to sustain your results, two things end up happening.

The Missing Finish Line Problem

Philip Pape 1:39

The first one is you have no urgency. And I don't want to confuse urgency with impatience. It's a subtle difference. You have no deadline built in by reverse engineering your strategy, which means you don't have the right pressure, which means it's easy to let things slide. And I know that sounds counterintuitive because we don't want to rush into this, but there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. And second, and this is the bigger one, is you have no transition plan because if you don't know when and how the diet ends and you come out of it, and if you're afraid of gaining fat or gaining weight afterward, you definitely don't know what comes after. It adds even more uncertainty to the process. So when you finally do then stop dieting, which you've already been doing kind of slap dash, right? Whether you do it by choice or you're burned out, you don't have a system to maintain those results. You go back to eating the way you ate before, especially if you're doing something like a keto diet or something restrictive where you know you can't do that forever. So you're not sure what to go back to because that didn't really work before, because quote unquote normal eating is what got you here in the first place. And I would say most diets that I see with people fall into one of two camps that satisfy these criteria we talked about. The first one is, of course, the crash diet. This is the aggressive, it's fast, it's unsustainable. And remember, we're talking about a sense of urgency, but that doesn't mean going so quickly that you have to white knuckle through a few weeks, you lose a bunch of water weight, probably not very much fat, maybe you lose some muscle, muscle, and then you crash and burn and you rebound

Urgency Versus Impatience

Philip Pape 3:20

even harder. Maybe binge and restrict cycles are the result. You often end up worse than where you started because you're probably gaining more fat back and not any muscle. And because you cut so hard, you know, your hormones, your metabolism are downregulated and it's a longer recovery, right? So now your metabolism's a little bit slower than it was, you have less muscle, you look softer, even at the same weight. Sound like a familiar story. That's the first camp. The second camp is the vague lifestyle change. Now, this is a lot of you who probably listen to podcasts and follow more evidence-based advice and are trying to do this thing the right way. I'm increasing my protein, I'm strength training, et cetera, but there's no structure, there's no timeline, there's no measurable targets, you're not measuring or tracking the right things. Maybe you're eating a little bit quote unquote better, whatever that means to you, and the results come in a little bit slowly or more slowly than you'd like, and you lose motivation. And eventually you're not really dieting anymore. You're just kind of eating and thinking this should work and it's not working, your body's not changing, and it's super frustrated. And then you try to hit it hard on another diet, and it just doesn't work even worse, right? If that makes sense. Now, what these have in common is that there is no intentional strategy or endpoint, there's no plan for afterward, and there's not a process along the way that helps you lose body fat efficiently while holding on to or gaining muscle, right? So the diet itself was set up to fail from day one because it was never designed to end well. And this goes for trying to compress your diet into something really fast or do like a rapid fat loss phase, but not doing it well, or trying to go longer, like three, four, five months and stretch it out and then getting fatigue along the way. So, for what I I found works for a lot of people, especially those of us older, over 40, you know, been through dieting many, many times, is having a strategic, moderately aggressive timeline. Not too fast, where it's this quick crash diet, not too slow, where you build up fatigue over time and the results are slow to come. So it creates a uh dissonance with your, you know, cognitive dissonance, but sustainable enough to finish, but aggressive enough to see results. Kind of like that Goldilocks zone of a calorie deficit. And I don't see a lot of people doing this. I really don't. I see a lot of people going on the the two other extremes. And I love to base a diet on your body weight, not on percent calorie deficit, not on a calculator, right? It's based on your body, your body weight, and your metabolism, where you're going somewhere between 0.6 and 1% of your body

Two Failing Camps Of Dieting

Philip Pape 6:01

weight a week, maybe a little higher if you have a higher metabolism, and maybe on the lower end if you kind of struggle with this in the past. And of course, because this includes, you know, strength training and eating enough protein, you're losing fat, you're not losing muscle. You're holding on to the muscle, so you actually look better at the end, not just smaller, and you're happy about it because the protocol has a defined endpoint. In my opinion, six weeks is a good period for this. Okay, you might have heard it called a mini-cut. You know when it starts, you know what it ends, you have checkpoints, it's not too long, you can go a little bit aggressively, and you can really hone in those six weeks on specific things to focus on. I think though, the piece that changes everything for you guys is the exit strategy. Okay, this is honestly, if I could only talk about how do you maintain results, I think that would help a lot of people. You know, most programs, most diets, they're designed with a start and finish, and then you're done, and then here you go. Congratulations, you're on your own, good luck. Which is kind of insane because it doesn't solve the actual problem that most of us have. Even if you lost weight the quote unquote wrong way and lost some muscle along the way, if you could at least maintain that, you'd be far better off than most people, right? Than 95% of people, as we mentioned before. How you end a fat loss phase determines whether you keep the results or give them all back, right? So it's not just the process, but how you end it as well. But the process itself feeds into how you end it. So the protocol I tend to teach includes what I call the recovery diet. I didn't make up that term, but I prefer recovery diet versus a reverse diet. A recovery diet is just how you transition out of a deficit and back to your current maintenance as quickly as possible, but without rebounding or overshooting and gaining extra weight or fat. You don't want to slowly trickle calories back over months because that will take too long to recover from and that will feel like you're in a diet. You all you instead move to maintenance and very intentionally. You accept that there's gonna be a small bump in water weight, but then you understand how to like read the data and level out and stabilize that weight once you get there. And so you kind of have to advance plan for that, right? If if you're gonna lose eight to 12 pounds of fat and keep it off, you have to understand how that curve kind of works. You have to understand the numbers so that you can reverse engineer your system to work from the beginning and then you just execute it and then see what your data and your body is telling you about the reality of it, right? Because you may only be able to lose six or seven pounds, but you do it the right way. Or you may get lucky and be a more higher responder and you you lose, you know, 15, 20 pounds, whatever. So, having said all that, if you're seeing this on Sunday or Monday in January, this Tuesday, January 20th at noon Eastern, I'm gonna host a live workshop called Get Lean in 45 Days, where I'm going to walk you through this entire protocol and you're gonna get a complete guide. Okay, it's it's it's many, I don't even want to say how many pages it is, it might scare you, but it has all the ways to calculate this, how to walk through week by week. It has a training template called Chisel that I built specifically for fat loss so that you can hold on to your muscle and know exactly what to do if you're not sure how to train. We have some refeed protocols in there that give you a little more flexibility and help you, you know, uh shorten or lengthen the diet as needed. And of course, a full exit strategy. How do we maintain the results so we don't rebound? As a little bonus, a surprise, we decided this week we're gonna create, we already did create an eight-week guided course that goes along with this fat loss

The Goldilocks Deficit Strategy

Philip Pape 9:45

phase, where the first week is your setup, then you have the six weeks of fat loss and then coming out and maintaining your results. And so that's gonna help you implement the information as well. If you're not here to do the work, if you're not here to lose the fat the right way, then it's not for you. But if you are, if you're ready to get it done and week by week execute the protocol with structure and support given to you so you can follow through and transition out successfully, then it's definitely for you. All right. And you're gonna get all the support to go along with it. So to check that out, go to live.wits and weights.com. I'm gonna see you Tuesday at noon Eastern. If you can't make it, we're gonna have a replay built in. Even if you join the next day or the week after that, you can get access to the replay, the guide, and the course. No matter when you join, you'll get access to all of those. If you're losing the same 10 pounds over and over again and you're just sick of it, if you're tired of that, it's the approach. We can do it the right way together. Let's fix it together. Go to live.witsandweights.com. That's live.witsandweights.com for the get lean in 45 days workshop, plus access to the course. I'll see you there on Tuesday. Live.witsandweights.com.