The cycle, PMS, and weight loss question

Philip Pape 0:00

Ladies, I've been getting a lot of questions about whether you should cycle sync your diet or training and how to deal with your period and PMS when it comes to things like cravings and hunger when you're trying to lose fat. I've also heard, hey, I get a lot of fluctuations in the scale due to water weight and maybe some other things. Today, I'm covering the real numbers behind cycle-related weight swings. Why cycle sinking has almost no real-world evidence in the literature, and a measurement and nutrition framework that does work, whether your cycle is predictable or completely all over the place. And if you're in perimenopause, that last part is for you. Your menstrual cycle, your weight, and how to actually lose fat when your body seems to be working against you every few weeks. Now, I'm recording this because over half the women I work with report hormonal concerns as a major barrier to seeing results. And the advice that they've gotten falls into two camps, both of which are woefully incomplete. And we're gonna fix that today on Wits and Weights. Stick around to the very end because after the episode wraps up, I'm going to share a one meal change that can blunt your cravings before they start, whether it's from PMS, a bad sleep night, or just a high stress day. It takes five minutes, and the physiology behind it is surprisingly clean. In this episode, you will learn the actual magnitude of cycle-related weight fluctuations. Spoiler alert, it's probably less than you think. Why cycle sinking has almost no clinical trial support and it falls apart entirely in perimenopause, and a measurement plus nutrition framework that you can start using this week that filters out some of that hormonal noise from the real fat loss progress. So let's get into it. And if you are a woman who tracks her weight, and by the way, if men, you guys are listening to this, it really helps us as guys to understand women and the plight of hormones and perimenopause, because there's a lot going on there. And the medical industry and the women's health domain is very incomplete at this point. So the more we can learn, the better. To support our ladies, our wives, our clients, our friends, anybody who needs support, who's asking for support. And one thing as a man I know is to not try to fix things unless asked. And the first thing you

Two bad advice camps

Philip Pape 2:56

always want to do is listen. I hope I have that right. So if you're a woman who tracks her weight and you've noticed that it jumps around a lot during your period or around your period, you've probably gotten some different pieces of advice. And I'm gonna guess that it's one of two things, especially. The first one is around cycle syncing. There's so much marketing around cycle syncing, everything. All right, eat more carbs in your follicular phase, cut back in your luteal phase, train harder in the first half of your cycle, go lighter in the second half. There's actually apps for this, there's courses for this, entire Instagram accounts built around color-coded phase charts. And I get the appeal as a numbers guy, even though I don't have a period myself, but it feels like you're finally, you know, working with your body. That's what we talk about here, right? It's like, okay, listen to the signals and individualize it, personalize it, and work with your body. The problem is the evidence doesn't necessarily support it, and we're gonna come back to that in a minute. Option two, the other thing they say is, you know what, you just gotta be patient, ladies. It's it's your water weight, it'll pass. I mean, I I've said that to some extent to folks that, like, hey, if you have a 10-pound weight that goes up and down 10 pounds and you've been stuck in that range, how much of that is water weight could be a lot of it. I don't know for sure until I know you and your patterns and what's happening. But to just be told or gaslit and said, like, well, it is just water and don't worry about the rest, it although technically true, someone telling you, hey, just ignore it without having a framework for what to do instead, so that you can track the right things, such as, hey, let's track your actual trends over time month over month, and maybe compare your different cycle phases to each other to actually get rid of that noise. Then that's like someone telling someone, you know, just live with it. That is what it is. I can't actually help you, right? And so both of these approaches, you know, like hey, cycle sync everything or don't worry about it, are obviously a failed approach because they treat the cycle as the problem to solve. Either you micromanage it or you dismiss it. And by doing that, you're not addressing the real issue. You're not addressing it, which is that most women don't have a system in place for distinguishing the hormonal noise, I'll call it, from say actual fat loss or fat gain signals. And honestly, most men don't have one either. This is definitely not a gender thing. This is a most people don't have a system, and every spike in the scale, every jump in the scale becomes an emotional event. Do you feel me? How does that hit you? Okay. And then every time you have a plateau like weight loss resistance, it feels like this permanent thing, and you can never get out of that cycle, and you know, I'm broken or I don't know what to do going forward, and I it's just not gonna work for me. Okay. And there's different flavors of that. The research shows us what happens next. What happens next in this

How scale fluctuations change your behavior

Philip Pape 5:56

situation? A 2024 study tracked 50 women in a weight loss program, and they used daily assessments. On the days when participants saw the scale go up, they reported guess what? More guilt, more shame, lower confidence. They were less likely to track their food or to exercise that day. And essentially the behavioral response was immediate. And then there was a separate analysis of the data that found that after a full week of weight regain, participants successfully lost weight the following week only 5% of the time. Five percent of the time. So this is what we talked about in the last episode, the what the hell effect in action. Psychologists call it the abstinence violation effect. The abstinence violation effect. When you perceive that you've broken your rules or you've lost your progress, you don't only feel bad about it, you also disengage. You stop doing the things that were working. Now, here's what matters the most for today's episode. The late luteal phase, the week or so before your period, is when the scale weight is most likely to spike up, to jump from that fluid retention. However, it's also when emotional eating vulnerability hit its peak hits its peak. In other words, you are most likely to eat emotionally while you're also most likely to gain weight from fluid. Kind of stinks, right? There was a twin study of 460 women, so twins, they looked at twins, and they found that genetic influences on emotional eating were twice as high after ovulation compared to before. So you're looking at a window where the scale is least reliable, and at the same time, your psychological response to it is most reactive. And that combination is what often derails the fat loss. So I didn't even realize this powerful connection until I looked into the research for this episode. And the reason I looked into this research is because I hear this challenge all the time, literally every day with our clients and in our community, and I want to help. And this is how we're gonna do it. And so today's kind of the framework for that. Obviously, in our programs, we dive deep and actually figure it out for you as an individual. But that combination

Evidence regarding weight fluctuations

Philip Pape 8:24

is a big challenge. And it's so so it's not the water weight itself, it's not your hormones, it's the interaction between misleading data and this heightened emotional reaction. So that's the real problem we're gonna solve today, right? Not how to hack your cycle, not how to hack your cycle because the evidence doesn't say that that's something that you should even try to do. But how to stop your cycle from hacking your behavior. Ooh, mic drop. Okay, so we're not gonna hack your cycle. Your cycle's not the problem. You're not the problem. It's how do we stop your cycle from interfering with your behavior? Okay, so let's talk about what the research actually shows is happening to your weight across your cycle. Because the numbers matter, they matter. You know how much I love numbers and data and math, and it helps to understand this context. The most commonly cited figure is three to five pounds of water weight. And you'll see that everywhere for some women who have, I'll say, clinically significant PMS, that is very accurate. But the best prospective data actually tells something different. So stick with me. A 2023 study looked at 42 women twice a week. They use bioelectrical impedance across full menstrual cycles. That's kind of the uh body fat scale, like the in-body. Okay. And the average weight increase during menstruation was 0.45 kilograms. So I'm switching between metric and imperial because it was reported in kilograms. So 0.45 kilograms is about one pound, and it was almost entirely accounted for by a 0.47 kilogram increase in extracellular water. So there was no change in fat mass or lean mass and no change in body circumferences. So it was about one pound. That's like the median, not three to five pounds, even though we talk about that a lot. Even I've used numbers like, yeah, two to five. I usually say two to five because I'm a little bit more conservative. So fortunately, the two is closer to one, and one's the median. Now, does the range go higher? Of course it does. Women, like I said, women with significant PMS symptoms can retain two to three kilograms, which is five to six pounds. So that's a real thing, it's a real phenomenon. We have to acknowledge that. This is the this is the problem between population averages and individuals with certain use cases. And there could be a lot of people that fall into that latter category for sure, but you have to, you have to, when you're looking at studies, you have to compare what's being studied and what population is being looked at and don't make assumptions. So the population average is much smaller than the internet is saying, basically. And if we conflate the PMS subgroup with all women, I think that creates a lot of panic for people that just unnecessary. So this is where the nuance comes into play. So that's the pounds. Okay, so it's usually like one pound, but it could go as high as five to six if you have significant PMS symptoms. The timing is also different from what a lot of people assume. So there was a study that tracks 62 women across 765 menstrual cycles, and they found that fluid retention actually peaks on day one of menstrual flow, not during the luteal phase. The mid-follicular phase, which is about days seven through 10, shows the lowest retention of fluid. So the lowest noise, I'll call it the lowest noise window for weighing yourself is about a week after your period starts, not right after it ends. You may want to go back and listen to what I just said just to get all that. Okay, but it it it's different than what some people assume. Now, the hormonal mechanisms underneath all this are worth understanding as well because they explain why this isn't just something you can supplement

Hormones, metabolism, and cycle syncing

Philip Pape 12:20

away. There's so much misinformation about supplements for all this stuff, hormonal support and all that. Estrogen lowers the threshold for your body to release anti-diuretic hormone. So you hold on to water at a lower set point, right? That means you're you're more prone to hold on to more water. Progesterone initially promotes sodium excretion, which you would think would help. But guess what happens? The body loves homeostasis. So when you have more, when you're excreting more sodium, it triggers a compensatory response from the renin angiotensin aldosterone system. I had to write that down because I would not remember it. The renin or renin and angiotensin aldosterone system. And that overshoots and increases your water retention. And by the way, this is what happens a lot when you're dehydrated or when you drink too much alcohol and you get dehydrated, your body compensates by actually retaining more water. And so that's why sometimes people see a big uh jump in the scale, like a day or two after they drink a lot, even though they were dehydrated because the body compensates with water retention. So this is happening hormonally with women. One study actually showed progesterone drives a nearly three times increase in aldosterone production just by itself. So your body is always trying to manage the fluid balance, trying to keep things in balance, and it is doing it in response to these reproductive hormones that are wildly changing every few days because of your cycle. And so there's really no supplement or even food timing strategy that can like override that. It's going to happen. The question is, to what extent does it happen for you? Now, what about metabolism? Let's talk metabolism. Does your metabolic rate actually go up in the luteal phase? Yes, it does. Sort of. A meta-analysis of 30 studies found a small increase that favored higher RMR, that's resting metabolic rate, in the luteal phase. But when they restricted the analysis to studies only published in the last 25 years with better methodology, the effect became not statistically significant. Okay. This is why we have to be careful how we reference the studies. So a more realistic estimate of metabolic rate going up during the luteal phase is probably about 100 extra calories a day on average. And that's about 1,400 calories across a 14-day luteal phase, which is the energy equivalent of 0.4 pounds of fat. So it's not nothing, it exists, but it's not like 300 calories a day, you know, which would be three times that amount. And you're like, oh, that's why I gain a pound of fat every month. No. But but it's not nothing. So again, I don't want to gaslight any of this stuff. I want to approach it with some nuance. And honestly, this is where this whole cycle sinking pitch starts to fall apart. I mean, it starts to fall apart. There's a lot of other ways that it falls apart. Because the premise is that your metabolism and your physiology shift enough between phases to justify different eating and training protocols. But if in reality the metabolic difference is small and the weight, the fluid retention differences are actually rather small, then the case for restructuring your entire nutrition plan around it really gets pretty thin. So I want to put this cycle sinking under the microscope even more directly. That's what we do here, right? We put these things under the microscope and see what makes sense. Let's talk about training first. The claim is that, okay, you should train harder during the follicular phase, your estrogen is higher, and then back off during the luteal phase. And there's two studies that seem to support this. One is from 2014, looked at 20 women, and it assumed every participant had a 28-day cycle with ovulation on day 14, which is one of the problems. Lauren Calenzo Semple talks about that a lot, is like these assumptions that everyone's the same, and then it totally waters down the data, if you will. And they verified the cycle phase, but only with basal body temperature, which is somewhat unreliable in doing that. The other study from 2017 mixed together naturally cycling women with women on oral contraceptives in the same groups. And neither study would probably pass the methodological bar that you would want from evidence-based advice. And that's just scratching the surface. When we balance against those two studies, there's an umbrella review. This is the highest level of evidence synthesis we have. Synthesis meaning combining

Does cycle syncing work (for training or nutrition)?

Philip Pape 16:56

multiple studies together, especially a meta review, especially an umbrella review, combines a lot together, concluded that prescribing resistance training based on menstrual cycle phase is just not evidence-based. Three independent studies that used what would be the gold standard muscle biopsy and stable isotope in their methodology. They found zero difference in muscle protein synthesis between the two phases of the cycle, between the follicular and luteal phases. In other words, your muscles respond to training the same way regardless of where you are in your cycle. And this is consistent with a lot of what I'm hearing from experts in the field who understand the literature. On the nutrition side, it's even simpler. There has been no RCT randomized control trial that's ever compared cycle-synced calorie or macro intake versus consistent intake for fat loss or body composition outcomes. So there's just no evidence. Any recommendation for syncing to your nutrition is probably extrapolating from hormonal fluctuation data without testing that they actually produce different outcomes. That's all. And I want to be fair about this. I want to be fair, okay, because cycle awareness is not the same as cycle sinking. This is this is the side that I stand on. Knowing that you, you dear listener, tend to feel more fatigued and low, you have a low energy state. You feel wiped in the luteal phase. And then adjusting your training intensity based on how you feel that day and your recovery, that's a smart thing to do. That is responsive, auto-regulated programming, and it is what I recommend. Awareness of your body signals and how you feel and perform, and all of that is great. Also, tracking your symptoms so that you can spot patterns and then know what's coming is smart too. But all that is is listening to your body with a better set of data, just like we try to do with other forms of biofeedback, whether you're a man or woman, whether you're menstruating or not. That is not the same as following a color-coded calendar in an app that tells you to eat sweet potatoes on day 14 and reduce training volume on day 21. That is complete nonsense. I mean, even Stacy Sims, who came on, what was she on with Lauren Calenzo Simple? They kind of went at it and they argued with each other. And, you know,

Perimenopause and the measurement fix

Philip Pape 19:22

Lauren's more on the side of the nuance and like much of this stuff is pretty much not supported by the evidence. Stacy Sims is probably the most prominent advocate of training around the menstrual cycle, but she has even acknowledged this evolution in the evidence recently, like last year, 2025. She wrote that there is no single right way for all women to train around their cycles. And I heard her say it on a podcast. And so she's kind of evolved her thinking as well. Good for her, right? The real story is individuality, which is essentially the position that I'm presenting here and that I always try to present on the show. Now, for women in perimenopause, perimenopause is the entire period of hormonal fluctuations leading up to menopause, which could be as long as 10, 15 years, you know, starting as early as your mid to late 30s. For women in perimenopause, cycle seeking, cycle sinking is, I'll say structurally impossible because when your cycles shift from 26 days to 45 days to skipping months as you get closer, and I know a lot of you are going through that. We don't talk about it enough, ladies. I know that your cycle is not this fixed 28-day thing. If it is, great, but that's not the case for a lot of women I talk to. It changes, it sometimes gets wildly all over the place. It extends out. Sometimes you don't have one. And this is even outside of like low energy states, amenorrhea, and all that from dieting. This is just, it happens because of hormones, because of perimenopause. In that case, what are you going to sink to? Like it's you're just going to, you know, drive yourself crazy. The entire framework assumes a predictable hormonal pattern, and perimenopause is often defined by the loss of that predictability. All right, if you're hearing all of this, if you're thinking, okay, okay, I get that cycle sinking is oversold. I also know just be patient and gaslighting isn't gonna do it for me. But I need, I want someone to actually help me build that system that works for my body. That is exactly what we've built with Eat More Lift Heavy. And I hope you guys love the name. I'm really loving it because it it says exactly the thing that many of you need to do right in the name. Eat more lift heavy. It's a 26-week coaching program launching March 30, where you get both training and nutrition coaching together, which almost nobody offers at this price point. Over half the women in our intake data report hormonal concerns affecting their progress. And our curriculum has an entire week dedicated to hormonal pattern awareness. You learn About it, you personalize it, you apply it to yourself, and you get coaching. And every member gets a personalized plan that accounts for where they actually are, not where a generic chart says they should be. If you want in at the lowest price that'll ever be our founder's price, get on the wait list now at witsandwaits.com slash eatmore. That's wits and weights.com slash eatmore. The link is in the show notes. The early access window is opening March 16. So get on the list so that you get the emails that say, here it's open. Here's the special deal you're gonna get once and only once, but you're gonna get it because you're on the list. Go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore or click the link in the show notes. Okay, so we've established that cycle syncing over promises, under delivers, and that just be patient does the same. So what do you do instead? All right, two things. You're gonna fix how you measure progress, and you're gonna fix how you eat during the luteal phase. Here we go. How do we fix how we measure progress? The goal is to separate the noise from hormones from the real body composition signals. What's actually happening with your body? And this is gonna help you a lot emotionally too and help you not overreact and know what's going on. The engineering principle here is simple. You don't make decisions on noisy data. You have to filter it first. So I want you to think of it like a filter. Step one, okay, we've got three steps here. Step one, weigh yourself daily, but use a trend. So for that, I recommend an app that can smooth the trend for you. You can do it in a spreadsheet, you can do it on your own, but it takes a lot of math and using the right equations and like making sure you do it. And that tends to create a lot of friction and it's harder for people to get into or stick with. So I would definitely use something like Macro Factor, that's my favorite app that does that. And that's I want you to weigh every day, not because daily weigh-ins are some magical thing, but because we know from the evidence. There was actually a study of 10,000 smart scale users in 2021 that found daily weighing was the only frequency associated with weight loss across all BMI groups and maintaining the weight loss. So the key here is you never react to a single day's number. I know, easier said than done, I get it. But if you're taking a weight every day, it eventually starts to get, it becomes less and less important, and you just kind of get used to seeing that it goes up and down. But what you really care about is the trend. And MacroFactor does this well because they have an exponential moving average, and then they have their expenditure algorithm that takes your trend weight and your calorie intake. And then they actually have their algorithm now has improved handling of cyclical fluctuations. So, and you can track your period as well alongside it. It's it is very fast. So I like that app because it does all of that. So, like if you're working with us or if you're an eat more lift heavy, that's our recommended tool. And if you come to, say, me or Carol and you want some feedback on your data, we're gonna say, hey, one of the one of the data points we need is your macrofactor data because then we have your trend weight and we know what where your expenditure is. If you don't have that data, we're kind of flying blind, right? We're kind of flying in the dark. And so if you're doing this for yourself, same thing. Step two.

Phase tracking and the nutrition fix

Philip Pape 25:11

So that's step one is weigh yourself daily and use a trend smooth, a smoothed trend. And that should that trend, by the way, should be over at least a two-week period, but I really prefer three weeks. Step two is to use the same phase comparison. So phase to phase is how you want to compare as your monthly sanity check. So you're gonna compare your weight from the mid-follicular phase this month, like days seven through ten, to your mid-follicular phase last month. That's that's your most stable hormonal windows, the mid-follicular phase. And and again, you want to take the trend weight from that point, but even if you have just a few spot weights, a few individual scale weights, at least it's been a month and you can do that comparison. But take several of them, don't just take one day. If that number is moving in the direction you want over, say three months, hey, your plan's working. If it's flat, something is off and we need to adjust. And that eliminates a lot of the false alarms that come from weighing yourself, you know, pre-menstrually and comparing it to a random day three weeks ago. Step three, and this is really important if you're in perimenopause, and that is to extend your evaluation window. Listen to me carefully. I want you to extend your evaluation window, the window within which you evaluate what's happening. Because when your cycles are more and more irregular, as they tend to be in perimenopause, especially closer to menopause you are, you cannot rely even on step two, the same phase comparisons, because there's no reliable data, no reliable phase to compare. Instead, you're going to use longer moving averages. You're going to use four to six week moving averages before concluding that any weight change is real. And I know that takes patience. And I know you got to wait. And you want the quick fix and the quick change. It, but you're not going to get it. In fact, you're going to slow your progress down. You're going to go in the wrong direction if you overreact to the short term. Because if you end up under-eating and stressing your body out further, it could actually compensate the wrong direction by burning fewer calories and actually making you have a worse outcome. But in addition to this, see that that's just scale weight. Honestly, you've heard me talk about how scale weight is just a tiny piece of the puzzle and really not that important. I would supplement your scale data with your waist measurement, how your clothes fit, of course, how you're improving in the gym with your strength, and even progress photos. Right? Those things can all be very helpful because the scale alone is going to miss all the changes in your body composition, like building muscle and losing fat at the same time, for example. And during perimenopause, those shifts can be pretty dramatic, right? We know from plenty of research at this point that the rate of fat gain tends to jump up almost double, or I think it did double at the start of the menopausal transition. And lean mass is declining as well. And of course, you know, you lift, listen to wits and weights, you lift weights, you're eating your protein, right? Right? Well, if you're not, that's a whole different thing we got to deal with and get you doing that. But a woman whose scale weight is fairly stable still might be gaining fat and losing muscle. Obviously, the opposite could happen too. You could be gaining muscle and losing fat. Uh, it depends on your lifestyle and what you're doing. And the scale alone is not just is just not going to tell you that. So that's the measurement side. On the the nutrition fix, okay, let's talk about nutrition. We have the behavioral side of this first, and this is big. Luteal phase, the luteal phase is notorious for having uh lots of hunger. So I've seen it over and over again, okay. I can't imagine where like once a month your hunger just is higher than it is the rest of the month. So I feel for you. There's a meta-analysis I found of 15 data sets that show the average increase in energy intake, so how much you eat during the luteal phase is about 168 calories per day. And for women with PMS, it's closer to 300. And then if you fight this with trying to restrict calories, that's like the worst possible strategy because all it does is amplify the what the hell effect, the all or nothing effect. And then it works against the serotonin deficit. That's what's going on here, that is driving the cravings. Now, why is serotonin important? Because serotonin levels drop in the luteal phase and carbohydrate carb cravings appear to function as a form of self-medication because eating carbs increases tryptophan. The tryptophan ratio that feeds how your body synthesizes serotonin. And there's a study on this. There was a double-blind crossover study that gave women with confirmed PMS either a high carb beverage or an identical tasting placebo, and the carb drink significantly reduced depression, anger, and cravings within 90 to 180 minutes, and the placebo did nothing. So the cravings are not a failure of your willpower. They are your brain requesting a specific input that it needs. Interesting, right? So what's the fix here? Well, it's not to fight the hunger, it's to redirect that hunger. This is a powerful tool, ladies. Listen, okay, this is something I've learned working with clients, and it works a lot. First, you've got to leverage protein. If you are not already eating the right amount of protein per day and having protein in every meal, that's your biggest opportunity. 30 to 40 grams of protein every meal, especially your first meal of the day during that luteal phase. The reason is protein is when it's diluted in your diet, like when you don't have enough, right? Total calorie intake goes up because your body keeps eating it until it gets enough protein. So if you can front load protein, you're gonna satisfy that target earlier for your body and reduce the amount of calorie you over calories you overshoot for the day. So if you're not already leveraging plenty of protein, that's number one. The second thing is using complex carbs strategically, don't cut carbs during the luteal phase. That's the opposite of what your brain needs. But what you can do is include complex carbs like whole grains, legumes, starchy vegetables in all your meals, and then you support your serotonin without the crash in blood sugar that comes from you know simpler carbs. Although, I don't want to overstate the blood sugar thing if you're eating balanced meals anyway. Even if you have simple carbs, as long as they're with proteins and fats, you tend to be okay anyway. And then if you're lifting weights and walking, it just makes it even better. But carbs can be your friend for sure. So listen up. If you're low carb, this could be the problem. Third, I want you to allow a modest increase during that phase. So actually shift your calories. If your metabolic rate actually does go up at least 100 calories or so, like if you've proven it for yourself through your tracking, and again, the only way to do that is a tool like Macrofactor where you can tell, then eating an extra, say, 100 to 200 calories during those 10 to 14 days is just gonna offset it. In other words, you're not gonna, you're not gonna stop losing fat. You're not gonna gain weight, it's just gonna offset it. And I know you want to like take advantage of the fact you're burning more calories, but if you're also massively more hungry, you might overshoot that benefit through your food. But if you intentionally increase your food a little bit to match it, then it can on the net work out better. And then over the full cycle, the math washes out in your favor. But if you're trying to maintain a steep deficit during the phase when your body's most resistant to it, then it usually creates, you know, the psychological conditions that lead to you binge eating. Does that make sense? I hope that all makes sense that I didn't get like too technical, because even for myself, I realized the way I worded all that is kind of in the weeds. But the principle across all of this is to work with your biology, not to cycle sink, but understand your body has physiological explanations that are going on and little tweaks in your nutrition and your measurement can go a long way to supporting you through your pattern of your cycle. And not every woman's gonna need every one of these strategies. Now, I want to be clear about what I'm not claiming here because again, nuance, guys, nuance. I'm not saying your cycle doesn't affect how you feel. I'm definitely not. It absolutely does. It does. Fatigue, mood shifts, bloating, cramps, you

How to structure your diet and training

Philip Pape 33:42

name it. All of that is real. And if you adjust your training intensity or expectations based on how you feel, that's a smart thing to do. And it's independent of trying to align it with your cycle. It's based on how you're feeling. I'm also not saying that tracking your cycle is useless. It's actually very useful. I even mentioned that in MacroFactor, you can track it and then it aligns it with the other stuff going on there. And it's helpful if you have a coach or if you're in our program and then you can share your data. But for yourself, knowing those patterns gives you better data. And a lot of you do already track your cycle, you know, and I and may not be tracking it against the other things. But what I'm saying, what I'm not saying to do is restructure your entire diet and training plan around this 28-day idea that half the population doesn't even follow predictably. Like half of women don't even fall into the quote unquote normal, you know, ovulation cycle. I'm also not saying the scale doesn't matter. It's a useful data point among many, but I am saying that a single day's weigh-in during the late luteal phase is one of the least helpful things you can collect. And that making decisions based on it is not helpful for the reasons we talked about earlier. So, what I am saying from this whole episode is this you deserve a better framework than quote unquote, sink your macros to the moon, or quote unquote, just relax. The water weight fluctuations are normal and it's all gonna average out. No, you've got to be intentional. And the fix here is a measurement system to filter the noise out, a nutrition approach that respects your individual biology, and then of course, patience to evaluate progress over multiple cycles, not just days or a few weeks. Before we wrap up, remember that I promised you a one meal change that blunts cravings before they start anytime they spike. I will share that in a second. But if this episode is clicking for you, if you are enjoying this, if you want a structured system for navigating all of this with human coaching support, Eat More Lift Heavy is coming. It's a 26-week program. It integrates training and nutrition coaching together. It is built for women over 40 who lift and track but are not seeing the results. And hormonal pattern awareness is built directly into the curriculum. Not to mention Coach Carol. She is amazing. She is an expert in women over 40 hormones and thyroid health, especially, and has personal experience with all of those. The wait list with founder pricing at the lowest it'll ever be is open now. Go to witsandweights.com slash eatmore. That's witsandweights.com slash eatmore. There's no obligation at all. You can join the list for free. Just so you get the information, go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore. Uh by the way, if you're already on my email list, you still want to go there and get on the wait list specifically because you'll get tagged for the early access and the founders pricing. All right, let's

Bonus: one-meal craving strategy

Philip Pape 36:38

talk about the strategy for cravings. Next time you have cravings, whether it is PMS week, maybe you had a bad sleep night, maybe you have a stressful afternoon. Honestly, men, women, whatever the cravings are from, this is what you do. At your very first meal of the day, hit at least 40 grams of protein before anything else. And that could be two eggs plus a cup of Greek yogurt. That could be a protein shake. And the 40 grams is more than enough to suppress ghrelin, that's your hunger hormone. It elevates CCK, that's a satiety hormone. And it does so for several hours. Because cravings are partly a hunger management problem. They are partly a hunger management problem. You're like, yeah, duh. But what I mean by that is when your baseline hunger is already elevated because of your hormones or poor sleep or stress, your threshold for giving in to the hunger is lower. And protein raises it back up. It raises it back up. So you front load the protein and then you build the rest of the meal around things like whole grains and starchy vegetables, a little bit of fat, especially if carb cravings are the issue. You see what I'm saying here? If carb cravings are the issue, why don't you eat some carbs? But eat the carbs that you choose that will benefit you, right? I'm not talking about donuts and pizza. I'm not talking about reading the pantry or the fridge on a whim. I'm talking about you be intentional and have whole grains, fruits, starchy vegetables, things like that. And that way you're not fighting the craving. You are taking the edge off with intention and responding to it gracefully instead of reacting to it. And isn't that what we all want to do? All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your cycle is not the enemy of fat loss. It's just data that most people never learned to need. I'm Philip Pate, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.