The undereating trap that stalls fat loss after 40

Philip Pape 0:00

If you've been eating 1200, 1500, maybe even 1800 calories for months or even years, and you're working out and the scale won't budge, this episode is going to explain exactly what's happening inside your body and why eating less is probably the thing keeping you stuck. Today I'm going to show you the metabolic trap that catches almost everyone over 40 who's been dieting for years, why the calorie deficit that worked when you were 30 stops working at 45, and a three-part approach to fix this without gaining a bunch of weight in the process. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness device under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape. And if you listened to Tuesday's episode, you heard me walk through the full 26-week structure of Eat More Lift Heavy and what a coached body composition process looks like. But today I want to talk about the problem that that program was built to solve because it's the single most common pattern that I see in men and women over 40 who come to me frustrated, stuck, convinced that something is wrong with their body, they just don't know what. And it's usually this they're eating too little. They're not eating too much, they're eating too little. But what does that mean? The advice you keep getting is to eat less, move more. So stick around because we're gonna go over exactly what this means and what to do about it. And then at the very end of this episode, I'm going to share one number that predicts whether your next diet will actually work, or you're just gonna repeat the same yo-yo cycle. And it's a number that most people never look at. You'll learn in 30 seconds whether your body's ready to lose fat or whether you need to do something else first. So stay around for that. Here is what we're covering today. First, why eat less, move more, just is bad advice, especially the older we get. And what is different about this stage of life in our 40s, 50s, and beyond that affects that advice. Second, the three metabolic adaptations that your body makes when you chronically under-at, and why they create this vicious cycle that gets harder to escape the longer you stay in it. And third, a three-part fix that can reverse the cycle without requiring you to just eat whatever you want, like they say on social media, or to abandon your goals either. So let's start with the typical advice, the conventional wisdom. I always like to break apart

Why "eat less, move more" doesn't work

Philip Pape 2:36

the advice. That's the mission of this show. You know it, I know it. It's called eat less, move more. It's very, very common. It is a pithy response and a comment to just about any YouTube video or Instagram post where someone's talking about a struggle and they're like, you just need to eat less, move more, bro. It's all you need to do. Create a calorie deficit. The bigger the deficit, the faster results. And if you're not losing weight, you're not in a deficit, so eat even less. Boom. Easy, right? And here's the thing like the advice related to energy balance and calories in, calories out, I will say over and over, is technically and scientifically correct. You do need a calorie deficit to lose weight and thus lose fat. That is thermodynamics. And so I would never argue with physics. I'm a man of science. The problem is the assumption underneath this, the premise, and that is that your body is a static system. That's the premise that is false. That if you eat 500 fewer calories today, that you're gonna burn 500 more calories and that that math is gonna hold indefinitely for the next few weeks, months, and beyond. But it doesn't because your body is an adaptive system. It responds to the inputs you give it and it changes that equation. In other words, calories in, calories out is technically correct, and the way we apply it to our body is very well misunderstood. And if you're gonna understand it, you can then take advantage of that correct equation for you. Now, for a lot of people who are younger in their 20s and their 30s, a simple deficit approach often works. You cut calories, you lose weight, you go back to eating normally done. And that's because there's a lot less fighting against that at this age. We're gonna talk about that. You tend to recover much more quickly. But once you get older, once you get into your 40s, raise your hand if you've realized this or recognize this, especially if you are a woman going through peri and postmenopause, a man on lower testosterone, people with high stress lives, et cetera, you notice something doesn't quite work the same. And it's not because, again, thermodynamics, physics stops working, but because the compensatory mechanisms get more aggressive. They were always there to some extent, even in your 20s, but they're way more aggressive. Your hormones shift a lot more. For women, estrogen plays a role in storage of fat, where you store fat, how you partition nutrients, how sensitive you are to insulin. Cortisol is higher because life is just more and more stressful. It's like a compounding stress over time. Kids, parents, finances, job, house, all of it, right? All of it. Your sleep quality is often dropping at this time of life as well for a lot of the same reasons. And guess what sleep affects? It affects appetite, it affects recovery, how your body handles glucose, even and carbs, all of those things, cravings, the list goes on. So when, for example, a 47-year-old woman who's been dieting on and off for 15 years

How your body adapts differently in your 40s vs. your 20s

Philip Pape 5:30

cuts to 1200 calories yet again, and now her body doesn't respond the same way it did at 32, it responds more aggressively, it holds on harder. And she still gets the same advice. Eat even less, do more cardio, try harder. Like, let's go to 1100 calories, let's go to a thousand. I've seen people come from other coaches when they're like, yeah, she had me on 800 calories because the needle wasn't moving. I'm like, are you kidding me? Are you kidding? Is that is that the only solution we have out there, coaches? Come on. So I hear this all the time, and I get really pissed and frustrated on behalf of everyone who gets this advice. Because having worked with hundreds of clients myself in our coaching programs, you know, 49% of them report that protein is their number one struggle. And you're like, what does this have to do with everything you just said? It's because you are eating so little food and probably even so little protein, even if the calories are like okay, right, that hitting adequate protein with low calories is nearly impossible without a very, very specific intentional plan. So you're shortchanging your protein massively, and that alone can be a big lever behind why things aren't working, let alone all the other problems we're gonna talk about in this episode from under-eating in general. So if you are living on a calorie target and a prayer, living on a prayer, right? It's not gonna work for you. So the conventional wisdom is not wrong about the physics, about the mechanism of calories in, calories out. It is wrong about the application of that, that theory or that fact, I should say. You know, it treats your body like a static system when it's actually a very dynamic system. All right, so what is actually happening when you chronically

Metabolic adaptation and suppressed energy expenditure

Philip Pape 7:03

undereat? Because this will now take us to that next level of understanding the dynamic system. And by chronically, I mean months to more likely many years of eating below what your body needs to maintain its current weight while also supporting muscle hormones and daily function. Listen to what I just said that most important sentence of the whole podcast. You are eating below what your body needs to maintain weight and support muscle hormones and function. So what's probably happening is you're maintaining weight, but you're not supporting your muscle hormones and function. That's the key. It's not just about scale weight. You might be eating 1200 calories and maintaining your weight, but you are under supporting lots of things inside your body that are independent of scale weight, right? I'm not talking about a mini-cut or a well a well-planned fat loss phase that someone goes through. Those are fine. I'm talking about the perpetual 1200 calorie existence that millions of people live in, millions of women especially live in. So your body is making three adaptations, three adaptations through the compensatory mechanisms I mentioned before. And they stack on top of each other. So these can be additive, all right? Adaptation number one is metabolic adaptation or the suppression of your metabolic rate, also called adaptive thermogenesis. Okay, the phrase doesn't matter. The point is that your metabolism, your daily energy expenditure drops, not because you weigh less, that's actually totally expected. Like if you lost 20 pounds of weight, yeah, you're gonna burn a few calories, it's fine. But beyond that, there's an additional adaptation that occurs, this adaptive thermogenesis. We mentioned the biggest loser study many times because it's such an extreme but really illustrative example of this, where six years after the show, where these contestants lost a ton of weight very quickly, their metabolisms were still burning fewer, 500 fewer calories per day than predicted for their body size. Now that's an extreme case, right? That's extreme dieting, extreme exercise, extreme weight loss. But it's the same mechanism for anyone in a chronic deficit. Your metabolic rate declines. Your basal metabolic rate declines, right? That's your BMR, but also your neat, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis drops because you tend to move less unconsciously, you fidget

Muscle loss from chronic dieting and why it compounds

Philip Pape 9:15

less, you take fewer steps, you sit more, you tend to feel more tired. And then because you're eating less, the thermic effect of food drops, you're burning fewer calories just from eating less and eating less protein. And all of these are components of your metabolism dropping, right? Compressing, dropping. And it doesn't just happen while you're dieting. If you have been in a deficit for a long time, and then you go back to eating normally, let's put quotes around that, because you're still probably not eating normally, your metabolism, it's not going to instantly bounce back. It's going to take time. It takes the right conditions. You have to have adequate food, adequate protein, resistance training. And for many of you, even if you came kind of out of a diet, let's say, you never quite came out of it to recover all those functions. Like I said before, you might be maintaining your weight, but you're under-supporting everything else in your body. So that's the first adaptation. The second one is muscle loss. When you're in a calorie deficit, especially a large one, and you're not doing resistance training, or you're not eating enough protein to support that training, your body is going to pull its energy not just from fat, but also from muscle. I hate to say it burns muscle because that's the word burn is very unscientific in this case, but if that helps you visualize it, feel free. So you're not just burning fat, you're burning muscle. Um, I mentioned the 2010 sleep and adiposity study before that looked at sleep-deprived dieters, and they lost 60% of their weight as lean mass instead of fat. And now we have studies, people on GLP1s, and we see it's something like 30 or 40% of lean mass is lost instead of fat. And again, that's without resistance training and eating enough protein. When you do resistance training and eating enough protein, you can hold on to the vast majority, if not all, of your lean mass. And for newer lifters, you might even gain some lean mass. So that's a very, very important aspect that's independent of calories in, calories out. And this matters extremely because muscle is the most metabolically active tissue in your body. It's that metabolic engine where when you lose muscle, that's gonna further lower your metabolic rate, which means the deficit you started with gets smaller and smaller without you trying, which means you have to eat less if you want to get the deficit back. And then that causes more muscle loss. Okay, so you see what the vicious cycle is, it feeds itself. And so for women over 40 specifically, thinking of peri and post-menopause, this is happening. This is this is a big part of what's happening, ladies, when you look at why you have weight loss resistance and have to feel like you have to eat less and less. There's muscle loss compounded

Hormonal disruption from undereating (thyroid, cortisol, estrogen)

Philip Pape 11:45

with the natural age-related tendency to lose muscle called sarcopenia, right? So not just the muscle loss from dieting, but just the muscle loss from not lifting weights due to age and the loss of function as well. So if you're not actively building and protecting muscle through resistance, training, and adequate protein, you are definitely losing it. And every pound of muscle you lose then makes the next diet harder. So that's the second type of adaptation from chronic under-eating. The third one is hormones. Let's talk hormones, because they are a thing, even though they sometimes get overblown in social media. But just to be straight about it, chronic energy restriction suppresses hormones. One of those hormones is thyroid hormone, especially T3. That's the active form that relates your metabolism. It's the metabolic regulator. So if you have lower T3, lower metabolism, that means you have to eat less. It also suppresses your reproductive hormones. Your body decides, hey, reproduction is not a priority when food is scarce. I mentioned earlier, if you're under-eating, even if you're maintaining your weight, you might not be supporting your hormones. You might even be amenorrhea and not have a period, like if it's very extreme or, you know, low energy, very low energy. So dieting not only does it affect thyroid, it affects your reproductive hormones, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. And of course, that affects men as well. And that makes your body composition worse as well. Okay, all of these things affect fat storage, like visceral fat storage. Your stressors, your stress goes up, which is represented by cortisol, because under eating, guess what, is a physiological stressor. And then that promotes more fat storage, especially in the midsection. And that impairs recovery from training. So ironically, you're trying to lose weight or fat by undereating, but it's causing you to hold fat and causing you to hold fat in the places you don't want. So you have a woman eating 1200 calories, exercising five days a week, probably not doing lifting properly or with progressive overload, if at all, maybe instead doing, I don't know, Peloton, spin classes, group classes, those things, which are fine. They're social, they're all that, but they, you know, Pilates, I know I get flack for saying Pilates isn't strength training, but from a progressive overload perspective over time, especially for heavier loads for things like bone density, it's not going to do the job. It's just, it just can't. By definition, physically, it can't. Okay, it's no judgment on you for liking Pilates. It's the physical manifestation of the movement patterns and the load that you can't get relative to resistance training. Anyway, that's a side tangent. But going back to this woman who's 1200 calories, probably not sleeping very well, probably running on like a lot of cortisol, right? A high stress situation, probably losing muscle, probably have suppressed thyroid function, probably trying to take a bunch of supplements to make up for it, and it's not doing it. The number on the scale doesn't move. And everyone around you, including your freaking doctor, is telling you to eat less or try harder. You need, you need to do more diet, and you have to focus on your diet and exercise. And that's the extent of their advice. Am I right? Am I right? Come on. Okay. So

The undereating trap defined

Philip Pape 14:44

that's the under-eating trap. That is the under-eating trap, meaning the thing you think is the solution is the thing causing the problem. And the longer you stay in it, the deeper the hole gets. So if you're hearing this, if you're like, hey, I recognize myself in what Philip is saying, that is me. That is me. I've been stuck in this cycle of eating less and getting nowhere. All right, listen up. I want to tell you about eat more lift heavy. This is my brand new 26-week experience coaching program. I built it with Coach Carol. So you've got two coaches. By the way, she's a women's and hormone expert, especially in thyroid. The entire first phase of the 26 weeks is about breaking this cycle. We do not start you with a diet. We do not. And by the way, in this program, you can eat whatever you want, but it's going to be with intention. We actually start building a measurement system. We establish your baseline. We get you eating enough and breaking through the psychological fears of eating enough to support your training and your hormones and to feel great and to look great eventually. And I say eventually because obviously physical change will take time, and to live that identity you want to live as someone who fuels yourself. You get a training program on day one, or I should say week one, if you submit our intake. There are monthly live coaching calls. If you prefer a live interaction, there is one focus per week in the program. So you never get overwhelmed. You're never going to fall behind because it's at your own pace. It unlocks whenever you join. It's not that you're joining a group of people. It's whenever you join. But it does open up this Monday, March 30th. And we have founders pricing only through this week, March 29th. It's a big discount from what it will be when it goes public on Monday. So if you want to grab a spot there, you won't get charged until the 29th. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com. All the details are there. The pricing is there, fully transparent. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. Link is in the show notes. All right.

Fix #1 (related to calories)

Philip Pape 16:36

So now we know why this is a trap, why it's a contradiction almost. Now, what do you do about it? Okay. What do you do about it? I want to be clear. The fix is for everything I everything I share on the show, the fix is usually straightforward, but it's not fast and sometimes it's not easy. And if you're not ready to do a little bit of effort and work, you're not going to get your goals and you're not going to improve. And I'm sorry if that hurts you, you know, in your heart or your mind, but it's the truth. And you know it's the truth. You know, anything in life in this world that that involves improving yourself and breaking it through your comfort zone requires a little bit of effort. So, and it's not always fast. In fact, it's usually slower to do it right. If you've been chronically under-eating for years, you're not going to fix everything in two weeks. Nor would you expect to or want to. It's been years. What's another few months to do it the right way? The direction of change, however, starts immediately, as in right now, based on what you decide to do from this episode. And that matters a ton. That matters. Men and women listening, dear listener, change can start right now. The direction of change is an action and of itself that will change your life. All right. What's the first thing you're gonna do? The first thing is to restore your calorie intake to maintenance. We're not getting you to a surplus. We're not doing cheat meals or eating whatever you want. We're getting you to your true maintenance. But this means you have to figure out what your total expenditure is right now in your current adapted state and eat at least that amount consistently, and then start to eat more than that to help you recover. So I'll mention it again: a tool like MacroFactor is incredibly useful here because it uses your weight trend and food intake over time to calculate your actual maintenance calories, and then it'll follow it as your calories increase. So this is not reverse dieting, this is recovery dieting. We're jumping right to where we think your maintenance is now, and then we're pushing that up to get you to your final recovered maintenance. So go download MacroFactor from the App Store if you don't already use it. Use my code WITS and Waits, all one word, all spelled out, wits and weights, to get a two-week free trial. You're gonna, it's gonna change your life. Some I've had I've had hundreds of people email me and say, look, I just started using Macro Factor months ago, and that's all I need. I don't even want your coaching programs. Like that has solved it for me. And I'm happy to say that on a show like this because it supports the podcast and it helps people. And if you want to do it, do it, please. Macrofactor, use my code WITS and Ways. Okay. So by doing that, you can find what your maintenance is. Now, for most women that I work with who have been chronically dieting, maintenance is higher than they think. It's higher than they think. It's not dramatically higher, like 500 calories or a thousand calories higher. Well, it could be 500 calories. So I take that back. It depends on how you define dramatic, but it could be enough that the jump from like 1200 to 1600 is what they need. And that feels significant. I mean, 400 calories is like a whole extra small meal, or maybe not even a small meal, maybe a decent meal that's full of, you know, fiber and vegetables and lean food, lean meats and such. You can get a lot from 400 calories, right? And so when you do that though, here's the fear. When you do that, the scale not only might, it probably will go up a few pounds initially because of the water and glycogen from eating the extra food, the extra gut content, the extra fluid, and the extra carbs, probably extra carbs, right? And that has nothing to do with body fat. Your muscles are refilling their carbohydrate stores, your liver is refilling the glycogen, you're retaining more water, and your digestive system has more stuff moving through it. So this is normal and it's temporary. And by temporary, I mean the weight bump occurs and then it stops. And here's the thing: just to take a quick side tangent, when you get used to cutting and bulking, you see that both sides of the equation have like a few pounds of buffer because of water. Meaning when you go on a diet, you're gonna lose quickly a few pounds. That's just water. When you come out of the diet, you're gonna gain quickly a few pounds. That's just water. So you kind of notice that there's this little buffer of weight, and you have to push through that mentally to realize that has nothing to do with body fat. And so I don't want you to get stuck on like a fixed number that this is your ideal weight or this is what I weighed when I was 25, so that's what I should weigh now. Don't think that way. So I'm not gonna pretend that this is easy up here psychologically, okay? After years of restricting, eating more is gonna feel wrong. It's gonna go against every instinct you've ever built. And that is a real, real fear, and I respect it. I do. But let's look at the data. Let's look at the data. Clients who spend eight to 12 weeks of maintenance before attempting a fat loss phase tend to lose more fat, retain more muscle, and have dramatically better adherence when they eventually cut, meaning they can keep their results. Okay? That's clients who spend eight to 12 weeks of maintenance because they're dieting from a position of metabolic strength as well as physiological and psychological confidence instead of a depleted, stressed out, underfed state that is just gonna backfire. So that's part one is simply restoring your calorie intake to maintenance. And it could take four, six, eight, even twelve weeks to get there. The longer you've been dieting in the past, the longer it's gonna take. And that just is what it is. Accept it and go after it. Part two.

Fix #2 (related to protein)

Philip Pape 22:00

Is prioritizing protein at every meal. And I know every single fitness person, every single health and fitness podcast talks about protein all the time now. I don't want to just like talk your ear off about it. But a few of the reasons this is so important is it's going to burn more calories just by eating more protein as a percentage of your diet. So I've seen women keep the calories the same, double their protein. So they reduce their fats and carbs a little bit, they double their protein, and they increase how many calories they burn by a hundred calories, let's say, just by doing that. And it is often the difference between being able to do a calorie deficit and not, like mentally. So more protein literally increases your metabolic rate. And of course, it protects and builds muscle. That's that's really the most important reason we eat protein because of the importance of building and holding on to that muscle. Okay. The target for protein is 0.71 grams a pound per per pound of body weight. Now, in Eat More Lift Heavy, in week four, I believe it is, we unlock a tool called the Protein Day Builder. I'm very proud of this tool. It is a very well-designed tool where you put in your target protein, how many times you want to eat per day, all of your preferences. Like, I mean, even if you're vegan or omnivore or you're, you know, gluten-free, you don't want to use protein powders, you don't want to use protein bars, all those preferences. And it will build you a protein-based plan for the day that has a lot of variety and a lot of ideas, and you can rebuild with a click of a button and like instantly, you can click a button and it'll keep rebuilding for you. So I know that's the biggest struggle for a lot of you guys is like, okay, I know I have to get a gram of protein per pound or up to that, but I don't know how. And you can go to AI and you could try tools like that for sure. You can try to do it that way. But we have a tool like that in our program. Anyway, you know, stepping back a bit, I'm kind of jumping into the weeds. You can't just fix the protein gap just by adding protein shakes. I mean, you can numerically, but you really want protein sources, a variety of lean protein sources that also tend to have other forms of nutrition in them, that they taste good, that they're gonna make great meals, et cetera. Everything from eggs to Greek yogurt to chicken, fish, lean beef, cottage, cheese, and yes, even whey protein and kind of a good variety where protein always anchors the meal, and then you fill in the fats and carbs around it. I like to think protein, then fiber, then other carbs. And fats kind of come in naturally with like oils and sauces and naturally in meats and stuff like that. When you do this, something interesting happens that people don't talk enough about, and that is your hunger stabilizes. Your hunger stabilizes. Protein is the most satiating macro. So you feel fuller on more, you feel fuller because you have more protein, but even when the calories are the same. And it can help with things like your 3 p.m. energy crash and radiating the pantry after dinner. A lot of the cravings that you might have might go away simply because you upped your protein and your total calories with these first two parts. All right. So that's the first two

Fix 3# (related to training)

Philip Pape 24:51

parts. And then part three is of course resistance training with progressive overload. If I hear anyone, anyone tell me or think in their mind even that they don't need to do resistance training, that it's just another form of exercise, that, well, you should train based on what you like. And you are 100% incorrect. Resistance training is absolutely a non-negotiable requirement as a human being if you want to stay healthy and have a long, healthy life. You have to do it. You have to do it. I'm sorry. Okay. I've seen too many women doing bodyweight circuits that they never increase in weight, light dumbbell classes, the pink dumbbells that never go up. They do the machines that they never increase in weight. They're doing cardio heavy programs, they're doing even Pilates. Yes, I'm calling out Pilates again or spin or whatever else. And they don't actually progressively overload. And then they wonder why my body composition isn't changing. Why I don't want to see muscle definition? Or, hey, I went on a diet, I lost fat, I still don't see the muscle. It's because you're not training properly. Building muscle requires a specific stimulus. You have to challenge the muscle with enough resistance that it adapts by growing. That's what's happening. You're giving your body a hormonal signal that it needs bigger muscles. And bigger means tone or cut or whatever, whatever word you'd like to use. It doesn't mean bulky, especially for women. Women aren't gonna get bulky. And this means lifting weights that are genuinely hard for anywhere from, let's say, three up to 20 reps per set. The details about training we're not gonna get into today, but it's got to be enough frequency, enough volume over time, tracking your lifts and progressively adding weight or reps over time. Even if you do this in a sloppy, imperfect way, as long as you can look at your log and say, wow, six weeks ago, I did this one exercise for 85 pounds and now I'm up to 115, that is proof that you're getting stronger and thus building muscle. Okay. Now it doesn't require a gym. You can have a gym at home. It doesn't require barbells, you can use dumbbells and machines, but it does require progressive challenge, not just the movement or quote unquote exercise itself. So those are the three big things. When you combine adequate calories, adequate protein, progressive resistance training, your body starts to rebuild. And it might, I might sound like a broken record, like, okay, these are the basics, but I hope I got into a little bit level of detail today that helps you understand the why behind how this affects your metabolism and your ability to eat food and why we're probably under-eating, and that's really part of the problem here. Okay. It's not just eat whatever you want, eat a whole bunch more food, eat a whole bunch of pizza and donuts, sit around all day, and that's what Philip told me to do, and that's gonna help me. No, that's absolutely not what I'm talking about. But once you do that, well, now you're gonna support those things I just said earlier. You weren't supporting, even if you were maintaining your weight. And that is your hormonal function because you're no longer restricting. You're building a body that requires more fuel because you have more muscle, because you're moving more, moving more in the right way. And now eventually you could do a strategic fat loss phase and you have room to work with. It's not because you've magically increased your metabolism, it's because you're probably finally supporting your metabolism. And now you could eat, say, you know, 1800 calories and lose some fat instead of 1200. That's the fix. Eat enough, prioritize protein, lift progressively. And it sounds deceptively simple because on paper it is. The hard part is not the information. I've said this before. The hard part is trusting and taking action on the process when everything else you've been taught says to do the opposite. Now, just to really quickly get ahead of the YouTube commenters, although they're probably not going to comment on this because it's audio only. Three things I'm not saying, or four things

Deficits, hormones, and fear of gaining weight

Philip Pape 28:23

I'm not saying. The first one, I'm not saying calorie deficits don't work. If you were listening carefully, you know that yes, you need a calorie deficit to lose fat, but the way most people do it is counterproductive because of the chronic restriction. And there's a difference between a well-designed, time-limited fat loss phase from a metabolically healthy starting point and a perpetual 1200 calorie, I'll say grinding deficit misery that erodes your muscle, your metabolism, your hormones month after month. I'm also not saying just eat more and magically lose weight. Just eat more in general, right? Eating at maintenance is a recovery strategy to restore your body's capacity. So when you do diet, it actually works. That's what we're talking about by eating more. And part of the eating more is eating more protein, not just calories. Right? I'm also not saying hormones don't matter. They absolutely do. In fact, I mentioned that several times. But the hormonal issues you're experiencing are probably amplified by chronic undereating, meaning it's bi-directional. If your hormone panels, if you get lab work, don't look great, or you have symptoms from low hormones, it could simply be that these other things like chronic undereating are keeping those hormones low. Not that the low hormones are causing the other issues, but it's all a cascade. So if you can fix the energy availability and fix the protein and fix the training, a lot of those symptoms improve or go away. And maybe not all of them. Some women definitely benefit from HRT and other medical interventions, but the foundation has to be there. And then the last thing I'm not saying is that it's easy or that the fear of eating more isn't real. It's definitely real. I hear it every day from clients and listeners. Like, hey, I know I'm probably not eating enough, but I'm afraid of gaining weight. I hear that language where they even know they need to eat more, but they're afraid of gaining weight. And it comes from years of conditioning. Let's just say it out loud. Like, I've been conditioned that way from years and years, but the path forward is going to be through adequate fuel and muscle, not more restriction. And the women who trust that and commit to it for six months are the ones who break that cycle. All right, before we wrap up, I promised you the number one thing that predicts whether your next fat loss phase will work or just stall. Again, it's quick, it's practical, it's coming up in just a second. But if this is if this episode described you to a T, if you've been eating less and less with nothing to show for it, if you know you need to change your approach, but you're not sure how to do it without gaining weight, that is what Eat More Lift Heavy was built for specifically. It is not an education program or a learning program. It's actually an experience that walks you through each of these steps of the phases to teach you the skills so that you have the confidence to do this while also, of course, getting the result, changing your body composition, looking and feeling better than you ever have before. The first phase is building your foundation, getting your tracking set up, establishing your baseline, making sure you're eating enough, doing this recovery phase we talked about today to support muscle and recovery before we make other changes. You'll have human coaches, you'll have live calls, you'll have a training program assigned to you so you'll know what to train with exactly. You won't be guessing or choosing on your own. We're gonna help you. And then you follow the 26-week program. It gives you one thing to focus on each week instead of trying to overhaul everything at once. So if you want to stop guessing, if you want to eat more and lift heavy to get the result, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. Grab your spot before Monday, grab the founder's price right now. You won't get charged until launch. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. All right,

The one number that predicts whether your next diet will work

Philip Pape 31:50

there's one number that predicts whether your next diet is going to work or you're gonna keep yo-yoing. It is your expenditure trend over the last four to six weeks. Your actual observed expenditure, how many calories you burn every day based on what you've been eating and what your weight has been doing. Now, this is a classic thing that coaches for years, nutrition coaches for years, have helped their clients collect. And as I mentioned before, if you use macrofactor, it does it for you. Use my code wits and weights, all one word. Okay. And track your food and weight daily for four to six weeks. And I say four to six because for some people, their metabolisms are more stable than for others. For others, you're really you have a lot of volatility or a lot of recovery going on, so it'll take a little longer to stabilize. Now, if you've looked at that trend and the excuse me, and that trend has been declining steadily week after week, and you've been dieting or maintaining, then your metabolism is adapting downward. And you don't want to try to cut further or start another calorie deficit from that position, right? It's like trying to squeeze water from a dry sponge, think of it that way. If your expenditure has been stable or rising, then your body has a good enough capacity, it's pretty well recovered, and you're probably in a good place to handle a deficit. And that's it. That that's what I wanted to share today is you have to have real expenditure data. And if it's going down, you probably still need to recover. If it's stable or going up, you're probably good. So before you start your next diet, do this. Track your food and weight consistently for four to six weeks weeks it to current intake. And we definitely help you do that and eat more lift heavy. I've always taken that approach with clients. A tool like Macrofactor will calculate your real expenditure from that data. Don't change anything, just start tracking. That's all I'm asking you to do. Don't actually change the targets, just set it to maintain and start tracking until that number is stable and not decreasing. If it's going up a little, that's fine, but as long as it's not decreasing. If it's falling, you have to restore your metabolism first. Get up to your true maintenance. Build muscle. Make sure you're training. Let that number climb back up before you try to cut. All right, that is it. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the path to losing fat after 40 starts with eating enough to build the body that burns that fat. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.