Muscle loss during a cut

Philip Pape 0:00

If you spend months building muscle and you're about to start a fat loss phase, or if you're on a GLP1 medication and watching the scale drop, but wondering how much of that is muscle, this episode is going to change how you approach your cut. Today I'm going to show you the three specific mistakes that cause people to lose muscle instead of fat during a deficit, and a research-backed approach to fix all three. You'll learn about how fast it's too fast to lose weight so that you don't lose up to 60% more lean mass, how much more protein adults over 40 need versus their younger peers, and what a recent case series found when GLP1 users combined resistance training with adequate protein. All that and more in today's episode. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice 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 this episode is coming out during the spring. I know a lot of you are thinking about transitioning into a fat loss phase ahead of summer. Maybe you just finished a building or bulking phase over the winter. Maybe you've been on a GLP1 medication like Wagovi or Manjaro, and you're losing weight, but you're not sure what weight you're losing. Are you losing some muscle along the way or not? Maybe you've been through this cycle before where you dieted down, you lost some fat, but you also lost a bunch of muscle that you work very hard to build. And then when you try to build again, you're basically starting from scratch. And that is the cycle I want to help you break today. Stick around to the end of this episode because I'm gonna share a specific meal structure that helps you hit 50 grams of protein with less than 400 calories with almost no demand on your appetite. If you're on a GLP1 medication or your appetite is pretty crushed during a cut, which is sounds strange, but for some people this does happen. This is definitely going to be useful. All right, today you're gonna learn the three biggest threats to your muscle during a fat loss phase. You're gonna learn the specific protein and rate of loss targets that the latest research supports and why GLP1 users who lift and eat enough protein can have just as good outcome as anyone else and lose very little, if any, muscle mass. All right, let's get into it and look at the standard advice when it comes to cutting. When you listen to podcasts, when you think about how to plan out fat loss or weight loss, and that is you're gonna cut your calories a certain amount, you're gonna keep training. Maybe you modify your training, but you keep training, and then you ride it out until you're lean. Maybe you have a target, maybe you don't. There's all different ways to approach this. And you're not sure, do I add in more cardio or do I increase my step count? Do I drop my carbs? Well, they're gonna drop naturally, but should I deliberately drop them even further? And then for GLP1 users, you know, you're taking the medication and your appetite is lower, but then you want to do a fat loss phase. It's like, do you still need to force yourself to eat a little bit more than you were, even though you're in a deficit? So the deficit is not too big, right? There's all these questions swirling about cuts that I want to address kind of all together today with concepts coming together. And there's some truth in all these things, right? You have to have a calorie deficit to lose fat. Yes, that's that's the truth. You do have to keep training to hold on to the muscle. But the the problem is what is often not said with the advice that helps you hold on to muscle optimally. So if we just step back a bit and think of two people who lose weight, both people lose 20 pounds, and one of them loses, say, 18 pounds of fat and maybe two pounds of lean tissue, which isn't terrible, right? It's just a little bit of muscle, but mostly fat. The other loses, say, 12 pounds of fat and eight pounds of lean tissue. Well, you're gonna have very different outcomes at the end, which is why we have to stop obsessing over scale weight, because it's a very small piece of the equation. And somebody who loses that much muscle is gonna feel much different. They're gonna have a much different metabolism. The same result on the scale, but very different body composition outcome. And I see the people walking around taking the GLP1s, not doing the training, not eating protein, and they're not happy. They're not happy. Maybe they're a little bit happy on the scale, but it doesn't last because they're not keeping, they're not getting the body that they actually wanted out of this. Maybe they improved their health outcomes, so there's definitely value in that. But there's a lot of research on this now because of those drugs, and it affects everyone. If you're listening and you're not on these drugs or not even considering them, this still impacts you in understanding this. If you don't do things a certain way, then some percentage of the weight you lose is going to come from lean mass. And it's probably about 25% on average, and sometimes even more than that. It's what we call the quarter rule from body composition research: one out of every four pounds as lean tissue. Now, for most people who are just dieting without the resistance training at all, without paying attention to protein, without controlling the rate of loss, which is a lot of people on GLP one meds, but it could be people who are just crash dieting or doing like a keto or carnivore type deal and they're just losing weight really quickly, but they're not doing the other things. That 25% can climb up to 35 or even 40%. If you're on a GLP1 med, again, without a structured plan to change your lifestyle, we've seen DEXA data. DEXA can measure body composition. There were the semaglatide trials showed that lean mass made up about 40% of the total weight loss. That's a lot of muscle to lose. And it's not to me, not to scare you. You've heard this many times on podcasts, because you can actually do something about it. It's not inevitable. This is where the episode is headed. Okay, with the right strategy, you can get that number down to under 10%, some cases zero. And we want to be able to measure it as well. Okay, folks who are, for example, in our program eat more lift heavy. We have a very good tracker to do that. So we can track fat-free mass and lean mass and body fat change and all of that stuff. Anyone can do it. It's just math, simple numbers. But in some cases, people actually gain some lean mass while losing significant body fat, even on GLP1 medications. So there's this huge gap between the worst case and the best case, and the variables that control it are entirely within your hands. So let me walk you through each one. All right, here

Rate of loss and lean mass

Philip Pape 6:31

we go. These are the three things that are threatening your muscle while you're in a cut, so you know you can do something about it. Threat number one is you're just losing weight too fast. And there is a study I think every everybody should know about who's listening to this. It's it's pretty old now. It's 2011. Researchers took 24 elite athletes and they split them into two groups. One group lost weight at about 0.7% of their body weight a week, and the other lost at about 1.4% body weight per week. So twice as fast. Both groups trained four days a week. Both groups lost a similar amount of total scale weight. What do you think happened? Well, the group that went slower gained lean mass. The fast group didn't gain lean mass. Now you're like, well, aren't you talking about the loss of lean mass? Still, this is incredible because they were in a fat loss phase. And what you're noticing here is that training is a really important variable, even if you're losing quickly, not just to hold on to muscle, but if you can go at the right rate and it's not too fast, you could potentially gain muscle, which is insane, right? It's insane because we're always told, no, you can't do that. When you lose weight too fast, remember what's happening. Your body needs to pull energy from somewhere. It's trying to get back to homeostasis. And so, on one hand, it has some fat stored up that it's trying to pull energy from, but because you're going so fast, it can't even, it's like it can't keep up and it's just trying to take energy from wherever it can, including muscle tissue. And so, if we go to a more recent study from 2022, a meta-analysis that I've referred to quite a bit, it showed that once your deficit exceeds about 500 calories a day, your ability to gain or maintain lean mass during resistance training drops to essentially zero. And then below five, you know, below 500, like losing losing fewer uh pounds, going slower, you can still build muscle in a deficit, you know, if you're training hard and eating enough protein. And then above 500, that ability kind of goes away, right? So that's the first place to start here. And that leads us to a rate of loss target of about a half to 1% of your body weight a week. Or you can go slower than that, of course, but up to 1% of your body weight a week, which is something I've talked about for several years now. So for if you're a 180-pound person, that's around 0.9 to 1.8 pounds a week. If you're 150 pounds, that's up to one and a half pounds, right? It's just one per 1%. Pretty easy math. Now, if you're leaner, I usually suggest aiming for the lower end. If you have more fat to lose, you probably have a little more room at the upper end if you're concerned about muscle preservation or even trying to gain muscle during a cut. Once you go faster than 1% a week, the research shows that you have a higher chance of losing muscle. And again, it's very individualistic. Like I definitely have worked with folks who have a lot of fat to lose, are training really hard, they have a lot of muscle, and they can go a little bit more than 1%. Maybe they can go 1.25%. It also depends on the duration. But again, the relationship is still there. And if you want to avoid that risk, you're going to keep the rate of loss more reasonable. And a lot of people are not doing that, especially on GLP ones, is that they're going faster than they need to. And when they come into our program, we're like, hey, we need we need you to eat more, even though you don't have as much of an appetite and you're still losing weight. It's kind of a weird situation to be in. It also implies that maybe you don't need to be on those drugs if you're doing this the right way, but it depends on the person. Okay.

Protein during a fat loss phase

Philip Pape 9:56

The second threat to this muscle loss is, of course, protein. And I might be stating the obvious here, but I did want to bang them out one, two, three, just so we are making sure we're doing these things. Because if you're not doing these things, why are you so focused on all the other stuff that just doesn't matter? Focus on the one thing to optimize in front of you. Okay. So protein. Now, training is absolutely essential throughout this discussion. So I'm not even going to mention it as a threat to muscle loss. In other words, if you are not training, you will lose muscle. Let's just get that out of the way in case you're listening and you thought I was going to mention uh not training as one of the three threats. No, not training is an inevitable threat always, by definition. So you have to be resistance training. And if you have been pushing against that for whatever reason, you don't like it, you hate it, you, whatever excuse you're making for yourself, now's the time to stop and find a way to eliminate all those excuses. We help people do this all the time. I just had a chat this morning with one of our uh dialed-in clients in Eat More Lift Heavy, where she's like, all right, I know the first thing I need to do is learn to like lifting weights. Now, it may not be exactly that. It may be finding a way to lift that then gives her the results so that she starts to find joy in it. But the point is you have to train. Okay, I got off on a tangent, but the second risk we're talking about here is protein. The original landmark review by Eric Helms in 2014 recommended 2.3 to 3.1 grams per kilogram of fat-free mass for lean athletes during a deficit. You're like, oh, okay, now I have to do all this weird math. No, I don't want you to do all the weird math. What it translates to is the thing I talk about all the time: roughly 0.7 to one gram per pound of total body weight. A little bit more than that is never gonna hurt. Like more protein is not gonna hurt you. All it does is take away from the other macros, which could be a problem if the calories are really low, but more protein is not gonna hurt you. The minimum, though, you want to get to around, you know, 0.7. Now, there was just last year, 2025, an updated systematic review from the same group that looked at 29 studies instead of the original six, and they found a greater than 97% probability of a dose response relationship between protein intake and lean mass retention during a deficit. And the threshold they identified was around 1.9 grams per kilogram or 0.87 grams per pound as the minimum to prevent accelerated lean mass loss. Now, again, these are just means, these are averages. 0.87 during a deficit, okay? During a deficit. So below that, yeah, you have a higher risk of losing muscle. And of course, you know, it's dose response. So, you know, if you're near it, that's fine. The farther you get from it, the more it increases that risk. And then above it, the benefits continue in a linear fashion up to about 3.2 grams per kilogram. So for practical purposes, here we go. Conclusion During a fat loss phase, if you can get around that upper end of like one gram per pound of body weight, and if you're over 40, I'd really seriously consider doing that and push it at least there, if not 1.1, 1.2 grams, because of the anabolic resistance and all that. You know, as we age, our muscles become a little bit less responsive to protein. So your ability to maximize muscle protein synthesis is a little bit less efficient. So, anyway,

Per-meal protein over 40

Philip Pape 13:12

you need a little bit more. I don't want to overthink it. I don't want to overthink it. But I, again, going back to the GLP1 discussion, we've got a client in our group that joined this week for eat more lift heavy, and he's on, he doesn't have as much of an appetite and is worried about how to get enough protein. I said, look, don't worry about trying to get the full amount we want to get you to. Let's get you from where you are today, step change up to the minimum, and then you can start to tweak up from there. It's just a function of the math initially, but then it might be a function of how do you do it with your appetite? Like if you don't have an appetite, if you can't eat that much, we need to look at more energy dense foods or protein shakes, things like that. Not all of your protein, but there are little tricks we can do to kind of eke our way there as you learn about energy density and volume and all of that. And also frequency. Like if you're trying to get all your protein in one or two meals, it's gonna be a lot harder than if you distribute it across three, four, or five meals or snacks of you know, 30 to 40 grams each. So, long story short, in a fat loss phase specifically, going for a higher end is more helpful. And if you guys use macro factor, which I use, code wits and weights, all one word, get your two-week free trial if you want to support the podcast. That's macro factor. When you go into a fat loss phase, it actually does jack up your protein based on this science. All right. So, what I what I often see happen is the opposite. People cut their calories. So, of course, their meals get smaller, or they may even have one or two fewer meals a day. And yet they're trying to get they need to get the same or more protein, but it's harder to get more protein when you've already now dropped the calories. And so it takes a shift in your planning. Like you really have to plan well during a fat loss phase to do that because your percentage of calories from protein goes way up. It goes from say 10 to 20% up to like 40 or 50%, maybe.

Sleep and body composition

Philip Pape 15:01

Okay, the third threat to your muscle growth is you're not sleeping enough. You're not sleeping enough. Okay, and and this one can never get talked about enough. I'm not gonna rehash the study that I've mentioned over and over again, but essentially we've seen time and again in a calorie deficit, if you are sleep deprived, you're actually gonna lose more lean tissue during a deficit. And we're we're talking a massive amount, potentially, depending on how sleep-deprived you are, like up to that 30, 40, 50% range of your muscle as lean mass. And again, this is mitigated somewhat by your training and your protein that we've already talked about. But your, you know, what we call nutrient partitioning, the fancy word to say how much of the nutrients are going to muscle and fat versus how much energy is pulled from muscle and fat, is not the way you want it to be if you're sleep deprived. All right. And we've seen multiple studies where sleep-restricted subjects didn't lose very much body fat because they were losing some muscle as part of their weight loss. So if you are not in a good place with your sleep, it is not a good time for fat loss. And I can't tell you how many people have come to us. They're frustrated because they're trying to lose weight. The calories keep going down and down, but they're not losing it. And they're like, Yeah, I don't get much sleep. Like, okay, let's fix that. Oh, I know I need good sleep, but I want to lose weight. Well, I'm sorry. The mechanism is there. It's your body. Poor sleep increases cortisol, it decreases testosterone, it impairs muscle protein synthesis, it shifts your nutrient nutrient partitioning toward fat storage and away from muscle recovery. Why does it do this? Because your body is looking for any energy it can get. And because you're not giving it sleep, it's like, well, I'm gonna hold on to that damn fat right now. Apologize my uh for my language. That's the worst you're gonna hear in terms of swearing on the show. So sleep, sleep, sleep. So important. If you're doing everything else right, if you're eating enough protein, if you're controlling the rate of loss, you're training hard, but you're only sleeping five hours a night, you are massively holding yourself back from all of that, and it's really not gonna go anywhere. You've got to fix that sleep. Just gotta do it. All right, so we've covered the three biggest threats to your muscle during a cut losing weight too fast, not getting enough protein, and not sleeping

Eating more and lifting heavy

Philip Pape 17:08

enough. And I want to tell you quickly about Eat More Lift Heavy because what we just talked about is exactly what phase two of this program is designed to guide you through. Eat More Lift Heavy is a 26-week coached program that I created and we recently launched. I run it with Coach Carol, and it's three phases. And the second phase, which is called Eat More, Lift Heavy, is where you learn to execute and adjust your plan with us as the coaches looking over your shoulder. And so that includes navigating your phase transitions, like going from a building phase into a fat loss phase without losing the muscle you just built. And you're gonna learn to read your own data, you're gonna interpret your expenditure, you're gonna adjust your training, you're gonna learn to troubleshoot plateaus in real time with again, coaches who are watching this and giving you the feedback on, hey, is what you're interpreting correct? Let's help you out. So it's not a meal plan, it's not a course, it is a coached experience that builds skills so you can do this independently for the rest of your life. Isn't that what you want? Isn't that what you want? Now, if this topic today is really hitting home for you, if you've been through the cut and lose muscle cycle multiple times, that's exactly what Eatmore Lift Heavy was built to solve because I've seen this problem time and again, and I want to help you guys, but it you've got to do more than just binge podcasts, you've got to put it into action. So if you want to do that, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com and check us out. All right.

Rate of loss and protein targets

Philip Pape 18:36

So now you know the threats to muscle loss during a deficit. What do you do about it? What does the research say we should do, other than just the opposite of those threats? So step one is okay, if going too fast is a problem, how fast should I go? And we we mentioned briefly the half to 1% of your body weight a week is a really solid range to be in. And you can calculate this manually. Just take your body weight. We said it before, if you're 150 pounds, that upper range is 1.5 pounds. I'm talking to someone on a consult who's about 185 pounds, he's losing over two pounds a week. And his energy is dropping, and there's a reason for that. He might be losing muscle. It might be too fast, especially if you've been on a prolonged deficit. If you're losing fat, if you're losing weight faster than that, you just run the risk of losing more muscle than you need to. And I see it more often than I don't. And all you got to do is increase your calories a little bit. You could also make sure the other things like sleep are really rock solid, and these will also mitigate often the muscle loss as well. But anyway, this is the easiest lever to pull because it's just a number, it's just a rate of loss. And the pushback I see is often like, well, I want to lose weight faster than that. Like I just want to get to a result fast. If that is your mindset, it's not going to serve you long term because that puts you in the 95% of people who are inevitably going to gain it back. If your mindset is, I want to do it the right way and hold on to those results, then please process what I'm saying. All right, step two is setting that protein floor. Um, I mentioned during a deficit, if you can get at least that one gram per pound of body weight or even more, the older you are, the more you probably need. And then you distribute it evenly across your meals, where every meal is like a protein event. Every meal has protein, not just dinner, not just your post-workout, every single meal, just make it a habit. Because it can be really hard to get your protein otherwise. If you go into the office and you don't plan ahead and bring your lunch with enough protein, you end up going to the cafeteria. Good luck. Like good luck getting enough protein that isn't, you know, deep fried or a tiny bit of the meal without doing like a grilled chicken salad, which is fine if you want the same, you know, grilled chicken salad every day. And there is an interesting little thing called the protein leverage effect that I've alluded to before, where if protein drops below a certain percentage of calories, you tend to unconsciously overeat to meet that protein target, and you end up eating even more fats and carbs and still not getting enough protein, and then it affects your hunger. So having the protein is increases your satiety, but not just directly. There's this indirect way that it does so as well. So that's protein. And by the way, in eat more lift heavy, uh, very early on, I think it's week four, we give you a very massively helpful tool called the Protein Day Builder that helps you build out your entire day based on whatever your targets are. And you can keep running the tool as many times as you want, forever, while you're in the program.

Training volume and intensity

Philip Pape 21:25

All right, step three is maintaining your training intensity. So here I do want to talk about training. A lot of people get this backward, right? A lot of people want to reduce their training during a cut or they want to do more high-rep endurance cardio type like fat burning stuff. Now, we know that when you're in a deficit, recovery is lower, it's compromised. But the hierarchy of how you do things is important. So if you have to reduce something for that recovery drop, I would reduce the volume first, right? Number of sets, then I would reduce the frequency, how often you do the same lifts or hit the same muscle groups. And then last thing I would reduce is the intensity. And I probably really wouldn't reduce the intensity, other than the fact that you might go from, you know, a strength type program where you're doing PRs above 80% of your max to a more mid-range strength/slash hypertrophy, where you're often hitting higher rep ranges, say above 60% of your max, but you're still lifting heavy, quote unquote. Because maintaining heavy loads is the most important signal to hold on to your muscle. We know from research that even when your deficit prevents you from gaining muscle, which once you've are a little bit experienced, that's usually what happens. You're not going to gain new lean mass in a deficit, usually. You're also not going to lose a lot of strength either. Your nervous system can still adapt even when your muscles can't grow. This is that whole interesting dichotomy between strength and muscle. So keep lifting heavy. Keep lifting heavy. You can drop the volume from, say, if you're doing 15 sets a week down to 10. We know it takes a lot less to maintain than to build. So by definition, if you're all you're trying to do is send a signal to maintain muscle, you have some permission to drop that volume to give you more recovery. A lot of this is going to be by feel and by what the data is telling you in the moment. You may not notice much of a difference in the first, say, four weeks of the cut, and then it really starts to ramp up later on. It's also going to be affected by your sleep and how much how fast you're going of a deficit. Again, these all tie together. One last thing about the maintenance thing, I know I've I've looked in the research lately again, and it does seem that the older you get, the higher dose you need to maintain your muscle. And I don't know if that's really just an age thing or it's confounded by other variables. But as long as you're training like a reasonable level of volume, you know, at least those five to ten sets per muscle group per week are good. All right. Step

Diet breaks and refeeds

Philip Pape 23:57

four is kind of my bonus step today. And that is about diet breaks, using diet breaks as a strategic tool. There's the famous Matador study that found that men who alternated two weeks of dieting with two weeks of maintenance lost a lot more total weight than men who dieted continuously for the same time in the deficit. And that intermittent group that went on and off two weeks at a time showed less metabolic adaptation and maintained more of their weight loss at a six-month follow-up. And I know there have been some pushbacks against this study over the years, but the general principle still applies. And most of it, more of it is psychological. I've I believe this is maybe more anecdotal. The ability to take breaks keeps you more consistent with your diet. So for resistance-trained individuals, which you are trying to be, the the body composition advantage of diet breaks is not like this clear-cut thing, but psychologically it's very helpful. It's very helpful. Really, the only study I can think of that showed some advantage was one of the one that I did called the weekend diet, where you went to a full refeed on the weekends. Like you brought your calories all the way up to maintenance on the weekends, and there showed a slight advantage for retaining muscle, more muscle for that. So I do recommend that approach for a lot of folks, but I mainly recommend it because weekends are where people go off the rails. So if you plan in a break every weekend, it's ah, it's a nice relief. You can go out and enjoy yourself. You know, it's it's just a really good cycle that goes with your natural week for most human beings, social your social calendar. But the big advantage of diet breaks is the subjective well-being advantage. You tend to have less hunger. I mean, you definitely have less hunger the days you take the that you're taking the break, but then it translates psychologically to overall less hunger because you're you're satisfying yourself more often, right? So you have more satisfaction, and then what do you get is better adherence. And you know what? Adherence is the variable that governs everything else. If a diet break every four to six weeks keeps you going, keeps you from falling off the wagon or chasing the next shiny object, then it is worth it, regardless of the math on, oh, it's gonna slow me down a little bit. Well, yeah, but you would have slowed to zero or reverted or regressed if you didn't have the diet break. So, from a practical standpoint, I recommend something like a one to two week diet break at maintenance every, say, four to eight weeks if you're in a longer cut. Almost think of it like a deload for your diet. If you want that more frequent cycle of relief and refeeds than the weekend refeed or the two days per week, one day is often not enough in practical experience. Like the one day it kind of comes and goes real quickly, and it's just not enough. Two days is a really nice compromise because it's two, it's still two out of seven. So five days you're still in a deficit. You can go in a harder deficit on those five days than you would have otherwise, or just keep it, keep it to the same level of calories and accept a slower rate of loss and a slower weekly deficit overall. You can do it whatever way you want.

GLP-1 body composition research

Philip Pape 27:04

All right, so everything I just said applies to anybody, including GLP1 users. So I kind of want to touch on this a little bit, these edge cases. So rate of loss, protein, training. The difference, though, is that these medications make it easier to lose weight, but harder to eat enough, especially protein. It's kind of funny. That's what that's what I noticed, which is kind of a clue that protein is a really good thing to have in your diet for a lot of reasons, isn't it? I think it's like this intuitive clue that hey, maybe you should be getting more protein. And the fact that it's harder to eat if you came off or lowered the dose on the GLP1s while you're increasing your protein, does that kind of solve some of the issues you were having with your appetite? Maybe, maybe not. It depends how strong those signals are in your brain. A lot of brain-related genes. So I want to give you some numbers from trials so you can see the range of outcomes. You've probably heard of the step one some magnitude trial. It's a big one that's referenced all the time. And there was no exercise or protein guidance in the trial. And in that one, lean mass was up to 40% of total weight loss, what I mentioned before. And that sounds really bad. Okay. But a 2025 case series looked at GLP1 users who did resistance train three to five days a week and had adequate protein. And in a case series, so these look at case studies. Okay, it's not like a big trial with a huge sample size, it's just case studies, but they're still helpful to understand. One person lost a third of their body weight, but less than 9% of that loss came from lean tissue, which is totally acceptable, I think, when you've lost that much body weight. I mean, seriously. That's the other thing is like if you if you have a lot of weight to lose, getting a little bit of muscle loss is not fine. It's probably fine and probably worth it. And it's probably not all truly muscle loss. It's lean tissue, so it includes fluid and things like that. In which case you're probably gonna be in a better position afterward to build that as long as you've been holding on to a lot of it to begin with. And then two of the three participants gained lean mass while losing significant body weight. Isn't that pretty cool, right? And that happens. And I'm guessing it's because they hadn't been training before. They were new to it. Now there was a bigger study, it's a prospective study of 200 adults who they were educated on resistance training and protein when they started the GLP1s, and they had 13% weight loss with only 3% muscle loss after six months. So this is a massive gap that we need to understand and we need to spread the word. The same class of drug, vastly different body composition outcomes, based entirely almost on whether they lifted and ate enough protein. And then there's a nuance I do want to mention. I want to mention it, okay. A lot of the scary headlines about GOP1 muscle loss come from those DEXA measurements that I mentioned. And remember that there are, there's not really one body fat measurement that is foolproof. There's error in every single one of them. And if you think of DEXA, anything that's not fat or bone is counted as lean mass. So that includes water, glycogen, and even your organs, which can change in size. So it's not just muscle mass. So when you lose a large amount of body fat, you're also gonna lose the water and protein embedded in that fifth in that fat tissue. And about 15 to 20% of fat or adipose tissue mass is water and protein. Not sure if you realize that. So the DEXA is overstating the amount of skeletal muscle you're losing. I kind of said this already, but I'm saying it in a different way. When researchers use MRI, which can directly measure muscle tissue, we see that the lean tissue drops or lean tissue loss drops about 16% of total weight loss. So, in other words, I'm acknowledging maybe it's not as tremendously massive as we think, but there's still a gap between 16% and 3% or 0% or gaining muscle, right? There's still a big difference. So none of this means you should ignore the risk to that and that you shouldn't train any protein. We want to do those anyway. You want to do those anyway. But I gave you some other tips today, like the controlled rate of loss, and I also mentioned those diet breaks. Um, and I think there are there are medical organizations that are now recommending similar rates of protein intake for people on GLP ones, you know, like up to, not up to, but around 1.2, 1.6 grams per kilogram, which gets you around, gets you to that 0.7 grams per protein, which is great. And they're recommending at least, I think, 360 minutes per week, which is what, six hours per week of exercise with an emphasis on resistance training. So if you're training three or four days a week, you're already getting at least three to five hours just from your training and moving around, and then you're probably walking as well, and then you might be getting a little bit more cardio. So you should probably be in that range anyway. Now, I want to mention retatrotide briefly, because there's a lot of news and buzz around it. It is the next generation, the triple receptor agonist. And it's currently in phase three trials. And I've heard from some of you listeners and some former clients who have taken this, and it is becoming popular in the body composition space, interestingly, with a different, a different judgmental lens on it than things like OZEP. And now, why that is well, okay, so what do we see from it? We see a massive amount of weight loss. I think the most of any of the drug, up to 28% weight loss over the same time periods. And the there's a body composition stuff sub-study that confirmed the proportion of lean mass loss is similar to other GOP1 drugs, which again, I'm not surprised. Same problem, same solution. The mechanism is the same. It's a calorie deficit, it's not the drug itself. And there might be other benefits to all these drugs like retatrotide, might have benefits for liver fat and things like that. And I've seen it used almost as a tool for rapid fat loss or protein-sparing modified fast in a way that the other drugs are not talked about, which is very interesting. I might talk more about that in the future. All right, before we wrap up, remember I promised you a specific meal structure to hit plenty of protein. So in this case, 50 grams of protein with doing it very efficiently, so under 400 calories with minimal demand on your appetite, whether you're on GLP1 drugs or you're just looking to get a lot more protein and you're having trouble from a from a hunger perspective, fitting it in. Like you can't feel like you can't eat that much. I'm gonna share that in just a moment.

Bonus: 50g protein meal for low appetite

Philip Pape 33:16

But if this episode was useful to you, I do have a favor. All I want you to do is think of someone in your life who wants to start a cut, wants to lose fat, who might be currently on a GLP 1 med. You know, those are two different categories. They might want to lose fat and or they might be on GLP1 med, wanting to lose weight, and they're worried about the muscle loss thing. Send them this episode. Just text it to them from your app or tell them about it, or tag me on Instagram and send it to them. All right, this can change someone's life, just knowing this information on what to do, and hopefully you're giving it to them out of love, out of kindness. People are not hearing this from their doctor. They might not be hearing it from their trainer, or if they even have one, so share it with a friend. All right, here is the 50 gram suppressed appetite meal idea I have for you. It's designed for days when eating feels like it's tough to do. And I know that's not the case for everyone. You might be listening, like, whoa, I would love to be in that situation. But many of you are, okay? Especially if you're trying, I'm asking you to increase calories. Like when you join eat more, lift heavy. The first two words, eat more. We're trying to bring up that metabolism, help you eat more calories. So, this this is for people on a cut, deep into a cut, especially on GLP1 meds, or just one of those low appetite days. I want you to take one cup of non-fat Greek yogurt. That's 130 calories, that's 20 grams of protein as a base. You're gonna mix in one scoop of your favorite protein powder, flavored, unflavored, I don't care, whatever you like, casein or whey or a vegan protein powder with pea and rice. That adds another 25 to 30 grams of protein. So now you have another 120 calories. Now you're gonna fold in a handful of berries, maybe about a quarter cup of berries. That gives you some flavor and some fiber and also a little bit of hydration. I personally love raspberries and blackberries because they're extremely high in fiber. But hey, blueberries, strawberries, they all work. So when you add it all up, you've got about 50 grams of protein, around 280 to 350 calories, depending on the protein powder amount. Takes 90 seconds to make, doesn't require you to chew, it doesn't demand a lot of stomach space, it is cold, it is creamy, it is mildly sweet, it goes down easily, even when you have no appetite. And if you're looking for a pre-bed or late evening snack with enough hours before you go to sleep, this is also a great idea. So, again, that's just non-fat Greek yogurt, protein powder, and berries. Super, super simple. And the reason this works is yogurt and protein powder are the two most protein-dense foods per unit of volume. You're getting 50 grams of protein in the physical space of this small bowl. And you compare that, say, to say eight ounces of chicken breasts when you don't have an appetite and it feels like kind of a chore to get down. It's the same protein but a different experience because of the food density. And I just wanted to share that. It might sound obvious to some of you who are really into making recipes that this is like, you know, child's play 101 stuff, but a lot of people are not thinking of this with intention, how they make this work. And if you put this in your rotation, plant it in, add it to macrofactor or wherever you track, and you could skip it if you need to, but have it in there, pre-plant it, and it can be a really helpful tool. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember the muscle you built is worth protecting. And the way to do that is just simpler than you think if you listen to this episode. I'm Philip Bate, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.