Scale weight and the fat loss problem

Philip Pape 0:00

If you're stepping on the scale every morning and using that number to decide whether fat loss is working, you are masking decisions based on one of the noisiest, most misleading metrics you could possibly choose. Your scale weight can swing two to five pounds overnight from water, glycogen, sodium, hormones. None of that is fat. Today I'm going to show you three specific metrics that actually predict whether you're losing fat, preserving muscle, and doing it at a rate you can sustain. You'll learn why a woman in perimenopause can lose half a pound of fat per week and see a three-pound gain on the scale the same morning. Why one measurement predicts your cardiovascular risk better than BMI, and the biofeedback signal that flags an unsustainable deficit before the scale ever catches up. 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. Summer is right around the corner. And if you're in a fat loss phase right now or you're about to start one, you need to know whether your approach is working. For most people, working often means one thing, and that is hey, the scale is going down, and that's it. And that is the entire feedback loop. And if you are over 40, if you're strength training, if you're a woman dealing with hormonal fluctuations, that feedback loop is going to mislead you. It is going to cause you to make bad decisions. It's going to make you think that you are failing when you're succeeding. Or worse, think that you are succeeding when you're actually maybe not. So today I'm going to give you three metrics I want you tracking alongside your scale weight. Not instead of the scale weight, but alongside it. We're going to use the scale weight for one of those metrics actually. Because together they will give you a complete picture that the scale alone will not give you. Then I want you to stick around to the end of this episode because I'm going to share one specific threshold that tells you your cut is too aggressive and that you need to pull back potentially immediately. It's a red flag that you could miss for a long time until the damage is sort of already done. And I'm going to give you that at the end. Here's what we're covering in today's episode. First, why the scale is such a terrible standalone metric and how much it actually fluctuates from things that have nothing to do with body fat. Second, we'll talk about the three metrics, and I'm not going to reveal those just yet. I want you to listen to the episode because I'm going to explain the context behind them. But they are very simple things you can do already with nothing special, no special math. There's a little bit of math, but it's going to work really well for telling you what progress you are actually making. So let's talk about the scale again. Okay, and I say again because if you've listened to the show, we've talked about fat loss versus weight loss. If you're new to the show, listen up. This is super important. You step on the scale in the morning and it's up two pounds from yesterday. I'm sure that's happened to you many times. What do you do? If you're like most people, you panic a little bit. Maybe you panic a lot. Maybe you think I need to eat less. Maybe you think I need to do some more exercise or cardio. Or maybe you're just defeated, deflated because you're doing everything right. And I did everything right yesterday. I didn't even overeat, and the number still went up. Well, the problem here is that your body weight can fluctuate one to two and a half kilograms or two to five

Daily fluctuations from water, glycogen, sodium

Philip Pape 3:30

and a half pounds in a single day. And usually, almost guaranteed, none of it is body fat. And it makes a lot of sense when you think about it because every gram of glycogen in your muscles stores three to four grams of water. So if you eat a higher carb meal, 500 grams of carbs can add four to six pounds of scale weight from glycogen and water alone. And sodium does the same thing essentially. If you have a salty meal, it can cause one to three pounds of water retention that resolves within about one to three days, and none of that is fat. Of course, sodium is in a lot of things, it's in processed foods, it's in takeout, pizza, Chinese, you name it. Now, where it gets really important for you is specifically depending on your age and depending on your hormones, there could be some other confounding factors. So, for example, if you're a woman in your 40s, if you're in perimenopause or postmenopause, the scale becomes even more useless, is the way I'm gonna put it. When we look at menstrual cycle weight fluctuations, on average they're one pound per cycle, but the clinical range is like one to five pounds. And then during perimenopause, those fluctuations become erratic and unpredictable because estrogen and progestrogen are not following a consistent pattern anymore. So you could be losing, say, half a pound of fat per week, and then you see a three-pound spike on the scale one morning. And then if you react to that by doing something silly like cutting calories or doing more cardio or changing your whole routine up, you probably made a bad decision based on bad data. The Swan

Perimenopause and menstrual cycle changes

Philip Pape 5:00

study, it's the gold standard study we've talked about for menopausal body composition research, tracked over 1,200 women and they used DEXA scans over 18 years. They found that during the menopause transition, fat mass gain roughly doubled, going from about 1% a year to 1.7% a year. Meanwhile, lean mass, right, muscle, lean mass shifted from a slight gain to a decline. But total weight gain over the transition averaged only three and a half pounds. So because fat was going up and muscle was going down, the scale didn't really change that much. So think about that. Think about that a lot. A dramatic shift in body composition, more fat, less muscle. The scare scale barely moves. And this results in a

Body composition during menopause

Philip Pape 5:45

lot of stories I hear from you from ladies who they're just not happy with their body. They have belly fat. I hear it all the time. They're it's not that they've gained a ton of weight necessarily. They could have, but even if they didn't, something is off, something isn't computing, and this is behind it. And when we talk about this body composition issue, which is relevant for all of you listening, anyone who lifts weights, listening to this show, you're trying to build muscle and lose fat. We see in study after study, trial after trial, that when people are put into a calorie deficit and training and eating enough protein, we see that there are differences in how much lean mass is retained and fat mass is lost. And you can't tell the difference between these different groups based on their training and protein, just based on the scale, because the scale weight might stay the same, but one group is actually building muscle, one group is losing muscle. And of course, we don't want to do that. We want to lose fat. For anyone starting or returning to lifting, especially when you're older, maybe you're detrained, maybe you trained when you were younger. This is also especially relevant because your body is going to respond like a novice lifter and have that high anabolic sensitivity where you are primed for recomposition. And then what happens is you sometimes gain some weight and yet you're gaining more muscle than you're gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time, yet the net effect is you're gaining weight, and that can really mess with your head. So I'm not telling you throw out your scale. In fact, the scale is something we're gonna use, and it's actually very important. You'll see why in a moment, but what you need is context, and that's what these metrics provide. So let's get into metric number one, which I call weight trend velocity. All right. So if a single daily weigh-in is unreliable, what do we do? Well, we have to zoom

Weight trend velocity

Philip Pape 7:30

out, right? Instead of the trees, we want to have the forest. And so, interestingly or ironically, to do this, we want to weigh ourselves every day. Okay, you're like, what? Just stick with me. You're gonna weigh yourself every day under standardized conditions. The best time to do that is first thing in the morning after using the bathroom before you eat or drink, wearing minimal clothing. And you're gonna do this every day. Then if you want to do this by hand, what you would do is calculate a rolling average. So seven days is reasonable. I really prefer more like 14 days. But let's just say you want to start collecting this now, seven-day average, and then you're gonna compare those rolling averages across time to see the trend. This is not the end of it. This is not what this is not the metric we're talking about yet. We're gonna use the trend velocity, but we need to have the trend first. Now, if you use an app like MacroFactor, okay, I love MacroFactor. All of our clients and members use it and eat more lift heavy. If you want to go download the app and use my code Wits and Weights, all one word, you'll get a two-week free trial to try it out for yourself. It's the only app that calculates your metabolism to give you accurate targets for calories and macros. So go download it, use my code Wits and Weights all one word. But in macro factor, there's something called the trend weight. And the trend weight is an exponentially weighted moving average. So it essentially smooths out the daily noise and it gives more weight, pun intended, to more recent data points over 20 days. That is something you can do in a spreadsheet as well. But my point is it's over about a three-week period, over 20 days. And what's cool about trend weight is it shows you the true direction that your weight is heading based on body fat change, because that's the energy storage in your body. And so it smooths out all the other noise from that daily number that's that's influenced by fluid. That makes sense. So the trend line is the signal, the daily number is just the noise, and we're trying to reveal the signal. But it only tells you, okay, my weight is going up or down. You also need to know how quickly that's happening. And this is where the rate of loss comes in. And it really matters a ton. So the consensus at this point is if you're gonna lose weight on a deficit, you should be losing anywhere from like a half to one percent at most of your body weight per week. There are exceptions to that rule. We're not gonna get into those cases today, but in general, you peg the top end at 1% of your body weight per week if you want to avoid losing muscle mass. So for a 160-pound person, that's 0.8 to 1.6 pounds a week. If you're 200 pounds, that's one to two pounds a week. And again, we've seen studies on athletes, on trained individuals showing that a body weight loss at these percentages of 0.7 versus 1.4 in one study resulted in similar weight, but the slower groups tend to gain more lean body

Rate of loss and muscle preservation

Philip Pape 10:30

mass or hold on to more lean body mass while they're losing the fat. And so that's where we get the confounding issue. If you're going too fast and you're losing weight too quickly, and a great example of this is GLP1s, GOP1s, okay? You may be losing muscle mass and it confounds what's actually happening with your body. And we don't want to do that. We don't want to do it. We want to get more muscular or at least hold on to that muscle. So when you lose faster than about 1% body weight a week, these bad things tend to cascade. Your muscle protein synthesis tends to drop. Your body doesn't have the resources to care about preserving muscle anymore when all it's trying to do is find as much energy as it can. Along with this, your testosterone can drop significantly in an aggressive deficit, as well as your other reproductive hormones, your thyroid, and your body starts pulling from lean tissue for energy. So, what I want you to do is actually look at the velocity or the rate of loss of your trend weight. And all I mean by that is what percentage are you actually losing per week? Now you may have intended on a certain amount, but what are you actually losing? So if you're doing this by hand, all you have to do is compare this week's rolling average to last week's rolling average and see what percentage of your body weight that is. If you use macro factor, all you have to do is go to your weight trend page, scroll down under the insights and data section, and you'll see something called weekly weight change. And if that number

The #1 foundation of recovery

Philip Pape 12:00

is faster than the 1%, just watch out. It might be too aggressive. If the number is flat or slightly positive and you're trying to lose weight and it's been more than three weeks, don't panic. That is where metrics two and three come in to tell you whether the approach is working, even if the scale isn't showing it. Now, speaking of things that you should be tracking, we are gonna talk about sleep and biofeedback in a little bit. And the foundation of recovery, the foundation of everything we're talking about today is sleep. So I want to put it in your head now, and then we're going to revisit it later. But this is a nice smooth segue into our sponsor for today, Cozy Earth. And I want to talk about their pajamas and their cuddle blanket because when we talk about sleep and recovery, you might have heard me talk about their sheets, but pajamas is are something I never used to wear, and now I wear them every day. They're made, they're made from a bamboo-derived material. So not only are they lightweight and comfortable, but I run really hot. And temper temperature regulation is really important for me. They don't make me overheat, and that's really, really simple. When I overheat, just everything goes wrong. My heart rate goes up, my HRV gets worse, my sleep is not as good. So really think about the clothes you're wearing at night and making yourself relaxed and really pulling energy back into your body is kind of a way to put it because you get into that parasympathetic state when you're relaxed. The other thing they have is called a classic cuddle blanket, and we have it just available on our couch all the time. It is super, super soft. And if you get chilly, it's a great product. And they have so many more. A lot of them are derived from bamboo to give you, again, this temperature regulation. So go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth to check these out. Check out all their products. I love the company, and I love if you could support the show if you're looking for something like that. Whether it's for a birthday, a gift, or just for your own use, go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. Code wits and weights will give you 20% off. They back everything up with a hundred night sleep trial, which means you could try it for more than three months and still return it if you don't like it. They also have a 10-year warranty. Go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. Automatically the code Wits and Weights will show up when you go there to get 20% off. That's witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. All right, now metric

Waist circumference

Philip Pape 14:17

two. And I'll say that this is quite underused today, which surprises me because I thought everybody just does this. And that is measuring your waist circumference. Okay, just your waist circumference, not everything else, just your waist. And the reason this matters so much, I'm gonna point to a massive European cohort

Cohort data on cardiovascular risk

Philip Pape 14:39

study in the New England Journal of Medicine, over 359,000 people. So you can't argue about sample size on this one. This found that every five centimeter increase in waist circumference raised mortality risk by 17% in men and 13% in women. And the waist circumference's predictive power got stronger after you controlled for BMI. In other words, BMI often becomes non-significant once you account for waist circumference. And that makes sense because where you carry your fat and the fact that you have more body fat matters more than how much you weigh. The more muscular you are, the more higher your BMI is gonna be, and it just throws off the number, but your waist really tells a vast majority of the story. There was something called the interheart study with 52 countries, 27,000 participants, and it found that the highest waist to hip ratio group had two and a half times the heart attack risk. So if we define obesity by waist to hip ratio instead of BMI, the number of people classified as at risk would roughly triple, roughly triple. This is why I prefer things like body roundness index. This is why our clients measure their waist, along with some other measurements that give you extra nuance, but definitely want to measure your waist. It's also why waste is part of body fat calculations typically. So what are the actual thresholds? Well, the World Health Organization has two tiers. You have an increased risk above 90 centimeters for men, which is like 37 inch waste, and above 80 for women, which is about a 31 and a half inch waste. That's an increased risk. So 37 for men, 31 and a half for women. Substantially increased risk is 40 inches for men, 35 inches for women.

Waist thresholds for men and women

Philip Pape 16:30

And for the waist to hip ratio, the threat the thresholds are if you're higher than 0.9 for men and 0.85 for women. By the way, we in in Eat More Lift Heavy, we have this amazing physique tracker that will calculate all this stuff for you based on your measurements and tell you whether things are at risk or not. Now, for tracking fat loss specifically, a meaningful change based on interventions from exercise, from training is typically around five centimeters. And we know that waist circumference reductions also correlate with visceral fat reductions. That's belly fat. Okay, now we know also it's not just from exercise, that's for sure. It's also going to be from your diet and how much body fat you have. But this is especially relevant for women in perimenopause. The Swan study showed visceral fat shifts from 5 to 8% of total body fat up to

Visceral fat shifts in perimenopause (menopause belly)

Philip Pape 17:30

15 to 20% during the menopause transition. That's a threefold increase in visceral fat, which is the most metabolically dangerous type of fat. It concentrates in the midsection. So even if the scale isn't moving, your waist circumference going down is telling you a very important thing that you are losing visceral fat. And that is a big positive for your health. That's why I love this metric so much, because even if the scale is not moving, or even if it's going up a bit, maybe you're gaining muscle. We don't know. If your waist is going down, that's a fantastic sign. Now, here's the nuance waist circumference has measurement error, right? It's a little bit difficult to get it perfect. You know, breathing can shift your reading by four to five centimeters, meal timing can make a big difference. And if even if you're trained at this of how to do it, there can be an error. And so the protocol, the way you do this is important. I would say pick one consistent objective spot. Now, the WHO has the technical definition of the midpoint between your lowest rib and the top of your hip bone. But my shortcut is just use your belly button. Okay, we all know where our belly button is, right? So just stand in a relaxed state. Don't tense up your abs and don't slouch or like pop out your stomach. You know what I mean? Just a neutral state. And that'll be a pretty objective measurement you can do. You can use a digital measurement, you can use a normal closed tape measure, you can use the what's it called, accutape, which lets you do a little ratchet. It's okay. What matters is the trend over time. That's what matters. You'll know. I mean, the measurement error isn't so big that you're not gonna detect inches over time. You will. And so I would track it weekly, but then look at the trend, look at the average, you know, just just like you would with scale weight, but you're not tracking it every day because your waist isn't gonna change that much. But this will tell you whether you're losing fat, even if the scale is staying the same, going up, going down, it almost doesn't matter. All right, so the

The 4-signal biofeedback composite score

Philip Pape 19:30

third metric is a bit different from the first two. It is a little more subjective, but the way we track it makes it more objective. Let me explain. This is the biofeedback composite. Now, you might have heard me talk about rating your biofeedback, things like energy, digestion, hunger, sleep, stress, et cetera. We have seven metrics that we look at in eat more lift heavy. By the way, if you you keep hearing me say eat more lift heavy, it's just our our program. It's a 26-week coach program where we walk you through building all of these skills, tracking your physique, improving your nutrition and training all together, your whole lifestyle. You can go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to check out what that's about and learn more. But where I'm going with that is we recommend clients track at least once a week across all seven categories. What I'm talking about today is a more precise measurement you can choose to do, where you track four specific things on a scale of one to ten, and then you just average them up, and we're gonna see if how if it deteriorates or not over time. Okay, those four things are hunger, energy, sleep quality, and training performance. Hunger, energy, sleep quality, and training performance. And you can use a scale of one to 10 to give you a little bit more uh resolution. So where one is the worst, 10 is the best. So, like if you're if you're super hungry all the time, that would be closer to a one. If sleep is pretty poor, that's closer to a one. If you're low energy all the time, that's close to one. And if your training performance is low, it's close to one, right? And then the opposite, if they're good, closer to 10. And you average them out. And the reason this works is it gives you a signal of your adaptations and your metabolism during a deficit. And that and that's because it shows up in how you feel, and that's the subjective part, but you know your body best and how you feel is becomes kind of objective because it's relative to how you felt last week. Well, you know how you feel day after day after day, and what's a good direction, what's a bad direction. And we know that your total daily energy expenditure, your metabolism, drops beyond what body mass loss would predict through reduced BMR, through decreased spontaneous movement, through hormonal shifts, especially lower leptin, lower thyroid hormones, higher cortisol, higher ghrelin, right? Appetite, uh metabolic hormones, stress hormones, all of that changes. And so your body is giving you signals. Very early in the process. And the question is whether you're paying attention to them and they if they are, let's say, appropriate or within the window that's acceptable to you, or if you're working with a coach, that's what we tend to look at is hey, let's let's use this as a proactive measure here. So if we look at the individual markers, those four things, start with hunger. Hunger is the strongest standalone predictor. And if if I'm working with a client, I can look at their hunger all by itself and learn a lot about them, not everything, but learn a lot. We know that an increase in hunger ratings predicts a decrease in adherence to your diet. And that's the biggest thing. It's simply that hunger makes it harder to stick to your diet. And temptation, the level of temptation you have, predicts an even larger decrease in your adherence. So temptation is kind of a subset when we think of hunger and cravings and temptation, right? There's a whole bunch of factors combined. Training performance is kind of like the physiological canary in the coal mine. Now I know I mentioned this as the fourth metric, but I I in my notes I had them out of order. It doesn't matter. Training performance is interesting because we know that in a deficit, strength gains tend to hold on for a while, but muscle mass starts to drop. And so if your performance in the gym is starting to drop, and performance can be measured in different ways. It can be measured with the actual numbers, but also in the effort and in how lethargic you are and how much energy you have and all that. Kind of up to you how you do that. Again, in E More LiveTavue, we give you some prescriptions around that. But just pick a way, pick a way to track that, either objectively based on your weights or slightly subjectively based on how you feel in the gym, things like that, to know whether you're losing muscle or not. That's how we look at it. Then we have sleep quality. Obviously, we know sleep is super, super important. It is difficult to self-report on sleep. But essentially, if you are more restless, if you are waking up tired, like those alone are a big way to track that your sleep is getting better or worse, not just the hours of sleep, excuse me, but basically are you waking up tired or not? Versus, hey, I'm sleeping really well, I'm sleeping like a baby, I wake up on my own. It's great. And as I mentioned before, you know, there are a lot of factors that affect sleep, including what you wear, what you sleep in, your environment, your blue light, your routine, how consistent you are with sleep times and wake times, all of that. And then, of course, the fourth one that I mentioned at the end out of order here is energy. And energy, again, it could be several different things. For many of you, this is a sense that you don't have enough energy to get through the day properly. And I say it that way because we should all have an energy drop toward the end of the day, just naturally due to cortisol, but it should feel fairly natural and smooth, I guess is a way to put it. And it shouldn't feel like you have these massive dips in energy or like you're super tired in the morning and need this huge jolt of caffeine to get going. That's what I mean by energy. And again, it's relative. So when I say relative, what you're gonna do at this state is you're gonna track it all on a daily basis and average it. Now, you're not gonna do this forever. I'm not asking you to track biofeedback forever this way, but doing it temporarily as we head into summer, if you're in a deficit, if you're trying to lean out, if you're trying to get shredded, whatever, this is gonna give you a good trend of how your signals are telling you your body's adapting. So if your hunger goes from a seven to a three, your energy goes from a seven to a four, your sleep quality goes from a six to a five, you know, your bench press starts to stall, right? All within the same couple weeks, the average is gonna start dipping down, right? Some things go up, some things go down. But if the overall average is dipping down, maybe your deficit is too aggressive. And we don't care what the scale says, because if the scale says your weight is dropping, great. But if it's at the expense of potential muscle mass or adherence or something else, we want to get ahead of it. Now, I mentioned in a recent episode, the Matador study about intermittent energy restriction, the alternating two-week deficit, two-week maintenance, producing greater fat loss. And part of that has to do with your biofeedback and adherence and your metabolism not overadapting, right? So this biofeedback composite can potentially tell you that your deficit is or isn't sustainable. Pretty cool, right?

Bonus: red flag threshold for an aggressive cut

Philip Pape 26:17

Now, I did promise you a specific number at the beginning of this episode. It's a red flag threshold that tells you that your cut has maybe crossed the line from being productive to somewhat destructive. I'm gonna share that in a second. But if this episode made you realize that you want to track this stuff, but you don't want to use a bunch of spreadsheets or you don't want to manually track them, that's what we designed Fitness Lab for. It's an app that we designed and upgraded this spring and gives you personalized guidance on nutrition, training, biofeedback. It adapts to your data. It connects to Apple Health. Eventually it will connect to the Google Health and it can suck in all that data to really help you understand what's going on, whether or not you like tracking. But for a lot of people, you don't like it. And ironically, even though this sounds like a tracking app, it is not a tracking app. It actually tracks a lot of the stuff for you and tells you what to do with it. And then it's super empowering. So go to wits and weights.com slash app to check it out. That is witsandweights.com slash app. The link is in the show notes. Okay, here's the red flag number, and it's going to be based on that third metric, the biofeedback composite, the average of your hunger, energy, sleep, and training performance. If it drops below five for three or more days in a row, almost guaranteed that your cut is too aggressive. So that's the threshold I would look for. If it drops by five two to below a five for three days in a row, it means at least two of those four markers are significantly impaired at the same time, just based on math, based on averages. And that is a pattern that is predicting unsustainable dieting, potential muscle re muscle loss, and a potential rebound where you overconsume and you binge. One single bad number is not gonna get the average below a five for three or more nights. That's why we like this. Okay, but when it does, you have two options. Option one, take a diet break. Eat at maintenance for about a week. Research shows this lowers hunger, it improves your alertness, it preserves muscle endurance, it reduces your metabolic rate being suppressed. It's a great tool. Option two, it's just to reduce your calorie deficit a little bit. So stay in the deficit, but increase those calories. So it's maybe two to three hundred calories of a deficit and reassess for a week. This is gonna give you a good idea of whether it was simply a dip a past the line for your deficit and the deficit's okay, or whether just the deficit itself is the problem. You can kind of compare the two, and then if you have to, you can still take a diet break, right? We know that pushing through an unsustainable deficit does not get you to your goal faster. All of the research on metabolic adaptation tells us this. It actually gets you to a plateau faster, and it costs you a ton on the way there and it frustrates you, and then the whole thing kind of falls apart until you do it right again. So tomorrow morning, rate your hunger, energy, sleep training on a scale one to 10, average them out. If you're above, you know, six, if you're six or above, you're in a good place. If you're like five or six, keep an eye on it. But if you're below five for three days in a row, maybe you should pull back. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the scale measures gravity, not progress. That's it. Your body composition, your waist, how you feel, those tell a much more accurate story. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.