Why eating less keeps backfiring for fat loss

Philip Pape 0:00

Can eating more protein actually burn more fat without even being in a calorie deficit? Well, protein does something to your body that no other food does. It's the most filling macro you can eat. It costs you way more calories just to digest it, and it's the one nutrient that protects your muscle when you're losing weight, which means eating more of it can leave you leaner, sometimes even when you're not in a deficit. Today I'm going to show you the science behind that. I'll call out the one protein claim that gets oversold, and I'll give you the exact number to hit no matter what your goal is right now. 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 today we're going after one of the most deeply held beliefs in all of fitness, which is that fat loss is a subtraction problem, that you need to eat less and move more, shrink those numbers, reduce those calories. If you're over 40, if you've been dieting on and off for years, hey, we all have. Maybe you're even going through perimenopause or menopause right now, and you feel like your body isn't cooperating anymore, you have almost certainly been sold the subtraction model over and over. And it is not that the math is wrong or that calories and calories out is wrong exactly. It's that the math hides an input, a very important input having to do with the composition of what you're eating that is a very, very powerful level. And that, of course, is protein. And when you understand why it's different, and we're going to get into some more nuance today than you probably hear on most podcasts, where there is a lot of discussion about protein today, for sure. When you understand these differences, you stop thinking about fat loss as how little can I get away with eating? And you start thinking about it as what do I need to add into my diet, into my nutrition, so my body does the work for me. So things are easier. So I feel better. So I perform better. So I build muscle. So I lose fat. So I get leaner, all in a way that doesn't feel like this huge amount of misery and suffering. And then I want you to stick around to the end of the episode because after the main content, I'm going to share a 30-second mental model that I use with clients called the two envelope trick. And it's a very fast conceptual visual way to understand why the scale is very unreliable, especially when you're trying to change our body composition, but also to motivate you to focus on what we're talking about today. All right, so here's where we're headed. I'm going to show you the three real reasons that protein affects your body fat differently. I'm going to be honest with you about a big claim that floats around online today that does not survive what I call skeptical scrutiny. And then I'm going to give you the protein floor to set and hold no matter what phase you're in. So some of this is going to be a refresher, but there are going to be some surprises today for you in how powerful protein really is. So let's start with the belief, because the conventional data that gets shared often creates competing camps that don't necessarily need to be competing. Meaning there's some truth in a lot of what people say online. There are a lot of falsehoods as well. And sometimes the truths overlap from two different camps. So the conventional model is really about energy balance. Calories in,

Energy balance vs. differences between macros like protein

Philip Pape 3:30

calories out. It's like your body is a calorie bank account. You eat less than you burn. And you now your body has to withdraw from the fat account, right? If it's a bank account, and therefore you lose weight. And at the highest level, that's pretty much true. I'm not a calorie denier. Energy balance is real. Thermodynamics exists, it's physics. Okay, we need to assert that that is a truth. But what the model treats as an assumption that is not true is that it treats every calorie as identical. Now, a calorie is just a measurement of energy. So, in essence, the energy piece of it is identical. But your bot the way your body processes calories changes drastically depending on what you eat. And of course, we know this because we know that, for example, eating all processed foods versus eating mostly whole foods, you're going to be hungrier and you're going to eat more just naturally because they don't fill you up as much. Well, that's because it's affecting your hunger and your hormones related to hunger. That is a real phenomenon that's occurring because the calorie source is different. So we have to kind of separate calories, which is a real thing, it's a unit of energy, from the practical reality of when you eat foods from different types of macros and nutrients separate from the calories. There's other things going on, is my point. So a hundred calories of protein, a hundred calories of rice, a hundred calories of olive oil, they all go into your body with the same amount of energy. And yes, but that's not the whole story. There's a lot more that's actually far more important, in my opinion. In fact, when you only count calories, you often do yourself a disservice because then you start making choices based on calories rather than based on these other factors. When you think about what happens when a chronic dieter, and a lot of you listening are chronic dieters. I say that with love because I've been there. When a chronic dieter tries to lose more fat, and oftentimes you talk in terms of weight loss instead of fat loss, which is the first problem. But anyway, what do you do? What's the move? I'm gonna cut calories again. I get emails from people who say I've cut down to 900 calories and I still can't lose weight. And they say it as if I should be losing weight because I've cut calories, not realizing that there are other factors involved, both on the calories and in calories outside. Now, where do calories usually get cut from? Well, people cut the thing that's easiest to cut, which is usually whatever the food is on your plate in general. And so protein tends to drop along for the ride, even though, as we're gonna discuss later, protein is one of those things you want to keep anchored at a reasonably high level, but it tends to drop and now you're eating less total and you're eating less protein specifically, and you're hungry, hungrier, and your training suffers. And even if a scale drops, part of what you're losing might be muscle because now you're not holding on to that. If you're even lifting weights, which many of you are not doing that either, and you have to be lifting weights. The older we get, the more this is a problem, especially through periposmenopause, where you're already fighting to hold on to that lean tissue. So the subtraction model, if you follow it, you're going to walk straight into a big cyclical vicious cycle, I should say. A big vicious cycle where you're losing muscle tissue, your metabolism's declining, you have to cut more, you stop losing weight, so you cut more, metabolism declines. You get what I'm talking about. It's a vicious cycle. So it's not that calories don't count. It's that eat less as this blanket instruction results in all of the wrong decisions for protein, for nutrients, for energy, for performance, for muscle that are essentially the opposite of what we're trying to do. Which you're gonna understand why that leads to, okay, why so why some people say eat more to lose weight or eat more to lose fat. And even that is overly simplistic. You have to explain what you mean. What are you eating more of and why, and in what you know, phase and process are you doing it? But anyway, let's talk about why protein is so different.

Does protein burn more calories to consume vs. fats and carbs?

Philip Pape 7:28

And the first one is a little bit oversold, but I want to talk about it, and that is the thermic effect of food, T E F. This is that protein burns more calories to digest than the other macronutrients. That is true. Every time you eat, your body spends some energy just processing what you ate. And the macros are very different in how this happens. So when you eat fat, it costs almost nothing to process, about 0 to 3% of the calories get consumed. Carbs are around 5 to 10%, and protein is around 20 to 30%. So if you eat 100 calories of protein, your body's gonna spend something like 20 to 30 of those calories just breaking it down and putting it to use. So you net as little as 70 of those 100 calories. Now, this is a real thing that has been measured in humans, but the size of it probably gets oversold a little bit. So let's say you're eating 180 grams of protein a day. That's a very solid target for a lot of people in this audience, probably above what many of you are eating, to be honest. But that's what I eat. So I weigh 180 pounds. I tend to eat around 180 grams. That is 720 calories from protein. So if you're netting an extra, call it up to 20% back compared to eating those same calories as fat, you're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to 100 calories a day. Now that is real. I'm not gonna call it magic, but that is very real, right? 80 to 100 calories, but it's also not massive and you know, 500 pounds a day, a pound a week type of reel, but it's starting to move the needle. And guess what? It's the smallest of the effects I'm talking about, even though a lot of people fixate on this, but I think it's good to know. Okay, so it's a nice little tailwind. Now let's get to the next part that starts to change your behavior and starts to change the result. And that is, okay,

Why protein is the most filling macro for fat loss

Philip Pape 9:20

that is satiety fullness. Protein is by far the most filling macronutrient per calorie. And this has evidence behind it, despite the keto and carnivore folks trying to suggest that fat is the most uh filling, or some people say carbs are the most filling. It really comes down to protein. Now, protein as a whole, I get it, it's a macro and it contains lots of different foods. So we have to look at specifics. But there's a classic study from 2005, Weigel and colleagues, where they raise people's protein to about 30% of their calories. And then, and this is really important, they let them eat as much of anything they wanted, totally free. We call this ad libinum. That's what the researchers call it. And what happened is people spontaneously ate about 440

How high protein creates a deficit through appetite

Philip Pape 10:03

fewer calories a day. That's it. So they were not counting calories, it was purely natural because they were full. They just stopped reaching for more food and they ate 440 fewer calories a day. And so what happened? Over the study, they lost fat without being told to be in a calorie deficit or trying to be in a calorie deficit. So the protein created the deficit for them through their own appetite. It's not that they weren't in a deficit. This goes back to why I say energy balance is a real thing, but how we get there and whether we get there and whether we stick to that deficit is much more practically important. So if you think about that, this flips the whole psychology of dieting. The restriction or subtraction model says you have to fight your hunger with willpower, you've got to be in a calorie deficit. Cut, cut, cut. You've got to starve, you've got to do optavea, you gotta do uh uh what's that called? Weight watchers, whatever. The protein model says, hey, just raise your protein high enough, and a big piece of that psychological battle that you've had for years just disappears because your gut is sending the fullness signals. Your hunger hormones tend to settle down. The food you would have grazed on or licked, tasted bit in the evening no longer is attractive to you, or you don't, you just simply naturally don't reach for it, or you simply feel full. This is the difference between white knuckling a diet and one that is running a little bit on autopilot, which is where we try to get our clients to and what this podcast is all about. I want it to be easier for you guys. And if you're on GLP1s and you start to do this, you might find that you're too full and you have to reduce the dose or even start to come off of it. This is one of the key levers that we use to help people reduce their dosage or potentially come off of it with working with their medical professional, because that is not in my scope of practice. And if the, let's say the evening snacking, that's where you tend to fall into the temptation, right? This is a great lever. More protein earlier in the day. We actually see studies where front loading the protein can be even more beneficial, can vastly help than just trying to try harder. And we know this from the evidence. So this is a great time to tell you about today's sponsor, True Nutrition, because getting more protein into your day is what they help solve, but in a very cool way, because you get to build it yourself. Instead of a one-size-fits-all tub, you customize

What is the best protein supplement?

Philip Pape 12:30

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Nutrient partitioning and mouse studies

Philip Pape 13:40

and weights for 20% off. Try their customizer, build it today, and enjoy getting delicious protein customized exactly to your needs. All right, now we've covered the two effects that do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to protein's magic, the fullness and the digestion. But there is a third one that potentially is more exciting, but also more overrated or oversold. And so I want to get into the nuance here, and this is why I saved this one for last, because it requires a little bit of explaining. The idea is called nutrient partitioning. And in its, I guess the strongest claim is that when you're building muscle, your body preferentially shuttles nutrients toward that muscle and away from fat storage, so that when you add protein and of course you're training hard in the gym, you can produce muscle gain and fat loss at the same time, what we call body recomposition. And there's a good review by Habers and colleagues from 2025 that talks about the mechanisms here, which is that growing muscle pulls in glucose and the muscle growth signals, the signals from that growing muscle, then increase the release of fat. And because building tissue is metabolically expensive, the energy gets quote unquote spent on construction of the muscle instead of stored as fat. And so it sounds awesome. It sounds like like the holy grail for body recomp, you know, body recomp. But in that same review, in plain language, it says this partitioning effect is most apparent in animal models. That's in mice. And the best demonstration we have in humans comes from a class of drugs called myostatin inhibitors, like bimagrumab, where people gain lean mass and loss significant fat at the same time. But that's a drug. You have to be taking that drug. That's not just eating more protein. So when you strip it down to what do we really know based on the evidence and what's proven in humans eating food and lifting weights, the effect is there, but maybe it's smaller and slower than we think it is based on the animal work, even though there is a whole set of research looking at myostatin inhibitors that could change the game in the future, just like GLP1s have. So muscle and muscle gain and fat loss can happen at the same time. We have plenty of human recomposition data that I'm gonna get to in a bit, but your body isn't

The myth of "free" protein calories in a surplus

Philip Pape 16:00

this like magic nutrient partitioning machine that ignores calories, right? You still have to have you still have to have the energy balance accounted for as well. So this brings me actually to the biggest online claim for protein. And it comes from real studies, as many of these claims do, right? Things get cherry-picked and then they get reinterpreted so often incorrectly. These are the Antonio studies where resistance-trained people ate huge amounts of protein. And we're talking like 4.4 grams per kilogram. So that's hundreds of extra protein calories a day. And then on paper, when we look at their numbers, they didn't gain any body fat. And then people took that to mean, hey, protein calories in a calorie surplus are essentially free. Like you literally cannot get fat from extra protein. And I've heard really good folks like Dr. Bill Campbell talk about this research, not with that language, you know, with the right amount of nuance, where they're like, yeah, there's there's other things going on. What it's it seems that you're adding protein in and then not gaining body fat. But what is actually happening? Well, the first of all, there's methodological issues with the studies themselves. We could break that down first, and that is self-reporting, which is always a challenge, not, not, not the be-all-end-all, but self-reporting what you eat. And we we know this is one of the most consistent findings in all of nutrition research that people are terrible at reporting their intake, especially when you ask them to eat way more than usual. And it's honestly right there in the data. I mean, if the subjects didn't gain the weight you'd expect if they'd actually eaten all that extra protein above and beyond their current calories, they probably didn't eat as much as reported, or they unconsciously compensated by moving more and eating less elsewhere. And the moving more piece, people want to focus on and say, well, yeah, that's okay, Philip, but it's because their metabolism, their energy out must have gone way up to make up for it. It didn't go up at that much. I mean, it probably went up for sure. And there's things like the thermic effect of food we've already talked about. But when you actually control for these things, like in a metabolic ward where researchers are controlling the calories that you eat, and by the way, they did this in 2012. Bray and colleagues, these what they call protein overfeeding studies, we do see an addition of body fat. So I think there's some contradictions here. People love to glom onto something that seems like, you know, the secret, the magic. And you know what? It's close to magic, not as much as some of these people claim, but it's still phenomenal. Eating more protein definitely will result in less body fat added and more lean mass added than overfeeding on carbs or fat. So we definitely lean by toward biasing protein, but it still also comes down to energy balance. So the the honest like conclusion here is you cannot eat unlimited protein in a big surplus and expect zero fat gain. Okay. What does come out of this data that matters to you is because protein is so filling, because it costs more to digest, and because it drives your body to build and repair instead of store fat, then if you build your diet around a high protein floor, it will tend to naturally settle you near maintenance or a mild deficit on its own, even when you're eating what feels like a lot of food. Okay, and your metabolism, your expenditure might be a little bit higher as well, which means you could eat more than you would have otherwise on a purely calorie basis as well. You're not gaining fat because thermodynamics doesn't work, because calories in, calories out doesn't work, but because, or it's not that you're not gaining fat because of those, but it's because all of these things tend to stack together, resulting in you being at maintenance or in a slight deficit while it feels like you're eating a lot more and you're preserving or building muscle. So you're getting some body recomp at the same time. So I know you want it to be all flashy and this amazing like eat unlimited protein and you're gonna lose body fat. I will say people who jack up their protein do often lose body fat, but it's not because of thermodynamics being broken. It's because of all these other things that are that are happening, which guess what? For practical purposes, that matters. Like that's super important anyway. So you can say, you can say at a top level, eat more protein, you'll probably lose body fat. And it's probably generally true for a lot of people, which is phenomenal. That's pretty cool. So now when we talk about body recomp, the idea of losing fat and

Your daily protein target for muscle and fat loss

Philip Pape 20:30

gaining muscle at the same time, we the discussion was always in the past, oh, that's only for beginners or that's for people on drugs, you know, performance and anti drugs or whatever. And that's not true. You know, we know a lot more people can experience body recomp, even experienced lifters. Eric Helms, I have a lot of respect for Eric. He put out a great piece recently working through the math of it in mass, uh the mass research review. And the bottom line is that whether you gained or lost body energy depends on the relative change in fat mass versus muscle, not the number on the scale, right? Because a pound of fat holds roughly 3,500 calories of energy, whereas a pound of muscle holds only about 800. So the density difference makes a difference here. And it it complicates the math. So when people are trying to do the math, they they tend to get lost in it because of those differences. So you can hold your body weight the same, like your body weight doesn't change. But then if you lose a pound of fat and gain a pound of muscle, that is a massive change in your body composition without a change in your body weight, which is what we deal with all the time when clients are like, oh, my weight did not go down. I was hoping to lose weight, but my inches went down and my lifts going up, and I honestly look a little bit trimmer. You might still have a little belly fat that you want to lose. That's fine, but you are getting leaner. So that's pretty incredible. All right. So if protein is this big, close to magical lever, how much do you need? Let's just get that out of the way again, especially if you're new to the show or you need Refresher. The target that I usually go with from the research is roughly 0.7 grams per pound of body weight per day. That's about 1.6 grams per kilo in metric. And there's a really well-known meta-analysis by Morton and colleagues in 2018 that found muscle gains start to plateau around that point. More than that is not harmful. There's no issues with it. If you like to eat more protein, awesome. Enjoy it. There is a case for going higher up to a gram per pound, especially where when you're in an aggressive fat loss phase and you're trying to hold on to that lean mass.

Why protein matters more for lean dieters

Philip Pape 22:35

And then it's fine to go up just because of preference. And if you happen to get benefits that we talked about today, like satiety above and beyond that amount, and that affects your calories overall and makes things easier, go for it. There's newer research, it was a meta regression from Reffalo, Trexler, and Helms that looked at how much protein you actually need to hold muscle in a deficit. And the interesting finding is that pushing protein really high, like around 1.1 grams per pound, only mattered for the leanest people. So for example, women already under 20% body fat and men under 12%. But for everybody else, and that's most of us listening, protein explained only a small slice of who was able to hold on to muscle. Guess what explained more of that? Well, the size of the deficit and whether they were training hard. So I'm not going to oversell the protein floor. I never have, or at least not in a long time since I started doing this podcast. I often use the 0.7 grams per pound as adequate for almost everybody. And if you want to go higher for other reasons, that's fine too. The last thing I want to mention is the idea of anabolic resistance. A lot of the research we have skews toward young men, but anabolic resistance gets more pronounced as you age. It means your muscles respond a little less to a given amount of protein than they used to. And I guess the practical upshot of this is it kind of simplifies things that, hey, you should just make sure to get a lot of protein. Just 30 to 40 grams of protein per meal is usually a way, good, good rule of thumb. Don't wait for dinner. If, if anything, front load it if you can and spread it out throughout the day so that you can get that floor. All right, before I wrap up, remember I promised you that 30-second mental model at the end, the two envelope trick. I'm gonna share that in a second. So stay with me. But if this episode sold you on the idea that protein is the lever and eat less is probably not way the way to go, the next natural question is okay, Philip, what do all my other numbers look like? How much protein should I eat? And then how do I set my carbs and fat? So people ask, what should be my macros be? Well, I put together a free guide

Free macros guide for body composition

Philip Pape 24:50

a while back that walks you through setting up your macros for different phases and why and the kind of flexibility you have behind it. It's called Nutrition 101 for body composition. Go to witsandweights.com slash macros, totally free. And it's my whole framework on flexible dieting. How to find your maintenance, how to set your protein, carbs, and fats, how to make it sustainable. Just general ideas of setting this up, the basics. Everything we talked about today, put into the actual targets that you can use. So go to wits and weights.com slash macros to download that free guide. All right, here's the two envelope trick or concept. I want you to imagine your body as two envelopes. That's it. It's it's just two envelopes. One has

Bonus: the two-envelope trick for body recomposition

Philip Pape 25:33

all your fat in it, and one has all your muscle in it. All right. And they're gonna have very different amounts of energy. A pound of fat has 3,500 calories, a pound of muscle has 800 calories. But you have different amounts of fat muscle. Let's not worry about that. Now, over a couple months, you lose a pound of fat and you gain a pound of muscle. So what happens? You're gonna take a pound of fat out of your fat envelope, you're gonna add in a pound of muscle to your muscle envelope, and so they're gonna balance each other out. What's gonna happen? You're gonna step on the scale, it's gonna read the same. No change in scale. And so if you're only using the scale, you conclude, oh, nothing happened. I was trying to get leaner. That means I was trying to lose weight, nothing happened, right? But you just took 3,500 calories out of the fat envelope of your body, and you only put 800 into the muscle envelope. So you've actually gotten rid of some volume and you should actually be leaner. Your clothes should fit a little bit differently, you should feel stronger and look leaner, and none of that is visible on the scale because the scale only measures weight. And yet you just traded a light energy dense tissue for a heavier, leaner one. All right, that's the best I could do it to visualize this on a podcast. The next time the scale doesn't move, I want you to ask a better question. Not, hey, what do I weigh, but which envelope is filling and which one is emptying? Because you want to fill the muscle envelope and you want to empty the fat envelope. That is the game. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, fat loss was never really a subtraction problem. Protect your protein, protect your muscle, let your body do the math for you. And I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.