The most important part of the fat loss equation

Philip Pape 0:00

Did you know that the total fat you can lose is how fast you lose it times the number of weeks you stick with it? Might sound obvious, but most people only optimize the first half of that equation. They pick the fastest cut they can stomach, the big calorie deficit, the dramatic first month quick fix, lose a bunch of pounds fast, and they ignore the second half, the number of weeks you can stick with it. And that's the part that actually decides whether you're successful. So today I'm gonna show you why the slower, more moderate approach often gets you to the body you want sooner. Not because slow is something magical, but because it determines whether you make it to the finish line. And then we're gonna wrap it up at the end with a 30-second gut check to tell you whether your current deficit is too aggressive before something like the scale or the mirror tells you that. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that it does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and back on episode 479, I made the case for the aggressive cut, the short, sharp cut, rapid fat loss, and who it's actually for. And I stand by every word of that. There is a real place for a fast cut, and I'm not gonna walk that back at all today. This is the compliment or the companion or the yin to the yang of that episode, because the answer to how fast should I lose weight or how fast should I lose fat is always, of course, it depends. And today I want to give you the framework for what it depends on, which may not be what you think. So I want you to stick with me. This is one of those fun episodes where we dissect the things that make fat loss successful. So you can go all in on that. It matters because, especially if you're over 40, like me, and you got a lot going on in your life, most people are picking their rate of loss, like how fast they want to lose weight, just based on feels and based on vibes. Let's be honest. Faster, of course, sounds better, doesn't it? So you tend to go fast, often too fast. And you run a big calorie deficit, you kind of try to push it right to that limit. Like, well, I might as well go as big of a deficit as I can handle. That way I'll lose faster and I can get it over with. And what happens is very quickly you start to run into issues and start to white knuckle things, and it's very hairy. And somewhere around week four, five, that's when I see these things fall apart and you start to graze, lick, binge, all the things that tends to hold you back. Not only that, your energy is going down, your training quality is going down, like something happens in your life. Let's be something is gonna happen in your life and it gets in the way, or you just bail. You're like, okay, this is too much work. Or you kind of finish the crash diet successfully, I'll call it, in quotes, and then you rebound, you rebound right back. And then you're like, okay, this doesn't work for me, or how do I actually stick with the results? Right. It's not just about the loss, but the sustainability. The real problem for a lot of you is just that you picked a speed or a rate that was not sustainable for you. And then you get into a pattern, the start and stop and start again, which is why you're not getting to the result and why going slower, going more slowly, can actually be faster. And I actually mean faster, not just better, if that makes sense. And I'm gonna show you the math on that. Now, I want to be straight about evidence always, because there is a version I could have given you today that I'll say oversells the slow approach. The head-to-head research, when they look at fast versus slow weight loss, does not say, does not show us that slow wins when it comes to total pounds lost. It mostly says the opposite, believe it or not. So the case for going slower, you're gonna wonder how that compares to the evidence. And I'm going to have to add context for you so you understand why. This is where the coaching experience and working with hundreds of people, thousands of people at this point is gonna help you because it's not just about, okay, go as fast as you can stomach and you'll lose the weight. And that's what the evidence shows. So therefore, that's the way I should do it. There is more nuance. Nuance is what this episode is about. And then I want you to stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a 30-second gut check. Three questions. You know how much I love these. The very practical little self-quiz to tell you whether your current aggressive is too aggressive, your current deficit is too aggressive for you specifically before other data starts

Where the "slow and steady" rule comes from

Philip Pape 4:38

to tell you that. So here's what we're covering today. First, I'll show you why aggressive cuts often fail or break down for most real people in practical real life, and why that makes slower genuinely faster over, say, a year, like a 12-month period. Then I'm gonna walk you through what the strongest research that I could find tells us, including the part that I'll say contradicts some of what I'm telling you today, seemingly, but really doesn't. And then a decision rule that you can use to make this simple. We're also gonna look at why a moderate deficit tends to give you room to breathe and take things like breaks or an aggressive one doesn't, and how that helps things like muscle metabolism, bones, all of the stuff. So I always like to play devil's advocate. And if let's say tortoise in the hair, you guys know the story. Slow and steady wins the race. When it comes to fat loss, if you listen to any other podcast about fat loss, you hear the half a percent a week or one to two pounds a week is thrown out quite often. You know, half a half a percent to one percent of your body weight a week. We actually see that in obesity guidelines. We see it in evidence-based coaching in general. It's kind of a consensus at this point. And we see it baked into apps like Macrofactor, for example. And either you try to follow it and then you struggle due to other reasons, or you try to override it because you're like, well, that's too slow for me. I can handle more, my metabolism may be higher, whatever the reason you want to justify or rationalize for yourself, and you want that number to start moving, you want to lose the weight. You see your friend on keto or you see your friend on GLP ones or whatever, losing all these pounds, you're like, okay, I gotta do that. And I'm gonna be the one that can sustain it. After all, I listen to wits and weights, right? Or, you know, whatever. Like, you know, I eat a lot of whole foods and fiber. So I like to bring this back to math and numbers. Let's just take the emotion out of it. Okay.

What a steep calorie deficit requires

Philip Pape 6:28

The total fat that you're gonna lose, of course, equals your rate of fat loss times the number of weeks you stick with it. So rate times duration. That's it. That's like the very simple math. I've written a million charts and graphs for clients showing this. Now, if you put all your attention into that, which again, if you're using an app like MacroFactor, that's kind of what you're scoping into. What am I trying to say? You're like very myopic. It's very focused on just the rate of loss and then the deficit. If you pour all your attention into that, and then consequently how fast the scale is dropping, because that's the feedback loop, then you're gonna think, okay, this is starting to work, or this is the process. Now I just need to go as long as possible to get to the weight I want. As if you're gonna be able to keep going that duration. Does that make sense? But the duration is the hardest variable in all of fat loss, not the aggressiveness, believe it or not. Because you could, I mean, think about it. You could probably fast for three days if you really had to, and you could do it and eat zero calories for three days, but you couldn't do it for a week or two weeks or three weeks. And again, I'm giving you an extreme, but it's the duration, the sustainability part that's the issue. The bigger and more aggressive your deficit, conversely, the harder it is to sustain it. So, and and it sounds obvious, but it's a true phenomenon. We have to understand the mechanism behind. Okay. Think about what a steep deficit demands of you and your body. It demands that you're gonna be hungry a lot for a long time and to keep making good decisions anyway. Whether you're the type that gets hangry or not, you are going to get some level of hangry. It demands of you precision, okay? When your deficit is small, you have all this margin to play with. If you overeat on the weekend or you go to a party, you're still in a deficit. Maybe it's not as big. But when your deficit is very, very aggressive, the margin to hit that deficit is gone. Now you're like, wait a minute, isn't that contradictory? Because now I have all this room to play with. The problem is if you have a bad day or you go to a restaurant, whatever, and your deficit is predicated on the fact that you need this huge deficit because of the duration. And now you're cutting into that significantly every week, the duration part goes out the window. Does that make sense? Like in other words, if the deficit is smaller, you're kind of expecting the duration to be longer. And in general, things feel more sustainable. And so going off track occasionally doesn't meaningfully impact the duration. Does that make sense? It sounds counterintuitive, but hopefully that made sense the way I put that. Yes, you have more margin on the big deficit, but you're quickly erasing the whole point of the margin, which was to shorten the duration. Does that make sense? Okay. Also, when it's very aggressive, you have to have not just more willpower, but more accuracy, more tracking, more consistency week after week, less room for the normal messiness of you're a human being over 40 with a job and a family and a life. And on top of all of that, it affects your training. So when you're eating in a big deficit, your lifts are going to just feel more sluggish. They're going to suffer. You're probably going to regress. You're going to have less energy in the gym. Your recovery between sessions gets worse. And then the strength you were building starts to regress. And now you're hungry and you're tracking kind of obsessively, but you feel weak in the gym and you're doing all of it under all this pressure with less slack and less margin. How do you keep that up? How do you keep that up? How long do you keep that up? And for most people, the honest answer is maybe a few weeks, but it's just another form of deprivation, if you ask me.

The start-and-stop cycle that wastes 12 months

Philip Pape 9:56

So what happens in the real world? Well, in the real world, this is what happens to you when you do this. Okay. And again, this is not contradictory with my rapid fat loss episode, which is a very, very, very short, like two, two-week deficit. I'm talking about a very aggressive deficit where you go really fast, and then right around week or four or four or five, you start to hit that wall. You start to crash. You take a few weeks off to recover mentally. And then maybe you start again and then you crash again and start, stop, start, stop. And so the stops are not just like pausing and going to maintenance. Oftentimes it's a rebound and you're actually eating more than you probably should, and you're binging, and you maybe not eating the best things for yourself. And then you have to relose that same five pounds over and over again for the third, fourth, fifth time. Add up a year of doing that, two years, ten years, raise your hand. And the tortoise versus the hare comes in. The tortoise over there, who ran this nice slow deficit that they barely noticed, and they just didn't stop because it was super easy and sustainable. They got to the finish line, they lost more fat than you, and they did it through one long phase. It wasn't because their diet was better on a given week, but because they were still going on after, you know, four months, six months, whatever the length might be. That is why slower is actually faster. And I mean that word actually faster, because over a 12-month horizon, a moderate deficit that you can run continuously is gonna beat an aggressive deficit that keeps getting broken up. That keeps getting broken up. That makes sense, right? Slower isn't better just because it is gentler, let's say, or more moderate. It's because you can finish it.

Research that contradicts the slow approach

Philip Pape 11:37

That's it. Now, I have to, I'll say, complicate my own argument here for you and be honest, because if you go looking for studies that directly compare fast weight loss to slow weight loss head to head in in humans, you might find a contradiction in what I'm saying. So I want to walk through that. All right, being this is this is part of how we examine the evidence. There is a big trial by Purcell and colleagues published in the Lancet Diabetes and Endrocinology back in 2014. They took 200 adults with obesity, they randomized them to lose the same amount of weight, either gradually over 36 weeks or rapidly over 12. So that's like a third the duration, right? And then they followed them for almost three years. And what they found is the rapid group was more likely to hit the target, 81% of them versus 50% of the other group. So the the rapid group was actually less likely to drop out. And then the regain afterward was identical between the two groups. And so they actually ran an editorial that was titled Slow and Steady Does Not Win the Race. Now, I just spent the whole segment telling you Slow and Steady wins a race. Fast fat loss tends to fall apart for a lot of people. And here's a study that contradicts that. So let me square it for you. In that trial, the rapid group wasn't crash dieting and they weren't doing it freewheeling on their own. They were on a structured, monitored, total meal replacement program and had a research team helping them out and checking in on that. So if you take someone who struggles with an aggressive diet and you hand them a rigid plan, and but then you remove the guesswork about what to eat and you watch them hold them accountable, well, then more of them are definitely going to finish. That's not who I'm talking about. In other words, if you come into our program, eat more and lift heavy, we can guide you through any level of aggressiveness to help you be successful. And there's a much higher chance you'll be successful with a more aggressive diet. But if you're trying to do this on your own or there's other complicating factors, which we can get into, you're at home, you have access to your own fridge and your own life kind of get in the way. You're not part of a research study. Maybe you don't have coaching, maybe you do, but you still have all this stuff happening that's different than what's in a research study. You don't have that level of supervision and accountability, which is the thing that fixes precision and consistency for a lot of people, right? And if you don't have that, you got to listen up to what I'm saying today because it may not work for you. So this is not a pitch for coaching. This is just trying to understand the different variables. So that trial doesn't prove that fast is easy to sustain. It's it proves that fast can be sustainable when somebody removes the roadblocks, helps you out, guides you, tells you what to eat, and holds you accountable. Okay. Then there's another trial called the tempo trial. Seyman and colleagues, they ran a severe versus moderate restriction in postmenopausal women. The severe group lost about twice as much weight and fat at 12 months without losing more lean mass and with no difference in their grip strength. And then in another trial in older women, they are averaged age around 859. The faster initial weight losers, not losers, but people who lost weight, were five times more likely to still be down 10% a year and a half later. So if you came to this episode wanting me to tell you that going slow means you lose more fat in a controlled trial, I can't tell you that. When someone else is helping you with the diet through coaching, accountability, structure, precision, sometimes meal planning, like if it's a dietitian, then the faster is often the way you do want to go because it's more efficient. It's more efficient. So we should be honest about

When slower wins, and for whom

Philip Pape 15:14

that. For many people, going faster can be totally successful if you have the support in place. So when does going slower win, though? Well, in your real life, unsupervised, the moderate deficit is what I've seen actually works. Now, even coaching clients, for many of them, they have so many things going on. They have trouble getting sleep, they have a busy job, they can't get their steps in, all these things that that's also a reason to go slower. They're again, they're not in this structured, supervised context, even though they have a coach. I still would guide them to go slower. The other reason, though, and this holds even for a disciplined person who can finish a fast cut, is just making sure that you're holding on to your muscle mass and maximizing the fat loss. And I don't want you being a situation where the pounds are flying off, but some of it or a lot of it is muscle. And so a lot of these research trials are optimizing for weight, purely weight loss. And if that's your only goal, then yeah, the faster you go, the better. We see that with GLP1s, but you know, what tends to happen is you lose muscle mass, you lose lean mass if you're not training and if you're going too fast. So if you care about body composition, not just scale, if you care about muscle and how you look and feel, then we have to add that nuance to the equation. When you look at studies, excuse me, that hold weight loss equal and then look at the body composition, we actually start to see that slower weight loss is superior. There's a meta-analysis by Ashtari Larki and colleagues, and they pooled all the head-to-head trials. And for the same total weight loss, the gradual approach produced about a kilogram more fat loss, a meaningfully bigger drop in body fat percentage, and significantly better preservation of metabolism, of resting metabolic rate. So for the same scale change, they had better body composition and I'll say a metabolism that didn't drop as much or would crash as much because of going slower. And then one of my favorite studies on this, uh, which is relevant to anyone who trains, Garth and colleagues, these were elite athletes, all of them resistance training four days a week, and they split them into a slow fat loss group and or a slow loss group and a fast loss group. Both of them lost fat, but the slow group gained lean mass, they gained about 2%, and the fast group was flat, right? They didn't gain or lose. And the slow group gained more strength. So they had the same goal, which was fat loss, but the slower group had more muscle and more strength than the faster group. I really love that study. So now you see coming full circle, when we care about body composition and sustainability and real life and muscle mass and all of that, there's a very good chance that going a little bit slower is just the thing you need. If you want your body to look good, function well, hold on to your results. Very, very important to think

The rule of thumb for rate of loss

Philip Pape 18:02

about this. All right. So here's the fix. And it it really is simple, even though getting here was not because I do love to talk. But hopefully that was helpful context. Pick the slowest cut you can tolerate that still shows you visible progress in about four to six weeks. That's it. That's the rule. The slowest rate that still produces a result that you can see and that you're happy starting to get. Not the fastest one you can survive, but the slowest one that still works. And as a side tangent here, you're thinking, wait, I want to lose X number of pounds. Stop thinking that way and start thinking about sustainability and let the actual number work itself out for you. Because you may not need to lose 10 pounds. You may not need to lose get to X weight. You may find that you feel look what you want to at a different weight. Or you might find that, hey, losing five pounds makes a huge difference. Another five pounds would be great. You just will know. Work on the sustainability piece first. So for most people, that does land somewhere around half a percent to 1% of body weight a week. But I want you to lean toward the slower end of that range, especially the leaner you already are, and the more you care about keeping muscle and getting through this. Also, if you have a lower metabolism, if you have more fat to lose and you're fresh and you're a novice, you can start probably more aggressive and it still wouldn't feel that aggressive. People who have actually a lot of extra body fat, I say, hey, your advantage is you have those fat stores, you have that energy store in your body. A pretty big deficit may not feel like a deficit to you or your body. And yet you're gonna drop the fat, right? Now, as you lean out, you can ease off the gas. As you get closer to your goal, you can always ease off the gas because the longer diet goes, the harder it is anyway. So we could always start faster and go slower, things like

Room to be human during a cut

Philip Pape 19:42

that. Now, we've been dancing around the fact that there's a huge benefit of going with a moderate deficit instead of an aggressive one. And it's it's maybe the reason why people finish, and that is it gives you room to be a human being. When you're only a few hundred calories below maintenance, you can take a planned diet break. You can eat at maintenance for a week. You can take a weekend refeed when life gets busy or you your head mentally needs it, when there's friends that you're gonna hang out with, when you're going on a trip, whatever. And then you can slide right back into the deficit and you barely cost yourself anything when you do the math. You could even intentionally run it in a wave-like form, like a nonlinear form instead of a straight line. We do that all the time. In fact, in eat more lift heavy, one of the things we love to do is help people non-linearize their diets. Instead of saying just do this deficit every day, let's mix it up for you. Maybe around your cycle, maybe things like that. But when you're already, you know, hitting the gas with a very, very aggressive deficit, you really don't have slack in the sense I mentioned this before. If you take a break, you feel like you're losing a lot of progress. It really extends mathematically the end of the cut. And it kind of just feels like counter, like it's um, you know, a tug of war. So a slower cut is like a stick that bends without breaking, let's say, like a fiberglass stick instead of a wood one. And so it can absorb. So another analogy would be a rubber band. You can stretch it and it can come back. So it can like absorb, it has buffer for things like vacations, a very stressful time in your life, a bad week, and then you keep going, right? If it's aggressive, it's kind of like the rubber band's brittle and can snap as soon as life pulls

2 things you can't skip while cutting

Philip Pape 21:21

on it. So we talked a lot about duration and aggressiveness. And I'll say that that is really, really important. But the non-negotiable that has to be there anyway is lifting and eating. And by eating, I mean eating enough protein, not eating enough calories, because obviously, if you're in a deficit, you're only eating those calories. But eating enough protein that turns a slower cut from, you know, let me just be patient and get through this to, oh no, I'm actively building, I maybe actually gaining strength and muscle even on a deficit because it's a slow deficit. And so you can almost think in terms of I'm not really in a diet, I'm not in a diet. I'm not fat loss training. I'm just training, training, right? I have a I have pretty close to full energy, not quite there, but pretty close. It's not like an aggressive deficit. I have plenty of protein. I can get through this and I can train and maybe even hit still hit some PRs and keep growing. So for protein, that's 0.71 grams per pound of body weight, spread across your meals. Great rule of thumb, resistance training, two to four days a week with progressive overload. We have plenty of other episodes that get into those details. And those are the biggest variables that are going to support you no matter what. And a lot of people doing crash diets or keto or carnivore or GOP1s or whatever, and they're not doing that, they're not going to be successful. And then I want to give you permission that if you've been running an aggressive diet, diet or deficit and you feel like garbage and watching your lifts go backward and you're like, what's wrong with me? I can't do this. Nothing's wrong with you. You picked a rate that is probably too fast for you, not good for your recovery, for your life stress, for your hormones, whatever, slowing down is not giving up. It's choosing a different path that you can finish in the best way possible.

Severe restriction and postmenopausal women

Philip Pape 23:00

All right. So I looked in the research and there's a couple other things I wanted to mention about bone and whether the aggressive approach can actually make sense. So on the bone piece of this, in the tempo trial with postmenopausal women that I mentioned, the severe restriction group lost two and a half times more bone density at the hip than the moderate group. So that's the same study where the fast group won when it came to pounds of weight loss, but the fast, the fast group lost when it came to bone density. So bone is important, I mean, in my opinion. It's super important for the rest of your life, especially for women, but really everybody as we get older. And that alone is a reason to favor the moderate deficit to lift heavy, which of course loads the bone. We talked about that on our last episode as well, and not be crash dieting your way just to get to a number. Right. So that's really good context. And then secondly, I want to clear up, be clear about where my argument maybe doesn't hold up because I'm not saying fast fat loss is bad. We've talked about rapid fat loss many times. I made that case a few weeks ago. If you have a hard deadline, if you're carrying a lot of fat, want early momentum. If you genuinely do better with a defined, you know, sprint than like an open-ended, I'll call it a slog. It doesn't have to feel like a slog if it's moderate enough. But in that case, a faster approach can be totally the right call for you. And the research tells us, hey, it can be effective as well. It's not going to doom you to rebound. They're both true. So they're true in different contexts. And the skill, I think, is just knowing which context you are in and using the right approach. So everything I just described, picking a rate that you can sustain, tapering it as you lean out, holding on to muscle, that is can be difficult to do for yourself because you're inside your head and you're inside your life, and there are a lot of variables at

How to choose the right rate of fat loss

Philip Pape 24:53

play. I get it. It's hard to be objective about your own deficit when you're hungry, maybe when you're impatient, maybe when the scale isn't cooperating. And that's why support structures exist. However, you get the support, I highly encourage finding what works for you within your budget, within your life. One thing that we offer, and I always want to mention it because it's helped so many people, it's called Eat More Lift Heavy. Coach Carol and I are in there helping people human to human. And we also help you build the skills over 26 weeks. We've got a lot of great tools as well. One of those tools actually helps you determine these things like transitions, how fast to go, uh, what phase you should be in, et cetera. We help you pick a rate that fits your life, your recovery. We help you adjust as you go and run into roadblocks. So if you've done the cycle over and over again, if you've done the cuts, but they're not sticking, we're trying to break that pattern for you. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, check out the information. No pressure at all. Just check it out. And then I'll have a link in the show notes as well. EatmoreLiftheavy.com.

Bonus: 3-question gut check BEFORE your deficit

Philip Pape 25:56

All right, before we wrap up, that 30-second gut check that I promised you, is your diet too aggressive or not? It's three questions. So question one, are your lifts going backward? Like, do you have a trend over and over again where the weights are just feeling heavier and heavier and heavier? That's your body telling you maybe you can't recover at this deficit. Number two, is your sleep getting worse? Is your mood getting worse? Cutting too hard affects your brain and it affects your sleep. Okay, that is a great sign. And then number three, could you keep doing exactly what you're doing right now for another eight weeks? Not could I like barely survive it and hang on by a thread, but could you just live it pretty predictably, even if some things come up? And if the honest answer is, yeah, not really. Not really. This is really, really tough. I don't think I can make it. Then the rate is too fast. So if you said basically yes to the first two, lifts going backwards, sleep getting worse, no to the third, no, I can't keep doing it. All right, then let's ease up on that deficit. Let's add a few hundred calories. You're gonna do it from, you know, probably mostly carbs, maybe some protein depending. Add the carbs around your training to fuel you best, and then keep going so that you can get through the deficit and get the result. It works. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the goal is never to weigh less, it's to keep the muscle and the strength and the bone that make that weight loss mean something for you, your body, and your future. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.