Cut to lose fat, build to gain muscle, plus your calendar

Philip Pape 0:00

If you're trying to figure out whether you should cut, that is, fat loss, maintain your weight, or build muscle right now, I bet you already know what you want the answer to be. And that's often part of the problem. Today I'm going to show you why most people make this decision backward. Three situations where it doesn't really matter what you want, it matters what your body is telling you, and the cost of picking the wrong direction. 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 on Monday, I walked you through the seven weeks that come before a fat loss phase and how to get to your maintenance calories that you can actually trust instead of using, say, a calculator. And the very next question every single time is what we're covering today, which is okay, I've got the data now. So what phase am I supposed to be in? You can cut, that is a calorie deficit to lose weight, to lose fat. You can maintain your weight or your results, or you can build muscle. And these are three options. A lot of you are picking these by feel, by gut, by vibe. There's that's not always wrong, but sometimes it is. And that's kind of like from where I sit, what I see a lot of people doing in this very reactionary way. But I like to think ahead and do things that make sense. And I hope you do too. And you want the result. I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a runway question. It's going to take about 10 seconds that tells you whether you should even start a deficit right now. I think it's a good culmination of today's episode. But in the meantime, we are going to get into why your lifts are one of the worst signals to use for this, even though a lot of people use them, including me for years, and what a roughly decade of research on bone density says about deficits related to menopause. And of course, all the mechanistic details about cutting, maintaining, and building your weight and what to choose and when. So most people follow like the first piece of advice they hear on this when you Google, when you use AI, go on social media, is hey, I want to lose fat, and so I've got to go into a cut, right? If I want to go into build muscle, I have to go into a surplus, even if it is a lean gain or not much of a surplus. And you might be tired of this, you might be busy, you might be stressed out, and you might want to sit at maintenance for a while. And so what do you have to do there? Well, I have to get myself in a place where I'm not gaining or losing. And then there's the calendar that sits on top of that, I'll say, where, you know, a lot of us don't think in terms of the holidays or and thinks think in terms of the months that are better or worse for us. And a lot of us want to cut in January because that's like you coasted through the holidays, you gained some weight, and that's the New Year's resolution. And then, of course, you want to look great for summer and so on. It sounds reasonable, it sounds intuitive. Oftentimes the way that people do this though tends to be wrong. And it's not because the categories are wrong for the goal, right? Cut, maintain, build. It's the order that you're doing them in is not efficient. That's the way I'm gonna put it. So somebody comes to me and she says, Hey, I think I should probably cut. I need to lose weight, I need to lose fat. And then she gives me all the reasons, right? Hey, my weight's been flat for a while, my genes are feeling tight, you know, I'm feeling a little bloated. I got to lose that next five, 10 pounds. Maybe I'm in menopause and it's the hormones. Maybe I have a wedding to go to in October, right? Every one of those reasons is fine. It's perfectly fine. And

Why you already decided (how the brain works)

Philip Pape 3:45

yet I would say not one of those reasons are why she decided she should cut. She probably said, Look, I need to lose weight, and then went on and piled on all the evidence as to why. And that's a completely normal thing to do. It's it's something we all do. It's also the reason we get stuck, especially those of you who are perennial weight lossers. What do I mean? All you think about is cutting, cutting, cutting. You never think about anything else and how that's going to help you, even with a cut, like building muscle, for example. Now, I'm gonna tell you something that's gonna make you a little bit uncomfortable. That most of you are not picking the phase you want to be in based on your mood. I'm not saying that. Okay. You're picking it out of fear and then dressing it up as data. And the fear is always, hey, if I eat too much, I'm gonna get fat. Let's be honest. That is the fear. So then you kind of find your way in this serpentine path to a calorie deficit, no matter what the numbers or evidence say you should do, no matter what the biofeedback says, no matter what all this other stuff says, whether or not you're collecting the right data or not, which is a different problem. And that's because a deficit feels like, okay, that's the safe thing I need to do. That's what I need to do to get thin, skinny, lean, whatever terms you want to use. And then once you've done that, it's what do we call that? Confirmation bias. You're confirming the decision you already made. And I've done this myself so many times. And I have to avoid gut reacting when a client or member or somebody new who reaches out to me says, like, this is what I want to do. I have to avoid giving them an answer to what they want to do because what they want to do maybe maybe not what they need to do. Does that make sense? Now, inside our program, Eat More Lift Heavy, we have a bunch of tools. And one of the tools I created, I'm very proud of these tools because it takes the coaching philosophy and the evidence and the decision chain and puts it into a tool that you can use. And there's a design choice that inspired this episode. So, with this tool called the phase transition tool, we ask you a bunch of questions like what is your current phase? How long have you been in it? What's your weight trend? What's your body composition? How are your lifts? How's your biofeedback? Hormonal context? How's your adherence? How's your stress? Right? A lot of the same things. Like if you got on a call with me, I'd probably ask you all these questions to kind of figure out where things are. But then the last question I ask is, what do you actually want to do next? And I say it last on purpose, because if you say it first, then it biases all the rest, doesn't it? And you would answer all those other questions to support the conclusion you already reached instead of, and I'm not saying everyone does this. Like some of you are hyperconscious of this, but many of you are like, well, I gotta lose weight. So now how am I gonna answer these questions to support that? So that's like the fatal flaw that in our human psychology is this confirmation bias. So just sit with that a little bit and think about if that's something you might be doing. Now,

Scenario 1: biofeedback in the crapper during a deficit

Philip Pape 6:43

I want to talk about three situations where what you want, like if you said I want to lose weight, actually doesn't matter. And this is empowering. This is not defeating, this is going to be empowering because this is gonna unlock you making a better choice for yourself and then dealing with what it takes to get there, including overcoming some of these fears. And the nice thing about these three situations is if any one of these is true right now in your life, then the question of what phase to go into actually comes off the table altogether until you fix this thing. And a lot of you aren't gonna like to hear this, but let's let's do it. Okay. The first one is that your biofeedback is in the crapper and you are in a calorie deficit. Okay, listen to me here. So by biofeedback, I mean sleep, energy, hunger, mood, recovery, digestion, libido, all of that. Does that make sense? Like bio, as in body biology, feedback. What is your body telling you? And I like to break it out into these little categories because, first of all, that's what the evidence shows is helpful. And secondly, it makes it more objective. Like you can really hone in on those specific things. So if any or most or all of those things are genuinely really, really low or poor for you right now, and I don't mean kind of like, eh, this is my normal, like we all live this way. It's it's we have stressful lives and we're busy and all that. I mean really poor relative to you. And at the same time, you are in a calorie deficit. Now keep in mind, based on our last episode, you might be in a deficit and not quite realizing it, but let's just say you're in a deficit, then the answer isn't to go to a different phase. It is to take a structured break at maintenance for roughly two to four weeks before you do anything else. Now you might say, wait, isn't that going to a new phase? Well, I think of maintenance, I think of the phase of maintenance as more of a longer-term maintenance that you're really setting yourself up for for months and months. This is the diet break version of maintenance. This is coming out of a diet-backed maintenance. And there is real evidence for this one, especially on the sleep side. They have taken people and put them on the same calorie deficit two different times with the same food, but one with eight and a half hours in bed and one with five and a half. I've cited this one many times. Both times they lost about three kilograms, so same scale weight loss. But those who had really short or deprived sleep, only 0.6 kilos of that came off as fat. Whereas in the people had more sleep, it was 1.4 kilograms of the three. So more than double the fat loss came from the same deficit because of the better sleep. And of course, the lean mass went the other way, like something like 2.4 kilos lost on the sleep deprived versus 1.5. So, and I'm sorry I'm doing um metric, that's what the study's in. But if you think about that for a second, that's powerful. Same calories, same number on the scale. And sleep alone is what decided how much came off as body fat versus muscle. And we just had someone in our coaching call, our monthly coaching call yesterday, who had this exact thing where she really just needs to address sleep. Her sleep has declined quite a bit from something like seven or eight hours to like barely five or six. And we see everything starting to tank with nothing else changing. And it's it's tanking not because your metabolism just drops, but you're also probably losing some muscle and gaining some fat, et cetera. Now, that that's a small study, but there's a lot of other research that supports that. We know how important sleep is. The magnitude is big enough. We know that if you're sleeping like five and a half or less hours and you're about to start a cut, then the question isn't should you start a cut? It's you shouldn't start a cut. You should fix the sleep problem first. So that's the first one is is your biofeedback low and you're in a deficit? You need a break. The second one is if you have very high stress

Scenario 2: high stress stacked on a deficit

Philip Pape 10:41

plus a deficit now. It sounds like stress is a not is part of biofeedback, and it is, but I have to separate this out in and of itself because stress is like the the worst element of stacking going on against you when you are in a deficit, and then you stack it on top of like a genuine life crisis, a job loss, a sick parent, a divorce, financial issues, all of those things. It tends to produce the worst version of both things. And so here you also need a diet break to come back to. So I wanted to call that out separately. And then the third one is that your lifts in the gym are dropping significantly and you're already lean.

Scenario 3: why your lifts can be misleaing

Philip Pape 11:25

Now, this is an interesting one, but we see it a lot. Uh, I want you to be careful because it gets misused, and I've probably contributed to that. I'll be honest, a lot of coaches will tell you to, hey, watch your lifts as the early warning sign whether your deficit is too aggressive. Like, are you plateauing? Are you regressing? And the problem is here that, like when we look at research, there's Murphy and Kohler had a meta-analysis where they looked at trials of people lifting in a calorie deficit. And they found that the deficit reliably halted or impaired lean mass gains, and the threshold started at around 500 calorie a day deficit. But strength gains were basically comparable between the deficit and the control groups, which may be backward from what you'd expect. You know, I know better, I've looked into this research. Now I I frame it the right way for people. I have for the last few years, but your body defends your strength while your ability to actually add muscle has stopped. And that has to do with the neuromuscular adaptations versus the actual lean mass of muscle, two different adaptations. And what that means practically is by the time, but by the time your lifts are visibly decreasing or falling off or regressing, you are actually seeing the lagging effect of things happen, you know, weeks later. So you don't just go by how your lifts are doing to pick what phase you should be in. And the the convert converse or the opposite of that is don't don't get lulled into a false sense that everything is fine because let's say your bench press is stable. You get what I'm saying? So sometimes we have to have more nuance when we're picking our phases, and those three things are really important to think about. Now, you're thinking, okay, this is useful, but you know, I still don't quite know how to make this decision for myself. And because there are so many inputs, and that's exactly why I built the tool I was describing earlier, because I've seen this exact point of friction as a huge like brick wall for a lot of you, where you understand you have to do all the things, like I have to lift weights, I have to eat my protein, I have to get good sleep and stress, but you don't quite know when and why to transition phases,

The body recomp decision chain

Philip Pape 13:40

okay? Besides just, oh, I hit my goal, now I'm ready for the next phase. So in week 14 of our program, so that's eat more lift heavy, and I'll just give you the website so you can check it out, eatmore liftheavy.com. You could scroll to the bottom and see all 26 weeks. Week 14 is is we teach you about phase transition planning. And that's where we have this phase transition tool that takes your weight trend, how long you've been in the phase, what is your body composition, biofeedback, adherence, goal, all in that order. And then, like I said, the last question is well, what do you want to do? Just so we have that as well. And then it gives you a recommendation with reasoning attached to it. And the reasoning is the point because I want you to learn the framework. Why, why am I thinking I need to do this or that relative to what the actual data says? And it when what you want conflicts with what the data says, that's a really powerful thing. That, you know, and by the way, the tool tells you that too, because it says, What do you want to do? And you say, I want to lose fat. And the tool's like, I don't know about that. Uh, I don't know about that because here's the other things happen up happening to you right now. So I'm I'm I know I'm always making little pitches for our programming because I'm very excited how much it helps people. And today's episode is all about phase transitions and how to choose how to get it in and out and when to go to each one. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to check that out. And to celebrate episode 500 coming up, we have a code 500Club that will get you $50 off the six month commitment to either of our programs in there. So go to eatmore liftheavy.com.

Most phase questions are something else in disguise

Philip Pape 15:14

So most phase change questions are actually adherence questions that many of you misdiagnose as phase questions. Okay, sit with that just for a minute. It is probably the most useful thing in this whole episode, and it's also a thing that people skip all the time. If you are hitting your targets three days a week or fewer and you're not consistent, changing the phase isn't gonna fix that. You could go from a deficit to maintenance to surplus, back again, and just get the same result, which basically nothing, or even get worse because you never actually did those phases properly. You think you did, oh, I was in a deficit. Yeah, but you weren't doing all the other things that supported the deficit, right? And so adherence really comes to the top, and it's not a matter of your character or your discipline. It's usually how it's usually a function of having the targets that make the most sense for you and are achievable for you right now. Like what's the lowest bar in your life right now to move the needle? Meaning your protein number doesn't have to be a gram per pound. It could be 0.7. Or guess what? If you're eating almost no protein, maybe you need to go to 0.5 and then go to 0.7, right? Maybe it's it's a problem in your life. Like the plan you're trying to follow doesn't account for, okay, I travel regularly for business. Okay, I'm, you know, taking care of my sick mom. Like all of those things. Okay, I have weekends where I always get out, I always go out to restaurants. So none of those things, those skills, those competencies and capabilities are fixed by just changing the phase. So that's what I'm saying. You're like trying to slap a band-aid on this. Oh, now I need to go to maintenance. Oh, now I need to go into phallus, now I need to go building muscle. And that's not the thing that matters. Okay. And what you can do is pull up your last, say, four weeks of data. And if you don't have data, that's the problem, right? And I want you to look at the number of days where you hitch your protein target and the number of days where you're in a reasonable range on calories. And I said reasonable, I didn't say perfect. If the number is like below 20 out of 30, or 28 days, I guess is four weeks, then you're probably not consistent enough. You got to fix that and then come back to the question of what should you do based on the data, which is again why we spend six or seven weeks at the beginning of our program helping you build those skills first. Is this all? I hope this is all making sense and I'm not kind of rambling too much on this. So you've gotten past these roadblocks, your adherence is solid, and now we can pick the phase.

Your current leanness

Philip Pape 17:49

So the first input is where are you with your leanness and your body fat right now? I'm not the exact number, it's very hard to get that. I don't care about your exact body fat percentage. You kind of know how much body fat you have based on how you look and feel and your waist and all that. But, you know, I told you in the last episode that calculators aren't very helpful. And I'm not going to turn around and tell you go and get your body fat from a bathroom scale or from an inbody today, either. Okay. Just do you have significant amounts of fat to lose? Do you have a moderate amount or are you fairly lean? Or do you honestly not know? And if you don't know, there's ways to start to figure that out. Now, why this matters, it's because it's one of the most quantitative, so numbers-based relationships we have in this in this field, in this industry. If we look at Forbes's work originally and then Kevin Hall, who modeled it, and what we know is that the proportion of what you lose that comes from lean tissue does correlate with how much fat you're carrying when you start. So the leaner you are, the bigger the risk is of losing some muscle mass. If you're carrying more fat, you can run a more aggressive deficit and lose proportionally less lean tissue while you do it. Those of you who are quite overweight, I've seen some almost magical results when you start lifting weights and you don't even have to go into a diet almost. Like it's like your body starts to release its own stored fat. But if you do go into a diet, it also doesn't experience it the same as someone who's leaner. Meaning you, if you keep the deficit reasonable, and even if it's somewhat aggressive, your body may not feel like it's in a deficit because you have all that fat to draw from. And so that's like the positive of being overweight in that your starting point is going to help you there. So the same, say 500 calorie deficit, it's gonna be a different intervention depending on you know your leanness and it's gonna feel different, et cetera. So it's very individualistic. So that's the first one is your body fat. The second input is your expenditure trend. So what is your metabolism doing? I covered

Your expenditure history

Philip Pape 19:50

that on Monday. I'm not gonna reteach all of that, but you're basically looking at, hey, is it going up? Is it flat, or is it falling over the past, say, four to six weeks based on my real logged data, not based on a calculator, not based on a wearable, but based on actual food intake and weight change over time. If you miss that, go back to episode 497, the one right before this one. That is a good foundation for what we're talking about today. The third input is that if you are in perioprost menopause,

Bone density

Philip Pape 20:22

I want to address your bone density real quick here. Um, this is more important than you think. There's a year-long randomized trial from Villarreal and colleagues. They took non-obese middle-aged adults and they had one group lose weight by cutting calories, and another group lose a comparable amount of weight through exercise. The calorie restriction group lost 10% of their body weight, and they lost some bone mass along the way, around 2% at the spine, roughly the same at the hip, that like the total hip. And then the exercise group lost a similar amount of weight, but they didn't have bone loss at any site. So, again, we see where there's one variable that can make a big difference in your body composition, which in this case is exercise. Now we can extend that to say what types of exercise. And then we look at, okay, lifting weights is probably the most important type, but even just moving in general and being active really helps because you're using your body. That makes sense, right? And then there was a follow-up that looked at post-menopausal women and said, hey, what happens to the bone when the weight comes back and it looks like the bone didn't come back? Again, this is, you know, without the exercise, right? So I would love to have seen a study where then they had the same group incorporate exercise and see what happens, but then that adds another variable. So it gets even more actionable than that. Listen up, because there's another year long trial from Shah and colleagues in older adults where diet only weight loss reduced only what 2.6% of total hip bone density, whereas diet plus exercise reduced it by only 1.1%. So just having exercise. Training in there cut bone loss by more than half. And the exercise only group that didn't do a diet, guess what happened to them? Well, their bone mass went up. The only thing that predicted who held on to their bone mass in their hip was their strength, their one rep max. So isn't that fascinating, right? Lifting isn't just protecting muscle while you cut, it's also protecting your bone density. And I think that's very, very important,

How much of your weight loss comes off as lean tissue

Philip Pape 22:28

depending on who you are, your history, your risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis, et cetera. It's why I bring it up as a special case. Now, it's the same story on lean mass. There's a big systematic review from Weinheimer that looked at what amount of your weight loss comes off as fat-free mass, like muscle or lean mass. And in groups that do just the dieting by itself, okay, calorie deficit by itself, something like 81% of them lost at least 15% of their weight is fat-free mass. But when you add in exercise, that drops to only 39% of them lost more than 15%. I know it's a weird way to put it, right? Because instead of just talking about the amount lost on average, it's the amount of people that lost a certain amount. But either way, it's a huge benefit adding in the exercise. So, what that adds up to that I want you to take away is that for example, a woman in her 50s, if you choose to go in a deficit at the wrong time in the wrong way, and you don't have the skills in place, and especially if you're not lifting or moving, it can massively reduce your bone density. That is very hard to get back. And same thing goes for muscle. I mean, you're going to be losing muscle, mass, and bone anyway. That's the fear we talk about all the time. It happens to human beings as we age, but it doesn't have to happen, at least nowhere near that extent. And for many of you, you could absolutely build new muscle, that is for sure. So there's a big cost to this. Okay. Even though you want to lose

The hidden constraint

Philip Pape 23:54

fat, there's a big, big cost to this, which I think makes this decision very important. Now, the fourth input, the fourth and final input is your runway. And this is more like what I'd call a constraint, meaning it doesn't tell you what, like it doesn't tell you what phase you should do. It tells you what phases are available to you. And this comes down to how fast you are losing weight, for example. So you want to hold on to your lean mass. And when we see like the athlete literature, for example, we know that somewhere around a half a percent to three quarters of a percent of body weight a week is a good target or upper limit for most people to be pretty sure you're gonna hold on to all your lean mass as long as you are lifting weights. And sometimes you actually see a gain of lean mass if you keep the deficit small enough while losing fat. So we call that body recomp. Whereas people that go faster and faster, they often either only hold on lean mass or lose the lean mass, if that makes sense. So do the do the math on yourself. If you want to lose 15 pounds and you're around 160 pounds, you then need somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 18 weeks of relatively uninterrupted fat loss to do it properly, right? At that rate. So if you've got six weeks from now and stuff is gonna happen that will make that very difficult, your life is gonna blow up in some way, or there's some events on the calendar or some change, then that option's not really available to you and you have to think differently. Maybe you need a maintenance phase in there and you just need to interrupt the fat loss. Maybe you shouldn't do fat loss at all. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, there we go. All right, now I'm not saying that you shouldn't do a deficit. Obviously, I'm not. Cutting, fat loss, it's all part of the process. You just have to know that you are ready for it and you're doing the right things. I'm also not saying you shouldn't be in a surplus, right? Like for women who are over 40, for for anybody who's over 40, really, who lift weights, a real surplus to build muscle is, well, I should say a lean surplus is is often the right call. A big surplus may not be, depending on whether you've done this before and how responsive you are to building muscle. But it's pretty easy to set things up to be in that slight surplus that's more than enough to build muscle and strength and even get some body reconp for the ride, as long as you are lifting, you're eating protein, you're doing all the right things. So I know I threw a lot at you. I would just go back if you have to re-listen to the four inputs I just talked about, will really help, will really hold up for you when you're thinking about what you want to do. All right, before I let you go, I promised you that what I call runway question. It's like a 10-second question of whether you should even start a deficit. Do you have the runway? It kind of ties to what we just talked about. But before I do, if you're listening to this in late August when the episode comes out and you're thinking that, you know, I'm gonna sort all this out by January, I want to give you the math on that. Okay. Let's say you started the week of September 7th, weeks one through seven. You just try to build your skills. You don't try to go into a deficit. You do the tracking, do all the stuff we talked about on episode 497. And then now you're at roughly October 25, and now you start your fat loss phase between October 26th, which is my birthday, by the way, and it runs to about say early January. You've got Thanksgiving in there, you've got Christmas in there, where you know, you take maintenance breaks or you figure out how to fit those in. And then January first is like week 17. So now you're four months in, you're past the stretch where most people would quit something like this if you've done it at the right rate, and then you can decide what's next. Well, you know what? We can walk you through that exact process to so that you don't stumble, so that you are supported all the way through. We do this in Eatmore Lift Heavy. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. To celebrate the 500th episode, I've got a code for you. 500 club, all one word, takes $50 off the six month option. You can join Eat More Lift Heavy or get personalized coaching with the dialed in level of Eat More Lift Heavy. But I'll go let you check that out at eatmore liftheavy.com. All right. So here's the question. Before you start any

Bonus: 10-second runway question

Philip Pape 28:06

phase at all, any phase, answer one question. How many uninterrupted weeks do you have between right now and the next disruption? Okay, so how long are you gonna be at relative peace in your life before something like a vacation, a surgery, a big stretch at work or deadline, the holidays, all of that? If it's less than eight weeks, probably not a good time to start a deficit because you don't have the runway to lose meaningful fat before you have to take some sort of break and you're gonna get frustrated and you're gonna feel like it's not giving you the results. I would work on the skills on building your baseline, on going for something like body recomp at maintenance, or even in a slight surplus, if that's the case. And then you can slow roll into that part of your life in a much more fueled state. Okay. And then, you know, weeks, if if your stretch of peace in your life is eight to 16 weeks, so that's like two to four months, hey, great. That's probably a good window to run a conservative deficit, but always plan in the disruptions now while you're thinking about it. So you don't have to improvise and react when it happens. Now, if you have well over 16 weeks, you know, four, five, six months, you've got room for pretty much anything you want to do. All right. But again, you still want to plan ahead for the disruptions that may come up. So the mistake isn't, hey, I picked the wrong phase. It's I picked I picked a phase, but then I hit a wall and I couldn't finish it because something happened in my life. And that's the kind of thing we want to plan around. All right, I hope that was helpful. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that the phase you want and the phase you need are often two different questions. And only one of them can be answered by your data. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.