Why your results unravel 1 year later

Philip Pape 0:00

If you've tried body recomp before, that is building muscle and losing fat at the same time. Maybe you joined a program and you got success, but then a year, two, three years later, the results kind of regressed. This episode is for you because today I'm going to show you the four skills you need for body recomposition for the rest of your life. Also, why does the research say the weight comes back about four years after you're done with a coached program? And then what separates people who succeed and maintain those results past four years from those who don't? 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, Philip Pape. I'm a certified nutrition coach, and the last two episodes were really about how to figure out parts of the body composition process. On episode 497, I talked about not using calculators to set your calories to learn how to measure your own expenditure instead for calories and macros. So if you missed that, check it out. On episode 498, I gave you sort of the gates and the inputs for deciding when to cut, build, maintain. And many of these assume that, hey, you are collecting, tracking, measuring your data. You know how to act on it, you have the confidence to do so, and you don't really need anyone helping you out, which we all know can be a big struggle in this world today, because there's either too much advice, and it's so confusing out there, and you don't know where to go. There's bad advice, or there's you're kind of living in your own head trying to do this and not quite knowing what to do. So this is why I have a lot of coaches and mentors myself, because we can't do it alone necessarily. So the question is though, can you? Can you build the skills that you need to be better and better and better at this? Of course, that's true with anything regarding personal improvement. And it really, really matters, probably more than usual for those of you who are older, you know, over 40, over 50. And if you've been at this for a while, your body is changing quite a bit during this phase of life, but you're still struggling to manage, you know, a diet, like how do you eat to manage your body composition? Maybe you don't even know what I'm talking about, and you're just trying to lose weight, and you're gonna have a big revelation today. And you don't buy like a 30-year lifestyle improvement and fat loss and body composition program, right? Or you don't necessarily have like a personal coach for decades. Most people can afford that. So we need to build those skills. It's a very important skill. It's right up there with like relationships and your career, right? Light health and fitness is the biggest investment you can make in yourself because it's gonna reduce significant cost later in life and make your health spend much more fruitful. I want you to stick around to the end because I always have a little treat at the end of our episodes. I'm gonna give you a sentence that you can write down before your next phase starts that will save you six weeks of a stall. Okay. So one sentence, just stick around for that. I know I'm such a tease. So

4 body recomp skills and how I rank them

Philip Pape 3:10

here is our map for today. Okay, and you might want to write these down because I'm gonna come back to them at the end. These are uh four skills. The first one is whether you can read your own trends, your own data. The second is whether you can set a, I'll say, a trigger before you need it, i.e. being proactive. The third is whether you can get back to normal after life disrupts you. And the fourth is whether you can troubleshoot an issue or a stall and do it in the right order of priority. Okay. So those four skills are what you need if you are going to do this successfully for the long haul. Body now, I put it in the phrase of body recomp, but really I just mean in general building muscle, losing fat, trying to be fitter, have better energy, look better, all of it together. Okay. And then I'm gonna talk a little bit about the evidence for each one and really connect it to some of the things I enjoy, like psychology and human behavior, because that's ultimately what moves the needle, not just information. So before we get to those, I want to look at a study on depression. Okay, yes, on depression. It has nothing to do with fitness, but it's the best evidence that I've found for any of this. This is cool. This is why I like multidisciplinary research, okay, because we can learn from other areas. It's not all about fitness. I also want to look at what the number 3.9 years means. We're gonna come back to that. For anyone who has finished a program, like an online program or working with a coach, there's a magic number of 3.9 years. We're gonna talk about that as well. Okay. Again, I'm such a tease, right? So let me describe a scenario and you tell me if it's you, okay? You've done this four, five, six, seven, maybe more times than that. And you had, let's say, a macro coach back in 2019. Maybe you had an online program. Everything went online in 2020 for obvious reasons. So 2020, 2021. We launched our show in 2021. You did a challenge. A lot of you do challenges all the time, online or with the gym. You've probably used one, two, three, or more apps at some point for different things, for food, for training, for habits, whatever. And I think when when people talk about this stuff, they say it in the sense of, okay, you did those things that they didn't work, but in many cases, they did work. Like in the short term, a lot of these things work for you, right? You lost weight on most of them, or maybe you built a little muscle. Maybe you weren't lazy, you weren't, you weren't non-compliant, you were sticking to it and showing up. A lot of you like things like challenges for that reason. It's kind of this burst of group-centered motivation, but then they end. It's kind of like when I go to a training session or workshop. It could even be for your career, right? And you get all pumped up and you get all the materials and you go through all the exercises, you do all the brainstorming and networking, and then it's done. And then you go home, and the next week it's like the binder goes on the shelf and you don't think about it again. That's often what happens. Okay, so same thing with a lot of these programs, which is a challenge for us as coaches and me with this podcast like, how do I keep you motivated for the long haul? How do we make this sustainable so you're not just going off of bursts of motivation, even with even with our own programs? So now what you see online, and I've said this myself, is that hey, these programs are designed to keep you dependent. Okay, that's a little bit of a cynicism in the business model, right? The business model's retention, long-term revenue. So, of course, nobody has any incentive to teach you to leave the program. Now, I want to be careful with that argument because it's a very satisfying argument, but I don't think it's completely fair or honest because most coaches I know are not sitting there like Mr. Burns on, you know, on Simpsons. Ooh, how are

Are coaching programs built to keep you dependent?

Philip Pape 7:00

we going to keep you confused and sticking with my program forever? Right. Now, there's a lot, there is a lot of manipulation. There's a lot of, you know, 20-year-olds out there that are using cold DMs and junk like that. But there's a lot of great people in the industry that I've met. And they're just answering the question that sits right in front of their face, right? And for many coaches, that's just clients wanting to know what they need to do. What do they need to eat this week? Right. Well, how do I need to train? Like what the heck is gonna make me successful? Why am I not losing weight, et cetera? And I think a coach can be doing the first one really well, like the first answering those questions, but not necessarily teaching you the why or the method behind it or the science or the process behind it. Now, many of you might say, hey, I don't even need to know that, just tell me what to do. And that's fine. You're kind of ensuring your own dependence on coaches. And I would say that there's nothing right or wrong with that. Like many of us want to have teachers, coaches in our lives, maybe for a long, long, long time. I mean, we generally outsource all our medical decisions to the medical professionals. And yet we know that when we take control of our health and start to research things and do it in an evidence-based way, sometimes we come across insights that we didn't get from those folks. And it's really good to understand. Plus, you have different phases in your life and you're changing constantly. So if you have to pay someone or you have to like depend on another person to give you the answer all the time, you're constantly gonna be bugging them every time you do this. Now you might say, okay, AI can be helpful there. Well, that's a whole other can of worms. We have our own AI app, it's called Fitness Lab, and we're actually coming out with a new release, it might be out already, that gets better and better and better for this kind of stuff. And it kind of serves that same purpose, but it's still an app, you're still gonna pay for it. So I do like to be kind of on that edge of both sides. Like, on one hand, I love helping people, and if you want to pay me for that service, I'm here to help. On the other hand, I want you to be very competent and skillful in what you do. Cause at the end of the day, that's what being a positive, I guess, human community is all about. Okay, so I want to change the question here. What I mean. What I mean by that, it isn't whether you should have a coach. Okay, that's about the money and preferences and how much like you have like having a coach and someone in your corner. There's not a universal right or wrong answer to that. Everybody's different. The question is whether you could without a coach. I think it's a really good question. And I say coach as like a euphemism for any sort of external support. That could be an app, that could be a group, it could be free, it could be paid, doesn't matter. But if that thing vanished tomorrow, if the app shut down, if life

The real question behind "should I hire a coach?"

Philip Pape 9:40

got difficult or expensive, and that was the first thing to go, because it's just not a priority for you right now. Could you still keep doing the thing and doing it competently? And you know, it's funny, I had a former client, Heather, she knows who she is, who was with me for a long time. And she took the most advantage of that process to learn to the point where, you know, when she left me, I didn't feel like I felt sad in one way, but at the other hand, I was proud. She went on to be a coach herself. And then she reaches out for mentorship on that. So that's awesome, right? Like we want to be able to pay it forward. But notice these are two different questions. I know people who could DIY everything, they're just super disciplined, they hustle, and and yet they pay for coaching anyway, because having a second set of eyes is worth it to them, and it helps them level up even more. And that's a great reason. I also know people who've been with a coach for three, four, five years who couldn't tell you, don't have a clue why they're being told what to eat, how to train, whatever. We even had a very experienced power powerlifter, award-winning, you know, competitive power lifter, who started working with me because of that reason. Like her coach didn't explain it. She felt kind of stuck, like not knowing why and very dependent, and reached out to me and said, Look, I want to understand why. So would you rather be able to take what you learned and apply it for yourself going forward or not, is the question. And I, you know, in full disclosure, if you've just found this podcast, you know, I pitch my stuff all the time on the show because this is free content I give to you guys. I love doing it, but we also have to support our business. And I sell a program. I have a direct financial interest in you deciding that you want coaching. So everything I say for the next 20 minutes, yeah, run it through that filter, to be honest. And you don't challenge me on it, right? I'm gonna try to make it easy on you by telling you where the research doesn't go my way. I hope I do that more often than not. There are a few. And why don't we start there? How do you like that? Okay. In any okay, I never I never did debate in in high school or college, but I understand that one of the best tactics in debate is to acknowledge the other side's argument so that you can potentially dismantle it. And maybe you can't, I don't know, but that's that's what I understand. So I want to start with the research that is strongest against what I say sometimes. It's

Where the research argues AGAINST me

Philip Pape 11:55

the strongest evidence where ongoing contact with a coach works and it doesn't just work in a vague, you know, low-grade sort of way. It works very statistically measurably. What I mean by that is there's a trial called Tours, T-O-U-R-S, and it was by Perry and colleagues. It was on rural women with an average starting loss, uh weight loss of about 10 kilograms. The group that got continued phone or in-person contact for a year regained 1.2 kilograms, while the group that got educational materials without the coaching regained 3.7 kilograms. Now it's interesting, they both regained, but the group with the support didn't regain as much. Same people, the same starting weight loss, but that's like a 3x difference. There was another trial called the stop regain trial, found the same pattern. There's another one called Look Ahead, a lot of these acronyms, I don't know. A-H-E-A-D. And that's the big one where they looked at five over 5,000 adults, 45 to 76, and they found ongoing monthly contact kept them, you know, sustaining their results. So meaningfully less uh weight regain or maintenance of their weight for eight years. Now, eight years is a long time to keep the weight off. Now, I'm not all about weight, you know, I'm about body composition, but still it's a good proxy for how this might matter. So we can't look at that in a vacuum. There's the other half. Let's look at the other half. Okay, in 2021, there was a big synthesis of the evidence in the BMJ journal. 155 trials of more than 150,000 people that looked at what happens after these programs end. Well, at the end of a program, people were 2.8 kilograms lighter than the control group. That's good, right? But once the program stopped, they regained faster than the control group did. And the model predicted their body weight was back at baseline 3.9 years after the treatment ended. So that's the 3.9 years I was teasing about early on. I think I said four years in the teaser, but you get it. Then there's something I think matters even more here. There's a trial called weight loss maintenance, and they did brief monthly counseling out to 30 months. And then they kept going with some people out to 60 months. That's five years. So they doubled the contact from 30 to 60. And then that extension from 30 to 60 months produced no significant additional benefit. The weight regain was steepest in year one, slower in year two, and it was flat by year three, no matter which group you were in. So if we look at the results together, they okay, are these disagreeing with each other, right? It sounds like the support helps while the support is there. And then when it stops, whatever it helps with tends to stop too. And then if you add more and more of it past a point, though, you don't get any extra benefit. So it's kind of a time-based analysis that we have to do here, which is important because a lot of stuff we look at over too short of a length of time in these studies. So, what does this mean? Is you know, how long do I need a coach? Is maybe not the right variable. Six months versus two years versus forever. That is not what's separating the people who keep their results from the people who don't, because we just learned that past a certain point it doesn't matter. And there's not a study that would like settle this. There's no trial that compares a finite skills-focused program against an open-ended one on long-term outcomes. We just don't have that. But where we can look is outside of fitness.

Research on depression and CBT applied to fitness

Philip Pape 15:31

So this brings me to what I mentioned earlier. Cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, for depression, is probably the closest well-studied thing we have to what we're talking about because it's deliberately time-limited. And the whole point of it is to teach somebody skills to use when it's done. They're teaching skills. It's fascinating. So we look at a study by Holland, H-O-L-L-O-N, and colleagues back in 2005. They took people who would respond or who had responded to cognitive therapy and they took away the therapy. Sounds mean, I know. And then they took people who had responded to medication and they took away their medication. Ooh, okay. So there was a relapse in, or they measured the relapse and in the withdrawn therapy group, so the CBT that was taken away, it was 30.8% relapse. The relapse in the withdrawn medication group was 76.2%. So, like, what is that more than double? So the people who came off therapy, actually, this is another finding. The people who came up therapy, that 30.8%, they did no worse than people who were kept on medication, which was 47%. So even people who stayed on medication, their relapse was 47%, which is actually higher than the group that had the therapy, but then came off the therapy. Does that make sense? So they did better after stopping therapy than the other group did after stopping medication, and better than the group that never stopped taking medication. Okay. Powerful stuff. Now, that is depression. That is not fat loss. I'm not going to pretend it transfers. All of this stuff is these different disciplines, but it does show that some that it's possible that something that ends, like a training program or a nutrition program or some sort of coaching or therapy or whatever, can still work after it ends. As long as what you got from it was a skill or skills and not just a like a static plan or schedule or set of things to do. Like they were telling you what to do, but not teaching you how to do it. That's the difference. You need to learn how to do it. And I think of medication as like they're not teaching you to do anything, they're just giving you a drug, right? It's just doing it's doing something for you, let's say. So that's more or less my argument today. It was never really about how long, at least, not the way that we argue about it online all the time. It's really whether you learned anything during the time you were in a program that you can still use afterward, and that you can prove that to yourself, which is what we're gonna get to in the next 10 minutes of the episode. Now, I know some of you are listening to this show and you're saying, this is a kind of a cool argument, right? But you're about to sell me your coaching program. Uh, and isn't that a little convenient? And that is totally fair. So instead of pitching you, what I want to tell you is about how we designed our program, just so you understand how it ties to this research and why I think it's important that service providers, that business owners, that coaches think about these things thoughtfully when they design how they're going to deliver the

Designing a program that ends "on purpose"

Philip Pape 18:40

service. So I've got a lot of coaches who listen to this program, but even if you're not a coach, you are looking for coaches probably. And you've got to look for these things whether you hire me or not. So our program is called Eat More Lift Heavy. You can check out the details without buying anything, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. It goes for 26 weeks. Now that is a half a year. That's a decent commitment. And then it technically ends. Okay. And I I have that in air quotes that you can't see because, as with all things, process personal improvement never ends. But my design for getting you the skills that you need at a minimum definitely ends. Okay. So by week 25, no, in week 25, we have what's called a graduation readiness checklist. It is a scored self-assessment. Yeah, you do have to use quit do tick quizzes in my program. I'm sorry, you have to do some work where you rate yourself across these skills and it tells you which ones you're still weak on. It's just a self-assessment, it does it immediately. You don't have to wait for somebody to review it or anything. It's all, it's something I coded, it's software, which means part of what that tool does is tell you maybe you're not ready in these couple areas, but you're ready in all these other areas. And it's based on your own self-assessment. So it's not like trying to, you know, deceive you. Like if you say you're good on everything, it's probably gonna pair it back. Hey, you're good on everything. So that's right near the end. Now, if we go back, reverse engineer this back in week 20 of the 26 weeks, we have something about teaching yourself where what you have to do, it's kind of fun, is explain what you've learned in your own words. We give you specific questions and prompts. And we've had members and students post about this. And it's fascinating because you see them really struggling to get this out. I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean like you have to think about it. And can you explain how you know what your data is telling you? How do you know how to deal with a weight loss plateau, right? Like those kinds of things. Like, how do you know this system is going to work for you? And then we kind of review that with you to make sure you really do know. So I think that's awesome. And as I mentioned, like it's 26 weeks that the idea is to give you skills. And we're we're talking about that process today, in a sense, and like the philosophy behind why that's important. That doesn't mean that you wouldn't then want a community or coach on top of that or for longer, or indefinitely if you wanted to, to give you that second pair of eyes, right? But that's different than needing someone to tell you what to do. That's the distinction I'm trying to make today. So if I were to pitch you, I'd say, hey, we're coming up on episode 500 in the next episode. So we have a little code for you. It's 500 club, gets you $50 off the six-month options. No pressure either way. If it's a line for you, great. If not, keep listening to the podcast. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. Go to eatmorliftheavy.com. All

Reading your own data and acting on it

Philip Pape 21:23

right. I want to get into the four skills of body recomp. And I'm going to tell you how much I weight each one or how much I trust each one. Okay. All right. So skill number one is reading your own data, your own trends, and acting on it. Now, this is the highest evidence skill on the list. We know that frequent self weighing, when you read it back as a trend, as opposed to a daily taking the daily snapshots of your weight and freaking out. So when you take it as a smoothed average or a trend over time, we see this over and over in randomized human trials that there is a huge Advantage to this. So Steinberg is one of the studies that found daily weighers lost meaningfully more over six months than people who weighed less often. There's a maintenance study by Goki LaRose and colleagues. I'm probably butchering the name, where over a maintenance period, the daily weighers were still slightly losing weight, 0.18 kilograms in my notes. And the weekly weights gained 0.37 pounds. So opposite directions, meaning they were losing weight if they were weighing every day. They weren't, they were gaining weight if they were doing it once a week. And I guess the caveat to all of this here is that people who weigh daily, by definition, are probably more engaged with the process. And people who are engaged with the process in this way tend to get better results anyway. Now that's not to take away from the results. That only reinforces it in my mind. And research researchers try to separate those. It's hard to do, but even without separating them, you could draw some good proxy type conclusions, I guess is the way to put it. So the skill here is not that hard to develop. It's that you can engage in the process with a regular and frequent form of measurement that is low friction, low friction. So like weighing it, weighing yourself every day isn't that hard. I mean, you get on the scale and there it is. You have a Bluetooth scale, even easier. Beam it over to your phone and it can connect in Apple and Google Health to everything, right? That that's super easy. I mean, if you can't do that for five seconds, I don't know what to say. But even like food tracking, right? We recommend Macro Factor because it's the fastest app and it takes a lot less friction than other apps, for example. And then when you're doing that every day, it it it itself, by definition, is start is holding you a bit more accountable to the process because you're engaged. And once you do that, what's awesome is you have the amazing side effect of multiple weeks and months of data where you can now turn that into a trend and see what's actually happening. Are you actually gaining or losing body fat? Not as you wait up or down randomly here or there. That's useless. Are you actually getting enough protein and fiber and all the micronutrients? What is your trend against, you know, your food patterns? Are you actually eating the way you want on the weekends or when you're on vacation or whatever? Right. And the list goes on and on and on. Having that data is just super powerful.

Setting an "if/then" trigger before you need it

Philip Pape 24:25

Skill number two, skill number two is setting a trigger, a trigger point, okay, a trigger, like an action before you need it. So being proactive. A lot of people don't have this. And what it means is you decide in advance what engineers say or computer programmers, if-then statements, if-then, like an if-then form. What will you do when something happens? If this happens, I will do this. That's what I mean by a trigger. And I don't mean like getting triggered, right? I mean an inflection point, like a catalyst. Oh man, I get I'm not good with my words today, but you get what I'm saying. An if-then decision point. Now we look at research by Gollitzer and Sheeran. They took a meta-analysis of 94 tests with more than 8,000 people, and they found a medium-to-large effect on whether people actually did the thing they meant to do. Meaning, among people who actually planned in advance and had if-then strategies ready to go, that alone had a huge effect on whether people stuck to their behavior change, to their habits, to whatever the thing that they're trying to do. That's pretty significant. Now, when we look at eating specifically, the effect shrinks a little bit in the research. There's a meta-analysis by Adrians, it's two A's in there. I do not know how to pronounce that. That found point a 0.51 effect for adding a food that you want more of. So, in other words, planning ahead to include more foods you want, and only a 0.29 effect for cutting a food that you want less of. That is amazing. Did you hear what I just said? In other words, it's far better to have a strategy that plans to eat what you want, i.e., more protein, than to cut out what you don't, i.e., skip the cookies. How consistent is that with what we talk about on the show all the time? Additive nutrition, adding things in, thinking and planning ahead to have what you want to have, not to cut out what you want to cut out. Very different mindset, very different impact on the human brain. When researchers measure objective behavior over longer periods instead of just self-reporting, it seems to be even more of an effect. So it works really, really well. Now, what does that look like? Well, before let's say a fat loss phase starts, I mean, honestly, I wouldn't even wait for a fat loss phase. You just do this now. Okay. But let's let's take fat loss as an example, and you know when you want to end the fat loss phase, let's say at a certain number, certain number of weeks, or whatever. If your trend weight hasn't moved in, let's say three weeks and your adherence is above 80%, if that, then go to maintenance for two weeks. That isn't a good example of a very specific if-then statement. Okay. If my weight has stalled basically for three weeks, but my adherence is really good, I'm gonna go to maintenance for two weeks, like a diet break. And when I see people on social media oftentimes talking about, hey, I've been losing weight pretty steadily, or I just started to hit a wall after losing some weight. I really want to lose more. What do I do? My first inclination, not knowing any other context, is hey, maybe you just need a break. Maybe you do. I don't know all the details, but that's like where my brain goes first without knowing the context. But if you have a specific strategy, that's very helpful. And you write it down before it happens. You put it in your plan. Now, if that sounds like too much work, I'm sorry. It's gonna cost you a lot more if you don't have that in your plan later on, in frustration, not knowing what to do, going the wrong direction, giving up. Because a lot of people wait till things are bad and then they're in a bad mood and then they're hungry or hangry. That's the worst time possible time to be making a call about this stuff, right? Because that's your emotional. So that's skill number two, setting the trigger before you need it. So the if-then strategies, and I'm keeping these fairly high level, guys, because each of these can go into its own podcast episode and you can go into all sorts of details about it. Um, but these are the skills that we teach, at least in our program. Skill number

Getting back to normal after a disruption

Philip Pape 28:12

three is getting back to normal after a disruption. This is really powerful. So I was inclined to put this on the top, but again, I'm ranking them by the order of how much evidence I could find in the actual recent literature. Okay. The problem isn't that you're going on vacation for a week or two, all right? Almost nobody, almost nobody's problem is the vacation. Let me explain why. Here's a study that I really love because I think it addresses a myth that everybody repeats. Yanofsky and colleagues, published in the New England Journal in 2000, followed 90, 195, about 195 adults through the holidays. Now, there's this claim that you see online that people gain five or 10 pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year's. The actual average gain is a half a kilo, a kilogram. So that's roughly a pound. Fewer than one in 10 actually gained more than five pounds. So it's actually quite tiny. And I think the more important thing is that they just didn't lose the weight afterward. So year after year after year, that is how people end up 10 pounds heavier by the time they're say 45 or 50 years old. Not from one bad holiday stretch, but from an accumulation of years after years of slowly drifting. Now, the the cause, there are multiple causes of this, but one big root cause is overcorrection. That's why I'm talking about this skill. Again, the skill we're talking about is getting back to normal after disruption. So you have a weekend where you go out to eat and you're just out of control. Happens all of us, right? You're with friends, they get the drinks, the appetizers, the dinner, the dessert. Or yeah, no, let's just go with that scenario. And then you're like, oh, I blew it, I'm guilty. Like, I can't believe I did that again. It was fun, but I overeat yet again. What do I do? Slash my calories on Monday. And now you're trying to be kind of hungry, you know, knowing that hunger implies you're in a deficit. And then you're starving by Wednesday, and then you're in a big hole by Friday, and the hunger actually leads to the binging on Saturday, actually. And that pattern, which is a very familiar pattern to a lot of us, it has a formal name in the addiction literature. It's called the abstinence violation effect. The abstinence violation effect. And it's that you're reacting to this lapse itself, this abstinence doing the damage rather than the lapse itself. And this is has some similarities to the flexible versus rigid restraint work as well. The research that finds that people who diet flexibly hold onto their weight loss better than people who diet rigidly. And the conclusion for this, as far as skill building goes, is when you come back from a day, a weekend, a vacation where you've maybe not behaved the way you wanted to behave. Maybe you binge, maybe you overate, whatever, doesn't matter. The easiest thing to do is go straight back to your normal targets, as opposed to overcorrecting and trying to offset or make up for that with even lower or tighter or more restrictive targets. You know, everybody does that with training just fine. They come back to the training and they might reset a little bit, which is actually going even lighter than your previous targets. They don't say, Oh, I just was off for a week of training. I need to go up by even more than I would have gone up now. Nobody does that. And yet you do that with the food for some reason. You come back and you're like, well, I'm gonna cut calories like 500 more calories to make up for it. That's the equivalent of doing that. Okay, so don't do that. All right,

Troubleshooting a stall in the right order

Philip Pape 31:36

skill number four is troubleshooting a stall and doing it in the right order of priority. So this one probably has the least evidence that I could find, let's say. Um, but it comes from anecdotal coaching people and from what I've seen go wrong all the time. I do believe there's plenty of evidence in different areas of behavior change and self-motivation theory and habit formation and all that that still supports this, but it's hard to say that we've studied it exactly. But the order that I use is adherence is at the top, then recovery, then stress, then your overall program, your lifestyle program, whatever your nutrition training, et cetera, then patience. And this is what we teach in Eat More Lift Heavy. Just those five things in order to go through them as like a checklist anytime you stall to see where the problem is. So we start with adherence. And this has evidence behind it. Okay. Lichtman and colleagues published a study in the New England Journal in 1992 on people who were convinced they were resistant to diets, they were weight loss resistant, and they measured them. And basically, these folks underreported what they were eating by about 47%, and they over-reported their activity by about 51%, and their metabolic rate came back to normal within about 5% of predicted. Their metabolism was fine. Uh, and they were not lying, by the way. They're the the the view they had of their own intake was just not correct, but they genuinely believed it. And that is why adherence tends to be the first thing to go. It's also why you should be suspicious of yourself, not as a character flaw, I'm not judging you, but as a natural human trait. It's very hard to see your own behaviors accurately, your own, you know, calorie intake, your own training, whatever. That's why we go back to skill number one, which is tracking and measuring. So you have objective data that no matter how much your brain's trying to fight it, it's staring you in the face. It's cold, hard logic. Okay. So adherence is first. Like, are you actually doing the thing consistently? And by having skill number one in place, you'll know it. Now you see. Then we have recovery, then stress, because those are pretty easy to check. I mean, you pretty much know what's going on in your life and whether your recovery is poor, your energy, or I mean, that's that's energy, that's hunger, that's digestion, that's soreness, you know, and then stress I put as its own thing. Oh, sleep, right? Of course. All of that's kind of in that bucket. You can combine them if you want. Super common issues here. Then it's your program. A lot of people put that first, right? They say, Oh, I need to change my program, I need to change my plan. Don't do that, don't do that. Check these other things first and then see if it isn't the structure of the program that maybe isn't good for you. And then I put patience last because what you might find is all these other things are fine. I'm just not being patient. Right. So now maybe you could put that at the top if you're for certain people, but sometimes the answer is that eight weeks isn't long enough for what you're trying to do and you need to do three more weeks. I'm sorry, that could just be the reality of it. But if you have all these skills in place and you go through that order of troubleshooting, you're gonna be in a much better place than the average person who just does the changes the wrong things and they change it as a knee-jerk reaction. So I want to recap the four skills just real quickly. Okay. Number one, that you can read your own data, your own trend of data because you've been actually tracking and measuring, and then say what you can conclude from that data. That's a very, very important skill, the most important skill on this list, probably that leads to the rest. Number two, you've got your if-then strategies or your triggers written down in advance before you need them. Okay, you don't have to have 50 of these. You can have just one to start and then another and another, build on it. Number three, you know how to come back from a disruption, just getting back to normal instead of overcorrecting or punishing yourself. And number four, when things do stall, you think of adherence first, then recovery, then stress, then the program, and finally, are you being patient enough? And just go in that order. All right. So that's it. Those four are pretty much the whole thing. Now you're like, well, that's that's a big that's like changing my whole life. And you know, I'll be honest, most of you are solid on maybe the first one and the second one. If that, maybe you're shaky on the other two, but that means you have two specific skills to work on. So figure out the one that's the one for you to work on. Now, before we wrap up, I have the thing I told you earlier that you can write down in two minutes to save you six weeks. Before I

Timing your next phase around the holidays

Philip Pape 35:58

do, I want to say one more thing about timing here because we are coming up on episode 500. If you've been thinking about eatmore lift heavy, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. We have a code 500CLUB. Expires this Sunday, September 6th, and it's not coming back. You'll get 50 bucks off to celebrate episode 500 on the six month options for eatmore lift heavy, either the base version or dialed in. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to know what the heck I'm talking about. Now, if you start the week of, say, September 7th, it's pretty good timing because the first six or seven weeks, we get this some of these skills set up. Then you do a fat loss, if that's your goal. For many of you it's not, but for many of you it is, which would start around the end of October and go all the way through January. So you're basically going through the holidays, testing yourself, getting those skills in place, doing it successfully, not going off the rails like a lot of people. And now you're not quote unquote starting over on New Year's like everyone else, right? In fact, you're gonna be in a good position to get ready for either direction leading into the summer. So you look and feel your best. All right. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. And by the way, the next episode is 500. So I've got a specific topic plan for that that I

Bonus: 2-minute sentence that saves you 6 weeks

Philip Pape 37:05

think you're gonna really enjoy. Basically, it's five beliefs that I no longer believe you're gonna find that interesting. All right, so here's something you can write down in the next two minutes to save you six weeks at some point this year before your next phase starts. So for many of you, that is a fat loss phase. It could be a muscle building phase, it could be a maintenance phase or body recomp. I want you to decide the exit condition ahead of time and write it down as an if-then statement. So we talked about this already as one of the skills, but now I'm having you do the homework for yourself right now. Something like if my trend weight hasn't moved in three weeks and I've been hitting my targets at least 80% of the days, go to maintenance for two weeks. Okay. Now again, that is that is you deciding your exit condition if things aren't going the way you want. That's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about the actual final true exit of the fat loss phase. I want you to write this down because the alternative is you're gonna choose this at the wrong time when you're driven by emotions. And we know there's great research on this, I mentioned before, and we don't want to try to be disciplined. We don't want to try to be disciplined. We want to let our future selves give ourselves some, you know, grace, some help, some support by saying, hey, will you, you, you've got this. When this happens, I've already got a plan for you, buddy, out in the future. Okay, so go ahead and do that. If you're wondering exactly how to do that, just reach out. The best way to reach out is go to witsandweights.com slash email, join my list and just reply to my email and we'll get into a conversation about it. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the question was never never whether you have a coach, it's whether you can do it without one. Those are two different things with two different answers. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.