Last Call And Why Now

Philip Pape 0:00

Hey, this is Philip, and I've got a quick bonus episode for you on this Saturday, and it is short on purpose because this is the last call for the Dialed In Fall Challenge, which starts on Monday. I don't want this to be just a pitch, so I'm going to give you some information from a holiday study that I think makes this moment right now, early October, the best time of year to start. And then I want to tell you about Denise, one of our members, because her story is the best real life argument I have for how we set this challenge up so that you can be successful. Now, if you caught episode 509 this week on Monday, I talked about weight loss challenges and what happens after they end. The short version is the results tend to fade once the incentive or the prize goes away. And then the last episode, 510, you heard Jenny tell her own story after dieting since seventh grade. So if you missed either one, go back and listen to the two episodes this week because this one builds on both of those.

The Holiday Weight Gain Study

Philip Pape 1:04

But let's just talk about timing, okay? Thanksgiving is still about seven weeks away. I know most of you aren't thinking about the holidays yet, which is exactly why I want to bring it up. I'm all about being proactive. Back in 2000, that's that's 26 years ago now. Wow, a group at the NIH published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine where they weighed 195 adults every six to eight weeks, starting in the fall and going into the next year. And to make sure that they wouldn't change their behavior, they didn't tell them that the study was about weight. Isn't that interesting? They measured blood pressure, they measured a bunch of other things to hide the fact that they were looking at weight, which is pretty clever. Uh a little deception, you know, when it's for a good cause. From early October to mid-November, their weight barely changed. And it wasn't even a meaningful change statistically. Then from mid-November into January, the average person gained less than a pound, about eight-tenths of a pound, which is, I'll say, way less than the five pounds that you often hear about on social media. People say, yeah, everybody gains five pounds during the holidays, or sometimes 10 pounds, you know, it becomes a tall tale over the years. Now, this sounds like good news, right? It mostly is. But then they followed up. They weighed people again in the spring and they hadn't lost that extra almost pound of weight. They weighed most of them the following September, and it still hadn't come off. So the holiday gain did still make up a vast majority, about half of all the weight people gained over the entire year, just in a couple months. And about one in seven people gained more than five pounds, mostly people who are already carrying more weight going in. So there are outliers like that. Now, this was a mixed group of adults between 19 and 82 years old. It wasn't a study of people over 40 or women in menopause or anything like that. So I wouldn't, you know, say it applies to a specific population. But the pattern makes a lot of intuitive sense to me that the weeks you're in right now are the calm part of the year, at least in this data. You know, we haven't hit Halloween yet, which my birthday is around that time too. So it kind of all starts to stack in terms of the potential for eating events.

Why Holding Steady Is A Win

Philip Pape 3:16

So therefore, right now makes it the best time to set up your habits, your data, your support, your structure, your system, all of that, so that when late November arrives, you're already six weeks in to building a good routine and it feels routine instead of like starting over, probably. So think about what that means for you. If let's say you're lifting weights and you get through Thanksgiving and Christmas at the same body weight, but your lifts have been progressing. And let's say your waist is pretty steady or even comes down. That's a huge win, right? And it's probably a bigger win than it sounds because you don't have to then lose weight over the holidays and you don't have to gain weight that you then have to lose later. And again, it's not just about weight, but this is just simplifying to what everybody talks about this time of year. And honestly, for a lot of you, holding steady and getting stronger is a very smart goal for those six weeks. Like you're not necessarily trying to go through a fat loss phase right when the holidays come. So then when you get to January, you're actually ahead of everybody else. You haven't lost anything and you've held at least held steady, if not gained. Because the reason we all gain weight over the years is it creeps on year after year after year, and half of the weight each year is in the holidays. So now this is also why our challenge doesn't rate you just on pounds lost,

Denise And The Power Of Data

Philip Pape 4:36

right? There is an element of your trend weight that's part of this. But I want to talk about Denise because Denise came into this year with a long history of believing, in her words, that she was unable to control her weight. She kept trying to hit that lower calorie number. We've all been there trying to cut, cut, cut to see, okay, if I'm not losing weight at this level, I need to cut further. She never saw any consistent difference on the scale. At the beginning of the year, she started a cut with us. She learned to use food tracking, we use macrofactor. She lost six or seven pounds and then she kept it off for six months. That's a massive, massive difference in what she had done before in her life. Now, she's in a position to start a conservative muscle building phase because she also has some strength goals. And she's been barbell training for like five years, so she knows what she's doing in the gym. Now, this is the part I love. She's eating 500 calories more than the number she was trying to hit when she started. Which, if you've been dieting for many, many years, it probably sounds impossible. You're like, yeah, I don't believe you, Philip. Now, I can't tell you exactly why the lower calorie number never worked for her, whether it was just too hard to be consistent with, so she didn't actually hit it, and she is eating more than she thought. You know, metabolic adaptation, where she was just always a little bit underfed, but not enough to cause a deficiency. Maybe there were binge episodes. Like there's a lot of reasons that happened to all of us. It doesn't really matter now because she has the data and she knows how to read it now and can see what it takes to be successful. Um, she sent us three photos in our community, uh, Eat More Lift Heavy, one from when she started lifting and two from this year. And her weight is almost the same in all three, but wow, can you see the change in her body composition, you know, those back muscles, the definition. And she wrote in her own words, I can now truly say that my weight is the least interesting thing about me. I love that. I really love that. I hope everyone listening can get to that point. If you base Denise's progress purely on scale weight, it would look pretty boring. It might even look like a loss or or not a win, because okay, she lost six or seven pounds and then it went flat. But she kept it off. She's eating more food, she's building muscle, she's got muscle definition. That is exactly the kind of, you know, 12-month period that I want you to have over the next 12 months.

How The Fall Challenge Works

Philip Pape 7:00

So here's the information one last time about our dialed-in fall challenge. It is 12 weeks of dialed-in coaching inside our Eat More Lift Heavy program and community. Very, very supportive place where you are going to get a personal coach. So that's Carol. Uh, I've talked about it quite a bit, and she will direct message you, build your nutrition plan, reviews your data, checks your form, all of that stuff within the broader community of Eat More Lift Heavy. So you definitely have a lot of resources around that. And I'm there as well. There are live calls, there's community, there's all this other fun stuff, whether or not you choose to take advantage of this. But you're gonna get starting Monday, October 12th, uh a clear plan, targets to hit, and support to get there. And it goes through Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is done on purpose so that you can get through this hardest time of the year successfully. You're gonna pick three goals. At least one of them is an outcome, like your waist measurement or your strength on a lift or your trend weight. The others can be habits like hitting your protein or being consistent with your training. So you have some flexibility there. And then Carol's gonna sign off on those. You're gonna get scored against where you started. The scores are capped. You can't like go to an extreme to get a higher score. We do that on purpose, so you do it in a reasonable way. And then the prize that the winner gets is three months of free coaching plus a private call, Carol and me. I think the bigger prize, I know it sounds a little cheesy, is coming out of the holidays stronger and better for it instead of starting over in January with New Year's resolutions, and we know how that goes. To check things out, go to witsandweights.com slash challenge. Uh, spots are pretty limited again because it's a very personalized approach here to this. So we are limiting spots, but there are some openings. Go to wits and weights.com slash challenge. Link is in the show

DIY Plan And Final Link

Philip Pape 8:43

notes. And if the timing isn't right, if it's not aligned, if it's not in your budget, whatever, that is totally fine. You can still do a version of this on your own if you stick to it, if you get commitment. And like I spoke about on a recent episode, if you can get some sort of support, uh, it will enhance your ability to achieve your goals. Pick three numbers, one outcome, two habits. Text a friend, ask them to check in with you once a week at a minimum. That's a great accountability approach. That alone will probably put you ahead of most people this time of year. And that's it for this bonus episode. So if you want to check out the challenge, go to wits and weights.comslash challenge. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.