You’re over 40, lifting weights, and doing everything right, but your body composition isn’t changing. In every episode I put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn’t work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. It’s strength training over 40 and fat loss for men and women, built for skeptics of the fitness industry.
If you’re tracking macros and following every rule, you’re probably overcomplicating it. Wits & Weights shows you how to build muscle, lose fat, and achieve real body recomposition by focusing only on what the evidence actually supports. The show centers on women over 40, but plenty of midlife men listen for the same approach.
Evidence-based coach Philip Pape brings an engineer's approach to strength training, nutrition, and metabolism. Instead of another generic program or meal plan, you get specific, science-based strategies for body recomposition, whether you're focused on building muscle, losing fat, or both. The focus is on strength training over 40, body recomposition for women over 40, perimenopause and menopause fitness, metabolism recovery, hormone health, and longevity.
You've seen the conflicting advice, even on other nutrition podcasts. One expert says cut carbs, the next says eat more. One says train six days a week, another says three is plenty. Building the body you want doesn't have to be this confusing or time-consuming.
By using your wits (systems plus identity-based behavior change) and lifting weights, you can build muscle, improve your physique, and maintain your results for life without rebound weight gain. You'll also learn about metabolism recovery, and why years of dieting can lead to metabolic adaptation that makes fat loss harder than it needs to be.
You'll learn smart, efficient strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle, and mindset: why fat loss matters more than weight loss, why all the macros (protein, fats, and yes even carbs) are critical to body composition, how just 3 hours a week of proper hypertrophy training can outperform twice that time, why building muscle is the single most powerful thing you can do for metabolic health and longevity, why perimenopause and menopause don't have to derail your progress, and how shifting the way you think about fitness drives more growth than any program alone.
Looking for fat loss podcasts, nutrition podcasts, or strength training podcasts for women and men over 40? Wits & Weights brings the science-based answers without the conflicting noise. If you're ready to learn what actually works, hit "follow."
Popular Guests: Greg Nuckols (Stronger by Science), Alan Aragon (nutrition researcher), Eric Helms (3D Muscle Journey), Dr. Spencer Nadolsky (Docs Who Lift), Bill Campbell (exercise science researcher), Jordan Feigenbaum (Barbell Medicine), Holly Baxter (evidence-based physique coach), Laurin Conlin (physique coach), Lauren Colenso-Semple (nutrition researcher), Karen Martel (hormone optimization expert), Steph Gaudreau (women's strength and nutrition), Bryan Boorstein (hypertrophy coach)
Popular Topics: strength training for women over 40, strength training over 40, women's strength training, body recomposition for women over 40, body recomposition after 40, body recomposition, muscle building after 40, muscle building, hypertrophy training, fat loss for women over 40, perimenopause fitness, menopause fitness, menopause metabolism, metabolism recovery, metabolic adaptation, protein for women over 40, nutrition for lifters over 40, hormone health, longevity and healthy aging, lifting weights for fat loss, macros and nutrition tracking
Hater Comments - Carnivore, Keto, Fasting, and Running
•Philip Pape | Strength Training & Fat Loss Over 40
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
15:21
Are the haters right about carbs, fasting, running, and weight loss meds?
I went through 3 years of comments on my YouTube channel and grabbed some of the juciest hater comments (Mark Rippetoe Starting Strength style). Some have a kernel of truth, some haters just wanna hate, and a few truly belong in the Hater Comment Hall of Fame.
I'm responding to the carnivore and keto crowd, the fasting zealots, and a longtime listener who thought we were rude to runners. I also address a commenter who blames weight loss meds for muscle loss. Then I explain why I don’t cite every study by name and what I think about clickbait titles. One commenter even counted how many times I say “right?” (right?).
If you’ve ever wanted to argue with a fitness podcaster in the comments, hit play.
Wits & Weights family. This is a short bonus episode for your Saturday. It's a fun one where I went through my YouTube channel comments going about three years, hundreds of comments, and I picked out the hater comments. And this is inspired by the Starting Strength podcast, which I've listened for years. And Mark Rippetot always has the opening with hater comments to, you know, kind of call out some of the nonsense. And I'll I'll say that there's always a mixed bag. There are things that are maybe good things to call out, but are done in a spiteful way, a hateful way. There's also people that I just need to block right away because they're they add zero to value to the conversation and they're out to lunch. And then there's kind of in the middle, like true hater comments that need to be addressed to because there's some, you know, kernels of truth in there that are then extrapolated in some leap of logic to things that aren't true. So I want to address some of those as well as some of the mean comments, uh, because I think this will be a lot of fun. All right.
So the first one is on our keto versus pro-metabolic diets episode. And the guy said, Hey, this guy is talking out of his beep. Let him debate Bart Kay or Anthony Chaffee, and you will see his complete ignorance. All right. So I see a pattern with a lot of the carnivore and the keto, and now we have the fasting and all this, these comments. Uh, this is a good example where they're not really arguing facts. They're telling me, go follow this person, go read this person. It's it's like by proxy, go watch this guy, go debate that guy. They have the answer. And I'm happy to look at ever anybody's evidence, but a name is not evidence. And we actually have a lot of good evidence from the research. So if these people are using the research, that's great. If they're simply cherry picking or twisting, that's where the problem is in this industry. We go to, for example, Kevin Hall's research at the NIH, very good research in a metabolic ward where we see calories are matched and low carb doesn't have any advantage for fat loss or anything else. We see other studies where they look at insulin, they learn look at fat burning. We see that there's a confusion between fat burning and losing fat by being in energy deficit. And so there's a lot of conflating things going on. Or insulin, you know, a lot of arguments about insulin or the what is it called, the carb insulin theory of obesity. And I think GLP1s put a lot of that to rest when we see that. Oh no, it actually is about energy deficit, especially since on GLP1s insulin goes up. But my point is just throwing names at me isn't gonna add anything unless you're trying to like spam my comments. Like if somebody throws in, hey, go check out my video where I talked about it here, total spam, block,
delete. On the same episode, another person said, Comment, carbs give you nothing you cannot get from protein and fat. Carbs is nutrients poor and not essential. So, aside from the poor English, I'm gonna say this one's half right, but not the half that really matters. So, yes, carbs are not essential. A lot of things aren't essential because your body can make things. It's really good at adapting, making the glucose it needs. It can do that from protein, that's true. But just because something's not essential doesn't mean it is best or optimal or even normal for your health, for your vitality, for your strength, for your muscle, for your longevity, everything else. So if you're gonna lift weights, like we talk about, and you want to build muscle, there's plenty of things that aren't essential and yet still helpful, still useful. Two totally different things that we shouldn't conflate. So if you want to train hard, if you want to recover better, carbs are probably gonna be helpful to the vast majority of you, if not everyone. There are a small, tiny selection of people on low carb on a consistent basis who might do okay. But unless you want to torture yourself that way, that you know, I find it torture when you cut out a whole food group or whole macro, let's say, you don't have to do it. So, anyway, the next comment is the most liked
mean comment. It has five likes. So I said that kind of facetiously because generally people can spot BS. Uh, but it was on their intermittent fasting myths episode. Quote, this video is just wrong. Suggest avoiding it. Search Eric Berg, Minzi Peltz, or Jason Fung. Okay, another list of people. Okay, well, I've talked a lot about fasting lately. We even had Lyle McDonald on the show, and I clipped that up and I'm putting that on YouTube as well because I think there's a lot of really good stuff there. People need to hear and see that the what the research says, where you know, when you put fasting up against just eating a little less every day with calories matched, people lose the same amount of weight, same amount of fat. In in even in a year-long trial with alternate day fasting versus um regular dieting, came out basically even. We see this time and time and time again, and more people tend to quit fasting because it's not as sustainable. So, does it quote unquote work? Sure, it works for just like not fasting works if calories are matching, you go into a calorie deficit. It doesn't work for all the other claims like autophagy and everything else, which we kind of beat that to death, but
I think that's where sometimes people are going. Now, on the same episode, there was a criticism that said, quote, the part of this talk that lost me was your generalization of studies. The study show X, Y, Z. Why not cite a specific study to back that up? So this comment's actually been in my head for a while. It always I like I actually want to thank the commenter for making me think about this. When I create podcast episodes, you know, I have to make a trade-off. Do I want it to be an hour or two or three hours long where I go through and explain every single study and link to them in the episodes? Or do I act like a responsible science communicator who takes those studies, synthesizes them, occasionally references them by name. Occasionally I don't, but I have all the notes and ultimately conveys the message that I want you to hear in terms of here's how you put it into practice based on the research. So on one hand, I I could, of course, say, you know, this study, this study, this study, but on the other hand, the episodes are going to be way too long. So I don't think that's a cop-out. I think that's a function of you need to challenge me in this way. Also, you can reach out to me and ask, hey, which study are you talking about? And I will respond. If you do it on YouTube, if you said, hey, which study are you talking about? I'll post the link to the actual, you know, research where I got it from or the group of researchers, whatever. So there we go.
All right. Now, this quote is from a longtime listener. It was on the walking versus running episode with Brad Kearns, and they said, I've been a loyal follower of the podcast, but this episode made me furious. The con condescension and rudeness toward runners was just too much. Brad Kearns was supercilious and you just laughed along with him. And I think I commented on this, like, not really an apology so much because I didn't feel like we were being rude or condescending. I think that both of us have strong opinions, especially Brad when it comes to running. He's an elite athlete who has discovered, you know, in his master's years that the best way to be sustainable with this is not only to run with proper form if you're going to run at all, but to moderate your training so that you don't run yourself into the ground, get injured, and basically wash out, right? You have to make this sustainable and that lifting weights and walking tend to be, you know, more longevity promoting or correlated with higher mortality than an excessive amount of highly stressful, you know, running. Now, if I laughed along in a way that came across as making fun of runners, okay, I'll take that criticism. And there are a lot of people who listen to the show who do a lot of endurance sports and running and so on. I want people to come away from it with a maybe a different mindset from what they think of from the bias of being in the community they're in. Because I don't care one way or the other if you run. I really don't. Like I have I have no skin in the game whether you run. We have a lot of clients and members who who like to run. It's are you getting the result you want with the activity you're doing? And you know what? That episode wasn't aimed at people who are actually doing, actually running the right way. So if you're in a running group and you wear the right footwear and you have the right form and you don't get injured, awesome. I'm not talking to you. Okay.
Now, from the other direction, we had a strength and endurance episode where the commenter said, quote, they have known for years that running kills muscle. So sorry. And I think we beat this to death now as well, that we find that there is no interference effect. The biggest review on this pooled over 40 studies and found that adding cardio to your lifting doesn't hurt muscle growth or strength. But we do see that if you run an excessive amount or you run in a way that interferes with your ability to get into the gym because you're sore, or you run out of time, you don't have enough time to lift weights. Like in so much as it interferes with your logistics of your training, then it could prevent you from building as much muscle as you want. But it's only because you're, you know, you have opportunities to move things around in your schedule, to run, you know, hours apart from your lifting, maybe do it on different days, all those kinds of things. If you love running, keep running. If you want cardio for your health, you want to protect your legs for your lifts. Um, you don't have to run, right? You could bike, there's different forms of cardio, but the idea that it kills muscle is definitely debunked. All right.
Now, here's some here's some that I'll say are kind of like technicalities. They annoy me a little bit because I think people are missing the point. They they just want to be annoying little commenters and say, like, this is like calling out typos kind of thing. Okay, so this was on the Women Over 50 QA, which is one of our most popular videos ever, is with Pam Sherman. Shout out to Pam, she's awesome. And, you know, on YouTube it was one of our most popular, as well as on the audio. The quote was good info, except about the nuts. For starters, a handful of nuts is not 500 calories. 24 almonds, a handful for me, is only 160 calories. Okay, yeah, fine. An ounce of almonds is 160 calories. And maybe your handful is fifth of somebody else's handful. Maybe when we meant handful, we meant the typical person grabbing multiple handfuls. You get the idea. The point wasn't the precision of this amount in your palm equaling this calories. It's hey, nuts add up fast because they're calorie dense and they're also a whole food. So we need to understand what we're putting in our mouth when it comes to how it affects our energy intake. And that's really all it is. Somebody else in the episode wrote in all caps, peanuts are legumes, not nuts, which is also correct. But you know what? I think cashews are fruits too and not nuts. Guess what? We call them nuts colloquially. So I'm not talking about allergies or where they come from. We call them nuts. Big deal. Okay.
The next one is on a bonus episode we did called weight loss meds do not cause muscle loss. And the quote was I disagree. I've heard of early studies that directly correlate GLP1 and muscle and bone loss, even when working out and following a nutrition plan. So I'm gonna respectfully push back hard on this comment. Yes, people on these meds on GLP1s, we are seeing them on average lose lean mass. In the big, you know, some magnetide trial, like 40% of the weight people lost showed up as lean mass on their scan, you know, when they got scanned. And we know that lean mass includes water and organs, not just muscle. But when researchers compare that to people losing a similar amount of weight with diet alone, even when they're not on GLP1s, guess what? The share of lean mass you lose is about the same. That's my point. In other words, the weight loss meds themselves do not cause it. It's the fact that the weight loss meds put you in a big deficit. That's all it is. And there was even a study in animals, same thing. Control group got a reduced amount of food. The experimental group got the drug, and the muscle loss was identical. So, again, the meds, GLP1s, do not cost you muscle, but losing a lot of weight really fast can definitely cause you to lose muscle mass, especially if you're not lifting weights, right? It's all about the calorie deficit and about whether you're lifting, period. Also, protein comes in for the ride, but the lifting is the most important uh piece of it that you gotta be
doing. All right, on a video that I called double your muscle gains, new research changes everything. Someone said, Is this some some kind of clickbait? I'm like, yeah, sure. Everything I publish is intended to get you to click and listen because I think it's great information and you gotta play the game, folks. So, like podcasting, it's very hard to get your podcast discovered. YouTube is better, it's an algorithm, but the algorithm favors titles that are that are appealing to you. So I'm not gonna apologize for like playing the game of social media and and online. What I what I what I would be uncomfortable with is if you clicked on it and then the podcast or the episode didn't deliver or the video didn't deliver. And I always deliver on the promise in the title. It's one of the really important checks that I do before I use that title. I don't want to make a claim that is not true. Okay. I love making claims that seem surprising or provocative, maybe even shocking, but they're
true, and then deliver on it. Okay. This one's my favorite on our this was on our midlife metabolism myths episode. Quote, I wish these experts were more sure of what they were saying and didn't feel the need to ask each other and us, the listeners, to confirm their point so often. 65 or more right requests for validation in under 55 minutes, smacks of insecurity. So I wanted to share this. This is because this is an example of a complete moron who just wants to go after people personally for no reason whatsoever. I say right all the time. I say ums. These are called filler words. They're called filler words. They have nothing to do with anything you're trying to read out of it, like insecurity. They have to do with habits. And you know what? I used to use a lot more filler words when I started my podcast. I also used to used to use a lot more filler words five, 10 years ago before I joined Toastmasters and learned to become a better speaker. So guess what? We could all improve in this stuff. And calling people out for something so ridiculous is definitely worthy of the Hater Comment Hall of Fame. All right,
last comment. I'm sorry, but I can't ignore how crooked you're wearing your headphones. But good informative video. So thank you for the second half of that comment. All right, that is it. Again, hundreds and hundreds of comments. I read all the ones coming in. I try to respond to all of them. I will block you if you're just mean and add zero value. I will not block you if you challenge me, argue with me, pull out evidence that uh, you know, maybe uh goes against what I'm saying and you you're intellectual and logical about it. We can definitely have that conversation. I love that. I'm changing my mind all the time. That's what this is all about. If you want more of the nice kind of conversation without the haters, I'd love for you to join our Facebook group as well. It's a much more supportive and friendly place to talk about this stuff. I do have the link in the show notes for that just to put it out there. You can share what's going on and sort of a supportive, safer environment of people in the same boat as you. You can go to Facebook and look up wits and weights, or it's easier just to go to the link in the show notes. Hope you enjoyed today's bonus episode, and I'll see you on Monday.
.png)
.png)
