7 Fat Loss Tips from 70 Years of Research | Ep 344
Grab your free Ultimate Macros Guide ebook to implement everything covered in today's episode with specific formulas and practical steps. Go to witsandweights.com/free
--
What really works for fat loss?
After 70 years of scientific research spanning thousands of studies and millions of participants, the truth is both simpler and more nuanced than the fitness industry would have you believe.
Forget the latest fat loss hack or magic supplement. After 70 years of rigorous research (thousands of studies spanning from NASA's bedrest experiments in the 1970s to today's landmark trials), science has identified 7 key principles that determine fat loss success.
These aren't TikTok trends or new theories. They're evidence-based principles proven over and over again in controlled studies, meta-analyses, and real-world applications.
Main Takeaways:
A calorie deficit remains non-negotiable for fat loss, but the method to create it is highly flexible
Protein preserves muscle and controls hunger through multiple mechanisms
Resistance training beats cardio for body composition every single time
Diet adherence matters more than diet type when calories are controlled
NEAT (non-exercise activity) can swing your daily calorie burn by up to 2,000 calories
Muscle mass serves as your metabolic insurance policy for long-term success
Sustainable approaches always beat aggressive "quick fix" methods
Episode Resources:
Try MacroFactor for free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS
Download our popular ebook, Ultimate Macros Guide
Related episode: The 3+3 Optimal Model of Fat Loss
Timestamps:
0:01 - 70 years of research distilled into 7 principles
3:28 - Principle #1: A calorie deficit is required
7:23 - Principle #2: Protein is king
11:13 - Principle #3: Resistance training is best for body composition
15:45 - Principle #4: Diet adherence beats diet type
19:56 - Principle #5: NEAT can make or break your deficit
25:09 - Principle #6: Muscle mass is your fat loss insurance policy
29:39 - Principle #7: Sustainability vs. speed
35:36 - How these principles work together for life optimization
The 7 Fat Loss Truths You Should Actually Follow
Most people looking to lose fat get caught in a web of conflicting advice, fads, and complicated protocols that promise the world but deliver frustration. But when we step back and zoom out over seven decades of nutrition and fat loss research, certain principles emerge that cut through the noise.
These are not trends or theories. These are conclusions drawn from thousands of studies, some going back to NASA’s space research in the 1970s and others in major journals like Science and The New England Journal of Medicine. If you want to stop spinning your wheels and start making real, sustainable progress, these are the seven truths that matter.
Calorie Deficit Is Non-Negotiable
Every successful fat loss method in history has one thing in common: a calorie deficit. You must consume fewer calories than you burn. That’s it. You can debate carbs versus fats, fasting versus grazing, keto versus vegan, but if you’re not in a calorie deficit, you will not lose fat.
Metabolic ward studies prove this again and again. Even the effects of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic boil down to reducing appetite and total intake. Hormones matter, yes, but they influence how much you eat and expend—not whether energy balance still applies.
The takeaway? You can get creative with how you create the deficit. But the deficit itself must exist.
Protein Preserves Muscle and Controls Hunger
Protein is the most underrated tool in your toolbox. It doesn’t just build and preserve muscle during a deficit—it also helps control hunger and increases your calorie burn through digestion (thermic effect of food).
Studies show that getting about 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight (or 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kg) is ideal for most people. Spread it out through the day to improve satiety and muscle protein synthesis. It’s not about protein timing perfection, but total intake does matter.
This is especially critical when dieting, because without enough protein (and resistance training), your body will gladly burn muscle for energy.
Resistance Training Beats Cardio for Body Composition
Cardio burns calories. Lifting builds your body. If you want to look fit and lean when the fat comes off, you need to keep your muscle. That’s where resistance training shines.
NASA’s early studies in zero-gravity environments showed just how quickly muscle vanishes without load. More recent meta-analyses confirm that lifting preserves lean mass far better than cardio during weight loss.
That doesn’t mean cardio is bad. But if you skip strength training, you risk ending up “skinny fat” instead of strong and lean.
Adherence Beats Diet Type
It’s not about whether you’re low-carb, low-fat, Mediterranean, carnivore, or intermittent fasting. It’s about whether you can stick to your approach. Long-term success hinges on sustainability.
Multiple large-scale trials—including the DIETFITS study and A to Z trial—show no meaningful difference in fat loss when calories are controlled across different diet types.
You don’t need to eliminate entire food groups or follow rigid rules. Find a way of eating that aligns with your lifestyle, values, and preferences, and you’ll have a much easier time reaching your goals.
NEAT Can Make or Break Your Deficit
Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) is the silent driver of fat loss that most people overlook. It includes things like fidgeting, standing, walking, chores—anything that isn’t formal exercise.
Research shows NEAT can vary by up to 2,000 calories per day between individuals of the same size. That’s the difference between maintaining weight and losing fat at a good clip.
During fat loss, NEAT tends to drop without you noticing. You move less, fidget less, and unconsciously conserve energy. So tracking your step count and staying active outside the gym becomes essential. Target 7,000 to 12,000 steps per day as a practical strategy.
Muscle Mass Is Your Metabolic Insurance Policy
Muscle does more than burn a few extra calories. It improves glucose disposal, enhances nutrient partitioning, and increases your ability to eat more while staying lean.
More muscle means you can eat more food and still maintain a leaner physique. It’s also your buffer against age-related decline, frailty, and poor metabolic health.
This is why bulking and cutting phases (yes, even for general population clients) are such effective long-term strategies. Build muscle in a surplus, then reveal it during a well-managed fat loss phase. Rinse and repeat.
Sustainability Beats Speed
The “Biggest Loser” contestants lost weight fast, but almost all regained it years later—along with suppressed metabolic rates and higher body fat percentages. That’s the danger of aggressive diets and extreme deficits.
Moderate, sustainable fat loss of around 500 calories per day tends to produce better outcomes over time. You’ll preserve muscle, have more energy, reduce stress, and build long-term habits that actually stick.
The goal isn’t just to lose weight. It’s to lose fat while creating a lifestyle where that result is maintainable for years to come. That’s where real change happens.
Final Thoughts
The fitness industry thrives on complexity. But fat loss doesn’t need to be complicated. The hard part isn’t knowing what to do—it’s doing it consistently and patiently. The seven principles above are your roadmap. They’ve worked for decades, across age groups, body types, and goal levels.
If you want help implementing these ideas with a step-by-step plan, grab my free Ultimate Macros Guide. It includes the formulas, strategies, and mindset shifts I use with clients to build sustainable results.
You already have the science. Now go put it into practice.
Have you followed the podcast?
Get notified of new episodes. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or all other platforms.
Then hit “Follow” and you’re good to go!
Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
70 years of fat loss research, thousands of studies, millions of participants, and you could boil it all down to a few key principles that determine whether you succeed or fail. So today we're going to give you seven tips from those 70 years of research. Not trends, not theory. It's based on conclusions from major studies NASA's studies in the 70s, landmark trials published in major journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, metabolic chamber studies. You'll discover why the biggest loser contestants, regained all their weight six years later, how one factor can swing your daily calorie burn by 2,000 calories and why the diet that works best has nothing to do with cutting carbs or even counting macros. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're going to cut through seven decades of research to bring you the only fat loss strategies that really rise to the top, that actually matter. And I get it. The fitness industry loves to overcomplicate fat loss. Talk about optimization and new diets, new supplements, new exercise protocols. There's always something promising to be the answer, the shortcut, the magic pill. But when you step back and look at the seven decades of high quality research, from metabolic chamber studies to landmark trials involving thousands of participants that have held up over this entire duration, there are clear patterns that emerge. They're things that we just know work, and today I'm going to share what those are seven principles that have stood the test of time that are backed by studies upon studies upon studies. And as much as science can never be perfect, we can never fully prove things there are things we just know that work because, at any level of the evidence from scientific research to coaching practice, to anecdote, to individual experimentation we know that these things go far beyond hypothesis, opinion, theory. They are as close as we could get to what we call facts or truth that are derived from investigating the key questions around fat loss. Now, before we get into these seven tips, I want to give you something that will make implementing them just a bit easier.
Philip Pape: 2:35
I have a guide that's been around for a while. It's a really solid one, of our most popular, called the ultimate macros guide. It's actually an ebook and that breaks down how to set up your nutrition for fat loss, preserving muscle, long-term success, but it also talks about a lot of aspects of nutrition and supplementation and periodization. All of it. It's completely free. It includes the approach that I use with clients and the philosophy we're discussing today. That again is backed by the evidence. Just go to witsowaitscom, slash free or click the link in the show notes to grab your copy of the Ultimate Macros Guide. And, by the way, it's been edited over the years as I've gotten feedback from many of you who have either challenged me on things that were kind of on the edge of evidence-based or who just wanted their questions answered. So go get your ultimate macros guide today, link in the show notes.
Philip Pape: 3:28
All right, so seven tips from 70 years of research. I'm going to give you the science, the practical application and then, most importantly, why this matters for your results. So let's start with principle number one, or tip number one a calorie deficit is non-negotiable. Now let's talk about the elephant in the room, right, energy balance, calorie deficits and I know some of you are rolling your eyes thinking this is obvious. This is simplistic. I've been listening to your show for a while, philip. Of course, calories in, calories out works, thermodynamics make sense, but there is so much nuance behind that and it is always worth repeating and understanding what the evidence says over that 70 years of research. So the science behind this was first quantified using metabolic chamber studies in the mid-20th century. If anybody is as old as me, they've been around since that time. I was born in 1980, just for reference. Now we're talking about.
Philip Pape: 4:25
Metabolic chambers are controlled environments and researchers are able to measure what is eaten, every calorie that's consumed and burned. They use all sorts of equipment to figure this out. And the first law of thermodynamics you probably heard about it before from physics it is the principle of the universe that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transferred, and that's really important to understand because we still have to validate that when it comes to human beings and our food consumption, our energy. There's a study by Hall et al it was a landmark study in 2011 in science, translational medicine and they took people and put them in a controlled, inpatient setting Think of it like a laboratory for humans and when calories were matched, low carb and low fat diets resulted in identical fat loss identical. And we've seen time and time again where calories are controlled, no matter what the macros look like, we tend to see almost identical results. It doesn't matter if you're fasting, it doesn't matter when it's controlled for calories we have the same results.
Philip Pape: 5:33
Very important why this matters is any argument about this versus calories. It's my hormones versus calories are missing the point. In fact, the whole GLP-1 Ozempic craze now is proving the fact that it is about energy balance, because those medicines cause only one thing you to eat less. And when you eat less, you lose weight because you go into a calorie deficit. This is just a law of physics. Yes, hormones influence how much you want to eat and how much energy you expend. Right, and that's the other side of the equation we have to think about when we say calories in, calories out the calories out side is highly influenced by so many complex factors, including calories in. So even what you eat and how much you're taking in it affects how much you burn, and so we can't override thermodynamics. You know again, the new GLP-1 medications reduce appetite, which reduces calorie intake, and that's a great modern proof of this principle.
Philip Pape: 6:27
So the takeaway is for fat loss, to lose fat, you have to be in a calorie deficit. Now, of course, people are going to say what about body recomposition, where you gain muscle and lose fat? That is a very tiny corner case, which does exist, where you're taking in enough energy to pack on some muscle while also losing fat. But you're losing fat because you don't have enough net energy to support your current fat stores and therefore your fat is lost. But when we're talking about meaningful fat loss right, more than a few pounds you're trying to lose fat. You have to be in a calorie deficit. The method you create that deficit, with whether it's your food choice, your meal timing, how you train, how you move, even medication that part is far more flexible than people realize, and that's one of the messages of wits and weights is that there are many roads to get there, which is very empowering when you know that your food can be flexible.
Philip Pape: 7:23
It's just the guardrails around calories and then macros, for other reasons besides weight loss, that come into play. So principle one is calorie deficit is non-negotiable. Tip number two is that protein preserves muscle and controls hunger. This is an important principle from fat loss research, because if you're not eating enough protein, you miss out on not only lots and lots of side benefits of eating protein, but the very purpose that protein, the very reason that we consume protein, which is the metabolic advantage for our muscle building and our muscle preservation while we're losing weight, so that we don't lose muscle. Now, there are lots of advantages of protein. One of them is the thermic effect of feeding, meaning that the energy cost of digesting and processing protein is highest of all the macros. It's about 20 to 30% of calories consumed, compared to five to 10% for carbs and close to zero for fats. So if you eat 100 calories of protein, your body's going to burn 20 to 30 calories just processing the protein.
Philip Pape: 8:35
Perhaps more importantly for a lot of you, though, when it comes to fat loss, is how protein affects your hunger hormones. Patton Jones and his or her colleagues showed in 2008 that protein suppresses ghrelin, that's your hunger hormone. It then increases GLP-1, pyy and CCK, which are your satiety hormones. You literally feel fuller and more satisfied, so it's kind of the natural GLP-1. Never like to overstate the effects compared to very powerful medications, but it's important to understand how protein increases fullness, satiety Also. This is what I alluded to as perhaps the most important reason we eat protein is during a calorie deficit. Right?
Philip Pape: 9:17
Tip number one your body wants to break down tissue because it needs energy. It's looking for energy and protein, especially when it's combined with resistance. Training is telling your body let's preserve muscle tissue when you're seeking out those energy sources. Let's not go after that, because that's important. Let's pull it from your fat stores instead. If you're not eating protein, if you're not strength training, the body's like well, I'm going to take it from where I can get it, and that includes your muscle mass. This is why people on GLP-1 lose massive amounts of muscle, for the most part when they're not training and eating protein, and they're obviously. Crash dieting is effectively the result. Again, when lifestyle is not controlled.
Philip Pape: 9:58
For We've said it before but I'll say it again Studies show we need about 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight of protein, or about 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight, and that's a super optimal, well-supported range for the vast majority of people. Now, eric Helms you guys know him, he's been on the show a couple of times and his research team. They found that lean individuals in extreme deficits might need higher intake, up to, say, three grams per kilogram, but for most of you, the 0.7 to one gram per pound and I'm sorry, I'm such a between metric and Imperial here is the sweet spot. So when it comes to protein, it's pretty simple. It doesn't matter when you get it, as long as you get your total. It's helpful practically to try to spread it across your meals. It also is good because of the satiety and there's a tiny optimal effect for muscle building and preservation when you spread it out. But it is very, very small Because your body can utilize protein very intelligently, no matter how you eat it. Even if it's in large what they call boluses, you eat a lot at once, but practically it helps to. If it's in large what they call boluses like, you eat a lot at once, but practically it helps to spread it throughout the day. So that's tip number two.
Philip Pape: 11:13
Tip number three is that resistance training beats cardio for body composition. Now, this is important because some of you are going to say, wait, I've heard recent studies that say cardio is actually really helpful for fat loss, and yes, it can be. To an extent, moving your body, increasing calorie burn, can help. But we're not talking about just dropping fat. We're also talking about holding onto the muscle while doing that. I should reword what I just said we're not talking about dropping weight, we're talking about holding onto muscle while dropping weight, so that what you drop is mostly fat. And that's where resistance training is by far the perhaps most important principle for how you actually look when you reach your goal weight, because it's not about the weight on the scale, it's about losing fat, building muscle, becoming fitter, becoming leaner, and so resistance training absolutely is non-negotiable for that. So it is one of the three non-negotiables. Besides protein, protein and recovery for fat loss. Go look up my episode called the 3 plus 3 optimal model of fat loss, and that is one of the three non-negotiables.
Philip Pape: 12:12
Now, back in the 1970s, nasa was studying what happens to astronauts in space and they discovered that without the mechanical loading right, without the resistance training against your muscles which we get from gravity here on Earth, muscle breakdown accelerated dramatically. I mean, we know this now that in people in outer space and this is one of the challenges of potentially going to Mars is the significant muscle loss and what you have to try to do to hold on to that. And it was one of the first major clues that resistance training provides a unique signal that you can't get from cardio, and that's why astronauts are expected to use resistance of some form. Right, it's definitely not going to be a barbell when you're up in the space station. There's bands and there's all sorts of rigs that they have for this, but it's a great way to show how resistance training is necessary.
Philip Pape: 13:08
There was a 2015 meta-analysis by Strasser and Schobertsberger, and it looked at dozens of studies. This is a study of studies that compared resistance training to aerobic exercise for body composition and, no surprise, they found that resistance training preserved lean mass better than aerobic training every time. And there was a recent study done by Dr Bill Campbell that, I believe, showed the same thing. In his study, they showed what some people found surprising, which is that, yes, cardio can actually be quite effective for fat loss, but resistance training was better at preserving lean mass. So that's why, when we talk about body composition, you need both. You definitely need the resistance training, and then moving through walking and through some strategic forms of cardio help move the needle a bit more on the being able to burn more calories without having to eat less, so to speak.
Philip Pape: 14:00
When you're dieting, your body is in an energy deficit. Right? Principle number one it needs to get energy from somewhere, and weight lifting, or lifting weights training, sends what we call an anabolic signal. Anabolic means build. We need this muscle tissue and we need to build muscle tissue to replace the tissue that's breaking down because we're in this energy deficit, because we're in this energy deficit. Without that signal, your body happily breaks down the muscle for energy, because muscle is metabolically expensive to maintain. You don't need to live in the gym, you don't.
Philip Pape: 14:33
You can train as little as two, and even some approaches you can get away with once a week, but for most people it's going to be three to four. For older individuals, let's say over in their 60s, 70s, sometimes I see two being more effective because of recovery, but for most of you it's going to be three to four sessions per week focused on the big movement patterns squatting, deadlifting, pressing, rowing, pulling right, that's deadlifting. But other types of pulls as well, which work multiple muscle groups right, we call them compound lifts. They work multiple joints, multiple muscle groups. They give you the biggest bang for your buck and you are progressing. You're using progressive overload, which is a gradual increase in weights or reps and or sets over time. You're challenging your body more and more over time and if you are not getting stronger, if you're not able to push harder, you're not providing the anabolic signal your body needs, with the caveat that, while you're in fat loss and potentially losing weight, your relative strength is probably more important than your absolute strength because you don't have as many resources coming in. But what I like to tell people is just train as if you're able to get stronger and build muscle, and that should be sufficient to hold on to that muscle, all right.
Philip Pape: 15:45
Tip number four is that diet adherence beats diet type every single time, and for those of you newer to the show or to the philosophy we espouse here, this might surprise you, especially if you're caught up in all the debates online about the right diet keto versus plant-based, versus carnivore versus intermittent fasting. There's something new every day, especially with TikTok and social media. You've got people inventing diets left and right. You know the sugar diets. I mean all sorts of things that are all based on a type of diet like exactly what you eat, but we know that that actually doesn't matter. What matters is are you able to adhere to your diet? Because if you can adhere to it, it's sustainable, and then, once it's sustainable, you can tweak the levers to get to the goal you need and actually be able to do it.
Philip Pape: 16:40
There was a landmark study called the Diet FITS trial, published in JAMA in 2018, and it followed 600 people for 12 months. Half of them did low carb, half of them did low fat. Guess what? No significant difference in weight loss. I alluded to this in principle. One tip number one about a calorie deficit no difference. The A to Z trial did something similar. They compared Atkins Zone, ornish and Learn. Same result no meaningful difference. When you look at the big picture and control for calories, the SAC study in the New England Journal of Medicine tested different combinations of macros of protein, fats and carbs. So it wasn't really about the food specifically, just different macros of protein, fats and carbs. So it wasn't really about the food specifically, just different macros. Again, no significant difference in fat loss when calories were controlled.
Philip Pape: 17:26
Okay, and you might say well, wait, what about? You talk about protein and this and that. Again, we're talking about what moves the needle versus what's optimal. Yes, you need a sufficient amount of protein, but you don't need massive amounts of protein. Most people are getting too little protein. But when calories are controlled, that alone is going to have the biggest lever when it comes to the rate of weight loss.
Philip Pape: 17:52
So what actually matters? Well, it's adherence. Can you adhere? The diet that works is the one you can stick to without feeling deprived or feeling restricted. These elegant, scientifically designed diets, the ones in the beautifully polished books on the shelf or on Amazon or whatever your Kindle. They're all worthless if you can't follow them. Now, if you can follow them, they can be very helpful tools. They really can be. I'm not arguing that. I'm not arguing that a well-prescribed set of foods and meal plans and recipes that give you some structure and direction that you can stick to because you enjoy it. I'm not arguing that that can't also be successful for you because of the adherence factor.
Philip Pape: 18:28
In fact, I was on paleo for years, and part of the reason I was able to stick to it so long is it was flexible enough to have all the foods I enjoyed. It had meats, vegetables, fruits, I think, yeah, it just didn't have grains. It had other forms of carbs, right, fruits, and it had. There was no dairy in there, but there's. It depends on the version of paleo you follow. But anyway, I was able to eat a lot of variety of foods and there were a bunch of great recipes that I would make, and so I was okay with it. Compared, and so I was okay with it. Compared to how I eat now, it wasn't nearly as flexible as how I eat now, because now I can enjoy just about any food, which is awesome, and so this should be liberating. That's my point.
Philip Pape: 19:03
You don't have to cut out entire food groups, you don't have to eat foods you hate, and you can eat foods you love, and you can build your fat loss plan around those and around your cultural preferences, your family, your schedule, your lifestyle, your vacations, your travel all the things that life has for us that are amazing. A lot of them are around food. Just a quick reminder because I don't want to get too off track here. But if you're finding value in these fat loss principles, I want you to grab my Ultimate Macros Guide. Go ahead and pause the episode, go to witsandweightscom slash free, or click the link in the show notes. You're going to see a lot of these philosophies put out into practice, you know, explained in actual step-by-steps of what to do. It's going to help you implement what we're covering today, so you might want to follow along. Go grab the ultimate macros guide, click the link in the show notes or go to what's the weightscom slash free. All right. Tip number five neat, can't neat. I'm going to explain what that is.
Philip Pape: 19:56
Neat and I'm not saying NEAT for those of you who are Monty Python fans. Neat can make or break your deficit. What is NEAT? Neat stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis. It is a component of your metabolism and I still believe it is the most underestimated factor in fat loss success. There is research by James Levin published in Science in 1999. And I love this study. I love this study because it's eye-opening. It showed that NEAT can vary. Your non-exercise activity thermogenesis how many calories you burn from non-structured activity throughout the day is how many calories you burn from non-structured activity throughout the day can vary by up to 2,000 calories per day between individuals of the same size. And it seems unbelievable. Right? That sounds like a massive number, because some of you are saying well, I burn 2,000 calories. How is this possible? Because that's the difference between, you know, maintaining your weight and losing two pounds a week, for example, or whatever. The math comes out to be Neat.
Philip Pape: 21:00
So what does neat include? It includes everything that's not structured exercise or training. So it includes, yes, walking. Some people argue that, but it does include walking. It's fidgeting, conscious or otherwise. It's standing, it's doing chores. It's even how much you move your hands when you talk, like I'm doing right now on video if you're watching the YouTube. So it's all your spontaneous movement throughout your day, and, yes, even walking, which is not always spontaneous. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
Philip Pape: 21:26
And I'll say, the insidious thing, when you are restricting calories and you're trying to lose fat, is that your body then does a double whammo and subconsciously reduces your NEAT to conserve the energy that you're depriving it of right? People don't realize that that, oh, I'm in a fat loss phase. I should. The weight should start flying off and all of a sudden, I'm hitting this plateau, and it could be because you're not moving as much in all these different ways. Rosenbaum and Liebel's research from 2010 show that during weight loss, your body implements what is called adaptive thermogenesis Okay, and I'm just mentioning one study that refers to this term in the last 15 years.
Philip Pape: 22:06
This is a concept we've known about for a long time. It is the idea that your total, your metabolism, your daily energy expenditure drops because of the unconscious reduction in your movement. That's what it is. There are other reasons your metabolism drops during fat loss, one of those being that you're losing weight and you weigh less, and the other being the hormones, the hormone downregulation, but the fact that you're simply moving less due to your neat dropping and much of it is unconscious is also a significant factor, and you might not realize it's happening. You might like take the elevator instead of the stairs, you might sit more, you might fidget less, you might walk slower, and the tiny changes then add up. They accumulate up to hundreds of calories a day, potentially right.
Philip Pape: 22:50
And so I think the solution is awareness of these things and tracking things like step count right. I think step count is a great proxy because all these things I just mentioned generally are reflected in your steps, and so if you notice your steps go from 8,000 a day to like 7,000 a day maybe it's only a thousand steps, but on average you're now giving yourself, making yourself a little bit harder to lose fat and if you could aim for around seven to nine or 10,000 steps a day you know 10,000 has always been touted in popular media, but it's a good number, it's a good round number to remember. I always encourage clients to go for 10 to 12,000 if they can really hit that 12,000 mark, because that extra 2000 calories or steps a day, which is like a mile, can make a difference. You know just the right amount of difference between continuing with your dieting phase and feeling fine versus like feeling like it's you're too hungry and not eating enough right it's. It's finding that threshold and letting your little bit of extra steps and movement push you past, push you up into that higher regime where you could eat just a little more and still lose at the same rate. And so if you're tracking your steps, that's great, but then you could also trigger yourself to change your behavior.
Philip Pape: 24:05
Walking after meals is awesome, love it. It's great for blood sugar right, it's great for recovery, insulin sensitivity, all that great stuff. It's one of the best times to walk. If you're going to pick a time, using a standing desk, pacing during phone calls, all the fun hacks and just remind yourself to do it, set reminders, set yourself calendar notices, things like that. The goal is really just to maintain or increase your movement when you're in a calorie deficit. So if you're able to do this ahead of time, before you go into your fat loss phase and you know, hey, I'm getting 7,000 steps a day I definitely don't want to drop when I go into deficit. If anything, I want to try to ramp it up a bit. So that's tip number five is neat, and what a huge factor it can have in your metabolism. Now, just to caveat, the 2,000 calories. I believe that that difference was between sedentary people and then the most active jobs you can imagine right Construction or what have you and so, realistically, we're not expecting you to increase your metabolism by that much. You're going to be probably somewhere in the middle and you can bump it up by a few hundred calories is the way I would frame this.
Philip Pape: 25:09
All right, tip number six out of seven from 70 years of research, is that muscle mass is an insurance policy for fat loss. Right Now, we all love muscle for how it looks. We love it for its strength and function, but it also is a huge metabolic insurance policy. I've talked before about how the industry, the fitness industry, overplays the fact that muscle is an expensive tissue and it burns a bunch of calories, because it does, but it doesn't. It burns calories, but it's like six to at most nine calories per day for each pound. Now if you have an extra 10 pounds of muscle, that's up to 90 pounds a day. I mean, think about it. You're like, okay, that's decent, but it's not this huge game changer that people talk about. Build muscle and you just ramp up your metabolism, but muscle does so much more.
Philip Pape: 25:56
That then downstream actually does increase your metabolism and make a lot of things easier. For example, your muscle is a huge sink for glucose. It improves glucose disposal and that means that you can handle carbs better and I mean better by a mile, by infinitely better, to where you can consume massive amounts of carbs and make them go to good use. And then you open up the flexibility in your diet as well and all the other benefits that come along with carbs, like reduced stress, better nervous system, more anti-catabolism, where you hold onto protein or you hold onto muscle tissue, like just so many benefits. Muscle also enhances nutrient partitioning. More calories then hold on to muscle tissue, like just so many benefits. Muscle also enhances nutrient partitioning. More calories then get directed toward muscle tissue rather than fat storage. So it's like a virtuous cycle when you have muscle mass and of course, it provides a huge buffer against sarcopenia as you age. By definition, sarcopenia is the loss of muscle mass and that is the root of many of the age-related problems diseases, frailty, injury and ultimately pharmacology, which is being on multiple medications, and death and I don't mean that to sound dire, and yet it is.
Philip Pape: 27:14
I'm a huge advocate of a muscle-centric approach to all of this. Yes, we need to manage our body weight, for sure, and our body fat, but muscle's part of that equation, so we might as well also try to maximize that. Now there's a lesson we can take from bodybuilding. Since the 80s, bodybuilders have shown us that muscle can be manipulated pretty tremendously through bulking and cutting. Now, whether they're on gear or not right, whether they're on anabolic steroids or not, it's a model for the fact that you could eat a lot more food during a muscle building phase without getting that fat. You know, if you eat it at the right rate, you can put on a lot of muscle and not too much fat. And again, even when you're natural, when you're not taking special drugs to gain this system, I've worked with many, many, many clients and I've done it myself now probably five times in the last five years muscle building phases where you are deliberately gaining weight and you're putting on muscle and you don't gain that much fat. You gain some fat and then you diet down you fat loss to lower body fat levels and preserve the muscle mass. And, of course, bodybuilders do this to an extreme right. They have the off season the improvement season, they call it. They pack on all this muscle. They might gain 20, 30 pounds and then they go into fat loss for pretty long fat loss phase, way beyond what any of us need to do. But again, it's an example of the extremes of what happens. And they go to extremely low vascular levels of quite lean body fat levels, and yet they're able to preserve their muscle mass and that's because they're building this metabolic engine. They're focusing first and foremost on the muscle mass and then only using the fat loss to reveal that muscle.
Philip Pape: 28:54
More muscle means you can maintain a leaner physique, probably at a higher scale weight, while eating more calories. Don't we all want all of that? More muscle, more food. And when I say higher scale weight, I know you're thinking I don't want that, but what it means is you can be leaner at a higher scale weight than you think, which gives you more flexibility regarding scale weight for how to live your life and sustain all of this and then eat a good amount of food. You have metabolic flexibility, you have better hormonal profile, you have higher insulin sensitivity. You have stronger, denser bones. And what does this all translate to? Right? Not just looking good. Better long-term health outcomes period right All the things we hear people complain about online and wondering what the fix is for.
Philip Pape: 29:39
If they were just lifting weights and building muscle, the vast majority of those things would go away or be significantly mitigated, including many, many, many people who think it's their hormones. So this is why resistance training is not optional. It is the foundation of sustainable fat loss. I wish people would not think of fat loss as like dieting. I want people to think of fat loss as having muscle right and supporting your metabolic engine, and then you can manipulate your energy stores as needed to reveal your muscle. That, to me, is fat loss. It's not losing weight, all right. Tip number seven, the last tip from 70 years of research, is that sustainability beats speed every time. Now we talked about adherence earlier, how the adherence of a diet is more important than the type of diet. Well, this is related in a way, but it's also related to the concept of quick fixes and impatience in our modern world and the way things are marketed, and it might be the most important one for your long-term success.
Philip Pape: 30:44
There was a study in 2016 by Fothergill and colleagues following up the biggest loser contestants. Now I did a separate episode just on biggest loser follow-up. You can find it in my feed, but they were looking at what happened six years later, after the biggest loser contestants lost all this weight in this competition. It was a TV competition and most had regained their weight and had very significantly suppressed metabolic rates compared to where they were before the show. And this is six years later.
Philip Pape: 31:16
Right and for sure, metabolisms can recover, but it's a matter of degrees, and how much you've beat it up over the years tells you how long it's then going to take to recover. It's kind of a symmetrical curve here tells you how long it's then going to take to recover. It's kind of a symmetrical curve here. And the reason here is because they used very aggressive dieting, very excessive amounts of cardio, and that's exactly the opposite of what I've been discussing today. That is supported by the evidence. Rapid weight loss is going to increase your adaptive thermogenesis, it's going to increase the muscle loss, it's going to increase your psychological stress and that creates the perfect storm for the rebound weight gain, right, and then the cardio and the lack of muscle and all of that stuff.
Philip Pape: 31:57
Research shows, conversely, that moderate sustained deficits of about 500 calories a day 500 calories a day, which is a nice round number it comes out to be a pound of weight loss per week. For a lot of people that's about a half to 1% of their weight. Right, it depends on how much you weigh. Of course that moderate deficits around 500 calories are associated with better long-term outcomes. We know smaller deficits than that. The problem is they're not enough to move the needle meaningfully and your body might even adapt into them. And then we know that much larger calories per day is just not sustainable. It ends up causing all the problems we saw with the Biggest Loser maybe not to that extent, but to some degree along that spectrum. And it's not just the physical side effects, they're.
Philip Pape: 32:45
You know, when you have a sustainable rate of loss which I'm a huge advocate of finding out what's the rate of loss you need to stick to the diet and don't care about the amount of weight you have to lose. Let the rate of loss tell you how much you lose over a certain timeframe and then you can say, okay, at this rate of loss, I'm going to end up at this weight by this date. And what are you going to do? Also, when you're at a sustainable rate of loss? You're going to end up at this weight by this date. And what are you going to do? Also, when you're at a sustainable rate of loss? You're going to preserve your muscle mass. It's huge. You're going to maintain energy for the training itself because you're trying to preserve muscle mass via training. And if you feel wiped out because you're crash dieting, you're not going to have that energy. It's going to allow you to have a social life, because now you're not saying no to everything that gets put in front of you. You can still enjoy going out to eat and parties and things like that, with some self-restraint.
Philip Pape: 33:37
Obviously it also helps you to learn skills and habits sustainable habits. What even does that mean? So many of you are listening. You've never had that in your life and I feel you because I used to be there.
Philip Pape: 33:54
The up and down, the crash dieting, the extreme approaches, the next quick fix you get to learn sustainable habits. In fact, I just had a call with a client who we went through a fat loss phase. We did her pre-diet maintenance phase, we did the fat loss phase and now we're at a sustaining phase and she's like I don't even want to do anything different for a while because I realized that it takes skills to even sustain your result. There are skills you have to put in place. And if you're constantly trying to diet, especially do it aggressively, you're never going to build those skills. And then, of course, you're going to avoid the psychological stress, the fatigue of the extreme dieting it's the white knuckling, it's the crash. You know, like I'm in diet mode right now, I have to say no, I'm on a diet Like all that language effectively goes away when you're only in a moderate deficit. A moderate deficit is just, you know, some good meal planning, some tweaks, a little more protein, more whole foods it's just some tweaks. A crash diet is a whole game change or a whole change in your entire lifestyle. That's extreme. So if you use things like diet breaks along the way, if you use maintenance phases, if you use periodization, if you use refeeds, all of those can reduce the physiological and psychological fatigue, even on top of the fact that you're going at a moderate rate of loss.
Philip Pape: 35:09
So think of fat loss as a series of strategically designed phases. It's not a sprint to the finish line. I got to get, I got to lose the weight. If your mentality is I got to lose the weight, you're already screwed and you're not ready for fat loss, to be honest, because the goal isn't to lose weight as fast as possible. It is to lose fat while building the lifestyle where you can maintain that fat loss long term, involving all the tips we just talked about today. So tying all these together.
Philip Pape: 35:36
This really isn't just about fat loss, is it? It's really optimizing the way you live, right, and when you do these things, you don't just lose fat. You start to build a relationship with your body that is based on trusting yourself rather than punishing yourself, rather than having guilt and a low sense of self-worth. You trust yourself, you have confidence, you develop skills that then compound over time. It is a form of personal growth and development and you become someone who understands how your body responds to the different inputs. It's what we're all about, because you know what. No matter how much science you look at, it doesn't matter until you try it out for yourself and see how your body responds, because I guarantee you're going to be an outlier with something, and that's okay and you figure it out. You'll figure it out doing it.
Philip Pape: 36:23
I've worked with clients who've implemented these principles and for years later you know, obviously they they eventually fire me because they're like okay, you just taught me everything I need to know You're not everything. A lot of them come back because there's there's next levels of of knowledge here in optimization, but still they. They have a confidence and a freedom that they can go forward and maintain the results and continue to improve. They may have come to me listening to the podcast, understanding the science and still not quite getting how to make that work for them. And when you put all these principles into place the sustainability, along with, yes, the calorie deficit and the training, the protein and the adherence, all of it, doing, know, doing it, a reasonable rate of loss, et cetera Then you become physically and mentally stronger, you become more confident and you have sort of a toolkit for your life that's going to carry you forward forever. And remember the research we've covered today.
Philip Pape: 37:21
I deliberately wanted to go back as far as I could and say how long have we been looking at fat loss? And it's like anywhere from five to seven decades. It's thousands of studies, millions of participants. It's decades of human experimentation, but it's more of a roadmap than anything. It's a starting point. Yes, you're going to become strong, you become lean, you're going to become healthy. That is what it's all about. But you've got to try these things for yourself. And the big irony with all of this, with everything that we talk about all the time on Wits and Weights, is if you focus on sustainability and principles instead of the next quick thing, you're probably gonna achieve your goal faster, right? Because you're not constantly failing and starting over. So there you have it. All right, seven tips backed by 70 years of research.
Philip Pape: 38:06
Your calorie deficit is non-negotiable, but how you create it is very flexible. Protein is your secret weapon for preserving muscle and controlling your appetite. Resistance training is gonna beat cardio for body composition. Every time, diet adherence is going to matter more than diet type. Neat can make or break your results. That's your movement. Muscle mass I'm up to number six two hands. Here is your metabolic insurance policy. And sustainability always beats speed. And these work. Guess what? Whether you are 19 or 79, whether you have 10 pounds to lose or 100, whether you're just getting started or you are advanced, these principles work, just to different degrees and different levels of customization to the application.
Philip Pape: 38:52
All right, if you're ready to implement these in practice, grab my Ultimate Macros Guide. It covers everything witsandweightscom slash free or click the link in the show notes. Gives you formulas, steps, explanations, the science behind this, all the things you need to care about, I'll say, to put in place what we've covered today and put it into action, because knowledge binging content without implementing it this is just entertainment, folks. It's just info that's gonna go in one ear and out the other, and I want you to get results. I want you to put this stuff into action and, until next time, I want you to keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that when science speaks, smart people listen, but it's up to you to put it into practice. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.
