6 Ways to Lose Fat in 2025 (Using Science-Based Methods) | Ep 266
Download my free Precision Fat Loss Guide with the 6 core fat loss strategies customized for your experience, goals, and lifestyle (or go to witsandweights.com/free)
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Struggling to shed fat without sacrificing your sanity? Why do 95% of dieters regain weight—and how can you avoid that trap? Can fat loss really be sustainable without drastic measures like cutting carbs or doing a 28-day challenge?
Philip (@witsandweights) kicks off the new year with a powerful guide to six evidence-based fat loss strategies tailored to your unique lifestyle and goals. These approaches aren’t about quick fixes but real, lasting results without misery or burnout. Learn how to pick the strategy that fits your body, goals, and life, and start 2025 with a sustainable plan you’ll stick with.
You’ll also hear why most fat loss plans fail, the role of metabolic adaptation, and the secret to flexibility in dieting that most people overlook. Download Philip’s free Precision Fat Loss Guide at witsandweights.com/free to follow along and put these strategies into action.
Today, you’ll learn all about:
3:03 The three main reasons diets fail
8:27 Strategy #1
10:48 Strategy #2
13:15 Strategy #3
16:50 Strategy #4
18:44 Strategy #5
21:03 Strategy #6
23:04 Understanding metabolic adaptation and its impact
27:38 How to choose the right strategy for you
30:41 Setting up calories, macros, and meal timing
37:26 The importance of maintaining strength while cutting
39:17 Why successful fat loss doesn’t require perfection
41:36 Fat loss that fits your life
42:52 Outro
Episode resources:
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6 Science-Based Fat Loss Strategies to Kickstart Your Success in 2025
If you’re tired of falling into the same diet traps every year and want fat loss methods that actually work, this is your year. Forget the quick fixes and unsustainable trends—2025 is all about using evidence-based strategies tailored to your goals, lifestyle, and experience.
In this episode of Wits & Weights, I break down six proven strategies for fat loss and show you how to choose the best one for your unique situation. Whether you’re just starting out, have been training for years, or want to refine your approach, these methods will help you achieve sustainable results without sacrificing your sanity—or your favorite foods.
Why Most Fat Loss Approaches Fail
Before diving into the strategies, let’s address why so many fat loss attempts fall flat:
One-size-fits-all plans: Most diets ignore individual differences like genetics, lifestyle, and metabolic rate.
Focus on short-term results: Quick fixes lead to muscle loss, hormonal imbalances, and eventual weight regain.
Unrealistic expectations: Many plans assume you can live like a robot, ignoring real-life challenges like social events, stress, and fluctuating schedules.
The solution? Personalization and flexibility. By choosing a strategy that fits your life, you can avoid these pitfalls and finally make progress.
The Six Science-Based Fat Loss Strategies
1. The Slow Burn
Target a gradual fat loss of 0.25–0.5% of your body weight per week.
Best for: Beginners or those with a lot of weight to lose.
Why it works: Preserves muscle, minimizes hunger, and allows for social flexibility.
Example: A 200-pound person aims to lose 0.5–1 pound per week.
2. The Sweet Spot
Lose 0.5–1% of your body weight per week over 8–16 weeks.
Best for: Those who want faster results without extreme measures.
Why it works: Balances results and sustainability while maintaining workout performance.
Example: A 200-pound person loses 1–2 pounds per week while staying consistent in the gym.
3. Rapid Fat Loss
Drop 1–1.5% of your body weight per week for 2–8 weeks max.
Best for: Advanced lifters with a specific deadline, like a photo shoot or event.
Why it works: Delivers fast results but requires precision and strict adherence.
Caution: Should only be used as a short-term tool to avoid muscle loss and metabolic adaptation.
4. Ride the Wave
Cycle calories or carbs based on training days or social events.
Best for: Those with irregular schedules or frequent events.
Why it works: Reduces diet fatigue and makes the process more flexible.
Example: Higher calorie intake on leg day, lower intake on recovery days.
5. Alternating Phases
Periodize your diet with on/off cycles, such as 2 weeks in a deficit followed by 2 weeks at maintenance.
Best for: Advanced lifters or those with unique schedules.
Why it works: Provides mental relief, hormonal recovery, and sustainable progress.
6. Recharge, Recomp
Focus on eating at maintenance while building muscle and losing fat slowly.
Best for: High-stress periods or plateaus.
Why it works: Allows for recovery, resets your metabolism, and promotes recomposition.
How to Choose Your Strategy
Picking the right strategy depends on your goals, experience, and lifestyle:
Beginners: Stick with the Slow Burn or Sweet Spot to master the basics.
Intermediates: Any approach except Rapid Fat Loss can work, depending on your preferences.
Advanced lifters: Match the strategy to your specific goals, such as prep for a competition or overcoming a plateau.
Implementation Tips
Know Your Maintenance Calories
Track your food intake and weight for two weeks to determine how many calories you need to maintain your weight. Apps like MacroFactor can make this process easier.Set Your Deficit and Macros
Protein: 0.7–1 gram per pound of target body weight.
Fats: Around 30% of calories, with the rest from carbs.
Adjust calories based on your chosen strategy.
Track Progress with Trends
Focus on weekly averages for weight and other metrics, like waist measurements and progress photos.
Don’t stress over daily fluctuations—what matters is the overall trend.
Prioritize Strength Training
Maintain your regular lifting routine and push for strength gains to preserve muscle during fat loss. Avoid the myth of switching to higher reps for "fat-burning."Plan for Real Life
Incorporate flexibility with planned higher-calorie days or maintenance phases to stay consistent long-term.
The Key to Sustainable Fat Loss
Fat loss doesn’t have to be a miserable grind. By choosing a strategy that aligns with your situation and building in flexibility, you can achieve your goals while living your life. The best fat loss plan isn’t the one that promises the fastest results—it’s the one you can stick with long enough to see meaningful changes.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
If you're already dreading another year of frustrating fat loss attempts, wasting time with those popular diets that don't work for your lifestyle and genetics, or feeling overwhelmed by all the nutrition advice out there and not sure what actually works, this episode is for you. Today, I'm breaking down six science-backed strategies for fat loss that you can implement this year, based on your unique situation, your experience, level, goals, lifestyle. I'll show you how to choose the method that will work best for you and the exact steps to put it into action. And the best part is you don't have to do anything extreme. A 28-day challenge, start fasting or cut out food groups these are approaches that fit you like a glove, so you can stick with them long enough to lose fat without being miserable. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we are kicking off 2025 by breaking down six proven strategies for fat loss that align with your individual needs, and that is the key differentiator. The timing of this episode is intentional, because January is not just about New Year's resolutions. It's about starting the year with the right tools and knowledge to make sustainable changes, whether you have a resolution or just want to follow the process and get the result, and that is what we're covering today. Now, before we get into those strategies, I want to let you know that I've created a free guide called Precision Fat Loss that complements today's episode perfectly. It gives you a targeted plan including all six core strategies that we're discussing. It gives you detailed guidance on choosing the right one for you and the steps to implement your strategy properly. You can get your free copy at witsandweightscom slash free or click the link in the show notes, and it's a great companion to follow along with this episode.
Philip Pape: 2:06
Now, my goal, as always, is to live up to what you're asking for as the listener or the viewer, so I wanted to share some recent five-star reviews that explain what we're about much better than I can, and I'm going to start with a review from RNK. Great stuff. Philip delivers interesting insights in a polished way. I love the analytical approach to health. He kept me engaged throughout the episode. The next review is from Brad Kearns, who, by the way, is going to be on the show soon. Really well-informed and interesting. Philip does a fantastic job, covering the most interesting and important topics, including scientific research into easily understandable and actionable tips for healthy living and especially getting fit and strong for a lifetime. And then we have LadyLifter07. I love that. Handle Best nutrition podcast. Real advice for real people. Always look forward to the next episode. I should use that as my tagline going forward Real advice for real people.
Philip Pape: 3:03
All right, let's start by addressing why most fat loss approaches fail. We've got to understand what the heck is going on in the world where so many people they lose weight and then they gain it back, and even when they lose weight, they lose muscle and they don't understand how to do this, despite tons and tons of information. And there are three core issues that I see all the time, especially with clients, and this is why they tend to seek me out and reach out and say, hey, I need help with this. The first core issue of the three is fat loss approaches usually treat everyone the same. They completely ignore individual differences. Now, I'm not talking about just general personalization. I'm talking about the vastly different genetics and lifestyles and goals that people have. And yet we lump fat loss all into one big giant category. For example, you've got people with different metabolic rates, just genetically and also based on their history. Some of you can eat 3,000 calories, maintain your weight. Others maintain it 2,000 or far less. That's the first issue. Then there's the recovery ability, and this is important for fat loss. When you're training five days a week, six days a week and you can't recover, that's going to add stress during fat loss, and you know some people need more rest, some people need more rest. Your lifestyle demands and your stress levels play a huge role. You know A busy executive with three kids is going to need a very different approach than someone with more flexibility in their schedule. And then the training experience and the muscle mass you already have. These are all factors that dramatically influence how your body responds to a calorie deficit. So that's the first core issue.
Philip Pape: 4:43
The second core issue is that traditional approaches focus on short-term results. You hear me talk about this a lot. I think it's worth harping on the fact that 99% of diets out there are trying to get you a quick fix, whether it's the crash diets, whether it's the detoxes, whether it's programs like Weight Watchers or Optivea, whether it's the weight loss drugs and again, I'm not bashing on those drugs for people who need it. I'm just saying the marketing of that is promising rapid weight loss, even if it's ostensibly for a health issue, you'll still see like such and such achieved, you know, 45 pounds of weight loss. But what actually happens to the vast majority of people doing this when you're losing weight so quickly is, yeah, your hormones get completely out of whack. We know that happens Metabolic adaptation. I'll address that later. But worse for most people is they're losing muscle. They get ravenously hungry, they're cutting food so they want to binge on those foods again and they gain it all back. We're talking 95% of people gain it back within five years and oftentimes because you have less muscle, you're now going to have more fat than you had before, even at the same weight, and a lot of you are gaining even more weight than that. So the body fatness just keeps to creep up over the years.
Philip Pape: 5:54
There's zero consideration in these approaches for building the habits that take you through all the different phases of life and through training and not losing muscle, the importance of maintenance, the importance of building and losing fat. It's all about the quick fix and that's the problem. The third problem is the approaches don't account for real life. A lot of them claim to be personalized, but by that they usually mean oh, we're going to take your gender and your genetics, or we're going to take your gender and your height and weight and a few other factors, and that's what we mean by personalization. No, what I'm talking about is the very significant differences between how people live and who they live with, and where they live and what their job is, and so on.
Philip Pape: 6:41
And the existing approaches assume you're going to be this perfect dieting robot who never has social events. You never travel, you never. You know you have perfect stress levels. You get eight hours of sleep every night. Come on, like, when does that ever happen? Ever, ever, ever, except maybe maybe a 20 year old or something with, like, no stress in their life. No, your work stress fluctuates. Your training intensity varies week to week. You've got family obligations that pop up. A sustainable approach has to account for all of that. It can't be the other way around. We can't say, well, you need to just get rid of all that. Like, you're not working hard enough. You need to double down and like, be disciplined. No, no, come on, this is reality, so work with me here, all right.
Philip Pape: 7:28
So I want to now dig into the six evidence-based strategies that I've developed over the years with clients, and when I say I've developed, there's nothing new under the sun here. I'm just going to be totally honest. What I've done is taken, everything that I've worked with over the last three years myself, clients, this podcast and for 2025, I smushed it all together into a very simple, understandable set of six strategies, all right, and I'm going to split them into three and three and then talk about how to which ones to pick, based on you. So let's build this piece by piece. I'm going to start with a foundational approach and then go to the advanced methods. Think of it like a pyramid, where you want to master the basics before moving to the complex stuff. And, by the way, the Precision Fat Loss Guide if you download it, it will tell you with a check mark or an X whether each plan is good for you, based on all the different situations that you could be in, so you can immediately rule out things that I would not recommend for you right now. So, strategy number one of the six here we go. Here we go.
Philip Pape: 8:25
I don't know how long this episode is going to be. I call it the slow burn. You're targeting a loss of around a quarter to half percent of your body weight a week, which is quite reasonable and conservative, and you're doing it over anywhere from 12 to 20 or more weeks. I mean you could conceivably do it forever. I would never do a fat loss phase like that, but if you have like 300 pounds to lose, this could be the one that you want to go with, you know, in segments, over time.
Philip Pape: 8:54
Now I know it doesn't sound sexy, right, this is not a quick fix thing we're talking about. This is about a half a pound a week for a 200 pound person, but here's why it's so powerful. First, you are going to maintain almost all your muscle mass Like. That solves that problem right off the bat. When you're only dropping weight this slowly, your body has time to preserve that precious muscle tissue. Compare this to crash dieting, whether it's done on purpose or because you're on a weight loss drug GLP-1, you know, semaglutide, terzapatide, et cetera where you might sacrifice a decent amount of muscle as much as five to 10 pounds of muscle just to see the scale move faster.
Philip Pape: 9:39
The second thing is this approach has the highest adherence rate. Okay, I've seen this with client and it just makes mathematical sense. Why? Because you're not walking around starving all the time you can eat enough to fuel your workouts, to maintain your energy, to enjoy your food, and that's why I really like the slow burn. For a lot of people, again, you got to get out of the quick fix mentality and think I want to get the result. Yeah, but I actually want to keep the result and do it in a sustainable way. And, speaking of sustainability, it's perfect for that.
Philip Pape: 10:10
This is the third reason I love it so much. You've got enough mental bandwidth to focus on things like eating your protein, your meal prep, recovering from your workouts, your training, and you're not just white knuckling through hunger, right, you get the mental capacity to focus on the process and the habits. And then, finally, there's a lot of room for social flexibility. If you have a wedding, a holiday party, if you like to go out a lot, whatever it is, one higher calorie day isn't going to really do anything. It's not going to derail anything. It's going to be a blip because we're not talking about having a very aggressive deficit. You're always not that far from maintenance anyway and you're just doing the slow burn. So that's strategy number one.
Philip Pape: 10:47
Strategy number two this is the sweet spot and this is where you're targeting around a half to 1% of your body weight loss per week over about eight to 16 weeks. All right, this is actually my go-to approach for many clients because it perfectly balances the results with the sustainability. So it gets you there faster. And again, I can't discount the fact we do want to get there in a reasonable amount of time, right, or else we get impatient or we get mentally fatigued. So I understand speed is a factor, right, just not going too fast. And then the faster we go, the shorter the duration we can handle. So this is the sweet spot half to 1% loss per week over eight to 16 weeks. And so when you're losing about a pound a week for someone weighing 200 pounds, do easy math.
Philip Pape: 11:39
You can see meaningful changes in the mirror while still having enough calories to maintain the quality of your training, and I think that's really important. I think the quality and ability to perform in the gym is like half the equation when it comes to fat loss. All right, you're not going to feel like you're dragging yourself through your workouts and the psychological impact is also moderate. It's more than the slow burn, but it's still moderate Meaning. Yeah, you're going to feel like you're dieting. You're going to have a little bit of hunger, but it's not overwhelming. You can still think clearly at work. You can still engage people with people socially. You can still maintain your relationships. It's not some extreme like, say, a physique competitor would do, and I can't tell you how many clients appreciate this balance. And, by the way, the reason I use this and not the slow burn with most clients is because they have my support there to know that they can fall and they can trip a little bit along the way, but I'm gonna keep them going, I'm gonna be there for them and they'll learn the skills that they need faster because they're working with me to get there.
Philip Pape: 12:42
But you can definitely do this part on your own if you've got the right plan and the right approach. Now what's really nice about this is you have room for again some occasional higher calorie days, even if they're not planned in, even if they're not refeeds. Maybe you're going out to dinner with friends, maybe you've got a birthday coming up. You can just plan around the events for the week and not feel like you're really going way off, like oh my goodness, I'm just gonna wipe out my whole week's progress with this one thing. No, you can shift things a little bit and you've got some still plenty of flexibility. So that's the sweet spot.
Philip Pape: 13:15
So strategy number three Now this is rapid fat loss. Okay, so you'll notice strategies one, two, three are really different buckets of speed. And before we get to the advanced ones, this is rapid fat loss. Now I have to be very clear here. This is like a precision tool that should only be used in very specific situations. We are talking about losing one to one and a half percent of your body weight over a very short timeframe two to eight weeks max. And by eight weeks I mean like you really better have a lot of muscle mass and some decent weight to lose and be everything dialed in. I would say it's more like four weeks is where I've seen this happen, and if you've ever heard me talk about rates of loss over 1% is where you're starting to risk a little bit of muscle loss. That's why we keep the duration very short. The main benefit here is you guessed it speed, speed.
Philip Pape: 14:12
So if you do have a specific deadline, like a photo shoot or a wedding or a competition or that thing on the beach, right, for me it might be my upcoming. You know, we're going to Florida to Disney, we're going to visit my parents, we're going to go to the pool hey, I want to feel confident at the pool, that's all. So maybe I'm going to fit in a little rapid fat loss phase in the six weeks leading up to that point. This can definitely get you there, but you need to know exactly what you're doing with your training and nutrition Now, having this clear end point, like knowing it's going to end, and it's going to end pretty soon, that does help reduce mental fatigue because you know exactly when you'll be done right, and this isn't something you want to do indefinitely. And if you come to me and say, hey, philip, I did your rapid fat loss phase and I want to keep going, what do I do? I'm going to say don't keep going, that's ridiculous. You're just going to start losing muscle mass, your hormones are going to go crazy, you're going to feel terrible and it's going to end up backfiring. Just don't do it right, don't push it. But if you want to, if you're in the middle of a year or two year long building phase and you're like, hey, I just want to shed some fat really quickly in six or eight weeks Again, not a quick fix, this is a controlled high protein, almost like a protein sparing, modified fast.
Philip Pape: 15:22
If you've heard of that. It's very similar to that, but there's refeeds built in. There's a strategy to this and I wasn't going to mention this, but I do have a specific guide called Rapid Fat Loss. If you go to winstowheightscom, slash free, I'm not going to link it in the show notes, I'd rather you get the main precision fat loss guide and then you can like jump from there. But the key here is that short and also you have strategic refeeds and this is usually one day a week after about four days. So four days, very aggressive, and then one day of a refeed where you bump up your calories, mostly from carbs, right up to maintenance, and that's to. It's really to kind of just give you the mental break. It does help maintain some of your performance as well if timed appropriately, but it's mainly the mental break and the quick little jolt of recovery so you can keep going. So those are the three, I'll say, foundational strategies for fat loss.
Philip Pape: 16:18
And now I want to get to the three advanced approaches, and what you're going to find is that these advanced approaches are more about timing and other variables and you could in a way, combine them with the first three. Right, so you can. I would start with one of the first three and then look at the last three to decide okay, do I need to really change the timing significantly based on my life? And that's why you need the guide that I'm sharing, because it tells you later on, based on your situation, if this is appropriate. Okay. Strategy four, then, is called ride the wave. Yeah, I've got some silly names here. Okay, ride the wave.
Philip Pape: 16:56
And this is where things get interesting, because, instead of trying to hit the same calorie target every day which, again, I would recommend for most people to start out you are intentionally varying your intake throughout the week or month, and you've probably heard of carb cycling, calorie cycling. A lot of these strategies are going to be related to that. This approach is fantastic for people who have regular interruptions, regular social events. Maybe you would always go out on Saturdays Great. We plan to hire calories on those days and then we pull back a bit during the week, and the beauty of this strategy is how it reduces diet fatigue and even the fear that you're constantly failing. Even if you're not failing, you know, there's the mental side of oh, I went over again. I went over again. You're not constantly grinding away every day at the same calories that might feel restrictive to you. You've got those higher days to look forward to, right? Not cheat days, but they're planned days where you up the carbs and they're planned in, and this makes the whole process itself again more sustainable for people who have these regular interruptions.
Philip Pape: 18:00
Now, one of my favorite applications is structuring this around training. Right, we got to be careful, though this is where classic calorie cycling comes in, or carb cycling where, all right, you've got a big leg day, we're going to bump up our calories and carbs on those days. On recovery days, we pull back a bit. The caveat is for some people, this backfires because they need more days. We pull back a bit. The caveat is for some people, this backfires because they need more. They need just as many calories on recovery days to feel like they're bringing it back from the fold as they head into the next training day. And it also depends on your training schedule, what time of the day you train, and on and on right. So, again, this is just an example, but ride the wave is essentially what it sounds like. It's you riding the wave of your life, of your week, of your months, of your seasons.
Philip Pape: 18:43
Strategy number five All right, this is called alternating phases and I'll say that this takes the ride, the wave concept, to the next level in which you have a periodized on off. That on-off can be any length, so you might do two weeks of aggressive dieting followed by two weeks of maintenance, and this is especially powerful for advanced lifters, for example, who really understand their bodies, or sometimes women, to line it up with their menstrual cycles, which again, don't just start there, because, for I would say, 90% of women, they don't need to do that, but there's a small subset who it could help. It also might line up with your work schedule, your shift schedule. You know, I have a client who's a I think they call it a magistrate because it's not in the US but she has like intense, like a few intense months where she can't get much sleep, and then a few intense, a few months of total time to do whatever she wants, almost Right. And that's where you can line up the dieting across a month on, month off, two months on, two months off, very much like this stair step approach that I mentioned quite a few episodes ago. You can go, look it up my stair step fat loss process of okay, I'm going to diet for a while and then I'm going to stop, and then I'm going to go on and then I'm going to stop, right.
Philip Pape: 20:06
It's just an overarching alternating phase approach and the mental relief during those maintenance phases can be massive. It could be the exact thing you need just to hold steady, get recovered, eat more food, feel more energized, give your body a break from the stress of dieting. Your hormones get a chance to recover if it's long enough during those phases. Leptin, thyroid, testosterone they all drop during extended dieting and they come back fairly quickly, but not like in a day. So when you alternate, say two weeks on two weeks off or a month on a month off, it can be an interesting way to manipulate that situation. You are not, I repeat, you are not just artificially increasing your metabolism that is bogus BS, myth stuff but you are getting a massive break and things recover to the point where, physically and mentally, you're ready to go for the next phase, which means you're going to stick with it. It's going to be sustainable. Hugely helpful for that.
Philip Pape: 21:02
And then number six strategy. Number six is what I call the recharge, recomp. And again, I don't get any awards for these names. I like alliteration, let's just put it that way Recharge, recomp. So recomp, as in recomposition, where you build muscle and lose fat at the same time, this is technically not even a fat loss phase. You are eating at maintenance while focusing on getting your act together with your training and with your recovery, and this works incredibly well between more focused fat loss phases or if you've got a high stress period.
Philip Pape: 21:39
So the reason I include this as its own strategy is to sort of give yourself the permission to drop this in when you need it. Maybe you didn't plan out alternating phases, maybe you're doing the same calories every day for weeks on end and all of a sudden you're like something is not working, or I'm hitting a plateau, or I'm just not feeling it. I don't want to be dieting, or this thing has come up in my life and I want to take the opportunity for the next month to focus on that. Drop this in. Think of it as a fat loss phase within your overall fat loss approach. It's kind of a mental switch, a flip the script, if you will. You're recharging and you're re-comping. You're trying to still lose a little fat slowly and you might even gain some muscle where you weren't necessarily gaining during fat loss, but you're not ready to push it to a building phase yet or come out of your fat loss phase. You still have more to go, so to speak. So the recharge, re-comp this is its own special strategy that can fit wherever you want or need it. So those are the six strategies and I believe, having gone through this and created this guide in today's episode, this covers the vast majority, if not all cases you could possibly think of, because you can combine these as well.
Philip Pape: 22:49
So the next thing I want to talk about is how your metabolism adapts during fat loss, because this is going to influence which strategy will work best for you, in addition to the other things that we'll get to later. So I want to talk about the three types of metabolic adaptation that happen when you diet, because this is highly misunderstood. So this is when your hormones start to downregulate Things like thyroid, testosterone, leptin. They all decrease and this is your body's way of trying to conserve energy.
Philip Pape: 23:22
Some people have used the term starvation mode, and I don't like that so much, but I get where they're going. It's your body clamping down. It has a built-in preservation system that says, hey, food seems scarce, energy's not coming in, let's slow everything down, right? That's one thing. Then there's the reduction in your daily energy expenditure from the things you may not even notice. You might not even notice that you're not fidgeting as much. You're taking the elevator instead of the stairs, like you just get a little slower and sluggish and, unconsciously or not, decide to not move as often, or maybe you're going to park closer to the store. But not only that your body gets more efficient with movement, which sounds great, but it actually means you're burning fewer calories doing the same activities. So all of this comes into play.
Philip Pape: 24:07
And then the third type of adaptation is probably the most noticeable, and that is the increased hunger signaling that comes along for the ride. And that is because your hunger hormones, like ghrelin they, go up, while the fullness signals leptin we talked about decrease. And so it's not about willpower. This is your body actively fighting against fat loss, and this is why it matters for choosing one of the strategies we talked about, because the more aggressive your approach, the faster these adaptations kick in. And I didn't even talk about the adaptation that occurs because you just weigh less. Right, by carrying around less body weight, you're going to burn fewer calories. Yes, I don't think of that as a metabolic adaptation so much as just pure math based on body mass, right. So if you go with something like rapid fat loss, let's say, all right, you might see these changes I just talked about. These adaptations occur within days.
Philip Pape: 25:00
When we did our challenge for this, probably more than a year ago, I recruited some folks in the community and we all did it together. I saw people's expenditures drop pretty quickly. Now you couldn't tell in the data until days later, or even a few weeks later, because we use averages and trends, but you can tell in retrospect that it dropped a lot faster than it would normally. With the slow burn approach, on the other hand, right strategy one, these are going to happen much more gradually, and then it gives you time to adjust to them. This is where this personal metabolic resilience comes in.
Philip Pape: 25:35
I think this is something that a lot of people overlook. This is your dieting history and your history of yo-yo dieting how often you've dieted in the past. That history is going to play a huge role today. I'm sorry to say it, if you've done a lot of crash dieting in the past, your metabolism might be a little more sensitive to calorie restriction, and we don't entirely always know why this is, and it's not necessarily a massive difference.
Philip Pape: 26:01
For a lot of people, it's just because you have less muscle mass, right, which means, on the other hand, if you spent good time at maintenance and building muscle and not dieting as much, you might be able to handle more aggressive approaches better. But at the end of the day, this just comes down to the fact that you have a higher metabolic rate, and some of you are blessed with that. Some of you are not. The genetics make a difference, and on and on and on. That's why personalizing these strategies are helpful, and when we come back after the break, I'm going to help you choose the best strategy for you and then implement it. Plus, I'm going to reveal the surprising truth about adherence that changes how you think about good and bad days in your diet. And then I'm going to reveal one thing that all successful people do to stick with their fat loss plan and actually get the result they want. Stay with me.
Max: 26:47
Shout out to Philippe. I know Philippe for a long time. I know how passionate he is about healthy eating and body strength, and that's why I chose him to be my coach. I was no stranger to dieting and body training, but I always struggled to do it sustainably. Philip helped me prioritize my goals with evidence-based recommendations, while not overstressing my body and not feeling like I'm starving. In six months, I lost 45 pounds without drastically changing the foods I enjoy, but now I have a more balanced diet. I weight train consistently but, most importantly, I do it sustainably. If a scientifically sound, healthy diet and a lean, strong body is what you're looking for, philly Pape is your guy.
Philip Pape: 27:31
Welcome back Now. I'm going to walk you through exactly how to pick the right strategy based on where you're at right now. If you are a beginner, stick with the slow burn or the sweet spot period. I just simplified the whole thing for you. Forget the rest. Forget number three, four, five, six. Pick number one or two. You need to build those fundamental habits. First, consistent protein intake, regular training, proper recovery. It's like if you learn to drive, you wouldn't start on a Formula One racetrack.
Philip Pape: 28:02
Intermediate folks now, by intermediate that's a very flexible term, but to me that's someone who has some experience training and maybe some experience dieting, but not necessarily In that case you can use any approach, except rapid fat loss is what I'm going to say. So approaches one, two, four, five, six. Because you understand how your body responds to different calorie levels and training intensities. You've got some experience reading your body's signals. So again, even if you haven't, like expressly gone through these types of highly targeted track fat loss phases, you still probably have experience from dieting in general and kind of understanding how your body reacts. But just make sure you truly feel like you have that experience. Otherwise, if you're like this all is new to me consider yourself a beginner, even if you're a more experienced trainer. So that's kind of what I mean is the experience with the dieting and the training together. Now, if you're more advanced, if you've gone through bulks and cuts, you've trained for a while, you're an athlete, et cetera you can use any strategy, but you still have to match it to your goals, right? So if you're prepping for a show, yeah, maybe rapid fat loss makes sense and maybe not, right? I know I talk to a lot of bodybuilders and they actually want to take time to get there and cut over time. Maybe you have some other event or date on the calendar where rapid fat loss makes sense. If you're in a high stress period, maybe that's where you want to drop in one of these recharge, recomp periods and just say, look, I'm not going to give up on fat loss, but I know that it doesn't make sense for me to be in a calorie deficit right now, but I'm going to put it on hold and continue later. But I'm going to still focus on doing all the right things keeping it sustainable, recharging and recovering my metabolism so I stop under eating and then maybe get some recomp as a side benefit. So, other than that, there are multiple other scenarios in the guide itself.
Philip Pape: 29:58
I didn't want this podcast to be three hours long, but there are, I think, four tables for four different types of tendencies or things to think about. There's a table on personal tendencies Do you love tracking, for example and so I want you to go through the guide yourself and just look at each one and say, okay, I'm that person. Here are the things yes, yes, no, no. That could work for me. So what I really want to do today is get to how to implement this. So, once you've picked the strategy, okay. So I gave you the six strategies, I gave you some thoughts on personalization, but definitely get the guide to get all the details, and then now we're going to talk about implementing at a very high level.
Philip Pape: 30:40
All right, the first thing you have to do to implement a fat loss phase is you've got to know your numbers, and the best, the first number you have to know is your maintenance calories. Your maintenance calories are the calories you burn every day. The best approach is to track your food and your weight for at least two weeks and see how your weight responds to your food. That is the only accurate way to do it. First start, but they can be off by hundreds of calories. I think I used to say 400 calories in either direction and I heard someone recently say a 700 calorie swing, so I think it's the same idea. I don't know if they meant 700 either direction or just 700 total, like you could be up and down 350, but it's insanely inaccurate. Your true maintenance calories are probably going to surprise you, because I've had clients who thought they maintained at 1800 and then we get them eating more and recovering and they're actually closer to 2500. And I'll be honest, there's some that are the opposite. They're like yeah, I should be burning 2000, but I'm not losing weight. Well, it's because you actually burned 1600. So the only way to do that is to track your food and weight.
Philip Pape: 31:52
And if you want an app that will do that for you so you don't have to pull out a complicated spreadsheet, download Macrofactor, use my code Wits and Weights. All one word. Yes, this is a plug, but it's a plug for my favorite app. I use it, my clients use it, I talk about it all the time because it's the only app that calculates your maintenance calories accurately and that's what you need to get the targets. Forget the other apps MyFitnessPal, chronometer and so on. They don't do that, so all they are are glorified loggers. They allow you to log food and then they're like tell us what your targets are. I'm like I don't know what my target is. Well, macrofactor gives you the target. Every week you check in, it gives you a new target based on how your and your weight. So you've got to start with that number, because that's the number you would eat to maintain your weight.
Philip Pape: 32:46
And if you're not even eating enough to maintain your weight, that's a whole separate process. Okay, I talked about on the last episode, the last Monday episode, about the 12 month plan. I talked about this recomp phase. Not even talking about that. Today I'm jumping right to the fat loss phase. Once you've done all that setup, you've got your routine in place, and so on. Okay, so if you don't even know all the things you need to do to set yourself up for success in fat loss, go listen to that episode. See episode 260, oh, it was before the new, it was before the replays that came out. Go look for it. It says 12-month plan for your best physique in 2025, something like that. I'll include a link in the show notes.
Philip Pape: 33:27
Once you have your maintenance calories, then what do you do next for macros? Get this question all the time. We're gonna set our protein next. We're gonna aim for 0.7 to 1 gram per pound, and you can convert to kilograms if you want. 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of your target body weight. So if you're 220 pounds, you're trying to get to 180, you're trying to lose 40 pounds, doesn't matter. Use 180 as your protein target max. So 0.7 of that to 1 times that, right. So what would 0.7 be? It'd be something like 150 or something. So you'd be around 150 to 180 grams of protein. Okay, don't. If it seems like too much, like way too much, bring it down toward that 0.7. You don't have to go to the one and, by the way, there's no benefit to going beyond that, whether you're in a cut or not, other than the tiny situation of the rapid fat loss phase where you might need to crank it up just a little bit. But even getting to that one is probably enough, even during that.
Philip Pape: 34:26
Now, so you've got your calories, you've got your maintenance calories, you've got your protein. Now those maintenance calories are going to drop to the real target. You need to lose fat, right, and that's going to be based on the strategy you picked from what we talked about earlier. So let's say we're using the sweet spot at a half to 1% of your body weight a week, and so that's going to be about a 500 calorie daily deficit for a 200 pound person. Again, we're not going to do all the math on the show here, but that's what it comes out to be and you can adjust it as you go, like if that's too aggressive, not aggressive enough, you can always adjust it as you go. So once you have that deficit, now you've got your protein, the protein calories will be taking up some of those calories. Then fats and carbs are very flexible, and that's all I'm going to say about fats and carbs. Basically, if you set fats to around 30% of your calories and carbs the rest, that's a good starting point.
Philip Pape: 35:21
Some of you may want a lot less fat, some of you a lot more. I definitely have heard that people on GLP-1 drugs, for example, like semaglutide and trisepatide, do better with lower fat. Just something happens where they have to go to the bathroom or they eat too much fat. So you personally may have different preferences and those preferences shouldn't be based on what someone said about keto or low carb or anything like that. It should be based on how you respond to the fat and carb levels with your energy, with your performance, with your recovery, with your preferences. All of that, all right. And then you want to track all of this. Now, again, if you get macro factor, you can track your food and get your targets based on your real results. But you could use a notebook, you can use a spreadsheet A million ways to do this. All right.
Philip Pape: 36:07
So we've got our calories, we've got our deficit, so it brings the calories down. We anchored our protein and then filled in the rest with fats and carbs. And then a much less concerned, but still has a little bit of importance, is your meal timing. So people are like, okay, now, when do I eat? What do I eat? How do I do this? My main recommendation here is to plan a decent amount of protein and carbs around your training, whether that's in the evening, whether that's in the morning. So if you lift in the evening, you can have more calories later in the day. If you're in the morning, you're going to have more in the morning. Pre-workout, post-workout, and then just keep things balanced as the day goes on. So keep the fats low pre-workout, but other than that, keep everything balanced. Also, don't train fasted, don't go low carb before your workout, just have some protein and carbs before and after. Other situations like low carb, keto, et cetera. Yeah, you're going to have to make adjustments if you want to follow those protocols For the training itself, the goal here is to maintain your strength.
Philip Pape: 37:05
That is absolutely the goal. To maintain your strength, to maintain your numbers. If not, push your numbers higher where possible during fat loss. A lot of people make the mistake of dropping their weight and going higher reps when cutting, thinking it's some sort of fat-burning, you know whatever. A fat loss style workout, endurance, cardio, things like that no, keep pushing the heavy compounds, the heavy lifts, the typical types of training, to give yourself that signal, to preserve muscle.
Philip Pape: 37:33
And then you want to track things to let you know that you are making progress right, not just your scale, weight and your calories and your metabolism, but also the trend in all of those your progress photos, your training performance, your body measurements. I like your waist, especially as a great indicator of fat loss for most people. A great indicator of fat loss for most people. Obviously, progress photos. You're not going to see a lot of change from one week to the next, but if you take it every week, then four, five, six weeks apart you can start seeing changes and that validates that, hey, what I'm doing is actually working. And then just the fact that you are adhering to this process and to those targets, that you are doing something every day For many of us, that is okay. We're logging in macro factor every day. We're putting our trend weight in every day. We're logging our workouts every time we go.
Philip Pape: 38:20
I've had some calls with folks and I asked them how do you track your workouts? They're like yeah, I don't really track them. Okay, it's like calculus then and advanced math to be able to remember every PR from the 20 lifts you just did last week. Impossible, not going to happen. You got to track. Now what most people miss is they get obsessed over the individual data points, and we don't want to do that. We want to look at trends, not data points. We want to have the data points when we look at trends.
Philip Pape: 38:48
One higher scale weight during fat loss means absolutely nothing. For you to gain a pound of fat in one day means you would over consume by 3,500 calories. Well, if you ate roughly the same you did every day before that in that week, and then you gain two pounds. It's not fat, it's water weight, it's glycogen inflammation. There's a whole bunch of reasons that have nothing to do with fat. It's probably going to come right back down, and so what matters is the averages over time. All right, so here's something fascinating Most people don't realize about successful fat loss.
Philip Pape: 39:22
The most successful clients I've had are not the ones that follow the plan perfectly. You're like what Don't you give them a plan and you give them accountability and support, check-ins, and that you're saying they don't follow the plan? No, I'm saying they don't follow it perfectly. They are the ones. The successful ones are the ones who build in the strategic flexibility from the start. I help them do that, I help them identify how to do that, but they understand right from day one that this is not a game of a perfect plan and perfect execution. This is a game of real life, and so let's account for that right.
Philip Pape: 40:03
Think about this If you're doing the slow burn approach and you you're losing a half a percent per week, you can have an entire week where you maintain weight or even gain a little weight and still average out to your target over a month, right, and this, this changes how you think about progress. It also takes enormous pressure off of you, right. It reduces stress, it takes off pressure off a single day or even a single week. And as far as being a coach, I can definitely help people process those thoughts, those emotions, those fears, to realize that that's the case, right, because we can't always see inside ourselves. We get in our own heads. And what's better than that? Even than that, um, the way you think about progress is that your body can respond really well to the consistent variation you give it because it's in this low stress way. In other words, you're planning it in. You avoid extremes like even the ride, the wave and the alternate phase.
Philip Pape: 40:56
Approach, I'm not approach. If I sat down with you and we mapped that out, I wouldn't have like a thousand calorie difference one day to the next. It would still be within spitting distance, so that your body feels assured and safe, let's say, to lose fat. But then it reduces the overall stress on you, which helps with your metabolism because you're planning it in and giving yourself the chance to succeed, and then your metabolism is maybe firing a little bit higher, burning a few more calories as a result, and then it makes the fat loss easier. So the fact that you've built in sustainability, you've slowed yourself down, will probably help you speed up the whole process at the end. Isn't that cool, all right.
Philip Pape: 41:36
As we wrap up, let me emphasize something really important, and that is fat loss does not have to be a miserable grind. It doesn't okay. There's going to be some hunger and some challenges. Absolutely and too many people think suffering equals progress. It's not true. If you can choose a strategy aligned to your situation and then implement it properly with flexibility, you can achieve the results and live your life. They are not mutually exclusive, and that's the way I love to do it, and that's why, once you do that a few times, you realize yeah, it's not so hard. I actually got this, I have the confidence to do this and I don't have to do it too often throughout the year. If you go back and listen to my 12 month episode, you'll understand that I want you to spend probably nine months out of the year not dieting, but when you do have to go after it, you're going to do it just like this, with precision.
Philip Pape: 42:24
All right, if you want to implement these strategies properly. Download my free Precision Fat Loss Guide. Again, it includes the detailed breakdowns of all six strategies, a decision matrix to help you choose the right one, and then some step-by-step implementation guidelines. Use the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash free, where I have a ton of guides, by the way, but for this specific one it's called Precision Fat Loss Link is in the show notes, or go to witsandweightscom slash free. All right, until next time. I hope you guys love this one. This was actually a fun one to put together and I hope it kind of maps out my overall thoughts on fat loss in general. Until next time, I want you to keep using your wits lifting those weights, and remember the best fat loss strategy isn't the one that works fastest, it's the one you can stick with long enough to actually work. This is Philip Pape, and you've been listening to Wits and Weights and I will talk to you next time.
