Whether you’re trying to lose weight, get healthier, increase strength or performance, or just look and feel better in your body, improving your body composition is the path to overall health.

Body composition refers to the percentage of muscle versus fat in your body, which determines how “lean” you are. The lower your body fat percentage (or higher your muscle percentage) relative to your weight, the leaner you are.

Someone who weighs 180 pounds at 40% body fat is not as lean as someone who weighs 180 pounds at 25% body fat. This is more about composition than scale weight.

But why is “leanness” important?

Yes, being leaner affects how you look and feel. Even better, improving your body composition goes way beyond aesthetics and has numerous benefits for health, performance, and longevity.

Everyone can benefit from improving their body composition, and today we’re diving into the topic, including its benefits and the most important priorities for achieving a leaner, healthier physique.

Then I go over three scenarios—skinny fat, somewhat overweight, and very overweight—and discuss strategies for improving body composition with each.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• What exactly is body composition?

• How body composition gets worse over time (unless you do something about it)

• The concept of "body fat overshooting" from repeated dieting

• Benefits of improving composition

• How to improve body composition

• Applying these strategies if you're skinny fat, somewhat overweight, or very overweight

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Transcript

Philip Pape  00:08

Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, where we discuss getting strong and healthy with strength training and sustainable nutrition. I'm your host, Philip pape, and in each episode, we examine strategies to help you achieve physical self mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent nutrition and training for sustainable results. Welcome to another episode of Wits & Weights, we are streaming live in our Facebook group. So if you want to watch future episodes, if you want to interact with our community, you want to get access to future live trainings like this one free guides, blueprints, other free info on strength, fat loss, nutrition, and all things related to that just join our group using the link in the show notes. I am your host, Philip pape, founder of Wits & Weights, nutrition coaching. And as always, if you enjoy the show, please if you find it valuable, interesting, if you learn something new, the best way you can support me is doing a rating and review on Apple or Spotify. Just support the show let others know it's there. That's how the algorithm works, how people can find it. Just again, leave a rating and review on one of those wherever you get your podcasts. You could also take a screenshot and share it on social media and just tag me Wits & Weights. So let's get into today's topic on body composition. Whether you're trying to lose weight, get healthier, increased strength, increased performance, or if you just want to look and feel better in your body. And there's no shame in that improving your body composition is the path to overall health. Body Composition refers to the percentage of muscle versus fat in your body. And that determines how quote unquote lean you the lower your body fat percentage or the higher your muscle percentage relative to your weight. The leaner you are now someone who weighs 180 at 40% body fat is not going to look as lean or be as lean as someone who weighs 180 at 25% body. This is more about composition than scale weight. But now why is this important? Why do we care about leanness? Yes, being leaner affects how you look and feel. But even better, improving your body composition. It goes way beyond aesthetics. It has numerous benefits for health performance and longevity that we're going to discuss today. Everyone can benefit from improving body composition, everyone. And today we're diving into the topic, including the benefits, the most important priorities for achieving a leaner healthier physique. And then I'm going to go over some scenarios toward the end. Depending on your starting point, if you're starting from skinny fat, somewhat overweight, very overweight, and discuss strategies for improving body composition with each and I'm sorry, if any of those terms are offensive, we'll get into why we use those definitions, but they are what they are. So we're gonna get into body composition. What is alright, body composition is simply the percentage of our tissue that's fat relative to all other tissue. And that would be organs, bones, muscle, that's an important one. And any other tissue in our body. Now we all have to have some essential level of fat to survive, right, we need at least for men, we need 3%. For women, it's 12%. So there's about a 10% spread. Women need more fat for biological reasons having to do with childbearing and other reasons related to hormones. But if, for example, if I said, most men might want to be between 10 and 20%, body fat for health, for women, I would add 10% to that, so 20 to 30%. On top of the essential body fat, there is not essential body fat. And that's not all bad, right? Because, for example, I just told you 3% for men is essential. Well, nobody walks around 3% Except the most stage lean, high performing professional bodybuilder, most of us are walking out with much more fat than that. And that's okay, we want some of that fat for overall health, for balanced hormones for energy. And it even protects our internal organs, but too much fat too much. And we're talking, say well beyond 20% For men, or 30%. For women, it increases your risk of disease, heart disease type diabetes, and then many other health effects that we're gonna get to in a second. The other cool thing is that muscle is more dense than fat. You've probably heard this before, but because of that, it takes up less space, right? So leanness is determined by body composition, because of the density of muscle. So two people can weigh the same, but look vastly. Now, if we're talking statistics got a couple interesting ones for you. More than 40% of adults in the US are now obese with an unhealthy bowel position. And it keeps growing and the related diseases and illnesses keep and this is this is not a good thing. And to top it all off, you lose 8% of your muscle mass each decade between the ages of 40 and 70. And that accelerates to 15% per decade after age 70 Which means you could lose 37% of your muscle mass from age eight. Now that's only if you don't do anything about it. And today we're Talking about doing something about it, which is why you tuned in and while you're listening, and so I know you're going to be in the minority of people who go out there and get results and improve your body composition. Now, how

 

Philip Pape  05:10

does body composition worsen over time? All right, pretty obvious things that I think we're all familiar with. But just to state them. Number one lack of exercise, specifically, lack of resistance training. So there are people who do lots of cardio, but doesn't mean they have very good body composition, if you're lacking resistance training, lack of sufficient protein, which is widespread lack of movement. So I'm not talking again, about running or high intensity cardio, I'm just talking about being ambulatory walking, moving your body around, there's health benefits for that. And then repeated dieting. This actually potentially is the worst culprit of them all when it comes to your body composition getting worse over time. And I want to talk about that specifically. So you may have heard me talk on other episodes about the concept of body fat overshooting. And I think the term was coined by Layne Norton. But it's been used by many academics, and it's pretty widespread term by now. But when you die it what happens over time is you you lose fat when you diet, right? When you're in a calorie deficit, you definitely you lose weight, and some of that weight is fat. But a lot of that tissue is also muscle, as much as 50%, when you're not doing the other things we need to do to improve body composition. And that's a pretty scary concept. But it's supported by the statistic I mentioned before about muscle loss. And people don't realize that they think every time I diet, I'm just I'm losing fat, right, I'm losing my weight, so I'm losing fat. And then when you regain the weight, you regain mostly fat. And so every time you diet, even if you end up at the same weight, you have excess fat accumulation from each time you do it. There's also something called hyperphagia. With a G, that's a Greek spelling, and hyperphagia is the loss of muscle mass, leading to ravenous hunger, the more you diet. So if you've ever experienced it many times and feeling like you need to do it on less fewer and fewer calories, and you get hungry and hungrier. And then you basically just binge the food right back. That's probably what's happening 30% of people who diet gain more weight and and the rest of them, they may not gain more weight, but their body composition is worse. The other thing you have to be aware of is this energy restriction, which usually comes from crash dieting. That's how many of us do it right. You do keto, you carnival Weight Watchers, whatever it is, you oftentimes severely restrict well beyond what we should be doing. And then your body creates new fat cells as a response to that energy restriction. And those fat cells never go away for the rest of your life, but we can reduce their size. And so have no fear, if you've dieted 30 times that it's not a lost cause, we the same principles and methods can still help you reduce the fat. So this is why we don't just want to lose weight. This is what is wrong with the fitness industry. And the way we talk about this and all the 21 day challenges and all the everything everybody's trying to sell is we're not just trying to lose weight, yes, we need to be at a healthy weight to avoid disease, okay. But we also need to be at a healthy body composition to optimize health. So I hope I hope you got that what I just said there, we need it to be a healthy weight to avoid disease and sickness. But we need to be a healthy body composition to optimize our health to live longer, and to live a higher quality life with those extra years.

 

Philip Pape  08:28

So let's go over the benefits of improved improving body composition. And it's a very long list. So get ready. But I think it's it's worth understanding how powerful this one thing is, among everything else you'd have to filter through when it comes to diet nutrition fitness, because this is it like this is why I do what I do, and try to help people in in getting better habits and figuring out how to eat more protein and train and things like that. It's because of body composition, period. It's not weight loss. So what are the benefits of improving body composition? First, it increases your metabolic rate. And it does so all day long. Now think about that. When you have extra muscle on your frame, every ounce of muscle, every pound of muscle burns more tissue than a similar amount of fat. So you're increasing your metabolism, your total daily energy expenditure always. So once you have that extra muscle, you might train one hour a day, if that the other 23 hours you're burning extra calories. Now would you rather do that? Or would you rather go run on a treadmill for that's a pretty easy answer in my opinion, and I enjoy lifting too. So I'd rather go do that than run and then I can burn the calories the rest of the day. So this is huge. In my opinion. This is a huge aspect of body composition because once you improve it once you add muscle, your body, everything shifts up, your ability to diet gets easier, and your ability to maintain your weight gets easier. Alright, the second benefit is that adding muscle mass and focusing on muscle mass counter X sarcopenia. sarcopenia is basically the muscle wasting that occurs urs as we get older, it also counteracts what's called anabolic resistance. And this is a concept where our sensitivity to muscle protein synthesis. So our ability to basically construct muscle tissue from proteins, our sensitivity to that decreases as we age, which compounds the loss of muscle mass, unless we are doing the other things, the right things, right, the training protein cetera that we're going to talk about. So you not only lose muscle, as you get older, you lose it at a faster rate. Okay, improving body composition, it strengthens your bones and ligaments. So think about this people who think they're prone to osteopenia, or even osteoarthritis in later years, especially if it's genetic. This is a way to prolong or prevent that push off the time in which it could occur or prevent it altogether. You know, we've seen time and again, people who had bone loss, they tried medications wasn't really working. And then they start strength training, and all of a sudden their bones get denser on a DEXA scan, and also strengthen, strengthen your ligaments, which is great for overall, alright, increases your strength, which increases your function. This is so critical. Imagine all the things you want to do and you're 5060 7080 years old, the things you're doing now, and you're 35 or 40, don't you want to be doing those when you're 85. And having the extra strength having the improved body composition is going to give your body the capability to do that, to enjoy athletics to enjoy pursuits, like, you know, physical pursuits later. Also prevent frailty. And to prevent injury, when you fall, things like that. What else it improves sleep, improves mood increases energy. Why is it increased energy? Well, you have less fatigue, you're carrying less weight around and you have more strength, you have more muscle less overall weight. And even if you have a little extra weight, your body composition is better. So you're strong, so you can walk up stairs more easily. You could enjoy your lifting your cardio your sports better, because you have a better body comes in it reduces joint hip and back pain. Okay, so if this is you, if you've had issues in these areas, these often decrease or go away. When you start strength training and adding muscle you can walk more, for example, now I want to share a statistic according to a Danish study in 2011. For older adults with osteoarthritis, losing just a pound of excess weight decreases the forces on your knees by more than two pounds. So basically, if you were 25 pounds heavier than you need to be and you lost that excess weight, the load on your knees would go down by 50 pounds. Now that's just wait, we're not even talking about body composition. Add in strength to that and it just gets better. Okay, here, here's some more sobering things about body composition. In terms of how it actually helps actually, it decreases your risk of heart disease, type two diabetes, high blood pressure, which is hypertension, and even cancer when you are not strong and you have extra weight 25 extra pounds beyond a healthy weight requires 5000 extra miles of blood vessels and most of these are small capillaries, which means your heart has to work harder and you get a higher blood pressure to pump blood through all those vessels. Okay, improving body composition decreases your cholesterol and triglyceride levels. It decreases your blood sugar increases your glucose tolerance, your insulin sensitivity, it also potentially increases fertility and lowers pregnancy related complications and might reverse metabolic syndrome that's also called pre diabetes. So pay attention. If you have any of these numbers, you potentially have pre diabetes, and you're probably already aware of it. But just to be clear, blood pressure above 135 alrady blood sugar are fasting glucose above 100 triglycerides above 150 HDL below 40 for men or 50. For women, that's the quote unquote cholesterol. So if it's true, and then if you have a high level of abdominal fat, which means a waist size of 40 inches for men 35 inches, so improving your body composition can counteract all of these things. It can improve your breathing, it can decrease visceral fat, visceral fat is the most dangerous kind that's around your organs. It's in your abdomen looks like a beer gut on men as opposed to the subcutaneous fat under your skin. Alright, the last two benefits are pretty cool. The first one has to do with performance if you improve your body composition so for those who like to compete, and we're talking any any kinds of sport pretty much boxing, gym, gymnastics, basketball, endurance sports, CrossFit, mud races, whatever the you know, muscle mass is correlated with strength and power. So if you're more lean, and you have more muscle mass, you have a greater strength to train to weight ratio. So that increases your speed, your quickness, your agility. Now there's some genetic component to things like the vertical jump and to speed and things like that. But the one variable you can affect the most is strength in that equation. Yes, you can lose weight, but the strength has a much bigger of reducing excess body fat also helps with endurance, both muscular and cardio endurance. So if anybody's ever done a CrossFit workout, and you all of a sudden lost a bunch of weight, they tended to be easier. What else your joint range is improved when your body composition is leaner. So think about how that can affect you when it comes to food. functional movements and what I'm trying to say your form when it comes to lifting. Think about how that will help you form if you're doing rain. Now, there's some exceptions to this when it comes to improving body composition and reducing weight exceptions would be American football, wrestling powerlifting, where you actually might want to gain weight as well gain some extra fat along with the muscle, you're still improving your body composition, though, because you're adding muscle either way. But most, most sports benefit from the higher string to mass mass ratio. So that's the performance aspect. And then last, but not least, and this honestly, is why a lot of people get into this, it gives you a healthy physique. And this could do things like improve your self confidence,

 

Philip Pape  15:37

give you you know, make you feel more comfortable in your skin. Something let's not kid ourselves, okay? There's no shame in wanting a fit, shapely body looking good in clothes, feeling comfortable in our own skin. There's nothing wrong with that at all. Now, what is what this presents itself as is just something I guess we could say is genetically or biologically aesthetic, which would be broader shoulders for men or tapered torso, trim ways, maybe strong toned arms for women, we we know what we're talking about here. But for you, as an individual, it's really do you feel and look that also, don't be afraid of getting too big. It's very hard to do. Ladies, man, whoever you are, without some enhancements, and many, many years of body composition is going to improve your physique. Alright, so one last thing before we talk about proving body composition, because I know we want to do that now after you heard that extremely long list of benefit is how to measure it. Now I was going to leave this out of the training because when I'm working with clients, for the most part, we we go by how you look and feel right? We go by progress photos, or even if we don't have photos, it's Hey, do you feel like you are your body composition is getting better? Are you stronger? Are you lighter on your feet? Do you just feel better overall better mood, you know, the biofeedback but then I thought, you know, some of us do like data. I'm a nerd myself. I'm engineering background, I

 

Philip Pape  16:54

love to see progress and objective data. So beyond how you look and feel and photos, you can measure your body fat, okay, but I would keep it simple. And the way I suggest doing it is either with a tape measure, or caliber skinfold caliber. So with a tape measure, you can measure your neck and waist for men. And for women, you also measure your hips. And then you can plug that into the Navy calculator, go online and just Google Navy calculator. And that'll give you a body fat percentage that's based on a ratio. Now that's based on the average population, not you as an individual. So don't trust the number, but trust the trend over time. So if you take that measurement, and then you do it every week, or every couple of weeks, as you are building muscle or losing fat, you should be able to see a change in your body fat percentage. So like if you're, if you're building muscle, you're intentionally gaining weight, you actually might see the body fat percentage start to go up. We expect that because we expect the muscle to slightly outstripped the fat as we're gaining weight just because it comes on much easier. But then after you spend six to nine months or more in a building phase, and then now you go on a diet, now you should see the body fat percentage come down. So rather than focus on the number, focus on the trend, I personally have used this as well as skinfold calibers. And there's a lot of ways to do that. And I can get into details here. But when I measure them both in parallel, they're off from each other by as much as 5%. But the trend is very precisely in lockstep, you know, meaning one might say, I'm 20%, one might say, I'm 15%. But then after I go through my diet, the top one has gone down by five, and the bottom one has also gone down. So I know I've lost around 5%. But so that's a way to way to measure it. But really do you look and feel the way you want. So now the fun part, how exactly do we improve our body composition? And the simple answer is that we need three things. Number one, and I'm going to say this is the most important because without it the rest don't matter. Number one is resistance training to build muscle. If you don't build muscle, you can't improve your body composition. Like we said before body fat overshooting means every time you lose fat, you lose muscle, every time you gain weight, you only gain fat. So all you're doing is losing muscle. As you get older, this is the missing ingredient resistance training, we'll get into details number two periodized nutrition to control macro balance and intake. So I use my words very carefully periodized meaning we don't just do everything at once like a crash diet. We do things in phases to give our body a break to recover. And we're using nutrition to control our macros or macronutrients namely protein and the intake so being able to turn the dial for weight loss or weight. And then the third thing is going to be movement movements so that we remain active and healthy and also increase our expenditure from Neat non exercise Activity Thermogenesis and I think I was I was arguing with myself as to whether to include that part in here because technically you can improve body composition and not really get many steps or do much activity, but it makes it way harder to the point where the adherents level the concerns Since the level is going to be so low, and and that right there is going to kill the rest of the plan, right. So I think these three things go hand in hand, and we're gonna dive into each one, and how to do them. And if you guys who are watching live, you ever have comments along the way, feel free to throw. Okay, so the first thing is resistance training. And if you remember nothing else from the training, remember this phrase stress recovery, adaptation, stress recovery adaptation, this is the way our bodies get stronger, and add muscle. And the way it works is simply we have to offer some sort of stress that pushes our muscles close to muscular failure by training hard so that after we recover recovery, meaning sleep and food, our bodies have to adapt by adding muscle tissue, and programming our brain for lack of a better phrase to be a little stronger, right neuromuscular adaptation along with muscle mass. So that next time we try to do what we just did, you know, lift a very heavy bar off the ground, for example, with a deadlift, our bodies will be able to do at least that much weight, and then probably a little more. And then when we go to the gym, we add a little more weight, we do it, we stress ourselves, we recover with food and fuel, or food and sleep. And then our body adapts again, because like, oh, geez, you keep pushing me to the my limit, I'm recruiting as many muscle fibers as I can, I need to build this muscle tissue, I need to add and change the size and the muscles, and you go over and over and over again. So what am I talking about? I'm talking about progressive overload. And the best way to apply resistance training to increase your strength and muscle mass,

 

Philip Pape  21:37

which then improves your body composition is a planned out program of progressive overload, where you increase weight and or repetitions with the same movement over time. Now, for beginners, if you're just starting, or even if you're not a beginner, but you're trying to do this the right way for the first time, I would keep it very simple, I would use something like starting strength, starting strength by Mark Rippetoe, or something like it where the focus is on a few big compound lifts. And by compound I mean multi joint movements, namely, the squat, the deadlift, the deadlift is a hip hinge, the benchpress, which is your horizontal, push the overhead press, which is a vertical push, and then chin ups or pull ups, which is your vertical pole, and I missed one there, I don't think I did. So I would focus on a program that includes those basic movements with a barbell, that that is the preference of you can get access to that at a gym, or invest in your own home gym. And it really isn't that expensive. But of course, you have to have the space and know what you're getting into, I would go there failing barbells access to barbells, you can go with dumbbells and cables. I wouldn't use the machines, quote unquote, at a big box gym, because they restrict you and your range of motion and stability. And there's a whole bunch of reasons. Of course, it's better than nothing. So the point here is find a simple program where you can do two or three compound lifts three days a week. So starting strength, for example, we'll have you squatting every session, and then benching and overhead pressing alternate alternate sessions. And then deadlifting, and chin ups, alternate sessions, and everything is done with sets of five. So a lot of the really good programs that build that focus on strength, or in a low rep range between three and eight. And I think five is like a sweet spot. And if you go back to, I think it was episode two or three of the podcast, I talked about a bunch of different strength programs you can look into. And when you do sets of five, you go, let's go with the squat. For your very first session, you're going to live something moderate, you're

 

Philip Pape  23:34

not really sure how much you can, let's say it's 95 pounds, and you do three sets of five, and you take sufficient rest between each set. So you can get the three sets of five. And that means you're not going to just rest 30 seconds, it might be two to three minutes later on, it might be three to five minutes. And when you get super strong, because we're not focused on endurance here or getting your heart rate up, we're focused on getting stronger. So you're going to do three sets of five squats with couple, three minutes in between each set. Okay, then that night, you're going to sleep and get a good eight hours, you're going to eat plenty of food, you're going to take a rest day. And then the next day you're going to squat. Again, this is Wednesday, you're gonna do it again, three sets of five, but you're going to do it five pounds heavier 100 pound, rinse and repeat, do it Friday, then you get the whole weekend off do it Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, squat, squat, squat squat. Now this is in addition to the couple other movements in the program, but we're talking about the squat, either to go up five pounds, five pounds, five pounds. Now the goal here isn't to go in and not be sure if you're going to be able to get that weight, the goal is to go in and get that weight because you're stronger. And if you have to go up two and a half pounds do that do it. If you can go up 10 pounds, do it. And after a couple of months, you've gone from 95 to 215 on the bar for three sets of five and eventually after three to six months, you're going to be an intermediate and you're gonna move on to all sorts of other fun stuff. How do you part splits for day splits, maybe power building all these other fun things that we can talk beyond the scope of today? But let's bring it all the way back. What am I talking about? I'm talking about something that a lot of people don't do. A lot of people go in and they fling around 10 pound on balls for sets of 20. And I've nothing against the 10 pounds. But I just wanted to put that image in your head if you could do sets of 20 than 10 pound content. And what we need to do is stress ourselves enough, so the muscles know they need to. And that's training hard, that's training close to muscular failure failure, with the big compound lifts, that might be around two to three reps shy of the most you can do. But I don't want you to think about that, I just want you to add weight to the bar each week with one with an isolation movement like a barbell curl, you might go to, okay, so I can go on and on about training. The key here is that you need to stress yourself with muscular tension with heavy lifting with an effective program of progressive overload, do it over time, and within two to three months, you'll be much stronger than when you started. And that is the key to adding muscle mass. It's also why I always recommend spending at least six to nine months in a muscle phase. Now when you do that, and how you do it, we'll talk a little bit later in the scenarios. But that's the those are the fundamentals. So that's the first thing you need to improve your body composition is probably the most important that we're missing. So the second piece is nutrition. So this is the next most important that a lot of people don't, don't quite get the, you know, optimally. And we're going to start with macros. So your macronutrient composition, the amount of protein, fats and carbs you have in your diet, the percentage of those that contributes to your ability to build muscle, and your ability to maintain muscle, all three macros, and I'm gonna explain why. And I've done previous episodes where I dive into these in great detail. But just in the context of body composition, starting with protein, most people don't get anywhere near the amount of protein that the evidence shows we need to maximize muscle protein synthesis. Why do we care about muscle protein synthesis, because that is how when we are giving our body that stress from resistance training, our body can take the fuel coming in our protein, and shuttle it to the right metabolic processes to build as much muscle as possible. Okay. Similarly, when we're losing weight, we're trying to lose fat. That's how we hold on to as much of the muscle as possible. And it basically flips the body a fat overshooting effect on its head, it flips it around. So when you're resistance training, and you're getting a lot of protein, now when you lose weight, it's mostly fat. And when you gain weight, it's a combination of fat and muscle. So you flipped it around to now where you adding muscle, adding muscle, adding muscle cutting, fat cut, that's what we want. Now a few other things about protein. First of all, it's more satiating, it fills you up. So it helps with dieting. Second, it burns more calories when you digest it. So it helps with dieting, and then it supports muscle building and preservation, like we just talked about. But getting enough protein is definitely a challenge for people. And a lot of what we talked about today is the what, and it's a lot harder to do the how actually, it's even, it's the how isn't even that hard for people to understand. It's the doing it, that's hard for people to understand. This is why, you know, potentially having really good support structure, or a trainer or a coach can be super helpful to get through this initially. So how can you get enough protein? My general recommendation is you have four or five meals every day, evenly spaced, and every meal includes protein, one or two of those could be a protein shake initially when you're struggling to figure out how to get it all in. But as you move forward, you'll start figuring out how to get the protein from animal sources like that. Another topic that is sort of beyond the scope of today, but always happy to talk about questions. Okay, so that's protein. Now, carbs, okay, carbs, oh, carbs are terrible, right? So carbs are there. Now one of my best friends have to say I can, I can snuggle with carbs. And we have a great time. And it didn't used to be that way. Carbs were evil. You know, back in the day, for me, I did keto. I did paleo, I did all the things pretty popular today. And the I suffered for it. You know, I did CrossFit for like eight, nine years. And I did it fast it and I did a low carb, oh my gosh, if I redid it again, I would have loved to see how much different different my performance was, if I didn't do it fast, and I had carbs, which is what I do today. So carbs have to be high enough to fuel performance and recovery. Now there was a recent study that came out. I don't know if it's that recently might have been 2020. But I read a review about it by Dr. Bill Campbell, where they looked at two groups, one group that ate keto. And if you're not familiar with keto, it's just very high fat, very low. And the level of protein depends on the type of keto but the modified version of keto today has average level of protein. And they had one group doing keto one group doing a Western diet, a standard diet. These were bodybuilders eating like 3500 calories, so they had plenty of food coming in. And they had Zach's exact same amount of protein. It was sufficient protein like 150 or 200 grams of protein. And they were trying to build muscle and they found that the group that had the carbs, the non keto group gained about five pounds of muscle over this eight or 12 week period and the group that was keto gained like one pound that was enough to just tell me right there, that if I'm trying to build muscle, I've got to have carbs There's plenty of other evidence that supports this. But you can lose weight on a low carb diet, but you may not preserve as much muscle. And definitely, it's harder to build muscle on just saying, all right, and then fats, fats are usually around 25, or 30%. So when you're scripting all this out, depending on what phase you're in, you're going to start with protein, then you're going to pick up fats, and then everything that's left is for carbs. So if you're dieting, the carbs are gonna be lower. And if you're gaining, there'll be higher period, proteins usually around the same. And fats are a scale, they scale with how many calories. So that's the macronutrient composition. And the key, I don't think I mentioned it, but the key is to get around one gram per pound of protein. So if you're 150 pound female, you need close to 150 grams of protein. And that's just ballpark if you if you get 130. If you get 170. That's, that's good enough. But at least for me, when I see clients coming in, you know, 150 pound female, they're usually getting around 60, which is far short of what we need. And that can be the root of many of the issues that are experienced by that client. Previously, when it comes to feeling hungry, feeling like they have to go cut on low calories, feeling like dieting doesn't work, all these other things, part of it could just be a shortage of protein. Okay, so that's macro composition, then the second part of nutrition is the intake.

 

Philip Pape  31:19

Hey, this is Philip pape, letting you know that applications are now open for one on one coaching. If you're a busy working professional, who has tried dieting, and exercising for years, with little in the way of results, and you want to lose fat, get lean or feel confident in your body without excessive dieting, cardio or restrictions, just go to wits & weights.com/coaching, to apply. You can go back to the last couple episodes I did where I talked all about gaining and losing at different rates and whatnot. But basically, you want a reasonable deficit, if you're dieting to lose fat, and you want a reasonable surplus if you're building muscle. And this is one thing a lot of people get wrong when they crash diet, they go way higher than this rate of loss. And then of course, they don't try to build muscle. So that's an A not so a reasonable deficit, to remind everyone is quarter to 1% of your weight per week. And a reasonable surplus if your building is point one to a quarter percent per week. And you can use tracking and food logging to do this more precisely to control your weight gain or your weight loss. We use diet breaks, we use periodization. And then we use food selection to help us win, right. So when it comes to body composition, the importance of intake is simply that once we've dialed in protein and resistance training, we can now use the calorie level to help us go in the direction whether that's fat loss, or muscle gain. So if we're doing fat loss, there's other things we have to build. There's other skills, we have to develop learning to eat high volume foods, nutrient dense foods, you know more foods from whole sources, just to manage hunger and to increase our sensitivity to taste. And the idea is that as we incorporate those kinds of foods, whether we are dieting or gaining that's basically what our diet looks like, with not very major changes, like we don't go from processed foods to Whole Foods and vice versa, which is something we see a lot when it comes to binge eating, overeating and so on. When you go on a very restrictive diet, you cut out all these things. And when you come back, you want to add them all back in. Well, we don't want to do that we want to enjoy the variety and diversity of food out there. But we want to do it skillfully with some restraint, you know, and do it in a smart way. And then one last piece of nutrition, I should mention is the health aspect. Okay, not I'm not talking about clean food or any I'm talking, getting enough micronutrients for health, right? If we care about disease and things like that, get enough micronutrients, which comes from a diverse diet and vegetables and things like that get enough fiber, which helps with our digestion, with our bowel movements, with our colon health, with our gut, microbiome, and then saturated fat, keeping that to a reasonable level, which is about 10% of our overall calories. And that helps with cholesterol, heart disease things. Okay,

 

Philip Pape  34:05

so that's nutrition. And then the last aspect of body composition is going to be movement. And I split this into two things, steps and cardio. So four steps, just checking for steps, we want to I would say aim for somewhere around eight to 12,000 steps a day. But if you're currently getting to, I would like you to shoot for if you're currently getting four, I'd like to shoot for six 2000 steps is like walking about 15 to 20 minutes, it's a mile. And most of us can find a way to do that versus what we do today. So I encourage you to do that. So if you get more steps, you're going to increase your metabolic rate your metabolism, your total daily energy expenditure, expenditure, some times quite dramatic, right in addition to the training and protein, but steps or walking is also important for overall health, for movement for energy for mood for lots of things that we did still don't quite understand exactly why As physiologically, but we know it's true, we know there's a correlation between getting around 7500 steps or more, and a significant drop in mortality disease, and all these issues. And maybe intuitively, it's just the fact that, hey, you're always moving, you're active, it keeps you doing things that prevent you from, you know, sitting around all day, and just overall is correlated with all these other good practices. So that's steps. And by the way, when you're dieting steps can come in handy when you when you ramp those steps up, you know, if you're currently getting 6000, you ramp it up to 10,000. During a dieting phase, you might see your expenditure actually go up where you could actually more calories than you would. And then cardio. So I want to emphasize that we want to limit cardio to primarily walking, and then bursts of cardio as needed as a little bit of a calorie burn boost. But we want to stay away from these long bouts of medium intensity cardio, because they affect recovery from resistance training. And they could also cause other issues, if it's something like running where we have issues with your joints, that can cause other recovery problems. But the other thing that too much cardio does is it sends an endurance signal to your body that we need to be efficient with calories. And that's not what we want to do, we want to be inefficient with calories by prioritizing muscle. So the rule of thumb is to limit that kind of cardio to 50% of your lifting time. So if you live three days a week for an hour, that's three hours, you shouldn't do more than an hour half hour and a half of cardio. And that doesn't include walking. So like walk as much as you want seriously, you can walk for hours and hours, but limited to 50% of your time. And I prefer modes like high intensity interval training, with a short, short all out effort and a two to 3x. Rest, so on off on off on a one to two ratio or one to three ratio, or just something like walking on an incline treadmill riding a bike. Okay, so now, I've covered a lot here. And I just want to go ahead and apply these three scenarios to some or apply these two, three real life scenarios. skinny fat, somewhat overweight, and very overweight. And in all three cases, if you are a client of mine, you came in whatever situation you came in with, we want to set you up for success first, okay, I'm not going to stress your body right away with muscle building or fat gain, we're going to find your true maintenance calories. First, this might take a week, it might take two months. And while we're doing that, and by we I mean this is what you can do as well is while you're finding your maintenance calories, which means you have to eat enough food, right? Don't keep trying to diet get up to the highest amount you can eat without losing weight. While doing that you're going to start these other things we talked about, you're going to start resistance training, you can work on getting more steps, and you can increase your protein. And you can go back to Episode 25, where I go into great detail about this whole metabolic prep phase. So for most people, this means eating more and doing these other. Okay, once we've done that, no matter who you are, you start with that, then there are specific goals for each scenario. So the first scenario is skinny fat now by skinny fat. I mean, maybe it's a loaded term or controversial term. But I think we all know what it mean. This is the result of the repeated dieting we talked about before the body fat overshooting. But this is someone who's now dieted again, and they've lost a bunch of weight. And they're at what they thought was their target weight, their ideal weight, let's say they were 170 pound female. And now they've gotten down to 140. And they're like, Yeah, I hit my weight. But I don't feel so great.

 

Philip Pape  38:32

I don't like how I look, I'm not comfortable and body, I've got excess skin, I just don't have great energy. And no, my sleep is not great, something's off on my hormones, and on and on. And, you know, you might have loved handles, you know, kind of a flabby midsection or whatever. And I've been there myself. So and that's what we call skinny fat, because your body composition is actually a pretty high percentage of fat even though you're at a weight. So for a person like this, I'm gonna go right into building muscle right after we do the prep phase, we're gonna go right to building muscle because you don't need to lose more weight. So right away, you're gonna go in a calorie surplus of like we said before, point one 2.25%. And honestly, somebody who's at this level, I might push them if they're a newbie, I might push him to the point three 5% a week, you know, battle one and a half percent a month. Because you're not going to gain that much fat, you're gonna gain a lot of muscle, you're going to be very responsive, most likely. And you're going to spend at least six to nine months in that. Once you've done that you've now let's say you've gained 20 pounds, we've got back up to 160, maybe half of that as muscle and now you spend about 12 weeks losing 10 pounds of fat. Now you've now you've gone from 140 to 150 and all of it pure additional muscle. I'm not going to do the math here, but you can figure out how the body composition has obviously improved if you've gone from 140 to 150 and that extra 10 pounds is pure muscle. Okay, so that's it for skinny fat. Now you if you thought I was going to spend a lot more time talking about each scenario you I guess the big surprise is that all the lead up to now has shown you that the process is basically the same no matter who you are, which is a good thing, right simplifies it. But you might have a different starting point and have to go one direction or the other, before you finally get to your ideal composition. Okay, so the second category is someone who is somewhat overweight. And I would define that as like 10 to 30 pounds overweight. Now, when we say overweight, we mean, you, you think you're about 10 to 30 pounds over what you want to be at. But you may not know that what you want to be at is a different weight once you've improved your body composition, but that's okay, right? Because you know, from your history, hey, every time I've been, you know, 150, I been a little bit more comfortable with my body at 170. Right? You kind of know that. But now, once we work on body composition, and you improve that, you might, you might say, Hey, I look great at 180, I feel great, I have extra strength, like I'm strong and light at the same time. That's my new ideal way you're gonna get there it happens. But in the meantime, we're going to say that, once you've gone through the metabolic prep phase, we can actually go either direction here, okay, I would encourage you to continue at maintenance, or even a slight surplus, believe it or not, to build muscle first at this point, because you don't have you're not that much overweight, and you're you're a beginner. So I would rather you take advantage of what they call the newbie gains, and gain as much muscle as you can right now, because it's easy to cut the fat off later. And it's gonna make you feel better, you're gonna eat more carbs, you're going to establish all these new habits and a much easier way, you're not going to worry about dieting, you're going to shift up your expenditure, all those things. And then after, again, about maybe six months of building you can cut. But here's the estrus. If you come to me, you're 2030 pounds overweight, and

 

Philip Pape  41:45

you're just like, there's no way you're going to have me gain weight, like there's no way, that's crazy, I came to you to lose weight, I'm not gaining weight, okay, in that case, what we can do is either keep you at maintenance or going to a very slight deficit. And what I found with a lot of people, if they have that extra weight, they can still build muscle since they're new to the game, while losing a little bit of weight on the way. And while they're doing that their expenditure goes up with their steps in their training. And their deficit actually increases without them trying to lead increases because their expenditure goes up, even if the calories stay the same, right? So the gap gets bigger, you end up losing more weight. And then after say maybe three months, you're probably around your ideal weight, what you thought it was, that's what I would say, Okay, let's, let's stop this right now. And let's really focus on building muscle. Which brings me to the final category, which is very overweight, okay. And this is more than 30 pounds. But typically, we're probably looking at 50 6070 pounds or more very overweight, lot of weight to use, lose. And for men, this man, this might be your 25 30%, probably even higher body fat, maybe it's like in the 40s or 50s, potentially, of percent body fat. So right here, right off the bat, we go to the metabolic prep, and then go right into an aggressive deficit, like this is the time where you do want to just lose fat for your that's more important than your cholesterol, your blood pressure, your joints, all the things we talked about, let's lose fat, but we're doing it while training, getting protein and getting steps. Magic happens, okay? Because this is where body re composition usually occurs, body re composition is simultaneously building muscle while losing fat. And when you're very overweight, it's actually pretty easy to do. Because you have such a reserve of calories on your body, that you are feeding yourself from your body. I mean, that sounds kind of gross. But you know what I mean, you're feeding yourself from your fat reserves in for quite a while. And I've seen this happen. And often what happens is your expenditure goes up, your weight goes down, you're in a big deficit. And yet, it doesn't take a huge cutting calories to do it. Because of all the other things. Then at some point, you can decide, okay, if you've done it for four or five months, we need a diet break before we continue, or hey, you know, I'm a little overweight now. But I feel so much better. I have so much more muscle. Now. Let's stop with the diet. And let's go the other direction very conservatively for a while before we cut all the way to my final level. Okay, I just covered a ton of information. And as usual, I would say at this point you the listener, the watcher can do one of two things. You can either take this information, study it, rewatch it, reach out to me with questions, I'll answer questions whenever you send them to me, I love answering questions, go forth, conquer, give it a go. Or you can work with a coach who can take you through these phases. Make all the adjustments along the way. Provide some accountability, some education, some confidence, so then you can continue on so if you need a coach, I am currently accepting applications for one on one coaching. You just have to DM me on Instagram at Wits & Weights or Facebook or go to my website wits & weights.com/coaching. And we together will go through this entire process and much more while all the nuances all the details, all the individualized First approach that you might need that you know, make you unique compared to someone else. To improve your body composition over a six month period, you get weekly check ins, private group access 24/7 direct access to me in our professional app. And then I also offer a guarantee that if you don't achieve the improvement in body composition you want by the end of six months, I will work with you for free until you do because I know this stuff works. So again, just DM me on Instagram at Wits & Weights or Facebook or go to wits & weights.com, forward slash coaching. And if you found this discussion helpful, if you have questions, just comment on the video, click the link in the show notes or go to wits & weights.com and look for the Ask Philip section on the homepage. And I promise to get back to you with answer. Thanks as always for supporting the show. Thanks for listening to the show. Before you go, I have a quick favor to ask. If you enjoy the podcast. Let me know by leaving a five star review in Apple podcasts and telling others about the show. Thanks again for joining me Philip Pape in this episode of Wits & Weights. I'll see you next time and stay strong.