Eat More To Lose Weight? (The Iron Triangle of Fat Loss) | Ep 204
Just eat more food and you'll lose the weight!
This advice has been floating around the fitness industry for years and it still persists. Today, we are going to use an engineering concept called the Iron Triangle to show why this idea doesn't hold up.
What looks like "eating more" might actually be your first step toward effective fat loss, but not for the reasons you might expect.
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Main Takeaways:
The Fat Loss Iron Triangle (Energy, Sustainability, Speed) reveals why "eat more to lose weight" advice often fails. You can't optimize all three factors at once.
Accurate calorie tracking is crucial. Many who think they're undereating are actually consuming more than they realize, leading to stalled progress.
Sustainable fat loss requires finding your personal balance within the Iron Triangle, prioritizing consistent, moderate progress over extreme measures.
Episode Mentioned:
Episode summary:
We take a deep dive into the persistent myth that eating more can lead to weight loss. This notion has permeated the fitness industry, creating confusion and frustration for many. Through a comprehensive examination of energy balance, metabolism, and the engineering principle of the iron triangle, this episode aims to set the record straight.
The episode begins by addressing the widespread belief that increasing calorie intake can somehow accelerate weight loss. Philip Pape uses the iron triangle concept—comprising cost, quality, and schedule—to illustrate the fallacies in this idea. Just as in project management, where optimizing one aspect often compromises another, the same applies to fat loss. The iron triangle's principles are applied to managing energy intake (cost), sustainability (quality), and rate of fat loss (schedule).
Heather's journey is a poignant example of how misguided coaching can exacerbate confusion. Misunderstandings about energy balance and metabolism often lead people to believe they are eating too little, when in fact, they are not accurately tracking their calorie intake. Heather's story underscores the importance of precise calorie tracking and how a perceived increase in food intake often results from more balanced eating habits rather than simply eating more.
The episode then delves into the complexities of energy balance, emphasizing that a calorie deficit is essential for fat loss. The notion that eating more will boost metabolism and lead to fat loss is debunked by highlighting the importance of accurate calorie tracking. When individuals begin to track their calories meticulously, they often discover they are consuming more than they realized. This newfound awareness allows for better dietary adjustments, which can seem like an increase in food intake but is actually a move towards a balanced diet.
The iron triangle's relevance to fat loss is further explored by breaking down its three components. Energy, or calorie intake and expenditure, is the foundation of fat loss. A calorie deficit is necessary, but it must be balanced with sustainability and rate of loss. Sustainability refers to how well one can adhere to a fat loss plan over time. An overly aggressive calorie deficit might lead to faster results but is often unsustainable due to increased hunger and lower energy levels.
Rate of loss is the third component, where a moderate, sustainable rate of loss is emphasized. Rapid weight loss can lead to muscle loss and other negative health impacts, making it crucial to find a balanced approach. The episode advocates for a moderate calorie deficit that allows for muscle preservation and overall well-being.
Consistency and realistic goal-setting are highlighted as the secrets to long-term success. The importance of setting achievable goals and maintaining consistent efforts cannot be overstated. Listeners are encouraged to focus on sustainable practices rather than quick fixes, which often lead to frustration and setbacks.
The episode also tackles the psychological aspects of weight loss. The belief that eating more will lead to weight loss often stems from misunderstandings about calorie tracking. When people start tracking their calories accurately, they become more aware of their actual intake, leading to better dietary habits. This newfound awareness can make it seem like they are eating more, but in reality, they are simply eating the right amount for fat loss.
Philip Pape's engineering background adds a unique perspective to the discussion. By applying the iron triangle principle to fat loss, he provides a structured framework that helps listeners understand the trade-offs involved in any weight loss strategy. This approach encourages a more analytical and evidence-based mindset, moving away from oversimplified and misleading advice.
In summary, this episode of Wits and Weights offers a comprehensive guide to debunking the 'Eat More, Lose Weight' myth. By examining the concepts of energy balance, metabolism, and the iron triangle, listeners gain valuable insights into effective fat loss strategies. Heather's story serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of misguided coaching and the importance of accurate calorie tracking. The episode underscores the necessity of a sustainable, moderate calorie deficit to preserve muscle mass and overall well-being. Consistency and realistic goal-setting are emphasized as the keys to long-term success.
For anyone struggling with conflicting weight loss advice, this episode provides clarity and actionable steps to achieve fat loss goals effectively. By focusing on the right balance of energy intake, sustainability, and rate of loss, listeners can navigate their weight loss journey with confidence and achieve lasting results.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:03
Just eat more food and you'll lose the weight.
Philip Pape: 0:06
Have you ever heard that advice? All you got to do is eat more calories and the weight's just going to start flying off. This advice has been floating around the fitness industry for years and it still persists. Today, we are going to use an engineering concept called the iron triangle to show why this idea doesn't hold up. This claim doesn't hold up. We'll explore how misunderstandings whether it's energy balance or other elements behind the scenes are leading to people continuing to make this claim. You'll learn why.
Philip Pape: 0:35
What looks like eating more might actually be your first step toward effective fat loss, but not for the reasons you might expect. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast 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're breaking down the eat more to lose weight idea or, shall I say, myth using a principle again straight from engineering the iron triangle, also called the project management triangle or the cost quality schedule triangle. This notion that eating more will boost your metabolism, will speed up fat loss, has become very popular, and it often comes from a misunderstanding, namely of how many calories we are actually eating and actually burning. Just this week, I talked to somebody in one of the communities I'm in who didn't realize that your metabolism adapts and changes, and that's just one of the misunderstandings going on. Today we'll uncover how people who think they're eating too little often find out they're eating more than they thought once they start tracking accurately. And that's the discovery that can make it seem like you are eating more to lose weight, when really you're just finally eating the right amount for fat loss. I do want to give a quick shout out to listener Heather M, because Heather sent me a message about struggling with this advice that inspired today's episode, and her experience shows the confusion that many people face with calorie tracking and weight loss plateaus. Let's break down this myth using our engineering lens and uncover the truth about calories, metabolism and effective fat loss in the context of the eat more to lose weight advice.
Philip Pape: 2:31
Now, this advice usually pops up when someone has been dieting for a while and then they hit a plateau, they stop losing weight, and then they hear this idea hey, you're probably just not eating enough, you need to eat more. If you eat more, you'll boost your metabolism and you'll start losing fat again. And it sounds very appealing, right, and it sounds like one of those. Ooh, I didn't realize that that must be it, especially when people put the label science-based or evidence-based and yes, I use those labels as well, but it's often used as a bait and switch to get you into their coaching program to say, look, all you've got to do is eat more food. Doesn't that sound great? But this is an oversimplified approach. And then it makes you more frustrated and confused when it doesn't work, or doesn't work like you expect, or you get blamed by your coach for not hitting the exact number. And then, oh, you didn't hit your exact. You know 1953 calories that I told you to hit. You're over by five or 10 and that's why it's not working. And specifically, I'm talking about a real person here who wrote in again Heather. She was told to eat 2000 calories a day and when she went over by even five or 10, she was criticized for overeating, right. And this is ridiculous. Like I can't imagine coaching somebody and being that much of an a-hole about it and blaming the client in that way. And this, this is ridiculous. Like I can't imagine coaching somebody and being um, that much of an a-hole about it and blaming the client in that way and obviously the guy had no idea what he was talking about. And that's why I have a podcast, um, to kind of dispel these things, because this kind of advice is nonsense and it doesn't work and it's not going to be consistent and it causes so much confusion. And so here's what we're going to do today I'm going to introduce something called the iron triangle and then we're going to apply it to this concept In engineering, in engineering project management specifically, the iron triangle represents the balance between three factors that effectively compete with each other cost, quality and schedule.
Philip Pape: 4:23
And the principle states that you cannot optimize all three simultaneously. If you improve one, it often means compromising on another. And so let's apply this concept to fat loss and its overall energy and calorie situation. First, we have cost. What is cost in our case? In our case, cost is energy your calories consumed, right, what you eat, your calorie intake and your calories burned or expenditure. So it's just the balance of energy that is your cost. Okay, the cost generally thinking in fat loss, your cost is the deficit that you're in to be able to get that fat loss.
Philip Pape: 4:59
The second leg of the triangle is quality. In our case, that quality is sustainability. It's how well you can adhere to the plan long-term, how high quality the plan is so that you could actually adhere to it and get it done. And then the third leg is schedule, or time, and in our case that is our rate of loss, how quick we're going to go and lose the fat. Right, and just as in engineering, we can't optimize all three.
Philip Pape: 5:23
So think about engineering. If you want to go faster, if you want to create the product faster, it's going to cost more. It's going to cost more in terms of people and overtime in getting suppliers to send you parts faster. So you're going to have to compromise by costing more. Or if you want to go faster, you might have to lower the quality, you might have to reduce some of the requirements and not get as many bells and whistles in your product or software. So, similarly, we can't optimize our energy balance and our sustainability and our rate of loss. In other words, we can't eat 5,000 calories and lose fat or we can't go at a super fast rate of loss, like lose three pounds a week and maintain a decent amount of energy right, we'd have to be in an extreme deficit to do that, right, or we'd have to compromise, sustainability and quality, because it's so hard to do it. So it's the same idea. And let's just break each of these down so you can see what this has to do with the eating more to lose weight.
Philip Pape: 6:27
Let's start with energy, energy, calorie, energy balance right, this is your cost. Okay, this is the foundation of fat loss. It's the foundation of changing your body mass, right, from a nutrition perspective. We're not even going to talk about strength training or specific macros. We're just talking about changing body mass. Your body needs a certain amount of energy to function and especially to function optimally. Right, that's where the compromise comes in. Like, we know we need a calorie deficit to lose weight, but if the calorie deficit's too high, we're going to start influencing negatively our hormones, we're going to lose energy, we're going to crash and burn, we're going to have cravings, we're not going to be able to adhere. Our sustainability is going to go down, right. So the size of your calorie deficit directly impacts the other two factors your sustainability and your rate of loss. Right Now let's talk about eating more.
Philip Pape: 7:17
A slight increase in calories can sometimes help in terms of your energy, your metabolism, your hormones right. But if you'd simply do so without regard for energy balance, it's not going to lead to fat loss, unless you're in a deficit. You're not going to lose fat period period. You still have to be in a calorie deficit, all right, so let's set that aside for now. That's the first leg in the iron triangle.
Philip Pape: 7:42
The second leg is our quality leg, sustainability, and this refers to how well you can adhere to your fat loss plan, both short-term and long-term. Right Meaning by long-term, I mean if it's going to take many weeks, we want to stick to it. But even in the short term, we don't want it to totally rip us apart within a week or two and then we give up. A more aggressive deficit might lead to faster results, but it could be harder to sustain due to increased hunger, lower energy, the impact to your social life and how neurotic and obsessive you have to be about all the tracking and effectively saying no to things. Right, we don't want to be in that state. This is where many people stumble. When they're told to eat more, they might again feel better temporarily because they have more energy, maybe they're no longer in a low energy state. But then, if it puts them out of a deficit, if it puts them up to their maintenance calories or higher, it's not going to give them the fat loss. It's not going to be sustainable for fat loss either. Interesting, right, it goes both ways. That's the second leg.
Philip Pape: 8:44
The third leg is your time, your schedule, which, in our case, is how fast we lose weight or lose fat. This is how quickly we go, our rate of loss. And, yes, a larger deficit will lead to faster fat loss, but it might compromise sustainability, right, because it's just too fast, you don't get to eat very much, you become hangry and miserable and it could potentially lead to muscle loss, which is even more dangerous. When we talk about fat loss, we don't want to lose muscle. If we go too fast, we're going to lose muscle. So when we go back to, should you eat more to lose weight?
Philip Pape: 9:17
It often ignores all of these factors, right, but it essentially promises a violation of the iron triangle. It promises quick results without a cost, right, and the sustainability kind of falls in between, because of course, eating more is gonna be more sustainable, but it's not gonna give you fat loss. So we have to balance all of these, that we consider the rate of loss along with the other two factors. So how do we do that right. So if we're violating the iron triangle with this nonsense claim that you can eat more and lose weight, how do we apply the iron triangle to make it effective? All right Again, let's start with energy, with cost. Instead of eating more, why don't we focus on eating the right amount, which means we have to actually create a deficit that aligns with our goals? And the only way to do that is to track and measure. And so here's where I'm going to talk about.
Philip Pape: 10:12
The biggest, I'll say, cause of people giving this advice is that you are typically okay. Let's put it this way. Let's say you do eat more and you start to lose weight. Is it because you ate more? No, it's because you think you're eating more. Why do you think you're eating more? Because you probably weren't tracking your calories accurately in the past. Now you are, and now that you know what you are eating, you probably start to tighten up what you eat in response to trying to hit certain targets, and you feel better and you have more protein, right. And now you set the deficit that you actually want and it seems like you're eating more than you were before, but you're actually eating the accurate amount because of your tracking. And another reason for this is usually, when you are not tracking, you're binging on the weekends, right, and you're starving yourselves during the week. When you start tracking, you start to balance that out and it seems like every day you're actually eating a little more because on most days you probably are, and on it seems like every day you're actually eating a little more because on most days you probably are, and on the weekends you're eating a lot less than you were, and the net effect for the average for the week is a deficit. Okay, a lot of this is mental. So, as far as energy goes, you have to know what your maintenance calories are and what your deficit needs to be.
Philip Pape: 11:26
Go listen to my recent episode called your First Cut Lose 10 to 30 pounds of fat, something like that, your first cut. And I talk about these principles. All right, the second part of the triangle we can apply is the sustainability or the quality piece. This is where we choose a deficit that you can maintain consistently over time. It may be a slower rate of loss than you quote unquote want, right, but it will lead to you sticking with it and getting the result. I think I posted a threads post recently. It said something like.
Philip Pape: 11:56
Unsuccessful people will say I need to lose 20 pounds in eight weeks. A successful person will say how fast can I go where it's sustainable and I can do it? And then, how long will it take me to lose 20 pounds? Right, there's a difference between the two. The third leg of the triangle, then, is the rate of loss, the time right, understanding that faster isn't always better. Effectively, what I just said a moderate, sustainable rate of loss, like half a percent of your body weight a week. That is what leads to you getting the outcome and sticking with it.
Philip Pape: 12:29
And now you've got the triangle nicely balanced between energy, sustainability and time, and you could actually get there, rather than this weird, nebulous, uncertain state you were in before, where you're like I don't really know what I'm eating. I feel hungry sometimes, not others. I'm probably binging on the weekends, but I'm not sure how much alcohol I had at the Mexican restaurant. This fit pro, 22 year old, on Instagram, says I just need to eat more to lose weight. And lo and behold, I start eating more and I lose weight. Well, not really Right, or you probably don't, actually, because you weren't accurately tracking before, and now you are All right. So the problem isn't that you're eating too little, it's you're not accurately tracking what you're eating, right?
Philip Pape: 13:15
I've had clients come to me convinced they're eating 1200 calories a day and not losing weight. Right, I'm just. I've cut my calories so low I'm down to 1100. I'm still not losing weight. One of the first questions I ask is are you tracking? And usually the answer is, well, no. But and right there I know what the problem is. And so when we implement precise tracking, we discover they're consuming much more on average per day. Right. On average, it might be 1100 calories Monday through Friday, and then 2000 calories on Saturday and Sunday. Right, and so sometimes it's you know, hundreds of calories more than what they thought, hundreds of calories more than what they thought.
Philip Pape: 13:51
And that is why the eat more advice is so, so dangerous and so misleading. Because if you're already eating more than you realize, if you just indiscriminately add more calories, it's going to move you further from your goal, you're going to start drifting up in weight. And now you're going to say what the F? You know what is going on. That's nonsense, and it is, and if you can understand this and understand the iron triangle, that there is a, there's a balance between cost, quality and schedule or, in our, our cases I'm sorry, in our case energy balance, sustainability and rate of loss. Ah then, instead of blindly following advice to eat more, you find the right balance of those three things for your specific situation. So let me just recap Eat more to lose weight is an oversimplification and usually completely false. The iron triangle energy, sustainability, rate of loss helps us understand the trade-offs involved in any weight loss strategy. Success comes from balancing these three, not from just increasing calories. And then tying this all together is accurate tracking and measuring, which is crucial to understand your true energy balance so that you can make informed decisions.
Philip Pape: 15:07
All right, if today's episode resonated with you, if you found it interesting, if you're like, oh, I never thought of it that way before. The iron triangle, that's pretty cool, or ah, now I understand why eating more to lose weight isn't what I thought it was, or why it may or may not work, depending on your situation. I want you to just share this episode with a friend who's been struggling with the conflicting advice out there. We are skeptics of the industry here. I want more people to be I'll call it enlightened, but really just to be inquisitive and curious, asking these questions and getting answers that apply to them, that have the nuance and context necessary to make them work in practice. So share it with a friend.
Philip Pape: 15:47
If you want to take that next step and really, really support me, please give me a five-star rating and review. In Apple and Spotify, we don't get enough of those. Very few people actually take the time to do that. I understand there's friction involved, but it really doesn't take long. Just go right now in your podcast app as you're listening to me right this moment scroll down to where it says write a review. Click that button and give it five stars and type a little blurb just what's on your mind. Hey, I love how this show XYZ done send. I would really appreciate it. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember that in fat loss, as in engineering, it's all about finding the right balance. This is Philip Pape, and you've been listening to Wits and Weights. I'll talk to you next time.
