Ep 12: Gaining Weight to Get Lean
It seems that everyone wants to get “lean” these days. There’s almost an obsession with six-pack abs, visual muscularity, and thinness if you’re to believe the legions of fitness influencers who appear ready for an instant photo shoot on any given day.
I’ve got nothing against maintaining a healthy weight, and in fact this podcast is all about finding a sustainable way to get stronger, build muscle, and stay healthy. But if you were to ask yourself, “what exactly is my goal when it comes to body composition?,” most of us would answer that we want to be lean, as in lower our body fat percentage.
The reasons why are many, from improved performance and cardiovascular health to just feeling and looking good, often measured by whether we can fit into our favorite pair of pants again.
But it often leads to a cycle of aggressive dieting and gaining back the weight (and then some) in an attempt to “see our abs” rather than a steady, consistent approach that results in “leanness” without the extreme dieting, hunger, and disappointment at failing to reach this coveted goal.
Today I want to talk about a refreshingly sustainable, enjoyable approach to getting lean by gaining weight! This episode is all about the benefits of using a nice, long building phase to develop muscle, increase your metabolism, and set yourself up for a much easier dieting phase later on. You’ll be able to perform better in the gym, eat more, and eventually reach your goal without (as much) suffering.
In today’s episode, we cover:
Two approaches to getting lean, one which often fails
My recent, successful 15-week muscle-building phase
Listener Q&A about wearables, calories, and dieting
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Transcript
This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.
[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.
[00:00:27]Welcome to episode 12 of Wits & Weights. It seems that everyone wants to get quote unquote lean these days. There's almost an obsession with six pack abs visual muscularity and thinness. If are to believe the legions of fitness influencers who appear ready for an instant photo shoot on any given day.
[00:00:55] And now I've got nothing against maintaining a healthy weight. And in fact, this podcast is all about finding a sustainable way to get stronger, build muscle and stay healthy. But if you were to ask yourself what exactly is my goal, when it comes to body composition, most of us would answer that we want to be E lean as in lower our body fat percentage.
[00:01:19] Now the reasons why are many from improved performance and cardiovascular health to just feeling and looking good, often measured by whether we can fit into our favorite pair of pants again. But this often leads to a cycle of aggressive dieting and gaining back the weight and then some in an attempt to quote unquote, see our abs rather than a steady, consistent approach that results in leanness without the extreme dieting, hunger and disappointment at failing to reach this coveted goal.
[00:01:54] Today. I want to talk about a refreshingly sustainable, enjoyable approach to getting lean by gaining weight. This episode is all about the benefits of using a nice long building phase to develop muscle, increase your metabolism and set yourself up for a much easier dieting phase later or on you'll be able to perform better in the gym, eat more and eventually reach your goal without suffering.
[00:02:21] So in today's episode, I cover. Two approaches to getting lean. One of which often fails and one which is much more sustainable. My recent successful 15 week muscle building phase. As an example of one way, you can do this. And finally, I have listener Q and a, a question I'll be answering about wearables, calories and dieting.
[00:02:45] Let's get into the show. All right. The first thing I wanna cover is this idea that the best way to get lean is to burn fat. And it sounds great. Uh, oftentimes it's a combination of dieting and excessive exercise, usually in the form of cardio that is at least in the common zeitgeist of how to do the us.
[00:03:07] But what happens is if you've never gone through a muscle building phase, if you've never added muscle to your frame, through lifting. And you're just trying to get thinner so that you can see your abs or your muscles, whatever, what you're gonna end up doing is being a lighter skinnier, but fatter version of yourself who has a lower metabolism, meaning you're not gonna eat as much in as you diet.
[00:03:34] You'll have to eat less and less. To reduce weight, which is gonna make you miserable. Let's just admit it. It often leads to yo-yo dieting where you rebound, you hit your weight. Great. I'm I've got my goal. I'm thin. Uh, but I'm pretty disappointed at how I look, but I'm thin and now I need to eat again. And then you start gaining the weight and because you've undergone this metabolic adaptation to a small extent, or sometimes an extreme extent.
[00:04:06] Your body is that much more primed to gain more weight and potentially more than you had before. Furthermore, if you're always cutting calories, always trying to get lean or thin, you will never have the performance you need in the gym, especially if you're cutting carbs, for example, to do it, which is a, a common approach these days.
[00:04:28] And this is just an overall inability to get stronger. Keeps you weak. You won't have muscle and you'll just be. Miserable skinnier, but fatter version of yourself. Now, I'm sorry to say, many of us have gone through this in trying to get lean. You may be overweight today, but at some point in your life, I'm going to bet that you've tried a fat loss phase and you were somewhat successful in the short term often through some sort of.
[00:04:56] Diet like keto, low carb Atkins. You didn't add any form of progressive lifting or an idea of building muscle and you got kind of thin or skinny, but you still didn't really see any muscle. Didn't really see the abs. You just look skinny and weak. Let's contrast that with a different approach, the approach that I'm in favor of the approach that.
[00:05:22] Many of us have discovered through a different strategy, one based on improving your body composition in the other direction. And that is getting bigger by adding muscle, adding lean tissue and then dieting. And the idea with this approach is that you enter a long and slow. Muscle building phase, you supply sufficient calories to your body so that as you are lifting, using progressive overload using the.
[00:05:54] Tried and true principles that we've talked about before on this podcast. And we'll talk about again, of objective progress, training, hard, doing it consistently. You will grow muscle over time, especially if you were a newer lifter, newer lifters can gain anywhere from one to maybe even four pounds of muscle in a month, which is quite a bit of lean tissue.
[00:06:18] And the more muscle you have, we've talked about this before, as well, the higher, your total daily energy expenditure metabolism for a variety of reasons, some of which we still can't fully explain some of which come down to the tissue itself. The fact that muscle tissue is more expensive. But there's a systemic effect that you see it inevitably.
[00:06:36] I've seen it myself. I see it with all the other folks in our community who go through phases of building phases of dieting. And inevitably, there's this shift up in your metabolism as you gain weight and muscle. Now, as you gain muscle while lifting and eating more, that is eating in a caloric surplus.
[00:06:54] You are gonna gain a bit of fat. That's just inevitable. And I think this is the thing that scares most people. The thought that there's no magic way to just gain muscle. You're going to gain all types of tissue. The thing is, again, if you are a newer lifter or even intermediate, you can still gain quite a BI bit of muscle as a percentage of that game.
[00:07:16] And then it's a lot easier. To lose fat fairly quickly versus the gaining of the muscle. And you're able to lose fat without losing much muscle. You retain that muscle and that will ultimately result in you being leaner than you were before at the same body weight. Now, if you've ever seen athletes or powerless or body builders or anybody, who's worked hard on their physique, And you try to guess their weight chances are you're gonna underestimate their weight by a pretty good margin because a leaner body will look thinner.
[00:07:53] It's filled out with a, a, a tighter kind of physique to it, but you can still be a heavier weight because muscle's denser. It sort of skews our perception of what we do talk about when we mean fat versus thin. What we mean by lean. And then we get into the rat race of just trying to lose weight, to get lean.
[00:08:11] My argument today that I, that I'm trying to get to here is that. By eating and lifting. We get stronger. We build muscle, we take in more calories, we have better performance. We then enjoy ourselves in the gym. As we see progress, the more progress we make and the bigger we get, the more progress we make still.
[00:08:32] And we get to a point where we say, you know, I'm putting on maybe a little too much fat, but I've, I know I've gained a lot of muscle as evidence by the objective progress in the gym. And now I can go on a steady or maybe slightly aggressive if I want to fat cutting phase, where I try to retain as much muscle as I can.
[00:08:51] Cut off that little bit of extra fat or even more and result in a leaner version of myself. In fact, you may end up at a slightly higher weight than before you started the building and then cutting phases, and yet still be leaner. And isn't that our goal, best of all, not only that you probably have shifted up your TDE, your energy expenditure.
[00:09:15] To the point where now you can eat more at the same weight than you used to. And that to me is an extremely sustainable approach. Let's just walk through an example, right? I'm gonna use my typical 180 pound male. And we're talking about a new-ish lifter. Let's say you've been lifting for six months.
[00:09:33] You've gotten past the, the new beef phase. You've gotten past the awkwardness of learning the lifts, and now you're starting to make. Steady consistent progress. And you're 180 pound man with 22% body fat. Now in subjective terms, if you were to look at someone with 22% body fat, you would say they actually look pretty healthy, but maybe with a little fluff, maybe a little gut or love handles, maybe a little bit on the backside, you know, wherever ends to collect for an individual, we all have our spots.
[00:10:04] You know, I'm not gonna talk about, um, obese or extremely overweight folks on this example, because that's a different scenario. I, I feel that if you are very overweight to an unhealthy level and yes, having too high of a weight is a health concern. It's not about the physique. It's not about the antibody image.
[00:10:25] It's about health, cardiovascular health, uh, and metabolic disease, et cetera. So if you're very overweight, my suggestion would be hit the gym hard, lift heavy and eat roughly at maintenance. And you're probably gonna see some sort of body composition you're gonna lose fat. Anyway, that's a unique scenario.
[00:10:42] There are a lot of sort of use cases that are on the corner like that one, but I wanna focus on the person who's not quite lean, has a little extra fat and wants to become lean. And I think this applies to men and women, you would just shift the body fat percentage by about five to 10% higher for women.
[00:11:01] So the 180 pound man with 22% body fat, if you do the math, that's about 140 pounds of lean mass and 40 pounds of fat. Now we're gonna go on a gaining phase. So this is the trick, right? We need to gain weight to gain muscle in this scenario. There are, there's no way around it. There's no magic formula to some sort of massive body recomposition.
[00:11:25] Yes, body recom recom is possible. But if we're talking about doing this in a fairly effective, efficient manner, rather than over a long period where we have to optimize everything. Uh, this is the more typical approach. So we're gonna target, for example, a pound a week of gain, which is pretty aggressive, but we're talking about a newer lifter, which makes sense.
[00:11:51] And we're gonna assume that half of that gain is muscle. Just for this example, it may be less, it may only be a quarter or a third. It actually may be slightly more depending on the individual responder. And the more advanced you get the less of the percentage of what you gain is muscle. And so you tend to dial back how aggressive you are to increase that percentage back to a higher level, which simply means it's gonna take longer to build muscle.
[00:12:17] But again, going back to this newish lifter, one pound a week, assume how half of that is muscle, which is about four pounds a month of weight gain with two pounds a month of muscle. I think that's reasonable. So after 16 weeks, so here you go, about four months getting to eat more food. If you're using an app like macro factor to track your food and track your weight, you can see how your metabolism fluctuates.
[00:12:47] You're probably gonna see it climb over time. It's generally what happens, which is great. Eight, because then each week you're gonna check in the, app's gonna say, Hey, you get another 125 calories a day this week, next week, Hey, you get another 80 calories a day this week. And you keep pushing and pushing and you enjoy this process of getting to, to taste new foods and try different combinations to hit your macros and all that great stuff that we like about gaining weight.
[00:13:12] So after 16 weeks you've gained 16 pounds. And if half of that is muscle, you've gained eight pounds of muscle. Now you weigh 190. Pounds now, there are people walking around at 180 and I was one of them who never could imagine pushing myself up close to 200 pounds on purpose. Just seemed crazy. I had gotten to 210 in college.
[00:13:36] Totally not on purpose. Uh, and I, I was not lean and I was not lifting. So that was a very different scenario. The kind in that we don't want to follow, but you've been lifting hard three days, four days a week following a linear progression. Or maybe a, an intermediate program. If you're at that level, maybe a four day split, and now you weigh 196 pounds of which 148 is lean mass because you've gained eight pounds of muscle and 48 pounds of fat because you've gained eight pounds of fat.
[00:14:09] So now your body fat percentage has climbed up a little bit to 24 or percent. So you might look in the mirror and say, huh, I'm looking a little fluffy. Uh, my pants are a little bit tight, but it's, it's an incremental change and you've been training hard and eating a lot for about four months, which is a pretty good stretch.
[00:14:27] So now you're slightly quote unquote fatter, but you have quite a bit more muscle. Eight pounds of muscle is nothing to sneeze at. That's a lot of extra lean tissue on your body. So now you just, so I'm gonna go on a diet phase. For eight weeks and eight weeks is a perfectly reasonable sanity maintaining length of time.
[00:14:46] Uh, some people might even call this a mini cut where you're gonna go pretty aggressive. You're gonna go maybe two pounds a week, which again, for a newish lifter at 24% body fat is totally reasonable. In fact, I'm on a cut right now, now where I I'm at 1.7 pounds a week. And the second phase of my cut will be less than that, but it's still pretty aggressive.
[00:15:07] So you're gonna go on a diet phase for eight weeks. At two pounds a week. Cause the goal here is we're gonna take all that, all those pounds that we added, we're gonna take them right back off. But you're gonna find that at the end, you actually have more muscle than you did before. So after eight weeks you've lost 16 pounds.
[00:15:26] You're back to 180 pounds. Now we're gonna assume that of those 16 pounds, you've lost two pounds of muscle. There's always gonna be some level of muscle mass. And there there's different evidence that supports different rates of fat loss. You know, you go, you can go very quick and make sure you have the intensity and volume to the where you retain your muscle in your lifting program.
[00:15:50] But inevitably there's gonna be some loss. So there's no easy way to predict how much it's going to be. The key is just to keep training hard throughout that period. So we're just gonna assume you've lost two pounds of muscle. And now you're back to 180 pounds with 146 pounds of lean mass. Now that's six more pounds of muscle than you used to have.
[00:16:12] And then 34 34 pounds of fat. So that's six pounds, less of fat. So your body fat percentage is 19% at 180 pounds. You just went from 22. It's a 19% body fat. At the same weight, not by reducing fat, but by essentially replacing some fat with muscle, obviously not directly, but you've built muscle. And then lost fat.
[00:16:41] And now you're leaner. Technically, if you wanted to be at the same fat level you were before, you'd actually have to carry a heavier weight than you are now. And as you build muscle, you may find that's what you wanna do, that you actually have a. Nice healthy lean look at a heavier body weight than before.
[00:17:01] And you'll start to change a mindset of what scale weight even means that it's not so much about the number as how you feel. How you're performing in the gym, how healthy you are and your overall leanness in terms of body composition, even better. And here's the bonus. This is the thing that I've actually really enjoyed the past few years.
[00:17:21] Going through this process, your metabolism has likely shifted higher due to the extra muscle on your frame. So your daily food needs. Are at a more comfortable level than before, even when you're just gonna go at maintenance. Now you can switch to maintenance. You've you have this extra muscle and spend a good 2, 3, 4, 6 months a year at this higher metabolism, enjoying more freedom to eat what you want during that building phase, you would've pushed up your metabolism constantly.
[00:17:53] As you're growing in size as you're gaining muscle. And then as you were dieting, the metabolism probably came back down, but chances are, it did not come down to what it was before. And you had a higher level than you were before. Uh, similar phenomenon occurs when someone's in a diet dieting phase and then goes into a maintenance phase or reverse diet as it's called kind of slowly coming out of it, where you can recover some of your metabolism before continuing your diet.
[00:18:19] So all of these are mechanisms to shift your metabolism up, but the, I idea of putting, putting on muscle to do it is one that's sustainable and will last for months or years to come as you retain that muscle. The cool thing is you can repeat this process multiple times over and over again, perhaps with weeks or months of maintenance in between.
[00:18:40] Meaning just not losing weight, not gaining weight, just sitting around, getting a feel for your body, letting things recover, training hard, seeing how you respond and then deciding, okay. Do I need to push it up to add muscle? Do I need to cut to get leaner. Sometimes we do have short term goals. Maybe it's some big event where we just, you know, what a feel and look our best, or if we've got a good six or eight months ahead of us, of the deep, cold winter of new England where I live, I might say, you know, screw it.
[00:19:11] I don't. I don't need to be lean during that period when I'm bundled up. Anyway, it's cold. I just want to eat. I just wanna hunker down. Let me build muscle. Let me just eat at a steady pace. Grow, grow, grow, add that muscle. And then it won't be very hard to spend a couple months. Cutting the fat on top of this, if you add in walking, okay.
[00:19:33] I'm a huge advocate of walking. I've talked about it before. Step count, I think is the most sustainable form of cardio to give you the most impact. So it's not the most effective. In other words, it high intensity interval training and other forms of cardio like that might burn the most calories. But they're not sustainable.
[00:19:53] They beat you up. They're hard on the joints. They make it harder to recover in some cases where they might interfere with your lifting, all of these reasons, but walking doesn't do any of those. Walking's enjoyable. Uh, we're getting to the warmer seasons here. So you get your vitamin D you get your sunshine.
[00:20:10] Get to enjoy nature. It's mentally relaxing. It's great on the joints and the bonus from walking is it adds some cushion to your calories. So as you're lifting, for example, it's a way not to interfere with your lifting and not get to fatigued while still allowing you to keep bumping up your calories.
[00:20:30] And then conversely, with dieting it's even perhaps even more pivotal in that it prevents you from having to cut your calories too much. So I don't know about you, but. Adding muscle by having some fun lifting in the gym while eating more food and increasing my metabolism and hitting these goals, sounds like a pretty reasonable way to get leaner.
[00:20:51] Feel good about yourself after all a said and done. And it's also quite sustainable, which is what we're all about on this podcast. And I wanna talk now about the building phase that I just completed. Uh, as I, as I'm recording this podcast, it was about six or seven weeks ago. I took 15 weeks to bulk after I had cut.
[00:21:12] I had cut to a fairly lean level. About 11% body fat. And if you're wondering how I measure that every week, Sunday morning, I use a tape measure to measure my neck and my waist. I also take measurements of, for muscle mass of my biceps and thighs and chest. And then I also use hallers and I take a few points on my chest, abs and thigh, and I plug those into a couple calculators online and I average them out.
[00:21:43] To get my body fat. So there tends to be a big tolerance or I should say a big, I don't wanna say error, but there's a big variance between these calculators. So for example, I might be. Uh, 12% on one and 15 or 16% on another. So then I average 'em out to about 14% and what I really care about is the trend.
[00:22:02] So over time I can see both numbers shifting up or shifting down in tandem. It's pretty consistently. And so I just take the average. I don't really care about the absolute number. I care about the change, how look, and how I feel. So I dieted down to about 11, 12% body fat, and I was now ready to. Bulk and my goal, because I've been seriously lifting for about two to three years.
[00:22:26] It's not 5, 10, 15 years. Like some folks, you know, I got in my forties finally started to be healthy and started training seriously. And that's what this podcast is all about is sharing these things. I've learned with people maybe in similar, or maybe completely different circumstances who do just want to get healthier.
[00:22:43] And I decided at this point I wanted to bulk and gain a bunch of muscle so that I could do it in time to do another dieting phase leading into the summer, which is a common cycle for a lot of people follow. When you know, you're going to be swimming and be wearing shorts, showing more skin, you know, you wanna feel better about yourself in those leaner months.
[00:23:05] So in late October, just before my birthday, my starting weight was. 167.8. And then the ending weight in February of 2022 was 182.3. So I went from 167.8 to 182.3, the average change being 0.8 pounds per week. And right toward the end of the bulk, I actually had a week long vacation where I didn't do any lifting.
[00:23:34] There was a little bit of a, a burst in my weight there, which. Makes perfect sense. Right? Cuz my activity level was lower during that week. And that gave me a loss of some of my calories for my diet, but I kept my diet the same. So I gained a little bit more weight during that week. It's it's science, you know, it works like you expected to work.
[00:23:55] So the, the true average was 1.0, but the. Trend average throughout the most of the phase was 0.8 pounds a week. By the way, I tracked all of this using macro factor. This is by far my favorite app for this. I've talked about it before. I do have a discount code. It's wits and weights. If you go download the app, but as I am an avid daily user of the app and gained tremendous benefit from it, I have no problem plugging it or being affiliated with them.
[00:24:25] Great developers over stronger by science. So shout out to them. All right back to the bulk. So I gained 14 and a half pounds in 15 weeks, and I would call that a moderately aggressive gaining phase. It's a perfect rate of change for somebody who is still new to intermediate. In fact, you could go faster than that.
[00:24:43] If you wanted to, if you were newer, Um, and if you were more intermediate or you just didn't wanna gain that much fat that quickly, you can go at about maybe a half pound a week if you're around my weight. So it resulted in about a half percent of my weight per week. My starting body fat percentage was about or not about, but the average was 10.7%.
[00:25:06] And I ended at 15%. So I gained about four, a little over 4% of body fat, which you'll tend to gain more. At a leaner level at the rate that I was going, then in the earlier example, I talked about where he went from 22 to 24. So I gained 9.7 pounds of fat and 4.9 pounds. Of lean mass. So about a third of the gain was lean mass lean mass is a combination of muscle water, bone, et cetera.
[00:25:34] It's everything. That's not fat, but most of it's gonna be, you could just use it as a proxy for muscle. So about a third of what I gained was not fat. And I was very happy with that. Remember, in the example earlier, I, I said, assume that. Of what you gain is muscle and for a newer lifter that's that could be true for me going at the rate, I was going a third was pretty good.
[00:25:55] And then I mentioned before that I measured my body measurements and body measurements are a great proxy of your composition, your body fat, as well as your. Muscle mass. And that's why I encourage taking them. I know it's a pain, it's a little bit extra, uh, uh, obsession there. If, if you have body image issues, but I'm a big fan of objective data, especially trends.
[00:26:18] So I collected body measurements. My waist went from 30.8 to 33.8. So I gained three inches by, by no means, you know, fat, obviously still in the low thirties for male. Uh, most of my pants still fit fine. My chest went from 37 to 38. You know, I don't have the biggest chest. I admit it, but I gained an inch biceps.
[00:26:37] I gained a half inch thighs. I gained 1.6 inches. So I'm very happy with this bulk in terms of gaining, you know, a third of the weight as muscle. And I've had two plus years of what I'll call intelligent, serious training that I think has helped, uh, get me to this point of being able to do this. Now let's talk about total daily energy expenditure.
[00:27:01] This is your metabolism. And why? I think using an app like macro factor is important is because the premise is that you track what's coming in, that's your food and you track what's going out based on how much you weigh and that will help you determine your energy expenditure. You don't need any other.
[00:27:23] Variables in the way you don't need to track your exercise calories. For example, your walk, you don't need to track steps. None of those have to be tracked to determine your expenditure because it's all so called built in. Uh, if you use food and weight now, of course you have to smooth the weight over time.
[00:27:41] And that's where it gets a little bit complicated. And that's why using an app or a spreadsheet, uh, is helpful with this. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share it to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you.
[00:28:04] And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again. An incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. So when I started the bulk, my metabolism was burning 2,965 calories. So Al almost 3000 calories a day. So it was Al already a pretty robust metabolism from the previous muscle building cycles I had gone through, but through the bulk, I actually ended up at 3,500 calories.
[00:28:35] So I was really happy because every week my targets just kept going up and up and up and up. And if you look at the graph. It sort of looks like kind of like a smooth stock market chart in good times when it's going up, comes down a little, goes up, comes down a little bit. Generally the trends is upward.
[00:28:51] And then right at the end it had a small dip. I think that was correlated with the week off that I took the D load, the vacation that I took now, because I switched from. A cut to a bulk, which some people, some coaches don't always recommend that sometimes it's recommended that you have an intermediate maintenance phase.
[00:29:10] You know, you switch to maintenance, say how your body responds, see where your maintenance really is, and then start to. Push it up, you know, that's sort of a reverse diet is the term sometimes used, but I've also heard. And for me, it seems to be perfectly fine that you can switch just like a light bulb, go from a cut, right to a bulk, no big deal.
[00:29:31] Your body will handle it as long as you're tracking it. So that's what I did. And so if you looked at my nutrition every day, I went from eating. A little bit over 2000 calories because I was in a cut to eating well over 3000 calories on a bulk, which I was pretty happy with the first week. I actually had to kind of hunt around for more food to make sure I got enough calories.
[00:29:50] And I know people are groaning listening to this podcast like, oh, don't complain that you had to eat too much. And I'm not, I'm not complaining. I had to eat too much. I was actually very happy at it. And this is why gaining weight and bulking can be, can be a fun process if you don't overdo it. And you stick primarily to.
[00:30:07] Healthy foods, quote unquote, but you still have to throw in some other snacks, treats desserts, things like that to, to get it all in and you might as well, you might as well enjoy life. That's that's my philosophy. At least, you know, the occasional pop. Tart's not gonna hurt you as long as you're also having sweet potato rice and broccoli, uh, for most your meals.
[00:30:26] So by the final week of the gaining phase, I was. Eating 200 grams of protein. My protein always tracked a little bit more than one gram per pound. I'm a, I'm a big fan of, of hitting that target, especially on a cut, but on a bulk is important and I was hitting 450 grams of carbs. And this is somebody folks.
[00:30:48] Let me tell you. I used to be a low carb advocate. And to think that I would be intentionally eating more than 400 grams in a day, would've seemed insane. But the carbs are your friend. When it comes to training, you need them, you love them. The body thrives on them. Don't shy away from it. It's a different way of thinking.
[00:31:09] I know for many of us, but if you're lifting hard in the gym, you need the calories, you need the carbs. It's all good. So to fit all this in I'm, I'm, I'm going through this process by the way, so that you can get a visual of what it's like to do this, and maybe some of the positives. So it doesn't, you don't shy away from it, but you also know what's acquired to be successful.
[00:31:29] So for me, it was three big meals, plus two snacks every day. I would shoot for an average of 40 grams of protein per feeding. So that's an average. I might have 60 on one and 20 on another, but generally I shop for shoot for 40. Um, I try to, you know, really get the protein synthesis triggered. Um, some evidence says it doesn't really matter the timing and, uh, how and the frequency try to get it these three meals and get all your protein and that'll get you most of the way there.
[00:31:59] So here are some things that I. Was consistent about to meet these targets. And I think consistency is. So important. If you generally eat similar foods, it's gonna be a lot easier. If you make your own food, it's gonna be a lot easier. If you're going out to restaurants a lot and eating completely different things every day, it's gonna be a little harder, not impossible if you're okay.
[00:32:20] Fight, figuring it all out, weighing, tracking. And so, and looking up nutrients on cha you know, rest, front websites, et cetera. That's fine. And in fact, while I was bulking, it gave me the opportunity to eat out a little more, but the foundation is consistency. So in a typical day, I'd get up at around five 30.
[00:32:39] Yep. It might be early for some of you. Sorry. That's just me. I like to work out in the morning. I get up at five 30 and I have a, pre-workout a protein shake and a large banana. So that's 30 grams of protein, 25 carbs about half an hour, 45 minutes later. I do my workout. Currently, I am doing a body building program, so I'm working out six days a week and it takes about an hour when I was bulking.
[00:33:04] For most of that time, I was actually doing a, either four or five day split conjugate style programming with maximum effort and dynamic effort days. And this is more advanced training, not gonna get into the details here, but it was a good, good high intensity training with a decent amount of volume and some, uh, physi work as well.
[00:33:24] Um, then I would have a post workout at around eight 30, which is oatmeal with peanut butter and a protein shake. 40 grams of protein, 20 grams of fat 40 grams of carbs. Then mid morning, I'd have to get a snack. Usually it was bagel with cream cheese. A little bit of protein, little bit of fat, a lot of carbs for lunch.
[00:33:42] Some sort of meat might be chicken. Thighs might be pork chops leftover from dinner might be roast beef and then a starch and a veggie. So the starch or other carb, it could be rice, but it could be potato, something like that. And, and then a veggie. So that would gimme about six grams of protein, 20 to 30 of fat and 80 to a hundred of.
[00:34:03] Carbs mid-afternoon snack a protein carb snack of some kind. It might be like a quest bar if I'm feeling lazy, but it might be something like cottage, cheese and some pretzels. And that would gimme about 30 grams of protein, a tiny bit of fat, and about 40 to 60 of carbs. Then for dinner, similar to lunch, I'd have meat starch.
[00:34:23] Veggie. My wife cooks a lot. She makes great food. I sometimes cook. And oftentimes the dinner becomes the next day's lunch. And then I might even have a carby dessert if I'm lowering my carbs for the day. And then before bed, I usually have a pre pre-bed snack of casing pudding, which is another 20 or 30 grams of protein.
[00:34:43] And the only reason I do that is it's just hard to get all that protein in through the other meals consistently. So I would just assume I was gonna have this snack at the end of the night to, to punch it in right before I went to bed. But if I met the macros or calories during the day, I would just skip the pre-bed stack.
[00:35:01] All right now, I took notes as I was bulking the whole time to see how it affected me and some things I observed, some things I learned, and I wanna share some of those today. Using a tracking app or a spreadsheet. So in my case, again, macro factor made this a much easier process because it could calculate my rapidly changing metabolic rate.
[00:35:23] And so I could adjust my macro plan every week, much more dynamically without getting too far off of my, my rate of change. The second thing is that when you're bulking, when you're eating, you definitely see a performance improvement. Just it's inevitable. You're gonna make progress in the gym. All your lifts are gonna go up.
[00:35:42] It's gonna feel great some days. I mean, when I would deadlift, if I had a nice big meal the night before and ate a lot, the deadlift just felt great. Even at six in the morning. And I was never hungry. The third thing that walking every day. So in my case, I shoot for 12,000 steps a day. Which is reasonable, kind of maybe above average, especially since I work from home, I'm not in the city, so I kinda have to force myself to walk, but walking's great.
[00:36:08] A great form of cardio didn't interfere with lifting or recovery while I was bulking and allowed me to just eat a ton of food. And then speaking of eating a lot. Eating 3,600 calories was probably the most I ever had to eat on purpose in my life. So it required consistency. I had to make sure to eat frequently enough.
[00:36:28] Like you can't just fast. You can't wait too long for your first meal, or then you're trying to catch up in the rest of the day and, and stuff yourself. And you don't want to be there. Air. Also try to get EV enough carbs into every meal does require sometimes adding processed foods and by process, I mean, bread.
[00:36:46] I did eat some pop tarts, an occasional donut, maybe, but that was rare. I'm just saying it opens up the options and allows you to throw some of these extra things in there. And then when I wasn't sure how many calories or macros were in a meal, like, you know, my wife cooks, so I, I can't just weigh everything as she's making it at the risk of insulting her.
[00:37:05] And then I had to slightly. Underestimate when I wasn't sure. So if it was my, my wife's cooking or going to a restaurant and I didn't have the exact calories of macros, I would want to slightly underestimate because when you're bulking, it's the opposite of dieting. You're actually trying to eat enough.
[00:37:21] And so you wanna be conservative. The other direction, assume something has fewer calories than it might so that it forces you to make sure you eat enough, to go at least to your target and, and slightly exceed your target. Now, having said all this stuff about eating a lot, I'd never went totally crazy.
[00:37:39] Just eating anything and everything like some people wanna do. They call that. The dreamer bulk, but I did get to enjoy some luxuries ice cream. For example, I love ice cream and I could just enjoy that much more frequently than when I'm dieting also alcohol. You know, if I just want to have a glass of wine or a beer or some liquor, I can do that.
[00:38:00] I still track it, but it fits in nicely. Although always recommend keeping alcohol. To a minimum at any given time, just period. If you're trying to live a healthy lifestyle and perform in the gym, when I'm bulking, I might have alcohol once or twice a week. And when I'm dieting, I usually don't have it at all.
[00:38:16] I know that sounds crazy, but it feels great. And then I did go on that week long vacation at the end of January and I didn't lift at all that week. I didn't get enough steps. I even ate a bit more than usual because I was enjoying myself. And as a result because of science, my weight change rate almost doubled the last few weeks because my metabolism came down and my calories went up.
[00:38:43] But at the end it didn't really matter. I still had the data. I knew what was happening. It was objective and it was kind of my last rah before I turned around and went on a cut. So the bulk was successful. I hope I gave you a good idea of what's involved. And I'm currently now on a cut, which is something I'm going to talk about in the next podcast.
[00:39:03] We'll talk about the other side of this coin, dieting, you know, reasonable dieting, but I wanted to take the last few minutes of today's episode to answer a listener question. Judy in Connecticut. So the same state as me right in the neighborhood says, Hey, Philip, I recently started listening to your podcast.
[00:39:26] I really enjoy it. And I have a question about dieting without dieting. I understand all the info about macros and losing weight, but does my daily exercise fit into the calorie count in any way? I use my fitness pal and it adds your exercise, your calories burned to the daily calorie allotment. Should I not enter my workouts?
[00:39:48] And should I ignore those extra calories that I'm allowed to consume? So thanks for reaching out Judy, and, and this is a great question. I actually hear it. A lot when it comes to, how do we calculate metabolism? If I take the pie chart of metabolism and part of that is my basal metabolic rate. And then you've got your neat, right?
[00:40:10] Your, your, um, like steps in fidgeting and things like that. And then you have your thermic effective feeding. And then finally you have your exercise. Well, shouldn't I be tracking exercise as part of my cat calories. You know, I'm going to eat 2000 calories. But now I'm gonna burn 300 calories. So shouldn't I add or subtract.
[00:40:30] And my response to that is. First of all the data from wearables or machines regarding calories are highly unreliable. The devices themselves tend to be very unreliable as evidenced by any test where they compare these devices. Each individual also burns a different fr of those estimated calories from the device were all different.
[00:40:57] And so if your apple watch says 350 active calories, You may have only burned 70% of that or 245 calories. So even if you were to rely on that, the data itself is not precise, but, but more importantly, the most accurate way to determine your maintenance calories is simply to compare how your weight responds to your food exercise.
[00:41:18] Neat. All these other things are, are lots of variables in the middle of the process and trying to track them separately would be a nightmare. And frankly, F futile. But if you know how much you weigh and you know how much you eat and you eat the exact same amount every day, And you track your weight over say two weeks.
[00:41:35] And you look at the change in the average weight seven day, moving average, for example, you'll know if you're eating too much, too little or just the right amount of calories to maintain your weight. And that builds in all this other stuff that affects your metabolism, including exercise eyes. Now, having said that additional activity in the form of lifting your steps.
[00:41:58] Even cardio, as long as we don't overdo, it usually increases your TDE E E because you are burning more calories and this allows you to eat more. So if you're getting 12,000 steps a day, like I try to do my TDE is probably a few hundred calories higher than if I weren't, but I will see that I, my weight not increasing as much as it would have if I wasn't walking.
[00:42:24] And as a result, it does account for the exercise without me having to track it separately. So, if you're fairly active, your maintenance calories are likely higher. All things equal, but TDE E fluctuates so much and it fluctuates while you're losing weight tends to go down while you're gaining weight tends to go up and even then it's more like a roller coaster.
[00:42:41] Such that I would never recommend counting activity. As part of calculating the calories you need to eat instead base your calories and macros off of your calculated TDE, based on your weight change, do it for the week. Leave it alone. You have your plan in place, and then next week you adjust it again, adjust it weekly, and you'll be just fine.
[00:43:01] So, thanks again, Judy, for that excellent question. I'm sure it's on a lot of people's minds and thank you all for listening to this episode. I had a lot of fun talking about this journey of becoming lean by gaining weight. It's a fantastic, enjoyable process. If you remain consistent, you'll see. Great results.
[00:43:23] Hopefully the things that I shared about my own experience will give you a little view into what it's like as always, I'm happy to answer any questions you have about this. Just reach out and be happy to reply by email and share your answer on a future episode of the podcast.
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