Ep 25: Lose 30 Pounds (or More) the Right Way and Keep it Off
What if you have significant weight to lose—around 30 pounds or more?
Most people have no problem losing weight . . . in the short term. What usually follows is a rebound, usually because calories or the diet itself were so restrictive that they were impossible to maintain for more than a few months.
In this episode, we discuss a completely different approach. Instead of “weight loss,” we want to achieve FAT LOSS. We want to improve our body composition over time and actually become leaner.
Our topic is how to lose 30 pounds or more the right way…and keep it off.
Not how to lose 30 pounds in 30 days, or how to lose weight now and then…good luck!
Those approaches to dieting are completely myopic. They’re short-term. Just cut calories and lose weight. Then you’ll be lean.
The problem is, every time you lose weight this way, usually without enough protein or resistance training, you lose some muscle and then regain mostly fat. This bodyfat overshooting phenomenon causes your body fat percentage to rise over time, even if your weight stays in the same range, but most likely you gain even more weight each time you rebound.
Does this sound familiar?
Here’s the reality. Losing weight is the “easy” part. The challenge is the 95% of skills, behaviors, and metabolic recovery we need to address BEFORE losing weight.
In this episode, we cover how to lose mostly fat, do it sustainably, and have the knowledge to do it whenever you want for the rest of your life. We’ll discuss what happens when you lose weight through chronic dieting, what I would do with a client who needs to lose significant weight, and step through the entire process to get successful, long-term results.
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Transcript
Philip Pape 00:08
Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and 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.
Philip Pape 00:31
Hello, everybody, welcome to another episode of Wits & Weights. And just like the last episode, we're gonna stream this, we're streaming this live on Facebook. So if you want to watch future episodes, and get access to a bunch of free resources, related to strength related to fat loss, nutrition, things like that, just join our group using the link in the show notes. I'm your host, Philip pape, I'm the founder of Wits & Weights Nutrition Coaching. And as always, if you enjoy this show, just let people know about it, submit a five star review, tell others about it, take a screenshot. And I appreciate your support as always, now what if you have significant weight to lose, we're talking 3040 50 pounds or more. Most people have no problem losing weight in the short term. What usually follows then is a rebound. Usually, because calories or the diet itself were so restrictive, that they were impossible to maintain for more than a few months. So today we're discussing a completely different approach. So instead of weight loss, we want to achieve fat loss. We want to improve our body composition over time, and actually become leaner. And this topic is a little different from the last one where we talked about cuts and bolts, because in that episode, we assumed that you had already gotten to a reasonable level of leanness today, it's what do we do on the other extreme, when we have a lot of weight to lose, even if you only have 15 or 20 pounds to lose, though I think this will be highly relevant. So our topic is losing 30 pounds or more the right way, and keeping it off, not how to lose 30 pounds in 30 days, or how to lose quite weight quickly. And then good luck. Those approaches to dieting are pretty myopic, right? They're short term, you just cut your calories lose weight, you'll be lean. But the problem is every time you lose weight that way, usually without enough protein, usually without resistance training, you lose some muscle and then regain mostly fat. I've talked about this before. It's called body fat overshooting. And this phenomenon causes your body fat percentage to rise over time, even if your weight stays in the same range. But most likely, you gain even more weight each time you rebound. So if this sounds familiar to you, it's because it affects a lot of people. And here's the reality, losing weight is the easy part. Right? The challenge is in the 95% of other things, the skills, the behaviors, the mindset, the physical and metabolic preparation, the preparation of our bodies that we need to address before losing weight. So today, we're gonna go over how to lose mostly fat, do it sustainably and have the knowledge to do it whenever you want for the rest of your life. We're going to discuss what happens when you lose weight through chronic dieting. So that's the first part, then we'll discuss what I would do with a client who needs to lose significant weight. So something that you can do for yourself as well. And then we're going to step through the process to see how we get successful long term results. So first thing, let's discuss what happens when losing weight through chronic dieting. Because I think people aren't aware of this for the most part, and don't think about it. And the first approach to dieting is just cut calories. So here's what happens when you lose weight through dieting, you eat fewer calories, that it decreases your body fat, and then your fat cells shrink. The fat cells shrinking sends a signal to leptin. Leptin is a hormone that regulates your metabolism. It regulates hunger, satiety your energy expenditure overall. And so that's controlled by the size of those fat cells. This sends a signal to your brain to the hypothalamus specifically, that there's an energy shortage. And then the receptors in your brain say, Hey, I'm not full, I'm not full anymore, so you get hungrier. Then multiple other hormones are downregulated, we're talking thyroid hormone, which regulates cellular metabolism, your basal metabolic rate, protein synthesis, leptin, as I already mentioned, but also insulin. And then, ladies and gentlemen, the reproductive hormones go down testosterone, and estradiol. And then on the other hand, ghrelin which makes you hungrier goes up. And cortisol, which is associated with stress goes up. So this cascade of hormones, results in increased appetite. You can lose muscle mass, you get a lower metabolism, and that's just a few of the problems. You also get all sorts of symptoms. Ah, crankiness, angriness, whatever you want to call it, that you've probably experienced with chronic dieting. So our goal is to offset some of these, especially the decrease in metabolism, and the loss of muscle mass. So we can take take control of this process to avoid that, and avoid what everyone else does. And they chronically diet and puts their body into this downregulated state. So now we're going to go over now that you understand what happens when we chronically diet, what I would do with a client who needs to lose at least 30 pounds the right way, so that it's sustainable, that's what I mean by the right way, is on the way down, as you're losing the weight, you're not suffering as much. And then you know what to do when you've lost the weight. So you don't just rebound because, hey, I can't stick to keto that long. So I'm just gonna gain all the weight back. So we want to make it maintainable for the long term. Alright, so it all starts with establishing healthy habits. These are skills, skills that we have to learn outside of dieting, right, we all want to diet, we all want to just lose weight. But there are a bunch of skills we have to learn before dieting, so that dieting itself is easy. And then when you lose weight, it's easy to maintain. So I'm going to go through a list of these habits, it might seem overwhelming if you struggle in more of these areas than others, but have hoped that the way to attack this is pick one thing at a time and work on it week after week, and start to improve each one. Some are more important than others for you as an individual. And if I was working with you, as a client, we would focus on the big red flags. But we would also take advantage of your strengths. So the first thing is tracking? How do you know what's going in your mouth? How many calories are in a particular food, how much protein how hungry a food makes you feel relative to the calories How do you know all that if you don't track your food. Now, there's a lot of controversy surrounding tracking, that it causes eating disorders or it's obsessive. The evidence generally shows that unless you had a prior issue, eating disorder an issue with tracking, that it's correlated with better adherence, and better results, bar none. Plenty of studies have shown this, that if you're to track versus not track, you're gonna achieve your results more than than if you weren't tracking. And by tracking, I mean tracking your food with some sort of log, generally an app these days that make it very, very easy. The one I always recommend is macro factor. I use it my clients use it, but whatever works for you. And what you can do is for two weeks, you track everything you eat, you track your weight, and you can tell based on the intake, what you're truly consuming, and how it affects your weight. So let's say you've been maintaining your weight for a while, and you decide to start tracking, don't change anything, just eat the same way you've been eating, I don't care if it's processed food, junk food, whatever binges on the weekend, track your food for two weeks, and assuming your weights still maintain is maintained, then the calories you ate are your maintenance calories, and they may be much less than you expected. That's that's often what happens, we usually overestimate or we underestimate the calories you're consuming. So tracking is a very important skill. I'm gonna go through all these skills today. And we could do an entire episode on each one. And I'm not going to get into the details of how to improve that skill necessarily. But just know that if you if you find a way or work with a coach, these are going to go a long way. Okay, the second skill is eating enough protein. Most people eat far less protein than they need. Even if you're sedentary. Even if you don't resistance train, you still need protein to preserve muscle. And you need more protein the older you are. If you're training though you especially need protein. And most importantly, our topic today is fat loss. Well, I talked about body fat overshooting where you lose muscle mass. That's because partly because you don't have enough protein. So we're looking for around one gram per pound of body weight. That's just a rule of thumb, anywhere between point seven to 1.2 is perfectly fine. For most people. My clients when they come in usually our half that most of them are eating, let's say 160 pound female might be eating 80 grams of protein a day. And we need to get her up much closer to 141 50. But I'm not going to do it overnight. Right? We're going to take time over the next few weeks to figure out how we choose foods and food quality and structure our day to be able to get that protein. Right. So protein is just so so important. And most of us don't get enough. If you track your food. Step one. You'll know how much protein you get. Step two. All right, then that leads us to kind of an even bigger picture with food, which is food quality and selection. So the idea here is to change our mindset about diet Eating and about food, we want to move past the idea of restriction where we cut out food groups, particular foods, you know, unless you have obviously an issue, or an allergy, I'm talking about pure choice. All the fad diets out there are based on the idea of restriction because in the short term that works, when you cut out a bunch of things that are usually the source of processed foods, then you will lose weight. But now you've gotten yourself in a bind, because you have to restrict more and more. And then eventually you get tired of it, or you compulsively overeat you binge something because you miss the things that you've cut out. Right? Tell me this doesn't sound familiar, you miss these things. I've been through myself so many times over the years. So what we want to do instead is use restraint, not restriction, and understand everything that we put into our mouth, how full they make us feel, how much volume they have, how many calories they have, what their macros are, understand that a tablespoon of peanut butter might have 100 calories, whereas a tablespoon of broccoli is almost no calories. Right? That's kind of a weird analogy. I know, a weird comparison. But the idea is that as you diet, and you if you have the skill of knowing how to select foods that make you fuller, without too many extra calories, you'll be able to scale more in that direction, as you're dieting more and more deeply. But without restricting anything. You know, if you still want that pizza on the weekend, or you still want that glass of wine, you still wanna enjoy ice cream. You know, unless you're a bodybuilder trying to get down to essential leanness, you can enjoy those things. But we have to do it in moderation with restraint, right? And understand that the majority of our diet has been made up of things that serve our goals. So this is going to help with fullness, this is going to help us scale our foods up or down depending on if we're losing or gaining weight. And it's a great skill to have to get us out of the mindset of restriction. Okay, then that brings me to meal timing, meal timing, I'm not talking about the complicated meal timing that athletes need to understand with pre and post workouts and things like that I'm talking about if you if you're tracking your food, and you know, you have to get so much protein. And you know, you don't want to get hungry or suffer through a diet, you want to plan your day out and structure it so that you have the right number of meals spread across the right timeframe. So for example, if you like intermittent fasting, but now you realize you need 160 grams of protein, but you only can eat two meals in that timing window, it's going to be tough to get 80 grams of protein at each meal. And you might decide, maybe I need to move away from intermittent fasting for this and have three meals and maybe I need an extra snack in there. So that I can space things apart, not get hungry, get my protein, etc. So that's what I'm referring to when it comes to meal timing. It's a skill. Mealtime is also associated with planning ahead. So if you were to look, if today's Tuesday or Monday, today is Monday, and you want to look ahead to tomorrow, and you have no idea what you're gonna eat tomorrow, because you live in the moment. Well, what if you sat down and just figured out what you were going to eat just for one day to hit your targets, calorie targets, protein targets. Part of that part of that planning is going to include the timing of the meals and you might surprise yourself, you might realize that, hey, this is why I'm not getting enough protein by 8pm Because I need to stick some other snack in the mid morning as an example. Okay, so that's meal timing. The next aspect of nutrition here, as a habit is hydration. Some people have no problem drinking plenty of water, others are woefully dehydrated. And I'm not going to give you a rule of thumb. I mean, most people say to shoot for three quarters of a gallon of water a day, I like to say just take your weight divided by two and add a little bit. And if you're very active, or you do something like CrossFit, you don't drink even more. There's a study that recently came out, I think I heard about it and stronger by science, where athletes when they were training to strength training, if they drink to thirst, they actually didn't perform as well as if they drink a little more than that. So we can't always rely on our thirst signals for this. Definitely if you're thirsty drink, but you might need to drink a little more. And so we work on that as a habit. Okay, so moving beyond food, the next two habits are related to sleep and stress. Okay, sleep, highly underrated, potentially one of the most important things for you, especially if you chronically under sleep. So by sleep we mean two things, we mean quantity and quality. I did a whole episode not long ago, all about sleep and various ways to use sleep hygiene to improve it. But two things number one, quantity. If you can get around seven or eight hours of sleep most days, you're pretty good. And especially if you go to bed and wake up around the same time. Quality is a lot of different things. But for most people, it's your pre bed ritual. How do you get the cortisol down get the melatonin So you're ready for bed, and you sleep through the night and you're well rested. And for some people, this is wearing blue blocking glasses, you know, not using screens, taking a shower, meditating before bed, whatever. And then stress, okay? Stress is also critically important because dieting is a stress training is a stress, and why add more and more stress and stack them on and make it harder on yourself to recover. And for your muscles to grow. And for you to feel full. Stress can cause issues with appetite issues with your hormones, so many issues. And the first step is to try to eliminate or reduce it. Easier said than done. Right? Many of us can't just change our jobs, we can't change our family situation. But we might find creative ways to reduce stress. If you can't reduce stress, you can at least cope with it. And this is making sure to find time for things that you enjoy that or not at all stressful. Things like walking, breathing, exercises, meditating, dancing, playing, singing, you name it. Okay, then that brings us to the last two behaviors that we need to put in place before we go and start cutting calories. And these are related to activity. So the first is steps. And I think I saw my dad join. He's a huge fan of walking. So am I ever since my back surgery last year, I fell in love with walking. And then since then, I've realized how much evidence shows us that increasing your step count, even even by three or 4000 steps a day, has massive benefits for mortality, diseases of aging, metabolic disease, perhaps even things like Alzheimer's, I mean, I'm not a medical professional. But there's correlations here that are undeniable. And then the short term impact of of walking is simply that it increases your metabolism. As we're going to die it, our metabolism is going to decline. And I talked about earlier that when we're chronically dieting, that's one of the things that starts to drop, because of the cascade of hormones, steps actually can counteract that. And they can do so to an incredible extent more than you could possibly imagine by hundreds of calories a day. And I've seen this in data. And I've seen it with my own clients. So there's a friend of mine who used to be a co worker, or I guess he still called her, but he's also a client. And I'm going to share his information on our group in a couple of days. He sent me two graphs from his macro factor screenshots. One was his weight. So he's consistently losing weight at a nice clip. But the other is his expenditure, and it's going up and up and up. And then last two months, it went up by 400 calories a day. So he's burning four and a calorie today more than it was two months ago, eating less, because he's training and walking. I mean, that is the clear correlation. If you were looking at everything he changed, he's eating more protein, yes, but he's also walking a lot more than he used to. So don't discount steps. And when you're deeper and deeper into a diet, increasing steps can be a good way to offset the calorie reduction. All right, and then the last behavior that's so important to all of this. And in fact, it's like a house of cards that will collapse without it is resistance training, you know, is going to talk about this one. I mean, that's the first word in our Facebook group of strength. It's, it's in the podcast, everything. I love strength training, not just because it's so much fun, and it makes you feel great. But it changes your life. Because it allows you to build muscle, and more importantly, allows you to preserve muscle and prevent muscle loss when you're dieting. So if you don't have this and you don't have the protein, none of the other stuff is gonna matter as much, because you're still going to lose some muscle when you die it and this is where most people go wrong. So I'm always very excited when someone who has never trained before starts training. Even if it's just some dumbbells or machines, cables, I don't care just start training. And it's going to just make a huge difference in your life. Okay, so I just spent a whole bunch of time talking about things that have nothing to do with cutting calories. And that's intentional. Because if if you if we were to hang out and I was in you were to say hey, how do I lose weight?
Philip Pape 19:15
I'm not gonna say cut calories, I'm gonna say, Well, do we have these other 10 things in place first, then it's gonna be easy to lose weight, keep it off. Alright, so while we're doing all this, and this process could take two weeks for somebody who's already pretty dialed in with most things, or could take two months if it if you've got a lot to work on. But you'll get there it doesn't take long once you focus on these Like any skill. Now during this phase, we are going to focus on what we call metabolic restoration, which is just what it sounds like you're restoring your metabolism. And what we want to do is take you from your current maintenance, meaning right now you've been maintaining your weight, probably at a lower calorie level because of all the dieting and we want to bring that up to a higher maintenance meaning we want to get to a point where you're actually eating more and still maintaining your weight. And you're like, oh, sign me up for that, right? That sounds great. But most people who've chronically dieted are always in an underfed state, or have never bounced back up above that, and given their body a chance to get to restore to what we call homeostasis, right, which is just just a form of balance for the human body where the stressors are, as as few as possible, you're trying to give your body the nutrition, it needs, the recovery, it needs, reduce stress, etc. And what this usually requires. So listen to me, if you have 30 pounds or more to lose, what this usually requires, is a reverse diet. A reverse diet is where you eat more food, okay, you eat more food, you titrate up by, say 200 calories a day, the first week, and then maybe another 200 calories a day, the next week, and you monitor your weight and make sure that it can take up a little bit, okay, I expect it to tick up. Because you've got more gut content, water, glycogen. But I expect your expenditure, your metabolism to come up at the same time. And so what should happen is, your intake goes up and your metabolism goes up together, and you're still maintaining your weight, but you're eating more food. And if this sounds like a revelation to you, or like something you never would have thought to do, because you thought you would gain all this body fat. It's definitely something that works for a ton of people. Because you're helping your body recover to the level of nutrition, it needs to be in balance. Alright, so I hope I hope that makes sense. So the way you can do this is if you're tracking, like we talked about rule number one tracking, and you're tracking your weight, then you can just gradually up the calories. While you're doing this, you want to start training and getting those steps in all of these go hand in hand to push and push and push your metabolism up to eventually it might start to plateau. Or in the case of the client I was talking about, it's still going up, which is awesome. So for him, you know, it kept going up and up and up. So we realized he was feeling great, and we were ready to go into fat loss. We weren't going to wait for it to go to some astronomical level first, we basically want to recover it to something that is enough so that when you cut your calories, you feel like yeah, I'm not going to suffer on this number of calories as I'm losing weight. So usually takes from two to eight weeks for most people. And you kind of know when you're ready when the biofeedback is all good. Like when when you're feeling good in the gym, when you are sleeping well, when you're less moody or you feel like you have more energy, those kinds of things are very important. Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, You'd 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. And we can talk about what you found helpful, and how I can improve again, and incredible. Thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode.
Philip Pape 23:08
Alright, so now we've done all of this pre work, it's time to lose the fat, it's time for fat loss. Acceleration, I call it acceleration, because we are going to be able to do it fairly quickly. Without the suffering you would do otherwise in a traditional approach. And it's going to be mostly fat. So even if it's the same rate as you went at before, the last time you dieted, you lost muscle in the process. Now you're doing what you're eating protein, you're training, you're getting steps, and you're going to hold on to that muscle. And by the way, I didn't mention when we were talking resistance training, I kind of went off on a on a ramble because I got so excited about it. I forgot to mention the the approach to resistance training without getting into a ton of detail should be one that requires progressive overload, meaning over time, each session or each week, you're adding weight to the bar to the dumbbells to the machine, or adding reps or tonnage. But usually when you're a newbie, it's its weight, you shouldn't be kind of all over the place just randomly doing exercises, you should have a good training program, usually three or four days a week for a newer lifter, that is focused on some key movements, that all work for you and your body and your mobility, and that you progressively overload over time because the goal here is to give your muscles the stimulus to actually grow. Okay, so having said that, let's talk fat loss. So remember, we have all these habits in place first. And all we're doing now is just turning the dial. As I mentioned before, this is actually the easy part once you set everything up. So what do we do from a numbers perspective? Okay, let's use an example of someone who weighs 250 pounds. I think it's a it's a good way you know if you're overweight, male, female, that's a that's a ballpark wherever a lot of where a lot of people sit. So the first rule of thumb I'm going to throw out there is to not try to lose more than 10% in one shot, meaning don't, you know, lose weight lose up to 10%. And then after that, we're going to take what's called a diet break, and I'll explain that in a bit. And then you're going to continue the fat loss. So let's say you're 250 pounds, and your goal is 200 pounds, you know, your final lean weight might be 190, or something, but just for the sake of simplicity, so I wouldn't try to just go all the way to 50 pounds, I would set the target at 25. So you're trying to go from 250 to 225. So we're going to lose 25 pounds. And we're going to do it in a reasonable deficit. And if you've heard my other podcasts, or you're familiar with the, what the science says, that's usually a quarter to 1% body weight per week, same as when I talked about bulking and cutting, it's the same range, okay, a quarter to 1% body weight per week. So in this example, for round numbers, we're going to go with point 6%, which comes out to one and a half pounds a week. Alright, so you weigh 220, or you weigh 250. And you're going to lose one and a half pounds a week. So that's going to take roughly 16 weeks. All right. And as far as calculating the one and a half pounds, that's going to have to do with the the deficit that you go into, which I wasn't going to get into details today. But just for simplicity, about a pound a week is 3500 calories. So one and a half pounds is going to be and now I don't have my calculator 3500 plus 55 5250, I think I got that, right, I don't know, it's gonna be
Philip Pape 26:39
that much divided by seven. So whatever that is, in calories, you have to eat that many calories below your maintenance. But I don't want to complicate it with all those calculations. I've got other episodes in the past that go into the numbers at nauseam. The point is, you're going to use an app or work with a coach or calculate the numbers yourself, and aim to lose one and a half pounds per week. Here's the thing, or the problem or issue or challenge. As you diet, your metabolism will decline, like we talked about earlier. And if you do nothing differently, then you're going to have to cut calories more and more as you get leaner and leaner. partly just because you weigh less, your body's burning less. But it's also starting to downregulate in general, because not that you're starving your body. But your body's not getting everything it needs for that full hormonal balance. So we've talked about, so how do we counteract that you got it steps and training, I'm gonna assume you're already training hard. So you can't really train harder on a cut. So the one thing you can do is increase your steps. So in a diet, think about how to structure your day, your week, to get an extra 2000 steps a day, or 4000 steps a day, whatever you can handle, whatever it is, you're going to have to adjust calories roughly every one to two weeks based on the rate of change. So you're trying to lose one and a half pounds a week, and you're going to weigh yourself and you're going to use the average weight, you're not just going to use the daily fluctuations. And after the first week, you've lost one and a half pounds Great. Stick with those calories. Next week, you lost only one pound. Okay, you might need to cut calories a little more. Next week, you lose two and a half pounds, okay, maybe a little more aggressive, you get you get the idea, right? We're just kind of eating it out over time. So the average is one and a half pounds a week. Okay. Now, how do we do that from a food perspective? Well, on a cut when you're losing weight, we often actually need to eat more protein than when we're gaining weight. But if you just went from very low protein in your past life to you just listen to this and you've brought your protein up to where it needs to be around one gram per pound. That's perfectly fine. I tried to push people to go to 1.2 grams per pound. The problem is that pushes out more fats and carbs. So for balance for flexibility for not suffering anywhere between point eight and 1.2 grams per pound is okay. And then the rest. The rest of the reduction comes from fat and carbs. And you might ask, Well, are we talking low carb? No, we're talking whatever you enjoy. So if you prefer fats over carbs, then the carbs will be lower. If you really like carbs, or you realize the value of carbs for energy when you work out, cut the fats. The lower the calories you have to work with and the lower fats and carbs you have to work with. It's just straight math. All right. So then what we're going to do is divide all those calories by the number of meals and snacks we need or want to have each day. So we're going to have three meals and two snacks. Well, and we've got 1800 calories to work with. Well, that might be three meals at 400 calories. That's 1200 And then two meals at 200 calories, for example. And this is what we mean by thinking ahead plus Planning and not being compulsive. And I can go off on a whole tangent about compulsive and obsessive and emotional eating, and it can be its own episode. But one of the experts in that area, I think his name is Dr. Glen Livingston. He talks about the concept of ordered and planned eating, versus compulsive eating. Meaning that one of the best ways to combat this emotional eating that a lot of us suffer from is just to plan things ahead of time. So making sure you have your day structured your meal structure, etc. To the extent you need to, right, I'm not talking about being obsessive about it, it's just what you need to execute your plan, versus just go grab what's in the cupboard. Alright, so I'm going off on tangents, hopefully, these are interesting, helpful tangents, but back to the calories, the lower the calories, the more you're gonna have to focus on high volume foods. So we talked about food selection, and we talked about restraint versus restriction. What we're talking about here is, the lower your calories are the hungry, or you're going to be if you continue to eat a lot of processed foods, for example. So I'm not telling you to cut all those out, what I'm saying is, you may have to incorporate more fruits, vegetables, when you eat dairy, like cottage cheese, or Greek yogurt, you might try the low fat version of that, you know, I know it's not as tasty. But you know, you don't have to get skim. You could get 2% Whatever, leaner cuts of meat, there's plenty of delicious meat that are lean. And by the way, chicken thighs are not as fatty as people think. So you can still have chicken thighs on a diet, trust me. Whole grains versus white grains. You know, if, if you're still gonna enjoy a bagel, fine, go get a whole grain bagel instead of weighed in and look at the difference in calories. It's a few, it's fewer calories for the whole grain version. And it might fill you up more. It's just kind of a smart decision. smart, creative decisions like this. Egg whites, egg whites are kind of disgusting in my opinion. But when you mix them with whole eggs, and you have an omelet, where there are whole eggs in there, the whites kind of just sneak in there and give you the extra protein and fewer calories, right. And then mostly unsaturated fats. So try using olive oil instead of butter while you're on a diet. Okay, I love butter as much as the next person, but you're not going to notice that big of a difference. And just try to be creative is my whole point here without necessarily restricting. Okay. So while we're going through this process, we need to monitor biofeedback, we're talking sleep, stress, hunger, energy performance recovery. I know it sounds like a lot. So like with my clients, I have them do a weekly check in. And there's ratings where they rate each of these and usually, they're all pretty good. But occasionally I'll see one come in at a three or four at a 10. You know, that's, that's a point that might be worth talking about. So you can do the same for yourself with a journal, you can do it with an app. And I would focus on the things where you have the most challenges, like for me, it's getting enough sleep. So I went out of my way to get one of those smart rings, and really have to go out of my way to to not work so hard during the day and then not sleep enough, you know, prone to get up at five and train and work and then stay up late just because I'm trying to get things done. But that's not good for my recovery, your issue might be something else, you might get super hungry at 3pm. And knowing that information will allow you to adjust things like to have more vegetables with your lunch, simple things like that, or drink more water in the afternoon. Okay, so we've talked about a lot of things, we're losing weight, we already have a really good system in place for food selection, meal timing, protein training. And by the way, if you're training and getting steps, a lot of this stuff is easier simply because you have higher calories. So don't discount that. Whereas the person next to you is just like, you know, dragging their feet, their legs feel heavy, they're cranky. They're doing all this cardio, or they're on the treadmill, and they're eating 1300 calories. You you're going and you're resistance training and going for nice walks, you're getting good sleep, and you're at 1900 calories, and you're losing more fat. That's what we want to get to. Okay, so now you've lost 10%, you're down to 225 you're feeling okay, maybe you're feeling a little bit, a little stressed or a little bit over overnighted, so to speak, because it's been 16 weeks, it's been four months. This is where we're going to take a diet break, right and a diet break is just a fancy term for stop dieting for a while. And we do that not just for recovery and for the additional calories, but for psychology. And the science actually supports the idea that the psychological component is probably the most important component because it allows you to mentally stop thinking about dieting and food and all these things and Just enjoy yourself for a while to a higher level of calories, and then continue with a fresh start. It's like when you have a vacation, right? Or when the weekend comes around, you've been working hard all week, the weekend comes around, and you get that break Monday comes around, okay, you're ready to go again? Well, most people, maybe not most people, you get the idea. It's like a vacation. So there are two ways to do a diet break. One is to do a reverse diet, like we did at the beginning, where you add a few 100 calories each week. But I prefer for a diet break to just go wham right away into what's called a recovery diet, where you just jump right up to your maintenance. So if you've been at a deficit of 600 calories a day, you're going to up your calories by 600, immediately that Monday, and you're going to stay there for maybe four to eight weeks. So we're talking about a decent amount of time, where you're going to stop your dieting on purpose, so that your metabolism can recover, you can start performing better in the gym, you're gonna feel better, everything's just gonna kind of feel a little better, and then psychologically, you get that boost. Now, if you feel completely great, after 16 weeks of dieting, and you want to keep going, and you're my client, we have that conversation Sure, we're gonna keep going potentially, this is more of a rule of thumb. Similarly, if after 12 weeks of the 16 weeks, you're just, you've had it, think about having a diet break, it could be a shorter one, it could be a one or two week diet break. It could even be what they call a refeed, which is just just a weekend. Not a binge, but a planned higher calorie weekend. Okay, but what we're talking about here is you've lost 10% of your weight, we're gonna go for a month or two at maintenance. And here's how we're going to do it. We're not going to start eating Pop Tarts, and kettle corn, although I love those things. Okay. Now, if you were already eating Pop Tarts, and kettle corn and some level as part of your diet, okay, then maybe it's not a big difference, but you get the point, we're instead going to scale up what we were eating. That's all we're going to do. So if we're going to add 600 or 1000 calories. And I'm looking at the comments, avocado Yeah, love avocado and a shirt that's taking some saturated, go for it. We're going to scale up our foods. So we're going to stick with the avocado oil, the olive oil, egg whites, the low fat, dairy, all these things mixed in with the delicious things. So it's a nice balanced diet, and we're just going to scale them up. So if you are normally having two eggs, you're going to have three if you normally have eight ounces of meat, now you're going to have 12 ounces of meat, so you get the idea. And this is to avoid completely changing
Philip Pape 37:39
our mindset in the middle of the diet where we still have more dieting to go. The the more process palatable foods, those will come later once you get to the leanness where you want. Those will come later when we talk about bulking and the opportunity for some extra indulgences. But the nice thing about a diet break is you scale up and you still have some room for these indulgences, you'll have some room for what I call planned indulgences. So this could be your glass of wine, or your ice cream on the weekend or that slice of pizza. If you know you're going to a party or an event or holiday event, you know thinking ahead and planning for what you're going to eat. And I like the strategy I like to use for example is if you know you're gonna binge not binge, if you know you're going to have a party on the weekend, and it's gonna be mainly fats and carbs we know it's gonna be then eat your protein in the morning, almost exclusively protein and save the rest of the fats and carbs for the night, or eat fewer calories during the week, and then scale up the calories on the weekend. Alright, but I digress. My point here is we're taking a diet break, we're getting everything back, excuse me back to normal. And that's going to take about four to eight weeks. So now we're 225 pounds, we're gonna rinse and repeat that entire process of the reasonable caloric deficit. And you might find, you might find that your metabolism is at a state now. And you're so used to dieting now that you could go more aggressively, you might be able to maybe not, your lighter, your metabolism might be lower, maybe not depends on the individual. So you do that again, and you get to 200 and boom, you're at your target weight. And notice how we got there. We didn't get there just by cutting calories right off the bat and suffering we got there by getting us into the healthiest state we could possibly get. And then quickly losing the fat holding on to the muscle. And now we are in a state where we can possibly maintain this 200 pound weight on more calories than we used to have at 250 pounds. And you can understand the logic of how we got there because of the training because of the steps because of the protein. So now you have think about this you have lifelong habits in place. You've lost mostly fat while preserving muscle. You're now training you know how to manage food quality food selection, timing meal timing intake, you have all these skills in place, so that you can just turn the dial whenever you want, you can turn it up or down. And then you can start having fun with advanced strategies like cutting and bulking. Okay, and I went through this myself, after years and years of chronic dieting, finally figured out, oh, there's a way to control this process, and make it not suffer and get to a level of leanness that you'd never really been to before. With more calories, a true state of health. Now, I can actually intentionally gain weight while building muscle, which is something most people never even consider. So normal normal rebounds, where you just gain fat, your body composition has improved. And best of all, you have confidence. This is really about skills and confidence, to have control of the process of what goes in your mouth of what your body looks like, feels like. And then now you can play with your kids play with your family, you know, do those things you want to do up into old age. And that's really what we all want. And And last but not least, you basically know what the heck you're doing in the world of nutrition and fat loss. So that is how you lose significant weight sustainably for long term results. So I hope that was helpful. I know there's a lot to cover. And there's probably a lot of other topics I didn't cover. So if you have questions or follow up, please reach out to me, I'm going to provide a short blueprint or pdf of all of these steps. In the Facebook group. If you if you're in there, just reach out I'll put out a post asking if anybody wants it. If you need someone to give you accountability, because I know this is a lot. And you want that external motivation. You want that guidance to successfully to sustainably lose fat using the process we just covered. Reach out to me reach out to me I do one on one nutrition and lifestyle coaching. But I'm happy to answer questions for free you know, I'm not going to charge you just to answer a question. Just DM me @witsandweights on Instagram or Facebook, or you can go to witsandweights.com/coaching. So if you're interested in coaching, it's a six month program, which as you learn today is kind of the timeframe we need to restore your metabolism, accelerate fat loss from a better starting point and integrate these changes into your lifestyle. So you what you get with that is one on one strategy calls, weekly check ins private group access 24/7 Direct Message access to me in our professional app, whenever you have questions or issues. I also offer a guarantee that if you don't achieve the results we want by the end of six months, I will continue working with you for free until we do because I'm confident we will get you the results if you also put in the work. So again, just DM me on Instagram @witsandweights weights or Facebook, or go to witsandweights.com/coaching. And if this training was helpful, or if you have questions, just comment on the video, click the link in the show notes or email me at philip@witsandweights.com And I wish you the best in your fat loss journey.
Philip Pape 43:04
Thank you so much for joining me today. Before you go, I do have a quick favor to ask. If you enjoy the podcast, just let me know by leaving a review in Apple podcasts. This will help others find the podcast in search results, which makes a huge difference. Thanks again for joining me, your host Philip Pape in this episode of Wits & Weights. I'll see you next time and stay strong.
