Stop Eating LESS to Lose Fat After 40 (Do This Instead) | Ep 454

If you've been eating 1,200, 1,500, maybe even 1,800 calories for months or even years and you're

working out and the scale won't budge, this episode is going to explain exactly what's happening

inside your body and why eating less is probably the thing keeping you stuck. Today I'm going to

show you the metabolic trap that catches almost everyone over 40 who's been dieting for years

while the calorie deficit that worked when you were 30 stops working at 45 and a three-part

approach to fix this without gaining a bunch of weight in the process.

Welcome to Whits and Wates, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the

microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work and gives you the deceptively simple fix

that does. I'm your host Certified Nutrition Coach, Philip Pape, and if you listened to Tuesday's

episode, you heard me walk through the full 26-week structure of eat more, lift heavy, and what a

coached body composition process looks like. But today I want to talk about the problem that

that program was built to solve because it's the single most common pattern that I see in men and

women over 40 who come to me for us straighted, stuck, convinced that something is wrong with their

body. They just don't know what. And it's usually this. They're eating too little. They're not

eating too much. They're eating too little. But what does that mean? The advice you keep getting is to

eat less, move more. So stick around because we're going to go over exactly what this means and what

to do about it. And then at the very end of this episode, I'm going to share one number that

predicts whether your next diet will actually work or you're just going to repeat the same

yo-yo cycle. And it's a number that most people never look at. You'll learn in 30 seconds whether

your body is ready to lose fat or whether you need to do something else. First, so stay around for

that. Here is what we're covering today. First, why eat less, move more, just is bad advice,

especially the older we get, and what is different about this stage of life in our 40s, 50s, and

beyond that affects that advice. Second, the three metabolic adaptations that your body makes when

you chronically under eat and why they create this vicious cycle that gets harder to escape the

longer you stay in it. And third, a three-part fix that can reverse the cycle without requiring you to

just eat whatever you want, like they say on social media or to abandon your goals either.

So let's start with the typical advice, the conventional wisdom. I always like to break apart

the advice. That's the mission of this show. You know it. I know it. It's called eat less, move more.

It's very, very common. It is a pithy response and a comment to just about any YouTube video or

Instagram post where someone's talking about a struggle and they're like, you just need to eat less,

move more, bro. That's all you need to do. Create a calorie deficit, the bigger the deficit, the faster

results. And if you're not losing weight, you're not in a deficit, so eat even less. Boom, easy, right?

And here's the thing, like the advice related to energy balance and calories and calories out,

I will say over and over is technically and scientifically correct. You do need a calorie deficit

to lose weight and thus lose fat. That is thermal dynamics. And so I would never argue with physics.

I'm a man of science. The problem is the assumption underneath this, the premise. And that is that

your body is a static system. That's the premise that is false. That if you eat 500 fewer calories

today, that you're going to burn 500 more calories and that that math is going to hold indefinitely

for the next few weeks, months and beyond. But it doesn't because your body is an adaptive system.

In response to the inputs, you give it and it changes that equation. In other words, calories and

calories out is technically correct. And the way we apply it to our body is very well misunderstood.

And if you're going to understand it, you can then take advantage of that correct equation for you.

Now, for a lot of people who are younger in their 20s and their 30s, a simple deficit approach

often works. You cut calories, you lose weight, you go back to eating normally done. And that's

because there's a lot less fighting against that at this age. We're going to talk about that.

You tend to recover much more quickly. But once you get older, once you get into your 40s,

raise your hand if you realize this or recognize this, especially if you are a woman going through

a pair of imposed menopause, a man on lower testosterone, people with high stress lives, etc.

You notice something doesn't quite work the same. And it's not because, again, thermodynamics,

physics stops working, but because the compensatory mechanisms get more aggressive. They were

always there to some extent, even in your 20s, but they're way more aggressive. Your hormones

shift a lot more. For women estrogen plays a role in storage of fat, where you store fat, how

you partition nutrients, how sensitive you are to insulin. Cortisol is higher because life is just

more and more stressful. It's like a compounding stress over time. Kids, parents, finances,

job, a house, all of it, right? All of it. Your sleep quality is often dropping at this time of

life as well for a lot of the same reasons. And guess what sleep affects? It affects appetite,

affects recovery, how your body handles glucose, even in carbs, all of those things cravings,

the list goes on. So when, for example, a 47 year old woman who's been dieting on and off for 15

years, cuts to 1200 calories yet again. And now her body doesn't respond the same way it did at

32. It responds more aggressively. It holds on harder. And she still gets the same advice, eat

even less. Do more cardio. Try harder. Like, let's go to 1100 calories. Let's go to 1000. I've seen

people come from other coaches when they're like, yeah, she had me on 800 calories because the

needle wasn't moving. I'm like, are you kidding me? Is that the only solution we have out there,

coaches? Come on. So I hear this all the time. And I get really pissed and frustrated on behalf of

everyone who gets his advice because having worked with hundreds of clients myself in our coaching

programs, you know, 49% of them report their proteins, their number one struggle. And you're like,

what does it have to do with everything you just said? It's because you are eating so little food

and probably even so little protein, even if the calories are like, okay, right, that hitting

adequate protein with low calories is nearly impossible without a very, very specific

intentional plan. So your short-changing your protein massively and that alone can be a big

lever behind why things aren't working. Let alone all the other problems we're going to talk about

in this episode from under eating in general. So if you are living on a calorie target and a prayer,

living on a prayer, right, it's not going to work for you. So the conventional wisdom is not wrong

about the physics, about the mechanism of calories and calories out. It is wrong about the application

of that theory or that fact, I should say. You know, it treats your body like a static system when

it's actually a very dynamic system. All right. So what is actually happening when you chronically

underneath? Because this will now take us to that next level of understanding the dynamic system.

And by chronically, I mean months to more likely many years of eating below what your body needs

to maintain its current weight while also supporting muscle hormones and daily function.

Listen to what I just said that most important sentence of the whole podcast, you are eating below

what your body needs to maintain weight and support muscle hormones and function. So what's

probably happening is you're maintaining weight, but you're not supporting your muscle hormones and

function. That's the key. It's not just about scale weight. You might be eating 1200 calories

and maintaining your weight, but you are under supporting lots of things inside your body that are

independent of scale weight, right? I'm not talking about a mini cut or a well plan fat loss phase

that someone goes through. Those are fine. I'm talking about the perpetual 1200 calorie existence

that millions of people live in. Millions of women especially live in. So your body is making three

adaptations, three adaptations through the compensatory mechanism, as I mentioned before. And they stack

on top of each other. So these can be additive. All right. Adaptation number one is metabolic adaptation

or the suppression of your metabolic rate, also called adaptive thermogenesis. Okay. The phrase

doesn't matter. The point is that your metabolism, your daily energy expenditure drops,

not because you weigh less. That's actually totally expected. Like if you lost 20 pounds of weight,

yeah, you're going to burn fuel calories. It's fine. But beyond that, there's an additional

adaptation that occurs. This adaptive thermogenesis. We mentioned the biggest loser study many times

because it's such an extreme, but really illustrative example of this, where six years after the show,

where these contestants lost a ton of weight very quickly, their metabolism's were still burning

fewer 500 fewer calories per day than predicted for their body size. Now that's an extreme case,

right? That's extreme dieting, extreme exercise, extreme weight loss, but it's the same mechanism

for anyone in a chronic deficit. Your metabolic rate declines. Your basal metabolic rate declines,

right? That's your BMR, but also your neat, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis drops

because you tend to move less unconsciously, you fidget less, you take fewer steps, you sit more,

you tend to feel more tired. And then because you're eating less, the thermic effect of food drops,

you're burning fewer calories just from eating less and eating less protein. And all of these

are components of your metabolism dropping, right? Compressing dropping. And it doesn't just happen

while you're dieting. If you have been in a deficit for a long time, and then you go back to

eating normally, let's put quotes around that because you're still probably not eating normally.

Your metabolism, it's not going to instantly bounce back. It's going to take time. It takes the

right conditions. You have to have adequate food, adequate protein, resistance training. And for

many of you, even if you came kind of out of a diet, let's say, you never quite came out of it to

recover all those functions. Like I said before, you might be maintaining your weight, but your

under-supporting everything else in your body. So that's the first adaptation. The second one

is muscle loss. When you're in a calorie deficit, especially a large one, and you're not doing

resistance training, or you're not eating enough protein to support that training, your body is

going to pull its energy not just from fat, but also from muscle. I hate to say it burns muscle,

because the word burn is very unscientific in this case, but if that helps you visualize it,

feel free. So you're not just burning fat, you're burning muscle. I mentioned the 2010

sleep in adiposity study before that looked at sleep deprived diners, and they lost 60% of their

weight as lean mass instead of fat. And now we have studies of people on GLP1s, and we see it's

something like 30 or 40% of lean mass is lost instead of fat. And again, that's without

resistance training and eating enough protein. When you do resistance training and eating

enough protein, you can hold onto the vast majority of not all of your lean mass. And for newer

lifters, you might even gain some lean mass. So that's very, very important aspect that's

independent of calories and calories out. And this matters extremely because muscle is the most

metabolic, the active tissue in your body. It's that metabolic engine where when you lose muscle,

that's going to further lower your metabolic rate, which means the deficit you started with

gets smaller and smaller without you trying, which means you have to eat less if you want to get

the deficit back. And then it causes more muscle loss, okay? So you see what the vicious cycle is,

it feeds itself. And so for women over 40 specifically, thinking of parry and postmenopause,

this is happening. This is this is a big part of what's happening. Ladies, when you look at why you

have weight loss resistance and have to feel like you have to eat less and less, there's muscle

loss compounded with the natural age-related tendency to lose muscle called sarcopenia, right? So

not just the muscle loss from dieting, but just the muscle loss from not lifting weights due to age

and the loss of function as well. So if you're not actively building and protecting muscle

through resistance, training and adequate protein, you are definitely losing it. And every pound

of muscle, you lose then makes the next diet harder. So that's the second type of adaptation

for chronic unreading. The third one is hormones. Let's talk hormones because they are a thing,

even though they sometimes get overblown in social media, but just to be straight about it,

chronic energy restriction suppresses hormones. One of those hormones is thyroid hormones,

especially T3. That's the active form that relates your metabolism. It's the metabolic regulator.

So if you have lower T3, lower metabolism, that means you have to eat less. It also suppresses

your reproductive hormones. Your body decides, hey, reproduction is not a priority when food is scarce.

I mentioned earlier, if you're under eating, even if you're maintaining your weight,

you might not be supporting your hormones. You might even be amenorrhea. I cannot have a period

like if it's very extreme or low energy, very low energy. So dieting not only does affect

thyroid affects your reproductive hormones, estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, and of course

that affects men as well. And that makes your body composition worse as well. Okay, all of these

things affect fat storage, like visceral fat storage. Your stressors, your stress goes up, which is

represented by cortisol, because under eating, guess what? Is a physiological stressor? And then

that promotes more fat storage, especially in the midsection. And that impairs recovery from training.

So ironically, you're trying to lose weight or fat by under eating, but it's causing you to

hold fat and causing a hold fat in the places you don't want. So you have a woman eating 1200

calories, exercising five days a week, probably not doing lifting properly or with progressive

overload, if at all, maybe instead doing, I don't know, palatons, spin classes, group classes,

those things, which are fun, they're social, they're all that, but they, you know, Pilates, I know I

get flack for saying Pilates isn't strength training, but from a progressive overload,

perspective over time, especially for heavier loads for things like bone density, it's not going

to do the job. It just can't, by definition physically it can't. Okay, it's no judgment on you for

liking Pilates. It's the physical manifestation of the movement patterns and the load that you

can't get relative to resistance training. Anyway, that's a side tangent. But going back to this

woman is 1200 calories, probably not sleeping very well, probably running on like a lot of cortisol,

right? A high stress situation, probably losing muscle, probably have suppressed thyroid function,

probably trying to take a bunch of supplements to make up for it and it's not doing it.

The number on the scale doesn't move. And everyone around you, including your freaking doctors,

telling you to eat less or try harder. You need, you need to do more diet, you have to focus

on your diet and exercise. And that's the extent of their advice. Am I right? Am I right? Come on.

Okay. So that's the under eating trap. That is the under eating trap, meaning the thing you think

is the solution is the thing causing the problem. And the longer you stay in it, the deeper the whole

gets. So if you're hearing this, if you're like, Hey, I recognize myself in what Philip is saying,

that is me. That is me. I've been stuck in this cycle of eating less and getting nowhere.

All right. Listen up. I want to tell you about eat more, lift, heavy. This is my brand new

26 week experience coaching program. I built it with coach Carol. So you've got two coaches.

By the way, she's a women's and hormone expert, especially in thyroid. The entire first phase

of the 26 weeks is about breaking this cycle. We do not start you with a diet. We do not. And by

the way, in this program, you can eat whatever you want, but it's going to be with intention.

We actually start building a measurement system. We establish your baseline. We get you eating

enough and breaking through the psychological fears of eating enough to support your training

and your hormones and to feel great and to look great eventually. And I say eventually because

obviously physical change will take time and to live that identity you want to live as someone

who fuels yourself. You get a training program on day one or I should say week one. If you submit

our intake, they're monthly live coaching calls. If you prefer a live interaction, there is one

focus per week in the program. So you never get overwhelmed. You're never going to fall behind

because it's at your own pace. It unlocks whenever you join. It's not that you're joining a group

of people. It's whenever you join, but it does open up this Monday, March 30th. And we have founders

pricing only through this week, March 29th. It's a big discount from what it will be when it goes

public on Monday. So if you want to grab a spot there, you won't get charged until the 29th.

Would it eat more live tevy.com? That's eat more live tevy.com. All the details are there.

The pricing is there. Fully transparent. Eat more live tevy.com. Link is in the show notes.

All right. So now we know why this is a trap. Why it's a contradiction almost. Now what do you do

about it? Okay. What do you do about it? I want to be clear. The fix is for everything I

everything I share on the show. The fix is usually straightforward, but it's not fast. And sometimes

it's not easy. And if you're not ready to do a little bit of effort and work, you're not going

to get your goals and you're not going to improve. And I'm sorry if that hurts you, you know,

in your heart or your mind, but it's the truth. And you know it's the truth. You know anything in

life in this world that that involves improving yourself and breaking it through your comfort zone

requires a little bit of effort. So and it's not always fast. In fact, it's usually slower to do it

right. If you've been chronically under eating for years, you're not going to fix everything in two

weeks, nor would you expect to or want to. It's been years. What's another few months to do it

the right way? The direction of change, however, starts immediately as in right now based on what

you decide to do from this episode. And that matters a ton. That matters. Men and women listening,

dear listener, change can start right now. The direction of change is an action in of itself that

will change your life. All right. What's the first thing you're going to do? The first thing is

to restore your calorie intake to maintenance. We're not getting you to a surplus. We're not

doing cheat meals or eating whatever you want. We're getting you to your true maintenance.

But this means you have to figure out what your total expenditure is right now in your current

adapted state. And at least that amount consistently and then start to eat more than that to help

you recover. So I'll mention it again, a tool like macro factor is incredibly useful here because it

uses your weight trend and food intake over time to calculate your actual maintenance calories.

And then it'll follow it as your calories increase. So this is not reverse dieting. This is recovery

dieting. We're jumping right to where we think your maintenance is now. And then we're pushing that

up to get you to your final recovered maintenance. So go download macro factor from the app store.

If you don't already use it, use my code witsandweights all one word all spelled out witsandweights to

get a two week free trial. It's going to change your life. I've had hundreds of people email me

and say, look, I just started using macro factor months ago. And that's all I need. I don't even

want your coaching programs like that has solved it for me. And I'm happy to say that on a show like

this because it supports the podcast and it helps people. And if you want to do it, do it, please

macro factor use my code witsandweights. Okay. So by doing that, you can find what your

maintenance is now. For most women that I work with who have been chronically dieting,

maintenance is higher than they think. It's higher than they think. It's not dramatically higher,

like 500 calories or 1000 calories higher. Well, it could be 500. So I take that back. It depends

on how you define dramatic. But it could be enough that the jump from like 1200 to 1600 is what

they need. And that feels significant. I mean, 400 calories is like a whole extra small meal,

or maybe not even a small meal, maybe a decent meal that's full of fiber and vegetables and lean

meats and such. You can get a lot for 400 calories, right? And so when you do that, though,

here's the fear. When you do that, the scale not only might, it probably will go up a few pounds

initially because of the water and glycogen from eating the extra food, the extra gut content,

the extra fluid and the extra carbs, probably extra carbs, right? And that has nothing to do with

body fat. Your muscles are refilling their carbohydrate stores, your liver is refilling the glycogen,

you're retaining more water and your digestive system has more stuff moving through it.

So this is normal and it's temporary and by temporary, I mean, the weight bump occurs and then

it stops. And here's the thing, just to take a quick side tangent. When you get used to cutting

and bulking, you see that both sides of the equation have like a few pounds of buffer because of

water, meaning when you go on a diet, you're going to lose quickly a few pounds. That's just water.

When you come out of the diet, you're going to gain quickly a few pounds. That's just water.

So you kind of notice that there's this little buffer of weight and you have to push through

that mentally to realize that has nothing to do with body fat. And so I don't want you to get stuck

on like a fixed number that this is your ideal weight or this is what I weighed when I was 25,

so that's what I should weigh now. Don't think that way. So I'm not going to pretend that this is

easy up here psychologically, okay? After years of restricting, eating more is going to feel wrong.

It's going to go against every instinct you've ever built. And that is a real, real fear.

And I respect it. I do. But let's look at the data. Let's look at the data. Clients who spend eight to

12 weeks of maintenance before attempting a fat loss phase tend to lose more fat, retain more muscle

and have dramatically better adherence when they eventually cut meaning they can keep their results.

Okay, that's clients who spend eight to 12 weeks of maintenance because they're

dieting from a position of metabolic strength as well as physiological and psychological

confidence instead of a depleted stressed out underfed state that is just going to backfire.

So that's part one is simply restoring your calorie intake to maintenance and it could take

four, six, eight, even 12 weeks to get there. The longer you've been dieting in the past,

the longer it's going to take. And that's just what it is except it and go after it.

Part two is prioritizing protein at every meal. And I know every single fitness person,

every single health and fitness podcast talks about protein all the time now. I don't want to just

like talk your ear off about it. But a few of the reasons this is so important is it's going to

burn more calories just by eating more protein as a percentage of your diet. So I've seen women

keep the calories the same double their protein so they reduce their fats and carbs a little

when they double their protein and they increase how many calories they burn by 100 calories.

Let's say just by doing that and it is often the difference between being able to do a calorie

deficit and not like mentally. So more protein literally increases your metabolic rate.

And of course it protects and builds muscle. That's that's really the most important

reason we eat protein because of the importance of building and holding on to that muscle.

Okay, the target for protein is 0.71 grams a pound per per pound of body weight.

Now in eat more lift heavy in week four I believe it is. We unlock a tool called the protein day

builder. I'm very proud of this tool. It is a very well designed tool where you put in your target

protein. How many times you want to eat per day? All of your preferences like I mean, even if you're

vegan or omnivore or you're gluten free, you don't want to use protein powders, you don't want to

use protein bars. All those preferences and it will build you a protein-based plan for the day

that has a lot of variety and a lot of ideas and you can rebuild with a click of a button and

like instantly you can click a button and it'll keep rebuilding for you. So I know that's the

biggest struggle for a lot of you guys is like, okay, I know I have to get a gram of protein per pound

or up to that. I don't know how. And you can go to AI and you could try tools like that for sure.

You can try to do it that way. But we have a tool like that in our program. Anyway, you know stepping

back a bit, I'm kind of jumping into the weeds. You can't just fix the protein gap just by adding

protein shakes. I mean, you can numerically, but you really want protein sources, a variety of

lean protein sources that also tend to have other forms of nutrition in them that they taste good,

that they're going to make great meals, et cetera. Everything from eggs to Greek yogurt to chicken

fish, lean beef, cottage cheese, and yes, even way protein. And kind of a good variety where protein

always anchors the meal and then you fill in the fats and carbs around it. I like to think protein,

then fiber, then other carbs. And fats kind of come in naturally with like oils and sauces and

naturally in meats and stuff like that. When you do this, something interesting happens that people

don't talk enough about. And that is your hunger stabilizes. Your hunger stabilizes. Protein is the

most satiating macro. So you feel fuller on more, you feel fuller because you have more protein,

but even when the calories are the same. And it can help with things like your 3pm energy crash

and rating the pantry after dinner. A lot of the cravings that you might have might go away.

It's simply because you up to protein and your total calories with these first two parts.

All right. So that's those first two parts. And then part three is of course resistance,

training with progressive overload. If I hear anyone, anyone tell me or think in their mind even

that they don't need to do resistance training, that it's just another form of exercise that

well, you should train based on what you like. And you are 100% incorrect. Resistance training is

absolutely a non-negotiable requirement as a human being. If you want to stay healthy and have a

long healthy life, you have to do it. You have to do it. I'm sorry. Okay. I've seen too many women

doing body weight circuits that they never increase in weight, light dumbbell classes, the pink dumbbells

and never go up. They do the machines that they never increase in weight. They're doing cardio heavy

programs. They're doing even Pilates. Yes, I'm calling out Pilates again or spin or whatever else.

And they don't actually progressively overload. And then they wonder why my body composition

isn't changing. Why do I see muscle definition? Or hey, I went on a diet. I lost fat. I said,

don't see the muscle. It's because you're not training properly. Building muscle requires

a specific stimulus. You have to challenge the muscle with enough resistance that it adapts

by growing. That's what's happening. You're giving your body a hormonal signal that it needs bigger

muscles. And bigger means tone or cut or whatever whatever word you like to lose. It doesn't mean

bulky, especially for women. Women aren't going to get bulky. And this means lifting weights that

are genuinely hard for anywhere from let's say three up to 20 reps per set. The details about training

we're not going to get into today. But it's got to be enough frequency enough volume over time,

tracking your lifts and progressively adding weight or reps over time. Even if you do this in a sloppy

imperfect way, as long as you can look at your log and say, wow, six weeks ago, I did this one

exercise for 85 pounds. And now I'm up to 115. That is proof that you're getting stronger in

thus building muscle. Okay. Now it doesn't require gym. You can have a gym at home. It doesn't

require barbells. You can use dumbbells and machines. But it does require progressive challenge,

not just the movement or quote unquote exercise itself. So those are the three big things. When you

combine adequate calories, adequate protein, progressive resistance training, your body starts

to rebuild. And it might I may sound like a broken record like, okay, these are the basics. But I

hope I got into a little bit level of detail today that helps you understand the why behind

how this affects your metabolism and your ability to eat food and why we're probably

under eating. And that's really part of the problem here. Okay. It's not just eat whatever you want,

eat a whole bunch more food, eat a whole bunch of pizza and donuts, sit around all day. And

that's what Philip told me to do. And that's going to help me know that's absolutely not what I'm

talking about. But once you do that, well, now you're going to support those things I just said

earlier. You weren't supporting even if you were maintaining your weight. And that is your hormonal

function because you're no longer restricting. You're building a body that requires more fuel

because you have more muscle because you're moving more, moving more in the right way. And now

eventually you could do a strategic fat loss phase and you have room to work with. It's not because

you've magically increased your metabolism. It's because you're probably finally supporting your

metabolism. And now you could eat say, you know, 1800 calories and lose some fat instead of 1200.

That's the fix. Eat enough, prioritize protein, lift progressively. And it sounds deceptively

simple because on paper, it is. The hard part is not the information I've said is before.

The hard part is trusting and taking action on the process when everything else you've been taught

says to do the opposite. Now just just to really quickly get ahead of the YouTube commenters,

although they're probably not going to comment on this because it's audio only three things I'm not

saying or four things I'm not saying. The first one I'm not saying calorie deficits don't work.

If you were listening carefully, you know that yes, you need a calorie deficit to lose fat,

but the way most people do it is counterproductive because of the chronic restriction.

And there's a difference between a well-designed time-limited fat loss phase from a

metabolically healthy starting point and a perpetual 1200 calorie, I'll say grinding deficit

misery that erodes your muscle, your metabolism, your hormones month after month.

I'm also not saying just eat more and magically lose weight. Just eat more in general.

Eating at maintenance is a recovery strategy to restore your body's capacity.

So when you do diet, it actually works. That's what we're talking about by eating more. And part of

the eating more is eating more protein, not just calories. I'm also not saying hormones don't

matter. They absolutely do. In fact, I mentioned that several times, but the hormonal issues you're

experiencing are probably amplified by chronic underneath, meaning it's bidirectional. If you're

hormone panels, if you get lab work, don't look great or you have symptoms from low hormones,

it could simply be that these other things like chronic under-eating are keeping those hormones

low, not that the low hormones are causing the other issues, but it's all a cascade.

So if you can fix the energy availability and fix the protein and fix the training,

a lot of those symptoms improve or go away. And maybe not all of them. Some women definitely

benefit from HRT and other medical interventions, but the foundation has to be there.

And then the last thing I'm not saying is that it's easy or that the fear of eating more isn't

real. It's definitely real. I hear it every day from clients and listeners. Like, hey, I know I'm

probably not eating enough, but I'm afraid of gaining weight. I hear that language where they

even know they need to eat more, but they're afraid of gaining weight. And it comes from years of

conditioning. Let's just, let's just say it out loud. Like I've been conditioned that way from

years and years, but the path forward is going to be through adequate fuel and muscle, not more

restriction. And the women who trust that and commit to it for six months are the ones who break

that cycle. All right. Before we wrap up, I promised you the number one thing that predicts whether

your next fat loss phase will work or just stall again, it's quick. It's practical. It's coming up

in just a second. But if this, if this episode described you to AT, if you've been eating less and

less with nothing to show for it, if you know you need to change your approach, but you're not sure

how to do it without gaining weight, that is what eat more, lift heavy was built for specifically.

It is not an education program or a learning program. It's actually an experience that walks you

through each of these steps of the phases to teach you the skills so that you have the confidence to

do this while also, of course, getting the result, changing your body composition, looking and feeling

better than you ever have before. The first phase is building your foundation, getting your tracking

set up, establishing your baseline, making sure you're eating enough, doing this recovery phase we

talked about today to support muscle and recovery before we make other changes. You'll have human

coaches, you'll have live calls, you'll have a training program assigned to you so you'll know what

to train with exactly. You won't be guessing or choosing on your own. We're going to help you.

And then you follow to 26 week program. It gives you one thing to focus on each week instead of

trying to overhaul everything at once. So if you want to stop guessing, if you want to eat more

and live tevy to get the result, go to eatmorelifttevy.com. Grab your spot before Monday, grab the

founders price right now. You won't get charged until launch. That's eatmorelifttevy.com.

All right, there's one number that predicts whether your next diet is going to work or you're going

to keep yo-yoing. It is your expenditure trend over the last four to six weeks. Your actual

observed expenditure. How many calories you burn every day? Based on what you've been eating and

what your weight has been doing. Now, this is a classic thing that coaches for years. Nutrition

coaches for years have helped their clients collect. And as I mentioned before, if you use macro

factor, it does it for you. You use my code widths and weights all one word, okay? And track your

food and weight daily for four to six weeks. And I say four to six because for some people,

their metabolism is a more stable than for others. For others, you have a lot of volatility or

a lot of recovery going on so it'll take a little longer to stabilize. Now, if you've looked at

that trend, and that trend, and that trend has been declining steadily week after week,

and you've been dieting or maintaining, then your metabolism is adapting downward.

And you don't want to try to cut further or start another calorie deficit from that position,

right? It's like trying to squeeze water from a dry sponge to give it that way.

If your expenditure has been stable or rising, then your body has a good enough capacity as

pretty well recovered, and you're probably in a good place to handle deficit. And that's it.

That's what I wanted to share today is you have to have real expenditure data.

And if it's going down, you probably still need to recover. If it's stable or going up,

you're probably good. So before you start your next diet, do this. Track your food and weight

consistently for four to six weeks or weeks of current intake. And we definitely help you do that

anymore. Lift heavy. I've always taken that approach with clients. A tool like macro factor will

calculate your real expenditure from that data. Don't change anything. Just start tracking.

That's all I'm asking you to do. Don't actually change the targets. Just set it to maintain and

start tracking until that number is stable and not decreasing. If it's going up a little,

that's fine. But as long as it's not decreasing, if it's falling, you have to restore

metabolism first. Get up to your true main. It's build muscle. Make sure you're training.

Let that number climb back up before you try to cut. All right. That is it. Until next time,

keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the path to losing fat after 40 starts

with eating enough to build the body that burns that fat. I'm Philip Pave and I'll talk to you next

time here on The Wits and Wits Podcast. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not

attended as medical advice. Please consult your healthcare provider before making any health changes.

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