Philip Pape: Building Muscle First To Lose Fat

I have a great discussion to share with you from Philip Pape, the host of the Wits and Weights podcast.

I had the pleasure of joining him on his show, and he was a really sharp guy with some nice, focused, and quantified insights about how to lose excess body fat the right way. If you visit witsandweights.com, you'll see some nice free offerings of his free metabolic assessment, nutrition coaching, nutrition guides, and some great content at the Wits and Weights podcast. 

In this episode, you will hear us discuss the fitness industry, what he's doing, and the always popular topic of trying to drop excess body fat. Phillip stated what I believe to be a life changing insight about weight loss by saying: it all starts with strength training. You have to work on building muscle in order to succeed, even with dietary transition, because if you don't, you're going to fall into old habits—you're going to get hungry, you're going to want to chomp on something. As you will learn in this show, when you start working hard on strength and resistance training, you are going to have muscles actively taking glucose in from the bloodstream and replenishing the larger muscle, the more muscle mass that you build, as well as recovering from the workouts where you are burning glucose in the workout, burning glycogen, and then replenishing stored glycogen. What an interesting and very simple takeaway—that it's not just about locking in on your diet, watching your portion sizes, and all the things that we've been programmed for so long to think is the main starting point to getting the physique that you dream of. It starts with hard work and pumping the iron.

We also have a fascinating conversation in the middle where we talk about this theme that I've talked about on the podcast often—the fully fueled approach to fitness and longevity, where you're eating more food, moving more frequently, recovering faster, and living longer. This topic came up as Phillip was describing a gaining phase that he goes through in his training where he's doing some strenuous workouts, the hypertrophy style workout, and deliberately and systematically consuming more calories over a sustained period of time, whether it's a month or six weeks. And during that time period, what a surprise!—he has more energy, he's more active, he’s tapping his foot more at his desk and feeling great and recovering and building muscle. So I think it's a nice reflection on the importance of fueling yourself with natural, nutrient dense food exclusively, and then getting to work and working those muscles. That is the path to not only getting off that stubborn, excess body fat that might have been sitting there even when you're doing hard work on your diet, but to opening a new portal and exposing yourself to new possibilities. Enjoy this show with weight loss and fat reduction body composition expert Philip Pap of the Wits and Weights podcast.

 

TIMESTAMPS:

Philip Pape talks about the best way to lose weight is with strength training. [00:56]

When you start the program with Philip, you start with self-awareness of how much you are eating, what you’re eating, the composition of there food and the movement and the training you are already doing. [08:41]

What is the muscle centric approach? Burning calories is not the best way to lose weight.[11:14]

What is the biggest offense to healthy living and longevity? [16:05]

When you have a lot of muscle mass on your body, or you're stimulating the muscles in aworkout, the glucose is going into the muscle to refuel and replenish. [19:34]

How’s it that a person can have good muscle mass but still need to lose weight? [21:52]

Philip explains how and why he purposely gains weight as he is trying to put on more muscle. [23:22]

The consumption of more calories is fueling a more