5 Real Situations That Stall Your Fat Loss Every Week

Learn about 5 specific moments that happen during an ordinary week, when you're hungry or rushed or looking at a menu and you just have to decide something right now, that can cause you to slip up during fat loss (when in a calorie deficit).

These small, recurring moments of real-life decision-making drive a disproportionate amount of your actual fat loss results, yet most people never identify them as the real bottleneck.

This episode covers each scenario, a helpful too for each one, and a pattern that connects all five (and shows up in dozens of other moments people don't realize are costing them progress).

Today's the last day for 20% off the Fitness Lab app, now 20% off all plans through TONIGHT, Friday, May 8. Real-time coaching for fat loss, strength training, and lifting weights built for adults over 40 who want a smart second opinion in the real moments where decisions get made.

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Transcript

Five Moments That Break Diets

Philip Pape 0:00

Happy Saturday, another surprise bonus episode because I want to walk you through five real moments during the week where fat loss can become a problem. We have all these moments, these situations where we don't plan for them. They just happen. And they are the ones that tend to drive most of the results. It's like when you have your budget and you're going along and you have your income and your expenses, and all of a sudden, oops, I need to replace the exhaust of my car, right? And you didn't really have enough saved up for that. So boom, your whole week or month budget just gets blown up, and now you have to make all these shifts. So in dieting and in fat loss, there are moments where you know what you're supposed to do, but you're trying to figure out what to do. And there's this thing called decision fatigue, where in the moment you have to make a decision. And unfortunately, oops, I didn't plan for it. Obviously, planning for things ahead, being intentional is the best approach, but we don't always do that. And sometimes life throws things our way, and then you don't have anybody around you to help. Maybe if you have a coach, you can't reach out to them or they're not going to respond instantly. So on last Saturday, I did a bonus episode on the structural gap in coaching. The idea that availability drives the disproportionate amount of your actual income. In other words, the moments in life where coaching would help the most is usually the moment you can't get a coach or can't get access to a coach. And I see this with clients too. When we get on a call, I'm like, why didn't you reach out to me during the week? And they're like, well, it wouldn't have helped because I couldn't get you in like the next five minutes and I had to make a decision. And so we diagnose after the fact. So I want to get more specific about what helps in specific moments during fat loss, because that is why. Look, I love technology. I'm a software guy by background. And I also love coaching, not just being a coach, but having mentors and coaches and tools to help me out. Well, now we have AI, we have technology, we have all this amazing stuff, but it's being misused or it's just not helpful. So my app, it's called Fitness Lab, if you haven't heard about it before, I wanted to design it where you could pull it out of your pocket in the moment when something's happening and figure out what to do and get a real-time response with context on you already there, like your goals, your data, your history, not having to tell ChatGPT like a million things before it can figure out what the heck you're trying to ask it. And over the last few months, I've been watching, hey, how are people using this? What situations come up again and again where they would love to use the app and maybe it's not fully up to snuff because I'm always trying to improve. So these are the ones. And now the latest version can handle these situations. So let me walk you through them. By the way, if you want to go check out the app, go to wits and weights.com slash app. You don't have to pay for it until you go through a quick onboarding quiz and see what plan it's generating for you. You can see exactly what how it works, screenshots, all that fun stuff before you even buy it. So just go to wits and weights.com slash app. All right, scenario number one is at a restaurant. Super common. You sit down, you open the menu, or maybe it's a fast food or casual like Chipotle, which I talked about last week, and you didn't plan ahead or you couldn't plan ahead, maybe you haven't been here very frequently, and you don't know what to order. And you don't want to derail the day. And look, there's some apps out there that are designed for fast food restaurants and stuff like that, but they're very restricted to certain databases, certain stores, right? So all you have to do is you open Fitness Lab, you go into the coach chat, you take a picture, or in fact, scratch that. We actually have a pre-meal coaching activity already built in for you. So you can go in there, take a picture of the menu, or if there's food available, you can take a picture of it and just ask, say, hey, what should I choose? Like it's gonna say, well, based on your protein needs and your history and your eating pattern, blah, blah, blah. Here's what I would suggest. And you get an actual answer based on your data and your goals. So that is really cool. That that only takes like 15 seconds. That's scenario number one. Scenario number two is you're at home and you haven't planned dinner and it's 5 p.m. Raise your hand. Or, oh, I thought my wife was gonna make dinner. Oh, it was my turn. You open the fridge and you're like, I have no idea what to make. Like, I don't have many leftovers. We haven't gone grocery shopping in a week. You get my drift. And what you could do is take a picture of what's in the fridge. Pretty cool, right? You could take a picture of what's in the fridge and say, hey, fitness lab, give me some ideas. Boom. And it does. It can do that. Now, hopefully, the it's it can tell what's in your fridge. You might have to give a little description and you can do that. But a lot of people don't even realize this is possible. Like you can take a picture of anything, you can give it any file, any audio, any video, and watch it work its magic. It's actually quite incredible. And that includes form checks, which we're gonna talk about right now. All right, so this is number three form check on a lift. And it's very fast now. It's very fast. So even if you're in the gym right now, listening to this podcast, and you go grab Fitness App. Now, of course, it takes a bit to set it up. So if you already have Fitness App, you can just do it right now. You can take a video of yourself doing a set of squats, let's say, and drop it in. Drop it in either the actual lifting activity or just go to the chat. Like honestly, you could do a lot of this stuff in the chat. It's trained to be like me. And you say, Hey, you could either either ask it to give you feedback on certain things, like, hey, does my depth look right if you know that you're what you're working on? Or you just say, here's my squat, tell me about it. And it's gonna give you a really good response. Now, is it a substitute for the best strength coach standing there watching you in person? 90%. I was gonna say no, to be honest, but also to be honest, 90%, 80%. It's a lot better than just guessing or going to YouTube and trying to figure it out or posting a random Reddit thread and hoping somebody who's not an expert responds. Like you get my idea, right? Or even reaching out to your coach, which you may not be able to do right away if it's not a live session. So that's that's number three. Scenario number four is screenshotting your tracking data. This is a lot of people, a lot another one people don't think to do. By the way, all my fitness lab users out there who are listening to this, I hope you stuck through because these are like really cool hacks and tips that are not obvious. So screenshotting your tracking data. Let's say you already tracking some other app like MacroFactor or chronometer. It's fine. I'm not gonna get my feelings hurt if you use chronometer. Or you're using a workout app or a habit tracking app or any, you know, it could probably give you advice on finances. No, scratch that. That is outside my scope. And you take a screenshot of, let's say, your weekly summary from your workout log, right? Or the last couple meals in your food logger. And again, you drop it in the chat and say, hey, what do you see here? And it's gonna look at patterns, tell you what to adjust, tell you what it means, tell you, like, should you be tracking this or something else? And you can go back and forth and interpret it in a really cool way. I mean, you can put in things like blood work and whatnot. Now, it's gonna give you disclaimers that it is not medical advice. Neither am I offering medical advice, but there's so much you can do with the information. And then tip number five, and I'll do this quick because I covered it last week, but it's the pre-meal coaching. And that's, you know, you snap a picture of what you're about to eat and it gives you the structured readback before the, you know, before you eat it. So protein alignment, how to adjust it, the context within what you do. It's all part of the app. And and that's that's a subtle difference from like using a restaurant menu, but it's similar. So that's five things. Honestly, I could probably name 10 more things. I can go on and on and on, you know, using it at the grocery store, using it with supplement labels, using it to analyze your progress photos, your spouse cooks, so you're gonna use it to look at what she or he cooked, a weird symptom you want a sanity check on. Like the pattern is the same. You're in a situation, you're not sure what to do. You get a photo, a video, an audio, a text, whatever, you put it in there, and you get a response that is pretty uncannily helpful. Uncannily helpful. All right. So one thing I should mention today is the last day of the spring promotion on Fitness Lab. I couldn't get this episode out earlier. So go to Witsawaits.com slash app and lock that in. It's 20% off all plans. And I'm gonna give you a little secret there is a refund period. So even though we don't have a trial, it's kind of like a trial. It's not gonna hurt my feelings. If you buy the app, you don't like it, and you get a refund, it happens. And everything we talked about today is something you could do, and that's just scratching the surface, tip of the iceberg. So go to whitsawaits.com slash app. Link is in the show notes. The promo is done after tonight, the eighth. Okay, I'm a huge advocate of the app. I use it myself. It is so helpful to fill in that gap between expensive human coaching and out of the box Chat GPT or nothing. It's a great solution in between. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And again, remember the coaching that is most helpful is the coaching you actually have access to. I'm Philip Pape. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.