Metabolism 101: What You Need to Know
Last week we talked about the different lifestyle factors that influence the metabolism.
Most people associate the metabolism with simply losing weight. A healthy metabolism, or a flexible metabolism as Dr. Jade Teta refers to it, will allow you to more effectively and predictably control your weight, but the metabolism isn’t just something that decides to burn calories or not.
If you want to read up on the 7 factors that influence your metabolism, click here.
Rehabbing your metabolism is really reflection of living a healthier life and managing the stressors that come along with our fast paced, modern society.
Once your lifestyle factors are in order, we want to show you what processes burn calories and what switches you can manipulate to turn the metabolism up or down!
How does your body use calories (energy)?
Let’s say you have all of your lifestyle factors under control and you’re ready to take safely and predictably manage your body composition. It’s important to know the processes that burn calories in your body.
1) Basal Metabolic Rate
• This is the amount of calories your body burns at rest.
2) Non-exercise Activity Thermogenesis
• This is the amount of calories you burn through daily movement.
3) Thermic Effect of Food
• The energy it takes to digest the food you ingest.
4) Exercise Associated Thermogenesis
• The energy you burn through exercise
Why is this helpful to know? The biggest takeaway is that you don’t just burn calories exercising. It’s almost like people believe that if they don’t exercise I’m not burning calories. You can see that that’s not true.
YOUR BODY NEEDS CALORIES TO SUSTAIN LIFE!
Also, it’s worth noting that different types of foods take more energy to digest than others. Protein and alcohol take the most calories to process. Besides being a macronutrient that helps keep you satiated for longer, including an appropriate amount of protein in your diet will also help you burn more calories. How fun!
Remember, one of the components of a healthy metabolism is nutrition, that includes the calories you ingest. Which brings us to our next point and something you may already know…
Calories in & Calories out Matters
There’s more to healthy body composition than just diet and exercise but those things still matter. This is one of the biggest hurdles for our members to overcome because it goes against everything they’ve been taught about weight management.
You can’t just diet (I.e. restrict calories) and exercise to get thin. It will work for a period of time but it comes at a great cost to your metabolism, potentially making it less flexible, which leaves people wondering why their progress has stopped and they feel like crap.
Weight management and fat loss is really about balancing those 7 lifestyle considerations along with your activity.
This is where people have so much more power than they realize!
If someone can work to manage their lifestyle and eat enough food to sustain the activity they exert on a daily basis and weave between a controlled caloric deficit and maintenance calories they have the tools they need to manage their weight for life!
Easier said than done so let’s dive in further.
What You Can Do to Start!
1) Understand How Many Calories You Burn at Rest
Go to TDEEcalculator.net.
This site will give you your Basal Metabolic Rate and maintenance calorie recommendations based on your activity level.
Be prepared for the caloric number to be more than you expect! This is common. Diet culture has ruined our perception of how important food is to losing weight and being healthy. It seems counterintuitive.
“How can I eat MORE and lose weight?”
It works!
2) Exercise vs. NEAT
From there the goal is to find your maintenance calories, the balance between calories in and your activity level that keeps the scale even. We recommend running this for 2-6 weeks to make sure you can find the right balance for you.
Then you have the choice to increase your activity level or slightly decrease your calories to influence the scale.
Our #1 recommendation is to increase NEAT or daily activity. At this point, investing in an activity tracker and a heart rate monitor is HUGE. If you want the top of the line we recommend the Oura Ring (sleep/steps/readiness) and the MyZone heart rate monitor (tracks heart rate and calories burned during workouts). An Apple Watch, Fit bit or other tracker will do just fine at this point.
Increasing daily activity (steps) burns calories at a lower cost to your body compared to exercising more. Exercise is more stressful for the nervous system and breaks down tissues that need to be rebuilt. This means nutrition has to be a consistent focus plus other recovery strategies like sleep, stress management and hydration become even more important.
So if you have more time to exercise but don’t want to commit to maintaining or improving the other lifestyle habits necessary to sustain this choice, choose walking! Shoot for 10,000 steps per day. If you meet that mark consistently, increase steps by 20-30%. Do that for 3-6 weeks while tracking your nutrition and weight and see if the weight goes down. If it doesn’t your calories may need to be adjusted, you’re not accurately tracking or there may be an underlying deficiency you’re not aware of.
3) Setting calories for Fat Loss
Like we said, calories in and calories out is a real strategy but the sad part is people take it too far for too long.
Think of any commercial diet. It’s 800-1200 calories per day. For reference, that can be over 1000 calories under maintenance calories (depending on age, sex, height, weight, activity level, etc).
How long should your live there? Do they even tell you? Even if they did, most people wouldn’t listen and when they see results assume more is better.
We recommend setting a slight deficit of about 250-500 calories once a person is able to manage their calorie intake appropriately. Being in a deficit like this, and all other factors remaining consistent, can yield fat loss around 2-4 pounds per month.
Why is a slight deficit or more activity better than more aggressive deficits?
Sustainability.
Being in a deep deficit puts a lot of stress on your body. Combine that with more extreme exercise choices and you have a potent combination that will slow the metabolism and lead to negative consequences.
Keep in mind our approach is for people who want to NEVER DIET AGAIN. That means learning healthy lifestyle habits and strategies and understanding how you have the power to safely manage your weight and body composition if you respect your body and give it what it needs to function optimally.
Before you ask if it’s safe to go into a bigger deficit to lose weight faster, prove you can work this process and balance the inputs and outputs. Once you have a handle on the basics you can talk to your coach about whether more advanced strategies are right for you.
Rant over!
Once you’ve set a slight deficit the goal is to train and eat, following the plan set, until you see dips in certain metrics.
4) When to Change Course
Once you’re all in on your program and process the goal is to bend, not break.
What’s the traditional fat loss/fitness experience. Dieting and exercising as hard as you can until you break. Eventually a lack motivation or injury sets in and your train is off the tracks. This is not a sustainable process, wouldn’t you agree?
Instead the goal is to impart stress on your body, stop before you go too far, then allow the body to compensate and recover. Rinse and repeat!
To know when you’re approaching the breaking point we recommend tracking as many metrics from this list as you can.
Objectively:
Resting heart rate
Heart rate variability
Blood pressure
Subjectively:
• Sleep
Hunger
Mood
Energy
Cravings
When these start to trend in the wrong direction that’s your body telling you that it’s “bending”. See the next section to know what to do next.
5) 3 Options
Increase positive inputs (sleep, soft tissue work, nutrition, stress reduction) and stay the course.
Deload or rest for a week and return to maintenance calories.
Reduce workout frequency, intensity or volume, up calories and continue.
At that point it’s up to you (and hopefully a coach) to decide the best strategy going forward. The “best” strategy is the one you can get behind and allows your metrics to recover. Once you’ve recovered take note of how long it took to see the metrics dip and how long it takes them to recover.
This gives you information on how long you can push a program, which of the 3 options above is more favorable for you, and how long it takes to recover based on the stress of the program. This gives you important pieces to the puzzle to creating a sustainable diet and exercise program that works for you without hurting you.
If you experimented with commercial diet plans in the past and fell short of your goal or achieved your goal but back tracked later on, you’re not alone. The most frustrating part about traditional dieting is it does work, but only for a short amount of time and it comes at a greater cost than most people realize. Over training plus deep caloric restriction is a recipe for “breaking” your metabolism and setting yourself up for the same rebound you always hear about.
The process to make weight management sustainable starts with prepping to make it sustainable. Getting your 7 lifestyle factors in order. Learning all the skills from planning, shopping and cooking to safe training practices, healthy sleep hygiene and hydration strategies.
Once you’re there you need to find what maintenance calories are for you. When you prove you can eat at maintenance reliably then you can work the plan, execute a controlled caloric deficit while increasing activity and tracking your metrics to decide when to recover.
On paper it doesn’t sound too difficult and it doesn’t have to be in practice either. The hardest part is getting yourself to the point this can be sustainable. “Play the long game” we say! This is a much easier process when you give yourself the time to get better at living healthier. That’s when things really fall into place!
Your Fitness After Forty Specialists
It’s difficult to change on your own but we’re here to help! We want to learn about you.
If you’re ready to become the person you dream of fill out the form below and we’ll contact you within 24 hours to see what we can do to help.