Understand metabolism to LOSE FAT and get lean - (The ONE article you need)
There’s been a lot of confusion surrounding metabolism. Fitness and “health” industries and “gurus” spreading these familiar words…
You can trick your body into boosting its metabolism.
You can’t lose weight because of “slow metabolism”.
Here are the top 10 “superfoods” that will “boost” your metabolism and help you lose fat.
Start your day with a breakfast that’ll “kickstart” your metabolism so you can start losing fat immediately.
Eat every 2-3 hours to “keep your metabolism high” to lose fat.
If you’ve heard these before, then let me mute the noise and give you the REAL truth.
All of the above are false. Yes. All.
Read on, and you’ll understand very soon. But first, we gotta define what metabolism is.
What is metabolism?
Metabolism is simply anything and everything your body does. This includes withdrawing energy from your fat stores, building muscles, regulating heart beat, your conscious and subconscious brain activities, exercising, walking… making sperm!
Literally. Everything.
Now, as far as we’re concerned for us regular folks, for our purpose of losing fat, getting in shape, building some muscles, tone our body, etc… we don’t really care about the actual science…
For us, metabolism is the total ENERGY your body needs to do everything it does.
What’s really included in this “metabolism”?
Metabolism, as professionals call it Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), is made up of a lot of processes. As far as we’re concerned, we need to deal with only the biggest chunks of your metabolism, as they affect our fitness and fat loss process the most.
Here’s what metabolism includes:
Metabolism = Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) + Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) + Thermic Effect of Activities (TEA) + Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)
What the hell do all those mean? Let me make this simple.
RMR: The LEAST amount of energy you need to maintain your body while you externally do absolutely nothing. This is affected by 1) genetic factors, such as height and gender, 2) current weight (“what your body is made of, and how much”).
TEF: The energy you need to digest and breakdown food.
TEA: The energy you need to do intentional physical exercises.
NEAT: The energy you need to do daily tasks (such as walking, or as little as an unconscious movement like fidgeting).
Here’s a rough breakdown in a pie chart what it looks like.
(Source: https://blog.nasm.org/nutrition/resting-metabolic-rate-how-to-calculate-and-improve-yours)
How does this apply to fat loss?
Here, I stress this point once again. The overarching law that governs above all other concepts is energy (calories). NOT insulin, NOT genetics, NOT carbs, etc etc. (It’s 2020 guys, c’mon! This should be common sense by now.)
So in order to lose fat, the total amount of calories you consume must be LESS than the energy that your metabolism needs.
Fat loss is caused by: What you eat < Your metabolism (remember this!)
Of course, this is known as a calorie deficit.
Now some of you may wonder…
Hey, if that’s true, instead of decreasing what I eat, can’t I increase metabolism?
Even though mathematically and logically, that makes sense, let me share with you the truth on that. This brings us to the next topic.
“Can I increase my metabolism”?
First of all, it’s important to understand that, as far as we’re concerned:
Your RMR (given a certain current body weight) is largely determined by your genetics. So you can’t change your innate metabolism, nor can you “speed up” or “slow down” that metabolism to any significant extent.
The calories you eat (on the “what you eat” side of the equation) will ALWAYS be greater than the Thermic Effect of Food (TEF). That means, you can’t boost your metabolism to the extent that you can rely on it to create a deficit. Your TEF will never catch up to the actual calorie content of the food you eat.
What you can “control” are TEA and NEAT. But on a practical level, there is a HUGE catch to this. (So it’s NOT as simple as, “do more cardio, exercise more”. I'll explain more in detail later.)
But we need to be clear on one thing. According to the 3 points above, we can see that...
THERE ARE NO TRICKS TO BOOSTING YOUR METABOLISM.
Let’s revisit a few ideas mentioned in the beginning.
IDEA 1: You can trick your body into boosting its metabolism.
True or false? FALSE.
FACT: You can only “increase your metabolism” by increasing the need for energy, literally by more physical movement, as we can see in point 3 above.
People treat our bodies like some sort of separate entity, as if we can somehow manipulate it. But the truth is… we ARE LITERALLY our body.
The fact is, in order for our body to burn more energy, we have to literally do more work (such as exercising). There are no magic pills or shortcuts here. To burn more calories, WE need to do more work in proportion.
IDEA 2: You can’t lose weight because your metabolism has crashed/slowed down.
True or false? FALSE.
FACT: As we can see in the calorie deficit idea, as long as we eat less than our metabolism, we can ALWAYS lose fat, regardless of such “slowdown”.
As well, except at the extremely rare chance that you have some sort of metabolic disorder (which you need to seek medical professionals for help, not here), your metabolism isn’t low. In fact, it’s determined by genetics (as mentioned in point 1 above), and it’s pretty much set in stone.
IDEA 3: Here are the top 10 “superfoods” that will “boost” your metabolism, and help you lose weight.
True or false? FALSE.
FACT: As mentioned in point 2 above, you can NEVER burn more calories by digesting, than the calories you eat. Therefore, even though by eating more food, yes you’re spending more energy digesting, but you’re also accumulating more calories into your body.
So no. You cannot lose weight by eating MORE (of so-called “superfoods”).
IDEA 4: Start your day with a big breakfast that’ll “kickstart” your metabolism, which will help you start burning fat as early as possible.
True or false? FALSE.
FACT: Same as the previous idea.
IDEA 5: Eat every 2-3 hours to “keep your metabolism high’.
True or false? FALSE.
FACT: Your metabolism (as far as we’re concerned) is an AMOUNT, not speed. The speed is more or less set in stone by genetics.
By eating more frequently, you’re simply accumulating more calories in the “what you eat” side, and in fact, reduces the likelihood of you being in a calorie deficit.
Again, same as IDEA 3, you cannot lose weight from burning more calories by digesting.
So coming back to the question, “Can I increase my metabolism?”
The answer is, NO - not to the extent that you can rely on it for fat loss.
“What about exercising and cardio? Doesn’t that burn more calories?”
Mathematically yes. But hormonally, it’s less practical. Long story short, if you’re doing cardio PURELY for the sake of fat loss, then it’s not worth it.
Your body isn’t a static mathematical robot. Your body is a complex dynamic biological machine.
When you do moderate to intense cardio (especially one that you hate), in general:
Your stress hormone, cortisol, goes up. This causes your body to slow down a lot of its other bodily functions, and causes it to hold onto your body fat more. Why? Because it’s getting ready to repair your body from the aftermath of your cardio workout.
Your satiation hormone, leptin, goes down. ESPECIALLY during fat loss, you want your precious leptin to be kept high up! Lower leptin = more eating to feel full.
Your hunger hormone, ghrelin, goes up. Self-explanatory. After excessive cardio, your body now needs energy back in, so your hunger hormone shoots up.
Your willpower goes down. This is VITAL in fat loss, because the depletion of willpower is when you quit your fat loss pursuit.
Why shouldn't you use cardio (if you hate it) to "increase metabolism"?
1 | Burning calories from cardio takes much more effort than eating less to produce that same calorie deficit.
It may take you 30-45 minutes of boring cardio to burn 300 calories on the treadmill, but it’d take you less than 5 minutes to gobble down that cheesecake. One takes much more WILLPOWER than the other. And people quit once they run out of willpower.
So unless you have a type of cardio (such as a sport) that you really enjoy, it’s just not worth it from a lifestyle standpoint.
2 | Too much cardio can produce stress on your body, which in turn can spike your stress hormone, cortisol.
Increase in cortisol is known to be associated with fat retention, and increase in hunger. Essentially, your body doesn’t like drastic changes.
So the key to cardio is to pick something you love doing, and do it so subtly that your body doesn’t realize that you’re trying to produce a calorie deficit. Doing 2-3 times weekly is enough.
Here are my tips:
1. Do the cardio you absolutely enjoy.
2. If none is enjoyable for you, then do more walking, increase non-exercise types of movement. Take the stairs. Park your car further away, etc.
BUT what's more important is...
Instead of focusing on what shortcuts you can use to “boost” your metabolism, focus on your actual diet and nutrition instead, and make sure you’re in a CALORIE DEFICIT.
What about the metabolic crash people talk about? Is it true?
As you stay in a proper calorie deficit (10-25% deficit) for a prolonged period of time, you may notice your weight drop. However, as you lose more and more weight, you may notice that your fat loss progress seems to “slow down”, and “plateaus”. So what’s really happening there? Did your metabolism really crash?
The truth is, there was a drop in metabolism - but hardly a “crash”. When we say “crash”, we indicate something severe, like it has dropped SIGNIFICANTLY. But that’s NOT the case here.
However, the MAIN reason why your metabolism dropped is simply because… there’s less of you!
When your weight drops, your body essentially has less “stuff”. As we mentioned earlier, one factor that determines your RMR is body weight. So if your weight changes, so does your RMR.
So what really happened was that your RMR dropped, and it partially cancelled out your deficit that you initially were trying to put in place.
But is that it? Does your metabolism drop due to hormonal reasons (excluding the drop due to your body weight decrease)?
Yes, it does - BUT does it cause you to stop losing weight? The answer is, not to any significant extent, as calorie deficit is STILL the overarching law of fat loss.
Science has shown that when you diet down to a lower body fat (prolonged period of calorie deficit), many of your bodily functions begin to slow down. And this is all due to your body trying to survive. (It’s a survival machine!)
To keep this simple, when your body believes that there seems to be a shortage of food, its “metabolic thermostat” begins to crank down its functions, in order for it to require less energy to run. (Essentially, it’s like if you see that your income has decreased, you’d try to cut some of your expenses in order to survive. Your body does the “survival finances” for you.)
And especially NEAT - you’d notice that you’d feel more tired, you’re less willing to move around, and you fidget less, etc.
But why did I say that this drop isn’t really significant when it comes to fat loss? To explain this, let’s take a trip back in time.
The dark side of scientific knowledge
We know that during World War II, the Germans kept prisoners in their concentration camps. These prisoners were kept on a daily intake of 700-800 calories. On top of such low caloric intake, they were forced to do hard labour. So their net daily calories is likely extremely little. This went on for months and months! This was a real starvation.
We know that these prisoners most likely:
were in a highly stressed state
didn't sleep well, and
were starving every day.
They were breaking every single “rule” of conventional fat loss.
But did they stop losing weight? Did they plateau? Did they get fat?
The answers to all of those questions were, of course, NO.
Obviously, there were no fat prisoners. The fact was that they were in a calorie deficit. Now I’m 100% NOT saying go ahead and starve yourself, because these prisoners experienced much more severe health deterioration than just that little “fat loss” problem we’re having. They were facing survival problems.
But the fact is that, no metabolic decrease, hormonal changes, sleep, nor stress, can stop you from losing fat, if a proper calorie deficit is in place.
DISCLAIMER: AGAIN, I’m NOT saying you should ignore health, nor that health issues can be overridden by simply a caloric reduction. I’m merely using this example to state a biological fact.
So what should you do after a prolonged period of calorie deficit?
My recommendation is that if you are experiencing an apparent “plateau” (usually after 2-3 months), try the following:
Slash out another 100-200 calories of your daily intake, and observe for another week
Repeat step 1 until your daily calorie intake is just way too little (For men, below ~1400. For women, below ~1000).
Eat at maintenance calories for 3-4 weeks, depending on how you feel. (Don’t worry, when you eat at maintenance calories, you won’t get fat. You’ll simply “hold onto” your current body for a while.)
Step 3 is so that we “reset” hormonally, and bring your body back to its optimal functioning. This will reset you psychologically as well, and you will feel much better.
After the 3-4 weeks of maintenance calories, go back on your deficit. You’ll find that your fat loss progress will resume quite nicely.
Now… To the people who use “slow metabolism” as an EXCUSE for failing to lose fat…
The fact is clear. If you’re in a real calorie deficit, YOU. WILL. LOSE. FAT.
It ain’t your hormones. It ain’t your “fat genes”. It ain’t insulin. It ain’t processed foods. It ain’t because you were “born this way.” It ain’t because you caught the “obesity” disease.
Obesity is the sum of the poor daily decisions you made on food.
You gained weight because YOU ATE TOO MANY CALORIES - accumulated over a long time!
If that’s you, then I’m going to say something you might not like hearing...
You shouldn’t be looking for ways to “boost metabolism”. YOU NEED TO BE DILIGENT IN CALORIE MANAGEMENT, AND EAT LESS CALORIES.
Here's my YouTube video explaining this further:
Hope this makes the concept of metabolism and its practical application for fat loss and leaning down to your dream physique… CRYSTAL CLEAR!
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