Your body's metabolism has two distinct sets of processes that work synergistically and will either enable you to accomplish your body goals or hinder you. This metabolic duality sets the internal stage for you to have either a high or low caloric need each day.
Many of the components within your lifestyle will contribute to the speed of your overall metabolism and can always be classified within one of these processes. In order to master your metabolism, you will need to understand both internal processes and what factors within your lifestyle can influence each of them.
The most obvious factors include genetic heritage, lean body mass, activity levels and dietary habits. But there are also other very important factors that can heavily influence your body's metabolism, such as timing of nutrients during the day, timing of activities, intensity and duration of physical activities, stress levels, long term dieting protocols, and excessive activities over long periods of time.
All of these factors have an impact on the speed of your metabolism, and oftentimes in ways that seem contradictory at first.
How efficient is your engine?
Throughout the years, my clients have often expressed concerns about the speed of their metabolisms. I've consistently heard, "I'm going to be a tough client, my metabolism is slow and I gain fat easily." While sometimes this has been true, typically they didn't lose fat quickly because factors in their lifestyles were not conducive to faster metabolisms.
To begin, it's important to understand what metabolism is and to define the two processes that make it up. Metabolism is the building up or breaking down of body tissues and energy stores in order to generate fuel for the body.
With this definition, we can understand our body's chemical processes more simply in two areas, anabolic reactions and catabolic reactions, or simply anabolism and catabolism.
Your body's anabolic processes are a set of constructive metabolic pathways that build up organs, tissues, and cells. This kind of constructive metabolism focuses on building, repairing, and maintaining body tissues through the conversion and storage of macronutrients such as carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids.
If you're a bodybuilder or figure competitor, anabolism is very important because it enables you to repair muscle tissues after workouts, maintain healthy skin, hair and nails, and build muscle in certain circumstances. It also has two quite opposing definitions: it can mean the storage of excess glycogen in muscle and liver tissue in order to fuel workouts and activities, or it can mean the storage of excess energy materials as body fat.
So, how can we influence anabolism within our body in a way that'll have our metabolism building muscle, repairing tissues, and not storing excess body fat?
Ironically, the answer to greater anabolism, and thus a faster metabolism, is to eat more!
Your goal should be to eat appropriately for your energy needs and the repair and recovery processes of your body, never becoming deprived of the nutrients that you require. Your diet should include the right kind of carbohydrates at planned times and in amounts appropriate for your activity levels. This will have your body functioning at its anabolic peak speed.
These days, "carbohydrate" seems to be a bad word and most people who are trying to lose fat and eat healthier are doing their best to minimize their carbohydrate intake. What they don't know, however, is that metabolism is regulated by this nutrient. It can easily become depressed if you deny it this clean burning energy source for too long.
Simply put, carbohydrates make your metabolism run faster, and a lack of them will cause your metabolism to conserve energy and slow down making anabolism difficult to achieve.
As a matter of fact, long term caloric restriction can cause severe metabolic adaptations, and in some cases persistent metabolic slow-down. If you want your metabolism to speed up, implementing the appropriate carbohydrate feeding is essential. Pump up your body's anabolism with rice, potatoes or pasta after high intensity activity, and your metabolic pathways won't negatively adapt and slow down.
Now, before you get too excited and storm off to the fridge for a whole pizza pie, just a word of warning: much of the carbohydrate loading that people do comes from less than optimal sources. This results in negative hormonal reactions such as soaring insulin levels, which encourages fat storage.
Looks good, but it won't help your metabolism one bit!
Your metabolism can adapt and become faster if you feed it correctly, but it will only respond within reason and only to high quality nutrients.
Some factors that influence anabolism are genetic. Most of us fall in the "average" category; our bodies will perform normally and within general guidelines. But there are others who seem to operate outside these limits.
Some of these individuals experience a metabolism that's much faster than the norm, while the metabolism of others' seems to be very sluggish.
Before you blame genetics for all the damage an inactive lifestyle and daily chocolate cake have done, let me make an important note: either of the above cases are exceptions and not the norm! Ninety-eight percent of the population has normal metabolic function, yet an overwhelming fraction of the general public believes themselves to be overweight due to genetically problematic metabolisms.
It's commonly accepted that activity can have a profound effect on metabolism. Most physical exercise will speed up metabolism for several hours after it's performed, but you probably knew that.
What you may not know, is that this speed up effect is relational to your lean body mass. Simply put, the more muscle you have, the more you can speed up your metabolism.
In the end, your muscle mass and your daily activity level will be the biggest factors in determining how many calories your metabolism will require for its basic metabolic needs, along with the degree to which your metabolic rate can adjust if you speed it up or slow it down.
Now for the paradox: too much activity, under certain circumstances, can actually slow your metabolism!
While in general, doing cardio and working out will increase caloric need (thus producing an increase in metabolism), too much activity will cause your body to adapt in ways that slow down nutrient need if performed on a very calorie-restrictive diet. Your body is continually trying to balance caloric need with caloric expenditure, and will find ways to slow down tissue wasting by creating a balance with energy demand.
These slowing adaptations often result in quite a few negative factors including a decrease in thyroid hormone output, a reduction in anabolic hormones and lean tissue, an increase in catabolic reactions, and a systemic conservation of thermo reactions (you'll start feeling cold as your body temperature begins to plummet). Obviously all of these are very harmful effects and will contribute to a severe metabolic slow down.
One other thing to keep in mind is that any adaptation your metabolism initiates will happen over time. The longer you put a stress on your body, the more likely it gets that it'll find the quickest way to adapt to whatever it is you're doing to it.
The last factor that influences your anabolism, thus influencing your metabolism, is your lean body mass or how much muscle you have. This one is simple; more muscle means a greater anabolic need.
Muscle is the main tissue in your body that requires calories to exist. The greater your muscle mass, the greater your protein requirements and energy requirements will be—even if it's just to keep your body functioning normally while at rest.
His engine is pumping away as he just sits there!
Creating lots of muscle means maximizing your anabolic drive system with nutrients. This means lots of energy and fuel components like carbohydrates, along with more recovery and maintenance materials like proteins. It'll be impossible to build muscle if you don't feed your metabolism with high quality fuel, like rice and potatoes, and give it lots of building materials, such as lean meats and whey protein.
The key to making this anabolic system support muscle synthesis is continual feeding throughout the day. Eating every two to three hours will help enable you to do this.
Building an effective anabolic metabolism is very calorie-expensive. It will always take thirty-five hundred stored calories to make just one pound of muscle or fat.
This means that you just don't put fat or muscle on your body without over consuming your basic needs by this quotient. Conversely, you don't burn off a pound without exceeding your caloric needs by this amount, either.
Many of the anabolic reactions in your body can, in the long run, enable your metabolism to speed up. The keys to speeding up your metabolism with anabolism consist of feeding it with the appropriate energy and recovery nutrients, increasing your physical activities without placing an unbalanced demand on your system and caloric intake, and maximizing your lean muscle mass so that your body's metabolic need is higher.
This is only half of our definition of metabolism. We'll now take a look at the other part of the equation, catabolism, and how it can affect your metabolism.
Catabolism is your body's destructive metabolism; it's the other half our definition of metabolism. This side of it centers on the processes that produce energy for anabolism as well as the energy required for all the other cellular processes in your body.
Keep in mind, both anabolism and catabolism go hand-in-hand and function simultaneously; it's not possible for one to exist without the other. The reason this relationship is so important, is because catabolism is responsible for the breakdown of basic fuels into a usable energy source called ATP, and it's this usable energy that makes anabolism possible.
So how do we use catabolism to help us in our efforts to speed up our metabolic processes?
You can't directly use your body's catabolic reactions to speed up your metabolism, but you can understand the dangers associated with excessive catabolism.
Losing lots of scale weight quickly may seem like an ideal way to diet, when in reality, it can cause some serious setbacks down the road by making your lifestyle and health plain miserable!
As you take in fewer and fewer preferred energy materials like carbs, your body will begin preferring to first break down lean tissue and extract the valuable energy it needs from your muscle instead of freeing up lipids from stored body fat.
This is a protective mechanism that automatically lowers burn rate by reducing lean muscle mass and thus reducing your overall daily caloric need. It's a biologically pre-programmed process that used to mean survival, and these days means nothing but a spare tire around your midsection!
Over long periods of time, lean tissue wasting can lead your body to a point where your caloric need is so low, that over-eating your daily demand is almost a certainty if you follow your appetite. Anything over a grape will end up being excessive as far as your body is concerned, and every additional calorie will begin to get stored as fat.
There is a delicate balance between ideal tissue wasting and a healthy amount of fat loss that won't set off your body's defensive adaptations. In general, the ideal number you're looking for is about one pound of scale weight loss a week for women, and one to two pounds of scale weight lost per week for men.
It's important to note that these numbers are only general guidelines; they don't include initial water loss that many people experience when they start up a clean eating program, either.
Unless you like the "skinny-fat" look, prevent catabolism at all costs.
Now that we know quite a bit about metabolic anabolism, we can assemble some guidelines to follow. Here are a few actions we can take to safeguard the metabolism from plummeting:
• Eat high quality carbohydrates to fuel high intensity activities
• Eat high quality protein to enable lean tissue building
• Eat small meals often
• Workout regularly with high intensity resistance training to add muscle
• Do your cardio regularly
• Don't over-do your workouts or cardio sessions, this can result in lean tissue wasting
• Mediate quick scale weight loss; this could be a sign of lean tissue wasting
Use these metabolic lifestyle guidelines as you set up the winning strategy for your ideal physique. Remember, your metabolism has a dual nature that you must work with in order to accomplish your body goals.
Tad Inoue is a professional diet coach for figure and bodybuilding. Tad has over 22 years of experience in the fitness industry as a nutritionist, trainer, competitive bodybuilder, and coach.
For more information on diet coaching with Tad Inoue please visit his website or contact him at Tad@Tadthedietcoach.com.
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