#552： How to Optimize Your Metabolism
Episode Stats
Summary
If you struggle to lose weight, you may blame an inherently slow metabolism. Is your metabolism really to blame, and can you increase it in order to burn more fat? Today, we tackle these questions and more with Dr. John Berardi, who earned a PhD in Exercise Physiology and Nutrition Biochemistry and is a writer, athlete, coach, and professor, as well as the co-founder of Precision Nutrition and the founder of The Changemaker Academy.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you struggle
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to lose weight, you may blame an inherently slow metabolism. What is your metabolism really
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to blame and can you increase it in order to burn more fat? Today, we tackle these questions
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and more with Dr. John Berardi, who earned a PhD in exercise physiology and nutrient
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biochemistry and is a writer, athlete, coach, and professor, as well as the co-founder of
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Precision Nutrition and the founder of the Changemaker Academy. John and I begin our discussion
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with what metabolism is, the components that make it up, and how much each element contributes
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to your body's energy expenditures and which can be controlled. We then get into whether
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or not it's true that some people have an inherently slow or fast metabolism and how diet and exercise
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influences your metabolism, including whether or not dieting itself can slow your metabolism
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down and why you might want to consider wearing a weight vest around once you lose some body
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fat. We then discuss how intermittent fasting can increase your metabolic flexibility, whether
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there are certain foods that can boost your metabolic rate, and the best exercise routine
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for optimizing your metabolism. We also talk about how stress and sleep affect your metabolic
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health, and we end our conversation with John's best tips for maintaining optimal metabolic
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health and losing weight in general. After the show's over, check out our show notes
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at aom.is slash metabolism. All right, John Berardi, welcome back to the show.
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Thanks for having me back. I really appreciate it. I always enjoy coming on. Before you and I started
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doing podcasts or articles together or whatever, I was a huge fan of the site and of the podcast,
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so it's really an honor to chat with you, man. Well, thanks so much. So you are a nutrition
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coach. You have your PhD in exercise physiology and nutrition biochemistry. We had you on the
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show a couple years ago to talk about the science of intermittent fasting. That's episode number 328
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for those who want to check that out. And today, I wanted to bring you back on the show to discuss
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an aspect of nutrition and health that I think people have heard the word and the concept a lot,
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but I don't think they fully understand it. And that's metabolism, right? It's a word that we
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throw around a lot. Hey, I got to speed up my metabolism. I can't lose weight because I have a
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slow metabolism. But I would like to unpack what metabolism is so people have a really good
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understanding of what's... That it's more than just about losing weight. There's other things that go
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on with it. So let's talk... Let's start with the very basic. What is metabolism?
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Yeah, it's great. Let's start there. Yeah. Basically, it's the sum total of all the cellular
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activity that goes on in your body. So that's kind of a vague answer. But generally, this miracle of
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life, us being alive is really a series of communications between different cells of our
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body. And metabolism is all that activity that's going on at any point in time. And that's the
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description, if you will. But when we think about measuring it, for example, there's an equation
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that we can use to figure out how much activity is happening at any point in time. So we usually
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call that total daily energy expenditure. So the sum total of all our metabolism, it costs energy.
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Keeping a human alive costs energy. And so the components that total up to our total daily energy
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expenditure, resting metabolic rate. So that's just the functions that keep us alive. That's our
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activity levels. And a lot of times people think about that as exercise, but it's any movement at all.
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So there's actually a component of activity called NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And this is a
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kind of a fascinating one where it's kind of genetically determined. So some people tend to move around.
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It's been called fidgeting before more than others when they're not purposefully exercising. So this is
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actually another important component of the activity sort of part of the equation. And then the one I've
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always found is really interesting that we parse out is the thermic effect of feeding. So eating itself
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and the mechanical process of eating plus the chemical process of digesting that food, breaking it down
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and transferring it to our cells is also another component. So that's called the thermic effect of
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food. So when we think about metabolism, it's all this wonderful activity that's happening. When we go to
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measure it, we can measure it as total daily energy expenditure, how much energy we burn in a day.
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And then to think about what contributes to that, it's our resting metabolic rate,
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just the functions that keep us alive, plus all the movement we do in a day, anything beyond laying
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still, and then the thermic effect of feeding. So those three things add up to total daily energy
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expenditure, which represents a measure of our metabolism. All right. So metabolism is everything
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our bodies do to keep us alive, to function, to think, talk, breathe, move, et cetera, all of which
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expends energy. So metabolism is everything that creates life that we tend to narrowly associate
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it with weight gain and loss. And we'll try to give people a better understanding of that aspect
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of metabolism today in our conversation. You mentioned several factors which contribute to
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metabolism, which are resting metabolic rate, NEAT or non-intentional exercise like fidgeting,
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and then there's thermogenesis, when we eat and our bodies convert food to energy, and exercise.
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Is there like a pie chart of how much each energy expenditure makes up our metabolism?
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Yeah, there is actually. And most people are actually fascinated by the breakdown. The most
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expensive part of the daily energy expenditure that we use up comes from our resting metabolic rate.
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It's not from our activity. It's from just the functions of keeping us alive. Now, if you're not
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very physically active, about 75% of your total daily energy expenditure comes from just the resting
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metabolic rate, keeping you alive. About 15% will come from activity and about 10% from the thermic
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effective feeding. So as you can see, most of this is just keeping us alive. Now that shifts a bit.
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If you are highly physically active, you may end up with 60% of your total daily energy expenditure
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coming from resting metabolic rate, 30% from activity, including NEAT, and 10% from the thermic
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effective feeding. So you can see the bulk of the calories we use in a day is just resting metabolic
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rate, keeping us alive stuff. But you can also see that exercise can make an important difference to
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that. It can shift it from 15% of your energy burn in a day to 30%. And obviously we're just talking
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about percentages. So this would be a pie chart. You have to realize that when you start exercising
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more, the total pie gets bigger. So the amount of energy you burn in a day is much larger. So your
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resting metabolic rate may not change at all, but it goes from 75% of the pie to 60% because the pie grew,
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Yeah, that makes sense. So let's talk about this idea of like, you know, a fast metabolism and slow
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metabolism. I mean, people, when people hear that, the layman thinks, well, you know, if I have a fast
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metabolism, my body uses a lot of energy. If I was slow and uses less, what does that mean from a
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scientific point of view? What, like when you hear fast metabolism, what, what do you think?
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Yeah. I mean, the, the thing is there are individual differences for sure. I mean, we've like,
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you only need to look around the world and see there's some people who seem like they can eat all
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they want with no regard for, you know, caloric intake and not exercise at all. And, and their body
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appears skinny quote unquote, and others who really seem to watch what they eat and they do purposeful
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exercise and they may have a heavier body weight or carry more body fat. So there are some factors
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that affect resting metabolic rate. Cause that's what we're, that's what we're thinking about when
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we think about, Hey, you know, let's say exercise was equal, you know, two people have different bodies.
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Well, then their metabolisms might be different based on their resting metabolic rate. But what we
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often find is that there are like subtle things that actually shift the rest of their lifestyle
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that make it less about this sort of magical, you know, like a fairy waved metabolism wand over them
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and made them a fast metabolism or slow metabolism. So for example, a lot of people, you know, who think
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they have a very fast metabolism actually don't understand the impact of neat. They are fidgeters.
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So they may burn an extra 10, 15% calories each day, just fidgeting around. So they may not quote
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unquote, go to the gym. Whereas, you know, someone with low need who does go to the gym could end up
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burning fewer calories in the day, even though they're like, what the heck? I go to the gym for
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an hour every day. So oftentimes there isn't any magical disappearance of calories or appearance of
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calories. It's this simple equation, resting metabolic rate plus activity, either purposeful
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or unintentional and thermic effective feeding. So someone has a quote unquote, slow metabolism.
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You just have to look at the equation and say, well, what's slow? Is it thermic effective feeding?
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Probably not because that's pretty standard between people. Is it their resting metabolic rate?
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Probably not. That could be plus or minus, but our resting metabolic rates largely determined by body
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size. So if you're a bigger person, it'll be higher. And if you're a smaller person, it'll be
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lower. And that makes total sense because if you're bigger, you have more cellular function
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to account for. And then your size also influences the activity burn too. Because if you're a bigger
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person, it's harder to carry that weight around when you do move. It's often why when people lose weight,
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at let's say a certain caloric deficit, like they're following a quote unquote diet or eating fewer
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calories, and they start to lose weight, then that weight loss plateaus. And they're like,
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I don't understand. I'm still at the same deficit. I'm even exercising a bit more. Well, they've lost
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weight. So it's less expensive to carry around the current weight they are. I actually have a friend,
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I was just at an event recently, and a strategy he's been playing around with is putting a weight vest on
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people like they'll, they live most of their waking hours with a lightweight vest on that accounts for
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the weight that they've lost. So let's say they started 200 pounds, and they start exercising a
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bit more and eating a bit less. And they dropped down to 190 pounds. Well, then he would put a 10
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pound weight vest on them. So they're still carrying around 200 pounds. I'm not saying this is for
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everyone. But what he's found there is that they don't have to keep lowering their calorie intake,
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or increasing their exercise, they can continue to lose at a similar rate, without pushing the
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exercise harder or eating less by accounting for that body weight, which it seems like such a simple
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thing. But it makes such a huge difference. And it frustrates a lot of weight loss efforts.
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Yeah, we'll talk about the role of dieting and how it can slow down or speed up metabolism.
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But I think another interesting concept that you've written about in different places is this
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idea about understanding how our metabolism or our body wants to be efficient. Now, when we hear
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efficient, typically, we think, oh, efficiency is great, right? You want a factory to be efficient,
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you we want our lives to be efficient, because it means we're getting a lot of stuff done,
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nothing's going to waste. But how can an efficient metabolism cause weight gain?
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Yeah, well, in the sense of metabolism, you know, like we talked about earlier,
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you know, the body wants to make life less costly, right? So, you know, it, we don't often get more
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efficient at like our, let's say, our resting metabolic rate, but it often comes to play with
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exercise, for example. So, let's say, you're going to start getting in shape, and you don't have an
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exercise routine, and you're going to run one mile. So, the first few times you do that one mile,
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you'll be inefficient. Your body hasn't upregulated the enzymes that are necessary for rapid energy
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production. Your technique is probably poor, you'll probably be heavier, so you'll use more energy just
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carrying that extra load around. And as you do that one mile over and over and over again,
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your body finds ways to make it easier, to make it less challenging. So, you may lose a little bit
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of weight, your enzymatic systems will upregulate, your technique may get better, especially as you,
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you know, drill technique over and over. In that case, if you continue to run that mile,
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the calorie cost will be less, even though you'll be going faster. And that's because you've gotten
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efficient. Now, that's good for performance, right? But it's not that great for calorie burn,
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unless as you get more efficient, you increase the intensity. So, you make it just as hard for the body
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as that one mile was. So, you can either go two miles, or you can go one mile markedly faster by
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pushing the intensity. But, you know, efficiency in this case, as per your question, would be if I go out
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and I run a seven-minute mile today, and I'm still doing that three months from now, that seven-minute
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mile is going to be markedly less effective because I've gotten more efficient. So, as you say, like,
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you know, efficiency, we usually think of as good. And it is good in this case, from the body's energy
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use perspective. However, this is where our bodies don't share our same goals, right? If you want to lose
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weight, you want it to squander energy. So, talking about this inefficiency with nutrients. So, we
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basically, in order to lose weight, we have to be inefficient, which means we have to spend more
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energy than we're bringing in. So, I'm trying to think of this like with body fat, for example.
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Like, our body stores fat. I imagine our body's like, you're not going to touch that fat. So,
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it makes it really hard. Like, our body does something once we start reducing caloric intake to say,
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no, I'm not giving up this body fat. And so, it makes it, you have to like work more to get to it.
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So, it's sort of putting up inefficiencies to protect. I'd rather use like dietary body fat,
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I guess is what I'm saying, than your stored body fat to power itself.
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Well, it actually does depend on the situation. You know, I did a pretty deep dive into literature on
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this. And it seems like if given the choice, and it's hard to control for, the body would prefer to
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burn what's stored on it before it burns what's coming in from a dietary perspective. It's why
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intermittent fasting, for example, although it takes a little bit of time to adapt to,
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it's why it ends up working fairly well. Because loads, you know, most of us have loads of meals
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stored on our body that the body actually wants to eat. You know, so if you go an extended window
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without eating, so 16 hours or whatever intermittent fasting protocol you're using,
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the body will gladly eat that stored food up. The challenge is, and this is what you're bringing up,
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is that at first, when we train the body to eat the food that's coming in, so we eat on a very regular
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cadence. And the body's used to that, it'll actually become what's called sort of metabolically inflexible.
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And this is the more interesting concept than fast or slow metabolism. To me, it's metabolic
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flexibility. The idea that I could not eat for an entire day, let's say, and instead of getting low
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blood sugar and feeling really low energy, because my body hasn't yet figured out or upregulated the
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pathways to eat the food that's already on me, I'll actually do that. You know, so one of the best
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ways to actually teach metabolic flexibility to the body is systematically over time doing extended
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fasts. So let's say you normally only fast for 10 hours with an overnight sleep. Well, then you might
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push it to 11 or 12 and then 13 or 14 and then 15 or 16, not as a life project, but as a training
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program, a short-term training program for metabolic flexibility. So your body starts to learn, oh,
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when I don't get external food coming in my mouth, I can just upregulate certain hormones and certain
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enzymes so that I can eat the food that's already on me. So, you know, like we talked about last time
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on the podcast, you know, intermittent fasting does all these things, you know, some good, some not so
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good, depending on the person and the goal and the conditions. But one of the things that I think it
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can do not as a lifestyle choice, but just as a training program, it can help with this metabolic
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flexibility thing and teach the body, hey, if carbs are coming in, I can use those. If fats are coming
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in, I can use those. If nothing's coming in, I've got loads of carbs and fats on my body already. I can
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just use those. And so one of the things I often hear when people think about, let's say, skipping
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breakfast is I get way too hypoglycemic and I feel terrible. And that makes sense. If you are on a
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program of eating frequently, your body doesn't know how to tap into the stored food that's
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already on it. So we train it and then it becomes a choice, not necessarily that I want everyone to
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do that, but it becomes an option. You could skip breakfast or not. Well, let's talk about diet and
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metabolism and weight loss because when someone needs to lose weight, the first thing they think
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is, well, I got to reduce the amount of food I eat. And as you mentioned earlier, that will work,
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you'll lose weight, but then you'll reach a point where it no longer works. So what's going
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on in our body? Is it because our body is smaller, it requires less calories, so it's not burning?
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You're no longer in a calorie deficit? Yeah. Well, that's it. Most people think it's that
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dieting itself slows down the metabolism. So when I eat less food, I burn fewer calories.
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And that's true for some people and not true for others, but even for the people it's true for,
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it's probably largely irrelevant. So, I mean, there's been some studies showing that there's
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folks with what's called sort of a thrifty or a spend thrift metabolisms. So the first study I saw on
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this was where they took a big group of individuals and they overfed them. So they put them on a weight
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gain diet. And I think it was 1000 extra calories a day. So that would accumulate calories pretty quick
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and you'd gain weight pretty fast. And so what they found at the end of this sort of 12 week period of
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overfeeding was that there was a group of people that gained almost no weight. And there was a group
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of people that gained like 35 pounds. And so when they looked at them, you know, they had to sort of
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look at, you know, matching on body size and reported caloric intake and activity levels.
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They were like, it doesn't make sense why this group would gain no weight. I mean, we overfed them
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a lot of calories over the course of this, this protocol. And what they concluded was that,
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and then subsequent studies sort of back this up was that there was a type of metabolism that was
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called spendthrift. So as these people ate more, they found ways to burn more calories in the day.
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So they may have done more purposeful activity, but most of it probably came from meat, this non-intentional
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activity. So fidgeting, walking around, you know, I often think about this, like you ever seen people
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who take a phone call and they just pace while they're talking on the phone, right? Well, that's an
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example of neat, right? They're not, they're not, I'm going to exercise now, right? But they just
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walk, they walk five miles while they do an hour long phone conversation, uh, where others may be
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sitting down for that whole conversation. And that matters in terms of the accumulation of energy
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expenditure. So that's what these sort of spendthrift people do where the thrifty people didn't upregulate
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at all. So the same thing happens in the case of weight loss. There are some people when they lower
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their calorie intake, their calorie burn stays the same when adjusted for their new body weight.
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There's others that when they lower their energy intake, they burn fewer calories when adjusted for
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activity levels. But as you said, and as we talked about earlier, most of the effect when you're
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quote unquote dieting happens from weight loss, you lose weight and you burn fewer calories just moving
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around. So every step you take costs less because of the weight loss. So it has very little to do with
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dieting, slowing down our metabolism. Although for some people that might be a small difference,
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it's mostly the weight loss that sort of makes it more efficient to move around. And that's why that
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weighted vesting becomes so interesting for some people, right? If you, if that weight loss is what
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causes this enhanced difficulty with subsequent weight loss, then replacing that body weight should
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Well, so apart from putting on a weight vest, I mean, the other option is once you reach that
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plateau is you just have to reduce calories a bit more in order to keep weight loss going.
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Yeah. So either exercise a bit more or reduce calories a bit more. Yes.
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But there's only so far you can go that, right? You can only drive down the amount of calories you
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consume so much before like you're not eating anything.
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Yeah, that's right. Or, or what happens much more frequently is that your hunger signals get so
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intense that it's impossible to sustain that calorie deficit. Now there are competitive
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bodybuilders, for example, who put themselves on like a 12 or 16 week diet that, and they have
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tremendous discipline and they have lots of practice doing this. They've done it time and time again.
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And so during that time, they will continually reduce calorie intake until, you know, maybe a
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200 pound guy is eating like 1200 calories a day and exercising daily. And so they'll do it and
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they'll do the exact thing that we just talked about, but it's impossible to sustain. And most of these
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people will gain 30 pounds in the next two weeks after their contest is over because hunger signals go
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through the roof. It's just impossible to maintain this kind of deficit over time as a real human
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being living in a real world full of food options, you know? So as you say, it just, it's not reasonable
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to continue to drive calorie reductions, you know, after a certain point. And people are always looking
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for what that number is. It's impossible to come up with that number. The research hasn't come up with a
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number. People have, again, different metabolic rates. They have different body sizes. They have
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different levels of physical activity. There's no number we can say, oh, below a thousand calories is
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when it gets unhealthy or dangerous or whatever. Those numbers are all made up. It just really,
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I think we have to think pragmatically and say below the level of caloric deficit or below a certain level
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for you personally, you just will be so hungry all the time that you're going to make up calories
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somehow, you know? And I remember I wrote an article a while back about this. I went, I was at an event
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in Arizona and I went out for a meal at the cheesecake factory. And I remember like looking at the menu
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because they had just started to include caloric values on the menu. And I was like, wow, there's,
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there's a lot of calories in this cheesecake, right? So I ordered a meal off their healthy menu.
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So it had the little lettuce leaf next to it or whatever. And so it was like a light pasta with
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vegetables and chicken in it. And then I had a piece of cheesecake for dessert. So this wasn't an
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extravagant meal. It was a healthy offering at cheesecake factory plus a piece of cheesecake.
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And then they hadn't listed the cheesecake calories. So when I went home, I looked it up online
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and I realized I had eaten something like 3,800 calories in that meal. Wow. So I know. So I was
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like, okay, imagine that you were wanting to lose weight and you're quote unquote eating in a energy
00:25:12.760
deficit. And so over the course of, you know, five, six days of the week. So let's say you went out for
00:25:21.100
cheesecake factory on Sunday. So the previous six days, you were in a 500 calorie a day deficit,
00:25:27.120
which should accumulate good weight loss over time. That would be 3000 calorie deficit. And then on
00:25:34.940
Sunday, you're like, you know what? I'm not going to have a cheap day. I'm just going to have one cheap
00:25:38.920
meal and I'll choose something healthy and just have that one piece of cheesecake. That one meal
00:25:44.220
obliterate your entire week of calorie deficit. It's sad and disheartening, but it actually shows
00:25:52.180
the reality of how easy it is to accumulate extra calories. Even when you've, you know, let's say
00:25:59.220
you eat three meals a day over seven days, that's 21 meals. 20 out of 21 meals were great. That one
00:26:08.900
meal obliterated the rest. That's how sensitive this system is. But I mean, there's, there's some
00:26:16.300
great ways to not obliterate it and to make thoughtful choices in a way that you can see consistent weight
00:26:24.720
loss. Well, I think understanding that as you get, as you lose weight, your body requires less calories
00:26:32.200
to, to function can explain like the, sort of the phenomenon of yo-yo dieting. You know, people
00:26:37.220
they'll, they'll say they lose 15 pounds. Like, well, I lost 15 pounds. I can go back and like,
00:26:42.980
I can eat, like I can eat good food again, but it's like, no, you can't because your body requires less
00:26:48.080
calories because it's smaller. And so if you go back to eating like how you did when you weighed 15
00:26:53.280
pounds heavier, you're going to gain 15 pounds again. That's right. And, and maybe even a little bit
00:26:58.020
extra, you know, because if you lost the weight by being pretty restrictive, then rarely do people
00:27:03.900
go back to eating normal after they've been on a calorie deficit. What they do is they go back to
00:27:09.980
eating normal plus 10 or 20%. And that if you track people's intake, that's exactly what happens. They
00:27:17.120
eat at 80% of normal for a while, they lose the 15 pounds. And then when they quote unquote,
00:27:22.700
go back to normal, there's a, there's an overcompensation. And so that's why they end up
00:27:27.860
gaining back the 15 plus a little bit of extra. Like you said, there's less metabolic cost now.
00:27:33.380
And now they're eating well over their needs, even higher than they would have been eating before.
00:27:40.140
And so this is, this is why yo-yo dieting happens. And it's why the cliche exists. You know,
00:27:45.480
this has to become some kind of set of lifestyle choices rather than a short-term weight manipulation
00:27:52.140
strategy. Right. So don't, instead of thinking diet, think of, okay, well, how am I going to eat
00:27:56.460
to, to, to get the goal is to, to maintain the weight I want to keep or whatever.
00:28:01.620
Yeah. And, and, and, you know, the, the thing I often say about this, especially to people new to
00:28:06.640
maybe trying to, you know, manipulate their body or improve their health is that often people,
00:28:12.220
they overestimate how hard it's going to be and they underestimate how long it's going to take.
00:28:18.980
So, you know, this idea of making smarter eating and exercise decisions as a lifestyle choice,
00:28:25.000
it seems in your mind when you don't know what the strategies are yet, like it's going to be really
00:28:30.720
hard, but it's actually not. There's just small interventions that you can do. It's just going
00:28:36.680
to take a long period of time and you have to be consistent with those, you know?
00:28:42.580
And you mentioned, so instead of letting that cheesecake factory meal ruin a week worth of
00:28:49.140
thing, like how can you still enjoy and have, you know, enjoy food, like say a cheesecake,
00:28:53.300
but not let it completely derail what you've, you know, whatever progress you made.
00:28:58.860
Mm-hmm. Well, I think, you know, as we start thinking about the different factors that can
00:29:05.940
contribute to, let's say sort of weight loss and improvements of health, you know, we have to look
00:29:11.800
at this combination of exercise, you know, nutrition, sleep, and stress management. These
00:29:19.460
four things all have to be accounted for or else one or more of them is going to sabotage the work
00:29:25.440
on the other. So one way to not have one piece of cheesecake, quote unquote, sabotage your diet for
00:29:31.340
the week is that you have enough exercise caloric expenditure over the course of the week that it's not
00:29:37.900
a problem. And, you know, if you do have one week that you're in calorie maintenance, let's say,
00:29:45.360
because you ate cheesecake, it's okay because the next week you'll be in a deficit. So usually I like
00:29:51.920
to really build out someone's thinking around this by looking at the specific strategies around
00:29:57.640
exercise, nutrition, sleep, and stress management. We can get into them when you want, but that can help
00:30:02.860
contribute to this in the long run so that a piece of cheesecake will be irrelevant.
00:30:07.160
Gotcha. Well, let's talk about exercise and its role in metabolism. So there's resting
00:30:11.560
metabolic rate, nothing really we can do to change that. There's the neat, but we can manage or have
00:30:16.840
control over our exercise. So are there types of exercise that are really good at revving up our
00:30:21.880
metabolism, causing us to expend more energy? Yeah. I mean, my favorite recommendation here is sort
00:30:29.780
of mixed modal exercise. And, you know, it's kind of a technical industry term, but it basically means
00:30:36.060
each week you should do some strength training. So some weights, whether it's with body weight or
00:30:41.640
whether it's with external loads, irrelevant, you should do some kind of interval training.
00:30:46.140
So people have called it a hit or high intensity interval training, but, you know, we don't have
00:30:51.140
to use the conventional methods of doing that. I mean, this could be sprint, go out on the road,
00:30:55.920
sprint one mailbox to the next, walk the next mailbox, sprint the next one. You can do, it could be on a
00:31:01.100
rowing machine. It could be with a kettlebell. There's all kinds of ways of doing high intensity
00:31:06.000
exercise. And then the third would be a low intensity mode for, you know, an aerobic type
00:31:11.860
of exercise. And it could be even less than what you're thinking of as aerobic right now. It could
00:31:17.540
be just going for a walk a few nights a week. So the idea would be that nearly every day you're doing
00:31:23.820
some kind of activity. That doesn't mean going to the gym. I could just be a walk outside, but,
00:31:29.600
you know, over the course of a week or two, even you will have mixed modes. So the strength training
00:31:37.680
will help with building strength, confidence, physical capacity, muscle mass, and it'll burn
00:31:44.240
some calories. The high intensity interval training will create a different set of compensations in
00:31:50.900
the body, all really, really positive, but we'll also burn some calories during the activity and will
00:31:56.560
cause, you know, a small, but not insignificant increase in energy expenditure over the next few
00:32:03.240
hours after the activity. And then your sort of low intensity sort of walks or bike rides or those
00:32:10.960
kinds of things will help accumulate again, more physical capacities. But one of the other things I
00:32:16.440
like about this is that it creates what's what we call sort of like a parasympathetic to sympathetic
00:32:22.600
balance. If all your activity is very high intensity, it engages your sympathetic nervous
00:32:29.920
system, which is kind of like your fight or flight nervous system. It produces a lot of epinephrine and
00:32:34.900
norepinephrine. And too much of that creates too much stress in the body. So that's not to say do less of
00:32:43.480
that kind of activity. It's to say balance it with parasympathetic activity, which is low intensity,
00:32:50.240
stuff that gets your heart rate going, but not super, not super hard. It doesn't cause muscle
00:32:55.260
damage. So, you know, if you're thinking about, okay, I want to get in shape or, you know, lose
00:33:01.300
weight or whatever the case may be, I'm going to start exercising. The direction you need to go is I
00:33:07.260
have to find a way to get these three things in and they have all kinds of different benefits,
00:33:11.780
but they all work together to create this effect that I'm looking for. And part of it also isn't just,
00:33:18.000
I need to burn calories. It's also these physical capacities, but also body remodeling. You know,
00:33:24.460
most people, if they lost 20 pounds, but had the same shape that they have right now would not be
00:33:30.840
happy with that transformation. So what they actually want is a body remodeling. You know,
00:33:37.180
they want some of the fat around their waist and other areas to reduce, and they want some of the lean
00:33:44.020
in let's say their shoulders or their thighs or whatever to increase. And that's a remodeling
00:33:48.820
process that can only happen with mixed modal exercise. So that's how we build it out. And again,
00:33:55.820
depending on your preferences, that mix can be different. I prefer strength training personally.
00:34:01.660
So I do more of that than the others, but I still include the others. If walking is what you prefer,
00:34:07.780
do more of that. And then just include one of each of the others in a week.
00:34:14.540
Well, let's talk about strength training. So strength training, one thing it does,
00:34:17.540
it helps increase muscle mass. Is there anything to the idea that increased muscle mass
00:34:22.980
makes you more metabolically active or you expend more energy?
00:34:27.540
Well, there's a whole bunch of things. Like if we ask certain questions, we'll get answers to them.
00:34:35.820
Whether those answers matter or not is irrelevant, or whether those answers matter or not is
00:34:40.420
important. So this is one of those examples. So gaining muscle mass increases metabolic rate
00:34:46.740
is true, but it just increases it to such a small extent that it may not be relevant.
00:34:53.620
There's another thing that people often ask foods. Are there foods that speed up the metabolism?
00:34:58.780
Yes, there are. Protein versus carbs and fats increases metabolic total daily energy expenditure.
00:35:07.700
Chili pepper, chili pepper, spicy foods do caffeine containing foods, cacao. They all do, but they're
00:35:14.340
probably not worth talking about because the effect of exercise, proper calorie balance in a week,
00:35:23.760
sleep and stress management are so big compared to these minute things. It would be like dropping
00:35:32.700
one drop of red dye into a huge lake. Does the red dye dye the lake red? Well, it adds red to the lake,
00:35:42.800
but it doesn't dye the lake red. So increased muscle mass, chili peppers, caffeine containing foods,
00:35:51.420
do they speed up the metabolism? Yes, but at the same magnitude of one drop of red dye into a big lake.
00:35:58.580
Okay. So that's good to know because don't obsess about those little minutiae.
00:36:03.020
Just eat right. Don't overeat if you're trying to lose weight or maintain weight and make sure you
00:36:08.700
mix up your exercise so you hit all those different modalities and be consistent with it. If you do
00:36:14.100
those things, you're going to be in pretty good shape. Yeah, completely. Well, let's talk about the
00:36:18.500
role of stress that it plays in our metabolism. So what role does stress play in our metabolism?
00:36:23.640
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting because stress has such important negative effects
00:36:30.960
on health and weight management, but it really doesn't have much impact on, let's say, total
00:36:35.860
daily energy expenditure. So it's probably not going to shift our energy expenditure too much,
00:36:42.120
but when we're under psychological or physiological stress, so it could be too much exercise, too little
00:36:48.320
food. It could be emotional stress at work or in a relationship. It increases our cortisol,
00:36:55.740
which is our stress hormone, which breaks down parts of the body. It increases our sympathetic
00:37:00.900
nervous system activation, our epinephrine release. So what we find is that people under long-term stress
00:37:08.500
have known outcomes. They gain more central weight, which is sort of where you gain fat around your
00:37:16.220
organs. And that's the most unhealthy kind of fat to have. It causes insulin resistance and increased
00:37:21.700
blood pressure. And those are the very physical changes. It also causes cravings. I mean, the
00:37:28.100
research shows over and over again, when people are under psychological stress, they end up eating more
00:37:33.180
foods that we consider foods that you should reduce. It causes problems with sleep. And then there's
00:37:39.940
the social outcomes like social withdrawal and depression, and there's immune and hormonal changes.
00:37:44.320
So one of the great books on this subject is called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And for people who are
00:37:51.400
really interested in this, that book sort of covers it all. And it's really a fascinating trip through
00:37:56.720
the often unexpected effects of stress on all the different systems of the body. So while it's not
00:38:04.420
necessarily like a potent energy expenditure disruptor, it can disrupt metabolic health
00:38:11.880
through all the mechanisms that I just talked about.
00:38:15.600
Yeah. I've, I had this weird experience that my recent training cycle, I think it might've been
00:38:20.800
stress-related. I'd love to get your input on this. So in July, I went on vacation to Vermont. It was a
00:38:26.780
working vacation, but I did plenty of hiking out in the woods. I was swimming in cold creeks. It was
00:38:32.120
fantastic. I get back in August and I started a new cycle and it was just going great. And I had to keep
00:38:38.740
bumping up my calories because I was just super hungry at night. So every week I kept bumping them up
00:38:44.540
and going, but still hungry. And then it got to the point where I was like consuming 4,100 calories a day
00:38:50.360
and I wasn't gaining weight. I was just feeling great. Everything was awesome. And then I hit this
00:38:55.400
like, like middle of September, I hit this patch with work where things just got really stressful
00:38:59.780
and I kept to maintain my caloric intake, maintain the same activity level, but I just, it was just,
00:39:05.960
I didn't, wasn't sleeping well. I was not feeling good, stressed. And then like a week later, two weeks
00:39:10.720
later, I started noticing I was getting pudgier. My face was getting fatter. My, the, my waist was
00:39:15.840
getting bigger. And I, so I, so I had to start reducing calories to, you know, to offset. So I don't know
00:39:22.460
if it was the stress, but something, it was just a weird thing to see happen where I could like
00:39:26.640
consume a ton of calories and not gain weight. But there was reached a point where I got stressed
00:39:31.580
and then that stopped working and I had to adjust. And yeah, you know, the important thing is then,
00:39:37.780
then we unpack, like, were you gaining weight or was your body comp shifting? Right. And I mean,
00:39:43.740
there's, there's a, the explanation for this is fairly easy unless it's something uncommon,
00:39:49.460
you know, like as stress accumulates, we produce more cortisol and cortisol actually can cause water
00:39:57.400
retention. So it's one of the known effects, like an over production of cortisol is called
00:40:02.780
Cushing syndrome. And it's described by this sort of very round what people have called sort of moon
00:40:08.460
face, which is just a tremendous, like abnormal water retention. So again, sometimes it's really hard
00:40:16.420
in the course of an individual personal life to figure out what's happening. You start to feel
00:40:21.360
and look pudgy and you're like, oh, I'm gaining fat, but it could not be fat at all. It could just
00:40:25.520
be water weight. And that's usually the first thing that happens in a quick kind of situation over the
00:40:31.980
course of a week or two where you're like, oh man, I don't know what's happening, but I look terrible
00:40:36.460
and oh, I have stress and I've got a lot of training load and all that. And so, I mean, it's,
00:40:42.580
it's a great, it's also a great example of how delicate sort of the stress recovery balance is,
00:40:50.520
right? I mean, you're training awesome. You're eating a lot of calories. Life is good in that
00:40:56.120
zone. If you love training, you're probably getting stronger and, but you're only like one
00:41:02.100
hair's width away from the wheels falling off the system, you know? And, and that could be this
00:41:08.780
like psychological stress at work or just simply not even like something causing anxiety, but it
00:41:15.840
could just be extra load. So you're just, you're like, things are great, but I'm just doing more.
00:41:20.720
And then you get that sort of predictable feeling where you're like, oh, I'm not feeling as great
00:41:25.900
as I was. I am looking weird. Emotionally, things are different. And so that's why like, you know,
00:41:33.100
it's, it's one of the reasons as I've gotten older, I've undulated my training. So for the people who
00:41:37.760
are very into training, you know, this is sort of like an advanced strategy when things are going
00:41:43.660
as great as you described, when you got back from vacation, I know right around the corner,
00:41:50.560
what you described later is going to happen. So I actually undulate my training. So I, I modulate
00:41:56.860
my volume over four week periods so that during any four weeks, I only have one very, very, let's say
00:42:05.980
high intensity week one, just below that one in the middle and one very low. So even if I don't
00:42:13.200
think I need it, my training's undulating so that I'm not always that one hair it's width away from
00:42:19.380
breakdown. You know what I mean? I know what you mean, man, but I really miss those days when I
00:42:23.800
eat 4,100 calories. I was, I was, I was able to eat like two little Debbie brownies and not feel bad
00:42:29.640
about it. It was, it was wonderful, but yeah, easy come, easy go. We'll get back there again
00:42:35.580
sometime, you know? So you also mentioned sleep plays a role in our metabolism. I imagine that's
00:42:40.760
just goes to stress management, recovery, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, I mean, the simple sleep deficit
00:42:48.260
causes some interesting challenges. You know, I have a friend who's a sleep expert at UCLA and,
00:42:55.580
you know, I, I love unpacking some of this with her because it's so fascinating to see what the
00:43:00.060
research is saying in this area, but altered processing of glucose in the body, increased
00:43:05.800
stress and sympathetic nervous system activation, risk of obesity and diet. It's the same things as,
00:43:11.660
as stress. And I think they play a role in each other. Oftentimes when we have an upregulation of
00:43:17.060
stress, we have a really difficult time sleeping. And then that difficult time sleeping creates more
00:43:22.560
stress. So it becomes that kind of cycle and then vice versa. Sometimes when we're not getting
00:43:27.160
enough sleep, we get really stressed about it. And then that stress causes the problems of stress.
00:43:31.420
And then that causes more sleep deficit, but it's all wrapped up. Like when you don't have
00:43:36.640
strategies and this, the one thing I hate is, is the conclusion is then be less stressed or sleep
00:43:43.380
more. Well, those aren't strategies. Those are, you know, that's just finger wagging. So I'd love to talk
00:43:49.160
about some of the things about that, but yeah, I mean, ultimately neither of them has dramatic
00:43:54.560
effects on our total daily energy expenditure, but what they do is shift how we metabolize nutrients,
00:44:01.660
the hormonal status of our body, the immune system status of our body. We all know like stress and
00:44:08.660
sleep deprivation leads to often a lot of people getting sick more frequently. So all these things
00:44:14.840
are happening. And I mean, you can't have good workouts and you can't make good choices at the
00:44:20.900
dinner table when you're stressed and you have a sleep deficit. So, you know, I think when it comes
00:44:28.500
to weight gain, you know, this is the primary driver. It's behavioral stress and sleep deficits
00:44:35.560
lead to behavioral changes that then cause you to be out of energy balance. But then there's obviously
00:44:41.240
the hormonal stuff happening too, which I don't think is as powerful a driver of, you know,
00:44:47.360
some kind of magical internal system being broken and causing magical fat gain. It's usually hormones
00:44:53.960
then drive certain behaviors that make you eat more or burn less.
00:44:59.520
So listening to this conversation made me think of this idea of people have like, oh, I'm getting older.
00:45:04.900
My metabolism is just slowing down. That's part of life. But it sounds like it's not so much the fact
00:45:10.280
of getting older caused your metabolism to slow down. It's that as you get older, you probably
00:45:14.100
move less. You're probably eating more. You're probably more stressed because you've got all
00:45:18.940
those other commitments going on. And as long as you take care of some of that stuff, your metabolism
00:45:23.820
can be just as fine as it was when you were 30 or 20.
00:45:27.960
Yeah. I mean, and most, it's just so hard to remember, isn't it? You know, people will say,
00:45:33.240
well, you know, now that I'm in my forties, my metabolism slowed down. I'm not less active. I actually
00:45:38.420
go to the gym now and I didn't in my twenties. And so it has to be something about my metabolism,
00:45:43.980
but it's just so hard to remember. You know, I don't know if you ever watched that show Explained
00:45:49.800
on Netflix that Vox puts out, but it's excellent. They do these 20 minute episodes on various topics
00:45:57.480
and they just did one called Explain the Mind and it was on memory. And it's just so fascinating at how
00:46:04.240
bad we are remembering, you know, even Daniel Gilbert's work on happiness, you know, he basically
00:46:10.160
talks about how people are terrible at remembering how we felt about things in the past, even the
00:46:18.180
activities themselves. And we're even worse at predicting how we'll feel about things in the
00:46:22.800
future. So the idea that I'm going to come up with a story that somehow I remember what I was up to
00:46:29.400
25 years ago when I was in my early twenties. And I can compare that accurately to how I am now in my
00:46:36.820
late forties. It's folly. So as you described, I mean, the metabolism generally isn't slowing down
00:46:44.240
as we age, unless we lose body mass, lean mass, or we do less physical activity, which for a lot of
00:46:51.240
people, and again, it's not just going to the gym. It's all the activities of daily living,
00:46:56.400
you know? So if we account for those, if we maintain or build lean mass, if we find ways to
00:47:06.000
do more activity, if we take care of our sleep and stress management, then body weight and metabolic
00:47:12.080
things should not be a problem as we get older, at least, you know, as we talk about the management
00:47:17.220
of body composition and body weight. So let's talk about what are people, what are things that people
00:47:22.360
can do after listening to this episode to, I don't know, they can't control completely their
00:47:27.340
metabolism, but take more control over their metabolism. Yeah. I mean, if we're talking about
00:47:32.880
metabolism, the only thing is that we can drive is the activity piece, right? But when we talk about
00:47:39.240
sort of getting in shape, then again, it's these sort of four things we need to look at exercise,
00:47:44.580
right? So mixed modal exercise, do something daily, doesn't always have to be a workout,
00:47:49.980
right? So, and it's something with an interval sort of component to it. It's hard for a bit,
00:47:56.500
you rest for a bit, hard for a bit, rest for a bit. Sometimes when I travel, I just go to a hotel
00:48:01.120
gym, I get on the treadmill, I put it at a fast pace, I run for 30 seconds, then I jump off it for
00:48:07.000
30 seconds. And I do that like 10 times, you know, it lasts five minutes. It's really hard,
00:48:13.660
but it's only five minutes. And then, so there's your intervals. Then you do some kind of strength
00:48:18.860
training, and then you do some kind of, you know, parasympathetic recovery, go for a hike in nature,
00:48:25.380
go for a walk around the neighborhood, you know, go for a bike ride, that kind of stuff.
00:48:30.560
So that's the first component, right? People have to get this into their lives. If you want weight
00:48:34.660
management and body composition as part of your goal set, you have to do mixed modal exercise like
00:48:41.560
this. The second thing is, let's talk about sleep, right? Progressively moving toward eight hours a
00:48:46.880
night. All the research suggests that, you know, less than that is too little. And it doesn't matter
00:48:53.560
how individually special you think you are. If you're doing some kind of weird sleep protocol,
00:48:58.060
where you think you can get away with five hours a night, the research shows again and again and
00:49:02.140
again, physiologically, that close to eight hours a night is ideal. If you're a parent with young
00:49:07.800
kids, I get it. You're not going to be getting that. We have four children at home. I understand.
00:49:11.940
Okay. But I'm not saying go to eight hours tonight. I'm saying progressively move towards
00:49:17.740
every few extra minutes that you can get versus what you're getting now helps. And how do you
00:49:23.860
create that with better bedtime routines? So, you know, are you winding down? Are you getting off
00:49:29.300
electronics or are you avoiding caffeine? Are you doing, uh, avoiding the foods that can keep you
00:49:34.200
up at night? Are you doing a brain dump before you go to bed to get out all the thoughts that,
00:49:39.380
well, I got to remember this tomorrow and that tomorrow. Well, if you write it down,
00:49:42.340
you don't have to remember it. You don't have to think about it while you're laying in bed.
00:49:45.760
Are you doing breathing? Are you doing mindfulness? Are you doing meditation type stuff as you lead up
00:49:50.880
to this to clear your mind? Are you setting the temperature correctly in your room for a lot of
00:49:56.040
people simply lowering the temperature of their bed or their bedroom to mid sixties, low sixties can make
00:50:04.520
a big difference in their ability to fall and stay asleep. This last year, I bought this
00:50:09.140
device called a chili pad, but you just lay under the fitted sheet in your bed and you can control
00:50:14.180
the exact temperature of the bed. And there's two, two zones where if your partner needs to sleep at a
00:50:19.260
different temperature than you, you can. And so I sleep at like 55 degrees. That's that's so I can
00:50:25.720
actually tuck under the covers and I can go totally dark, like cover up my head with my blanket and my
00:50:31.340
sheet go totally dark. But the bed is my side of the beds kept at 55 degrees. It's amazing.
00:50:38.540
You know, there's things like CBD and other things people are doing for sleep. So these are all just
00:50:43.300
options I throw out there as you progressively move towards trying to get more hours of sleep in a
00:50:48.620
night, stress, stress management. One of the top things people can do counterbalance all your
00:50:54.240
sympathetic activity with parasympathetic. So sympathetic is high intensity exercise. It's stress
00:51:00.560
at work. It's all that kind of stuff. So what will you do to counterbalance it? You know, going for a walk
00:51:06.640
in nature, going for a walk outside, listening to music, having a bath at night, ways to wind down
00:51:15.620
and get this sort of sympathetic is usually called your fight or flight system and parasympathetic is
00:51:21.620
called your rest and digest system. So trying to activate that rest and digest system, you know,
00:51:27.580
a long time ago, you know, even before the current sort of resurgence of cannabis research and things
00:51:34.320
like that, you know, a group of athletes I was working with, strength and power athletes were
00:51:40.120
using cannabis regularly. And most of the coaches, most of their coaches would sort of judge that
00:51:46.680
behavior as sort of morally wrong. And I was just really curious why they were doing it because they
00:51:52.760
were doing it so regularly and they kept talking about how it enhanced their training. And so when
00:51:58.880
we unpacked that, Oh, I realized, Oh, this isn't, it's not that this is a magical ingredient in your
00:52:05.860
training protocol. This was just the only parasympathetic activity you were doing your
00:52:11.180
only rest and digest activity. So I was like, okay, cool. Maybe we don't need to smoke weed every night,
00:52:16.700
guys. Maybe we can do these other strategies to counterbalance our sympathetic nervous system.
00:52:21.200
And so that's our stress management part. And then on the nutrition side, I mean, the interventions
00:52:27.560
for most people are fairly straightforward. Most people starting to pay attention to this for the
00:52:32.240
first time have a bunch of what we'll call subclinical deficiencies. So they won't be getting
00:52:37.700
enough protein. They won't be getting enough omega-3 fats. They won't be getting enough water and they
00:52:43.440
won't be getting enough vitamins and minerals from their food intake. So then when we correct those,
00:52:49.320
and then we find strategies to not eat too much, usually people are able to manage their
00:52:55.680
body composition. Well, now there's so many ideas. We could do a whole nother podcast on,
00:53:00.520
you know, low carb versus moderate carb, keto and paleo and plant-based eating and all that stuff.
00:53:08.540
But I think most of them work because when you pay attention to what you're eating and you set up a
00:53:14.180
bunch of rules, those rules prevent you from eating too much. And if you have a book to sell,
00:53:21.480
that's a really short book. So you have to then talk about why plant-based does X, Y, and Z
00:53:26.780
physiologically, or why all meat does X, Y, and Z physiologically. But I think the biggest driver,
00:53:34.900
because we know people who eat, let's say keto, and we know people who eat plant-based.
00:53:39.780
And in both cases, there are people who look great, feel great, perform great on either one
00:53:45.700
of those. So we have to look at what's common between them. And what's common is that both of
00:53:50.740
them help prevent eating too much. So whatever strategy you use, I mean, we often teach people
00:53:57.140
to just get really in tune with their hunger and appetite awareness. So we do that by having them
00:54:02.500
practice for a week or two eating slowly. And it's not a life practice necessarily, although for some
00:54:08.120
people it needs to be, but it's a practice to start to get in tune with our appetite cues and then eat
00:54:14.160
until satisfied, not stuffed. So that's the next practice we do for another week or two. And we
00:54:19.000
train people on what stuffed feels like, what satisfied feels like, what's still a little hungry
00:54:24.520
feels like. And we help them get into that zone where they're paying attention. And then once their
00:54:30.080
protein, omega-3s, water, and vitamin intake is good from eating lots of fruits and vegetables,
00:54:36.580
then when they can just regulate through eating till satisfied, not stuffed. And again,
00:54:42.560
it takes a while to practice this and learn the skill, then we don't need to count a lot of things
00:54:47.500
or restrict a lot of things. So whether this is a metabolic health protocol or not, it has a lot to do
00:54:54.420
with weight management, body composition. So again, exercise, mixed modal, sleep, any extra minutes
00:55:04.460
are positive, stress, you got to find something parasympathetic to do in your life. And then
00:55:10.120
nutrition, get rid of those four basic deficiencies and find ways not to eat too much. I mean, this is
00:55:15.940
the prescription for anyone who wants to look, feel, and perform better.
00:55:21.120
Well, John, where can people go to learn more about your work?
00:55:23.480
So if you're listening and you want to check out strategies, articles for looking, feeling,
00:55:31.240
and performing better, as I just mentioned, we have over a thousand of them for free at
00:55:35.480
precisionnutrition.com. So if you're kind of looking for having all your nutrition questions answered,
00:55:42.780
we've probably answered every question you could possibly have. What do you think about dairy? What
00:55:47.440
do you think about keto? What about plant-based diets? How do I lower my blood pressure? How do I lose 20
00:55:52.600
pounds? We've written about that definitive research-based evidence-based articles. So you can come to
00:55:58.380
precisionnutrition.com. And then my newest project is actually for people who work in health and fitness
00:56:03.560
or who want to, it's called the Changemaker Academy. So it's changemakeracademy.com. And so, you know, I wrote
00:56:11.180
a new book for people working in health and fitness or who want to, to help them turn their passion for
00:56:17.180
health and fitness into a meaningful purpose and a successful career. And it's called Changemaker.
00:56:22.600
And so if people pop over to changemakeracademy.com, they can download a free sample of the book.
00:56:28.900
And so those are the two places people can come check me out.
00:56:31.440
All right. Well, John Berardi, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:56:33.520
Oh, thanks, man. I appreciate you having me. And I hope everyone who spent the time with us
00:56:37.400
learned a little bit today, not only just learning, but they have some next actions that can make a
00:56:43.620
My guest today was John Berardi. He's the owner of Precision Nutrition. Check out
00:56:47.180
precisionnutrition.com where you can find out more about the services there, as well as lots of free
00:56:50.840
content about diet and nutrition. Also check out his website, johnberardi.com, where you can learn
00:56:54.880
more about his new book, Changemaker. It's available on amazon.com. And check out our show notes at
00:56:59.300
aom.is slash metabolism. We're going to find links to resources. We're going to delve deeper into this
00:57:10.960
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:57:14.420
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00:57:18.300
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00:57:50.320
Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what