Chances are you could eat whatever you wanted as a kid. You could eat all the chocolate bars you had access to and it wouldn't impact your weight, mood, or mental clarity. A lot of people think age is what makes it harder to eat whatever they feel like, and a "slow metabolism" is to blame for them becoming fat bastards but is this really true or is there more to this story?
What is Your Metabolism?
Your metabolism is the system responsible for how the body decides calories are used and influences weight management, energy, and more. The uneducated will tell you that the extra 2 kilos around your belly (or your brain fog, or gross feeling) is just a sign of getting older.
They'll say that because of your age, your metabolism has just naturally slowed down.
I don't agree with this, my metabolism has been getting faster with age. I'm currently eating 3000 calories a day with no weight gain. My lifestyle is set up for these results though.
The story that the makes most sense is that over time, your metabolism "forgets" to effectively put calories to use and becomes better at storing it instead of burning it. This happens when your diet is littered with processed garbage and your workout plan is nonexistent. But you can help your body remember by making some simple changes to what you eat and how you move.
Becoming Metabolically Flexible
Becoming metabolically flexible means your metabolism gets to a place where it can effortlessly switch between burning carbs and burning fat — leaving more room for a few treats now and then. You know those people who can "eat whatever they want"? those people have excellent metabolic flexibility. You can, too if you develop the right habits.
Heroes Use Fat For Fuel
Heroes learned how to use their own body fat for fuel instead of relying on bursts of sugar, the way nearly all of us do today. Fat is stored energy, and about one-fifth of our body is made up of stored fat, which can be used for energy when the body is low on glucose or sugar. Fat as fuel is an all-but-forgotten secret of endurance athletes, but when it's tapped into, the results are pretty cool.
Mark Allen, the greatest triathlete in history, made his breakthrough when he discovered a way to burn body fat in place of carbs. It revolutionised his approach to the sport and led to six Ironman titles, a top-three finish in nearly every race of his career, and recognition in 1997 as the 'World's Fittest Man. Fat as fuel. That's how heroes roll.
Skilful marketing made carbohydrate consumption a religion among athletes. It's common to believe that you cannot get energy from anywhere but carbs. But the same foods people think make them stronger and faster are a slow acting poison making them fatter, weaker, and more prone to heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and dementia. Just look at the companies selling you this idea. Ten companies produce 80% of the processed food in the world, it's just business.
How To Move
The best ways to boost your metabolism are daily walks, weekly sprints, and weight training. Not only does this help you burn fat, it increases mitochondrial biogenesis- or in other words helps reverse age-related loss of insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is important for metabolic flexibility. Check out our physical health guide more info on this.
Fasting To Boost Metabolism
I'll start this section by first introducing you to autophagy which is a natural process that happens in your body to help clean up and recycle old, damaged, or unused cells. The word "autophagy" comes from Greek words that mean "self-eating," which gives you an idea of what's happening.
During autophagy, your body gets rid of things like damaged proteins, cellular waste, and other debris that can build up over time and cause problems. It's kind of like taking out the rubbish, but at a cellular level.
Autophagy was all the rage back in 2019 when I first heard about it because of research that suggested it can help with things like reducing inflammation, improving insulin sensitivity, and even preventing some types of cancer. Reducing inflammation was a big deal back in 2019, not so much these days though. 2023 is the year of increasing testosterone. Anyway back to autophagy, how do you actually trigger it?
You probably already guessed it... fasting. When you fast, your body doesn't have any new nutrients coming in, so it starts looking for other sources of energy. One of the things it can do is start breaking down old or damaged cells and recycling their components to make new energy. This is a lost art as we don't really have any reason to go days without food anymore which is what is needed to kick start this process.
Fasting has been around for centuries as well, it's a common practice in many cultures and religions. And in recent years, fasting gained popularity in the diet culture as a weight loss tool because it seems people need a system to not eat every minute they're awake. There are several types of fasting that people use in their diets, each with its own set of rules and benefits.
- Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting is the most popular and involves restricting calorie intake during certain times of the day or week. The most common form of intermittent fasting is the 16/8 method, which involves fasting for 16 hours and eating during an 8-hour window. Other forms of intermittent fasting include the 5:2 method, which involves eating normally for five days and restricting calories for two non-consecutive days, and the alternate-day fasting method, which involves fasting every other day.
- Water Fasting
Water fasting involves abstaining from all food and drink, except for water, for a specific period of time. This type of fasting can last anywhere from a few days to several weeks. The goal of water fasting is to give the digestive system a break and to allow the body to focus on healing and detoxification.
3. Dry Fasting
Dry fasting involves abstaining from all food and drink, including water, for a specific period of time. This type of fasting is more extreme than water fasting and is not recommended for beginners. Health benefits include increased fat burning, improved digestion, and increased energy levels. This is the only type of fasting I haven't been crazy enough to try.
When it comes to fasting specifically to get into autophagy and boost your metabolism, you'd probably need to do a min. 3-5 day water fast. Anything less than that is fasting purely to restrict the amount of food you eat.
Final Thoughts
Our bodies are super adapting machines. I've experienced this first hand during my water fasts where I only consumed water for 3 days. These fasts taught me what real hunger is. Whilst those 3 days kind of sucked, I was surprisingly still able to function fairly normally. This was because my body was resourceful enough to find energy from other stuff lying around in my body. That other stuff being fat. Autophagy takes a few days at least to kick in but before that your body will turn to fat for energy.
Even though glucose is supposedly the bodies preferred fuel source, when you're running low it will look elsewhere to survive. That's your bodies main job, keeping us alive. To do this the body breaks down stored fat to convert it into energy. That's the main reason we're able to store an unlimited amount of fat on our bodies, so we could use it for energy when food was scarce. This was a long time ago when we had to forage and hunt for our meals.
We also had no way of preserving or storing food. In the good old ancestral days, storing as much fat as possible was the name of the game because you'd always go through periods of starvation and burn it off. Now that we not only have unlimited food but also ultra processed ones it's way more difficult for people to burn more fat than they store.
Rather than doing something about this obesity epidemic, society seems more incentivised to ignore its health risks and act like this is normal. If having an increased risk of all of the below is normal then I have no interest in being normal.
- All-causes of death (mortality).
- High blood pressure (hypertension).
- High LDL cholesterol, low HDL cholesterol, or high levels of triglycerides (dyslipidemia).
- Type 2 diabetes.
- Coronary heart disease.
- Stroke.
- Gallbladder disease.
- Osteoarthritis (a breakdown of cartilage and bone within a joint).
- Sleep apnea and breathing problems.
- Many types of cancer (too many to name).
- Mental illness such as clinical depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders
- Body pain and difficulty with physical functioning
So if you also have no interest in being normal and getting normal results take action. Incorporate a fasting and workout regime into your life now. Start with 12 hours if you're new to fasting. That means if your first meal is at 8am then your last meal should be eaten before 8pm. The more you shorten your eating window the better if reducing calories and improving metabolism is your aim, but it also needs to align with your lifestyle. I have a 10 hour eating window but this is purely because i'm bulking so need extra hours to get all my calories in. Play with it and stumble across what works best you.
Always remember, you were born to be the hero of your story.
Free you outlaw.