Boost your metabolism by doing this…
Is boosting metabolism a thing? Does that terminology ring true well we first have to look at the word homeostasis and that terminology is basically referring to how the body manages its internal environment independent of what’s happening outside. So, we have a barrier to the inside of our body which is our skin, and we maintain body temperature through thermogenesis, which is how hot we are, how much heat we lose, how much heat we maintain, how much energy we lose through exercise and how much food we take in so as energy in Vs energy out and then heat in and heat out. There’s an exchange of energy and homeostasis is one of the things, one of terms, that refers to keeping a constant state (or an equilibrium) and your body needs to have that to operate effectively to keep all the internal mechanisms of cellular metabolism functioning. So our metabolism will be affected to a degree by where we are, what climate we’re in, how hot we are, what we doing with exercise and what kind of foods we eat.

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Now it’s about getting our head around something called thermodynamics and there are principles in play that describe the way energy operates and energy is everywhere. The laws state that energy is not created nor destroyed it just changes form, so that means there’s a certain amount of energy within the universe and it remains constant but what happens to energy is it changes form so as an example if we were to fall over and we’re trying to break our full and we slap the ground with our forearm (so if anybody is the martial arts and we do Brazilian jujitsu, for example) when someone throws you to break your full what you do is you put your arm out and you slap the ground and that is turning the impact of the fall into heat and sound – so energy is being distributed in a different way and the impact is less, but it’s changing form. So the idea is that when we have energy in a system then what happens is there’s energy in and energy out so when we start to look at metabolism and the way our body heat itself and uses energy and then we get an idea of how thermogenesis works inside the human metabolism. One of the things were very aware of is the word calorie and calorie is a term that is used to explain the amount of energy it takes to heat a certain amount of water so when it comes to different types of food, what’s been studied for example – if we take a Brazil nut what that’s been used for is it’s been burnt inside a closed container and when it’s burned we see how many units of heat energy comes off of that food, in this case, a Brazil nut and we know how many calories or energy units comes from a particular food type for a certain amount of weight of food and then we know what calories it contains and therefore we had to understand how many calories are in a particular type of food then we can measure how many energy units are going into someone through food and going out through energy either expelled through heating our body and losing heat and also through exercise.

Looking at Thermodynamics and looking at homeostasis in an environment for the human body when we can see, for example, a person in a very cold environment – their body doesn’t want to drop under a certain temperature because our homeostasis (the way our bodies work) internally is going to start to suffer. So what our body does is it uses energy that’s been stored in our muscles as glycogen carbohydrates and it causes us to start shivering so that is a contraction (very small, fast contractions) creates warmth so our body maintains a certain temperature and therefore the cellular functions of our body are maintained so we maintain that balance or homeostasis and at the same point, we are burning more calories through energetic expenditure through shivering. So metabolism hasn’t been ‘boosted’ what’s happened is it has upregulated, now we’re working to use more energy in a way to burn carbohydrates as fuel (muscular contractions) to create warmth and therefore we are losing energy through thermodynamics and also we are using it to cause muscle contractions. So an environmental situation can change the way your metabolism functions

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By this example we can see that shivering is like a form of exercise or we could term it an increase in muscular function so we know that through shivering we’re going to burn more calories and metabolism is going to be working more quickly to use those calories so we’re going through that chain of events where we are now burning energy to stay warm. Now we can apply this to exercise as well so if we’re eating a stable amount of calories let’s say at this person in question is eating 2000 calories a day and then maintaining their body weight and then we throw in the additional energy requirement of exercise – so they’re in the gym lifting weights, causing muscular contraction and now something called the Krebs cycle is in effect where we are breaking down nutritional products; fats, carbohydrates and proteins and we are now gaining calories from those units of energy which our body has stored through eating. Now we’re having 2000 calories so what’s happening from the exercise point of view, we are now up-regulating metabolism to use those energies, those calories stored as energy, and we are now causing an energy leak because we’re now using those calories to move weight in the gym. So by default our energy expenditure has gone up through muscular exertion our calorie intake has stayed the same, therefore we are now in a deficit so the actual calories that we’re taking in may have dropped by 500 calories, burnt in a gym session, our body now has 1500 calories for which to do the rest of its cellular activity.

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One of the benefits of doing muscular work is that the body then takes a great deal of effort to try and stop muscle degradation. So when we are at the gym, we have trained and broken down some muscle therefore there has been an exertion which has caused some damage to the muscle and the body wants to try and stop this situation happening again so from a life perspective we’ve been in an environment where we’ve place ourselves under loads – we’ve been doing leg press for example or squats and our body is thought to ourselves this is a life threatening situation. We’ve worked really hard, it’s exhausted our muscle capability and now we don’t want this to occur again so what our body does is it sets about increasing muscular size and strength so if this situation was to occur again it would cope with it more easily. So what we do is we build muscle into our bodies – so our body starts to increase muscular size and strength at the same time so the cross sectional area of a muscle is also related to its strength. So we have done our gym session, we’ve utilised some energy so we are now in a calorie deficit, a nutritional deficit, so we are now looking to build muscle post exercise and what your body will do is set about building muscle. This is an expensive thing to do. So we’ve burnt calories during the session itself and then your body sets about building more muscle and that’s why protein turnover – so now our protein assimilation or the increase in our muscular proteins in our muscle requires energy and that comes from our calories from our food. Particularly protein is really good at that, so protein helps us to build more muscle so we could usually eat the same amount of calories the same amount of protein and that protein will be used to build muscle and that lends us to being in a deficit. We will start to build some muscle and will also start to lose other energy units. So when the muscle is requiring calories from protein, our body will start to use other energy sources like carbohydrates and fats to power the energy required for other cellular functions. We can start to get more muscle and start to get leaner.

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By its very nature, increasing muscular size and strength is a way of increasing our basic metabolic rate. So if you were to say “can we boost our metabolism” we can, 70% of our metabolism is down to our muscular mass – so the more muscle you have, the more metabolic function you require so if somebody has more muscle, even at rest they’re going to sit there and require more energy to maintain that muscle mass than someone who is less muscular so building muscle is a good way to increase metabolic rate, increase the demands on calories and therefore drop bodyweight because we’re now going to start to build some muscle and also lose body fat in the process. If we wanted to see an increase in weight loss from fat particularly, we are going to shunt our body weight to fat loss by increasing our muscular output, creating more muscle tissue and more demands from a muscular system point of view and then we start to get leaner from losing body fat. Now if we were to increase our calories what we would do if we maintained muscular function, we wouldn’t need to use our body fat in our carbs as much as everyone thinks – we’re replacing those calories by eating more food therefore we stay at the same weight, but our composition would change. We would have more muscle, as a ratio, and have less body fat.

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The next thing to consider is that if we are now burning 500 calories through muscular exertion in the gym and we are still eating the same amount then we are going to be in a 500 calorie deficit, from a nutritional standpoint. We are going to start looking for those calories from some other place like stored body fat, for example, is a great place to get those calories from. So we’re going to start using our adipose tissue that is being stored in our bodies for times of emergency. Now if that person also drops calories from intake of calories so we are now expanding 500 calories more by exercising with our muscular system, but they also drop say another 100 calories or 150 calories by eating fewer carbohydrates or fats for example they are now going to be in a further calorific deficit and will start to lose weight more quickly and research has shown that the best way to lose body fat is to combine restricting calories and increasing muscular exercise.

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So we’re also very aware of people who do fad diets they go on shake diets they don’t exercise at all these guys end up being smaller versions of themselves. Yes, they are taking less energy in, which means they’re in a nutritional deficit, but they’re not building any muscle – they’re not building or expending energy through muscular exercise which means they’re not going to increase their BMR by building new muscle. So what we see happening in this circumstance is they tend to lose weight because they’re cutting their calories but they don’t maintain muscle mass, they lose some muscle, quite a large proportion of their weight loss is muscle, and then they lose a small amount of body fat so their ratio is now skewed in an unhealthy way because now they’re less muscle and more fat as a comparative ratio.

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What we also have to consider, and if we think about this scenario as a bank account what we’re looking at is body fat is hanging off people, we see people who carry body fat and too much body fat. We can say that they’ve been paid, they’ve got lots of energy or lots of money coming into their bank account and they can take it out of their current account which is what they are using on a daily basis and they can put it into their savings account. So they got their ISA, or their savings account where they get lots of interest, so this person who is now got lots of savings, lots of body fat, stored in their bank account they are now going to start a journey where they’re going to start trying to lose body fat. That means they need to get paid less. So what they want to do is start spending more, from their current account, so that they are now in a deficit – their bank account is empty, and they’re thinking right I still pay my bills so how am I going to do that? They’re going to do that by dipping into their savings account. So when you start to drop your calories what you’re doing is basically getting paid less, so your current account is getting less money. Then you’re going to start using that stored money, those savings, so when people say there in a diet phase or their dieting and it’s so hard they’re in a nutritional deficit because they’re eating less calories but they still got lots of calories on their body because they are wearing them, so they’re not really in a negative calorie state or energy state, energy balance because they’ve got lots of stored energy on their bodies – they are just not getting enough energy at that point in time. So this is the whole principle – we’ve got our savings account where we have lots of fat, lots of money in, but we start to get paid less through cutting our calories. We have less money in our current account but on top of that exercise is like all the bills going up so now we’re going to spend more money on gas, electricity and water pretty similar to what’s happening right now. Our expenditure has gone up, our income is less and now we’re going to dip into our savings account and that is how we start to lose that body fat.

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An additional point to the situation of homeostasis, our body doesn’t want to burn calories, it wants to maintain them and store them, we’re very good at storing calories, because it helps us to survive ice ages and periods of starvation, famine and drought that kind of things which are human experience has had us live through for thousands of years and now we’re in a position where we’ve got lots of food at our disposal and also food which tends to be made from fats and sugars, which is never found in nature. They work on the hedonistic part of your brain and they’re very pleasurable, so our brain starts to like them and want more of them so they’re not addictive, we just like to eat that stuff and we can get a lot of calories through sugar and fat so our body is almost driven to eat those things by nature so we have to work on eating less of those things. We also need to consider as well our body doesn’t want to obviously lose calories it wants to store them, so we look at our biomechanics – when we’re standing we are standing on our skeleton, our quads are not activated, our glutes aren’t doing anything biomechanics has got a plum line of gravity straight from the middle body. Our ears are over our shoulder, our shoulder is over our elbow, our elbow is over our hip, our hip is over our knees and then our knees are over our ankles so there’s a plumbline where gravity helps us stand using as little energy as possible so we don’t stand there with bent knees because that means our quads are activated so our very nature, our biomechanical nature, our body posture is there to basically resist burning calories. This is why we have to make sure that we do exercise because that’s going to make our body less effective at being efficient and we’re going to burn more calories, so we have energy leaving our body, we expend energy and then we reduce the energy that comes in and this is where we look at thermodynamics and the energy balance of energy in energy and energy out and luckily for us that any system always loses energy. We don’t maintain energy, we always lose it in some form or another. When we eat our food we’re going to have metabolic processes that are working throughout our body like cel regeneration, hair growth all those kind of things and then we add in other energy expenditure models like exercise, shivering, being in a cold environment that kind of thing, we are going to start to use more energy and if we don’t replace them, we will lose weight.

John Buckland

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