Is it possible to speed up your metabolism?

When talking about health/fitness, words such as “calories” and “metabolism” are used by a lot of people but not always fully understood (FYI: a calorie is a unit of energy; so if a food contains 100 calories, for example, it has 100 energies). So, metabolism - simply put - is the rate at which we burn those calories, build tissue and get rid of the waste - formally known as “the life-sustaining set of chemical reactions that occur in living organisms”.

Metabolism has 3 main purposes:

1 - The conversion of food to energy (to use the calories within food)

2 - The conversion of food/fuel to building muscles, fat and DNA (calories are then used to produce DNA, build healthy muscle tissue and unused calories into body fat)

3 - To eliminate waste (I don’t think I need to explain this one) (poop emoji inserted here)

Our metabolism basically keeps our body’s “ticking over”. It is always running in the background to keep us running smoothly, effectively and efficiently. It helps us grow, reproduce, maintain structure, and respond to the environment.

Have you ever heard the saying: “Eating breakfast kick-starts your metabolism”? Of course, you have. It’s a saying that’s been around for decades. Is it true? There is some truth behind it but not in the sense that they are referring to. If something lives and breathes, then the metabolism never stops. We even burn calories while we sleep as our hearts are pumping and blood needs to be transported around our bodies. This is what we refer to as our BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) and we each have an entirely unique BMR, as we are all completely individual organisms. The only time our metabolism stops is if we die: the metabolism is a non-stop process that adapts, literally, to keep us alive, thus, it can, in fact, speed up and slow down.

Eating breakfast after a good 8-hour sleep simply upregulates our metabolism in order for the chain reaction of chemical processes that the body is about to undergo. From the moment you rise out of your bed, your metabolism will upregulate as your body is no longer “idle”. So, as soon as we start to think, talk, move, breathe faster, do any sort of movement, we are in a higher state of caloric/energy expenditure (metabolism) for that specific moment. We speed up this process when we eat. This is called the Thermic Effect of Food, which is the increase in calories burned that occurs after you eat, which may explain why you feel hungrier within a couple of hours after eating your breakfast than you would if you skipped it. While your digestive system is using up calories in the background and whilst getting on with your daily routine, you’re using up extra calories having eaten breakfast as your metabolism has now got to process more (use more calories).

So, are you better off eating breakfast? If you’re the kind of person looking to lose weight, then eating breakfast won’t really make that much of a difference to you - in short - the answer is no, not really because digestion doesn’t burn as many calories compared to the number of calories contained in your breakfast. The general formula is to multiply the total calories you eat by 10%. If you eat 2000 calories a day, you'll burn about 200 calories digesting that food. For example, if you’ve just eaten 2 rounds of toast with butter on, that would roughly come to about 400 calories, so, out of that, you’ll only use 40 calories to digest it. So, my humble but respectful opinion? If you want breakfast, have it. If you don’t, then don’t. It’s as simple as that.

Now, that doesn’t mean you should never eat breakfast again. It just means be mindful of what you do eat for breakfast (if you choose to have it or not), and for the rest of the day if you know you’re going to be inactive for most of the day.

This is the part where you will probably get confused. The above saying “Eating breakfast kick-starts your metabolism” is said by those who are under the impression that a faster, or rather, kick-started metabolism will help you lose weight. It doesn’t. As previously mentioned, it simply runs at a higher burn rate (Thermic Effect). If the food that you consume in one day contributes to you being in a calorie surplus (a higher amount of calories than your body requires) at the end of each day, then you will still end up gaining weight/fat, regardless of whether you have kick-started or fast metabolism, it just means you will burn them faster, and not that you’ll necessarily lose weight/fat. It is, of course, possible to lose weight with a faster metabolism, but only if you’re in a calorie deficit (a lower amount of calories that your body requires per day), or, if you maintain your calorie intake but expend more calories through added activity/exercise.

With that said, you can actually slow your metabolism down by not eating enough calories over a period of time. If you’re constantly in too much of a calorie deficit, your metabolism will slow down as an adaptation to the decrease in calories. It’s your body’s on-board survival mechanism. It doesn’t know whether you’re stranded on an island with no food or simply being a wolly and choosing to not eat as much, so, instead of dying, your body decides to slow everything down so you can survive until you can next eat because that’s where we’ve evolved from - back in the palaeolithic era, they didn’t know when their next meal was coming and so that’s why there is such a thing as a slow metabolism. We certainly do not have that danger to worry about in the present day.

It is possible that you can have a fast metabolism and gain weight, and we can also have a slow metabolism and lose weight.

Making sense? No, I didn’t think so.

Ok, here’s another way to explain it. We all have that one friend that can eat whatever they like and never seem to put on weight, don’t we? Let’s name him Fred for the sake of this article. Fred actually has a slow metabolism. And it’s really frustrating for those who really want and need to lose weight but always end up maintaining a higher body fat percentage than they’d like, isn’t it? Some people may label this as “lucky” and “have been gifted with a fast metabolism”, and that’s - in my experience - said by the same people that maintain a higher body weight/body fat percentage than they’d like.

A person isn’t born with or lucky enough to have a fast metabolism, it’s something we all have to work on throughout our lives. Let me explain… You see, as humans, we’re all supposed* to be “made” equally (*unless born with a birth defect). We’re all born with 4 limbs, the same internal organs and amount of muscle/soft tissue. We all start our lives with the same chances of being able to maintain a healthy body weight. So why do some people struggle..? Honestly? - Upbringing, influences, lifestyle and choices. Yes, there are other scientific variables, but let's cover these first.

Upbringing: Ultimately, our lives start off being dictated to us by our parents. I mean, let’s face it, humans basically start out as potatoes that cry and crap, so our first experience of life must come from our parents, and in turn, shapes the start of our lives. Of course, parents will always pass on their beliefs to their children. From then on, we are constantly being influenced by friends and family, other people, society, news, peers, media, social media, the list goes on… Pretty much everything influences us. When we are young, we are more impressionable because we don’t know any other way, personally, I’d say up to the age of 20, and then we are more likely to be allowed to make our own decisions and choices. Unfortunately for some, those first 20 years of life have not been influenced well. Again, in my experience, if a set of parents are obese, the likeliness of the child becoming obese are moderate to high. The same can be said for the quality of a child’s diet and level of activity- they’re very impressionable - a child may not see their parents ever eating nutritious food or exercise regularly, so will likely follow in their footsteps and also lack a quality diet and may be resilient to physical activity. Obviously, this does not occur in all cases, but a child may have a higher chance of having a bad diet/lack of exercise if their parents show these traits.

Which then brings us onto a person's lifestyle and choices. With evolution and technology rapidly developing, life and existence are at their cleverest and easiest, making it much more acceptable and doable for us to lead a poor lifestyle and make bad choices. Now, I’m not saying that these things are necessarily bad for us - they’re only bad for us if we let them be bad - we still have old fashioned ways of doing things. Just because it’s now available to us, doesn’t mean we should abuse them. For example, cooking up a chicken and vegetable dinner is no harder for us now than it was 40/50 years ago - we just have quicker and easier options to take advantage of, such as apps and delivery services that we didn’t have before, or online shopping opposed to physically going to the grocery store, which some people give in to and continue the rest of their lives that way.

So, let’s go back to Fred, the friend who can eat whatever he likes and not gain weight, even though he has a slow metabolism. This is where something called NEAT (Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) comes in. Basically, it’s all the calories we burn (thermogenesis) in a day whilst not exercising. It’s all the other activities in the day you do that burns calories excluding exercise. So Fred eats whatever he wants because 1: he consumes a number of calories that matches the amount of energy he expends and 2: does a lot of NEAT that you are unaware of. Fred doesn’t go to the gym or partake in any usual physical activities. He eats one meal a day (the one you just saw him eat) and has a slow metabolism.

So, how is it possible that Fred maintains a normal body weight through this method (NEAT) even though his metabolism is slow?

Absolutely everything contributes to an individual's NEAT. If you’re not asleep or sitting on your bum doing nothing all day, you’ll be contributing to your NEAT. So, because Fred is on the go all day, moving around, standing up rather than sitting, fidgeting, doing housework, playing with his children, gardening, laundry and also has a manual labour job, all those things burn a lot of calories, believe it or not. The meal you just saw him eat contained 2500 calories, and he also used 2500 calories doing all those NEAT activities, so therefore, Fred will maintain his body weight. The moment any variables change (eat less, do less/eat more, do more/eat less, do more/eat more, do less) his weight will change, too.

Now, here’s the really cool, scientific variable from earlier:

Muscle burns calories at rest, i.e, you’ll have a faster metabolism, hence why resistance training is advantageous for every human being despite if you are female and your friend Sheila says it’s bad for you. Sheila is simply on crystal meth and doesn’t know what she’s talking about and isn’t knowledgeable in this field (Always refer to a professional when learning about complex information. Do not rely on hear-say or things you’ve read in a magazine/online unless it’s from a trusted source).

Why does muscle burn calories at rest? Just like having a bigger engine in your car, it requires more fuel. In this analogy, the engine is your muscles and the fuel is your food. But obviously, the car has to be on for it to use fuel - we don’t, because we never turn off, so, in order for our muscles to receive a constant flow of energy, they receive more calories even at rest, because there are more of them than someone with little amount of muscle. If there’s not much muscle to feed, the spare calories simply gets converted into body fat.

Now, someone with a fast metabolism can still gain weight. They’re not immune to gaining weight just because they have a fast metabolism. Even though they burn more at rest, if they were to cut their training down or eat more calories consistently every day than their body requires (calorie surplus), they would gain weight, that’s a no-brainer.

We now know that resistance training helps us speed up our metabolism, so what about endurance training (long distance running, cycling and walking etc.)? That actually has the opposite effect on our metabolism, and slows it down. Yes, you’ll burn calories and can possibly lose weight but as mentioned earlier, our bodies are designed to preserve energy in life threatening situations, and it doesn’t know whether you’re running a marathon or running from a slow paced lion in order to save your life. So, it slows down the rate at which you burn calories, in order to keep you alive for as long as possible. Again, your body doesn’t know when your next meal will arrive and its survival mechanism is to slow everything down. Like our mate Fred, if you’re the type of person to only eat one big meal a day, you’ll actually be slowing your metabolism. Now, imagine adding endurance training into the equation - it’ll slow down even further. But again, this doesn’t mean you have to eat breakfast if you don’t want it/not a breakfast person, it just means you shouldn’t starve yourself for most of the day then gorge on lots of calories when you get the chance to finally eat. Plus, at the end of each day, you won’t be able to burn those calories off as well as you would in the day, because 1: you can’t/less likely to do any NEAT, 2: you’ll be sedentary at the end of the day and most likely be going to sleep shortly after that meal and 3: you’ll most likely not want breakfast anyway if you’ve had such a big meal the night before (eating a large meal before you sleep can also disrupt your quality of sleep leading you to mess up your hormones and recovery).

Ladies: here’s the crap part - We naturally have less muscle than men due to the fact that we don’t produce as much testosterone (for obvious reasons) and hold more body fat than men because we naturally have a slower metabolism than men (unfair, I know). This is because we reproduce so require more body fat for us to be able to feed the fetus without having as much risk of dying from starvation. We have more reserves of food (body fat). And that’s the whole reason why we have body fat - to use if we were to ever run out of food for a period of time.

So, what should you do from now on?

• Eat regularly (the right amount of calories and home cooked nutritious foods).

• Do resistance training (even if it’s bodyweight training).

• Move more, do more (NEAT) (set a goal of 10,000 steps a day).

• Change your lifestyle and make better choices

• Stop away from fad diets and don’t trust random sources of information.

• Stop being lazy.

And no, before you ask, starvation mode isn't a thing. You literally cannot hold onto body fat if you're not eating anything.