Metabolism is hard to measure – it’s not clean and simple.
It’s not like you gain 3kg of muscle so I burn [X] amount more calories every single time.
The metabolism can be very efficient or non-efficient with it’s calories – there’s a lot of ways that the body wastes calories, through heat production, or other processes that we haven’t really fully identified.
So just training and eating in a way that tells your body to burn more calories, you burn more calories by having more muscle but you also burn more calories because your body has become less efficient with calories.
[Studies done on P.O.W surviving on less calories for years, but they were lean because their bodies become very efficient.]
You can tell your body to be more or less efficient with calories by the types of signals that you send your body.
One of the best ways to do that is that you want your body to be less efficient with calories which is AKA fast metabolism – is to build muscle, getting good sleep can help this.
Getting poor sleep tends to tell the body to become less efficient with calories.
Chronic dieting
This type of dieting tells the body to become efficient with calories (meaning your metabolism stays in one gear and does not change, reducing the ability to adapt) – your body cannot build muscle with not enough calories, so heavily restricting wrecks metabolism.
The amount of cardio you need to do to burn 800 calories due to no muscle is ridiculous.
Whereas if you have good lean muscle mass – this isn’t a hard task.
Diet and boosting metabolism:
Marco’s -carbs, protein and fats have a thermic effect meaning that they burn different amounts of energy/calories to process them.
Why include protein:
Protein has the highest thermic effect – if you were to eat X amount of calories of protein and an equivalent amount of carbs and fats through the ‘calorie-out’ /calorie burning side of the equation technically the same amount of calories of proteins is a little lower.
Eat in a way that maximises strength – in a way that makes you feel strongest that builds the most muscle – this way the body realises you are prioritising expensive muscle and you need it because you are strength training and sending muscle building signals, plus you are feeding it in a way that says we don’t need to conserve energy (you’re not excessively cutting calories).
Just by cutting calories your body starts to burn less calories – it starts to slow its metabolism down.
You want to eat in a way that tells your body it’s ok – with food and calories coming in.
If your goal is to burn body fat you do need to be in a calorie deficit but it’s a good idea to inject some higher calorie days (not loaded with alcohol).
Don’t treat this like a cheat day – this is a bad relationship with food – just eat a little more every third or fourth day in a week, with maybe a day of less calories, if you are planning on reducing body fat, this will prevent you from this mindset of ‘cheat days’.
If you’d like to work with me in 2021 click this link
