Understanding Your Metabolism
Need help understanding your metabolism?
It sure looks like you do!
I mean, you’re mad at your friend who eats anything they want. Pizza. Donuts. Burgers. Cake. ANYTHING!!! They eat all that without gaining a single pound. But you? Ha! You’re not as fortunate. It seems like you just look at food and the weight piles itself on.
And then there’s your other friend whose personal trainer has them on some meal plan that has them looking completely bangable.1Like, you want to bang them too, and you don’t even swing that way or have never even thought about it because they’re tucked so far away in the friend zone.
Because you want to look completely bangable too, you try your friend’s meal plan right down to the exact and macros. And what happens?
You don’t end up looking completely bangable is what happens!!! The calories and macros that are working so well for your friend do bupkis for you.
Total bummer!
You probably want to know what the fucking bleepity bleep is going on, right?
Well, there’s nothing going on but a lack of understanding of your metabolism.
Your friend not gaining weight from eating the same shit that’d make you balloon and your other friend’s diet not working for you are nothing but proof that we’re all special in our own ways, just like mum used to tell us.2Wait, the same woman who lied to you about Santa, and kept buying you a look-alike dog every time Boomer died so she wouldn’t have to explain death to you, and said she has no regrets about having to put her social life and career on hold because of you was telling the truth?!?! Yup, she sure was!
We’re all special, and our metabolism is a perfect display of that.
So before your resentment ruins that friendship of yours, allow me to explain to you real simple like.
Then please, by all means, go ahead and ruin it to high hell!
What do all the things you do every day have in common?
Yeah, what’s the connecting link between all that blinking, breathing, growing new cells, and using your brain to come up with new, creative excuses to skip working out?
If you said they all require energy, then you’re correct!
All the things you do every day require energy. Lots and lots of it. Where the human body gets all of that energy from is food in the form of calories. It’s the collection of chemical reactions that convert food calories into fuel that makes up the “metabolism”. The speed at which this occurs is called the metabolic rate, with the amount of calories that the body burns to power itself throughout the day known as the total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). It’s this figure, TDEE, that has to be calculated and adjusted for when it comes to weight control.
Now, the factors affecting the metabolic rate and TDEE are
• basal metabolic rate (BMR);
• the thermic effect of food (TEF); and
• the thermic effect of activity (TEA).
It’s these three things that explain why a meal plan that’s working magic on your friend may not work magic on you, as these factors are responsible for differing energy requirements among individuals and the speed at which that energy is used.
BASAL METABOLIC RATE (BMR)
BMR is the amount of calories that the cells need for the body to perform its vital functions were you, let’s say, laid comatose by the significant other of the person you do all that reckless eyeballing of at the gym. What influences the number of calories that you have to be fed through an IV to keep you alive?
Well, there’s
(1) Body Surface Area: A larger person in height and/or weight will have a higher BMR because of the greater number of cells to maintain.3That means a taller person needs more calories than a shorter person and a heavier person more calories than a skinnier one.
(2) Body Composition: The higher the proportion of muscle mass to fat mass the higher the BMR because lean tissue requires more energy to maintain than adipose.4 As such, someone with muscle has a greater need for protein than someone lacking it.
(3) Gender: Women have BMRs about 5-10 percent lower than men because females carry more body fat and less muscle mass than their male counterparts.
(4) Age: BMR is high when you’re a child and teenager because you’re growing but slowly decreases at 1-2 percent per decade after your 20s, with the rate of decline accelerating around age 40 in men and 50 in women.5Reasons why range from the brain and organs shrinking, physical activity lessening as you become older, and more and more loss of the muscle mass you didn’t give a fuck about developing in your youth.
(5) Hormones: The over- or underproduction of thyroxine, the main hormone responsible for regulating cell metabolism, can cause BMR to increase or decrease.6Hormone production, primarily insulin, can also impact the tolerance to carbs.
(6) Stress: BMR can increase with the production of epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine, and cortisol, but decrease the more prolonged the body is exposed to these “fight or flight” hormones from inadequate sleep, anxiety, overtraining, and other acute, episodic, and chronic stressors.
(7) Temperature: It takes energy to cool the body via sweating when active or in temperate weather, as well as to keep the body warm by shivering in cold environments to produce heat.
(8) Genetics: BMR can vary from someone of the same height, weight, age, sex, body fat percentage, etc, because of the genes your forebears blessed or cursed you with.
THE THERMIC EFFECT OF FOOD (TEF)
All that chewing and swallowing of the crap you eat requires energy.
Know what else does, too?
Yeah, the breaking down of that crap into nutrients that the body can absorb in the intestines and transport to the cells for their immediate needs or place into storage for future use.7Yeah, future use like providing you with the energy to power through that round of fasted cardio that you’re (thinking of) doing for no reason other than the fact that it’s trendy and everybody else is doing it, which, of course, means that it’s something you should be doing too!
Protein requires as much as 3-4 times more energy to process than fats and carbs. But because people can have different size guts than others and vary in the number of stomach microbes and production of digestive enzymes, a person eating the same food prepared the same way may not extract the same calories out of it as someone else.
THE THERMIC EFFECT OF ACTIVITY (TEA)
Unlike BMR and TEF that have to do with cellular activity, which is involuntary, TEA has more to do with physical activity, which is within our power to control and reap the benefits of.
On that front, a very active person not only requires more calories (and carbs) than someone who’s sedentary but also has the ability to burn more.8With that said, however, remember that bodily movement isn’t responsible for as much daily energy expenditure as is commonly believed!!!
So why can your friend make less than stellar food choices but not you?
Or why didn’t your other friend’s meal plan work on you?
Or why did you have little to no success with the one you saw in a magazine that’s responsible for the celebrity on the cover getting their body in tip-top shape for the lead role in the latest superhero flick?9Like, really, who besides you is clamoring for an Extraño movie? Hear that silence? Yup, nobody!
Or why’s it stupid to ask any fit motherfucker like me what they ate?
Or why’s it just as stupid to look at someone’s full day of eating on Youtube?10Riveting content right there, folks! Keep those videos coming!!!
Whatever the case, now that you have an understanding of your metabolism and how it works, you know the answer to all of those great mysteries.
And that is…?
Ummm…the calories and macros that do or don’t do shit for one person may or not do shit for another because no two people are alike. In other words, no two people burn calories in response to activity in the same manner, process food the same way, AND possess the exact same height, weight, age, body fat percentage, and other components responsible for BMR!11That is, unless you’re a clone…
…a clone replicated from the DNA of the person whose nutrition you’re trying to copycat…
…a clone born in one of the Illuminati’s secret cloning centers as part of our their evil bid to take over the world.
Oops, I’ve revealed too much.
Bye!
Glossary: adipose, calories, diet, gym, meal plan, metabolism, muscle, personal trainer, work out