Welcome back to snack cast. Today, we are talking about metabolism.
Metabolism. That’s a good one. Yeah, it’s mysterious. A lot of people don’t know if it is a thing. Is it a chemical? Is it? Yeah, what is it? Well, it’s technically, the process of how your body determines whether to turn food into energy or waste. It’s how your body processes fuel. And it’s supposed to be different for everybody.
Can you boost your metabolism? I have a faster metabolism than you. You probably do. No doubt, give me a couple of beers. And we’ll go. Yeah, right. The automatic metabolism booster. right? It’s this big Whirlpool of food. Maybe that’s a bad example. It’s like an engine, per se. You put fuel into the engine. And it’s either running hot or cold, and it’s driving your vehicle.
I think at the basic level, it kind of helps determine how many calories we require to really operate. We all have a base level, I think it’s actually called the basal level of minimum calories, you need to sustain your life. I think that can change, depending on a lot of factors that we’ll get into later. But once you understand that my body requires so many calories then it’s a matter of what does, overconsumption of calories do and what is underconsumption.
You’re talking about two different things, right? You’re talking about a base rate of calories that I need in order to operate this body, and that’s your metabolic rate. But the metabolism itself is something different, is it not? It’s not how many calories I need to burn in a day. No that is true, the metabolic rate in metabolism is the process of breaking down that food, turning it into energy. That’s one of the myths that are out there.
If you say, I have a slow metabolism, does that really mean anything? Arguably not and that’s what will present over these next few podcasts. Help you have an understanding of why does it matter? Why should you care about metabolic rate and metabolism? What’s it really mean to your real life? What are the myths?
Obviously, people burn calories at different rates. Let me reiterate, people need a certain level of calories for the body to function, for example, to help your heartbeat and your lungs to breathe. So you need a different set of calories each day than I need. Correct. Someone in Wisconsin, in cold weather with stresses in their life, will need a different level of calories. What if you and I were the same height, same weight, same age, same diet, and the same level of activity? How far would ours be off? They probably wouldn’t be off too far. But I would also imagine that there are a ton of environmental factors that also go into it. How do you sleep? What types of foods do you eat? Do you have stress in your life? Or do you not have stress in your life?
That brings up an interesting point. The body wants to be lazy. And not because it’s laziness, it’s survival. Our evolution is the brain wants to survive and conserve. But to your point about the foods that we eat, the body has to work harder to digest some foods than others mainly protein. Protein requires a higher caloric load to convert it into energy, whereas fats and carbs do not. I don’t know if one is better than the other, I would suspect fat. Although fat does make you work harder, we know that from keto.
So the next couple of podcasts we’re going to talk about the myth of metabolism. What can you do about it? And slow versus fast. All right, giddy up. Thanks for tuning in. Email us at snackcast@yes.fit if you have any ideas for topics you want covered, and we’ll see you tomorrow. Keep moving