Eating More to Speed Metabolism
In my last post I discussed various eating style options; that post was written to detail various approaches to eating styles I’ve done or researched. In the recent past I’ve gone from eating an average 1500 calorie intake to 2280 calories, or more, daily. (You can use my Total Daily Energy calculator to find your number.) I’ve learned, over time, to be more intuitive to how I feel each day and how certain foods or groupings of foods can make me feel or how my body responds. Our body is always evolving, changing over time, each phase of life changes nutritional response and requirements it seems. My one lifetime goal is to remain naturally healthy and fit over time and across all phases of my life. I’ve always incorporated fitness in my life plan, why?
- We want to retain muscle: studies show the population will see a decrease in muscle as they age. This impacts health in a multitude of ways from performing activities to how much energy your body burns daily; yes the slowing of your metabolism is impacted my lower muscle mass.
During 2013 I’ve run trials on various eating protocols, with a group, to see how our individual response based on body type.
During 2013, a range of eating styles used included: timing macros around workouts, managing macros in an undulating style, using various macro nutrient percentages and various ranges from low to high carbohydrate daily intake; data tracking was done over time as well.
One major take away I had from these trials:
Eat enough to support the basic daily activities of life, plus your daily physical activity!
Under-eating creates a situation where your body responds by slowing down metabolism to use less energy to do more activity. Congratulations, you have now become a Prius and can go long distance on less energy. What you really want is a metabolism that runs like a Ferrari and requires more energy to go the same that same distance..
Who doesn’t want to be the sleek Ferrari or Lamborghini of the metabolism world right!!
Knowing what your TDEE or Total Daily Energy Expenditure number is will help rebuild you to health eating levels and happy metabolism.
If you have been eating at a level much lower than you get from the TDEE calculator, or, if you want to get back to a better place, adjusting by additional nutrition should be added slowing each week until you get from where you are today to where you should be.
I’ve listened to this lecture a few times, it relates to experiences Layne Norton has had while working with fitness competitors that come to him in preparation for a competition.
Layne makes excellent points about working with clients when they are chronically underfed. How he can’t change a person’s nutritional intake to assist weight loss when they are already under eating. Layne has a few follow up posts to this Vlog, I’m currently enjoying some of his very intuitive video posts.
The take Away:
If you are chronically underfeeding yourself you have no options to cut from if you need to lose weight, the only answer is to retrain your metabolism to run efficiently on the upper calorie limits before you can manipulate your intake to burn bodyfat.
And that is my 700 word answer to how I utilized a Daily Energy Calculator (below) to determine what my activity level, plus basal energy rate, would equate to. Knowing this information, I set out to slowly increase my daily intake to match the TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) and to slowly retrain (speed up) my metabolism to run on the upper level intake.
Is it working?
Yes, I’ve gone from and average of 1200-1500 daily calories to 1800-2300 daily calories, without any noticeable increase in body weight measures via the scale or caliper testing. While those measure are only loose calculations of my lean muscle mass vs body fat mass, I can certainly tell, by the fit of my clothing, that things are remaining static and I am winning in the fight against down regulated metabolism and the process of losing muscle mass as I age.
I’ve recently added a Omron handheld body-fat tester to my arsenal of testing devices as well, more on that later.
What about you?
- What measure are you taking to maintain your muscle mass?
- Do you feel you eat close to your Daily Energy Expenditure?
- What measures would you take to meet your goals?
- Would you like to speed up your metabolism too?
I’ve included a link to my Daily Calorie Calculator here for you to use. If you need more explanation regarding the calculator click TDEE on the above menu to bring you to a new page with more detail..
Please comment and let me know if this is information you find helpful or if you have any questions, I would be more than happy to assist you.
I think one very important thing is to eat low to zero carbs in the couple hours before bedtime because you can end up gaining weight. So no rice, potatoes, noodles, that sort of thing after like 7pm. I don’t remember right but I believe your body produces some sort of chemical in the beginning of sleep that reacts with carbs and results in accumulation of fat?
Janet,.. one again you throw out a kickstarter! Working on “stuff” wished you lived next door. (trying to get a handle on the gut right now. Kombucha, kefir, and tumeric items are my experiments,…. I eat plenty of protein, wayyyy less carbs than I did 2-3 years ago, and have to so much more diligent about my timing. (and of course exercise, which I hate) Love your blog posts. eye opener, every time. some soaks in,but often I read the new one, and go back to the previous one or two, and re-soak in what you have been doing!