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Burn! How To Boost Your Metabolism

Plus: how to change your life in six months

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The 10almonds Team
July 15, 2023

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

Loading Screen Tip: the dreaming has to be backed up by the doing

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⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

  • Our metabolism is influenced by some factors that can be difficult or impossible to control, for example:

    • Age

    • Body size

    • Sex

    • Medical conditions

  • However, there are lifestyle factors we can control that will boost our metabolism, for example:

    • Intermittent fasting

    • Protein consumption

    • Hydration

    • Standing (or walking) vs sitting

    • Nutritional considerations

  • See today’s main feature for much more about all of these!

  • Physical and mental wellness are inextricably linked; it’s very difficult to have one without the other

    • Today’s sponsor Maude are offering 10almonds subscribers a discount on their product line to take care of both at once

Read on to learn about these things and more…

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👀 WATCH AND LEARN

How To Change Your Life in 6 Months

Overnight transformations are enticing, but rare. Changing your life in 6 months, though? That’s very doable:

🔥 MAIN FEATURE

Let’s burn! Metabolic tweaks and hacks

Our metabolism is, for as long as we live, a constantly moving thing. And it’s not a monolith either; there are parts of our metabolism that can speed up or slow down independently of others.

If we talk about metabolism without clarifying context, though, this is usually about one’s “basal metabolic rate”, that is, how many calories we burn just by being alive.

Why do we want to speed it up? Might we ever want to slow it down?

We might want to slow our metabolism down in survival circumstances, but generally speaking, a faster metabolism is a better one.

Yes, even when it comes to aging. Because although metabolism comes with metabolizing oxygen (which, ironically, tends to kill us eventually, since this is a key part of cellular aging), it is still beneficial to replace cells sooner rather than later. The later we replace a given cell (ie, the longer the cell lives), the more damaged it gets, and then the copy is damaged from the start, because the damage was copied along with it. So, best to have a fast metabolism to replace cells quickly when they are young and healthy.

A quick metabolism helps the body to do this.

Most people, of course, are interested in a fast metabolism to burn off fat, but beware: if you increase your metabolism without consideration to how and when you consume calories, you will simply end up eating more to compensate.

One final quick note before we begin:

Limitations

There’s a lot we can do to change our metabolism, but there are some things that may be outside of our control. They include:

  • Age—we can influence our biological age, but we cannot (yet!) halt aging, so this will happen

  • Body size—and yes we can change this a bit, but we all have our own “basic frame” to work with. Someone who is 6’6” is never going to be able to have the same lower-end-of-scale body mass of someone who is 5’0”, say.

  • Sex—this is about hormones, and HRT is a thing, but for example, broadly speaking, men will have faster metabolisms than women, because of hormonal differences.

  • Medical conditions—often also related to other hormones, but for example someone with Type 1 Diabetes is going to have a very different relationship with their metabolism than someone without, and someone with a hypo- or hyperactive thyroid will again have a very different metabolism in a way that that lifestyle factors can’t completely compensate for.

The tips and tricks

Intermittent fasting

Intermittent fasting has been found to, amongst other things, promote healthy apoptosis and autophagy (in other words: early programmed cell death and recycling—these are good things).

It also has anti-inflammatory benefits and decreases the risk of insulin resistance. In other words, intermittent fasting boosts the metabolism while simultaneously guarding against some of the dangers of a faster metabolism (harms you’d get if you instead increased your metabolism by doing intense exercise and then eating a mountain of convenience food to compensate)

Enjoy plenty of protein

This one won’t speed your metabolism up, so much as help it avoid slowing down as a result of fat loss.

Because of our body’s marvelous homeostatic system trying to keep our body from changing status at any given time, often when we lose fat, our body drops our metabolism to compensate, thinking we are in an ongoing survival situation and food is scarce so we’d better conserve energy (as fat). That’s a pain for would-be weight-loss dieters!

Eating protein can let our body know that we’re perfectly safe and not starving, so it will keep the metabolism ticking over nicely, without putting on fat.

Stay hydrated

People think of drinking water as part of a weight loss program being just about filling oneself up, and that is a thing, but it also has a role to play in our metabolism. Specifically, lipolysis (the process of removing fat).

Because, we are mostly water. Not only is it the main content of our various body tissue cells, but also, of particular note, our blood (the means by which everything is transported around our body) is mostly water, too.

It’s hard for the body to keep everything ticking over like a well-oiled machine if its means of transportation is sluggish!

Take a stand

That basal metabolic rate we talked about?

  • If you’re lying down at rest, that’s what your metabolism will be like.

  • If you’re sitting up, it’ll be a little quicker, but not much.

  • If you’re standing, suddenly half your body is doing things, and you don’t even notice them because they’re just stabilizing muscles and the like, but on a cellular level, your body gets very busy.

Time to invest in a standing desk? Or a treadmill in front of the TV?

The spice of life

Capsaicin, the compound in many kinds of pepper that give them their spicy flavor, boosts the metabolism. In the words of Tremblay et al for the International Journal of Obesity:

❝[Capsaicin] stimulates the sympathoadrenal system that mediates the thermogenic and anorexigenic effects of capsaicinoids.

Capsaicinoids have been found to accentuate the impact of caloric restriction on body weight loss.

Some studies have also shown that capsinoids increase energy expenditure.

Capsaicin supplementation attenuates or even prevents the increase in hunger and decrease in fullness as well as the decrease in energy expenditure and fat oxidation, which normally result from energy restriction❞

You snooze, you lose (fat)

While exercising is generally touted as the road to weight loss, and certainly regular exercise does have a part to play, doing so without good rest will have bad results.

In fact, even if you’re not exercising, if you don’t get enough sleep your metabolism will get sluggish to try to slow you down and encourage you to sleep.

So, be proactive, and make getting enough good quality sleep a priority.

Eat for metabolic health

Aside from the chilli peppers we mentioned, there are other foods associated with good metabolic health. We don’t have room to go into the science of each of them here, but here’s a well-researched, well-sourced standalone article listing some top choices:

Enjoy!

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Fast Burn: The Power of Negative Energy Balance - by Dr. Ian K. Smith

Intermittent fasting seems simple enough: how complicated can "stop eating for a bit" be? Well, there are nuances and tweaks and hacks and "if you do this bit wrong it will sabotage your benefits" things to know about, too.

Dr. Smith takes us through the basic essentials first, and covers each of the main kinds of intermittent fasting, for example:

  • Time-restricted eating; 12:12, 16:8, etc, with those being hours fasting vs hours eating

  • Caloric restriction models; for example 5:2, where one eats "normally" for 5 days a week, and on two non-consecutive days, eats only 500 calories

  • Day off models and more; for example, "no eating on Sundays" that can, depending on your schedule, be anything from a 24-hour fast to 36 hours or more.

...and, most notably, what they each do metabolically.

Then, the real meat of the book is his program. Taking into account the benefits of each form of fasting, he weaves together a 9-week program to first ease us gently into intermittent fasting, and then enjoy the maximum benefits with minimum self-sabotage.

Which is the biggest stumbling-block for many trying intermittent fasting for the first time, so it's a huge help that he takes care of this here.

He also includes meal plans and recipes; readers can use those or not; the fasting plan stands on its own two feet without them too.

Bottom line: if you've been thinking of trying intermittent fasting but have been put off by all the kinds or have had trouble sticking to it, this book may be just what you need.

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Wishing you a wonderful weekend full of energy,

The 10almonds Team