How to Boost Your Metabolism & Burn Fat

the science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport play and life Welcome to perform I'm Dr Andy Galpin I'm a professor scientist and the executive director of the human performance center at Parker University today's episode we're going to be talking all about how to boost your metabolism the reason I chose this is because of all the topics in the entire space of human performance this probably has the most discussion among pop culture you see it everywhere supplements diets magazine covers boosting metabolism boosting metabolism you speed up your metabolism is one of the most popular

topics yet because of that it's also fraught with misinformation with outright lies and so how do you understand what's going on I'm in preparing for this show I asked a lot of my friends many of which have phds in the field master's degrees registered dietitians I just simply ask them can you speed up your metabolism and I never got a straight answer nobody I talked to confidently was able to tell me yes you can or no you can't and so I was really excited to do this topic and break that down for everyone because the

reality of it is we have a lot of science here there are some extremely clear-cut answers about whether or not you can even have a fast or slow metabolism the reality is you can't your metabolic rate and my metabolic rate are not necessarily different but despite that there's over a dozen different scientifically documented ways in which you can enhance your metabolism we have learned very recently a lot of information about what explains why some people can do things like eat more calories eat more food but yet not gain as much weight as you that is

a real phenomenon even when all other variables are controlled for that can happen but that's not explained by having a faster or slower metabolism and so these topics and many many more are what I'm going to get into in today's show and I know know that when you leave the episode you will know much more about how metabolism Works what it really is and exactly what to do to enhance it if you so please or so like to do that and what the true state of the literature says on enhancing boosting or speeding up your

metabolism as always we're going to tackle this problem by covering the three eyes investigate interpret and intervene so by investigate we'll walk through really quickly how to get this tested or measured if you're interested in learning more about this what are some of the high-end ways the most scientifically supported all the way down to low or moderately low cost and all the way down to free if we can from there I will talk about how to interpret those data so how do you know whether you're slow or fast or high or low or where it

should be based on your age and sex and other other factors that are important but we're going to spend most of our time on the third eye which is I will cover what we know scientifically about what works and what doesn't work we'll get into exactly how much it works so what's the magnitude of effect how much will it raise my metabolism by and for how long after that we'll talk about the specific details of the protocols if you will so what to take how long what dosage what timing and so on and so forth

in the case of say supplements or food we'll talk about other factors including but not limited to things like the temperature water intake spicy foods types of exercise sleep protocols and so forth the reality of it is we have a lot of different options from the lifestyle from environmental from food and supplementation that give you the ability potentially to increase your metabolic rate we're going to finish the episode by going over what I call a couple of case studies in which I give some sample combinations of these factors that I have used and do use

in the folks I work with to effectively enhance metabolic speed in a long-term successful adherent fashion so things that are going to be not just giving us a short bump a shortterm effect but something that is long lasting and sustainable over time so to get us started the first thing we have to talk about is what we're even talking about these terms as I open up the show with are malign they're confusing and that's in large part and often is the case just because of simple miscommunication I'm going to keep it brief I know in

the past and I love to talk at length about the physiology and what's happening at the level not going to do much of that today but I do need to explain the different parts because as you'll see the episode unfold we're going to talk about how each intervention or protocol or thing that you can do influences each area of metabolism and it's really important that you do something that covers all four of the major areas so that you have the most likelihood of improvement so we have to know what those areas are and then roughly

what they mean I promise so I will keep it very brief and by that I mean it's Galpin Style but it will still be brief for me now some of you might be thinking here I'm not incredibly interested in Fat Loss or metabolism maybe you're already lean and you're lean no matter what or you don't work in the area or with clients who care that much about fat loss so you might be thinking to yourself this episode isn't for me I'm just going to sort of tune out I'm going to try to caution you against

that for a couple of reasons one you're going to care about your long-term metabolic health and this is highly tied to that and so whether just because of the fact that you're lean now doesn't mean you always will be lean in addition if you do want to continue to stay lean you need to keep this engine revved up as high as possible for as long as possible and so we're going to cover exactly how to do that from what we know scientifically in today's discussion the second thing is what I call the higher Delta so

let's imagine a scenario in which you consume and burn exactly 2,000 calories per day so your net equal and at that you keep the exact same level of muscle and energy and recovery and performance and body fat and so on and so forth if I could do that exact same thing at 4,000 calories now I've got much more options what I mean by that is if I can keep you with the exact same for all those variables at Double the caloric load I've got a greater ability to increase my food intake which means my micronutrients

go up if I eat double the food I get double the vitamins and minerals and nutrients and fiber intake and if I'm staying at the exact same body composition body mass that is a huge Advantage additionally it now becomes far easier to lose weight if you ever want to do that one of the things that makes it really hard for weight loss if your metabolism is quote unquote slow again think that total input versus output is low say 2,000 and you want to drop it by say 500 calories you've reduced a significant portion of your

caloric intake you're going to feel that and you've dropped a quarter of your calories however if you're at 4,000 calories Turn and Burn and we drop you by 500 now we've only lowered your intake by a small percentage and so you don't feel that much of a difference you won't really feel 3500 calories versus 4,000 calories but you'll feel 15 versus 2,000 even though in both cases is exact 500 calories and so for a lot of people there is still a huge interest in understanding and making your overall metabolism function how you want for both

the short and long term regardless of whether or not body composition or body fat is your primary secondary or even of slight interest to you right now now I can continue talking about that Delta and why you want to avoid energy toxicity but you do at the same time want to have a high caloric intake but we'll save those thoughts for another conversation we want to get really into today's topic and so what does speeding up your metabolism even mean and I've been using a bunch of different terms thus far on purpose I've tried to

throw out misconceptions I've used the wrong phrase intentionally because that's how it's used colloquially that's probably how you've heard it and that's how you've thought about it so I've done that uh with direct intent there we're going to talk about what those things mean we're going to talk about what it actually means to have a fast or slow metabolism and so let's get into those very basic parts right now scientifically metabolism is the net of all cellular processes in your entire body so when you're metabolizing hormones or proteins or energy substrates like carbohydrates and fat

all of that is combined together to make up your metabolism so that is a giant net it is not specifically and only referring to the calories in versus calories out what you're burning for exercise or your body fat composition it is all things going on that is an incredibly difficult number to come up with with it is not a rate it is a total amount what I mean by that is it's not a speed this is why I can tell you people in our field and mind you I've got a PhD in human bioenergetics so

people in this field will tell you there is no speed component here it is a total rate component and so the analogy I'll give you here is a car okay now if I had you driving in your car at 50 m an hour and we increased you to 70 mph you your speed went up okay when people think about boosting their metabolism that's what they think happens I'm driving faster and when we say you don't speed up your metabolism when I tell you yours is the same speed as mine what I mean is we're all

driving at 50 m hour but at the same time I also did tell you we can raise it and that there are some people who can handle more energy and not gain as much and so forth that's not a speed issue what that is is the total amount of drive time right it is not speeding up your metabol M it is going through metabolism more frequently that's effectively what's happening so it's driving more often if you drive more often let's say again the analogy of speed here we're both driving at 50 mil per hour you

don't speed up or slow down but I drive for one mile and you drive for 15 who burned more gas you did that's exactly what we're talking about so somebody with a fast metabolism is someone who's simply driving for 15 miles and someone with a slow metabolism is somebody who's driving for 5 miles or 2 miles or whatever the case may be that is incredibly important because we as we start getting into claims in the field and misconceptions and improper marketing they're going to use those things as tricks and ways to twist you so easy

examples there's plenty of supplements that you can take that will quote unquote speed up your metabolism they will turn it on they will get you going but they do not result in any additional fat loss for mechanisms in which we will cover later and so understanding the very basic principle there lets you realize okay great they can make a certain claim there but in reality it is what I'm trying to hear is that product will help me lose fat more and that will not be the case that is often what we see and have historically

heard in the magazines in the media with the supplement companies and so forth regarding speeding up your metabolism so now that you understand that you're not going to fall all a prey to that trick again so here's what we really mean when people say I want a faster metabolism or my metabolism is slow and so they say my metabolism is too slow or I want it to go faster what are they really saying they're generally talking about body composition I hate to phrase it this way I didn't want to do it because there's so much

more to metabolism than just body comp but again this is a very easy entry point for us so we'll stay here just so most people can understand so when they're saying that my metabolism is slow what they're usually saying saying is a common about their body composition they have more fat than they would like it's hard for them to lose fat it's hard for them to gain muscle or the opposite someone who complains of a fast metabolism is somebody who's having a hard time gaining muscle I eat and I eat and I eat and I

just can't gain I eat and I eat I just can't gain so there's there's complaints on both sides of the equation example here just to give you some math let's say both you and your friend eat 1500 calories a day and let's say we live in a magical universe and stress and sleep and all that is all qued for the only difference between you you both add 1,500 calories per day for 8 weeks one of you loses three lb the other loses 12 PB that is a real thing that can and does happen it's easy

then for you to think okay metabolism Fast Metabolism slow so what's really happening there is a change in what we call TDE e or total daily energy expenditure when you hear the phrase fast and slow metabolism or the phrase is I want you to think total daily energy expenditure now that has four unique components and I'll cover in one second but the reality of it is what could be explaining that person who lost more weight than you did or didn't gain as much whether you're in a choric surplus or caloric deficit it doesn't matter something

in that total daily energy expenditure was different for them there is no in that component that is metabolic speed but that's the translation all right so boosting metabolism is really an increase or decrease in total daily energy expenditure if you want to look at total body mass body composition we can look at this as simply as our energy expenditure versus our energy intake a lot of times you'll see this abbreviated is EI energy intake so I can increase or decrease my weight by changing either side of my equation for example if I increased my total

daily energy expenditure of which I have four ways to do that four components but if I increase that and I didn't increase my intake my body mass will go down or I could keep my energy expenditure the same and I could lower my energy intake okay or combinations of both but that's honestly what we're what we're talking about when we're discussing metabolic speed I'm actually fine with people saying I've sped up my metabolism as long as they're using it appropriately in this context I don't like to use it but I absolutely get it why most

folks do and so total daily energy expenditure as I said has four components what are those four components the first one is what we call eat eat some people call this e what we're effectively talking about is exercise so eat stands for the exercise activity thermogenesis it's the calories you burn during exercise e is energy expenditure it doesn't matter how you think about this but it's how many calories did you burn in your workout for most people that's going to represent somewhere between 0 to 30% of their total daily energy expenditure so just to make

sure you're following me of all the calories you burn throughout the day everything combined if you don't work out well then none of their caloric expenditure is going to be explained by exercise most people though probably going to have 10 to 20% % of the calories they burn throughout the day coming from exercise folks that are really training a lot maybe closer to 20 25 or even up to 30% it's hard to get past 30% you would have to train a ton but you can generally think 10 20% of your energy throughout the day coming

from calories we will talk about this later but this is one of the reasons why and and I I will explain very clearly why this is the wrong thing to think but this is the fodder some people use to say things like oh exercise doesn't even help with fat loss and they're not entirely wrong here because it's not explaining the largest part of your caloric expenditure 10% even for someone who works out pretty often or pretty hard 90% of the calories you're burning are from things not exercised so they're not completely unfounded though again I

think it's really terrible advice we'll talk about that and the research on it in detail later but again component number one of total daily energy expenditure is exercise component number two is similar to eat which is called neat so it's eat with an n in front of it it is non-exercise activity thermal Genesis this is all the other physical activity you're doing throughout the day that is not structured and specific exercise this is everything from fidgeting to walking pacing taking the stairs going uh parking further in the parking lot so you walk more it is

all of those other things that are still going to expend calories but they're not exercise one of the interesting things about this is this has often times as much if not a bigger component of your total energy expenditure than structured exercise does people have completely forgotten about this but the reality of it is it's going to be somewhere between 5 to 30% of your TDE the next two components are what's called your TEF and I apologize for all the acronyms here I'm trying to really make sure we walk you through it I think you're holding

on this far it is the thermal effect of food this is quite simply the energies or the heat you create in response to breaking down food in your stomach so the reality is when you eat food items they sit in your stomach you have to burn some calories to digest them if you want to think about it that way and that then creates some chloric expenditure it's usually about 8 to 15% of your tte and so if you add eat neat and TEF up what you have remaining of that 100% is your rest testing metabolic

rate and that ranges from about 40% of TDE all the way up to 80% especially in folks that are sedentary or lowly active so as we get into this how I'm going to cover the intervention and the research is which area of total daily energy expenditure is each given protocol or intervention influencing so what can we do to increase our eat what can we do an increased neat TEF as well as resting metabolic rate the reality as I said at the beginning I think it's best that you try to implement a well-rounded plan that influences

all four of these components or at least multiple of them but if you can't exercise say you're injured or bedridden or you're in another scenario where you can't exercise or whatever the case may be you have other options and that's why I want to present all this stuff as so you know no matter what situation you're in based on preference or realistic or feasibility or Effectiveness you can alter your metabolism in in multiple Fashions to make sure that your body composition and overall energy intake is where you want it to be whether that's loss gain

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now nobody has to use supplements and I hope you never feel pressured to do so but if you're interested in supplements it's important that you get them from the highest quality providers you don't want Mercury and your fish oil or lead in your way protein or anything like that so that's why I stick exclusively to momentus if you'd like to give momentus a try go to liv.com perform to get 20% off your order again that's Liv mous.com perform to get 20% off as I mentioned a moment ago exercise calories tends to get most people's attention

when it comes to the thing you got to do you got to work out more you got to train harder you got to burn more calories I am actually in the the camp that the caloric expenditure from exercise is playing a fairly minimal role in weight management that said there are a trillion other reasons why you should exercise even if fat loss is your only goal we'll talk about that later but from a simple caloric expenditure from a simple boosting metabolism concept exercise is not playing a massive component this is one of the few times

in physiology when we can say that hey exercise is not the biggest hammer we can swing in this variable more important is that neat now that neat as I mentioned somewhere between 5 and 30% and it is highly responsive we've actually only known about neat for 20 or 25 years um James LaVine has the the famous paper here I think it was 1999 that thing was published where he outlined he said oh my gosh this kind of fidgeting and walking thing feels completely un necessary or not it can't contributing that much is really making a

big impact in fact now we know that neat is likely the most modifiable one it is ultra responsive it's it's the governor your body uses when it needs to dial up energy expenditure it ramps up neat when it KN needs to dial it back it ramps it down it is absolutely the throttle your body is moving completely unaware of your conscious thought to regulate overall energy balance we had no idea of this until again as I mentioned 20 years or so so which is very recent scientifically in that original paper I think it's really cool

because it it's just going to hammer this point down what they sort of found was it was something in the order of the neat accounted for like a tenfold difference in fat storage when you overfed now I can't remember if this was in I think it was an animal study we certainly if if you're aware we can put some comments in the YouTube section to help me out there but it doesn't matter the point was what they did is they overfed the folks or the the animals in the study and what they realized was again

a tenfold difference in fat storage based on the animals that upregulated neat in response to the overfeeding and I think the correlation was like 08 correlation of one is a perfect line cor correlation like 3 or four is still really important so the fact that their correlation was like 08 or or more said hey this is basically exactly what is explaining folks who can eat more food food again they intentionally overfed this group I'll call them folks but probably animals and the ones that didn't gain the most amount of weight were the ones that responded

almost perfectly for 50 extra calories eaten 50 extra calories a neat I made that number up but you get the point right the ones that had 50 extra calories of food 10 extra calories in eat were the ones who gained the most weight and this is when our field completely turned the attention and said oh my gosh it's not the 100 calories you're burning in your workout it is really whose physiology can match or is mismatched with their energy intake and their need and that is clearly one of the bigger than drivers of the faster

metabolism person versus the slower metabolism person to be really clear here what they're suggesting here is the folks who appear to have a faster metabolism are the ones whose bodies upregulate neat in response to upregulations or increases in energy intake the ones who seem to have a slower metabolism are the opposite their body doesn't have a tight understanding or communication loop with energy intake so even though they ramp up calories in they don't see a huge increase in caloric expenditure through neat and that thus then probably explains when you and your friend both increased your

calories by 1,000 calories yet you gained two pounds and she gained 15 pounds or whatever the case may be so that's why I make sure wanted to make sure we neat because it has that incredible role and we will talk about what happens in different short and long-term scenarios with neat so we can really understand what we need to do to manage it and to take the most advantage of it regardless of whether we're fast or slow or in between metabolic speed person now the next two components that we talked about outside of eat and

neat are the thermal effect of food and resting metabolic rate the thermal effect of food as I mentioned is somewhere between like 8 to 15% of your total daily energy expenditure what this is is how much calories or how many calories you burn breaking down food and that differs based on your macronutrient in fact the reality of it is it differs based on your food preparation so if you get a whole steak as an example in bites versus that same exact cut of meat but preg ground up you'll see a difference in thermal effect and

it makes total sense if your body is having to work to digest that whole big chunk because you didn't chew it well for example of steak it will take it more calories to break it down however if you pre- digest it I.E blend it up chop it up then it's less work more chemical bonds have been broken so your body will it'll be a very small amount basically negligible but conceptually you're seeing the point here right your body won't have to spend as many calories to break it down so the thermal effect of food is

different based on the macronutrient profile for example fat has an effect of somewhere between 0 and 2% now there are pros and cons what this means is if you eat 100 calories of fat you're probably going to digest absorb and assimilate a basically all 100 calories this makes it highly effective for a lot of different things particularly for storage for keeping the calories around if you're in a survival situation if you want to use an extreme here again it doesn't matter I know most of us are rarely in a survival situation but just use it

as the thought concept here I don't want to waste a bunch of my calories of my food on breaking it down I want to preserve as many of those calories from the small food that I was able to procure and keep those in my body so fat has a huge Advantage there however from a weight management perspective most of us being in a position where we have too much access to food rather than not enough that can actually be a little bit detrimental because now now I'm going to definitely take on all the calories that

I eat contrast that to carbohydrates and protein carbohydrates are a little bit higher thermal effect is usually between 5 and 10% what that means let's just say again you ate 100 calories of carbohydrate you might burn five or 10 calories breaking them down and so the net result in your body is 95 or 90 and this is one of the main reasons why not to get us on a tangent here off track when people say things like oh calories in calories out don't matter or I tried that and it didn't work there's a lot of

reasons that explain that but the thermal effective food is one of them 100 calories of carbohydrate versus fat versus protein just thermal effect alone is going to result in a different amount of energy absorption and so calories in calories out is still perfectly explaining that you just didn't fundamentally realize that the calories out portion is is changed based on the macronutrient because of the thermal effect so I have a separate video on YouTube it's called the quality versus quantity I think the great calorie debate or something it's an hour or too long you can see

exactly what I'm talking about you can see some of the papers and plenty of examples and we'll have that Linked In the show notes so if I lost you there I apologize but if not just trust me so to come back to this the thermal effect of protein is the highest of these three by far 15 30% and so right off the Gaze here you're probably intuitively thinking okay wait a minute then if I eat 100 calories of protein I may only have a net of 70 or 80 or 85 with that same 100 calories

in my mouth in the form of carbohydrates and fat would have a much higher yield and so you can increase your metabolism I'm going to lose you a little bit on math here right you can increase your metabolism I'm I'm for those of you just listening I'm air quoting right now by eating more protein because you're going to actually be eating the same amount of calories as your friend but the net result of calories you keep on board is much lower Therefore your caloric intake is lower and therefore your body composition would change because of

that so this is a case where it it made you feel like it gave you the perception of the metabolism being higher or faster because your net body composition result result was better body fat was lower even though you made the same calories and you can't understand why cuz you were calorie matched I will walk you through specific examples with numbers on this stuff later if I just lost you in a kind of a bunch of negative positives up down things there if not I think you get the concept I hope you do at this

point so thermal effective food is an important consideration last caveat there before we move on to resting metabolic rate and that is those numbers I gave you are very rough when I say carbohydr yes it depends on the typee of carbohydrate uh a scoop of Honey will not give you the same thermal effect as a potato so the the way that you prepare your food the preparation how they're combined together starches versus glucose versus monosaccharide yes all this definitely matters but that's why that numbers a range 15 to 30 for protein 5 to 10 for

carbs 0 to two for fat so don't get Ultra caught up in those numbers just think of it as cons Cally um burning a small but not irrelevantly more calories for digesting protein then carbohydrates and then certainly versus fat our fourth and final component here your resting M metabolic rate is the thing people most associate with their metabolic speed somewhere between 40 to 70% and generally you can think about this as folks that are highly Physically Active whether that be from exercise or from neat because they're burning more calories from there by default the number

of calories they're burning as a percentage of their total daily Ingy expenditure goes down so highly Physically Active people their resting metabolic rate is sometimes like only 40 or 50% of their total energy expenditure as you get less active all the way up to sedentary or completely inactive people that resting molic rate may explain 70 to 80% of your energy expens man want to be really careful here thus far I've only explained these as a percentage of your total output I'm not even talking about increasing or decreasing total output so just as a percentage there

if neat is not the most modifiable one resting metabolic rate is this the two places that you have the most short and long-term ability to interact and change often times people will talk about resting metabolic rate or you'll also hear the term basil metabolic rate for purposes today I'm going to continue to use resting metabolic rate but I want you to be aware these are not the exact same thing I don't think it's Ultra important you know the difference today but just in case you're wondering they're both functionally measuring energy output in the body but

they do it in a little bit of a different way technically basil metabolic rate is the number of calories your body needs to perform very basic functions at rest so if you laid there on a table nothing was in your system you were awake how many calories is your body burning to pump your blood circulate your hormones keep your brain alive so on and so forth it is the minimum to keep you alive and that's why they call it basil metabolic rate resting metabolic rate is the same thing but it is the actual amount of

calories you're burning at any given moment your basil metabolic rate is pretty stable we'll talk about how to increase that a little bit later your resting metabolic rate is completely responsive to what you just did so if I gave you let's say caffeine your resting metabolic rate if I sat you on a table after gesting caffeine your resting metabolic rate would go up however that's not your basil metabolic rate because your basil simply said what did I burn before or outside of the increase in response to caffeine so because we're talking about ways to increase

metabolic rate I'm going to mostly focus on resting metabolic rate now as you'll see in our investigate discussion we can measure this a lot of different ways but just so you know what you're asking for I'm jumping ahead of the gun a little bit here but since we're on it I want to get it out now a basil metabolic rate test has to be done after at least a 12-hour fast as I just alluded to you can't eat before it you can't can't have your coffee or tea or anything else you can't be sleeping or

listening to music it needs to truly be a baseline if that's what you're interested in a resting molic rate is way less stringent you can do it under any condition you want you have to understand how to interpret it that way but it is functionally different there so the usefulness in my opinion of resting Mal metabolic rate is probably a little bit higher because it's a better understanding of what's happening on a day-to-day basis or what's going on in your real life scenario where basil metabolic rate though is more controlled it's more scientific and it

does help you understand what's really happening in your body if you care so that said let's talk really quickly about how to measure these things if you want to know your metabolic rate your B BMR or your RMR how do I get these things tested from the highest quality gold standard all the way down to the cheapest and I can't afford or have access to a lab what do I do as I mentioned a moment ago if you really want BMR testing done please contact the lab that you're going to work with you're going to

have to do it in that setting and make sure that you follow their exact protocols and I'm saying this because I've had a lot of clients that I coach personally do this in the past and their numbers come back completely funky and I ask did you follow all the exact recipe that the place told you to prior to and they don't and so everyone does it a little bit differently but almost always if you are going to a lab say Dr Mike ormsby's Lab at Florida State who offers service like this for somewhere neigh of

like $50 to $75 or something like that they will usually send you a list or an email that says hey the night before do a b and c and don't do this in the morning and so forth follow those things perfectly this is not a blood draw where you can kind of get away with some different things everything that you're going to do through your sleep to the music you're listening to and number of other factors could influence the number and if you want good data we've got to have excellent control so if you're going

to do that follow those rules so I just sort of alluded to it but the gold standard here would be to get a test done in a laboratory you can find them all over the place I would personally nothing against anybody but personally encourage you to do this in a scientific laboratory if you can there's plenty of clinics and popup facilities that do it and some are good just my again personal experience having coached a lot of athletes and a lot of non-athletes I don't always have super strong trust in these places they don't calibrate

their machines often and so on and so forth so if you go to a research facility that does this for a living they have the scientific standard and they've done thousands of these over years you're just a little bit more likely to get better data so contact your local University if you can if they have an exercise physiology department or anything like that and there's a reasonable chance that they offer such testing and again the price point is you know call it $100 plus or minus or a little bit lower so that's the best way

to do it there's also some portable devices coming on board I've tried a number of these I don't love them yet but I'm actually pretty confident they will get better in the near future so I don't have a product to recommend to you right now because of that reason but I have hope for that in the future there's also other ways you can go about this there are products that I know for example one called colorify where you can buy doubly labeled water they'll ship it to you you can drink it you will collect your

urine chip it back in uh doubly labeled water for the record is the scientific one of the scientific gold standards and so this is fairly expensive I think I paid $1,000 for it um if you I don't know like we've We've ran with through some people some of it was okay some of it was really good some of it wasn't as good I actually I'm assuming the price will get cheaper over time it'll get better over time so if you really want to know the exact number you're at and you have a little bit more

to osble income perhaps a company like chlori which I have no ties to whatsoever I bought it a normal price that everyone else did or if you're needing a little bit lower price point or have other interest maybe a lab is the way to go in terms of wearables you're generally not a good solution there's a lot of data on this you will find some reports and so papers that suggest a caloric expenditure estimates from a watch or a ring or a strap are okay most of them are not good in general they overestimate caloric

expenditure we've seen this for decades now this originally started with the treadmills and the bikes and the stair climbers in gyms I tell you you burned 1 th000 calories in your workout and almost ubiquitously universally they overestimated it we've seen the same basic thing with wearables they generally overestimate it by honestly an amount that makes it not worth it if it's off by 15% that's your entire margin of error that's your window of opportunity to lose weight so at that point how useful is it so if you want to use something like that or you

already have one that's great maybe it does track well for you awesome but I I wouldn't put a ton of stock in that if you really are concerned about this I would go to one of those other two options or the third option which is entirely free and that is using scientifically validated prediction equations these have been around for over 50 years and actually more than that the the one that we have used probably the most is called the Harris Benedict I'm pretty sure that's about a hundred years old actually actually I'm quite positive that

was from the 1920s originally it's been around a long time been validated in men women young old all kinds of different demographics we use it a lot because uh there's actually a friend of mine Andrew yum at mail Clinic has has published a paper quite recently finding that the Harris Benedict was more effective and more accurate I should say for specifically athletes and so whether or not you're an athlete it's probably not the defining Factor but this is generally probably the thing that is better for people who are maybe higher in muscle mass and higher

in physical activity so don't worry about the athlete part but just think if you have more muscle than the average person and you're more active maybe this equation is better for you there are plenty of them if you poke around they are almost all free you can take your information put in then uh you can add additional physical activity modifiers what I mean by that is they'll ask you questions like are you lowly physically active so take these numbers in the equation and multiply them by 1.0 are you moderate maybe multiply it by 1.2 are

you highly active are you extremely active 1.3 modifier so on and so forth if I lost you don't worry about it if you again pull these things up they'll walk you through it you can enter some basic information about your age height weight and so forth and then it'll give you a rough estimate of your energy expenditure so they're going to get you in the right ballpark if you don't even want to do that the easiest cheap way to do it is just test retest what I mean by that is measure your body weight hold

as many variables constant as you can and then see what happens if you're losing weight you're in a deficit if you're gaining weight you're in a surplus I've used that more than almost anything to be honest with you I I don't spend a lot of time on Harris benedict for high performers because ultimately I want to care about well are you going down if you're losing weight too fast and you're not feeling as recovered your performance isn't good energy is going down then I know we've underestimated calories and we'll bring them back up if you're

not losing weight you get the idea there if you're gaining weight well then you get the idea or you're not gaining weight and we're trying to gain weight so it's a little bit self-correcting as my point there but nonetheless if you want to get it tested there's a handful of different options at different price points and that are available at least here in America plenty of options and then certainly the prediction equations are open to anyone in the world you can explore and use what is best for you in your situation today's episode is sponsored

by element element is an electrolyte drink mix that has an ideal electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium but no sugar hydration is critical to Performance both physical and mental performance countless Studies have shown that even a slight degree of dehydration even as small as 1% can lead to decreases in physical output and mental performance we also know that electrolytes are critical to proper hydration which I've been harping on for years but you can't do that proper hydration by only drinking water you need to get the right amount of electrolytes in the right ratios and

that's why I'm a huge fan of element in fact many of you will probably remember that I featured element in my YouTube series on optimizing hydration nearly 5 years ago I featured element in these videos because they're blend of 1,000 mg of sodium 200 Mig potassium and 60 Mig of magnesium really is unique and different than any other electrolyte on the market and it has great scientific support I use element constantly particularly when I'm sweating a lot and I routinely make it a part of my client's optimization programs if you'd like to try element you

can go to drink LM nt.com perform to claim a free element sample pack with the pures of any element drink mix again that's drink LM nt.com perform to claim a free sample pack today's episode is also brought to you by Parker University Parker is the only University in the world dedicated exclusively to Human Performance it's also my new academic home I first heard of Parker after attending their neuroon seminar and was stunned I've been to countless clinics and conferences and nobody is even close to Parker Seminars the speakers the setup and the total experience are

frankly jaw-dropping all their seminars are great but the upcoming Las Vegas show which is going down March 20th through 22nd is going to be extra special it's featuring speakers like doctors Andrew huberman Tommy wood Gab a lion and more but on top of that I'm personally hosting a co- seminar at the same time so imagine going to a phenomenal lecture on how the nerve system works then popping over and lifting some weights with me personally grabbing lunch and then settling in for a talk on how NASA scientist Cody Burkhart is preparing human bodies for Life

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there so now that we've got this thing tested you've got your data one way or the other how do you interpret it well let's remember resting metabolic rate alone is you know 40 to 80% of your total daily energy expenditure and so we don't want to make decisions about all of our caloric intake based only on resting metabolic rate we've got to have some sense of thermal effect energy expenditure and neat this is why I'll go back to the previous conversation about saying what's actually happening in your body weight and composition is the ultimate answer

because it factors everything in by default but nonetheless let's just talk about resting metabolic rate I don't know of any way at this point to measure neat outside of something like a step count and this is where a wearable or a Tracker would be effective it's going to miss a lot of stuff fidgeting chewing gum things like that so they're not going to be great but if you wanted to have a physical activity thing and get you maybe 80% of the way there 70% I don't know that's a probably a pretty good use energy expenditure

during exercise is quite simple a a heart rate monitor a strap preferably is the best way if you have a wearable that's fine again they tend to significantly overestimate caloric expenditure but if you have a heart rate strap that's very likely to tell you the real answer in the real number that is still the gold standard the Garmin the polers the ones that you buy off the shelf are the same ones we buy in our lab and have bought a button I can't tell you how many hundreds of polar straps in my career and so

that's one example of a technology in a product that is the exact same in the lab as it is on the consumer shelf that will tell you your real num so if you really do care about caloric expenditure I would not use the data from the machine the treadmill the bike or anything like that use a heart rate monitor use any situation or setup that you'd like and that's going to give you really strong data about where you're at all right so again can't do much about thermal effective food can't do much about neat outside

of maybe a step count or accelerometer something like that in terms of energy expenditure we use the heart rate monitor in terms of resting metabolic rate though here's what we know about it the range is enormous I have seen people as little as a thousand to well over 3,000 this sometimes tracks with body size generally but not always such to say I've seen people that are the same size with with the resting metal ball at rate of a th000 and someone else their exact same size that's at 2500 or the inverse so it tracks roughly

bigger people gen to have a bigger RMR but not specifically enough to where it's useful if you're actually trying to adjust based on calories men are generally a scooch higher for resting metabolic rate 1600 to 1800 is a pretty common number you'll find collectively in literature women more like 1,400 to 1700 okay now remember this is just resting metabolic rate not total daily energy expenditure and one of the things that you'll see happen is the differences between both sex and age in resting metabolic rate are explained almost entirely by lean muscle mass and by entirely

I mean up to 80% so I've kind of answered one of our questions for later now but I'll hit it since we're here does your resting abolic rate change or go down with age and the answer is not nearly as much as you think if it does it's explained almost entirely by lack or loss of muscle mass we will talk in more detail later about the men versus women aspect of that but one more time if you equate for muscle mass we see very little very very little differences in resting metabolic rate between those two

and so off the cuff we we don't have numbers that I'm going to give you here that are men versus women for these exact reasons so I will cover the numbers in one second but if you're wondering is he talking about are these numbers for men or these numbers for women or why didn't he talk about women I'm not going to differentiate because again we have evidence that suggest it's not going to be differ so we don't need to specify it that way so the things that ultimately influence your resting metabolic rate in terms of

interpreting that I break them into into controllable and uncontrollable factors the latter are things like your height your age as we talked about your gender as we talked about neither of those probably influence it as much as you think but there are other things clearly your genetics your ethnicity you can't do anything about these and they will absolutely change your your Baseline but the list of controllable is far larger and we'll spend all of our time today on that and that's everything from your activity level your nutrition and supplements and diets and drugs and hormone

concentrations activity levels the environment you're in the temperature that you're around and so on and so forth so there's a lot of things that are going to influence it and it changes based on the day there's an awesome paper that came out really recently uh Margaret Jones was a part of this um Andrew yagen was a part of this but it's called differences in body fat and athletes categorize by resting metabolic rate a bit of a a mouthful there but the reason I'm bringing it up now is it gave a table of percentile rankings of

resting molic rate for men and women that range from the bottom fifth percentile to the 10th to the 20th and so on and so forth all the way up to 90th percentile that show that paper is available on the show notes you can pull up this exact table I'm looking at so if you go get it tested or go get it estimated and you want to look at this table you can see exactly where you rank one more time this was done in athletes but I don't want you to think about this as oh it

doesn't apply to you because you don't play a sport just think of this as a probably more muscular than the average person and pretty highly Physically Active the data are probably then going to explain pretty closely what's going on with you but they had a couple of interesting findings from this and I'll walk through the numbers here in one second but what they found was uh expressing resting modol rate relative to body weight or at least adjusting for independent factors accounted for way more of a difference in body size than not so it's allowed for

more favorable comparisons and I know I maybe just jumbled that up a little bit there it was probably less clear than I could be but what I'm effectively saying is if you were to take a normal chart and just Googled resting metabolic rate you'll get numbers if you're highly physically active and athletic I think those numbers are different and I think Andrew and Margaret's paper showed clearly that they are and so I'm bringing this paper up now in this section because I think this table is a better one to use for these people and I

know a lot of you listening are pretty physically active so you're probably more likely to fall into this category than you are someone who doesn't exercise and with high amounts of obesity or things like that and so I like this table better it is a better resource rather than pulling up chat GPT or something else and just sort of asking what's a good metabolic rate these numbers are significantly better so what are you looking at okay let's Capstone this a little bit for the bottom F percentile if you're resting metabolic rate and now again we're

expressing this relative to body size a low the bottom fifth percentile you're looking at in the neighborhood of about 22 calories per kilogram the highest 95th percentile is about 31 32 33 kcals per kilogram again the table breaks down everything else in between but that's a pretty good number to think about a lot of the times you'll see resting metabolic rate reported simply as a number like I've done earlier 1,500 calories 1,200 calories the more accurate way though is to do it again Andrew's paper showed this but is to do it based on how much

muscle size you have and that's why you're seeing numbers like 25 27 if you're like what the heck it's divided by their body weight so if you wear if you weigh 80 kilos and you have a resting metabolic rate of 20 which which would be really really low K Cals per kilogram 20 * 80 would be 1,600 and you would have a resting metabolic total resting metabolic rate of 1,600 K calories so hopefully that math made a little bit more sense but the the argument in this paper was quite compelling and I think this is

the better approach to it uh if you followed along with that with that business now taken care of it's finally time for us to get to our third and final eye and that is intervene we need to break this up into a couple of categories I'm going to call them acute and chronic and what I'm really meaning here is what are things that will change your total daily energy expenditure in any four of the categories that are transient versus those that are going to make a longlasting permanent change couple of examples to make this tangible

the way that you want to think about these acute markers are these aren't necessarily establishing say a new resting metabolic rate there's no Baseline so if you uh example I gave at the beginning was caffeine and we'll just stick with that because it's easy to understand if you take caffeine right right now your resting metabolic rate will go up it's not going to influence your thermal effect of food makes sense but it may make you more physically active so it may result in you burning more energy through neat or you may be more motivated and

able to work out harder so your energy expenditure can go up so you can see a single acute Factor influence three of your four variables and that that particular case however you wake up tomorrow morning your neat your energy expenditure and your resting metabolic rate are going to be right back down to normal Baseline and so chronic changes though are things like is your basil metabolic rate that resting metabolic rate now higher day to day to day to day there's a lot of things and you could really have an almost endless list that will acutely

increase or decrease one of the four factors but most people when we're going all the way back to the beginning if you're thinking I want a faster metabolism because I want to burn more calories and have a more efficient or effective system have a different body composition however people interpret that you're most likely thinking I just wish I burn more calories doing nothing that's effectively chronic changes so can I increase my resting metabolic rate so that I'm burning more calories sitting around right Al talk about how things that necessarily boost your basil metabolic rate or

rather your acute metabolic rate won't necessarily always translate into body fat loss but wanting to establish acute Factor versus chronic factors now they are both important certainly things that will increase your acute resting metabolic rate for example if repeated days and days and days and then therefore weeks and weeks and weeks will simply result ideally and more calories burn which will then increase total daily energy expenditure but that distinction is important kind of what are going to be requiring more active continually practices versus ones that are passive and sustained for a long time that's acute

versus chronic let's start with the acute list all right and we'll go through both sections by the way acute and chronic going through each individual Factor TEF neat eat and resting metabolic rate so starting with the cute if you look at energy expenditure from exercise clearly here you want to burn more calories do more work that's a simple as it could possibly be but probably the more interesting thing here is Are there specific types or forms or modes of exercise that burn more calories more efficiently than others and so if all you're interested in here

is caloric expenditure which ones should I choose well ultimately I'd say it doesn't matter that much pick the one you're going to have the most effort in that has the lowest risk of injury for you the one that you'll be the most sustained that you'll have the highest throughput with with and effort and repeatability and that's the long answer that's the real answer but I know that's not what you're fishing for here the reality of it is aerobic exercise conditioning exercise endurance exercise however you like to term this almost always burns more calories than strength

training type of exercise I'm a strength training guy I love it I like lifting weights I greatly prefer it and this is one of the cases though where the caloric burn is just not that high the honest reality if you were to try and in fact I've I've spoken with colleagues in preparation for the show about this that have ran studies like this in the lab I know of one person who's trying to figure this out and the amount of strength training you have to do to match caloric output from a say steady state or

even interval based conditioning or endurance workout it's really challenging I remember a cred student a long time ago and my faculty member who was running the lab was very adamant about this and I was like no way no way because I was very much focused on strength training is better than cardio for everything and we directly went in the lab and tested this sometimes behind his back sometimes with him there and we just never got close we never got close burning the calories lifting no matter what style of lifting we did circuit training hard lifting

uh bodybuilding stuff tons of high volume and then you sit on a bike for 45 minutes and you just smash the the calorie output so that doesn't mean I'm saying only do endurance work or that it is better for all things or that is better for fat loss but if the only variable we're looking at here is more caloric expenditure almost always the endurance side of the equation will win out to the strength training side of the equation right there's dozens of other benefits of why you want to uh lift and and do a combination

of these probably for most effective long-term weight loss but calories will not be it in fact as I talked about earlier goric expenditure overall with exercise is much lower than what many people realize and so it's not a huge component of TDE so why we're going to keep this part of it short in general though one thing we can say is people who lift weights very routinely lose less muscle when in a caloric deficit so one of the major reasons why you would want to lift weights if you're trying to lose fat is not the

calories but to preserve or even slightly increase if possible and it is possible by the way to lose fat and gain muscle under certain circumstances that's the reason why you'd want to do it so the calories great you can burn 100 you can burn 150 200 that's amazing but you want to do it for those reasons of preservation or even increasing muscle mass we'll talk about that down the road here about why that's critical to successful fat loss but if you just simply look at the randomized control trials look at the systematic reviews and meta

analyses people that lift weights as a part of their fat loss strategy are often times more successful in the short and long term meaning they keep the weight off longer now nothing's perfect keeping weight loss off forever is a hard challenge but more likely than not if you incorporate strength training into that equation you're more likely to have a successful maintenance or permanent loss of that fat I think I've made that point by now let's go ahead and move on to the next concept I talked about endurance and I talked about strength training what about

something in the middle high-intensity interval training is one that comes up commonly and there's good reason for it it's great it's awesome super effective but there's also some misconceptions here we need to clarify some of the things up that we've heard a lot and frankly things I've said in the past that not necessarily wrong but they're probably exaggerating the point here so as we mentioned the endurance side of the equation is probably better at burning calories during the acute exercise than strength training however post exercise what differentiates those two is the caloric expenditure after the

workout is done if you do moderate to low intensity steady state work basically as soon as you stop exercising or within a few minutes your caloric expenditure goes right back down to Baseline what's happening is you start working out you start burning more calories to match the calories needed to move but as soon as you go down to rest you come back down to Baseline when you strength train and specifically more when you do higher intensity interval stuff whether that's with weights and a kettle bell or pushing a sled or running Sprints or any combination

we have a phenomenon called excess post exercise oxygen consumption we summarize that as Epoch what we're referring to there is the extra oxygen consumption that happens after exercise has been completed the easy way to conceptualize this when you done if you're done cycling for 20 minutes at 50% of your heart rate seconds later your heart rate's back to normal your breathing's back to normal however if you did a killer out of intervals you're going to be huffing and puffing for many many many more minutes afterwards even after your respiratory rate and your heart rate feels

like it's back down to normal you will continue to be breathing higher than normal for potentially hours if not much longer five to 8 to 10 hours after that exercise and so that is the excess post exercise oxygen consumption you're continuing to breathe in that is burning calories the reason you're doing that is for a a phenomenon that is not necessarily important right now but the reality of it is that is real and so when you want to account foror expenditure from exercise with that form of exercise you have to account for the calories burned

post exercise you can't simply look at what you burn in the workout you have to continue to track the calories you're burning outside of that some people will refer to this then as increasing your metabolism or resting metabolic rate I have it here under the eat section because it's not really increasing resting metabolic rate it's just a carryover you're kind of basically just continuing to burn calories from the exercise after you finish fin it now this is true Epoch is real it is much higher and it pretty much tracks with exercise intensity the higher the

intensity the more Epoch but the reality of it is it's not that many calories we used to think it was several hundred calories and so say you did an interval workout you burn 200 calories in the workout you might burn an extra 150 in Epoch but it is substantially lower than that uh you're probably looking at something more on the borderline of 30 50 calories kind of depends there's a large range there and so it's not irrelevant it all adds up eventually I'll leave that up to you to decide whether not 30 or 50 calories

in the couple of hours post exercise matters maybe it's a little bit higher but it's certainly not several hundred calories in most circumstances I share all this information not to confer you one mode of exercise is better than another for energy expenditure but to actually share with you sort of the pros and cons so that you can make this fit your system you like I personally prefer a combination of all three of them what I like about the lower intensity steady state stuff is it burns a lot of calories number one and the recovery is

really high so it doesn't take much out of your system you can repeat it and therefore do it often what I like about the strength training is a preservation of muscle it isn't as repetitive and hard for some people mentally to get in there but I'm not going to get a ton of calories out of it what I like about the intervals is it's a short time domain it has sucks out your recovery window prob quite a bit though it's it's tough to recover from but you get the benefit of the epoch as well so

I like to use all three of them but use what you feel best in your CC circumstances and preferences our next variable then is your neat this is anything you think can help you move and be a little bit more active throughout the day this could be things like standing desks most of the research is going to suggest they're going to burn an additional 100 to 200 calories per day kind of is a range that number will be higher the more you're standing it'll be higher the more you weigh but that's a pretty standard number

one would see so helpful but again it's not a th calories per day it's not an enormous amount you don't have to necessarily do them all day either by the way this is something that I thought Kelly Starrett did a great job of many years ago telling people and helping us he had a wonderful book on this topic but you don't have to go all or none with just to say you don't have to go all standing desk all day you can stand and sit and move about that's personally how I do it I'll Stand

I'll sit I'll go up and down so maybe I'm burning an extra 50 calories or 100 calories per day but this would be considered neat other things that have gotten more popular of recent are treadmill desks I had an adviser a long time ago uh probably almost 20 years ago who was really into this stuff he had a treadmill for his desk I think he set it at 1 mile per hour you could do some basic math there if you do 1 mile per hour for 1 hour a day you've walked one mile it's about

150 250 calories depending on your size so again you don't have to be walking all day I have a ton of friends who do this I don't have one personally but anytime I can walk during meetings that's what I do and I have a lot of friends who will do that so maybe you'll do it not when you're maybe typing or writing or doing things like that but you're in meetings you're on zooms and if you're walking at a very very very low speed it's almost imperceptible you don't notice it and you scratch out 100

calories here 50 calories here 75 there and that's going to add up pretty substantially over time lots of other ways you can do it we've talked about exercise snacks before we've talked uh about at the beginning of the show you know taking the stairs more these things never really excited me because you're like oh I burned 50 calories I walked more throughout the day but the reality of it is I actually had a client who did six 15minute walks throughout the day and that was his entire exercise he couldn't do any other stuff didn't want

to do it he felt good he did six 15minute walks per day that's about 400 calories so that's actually it's quite substantial and honestly far more calories than most people are burning during their really hard strength training workout so you don't have to be that extreme you can do three five minute walks a day three 10- minute walks a day my friends Dan ordine has been a huge component of three 10 minute walks a day morning noon and night you do something like that you're easily going to hit a couple hundred maybe even 300 calories

and that is stuff that you're not going to get fatigued from it you can do it when you're tired you can do it when you're sick you can do it in all kinds of scenarios and you can keep that neat a little bit higher which will build up over time and make a big impact on your overall energy expenditure and body composition our third variable here is thermal effective food and this one's pretty simple you can number one eat more total food the more food you bring in the more energy you're going to burn on

digesting and absorbing food but anyone who's paying attention right now was be like well wait a minute sure I ate a thousand extra calories and so yes I burned a 100 more calories breaking down food but I also then still had 900 additional calories and so we'll hear this theme come up multiple times but in this area of boosting metabolism you have to consider the whole impact on your system and so you could theoretically just eat more calories you'll have a higher chloric expenditure from thermal effect but that's not probably getting you the ultimate fat

loss result that you're thinking of so that is one thing you could do another thing you can do here is keeping your calories the same but increasing the percentage of your calories that come from protein now I said that very specifically I did not want to tell you just to eat more protein because it's the same mistake I just made a second ago I kind of set you up for that if I tell you eat more protein and you just use that and increase total caloric intake you're not going to see a change in body

composition because you burned more calories breaking down the protein but you had more total calories and so the correct way to approach this is a higher percentage of your calories come from protein which means you increase your protein intake but then you reduce your carbohydrate intake your fat intake or combination of both you hear this message a lot it's very common and popular and for good reason I personally prefer to recommend protein as a total amount in terms of total amount of grams per day and fats and carbohydrates as a percentage of your caloric intake

and this is exactly why I want you to hit your protein targets and we can play with the rest of your calories from fats and protein but this is how we maximize thermal effect and so if you and I are both eating 2,000 calories and you're at 10% protein and I'm at 40% protein well now I'm going to have a huge win because I'm burning so many more calories of that same number in the form of thermal effect so that's how you get the most Advantage out of thermal effect not just upping protein intake I

hear people say this a lot and I know what they're trying to say but I wanted to clarify that because it confuses a lot of people and they're just say hey man I I increased my protein by 80 gram a day and I didn't lose any weight and I'm like ah yeah calories still matter what they meant to say was the percentages of your total chloric intake is the better approach there another sneaky benefit to increasing that protein intake by percentage is it often times will reduce your total caloric intake handful of the other topics

we're going to cover will do the same thing and so when we're looking at strategies to regulate total daily energy intake we're not I'm trying to get multiple wins in one long-winded way here of saying even if I held your calories constant and I up that percentage of protein the research is going to indicate likely you will spontaneously reduce your caloric intake by 3 to 500 calories so I get a double win here I get this increased thermal effect but in reality unless you're in a controlled scientific study there's a good chance you'll just spontaneously

reduce your calorie intake and that's because protein is more satiating means it makes you feel more full not always the case but a lot of people will have that response it's well documented in the literature and so from a direct calorie win thermal effect great but probably the bigger benefit is that indirect you don't feel as hungry you feel more full and so you just probably eat less total food which will have the perception of feeling like your metabolism sped up wow I'm eating the same Foods I'm eating all the time I'm eating till I'm

satiated all the time I'm not starving or hungry but I'm losing more weight my metabolism must have sped up well no you just increased or decreased chloric intake but it felt like that right another sneaky trick here to boosting your metabolism if you will today's episode is sponsored by ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral drink with probiotics prebiotics and adaptogens initially I was extremely skeptical of ag1 as I am with all supplement companies but after months of discussions with their lead nutrition scientist and the general team at ag1 I've been impressed by a1's commitment to

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drink a1.com perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 plus K2 again that's drink a1.com perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 plus K2 so our fourth and final category is that resting metabolic rate and this is where we've got the most juice in fact there's eight very specific items I'm going to cover here but I wanted to caveat all of it by making sure we remember here that change these things change by the hour so there's a lot of things you can

do to alter resting metabolic rate basil metabolic rate I can't cover them all but I pulled out a very specific ones that I thought you would be most interested in they have the most research behind them that's the easiest to integrate and they are the least Kookie is how I'll say it the other final caveat here is remember just because we acutely change your resting metabolic rate that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to lose body fat in the long term we'll Circle back to that later but the first of our eight is what are called

spicy foods people this is in the lore people talk about it a lot it's it's out there a bunch is it really real yes technically it's true although if you wanted to consider this to be a myth I wouldn't push back that hard this is how the field honestly Works in a lot of the cases it's officially there but is it practically relevant I'll just share with you the data and I'll let you decide now I'll tell you my personal bias I love spicy foods I put hot sauce or some sort of spice on basically

everything I eat I love it uh I actually did I grew up not eating anything spicy probably even into my mid 20s black pepper was too spicy for me I my family just growing up never did anything like that but I learned to love spicy food when I started dieting I started cutting weight and losing weight for competitions and Combat Sports and weightlifting and things like that part of that I'd never done it and I'm bringing this up now because I realized man spicy food really helped me in that caloric Management number one when things

are really spicy I at least personally tend to not eat as much so I'm not going to Gorge as much because I'm dealing with sort of a little bit of the pain and suffering I'm more likely to stop a little bit early I don't know if that's really well documented scientifically but it's certainly personally true for me additionally spices herbs flavors can help you make food not taste as Bland when you're really controlling stuff so often times when you're managing calories you're probably not putting on uh flavor fact you're you're managing fat so you don't

have the cheeses and the sauces and so because of that food can start to taste a little bit Bland the beauty of spices and hot sauces is they can be a caloric and so you can make food taste different and you can change it up and have more variety when your total actual food intake is not that different day by day so from a practical perspective the work we've done with people that are trying to lose weight and me personally I love spicy foods I Ed them at ton here just think about exchanging out hot

sauce or Tobasco for ketchup right easy win there ketchup has reasonable amount of calories you can get tons of different hot sauces that don't have any and there you go you've saved that 50 calories or 100 calories per serving which adds up a ton so from a practical perspective I like it if you don't that's cool too does it do anything scientifically yes it actually does if you eat spicy food and most of the research here has been done on things like Chili Peppers ginger red peppers and even turmeric these will increase your resting metabolic

rate they'll increase your thermal effective food and they'll actually oftentimes lower energy intake like I mentioned earlier we've seen that routinely there's actually been research on other spicy foods that wasn't as promising uh I know that things people have looked at mustard horseradish black Peppers those don't seem to do anything but the other ones I mentioned a second ago do seem to do that and they're they're effectively working by giving you a shot of adrenaline so more specifically they're increasing and activating bet beta adrenergic responses that's the long way of saying adrenaline or epinephrine and

getting sympathetic Drive you'll see this like pretty routinely and you don't have to stretch your imagination too far to think yeah I eat something super spicy and you get a little shot of adrenaline all right now at the same time this this is a classic Lane Norton right he Dr Norton a friend of mine always talks about people majoring in the minors and this is a good example of that so technically does it increase metabolic rate yes does it do it to a level that you really care not really sure what you're functionally talking about

here is probably three to five calories so officially it does doesn't matter I don't know um you have you would have to eat a enormous amount of red bell peppers you would have to probably eat ounces or pounds of Ginger or turmeric for this to have a real practical output on you so Additionally you get sensitized or desensitized to these things so you may not have the same response over time I certainly know if you would have given me Tobasco 20 years ago I would have had a much bigger adrenaline response than I do now

and so since we know that's the mechanism is it then still leading to additional increases in my resting metabolic rate I actually don't think it does I would assume me personally probably nothing because I'm I'm I'm so used to it by now so when you balance the like technically officially I could pull up a a systematic review or a paper and show that it increases metabolic rate if someone doesn't like it or it's not a preference or they're traveling like should you really be going out of your way to strongly encourage spicy foods for people

to boost metabol ISM I don't think so right probably not the biggest win so while I technically have this on our list again if you said this is on your list of things that don't work I wouldn't push back that much either moving on then the second on our list is actually surprising enough water intake there is more than a small amount of research on water increasing metabolic activity if you think about this for a couple of seconds it makes perfect sense I actually know one paper specifically looked at I think like 16 or 17

ounces of water and found that it increased resting metabolic rate by 10 to 30% for about an hour now practically I wouldn't recommend chugging water all day optim hydrate but think about what it does if you're ingesting something at a temperature that is lower than the temperature inside your stomach by putting that in there you'll have to burn calories to heat that water up in fact that is actually by the way the strict definition of a calorie it's the exact amount of energy it takes to raise I think it's one gram of water one degree

something like it's pretty close like the definition of a calorie is how much energy it takes to increase the temperature of water so by definition if your body is working to increase the temperature of your water then it is going to be burning some calories now there's also some and I wouldn't call this extensive but some research on then by extension of logic colder water might be of more benefit than room temperature water it should theoretically take more energy to heat up okay but probably the bigger benefit here if there is one at all is

satiety so I know of again another study off the top of my head here that in overweight individuals and that gave them um I think something like a half a liter of water which is a reasonable amount to drink 30 minutes before meal and those that group eventually lost more weight so what you're probably at here is a lot of people I I've heard in the vernacular say things like oh a lot of times when you think you're hungry you're just thirsty I don't know if that's necessarily true or not but having dealt with a

lot of folks who have to lose weight over time again athletes and regular people I will say in my personal coaching experience making sure you are drinking water will help you reduce calorie intake the amount of food you eat in a meal and so forth with really no consequences to digestibility unless you're you know going extreme with it so water is another potential option you can turn to the effect will be minimal but you start stacking some things on top of each other and you need to drink water anyway so not something I would say

to overdo but just making sure you're not under hydrated is probably the biggest win here a similar concept here but probably more effective is using a different form of temperature regulation that is the temperature in the environment you're in so there have been several studies that have looked at lowering the thermostat in your house by even a few degrees and that can lead to substantial and significant loss of body fat over time same exact concept here if your body has to work a little bit harder to keep itself at a certain temperature that is caloric

expenditure you've boosted your metabolism and it will result in a practical and meaningful loss of body fat now I wouldn't necessarily Advocate dropping the thermostat so much that you're fre freeing and your fingers are frozen you can't type and work but maybe a notch or two I have friends that have done this a lot over the years where they bring it down one degree for three months bring it down another degree bring it down another degree and just slowly work themselves down 3 or four degrees where they used to keep their house at 72 degrees

and now they keep it at 66 or something reasonable like that if this feels like majoring in the minors to you fine again my position here was just to share with you all the data that we know of let you know how much it works how well it works and then you can decide what to deploy what to disregard or not based on your situation and circumstances all right so playing with temperature whether it is colder water or colder environment is another option and probably more effective than the spicy food thing but still we haven't

I probably haven't sold you a ton on things that are really going to move the needle but we're going to change that here soon fourth on our list is something I've talked about now and that is caffeine there is a lot of data on this I will summarize the entire field but you can generally expect something between like a 3 to 11% increase in resting metabolic rate that's going to last somewhere between an hour to three hours this is very very well documented pretty easy it's a stimulant it's going to rev up energy it's going

to tell your body to expect energy output so it's going to get you going nicotine is next on my list and it has a very similar effect the magnitude of effect is a little bit smaller generally more like 5 to 6% increase and resting metabolic rate and it's going to last for the same you know 60 Minutes 120 Minutes something like that now I personally don't use nicotine we've used it and some clients they've asked for it and we've done it with some success there I personally like to avoid it as much as I can

but those data are there and and use it how you will similar and now we're up to number six on the list is green tea or green tea extract you'll see this abbreviate a lot of GTE has similar effect of caffeine but in the four to 5% range for about the same length and duration as we've mentioned for some of the stuff prior with water and spicy foods one thing that has been documented pretty consistently with caffeine nicotine and green te is they all also affect satiety so they're appetite suppressant so is the benefit really

in the elevation and resting metabolic rate I don't know maybe yes maybe no but if it helps you just not feel as hungry and not then overeat that's probably the real win but options nonetheless a lot of people are already consuming these things I don't think you need to go in there and add additional stimulus to your life if you're already on them you don't have to use these at all but one more time they are options to use or not at your discretion number seven on our list is a combo I had to do

it this way if not the list would have been 50 things or more and I'm generally going to call these Thermo Regulators so this is a handful of herbs and drugs and other stimulant like factors that are going to have a similar impact as caffeine and green tea and so on and so forth but they're not in those forms just to give you a couple of examples wonderful scientist Bill Campbell friend of mine in Florida has done some work in the past on Guana uh you can Google that one up there g u a r

a n a um combined with other elements much of the research in this field and the reason I'm calling them you know Thermo Regulators is because they're rarely single ingredient things so they're multiple herbs combined with multiple different things and combinations and Cocktails and so you don't know what the individual effect is but nonetheless in these multi-ingredient Thermo Regulators in in Bill study in particular I I think they gave their I think in young healthy men probably the college kids that are running around his lab and they saw about a 10% increase in resting metabolic

rate for about three hours post exercise now what I liked about Bill study in particular of course because he's such an awesome scientist is they had a placebo group and they reported the placebo group what I mean by that is the placebo group had a 3% increase in resting metabolic rate so if you actually kind of cancel that out you could still see about a 7% bump in RMR here which I think their data was something like it took them from about a group average of 8 or 1,850 calories to 2,000 So 150k Cal bump

from this Guana based multi-ingredient supplements tons of other Studies have been done like this one in particular I know actually several of them have used things like caffeine plus GTE plus herbl and stuff like that and if you go back to the number numbers I just gave you on green tea and caffeine combine them with other ingredients you'll see about a 10% total increase again going to last two to three hours others have been done on caffeine GTE and nasin combined with actually uh something called Garcinia Cambogia which was the original primary ingredient in hydroxy

cut you've probably seen hydroxy cuts and commercials all over the place I think there was actually a bunch of problems with people with getting liver failure so they took this ingredient out of it U so it's no longer in there to my understanding but it was in the original formulation but nonetheless you throw all those things together and you might see a 15% or greater increase in RMR last one here similar caffeine plus GTE plus yiman another one showed about a 15% bump so you can basically see here kind of no matter what combination you

have of these stimulants and herbs about the higher end of the impact is a 15 or so% increase for about 2 to 3 hours right whether that fits in what you like and and how you live your life that's up to you I personally don't use any of these for fat loss clients it's not how we approach it but if you want to there's the data make your choice number eight on my list is getting good sleep now you don't have to be perfect here but one of the things we know happens with really bad

sleep even on a single day is people people tend to seek out more total calories and it makes sense you're tired you feel like you're in a low energy State you're going to want to get more energy that's exactly what your body is doing and it is a natural response this has been shown extensively in the literature under acute fatigue from lack of sleep people will search out more total calories and they'll also search out food items that tend to be higher energy density you can think about these as junk Foods if you'd like I

know personally I search after carbohydrates I don't know why but I really want more bread I really not that that bread is bad for you but I really want carbohydrates when I'm fatigued again intuitively it actually makes a ton of sense this is the primary and fastest energy source for your body but that one hits me very directly so I know that's something I have to watch out for and it's been shown multiple times most people are like that and the physiology makes intuitive sense so if you're wanting to then quote unquote speed up your

metabolism ensuring you're not in a spot repeatedly where sleep is bad therefore it's not that your metabolic rate has changed but you're going to make worse food choices and so your total energy intake is higher which means your intake versus energy out that balance is off which is then going to lead to eventual body composition changes so there's more to say on that but that's if you're a little bit confused on why that is on my list it's not necessarily that sleep will enhance hands your metabolism but bad sleep can have a number of negative

impacts and one of them being behavioral changes specifically with food and calorie intake one thing that will suppress acutely and chronically as we'll talk about later your total daily energy expenditure and specifically RMR is really bad sleep neat specifically will go down in the presence of poor sleep acute and chronic the one night of bad sleep is probably not a big deal but magnified over time will make a huge impact so your neat is going to go down your drive for Worse food choices and more food overall will increase energy expenditure might also go down

you know it's harder to work out you're not going to take the walks you're not you're more likely to skip your training sessions or condense them or just get through it when you've had a bad night of sleep and you also are going to potentially see red reductions in resting metabolic rate and so for me personally what I do when I have a bad night of sleep and it happens I have kids and I travel and all kinds of things happen three things I do to mitigate this damage number one what I've already talked about

I will double triple down as much as I can on protein basically I'm trying to crowd out other Foods so when I know I just really want to go for Burgers and Fries and stuff like that and I know it's because I slept for three hours the night before I'm going to smash a double scoop of protein I'm just going to keep it really really really high I still might go get those foods but I just don't have the physical space in my stomach anymore I get full of course occasionally I'm a person I'll just

go have the burgers and fries I'm not neurotic about it but if this stuff happens somewhat regularly you can't always fall into that trap at some point you need to make sure you don't do that willpower is one way but personally I just make sure I'm smashing protein throughout the day to reduce that risk second thing I do is I make sure I hit all that lowlevel energy expenditure stuff so maybe I don't have it in me to do my interval training or my assault bike or run my Hills or whatever but I'll make make

sure I walk let's move around let's get three or four of those 10-minute walks in no matter how tired and sleepy I am or sick for the most part you can probably get yourself to walk those couple hundred calories are going to add up especially again if this happens frequently uh sauna is another good one sauna is not a replacement for exercise but hey you can a lot of times convince yourself to take a hot bath or a sauna and get something out of the day third thing I do and this is going to stun

people but take a nap go ahead and actually just sleep you could suffer all throughout the day making worse choices and skipping your workout or maybe that 30 60 or 90 minute nap while you're going to feel like you're not working that time because you're not if it's substantially enhances the quality of the next 10 hours of your day sneaking in a little bit of nap may change everything and is a good thing to do again when you magnify this stuff over time another thing I wanted to fold in here before we left we spoke

about this at the beginning but to be really clear and that is the impact of age on metabolic speed for a long time we have said and you'll see this all over the Internet that it goes down as you age and it may sum but more recent research suggests that most of that is being driven by a lack or loss of muscle mass so if you preserve the amount of muscle you have as you age you should not see that much of a decline in your metabolism if you look at folks and this specifically happens

in that early teen to early 20s range where people say wow I eat kind of the same and now I've all of a sudden gained these five or 20 or 40 pounds in the last couple years and they look back and they think well I used to play sports and now I don't yeah these things are all true but the reality of it is as you get past that and you start getting into the 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s most of your change or perceived change in metabolic speed is a function of losing

muscle remember muscle explains up to 80% of your resting metabolic rate that's the thing that will really change it and drive it so that's a nice little lead in to what we're going to talk about next which is how do we make sure we have not only acute but chronic changes in our metabolism so let's get into those options right now the acute changes we just got done discussing are mostly beneficial if they can lead to an increase in either energy expenditure or neat The Chronic ones are probably going to be more predictive of long-term

fat loss I used an example earlier and we'll do it one more time to finish out this point if you say ingested caffeine and you looked at your rate of fat oxidation or fat burning it would go up your resting metabolic rate would go up but if you just sat there on the couch for the next three hours what will happen likely is not only will it come back down to Baseline but then it actually might go below Baseline and that's your body's way of saying we gave you more potential energy but you didn't do

anything with it therefore we're going to balance that back out by lowering energy and I'm saying that to say while we discovered eight different ways to enhance your metabolism acutely they may not have any impact in long-term fat loss if you didn't use them to actually burn more calories you then need to use the caffeine to give you more energy to work out harder or longer and that's been shown extensively or the green tea extract or the spicy foods or whatever the case is so you want to think about acute activators are ways to give

you some motivation if you will to get you up to make you help you move more throughout the day to bur more energy but if you just increase fat burning and then you don't use the fat that fat will get stored right back again and your net result will go nowhere and so they don't have a broad last impact on fat levels I really needed to make sure that point was clear because when we now get into these chronic adaptations that's what will functionally change your net result with what you're finally looking for but the

system gets tricky because as I just alluded to it will adapt and respond so what works your first week or six weeks or 6 months may not continue to work and it can give you a false sense of a slow metabolism or that calories don't matter that's not the case but the system changes so what is going to move it and then how do I anticipate and prepare for and adjust based on my body's response to a changing Target going through the four different areas these first ones are very fast thermal effective food there's nothing

really here I don't know of any way to chronically increase your thermal effective food I guess the closest analogy or thought we could have here would probably work in the opposite direction which is to say something like theoretically and and there's some reason to think this is the case chronic changes in your gut microbiome may actually upregulate or downregulate enzymatic activity that makes you more efficient at breaking down certain macronutrients if you don't eat much protein or you change the type of protein you eat and then you chronically ingest it you will increase the enzymatic

activity needed to break those things down and so you'll actually probably get more efficient at breaking down Protein that's why if you're not used to say eating a a steak and then you have one your stomach might feel really heavy or oh my gosh that's hard to digest but people that eat it every day don't feel that same thing I have no issue at all digesting red meat but I eat it really constantly if you were to bring something in your stomach I'm not used to you get the idea there we have some issue so

the only thing really to think about thermal effective food chronically is if anything it might get lower because you've changed gut microbiome properties to be more efficient at breaking that food item down so instead of burning 20% maybe it's now down to 15 so I don't know necessarily the the case here but we'll certainly say we'll check this off the list of things that will change chronically that'll enhance and speed up my metabolism so we got to go somewhere else next ones up are then neat and eat so in terms of neat again we don't

really have much of a chronic effect here the only thing I could maybe argue would be if you have made something into a pattern and a habit so say you go for those three 10-minute walks a day and you do it so much that it becomes a pattern that you stick to it more often I guess we could call that a chronic effect that's not really changing your levels at Baseline because as soon as you stop walking that number comes right back down so not really a chronic benefit we can see there the one thing

we can say here is what we talked about earlier in that people who have a close relationship between an increased in caloric intake and an increase in neat are the ones who are most likely going to be described as your fast metabolizers and ones that don't will be your slow better than that again we don't have really a chronic effect on neat so we struck out on thermal effect we struck out on neat what about energy expenditure from exercise or eat yeah kind of the same boat so on one hand energy expenditure during exercise the

more fit you are the harder you can train the more you can do it and you can recover and and so you should be burning more energy but on the other hand the more fit you are the more efficient you become you're more efficient in your mechanics and your movement entic profiles have changed and and upregulated and downregulated and oxygen utilization and capitalization have improved improved and so your energy demand per work is lower all washed together it's pretty much uh negates itself so we're not going to get much benefit from that either which then

leaves us to the real shabam here and that's resting metabolic ratee this is the one we're after and the only one that really matters in terms of me officially saying yes we have boosted your metabolism in a way that you care about and will matter got a handful of ways to do that and the very first one is sleep we talked about this with a cute but the impacts of sleep are far better explained from The Chronic side enormous amounts of data here and much of it is very recent in fact we had very little

understanding of the metabolic ties between sleep and Metabolism until the last really 10 years or so now the relationship between sleep and metabolism is bidirectional we talked about bad sleep changing metabolism a second ago but it goes the opposite direction as well a bunch of research I could pull up here but a couple of ones that I've found most interesting that I wanted to highlight one study in particular that came out of the University of Chicago a number of years ago looked at 10 overweight individuals and they put them on a 14-day caloric restriction protocol

and one of the times they went through the protocol they slept 8 and 1 half hours the other time they went through the protocol they slept 5 and half hours so again University controlled calories in both situations the only variable that changed was 3 hours of sleep so now we're not even talking about the impact of bad nutritional choices this is simply even if calories are matched what happens when you sleep more all right now the Sleep curtailment group the sleep that the group that slept for five and a half hours had a reduction in

fat loss by 55% in absolute terms you're talking about the difference between like 1.4 kilos versus 6 kilos so almost a full kilogram difference in fat loss that favored the group who slept more the same thing basically happened in terms of muscle mass uh you can't directly measure it in the study but it's called fat-free body mass and just think about it like muscle mass and this was about a 60% difference so absolute terms you're talking about 1.5 kilos versus 2 2.4 kilos so almost a full kilogram or about 2 pounds of lean muscle difference

this is substantial remember this is 14 days that's it and all they Chang was sleep and we see pronounced increases in fat and reduction in muscle growth with just this variable change right so what you can see there is additional stuff that they looked at actually fat oxidation um satiety I think as well was in there but really problematic uh things going on when you sleep poorly that relationship uh if I had to summarize the literature you're going to see like a 10 to 60% increased likelihood of obesity with bad sleep so there's a chronic

effect here that is very very real one more time it's bidirectional so we see what I'm meaning there is if you are overweight you're probably going to have worse sleep but worse sleep is actually going to cause overweight so the cause goes both directions there a really nice paper came out pretty recently to be up in the show notes you can check it out specifically on the relationship between obesity and sleep and how it goes both directions you can see those details and that but another thing that is that has been identified in the literature

there is the direct relationship between muscle mass and sleep and it goes the way that you would predict not only does more fat often times equal worse sleep but more muscle oftentimes equals better sleep so two independent things happening there not enough muscle bad too much fat bad there's a relationship as well there but they are separate and we need to acknowledge that so it's not only important to make sure we're we're not over fat but that we have muscle as well this is actually an area that's getting a lot of scientific attention right now

that people don't necessarily realize and that is normal weight obesity you heard that right normal weight obesity so people whose total body weight is not exceptionally high but their body fat percentage is really high probably not kindly put but you may know this more cloy as skinny fat the more proper term is again normal weight obesity but this is an area again scientifically that's getting a lot of attention right now because of acknowledgement of things like that it's not necessarily just about body weight but the quality of that body weight matters a ton more research

on this chronic tie between resting metabolic rate and bad sleep very very famous study in the field called The Sleep heart health study um this was self-reported sleep folks that self reported less than 5 hours of sleep per night had and this is going to stun you here this was associated with a 200 51% increase in their Hazard ratio of developing type 2 diabetes Now type two diabetes and obesity are not the same thing but obviously there's a strong relationship there what we're seeing here is just general metabolic dysfunction with bad sleep similar things have

been done with impaired insulin signaling specifically in atopos cells those are your fat cells and folks who sleep 5 and 1/ half hours versus 8 and 1/2 hours so we're seeing this in a lot of different forms and fashion in fact one of the papers and I'm going to quote it directly here because it's so powerful uh specifically said that quote from a clinical standpoint our study provides additional evidence that insufficient sleep May contribute to the development of or exacerbate metabolic disorders I can tell you in my coaching experience it is really really hard to

manage body composition and thus metabolic rate and somebody who is truly chronically sleeping really poorly it is tough you got to fix that sleep or at least improve it before you expect major changes in body composition one night of sleep not a big deal bad nights of sleep though you're probably going to expect a reduced resting metabolic rate which is why it's in our chronic section and a big big big hammer to swing number two on our list is going to surprise some people but it's actually fish oil now this is a really interesting one

we know of the many benefits of fish oil but many don't realize the metabolic ones easy study here to highlight what's going on 24 females and they did this in I think they were over 60 656 years old uh if I'm remembering exactly the age range there and they gave him three grams per day of EPA and DHA for a total of 12 weeks now what's cool about this study is they actually matched it with olive oil and so calories were equated for one group again got the olive oil which is obviously a very healthy

food Choice the other one specifically got fish oil and so really in smart study design here because they of course matched calories they matched fat and they gave them not really crummy food items or low quality stuff but too high quality quity items and so what that allowed them to do is tease out the Direct effects of the EPA and DHA net result here and remember this is chronic so what happened not in the the 60 Minutes or 90 minutes or 3 hours post taking the fish oil what happened at rest 12 weeks later about

a 15% increase in uh 14 actually I think increase in resting metabolic rate they saw an increase in energy expenditure during exercise by about 10% and the fat oxidation rate both at rest and exercise will increased about 19 and 27% respectively what's probably more impressive than all that though is they saw a increase in lean mass by about 4% take a second to digest that by simply taking three grams per day of fish oil not a high dose at all you saw a chronic elevation in resting metabolic rate that had a functional and practical outcome

of a 4% in lean mass compared to olive oil now what do you think this would be compared to of a lower quality fat or worst Food choice in general it would probably be substantially more so to me this is incredibly impressive and it is another reason why taking fish oil is probably a really smart strategy but in full honesty here and candidly I didn't know this I hadn't missed this one I was pretty aware of basically everything we talked about so far at this point but I had absolutely no idea that fish oil would

chronically do this at rest over time so pretty powerful uh pretty low hanging fruit and a pretty easy win in my opinion next up something we've already mentioned before and that is adding lean muscle mass now we've been saying this for a long time and this is something I need to offer an official correction on I have misspoke on these words many time in the past as many people did we would often tell people that for every pound of lean muscle you add you burn an extra 30 to 50 calories per day more realistically that

number is significantly lower probably closer to six to maybe 10 calories per day so what I mean by that is muscle is metabolically active and so just being alive being on your body costs you calories to sustain but that calorie cost is about again 6 to 10 calories um per pound of muscle so in that example if you were to add s pounds of muscle you will probably expect to in increase your resting metabolic metabolic rate by about 40 to 60 K Cals per day now is that a lot is that not a lot I'll

let you decide but just basic math there if I take that and I say okay that's about somewhere between 1,200 and 1,00 calories per month which is four to five six pounds per year pretty conservatively there again there's your 10 to 15 pounds over that 5 to 10 years so we know that it burns calories we know that it expense experi a huge percentage of the variance of your resting metabolic rate we know that it's the primary thing describing the difference with age it's the primary thing describing the difference with male and female and there

are many other studies that I could bring up to show that but I think we've made this point and I hope you believe me by now so let's go ahead and move on and talk about other things and by other things I mean the fourth and final thing on our list and that is exercise now the question about whether or not exercise chronically changes your resting metabolic rate is tenuous we don't actually have full scientific agreement here here's where the field basically stands we know that it is particularly good at keeping your resting metabolic rate

high when you're on a low calorie diet so that alone again I don't know that it will increase you above Baseline but we know that when you reduce calorie intake just like when you increase calorie intake it raises your metabolic rate if you chronically suppress caloric intake you will then eventually lower your resting molic in intake it's going to match it so with that in mind then if you're on a calorically restricted diet for a long time and you exercise you will not have nearly as much of a drop in resting metabolic rate so it

will preserve current reol resting metabolic rate rather than increase it which is a benefit in and of itself there's also extremely good evidence that when you go from even moderately active to completely sedentary that resting metabolic rate goes way down uh same thing has actually been shown with high level athletes specifically endurance athletes when they drop training so their normal level of training and they bring that down a little bit resting metabolic rate will come down as much as 10% or more and so while we again can't make an argument that this stuff will necessarily

boost RMR it may stop it from going down if it does Boost it it's probably going to go back to the point from earlier which is because it yielded an increase in total muscle mass but we've already covered that point so what we're trying to tease out right now is does this have any additional benefits outside of just giving you more muscle now you can look at some systematic reviews and men analyses here but generally here's what you're going to find strength training tends to have the biggest win here fun going back to the beginning

of our show remember I said it doesn't have the biggest win in terms of caloric expenditure but it does have the biggest win in terms of chronic boosting and elevation or maintenance of your resting metabolic rate usual effect size here effect rather is about 100 K Cals per day the data are mixed probably could be mostly entirely explained by muscle but the number you're going to see is about 100 in terms of the aerobic exercise side of the equation it's closer to 50 to 60 K Cals per day so it seems to be substantially lower

for a number of reasons at the same time because of that lots of studies are going to say that it has no effect or minimal effect and you're probably what's happening is that number is kind of on the borderline of the ability to reach statistical significance so some depending on study design some studies find that it crosses the threshold and it is a significant I'll be a small effect and some it's just not enough to cross that threshold so minimal effect if any there with chronic endurance exercise so because of that the research on mixed

methods of training protocols that incorporate both strength and endurance it actually lines up pretty much perfectly the average increase in RMR there is about 75 K Cals per day so endurance exercise maybe gives you 40 50k Cals strength training maybe 100 you do a combination of both you're going to meet in the middle uh in that range somewhere right so that's the best you can hope for in terms of chronic exercise elevating your resting metabolic rate one more time I'm billion reasons to exercise but that's probably not our our biggest win relative to our sleep

or fish oil or some of the other things we can do our fifth and final one is short because we've mentioned it numerous times now and that is simply eating more your resting metabolic rate will adjust to your chronic energy intake it won't do it that much or relevance on a day-to-day basis but if you are repeatedly eating high amounts of calories your me resting metabolic rate will adjust up or down so that all being said I wanted to tie this thing together and wrap it up by talking about what is realistically going to happen

with some of these acute and chronic changes and how do I wrap that into a complete picture or a program or a protocol that one might use you have to keep in mind the fact that I as I said at the beginning of our chronic section it's a bit of a moving Target here here's what I mean as you lose weight the equation changes thermal effect of the food tends to go down why you're eating less food okay so we lose some calories to that neat tends to go down there's a great paper uh Herman

poner at Duke it's probably most famous for this adaptive thermogenesis or this conservation idea I know that um Eric Trexler and Abby Smith Ryan and Lane Norton published a paper at least a decade ago now showing and arguing for the same thing but what's most likely Happening Here is neat is the first response so when your body senses the fact that you're in a low choric State it's probably going to bring down your caloric expenditure through neat in the the coaching realm and the in the weight cutting realm this is what we call the shoulder

lean so you know somebody's really low on calories because they start leaning up against tables they start sitting down more their elbows get placed upon uh stands and and desks and like that and they're doing this subconsciously but what we how we always justify this is their body knows they're in a Lor loric State and so they want them to sit down a restmor so they're really lowering that non-spontaneous activity anyone who's ever dieted uh or brought calories down for a long amount of time that was exactly what I'm talking about here after that if

you were to continue to be in a low chloric State you're now going to run into actual reductions and resting metabolic rate um especially if you've lost physical sight and especially especially if you've lost muscle with that so that can happen over time so you've lost thermal effective food you've lost knat you've lost resting metabolic expenditure and you'll probably will even go down in your eat if you are smaller and you're doing something like running if you have less Mass to move you burn less calories and so what happens here is all four of those

factors can come down So eventually you either have to then reduce your calories more or or artificially increase your energy output more to make sure that your continuing sles away so one of the reasons that people tend to plateau in fat loss is because they're not accounting for these things to go down along for the ride now I don't want to leave you on such a confusing note and so what I'd like to do now is just quickly summarize exactly what we've covered today and then give you a couple of real practical examples of how

you can combine some of these things to have an effective total daily energy or resting metabolic rate or boosting metabolism Pro call that's going to put you in the best position possible so where you don't have to suffer some of these long-term conservation or adaptive thermogenesis problems so we started off by talking about a handful of acute factors in terms of thermal effective food the basic thing you're doing here is eating a higher percentage of your food in the form of protein we then talked about neat that is just effectively strategies like standing desks and

walking treadmills that can help you move more throughout the day from the energy expenditure perspective most likely you'll burn more by doing endurance or aerobic type of activity or even higher intensity intervals the last component then for our acute factors was a resting metabolic rate and we covered eight specific factors there everything from spicy food to water or cold water to cold air or temperature in your room or work environment to caffeine and nicotine and green tea and other thermogenics or Thermo Regulators there and then we finished by talking about having great sleep to make

sure you don't put yourself in a bad food Choice position once we got through all that stuff and we remember acute effects don't necessarily chronically change into long-term adaptations and so what are the things that are going to really boost my metabolism over time we didn't see a lot of opportunity there for in thermal effect not a lot in energy expenditure or neat and so really we had four main components from the resting metabolic rate perspective and that is getting great sleep fish oil at 3 grams per day adding more muscle and then fourth one

on our list was adding more calories so the higher caloric place we could be in while maintaining overall body composition is going to have us having the highest and fastest metabolism possible so now that that is all in our mind I want to give you a couple of examples of how you can put this together I picked a caloric intake and expenditure of 2500 100 calories just to give us a starting place so let's say your goal was to reduce caloric balance by 500 calories that would equate to about one pound per week 500 multipli

by 7 is about 3500 that's roughly how much uh calories or energy goes into a pound of fat not exactly how it works but that's pretty close I picked these numbers on purpose one pound per week is a really good number I use it a lot that's almost always is what we go after if you have a lot more weight to lose you can go a little bit higher if you have less to lose you may be a little bit lower but it's a really good starting place for sustainable long-term and effective weight loss that

will stay off so not a mistake there but nonetheless I'm going to give you three different options of how you could get to that 500 calorie deficit option one is to Simply add 500 extra calories of exercise you don't want to change your nutrition don't want to change anything else want get a standing desk you just want to work harder that's fine you can do that I'll tell you in my opinion that's that's pretty hard number one you don't burn nearly as many calories in your workouts as you think uh try try try sitting on

a a bike with a heart rate monitor on and and getting to 500 calories if you're big it's a little bit easier but if you're moderate to small that's quite a lot of work so it's not impossible it's an option plenty of people have done it but it it can be check tough especially if you're trying to use more calories than 500 this is a hard go all right so in addition you got to be really concerned about what's going to happen to neat remember that adaptive thermogenesis if you burn a bunch of calories during

exercise there's a really good chance your body will reduce neat that day so if you burn 500 calories in the seat of the bike your body might drop your neat by three or four or even up that 500 calories as a way to conserve your body weight and so you can win here but a lot of folks who have gone through this where they're like man I trained so hard I was killing myself in the gym and then my weight didn't move at all there could have been an issue with not necessarily measuring your calories

right and so on and so forth but the reality of it is at least according to Dr poner it's possible that your body was just adapting your neat to match your eat so your body didn't move anymore so that's one option it wouldn't be my top choice though because of those reasons another option would be the opposite and that's you cut all 500 calories from your food candidly this is much easier I've done this a lot it's possible um sometimes it's unsustainable some people have a hard time with hunger and some people have a hard

time regulating food intake others don't have a hard time so you can use it it will drop resting metabolic rate though remember lower calorie intake means lower RMR and also might drop neat if you're one of those folks that have that relationship and you have a strong tie there you might go down so you might be chasing your tail a little bit there if you're doing it in a way especially if you're not having enough protein and you're not strength training this might also long-term result in more muscle loss which will drop your RMR and

so while again it can be successful I think it's as limited as the previous approach and so just getting all your calories from more workouts possible but probably not the best approach for most people getting all your calories by just eating less again possible but probably not the most approach if we're using all the information we learned today we're going to use some sort of combination you have four ways to manipulate this you have thermal effect you have exercise you have neat and you have a bunch of ways to alter resting metabolic rate use any

combination I'm going to give you one sample but please by all means use whatever fits your preferences as I've said all day today so just one example to strike you up here let's say you needed to burn those 500 calories and you were able to increase your energy expenditure from exercise by 200 calories maybe you uh did a little more on the bike or the whoever knows right combination of circuits and lifting weights and whatever but 200 additional calories sounds really easy trust me like it's it's harder than you think and so I think 200

is a pretty reasonable number especially for for somebody who's already exercising to do an additional 200 calories per day it's it's a decent amount more work I actually don't think much more than that is is that realistic for many people so 200 calories you're going to feel that but we got there now that's how I I got my energy expenditure from exercise in terms of resting metabolic rate maybe I'm going to add that fish oil and that grain tea if you ran back the numbers I talked about earlier that might get us an additional 25

or so calories so not a huge effect there but we're stacking things on top of each other taking some fish oil and having a cup of green tea per day is is not a super hard thing to get a lot of people to do so we're going to stack some winds here then for thermal effective food I'm going to switch out 15 grams of fat out of my diet which is about 135 calories for 30 grams of protein maybe I just take a David bar there we go maybe you got a couple of sticks of

Maui Nei or protein powder whatever you want to do right now that alone did a couple of things those 30 grams of protein are about 120 calories those 15 gram of fat is about 135 calories so that alone we bought 15 calories but more importantly we're taking advantage of thermal effective food so we Dro that 15 we're preserving lean muscle mass more we've added to satiety maybe then we'll not have a harder time diet will be easier maybe we'll reduce calorie intake but in addition to that we got another 30 or so calories from that

10% thermal effect from those 120 calories from our protein intake so net together the 15 from low calories plus the 30 from the thermal effect got us another 45 free calories now I know you're maybe hearing these things you're like oh my God he's talking about 20 calories and 40 but like in my experience to be honest with you this is how you make chloric restriction feel easier no one that's going through this feels like they're on a crazy diet worked out a little bit 15 gram of fat out 30 gram of protein in I

feel full I'm not feeling like I'm starving all the time or I'm super restricted I'm not also on a crazy you know all protein diet or anything like that you're talking about a pretty small change that's going to add up effect okay another change you would make here maybe you do drop your your calories one way or the other uh in this example I just said okay let's cut carbohydrates by 20 total G that's 80 calories so we did a little bit of caloric restriction we did a little bit of switching out macronutrients with a

thermal effect we stack all that on top of a little bit of neat which is a 15minute walk at lunch gives us another 100 or so calories so you add all that stuff together a couple hundred calories from exercise 25 maybe 50 calories from fish oil and green tea another 50 calories or throw or so by switching out our macronutrients another 100 calories or so by cutting out a little bit of energy from this is a carbohydrate and then and then a walk per day all that together is going to get you your 500 calories

you're going to do that in a way that doesn't make you feel super hungry it won't smash your neat it won't smash your resting metabolic rate you won't learn lose muscle over it and you won't have as many issues with that adaptive thermogenesis which means you'll be able to hold all that weight off a lot longer than in other approaches I know we covered a lot of ground today and I apologize about all the acronyms and the TS and the Rems and things like that I know we got a little bit technical with our math

but I wanted you to have some actual direct practical numbers one of the reasons I believe we have so much confusion in this area of metabolism and boosting your metabolism is because there's too many generalities thr out there lack of specificity with terminology and so people have got confused and I hope this provided you some clarity I hope it was actionable for you in your own individual practice your coaching practice or just simply sharing with a friend who's interested in this field in reality you have a lot of ways that you can work on your

metabolism while I have to break some hearts and let you know you can't speed up your metabolism and there's really no such thing as a fast or slow one in practicality you can have that net result that you're actually looking for with subtle changes in your total daily energy expenditure what makes it feel like your metabolism is found F so all that to say if you implement any of these things I would love to know about it I would love to hear about it whether it worked or didn't and if you did work for you

and you had success with it I give you full permission to go around telling the world that Dr Galpin said I've officially sped up and boosted my metabolism and I will not tell the world any different thank you for joining for today's episode my goal as always is to share exciting scientific insights that help you perform at your best if the show resonates with you and you want to help ensure this information remains free and accessible to anyone in the world there are a few ways that you can support first you can subscribe to the

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forget in the famous words of Bill Bowerman if you have a body you are an athlete