How To Increase Your Metabolism (At Any Age)
Let’s get one thing straight - There are no "metabolism Killers"
Your metabolism adapts.
And I want to explain why our metabolism adapts and even strategies you can use to make this work to your advantage.
And just to be clear…your age is not an excuse.
While yes it can feel harder to make changes as we get older, a big part of that is simply the fact we’ve ignored many of these other factors for so long and previous dieting and training practices are catching up with us now!
So first…why does your metabolism adapt?
Our metabolism isn’t a stagnant thing.
Changes in our lifestyle and changes in our lifestyle can have a huge impact on it - from how we fuel to how active we are.
That’s why we have to be conscious of how we approach losing weight, especially if we want to see amazing and LASTING body recomp.
Because so often in search of faster results, and more dramatic changes on the scale, we implement habits that have a NEGATIVE impact on our metabolic health.
While we do need a calorie deficit to lose weight, creating too big a deficit will backfire.
Yet this is so often what we’ve always done.
If calories in vs. calories out is our main focus for weight loss, we almost assume going lower is better.
But it’s not.
Yes, it may be nice to see that scale change quickly, but dropping our calories extremely low changes how our body functions.
Metabolic adaptations occur and our metabolism slows to try to regulate energy expenditure to match energy intake.
Less energy coming in, your body makes sure survival functions are covered first.
This can mean we may find ourselves having less energy to get up and move around extra.
Your body will slow down, or reduce, any processes that burn energy it doesn’t feel it has coming in…
And this can also mean muscle being lost.
Muscle is metabolically costly. It requires more energy to be maintained.
Whereas, our fat stores are more pure fuel for our body.
When energy is in short supply, our body is going to do what it can to conserve.
Less muscle means less energy needed to survive.
That is why we can not only struggle to build muscle in an extreme deficit even though we’re trying to train hard, but we can even LOSE muscle.
And oddly enough, the harder we train to try to see the results, the more we may be making that deficit even more extreme…fighting against any muscle building efforts further.
So while yes, a calorie deficit is key…
Slashing our calories lower to try to see results faster started the snowball of metabolic adaptations…
Adaptations you may find accumulate more and more as you get older.
And this is why we start blaming our age for the metabolic slowdown.
Over time, we’ve repeated this yo-yo dieting cycle…
Slash our calories lower and burn more calories in our training.
So we lose fast on the scale.
But we ultimately lose just as much muscle as fat.
Slowing our metabolic rate.
And in the process creating hormonal imbalances which only make matters worse.
Then ultimately we can’t sustain the severe restriction and training regime, so we regain the weight.
But when we regain the weight, we aren’t doing so in a healthy way to rebuild muscle.
Instead we’re defaulting back into bad habits.
All that weight we then gain only makes our body composition worse as we put on fat.
This leads to us even potentially putting on more weight as our body has learned to function better off of the lower calories AND we’ve lost muscle.
So the next time we go to diet down, not only is the process HARDER but our metabolic rate may be slower and may only further adapt as we implement those same dieting practices!
And this is why it can feel like it as we get older it gets harder and harder.
Not to mention, as most of us get older…we aren’t as active.
So lower activity levels on average coupled with improper dieting practices and this yo-yo dieting cycle…
Of course it feels like it gets harder and our metabolism is slower than ever.
Now I do want to mention…age DOES have an impact.
Because while too often we just blame our age and write ourselves off because of it, there are things we WILL need to address with how we train and fuel if we want to see results NO MATTER our age…
As we get older, we aren’t able to utilize protein as efficiently and muscle gains are slower.
Our hormonal environment isn’t as optimal as it once was for muscle growth.
And less muscle as we get older DOES mean a slower metabolism.
BUT again…our metabolism is constantly adjusting…
So as much as our previous dieting practices have had an impact negatively…we can also CHANGE them to not only address our changing needs as we get older but also REVERSE the adaptations we’ve created with previous dieting attempts…
00:00 - Metabolism Killers
01:20 - Why Your Metabolism Adapts
04:00 - Metabolic Slowdown
05:20 - Age Has an Impact
06:00 - Metabolic Adjustments
07:23 - Why it Takes Time
09:03 - Weight Gain & Metabolism
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