Let’s burn! Metabolic tweaks and hacks

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

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

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

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

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

A quick metabolism helps the body to do this.

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

One final quick note before we begin:

Limitations

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

• Age—we can influence our biological age, but we cannot (yet!) halt aging, so this will happen
• Body size—and yes we can change this a bit, but we all have our own “basic frame” to work with. Someone who is 6’6” is never going to be able to have the same lower-end-of-scale body mass of someone who is 5’0”, say.
• Sex—this is about hormones, and HRT is a thing, but for example, broadly speaking, men will have faster metabolisms than women, because of hormonal differences.
• Medical conditions—often also related to other hormones, but for example someone with Type 1 Diabetes is going to have a very different relationship with their metabolism than someone without, and someone with a hypo- or hyperactive thyroid will again have a very different metabolism in a way that that lifestyle factors can’t completely compensate for.

The tips and tricks

Intermittent fasting

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

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

Read the science: Intermittent Fasting: Is the Wait Worth the Weight?

Read our prior article: Fasting Without Crashing? We Sort The Science From The Hype

Enjoy plenty of protein

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

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

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

Read the science: The role of protein in weight loss and maintenance

Stay hydrated

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

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

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

Check it out: Increased Hydration Can Be Associated with Weight Loss

Take a stand

That basal metabolic rate we talked about?

• If you’re lying down at rest, that’s what your metabolism will be like.
• If you’re sitting up, it’ll be a little quicker, but not much.
• If you’re standing, suddenly half your body is doing things, and you don’t even notice them because they’re just stabilizing muscles and the like, but on a cellular level, your body gets very busy.

Read all about it: Cardiometabolic impact of changing sitting, standing, and stepping in the workplace

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

The spice of life

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

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

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

Some studies have also shown that capsinoids increase energy expenditure.

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

Read for yourself: Capsaicinoids: a spicy solution to the management of obesity?

You snooze, you lose (fat)

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

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

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

See: Effects of sleep restriction on metabolism-related parameters in healthy adults: A comprehensive review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Eat for metabolic health

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

The 12 Best Foods to Boost Your Metabolism

Enjoy!

Our body requires 20 amino acids (the building blocks of protein), 9 of which it can’t synthesize (thus called: “essential”) and absolutely must get from food. Normally, we get these amino acids from protein in our diet, and we can also supplement them by taking amino acid supplements if we wish.

Specifically, we require (per kg of bodyweight) a daily average of:

1. Histidine: 10 mg
2. Isoleucine: 20 mg
3. Leucine: 39 mg
4. Lysine: 30 mg
5. Methionine: 10.4 mg
6. Phenylalanine*: 25 mg
7. Threonine: 15 mg
8. Tryptophan: 4 mg
9. Valine: 26 mg

*combined with the non-essential amino acid tyrosine

Source: Protein and Amino Acid Requirements In Human Nutrition: WHO Technical Report

Why this matters

A lot of attention is given to protein, and making sure we get enough of it, especially as we get older, because the risk of sarcopenia (muscle mass loss) increases with age:

Protein vs Sarcopenia

However, not every protein comes with a complete set of essential amino acids, and/or have only trace amounts of of some amino acids, meaning that a dietary deficiency can arrive if one’s diet is too restrictive.

And, if we become deficient in even just one amino acid, then bad things start to happen quite soon. We only have so much space, so we’re going to oversimplify here, but:

1. Histidine: is needed to produce histamine (vital for immune responses, amongst other things), and is also important for maintaining the myelin sheaths on nerve cells.
2. Isoleucine: is very involved in muscle metabolism and makes up the bulk of muscle tissue.
3. Leucine: is critical for muscle synthesis and repair, as well as wound healing in general, and blood sugar regulation.
4. Lysine: is also critical in muscle synthesis, as well as calcium absorption and hormone production, as well as making collagen.
5. Methionine: is very important for energy metabolism, zinc absorption, and detoxification.
6. Phenylalanine: is a necessary building block of a lot of neurotransmitters, as well as being a building block of some amino acids not listed here (i.e., the ones your body synthesizes, but can’t without phenylalanine).
7. Threonine: is mostly about collagen and elastin production, and is also very important for your joints, as well as fat metabolism.
8. Tryptophan: is the body’s primary precursor to serotonin, so good luck making the latter without the former.
9. Valine: is mostly about muscle growth and regeneration.

So there you see, the ill effects of deficiency can range from “muscle atrophy” to “brain stops working” and “bones fall apart” and more. In short, any essential amino acid deficiency not remedied will ultimately result in death; we literally become non-viable as organisms without these 9 things.

What to do about it (the “life hack” part)

Firstly, if you eat a lot of animal products, those are “complete” proteins, meaning that they contain all 9 essential amino acids in sensible quantities. The reason that all animal products have these, is because they are just as essential for the other animals as they are for us, so they, just like us, must consume (and thus contain) them.

However, a lot of animal products come with other health risks:

Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy? ← this covers which animal products are definitely very health-risky, and which are probably fine according to current best science

…so many people may prefer to get more (or possibly all) dietary protein from plants.

However, plants, unlike us, do not need to consume all 9 essential amino acids, and this may or may not contain them all.

Soy is famously a “complete” protein insofar as it has all the amino acids we need.

But what if you’re allergic to soy?

Good news! Peas are also a “complete” protein and will do the job just fine. They’re also usually cheaper.

Final note

An oft-forgotten thing is that some other amino acids are “conditionally essential”, meaning that while we can technically synthesize them, sometimes we can’t synthesize enough and must get them from our diet.

The conditions that trigger this “conditionally essential” status are usually such things as fighting a serious illness, recovering from a serious injury, or pregnancy—basically, things where your body has to work at 110% efficiency if it wants to get through it in one piece, and that extra 10% has to come from somewhere outside the body.

Examples of commonly conditionally essential amino acids are arginine and glycine.

Arginine is critical for a lot of cell-signalling processes as well as mitochondrial function, as well as being a precursor to other amino acids, including creatine.

As for glycine?

Check out: The Sweet Truth About Glycine

Enjoy!