How to Boost Your Metabolism

How to Boost Your Metabolism

We've all asked Google this question before: "How do I boost my metabolism?"

Unfortunately, Google has most likely given you tons and tons of different sources for answers. Some may have been similar, some may have differed. Point is, you're sick and tired of feeling unsure. 

Don't worry, we'll answer your question without hesitation or doubt in this article. But before we begin to answer the question of "can or how do I boost my metabolism?", we must first go over what the metabolism actually is. 

Metabolism

The Merriam-Webster definition of metabolism is: 

- The sum of the processes in the buildup and destruction of protoplasm; specifically the chemical changes in living cells by which energy is provided for vital processes and activities and new material is assimilated. 

If you're like me, you read that over five different times, took a break from the computer, did some errands, came back to the computer, read it five more times, still thought you were reading Chinese, and proceeded to follow up with this statement:

So let's simplify things. When we're talking about metabolism in health, fitness, and nutrition, we're referring to the amount of calories our body burns in a day without activity. If your metabolism is slow, it means that your body is burning minimal amounts of calories in a day. If your metabolism if fast, it means that your body is burning tons and tons of calories in a day. 

So if we want to know how to "boost our metabolism", we need to know a couple of things:

1. What determines current metabolic rate
2. How to improve the determinant of metabolic rate

What Determines Metabolic Rate?

When determining how many calories you're burning in a day, it's likely that you'll want to figure out your Basal Metabolic Rate. Your BMR will tell you how many calories you burn in a day while at rest. Essentially, BMR will tell you how many calories your body will burn while you Netflix and chill all day long. 

So how do you figure out your basal metabolic rate? Well, there are a lot of factors that play into your BMR like sex, age, weight, and height. As you can see, all of these factors change over time and there's not much we can do about it. We age, and as we age our bodies change. Unfortunately a lot of those changes are out of our control.

Although some of those changes are inevitable, there is one big factor that we can control well with physical activity. It's our lean muscle mass. 

Lean muscle mass has been shown to be one of the greatest determinants of metabolic rate (1). Someone with the same age, weight, height, but lower lean mass will have a lower Basal Metabolic Rate than someone else with the same age, weight, and height, but higher lean mass. 

Simply put, the more lean muscle tissue that your body carries, the more calories your body will burn at rest. 

But what does this mean for you along your fitness journey? How can you apply this knowledge to your life and use it to benefit your health and physique?

How to Increase Lean Muscle Mass

There are plenty of things we can do to in order to burn more calories throughout the day like walk more, do a killer circuit workout, or add 30 minutes of cardio to the end of every single weight lifting session. When it comes to thinking about burning calories, have you noticed that we almost always think of what kind of additional activity we can do to burn more calories? The last time you ate more food than you were supposed to I can almost guarantee you told yourself you'd work twice as hard in the gym to make up for it. Why do we do that? Why don't we think more about what we can do to make sure our body is burning more calories while we do nothing? After all, if we're trying to ensure that our approach to fitness is optimal, practical, and sustainable, wouldn't it be best to be burning more calories at rest, rather than working more and more and more?

So what's the solution? What can we do to make sure our body is a calorie furnace 24/7? The answer is:

Increasing lean muscle mass through resistance training.

Resistance training should be the staple of every workout program whether you're trying to build muscle, burn fat, or do both. It sends a signal to your body that it needs to be stronger, leaner, and build more mass in order to adapt to the load that's being placed upon it. Cardio however, sends a signal to your body telling it to be more efficient with the energy that it has. Therefore the more frequently you do cardio, the better your body will be at using less calories in order to fuel the activity.

Am I saying that you have to or should cut out cardio completely? Of course not. But I do believe that if you're trying to lose fat, avoid a plateau, and avoid getting burnt out, cardio should be a supplement to your resistance training.

If you're at a plateau and you're doing more and more cardio, stop. Lift weights. Apply the same intensity in your cardio sessions to your weight lifting sessions and I'm willing to bet that your body will begin to build a faster metabolism. 

So how do you boost your metabolism? 

Increase your lean muscle mass by lifting weights! 

Short, sweet, and to the point. 

References

(1) Speakman, J R, and C Selman. “Physical Activity and Resting Metabolic Rate.” The Proceedings of the Nutrition Society., U.S. National Library of Medicine, Aug. 2003
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14692598.

Thanks for reading!

Be sure to follow Poehlmann Fitness and Subscribe to the YouTube channel! Why? Because you'll get notified when awesome videos get uploaded for you to watch. And that's never been a bad thing. 

Adam is a fitness professional, Chipotle fanatic, and cookie enthusiast based in Fort Collins, CO. After hanging up the baseball cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. 

Adam is an ACE CPT and Fitness Nutrition Specialist. His years of experience in fat loss, muscle hypertrophy, and sports performance training have helped people improve in all walks of life. If you're interested in hiring Adam as your coach, fill out an application here.

How Not to Get Fat in College

For most, college is the first time that you're out of the house and completely on your own. You're in charge of everything. New schedules, new responsibilities, new choices, and plenty of crossroads. Your fate is in your hands. This means that you are in an extremely important stage of your life. Good or bad, the habits that you create now, on your own, will influence your decisions for years and years to come.

Due to these new opportunities and experiences, I've seen a lot of damage done. I've seen too many of you completely throw away your health due to "the college experience". Not only have a lot of you decided to throw away your health, but you've also just put on a bit of fat and quite frankly it's not a good thing. I know you probably haven't heard the word "fat" on your campuses, since your schools feel like they have to be extra sensitive to your feelings or whatever. But I'm not your safe space. I'm here to give you a light slap on the face with a side of advice and encouragement. By they way, that was the slap in the face, the rest is nothing but advice and encouragement :)

Let's not get off on the wrong foot. I don't want you to be under the impression that I believe weight gain in general is this horrible thing that should always be avoided. We all gain weight. Sometimes it's healthy, and sometimes it's not. In this situation, it's almost always the latter and that's why this article was written.

Habits

Remember how I was talking about decisions and habits at the beginning? Well, that's where it all starts. As you know, this is the first time (whether you're a freshman or not, it's still new) that you're out of the house making nearly every decision for yourself. It's so liberating. You can do whatever the heck you want, with seemingly no consequences. Due to the nature of this stage in your life, you're like this piece of clay, just waiting to be molded all over again. Parents can brag about how well they raised their kids all they want, but no matter how they raised you, you'll make decisions however you want. You have an opportunity to completely rebrand yourself and start over. Having said that, the things that mold you into the young adult you'll be after school are the friends you hang out with, and the habits you create in college. 

We all know what friends are, and we all know what habits are, but just to make sure I'll give you a refresher on habits. 

According to Brilliant Living HQ, "a habit is the repeated thinking and behaviors that become automatic..."

These habits are created by behaviors, which are initiated by cues. Following the behavior or action there is a reward. Cue, behavior/action, reward. 

So how does this play into your stage of life (college), your health, and the rest of your life? 

Habits and Health

As mentioned earlier, college is place where students gain a lot of body fat, and seem to take poor care of their health. This is bad for two reasons:

1. You're getting fatter and it's most likely not looking good, and it's hurting your self-esteem. 

2. This weight gain is a result of poor habits that are developed in college. These poor habits leak into life after school. Next thing you know, you're 50 pounds overweight and you have several health issues in your 30s. 

Sure, I may have titled this article "How Not to Get Fat In College" and I'll teach you how not to get fat in college, but throughout that process I'm going to stress the importance of habits, too.

So here's how I'm going to do this. I'll keep it simple. We'll identify the problem, what's causing the problem, what the solution is, and how you can change your habits for the better through that solution. 

Since we've already identified the problems (weight gain and poor habits), we'll address why this is happening.

What's Causing the Problem?

You're smart, right? You're in college and you know exactly what the problem is. An overconsumption of alcohol, and and overconsumption of food. Ultimately, the problem is overconsumption of calories from those two sources.

If I could summarize this issue into two gifs...

I'm not going to sit here and say that the solution is to stop doing both of these things for the rest of your life. I'm not your mother. 

But what I am going to do is teach you how to make sure you DON'T put on excess body fat, create bad habits, and damage your long-term health.

Two Different Approaches

We know that the problem is an overconsumption of calories through food and alcohol, and we know that the solution is properly managing calorie intake. The question now is: how do we do that? 

I want to break this section of the article into two different sections, one for each approach. 

There are two different ways you can manage your caloric intake. Both will keep you enjoying college, but you'll be doing it in a safe way that will enable you to create good habits in your life. 

Approach Number One: The Tracker

If you've been following me and reading my articles for a while, you know how much of a fan I am of macronutrient tracking. If you haven't been following me and you didn't know that, well shame on you. And now you know. 

Tracking food intake does one major thing for us all. It completely opens our eyes to what we're putting into our bodies. Beyond that, it allows us to think of food as nutrients and fuel, rather than just palatable items that only serve our taste buds. Through tracking, you're able to learn how much food you need to maintain your weight, and how much you should be eating based on your goal. It's an accurate measurement to make sure you're not doing anything to damage your body composition and health. It's like a budget for your food. If you go over your budget in real life over and over again, you'll be broke. If you go over food budget over and over again, you'll be fat.

Bada bing, bada boom.

So if you enjoy numbers, you have experience with tracking, or you don't mind taking a few extra minutes each day and you'd like to learn, I'd suggest going this route and keeping track of what you eat and drink each day. And yes, this includes the moments where you drink too much and you eat three burritos rather than one. 

Beyond learning about what's in food, what quantities and serving size actually look like, and realizing how much or how little you really eat/drink in a day, tracking macronutrients can help create some great habits. 

One of these habits is thought. Think about the budget analogy again. When you have a budget, you're forced to think more about what you're purchasing, why you're purchasing it, how much you're spending on it, and whether or not you should actually be purchasing it. Same thing goes with tracking. Tracking makes you think these things to yourself:

"What are the macros in this meal?"
"Do I have room for these macros in my day?"
"Should I use all of my carbs on these pop tarts?", etc. 

Before you know it, you'll have a different relationship with the food and drinks you're consuming. You'll really think about what's best for you and your health before you dive into chugging or stuffing your face. It'll be a habit before you know it. 

If you need a place to go to find a good starting point for what you should be eating, check out iifym.com to get your numbers. 

Alcohol is a lot more tricky to track and takes a bit more practice. But that's ok, I wrote an article on this just for you :)

Approach Number Two: Being Intuitive

This approach is a bit more advanced and I recommend it to those who have experience with tracking food and want a bit more freedom in their life. This can be done by a beginner, but it's a lot harder to implement this if you don't have a good idea of what's actually in the food/drinks you're eating/drinking. 

Being intuitive includes many practices that can help you stay lean in college while creating great habits for the rest of your life. Some of these practices are:

Completely rejecting a diet mentality
Listening to your body
Recognizing real hunger

These basically can be packed into one, and that one thing would be respecting your body. But, since intuitive eating can actually be a bit more complex than it sounds, I'll touch on each one a little bit. 

Completely rejecting a diet mentality can be dangerous which is why I only recommend this intuitive eating thing to those who have experience in tracking food and thinking deeply before they make decisions. Note: this is not to say that diets aren't dangerous either. They definitely can be and that's why I've never put a client on one. But as you know, complete freedom can offer some enticing but dangerous opportunities whether it's about food or whatever it is y'all college students do nowadays.

But you know that. You're in college. If someone is to completely reject a diet mentality, it opens a world where possibilities are endless. There are no rules and regulations to keep the individual within healthy boundaries for the food and drink intake. So the only way to make this really work is by listening to your body.

Listening to the body is something that is completely forgotten about by most of us. We don't understand what being full is. We understand what being stuffed is, but not full. Heck, we don't even chew our food enough. Listening to your body includes many things like understanding hunger and fullness. Are you actually hungry, or do you just feel like you need to eat? Are you actually full? Or are you physically stuffed to the point where the thought of more food makes you gag? 

Here's my advice when it comes to college and intuitive eating. SLOW THE EFF DOWN. I know you have so much to do and there are a lot of things happening. When you eat, don't be on your phone, don't watch TV. Think about what you're eating. Think about each bite. Chew your food. Chew your food A LOT. Did you know the purpose of chewing is not just to get it down, but to actually help liquify the food? So yeah, chew.

When you're drinking, SLOW THE EFF DOWN. If someone is encouraging you to chug, or you feel like you want to chug, stop and realize that you're doing it for a false sense of approval that you ultimately don't give a crap about. I'll try not to get too into the moral dilemmas behind binge drinking, so here's this piece of advice:

Try not drinking on a full stomach, but rather an emptier one.

"SAY WHAT?!"

I know it sounds crazy, but if we're trying to avoid overconsumption of calories, we're also trying to avoid overconsumption of alcohol. And if you're out trying to feel the effects of alcohol - don't think I'm an idiot. I know exactly what you're doing. Because if you're going to tell me that you enjoy the taste of an IPA more than a Coke, I won't believe you. - you'll feel it quicker than you would if you had 2 pounds of pasta and bread in you. Also, take more time in between drinks. Especially if your stomach is on the empty side. Don't go into the bar expecting to slam 3 beers and 2 shots because that will be a freaking disaster and it won't be a good night for you.

Just like tracking food, being more intuitive and listening to your body will help you slow down and think. Beyond that though, it will help you understand what real feelings are, what real hunger and fullness really is. It'll help you understand what your body is telling you. You'll know when your body has had enough, and you'll know when you're being lied to because your mind is telling you it hasn't had enough. 

Catch my drift? 

Bottom line. Stop, think, act. Slow down, and then slow down some more.

Anticipate your environment before you get into it, and have your actions ready. 

Takeaway

College is an opportunity to make or break your present and future self. Don't only make the right decisions, but be prepared to make the right decisions. 

Take care of your health by either tracking your macronutrients or eating intuitively. Heck, practice both at the same time. Implement either or both of those into your health journey and I'm willing to bet that your body composition, physical health, and mental health will change for the better.

As always, thank you for reading. If you have question feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email. For those that are interested, coaching spots are open, and I have also made myself available for consultation. They're a great way to sit down with a professional and figure out a plan that works well for you as an individual without breaking the bank. 

Adam is a fitness professional, Chipotle fanatic, and cookie enthusiast based in Fort Collins, CO. After hanging up the baseball cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. 

Adam is an ACE CPT and Fitness Nutrition Specialist and has years of experience in fat loss, muscle hypertrophy, and sports performance training.  

Don't Crash Diet. Eat Mo' Food.

"Our ancestors did this", "our ancestors did that." 

Whoopdie freaking doo. Our ancestors pooped outside all the time, too (hehe that rhymed). How's that going for ya?

I can hardly handle all of the fads that our going around just because "our ancestors did it." Believe me, I understand that hunter gatherers exercised more, ate more nutrient-dense foods, and were leaner and just healthier all around. 

But what if I told you that their diet and exercise wasn't the big difference between them and western civilization. What if I told you that hunter gatherer groups have similar energy expenditure that you and I do?

Here comes the bomb.

They do.

Hunter gatherer groups aren't leaner and healthier because their burning so many more calories than we are, according to a recent study (1). 

Then What is it?

I'm sure that you've heard this several times over: Your body is smart. 

And it is.

It will adapt and change they way it does things based on the environment that you put it in. So how does that translate with the Hadza population that was studied?

The Hadza is one of the few remaining hunter gatherer populations left. Located in Tanzania, they forage for their food individually and sometimes cooperatively for a diet that consists mainly of honey, fruits, and occasional meat. Just like you'd think, they're on the move constantly during the day in order to gather and hunt. 

Since we've been taught that eating less and moving more is the ultimate key when it comes to burning calories and losing fat, it would be fair to think that these people are plowing through calories each day, right?

Interestingly enough, they're not. Why?

Their body is smart, and their metabolism and energy expenditure has adapted to the environment it has been placed in. Think about it. They don't eat much food - I'd be willing to guess 1000-1200 calories per day (and that's generous). On top of that, they're constantly moving around. Walking, running, jumping, walking, running, jumping. What does that combination tell the body? 

BE EXTREMELY EFFICIENT AT UTILIZING THE CALORIES GIVEN.

The body has no other choice. The body wants to survive and that's what it's always going to revert to. 

Survival.

All of that activity and minimal calorie intake is just telling their body to be reeeally good at utilizing the energy it's been given. So how does it do that?

By expending less energy. The less energy the body has to expend, the better.

What Does That Mean For Us?

Great question. Because we're not hunter gatherers, right? 

Right.

But our bodies work the same way. In fact, if you've been attempting to lose fat at some point in your life and you reach a plateau, I'm willing to bet that you reached a state where your body has become the most efficient it's ever been. 

Here's why. 

As I mentioned before, we've been taught that eating less and working out more is the ultimate, be-all end-all for fat loss. So, what do we do? We begin to control our portions, and we start exercising more. As a result, we lose some weight. 

But we want to lose more.

So what do you do? Eat even less, and workout even more. By this point, you've hit a plateau and you're doing all you can to beat it. Eating 1000 calories per day, ramping your cardio up to 1 hour per day before or after you lift weights. What have you done?

You've become the Western Hadza, my friend. 

Your body is now an efficiency machine, and fat loss is extremely difficult.

Reverse Dieting

Getting to this point of efficiency isn't a bad thing, unless your calories are super low, your cardio is hours long, and your life is absolutely miserable because of it. But since most people on a fat loss plateau feel this way, I'm going to speak through that lens. 

Reverse dieting is the answer to this problem.

It's exactly what it sounds like. Simply put, reverse dieting is a term used when slowly increasing calorie intake over a period of time. If your body is extremely good at using as little energy as possible in order to do the things it's being asked to do, we need to change that.

We want to make the body inefficient at doing the things we ask it to do. The word "inefficient" sounds like a negative thing, but it's not. We simply want your body to use more energy to operate. Whether you're training, resting, or performing NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) - which is fidgeting, doing chores, etc. - we want your body to need to use more energy for those tasks. Why?

Well, the more energy that is required for those tasks, the more food you will be able to eat without putting on weight. In this case I'm speaking of your RMR (resting metabolic rate). The higher that number gets, the easier it will be to lose fat. Say your initial RMR is 1500 kcal per day. You'd need to eat like a bird in order to lose fat. Now say you increased it to 2000 kcal per day. Which would you rather lose fat on. Dieting at 1300 kcal, or 1800 kcal? I'd choose 1800.

Mo' food baby, mo' food. 

So how do you increase your RMR to make sure your body is using more energy to perform? I'm sure you could've guessed it:

LIFT SOME HEAVY A$$ WEIGHTS (2).

It's simple, and you've heard this before: the more lean muscle tissue your body holds, the more calories you'll burn at rest. So make weight training a staple in your routine. 

"Good talk Adam, but how the heck do I start? What do I do from here?"

Great question, fake person in this article. Here are some simple steps on what I would do if I was in your shoes:

1. Figure out your daily maintenance caloric needs. You'll need to eat this many calories to maintain your weight. If you don't know your body fat percentage, get it tested. Because that plays a huge role in this number. 

2. Once you've found your maintenance number, begin tracking your food intake. If your maintenance number is HIGHER than what you normally eat, and you haven't lost weight in a while, slowly at carbohydrates and fat to your diet (2-5% increase in cals per week from carbs and fats) until you get there. 

3. Once you've been eating at your maintenance level, continue to increase your daily caloric intake each week. If you don't mind a little extra fat gain, bump your cals from carbs and fat by 6-10% each week. If you want to stay as lean as you possibly can, bump your cals from carbs and fat by 2-5% each week. Also, slowly take away your cardio sessions each week. Remember, we want the body burning max calories with the least amount of work. 

*Keep in mind, this is all assuming you're eating 1g of protein per pound of lean mass.*

4. Once you feel comfortable with your caloric intake or you feel like you wouldn't be comfortable eating more than that, begin decreasing your calorie intake SLOWLY each week from carbs and fats. I recommend 2-5% decrease in calories. 

5. Following that decrease, sprinkle in some cardio or take cals down a bit more. As you hit plateaus. Whatever you do, DO NOT decrease calories significantly in a short amount of time, or add a ton of cardio to your routine in a short amount of time. 

Takeaways

Your body is smart, and it will adapt. Don't continue to starve and run, run and starve. Slowly increase your caloric intake so you can set your body up to use energy like crazy. Build muscle and RMR (resting metabolic rate) with resistance training, and sprinkle in a slight decrease in cals or some cardio as needed, but NEVER overdo it. 

Thanks for reading!

References

1. Pontzer, H, et al. “Energy Expenditure and Activity among Hadza Hunter-Gatherers.”American Journal of Human Biology : the Official Journal of the Human Biology Council., U.S. National Library of Medicine, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25824106.

2. Pratley, R., et al. “Strength Training Increases Resting Metabolic Rate and Norepinephrine Levels in Healthy 50- to 65-Yr-Old Men.” Journal of Applied Physiology, American Physiological Society, 1 Jan. 1994, jap.physiology.org/content/76/1/133.

Adam is a fitness professional, Chipotle fanatic, and cookie enthusiast based in Fort Collins, CO. After hanging up the baseball cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. 

Adam is an ACE CPT and has years of experience in fat loss, muscle hypertrophy, and sports performance training.