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 You have been lied to about metabolism. Let’s get real. Most of those boosts you hear about out there, they’re just temporary gimmicks. But there are some science back strategies that can actually move the needle long term, and that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. I’m gonna reveal why sleep is actually better for your metabolism, will do a bigger impact than a cold plunge.

How neat. Non-exercise activity, thermogenesis trumps cardio and there is one supplement. That actually works. And by the way, it’s not what you think it is. And if you love learning all about metabolism, improving body composition, metabolic health, and aging powerfully, then be sure to subscribe to my channel.

’cause I am going deep into all of these topics. Alright, first, let’s bust some myths. Just the term fast versus slow metabolism. That reality is misleading because metabolism isn’t inherently fast or slow when you get down to it. Most of us are. Basically the same. It’s really about the different components of metabolism and how you can impact them.

So let’s break those down. Your overall metabolism or how many calories you burn throughout the day, how much energy you’re using. This is known as your total daily energy expenditure, or you might see it written out as TDEE and that TDEE is comprised of three areas. 60 to 75% of it is through resting metabolic rate.

And this is dictated by how much muscle mouse you have. That’s the big driver you can impact there. Thermic effect of food is about 10% of your TDEE protein’s, the big needle mover there. Then we have activity. This is where you think the biggest impact would be. Exercise reality is only about five to 10%.

The bigger needle mover, ready non-exercise activity thermogenesis or neat, 15 to 30%. So NEAT is standing instead of sitting. Fidgeting every time you’re moving, but you’re not actually going, I’m gonna go work out. And as you can see, it plays a far bigger role in exercise and really very little attention is paid to it.

I think that this is your secret metabolic weapon, and I’ll be talking about how we can really bump this up in a little bit. Now, from looking at the above, you probably are getting a. Oh, I see why all these metabolic boosters are not working like the spicy food or the cold exposure or the water intake.

Hey, the reality is all those things actually help little bits and we’ll talk about how to put them together. But let’s talk about the biggest needle. Of all what actually works and the biggest one. Neat. I view this really as your secret weapon. Here’s the problem with it. If you’re not actively tracking it, as you start to do harder workouts, as you do caloric restriction, you might actually decrease your neat because your body adapts to what you’re doing to maintain homeostasis and can drop your knee.

And in fact, knee can vary between people as much as a thousand to 2000 calories a day. This is why the. First thing I have someone do when I start working with them is start to track their neat track, their activity all throughout the day. Because I wanna make sure that if you’re adding an intentional exercise or you are doing any kind of caloric restriction, you aren’t compensating by dropping down that non-activity, uh, thermogenesis.

So what do you gotta do? You gotta start by tracking it. First thing you’re looking at is how many steps are you taking throughout the day? Your floor, like the non-negotiable. Is to get to 8,000 steps a day no matter what. Okay? The goal is gonna be to do higher than that, but the first step is always 8,000 steps a day.

Once you get to there, then go to 10,000 a day. Then go to 12,000 a day. But the very first thing that I want you to think about is how do I get to 8,000 steps a day? So all sorts of things make a difference. One of the things I love is walking after a meal, especially dinner because it’s gonna help with digestion.

Help get you ready for sleep stand rather than sit, walk rather than stand. Take the stairs whenever possible, like look throughout your life and go, how can I just. Move more all throughout the day. And by the way, like let’s say you had a desk job, if you could move into a more physically demanding job, you could increase your need by like 1200 calories a day.

I mean, it’s crazy. Or put a little alarm on your phone, five minutes. Every hour get up, move around. I do this naturally ’cause I just drink a ton of fluids, so I’m always having to get up and move around. I mean, in the perfect world when you think about it, you would have like your office on your top floor of your house and have to run down three flights of stairs to go to the bathroom and run back up, something like that.

But look at all the different ways that you can move more throughout the day. Now you’re monitoring meat to make sure that you aren’t lowering your total daily energy expenditure. So that’s the first one. The next one. Sleep seriously, this is a game changer for your metabolism and your overall metabolic health.

Poor sleep is going to impact both your total daily energy expenditure and your resting metabolic rate because it messes up your metabolic processes and your hormone regulation. Now there is a little positive when you don’t sleep well. Like if you, if you had less sleep, you actually have a little bit more movement throughout the, you know, the day ’cause you were up a little longer.

But honestly the, this is offset by the fact that you are probably moving less. ’cause you’re more tired, you’re not really working out, you’re hungrier. So you’re eating more. And we know that chronic sleep deprivation lowers your resting metabolic rate. Over time because it makes you better at storing fat.

It makes you more insulin resistant, it makes it harder for you to burn fat for fuel, and you’ve got elevated cortisol, which can make you store even more belly fat. Makes it harder for you to build muscle, and of course, who wants to work out hard or move more when you didn’t sleep well? My favorite exercise physiologist, Dr.

Andy Galpin theorizes that poor sleep could trash your resting metabolic rate by anywhere from five to 20%. I mean, that’s huge. Now that being said, if you’re in perimenopause or under stress or both, hey, what’s going on? Your sleep is probably suffering, and you want to check in with your menopause doc about this because you know, first hormone that tends to go down during menopause is progesterone, and that can massively impact your sleep.

So adding a little progesterone during perimenopause at night can be amazing for, for you in getting back to that restful sleep. Again, think about this ’cause progesterone truly is. The first hormone. Most people start to, uh, notice declining most women during menopause. So you have that going down. You also, during menopause have cortisol going up.

So those are those the double whammy for sleep. Now, I’m one of those people who tends to have my brain light up. 2:00 AM with, oh, I need to get up and write that down, right? Or I just have trouble shutting my brain off at night. And so I am relentless about my sleep routine. I have my power down hour, about the hour before bed.

I get my red lights going on. I have light bulbs in my bedroom for my red lights. That I flip over on, uh, my phone. It’s called a Phillips Hue. Amazing. Cool. The room down to 67 degrees and I just get it really nice and dark and quiet. And if I’m traveling, I always travel with an eye mask and earphones so that I can plug out any sounds.

And every night I take sleep candy, which is my thine melatonin, five HDPA Nossal B six Wonder Formula to help you fall asleep and stay asleep. Again. The big thing here I want you to understand is sleep’s gotta be a non. Negotiable here. Another non-negotiable protein. So I talked about the thermic effect of food being about 10% of calories.

The way you can increase that is by upping your protein relative to your carbs and fat. ’cause protein is three times the thermic effect of carbs or fat. I like you to eat 0.7 to one gram or higher, a protein per pound of your target body weight. And how do we make sure you get this in? Eat it first. I always say eat protein first.

That is my mantra. So some of the things that I love here, I love my loaded smoothies with my Reignite Wellness protein powder. A lot of times I’ll take my bone broth protein powder shake, and I’ll stir it into Greek style yogurt. I like grass fed, finished beef, pastured chicken thighs, wild salmon. And then what I like to do is I’ll have my protein.

With some veggies for the fiber, little bit of healthy fat, and I’ve got this perfect protein, fat and fiber satiety trifecta. Okay. Are there fat burner supplements? Because if you go on Amazon or you walk into a health food store, you’ll see all these fat burner, fat burner, fat burner. Like does it really work?

The reality is. Some of these things could have a small impact. I really emphasize small, like a couple percentage points. What we know is there is one thing that makes a big difference. It just happens to be one of my favorite food groups, caffeine. So I love coffee and green tea. And it turns out that these can help in a couple different ways.

Number one, they do bring your metabolism up a little bit, improve insulin sensitivity, help you burn fat, but also they may inhibit myostatin, which is this hormone that raises as we age to break down muscle faster and they may support fos statin. That’s you being able to. Build muscle. So beyond just the metabolic effect of a slight boost in metabolism, better fat burning, more insulin sensitivity, a little adrenaline hit, they also can help overall with muscle mass and muscle mass.

Of course, as we know, is the way you impact your resting metabolic rate. Now, there’s one other supplement that I would add in here. You might not think of this as a supplement. And this was kind of a recent addition to my stack and I kind of was like, where has this been all my life? And, and it is electrolytes because I drink a lot of fluids.

And what I found was I was starting to get like cramps and I think it was because I was diluting my electrolytes. And I also do a lot of, of sunlight and sauna. Shout out to Sunlighten and remember if you’re just even mildly dehydrated. It can raise cortisol, it can lower metabolism, and on the other side, if you’re hydrating, it can boost your metabolism a little bit.

So love electrolytes. I would tell you to do at least a serving or two every single day. I do that with my electro replenish from Reignite Wellness. Okay, let’s put it all together ’cause I wanna make sure your metabolism is firing on. All cylinders. Number one is the boost from doing non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

Okay? Remember we talked about 8,000 steps was your absolute bare, bare minimum, and ideally more is better now. I’m gonna give you another little piece to that, that you could take that and make it even bigger is throw on a rucking vest, five or 10 pounds of a rucking vest. That means you’re moving more weight all throughout the day.

One of the things that I do to help with Neat, by the way, is I have. Next to me in my office, I have the standup desk and then I have a walking pad right next to it. So that’s the first one is make sure you’re really keeping that neat up and you can add the intensity of that neat by throwing on a rucking vest.

So move as much as possible. And one more thing around the neat is if you’ve got the kind of job where you are just sitting for hours on end. Get yourself a little trigger on your watch, a trigger on your phone to say, Hey, get up and every hour get yourself up and move around. You could be doing some air squats, some lunges, some step ups.

Just make sure you’re moving all throughout the day. Do not spend hours on end sitting. All right, next up. Resistance training. So one of the things we talked about with metabolism was your resting metabolic rate. Resting metabolic rate, hormonally, thyroid and estrogen are going to impact it. But what you can really do to impact your resting metabolic rate, of course, is to add more muscle on your body.

Muscle does a lot of. Other cool things as we know, like improve insulin sensitivity, improve metabolic flexibility, but it’s also that metabolic Spanx that helps hold everything in tighter and boost your metabolism. It’s not huge, but it does add up. So every pound of muscle you put on might be 10 more calories that you’re burning a day.

But think about that. If you took off 10 pounds of fat, put on 10 pounds of muscle and had a hundred more calories burned a day, that is a sizable difference. When you look at the weight maintenance research, people gain weight fairly slowly, and it’s not much difference. It’s like maybe a hundred calories a day makes all the difference.

So this is huge. Doesn’t sound huge. It’s huge. Next one is sleep fix and make sure that you’re doing things that really help with sleep. I talked about sleep candy. I take that every night. I also take my magnesium body calm every night. I find that works really well as well. And don’t think you’re one of those people that doesn’t need much sleep.

And literally, I think there’s like one half of the percent of the population is are short sleepers. I’ve met one in my entire career. 40 years of working in the health and wellness space. One, one short sleeper. Uh, so seven to nine hours. See where you feel the best. And again, uh. Do all the things to make sure that you’re setting yourself up for a good night’s sleep.

Poor night’s sleep. Not only will it impact your resting metabolic rate, you’re not gonna work out as hard and you’re not gonna move as much. Then eat protein first. Very important. So that is that 0.7 to one gram per pound of target body weight. In the show notes, I will put a link to our eat protein first challenge that gives you all the meals.

Plans, et cetera, and the calculator. So it makes it super easy for you to put this into practice. Again, protein, you burn about 25% of the calories from protein in the digestion and the simulation of protein. It’s like less than 3% for fat and somewhere around five 7% for carbs. So it’s a sizable. Difference in what you can do and then stay well hydrated.

Stay well hydrated, and I highly recommend doing electrolytes. In fact, I would say start the day, end the day with electrolytes, so you make sure that you’re in balance. But that hydration throughout the day also does its own little mild metabolic boost, by the way, little fun fact. If you are even mildly dehydrated, I learned this from Dr.

Rick Johnson, who wrote, nature Wants us to be Fat. It can actually make you free up some of the sugar stored in your liver, turn it into, um, fructose and store it back as fat in preparation for you to have that on board. If you do need to liberate up water so you can get better at storing fat and slow down your metabolism by just being even mildly.

Dehydrated. And when you drink good fluids, you’ve got great electrolyte balance. Again, that’s why I take electro replenish now twice a day. You give your metabolic rate a little boost as well, so it’s not massive, but all these things add up. All right, I’ve got a video here on the screen that I think you’re gonna enjoy and.

I know I talked about a bunch of different things, so I put some links in the description so that you’ll have what you need to get started. So be sure to check those out and be sure to hit the notification bell so you don’t miss the next video.
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