What is Metabolism?

Energy, focus, body composition, recovery, detox, and hormone balance is all resting on the health of your metabolism.  In this episode, we dive into what metabolism actually is and how to we take care of ourselves so our metabolism is purring like a perfectly revved engine.

Transcript

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Jolie Life Podcast. This is Julia. And today I want to talk about what is metabolism? What in the world is metabolism? We throw this word around, we say this word all the time. We say, oh, my metabolism is low, or I'm trying to improve my metabolism. If you don't need enough calories, your metabolism is going to take. We talk about metabolism, metabolism, metabolism. What is metabolism? It is much bigger than you think. So think about how you feel right now. How is your energy level? How is your focus? The last time that you worked out? How quickly did you recover the last time you had a cold? How quickly did you recover the last time you had too much alcohol? How quickly did you recover? When you eat, how do you feel after you eat? Do you feel light?
(01:06)
Do you feel heavy? Do you feel bloated? Do you feel energized? Do you feel tired? How do you feel after you eat? How does your stomach feel when you wake up? Does it feel light? Does it feel like it's still digesting? Does it feel heavy? Does it feel upset? How are your poops? Are they happening regularly? Are you constipated? Do you have diarrhea? Do you have lots of pain like cramping when you're going to the bathroom? All of these things are related to metabolism. Your hormones are related to metabolism. Metabolism is how your body breaks down foods. It's how your body builds and repairs, and it's how your body detoxes. And so we're going to break these three processes down. That all equal metabolism energy will be the first one we discuss because we all want energy. We all want to go through our day and feel energized.
(02:10)
We want to sleep well, and we want to wake up well rested. All of the pathways that convert food into energy are used to power your cells. This is an essential part of metabolism. Metabolizing your food, breaking down what you're eating and packaging it in a way that your body can use it for energy. So this means that energy dips are feeling tired in the morning or brain fog in the afternoon, or sort of the time you need a siesta at 3:00 PM are all influenced by your metabolism. When you see these things, when you feel these things, when you sense these things, you know that something is happening in your metabolism that is not optimal for you. Many of us lump the whole discussion about metabolism with something that has to do with weight, but it is so much more important because it has to do with energy.
(03:20)
And energy does affect your weight, but energy affects how you move. Energy affects your alertness, energy affects how you feel. If you have energy swings, mood swings. If you sleep for eight hours and you're still tired in the morning, this is a metabolic issue and a little metabolism repair needs to happen depending on how severe these things are. And at the end of the podcast, we'll talk a little bit more about like steps to repair one's metabolism or steps to optimize one's metabolism. The second aspect of metabolism is that it has to do with your building and repairing. And this I think is the most overlooked aspect of metabolism. Metabolism is directly related to your ability to heal, your ability to recover from exercise from a weekend to make a baby. That's your metabolism actually, because a lot of building and repairing is happening to maintain your brain health.
(04:35)
All of this is dependent on how well your body can synthesize. So put together and repair proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. So what are nucleic acids? Nucleic acids are the building blocks of your RNA and your DNA. This is the blueprint for your cell. So your metabolism is intricately involved in how well your body can create these things, how well your body can repair these things, how well your body can make a new cell, can repair cells, can repair DNA or misfolded proteins. All of this is related to your metabolism. Your metabolism has a huge impact on your ability to heal from say a surgery or an injury or even a cut on your finger. It has a huge impact on how you recover from medicine. I was listening to another podcast called Girl Gains, which is about bodybuilding for women. And the ladies were talking about how quickly their filler and their Botox disappears.
(05:53)
And part of that is because their metabolism is so revved up that it metabolizes the Botox super quick and it gets rid of the filler super quick. So metabolism has a lot to do with your building and repairing. The third aspect of metabolism is detoxification. So we talk about detox, detox, detox. Your body is made to detox. Your body is an engine. All engines have waste products, all engines have stuff they need to get rid of, have trash that needs to be put out, and your body has many metabolic processes that are related to detoxification. If your metabolism is compromised, then your detox is compromised, and when your detox gets compromised, then you have a buildup of waste material with your cells and around your cells that impair the function of your cells and can lead to disease, which of course is not what we want.
(06:59)
An inability to detox to feeling like your limbs are weighed down. With lead, for instance, you just feel heavy. You just feel like everything takes an effort. If you're suffering from acne, particularly cystic acne, if you have lots of skin eruptions, skin eruptions are, you break out randomly or you get irritated randomly. Those are skin eruptions. If you have yeast infections and those can happen vaginally, they can happen in your gut. That's a huge cause of gut dysfunction. That is not IBS and is not Crohn's. It is sometimes due to yeast overgrowth, and that has to do with metabolism. All of these things are related to detoxification pathways, and a huge organ in your metabolic system is your liver. And so if your liver is compromised, you're unable to detoxify medicines, chemicals, you're unable to detoxify a lot of the byproducts that come from regular cell respiration.
(08:14)
So our detox process is very much tied to our metabolic process. So your ability to remove waste products from your body is part of your metabolism. And when we think about metabolic health, we want to think about the moment like your metabolic health affects how you feel right this moment as you're listening to this podcast. And it will affect how you feel 5, 10, 15 years from now. How you'll feel 18 months from now is impacted by your metabolism. So one of the things that I did for you, I made a metabolic assessment, which is on our website. It is www.thejolielife.com. You can go there and get the metabolic assessment. It's super quick, but it asks many questions related to metabolism, and you can score it and you'll get a general score of how your metabolism is. So let's jump ahead. What do we do to repair our metabolism?
(09:24)
There are many things that we can do, and I'm just going to touch on a few of them because we're going to dive deeper into this in later podcasts. So what can you do right now when you finish listening to this podcast to improve your metabolism? Your metabolism is intricate connected to what you're eating. So the first improvement or the first action point has to do with the food that you eat because the food that you eat is information to your body of what to do. Can you guess what is the number one thing that throws our metabolism and metabolic processes off kilter, off balance? That one thing is sugar. So if you do anything for your health, if you begin to cut back on the amount of sugar you have in your diet, you will find your metabolism balance. Now, you say to me, some of you'll say, okay, I eat a ton of sugar.
(10:40)
Yes, I need to unhook. How do I do that? So for those of you who eat a ton of sugar and you need to unhook, my advice always is to start with the lowest hanging fruit. So the sugary things that you can easily replace, the sugary things that you can easily choose a better choice, replace this first. So let's say you're a soda person. Replace soda with sparkling water. Let's say you love your chocolate bar. Make your chocolate bar instead of milk chocolate, upgrade it to dark chocolate. You can do this with baby steps. You get less and less sugar. Let's say every day you come home, you want something sweet, make it so it's really hard to get that something sweet, that something sweet isn't there or that something sweet is there in very, very finite amounts. So this is how we begin to roll back our sugar consumption, and as we roll it back, our taste buds begin to adjust and our cravings for sweet become more easily met.
(11:53)
So it's kind of like, I call it glucose sensitivity. So the less sugar you have, the less glucose you have, the more it registers, the less amount registers more. So let me put this in context because it might be hard to understand. So for example, I love Pilars chocolate cake. My favorite dessert, I make it myself. It's named after a friend of mine. It was her recipe. I adore it. So I would make pilars chocolate cake usually once a week, and if I ever had guests, you knew what dessert you were getting. It was pilars chocolate cake. So what I started doing was having the sugar in the cake. So I think it caused for a cup of sugar. I would put half a cup of sugar, and then I got used to it, and Pilars chocolate cake tasted fabulous with half the amount of sugar.
(12:49)
If I forgot and I went back to the old recipe, suddenly it would be like, oh my gosh, it's so sweet what happened here? Because I had changed my glucose sensitivity, I was happy, satisfied with less sugar. So this is the process that we're doing as we're rolling back or we're unhooking from sugar. So there will be those of you who say, well, I don't really eat that much sugar, but sugar's hidden. So things that we don't think of as sugar actually are sugar. So for example, maybe you are a person who loves an English muffin with a little jam and peanut butter. Two of those three ingredients equal sugar, the jam and the English muffin, we don't think of it that way, but bread, bagels, pasta, crackers are all sugar. Your oats, your rice, your sushi, like what gets wrapped in the fish, the white part that is sugar.
(13:58)
The bun on your hamburger is sugar. The caramelized walnuts, caramelized equals sugar on the walnuts, your mashed potatoes, that's sugar, your macaroni, that sugar. So sugar is found in many different forms that we may not intuitively say, oh yeah, that's sugar. So let's say your diet is you have a bowl of oatmeal in the morning with some fruit, maybe some raisins, a little bit of milk, a little bit of brown sugar. And then for lunch, you have, let's say a ham and cheese sandwich and a salad, or let's say you just have a salad, but you have croutons or little squiggly things on it. And then for dinner, you have a, let's say pasta with some shrimp and steamed vegetables. So in every meal you have sugar, you have it in your breakfast with your oats, your dried fruit, your brown sugar. You have it in your lunch with your croutons or your squiggly things with your bread.
(15:10)
You have it in your dinner with your pasta. And we might have sugar in other forms along the way. It might be in the form of a latte or a frappuccino or a piece of candy or a piece of chocolate, a bun, a muffin. Those are forms of sugar. So if you notice, hey, my metabolism is off whack, I'm eating and then 30 minutes I need to lay down and take a nap. Then we're looking at, okay, what am I eating that is throwing my metabolism off? And even though you're not eating refined sugar, you're eating things that easily turn into sugar. So the hack here is to begin dialing that back. And I like to take it either from the end of the day or the beginning of the day. So maybe I dial back the carbs, the sugary, the quick glucose translation, carbs like pasta and bread.
(16:11)
I dial it back from dinner so I don't have it at dinner. I only have that at lunch and breakfast, or perhaps I only have it at lunch and dinner. I find from my body the best time to have those carbs is lunch. When I have it at breakfast, it makes me tired. Mid-morning when I have it at dinner, it disturbs my sleep. But a small portion at lunch, it works for me, but you can play with your body to see what works for you. So we talked about those that know that they're addicted to sugar. We talked about those that say, Hey, I eat healthy, but if we looked at the daily consumption, it would be high in sugar. So let's say that you have a pretty clean diet and you still are feeling these ups and downs. Here is time for fine tuning.
(17:09)
And so it's time to really look at, okay, what are we eating? How are we eating? What's the timing of our eating? Because the body is incredibly sensitive and responsive, which is a huge boon for us. It might be something that you don't realize is screwing up your metabolism. And by just observation, you can say, oh, that doesn't really work for me. So for example, I have a very, very, very clean diet, and I notice that if I eat carbs at certain times, it'll make me immediately tired. And it's not that I can't eat carbs or that I'm eating too many carbs, it's just how my body is responding to it. But for instance, if I have a salad and then I have a piece of bread, that doesn't happen because the salad slows down the absorption of the glucose and it keeps my metabolism in a less volatile state.
(18:19)
So if you have a very clean diet, it's time then for you to put on your investigation glasses and have no judgment, no preconceived notions. You are scientific investigator. So we don't go in here with a bias and in the ideal world, and we look at, okay, what are we eating? How are we eating? When are we eating and how do we feel afterwards? And we try and go back and correlate those things. And then we do tests where we tweak our diet and we change things and we see what happens. So that is a quick and dirty on the most most hyper impactful thing you can do as it relates to your metabolism. The second most impactful thing you can do is to make sure you're hydrated. And we always talk about hydration, hydration, hydration. The reason for that is every metabolic process that happens in your body depends on water.
(19:22)
And so sometimes when we are tired or when we are irritable, it's not that we're actually tired, it's that our metabolism is off. It is slowed, it is stalled because not all the materials are there to do what our body needs to do. And one of the materials that is frequently missing is water. So one of my first fixes is, okay, if you notice that you're getting tired or you're running low or your energy is tanking out, or you're becoming very fidgety, irritable, drink some water and see what happens. Most often you are under hydrated and hydration is dynamic. So the amount of water you need, for example, on a hot day will be different than a cold day. The amount of water you need if you are in a really dry environment is different than, let's say you're sitting outside and it's 80 degrees in humid.
(20:22)
In New Jersey, it's a little bit different. Your need for water will be different based on what you're eating. So when I'm eating a lot of really watery fruits and vegetables like watermelon and tomatoes and cucumbers and things of that sort, guess what? I don't need as much water because I'm eating my water. But let's say it's a day where I'm having carrots and sweet potatoes and beets and things like that, like denser vegetables, then I'm going to need more water because I'm not getting that same amount of water in my food. So be mindful that your water needs will change If you have a cold, you need more water. If you're drinking more coffee, you need more water. If you had a late night, you need more water. There are reasons. If you had something that was a little bit salty that you're not used to, you'll need more water.
(21:23)
So let your water intake be dynamic. And when you find you are, let's say you've taken care of the sugar, but still you're running a little bit sludgy. The second thing is to add in water. And I will put a plug in for eating You're water. It is one of the best things. So not only to drink it, but to eat foods that are high, have high water content because it's like slow drip irrigation for your body. It's wonderful. So I will put a plug there, drink it like the little sprinkler system, but also eat it like the slow drip system. So those are two things that you can do diet wise to help your metabolism. The third thing that you can do to help your metabolism is get out and move. And I cannot stress how important this is. Movement is essential for optimal metabolism because the contraction of our muscles, particularly our big muscle groups like our quads and our hamstrings, so our thigh muscles, our butt muscles, our glutes, the contraction of those muscles moves up in.
(22:39)
So those muscles have very long cellular bodies, and so they cover a lot of surface and there are receptors that take up glucose. When the muscle contracts, those receptors go to the surface of the cell and take up glucose. Glucose is the energy your body runs on. It is what your food is broken down into, and that is what's what's swimming in your bloodstream is the glucose. So when we contract these big muscles, we are stoking the flame of our metabolism because we're activating more glucose absorption from our muscles, and we want our muscles to use glucose. We don't want our glucose to be stored in large amounts in our liver. We don't want our glucose to be stored in large amount in our abdominal cavity, and we don't want it to be stored in large amounts in our fat, like our subcutaneous fat or the fat that you see.
(23:44)
So one of the big things that you can do to help improve your metabolism, and not only does it affect glucose absorption, but it affects many other pathways related to your metabolism that give you energy, that lower inflammation, that lower cortisol levels, that improve sleep at night is to move, is to exercise. And if I were to give you a blanket prescription, I would say that everyone needs to do low to medium cardio hopefully every day, if not every day, then try and do it almost every day and low to medium. Cardio is like taking a walk with your dog or taking a brisk walk, but you can still talk to your friend. Everyone needs to be doing that. That should be like the bar that if we breathe, we take a walk as simple as that. We breathe, we take a walk, and it can be around your driveway, it can be up and down your steps.
(24:43)
It can be around your house, it can be around the block. There's nothing that says that you have to go to a gym or you have to go to a park or you have to go to a track. Those things are great and I definitely use them, but find ways to walk. The other blanket prescription is to do something to build your muscles. Muscles are your metabolic friend. And so you always want to include in your movement routine, in your exercise routine, two to four days of doing something that builds your muscles. To build our muscles, we have to stress them out. That means that we have to lift heavy things. Our heavy thing could be ourselves, it could be a weight, it could be the resistance that we push against. So there are many ways to get this type of exercise. The important thing though is that you are putting effort.
(25:43)
So for me, for example, if I do bicep curls and it's like a 10 pound weight, that's not doing anything, that is not building my muscle. I need to have a weight. That is challenging when I get to the end of my reps so that my muscle is stressed and it says, Hey, I need to build stronger. Because the more muscle we have, the more elasticity we have in our metabolism. I see muscle as being very, very protective to metabolic health. So then when there are factors that might put our metabolism off kilter, our muscle, those are the guardrails of our little bowling alley here that helps keeps us. So for instance, if we have high cortisol levels and our metabolism is getting all screwed up by that, our muscles help to mitigate that by uptaking. Some of the glucose, let's say we have been working really hard, we get a cold and we need to recuperate.
(26:57)
Our muscles are active in our production of human growth factor and other immunological factors that it helps us to recover faster. So you really, really, really do need your muscles. So to wrap up, what is metabolism? Metabolism is your ability to have energy, consistent energy metabolism is all the pathways related to detoxification and metabolism is your body's pathways for repair and rebuild. We all need to be mindful of it. The main thing that throws off our metabolism is excess sugar, not moving stress, not getting enough sleep and being dehydrated. So if we can help to correct some of those things, get more sleep. Sleep is important, hydrate ourselves according to what our body needs. Eat foods that don't contain large amounts of sugar and be mindful of how much sugar we eat during the day from regular old food to move daily. You will find that your powerhouse will get stronger, that you will have metabolic power and that metabolic power will power you through your day.
(28:15)
Literally. It will help you do all the things that you need to do and to feel good while doing it, which at the end of the day, the most important thing to me is that I've gotten through my day and I feel good. I don't want to ever get through my day and feel like I'm under the floor. We always want a little gas in the tank at the end of the day so that we're not totally spent, totally exhausted, totally out of ourselves. And how do we get that through mastering our metabolic health. If you want to know more, go to our website, www.thejolielife.com. I also do lots of coaching for people and coming up this fall. So look out for it. We will have the program restore eight weeks of metabolic power. You don't have to be in New Jersey to do this program, but it will help you to really hack into your body's metabolic processes to give you more energy, to help balance out your hormones, to clear the brain fog, to make you feel better. So look out for that. Have a wonderful day, and go forth and have tons of energy.