What Your Metabolism is Actually Doing

Does your metabolism actually change over time—or is it more flexible than most people think?

In this episode of Health Recoded, we break down how the metabolism works in the human body and what it really means for your energy levels, weight changes, and long-term health.

If you’ve ever struggled with weight gain, weight loss resistance, or changes in energy as you age, this episode will help clarify what’s actually happening inside your body.

We also explore what most people misunderstand about “slow metabolism,” and whether metabolism can truly “break” or permanently shut down.

We cover:

• How metabolism actually works (energy expenditure and regulation)
• What happens to metabolism with aging
• Differences in metabolism between men and women
• Whether metabolism really slows down or “breaks” over time
• How lifestyle factors like sleep, activity, and muscle mass affect metabolic rate

If you’re looking to improve your energy and long-term health, this episode gives you a clear place to start.

Subscribe for more conversations that help you better understand your body. New episodes weekly.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:53 What metabolism actually is (energy expenditure explained)

03:02 What organ system uses the most energy?

04:54 How macronutrients affect the metabolism

09:00 How BMR affects metabolism

10:14 Men vs women: metabolic differences explained

16:32 Debunking “Gym-bro” advice

18:26 How does menopause affect the metabolism?

20:24 Caloric differences between men and women

21:21 Why people misunderstand “fast vs slow metabolism”

23:07 Does the metabolism “break?”

24:32 What is insulin resistance?

26:30 What is NEAT?

28:59 How to support a healthy metabolism (muscle, activity, recovery)

37:51 Key takeaways

This content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for guidance provided by your own medical professional.

Resources:

Mayo Clinic. (2024). Metabolism and weight loss: How you burn calories. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/metabolism/art-20046508

U.S. National Library of Medicine. (2023). Metabolism. MedlinePlus. https://medlineplus.gov/metabolism.html

Mauvais-Jarvis, F. (2015). Sex differences in metabolic homeostasis. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 17(Suppl. 1), 76-85. https://doi.org/10.1111/dom.12517

Speakman, J. R. (2013). Sex differences in energy metabolism. Annual Review of Nutrition, 33, 291-313. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-nutr-071812-161528

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22206-insulin-resistance

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

As a nurse, I get asked a lot of questions about metabolism. Is my metabolism broken? Is it slow? How do I change it? Am I insulin resistant? Unfortunately, there is a tremendous amount of misinformation online, particularly about metabolism, and most people don't actually understand what metabolism is. Hi, I'm Alex. I'm your nurse, and today we're talking about your metabolism, what it does, and how it works, and is it actually broken? Your metabolism is responsible for every heartbeat, every breath, every thought, every step that you take, yet most people only think about it when they're trying to lose weight. Your metabolism isn't just about weight loss, it's about staying alive. So today we're gonna break down how the metabolism actually works, differences between males and females, and debunk some common misconceptions about metabolism. So digging into the A and P, what is your metabolism? Metabolism refers to all of the chemical reactions occurring within the body that are necessary to sustain life. These reactions allow the body to produce energy, repair tissues, regulate hormones, maintain your body temperature, all the basic functions that happen in every organ system. So every cell in the body is constantly participating in metabolic activity. Metabolism isn't just one organ or one process, it is the sum of every chemical reaction that is occurring in your body. So there's two major components that we're going to talk about catabolism and anabolism. So catabolism involves breaking substances down to release energy. Examples include breaking down carbohydrates, fats, and glycogen in the body, and all of these generate ATP and fuel bodily functions. Then on the flip side of that anabolism, this involves building new structures. So building muscle tissue or creating hormones or repairing damaged cells. The purpose here is growth, repair, and maintenance. So think of metabolism as a constant balancing act between breaking things down for energy and then building them back up. So the primary purpose of metabolism is energy production. So cells convert nutrients from food into ATP. This is adenosine triphosphate. And I want you to remember that because it's going to be something that we're talking about a lot in today's episode. So every process in the body requires ATP. This is basic energy. Muscle contraction, nerve signaling, digestion, breathing, all of these things require ATP in order to happen. So your metabolism also helps to maintain homeostasis, body temperature, blood sugar regulation, fluid balance, electrolyte balance. Without metabolic processes, homeostasis would collapse. So yes, your metabolism is helping to build things up and break things down, but it is that balancing act that is keeping your body at a normal level. So let's talk about how this affects different organ systems specifically. Every organ and organ system has metabolic demands, particularly the brain and the heart. So we're going to start with those two. The brain is only about 2% of body weight, but it consumes about 20% of your body's energy stores. That's a lot. The brain requires a constant supply of energy to support cognition, memory, attention, and just overall nervous system regulation. So think about it. If you don't have a lot of energy or ATP with which for your brain to use, then you're going to feel brain fog or maybe mood dysregulation or feel more irritable or just tired in general. And that shows that your brain is requiring more than what your body has energy for or supply for your brain to use. For the heart and metabolism, the heart beats approximately 100,000 times per day, requiring an enormous amount of metabolic activity. It's pumping constantly. It doesn't stop, hopefully. It's pumping oxygen and blood and other key nutrients throughout the body because every organ system needs blood, because every organ system needs oxygen. So therefore, the heart requires a lot of energy in order to sustain that process. The immune system, when fighting infections, metabolic demand rises substantially. So again, if you're sick, your body's baseline is at a lower level of functioning because it's requiring so much more in order to fight off this infection or this foreign pathogen. So immune cells require large amounts of energy for inflammation, pathogen detection, antibody production, and tissue repair. And this is one of the reasons that illness often causes fatigue. So how does this all work between metabolism and ATP and the breakdown and the buildup of it all? So, step one, food becomes fuel. So all food contains some form of macronutrients, which is carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. And all of these nutrients get broken down during digestion. So carbohydrates break down into glucose, fat turns into fatty acids, and protein turns into amino acids. These smaller molecules then enter circulation and become available for cellular use or energy. So then the next step beyond that, cells produce ATP inside cells or mitochondria, as we know, the powerhouse of the cell, and their job is to convert nutrients into ATP. So all the things that I just talked about, they take that and they break it down and they turn it into ATP so that then the other organ systems can actually use it. Most ATP is produced through aerobic metabolism, and this requires oxygen, glucose, and fatty acids. The simplified equation, though, is glucose and oxygen together turns into ATP or energy, carbon dioxide, and water. So you think about it, you're breathing in oxygen and you're eating food and you're getting glucose stores and energy from that, but you're not directly getting the energy from it. It's what your body breaks down that it then turns it into said energy. So the ATP and then the carbon dioxide is the byproduct from the oxygen and then water as well. And this occurs continuously throughout the day, throughout your week, throughout life. Another step after that is hormones regulate your metabolism. So several hormones influence metabolic activity. Thyroid hormones, insulin, cortisol, we're going to talk about all of these. But thyroid hormones such as T3 and T4 help to regulate metabolic rate, and they influence energy expenditure, heat production, heart rate, and oxygen consumption. So this is why thyroid disorders often have weight changes or energy level changes as common symptoms, and then therefore you can get your diagnosis from there. Insulin helps move glucose into the cells. This promotes energy storage, glycogen production, and nutrient utilization. So think about with diabetics, this is why they need insulin. When you consume the food or the glucose and your body goes to break it down, you have to have the insulin with which to do something with the glucose and to help regulate your body. And if your body doesn't naturally produce that, that can be really dangerous because then if the insulin's not there to help regulate the glucose, that glucose builds up and that can cause some problems. As we talked about in the blood sugar episode. So this is where insulin helps with our metabolism. Moving into cortisol, this helps regulate energy availability during stress. So again, short bursts of cortisol can be very productive. It's when it's elevated over a prolonged amount of time that it can actually start to be really detrimental. But for our purposes today, glucose, sorry, cortisol can increase blood glucose and improve energy mobilization. So this can help activate you to a point of where you are moving and you're using that energy that has been produced. And again, during chronic stress, cortisol can alter metabolic regulation. If it's staying switched on entirely too long or if it's staying too high, then it can actually start to deplete instead of energize. And then the last hormone we're gonna talk about here is leptin and ghrelin. These help to regulate hunger, satiety, and energy balance. Okay. So you eat, these are released, and then it can help to regulate those different cues so that you're not overeating or under-eating, and therefore can maintain that level of balance that your body ideally needs. So we're gonna talk about a few other key ingredients here. I'm sure you've heard about BMR or basal metabolic rate. Approximately 60 to 70% of daily calories are burned from your basal metabolic rate or your BMR. This includes breathing, circulation, brain activity, organ function, and most calories burned each day are not actually from exercise. At rest, the brain uses 20% of energy expenditure, the liver does as well, skeletal muscle is also 20%, and then your heart is roughly 8 to 10%, and your kidneys roughly 7 to 10%. Even at rest, your body is extremely metabolically active. And this is why it's so important to make sure you're taking in enough calories throughout the day, but why it's also important to calculate the appropriate amount of calories for your base so that you know what you're doing if you're trying to go above to build muscle or below for a calorie deficit for weight loss. Most people think metabolism determines how easily they gain or lose weight. But before we talk about weight, we first have to understand that metabolism's primary job isn't weight management, it's just survival. So I mentioned we're gonna talk about the differences between men and women, so let's get into that. Most metabolism conversations devolve into eat more protein, lift weights, or do cardio, and all of those things are great. But when we're talking about the gender differences specifically, the real conversation is men and women share the same metabolic pathways, but hormones regulating those pathways are different. The distinction there is important. One of the biggest myths in health is that men and women should eat, train, and recover exactly the same way. The physiology is similar, but the hormonal environment is not. And that's not to say that we need to exercise completely differently. Women should still be going and lifting heavy weights. But there is some nuance into how we go about doing some things. Not every single piece of Jim Bro advice or any advice out there is going to necessarily be applicable in every situation. So let's dig into that a little bit more. Does the female metabolism operate differently than male metabolism? Yes and no. The metabolic processes themselves are identical. Everybody has a body, and more or less the body operates in the same way. But again, the different hormones can alter how that operates and how that works. So both sexes use ATP, metabolize carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, need to regulate blood sugar, need to exercise, but the major differences can come from hormone levels, body composition, reproductive physiology, and energy demands. So the engine is the same. The hormonal signals controlling that engine are different. So body composition differences. On average, men typically have more skeletal muscle mass, larger organs, and lower body fat percentages, whereas women typically have leaner, sorry, women typically have less lean mass, higher essential body fat, and greater fat storage capacity. Since muscle tissue is metabolically active, men generally have higher metabolic rates, considering considering that they have more muscle mass. This is why it's so important to go in and lift heavy weights and build your muscles because muscle is a metabolically demanding organ system. And as a result, your baseline of how many calories you're burning or your energy expenditure, even at rest, is going to be much higher. So for average body fat percentages between men and women, men can sit between 10 and 20%, women between 18 to 30%. So it's much higher. And again, remember hormones need fat. So we have women have more of a complex hormone profile. And so as a result, having higher body fat percentages is typically considered healthy within a certain range. So essential fat, this is as much fat as you need for essential basic functioning. Men can sit as low as 2 to 5%. I'm not saying that's easy, but I'm saying that they can sit there and still have a healthy hormone profile. And then for women, 10 to 15%. So it's a decent amount higher. So it's harder for women to get down to that really lean body composition and still have a healthy hormone profile. The additional fat stores in women support fertility, pregnancy, lactation, and estrogen production. And all of these things are really important. So talking about the two different hormones, the main two different hormones in this testosterone and estrogen. Testosterone generally promotes muscle protein synthesis, lean muscle growth, strength, recovery, and higher resting energy expenditure, as I was talking about a second ago. Because muscle requires so much energy to maintain, greater muscle mass contributes to a higher metabolic rate. This is why once you start really building up more muscle, you will find that you likely need to take in more calories at baseline just to maintain your energy, and you may not even gain weight from there. On the flip side of that, estrogen affects insulin sensitivity, fat distribution, appetite regulation, energy balance, and reproductive function. So estrogen is essentially metabolically protective in so many ways. Research suggests that estrogen helps maintain your insulin sensitivity and regulation, support cardiovascular health, and regulate hunger signals. Remember, in our estrogen episode, estrogen is very protective, and this is why women, when they start to go through menopause, notice so many changes in their body. That estrogen level is decreasing, and therefore the protective effects are as well. And this is important to notice because estrogen often gets blamed for things that it isn't actually causing. So does estrogen make losing weight harder? Not directly. This is where social media gets messy. There is no evidence that healthy estrogen levels inherently prevent fat loss. Fat loss still occurs through sustained energy deficits. So estrogen can influence water retention, appetite, cravings, energy levels, and your training performance, particularly across the menstrual cycle. During the luteol phase after ovulation, many women experience increased hunger, increased cravings, reduced insulin sensitivity, and increased water retention because you're moving towards menstruation, right? And this can make fat loss feel harder, but it doesn't mean the metabolism has stopped working and it doesn't mean that you can't lose weight. It's just your cycle and it's just the fluctuation that is naturally happening. And oftentimes, even if you increase a little bit in that week, you'll find that your body, after that week, re-regulates itself and you're actually back in the progress and process of weight loss that you needed. So this nuance is important because ultimately the physiology becomes more complex, but it's not broken. So let's get into some Jim Bro tips and talk about how they're different between men and women. One that I've already talked about before is fasting. Women may be more sensitive to aggressive energy restriction because reproduction requires substantial energy availability. So the thought here is essentially starvation mode, when you have two little energy stores and availability coming in, the body essentially freaks out and will hold on to whatever is left and you won't actually lose weight, you'll be retaining. So the female body continuously monitors for energy intake, energy expenditure, and nutrient access. And so if energy availability is starting to feel like it's chronically low for the body, that's when it may reduce the weight loss, menstrual regularity, fertility, or reproductive hormone production overall. And this is why extreme fasting for women can become problematic. The body doesn't know the difference between dieting, overtraining, and starvation. It only sees energy availability. So that's not to say that women can't fast. If you want to, you can, but the idea is if you're a woman in childbearing years and you really want to fast, first step is to really make sure that you're actually getting enough calories when you are in your non-fasting window. And then for your fasting window, try to make it smaller. So don't go over, I think it's 8 and 16 is the split that they say is the max. But ultimately, longer, um, prolonged calorie deficit for females of reproductive years has started to show in the research that it's not as productive as it would be for males. So one topic that I think is gonna speak to a lot of women is menopause. How does menopause affect the metabolism on women? I hear this all the time. I feel so bad for everyone that I talk to about it because it's awful. They'll come in and say, I went through menopause and now I can't lose any weight. I have an extra five pounds on my belly and I haven't changed anything, and I can't get rid of this belly fat. Estrogen levels decline significantly after menopause, and this affects the body fat distribution. So that from there affects body composition, muscle mass, fat distribution, and insulin sensitivity. Many women notice increased abdominal fat, reduced muscle mass, lower activity levels, and slower recovery. And so this can be really excruciating because you're working out and you're eating well and nothing is coming off. And this is why we want to prioritize lifting weights because we want to help support a healthy muscle mass but also hormonal environment as much as possible. Another myth does metabolism slow? Yes, but probably less than most people think. Research suggests that much of the metabolic change during menopause is often driven by loss of muscle mass, reduced activity, and hormonal changes affecting body composition rather than a dramatic collapse in metabolism itself. So this is why muscle matters. Beginning around age 30, adults lose approximately 3 to 8% of muscle mass per decade. This accelerates after menopause. So less muscle means lower energy, reduced glucose, reduced strength, and reduced resilience. So many women think my metabolism stopped after menopause, but what's often happening is hormonal changes, muscle loss, decreased activity, and changes in recovery. These are physiologically different from a broken metabolism. So let's talk about the difference between caloric intake needs for men and women. Women typically require fewer calories because they typically have smaller body size, less muscle mass, and lower total energy expenditure. So average estimates between the two, women can average about 1800 to 2400 calories a day for basic maintenance calories. And then for men, 2200 to 3,000 calories a day. And this is all depending on age, activity, body size, muscle mass, activity or sorry, energy levels. And again, there's nuance to this and it's subjective for everybody. So those are just basic ranges as a whole. The difference is largely driven by lean muscle mass, not because women's metabolism are worse. The question isn't whether men and women have different metabolisms. The better question is how hormones influence the same metabolic machinery. I wanted to talk about some metabolism myths that I'm sure we're all familiar with. And one is common, or one that is common, is fast or slow metabolism. It's very common to hear, well, my metabolism is really slow, so I just hold more weight or I gain weight. This idea is everywhere, but it's usually oversimplified. Most differences people feel day to day aren't coming from some fixed metabolic speed setting. They're typically explained by a mix of your body size and composition and your activity level, as well as your recovery, such as sleep and stress, and then recent dieting. History and your body's adaptation to that as a response. So this is where something like NEAT in EAT comes into play. NEAT stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And I'm gonna talk about this a little bit in more detail in a second, but it refers to the calories your body burns for all physical activities that aren't sleeping, eating, or sports like exercise. So walking, typing, fidgeting, things like that. So instead of thinking fast versus slow, it can be more accurate to think in terms of metabolic output changing with context, not identity. So often it'll be said thinner people just have a higher metabolism, which is why they're skinnier. Larger bodies inherently burn more calories at rest just to function because they're larger and they require more energy. So therefore, lean or thin individuals often have slower resting metabolic rates than larger individuals. The whole point is what is your activity level compared to what is your intake level? Another common one, does the metabolism break? This myth shows up most often after repeated dieting, burnout, or long periods of stress. But broken isn't really what's happening physiologically. What people are usually experiencing is adaptive down regulation of energy expenditure, hormonal shifts conserving energy, reduced spontaneous movement and output, and the increased drive to restore balance, so hunger and fatigue. So, in other words, your system is adapting, not malfunctioning or broken. And a useful reframe here is your body is responsive, not fragile. And this is why it's often recommended to not do super prolonged amounts of time of a diet or really restrictive caloric deficit. So I believe the um average is three months. If you're going for about three months and a focused caloric deficit, go on maintenance, increase your calories gradually, maybe reduce your activity gradually for six to eight weeks, and then go back into it. Because the more you keep your body in that lower deficit state, the more it's going to adjust and respond and think that that is its normal that it has to maintain at a baseline. And so you want to gradually teach it that that's where it needs to lose, and this is where it needs to maintain. Another one is insulin resistance. This one gets heavily oversimplified online, and I hear about it a lot. Insulin resistance is not a binary you have it or you don't label. It exists on a spectrum and is strongly influenced by multiple factors, including muscle mass inactivity, liver fat accumulation, and energy surplus over time, sleep and circadian rhythm disruption, and genetics and individual variability overall. So insulin resistance is not always linked to being overweight. Common causes can be excessive belly fat or visceral fat around the organs and the abdomen, lack of physical activity or a sedentary lifestyle, a family history of diabetes, and then underlying conditions like PCOS or fatty liver disease or even diabetes. It's a very common condition that actually precedes prediabetes or type 2 diabetes by several years. So it's not just a sign of a broken metabolism, it's actually something a little bit more complex that's going on underneath. But the difference is at a glance, insulin resistance, your cells do not respond effectively to insulin. So to compensate to keep your body sugar normal or your bloody, to keep your blood sugar in your body normal, your pancreas has to work overtime to pump out extra insulin. And then with diabetes, your body's demand for insulin eventually exceeds what your pancreas can actually produce, or your pancreas stops making insulin altogether. So as a result, your blood sugar levels rise to the threshold required for a diabetes diagnosis. Importantly, though, it's modifiable, often significantly, insulin resistance is. So instead of treating it like a permanent condition or a failing, it's more accurate to view it as a state the body can move into but out of depending on your environment and the behavior that you're providing it. So moving on to some nursing tips here. There is nothing out there that is going to magically jumpstart your metabolism. Before talking about boosting metabolism, it helps to understand what you're actually influencing. Your average daily expenditure isn't just a single number, it's a few systems working together. So we're going to talk about NEAT a little bit more and RMR so that we can understand some more of these basic processes that are going on underneath so that we can then understand how to apply these other metabolic support pathways. So your RMR, this is your baseline energy usage. So RMR stands for resting metabolic rate. And this is the energy your body uses just to stay alive at rest. So breathing, circulating blood, maintaining organs, brain function, XYZ. A few important points though, RMR is largely driven by lean muscle mass. It is relatively stable day to day, but it can adapt over time. And severe calorie restriction, stress, or illness can downshift it slightly as an energy conserving response. So RMR isn't something you hack, it's something you support through overall physiology. And there are ways that you can go get this tested. You can go get this tested with a metabolic test. Typically, DEXA scan places will have them, but you can get an idea for how much your body is actually using at baseline so that you can actually know where you're starting from for when you want to go into a cut for weight loss or a bulk if you're trying to build mass. But moving into neat, as we said earlier, this is non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This is where a huge amount of variability between people actually comes from. NEAT includes things like walking around your home, fidgeting, sitting versus standing, pacing while thinking, small movements throughout the day. So what makes neat so important is that it can vary by hundreds, sometimes over a thousand calories per day between individuals without formal exercise changing. And more importantly, neat tends to drop when people are stressed, sleep deprived, or dieting. It tends to increase naturally when energy availability and your mood are higher. So rather than thinking I need to burn more calories, it's often more accurate to think, how do I keep my baseline movement from collapsing? So, how do we do that? Let's talk about some tips to support our metabolic health without any extremes. These aren't hacks, they're stabilizers. The goal is to support RMR and neat so your system doesn't downshift unnecessarily. So protect your muscle like it's metabolic currency. This is why I'm such a strong advocate for going and lifting weights or doing something under mechanical tension for your muscles. Muscle is one of the strongest drivers of your resting metabolic rate. Resistance training two to four times a week, progressive overload over time, and adequate protein intake across meals can help to support this. You're not just building strength, you're influencing your baseline energy expenditure. So for me, for example, I used to have to go on a deficit at like 1400 calories. That's pretty low. The average daily recommended amount to not go below is 1200. So my maintenance level for where I would maintain weight to try to not gain or lose would be about 1600. I have gotten to a point where I need closer to probably 1900. Actually, no, I know. I just had a scan, I had that metabolic test I was telling you about, and my metabolic rate is now at 1900. And that's because I've gone through so many different muscle massing phases and I lift so consistently, but I also have a fairly high meat because I'm very active in the day. I walk 10,000 steps, even though I sit at a desk and I do my telehealth job, I'm still getting up and I'm doing physical activity between going to the gym or going dancing or going on a walk. And so this is how you're gonna basically build up that reserve and that capacity so that you're able to eat more. But it's not necessarily that you're building it so that you can eat more, it's that you've built it to a point where your body requires it. So stop the neat crash before it happens. One of the most common metabolic adaptations isn't dramatic, it's subtle movement reduction. So going on less walks or sitting more often, taking less breaks if you have a desk job like I do, walking the dog less, whatever it might be, to counter this. We want to do those things. Take your walking breaks, aim for consistent daily steps. If you have a tracker, track it. Notice low movement days, and I'm not saying this to ostracize them because recovery is still really important, but don't normalize every day that's a low activity day or a low movement day as rest. We want to try to average our days with a decent amount of activity in them without fully exhausting ourselves. This is especially important during stress or dieting phases because if you're going into those where you're having less energy already, your body's essentially going to crash. So eat enough to signal safety to your body. Kind of back to what I was talking about a little bit with fasting and females. Chronic under-eating doesn't just affect weight, it changes your output. If you're not taking in as much for the body to change into energy, it's not going to give you much energy to then go do things with. So when energy availability is consistently low, spontaneous movement often drops, recovery slows, and your training output declines as well. Adequate fueling helps maintain both RMR and NEAT by reducing energy conservation signals. I counsel a lot of people that tell me how little they're eating and they think it's a win. And then when I tell them to eat more because they're not losing weight, they get really confused. And I understand it's important to be in a deficit in order to lose weight. You have to be. But if you're eating so low that your body doesn't even have energy, anything to put energy out, it's gonna hold on to what it has. So this is why adequate fueling is important. Whether you're trying to gain muscle or lose fat, you don't want to put yourself into starvation mode. It's not a punishment, it's already a stress response to try to go lose weight. And so we need to put a healthy environment in place for our metabolism in order to do what we're asking of it in the first place. Okay. So then to piggyback off of that, sleep and recovery, sleep is a metabolic regulator. It is not a recovery luxury. Poor sleep reliably lowers spontaneous activity and it worsens your glucose regulation, which is therefore going to worsen the homeostasis of energy in your body. Even a few nights of disrupted sleep can reduce your neat the next day, shift your appetite signaling, and increase perceived effort of movement. This is one of the most underappreciated metabolic controls. So eating appropriately and making sure you're getting enough rest and sleep. And again, this is not to say that you need to make all of your days rest because we need to make sure we're staying active. But the point is the balance to support each other. So think in outputs, not fixes. Instead of asking how do I speed up my metabolism, a more useful question is am I preserving muscle? Am I naturally moving enough throughout the day? And am I recovering well enough that my body doesn't downshift? The whole point isn't to necessarily change your metabolism, it's to support it so that it can do what you're asking of it. Metabolism isn't something you force, it's something you either support or you constrain. Once you understand metabolism as a system of outputs rather than a fixed speed, the next question becomes what actually disrupts it? So instead of falling for magic hacks, prioritize strength training. I will die on this hill. Building lean muscle mass significantly improves the number of calories you burn at rest. Just like I told you, I was at 1400 calories for my deficit, and now for my maintenance, I'm sitting at roughly 19 to 2,000 calories, where my previous maintenance was 1600. That's a big difference. And when I don't eat that, I can tell. So this is not to say that you need to start go eating more in order to lose weight. It's you have to build the muscle so that you can then have that energy support for your metabolism. Muscle tissue is highly active and burns more calories than fat does even at rest. So building it will actually help to burn more fat in the future. Incorporate resistance training at least two to three times per week. Ideally, strength training with weights. You can use machines, but if you need to use body weight or bands to get started, that is a great place to start. Then nowhere. With that, we want to prioritize protein. Your body burns more energy digesting proteins compared to fats or carbohydrates. And it also helps to fuel and preserve your muscles. So aim for a balanced meal with ideally 20 to 30 grams of protein to preserve your muscle mass. But this is one gram per pound of body weight. So I weigh roughly 120 pounds. I'm aiming for 120 grams per day, but I'm honestly going closer to 140 or 150 because even more protein is only going to support your muscle even more. And this is not to say that you need to do, I think it's like two grams per pound has been shown to be not nearly as effective. But start where you can. One gram is a great place to start, and that's typically the sweet spot. Don't skip meals. Eating regular, balanced meals keeps your metabolism going. Long periods of fasting or severe calorie cuts tells your body to conserve energy, which lowers your metabolic rate. And so again, this comes back to the fasting and the starvation conversation that we were having a second ago. We want to make sure that we're supplying our body with enough so that it can continue to function, but we don't want to overdo it to the point that it's not losing at all. And so this is where knowing your RMR or figuring out your neat can really come into play. And then for some more supportive tips, prioritize your sleep, keep your stress in check, and stay hydrated. Quality rest, seven to nine hours, is vital for hormone regulation, which is then vital for regulating your hunger and then your metabolism. So lack of sleep can lower or slow your body's energy usage overall. And stress is also a component of this. Stress raises your cortisol, and this hormone encourages your body to hold on to fat if it stayed high for too long. So managing stress and improving sleep can help to balance all of these things. So my key takeaways for you metabolism isn't one organ or one process, it's the sum of every chemical reaction happening inside your body. Think of metabolism as a constant balancing act between breaking things down and building things back up. Men and women share the same metabolic pathways, but the hormones regulating those pathways are different. There's nothing that's going to reset your metabolism because your metabolism doesn't really break. Your metabolism is a system that can be supportive so that it can best then support you. If you've been worried that your metabolism is broken, hopefully this episode helped to clarify how your metabolism actually works. Share this with someone else who may benefit, and don't forget to like and subscribe, please. If you ever have questions, you can always comment or reach out to me. I'm on Instagram at Health Recoded Podcast and I'll respond there too. I'll see you guys next week for our next topic, and thank you for listening.