How's Your Metabolic Health?
The essential health factor you may have never heard of.
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The fitness and wellness industries tell us every day through social media tons of different things to care about. The right supplements, the right workouts, the right rituals, habits, and practices. It’s overwhelming.
What we need more than a landslide of practices is to know what to prioritize.
The most important aspect of your fitness and health might be something you’ve never known to think about.
The essential health factor you’ve never heard of.
You’ve probably heard of metabolism, but could you define it?
Metabolism is the sum total of all the chemical reactions in the body that create and use energy.
Seems straightforward enough, right? Let’s take it one step deeper.
Energy is created in the mitochondria, you know - “the powerhouse of the cell”? Every cell has mitochondria (almost), and some cells have way more than others. For our purposes, it’s helpful for you to know that muscles have lots of mitochondria (or should) so they can do their job.
That job? Skeletal muscles move us and smooth muscles keep us alive (through the heart, digestion, breathing, etc).
Metabolic health is the totality of the function of the structures in your body that create and use energy.
(Point of fact: there’s no clinical definition of metabolic health. Conventional medical practice says it’s the absence of metabolic diseased like diabetes and heart disease - but I personally believe it’s so much more than that, which is what the rest of this is article is about.)
All sounds good, right?
IMHO, you should care more about metabolic health than the number on the scale and the visibility of your abs.
Why?
Because metabolic health is a foundation of longevity, wellbeing, quality of life… and, yes, the prerequisite for said abs.
How it works:
Your body is an energy making machine.
Food goes in. Assuming you have a well-functioning digestive system, that food is broken down into component parts that are transported through the intestinal wall. Your circulatory system takes those bits and pieces throughout the body where it’s used for all kinds of things. One of those things is to convert it to some form of either glucose (sugar) or glycogen. Glycogen gets stored in the liver and glucose gets used by the mitochondria to make energy. Then you get to go do all the stuff you wanna do!
Cool? So cool.
There are a whole host of hormonal processes that go into that. The pancreas makes insulin to allow the cells to take up the glycogen to get used. Glucagon, also made in the pancreas, tells the liver to convert glycogen into glucose. On and on and on.
In the other direction, the mitochondria themselves have to function well so they can make energy. If you have more mitochondria, you’ll make more energy, which means a rockin’ and rollin’ metabolism.
So when you say “I want more energy” or “I want to feel more energized”, on some level you could literally saying “I want more volume and more active mitochondria”.
Benefits of a “Good” metabolism:
Metabolism = having energy, but really there’s so much more. A healthy metabolism means you’re digesting food well, having a cardiovascular system that distributes energy well, you’re hormonally balanced with few spikes and drops in blood sugar, and your cells soak up your sugar well.
What’s this translate to? A whole host of things your familiar with:
Stable, healthy blood pressure
Absorbing nutrients well
Healthful and strong muscle tissue
Lack of visceral fat around the organs (bad because it puts pressure on organs)
Healthy response to sugar intake (or fasting)
All these things combined prevent a bunch of things you don’t want: heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, increased blood cholesterol and lipids, inflammation.
3 Simple tactics for metabolic health:
Convinced?
Want to know what to do about it?
Limit blood sugar spikes & dips - to be hormonally healthy your cells want a steady level of glucose available to them. When your blood sugar spikes or drops it damages the cellular structures that keep your metabolism humming. How to limit spikes and drops? Eat regular meals at regular intervals, that have protein and fats, and limit high volumes of fast-absorbing sweets (read: sugar, white flour, processed potatoes, etc)
Pick up heavy things - depending what decade you were born you might think to “burn more calories” you should do high intensity cardio. Unfortunately, that’s fitness media nonsense. When you pick up heavy things (strength and resistance training) your body builds more mitochondria into the cells of your muscles. That boosts metabolism, soaks up more blood sugar, and keep you energized.
Take care of your gut - the whole thing breaks down if your gut is garbage. Eat fermented food and enough fiber so the bacteria and other microbes in your gut can flourish, they help digest your food and keep the gut healthy, and then that food keeps you rockin & rollin
Great, practical post!