What is metabolic efficiency?
The measurement of how efficient our body utilizes carbohydrates and fat for energy at various intensities and durations of exercise as well as at rest.
Do you know how well or how efficient you are at burning FAT for fuel at rest and during exercise sessions?
You can’t really know unless you are tested via metabolic efficiency testing equipment as we used to do for years with NEW LEAF (until Lifetime Fitness took it away from the rest of the world!) or the Parvo metabolic cart or other services. The testing metabolic carts are not cheap to purchase but you can use portable testing equipment as we discussed on my podcast.
We have talked about training your body to burn fat over sugar for many years on my original podcast FIT FAT FAST and in many blogs as well as my book and manual. Metabolic Efficiency is the secret sauce for performing your best in life and endurance events/races.
We have talked about eating more fat to burn fat… or eat more carb/sugar to burn sugar.
If you want to lose weight and improve performance in your next athletic event then you may want to start training and eating to improve your ability to be a more efficient fat burning machine.
EAT FAT – BURN FAT
EAT CARBS – GET FAT.
Is this true?
It depends.
Based on our bio-individual unique self – our genetics, gut biome, lifestyle habits, and activity level, we burn fat at different rates. We can improve our eating habits and food choices as well as how we train and deal with stressors (as with The WHOLESTIC Method eight elements to train the WHOLE athlete) to become more metabolically efficient.
For many many years, I fueled, trained and raced long distance events as a low-carb, metabolically efficient athlete including Ironman Hawaii, marathons, 50k trail running and more distance events.
- If we eat more carbohydrates –especially from refined sugars, we will burn more sugar and probably gain weight.
- If we eat more healthy fats like avocados, fish oil, raw nuts, olive oil, and grass-fed butter, the body will burn more body fat.
How you train makes a difference as well – as MAF training we have been taught for years by the master Phil Maffetone. MAF training is training at or below your MAX AEROBIC FUNCTION heart rate. Learn more in my The WHOLESTIC Method Manual in the exercise chapter but for now, train at 180 – your age plus 5 if fit and healthy or minus 5 beats if sick or undertrained.
If you want to train your body to be metabolically efficient or rather a fat burning machine so you can spare carbohydrate stores for when you really need them- then build up that aerobic engine and train your body to burn fat. How do you know where to train – which heart rates you burn fat and what is your metabolic cross over point where you shift to burning more carbs than fat? Well, you can find someone trained in metabolic testing – ideal scenario OR you can train with me to build up your aerobic engine by training as well as improve your fat burning capacity with how, when and what you eat.
The WHOLESTIC Method program to train The WHOLE Athlete!
So what is metabolic flexibility?
“The ability to burn the fuel that is available to you with ease. That means if glucose is available, you burn that, but when it is absent you are metabolically flexible enough to use fatty acids and ketones for fuel. This never leaves you in a limbo where you are dependent on one single fuel source. -Metabolic Health Summit
“becoming metabolically flexible may require some metabolic training, and you might have to put in some work to teach your body how to switch from glucose to alternative fuel sources. It can be a bit of a process, but a worthy one. This involves an adaptation period where insulin is suppressed to the point that we can start breaking down our own fat for fuel, and if sustained long enough, enter ketosis! It’s almost like training ourselves to be hybrid cars. Metabolic Flexibility has the potential to have a powerful impact on overall health, and its a topic we will be diving into again at the Metabolic Health Summit 2020!” -Metabolic Health Summit
Metabolic flexibility is the ability to respond or adapt to conditional changes in metabolic demand.Metabolic Flexibility in Health and Disease: Cell Metabolism – Cell Press
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131(17)30220-6
Genetics, insulin resistance, mitochondrial function, the rate of fat oxidation and chronic stress – influence your ability to utilize fat as your main fuel source for daily activities as well as exercise sessions. If you have insulin resistance, then the cells do not respond as strongly or normally to circulating insulin. This happened to me from living life as a race…not from eating a high carb diet!
Chronic insulin resistance is related to chronic stress and chronic consumption of excess refined carbohydrates. We need to lower the insulin levels by eating a low carb diet with higher fats and moderate protein that balance your blood sugar, keep you full and satiated for hours. PLUS YOU NEED TO MANAGE YOUR STRESS! Get outside, breathe and move more- disconnect and unplug, be grateful and find joy in each day.
Exercise will help increase your insulin sensitivity, increase mitochondria and lower body fat if you train right for your type (Goldilocks Effect). We want to activate our fat burning furnace and increase our insulin sensitivity. FAT is our friend – not our enemy… well healthy fats and burning fat rather than storing it!
What is metabolic flexibility?
“Metabolic flexibility describes the ability of an organism to respond or adapt according to changes in metabolic or energy demand as well as the prevailing conditions or activity. The more common concept of metabolic flexibility has been promulgated in the context of fuel selection in the transition from fasting to fed states, or fasting to insulin stimulation to explain insulin resistance (Goodpaster and Kelley, 2008). The original Randle Cycle (Randle et al., 1963) was put forth as a tenet to explain elevated fatty acid oxidation and reduced glucose oxidation underlying insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Kelley and Mandarino later reconsidered these concepts following a series of elegant in vivolimb balance studies demonstrating the metabolic inflexibility in human type 2 diabetes and obesity in which, during post-absorptive conditions, skeletal muscle has elevated glucose oxidation and reciprocal reduced fatty acid oxidation (Kelley, 1994, 1993; Kelley and Mandarino, 1990; Kelley et al., 1993). Since those first experiments were described, the term metabolic flexibility has evolved to encompass other metabolic circumstances and tissues and more broadly refers to a physiological adaptability. Metabolic flexibility was also inferred to have tissue specificity in response to nocturnal and diurnal fasted and fed conditions (Kelley et al., 1999).
Exercise is another physiological condition requiring metabolic flexibility in order to match fuel availability with the metabolic machinery to meet enormous increases in energy demands. Exercise duration and intensity can each profoundly influence energy demand, thereby taxing energy stores and catabolic pathways in very different ways. Although the topic of exercise-induced changes in metabolism has been covered in recent reviews (see (Egan and Zierath, 2013; Hawley et al., 2014)), the mechanisms underlying metabolic flexibility with exercise deserves further inquiry. “Muscle plasticity” was first used (Pette, 1980) as a term used to characterize muscle’s ability to respond to a variety of stimuli, and included a metabolic flexibility. Exercise training can alter fuel storage and availability, and recent evidence that exercise promotes changes in the skeletal muscle epigenome (Rasmussen et al., 2014), transcriptome (Keller et al., 2011; Raue et al., 2012) and proteome (Hoffman et al., 2015), all of which constitute an anabolic flexibility in order to meet changes in energy requirements for each bout of exercise or activity, merit deeper investigations into the molecular mechanisms driving metabolic flexibility. -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513193/
Metabolic flexibility is the capacity for the organism to adapt fuel oxidation to fuel availability. The inability to modify fuel oxidation in response to changes in nutrient availability has been implicated in the accumulation of intramyocellular lipid and insulin resistance. The metabolic flexibility assessed by the ability to switch from fat to carbohydrate oxidation is usually impaired during a hyperinsulinemic clamp in insulin-resistant subjects; however, this “metabolic inflexibility” is mostly the consequence of impaired cellular glucose uptake. Indeed, after controlling for insulin-stimulated glucose disposal rate (amount of glucose available for oxidation), metabolic flexibility is not altered in obesity regardless of the presence of type 2 diabetes. To understand how intramyocellular lipids accumulate and cause insulin resistance, the assessment of metabolic flexibility to high-fat diets is more relevant than metabolic flexibility during a hyperinsulinemic clamp.
An impaired capacity to upregulate muscle lipid oxidation in the face of high lipid supply may lead to increased muscle fat accumulation and insulin resistance. Surprisingly, very few studies have investigated the response to high-fat diets. In this review, we discuss the role of glucose disposal rate, adipose tissue lipid storage, and mitochondrial function on metabolic flexibility. Additionally, we emphasize the bias of using the change in respiratory quotient to calculate metabolic flexibility and propose novel approaches to assess metabolic flexibility. On the basis of current evidence, one cannot conclude that impaired metabolic flexibility is responsible for the accumulation of intramyocellular lipid and insulin resistance. We propose to study metabolic flexibility in response to high-fat diets in individuals having contrasting degree of insulin sensitivity and/or mitochondrial characteristics. -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2584808/
Metabolic Flexibility is the ability to switch from burning fat to burning carbohydrates/sugar/glucose rather than some people who burn sugar and not efficient at burning fat (perhaps from how and what they eat as well as train!). If you eat more carb heavy diet and train at high heart rates above your metabolic cross over point- then you will be less efficient at burning fat, increase the risk for insulin resistance as well as gut stress.
- poor use of fat stores
- increased dependency endogenous carbohydrate stores
- increased need for supplementing with carbs (sugars) during exercise and rest
- increased risk for gut stress
- higher body weight and fat
- increased risk of disease
Remember what we discuss all the time on my podcast and in my blog posts…
“you are what you eat”
“you can’t out exercise a bad diet”
We often think we are eating the right foods for our health and well being because the media or traditional medicine told us so- but usually, the nutritional advice we get out in our society is incorrect. If you were like me and grew up with a fear of eating fat and only ate carbohydrates because everything else was “off limits” and “unhealthy” – plus consumed diet, sugar free and fat free products then you may be more motivated to get off the blood sugar roller coaster to avoid insulin resistance and other health complications. Find the CAUSE of your health concerns and symptoms- you may feel better on the inside and out with a few simple lifestyle changes, intermittent fasting and change your nutrition plan! The WHOLESTIC Method.
If you want to burn fat…you need to eat more healthy fats, moderate clean protein from healthy animals and organic colorful, in-season vegetables. As well as work on your sleep, stress, movement, digestion, gut health, hydration and happiness!
If you want to know why I do what I do then read my LIFE IS NOT A RACE book (Amazon) and The WHOLESTIC Method manual with a workbook to help get you started on training the WHOLE you!
Until next time!
The WHOLESTIC Method Coach,
Guiding you to improved longevity and performance!
Debbie Potts
