Podcast Episode #22: “Eight Ways to Instantly Increase Your Low Metabolic Rate.”

Podcast episode number 22 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. Each week we'll be bringing you cutting edge content on holistic nutrition medicine, weight loss and sports performance, as well as a host of other exciting topics pertaining to fitness, diet and lifestyle wellness. My name is Ben Greenfield and I'm a certified nutritionist and exercise physiologist. So whether you are an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, we're going to keep you entertained and help you achieve success in all your personal goals. So enjoy this podcast and stay healthy. Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and in today's podcast we're going to be focusing on hypothyroidism and low metabolism. Some of the things that you can do to support your metabolism. A few of the topics included in this podcast is going to be how you can actually find out a very good, accurate home test to determine if you have a low metabolism or low thyroid. We're going to talk a little bit about exercise. Is there a way that you can actually hurt your metabolism when you're exercising? We're going to talk about thyroid medication, what thyroid medication might be your best bet and why some of the more popular thyroid medications may not actually be the ideal answer for your needs. One of the oils that you have to be consuming to keep your metabolism elevated, whether you have a low metabolism or not, a very, very crucial oil for overall wellness. There is a certain mineral that's crucial to your metabolic rate compared to all the other minerals out there. I'm going to be going over that. A couple of compounds that really should be in your daily multivitamin. Got a recipe for a special thyroid support juice. And then finally, eight foods that you really need to avoid if you have a low metabolism. Also in the episode today, I will be unveiling a way that you can actually win a free gym stick. And if you have no idea what the heck a gym stick is, I'll be telling you a little bit more about that. We'll also have a little bit of an interview today about your off season triathlon training, training for you triathletes out there, as well as the way that you might need to be getting through the holidays and some choices that you can make to help you get through the holidays just a little bit more successfully from a health and a nutrition perspective. Going to be talking to an expert on a couple of these things. Mark Cavallaro, who's a new personal trainer and triathlon coach over at Pacific Elite Fitness. This guy has 20 years of experience in the industry. He's done over 10 Ironman triathlons. Really great interview with Mark. So obviously just a giant jam packed episode at the end of this episode. Just in case you want to rate us in itunes, I'm going to explain how you can do that. I'm also going to put a link in the show notes about how you can do that. Anything that you hear mentioned in this episode you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and find more about in the show notes for this podcast. Episode number 22 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Before we jump into today's packed content about metabolism, I want to mention a special offer that I'm giving to anybody that lives in the local Spokane Coeur d' Alene area. Now you may be aware that one of my favorite devices for muscle toning and fitness, especially when you need a portable exercise tool, is something called the gym stick. And this is something that I discovered a few months ago at a health and fitness expo that's kind of big in Europe right now. It's straight out of Denmark and it's used for group fitness classes. It's also used for individual, whether sport specific or muscle toning workouts that can be used for core, for legs, for lower body, for full body combo workout. It's called a gym stick and it's like a combination between training with free weights and training with an elastic band. There are a ton of different exercises that you can do with it. If you go to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com videos page, I actually have an entire workout that I filmed using the gym stick. It's something that I implement with a lot of the clients that I train in Spokane, Washington. And you can actually read a little bit more about the gym stick itself if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com gymstick or click on the link to the gym stick in the show notes for this episode. But basically a very, very simple program that I'm offering is a free gym stick. That's right, you can win a free gym stick of your choice, a resistance of your choice because they come in varying resistances and all you need to do is refer someone into our program in downtown Spokane, Washington. And this is the personal training program that includes exercise metabolic testing to determine your fat burning zones and caloric requirements. It includes body composition testing, range of motion flexibility testing, fitness testing to identify your baselines, and then from there on out a detailed workout and nutritional plan that is good for anybody that's going after general fitness. But specifically, one of the things that we're very, very good at down there is developing a fat burning enhancement program. Because the combination of metabolic testing, exercise and nutritional programming, and then access to some of the things that we offer at the medical clinic, such as a comprehensive blood metabolic profile, thyroid screening, hormone analysis, biochemical evaluation, basically these are a lot of the things that will allow you to delve a little bit more deeply into your body than just for example, a strict exercise program or something of that nature. We basically put all the pieces of the puzzle together for you. Now if you know someone or you yourself are interested in this program, all you have to do is shoot me an email BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you can win a gym stick, a free gym stick. If you refer anyone into this program or, or if you yourself enter into the program, we'll provide you with a gym stick. We do that for a lot of the people down there anyways who are training and who need access to this portable exercise tool. One of my favorite ways for muscle toning and fat loss. So again, special referral program for people in the Spokane, Washington area. Refer to me, Ben@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and win a free gym stick. I get a lot of questions from people on a daily basis about how an online personal training or online nutrition program actually works. And this week I actually received an email from someone with some very important questions about metabolism. And so I'd like to use the conversation that ensues is a way to teach you about how to manage low metabolism and how to use natural, healthy methods for supporting your thyroid gland and increasing the number of calories that your body burns naturally throughout the day. I also want to use this information to teach you just how much you can get out of a simple email or phone conversation with a certified nutritionist or a personal trainer who can actually help you with your daily exercise and nutrition choices. So let's go ahead and look at this email that I received. It says, dear Ben, I'm really discouraged because I'm a medical mystery and the doctors don't know what to do with me. I have hypothyroidism, so my metabolism is basically non existent. The doctors put me on a hormone supplement and my thyroid levels have gone up, but I don't feel any different than before. I'm often very tired and my metabolism is very slow. I can eat 500 calories a day and not lose weight and if I try to eat like a normal person, then I generally put on one to two pounds each day. So to avoid gaining weight I have to run 12 miles and sometimes up to 16 just to maintain my current weight. I hate this because I don't have the time to run more than 12 miles each day, but I feel enslaved to my condition. As a result, I have avoided going to social events, skipped family time, etc. In order to get a decent workout in. Doctor told me that I'm just going to have to keep working out super long and hard, which is so discouraging. What about when my joints and muscles give out? I was wondering if there was any way that you could help me. Now, just to clarify, when I offer consulting services or personal training advice to someone online, I'm not a doctor. I don't prescribe medications. I simply give out advice based off a decade of experience of helping people to lose weight and to have nutritional and exercise protocols that allow them to live the life that they want to live. When I got this letter, I sat down and I wrote out a response that basically included some of my top tips for increasing your metabolism. You'll find many of these in my book, 100 Ways to Boost your Metabolism, but I go into just a little bit more detail on a couple of these methods in my response to this individual. So let's go ahead and jump straight into some of the suggestions that I gave out. And then I also want to talk to you a little bit about the emails that we sent back and forth after this first email exchange. So first of all, 12 to 16 miles of running a day is a lot of exercise. No one should have to exercise that much to actually maintain a normal and healthy weight. And it is true that you actually can exercise. Too much. Exercise is stressful to your body. And one of the things that happens when you exercise is that your body releases a high amount of cortisol, which is basically your body's stress release hormone. And when you release a lot of cortisol, your body experiences a natural increase in energy. Cortisol is part of what's called our fight or flight response, and so your body becomes more physically alert. We'll also see a large cortisol release in situations like trauma, injury, surgery, basically very, very stressful situations. Outside of sports, well, there is a link between high cortisol levels and your body's propensity to store fat, particularly the type of F that would be considered visceral fat or abdominal body fat, which is not only unhealthy for a lot of people's personal goals, but it can also be a risk factor for heart disease or for diabetes. Now, high levels of cortisol are a contributing factor to your ability to store body fat. If you have constantly high levels of circulating cortisol, you're not necessarily going to get fat. There are a lot of people that exercise quite a bit who have the propensity towards fat gain. But if you have a low metabolism and chronically elevated levels of cortisol, that's kind of a one, two whammy in terms of weight loss. So my first response to this individual was that you're exercising to an extent that's actually going to increase cortisol production and potentially continue to decrease your metabolic rate and increase the deposition of storage fat. So rather than running 12 or 13 or up to 16 miles on a treadmill, it would be better to do shorter bouts of high intensity interval training. And if you're not certain about what high intensity interval training actually is, you may want to go to a website called trifuel.com t r I f U-E-L.com and read an article that I wrote on that website about high intensity interval training, also known as HIIT training and its effect. It allows you to work out for a very, very short period of time, not do a lot of damage to the body, and still get a very good cardiovascular and metabolic response. The other thing that should be happening is resistance training. Your body's metabolism is dependent upon the number of fibers of lean muscle that it contains. And if there's not a lot of lean muscle being built, then you're not naturally increasing your metabolism, not naturally increasing the number of calories that your body is going to burn when you're not exercising, because muscle takes a lot of calories to keep around. So the more muscle you have on your body, the higher your metabolism is going to be. Does that mean you need to bulk up? Absolutely not. You can use something, like I mentioned earlier in this podcast, elastic band training. Use something like a gym stick, use cables, use some of the things that will allow your muscles to elongate and be toned and not just bulk. So, no, you don't have to do a bulk program, but you should be resistance training. And I recommend about three to four days a week of resistance training and maximum, about a 60 minute session, possibly 90 minutes of high intensity interval training. If that's not done on the same day as the resistance training. And then you also want to throw a few just easy fat burning session in for the Sesingen 45 to 90 seconds of long, slow cardio. Now, understand this would be for someone who really has a very low metabolism. Yeah, you may need to exercise a little bit more than the average individual. My recommendations would come out to about 90 minutes tops, two hours a day, which is a good chunk of time. That's a big chunk of time. Even if you're taking one day off, that's looking at maybe giving eight to 12 hours a week to exercise. While that's a lot, it's nowhere near 12 to 16 miles on the trail treadmill every day. And so you can overdo it with exercise. Yes, if you have a low metabolism, you may need to exercise more, but you want to be smart about the way that you exercise. And if you incorporate some of my other suggestions that I give later in this podcast, you'll find that you need to exercise less and less. So this particular individual, in a later email revealed that they were on levothyroxine and basically it's kind of similar to Synthroid. It's basically a synthetic thyroid hormone replacement and consists primarily of T4, which is one of the thyroid hormones. There is, in my opinion, a better product that can be taken for thyroid. It's called Armour Thyroid and it's made up of a more complete profile of the thyroid hormones T1, T2, T3 and T4. Typically, the dosage specifications on something like that are a little bit more specific to your situation. This is something that you would want to work with a local physician to actually determine how much you should be taking. To find out more about Armour Thyroid and what it's all about, I would actually suggest you go to armorthyroid.com, where you can actually find a local health practitioner who could prescribe it for you. You can get it out of the country, you can get it from Canadian pharmacies. But if you want someone who's an expert to actually help you determine what your dosage should be, I Recommend the website armorthyroid.com it's a R M O U R thyroid. That's T H Y O r o I d.com a r m o u r t-h y-o R-O-I d.com having trouble spelling that out. But anyways, armorthyroid.com would be a great website to find out more about that thyroid medication that I would recommend above popular synthetic hormone replacements. So there we're going to move on to some of the food recommendations that I gave to this individual. First of all, studies have shown that medium chain triglycerides can not only increase the amount of fat that you burn as a fuel on a daily basis, but they can also increase your metabolism. Now this means that you're going to expend more energy and utilize more fat by simply including medium chain triglycerides in your diet. Well, I'm going to give you my top tip for a medium chain triglyceride source. And that's just Virginia coconut oil. You're going to have to get this probably at a specialty food store. A lot of typical grocery stores don't have virgin coconut oil, but you would want to consume 2 to 3 tablespoons of this per day. Now, most cities now have a natural food store, a co op, something that you can get virgin coconut oil at. But this is just a concentrated medium chain triglyceride source. Interestingly, medium chain triglycerides are what I prescribe to my ironman triathletes that I trained take in as a fuel source during their race. Because it's the type of fat that is burnt so efficiently as a fuel, it's not going to make you fat. It's not that type of fat. It's going to actually increase your metabolism. So that was another tip that I gave out. All right. There is a mineral that is one of the best ways to support your thyroid gland. If you are deficient in this mineral, you will not create enough of thyroid hormone. And a lot of people are deficient in this mineral. It's called iodine. And while you can supplement with iodine, it's going to be more well absorbed if you get it from natural food sources in your diet. The best sources of iodine are going to be sea vegetables, fish, seaweed and eggs. Now if you get your iodine from fish, you want to go with a cold water fish. Okay, so we're talking about something like salmon, mackerel, halibut, sole, snapper, any of those are going to be acceptable cold water fish sources. You'd want to go with no more than about the size of a deck of cards a day of fish. Now if you're a much, much larger person, you could probably get away with a slightly larger filet of fish. But generally you don't want to overdo it on the meat. If you're going with salmon, avoid farm raised salmon. It's going to be a little bit higher in toxins. If you do eggs, try and choose the natural eggs. It's okay to spend that extra 50 cents on a of the cage free hormone antibiotic free eggs, but those are also a great source of iodine. Not a huge fan of eggs being a primary source in the diet, so I recommend if you're a female, only about one egg per day. Males, you can go a little bit more than that. Eggs can be a little bit high in allergens. You can develop an allergic reaction to eggs if you eat too many of them. They also tend to be a little bit high in cholesterol. There's an enzyme in eggs called lecithin that will help you to burn through some of the fats that you get from eggs. But just be careful, don't overdo the eggs. So no 6e morning no sucking down four raw eggs before you go out on a run rocky style. But eggs can be a great way to supplement your iodine sources.