5 Simple Tips to Increase Your Metabolism Over 50

Hey, it's J.J. here.

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout.

Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author.

Yes, I'm a Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking.

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And that's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from.

Personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to.

Healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better.

Health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full bull out at 100.

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You've probably heard that your metabolism doesn't really start to drop until maybe 60 or beyond. But yet you're in your 40s and 50s and things just aren't working like they used to. So what's up? Well, there are some things that start to make your metabolism slow down as you hit this age. It's called perimenopause and muscle loss. And I've got five simple tips that are going to help kick your metabolism into high gear and help you feel better than ever. So let's go. First up, what is metabolism? This is the work your body does to take food and drink and turn them into energy. Now, there's a couple different things that are going to impact your metabolism. Number one, the first thing you got to know is your resting metabolic rate. This accounts for about 60 to 70% of the calories you burn throughout the day. And this is if you just hung out all day long, sat on the couch and I'm going to talk about how you can impact this. Specifically, the next one is activity. And activity has two different parts to it. Exercise, which accounts for maybe 5% of the calories you expend throughout the day. And then something called non exercise activity thermogenesis. So it's everything but exercise that can be somewhere between 15 and 20%. This is where we actually have a huge opportunity. And then the thermic effect of food, that can account for about 15%. So your resting metabolic rate, what impacts that? First of all, your age and your sex and your genetics. But the big thing that you can shift is your body composition. You got more muscle on your body, you're going to have a better resting metabolic rate. The other thing that impacts it is estrogen and thyroid. So of course, if you're in that perimenopause state and you're going, something's not quite right. Yes, your estrogen going low can impact your resting metabolic rate. All right, let's talk about what you can do to get that metabolic rate kicking first. One, One of the fastest ways to change things is to change what's at the end of your fork. So when we think about eating, we think about eating three different things, right? You're going to eat protein, you're going to eat carbohydrates, you're going to eat fat. Turns out that if you take some calories from carbs or fat and move them over to protein, that alone is going to give you a better metabolic effect. Here's why. It takes basically no calories for fat to be digested and metabolized. Fat is very easily digested and metabolized. Like 0.3% of the calories from fat are used in the digestion of it. For carbohydrates, it's somewhere in the 5 to 10% range of the calories from carbohydrates are used in the metabolism, digestion and metabolism of carbohydrates. Protein is the winner here. It takes somewhere between 20 and 30% of the calories from protein are used in the digestion and assimilation of protein. Probably because your body has to take those amino acids from the protein and especially one called leucine triggers muscle protein synthesis. And it's using those amino acids to build muscle. It's a very expensive process. So if all you did was take some of the calories from carbohydrates and fat and shift them over to protein, you are going to have a boost in your metabolic rate. You're going to have a better thermic effect of food. Remember I talked about that was one of the things that impacted your overall metabolism. This is why I tell people to eat protein first. And I have you eat 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight in protein each day. And I have an eat protein first challenge that you can do for free@jjvirgin.com proteinfirst so that's an easy one. Next one is water is hydration. This is wild when you start to look at this one. So water can increase energy expenditure because of the process of thermogenesis. And this is where the body uses energy to heat water up to body temperature. In fact, one study found that drinking 500 milliliters of cold water could increase the metabolic rate by 30%. And that peaks about 30 to 40% 30 to 40 minutes after ingestion. It's not 30% all day long. It's a small window of time, but still, every bit helps right now. Another thing that water can do is increase fat oxidation. Water has been shown to influence substrate oxidation rates, promoting the use of of fats as an energy source. I will tell you what's interesting with this, the converse is true as well. And this is wild. I Learned this from Dr. Rick Johnson. I did a podcast with him on this. Even mild dehydration can make your body better at storing fat. When you're mildly dehydrated, it turns out your liver takes glycogen that's stored in the liver, that's carbohydrates that we store as glycogen in the liver and liberates them. They get converted from glycogen to glucose to fructose and then stored as fat so that your body has fat. Because if you're dehydrated, you can burn fat to free up water. So this is what happens when you're de. When you are dehydrated, your body will actually store more fat, so it has it there in times of severe dehydration. It also raises stress hormones, increased water intake independent of your diet and exercise levels.

Right.

Has been associated with weight loss in overweight women as well. It helps reduce fasting insulin levels and improve lipid profile. So, so much good stuff about hydration. Besides the fact it can help with satiety, it can help with detoxification. So my rule of thumb with hydration is that you want to get half your body weight in water. And then I drink another half ounce to an ounce for every minute of exercise as well. So hydration, you should be having to pee about every three hours. There you go. Next step, my favorite food group, coffee. So coffee and tea can help support a good metabolic rate. Caffeine boosts your metabolic rate. It increases energy expenditure by stimulating the central nervous system, which leads to an increase in the body's metabolic rate for several hours after consumption. Plus, I like to have coffee before I go to the gym. Coffee has been shown to promote fat burning, particularly after meals. Coffee has amazing polyphenols. I mean, tea does, too. But there's some polyphenols in coffee, chlorogenic acid specifically, that can contribute to the metabolic effects. These compounds have been shown to help with fat utilization and improve energy metabolism, which means less body fat accumulation. However, here is the caveat. Do not make a good thing bad. Don't take that coffee and then load it with, like, some garbage, you know, creamer or something like that. What you can do if you don't just like having black coffee or tea, is you can take that coffee and use a little coconut milk or a little allulose. Shout out to my buddies over at RX sugar if you need it. Sweetened up allulose for the Win because allulose can help improve insulin sensitivity and raise GLP1 as well. So you get a double hit. There's now speaking of tea, my favorite tea of all is green tea. And I literally take a big jug to the gym when I go 64 ounce jug of green tea. And I put in there my creatine and my essential amino acids and my electrolytes. So that's how I do it. But the reason I love green tea is because the catechins in green tea, especially one called egcg, can help with fat burning and they also enhance the body's ability to use fat as a source of energy both during rest and exercise and helps your body burn more calories. Green tea has been found to elevate resting energy expenditure by boosting thermogenesis, that's your body's heat production and improving fat oxidation. So it increases the number of calories burned throughout the day. Plus, green tea has been found to activate key metabolic pathways like AMP activated protein kinase, that's the AMPK pathway, which plays a significant role in energy metabolism which can mean improved fat metabolism and reduced fat accumulation. And there are great synergistic effects with exercise where green tea has been shown to improve endurance and fat burning during exercise. So it's a great supplement if you are looking to improve your metabolic rate throughout through physical activity. And again to me this one's like a no brainer. I was having trouble getting my green tea in throughout the day and I just went, this is simple. I do a big drink when I go to the gym or when I work out at home. So I just do it every single day in my big workout container. That means that I'm getting in. I dump a 32 ounce thing into my 64 ounce container because I put ice in there too. But that my electro replenish electrolytes, my creatine and my essential amino acids and I'm good to go. Remember with all of these things you want to make them part of your daily routine. So the big question to ask yourself is how do I put this into my routine? So it's just something that I do all the time. Spices are another one like that. There was a 2006 study that was published in Physiology and Behavior and found that eating spice foods or drinking herbal beverages can increase your body's heat production. That's again that thermogenesis which means that you're burning more calories and they can also make you feel fuller. Plus there are ingredients like capsaicin that's found in chili peppers, black pepper, ginger, mixed spices, green tea, black tea and caffeine are all very effective as thermogenic aids that can also help you feel fuller and, and can also impact your metabolism beyond just the satiety and the thermogenesis. They can also promote fat burning. So I'll give you one that I really love. I found this drink called Suja Lemon Love. Now of course you could make this easily too at home, but I'm a little lazy. It's lemon juice, spring water, a little stevia. And you don't want too much stevia, you want to have the sour and, and then some cayenne pepper. How easy. The other thing you can do is take a little cayenne pepper and throw it into your chocolate all in one shake. And you'll get a little bit of a burst there. So that's another easy way to do it. And finally, activity. So you're going to be surprised to learn that exercise is not the biggest shifter here. Although I do want you to exercise and specifically I want you to do resistance training because resistance training is going to build more muscle and more muscle is going to improve your resting metabolic rate. But I want you to think and when you're doing exercise of doing things that are either high intensity interval training or resistance training that not that are going to create a big cost to your body. So your body has to have a higher metabolism post exercise to recover. But that's actually not where you're going to get the biggest initial metabolic hit. Remember you're going to get a long term metabolic effect effect by putting more muscle on your body that also improves your insulin sensitivity and that more muscle boosts your metabolism. But throughout the day when you really looked at how to, how to modify your metabolism and I said 60 to 70% was your resting metabolic rate and that non exercise activity could be anywhere from 15 to 20%. This is where we want to push because you can actually make a big difference by just how much you move. In fact there's been some interesting research that shows when you take a normal weight person and you under feed them, they tend to move less. So their neat goes down to conserve energy and when you overfeed them, their neat goes up to expend more energy. We can use these tracking devices now just to make sure that we really are pushing our neat and then you can continue to increase your neat every week. So the first thing I always look at is are you getting your bare minimum? This is your floor that 8,000 steps a day and you Start to look for opportunities wherever you can to get more steps in. Once you've got that 8,000 steps in, how do you make it harder? Where can you take the stairs? Where can you sprint up the stairs? Where could I add an exercise snack or 2 in? Can I add a rucking vest? Could I put a walking treadmill under my desk so that I can get some steps in when I'm on a meeting? When can I walk or stand rather than sit? So as much as you possibly can move and a rucking vest or a weighted vest or a waiting backpack, if you can add that in, you can even wear that around the house some all of this is going to expend more calories, so it's going to make that 15 to 20% of your metabolic rate. It's going to take even more of it now and start to spend more calories throughout the day. So and then look for how you can just move more. I have a girlfriend, we used to go for coffee, now we go for a walk, we get coffees and we drive home with our coffees, right? So what are the situations where you can stand instead of sit, walk instead of stand, wait your walk instead of just walk normally and again, still want you doing the exercise, especially that resistance training to add on that muscle and that high intensity interval training for the metabolic costs that afterward. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook and my website jjvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast@subscribetoj.com so you don't miss.

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