Can You Really Boost Your Metabolism? (What Actually Works)

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout— sorry, Mom— turned 4-time New York Times bestselling author. 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 most of all by my insatiable insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's where you come in. 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 powerful 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 out at 100. Don't miss an episode. Subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. Wanna listen to the show ad-free? Head over to subscribe2jj.com and start your ad-free experience Today.

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You have been lied to about metabolism. Let's get real. Most of those boosts you hear about out there, they're just temporary gimmicks. But there are some science-backed strategies that can actually move the needle long-term. And that's what we're gonna be talking about today. I'm gonna reveal why sleep is actually better for your metabolism, will do a bigger impact than a cold plunge. How NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, trumps cardio, and there is one supplement that actually works. And by the way, it's not what you think it is. All right, first let's bust some myths. Just the term fast versus slow metabolism, that reality is misleading because metabolism isn't inherently fast or slow. When you get down to it, most of us are basically the same. It's really about the different components of metabolism and how you can impact them. So let's break those down. Your overall metabolism, or how many calories you burn throughout the day, —how much energy you're using—this is known as your total daily energy expenditure, or you might see it written out as TDEE. And that TDEE is comprised of 3 areas. 60 to 75% of it is through resting metabolic rate, and this is dictated by how much muscle mass you have. That's the big driver you can impact there. Thermic effect of food is about 10% of your TDEE. Protein's the big needle mover there. Then we have activity. This is where you think the biggest impact would be—exercise, reality is only about 5 to 10%. The bigger needle mover— ready? Non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, 15 to 30%. So NEAT is standing instead of sitting, fidgeting, every time you're moving but you're not actually going, I'm going to go work out. And as you can see, it plays a far bigger role than exercise, and really very little attention is paid to it. I think that this is your secret metabolic weapon, and I'll be talking about how we can really bump this up in a little bit. Now, from looking at the above, you probably are getting a, oh, I see why all these metabolic boosters are not working, like the spicy food or the cold exposure or the water intake. Hey, the reality is all those things actually help little bits, and we'll talk about how to put them together. But let's talk about the biggest needle of all, what actually works, and the biggest one NEAT. I view this really as your secret weapon. Here's the problem with it: if you're not actively tracking it, as you start to do harder workouts, as you do caloric restriction, you might actually decrease your NEAT because your body adapts to what you're doing to maintain homeostasis and can drop your NEAT. And in fact, NEAT can vary between people as much as 1,000 to 2,000 calories a day. This is why the first thing I have someone do when I start working with them is start to track their NEAT, track their activity all throughout the day, because I want to make sure that if you're adding an intentional exercise or you are doing any kind of caloric restriction, you aren't compensating by dropping down that non-activity thermogenesis. So what do you got to do? You got to start by tracking it. First thing you're looking at is how many steps you're taking throughout the day. Your floor, like the non-negotiable, is to get to 8,000 steps a day no matter what. Okay, the goal is going to be to do higher than that, but the first step is always 8,000 steps a day. Once you get to there, then go to 10,000 a day. Then go to 12,000 a day. But the very first thing that I want you to think about is how do I get to 8,000 steps a day? So all sorts of things make a difference. One of the things I love is walking after a meal, especially dinner, because it's gonna help with digestion, help get you ready for sleep. Stand rather than sit, walk rather than stand, take the stairs whenever possible. Like look throughout your life and go, how can I just move more all throughout the day? And by the way, like let's say you had a desk job. If you could move into a more physically demanding job, You could increase your NEAT by like 1,200 calories a day. I mean, it's crazy. Or put a little alarm on your phone, 5 minutes every hour, get up, move around. I do this naturally because I just drink a ton of fluids, so I'm always having to get up and move around. I mean, in the perfect world, when you think about it, you would have like your office on your top floor of your house and have to run down 3 flights of stairs to go to the bathroom and run back up, something like that. But look at all the different ways that you can move more throughout the day. Now, you're monitoring NEAT to make sure that you aren't lowering your total daily energy expenditure. So that's the first one. The next one, sleep. Seriously, this is a game changer for your metabolism and your overall metabolic health. Poor sleep is going to impact both your total daily energy expenditure and your resting metabolic rate because it messes up your metabolic processes and your hormone regulation. Now, there is a little positive when you don't sleep well. Like, if you, if you had less sleep, you actually have a little bit more movement throughout the, you know, the day because you were up a little longer. But honestly, the— this is offset by the fact that you are probably moving less because you're more tired. You're not really working out. You're hungrier, so you're eating more. And we know that chronic sleep deprivation lowers your resting metabolic rate over time because it makes you better at storing fat. It makes you more insulin resistant. It makes it harder for you to burn fat for fuel. And you've got elevated cortisol, which can make you store even more belly fat, makes it harder for you to build muscle. And of course, who wants to work out hard or move more when you didn't sleep well? My favorite exercise physiologist, Dr. Andy Galpin, theorizes that poor sleep could trash your resting metabolic rate by anywhere from 5 to 20%. I mean, that's huge. Now, that being said, if you're in perimenopause or under stress or both, hey, what's going on? Your sleep is probably suffering, and you want to check in with your menopause doc about this because your first hormone that tends to go down during menopause is progesterone, and that can massively impact impact your sleep. So adding a little progesterone during perimenopause at night can be amazing for, for you and getting back to that restful sleep. Again, think about this because progesterone truly is the first hormone most people start to notice declining, most women during menopause. So you have that going down. You also during menopause have cortisol going up. So those are those, the double whammy for sleep. Now I'm one of those people who tends to have my brain light up 2 AM with, oh, I need to get up and write that down, right? Or I just have trouble shutting my brain off at night. And so I am relentless about my sleep routine. I have my power-down hour about the hour before bed. I get my red lights going on. I have light bulbs in my bedroom for my red lights that I flip over on my phone. It's called a Philips Hue. Amazing. Cool the room down to 67 degrees, and I just get it really nice and dark and quiet. And if I'm traveling, I always travel with an eye mask and earphones so that I can plug out any sounds. And every night I take Sleep Candy, which is my theanine, melatonin, 5-HTP, and inositol B6 wonder formula to help you fall asleep and stay asleep. Again, the big thing here I want you to understand is sleep's got to be a non-negotiable here. Another non-negotiable: protein. So I talked about the thermic effect of food being about 10% of calories. The way you can increase that is by upping your protein relative to your carbs and fat, 'cause protein is 3 times the thermic effect of carbs or fat. I like you to eat 0.7 to 1 gram or higher of protein per pound of your target body weight. And how do we make sure you get this in? Eat it first. I always say eat protein first. That is my mantra. So some of the things that I love here, I love my loaded smoothies with my Reignite Wellness protein powder. A lot of times I'll take my bone broth protein powder shake and I'll stir it into Greek-style yogurt. I like grass-fed finished beef, pastured chicken thighs, wild salmon. And then what I like to do is I'll have my protein with some veggies for the fiber, a little bit of healthy fat, and I've got this perfect protein, fat, and fiber satiety trifecta. Okay, are there fat burner supplements? Because if you go on Amazon or you walk into a health food store, you'll see all these fat burner, fat burner, fat burner. Like, does it really work? The reality is some of these things could have a small impact. I really emphasize small, like a couple percentage points. What we know is there is one thing that makes a big difference. It just happens to be one of my favorite food groups, caffeine. So I love coffee and green tea. And it turns out that these can help in a couple different ways. Number one, they do bring your metabolism up a little bit, improve insulin sensitivity, help you burn fat, but also they may inhibit myostatin, which is this hormone that raises as we age to break down muscle faster. And they may support follistatin. That's you being able to build muscle. So beyond just the metabolic effect of a slight boost in metabolism, better fat burning, more insulin sensitivity, a little adrenaline hit, they also can help overall with muscle mass. And muscle mass, of course, as we know, is the way you impact your resting metabolic rate. Now, there's one other supplement that I would add in here. You might not think of this as a supplement. This was kind of a recent addition to my stack. And I kind of was like, where's this been all my life? And, and it is electrolytes because I drink a lot of fluids. And what I found was I was starting to get like cramps, and I think it was because I was diluting my electrolytes. And I also do a lot of, of sunlight and sauna— shout out to Sunlighten. And remember, if you're just even mildly dehydrated, it can raise cortisol, it can lower metabolism. And on the other side, if you're hydrating, it can boost your metabolism a little bit. So love electrolytes. I would tell you to do at least a serving or two every single day. I I do that with my ElectroReplenish from Reignite Wellness. Okay, let's put it all together because I want to make sure your metabolism is firing on all cylinders. Number 1 is the boost from doing non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Okay, remember we talked about 8,000 steps was your absolute bare, bare minimum, and ideally more is better. Now I'm going to give you another little piece to that that you could take that and make it even bigger is throw on a rucking vest, 5 or 10 pounds of a rucking vest. That means you're moving more weight all throughout the day. One of the things that I do to help with NEAT, by the way, is I have next to me in my office, I have a stand-up desk and then I have a walking pad right next to it. So that's the first one, is make sure you're really keeping that NEAT up. And you can add the intensity of that NEAT by throwing on a rucking vest. So move as much as possible. And one more thing around the NEAT is if you've got the kind of job where you are just sitting for hours on end, Get yourself a little trigger on your watch, a trigger on your phone to say, hey, get up. And every hour, get yourself up and move around. You could be doing some air squats, some lunges, some step-ups. Just make sure you're moving all throughout the day. Do not spend hours on end sitting. All right, next up, resistance training. So one of the things we talked about with metabolism was your resting metabolic rate. Resting metabolic rate, hormonally thyroid and estrogen are going to impact it, but what you can really do to impact your resting metabolic rate, of course, is to add more muscle on your body. Muscle does a lot of other cool things, as we know, like improve insulin sensitivity, improve metabolic flexibility, but it's also that metabolic Spanx that helps hold everything in tighter and boost your metabolism. It's not huge, but it does add up. So Every pound of muscle you put on might be 10 more calories that you're burning a day. But think about that. If you took off 10 pounds of fat, put on 10 pounds of muscle, and had 100 more calories burned a day, that is a sizable difference. When you look at the weight maintenance research, people gain weight fairly slowly, and it's not much difference. It's like maybe 100 calories a day makes all the difference. So this is huge. Doesn't sound huge. It's huge. Next one is sleep fix and make sure that you're doing things that really help with sleep. I talked about Sleep Candy. I take that every night. I also take my Magnesium Body Calm every night. I find that works really well as well. And don't think you're one of those people that doesn't need much sleep. And literally, I think there's like one half of the percent of the population is, are short sleepers. I've met one in my entire career, uh, 40 years of working in the health and wellness space. One, one short sleeper. Uh, so 7 to 9 hours, see where you feel the best. And again, uh, do all the things to make sure that you're setting yourself up for a good night's sleep. Poor night's sleep not only will impact your resting metabolic rate, you're not going to work out as hard and you're not going to move as much. Then eat protein first, very important. So that is that 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. In the show notes, I will put a link to our Eat Protein First Challenge that gives you all the meals, plans, etc., and the calculator. So it makes it super easy for you to put this into practice. Again, protein You burn about 25% of the calories from protein in the digestion and assimilation of protein. It's like less than 3% for fat and somewhere around 5-7% for carbs. So it's a sizable difference in what you can do. And then stay well hydrated, stay well hydrated. And I highly recommend doing electrolytes. In fact, I would say start the day, end the day with electrolytes so you make sure that you're in balance. But that hydration throughout the day also does its own little mild metabolic boost. By the way, little fun fact, If you are even mildly dehydrated, I learned this from Dr. Rick Johnson, who wrote Nature Wants Us to Be Fat, it can actually make you free up some of the sugar stored in your liver, turn it into, um, fructose, and store it back as fat in preparation for you to have that on board if you do need to liberate up water. So you can get better at storing fat and slow down your metabolism by just being even mildly dehydrated. And when you drink good fluids, you've got great electrolyte balance. Again, that's why I take ElectroReplenish now twice a day. You give your metabolic rate a little boost as well. So it's not massive, but all these things add up. 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 at subscribe2jj.com so you don't miss a single episode. And hey, if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you on the next episode. Want to listen to the show ad-free? Head over to subscribe2jj.com and start your ad-free experience today. Hey, JJ Virgin here. And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 Podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice. Medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.