Metabolism Matters!

Do you remember that the "It's Not About the Number on the Scales"  article mentions that the body chooses what to do with “excess”energy? It could indeed store it as fat, to be used in times of shortage, but it can also use it to generate heat or help build muscle or make you feel bouncy.

Bouncy is kind of good. That feeling where you are dancing around the kitchen, or powering up that hill, or just have that spring in your step. Where you have energy to spare, rather than just enough energy to scrape through your day, or maybe not even that much.

That’s what we’re aiming for, Thorny Roses. Energy to spare. Energy to thrive. Energy to smash the patriarchy. Or… insert your own goal here.

So we have to take in enough good nutrients. We need very little in terms of cream cakes (although a little of what you fancy, etc), but we do need plenty of fruit and vegetables and protein and fibre and good quality fats, and then we also need to MOVE so our body can do all the things that bodies need to do to keep healthy. Movement is critical to so many processes it’s almost like we were designed to be in motion. We’re not quite like those sharks that are “obligate ram ventilators”, who need to keep moving to receive oxygen through their gills, but we need to move, and we need to rest.

If we move too much and eat too little, as women we very much risk lowering our metabolic rate, putting our bodies into conservation mode, so that energy expenditure is minimised. This is an extraordinary thing, really, this thermogenic adaptation. It means that whereas before a certain activity would have needed a certain amount of energy, when the body is concerned about how much energy is being expended, it will spend less energy on that self-same activity. How does it even do that? Doesn’t a certain activity just take a certain amount of energy? Apparently not. It’s as if when the body is confident there is plenty of energy coming in, it can splash it around a bit, be less efficient, like a Ferrari. When it isn’t confident it becomes the most fuel efficient vehicle on the market.

So, it can do an activity much more efficiently, and another way it can conserve energy is to dissuade you from doing very much at all. Since it’s the one that has to expend the energy, it can very strongly suggest that the sofa is a better option than the walk.

Another factor for women is the role of stress. And eating too little and exercising too vigorously are both a form of stress for the body. Cortisol, the stress hormone, will kick in and cause the breakdown of lean muscle mass, which is then converted into belly fat, because belly fat is active fat that produces a low quality oestrogen. This is particularly the case for menopausal and perimenopausal women, and it’s a sad case of following strategies that used to work (eat less, move more), to bad outcomes!

And it’s worth repeating - this happens to women, not men.

So paradoxically, sometimes the solution is eating more and resting more. This removes the two stressors (caloric insufficiency and exercise-induced stress), that cause the body to go into crisis mode, and provides the nutrients required to build rather than break down lean muscle mass, which is what we are after!

But this isn’t to say that eating our body weight in almond croissants whilst sat on the sofa is the right way. It’s about good amounts of frequent low level movement throughout the day. You know, the stuff you are doing daily as you work through the Thorny Rose exercises. It’s about eating reasonable amounts of the sorts of food that keep our blood sugar stable and our gut microbiome thriving. And it’s about more vigorous exercise followed by actual rest. A day of light movement. A gentle walk. Some mobility work.

It’s also about getting enough sleep and keeping the other stressors of our lives at bay. Which is of course, easier said than done.