If you want to lose body fat, but you don't want your metabolism to go down the drain, in this video, I'm going to explain everything you need to know to keep your metabolism high while you're losing body fat. The only caveat here is I'm not going to BS you. There are no sponsors.
I'm not looking to make any money. All I want to do is give you the science-based truth around how you can keep your metabolism as high as possible while you're losing weight. First and foremost, what is metabolism? This is the word everyone loves to throw around, but they have no clue what they're talking about. Scientifically, metabolism is the sum of all the chemical processes in your body.
But from a layman's perspective, what the hell does that actually mean? mean. Very basically, how many calories do you burn per day? That's your metabolism. How much energy is your body using?
Someone who has a fast metabolism burns a lot of calories every single day. Someone who has a slow metabolism does not burn as many calories every day. That is what metabolism means. Now, there are many things that influence your metabolism, not least of which being your genetics. But genetics is something you can't control, unfortunately.
I'm going to discuss the things that you can control and that actually have a major impact on your metabolism. Before we do that, though, there's one very important question we have to answer, which is, does dieting, or being in a calorie deficit, cause you to slow your metabolism? The reason I asked this question, I want to answer it early on is because one of the main reasons people will discourage you from trying to lose weight or trying to go into a calorie deficit is because they will say they'll try and scare you into thinking that losing weight will cause you to lose your metabolism or to slow your metabolism drastically. And the truth of the matter is they're right. If you eat in a calorie deficit and you subsequently lose body fat, your metabolism is going to decrease.
But this isn't a bad thing. This is completely 100% normal. Someone telling you not to lose weight because it's going to decrease your metabolism is like someone telling you not to invest your money in the stock market because your bank account is going to go down. Yes, that's absolutely right. The money in your bank account will go down, but your money in the stock market will go up, which is exactly what you want.
When you're trying to lose fat and when you're in a dieting phase and you're in a calorie deficit, because that's the only way you can lose fat, your metabolism is going to go down because that's what happens. When you lose weight, your metabolism inherently drops. Likewise, and in reverse, when you gain weight and you gain body fat, your metabolism increases. Someone who weighs 300 pounds will inherently have a higher metabolism than someone who weighs 300 pounds. someone who weighs 200 pounds, but no one wants to gain body fat just for the sake of increasing their metabolism.
If your goal is losing body fat so you can improve your performance, improve your health, or just like how you look better, then your metabolism will decrease. But again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, and we can mitigate the amount that you lose it through the ways I'm going to explain later in this video. It's just important for you to know that decreasing your metabolism is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you mitigate it.
And when you lose weight and you lose body fat, your metabolism will decrease. It is normal, expected, and not a bad thing. Now what I'm going to do is explain five science-backed ways to help increase your metabolism. Now I'm going to split these ways into two categories. One will be direct and one will be indirect.
The direct ways will directly increase your metabolism. obviously. The indirect ways, while they won't be directly increasing your metabolism, they might be directly impacting your behavior and other things that will have an impact on your metabolism.
Just remember that in my opinion, these are the most important ways to increase your metabolism, whether you're dieting or not. They're science-backed, they're proven, and they actually work. There's no supplements.
There's nothing tricky about it. Again, I'm not making any money from this. All I want to do is give you the truth and science-backed ways to improve your health and performance and get you the results you want. Now, the first method to directly increase your metabolism is walking. Now, I know this one goes under the radar every single day, and many people on the internet say it doesn't count as exercise, but it is without question the single best way to not only help you lose fat, but to help you keep the fat loss.
off because of the direct impact that walking has on your metabolism. The great part about walking is it's not stressful on your body or your central nervous system. You can do it a lot.
And the vast majority of your daily calories are burned through something called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which is a very fancy and obnoxious way of saying just the general things you do throughout the day, usually that include walking. If you look at the research around the people who are the best at not just losing fat, but keeping it off for the rest of their life, it is the people who consistently walk day in and day out and try to get at least 7,500 steps every day. So if you're concerned about your metabolism dropping, but you're focused on trying to find a certain supplement to increase your metabolism, and you're not just focused on walking every single day, you are missing the forest for the trees, my friend.
The most important thing you can do every single day to keep your metabolism high is simply walk. I know it's not sexy. I know it's not fancy.
I know it's not something I can sell to you, but it's the truth. The best thing you can do for your metabolism is to walk at least 7,500 steps every day. You can take that to the bank.
Now, the second thing on this list that will indirectly keep your metabolism high is sleep. And I feel like in the last five to 10 years, we've really all started to appreciate how important sleep is for us. When I was coming up in the industry, sleep wasn't talked about at all.
It was just grind, grind, grind, work, work, work. You can sleep when you're dead. Now, thank God we're realizing how important sleep is and how impactful it is for your health.
When it comes to your metabolism, sleep isn't going to increase your metabolism. But if you're not getting enough sleep, then obviously you're going to be more tired. And when you're more tired, you're less likely to get your day.
daily steps in, you're less likely to get your workouts in, you're less likely to be able to bring as much intensity to your strength training, so you won't be able to build as much strength or muscle. Your cravings and your hunger is going to increase, you're going to be eating more, so it's going to make it more difficult to hit your calories every day. Sleep is one of the most important ways that will indirectly increase your metabolism because it will give you the energy to do what you need to do in order to make progress.
So please don't skimp on your sleep. And for all the new parents out there, I get it. I've got an almost two-year-old and I've got, God willing, another one on the way in a couple of months. I understand it's very difficult if you can't control your sleep.
So obviously I'm talking to the people who can control their sleep. I'll also say you can still lose fat even without good sleep. I did it when my first daughter was born.
I documented it. You can still do it. It just it makes it much more difficult. So don't get discouraged if you aren't getting enough sleep or if you can't get enough sleep right now.
That's okay. As long as you're in a calorie deficit and as long as you're following the general guidelines for fat loss, you're still going to lose fat. which by the way, if you don't know how many calories to eat in order to lose fat, I have a free calorie calculator.
The link is in the show notes. It will tell you everything you need to know in terms of how many calories to eat, how much protein eat every day to lose fat sustainably. I just don't want you feeling discouraged if sleep is an issue right now.
If it's something you can control, it will have a massive impact on your overall energy and indirectly impact your metabolism. The third thing on this list that will directly impact your metabolism is your protein intake. And like I just said, I have a free calorie calculator. It will tell you how much calories and how much protein to have every day in order to lose fat sustainably. But protein will directly impact your metabolism because it has a very high what's called thermic effect of food.
In other words, everything you eat, your body will expend energy in order to process and digest it. Protein, way more than carbs and way, way more than fat, is much more energy costly. So in order for your body to digest and process protein, it takes your body more energy to do it, which means that it's going to increase your metabolism.
Now, it might not seem like much, but when you take your protein from a very small portion of your daily calorie intake to a very high percentage of your daily calorie intake, the number of calories your body will burn is very significant and will increase your metabolism far more than you'll probably realize. The next thing on this list that will increase your metabolism both directly and indirectly is building muscle. Now building muscle is amazing for any number of reasons, not least of which it will be good for your health and for your performance. But from a metabolic perspective, building muscle will directly increase your metabolism and indirectly.
Let me explain from a direct perspective, having more muscle burns more calories. Unfortunately, it's not as much as we would like to think. Generally speaking, a pound of muscle will burn about six to eight calories per day, whereas a pound of fat will burn about four calories per day, even though it's not that much. it is still pretty significant where if you add 10, 20, 30, 50 pounds of muscle to your frame, you're going to be burning a significant number of extra calories per day.
It's just not that easy to build 20, 30 pounds of muscle, and it's not burning as much as we would like. Either way, it does directly impact your metabolism. From an indirect perspective, I look at what having more muscle does to your day-to-day life. When you build more muscle, and you're actually you have more muscle and you have a more conducive body composition to health and performance well now you're going to be able to do more you're probably going to be able to walk more probably likely getting fewer injuries you're going to be able to function better as a human physically so you can be more active without having issues you'll probably be able to get up and move more earlier in the day stay up late and get stuff done if you need to you're a more capable human and when you're more capable you will burn more calories just because you can For example, walking up the stairs will be relatively easier for you. Whereas if you were getting up on the escalator, you wouldn't be burning those extra calories.
And just because you have that extra muscle and you've been moving more, you will now indirectly and directly increase your metabolism from having more muscle. While a lot of people only tout that muscle burns more calories than fat, and it's true, I actually am more interested in how does having more muscle impact your day-to-day life and what that does for you in terms of being able to burn calories and increase your metabolism just from having that extra muscle and what it allows your body to do. I think it's invaluable. Now, before we dive into the last thing on this list that directly increases your metabolism, after this, I'm going to talk about why some people lose weight when they increase calories.
Most people have no idea what's going on, and it's a major topic of discussion. on social media, especially Instagram and TikTok. So I want to dive into that. But first, the last thing on this list that directly increases your metabolism is not cutting your calories too drastically when you go into a calorie deficit. Again, if you don't know how many calories to eat, I have a free calorie calculator link in the description.
It tells you how many calories to eat sustainably so you can lose fat without starving yourself. But when you drastically cut calories and you end up eating 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 calories below what you should be, yeah, you're going to have a major metabolic drop. You're going to lose muscle mass. You're going to be super tired. You're not going to be getting your steps in.
It takes a real toll. on your metabolic rate. But when you have a slow to moderate calorie deficit, maybe somewhere between 250 to 500 calories, that's much more sustainable and your metabolism won't take as big of a hit from it. Now I will say some people get really all up in arms and they're like, I cut a lot of calories.
Now I have a huge metabolic drop. Is it ever going to come back? Yes. Your metabolism is very good at readjusting and fixing itself.
Assuming you didn't have severe disordered eating habits for years and years and years, your metabolism is very malleable and it will come right back up as soon as you increase your calories. But generally speaking, if you don't want your metabolism to drop very much, just have a much slower, sustainable, more moderate calorie deficit, and it's not going to be as big of a deal. Now, why do some people lose weight even when they...
increase their calories? This is the golden question. This has people confused all over social media. I see it all the time.
Someone says they increased their calories and they started losing weight. Why did that happen? There are two major reasons.
The first reason, and the most important reason is just because someone increased their calories doesn't mean they're not still in a calorie deficit. This is very, very important. It's almost like a riddle, someone says, I increased my calories. So you think, oh, they're eating way more. They're in a calorie surplus.
No. Maybe they were eating a thousand calories a day like a fucking idiot. And then they decided to increase their calories to something more sustainable, like, I don't know, 1500 calories a day.
But a calorie deficit for them is anything below 1700. So they went from a thousand to 1500. and now they're in a 200 calorie deficit, yeah, they're still going to lose body fat. They're still in a calorie deficit, which is why they're still losing weight. But why do they lose weight when they increase their calories? This goes into the second point. Oftentimes, when you're in a very severe calorie deficit, your stress will go up.
And when your stress goes up or cortisol, you will hold on to water. This is not permanent. It's temporary. But for a short period of time, whether it's a week or a couple of weeks, your body can be holding on to a lot of extra water in response to the added stress. So you might not be losing any scale weight.
But just because you're not losing scale weight doesn't mean you're not losing weight. mean you're not losing fat. So then they increase their calories from 1000 to 1500. And all of a sudden their stress goes down, cortisol comes down, water flushes out, and they see a huge drop on the scale.
It's not because they lost four pounds of fat overnight. And it's not because they increase their calories that all of a sudden their metabolism increased. It's because they reduced the stress, they're still in a calorie deficit, the water flushed out and they saw them. big whoosh overnight. That is why people are able to increase their calories and lose weight at the same time.
They're still in a calorie deficit and they're reducing the stress on their body. For you, if you want to lose weight, take a small calorie deficit, reduce the stress on your body, be very consistent, and that's going to help you lose weight while keeping your metabolism as high as possible and while keeping stress as low as possible. Well, That is it. I hope you enjoyed the video.
If you did, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel if you don't already. And if you would like to figure out how many calories you should eat in order to lose fat sustainably, again, I have a free calorie calculator. The link is in the description. It will tell you how many calories and how much protein to have every day to lose fat enjoyably and sustainably.
Have a wonderful week. I'll talk to you soon.