So finally home from Italy and didn’t really pay attention to food or what have you. One thing I do know is my metabolism has slowed from when I had it running high octane of 3200+ calories a day. It took a year of buildup and I’m going to start that again. Hopefully it doesn’t take a year again, but you can’t rush repairs. So what I’ll do is make week to week notes of average daily intake with macros alongside weekly amounts which are the important numbers. I’ll track water as well as weight. I know the scale isn’t the best measure, but I also know tracking by the week I can get a better picture of what’s happening.
My supposed BMR is roughly 2400cal a day which is 16,800cal for the week. I’ll be aiming to hit 17kcal in total and see weight change. As of this morning I am 179.4lbs. My goal? I would like to be 160-164lbs, but my ultimate goal is to be able to eat 3400+ on average. Why? I remember how I felt eating so much and it was a new level for me. My energy levels, sex life, strength and mental drive we’re on point and I’d like it back. I will fast from time to time, though more out of response to food rather than desire. If I fail to feel hungry then I won’t eat, but i know I’ll need to add food to hit my numbers eventually until I adapt.
Timely post, I just finished listening to the latest 2kd which is about metabolism. If you haven’t listened check it out you might be able to accelerate your high burn.
That’s funny, I didn’t have that in my feed just yet. I listened to it and it really does follow my knowledge of how the metabolism works. So being as lean as I am and aiming for a BF that’s in the single digits I have to play a bit more with this. I have a hard time fasting over 24hrs as I really only get 600kcals from BF which isn’t much at all. So instead of feasting to bump up my metabolism and fasting to use it. I’m slowly increasing the food amount to ease my metabolism higher. Like they said, the body gets used to the calories eventually and by increasing it I’m having it kick higher until eventually it will begin to store. Then you take some food away, not fasting but by undulating the calories it stays high but on lower days it burns more. This is different from CICO because im not cutting calories and increasing output, but allowing the body to access BF with slightly less food because it’s used to a higher burn. It’s no different than fasting when you’re fat adapted.
I completely agree with the whole cardio lowers metabolism. I’ve said it for years and hate cardio but have to do it for work so I do the bare minimum. But! I am a supporter to building lean muscle to increase metabolism as well. Muscle is expensive and needs energy. It may be not much extra per lb, but it adds up over the days, weeks, months and years. Just because the number is small doesn’t mean it isn’t significant.
Also again my goal is to get into single digit BF. Naturally speaking my body type doesn’t want that. Why? It’s so low in fat it is fearful of losing too much for safety. So what is needed? Increased calories/metabolism. So I have to eat even more food and get my metabolism higher so when I have a low day the body is forced to compensate for the difference.
A BF in single figures IMHO apart from the ultimate pro athlete is almost impossible to obtain. In fact I know someone who had a Dexa scan as he wanted same as you and the person doing it said was actually harmful to the person as you suggest the body wants a natural level of BF to live on.
Look at the likes of Chris Froome, supposed to be 8% and he looks ill.
Guess it all depends on your own personal target in sport.
Tell that to my husband - who is at 6-8%, at least by our scale. lol… Maybe a DEXA would show more fat? He is very fit, but not an “ultimate pro athlete”. He is skinny with a lanky runners build. He was getting a little bit of a gut lately and went LCHF with me, he is down to 160 I think. At 6’3" that is pretty skinny. He looks skinny, but not ill.
So the first week is done and I weighed in at 178.1lbs which is a pound difference than last week. So what do I know? I ate 19,348 calories in total averaging over 2700 every day which is 300 higher than my suggested BMR. I also know I fasted on Saturday for 24hrs prepping for a Easter meal where I knew I’d have carbs. This was a social gathering where I didn’t wish to be rude. Please leave the comments of this decision quiet. My choice to have a healthy social relationship of my in laws a few times a year are not going to ruin me if treated correctly. In the end i still only had 60ish carbs in total. I ate high fat before to control my appetite and instead of my normal demolition of food and eating 10+ tamales I had 4.
So still being down while drinking 1-1.25gals of water a day I know I’m holding some water weight still and yet still down. This tells me I’m probably another pound or two lighter without those carbs. So I’m going to increase my weekly calories to an even 20,000 to make up the difference. My metabolism is reacting well to the increase of calories though negatively to the greens. I’ll cut the veggies down in half as I was eating 3-4cups of greens. Only reason to eat them now is my hate for wasting food.
Why are you tracking calories? Carbs and protein grams are important…i understand that part. How is tracking calories helping you? I’m having a hard time following your analysis.
I’m tracking for metabolic adaptation. So if I keep my proteins and carbs at max I’m at 720 calories. What I’m doing is upping my fat higher and higher to see my metabolic potential. So I could change this to a pure daily average fat intake track but it doesn’t push the point as much.
We already know there is an equal reaction in metabolism to the amount of food you eat at any given time. Whether it’s 1 meal vs 6 the thermic effect is the same, but! There is a fuel level I can reach so that my body is running at its peak. Getting there allows some hacking as I know regular eating keeps me at 170lbs no problem. Breaking that threshold dietarily takes work without starving myself. So my initial phase is speeding up the metabolism on fat so when I remove that source it grabs it from my body more as my BF is too low for me to comfortably fast longer than 24hrs.
Bear in mind that this is a thread concerning metabolism rebuilding.
I track calories as well, and I agree that CICO is extremely flawed and drastically over-simplified, so at a minimum, showing an increase in calories over time when correlated with no change in body weight, would validate the flawed nature of CICO, but in the extreme we do know that at some point, despite an optimal metabolism and hormone environment, adding more calories will result in increased body fat. IOW, I can’t expect to be eating 10,000 Calories per day and not expect to gain some body fat.
Under any CICO consideration comparing my caloric intake to someone else’s is extremely misleading, but tracking increase/decrease in calories for the same person over time should give us insight into hormonal changes and probable inferences to changes in BMR.
IOW, if I can show an increase in calories over time, with no increases in body fat, I think it’s reasonable to assume that, aside from the possible excretion/bypass of dietary intake, the person is increasing BMR.
That being said, the best determination for changes in BMR would be the indirect measurement used by the breathing machines that infer resting metabolims from the amount of oxygen consumed over the length of the testing interval.
I have data points from the last 3 years and notes of how I felt alongside numbers which are what we are essentially looking at. Physically I don’t feel different yet. I do know from my data when I did get to higher intake fasting was easier and sleep was solid. Stress management improved and ADHD tendencies went away.
So is the idea that by slowly increasing the calorific value of fat in your diet, other macros remaining constant, your BMR will slowly increase to use the additional calories rather than store them or ignore them. At a certain point the additional fat calories will be removed and the higher BMR will then draw on stored fat without the need to fast. Is that right, because it sounds like black magic
We’ve seen many instances where people have calorie-restricted for a period of time, including those practical examples from the Biggest Loser TV show and clinical trials, where they reduced their BMR to the degree that it is not only harder to lose weight, but they need to work harder to maintain it. This is the opposite of raising BMR and this decrease is not black magic, it is the result of the body readjusting all it’s hormones to accommodate the perceived famine.
In other words, studies have shown that chronic dieters who gain/lose/gain/lose, end up worse off then when they started and tests have proven that they decreased their BMR.
So it seems intuitive, as well as through n=1 reports, that if someone has damaged their metabolism and reduced BMR, that by slowly acclimating to higher calories, the body will restore the metabolic processes that became conserved and down-regulated during the restriction.
This is also supported by overfeeding studies where CICO would predict a certain weight gain, but in many cases didn’t even come close to the results that CICO predicted. These people didn’t magically make calories disappear, their bodies adapt to the overfeeding and find ways to burn the excess instead of storing it. This includes not only the thermic effect of food, but also thermogenesis through the action of Brown Adipose Tissue (BAT), aka brown fat. Studies are showing that ketones “encourage” White Adipose Tissue (WAT), aka white fat, to behave a little more like BAT and begin to actively burn fatty acids in the mitochondria through an uncoupling protein. You can look for Dr. Benjamin Bikman on YouTube for some information on these thermogenic mechanisms.
I do not believe that someone with an optimal metabolism and endocrine system can make significant and lasting changes to increase their BMR above this optimal state, but someone who’s damaged it, may be able to recover some of the lost functioning.
Edit:
Although I don’t think it’s been mentioned here yet, it’s important to point out that the mitochondria are responsible for actually producing energy in the cells and mitochondria can be increased through proper exercise and damaged/under-performing ones replaced through autophagy and fasting, so exercise and fasting would be good to add to any attempt at rebuilding metabolism.
i’m not totally on board…partially wishful thinking, hoping, praying
if we can significantly manipulate/lower our BMR (a lot of ppl with otherwise healthy systems before “dieting”) and the body is highly adaptable…couldn’t we also teach it to run higher?
like jason wittrock, cory gregory experiments, and non keto reverse dieting?
I think we can run higher but if the baseline stays the same then we have a limit. I’m sure we can raise out metabolism pretty high but something needs to change to allow more without storing any. This could be overall activity, muscle building or so on. In the end though a faster metabolism to an optimized point is where we should strive. I forget who said it but something along the lines of, “to live ones life without reaching their full potential is a sad life.”
Sorry guys (@BillJay and @Abrane), but I respectfully beg to differ. The strategic play you are taking on adjusting your fat calories is just another form of CICO thinking.
Reading through medical literature, I discovered that a phenomenon happens when we fast. While cells undergo autophagy for the most part, mitochondria do something entirely different. They fuse together, creating larger or more elongated mitochondria. But for limited period of time before real starvation starts to happen…and in the case of going too long in fasting (where now the person starts to suffer serious consequences) the mitochondria will start to break apart and join the other components of cells undergoing autophagy.
The nice thing about this is the number of cells are decreased, because your body feeds on the cells, but the mitochondria are spared. So, as a result, the mitochondria density increases. When you increase mitochondria density, you increase potential for higher metabolic rates (essentially, you have more energy producing mitochondria in your body). I’ve read that about 10% of our cellular make up is mitochondria. You can increase this with fasting (autophagy), since the autophaged cells donate their mitochondria to surviving cells.
Now, what happens if you decrease calories? You force your body to turn down energy expenditure (drive down metabolism). Some cells have no mitochondria, while others are full of them (like liver and kidney cells). Your digestive system cells have lots of mitochondria…they are needed for digestion. So, to make sure food doesn’t rot in your gut and evacuates well, your body “steals” energy from other parts and makes sure your digestion stays running properly.
But, if you fast, your body doesn’t “panic” since it doesn’t have to “turn on” digestive processes…and therefore, no need to steal power from other parts of body (resulting in not lowering of your metabolism). And, while your body doesn’t lower metabolism, the autophagy of cells, and fusing (sparing) of mitochondria of your autophaged cells, increases mitochondria density. When you finally break your fast, you have a greater mitochondria to cell ratio. This promotes increased metabolism rates.
This is why I don’t buy into the increasing your fat to increase metabolism. Yes, lots of fat is needed to stay fat-adapted, but if a fat-adapted person in ketosis eats more fat, I don’t think they are increasing their metabolism, like flipping a light switch. This assumption doesn’t take into account what happens at the mitochondria level. From what I understand in literature, eating more fat does not trigger the generation of more mitochondria. While high carb diets create oxidative stress that destroy mitochondria, high fat diets protect mitochondria from destructive oxidation (but, not increase rate of generation).
A bit of reading on the “fusion” phenomenon of mitochondria during fasting and autophagy, leading to increased density in papers below…this is how I interpret the literature. Would love to hear from others if they understand the science differently.
