Ep 4: The Truth about Metabolism, Cardio, and Fat Loss
Today we’re focusing on the “calories out” side of energy balance with a discussion of metabolism, as well as whether and how we can manipulate this “calories out” side of the equation.
We will not discuss diet or nutrition, which is the “calories in” side of the equation. Stay tuned for the next episode. In the meantime, understanding metabolism and especially how to accurately calculate your own energy expenditure sets the foundation for a sustainable approach to diet later on.
In today’s episode, we cover:
What is metabolism in the context of your total daily energy expenditure?
How to estimate your expenditure, which will be useful later for weight management
Whether it’s possible change your baseline metabolism, both short- and long-term
The truth about cardio and its effect on metabolism and fat loss
A more efficient, sustainable way to burn fat
RELATED LINKS
Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy by Herman Pontzer, PhD
MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use code "WITSANDWEIGHTS" to extend free trial to 14 days)
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Transcript
This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.
[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.
[00:00:29] Welcome to episode four of Wits & Weights. As pedestrian as it sounds, your ability to manage weight comes down, not to food, quality, carbs versus fat meal timing or any other new and improved fat loss secret. But rather to the age old first law of thermodynamics energy can neither be created nor destroyed, or in our context, calories in calories out, we refer to this as energy.
[00:01:01] Today, we're focusing on the calories out side of energy balance with the discussion of metabolism, as well as weather and how we can manipulate this calories outside of the equation. I don't plan on discussing diet or nutrition. Which is the calories in side of the equation. You can stay tuned for the next episode for that, but in the meantime, understanding metabolism and especially how to accurately calculate your own energy expenditure, sets the foundation for a sustainable approach to diet.
[00:01:34] Later on in today's episode, we cover what metabolism is in the context of your total daily energy expense. How to estimate your expenditure, which will be useful later for weight management, whether it's possible to change your baseline metabolism, both in the short and long-term. The truth about cardio and its effect on metabolism and fat loss and a more efficient, sustainable way to burn fat.
[00:02:05] Let's start by defining metabolism. Metabolism is basically all the chemical reactions going on inside your body that keep you alive. If you look up the definition on Wikipedia or anywhere else, You'll see three purposes for your metabolism. The first is to convert energy from the food you eat to run cellular processes.
[00:02:30] The second is to convert the stuff that comes from food, into building blocks, for things like proteins to build your muscle. And the third is to eliminate metabolic waste. So this would be through excretion urination, CO2. And the inner workings of this can get very complicated and it could be worth exploring in a future episode.
[00:02:54] But today I really want to keep it at a higher level and talk about the constituents of your metabolism and the various models that are, that exist to define how you might manipulate metabolism. We'll talk about how to track it, how to calculate it. Can you change it? And all of those sorts of things.
[00:03:13] Now, if we want to get objective and start tracking what we mean by metabolism. Total daily energy expenditure or T D E E. And I found a pretty good breakdown of this that you, you can consider an average for most people who are generally active or just mildly active, uh, some of these components change based on your activity level, but generally they hold for the average person, your TD E again, your total daily energy expense.
[00:03:43] Can be broken down into four components. The largest component is your BMR, your basal metabolic rate. And this could comprise roughly two thirds to maybe 70, even 75% of your expenditure. This is just the energy you need to stay alive. This is the energy you would burn. If you were sleeping. The next component of metabolism is the thermic effect of feeding.
[00:04:12] And this is the energy you burn to eat, to digest metabolize and store your food. And that makes up roughly 10%. And some people argue, you can increase that by eating more protein. And, you know, these things are probably true, but. Amount by which you can manipulate. It may not be significant. The next component is neat.
[00:04:33] Non-exercise activity, thermogenesis. That's all the energy you expend throughout the day, doing stuff, not necessarily intentionally like standing, walking yard work, doing your job, fidgeting, typing on the computer. So that's your non-exercise activity thermogenesis that represents roughly 15%. This is the, the one that I think possibly fluctuates most from person to person and even within a single individual, depending on.
[00:05:06] Your circumstances, right? How much sleep you're getting, how much activity you're doing, whether what your job is also, whether you're on a diet or gaining weight. And then the last component, which happens to be the smallest is exercise activity, thermogenesis. And this could be as little as 5% of your metabolism, which you might be thinking, well, that's not very high.
[00:05:27] Is it? Isn't the point of exercise and activity to burn calories? Well, not. And we'll get back to that. That actually brings me to the next topic, which is energy expenditure models. Now just to keep it simple, I'm going to compare what I'll call the traditional model, which is called the additive expenditure model and something proposed by Herman.
[00:05:55] Ponsor called the constrained energy model. And I'm not saying one is right or wrong. They're evidence, there's evidence to support both. And even if the constraint model is. Quote unquote accurate. It has to be interpreted properly. I think people take some of these to the extreme, to make a wild claims and recommendations.
[00:06:16] So if we look at the additive model, this is what I'll call the traditional model. The idea is simply. The more activity you engage in, the more calories you burn and it's linear and it goes up forever. So if you're running two hours a day or you're preparing for the tour de France or Olympic swimming, you're just going to burn tons and tons and tons more calories a day than somebody who's less active or sedentary.
[00:06:44] That's the traditional model. What Herman ponsor. His colleagues have found, and other researchers who have analyzed precisely calories in calories out in many different populations is that perhaps there's a, an adaptation that occurs with higher activity levels. When you go from sedentary to lightly active, to active, the more activity you engage in, the more calories you burn, but then your body starts to adapt your BMS.
[00:07:14] Declines and thus the total calories burns starts to level off. It starts to plateau rather than continuing to increase. If we're to accept this, then the extreme conclusion some people have made is, Ugh, well then I don't even need to exercise because if I exercise more, my body adapts by burning fewer calories and my net calories are the same.
[00:07:38] I just should just sit around all day because it doesn't make it. Well, the problem with that taken to the extreme is it's just that it's the extreme. When you look at the graph, when you look at the model, there's an entire first segment that shows your activity level does correlate with an increase in calories.
[00:07:57] It's just that perhaps doing lots of activity in the form of cardio could be counterproductive because of this adaptation. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that because that conclusion is supported by what we've discovered when it comes to cardio versus strength training, for example.
[00:08:16] So the constraint model is not a license, not to exercise. Now that we've established the objective definition of metabolism that is total daily energy expenditure, which is comprised of several constituents BMI. Thermic effect of feeding non-exercise and exercise activity, thermogenesis, and that perhaps the curve does not increase forever with activity.
[00:08:44] The next thing we want to understand is, well, how do we measure this? How do we calculate our TDE and then continue to measure it so that we know what to do about it in terms of diet, exercise, or any other levers that we can. And the thing about tracking your TDE, your daily expenditure was just simply how many calories you burn every day.
[00:09:07] Is there tends to be an inverse relationship between the convenience of doing so and the accuracy. That is the easier it is. The more convenient it is, the less accurate it is, but the more complicated and advanced the more algorithms and calculations you do, that's great, but that takes a lot of work and it may not be sustained.
[00:09:29] So we're going to talk about three ways to estimate your daily expenditure from the quick and easy, quick and dirty method that is not very accurate to an intermediate way to do it. That's somewhat accurate to vote way that's most accurate, but not necessarily convenient. And then I'm going to talk about an app that I use that takes the high accuracy.
[00:09:52] But also makes it convenient. So you can kind of have your cake and eat it too. We'll talk about that at the end. So starting with a quick and easy approach, the quickest way to estimate your potential calories burned is purely based on body, weight and calories per pound. So let's say you are. 200 pounds.
[00:10:15] The general number range you see is around 15 or 16 calories per pound. This is your total daily expenditure on average for your weight. So if you're 200 pounds and you assume 15 calories per pound, simple math, 3000 calories, or for example, I'm closer to 180. So 180 pounds, times 15. 2,700 calories. Now in reality, my.
[00:10:44] Daily expenditure at the moment is close to 3000 and the day I'm recording this podcast, I weigh only 1 71, cause I just finished a cut. I just started a bulk. So the 15 calories would be way off. And that's because I'm quite a bit more active. I have a higher metabolism. I have more muscle tissue, all these things that take me away from.
[00:11:09] The center portion of the normal curve in the population. So that's why the accuracy could be way off with this approach. But it's, if, if you have never thought about this before, and you're wondering, Hmm, how many calories do I burn every day? Add maintenance. Take your weight, multiply it by 15. Okay. The next.
[00:11:29] Where you get to a more accurate estimate for most people, but it takes a little more work is to use one of the validated formulas based on research. And most of these formulas are named after the researchers who were involved. And I, there are three formulas that I see used most often. Now the nice thing about these is because they're so.
[00:11:50] You can find calculators online, where you just enter the input data, and then it does the calculation for you. So I'm not saying you have to set up a spreadsheet or, or use Mathematica or something to calculate these, but there are three formulas that I wanted to mention. One is the revised Harris Benedict.
[00:12:09] This uses your gender height, weight, age, and activity level to determine your. TD E and I want to take a quick tangent and talk about this activity level. The big challenge with activity level. They don't decouple deliberate bouts of activity, like going to the gym and lifting heavy five days a week from all the other activity people perform.
[00:12:37] So for example, if you lift heavy and then you sit on your ass all day at a desk job, the rest of the time, another person never goes to the gym, but they're a construction worker who does lots of yard work and chops, whatever. Who has a higher activity level. That's the challenge. So if you're going to use one of these calculators, Look at how they define activity and probably be a little bit conservative just to make sure that you underestimate your expenditure.
[00:13:05] And then there are a couple others. There's the Mifflin St. Jor I think is how you pronounce it, which I think is more accurate than the Harris Bennett Benedict. And you don't have to know your body fat percentage. If you do know your body fat percentage, I would recommend the catch McArdle formula. I will mention these in the show notes.
[00:13:27] But you can go online and Google calculate TDE, and you'll find all these calculators. And most of these websites will say what's recommended. Also be aware to take any recommendations as to what calories and macronutrients you should use to gain or lose weight from those calculators, because they may have very different philosophies than what we're trying to achieve here on this podcast.
[00:13:52] Then we get to the most accurate approach. To collect real data on yourself. And there's two types of data we need, we need our food coming in and we need our wait. The best way to do this as it was some sort of food logger, usually an app where you can log your food every day and figure out how many calories you're eating.
[00:14:14] And then you use a scale every day, weigh yourself in the morning after you've gone to the bathroom with minimal clothing, and then you use a smooth version of your weight, something like a seven day. After about, I would say 14 days, you will have determined how your weight is changing relative to the calories you're eating.
[00:14:38] And that'll tell you how close you are to maintenance. So if you're somebody who has been roughly the same weight for months and months and more. And you're eating fairly consistently. You start measuring that food and you continue weighing yourself and you confirm, yeah, I'm not changing my weight, but I'm eating 2,400 calories a day and I weigh 180 pounds.
[00:15:00] Well, there, you know, you have a data point that tells you that your metabolism is somewhat lower than what these calculators might produce. Conversely, it might be much higher, but the point is it's individually. Now you might say, oh, that sounds like a lot of work. Well, we're going to talk in the next episode about diet and in the following episode about systems to track things on autopilot.
[00:15:23] I am going to be recommending that you log food and weigh yourself daily, at least for a period, if nothing else, then to learn about yourself and to learn about the calorie content and density of foods. But this brings me to what I mentioned earlier, that there are food bloggers that do some of these for.
[00:15:44] But there's only one that I found it's called macro factor and it's by the guys at stronger by science. I have no affiliation with them. They don't even do affiliate links. There's no program or sponsorship with them. I just love the app. I use it every day. And the best thing about it is that it's an adherence.
[00:16:05] It doesn't penalize you for going over or under your calories and macros like many other tools do, but the best part about it is it can calculate your TD E based on some sophisticated algorithms that they've worked out that account for many of these factors and more things like body fat things like are you lifting and doing cardio and can tell you within a few short weeks, roughly what your expenditure is, and then adjust your food plan.
[00:16:32] Going forward week after week to hit your target. And we're not talking about diet today, but I wanted to mention the app because of its ability to calculate for you, your individual TDE based on your food. And. Without you having to do any calculations. All right. We've covered what metabolism is the different models of metabolism and how to calculate it.
[00:16:59] So the next question you might be thinking is, okay, great. That that'll come in handy for diet, but can I actually change my metabolism? Can I change the energy outside meaningfully? I'd like you to ponder something. Think about the calculators we talked about and how most of those calculators. Ask for things like age, gender, height, and weight.
[00:17:19] And the reason they do that is because those factors tend to be correlated with body fat percentage. And it turns out that fat free mass is the strongest explanatory predictor of metabolism. Now, what is fat free? Mass fat free mass is just everything that's not fat in your body, which will be things like Oregon's.
[00:17:41] But more importantly, it includes your muscle tissue. And your bones. Ah, we're going to start to connect the dots here. How can we increase muscle tissue and bone? Resistance training. And we're going to hammer home this message time and again, on this podcast by resistance training, especially with a focus on strength so that you can increase muscle mass and bone density.
[00:18:07] You thus increase your fat free mass and that results in a higher metallic. If you were to take two people that weighed the same, let's say two men that weighed 285 pounds, both six foot eight, but one had significantly lower body fat. Let's say the first person is in the 30% range of body fat and has maybe 20% muscle.
[00:18:34] The second person is down near 10% with 60 something percent. The second person is going to have a higher metabolism by virtue of the extra muscle mass. And you've probably heard muscle is more expensive than fat muscle tissue requires more calories and fat tissue, and it goes beyond just the tissue itself.
[00:18:54] Some people. We'll say, oh, but I've heard it's very few calories per day, extra from muscle versus a pound of fat. And that might be true, but there are other systemic effects of having the extra muscle tissue that also lead to additional calories burned. And we can get into details behind the science, perhaps in another episode, some really cool stuff.
[00:19:15] That's been discovered even in just the last year or so, but suffice it to say it's well understood that a higher fat free mass, which occurs because you have more muscle higher bone density from resistance training will give you a higher metallic. So the best way to do that is through strength, training, the focus, the very focus of this podcast.
[00:19:37] Now, what are some other things you could do to increase your metabolism on a day-to-day level? Because I look at strength and resistance training as the long-term way to increase your overall metabolism, but in the short term, there's some other things you can do. Generally, you're going to burn more calories with more activity.
[00:19:54] Now, many of us can't really help what we're doing for our jobs. You know, if we're working a desk job, If we're sitting behind a desk all day, but we can walk more. We can take a few more walks, take, take a walk after lunch, take a walk after dinner for half an hour, get a couple miles in maybe five, 6,000 more steps for the day than you normally do.
[00:20:13] That's going to burn some more calories. And if you develop a habit of doing that, you might find you enjoy it, and it helps take the edge off of your need to cut your calories on the diets. Also your weight affects your metabolism. When you, if you've lost weight, you're probably going to have a slightly lower metabolism.
[00:20:31] Also things like eating more meals. When you're gaining, when you're bulking, you might end up eating an extra meal or two every day. You're, you're eating more. You're digesting more, you're eating more protein, you're eating more frequently. All of those things can affect your thermic effect of feeding your neat, those.
[00:20:49] The challenge is that metabolism fluctuates constantly. I've seen in my own tracking, my metabolism fluctuate between 2300 and almost 3000 calories just in the last three months or so. And I can't always necessarily explain why, well, what about cardio? I go to the gym and I hit the treadmill. I jog for half an hour, 45 minutes.
[00:21:16] I do the elliptical machine. I swim. What's the problem with lots of medium intensity cardio. Doesn't that burn a lot of calories? Well, here's the problem with too much cardio. And when I say too much, there's a F there's a balance. I'm not one of those hardliners that says you can't do any cardio at all, because it completely interferes with your strength training.
[00:21:36] No, I think there's a balance. I think it is okay to do some cardio. And I think you have to be smart about it, both in terms. What and when, but too much cardio, we're talking 3, 4, 5 days a week, half an hour to an hour or more of medium intensity cardio, where you are doing as much cardio as you are lifting, or perhaps even more, it sends a signal to the body to do two things.
[00:22:04] First, it tells your body to become more efficient, to conserve energy. And it does that by reducing your metabolism. And this is actually. The part that is supported by Herman pantsers constraint, energy model that shows as you, as your activity level goes quite a bit higher, your body starts to adapt and down-regulate parts of your metabolism and thus your overall calorie burn, doesn't go up very high.
[00:22:29] And this is why you see folks. Only do cardio as a form of exercise, often get into a hamster wheel of having to do more and more, eat less and less, not really lose weight, or even if you lose weight, you don't have much muscle and you become. What they call skinny fat, which is the second part of this in that doing too much cardio actually inhibits muscle growth, or even reduces or cannibalizes muscle tissue in the quest to become efficient because of a signal you're sending your body.
[00:23:03] Now it does interfere to some extent with lifting and that's a more nuanced topic for another time, but the take home message here is that some cardio is okay. And you have to be smart about it. For example, when I lift the forms of cardio, I like to use are walking. I think walking is awesome because it doesn't affect your joints.
[00:23:23] It doesn't interfere with recovery, between lifting sessions. You can enjoy nature if you're walking outside and it still burns a bunch of calories and it takes the edge off of your dieting. But other forms of cardio, I like occasionally would be some forms of high intensity interval. Like Tabata sprints are running shuttle runs and sled pushes sled poles, sled, drags, but re you want to limit the total amount of cardio time-wise to something like a quarter to half of your lifting time.
[00:23:53] Not really including things like walking again, walking or very easygoing biking, you could probably do. A lot of it, and it wouldn't interfere with your, if we piece all of this together, we get a good picture of maybe a more optimal way to burn fat. The most immediate route to fat loss is through your diet.
[00:24:13] We're talking about reducing fat, but as we know, reducing fat will take some muscle with it. So there's a smart approach to doing that. And we'll be talking about that in the next episode. The longterm sustainable route to fat loss is like we mentioned before, add muscle. And to do that, you have to do resistance training the way I've heard it said, which I really like is cardio burns, fat while exercising muscle burns fat while you're not exercising more lean tissue equals a higher metabolism, which makes it easier to lose weight later on.
[00:24:51] Or avoid getting fat while still eating more calories. And that is why I love strength training. That is why we're going to hammer that message home time. And again, the importance of adding lean mass to your body, because it helps your metabolism helps you control your diet, helps with fat loss. It's a more sustainable approach.
[00:25:10] And it's a lot of fun. All right, last but not least, I'm introducing a new segment today called the internet. Gets it wrong again. Where I look at the kind of information you get from a Google search when you're just trying to get a simple question answered and Google spits out tons of information that you have to sift through.
[00:25:28] Some of which is right, but most of which is not so right. For example, if you search for ways to increase my metabolism, you'll find several claims that just are not supported by the evidence or if they are they're so insignificant, they're not worth your. Now, the first claim is that metabolism just goes down when you get old and there's not much you can do about it.
[00:25:53] And that is just not true. The reason metabolism decreases as you age comes back to fat, free mass. As you age, you lose muscle mass and bone density. Therefore the lower fat free mass results in a lower metabolism. It's not just because of age. If you can counteract or increase your muscle tissue or bone density.
[00:26:14] As we've discussed multiple times through resistance training, then you can offset this idea that your metabolism declines with age. The second claim is about all these magic foods that can speed up your metabolism. I've seen green tea, chili peppers, even just eating more. We'll increase my metabolism.
[00:26:35] Now, now there might be a little kernel of truth to those in that they affect your digestion and they might burn a few extra calories here or there, but it really is insignificant and it's not worth deliberately going out of your way to try to eat more chili peppers, just to increase your. Just eat a good diet and you'll be fine.
[00:26:55] And the third claim is about using meal. Timing, eating early, eating late skipping meals to jumpstart, weight loss. At the end of the day, the calendar. Inside of the equation comes down to just that calories. And any attempt to manipulate that at the end of the day is measured in terms of calories. So stop trying to use quirky, weird ways to manipulate how and when to eat just in the interest of jump-starting your weight.
[00:27:25] I hope you enjoyed this examination of metabolism and its relationship with cardio fat loss and resistance training. And you're excited to use this information as we delve into diet in episode five, then in episode six, we'll talk about the systems and habits you can put in place to put your fitness and diet on auto.
[00:27:48] If you have questions for me or topics you'd like to hear in future episodes, just connect with me by email, Instagram or Facebook. All the links are in the episodes. Show notes.
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