5 Things to Preserve Metabolic Reserve and Strengthen Metabolism
What’s metabolic reserve? Metabolic reserves (MR) are the nutrients stored in your body that help you recover from stress. When stress is chronic, these reserves become used much more quickly. These same nutrients are also used to maintain health and a strong metabolism. In cases of chronic stress, a person is at risk of running low on MR and soon after health begins to decline. These five things can help you increase MR and boost metabolism.
1. Five times per day, take one minute to reset your autonomic nervous system (ANS) with six breaths lasting 10 seconds each (five seconds in and 5 seconds out). Focus more on the exhalation. Doing this helps stimulate the parasympathetic branch of the ANS, which you can think of as the restorative branch. Every time you adopt this prolonged breath you also reduce nutrient expenditure, thus maintaining MR.
2. Activate a renewing emotion such as appreciation, care, love, courage, or joy throughout your day. Consider combining it with your 10 second breath in #1. Choose the emotion that’s easiest for you to feel. It’s important to actually feel the emotion. Evidence suggests renewing emotions stimulate the release of a restorative hormone called DHEA. This is in contrast to depleting emotions (such as fear, worry, and anger) that stimulate cortisol production. For many of us it can take practice to engender a renewing feeling without an external stimulus. Thinking of feel-good situations can be a big help!
3. Get your sleep. Lack of it can increase amygdala activity as well as food cravings. The amygdala is a portion of the brain associated with novelty and reactive behavior. People with more amygdala activity tend to respond before thinking; as well as feel worry, fear, anxiety, and anger more frequently (all emotions that deplete MR). Getting enough quality sleep improves this and our cravings for food. When we’re lacking sleep (a source of renewal and recovery), our body seeks out an alternate form of energy. The most readily available is food! Better sleep should also be considered if overeating or binge eating is a problem for you.
4. A forgotten element of a strong metabolism, and improved body composition, is nutrition. Too often people focus on the calorie model (calories in versus calories out). Focusing on calories can lead to behaviors such as skipping a healthy breakfast because you ate a donut or some sort of commercial cereal. These are displacing foods. They displace an otherwise nutrient dense food that replenishes MR. Proper nutrition keeps our organs functioning strong. And strong functioning organs will help us stay metabolically charged. Therefore, it’s not necessarily a problem if you’re eating unhealthy foods from time to time. The problem is the habitual skipping of healthy foods, regardless of the calories.
5. And finally, listen. Listen to what your body is telling you about the foods you eat. Are you getting heartburn, abdominal pain, feeling sluggish, bloated, fatigued, or any other negative feeling from a meal? If so, something in that meal may not be appropriate for you, at least at that moment - we have many tempting options here in Turks and Caicos. People tend to adopt dietary principles based on what they hear from outside sources. This is fine as long as you listen to how you feel from the foods you’re eating. Use outside information as a tool to refine your way of eating. It’s OK to experiment, but be honest with yourself and be ready to discard what’s not working for you. We all have different metabolic make-ups with different levels of toxicity and metabolic reserves. To really listen to how your body feels from food it’s important to keep the internal noise to a minimum (see tip #1). If your life is hectic you may not hear the subtle cues from your body. Developing nutritional wisdom can take months or years to develop. Yes, it’s worth it!