Are you a member of the hot chicks club?
(And by hot we mean achieving a hotter basal body temperature.)
Matt Stone will show you how to heal your hormonal problems – lose weight, regain your sanity, and GET HOT. He’ll be here June 24th. Read below for Matt’s blog.
The Importance of Metabolism
Metabolism is a word we generically think of when it comes to weight loss. Metabolism, as we know it, means how many calories we burn per day. Metabolism, as I’ve come to understand it, is of course much, much more – and even the word metabolism as it is commonly used is a misnomer.
For example, if you jog for a couple of hours every day this is said to raise your metabolism because you are burning more calories through exercise. This is false. Jogging dramatically lowers metabolism, especially when taken to such excesses – instead it is the Total Energy Expenditure or TEE that is raised by burning more calories through exercise while the basal metabolic rate or BMR drops. If you stop jogging, it is easier to gain fat than ever before because your metabolism has been lowered by this form of exercise. This is just one of the many myths surrounding metabolism. Another is that thin people have “high metabolisms,” which is sometimes the case, and sometimes not the case at all. All different body types can have an underlying low metabolism. You can store excess fat from a low metabolism, or be incapable of building tissue effectively and suffer from muscle underdevelopment and an emaciated or skinny-fat look.
An increasingly popular myth is the idea that it’s good to have a low metabolism – and that if we burn energy more slowly we will live longer. Much of this stems from laboratory research showing that severe calorie restriction (like eating half of what you normally eat) prolongs life in several species like fruit flies, rats, monkeys…
But, like most research, this prolongation of life is taken completely out of context and then turned around and applied to adult humans living and interacting in the real world. It ignores aspects of drastic and game-changing significance like…
1) The only people successful at permanently reducing calorie intake by at least half are those that develop an eating disorder (and dieting at a young age is the top “risk factor” for developing an eating disorder), the deadliest known psychological disease that affects 11 million Americans, mostly young women – and globally has killed more people than the Holocaust.
2) Humans are surrounded by endless abundance and temptation for food, and with real people in the real world, cutting calories by half leads to massive rebound hyperphagia (pigging out – as is seen in yo-yo dieting and every human calorie-restriction trial ever conducted).
3) Calorie restriction experiments are done with animals from birth. This is a hugely significant difference, and the bodies’ of the creatures can develop at a rate that makes the low calorie intake sufficient – but this calorie intake is insufficient and causes rapid degeneration when the calorie level is cut after adulthood has already been reached. Comparing calorie restriction from birth to calorie restriction begun in adulthood is a completely invalid comparison.
4) Calorie-restricted laboratory animals display many characteristics of neurosis, anxiety, and social/behavioral disorders. Thinking that cutting calories will lead to a long and prosperous life in a human is total fantasy that ignores what science has already shown us.
5) A laboratory is a sterile environment, and even if the calorie restricted animals lived longer and did have a verifiably slower metabolic rate (pound for pound I don’t think they do), it’s hard to compare this to the real world. The real world is filled with opportunistic organisms and other pathogens, and a high metabolism controls the strength of the immune system completely. A high body temperature – a result of a high metabolism, protects from invasion just like a fever wipes an infection out. More importantly, it is obvious when looking at the real world what happens when food becomes scarce – famines lead to widespread disease and infection at astronomically higher rates.
The last example we’ll use as a springboard into talking about the critical importance of maintaining the highest metabolic rate that you are capable of maintaining for health, infectious and degenerative disease resistance, fertility and sex drive, muscle mass and energy and vigor, high-quality functionality and longevity, and much more.
For starters, we all want to avoid getting sick. Viruses, yeasts, fungi, parasites, and bacteria surround us, and it doesn’t take much of a crack in the armor for us to succumb to everything from a common cold or sinus infection to something far more serious. The metabolism is more or less the ultimate protection, and having adequate food supplies in nature protects against widespread epidemics of disease in every species, not just humans. However, when a species outgrows its food supply and no longer has enough food to maintain optimal metabolism, the pathogens quickly take over and disease spreads quickly.
This can all be attributed to a drop in body temperature, which systematically slows down many enzymatic reactions vital to maximal immune system potency as well as many other involved factors. In fact, even a simple drop in body fat levels due to inadequate calorie intake (something I argue is fundamentally different from weight loss that is induced without hunger, conscious attempts to restrict calories, or excessive exercise) lowers the hormone leptin – the master hormone well-understood to regulate appetite, metabolism, and immune system potency. It also raises the stress hormone cortisol, the primary aging and immunosuppressive hormone.
Of course, you’re now thinking “outgrow our food supply? Humans clearly haven’t done that!” And you’re right. Food is more abundant than ever, and your typical person is looking to lose fat not gain it. We’ll get to that in a minute, but let’s say for now that you can have a low metabolism because of a shortage of anything, from lack of sleep to lack of certain nutrients – not just overall calories. And on any given day in the United States for example, 45% of the population reports actively being on some kind of diet – which often triggers the same famine physiology as a real famine.
This is of course compounded by the fact that 35% of the calories in the American diet come from fat, 25% from refined sugar, and another substantial amount from white flour, refined corn products, and other foods that have next to no nutritional value. When you get 50-80% of your calories from low-nutrient fat and carbohydrates that have been stripped of all their nutritional content down to a syrup or white powder, developing a subclinical nutrient deficiency over time is virtually guaranteed.
It’s certainly worth pointing out that infectious disease is not just infectious disease unfortunately. In fact, I’m a part of a discussion group hosted by researcher and co-author of The Potbelly Syndrome (a book showing the countless connections between degenerative disease and infectious agents), Russ Farris, and weekly we receive up to a dozen new studies, articles, and press releases showing new connections between various pathogens and seemingly unrelated diseases. The connections between various pathogens and an endless array of autoimmune diseases, cancers, chronic fatigue, autism, and even heart disease and diabetes are becoming increasingly well-understood. Keeping the immune system optimized by maintaining a high metabolism has ramifications far beyond how many times you have to call in sick at work.
In short, my many years of investigative study, conversing with thousands of others, and wrapping my head around the big picture of health has led me down one consistent path. Cellular energy production – what one could call “the metabolism” or “metabolic rate” is central or highly-connected to every known health problem. While raising the metabolism isn’t a cure-all for everything, there is no doubt in my mind that with any health problem, the first line of action in overcoming it is getting the metabolism up closer to its ideal range. More importantly, optimizing and guarding the metabolism is the key to preventing illness of all kinds and living life with the maximum number of optimally-functional and disease-free years.
My general rule is that if you have a health problem and a low metabolism, bring the metabolism up first to see if it improves or eliminates the condition. Regardless of the health problem, I believe there is a urgent need to maximize metabolic output for health and well-being in general, so this needs to be addressed no matter what your health problem may be. If that works, great. If it doesn’t, THEN you seek out alternative treatments, supplements, medication, and other things to control the issue. The worst case scenario is that you end up with a healthier metabolism, notice at least a handful of health improvements, but still have a lingering problem.
In the rest of this report I hope to lay out just a small sampling of health problems and issues that are directly and indirectly related to metabolism to give you a picture of just important it is to keep your metabolism at a high level – and of course guide you towards the information that can help you overcome a sluggish metabolism in the first place, and help you figure out what might have caused your metabolic problems at the core. It’s easy to do by the way, if you like sleeping in and eating lots of good food.
Constipation
This is a very common disorder. Most people who go daily believe they are not constipated, but really if you are straining at all, spending more than 60 seconds on the toilet, shooting pellets that look like deer poop – you are constipated to some degree. Like most things, it’s not black and white where one thing is constipation and everything else isn’t constipation. It’s more like a scale of 1-10. Bowel movements should occur 1-3 times daily, be moist and full – breaking apart when flushed, easy to expel, low in odor, require little wiping, and so forth.
Metabolism controls your bowel transit time, which means the amount of time it takes for the food you ate to come out the other end. A healthy transit time is about 24 hours. The mammal with the lowest metabolic rate is the tree sloth, with a body temperature of 93 degrees F and a transit time of 30 days!!! Lifelong constipation commonly disappears in as little as three weeks when metabolism is brought to the ideal level.
Low Energy/Chronic Fatigue
The sloth is a wonderful segue for this topic, as this hypometabolic creature has extremely low energy levels, low muscle mass, sleeps most of the day, and is well, a sloth! Raising your metabolic rate makes you increasingly less sloth-like. Your energy levels rise, your desire for physical activity rises, the quantity of sleep you need to feel rested decreases, drowsiness after meals disappears, and an increase in overall vigor and vitality is the norm.
Low Sex Drive
The metabolic rate controls the rate at which sex hormones like progesterone and testosterone are produced by the body. The higher the metabolic rate, the greater the sex hormone production. The primary hormone responsible for sex drive is testosterone, produced in the testis by men and in smaller amounts in the adrenal glands by women. Thus, higher metabolic rate yields increases in testosterone where it was previously lacking (in women who produce excess testosterone – PCOS, hirsutism, etc., a rise in metabolism can make testosterone drop back to normal levels due to the rise in progesterone it stimulates), which produces much greater sex drive and sexual performance, as well as ease of building muscle, greater leanness, enhanced athletic ability, and so on.
Amenorrhea/Infertility
Lack of menstrual period, menstrual irregularity and PMS, and female infertility are all generally caused by a lack of progesterone – as in “pro gestation hormone.” During the first half of a woman’s menstrual cycle (start of period to roughly day 14), estrogen dominates progesterone – meaning there is a much higher ratio of estrogen to progesterone in the body. This stifles the metabolism, which is why women’s body temperatures are significantly lower during the first half of the cycle than the second half of the cycle – sometimes by more than .5 degrees F. However, the rise of progesterone stimulates ovulation, a large rise in sex drive typically as well as an increase in vaginal lubrication and other pro-sex changes, and a substantial rise in metabolism.
But this swings both ways. In other words, by raising the metabolism you can raise progesterone. The metabolism controls the rate at which LDL “bad cholesterol” is synthesized into progesterone. When this happens, lack of menstrual period clears up, and does so very consistently. My success with this as far as I am aware is 100%. With this comes improvements in fertility as well as improvements in menstrual symptoms, which usually occur at the end of the cycle if insufficient progesterone is being produced.
High cholesterol/High triglycerides
As I just mentioned, the metabolism controls the rate at which LDL “bad cholesterol” is converted to progesterone. This is true for a lengthy series of hormones (testosterone in men), not just progesterone. Cholesterol in and of itself is a vital substance, that, if merely swept away with a cholesterol-lowering drug can result in many symptoms – most of which can be attributed to insufficient production of these vital hormones. The answer to high cholesterol is increasing the metabolic rate and turning “bad cholesterol” into vital life-giving, rejuvenating, essential hormones associated with youth and strong disease resistance (I received an email yesterday of a young man who dropped his cholesterol from 220 to 156 following my general guidelines with a rise in “good cholesterol,” and he more than doubled testosterone levels). The metabolic rate also controls the rate in which we burn or “oxidize” fats. When metabolic rate is high, triglycerides – blood fats, do not accumulate in the blood. High levels of triglycerides are a prominent risk factor for heart disease.
Heart Disease
Other than the obvious factors listed above, the most successful doctor in the history of medicine at preventing heart disease was a physician named Broda Barnes. Barnes took exhaustive and detailed records of his patients, cataloged them, and reported them in official medical studies that he later documented. His patients experienced more than 90% fewer heart attacks than the general public at his time of practice. Only four of over 2,000 patients that he recorded had a heart attack, and each of these four had something out of the ordinary about them – one patient had only been seeing him for a few months, another had just moved away and had discontinued his treatment. He had this great success by making the metabolic rate the sole focus of his practice, having patients keep track of their body temperatures to make sure they maintained a youthful metabolic rate – thus avoiding an elderly disease. He also treated countless health problems using the same protocol. His book, Solved: The Riddle of Heart Attacks, which was overlooked by a medical community already entrenched in an ineffective war on cholesterol, has never been challenged on the scientific level – nor has his results as a physician ever been matched.
Cancer
Cancer is a disease of impaired cellular respiration. Many have theorized that the one consistent commonality between all forms of cancer is a lack of sufficient oxygen. When oxygen levels are too low, cells cannot burn glucose for fuel normally, and cancer cells form which operate under a more primitive type of cell metabolism – converting glucose to lactic acid in the body. Estrogen is the primary anti-respiratory hormone (particularly the type of estrogen called estrone which is produced in the adrenal glands by both men and women), occurring in significant quantities in both men and women, that chokes off the oxygen supply to cells. Estrogen is opposed by the hormones of youth such as progesterone and testosterone. Of course, the metabolic rate controls how much of the youth hormones are produced to oppose the anti-respiratory estrogen. As metabolism falls in old age, cancer becomes much more likely. Our best defense is keeping metabolic rate as high as possible, which increases cellular activity, respiration, and cellular oxygenation. There is no better defense against cancer than optimizing and guarding a high metabolic rate.
Conclusion
This was just a small sampling of many of the health problems that have close links to the metabolic rate. Others include all forms of autoimmune disease (the metabolism exerts many direct actions over the thymus gland – our immune system central command), which I’ve seen dramatically disappear with a rise in metabolism, allergies and asthma which I’ve seen disappear with a rise in metabolism, sleep disorders, mood disorders, chronic pain, elevated blood sugars or type 2 diabetes, obesity, acne, and countless other issues both minor and major.
While we cannot avoid at least some drop in metabolism as we age, at the very least we can minimize the rate at which it declines. Unfortunately, many accelerate this process with various restricted diets, weight loss attempts, excessive endurance exercise, and many other flawed approaches that slow down the resting metabolism.
The answer is much simpler and easier, and is what most people’s bodies are crying for them to do anyhow. And that is get sufficient rest, sleep, and relaxation for starters and pair that with a superabundance of nutritious foods with an emphasis on eating plentiful amounts of fat, protein, and carbohydrates – and more importantly calories. Top this off by spending sufficient time doing enjoyable activities and strict avoidance of endurance or steady-state exercise.
I promise you that it is literally impossible to live at your highest level of energy, vitality, resilience, happiness, and health unless you have obtained a reasonably high metabolic rate.
For the latest in how to achieve this most effectively, which is an ongoing work in progress as I continue to refine it, visit www.180degreehealth.com.