Metabolic Health—The Missing Link of Health
Metabolic Health—The Missing Link of Health
CGMs, Metabolic Fitness, Metabolic Flexibility
Hey friends 👋🏻
In this week’s newsletter, I wanted to share some new learnings around metabolic health—one of the keystones of health.
Before we jump right into it I wanted to make everyone’s caught up to speed, so let’s cover the basics.
📚 The Basics of Metabolism
Metabolism is a collection of processes that produce energy from our food and environment and is required for every process in the body.
In general, our bodies primarily use glucose for energy and it needs to be heavily regulated to work efficiently throughout the body.
Our bodies primarily obtain glucose from breaking down carbohydrate-dense foods (ie. rice, potatoes). This glucose then enters our bloodstream, raising our blood sugar levels and signaling to our pancreas to make insulin.
Some of this glucose ends up being processed by our mitochondria to form energy (called ATP) that our cells can use. Whereas, the excess glucose is signaled by insulin to be stored for later in our muscles and liver as glycogen, and even as triglycerides where they're stored in fat cells.
Eventually, once our body needs more energy we either supply ourselves with glucose by eating more, or we can utilize our body’s existing energy sources. This can come from the bloodstream, glycogen in our muscles and liver, or we even create new glucose from amino acids (a broken down form of proteins). Other than glucose we can also utilize stored fat or broken-down proteins to create energy as well.
While the efficiency of this process can be thought of as metabolic fitness, a spectrum that lets us know how well our body is able to generate and process energy.
🥦 Benefits of Being Metabolically Fit
So now that we all on the same page we can begin to jump into why the heck we should even care about this in the first place.
Well, a person with optimized metabolic fitness can see a wide range of benefits:
Stable and sustained energy throughout the day
Improved memory and recall
Sustained endurance
Fat burning ability
More stable mood
Improved fertility and sexual health
A better functioning immune system
Lower risk of chronic disease: diabetes, Alzheimer’s, obesity, heart disease, stroke, and more.
Luckily we can all become metabolically fit, we just need to put in the time and effort.
💪🏻 Improving Our Metabolic Health
So there are a couple of ways we can do this in our everyday life.
Minimizing Sugar Intake
One of the first ways is cleaning up our diet/nutrition. In this case that would mean reducing the number of high sugar foods in our diet, artificial and natural. So that would mean cutting refined sugar (ie. cookies, candy, pop) and choosing low glycemic fruits (ie. berries, grapefruit, avocado). Keep in mind that some fruit can have a ton of sugar, so be sure to do your research (ie. ripe bananas).
Becoming Metabolic Flexibility
This is the state where our body doesn't care about what energy source is being used, were easily and efficiently able to use the whole lineup—ensuring that our energy levels stay normalized.
Unfortunately, the majority of us haven’t really been training our bodies for this ideal state. By eating consistently throughout the day, with each meal consisting of a ton of carbs we signal to our body that the other energy sources aren’t important.
This can be fixed by making a habit of time-restricted feeding (intermittent fasting) where we train our body to use other sources of fuel, for example from our stored fat. We can also utilize the ketogenic diet to better adapt our body to use fat from our diet for fuel.
Track Our Blood Sugar
There's this amazing quote from Peter Drucker that says, "What gets measured gets managed". So if we're actually able to see in real-time how our body is responding to food and lifestyle decisions that would be quite game-changing.
Thankfully that tech is available and is slowly becoming more accessible and user-friendly. We can use a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), for example, the FreeStyle Libre from Abbot. We can then pair these with a sleek and sexy UI (user interface) from companies like Levels Health to make the whole experience seamless.
This is really just scratching the surface of metabolic fitness, but I hope I got you just a little bit excited about what it can do for our health. 🎉
🔖 Quote
“If you’re over 40 and don’t smoke, there’s about a 70 to 80% chance you’ll die from one of four diseases: heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, cancer, or neurodegenerative disease.”
Peter Attia
Hopefully, this puts fire on your asses to start prioritizing health before it’s too late. ❤️
📚 Content Rec.
If you’re interested in learning more about this check out this episode of the Genius Life👇🏻
📸 Learn More About CGMs
If you’re interested in more content like this be sure to check out my channel.
▷▷ Mike Hanna
🎉 Thank you!
Hope the newsletter was able to add some value to your life!
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