The Case for More Calories
If you Googled “metabolism” or “ways to boost metabolism,” you’d probably end up with, quite literally, infinite hits. You hear every doctor, nutritionist, and celebrity trainer ramble on about how we need to be focused on improving and increasing our metabolism, but there’s never any context as to why or even what they mean when they refer to it.
Quite frankly, the health world really confuses people more often than they clarify.
To keep it simple: metabolism is essentially the name for the entire process of turning ingested food into smaller, usable building blocks for the body to best repair, restore, and rejuvenate itself.
It’s eating food and turning it into energy. Well, more accurately, it’s every process involved in doing so — which includes the digestion and breakdown of food into its smallest parts, which get absorbed into the bloodstream in the small intestine.
To summarize, the nutrients from the food we eat eventually find their way into all the different cells in our body to be used as fuel, storage, energy or energy production, etc. Each cell uses signaling molecules to trigger cascades of MORE signaling molecules, that eventually lead to cyclic procedures to make and store energy. These food->energy cycles, as well as many others involved in metabolism, are always running in the background to keep us alive and well.
There are many factors that can change our metabolic rate, and each will get their own post because they’re all that important.
Can’t we just… BOOST metabolism?
We can technically jumpstart our metabolism and switch it up every now and then for a different result (hence “boost”), as you often hear in the health world. However, metabolism can more accurately be explained as a reflection of your habits over time. Your body will adjust itself through your metabolic rate depending on the inputs you provide it.
What does that mean exactly? What is the metabolic rate, and what are the inputs?
As an umbrella term, your metabolic rate is the speed at which your body burns the fuel its given, which gets affected by those inputs I mentioned, which include the things I’m always talking about in my posts — how well you sleep, if you build movement into your day, managing stress in healthy ways, and, of course, food.
And as a reminder, this post is about a life hack us nutritionists love handing out to clients: EAT MORE FOOD.
Enter The Case for More Calories
I have this conversation often with my clients — in fact, I find I need to talk about this with every. Single. Client.
EVERYONE I come across is undereating.
Your first reaction might be laughter — like, you gotta be kidding.
No, I’m not.
Example: A 38-year-old client (gender doesn’t matter, this affects all of us) who works full time is eating ~1,200 calories per day, mostly coming from refined carbohydrates and low-fat proteins (like the standard American guidelines suggest), exercising 2-5 times per week, and having some sort of health issue, like stagnation in weight loss, difficulty sleeping, losing hair, thyroid abnormality etc.
Maybe the biggest issue here is staring you in the face, making my foreshadowing obvious. Or maybe you don’t see a problem, and feel like I just described you, and you want to know what I see.
The problem for this example client: 1,200 calories is hardly enough to keep your body alive, at rest, laying in bed all day, where your only task is to continue breathing… and yet most people who want to lose weight end up eating somewhere around this 1,200-calorie mark. Per day. It’s not enough. I’m serious.
The “keeping your body alive” number is called the “basal metabolic rate” — simply the amount of calories (energy) required to just keep your body alive and functioning. You might be surprised that so many calories are needed to do that, since merely existing seems so effortless on our conscious minds, but think about all the amazing things your body accomplishes in a day:
Unconsciously drawing in oxygen (using chest muscles and pressure change) and exhaling carbon dioxide
Keeping electrical charges balanced on the inside and outside of your cells (electrolytes!)
Maintaining a constant heartbeat (using muscles again! — cardiac this time) that literally force volumes of blood throughout your body to get oxygen and nutrients to your tissues (think about how far it has to travel… this is a big deal!)
Walking (requires muscle contraction, blood flow, electrical charge, etc.)
Thinking! Your brain uses over 20% of the energy you consume. There’s so much going on up there that we have yet to even learn about, but we want to make sure those amazing organs are WELL supported with plenty of (healthy) calories
Making and secreting hormones to keep the body in homeostasis (needs good fats, and lots of ‘em!)
Bone breakdown and formation, depending on factors like dietary calcium
DNA repair and cellular replication! (remember helicase?!)
This list doesn’t even include the process involved in digestion, which is my focus as a nutritionist! Digestion alone incorporates:
Organs secreting enzymes and other compounds to breakdown food in the upper GI tract
Organs working together and/or signaling one another
Microvilli in the intestine absorbing small nutrients and putting them into the bloodstream, closing and opening sphincters, etc.
The involuntary muscle contraction in your intestines that cause peristalsis (the movement of food down the GI tract — yes your organs literally squeeze themselves in a rhythmic pattern to move food along… NATURE IS AMAZING!)
Making byproducts to feed the gut flora that make up your microbiome, working together to keep us healthy and resilient
Reabsorbing water in the large intestine
Filtering blood in the kidneys to remove wastes through our urine
Neither list is comprehensive, by any stretch of the imagination. The examples I gave are simply things that come to mind as I sit here.
The real list of bodily processes involved in our basal metabolic rate goes on and on and on.
Most basal metabolic rates for sedentary folks are anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 calories, depending on gender, age, etc. The more active you are — or the more strenuous your job, even MENTALLY — the more calories you burn at rest. The caloric demand goes up rather quickly, as you begin asking more of your body.
There are BMR calculators out there on the interwebs that can help you estimate your own. (Here’s a simple one — and after plugging in my own numbers, my BMR is roughly 2,193 calories, for reference. The higher number reflects my activity level. So this means I need to eat at least 2,193 calories to maintain my current lifestyle and not die. I usually eat more than this, and no, I do not gain weight because of it.)
So, circling back to the example client from above… if it takes a MINIMUM of 1,200 calories just to keep oneself alive, why does society tell us it’s okay to eat this little AND work a full time job, exercise, raise children, etc.?
It’s because these adages have been crafted by the fitness industry to keep us stuck in a loop of ill health and weight gain. They profit off of our struggles.
Diet culture tells us to eat less and move more, but where has this truly gotten us…?
Fat, sick, and exhausted.
Why? Because our bodies fight back against eating so little — even though you know food is plentiful, your body doesn’t. It feels like it’s in pseudo-starvation mode, and will cling to every fat cell possible, because fat cells are not only going to keep you warm and safe, but they also provide energy for when the food truly does stop coming in. It does this for you to save your life, because it thinks it needs to.
Why Calories are Important for Metabolism
Opposite to the starvation situation above, eating more calories lets your body know you have an abundance of energy at your disposal. It’s able to increase how much it burns to do those daily activities I mentioned, therefore speeding up your basal metabolic rate, knowing it has plenty of energy to spare for your exercise routine, stressful life events, and hard work. (Yes, getting stressed in a traffic jam uses up energy!)
It needs to know it has enough in order to be convinced to relax and let go.
Restricting your energy intake, on the other hand, signals to your body that scarcity is the theme and to downregulate metabolism — meaning it burns less energy to keep you alive and begins to prioritize survival over things like reproduction and aesthetics. Undereating lets your body know that it won’t be fed enough nor regularly, and makes it hang on as tightly as possible to stored body fat (in case it needs it).
This is, in part, why people who eat too little might experience things like fertility challenges, autoimmune symptoms, etc.
The Struggle is Real
How frustrating, right? We’ve been told to just keep “eating in a calorie deficit” for so long that we’re dwindling down to low-fat cottage cheese every four hours and praying to whoever will listen to let us drop those “last ten pounds.”
By making us think this way, knowing our bodies do the opposite, the fitness industry makes lifelong customers. You never lose weight, get healthy, or feel good, so they know you’ll be back for that next diet trend or new workout machine, because you’re desperate to break free of this difficult journey. This is the thing that’ll get you to where you want to be, finally!... right?
And then when it doesn’t work (again), because it’s not supposed to… we blame ourselves. And eat even less.
How many times have we all been duped by this tactic?
I know I have. I suffered for years thinking if I just ate less and did ten more minutes on the elliptical every day, I’d finally lose the stubborn belly fat and my thighs wouldn’t juggle so much.
Couple things wrong here:
Thighs will always jiggle, no matter how fit you are. And thigh gaps don’t matter. (Are these even real? Why do we talk about shit like this? Who created this, anyway??)
Chronically overdoing cardio workouts or machines also won’t support healthy weight loss or metabolism. (Stay tuned for another post on exercise!)
You have to eat more and switch up your inputs to truly be healthy.
Eating enough and switching your total calories up helps keep your metabolic fire burning STRONG and healthily. This means healthy fat burn, evening out your body composition (think: lean mass vs. fat mass), and providing yourself plenty of energy.
And when I say switching your total calories up, I mean NO LESS than 1,800 per day (if you are completely sedentary, and most of these calories should be coming from complete proteins and healthy fats), but more in the range of 2,000-3,000 — if not more for super active folks. For reference, my intake ranges from 2,200 (NEVER less than this) to 2,800 as a physically active, menstruating 30-year-old female with a mentally demanding occupation.
Curious about where your best set point would be?
I encourage you to avoid just guessing — energy intake is a big deal and you want to make sure you’re doing enough for your amazing body.
If you’d rather fly solo for now and want somewhere to start, you can try adding 50 more calories per day for 7 days. Then 100 (total) more calories per day for 7 days… repeating the pattern all the way up to 200-300 total calories more per day than you were consuming originally. Of course this requires tracking food for a short period of time to determine your baseline, for which I recommend getting a food scale and using MyFitnessPal, but it’s definitely a fun n=1 experiment, and this provides concrete data instead of guessing.
50 more calories per day could look like, roughly:
Half a tablespoon of olive oil — drizzled on a salad
Half an ounce of cheese
3 ounces of apple slices
1 egg (ish… eggs are usually more like 70 calories, but close enough)
¼ of an avocado
A serving and a half (4-5 ounces of carrots or broccoli)
1 strip of bacon
About a quarter cup of almonds
2 ounces (1/2 serving) of chicken thigh meat
1 ounce of steak
Think you’d rather have someone in your corner to help? Book a free call with me. Let’s talk out some of your biggest hurdles with this, and we can determine if nutritional therapy would help get you unstuck. Like I said, I’ve coached every single one of my clients through this. It’s doable and you will see change!
Message or comment below! See you next time folks.
