we're back with today's checklist on everything that you need to know to understand your metabolism NBC medical contributor Dr Taran n is here to break it all down for us Dr n welcome back good see as always I mean first of all for folks who aren't familiar with the metabolism what exactly what exactly is it and how can we tell if ours is too fast or too slow yeah we talk about this sword a lot so these are basically the chemical process that happens when you intake food and drinks and how you c
onvert that into energy energy that you use for important bodily functions like GRE breathing digestion growing cells hormones all the things that we need to happen and this accounts for about 60 to 70% of the energy we use it's called our basil metabolic rate okay the other 10% is the energy we need to digest foods and then the remaining amount of our metabolism is really what we do in terms of exercise and movement you can actually calculate your basil metabolic rate yourself there are calcula
tors online that you can go on and plug in some information it let you know kind of how many calories you need every day just to stay alive essentially and do these essential functions there are things that can change your basil metabolic rate like age so it slows as we age men have a higher basil metabolic rate than women more muscle mass and bigger size can increase your basil metabolic rate as well and how do you know if yours is too fast or too slow I mean it's all we all relatively have the
same amount there's genetics component as well so some people may change a little bit based on their genetics and some of those other factors I mentioned like age size body mass my friend Dyan is standing by yes let's get to food and how we should be properly fueling our body to help our metabolism correct so the important thing is you have to eat I think a lot of people think if I restrict restrict calories but that actually can slow down your metabolism number one because your body thinks it'
s in Starvation mode the other thing is you can start to break down muscle and we know that muscle is actually helpful for metabolism so that's important so intermittent fasting isn't so interesting intermittent fasting can be beneficial in terms of changing some of those metabolic parameters but in general you do need to get a certain amount of calories in um the other thing is what types of foods so certainly protein rich foods legumes vegetables fruits and then things like why coffee and tea
can speed up metabolism and even spicy foods which I hate but some people love can be helpful as well um and there's something called the thermic effect of food and really what that says is that if you eat protein it actually takes your body more energy to digest protein so you're burning more calories with cars exactly Dr n let's talk about sleep how important that is so important um so a lot of people think this is a time where nothing's happening but actually a lot of processes are happening
in the body and you're changing hormones and your metabolism is changing so we need about 7 to n hours and we do know that ineffective sleep or not enough sleep can actually alter um some of these hormone levels in particular them in studies that have shown the hormones gin and leptin that we produce that control how full we feel and how hungry we are can be altered by inefficient amounts of sleep and then F uh let's talk about uh physical activity yeah so important too so important to really ju
st get up and move any activity you do whether that's standing walking can be helpful but certainly aerobic exercise we think about 30 minutes 5 days a week muscle building or strength resistance is so important because again muscle is going to burn calories as well and then some people recommend high intensity interval training or hit workouts may be helpful too especially as you age especially as you age we know a past 60 metabolism does seem to slow this next one interests me I didn't realize
about one in three Americans deal with metabolic syndrome it's a big number so first off what is it um and then what are the most important conditions to watch out for so it's really this kind of constellation of five things you need three to meet the criteria and it's basically a large waist circumference high blood pressure high blood sugar low HDL or good cholesterol and high triglyceride and then how does it what do this the the you know the symptoms of it so you may not have symptoms which
is why you need to know your numbers we talk about this a lot go to your doctor get some of those things checked but the bad part about metabolic syndrome is it is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease heart attack stroke diabetes and even a new study shows cancer as well wow if one in three people have it that means a lot of people watching this morning have it and don't know corre and they're at risk for these things that's right that's important all right learned a lot the
re thank you so much hey thanks for watching don't miss the Today show every weekday at 11:00 a.m. eastern 8 Pacific on our streaming Channel today all day to watch head to today.com allay or click the link right here
Comments