Podcast Transcription: How to Reset Your Metabolism for Weight Loss and Fat Burn with Ted Ryce

Ted Ryce: I'm super excited to share this episode with you today because we are going to be talking about something that so many people talk about, but I’m not sure if they have the right idea about it.

So, what are we talking about here? Well, have you ever said, “Oh, I think I have a slow metabolism?” And if you’re like me, you have said that. I said that in my late mid-thirties. I think I was thirty-six, thirty-seven. I was eating low carb, quite strict with the low carb although I was putting coconut oil in my coffee and butter on my vegetables because that doesn't make you fat. Right? Yeah.

And I was doing all the things that people were telling me to do. And I was doing everything right. Have you ever felt that way? Like, I'm doing everything right?

Well, today we're going to dive into what your metabolism is, and the different components of it, and really how to reset and supercharge your metabolism for fat loss.

So, let's talk about this. And as I was saying, I really felt in my mid 30s that there was something wrong with me. I thought, and I'm being honest here, okay. These are the thoughts that were going through my head.

I thought maybe I partied too hard. I drank too much alcohol or did too many drugs and it damaged my metabolism. I really thought that. And don't get me wrong. I did party hard. I was in the fitness industry, so how hard could I party? I started looking like a vampire and losing muscle. And then I had to back off, you know.

And I trained a lot of people in the nightclub industry. And I was, VIP all the time, drinking for free, bottles of crystal with sliced strawberries in them, in the VIP room. That was my norm, and little MDMA and marijuana. That was kind of the thing. And I thought maybe that had done something to me.

I had my testosterone levels checked; actually, my testosterone and estrogen levels check. I thought, “Oh, my estrogen levels were high.” And I thought that my metabolism is messed up, my hormones are messed up. This is why I can't lose fat. This is what's wrong. Because I'm working out hard and I'm eating low-carb, but I'm not getting results. It must be this. It cannot be that I'm not doing the right thing.

Now fast forward to where I am today. I know better. I get great results with people. Everyone who works with me loses, in between 20 to 30 pounds is the average.

Some people lose a bit less because they put on muscle, or we have a special situation occasionally. I had a woman who worked with me, “Shout out to you, Bassey.” she gained two pounds. “Oh my gosh, that's horrible on a weight loss programme!” Except that, she went from 26% body fat to 18% body fat. Her body was so much more noticeably lean. It was amazing. And she gained weight.

So, let's dive into this then, because this is what I teach my coaching clients. And I want to teach it to you today. In fact, I've made a commitment to be better on this podcast, to teach you more useful things so that you can get better results. So, I'm stepping up for you. I hope you enjoy it.

So, let's talk about your metabolism. “I've got a slow metabolism, man.” Okay, what are the components of a metabolism? What are the things that come in the body for energy? What are the things that go out?

So, here's what your metabolism is. You have something called your basal metabolic rate. For example, you’re breathing right now. You're not controlling it. Your eyes are seeing, transmitting light through your eyes all the way to your brain, and then you're processing the image.

The pH in your blood is being managed. How the hell does all that happen? Well, that's your basal metabolism. It's all these things going on that, keep you alive.

And it's a significant amount of the calories that you burn every day, the energy that you burn every day. So don't get turned off by that word, calorie. If you're new to this show, you might have just gotten triggered, “Oh my gosh, he's talking about calories.” Yes. Because it's just a measurement of a unit of energy.

So anyway, your resting metabolic rate or your basal metabolic rate, I'm going to use those interchangeably although there's a slight difference, that's how many calories you burn when you're resting or asleep. And it's what keeps you alive and functioning.

Now, the next component of your metabolism is, how many calories you burn through exercise. So, do you exercise, yes or no? Because if you don't exercise at all, or if you exercise very little, you're slowing down your metabolism. See how this is working?

And then we have the non-exercise activity, thermogenesis. So, in other words, the activity that you do throughout the day. So, you stand up. You walk over to the watercooler. You come back down, sit down. You get up. You go to the bathroom. You come back. You sit down. You get up. You walk over there. You come back. You sit down.

You don't burn that much through sitting, although you do burn some. Another way of thinking about this is just the steps that you take every day. Although the steps don't include what you do with your arms. I'm talking with my hands right now. Now you can't see that. But I talk with my hands a lot. So, I'm literally burning more energy through doing that; through standing, fidgeting, washing dishes and other household chores, gardening. But it's not exercise. We shouldn't think about it as exercise. Exercise is really purposeful exercise.

Now, I want to say this, you might think that, “Oh yeah, well, that whole neat thing that activity throughout the day thing, it probably doesn't really matter.” And that would be wrong. Because the difference between you sitting down all day, and you getting up sometimes because you have to, is about 300 calories a day. That's a slice of pizza that you can eat more of if you want to think about it like that. I love pizza.

And the difference between someone who stands and does something quite active, that person burns even more, right. We're talking like 700 more calories. So, this is a big deal. That's two slices of pizza.

So, it's a big deal, because in 30 minutes of running, because you're like, “Oh yeah, that's, you know, kind of bullshit, this whole idea of like getting up and moving more, it's kind of bullshit. You know, I mean, how much does that really burn?” Because I used to think like that, by the way.

But 30 minutes of running burns about 300 calories. Depending on your body weight and size, you might burn more, but 30 minutes of running. Now granted, we're talking about the activity throughout the whole entire day versus 30 minutes. But still, you're not working out. If you can just be more active, it can go a long way, a long way. And we are so sedentary. And we haven't gotten to the energy in part, this is just the energy out.

And then there's one more thing worth mentioning here. It's called the thermic effect of food. It's how many calories you burn through digesting and absorbing food because mastication, which is the sciency, nerdy way of saying, chewing your food, right, mastication and creating and releasing enzymes and absorbing the food, that's 10% of your daily calories burn; actually 10% of the food that you eat.

And we'll talk about how to tweak that because there's a way to tweak it. And for those of you who are my clients, you know, ‘cuz you're smart. But for those of you who've never heard that before, we'll talk about that.

So, let's talk about the energy coming in. So just to talk about your metabolism, there's your resting metabolic rate. We could also call it your basal metabolic rate. You don't need to know the difference. You're not running studies. Just understand, basal is really just sitting down and not moving.

And then, like what you would measure under laboratory settings in resting metabolic rate is like, what people call when you're sitting around. So that's the first part.

Then you have exercise. How many workouts do you do per week, right? Resistance training and cardio and, or sports, right? Then activity throughout the day, then the thermic effect of food.

So those are the four components. And there's also one more thing, but it's not even worth mentioning; actually, two more things. Thyroid hormone acts directly on your metabolism. But it's not that significant, for those of you who have hypothyroidism. “Shout out to you, Karen!” Fifty-six years old, has hypothyroidism. Hit her weight goal within two months of working with me; eight weeks, two months.

So, let's talk about the energy coming in. You take energy in from what? You know this already, the food you eat. So, the meals you have every day; breakfast, lunch, dinner, second breakfast, if you are a fan of Lord of the Rings, which I just rewatched. Great movie, at least standing the test of time for me.

So, the meals that you eat, the caloric beverages that you drink, and no, aspartame doesn't count, or diet soda doesn't count. So caloric beverages, sugary soda, fruit juices, et cetera, the snacks you eat and the alcohol you drink.

That's really where it comes from; food, the meals you eat, the drinks you drink, the snacks you snack on, the alcohol you drink. And so, I want you to think about it like this. If that's true, then what's going on here?

How can we speed things up? How can we speed up our metabolism? What do you think the answer is there? Move more, eat less. Eat less, move more. Yeah, for sure.

And we'll talk about in future episodes why it doesn't quite work like that. Because when you try to eat less, and then you move more, you tend to get really hungry.

We’ll tackle that on a different episode. But I want you to understand this. This is why it's like yeah, okay, you can, you can ramp up your exercise and you should. But this is why it's so hard to outrun your nutrition.

I'm looking at Kirkland cheese pizza. How many of those do you have in your freezer right now? One slice of frozen Kirkland cheese pizza is 280, 280 calories. Thirty minutes of running will burn, like I said earlier, between 280 and 520 calories, depending on your size. So let me ask you this, some real simple math here.

How many slices of pizza can you eat in 30 minutes? So, you see. That's why it's so hard. And I chose cardio for a reason because you burn even less energy in the workout when you do resistance training.

You burn less energy with resistance training. But there is another side to it, and we'll talk about that in a second. But do you see? One slice of pizza 280 calories, and that's pretty typical for your average cheese pizza. Then if you're putting like meat-lovers with pepperoni and other things on it, sausage on it, that even jacks it up more. And then you're running 30 minutes, and that only knocks off one of those slices of pizza.

That's why controlling the calories that come in, and I say calories for a reason because eating less food doesn't work, all the time. You have to focus on satiety, which we will talk about on one of the coming episodes that I'm doing.

This is what I teach my clients. Because once you learn like, “Oh, well the calorie thing,” but then you do it and then you're eating again, because you just can't stand the hunger, because none of us can resist hunger for that long. So, what do we do then? Well, we've got to find foods that are filling, but also are lower in calorie that allow us to control the amount of food that we're eating.

So, if you're eating meals indiscriminately, and I want to tell you this because a lot of people will be like, “Well, I eat a lot of organic food.” But guess what? If you're eating Justine's Peanut Butter Cups, they have more calories in them per serving than Reese's.

So, you can’t focus on food quality like that. And if it is calories, then you can get just as fat from eating salmon, sirloin steak and olive oil, as you can from eating Oreos and ice cream.

“Oh, no, I don't believe that. That can't be right.” Yes, it's a 100% right, a 100%, right. It's not even 99% right. It's a 100% right. Do not make me, do what I do on Twitter, and send you a picture of me with abs eating Oreo Cookies and Cream ice cream cake, because I will do that.

Actually, I've shown my clients, my coaching group, I've taken them into my freezer and shown them the Oreos cookies and cream cake, because I understand this principle.

The energy in is the easiest way to manipulate this, okay. And that's the number one; nutrition, energy coming in. And the best way to get a handle on this is to track it.

If you want to be old school and write it down on a spreadsheet, you can do that, on a food diary, you can do that. If you want to be new school and if you want to track it in My Fitness Pal or Lose It or something like that, do that.

But get a handle on how much you're eating. And you'll notice a change right away.

So, let's talk about the other things now. Now your resting metabolic rate, what can you do to bump that up? One thing, increase your size. Bigger people actually have metabolisms that burn more calories, not less. I'll say that again. If you're overweight or obese, you're burning more calories right now for your metabolic rate than when you were smaller. Now I'm not saying you exercise more; you're probably exercising less. Do you see the difference there? It's a nuance, but it's an important one. You're burning more calories.

A Mack truck burns more gas at rest than a Honda Civic if they're both sitting at the red light idling. It's just simple Physics here. Took me a long time to learn this because of all the misinformation but it's the real deal. But hey, what if we increase our weight and increase muscle. Ooh, now we're talking. That's why having so much muscle is so important. That's why I've put on muscle now and gotten leaner in the process and eating more calories.

And that's because I've focused on muscle building. So, building muscle can boost your metabolic rate. It's not huge, by the way, but it definitely matters. It's easier to stay lean when you have more muscle.

And then there's exercise, a combination of resistance training focused on muscle building, which a lot of people think they're trying to build muscle with their resistance training, but they're doing it wrong. How do I know? I talk to them all the time.

Everyone who's in my coaching programme was really knowledgeable about exercise and nutrition and they still weren't getting results. They knew a lot, but they were missing key things, and when I showed them what to do, they got results, simple as that.

So purposeful cardio, or even high intensity interval training if you're in shape enough to do that and get benefits from it. And then non-activity thermogenesis, so moving more, track your steps, look at your smartphone. We have so much data going on now. I mean, it's so easy to get a handle on this stuff. So easy and that's what I do in my coaching programme.

It's data driven. I can guarantee results, because we use data. So, I want you to do the same thing on your own.

This is what the low carb people are missing completely. I know I used to preach low carb, 10 years ago, and then I grew up, right. I checked my dogma. So that's how we do this.

So just to recap, you have your resting metabolic rate. What's the only thing you can do with that? You can increase your muscle. There is exercise. What can you do with that? Make sure that whatever workout you're doing, whatever resistance workout you're doing, it's optimised to build muscle.

And for your cardio routine, just understand that you're going to burn a lot more calories if you're jogging than if you're walking. That's why it pays to get into great cardiovascular shape, besides all the health benefits, it just makes it easier to stay in shape, stay lean.

Then you have your non-activity thermogenesis, in other words, the activity throughout the day. Look at your steps. Make sure that you're hitting a certain number every week, and then try to build on that. And then for the energy coming in, start to get a handle on the amount of food that you're eating.

And the best advice I can give you is, track your food, whether keeping a diary like I used to do, and now I have people track using apps.

And then there's one more thing you can do. I talked about earlier the thermic effect of food. Higher protein intakes can help with this. Now, it's not a magic bullet, but it definitely helps. The protein helps you keep the muscle that you've built. It helps you build muscle.

And it also can burn up to 20 to 30% of the calories. So high protein meals, you're burning 20 to 30% versus 10% with a carb and fat heavy meal. So, protein is crucial.

So, these are all the factors that affect your metabolism. And even when it comes to thyroid hormone, it's not a big deal. It's important, but it's not going to stop you.

In fact, the thing I'll tell you is that after working with several people who have thyroid issues, the biggest issue is not the thyroid slowing down, it’s the sluggishness that you feel. It's the lack of energy and the fatigue. You're just not moving enough, moving that much. And as a result, you end up burning less calories.

So, it's not even about the effect on the metabolic rate. It's the effect on your behaviour, on your activity. That's why it's so important to get it handled. But it isn't stopping you.

That's it for today. Listen to this again if you need to be reminded about the factors that influence your metabolism.

Listen to it again if you want to learn about the things that you can do to affect those factors that affect your metabolism, and take action on it, and enjoy the results.

Hope you enjoyed this today. Speak to you soon and have a great week!