If your metabolism is stalled—or stuck in reverse—it would be helpful to look at what might be keeping your body in a state of low-level inflammation. It’s well established that weight gain is often a sign of chronic low-level inflammation, and frequently this is related to the foods you are eating.
Food sensitivities can lead you down the road toward insulin and leptin resistance and can seriously hamper your metabolism.2 When you have a food sensitivity or allergy, your body feels “attacked” by a food rather than nourished by it.
Inflammatory molecules are then produced and circulated to protect you from your body’s perceived threat, causing you to decrease insulin and leptin sensitivity. Your body is under stress so it uses its resources differently. This is typically accompanied by a gut dysbiosis, an imbalance in the microorganisms in your digestive tract.
In addition to food allergies and sensitivities, inflammation can be caused by a number of different factors, including poor sleep, environmental toxins, stress, and other factors. Even overexercising may stall your metabolism by triggering inflammation, pain, water retention, etc.
The foods most likely to be pro-inflammatory are junk foods and highly processed foods, grains, foods high in sugar (especially fructose), and GMOs. For help with dietary strategies, please refer to my Optimized Nutrition Plan. However, many people have food sensitivities to what would normally be considered healthy foods, such as gluten, nuts, and dairy products.
It’s important to not rule out the possibility that you may be having an unhealthy reaction to a “healthy” food. These food sensitivities can be very subtle, so they can sometimes be challenging to identify, requiring some trial and error.
Foods that can help reduce Inflammation.
Whey protein increases calorie burn and fat utilization, helps the body maintain muscle, and triggers the brain to feel full.
Protein in general has a tendency to rev up your metabolic engine due to its thermogenic effects—meaning, it makes your body produce more heat and in turn, burn more calories—but whey is particularly effective for this.
A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that fat oxidation and thermogenic effects are greater with whey than with soy or casein.3
Consuming a high-quality, rapidly absorbed, and easily assimilated whey protein concentrate, not isolate within about 30 minutes of resistance training may maximally stimulate muscle building in young healthy individuals, but this is equally important, if not more so, for the elderly.
People tend to lose muscle mass as they age. The leaner you are, the better your metabolism will be, regardless of your age. There is only about a two-hour window after exercise for optimal muscle repair and growth, and supplying your muscles with the right food at this time is essential—and whey is among the best.
Strength Training Is the Engine That Drives Fat Loss
Most adults need more muscle building activities, and strength training (aka resistance training or weight training) is an excellent way to achieve this. Working your muscles is the key to firing up your metabolism—muscle contraction is the booster rocket of fat loss. Unlike traditional cardio, strength training causes you to continue burning more calories for up to 72 hours after the exercise is over through a phenomenon called after-burn.
Not only does strength training give your metabolism a boost, and increase your brain power but it’s also an excellent way to reduce aches and pains, while at the same time preventing osteoporosis and age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia). Light walking is not enough to preserve optimal muscle tone, bone health, and posture, so if you’re not engaging in strength training, chances are you’ll become increasingly less functional with age.
Super-slow weight training is a form of high-intensity exercise that has superior metabolism-boosting benefits, especially for older individuals. What does this involve? Basically, you just go much slower!
By slowing down your movement, you’re actually turning it into a high intensity exercise. The super-slow movement allows your muscles, at the microscopic level, to access the maximum number of cross-bridges between the protein filaments that produce movement in the muscle. Another benefit of the super-slow technique is that it shortens your sessions to 12 to 15 minutes, just two to four of times per week.
Friendly Bacteria Can Help You Lose Weight
As mentioned earlier, health problems such as obesity, insulin resistance, and heart disease are all rooted in inflammation, which must be properly addressed if you wish to reach optimal health. Research suggests there’s a connection between certain types of bacteria and body fat. Bacterial imbalance in your gut can produce an exaggerated inflammatory response, and toxic molecules (superantigens) produced by pathogenic bacteria such as staph may play a role in the development of type 2 diabetes due to their effects on your fat cells.
So, if your metabolism has you feeling sloth-like, it may be that your gut bacteria and fat cells are interacting to produce the “perfect storm” of inflammation. A recent study published in British Journal of Nutrition found that a certain strain of bacteria—Lactobacillus rhamnosus—seems to help women lose weight and keep it off.4 This makes sense, given what we know about lean individuals having different gut flora from obese individuals.
Research also tells us there’s a positive-feedback loop between the foods you crave and the types of organisms in your gut that depend on those nutrients for their survival. Eating processed and pasteurized foods worsens dysbiosis. Sugar, refined carbohydrates, and junk foods promote the growth of disease-causing yeasts and fungi, and cause certain bacteria to release endotoxins that drive inflammation, resulting in metabolic changes that lead to overproduction of insulin, increased appetite, excess fat storage, and obesity.
A gut-healthy diet is one that eliminates sugars and processed foods and is rich in whole, unprocessed, unsweetened foods, along with traditionally fermented or cultured foods.
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