Lower Your Metabolism!

OK, now that we’ve established what your metabolism is, and the manners in which it can be raised, let’s make sure we can put that information to use and get its’ full benefits. The way to do that is to avoid some all too common mistakes that may negate your progress, or worse, actually lower your metabolism.

The following are the best two ways to lower your metabolism. Please avoid them!

• Don’t move.

This is by far the best way to lower your resting metabolic rate. When you don’t expend any energy, your body doesn’t want to use any, so it lowers your metabolism to meet your lack of activity.

This is why I tell people all the time this is the best way to lose pounds. Just sit on the couch and do NOTHING. You won’t burn any calories, so your body will lower your metabolic rate so you won’t feel the need to eat any calories and you’ll waste away and be one of those skinny fat people. Enjoy.

That actually leads to #2…

• Don’t eat frequently enough

When your body goes for a sustained period of time with no food (usually around 4-6 hours) it goes into starvation mode. This is a self - defense mechanism by the body to avoid starvation designed to keep you alive. Your metabolism doesn’t know you may eat something later – it assumes you won’t, and it stops using energy, and stops burning…calories…COMPLETELY. One of the best ways to bring your metabolism to a screeching halt is to starve yourself.  Then, you'll also have the mood and the personality to go along with your great “skinny fat” look.

And although it may not lower your metabolism, the best way to keep it nice and low is to…

• Waste your time with exercise that is not intense

Exercise that is moderate or low in intensity can be a deleterious, crippling factor to your metabolism. Although it technically may not lower your metabolic rate, it certainly takes a lot of time and takes you away from more beneficial activities that you can be doing to raise your metabolism.

Before we move on, let’s get a few things out of the way quickly:  Typially this is the point in the discussion where peoples’ opinions begin to differ with mine and like to point out a few very common rebuttals to my statements. The rebuttals always come at this point in the discussion because nobody had a problem with what I wrote in part 1, where we defined metabolism, or in part 2 where I told you how your metabolism can be raised. They have a problem at this point because of one reason:

They don’t like what I have to say – period.

They either a)want their own opinion validated, and are pissed when I don’t do that, or b) realize what I’m saying they need to do is hard work – real hard work and they just aren’t willing to do it, and would rather choose the easy way out.

For discussions’ sake I’m going to need you to pick out a low intensity exercise to fill in the blank below. It can be anything – jogging, yoga, hiking, whatever. Generally, if it takes more than 20 minutes to do, you can use it for our discussion. I’m going to use jogging as my example. I hate to always pick on jogging, but it’s just the most common choice for most people, so I’ll go with it. And again, if you do any of those things, don’t take it personally, it doesn’t make you a bad person if you do it for fun or competition. But if you’re doing those things to become lean…

Common rebuttal #1: “Well, when I jog, it IS intense, hard, makes me sweat, etc. so it must be raising my metabolism.”

Answer: No, it’s not intense. There is an inverse relationship between intensity and duration of exercise. This is a matter of physics not open to debate. This is why the fastest people in the world can only be at their fastest for a matter of seconds. The longer they run, the more they have to slow down. The intensity must decrease in order for them to continue running. Therefore, any extended run, by definition, is NOT intense.

Common rebuttal #2: “Well at least I’m doing something – that’s better than doing nothing.”

Answer: If you want to reduce it to the lowest common denominator, sure, doing something is better than nothing. But if I said to you all I had to eat today was a Big Mac, you would say that was stupid. But then if I said, “Well it’s better than eating nothing!” It’s still stupid.

Common rebuttal #3: “Jogging is fun/I enjoy it.”

Answer: That’s fine if you do something for enjoyment, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re discussing the best way to burn calories and your way is not the best way.

Common rebuttal #4: “So many people jog, it must do something.”

Answer: A lot of people smoke pot too, that won’t raise their metabolism either.

Common rebuttal #6: “Well, your workouts are 1 hour, how can they be intense?”

Answer: Technically we do 5 separate workouts in one hour at The Training Rim. We do a mobility workout, a core workout, two separate strength workouts and a conditioning workout, all with breaks in between. This is how we keep the intensity up, and is why our members resting metabolic rates rise.

To recap all 3 parts of the Metabolism articles:

Many people just don’t want to accept the fact that getting results from exercise is HARD. Raising your resting metabolic rate is HARD. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. And as I’ve said plenty of times previously, I’m like Morpheus in The Matrix: I’m not here to BS you – I’m here to tell you the truth. And if you want to live in denial or if you really don’t want results from exercise that’s fine, it doesn’t make you a bad person – we’ll still be friends. Take the blue pill and believe what you want to believe.

But if you want results from exercise, I’m going to need you to take the red pill. Welcome to the real world with the knowledge the truth will set you free.