Your metabolism: How it changes as we age, how to give it a boost

Oh, we’re back with today’s checklist on everything that you need to know to understand your metabolism. NBC medical contributor Dr. Tara Nerulla is here to break it all down for us. Doctor Nerulla. I mean, first of all, for folks who aren’t familiar with the metabolism, what exactly? What exactly is it now? Can we tell if ours is too fast or too slow? Yeah, we talked about this word a lot. So these are basically the chemical process that happens when you intake food and drinks and how you convert that into energy, energy that you use for important bodily functions like 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 basal metabolic rate. OK. 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 basal metabolic rate yourself. There are calculators online that you can go on and plug in some information. I’ll 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 basal metabolic rate like age. So it slows as we age. Men have a higher basal metabolic rate than women. More muscle mass and bigger size can increase your basal metabolic rate as well. And how do you know if you’re just too fast or too slow? I mean it’s all we all relatively have the same, 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 Dylan is standing by. Yes, let’s get to food and how we should be properly feeling 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 #1 cause your body thinks it’s in starvation mode. The other thing is you can start to breakdown 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 changing some of those metabolic parameters, but in general you do need to get a certain amount of calories in. The other thing is what types of foods? So certainly protein rich foods, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and then things like water, coffee and tea can speed up metabolism. And even spicy foods, which I hate but some people love, can be helpful as well. 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. You’re one with carbs by just that. Exactly. Let’s talk about sleep. How important that is, so important. 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 9 hours. And we do know that ineffective sleep or not enough sleep can actually alter some of these hormone levels. In particular them in studies that have shown the hormones ghrelin and leptin that we produce, that control how full we feel and how hungry we are can be altered by inefficient or amounts of sleep. And then let’s talk about physical activity. Yeah, So important too. So important to really just 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, five 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, right. May be helpful too, especially as you age, especially as you age. We know past 60 metabolism does seem to slow. This next one interest 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? Yeah. 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 3 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 how does it? What are the the symptoms of it? So you may not have symptoms, which is why you need to know your numbers. We talked 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. If one in three people have it, that means a lot of people watching this morning have it and don’t even know. Correct. And they’re at risk for these things. That’s right. It’s important. It’s good word. Alright. Learned a lot there. Thank you. Thank you. So yeah.