Questioning Metabolism

Chad Frakes is one of our contest winners who knows how to walk the line; pushing hard with nutrition and workouts yet allowing his body to recover so he can keep a healthy metabolism.

What is metabolism?

  It’s a vague term.  It is the sum total of the various chemical functions in our body, not the calorie cost of those functions because that’s your metabolic rate, but your metabolism is actually how are all those functions working and are they working properly?   Most people are actually interested in their metabolic rate.

 There are many different ways to measure this and the outcome will be different for each method, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really give you what you need to make a change to your body.

 Generally people think that a higher metabolism is better or that a higher metabolism feels more energetic.  In fact people can’t really even feel metabolism.  

What you really want is a healthy metabolism.  Mainly all you need to do is avoid exhaustion and systematic fatigue.

People push themselves too hard with both a calorie deficit and exercise, get fatigued, and then blame their metabolism.  What they really need to do is stop pushing so hard without giving their body a chance to recover.

 Don’t try to make too much happen too soon.   Exhaustion is in your control, metabolic rate is not.

 To hear more about what John and Brad have to say about metabolism and metabolic rate click on the link below.

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Here’s the next episode of the UNCENSORED Podcasts Season 3.

Questioning Body Fat Percentage

Caroline and Tori are fitness competitors who both got in amazing shape and hit their Venus ratio’s. Both had 23-24% body fat in their legs yet 5-7% in their upper body. The main thing here is everyone, depending on their genetics and heredity, will compartmentalize fat differently on their body. You can’t compare yourself to others.

What is so important about body fat percentage?

Hydrostatic body fat percentage is the gold standard.  It is the method which every other method is calibrated on.  There are no assumptions; they use just the properties of your body in the water.

What is so important about of your body fat percentage?  It’s a number.

It reminds Brad of eating for calories when you need to lose weight when really you just need to eat the right amount of food to lose weight.  People like to go to an online calculator and find out they are supposed to eat 2712 calories a day as an example, then they don’t lose weight and they think their metabolism is broken.  The calculator just gave them the wrong estimate for their body.  People forget that the body is the end game, not the calculator, chart, book, theory, or what someone else did to lose weight.

The total over all body fat percentage does not tell you a whole lot unless you reach a dramatically low percentage that it is irrelevant.   It’s just like how your overall body weight on the scale doesn’t tell you a whole lot either.

DEXA/DXA is the most accurate and is the key for a health standpoint because it tells you regional fat percentages.

DEXA/DXA is the most accurate and is the key for a health standpoint because it tells you regional fat percentages.

Everyone stores fat differently

Brad and John have a lot of data to look at and today they focused on two female fitness competitors who were both approximately 15% body fat which is very low for females.   This is dramatically low for a woman.   One of them had 6.9% Bodyfat in her trunk (her upper body from the waist up).  The other one had below 5% in her trunk (she had a full set of shredded abs and her back was totally visible).

Tori and Caroline are fitness competitors that places first and third in their respective categories so they were both in amazing shape.  Neither of them looked awkward, they both looked totally feminine.

Both had 23 and 24 percent body fat in their legs.  See the difference between the upper and lower body?  The main thing here is everyone depending on their genetics and heredity will compartmentalize fat differently on their body.

So another female could have 20% in her legs, but maybe 11% in her upper body, and roughly the same overall body fat percentage as Tory and Caroline and look totally different.  If she tries to compare herself to these fitness competitors (or anyone else for that matter) at the same overall body fat it totally falls apart.

Everyone stores body fat in different patterns.  These storage patterns are genetic and you cannot manipulate them.  There are some schools of thought that you can manipulate them with diet but there is no data or measurements that prove this theory.  The theories are purely anecdotal and guess work.  

Don’t let body fat measurements hijack your goals

Setting a goal as a percentage body fat can mess you up.  It is a form of goal hijacking.

If you get down to your golden ratio and then would need to go a lot leaner to get the ab definition it could change your overall aesthetic to not be as visually appealing.  Also total body fat percentage is totally dependent on how much muscle mass is there.  Body fat is relative to your lean body mass.  So if you increase your lean body mass without losing any fat your overall body fat % drops.

Body weight and body fat percentage is only useful if you have a “shape” to go with it or a measurable goal like  Adonis or Venus  Ideal or Ratio.

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