Metabolism, that word that gets thrown around so often in the fitness and the weight loss space. You know, is it the thing that's stopping me losing weight? Is it the thing that's helping that person lose weight? Are we born with a fast metabolism? Are we genetically programmed to have a slow metabolism? There are so many products that promise to speed up in metabolism. It's a really confusing topic.
So I wanted to speak to an expert who knows a lot more about it than I do, so we could dispel those myths and really get to the bottom of it so you could understand it properly. And after that, we're going to get a little bit in the statgic and we're going to reflect on some episodes. I'm a big believer that the more you know, the more curious you're becoming, the more questions you ask. So we've learned a lot from our past guests, but naturally that brings
up more and more questions. So we're going to expand on your thinking. We're going to answer some of these follow up questions.
I've been listening to the Joanne McMillan podcast, so I'm just curious what your thoughts are on faster training, particularly for menopause or women.
There are so many protein bars on the shelves, which ones are actually any good?
I'm Sam Wood and this is the Wood Life where we're making health and fitness simple. Let's dive into metabolism. Our next guest that I am very excited to speak to. She is the TV nutritionist, one of Australia's leading dietitians with the background in nutrition and psychology, Casi Burrell. Welcome to the WOODLFE and thanks so much for joining us.
I'm so honored to be here, Sam, thank you for having me.
You are so knowledgeable and you've got so much experience in dealing with the whole spectrum of nutrition. And I thought we could really focus on a topic that I get a lot of questions about, and that is metabolism. What is our metabolism? How does it work? And these people that are saying I can't lose weight because of my metabolism, is there any truth to what they are saying?
Oh, it's complicated, isn't it. It's simple? But it's not. So I'll try and explain it in as simple terms as I can. I would describe metabolism as the body's basic engine of burning, and some of it is programmed. We don't necessarily have control over it. It's the number of calories that's required to keep us breathing. It is heavily
dependent on our size. So for example, males have a higher metabolic rate or higher metabolism because they've got a larger body frame generally, and the more muscle mass that you have, more what we would describe is being more metabolically active, so you burn more calories to keep that muscle mass active. And it's dependent from genetics, gender, a certain degree of our training loads, so athletes or ex athletes personal trainers will have a higher metabolism because they've
got more muscle mass. And then about twenty five percent of the calories that we burn are controlled by us, so that comes down to the volume of food that we're eating, the amount of activity or the burn that we have each day, on top of what we would need if we were laying in a hospital bed at rest and just needed that certain number of calories to survive. So the average person, in my experience, has the resting metabolic rate we call it, which is the number of
calories they require without any other level of activity. Ranges for a very small inactive female from maybe one thousand up to fifteen sixteen eighteen hundred two thousand for a large frame guy with a lot of muscle mass. So I think one of the misconceptions about metabolism is people believe or like to tell themselves that we can't change it. You know, I've got a poor metabolism. My body is
not burning or working as well. And indeed, when people gain weight over time and have higher proportions of body fat or have hormonal shifts, certainly that does happen to people as they become less efficient at burning glucose over time, and hormones like our insulin are not being well regulated,
and that can predispose us to storing body fat. There's a perception that the metabolism isn't working because you would take one person who could eat a certain number of calories each day and lose weight successfully a person given exactly the same number of calories, and yet they still don't lose weight or even gain weight, depending on some of those underlying factors, like how much body fat they
have or what their hormones are doing. So indeed, there are large individual differences in metabolism and metabolic rate, but what I want most people to take away from it is that we all have the capacity to improve metabolic
rate and become better at burning over time. And I would say that one of the key jobs I have, particularly working with women in their thirties, forties, fifties, as they've experienced that gradual weight cree and had some of the metabolic inefficiency build over time as a result of
gaining weight and having those in pormodal impairments. My job as a dietitian is to help what I describe is rehab that muscle and try and get it better at burning, and then of course working very closely with personal trainers who are also skilled in that area. As I'm sure you would agree, your job is also getting that person better at burning with their muscle mass or the type
of training that they're doing. So it's absolutely a misconception that people have got a bad metabolism because the truth is larger people, even if they've got more body fat, have also got more muscle mass, so they've actually got a higher metabolic rate than someone who's much smaller, but they're not operating efficiently as such, and perhaps sitting down a lot through the day or consuming their calories at the wrong time of the day, and so hormonally they're
not working as efficiently as they could. And there's absolutely no reason why we can't, as we would describe, rehab that muscle over time and get it back on track and improve an increase metabolic rate. But it takes time. If you think about bodies, you know they might have had ten or twenty years of that gradual inefficiency happening.
It takes time to reverse it. And that's why when people are wanting to improve metabolte rate, lose body fat, lose large amounts of weight ten twenty thirty kilos, it takes three, six, twelve months to reverse all that what we would describe as inefficiency that's built over a long period of time.
That's a really good answer, he said. It's the personal trainer, which is me that side of things, which I'm really glad you brought up because I have a lot of clients. We've had a lot of clients over the years. They come to me and there I genuinely think they believe that they can not get a result, And where I always start with them is we can have this conversation
in three months or six months. Unts if you follow my plan and if you do what I say from a workout perspective, and if that doesn't work, then we can perhaps look at the metabolism side of things. From an exercise perspective, it's consistency. It's the quality of your workouts,
and it's not getting big and bulky. For all of the particularly women out there that are a bit reluctant to do weight training or strength training or whatever you want to call it, any form of resistance work, it is building strong, toned, lean muscle to help stoke that engine that you talk about when you talk about rehabbing the muscle, which I love that term. By the way. From a nutrition perspective, what do you do?
I absolutely do it in stages, So I guess my way of working through it with clients, and particularly clients who would present with that my metabolic rate's not working very well. I want to lose quite a lot of weight. I like to work on the nutrition first, because within calorie loads, and there's only people are going to need between say twelve fourteen hundred and maybe two thousand. I've only got two for six hundred calories to play with it.
It's not really a lot of variables. So once I've perhaps cleaned out all the rubbish, reduce the carbohydrate load in line with the amount of activity that they're doing, loaded up their vegetables so they're getting a lot more low calorie energy volume, nutrient dense food so they're nice and full. The dietary plans not restrictive. It's structured timing so that they're fueling at the right time and allowing for an overnight fast to achieve a deficit. Just basic
kind of calorie control. Reduce the carbohydrate load, get rid of the process packaged food, and stick to a relatively calorie deficit of say up to five hundred calories a day. Once I've done that, and over four weeks, eight weeks, twelve weeks, got that initial five ten kilos off, the only other thing I have to do is get that muscle better at burning. And the only way, as you know, to do that is to train the right way. So I will start my clients with a basic level of movement.
I want them to be basically, you know, getting their ten thousand steps a day, and then the job is to fine tune the exercise to improve the muscle's ability to burn, and the way to do that. It's high intensity interval training to challenge the muscle to increase metabolic rate and get it better at burning, and it's working
on the muscle mass. So it's looking at how much muscle mass is this person got, and how can we strength train in a way to get that muscle more sensitive to insulin, better at burning body fat and even building muscle tissues so that over time we increase metabolic rate with more muscle mass. So people can eat more,
because let's be honest, most people like to eat. So I tend to work in stages, and indeed I have some clients who only need to keep their calories controlled and walk, do a little bit of cardio, and they're very happy with their body. And then I've got others who are much more interested in shaping and want to really lean up and get a low body fat and they would work very closely with a personal trainer to achieve those goals in the gym. So it's looking at
people where they're at. But absolutely I would say nutrition is the initial intervention. We all have to eat, we all have to get our calorie loads right. We all have to create the deficits that we need, and then after that it's about working out the right workout program for you long term that enables you to eat and enjoy food and not have to constantly be on diets and restricting. So absolutely, it's a process and it all works very very closely together.
It's funny, it doesn't really surprise me. So you start with the food, I start with the gym. We're probably twenty episodes into the wood Life Suits, and it's amazing how many common themes keep coming back to the surface. It comes back to these basics. Eat real food, reduce your process food and carb inate, eat more vegetables, drink more water, move more consistently. I mean, it's not rocket science. If you're listening to this, you have to actually be
prepared to hear it and accept it. Because if you've been told this and you've had the blinkers on or that your hands covering your ears for five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, it's never going to change. That fundamental advice is always going to be the way that you are going to start to get yourself into shape.
You know what you've said that I think is the thing that links it all together. And perhaps the reason that starting with training at that focus level would yield fantastic results, but the people I'm seeing aren't doing that is the consistency sam Because if people were getting in the gym and doing an amazing workout with a really well qualified, experienced trainer who can eyeball someone and prescribe
the right exercise intervention, people would get results. Now, the thing with diet, and probably one of the most common pieces of feedback I give to my clients on a daily basis, is your version of my diet won't work, just do it my way. In nine out of ten cases, when people aren't get results and they send their diaries through, I'll have a look at it and it's nowhere near
what I wrote for them. Will prescribe because like you, I give the recommendations for a reason, But then they take the snippets of the diets that they like and then do their version because they think, oh I don't need that bread there, or cut that out, or That's what with our job as health professionals is to help
people establish those habits. So most of the time, the default out of you know twenty eight meals a week that twenty four of them are pretty good, or on out of seven days, six of them are pretty good when it comes to activity, and then you've got your results. But in our the clients we're working with and the reason they're looking for help and guidance is that they don't have that consistency and it's always less days that
are better. And so it's coaching people to get that consistency with both their diet and their movement that will yield results for anybody. And that in busy lives can be challenging when people have got a lot of other priorities or perhaps it's not the right time, or you know, not as important as it should be. But yeah, consistency for me is everything, particularly because we all have to eat.
And this is where the problem has arrived from, because we none of us get overweight quickly. None of us wake up one day and we just happen to have been overweight. It is the consistent bad habits that it sneaks up on us. You know, we wake up one day, Holy crap, I'm thirty kilos overweight, and I'm not sure how I got here. And it's a hard thing to
emotionally and psychologically, get your head around. Most people that I have met that are frustrated with their metabolic efficiency have done very little in the behavior environmental side of things to help themselves for a long time, or they've had lots and lots of peaks and troughs for a long time. I don't want our listeners to be overawed by the mountain is too big to climb by listening to us going I feel like I've got all this weight to lose, and I do have a crappy metabolism,
and it's just all too eff and hard. That's the last thing I want them to think. And I love that you said be patient, except from the outset, it's going to be three months, six months. If you have not done the right thing for twenty years, where is the logic that you can reverse that in twelve days. It makes no sense. It doesn't take twenty years. That's the good news. If you haven't done the wrong thing for twenty years, it doesn't take twenty years to come
out the other side. But you need to, you know, strap yourself in and prepare yourself for a good sort of six months, a good twelve months to build these habits and get yourself and the great news is it gets easier. I think we've sort of touched on you know, it's different for age and gender and size, and I
think people conceptually understand that. But what about specific food Susie, What are specific individual foods or types of foods that are beneficial from a metabolic perspective that you prescre there are.
It's probably more relative is the style and pattern of eating. So that programming effects similar to the way in which the regular training builds muscle, and so over time you have an improvement in burning. The same goes with our
patterns of eating. So if you think about the average person, they get up in the morning, they have a quick coffee, and then they've had half a breakfast but not really a breakfast, and something very sweet, and then they go off and they don't eat a whole lot in the day. They're trying to diet and be good as we always talk about, and grab a light lunch of the salad or the sushi. And then what happens late afternoon they haven't eaten enough. The body registers that, they get the munchies.
They overeat, and then we overeat all through the evening, reward ourselves with wine and treats and chocolate, and have our largest meal at night. Now, that pattern of eating is the most common one I would see on a day to day basis. It's very common in busy working people who are trying to be good. But it's the exact opposite of what we need for metabolic fitness because the body is programmed according to a circadium twenty four
hour rhythm. Basically, we're more active and our hormones are programmed to burn in the day and store at nighttime. So one of the other things that I am working with people on is trying to shift it so that we have a lighter second half of the day so they actually wake up hungry in the morning and then within an hour or two of waking we're looking for natural hunger. That's a sign your body's working well, it's
naturally burning its food and your metabolism's kicking in. But then you have got to have a balanced meal sam and ideally protein rich. About twenty grams of overall protein is the key nutrient that promotes or requires more calories to burn in the morning. So that's a little thing we can do to metabolic rate is have small meals with a good quantity twenty thirty grams of total protein. So the equivalent of say one hundred grams of lead meat or a couple of eggs is roughly twenty grams
of protein. So I want someone with an hour or two of waking to have a meal that's got that component in it. I want a small amount of carbohydrate, again important for metabolism to fuel the muscle at the right time, because if we deprive the muscle of carbohydrate again, we lose metabolic efficiency over time as the body is more likely to store. So every three to four hours,
I then want meal one, meal two. I want to top up in the afternoon that's protein rich, so then I can leave in a smaller light and I probably for most people would cut the car back unless they were training early in the morning fasted. So that is a model that works really well. So the key components are small regular meals. But that's not every hour or two. I'm talking every three to four hours, so you're igniting natural hunger. The body's burnt through what's there the metabolisms
ready for some more food. I want a decent amount of protein at each one of those meals to get the thermic burn effect of that extra protein. And then I want a lightness at night to try and get the body working harder in a deficit, so you're more likely to wake up hungry. So that pattern is really
really important. But to try and shift people, especially people who love drinking coffee and they'll often have milk and almond milk, and that delays hunger and then they have this kind of weird snacking all the time but not really eating a meal. It's that programming and habits and systems as part of their workday and at home to make those meal choices and food choices the default and
become the easy option. And so these are all the steps we're working through with people to try and create what I call the nutrition platform or foundation, which is that baseline five or six days a week that also then allows people to have a meal or two off, not a day or two off, a meal or two off each week to factor in celebrations or a high carbohydrate meal. But that's that consistency. We want the platform there, so most of the time people are ticking those boxes.
So in short answer to your question, small regular meals that have a good amount of protein is the most important thing we can do. There's a little bit of stuff on green tea and chili, but really it's minute compared to that baseline, you know, as we've just talked about twenty four to twenty six meals out of twenty eight being pretty on trap from a balance perspective of those macros and calories.
It's really interesting. I mean, you say it's so easy, but I also understand why people struggle so much. And traditionally, historically we've all been brought up that dinner is the biggest meal of the day, and we you know, we are hungriest at dinner because we probably haven't eaten as much during the day. Then there's the other challenge, how much people struggle to not snack after dinner. That takes
some serious willpower. And then the third challenge, it's really hard to get protein into your breakfast.
I couldn't agree more, and I would say that the increase in the number of protein based breads has really helped that breakfast problem.
Oh good one, yeah, because now you can.
Get a whole range of protein bread that you can team with some one hundred percent nutspread or banana or I quite like the protein wraps as well as a different option, and the same for the higher protein yogurts. So that has given a whole span of other foods. And I quite like my clients if they can to prep their breakfast the night before, because it's then that quick when you've woken up late, you're in a rush, you might be trying to get to a workout. Then
you don't have to think about it. You just grab it from the fridge, the breakfast wrap or the breakfast sandwich. But I would agree with you getting twenty grams of high quality protein at meal one and having an eating cut off time that gives you ideally sam twelve hours overnight without food. That's the gold standard from a gut health perspective. So the way I deal with it myself with clients is if they want to have they have to choose whether they have wine, dessert or carbs at night.
So if you're someone who loves a glass of wine, no problem, but you don't get the potato. And if you love to have the sweet treat an hour or so after dinner, you got to keep it at a hundred cow, but you can't have the carbs. So we've got to factor that in because then it's sustainable. And then when we've got a sustainable model, it's not restrictive,
it's not depriving. You won't binge eat, and that's a lot of what we work on with people is creating that nutrition foundation that is sustainable for them long term.
So you've absolutely loved what you've said, But what about our listeners that are sitting there and there will be playing any of them that are saying this all makes sense, it's all great information. But I know that I have, whether it be hormonal or otherwise, that even if I do all of these things and take all of this advice, I still really really struggle to lose weight. What do you say to those people?
For people who do struggle to lose body fat? And indeed, there is a group of people who, you know, I'm not talking about people who are carrying five kilos, but people who are obese have been had weight issues their entire adult life. They find it really difficult to lose weight. Even with relatively good dietary and exercise compliance, their weight loss results are slow. This is the group who perhaps
lose size but not weight on the scales. These are my groups who probably do have hormonal issues like clinical insulin resistance, and absolutely for that group, I would be suggesting they go and consult with a good GP or endochronologist. What we want to see is the hormonal response, and really I'm looking for what we call insulin resistance, so it's pre diabetes. But when this group of people eat carbohydrate rich foods, they oversecrete insulin which blocks that loss.
So it does work against that standard energy and versus energy out. These people won't lose half of a kilo a week consistently. They will lose body size over time, but they will struggle and really contain that have that abdomino obesity. Be carrying twenty thirty kilos, they've got about twenty five percent more muscle mass than a normal person without insulin resistance, which means we have to train them in a different way because they don't need to build
muscle tissue. They need to just get it working better, which means we've got to deplete it as opposed to build. And because they will build more readily because they've got a storage hormone in elevated amounts. But absolutely, and I see a lot of those people because that's my specialty area. That's probably the one the only ones that really spring to mind. But I do think in the future we will absolutely have full genetic profiles of people and what
they should and shouldn't eat. But for me, I sort of am looking generally at hormonal disturbance, which is generally insulin resistance.
Yeah, I love it, SUSI thank you so much for coming on the woodline.
Thank you always nice to chat.
What a fascinating conversation. It varies a lot between dietitian and nutrition us as you speak to them, and I obviously have the privilege of speaking to lots of them. I think that's the beauty of getting into shape, and it's the beauty of this show that you get to make up your own mind. And I'm absolutely comfortable by saying there's more than one way to get into shape.
There's more than ones that are rules. I mean, there are absolutely some underlying fundamentals that I think I harp on enough about that you would understand it's not just a one size fits all when it comes to getting ourselves into shape, whether it be exercise or nutrition or any other facet of wellness. And on that note, we are twenty episodes into the WOODLFE now absolutely three that we've made it episode twenty. Can't wait for the next two hundred. But it made me think we should go
back into the archives. We're going to have a little bit of a question recap. That's what's up next. We've spoken to some really knowledgeable people in the Woodlfe episodes and we've answered some of your questions and some really great detail. But some of our guests that we've had on the wood Life really get your thinking deeply about your own lifestyle, and it's only natural that as you're thinking about it, you're going to have some follow up questions.
So that's what we're going to get into.
Hi. Sam, My name is Karen from South Australia. I've been listening to the Joanne McMillan podcast with the importance of maintaining muscle mass for menopause or women. So I'm just curious what your thoughts are on faster training, particularly for menopause or women.
First of all, Karen, I love that you've been listening to the episode. I'd have to say that's one of my favorite episodes. You know, Joanne knows her stuff because she was speaking so quickly without drawing breath, and had so much gold, so much knowledge to share. I was literally scribbling notes seriously trying to keep up and take it all in. And one of those key things was the importance of resistance training or wait training for mental pools or women. The question that you're asking, do I
do that training faster or not? It really depends on the individual. I think the fact that you're a mental pools a woman shouldn't necessarily dictate that choice one way or the other. I think you need to find what works for you now. I know some people that train brilliantly on an empty stomach, and then they get their carbs and protein into their system post workout. I know other people that are just not going to train well
or feel very good training on an empty stomach. They need some kind of fuel in there, particularly early in the mornings, to really get the most out of their workout. So it's an individual decision. You need to experiment see what works for you. Do some more carbs and protein
half an hour before you work out. Men, you train really really well, and you're bursting with energy, and you're lifting heavier, and you've got and you know you're smashing pbs and you're feeling great or does it make you a bit heavy and slow and letharge you can it actually has the opposite effect. And then of course you
balance that out with what's on the other side. And I always advise that you get some carbs, good carbs, and some protein into your system within thirty minutes of finishing that workout.
Hey, Sam, it's lou There are so many protein bars on the shelves, which ones are actually any good?
So remembery, this is a follow up question from the hate or rated section that we did on protein bars, which is way back in the first week of March. And I recognize that voice. That's beautiful Lube from Bar and Bay, who has been to a couple of my retreats, and I would recognize that voice anyway. She's a lovely twenty eighter. Hello, Lo and great question. There's two parts to this. The first part is you need to always
remember that a supplement needs to be exactly that. And I've said that a couple of times, but it's a really important reminder. Let's not have protein bars instead of getting our protein from a real food sauce, eggs, chicken, whatever it might be. If we can. So if you can get the protein from one of those real food sources,
then that is always my preference. However, if you do need a supplement because you're on the goal, whatever it might be, protein bars can be good, but it's really important that you become a good label reader because they are not all created equal. Some of them literally have as many calories or as much sugar content in as much as a Mars bar. You may as well grab a marsmar off the shelf for the amount of good
it's going to do. So you want to look at something that's got as fewer ingredients as possible, as much protein as possible, and as lower grams of sugar per one hundred grams as you can, particularly if you're trying to lose weight. If you're an athlete and you're just sort of trying to break even and get energy in there, and your case, loof it's your little boy and he's
just finished tennis training, it won't matter as much. But if you're trying to lose weight and have a good healthy snack option, then make sure you really read the label. As always, thank you so much for sending through those questions and anyone else that's got any questions, don't hesitate to click on the link in the show notes and send those questions through and go back and listen to
those episodes. Look at the title of the episode. There'll be plenty in there, with a guest that you may not have known that we've spoken to, or a subject matter that you may not know that we've covered. And I would love you to go back, listen to the episode, send me a message, let me know what you thought. I'd love to hear from you.