#369 Metabolic Cheat Codes for Weight Loss and Longevity - Biohacker Summit 2022 Full Speech

Siim Land (0:03)

We're going to take a little break from hacking the ego into hacking the metabolism because the metabolism itself is still one of the, you know, crucial things for your existence as a whole. Your metabolism creates your reality in the sense that your consciousness, your body, your mind, they all work on your metabolic engine. And the word metabolism itself translates into change. Everything is always changing in your metabolism. It's always running to some degree. And there are hundreds, even more, different pathways and processes in the body happening all the time. And to be healthy, to feel great, to have energy, to lose fat, to build muscle, you would need to at least know to a certain degree how to hack it or how to control it. So that's going to be the purpose of my presentation, to give you five principles and five keys, or cheat codes, as I like to call them, to improving your metabolic health.

First of all, I'll start by refuting a common misconception, which is that your metabolic rate slows down with age. How many of people have you heard about it? Yeah, many people, it's like common knowledge, but based on actual science, it's not really the case. At least it's not as severe as many people think it is. So your metabolic rate actually stays relatively stable throughout your entire adulthood, and it only stops to or starts to decrease about 0.7% after your 60s. So before that, it stays still relatively the same. So the aging process kicks in only when you get in your elderly years. So that's actually good news, because it goes to show that a lot of the things that control your metabolic rate and your metabolic health are determined by our lifestyle in general. And the reason why people start to gain weight with age actually has to do with just their current state of metabolism, and their degree of insulin resistance. So insulin resistance is one of the most common metabolic health conditions out there. It promotes diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and is generally not a good thing. So what insulin resistance does is that it makes it more easy for you to store weight or store fat, and a lot of it has to do with your body's inability to store carbohydrates and glucose in the cells. And as a result, the glucose molecules stay in the bloodstream for longer. They start to cause more damage over time, and that's where all the ailments and metabolic disorders come in.

And this also leads to leptin resistance, which refers to your body's inability to receive the satiety cues you would normally get from eating food. And as a result of that, people overeat calories, and they gain weight from that as well. So the process works normally that you eat food, you get the calories, your fat cells release leptin, and the leptin will tell the brain that it has received enough calories, and as a result of that, you stop eating, or you're satiated. With leptin resistance, which usually comes from insulin resistance or eating very hyperpalatable processed foods, then this leptin signaling becomes dysfunctional, and the brain doesn't receive the signal, and as a result, you keep eating, you overeat, and you gain fat from that. So hack number one to override this process is resistance trading. So lifting weights, doing calisthenics, any form of resistance, is, I think, one of the most underrated and the most effective ways to actually improve your insulin sensitivity, leptin sensitivity, as well as overall metabolic health.

And the funny thing about your metabolism is that the vast majority of your metabolic rate, or how many calories you burn per day, actually doesn't come from, you know, exercise or the activities you do. The huge vast majority of it, over 60%, comes from your basal metabolic rate, which is the processes that are required for you to stay alive. Breathing, different digestion processes, metabolic rate, heartbeat, all of that comes from your basal metabolic rate. And the more muscle you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate is. So you're going to be burning more calories at rest without doing anything, which is, you know, very beneficial. You don't have to exert that much effort to stay metabolically healthy and to burn calories as well. The other things that contribute to your daily calorie needs are exercise, activity thermogenesis, which is exercise, which is actually a very small amount, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, like fidgeting, tapping your feet. You know, some people are very hyperactive, so they're burning more calories in so doing. And the last one is the thermic effect of foods, which refers to how many calories you burn to digest a particular food.