How to change your body through metabolic fitness

What was the last thing you ate? You might have forgotten about it by now, but your body is still working very hard on that avocado toast.

From the moment the toast entered your mouth, it began its wild journey through the rollercoaster of your metabolism. First, it had to be broken down by chewing, stomach acid, and enzymes. Then your body used the fundamental molecules of that toast to build your own tissues. The rest of it was filtered out and excreted. The avocado toast has just undergone metabolism.

What is metabolic fitness?

Metabolism is the sum of all chemical processes that are happening in your body. Everything from food ingestion, digestion, and excretion is metabolism. It is the way your body processes the food you eat, and the byproducts it produces while doing so. For our purposes today, metabolic fitness is about how well your body converts food into energy.

Fitness is the optimal state of something. For our purposes, that would be physical health.

So, metabolic fitness is the optimal state of how your body uses the food you eat to produce energy and power your brain, heart, lungs, muscles, and everything in between.

Especially the metabolic fitness of skeletal muscles has been shown to be a critically important aspect of the development of metabolic diseases or disorders. These include stroke, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity, although these are just the most common ones.

When we are metabolically fit, our bodies sort of work for us, instead of against us. The food that we eat is converted to energy and muscle. And that’s for a very good reason. When your metabolism fitness increases, your muscles actually become better at burning energy on a cellular level. In some way, you are now better at converting food into energy.

But getting your metabolism fit requires work.

How to improve your metabolic fitness?

Just like getting your physical fitness in shape requires months of effort both from what you eat and how much you exercise, the same as for metabolic fitness. The main goal in the endeavor to increase your metabolic fitness is to try to increase your metabolism.

When you exercise, you burn calories. When you burn calories your body wants to consume more calories, and that’s good. When you burn and consume more calories than you previously did, you’ve just increased your metabolism, and your body has become more metabolically fit.

Your muscles have actually become more efficient at producing energy. That is a change that’s long-term and that’s what you’re aiming for. Just keep in mind to also eat healthy food.

And just like that, you have just changed your body. It is still you, but slightly different. A more metabolically fit version of you. It might require some effort and consistency, but if you’re truly striving for a better life, longer lifespan, and also healthspan, then this should surely pay off.