My Favorite Fitness Myth

I was just recently thinking about a piece of fitness wisdom that you hear just about everywhere these days: the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism will be and the easier it will be to lose weight.

My question: if your metabolism is higher, what stops you from eating more food and eliminating any possible calorie deficit that might exist? Or to put it another way, couldn’t you just eat less food without raising your metabolism and still lose weight?

In fact, while it is true that muscle adds to your metabolic rate, it is also true that fat also increases your metabolism. So we should all just put on the pounds to boost our metabolisms!

Don’t believe it? Just watch a reality TV program like The Biggest Loser to see high metabolism at work. Those guys lose like 10+ pounds a week, and they do it because they probably need like 5,000-10,000 calories a day just to support all that excess weight; so they can easily cut 2,000 calories and still meet all their nutritional requirements and get enough food on a regular basis to maintain blood glucose levels. As they drop the pounds, though, it becomes harder and harder for them to lose as quickly.

I suspect that the reason people like the contestants on Biggest Loser get fat in the first place is because their bodies cannot regulate blood glucose levels and burn fat very efficiently, so they are constantly hungry and eat too much—emotional eating issues might also be a factor. But if you can manage your blood glucose and improve the efficiency of your metabolism, then you can also lose fat more easily by simply exercising more, eating less, and not being ravenously hungry all the time. Therefore, I feel that the most important factor in weight loss is not having a fast metabolism but having an efficient metabolism.

Of course, for the competitive marathon runner the real concern is not about losing fat—most marathon runners tend to be, how shall we put it, extremely lean; but the marathon runner does benefit from an efficient metabolism because it allows him or her to get the most bang out of the fewest caloric bucks. This might involve a combination of teaching the body to store more sugar in the liver and muscles (i.e. glycogen), burn more fat during exercise, or tolerate lower blood glucose levels without bonking or hitting the wall. In other words, it is all about making the most out of limited fuel resources so that you can complete 26.2 miles without running out of energy. Maybe this is yet another reason why body builders don't make the best marathon runners--they've got those overly fast metabolisms to worry about!

But how does the marathon runner improve the efficiency of his or her metabolism? My theory is that he or she accomplishes this by depositing as many miles as possible into the weekly, monthly, or yearly running bank. I have also heard some claims that running longer without ingesting any calories before or during exercise can teach the body to become more efficient. Since I am now on the early morning running schedule and do not have enough time to eat a breakfast and digest it before going out on a run, I am essentially taking this approach on all of my longer runs. Perhaps that is why I never hit the wall during Chicago last year? Hmmm…..