The 4 Parts of Metabolism Explained | Why Exercise Isn’t Driving Your Weight Loss - The Body Recomposition Revolution

Hi, welcome back to the Body Recomposition Revolution. This is Robin. And today I'm clearing up a huge misconception that many people, many women have, and that is that your workouts burn the majority of your calories, right? We've all thought that. I mean, who hasn't thought that the more cardio you do, the less food you eat, the harder you push, then you'll finally lose weight. Now here's something that was shocking for me, and that is your workouts are actually one of the smallest pieces of your metabolism.

That's right, yes, your workouts. When you think about your metabolism and what is actually burning calories throughout the day, your workouts are truly one of the smallest pieces of your metabolism. And get this, the majority of the calories you burn every single day happen whether you workout or not. Let that sink in. The majority of the calories you burn on a daily basis will be burned whether you get to the gym or not. And in order to make that make sense, you have to understand TD EE, which just stands for total daily energy expenditure.

And once you understand, like once you truly understand what total daily energy expenditure means, fat loss, body recomposition, it makes sense. It makes sense. And when something makes sense, it no longer feels as intimidating because you get it. You get what actually will spur your body to drop fat, what will enable your body to build muscle, what will get you where you want to go. And today we're covering the most basic foundation of fat loss of body recomposition, and that is TD EE. So what is TD EE?

As I said, total daily energy expenditure. A better way for me to understand what that means is the amount of calories my body burns every single day. Not just from my workouts, not just from my steps, not from cardio, all of it combined. OK, so your TD EE, which means again, the amount of calories you're going to burn during the day is made-up of four components. Now I'm about to throw 4 acronyms at you. Don't be overwhelmed because we're going to briefly go over each one so that it makes sense.

So right now we're just going over what is making up your TDE again, how many calories your body burns. And that is BMR, your NEAT, your TEF and your EAT. And understanding those four things is a game changer. It really it, it just makes fat loss make sense. OK, so we're going to start with BMR. We're starting with BMR because BMR makes up 60 to 70% of the calories you burn on a daily basis. So we're starting with BMRBMR means your basal metabolic rate. What does that mean? It just means the calorie, the calories your body burns by existing.

If you get a custom macro microformulation from me, I refer to this as your couch calories. And it's just how I've mentally, I don't know, understood this concept as if I laid on the couch all day and just existed. These are the calories my body will burn, not with movement or any other factor besides the following. So breathing your heartbeat, your body producing hormones that actually expends calories, your brain function, your digestion, your organs functioning, your body temperature for some reason to me that was always kind of surprising like oh wow, my body burn needs calories to to survive yes, your body actually burns calories producing your hormones, making your brain function, having your organs work.

All of those things need energy just to work now that's key to remember. So again, your BMR makes up 60 to 70% of the calories you burn just by existing. And This is why your metabolism matters so much. This is why building muscle matters so much. This is why a lot of my episodes lately have revolved around battling low energy availability and artificial maintenance calories and basically just trying to help women because I've gone through this myself the last year. Learn that you have to eat more, especially after age 35 when your hormone production is just a little bit flighty.

You have to it's it's why crash dieting is a disaster. It's why GLP one rebound is horrific, especially for women, especially after age 35. But for everyone in this episode, we're just talking about women. So when you chronically under eat, your body adapts. Your movement subconsciously drops. You don't realize it, but it does. Your hormones adapt, your recovery worsens. So like in the mornings, maybe you're just feeling a little bit more sore, right? Maybe you just are inflamed. You have just this chronic puffiness.

Your muscle loss increases, your metabolism has downshifted because you starved it. So now our BMR, maybe it used to be 1500. Now since we've starved it, oh, it's gotten down to 1200, right? Because your body had to adapt to the fact that you are not giving it enough fuel. So if you are not giving your body enough calories just to survive, your couch calories, your BMR and your metabolism actually downgrades, it adapts to that starvation. It burns less calories. It just by existing, right? It burns less because it has learned to adapt.

I can't stress that enough. I know I'm repeating myself, but your body is so smart, so smart. I've, I've learned that over the last two years, my body is so smart and it has adjusted to starvation mode by all of these factors I listed. You know, all the things that I've been talking about, chronic fatigue, that recovery for me, horrendous. I haven't been able to build muscle. All the things that coincide with that I have experienced because I unknowingly was not eating enough. OK, so we're moving on to NEAT NEAT and this is this is the most the most underrated fat loss tool.

So what NEAT stands for is non exercise activity thermogenesis, which is just all the movement that happens in your day outside of formal exercise like walking, cleaning, pacing around, fidgeting, standing, taking the stairs, chasing your kids, grocery shopping, yard work, you name it. If you're moving, that is your NEAT and people get shocked because NEAT can burn more calories than your actual workouts. So for sedentary people who might work at a desk job and not aren't moving a lot, they're NEAT might make up for 10 to 15% of your your metabolism.

And for someone like me who's very highly active, I'm walking around, I'm moving, I'm cleaning, I'm fidgety, 3030 to 50% of my metabolism is affected by my NEAT. That's why two women who are the same age, the same height, the same weight, can have wildly different maintenance calories. So we went over BMR and how that makes up 60 to 70% of your total daily energy expenditure. Again, how many calories your body burns, your NEAT makes up for 15 to 30%. Those are big stats, none of which involve your workouts, mind you.

And here's another shocking fact. When you slash your calories too hard, like if you're on a GLP 1:00 and you're just like I can't eat, you're neat subconsciously drops you are you are unconsciously moving less, you're sitting more, you're fidgeting less, you feel exhausted, you're body it. It's it's way of becoming more efficient to conserve its energy that it has. And that that is truly one of the reasons why women plateau despite the fact that they're eating nothing is because subconsciously they are moving way less.

OK, acronym #4TE F. This ones not as widely known as BMR and you're neat. The thermic effect of food. OK, that makes up for about 8 to 10% of the calories you're burning throughout the day. TEF calories burned digesting food. He might be like what? What does that mean? Yes, your body actually burns calories just by digesting digesting food. And if you think about protein, carbs and fat, protein has the highest thermic effect. Think about that. The more protein you eat, the more energy your body uses just to digest it, the more calories you burn just to digest that protein.

Proteins, thermic effect, 20 to 30%, a bit of energy, Carbs 5 to 10, fat 0 to 3. Fat is so such a fickle girl. We should just do an episode on fat. But when women increase their protein, you stay fuller, it's more satiating. You preserve your muscle because protein is muscle sparing. You recover better. And the best part, as I just said, you burn more calories just by eating more protein. And the last section of what goes into our metabolism is eat, EAT, exercise, activity, thermogenesis, the the one area that everybody overestimates because your exercise only accounts for 5 to 15% of the of the calories you burn on a daily basis.

That was disappointing to me. I was like, I work so hard and I feel like our workouts are what we all obsess over the most and it has pretty much the least impact on the amount of calories we burn a daily, daily basis. That's your lifting. Lifting does barely burns calories. That's not why we're lifting. We're lifting to build muscle because more muscle you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate is, right? Your workouts are lifting, cardio class is running. Those things all tie into your exercise activity thermogenesis.

And again, they only make up 5 to 15% of the calories you burn during the day. This is why I always tell my clients you cannot out train a bad diet. You just can't. I did a figure competition a million years ago, 15 years, whenever it was, I have no idea 15 years ago. And you get so in tune with your body it's crazy. I remember I was because I was doing a figure competition. You have to get down to a very unhealthy amount of body fat and I remember my coach always saying you cannot out train a bad diet, ABS are made in the kitchen blah blah blah.

But I would eat, I remember eating a mini Snickers bar and I was really close to my show date so you could see muscle striations and if I ate too many carbs you could tell there was a little more softness in my physique. So I I ate a mini Snickers bar and I looked at the calories and I remember thinking, OK, I'll have to go on the treadmill and run for 1/2 hour, maybe it's 45, whatever it was. And I remember thinking OK and well now I've burned it off the next day I just didn't look the same way as I did the day before.

This is a mini Snickers bar. But when you get down to such a low amount of body fat and you're doing something super intense like a figure competition, you can tell it's not healthy. You can tell though, and that Snickers bar affected my body, my water retention. It it even though I I thought I out trained the Snickers bar, I didn't. It had an impact on my body. So when people think that they can out train bad nutrition, maybe you eat fast food a couple times a day, you have a couple drinks, you know, and then you eat what you deemed to be healthy.

But in your brain you're like, oh, I'll just do 2 hours of cardio that that's not going to work. It's truly not. I've tried to do the same thing before. It's not. You have to be dialed in on your nutrition. If your goal is to drop fat, you have to, you can't out train it. And that's, as I said, another huge reason why lifting is so imperative. It's not because it burns calories. It really doesn't. The point of lifting is to build muscle. When you have more muscle, your metabolism is higher. The more muscle you have, the higher your TDE is.

Now why does all of this matter? It matters because I see women constantly under eating, constantly overtraining. I was one of them. I fall into that pattern all the time. But that is not the goal. If your goal is to look more toned, that means you want better body composition, which means less fat, more muscle. The goal is not to eat less. Or like how low can I get my calories? How small can I become the goal? Just to ask yourself, how healthy and metabolically active can I make my body while still rotating through the phases of fat loss and not damaging my hormones?

And I know that sounds a little convoluted, but all it means is that you have to eat enough food. Food to build muscle so that your body maintains a healthy metabolism and you can continue to build muscle. And by doing that, your body's fat will reduce. It will The more muscle you have, the better quality food you're eating, the more protein you ingest. Let's, let's shoot for 30 to 40% of your total daily caloric intake being from protein. Your body composition will change. You just have to be consistently eating that protein, consistently hitting those weights.

OK. It's not about cardio. It's not about eating less. It's about fueling the right way to build your body into. But you want it to be. Which 90% of the women who contact me is less fat, more muscle, The toned look. No, I had this awakening the, the last year that my body wasn't doing what I thought it should. And at first I thought, well, it's got to be my hormones. So I got my hormones tested and, yeah, they were all out of whack. But I was pretty young at the time. I think I was 36. I, I don't know, but they, they were out of whack.

Why am I just this crazy early case of perimenopause? So I kind of proceeded forward with hormone friendly training. I started this business. I trained the way that women who are experiencing perimenopause symptoms should train. And my clients who were actually in perimenopause, menopause beyond, they trained that way and they were seeing great results. Why was I not? Well, because I was eating about 18-19 hundred calories thinking this was maintenance. In reality, I was not at maintenance. I was chronically under eating and I just didn't know that.

I didn't know that because I was, I don't know, delusional. As I've said, I have no idea, but the swim, the symptom list that I want you to refer to that might key you in as well. If you are under fueling, your body is constant fatigue, cold all the time, food obsession, poor sleep, plateaued fat loss, low libido, poor recovery. You're sore all the time, hair thinning, loss of menstrual cycle, anxiety around food, reduced workout performance, you're exhausted all the time. I'm not kidding you. I experienced probably 98% of these symptoms.

I just listed it was to me a hormonal thing, but in reality it was because I had deprived my body so much it affected my hormones. I wasn't eating enough to even produce the correct amount of hormones that my body needed, right? My body had adapted to that low intake by downshifting the functions that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode. It downshifted my hormone production, my recovery, horrible sore all the time. I wasn't putting on any muscle. I wasn't experiencing any fat loss, that's for sure.

I just didn't understand until I had an outside perspective from a professional who was like, well, let's actually look at how much activity you're doing. And that's when I learned, wow, I have really wreaked havoc on my total daily energy expenditure. I have not given my body nearly enough to function efficiently, which is what I teach all of my own clients. We have to give our body what it needs. I wasn't doing that. So over the last two months I have drastically increased my calories. Yes, there is some anguish overseeing the scale go up a bit, but I'm OK with it.

I'm OK with it because I know I'm building a better body that will function more metabolically healthy in the in the long run. I'm actually putting on muscle now for the first time in a year. I'm putting on muscle. Yeah, I'm 5-6, sometimes 7 lbs heavier than I was last year. But that's OK because that's what's needed to get my body where I want it to go. It's a hard realization to have, and it's a hard action to move forward with giving your body what it needs. It really is. But it's absolutely necessary for body recomposition in the long run, especially after your mid 30s.

OK, so last thing, how to increase your total daily energy expenditure? You're going to build muscle. You need to do that. Increase daily movement, move around more, clean more. Eat enough protein. Again, 30 to 40% of your daily caloric intake. I want that from protein. Improve your sleep, manage your stress. No more chronic crash dieting, no more under eating. Spend more time at maintenance. Maintenance should be about 8 months of your year. That's where I am right now. I'm going to move into a slight deficit soon because hello summer, but maintenance should be the majority of your year.

Lastly, prioritize your recovery. Go to bed at a reasonable hour. Get that sleep. And I know it's easier said than done, but now that I'm eating enough, my recovery is exponentially better. It is. I just feel better as a whole and I hope you do too after you follow these steps and understand what goes into your body's total daily energy expenditure and closing your metabolism. It's not just your workouts. Remember that. It's not just your workouts. Your body is incredibly intelligent. It is constantly adapting to what you're giving it to keep you alive.

And the women who see the best long term body recomposition results are not the women who starve themselves. They are the women who are fueling property. They're properly, they're focusing on building muscle, they're moving consistently, they recover well. They do all those things. They're playing the long game. OK, If you want help with your nutrition, you can always e-mail me. That's RAC, RAC [email protected]. You can follow me on Instagram. That's RAC Fitness under score. Post a lot on there and remember to subscribe.

That was the last thing. Remember to subscribe, share it with a friend, help get the word out that women need to give their body what it needs. Thanks, ladies. Talk to you next week.

The 4 Parts of Metabolism Explained | Why Exercise Isn’t Driving Your Weight Loss

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