The Role of Metabolism and Hormones for Muscle Gain and Fat Loss

The metabolism is the body's energy management system, sensitive to stress and responsive to various factors like food availability, temperature, light exposure, environmental pressures and exercise levels. 

The metabolism's main concern is having enough nutrient density to generate energy. Simply put, it measures the gap between calorie intake and output. 

Whether you eat less and exercise more or vice versa, chronic patterns will create problems, starting with your metabolism. The perceived possibility of starvation causes the metabolism to slow down, to preserve energy, to store. 

Women, due to their hormonal software system, are particularly sensitive to stress, (more than men) due to the role of the metabolism in hormone production and regulation. As hormonal changes occur, their system may struggle, much like a computer overloaded with multiple applications. 

The hormonal software system's protective mechanism against starvation affects and alters mood, energy, sleep, cravings and hunger. 

We can make an acronym of MESCH to the above listed affects. 

So what do we do? How do we bridge the gap in calorie intake and output, to help our metabolism and hormones? You have to monitor yourself and keep filling the gap by listening to your “MESCH”. 

Ask yourself: 

1. What is your mood doing? If you’re moody, that actually is just a stress load somewhere in the body!
2. what is your energy level? If you are exhausted you need to GIVE the body time to gather energy with good nutrient density and working IN as opposed to working OUT. 
3. how are you sleeping? If you have broken sleep, can’t sleep, you know your body is stressed. DON’T wake up and do a hectic workout when you’ve had a sleepless night. 
4. what are you craving? Different cravings indicate what you’re your body is MISSING, and is lacking energy.
5. are you hungry or not? Either indicate whether your body is needing energy actually but both put your body into starvation and chronic starvation will trigger storage. 

So once you’ve linked the gap with your MESCH, by working on these essential foundations first, then you work on building. And this is how you build. This is how you reduce throwing MESCH out of check.

1. Focus on nutrient density and satiety, rather than calories. 
2. Focus on gaining muscle. The more muscle you have, the better off you are going to be. The more muscle you have, the less you have the yo-yo of losing weight and then regaining it. The more muscle you have, the better you can manage stress, the better your metabolism is prepared to say “I can handle this”. 
3. Train functionally which is moving the body in different planes, ie from side to side, front to back, up and down. 
4. Short-duration, high-intensity resistance-based weight training. This gives you the benefit of creating muscle, with the benefit of burning fat by short bursts, not triggering stress with long cardiovascular exercise. 
5. Long walks! 
6. Nasal breathing.
7. As we age, sometimes we need to first slow down to speed up, to train smarter rather than frenzied. 

If you want to build muscle and lose fat, it might be a hard pill to swollow, especially for those who’d prefer to just swallow a pill instead, but you have to lay foundations. This IS not tipping the metabolism into stress mode, to then mess with hormones, which causes fat gain and muscle loss. You accomplish more when you enjoy the journey instead of striving in the journey. The body is systemic and foundational. Learn to live in its wisdom - and enjoy the journey. 

If you have any questions or need any help please reach out. I’m professionally qualified  but more than that, qualified by experience!