Speeding Up Your Metabolism

Do Intermittent Fasting Diets, such as The Warrior Diet, Slow Your Metabolism? Not at all. Here's why...

Using the Warrior Diet will not slow your metabolism - it's actually possible it may speed it up (I'll explain below). It's a different view to manipulating the metabolism to the one common in fitness circles at the moment - but it's just as valid.

I'd say make sure you know what you are doing when you start any new diet, especially intermittent fasting (which is what this diet is a form of). Read up on it first so you do it properly, don't just go on what you've heard or you may not get the desired results.

It's worth noting that this diet requires you to exercise regularly for it to give good results, so stick to the main rules which are stipulated in the book - 'undereat' during the day, 'overeat' in the evening, exercise during the 'undereating' phase (in the fasted state) and eat immediately after you exercise. You also need to stick closely to low GI foods for the Warrior Diet to really work. If you don't stick to those rules you are less likely to get a good result.

Why does it work?

It's slightly different to standard intermittent fasting in that the Warrior Diet works by speeding up your metabolism rather than just controlling calories eaten. There is a specific 'trick' it uses, based on the fact that if your body takes in food it only has a few options available as shown below:

*It can burn the energy from digestion (this is moderated by the pace of your metabolism, which can speed up or slow down).
*It can incorporate the nutrients from digestion into your tissues.
*Or it can store the excess nutrients from digestion (as glycogen in the liver and muscles - or as fat).

Those are your options whenever you eat. The one aspect that's conspicuously absent from the above is to stop digestion. We cannot stop our digestive processes whenever it suits us and that is why people get fat - everything we eat is digested.

This leads to the 'trick' I mentioned above. Because we cannot stop digestion and because it is not always possible to burn off all our excess nutrients by exercising, our bodies are forced to use at least one of the 3 options outlined above to get rid of excess food calories. What the Warrior Diet does is by cramming most of your total calories into a short 4 hour period, right after you have exercised, is that your metabolism has no option but to accelerate.

You cannot burn a full day's calories in just four hours of the day, regardless of how hard you exercise. You cannot convert it all into fat in just 4 hours (you could if you spread it out across the full day, but not in just 4 hours) and you can't turn it all into glycogen and store it in the liver and muscles - those stores are very limited. The last theoretical option would be to just flood the bloodstream with all the excess glucose - and that would kill you.

So the last option your body has is to become excessively inefficient and to burn energy at a very fast rate. That is the only realistic way to get rid of the excess - much like some countries incinerate their rubbish because they have nowhere to store it. In addition, when you exercise and then eat immediately afterwards, the body keeps burning energy at the same rate as it did when you were exercising - this goes on for hours and it is a well-known phenomenon in relation to eating right after you exercise.

The last part of this Warrior Diet strategy is the 'undereating' phase for most of the day. The trick when 'undereating' is to use very low GI foods and eat small (negligible) amounts of them every few hours to fool the body into thinking it's eating regularly. But because these foods will be so little in quantity and will release so slowly, they will add very little to total calories consumed. However, the body thinks it is eating due to the small glucose response, so the metabolic boost from the overeating phase the previous night is sustained - until you start exercising in the evening.

That is how it works, it's worth trying. Just make sure you understand the science and that you can stick to low GI eating.

I hope that clears it all up for you.

Idai Makaya
www.idaimakaya.com