In part one of her series on the metabolic advantage of being fit, Nutritionist Nuwanee Kirihennedige describes the very first changes that occur in the body that give the advantage to the more fit female at the dinner table. From better nutrient partitioning to increased long term health, which side are you on?
From a scientific perspective, a person who is fit (low body fat, moderate to high strength, decent maximal oxygen consumption or V02max) is a completely different person metabolically from their unfit counterpart. The good news is that it does not take long to become “metabolically fit” and staying there is even easier. First, what do we mean by metabolically fit? Read on…
Two Dinner Scenarios
Imagine two sisters have gone through their normal day and are sitting down to a healthy dinner of poached salmon with a side salad and a small sweet potato. They share their day with each other and one finds that the metabolically-fit sister had a great, but brief weight workout finished with several short, but intense sprints. The unfit sister simply went to her desk job and came home. Even with similar genetics, and the same healthy food, there will be a vast difference in how they store their nutrients at the end of the day. Furthermore, the way they store their food will have a dramatic effect on their bodies tomorrow and their overall health in the long run. Lets walk through how their bodies will react.
As the sisters are eating dinner, the food that they are consuming is starting to enter into the bloodstream at a rapid rate. As soon as the body senses higher amino acid levels (from the salmon) and higher sugar (from the sweet potato), insulin will be released into the bloodstream. Insulin is often called the most anabolic hormone in the body, because it causes growth and storage of lean tissue, glycogen (our carbohydrate stores in the body) and fat. But there is a key difference between our two sisters and the effects insulin will have on their bodies. Our unfit sister has full glycogen stores because she didn’t exercise all day, additionally there are no signals from her muscles to grow any larger because she did not do any resistance training that day. So the insulin simply tells her body to store everything excess as fat in the body. While our metabolically fit sister has a completely different scenario; her glycogen stores are depleted and need to be refilled, so the glucose from the blood stream gets stored as glycogen. The amino acids are pushed into the muscle cells to repair and rebuild (stronger) the muscles that she exercised that day and any fat in the salmon is burned for energy since the protein and carbohydrates have already been used by the body. So you can see that by tomorrow our unfit sister will be fatter and our metabolically-fit sister will be ready to tackle another workout!
This example highlights why it is so much easier for people that are already "fit" to stay so. Their bodies function very differently at many different levels than do their unfit counterparts.
Metabolically-Fit Does Not Take Long
One of the greatest parts about becoming metabolically-fit is that it does not take very long to do so. For example, take our unfit sister above. If she applied herself to exercising with her sister for two weeks, she too would have a dramatically improved profile. While her other goals of sculpting a lean physique will take longer, her metabolic profile will improve rather quickly and she too will enjoy the benefits of storing nutrients more effectively to help her get to her goal faster. Of additional importance, by being more metabolically-fit, both of the sisters will reduce their risk of developing chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease later in life.
So next time you are at the gym, know that you are not only training your muscles to better shape you, but you are also training your metabolism to partition its nutrients in a manner that will assist you tomorrow and for the long-run!
In the next part of this series we will explore what is needed to get a person metabolically-fit and offer some nutritional strategies to speed things up!
Nuwanee Kirihennedige – Is a nutritionist and dietician that works with athletes and health minded individuals on sports performance and weight loss. Nuwanee currently is the nutritionist for the California Strength Academy in San Ramon California. Her research skills are second to none when it comes to translating research into results. Nuwanee can be reached at nuwanee@californiastrength.com