My research at UCSF shows muscle can idle like a car, burning up to 1,000 Cal per day while we are at rest without generating force. This is called the “disordered relaxed state” (or DRX) because the muscle motor proteins burn calories as they search in a disordered pattern to get a grip to create force. Only when our brain sends a signal do they get the grip they are searching for, which is how we control movement. In sports sciences, the DRX is also called “twitch potentiation” but it has been underappreciated how this mechanism can be harnessed to instantaneously double our resting metabolic rate (or RMR).

If our motor proteins can idle like a car, they can also stop idling, like turning a car off. This reverses the 1,000 Calorie burn into what is called the “super relaxed state” (or SRX). Research shows that staying out of the SRX eliminates weight gain when overeating by 1,000 Calories per day. Going in the opposite direction, RMR is shut down by that same amount for years after strict dieting and hard exercise, as was shown with “Biggest Loser” contestants 6 years after being on the show. It is sad to see how the world has bought into the Calorie balance model, peddling diets and workouts as if they are the answer to health when they can easily shut down our body into a metabolic collapse. The answer is to enable our body to be healthy by supporting it. Like a car, our body is a system of parts working together with a natural flow that starts with sleep, breathing and eating to deliver what our cells need so they can return the favor, providing us with a healthy and vibrant life. I call the steps from sleep, breathing, and eating to cellular function our “metabolic flow.” I call any limiting step that holds back the entire system a “metabolic gap.” Filling a metabolic gap is almost trivial in its simplicity and never takes more than 10 minutes, and yet it directly contributes to enabling our engine to keep idling instead of shutting down to survive our weight loss and fitness efforts, which includes 84% of overtraining.

Something as simple as a small snack when waking in the morning, and another equally small snack after exercising, or activating your muscles for one minute each hour through the day, transitions your body from a metabolic ditch to an immediate peak (including for diabetics), rescuing your cells so they can rescue you. The Calorie balance model is only correct when eating unprocessed natural food, but we now live in a processed world wherein our internal reward response is in a codependent relationship with a toxic food environment. Even foods that look healthy no longer are because of added processed ingredients, like double fiber bread or oats or yogurt with added sugar so that we get an opioid hit in the brain when we eat them. This is a Trojan horse of toxicity that we ourselves created and repeatedly let in. I call this the “hormonal death diet” because it replaces satiety hormones (that we are mimicking with weight loss meds) with an insulin and cortisol response that lowers metabolism and nourishment while increasing hunger and disease. This hormonal death spiral alternates between processed food and cutting Calories with diets, fasting, and weight loss medications.

Focusing on metabolic health by providing our body what it needs is the exact opposite of a focus on cutting Calories to reduce how much toxic food we are eating. Eating less garbage without also eating healthy food is like reducing financial debt without increasing wealth; it is a step in the right direction to get out of bankruptcy, but less toxic eating does not by itself nourish us. Metabolism (by definition) burns Calories, so you can think of it as physiological wealth by the numbers. As with any system, it only takes one small gap in functional flow to slow down a whole process, whether that is a car’s engine, financial income, or metabolism. Metabolic gaps that lead to cellular bankruptcy include skipping meals, staying sedentary, or replacing circadian sleep with late screens and late overeating. While you might think being sedentary without eating keeps your Calories balanced, or that exercise without eating is even better, these things devastate our metabolic health, which is why research shows dieting and exercise do not work and can even backfire. Society’s answer is to pummel our body even harder by fasting or eliminating our perception of hunger with weight loss meds. The result is the rapid loss of muscle, metabolic rate, and brain function. Society has come to an impasse with its addiction to processed food and screens that replace authentic living. It is now on us to recognize that the traditional longevity and hunter-gatherer lifestyle patterns are only out of reach because we keep reaching for a screen or a processed snack instead. Is the answer to overhaul our lives back to the beginning of time? Not at all. Keeping things simple and easy is critical to enabling our metabolic success.  And with that in mind, by paying attention to the key steps of our metabolic flow, it is clear what small things we can do to reestablish that flow and therefore reignite the metabolism we are suppressing in our cells with our metabolic blunders.

To create a systematic approach for enabling and driving our metabolism, we must start with basic physiology. By paying attention to how the body works, it becomes obvious what aspects of our lifestyle make or break our success. Metabolism begins with quality circadian sleep because that is when DNA gene expression increases to create RNA. Without RNA we cannot build the protein encoded in our genes, making eating and breathing irrelevant. The second step is therefore breathing and eating to supply oxygen and nutrients to our circulation for our cells. Cardiovascular health determines the efficiency of our circulation and therefore our fuel supply capacity, whereas our functional muscle activated out of the SRX determines how much is burned. Exercise recovery increases the supply and demand capacity of our body, but it is regular muscle activation throughout the day that enables us to fully benefit from that capacity. And finally, the cortisol from stress replaces protein production with protein breakdown, increasing metabolism briefly at the expense of metabolic health. Our metabolism therefore flows from sleep to nutrition to movement (including exercise) and is broken down by stress. Metabolic gaps are therefore created by poor sleep, a poor diet, inactivity, and chronic stress. Our metabolic levers are therefore sleep, nutrition, movement, and stress management. Metabolic flow results from filling whatever gap is most lacking and therefore holding up everything else you are already doing correctly.

I started giving seminars on nutrition at Stanford 25 years ago in 2000. I got my PhD in chemistry there in 2002 and immediately started doing research at UCSF and continued teaching at Stanford. My seminars developed into courses on food pharmacology in both medical schools and to teaching kinesiology in the departments of Athletics and in Human Biology. The deeper I dove into the molecular aspects of nutrition and movement, the more I realized we are all making the same mistakes that create metabolic gaps and that are easily fixed.

While every person has unique needs and preferences, we are the same in terms of our basic function demanding a supply of sleep and food to nourishment and recover from both mental and physical stress, including exercise. We are also similar in that we tend to be less interested in food when we wake than in the hours before sleep, and we are less interested in staying active than in watching screens when we have a few spare minutes. These tendencies result in many people having the same 10 lifestyle habits that create metabolic gaps. Their opposites create the top 10 lifestyle habits that drive metabolism, each of which takes at most 10 minutes at a time. Of these, 6 involve nutrition, 2 involve movement, 1 targets sleep, and another stress management. Focusing on one or a few that are most lacking in your life fills gaps so you benefit from everything else you are already doing. This creates an 80 – 20 principle of metabolism, which is that you get the majority of your benefits from simply addressing one or a few things that reestablish your metabolic flow.

Water breaks can be timed together with a movement and stress management break at the same time and can include a healthy snack as needed. It is a mistake to attempt to remember food, water, movement, and stress management separately in a busy day. By combining them, your body and mind will consistently get the things they need to maintain their metabolism and therefore your health and vitality. Diets and vacations can reset our body and mind, but these do not address how we are living between these resets. Sedentary stress turns life into dead space between the resets whereas metabolic flow creates vitality and flourishing, turning any diet or vacation into a short extra effort to elevate us even further, as opposed to depending on diets and vacations for survival. Fill your metabolic gaps to achieve that natural metabolic flow your cells are waiting for. And enjoy it!