Things that Speed the Metabolism and Slow the Metabolism

Episode 26: Things that Speed the Metabolism and Slow the Metabolism

Is there such thing as good metabolism? Leading health and wellness entrepreneur Haylie Pomroy goes back to the basics of metabolism in order to give us an idea on how it affects our body and how a better understanding of its process will enhance the way it works. What can one do in order to sustain a healthier lifestyle? Haylie points out the important components that influence how metabolism works and what you can do to ensure it is doing its best to help you achieve a healthy body.

---

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Back To The Basics Of The Metabolism

Let’s get started with a little bit of talking about metabolism. I’m your nutritionist. I did not come by this profession by choice. I was dragged out of a barn, kicking and screaming into a hospital bed and found myself in a health crisis. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder at nineteen. It’s called ITP. It’s been in the news with all of these clotting issues that a lot of people are dealing with in their health and immune system. At a very early age, I got the privilege of being voluntold that I was going to study metabolism.

Metabolism was at the crux of why my body was attacking itself, why my immune system was attacking its own platelets, why I had chronic inflammation, premature graying, hair loss and weight gain. I was extremely wired and tired. I don’t know if any of you can relate to that feeling where you know you’re exhausted, tired and you need rest. At the same time, there’s this internal angst that’s going on in the body when the immune system is in a flare, when you’re having reactivity or when your adrenals are out of balance. As I got dragged out of the barn and into the hospital and I laid there, I was taking prednisone and anti-rejection drugs for the autoimmune disorder. I had systemic eczema. I had rashes all over my skin. I had a lot of scarring and scar tissue, which I’ve been able to resolve through food. That’s why I like to do our homemade face care programs together.

As I was going through that process, I had to try to study, understand, lean in, be gentle, be kind and be loving to my body in order to figure out how I was going to not just sustain organ function in life, but how I was going to thrive as opposed to survive. I was well on my way to go into vet school. I have a degree in Animal Sciences, Agriculture Sciences, Soil Sciences. I was not planning on doing this whole nutrition thing for people. Lucky me, through my own health crisis, I realized that there had to be a better way and a different way. I started to study the biomechanics and the biochemistry of metabolism. I learned a lot about the human body. I started to go, “This is a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about in Agriculture Sciences.”

One thing that is bizarre to me is that the human species is the only species that we think of diet as a bad word, “You’re on a diet. You have diet food. You have diet products. You’re drinking diet soda.” That’s awful. In every other species, the diet is something that all these people, scientists, nutritionists and biochemists come together to design a diet for your dog that will make their joints more nimble, make them not be in pain, increase longevity, enhance their digestion and regulate their weight. We have zoologists, biologists, biochemists, nutritionists that create diets for animals that are in captivity. I worked on a project with black rhinos at the Denver Zoo. I worked with the chimpanzee program with the zoo in Nebraska. I worked with the Division of Wildlife to create a diet for deer and elk populations that were in captivity while they were doing some research on wasting disease.

I had this disconnect where I said, “How can diet be such a powerful, impactful, loving, kind and have major expectations in every other species but the human species?" I set out to set the diet world on its head. As I was studying metabolism, I was saying, "If we can alter the structure and the physiology of the animals that we use for production in meat, the marbling, the quality, the grade of the meat, if we can change the feed to gain ratio, meaning how we feed them determines whether they gain weight, where they gain weight, how they gain weight, is it muscle, is it fat? If we can do that in the animal industry, why can’t we do that in the human industry? Why can’t I use diet to change my life and health and drag me out of the hospital bed back into the barn and into life?” That’s how I got started in this whole thing.

I created a bunch of clinics. It’s awesome, fun and lovely. I love my clinical practice. We were in a situation where I was flying all over the place. People were flying in. People were flying me out. Our clinics were at full capacity. One of my clients insisted that I write a book. Many of you know that I’m dyslexic. For me, books go like this. Since I was a little kid, we would have book fairs. I would stack my books as high as I could stack them at the bookstore and beg my mom to buy me every book that I could not read. I felt like it would make me seem well-read. It would make me feel smart. I had books in my bedroom that I didn’t have the capacity to read. By surrounding myself with those books, it made me feel smarter for some reason.

I was fortunate that my mom worked next to a library that had books on tape. What I would do is while she was at work, I would sit at the Harvard Public Library and I would listen. I was an ear-reader. I would consume book after book. I was always interested in Anatomy books, Physiology books and Veterinary Science books. I loved gardening and bio eco culture like what ladybugs do and how the worms enrich the soil. All those kinds of things were always so fascinated to me. When my client said I should write a book, I thought that was crazy. Even when I set for my graduate-level testing, I was in third grade, second month. I thought, “If you can’t read a book, how are you supposed to write a book?”

I decided to put this program together to create a Fast Metabolism Diet for a larger community. I audio recorded the entire book. I was blessed and fortunate to work with a publisher that was willing to think out of the box or out of the book. They love hard-cover books. They liked the paper to pen. When I proposed the book and I said, “The issue is I’m going to have to audio everything and have somebody transcribe it,” that was going to be a whole another venture. Fortunately, I had an amazing publisher that supported that. As you all know the history of it, we were an instant number-one New York Times bestselling book. We're in over 35 different languages. We've sold millions of copies. It was well accepted. It was so funny. Someone said to me, "I feel like you're talking to me." I said, "I actually was,” because everything was audio recorded.

I want to take a little bit of a giant scissor step backward and talk about a realization that I had about metabolism, and I remember it distinctively. I was very young. I was struggling significantly with my health. I was depressed. I was not well. A lot of the future did not look very positive. I felt like no matter what I did. I wasn’t getting the results from my body. Someone would say, for example, “Take a certain vitamin, a certain herb, a certain drug. Eat a certain way.” I would watch these other people have these miraculous, amazing results as if I was pouring water through a colander like what you would rinse your noodles in. I felt like I was pouring buckets of wellness water into this porous environment. Everything was draining through me and not manifesting the health that I wanted.

I went and I started studying BioChem, specifically the biochemistry of metabolism. I'm going to use the word metabolism a lot. I want to talk about what metabolism is. It's popular. When I first started talking about metabolism even on a lot of the talk shows, TV shows and stuff that I was doing, I was met with aggro aggression when I'm like, "Calories are a lie. Don't drink diet soda." People were mad at me. I said, "That's okay. We'll evolve together through the process of wellness." I'm happy to see this. We have an amazing individual that donates a lot of books to our community. They're in the medical health and wellness world. They feel very compelled that this book is changing lives. If you don't have the book, make sure you go to our website and type in the free book. We're giving some away. Please take advantage of that.

What Is Metabolism?

We talk about metabolism as being something, but it’s a process that happens in the body. It’s not an object. Specifically, the metabolic processes are thousands, millions, billions. We got some new research on how many billions of things happen in your cell every day. It’s a metabolic process that consists of chemical reactions that occur in the cells of all living organisms to sustain life. It’s the change or transformation of food into either heat and fuel or substance. I want to jot a couple of things down and make sure we don’t grasp anything else. We talk about what’s metabolism. Know that it’s a process. I tell you that because I want you to be very kind and gentle with your body.

Sometimes you might not lose weight right away because your body is busy healing other metabolic processes that have gotten out of balance because of chemicals, pollutions, chronic dieting, stress, medications, drugs, the wrong supplements. Your body is in the repair process. It can’t yet burn food, fat for fuel. Remember, it’s a process. It’s not an object. You can’t say, “I’ll boom tomorrow. I want the best metabolism in the world.” You can lean into your body and say, “What is the current status of my metabolism telling me about my environment? What do I need to do to change my environment by what I expose myself to here on your skin, diet, mouth, through your eyes?"

What Metabolism Does

The first and foremost job of metabolism is to sustain life. If you are struggling, have an autoimmune disorder, have high cholesterol, scale is going up, please give yourself a big warm hug and tell your body, “Thank you so much for sustaining my life.” A dysfunctional metabolism means that this is the very best way at this given moment that your body can sustain life, first and foremost. If you feel like you have a slow metabolism, if you feel like you have a sluggish metabolism, you do all have a metabolism or we wouldn't have life. If you're not thrilled with your metabolism, be kind, gentle, systematic in your approach to healing it. Above all else, be grateful that it's still sustaining life even if it feels like a dysfunctional life.

Remember that it is designed to create a change to transform food and stored fat into either fuel or substance. Fuel is going to be energy. Remember I talked about feeling tired and wired. My body was not efficient in having that. There are different adrenal hormones. There are epinephrine, norepinephrine, corticotropic hormones. There’s aldosterone, which makes you feel strong, smart, clear-headed. My body was leaning on some of the crisis fight and flight hormones in order to sustain life. I was efficient at the metabolic pathway of being reactive, depressive, anxiety-riddled. I was good at it. I’m proud of my body for sustaining life in that state of dysfunction long enough for me to hack or crack some of the codes of having more balance and heal my metabolism.

The Factors That Affect Metabolism

The other thing is that the process of metabolism is designed to create a substance. The substance is muscle, fat, bone or blood. Over here, I'm going to put muscle. We love muscle. Not just for its looks, not just for its beauty but we love it for all that it does for our body. We love fat. Remember, when we're burning fat efficiently and not storing it, it is what makes all of our sex hormones. We manufacture our sex hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, glucocorticoids, mineralocorticoids, everything that regulates your blood sugar, blood pressure, whether you have allergies or not, during allergy season, your vitamin D levels, sustained vitamin D levels for the immune system. All of that happens when you metabolize fat efficiently. It does blood and bone also.

Remember that your blood is the delivery system. It’s the UPs, FedEx, USPS, snail mail, email, DMs, IMs, anyway that you communicate. Your blood is the vessel that communicates all of your nutrients to the place where healing can occur. The next one is your bone. A lot of people talk about menopause, bone density, osteoporosis, osteopenia. It’s important how it structures and what holds us up. What a lot of people don't necessarily think about is that our bone is one of the most adaptogenic resources in our entire body, meaning our ability to adapt. We always think of the adrenals. It’s where we store minerals, which help create a nice calm, deep sleep, nice mood, no depression, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, always seeing the positive side of things. Our bone is important in metabolism. It helps with regulating the pH. It helps support the adrenal hormones, our stress hormones, whether we produce stress hormones, how we produce stress hormones. That structure is all important.

Metabolism is a process. It takes something, food, fat, stored nutrients. It can also take muscle, unfortunately. It can also take organ tissue, unfortunately, when we don’t feed ourselves. We do feed ourselves. We eat our structure when we don’t consume healthy things. Always remember that. Our metabolism is designed to sustain life. If we create healthy things that we put in, we have a better chance of creating a healthy life. If we don’t eat, our body will consume our structure in the form of muscle. Smooth muscle is the heart, the bicep in the form of bone, blood and lastly, unfortunately, in the form of fat. We want a healthy metabolism that goes and converts food for fuel, fat for fuel. We have a nice sustained energy.

I want you to take two seconds out of your life and thank your body for having a metabolism. As we go through how we maximize, heal, support or stimulate the metabolism, I want you to make sure that you have a clear, ideal or vision for what you want your metabolism to be like. When I was in clinical practice, as I’ve been in clinical practice for many years, a lot of people would come in and say, “I want to lose weight. I’ve got a life insurance policy and they won’t approve me because my cholesterol is high. My cholesterol medication is making me feel shaky or fatigued. I want to stabilize my diabetes. I want to get pregnant.” We had a nice list of goals. On the website, you can go and there’s a health wish list. I encourage you to immediately fill that out if you have not filled that out and to dream big.

We also have a self-assessment questionnaire, which gives us a good definition of where you’re at so that we know where you’re at and where you want to go to. In the self-assessment questionnaire, there are some things that you might not think about. Maybe your eyebrows are thinning, you have cracked heels, or you feel like your skin is creepy. All those assessments tell us things about your metabolism. All the things that we want to look at and monitor together so that we can work on healing the metabolism and making sure that it’s manifesting in all aspects of the structure, energy, muscle, fat, blood, bone, all of those things as we work and heal on the process. I decided to put together a four-week program where we could focus on healing the metabolism.

One thing in the principles of The Fast Metabolism Diet is we’ve talked a lot about confuse it to lose it. What we want to do is change the trajectory of your metabolic destiny. If you’re struggling, hug yourself because you’re sustaining life in that state of dysfunction. In order to get out of that state of dysfunction, we have to change things up. What’s the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results. As I shared with you, when I was going through this, I felt like I was doing a lot of good things to try to get my health under control. I was never the person to go through fast food places. Quite frankly, my body couldn’t tolerate it.

When I was in college, I was making my own food but I was still on a ton of prednisone. I had eczema and my platelets were low. I didn’t feel like I could get traction in being well. I felt like I was doing a decent job at being a fairly healthy, unhealthy person. I used to always say, “I learned about the Lemon Law in the car industry. Where can you turn your body in from the Lemon Law?" I couldn't get traction. I started to create a program where I said, "What if we support intensely in certain areas of the body or what I like to call The Five Major Players in the Metabolism, through nutrients, micronutrients, targeted micronutrients, foods, what we call success boosters, natural therapies? What if I took bite sizes at this ginormous thing that felt like out-of-control health?

The Five Major Players

I identified what I call The Five Major Players of the Metabolism. Let’s isolate those here. Let’s talk about the liver, adrenals, thyroid, and pituitary. In the book, this is on page 33. I’m going to call your substance. If you had a lot of muscle mass and good bone density, it’s going to be easier to usually trigger a change in your metabolism. If your body feels like it has enough metabolic energy to have thick hair, nice eyebrows, healthy skin, those are some of the first things that the body will track from producing when it's under crisis. We see that in our animal world. Oftentimes when a dog goes into heat, it'll blow its coat. They'll lose their energy capacity to maintain a nice coat. We see that in horses. Their hoof and coat will be poor when they get a fever or they're not healthy.

We see that a lot around us. If a tree is under distress, it will lose all of its leaves. Oftentimes, when we're under distress, in order to maintain life, we'll lose our bloom. We'll lose our shininess. Maybe that's through our thoughts. We lose our shiny thoughts. I had a ton and a tremendous amount of crown hair loss. It was not fun at all. When I decided to develop this program, I said, "What are the areas that we can focus on and we can target those? Maybe if we hit those five major players and flood them with nutrients, those can help pull up the other billion metabolic processes that happen in the body, we can level the playing field and elevate our health." I first identified that. I started researching foods, herbs, tonics, spices and food combinations that would nurture all of these.

The thyroid is the metabolism superhero. There are receptor sites on every cell of the body that the thyroid binds with that create an excitation or an exchange of energy. The thyroid is a powerful one that we talk a lot about in the book. We also can see with things like keto diets, fasting, excessive dieting or diet-based products, artificial sweeteners, how it can alter the bond angles in the thyroid hormone that give you a slower metabolism in the long run. We talk a lot about reverse T3 in the thyroid hormone. It's one that is a scientific proving like, "We see this in the actual microscope and our blood labs. We see that stress, artificial sweeteners, excessive fasting and metabolic extremes like extended ketosis. We see that it alters the shape of one of our superhero hormones. It slows the metabolism in the long run.”

The pituitary is the conductor of the whole thing. It tells the body how and when to be active. The substance, we’re talking about fat, but we’re also talking about Brown fat that is thermogenic. We’re talking about bone, blood, hair, skin, nails, all of that substance. If we can focus on these five superheroes or these five major players in the metabolism, we can elevate the health of the metabolism. It's how’s this program. It’s 28 days started, then I said, “If we’re going to do that, we’re going to need to figure out a way with nutrition to support those but go between rest and restoration.” Anytime something needs healing, let’s talk about a broken bone, for example. There is a period of rest so that the body can rebuild and remodel. There is a period of restoration where maybe you’re doing physical therapy or coming back into activity.

If you’re running a marathon and you break your leg, you stop running the marathon. You allow the bone to heal. You rehabilitate before you go back into running a marathon. When I started looking at supporting these areas, I thought, “If I blast liver support, adrenal support, pituitary support, thyroid support and substance support, that’s a lot for a body that’s already struggling.” I took this massive thing. I took bite sizes. I said, “Let’s go for four weeks. Let’s go week by week. Let’s cycle or rotate our rest and restoration.” In The Fast Metabolism Diet, each week you focus on three targeted areas. We call it Phase 1, Phase 2 and Phase 3.

It happened all within a week. Phase 1 is the first two days of the week. Phase 2 is the second two days. Phase three is the last three days of the week. For example, phase 1 would be Monday, Tuesday. Phase 2 would be Wednesday, Thursday and phase 3 would be Friday, Saturday, Sunday. In each of those phases, there is a very specific food list and style of eating. There are do’s and don’ts. The goal is to take a minute of your time, offer power on your plate and say, “Can I sneak in here and help out a little bit?” Maybe through cycling that, “How about if I help with this? How about if I come over and do your dishes? What about next week, maybe if I do laundry? What if next week I come and sweep your patio?” It’s sneaking into an exhausted, not well-balanced, not healthy or not optimal.

I’ve got Olympic athletes that want more out of their bodies, moms that need more to give to their families, dads that are in the same position, teachers or children that need more to give to their communities. If we can sneak in by putting power on the plate and we can rotate through that, this is why we don’t do one thing all week long. We don’t, even as a community do one program all year long. We’re constantly coming in, serving the body in different and unique ways to create an environment that the body does what it’s designed to do, which is come into homeostasis so that you can maintain your metabolism and you can maintain life.

We start with The Fast Metabolism Diet. I said, "Give me 28 days or four weeks." In each of those four weeks, we elevate what we're feeding our bodies. We get maybe savvier. We have challenges in our community. We have people that follow along with 5 or 6 challenges and never make any of the food. They grasp the ideas, concepts, change their paradigm around food, fall in love with food, and think about some of the basic rules that we have, which is eating 5 times a day, 3 meals and 2 snacks. Making sure you eat within 30 minutes of waking, things like drinking half your body weight in ounces of spring water every day because dilution is the solution for pollution. As we're starting to burn fat more efficiently, we're releasing fat-soluble toxins. We want to flush them out of our bodies. Some of those basic rules that we can start to grasp are important to nurture and heal the metabolism. They then jump in and they say, “I’m ready to give you the 28 days.”

Nutrition is a lifelong process. Not just because you need constant coaching, nurturing and feeding but because the metabolism sustains life. As long as you’re planning on sustaining life, you’re going to be working on your metabolism. As long as you are planning on eating, breathing, drinking, sleeping, you’re going to be working on your metabolism. It’s like we don’t brush our teeth once, we don’t go to the gym once and consider ourselves fit. We don’t make our bed once and consider our home tidy. It is a process. I want to talk about, what do you do? You’re sitting here going, “I am doing the fast metabolism diet. I went to do The Fast Metabolism Diet. I’m ready to incorporate The Fast Metabolism Diet. How do I get the support that I need?”

Let me talk you through a couple of tools. I'm a big advocate for having the actual book. A lot of people have it on audio. I'm an audio person. However, this is a workbook. This is not concepts. This is not theories. These are things that have practical application in your life. We've had hundreds and hundreds of recipes on our website. Some of our most favorite recipes like the chili, the coconut curry chicken, the lentil stew, the avocado turkey lettuce wrap are in the book also. Make sure you grab a book. If you don’t have a book, you can get them on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and our website. We have amazing donors in the health, medical and science world that believes so much in this program. They donate books every month to our community. If you need a book, you can apply for one for free.

The other is making sure that you have downloaded the app. We have an app, The Fast Metabolism Diet by Haylie Pomroy. It is free. If you do nothing but track your water, log your food, use the grocery list, export your meal maps, use it for reminders of things and little tips on how to nurture your metabolism, use that app on your phone. That technology is supportive. We also have a different style in our community. I went from barn to hospital, hospital back to the barn, back to school, into the clinic and then into the book world. When we started selling so many copies of the book, one thing that I was grieving was being able to help people that had what-ifs and yeah-buts in their life like all of us, “What if I’m nursing? What if I’m running a mud runner? What if I don’t have a gallbladder? What if I want to get pregnant? What if I’ve stopped my periods?”

We have created two different kinds of support. We have a membership community where you can get your questions answered. My team is on there 24/7. They meet with me once a week on questions that we maybe didn’t have answers to or they didn’t have answers to. Sometimes we’ll shoot a video. Sometimes we’ll create a blog post. Sometimes I get on there and answer a lot. We have another fun level of support, which are challenges. We do those every month. They start at different times. You can jump in at any point. We call those challenges and events. Sometimes we even do live events, which is great. We’ve done a cruise. Our community is getting ready. We’ll be cruising again together. It’s the plan. We do live Facebook events, podcasts and all kinds of events where you can get solutions and answers.

This is my challenge for each and every one of you. I’d like you to embrace your metabolic status. I’d like you to dream big and create a wish list for where you want to be in your health and wellness. I want you to join us in our next challenge and our membership community, get the support, get your questions answered. Above all else, truly believe that you can put power on your plate and you can completely change the trajectory of your life. I still have a barn full of critters but a clinic and a community full of individuals that have filled my life and my life's purpose. Jump in. Join us in the fast metabolism journey. You will fall in love with food. This is not a diet for first-time dieters. It's a diet for last-time dieters. I hope you enjoyed the class. Love to all.