55. 5 Foods That Boost Your Metabolism

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 55 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, I’ve got a cool episode for you, I’m going to be bringing to you five different foods that help boost your metabolism. I think we can all agree that if you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat, right? This is why I talk so much about how to turn your body into a fat-burning machine. Right?

If you want to lose weight, you got to burn the fat. But becoming an efficient fat burner also has these other cool benefits besides weight loss. For example. Burning fat is a great source of fuel for running. It also gives you all this all-day energy. And it improves your mental focus and concentration boosts your brainpower as well.

So in this episode of the Running Lean podcast, I’m talking about foods that will definitely give your metabolism a boost to help you become that lean, fat-burning machine.

But first, I want to quickly invite you to come join us on Facebook, we’ve got this cool community called the Running Lean community over on Facebook. This is a group of runners who encourage each other, support each other, and I do some training in there. Right now we’re doing a fun challenge. It’s the January journal challenge.

And this is a challenge for you to spend a little bit of time each day doing a little writing. Now some of you might be thinking, that sounds super boring. I don’t want to do that. And that is fine. But I would encourage you to come and check out some of the prompts that I’ve been adding into the group each day.

So each day you get a different question, or a series of questions to kind of ask yourself, and then write about, and people have been getting some pretty profound insights into themselves and finding some motivation. And it’s been really cool. It’s been, it’s been surprising for some people, okay, so some people that were like, I didn’t think this is going to do much for me.

They’re like, wow, this is like really changing the way I feel about myself. It helps you to create awareness of what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling and, and how you focus on achieving goals and things like that. Cool.

So join us if you want to, it’s not too late, you can start journaling today, you know, we’re about halfway through the month of January. But go ahead, start anytime. So just find us on Facebook, just look for the Running Lean community. We’re all doing this together. So join us. It’s a fun group.

Alright, let’s talk about foods that boost your metabolism. And I got five foods I want to talk about today. But the first thing I want to do is go over a little bit about what metabolism actually means. What does it mean when we talk about metabolism. So if you look up the definition of metabolism, it’s basically the conversion of food to energy to run cellular processes. Alright, so when we’re talking about metabolism, in general, are we talking about is how our bodies use the food we eat for energy.

Another way of saying this is like how many calories we are burning at any given time. That’s what metabolism is. Now there’s more to it than that. I’m just trying to make it you know, simple for what we’re talking about here today. Okay.

So your metabolism is how you convert food, energy, and how many calories you’re burning. And there are a couple of different types of metabolism and I’m going to talk about a couple of them here. First is your basal metabolic rate. This is the metabolic rate like during sleep or deep rest. I don’t know what deep rest is actually. Is that like light sleeping napping? I’m not sure.

But anyway, so this is the minimum metabolic rate that is needed to keep your lungs breathing, to keep your heart pumping, to keep your brain actually functioning, and to keep your body temperature regulated. So this is your basal metabolic rate. So this is just the very, very minimum amount of energy you need basically or energy conversion that you need to just keep your body functioning at a basal level, okay.

Then we have something called resting metabolic rate. So your resting metabolic rate is the minimum metabolic rate required to keep you alive while you are at rest. And this is not the deep rest or sleeping, this is just like, when you’re just hanging around, you’re just sitting around talking, working that kind of stuff, okay?

On average, this is your resting metabolic rate accounts for something like 50 to 70%. 50 to 75% of the total calories that you use each day. Okay, so just resting and just hanging around just going through your day, you know, you’re burning 50 to 75% of the calories that you’re taking in or, or your total calorie expenditure for the day. I should say it that way. Okay.

So those are just a couple of different types of metabolism that we have like or a metabolic rate. Okay. So, you know, here’s the thing, if we’ve always been told, like, if we want to lose weight, then we have to burn more calories than we are taking in, right? This is the whole calories in versus calories out the whole myth, right. And I say it’s a myth because it really doesn’t work very well. Okay, I’ll get to that in a second.

So when we talk about boosting your metabolism, what we’re trying to say here is like, we want to increase the number of calories that you can burn each day, we don’t want to just be satisfied with your resting metabolic rate or your basal metabolic rate, like we want to increase your body’s natural ability to burn calories, okay.

So when you boost your metabolism, when you raise your metabolism, this means you’re a more efficient calorie burner, you, you actually are a more efficient fuel burner, okay. But the thing is, we want to pay attention to the type of fuel that we are burning, okay, we don’t want to just burn through, you know, sugar and the kind of carbohydrates that we’re eating and things like that.

We want our fuel, we want the fuel source that we’re burning, to be our own body fat, right? This is what we mean when we say we want to be efficient fat burners. So when I talk about boosting your metabolism, I’m really talking about boosting your fat metabolism, I want you to become a more efficient fat burner, not just a more efficient calorie burner. But when you’re when you eat the right kinds of food and you eliminate the wrong kinds of food, then you can become a more efficient fat burner. Okay?

So there are so many factors that go into what happens when we eat food, right? When calories come into our body there are so many things that happen, right? There are different gene expressions, there’s, you know, we all have our own set of genes and our own gene expressions and our own gut microbiome that affects what, you know, how we process fuel from the food that we eat.

It’s not as simple as just like a number of calories coming in and a number of calories that we’re burning, okay? It’s not some linear machine like that. We’re not like a steam engine, okay? You don’t just like put coal in one side, and we all generate the exact same amount of energy from that. And then we have this energy coming out the other side is not that simple. Okay.

We are like, the space shuttle, you know, we’re very complicated, super complex, highly sophisticated organisms that all use different fuels differently. We all have our own very unique metabolic fingerprint, and no two of us are the same. So when we, when people talk about this idea of like, Oh, it’s just about calories. They’re not talking about the types of calories or the type of person that’s burning the calories or anything else, right.

There are so many factors to take into consideration here, okay. And the type of fuel that we give our bodies, the type of fuels that We are burning is very important, it matters, it matters a lot. Yes, we can run our bodies on sugar as our primary fuel source, we can do that it’s fuel that we can use for our bodies.

But running our bodies on sugar causes all these detrimental health effects like insulin resistance and incessant weight gain and type two diabetes and obesity and heart disease and stroke, certain cancers, even Alzheimer’s, they’re calling Alzheimer’s now, type three diabetes because it is so linked to insulin resistance and, and diet, really, type two diabetes and now Alzheimer’s are really related to your diet.

So they’re finding all these correlations between all these detrimental chronic diseases and diet. And it’s kind of the equivalent of like, putting unleaded gasoline into the space shuttle’s fuel tank, you know, this is not going to work, it’s not going to work at all. The space shuttle needs very sophisticated, a very specific fuel for its purposes, right.

So just to kind of recap how this works, if sugar is available, your body will use that for fuel. First, your body can use sugar very easily. So when you’re eating a lot of sugar and a lot of refined carbohydrates, and your body is full of glucose, sugar, or a lot of that glucose is stored as glycogen in your muscles, then your body will burn that for fuel first, okay.

You can boost your metabolism all you want. But if you’re just filling your gas tank with sugar, and that’s the only fuel you’re burning, you’re never gonna be able to get to that stored body fat for fuel. Okay, so what we want to do is stop eating the sugar, stop eating all the carbohydrates give our body a chance to burn through the glucose that’s floating around in our system, get rid of the glycogen that’s stored in our muscles so that we can begin to release the body fat that we have and be able to use that for fuel.

Okay, so this is what it means when I talk about getting fat-adapted, adapting your body to be able to use fat for fuel, you also will use some glucose, you know, we’re not talking about eliminating sugar 100% from our diet or carbohydrates 100% from our diet, we’re talking about giving our body a chance to get our blood sugar’s normalized, bring insulin levels down, access our stored body fat as that super clean-burning source of fuel that has all these amazing benefits. Okay, so that’s a quick recap of, you know what it means to be an efficient fat burner.

Okay, so when I talk about increasing our metabolism, boosting our metabolism, really talking about increasing our body’s ability to use our own stored body fat for fuel, our fat metabolism, and being able to metabolize fat more efficiently. Okay, so what you eat really, really matters, right? The number of calories, not so much the types of food you eat, though, definitely, the types of food you eat plays a huge role in what your body does with those calories.

So and a lot of people will argue with me about this. And there’s been so many studies that have been done about the fact that calories in versus calories out that whole myth is just that a myth. It really doesn’t work. Calorie restricting diets. They do work in the short term, but they have this crazy side effect that people really don’t talk about, and that is that calorie restricting diets when done over a period of time will begin to actually slow down your metabolism.

This is known as metabolic adaptation. Your body will actually adapt to the number of calories coming in. Your body will slow down its metabolism, according to the number of calories that it’s receiving, in other words, if you typically eat a 2000 calorie diet 2000 calories a day diet, and you restrict that to 1500 calories. At first, you might lose some weight. But over time, your body is only going to burn 1500 calories a day, and you’ll stop losing weight.

And in fact, you’ll start gaining weight. And then you would have to lower your caloric intake even further in order to lose weight again. And then your body would eventually adapt to that. And honestly, this is why calorie restricting diets just don’t work. Okay?

This process that happens is also called starvation mode. This is your body’s natural response to a caloric deficit. You know, when your body doesn’t get enough food coming in, it doesn’t have enough energy and enough fuel coming in, it tries to compensate by reducing how much fuel It’s burning. Because your body is always trying to maintain neutral, it’s trying to get back to homeostasis, it wants things to get back to normal.

So if it’s if it sees all these limited calories coming in, over time it’s just gonna say, nope, not doing this. They also call this the biggest loser effect, because you know, on that show the Biggest Loser, they have all these contestants, and they dramatically limit the number of calories these people eat, right?

These are very obese people when they start, and then they dramatically limit the number of calories they consume. And of course, they make them exercise like crazy, whatever, and they all lose weight, they all lose a lot of weight, okay.

But what they don’t tell you is that 93% of the contestants on that show gain all the weight back 93%. That’s like, almost everybody. You ever wonder why they don’t do a biggest loser reunion show? That’s because it doesn’t work long term.

Now, a couple of people on there may have long-term effects, but I guarantee it is not because of caloric restriction. Because they’re all experiencing the same thing, this metabolic adaptation. So the whole idea of just restricting calories just really doesn’t work long term, okay.

And they did this meta-analysis of all the top diets in the world, right, and they covered like, some 26,000 people in all these different studies. And they found that calorie-restricting diets did have the most short-term success. So people lost the most weight in those types of diets, across all of these different studies, right.

But they also found that those same calorie restricting diets were the ones where the most people gained weight after six months. So it may work very short term, but it doesn’t work long term, right? Simply restricting calories does not boost your metabolism, it actually slows it down.

So what I want to focus on today is talking about how we can, you know, improve our body’s ability to burn fat more efficiently. And I’m going to specifically talk about five different foods that you can start eating that you can include into your diet, whatever that is for you, that will actually help you to become a more efficient fat-burning machine.

Alright, so the first food I want to talk about that’s going to help you to boost your metabolism is salmon. Salmon is a fatty fish. Fatty fish are not only delicious, but they’re incredibly good for you. So this includes fish like salmon, herring, sardines, mackerel, and any of the fish that are considered oily fish. And these all contain high amounts of omega-three fatty acids. Omega-three fatty acids are amazing because they have been shown to reduce inflammation and they also have shown to help decrease your risk of heart disease.

I just prefer salmon in particular, like I’ve done the sardine thing and all that, and honestly, I just like salmon, nothing else. It tastes delicious. So it’s a great way to add omega-three fatty acids into your diet. So omega three is also helped to boost your metabolism, so you can burn more body fat.

They did this study, a six-week controlled study, where they had all these people take fish oil supplements were, you know, these fish oils high in omega threes. And these people lost an average of 1.1 pounds of fat and experienced a drop in cortisol, which is a stress hormone that’s associated with fat storage. Okay, six-week study, people lost an average of a little over a pound just by taking a fish oil supplement.

Another study that was published in the journal plus one, that’s the Public Library of Science found subjects who took three grams of fish oil per day for 12 weeks, had their metabolic rates increase by 14%. This is crazy. This is like the equivalent of being able to burn around 200 more calories per day. This is just from you know, they didn’t really change anything else other than they added some omega threes in the form of fish oil, okay.

And then they did this meta-analysis. So that meta-analysis is where they study a bunch of studies. Okay, so they did a meta-analysis of 21 different studies and found that people who took fish oil, were able to also reduce their amount of belly fat, and improve their hip to waist ratio more effectively than the people who did not take the Omega three fish oil supplement. Okay?

These are amazing results, these are all really, really cool. And this is just from the fish oil itself. This is not eating actual fish, which is even better for you. Okay, so when you include fatty fish like salmon into your diet on a regular basis, this is an amazing source of Omega threes, but also super high-quality protein.

Digesting protein leads to a greater feeling of fullness. And it helps to increase your metabolic rate more when you’re digesting protein than when you digest fat or carbohydrates. Okay, so protein actually will help you to feel more full and helps you to burn more calories just by eating protein in general.

Omega threes also have this anti-obesity effect by helping to increase your levels of this hormone called adiponectin. So this is a hormone that helps you to regulate your appetite. So not only do you feel more full because you’re eating this great source of protein, you’re getting all these amazing, amazing omega threes.

You also will feel like you’re not hungry all the time, which is awesome. There’s another great way to you know help you to lose weight. You know if you’re not hungry all the time, okay. The type of fish you get is important to make sure you’re getting wild-caught salmon. And I just suggest any kind of wild-caught fish, in general, don’t do the farm raise stuff, farm raised salmon. I know this for a fact that they feed them grain.

This is not what fish are supposed to eat. Okay. Wild Salmon eat. Their diet is mostly shrimp and krill. And this is where they get their orange coloring from, okay. Farmed fish, though, are fed grains they’re fed like corn and soy and vegetable oils and then they have to add this pigment to their food to make them turn orange. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be orange. They would be like a grayish color, which sounds super gross. So my suggestion is always to go for the wild-caught salmon.

Yes, it costs a buck or two more per pound or whatever, but it’s totally worth it. So, shoot for something like three to four servings of wild-caught salmon each week to help you boost your metabolism you’ll feel more satiated. And that protein helps to build lean muscle mass. And you’re just going to be eating like one of the best things you can eat seriously.

Alright, the second food I want to talk about to help boost your metabolism is eggs. Eggs are like one of the world’s healthiest foods. They are super packed with nutrition. They are little nutritional powerhouses. They’re full of protein, healthy fats, and lots of vitamins and minerals like vitamin D. And I love that eggs have this really perfect ratio of macros.

So eggs are 64% fat. And that’s mostly in the yolk, which is also by the way full of an array of powerful antioxidants, which is super cool. So 64% fat 34% protein. And for me, I shoot for somewhere around 65% like, just in my diet in general, I tried to shoot for something like 65-70% fat, and around 30% protein. So eating an egg is like the perfect little package of macro percentages, I think it’s so cool.

Here’s the thing, eggs have been sort of vilified in the past. Like, I know back in the 80s. People used to say don’t eat eggs, especially the yolks know everybody was going to the egg white thing, you know, egg white omelets were the big thing, right. And because of the cholesterol, they were everybody was worried about cholesterol. But since then science has totally debunked all of this we have to have cholesterol.

Cholesterol makes up every cell of our body. Whole eggs have actually been shown in many, many studies to help protect your heart health in those, especially in those who are at increased risk of heart disease. Eggs are also an awesome metabolism booster. Studies have shown that you know, when you eat eggs for breakfast, it reduces your hunger, it promotes feelings of fullness for several hours after eating them.

They did this controlled eight-week study. So this is a randomized controlled trial, which is really the best type of trial that you can do. There are two main types of nutritional trials that they do. One of them is called an association study. And that’s where you associate eating some foods with some kind of health benefit, like, oh, people that ate broccoli lived longer.

That’s an association study. But it’s not a randomized control trial is where they control everything. And they only, you know, they only alternate this one variable. These are very hard to do, by the way, especially for the long term. Because you have to have everybody in a controlled environment.

You have to you know, make sure you are paying attention to everything they’re doing. They all have to be doing the same things. They have to be eating the same things, exercising the same things, and very hard to do. But these are like the ones that are considered sort of the gold standard of trials. So they did a controlled, randomized controlled trial. And this was published in the International Journal of Obesity. And they took 21 men and had them eat three eggs for breakfast.

And that’s all they did. They had one group of people ate three eggs for breakfast, another group of people ate a bagel for breakfast, the same number of calories in those two breakfasts. But over eight weeks, they looked at the people who ate three eggs for breakfast. And these people had a 16% greater reduction in body fat 16% greater reduction in body fat than the people who were eating a bagel for breakfast.

That’s one simple change to lose more weight just by eating eggs. One of the reasons eggs are more filling is because they contain a lot of protein. And I mentioned this when I was talking about salmon is that digesting protein will help you to burn more calories. Okay, so one of the reasons why eggs help you to burn more calories is because of the protein content.

Now, this is due to something called the thermic effect of food. This is the process of when you digest foods, just the fact of digesting a food actually burned some calories so it takes some calories to digest that food. Okay. Protein-rich foods have the highest thermic effect.

In other words, when you eat protein that increases your metabolic rate by somewhere between 50 to 30%. So that would mean that when you eat 100 calories of protein, around 30 of those calories are getting burned just to digest the protein, you’re right without doing anything else.

When it comes to other foods, like carbohydrates, for example, the thermic effect is only five to 10% of those calories get used for digestion. And when you’re eating fats, 0 to 3% of those calories gets used for digestion. So our bodies are actually really, really efficient at digesting fats, which is, you know, very telling that fats are good for us, our bodies are really conditioned to absorb and digest those fats without using a lot of energy.

Whereas protein takes the most amount of energy. So a lot of people that eat higher protein, actually, you know, you’re burning more calories and you’re feeling more full too at the same time. It’s really good. So, like I was saying, eggs are high-quality protein. High-quality protein means that eggs contain all the essential amino acids, right and in the right ratios, this means your body can easily use the protein and eggs to build muscle to maintain the muscle that you have, and it helps to give your metabolism a boost.

So based on a bunch of different studies, they’ve done eggs can actually increase your metabolic rate by something like 20 to 35% for many hours after eating them. Okay, so I suggest if you do eggs, eat three eggs several times a week this is going to help you to burn fat it’s going to help you to feel more full and more satisfied. Plus eggs are delicious.

And there’s like limitless ways to eat eggs right? And you can scramble them you can flip them you can sunnyside up um you can do an omelet you can do a fritatta. You can do hard boiled, like there’s just so many different things you can do with eggs. Make sure you go for the good eggs, get organic eggs, get pastured, or free-range eggs. Yes, again, it’s cost a little bit more, but it’s worth it. It’s better for you. It’s better for the chickens, it’s better for the planet, okay, so eggs are a high protein food that helped to reduce hunger and helps you to feel more full. They’re delicious, and they help to boost fat burning.

Alright, the next food I want to talk about to help boost your metabolism is yogurt. Specifically, full-fat Greek yogurt. This is an extremely nutritious food. First of all, it’s an excellent source of protein. It has potassium and calcium.

Research suggests that high protein dairy products specifically can boost fat loss, protect muscles during weight loss and help you feel more full and more satisfied. Another cool thing about Greek yogurt is that it contains probiotics. So this will help to keep your gut healthy. A healthy gut means you’re a more efficient fat burner as well. And full-fat Greek yogurt contains something called linoleic acid, which seems to promote weight loss and fat burning.

According to this meta-analysis of like 18 different studies, right? They showed that the linoleic acid will help you to burn fat more efficiently, which is super cool. Greek yogurt is also an excellent source of iodine. So iodine is one of those things our bodies do not make. We have to make sure we get iodine through the foods that we eat.

Iodine is very important that it helps to promote proper thyroid function. And thyroid is responsible for a healthy metabolism. Okay, so people a lot of people today are iodine deficient. And this can cause you to know, all kinds of serious problems including, you know, fluctuations in weight. So, for people with weight problems, increasing iodine can actually help to increase your thyroid activity, which will, in turn, increase your metabolism.

So iodine is important Greek yogurt is a great source of iodine. Eating Greek yogurt will help you to feel full and satisfied for longer like some of these other proteins we were talking about with should you know when you’re feeling full and satiated like your body gets a chance to like regulate blood sugars. This will help to keep you from feeling hungry between meals and going for snacks between meals.

They did this study, it was a year-long study back in 2014. And they found that people who ate more than three servings of yogurt per week actually gained less weight than those who ate less than one serving of yogurt per week. That’s crazy. Greek yogurt is also a great post-run recovery food. So if you’d like to eat a little something after a run, Greek yogurt is a great option for that.

It can be very satisfying after a tough workout, so you’re gonna get the protein that it has, you’re gonna, it’ll help to repair muscle damage done by exercise, and it’ll help to tide you over until your next meal. I personally like to add a few berries and some nuts to my yogurt just make it a little more interesting. It’s a little boring to eat on its own, but I kind of liked the taste of it.

Some people don’t really like the taste of it. But be sure to get the plain, full fat, Greek yogurt, none of this low-fat stuff or nonfat stuff, make sure that yogurt does not have sugar in it either. Okay, we don’t want these, you know, sugar-laden yogurts, you know, they have all kinds of stuff in them. They have thickening agents and preservatives and all kinds of other nonsense. So I get the Chobani whole milk, Greek yogurt, it has one ingredient, it says cultured milk, that’s the only ingredient in there. Okay.

So add some full-fat Greek yogurt into your diet. And this will help to increase fat burning and helps to reduce your appetite protects muscles during weight loss and helps to improve muscle recovery after a workout. And it’s good for your gut to have those awesome probiotics.

Alright, the other food I want to talk about. This is number four if you’re keeping track here, and this one might surprise you a little bit. But that is chocolate, specifically cacao or cocoa. So these are amazing. This is an amazing superfood right here. Okay. And when we talk about chocolate, what I want to talk about here is cacao or raw cocoa, okay? So cacao is the bean like seeds from which they make cocoa, cocoa butter, and chocolate. Okay, so they did these studies, here’s why I like this for fat burning.

They did these studies in mice is not a human study, but they did it in mice, that cocoa and cocoa extracts may promote the expression of genes that stimulate the use of fat for energy. So, especially in mice that were fed high fat or high-calorie diets. So they fed chocolate, basically to mice, and they were able to use more of their fat for energy. This is kind of cool. I mean, I’m willing to give it a shot, you know, just to see if it works.

One study that they did actually suggested that cocoa may actually prevent the action of enzymes necessary to break down fat and carbs during digestion, which means that cocoa could theoretically play a role in preventing weight gain by reducing the absorption of some of the calories that you’re eating.

So it’s shown that cocoa can actually prevent the breakdown of some of the calories that you’re eating, meaning that your body won’t absorb everything that you’re eating, right. That’s interesting. Here’s the one that I thought was really cool, though. They did this very cool study.

And this was published in the International Archives of Medicine and they took two groups of people, and they had them on a low carbohydrate diet. So half the people are on the low-carb diet. They also gave them one and a half ounces of dark chocolate each day. It was at 1% dark chocolate. The other half was doing the low-carb thing, but they gave them no chocolate. How do you sign up to be on the chocolate group? That’s cool. I want to be in the dark chocolate group.

So half the people, they’re both eating the same low carb diet, but half of them were given 1.5 ounces of a 1% dark chocolate every day. So after many weeks, the half who were eating the dark chocolate had lost 10% more weight. They also said that losing weight was easier and less challenging because they’re eating chocolate every day.

One of the reasons that they believe this happened is because there’s this incredible array of micronutrients found in dark chocolate. So there are things like magnesium, iron, and copper. And copper especially has been shown to play a key role in your body’s ability to metabolize fat.

So if you want to add some chocolate, to your fat burning list of foods, go for the dark stuff, embrace the dark side, the darker it is, this, this means it has less of the stuff you don’t want, so it doesn’t have as much sugar doesn’t have milk and things like that. So the darker chocolate has more metabolism-boosting properties in it. Okay, the darker the better.

I do a little bit of 88% Dark Chocolate most days, right? This is like something I eat with my dinner. It’s kind of like a little after-dinner treat. I’ve tried 100% dark chocolate and I gotta tell you, it’s so bitter. It was tough. It was not tasty at all. So I liked that 88-90% That seems to be pretty good. Like Darth Vader says to Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back, if only you knew the power of the dark side. Indeed, Darth Vader indeed.

Alright, the last food I want to talk about here to round out our list of foods that boost your metabolism is MCT oil. So MCT oil – MCT stands for medium-chain triglycerides. So there are different types of saturated fats that we can utilize as humans. There are some are called short-chain triglycerides, some are medium-chain triglycerides, and some are long-chain triglycerides. And the different links just have to do with how many carbon atoms are attached to the molecules that make up the triglyceride. This is like deep science stuff right here. Don’t need to worry about that though.

We can use all of these types of fat for energy which is good, right, but some are better than others. For whatever reason, due to their shorter length, MCT’s medium-chain triglycerides are rapidly absorbed by the body, they go straight to the liver, and they can be used immediately for energy. Or sometimes they can be converted into ketones, which is another source of energy that our body can use. Okay.

Medium-chain triglycerides have been shown to increase your metabolic rate in many different studies. One study that I’m going to talk about here was published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And they found that just by adding one to two tablespoons of MCT oil per day to the participants use usual diets increases their metabolic rate by 5% per day, meaning that they’re burning an average of like 120 extra calories per day, just by adding a little bit of MCT oil to their diet, they didn’t change anything else.

So this oil just immediately just starts to boost gives your metabolism a little bit of a boost, it’s really cool. In that same study, the MCT oil was shown to increase the release of two hormones that promote the feeling of fullness in the body. So these two hormones are called leptin, and peptide YY. Just know that you know MCT oils will help you to feel more full and give your metabolism a boost.

So this is something that I do every day actually. I actually add one to two tablespoons of MCT oil to my coffee every morning. And I also put a little bit of grass-fed butter in my coffee and I blend it up. A lot of people call this bulletproof coffee. This gives me a boost of energy and I gotta tell you lasts all day long. MCT has also had this other side benefit where they are an amazing food for your brain.

MCT helps you to improve your focus and your concentration They are one of the few nutrients that can actually cross the blood-brain barrier that can actually get right into your brain to help stimulate brain function. Your brain loves MCT. Yes, so just replace some of the fat in your diet with a couple of tablespoons of MCT oil every day, and you will increase fat burning. See, it’s super easy.

Now the way they make MCT oil is they extract the oil from either coconut oil or palm oil. And I would say do not use the palm oil extracted MCT oil focus on the coconut extracted MCT oil because the palm oil industry, this is not good. They’re like destroying the rainforest. This is not good for the planet.

So make sure you’re just getting the 100% coconut oil-based MCT oil a little caution here, some people experience a little bit of stomach discomfort when they first start taking some MCT oil. So start with a little bit like a teaspoon or something like that and see how you feel. Some people don’t have any of those issues at all.

But you can add MCT oil to salads, you know you can cook with it. It’s odorless and tasteless. So you can use it wherever you use any other kind of oil. MCT’s are rapidly absorbed, they’re used immediately as energy, they help increase fat burning, they help decrease hunger and help improve your brain function.

So this is like one of my favorite things, I definitely do a couple of tablespoons every day of MCT’s. Okay, so those are the five foods that will help boost your metabolism. First, we got salmon, then we got eggs, we got yogurt, go for that full-fat Greek yogurt. We got cacao cocoa chocolate, go for the dark side. And then we got MCT oil. The bottom line is that adding these metabolism-boosting foods to your diet will help you to burn more fat.

It will also support you in other ways, all these different ways I talked about, you know, they help support muscle growth, recovery, help you to stay focused, help you to feel more for they support you in so many ways and becoming the healthiest person that you can be. And listen, this is optimal health.

It’s not some destination you’re trying to get to over there. This is what we do. Being healthy is who we are. It’s how we live our life. You know, just like running is part of who you are. I want eating real food to become a part of who you are for good. You know, it’s not about just like losing 30 pounds, so you can go back to doing all the stuff that you used to do. It’s not a short-term thing.

This is what we do. This is about changing your life for good. This is about becoming the most badass healthiest version of yourself yet. Okay, you totally got this, my friends, lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

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