Stress and Metabolic Fuel Selection

And everything's contextual. And things like stress and your brain's perception of stress will alter the way you handle your macronutrients. It'll alter the energy flux through different pathways. so if we consider we just look at three macros you know protein carb fat we won't worry about ketones we won't worry about ethanol we won't worry about any of this shit we're just talking about the three ones that everybody talks about and everybody tracks because nobody tracks the booze that's crazy um even though they should so when you look at you got your two main areas of energy is going to be fat and carbohydrate and now you can you can leverage protein too you can utilize, like you said, lots of protein, a high level of protein to leverage a small amount of thermic effect of food. You can change some of that protein into carbohydrate. You can use that to funnel some energy through the Krebs cycle. There's a lot of things you can do with protein that can manipulate some of these things. It can be sneaky little, what I call caloric funnels here and there. Now, if you look at fat and carbs, what's the difference? A lot of energy in fat, a lot less in carbs, but fat's slow. There's a lot more steps of getting fat where it needs to be. and also broken down to utilize, carbs are much faster. So here's the thing. Right now, low-carb diets are very popular, and they have been probably for the last 20 years, whether that's South Beach diet, Atkins, whether that's carb backloading, cyclical, whatever. The more stressed out someone gets, the more likely they're going to skew their metabolism to want to utilize carbohydrates. So if that's the case and they're stressed all the time and their brain is in a state of fear instead of a state of safety, then their body's going to want to utilize carbohydrates because they can make really fast energy from that. So when that happens, they become metabolically inflexible, meaning that they're not burning enough fat at rest. They're burning a higher percentage of carbohydrates. Now that can pose a problem when your goal is fat loss, because if I'm burning, if someone with good metabolic flexibility is burning 70% fat at rest and 30% carbs, and you skew that and that drops down to say 50% fat and 50% carbs, that's going to pose a real big problem for you because you're going to get, you're going to struggle to lose body fat as fast as you think you should. And you're going to get demotivated. That's going to lead to binging, which is going to make the weight go up. So there's a lot of things that go on. And so in a lot of cases, if people are stressed out like everyone is now it makes sense to think about possibly lowering your carbs a little bit since that tends to be the macro that rules all the other ones especially under under a state of stress