if a slow/fast metabolism defines how much energy we burn through the day, how come its not possible to artificially boost it to extreme levels and thus lead to obese people sheeding all that extra weight with minimum effort?
In: Biology
People talk about “metabolism” as though food is being magically burned away to nothing. But that’s not what’s happening. “Metabolism” is just a scientific term for converting one kind of energy into another.
In this context, we’re talking about converting the chemical energy stored in food into other kinds of energy your body needs to function. Mechanical energy for your heart and muscles. Electrical energy for your brain. Heat energy as part of cellular respiration.
People with “fast metabolisms” have a higher baseline need for these forms of energy, for whatever reason. So to “speed up” someone else’s metabolism, you need to similarly increase their body’s demands for these other kinds of energy.
There’s surprisingly few ways of doing this. Obviously exercise will burn mechanical energy, but people don’t want to do that. Amphetamine-based diet pills will increase your heart rate, and your heart is just a muscle, so that works. But this will mess up your heart over time. Anxious and fidgety people burn more, but is that really an added feature?
We don’t really know how to increase your body’s base demands for electrical energy. Your brain uses about 20-30% of the calories you consume in a day, but it’s doing such incredibly complex stuff we don’t really know what, or how, adding “more” energy would even accomplish. It’d probably just give you a seizure and kill you.
We could increase your base body temperature, but that’s basically a fever, and we all know what a fever feels like. Not to mention that prolonged high fevers will eventually cook your organs. So that’s pretty much ruled out too.
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