What is metabolic health?
‘Metabolism’ means chemical processes that the body goes through each day to meet its energy requirements.
The term ‘Metabolic health’ means the absence of metabolic disease.
The term ‘Metabolic flexibility’ means how efficient your body is at utilising fuel. Remember fuel is carbohydrates, fats and protein.
‘Metabolic inflexibility’ is caused by modern day living which means having a sedentary lifestyle and eating sugary and fatty foods.
The term ‘Metabolic inflexibility’ means your body is not good at utilising its fuel.
To get back to ‘Metabolic flexibility’ you need to exercise and have good nutrition.
This is often why overweight and obese people become ‘metabolic inflexible’. This can include female’s suffering from PCOS too. These people struggle to utilise food as fuel, especially fat.
What is a biomarker?
It is an objective medical sign used to measure the presence or progress of a disease. It is also used to predict health status.
As a ‘Female health and performance coach’, I will use them to monitor your health status. This is for men too!!
‘Bio’ means biological.
The 5 biological markers that a GP will look at include:
If your results are high in 1 of these tests, then consider it as a warning sign.
If you are high in 3 out of 5 then you have ‘Metabolic dysfunction’.
Recommendations:
Both planned and unplanned exercise – get out and walk every day. Invest in a ‘sit to stand’ desk.
Purchase a blood glucose testing kit for regular glucose monitoring. Test yourself upon waking, then after lunch and dinner for the next 10 days to get some baseline figures.
Purchase a blood pressure testing kit and again take your blood pressure the same time every day for 10 days.
Get a better night’s sleep (7-9 hours per night) to reset your metabolic state. This is the most important one for overall health.
Work closely with your GP.
Work closely with your personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist who will work with your test results.
Exercise action plan:
Do more weight training to keep your body ‘insulin sensitive’ and hormonally balanced.
Keep moving. Incidental exercise will keep your body ‘insulin sensitive’.
Do ‘Low volume HIIT’ training:
“It is becoming increasingly accepted that low-volume HIIT involves interventions in which the total time spent in active intervals (i.e. not including rest periods) is less than 15 min, whereas high-volume HIIT requires total time spent in active intervals to be greater than 15 min (Taylor et al. 2019).”
Resources:
More on fasting glucose:
More on Triglycerides:
More on HDL/LDL:
More on Blood Pressure