How to Reset Your Metabolism After 40

Is there a way to reset your metabolism after you’ve turned 40? I’d love to take you through some of the ways that this is possible, but what I want you to know is that it can be done — and it might even be easier than you think. Let’s talk about it.

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Table of Contents

The Role of Metabolism
What is a Flexible Metabolism?
How Does Our Metabolism Work?
Resetting Your Metabolism After 40
The Critical Role of Protein
Another Big Tip: Resistant Starch
Natural Remedies for Thyroid Support: Top Tips
Set and Reset Your Metabolism Today

The Role of Metabolism

Metabolism is all about converting the food you eat into energy. When your metabolism is in a good place, it makes you can positively answer the following questions, like:

• Can you keep your energy levels steady throughout the day?
• Can you function with a good amount of food, or do you have out-of-control cravings?
• Can you burn fat when you store it?

All of these things tie into a healthy metabolism. And, as we age, our metabolism gets less flexible. So we need to find ways to make it more flexible.

What is a Flexible Metabolism?

The fact is that we are never consuming and burning an exactly balanced amount of fuel. When we have a flexible metabolism, though, we are going to be hungry for a reasonable amount of food, we’ll store it away, and we’ll have good, steady energy before eating again.

As we store food, we’re not going to make a reasonable amount of food into an excessive amount of fat. And when we’ve got food to take out of storage, stored fat to break down, we can do that. This is metabolic flexibility.

In general, metabolic flexibility means that even if we’re not consuming the exact amount of fuel that we need at every given moment, our body is better able to sort that out over time, meaning our energy and weight stay even and steady over long periods of time.

When our metabolism is not flexible, we find ourselves on this knife’s edge where we could have too much fuel that we stop burning it and store it. We’re not burning it, so we’re gaining weight, and we’re feeling the effects of that.

Or, if we lower our food intake by a small amount, we may be losing weight, but we are exhausted and suffering from horrible cravings. This is what it means to have an inflexible metabolism, because the imbalance always comes with negative effects.

How Does Our Metabolism Work?

So what’s going on behind the scenes here? Most of this stuff is happening within the liver, where the liver is storing energy in the form of glycogen (stored glucose) or triglyceride (stored fat, glucose, ketones, etc.). The liver needs the right amounts and balance of both.

If those things are not right, we lose our metabolic flexibility. So, what are some of the things that we can do to regain that flexibility? I’ll break down each, but here’s a very quick summary to help you get started:

• Phytonutrients – These help your liver conjugate.
• Lower food intake – So that you can break down what’s stored.
• Sleep debt – We want to reduce this or eliminate it.
• Some activity – But not always a huge amount!

Resetting Your Metabolism After 40

But let’s take it step by step and break it down further to make this actionable for you…

Step One: A High-Conjugation Diet

The process of conjugation is binding up with wastes and toxins, which is done by certain essential nutrients that we get, especially key amino acids. But there are also phytonutrients from plants and certain dietary fibers that are important for this entire process.

The thing is that when you’re trying to “clear out” your liver and heal it, in the process of resetting your metabolism, if you simply stop eating food, you may force your body to break down some fat, but the drawback is that you leave your liver unprepared.

You’re not able to give your liver the things it needs for healthy conjugation. Instead, we need to think about how we can eat foods that support conjugation, like:

• Protein-dense foods
• High-micronutrient foods

This includes things like poultry, lentils, pumpkin seeds, broccoli, leafy greens, and beans.

Step Two: Go Low-Fuel

These are ideas that I broke down further in the Metabolism Reset Diet, and the low fuel concept is an important one. If you simply plummet your food intake by a lot, there will be ways that your body compensates (often in not beneficial ways).

So you want to approach things strategically. The timeframe for “going low fuel” is somewhere between four weeks, about 28 days, which gives your liver a chance to break down these stored triglycerides.

That’s because the main problem that occurs when someone has an inflexible metabolism is that they have too much triglyceride relative to their glycogen. While we still need to consume glucose for glycogen, we also have to break down these stores of triglycerides.

The best way to do that is to get high-quality protein, with lower amounts of carbohydrate and fat, for a short period of time. It’s kind of tricky, though, because most foods that have protein also have carbs and fats! They come in a package.

But during the reset, I often recommend doing two protein shakes (one at breakfast and one at lunch), and then one pretty big meal (with appropriate foods that are good at conjugating). And, if you want, you can snack on veggies throughout the day.

Most people, most of the time, can tolerate some amount of saturated fat without much harm. During the reset, you’re going to want to minimize the amounts of saturated fat that you’re likely to get, because they can work against proper liver function.

Step Three: Paying Off Sleep Debt

It’s important to note: This isn’t just about getting enough sleep on a nightly basis; it’s about paying off your sleep debt and getting back to a level playing field.

There’s pretty good evidence that, if you’ve been chronically sleep deprived, you have accumulated debt through your sleep. And that it may take a fair amount of extra sleep to get us back to a breakeven point in our sleep.

This can take an extra hour or three hours, per night, for several weeks to chronic up on one’s chronic sleep debt. Towards the goal of helping your metabolism, it may be worth “binging” on extra sleep and allowing your body to pay back that debt.

And doing so can help support better gene expression, which can help turn off the genes that promote weight gain.

Step Four: Activity

The right kinds and the right amounts of exercise can be an absolute game-changer if you’re looking to reset your metabolism after 40. If you’ve already fixed your metabolism, and you’re trying to maintain it, the more exercise the better.

Train hard, have fun, and build up sensibly. But while you’re at a low-fuel state, and you’re losing weight, it can put your body under a lot of stress to do too much at once. That is why I encourage micro workouts.

You don’t want to be sedentary and do nothing, because that’s counterproductive to what we’re trying to accomplish. It helps a lot to do small amounts of brief, dynamic movements. Short, frequent workouts can be your best friend in this process!

These are things that can take just a couple of minutes per day, and done alongside avoiding being immobile, can go a long way in preventing hunger spikes and encouraging fat loss.

The Critical Role of Protein

One thing I want you to remember is the critical importance of protein. I mentioned how we need protein for supporting liver detox, but it’s also critical for keeping hunger in check, and making sure that muscle mass stays intact (and we’re not losing it).

If weight loss involves muscle loss, our basal metabolic rate goes down, and when we’re lowering our overall fuel intake, it is easy for our total protein to go down, too.

That’s why I like to think about lean, high-quality proteins like:

• Fish
• Tempeh
• Pea protein powders

Pea protein is especially worth calling out here. During a period of less food, it can help support overall muscle mass with less of an effect when it comes to your total acid load.

During weight loss, there is more acid to deal with in your body. Plant proteins are nice because they are more pH-neutral, meaning they can help with processing uric acid.

Another Big Tip: Resistant Starch

Resistant starch is another great thing to include. Keep in mind that we’re trying to get some glucose and achieve a steady blood sugar while lowering our overall food intake.

The trick with that is to have versions of glucose that metabolize really slowly. Resistant starch has been shown to:

• Stabilize blood sugar
• Lower insulin
• Decrease visceral fat
• Improve gut health

And the best sources of resistant starch include:

• Beans and legumes (especially white ones)
• Bananas (when they’re not totally ripe)
• Potatoes (if they are cooked at lower temperatures)

Other Foods That Can Help Your Metabolism

There are some other foods that are high in phytonutrients and can help your liver, which include:

Cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage)
Apiaceae vegetables (carrots, parsley, celery)

Natural Remedies for Thyroid Support: Top Tips

I want to close out today’s article by going through some of my most-recommended tips when it comes to natural remedies for your overall thyroid health.

The biggest single thing is regulating your iodine intake. It is easy to get enough, but it’s also easy to get too much (and potentially way too much).

Set and Reset Your Metabolism Today

After you’ve gone through a reset of your metabolism, it is very important to maintain some of these healthy habits. It’s good to maintain a good amount of protein intake, prioritize sleep, and be more liberal with your exercise and overall physical activity.

Doing so can ensure that these benefits persist and that you’re always putting your metabolism in a place where it can be flexible and keep up with the needs of your body.

The general idea is that exercise is the best way to maintain weight loss, but it has to be done in strategic ways during periods of weight loss and low-fuel intake.

That is why I would love for you to consider the Metabolism Reset Diet as an amazing starting point for putting your body in a position to thrive.

You can do it once and make a big difference, but I would recommend that most do it once yearly to maintain the bulk of these benefits.

If you feel like now is a good time to cleanse, detox, and step away from habits that aren’t serving you, I hope you’ll consider resetting your metabolism with my help.