The BioVitality Blueprint Chapter 5: Metabolism and Power

Unlocking Your Energy and Longevity Through Metabolism and Healthy Habits

In this episode of the Christi MD Podcast, Dr. Christi discusses Chapter 5 of the BioVitality Blueprint, uncovering key principles to boost metabolism, enhance energy, and achieve long-lasting health. This episode explores how balancing diet, exercise, stress management, and cutting-edge medical strategies can help you unlock a vibrant, fulfilling life. Discover how small changes in your lifestyle can have a huge impact on your overall health and longevity.

What You’ll Learn

• How metabolism drives your energy and overall health
• The importance of muscle building and stress management for longevity
• The benefits of a plant-based diet, intermittent fasting, and medical hacks for optimizing metabolism

Ready to take control of your health? Tune in to this episode of LifeSculpt by Christi MD and start implementing the BioVitality Blueprint today! Don’t forget to subscribe for more expert insights on optimizing your health and longevity.

https://lifesculptmd.com/the-biovitality-blueprint-chapter-5-metabolism-and-power/

Episode Transcript

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It has been shown that when we are more stressed, especially when we're in a state of chronic stress, our metabolism takes a hit, and you can see it in weight gain, you can see it in your face, in your face getting swollen, your skin not looking healthy because the stress is interfering with your body's ability to process food properly. The hormones get out of balance and you really start to notice negative effects on your health.

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Welcome to LifeSculpt by Christi MD, the podcast where we delve into the art of living your best life. I'm your host, Dr. Christi, a board certified surgeon, wellness and longevity enthusiast, and your guide to transforming health and happiness. Here we explore cutting edge health trends, chat with inspiring guests, and share practical tips to sculpt the life you've always dreamed of. So grab your headphones, get comfortable, and let's dive into today's episode.
I'm going through a series right now where we're looking at chapter by chapter, my book, The BioVitality Blueprint. And this book is a blueprint for how you can think about planning out your future decades, making this decade right now your best ever and setting yourself up for great decades moving forward. So we've gone through how to think through your blueprint, what you want, what God wants for you.
thinking through your foundation, the ultimate foundation. I call it, I like to use the analogy with the blueprint metaphor of building a building, building a beautiful skyscraper that's gonna enhance the skyline of a beautiful city. I live in a high rise and I look out at high rises and beautiful skyline every day. And I think about the architect that built that building, they had a blueprint.
They researched the foundation, then they laid their foundation. And then the next step is you have to have good building blocks. And in our last episode, we talked about hormones. I encourage you to go back and review that because that's such an important chapter, such an important part of how we can age optimally. And now we're gonna talk about the power. So the building, the skyscraper, it needs to have power, it needs to have energy, and we need to have power, we need energy.
and we need a metabolism reset sometimes. So let's dive into that. Let's dive into looking at how we can develop our bodily strength and our natural beauty to its highest potential, how we can optimize our metabolism, what it is, what kind of food we should be eating, how exercise improves our metabolism, how decreasing stress is so important, and then some...
more advanced health hacks and supplemental ingredients, let's say, that we can add into our regimen that are going to really give us power and make our metabolism really rocking and rolling along. So we need to dial in our metabolism and optimize it. when our metabolism is, first of all, let's back up. What is metabolism? What do I mean by that?
So what I mean by that is how our body, the engine of our body, which goes to the deepest level, to the cellular level of every cell in our body. There's certain organs that are more involved in metabolism than others, such as the intestines, the liver, all the gut organs in our belly, but also our lungs and our heart.
are very important for our metabolism and most of all our muscles because our muscles are really powering things. So when we have a good metabolism, when we're eating food that is really feeding our body, that is giving us energy that we can then process and we're processing it well, the food is going in, our body is breaking it down, using it optimally, we have more energy.
and we have more power. We feel better and we're able to accomplish more. Not only that, but research is now showing and clarifying that a lot of the negative effects of a bad metabolism are not just that we are overweight and we don't feel good because we're too heavy, but that is the root cause of many, many diseases.
Of course, I think most people understand that type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disease, that it's most often going to occur when we're carrying too much weight, not always, but most often that's when it will occur, when things go awry with our ability to process glucose, our insulin levels are depleted, we don't have enough functional insulin.
and we get diabetes. Other metabolic based disorders are cardiovascular disease, where we get clogging of the arteries, which leads to stroke and heart attack. Dementia is now considered a metabolic disease. If the body is not processing the food and the energy properly, the brain isn't going to work right. We're not gonna get the blood flow to the brain and we're not gonna have good cellular healthy turnover in the brain.
cancer is oftentimes now considered a metabolic disease because we can see that people that are overweight, that are not as healthy, have other metabolic diseases, they're more prone to cancer. So by getting our metabolism dialed in, keeping it strong, keeping our body as a, know, optimally running engine.
then we're going to not only feel better, have more power, but we're going to avoid a lot of these diseases. So let's think about what we put in our body. We want to have nice, clean fuel. We want to have very high-powered fuel, and we don't want to give our body junk all the time. I'll be the first to admit that I love Taco Bell.
That is one of my favorite fast food restaurants. I do get the plant-based options and they're actually not totally terrible for you. But that's my little treat that I'll do once every week or two. I'll go grab a little potato soft taco and a bean burrito, okay? And I don't think it's bad to give ourselves those little treats every once in a while.
The problem is when I give myself those treats every day, all day long, and I don't give myself enough good clean energy. Now, what do I mean by clean energy? Well, food is medicine. Food is going to promote good health, or if we're giving ourselves bad food, it's gonna give us really bad health. We're not gonna feel good, and we're gonna have a lot of problems down the line. The best diet, which has been confirmed again and again, is a plant-based diet where you're eating almost all plants, healthy whole foods, not processed. A Mediterranean diet is a really good place to start. It's gonna have a lot of plants in it. It's gonna be a very clean diet, very healthy, a lot of antioxidants, a lot of really delicious things too. A lot of it comes from Greece and Italy where you're gonna get the rice and the...
the good vegetables, the olives and olive oils and some feta cheese and all of these cleaner protein sources that are going to really make you feel great, give your body what it needs and it's delicious too. Speaking of having my little treats here and there, I don't think it's really healthy to strictly restrict yourself.
I have done that before and I think we've all probably tried that at some point or another where you're on a very restrictive diet, no carbs or no fats. I've been through lots of different iterations, tried lots of different things. Ultimately, it's not something you can maintain long-term and it takes away some of the joy of eating and there should be some joy and pleasure in eating. It's not totally for that, but it should be part of why we eat.
You know, we could just eat Soylent shakes all day long. That's a very good plant-based whole food, you know, perfectly balanced for our health, but there's no joy in that. And I don't think that God intends for us to eat that way. I think he gave us a variety of foods so that we can enjoy eating. Okay, another thing that has become a very hot topic in the last few years is intermittent fasting.
And there's really not a clear cut recommendation for intermittent fasting. There's different windows that people eat in. People will do several day fast. And certainly the traditional, the Orthodox Church has recommended God even prescribe fasting and praying as a routine. so, fasting from certain foods, certain days of the week, or fasting for longer periods of time where you're really eating a plant-based diet is what the Orthodox Church recommends for weeks, several weeks at a time even, is not only good for your spirit, but it's really good for your body. And here's why. If we're constantly feeding our body, even if we're just feeding our body really good food, our body's always digesting. It's always having to process this food and this energy and it's too much. It's more than we really need, but we can't use all that energy right away. So it ends up storing it as fat. It makes us sluggish. I'm you've experienced that after a big lunch. You're just really tired and you wanna take a nap. So intermittent fasting, eating less is really healthy for the body and for the soul as well. I like to try to give my body at least 10 hours of rest every night. So not eat from eight until six in the morning. And that way my body has a chance to kind of process everything, kind of get cleaned out. And it's actually nice and it's really good when you have a feeling of hunger. We don't always have a feeling of hunger because we're constantly feeding ourselves and to allow our body to get to the point where it's telling us what it needs is really healthy. I also like to do an intermittent detox for a few days. I don't do a complete fast. I'm still eating, but I'm eating a very prescribed, researched diet such as Prolon that is plant-based, but it's really helping my body to clean itself out, especially the liver.
I also like to look at food sensitivities. I do a blood test here in my office where we can look and see if an individual is sensitive to certain foods that are going to cause inflammation and make the body hold onto fluids, make it very difficult to lose weight. That can be very helpful, especially someone that's having difficulty losing weight. Limiting alcohol intake is very important because research shows that the more alcohol that someone drinks, the more risk they have for cancer, liver disease, and metabolic disorders. Eating is so important. Eating right is 80 % of your metabolism. You can exercise and run all you want, but if you're not eating right, your metabolism is not gonna be good. It's not gonna be strong. And you wanna find something that you can really maintain for the long term. That's why fat diets just aren't the way to go. Okay, so now the next step.
Exercise. Muscle building is so important and I'm gonna go through this pretty quickly. Muscle building is so good for you in so many ways. Muscle has been called the number one anti-aging organ because it helps your body metabolize better, helps your body, the muscles are there to take, to use that energy that you're feeding yourself.

(00:22):
You know, so that you're giving yourself all this good food, the muscles are going to really metabolize it more quickly. Your metabolism's gonna increase. You're gonna be able to actually eat a little bit more without gaining weight and not gaining fat, which is more important. But not only that, muscle is going to help protect you from falls, make you more stable, protect your bones, help them grow. As the muscles grow, the bones get stronger. You're gonna function better, be able to do more.
If you do need to do some cardio, it doesn't have to be super strenuous, but you need to get your heart rate going up for several times a week, whether you're walking briskly, biking, elliptical, running, whatever you enjoy, dancing. That's really, really important. But you don't want to overdo it. You don't want to put yourself into a stress state where you're over-exercising. That will work against you. I've been there, done that.
You do need to rest, need to let your body have a break, and don't forget to stretch to keep your flexibility. Flexibility is also very important to prevent falling. Okay, moving down, we're gonna talk about stress, decreasing stress to improve metabolism. It has been shown that when we are more stressed, especially when we're in a state of chronic stress, our metabolism takes a hit, and you can see it in weight gain, you can see it in your face, in your face getting swollen, your skin not looking healthy because the stress is interfering with your body's ability to process food properly. The hormones get out of balance and you really start to notice negative effects on your health. So what can you do to decrease stress?
The number one thing is to focus on your relationship with God, with Jesus, to really get to know Him, to put your rest and your trust in Him, because He will bring you perfect peace. He will, when you realize that you can put every worry and care into His hands and that He has taken care of you throughout your life that will help to decrease your stress. And it's a process. I know it's not a magic wand or something that you can just pray and then you feel less stress, but it's about that relationship. When you really know God, then you're going to have more peace. Thinking positively, controlling the thoughts that are going through your brain, not letting those negative thoughts, those critical thoughts or thoughts of fear to take nest in your brain but letting those float on by, training your brain to really stay on the positive side, on the gratitude, on what you have and not what you don't have or what you wish you had or what negative thing is going on. Really training yourself to think positively, protecting your inner peace. If you're eating better, you're gonna have more inner peace in your body. If you're mind is on a footing, positive track. If you're focused on God and your relationship with him, you're gonna have more inner peace, you're gonna have decreased stress. And then resting, as I said before, resting is so important to us. We are limited in what we can do. We are not robots, but you know what? Even robots get to rest. Even machines, factories have downtime because they need to rest too. So we need to give ourselves rest and give ourselves permission. Okay, finally, I'm gonna go into briefly and I'll do another podcast about this in more detail. Some medical hacks, medical tricks that can help your metabolism. The hot one right now is GLP-1 agonist. That's gonna be your Ozempic, which is some agglutide, Monjara, which is trisipatide. There's some other new ones out there, but these are really good ways. If you're struggling to get your metabolism back on track and you need something to really boost you, get you going, try it. Try the semaglutide. Try the terzepatide. It really works well. It's very well tolerated. There are some risks that your doctor needs to go through with you. The way it works is it helps to increase a natural hormone that we have, the GLP ones, which helps control insulin, helps control that feeling of satiety that you're full, it slows down your stomach emptying. So you just don't feel as hungry. You're able to decrease your cravings and to not eat as much. It kind of takes away that desire to eat all the time and the habit that we have for eating. So, you sometimes you have to really focus on making sure that you're eating enough when you're on these. But they do work really well and I do recommend them. I don't like the thought of putting someone on that for life. And I do think it needs to be coupled. I think it should be temporary to help you kind of get back on track. And then it needs to be coupled with healthy food. You know, I don't think it's wise to give yourself this shot and then just eat junk, you know, and not set you're going to set yourself up for failure when you get off of it. Another very simple thing, if you don't want to do a shot, there's a probiotic that's really new.
It's called acromansia and it's very essential to gut health. A lot of people are missing acromansia and it's spelled A-K-K-E-R-M-A-N-S-I-A. So acromansia is going to help restore the intestinal lining so that your body can make more of its own GLP-1. It kind of makes your own internal ozempic.
And the acromansia will help to calm your gut down, help it to restore itself, and you're gonna have better insulin control if you take that supplement. So that's the podcast for today. I want you to be healthy now so you can enjoy your life now and be stronger moving forward. You're gonna build this beautiful skyscraper. You're gonna feel amazing and you're gonna be able to more optimally fulfill your mission in life. So thank you for tuning into this episode of LifeSculpt by Christi MD. I hope you found our conversation as inspiring and enlightening as I did. If you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us to reach more listeners and spread the message of living a life sculpted by health and happiness. Don't forget to follow us on social media at LifeSculpt by Christi MD for more updates behind the scenes content and to join our amazing community. And follow my personal account at Love Life Medicine for more great health and inspirational content. Until next time, remember to prioritize your wellbeing and keep sculpting the life you love.