Welcome to the MetPro Method. I am your host, Crystal O'Keefe, and today I have with me Angelo Poli, the founder of MetPro. And we are gonna be discussing home devices or portable devices that tell you if you are burning carbs or fat. So I have a lot of questions about this. Angelo thank you so much for being here, first of all!.
It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Crystal.
Okay, so explain exactly what these tools are cuz there's like a variety of them, right?
Yeah, there, there's a number of tools now on the market. There have been for a while, everything from the old like keto strips. Now they have the, oh, I have pictures of myself with the few of the companies came out and had me beta test these massive oxygen chamber gas mask looking things.
And now they're a lot more portable and it is some neat science. But what some of the newer ones are doing is they're measuring either Keytones or co2. But they're great for what they are. And I am actually a big fan of them, but it comes with a little bit of a disclaimer. Okay.
And that is it. It's what they are. And recognize that they are. Very isolated data points and they're not the top of the funnel packet points, . So most people are using them because at the end of the day, they wanna try and lose weight or improve body composition.
Sure.
And there are much higher up the food chain metrics when it comes to that sort of thing.
So at the end of the day, what will happen it, it can be a frustrating experience for some because they're going to look at their physical reality. And here's what I mean by that. They're gonna get on the scale, they're gonna have their body fat measured, and they're going to see, am I making progress? Am I either losing weight or reducing body fat percentage?
Sure.
Then they're gonna go over to these devices that tell me if I'm burning and in the lipolytic pathway or the glycolytic pathway, or tell me how many calories I'm supposed to be burning a day. And they're not always gonna match up. They're not gonna always match up with your physical reality.
That doesn't mean they're not a good metrics as an arrow indicating up or down, but very similarly for anyone who's ever pursued. Weight loss via exercise. You track your calories burned, some quick math says I should be doing X, Y, Z. And then you notice it doesn't always-
it doesn't always work.
It really should though. It's totally not fair.
Amen.
Totally not fair. And so here's the nerdy here's the nerdy pieces because whether it's a, your Apple watch that's tracking your caloric burn, whether it's one of those devices you breathe into that tell you whether you're burning carbs or fats, whether it's one of the devices that are supposedly because these are a little accuracy, tricky on the on these that are supposed to tell you your actual metabolic burn.
They cannot account for the biggest factor that we battle with here at Met Pro. And that is adaptation. So adaptation dictates, and there's something called adaptive thermogenesis. So that is a quantification now in the scientific community for the delta or the difference that can't be explained when we're talking calorie burn and weight loss.
So some delta can be explained. In other words, you have a person who weighed 300 pounds and now they weigh 200 pounds. They weigh one third less. And so we can mathematically say, Here's how many calories less. It should require for them to sustain that body weight, the problem is in the real world, it never works that way.
Yeah.
There always seems to be a greater delta than on paper what it seems to account for. And where is that coming from? That's called. Adaptive thermogenesis and the reason they can't fix it, in other words, here's a pill, here's a cuz they've talked about researching leptin and ghrelin and all these different hormones and controlling insulin levels, and why can't we really conquer this?
And here's the reason why, because inside. Adaptive thermogenesis. It's not one big club that you're getting hit with. It's a thousand little stings. So what's happening is multiple hormonal systems, multiple I mean we're talking even the hypothalamus, the brain stem neuropeptide that every system in your body recalibrates subtly to make up for what it perceives as an assault on your body's survival because you cannot keep losing weight. So it adjusts a thousand little tiny levers to make you more efficient. So now I'm gonna nerd out just a little bit. Here's what the
I like the nerdy data.
Here's what the research is essentially now shown, and this is what you know fascinates us.
This is what we have observed for years at MetPro, which is why we have calculated periods of metabolic revving. So when you start restricting your intake, you have two aspects to adaptive thermogenesis. First, your RMR, your resting metabolic rate, or BMR. The very similar, Basically the bottom drops out almost instantly.
You go on a diet, your basal metabolic rate is gonna crash. That said, it can only drop so far, so that of itself is a few calories a day. It's not making up for all of it. But once your body is in a deficit, your resting metabolic rate drops quickly. It can only drop so far because your brain needs glucose.
Your organs need energy. You have to digest food and sustain life so it can't go past a certain point. Now what happens is something else starts more on a dosing effect, gradually adjusting, and that's called N R E, and that stands for. Non resting energy expenditure. So to put it more simply, activity Or exercise.
Okay.
Over time in restriction, your body will find a way to become more efficient. So I know your Apple Watch said X, Y, Z. I know that the elliptical machine said you just burned XYZ calorie. But if you're not seeing it on the scale, it didn't happen. How? Your body has acclimated over time, not one big lever, it's those thousand little stings to become more efficient in its expenditure, so your body is expending less. Now with that research in hand, now we go back to all of these measuring tools.
There's no way for them to accurately predict or know where you are in that acclimation process. In other words, when you blow into that thing it doesn't know whether or not you just finished 90 days of strict dieting or whether or not you just came out of the buffet line for two weeks on a cruise.
And that's massively gonna impact all those thousand little stings that are constantly tuning because they can be sped up just like they can slow down. Your metabolism's goal, it seems like it's to make you suffer. It's actually not.
The goal of your metabolism is actually to keep you in homeostasis, which is simply means to keep you from changing weight, whether that's up or down. It wants to try and keep you roughly anchored, and that's why your body has the ability to constantly adjust. So that's why I tell people when you're using different metrics, whether it's the calorie burn on your row machine, Whether it's a one of those devices that you breathe into, they're great references.
At the end of the day, if I'm coaching you, if anyone on the MetPro team is coaching you, you know we're gonna look at your photos, we're gonna look at your body fat percentage, we're gonna look at your weight on the scale, we're gonna look at your performance. Those are going to be far and wide more important to us than any of these other additional data points if you're not losing weight on the scale. And our goal is weight loss. We're gonna have to adjust something regardless of what those devices are telling us. And if the devices are telling us that you're not making progress yet, your body fat percentage is dropping every week… 'atta boy or 'atta girl, right? Nothing. Recognize what they are.
I'm a big fan of data across the board, so I like them, but they're not always what they're marketed to be.
Yeah. Cause sometimes those things, they make it sound like all you have to do is look at 'em and the whole world will be explained to you…. they do. It's got the secret of life inside.
If it was only that simple.
Okay. That's super helpful and it does really help to understand why two people that they look the same. At a glance, they might have same body type, they might be in the same kind of like weight range, but they might lose weight differently. And that could be because their weight loss profile history looks completely different.
Absolutely.
I know that when Tom and I both started using, my husband, Tom and I started using MetPro, he had never been a healthy eater. He never really cared one way or another. And I had been eating fairly healthy comparatively. And I had been exercising for all these years. So like when he started doing MetPro, the weight just fell off. And part of that's cuz he's a man and it's just, we just have different body types. But it's also, it's like he had so many more levers to pull and I had already pulled a lot of levers and it, was it still to this day can be a bit frustrating.
Absolutely. But don't sell yourself short Crystal. You have done amazing.
Thank you. Thank, I wasn't fishing, I promise. I was just saying it's interesting to see how all the different people add up.
Yeah.
Okay. Is there anything else about, about these devices you wanna make sure people know about? Make sure they understand before they might be purchasing one or just as they use it with their weight loss journey.
Yeah, so like some of the real popular ones on the market now, basically what they're saying they do is they tell you whether you're burning carbs or fats. Keep in mind, that's not a good, bad scenario. So you can lose weight, burning carbs. In fact, that's what most performance and explosive athletes will do.
You can gain weight or body fat, burning, mostly carbs. You can lose weight. Burning fats, guess what? You can gain While you're burning fats too. So again, it's a metric, there's a lot more. And my, my beef is just with all, and I'll give you one real quick other example is it's the same thing with Programs that use kind of sneaky wording to insinuate that you're gonna do a blood test and it's gonna tell us how to figure out your metabolism in exactly what you need to eat to lose weight.
Yeah.
I'm a huge fan of the data we extract from blood work, and most of my clients, I'm constantly encouraging them to get their blood work updated because there are so many valuable insights we get that are specific and unique to you. But there is no blood test that says, Oh, by the way, if you eat this many calories and you eat these 12 foods, you're gonna lose this much weight.
It doesn't work that way. These are all excellent, but individual data points, at the end of the day, you're going to gain muscle or lose fat, gain weight, or lose weight based on the performance and pace of your current metabolic rate versus your total intake. And if those are matched, you're gonna be in homeostasis and if those are right, wrong, or otherwise out of sync, you're either gonna be gaining or losing weight.
And so those are the bigger grandfather metrics to look for.
Very insightful. Thank you so much Angelo.
Thanks for having me.
So for our listeners, that is all for this week. If you want to learn more about MetPro, you can go to metpro.co. If you want to hear more of our episodes, please join us over at metpro.co/podcasts and make sure to rate and review. That's how other people know what to expect from the show.
Until next week, just remember consistency is key.
