My Metabolism Was DESTROYED After Extreme Dieting | Here's What Worked

I was 240 pounds in grade eight. I extreme dieted and broke my metabolism. I had to eat 1200 calories a day for 14 years. Using biophysics and biochemistry, I increased my metabolism and now I actually have to force myself to eat. In this video, I'm going to tell you exactly what I did and how I built it up from first principles.

Now, building from first principles is the way of thinking that is enabling Elon Musk to intelligently design spacecrafts and have a large impact on the world. It works because it forces you to think about what actually matters. And even Mr. Wonderful noticed that about Elon Musk. He was right. He was right.

And the only other person that I've seen that has a higher ratio than that is Elon Musk. He has no noise. In this video, we're going to apply that way of thinking on increasing metabolism. To do that, we have to first agree on what it means to increase metabolism. For this video, where we're talking about losing weight, we mean burning more calories.

And then next, we need to get the undeniable truths about burning calories. There are two of them. One, work requires the burning of calories. Now, work includes everything from exercise to unintentional efforts such as thinking, fidgeting, or even maintaining muscle or fat-free mass. And two, the conversion from calories to work is never 100%.

Energy is always wasted and we call that metabolic inefficiency. Now, if you want to increase the product of something, you can increase either number. But here's the thing, I don't want to waste your time. You have a limited amount of time and if you focus, you can achieve better results. Look at it this way.

Say you have an ordinary light bulb. Maybe it has 75 watts. Unfocused, it could light up a room, but is that what you really want? If it is, then you're not ready for results. If you want results, you have to focus those 75 watts into a laser that can eviscerate your problems and challenges. That is how you get results.

So then, which one do you focus on? Well, how about work? For a while, like most people, I chose to focus on increasing the amount of work that I did. So, I was running more, lifting more. Some people even try to fidget more. Nice part about that is that it feels like doing more honest work. But, there is a big problem with doing that.

It takes time. Do you really want to spend an extra hour running just to be able to eat an extra chocolate bar? Please say no. Now, if you compare that to increasing your metabolic inefficiency, everything you do burns more calories. And that's burning calories without costing you time away from the things you love.

Even if that means more running. Think about it this way. It's like charging your phone where your power source are the calories and your phone is the work that you need to do or the muscles. If you charge your phone efficiently using something like a USB-C wire, then it charges without heating up. Minimal energy is wasted.

If you charge your phone inefficiently, like using a wireless charger, a lot of heat is going to be wasted and your phone is going to be burning. If you want to be burning more calories, you want to aim for wireless charging. All right, great. So, I increase your metabolic inefficiency, but how does one actually do that?

To answer that, we need to understand how energy flows through your body. After the digestion of carbs, proteins, and fats, all of them come and meet in the same path. It's called the electron transport chain. The electron transport chain converts them into a chemical gradient. very similar to the gradient that you find in batteries.

And from here, you can use up the energy in one of two ways. One, it can be used to make ATP, which is used to carry energy around the body. And two, it can be leaked out as heat. In the 1930s, Stanford found that giving people a pill that does just that increased their metabolism. For some people, it actually doubled their metabolism.

The pill, which was made up of a 2,4-DNP molecules, lodged itself in the mitochondria and allowed that chemical gradient, the battery gradient, to just leak out as a heat. But, there was a big problem with that pill. It was lethal. In 1938, it got banned. Presumably, the molecule itself was toxic. It was giving people cataracts and killing a lot of people.

So, is there anything that's not toxic? Well, let's look to Mother Nature. There are people who naturally leak more energy. In 2002, Dr. Harper et al. found that women who lost 30% more weight on the same 900-calorie a day diet. These women would have a lot higher leak for that chemical gradient. Specifically, their muscles needed 30% more energy to achieve the same chemical gradient.

But, is it actually possible to increase your metabolism to be like those women? Honestly, studies looking at the low-level details of this have not emerged yet, but studies looking at the higher level are promising. Specifically, in 2020, when everybody was having COVID, a study looking at 45 participants found that when people are on a diet, meaning that they were consuming less calories than their body needed according to their weight, they had a broken metabolism.

But, then, as they increased the amount of calories that they consumed, their metabolism became normal again. So, all that is to say, if you have a broken metabolism and you're not eating as many calories as your body needs according to your weight, and you want to increase your metabolism, you should consume as many calories as your body needs according to your weight. Don't get stuck eating less calories than your body needs like I did.

Now, if you're anything like I was, you're probably thinking, "How is eating 10,000 more calories going to help me net negative calories?" It can, but under specific conditions. Subscribe and I'll show you the math in another video. For now, I hope you found this video valuable. If you know anybody that needs to hear that increasing calories back up could be the fix to their broken metabolism, please send them this video.

And thank you for watching.