Metabolism Schism
I am once again confused by my own body. I have been on as much of a regular exercise program for six months now as I can ever remember. This started with a trainer and swimming, it progressed recently to adding a rowing machine at home for workouts when I am not otherwise at the gym or in the pool, and the recent spring weather has me out in the yard doing 2-3 hours of sweaty work ridding myself of a fallen massive Euphorbia candelabra cactus. And yet, alas, the needle has not moved on my weight. In fact, where my weight generally fluctuates by several pounds in any given week, the scale seems stuck in a 0.5 pound range since the beginning of the year. I am not terribly weight focused and am much more into feeling and moving around better and with greater ease and less pain, which has clearly happened over that six months, but I just don’t get it. When I moved here four years ago, I went on a weight loss trend that had me dropping a bunch of weight without any intentional effort. I know I was more active outdoors and was adjusting to a new at-home eating pattern, but at some point, that losing regime confused me too. Why my body drops or adds weight is simply a mystery to me.
Yesterday I got a LinkedIn message notifying me that an old friend who joined Bankers Trust the same year I did in 1976 had just died of pancreatic cancer, the Big C that seems anecdotally to be felling more of my generation than any other. His name was Kevin Burke and he was a slightly more junior peer (he was a Harvard BA to my Cornell BA/MBA), but we were exactly the same age give or take a few days. He was a hockey player and a generally good-looking athletic guy who was a distant member of the Kennedy clan with his big pearly white teeth and quick smile. Kevin once said to me with total candor that while I was not such a bad guy once you got to know me, that he was amazed that any woman ever got over the first impression of me and agreed to go out on a first date with me. You can’t get a more honest and sobering assessment of the state of your physical presence than that. While it never stopped me from liking Kevin, the comment stuck in the corners of my mind and reinforced whatever negative body image I had to live with in my youth. I will say that while I was not exactly a dashing womanizer, I was able to get several women over that initial visual hurdle to date me and even marry me, not the least of which was my sweet and beautiful Kim. But I never kidded myself either. My bulk always lurked as the prevailing presence that I presented to the world at large…3X-Large to be exact.
This morning I saw an article about understanding metabolism and how to control it better. Metabolic rate is a key determinate of how many calories your body will burn over the course of a day and therefore, whether you gain or lose weight in the process. Of course, there are several varieties of that measure. There is the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) that measures how much your body needs to just sustain its life processes. Then there is the Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR), which is how much caloric consumption there is when you are just hanging out and not doing much. Needless to say, this implies that those base levels are then built upon during activity and especially strenuous exercise. I note that my Apple Watch measures three types of activity in an effort to prompt me into more rather than less caloric usage. The three things it measures are called Move, Exercise and Stand. When I try to relate these to the definitions of Metabolic Rate they do not match off perfectly since BMR would seem to not capture any of them. RMR seems like what Stand and Move are intending to boost and Exercise is exactly what it sounds like. As logical as it all sounds, its still confusing. Its made all the more confusing because the iPhone app with the little Heart wants to measure noise levels, the three discussed activity levels (Move, Exercise and Stand), steps, distance walked, and then gives me trends, highlights, active energy consumption, health research, logging of my emotions and then ending with a suggestion that I can even get more from the App if I want to even further confuse myself.
The article I read explained that the number one way to improve metabolic rate (presumably a good thing) is to build muscle mass because then those muscles demand more caloric input whether at rest, in action or in after-burn (a particularly big boost to metabolic rate). So if I go to the gym and pump iron, I will boost my metabolic rate. However, heart healthiness is best measured by the combination of the lowness of your resting heart rate and the recovery rate of your heart rate after you boost it up during exercise. So you are exercising to boost heart rate and raise metabolic consumption, but you want to see your heart slow down quickly and stay at a low heart rate, which implies that it is operating efficiently in serving up oxygen to your system. How can fast recovery jive with this whole after-burn phenomenon and which is it that I want to achieve more?
23&Me tells me that I have a genetic predisposition to being a performance athlete. When you stop laughing about that, recognize that that translates into a low resting heart rate (Ya see!). In fact, where triathletes have very low resting heart rates, so do I. My watch tells me that my resting heart rate is 46. My entire range so far today has been 45-80, and it is not unusual for my watch to give me a warning that my heart rate has dropped into the high 30s sometimes for 10-15 minutes in the evening while watching TV. And no, I do not tend to feel light-headed. It seems that I either have a very efficient heart or else I am just so fit that I’m putting all of you to shame. I will ignore the possibility that it means that I am actually on death’s doorstep. My watch also is on the lookout for A-fib signs and it tells me through its routine ECG function that there are no signs of A-fib. The other day, while in a training session where I was wearing my watch, my trainer and I discussed what was happening with my heart rate and she was amazed at how I could do three sets of weight lifting and have my heart at 100 beats only to see it drop into the mid-40’s while I rested. She said that was unlike anything she had seen before.
The article tells me that the Metabolic Rate is most improved by building up the large muscle groups like Gluts, Quads and Hamstrings. Those are all muscles that are extremely well developed on me as per my massage therapist and stretch kinesiologists. And then it struck me, it must be those muscles which are bringing my Metabolic Rate level down, but I can’t not use them a lot given my size and need to get around and stand erect to do my exercises. So, I am back in a conundrum which I have called my metabolism schism where I seem healthy, but would like to lose some weight to make exercising more comfortable….but getting there is being worked against by my big muscle groups keeping my metabolic rate low…or something like that. I’m so confused. Maybe like a watched pot, I have to stop looking at my weight on the scale and then it will go down.
Rich,
It’s the other Kevin Burke, fortunately still among the living. You may not recall that I worked at Bankers from 1981 to 1985 in the Pension Trust and Custody area? Well, I did indeed run into Kevin a few times as once our secretary called out to me that my grandmother was on the phone. She passed the call over to me but it wasn’t my grandmother as she had only recently passed away a few months earlier. After speaking to the woman, I realized she was looking for another Kevin Burke. Subsequently, that mix-up occurred every now and then during my tenure. Once, i got a check in the internal mail for almost 5,000 dollars made out to me for an appendix operation I had never received. i called Kevin and he came down and we had a laugh. He was dark Irish unlike me but who was born in Boston probably like he was. As to the Kennedy connection, I believe his grandmother was a sister to Rose Kennedy/ There definitely was a Kennedy connection. My first father-in-law who was a lawyer was a friend of JFK and ran his DC campaign office. He became an undersecretary in Health, Education and Welfare Dept. Speaking of Bankers my father’s eldest brother who was about 20 years older than my Dad was also a Harvard Alum like Kevin. I understand he may have run the Trust investment group there. I met a guy named Malcolm (can’t remember his last name) who worked for him but my uncle had passed away by then. Small world.
Your resting heart rate is like my brother’ Paul’s who was a Cross Country and Steeplechase runner at CAL. Keep it going!
Malcolm Stevenson I believe. All very interesting. Stay well