What is Metabolic Efficiency Training?

February 17, 2022

What is Metabolic Efficiency Training™ (MET)?

Metabolic Efficiency Training™ (MET) is a concept that teaches your body how to use the right nutrients at the right times to improve your health and exercise better.

It can be defined as a systematic nutrition and exercise approach to improving the body's ability to use its internal stores of nutrients, specifically carbohydrate and fat. The goal is to balance macronutrient intake so proper metabolic changes can happen and since a large number of active people eat an unbalanced daily diet (too high of a refined and processed carbohydrate load), it is important to bring them back into balance to control blood sugar and insulin levels. Research proves that eating lean protein and fiber together has a blood sugar stabilizing effect as well as being very successful in weight loss strategies. Metabolic Efficiency Training also has profound positive impacts on health and well-being, fitness, and athletic performance.

I teach my clients how to create a combination of foods to create an optimal balance of blood sugars to help utilize more of their internal fat stores. MET focuses on the manipulation of the daily nutrition plan and the contribution from different types of exercise. It blends nutrition and exercise, not one independently. Through the combination of nutrition and exercise, it can improve many markers of health, fitness and nutrition. It doesn’t matter whether you are wanting to make a dietary and exercise change to improve your lifestyle and health or are a seasoned athlete, MET relates to all physically active people and their individual needs.

MET is not restrictive. It does not negate any food groups. It is not a diet, for a diet is temporary without long lasting results. It's a lifestyle approach that will change as your health and fitness changes. There are detrimental effects to having unstable blood sugars: GI distress, weight and body fat gain, energy fluctuations, imbalance in hunger levels, performance fluctuations, inflammation, not to mention the risk of developing chronic disease state. The goal is to balance macronutrient intake so proper metabolic changes can happen and since a large number of active people eat an unbalanced daily diet (too high of a refined and processed carbohydrate load), it is important to bring them back into balance to control blood sugar and insulin levels.  

The average person has approximately 1,400 - 2,000 calories worth of carbohydrate stored in their body and 50,000 - 80,000 calories stored as fat. The body is a very complex system but it can be taught to oxidize (burn) more carbohydrate or fat in a surprisingly short amount of time. Burning more carbohydrate will allow the body to store more fat. Burning more fat will allow the body to preserve the small amount of carbohydrates it has. Metabolic Efficiency is the ability to teach our body to burn more fat while reserving carbohydrate stores. If you are teaching your body to become more metabolically efficient and thus use more of your fat as energy thereby preserving your carbohydrate stores, then you do not need to eat as many carbohydrates throughout the day and during training.

The ability to optimize and stabilize blood sugar levels has profound positive impacts on health and well-being, fitness, and athletic performance. This is easily managed through having the proper portions of specific foods! This lifestyle approach can bring about other benefits such as decreasing the risk of gastrointestinal (GI) distress during exercise, improved energy levels, improving body weight and composition, and improving health markers (including blood cholesterol levels, triglycerides, fasting glucose, blood pressure). 

Optimal Blood Sugars

I have experienced all of these amazing benefits with my clients to include improving body composition due to stored body fat loss. But the most powerful effect that I have noticed with my clients who implement this concept is that it has reversed pre-diabetes states, significantly reduced risk factors for metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease and allowed some people to completely discontinue taking blood lipid and blood pressure controlling medication. Having optimal energy levels throughout the day is just one of the many improvements when it comes to the benefits of Metabolic Efficiency.

I incorporate the concept of Metabolic Efficiency Training within all of my nutrition programs. There are five strategies with the first strategy being the one most commonly used:

Option 1: CHO:PRO Ratio/Hand Model

Option 2: Periodization Plates

Option 3: Carbohydrate Unloading

Option 4: Low Carbohydrate, High Fat

Option 5: Fat Adaptation, CHO Restoration

75% Nutrition, 25% Exercise

There appears to be a much more significant improvement in Metabolic Efficiency Training from daily nutrition changes (controlling and optimizing blood sugar) versus exercise changes. The contribution of changing your daily nutrition plan can account for roughly 75% of your ability to use fat better, with the other 25% coming from exercise.

The most amazing thing about the MET concept is that it is a flexible, non-restrictive, easy to implement and sustainable for a long time. The goal at the end of the day is to figure out which foods and which portions works best for you to optimize blood sugar levels. This is a very individualized concept that requires a very customized approach. Please check out my customized nutrition programs that include personalized meal plans that support Metabolic Efficiency Training.

Do you have questions about Metabolic Efficiency Training? Wondering how it can work for you? Please contact Katie for a free 15-minute consultation!