DoctorOz: Metabolism Explained - Your Ultimate Field Guide

Everyone seems to know what it is, but no one can really explain it, especially when it comes to your weight. So I decided to clear up the confusion. Today I'm giving you the ultimate field guide to your metabolism, and we're going to have a little fun with this. So I recruited Tarana Jones from the hit TV show Empire. She's getting in on the action by talking to women about their metabolism. Hey, Dr. Oz, I'm hitting the streets of Chicago doing your dirty work, trying to figure out if people know what metabolism really is. So hopefully they know, because I don't. What is metabolism? Um... Hmm... Oh, uh... Oh my God, I've never been asked like this. Um... Like energy? Something like that? It's like the thing that makes your body gas. Let's see. Hand it over. What? I can't do it? No! I think, like, you're a rate of something? Like... You're who? Actually, there's a guy named Lepiton that stores fat in your body. So confused. I don't know if this is a little man in her stomach. Metabolism refers to the process by which your body turns food into energy. Food into... It's the whole... Yeah. Phospholipids into, well... Wait, pholip... Phospholipids. What is it? Can you show me where you think your metabolism is located? In the stomach area. Or in here. Mm-hmm. And in here. And right here. In here. And in there. Where's it located? In, like, the leg part. The leg? Yeah. Well, that's the first. Does it feel like a metabolism is there? I feel like it. I think so. It's in the heart. Yes. When you were a kid, would you say your metabolism ran fast or slow? It ran fast. Show me. We were in it. Chin up. Yes! He's a maniac. Real fast, because I didn't have this. What about now? Now it's just a little steady, like, slow down, like... Not that slow. And how is it now? Like this. Yeah, that's slow. That's how slow it is. As I'm aging, it's getting slower and slower. Okay, Dr. Oz, how do the people of Chicago do? Because we want to know, what in the world does metabolism mean? Because I don't know! That was wonderful. Thank you. Why were you so gung-ho to torture these poor people about their metabolism? Because I don't know what metabolism is. I need to know. You're the little baby. She don't even know. I just want to know. That's why we got you, Dr. Oz, so you can let us know. So, you must have a little homework on this. When you Googled and searched, what do you think metabolism is? I Googled it, and it won't come up. It won't. No, it won't come up. Too many big things. Yeah. So, that's why you're going to tell me. Come on. Let's take a look. All right, so this is really cool. Think of your muscles like a metabolic furnace. When you're nice and big and strong, the furnace is working well. You dump extra food like coal, and your body burns it off. It's not a big deal. You actually want more muscle because it makes the flame bigger, and you can keep up with the foods you're eating. Your furnace burns the coal efficiently. You don't gain weight. But if you don't have a lot of muscle, and instead you're a little bit weaker, without that muscle, any food you eat, you can't burn through. It all is too much. And so, you gain weight because you can't burn through the regular calories. That's what a slow metabolism really is at its core. All right. So, I'm going to introduce you to Dr. Carolyn Cederquist. She's an expert in this area. Come have a seat here, buddy. Thank you. I'll get to sit down. 17 years of practicing medicine, and she's an expert in metabolism because she helps people lose weight. That's what she does for a living. So, you say there's some surprising things about how we measure all the energy in our body, the metabolism. Yes. What's really interesting for most people is that the majority of the calories that we burn all day, what most people think about as metabolism, actually happens at rest, not running, not exercising. What do you think about that? Imagine the two-thirds. That's easy for me. I'm going to sleep. There's a catch, though, here. All of us eat more than two-thirds of the energy we need. So, if that's the only energy you consume all day long, that's a problem. So, I bought you a jumping rope. Okay. I thought you'd like this. Here you go. Okay. Now, do you know how to jump rope? Yeah, I know how to jump rope. I've got to take these bad suckers off. Do they make you work out in the set? Do you have time? I do. I do a little. You know what? When we're in the trailer, we can't do much because you've got somebody next door to you. Like Cinderella shoes. One day, Jesse was in his trailer. I don't know what he was doing, but I was next door from him, and the trailer was just rocking back and forth, back and forth. That could be bad news. Yeah, I knocked on the door. Neighbor, what are you doing? He said, oh, I'm just, you know, working out. So, when I heard him say that. Was he alone? Yeah, he was by himself. I'm asking. The trailer was rocking. Yes, he was by himself. He was working out. So, I decided to bring some little dumbbells, 10 pounds. It wasn't that much. I brought those, and I do that while I'm on set. Because we're on set a good 13 hours. Yeah, long time. Let me see if you can jump jack. What do you want me to do? Jump rope a little bit. You want the hood? Just the hood. The hood. Do the hood one. Do I jump in with you now? Oh, she does it well. Does it really well. All right. What a show off. I love that. All right, Rhonda. So, that's the other third of the energy we normally consume, right, through movement. But you've got to move, and most of us don't actually move the right way. So, professors, take it away. What's the best way to move? And give us a little insight here that's going to surprise folks. Well, you know, any exercise is good. But just like you shared, that's actually really important. You said you're on the set 13 hours a day. You're sitting a lot. They've actually done some recent studies that show even small bursts of exercise may even work better, burn more fat. If you were to get three 10-minute segments of exercise, it would equal 30 minutes of exercise. So, to hear it right, you're better off breaking up the exercise to, let's say, three different equal amounts and doing it all at once. Yes. I say this because a lot of you go work out once a day, and you actually find yourselves gaining weight. And that may be part of the problem. Yeah. So, I did your math. We've got this calculator for metabolism, BMR calculator. And yours is around 1,500 calories. Is that good or bad? Because I don't know. No. It's a good number, actually. Okay. Good. In fact, no matter what your number is, we all have our numbers. This calculator, by the way, is at DrRoz.com. We ask you a couple questions, and we give you an estimate of what your basal metabolism is, which is what happens when you're sitting. Then you want to add to that whatever you need to add, the activity you're doing, for example, so you can eat something. Otherwise, you're going to be hungry all day long. Now, I bring that up for an important reason. The way you get your exercise can also affect your metabolism itself. So, come over here. I've got a little quiz for you. You can run to the other side if you don't mind. So, these are three bodies. Okay. Here's mine. That's yours. That's mine. That looks good. Is that you? That might be you. That's me. All right. So, I gave you three possibilities here, medium, slowest, and fastest. Okay. So, I want you to tell me which body shape is the slowest metabolism, which is the fastest, and who's in the middle? That's not fair. Pick them out and put them up there. What do you think? Slowest? What do you think, audience? Which one's the lowest? Right. The right. And you think that's the lowest because it's the heaviest? You can put it in the little square there. Here we are. Little big mama. She's a big mama. Little big mama? Gosh. Medium. And only because that's me. That's you. Yeah. You know, you're actually pretty close. In many ways, you're actually right. How many of you would have picked the middle one as the fastest metabolism? So, about 50-50. All right. That answer the question? Yes. You know, she does have the fastest metabolism because you can really see that she has, like, some great muscle definition. She actually has very low body fat, probably lower than most people, but most of our metabolism is really determined by our tissue, our muscle, our muscle mass. Now, what's interesting about these other two, her amount of muscle mass may not be that different from hers, so they may be similar. But the big takeaway is when you see someone with a lot of muscle, their metabolism is going to be fast. And why is that important? Because I want you to build muscle when you're exercising. So, you're over here jumping rope, but the barbells you're lifting, those are actually more important to you because you build up these little guns in here. You see these guns? You see those guns in there? These guns there, they'll actually help burn through a lot more calories. And there are a lot of folks, I think, who feel like they're stuck at their weight because their metabolism is slow. You ever hear that? Yeah. They all say that metabolism is slow. Dr. Cedars, can you change a quote-unquote slow metabolism? I find that many of my patients do have a slow metabolism, and it can get better. What it comes down to is losing fat, but maintaining your muscle in the process. That's the key, maintaining the muscle. So, how do you do that? That's a big question. Up next, that's what we're going to do. If you think your metabolism is out of whack, find the number one thing that's missing from your diet. It's a diet solution, actually, that really works to get your metabolism moving again when we come back.