What is Metabolic Flexibility?

metabolic flexibility, simply just I like to say it's the ability to just use the full spectrum of your metabolism efficiently. So you're able to use fat and ketones as a fuel source when it's warranted. But you're also able to use glucose and carbs when it's warranted as well. So that is kind of like the simple definition. And the biggest thing is being able to efficiently like we talked about efficiently shift back and forth, depending on what you're doing.

Is is the biggest thing here, with metabolic flexibility, just being able to, you know, like I said, if you're sitting at a desk all day, like, can you shift into using fat for fuel and potentially using ketones for fuel? Versus if you're exercising? Like, can you use glucose and carbs for fuel efficiently? So that's kind of like the simplest way to define it. And then just like I mentioned, you know, we are our ancestors are metabolically flexible by necessity they were. So it's kind of thinking back to that practicality side of things like they didn't have food available all the time.

So they had to be metabolically flexible to be able to go through periods of fasting and things like that. So just kind of just thinking back to that, in a practical standpoint, I like to again, put it back to Okay, where are you coming from? Like, where are you at on those sides of the spectrum? Like, are you coming from, like I said, a point where you have never really implemented any type of lower carb protocol into your life, you've never gotten into a state of ketosis since you've been a baby, right? Are you coming from that area. And people refer to this as being like a complete sugar burner, right, where they're just so you know, relying on carbohydrates for fuel, you know, maybe and this is obviously dependent on like your activity level as well.

So if you are someone who's sedentary and you're not really that that active and you are having, like blood sugar dysregulation, and you're not able to, like you're just you can't fast that all right, like you just have to eat every few hours, like you're, you know, have the afternoon slump all that stuff, like if you're on that side of the spectrum, versus if you're on the other side of the spectrum, which people don't talk about a lot, is that what I mentioned with being keto for so long, right, and being low carb for so long that their bodies now efficiently gone, or not efficiently using carbohydrates as fuel because we know that our bodies aren't going to adapt to whatever we're doing? Right. So if you have been consuming a low carb ketogenic diet for a long period of time, your body is going to be like, hey, you know, you're not bringing carbs in anymore. So I don't really need to have these, you know, enzymes that are upregulated to digest those carbs and absorb them. I don't really need the machinery to stick around to be able to utilize those efficiently. Because you're just not giving them to me.

It's kind of this, this the other end as well. So it's just realizing that our body adapts to those different things. So with being metabolically flexible, you're able to kind of use the different fuels when they're warranted, like I mentioned, but there's no like set like, Hey, you're metabolically flexible, because you did this or you did that there's different things to look at. And I would say that like there's some ways to objectively measure if you're metabolically flexible, and subjectively measure them