Cells Are a Furnace
Imagine you are in charge of keeping a campfire going all day. You would gradually add wood at about the same rate it is being burned. You would also need some kindling in case the fire starts to go out.
Coordinating your metabolism is the same thing as managing the fire within your cells’ furnace. Your activity initiates the burn. It has to be coordinated with the amount of fuel put into the furnace. You can learn how to coordinate these two things so that you have the right amount of energy during the day and sleep at night.
Bonk and Backlash
Developing a good metabolism takes some time, but the first step it to learn to keep at least a minimal amount of fuel in the furnace. Intense mental or physical activity without enough fuel is dangerous. The danger is based on the fact that the brain always needs some fuel to maintain its’ electric charge. That is why whenever fuel levels drop too low, which we call a bonk, we feel nauseous, light headedness, with a sort of panic that we need food right away. These cravings are so intense because of the danger of a bonk.
While it is good to avoid the bonk, if you flood the fire with too much it becomes backlogged. The fuel is greeted with a congested fire, and a backlash occurs in which the momentum of the wave changes direction and ends up moving away from the fire.
If you were to eat a huge meal, and then sit down on the couch, you may experience this type of backlash in the form of fatigue. As the fuel moves away from the fire, the amount of fuel within the fire drops. Ironically, the effect of flooding the system with too much food could be not enough food within the furnace.
Logs (Aerobic) Versus Kindling (Anaerobic)
There are two systems of fuel based entirely on the rate at which they burn. Logs represent the aerobic system which involves normal food and oxygen. This system burns slow and long. The kindling burns instantly, runs out quickly, and congests the fire with ash. Think of the kindling as having been soaked in lighter fluid. It should be obvious the need for both of these systems considering that our fire has to fluctuate without ever running out. The kindling can prevent a bonk with sudden increased activity, but because it is capable of being delivered quickly, can cause a more severe backlash. The logs can get warmed up and give you energy all day, but do not allow you to perform in an intense environment.
The Four Daytime Intensities
Posture
Posture is a burn of logs without transporting more logs from the storage area. Even on your worse day, you should be able to be relaxed and wide awake if you are able to develop this posture system.
Endurance
Endurance is the highest volume log of burn without without the accumulation of ash from the kindling burn. In other words, you are training your ability to transport logs from the intestines and lungs, which is why breathing and heart rate go up. For some people this might mean jogging, which they can maintain for several hours. If this person started running fast up a hill, they would have to start pulling significant kindling from its storage area in the liver.
Tedious
Tedious is an intense burn of kindling in the fire without dumping extra kindling from your stack. This is how your furnace behaves when you focus on one thing intensely. Having time to focus might be the most important part of your day and generally can be sustained for a max of two hours per day.
Excitement
Excitement is you dumping kindling from your stack into the fire as fast as you can in expectation of a huge explosion to follow. Your internal fire does this anytime you need to be intensely aware of multiple things at once. In reality, excitement occurs for short periods of time. Think of some sporting event like soccer when you are moving the whole time, but when you get the ball or the guy you are guarding gets it you are fully engaged. You could also think of a time when you nearly get in a car accident and remember the whole thing is slow motion. Being excitable is of fundamental importance for energy, and at the same time being excitable is the primary reason people have no energy. Just imagine you put a kid in charge of the fire and you give him a can of gas and you understand the potential for excitability on your metabolism for good or for bad.
Interaction of the Daytime Intensities
The intensities rotate in a rhythm, and to give an example we could start at any point. Suppose you are on a walk and you step in a hole. As soon as this happens you immediately enter the excitement state. You might have thought you had everything figured out, but apparently you had not accounted for this. Everything that follows has the specific goal of reshaping your world view to account for something you previously didn’t know.
The excitement allows you to have a detailed snapshot of the whole scene. The reason you must have the whole scene implanted in your mind first is that you don’t know what parts of the scenes details are important foreground and parts are more contextual or background.
Once you are home and safe, the intensity of lower and the fire is in the furnace is no longer so intense. Instead of your whole body hurting, you notice most of the pain is in the knee. Instead of the whole scene being relevant, you remember what part of the field had the holes.
How To and How Not To Have Energy
Backlash From Flood: The classic backlash would go something like this. Suppose you don’t eat anything on a stressful day. The stress burns your your kindling which is in short supply compared to the logs. Your kindling runs low, and a sort of panic sets in around dinner time. You then eat a huge dinner with lots of carbs. 15 minutes later you feel tired/uncomfortable and get sugar cravings, so you flood the system again.
Now refer to the furnace. Suppose the furnace has a supply of logs and kindling. And suppose the logs are barely burning, but instead the kindling is burning. As the kindling gets low, you overreact and throw a bunch of wood on the fire. The fire can’t burn all that wood especially since it is not really that strong of a fire. Also all the wood would actually drown out the fire, so instead the fire spits a batch of wood out. Now there is a wave of wood moving away from the fire. After 15 minutes, ironically, since the fire is sort of panicked it continues to eat the kindling at the same time food is moving away. Now, another panic sets in.
It is important to focus on the basic dynamics if this scenario and see clearly how it could have been prevented. Even though most people stuck in this sort of trap are not used to eating in the morning, they would be better off eating a small amount in the morning and maybe early afternoon. If their job is very stressful all day, this can and has to be addressed, but for the time being this person has to eat a smaller dinner in order to prevent the second backlash. Because this person is used to eating dessert, they will feel a little hungry at night, which might be the only time all day their digestion was actually stimulated. As long as it is just hunger and not a full bonk, it is ok. The only reason it would not be ok is if this person couldn’t relax at night, which causes the furnace to stop eating the kindling.
Basics of Sleep and Recovery
Whenever you are awake you are running in some degree of debt. The ash in the fire is accumulating faster than it is being disposed. Your batteries are being drained faster than they are being charged.
Remember the only two variables you have to play with are activity and anticipation. At night, you sit in a comfortable couch. Your activity is low. That means the fire is slow. Notice that the pacmen in the drawing have their mouths closed. The second thing you have to do is simply realize you don’t have to perform anymore. In other words you just have to relax. The rest happens automatically.
So go back to the fire again. Imagine first you lower the flame, but after being sort of worked up all day you still have a degree of anticipation. In other words, logs are still being delivered to the fire. But because the activity is lowered, the wood is not being burned. There is nowhere for the wood to go, so the flow of wood is reversed. Anytime wood is flowing away from the furnace, it is impossible to be awake for very long. After a while all the excess wood is cleared away, and there is enough capacity to actually draw the ash from the furnace as well.
Warming Up
The drawing on the right reflects a typical situation of ones metabolism in the morning that we will use as a starting point. First of all the actual flame in the furnace is still small as it was during sleep.
All Worked Up
The image on the left illustrates what happens to your furnace when you get all worked up which is really you getting ready to perform. The size of the flame increases as kindling is poured into the furnace. Ash builds up much faster than it would if you were less intense.
Getting stressed out has a negative connotation, but it does make you more alert. That is why the habit of getting amped up all the time develops. Ironically, its’ overuse is the number one reason for lack of energy. It is like a kid who gets ahold of a gas can and gets a great pleasure out of seeing the flame kick up. It doesn’t take long for the furnace to get congested with ash. That is why we normally delegate to adults the role of administering lighter fluid when having bonfire.
Flooded
A flooded furnace always occurs when lots of wood is brought to a small fire. If you pig out and sit down all day you will always flood your furnace. When the wood traveling to the furnace is not burned, there comes a point where there is nowhere in the furnace for the wood to go. The traveling wood simply makes a U turn. Gradually, a wave of momentum builds of the flow of wood away from the furnace. You might feel heartburn or bloating which are literal examples of attempted reversals of flow. Most people will experience weight gain. It is impossible to keep the fire going for very long when all the fuel is flowing away from the furnace. This is supposed to happen at night, but when it happens during the day you will feel exhausted. After eating too much, you have a window of time that you can stop the flooding by going for a walk instead of sitting down.
Bonk
As you can see, getting all worked up means that the furnace burns kindling much faster. In some cases, the fire keeps burning to the point that the storage area runs dangerously low on kindling. This is the cardinal sin of metabolism. If you were to get all worked up and drink too much coffee without eating anything it would like burning all the kindling in the furnace and driving all the kindling out of the storage areas without replacing them. You might feel suddenly light-headed or nauseous or angry and a panic need for some carbs would kick in. In this case you would have been better off eating breakfast before the coffee, and it is likely you would have avoided the bonk.
Example
Metabolism is a skill like driving a car, and when you realize that it is based on patterns of behavior, you really only have to fix one or two habits and you will have dramatic results. The following example illustrates all the principles of keeping the fire going.
Suppose you had a party and ate way more than you normally do at 11:00. And suppose that based on your fitness you are capable of jogging 15 minutes per day without being sore or tired the next day.
Here is what will happen if you handle the situation the wrong way. You would go somewhere and sit-down, and an hour or later you would experience the backlash and exhaustion from being flooded. All the excess fuel would be siphoned off to logs, and to deal with the exhaustion you would then take a stimulant, which would burn your kindling to the point you would actually eat dinner, which would flood your system and the same thing would happen again, to the point you would crave sweets after dinner. This is the cycle of throwing gas on a fire, burning off all the kindling, and even though there is plenty of logs on the fire, you need more kindling to give you a spark. It that’s confusing it might be easier to just consider how you should actually handle the situation.
You already know that the backlash is brewing. After you eat, go for a walk or even a run depending on how you feel which is related to how long after you eat. At this point, you will probably skip dinner. What will happen is that around three or so you might even feel a little hungry. If you can just not get all worked up and stay active, most people should be able to avoid the bonk. You might just eat an apple or something very small, and skip dinner. You will actually feel way better the next day. This works for almost everyone, the one exception being the person who is unable to rest their brain.
As you can see, the most important skills of metabolism have to do with you playing around with your activity levels, stress levels, and timing of your eating. We are constantly making mistakes, but you have a certain leeway, and need to learn to make adjustments. Once you master these basic principles of timing, you will naturally want to get more advanced, but most people make the mistake of trying to get advanced not having really understood the fundamentals.
Again, how much fuel is actually delivered is a combination of two factors. The first is how much fuel is actually burned. Anytime your cells are low on fuel, it automatically draws that amount in. The second factor, which was alluded to previously is anticipation. Whenever you get worked up about something you are anticipating having to do something more intense, and more fuel pours into the furnace, assuming it will be burned.
Virtually all disease revolves around the following simple theme. Whenever we over-anticipate, more fuel is poured into our system than what our collective furnace actually burns. What happens is that the excess fuel is either diverted like in the case of weight gain or diabetes or the system is diminished in capacity, examples including narrowing in size or number of blood vessels or decreased capacity of the lungs. The end result is the same. The body accounts for the persons over anticipation. I wrote about this several years ago in an article entitled deconditioning.
It is easy to demonstrate that virtually all currently described diseases revolve around this simple theme. The deconditioning described in the previous paragraph on the one hand is necessary due to the over-anticipation. All these so called diseases keep us alive, and at the same time they set us of for death. Suppose the furnace actually has to perform and burn a lot of fuel, but the actual capacity of fuel is too low. Ultimately the fire would go out at the exact same time the burn is necessary.
Keep this simple image of the furnace and the delivery of fuel in mind because all training involves controlling the fire by alternating intensities.
So, to review, in order to have energy throughout the day, the furnace has to maintain the fire at a minimal level for the daytime hours. We call that minimal intensity posture. The intensity of the daytime fire is already above what can be maintained for 24 hours simply because the ash builds up. At night time, the fire must reduce in intensity enough that the ash is actually cleaned faster than it builds up. We call this the sleep intensity. Understand that the concept I’m trying to get across is only understood by referring back to the furnace. If you were put in charge of keeping it going, you would likely already know what to do without any instruction, and what you don’t know you would figure out very quickly.
Suppose you decided you want to save the world, and want to function at full capacity. The only way to do that would be to quickly increase the size of the fire which you would do by throwing a bunch of paper and gas into the furnace. You would be able to perform for a second to to maybe minutes, but at some point the ash would build up to the point that it would have to be cleaned and the fire could no longer be maintained. In training, we just call this the excitement intensity.
It seems that it would not be difficult for us to sort of get into a rhythm and have energy all day and then sleep all night.
Gradient
If you were to go for an easy hike, the logs are burned which creates a deficit of logs within the furnace. The deficit is what draws logs into the furnace from the blood, which now creates a deficit of logs in the blood. Again, it is this deficit of logs in the blood that draws logs in from the digestive system where the logs are stored. The advantage of using mild exercise for energy is that the flow of logs is based on need and you are less likely to flood the furnace with way too many logs.
Remember a time you sat on the couch after a huge meal. Logs flooded the furnace at the same time the actual fire in the furnace was not very active. The furnace became backlogged, and the momentum of flow of logs would move away from the furnace back towards the storage area. Sleepiness will always occur shortly after the logs are flowing away from the fire for the same reason a fire cannot be maintained for long when fuel is being removed from it.
It is possible, however, to quickly reverse the momentum of flow of the wood. You could be relaxed or even sleepy on the couch, and then someone scores a touchdown or you remember you forgot to pick up one of your kids from soccer practice, and within a second you suddenly have lots of energy. In this scenario, the flow of fuel is driven into the furnace in the opposite order. First, the blood is flooded with kindling from the storage area of the kindling, which is the liver. From the blood, the kindling is driven into the furnace.