[Closed] keeping your metabolism ticking over

The old way of thinking was that you need to eat to keep burning calories.

Your body burns calories whether you eat or not. It will burn less if you fast, but it cannot stop burning calories or you will die. This is why people who don't eat get thinner and thinner until they die. The historical data on this is unequivocal.

Hols2 kinda has it nailed there to be honest.lol👍

This is actually kinda interesting. The body is amazingly intricate. There was a study showing people who didn't eat breakfast tended to be heavier, which seems counter intuitive. Turns out that if you skip breakfast and eat say at 11 or just wait til lunch your body detects this long period without food as a starvation trigger so when you do eat, it turns as much of that into fat as possible immediately to store away to deal with the starvation it is expecting.
So when you eat, how often etc, often has some unintended effects. You'll burn calories whether you eat or not. The more mass you have, particularly muscle the more you'll burn sitting still. No need to eat to burn (although when you eat your metabolism kicks up a notch)

I was trying to work out when I should eat for max fat burning and whether I should fast at all on exercise and rest days.

thanks.

The old way of thinking was that you need to eat to keep burning calories. Not sure what I believe now.

the diet industry is pretty much a food industry so while it seems obvious that you need to eat less to lose weight the industry wants you to feel like you are doing that whilst selling food. They do that instilling a fear of 'feeling hungry' and whether thats addressed by weird meal replacement shakes or Glycemic Index buzzwords the end result is it keeps you eating all the time.

What these fasting diets do (for all the pseudo science billshit they are dressed up in) is allow you to get familiar with feeling hungry and realise that its just normal sensation and that you can function perfectly well without the belief that your 'metabolism' is a boiler that needs to constantly be stoked.

thanks. You deffo need to eat regularly to gain muscle after working out with weights. that I know. It's what to do the rest of the time such as after rides and rest times.

It’s what to do the rest of the time such as after rides and rest times.

Eat modest portions of a well-balanced diet would probably be a good starting point.

This podcast is pretty good at debunking a lot of the diet / weight loss myths and lies if you're interested in that stuff, whcih you seem to be:

http://foodforfitness.libsyn.com/rss

thanks all. will listen to the podcast tonight.

It's a series of podcasts rather than one, but you can go through the feed and pick out anything that's relevant or interesting. I only came across it because I was looking for something slightly different - more sports nutrition than weight loss - but there are a fair few that are relevant to some of the questions you've been asking and it's pretty no-nonsense, practical stuff that debunks some of the myths. There's quite a good one that simply goes through things that won't help you lose weight, even though they're often touted to, and explains why.