Challenge #40 - Capacity
Understanding metabolism.
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time. The next four (or five) challenges are going to be a back-to-back four-part (or possibly five) Capacity Challenge series, each building on the previous. Part 1 – Understanding Metabolism, is a continuation of Challenge #23 – We are what we eat. In this approach, it will allow us to do a much deeper dive into a topic as we can do it in stages. I am very much looking forward to seeing how this rolls out and look forward to your feedback on these grouped Challenges of the same category.
Back in 2016, I happened to find myself hanging with a group of special forces (SF) soldiers and the topic of diet came up. This was a stereotypical group of very fit men. I was just getting myself back on track with my fitness after my retirement from the military ten years prior. I had taken up power lifting a few years earlier but just started to dial my diet in. Two of us realized that we were both on a ketogenic diet. As hipster as this sounds, this was years prior to the keto fad starting. I had done “keto” for a little over a year at that time, though I don’t think I was calling it that. It was initially Mark Sisson on Joe Rogan in January of 2016 that got me started on modifying my diet from the SAD – the standard American diet. I think he refers to his diet as the Primal Diet. Later in September that year, he had on Kris Kresser talking about his book the Paleo Cure, which I also read, and bolstered my diet experimentation. The SF soldier asked me how my breath hold time was since I started this diet. I told him I hadn’t noticed or even tested it and thought nothing of it.
Months later that summer, my family and I were staying at a vacation rental with a pool. I was swimming in it with the kids, doing laps underwater, and I noticed that my breath hold time was noticeably longer than I would have expected. It reminded me of that conversation, and I needed to figure out what was happening.
In biochemistry, specifically in cellular metabolism, there is something called a respiratory quotient. This is the ratio of how many oxygen molecules are required to metabolize a macronutrient into ATP, compared to the yield of carbon dioxide at the end of the metabolic process. I realize that’s a lot to compute, so I ask you to bear with me here. We’re going to dive deep. ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, is the body’s usable energy, and carbon dioxide is a waste product in the process of breaking down macronutrients into ATP.