Your Temperature's Effect on Your Metabolism
There is a simple way to “measure your progress” when trying to improve your metabolism, or to see how well your metabolism is functioning right now.
Checking your body temperature.
The reason this works is because ATP generates heat. So the more ATP you are making and thus using, the higher your body temp will be.
Get a basal temperature thermometer like this one. Then begin checking under the tongue and logging the results several days a week at these times:
First thing upon waking, before you get out of bed
40-50 minutes after you eat breakfast
Mid-afternoon
Evening before bed
Make sure that you haven’t just had anything to eat or drink or recently exercised, and keep your mouth closed around the thermometer during the reading. And ladies, keep in mind that your temp fluctuates with your cycle (cooler during menses, warmer after ovulation).
Here is what you want to be seeing:
A waking temperature of at least 97.8 or higher.
After breakfast, your temperature should rise, not fall. If it falls, this indicates that your waking temperature wasn’t basal at all but was higher due to stress hormones (not good), which are relieved when eating. If it does not rise, this indicates that your breakfast did not promote a healthy metabolism, or that your metabolism is sub-optimal.
Your mid-afternoon reading should rise again and be the highest of the day, and you want it to be at least 98.2 - 98.6 or even slightly higher (there is some individualism involved, but the goal is to raise your own readings over time to get to the highest that you can).
Your evening reading should lower slightly as your body relaxes for sleep.
As chronic disease and PUFA/seed oil contamination of our food supply surged, our collective body temperatures have plummeted. If you search up “normal body temperature of adults” you will get a string of articles claiming that collective human body temperature has been lowering over the past 50 years, and that the “healthy” body temperature should be re-evaluated and changed. Once again, poor health and disease is being normalized right before our very eyes.
The truth is that we have been poisoning our mitochondria for the past 50 years. Because of our ultra-processed diet, we have reduced our ATP production. Our high omega-6 (PUFA) diet has not only triggered hibernation, thus lowering thyroid hormones, but also damaged the thyroid pathway itself, lowering body temperatures.
This unhealthy low energy state is now the norm.
See for yourself. Get a good reliable thermometer and start checking your body temp throughout the day. And don’t fall for the “well I’ve always run colder than normal” excuse. That’s what I thought about myself, until I started eating a pro-metabolic diet and taking supplements that promote thyroid function. Now I regularly hit 98.5-98.6 in the middle of the day, whereas before I sat mostly in the upper 97s.
You may be thinking - what has the thyroid got to do with this?
We’ll take a deep dive into that next time.