Metabolism for Lyme: How Metabolism Affects Your Health

Today, let’s talk about why metabolism is important for Lymies.

What is metabolism, anyway? 

Metabolism is what helps your body turn food, water, air, vitamins, and minerals into energy. Your metabolic rate is the rate that you produce energy in your cells. High metabolisms manifest in many ways, such as a moderate to high pulse rate, an abundance of fidgety energy, or a high body temperature. Think toddlers on sugar.

Your metabolic rate is greatly affected by Chronic Lyme Disease (CLD). Increasing your metabolism lowers cortisol, and the inverse is also true. CLD is a chronic stressor, and chronically elevated cortisol affects leptin (important to thyroid function). Do you have a low body temperature? Is sleep unsatisfying? Tired? Constipated? No sex drive? Pee a lot? You may have the metabolism of an 80 year old, as I did. It kind of goes hand in hand with chronic infections. A low metabolic rate – CLD or not – correlates with just about every illness.

In Matt Stone’s words metabolism works like this:

“When metabolism falls, your sex hormone production falls (infertility, loss of sex drive, loss of period, erectile dysfunction, PMS). When metabolism falls, your youth hormone (growth hormone) falls, and you lose your ability to build muscle tissue, perform athletically, and you lose muscle tissue. When metabolism falls your rate of fat burning decreases and your body starts to manufacture more fat out of the food you eat. This causes a rise in triglycerides in your blood leading to insulin resistance (the precursor to metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes), increased appetite, increased storage of the food you eat into fat cells, and so forth. When metabolism falls you produce more estrogen (both men and women) and the opposing hormones testosterone and progesterone are produced in smaller quantities.”

But if we can increase our metabolism then good things happen:

• Your stomach engines work faster and you have fewer problems with constipation and food sensitivities. The hormone gastrin increases and digesting hard-to-digest foods becomes a lot easier.
• The thyroid functions better. And your thyroid has a lot of say in how healthy you liver is.
• Cortisol and insulin resistance decrease, and improved glucose clearance follows.
• Body temperature goes up.
• Mitochondria work better.

Stay tuned to learn about metabolic strategies.