How Metabolism Actually Works
“Metabolism” gets blamed for a lot, but it's rarely understood. At its core, metabolism is simply how your body converts food and oxygen into energy — and how it decides to spend that energy across the day.
The four parts of your daily burn
Your total daily energy expenditure has four components: your resting metabolic rate (the energy to keep you alive at rest, and by far the largest share), the thermic effect of food (energy used to digest meals), exercise activity, and non-exercise movement like fidgeting and walking. Most of your burn happens while you're doing nothing in particular — which is why muscle mass, the main driver of resting rate, matters so much.
Why “fast” and “slow” oversimplify it
Resting metabolic rates do vary between people, but usually less dramatically than expected. The bigger lever is body composition: muscle is metabolically active tissue, so people with more muscle burn more at rest. This is measurable directly with resting metabolic rate testing rather than estimated from a formula.
Metabolism adapts to what you do
Your metabolism isn't fixed. It rises and falls in response to how much you eat, how much you move, and how much muscle you carry. That adaptability is helpful — and it's also why diets stall. We cover that in metabolic adaptation.
See where you stand
Education is the first step. A metabolic evaluation turns these concepts into your numbers — and a plan built around them.
One interconnected picture
Understand what is limiting you.
Not all services are available yet. Telehealth appointments are anticipated to begin in late November 2026 for select patients. Please contact our office for additional information regarding eligibility and availability. In-person appointments and diagnostic testing are planned to begin in January 2027 at our Edina clinic.