This review of Metabolic Cooking will reveal to you whether this is a helpful resource for organizing your meal plans.
This recipe program is based on the Metabolic Thermo Charge idea for weight control and lean muscle. Here you will find what this is all about, the pros and cons, and of course about the recipes.
Metabolic Cooking is a collection of PDF format manuals with extra bonuses, easy to refer to, implement and stick to, with a sound nutritional plan that keeps your muscles but loses your extra fat.
There are many of these cookbooks around, but what makes this popular cookbook different from the others is the way it is organized and the criteria Karine and Dave used to create their recipes.
The whole nutritional foundation of Metabolic Cooking is based on 3 key factors:
Metabolic Thermo Charge
Metabolic Nutri Profile
Metabolic Adaptation Phenomenon
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How Does Metabolic Cooking Work?
The Metabolic Cooking recipe program offers a lot of flexibility based on the idea that different body types require different food composition, hence different food ratios because they respond differently to the same foods. First off, here are the main body types:
Ectomorphs – naturally slim body frame with long limbs and narrow chest and shoulders (long-distance runner, marathon men).
Mesomorphs – naturally medium frame with regular limbs and wider chest and shoulders (sprinters, boxers, gymnasts, athletic types)
Endomorphs – naturally stocky frame with comparatively short limbs and robust chest and shoulders (Olympic weight lifters, powerlifters)
There is also an infinite number of combinations and crossovers between these 3 main body types as most people display features from 2 main types together, but the important factor from a nutritional standpoint is that these different body types react differently to the same food, burning, or storing fat differently.
Generally, ectomorphs do need a comparatively higher ratio of carbohydrates, with moderate protein and low fat intake, like 60% carbs, 25% proteins, and 15% fats. Mesomorphs may need 40% carbs, 30% proteins, and 30% fats, while endomorphs may need 25% carbs, 35% proteins, and 40% fats. With this in mind, Metabolic Cooking does provide variations for each recipe to suit the different food compositions as required by your body type.
Metabolic Thermo Charge is a fancy name for a physiological effect that has been known for a long time, called TEF, or Thermic Effect of Food, that has a substantial impact on helping burn calories because it just happens naturally every time we eat.
Basically, it is the calories your body burns just to digest your food every time you eat. In other words, your body needs to spend energy in order to break down all the nutrients extracted from your food, hence the very act of digestion helps burn calories, even though this is obviously a secondary factor to the overall calorie intake of your diet.
That means that just by eating we force our body to burn a little bit extra calories and help it to lose fat, providing that we do not eat too many calories to start with, of course. How many calories then? Here is the caveat, for not all kinds of foods are the same, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins require different levels of breakdown energy, with proteins being the hardest ones to break down and requiring more calorie-burning for digestion.
On average, fats are the easiest to break down, with a caloric expenditure of about 5% of their own calories, carbohydrates require a little more, 5 to 10 %, and proteins require 30 to 35%. It is clear that for the same amount of calorie intake, proteins help the most in burning additional calories by simply digesting them.
Proteins also happen to contain the building block of your muscles, the amino acids, particularly animal proteins, while vegetable proteins are incomplete, do not contain all the 9 basic amino acids that animal proteins have and must be eaten in combination, like grains and legumes, except for soy that contains them all.
OK, this is for the Metabolic Thermo Charge idea. It is not surprising that the Metabolic Cooking recipes are focused on an emphasis on proteins in all possible variations and combinations since this kind of food boosts calorie burning through digestion alone while providing you with the building blocks for lean muscle, especially if you workout.
Of course, carbohydrates and fats also come into play, it is just that proteins get primary attention in this cookbook, at least 15 grams in any recipe. This brings us to the second key factor of the Metabolic Cooking cookbook: optimized personal profile.
The Metabolic Nutri Profile
The Metabolic Nutri Profile also takes into account your lifestyle and fat loss goals, then combines all these factors to provide a personalized diet plan. It is however a diet plan different from mainstream programs in that it does not rely on strict calorie counting or food measuring. It is rather a simple and effective protocol of guidelines to follow.
Calorie counting and obsessing about precision as traditionally found in many programs is not a natural strategy for a healthy diet and in fact, can only cause added stress and aggravation at best or even give up at worst.
Some Benefits Of Metabolic Cooking
The program also tackles the issue of metabolic slow-down, here called metabolic adaptation, which happens when your body has already adjusted to the new diet regimen and stops responding to the diet plan, not unlike when your muscles stop responding to a certain workout and need variation.
Variation is a key factor in keeping your metabolism “motivated” and responsive, and Metabolic Cooking provides all the steps and recipe variations to keep your metabolism high for lasting response and results.
This approach not just effective but also motivational because the same diet and dishes repeated over time are a surefire way to get stuck in a rut and lose interest in dieting at all.
About The Authors
There are two co-authors for this cookbook, Karine Losier and Dave Ruel who are partners in business and life.
Dave Ruel is a well-renowned bodybuilder and fitness cook also the author of his other Anabolic Cooking program, while his second-half Karine Losier has a different background, with a degree in psychology that helps her understand the struggles of overweight people in achieving their goals.
Both have a passion for good food and tasty recipes in line with their focus on fitness.
Metabolic Cooking Components – What’s In It?
The program is not just one PDF manual, but a collection of 9 different manuals encompassing 250+ recipes and 4 different bonuses. The main manuals cover different food topics as follows:
Breakfast
Chicken and Poultry
Fish and Seafood
Red Meat
Pork
Side Dishes
Smoothies
Snacks
Vegetarian
The remaining bonuses are:
Fat Loss Optimizer Guide – this manual is a bit like the ignition key of the program because it contains the very important 10 Rules of Metabolic Cooking, guidance on how to use the Metabolic Nutri Profile, the top fat-burning fats, and grocery tips. Basically, it tells you how to use the program and how to get the most of it.
Metabolic Salad Builder – we found this section useful to concoct healthy salad dressing and avoid the regular processed and sugar-filled dressing you normally get at the supermarkets.
Thermo Charged Seasoning Guide – it is a bit of a mouthful, but what it does is actually providing you with a sodium-free seasoning blueprint so that your dishes are still tasty even without sodium.
Metabolic Cooking Quick Sheets – these are simply additional, summary shortcuts to the main points of the program like grocery shopping master list, daily food log, Metabolic Cooking glossary that help you get through the program without sifting through the main manuals.
Metabolic Cooking is a complete recipe cookbook with flexibility and ease of use in mind. Even though all macronutrients are used in the recipes, it displays a protein emphasis to stimulate the Thermic Effect of Food in order to help burn even more calories.
This key factor coupled with the personalized dieting profile and the variation in food intake to prevent metabolic slow down makes Metabolic Cooking a sound and effective cookbook and nutritional plan for fat loss and body weight maintenance in an easy recipe package.
My name is Deborah Foster and I am a Weight Loss Coach with a background in Nutrition Coaching and Personal Training. I specialize in helping women and men break through the yo-yo diet cycle and lose weight for good, without being miserable in the process.
