08/24/2026
" What Does Metabolic Health Mean & Ways to Support Your Health"
Hello! I’m Tandy and excited to be here and to share ways we can all be strong and healthy! My background is a 20-year career in fitness, wellness, and nutrition.
My humble beginnings into the fitness world started with me being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and obesity. The catalyst to changing my life and lifestyle was losing 100+ pounds and reversing diabetes and maintaining that now for over 22 years.
Ah-ha…our metabolic health really has no official definition! What we do know is that metabolic health can act as markers to how our bodies respond to our lifestyle and choices, albeit food and alcohol and possibly other choices of consumption.
Metabolic health is how well your body turns food into energy and manages vital internal functions. You have good metabolic health when your blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, and waist size stay in a healthy range without medicine.
Some experts say that metabolic health means the absence of metabolic syndrome, which is a group of risk factors that contribute to the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and other metabolic diseases.
Your food choices, metabolism, microbiome, exercise, sleep, stress, and mental health, as well as your age, s*x, and genes, all shape your unique metabolic health.
Doctors look at five main numbers to check your metabolic health:
• Blood sugar: Fasting glucose under 100 mg/dL.
• Blood pressure: At or below 120/80 mmHg.
• Triglycerides: Blood fats below 150 mg/dL.
• HDL cholesterol: "Good" cholesterol above 40 mg/dL for men and 50 mg/dL for women.
• Waist size: Less than 40 inches for men and 35 inches for women.
Why It Matters
• Lowers disease risk: Good metabolic health lowers your chance of getting heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and stroke.
• Differs from weight: You can look thin and still have poor metabolic health or carry extra weight and be metabolically healthy.
• Metabolic syndrome: Having three or more out-of-range markers means you have metabolic syndrome, which signals a high risk of chronic illness.
How to Improve It
• Eat whole foods: Focus on fiber, lean proteins, and healthy fats while cutting down on sugary foods and refined carbs that spike your blood sugar.
• Move more: Get regular physical activity like walking, running, or lifting weights to help your cells use insulin properly.
• Sleep and stress: Get enough rest and lower your stress to help keep your hormones and energy levels balanced. Source: ZOE foundation and the National Academy of Sports Medicine.
Physical activity plays a huge role in our metabolic health and when we find ourselves looking for ways to exercise that fit our lifestyle, Zone 2 which is designed for getting our heart rate to increase, is very doable for most of us and the cardio exercises we implement can help us enhance mitochondrial function and long-term fat oxidation.
Zone 2 cardio is a low-to-moderate intensity exercise performed at 60–70% of maximum heart rate (a conversational pace). It uniquely targets Type I slow-twitch muscle fibers to stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis, dramatically boosting cellular energy production, metabolic flexibility, and long-term fat oxidation without excessive systemic fatigue. Source: American Fitness Association.
To be metabolically healthy means that your body is able to respond to food in a beneficial way that reduces your risk of conditions such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.
Tips for supporting your health –
Create a menu, even if for a few days a week, you have a plan!
Make a list of what you’ll need from the grocery to help stay on track.
Create time for your exercise! That can look like incorporating things you already love to do, brisk walks, riding your bike, taking fitness classes, going to the gym. There are so many options of ways to get your exercise in, and we want to do that more days on than off.
Coupled with an active lifestyle, watching what we consume is a perfect recipe for better health, wellness and quality of life as we age.
Please feel free to ask questions! Thank you!
Always,
Tandy
