What Is The Metabolic Cooking Cookbook?

Is the Metabolic Cooking a helpful resource for organizing meal planning for bodybuilder? Is the Metabolic Thermo Charge idea an effective tool for lean muscle and fat loss? Are the recipes any tasty? Here is a brief summary of what we found:
Good Points
  • Tons of delicious easy to make recipes
  • Easy to get ingredients
  • Economical in the long run
  • Recipes customized for body types
  • Flexible blueprint, you can lose more fat or just do maintenance
  • Instant download
  • 60 day money back guarantee
Bad Points
  • Disorganized layout - lot of information without a pattern
  • Some recipes have the option to include protein powder – we found this pointless
Who is the author? There are 2 co-authors for this cookbook, Karine Losierand Dave Ruel who are partners in business and in real life. Dave Ruel is a well renowned bodybuilder and fitness cook also author of his other Anabolic Cookingprogram (review here), 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 fitness requirements.
The Metabolic Cooking is a collection of PDF format manuals with extra video and bonuses, easy to consult and implement for you to stick to a sound nutritional plan in order to feed your muscles and lose unwanted fat.
There are many of these cookbooks around, so we dug in to find out what makes this popular cookbook different from the others and what criteria Karine and Dave used to assemble their recipes. The results were quite surprising, the whole nutritional foundation of their recipes is based on 3 key factors:
  • Metabolic Thermo Charge
  • Metabolic Nutri Profile
  • Metabolic Adaptation Phenomenon

Metabolic Thermo Charge – A Key Ingredient For Extra Calorie Burning

metabolic cooking review
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 yourdiet.
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 kind 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 . Which brings us to the second key factor of the Metabolic Cooking cookbook: optimized personal profile.

Metabolic Nutri Profile For Optimized Metabolism

karine losier
The idea is that different body types require different food composition, hence different recipe 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, power lifters)
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, some more and some less.
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, Metaboic Cooking does provide variations for each recipes to suit the different food compositions as required by your body type.
The Metabolic Nutri Profile also takes into account your lifestyle and the fat loss goals, then combines all these factor 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.
We liked this point very much as we think maniac 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.

Metabolic Adaptation Phenomenon And How To Avoid It

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 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 you metabolism high for lasting response and results. We found this approach not just effective but also motivational because the same diet and dishes repeated over time are a sure fire way to get stuck in a rut and lose interest on dieting at all.

Metabolic Cooking PDF Cookbook – What's In It?

metabolic cooking
The program is not just one PDF manual, but a collection of 9 different manuals encompassing 250 recipes and an array of 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.
  • Supplements Optimizer – this is a guide to few, specific supplements that according to the author are effective in allegedly burning even more fat. We did not find this manual particularly useful simply because we have an aversion to supplements and we think the recipe and nutritional guidelines based on natural foods contained in the program are already as good as they get, no need for supplements.
  • 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.
  • Bonus Video Library – a collection of videos with Karine Losier showcasing the various dishes preparation.

What Are The Benefits Of Metabolic Cooking? Pros and Cons

Pros
  • The actual recipes are delicious and easy to implement.
  • The program is based on a protein emphasis for better Metabolic Thermo Charge or TEF, hence more fat loss.
  • It is customizable to different body types and lifestyles for best results
  • It includes variation in order to avoid adaptation and stagnation in losing fat
  • It is flexible as you can choose to keep losing fat or maintain bodyweight
  • It is written by knowledgeable authors with experience in fitness and nutrition
  • It is immediately available online – no need for shipping
  • It has a 60 day money back guarantee
Cons
  • It is not properly structured – there is no main manual but a collection of many different manuals
  • Working out and exercise are not included in the program, after all it is a recipe cookbook program
The Bottom Line – Is It A Good Recipe Book?
Metabolic Cooking is a complete recipe cookbook with flexibility and ease of use in mind. Even though all macro nutrients 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 the Metabolic Cooking a sound and effective cookbook and nutritional plan for fat loss, maintenance or muscle building in an easy recipe package.