What is Metabolism?

Some people think that the metabolism is a kind of organ, or a body part, that influences digestion. Actually, the metabolism isn’t any particular body part. It’s the process by which the bodyconverts food into energy. Hence, you’ve likely heard of the phrase metabolic process used synonymously with the term metabolism, because they both mean the same thing.

The Medical Mumbo Jumbo

This isn’t a complicated medical text (which should be great news to most of you!), and so we don’t need to spend an unnecessary amount of time and space focusing on the layered complexity of the human body and its extraordinary intelligence.

Yet without drilling deeply into medical details -- which are not relevant for our general understanding purposes -- it’s helpful to briefly look at the biological mechanisms behind metabolism. Metabolism, as mentioned above, is the process of transforming food (e.g. nutrients) into fuel (e.g. energy). The body uses this energy to conduct a vast array of essential functions.
In fact, your ability to read this page – literally – is driven by your metabolism.

If you had no metabolism – that is, if you had no metabolic process that was converting food into energy – then you wouldn’t be able to move. In fact, long before you realized that you couldn’t move a finger or lift your foot, your internal processes would have stopped; because the basic building blocks of life – circulating blood, transforming oxygen into carbon dioxide, expelling potentially lethal wastes through the kidneys and so on – all of these depend on metabolism.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone say that they have a slow metabolism. While they may struggle with unwanted weight gain due to metabolic factors, they certainly have a functioning metabolism. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t even be able to speak (because that, too, requires energy that comes from, you guessed it: metabolism!).

It’s also interesting to note that, while we conveniently refer to the metabolic process as if it were a single function, it’s really a catch-all term for countless functions that are taking place inside the body. Every second of every minute of every day of your life – even, of course, when you sleep – numerous chemical conversions are taking place through metabolism, or metabolic functioning. In a certain light, the metabolism has been referred to as a harmonizing process that manages to achieve two critical bodily functions that, in a sense, seem to be at odds with each other.

Low Fat Labels Danger

Another big reason that people don’t have clear, consistent information on this topic is because, unfortunately, there are a lot of food and supplement companies on the market who don’t want
you to know fact from fiction. They want you to believe that constantly buying “low fat” foods is
going to somehow speed up your metabolism. While, yes, some low fat foods can play a role in an overall eating program that is designed to speed up metabolism, merely eating foods that come from packaging that screams “LOW FAT!” won’t do anything.

In fact, believe it or not, but many people actually gain weight when they eat too many “low fat” products. Many of these products are laden with calories from carbohydrates or proteins (which are still calories and still must be burned off or they turn into body fat). As you can see, and probably feel from years of trying to unravel this whole metabolic mystery, this is a confusing, stressful, and indeed, potentially depressing situation. Each year, tens of millions of people attempt to retake control over their health and the shape of their body; and each year, tens of millions of people feel that they’ve “failed” because, try as they might, they just can’t speed up their metabolism.

Because the perceived failure is not a failure in any of these hard working dieters and exercisers (of which you may be one). The failure is with the medical and nutritional sector as a whole, which has simply not provided people with the information that they need to know in order to speed up their metabolism. And given the size of the nutritional field and the fact that so much of it is influenced by money-making enterprises (not all of the field, of course, but enough of it to make a difference), there’s really no sense in playing a “wait and see” game for when clear, consistent, and helpful information starts to flow out to people like us. We want to know:

• What the heck a metabolism is, and what role it really plays on weight loss and gain

• The proven, scientific ways to speed up metabolism – not myths and fitness club “speculation”; but the real deal.

• Specific diet and food items and promote a faster metabolism, so that once unwanted weight has been lost, it can be kept off through a responsible eating plan.

UNDERSTANDING METABOLISM

In the simplest terms, metabolism is the rate at which your body burns calories. The rate differs significantly from person to person. You and your friend can have the same activity level, diet, and weight but still gain or lose weight at different rates based on differences in metabolism.

Determine what is influencing your metabolism. There are some factors that you can change, and some factors that you can't.

● Age - metabolism slows 5% per decade after age 40.

● Sex - men generally burn calories faster than women.

● Heredity - you can inherit your metabolic rate from previous
generations.

● Thyroid disorder - problems in the thyroid gland can slow or
quicken metabolism but this is rare.

● Proportion of lean body mass - metabolism increases with
muscle mass.

Regrettably, many people simply don’t understand the concept of metabolism and metabolic change. This, equally as regrettably, is hardly their fault. There is so much information floating around out there, much of it over the ‘net or through a “friend of a friend who has a personal trainer”, that there’s bound to be some confusion and conflicting messages. Furthermore, many people (quite understandably) mistake their own weight gain and loss episodes as a matter of metabolic change. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it is not. For example, as we will discuss in this book, there are scientific ways to increase the rate of metabolic change, and thus enable the body to burn more calories.

Eating certain foods more frequently is one way to do this (again, we look closer at these in this book). Yet another way to visibly lose weight – at least on a perceived, temporary level – is to sit in a steam room for a few hours. Whereas the former method (eating the right foods) is a real, proven weight loss method through increased metabolic change, the latter method (the steam room) is just temporary because the lost weight is merely water, and will return as swiftly as it “melted away”. The point to remember here is that some people mistake their own weight loss attempts as being related to metabolic change; and, as you can see with the steam room example, that is not always the case.

If, after you read this article, you get absolutely nothing out of it, please be sure to take the following and implement them into your daily routine...

● Eat small, frequent meals. Extending the time between meals makes your body go into "starvation mode", which means it'll hold onto as many calories as possible and store them as fat. This is why fasting and skipping meals will only make things worse. In addition to having four to six small meals per day eating healthy snacks will also increase metabolism.

● Drink water. As with food, depriving your body of water can encourage it to "hoard" rather than "burn". In order to encourage your liver to focus on metabolism rather than water retention, make sure you drink an appropriate amount of water that is... Spread out the drinking of at least 8 8-ounce glasses of water throughout your day. This is often referred to as the “8 by 8” rule.

● Boost metabolism temporarily with aerobic exercise. Different activities burn different quantities of calories but the important thing is to raise your heart rate and sustain the activity for approximately 30 minutes.

● Boost metabolism in the long run with weight training. Muscle burns more calories than fat (73 more calories per kilogram per day, to be exact) so the more muscle you build, the higher your resting metabolic rate (RMR). Every bit of muscle that you gain is like a little factory that burns calories for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is the only way to increase RMR, which accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the calories you burn daily. Avoid smoking as a weight-loss method. While nicotine is a metabolism booster and appetite suppressant, the health hazards far outweigh any benefits.Expect your metabolism to slow down as you lose weight. The more weight your body carries, the more calories your body has to burn in order to sustain itself, even at rest. When you restrict your calorie intake, you lose weight relatively easily because your body's high caloric needs are not being met. However, after you begin to shed the weight, your body has less mass to carry and thus, requires fewer calories. In order to continue losing weight, you have to restrict your caloric intake even further in order to maintain a difference between what your body needs and what you are providing. Let's go through a hypothetical example:

● You are 200 lbs and your body needs 2500 calories a day to sustain itself.

● You cut down your caloric intake to 2000 calories.

● You lose 25 lbs. Now your body only needs 2250 calories to sustain itself because it's carrying less weight.

● If you continue with your 2000 calorie per day diet (the diet that helped you lose the first 25 lbs) you will still be losing, but at half the speed. In order to maintain a steady weight loss you will need to reduce your caloric intake further. However, it is at the utmost importance you do not try to consume fewer calories than your RMR.

● Another potential problem: If you continue with your 2000 calorie per day diet (the diet that helped you lose the first 25 lbs in the first place) you may actually gain weight back because of varying levels of exercise. Let's say you lose 50 lbs. on your 2000 calorie diet. Your sustaining calories might be 1800. You're actually consuming enough calories to gain weight, but how would that happen if you had stayed to your diet. This can happen when your exercise has burned through many calories. If you slowed on exercise at this point you would actually gain weight again. The point here is to recheck your RMR when you lose weight and compare it to your consumption.

What is metabolism and how to boost it?

Metabolism. There is not perhaps a more frequently used word in the weight loss (and weight gain) vocabulary than this. Indeed, it’s not uncommon to overhear people talking about their struggles – or triumphs – over the holiday bulge or love handles in terms of whether their metabolism is working, or not. Doctors, too, often refer to metabolism when they try and explain why starvation and water-loss diets are not scientifically of medically responsible; since, alas, they do not influence or take into account metabolism (there’s that word again!).
So, for all of the usage that this rather daunting and biologically- charged word enjoys in our world, you’d comfortably assume that people understand it, right? Or, at least, they have some fundamental information when it comes to how to speed up their metabolism, right?

Wrong!

HOW TO BOOST YOUR METABOLISM

If you're trying to lose weight and think your metabolism might be the culprit, there are changes you can make to improve it but with the commercialism surrounding "metabolism-enhancing" products, it can be hard to separate fact from fiction (or advertising) and pin down techniques that are scientifically proven to change one's
metabolism.