A Closer Look at Metabolism and Weight Loss

Only in rare cases of medical problem such as Cushing’s syndrome that slows down metabolism or having an underactive thyroid gland (hypothyroidism), you get excessive weight gain.

As you can see, commonly weight gain is the result of eating more calories than you burn. And this is the opposite if you want to lose weight. What you need to do is to create an energy deficit by eating fewer calories or increase the number of calories you burn through physical activity, or do both.

Obviously you don’t have much control over the speed of your metabolism but at the same time you can control how many calories you burn through your physical activity.

The more active you are the more calories you burn. In fact, when people say that they have a fast metabolism the simple truth is that they are probably just more active than are others.

With all that said, you already have a sense of how metabolism relates to weight loss: 2 opposite actions

1. Catabolic metabolism or breaking cells down and transforming them into energy
2. Anabolic metabolism – creating a new molecules, building cells and tissue

To help understand this process even more clearly, let’s introduce an important part of the weight loss game: the calorie.

Calories
What Calories are? Simply put, they aren’t actually things in and of themselves but they are labels for other things — they are units of measure, just like an inch.

So what do calories measure?
Easy: while inch measures the distance between two points calories measure energy. Yup, the evil calorie is really just a 3-syllable label for energy.

The important thing to emphasize new is that our body itself, despite its vast intelligence does not really do a very intelligent job of distinguishing good energy from bad.

Actually, our body doesn’t care about where the energy comes from. So this matters and what does this have to do with calories and energy?

Again, while we can evaluate our food choices and eat a healthy food as a source of energy, or something else that is a non healthy source of energy, the body doesn’t evaluate.

Even though it may sound strange and amazing, but our body really doesn’t care. To the body, energy is energy and no matter the source.

It takes whatever it gets, and doesn’t really know that some foods are healthier than others. It’s kind of like a garbage disposal: it takes what you put down it, whether it should go down or not.

So if you apply this to the body, and to weight gain, when our body receives a calorie that is merely a label for energy it must do something with that energy.

Put it another way, it doesn’t matter how much calories our body receives; it has to accept them deal with.

On this stage our body can either metabolize it via anabolism, or it metabolizes it via catabolism. That means, it will either convert the energy (calories) into cells/tissue, or it will use that energy (calories) to break down cells.

Now the link between calories/energy, metabolism, and weight loss becomes rather clear and direct.

If there is an excess of energy, and physical activity require an additional energy, our body is preprogrammed to create cells with that extra energy but if your body figures out that your physical activity doesn’t require an additional energy, all that energy can’t be used to do anything, it will be turned into extra cells through anabolism and those extra cells are added weight!

In a nutshell, the whole calorie/metabolism/weight gain thing is really just about excess energy, that is, when there’s too much energy from food — then the body transforms those calories into stuff which, most of the time, is fat.

Sometimes, the extra calories are transformed into muscle, a good thing for those who are trying to maintain an optimal body fat ratio.

Muscles require calories to maintain and people with strong muscle tone burn more calories without actually doing anything; their metabolism burns calories to maintain muscles.

Now it’s obvious why exercising and building lean muscle is part of an overall program to boost your metabolism.

The more lean muscles, the more excess calories are spent before they’re turned into fat.

An overweight person weighing the same as an athlete can burn almost the same amount of calories during exercise, however, the leaner person burns many more calories at rest because lean body weight is much more metabolically active than fat weight. Problems are exaggerated if an overweight person leads a sedentary life, turning down a chance to speed up metabolism naturally!

Another interesting point is that the athlete would be a smaller person (not height) as muscle occupies less space due to its higher density compared to fat, fat takes up more room!

Don’t look to products that claim to speed up your metabolism. All these dietary supplements for help in burning calories or weight loss are often more hype than help, and some may cause undesirable or even dangerous side effects.

There’s no magical way to lose weight. It comes down to exercise and diet.

If you take in fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight and if you’re worried about your metabolism or you can’t seem to lose excess weight despite diet and exercise, consult your doctor.