The Whole Truth You Must Know About Metabolism

It’s only natural to know the answers on following questions related to metabolism and metabolic process of your body for successful weight loss. Some of the questions will test for your understanding of the basic concepts of metabolism as applied to human biology.

What people want to know about the process is:

• What a metabolism is, and what role it really plays on weight loss and gain
• If there is a proven, scientific way to speed up metabolism? Not myths and fitness club “speculation”; but the real deal.
• If specific diet and foods help promote a faster metabolism? And… Once unwanted weight has been lost, if and how it can be kept off through a responsible eating plan?

The most common reasons are consuming highly nutritious food and performing workouts. If your metabolism rate is slower, it shows you are burning less of calories.

So, what is Metabolism?

It’s common to see that some people think of metabolism as a kind of organ, or a body part… one that influences digestion.

In fact, the metabolism isn’t any particular body part but that allows the body convert eaten food into energy. Therefore, it’s not surprising if you’ve likely heard of the phrase metabolic process used synonymously with the term metabolism, because they both mean the same thing.

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. However, without drilling down into medical details (unnecessary for our general understanding purposes), it’s helpful to briefly look at the biological mechanisms behind metabolism.

Metabolism basically means the count of calories you burn per day and as mentioned earlier this is the process of converting nutrients from the food we eat into energy used later on to conduct a vast array of essential functions.

Actually, your ability to read this page – literally – is driven by your metabolism. Without metabolism food would not be converted into energy and as a result 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. This a common mistake that we have to shed some light on it — all these people certainly have a properly functioning metabolism otherwise they wouldn’t even be able to speak because even that requires energy that comes from, as you guessed already from… Metabolism!

What To Do If I Suffer From Low Metabolism?

It’s interesting enough to note that, while we conveniently refer to the metabolic process as if it were a single function, it’s really a catch11 all term for countless functions that are taking place inside the body. The simple truth is that every second of your life — even, when you sleep — numerous chemical processes are taking place through metabolism, or metabolic functioning.

And there is another common mistake: often people believe that slim people have faster metabolism rate than overweight and obese people. And as you can see isn’t necessarily true.

Your body requires a minimum amount of calories per day to be able to maintain its essential functions like breathing, maintaining your heartbeat, and keeping the brain properly functional.

Once again: weight is not directly connected to metabolism but it depends on the balance of the total calorie consumption as opposed to the total number of calories expended. When more calories than the body for proper function needs are eaten, weight gain occurs.

Just the same, when less calories than the body needs are eaten weight loss can be expected.

What is Basal Metabolic Rate — BMR

Basal metabolic rate (BMR) is a minimum amount of calories your boy needs for proper functioning and most likely you burn daily more calories than your basal metabolic rate, unless you spend the entire day in bed doing nothing.

Factors Affecting BMR

BMR, basal metabolic rate, accounts for sixty to seventy percent of your daily caloric needs and it’s affected by several factors such as:

• Age. A person’s BMR lowers as he ages.
• Height. Studies have also shown that taller people have higher BMR.
• Gender. BMR is generally higher in men than in women.
• Body composition. People who have more muscle that fat have higher BMRs.
• Environmental temperature. BMR has also been noted to be generally higher in extreme temperatures of heat or cold.
• Diet. People who live on low calorie diets have low BMRs.
• Stress. BMR appears to increase during periods of stress and anxiety.
• Factors like age, gender, and height are difficult to change — we cannot stop the ageing process, or change our height or our gender. However, we can control the other factors affecting the process, to change our basal metabolic rates.
• People who live in areas of extreme temperatures of hot or cold may need to increase their calorie intake to keep their body temperatures normal and support all vital body functions.
• Stress may help burn extra calories, however it is not advisable to subject yourself to mental or emotional stress just for this reason. Physical stress on the body, like pregnancy or growth, may also increase a person’s metabolic rate.
• Quick weight-loss diets affect the body by slowing it down, causing the body to initiate energy conservation and decrease its metabolic rate. Not skipping the important meals of the day may increase a person’s energy expenditure by 10% as eating requires calories for digesting, absorbing, transporting and metabolizing food.
• Exercising helps your metabolism in two ways:
  1. First, it helps burn calories while performing the exercise, and it burns even more calories after you stop exercising. It takes as long as twelve hours for a person’s metabolic rate to return to its normal rate after exercising.
  2. Second, it helps form more muscle, therefore adding to muscle mass that also helps speed up your metabolism just like hitting two birds with one stone.

So as you can see, the metabolism is a constant process that includes apparently conflicting functions, and does so in the most optimal way that enables the body to break down food and create an energy as needed.

I believe through careful analysis, exercise, and attention to each person’s unique needs, we could bring about a more natural balance of the metabolic burn vs. the calorie intake. To a level where optimal health and weight control are in equilibrium.

Healthy eating, coupled with the right amount of exercise and the right company leads to a better, happier, healthier life.