The Five Facts about Your Metabolism

If you read about losing fat or fitness stuff you’ll see thing like:

Metabolism

Metabolic exercise or workout

Metabolic rate

Metabolic boosting foods

It’s often a word people really relate to fat loss, that is used to market a certain exercise or nutrition.

Here are five facts to shed some light on what is and it is not.

1. Define it.

Metabolic- Relating to metabolism, the whole range of biochemical processes that occur within us (or any living organism).

Metabolism is a term that is used to describe all chemical reactions involved in maintaining the living state of the cells and the organism.

It doesn’t really have to do with fat loss. Yes, some these chemical reactions can contribute to fat loss but they can also contribute to weight gain.

2. Your metabolic rate- How these are used most often, are to refer to the amount of calories your body will burn by itself. So think of it like this: if you sat on the coach all day you’d burn a certain amount of calories, no matter what. This is related to lifestyle and lean muscle mass.

So when the workout claims to be metabolism boosting it’s usually because:

–  It will build muscle which may have elevated your daily metabolic rate.

– Of the stress of the workout, has temporarily elevated your metabolic rate, so you can recover from said workout

– When they talk about metabolic food. There are calories burned, when you consume foods. Some foods will take more energy/calories to digest.

3. 6 meals a day myth- There is a thought that if you eat more frequently you’ll burn more calories because of the calories burnt through digestion. That might say it boosts your metabolism. This isn’t true. The amount of energy you burn through digestion is related to the total amount of calories consumed not the frequency. If you eat 1500 calories in 3 meals or 6 meals; it won’t make a difference as affecting your metabolism.
4. Build muscle to build up your metabolism- This is why strength training can be huge to help shed fat. As we get older, we lose muscle mass and our metabolic rate goes down. So, as we get older we burn less and less calories. Strength training can reverse that.

3. Conditioning – If you run or do high intensity sessions for the purpose of fat loss, the most effective thing is changing it up. Your body gets used to it and it gets more efficient at it and it will burn less calories and it won’t lift your metabolic rate as much.

An example: if you start running, at first you’ll burn a lot of calories than after you start getting good at it, you’ll burn less and less. This is because your body has become more efficient so it doesn’t have to use as much energy

I hope that gives you a good idea about what your metabolism is or isn’t, also a couple of ideas on how to boost it as well.