Increasing your metabolism is part of the magic formula for weight loss along with healthy eating and regular exercise. The metabolic rate of your body is its ability to use up calories for the various bodily functions including digestion, pumping blood to the various organs, breathing and physical activities. Most people will tell you the concept of weight loss revolves around lower calorie consumption and higher energy usage. To put it simply, you need to eat less and work more if you intend to decrease your weight. This does not mean that you have to starve yourself; as a matter of fat, if your diet comprises of certain food items like greens and fruits, you may not need to reduce your intake; however, you will need to ensure that the calories you consume are burnt optimally.
This is where a good metabolic rate steps into the picture. Every individual has a different metabolic rate based on his/her body weight, gender and dietary habits. People with a lower metabolic rate are prone to weight gain because the calories which are not used up for the various functions in the body are stored in the form of fat in the cells. So, an increase in the metabolic rate would mean that fewer calories are stored in the body which in turn can help you to decrease your weight.
Metabolism 101:
Metabolism is the rate at which the body burns the calories obtained by processing the various food items consumed by you; this energy is required to perform the various physiological and physical functions. Metabolism is an ongoing process as your body continuously converts calories into energy which is subsequently used up even when you are sleeping or are at rest
How the composition of the body impacts metabolism
The composition of your body will largely impact your metabolic rate; for instance, people with lower fat and higher muscle tissue will burn more calories. So, if you were to increase the percentage of muscle tissue in your body through strength training this would help you immensely in increasing your metabolism. Muscle tissue requires more energy than fatty tissue for their working; this would obviously mean that a greater muscle percentage would help to boost your metabolism and decrease your weight.
How increasing your metabolism impacts weight loss
The body’s base metabolic rate is the amount of energy that’s required to perform the core functions of the body when it’s at rest. For every 3500 hundred calories that are burned beyond this amount of energy, one pound of fat can be lost. People with a fast metabolic rate will burn those 3500 calories faster than a person with a slow metabolism will. For this reason, people with a high metabolic rate are often slimmer and lose weight quicker than individuals with a slower metabolic rate.
Tips for increasing your metabolism
If you are truly interested in increasing your metabolism, you have to quit the crash diets and start exercising more. While eating a healthy diet and limiting your consumption of sugars and fats is important to reaching your weight loss goals, following drastic diet plans that entirely eliminate a food group or border on starvation will trigger your body’s natural survival mechanism. This will start the vicious cycle of slowing your metabolism down and storing excess calories. When you are trying to decrease your weight, this is the last thing you want.
So, make sure that you do not starve yourself and let your body believe that it is under duress so that it does not start storing the excess calories.
Physical activity can help those people that are working on increasing metabolism. The body’s metabolic rate will be higher when it has more muscle mass because repairing and maintaining muscle requires more energy when compared to maintaining fatty tissue. When you build muscle, the body has to work harder to ensure that the muscles are working optimally. Consequently, more calories are burned. Anytime the body needs calories for energy, it turns to the fat stored in the cells first. The body uses this energy to maintain the body’s muscles. When this happens, weight decreases. If you work on building more muscle, you will be increasing your metabolism. Remember, people with higher metabolic rates tend to lose weight faster than those with slow metabolic rates.
Metabolism is a fine tuned process that also depends on certain key nutrients such as vitamins and minerals; any fluctuation in the amount of these nutrients can cause the metabolic rate to slip so certain supplements can also help to ensure that your metabolic rate stays high.
Want to discover even more about increasing your metabolism, then take a look at Michael Gale’s site on 101 ways to increase your metabolism for your free copy of Maximize Your Metabolism.