subject: Will Increasing Your Metabolism Help With Weight Control? [print this page] Increasing your metabolism is one part of the weight loss formula. Increasing metabolism is as important to weight loss as exercise and a healthy diet. Your metabolic rate is the ability of your body to burn calories for bodily functions including physical activities, breathing, pumping blood, and digestions. Many people will tell you that the entire concept of weight loss revolves around higher energy usage and lower calorie consumption. Basically, you will decrease your weight if you move more and eat less. However, you don't need to starve yourself. In fact, if your diet primarily includes foots like fruits and vegetables, you might not have to reduce your intake. You will however, have to ensure that the calories you do consume are burnt optimally.
This is the point where increasing your metabolism becomes an important part of the weight loss puzzle. Each person has a unique metabolic rate that is based on body weight, dietary habits, and gender. People that have a slower metabolic rate are usually prone to weight gain because the body doesn't burn all the calories that are consumed to fuel the basic bodily functions, storing excess calories as fat in the cells. This means that increasing your metabolism results in fewer calories being stored as fat, which should help decrease your weight.
Metabolism 101:
Metabolism can be explained as the rate at which a body burns calories that are consumed. This process provides the energy that used to perform various physical and physiological functions. Metabolism is a process that is constantly occurring, converting calories into fuel that is used even when you're at rest.
The body's composition and how it affects metabolism
The body's metabolic rate is largely impacted by the composition of the body. For example, individuals that have more muscle and less fat will burn more calories than a person with more fat than muscle. Increasing metabolism can be accomplished by increasing the amount of muscle tissue the body has. Strength training is an ideal activity for increasing your metabolism. Because muscle tissue naturally uses more energy than fatty tissue, having a greater percentage of muscle tissue will help boost the metabolism and decrease your weight.
How 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 on increasing your metabolism
If you are working on increasing your metabolism, you have to work out more often and stop drastic dieting habits. While eating a healthy diet and reducing your consumption of sugar and fat is critical to weight loss, drastic dieting habits that resemble starvation diets will completely eliminate some food groups from your diet, which triggers the body's natural survival mechanism. This survival instinct slows the metabolism, allowing the body to store as many calories as possible. When you're trying to lose weight, you don't want this to happen.
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.
The metabolism is a process that's finely tuned and requires key nutrients. When the levels of nutrients fluctuate, the metabolic rate can slow down. To make sure you're increasing your metabolism and it remains high, certain supplements can be taken.
