Metabolism and Weight Loss
In all likelihood you have heard people blame, many times, their weight on a slow metabolism. What does that really mean and is metabolism actually the perpetrator? Is it possible to step up your metabolism to burn more calories and lose weight?
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Calories
Calories are simply units of measurement, not literal things. They are labels like an inch which actually is nothing, but it measures the length or distance between two points.
So what do calories measure?
Energy
Your body produces energy from the food you consume, whether it is healthy food or not. It produces energy from fruits and vegetables by applying the same exact process that uses to produce energy from chocolate bars and candy.
While you know it is best for your body to get energy from fruit and vegetables, your body does not assess the food. It produces energy from whatever you feed it.
It may sound odd, but the body actually does not care. However, YOU SHOULD. To the body, energy is energy. It takes whatever it gets, and does not really know that some foods are healthier than others. It is kind of a garbage disposal: it takes what you put down in it, whether it should go down or not.
So let’s apply this to the body, and to weight gain. When the body receives a calorie it must do something with that energy. If a carrot delivers 100 calories to the body, it has to accept those 100 calories. The same goes for 200 calories from chocolate bars.
The body does one of two things to the energy, it either metabolizes it via anabolism (one part of metabolism), or it metabolizes it via catabolism (another part of metabolism). That is, it will either convert the energy (calories) into cells/tissue, or it will utilize that energy (calories) to break down cells.
When there is an excess of energy, and the body can not use this energy to deal with any demands at the time, it will be forced to produce cells with the additional energy. It has to.
It does not necessarily want to, but after working out that the energy can not be used to do anything (such as help with your exercise or digest some food), it has to convert it into cells through anabolism .
What about those extra cells or adipose tissue? (They are also known as fat cells) Yeah, you guessed it: turned into more weight.
In a nutshell, the whole calorie/metabolism/weight gain thing is actually just about surplus energy. When there are too many calories in the body, they are transformed into fat.
Occasionally those extra calories are transformed into muscle. In fact, muscles need calories to preserve their mass, so people with strong muscle tone burn calories without in reality doing very much; their metabolism burns it for them.
This is the basic cause why physical exercise and building lean muscle is part of a total program to boost your metabolism. The more lean muscle you have, the more places extra calories can go before they are turned into adipose tissue or more commonly fat.
Metabolism, Weight Loss and Metabolism
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