Find out how our health and lifestyle choices impact our metabolism.
The metabolic process is something that occurs constantly. It’s how our bodies convert the nutrients in meals into the energy we need to live and function. Like all other forms of life, it is essential to our survival.
Metabolic processes are often blamed rather than praised. Surely you have overheard the lament, “I can’t lose weight,” or maybe even used it yourself. My energy expenditure must be low.
Rarely does this occur. Resting metabolic rate, the number of calories or other units of energy that our bodies expend while at rest, varies naturally depending on factors including age, sex, and body size.
These variations, however, are quite natural and are not typically the reason why people struggle to lose weight or become overweight.
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Excess energy is typically stored as fat because of our inability to control our caloric intake and lack of regular physical activity. Avoiding attempts to manipulate your metabolic rate in favour of increasing your activity level and improving your nutrition are the most effective means of weight reduction.
It’s true that our behaviours rarely have any effect on our basal metabolic rate, but they do have five major effects on our metabolism nonetheless.
1: The Connection Between Diet and Metabolic Rate
It has been said that consuming specific meals or eating at certain times of the day will speed up your metabolism. Even if you eat at different times of the day, you won’t notice a significant change in your metabolism’s speed.
The few exceptions are not healthy ways to lose weight.
Caffeine, for instance, has been demonstrated to boost calorie burn in the short term. A habitual coffee or tea consumer, however, will find that the stimulatory effects of caffeine wear off quickly. Most products marketed as metabolism boosters are worthless, and some might even be harmful.
In other words, how quickly you metabolise food is less important than how you metabolise it.
This means passing up processed sugars like those in sodas, candies, and many baked products and avoiding fried meals like potato chips. It is most common for these types of fuel to be deposited in the body as fat.
Instead, prioritise foods like nutritious grains, lean meats, veggies, and fruit, which the body can more efficiently utilise as fuel.
2: Exercise and the Metabolism
Most of the calories most individuals burn each day come from their resting metabolism, which you have little control over. But strength training can be useful. Even at rest, muscle needs more energy than fat.
This is a major factor in why women, who typically have less muscular tissue than males, burn less calories.
Therefore, this is one reason why persons over the age of 60 burn fewer calories than those under the age of 30. Muscle mass declines with age, but keeping your muscles active helps slow this process.
While increasing your strength can help your resting metabolism, increasing your aerobic exercise is the surest approach to shed extra pounds. Just 25 or 30 minutes of walking five days a week can make a difference.
Even more calories can be burned by engaging in vigorous physical activity, such as jogging or aerobics.
Exercising not only helps you lose weight and gain muscle, but it also causes your body to produce more of a type of fat called brown fat. White fat, which can be used to store energy, makes up the great bulk of human body fat.
Some of the fat on our bodies is brown, and it helps keep us warm by using energy. This brown fat typically accumulates in the neck and shoulders.
3: How Your Metabolism Responds to Your Present Weight
Energy production and breakdown are the two fundamental components of metabolism. The processes of anabolism include cell division, energy storage, and tissue repair.
The breakdown of fat and carbohydrates by catabolism provides the energy needed to power anabolism, maintain body temperature, and contract muscles.
Following a meal, the hormone insulin helps regulate this cyclical process by stimulating anabolism.
Being severely overweight increases the likelihood that your body will become insulin resistant. This prevents sugar from being used as an energy source and instead keeps it circulating in the blood.
Type 2 diabetes mellitus describes this disease. It can harm your body and increase your chance for serious diseases like heart disease, stroke, and kidney failure. However, Type 2 diabetes is not necessarily irreversible.
Many patients with Type 2 diabetes are able to reverse the disease by adopting healthier lifestyle behaviours, such as diet and exercise, and by reducing their body mass index (BMI).
4: The Impact of Your Previous Weight on Your Metabolism
Even if you’ve successfully reduced your weight, your metabolism may remain impaired due to your history of obesity. That’s why it’s so much more challenging to keep the weight off than it was to lose it.
A person who has fought with obesity their whole life and someone who has maintained a healthy weight throughout their lives both weigh the same.
Nothing bad will happen if the first individual just does ordinary things and eats normal amounts. However, the second person runs the risk of regaining a lot of weight if they switch from a limited diet to a normal one.
The specific origins of this phenomenon remain unknown at this time. Hormonal changes after weight reduction, however, have been linked to a slowed metabolism and an increased appetite.
Doctors at Rush sometimes prescribe appetite suppressants to aid with this issue. A small number of appetite suppressants have been licenced by the FDA for use in conjunction with regular exercise and a healthy diet in the maintenance of weight loss. Not yet have pharmaceutical options been developed to boost metabolic rate.
5: The Impact of Sleep and Food Deprivation on Metabolic Rate
Eating too little can have the opposite effect of what you intend and cause your metabolism to slow, regardless of your current weight.
Some people, for instance, just eat evening instead of breakfast and lunch. However, your body will interpret a lack of food as a signal to slow down its metabolic rate, so eating less throughout the day will have the opposite effect.
As soon as you put food into your mouth, your body begins working to absorb and store as many of the calories as possible from that meal.
Eat three or four small meals each day, with a focus on veggies, nutritious grains, and lean proteins, even if you want and need to drop a lot of weight.
Finally, aim for seven to nine hours of sleep per night. If you don’t get enough sleep, your body may start producing more insulin, which might cause you to gain weight.
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But what if Your Metabolism Really is Slow?
While our weight and lifestyle choices are the most significant factors in our metabolism, underlying disorders can account for a multitude of metabolic issues. Unexpected weight gain can be caused by a number of different medical issues, some of which are listed below:
- Hypothyroidism
- Disorder characterised by the development of cysts in the ovaries
- Diseases of the pituitary gland
- Condition caused by excess production of the hormone corticotropin
However, hypothyroidism is the most prevalent cause of a slowed metabolism, and it affects a disproportionately large number of women. Along with the aforementioned ailments, it can also bring on fatigue, dizziness, skin issues, and constipation.
Consult your primary care physician whenever you experience sudden and unexplained weight loss or gain, especially if you also experience any of the following symptoms.
