How many times have you asked someone who appears to be eating large amounts of food, but maintaining the figure of an over enthusiastic long distance runner, how they mange it, only to receive the somewhat unlikely reply that it’s just their metabolism? So what do you need to know about metabolism and how can it help you to achieve your weight loss goals?
The metabolic rate is simply the rate at which you use up energy as in calories. The higher the metabolic rate the more calories you burn, the better the weight loss. The lower the rate the fewer you burn. This can depend on a number of different factors.
Surprisingly and contrary to what appears to be basic logic, eating less can sometimes slow your diet down, or at least it can slow down the amount of weight loss. The thing is that many nutritionists believe that when you eat very small amounts of calories, the body “thinks” that there is not enough food available.
So in an afford to conserve the energy that is available it starts to slow the metabolism down, so that it can make the most use of the reserves that it has. So it is possible that far from helping your diet, that eating too little can actually slow your weight loss.
The theory is that the body will then do everything to conserve the best stores of energy that it has. This means that it is possible that the body will, instead of using up the reserves of fat and making you thinner, actually start to use the muscle tissue and burn this so that it can maintain a reserve.
Possibly one way to make sure that this does not happen is to make sure that you are eating enough food to keep you body from believing that it should go into starvation mode. But, at the same time, to control your calorific intake so that you will achieve the weight loss that is suitable for you.
There is not an answer that will suit everyone as to how many calories is enough to help with your weight loss. The best way to work out what is best for you is to visit a qualified nutritionist who will be able to tell you the most appropriate amount of calories for your dietary requirements.
Although the metabolism can slow when dieting to achieve weight loss it is believed by some that exercise can help. This may help in two ways. First the metabolic rate can be higher when exercising and so help to burn off those extra calories and help weight loss. Also exercising so that you gain more muscle can help to burn more calories as it thought that muscle burns calories more quickly than fat.
One of the best ways to improve your metabolic rate and at the same time gain more muscle and help weight loss is to do more exercise. This can not only help to burn calories but also to add to the amount of muscle and allow the body to burn the calories more efficiently.