Metabolism is a word that surely means a lot to those who are trying to lose weight. It will be even more important to those who have tried all diets and counted calories all their lives, only to feel like their battle with the bulge will never be over. Of course, when it comes down to this, it’s only metabolism that matters. The word can have a lot of meanings because it is a body process that functions in multiple ways. However, for a weight-watcher, metabolism is simply the process that burns unwanted fat and sheds off unwanted weight. The slower the metabolism, the slower the fat burns. The faster it is, the shorter the route to a leaner, healthier body.
If you find yourself struggling with metabolism issues, you’ll never be able to make them work for unless you understand the factors behind them. So if you’re serious about keeping that weight off, get to know these factors, understand them and determine how you may be able to work around them so you can improve your metabolic rate and make it your ally in your fight for fitness.
You’ve heard it all before but yes, there are many factors involved in the rate at which your body metabolizes the food you eat. The first one you’d like to consider might be age. It may be frustrating for those who are on the older end of the spectrum but age does contribute to how fast or slow one’s metabolism will be. When you’re younger, everything involved in your fat-burning process is young. That means optimal performance. But as you age, this performance deteriorates as well, so the most obvious conclusion is, younger means faster metabolism and older means slower metabolism. You will simply have to deal with that.
The good thing is, it’s not only age that affects how you burn fat. That means there are many ways for you to compensate. One is by exercising more. The more you move, the more you help your metabolism pick up speed and the faster you burn fat. You’ll have to take into consideration though that the greater your muscle mass, you’ll burn that fat even faster. This is why people are often advised to go weight-training so they build more muscle and burn more fat.
One common misconception about losing weight is that the fewer calories you consume the more fat you’ll lose. This is not entirely true because the body has a natural buffer system which tells you to burn fewer calories when you don’t consume enough calories. It is good to limit your caloric intake, but to have less than what your body requires is only going to boomerang on your weight loss efforts because you’ll only end up burning less fat.
Other causes of slow metabolism can be genetic or acquired defects of the thyroid gland which regulates metabolic activity. In these cases, medical intervention may be required. Some people even have to undergo surgery to improve their thyroid functions.