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Many of my overweight patients blame their struggles on their slow metabolism, whenever
I hear that I realize that a lot of people aren’t exactly sure what metabolism really
is and whether or not there’s anything that they can do to speed it up but it’s not
that complicated and if you understand what determines your metabolic rate, it’s a lot
easier to understand what you can and can’t do about it. Simply put, your metabolic rate
is the number of calories your body uses everyday just to keep your vital processes going sometimes
it’s called your resting metabolic rate because it’s referring only to those calories
you burn at rest to keep your organs like your brain, heart, and lungs functioning and
about 75% of all the calories you burn everyday are used just for these basic processes. The
rest of the calories you use during the day go to fuel your activity and to digest and
process your food. Each of us has our own unique resting metabolic rate that’s determined
primarily by how much lean body mass we have. You can think of your body as divided into
two parts, the fat mass and the lean mass that’s made up of everything that isn’t
fat like muscles, bones, and organs. Every pound of body fat you have burns only about
two calories a day but every pound of lean mass burns 7 times that amount so the more
lean mass you have, the higher your metabolic rate. Since a big portion of your lean body
mass is made up of muscle, one of the best things you can do to boost your metabolic
rate is to do some strength training exercises that will build muscle. This is one of the
reasons that weight tends to creep up with age, as people get older they tend to exercise
less and less intensely so they lose lean mass over time which drops the metabolic rate
and if they don’t cut calories to offset this decline the pounds start to pile up.
It is true that your metabolic rate can slow a bit when you start dieting and cut calories
it’s your body’s natural response to try to conserve if it sense that fewer calories
are coming in but the decrease in metabolic rate is relatively small and if you become
more active as you lose weight you can offset these small changes. It’s also a good idea
to eat small frequent meals to keep the body from shifting into conservation mode and if
you know someone who seems to eat all the time and yet never puts on an ounce, you might
want to chalk up their good luck to a fast metabolism that could be they have more muscle
than the average person which would make for a higher metabolic rate but naturally slender
people also tend to move around more, they fidget, they talk with their hands, they walk
down the halls to talk to a college instead of e-mailing, and more activity means more
calories burned so once you’ve made the commitment to boost your metabolism by building
more muscle, go ahead and put those muscles to use and move around frequently throughout
the day.