Your Metabolism
Your metabolism is a major factor in your weight loss success. Simply put, your metabolism controls how fast you burn calories and fat.
You may know people who can eat anything and always stay stick-thin. These people have a naturally high metabolism which burns off anything they eat while just going about their everyday lives.
The single most important KEY to losing weight is the speeding up your metabolism. One of the easiest ways to do this is the opposite thing you would expect to be told when on a diet - The answer is EATING.
Food & Metabolism
You can't eat anything you want, or whatever you want. You have to follow certain rules. The easiest way to speed up your metabolism is the practice of eating small, frequent meals - one approximately every three waking hours. This is by far the most effective way to speed up your metabolism. It's so effective, in fact, that when you see the results, you may wonder why you ever had any difficulty losing weight in the past.
5 - 6 meals a day is the answer to boosted metabolism and quicker fat loss.
The simple reason for this is that it takes about three hours to digest each meal and that will just about allow you to fit them into your waking hours.
Cardiovascular exercise & MetabolismThere is another way to increase your metabolism and it is a word that most people on diets hate to hear - EXERCISE.
Cardiovascular exercise like running, swimming or cycling is great for boosting your metabolism and the reason why, is that your metabolic rate stays boosted from anywhere between 2 and 16 hours after you finish exercise. So you can effectively sit watching the TV and burn a higher number of calories and fat than normal. This is also a great time to eat one of your 6 small meals, because more of it will be used up by your body. Exercise also slows digestion and keeps you feeling full for longer.
Resistance exercise & MetabolismThe other form of exercise that is a great metabolism booster is resistance exercise. This involves anything using weights. Muscles are like machines. Imagine them like an engine that needs constant fuel. The more muscle you have, then the faster your metabolism will be at rest, as they burn more fuel.
Every pound of muscle in your body requires 50 calories a day for maintenance. We can do another quick calculation here:
This means gaining 10lbs of muscle would cause you to burn 500 extra calories per day.
Many women worry about doing exercise with weights because they don't want to end up looking "muscley". The simple fact is that they can't. Women's bodies are not built like men's and will not build muscle in the same way. If you ever see muscley women in magazines or on TV, it is because they have taken something to get their bodies to grow that way.
When women do resistance training with weights, the results are a firmer body with more defined features.
The curse of Yo-Yo dietingThe reason so many diets fail is linked to muscle metabolism. When you stop eating so much, you are effectively starving your self and your body will start to use muscle for fuel. This then reduces the amount of calories you are burning every day you continue with your diet.
Muscle loss is also why older people tend to put on a bit of extra weight. As you get older you will find your self doing less strenuous activity. If you muscle is not used, then it will start to break down. This reduces your metabolic rate and causes you to put on weight.
Metabolism slow down is the main curse of Yo-Yo dieting. When you diet, your body is receiving less food. The problem with this is that evolution has designed your body to combat this. In early times if there was a food shortage, then this was a serious threat on your life. To solve the problem, when you eat less food your body slows your metabolism to be more efficient at running on less calories and also goes into a "fat storage mode". This means you lose less and less weight as the diet goes on.
Most diets leave you feeling deprived of foods and in the end you have to give the diet up because you just can't live that way for long. Now a massive problem arises. Your metabolism has slowed down, so when you give up your diet and start eating normally again you burn less calories per day. This results in you gaining more weight than when you started your diet. The depression of this dilemma causes you to start a diet again and the cycle repeats. This is the effect of Yo-Yo dieting.
The effects of Yo-Yo dieting happen to so many people who are so eager to lose weight. However not having the proper weight loss information at hand will, and usually does, leave them in a worse state then when they started.
