We have all heard it or even said it one time or another: "I'm not able to lose weight because of my metabolism." It's convenient to blame our unwanted weight on an abstract idea like metabolism, but let's look at the real importance of metabolism - and better yet, how to get the most "burn" for your buck by recharging your metabolism.
In the most basic sense, metabolism includes each of the chemical and physical changes that occur inside the cells of the body. Most often, though, metabolism refers to the process in which the body acquires and uses energy from food, so it really does have an important function in weight loss and gain.
Not everyone has the same metabolism, and our rates actually vary over the course of our lives, so someone who blames their metabolism isn't necessarily making excuses. Age affects metabolism, which will slow about 5% every 10 years after we turn 40, and by gender, as males usually burn more calories at rest than females, and by the quantity of muscle mass you have (more muscle generally means a higher rate of metabolism). Genetics also influences metabolism, not to mention pregnancy, as well as whether a woman decides to breast-feed.
Despite all of the wild cards, the simple fact is that if your calorie intake surpasses your metabolism, surplus energy will get stored in the body as fat. Though some of the factors affecting metabolic rate cannot be altered, fortunately, there are ways to rev up the metabolism you're born with.
The first guideline is to eat the correct foods in the right amounts. When you omit a meal, your body switches to starvation mode, which slows metabolism to conserve calories, because it does not know when it will be fed again. And when the metabolism slows down, so does your weight loss.
When you finally do eat food after skipping a meal, instead of using the calories in the food you have just taken in, your body converts them to body fat to keep for the next "fast." To keep your metabolism efficient, eat 4 - 6 smaller meals during the day and try to eat close to the same times each day. Most importantly, never skip a meal.
You can also step up your metabolic rate with exercise, including both aerobic routines and strength training. Aerobic activities, such as dancing, biking and running, burn more calories in the short term, while strength training will create more muscle, which increases metabolism and burns more calories in the long term - even when you're sitting still, muscle requires more calories to function than fat.
In fact, each pound of muscle uses 35 calories per day, while each pound of fat uses only 2 calories per day. Despite this, you might be surprised that the more weight you have, the faster your metabolism is likely to run. Simply put, the extra weight makes your body work more to maintain its processes.
This is partly why it's almost always easiest to lose weight when you begin dieting, and becomes harder as you continue because, when you are significantly overweight, your metabolism is already at a high rate, so that even a minor reduction in calories will yield an immediate weight loss.
But what happens after that immediate loss, when a plateau occurs and motivation seems to go by the "weigh" side? Persistent cravings and compulsions can quickly return, and when they do, do not overlook a valuable resource - lose weight self-hypnosis. Hypnotherapy can actually retrain your unconscious mind so that, in essence, you can do away with food cravings. When we examine why we snack, understanding why weight loss hypnosis works so successfully becomes clear.
For a lot of people, snacking has become a habit - maybe you do it automatically when you're driving or watching TV or when you're under stress. Hypnosis can actually reprogram your thoughts to break those associations, leaving you to watch TV or drive without experiencing the need to eat.
One of the most successful weight loss hypnosis methods for ending the snacking cycle is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, which relies on collaborating with the unconscious mind and getting it to use the same thought processes that are creating your appetite, to eliminate your appetite. NLP takes many years of study and practical experience for a hypnotherapist to learn and master, but positive results can come very quickly and seem almost magical to a person who has always suffered from cravings.
NLP can be equally as imperative as exercise and motivation because, as you learned above, it can help make sure that you eat the right kinds of foods at the right times, and this is a vital ingredient for turbo-charging your metabolism. If you aim to keep your metabolism at full speed and make sure that all of your exercise and hard work are not being wasted by surrendering to your food temptations, weight loss hypnosis and NLP can be a secret weapon to eliminate your cravings once and for all.
About The Author
Alan B. Densky, CH has worked with clients for appetite suppression and weight loss since 1978. Visit his hypnosis website to watch his Free hypnosis videos, or learn about his superb lose weight hypnosis CDs or his effective video lose weight by hypnosis DVDs.
The author of this article has chosen to make this article available with free reprint rights. Click here to copy this article.
Disclaimer: All information on this site is provided for informational purposes only! By no means is any
information presented herein intended to substitute for the advice provided to you by any health care or other professional
or organization.
