Boosting Your Metabolism - Part 22 - Common Metabolism-Boosting Myths

Myth No. 2 – Dropping Calorie Intake

As we discussed earlier in this blog series (but it’s so important that it deserves an encore near the end), trying to lose weight by drastically cutting down on your calories doesn’t work; in fact, it’s unhealthy.

The thing to remember is that the body’s ability to lose weight is not controlled by calories. Calories are the input. The real control mechanism is that famous concept that you’ve become very familiar with now: metabolism.

Calories are merely units of energy. It’s how your body deals with that energy that determines whether weight is gained or lost.

So with that being said, cutting down your caloric intake to, say, 1000 calories a day isn’t necessarily going to help you lose weight; because it doesn’t necessarily change your metabolism.

Indeed, as you know, if you slow down your caloric intake, your body – which is always trying to help you in the best way that it knows how – will slow down its metabolism.

Really, it makes sense: the body says that something has gone wrong; instead of the 2000 calories that it needs, it’s only getting 1000. The body doesn’t know why this is happening; it doesn’t know that you want to lose weight.

It just senses that something is wrong; perhaps you’re trapped in a cave or something, or stuck in a snowstorm. So the body, trying to help you, will slow down its metabolism; it will do its best to slow down the conversion rate, so that you have as much energy on hand as possible.

Now, if your body was able to read this book and you could say: look, please just do what you normally do, but do it with 1000 fewer calories a day for a while, then we might actually get somewhere.

But the body doesn’t work that way. It won’t help you lose weight if you dramatically cut down on calories.

It will not only slow down metabolism, but also (and here’s the worst part), if and when you ever increase calories again, your body will have to deal with that via a slower metabolic engine. So you can actually gain weight if, after cutting down your calories for a period of time, you consume extra calories (say while on a vacation for instance).

See you next time with Myth No. 3.

Take care and best wishes

Sandra

Boosting Your Metabolism - Part 2 - What is Metabolism?

Hi again,

Before you can begin to boost your metabolism, it makes sense to explain exactly what metabolism is, and how it works – but don’t worry, you only need to know the basics!

Some people think that the metabolism is a kind of organ, or a body part, that influences digestion. Actually, the metabolism isn’t any particular body part. It’s the process by which the body converts food into energy.

Hence, you’ve likely heard of the phrase metabolic process used synonymously with the term metabolism, because they both mean the same thing.


The Medical Mumbo Jumbo

Again, don’t worry - this isn’t a complicated medical text (which should be great news to most of you!), and so we don’t need to spend an unnecessary amount of time and space focusing on the layered complexity of the human body and its extraordinary intelligence.

Without drilling deeply into medical details (which are not relevant for our general understanding purposes) it is however helpful to briefly look at the biological mechanisms behind metabolism.

Metabolism, is the process of transforming food (e.g. nutrients) into fuel (e.g. energy). The body uses this energy to conduct a vast array of essential functions.

In fact, your ability to read this page, literally, is driven by your metabolism.

If you had no metabolism – that is, if you had no metabolic process that was converting food into energy – then you wouldn’t be able to move.

In fact, long before you realized that you couldn’t move a finger or lift your foot, your internal processes would have stopped; because the basic building blocks of life – circulating blood, transforming oxygen into carbon dioxide, expelling potentially lethal wastes through the kidneys and so on – all of these depend on metabolism.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone say that they have a slow metabolism. While they may struggle with unwanted weight gain due to metabolic factors, they certainly have a functioning metabolism. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t even be able to speak (because that, too, requires energy that comes from, you guessed it: metabolism!).

It’s also interesting to note that, while we conveniently refer to the metabolic process as if it were a single function, it’s really a catch-all term for countless functions that are taking place inside the body. Every second of every minute of every day of your life – even, of course, when you sleep – numerous chemical conversions are taking place through metabolism, or metabolic functioning. Anabolism (building cells) and catabolism (breaking down cells), are two of those functions we’ll be looking at a little more in Boosting Your Metabolism – Part 3.

So to sum up, metabolism can reasonably be referred to as a harmonizing process that manages to achieve two critical bodily functions that, in a sense, seem to be at odds with each other.

And that’s it – that’s about as much as you need to know about what metabolism is to start boosting yours, and when you do, you will find out that it is not just a healthy way to lose weight, but one of the most incredibly easy ways to lose weight too!

If you would like to find out more about a really great metabolism boosting proramme, just Click Here.

Till next time

Best Wishes

Sandra