Putting Your Metabolism to Work for You!

When most people think of metabolism, they think of burning calories – in particular, how many calories they use on a daily basis. Some people seem to be blessed with a “good metabolism” that allows them to drink milkshakes and eat pie. But metabolism is not a fixed number. There is a great deal you can do to influence your metabolism and put it to work for you. If you are not one of the lucky people who can eat whatever they want, take heart. Your metabolism is, among other things, a balancing act between constructive and destructive activities. All of the thousands of biochemical processes that are simultaneously occurring in your body can be divided into two categories: anabolism (building up) or catabolism (breaking down). Food is broken down so energy is released; molecules are built up so energy is stored. Nutrients are broken down; cells, proteins, and tissues are built up. Simply being alive burns calories. Your body burns calories even while you are asleep. The number of calories your body needs each day depends on three separate processes:

Your resting metabolic rate, or RMR. This is the number of calories your body needs for basic functions, such as breathing. This number depends largely on how much muscle you have. Most men have more lean body mass (muscle) than most women, so in general a man will burn more calories than a woman, even if they are both sleeping. When people age, they tend to lose muscle mass, and as a result their RMR declines – unless they use strength training to keep their muscles strong. RMR accounts for approximately 70 percent of the total number of calories your body burns in a day.

The thermic effect of food, or TEF (also called thermogenesis). This is a fancy way of describing the number of calories your body uses to digest, absorb, and metabolize the food you eat. TEF accounts for approximately 10 percent of the total number of calories your body burns in a day. TEF is the reason why celery is technically a negative calorie food. Ice water also uses up more calories than it provides, because your body derives no calories from water, but must expend energy to warm it up. Unfortunately, this does not work as a weight loss tip! The number of calories required is minimal.

Your physical activity. Moving your muscles requires energy. The more you move, the more calories you’ll burn. Physical activity accounts for approximately 20 percent of the total number of calories your body burns in a day – but this number can vary a great deal between individuals. This is why exercise is so important!

If you take in more calories than you use up during the day – that is, you eat too much – you put on fat. Too much fat is unhealthy, but a little bit provides your body with an emergency supply of energy-especially eating the “healthy fats”. In women, fat cells create estrogen. Women who are approaching menopause – when estrogen levels plummet – sometimes develop a “menopot” (a small amount of belly fat), which is nature’s way of ensuring that the body still has some estrogen. Too much fat, however, may result in enough extra estrogen to cause hormone-related problems. If you are carrying extra fat, you can burn it off with exercise – but only if you take in fewer calories than your body needs, which forces your body to dip into its energy reserves. Unfortunately for all the dieters out there, it takes a lot of exercise to burn off the calories in a cookie. If you’re looking at the calorie counter on your treadmill, you might get discouraged! I could insert a table here that shows exactly how many minutes you would have to exercise to burn off a specific number of calories while doing different activities… but I’m not going to. This program is not about counting calories. It’s about focusing on fitness and nurturing yourself in healthy ways for the rest of your life. If you keep making healthy decisions and moving in a positive direction, over time you will become fit without an unhealthy preoccupation with calorie counts. So what is a “normal” number of calories to consume in a day? When you read the labels on packaged foods, the “percent daily value” figures are based on an average diet of 2000 calories per day. Whether you would gain or lose weight on 2000 calories a day depends on the three factors you just read about above. This is where exercise comes in. If you eat more than your body needs, you can burn up the extra calories with exercise before they have a chance to turn into fat. Athletes can consume 6,000 calories a day without getting fat, partly because of their active lifestyle, and partly because they have more muscles, which use up more energy. Some athletes get in the habit of living large while they are young and active – especially football players, who are encouraged to be big. When these athletes get older and their level of personal activity declines, they may still continue to consume the same number of calories. We’ve all seen what happens next. All those calories that are no longer getting burned are stored as fat. This is where it pays to know a little more about how to manipulate your metabolism.