Metabolism determines the ease of gaining, losing, or maintaining weight.
You’ve heard of “Fast” and “Slow” metabolism as reasons (or excuses) as to why you (or others) can’t seem to gain or lose weight.
At the simplest level metabolism is a series of chemical reactions that happen within the cells that control how your body ‘creates’ and uses energy.
Every second of the day the body is performing actions/reactions to use as energy- from exercising to simply keeping the heart beating to breathing the body is using energy.
Metabolism can be broken down into two main processes:
Anabolism: Building of new and maintaining cells/tissues and storing of energy.
Catabolism: Breaking down of cells/tissues for energy to move, energize, and heat the body.
Having a healthy metabolism can make maintaining and controlling your weight a breeze. The problem here lies that most people who struggle to lose weight have a slower-than-desired metabolism.
When we have a slow metabolism, overeating for our bodies’ needs comes pretty easy. Eating more food (energy) than what metabolizes promotes the anabolic response of storing energy, in the form of body fat.
Your metabolism is always working to maintain your body weight in what we call a state of ‘Homeostasis’ or balance. This is why quick weight loss (or gain), rarely results in a sustainable weight loss (or gain). Making major changes to your food and activity choices over a couple of days, say Monday through Friday, isn’t enough to create a change that will last for good. Keeping these new changes in your habits in harmony with your daily(weekly) life will help create a new ideal and balanced weight for your body to recognize.
Now, How do we speed up our metabolism in a way that is sustainable for weight loss in the long term??
Before discussing the variables we can control, I’d be remiss not to mention the one variable you can not necessarily control, your genes. If you are naturally a bigger person, you will tend to naturally need more calories than others. If you are smaller, you need less than others. Size (really Tall and Heavily muscled persons) is relative to your energy needs
The Controlable variables:
Diet:
Controlling calories, i.e. not chronically overeating or undereating will keep metabolism in check at baseline.
Eating on a schedule, and eating at the same time every day can help “tune” your metabolism to be more efficient in utilizing energy
Eating HIGH PROTEIN, protein requires a ton of energy to break down. About 20-30% compared to carbs at 5-10% and fats at 0-3%. More energy is needed to break down protein, and higher metabolism goes.
Exercise:
The movement uses energy, i.e. burning calories. This means everything from walking to lifting heavy weights. THE EASIEST variable to change here is to move more by walking more than you do now… especially around meals.
Building Muscle, Muscle is a high-energy tissue. Meaning the more muscle mass we have, the more energy our bodies need to maintain the muscle mass, therefore, speeding up our metabolism.
Sleep:
The better rested you are the better your body is at regulating its energy needs. When we get poor sleep, the body’s ability to utilize and regulate our blood sugar levels drops tremendously, which then creates a proper amount of energy which triggers a response in the brain to search for sugary and fatty foods to help with the lack of energy.
Sleep is also where the body does the majority of its anabolic recovery responses. The better quality of sleep you get, the more muscle mass you’re able to build helping you utilize and burn energy more efficiently.
Sleep Tips:
Go to sleep and wake at the same times every day
Avoid high amounts of stimulants 10hrs before bed
Reduce stress by meditating and breathwork
Avoid screens and bright lights in the hours before bed
Dont consume calories within 2hrs of lying down
TL;DR
Speed up your metabolism by:
Control Calories, Follow an eating schedule, and EAT MORE PROTEIN
Move more, build & add muscle
Get your beauty rest
Struggling to find sustainable habits for your health goals?
Stop struggling and get some help… here for you when you're ready my friend-