When you’re trying your best to get into better shape, it can be very frustrating to keep returning to the scale only to see how little progress you’ve made. When you’ve tried every new diet, and bought every book, things can seem impossible, but could it be something other than diet that’s keeping that extra weight on? If any of that sounds like your situation, then it could be your metabolism. The following article is created by an expert from Functional Medicine Studio City which will be exploring your metabolism’s role in keeping you healthy.
What Is the Metabolism?
Metabolism is the name given to the chemical procedure carried out by the body when it converts the food you eat or the fact that your body has stored it into energy. Even if you are lying very still, the body requires an energy source to keep all its involuntary functions going. Every process in the body, including thinking, will burn calories. It is a small cost but in biological terms, it counts. This is particularly true during sleep when the body is making all of the repairs and replacing cells that have become too damaged or weak to go on. During these rest periods, the food or fat your body has collected is converted into its most basic parts to be used to nourish the body and build new cells. In general, the number of calories that it takes to make this happen is called the metabolic rate.
Metabolic Rate
Doctors from Functional Medicine Digestions say that there are several factors that play a major role in dictating how many calories it will take to keep body functions moving and make it possible for you to repair cells. Age is a major factor to consider in metabolism. When people get older, the metabolism tends to slow down quite a lot. That is why older people tend to gain weight much more quickly if they aren’t as active as in their youth.
A slower metabolism means that you won’t burn calories or metabolize the fats stored in your body as quickly, so you are likely to end up gaining a few inches over time. Your size also plays a fairly large role in determining how many calories you burn. Big people burn more calories than smaller people because it takes more energy to run a larger body. Sex is also a factor, in that women have smaller muscle mass, so they burn fewer calories in general than men.
What Might Cause Your Metabolism to Slow Down
Weight management and your metabolism are fiercely intertwined. Metabolism is defined as the process through which people break down food to nourish and repair themselves. It regulates your absorption of nutrients and how they are stored in the body. When you want to achieve health goals and reach a lower weight, variances or changes in your metabolism could be a real obstacle, but the question is, how does this happen? Functional Medicine Los Angeles listed down some possible reasons that might cause your metabolism to slow down.
- Your Age
Functional Medicine Doctors say that as people get older, the body loses some of its ability to regenerate and repair cells that are damaged or have gotten overworked and need to be replaced. This is because as humans age, their metabolism will naturally slow down, causing them to store fat that they were at one time able to burn by simply being active. As people progress into their late 30s and early 40s, their metabolism slows down and becomes less efficient.
- Sedentary Lifestyle
When was the last time you got to do something physical? A physically demanding lifestyle can help you to keep healthy and make sure that your metabolism keeps working at a more efficient level. As people grow older, their metabolism will begin to slow down, so working out or having some kind of activity schedule can help to fight some of the effects of this. People with an already sedentary lifestyle will experience increased effects of this, because if the body records that it doesn’t need a lot of calories on a daily basis, then it will optimize the metabolism to burn only what it needs. That means that if you eat more calories than you use, that food eaten will become fat in the body.
- Skipping Meals
A lot of people have become used to eating very few meals in a day. Depending on your activity level, this could be very bad for your metabolism because your body will think that it is starving and convert the foods you eat to fat to make sure there is always energy available. It can also make you sleep strange hours to conserve energy resulting in lethargy. This can keep you from enjoying the quality of life that promotes other healthy behaviors and thus create a vicious cycle of lethargy and weight gain.
As you can see, very small changes can have a drastic impact on your metabolism and how well you are able to lose weight.
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