Rev Up Your Metabolism: The Ultimate Guide to a Faster Metabolism eBook

#Boost #Metabolism #eBook

INTRODUCTION

Metabolism. This is perhaps the most frequently used word in the weight loss/weight gain vocabulary. It’s quite common to overhear people talking about their struggles or triumphs over the holiday bulge or love handles, in terms of whether their metabolism is working or not. Doctors often refer to metabolism when trying to explain why starvation and water-loss diets don’t work.

With all the focus on this rather daunting and biologically charged word, you would assume that most people actually understand it. Or at least, have some fundamental knowledge about how to speed up their metabolism, right? Wrong!

TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING METABOLISM

Regrettably, many people don’t even understand the concept of metabolism and metabolic change. There is so much information floating around out there that there’s bound to be some confusion and conflicting messages. And, understandably, many people mistake their own weight gain and weight loss experiences as a matter of metabolic change. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it isn’t.

For example, there are scientific ways to increase your metabolism, and thus enable your body to burn more calories. Eating certain foods more frequently is one way to do this. Another way to visibly lose weight – at least on a perceived, temporary level – is to sit in a steam room for a few hours. I’ll cover these more closely later in this book.

LOW-FAT LABELS

Another reason people might be confused is because there are a lot of food and supplement companies on the market who don’t want you to know fact from fiction. They want you to believe that eating their “low-fat” or “diet” foods or using their products is going to somehow speed up your metabolism. While some low-fat foods might play a role in an overall eating program that is designed to speed up metabolism, merely eating foods that come from packaging that screams “LOW-FAT!” won’t do anything.

In fact, believe it or not, many people actually gain weight when they eat too many “low-fat” products. Many of these products are laden with calories that still must be burned off or they turn into body fat.

ANABOLISM AND CATABOLISM

One function of our metabolism is to create tissue and cells. For example, if you cut your finger, your body (if it’s functioning properly) will begin the process of creating skin cells to clot the blood and start the healing process. This creation process is called anabolism.

On the other hand, there is the exact opposite activity taking place in other parts of the body. Instead of building cells and tissue, the body is breaking down energy so that it can do what it’s supposed to do. For example, when you exercise, your body temperature rises as your heartbeat increases and remains within a certain range.

METABOLISM AND WEIGHT LOSS

By now, you should have a sense of how metabolism relates to weight loss by breaking cells down and transforming them into energy through catabolism. To understand this process even more clearly, let’s look at an important player in the weight loss game – calories.

Calories are simply units of measure. They aren’t actually things in and of themselves; they are labels for other things, just like how an inch really isn’t anything, but it measures the distance between two points. So, what do calories measure? Easy – they measure energy.