If you are anything like I, in your youth you ate whatever you want, whenever you wanted with out any concern about gaining weight. Dieting, calories, metabolism, these were words that only fell into my vocabulary later on in life, as I got older I got fatter, now not a day go by without me closely examining the food I eat, how many calories does it have, is it healthy and nutritious, will I gain even more weight if I eat it?
What went wrong, why I can’t I just eat like I use too? Well the answer could lie in my metabolism. To understand the effect your metabolism has on your weight and how you can burn more calories to lose weight by speeding up your metabolism, read the following taken from Southasiamail.com
Speeding Up Your Metabolism To Burn More Calories And Lose Weight
Have you ever wondered why some people eat whatever they want, never say no to desserts, rarely if ever exercise, and never appear to gain weight? On the other hand, you do all the right things and keep putting on pounds.
Suzanne Somers, television star, sums up the problem, “Around age 40 I put on 20 pounds. I had always had a perfect metabolism. But my metabolism betrayed me as it does most people, except for a very rare few, who will always be thin.”
Why does this happen? A report from Johns Hopkins, confirms the answer rests in your metabolism. It determines how your body converts what you eat or drink into either energy or stored fat. The good news is that regardless of your age or weight there are ways to speed up metabolic rate and burn more calories.
Everyone has what’s called a “resting metabolic rate”. It’s the metabolic furnace that burns up calories while we’re sleeping, reading or watching television. Every 24 hours, as our hearts beat 100,000 times, calories are required to keep us alive. These everyday functions require 65 to 75 percent of the total number of calories we receive from eating and drinking.
Energy for physical activity requires between 15 to 30 percent of the total. The remaining 5 to 10 percent of calories is burned during digestion and transporting food.
So how can you kick-start your metabolism and speed it up to burn more calories? A good start is to build up more muscle, but not to run the four minute mile. Rather, each pound of muscle burns up six calories a day compared to a mere two calories a day for fat.
This means if you are able to exchange five pounds of fat for five pounds of muscle you’ll burn an extra 20 calories a day. Burning 7300 calories a year results in a loss of two pounds. Not much, you say? But carried on for 10 years you’re 20 pounds lighter. It’s the old story that a trip of a thousand miles begins with the first step! For some practical steps you can take continue the article here.
It’s about making small changes in our lifestyles that can make big changes in our weight, taking this extra step to speed up your metabolism, could make your weight loss efforts that bit more effective.
Besides dieting and cardio, have you included muscle-building activities in your weight loss plan? If not maybe you want to consider doing so, because as you can see, it’s all in your favour.
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