Metabolism Boost Part 1
Learn how to Speed Up and Increase and boost your Metabolism
The cold-weather months signal a time that is the toughest to stay in shape. It's a time when we are a lot less active. We spend most of our time indoors we are tempted to spend time munching on foods that are not conducive to weight loss and staying in shape. The holidays have passed, and we have put on a few pounds from over indulgence. However there is hope. This seasonal behavior pattern springs from bad habits and deep-down biological cues. What it boils down to is gaining an understanding of your metabolic rate, which is YOUR boy's natural weight-loss aid.

Your metabolism is your energy management system. It's the thousands of chemical reactions within a cell that turns food into fuel for energy. Metabolism picks up where digestion leaves off by converting complex nutrient molecules into simpler forms and frees up energy in the process. The released power comes from breaking down sugar glucose into water. Carbon dioxide contracts your muscle cells and moves chromosomes and pumps chemicals across cell membranes.

Calories are then spent or consumed. It is how quickly your cells convert food into these units of energy that determines your specific metabolic rate. Your metabolic rate is influenced, in part, by the number of calories you burn while resting. You burn these calories by breathing, brain activity and the beating of your heart. This is called your basal metabolic rate (BMR) and accounts for more than half of the calories you burn each day. The trick is learning how to motivate ourselves to burning the other half. That part is completely up to us. For the most part, how we burn the other half will determine how our overall physical appearance shapes up.

Just how high can we rev it up?

Our metabolic rate is regulated by thyroid hormones that signal cells in the body to work harder and organs to run faster in relation to our body's energy requirements. How our cells respond is somewhat inherited. Some people have so-called thrifty genes, and these genes enable certain folks to readily and quickly convert excess calories to fat. It's a different gene that seems to turn extra food energy into heat. The gene type that you inherit, in some cases, will dictate your metabolic speed.

Genetics also determines your body shape and the percentage of muscle or fat that it carries. If your body tends to carry more muscle, you will likely have a high metabolic rate. Muscle cells are hungry for energy, and will burn more calories than fat cells. This is true even while you are sleeping or at rest. This is the reason why men, who have more lean muscle, tend to lose weight faster, and put weight back on at a slower rate than women. People that are older tend to put on weight faster because their metabolism slows down. But it has more to do with a loss of muscle mass as than it does with age. At age thirty a sedentary person can expect to lose 10 percent of their muscle mass each decade. As soon as the loss of muscle mass begins, metabolism slows down and fat begins to increase.

There are weight-loss aids that claim to speed up your metabolism, but they have nothing to do with your genes or lean muscle. Many of them often contain ephedrine, a central nervous system stimulant derived from the ephedra plant (Ephedra sinica) that speeds up certain body functions. These products can be dangerous to people with certain medical conditions like, liver disease, hypertension, or glaucoma. The problem with using these products is that they are only a temporary metabolic fix and they must be used continuously to derive the same result. Once you stop using them your metabolism slows back down. For this reason it is better to use what you've been given by nature.