Define Metabolism - What is Metabolism?

If your goal is to naturally increase metabolism, a good place for you to start is to understand what metabolism involves.

To define metabolism and understand what metabolism involves, will make you far more effective in your efforts to increase it.

I see a lot of people who train regularly, doing the same routine each week day in day out and they look the same as they did the year before, with no improvement in their physique.

Many have one thing in common and that is they don't have a very good understanding of what they are doing.

By understanding and not 'just doing it' you will give yourself the best possible chance to succeed in creating change in your body.

The human body is very complicated, but even a little knowledge can go a long way in helping you get it into shape.

Following is a simple definition of metabolism that will help you understand what metabolism is and how it can help you achieve your goals to boost metabolism and burn fat.

Define Metabolism - What is Metabolism?

Metabolism is a very large number of chemical processes occurring within your body that support life. These processes need energy derived from food that you eat to occur.

We need to eat to supply our bodies with the energy it needs to keep our hearts beating, our cells regenerating and countless other activities going on inside us.

So we know that our body needs the energy from food to survive, we are all different heights and body shapes, so how much food does our own body need so that it has the right number of calories for metabolism?

You need to consume enough calories to support healthy metabolism, too little and your body will react by metabolising muscle mass, slowing metabolism and storing fat. Too many calories and.....I'm sure we all know what happens then.

For more information on detirmining the number of calories you should be eating every day, I highly recommend Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle as I have found it to be the most comprehensive resource on this topic available anywhere.

The speed at which your body uses energy for metabolism is its Metabolic Rate and it has 3 main parts.

1. Basal or Resting Metabolic Rate(BMR/RMR). This is a measure of the energy that your body uses when it is inactive. To maintain life, organs such as your heart, lungs and your brain all burn energy continuously and your BMR is a measure of the total energy that all these metabolic processes use when you are at rest.

It is important to note that your Basal Metabolic Rate accounts for around 70% of the total energy that your body uses and a large part of that 70% is energy used by your muscle mass.

By increasing your total muscle mass, you can increase your bodies total energy requirements even while at rest and increase your metabolic rate.

2. Physical activity is the second largest energy requirement that your body has, it accounts for around 20% of the total energy used by an average person.

3. Thermic Effect of Food, it sounds technical but it simply refers to the energy used by your body when you eat and digest food so that it can be metabolised by the body. It is a small but important part of your energy consumption at around 10% of the total.

From this we can see there are 3 areas that you can influence, to increase your metabolism.

You can increase your BMR by increasing your muscle mass.

You can increase the amount of physical activity that you do each day.

You can eat food that has a high thermic effect.

Although metabolism is affected by a number of things we can’t control such as genetics, hormones, age and gender, to define metabolism helps us to understand that there are areas of metabolism we can influence and which of these areas to focus on to get the biggest increases possible.

In Boost Metabolism I explain how you can use this information to give yourself a massive metabolism boost, which is the key to succesful weight loss and a number of other healthy benefits.

Enjoy.

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