What is Metabolism

"It's my metabolism!"

Sound familiar? If you're carrying some extra pounds (and having a hard time losing them), it's tempting to put the blame on a sluggish metabolism.

But is your metabolism really the reason it's often so hard to lose weight? And, more importantly, is there anything you can do about it?

The good news is, there are things you can do to help boost your body's calorie-burning power.

What Is Metabolism?

Your metabolism, experts say, involves a complex network of hormones and enzymes that not only convert food into fuel but also affect how efficiently you burn that fuel.

"The process of metabolism establishes the rate at which we burn our calories and, ultimately, how quickly we gain weight or how easily we lose it," says Robert Yanagisawa, MD, director of the Medically Supervised Weight Management Program at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.

Your metabolism is influenced by your age (metabolism naturally slows about 5 percent per decade after age 40), your sex (men generally burn more calories at rest than women) and your proportion of lean body mass (the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate tends to be). Heredity makes a difference.

Some people just burn calories at a slower rate than others, a defect in the thyroid gland can slow metabolism, though this problem is relatively rare.

And here's a fact that may surprise you: The more weight you carry, the faster your metabolism is likely running.

"The simple fact is that the extra weight causes your body to work harder just to sustain itself at rest, so in most instances, the metabolism is always running a bit faster.

That's one reason it's almost always easiest to lose weight at the start of a diet and harder later on. When you are very overweight, your metabolism is already running so high that any small cut in calories will result in an immediate loss.

Then, when you lose significant amounts of body fat and muscle, your body needs fewer calories to sustain itself. That helps explain why it's so easy to regain weight after you've worked to lose it.

If two people both weigh 250 pounds, and one got there by dieting down from 350 and the other one was always at 250, the one who got there by cutting calories is going to have a slower metabolism. That means they will require fewer calories to maintain their weight than the person who never went beyond 250 pounds.

So your take-away from this issue is:

• Build more muscle than fat (muscle toning exercises).
  
• If you need to lose weight pace yourself and do not do it drastically.
• Have you checked your thyroid lately?
• Eating a fruit between meals can sometime trick your body into burning mode especially if it burns more than you take in foodwise.