Metabolism, defined simply, is just the amount of calories your body needs to function in an energy-neutral state—not gaining or losing weight, just holding steady. We typically measure this in calories per day. That gives us two sides to work on: calories in and calories out.
The wider I can make the gap between the calories I use and the calories I eat, the more body fat I can end up using as energy. The trick is to know how to eat and how much to eat in order to keep the amount of calories your body is willing to burn—your metabolism—as high as it can be, while creating that deficit.
What complicates matters is that how we diet can drop our metabolism like a rock. But we have the power to increase our metabolism up to the maximum our genetics will allow.
The first thing you can do, at the risk of sounding boring, is to exercise. Seriously. You’ve heard it a million times, but jumping from 50 to 70 calories an hour at rest to 300 to 500 while exercising is a big deal when you add it up over a week, a month and a year. And that doesn’t include the increased calorie use for the next hour or two after training or the energy-using muscle gained and metabolic efficiency that causes you to burn more calories every day. A lot of good stuff happens when you exercise consistently. It is a big deal.
How about sleep? Getting enough? Sleep deficits lead to increased hunger. I’m pretty sure that’s common knowledge by now, but when you feel that weird hunger you get when you’re tired, you know it’s not normal.
As a matter of fact, you don’t even feel hungry, you just feel like eating. Maybe it’s the body’s way of trying to get a little rise in energy from food, maybe just a byproduct of the same brain chemistry that causes depression, but being deeply fatigued makes us want to eat more. Chronic sleep deficiency can even lead to adrenal stress issues.
And remember to drink more water. You don’t have to drag a gallon around with you like a ball-and-chain, but the more hydrated you are, the more efficiently your body works.
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Michael Cohen has been in the fitness industry for over 30 years. He associates with fitness experts, and consults with them on a daily basis.
