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What Does Metabolism Do?

All throughout the day your body is spending energy on the automatic functions it needs to perform to keep you alive, these subconscious activities require energy, and the rate at which they require energy is known as your metabolic rate. Almost every cell in your body needs energy at all times throughout the day, even in your sleep your body continues to work away through the night building new cells, maintaining organ function and helping you to stay alive.

Exercise

Exercise is the number one contributor to increased metabolism. Since your metabolism is directly proportional to the amount of calories you burn, then the higher your metabolic rate - the more weight you lose. If you want to burn more calories you simply need to increase the intensity of your workouts, there is no magic pill. Resistance training can also help boost your metabolism although it is definitely not as effective as intense aerobics. Regular exercise gives you many benefits including better joint flexibility, stronger bones and muscles and lower blood pressure. As you increase the size of your muscles you will also burn more calories throughout the day every day. Every single pound of muscle in your body burns an extra 50 calories each day, even if you don’t train that day.

To learn more about effective exercises check out this article, Getting Six Pack Women.

Sleep

Getting plenty of sleep will help you to maintain a healthy body weight and refill your depleted energy reserves. See, when we deprive ourselves of sleep we cause an increase of the hormone “ghrelin” which is responsible for increasing our appetites. If you don’t like the sounds of this I really recommend you aim for 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. For those that have trouble actually getting to sleep in the first place try tiring out your eyes by reading a fictional book before bedtime or in bed. Another great method is to do a little meditation before you hit the sack, meditating helps you to clear your mind and will allow you to fall asleep a lot faster.

Diet

Avoid Eating Big Meals

Small meals and healthy snacks throughout the day is a lot better at reserving energy compared to tiring out your body by eating large meals that your stomach finds hard to digest. Smaller meals allow your digestive system to digest the foods at a pace it can easily handle, you won’t be spending so much energy breaking down large amounts of food, most of which will be useless and will be stored as in fat cells. Our digestive systems are definitely not designed to process the foods which most of us eat, weather you think it has evolved or been created, either way it is built to digest healthy nutrient rich foods. So feeding it processed, modified, chemical rich junk food will only confuse the process, your body will not know what to do with it and will begin to act erratically and use up more energy. If you decide to follow this advice make sure that you are not just eating more of the same sized meals each day, you need to reduce the size of the meals which you are currently eating for this to work properly.

Don’t Restrict Your Diet

You will severely reduce your metabolism if you don’t supply your body with enough of the right type of calories. If your body lacks the calories it needs it will activate the “somatic response”. This event causes every system in your body to slow right down. The overall effect of this reaction is an erratic, random metabolic rate, resulting in muscle loss, mood swings and lack of sleep. Remember, keeping a steady metabolism is not about increasing or reducing the amount of calories you eat, its about eating the right types of calories, those which your body can actually process into useful living cells.