You will have heard that word ‘metabolism’ by now and may have even heard that if you want to lose excess fat weight and keep it off it is your best fat burning friend. Your metabolism is your bodies engine and unless you are one of the lucky people with a fast burning model you would probably like to burn off more calories that you do right now.
Our metabolism is a complex interaction of factors including some genetic ones as well, but eating and exercise habits affect it as well. It is well worth making sure you are looking after yours as a well conditioned metabolic motor can bolster your fat burning rate in significant ways. If your metabolism is sluggish you are going to have a very difficult if not impossible task of losing excess body fat.
There are a few factors that can slow the metabolism but two important ones are allowing your muscular system to weaken with inactivity and poor eating habits such as a diet of mainly processed foods. These things change the chemistry and hormonal response of the body and will favor fat storage hormones instead of fat burning ones.
It is not hard to change this environment back to how it should be and increase the rate your body burns fuel (calories). This is called your ‘metabolic fitness’ and means you will be increasing the amount of energy you will use every minute of the day and night.
The first thing to kick into gear is proper exercise to rebuild and restore the most important aspect of your metabolism – your muscles. Fuel from the food we eat is converted into sugar and transported in the blood to the muscle cells. This is how you will increase your fat burning, by increasing the amount of toned healthy muscle tissue.
Proper exercise means directly working your muscles with adequate resistance and will rebuild lost strength. No other type of activity can do this and a strength training exercise program is what you need to do otherwise you are going to be very disappointed in the results (or rather the lack of them).
Strength training ensures you will continue to burn fuel long after the exercise session is over whereas the old fashioned way was just to be concerned with what was burnt during the session. We are much more concerned now about the after affects of exercise and the only way to increase metabolic fitness is to rebuild lost and disused muscle tissue.
If you have not been doing strengthening exercise it will be unlikely that you will have an efficient fat burning engine. Unless you have a manual job there is simply not enough vigorous physical activity in our modern day lives anymore. For starters most of us sit in a chair of some kind for around 80 percent of our day.
To improve your nutrition eat smaller meals (5-7) each with a source of quality protein as the main component and each meal around 300 odd calories. This will keep your metabolism firing and give you plenty of energy to put some effort into your exercise program so you can make the changes you need to make at base level.
The more processed non-nutrients foods you can ditch from your diet the better as that will allow your fat burning hormones to rebalance and help you lose excess fat weight. These two strategies will get your body working for you not against you and finally the weight will come off and reveal that strong healthy body that has been there all along but just needed a bit of help to show itself.
