What Is Metabolism?

What is metabolism?

You know that if yours is too slow you might gain weight. But what exactly does this all mean?

"Metabolism" is the word to describe all of the biochemical reactions in your body. It’s how you take in nutrients and oxygen and use them to fuel everything you do.

Your body has an incredible ability to grow, heal, and generally stay alive. And without this amazing biochemistry, you would not be possible.

Metabolism includes how the cells in your body:

• Allow activities you can control (e.g. physical activity).

• Allow activities you can’t control (e.g. heartbeat, wound healing, processing of nutrients & toxins, etc.).

• Allow storage of excess energy for later.

So when you put all of these processes together into your metabolism you can imagine that these processes can work too quickly, too slowly, or just right.

This brings us to the "metabolic rate".

This is how fast your metabolism works and is measured in calories (yup, those calories!).

The calories you eat can go to one of three places:

1. Work (i.e. exercise and other activity).

2. Heat (i.e. from all those biochemical reactions).

3. Storage (i.e. extra leftover "unburned" calories stored as fat).

As you can imagine the more calories you burn as work or use to create heat the easier it is to lose weight and keep it off because there will be fewer "leftover" calories to store for later.

We're led to believe that's all that matters when it comes to weight loss. Calories in V calories out.

What they don't tell you is how it's your hormones that control how efficient your metabolism is AND that there are things that can damage your metabolism!