INTRODUCTION
Metabolism.
This is perhaps the most frequently used word in the weight loss / weight gain vocabulary.
It is quite common to overhear people talking about their struggles – or triumphs over the holiday bulge or love handles, in terms of whether their metabolism is working, or not. Doctors often refer to metabolism when they try to explain why starvation and water-loss diets don’t work.
With all of the focus around this rather daunting and biologically charged word, you would assume that most people actually understand it. Or at least have some fundamental knowledge when it comes to how to speed up their metabolism, right?
Wrong!
Towards Understanding Metabolism
Regrettably, many people don’t even understand the concept of metabolism and metabolic change.
There is so much information floating around out there that there’s bound to be some confusion and conflicting messages. And, understandably, many people mistake their own weight gain and weight loss experiences as a matter of metabolic change. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it isn’t.
For example, there are scientific ways to increase your metabolism, and thus enable your body to burn more calories. Eating certain foods more frequently is one way to do this. Another way to visibly lose weight – at least on a perceived, temporary level – is to sit in a steam room for a few hours. I’ll cover these more closely later in this book.
Whereas eating the right foods is a real, proven weight loss method through increased metabolic change, the steam room method is just temporary because the lost weight is merely water and will return as swiftly as it “melted-away”.
The point to remember here is that not all weight loss or weight gain is connected to metabolism (as with the steam room example).
Low-Fat Labels
Another reason that people might be confused is because there are a lot of food and supplement companies on the market who don’t want you to know fact from fiction. They want you to believe that eating their “low-fat” or “diet” foods or using their products is going to somehow speed up your metabolism.
While some low-fat foods might play a role in an overall eating program that is designed to speed up metabolism, merely eating foods that come from packaging that screams “LOW-FAT!” won’t do anything.
In fact, believe it or not, many people actually gain weight when they eat too many “low-fat” products. Many of these products are laden with calories that still must be burned off or they turn into body fat.
In addition, they are typically so over-processed that they can barely pass for “food” at all.
As you can see, and probably feel from years of trying to unravel this whole metabolic mystery, this is a confusing, stressful, and potentially depressing situation.
Each year, tens of millions of people attempt to retake control over their health and the shape of their body; and each year, tens of millions of people feel that they’ve “failed” because, try as they might, they just can’t speed up their metabolism.
This book is the antidote to that way of thinking and feeling — because the perceived failure of these hard- working dieters and exercisers (of which you may be one) is not a failure at all of these individuals.
The failure is with the medical and nutritional sector as a whole, which has not provided people with the information that they need to know to truly speed up their metabolism.
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Part 1:
What is Metabolism?
Some people think that metabolism is a kind of organ, or a body part, that influences digestion. Actually, the metabolism isn’t any particular body part. It’s the process by which the body converts food into energy.
Maybe you have heard of the phrase “metabolic process” used synonymously with the term metabolism, because they both mean the same thing.
The Medical Mumbo Jumbo
This isn’t a complicated medical text, so we won’t spend an unnecessary amount of time focusing on the layered complexity of the human body and its extraordinary intelligence. However, it is helpful to look at the biological mechanisms behind metabolism briefly.
Metabolism, as mentioned above, is the process of transforming food (e.g. nutrients) into fuel (e.g., energy).
The body uses this energy to conduct a vast array of essential functions. Your ability to read this page – literally – is driven by your metabolism. If you had no metabolism – or metabolic process – that was converting food into energy, then you wouldn’t be able to move!
In fact, long before you even realized that you couldn’t move, your internal processes would have stopped; because the basic building blocks of life (circulating blood, transforming oxygen into carbon dioxide, expelling potentially lethal wastes through the kidneys, etc., etc.) all depend on metabolism.
While you may struggle with unwanted weight gain due to metabolic factors, you certainly have a functioning metabolism. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t even be able to speak because that, too, requires energy that comes from… metabolism!
While we commonly refer to the metabolic process (metabolism) as if it were a single function, it’s really a catch-all term for countless functions that are taking place inside the body.
Every second of every minute of every day of your life, even when you sleep, numerous chemical conversions are taking place through metabolism, or “metabolic functioning”.
The metabolism is a harmonizing process that manages to achieve two critical bodily functions that, in a sense, seem to be at odds with each other, but is really a beautifully orchestrated system that keeps us alive.
Anabolism and Catabolism
One function of our metabolism is to create tissue and cells. Each moment, our bodies are creating more cells to replace dead or dysfunctional cells.
For example, if you cut your finger, your body (if it’s functioning properly) will begin the process of creating skin cells to clot the blood and start the healing process. This creation process is a “metabolic response” and is called anabolism.
On the other hand, there is the exact opposite activity taking place in other parts of the body. Instead of building cells and tissue, the body is breaking down energy so that it can do what it’s supposed to do.
For example, when you exercise, your body temperature rises as your heartbeat increases and remains within a certain range. As this happens, your body requires more oxygen so, your breathing increases.
All of this requires additional energy. After all, if your body couldn’t adjust to this enhanced requirement for oxygen (both taking it in and getting rid of it in the form of carbon dioxide), you would collapse!
Presuming, of course, that you aren’t overdoing it, your body will begin converting food (e.g., calories) into energy. This is a “metabolic process” called catabolism.
So, the metabolism, “metabolic process”, is constantly taking care of two seemingly opposite functions: anabolism that uses energy to create cells, and catabolism that breaks down cells to create energy.
This is how the metabolism earned its reputation as a harmonizer. It brings together these apparently conflicting functions and does so in an optimal way that enables the body to create cells as needed, and break them down, again as needed.
Fascinating stuff!
Metabolism and Weight Loss
By now, you should have a sense of how metabolism relates to weight loss by breaking cells down and transforming them into energy through catabolism. To understand this process even more clearly, let’s look at an important player in the weight loss game.
Calories
Calories are simply units of measure. They aren’t actually things in and of themselves; they are labels for other things, just like how an inch really isn’t anything, but it measures the distance between two points.
So, what do calories measure? Easy: they measure energy. Yep, the evil calorie – the bane of the dieter’s existence – is just a 3-syllable label for energy.
It’s important to highlight this, because the body itself does not do a very intelligent job of distinguishing good energy from bad energy. Actually, the body doesn’t care about where the energy comes from so long as it keeps on coming.
In our choice-laden grocery stores, with thousands of varieties of foods, there seems to be a fairly clear awareness of what good food is, and what bad or “junk” food is.
For example…
