Everyone has heard at some point in their life about their metabolism. Whether it is two skinny teenagers bragging about how they can eat anything they want because they have a high BMR, or adults wishing they had a high metabolism. Our bodies get energy from the food that we eat through our metabolism. Your metabolism is a series of chemical reactions that are needed to break food down into energy to perform many different actions. Metabolism has always been happening in your body since birth, if metabolism stops, the body dies (there would be no energy to supply to the body).
There is a process that starts even before metabolism in your body. It begins with plants, firstly through photosynthesis a plant takes in sunlight and uses this energy and its chlorophyll to build sugars and carbon dioxide. When people or animals eat the plants they take in the sugars that were created by photosynthesizing sunlight (if an animal or a person is carnivorous they take in the energy that the animal being eaten took in from the plant.)
After the food is eaten, enzymes in the digestive system break proteins in amino acids, fats into fatty acids, and carbohydrates into simple sugars (glucose). All of these can be used as energy sources by the body when they are needed. They are then absorbed into the blood and transported to the cells that need them. When they enter the cells other enzymes in the cells speed up and regulate the chemical reactions involved in metabolizing these compounds. During these processes the energy from the food can be released from the body, or stored in tissues such as the liver, muscles, and body fat.
This is a very basic understanding of metabolism; it is a very complicated chemical process. Where calories come into the picture is that a calorie is a unit that measures how much energy a particular food will bring to the body. For example the Dairy Queen Large Chocolate Malt contains around 1300 calories (source http://www.acaloriecounter.com/fast-food-calories.php) if you do not burn the calories that are from the Chocolate Malt the energy will be stored as fat. So what fat is in a nutshell is unused energy that the body has stored.
Now the number of calories that a person burns in a day is affected by the amount of time that person exercises, the amount of fat and muscle in that person’s body, and also their Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Your BMR is a measurement of the rate that your body burns energy in the form of calories while at rest. A person with a low BMR will be more likely to gain weight than a person with an average BMR even if they are eating the same food and exercising for the same amount of time. If you want to raise your BMR exercise is one of the best ways, not only will it directly burns calories but it will also affect your BMR. Body composition plays a role in BMR, people with more muscle and less fat generally have higher BMR’s
There are also ways of eating, and certain foods that can help your raise your metabolism. Researchers in Germany have found the drinking water helps raise your metabolism. The test subjects BMR’s increased their metabolism by thirty percent. Water is an extremely important tool towards weight loss. By drinking more water it will keep you from mistaking thirst for hunger. Drinking Green Tea can also help raise your metabolism, it has also been reported to contain anti-cancer properties and it can help prevent heart disease. (source http://www.fitnesstipsforlife.com/10-foods-to-raise-your-metabolism.html)
There are ways of raising your metabolism, the hard part is sticking to the foods that you need to eat and staying away from the Large Chocolate Malt will help you stay thin and not gain any unnecessary weight from extra energy.
