Speed Up Metabolism To Lose Weight

Health and Natural Living. Most often, though, metabolism refers to the process in which the body gets and uses energy from food, so it really does play an important function in weight gain and loss In the most fundamental sense, metabolism means each of the physical and chemical changes that happen within the body's cells.

Age affects metabolism, which will slow about 5% every 10 years after age 40, and by gender, as males have a tendency to burn more calories at rest than females, and by the amount of muscle mass you have (more muscle generally means a higher rate of metabolism). Our genes also impacts metabolism, not to mention having children, as well as whether a woman chooses to breast-feed Not everyone is given the same metabolism, and our rates actually fluctuate over the course of our lives, so someone who blames their metabolism is not necessarily making excuses.

Regardless of all of the wild cards, the simple fact is that when your calorie intake exceeds your metabolism, excess energy will get stored in the body as fat. Though some of the factors affecting metabolic rate cannot be changed, thankfully, there are ways to rev up the metabolism you're born with.

The first directive is to eat the right foods in the correct quantities. When you skip a meal, your body switches to starvation mode, which slows metabolism to conserve calories, because it does not know when it will get food again. And when the metabolism slows down, so does the rate at which you lose weight.

When you finally do eat food after skipping a meal, instead of using the calories in the food you've just eaten, your body transfers them to body fat to keep for the next "fast." To keep your metabolism efficient, eat 4 - 6 smaller meals spread evenly throughout the day and try to eat close to the same times every day. Most importantly, never skip a meal.

You can also step up your metabolic rate with exercise, including both aerobic workouts and weight lifting. Aerobic activities, such as running, biking and dancing, burn more calories in the short term, while weight lifting will build more muscle, which increases metabolism and burns more calories in the long term - even when you're sitting still, muscle uses more calories to function than fat.

In fact, every pound of muscle requires 35 calories per day, while every pound of fat requires only 2 calories per day. Despite this, you may be surprised that the more weight you have, the faster your metabolism is likely to run. Simply put, the extra weight makes your body work harder to maintain its processes.
This is partially why it is nearly always easiest to lose weight when you begin dieting, and gets more difficult as you go along because, if you are significantly overweight, your metabolism is already at an elevated rate, so that even a slight decrease in calories will lead to an immediate weight loss.

But what happens after that immediate loss, when a plateau occurs and motivation seems to go by the "weigh" side? Old cravings and compulsions can quickly return, and when they do, don't ignore a valuable resource - lose weight hypnosis. Hypnotherapy can actually retrain your unconscious mind so that, in essence, you can do away with food cravings. When we examine why we snack, recognizing why weight loss hypnosis works so well becomes clear.

For a lot of people, snacking has become a habit - maybe you do it without thinking when you're driving or watching TV or when you are under stress. Hypnosis can actually reprogram your thoughts to stop those associations, leaving you to drive or watch TV without having the need to eat. NLP entails many years of study and practical experience for a hypnotherapist to learn and master, but positive results can come very rapidly and seem almost magical to a person who has always suffered from cravings One of the most successful weight loss hypnosis methods for curbing the snacking cycle is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, which relies on collaborating with the unconscious mind and making it use the same thought processes that are creating your appetite, to eliminate your appetite.

NLP can be just as important as exercise and motivation because, as you learned above, it can help make sure that you eat the proper kinds of foods at the right times, and this is a key ingredient for turbo-charging your metabolism. If you want to keep your metabolism at full speed and make sure that all of your exercise and hard work are not going to waste by succumbing to your food temptations, weight loss hypnosis and NLP can be a secret weapon to eliminate your cravings altogether