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Your metabolism starts slowing down at age 18, and other facts about a widely misunderstood process
Your metabolism
It is in every cell in your body. It refers to a series of chemical processes in each cell that turn the calories you eat into fuel to keep you alive.
The body's major organs — the brain, liver, kidneys, and heart — account for about half of the energy burned at rest, while fat, the digestive system, and especially the body's muscles account for the rest.
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How we burn energy
There are 3 main ways:
- the basal metabolism, the energy used for your body's basic functioning while at rest
- the energy used to break down food (also known as the thermic effect of food)
- the energy used in physical activity.
Most of the energy you burn is from your resting metabolism.
Metabolism variations
Metabolism can vary a lot between people, and researchers don't understand why.
2 people with the same size and body composition can have different metabolic rates. One can consume a huge meal and gain no weight, while the other has to carefully count calories to not gain weight.
Metabolism and getting older
Getting older slows down the metabolism.
The effect happens gradually, even if you have the same amount of fat and muscle tissue. So when you're 60, you burn fewer calories at rest than when you're 20.
You can't speed your metabolism
There's a lot of hype around" speeding up your metabolism for weight loss, but that's just a myth.
While there are certain foods (coffee, chili, and other spices) that may speed the basal metabolic rate up just a little, the change is so negligible and short-lived, it would never have an impact on your waistline. Building more muscles, however, can be more helpful.
Diets and metabolism
Drastic dieting can slow down your metabolism. This may be the body's way of vigorously defending a certain weight range, called the set point.
Researchers don't fully understand why this metabolic slowdown happens though.
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Skipping Breakfast
Researchers say breakfast doesn't kickstart the metabolism and may not be the most important meal of the day. Different studies have found that skipping breakfast doesn’t lead to weight increase an...
"Hot" Workouts
They won't really help you lose weight. Research suggests regularly sleeping in colder temperatures may be optimal for weight loss as they stimulate the production of brown fat, the "good" fat. Brown fat keeps us warm by burning through "bad" fat stores.
Turn down the heat at night. You'll trim your belly and your heating bills.
Tongue-Scorching Peppers
Hot sauce can boost your metabolism. But research suggests that more-palatable, mild peppers may have the same calorie-burning potential.
Pack your salads and stir-fry with sweet peppers-including bell peppers, pimentos, rellenos, and sweet banana peppers. They're just as effective as the hot stuff.
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Metabolism
It refers to the thousands of chemical reactions that turn what we eat and drink into fuel in every cell of the body. These reactions change in response to our environments and behaviors, an...
How The Body Uses Calories
- Basal metabolism is the energy our body needs to keep our cells working and accounts for 65-80% of most adults' caloric consumption.
- The thermic effect of food is the energy our body uses to process food and accounts for 10% of most adults' caloric consumption.
- Physical activity accounts for 10 - 30 % of most people’s caloric consumption .
Controlling Your Own Weight
Not everyone overeats and becomes overweight, and not everyone who becomes overweight or obese develops illnesses like diabetes or heart disease.
There was never a special diet, exercise regimen, or supplement that worked universally to control weight. Through trial and error, we have to discover habits and routines we can stick with that help us eat less and move more.
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HIIT: high-intensity interval training
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HIIT workouts generally combine short bursts of intense heart-pounding exercise (during which a person’s heart rate reaches at least 80 percent of its maximum capacity, usually for 1 to 5 minute...
The most well-established benefit of HIIT...
...has to do with heart health: Intervals can boost cardio-respiratory health with a smaller time investment compared to continuous forms of exercise.
It's not about superior fat-burning capacity or bigger muscles, but about improved VO2 max, a measure of endurance that calculates the maximum volume of oxygen the body can use.
VO2 max is one of the best predictors of overall health.
HIIT and weight loss
People can burn comparable amounts of calories in HIIT routines lasting, compared to longer continuous exercise routines. But this doesn't mean that calorie burn translates into weight loss.
This is the problem with HIIT, just like with any other form of exercise: it’s much easier to lose weight by cutting calories in your diet than trying to burn excess calories.