How To Speed Up Your Metabolism To Lose Weight

We have all heard it or even said it before: 'I can't lose weight because of my metabolism.' It's convenient to blame our unwanted weight on an abstract idea like metabolism, but let's look at the real importance of metabolism - and better yet, how to get the most 'burn' for your buck by recharging your metabolism. In the most basic sense, metabolism includes each of the physical and chemical changes that happen within the cells of the body. Most often, however, metabolism refers to the process in which the body gets and uses energy from food, so it really does play an important part in weight gain and loss. Not everyone is born with the same metabolism, and our rates actually vary over the course of our lives, so someone who blames their metabolism isn't necessarily making excuses. Age affects metabolism, which will slow about 5% every 10 years after age 40, and by sex, as males have a tendency to burn more calories at rest than females, and by the quantity of muscle mass you have (more muscle generally means a higher rate of metabolism). Genetics also impacts metabolism, not to mention pregnancy, as well as whether a woman decides to breast-feed. In spit of all of the wild cards, the fact is that if your calorie intake exceeds your metabolism, excess energy will get stored in the body as fat. Though many of the issues affecting metabolic rate can't be altered, thankfully, there are ways to rev up the metabolism you are born with. The first tenet is to take in the right foods in the correct amounts. When you skip a meal, your body switches to starvation mode, which slows metabolism to keep calories, because it does not know when it will get to eat again. And when the metabolism slows, so does the rate at which you lose weight. When you finally do eat after having skipped a meal, instead of using the calories in the food you have just taken in, your body converts them to body fat to hold for the next 'fast.' To keep your metabolism efficient, eat 4 - 6 small meals over the course of the day and try to eat close to the same times each day. Most importantly, never skip a meal. You can also step up your metabolic rate with exercise, including both aerobic workouts and strength training. Aerobic activities, such as running, biking and dancing, burn more calories in the short term, while strength training will build more muscle, which boosts metabolism and burns more calories in the long term - even when you are resting, muscle needs more calories to function than fat. In fact, every pound of muscle requires 35 calories per day, while each pound of fat requires only 2 calories per day. Despite this, you might 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 more to maintain its processes. This is partially why it is almost always easiest to drop weight when you start dieting, and is more difficult as you go along because, when you are significantly overweight, your metabolism is already at a high rate, so that even a minor decrease in calories will give you 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 compulsions and cravings can quickly come back, and when they do, don't ignore a valuable resource - lose weight hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy can actually retrain your unconscious mind so that, in essence, you can eliminate food cravings. When we look at why we snack, recognizing why weight loss hypnosis works so well becomes evident. For most of people, snacking has become a habit - maybe you do it without thinking when you are driving or watching TV or when you're under stress. Hypnosis can actually reprogram your thoughts to stop those associations, leaving you to drive or watch TV without feeling the need to eat. One of the most successful weight loss hypnosis techniques for curbing the snacking cycle is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, which relies on collaborating with the unconscious mind and getting it to use the same thought processes that are creating your appetite, to eliminate your appetite. NLP requires 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. NLP can be equally as imperative as motivation and exercise because, as you learned above, it can help ensure that you eat the right kinds of foods at the right times, and this is a key element to turbo-charging your metabolism. If you aim to keep your metabolism at full speed and ensure that all of hard work and exercise are not going to waste by giving in to your food temptations, weight loss hypnosis and NLP can be a secret weapon to eliminate your cravings altogether.