What is Metabolism and How Does it Affect Your Weight?

When you’re trying your best to get into better shape, it can be very frustrating to keep returning to the scale only to see how little progress you’ve made. When you’ve tried every new diet, and bought every book, things can seem impossible, but could it be something other than a diet that’s keeping that extra weight on? If any of that sounds like your situation, then it could be your metabolism. The following article will be exploring your metabolism’s role in keeping you healthy.

What Is the Metabolism

Metabolism is the name given to the chemical procedure carried out by the body when it converts the food you eat or the fat that your body has stored into energy. Even if you are lying very still, the body requires an energy source to keep all its involuntary functions going. Every process in the body, including thinking, will burn calories. It is a small cost but in biological terms, it counts. This is particularly true during sleep, when the body is making all of the repairs and replacing cells that have become too damaged or weak to go on. During these rest periods, the food or fat your body has collected is converted into its most basic parts to be used to nourish the body and build new cells. In general, the number of calories that it takes to make this happen, is called the metabolic rate.

Metabolic Rate

There are several factors that play a major role in dictating how many calories it will take to keep body functions moving and make it possible for you to repair cells. Age is a major factor to consider in metabolism. When people get older, the metabolism tends to slow down quite a lot. That is why older people tend to gain weight much more quickly if they aren’t as active as in their youth.

A slower metabolism means that you won’t burn calories or metabolize the fats stored in your body as quickly, so you are likely to end up gaining a few inches over time. Your size also plays a fairly large role in determining how many calories you burn. Big people burn more calories than smaller people because it takes more energy to run a larger body. Sex is also a factor, in that women have smaller muscle mass, so they burn less calories in general than men.