How To Speed Up Your Metabolism To Lose Weight

We have all heard it or even said it one time or another: "I can't lose weight because of my metabolism." It's convenient to blame our extra fat on an abstract idea like metabolism, but let's learn about 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 chemical and physical changes that occur inside the body's cells. Most often, though, metabolism refers to the process in which the body gets and uses energy from food, so it really does have an important role in weight loss and gain.

Not everyone is given the same metabolism, and our rates actually fluctuate during 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 we turn 40, and by gender, as males typically 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). Genetics also affects metabolism, not to mention pregnancy, as well as whether a woman decides to breast-feed.

Despite all of the wild cards, the fact is that if your calorie intake surpasses your metabolism, excess energy will get housed in the body as fat. Though many of the aspects affecting metabolic rate cannot be changed, fortunately, there are ways to rev up the metabolism you're born with.

The first rule is to take in the correct foods in the correct quantities. When you miss a meal, your body switches to starvation mode, which slows metabolism to conserve calories, because it does not know when it will be fed again. And when the metabolism slows, so does the rate at which you lose weight.

When you finally do get food after skipping a meal, instead of burning the calories in the food you've just had, your body transfers 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 routines and weight training. Aerobic activities, such as dancing, biking and running, burn more calories in the short term, while weight training will create more muscle, which boosts metabolism and burns more calories in the long term - even when you're sitting still, muscle needs more calories to function than fat.

In fact, each pound of muscle burns 35 calories per day, while each pound of fat burns just 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 forces your body work more to maintain its processes.

This is partly why it's almost always easiest to drop weight when you start dieting, and gets challenging as you continue because, if you are significantly overweight, your metabolism is already at an elevated rate, so that even a slight decrease in calories will bring about an immediate weight loss.

But what happens after that immediate loss, when a plateau occurs and motivation seems to go by the "weigh" side? Persistent compulsions and cravings can quickly return, and when they do, do not neglect a valuable resource - lose weight hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy can actually retrain your unconscious so that, in essence, you can do away with food cravings. When we look at why we snack, recognizing why weight loss hypnosis works so successfully becomes evident.

For a lot of us, snacking has become a habit - perhaps you do it unconsciously when you're driving or watching TV or when you're under stress. Hypnosis can actually reprogram your thoughts to cut those associations, leaving you to watch TV or drive without having the need to eat.

One of the most successful lose weight hypnosis methods for stopping 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 struggled with cravings.

NLP can be just as vital as exercise and motivation because, as you learned above, it can help make sure that you eat the right kinds of foods at the right times, and this is a vital 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.