We all know someone who seems to have won the biological lottery – you know what I’m talking about – the person who can eat anything they want and never seem to gain any weight? They can eat cheesecake morning, noon and night and they’ll still be svelte and skinny. Most of us attribute it to their high metabolism – after all, why else would they be able to eat that way?
The truth is, metabolism doesn’t have as much to do with our weight as we might like to believe. People who slightly built or thin often have a slower metabolism than someone who is overweight. The reason why is that your basal metabolism is based on the calories you burn to keep your body going. So if you have a larger body, it correlates that you burn more calories and your metabolism is greater. The smaller body needs fewer calories and thus their metabolism is lower.
So How Does This Help?
Understanding this helps on two fronts. Metabolism is based on calories burned, so if an overweight person burns an average of 2200 calories per day – they can consume 1700 calories or conversely burn 500 extra calories through workout or a combination thereof. This will work for a while, but as they lose weight – they will be burning fewer calories unless they are building muscle.
Yes, you knew exercise had to come into it somewhere. Muscles burn more calories than fat, so as you are working on losing weight – building muscle can help because it can raise your metabolism – thereby increasing the fat burning you’re doing. So let’s go back to our original example. A person who is burning an average of 2200 calories per day and you are working out regularly, building muscle while cutting back on what you consume. So you are eating 1800 calories per day, but working out regularly and burning 300 calories per day, but building muscle so that you are actually burning 2300 to 2400 calories per day – this means that you are going to actually be losing more as you go along than you were in the beginning.
It’s all rather complicated, but it boils down to diet plans that work needs a fitness component. The fitness and exercise component helps you to build muscle and burn fat as well as increases your metabolism. Have you ever figured out what your basal metabolism is? If so, did it help you to increase your weight loss?
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