Your Metabolism Matters!
Metabolism, Anabolsim, and Catabolisim: What is the difference?
What does that mean to your weight loss plans?
First and foremost, whether you are dieting or whether you are working out makes a huge difference in this section. Secondly, I hope that this will inspire you to workout, with a little lay science to explain why.
The body is perhaps the most complex combination of chemical reactions on the face of the earth. At any given moment thousands of small chemical reactions are happening, breaking down food, degenerating and regenerating cells, sweating, fighting bacteria, releasing waste, the list goes on and on. All of these reactions require energy. I will explain in the simplest scientific language possible what this means for you and for your diet, and hopefully exercise program.
All of these chemical reactions are called metabolism. Yes, that means it is an oversimplification to say that a thermogenic, or weight loss product stimulates your metabolism. Metabolism is the broad definition of everything from breaking down food, transporting the nutrients and calories to your body, rebuilding your body with these nutrients and calories (or storing them as fat) and burning energy in order to do all of them.
There are two kinds of metabolism: Catabolism and anabolism.
Catabolism describes the process of breaking down fat, muscle, and bone into smaller more processable parts for energy in the body. Anabolism is the process of turning the nutrients and energy in foods passing through your blood system into larger molecules in the body, repairing cells, storing fat, and building new muscle. Anabolism requires energy to work.
What this means to you and your diet. This is the simplest explanation of why breakfast is important and it is essential that you don’t put yourself on a starvation diet (less than 1200 calories a day). Your body will actually catabolize muscle and bone, and take every extra calorie it can find and turn it into fat through anabolism. Essentially, the scientific explanation for my article on healthy weight loss, how much is too much, is that your body will store as much as it can, slow down what it breaks down, break down the wrong stores, and create an environment in your body where returning to normal healthy eating patterns will lead to weight gain.
What else does it mean for your exercise program? Once again in the simplest pseudo scientific terms possible, the reason to work out is based on these metabolism pieces. When you work out you break down muscle tissue. In order to repair that tissue, if eating enough calories (more then 1500), the body will catabolize fat, breaking it down to get the energy from it to repair the muscle cells you worked out through anabolism. It is literally turning fat into muscle.
You know that old saying that people that work out burn more calories throughout the day? Or that a pound of muscle burns about 50 calories per day? That is because it requires energy, in the form of burnt calories, to maintain that muscle.
So it is absolutely essential to work out when starting your weight loss regimen. The combination will make you lose weight faster, and more efficiently. And now you know why.