How to Increase Metabolism?

Metabolism is the set of chemical reactions that occur in living organisms in order to maintain life. These processes allow organisms to grow and reproduce, maintain their structures, and respond to their environments. Metabolism is usually divided into two categories. Catabolism breaks down organic matter, for example to harvest energy in cellular respiration. Anabolism, on the other hand, uses energy to construct components of cells such as proteins and nucleic acids. In short the burning of certain amount of energy (calories) by your body to maintain itself is called metabolism. Your body is constantly burning the calories no matter what you are doing be it eating, drinking, sleeping, cleaning just to maintain itself.

Metabolism is affected by your body composition i.e the amount of muscle you have versus the amount of fat. The muscle in our body uses more calories to maintain itself compared to fat. People who are more muscular than others that are less muscular (and have a higher percentage of body fat than muscular people) are said to have a higher metabolism. For example, let's say you have two people who have the exact same height and weight. One exercises on a regular basis with weights, in addition to aerobic exercise, and has a low percentage of body fat. The other never exercises and has a higher percentage of body fat. The first person who exercises will have a higher metabolism than the second person. What this basically means is that person number 1's body will use more calories to sustain itself than person number 2.

To increase your metabolism, you should start to exercise and get the right diet plan. To increase your muscle mass, start doing some type of resistance work such as lifting weights, rubber bands etc. For you to lower your level of body fat you should do some type of aerobic exercise at least 30 minutes a day 3 days a week. This could be activities such as walking, jogging, step aerobics cycling, swimming. These activities will increase your heart beat rate into the training heart rate and keep it there for the duration of the exercise session.

Apart from the workout, you need to have the right diet plan that does not starve you. As you are burning a lot of calories working out, you need to replenish your body by drinking plenty of water and you need to take your regular meal which breakfast, lunch and dinner. The right diet should cover what you eat, the size of your meals, the time of day in which you eat certain food groups, the time between meals, and the number of meals you eat each day. All this can have a bigger effect on your weight than the amount of calories that you consume.

If you do not eat, or you eat a very low-calorie diet, your metabolism will decrease because your body thinks it is starving and your body will burn less calories. This happen so that your body can survive.