How Does Our Metabolism Function

Metabolism is a fusion of internal chemical processes continuously happening inside our body that keeps us alive and functioning properly. Metabolism is mostly known as a process through which our body breaks down food and drink as digestion, turns it into energy, and then burns those calories as the energy is consumed. This conversion of food to energy is necessary for life-carrying tasks such as breathing, digesting food, circulating blood, regulating body temperature, repairing and growing cells, and discharging waste.

Even when our body is at rest, such as when we are sleeping, we are still using energy for such basic functions. In fact, the average human body burns about 1800 calories a day doing absolutely nothing or simply by breathing. However, this quantity varies from one person to another person, as the amount of energy our body burns at any given time is directly influenced by the rate of our metabolism, which can be slower or faster in some people.

What Is Metabolism?

Our metabolic rate speaks of how quickly our body converts and uses energy in order to function. There are two linked measures of our metabolic rate, these are often used interchangeably but differ moderately.

Basal metabolic rate (BMR): BMR estimates the minimum amount of energy that our body needs to perform its most basic activities such as breathing, digestion.

Resting metabolic rate (RMR): RMR measures the amount of calories our body burns while staying at rest as against to being engaged in any low- to high forced physical activity. This measures accounts for the types of movements we would do while spending a day at home doing nothing (for example., eating, going to the washroom, walking from one room to another) on top of our basic functions measured by BMR.

Our metabolic rate is influenced by various different factors, such as:

Genes and body type: Our genetic makeup can influence our body type, size, and level of muscle growth as we develop, all of which have an impact on our metabolism. People with large body sizes and greater muscles are most likely to burn more kilojoules of energy throughout the day as compared to skinny and small bodies.

Gender: Normally, men tend to have more muscles than women and burn more energy at a faster rate.

Age: As we age, we begin to lose more muscle mass and generally become less active, both of these factors can slow down our metabolism.

Physical activity levels: People who are more physically active on a routine basis generally burn more calories at a faster rate than those who have less physical activity. This is one of the few factors we actually have some control over.

Does Metabolism Slows Down With Age?

While it is true that metabolism slows with age, a recent, large-scale study has shown that this actually only happens much later in life than normally thought. The study found that from around the age of 50 years, our metabolism begins to slow down gradually each year at am approximate rate of around 0.7%. However, for a larger portion of our life from age 25 to 60 years, our metabolism actually remains impartially stable.

There are of course other factors involved that are linked with age that can also affect changes in the amount of energy we burn each day and affect our weight maintenance as we get older. These are mainly the amount of muscle we have and our physical activity levels. Muscle tissue uses more energy and hence burns more calories than fat does, so the more muscle we have, the more calories we can burn when we use them. People tend to lose muscle mass as they grow older, either as a natural part of the aging process or probably because they become less physically active and their metabolism begins to slow down.

Can We Boost Our Metabolism?

You probably know people who seem to be able to lose weight very quickly and easily than others and put this down to a faster metabolism. If you are struggling with maintaining your weight, you may be looking for some ways to boost your metabolism as well.

However, boosting your metabolism is difficult. There are a very limited scientific evidences that support the fact that any foods, drinks, or supplements can actually increase our metabolism beyond a temporary boost. However having a slow metabolism doesn’t always mean that you won’t be able to lose weight. The true fact is that everyone can lose weight if they burn more calories than they consume, so the focus should be reducing the number of calories we eat and increasing the number of calories we burn each day to create a gap or energy deficit. Monitoring our metabolism in order to maintain or lose weight is all about achieving balance in our diet.

We can totally influence how much energy our body needs, gets, and uses by making a few changes to our lifestyle:

• Eating a healthy and balanced diet consisting of whole foods, fiber, and proteins
• Staying physically active
• Getting plenty of sleep ideally 8 hours a day
• Taking care of our well-beings

Does Physical Activity Influence Metabolism?

Increasing our physical activity levels can help to boost our metabolism for a short period of time, but building regular exercise into our lifestyle is the best way to get long-lasting benefits for weight loss and management.

When we exercise, we burn additional calories beyond what our body would normally burn in a day for its internal functioning and low-level physical activities. Any additional exercises we do help to increase the gap between the number of calories going in and going out of our body each day. Our body burns these additional calories while we are engaged in any kind of physical activity. Depending on the potency of our workout, it may continue to burn calories at a higher rate for some time afterwards. However, this short-term increase in metabolic rate can not have a long-lasting effect on our metabolism in the coming days. Once we stop moving, our body generally reverts to its resting metabolic rate.