METABOLISM
by David Gilks
Are you the victim of a slow metabolism or poor dietary practices?
It is interesting to listen to the conversation of those who have spent their life playing around with various diet and exercise plans to no avail, and the most common thing that is blamed for our failure is one of a faulty metabolism. We often hear words such as slow metabolism, hypothyroidism, genetic predisposition for one body type or another to be the blame for our fitness catastrophes. Is the deck really stacked up against us? The biggest hurdle we truly face is how to decipher the mass of information that is available and deciding what is applicable to us. Since our metabolism is often made out the bad guy, I think it only makes sense to give our metabolism the benefit of the doubt.
So, what is a metabolism? Our metabolism is the process in which our body combines nutrients that we ingest with oxygen to release the energy our bodies need for our daily life. There are two phases to our metabolism, (stay with me here, it gets a little wordy) the anabolic phase and the catabolic phase.
Anabolic is when our body is in the building phase and catabolism is the tear down or destructive phase. This is the real key to managing weight loss and maintaining a healthy bodyweight. Most of our calories ingested daily are "burned" by our lean muscle, as fat is basically "metabolically dead". So obviously building and hanging onto as muscle as possible is a real key to staying lean. So when I work with the hundreds of clients trying to "lean out" strength training (think anabolic) is a major part of our program design. But weight training is not the only part of the equation. Eating is the single biggest mistake that we make (not eating that is).
What happens when we don't eat? Our metabolism begins to slow down and starts looking for other forms of energy to feed on, namely our muscle tissue, you know, the very thing that helps keeps us lean. To make matters worse, this constant yo-yo eating pattern teaches the body to produce fat storage enzymes, and the longer we do silly things with our diet, the better at fat storage we get. Not the desired effect I am sure you were looking for, but so many of us still get caught up in the dieting maze. Don't despair; there is hope for you yet. By planning and eating 4-5 meals a day we can jump-start our metabolism as quickly as 30 days! This along with a vigorous exercise plan our metabolism will begin to speed up, that is of course as long as we stick with the plan and not quit. You may find that you might gain a few pounds over the first month but hang in there and your weight will regulate itself and the weight will begin to come off during the second month and thereafter.
So remember, whatever your metabolism is doing right now, it is probably a byproduct of your dietary and exercise behaviour, so if you don't like where you are, simply change your behaviour! Check out the December issue of Chatelaine page 112 where we offer more great tips for staying lean and healthy during the Christmas season.
