Metabolism Magic - How To Increase Your Weight Loss

We've all heard it or even said it one time or another: "I'm not able to lose weight because of my metabolism." It's easy to blame our extra pounds on an abstract idea like metabolism, but let's look at the real importance of metabolism - and better yet, how you can get the most "burn" for your buck by recharging your metabolism.

In the most fundamental sense, metabolism means each of the chemical and physical changes that take place inside the body's cells. Most often, however, metabolism refers to the process in which the body gets and uses energy from food, so it really does have an important function in weight loss and gain.

Not everyone has the same metabolism, and our rates actually vary throughout our lives, so someone who blames their metabolism isn't necessarily making excuses. Age affects metabolism, which will slow about 5% every 10 years after age 40, and by gender, as males usually burn more calories at rest than females, and by the quantity of muscle mass you have (more muscle generally means a higher metabolic rate). Genetics also influences metabolism, not to mention having children, as well as whether a woman chooses to breast-feed.

Despite all of the wild cards, the fact is that when your calorie intake surpasses your metabolism, surplus energy will get stored in the body as fat. Though some of the factors affecting metabolic rate can't be altered, fortunately, there are ways to rev up the metabolism you are born with.

The first directive is to eat the correct foods in the correct amounts. When you omit a meal, your body turns on starvation mode, which slows metabolism to conserve calories, because it does not know when it will get to eat again. And when the metabolism slows down, so does the rate at which you lose weight.

When you finally do get food after skipping a meal, instead of using the calories in the food you have just eaten, your body converts them to body fat to hold for the next "fast." To keep your metabolism efficient, eat 4 - 6 small meals over the course of the day and aim to eat close to the same times every day. Most importantly, never skip a meal.

You can also step up your metabolic rate with exercise, including both aerobic workouts and weight training. Aerobic activities, such as dancing, biking and running, use more calories in the short term, while weight training will create more muscle, which boosts metabolism and burns more calories in the long term - even when you are sitting still, muscle uses more calories to function than fat.

In fact, every pound of muscle requires 35 calories a day, while every pound of fat requires just 2 calories per day. Despite this, you may be surprised that the more weight you posses, the faster your metabolism is likely to run. Simply put, the extra weight forces your body work harder to maintain its processes.

This is partly why it is nearly always easiest to lose weight when you start dieting, and becomes challenging as you go along because, when you are significantly overweight, your metabolism is already at an elevated rate, so that even a minor cutback in calories will give you an immediate weight loss.

But what happens after that immediate loss, when a plateau occurs and motivation seems to go by the "weigh" side? Persistent cravings and compulsions can quickly come back, and when they do, don't ignore a valuable resource - weight loss hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy can actually retrain your unconscious mind so that, in essence, you can eliminate food cravings. When we examine why we snack, recognizing why weight loss hypnosis works so well becomes evident.

For a lot of people, snacking has become a habit - maybe you do it unconsciously when you are driving or watching TV or when you're under stress. Hypnosis can actually reprogram your thoughts to cut those associations, leaving you to watch TV or drive without having the need to eat.

One of the most successful weight loss hypnosis techniques for breaking the snacking cycle is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, which relies on collaborating with the unconscious mind and getting it to use the same thought processes that are creating your appetite, to eliminate your appetite. NLP takes many years of study and practical experience for a hypnotherapist to learn and master, but positive results can come very rapidly and seem almost magical to a person who has always struggled with cravings.

NLP can be just as imperative as exercise and motivation because, as you learned above, it can help ensure that you eat the correct kinds of foods at the right times, and this is a chief aspect of turbo-charging your metabolism. If you wish to keep your metabolism at full speed and ensure that all of your exercise and hard work aren't going to waste by surrendering to your food temptations, weight loss hypnosis and NLP can be a secret weapon to eliminate your cravings altogether.