100 Ways to Boost Your Metabolism

Welcome to "100 Ways to Boost Your Metabolism"!

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This Week's Article: "Answering Your Questions About Metabolism"

by Ben Greenfield

What is the link between calories and energy?

Your body is always expending it. It doesn’t matter whether you are sleeping, performing a push-up, sitting at your desk, walking the dog or eating popcorn. Somehow, your body must muster enough energy, through one process or another, to sustain life and the activities of daily living.

Some energy requiring processes are automatic. Your heart must beat. Your eyes must twitch. Your lung muscles must contract and relax. Your liver must process organic compounds. Your kidneys must filter your blood. While you have no direct control over these processes, there are dietary and lifestyle modifications you can make that affect how much energy your body “automatically” burns.

There are also voluntary energy requiring processes. You must fire the muscles in your legs to sit in your desk chair, move your fingers to clip the leash on the dog, and contract your gripping muscles to grab a handful of popcorn. Each of these actions require energy.

All this energy is measured in tiny units called calories, and metabolism is defined as the caloric sum of all these chemical processes, whether automatic or voluntary, that must take place in order for the energy forming process to occur.

What is metabolism?

Technically, it is divided into four components: resting metabolic rate (RMR), thermal effect of feeding (TEF), thermal effect of activity (TEA), and adaptive thermogenesis (AT).

Resting metabolic rate, the RMR, accounts for the largest portion of your metabolism, up to 75% of your total daily energy expenditure. It includes all those automatic processes your body must sustain in order to live: action of your digestive system, cardiovascular system, and hormonal system, maintenance of proper body temperature, preservation of sensitive electrical gradients in your cells, and conductance of electrical transmissions through your nervous system.

Without your RMR, you would cease to exist. However, in the presence of certain crucial factors outlined in this book, your RMR can be slightly enhanced in a way that not only maintains normal function, but pushes the rate just slightly higher!

The TEF is the caloric sum of all the energetic processes required to digest, absorb, transport, metabolize, and store your meal. Believe it or not, this can account for up to 10% of your energy expenditure. Portions of this book explain how the content and chemical structure of the foods you eat can increase or decrease the TEF.

The TEA, is the easiest metabolic component to modify, and accounts for up to 30% of the total daily energy expenditure, depending on your level of physical activity.

If you’re already physically active, you’ve taken a step in the right direction to increasing your TEA. But the 100 tips in this book take you light years forward by supplying you with the specific knowledge of exactly which activities to perform, for how long, and with what intensity to drive your TEA through the roof.

The final component of metabolism, the AT, is your body’s reaction”system. Basically, the metabolism will make sensitive rate alterations in response to changes in the external or internal environment, such as physical or mental stress, hot and cold temperatures, and hormone levels. There are certain strategies outlined in this book that throw environmental “curveballs “at the AT, always forcing the body to react and maintain a sensitively high metabolism.

It is possible to have an energy surplus. There is a law in physics called the Law of Conservation of Energy, which says that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Energy can only change form. Therefore, unused energetic compounds found in food are either extracted as waste products or stored for future use, usually as fat. To avoid this energy storage, the metabolic strategy outlined in this book is two-fold: practice dietary methods that eliminate the energy surplus and follow specific lifestyle guidelines that maximize energy expenditure.

So where does food come in?

Energy comes from food. But complex actions must take place inside your body for turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberries to become the energy for talking, standing, sitting, walking and breathing. Your body must break the food into smaller and smaller pieces, then absorb these small pieces, and move them through the membrane of a tiny cell to be broken into even smaller pieces. These smallest pieces then enter into a miniscule cellular component called the mitochondria. The mitochondria is the cell’s powerhouse, and it is here that the electrical power of oxygen is harnessed to finally break that last tiny molecule of food and release energy!

Thousands of crucial steps lead to this eventual release of energy from food, and most of these steps require energy themselves. This energy is derived from calories, nutrients, vitamins, and minerals from the food that you’ve previously consumed, which is combined with the oxygen that you breathe. Any shortage of the necessary components will result in a shortage of energy.

Therefore, inadequate oxygen or inadequate food results in inadequate energy. And inadequate energy results in a slow metabolism. This book not only tells you how to ensure adequate nutrients from you dietary intake, but also how to achieve adequate oxygen balance in your internal and external environments.

What slows down energy and metabolism?

In the energy creation process, there are certain barriers to overcome. Take free radicals, for example.

The more energy you require and produce, the more oxygen you must utilize. Occasionally, the oxygen can mutate and escape from the cell in the form of a “free radical”. Also called oxidants, these renegade oxygen molecules combine with a host of other molecules in the body, and can interrupt the many different processes in your body these other molecules with which these molecules are associated.

Because they can interact with so many different molecules, free radicals can wreak serious havoc by altering DNA, destroying sensitive protective barriers around the cell, and changing the fragile biochemical structures of proteins and fats. These disruptions and alterations of sensitive cellular processes can sabotage energy production. Even a small amount of damage to the cell’s outside receptors and protective wall, or membrane, can severely alter the movement of compounds in and out of the cell, eventually killing the cell itself.

Fortunately, such challenges can be conquered with many of the simple dietary and lifestyle modifications you’ll learn about in this book.

Another serious barrier to boosting your metabolism is blood sugar stabilization.

After consumption of a carbohydrate-rich meal, your digestive system breaks down the carbs into tiny glucose molecules. Once these molecules enter the bloodstream, they trigger the release of insulin by an organ called the pancreas. Insulin ensures that the glucose is delivered to necessary tissues for energy, but when these energy stores are full, any excess glucose still in the bloodstream or digestive tract is easily converted to fat.

Unfortunately, most of us walk around with chronically elevated insulin levels because of excess energy consumption, especially in the form of simple sugars. Constant exposure to high amounts of insulin results in a condition called “Metabolic Syndrome”, which is characterized by high levels of circulating fats in the bloodstream, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, uncontrollable appetite cravings, obesity, increased diabetes risk, and most important to the vicious cycle, decreased sensitivity to insulin. Decreased sensitivity to insulin simply means that the cells become so accustomed to high blood insulin levels that they grow non-responsive to insulin, which only causes more insulin to be released!

You’ll find many strategies in this book that are directly focused on improving your sensitivity to insulin and stabilizing your blood sugar levels, thus avoiding this metabolic roller coaster ride.

How can I use this information to lose fat or gain lean muscle?

I've provided you with the key to unlocking your energy levels and making your metabolism burn like a wildfire!

If you follow 10 of the tips in this book, you’ll double your energy levels. If you follow 20 tips, you’ll see fat literally melt from your waistline. If you follow 50 tips, you’ll wonder why you avoided this incredible effect for so many years.

But if you read this book cover-to-cover and integrate each of the 100 tips into your daily lifestyle, you’ll find that the metabolic secrets give you far more than simply a high burning metabolism. Your entire quality of life will peak at levels you never thought imaginable. Enjoy the feeling.

Train smart, eat smart, live smart,
Ben Greenfield
NSCA-CPT, CSCS, MS PE
ben@bengreenfieldfitness.com

P.S. I’ve also scattered several “Metabotips” throughout "100 Ways to Boost Your Metabolism". These tips, tricks, and secrets are amazing weight loss tools!

P.P.S. If you scroll down this page, you'll also see a bonus DVD available from Amazon.com, complete with 5 body-weight only workout routines that you can use to boost your metabolism anytime, anyplace!

Click here to order 100 Ways To Boost Your Metabolism, for just $19.99, electronically downloaded to your computer !