You Must Be Physically Active to Have an Efficient Metabolism

Metabolic efficiency is directly related to the amount of activity you engage in each day. This includes everything from planned exercise to walking through your local mall to playing with your kids to taking your spouse out dancing or your family for a walk in the local park. If you aren’t physically active, you will begin to gain weight. It’s that simple. According to a recent report by the surgeon general, a shocking 60 percent of Americans do not engage in enough activity to keep them even minimally healthy, and 25 percent get no exercise at all. Many people think that metabolism slows as you get older. It is not your metabolic processes that are slowing down, however; it is your lifestyle and level of activity. When most baby boomers think back to how they looked in their childhood, they probably remember a skinny boy or girl who was always outside running around or playing sports. When they got older and took on adult responsibilities, they may have sat behind a desk for eight hours a day.

As time passed, children were born, family responsibilities increased, and they got older, they probably spent more time working and less time being physically active, resulting in gradual yearly weight gain. With the advent of television and home computers, even leisure time took on a sedentary nature, with the average adult watching four hours of TV daily. The commercials for junk food, sugary treats, soft drinks, chips, and highly processed foods also encourage poor eating habits. When was the last time you saw a TV ad for fresh fruits and vegetables? A certain amount of inactivity is directly related to the fact that more than 50 percent of all Americans are now living in urban environments where being active outdoors is not necessarily a part of daily life. If you live in a condo or an apartment, you probably don’t mow the lawn or do yard work; nor are your kids easily able to step outside and play or take a dip in the pool.

To create metabolic efficiency, you need to engage in at least twenty to thirty minutes of exercise at least three times per week. How you should exercise is related to your gender. Studies have shown that women tend to metabolize more fat at low to moderate intensities of exercise and men at moderate to high intensities. Also, as individuals get older, the ratio between aerobic and resistance exercise should change. The older a person gets, the more he or she will need to conserve bone mass and lean muscle, both of which decrease with age.

Controlling Your Insulin Response Is Key for Fat Loss

The most effective way to reduce body fat and promote metabolic efficiency is to normalize your body’s ability to manage insulin. Effectively managing insulin is based on four factors: (1) the glycemic index of the foods you eat (their complexity and the amount of time it takes to digest them), (2) the efficiency of your metabolism, (3) your fat–to–lean muscle ratio, and (4) the amount and type of physical activity and exercise you engage in.

Since muscle tissue is metabolically active and fat just basically sits there, the fatter you are, the less metabolically active your body will be. There are two main scenarios in which a person develops a high fat–to–lean muscle ratio. The first can occur at any age and is lifestyle related—high levels of stress, poor eating habits, low levels of exercise or no exercise. The second is a natural but reversible process called sarcopenia that develops with age. Sarcopenia is basically the wasting of lean muscle and the gain in body fat that results from lack of exercise, especially resistive exercise. Whatever the reason, having an unhealthy amount of body fat can lead to a lower metabolic rate and insulin resistance. Insulin is the hormone involved in storing energy from the foods that we eat. When there is an overabundance of energy-giving foods in a meal, especially carbohydrates but to a lesser degree proteins and to a much lesser degree fats, the body will secrete insulin in great quantities. Any nutrients that cannot be used at that time will be stored. Insulin affects excess proteins by promoting amino acid uptake by cells. Insulin causes excess carbohydrates to be stored as glycogen in the liver, muscles, and circulatory system until they are needed between meals when glucose levels drop. All of the excess carbohydrates that cannot be stored as glycogen are converted into fat and stored in the adipose (fatty) tissues.

The book Endocrinology and Reproduction by P. C. K. Leung and others gives further insights into this process in the chapter where it discusses insulin and diabetes: “When insulin is secreted into the blood, it circulates almost entirely in an unbound form: it has a plasma half-life that averages only about 6 minutes, so that it is mainly cleared from the circulation within 10 to 15 minutes. . . . This rapid removal from the plasma is important because at times it is equally as important to turn off rapidly as to turn on the control functions of insulin.”

Eating Too Little Can Slow Down Your Metabolism

Eating too few calories for the efficient functioning of your metabolism ultimately results in more stored fat. This might sound like a contradiction, but eating a calorically deprived diet over a long period of time actually causes the body to begin to hang on to the fat supplies it has and even add to them. Because a steady supply of food was not guaranteed to our hunter-gatherer forebears, the body developed the added ability to slow down the metabolism and store extra fat during periods of famine. If we did not have this ability, we would not have survived the lean times. This is the primary reason that very low-calorie or starvation diets do not work in the long run. Almost everyone who has ever been on a calorically
deprived diet knows that at first the pounds just melt off. But eventually you reach a plateau where you stop losing weight, no matter how hard you try. That is your body’s natural fat-storing survival mechanism kicking in. Recent studies have even shown an unexpected link between chronic caloric deprivation and obesity. Research conducted by Cornell University and the University of California at Davis have shown the connections between obesity, hunger, and poverty: poor women who periodically go without food so that their children can eat are often obese. The more often you starve yourself to try and lose weight, the slower and less efficient your metabolism will become.