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 fat 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 basic sense, metabolism includes all of the physical and chemical changes that take place within the body’s cells. Most often, though, metabolism refers to the process in which the body gets and uses energy from what we eat, so it really does play an important part in weight loss and gain.

Not everyone is given 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 typically burn more calories at rest than females, and by the quantity of muscle mass you have (more muscle generally means a higher rate of metabolism). Heredity also impacts metabolism, not to mention having children, as well as whether a woman decides to breast-feed.

In spit of all of the wild cards, the simple fact is that if your calorie intake surpasses your metabolism, excess energy will get housed in the body as fat. Though some of the issues affecting metabolic rate can’t be altered, fortunately, there are ways to rev up the metabolism you’re born with.

The first directive is to take in the correct foods in the correct amounts. When you skip a meal, your body goes into starvation mode, which slows metabolism to conserve calories, because it doesn’t know when it will get food again. And when the metabolism slows, so does the rate at which you lose weight.

When you finally do eat after having skipped a meal, instead of burning the calories in the food you have just taken in, your body transfers them to body fat to hold for the next “fast.” To keep your metabolism efficient, eat 4 – 6 smaller meals during 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 routines and weight lifting. Aerobic activities, such as dancing, biking and running, burn more calories in the short term, while weight lifting will create more muscle, which increases metabolism and burns more calories in the long term – even when you’re at rest, 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 only 2 calories per day. Despite this, you might be surprised that the more weight you have, 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 almost always easiest to lose weight when you start dieting, and gets challenging as you continue because, when you are significantly overweight, your metabolism is already at an elevated rate, so that even a slight cutback in calories will lead to 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 swiftly return, and when they do, do not overlook a valuable resource – lose weight hypnosis. Hypnotherapy can actually retrain your unconscious so that, in essence, you can do away with food cravings. When we study why we snack, recognizing why weight loss hypnosis works so successfully becomes clear.

For a lot of us, snacking has become a habit – perhaps you do it unconsciously when you’re driving or watching TV or when you’re under stress. Hypnosis can actually reprogram your thoughts to stop those associations, leaving you to drive or watch TV without having the need to eat.

One of the most successful weight loss hypnosis techniques for curbing the snacking cycle is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, which relies on negotiating with the unconscious mind and making it 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 essential as exercise and motivation because, as you read above, it can help make sure that you eat the right kinds of foods at the right times, and this is a chief part of turbo-charging your metabolism. If you want to keep your metabolism at full speed and make sure that all of hard work and exercise are not going to waste by yielding to your food temptations, weight loss hypnosis and NLP can be a secret weapon to eliminate your cravings once and for all.

Alan B. Densky, CH has worked with clients for appetite control and weight loss since 1978. Visit his self-hypnosis website to enjoy his Free hypnosis videos, or learn about his exclusive lose weight through hypnosis CDs or his effective video hypnotism for losing weight DVDs.

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