Fat Burning – Mastering Your METABOLISM 101
Before we dig into how we can turn our bodies into a 24 hour fat burning machine, it’s helpful to have an understanding of how metabolism works. Welcome to Metabolism 101. Try to pay attention!
All About Energy – Fat Burning
Our bodies are always using energy. We use energy when we run, when we sit behind a computer screen and type, when we do a set of pushups, when we have sex. No matter what we do our body needs to raise up enough energy to perform the function. This is an inescapable fact of life, for better or for worse.
We can split the things that our body does that require energy into two broad categories. The first is automatic functions. The second are functions we choose to perform.
Some examples of automatic functions include our beating hearts, when our eyes twitch, the working of our livers and kidneys. We don’t control any of these, but as we will see later in our Guide dietary and lifestyle choices can certainly affect how much energy we expend on them.
The functions we choose to perform include absolutely everything else we do in our daily lives. Walk the dog? Or get up to grab the milk? No matter what we “do”, it requires some sort of energy expenditure.
All this energy is measured in a unit I’m fairly certain you are familiar with the unit. It’s called a calorie. Metabolism is defined as “the caloric sum of both your automatic and voluntary functions that must take place in order for the energy forming process to occur.”
Metabolism can be broken down into four parts for our purposes here. They are
1. Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). This is, by far, the largest part of our metabolism. It counts for over 75% of our daily calorie expenditure. This is where the energy for all of our automatic body functions comes from. Can you see where even small enhancements here can add up to more pounds of fat lost week after week?
2. Thermal Effect of Feeding (TEF). This is the amount of calories we spend on storing, digesting and absorbing food.
3. Thermal Effect of Activity (TEA). The TEA is the area we can exert the most influence on. It’s the amount of calories we spend on activities like cardio and doing strength training. For some of us it can amount to up to 30% of our caloric expenditure a day.
4. Adaptive Thermogenisis (AT). We can think of this as our bodies “adaptive” metabolism. It adjusts up and down based on changes in our environment. Things as varied as the temperature we are operating in to our mental state can affect AT. This is an area that can be greatly influenced to our fat burning benefit using the secrets you are about to learn in our Guide!
These four pillars of fat burning metabolism are usually the enemies of the multitude of us who are trying to look our best and be healthy. We’re going to do our best to make them allies as we learn to burn fat 24 hours a day. The results far exceed the effort!
The Secrets To Mastering Your Fat Burning Metabolism
