Aspiring Spirit

We have all heard it or even said it one time or another: “I’m not able to lose weight because of my metabolism.” It’s convenient to blame our extra fat on an abstract idea like metabolism, but let’s learn about 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 all of the chemical and physical changes that occur within the body’s cells. Most often, though, metabolism refers to the manner in which the body acquires and uses energy from what we eat, so it really does have an important role in weight gain and loss.

Not everyone is born with the same metabolism, and our rates actually change during our lives, so someone who blames their metabolism is not necessarily making excuses. Age affects metabolism, which will slow about 5% every 10 years after we turn 40, and by gender, as males usually burn more calories at rest than females, and by the quantity of muscle mass you possess (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 fact is that when your calorie intake exceeds your metabolism, excess energy will get housed in the body as fat. Though some of the issues affecting metabolic rate cannot be helped, thankfully, there are ways to rev up the metabolism you are born with.

The first tenet is to eat the correct foods in the right amounts. When you skip a meal, your body switches to starvation mode, which slows metabolism to preserve calories, because it does not 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 using the calories in the food you’ve just eaten, your body converts them to body fat to store 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 each 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 build more muscle, which improves metabolism and burns more calories in the long term - even when you are at rest, muscle requires more calories to function than fat.

In fact, every pound of muscle requires 35 calories per day, while each 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 makes your body work more to maintain its processes.

This is partly why it’s almost always easiest to drop weight when you start dieting, and becomes challenging as you go along because, when you are significantly overweight, your metabolism is already at a high 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 suddenly return, and when they do, do not ignore a valuable resource - lose weight hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy can actually retrain your unconscious mind so that, in essence, you can do away with food cravings. When we study why we snack, understanding why weight loss hypnosis works so well becomes evident.

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

One of the most successful lose weight hypnosis methods for stopping the snacking cycle is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, which relies on collaborating with the unconscious and making it use the same thought processes that are creating your appetite, to eliminate your appetite. NLP requires 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 someone who has always struggled with cravings.

NLP can be just as important as motivation and exercise because, as you read above, it can help ensure that you eat the correct kinds of foods at the right times, and this is a chief ingredient for turbo-charging your metabolism. If you want to keep your metabolism at full speed and ensure that all of hard work and exercise aren’t going to waste by giving in 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 suppression and weight loss since 1978. Visit his hypnotherapy website to watch his Free self-hypnosis videos, or learn about his superb hypnotherapy weight loss CDs or his powerful video hypnotherapy losing weight DVDs.

- Alan B. Densky, CH