Metabolism is the chemical processing occurring inside your body. It helps burn down the food you consume into simpler parts and then helps those parts get absorbed by body to utilize the food.
Depending on your genetics and much more, you may have a metabolism anywhere from slow to fast. A fast metabolism would mean your body doesn’t store fats and other things much. How much is stored depends on how fast your metabolism is. As you go from fast to slow metabolism, the quantity deposition of fatty acids and other parts increase. Meaning you can get off eating a cheese hamburger every day and still staying slim if you metabolism is fast. However, if it is slow, even being on a special diet may not bring desired fat loss results. Hence, one must be well informed about this concept.
The typical categorization that most of you must have heard separates the entire spectrum into three parts:
1. Ectomorph: Fast metabolism
2. Mesomorph: Neutral
3. Endomorph: Slow metabolism.
However, to just know these three may not be enough to advance your fitness goals. You see, say the total scale of metabolism is from 0 to 100. Now dividing it in such simple crude way would mean 0-33 are endos, 34-66 are mesos and rest and ectos. If that was the case, Person A at 2 would be considered same as Person B at 32. Both shall be termed endo. Now without more information, both of them may pick a diet for endos from internet and start on it, hoping to see good results. Well you think about it, will they both get same results?
More often than not, people try hard towards their fitness goals but fail at the hands of lack of information. Especially about their own metabolism.
Also, your metabolism isn’t constant. Meaning if you are born with a slow metabolism, say of 4, it doesn’t mean it is destined to stay that way for as long as you live. Metabolism changes frequently, due to age and change in lifestyle. Such things can create massive influence on your workout goals and without knowledge, you may feel lost and may feel rules of fitness don’t apply to you equally.
For example, I will narrate my story. I always had a slow metabolism. I gained a lot of fat and was over 120 kg at the peak of my life. From there on, I started religiously working out every day. Years went by and I looked muscular. Due to my routine of lifting heavy weights every week, my frame had transformed. Little did I know my metabolism had transformed itself too.
There came a time when I had to discontinue my workouts for a month. Here is when I saw the magic. Immediately after I skipped my workouts, my appetite decreased. Then in the first week of not working out, my body weight actually dropped. However, after about one month, the weight started increasing alarmingly in form of fat deposits.
The thing I learnt here was how my body actually went in a state of pseudo-ectomorphism due to my rigorous workout. When I stopped it, the body lost reason to boost its metabolic rate anywhere above my natural state and that made my metabolism slow down again and start storing fat.
Pointers for anyone witnessing similar issues:
1. Make sure you include regular workout sessions in your routine where you sweat and keep your heartbeat elevated.
2. If you metabolism is slow, pay more attention to this point. Eat food which is simpler for the body to break. This would mean sticking to boiled stuff more than gravy stuff. Simply salt & pepper in place of spices. The easier your food gets for body to break down, the faster your metabolism gets.
3. Drink water.
The idea is for you to have a good idea about how your metabolism is behaving any usual day. Checking stool form can help gauze levels of digestion. You need not quantify your metabolism or even categorize it, but should have a hard idea on how it is in natural state and how much you can better it by changing your lifestyle.
Carefully Carefree 