What is metabolism?
The word metabolism comes from Greek and means “capacity for change.” This refers to the quality that living beings have of changing the nature of certain substances chemically.
When we talk about metabolism, we talk about the body’s process responsible for producing and burning energy from food. The metabolism is essential to living and is an intimate part of breathing, thinking, digesting, circulating the blood, keeping our body warm …
The metabolism is divided into two processes: anabolism, which produces molecules and substances, consuming energy, and catabolism, which produces energy from molecules, such as sugar. Each metabolic process is an intricate succession of chemical reactions, exchange of molecules, and gradient of substances, which allow everything to work.
Due to its intimate relationship with energy, there are numerous beliefs and myths about “activating” the metabolism to help us get more energy, consume more fat and get fitter. But is it possible to do it? Let’s take a look at what we know.
From passive to active person: this is how your health improves with physical exercise
In Vitónica
From passive to active person: this is how your health improves with physical exercise
What is this “to activate the metabolism”?
When our body needs a lot of energy to perform an activity, it automatically triggers a cascade of metabolic signals. These work in a “chained” way, as if it were a domino effect. The result is that the metabolism, effectively, is “activated” and begins to consume more substances (fats and carbohydrates, usually) to produce more energy.
This machinery is dependent on numerous hormones and signals. It is regulated precisely and through various actions that act on the expression of genes, the number of substances, the inactivation of enzymes … and countless other points. But when does this activation occur?
When we raise our level of physical activity, the main factor that increases the activity of our metabolism or, in other words, that consumes more reserve substances and produces more energy is exercise.
Although some other bodily activities consume a lot of energy (such as maintaining the excretory system or body temperature), none consume as much as moving the muscles. When the muscles begin to consume, nervous signals are suddenly launched, leading to hormonal signals.
The muscle begins to consume glucose, reducing the immediate concentration in the blood. When it is not enough, glycogen (stored carbohydrates) and fat are already in the process of catabolism to supply adequate energy. This change in substances causes new signals that make the system stay … and thus, the metabolism is “activated.”
When we decide to expand our information on the world of diets, we will quickly find references to metabolism, that word that we hear non-stop and that we rarely understand. Surely you have heard of a specific food group or physical exercises that accelerate it, and in many cases, it is related to weight gain or difficulty in losing weight, but do you know what metabolism is?
We talk about the process your body carries out to convert the food it consumes into the energy it needs. It is a vital process for all living beings, not only for humans, the energy that our body obtains when we eat, and that makes us capable, for example, of breathing or digestion. But what does that have to do with that ‘gordominal’ you can’t take off?
It has a lot to do with whether your metabolic rate is more or less fast, and this is measured in two ways: either by the heat that your body exudes or by monitoring the levels of carbon dioxide that you exhale. But why are there people who have it faster or less? Dr. Thomas Barber, an endocrinologist at the University of Warwick, explains in Live Science: “People differ in their metabolic rate, but if you look at people’s metabolism per unit or per kilogram of lean mass, they are The rate is remarkably constant throughout the population. Most of the metabolic process takes place in the body’s lean tissue, so if we consider people only by their lean mass, we are all quite similar. “
The more lean mass you have and the less body fat, the more efficiently your body’s metabolism will function.
