Metabolic Magic - Diet Tricks To Increase Your Weight Loss

We have all heard it or even said it before: "I'm not able to lose weight because of my metabolism." It's easy to blame our unwanted weight on an abstract idea like metabolism, but let's examine the real importance of metabolism - and better yet, how to get the most "burn" for your buck by recharging your metabolism.

In the most basic sense, metabolism includes each of the physical and chemical changes that take place inside the cells of the body. Most often, though, metabolism refers to the process in which the body gets and uses energy from food, so it really does play an important part in weight loss and gain.

Not everyone is born with the same metabolism, and our rates actually fluctuate over the course of 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 sex, as males typically burn more calories at rest than females, and by the amount of muscle mass you possess (more muscle generally means a higher rate of metabolism). Heredity also affects metabolism, not to mention having children, as well as whether a woman decides to breast-feed.

Despite all of the wild cards, the simple fact is that if your calorie intake exceeds your metabolism, surplus energy will get stored in the body as fat. Though many of the issues affecting metabolic rate can't be altered, thankfully, there are methods to rev up the metabolism you are born with.

The first directive is to consume the right foods in the correct amounts. When you omit a meal, your body goes into starvation mode, which slows metabolism to keep calories, because it does not know when it will be fed again. And when the metabolism slows down, so does your weight loss.

When you finally do eat food after having skipped a meal, instead of burning the calories in the food you've just had, your body converts them to body fat to keep for the next "fast." To keep your metabolism efficient, eat 4 - 6 small meals spread evenly throughout the day and try 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 workouts and strength training. Aerobic activities, such as biking, dancing and running, use more calories in the short term, while strength training will build more muscle, which boosts metabolism and burns more calories in the long term - even when you are at rest, muscle uses more calories to function than fat.

In fact, every pound of muscle uses 35 calories per day, while each pound of fat uses only 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 harder to maintain its processes.

This is partly why it is almost always easiest to lose weight when you begin dieting, and gets challenging as you go along because, when you are significantly overweight, your metabolism is already at a high rate, so that even a slight reduction in calories will bring about an immediate weight loss.

But what happens after that immediate loss, when a plateau occurs and motivation seems to go by the "weigh" side? Old cravings and compulsions can quickly return, and when they do, don't overlook a valuable resource - lose weight hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy can actually retrain your unconscious mind so that, in essence, you can eliminate food cravings. When we study why we snack, understanding why weight loss hypnosis works so well becomes evident.

For a lot of people, snacking has become a habit - perhaps you do it mindlessly when you are driving or watching TV or when you are under stress. Hypnosis can actually reprogram your thoughts to stop those associations, leaving you to drive or watch TV without feeling the need to eat.

One of the most successful lose weight hypnosis methods for curbing the snacking cycle is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, which relies on collaborating with the unconscious mind 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 a person who has always struggled with cravings.

NLP can be equally as important as exercise and motivation because, as you learned above, it can help ensure that you eat the proper kinds of foods at the right times, and this is a main ingredient for turbo-charging your metabolism. If you wish to keep your metabolism at full speed and ensure that all of your exercise and hard work aren't going to waste by yielding to your food temptations, weight loss hypnosis and NLP can be a secret weapon to eliminate your cravings altogether.

Alan B. Densky, CH has worked with clients for weight loss and appetite control since 1978. Visit his hypnotherapy website to view his Free hypnotherapy videos, or learn about his exclusive lose weight through hypnosis CDs or his powerful video lose weight by hypnosis DVDs.