What if it really is your metabolism?

If you’re overweight and have the audacity to suggest it’s at least partially because you have a slow metabolism, you may get ridiculed by people who think the human body works as simply as a car: put fuel in, burn fuel, need more fuel.

But let’s face it. If some people can stay slim while eating lard-dipped ice cream as a staple and never getting off the couch (with little awareness of their actual health, of course, since they look fine), that means it’s not always diet that makes you slim. Which means it’s not always diet that makes you not slim.

I’ve been working with a trainer, and it turns out I really was eating fewer calories than I should and was still heavy. It took six months of diet and exercise changes just to get my metabolism working again. After that, I finally started losing inches. Not weight; size. Here’s how I did it.

• Strength Training: I focused on upper body because my lower body builds great muscle just from walking and doing cardio stuff. I pushed the weights as high as I could go for sets of 8-12 reps. I did two sets each on every upper body machine at my gym 2-3 times a week. 4-5 times would be better, but if you’re schedule doesn’t allow it, 2-3 will get you there eventually. This built lots of muscle, and muscle burns calories even while you sleep. The number of calories I can burn in a day has gone up by several hundred. And muscle building is great for your bone health, too.
• Cardio: I did 30-45 minutes on the elliptical every time I did strength training. Again, 4-5 sessions would be even better.
• Diet: while I was not actually eating as many calories as a woman my age/size should, it turned out my diet was around 40% fat. Even though I was good about avoiding trans fats and sticking to “good fats”, I found that if I keep my fat calories to 20-30% of my overall daily calories, I can eat as many or few calories as I feel like and still lose weight steadily.

If I hit a plateau, I may cut back further on fat for a while. Or maybe I’ll squeeze in some extra cardio sessions. But for now, I’m losing inches slowly and steadily. My weight has hardly changed because I’m replacing fat with muscle, and muscle weighs more. But who cares what you weigh if you’re healthy and not flabby?

If you really are like me, don’t fret if you don’t lose a thing for months at first. You have to get your metabolism working before you can realistically expect to see changes. Just enjoy feeling stronger (and more energy – that’s something I noticed fairly early on). I feel so much better in so many ways that weight loss has really become secondary.

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Posted in Health and Beauty on August 24, 2007