There are five basic factors that will affect your metabolism or how fast you process food:

* Genetics
* The Foods You Eat
* Age
* Dieting
* Amount of Activity

Genetics: Unfortunately, it is true. Some people arc horn with slower metabolisms than others. If you've had trouble with your weight for your entire life, this probably describes you. But genetics is not the biggest factor and can be easily overcome if you know what you are doing.

Age: Another factor, that probably everyone has noticed, is age. As we get older, our metabolism tends to slow down. When you were young you may have been able to eat whatever you wanted and never gain an ounce. But after you had your first child or turned forty, the pounds started creeping on and now you find it's harder and harder to maintain the lean beautiful body you had when you were younger.

Again, that is an easy one to remedy this. And he really good news is, even though the pounds may have crept on over many, many months or even years, if you are able to effectively manipulates your metabolic rate you can reclaim the body of your youth in a fraction of the time it took you to lose it. In short: it takes a lot less time to lose the weight than it did to put it on!

Amount of Activity in Your Lifestyle: The amount and type of exercise you do can have a direct and significant effect on your metabolic rate. That is one of the reasons that you had less trouble keeping the pounds off when you were young - your lifestyle probably included a lot more physical activity. Even if you weren't an athlete as a youth, as we get older and begin to raise kids or advance our careers, our time gets filled with increasingly more activities that take place sitting down. This is called a "sedentary lifestyle" and it lends to slow the metabolic rate. It's also one of the reasons you feel like you have less energy as you get older. As you reduce the amount of physical activity in your life, your whole body starts to slow down... including your metabolism.

Exercise can have a direct effect on our metabolic rate, especially cardiovascular exercise. But, it must he done correctly to maximize your body's ability to burn fat - and that doesn't mean working hard. In fact that often has the exact wrong effect.

The amount of muscle tissue in our body also affects the speed of your metabolism. Lean muscle consumes a lot of calories just to exist, so very simply, the more muscle you have, and the more calories you can burn. The more calories you burn, the less calories get stored as fat. Once you reach adulthood, you lose about one-half pound of muscle tissue each year (unless you do something to actively maintain it). As that happens, your body loses more and more of its ability to burn calories, which in turn means your metabolism slows down.

In order to keep the fat-burning engine fires stoked, you need to maintain and/or build muscle tissue that you lose with age. This is one of the most effective ways to increase your metabolic rate. In fact, increasing lean muscle means you burn more calories all day long - even while you're sleeping.

The Foods You Eat: Probably the biggest factor affecting your metabolic rate - how fast your body processes food and turns it into energy - is what you eat. Unfortunately, many of the foods that are staples in our diets these days have the ability to significantly slow or even stop the metabolic process. Foods with lots of simple sugars like soda, fruit juice and other sweets, as well as many processed foods like breads and pasta, particularly when consumed in the wrong combination with other foods, will release a hormone in your body that essentially tells your body to stop converting food into energy and start storing everything as fat. As you can imagine, once that happens, you are virtually doomed to gain weight, particularly if your metabolism is already sluggish from one of the other factors listed above.

This hormone that controls these processes in your body is insulin, and it is directly responsible for regulating the amount of sugar in your blood stream.

Dieting: The other big problem that affects almost everyone who is significantly overweight is: dieting. Once you start radically reducing the amount of calories you eat, your metabolism starts to shut down. That is why every single time you have gone "on" a starvation-type diet, once you go �off� of it and start eating normally again, you gain all the weight back... and usually more. You have killed your metabolism, and with it, any hope of losing weight.

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