I’m sure you’ve all used this word or at least read it some­where, and it was most likely per­tain­ing to diet, weight gain or loss, or exer­cis­ing. But do you really know what it is and what it means?

Well, you’re in luck because today’s ques­tion is…

Q: What is Metabolism?

Sim­ply put sci­en­tif­i­cally, metab­o­lism is the chem­i­cal processes inside all liv­ing cells that main­tain life.

Those chem­i­cal processes inside your cells are what hap­pens when your mito­chon­dria (the ‘work­ers’ in each of your cells) con­vert the calo­ries from the food you con­sume into energy for the body to use. This is what hap­pens when you hear ‘calo­rie burn­ing’. Your cells are lit­er­ally burn­ing food calo­ries for energy pro­duc­tion. Think of your mito­chon­dria and the process of burn­ing calo­ries (your metab­o­lism) as a fur­nace; as your inner fire ignit­ing! That’s how I feel when I work out anyway…I get warm and go all out #BEASTMODE when that fur­nace is fully fueled and I have energy to ‘burn’!

It gets much more com­pli­cated sci­en­tif­i­cally, but maybe this will help you visu­al­ize what’s going on in your body when you eat calo­ries (food):

Where it gets tricky, is when you start to try and manip­u­late your body’s nat­ural processes to change how your body looks, acts, or feels. These aren’t bad things, but to really be suc­cess­ful at doing any of those things, it’s a good idea to try to under­stand the under­ly­ing processes first.

Let me help you under­stand a lit­tle bet­ter, as sim­ply put as pos­si­ble, because it can get con­fus­ing fast.

Every­one has a per­sonal meta­bolic rate (the calo­ries your own body, not your favorite celeb or your best friend’s body, needs) to a few things. Genet­ics play a role in this num­ber, but a very small num­ber, so out with that excuse! I like to tell my clients the good news that you can actu­ally change your genetic ‘future’ with proper knowl­edge and appli­ca­tion of train­ing + nutri­tion. Think of it like this: ‘bad’ genet­ics are only a dis­ad­van­tage not an excuse to be unhealthy or give up try­ing to be healthy.

Your body burns calo­ries (and needs a cer­tain num­ber of calo­ries daily: remem­ber your per­sonal meta­bolic rate men­tioned ear­lier) doing the fol­low­ing tasks:

• Stay­ing alive (nor­mal bod­ily func­tions, etc.= your rest­ing meta­bolic rate)
• Exer­cis­ing (fuel, rebuild and repair)
• Digest­ing and using the food you eat

So how many calo­ries do you need? Check out last Tuesday’s Q&A, and remem­ber these things when you open your fridge! :)