We’ve all heard it or even said it before: “I’m not able to lose weight because of my metabolism.” It’s convenient to blame our unwanted weight on an abstract idea like metabolism, but let’s look at the real importance of metabolism – and better yet, how you can get the most “burn” for your buck by recharging your metabolism.

In the most basic sense, metabolism includes all of the chemical and physical changes that occur within the body’s cells. Most often, though, metabolism refers to the manner in which the body obtains and uses energy from food, so it really does have an important role in weight loss and gain.

Not everyone has the same metabolism, and our rates actually change during our lives, so someone who blames their metabolism isn’t necessarily making excuses. Age affects metabolism, which will slow about 5% every 10 years after we turn 40, and by gender, as males have a tendency to burn more calories at rest than females, and by the quantity of muscle mass you possess (more muscle generally means a higher rate of metabolism). Family history also affects metabolism, not to mention having children, as well as whether a woman chooses to breast-feed.

In spit of all of the wild cards, the fact is that if your calorie intake surpasses your metabolism, excess energy will get housed in the body as fat. Though many of the factors affecting metabolic rate cannot be changed, fortunately, there are ways to rev up the metabolism you are born with.

The first tenet is to eat the correct foods in the correct amounts. When you omit a meal, your body switches to starvation mode, which slows metabolism to preserve calories, because it does not know when it will get food again. And when the metabolism slows down, so does the rate at which you lose weight.

When you finally do get food after skipping 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 during the day and aim to eat close to the same times every 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, burn more calories in the short term, while strength training will build more muscle, which improves metabolism and burns more calories in the long term – even when you are resting, muscle requires more calories to function than fat.

In fact, every pound of muscle requires 35 calories a day, while every pound of fat requires only 2 calories per day. Despite this, you might be surprised that the more weight you have, the faster your metabolism is likely to run. Simply put, the extra weight forces your body work harder to maintain its processes.

This is partly why it’s nearly always easiest to lose weight when you start dieting, and gets more difficult as you go along because, if you are significantly overweight, your metabolism is already at a high rate, so that even a slight decrease 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? Persistent compulsions and cravings can quickly come back, and when they do, do not ignore a valuable resource – lose weight hypnosis. Hypnotherapy can actually retrain your unconscious so that, in essence, you can get rid of food cravings. When we look at why we snack, identifying why weight loss hypnosis works so well becomes evident.

For most of us, snacking has become a habit – perhaps you do it automatically when you are watching TV or driving or when you’re under stress. Hypnosis can actually reprogram your thoughts to stop those associations, leaving you to watch TV or drive without experiencing the need to eat.

One of the most successful weight loss hypnosis methods for ending the snacking cycle is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, which relies on collaborating with the unconscious and making it use the same thought processes that are creating your appetite, to eliminate your appetite. NLP entails 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 someone who has always experienced cravings.

NLP can be equally as essential as exercise and motivation because, as you learned above, it can help make sure 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 want to keep your metabolism at full speed and make sure that all of hard work and exercise are not going to waste by surrendering to your food temptations, weight loss hypnosis and NLP can be a secret weapon to eliminate your cravings once and for all.

Alan B. Densky, CH has been assisting clients with appetite control and weight loss since 1978. Visit his NLP & hypnosis website to enjoy his Free self-hypnosis videos, or learn about his exclusive hypnotism for weight loss CDs or his powerful video lose weight by hypnosis DVDs.

– Alan B. Densky, CH