Myth: Aging slows your metabolism.
Reality: The tendency to put on weight does increase with age and as we get older, metabolism can slow. But adding another candle to your birthday cake isn’t to blame. Nope, if your metabolism is slowing down, you can chalk it up to less-than-ideal health habits (like eating that extra slice of cake, inactivity or skipping workouts).

So what can you do to prevent the decline of your metabolism through the years? For starters, check your lifestyle choices, such as your sleep habits. Researchers have found that getting less than 7.5 hours of sleep slows metabolism. Adequate sleep keeps the body in good working order, and 8 hours or more of rest is better still.

Keep (or, ahem, start) exercising. It’s an obvious way to encourage the body to burn calories. A bonus: The lean muscle you add to your physique will burn calories faster than your stored fat will. And the exercise itself creates an afterburn of sorts that gobbles up even more calories. Be sure to change up your routine every couple of months, too. Otherwise, as your body adapts to your usual workout, a routine becomes a rut. The result? Fewer calories burned.

Finally, mind what’s on your plate. Eating too little will slow your metabolism by convincing your body it’s at risk for starvation, prompting it to burn fuel much … more … slowly. In the other extreme, overeating will force your body to store the excess fuel as bulky, low-calorie-burning fat.

Myth: Your metabolism is genetically programmed and can’t be changed.
Reality: As with many genetic traits, your body may have a preference for a certain behavior. There is some wiggle room in the matter, however. Just how much is determined by the choices you make for your body.

By taking care of your metabolism—proper exercise, healthy diet, good lifestyle habits—you can train your body to deliver its best possible performance. Lack of exercise, poor diet, and general lack of attention to your health, on the other hand, can hinder even the best natural metabolism. The metabolism’s work of turning food into energy and then using that energy to operate the body and to bounce back from everyday wear and tear is quite a process. Through our choices and actions, we can make that process more efficient or less so.

First, the process: After we’ve eaten, the body uses oxygen to convert food into energy. The nutrients providing that energy, are either used to fuel the body or they’re stored as fat. The byproduct, or waste, from converting food into energy is carbon dioxide. Here’s how the body uses each of the main nutrients from the foods we eat:

• Carbohydrates are generally the body’s main source of energy. Carbs are broken down into sugars and stored in muscle cells as glycogen. The body can only store so many carbs, which have 4 calories per gram.
• Proteins are used to build and maintain body tissues and are rarely used as energy. Like carbs, only so much protein can be stored. Protein also has 4 calories per gram.
• Fat is the most energy-dense of the nutrients at 9 calories per gram, making it the most efficient source of fuel. Fat is also a long-term fuel reserve that guards against starvation. Sounds good, so what gives fat its bad rap? The body has a seemingly unlimited capacity to store it. And it’s not only fat that makes us fat: When the body is maxed out on other nutrients, especially carbs, those get stored as fat, too.

Which brings us to efficiency, and back to the car engine metaphor: A car that’s throwing off a lot of exhaust is wasting its fuel and getting terrible gas mileage. It may chug along and need frequent repair, and that can waste a lot of time and money. That’s a fairly reasonable sketch of what happens to our bodies, too.

Through proper diet, good lifestyle habits, and healthy exercise, we can teach the body to burn fuel with greater efficiency. At its most efficient, the body uses greater amounts of oxygen to convert more of our food into usable fuel (a bonus: the fat burns first!). Less carbon dioxide is produced as waste, and less of our fuel ends up stored as fat (double bonus!!).

 

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