Sport What is the benefit of having high metabolism?

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hello_kitty

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During my recent discussions with my mom (when I was trying to convince her that eating 1500 kcal per day is far from being too much for my height and activity level) she said something that I keep thinking about and need to make sense of hopefully with your help, guys.

It was smth like this...

Me: When you eat too little, i.e. way below your maintenance level, your metabolism slows down because you lose muscle.

Mom: What's wrong with that? So you're less hungry and don't need to eat as much.

I must say I do see some attraction in having lower appetite as it seems I'm constantly eating. Can someone pls explain why it is wrong?
 
Not being hungry or having less of an appetite doesn't mean you need to eat less. It just means that your body is learning to shut down different areas to work on less food.

It's saving its energy for the neecssary things like breathing, thinking and pumping blood.

The fact remains that your body has a BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate. There is a certain amount of energy needed for you to be hello_kitty. You just being you: breathing, walking, working, talking, digesting food, sleeping, your personality, etc requires a certain amount of calories. That certain amount of calories is your BMR.

Eating less than your BMR (which many women do) means that you are eating less fuel than your body needs to function at a basic human level. Forget working out and all the additional activity you do. If you eat less than your BMR, you are not even covering enough ground to function.

I recently made a new friend and she does not eat. She is telling me the same thing your mom is telling you... "I'm not hungry so why eat? Besides I can stand to go a few days without food."

Finally I had enough of her trying to tell me that food is not necessary and said "Do you find it odd that I look the way I do and eat 5-6 times per day?" She just sort of looked at me. I don't know what she was thinking, but I assume it went something like this "Hmmm, how does she eat so much and have a body like that?"

Point: eating is to fuel the body. Not to satisfy the belly. Hope that helped. Maybe some others will chime in.
 
when you read that "nutrition is 80% of fat loss" it is basically saying that metabolism is 80% fat loss...a quick metabolism requires muscle mass...the more muscle mass you have, the higher your metabolism will be...anaerobic type training (wts, sprints etc) will raise it even more...because of your high muscle mass, more food is required to fuel the body for movement...muscle weights more than fat so even a 2 - 3kg muscle increase with same body fat can increase metabolism just because it takes more effort to move around...during diets, calories are dropped which provides less energy to move extra muscle around with...the body responds to this by dropping fat and muscle mass to meet energy intake from low calories...this is where diets fail because yuor aim should be to at the very least maintain all muscle you have and drop fat wt only or metabolism will slow back down and you'll plateu quickly as you'll soon hit your BMR as described above...makes sense? lynee had a crack at explaining it in another post and so did i but it's pretty hard really
 
Having a high metabolism means you can eat more nutritious foods. You can eat more foods that contain antioxidants, enzymes, vitamins and minerals that make us healthy and give us longevity.
Typically our metabolisms slow down as we age. If someone starts with a low metabolsim and it gets lower as they age they'll likely gain weight.
Waiting until hungry to eat is not necessairly a good thing. By the time the body has signaled us that it's hungry, then we go make food, the metabolism is already dropping.

Sarah
 
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