Be sure to check out Part Two of this metabolism article The Top Five Sure-Fire, Works-Every-Time, Never-Failed-Yet Tricks to Increasing Your Metabolism.

It seems that almost everyone today is looking for a way to speed up their metabolism to lose those few extra pounds. The real shame is that with so many fad diets and sham exercise programs we've lost sight of our common sense when it comes to our bodies. We've lost the truth behind the inner working of our metabolism through television commercials promising miracle fat burning technology. The truth of the matter is that your metabolism works just like a machine. If you run it correctly and keep it well maintained, you'll find it does great work. If, on the other hand, you neglect to read your instructions you're liable to have it working at a suboptimal rate, leaving you with a body you don't want and barely enough energy to get through the day. In the following two articles I'm going to lay out the inner working of the metabolism, dispel some myths about weight loss, and tell you the top five, sure fire, works every time, never failed yet tricks to increasing your metabolism so that you burn fat just by sitting around.

Sound too good to be true? It's true. Sound easy? It won't be. I guarantee you will have to work for the results you'll get, but I also guarantee that it will be worth it all in the end. When you can metabolize one whole 250 calorie candy bar by just watching television, you will be glad you worked for it. This site never, ever promises an easy way out. Remember, lasting changes require lasting effort. Get your mind right and bring it and you'll never know the meaning of the word failure.

Busting the Myth of Metabolism

1.“I have a slow metabolism because of my genetics.”

People love to cling to this myth because it's a great way to excuse ourselves from responsibility for our weight problems. Believe me when I say that, while you may have a slow metabolism, it has little or nothing to do with your genes. Genetics has a lot to do with our weight, to be sure, but metabolic rate isn't one of the things that it regulates. Your genes will determine how easy or difficult it is for you to build muscle and in what areas of your body you will store your fat. Genes will not give you a low or high metabolic rate. The rate of your metabolism is determined by your lifestyle and how you treat your body as we'll see later in this article. It also has a great deal to do with evolution, but we'll get there soon.

2.“A high metabolism is something that you are born with.”

While this would be convenient, it too isn't the case. Genetics doesn't change your metabolism, but rest assured that it can be changed. Isn't that good news? If you've condemned yourself to being overweight because of a slow metabolism, now is the time to rejoice because you can free yourself from that jail sentence. Whether or not your metabolism is slow or fast, high or low, has to do not with the luck of the draw, but with your lifestyle. Take a few key steps and you can shoot your metabolism through the roof. I'll tell you these steps in Part Two of this article.

3.“I'll never be skinny. I'm big boned.”

Too many children's lives have been held back because their parents were foolish enough to tell them this lie. Have you ever, in your life, seen a fat skeleton? Me neither. There's no such thing. Being overweight has nothing, I repeat, nothing to do with your skeletal structure. This is a terrible lie that we tell overweight children to make them feel better about themselves. The sentiment is admirable, but the lie is destructive. Your structure may mean that you will never be considered “dainty” or “wilting” but rest assured that it will never, ever keep you overweight or out of shape. Think you can't look good just because you have a big bone structure? Crap. I'm here to tell you that not only can you look good, but it isn't any harder for you than anyone else. If you heard this lie and believed it, now is the time to change that conditioning. Don't believe it for one more day. You are not restricted by anything, least of all your skeleton.

4.“They have pills that can raise my metabolism so I don't need exercise.”

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. There is no such thing as a pill that burns fat. Period. There is also no such thing as a pill that raises your metabolism permanently. So many pills out there advertise things like “promotes favorable metabolic signaling.” Whatever that means. These fat burners have stimulants that will raise your metabolic rate by raising your heart rate and making your body work faster. The effect is slight and doesn't last long enough to do any real good on its own. Most fat burners contain tea extracts such as white, black, green and oolong which are said to raise your metabolism, or essential fish oils which can help promote the metabolism of fat, but guess what the main ingredient is? Caffeine. The same thing you can get out of a cup of coffee.

The bottom line is that there is nothing; no pill, no tea, no nothing, that will raise your metabolism for any real productive period of time. Does that mean that these fat burners have no use? Not necessarily. When used in tandem with a good exercise program they can help raise your metabolism while you work out, which may help you burn more fat with every gym session. Even Sylvester Stallone suggests a big cup of coffee before hitting the gym in his book, Sly Moves. In the end, fat burners should only be used as supplements to exercise and even then they aren't absolutely necessary and should be cycled on and off every few weeks as your body can build up a tolerance to them.

How Your Metabolism Works: Evolution and You.

Your metabolism is, for all intent and purpose, like the engine in your car or perhaps more accurately like the transmission. The transmission controls how fast / hard the engine is working and therefore how much fuel is being consumed. When it come to fueling your body there is only one real means of doing so: calories. Food goes in, energy comes out. Where your metabolism enters the picture is to make sure that your body is running at a rate at which it can survive on the amount of fuel allotted to it. Your metabolism exists to regulate how fast/hard your body works and makes sure that it can never run out of fuel.

Now to understand the way your metabolism handles fat, you first have to understand that our bodies were made through a evolutionary process and have not evolved to into the modern world yet. When you stop to realize that the modern supermarket and refrigerator hasn't been around even one hundred years yet, you begin to see how far society is ahead of our bodies. Back before the modern convenience of having food whenever we wanted it, our ancestors were never guaranteed a meal. If they grew their food, there was a chance that the crops wouldn't come that year. If they hunted, there was the very real possibility of failing to catch anything. Our ancestors lived in a world in which the possibility of going for days without real sustenance was a very real threat. With this threat hanging over their heads, their bodies evolved to make sure that there was a way to keep them alive for as long as possible.

You see, if our bodies operated in exactly the way a car operates, we would die very quickly without food. Once you run the gas tank dry, you're stuck on the side of the road. Our bodies therefore evolved a method by which they could continue to live even when food was scarce; it learned to switch fuel sources and, more importantly, how to store fuel. Your body learned that if food was scarce, it would have to find something else on which it could function. It discovered it could run off of two other sources, fat and muscle. In the hierarchy of your metabolism, fat is always the last thing to go. In other words, fat is your body's last reserve. You burn food first. Once you have no more food to burn, you burn muscles. Once you're out of both food and muscle, then you burn fat. Why does you body do this? Two reasons:

• Muscle is costly. It takes 50 calories of food to sustain one pound of muscle. If you body finds that it doesn't have enough fuel to keep muscle around, it will start sacrificing it.
• Fat is a crappy fuel source. When you run your body at a high intensity for a long period of time, fat isn't a good enough fuel source to sustain that energy output. Your body switches over to a better quality of fuel: muscle.

Now that we have a basic idea of why your metabolism works the way it does, let's take a look at how that effects you and your diet.

Lower Calories Can Equal More Fat

Most people, when they want to lose weight, figure that the best way to do this is to lower the amount of calories they are taking in. That way their body will will burn more calories than it is getting and therefore will be forced to dip into its fat stores. This, however, is not entirely true. This method generally works for about two weeks and then people hit what we call a “plateau” and their weight loss will cease. More importantly however, their weight has decreased independently of their body fat percentage. In other words they may weigh less, but the percentage of their body that is fat has stayed the same or even gotten worse. Less weight, but more fat. To understand why this happens we have to change our metaphor a little bit and start looking at your body less like a car and more like a house.

If you got your electric bill in the mail and suddenly found out that you were using more electricity than you could afford, you would probably start turning off your lights more often in the hopes of using less energy. This is exactly what your body does. When you lower your calorie intake your body assumes that this change is only temporary—it assumes you cannot find food at that moment. After about two weeks, your body begins to realize that this change in diet is a permanent one. It looks at how much energy it is using based on how many calories it is now getting and decides that it's too costly to keep operating a this level. It therefore lowers you metabolism in the hopes of saving energy. On top of a lowered metabolism it also begins to seek out fat to store just in case this food shortage gets worse. Your body isn't interested in how it looks, it's interested in keeping itself alive.

When faced with this two week plateau most people think that they should lower their calorie intake even further. They think that if taking out 500 calories the first time helped them loose weight, all they have to do now is to take out 500 more. This is logical, but ultimately unhealthy and wrong. Once again their body will loose weight for about two weeks and then once again it will lower its metabolism further and another plateau effect will occur. Now it's important to point out here that when people claim that they are loosing “weight” it is generally not fat. People are loosing water and muscle, which will make them lighter as far as a scale is concerned but generally has little effect of their body fat percentage or on how they look.

Most people will decide that lowering their calories any further just isn't worth it and go back to their old eating habits. The problem now is that they will gain more weight than ever before because they've lowered their metabolism twice. Ever wonder why people tend to gain more weight when they stop a diet than they had when they began it? Because the diet lowers their metabolism so that it is completely unprepared for the sudden inrush of calories. Those who continue to lower their calories, even to a dangerous degree, are considered anorexic. These people still continue to lower their calorie intake because they still, no matter how skinny they may look, feel as if they are fat. As Villepigue and Rivera point out in their book, The Body Sculpting Bible for Men, anorexics may look skinny and may weigh very little but still consider themselves fat because they have very little muscle and can have body fat percentages of over 30% which is considered obese.

So now we begin to see that the more you lower your calorie intake the more you lower your metabolism, which explains why so many diets out their don't work. Our bodies are not meant to operate at a caloric deficit. In fact, putting your body into a caloric deficit tends to make it think that it's in danger of dying and it will take any steps it has to to survive. As I said before, your body is concerned with continuing to live, not with what it looks like.

Now that we're familiar with the way our metabolisms work and why you may not have seen the weight loss results you were hoping for in the past we can move on to Part Two of this article which details how to raise your metabolism and keep it up. Part two will be available tomorrow, but until then, if you want more information regarding your fitness, your metabolism and some of the things I've talked about in these two articles, I encourage you to read through the books below. I have personally read them and they are among the best resources out there for working toward real results.

• The Body Sculpting Bible for Men – Villepigue and Rivera
• The Lean Body Promise – Lee Labrada
• Sly Moves – Sylvester Stallone
• Body For Life – Bill Phillips