Sluggish or quick, this is how your metabolism impacts the variety of energy you burn daily

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It is a frequent complaint from Dieter: “Ugh, my metabolism is so slow that I will never lose weight.”

When people talk about a fast or slow metabolism, they really get how many calories their body burns during their day. The idea is that someone with a slow metabolism doesn’t use the same amount of energy to do the same job as someone with a fast metabolism.

But does the rate of metabolism really vary that much from person to person? I am a nutritionist focused on the biological, environmental, and socio-economic factors that affect body composition. This question is tougher than it may seem – and regardless of the current rate of your metabolism, there are things that will put it in a lower or higher gear.

Your body’s energy needs

Metabolism is a biological term that refers to all chemical reactions required to sustain life in an organism. Your metabolism has three main functions: converting food into energy; Breaking down food into its building blocks for protein, lipid, nucleic acid and some carbohydrates; and elimination of nitrogen waste.

If you are agonized about the speed of your metabolism, your focus is likely to be on how much energy you are getting from the foods you eat and how much your body is consuming. The energy value of a food is measured in calories.

Your calorie needs can be divided into two categories.

The basal metabolic rate is the minimum amount of calories that is required for the basic functions at rest. Resting energy expenditure is the amount of calories your body uses while resting or sleeping – around 60% -65% of your total energy expenditure. It doesn’t take into account the calories you need to power everything else – exercise or energy expenditure (25% -30%), thinking, even digesting food (5% -10%). Your total energy consumption therefore combines both: your resting energy expenditure plus your energy consumption for other activities.

Find a number

The estimated daily calorie requirement of an adult woman of 126 pounds is between 1,600 and 2,400 calories per day. For a 154 pound man, the daily calorie requirement can range from around 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day. That’s roughly 13 calories per pound of body weight.

In contrast, infants burn approximately 50 calories per pound of weight per day. This requirement continuously decreases with the age of the child. So infants have the highest metabolism of all. This additional calorie requirement is necessary for growth.

So if two women of the same weight can have caloric needs that vary by up to 30%, does this mean that the woman whose body is consuming more calories has a faster metabolism than the woman whose body is consuming fewer calories? Not necessarily. A woman may spend more of her day being physically active and therefore need more energy to power her sidewalk and kickboxing class after work, for example.

Beyond these broad guideline areas, there are many ways in which you can estimate resting and total energy expenditure if you want to determine your body’s specific caloric needs. A common and simple method is to use predictive formulas such as Mifflin-St. Jeor or Harris-Benedict equations based on your age, height, weight, and gender to find out how much energy your body needs to be alive. To calculate the total energy consumption you also need to add the activity factor.

Indirect calorimetry is another way to estimate metabolic rate. Energy consumption is calculated by measuring the amount of oxygen consumed and the amount of carbon dioxide released by the body. Your body relies on oxygen to perform all of its metabolic tasks. For every liter of oxygen you use, you are using approximately 4.82 calories of energy from glycogen or fat. Indirect airway calorie intake is usually performed in a doctor’s office, although small, portable, and less expensive devices are increasingly being launched.

Factors That Affect Metabolism

Metabolic rate and calorie needs vary from person to person depending on factors such as genetics, gender, age, body composition, and the amount of exercise you perform.

The state of health and certain diseases can also influence the metabolism. For example, a regulator of metabolism is the thyroid gland, which is located at the front of the neck, just below the Adam’s apple. The more thyroxine a person’s thyroid produces, the higher that person’s basal metabolic rate.

Fever can also affect a person’s basal metabolic rate. For every 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 ° C) increase in a person’s internal body temperature, their basal metabolic rate increases by approximately 7%.

Other diseases that affect the basal metabolic rate can include muscle wasting (atrophy), persistent hunger, low oxygen levels in the body (hypoxia), muscle disorders, depression and diabetes.

Another important factor is body composition. For example, an overweight woman with a body composition of 40% body fat and 75 pounds of muscle will burn fewer calories at rest than a woman with 30% body fat and 110 pounds of muscle. Muscle tissue is more metabolically active in the body than fat tissue.

This is also the reason why the basal metabolic rate decreases with age. As people get older, they usually lose muscle mass and gain adipose tissue – representing a decrease in basal metabolic rate of around 1% to 2% per decade.

If you really want to give your metabolism a boost, the easiest way is to increase your muscle mass and activity level. As you increase muscle mass, you also increase the basic number of calories needed to maintain these muscles. Instead of complaining about a slow metabolism, you can try to at least make it a little faster.

Terezie Tolar-Peterson, Associate Professor of Food Science, Nutrition, and Health Promotion, Mississippi State University. This article is republished by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.