Mastering Your Emotions
Filling your life with positive giving thoughts will help you attract happy thoughts and people.
How to Maintain a Healthy Metabolism
Energy is all around us
Energy exists all around us. We all need a specific amount of energy to move, to feel to breathe and basically to exist. Energy is an omnipresent force in all living things. It is all around us and an intrinsic part of our very beings. Energy is the ability for our bodies to work.
How efficiently we use energy in our bodies plays a major part in how healthy we are. It also impacts how easy or hard it is for the average person to gain or lose weight. Maintaining a healthy metabolism is vital to keeping our bodies in good working order.
What is Metabolism?
Metabolism as a concept is how our bodies process or metabolize food into energy. Our bodies take in calories, then through a biochemical process we convert these calories into the energy we need to function as human beings.
Many factors affect how efficiently our bodies can process food as fuel. How quickly we burn calories is often referred to as the metabolic rate. The metabolic rate of each individual person may be different. Factors such as your age, your sex, your weight, body makeup and even your family history can change how your metabolism works.
Maintaining a Healthy Metabolism and Energy Balance
It is important to keep things in balance.
In a perfect world, we would only consume the exact amount of calories needed to perform our daily functions. If we needed more energy, we would simply consume additional calories, then any excess calories would be disposed of.
However, our bodies cannot calculate exactly how much energy will be needed for a specific time period. As a result, our bodies will store the extra calories so they can use them as needed. These calories are stored away in our bodies as fat. We become overweight when too much excess energy is stored as fat.
To make matters worse when our metabolisms are not functioning correctly, sometimes our bodies won’t burn this extra fat when it needs more energy. When things are out of balance we may burn muscle instead of fat which is the last thing we want our bodies to do. When this happens you’ll need to fix your metabolism so that it goes back to burning fat for energy as nature intended.
Altering your diet is one way to fix your metabolism. There are several popular diet programs designed to do just that since the dieting community has caught on to the relationship between our weight and our metabolisms. The Fast Metabolism Diet, created by Haley Pomroy is one example, where you will eat specific types of food that help the body reduce the stress of the adrenal glands and unlock stored fats so they can be used for fuel. These types of diets can help you restore your body’s metabolic processing rate so it becomes easier to maintain a healthy weight and body image. See a sample of the recipes and an outline of the program on the fast metabolism diet review page.
Fruit is a much healthier form of sugar.
Changing your diet is incredibly important when you are trying to restore your metabolic balance. Eating specific types of foods has a profound effect on how we feel. Sugar may give you and instant energy rush, then once exhausted, you end up feeling drained. This is what many call empty calories. Fruits and vegetables also have sugar, but they provide an added benefit of vitamins, minerals, and fiber our bodies need to feel good.
When the metabolism gets out of whack, it’s important to look at the reasons why and try to get it back in shape. Maintaining a healthy diet that includes the proper proportions of carbs, fats, proteins and nutrients our bodies need is crucial to our overall health.
The Affect of Dieting on Our Metabolisms
One of the major mistakes that people tend to make when they are trying to lose weight is to follow a diet that is not suitable for them at all. This includes an overly restrictive diet – which can literally trick the body into storing more fat! Or fad diets that completely exclude important nutrients – such as the lemonade cleanse diet, which became popular for a while when a few celebrities were using it.
If you are really serious about losing weight, then it is important to know how your body processes food in order to design a diet or nutrition program that will give you the desired results.
More Healthy Ways to Boost Your Metabolism
Maintaining a healthy metabolism is an integral part of maintaining a healthy body and mind. Here are a few more great ways to keep the metabolism in good working order.
Exercise More
One reason for a sluggish metabolism lack of movement. Have you ever noticed that when you sleep too long you become even more tired? The opposite is also true – the more you move in your daily life, the more you want to move. And your body will start to burn more calories to keep up.
Begin to incorporate more exercise and movement into your daily schedule. Strength training, walking, jogging or even a good morning stretching session can be helpful.
Eat First Thing in the Morning
If you would really like to kick start your metabolism on a high note, then you would have to make breakfast the most important meal of your day. No matter how busy or crunched for time you might find yourself to be, breakfast is not something that you should miss out on. This first meal wakes up your metabolism and gets it going.
A healthy breakfast wakes up your metabolism and gets it going early in the day.
Drinking Plenty of Water
You should also make sure to keep your body properly hydrated. In this case, make sure that you are drinking at least 8 to 10 glasses of water a day. Not only would it help you to attain that healthy glow, but it might even help to curb your appetite. As a result, it would then become easier to lose weight. Dehydration is a surefire way to slow down your body’s internal systems, so drink up!
Get Enough Sleep
Studies have shown that sleep deprivation may lead to overeating. We have a hormone called leptin which helps to tell our bodies when we have eaten enough. When we don’t get enough sleep, it lowers the amount of leptin in our system. This can cause you to feel hungrier than you actually are.
All in all, the relationship between metabolism and your energy levels is clear. We should keep these metabolic principles in mind as we go about our daily routines and remember – a healthy body fosters a healthy mind!
Living an Authentic Life
Do you want to be the best version of you?
Are you just going through the motions in life or do you approach every day with excitement?
Do you find yourself waiting for some future event to occur before you take action?
We only have one life, and it is our responsibility to live it to the fullest. Even if you fall off the wagon one hundred times on your way to achieving your goals, you can get right back on the right track. Simply change your mind to do it.
Does this sound too easy? Well, it is just that easy. Think about what you truly want in this life and decide right now that you will allow yourself to achieve it. We can never truly be happy if we spend all of our time trying to please other people.
Create your own identity and take the time to become who you want to be. Life can be magical only if you let it. If you want to wear bunny slippers in the middle of the day – then do it! If you love animals, adopt a rescue or volunteer at a shelter.
We only get the one life – there is no take two. So why not embrace your inner voice and give yourself permission to be precisely who you were born to be.
What Does It Mean to Live an Authentic Life?
You may have heard the phrase, “Be Yourself.” But it can be harder than it sounds. Many of us living a modern day life don’t take the time to think about who we really are and what would truly make us happy. Somehow it gets lost along the way. We become too busy taking care of other people’s wants and needs, whether this is our children, our bosses, our spouse or our parents. While it’s important to give of yourself, it is equally important to allow ourselves the time to focus on our own wants and needs.
When you don’t take time for yourself, you may wake up one day and just be unhappy. But you don’t understand why. This is the time to take stock of our lives and focus on our purpose in life and what makes us happy. Only when we allow ourselves the time to focus on our ourself, can we live an authentic life.
So how exactly do you do this?
- Quiet other people’s voices and allow your inner voice to come through
- Be sure what you think, feel, act and value are in line with each other. If you say you are a joyful person, make sure your actions are in agreement with your words. You don’t need to be perfect or even try to be – just be who you truly are at the core.
- Give yourself permission to be fully human with all your unique facets and flaws. Allow all parts of yourself to exist and be honored.
The Benefits of Living Truthfully
The benefits of living your truth are many. As you begin to figure out who you are and start allowing yourself to live authentically, you will be rewarded with many benefits, such as:
- Increased self-esteem
- Less Anxiety and depression
- Fewer food or addiction issues
- Finding more meaning in life and satisfaction
- Experience increased happiness and joy
- Becoming more creative
One of the most profound benefits will be to inspire other people also to live their truths. You will find as you allow yourself to become your true self, other people will feel empowered to take the same action. In this, you will be giving the greatest gift to those around you.