Yes, You Can Manipulate Your Metabolism To Lose Weight. Here's How

Thankfully, metabolism is a process—not a thing—that responds to inputs. These tips from Haylie Pomroy's book, The Fast Metabolism Diet: Eat More Food & Lose More Weight, will show you how to manipulate your metabolism to prime your body to finally shed excess weight.

We are asking more of our bodies than at any other time in the history of civilization. We ask them to live on food that is of a much lower quality than ever, thanks to all the chemical additives, preservatives, and processing. We pump ourselves full of sugar and artificial sweeteners, hormone-riddled dairy products, and foods like wheat and corn and soy that are so genetically modified, it's a wonder we can even digest them. We live in a world with depleted soil, polluted air, and water teeming with environmental chemicals. We eat and drink from plastic containers that leach even more chemicals into our foods and drinks. And we live with great amounts of often crushing, overwhelming stress.

When you starve yourself, your body adjusts to subsist on a smaller number of calories by slowing down your metabolism. That means that whenever you go off your diet, you're likely to gain weight with a vengeance. Your body is just trying to save you from future famine.

When you are under tremendous stress, your body excretes crisis hormones signaling it to store fat and burn muscle. When you are overloaded with chemicals, pesticides, and pollutants, the body creates new fat cells to house these toxins, so you don't become poisoned and sick. And when you consume food that is devoid of nutrients or contains artificial dyes, flavorings, and sweeteners, the body does its best to survive these foreign substances by slowing down the metabolism and minimizing the damage to the body's system as a whole. The very world we live in puts us all at risk for a slow metabolism

If food has been your enemy in the past, that's all over. Now, we're stepping into your future, where food is your medicine. Even if you're 10 to 20 pounds overweight, you need this medicine. You need to learn how to unwind stress, unlock fat, and unleash your metabolism.

You have a metabolism because you are alive, and life requires energy. We all need energy to survive—to breathe, move, think, and react—and the only way to acquire this energy is from the consumption and metabolism, or transformation, of food. Profound! We need fuel, and we need substance. A healthy metabolism and a functional metabolism allow us to have just the perfect amount of energy available, an appropriate amount of reserve energy stored and ready for use, and a strong and stable structure (the body).

This manipulation is what I learned about when I studied animal science. The animal science industry uses this knowledge of energy, storage, and structure to create livestock that is ideally proportioned for use as food, to the tune of billions of dollars of profit.

The metabolism can also get you into trouble because you can inadvertently manipulate it to create a body you don't want. Dieting, nutrient-void foods, and living with too much stress slow down your metabolism when it should be sped up. When you gain weight, feel blah, even get sick with a chronic disease, those are all coping mechanisms your body creates in response to your actions or environment, like the frogs that grow three legs in polluted swamps. Your butt or your belly could be protruding because of the very environmental, emotional, and biochemical ecosystem in which it is dwelling.