Mastering your metabolism

Understand your metabolism first and then you’ll understand how to be healthy and fit.

Do you have a scale that’s stuck no matter how little you eat or how hard your exercise? Or have you lost and gained the same 5, 10 or 20 pounds over and over? Are your energy levels sagging and only getting
worse?

Are you not happy with your results from p90x, Insanity, ChaLEAN extreme, TurboFire,  or some other diet? Starting to think that others are just genetically gifted and maybe you’re cursed?

I’d like to suggest that it’s because many people don’t truly understand what our metabolism is and how it works.

Most people have a simplified view of their metabolism: It’s their body’s engine that burns energy and they just have to REV IT UP to lose weight.

Your metabolism is made up of your hormones; it’s your biochemistry! And no, I’m not talking about only testosterone vs. estrogen.

Key hormones that affect your metabolism are cortisol (stress hormone), HGH (growth hormone), insulin (sugar response), thyroid (tsh) and leptin (fats). Over the past decade, scientists have discovered dozens of hormones that impact weight, fat stores, hunger, cravings and metabolism.

These hormones tell your body what to do with food, such as whether to store it as fat or use it as fuel. When you exercise, hormones tell your body how to consume energy stores and how to boost or shutdown different parts of the body.

Hormones control almost every aspect of how we gain weight and how we can lose it.

Guys – if you’re thinking this doesn’t apply to you, you’re DEAD wrong. Whether you are a guy or a girl, your weight has everything to do with your hormones.

Our hormones are influenced by millions of things in our diet and environment, from processed foods to pesticides to lack of sleep and excess stress. Any disruption can send one hormone in overdrive and
another into hibernation.

These chronic imbalances can make you fat – even when you are carefully tracking calories and exercise.

With the right foods, you can:

• Fix your metabolism to work for you instead of against you
• Choose foods that trigger your weight-loss hormones
• Increase energy levels and lengthen your life
• Prevent cancer and other diseases

Most of the “diets” out there will only screw up your hormones, age your body and make you fatter in the long run.

When you learn to eat and live in a way that balances your key hormones, your weight loss battle is won, before you even set foot in the ‘gym’.

The beachbody programs (p90x, TurboFire, etc.) are in sync with many of these principles but many people either don’t follow that part of the program or think they can substitute a superfood with another imposter without repercussions.

They don’t understand that our choice of nutrition will drastically affect our hormones and subsequently, our metabolism.

Our goal here at Symbiotic Fitness is to help change your perspective about nutrition so that you’ll realize how much it affects your efforts to become fit.

Exercise is only a small part of your day, what you eat, how you manage stress and how much you sleep make up the rest of it.

We’ll help you learn more about hormones and get your metabolism working for you again. We’ve followed these principles and have used them to reset our metabolism, triggering dramatic fat-loss and muscle-gain.

We’ll be focusing on 6 core areas here at our web-site:

1. Eating nutritious whole-foods that trigger your weight-loss hormones
2. Eliminating processed foods and refined sugars
3. Removing toxins from your environment
4. Managing and reducing stress
5. Intense exercise
6. Emphasizing rest & recovery

We’ve learned a lot during our journey to become fit but do you know what the most important one was? The choices we make in the grocery store and kitchen are more important than the choices we make with exercising.

Check back often as we will continue to explore this subject in future articles. You can follow us on twitter and Facebook to know when new articles are posted.
If you have questions, leave a comment below, post on our FB page or send us an email.

Most of what I’ve learned about metabolism is from Jillian Michael’s book: Master your Metabolism. But I didn’t just read it, I used it to completely reset my metabolism and lost over 37 lbs of fat and gain 9 lbs of muscle in just over 6 months.

If you would like more information about Mastering your Metabolism, check out Jillian’s book. I put a link to it on the right side of the web-page (scroll down).