Are You Making These Metabolism Mistakes?
By Sara Butler
There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about diets and exercise. How can you tell which strategies are legitimate ways to get healthy and which are just misrepresented schemes that can do real damage to your metabolism and your body? Well, here are a few of the most common mistakes people make it when it comes to diet and exercise and how you can avoid them!
The Diet Pill Dilemma
No doubt you’ve seen widely available over-the-counter supplements that claim to help you from feeling hungry or will speed up your metabolism. For someone with an average amount of nutrition knowledge it’s easy to think the claims made about these pills are true. There are a couple of things that are really important to know about these supplements:
- These pills are not regulated by the FDA or the FTC. That means that no outside source scrutinizes these pills for their effectiveness or safety.
- The word “natural” isn’t a regulated term either – anyone can slap it on their box without being required to back it up with facts.
So, be careful when looking at taking supplements that make claims that seem too good to be true, because they probably are.
If you’re interested in controlling your appetite and losing weight, talk to a nutritionist or even your chiropractor.
Restricting Calories Too Much
It makes mathematical sense that the less you eat and the more calories you burn the more weight you should lose, right? Well, yes and no. In order to lose weight, you do need to cut calories and exercise, but your body also requires a certain amount of calories a day to function. If you don’t get that it will go into starvation mode and hold on to fat instead of burn it. If you do lose weight the chances are that it’s actually muscle -- and that’s not good for you.
Not eating enough will actually slow your metabolism and make it harder to lose weight. You can easily find online calculators to help you set realistic calories and weight loss goals -- utilize them and stay healthy!
The Myth of the “Fat Burning Zone”
On the surface this seems like a reasonable thing, but the problem is that the fat burning zone is right up there with unicorns and leprechauns, it simply doesn’t exist -- at least in the way it is represented. There’s no zone you can exercise in that will burn more fat at a lower intensity level of aerobic exercise. The real secret lies in the total amount of calories you burn, and high intensity exercise is always going to burn more than low intensity exercise.
Have you fallen into any of these diet and exercise traps? Just remember, your body is a machine that needs balance. Doing too much or too little is probably never the right advice. Goldilocks was onto something because success lies somewhere between too much and too little with being just right.
To learn more about your health and wellness, see your local chiropractor at The Joint Chiropractic in Clayton, Mo.
