 By Elena Voropay
You probably have heard it many times - you are what you eat, how you move and how much you rest. You are your metabolism. Metabolism is a bit of a catch-phrase these days and it seems to have lost all its original meaning. In scientific terms, metabolism is ultimately a collection of all chemical reactions that take place in the body's cells. These reactions include converting the fuel from the foods you eat into the energy needed to power everything you do, be it moving, sleeping, thinking or simply growing. In fact, thousands of metabolic reactions happen at the same time to keep your cells healthy and working. Essentially, the word 'metabolism' comes from the Greek word meaning “change”, meaning that your body goes through various changes every second.
Metabolism is a constant process that begins when we're conceived and ends when we die. It is a vital process for all life forms - not just humans. If metabolism stops, a living thing dies. Every heart beat, every breath, every step requires energy. Energy expenditure is continuous, but it is not the same all the time. There are many things that determine how much energy your body needs and uses throughout the day.
There are two processes, or rather, two interactive channels by which metabolism runs.
Catabolism is your “destructive metabolism” and refers to the breakdown of large components into their simpler forms. Catabolism involves the maintenance of body temperature and the degradation of complex chemical units into simpler substances that can be removed as waste products from the body through the kidneys, intestines, lungs, and skin. Through catabolism, your body produces energy by breaking down nutrients which fuel all anabolic reactions, such as giving all muscles power to contract and the internal organs to function. When you lose weight, are under stress or when you exercise, you are in catabolic state.
Anabolism is your “constructive metabolism” and includes the chemical reactions that cause different small molecules to combine to from larger, more complex ones. The net result of anabolism is the creation of new cellular material, such as enzymes, proteins, cells, cell membranes, and tissues. The fuel for all anabolic reactions in the body comes from food calories. This fuels supports the growth of new cells, the maintenance of body tissues, and the storage of energy for use in the future. When you grow new muscle cells, enlarge existing fat stores, or need to recover from injury, you are in anabolic state.
Both, anabolism and catabolism, are governed by your hormonal and nervous systems. They work together like a team complimenting every single cellular action in your body. At any given time, the human body is in an anabolic state, a catabolic state, or a neutral state somewhere between the two extremes. Your body actually likes being in the neutral state the most.
Your Unique Metabolic Machine
Think of your metabolism as a bank account or a credit card statement. Some people earn more money, some less, some need more while others are happy to live on limited income and have no desire to build bigger homes, buy luxurious cars, or go to fancy restaurants every weekend. Same applies to your metabolism - your body is strictly yours, it is very unique in its anabolic and catabolic demands and requires different components to support these. You may need different amounts and types of energy to maintain good health than your pregnant girlfriend, your mass-building buddy, stressed-out boss, or your dieting mother. This is why comparing the effectiveness of diets on a mass scale may be a completely worthless task – the nutrient requirements are never the same for two people.
The first step is finding how much energy your body needs and uses. Then you need to figure out the amount of fuel you give your system to support the demands. The last step will be to determine if you earn enough or more than enough to pay off the energy demands, and adjusting the difference.
How can you measure your metabolism? There is a scientific method which involves calculating how much oxygen you breathe and how much blood you pump. These reactions produce a certain amount of heat, Heat production, in turn, requires energy. This is the same as heating up your house on a cold winter day – you need some fuel for the heater, from electricity, gas, or, if you wish, wood logs and coals for your fireplace. The fuel turns generates energy and turns your cold house into a cosy warm comfort place. You know how much energy you used just by looking at a meter, checking your energy bill or fuel tank, or by counting the number of logs burned in the fireplace. With the body, it is not that simple. Don't you wish there was a device which could be implanted into your body and give you a precise personalized calculation of your metabolic needs? Unfortunately, scientists haven't invented this yet, but they found a universal measure of your metabolism. This is known as kilo-calorie or kilo-joule, which you may also know as calorie or joule. In simple terms, a calorie or joule was originally defined as “the amount of heat required at a pressure of 1 standard atmosphere to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1° Celsius.” Since 1925 this calorie has been defined in terms of the joule.
The unit calorie has historically been used in two major alternate definitions that differ by a factor of 1000:
The small calorie, gram calorie, or calorie (symbol: cal) is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by 1 °C. One calorie is equal to approximately 4.2 joules.
The large calorie, kilogram calorie, kilo-calorie (symbol: kcal), or Calorie (symbol: C) is exactly 1000 small calories. It is the amount of heat needed to increase the temperature of one kg of water by 1 °C, or about 4.184 kJ.
So, while many of us count calories we eat or calories we burn, but not too many know what we are counting. Heat! Yes, we are counting how much heat we release when we work out or how much heat we intake when we eat.
Where do you get your caloric energy from? Food, of course. Where does this energy go to? All cells and tissues in your body which demand fuel to sustain their living. Obviously, if you eat more calories than you need, you may notice the numbers on the scale go up, which means you are trying too hard on the nourishment part and eating more than you need to restore energy. But if your weight goes down – you are in undersupply and use more than you get from your nutritious and delicious foods.
Losing weight may be a good thing sometimes, but only if this loss comes from excess fat tissues. This is because too much body fat is not only unpleasant-looking, but is very unhealthy as it increases your risk for an array of diseases and lowers your metabolism. The more flab you have – the less calories you burn. But you have to be careful with this. When you lose weight, you lose it from everywhere – water, fat and muscle tissue. While body fat just sits on your hips and thighs thriving on your hunger and appetite, lean mass burns off calories constantly, gives strength, energy and desire to move more. The picture is crystal-clear – burning off fat for energy is great, but wasting your hard-earned and nature-given muscle and organ tissue is the worst thing imaginable.
At the same time, gaining weight can be both – good and bad as well. Assuming that you want to gain lean body mass and lose fat, simply tracking your scale mark is not the most efficient way to know if you are on the right path. If your secret bathroom device tells you to upgrade the size of your pants, you may be gaining muscle density or size, retaining water or getting fat. Knowing your body composition, or the proportion of your lean tissue to adipose or fat, is a better way. Let's say your weight stayed the same for months, has anything changed? Provided you were in the hands of a bodybuilding angel, haven't shortchanged your diet or training and enjoyed the recovery phases, you probably gained a few kilos of mass and lost the same number of kilos of fat. The change you really need is the change in your mind – where your entire system gets its jump-start. You know that it's all good if you tracked your progress in the gym, and if you still thrive on elecrifying sensations of your workouts.
Want to put on a sleeveless tank-top you've got reserved from decades ago and wear it with pride? You may want to check your looks in the mirror first. Do you like what you see, or do you need to shred a layer of soft cushion covering your guns? If you want to lose fat and keep it off, build more muscle tissue and keep it on, and start burning more calories at rest, you have to exercise regularly, eat well and give your system sufficient recovery time. Mastery of these will fill in the missing blank spots, melt away the stubborn fat and help you preserve and build lean muscles while keeping your metabolism sky-high.
Nutrition, Training, Recovery: Anabolic or Catabolic?
Nutrition, training and recovery all have a positive effect on metabolism. They regulate heat production and stimulate the body to produce various anabolic and catabolic hormones, no matter what time of the day or night it is. A multi-million dollar question is: Which part of the metabolic equation does each one of these metabolic components take - anabolic or catabolic? The answer is: both!
Nutrition
A good bodybuilding nutrition will determine how successful you are in your bodybuilding program. Training without proper nutrition is like rowing against the current. At best, you would remain on the same place or even move forward a little bit. However, in the end, you get nowhere. Before you get too motivated to start a weight-loss journey, stop eating and start moving thinking that this is the only way to lose fat, there is one most important thing you need to keep in mind - eating less and lowering your caloric intake slows your metabolism. That's right – eating generates energy and increases your metabolism by generating heat.
Why do we even need food? Calories, the tiny units of energy that your body uses in order to do its anabolic-catabolic magic cycle of life. No food – no energy, no workouts, no health, no life. Food itself is anabolic because it provides fuel for all the constructive processes in the body. When you eat, your digestive system break down food into most basic constituents – sugars, amino acids and fatty acids. To do this right, your body calls up a large crew of various hormones, neurotransmitters and enzymes, both anabolic and catabolic, which help these nutrients to travel throughout the body where anabolism can take place in every cell. This is an additional heat-generating task for your body. Remember, heat requires energy, so it requires calories. In sum, the act of digestion and absorption is catabolic.
Not to alarm you, but whenever your body lacks sufficient nutrients to sustain itself, it often seeks to burn muscle tissue for energy, or to rebuild and repair muscle tissue. Taking all precautions, you don't have to stuff yourself in the morning and stay in this condition all your life in fear of muscle waste. There are certain basic nutritional rules for you to master and live by them. That is, eating the right foods at the right times, about which you will find out later on. So, eat well and train hard, just don't overdo either one, or your catabolism will take over. For now, take a permanent marker and write down on your forehead, on your bathroom scales, on your fridge and on your training gloves - the less food you eat – the less calories you burn and the more body fat you gain.
Training
Exercise itself is an interesting concept when it comes to metabolism. Physiologically speaking, any physical movement is a catabolic process, but in the long run it helps your body's reconstruction and stimulates all sorts of anabolic reactions imaginable. Exercise breaks down energy from nutrients needed to fuel your movement, splits the linkages in body tissues, such muscles and fat, and increases the production of catabolic hormones. On the other hand, without exercise all anabolic actions in the body will get to their minimal survival level. Remember – no stimulus, no growth. Every minute of training adds up to your anabolic account. And if these minutes are spent wisely, you can be rich, or huge, in a matter of weeks. It has been proven conclusively that certain exercises stimulate the most release in anabolic hormones consequently causing a lot more lean tissue growth while breaking down adipose tissue.
So, while hard training damages muscle fibers in order to rebuild them stronger than before, which is a good thing, this simultaneously causes the body to release catabolic hormones which destroy these same muscle tissues you are trying to enlarge. Unless you supply enough nutrients needed support the building constructive metabolic process, you will never grow in size nor in strength, regardless of how hard you train and how many anabolic hormones you stimulate. In fact, the harder you train, the weaker you may become if there is no sufficient recuperation from food and rest.
Training and eating, both catabolic, are just some of the physical and psychological stresses that increase the levels of various stress hormones. While both of these are meant to give you the most outstanding anabolic tools, they may hamper your ability to recover and grow if you don't create an appropriate anabolic environment. The key to outplay catabolism is not to encourage your body to produce less catabolic hormones by working out less, but to help push through the catabolic phases with less effort by making the most out of your anabolic environment.
Recovery
Ask any bodybuilder what he or she would do to provide the perfect anabolic environment? Ahh, deep breath. Spend all money on supplements? Exhaust the muscles under the hammer of a to-notch trainer? Pay for the exclusive brilliant workout design guaranteed to vent out your hot-headed behavior into a jaw-dropping physique? All these can work, but everything is worthless unless the last most important part of anabolism is not fulfilled. This component is recovery, or better yet, sleep. You may pay all you want for promising bodybuilding tricks, but if you don't discipline yourself into recovery, it may be the only debt you can never repay. Remember, you need to structure your recovery just like you structure your workouts and diet.
Rest is a subject very few trainers and bodybuilding experts want to talk about. Why? Because, rest induces muscle growth. It is only during this most productive muscle-building cycle when you can harvest the crops of your efforts in the gym and in the kitchen.
Did you know that you are probably sabotaging your muscle-building and fat-burning potential by 40 to 50 per cent by not sleeping well or long enough? A lack of sleep can cause drowsiness, sluggishness, crankiness, depression, forgetfulness, and slow our reaction time - all of which will have a huge impact on your stamina and energy, intensity in the gym and overall metabolism. Without enough sleep we are literally more catabolic all day long! And you can multiply this by 2 post workout! Without proper sleep your stress levels will be off the charts after a workout. Of course getting 8-10 hours of sleep every night of your life is practically impossible, but you have to make the effort to get more.
Sleep is one the keys to building a better body. During the hours of your shut-eye therapy protein metabolism occurs at a more proficient rate as does the general restoration of mind and body, hormones help repair tissues, preparing them for a new day of movement. On the other hand, sleep deprivation not only negatively alters brain activity and slows reaction times and makes you feel lethargic, but interrupts the brain's electrical patterns essential in coordinating several anabolic hormones and neurotransmitters essential for re-construction of healthy lean tissues and burning off fat.
Scientists have linked insufficient or irregular sleep to increased risk for colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes and even obesity. If you find yourself biting nails, grinding teeth, losing hair, building up or increasing the size of your spare tire around your imaginable washboard abs, fighting off headaches and increased appetite, forget any progress with your bodybuilding dreams, unless you already have due to poor memory related to your poor sleep and overabundant stress.
Conclusion
The first rule in obtaining a truly awesome physique is to understand that shedding body fat and building slabs of lean muscle mass requires an organized, dedicated and consistent approach to training, sleep and nutrition. What's more, you can't prioritize one over the other, or the synergy will be broken and results will grind to a halt. This is the cornerstone of building a great physique.
The second rule for your to learn is what governs your metabolism and how you can best achieve the utmost body’s potential naturally. Those proud warriors who stick with their program long enough see real rewards for their efforts. Their fat melts away, muscles become stronger and denser, functional performance improves, and the nourishing nutrients find a great use and purpose in all body tissues. So, physical activity actually incorporates both, catabolic and anabolic processes.
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