1. You have the wrong parents. One of the most powerful influences on how efficiently your body burns calories is your genes.
2. You’re an adult. It takes a lot of energy to grow up. Once you’re full grown, you won’t burn as many calories while you sleep or sit as you used to.
3. You’re 5 foot 2. A tall person, with more body surface area, typically has a more efficient basal metabolic rate (BMR) than a shorter person of equal weight. BMR accounts for 50 to 60 percent of the calories expended every day.
4. You’re over 50. As you age, you lose muscle tone. And you know what that means – muscle burns about 8 times more calories than fat.
5. You’re a woman. Men usually have more muscle mass than women. They get the muscle, we get the fat!
6. You’ve lost weight. When you lose weight, your BMR decreases. Your body composition –percentage of body fat to muscle mass – is essentially the same as a bigger person. But their BMR is higher than yours because it takes more calories to carry all that extra weight.
7. You avoid extreme hot and extreme cold temperatures. Who doesn’t? But if you tough if out, your metabolic rate will rise! (Running a fever also increases your BMR.)
8. You’ve gone on a starvation diet. Eating too little will lower your metabolism by as much as 20%.
9. You’ve lost the same pounds over and over again. When you lose weight, you lose muscle; when you gain it back, you gain fat.
10. You don’t exert yourself. You knew that one was coming, didn’t you?

Slow Metabolism Doesn’t Cause Weight Gain. We all know this: we gain weight when we take in more calories than we burn. But we would burn more calories at rest if we had the metabolism of an adolescent male. Even when he’s asleep, he’s burning more calories than a middle-aged woman.

All is not lost, though. Here are 7 ways to increase your metabolism:

1. Fidget. Forget what your mother said about sitting still. Be a little restless.
2. Build your upper body strength. Use hand weights or resistance bands, pushups or stretching exercises.
3. Build your lower body strength. Walk. If you’re already walking, speed it up a little.
4. Eat frequent, small meals. They say this helps because it increases TEE – the Thermic Effect of Eating (10% to 15% of the calories we burn).
5. Drink green tea – or try green tea extracts. Be warned, though. It’s high in caffeine, which may interfere with the next tip.
6. Get enough sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation mimics aging by slowing metabolism.
7. Combine aerobic and muscle-building activities. Aerobic exercise affects ARE (Activity Related Energy), which accounts for 25 to 40% of the calories we burn every day. Muscle-building activities affect our resting metabolic rate.

Sure – you may have slower metabolic rates than you used to. And sure – you’d love to eat like you used to. Maybe the above suggestions will help – not just so you can eat more of what you want , but more important – to give you the energy and stamina to do what you want.

Talk to me: Have you tried strength training? How has it affected your weight and/or eating habits? Any suggestions for getting a good night’s sleep?

Sources:

“Is Your Metabolism to Blame?”by Ahmed H. Kissebah, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine and pharmacology and director of the General Clinical Research Center, Medical College of Wisconsin. TOPS News, Volume 61, #8, November 2009.

“Slow Metabolism: Is It to Blame for Weight Gain?” http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/slow-metabolism/AN00618

“Lack of sleep alters hormones, metabolism,” http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/991202/sleep.shtml

Who, me?

Well, it looks like living to 107 is out! A recent blood test indicated that my total cholesterol level is way too high!

Needless to say, I was shocked. I thought I was taking care of myself!

Surely it’s not diet!

I think I eat well: lean beef and/or chicken breast maybe twice a week, no bacon in months, a quarter-cup or so of grated cheese on salads, occasionally indulging in desserts at potlucks, fresh fruits and vegetables always available.

Fried foods? Rare to non-existent in our house. Pasta? It’s been weeks since we’ve eaten either macaroni and cheese or spaghetti, though we’ve had some rice lately.

Maybe it’s genetic.

Diabetes, maybe, but not heart disease. My mother, who admits to being overweight, was diagnosed with high cholesterol in her 70’s, and although he was a paraplegic the last two decades of his life (the result of a high school football accident), my dad’s heart and lungs were still strong into his 80’s.

What to do now?

First thing, see a doctor for a long overdue checkup. We don’t have many choices in this little town, but from what a friend said, I thought Dr. G would not be quick to recommend medication. And I was right.

So what did the doctor say?

No dietary changes, except to recommend plenty of fruits and vegetables – not surprising.

His strongest recommendation?

1) Walking. 30 minutes a day. Every day. Not 45 minutes one day, 15 minutes the next, none the next.

2) One baby aspirin every day.

3) Another blood test in 6 to 12 weeks to see if the cholesterol level drops in that time.

(He’s a good example of what he preaches, by the way. He walks two hours every morning, no matter what his schedule.)

Putting my theories to the test

I have been pretty cocky about my theories of good health, so this blood test is a personal challenge to my simplistic assumptions.

Assumption #1. Good health is simply a matter of eating the right foods and getting enough exercise. Bolstered by the words and work of Dr. Joel Fuhrman, I have believed that – most of the time – when we suffer from a chronic illness, it’s because we’ve broken either a rule of good eating or been too sedentary.

Assumption #2. Long-term medication is meant to make up for our nutrition-starved bodies. They treat the symptom and mask the cause. Rather than taking an aspirin for a headache, for instance, determine what’s causing it and, if possible, fix it.

Test time

I say I’ll do anything to avoid becoming dependent on a pill. We’ll see about that, won’t we? But here’s the plan:

1) More walking. A quick check of my pedometer shows 139 minutes in the last seven days – an average of 20 minutes a day. Not that great!  Why not make this a real challenge and double my current walking time to 40 minutes a day – 7 days a week, rain or shine, sleet or snow? (There’s always the walking track at the high school gym.)

2) Oats for breakfast most mornings, not just a couple of times a week.

3) Fish oil supplements, maybe?

4) Lose weight. Though I’m not considered overweight, I’m 6 or 7 pounds heavier than I was 20 years ago. Three months is a reasonable length time to shed that extra weight.

And if it doesn’t work?

Accept the situation and take the medicine. Be thankful it’s available. Determine to maintain healthful lifestyle habits. Never, ever adopt the attitude, “It’s okay to abuse my body or neglect my health – there’s a medicine that will take care of it.”

Talk to me: You’ve no doubt overcome greater health challenges than I’ve mentioned here. Were diet or exercise part of your recovery?

I just enjoyed my smoothie of choice – one orange, a cup or so of strawberries and a few blueberries thrown into a blender with a cup of ice and 1% milk. By the time I disposed of the orange peelings and strawberry stems, returned the milk and remaining strawberries and blueberries to the fridge and took a glass from the cupboard, it was ready to pour. And I had enough left over to put into the freezer for some iced smoothie tomorrow.

No, this is not a promotion for a blender, but for fresh fruits and vegetables – not only because they’re good for you, which of course they are, but because they’re just good! My aim is to encourage people to speak of fresh produce with the same ecstasy they now reserve for plate-sized grilled steaks, double cheeseburgers, piping hot French fries and smooth, rich chocolate ice cream.

• Consider the abundant color of fresh produce. When you enter a grocery store, your eyes are immediately drawn to the produce section. Is there any more colorful aisle – with its multiple shades of yellow, orange, red, purple and green? Compare that to the meat aisle with its bank of red meat and white chicken and fish, edible only after you’ve turned them to a brown color.

• Consider the variety of flavors. In the early summer here in the Midwest, berries, watermelon and cantaloupe are plentiful and sweet. Later we’ll enjoy honey-sweet Colorado peaches, looking forward to juicy, crisp apples in the fall and Vitamin-C laden grapefruit and oranges through the winter. Even with the short growing season in the Midwest, we can expect not only sweet corn from the farm fields but carrots, beans, beets, black-eyed peas and tomatoes from backyard gardens. When did you ever hear of “steak” in season? How boring!

• Consider their availability. For all the complaints we may have about “the world today,” it’s possible to enjoy fresh or frozen vegetables from all over the world like never before.

• Consider their cost. Side by side on a recent grocery store flyer were New York strip steaks at $5.99 per pound and green seedless grapes for $.99 per pound. Ice Cream Bars were $.70 each on sale, compared to a pound of cherries for $2.99, on sale.

Both the ice cream bars and the cherries could be considered a sweet treat. The chart below shows the difference not only in fat and calories but nutritional value. Why choose brown and white when red is so much more colorful – and less fattening and more nutritious?

It’s no wonder Eve was tempted by a piece of fruit in the Garden of Eden! She had been promised it would make her wise; she also saw it was “good for food and pleasant to the eye.”

Maybe if we were told good food was forbidden – like salty fries and rich ice cream with chocolate sauce – it would be more attractive to us.

Maybe we’d look at each other and confess, “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m indulging in fruit salad tonight!”