How to Get a Better Metabolism

Most overweight individuals have a diet that is high in fats and other calorie rich food. Soft drinks such as Pepsi, Mountain Dew, or Coke are also loaded with easily digestible calories that; filling you system with energy but leaving you feeling hungry and wanting more food. The combination of easily digestible and high fat foods makes for a diet that packs on the pounds. When the news of how much exercise it will take to burn off the excess calories is delivered, it can be somewhat depressing. Statistically speaking only twenty percent of all United States citizens engage in regular, vigorous exercise to counteract the toll excess calories take on their bodies. Over fifty percent of all Americans are self described couch potatoes!

Maintaining your current weight is much easier than reducing the built up fat your body has already compiled. The average fast food dinner, a quarter pound hamburger, French fries and a milk shake, has a calorie count of approximately 1,000 calories. To burn off this many calories you would have to run close to eleven miles! The only way to reduce the fat on your body without killing yourself at the gym every day is to lower the amount of calories you ingest. Typically, most individuals enjoy the feeling of being full; thus, to get that feeling when you eat and not overdo the calories, you'll need to eat less fat and more proteins and carbohydrates. Fat has 9 calories for every gram, compared to the 4 calories per gram of protein and carbohydrates.

To give you an idea of how much energy is in every food calorie, you first need to understand how much energy is in a regular calorie. Each food calorie is really a kilo calorie; or, one thousand regular calories. Physics is where we find the regular calories used the most to denote the amount of energy is released or possessed. One calorie is defined in Physics as the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water 1°C at 15°C. Therefore, each calorie you count for food is really 1,000 regular calories.