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THE BOOK

The Power of your Metabolism

YOUR BODY IS ALIVE

It seems silly to have to say it, but “your body is alive”.  The point here is that live organisms have certain characteristics and abilities that are very different than things that are dead.  The human body is an organism that is alive.  What you need to know is that since your body is alive, it has the ability to learn and adapt.
  
It is calculated that human bodies have lived on this planet for the last 75 million years.  That is a long time.  Throughout all this time the conditions in the environment, the food and the lives of human beings have suffered many changes.  Human bodies have been able to survive all of these eras simply because they are organisms that learn and adapt.

We need to be aware of our body’s abilities to learn to adapt when we decide to increase our metabolism and slim down.  If you don’t take it into account, you could fail in your attempt.  Your body adapts to everything.  It adapts to your diet, to being starved, to not drinking water, to sleeping too little or to whatever else we make it go through.

In fact, the reason that the diets of counting calories don’t work is due to the same fact; bodies learn and adapt.  When a person goes on a diet of counting calories in reality what they are really trying to do is to lower the sources of energy for their body.  Diets of counting calories are diets, in many cases, of “starving out” by simply eating less than what you’d like to eat.  They don’t work.

Some people ask themselves why it is so difficult for them to lose weight even when they are “going hungry”.  That is the reason.  When you force your body to “go hungry” you are making it adapt to the shortage of food and the body must reduce the function of the thyroid and metabolism to protect itself.

The problem here is that the body “learns” from you.  This learning turns into a type of “cellular memory” under which the body’s cells “remember” the moments of shortage and adapt to having a slower metabolism.  If you insist on convincing your body that there is a food shortage, your body will keep on decreasing your metabolism to “economize”.  The cells will remember these moments of shortage.  This is the beginning of the famous “slow metabolism”.  If you teach your body that in order to survive it has to consume less food, it will not have any other choice but to reduce the metabolism to be able to survive the hunger and shortage that you have caused it.  It is suicide for the metabolism.

What would you do if one day you heard on the news that there was a shortage of food in every supermarket in the country?  Wouldn’t you take some sort of action to save the food that you have in your house or try to buy more food while the crisis lasts?  Well, if there is a shortage, your body does exactly the same thing you would do: economize and store! The way that your body economizes is by reducing the metabolism through the thyroid gland.  The way that your body stores energy is by accumulating fat.

When someone has done one of those diets of counting calories that make them starve or one of those drastic diets of only eating soup for several days, the body finds itself obligated to decrease the metabolism.  The moment when you abandon the diet, your body will be eagerly ready, waiting to store the food that you give it; and it is going to save it as fat.  This is because the body will be adapting to store energy (fat) in order to prepare for the next time the “shortage” happens.  This is the reason for the so-called “bounce” or “yo-yo effect” of the traditional diets of “eating less” or “counting calories”.

When you do a diet of eating fewer calories you are creating a “slow metabolism” and your body keeps on adapting to the situation.  When you finally give up the diet and try to eat normal portions of food, your body, which already has a slow metabolism, will begin to accumulate and save fat.  It is an attempt that your body makes to get ready to survive the next diet of “going hungry” that you impose on it.

There are some differences that must be established.  Your body is alive.  You are a being that inhabits your body.  You are not your body.  You have thoughts and feelings and you make decisions.  Your body doesn’t actually think, nor does it make decisions or have emotions.  You are you and your body is your body.  You and your body are not the same thing.

We’d like to think that it is you that controls your body (we hope) and not your body that controls you.  But, you can’t forget that the body is a living organism and that live organisms learn and adapt to their environment and to the conditions that they confront. Don’t make the mistake of giving your body the message that there is a food shortage.  If you do that, you will have a “slow metabolism”, and it will make slimming down difficult or impossible to do.

In my experience, people that have made the most random, drastic dieting attempts to lose weight are the people with the “slowest metabolisms”.  In other words, the people that have been “on a diet their entire life” and go from one popular diet to the next, are the people that have done the most damage to their metabolism.  They have successfully convinced their body that there is a constant food shortage.  Your body’s solution, since living organisms learn and adapt, has been to decrease the metabolism to be able to survive the shortages.

So then, to be able to increase your metabolism all you have to do is reverse the body’s process of learning and adapting.  In my experience, it is much easier to convince the body to slow down the metabolism than it is to speed it up.  The reasons can be found within the section about the thyroid gland (see the topic PROBLEMS WITH THE THYROID GLAND SYSTEM).

What is important is that you understand that there is a very close connection between what you do with your body and the reactions your body has.  If you aren’t aware of the fact that your body is alive, you won’t know what actions of yours give it the right message: increase the metabolism, and what actions of yours force it to reduce the metabolism. Yes, your body is alive.