Can Exercise Help to Metabolize Your Food?

Metabolism means the speed at which your body metabolizes food. People with slow metabolisms can become overweight easily, because their body may store more fat than they metabolize. If you have a slow metabolism, exercise can help. It helps your body metabolize food faster, whether you're exercising or at rest. Exercise strengthens and builds your muscles, and larger, stronger muscles require more energy to sustain themselves. Because of this, exercise and muscle building will help you to metabolize food faster.

  1. Your Metabolism

    • One of the main factors in weight loss success is your metabolism. According to WebMD, age is also a factor in your metabolic rate. This will slow down by about 5 percent each decade after you turn 40. However, the more muscle mass you have, the higher your metabolism. Heredity can play a role in your metabolism too, but that doesn't mean your metabolism can't be improved.

    Exercise Increases Your Metabolism

    • All exercise builds muscle, whether it's cardio, strength training, sports or yoga. Our muscles constantly burn calories even when we’re not using them. That means the more muscle you have, the more calories you'll burn to sustain yourself. This will lead to faster you metabolization of your food -- or a "higher" metabolism. Because you metabolize food faster, you gain less weight from what you eat. According to WebMD, each pound of muscle in your body uses 6 calories each day just to maintain itself, whereas every pound of fat uses only 2 calories each day.

    What Kind of Exercise?

    • The fastest way to increase your muscle mass is by doing strength-training exercises, which involve lifting, pulling or pushing weight resistance with your muscles. This causes micro tears in muscle fibers, which heal and become stronger, resulting in more muscle mass. Cardio exercises also strengthen your muscles, increasing your metabolism, and are important for balancing out a strength-training program. Cardio doesn't build as much muscle mass as strength-training, but the short-term effects it has on metabolism can be the same or better depending on your workout intensity. The higher you get your heart rate up, the more calories you will burn during your workout and for up to 24 hours after, so consider adding high-intensity intervals into your cardio workout. Strength training doesn't burn as many calories in the short term, but it will give you longer-lasting results for increasing metabolism.

    How Much Exercise?

    • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests each week doing at least two strength-training workouts, making sure you target all your muscle groups at least twice in the week. Do 8 to 12 reps of each weight-lifting exercise using a resistance amount that fatigues your muscles. Don't do another workout with the same muscle group within one 48-hour period, or else your muscles won't have enough time to rebuild and strengthen. Do a minimum of either 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio per week or 75 minutes of vigorous cardio per week. It's okay if you can only squeeze in 10-minute workouts at a time, as long as it adds up at the end of the week.