and space focusing on the layered complexity of the human body and its
extraordinary intelligence.
Yet without drilling deeply into medical details -- which are not relevant
for our general understanding purposes -- it’s helpful to briefly look at the
biological mechanisms behind metabolism.
Metabolism, as mentioned above, is the process of transforming food (e.g.
nutrients) into fuel (e.g. energy). The body uses this energy to conduct a
vast array of essential functions.
In fact, your ability to read this page – literally – is driven by your
metabolism.
If you had no metabolism – that is, if you had no metabolic process that
was converting food into energy – then you wouldn’t be able to move.
In fact, long before you realized that you couldn’t move a finger or lift
your foot, your internal processes would have stopped; because the basic
building blocks of life – circulating blood, transforming oxygen into carbon
dioxide, expelling potentially lethal wastes through the kidneys and so on –
all of these depend on metabolism.
Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone say that they have a
slow metabolism.
While they may struggle with unwanted weight gain due to metabolic
factors, they certainly have a functioning metabolism.