For example, as you aerobically exercise, your body temperature rises as
your heart beat increases and remains with a certain range.
As this happens, your body requires more oxygen; and as such, your
breathing increases as you intake more H 2 O. All of this, as you can
imagine, requires additional energy.
After all, if your body couldn’t adjust to this enhanced requirement for
oxygen (both taking it in and getting rid of it in the form of carbon
dioxide), you would collapse!
Presuming, of course, that you aren’t overdoing it, your body will instead
begin converting food (e.g. calories) into energy. And this process, as you
know, is a metabolic process, and is called catabolism.
So as you can see, the metabolism is a constant process that takes care of
two seemingly opposite function: anabolism that uses energy to create
cells, and catabolism that breaks down cells to create energy.
Indeed, it’s in this way that the metabolism earns its reputation as a
harmonizer. It brings together these apparently conflicting functions, and
does so in an optimal way that enables the body to create cells as needed,
and break them down, again as needed.
Metabolism and Weight Loss
By now, you already have a sense of how metabolism relates to weight loss
(catabolic metabolism, or breaking cells down and transforming them into
energy).