Now have a look at the information presented in Muscle & Fitness in June of 2002 with regard to dietary plateaus:

“Before you do anything drastic, make sure you’re really on a plateau to begin with.  Do a mood check.  ‘Pay attention to your energy, concentration and strength levels throughout the day,’ Sassis suggests.  ‘If you’re feeling super good, sleeping well and looking forward to your workouts, there are probably some positive internal changes happening.’  Though you may have stopped seeing immediate results on the outside, you may be under construction on the inside.”

The converse situation, where we are tired and gloomy, means the body is actually changing to deal with the reduced intake of macro and micronutrients, generally a result of reduced caloric intake.  Here the body is actually shutting down selective parts of the metabolism to deal with what it perceives as a time of starvation or drought.  It does this because up until 5 thousand years ago life was largely about periods of plenty and periods of nothing.  We’re designed to live through that.  Except that now, generally, we spend our entire lives in a period of plenty.  So we diet.

Now, to make this more clearn, let me walk you through one of those bad analogies to better understand metabolism.  Let’s say the gas tank in our car is getting a little low.  Our car couldn’t care less.  It’s just going to go on as if nothing is wrong; probably a bit more easily since it isn’t carrying around the weight of the gas, and eventually it will run out of gas.  Our bodies, on the other hand, know something is up and start reacting to it.  At a ¼ of a tank it stops trying to keep us in a good mood all of the time.  At an 1/8 of a tank it’ll pull back on our energy levels, making us slow down a bit to conserve energy.  How annoying would it be if our cars did that?

On the flipside, in a time of plenty, we’ve just filled the car up with gas.  Again, it could care less.  Our bodies though, recognize the opportunity and will generally use about 400 of the calories you just ate, and store the rest in long term storage to be used during one of those times of starvation.  Sadly that long-term storage is called fat!

So here’s the challenge – try to find an analogy that fits the behavior of our metabolism.  Here is something that could help.  It turns out our metabolism doesn’t just govern our ability to digest but instead governs just about everything about us, from the process of our blood pumping through our bodies to the neurons firing in our brains.  In fact, medically, Death is actually defined as the cessation of all metabolic activities in the body.  So when we talk about making our metabolism faster, we’re actually talking about “revving” our body.  Ask a mechanic how healthy that is for a car.  The analogy actually holds true here.  Revving our bodies isn’t the best of ideas.

Have you found an analogy that matches all of this?  The only one I can come up with is of a living, breathing being.  Feels a bit like one of those Tamagotchi toys from Japan, doesn’t it?  Too much food and no exercise = early death.  Too little food and lots of exercise = early death.  Just the right amount of food and just the right about of exercise = long happy life!

Food and exercise are just two parts of a bunch of components that control how our metabolism is doing. Use the following Metobolic Rate Calculator to see what your base rate is. Then, just for fun, leave your age, weight, and other setting the same only make yourself a man and see what his metobolic rate would be.

Source: Excerpted & Edited from an article by J. Wells