There’s a lot of information out there about what metabolism is and how it works – and some pieces of that information conflict with others.

We enlisted the help of Alessandro Alviani from Nordic Balance to explain exactly how your metabolism works, and how you can go about turbo-boosting it.

What exactly is metabolism?

You ready to concentrate deeply for a moment? Okay. Go.

Metabolism is the sum of the physical and chemical processes in an organism by which its material substance is produced, maintained, and destroyed, and by which energy is made available.

Basically, it’s the entire chemical process that continuously occurs inside your body to allow everything to function as it should.

All metabolism processes are controlled by your hormones and nervous system, and are influenced by your age, gender, muscle-to-fat ratio, diet, physical activity and overall lifestyle.

The amount of calories you use up running all these processes each day is called total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), and it’s broken down as follow:

• Around 60-70% of your energy expenditure goes on maintaining vital functions such as breathing, regulating your temperature, and keeping the heart beating – this is the BMR (basal metabolic rate).
• Around 15-30% goes on daily activities (working, training, commuting, etc).
• Around 10-15% is used up breaking down the food and assimilating it.

So: basic metabolic rate, daily activities and diet are therefore the three key factors that affect our total daily energy expenditure.

Now that we know what we’re talking about, we can debunk the five biggest myths about metabolism!