The Importance of maintaining a healthy weight
Many people have learnt the hard way that weight loss isn’t as easy as energy in minus energy out. Diet, exercise, sleep, stress, mental health, genes, age and sex all play a crucial role in your unique metabolic health, meaning that the same tactics that work for you won’t work for your sister, neighbour or best friend. Whilst there is no official definition of metabolic health, in our words to be metabolically healthy means that you have good overall health and are also at low risk of developing any metabolic diseases.
What is metabolic health?
This is the process where your body converts nutrients in your food into energy and helps your body recover, restore and function. No two people’s metabolism is ever the same which is why measuring metabolic health is a gamechanger. Your metabolism changes as you age, depending on lifestyle factors like sleep and also as a result of your body weight.
Having good metabolic health means that your body can readily digest and absorb nutrients from food without any large jumps or spikes in blood sugar, insulin, blood fat and inflammation. These spikes can contribute to the prevalence of metabolic diseases like cholesterol, high levels of body fat, increased weight circumference and high blood pressure.
Your metabolism is responsible for every single chemical process in your body. This includes but isn’t limited to the following:
- Energy production
- Growth
- Elimination of waste
- Helping repair old tissue
- Building new tissues
- Fighting off diseases
Whilst you can’t change your genes you can change your diet and lifestyle to improve your metabolic health.
Why is your metabolism so important?
Metabolic health doesn’t just play a crucial role in reversing chronic diseases but it also can significantly improve your overall health. This means that your body is able to process and digest food easily but also is ready and able to fight off any metabolic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.
A 2019 report1 using data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey revealed that just 12.2% of Americans were metabolically healthy. Whilst there hasn’t been research on Australians using the same metabolic health markers in 2017-182 it is estimated that 2 in 3 (67%) of Australians were overweight. Being overweight or obese negatively impacts your overall health and wellbeing and increases your likelihood of developing serious health problems like heart diseases, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancers.
Metabolic health and weight loss
Losing weight can be a little bit like trial and error with not only exercise and diet but many lifestyle factors playing their role in weight. Measuring your metabolic health takes the guessing game out of weight loss and allows for the creation of an individually tailored action plan, therefore, increasing the likelihood of positive results.
How do you measure yours?
The Metabolic Health Program was created by Life First and uses non-invasive technologies called ECAL which uses indirect calorimetry and bioimpedance spectroscopy to get an accurate measure of how your metabolism (on a cellular level) is impacting your body composition (your tissues and organs). This data is processed by Life First’s health coaches who then create individualised strategies to assist patients in achieving their healthy body composition targets.
SOURCES
1 https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/met.2018.0105
2 https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-health/overweight-and-obesity
Back to posts
