In: Goldman-Cecil Medicine. Elsevier; Accessed Sept. Preventing weight gain. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Perreault L, et al. Obesity: Genetic contribution and pathophysiology.

Piaggi P. Metabolic determinants of weight gain in humans. Department of Health and Human Services and U. Department of Agriculture. Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. Department of Health and Human Services. Dietary supplements for weight loss: Fact sheet for health professionals.

National Institutes of Health. Products and Services A Book: Mayo Clinic Family Health Book, 5th Edition The Mayo Clinic Diet Online A Book: Live Younger Longer A Book: The Mayo Clinic Diet Bundle Newsletter: Mayo Clinic Health Letter — Digital Edition. See also Calorie calculator Carbohydrates Counting calories Weight-loss plateau Hidradenitis suppurativa: Tips for weight-loss success Keep the focus on your long-term vision Maintain a healthy weight with psoriatic arthritis BMI and waist circumference calculator Weight gain during menopause Weight-loss strategies Weight Loss After Breast Cancer Show more related content.

Mayo Clinic Press Check out these best-sellers and special offers on books and newsletters from Mayo Clinic Press. Mayo Clinic on Incontinence - Mayo Clinic Press Mayo Clinic on Incontinence The Essential Diabetes Book - Mayo Clinic Press The Essential Diabetes Book Mayo Clinic on Hearing and Balance - Mayo Clinic Press Mayo Clinic on Hearing and Balance FREE Mayo Clinic Diet Assessment - Mayo Clinic Press FREE Mayo Clinic Diet Assessment Mayo Clinic Health Letter - FREE book - Mayo Clinic Press Mayo Clinic Health Letter - FREE book.

ART Healthy Lifestyle Weight loss In-Depth Metabolism and weight loss How you burn calories. Show the heart some love! Give Today. Help us advance cardiovascular medicine. Find a doctor. Explore careers. Sign up for free e-newsletters.

About Mayo Clinic. About this Site. Contact Us. Health Information Policy. Media Requests. News Network. Price Transparency. Medical Professionals.

Clinical Trials. Mayo Clinic Alumni Association. Refer a Patient. Executive Health Program. International Business Collaborations. Supplier Information. Admissions Requirements. Degree Programs. Research Faculty. Now, if you exercise for 60 minutes and burn calories, then during that hour, you burn the , plus your BMR.

If your BMR is 60 calories per hour, then you burned calories during the hour of exercise. And if you walk home from the gym instead of drive, then you will burn even more. So at the end of the day, when you add it all up, if your total daily energy expenditure is greater than the number of calories you've eaten, then you lose weight.

Richard Weil, MEd, CDE, is an exercise physiologist and certified diabetes educator. He has published dozens of articles on exercise and health and has appeared on many television programs.

He also speaks about health at many national conferences. All rights reserved. IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. That's because muscle uses a lot more energy than fat while at rest see the graphic in section one.

So the logic is if you can build up your muscle, and reduce your body fat, you'll have a higher resting metabolism and more quickly burn the fuel in your body. Jensen also noted that it's difficult for people to sustain the workouts required to keep the muscle mass they gained.

Overall, he said, "There's not any part of the resting metabolism that you have a huge amount of control over. The control tends to be relatively modest, and unfortunately, it also tends to be on the downside. While it's extremely hard to speed the metabolic rate up, researchers have found there are things people do can slow it down — like drastic weight loss programs.

For years, researchers have been documenting a phenomenon called "metabolic adaptation" or "adaptive thermogenesis": As people lose weight, their basal metabolic rate — the energy used for basic functioning when the body is at rest — actually slows down to a greater degree than would be expected from the weight loss.

To be clear: It makes sense that losing weight will slow down the metabolism a bit, since slimming down generally involves muscle loss, and the body is then smaller and doesn't have to work as hard every minute to keep running.

But the slowdown after weight loss, researchers have found, often appears to be substantially greater than makes sense for a person's new body size.

In the newest scientific study to document this phenomenon, published in the journal Obesity , researchers at NIH followed up with contestants from season eight of the reality TV show The Biggest Loser. By the end of the show, all of the participants had lost dozens of pounds, so they were the perfect study subjects to find out what happens when you lose a dramatic amount of weight in a short period of time.

The researchers took a number of measurements — bodyweight, fat, metabolism, hormones — at both the end of the week competition in and again, six years later, in Though all the contestants lost dozens of pounds through diet and exercise at the end of the show, six years later, their waistlines had largely rebounded.

Thirteen of the 14 contestants in the study put a significant amount of weight back on, and four contestants are even heavier today compared with before they went on the show. But the participants' metabolisms had vastly slowed down through the study period.

Their bodies were essentially burning about calories fewer about a meal's worth on average each day than would be expected given their weight.

And this effect lasted six years later, despite the fact that most participants were slowly regaining the weight they lost. Sandra Aamodt, a neuroscientist and author of the forthcoming book Why Diets Make Us Fat , explained this may be the body's way of vigorously defending a certain weight range, called the set point.

Once you gain weight, and keep that weight on for a period of time, the body can get used to its new, larger size. When that weight drops, a bunch of subtle changes kick in — to the hormone levels, the brain — slowing the resting metabolism, and having the effect of increasing hunger and decreasing satiety from food, all in a seeming conspiracy to get the body back up to that set point weight.

In the Biggest Loser study, for example, the researchers found each participant experienced significant reductions in the hormone leptin in their bloodstreams. Leptin is one of the key hormones that regulate hunger in the body. By the end of the Biggest Loser competition, the contestants had almost entirely drained their leptin levels, leaving them hungry all the time.

At the six-year mark, their leptin levels rebounded — but only to about 60 percent of their original levels before going on the show. But not every kind of weight loss in every person results in such devastating metabolic slowdown.

For example: That great effect on leptin seen in the Biggest Loser study doesn't seem to happen with surgically induced weight loss. Indeed, all the researchers I spoke to thought the effects in the B iggest Loser study were particularly extreme, and perhaps not generalizable to most people's experiences.

That makes sense, since the study involved only 14 people losing vast amounts of weight on what amounts to a crash diet and exercise program. The Mayo Clinic's Jensen said he hasn't found in his patients as dramatic a slowing of the metabolism in studies where people lose about 20 pounds over four months.

With slow, gradual weight loss, the metabolic rate holds out really well. There are some interesting hypotheses, however. One of the most persistent is an evolutionary explanation. That ability would to some extent increase our ability to survive during periods of undernutrition, and increase our ability to reproduce — genetic survival.

Today, the thinking goes, this inability to keep off weight that's been gained is our body defending against periods of undernutrition, even though those are much rarer now. But not all researchers agree with this so-called "thrifty gene" hypothesis.

As epigeneticist John Speakman wrote in a analysis , one issue with the hypothesis is that not everybody in modern society is fat:. We would all have the thrifty alleles, and in modern society we would all be obese.

Yet clearly we are not. If famine provided a strong selective force for the spread of thrifty alleles, it is pertinent to ask how so many people managed to avoid inheriting these alleles. And, Rosenbaum added, "The evolution of our genetic predisposition to store fat is quite complex.

It involves a frequently changing environment, interactions of specific genes with that environment, and even interactions between genes.

Researchers are also trying to better understand metabolic syndrome — the name given to a set of conditions including increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, a large waistline, and abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels.

This is something we humans are familiar with from everyday life. We humans are more sedentary less active than the typical animal, so we have an average daily metabolic rate of only about 1.

On the other hand, if an animal eats more food than it needs to replace the energy it uses, there will be leftover chemical energy that is stored by the body as glycogen or fat. This is the basis of weight loss and weight gain in humans as well as other animals.

Torpor, hibernation, and estivation. Torpor may be used over long periods. For instance, some animals go into hibernation , a state in which they slow their metabolism and maintain a reduced body temperature during the winter. The photograph below shows a Norway bat in its winter hibernation.

A photo of a bat curled into a ball with its eyes closed. Image credit: Eptesicus nilssonii hibernating , by Magne Flåten, CC BY-SA 4. Different animals have different hibernation patterns. Some animals enter an extended period of torpor during the summer months, when there are high temperatures and little water.

In this case, the extended torpor is called estivation. The snails in the photo below climb to the tops of fence posts to estivate. A photo of several fence posts in a field of dry grass.

Each fence post has several dozen large white snails attached to the top. Image credit: Kadina snails climb fence , by Vladimir Menkov, CC BY-SA 4. Torpor can also last for short periods.

Daily torpor can be sporadic, in response to unfavorable conditions, or can repeat in a predictable pattern. For instance, some small endotherms such as dormice reduce the amount of energy they need and thus, food they must consume by entering torpor during the part of the day that is coldest, when they would otherwise need to use a lot of energy to produce metabolic heat and maintain body temperature.

Want to join the conversation? Log in. Sort by: Top Voted. Posted 6 years ago. Why do endothermic like humans need more oxygen? Downvote Button navigates to signup page. Flag Button navigates to signup page. Show preview Show formatting options Post answer. Endotherm's need to perform cellular respiration to maintain a constant internal body temperature.

Oxygen and glucose are the reactants of cellular respiration, while the products are ATP, H20 and CO2. by endotherms--Since endotherms rely on cellular respiration to maintain body temp. Ectotherms, on the other hand, release the heat from cellular respiration into the environment.

Hope this helps! Comment Button navigates to signup page. Posted 5 years ago. I don't understand what metabolic heat is itself? Betty :. Posted 4 years ago. anika rymarz. hibernation and estivation are dictated by changes in temperature and day light in an animal's environment.

How recent changes in world's temperature would affect those processes? For examples, will it affect an organism in any way needing to stay hibernated for longer period of time than normally? Ivana - Science trainee. Recent changes in the world's temperatures won't change it much.

Do you allude to global warming and increased annual average temperature? However, it does have greater impacts and implications but that is a question of Ecology. You ask about hibernation, so you mean if the temperature is lower than expected for example on the Northern hemisphere, in May is still cold and under the snow.

Yes, I think it would affect the animal since animals also rely on the external temperature. The problem is once a bear is awake and hungry but cannot keep hunting in the spring since there is still snowball. When is the basal metabolic rate the highest in an adult? Posted 3 years ago.

When you asked "which has a higher basal metabolic rate: an elephant or mouse? Need to make an appointment with a Piedmont physician? Save time, book online. Close X.

All Content Living Real Change Physician's Name News. Back to Living Real Change Sign up to receive the Living Real Change Newsletter. Sign up to receive the Living Real Change Newsletter First Name Last Name Email Address Birthdate.

Zip Code. Alrutz shares these five tips to boost your metabolism: 1. Related Stories. How trans fat affects brain function. How to manage pain at home. How much water is enough water? Some people are just lucky. They inherited genes that promote a faster metabolism and can eat more than others without gaining weight.

Others are not so lucky and end up with a slow metabolism. One way to think about metabolism is to view your body as a car engine that is always running. When you're sitting still or sleeping, you're engine is idling like a car at a stop light.

A certain amount of energy is being burned just to keep the engine running. Of course, for humans, the fuel source is not gasoline. It's the calories found in foods we eat and beverages we drink — energy that may be used right away or stored especially in the form of fat for use later.

How fast your body's "engine" runs on average, over time, determines how many calories you burn. If your metabolism is "high" or fast , you will burn more calories at rest and during activity. A high metabolism means you'll need to take in more calories to maintain your weight. That's one reason why some people can eat more than others without gaining weight.

A person with a "low" or slow metabolism will burn fewer calories at rest and during activity and therefore has to eat less to avoid becoming overweight. Lean people tend to be more active during everyday activities than people who are overweight.

They may "fidget" more — that is, they tend to be in motion even when engaged in non-exercise activities. Whether this tendency to move more or less is genetically programmed or learned remains uncertain. But it can add or subtract hundreds of calories each day.

Obese people expend more calories, on average, than lean people during most activities, in part because it takes more effort to move around.