What is metabolism?
The relationship between your metabolism and your body is just like the connection between your car and its engine—they are useless without each other. Your metabolism is basically a process your body uses to convert all the foods you eat into pure energy.
Like an engine, your metabolic rate, a.k.a. calorie expenditure also contains several components: basal metabolic rate, known as BMR, resting metabolic rate, or RMR, the thermic effect of food, or TEF, thermic effect of exercise (TEE), and non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT).
- Basal metabolic rate keeps your body alive during sleep; it represents the minimum number of calories your body requires just to wake up every single day.
- Resting metabolic rate is basically the number of calories needed in order to survive while resting.
- Thermic effect of food represents the number of calories your body burns while processing the food you eat.
- Thermic effect of exercise is the number of calories consumed during exercise (as the name suggests).
- Non-exercise activity thermogenesis translates to the number of calories needed for non-exercise activities such as standing.
