We have all heard it or even said it before: "I'm not able to lose weight because of my metabolism." It is easy to blame our extra pounds on an abstract idea like metabolism, but let's examine the real importance of metabolism - and better yet, how to get the most "burn" for your buck by recharging your metabolism.

In the most fundamental sense, metabolism includes each of the chemical and physical changes that take place inside the body's cells. Most often, however, metabolism refers to the process in which the body acquires and uses energy from what we eat, so it really does play an important part in weight loss and gain.

Not everyone has the same metabolism, and our rates actually vary during our lives, so someone who blames their metabolism isn't necessarily making excuses. Age affects metabolism, which will slow about 5% every 10 years after age 40, and by sex, as males usually burn more calories at rest than females, and by the quantity of muscle mass you have (more muscle generally means a higher rate of metabolism). Family history also impacts metabolism, not to mention pregnancy, as well as whether a woman chooses to breast-feed.

Despite all of the wild cards, the fact is that if your calorie intake surpasses your metabolism, excess energy will get housed in the body as fat. Though many of the issues affecting metabolic rate cannot be changed, fortunately, there are ways to rev up the metabolism you're born with.

The first rule is to eat the correct foods in the right quantities. When you skip a meal, your body switches to starvation mode, which slows metabolism to keep calories, because it doesn't know when it will get to eat again. And when the metabolism slows, so does your weight loss.

When you finally do eat food after skipping a meal, instead of using the calories in the food you've just eaten, your body converts them to body fat to keep for the next "fast." To keep your metabolism efficient, eat 4 - 6 smaller meals spread evenly throughout the day and aim to eat close to the same times every day. Most importantly, never skip a meal.

You can also step up your metabolic rate with exercise, including both aerobic workouts and weight training. Aerobic activities, such as running, biking and dancing, use more calories in the short term, while weight training will create more muscle, which boosts metabolism and burns more calories in the long term - even when you're at rest, muscle requires more calories to function than fat.

In fact, every pound of muscle requires 35 calories a day, while every pound of fat requires just 2 calories per day. Despite this, you might be surprised that the more weight you posses, the faster your metabolism is likely to run. Simply put, the extra weight forces your body work more to maintain its processes.

This is partially why it is almost always easiest to lose weight when you start dieting, and becomes harder as you go along because, if you are significantly overweight, your metabolism is already at an elevated rate, so that even a minor cutback in calories will lead to an immediate weight loss.

But what happens after that immediate loss, when a plateau occurs and motivation seems to go by the "weigh" side? Persistent compulsions and cravings can quickly return, and when they do, do not neglect a valuable resource - lose weight self-hypnosis. Hypnotherapy can actually retrain your unconscious mind so that, in essence, you can do away with food cravings. When we examine why we snack, identifying why weight loss hypnosis works so well becomes evident.

For a lot of us, snacking has become a habit - perhaps you do it unconsciously when you're watching TV or driving or when you're under stress. Hypnosis can actually reprogram your thoughts to break those associations, leaving you to watch TV or drive without experiencing the need to eat.

One of the most successful lose weight hypnosis techniques for ending the snacking cycle is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, which relies on negotiating with the unconscious mind and making it use the same thought processes that are creating your appetite, to eliminate your appetite. NLP requires many years of study and practical experience for a hypnotherapist to learn and master, but positive results can come very quickly and seem almost magical to someone who has always suffered from cravings.

NLP can be just as imperative as exercise and motivation because, as you read above, it can help ensure that you eat the proper kinds of foods at the right times, and this is a chief ingredient for turbo-charging your metabolism. If you want to keep your metabolism at full speed and ensure that all of hard work and exercise are not going to waste by surrendering to your food temptations, weight loss hypnosis and NLP can be a secret weapon to eliminate your cravings altogether.