What Happens When Your Metabolism Is High?

German scientist Eduard Buchner first discovered the concept of metabolism in 1897. Although some individuals blame an inability to gain or lose weight on their metabolism, a 2010 study by Swedish scientists, reported in the "Scandinavian Journal of Clinical and Laboratory Investigation," indicates that they're not generally right. Subjects who thought they had high metabolism recorded the same metabolic data as those who thought they had low metabolism. But high metabolism does occur, and it can affect your weight.

What High Metabolism Means

People refer to metabolism as their basal metabolic rate, or BMR. Your BMR represents 60 to 75 percent of your caloric needs each day. These calories go toward things like keeping your heart beating, your lungs breathing, and generating and repairing your body's cells. Your body takes them from the food you eat and converts them to energy to keep your body functioning. If you have high metabolism, your body requires approximately 75 percent or more of your calories daily for this purpose.

Effects of Activity

Before your body can metabolize the calories it needs to maintain itself, you've got to eat and provide it with food. Digestion, called thermogenesis, represents another 10 percent of your caloric needs each day, in addition to your BMR. If you've got high metabolism and your body uses 75 percent of your calories each day at rest, a total of 85 percent of your daily calories goes to the process of chewing, swallowing, digestion and the metabolic breakdown of your digested food. This leaves only about 15 percent to power your body as you move around each day. If you're very active, you can easily burn off 15 percent of your daily calories. Unless you compensate for this, you'll drop weight, because your body is burning more calories than you're giving it.

Effects of Diet

If you've got high metabolism and you don't want to lose weight, you must add enough calories to your diet so your body can digest your food, burn it for energy and keep you moving all without a caloric deficit. If you want to gain weight, you have to add even more calories to your daily diet to create a surplus. You can't do much to change your metabolism, according to MayoClinic.com, but you can accommodate it by giving your body the calories it needs.

Tips

Certain foods take more energy to digest than others and may increase the percentage of calories your body uses each day for thermogenesis. According to research by the Harvard School of Public Health and reported in the "Journal of the American College of Nutrition" in 2004, eating high-protein foods appears to increase thermogenesis, so eating more protein to stock up on calories may cause you to lose weight, not gain.