A Fit Check metabolic assessment can help you chart the fastest course to success. You’ve heard the advice to “work smarter, not harder” time and again. With a metabolic assessment, you’ll finally have a tool that makes that advice meaningful.

What is Metabolism?

Simply put, metabolism is the body’s way of converting food into energy, and then using that energy to sustain and build the body. It works a lot like the engine of a car. To get up and go, your body needs food, much like a car engine needs fuel. Your body’s engine is your metabolism. When you rev the engine—say, when exercising—you burn more fuel.

Fueling your system is a calories in/calories out proposition. The “calories in” come from food fuels: fats, carbohydrates, proteins. The body uses each of those fuel sources for different purposes, and excess calories are stored in a way that is unique to each fuel source. (Take fat, for instance: The body has seemingly unlimited capacity to store excess fats, and it does so in a decidedly bulky way.)

The “calories out” are burned off through physical activity such as exercise, the digestion of food, and resting metabolism. The amount of calories burned via physical activity is largely up to you: your activity levels and your workout routine.

The process: After we’ve eaten, the body uses oxygen to convert food into energy. The nutrients providing that energy are either used to fuel the body, or they’re stored as fat. The byproduct, or waste, from converting food into energy is carbon dioxide.

Through proper diet, good lifestyle habits, and healthy exercise, we can teach the body to burn fuel with greater efficiency. At its most efficient, the body uses greater amounts of oxygen to convert more of our food into usable fuel (a bonus: the fat burns first!). Less carbon dioxide is produced as waste, and less of our fuel ends up stored as fat (double bonus!!).