Boost your metabolism

People are always looking for ways that they can boost their metabolism…why you ask? Well, if you raise your metabolism, your body can burn fat more efficiently. Metabolism has to do with how efficiently your body burns fuel (food), and it’s related to various enzymes and hormones in your body and how they work together, yada yada yada. So how can you boost your metabolism so that you can burn off some of that excess fat? Here’s some tips that I’ve compiled…

  1. Try Lifting Weights: Building muscle helps to speed up your metabolism. Every pound of muscle in our body burns about 35 calories per day, while every pound of fat burns just 2 calories – big difference! While aerobic exercise burns more calories right away, weight training will burn more calories in the long run.
  2. Eat Snacks: Before you go and grab a carton of ice cream and pack of oreos, by “snack” I mean healthy snack. Eating actually helps keep your metabolism in high gear, and it can also help you to eat less during breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Eating less can have the opposite effect and greatly slow down your metabolism.
  3. Eat High Protein Foods: Foods with lots of protein – such chicken, steak, fish, eggs, or nuts – take longer for your body to digest, and thus burns more calories and keeps your metabolism up.
  4. Drink Lots of Water: Your body can’t process calories properly without water, so drink plenty of it! It will help to keep your metabolism high while giving you plenty of other positive health benefits at the same time.
  5. Drink it on the Rocks: Drinking ice cold beverages rather than cold or room temperature drinks, makes your body work slightly harder to warm it up. This process burns more calories and helps to keep your metabolism higher – this slight change can burn about 1 pound of fat per year without diet or exercise!
  6. Drink Black Coffee: Coffee has been shown to boost metabolism rates for up to 4 hours, among plenty of other positive health benefits, which can be a great calorie burner. Just don’t drink it with cream or sugar, because you may end up taking in more calories than you would actually burn.
  7. Drink Green Tea: Much like coffee, green tea helps your body burn calories more efficiently. Drinking 2-4 cups of green tea per day has been shown to burn up to 50 calories per day, or about 5 pounds of fat per year!
  8. Stay Active Everyday!: Maybe one of the best ways to boost your metabolism is to be active everyday. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to run 5 miles per day, but you should do something like take a walk, ride your bike, clean the house, jog or run on the treadmill, etc…
  9. Avoid Stress at all Costs: This one is tough, because for most people stress is unavoidable, but there are ways to reduce stress (exercise, meditation, breathing exercises, etc…). Stress causes your body to release the chemical cortisol, which lowers your metabolism. So whatever’s stressing you out, fix it!!
  10. Get Plenty of Sleep Sleep has many positive health benefits including helping to keep your metabolism high. Studies have shown that people who don’t get at least 7-8 hours of sleep per night are prone to weight gain. And furthermore, it’s the last couple of hours of sleep each night that your body does most of its muscle building, and as we’ve already learned, muscle helps to boost metabolism.

Photo: ehow

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