Your metabolism plays a large part of how many calories you burn each day, and how easy or hard you find it to lose weight, or keep it off.
In this blog post I’m going to show you 4 different ways that you can boost your metabolism.
Using this advice will help you to not only burn lots of calories through your exercise, but also burn EXTRA calories throughout every single hour of every single day.
The problem a lot of people have is that they “Go on a diet” and don’t do quality exercise which means that their metabolism slows right down. That’s why many people try to maintain a low calorie and restrictive diet, yet still struggle to lose any weight. They have a metabolism that goes along at a snail’s pace.
With this in mind here are 4 things you can do that will speed up your metabolism and make it easier for you to lose weight.
1. Have regular meals
The longer your body goes without food the more your metabolism will slow. Your body starts to conserve energy because it doesn’t know where the next meal is coming from.
That’s why a regular intake of food will keep your metabolism at a consistently higher level which results in more calories being burned.
The key is to avoid eating more than normal while trying to eat more frequently. The best way to do this is rather than having three large meals during the day, you could consume three smaller meals plus 2 or 3 snacks in between.
This means you’ll still consume the same number of calories overall but you’ll burn more calories due to having a higher metabolism.
2. Don’t skip breakfast
The reasoning behind not skipping breakfast is the same as why you should have regular meals explained above.
If you skip breakfast you will be going for a long period without food, maybe 12 hours or more. So your metabolism will be much slower than what it could be which makes it harder to lose weight because you burn fewer calories.
The other thing about having breakfast is that it helps you avoid over eating later in the day because you’re not craving lots more food, or unhealthy food, as the day goes on. It may seem counter-intuitive but studies have proven that people who skip breakfast actually consume more calories during the day than people who eat breakfast.
3. Perform regular exercise
Every single time you exercise, your metabolism is boosted. With regular exercise you not only burn more calories from the exercise itself but also from having a consistently higher metabolism.
This is why it’s better to split your exercise into more frequent sessions rather than one or two sessions.
For example, 3 exercise sessions of 40 minutes will burn more calories than one exercise session of 2 hours. It’s the same exercise time overall but the more frequent exercise burns more calories because you have a higher metabolism. It’s therefore beneficial to exercise more days each week rather than making sessions too long.
The other benefit of exercising more frequently is that you can put more into the sessions and so your fitness increases quicker. This also helps you lose weight quicker because you can do higher quality sessions.
4. Use exercises that use a lot of muscle
The more muscle mass you use when doing an exercise the more calories you’re able to burn both during the exercise, and after the exercise as your body tries to recover.
The great news for everyone doing my exercise classes is that your circuit classes work your whole body and your running classes use around 60% of your total muscle mass due to some of the largest muscles being in your legs.
Also, after your classes your metabolism will be higher than with other exercise because using lots of muscle mass means that your body needs to burn more calories in order to recover. This after burn can last for many hours.
In addition to this, your body will maintain more muscle as your muscles repair, while losing weight from fat. This has the extra bonus of keeping your metabolism higher because muscle burns more calories than fat.
To summarise
As you can see there are several ways, both in terms of diet and exercise, where you can boost your metabolism.
By using this advice you will find it easier to lose weight because you’ll simply be burning more calories all day long, even while you’re at rest. This includes burning more calories even while you’re asleep. It doesn’t get much better than that!
James Porter