Your body’s metabolism is just like the furnace you use to heat your home. You feel the furnace with oil or fuel and it burns that fuel to create heat and energy. Your body uses and burns food to create the energy you need to perform daily tasks and live a full, productive life. Some people have naturally faster metabolisms than others. Exercise and diet also contribute to the speed of your metabolism. There are medications that can help you burn more fat, more efficiently as well. But what if you’re looking for new and different ways to rev up your metabolism, or fat burning furnace, that doesn’t involve medication? Here are 10 ways you can boost your metabolism safely and easily.
1. Strength Train
It’s no secret that exercise boosts your metabolism. The awesome news about exercise and your metabolism is not only does it spike during your workouts but strength training can actually increase your resting metabolic rate. That’s why incorporating strength training into your regime is so important. The more lean muscle mass you have, the more efficiently your body burns and uses food for energy. Your body naturally burns calories, even at rest. But bodies with more lean muscle naturally burn more calories during rest than others. So be sure to incorporate strength training into your exercise routine at least 2 to 3 times per week.
2. Eat Small Meals throughout the Day
When you don’t eat enough, often enough, your body enters what’s known as starvation mode. During starvation mode, when your body isn’t receiving enough nutrients through food, it goes into survival mode. This means that it will actually slow down your metabolism, storing fat for energy. If your body doesn’t know when its next meal will come, it hangs onto your fat stores. To avoid this, you need to feed your body regularly with healthy, nutritious foods. This lets your body know that it’s okay to burn the food for fuel because more is on its way. Ideally, you should eat every 2-3 hours. This includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner with 2 snacks in between. Be sure to keep portion size in mind.
3. Eat the Right Foods
Eating 6 times a day doesn’t mean eating whatever you want. You still need to choose healthy and nutritious foods. This means avoiding foods high in saturated fats and sugars. Filling your plate and belly with things like green leafy vegetables, citrus fruits, and lean protein will not only keep you fuller longer, but might actually help boost your metabolism and shrink your waistline.
Certain foods are said to naturally kick start your metabolism. Things like broccoli, spinach, almonds, eggs, avocados, and whey protein just to name a few. Other ingredients like cinnamon and ketone mineral salts are also said to jump start your body’s fat burning mechanism. Learn more about that here.
4. Reduce Stress
Stress can take a major toll on your body. Not only does it compromise the health of your major organs but it can cause other mental and emotional issues. Did you know that stress can also cause you to gain weight? This can happen for a few different reasons.
First off, stress sometimes causes people to overeat. Emotional eating is a real problem where people seek emotional comfort and pain relief through food. But stress also affects your metabolism and your body’s physical ability to burn calories. When you experience stress, your body releases a chemical known as cortisol. Cortisol is linked to increased abdominal fat. To help reduce your body’s production of this chemical, it’s important to keep your stress levels low and incorporate stress relieving activities into your life. These include yoga, meditation, and regularly scheduled vacations and breaks from work.
5. HIIT Workouts
Strength training and building lean muscle is a key component in boosting your metabolism. But cardiovascular workouts that increase your heart rate are equally important. HIIT, or high intensity interval training, workouts are the perfect way to kick start your metabolism and keep it working hours after your workout is done. The more intense your workout is, the longer the rise in metabolic rate you’ll experience. Most gyms offer HIIT workouts or you can incorporate them into your own routine. They are ideal for you if you enjoy running (either outdoors or on a treadmill), alternate short bursts of high-energy, fast-paced sprints with a slow jog. These sort of workouts spike your energy levels that bring the metabolic benefits you’re looking for.
6. Hydrate
What you drink is equally as important as what you eat when it comes to boosting your metabolism. Water is a basic need and component of the human body and your body needs adequate water to help process and burn calories. Once dehydrated, your body’s metabolism will naturally slow down. There’s great debate over how much water a person should drink daily, but a good estimate is 8 glasses of water per day or a total of 64 ounces. Did you know that dehydration is often mistaken for hunger? The next time you find yourself craving a snack, try drinking a glass of water. Those hunger cues might just be your body’s way of telling you it needs a drink. If you’re still hungry after 15-20 minutes, try a snack that contains water like celery or watermelon.
7. Use Caffeine in Moderation
Caffeine, when used in moderation, can help speed up your metabolism. That’s because caffeine naturally increases the amount of energy your body uses. Most people get their caffeine in coffee, tea, and energy drinks. Energy drinks, especially, contain an ingredient known as taurine, which is an amino acid known to speed up the metabolism. If you’re a coffee drinker, caffeine not only speeds up your metabolism but also boosts your energy, which may help you exercise longer and at a higher-intensity. But it’s important not to rely on these beverages for constant energy or a jump in your metabolic rate. They can cause anxiety, high blood pressure, and insomnia in some people.
If you weren’t blessed with a naturally active metabolism, you might be seeking natural ways to kick start yours and start burning fat. Exercise and a healthy diet combined with reduced stress and proper hydration can all help rev up your metabolism and guarantee that your body burns food efficiently, resulting in increased energy and weight loss.
Article Submitted By Community Writer
