Why can some girls eat as much as they like and never gain a gram while others just have to look at a chocolate cake and their jeans get tighter?
The rate at which our bodies use energy is our metabolism – and some are naturally blessed with faster ones.
The market place is full of pills, potions and foods claiming to boost your metabolism. Here’s what actually works...
1: Toning up
Muscle burns energy – even when it’s doing nothing! So doing some resistance exercise to add muscle mass not only burns energy during the exercise session, your newly toned muscles will be burning energy all day long. Studies have estimated that for half kg of muscle that you add to your body, you burn an additional 35 to 50 calories per day – that’s an extra 350 calories a week.
2: Cardiovascular exercise
Cardiovascular exercise such as jogging, cycling and swimming takes a lot of energy. Not only does it boost your metabolism during exercise, it also keeps it elevated for a period afterwards. This is because cardio workouts cause muscles to burn calories at a higher rate through promoting an increase in enzymes that make your muscles more metabolically active. So, if you exercise in the morning, your metabolism will remain higher throughout the day.
3: Eat!
Skipping meals and dramatically cutting back on what you eat will slow down your metabolism. Our bodies haven’t evolved with the times in terms of today’s food abundance. If we skip
meals and don’t eat enough, our bodies will think that there is no food around and slow down in order to conserve energy and hold onto the body fat we have.
So make sure you don’t skip meals and never resort to dramatically reducing food intake /starving yourself to lose weight – not only is it unhealthy, you’ll slow your metabolism and you’ll end up gaining more weight back.
As you can see – there are no magic ways to boost your metabolism. While things like green tea and caffeine may have a slight affect on boosting metabolism, the three above are what will make the biggest difference for you.
So move more, eat regularly and do some resistance exercise and you’ll be giving your body just what it needs to have an optimal metabolism.
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