Increase Metabolism
Increase metabolism and you accelerate weight loss.
Your metabolism is basically all of the chemical reactions occuring inside your body. It is divided into three primary areas.
Vital body processes like building new tissue
Physical activity
Food digestion
Your metabolic rate is the number of calories you burn every day so this is what you need to change in order to increase weight loss.
Digestion and physical activity both directly increase your metabolic rate but it doesn't last very long. You need to develop habitual behaviour to increases metabolism, long term. The following is a list of the main ways you can do this.
9 Principle Ways to Increase Metabolism
1. Regular exercise, spread out over the day, but with a morning session to jump start your metabolism. Combine aerobic and high impact exercise
Aerobic exercise is useful as the metabolic increase lasts for 4-8 hours after you have finished exercising.
More intense, high impact work outs like weight or resistance training do not have the same effect but they do increase muscle mass and burn fat. Muscle tissue uses more energy and contributes more to long term metabolic increases.
2. Eat smaller more frequent meals. It keeps digestive metabolic activity even and efficient.
3. Cook with spices especially hot chillis.
4. Turn down the central heating and let your body warm itself.
5. Eat a good energy filled breakfast as you need instant energy after a nights sleep. You need to keep your overall metabolic activity fairly even so that it is efficient. Cells appear to operate at different levels depending upon how much nutrition is available.
6. Avoid any refined sugars and carbohydrates as they make your metabolic requirements yo-yo up and down.
7. Do not go on a low fat diet as this suppresses certain hormone activity which in turn lowers your long term metabolic rate. In fact, do not go on any sort of diet as your body will cannibalize muscle for energy when it does not get enough from normal digestion.
8. Learn to control stress. Stress is entirely internally generated. A psychological response to stress is to lower metabolic activity. In extreme cases people can collapse from exhaustion due solely to stress.
9. Keep well hydrated. It won't directly increase metabolism but insufficient fluid will slow it down. It is a bit controversial as to exactly how much water has any effect but aim for at least 1.5 litres of natural water a day.
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