Your metabolism is the rate at which your body can burn calories to create heat and energy.  Changing your metabolism is most effective over time as it is hard to gauge short term metabolic changes.  Often people say to be me that I’m blessed to have a high metabolism.  I have to say that while I’m certainly grateful to have a high motabolism, I don’t feel blessed with it as metabolism is not strictly a factor of genetics or your heredity.  Your metabolism is something that is shaped over time based on your lifestyle, your habits and activities you engage with in life.  This means that your metabolism is largely a result of your choices and actions, regardless of how easy it is to put the blame elsewhere.  There are certainly many ways to boost your metabolism and they come in groups that I believe are short term and others are long term so I’ve presented them in that way in this article.

Short Term Ways to Boost Your Metabolism

Eat Breakfast

You body automatically reacts to not having food when you wake and will go into a slow metabolic rate for its automatic response to starvation.  This can only be eliminated by eating a decent breakfast every single day.  Studies show eating a bigger breakfast and shifting your calorie intake earlier in the day helps to increase your metabolic burn rate, reduce weight gain and the risk of obesity (published in the American Journal of Epidemiology).

Morning Caffeine

While I can’t stand coffee myself and prefer to avoid it for its negative side effects (particularly vein constriction from the brain), it is found in numerous studies (one published in the journal Physiology and Behavior) that coffee and other caffeinated drinks increase your metabolic rate and stimulate your breathing and heart rate. Its a quick action drug, highly addictive and can boost your metabolism by at about 10 percent.

Strength Training

Muscles burn calories, even while resting.  The more muscle you have the more calories you will burn in any given activity.  So strength training does 2 things, it increases your body’s temperature, which raises your metabolic rate on its own, and it builds muscle which will then increase your metabolic rate since more muscles burn more calories.

Long Term Ways to Boost Your Metabolism

Changing your metabolism is most effective over time as it is hard to gauge short term metabolic changes.  The more you improve or increase your metabolism the more energy you will have, more active you can be and the easier it will be to either loose weight or stay fit with an active lifestyle.  Here are some of the ways to increase your metabolism over a longer time frame.

Eating Habits

Both what you eat and how you eat have a big impact on your metabolism.  There are numerous foods that improve your digestion and boost your metabolism.  Ginger and fruit juices are high in enzymes that improve digestion.  Honey is a great antiseptic and helpful to the digestive system as well.  Lemon helps to cleanse the liver for more efficient fat processing.  Cinnamon helps to metabolize sugars in the body.  These are all great to add to your breakfast menu.  Cayenne is another metabolic rate booster and could easily be added to a drink mix.  Yogurt, nuts with high fatty acids and high energy foods like whole grains and fruits/vegetables are excellent additions to your regular diet.  Avoid processed and refined sugars and replace them with simple carbohydrates.  Spicy foods that increase your temperature (or cause a sweat) are also very good metabolism boosters.

Eat a large healthy breakfast (no, that doesn’t include 6 pieces of fatty bacon each day) and reduce the size of your lunch and dinner portions and replace that with eating small meals or healthy snacks more often throughout the day.  Various supplements can also help to boost metabolism, the simplest being vitamin C which helps to produce carnitine, an amino acid needed to burn fat.  Another nutrient that helps is calcium from dairy products as Calcium helps to increase the rate your body gets rid of fat as waste.

Regular Exercise and Aerobic Workouts

Simple exercise like walking can have a very positive effect on raising your metabolic rate.  The extra muscle activity in large muscles increase your body temperature, burns calories and develops lean muscle to also help burn fat.  Walking is also very good for digestion if done after meals.  Additional exercise and workouts that build muscle continue to raise your metabolism for the next 48-72 hours as muscles recover and then future use of muscles enable higher calorie burn rates.  The old myth of muscles burning a high amount calories even while resting is only true for a short time after training.

Weight training and high effort exercise are anaerobic and tend to burn more carbohydrates than fat during the exercise but they keep the muscles burning fat for several hours afterwards when high oxygen levels are available.  Aerobic exercises maintain higher levels of oxygen during the muscle activity and can be even greater at improving your metabolism.  They have the same after effects but during an aerobic workout, your muscles will still have higher oxygen levels, and since fat requires oxygen to burn completely, aerobic exercise will do more to burn fat directly.  Any good cardio workout is aerobic and will burn more calories during the workout than strength training for the same duration.

Regardless of your choice of exercise, doing it regular will have very positive effects on your metabolism as well.  Elevated heart rate exercise done with high intensity will even make you burn more calories for several hours after the activity.  The more active you are, the more likely your cardiovascular system is to supplying enough oxygen for cells to burn fat for energy.  This is also why an unfit person becomes out of breath so quickly when they engage in a new exercise. Iit quickly becomes anaerobic and the muscles do not get the oxygen they need so they burn carbs instead of fat.

Quality Sleep Habits

Sleep plays an important role in the health of our bodies and it is related to our metabolism directly as well.  Sleep is not all about the amount of time you sleep for as so many people are led to believe.  The real factor is sleep quality, which includes how well you sleep and how consistent your sleep patterns are to ensure a healthy, quality sleep. A quality sleep is when you get and feel well rested and your body has had the REM stage sleep time that it needs.  There are ways to increase your REM stage and get to REM faster and that is what I mean by quality sleep.  The biggest factor in quality sleep is the pattern of sleep that you have.  Your body works with an internal biological clock and each person has natural tendencies for wakefulness.  Following a pattern that is in line with your natural wakefulness and staying very consistent with it will ensure you have a quality sleep pattern.

Your wakefulness is directly tied to metabolism as your body will naturally reduce its metabolic rate as sleep onset approaches and your wakefulness levels decrease.  Therefore any exercising or activities you do to benefit from for boosting your metabolism is best done when you already have high alert levels.  If you are already fighting your biological clock and natural alert levels, it will take much more effort to activate and raise your metabolism.  On the other hand, if you are most active when your alert level is highest as well, you will benefit from already active and easily raised metabolic levels.  Your wakefulness levels and internal clock affect many of these other areas, such as diet as well.  Unfortunately, most people never take the time to learn about their true natural wakefulness and leave themselves fooled by sleep deprivation or habits driven by their social environment to lead them into thinking they understand their sleep needs, when in reality, they do not.  This impacts many things they do and can seriously hinder attempts to boost your metabolism.

Lots of Water

Water is not only a great appetite suppressant but also super at flushing our sodium and toxic from the body.  Often people who do not drink enough water feel hungry as its the body’s signal to want food (and water from those foods) when not properly hydrated.  Cold water also increases your metabolism since your body must do work to heat your core temperature back up and is great for flushing toxins. Water keeps you hydrated and it’s a lubricant for inside the body.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 16 Comments »

I love it when I discover something new about myself or in life that I really connect with or develop a quick passion for.  New things that really interest me often take a strong presence in my mind and Parkour has done exactly that to me in the last couple months.  While Parkour is definitely growing it isn’t known by everyone and so it needs an explanation.  In fact, it can be a bit hard to explain though quickly, so bear with me.  I’ve taken the description from the AmericanParkour website as I think it describes it best:

What is Parkour?

Parkour is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment.

• Parkour requires… consistent, disciplined training with an emphasis on functional strength, physical conditioning, balance, creativity, fluidity, control, precision, spatial awareness, and looking beyond the traditional use of objects.
• Parkour movements typically include… running, jumping, vaulting, climbing, balancing, and quadrupedal movement. Movements from other physical disciplines are often incorporated, but acrobatics or tricking alone do not constitute parkour.
• Parkour training focuses on… safety, longevity, personal responsibility, and self-improvement. It discourages reckless behavior, showing off, and dangerous stunts.
• Parkour practitioners value… community, humility, positive collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and the importance of play in human life, while demonstrating respect for all people, places, and spaces.

Fluid Movement

And there are millions of Parkour and Freerunning videos on Youtube. Many of them show ridiculous stunts, with no context to the training required to achieve them or the risk in jumping in without the proper training and conditioning required. There are if you look for tutorials, training and progression videos though a lot of help for learning these skills as it really has taken speed because of the internet and the ability to share content and inspire one another around the world. One of my favorite videos is below that I think does a great job of sharing a bit more about the thoughts and inspirational aspects of Parkour. I hope you enjoy it.

Posted by Mike King under Personal | 21 Comments »

Well it has been a long time since I’ve published any resources and links so its well overdue for that again.  Some of the articles I’ve really enjoyed reading over the last few months I’ve collected here and few items people have sent me as well I thought worth passing along.

Business and Leadership

• The Manager’s Cheat Sheet: 101 Common-Sense Rules for Leaders
• 25 Inspiring TED talks for leaders and managers
• How to Be You No Matter What – 7 Simple Tips

Personal Development Picks

• Vulnerability – A State of Grace
• Loving The Life You Have, Not The One You Think You Want
• Give It Your All Not For Your Boss But For Your Work Happiness
• A key Ingredient of True Happiness
• Just Be Happy

Guides and Help

• Self Publish Your Book – Sell It On Amazon
• Free Lucid Dreaming Handbook
• Is there Opportunity Outside the Comfort Zone

Excellent Lists

• 60 Ways to Make Life Simple
• A serious list of 100 lists…
• 33 Ways to End Your Day

Posted by Mike King under Life | 11 Comments »

Edward Stern is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on accredited online degrees for the Guide to Online Schools.

Author: The Arbinger Institute

The esteemed Arbinger Institute has done it again with Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box. A book for anyone in a leadership position but particularly those heading up an office or corporate team, the book seeks to make readers better leaders through doing what is truly the right thing—and not making excuses, or deceiving oneself, when what is right is not done.

The messages and morals of the book are told through a story. Tom, a straight-edged, by-the-book company guy who does good work, has just been hired as an executive at the fictional Zagrum Corporation. During his leadership training from two senior executives, Tom is shown how he is in the box without even being aware of it, how to get out of the box, and subsequently how to be a better leader, employee, and person. The box is limiting, and only by knowing how the box encapsulates his being and how to get himself out of it can he grow and stop deceiving himself.

Basically, “the box” confines because of the limited view of the person confined. This person has an inflated self-importance, often due to their status as a leader, and is not personally accountable. The person in the box makes excuses when tasks aren’t carried out completely, when promises are broken, or when team members are left out to dry. These excuses make the person believe they have done the right thing, it’s not their fault, or there was nothing they could have done to change how things turned out. People in the box avoid responsibility and accountability, and lie to themselves that they are doing right when they know, deep down, that they could be doing a lot better.

Rather than just purely about leadership, the book demands introspection and a rejuvenation of the self to get out of the box and to stay out of it. Doing so makes for a better person, which is necessary for one to lead other people and have them follow suit. The book takes a unique approach by identifying one source of where lack-luster leadership stems from and what it is, and how to identify it in other people and oneself.

The book also takes a unique approach by veering into fiction and teaching lessons through a narrative. Leadership and Self-Deception takes an approach equal parts show and tell. Tom is a relatable character, and it is very easy to see parts of oneself (especially less than glowing ones) in him. It makes the introspection happen a little bit easier, and it makes for a more spirited read than other dry self-help books that just tell you what to do in a dense non-fiction style. Like a really long fable or a philosophical discourse from the great Greek minds, the messages come out the reader regularly but do so through a story and through characters, one we can all identify with and, by the end of the book, strive to be.

Still, it’s this style that also keeps it one star away from a perfect score. The dialogue, and the writing in general, is very simple and can be unintentionally funny in how watered-down and elementary it sometimes is. Great literature this is not. Also, anybody expecting a neat conclusion will have to wait—the senior executives tell Tom there are three steps to getting out of the box and staying out of it, and as the book abruptly ends, he’s only completed the first step. Smart move by the authors to create demand for a sequel or two, but maddening for the reader.

That said, there’s a lot of good stuff in Leadership and Self-Deception and it deserves several readings to grasp its full message. It strives to help the reader become a better leader through first being a better person, and that is noble in and of itself.

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 4 Comments »