How to Boost Your Metabolism
Life February 28th, 2011Your metabolism is the rate at which your body can burn calories to create heat and Renewable 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.
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February 28th, 2011 at 4:14 AM
I sleep a lot.. from 1 or 2 pm in the night to 11 am in the morning but I still don’t feel refreshed.. maybe the timing of the sleep is important too.. I heard someone say 10 to 6 is the best time to get a sound sleep… Is that right?
February 28th, 2011 at 6:22 PM
Thanks Ajay for your comment, unfortunately there is no easy or right answer for everyone, but you are right, the time to sleep is very important for a good night’s rest. The problem with this is that the ideal time varies from person to person based on your natural internal clock and your alertness patterns and natural tendencies. You need to discover your natural alertness cycle and sleep more according to that then hours or rest. REM plays a HUGE factor as well for a proper sleep and I could go into much more detail on that and may in a future post, as I’m definitely passionate about knowing and mastering sleep patterns. So, for now, I encourage you look into sleep patterns more as they play a big role in the sleep you need for a high metabolism. If you are fighting your natural alert levels you are already at a metabolism deficit, not a good starting point.
March 2nd, 2011 at 2:09 PM
Great post on increasing Metabolism Mike. I have a big problem with not getting enough water. I know I need a lot, but I certainty do not drink enough of it. Anyhow thanks for sharing.
– Robert
March 7th, 2011 at 1:22 PM
Thanks for the great information, Mike. I personally need to work on consuming a whole lot more water. I was doing well with this for a while, but have gotten lax with my water drinking 🙂
March 9th, 2011 at 7:30 AM
Metabolism is really a main factor that essential to keep our body fit.You shared great information here that will help to increase it.I would say sound sleep and good consumption of water also essential for it…
March 11th, 2011 at 10:25 AM
I too am concerned about increasing my metabolism as I get older. A healthy full breakfast seems to help me but I could do even better by adding more sleep. Thanks for the informative post.
March 14th, 2011 at 2:39 PM
Eating a breakfast in the morning in something I struggle with, I tend to use a little bit of extra sleep time, rather than to use the 20 minutes for breakfast time. I keep telling myself too that I want to try to switch to breakfast but its always a hit or miss thing.
Also on the water, thats something I am trying to drink more and more of, and cutting off that soda.
-Jean
March 16th, 2011 at 1:10 PM
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March 19th, 2011 at 7:18 AM
I’m glad you brought up breakfast as it’s skipped by so many people. I actually put more focus on breakfast and plan it out properly more so than lunch or supper. It really sets a tone for the day, both physically and mentally. Sleep is another highly skipped commodity by most, especially in today’s high stress and competition driven work environment everywhere. People don’t realize that sleep is more important than ever but they sleep even less and less work take over valuable sleep time.
March 24th, 2011 at 11:40 PM
If I may just add up water as one of the tips in metabolism boost especially during the morning. You would feel your stomach being awaken in the morning with just a glass of water. 🙂
April 3rd, 2011 at 11:07 PM
I followed your tip with caffeine. I drink coffee everyday and the result is instant. After a few minutes of drinking one you will feel your stomach react to it in a positive way.
April 8th, 2011 at 4:02 AM
i usually take tea several times a day , but i guess coffee is a good idea cosidering my sedentary lifeystyle . what do u say
Sourish
April 12th, 2011 at 3:53 AM
Early to bad,Early rise is very aged line but extremely practical and Regular Exercise is adequate to increase Metabolism.
April 13th, 2011 at 11:42 PM
Doing Regular Excerises in several intervals will boost the metabolism.
June 8th, 2011 at 5:25 AM
I believe focusing on eating is very important -make sure you don’t get distracted reading, watching TV or working in front of a computer while eating. Also, avoid eating in your bed, as this could affect your sleeping habits!
October 13th, 2011 at 9:41 PM
After you are done with your morning rituals, do about 15-20 push ups and about equal number of squats. Make sure you don’t spend much time on it. Ideally, it should not take more than 2-3 minutes. This will increase your metabolic rate further.
February 4th, 2012 at 12:01 AM
sleep is not just how many hours you get, it’s also determined by how old you are
also by a sleep cycle
younger kids and teenagers need about 9 hours of sleep
also, their cycle is about every hour and a half, hitting points of almost consciousness then dropping into a deeper sleep, waking up when the cycles hit near conscious, that person feels more refreshed, hit it at the lowest point, and you feel dead tired, even if you get 10 hours of sleep,
as you get older the quality of sleep decreases, lighter sleep cycles, as in not getting as deep of a sleep
also, as you age you require a bit less sleep, which is where the 6-8 hours, but remember to pay attention to sleep cycles
May 5th, 2014 at 4:30 PM
Love all the tips, I dont eat Breakfast of Lunch and have a small dinner, also when I drink water I feel sick to my stomach, so i always feel hungry. I always knew breakfast was important, but ignored it because im not hungry in the morning. I’ll be switching my meal to breakfast time instead and hopefully drink more water… thank u for the tips 🙂
June 6th, 2014 at 8:22 AM
great tips man , thanks for sharing with us