Understanding Metabolism
7 Ways to Burn More Calories
Understanding Metabolism can give us the tools to achieve weight loss and maintain a healthy body weight.
We all know that the faster our metabolism the more calories we burn. But how fast your body burns up calories depends on many things such as age, sex and genetics and we clearly have no control over these.
Also some people may have developed certain medical conditions that can also have a negative impact on their metabolic rate.
Understanding Metabolism
Factors that slow down metabolism that we have no control over:
Age: As we get older our metabolism slows down, especially after 40 and plus.
Family DNA: There are many of us that are born into families that didn’t come with skinny DNA, I unfortunately know all about this as I’m one of them. If your parents had to watch their weight, guess what, you probably do too.
Sex: According to multiple studies men burn more calories than women. This is because men have more muscle than women and you burn more calories to maintain muscle as it is an active tissue.
Medical conditions: Ones such as hypothyroidism, diabetes and Prader-Willi Syndrome.
Understanding Metabolism
Factors that increase metabolism that we do have control over:
Here are 7 ways to help you burn more calories.
1. Food has got to be the biggest area that can help us with metabolism as eating nutritious foods accomplish two important things. They help us burn more calories than junk foods (especially ones high in antioxidants) and healthy foods help control our daily calorie intake.
2. Exercise can help us burn more calories and the best part is we have full control of what type of exercise and how intense a work out we want to achieve. More intense workouts do burn more calories but if you’re just getting back into the swing of things start off slow. There are lots of exercise choices to choose from that can make it fun no matter which level you are at.
3. As mentioned above more calories are burned to maintain a muscular body so building a little extra muscle will help. You don’t have to pump big iron just pump little ones now and then, it all helps.
4. Drink lots of water or herbal teas to burn extra calories. Lack of hydration can slow down your metabolism. Herbal teas can give you a nice change from constantly drinking water. They come in a plethora of flavors and as long as you don’t add sugar to them they are virtually calorie free.
5. Other beverages that can help are coffee and certain teas such as green, black, white and oolong teas, as they contain caffeine and the teas also provide some antioxidants.
6. Certain spices (the hotter ones) can increase your metabolic rate, so if you enjoy a little extra heat, add some chili peppers to a meal. My favorite is adding a little cayenne pepper to a warm glass of lemon water with a little honey to sweeten the taste (works like a charm).
7. Eating lots of protein also increases metabolism, that’s why protein diets are so popular. Protein diets, such as the Holiday Diet work well but are not recommended for more than 2 weeks at a time. If you choose to take this route try to stick to healthy lean meat choices.
Understanding metabolism just makes it easier to see the opportunities to help burn more calories, easy things like drinking more water.
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Wishing you health and happiness
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