How to Raise Your Metabolism
Making the resolution to raise your metabolism is a great idea. This lifestyle change can help keep weight off for the rest of your life.
As a fitness professional, I find that the greatest mistake people make is to crash diet or lose weight without exercising. This can be disastrous to one’s metabolism.
Taking extreme measures to lose weight leads to self-deprivation and ultimate failure. Self starvation puts the body into survival mode. This leads to a lowered metabolism. The body will react by storing fat and burning off muscle and bone. This is the reason why careless dieting can lead to obesity. Once the metabolism is lowered from starvation, it becomes more and more difficult to burn fat. In my experience, I have found that people with a history of yo-yo dieting burn less calories while at rest than the average person. In order to lose weight, they need to eat less and less. Now their body doesn’t have the nutrition it needs to go about life in a healthy way and this can lead to lowered bone mass, fatigue and many other health problems. So what can we do to raise our metabolism? Why is it that some people seem to eat a lot but still maintain a low percentage of body fat?
Exercise: This is the best way to raise the metabolism. A body that doesn’t move will store it‘s fuel as fat. Studies have shown that people who engage in thirty minutes of cardiovascular exercise three times a week while still continuing to eat the same amount of food through out the day lose an average of fifteen pounds in a year.
Resistance training adds lean muscle and tones the body. It also adds mass that uses up fuel. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn. This makes strength training just as important as aerobics when it comes to burning fat and raising that metabolism.
Exercise stimulates the body to move. It engages every area of the body to work and this helps circulate blood and cleanse the organs. The food you eat gets used and the nutrients you consume get absorbed. A body that doesn’t move is like a pond of murky water. It stays stagnant and eventually becomes toxic . Fat deposits start to form in the arteries and on the flesh. Digestion becomes less efficient and nutrients are not as easily absorbed. Exercise is essential for metabolic health and this spills over into every other aspect of health.
Eat more often: Let me tell you a story about myself. I was always a chubby child and I just accepted it as being a part of my general make up until I was about fourteen years old. One summer I decided to lose weight and become a thin teenager. I tried what most teenagers tried. I exercised until I exhausted myself. I starved myself, although I didn’t think I was hungry. I decided to become an athlete and joined the high school cross country team. I lost a ton of weight. I also stopped menstruating for a season and suffered from excruciating shin splints. But I lost the weight .
Less than three months went by and I gained back the weight it took me six months to take off. I went through this cycle for years. I had a low metabolism due to too much dieting. One day, a personal trainer advised me to eat small meals and snacks two to three hours a day. I took this advice and continued to exercise. I had gained a lot of weight and resolved to take it off. This time, I took a different approach. Because I chose healthy snacks, I lost the same amount of weight without having to starve myself. Furthermore, I didn’t gain the weight back when my schedule got tight and I couldn’t exercise as much. My weight stayed steady for years. Later on I got pregnant and dealt with morning sickness. I realized that if I don’t eat every two hours, I would get nauseous and won’t want to eat. I realized then that I had been hungry in the past. I suffered from migraine headaches and fatigue but I didn’t know it was due to low blood sugar. I ate often throughout my pregnancy and continued to do so afterwards. I didn’t gain any weight until I weaned my son. Due to the changes in my body and lifestyle I gained ten pounds. After that, I went back to the gym and lost the ten pounds I had gained with exercise and eating healthy and often but without starving myself. I have kept the weight off ever since. Looking back at these past ten years of my life as compared to the previous ten years makes me realize how rewarding eating often can be. My weight has been steadier and I’ve enjoyed food more.
Another example is one of my friend who gained weight by starving herself to the point of killing her metabolism. You see this a lot, terribly overweight people who eat hardly anything. The only way she was able to burn the fat was by eating more often and revving her metabolism back up. She lost twenty pounds by eating five times a day through the Jenny Craig program.
Eating often allows the body to burn what it intakes right away. Eating a large meal after starving yourself for six hours does two things. Starving yourself tells the body that there isn’t enough food available and that it must slow down its rate of burning fuel. Your body is in hibernation more and fat is stored. Once you eat again, the body will really want to store that food rather than burn it. Eating a big meal does not guarantee that all of that food will be burned so some of the meal will be stored as fat. Fat is harder to burn once it has been stored. So it is better to eat a small meal, burn it, then eat another small meal and burn it. This keeps the metabolism working smoothly and rapidly. Keep in mind that the body is burning calories as it digests food. This is why some foods are considered to have negative calories. For example, the body burns more calories simply in the act of digesting celery than the amount of calories in celery itself. For this reason, eat as many fiber rich vegetables as possible. You’ll burn calories digesting the calorie less fibers and gain many important nutrients.
If you have to eat a large meal, eat it as soon after you exercise as possible. When you exercise, your metabolism gets revved up. Depending on the intensity of your workout, you can be burning a ton of calories even after your workout is over. If you eat immediately, that food goes right into restoring the amino acids and glycogen your muscles need to recover which will also help pep you up for your next work-out. It is recommended that you eat within an hour after your work-out.
I hope you can use this information as a tool to help you in your lifestyle choices. The top diseases facing America today such as cancer and heart disease can be prevented simply by changing one’s lifestyle. Diet and exercise is the magic pill that everyone looks for. No prescription drug, herb or supplement can out do the power of proper diet and exercise. It fights stress,