Raise Your Metabolism

There is a lot of talk in the media and in the commercial sphere about the desirability of “raising your metabolism”. 

• Raising your metabolism means increasing the rate at which your body consumes energy, or “burns calories”, at rest.
• The more calories your body burns at rest, the more calories you can consume in food without gaining weight,
• The more calories your body burns at rest, the less you have to reduce your calorie intake to lose weight.

What can you do to raise your metabolism?  Here are three things:

Eat Plenty of Protein

Believe it or not, your body has to burn calories to digest and absorb food calories, and it so happens that protein costs twice as many calories as carbohydrate and three times as many calories as fat to digest and absorb.  This means that when you eat a high-protein diet (aim for 30% of total calories), more of the calories you eat are turned into body heat instead of body fat.

Recent Study Shows “thermic effect” of High-Protein Diet

This was shown in a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona.  A group of young, healthy women were fed two sets of diets.  The first diet was high in protein and the second was high in carbohydrate, while both were low in fat.  The “thermic effect” of the high-protein diet was found to be 100% greater than that of the high-carbohydrate diet.

Raise Your Exercise Intensity

When you exercise, your metabolism remains elevated for a while after the workout.  Between 6% and 15% of the total calories burned through exercise are actually burned after your stop moving.  The higher the intensity of your exercise, the more calories you burn after completing it.

A recent study from the University of New South Wales, Australia, found that women lost an average of 10.5% of their fat mass after 15 weeks on a three-times-a-week program of 20-minute workouts consisting of 8-second stationary bike sprints followed by 12-second passive recoveries.  Subjects in a control group that performed traditional endurance workouts lost considerably less fat over the same period despite spending roughly 400% more time pedaling.

So instead of doing slow-and-steady cardio workouts, do short, high-intensity interval workouts and burn more calories at rest.

Supplement Smartly

There are many dietary supplements that are purported to increase fat burning at rest.  Most of them don’t work.  But some do - check out EnergyFirst’s (Ephedra Free) Leanergy.  Leanergy’s active ingredients, including garcinia cambogia, green tea extract and citrus aurantium, are scientifically proven to elevate resting metabolism.

The most effective ways achieve and maintain a healthy body weight are burning calories through exercise and controlling the number of calories you eat.  But raising you resting metabolism will certainly help, and the best ways to do that are to eat plenty of protein, raise your exercise intensity, and supplement smartly.