How to boost your metabolism
Understanding how your metabolism works is the key to how you can get your body to help you lose weight. Without using a lot of medical and scientific language, your metabolism is a complete series of chemical reactions within your body that both convert the foods that you eat into energy and, based on the foods that you have eaten, will establish the calorie burning rate. The food-to-energy conversion rate of your metabolism is what determines whether you are able to maintain, gain, or lose weight.
Your personal metabolism is an individual BMR, basal metabolic rate, which governs your resting rate of energy used in order to maintain all of your essential body systems, including your body temperature, your heart-rate, your brain, your skeletal structure, and your breathing. Your BMR is mostly determined, and greatly influenced, by genetics. So, if you have a metabolic rate that is not supporting your weight loss goals, there are a few ways to boost your metabolism level.
4 ways to boost your metabolism
- Always start your day with breakfast. While you are sleeping, your body goes into hibernation mode and slows down to preserve the nutrients already in your body. Skipping breakfast continues this preservation of energy. Eating breakfast restarts, or boosts, your metabolism for the day ahead.
- Eat some protein with every meal. Since your body works harder to convert protein into energy, it will burn more calories during the process. But, don’t overdo it. What your body is not able to convert into energy, it will store as fat. And stored fat packs on the pounds.
- Don’t skip meals. Not eating at regular intervals will signal your metabolism to slow down and conserve energy. Today, dieticians recommend that we refuel our bodies every 4 to 5 hours throughout the day. This means eating more often, but in smaller, more nutritious portions. When your daily schedule does not allow you to take the time to prepare one or more of your meals, nutritional meal replacements are an ideal way to keep your internal furnace going strong.
- Exercising is a great way to boost your metabolism. The best time of the day for exercising is the morning. Exercising raises your metabolism rate by about 10 percent for several hours. Concentrate on building your muscle tone by lifting weights a few times a week. Because muscles are the basic conversion source for fat burning, the more muscle mass you have, the more calories will be burned throughout the day. The wonderful thing about muscle tone is that it weighs twice as much as fat, but only take up about 20 percent of the space as stored fat. The take away from this metabolism boosting tip is that even while you are gaining muscle tone, it will eliminate 80 percent of the previously stored fat while giving you a leaner more beautiful body image.
You do not have to live with a slow metabolism when you can boost your metabolism with just a few easy everyday changes. The only down side to revving up your metabolism, if there can be a down side, is the need to buy new clothes for your slimmer, toner, healthier body. I know; this is the down side that we all want to experience. Boost it up and love the body that you’ll gain.
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