How to Make Your Body Burn More Calories
Weight training builds muscle and muscle is a huge factor in determining your metabolic rate. In fact, studies have shown that regular weight training boosts basal metabolic rate by about 15%. The reason for this is that muscle is “metabolically active”: it burns more calories than other body tissue even when you’re not moving.
o Training with weights just 3 times a week for around 20 minutes is enough to build muscle.
Move more
While the average person burns around 30% of calories through daily activity, many sedentary people only burn around 15%. Remaining aware of this fact – and in turn taking every opportunity to move can make a major difference in the amount of calories you burn.
o Examples:
� Tap your feet
� Swing your legs
� Drum your fingers
� Stand up and stretch
� Move your head from side to side
� Change position
� Wriggle and fidget
� Pace
� Use the upstairs bathroom
� Park in the furthest corner of the parking lot
âÂ?¢ Stand up when you’re on the phone
� Clench and release your muscles
Get aerobic exercise
We all know that aerobic exercise burns calories. What you may not know, however, is that aerobic exercise also causes your metabolism to remain higher than normal for several hours post-exercise. If you can commit to 30 to 60 minutes of aerobic exercise every day your metabolism will skyrocket.
Don’t forget that your metabolic rate is directly related to the intensity of the exercise you perform. Walking will burn calories while you’re doing it and give your metabolism a small boost for a little while afterwards, but it doesn’t compare to high-intensity interval training. That type of training can boost your metabolism for a full 24 hours afterwards.
Drink green tea
Green tea appears to boost metabolism. That was the conclusion of a Swiss trial study conducted on 10 men in which drinking four or five cups of green tea a day was shown to burn an extra 60 calories. That’s the same number of calories you burn in about 6 minutes of jogging. Further, green tea seems to increase metabolism slightly more than the equivalent amount of caffeine. Try replacing your Starbucks with green tea for an even more dramatic effect.
Drink coffee
Caffeine speeds up your heart rate. Simply put, the faster your heart rate, the more calories you burn.
Eat high fiber foods
Foods with a high fiber content provide a boost to your thermic metabolism. By taking longer to digest, beans, fruit, veggies and whole grains help burn more calories.
Eat spicy food
There is evidence that spices, especially chili, can raise the metabolic rate by up to 50% for up to 3 hours after you’ve eaten a spicy meal. And nothing cures a sore throat like a glass of water with a teaspoon of Tabasco sauce.
Eat more protein
Protein requires the most energy of the major nutrients (the other two being carbohydrates and fat) to digest. This makes high protein foods the least likely to be stored as fat.
Eat little, often and enough
Our bodies were designed with the survival mechanism of hoarding fat to protect us from famine. Long waits between meals invoke this response. On the other side of the coin, when you eat, your metabolism ramps up in order to process the food. You’ll achieve an even greater metabolic boost by cutting calories AND spreading those calories out over the day.
Take a multi-vitamin
Your metabolic rate basically boils down to chemical reactions in the body. Vitamins, minerals and water are important parts of these chemical reactions. If you don’t have enough of these components available for your body to use when it needs them, your body will have to limit itself to what you’ve got.
