Raise your metabolism..

So what is your metabolism?

Well basically, your metabolism, is what determines how many calories your body burns each day. It is affected and controlled by your thyroid, and is largely a factor of your muscle mass. For every 0.5 pound of muscle you add, your body will burn 25 calories per day, just to maintain it, let alone further calories burnt training and further developing the muscle. This equates to 9140 kcals per year, or just over 2.5lbs of fat.

So you can see that gaining and maintaining just 2.5lbs of lean muscle will assist in burning over 13lbs or 1 stone of fat over the next year!
This is through lean muscle gain – add on the cutting out of bad foods, short sharp interval training, and you’ll be dropping fat by the load!

I mentioned in a previous Post the benefits of resistance training and this is just another benefit of resistance training over steady state cardio!


Below are 7 key tips for raising your metabolism:

1) Exercise – it’s a sure-fire way to increase the amount of muscle you have, which in turn will speed up your metabolism. Do a mixture of short, sharp, cardio and resistance training for best results and continued calorie burning effect. High intensity work is more beneficial than slow laboured workouts. Lean muscle gain is the key!

2) Eat little and often – there’s evidence that eating small, regular meals throughout the day, rather than one or two large meals, will help to keep your metabolism high. Aim to eat small every 3 hours. Surprisingly, around 10% of the calories we use each day go on digesting and absorbing food – so the more times you eat, the greater this effect is likely to be.

3) Eat a decent protein and nut breakfast  - as your body has been asleep overnight, it is ready for nutrients to feed and fuel it for the next few hours. What you eat should also rev up your metabolism.

4) Eat plenty of protein-rich foods, preferably with each meal – research shows that around 25% of calories in a protein-rich meal may be burnt off. But make sure you choose low-fat protein foods such as lean meat, skinless chicken, and fish.

5) Spice up meals - spices like chilli are thought to raise metabolism by up to 50% for up to three hours after eating, due to increasing your heart rate. However, I don't really mean an Indian take-away :)  Maybe try chilli’s in your food and spices such as Cinnamon to help speed things up.

6) Swap your daily cup of Barrys for green tea – yep I know..it's yucky..it's an acquired taste but then again so is Guinness but the end result is veeeeery different :) There’s evidence that green tea contains antioxidants that speed up metabolism.

7) Get some kind of exercise in daily - even if its a walk at lunchtime, climbing the stairs at work etc. anything to get the heart rate up and the body working. Off the bum-bum and onto the feet!

Your metabolism is your main fat loss key…keep it high and work it hard!

GO GO GO...