Steven Petrov
The Paw Print
Boosting one’s metabolism has always been one of the major objectives of those who are trying to lose weight or just get in shape. What a person’s metabolism represents is the speed with which your body burns the calories you intake. While it is a fact that some of the most important determinants of the speed of your metabolism are not under our control, such as genes, age, gender etc., there are numerous ways to significantly impact the way our body burns calories. The reason why we mentioned things like age and gender is because it is scientifically proven that men burn more calories than women and that most people’s metabolism slows down after the age of 40.
The first and most important thing that we can do to help our bodies accelerate the speed with which they burn calories is to gain some lean muscle mass. Even though it may sound contradicting to those who want to lose weight, it is a fact that muscles weigh twice as much as the fat in our bodies. What this means is that you can be heavier than you are now and look so much better. It is not about how much you weigh but rather about what your weight consists of – muscle or fat? The muscles in our body also require more calories in order to be maintained – for every 1lbs of lean muscle our bodies burn around 6 calories a day to support and maintain it, whereas the calories burned for fats are 2 calories for 1lbs of fat.
Aerobic exercises are a great way to temporarily accelerate your metabolism’s speed, during the post-workout hours. These exercises will not help you build muscle mass and will not help you increase your overall metabolism speed but will help you burn a lot of calories during and after the workout.
Drinking water is essential for almost any single physical process within our bodies. In order to absorb the calories our bodies need water. Even the slowest signs of dehydration will result in the slowing of the speed of burning calories. A study shows that people who drink 8 or more glasses of water a day burn much more calories than those who drink 4 glasses a day or less.
Eating smaller portions more frequently. Yes, eating more can result in burning more calories, but the secret is in the nature of the food as well as the frequency of intake. For example, when we eat in larger portions a couple of times a day we slow down our metabolism and burn less calories. When we eat in smaller portions every 3-4 hours we keep the levels of burning calories higher throughout the day.
Eating more protein will also boost our metabolism. The reason is because our body burns a lot more calories while absorbing proteins, rather than carbohydrates or fats. The most common sources of protein are beef, turkey, fish, white chicken meat, nuts, eggs and low calories dairy products.
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