10 Ways to Fire Up a Sluggish Metabolism
Anyone wanting to have sustained weight loss should focus on firing up their metabolism. Your metabolism is like the engine of your car. A higher metabolism is like a 6000 cc engine. A sluggish metabolism is like a 1500 cc engine. Obviously, the 6000 cc engine is more powerful and consumes more fuel. In the same manner, an active metabolism will burn more fat and keep you more energized and active throughout the day. A sluggish metabolism can lead to a lot of frustration when trying to lose weight. Read our earlier article on “6 Symptoms of a Sluggish Metabolism” to identify if you do have a sluggish metabolism in the first place.
Here are 7 steps that you could take to fire up your metabolism;
1. Weight Resistance Training – This is the most effective way to fire up your metabolism. Your metabolism is proportional to the amount of muscles you carry. A lot of men and women could have very high metabolisms if they only maintained all the muscles that they had at the age of 21. As people age, they lose a lot of muscles and the metabolism is compromised. Doing weight-bearing exercises is one way to ensure that your body holds on to your precious muscles. This keeps your metabolism firing at a high level.
2. Stop All Forms of Dieting and Starvation Diets – Diets activate your starvation response. When this happens, the body’s metabolism dips. The body will be in this mode so long as there is a shortage of food. This is a result of our internal survival programming. Someone trying to lose weight should not reduce their food consumption by more than 10%.
3. Replace Steady State Cardio with Interval training - Steady state cardio is the jogging and swimming that most people do. This also includes the various cardio machines that are so popular in gyms. These exercises are very effective for enhancing health but are not the greatest time investment if you want to set your metabolism on fire. Setting your metabolism on fire is exactly what interval training does. For more information on how to do intervals, please read “How to Make Jogging Work for Weight Loss”.
4. Always Consume Breakfast - Breakfast brings the body out of fasting. This ensures that the body does not activate its starvation response. When someone skips breakfast, it send a signal to the brain that there is a shortage of food. Why else would someone not eat in the morning? Little does your survival programming know that you are too busy to eat. Your survival mechanism does not know that there is an abundance of food around you and that there is no need to activate the starvation response.
5. Consume 3 Main Meals on Time - Breakfast, lunch and dinner should be consumed at approximately the same time every day within a tolerance of half hour. The body senses erratic eating times as a signal of food shortage. This puts your survival programming at risk of activating the starvation response.
6. Consume Healthy Snacks in Between Main Meals – Snacks between main meals keeps the metabolism revving. Furthermore, a lot of energy is expanded for the digestion of food. Possibilities for snacks include nuts and fruits.
7. Consume Hot Peppers such as Cayenne pepper - Capsaicins are the active ingredient in pepper. Capsaicin increases body temperature which increases metabolism. This is because the body needs to produce more energy to keep the body temperature elevated.
8. Consume Green Tea - Green tea has been shown to boost metabolism. Green tea also has lots of anti-oxidants that have tremendous health benefits.
9. Exercise in the Morning - Morning exercise keeps the metabolism revving for the greater part of the day. Metabolism usually slows down once we go to bed at night.
10. Have at Least 6 to 8 Hours of Sleep - Lack of sleep produces a high level of cortisol hormone which gets in the way of weight loss. Also someone who has a lack of sleep will find it very difficult to rev up his or her metabolism.
Tags: active metabolism, capsaicin, cardio, Cayenne pepper, dieting, exercise, green tea, jogging, lose weight, main meals, skipping breakfast, sleep, sluggish metabolism, starvation diets, swimming, weight loss
