You thought that getting a good night’s rest was just to avoid getting those matching bags under your eyes, didn’t you? Well, think again. Research has shown that if you get enough sleep at night, up to eight hours or more (if you need more) it will keep you from gaining weight.
People who do not get enough rest are more prone to gaining weight. So get some rest. You will be less stressed, and also, since you will be awake fewer hours, those are fewer chances to eat anything you shouldn’t. We’ve ALL done it, had something to eat as a pick me up, or reward, when we weren’t even hungry, or we were chewing just to stay awake.
While you’re resting, you’re avoiding stress. Stress is known to increase your chances of gaining weight. Stress releases a steroid called cortisol which depresses your metabolism, thereby encouraging your little soldiers to conserve calories as fat. Avoid stress at all costs, and you will be able to keep your cortisol levels in check, and avoid that stubborn belly fat that seems so hard to get rid of.
As for being awake so many hours, if you must eat, then as we suggested in a previous article on your metabolism, it is best to eat 6 small, sensible meals throughout the day. So for example, if you are allowing yourself 1500 calories a day, each of your main meals could be 400 calories, with 3 100 calorie snacks. Or, 3 meals at 300 calories each, and 3 meals at 200.
Remember that it takes 3,500 calories burned to take off one pound, but if you are watching what you eat and also working with your metabolism to make it run at peak efficiency, you will see your body turn into a lean, mean, fat burning machine.
In the battle of the bulge and the fight against fat, boosting your metabolism is one of the best weapons you can have in your arsenal.
Increasing your metabolism means not starving yourself. It means getting out there and putting on some lean muscle mass, eating small meals throughout the day to keep your blood sugar level and it even means avoiding stress and getting a decent night’s sleep.
Getting your internal fire burning will help you lose weight and feel better about yourself, and help you not only lose the weight you want, but keep it off too.
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Archive for Metabolism
Sleeping to Boost Your Metabolism
Chill Out and Heat Up to Boost Your Metabolism
Do you enjoy a nice long soak in a tub full of water hot enough to blister your skin? Who doesn’t? How about spending time in a steamy sauna with sweat pouring off your body?
Maybe you like turning your thermostat down in the winter till it’s so cold you can see your breath in the house when you talk?
If these activities appeal to you, then slap yourself on the back (yes that will burn calories too) because heating yourself up and chilling yourself down have been shown to boost your metabolism by about twenty percent.
Speaking of heat, add a bit of spice to your life and your food. Studies have shown that eating spicy foods, those with cayenne pepper, or jalapeños or chili peppers will give a boost to your metabolism as well. So will Indian foods, though better to prepare it yourself, since there can be a lot of butter and carbs in some of the dishes.
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Start Eating Properly to Boost Your Metabolism Part 2
But of course, the suggestion to eat six times a day to boost your metabolism assumes that you are eating a sensible diet, a big assumption to make in this day and age when we are surrounded by convenience foods.
So when we say small smeals frequently. this does not mean you can go out and have a Mcbreakfast meal in the morning, a steak and fries two hours later, five Twinkies and a ho-ho next, then tacos with sour cream and guacamole for your next meal, BBQ ribs with mashed potatoes for your fifth meal and a trip to that all-you-can-stuff-into-yourself-buffet at the mall for your sixth and final meal of the day.
Sure, you might be boosting your metabolism a bit, but you’re overcompensating with too many calories and losing the Battle of the Bulge in a BIG way. Your soldiers will be so over-run with calories that they will be forced to store them as fat.
Break down your meals into six smaller and HEALTHIER meals during the day. Lower your caloric intake in a healthy manner, and your little soldiers will not only win the battle, you’ve given them the right weapons to win the entire war.
Also, avoid white in your diet. Simple sugars, rice and refined flour are all absorbed quickly by your body and are turned into fat stores. Eat more complex carbohydrates, such as those found in wholemeal bread and grains. They take a longer time to be absorbed into your body and this enables your blood sugar to remain level. Try eating brown rice instead of white rice, whole grains in your breads and pasta made from wheat flour instead of white refined flours.
Avoid caffeine and drink green tea instead. Caffeine is known to block absorption of vitamin C, create unhealthy acid in your system and stimulate sugar cravings. If there’s one thing you don’t need when you’re trying to lose weight, it is sugar cravings. Green tea has antioxidants also, and doesn’t tend to have all those nasty side effects that caffeine can give you, though it does have some.
Drink at least 8 glasses of water a day. While recent studies have not proved its benefits conclusively, it does help you feel full if nothing else. Water also flushes out all the toxins that are set free when you’re losing weight. If you are dehydrated, your metabolism slows down.
Try drinking very cold water too, when you’re drinking water. Your body has to remain at a constant temperature, and needs to burn calories to do so. Cold water will boost your metabolism a bit each time it has to warm up after your glass of ice water.
Start Eating Properly to Boost Your Metabolism Part 1
This may seem like an odd piece of advice considering your goal is to lose weight.
But the fact is, you have to eat in order to keep your metabolism running in an optimal manner. Are you skipping breakfast in order to cut back on calories and lose weight? Bad battle plan, soldier.
Let’s work out a better plan of attack together, and we can show you just why you need to eat, when you should eat, and what you should eat.
Remember that not eating sends your body into survival mode, right? It believes you are starving and so slows down your metabolism in order to conserve its stores.
So let’s say you’ve been asleep for 8 hours. You didn’t have anything to eat for two to three or more hours before you went to bed last night. Now your body has been without food for about 11 or 12 hours.
If you skip breakfast, you’re adding more time to the starvation mode, and your body is starting to whimper and wonder where its fuel is, and if it’s ever going to get fed again. It will wonder if it should start conserving stores because starvation is just around the corner?
You’ve got your whole metabolism all in an uproar, and that’s NOT a good thing.
Now, what happens if you go to bed, get up and eat a healthy breakfast? You have, in essence, broken your fast. You’ve been fasting for ten or more hours, and now it’s over. Your little soldiers can relax and get back to their normal duty, which is burning calories instead of storing them.
So to keep your metabolism purring along at a good rate, eat small meals and eat them often during the day. Research has shown that breaking down the traditional three meals a day into six smaller meals, spaced evenly throughout the day, will result in a boost to your metabolism.
Move Your Body, Boost Your Metabolism
Yes, it’s true. If you want to boost your metabolism, the very best thing you can do is to start moving your body. Some exercise is good for building muscle, while other exercise is good for just plain sweating and giving you a good cardio workout.
While aerobic exercises like running, jogging, playing tennis or riding a bike will help you tone your body and maintain your weight, they don’t do a whole lot to increase your muscle mass-which is what you need to do in order to really boost your metabolism.
Weight training and strength training help build muscle, and this is a good thing. Think of your body in terms of an army. Too much fat means too many soldiers are weak and wounded, not able to carry on the fight.
Body: “Sir! Our numbers have been depleted! We’re not efficiently fighting the incoming calories, I mean missiles!”
Metabolism: “Recruit new soldiers, FRESH soldiers! Put them on the front lines and let them take on the calories! I mean missiles!
Body: “Sir, yes Sir! Commence lifting weights NOW!”
As you increase your muscle mass, and decrease your fat stores, your metabolism speeds up. It burns more of what you eat.
Your body will require more calories to maintain itself, so if you increase your soldiers, I mean muscle mass, through weight training and strength training, and consume a lower calorie amount, you will lose weight. Just don’t lower your calories so drastically that it sends your army into survival and hoarding calories and fat mode again.
Boosting your metabolism through exercise is just one way to light up those calorie-burning fires within you.
Diets Damage Metabolism
When we see beautiful models in magazines and svelte actresses in movies, we are tempted to cut down on our eating in order to lose weight and look more like them. We decide to stop eating as much so we can drops some pounds. Less food taken in should mean you’ll lose weight quickly, right?
Not necessarily. Our bodies are very efficient at storing food as fat as a defense against starvation. When you cut your calories, and if you do it drastically enough, your body panics. Think of it in terms of an army and its rations.
Body: “Danger! Danger! There’s not enough food! We’re starving!”
Metabolism: “Cut down on production, we’re going into survival mode! Slow and steady! Emphasis on the slow!”
Body: “Just make sure we have enough fat stores to get through this famine.”
Metabolism: “Aye Aye, Captain!”
Orders have been given and the next thing you know, you have are miserable because you have not only NOT lost weight on your diet, you have rebounded and GAINED. You have also gained any number of unattractive fat stores which get created in order to make sure that your body doesn’t starve.
Think of it as the general of an army, laying in stores for a very long winter. When your body is in survival mode, it takes fewer calories to sustain itself, to maintain its current weight.
Excess calories are stored as fat, and the rations are parceled out to the soldiers reluctantly and very slowly in order to make sure the resources last as long as possible.
Severe restriction of calories is a sure fire way to cause your metabolism to slow down to a crawl. So if you’ve been crash dieting for years without exercising, then your metabolism most likely has been affected.
Dieting like this burns muscle, and the less muscle mass you have, the less calories you burn, and the slower your metabolism. You will now need fewer calories to maintain your current weight. This means that if you consume more calories, your body won’t need to use them for energy and will store them. You will actually rebound and gain weight, and it will be that much harder to lose it. Remember, it only takes 2000 calories to gain a pound, but 3,500 to lose one.
When you put the weight back on, and you will if you’ve been crash dieting, then it will be put back on as fat. This means that your metabolic rate has probably dropped a little bit each time that you’ve crash dieted.
Putting on more fat and losing muscle will cause your metabolism to slow down even more. It seems like a cycle of doom, doesn’t it?
It can be if you don’t break that feast or famine cycle. But you can learn how to increase your metabolism in order to burn the most calories possible, even when you’re sleeping.
What is Metabolism?
Your metabolism is the amount of energy in calories that your body burns in order to maintain its weight. Whether you’re sleeping, running, sitting, standing, riding in a car or eating a bowl ice cream, your body is constantly burning calories in order to keep you going. Think of it as a fire within you, burning your fat and food away.
However, unless you have a very fast metabolism, you won’t burn enough calories chewing and swallowing your ice cream to cancel out the calories you just consumed. So you need to perform physical activities which will help you burn those calories so you don’t gain weight.
Get any group of women together, and even some men, and mention the word metabolism, and most of them will start to complain that their metabolism is slow. Many of us suffer the same problem. When we were younger, it seemed we could eat anything and not gain weight. Once we’re past 30, if we simply *think* about a piece of cheesecake we seem to put on five pounds.
It’s a sad but true fact of life that as we age our metabolism slows down. It doesn’t stop (although at times we might feel as though it has) but it does change. The reason for this is because we have more lean muscle mass at 20 than we do at 70, and lean muscle mass is what helps burn calories and keep our metabolism fast. It uses fuel more efficiently and does not try to store the calories we consume as fat on our body.
Some people have a higher metabolic rate naturally than others, and are able to burn off the calories they eat and never gain an ounce. Others have metabolisms which seem slower than a slug, and everything they eat seems to stick with them and not get burned off.
No two people are alike in the calories they burn and the rate of their metabolism, but there are some things we all have in common, that lean muscle burns calories, and that the extra calories and fat we consume is stored as fat.
It possible to boost your metabolism in order to burn more calories and be able to lose weight? Evidence suggests that there are a number of ways to help maximize our metabolism in order to more efficiently consume the food we eat, whether we’re walking, reading or even sleeping. Boosting your metabolic rate is possible and in this series of articles we will show you how.
The Benefits of boosting your metabolism
Did you know that one key to successful weight loss is by boosting your metabolism? Metabolism is the process of burning calories in your body. You burn calories naturally even if you are not exerting any effort, when you are at rest, and even when you are sleeping.
The recommended safe weight loss level of 1 to 2 pounds per week is really possible if you learn to work with your body and boost your metabolism. Your first five pounds or so of weight loss will always be mostly water weight. After that, if you increase your protein and limit your carbs and fat, which tend to get stored by the body, your metabolism should kick in to operate more efficiently.
Another way to boost your metabolism is through exercise. In many cases, if you perform the right exercises, you might not even have to think about trimming down your calorie intake.
The trouble with most diets is that they are only a short-term plan. What you want to achieve is permanent weight loss. This can only be achieved through increasing metabolism, but in such a way that it is sustainable, and not too difficult to incorporate into our daily lives.
Researchers have recently discovered, for example, that three or four short ten minute sessions of exercise per day, was actually more effective than one sustained forty minute burst of activity. Jane Fonda, whose workout put exercise on the map in the USA, was exercising up to three hours at a time at one stage. When she cut down to a more normal level, she never changed dress sizes.
So even if you are a busy person, incorporating a brisk walk at least twice a day for fifteen minutes will help kick-start your metabolism easily, and give you more energy. It will burn calories, and give you a positive outlook and change of scenery too.
Increasing your metabolism is a far better strategy than dieting because it will give you better long-term results, and will not increase your possibilities of gaining weight again, or of “rebound weight gain,” where you actually end up weighing more than before you started dieting.
Simple calorie cutting here and there, by making smarter overall choices, will also help you boost your metabolism. Going from whole milk to fat-free or 1% percent not only cuts calories, it cuts your intake of fat, which the body tends to store as energy.
Believe it or not, you are actually born with every single fat cell you will ever have in your body. They plump up or down depending on how much fat they are provided with to store—that’s right, the fat and other calories in your diet. But if you burn your calories you consume efficiently, there will be no chance to store them.
With a boost in metabolism through moderate exercise and watching what you eat, these small changes can add up to big results when it comes to feeling more fit and trim and losing weight. This in turn will contribute to your overall health and wellbeing, and positive mental attitude. Best of all, it is a long-term health and weight control strategy you can use for life.
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