Natural Ways to Speed Up Your Metabolism (Continuation…)

 

7) Don’t Starve Yourself

A common dieting trick is just plunging your calorie count below your necessary base caloric intake to burn weight. But this doesn’t help your metabolism any. In fact, it sends your metabolism into a panic, and your body hits starvation mode, attempting to conserve as many calories as possible from your food. It also sends a signal to your cells to stop burning sugars and fats for fuel to conserve them, and instead, has them cannibalize your muscle tissue, leaving you weaker than before. Muscle loss is also linked to a slower metabolism as well, making this poor choice a double whammy.

The same process goes for eating at your base caloric needs and then over exercising. The best way to determine how many calories you need each day is to find a reputable calorie calculator and be honest with it about your height, weight, age, and level of activity. Your doctor might also be able to offer an insight, or refer you to a nutritionist who can help you work out a plan to get the calories you need without any excess.

6) Drink More Water

The most obvious point to this tip is water is calorie free, unlike many beverages. Secondly, liquids can fill you up as well as solids, and drinking plenty of water with meals can therefore save you on calories consumed, helping you to eat less and feel fuller. Another point about water is it is necessary to sustain health. Our bodies are mostly water and the oxygen and hydrogen in each molecule are broken down and reformed in cellular respiration processes to perform many of our metabolic tasks. If you don’t have enough water available for your metabolism to run at peak performance, no other trick in the world is going to work for you. It’s like trying to run a car with no gas in the tank.

Water also helps to cleanse toxins from the body. You have a natural filtration system through your kidneys and urinary system, and one of its main functions is taking out the trash from your metabolic processes. If those lines back up and this waste moves too slowly, the cells will take the hint and slow down production to keep from making your molecular environment too toxic to support life. While the amount of water you specifically need can vary with many circumstances, a rough estimate often given out is 64 ounces of water a day for an adult. This sounds like a lot, but eight 8 ounce glasses can actually go pretty quickly if you’re making a habit out of starting out your meals with one full glass, or always take a drink when you come back from the bathroom.

5) Do Energy Work

This may sound a little New Age, but yoga and even reiki has become very mainstream in the health world. Yoga in particular can lower blood lipid levels and improve moods, and has the benefit of being physical activity; any physical activity you can do will help your metabolism. Yoga can improve flexibility and strength, and make more hardcore forms of exercising easier on you, which motivates you to do them more. Styles of yoga like bikram yoga are particularly helpful for metabolism, as they elevate your body temperature and heart rate, which speed catabolic processes of cells, allowing them to work faster.

It’s also suggested that the energetic balances achieved in yoga and other energy work traditions align your bodily system to improve overall function on levels not yet measurable. There is certainly a long history for this theory, but even if the anecdotal evidence was disproved, yoga has proven itself to be a healthful activity if you’re seeking better body regulation in a quantifiable way. Will yoga alone boost your metabolism to speed you to your weight loss goals? Unlikely, but it will definitely make them easier, and you feel happier about working towards them.

4) Build Muscle

Just as losing muscle mass from starvation or poor lifestyle will slow your metabolism, building more muscle will cause it to ramp up even faster than before. Muscle uses a tremendous amount of energy to work, as even at “rest’ it retains a certain amount of tension in each individual fiber — called tone — that keeps it ready to go at a moment’s notice. The more physically fit you are, the more fibers you have, and so, this is why trim, athletic builds are called “toned”: they have more tone! Since muscle powers more than itself, and must exercise precise control, every flex and relaxation cycle costs the cells the energy of the muscle fiber itself, as well as the physical energy of whatever it is pulling. This is why when your body feels starved, it takes what it needs from muscle tissue itself, because breaking that down is more cost-effective for running all your bodily systems, than to use up the precious fuel the muscles themselves need.

Because of this energy expense, having more muscle tissue — along with proper eating — will burn more fat, because your body needs to consume more fuel to accomplish its tasks. Many people try to avoid strength training to keep from trying to bulk up like a body builder, though, and don’t reap the benefits of denser muscle. You don’t have to worry about that, because basic strength training alone does not make bulky muscles, but lean ones. The extreme of this is found in dancers’ bodies, where they need to be as strong as possible, but still stay slim and graceful. Exercises like Pilates training are exceptionally good for achieving this effect.

3) Find Outlets for Stress

Many experts already discuss how stress can cause you to gain weight through the cycling of hormones that promote nervous appetite and retention of calories. Long term stress can damage many metabolic processes as well, with the continual flood of alert hormones and other signalers that keep the body in a state of emergency. Think about how you feel after a long period of stress: tired and worn. Think about what your belongings look like or function like after “stress” either in use and abuse or impact from accident. Everything wears down and gets broken. Your body is the same way. It isn’t designed to operate on high alert all the time, and causing it to do so is harmful.

Stress can’t always be avoided, but you can choose how you handle it. Find healthful ways – yoga, hanging with friends, a fun hobby — to keep down your stress levels and improve your metabolic function.

2) Add High-Intensity Intervals

This form of exercising is usually found in an aerobic routine, which you should already be doing if you’re trying to rev up your metabolism. High-intensity intervals are sets of intense maneuvers done over 5-10 minutes, depending on your fitness level. These exercises help to further boost your heart and pulse rate during workouts, which will in turn spark your metabolism to keep up a supply of energy to the necessary limbs. Having periods of high and low intensity in the same workout is actually a better booster than high intensity alone, as it allows your body to recover functions and remain aerobic, rather than switching to an anaerobic pathway that can hamper your metabolism during exercise, as well as leave you very sore. Think about it as the difference between the way an athlete trains and the way they play. Training is designed to build strength and endurance and make their bodies better, whereas games are a challenge of power that can drain them and force them to rest afterwards. Your body is the same way. Build workouts that charge your fat-burning cylinders in a sustainable way, and you’ll be rewarded with a faster metabolism.

1) Sleep Well

You have probably heard this before, and it can’t be stressed enough: get plenty of sleep. As mentioned above, bodies need rest. You need time to repair damage from your day and reset your functions. Metabolism does drop during sleep, but in a healthy way. This allows energy to be diverted to restorative activities that improve overall health, and allow metabolic processes to be boosted back up further upon awakening.

Most adults need a full seven to eight hours, and cheating just a little won’t help; Sanjay Patel, M.D., of Case Western University proved that the difference between the sleeping habits of fit people and unfit people could be as little as 16 minutes a night. The importance of sleep cannot be overemphasized, and while there are a multitude of excuses you could give for not getting the right amount of shut eye, if you’re serious about upping your metabolism to give you a healthier lifestyle, you’ll make sure to get enough.

Final Words

However you decide to speed up your metabolism and boost your fitness goals, remember that it’s important to know what your body needs and fulfill that in a healthy way, instead of punishing yourself for not being a perfect machine incapable of taking damage. Human beings are fragile cellular systems, and the tiniest changes can lead to big results for both good and ill. Take it slow — odd to think about when trying to speed something up — and be cautious about the methods you use. Many of the things on this list provide a wealth of benefits aside from boosting your metabolism: they can help prevent chronic disease and maintain good function for all your systems. Many other more harsh methods don’t give you that, meaning while they may seem effective in the short run, in the long run, they might end up costing you far more than you want to pay for a few inches off.

Source: healthdigezt.com
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