A few weeks ago, I went to the American College of Sports Medicine conference and attended a workshop called ‘The Great Burn: How to Maximize Your Metabolism.’ I’ve got some tips to share with you.
But first, what is ‘metabolism’? Think of a running car engine. Just as a car burns a certain amount of gas on idle, so your body burns a certain number of calories at rest. Calories are simply measurements of energy.
Resting metabolism is the number of calories you burn just to stay alive – organs like your heart,liver, and brain all need calories to run.
Since your body is at rest most of the day, it’s wise to maximize your calorie burn during those times. The more calories you burn the more pounds of fat you will shed.
So here are those little known tips to increase your resting metabolism:
1. Drink Green Tea with Lemon: Green tea has component in it called ‘catechins’ which can increase your ability to burn fat and calories. It can also lower your risk of heart disease and stroke. Unfortunately, less than 20% of catechins in green tea survive digestion for the body’s use. However, if you add lemon juice, that boosts the catechin absorption rate 13 times more than drinking green tea alone.
If you don’t like the taste of lemon, then add orange, lime, or grapefruit juice. It’s the vitamin C in citrus that does the trick.Two cups of green tea per day is recommended. Sweeten your tea with a natural no calorie sweetener, like Stevia or Truvia.
2. Eat Spicy Food: Red peppers contain a substance called Capsaicin, which is the “heating” component found in cayenne pepper, chili pepper, and red pepper flakes. So sprinkle some red pepper flakes to flavor your food or use cayenne pepper in tomato soup or juice to give it a kick.
3. Use Caffeine with Caution: If caffeine does not make you jittery, then drinking up to two cups of coffee each day should give you a metabolism boost. Don’t overdo this one: overdosing on caffeine can contribute to heart irregularities. Go easy on the sugar and cream too – the extra calories you added would cancel out the extra calories you burned.
4. Lift your Weights: Your metabolism drops 2-3% each decade after age 20. After that age, you typical become less physically active and start losing lean muscle. Muscle burns 5-10 times the number of calories than fat does at rest, so if you aren’t strength training and you are eating the same number of calories as you did when you were younger, then you will gain weight automatically.
5. Eat More Protein: When you eat protein, only 80% of the calories are available for the body’s use. The other calories were burned off just doing the work of breaking down the protein for digestion. Compare that to 95% of calories available from carbohydrates and fats. So eat lean protein with every meal and snack – examples include chicken, turkey, fish, lean beef, eggs, meat substitutes.
While none of these tips alone causes a huge metabolism boost, the combined effects along with consistent exercise, strength training, and solid nutrition will turn your body into a more efficient fat burner.
Be blessed with health, healing, and wholeness,
Kimberly Taylor
Author/Christian Life Coach of the Take Back Your Temple program
P.S. When it comes to weight loss, do you often know what you should do but have a hard time doing it?
I struggled with this issue on my own weight loss journey, but I discovered that “Nothing is different until you think differently.”
The value of the Take Back Your Temple program is that you will learn how to think differently through using Biblical keys to overcome obstacles. You’ll discover how to win the Spiritual and mental battle that often causes us to become inconsistent and get off-track on our weight loss journey.
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I notice these are the small steps that you are adding anyway in the beginner steps 31 day program. Thanks for making these tips a new habit for me.
Great tips, thank you 🙂