Improving Your Metabolism One Step At A Time

Your body’s metabolism has a direct affect on how many calories you burn each day, and therefore on how much weight you lose. In scientific terms, metabolism is the combination of two processes: catabolism, in which the body breaks down substances into energy, and anabolism, in which the body synthesizes substances needed for survival. In simple terms, your metabolism is how your body burns up the calories you consume, which means that by increasing the rate of your metabolism, you can actually burn calories more quickly and easily.

The most direct way to affect the rate of your metabolism is to do a little exercise. In the short term, you are using up lots of calories, which obviously helps you to lose weight. But then, something interesting happens. Your increased metabolism doesn’t immediately go away when you’re finished working out. Instead, you will continue to burn calories at a higher rate than normal for up to eight hours before the effect has fully subsided!

And exercise also helps you to increase your metabolism over the long term. When you have less fat and more lean muscle on your body, your metabolism speeds up. So as you exercise over time, your metabolism gets better, and that in and of itself makes your job a lot easier as you continue improving your fitness.

When the goal is increased metabolism, the best time to exercise is once in the morning and then a few minutes at various times throughout the day, whenever you can fit it into your schedule. Even doing just a few exercises in the morning will increase your metabolism throughout a significant portion of the day. You want to avoid exercising just before bed, however, as this can make it difficult to sleep.

How you manage your food intake also has a huge impact on the rate of your metabolism. Your metabolism speeds up when you ingest food, and it slows down when you go for long periods of time without eating anything. The optimum eating schedule is four to six small meals divided up evenly throughout the day (as opposed to three big meals). This keeps your metabolism up throughout the day during times when it would normally be slowing. Eating breakfast is especially important for jump starting your metabolism every day, as it has slowed dramatically by the time you wake in the morning due to a lack of food all night.

The types of foods you eat are the final piece of the puzzle. The normal rules of healthy eating apply here – did you think you would escape them? Sugar, fatty foods, alcohol, caffeine, and other unhealthy foods will harm your metabolism as surely as they will harm the rest of your body. Stick with lean meats, fish, proteins, fruit, grains, dairy, and other foods that can be found on the old nutritional pyramid you remember from school.