subject: Metabolism-Ways To Increase Your Metabolism [print this page] Metabolism-Ways To Increase Your Metabolism
Basic Metabolic Rate(BMR)
This is the fancy way to say metabolism. Metabolism is when your body converts and uses energy from food and drinks, burning calories in the process or the rate at which your body burns calories. The body requires energy for everyday functions. Even when you are sleeping your body is using energy and burning calories! This is called resting metabolic rate(RMR).
Here is a few things your body requires energy for, when the body is resting:
Adjusting hormone levels
Grwoing and repairing cells
Circulating blood
Breathing
What increases your metabolism
Exercise will definitely raise your metabolism. Certain foods can help boost your metabolic rate as well. The best way to increase metabolism is to combine exercise with eating certain foods.
You might already know that exercise requires quite a bit of energy. The physical activity you do burns calories. The more exercise you do the more calories you can burn. Research has shown that after strenght training you metabolism is running high for up to 4 hours. A plus, is that strength training can help you build muscle and for this muscle to be maintained the body has to burn calories.
Strength training isn't the only form of exercise to boost your metabolic rate. Any extra movement such as taking the stairs instead of the escalator can help out too.
Eating certain foods can help you burn extra calories as well. Foods such as spicy peppers naturally have a chemical called capsaicin that makes them spicy. Capsaicin speeds up your heart rate and can have you burning calories up to 3 hours after eating them.
Other foods and drinks that promote calorie burning
Coffe and green tea
Low fat milk and whole grains and oatmeal
Lean beef, pork, chicken and turkey
Salmon, trout, and tuna
There are also foods that have what are called negative calories. They don't actually have negative calories. What this means is that the food you consume has less calories than the calories your body uses to digest it.
For example 100 gram of broccoli is about 25 calories and the body uses to 80 calories to digest it. So in this case you burn 55 calories. Tomatoes, cauliflower, grapefruit and esparagaus are just a few other foods that have the same effect.
All of these foods are healthy foods. Eat healthy and exercise regularly and you'll have a fine tuned machine that will incinerate calories.
