Metabolism, One of the biggest questions that men and women ask me is, I’m in my 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s.
I feel like my metabolism is slowed down. What can I do to boost my metabolism? What are some of the research back ways to lose weight, boost my metabolism, and just feel better? And quite frankly, I think it was overdue because there are some simple things you can do every single day to have a faster metabolic rate, which is going to help you lose more fat, lose more weight, and keep it off. Let’s dive into today’s article.
Contents
Eat More Protein
All right, so let’s kick off number one of the research-proven ways to increase your metabolism. This one is that a lot of people know, but I think it’s so foundational, that we have to start with it first, and that is to eat more protein. What the research shows is that you have protein every single meal, and it makes up around 30% of your total daily calories. You will get a Metabolism boost from that. And the reason is, when you eat food, the food has calories.
And protein is pretty unique in that your body actually has to burn and use calories to metabolize the protein. In fact, your body uses and burns up to 30% of the calories that you eat in protein. So let’s say you have 200 calories from a chicken breast. 30% of those calories are actually just burned up in the process of breaking down and metabolizing that protein. And this is a very good thing because you can eat food.
Your body is burning calories. And in addition, not just to the calorie lift, which is called the thermic effect of food, your protein actually also keeps you full. So you get a double whammy effect. Eating protein means your body will burn more calories. This means you’ll eat less food overall. So this is why in many of the meals we recommend at the Fitfather Project and Fit Mother Project, we love this idea of the perfect plate.
You fill half your plate with some kind of veggies. You love a quarter of your plate with some kind of great protein, and you feel the other quarter of your plate without some healthy carbs or healthy fats, depending on your preference. If you do this, your meals are going to be around 500 to 600 calories. They’ll keep you full, and you’re obviously going to be burning calories because you’re having protein and veggies in that meal. So number one, eat more protein.
Drink More Water
Number two is to actually drink more water, particularly if you want to actually really amplify your calorie burn, cold water. Because let’s think about this. Number one, the body is around 70% water. We need it for high functioning. And I’ve been interviewing people inside our project programs.
And what we found is one of the biggest changes people make is they start drinking water first thing in the morning. It actually energizes the body. It’s one of the things your body needs first in the morning is some water.
We recommended 20 to 30oz at least in the morning you can add some salt for some trace minerals. Very, very good. Now, if you actually have cold water, you get an additional metabolic boost because our bodies are always trying to regulate core temperature. When you introduce something new, your body has to use energy to get it up to the right temperature. So that’s great for Metabolism.
And there’s actually a recent study showing that they actually gave young children ten milligrams per kg of body weight of cold water and they found a 25% increase in resting metabolism. Drinking cold water can help your body to reduce it. Now, there are also arguments for having room temperature water because it’s easier for your body to access. You don’t have to spend some energy heating up the water, but it depends on what your goals are. If your goal is losing weight, cold water could help you.
The feeling will only come for about 40 minutes after you drink the cold water But hey, maybe you start kicking off your day with some cold water in the morning. That might help increase your Metabolism rate. That’s what the research suggests to increase the Metabolism rate.
High-Intensity Workouts
The next thing and a lot of people know this, is to start doing high-intensity workouts.
So this is different than, let’s just say, steady state cardio where you might see people at the gym walking on the treadmill or doing the bike at a low easy pace for 45 minutes. That exercise is good. It’s great for your heart. You do burn some calories, but if you start doing high-intensity exercise, you have bursts of effort in a minute with some rest. So let’s just say you can be doing sprints on the treadmill and then you rest for like a minute and a half at a lower pace and you do another sprint.
Also Read:
15 Things You Should Never Do When Having A Headaches: How to Prevent it from Coming Back!
Top 11 Health Benefits Of Coffee, From Staying Motivated To Avoiding Heart Disease And Cancer
Top 10 Best Fat Burning Fast Ways
10 Best Face Moisturizers For Clear Skin And All Skin Types
That’s one way to do it. Our preferred method is doing a type of exercise called metabolic resistance training MRT. This is basically where we take some of the best string training exercises. Things like squats, shoulder press rows, and chest press swings, and combine into a circuit. So you’re doing exercises, then you’re resting, exercise, rest.
This is great because it gives you a high-intensity calorie burn. Besides working out, you will also get some stimulation to your muscles because you are lifting weights. It’s probably the most efficient way for people to exercise. So we absolutely love that.
The key thing to stop thinking about exercise is burning calories, how many calories did I burn during exercise?
The key thing is to start thinking about exercise as a Metabolism investment. If you sprinkle in these high-intensity exercises three times per week, let’s say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you can get a metabolic boost up to 24 hours after a single session. So you’re investing in your metabolism, you’re pulsing smart exercise, high-intensity exercise, absolutely key to Increase Metabolism.
Start Lifting Heavy Things
And this leads me to number four, which is if you want to boost your metabolism, start lifting heavy things to build muscle. Because muscle is very energetically expensive. If you look at a gigantic bodybuilder, let’s just say the guy is £250 of pure muscle, that guy may need to eat 4000 to 5000 calories a day just to maintain weight.
That’s how energetically expensive muscle tissue is. And what’s really cool is the more muscle you actually put on, the easier it is to keep the weight off. This is why we’re huge proponents of combining strength training and cardio in those MRT workouts because you get a muscle-building benefit and the high-intensity benefit all in one.
But classical strength training, like you, ‘re doing a set, let’s just say the set takes 30 seconds, you maybe do 8 to 12 wraps of something, then you rest as long as you’re getting stronger. Working on building muscle is fantastic for your metabolism, especially if you are on a diet.
Because what they show is when you’re actually eating a high protein diet and you’re lifting heavy things, as you’re trying to lose weight, you maintain more muscle. So you’re not just losing fat and losing muscle, you’re losing fat and maintaining muscle to lift heavy things.
Get Great Sleep
Next on our list is to get great sleep. This is absolutely one of the most overlooked aspects of health and longevity in general, our bodies need sleep. And here’s what happens when we miss sleep.
A couple of metabolic changes happen in the body that is absolutely damaging. Number one, your body becomes insulin resistant. And insulin is a super important hormone that once we eat carbohydrates or some proteins, we have an organ called the pancreas that releases insulin. Insulin helps clear out that blood sugar and some of those amino acids from the bloodstream and get some into the cells, into the muscles, and into the metabolically active tissues. So insulin is vital for life.
But the problem is, if we’re insulin resistant, insulin floats around for a long time and prevents fat burning. So when you miss sleep, you’re insulin resistant, your blood sugars are higher, and it actually makes you hungrier by increasing this hunger when you eat, leptin decreases.
This means your body will start to burn more energy, which will make you feel less hungry. So when you miss sleep, your metabolism is all jacked up, you’re more hungry and you’re less full. That is a recipe for disaster. So the converse, when we get great sleep, our metabolism functions so much better.
And this is why in our programs, one of the first things we help people do is fix their sleep. When you get quality sleep, your metabolism functions better. You’re going to do a lot better with your weight loss and your overall health goals to increase your Metabolism.
Drink Green Tea
Next on our list is to drink green tea. Drinking green tea has been shown to help people lose weight and reduce their amount of fat.
Green tea has a little bit of caffeine, and research shows that some green tea and oolong tea can increase your metabolic rate by 4 to 5%. And that’s okay, that’s a nice little benefit, and it’s probably driven mostly by the caffeine. But what I actually think is super cool is some of the special compounds in green tea. These catechins like EGCG actually increase fat burning. So they actually help release fat from your cells.
So your body can burn those fats up and use them for the daily activity that you’re doing so you can actually lose more fat. Green tea helps fat burning and gives you a slight boost in your metabolism.
Drink Coffee
Coffee is a good way to help increase your metabolism. So this is next on the list. Drink coffee if you want to have a higher metabolism rate.
In fact, they show that caffeine and coffee can boost your metabolism by up to 11%. That’s a high number. So let’s just say you burn on average around 2000 to 2500 calories per day. That could be an extra 200 calories. And if we stack that up over the course of a year, that can be very great.
What I found was very interesting from the research is that actually, this metabolic boosting effect of coffee works better in lean people than people who are overweight. The lean people got a 29% increase in fat burning, I should say in your metabolic rate, but only 10% for obese women. This is fat burning. I want to make sure I read this in one study. Coffee increased fat burning by 29% for lean women, but only 10% for obese women.
So it seems to have a good effect. But I think if you’re looking to lose weight and coffee is a part of your life, and I recommend you continue with that, just don’t throw the crap in your coffee. So instead of throwing a lot of sugars and a lot of creamers and stuff like that, maybe you try something like stevia. Maybe you do a splash of almond milk. Maybe you put some protein powder. So that’s great for increasing metabolism. Drink coffee.
Add MCTs To Your Diet
Another thing that’s helpful is to get some things in your diet called MCTS. These are medium-chain triglycerides. Now, without getting too complex into biochemistry, there are many different kinds of fats we can eat.
Triglyceride, meaning a type of fat. And there’s a special kind of fat called MCTS. They’re not long fats, they’re not short fats. They’re medium-chain triglycerides. What I think is fascinating, is as these MCTS are actually really concentrated in breast milk, and what we do is, as kids, when we get these MCTS, they provide our bodies with a ton of energy. And our body uniquely likes to use MCTS for fat burning.
It can help fuel the brain. Your body can make ketone bodies from MCTS. A lot of great things happen. And what the studies actually show is that MCTS increases your metabolism more than long fats. So long fats might be found, let’s just say in some kind of animal meat or butter.
MCTs are often derived from coconut oil is one place you can get them or you can get some straight MCT oil. This is why a lot of people who do like their coffee in the morning often throw some MCT oil, maybe a tablespoon inside your coffee to get a little extra energy.
And once the researchers found that MCTs increased metabolism by 12% compared to long-chain fats would increase it by 4%. So MCTS can be good. And this is a lot of the thought process behind people who enjoy bulletproof coffee, where they take some high-quality coffee, throw some MCTS, and often a little bit of butter in there.
And here’s what I’ll say about this. If you really want to lose weight and lose fat, calories do matter. And so if you’re throwing in a bunch of extra calories, let’s just say 300 to 400 calories of fat in your coffee, that’s not necessarily going to support your weight loss efforts unless that coffee plus the fat is replacing a meal and maybe you’re using it for some intermittent fasting.
What I would personally do if I was looking to lose weight is do some black coffee. And if I wanted a little bit of extra stuff, I might throw maybe a tablespoon of MCT oil, maybe a little bit of protein in there that could be a good recipe.
Fidget More
The next thing on the list is actually really interesting. It’s to fidget more. Fidgeting you see the people who are sitting there twitching their legs or they’re doing stuff like this.
There are some people who genetically are just more prone to fidgeting than others. And this is really amazing because fidgeting burns a lot of calories. You wouldn’t think it does, but over the course of a day, fidgeting can burn anywhere from 100 to 800 extra calories. And so I’ll read the study.
Actually what researchers did is they actually measured the energy expenditure, the number of calories burned by 16 people while they either sat down, basically not doing anything, they used a standing desk or they used an under desk chair where they can move their legs and fidget.
And what they found is chairs and devices that promoted fidgeting can increase energy expenditure by 20% to 30% without increasing heart rate. And dynamic sitting may be one of the great options to help people move more while at work. I think it’s really cool, if you can fidget more, you can burn more calories. This is called Neat non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which basically means you’re moving, you’re burning more calories.
Use Cold
The final thing on our list that is really great is to use cold. A better metabolism can be achieved by exposing your body to cold exposures. And it’s really interesting, as I said in the beginning, we were talking about the cold water. Our body strives to stay within a certain range or homeostasis. And this means balancing the system.
And one of the biggest things we need to maintain homeostasis with is our core temperature. Your body is always trying to maintain core temperature. So if you’ve ever gone outside and it’s very cold and you don’t have enough clothing, one of the first things your body does, you start to shiver. Shivering is like fidgeting. Your muscles are doing these micro contractions and what they’re doing is they’re burning fat, they’re burning carbohydrates to produce heat, to maintain core temperature.
So when we take a cold shower, or we may go on a cold plunge, our body is going to get a shivering response. We can burn more calories. Coldness is cooler than just burning calories from shivering. What it also does is activates a special kind of fat that we have in our bodies called brown fat. Now we have white fat, which might be the adipose tissue you can pinch maybe around your abdomen.
And this kind of fat has many functions, but it primarily stores calories in the form of those free fatty acids. Brown fat is different. It is brown because it’s packed, and loaded with mitochondria, the cellular powerhouses that do all this metabolism for us and produce energy. And what happens is when we get cold exposure, our body can actually produce more brown fat and make brown fat more active by increasing these brown fat enzymes that burn more calories. This is why cold can absolutely be your friend.
If you’re looking to lose weight and increase your metabolism, a simple way to do it is to take a cold shower. So maybe you do your regular shower, you’re on hot and at the end of your shower, for one to two minutes, you might go on cold. You can start by doing some ice-plunges or baths, and then gradually increase the number of times you do them each day. There are also great benefits to that.
Bonus Walk After Meals
And the final bonus I want to say that’s not necessarily increasing your metabolic rate per se, but it’s really good for your metabolic health, is to start taking walks after you eat a big meal.
What the research shows is that after we eat a meal, let’s say it does contain some carbohydrates, our blood sugar levels start to rise. And when we actually walk after a meal, what happens is our body can actually take that blood sugar and take that normal spike that we experience and actually shuttle some of that sugar into our muscles, into our legs, as we’re walking.
This helps stabilize your blood sugar, improves digestion, improves circulation, and smooths out that blood sugar and insulin response. So, although that’s not classically, increasing your metabolism, like caffeine per se, is improving your metabolic health, which I think is a really good thing. Overall, these are great strategies, great little tidbits, and I do hope that you take one or two of these things and you start applying them to your life.
But the bigger picture here is you need to develop a lifestyle, a daily rhythm every single day, where you’re getting these things into your body, right? You’re getting the right things in the morning with the good nutrition, you’re getting enough sleep, you’re having enough water, you’re doing things like the cold exposure you need to develop the rhythms and the habits. Otherwise, this stuff is just information. And let’s face it, information without action does jack shit for your health.
If you use some of these things and you found great health benefits in your life do comment down and let me know.
