How To Speed Up Metabolism & Lose Weight

You might be interested in finding out how to speed up metabolism to reduce your weight. But having a healthy metabolism gives so much more than that – you feel great and full of energy too!

Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the amount of energy your body uses to maintain its vital functions like breathing, keeping warm, and all the other automatic things your body does for you. For most people this is where most of their energy expenditure goes.

I’m going to give you 4 ways to show you how to speed up metabolism, and they’re all FREE!

Stop Dieting

People often go on restrictive diets to lose weight, and because they don’t understand how their body works they accidentally reduce their BMR.

Here’s an example to explain how that happens..

Let’s say you usually eat around 2,000 calories per day and your weight is steady. That means you’re burning around 2,000 calories per day too.

You decide to go on some kind of restrictive diet and reduce the amount of calories you eat to around 1,500.

By doing so you don’t pay any attention to the real cause of your excess fat which is excessive insulin – click here for more info about how that works.

Initially you lose weight, but because you’re not eating in a way that allows your body to access its own fat your body has to adapt in another way to compensate for this consistent reduction in calories.

Your body will slow its metabolism down to match your regular intake of 1,500 calories, to conserve energy. Your body is hardwired to preserve its fat because ongoing reduced calories suggests food shortage.

This is a survival mechanism from when times were harder than they are now.

You feel tired and cranky. But there’s worse to come. When you break your diet your weight gain is rapid because you’ve reduced your BMR, and that will take time to correct.

Lower Your Insulin Levels

To burn fat you need to give your system regular and consistent time without insulin, because you can’t burn your own fat while it’s present.

This is easy – all you have to do is have more time not eating than you do eating in each 24 hour period. I explain how this works here.

We’ve been brainwashed into thinking we need to be eating the whole time to keep our energy up. This is not true, in fact the opposite happens.

Many studies have shown increased energy during fasting. This makes sense from and evolutionary perspective. Imagine being alive during the ice age when food was short and you hadn’t eaten for a while – you’d need plenty of energy to go and find food or you wouldn’t fair to well.

Activate Your Energy Boosting Mitochondria

Mitochondria are tiny structures within most of the cells making up your body. They are responsible for creating energy.

The more mitochondria you have the better you feel, and you’ll have more energy too because your body is more metabolically active.

Regular exercise increases the number of mitochondria.

High intensity is the most effective exercise at improving the health of your mitochondria, and I ‘love’ the short 4 minute Tabata set – here’s an example:

It’s pretty easy time-wise to do one of these every day – no gym required.

Try A Bit Of Cold Exposure

Cold exposure increases and activates your body’s brown fat.

Brown fat is packed with mitochondria, and when you have brown fat it burns though your white storage fat to keep you warm when you’re in a cold environment.

Find out more about brown fat.