How to burn more calories

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Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

Metabolism is often a tricky topic for many people. People know they have one and they know it controls their eating habits and weight gain, but many people don’t actually know what your metabolism is and how it works. Another thing many people don’t know is that you can boost your metabolism easily and safely. Before knowing how to boost yours, you should understand exactly what your metabolism is. Simply put, it is a network of hormones and enzymes that converts food into fuel, while dictating how your body burns that fuel. It is different for every person, and there are factors affecting it for each person.

The main factors influencing metabolism are age, sex, proportion of lean body mass and heredity. Age naturally slows it by about five percent each decade after 40. Sex affects metabolism because men generally burn more calories at rest than women. The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism tends to be. Heredity also plays a role, but not as much, some say. Certain people just have slower metabolic rates than other people. While there are many predetermined factors influencing one’s metabolism, there are ways you can combat against those to raise your rate.

The first thing you should do each morning to boost your metabolism is eat breakfast. This jump starts your rate every morning because your metabolism tends to slow down when it goes long periods of time without food, such as overnight. Another thing you can do related to eating breakfast is by eating smaller meals more frequently. This will keep your metabolism in high gear, thus burning calories faster. You also can drink the recommended eight glasses of water each day. The metabolic process needs water to function properly. These recommendations are all small changes that won’t affect your lifestyle, just your metabolic rate.

Another thing you can do is exercise, including aerobic and weight training. Aerobic exercise boosts your metabolism short-term, causing you to burn calories while you’re working out. Weight training, on the other hand, boosts it long term. This works because the more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll be able to burn because muscle burns more than fat. By making small changes in your eating and exercise habits, you’ll soon be able to boost your metabolism to a more healthy rate. Not only will it be at a healthy rate, you’ll also be healthier because you’ll be able to effectively burn the calories you don’t need.

There are also a few products on the market today designed to assist in keeping your metabolism high. Herbal life has designed a nutritional supplement named Herbalife Total Control, with ingredients to help boost metabolism. While these products might not help you lose weight by themselves they can be great additions to add to your weight-loss program for faster results.