Your metabolism is the process by which your body breaks down food into energy or stores it as fat. A faster metabolism will burn more calories and store less fat. Our metabolism slows down as we age, but it does not have to. While diet pills offer to increase our metabolism, they are often not safe.Hellosmarty has suggested an interesting list of things you can do to increase metabolism without pills.
1. Eat Breakfast
A healthy breakfast is important. Breakfast fuels your body and mind allowing you to be productive. If you skip breakfast your body goes into starvation mode, conserving energy and burning as few calories as possible. This is a survival response for the times when food is less plentiful. Early nomadic man could go days without food and the body developed a way to store fat and break it down slowly.
2. Eat Small Meals More Frequently
Eat four to six small meals (or healthy snacks) a day. Your body burns calories digesting food, some foods like celery have "negative calories" because they take more calories to digest than they contain. Small meals will keep you satiated, stop hunger signals and overeating. Your body won't go into starvation mode when you eat frequent meals and will burn more calories.
3. Drink Water (Especially Cold Water)
Drinking water will increase metabolism. Drinking cold water will make your body burn calories to raise your body temperature. If you drink between 6 and 8 glasses of water a day you could burn another 10 pounds a year.
4. Drink Green Tea or Oolong Tea
A study conducted by the University of Geneva in Switzerland found that men who took green tea extract burned more calories than those who did not. Similar results have been found for oolong tea.
5. Avoid Sleep Deprivation
Chronic sleep deprivation reduces the ability of otherwise healthy individuals to perform metabolic functions such as breaking down carbohydrates or producing hormones. University of Chicago researchers found that reducing from the standard eight down to four hours of sleep each night created effects that resembled the effects of advanced age or the early stages of diabetes. This happened in less than a week.
6. Reduce Stress
Stress causes the body to release the hormone cortisol, which helps to break down protein into glucose. Your body then turns this excess glucose into fat and stores it in you stomach. Cortisol competes with dehydroepiandrosterone which is required for a healthy metabolism. Cortisol also reduces hormones necessary for muscle production and libido.
View the complete list after the jump.
Source: Hellosmarty
Image: Flickr/Unsure shot
Tags: Increase | Metabolism | Methods
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