Have you been trying to lose body fat, but find it comes off at a snail's pace? If you’re working out with efficiency and maintaining a slight caloric deficit, you can actually lose up to 1.5 pounds per week.
However, even if you haven’t been consistent, I have some metabolism-boosting tips that should help ignite some good, steady fat loss.
1. Increase your meal frequency: Eat more often but don’t increase total calories. For example, break three meals into five to six smaller meals and eat every three hours. food can actually help burn body fat when used strategically. Breaking meals into smaller feedings helps to control blood sugar and puts you in a better position to lose fat.
2. Break up your workout: Many people are pressed for time and the thought of exercise becomes another stress in their lives. However, research has proven that two short bouts of exercise per day will actually stimulate the metabolism more than one longer bout. Go for two brisk 15 minute walks per day, five days per week, and you’ll see progress at the end of 30 days.
3. Eat breakfast: If you sleep through the night and then deprive the body of food in the morning, the body is sensing a potential famine and holds onto stored body fat to keep you alive. Remember, calories from food represent heat. Use the heat to rev your metabolism.
4. Cycle calories: For three days, consume your minimum calorie requirement based on your height, weight and goals. Then, on day four, increase your calories by an additional 400 (nutritious foods only). This technique can actually get the metabolism racing and stimulate additional fat loss.
5. drinks lots of water: If you limit your Water intake, the body will retain water; the body only needs to be dehydrated by approximately 2 percent for this to take place. Drink 0.55 multiplied by your body weight in ounces of water per day.
6. Exercise in the morning: If you can fit it into your schedule, exercise in the morning. People who exercise consistently in the morning find that exercise at this time regulates their appetite all day long. They don’t get as hungry and they start the day with a boost to the metabolism..
7. Perform cardio interval training: Cardio interval training is simply short bursts of high-intensity exercise combined with more moderate intensity within the same workout. Studies have shown that people who perform interval training twice a week (in addition to two other days of lower intensity cardio) lose twice as much weight as those who do just a moderate cardio workout. You can easily incorporate interval training into your workout by inserting a 45 second burst into your stationary bike workout every four to five minutes.
8. Boost your metabolism by reading instead of watching TV: Researchers at Memphis State University monitored 32 girls as they watched a half-hour television program. They found the metabolic rates dropped as much as 16 percent below resting metabolic rate. They burned fewer calories watching TV than they did just by reading!
9. Drink green tea: Green tea is a popular tea from Japan that has numerous health benefits, including weight loss. It’s not 100 percent certain how green tea helps one to lose fat, but it appears to increase the amount of calories the body burns—not necessarily because of the small amounts of caffeine it contains, but due to a compound abbreviated as EGCG. When purchasing green tea make sure the label states that the green tea used is standardized for caffeine and EGCG.
10. Practice hydrotherapy: First thing in the morning, drink 32 ounces of very cold water on an empty stomach. Don’t eat Breakfast for at least 30 minutes. The cold water will force your body to raise its core temperature, thereby stimulating your metabolism and excreting any excess water. You may find that you lose two pounds the first month you try this. If you want to take it a step further, do the same thing at lunch.
