Boosting your metabolism can be easy as soon as you understand how it works. For most people, losing weight can be extremely difficult, even for those who think they can do the right thing. However, some simple changes in your lifestyle can move your body from a "fat storage" mode to a "fat-burning" mode.
What is metabolism and what affects it?
By definition, metabolism is your body's ability to find and use energy. Metabolism is complex, there are several processes that overlap and influence each other to increase or decrease, depending on what your body needs. A key part of how to influence your metabolism is actually helping the body to move to a state of "fat burning".
How can we make the change?
The first step is to learn the 4 main factors that affect the metabolism, in addition to age and gender:
1. Toxin load
The role of the liver is to convert nutrients from our diet into substances that the body can use and eliminate toxins and wastes. Only, what happens to most people is toxin overload, which can have a significant impact on their ability to lose weight and improve their metabolism.
2. Hormones
Often a major cause of slowing metabolism, the thyroid gland is an important gland that controls body temperature, normal organ growth, development, and the body's ability to burn fat.
Your adrenal glands are "the glands of stress". Their function is the management of stress. However, when they are tired, it is the whole body that is and therefore the metabolism does not work optimally.
3. Stress
Prolonged stress and anxiety affect each of these factors. Taking care of your mental health and well-being has an extremely positive effect on your overall metabolic state and your ability to successfully maintain a healthy weight.
4. Body composition
As it is the only metabolically active tissue in the body, muscle mass helps to increase metabolic rate, and increase fat burning. Low muscle mass slows the metabolism, and therefore the burning of body fat.
How to speed up the metabolism?
1. Reduce the burden of toxins
Drinking plenty of water every day helps eliminate toxins from your body. Thus, he will be able to release toxins through sweat, stool and urine.
It is important to remove processed industrial foods, artificial flavors and sweeteners, carbonated and energy drinks, which have a detrimental effect on health, because they overload the liver with toxins, which leads to a slowing down of the metabolism.
2. Hormonal balancing
Support your thyroid with healthy and optimal nutrition, by incorporating into your diet foods that contain vitamin D, iodine, zinc, omega-3 fatty acids and selenium.
Eliminate the exhaustion of the adrenal glands by minimizing stress and participating in a comprehensive stress management program.
3. Stress management
In order to improve both your adrenal health and your mental health, the best way is to start identifying the causes of your stress and evaluate your daily stress levels on a scale of 1 to 10, at least 3 to 4 times a day for 7 to 14 days.
This type of stress check not only identifies the key moments of stress in your life, but also helps you to become more aware when you feel stress, because many people do not even realize that they are stressed. . It can be remedied by practicing meditation, yoga or doing a pleasant activity such as strolling by the sea or reading.
4. Body composition
Lean muscle mass is actually your secret weapon for boosting your basic metabolism. This is an estimate of the number of calories you would burn at rest for 24 hours. It represents the minimum amount of energy needed for your body to function.
This means that the more muscle mass you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate, and the more calories you can burn. Improving overall muscle mass also improves the regulation of blood glucose and the ability to switch to a state of fat burning.
Bodybuilding exercises such as weightlifting are important because they help increase your muscle mass and counter the muscle loss associated with aging.