Brain Scramble, Health & Fitness

The secrets behind a successful metabolism

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions that surround the fitness industry, but something that’s pretty concrete is the fact that weight loss depends heavily on your metabolism.

If you have a slow metabolism, it’s harder to lose weight. If it’s fast, it’s much easier.

Bearing the above in mind, it comes as no surprise to hear that the latter is much more desirable. Armed with the latter, it’s easy to both maintain and lose weight, and means that you are less likely to need procedures like laser liposuction from the likes of Sono Bello.

At this point, the big question is how exactly do you fine-tune your metabolism? Through the course of this guide, we’ll now find out.

Make sure that you are eating enough calories

This is perhaps one of the primary mistakes that wannabe weight loss candidates make.

The reason behind this choice is perfectly understandable; if you eat fewer calories most people think that you weight will automatically tumble.

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work like this. To make the whole equation even more complex, if you eat too few calories you run the risk of your body being sent into starvation mode. This means that your body quickly realizes that it’s not receiving sufficient calories, so starts to store food as fat as a result. Naturally, this is the opposite effect to what you are looking to achieve and your metabolism has almost grinded to a half.

To give you some hard and fast numbers for guidance, men shouldn’t drop below 2,100 calories per day for weight loss efforts, while the figure for women shouldn’t be any less than 1,400.

Don’t just rely on cardio training – hitting the weights is crucial

Something else that can supercharge your metabolism is not sticking to a pure cardio regime. It’s the type of training which is supposedly associated with mammoth weight loss – but at the same time it’s not the most efficient route.

Instead, lifting weights can help you make huge progress. The beauty about weight lifting is that even after your session, your system will be working extra hard. In other words, your metabolism is faster than ever before, and your fat levels plummet as a result.

Sure, we’re not saying that you should eliminate cardio in its entirety. Instead, understand that other forms of training can help you just as much, if not more.

Use the “little and often” rule with meals

Something else that can keep your metabolism ticking over at the perfect pace is by eating smaller meals, at a more frequent rate. By tucking into these meals at regular intervals, your body needs to keep working in order to break the food down. If you were to revert to the opposite, larger meals on an infrequent basis, there will be times where your metabolism doesn’t need to work and that fat burning “in the background” just doesn’t happen. It might take a while to get used to, but if you can split your day into five meals you will do yourself the world of good.