Have you tried calorie-counting diets, fat-free diets, small-portions diets, or low-carb diets only to regain every pound you lost while on the diet? Have you tried the weight-loss support meetings and sat next to people who were having success while you looked like you’d been cheating when you really hadn’t been?
Have you always felt something was wrong or different about your body, especially as you’ve watched skinny friends eat twice as much as you and not gain a pound? Well, you were probably right. A combination of factors including aging, stress, hormonal changes, and poor food choices all cause a gradual change in metabolism. You are not lazy, and you do not lack willpower or discipline. Your body simply responds differently to food because you have a sluggish metabolism. I know this because I had a sluggish metabolism that slowed in my late thirties. But through studying to become a certified nutritionist specializing in weight management, I began to learn more about my metabolism and its effect on my weight gain. When I first started rapidly gaining weight, I would limit what I ate. I even tried to work out with a trainer but still gained ten to fifteen more pounds. I continued to gain weight despite following the traditional advice of “eat less and exercise more.” But my body did not respond to that advice. So, I knew I needed a different and new approach, and I needed it fast. Thank goodness I found it!
If you find it impossible to lose weight and keep it off, even when you follow all the traditional guidance on dieting and exercising, it is very likely that a sluggish metabolism is one of your problems. It is important to understand how your unique body metabolizes food because that determines how food turns into energy or fat in your body. Most diets don’t factor in each individual’s metabolism. They focus on dietary changes but don’t factor in how your individual metabolism is affecting your weight gain. This is why some people have great success with one diet but others get no results from it at all.
If you have a sluggish metabolism, your body won’t respond to traditional diets and weight-loss programs. The traditional diet approach of decreasing calories won’t work because weight is determined by your body’s response to how foods are processed or metabolized within your body.
Another problem may be that a lot of your weight loss on diets came not from fat but rather muscle, and you need muscle to keep your metabolic engine running effectively. Muscle cells burn fifty times more calories than fat cells. It is important to lose weight in a manner that ensures you will lose fat and minimize muscle loss, which is what we focus on in the DHEMM System.
Metabolism is commonly thought to be a matter of how fast or slowly you burn calories. We often hear people say, “I can’t lose weight because I have a slow metabolism.” In general, that is true, but metabolism is much more complex. Metabolism represents all the signals and chemical reactions in your body that regulate your weight and the rate at which you burn calories. A number of factors determine how your metabolism processes food and burns calories, including environment, age, food quality, stress levels, genes, and physical activity. Aging, in particular, has a noticeable impact on metabolism, due to changes in hormone balance. Once you understand what controls your metabolism, you will be able to make changes that will automatically turn your body into a fat-burning machine. When you stop focusing on losing weight and instead on restoring your body to its optimal performance level, the weight loss happens effortlessly and automatically.
Someone with a high metabolic rate is able to burn calories more efficiently than someone with a slower metabolic rate. Any calories that are not burned get converted to fat. Let’s take a look at the three main types of calorie burn that happen throughout your day.
Calorie burn #1. The majority of the calorie burn comes from your basal or resting metabolism, which means you burn calories while you’re doing absolutely nothing at all. Yes, 60 to 80 percent of your daily calories are burned up by just doing nothing. Whether it’s watching TV, sitting in a meeting at work, or sleeping, you are continuing to burn calories. The reason is that your body is always in a constant state of motion. Your heart is beating, blood is pumping through your veins, and your lungs are breathing. This is another reason I say that exercise is not that important to losing weight. Exercise is important for cardio health, but the calories you burn from exercise don’t account for the majority of caloric burn happening throughout the day while doing absolutely nothing (your basal metabolism). The calories you burn during your one hour at the gym are relatively insignificant compared to all the calories you burn during the other twenty-three hours in the day. It’s more productive to focus on naturally increasing the rate of your resting metabolism—i.e., your caloric burn throughout the day.
Calorie burn #2. The effect of simply eating and digesting your food accounts for about 10 to 15 percent of the calories you burn each day. Studies have shown that during the eating process, your metabolism increases by as much as 30 percent, and this effect lasts up to three hours after you have finished eating. How much caloric burn occurs depends on the type of food you eat. More caloric burn is used to digest protein (25 calories burned for every 100 calories consumed) than to digest fats and carbohydrates (about 10 to 15 calories burned for every 100 calories consumed). That’s why the DHEMM System calls for an appropriate amount of lean, healthy protein.
Calorie burn #3. About 10 to 15 percent of your calorie burn comes from increasing your heart rate, strengthening your muscles, or physical activity, even light physical activity, such as walking up the stairs. In the DHEMM System, we will discuss ways to “get moving” so that you become more physically active throughout each day even if you don’t go to the gym or work out.
One of the greatest myths about weight loss is that for some people, it is harder to lose weight because they have a genetically slow metabolism. But scientific research shows that this is simply not true. Your metabolic rate is not fixed for life, and, in fact, it can and will change throughout your lifetime.
Yo-yo dieting will alter your metabolism for the worse and make it more difficult to lose weight in the long term. Some of you who are constantly on diets have probably begun to slow your metabolism unknowingly. Here’s how this has happened: When someone goes on a diet, the body notices that it is not getting as much food as it used to or as it needs to, so in order to conserve energy, the body slows its metabolic rate. It also begins storing fat reserves to ensure that it will have enough energy throughout the day.
Another problem with endless dieting is that you begin to lose lean muscle mass, which controls your metabolic rate and helps you burn body fat. When the body isn’t getting enough food from the diet, it must conserve energy, so the body begins to “eat itself” to get the extra energy it needs. Thus, in addition to slowing your metabolism, you also may be actually losing muscle mass.
Instead of dieting and eating less, you actually want to eat more when you’re hungry, which for most people is every three to four hours. Eating every three to four hours signals your body that you have plenty of food and energy to fuel the body throughout the day, causing the body to speed up metabolism to allow the energy to be used most efficiently.
Your metabolism will naturally slow as you age. It’s true! Your metabolism does slow down with age. Starting at about age twenty-five, the average person’s metabolism declines between 5 and 10 percent per decade. So you will have to work harder and be more deliberate about speeding up your metabolism as you age.
If you’re like me and over forty, you probably have blamed your weight gain on your slow or sluggish metabolism. Well, you are correct because as you age, your metabolism tends to slow down. Thus, if your resting metabolic rate is, say, 1,200 calories per day at age forty, it will be around 1,140 at age fifty. So after forty, you may have to make dietary or lifestyle changes just to maintain your current weight.
Compounding things is the reality that, as we age, life gets more hectic and fast-paced, especially if we work or have children or aging parents. This causes us to eat on the run, which means eating fast foods or less healthy foods because that’s all we have time for.
As I said earlier, you definitely have the ability to speed up or slow down your metabolism. Because everyone’s body is different, some of the methods to speed up your metabolism will work extremely well, while others not so well. I know for me, drinking green tea gives me a very noticeable boost in my metabolism because I not only burn fat, I also notice less cellulite as well. Pay close attention to your body and how it responds to each metabolism booster. You will want to incorporate as many metabolism boosters as you can, but it’s best to not try them all at the same time so that you can figure out which ones are working well and which ones not so well. Then you can continue with the most effective methods on a consistent, regular basis.
Here are twelve easy ways to boost your metabolism to burn more calories:
1. Just stand up. A study by University of Missouri researchers discovered that inactivity (four hours or more) causes a near shutdown of an enzyme that metabolizes fat and cholesterol. This causes you to store more fat as opposed to the body burning fat. If you are going to be sitting for long periods of time, be sure to stand up once in a while and, if possible, simply walk around the room.
2. Eat breakfast. Have a hearty breakfast to rev up your metabolism for the day. Eating a high-protein breakfast wakes up your liver and kicks your metabolism into gear. A high-protein breakfast can increase your metabolic rate by 30 percent for up to twelve hours, which is the calorie-burning equivalent of a three- to five-mile jog. It is important to feed your body every three to four hours and not skip any meals. You especially don’t want to skip breakfast. When you skip breakfast, it means your body goes without fuel for about fifteen hours, including the overnight hours. This causes it to automatically store fat over the next twenty-four hours because it thinks it’s in starvation mode or a deprived state.
3. Eat more frequently. The goal is to not let more than four hours pass without a meal or snack. Yes, ironically, it is important to eat to lose weight! The number of times you eat is important to keep your metabolism revved up. Every time you eat, you have to burn calories to digest your food, so eating increases your metabolic rate. When more than five hours pass without eating, your body automatically lowers its metabolic rate. In contrast, by eating meals and snacks throughout the day, your body stays at a steady metabolic burn rate that helps you burn calories and fat all day. Remember, we are eating every three or four hours because eating less will slow your metabolism. It sends a signal to your body that it is starving and deprived, causing the body to respond by slowing the metabolic rate and holding on to existing fat reserves in the body. So, eat more. Yes, you can do that!
4. Don’t eat right before going to bed. Eating before bed is a guaranteed way to slow your metabolism and gain weight. The easy solution is to eat dinner and give yourself at least two to three hours after you eat before you go to sleep. You may even want to eat more lightly at dinner and the heaviest at breakfast. Getting more of your energy from your food earlier in the day helps you lose and maintain weight loss because your body can burn fat throughout the entire day. The fat-burning systems in the body slow, rest, and repair at night while you’re sleeping.
5. Get as much sleep as you need. One of my favorite ways to boost my metabolism is to get a full eight hours of sleep. When you don’t get enough sleep, your energy is low throughout the day. When the body feels tired from a lack of sleep, it seeks to increase energy by consuming food, causing you to crave more sugar, salt, and fats. In late 2004, for example, researchers showed a strong connection between sleep and the ability to lose weight; the more one sleeps, the better the body can regulate the chemicals that control hunger and appetite. One of these hormones is leptin, which is responsible for telling your brain that you are full. When functioning normally, it induces fat burning and reduces fat storage.
6. Get rid of toxins. Toxins can affect your ability to lose weight by slowing down your metabolism and decreasing your ability to burn fat. As toxins circulate in the body, namely the blood, it slows down your resting metabolic rate. In a study in 1971, the University of Nevada’s Division of Biochemistry determined that chemical toxins weakened a special coenzyme that the body needs to burn fat by 20 percent. Toxins (pesticides, food additives, herbicides) interfere with the body’s fat-burning process and make it harder to lose fat.
7. Drink more cold water. German researchers found that if you drink six cups of cold water a day, it can raise resting metabolism by about 50 calories daily, which in a year can help you to shed about five pounds. This is because it takes more work for the body to heat the water to your body temperature. This is a small thing that can help you lose weight with very little effort. The German researchers also suggest that for up to 90 minutes after drinking cold water, you will keep your metabolism boosted by as much as 24 percent over your average metabolic rate.
8. Drink caffeinated coffee or tea. Caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant and can speed up your metabolism by 5 to 8 percent, which helps to burn about 100 to 175 calories a day. This does not mean you should overdo it and drink several cups of coffee. Having one cup of coffee is sufficient, but too many cups of coffee can have adverse side effects. Additionally, green tea, my favorite metabolism booster, is found to provide many health benefits to the body.
9. Build lean muscle. As you get older, you will want to maintain as much muscle mass as possible. If you lose muscle mass, your metabolic rate will begin to slow, and you’ll burn fewer calories. In fact, one pound of fat burns about two calories a day to maintain itself, whereas one pound of lean muscle mass burns thirty to fifty calories a day to maintain itself. So just by maintaining more muscle mass, you will burn more calories throughout the day and keep your metabolism revved up. Putting on just five to ten pounds of lean muscle mass will speed up your resting metabolism so you will burn more calories even when you’re resting.
10. Eat more fiber. Research shows that fiber can increase your fat burning by as much as 30 percent. Aim for about 30 grams per day, through either fiber-rich foods or fiber supplements. In fact, there’s even a diet whose focus is solely on increasing daily fiber intake as a method to lose weight.
11. Get moving. Physical activity of any kind speeds up metabolism, and aerobic exercise gives it a significant boost. Also, the higher the intensity of the aerobic exercise, the more it will help your metabolism remain elevated for an extended period of time, so that you continue to burn calories even after you have stopped exercising. In Chapter 12, I discuss ways to “get moving” even if you don’t go to the gym.
12. Spice it up. One study showed that hot or spicy peppers (chili or cayenne peppers) caused a temporary metabolism boost of about 23 percent. Some people have even purchased cayenne pepper capsules to supplement spicy pepper into their diet daily just to boost their metabolism.
Certain foods are especially effective in speeding up metabolism. They do so in one of three ways: by helping to maintain hormonal balance; by reducing insulin levels, which control fat storage; and by increasing muscle mass (via protein), as muscle burns more calories than fat. These “magic” foods include:
• Whey or rice protein powder. Whey protein, which comes from cow’s milk, is a complete high-quality protein that speeds up metabolism. If you are a vegetarian, you can use rice protein to accomplish the same thing.
• Nuts and seeds. Nuts and seeds provide healthy fats that raise the body’s metabolism.
• Green tea. Studies have shown that green tea is one of the best metabolism boosters you can drink.
• Beans. Beans are loaded with fiber, which helps you feel full longer, preventing cravings and binges.
• Berries. Berries are packed with antioxidants and keep your metabolism going strong. Eat them fresh or frozen.
• Cayenne pepper. Cayenne pepper is known as a fat burner because it fires up your metabolism. It heats up the body, and the body burns calories when it cools itself down.
• Green smoothies. A blend of green leafy vegetables, fruits, and water.
• Vegetables. Vegetables contain fiber, vitamins, and many essential nutrients that help keep metabolism elevated.
• Whole grain cereals. Cereals such as oatmeal boost the metabolism by keeping insulin levels low after you eat. If you secrete too much insulin, it results in the storage of body fat, which slows down your metabolism.
• Lean beef, pork, chicken, and turkey. These are all good sources of lean protein. The more protein you eat, the harder your body has to work to digest it, resulting in more calories burned during the eating process.
• Salmon, tuna, and sardines. These fish contain omega-3 fatty acids. French researchers found that men who replaced 6 grams of fat in their diets with 6 grams of fish oil (omega-3 fatty acids) were able to boost their metabolisms and lose an average of two pounds in just twelve weeks. Wild Pacific salmon, in particular, is loaded with omega-3 fats and is a very healthy fish.
Once you begin to boost your metabolism, the weight will come off and stay off permanently. Not only that, but your health will improve as well. You can learn how your body works and how to speed up your metabolism so you burn more calories and fat throughout each day. You’ll learn how to get energy from your foods to sustain you all day and keep your metabolism revved up. Weight-related health problems will diminish and, in some cases, even disappear.