Increasing RMR
The safest path on road to physical fitness is through metabolism. With a simple change in our lifestyle, we can improve our health significantly and obtain the fitness level that we always desired.
- Eat Healthy
When we sleep, our metabolism slows down and takes its normal pace when followed by next meal. Do not skip any of your meals, especially breakfast. We need to have a high-fiber and high carbohydrate breakfast because it gets absorbed slowly and hence we won’t feel hungry easily, thereby it helps avoid overeating during rest of the meals. Eat 6 small meals equally divided over the day instead of having 3 heavy meals after long intervals. Add more protein for lunch and dinner.
Eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, skinless poultry, fish and meat. Have at least six mini meals including snacks throughout the day. Try to have a very light dinner that too two hours before sleep. Also avoid midnight snacks as the same is not followed by any physical exercise.
- Exercise Regularly
The best way to increase RMR is to exercise. Exercise helps in burning excess fat and in gaining lean muscle. Apart from exercise, controlling our eating habits also affect metabolic rate. If we eat too little, our metabolism will slow down. On the other hand, over eating will force our body to store the excess calories as body fat resulting in elevating our metabolic rate.
Being fit and healthy doesn’t mean maintaining an hour glass figure or six-pack abs. It means losing those extra calories and staying lean. There is a difference between staying thin or staying lean.
Exercise helps in triggering the release of natural metabolism boosters. A regular exercise program of at least 30 minutes a day, helps keeping those extra pounds off. Indulge into basic sports like biking, skating, swimming, dancing, playing tennis to exercise yourself. Calorie expenditure increases on exercising. The amount of post-exercise elevation of energy expenditure depends primarily on how hard you exercise and how long you exercise. Exercise is a possible means to increase resting energy expenditure, which could offset age-related metabolic declines and facilitate weight management.
- Increase Intake of Vitamin Supplements
Adding vitamin B12 supplements in your diet will boost your energy levels and will help you overcome fatigue by ensuring appropriate functioning of red blood cells.
- Don't be very tough with your diet plans
Cutting down on calories suddenly and strictly results in body storing extra pounds. The body’s survival mechanism gets triggered and metabolism slows down, thereby storing in higher amounts of fat. As the survival mechanism is triggered, the levels of insulin, thyroid, catecholamines and leptin (hormones required in metabolism) drops down resulting in slowing of metabolic process and decrease in RMR.
- Rest
An eight hours sleep is recommended to provide complete relaxation to the body. It also helps in triggering the release of cortisol, which is an appetite- regulating hormone, which helps in regulating the satisfaction level of individual while eating. Absence of this hormone might result in overeating and weight gain as the individual might not realize that his eating capacity has reached the threshold.
- Avoid alcohol
Alcohol slows down the metabolic process of the body which might result in storage of extra fat, specially the sugar present in the alcohol gets converted to fat.
- Spices
Have little spices in your food as spices increase our resting metabolic rate by releasing stress hormones like adrenaline, which makes one feel stuffed and full earlier than our stomach actually is. As a result we end up eating less than what we require, but feel more contented.
- Drink Water
Metabolism requires water and the more water we drink, the faster would be our metabolic process and higher would be our metabolic rate. Therefore, we need to drink at least eight glasses water a day.
- Get your body more lean
The contribution of muscle mass to metabolic rate is almost 20% which is a considerable amount of the overall energy expenditure. Therefore we need to add lot of strength training modules in our exercise regimen to build up lean mass.
