1. Increase Your Muscle Mass – Muscle burns fat. Exercise increases and tones muscles and therefore raises your metabolic rate. When you work out on a regular basis, you burn more calories all the time…not just when you’re working out. When you build muscle, you’re building a highly metabolic tissue that burns five times more calories than most other body tissues, pound for pound. The addition of ten pounds of muscle will burn approximately 500 extra calories per day…which can add up to 52 pounds a year! To increase muscle you must do some kind of weight lifting, strength or resistance program. All it takes to add ten pounds of muscle is a regular weight training program, 30-40 minutes, three times a week, for about six months. Then you’ll be burning more calories even when you’re sleeping!!
2. Increase Your Aerobic Exercise – Aerobic exercise trains muscles to burn fat and increase your metabolic rate, but this means you need to be taking in more oxygen without being winded or out of breath. The type of exercise necessary is non-stop and fairly gentle such as bicycling, rowing, walking, elliptical, etc.
3. Add Higher Intensity Burst to Your Exercise Plan – An example of a high intensity burst would be to cycle harder for a minute, or do a one minutes sprints in the middle of your walking. This will help you burn fat by raising the level of exertion for a short burst of “getting winded”, and then making yourself recover under stress. This means, as you recover, you’re still working out. You don’t just stop walking or cycling altogether. Forcing your body to recover under stress helps burn fat faster.
4. Eat Often – Cutting calories to less than 1,200 if you’re a woman or 1,500 if you’re a man, does not provide enough food to be satisfying in the long run. Eating less than these amounts will slow your metabolism and make it difficult for your body to get the necessary amounts of nutrients. Many people when dieting tend to skip meals. As research has repeatedly pointed out, the worst meal of the day to skip is breakfast. The reason is because you’ve already had a long stretch of time without eating (while you were sleeping) and to go much longer will put your body in a state of mild starvation. This means that your body starts to use up the muscle instead of the fat, because it wants to store the fat for a time when it is desperate. In other words, the more meals you skip, the more fat you will gain when it comes time to eat again. Eating every 3 hours or so is an ideal approach to keeping your metabolism fire stoked.
5. DRINK WATER – You’ve heard it over and over again but maybe you’ve never known why you need to drink so much water. Well, here it is. Water is a natural appetite suppressant. A good tip would be to drink a large glass of water 15-20 minutes before each meal or snack. The liver’s main functions are to detoxify and regulate metabolism. The kidneys can also get rid of toxins if they have enough water. Drinking enough water daily (8 cups plus more if you’re exercising) allows the kidneys to spare the liver some of its purifying efforts, which allows it to metabolize more fat. In addition, adequate water will decrease bloating and edema caused by fluid accumulation, by flushing out sodium, acidic wastes and other toxins. SO, if you do ONE thing differently EVERYDAY…DRINK MORE WATER!! It’s an easy solution and a great way to start off your healthy lifestyle routine.
