The Biggest Diet Mistakes That Kill Your Metabolism (Burn Calories Insanely)
- Learn how to increase your metabolism. If you are struggling to lose weight or tend to gain weight easily, you may have a slow metabolism. This means that when you burn calories you burn them at a slower rate.
- Learn about common diet mistakes that slow down your metabolism and how to avoid them, for example, stop cutting calories and enjoy your food. Following these tips will ensure that you burn 100 extra calories while staying completely healthy and satisfied.
Some people get fat on a salad diet, whereas other people can eat all day long and still be skinny. How is this possible? It is not your genes. It is metabolism. Your metabolism is in charge of how much energy you burn and how much fat you store.
In this article, we will be looking at the biggest mistakes that result in a slow metabolism and what encourages your body to burn calories.
What Slows Your Metabolism
- Chronic Dieting: If you are constantly eating a low-calorie diet your metabolism slows because your body is programmed to store fat to use as energy during lean times when food is scarce. Very low-calorie diets and fad diets are dangerous as they can lead to nutritional deficiencies and weak bones over time among other things.
- Poor Sleep Quality: When you do not get enough sleep this messes up your hunger hormones. You will be secreting more ghrelin which lets your brain know that you are hungry and less leptin which lets your body know that you are full. You will also have more stress hormones being released.
- Stress: Stress is natural and is there to protect you, but if you are constantly stressed you can develop chronic stress. This leads to hormone imbalances and inflammation. Poorly managing your stress by eating junk or drinking too much alcohol also contributes to inflammation and the formation of belly fat.
- Inflammation: Chronic inflammation causes your body to store belly fat, your metabolism to become sluggish, and can lead to insulin resistance. Inflammation is caused by chronic stress, environmental toxins, food sensitivities, eating many hard to digest foods, too much meat, alcohol, coffee, dairy, and processed foods.
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- A Sedentary Lifestyle: When you sit all day and especially if you never exercise, your metabolism slows down. The less muscle you have, the less energy your body will burn. Your body won’t work as well as it should and stores extra fat. While eating healthily is important, exercise has amazing benefits.
- Exercising Too Much: Like with everything in life, too much exercise does more harm than good. It leads to inflammation, exhaustion, and you may be burning more calories than your body needs to live healthily. Whenever insufficient calories are being consumed, your body will slow down your metabolism in a bid to survive.
How To Increase Your Metabolism And Avoid Diet Mistakes
1. Feed Your Body What it Needs
In the past when people wanted to lose weight they were told to cut fat and to eat less. While making sure that you do not overeat is important, simply switching to a healthier diet is already enough for most people to lose weight and to see an improvement in the speed of their metabolism.
Giving your body what it needs boosts its metabolism and makes you more energetic. To give you an idea, for every pound of muscle that you put on, you need to eat about 50 calories more. If you are exercising regularly and not seeing any benefits, make sure that you are not under-eating.
You do not need to lower your fat intake, in fact, going on a high-fat low carb diet is actually beneficial because it encourages your body to burn fat. You can still lose weight while eating full-fat foods that are delicious and healthy. Fat is not the enemy.
Even saturated fat is healthy but get it by eating grass-fed meat and raw dairy. Make sure that you also increase your omega 3 intake by including flax, chia, and hemp seeds in your diet as well as fatty fish like wild salmon and sardines. Your carbs will come mainly from vegetables.
Eat 3 cups of vegetables per day making sure that one of them is cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower), one of them is sulfuric vegetables (onion, kale), and that one is colorful vegetables (tomato, carrot). If you add chilis to your diet, they can also help you to burn calories and boost your metabolism. Check out these common nutrient deficiencies and learn the truth about supplements.
2. Lower Inflammation
Inflammation, the root of all illnesses, can cause weight gain and be worsened by obesity. In addition to the tips mentioned above, cut out processed foods and sugar. Stay well hydrated by drinking water to minimize toxins and make sure that 80% of your plate is filled with veggies. Vegetables promote alkalinity. Juicing is a great way to increase your vegetable intake.
Cut out or limit alcohol and soft-drinks which are highly acidic. Eat meat in moderation and consider lowering your intake or cutting out grains, especially wheat. Check out these articles for more information on how to eat to reduce inflammation. Keep your stress levels low by meditating, practicing gratitude, doing things that you enjoy, and taking walks in nature.
3. Improve Your Gut Health
The health of your gut plays a massive role in your overall health and the speed of your metabolism, not just whether you have digestive distress or not. Studies have found that obese individuals have different gut bacteria ratios than lean people.
Be sure to include probiotic foods in your diet as they contain good bacteria that your body needs:
- Kefir
- Sauerkraut
- Miso
- Tempeh
- Kombucha
- Raw yogurt
The fiber from your veggies will also help to feed these good bacteria strains so that they can fight off the bad bacteria.
4. Drink Green Tea
Green tea has a fat burning effect not just due to its caffeine content but also a type of antioxidant known as epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). Drink it with lemon to boost the absorption and use of EGCG a few times a day and especially before workouts. Up to 4 cups a day is safe, but avoid it after 4 pm because of the caffeine content.
Coffee also makes a good pre-workout drink but make sure that you choose the right kind.
5. Improve Your Sleep Quality
Getting enough good-quality sleep is one of the best things you can do for yourself along with keeping your stress levels low, improving your diet and getting enough exercise. Sleep helps to balance your hormones, lower stress, and inflammation gives you energy, helps you to think clearly, and strengthens your immune system.
Here’s how to improve your sleep quality:
- Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, even on the weekends.
- Sleep in a pitch dark room or use a sleep mask.
- Keep your bedroom at a comfortable temperature.
- Stay away from the computer, TV, and your cellphone at least an hour or 2 before bedtime.
- Don’t drink alcohol or eat within 3 hours of sleep.
- Drinking kava or chamomile tea before bed can help.
- Avoid caffeine after 4 pm or earlier.
6. HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training)- A Metabolism Booster
HIIT is easy to fit into your schedule because you can do it in a minimum of 10 minutes. Up to 30 minutes 3 times a week is beneficial, more than that can cause over exercising because of how intense it is.
It uses both the anaerobic and aerobic energy system meaning that you burn fat and calories and what’s more is that it causes the afterburn effect (meaning you continue to have an increased calorie expenditure for another few hours or even a day or two post workout) which is also caused by other intense types of exercise such as resistance training.
All types of exercise benefit your metabolism, but resistance workouts and HIIT are more beneficial than steady state cardio due to the afterburn effect.
Be sure to eat a high protein workout snack within a half an hour of eating. Whey protein is perfect for this.
7. Defy Age
If you find that your metabolism has slowed down to due to age it is due to a drop in the production of human growth hormone (HGH) levels. Everyone after the age of 21 produces less, and after the age of 30 the somatopause starts setting in meaning you produce hardly any at all. This is the cause of aging and a slower metabolism.
You can raise your HGH levels naturally. HIIT is the only type of exercise that does this. Intermittent fasting also plays a big role. You can do intermittent fasting simply by skipping either lunch or breakfast. Taking a collagen supplement before bed can also help.
There you have it. If you are struggling with losing the last bit of belly fat, check out this article. You can get a flat stomach even on an Indian diet. If you would like more tips on weight loss or curing lifestyle diseases, check out my YouTube channel.
