If you are overweight right now it’s because of one thing…
You gave your body more energy than your metabolism needed.
Your metabolism is your body’s engine; it needs energy to keep on running but most of the time it has energy to spare. These finally get dumped into places like your belly or your thighs.
Although there are ways to increase metabolism, it’s not easy because your metabolism is a moving target.
It seems to make sense to try starve yourself; unfortunately your metabolism reacts to this and lowers its energy requirements to ridiculous low levels. I’m sure some of you have experienced the massive disappointment after going on a starvation diet and finding that you put on more weight than you started with.
Another way people have tried to boost metabolism is through exercise, unfortunately this doesn’t work for normal exercise either as it only attacks about 20% of the metabolism and it only lasts for as long as the exercise does.
What you need is a weight loss program that caters for both of these problems.
Firstly you need an exercise routine that targets a bigger portion of your metabolism, creating a much bigger furnace to burn your fat in. You also need this exercise program to keep the furnace burning high for longer.
Your nutrition program has the difficult task though, it has the tricky job of balancing your fat loss and keeping your metabolism happy, making sure that the body doesn’t get enough energy through food so it has to turn to its fat store while at the same time making sure your metabolism doesn’t panic and lower its requirements.
To jump start your metabolism you need to consider what it consists of. Your metabolism is influenced by three things - Exercise, digestion and energy used in normal body functions.
Exercise and digestion make up about 30% of the metabolism, 70% of your requirements come from running normal body functions.
Increasing your metabolism from exercise is pretty self explanatory. Exercise uses up energy and raises your metabolic requirements.
Increasing your metabolism by digestion relates to how your combine your food and when you eat it. This is called the thermic affect of food and your body burns up more energy digesting. This will be dealt with in great detail later in the program.
Lastly your normal body functions - this is called RMR or resting metabolic rate. It’s the lowest amount of energy that your body requires to keep itself running excluding things like exercise and eating.
It is by far the biggest requirement of energy so we target this area especially. Your RMR can be influenced it by HIIT. This training taps energy from your muscles called glycogen. Your body spends hours replacing this and needs energy to do this, so your RMR is raised from 24 to 40 hours after your training.
It’s also very important with nutrition. Not only will we be incuding foods that speed metabolism you also need to watch the amount you eat. Research has discovered that if your daily intake of calories is close to your RMR, your body keeps it metabolism high. That’s why this week’s nutritional goal is to find out what your estimated RMR is and start consuming meals at around that calorie value.
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