St. Petersburg weight loss

“As I get older, my metabolism keeps getting slower!!”

“Man – I used to be able to eat anything.. now I can’t even get away with a bite of cake!”

Sound familiar?  As we age, it is crucial to keep our metabolism at a good rate.  The rate of your metabolism depends on the amount of calories you eat, calories burned exercising, and your genetic make-up. Age does seem to cause a slowdown in metabolism.. BUT I have good news!

Regular exercise can thwart this slowdown.

In fact – here are 7 different ways to boost your metabolism.

1. Build Lean Muscle

Lean muscle mass burns more calories than fat while the body is at rest. When you strength train, your body breaks down muscle tissue to repair it even stronger.  This can rev up your metabolism for up to 72 hours.

2. Afterburn Effect

You can actually TORCH calories and spike up your metabolism after an intense metabolic workout.  Here’s how: increase the intensity (try interval training), add weights, and push yourself!  I wrote a blog post JUST on this topic.. you can read it HERE.

3. Interval Training

Interval training, where you mix up high intensity with easy effort moves, stimulates fat-burning in the body. Interval training boosts endurance, burns more calories, and causes you to work harder without spending a lot of time at the high intensity.  A type of interval training that is trending in the top gyms and one of our boot camp favorites is called tabatas.  Here’s how to do it: 20 seconds of exercise (HARD!), 10 seconds of rest, 20 seconds of exercise (HARD!) for 4 minutes.  Give it a try with jump squats! :)

4. Sleep

Sleeping less than 7 hours each night can cause leptin and ghrelin levels, the hormones that regulate energy and appetite, to become imbalanced. Lack of sleep can also decrease the amount of calories your body burns while at rest. Losing just 2 hours of sleep a night can increase the stress hormone cortisol by 50%!! Cortisol triggers your appetite, causing you to eat more. Yikes!

5. Eat Often and Eat Well

Eating a good breakfast is your first chance of the day to kick start your body’s St. Petersburg weight loss efforts. Skipping breakfast, or any meal, will cause your body to go into starvation mode and your metabolism will slow down to conserve energy. Following a good breakfast, eat every 3-4 hours throughout the day. Every time you eat, you give a little bump to your metabolism keeping it running smoothly throughout the day.

6. Protein

Eating protein helps build and maintain lean muscle mass. Even while the body is at rest, muscle burns more calories than fat. Also, your body burns twice as many calories by digesting proteins than it does when digesting carbs and fats.

7. Fish Oil

Fish oil contains the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA. In an issue in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a study showed that taking fish oil resulted in a reduction of body fat.  The study showed that this effect is amped even more when coupled with exercise!

 

Know of another way to boost your metabolism?  Put it in the comments section below.  Don’t forget to ‘Like’ this post if you learned something new! :)