Tips to Take Care of Your Metabolism

Follow these tips to take care of your metabolism

Certain lifestyle mistakes tend to slow down your metabolism, so it is very important to keep a check on these mistakes that we make.

• Eating Fewer Calories: It can slow down our metabolism. So try to create a calorie deficit and not eat too fewer calories as our body senses that and lowers the rate at which it burns calories. So when trying to lose weight by calorie restriction, don’t restrict too many calories for too long because it will slow down our metabolism.

• Protein Intake: Protein helps to keep you full for longer and is beneficial in weight loss as high protein intake increases the metabolic rate even more than fats or carbs. Therefore, helps to preserve the metabolic rate during weight loss.

• Sedentary Lifestyle: It decreases the number of calories one can burn in a day, and being inactive slows down our metabolism. So it is very important to increase one’s activity levels and minimise the sitting time.

• Sleep Quality: Sleep is very important for good health, and if one does not get enough sleep, it may increase the risk of diabetes, depression, heart diseases, etc. Lack of sleep decreases the metabolic rate of our body. Therefore getting a high quality sleep at night is very important to help preserve the metabolic rate.

• Sugar: High sugar drinks especially, the ones containing fructose have many negative effects on our health. It promotes fat storage and slows down your metabolism.

Keep a focus on your lifestyle and avoid engaging in behaviours that tend to slow down your metabolism as it may lead to health problems. Some of the foods that you can add in your diet to boost your metabolism are:

Foods high in iron, zinc and selenium: All these three minerals are required for the proper functioning of our thyroid gland, as these are responsible for regulating our metabolism. A diet low in these minerals slows down our metabolism as it reduces the ability of the thyroid gland to produce sufficient amount of hormones.

• Coffee: It helps to increase the metabolic rate and also burn body fat for energy.

• Tea: The catechins that are found in green tea help to burn fat and increase metabolism. Catechins and caffeine help to increase the fat-burning ability of our body.

• Spices: Cayenne pepper and ginger have fat-burning effects, and they help to increase the metabolism upon their consumption.

• Cacao: It helps to stimulate the use of fat stores for energy, and also helps to prevent absorption of extra calories, thus providing with metabolism-boosting effects.

• Coconut oil: It is high in MCT i.e. medium-chain triglycerides that do not get stored as fat as they directly go to the liver where they are turned into energy. MCTs, help to increase the metabolic rate of the body.

• Water: It helps to stay hydrated and helps to boost the metabolism upon its consumption.