5 easy ways to increase metabolism

1. Eat Plenty of Protein at Every Meal

Intake of protein can increase your metabolic rate.

Thermic effect of food (TEF) is the extra calories required to digest, absorb and process the nutrients in your meal.

Protein will trigger the largest rise in TEF. It increases your metabolism by 10–25%, as compared to 8% for carbohydrates and 0–3% for fat intake.

Eating protein also makes you feel more full which prevents you from binging.

It has been observed that people were likely to eat about 400 lesser calories in a day when protein makes up 30% of their food intake.

Having more protein intake also increases the growth of lean muscle mass, which directly increase metabolism as well.

2. Drink More Cold Water

People who consume plain water instead of sugary drinks will find losing weight easier.

As sugary drinks contain high calories, substituting them with water naturally reduces your daily calorie intake.

Also, drinking water can speed up your metabolism too.

There have been studies which have shown that the consumption of 17 oz (0.5 liters) of water can raise resting metabolism by 25% for about one hour.

This calorie-burning effect is similar to Themic effect of food and can be even better if you drink cold water, as your body will need to use energy to heat the water up to body temperature

If you drink about 0.5L of water before a meal, it can help you feel full and hence eat lesser.

An experiement on overweight adults found that those who drank 0.5 litre of water before taking their meals lost 44% more weight than those who did not.

3. Do a High-Intensity Workout

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) consist of quick and extremely intensed bursts of physical activities.

It is meant to burn more fat by increasing your metabolism, even you are done with your workout.

Overweight young men found that 12 weeks of HIIT training reduced their fat mass up to 17%.

4. Lift Heavy Things

As lean muscle is metabolically more active than fat, building up on muscle mass can help increase your metabolic rate.

With more muscle mass, you can burn more calories even while resting.

Weight lifting will trigger the growth in lean muscle mass, thus help you retain muscle and prevent the drop in metabolism that can happen during weight loss.

5. Drink Green Tea or Oolong Tea

Green tea and oolong tea have been proven to increase metabolic rate by about  4–5%

These teas can break down some fat stored in your body into free fatty acids, that helps fat burning during exercise.

Teas are naturally minimal in calorie, and they can also lower cholesterol in your body.