I have heard that eating more meals a day in less portions (e.g. take your normal daily intake and divide throughout the day for ~5-6 meals) will greatly increase your metabolism. However I have not heard in detail how to accomplish this.
Putting aside a normal healthy diet, are there specific foods that would increase it even further or perhaps decrease it?
What other ways are there to increase ones metabolism?
I have heard that increasing your muscle mass increases your metabolism, but I’m sure someone with more knowledge than me will give you a better explanation!
Put on muscle, basically. The amount of calories necessary to maintain mucsle, even at rest, is greater than to maintain fat. Of course, rest too much and the muscle atrophies away.
I have also heard this many times along with the converse that not eating enough calries will cause metabolsim to slow.
But I’m not sure that this might not be an old husband’s tale. For one thing it doesn’t match with my own personal experiences which are that the less I eat the faster I lose weight - not just muscle but definately also blubber from around my middle. Also the amount of exercise I do (which is supposed to increase metabolic rate) does not seem to have any effect on the amount of blubber I lose.Secondly (and more importantly), despite searching for them I have never been able to find any reputable scientific studies that support the claims about calorie intake and metabolic slowdown.
Of course these are just my experiences, and I could be some sort of bizarre exception to the general rule.
I wouldn’t say it greatly increases your metabolism, but it does help some. The “thermal effect of food” is the amount of calories used to burn the food you eat. You can look at each meal as kind of a mini workout. Each time you eat, like when you excircise, your metabolism is slightly raised(although not nearly as much, not even in the same ballpark). Say I just ran up ten flights of stairs, walked 10 miles, or ate a meal. Obviously I’m burning more calories(metabolism) when I am exercising, but my increased metabolism doesn’t just go back to normal the second I stop. It gradually falls back to my Basal Metabolic Rate(BMR). The longer and/or harder you excercise, the longer it takes to fall back down to the BMR.
Say you eat one 2000 kcal meal in a day. You have one big(relatively speaking) jump in your metabolism and it slowly falls back to BMR but after a few hours(SWAG) or so it goes back to BMR.
Now say you eat five 400 kcal meals evenly spaced throughout the day. You would have a little spikes in you metabolism but you would eat your next meal before your metabolism dropped back to BMR. So if you imagine a time map, you would start at BMR and have five small peaks with the vallies(?sp) approaching, but never reaching BMR until you went to sleep. Then you break the fast the next morning and start again.
Stimulants also raise your metabolism. According to an old nutrition professor of mine, the average smoker’s metabolism is raised by about ten percent(which is a cause of smoking cessation). Caffine works also but you adust to it pretty quickly. Crack also works, but it has the added advantage of not having any money left over to buy food.
Muscle is a functioning organ, fat is just a storage depot, so having more muscle would make you burn more calories at rest. It also makes you burn more calories because you constantly have to exercise to keep it.
Actually, anything that increases your weight would, all else being equal, make you burn more calories. In the case of muscle, it takes energy to upkeep them, and in the case of fat, it takes more energy to walk around. But what often happens in real life that the more fat people gain, the more sedentary they become, so they gain more fat, and become more sedentary, etc. Most people will eventually reach an equilibrium though. This is how (normal healthy) people become morbily obease. They just never reach their equilibrium.
Oh, as far as specific foods with higher thermal effects I’m really not sure. I would guess foods high in fiber just because they would work out the muscles involved in peristalisis. I doubt that this would add up to any significant amount of calories, but there are alot of added bonuses to eating high fiber foods: slower and steadier absorption of nutrients(including sugar which helps with maintaing steady blood sugars and as a result, cravings), stay fuller longer, less risk of hemmoroids, and less room in your stomach for other high calore foods.
A cousin MD of mine told me once that the nutrient most connected to obesity is fiber. Populations who eat more of it have lower obesity rates. He didn’t cite a study but it makes sense to me. The AHA and ADA both recommend 20-35g of fiber a day? I would guess that the average American gets 5-10. Count how much fiber you get a day. It’s pretty depressing.
Thanks for all the replies everyone. I guess sometime soon I will integrate some type of work out schedule at the gym next to work. The only bad thing is it is a extremely busy gym and most busy during lunch hours. Right now I just walk/run 3miles during lunch. Least I can do when I sit down at work for 8-15hrs a day and more at night at home.
Besides muscle mass, there’s the issue of ambient temperature. If you spend most of your time at or below 65 degrees F, you develop brown fat instead of white fat. Once that happens, you’ll have a higher metabolic rate.
Now, how much are you willing to suffer to burn calories faster? I’d rather work out than be cold. That’s my opinion.
Walking/running is a good start, you need to build an aerobic base, but it’s not going to add much muscle mass. You can work in some strength training right now that doesn’t require a gym. There are many exercises, like lunges and push-ups and such, that don’t need equipment and can be done anywhere.
Caffeine! The coffee (stimulant) and cigarettes (appetite suppressant) diet is tried and tested.
I must add that there are presribtion diet pills that doctors will give to very obese individuals in order for them to get enough energy to start an exercise program or lose enough fat in order to do a life saving operation. Very addictive and long term use has dangerous side effects.
haha I can’t get it that cold where I live unless I go to some restraint with a large freezer.