Metabolism is the process by which your body converts what you eat and drink into energy. Having a fast metabolism allows the body to burn a higher number of calories allowing for more readily available energy. While having a slower metabolism will mean more consumed energy will be likely stored as fats.
There are numerous myths in the fitness industry surrounding speeding up your metabolism, these include doing more cardio or taking supplements to boost your metabolism, or using a certain diet fad to boost it. These will not work. The research surrounding metabolism is very mixed and ultimately scientists don’t fully understand metabolism enough yet, however they do agree that there are some methods in which you can boost it to a certain degree. These methods are all based around increasing your Non exercise associated thermogenesis (NEAT), which is essentially the number of calories you burn throughout the day when you aren’t exercising. So, for example, walking, cooking, and even fidgeting.
Ways to boost NEAT
1. Move more
The first and most effective solution is simply to make conscious efforts to move more outside of your workout. In fact, from the Journal of Obesity has shown that even in mostly sedentary individuals, those who are leaner still tend to stand and move more in general outside of the gym than those who are overweight. And this then enables them to burn more daily calories and maintain their lower levels of body fat.
The graph below shows the results of a study comparing 8 different conditions on calories burned per hour.
2. Take regular diet breaks
So let me start this by saying i’m not a big fan of the different diets out there and the majority aren’t sustainable in the long term, however all diets have one thing in common and that is they all provide a calorie deficit (less calories consumed compared to calories burned) meaning the person on the diet should lose weight. However the body is smart and over time adapts to these calorie deficits by slowing down your NEAT (calories burned outside of exercise) meaning you are no longer going to lose more weight. At this point it is recommended to take a diet break.
To implement this strategy, you simply increase your calories back up to maintenance for a week or two during your diet. What this does is it reverses a lot of the physiological adaptations that your body has made in response to your diet. And it’ll then make your weeks of dieting after this break a lot more effective for both fat loss and muscle retention.
In a 2017 study one group did a continuous 16 week diet while the second group did 16 weeks of diet but had diet breaks every 2 weeks. After both dieting periods were over, despite being in a calorie deficit for the same amount of time, the diet break group ended up losing 50% more fat without losing more muscle. They also experienced significantly less of a drop in their metabolism throughout their diet. The results are shown in the graph below.
3. Resistance training
Research published in 2015 has shown that a weight training workout appears to actually increase your NEAT levels for the rest of the day. Which is in contrast to the reduction in NEAT we typically see after cardio sessions. Simply meaning that regularly performing weightlifting workouts throughout your diet is essential and should take priority over trying to perform a lot of cardio.
Conclusion
While these methods may help boost your metabolism, you need to realise that although you may spend 30 minutes to an hour exercising, there are still 15 other waking hours during the day. And it’s what you do during those hours that will make the most impact on your fat loss progress. So really what I’m trying to say is that these methods above should be used in conjunction with good nutrition and activity habits to make them effective.
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