Ways to boost metabolism to speed fat loss....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 8-29-2013

I.  Three reasons to boost metabolism or keep it high for fat loss success are these.

1.  The higher your metabolism and the calories you burn each day, the more you can eat and still lose fat and keep it off.

That makes mostly hunger free fat loss possible.  THAT is huge because it makes significant fat loss doable and keeping it off doable since the methods are sustainable.

2.  The horribly tiny success rate for fat loss has largely been because cutting back calories by too much each week and doing it every day reliably triggers your body’s failsafe famine response that SLOWS your metabolism and makes you MUCH hungrier.  Then fat loss stops and then you gain it back.  Oops!

There are 3 cures for this:

a)  Instead of eating less food stop eating and drinking things that make you fat or hungrier and add calories that fail to make you less hungry AND replace those with foods that support your health and are high in health OK protein and some health OK oils and lots of nutrient dense vegetables, and some fruit and beans & lentils.

Doing this cuts your total calorie intake without making you hungrier.  Some people even get LESS hungry!

In fact, you can actually eat quite a bit of these health supporting foods and still take in fewer calories.  And, the protein, health OK oils, and fiber in these foods does a great job of turning off hunger.

b)  Do partial fasting but only on two non-consecutive days a week.  This is a bit of effort.  But each time it’s temporary.  It saves time and money on those two days too.  This cuts ten or fifteen percent from your weekly calorie intake.  But because you eat well the other five days, your body thinks that it’s just normal variation and does NOT trigger the famine response.

So, your metabolism stays up and you lose no muscle from doing so.

c)  Do exercises that cause you to burn calories for hours after you do them and exercises that add muscle and prevent its loss.

3.  Faster metabolism helps speed your fat loss in the first two months which studies show helps ensure you continue until you get good results.  And, it can make it far easier to keep off too!

You think, this is worth doing because I’m getting such good results; and even if I mess up occasionally, within a few days I’ve taken off the fat that added.

Faster metabolism is a great help in thinking that way because it causes those results!

That said, here are some ways to speed up your metabolism or keep it high:

II. Ways to speed metabolism and keep it high.

a)  Do the exercises that cause you to burn calories for hours after you do them and exercises that add muscle and prevent its loss.

There are two kinds of exercise that do this.

*Super slow strength training was found to do this over 50 years ago. But it’s been surprisingly little used since then.

The ideal speed seems to be for each repetition of the exercise take 15 seconds to move the weight up and 15 seconds to lower it.  (Between being able to lift less weight and completely avoiding slamming it into motion, this approach is surprisingly unlikely to cause injury.)

But don’t let that make this sound easy!  The trick is to pick a weight you can just barely do this for four repetitions.  Then try to do the fifth one anyway and fight hard to do it and then fight hard to lower the weight that slowly.   This is hard to do, granted.  But by doing it anyway, this last repetition is actually a success to be celebrated!

Your body then boosts your metabolism to repair that muscle and build it back a bit stronger and bigger to do better next time.  This burns extra calories for several hours AFTER you stop exercising. 

You do eventually get to where you can do five repetitions and have to try 6 to get this effect. Great!  Increase the weight slightly and repeat the process.

Guess what that does?  If you eat enough protein too, your muscles get bigger and heavier. 

When that happens, it burns three times as many calories as the fat it displaces!

That means such super slow strength training exercises boost your metabolism not one way but two!

Once you do the other things to remove the fat they cause, that means that such super slow strength training exercises quite literally forces fat loss to happen!

**The other kind of exercise that causes you to burn calories for hours after you do it is high intensity cardio.  Sometimes these short but fast bits of cardio are called burst cardio.  Another name is HIIT since they use high intensity effort.

And, there are two styles. Interval cardio is where you rest in between bursts for a short time.  Variable cardio is where you just go at a slow or brisk pace between bursts.

The ideal is to have the bursts be so intense you can only do it for ten to 25 seconds.

The wonderful news is that if you start easy and don’t try to make progress too fast and rest or cut back in between bursts, you get really fit FAST and burn calories for hours after you do them -- AND it’s actually easier on your body to adapt to safely than just trying to go farther and at a moderately fast pace with no rest breaks at all.

b)  Cause your body to adjust to cold temperatures often.  This can be easy to do or very hard, particularly at first.

But it boosts metabolism two ways.  You force your body to warm you back up every time you do it.  And, by continuing to do it, your body switches some of your white fat that stores calories into brown fat that burns calories and warms you up when it’s cold!

The easy way to do this is to drink ice cold plain water instead of soft drinks and to even drink a bit of extra water to take in more.

More ways to boost metabolism:

Drink one to three super-chilled quarts of water a day.  (I drink a lot of tea and can’t drink too much extra water; but realized I could drink chilled water instead of room temperature water every time.  I’ve found I can drink about half that much or more just by doing that each day.)

Take cold water baths each day.  Not sure how long they need to be.  Far more doable is to take a cold shower that lasts at least five to ten minutes every day.  THAT is harder!

I’ve taken to taking a regular shower and counting while I then finish with a cold shower.  When I have extra time I’ll gradually do it for longer times. Then when I’ve built up a bit with that, I’ll try taking a whole shower in cold water.  This one is NOT easy; but it does seem to work.

c)  Eat foods or take supplements that increase metabolism directly!

Eating foods spicy hot from hot peppers helps a bit.  So does drinking green tea or taking green tea extract.  But those are relatively tiny effects even if, as I do, you do both things.

*There is a much more effective sweet pepper extract supplement now available through doctors in the New York state area and is available in Scandinavia. So far, the FDA is blocking wider distribution here which I hope can be changed.  Apparently it can boost metabolism by another 5 to 10%.

That could help cause and speed fat loss without side effects. 

Amphetamines do that but have significant side effects and can cause death and other harm to your lifestyle.

And, there are drugs approved for fat loss; but they too tend to have risky or obnoxious side effects.

So this could be a huge development if it was released for general use nationwide even if you needed to see a doctor to get it.

**Then there is this new kind of "super" broccoli that does look likely to be available soon that boosts metabolism in older people by restoring all or most of the metabolism people had when they were younger.  See the story below!

This will REALLY help!  Men over about 50 and women past menopause tend to find it easy to gain fat and hard to lose fat because their metabolism tends to slow down even if they exercise.

And, besides, every time you eat any kind of broccoli as a super low calorie, high nutrient, and high fiber food that is filling, it then becomes MUCH easier to NOT eat more high calorie foods!

So, people who eat this new broccoli will get a triple fat loss action because most people who eat it will eat more than they were eating of such foods before!

Best of all, this one looks like it will reach the market and be available online or at Whole Foods soon!

Note in the article that they have a trade name they will use.  It was in Medical News Today.

"Norwich 'super broccoli' rejuvenates metabolism 

http://mnt.to/a/4gqf

Eating 'super broccoli', developed by Norwich Research Park scientists, three

times a week can help to 're-tune' the metabolism and this could protect against

age-related diseases such as obesity, Type II diabetes and cancer, according to

new research." 

Some fatloss boosting methods that may work....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-21-2010

All such extra strategies work best in people who are following the basics of:

a) no soft drinks or packaged snacks or commercial desserts, limited use of sugar otherwise, and virtually no foods made from refined grains, no MSG, and little or no use of artificial sweeteners;

b) lots of nonstarchy vegetables and health OK protein foods and some health OK fats and oils and whole fruit;

c) some kind of quite moderate but extremely consistent calorie reduction in addition;

d) and abundant regular exercise most days of every week -- including vigorous exercises such as strength training and interval cardio -- and more moderate exercises such as walking in addition.

If you don’t do those, the extras are likely not enough to do much. But some of them may boost your results from following the basics by 5 to 20 %.

Today’s post has some of these extras that may work for most people or may work for you.

Yesterday I spoke of a possible new strategy to add that is said to help lose belly fat. It’s inexpensive enough I can do it for a month or two to see if it actually helps.

I decided to list it today long with three other methods.

The last method listed is not yet available but is clearly a potential blockbuster! The other strategies are readily available currently.

1. In one study, people who were working to lose fat who added 1 to 2 tablespoons of vinegar daily lost more fat as shown by weight loss AND they lost more inches off their belly fat.

Vinegar is relatively cheap & it’s not that hard to just take like a supplement.

But what may work best is to add it to just a bit of extra virgin olive oil in a salad with green and other nonstarchy vegetables such as diced onion and tomatoes.

So my plan is to try this for two months to see if in my case, it seems to help me lose my loss resistant belly fat.

2. Some people have trouble doing the things that help them lose fat because they are mildly depressed or they find they get hungrier for sweets than they should. One thing that may help such people lose more fat and take action more consistently is to take 50 mg of 5htp before meals &/or at bedtime according to one study I read. (It is a precursor to the calmness and feel mellow compound serotonin. Taking it some studies found increased fat loss and belly fat loss. Wikipedia’s article said that it did test as helping mild depression. It’s certainly a much safer and cheaper solution to taking antidepressant drugs to boost your serotonin levels.)

I don’t have the problems it is said to help and, not surprisingly, I found it to have little effect when I tried it. But if you have the problems it helps, it may help your fat loss.

3. Coconut oil’s “saturated” fat is actually made up of medium chain triglycerides and is said to be burned directly by your body instead of going into storage and to increase your metabolism.

Coconut also is stable in cooking at higher heat. This may mean that some kinds of baking with coconut oil instead of butter may help you lose fat.

Apparently people who eat it or cook with it a few times a week are leaner than people who don’t.

Extra virgin olive oil has the best track record of increasing your heart health and overall health. But it doesn’t work for baking pie crusts very well. And, using coconut oil or shredded coconut or coconut milk – which both have the oil – for a different taste and some variety may actually help boost fat loss.

We once tried a recipe that used diced, skinless chicken breasts with diced ginger root that was peeled and minced garlic that was all simmered in coconut milk.

That was unusually good.

Chilled coconut milk would also work as a substitute for cream in coffee.

Lastly, coconut oil is strongly anti-viral and also anti-fungal. So it may help get rid of things like cold sores and colds. And both eating it and applying it topically may help get rid of rashes and fungus infections of your skin.

4. The last method is not yet available and with good reason. It has not yet been worked out how best to use it or if it is safe to use.

But it’s a potential blockbuster!

Today in several news sources was a story about a study that said that injecting a protein called BMP-7 into deposits of white fat caused the white fat cells to become brown fat cells. Because brown fat increases metabolism and directly burns calories instead of just storing them, this would be a great extra help in losing excess fat.

Since this research was done in mice and not yet in people or even other primates, it may not be effective in people OR it may work but not be safe to use for some reason.

It seems that mice that became obese or really fat easily had little brown fat while mice with more brown fat were seldom obese and were much leaner even when eating similarly. So this could be a huge breakthrough.

My guess is that it will work and be safe to use in people when tested.

If so, it would be a dramatic improvement over stomach reduction surgery of various kinds.

Those things prevent you from having a normal life once they are done. Worse, they have a significant death rate in people who get them and rate of nonfatal but obnoxious complications.

The part that appeals to me most is that it may be possible to do as I’ve done and lose fat all over but little off my belly fat and then get a few shots into your excess belly fat which causes it to gradually disappear!