You already know that exercise boosts your metabolism, of course. And we can not recommend highly enough that you do some type of aerobic activity every day, even if it’s just walking up a few flights of stairs a few times a day at work, or taking a brisk walk on your lunch hour.
If you do aerobic exercise, your metabolism remains higher for up to eight hours after you finish exercising!
And if you exercise enough to put on more muscle, so much the better. Building up muscle can boost your metabolism by ten percent or more, which will generally mean you can eat a few hundred more calories a day.
But when you’re dieting you need all of the help that you can get, so here are some ways to boost that metabolism and burn those calories off faster.
5 Diet Changes To Boost Your Metabolism
1.) Magnesium: Magnesium is necessary to keep your metabolism functioning properly. Magnesium plays an important role in over 300 enzymatic reactions within the body including the metabolism of food and synthesis of fatty acids and proteins.
Magnesium is involved in neuromuscular transmission and activity and muscle relaxation. Magnesium deficiency, especially prevalent in older populations, is linked to insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, coronary heart disease and osteoporosis.
If you are not getting enough magnesium in your diet, your metabolism may slow down. (When you buy vitamin supplements, never take more than the recommended dose, however!)
2.) Vitamin B is another vitamin that is essential for boosting your metabolism. B-12 in particular is known to give an energy boost and increase your metabolic rate.
In addition to their role in metabolism and in maintaining healthy skin and hair, B vitamins have been linked to a lower incidence of stroke — a condition where a blood clot blocks blood flow to the brain, or a blood vessel bursts in the brain.
3.) Spicy foods. Studies show that eating foods containing ingredients like black pepper, ginger, and chili peppers can boost your metabolism by as much as 8 percent for several hours after you eat them!
4.) Green Tea not only boosts your metabolism, studies show that Green Tea has health benefits including acting as an anti-oxidant and protecting against heart disease.
5.) Water. Dehydration causes your metabolism to slow down. Even mild dehydration can cause your metabolism to slow down as much as three percent, in much the same way that cutting back on calories does.
When your body is deprived of water it slows down all of its metabolic functions. Drinking water not only fills you up, it keeps your metabolism functioning efficiently.
These metabolism boosting foods are a great addition to your regular diet anyway and the fact that they will help you increase your metabolism is an added advantage to start using them.