How To Speed Up Your Metabolism

When it comes to fat loss, we’re always in search of tips, tricks, secrets, or methods that will give us that edge, and help us get the results that we’re looking for.

Some methods, like counting calories or performing regular bouts of resistance training, work great. Others, like diet pills or cleanses, not so much.

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If you’ve spent any time in the depths of the internet in your quest to lose fat, you’ve undoubtedly come across claims about things that can help boost your metabolism. And it's all too easy to blame biology: “Well, I can’t lose weight…must be my slow metabolism.”

This is a common yet not completely correct statement. Yes, there are some medical conditions and medications that may affect your metabolic rate, but on the whole people who have trouble losing weight do not have a slow metabolism.

So, before we can even begin to answer the question about whether or not it’s possible to boost your metabolism, we need to understand what makes your metabolism work.

Understanding Metabolism

Metabolism is defined as the bodily processes necessary to maintain life, but is most often referenced when it comes to gaining or losing weight. Through metabolism, your body turns the food you consume into the energy it needs to do, well, everything.

Our metabolic rate is what determines whether we gain or lose weight. There are a number of factors that play into determining our metabolic rate. Let’s take a look at each one…

Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)

Your RMR is the number of calories you burn at rest (not moving) on an empty stomach. Basically, this is the number of calories your body needs to live, if you don’t perform any sort of physical exertion. RMR makes up approximately 60-70% of your total metabolic rate, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE).

The biggest thing that determines your RMR is how much you weigh and your body composition. The more you weigh, the more energy your body has to expend to keep you alive, so the higher your RMR.

Body composition also plays a role because the more muscle mass you have, the higher your RMR because muscle takes more energy to maintain than fat. So, if you have two people who weigh 200 pounds, but one is at 10% body fat and the other is at 20%, the person who has 10% body fat likely will have a higher RMR because they have more muscle.

Gender also plays somewhat of a role in your RMR. Women will usually have a lower RMR, mainly because they tend to have less muscle mass.

Activity Levels

Your activity levels are the biggest variable in your TDEE. This is determined by things such as how much you sit or stand during the day, how active you are at your job, and how much or how intensely you exercise.

Thermic Effect of Food (TEF)

The food we eat requires energy to break down and digest. And the type of food we eat determines how high our TEF is. Protein has the highest thermic effect of any food, with 25-30% of the protein that you eat being burned off through digestion. Carbohydrates are the second highest at 5-15%, and fat is the lowest at 5% or less.

Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) & Non-Exercise Physical Activity (NEPA)

NEAT is the energy you expend through subconscious, unintentional movement. NEPA is the energy you expend through intentional, but non-exercise activity, like carrying groceries, moving boxes or general fidgeting. These numbers are going to vary from person to person.

Metabolic Adaptation

How much you eat also affects your metabolism – although not to the degree that some would make you believe. Eating more food naturally increases your energy expenditure, while eating less food naturally decreases your energy expenditure. Neither is extremely significant, however.

So, as you can see, there are a lot of things that factor into your metabolism. And sure, there are other outside factors that can affect your metabolism, like medications or medical conditions, but for a majority of people, the ability to raise your metabolic rate comes down to manipulating one of these things.

So that begs the question: Is there any truth to these claims that you can boost your metabolism? As always when it comes to fitness, the answer lies somewhere between yes and no…

Claim: Eating many small meals per day “stokes the metabolic furnace”.

Fact: This one has been popular for a long time. As we already talked about, eating does raise our metabolism temporarily through the process of digestion and the thermic effect of food. How much of a bump we get is determined by the type of food we eat.

Here’s where this claim falls short, however: because the increase in metabolic rate is only temporary, AND dependent on what we eat, eating more often does not mean a sustained increase in metabolic rate. Whether you eat one large meal, or six small meals, the calories burned through digestion are going to be the same.

To illustrate this, we’ll do some simple maths.

Say you have two people who are going to eat 100 grams of protein today and nothing else. Person A is going to split that up into 4 meals of 25 grams each. Person B is going to eat all 100 grams in one large meal.

We know that approximately 25% of the protein we eat is burned off through digestion, so for Person A, at each meal about 6.25 (25 x .25) grams of protein will be burned off through digestion. Add all meals together and that’s 25 grams burned off through digestion for the entire day.

Person B, on the other hand, eats his 100 grams at one meal. But what’s 25% of 100? 25 grams…same number of grams burned off through digestion as Person A.

Solution: Eat more protein. Not only will more of the calories you eat be burned off, but protein takes longer to digest than any other macronutrient. This will help keep you fuller for longer, stave off hunger, and leave you less likely to snack. This is also the reason why high-protein diets have been linked to weight loss.

Claim: Eating breakfast jump starts your metabolism for the day.

Truth: Ah, the old “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” myth. While I’m certainly not a hater of breakfast by any means, claiming that one meal is more important than any other is foolish.

This claim comes from a number of different studies that showed that people who eat breakfast on average weigh less. But correlation does not always equal causation.

If you take a deeper look into this claim, you’ll find that the real reason for this connection is that the people who eat breakfast are more likely to make better decisions later when it comes to food because they are less hungry. So it has nothing to do with jump-starting your metabolism.

Solution: Eat breakfast if you want. Or don’t. Just be smart about your food choices during the rest of the day. And if you do eat breakfast, high protein makes sense. Like we talked about above, it will help keep you full and less likely to make bad choices as the day goes on.

Claim: Building muscle will increase your metabolism.

Truth: When it comes to changing the physiological processes of your metabolism, increasing muscle mass can increase your metabolism.

Like we touched on earlier, muscle tissue costs more to our metabolism than fat does. Every pound of muscle you have requires around 10 calories to maintain. Fat, on the other hand, only requires about three.

So while yes, an increase in muscle mass means an increase in metabolism, if you do the maths, you’ll see that it doesn’t add up to much. An increase of 10 pounds of muscle only equates to eating 100 calories more per day.

Solution: I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to build muscle. You should. It makes us healthier, stronger and sexier. But doing it for the sole purpose of increasing your metabolism isn’t going to put you that far ahead. Focus on reducing your caloric intake to lose fat, and build muscle to help make you stronger and healthier.

Claim: High-Intensity exercise increases your metabolic rate.

Truth: High-intensity exercise increases the amount of calories you burn, not just during activity, but after activity as well by increasing a thing called EPOC (although this one is still somewhat disputed).

EPOC, or Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption, is the amount of oxygen your body has to consume post-exercise to return itself to baseline, or normal. The longer this process takes, the more calories you burn.

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Solution: The best way to increase EPOC is to choose exercise modes that require you to go from periods of very low intensity or complete rest to periods of very high intensity.

The two best methods for this are resistance training – think lifting weights and then resting – or High Intensity Intervals, like sprints or circuit stations.

Claim: Move more to increase your metabolism.

Truth: We already know that our non-exercise activity factors into our metabolic rate, so it only makes sense that increasing it will help us burn more calories.

Solution: Move more. Take the stairs, walk or bike to work, park farther away when you go places instead of looking for the closest spot, stand more…anything you can do to get more activity in your day. Each thing may not be much on its own, but it can all add up.

This is actually the “secret” of people who are just naturally leaner – they have habits of doing all these things on a regular basis.

Claim: Reverse diet your way to a higher metabolism.

Truth: Reverse dieting is a concept that not many people have heard about, but can be very useful for increasing your metabolism.

Basically, reverse dieting is exactly what it sounds like; instead of eating less food, you eat more food.

Reverse dieting works best after a prolonged period of dieting. As we discussed earlier, dieting has an effect on your metabolism. You weigh less, so your body requires less energy. By using reverse dieting, you can restore your metabolic rate to its pre-diet level, and even increase it, without gaining fat.

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Solution: There is a strategy to reverse dieting. Sure, you could just go eat a bunch more food every day for a few months and bump up your metabolic rate, but you’d add a significant amount of fat as well.

The way to reverse diet is to gradually increase your caloric intake over a prolonged period of time. The gradual increase of calories, combined with the longer time frame, will allow your metabolism to adjust to the increased calories by increasing its efficiency at using them for energy and not storing them as fat.

And when I say gradually increase your calories, I mean gradually. We’re talking an increase of 50 calories per week for most people. This will allow your body to adjust to the increase, while minimising fat gain in the process.

Claim: Supplement X, Y, or Z will help increase your metabolism.

Truth: While many supplements claim to be able to help you increase your metabolism, very few can actually do so with any significance.

There are a number of vitamins and minerals that help our metabolisms function properly: B6, B12, folate, thiamin, niacin, and magnesium are all involved in the metabolic process, and a deficiency in any of these could slow your metabolism somewhat.

Taking more than you need, however, is not going to speed up your metabolism.

Solution: Some studies have shown that caffeine can boost your metabolism, by up to 11% in some cases. However, the effects of caffeine begin to wane the higher your tolerance is to it. That means that the more caffeine you drink, the more caffeine it will take to see effects.

When it comes to supplements for increasing your metabolism, you’re much better off focusing on maintaining a caloric deficit to lose weight, and taking any supplement you need to help maintain overall health.

Claim: Certain foods will help you boost your metabolism.

Truth: There are certain types of foods that can affect your metabolism.

Spicy foods that contain capsaicin can slightly boost your metabolism, but most people can’t handle the amount necessary that would be required to make any significant difference.

Green tea contains a substance called EGCG, which may enhance fat-burning properties but doesn’t really have any significant effect on metabolism.

Medium-chain fats found in more natural oils, like coconut oil, could also help boost metabolism, but not significantly.

Solution: The metabolism-boosting properties of these foods is not significant enough to make them a priority. Focus on a calorie deficit, and some of the other, more effective methods we’ve talked about, and eat these foods for overall health and enjoyment.

Claim: Drinking cold water can help boost metabolism.

Truth: Regardless of metabolism, there’s no one who couldn’t benefit from drinking more water.

First off, replacing calorie-laden drinks with water automatically cuts out calories from your diet. Not only that, but water helps keep you full.

Water may also help temporarily boost your metabolism. Studies have shown that drinking 17oz of water can help boost metabolism by anywhere from 10-30% for around an hour after consumption.

Not only that, but cold water may boost your metabolism even more as your body heats the water up to body temperature.

Solution: Like I said, there’s no one who wouldn’t benefit from drinking more water. One study even found that drinking water before meals could help boost weight loss by 44%.

Again, though, the main benefits of water come from an overall health standpoint, not just a metabolism-boosting one.

Claim: More sleep can increase your metabolism.

Truth: Sleep is vital for a number of physiological processes, most importantly, proper hormone production.

A lack of sleep has been linked with insulin resistance, which means our body becomes less efficient at how it processes sugar and carbs. Being insulin-resistant can lead to more fat storage.

A lack of sleep also increases the production of ghrelin and decreases the production of leptin. Ghrelin is the hormone responsible for feelings of hunger, while leptin signals to our brain that our bodies are full, so you can see why this can have a negative effect on our waistlines.

Solution: Getting adequate sleep will help avoid these negative effects, but more sleep than you need will not boost your metabolism or increase fat burning. Aim for 7-9 hours per night for optimal function.

Your metabolism is a complex system. It’s not as simple as quick fix solutions may suggest.

While, yes, there are some things you can do, they are minor in the grand scheme of things – the final 5%, if you will. The best way to lose weight is, and always will be, regular exercise, combined with a proper diet, and a caloric deficit. That’s the 95%.

However, when that is combined with the methods in this article, it can certainly help speed up your fat loss and boost your results.