Ways to Rev Up your Metabolism

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As we age, it’s safe to say that our metabolisms will slow down.  Gone are the days when those of us who are over forty can sit down and eat an entire half gallon of ice-cream without a significant weight gain the next day.  The job of our metabolism is to burn the calories our body consumes. The rate at which our body burns calories from the food we consume is called the metabolic rate. When our metabolic rate slows, the result to our bodies is what some people usu refer to as “the old age spread”.  Guess what, there is no need to settle for larger hips and a larger waste line as we age.  There are ways to speed up the bodies’ metabolism that are proven by experts in the field of medicine.

Understanding How our Metabolism Operates:

Tammy Lakotos Shames, RD, LD, CDN, and co-author of Fire It Up! 200 Simple Ways To Jumpstart Your Metabolism and Lose Weight Forever says things like height, weight, genetics; age, lifestyle, body composition, and sex are factors in how our metabolism functions. She also states: “It’s a complex process that includes all of the chemical reactions that take place in your body to keep your organs working and to keep you alive.”

Shames goes on to banish some old myths about foods such as grapefruit that has been thought to help burn calories, especially in a well known fad diet.  The following is expert advice on fat burning myths:

Common fat-burning myths:

• Eat grapefruit.  Shames says that there is no real evidence that can prove t grapefruit helps to burn calories, in fact, states Shames, eating the same number of grapefruit as opposed to other fruits may actually cause weight gain because grapefruit, (because of their size), are higher in calories than a lot of other fruit.
• Eat Spicy Food. Although applying spices on things such as vegetables is a good substitute for salt and may even get you to eat more vegetables, Carey Clifford, MS, RD, and vice president of Nutricise (an online nutrition and weight loss program) says the rise in the metabolism as a result of eating spices is so slight, it really doesn’t make a difference in weight loss.
• Fast or skip meals to lose. A common myth based on the fact that the less you eat the more you’ll lose.  But Sue Ayersman who is a certified clinical nutritionist at Kronos Optimal Health Centre in Arizona says that our bodies need a certain amount of calories to operate properly. Ayersman goes on to convey that an extreme decrease in calories denies our bodies of essential nutrients thereby throwing it into survival mode.  When in a state of survival mode, the metabolism slows down and we store fat.