Lose Weight For Life: Exercise Basics 2 - Increase your Metabolism and Burn Calories Tomorrow

Exercise Basics 2

Increase your Metabolism and Burn Calories Tomorrow

Total Calorie Expenditure in a day is made up of the physical activity that you do but also your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). In the last article, we talked about burning calories through exercise and now we will talk about increasing your BMR to burn more calories tomorrow and in the future.

By increasing your BMR you will be able to more easily create a calorie deficit and you will be able to do less work. This is how you build habits and muscle to increase your metabolism which ensures you lose the weight for life. 

How to increase metabolism through HABITS

There are a few things you can do every day to increase your metabolism which will increase the calories you burn every day.

Eat more Protein

Protein requires more calories to digest, absorb, and process than carbohydrates and fats. 20%-30% of the calories in protein are used just to metabolize. Not only is protein required to build muscle it will also cause your body to burn more calories.

High-Intensity Work Outs

Not only do more intense workouts such as High-Intensity Interval Training burn a lot of calories. These workouts temporarily boost your metabolism, which can stay elevated for 24 hours even after you have stopped working out. 

Sleep

Sleep does regulate many of our bodily functions, fat metabolization is no different. Studies have found that if you do not get enough sleep your body will start to metabolize fat slower than if you had a full night’s rest. 

How to Increase Metabolism FOREVER

Habits are great, but you can increase your metabolism permanently. To permanently increase your metabolism you need to increase your muscle mass. For every 2 pounds of muscle to add to your body, you will burn an extra 100 calories every day! You can do this by adding resistance training to your program that will help you build that extra muscle to bolster your metabolism. 

While adding muscle is a longer process, over time and through proper training and nutrition you can add 5-10 lbs of muscle year from resistance training. If you added 10 lbs of muscle you would burn an extra 500 calories per day. This extra metabolism boost is how you can make sure those extra pounds you lose, stay lost.

Total Calorie Expenditure

What you do each day is very important to increase calorie expenditure and to create that calorie deficit. It is also very helpful to build muscle to increase your BMR, this will increase your calorie expenditure for tomorrow and into the future. The journey to Losing Weight for Life is built by consistently adding to the progress you have made today and the day before. The hard workouts will get easier and with consistency maintaining the weight loss will also get easier. 

Nutrition and Exercise are the ultimate combo for losing weight and keeping it off. If you just focus on nutrition without exercise, you may not be eating enough and this could slow your metabolism in the long run, making future weight gain more likely. If you just focus on exercise without nutrition, you may never be in a calorie deficit and will have a difficult time losing weight. It is possible to lose weight by only focusing on one variable (Calorie Intake or Calorie Expenditure) of the equation but you not only get better results in the short term but be better suited to sustain those results in the long term. If you are not excited about your journey yet jump into Lose Weight for Life: Motivation 1.