6 Ways To Fine-Tune Your Metabolism

Find out how to maintain your metabolic health

Have you been working on your fitness goals and want to approach your health holistically?

If yes, you definitely want to work on your metabolism as it not just affects your body weight but overall health including heart, brain, immunity, and energy levels. You can achieve and maintain an efficiently working metabolism by virtue of a disciplined lifestyle and consistently healthy choices.

You must be wondering what determines the health of your metabolism? Any shortcuts like crash or fad diets that ask you to eliminate any food group can be detrimental to your overall health. A balanced diet, regular exercise, adequate sleep, and staying hydrated are paramount in having good metabolic health. It’s the small everyday habits that eventually add up to show you results.

So, Dr. YOU brings you some simple ways to fine-tune your metabolism that you can easily follow to succeed in your fitness journey:

Source: https://www.facebook.com/redtabletalk

1. Increase your muscle mass — Muscle is a metabolically active tissue. It uses both glucose and fatty acids as fuels to absorb energy. As a result, it burns more calories compared with fat even at rest. So, people with more lean muscle mass burn more calories. Muscles can be built by strength-training exercises and a protein-rich diet.
2. Ensure adequate protein intake in your diet — Your body expends calories even when you eat, digest, and store food, which leads to an increased metabolic rate. This process is called the thermic effect of food. Protein takes longer to digest and absorb compared with fats and carbohydrates and thus it burns more calories due to higher thermic effect. Combining protein intake with weight training also helps build muscles, which further increases metabolic rate.
3. Engage in high-intensity interval training (HIIT) — It’s a form of cardiovascular training that involves alternating periods of highly intense activity (anaerobic exercise) and recovery time (could be rest or less intense aerobic activity). Scientific research has proven that HIIT activates your metabolism and causes significant reduction in fat mass compared with steady state exercise.
4. Get adequate sleep — Your sleep modulates your metabolism in multiple ways. Sleep deprivation leads to hormonal imbalance and inflammation. Lack of adequate sleep increases levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin and decreases those of the satiety hormone leptin. As a result, you tend to eat more. Scientific research proves that sleep deprivation leads to increased levels of a stress response hormone called cortisol, which degrades protein of muscle tissues to meet energy demands. Consistently high levels of cortisol can also cause insulin resistance by altering glucose metabolism. When sleep deprived, you tend to crave salty, high-sugar, and fat-rich foods.
5. Include enough micronutrients in your diet — Micronutrients are necessary for your metabolism to work properly. For example, over 100 enzymes (proteins that help in chemical reactions) are dependent on zinc to carry out metabolism. Likewise, some biochemical reactions are not possible without B vitamins. Your metabolism also releases waste biochemical products called free radicals, which can damage body tissues. So, vitamins A, E, and C act as antioxidants and protect from tissue damage caused by these free radicals. Your diet should include an adequate amount of diverse fruits, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains that fulfil requirements of all the micronutrients in your body.
6. Stay hydrated — Water plays an important role in most of the metabolic reactions taking place in your body tissues. Dehydration significantly lowers the metabolic rate. So, you should have adequate water, and eat hydrating fruits like apples, watermelons, oranges, peaches, strawberries etc. and vegetables like spinach, cucumber, tomatoes, zucchini, radish, and carrots regularly.

Remember, the only person who can keep YOU the healthiest is YOU!

DISCLAIMER: Dr. YOU aims to bring you the latest evidence-based science, and our content is for informational purposes only. The content is not medical advice or guarantee of an outcome. You should always consult a doctor or qualified healthcare professional if you need further clarification and before making any changes to your treatment plans and lifestyle, or that of others.

Dr. YOU is a one-stop platform to address the health information needs of health consumers. Our goal is to arm people with the information necessary to make meaningful decisions regarding their health and nudge behaviour change.

With our combined experience of two decades in research and healthcare, we built the Dr. YOU platform around the WHO-endorsed “Best Buy” intervention design for preventing and managing chronic diseases.

Follow us on Medium (@drYOUofficial) and Instagram (@dr.YOU_official) for the latest content and updates.