Everyone wants to achieve their ideal weight, but maintaining it can often be extremely challenging. To lose excess weight, our metabolism needs to operate at maximum efficiency. When we eat, food is stored in our bodies as fat for energy, and metabolism is a series of complex processes that convert the food we eat into energy. Therefore, when we want to maintain or lose weight, instead of restricting calories and feeling tired and hungry all the time, we want to focus on how to speed up the fat-burning process.
Fortunately, there are many easy tricks you can implement in your daily life to help burn more fat without strict dieting, weight-loss pills, continuous exercise, or overly restrictive eating.
Drink More Water
More than half of our body is made up of water. We lose water through eating, sweating, and breathing, so it's crucial to stay adequately hydrated. Additionally, drinking at least eight glasses of water a day can burn nearly 20,000 extra calories a year.
Intermittent Fasting
Limiting food intake to specific periods can stabilize blood sugar levels and reduce inflammation, both of which encourage fat burning. Fasting also lowers the hunger hormone ghrelin to help curb cravings for sugary, inflammation-causing foods.
Increase Healthy Fats
By reducing carbohydrate intake and increasing healthy fats, the body shifts from burning sugar to burning fat. This means training the metabolism to move away from relying on glucose for fuel and instead turning to fat stores for energy. You end up consuming more energy overall while maintaining muscle at the same time. A ketogenic diet, which focuses on plenty of healthy fats, moderate protein, and fewer carbs, is a great tool to ensure you're getting the right macronutrients.
Drink More Hot Beverages
Thermogenesis is a bodily process that produces heat and can also increase calorie burning. Certain compounds in foods naturally have thermogenic nutrients. The catechins in green tea can boost fat burning by 10 to 16 percent.
Eat More Spicy Foods
Spicy foods like chili peppers contain a compound known as capsaicin, which has been shown to speed up metabolism, burn fat, and reduce appetite.
Sweat
Infrared saunas have the ability to penetrate the skin barrier to raise core body temperature directly, unlike regular saunas that have to heat the air first. Research has shown that regular use of infrared saunas for over three months contributed to significant weight loss. As the body sweats, which is its way of detoxifying, it also eliminates toxins and reduces inflammation, which can contribute to common health issues.
Probiotics
The gut controls almost every aspect of your health, including weight. Research has linked decreased diversity of the microbiome with weight gain, and people who struggle with weight loss are more likely to have larger amounts of harmful bacteria and lower amounts of beneficial bacteria. Fortunately, consuming plenty of fermented foods and probiotics has been shown to positively impact the microbiome and can help increase the good bacteria in the gut.
Strength Training
Muscles burn more energy than fat, so the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn, even when sitting still. Strength training can also improve your resting metabolic rate, which boosts metabolism.
Drink Cold Beverages
There are two types of fat in the body: white fat and brown fat. White fat accumulates in response to excess energy storage, and brown fat is the type that enhances metabolism and burns more energy. According to research, regular exposure to cold temperatures increases the amount of brown fat, which helps burn more fat.
Medical Tests
Metabolism can be simply managed, but unless the underlying cause of not reaching a healthy weight is addressed, it will return. The root cause of weight loss resistance should be looked at; we don't lose weight to become healthy, we become healthy to lose weight. Everything from gut dysfunction to thyroid problems to unbalanced hormones can contribute to not losing weight. For sustainable weight loss, medical tests can provide you with the main reasons for not achieving your ideal weight and come up with an action plan to rehabilitate your health from the inside out.