Whether you feel as though your body isn’t burning as much fat as it should be, or you’re aiming to lose weight and can’t seem to keep it off no matter how hard you try, you may start to believe that your metabolism is simply against you. While there is some truth to fast and slow metabolism affecting weight, having an ill-functioning metabolism can affect more than just your weight.

In fact, every single thing you do (from thinking to breathing to sleeping) relies on a properly functioning metabolism. But what is your metabolism, exactly? How does it work? And are particular foods better for boosting metabolism than others? Read on to learn all you need to know, including why certain foods speed up your metabolism.

What is your metabolism?

Metabolism is a bodily process that converts the food you eat into energy that can be sent throughout the body. For example, when you eat an apple, its components are broken down and divvied out through the metabolism process. Metabolism combines the food’s calories with oxygen, which aids in the release of energy.

While some people may believe that you only need energy when you’re engaging in an activity, that’s not true. Your body requires a certain level of energy to perform even its most basic functions, such as breathing, growing and repairing cells, and circulating blood.

When we talk about speeding up the metabolism, the conversation is usually more geared toward to weight loss or maintenance.

What is the metabolic rate?

As mentioned above, when the body is at rest, it still needs energy. This means you could be doing nothing but lying down and breathing and you’ll still be burning calories. Your metabolic rate, also referred to as your basal metabolic rate, is how many calories you need for those basic functions. Not to be confused with your basal metabolic rate, your resting metabolic rate is how many calories your body burns while at rest.

When you’re thinking about speeding up the metabolism with food, you’re looking to increase your metabolic rate so that your body burns more calories when you’re not working out or moving around.

How does food affect your metabolism?

Every time you eat, digest, or store food, your metabolism increases because of the thermic effect of food. The thermic effect is a boost in metabolic rate after you eat due to the energy it takes the body to chew, swallow, and digest food. This means that regardless of what you eat, you’re still boosting your metabolism at every meal.

Different foods will offer a different type of boost, because each food comes with its own thermic effect and therefore boosts the metabolism in different ways. For example, eating a large steak will have a much more powerful boosting effect than eating a few small pieces of fruit.

Other factors that affect metabolic rate

While food plays a role in your metabolism, there are other factors to be taken into consideration when figuring out how to boost your metabolism. Your age, for example, is a key factor, because as you age, your metabolism begins to slow down naturally. This is due to a variety of reasons, including less physical activity, a decrease in muscle mass, and simply the natural aging process of the internal components that make up the metabolism.

Your hormones, overall weight, muscle mass, and body composition also play a vital role in metabolism.

What foods make your metabolism faster?

While all foods will provide a brief boost in metabolism because of the thermic effect of food, some are better for this purpose than others. The best metabolism-boosting foods include:

Protein-rich foods

Foods rich in protein such as lean meats, eggs, dairy products, nuts, seeds, and legumes have been shown to help boost the metabolism because of they have the highest thermic effect of food. Plant-based protein sources such as beans also have the same effect and can aid in boosting metabolism.

Mineral-rich foods

Foods that contain high levels of iron and selenium are important for metabolism boosting because of the way they affect the thyroid gland. The thyroid gland helps to regulate metabolism, so when it is running as it should, it helps speed metabolism up. Foods that are rich in minerals include nuts and seeds, shellfish, cruciferous vegetables, and organ meats.

Image by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash: What foods make your metabolism faster?

Chili peppers

Chili peppers can help to boost metabolism because of capsaicin, a chemical they have in abundance. Research has found that eating chili peppers or using supplements can help to boost the metabolism so much that it burns an extra 50 calories per day.

Coffee and tea

Caffeine has been shown to help the body burn more fat for energy as well as boost the metabolism so much so that the body burns up to an extra 100 calories per day. It does this by stimulating the body’s system to burn more calories.

Tea can also boost the metabolism because it contains catechins, which are compounds that promote overall health. Tea, especially green and oolong, increase the body’s ability to burn more calories and use fat stores for energy.

Water

While many people may not think of water as a metabolism-boosting food, it has been shown to increase the speed of metabolism because the body needs to use more energy to heat the water up to room temperature – a process known as induced thermogenesis.

While all foods have an effect on metabolism after you consume them, some are more effective than others at boosting the metabolic rate. So why not include some of the above metabolism-boosting foods in your next meal?

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The metabolism is a system of chemical reactions within the body that processes food into nutrients and energy. The energy conversion that takes place is used by the most basic functions of the body, such as breathing, circulation, and digestion. The energy that is left over from the food you eat is then utilized to help you get through the day, exercise, and live your life. But as you age, the speed of your metabolism begins to slow down. There are a few reasons behind those changes, so today let’s answer the question: how does your metabolism change as you age?

Metabolism and aging

As you get older, the metabolism doesn’t always work in the same way it did when you were a child or young adult. If you’ve ever reflected that you “can’t eat the same way you did when you were younger”, you’re aware of these changes!

The slowing of the metabolism comes down to a few different factors. They include:

• The resting metabolic rate (RMR). Your RMR is the number of calories that your body needs to keep you alive. It is the energy needed to perform the most basic bodily functions.
• Thermic effect of food (TEF). This is how much energy or calories are burned away through digestion or absorption of the food you eat. Even the process of fueling your body requires energy to put the food to good use.
• Exercise. Exercise is one activity that everybody uses to burn calories, but the amount a person gets also effects their metabolism.
• Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). This is how many calories it takes to perform basic tasks such as standing, washing dishes, or other chores.

Of course, there are other factors that affect how a person’s metabolism functions, including height, hormones, age, and the amount of muscle a person has on their body.

Why does your metabolism slow down as you age?

There are a few reasons why the metabolism will slow down with age. Some of those factors are lifestyle-related, whereas others are biologically driven. Although lifestyle factors can be changed, biological aging cannot be stopped.

Exercise and diet

One specific driver related to metabolism slowing with age is exercise. As people get older, their ability or drive to exercise becomes lower. Activity levels have such a big impact on metabolism that research has shown that exercise and non-exercise activity or movement can account for up to 30% of your daily calorie expenditure.

Although the connection between less activity and aging isn’t entirely clear, research has also found that people aged 50 and older don’t typically exercise outside of work at all. Older people also tend to eat less, which can affect the metabolism’s speed as well.

Muscle mass

A key lifestyle and biological factor that comes into play with a slowed metabolism is muscle mass. Since people are not exercising as much as they used to past a certain age, they are bound to lose some muscle. Combine that with the natural aging process and the average muscle loss that simply occurs as a result (also known as sarcopenia), and it shows exactly why the metabolism slows as a person gets older.

After a person turns 30, the average decline in muscle is anywhere from 3–8%. The reason this affects your metabolism is because muscle plays a large role in how many calories the body burns at rest (RMR). 

Hormones

Hormones have also been shown to play a role in metabolism. As the body ages, the production of certain hormones such as estrogen, testosterone, and growth hormone begins to decrease. This deduction in hormone levels also slows the metabolism.

Cellular changes

As the body ages, cellular components and chemical reactions within it begin to change. Two specific cellular components that play a role in chemical reactions that affect the metabolism are sodium-potassium pumps and mitochondria. While mitochondria is tasked with creating energy for cells, sodium-potassium pumps help with the contractions of muscle and the heart as well nerve impulses. These two components begin to lose their ability to effectively perform as the body gets older.

Although these two things contribute to the slowing of the metabolism, they account for a small part of the slowing process when compared to activity levels and the amount of muscle a person has on their body.

At what age does metabolism peak?

Although the exact age of peak metabolic function varies from person to person, research has shown that the early 20s are the age that shows the most efficient metabolism. At this age, the number of calories burned by the body while at rest are the highest. This could be due to a lot of reasons, but like all ages and metabolism, it can most likely be attributed to exercise levels and muscle mass.

Is there anything you can do to stop metabolism changing?

Although there is nothing you can do to stop the cellular process of aging, there are ways around a slowing metabolism. Keeping up with regular exercise can be a great metabolism boost. Strength training, for example, is a great way to help build and maintain muscle mass and provides the overall benefits of exercise. Studies have shown that when older people do strength training, they can increase their RMR by close to 8%.

High-intensity interval training is also a great way to help the body burn calories. This is because it has been shown to cause the body to continue burning calories for as long as 14 hours following the end of the exercise session. 

Diet can also play a role in speeding up the metabolism. By eating a diet that has a lot of protein, you can increase metabolism. This is because protein-rich foods need more energy to be digested. And it’s not always what you eat that helps metabolism, but also how much you eat. Eating too little can cause the metabolism to slow down, because by eating too little calories, the body begins to reserve energy, leading to a decreased metabolic rate.

Fighting the passage of time is always going to be a losing battle, and aging is just a natural part of life. That doesn’t mean you have to give up on a healthy and speedy metabolism. By keeping up with exercise and muscle mass, you can help to combat the natural process of metabolic slowdown.

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The human body requires a specific amount of energy to get through each day. This energy comes from food in the form of calories. Even if you were to lie in bed all day doing nothing, your body would still need a set amount of calories to perform basic vital functions such as breathing and blood circulation. This set number of calories is what is referred to as metabolic rate.

There are two different types of metabolic rate: the basal metabolic rate (BMR) and the resting metabolic rate (RMR). Although these two terms are often used interchangeably, they are slightly different. The BMR is used to measure how many calories a person needs to perform the most basic of tasks. The RMR is used to measure how many calories the body burns while it is at rest.

To calculate a truly accurate BMR, a person must be in a lab setting and under very restrictive conditions whereas they can be measured in the morning before eating or exercising. There are, however, calculators you can use to measure your BMR if you plan to use it to help you reach your weight loss goals.

Why is metabolic rate important?

Knowing your BMR can be a great tool on the road to healthy weight management. This is because it allows you to see just how many calories your body is burning while at rest and how much energy your body needs daily to function. The BMR will be different for anyone, so sometimes, counting calories based on an average isn’t always enough to determine if you’re getting the right amount of energy per day.

For example, if your BMR is 1600 calories per day, that means that you will need to consume 1600 calories just to sustain yourself. This doesn’t account for activity levels. If you are more active, you will need to consume more to help balance the energy in versus energy out levels.

A popular equation used to calculate BMR is the Harris-Benedict BMR. It calculates for men and women separately. The equations are:

• BMR for men: 88.362 + (13.397 x your weight in kg) + (4.799 x your height in cm) – (5.677 x your age in years)
• BMR for women: 447.593 + (9.247 x your weight in kg) + (3.098 x your height in cm) – (4.330 x your age in years)

These equations are able to tell you exactly what your BMR is, which will give you the information you need to determine how many calories you need to consume or burn for weight loss or gain. Be aware that this equation does not take into account your activity level; however, there are Harris-Benedict BMR calculators online that can incorporate that factor for a more accurate measurement.

Does resting metabolic rate decrease with weight loss?

When someone loses weight, they may require less energy to get them through the day. This is because with less body weight, the body doesn’t have to work as hard to perform basic functions and thus less energy is expended throughout the day.

On the opposite side of things, when a person gains weight, their RMR is likely to increase. It also depends on the kind of weight a person gains. For example, muscle gain is more likely to increase RMR to a greater extent than fat gain would. This is because the energy used by fat is lower than the energy used by muscle.

Factors that can affect the RMR include:

• Age. As a person ages, they RMR decreases. This is because of typical age-related changes in weight and body composition caused by hormone changes, the body’s decreased ability to synthesize protein, and cell death.
• Eating less. When a person partakes in caloric restriction, their body lowers the RMR in an effort to conserve the energy it has reserved.
• Medications. Both antidepressants and stimulants can have an effect on RMR. Antidepressants tend to increase it because they are typically associated with weight gain, and stimulants tend to lower it because they are associated with weight loss.

Other than those factors, a person’s RMR is typically unchangeable because it is determined largely by their unique way of expending energy for basic life-sustaining functions. 

How do I speed up my metabolism for fat loss?

Although it can be difficult to manipulate your resting metabolic rate, there are things you can do to slightly speed up your metabolism and increase fat loss after you’ve calculated just how many calories your body needs.

One such thing is utilizing the thermic effect of food. Research has shown that the thermic effect helps to increase metabolism for a few hours after eating. The nutrient that offers the highest thermic effect is protein. By eating more protein, you can help to rev up your calorie burning after every meal.

You can also incorporate more exercise, since exercise is proven to help boost the calorie-burning powers of the metabolism. High-intensity workouts, specifically, are great for helping to boost the metabolism. Other ways you can help speed up your metabolism and thus speed up weight loss include drinking more cold water, drinking green or oolong tea, and eating spicy foods.

While you’re pretty much set with your RMR and BMR, you can use it to help you lose fat and get to a healthy overall weight.

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