Weight Loss for Busy People Best Fitness Blog
It is very important to increase metabolism to lose weight… No question, improved metabolism is the most effective strategy to burn body fat and achieve long term weight loss.
Your metabolism is the process whereby your body converts the food you eat into energy and burns it to generate heat or store it as fat. The rate at which your body generates heat is your metabolic rate.
From a physiological perspective, your metabolism is the main determinant of weight loss or weight gain.
For most of human evolution we’ve been active, whether it be hunting for food, growing food crops, gathering food stuffs. It’s only very recently in human history that that’s all changed.
Our Lifestyles Are Making Us Fat…
People in the developed world live largely sedentary lives. Far from increase metabolism, our lifestyles mean it rarely gets out of first gear!
The most exercise that many of us get is the walk to the car, the school gates, the office, the trawl around the supermarket or mall.
Our jobs are largely sedentary – sitting at a desk, a computer, behind a counter.
Our leisure pursuits tend to mirror this. Guess what surveys tell us most people’s number one leisure activity is? Yep, watching TV.
This trend towards inactivity in all aspects of our lives, fuelled by an increasing dependence on labour saving devices like the car and coupled with high carb, high fat, high calorie diets has resulted in an obesity epidemic of startling proportions. And this inactivity or stuck into places, reducing the metabolism of our body. This reduction of metabolism making us fat and bulky. 🙁
Increase Your Metabolism To Lose Weight Fast
60% of Americans and Europeans are overweight, nearly 1 in 3 are clinically obese.
Our lifestyles have evolved at a startling rate. The problem is our bodies and their survival mechanisms haven’t caught up.
Our bodies have evolved to conserve energy. They’re designed to store fat as protection against starvation, which has been all too frequent during most of human evolution.
We’ve evolved an efficient fat storing metabolism as a response to an environment in which food has been scarce.
It takes thousands of years for evolution to catch up with changes in our lifestyles. But the truth is, we’re not going to become prolific fat burners overnight!
So, how to increase metabolism to lose weight and to keep it off in these times of plenty?
Quite a challenge with a fast food outlet on every corner and hundreds of calories more than we need on every plate!
Strategies to Increase Metabolism…
One pound of lean tissue burns around 14 calories a day at rest. So a person with 150 lbs of lean tissue will burn around 2,100 calories a day at rest.Your metabolism is largely governed by your lean tissue mass. Your muscles account for most of the calories that your body burns at rest.
This is known as your Resting Metabolic Rate.
The more lean tissue you have, the more calories you burn at rest. Simple.
The second key factor that determines your metabolism is the amount of activity you do each day. Someone who sits at a desk all day and watches TV and sleeps all night won’t burn a lot of activity calories each day.
Someone with a physically active job, someone who exercises or plays a lot of sport will burn a lot of activity calories.
For example, when I was in my late 20s I was a keen weight trainer. I still am but I’m not as obsessive now!
I’m 5’7″, weighed 175 lbs now but more lighter on that time. Actually I can’t remember the weight of that time and maybe a inch shorter! I was busy with heavy weight training 4-5 times a week and running 5 miles a day 3-4 times a week. As I can remember, I had a physically active job and played the drums in a rock group.
I had my respiratory quotient measured, a way of determining your metabolic rate. I required approximately 5,500-6,000 calories a day to fuel my exercise, daily activity and maintain my body weight.
What are the Most Important Ones to Increase Metabolic Rate?
The combination of muscle and exercise is a potent one when your goal is to increase metabolism.
So, the most effective ways to increase metabolism are to:
Build more lean tissue
Do some exercise or other kind of physical activity
You can also influence your metabolism positively and negatively through your diet and certain supplements may also help.
Eating too little and a cycle of yo-yo dieting can depress your metabolism. A balanced diet rich in nutrients and containing adequate protein can boost your metabolism.
Check out the section on this site about foods that promote weight loss to find out more about how the foods you eat can increase metabolism.
Also take a look at our pages on healthy weight loss supplements for info on natural products that you can add to your diet. They may help to enhance your exercise regime and increase metabolism to lose weight fast.
Increase Metabolism Through Exercise
Regular, vigorous exercise done consistently week after week.Whilst diet is important and some supplements may help, it’s exercise that is the most effective way to increase metabolism.
We stress the importance of regular exercise because studies have shown that exercise is not as effective as diet for weight loss.
Now, that’s not because exercise isn’t effective for weight loss, it’s because people don’t exercise hard enough, frequently enough, they don’t do the right types of exercise.
In short, exercise works if you do!
Now, I hear you cry, “I’m a busy person with a busy life, how am I going to find the time to exercise!”
Gosh, wish we had a buck, a pound, a euro for every time we heard that! :p
Track Your Daily Activities
It really works. From my experience, I’ve found people with daily tracking lose weight faster than who don’t. So, here’s a little task we suggest our clients to do. We ask them to keep a diary of what they do each day for a whole week.
In addition to what they ate we ask them to record things like:
- What time they got up in the morning
- When they went to work
- The amount of time they spent on housework, the shopping and other chores
- What time they ate and how long the meal took to prepare and eat
- What they did in the evening, and so on
At the end of the week we go through their diary with them. It makes interesting reading!
People are Mostly Busy With Nothing!
Yes, you read it right! Most people, busy people in particular like doing nothing. The busier and more stressed out they are the more they like doing nothing.
It’s a sharp contrast to their busy-ness, an antidote, a stress reliever.
Analyzing people’s schedules as recorded in their diaries identifies two things in particular:
- How people are never quite as busy as they think they are, and
- How much time they spend doing nothing
Now let’s qualify that.
We like nothing better than sitting around as a family doing nothing much at all, listening to the kids chatter away, just enjoying each others company.
That qualifies as doing something, something valuable.
What we’re really talking about is TV time, aimless internet surfing time, rushing around accomplishing very little at all time.
Some of our clients who are very busy people spend around two hours a night and the whole weekend on these time wasting activities.
You Have Time To Exercise!
Let’s be frank, if you can find a couple of hours to watch a soap or two and a film you’ve got time to exercise!
Will watching TV help you to increase metabolism to lose weight, or cause you to gain weight? Of coursethe answer is the later one!
Are you serious about losing weight? Yes? Well turn the odd session of TV time into exercise time.
If you’re not willing to do that then sorry, you’re effectively choosing to be fat and no one can help you.
What do I Do To Increase Metabolism?
You might think that it is easy to say but very tough to do. You’re maybe bored till now by reading this lecture. But I’m not guy of words. I love to do what I say, what I enjoy and what I have to.
Now, here’s what I do.
I work 9-11 hours a day in my highly stressed day job. Everyday I have to commute for over an hour. Most of the days in a week, I cook dinner and we sit down and eat it as a family. We run a business that takes a couple of hours a night and each weekend.
Three days a week I get up early and go to the gym on my home. I work out for an hour, shower and change and grab some breakfast.
At least one day a week I go to the park on the way to my home from work, to have some natural air, walking, sometimes running for 10-15 minutes. I spend one to two hours on the park.
On a Saturday or Sunday I go to the gym if I don’t go to any vacation, actually it is my home gym (to build yours read this home gym review). I often go pool for swimming along with my family while my kids swim around me.
That’s all accomplished in a couple of hours of TV time three times a week!
I make time, make it a habit and make it happen. So can you if you want to.
Now it’s Your Turn to Increase Metabolism! So, follow our guidelines and make time for yourself to increase your daily activities. This will help to increase your metabolic rate.
What Activities Should You Follow?
So, sermon over. The objectives of your exercise routine to increase metabolism are to:
- Burn body fat
- Build some muscle
Don’t worry, you don’t need to run a marathon or train as if you’re competing in a triathlon to increase metabolism. You won’t need to spend hours a day in the gym and end up looking like Arnold Shwarzenegger.
We’re talking about doing some moderate aerobic activity and some strength training. You can do these in the gym, at the office, at home, whatever suits you the best.
So, follow the two links above and explore the two essential components to any exercise program if you want to increase metabolism to lose weight and get in shape!
Probably the easiest fat burning exercise to increase metabolism and build into a busy schedule is walking, so why not make a daily brisk walk a habit?
Or go one step further and start running for weight loss.
To burn a ton of calories, burn fat and build muscle why not try rowing for weight loss.
Getting on a bike and cycling is a highly effective fat burner and muscle builder, so why not check out our bicycling plan for weight loss.
As your body fat comes down you’re going to want a six-pack and a tight waist to show off, so take a look at our choice for the best abdominal exercise.
If your lower abs are a problem, perhaps protruding after a baby or just plain difficult to flatten, then try the best lower abdominal exercise.
The Last Words Before Finishing!
Well, I think you’re aware of the importance of metabolism rate to burn some fat. After coming to this, you already know the things you have to do. Just one thing you need is to motivate yourself to increase your daily activities. If you need some additional support and motivation to increase metabolism you may benefit from an online personal trainer. A great way to get a personalized exercise program that will fit around you and your busy schedule.
For more information on getting in shape why not try The Fitness Motivator? This site provides information and inspiration to help those with busy lives achieve their fitness goals. It includes guidance and tips on nutrition, exercise, walking, running, and much, much more.
So, I think this will help you. And if it does, then all my effort will be a success. So, I hope you will make yourself lighter and made my efforts into successful ones! 😛 Cheers!
