Lift heavy 🏋️ Drink green tea 🍵Eat spicy foods 🌶️ Get 8 hours of sleep every night 💤

The list of ways to increase your metabolism is endless. But when it comes to reaching your weight loss goals do any of these tactics even make a difference?
Whilst genetics are one of the biggest factors when it comes to BMR (Base Metabolic Rate- the amount of energy we expend while at rest), health officials have confirmed in numerous studies that there are three main ways you can kick start your metabolism into gear.

Building Muscle and Staying Active
Muscle burns more kilojoules at rest than fat does. In fact, muscle is eight times more metabolically demanding than fat cells.

Which is why you often see body builders indulging in cheat meals that equate to your entire week's worth of calories - they have a BMR that helps them to burn through these kilojoules faster than those without.

Of course, if you combine muscles with staying active - you can burn twice as many calories as you could when your metabolism was slower. Balancing your weekly workouts with weights and cardio will equate to your metabolism speeding up and you will see an increase in weight loss in no time!

Stay away from ‘Diet’ foods
At first glance, it would appear that any food with the label ‘diet’ would have to do amazing things to aid your weight loss. However, if you delve deeper the flip side of diet foods are often worse than the original product before it was ‘diet’ friendly.

The majority of these products are low-fat or no-fat but in replace of the fat is sugar. Sugar is one of the worst things you could consume if you are trying to lose weight and speed up your metabolism.

Sugar causes our body to have a ‘sugar spike’ which increases our blood pressure. But what goes up, must come down, and in the case of sugar, shortly after our consumption we crash. A sugar crash causes us to have cravings and feel sluggish, which more often than not, leads to more sugar. It is a vicious, sweet cycle.

Drink Green Tea

Aside from the obvious working out and staying active, green tea is one of the only other ways that have been scientifically proven to increase your metabolism. Green tea contains an antioxidant called catechin which helps your fat cells release fat.

That’s right, you read that correctly. Green tea helps your fat cells release fat.

Studies have shown that people who drink green tea regularly, burn up to 100 calories per day extra than those who do not. As well as this magical antioxidant, green tea also contains caffeine. Caffeine is a known metabolism booster and also provides you with more energy throughout the day.

Because of its antioxidants and caffeine, green tea goes hand in hand with your workout sessions and gives you a better chance at staying active longer.

Choosing green tea to drink daily is one of the easiest ways you can give your body extra tools to fight fat and boost metabolism.

So put down the chilli powder - there are easier and tastier ways to increase your metabolism simply by building muscle, staying active, ditching the diet foods and drinking green tea.