What's most important for upping your metabolism is CONSISTENCY in applying the nutrition and training principles every single day.
That includes:
- Meal frequency: eat 5-6 small meals per day
- Meal timing: eat approximately every 3 hours, with a substantial breakfast and a substantial post workout meal.
- Sufficient Caloric Intake: maintain a small calorie deficit and avoid
starvation-level diets (suggested safe levels for fat loss: 2100-2500 calories per day for men, 1400-1800 calories per day for women; adjust as needed) - Food choices: Select natural, unprocessed foods with high thermic effect (lean proteins like chicken, turkey, egg whites and fish are highly thermic, as are all green vegetables, salad vegetables and other fibrous carbs)
- Cardio training: Push up the intensity a bit if you really want to get a
metabolic boost. Walking and low intensity cardio is fine, but higher intensity is more metabolism-stimulating - Weight training: The basic exercises that include the largest muscle groups or
even call into play the entire body as a unit (squats, split squats, deadlifts,
stiff legged deadlifts, overhead presses, rows and full body core exercises)
will have a much greater metabolism-stimulating effect than isolation exercises
(concentration curls, crunches, calf raises, etc)
Weight Training & Metabolism
The weight training is extremely important in cases of "metabolic damage"
because this is the stimulus to keep the muscle you have and begin rebuilding
new muscle tissue, which is the engine that drives your metabolic rate.
The men don't usually have a problem with the weight training, but I still hear women say they don't want to lift weights as part of their fat loss programs. Well, people who wont lift weights can expect a very, very long metabolism "repair process" if they achieve it at all.
Consistency is the key.
Nothing will undermine the "re-building" of your metabolism like inconsistency.
If you stop and start, or skip meals and workouts often, you will not even get
off the ground.
After your metabolism is back up where it should be, it takes continued
"stoking" of the metabolic furnace to keep it there. Once you get your metabolic
engine running, you've got to keep feeding it fuel or the fire will die down.
Picture an old fashioned wood burning stove...
Imagine you're in a cabin up in the mountains in the winter. It's cold in there
and you want to keep the cabin warm. Can you achieve this by feeding the fire
once or twice per day? Nope. Not enough fuel to burn, so not much heat is
generated.
What if you just toss an entire pile of wood in the stove all at once? Will that
work? Nope. Lots of fuel, but can't all be used at once... it just smothers the
fire and the excess just sits there.How about if you throw some tissue paper or crumpled newspaper in the stove,
will that work? Nope - too quickly burning.
You have to keep putting small amounts of wood (the right type of fuel) on the fire at regular intervals or the fire burns out.It's also difficult to get the fire lit again. In the case of metabolism, it's like going through those initial few weeks of overcoming inertia all over again.
Your goal is to get your metabolism burning hot and keep it burning and this cannot be achieved by missing meals, missing workouts or with sporadic, infrequent training.I have only seen a handful of cases where all these things were done properly and there was still a longer "repair" process.
For example, one case was former ballet dancer. At 5' 5", she was previously 110 lbs and had increased to about 145 or so. She didn't want to reach her previous 110, but find a happy medium of about 125 lbs.
I figured with 20 lbs to cut, this would be a simple and predictable process,
but she had a challenging time (and I didn't know why at first).I later found out that she had been anorexic and bulimic for many years. This
had caused a lot of damage, and although she did reach her goal, it took about
twice as long as we had anticipated.
The good news is, even in this extreme case, the same nutrition and training principles worked! It just took a little longer. And by the way, her program included some serious training with free weights and she ate a lot more (clean) food than she had ever eaten before. No "starvation!"
Trying to starve the fat with crash diets is what causes metabolic damage in the first place! You have to Burn The Fat And Feed Your Muscles!
>> Click here for Tom Venuto's Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle program
