11 Ways To Increase Your Metabolism

Your metabolism plays a vital role in burning fat and is essential to your body's ability to perform functions. Metabolizing is a process that involves turning the food you eat into energy, enabling functions such as breathing and circulating blood.

However, factors like your body type, gender, and age can help speed up or slow your metabolism. For instance, your metabolism slows as you age. Also, if you choose practices to help increase your metabolism, you won't necessarily burn more calories or lose weight. Here's what to know about 11 ways to experience improvements in your metabolism.

1. Do Interval Training

Interval training—like high-intensity interval training (HIIT)—is one way to give your metabolism a boost. This type of training can help you take in more oxygen and allow mitochondria, small organs with a cell that help give cells energy, to work harder for energy burn.

When you run, swim, or bike, try to intensify your pace for 30-second intervals before returning to your normal speed. However, ensure you don't overdo interval training. Too much interval training can decrease mitochondrial functioning, glucose tolerance, and insulin release.

2. Do Strength Training

Resistance training, also known as strength training, is also an important way to increase metabolism, strength, and endurance. Building muscle through physical activity like strength training can help add some speed to your metabolism, as fat uses fewer calories compared to muscles.

However, the key is to keep your muscles moving to achieve the metabolic benefits. As part of your weekly exercise, you can add in strength training sessions to help your metabolism and make yourself stronger.

3. Eat Enough Calories

When you eat significantly fewer calories than normal, your body can adapt to using fewer calories. This adaptation doesn't help metabolism.

To keep your metabolism from slowing while trying to lose weight, you'll want to make sure you have enough calories to at least match your resting metabolic rate (RMR). You can test for your RMR at an RMR testing site near you and work with a registered dietitian to help determine your calorie needs.

4. Work Out Consistently

Excess postexercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) occurs when your body can take time to recover from an intense workout and return to its previous RMR. During this period, your body burns more calories than it normally would, even after you stop exercising.

However, the high-calorie burn won't last that long. Within an hour or so after your workout, you'll return to your RMR. Instead, exercising regularly and intentionally, along with eating balanced meals, can help you get the most out of your metabolism.

5. Avoid Trans Fats

Trans fats aren't just bad for your heart—they also slow down your body's ability to burn fat. Trans fats can negatively impact how your body metabolizes essential macronutrients your body needs, like the lipids in your blood and fatty acids.

Eating trans fat can cause insulin resistance and inflammation—two factors related to conditions that indicate problems with metabolism, like diabetes and obesity. Foods high in trans fats include many commercial baked goods and fried foods.

6. Eat More Protein

Your body takes more time to break down protein than fat or carbs, so you end up feeling fuller for longer. Protein may also help increase your metabolism thanks to a process called thermogenesis, where your body uses about 10% of its calorie intake for digestion.

Because it takes longer to burn protein than carbs or fat, your body uses more energy absorbing the nutrients in a high-protein diet. A quick way to get in more protein is to add whey to a smoothie. Fat oxidation, the process of breaking down fatty acids, and the thermic effect, the extra energy your body needs during digestion, was greater with whey than with soy or casein.

7. Drink Coffee

Caffeine speeds up your central nervous system, and that can boost your metabolism. What's more, coffee can give you energy and antioxidants.

Coffee also improves energy levels during exercise, helping you work harder and longer and burn more calories in the process. However, the boost that your metabolism gets from caffeine will be small, and you probably won't notice any change in weight because of it.

8. Drink Green Tea or Oolong Tea

Green tea and oolong tea may also help increase metabolism. Research has suggested both teas may be able to help you burn more fat. Unfortunately, the effects of the added fat-burning boost from tea won't be enough to affect a person's weight.

9. Stand More

It might be beneficial for your metabolism to stand, when possible, or just move around if you're sitting for long periods. Whenever you're physically active and moving, you can burn more calories compared to if you're stationary or seated.

10. Try To De-Stress

One of the benefits of less stress is a better metabolism: Research suggests that when you're stressed out, your metabolism stalls. There are a few possible reasons for this, but one is that chronic stress stimulates the production of betatrophin, a protein that inhibits an enzyme needed to break down fat.

De-stressing may not always be easy, but it can be achievable in some cases. You can reduce stress by doing something that you enjoy but also find relaxing, like reading a book or taking a walk.

11. Get More Sleep

Research has found that sleep is important for regulating your metabolism. One study's findings indicated that, after a few days of sleep deprivation, study participants felt less full after eating and metabolized the fat in their food differently. While getting enough sleep isn't exactly a boost to your metabolism, it can keep you from experiencing weight gain.

It's recommended that adults get at least seven hours of sleep a night. If you're having a hard time hitting seven hours a night, try getting into new bedtime habits that will help you get a full night of sleep.

A Quick Review

Your metabolism can be affected by different factors, but it's possible to boost it. Regular movement, including activities like strength and interval training, making changes to your diet, and getting enough sleep are all ways to see potential improvements to your metabolism.