3 tips to boost your metabolism and lose weight
When I was trying to lose weight, I spent months in a plateau despite eating very little and working out every single day before figuring out how to boost my metabolism and finally lose the weight.
If you too have been experiencing slow or stalled weight loss despite working hard, you might think something’s wrong with your body, but I’m here to tell you that you can speed up your metabolism to see more progress just as I did, not by doing quick fixes and hacks, but by implementing strategic habits grounded in science and evolutionary biology.
Before we go ahead and I give you the 3 tips with no bullshit, I want you to understand my journey a little bit more. If you want to directly jump to the tips, be my guest. They are not extraordinary things but things that we tend to overlook a lot. So, go ahead and skip. Or else, stick around.
My journey
I have been of this staunch believer that calories in vs calories out. In fact, in my last article, I have made this abundantly clear that that’s what it is. It is so. I am not going back on my word right now. But, what I started doing when I first started to lose weight was simply to eat less.
I started tracking my calories on MyFitnessPal and it suggested that I eat 1800 calories a day to lose 1 kg a week. I did my research on how to track calories and I did it. I started losing weight but slowly the rate was going down. I became fixated to making my scale drop every day because it was so addictive. I was losing weight and I wanted to lose weight fast. So, to keep the weight going down, I began eating very less.
Eventually, I began eating only once a day. The weight loss stopped even then. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Wasn’t it calories in vs calories out?
I asked around and many people said that it was due to exercise. So, I started exercising more. I started losing weight but then I hit a plateau again. I started exercising more and again I hit a plateau. Eventually, it so happened that I was walking 30–35k steps a day, eating once a day with 800 calories and dropping 0.1 to 0.2 kgs a day.
Now, you might think that that’s a total loss of 0.7 to 1.4 kgs a week. Which is a good loss. But, think from my perspective, I could have not only lost that weight normally, but I had become an addict who was hell bent on seeing the scale drop.
So, my first change was to get a shift in my mentality. I am not going to talk much about it today but that helped me a lot in my journey. I went from “I need to lose 4 kgs per week” to “I need to lose 1% of my bodyweight per week and be healthy”. This change didn’t come suddenly on it’s own like it does to many people. It was something that I knew but I didn’t want to think about it because I wanted to lose weight really fast. However, slowly slowly I kept trying to rewire my brain and made the change. You will need to find the right motivation for yourself to make this shift but it is really important.
So, after this, these are the three things that I followed which helped me lose a lot of weight and keep it off.
1. Don’t think about dieting.
Yes. You read that right. Dieting is very temporary. You think that once you start dieting, you can get to the goal and then eat whatever you want. No. That’s not what it should be. Your goal is to get healthier and look good. So, it needs to be a lifestyle choice. Remember that it is a permanent game. You need to do it for the rest of your life. So, you might as well enjoy it. Incorporate foods that you do like eating and eat them in small portions.
Pro tip: Whenever faced with a choice, think about what would you have done if you were already at your goal. Would you do it?
Losing weight shouldn’t be a game of brute force and pure willpower. Trust me. Willpower runs out. Go into a calorie deficit or around 10 to 20% of your maintenance calories. More than that and you risk a metabolic damage. So, it is more than enough. Couple that with some exercise and you are good to go.
Once you hit plateau, introduce a refeed week where you eat at your maintenance calories for a week. This will help your body reset and not go into starvation mode. Then revise your maintenance calories (as you have lost weight) and do it again.
Pro tip #2: Not only weigh yourself but also measure yourself. You might not be losing weight but you might be losing fat and building muscle.
2. Shut eye is important
If you sleep well, you will notice something. Without changing anything else, your workouts will improve, and I will start losing fat faster than you did before.
Fun fact: One pound of muscle burns about six to 10 calories per day. The more muscles you have, the more you will burn calories.
Better sleep itself improves metabolism. When your sleep deprived for a long time, a few things happen. Your body is so stressed that it thinks you need
to conserve energy. So it hangs onto your fat a lot more than if you had gotten proper sleep.
Plus, your body’s ability to process insulin, a hormone needed to change sugar, carbs, and other food into energy, goes awry. This means you end up storing more fat, since you aren’t able to convert foods to energy as normal.
3. NEAT
So, your body needs energy just to survive. That’s called your BMR or “Basal metabolic rate”. It’s the amount of calories that you would need if you were in a coma.
However, when you are doing any kind of activity, your maintence calories increases. Well, because you are not in a coma anymore and you are doing activities.
But, if you are in a calorie deficit, your body beomes way more efficient in conserving that energy. All that restless leg shaking and fidgeting goes down. You will start to experience lethargy because your body will just not want you to move to conserve energy.
This is where NEAT comes in. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) is the energy expended for everything we do that is not sleeping, eating or sports-like exercise. It ranges from the energy expended walking to work, typing, performing yard work, undertaking agricultural tasks and fidgeting, etc. So, just by increasing your NEAT, you can increase your calories and continue to lose weight.
One of the best ways that I have noticed for myself is by walking. I have a German Shepherd dog who gets very grumpy when I get late for her walks. So, that’s a right kind of motivation for me. You just need to figure yours out.
Just don’t sit at one place and start shaking and spasming to increase your NEAT. That’s just called having a seizure.
So, these were the three tips that helped me figure out a balanced way of losing weight for myself. Try and follow these 3 tips the next time you are trying to lose weight and I guarantee you that it will work. The process takes time but it will be worth it.
Conclusion
Remember that it took you a long time, probably 5–6 years or more to get to the weight that you are today. You can’t expect your body to go back in 2 months. Give it some time and you will reach there. Trust the process.
See you soon!
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