Burn More Calories: Jump-start your metabolism

Jump-start your metabolism for maximum benefits

Metabolism gets a bad rap. It's one of the first things people blame when they start to put on weight or can't lose stubborn pounds. But here's the good news: You can make your metabolism work for you, not against you. Learn which activities will speed up your metabolism and maximize your calorie-burning potential, what it takes to beat middle-age spread and how to find the right time to exercise.


Metabolism Meter

Make the most of your metabolism

Nobody likes dieting. But is there really any other choice for those who want to lose weight?

Yes, there is. Look at the graph below to see how many calories you can burn if you replace some fat with muscle.

If a 150-pound woman converts 10% of her body fat to muscle, she can eat 300 extra calories per day without gaining weight.

There's a lot you can do to increase the amount of CALORIES you burn, even when you're sitting around doing nothing. The key is understanding your metabolic rate.

The metabolic rate is a rough estimate of how much energy — calories — the body uses each day. Your total metabolic rate is determined by three factors:

• The basal metabolic rate (BMR), which is the minimum amount of energy required to keep your heart pumping, and brain and organs functioning while you are at rest
  
• The energy you burn during physical activity
  
• The energy you burn during the digestion of food
  

By adjusting each of these factors, you can boost your metabolism without making radical alterations to your diet.

"Even small changes, done consistently, add up to a good deal of calories," says Jack Wilmore, Ph.D., a leading expert on fitness and weight control and the head of the department of Health and Kinesiology at Texas A&M University (http://hlknweb.tamu.edu/).


What's Your Efficiency Rating?

Just as different cars burn fuel at different rates, so the metabolic "engine" burns fuel faster in some people than in others.

Most of this variation is due to differences in basal metabolic rate (BMR), the minimum amount of energy necessary to keep a human alive. It takes a lot of energy to run a body, and the average person burns quite a lot of CALORIES even when lying completely still. In fact, the BMR accounts for about 70 percent of the calories you burn each day.

Your BMR and total metabolic rate are determined by many factors, some of which are within your control (body composition, work schedule), others which are not (age, gender). But altering the controllable factors can make quite a difference in the number of calories you burn over time.