Best ways to improve metabolic efficiency

November 30. 2021

Are you struggling to lose weight? Do you want to become more efficient at burning fat? If you want to know how to improve metabolic efficiency or what it is, you are in the right place.

What is metabolic efficiency?

Have you ever had a chance to talk to a professional athlete or a person who goes jogging every morning but still struggles with weight? If you have, it’s important to understand that our weight depends on how well our body utilizes fat as an energy source. To better explain metabolic efficiency, we have to go a little bit into the past. In the 1930s, many scientists researched metabolic efficiency, and interesting information about the connection between exercise intensity and the use of fat and carbohydrates was discovered. This discovery was named the crossover concept. Many scientists confirmed, back then, that with increasing the intensity level of exercise, your body is more likely to use carbohydrates as the source of energy. But what about fat? That’s the point of metabolic efficiency; we have to figure out how to make our body burn stored fat during exercise, or if we say it simpler, we have to find out how to improve metabolic efficiency.  

What is metabolic efficiency training? 

MTR (metabolic efficiency training) is a concept developed by Bob Seebohar, and it’s teaching us how to train our body to use fat as a primary energy source. We first have to discover when the body uses carbohydrates as the primary energy source and when it uses fat. Typically, when we exercise for a small amount of time, we use carbohydrates as fuel, but our body will start burning fat when we do a long and productive exercise. That often happens during aerobic workouts. Metabolic efficiency training is intended for any fitness enthusiast, power athlete, endurance athlete, or team sport athlete.

How to improve metabolic efficiency?

Implementing the following tips can be very beneficial to your health; not only do they help you improve your metabolic efficiency, but they are also the answer to how you can improve metabolic age.      

• Avoid carbohydrates
  Try avoiding white bread, pasta, and rice for a while. It would be best if you mostly got carbohydrates from fruit and vegetables. There is nothing wrong with carbs, but avoiding them even for a small amount of time will help you boost your metabolism. 
• Stop binge eating and start losing weight.
  Binge eating is one of the reasons we gain weight, and it is definitely one of the crucial reasons we can’t lose it. In order to improve your metabolic efficiency, you have to stop binge eating and focus on healing your relationship with food to start losing weight.
• Eat lots of protein.
  First of all, protein keeps you full, and eating enough protein will prevent overeating. By consuming food, you increase your metabolism rate for hours, which is a concept called TEF (thermic effect of food). Protein causes a significant rise in TEF and boosts your metabolic rate by 15-30%. Also, when 30% of the nutrients you take daily are protein, you prevent muscle loss, which is a common side effect of weight loss.
• Do a high-intensity workout.
  HIIT (high-intensity workout) will help you burn fat during the exercise but also aid the fat-burning process for some time after you’ve done exercising. You don’t need to do a high-intensity workout every time you go to the gym or exercise at home; you can insert HIIT in your regular workout routine a couple of days a week, which will also help you burn fat. 
• Drink green tea.
  It’s proven that drinking green tea helps your body burn fat. Green tea helps your body break stored fat into fatty acids, speed up your metabolism, and enable your body to burn more fat. It is low in calories and helps you with weight loss; it also helps you maintain weight. 
• Include peppers in your diet.
  Capsaicin is an ingredient of peppers, and it’s a substance that boosts your metabolism. Some research shows that eating pepper with your meal burns additional ten calories. That is a slight change, and it has a subtle influence on the speed of your metabolism, so if you don’t like eating spicy food, don’t bother adding it to your diet. 
• Get enough sleep.
  Lack of sleep is considered a risk for obesity because sleep deprivation has a bad influence on our metabolism and hormone secretion. There is a connection between not sleeping enough and high blood sugar levels, linked with the risk of developing type two diabetes. Also, lack of sleep boosts the ghrelin (hunger hormone), decreasing leptin (fullness hormone).
• Drink coffee
  Caffeine in coffee can boost your metabolism, but you have to be careful about the amount of coffee you drink. Drinking too much coffee can cause problems, too, so be moderate. The problem here is that drinking coffee showed better results for skinnier people, and it was more beneficial to maintain weight and boost the metabolism of lean people. Caffeine affects obese people’s metabolism too, but to a lesser extent.  
• Use phentermine for weight loss.
  Phentermine is very beneficial for boosting our metabolism. Taking phentermine will increase your heart rate and give you more energy, affecting how many calories you burn. Also, it will control your appetite, and you won’t be craving food while dieting, which will make your weight loss easier. If you want to start taking phentermine for weight loss, you must visit an experienced physician first.
• Exercise before breakfast.
  Studies show that exercising before breakfast can make our bodies burn stored fat. You can go jogging, do at least a thirty-minute workout at home, go to the gym or just go for a thirty to forty-five-minute walk.     

Final thoughts

If you don’t want to guess how much fat you are burning, and if you can’t decide if these tips on how to improve metabolic efficiency work for you, we strongly suggest you visit professionals and do the metabolic efficiency test. That’s the way of measuring the oxygen you take and the carbon dioxide you produce during the exercise or while resting. It allows experts to estimate how much fat your body is using as an energy source. We all have unique metabolism rates because they depend on various factors such as hormones, gender, age, height, and weight. By doing a metabolic efficiency test, you may also find out why your current diet or exercise is not working for you. That information will allow your dietitian, doctor, or a fitness trainer to make you an adequate diet plan, which will help you achieve results.

Author

Nurse Walton

Born and raised in Chicago, IL, Chanay received her Practical Nurse licensure and went to work in clinical specialties such as Home Health, Assisted Living, Long-Term Care and Dialysis Centers. Through this work, she realized the importance of diet, nutrition and weight loss among her patients. This led her to open A Better Weigh, Inc. Medical Weight Loss Center in 2009.