Metabolism and weight loss

Our body continuously burns calories and uses Vitamins minerals to maintain cells. This process is called Metabolism

There are three types of metabolisms Basal, Physical Activity Induced, and Thermogenesis.

1. Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)

This is defined as the rate just sufficient enough to keep alive without any physical activity. Sometimes, it is also called the Resting Metabolic rate. The BMR depends on genes, age, gender, and body fat. The other components effecting BMR may be hormones, and medicines.

The two major causes of low BMR are aging and obesity. With agiing our caloric intake goes down. Muscle cells burn more calories than fat cells, so the higher body fat reduces the metabolic rate.

BMR Calculator

2. Exercise Regularly

During exercise, we burn calories. After exercise, the metabolic rate goes up and we continue burning calories for 4 to 8 hours. For a weight loss program, I suggest a morning exercise to kick start the metabolism, and an evening exercise.

When to exercise?

3. Thermogenesis

Metabolism goes up to digest food. This is called Thermogenesis or the thermogenic effect of foods. There are three components to Thermogenesis: Amount of food in the stomach, Nutrition of food, Thermogenic Foods

Amount of food in the Stomach

When stomach is empty too long the metabolism slows down, that's what happens at night when you are asleep and have not eaten. Breakfast basically kick starts your metabolism.

For a weight loss program I recommend the following:

Breakfast, Lunch, Noon snack, Dinner, night snack. Allow 2 to three hours between main meals.

Food Nutrition

Deficiency of Vitamins and minerals, can cause Metabolism to be sluggish and erratic. Balanced diet increases the efficiency of metabolism.

Thermogenic Foods

These foods raise the metabolism during Thermogenesis.

Proteins

Thermogenesis can burn up to 25% calories derived from Proteins. Therefore, many weight loss programs are based on High proteins. Thermogenesis is at most 10% of total metabolism. So there is very little gain of total metabolic rate. Eating high protein diet with low carbohydrates also reduces the amount of vitamins and minerals. My recommendation is to eat low fat meats for proteins, but not in excess of 15% of total calories for a balanced diet.

Green tea

This is becoming a much touted Thermogenic food. Green tea contains a chemical epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). EGCG is a polypnenol, an antioxidant. EGCG is found in both the black tea and green tea. Both the teas are harvested from the same plant. Black tea is made from fermented leaves, while green tea is produced by steaming leaves. This processing difference changes the amount of available EGCG. Black tea has about 7% polyphenols, while green tea has about 35%.

The studies indicate that EGCG increases Thermogenesis, a metabolism process that helps burn calories. One study indicates that EGCG extract equal to one cup of Green tea can increase metabolism by 4%.

Other Thermogenic foods

The capsaicin found in hot peppers increases Thermogenesis.

Ginger

Coffee