Do you often feel that when you are working with sweat and blood to lose weight and get lean, your body is putting up a stronger fight and throwing all your efforts literally down the drain, by adjusting the metabolism in such a way that even with exercise and diet, losing weight becomes an uphill task. This is called as “metabolic compensation,” and it’s a survival mechanism through which the body maintains its current weight. Weight loss materializes when there is a calorie deficit which means fewer calories come in and more gets utilized to release energy. When you workout more and reduce calories through food to slim down, the body detects this as a famine situation and brings about adaptive mechanisms, including slowing down of metabolism, where it burns fewer calories to maintain the fat stores and current weight. Think about it, if metabolic compensation didn’t kick in, losing weight would have been a cakewalk for everyone! The more you try to slash down calories or melt the fat away, the more the body would try to compensate by adjusting metabolism. Human body has evolved through thousands of years to conserve and store fight and resist loss of fat. In metabolic compensation, the total daily energy expenditure including resting metabolic rate and non-resting energy expenditure slump down. In such a scenario, to override metabolic compensation in order to lose significant weight, we need to find ways to revv up metabolism and speed it up because after going on a diet and exercising regularly, the body start to lose weight, but after a few days, when metabolic compensation kicks in, the pace at which weight loss happens slows down.
What is Metabolism?
Metabolism or metabolic rate can be termed as the rate at which the body burns calories. Since it’s important to keep metabolism high in order to shed weight, you would have to find ways to override metabolic compensation in order to lose weight. When metabolic compensation kicks in, the rate at which calories get burnt falls down and you would notice that you are losing muscle mass as well.
10 Ways To Override Metabolic Compensation?
1. First of all, Don’t Starve: Crash dieting can completely lower and slump down the metabolism because it sends the body into a starvation mode, and instead of using fat stores, the body burns muscle tissue and triggers storage of fat at a faster rate whenever calories are available. To avoid lowering of metabolism, eat a healthy and nutrient-dense diet plan, like on Rati Beauty diet, and you will see the magic soon.
2. High-Protein Diet: Protein is an important macronutrient with regards to weight loss because it boosts metabolism, burns more calories, helps in repair and building of muscles, reduces craving, and also keeps one fuller for longer.
3. Get up on your Feet: Nothing can help metabolism as much as being on your feet for most part of the day. In fact, being inactive or spending the day in a sitting position can cause switch off of an enzyme that is essential for fat burning.
4. Amp up vitamin B levels: B vitamins help convert carbs, fats, and protein into energy form and a deficiency of B vitamins does affect metabolism.
5. Try Strength Training: Cardio is not enough, you need strength training to build muscle and burn more calories.
6. Drink Coffee: Avoid the creamer in your cuppa coffee, and take a liking for black coffee because the caffeine content not only stimulates lipolysis (fat burning process), keeps you active, it also boosts metabolism.
7. Sleep for at least 7 hours: There’s a direct link between sleep deprivation, low metabolism and weight gain. Sleep at least for 7 to 8 hours, and wake up with a super high metabolism
8. Sip on Green Tea: Loaded with antioxidants called catechins, green tea increases energy expenditure, aka metabolism, and can help burn up to 3 to 4% more calories.
9. Practice NEAT activities: NEAT stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis and is the energy we use for everything we do in our day-to-day life except for when we are sleeping or exercising. Using the stairs instead of the lift, squatting on the floor to lift something up, walking while talking on the phone, every activity we do while being on our feet, comes under NEAT. All these activities help to burn some amount of calories and these bits of calories spent here and there, add up to a considerable amount when you are trying to lose weight.
10. Thermogenic food: Every morsel of food raises heat in the body in order for digestion to take place, but certain foods raise more temperature compared to others. Thermogenic foods increase energy expenditure in the body through the process of thermogenesis where the body actually burns more calories to breakdown such food, converting these calories to heat form. The thermic effect of food is the amount of energy required to actually digest and process food. Thermogenic food raise your body temperature and more calories get burnt to digest and process them. Ginger, chillies, garlic, turmeric are a few examples of thermogenic food.
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