How to Burn More Calories
Losing weight can be extremely frustrating as it’s usually a slow process, especially as you age. After losing a considerable amount of weight, it can be even more difficult to lose those last few pounds because your body struggles to maintain fewer calories while burning fewer calories.
Fat Burning Foods
Although the body uses energy to digest all foods, some foods are better for burning fat than others. Foods with more thermogenic or calorie-burning effects include lean protein as those found from solid foods. Examples include turkey and egg whites, chicken breast, exceptionally lean red meats, most fish varieties and game meats such as elk and venison.
Lean protein foods offer the added advantage of suppressing the appetite. That’s why many diets require food containing lean protein at every meal.
Food Combining
It’s important to combine lean protein foods with the proper amounts of green vegetables and good carbs, along with whole grains. This helps your body burn fat without having to take drugs or supplements.
It’s also healthy to always combine food with carbohydrate food. Besides making you feel fuller, this also helps lower the Glycemic Index (GI) of food and helps lower your odds for diabetes.
Fat Burning Spices
Spices not only add flavor to foods but also help with weight loss. Spicy foods can raise heart rate, making your sweat. This temporarily revs up metabolism.
Pepper is excellent. Black pepper helps increases the body as it binds to TRPV1 receptors located in the brain. Cayenne pepper is one of the most effective fat-burning spices.
Turmeric, which helps burn fat, also helps fight cancer,
Capsaicin is a spice that provides energy.
Limit Salt Consumption
Too much salt in the diet is not only unhealthy, as it can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension), but it can also cause water retention. As blood moves through the veins and carries nutrients to cells, the nutrients have to pass through cell walls by the process known as osmosis. Excessive salt can hinder this process. As a result, nutrients are unable to enter, while wastes are blocked. Water and waste retention show up on the scale. When you flavor your foods with fat-burning spices you won’t miss the taste of salt.
Increasing Your Heart Rate
As you get closer to your goal weight the more you’ll need to increase your exercise program. If you faithfully exercise but fail to get your heart rate high enough your efforts may be in vain. In other words, when you exercise with either insufficient or too much intensity your workout is not effective. I remember a Weight Watchers lecturer once explain that if you can talk or sing while exercising, then you’re not working hard enough to burn enough calories. This is known as a conversational pace.
Therefore, you need to find your target heart rate for an efficient workout so you’ll be able to burn more fat. Wearing a heartrate watch takes the work out of measuring your pulse manually. These watches usually contain several modes, including a personal mode where you can fill in your age in years and sex to determine what heart rate works best for you. For example, a 60-something-year-old female, such as myself, would have fewer heartbeats per minute during a workout, than a 30-year-old male.
Finally, don’t give up. If you persist in making the right food choices and continue to burn calories through effective workouts, those last few pounds will finally melt away.