15 Easy Ways to Boost Your Metabolism Instantly

Metabolism is not just about burning calories, it is all the chemical reactions that help you store energy, repair and maintain muscles and body tissue, and break down energy for fuel.

Metabolism helps to convert nutrients into fuel, allowing you to breathe, move, circulate blood, digest, and heal.

While there are many factors that go into the metabolic rate, it is possible to boost your basal metabolic rate, the number of calories you burn while just resting.

Here are 15 proven ways to increase metabolism to support overall health and manage weight!

Top 15 Ways to Boost Metabolism

Here are the best, science-based ways to increase metabolism today!

1. Do HIIT instead of Normal Cardio

HIIT cardio, as opposed to regular cardio, offers many more benefits. HIIT, or high-intensity interval training, is a type of workout routine where you alternate between high-intensity movement and low-intensity recovery.

This style of workout has been proven to increase metabolic rate and particularly increase VO2 max, the ability of your body to use oxygen. This increases endurance, and stamina, and decreases the time needed for recovery.

Furthermore, HIIT has been shown to be a more effective way to burn fat.

2. Increase Muscle Mass

If you Increase muscle, you automatically increase your metabolism. This is because muscle is more active than fat in the body and requires more energy to maintain.

By building more muscle, you can increase the amount of energy you use even while resting. In fact, every pound of extra muscle requires up to 4 times more energy to maintain that fat. After a session of resistance training, the full body activation of muscles also boosts metabolic rate, as well as the recovery to repair and maintain the muscles.

No weights? No problem! Bodyweight workouts like calisthenics are just as effective, if not more so, at building muscle mass.

3. Eat at Regular Times

Eating at regular times is highly important to overall health and wellbeing and consistency in eating times helps metabolic balance

Research has shown that the body experiences a food anticipation effect, where it will release insulin before a meal. This means that if you regularly eat at noon, your body is already prepared to digest, absorb, use as fuel, or store the nutrition and energy gained from the meal.

By having regular eating times, you can take advantage of this internal clock system.

4. Do Not Go Hungry

People might think a good way to lose weight, reduce fat, and increase metabolism is to skip a meal but nothing can be further from the truth.

Too few calories can slow down the metabolism as it is a signal to your body to start conserving energy. Intermittent fasting may help naturally reset metabolic rate, but newer research indicates that working out has a better outcome.

5. Eat Enough Protein

Protein is needed to repair the muscles after a workout, but it is also a great way to make sure you are full. Protein will fuel you and give you the energy your body needs to maintain and even increase metabolic rate, as it will prevent muscle loss.

A salad with just greens will not fill you the way a salad with chicken, plant-based protein, or nuts will.

6. Hydration

Water is needed for a variety of chemical reactions in the body. Being dehydrated means your body cannot complete these reactions, leading to a slow down of metabolic rate.

Make sure you drink enough water throughout the day to ensure you are getting enough water. You can even drink a glass of water before or after meals to improve digestion.

Plus, replacing sugary drinks with water can help reduce calories and drinking water can help you speed up your metabolism temporarily.

7. Reduce Stress

The stress hormone cortisol is a chemical that affects the way your body stores energy. Increased levels of cortisol cause an increase in storing fat, which can slow down the basal metabolic rate.

To reduce stress, try incorporating different habits into your life, like mindfulness, meditation, or breathing exercises. There are many different meditations and breathing exercises to try, to test them out and see which works for you.

8. Sleep

Sleep is incredibly important to metabolic rate. When a person does not sleep enough, the hormone ghrelin is released, which can make a person incredibly hungry.

Less leptin, the hormone that indicates you are full, is released less. To ensure hormones are balanced, practice good sleep hygiene and get a good amount of rest each night.

Try guided meditations or breathing exercises designed to help you sleep if you suffer from insomnia.

9. Increase Vitamin B

Research has shown that vitamin B plays an essential role in metabolism. To maintain metabolism balance and increase metabolic rate, make sure you are getting important B vitamins in your diet, such as B vitamins including B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin), and B6 (pyridoxine).

Foods high in vitamin B include peas, spinach, eggs, oranges, potatoes, bananas, peanut butter, and whole grains.

10. Avoid Crash Diets

Crash diets, particularly those that reduce food drastically, are not good for the mind or body. Losing weight too fast will also drop the metabolic rate drastically, as this is a signal to the body that times are hard and food is scarce. 

Research states that fast weight loss leads to a huge reduction in metabolism as opposed to gradual.

Things To Eat That Increase Metabolism

Here are important diet changes that can help increase metabolism! Diet refers to the habitual food or drinks consumed, not any regulation.

11. Fermented Foods

Fermented foods are incredibly important to support well-balanced gut microbiota. Research has found that not only can a balanced microbiota increase mental health, but it has a role in immune defense and metabolism.

Fermented foods are the number one way to increase gut health, but here is a full list of what to eat and what to avoid!

12. Whole Foods instead of Processed Foods

Whole foods as opposed to processed foods are usually filled with more fiber, nutrition, and healthier ingredients. 

Some of the ingredients of processed foods, like sucralose, can negatively impact overall health, and gut health, and influence metabolic rate.

13. Sip on Black Coffee 

Coffee in and of itself has amazing health benefits! Caffeine in the morning can temporarily boost metabolism and may promote fat-burning processes in the body.

And there are many ways to boost your coffee and make it even healthier like adding collagen or flavors.

14. Drink Green Tea

Some research suggests that drinking tea can help the body break down fat. In a similar way to coffee, it can momentarily increase metabolic rate as well.

15. Eat More Spicy Food

The chemical in spicy food that makes it spicy,  capsaicin, can help boost the rate of your metabolism. While the effects may be small, it adds up over time!

The Relation between Metabolism and Weight

Metabolism in its totality is the chemical reactions in the body to sustain life, usually broken down into anabolism (storing energy, repairing, maintaining body tissue) and catabolism (breaking down stored energy to move).

And truly, your metabolism wants to maintain weight if you do not change anything about your lifestyle.

By adopting better habits, working out more, sleeping more, and eating more nutrient-dense foods, the body’s metabolism will adjust to a new baseline.

Habits like these can increase your basal metabolic rate, allowing your body to support you and fuel you efficiently.

The Takeaway

Metabolism is very complex and can be affected by a series of things including sleep, diet, physical activity, stress, hormones, and genetics.

While metabolism is complex, we can focus on raising our basal metabolic rate, or the number of calories burned while at rest.

Eat well, exercise well, and add things to your diet to support the body and increase wellbeing.

Health starts from within, so by giving your body good building blocks, it can support, repair, and maintain wellness easily.