Master your Metabolism
Acquiring and maintaining a speedy metabolism requires more than regular bouts of exercise and eating small frequent meals. If weight-loss is your goal, then it’s time to improve your calorie-burning strategies by learning the many ways we damage our metabolisms everyday without even knowing it.
1) Don’t Eat Before Bed
Laying down too soon after eating can cause digestive juices to flow upward into the esophagus, leading to heartburn, and making digestion more difficult. Sleeping decreases the digestive process. Any foods eaten too quickly before bed can lead to bloating and feelings of fullness upon waking because these foods were never digested.
Master your metabolism by eating in an upright position and avoid laying down for at least 1 hour. This allows digestive enzymes to break down our foods most efficiently.
2) Don’t Eat Large Meals Before Exercising
Exercise and digestive processes rely on many of same resources. Digestion requires blood circulation and oxygen flow to the stomach while exercise requires blood circulation and oxygen flow to the working muscles; the muscles will usually win the battle, leaving our last meal partially digested at best.
Master your metabolism by exercising before your next meal or by eating a small, quickly digesting snack prior to workouts (like a serving of fruit or a protein shake).
3) Eat Fruit By Itself
Fruit digests faster than just about any type of food. When fruit is combined with other foods, it gets trapped in between or on top of other slower digesting foods, leading to fermentation and inevitably, gas, bloating, and stomach pain.
4) Don’t Drink Too Much Water with Meals
While drinking water prior to or during a meal is helpful for decreasing your appetite, drinking too much water can dilute digestive enzymes, and disturb the digestive process.
5) Avoid Drinking Cold Water with Meals
Many believe that drinking cold water can speed up their metabolisms because the body has to work harder to change the temperature of the water during digestion. This might have some truth during normal consumption, but not while drinking water with meals. Digestion increases the body’s temperature, allowing more calories to be burned. Confusing the body by adding cold water will reverse the body’s temperature and slow down the optimal thermal caloric burn.
Master your metabolism by sipping hot, warm, or room temperature water or tea during your meals.
6) Avoid Bathing Immediately After Eating
I bet you never would have guessed that bathing during the wrong time of day could interfere with your metabolism! Yep! Don’t shower for an hour after eating. Hot water increases your body temperature and brings blood to the surface of your skin. If blood is flowing to your skin, then it can’t flow to your stomach where it is needed to help breakdown our last meal.
Additional Tips to Increase Digestion and Master your Metabolism
- Snack on raw celery sticks prior to eating cooked meals. Celery root stimulates digestive enzymes.
- Take digestive enzymes with cooked meals, especially when you are eating rich foods, unbalanced meals, or foods that your body is not used to.
- Avoid drinking excessive amounts of water prior to eating.