If you have some health goals, one of them should be to boost your metabolism. A faster metabolism can help you burn off more calories and prevent unwanted weight gain, so it is a good goal to make. But a fast metabolism is also a sign of good health. Following are some methods on how to build up metabolism without doing anything too excessive or dangerous.

Build Up Your Muscle To Boost Metabolism

You may have heard that a pound of muscle can help you burn off an extra 50-100 calories a day. While that may be overshooting the truth a little, more muscle really does mean more calories burned for a couple of reasons.

First, when you build more muscle, you tend to decrease the fat on your body. Fat secretes different proteins, such as leptin and cytokines, and they have a negative influence over your metabolism and how well it works. Therefore, when you decrease your fat, you decrease the amount of proteins secreted, and you give your metabolism a boost from that alone. This is where you will boost your metabolism the most from muscle building.

The truth is that an addition of one pound of muscle actually burns about an extra 5-10 calories per day, not 50-100. Compare that to 1 pound of fat that burns around 2 calories per day. There may be expectations to the rule, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you have a lot of fat, and a lot of muscle to build, you could build up your metabolism by a bit.

Drink Cold Water

There is popular tweet on Twitter that says 2 cups of cold water on an empty stomach can increase your metabolism by 30%. It sounds like an easy addition to a daily lifestyle, but can you really do it? It turns out there is a study that proves you can.

“Drinking 500 ml of water increased metabolic rate by 30%.” – NCBI

In the case of cold water, your body has to burn off more calories just to process it, and that can play a role in a stronger metabolism. But, just like muscle it doesn’t seem to be by a lot.

In fact, according to dietitian Andrea Tappe from the University of Arkansas For Medical Sciences, you only burn about eight more calories when you drink a glass of ice water as opposed to a glass of room temperature water.

Eat Healthier & Avoid Diets

If you are getting ready to go on a starvation diet, and your goal is to boost your metabolism, then you are setting yourself up for failure. When you starve yourself, you slow down your metabolism big time, which means that when you start to eat normally again, you are going to gain back the weight and have a harder time losing it in the future. The more you do this, the slower your metabolism will become.

So, if you want to boost your metabolism, get on a healthy diet full of natural foods and don’t overeat. Some choose to take supplements to help with their weight loss and metabolism boosting goals. Getting the nutrients your body needs to work properly will help balance out hormones that affect your metabolism and increase its efficiency.

Even some of the most simple ingredients around the house can help boost your metabolism.

“Cinnamon stimulates a sluggish digestion, and especially helps with the metabolism of fats. It contains an oil in its bark that can help to breakdown fats during digestion.” – Benefits of Cinnamon

Go To Your Doctor

Many people are living with chronic issues that affect their metabolism, and they don’t even known it. For instance, hypothyroidism can produce a number of symptoms, such as fatigue, moodiness, and hair loss, all of which may be waved off by the average person.

Hypothyroidism also causes weight gain because it has a negative effect on metabolism. In order to find out if your body is acting against your metabolism, you need to get some blood tests done.

“Thyroid hormone regulates metabolism in both animals and humans.” – American Thyroid Association

The bottom line is that if you want to build up your metabolism, you have to become healthier through a healthy diet and regular exercise. While you can do little things, like increase your muscle, drink cold water, and avoid diets to keep your metabolism strong, a healthy body keeps everything running well and the hormones working well, and that is the best thing you can do for a strong metabolism.