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First, let’s be clear: There’s no such thing as miracle metabolism boosters. No matter what you see in ads or hear in your running circles, there are no special supplements or super foods that can blast off unwanted pounds while you sleep. But you can and should take steps to keep your metabolism running at its hottest, because the same steps you take to stoke your calorie burn also improve your athletic performance and help keep you healthier for life.
What Exactly is Metabolism?
People talk about metabolism like it’s some genie in a bottle waiting for you to find the magic lamp. It’s not. Your metabolism is simply your body’s process of using a certain amount of energy it needs to live. It represents the number of calories you burn to keep your heart beating, your neurons firing, and to perform the countless other functions you do without thought to support the body you have.
The bigger you are, the higher your metabolism, because there’s more of you to keep running. Genetics also plays a role, as some people naturally have higher metabolic rates and burn more energy even when idling than others. Metabolism also naturally declines about one to two percent per decade with age.
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You can’t do much to change your genes, and you certainly can’t stop time. But you can change your body composition, which affects your metabolism. You can also control what you eat and how much you sleep, both of which can influence how your body makes, burns, and stores energy.
How to Boost Your Metabolism
Build the Engine
After age 30, you begin to lose muscle mass, up to 5 percent per decade. Men lose more than women, likely due to hormonal factors. Most men will lose about 30 percent of their muscle mass over the course of their lives, according to Harvard Men’s Health Watch.
That’s bad because muscle burns three times as many calories even when you’re inactive than fat does. To be clear, the metabolic benefits of strength training were greatly exaggerated for years. The absolute calorie-burning numbers are not huge: Each pound of muscle burns six calories a day to sustain itself, while each pound of fat burns two. But it’s not insignificant. My 115 pounds of muscle burns 690 calories a day even if I do nothing more strenuous than surf the web. If I lose 10 percent of that lean tissue, my do-nothing calorie burn drops 70 calories a day, or about 500 a week, or more than 25,000 per year.
Suddenly, it adds up. Most importantly, losing muscle doesn’t just diminish your Netflix watching calorie-burn. Less muscle also means you’re less strong to ride hard and fast, lift heavy things, and burn lots of energy through movement. That matters a lot.
Strength training helps you hang onto more of your muscle mass with age, slowing what can otherwise by a steady metabolic decline.
“By strength training twice a week, you can reverse about 50 percent of the metabolism slowdown that comes with age,” says long-time muscle and metabolism researcher Gary Hunter, Ph.D., a professor of human studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
It can also help you replace what you’ve lost. One of Hunter’s studies found that adults ages 61 to 77 years of age were able to add about four and a half pounds of muscle, increase strength by 36 percent, and boost their resting metabolism by nearly 7 percent after six months of strength training.
Feed the Furnace
You know how your phone goes into low battery mode when it dips below an essential amount of charge? Your metabolism does the same thing. When you don’t eat enough to give your systems the energy they need, your body goes into preservation mode and dims your metabolic rate (which is why weight loss can be so difficult).
So the first step in keeping your metabolism high is proper fueling and not dramatically slashing calories. The average recreational female runner burns between 2,000 and 2,400 calories a day, while their male counterparts burn between 2,200 and 2,700. Following mainstream diets designed for sedentary people, which often recommend super low daily calorie intakes, will wreak mayhem on your active-person’s metabolism.
Instead pay attention to the quality of your diet. Research shows that eating a healthy diet rich in whole, unprocessed foods will help fuel your activity and keep your metabolism humming along. If you doubt it can make a big difference, consider that a study published in Food & Nutrition Research found that volunteers burned nearly twice as many calories (137 vs. 73) after eating a cheddar cheese sandwich on multi-grain bread than they did eating the same calories from a processed cheese sandwich on white bread. Quality matters.
Fan the Flames
Good lifestyle habits like staying hydrated and getting plenty of rest can also help keep your metabolism humming along.
Research shows that sleep deprivation, like getting less than four hours a night, blunts resting metabolism by about 3 percent, and that it rebounds quickly after a long night of recovery sleep.
Drinking water, especially cold water, can temporarily raise your metabolism, according to some research. More importantly, proper hydration helps your organs and muscles function optimally, and allows you to crush your daily runs with ease.
Other studies show that drinking green tea and eating hot chili peppers can each give you a little metabolic bump. But you need a lot of both to make a measurable difference, so enjoy them if you like them, but don’t feel like your metabolism will meltdown without them.
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The Bottom Line
Yes, you can actually boost your metabolism, but—no surprise here—there is no silver bullet. Despite what Instagram influencers or clever advertisements will lead you to believe, the methods of boosting your metabolism are the same habits of a healthy and active lifestyle: strength training, eating well with a focus on high-quality foods, sleeping enough, and staying hydrated. Do these things, and you’ll not only stoke your metabolism, but you’ll also ride stronger and avoid injury.
