When it comes to losing body fat and gaining lean muscle, everything can be boiled down to these three areas…

1. Nutrition: Most diet experts agree that your nutrition will be responsible for 70% of your success.
2. Exercise: Although you can’t underestimate the synergy that is created when good nutrition and hard workouts go hand in hand, exercise will only take you as far as your diet will allow it to. Exercise is recognized as contributing 20% to the overall picture of fat loss and gains in lean muscle.
3. Genetics: Your genetic make-up completes the puzzle at 10%.

One key factor in all three of these areas is your metabolism. A strong and speedy metabolism can help you utilize the calories you take in more effectively (nutrition,) it can help you burn more calories while you are working out (exercise,) and it can allow you to tap into fat stores while you work on the computer, sleep, or watch a movie (genetics.)

Here are just a couple of things we all can do to speed up our metabolism…

Drink Lots of Water. Start by sipping a total of 64-90 ounces of water per day and then add 8 ounces for every 10 lbs of fat you need to lose. The benefits of water include, improved kidney function, appetite supresant, better transfer of nutrients into cells, and better digestion of food.

Get Your ZZZZZ’s. Deep sleep enables our bodies to produce HGH-Human Growth Hormone. This is the hormone that works directly on cells to stimulate metabolism. This is one reason younger folks have an easier time staying slim since HGH is produced at a very high rate during earlier years in life. Getting 7-8 hours of sleep each night can help our bodies produce more HGH. Strenuous weight training has also been showed to increase HGH levels.

Increase Protein Intake. When you eat foods like chicken, fish, and other lean meats the number of chemical reactions needed to help it digest increase. Scientist refer to this as the “dynamic reaction of protein.” This reaction can raise BMI-Basal Metabolic Rate as high as 30% for a period of 3-12 hours after digestion.

We all know we can’t be 15 years old again, but we can help ourselves by doing small things everyday to insure we are maximizing our metabolic potential.

Live well and live with purpose, Brad