8 Things That Could Be Slowly Killing Your Metabolism
Have you been trying everything under the sun in order to lose weight but feel like nothing is working? Maybe it works for a little but then you quickly plateau and are left scratching your head? Well, your lack of results could actually be due to a few things you’re not paying attention to that are killing your metabolism. The good news is that many of them are easily fixable. What’s even better is that none of the things mentioned in this article will take you a long time to correct. It’s a matter of identifying where you’re making mistakes and then working towards a solution.
Take a look at the list below and see which of these you are not doing that could be killing your metabolism.
1. Not Hitting the Weight Room
Did you ever read or hear someone say, “Muscle burns more calories than fat…”? Well, they’re not wrong. Not focusing on building quality lean muscle mass (regardless if you are a male or female) could be killing your metabolism. When it comes down to it, muscle demands energy pretty much 24 hours a day to function properly and to repair itself. Fat, well, doesn’t require any energy at all.
Hitting the weight room will help build muscle and keep your metabolism revving all day and all night. Don’t shy away from the weight room or think that there aren’t any benefits that can be had from moving around some heavy weights. It even doubles as a great stress reliever.
2. Not Consuming Enough Protein
There’s something called the thermic effect of food (TEF). Essentially, it takes a certain amount of energy for food to be broken down into a usable form by the body. Protein just happens to have the highest thermic effect. Your body takes longer to digest protein sources and requires more energy through the digestive process.
Instead of killing your metabolism by consuming a bunch of carbohydrates and fats in your diet, make sure you’re consuming adequate amounts of protein per day to not only help build lean muscle (like what was mentioned in #1) but to also give your metabolism a swift kick in the butt.
3. Not Consuming Enough Calories
Your body is the best computer and computer software ever invented. Without even thinking about it, your body is processing information, making changes and adjustments, pumping out blood, shuttling nutrients, working on cellular repair, digesting food, flooding oxygen into the blood, removing waste and toxins, fighting free radicals, the list goes on and on.
Related Article: 7 Things You Should Do to Keep Your Metabolism Revving
When you aren’t eating enough calories, your body feels as if you’re starving yourself and it goes into self-preservation mode where it’s going to slow everything down. Therefore, you aren’t using as much energy and are essentially killing your metabolism to preserve every calorie you take in. It also focuses on preserving body fat rather than using it as a fuel source. If you want to lose weight, focus on eliminating calories little by little from your maintenance. Dropping them too quickly will cause the self-preservation reaction to occur which is counterproductive.
4. Not Getting Enough Quality Sleep Each Night
Are you the type of person who burns the candle from both ends? Do you stay up late getting work done and only catch a few hours of sleep a night? That could be killing your metabolism. Lack of sleep can raise your cortisol levels and when they are elevated, it can destroy your metabolism and cause you to store unwanted body fat. Ghrelin (a hunger hormone) levels also increase which causes you to feel hungry more often.
Not only does lack of sleep crush your metabolism but your energy level as well, so you wake up the next day working off of a partially empty tank. Focus on getting a solid seven hours of sleep each night. Doing so will help keep the stress hormone, cortisol, managed while keeping you energized and your metabolism healthy.
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