When you start trying to lose weight, you inevitably wind up spending your first few weeks fighting to lose a few pounds only to watch them come back in the next couple of days. Weeks of this can go by, and you might be doing nearly everything right. You could be exercising properly, dieting appropriately, watching your calories... but the switch hasn't been flipped yet.
Then, one day, you see the scale drop for the second day in a row. Then a week goes by and you've lost a few pounds, and it happens again the next week. You haven't changed anything, but something definitely happened.
Your metabolism likely changed. Your metabolism is the key component in getting your body to lose or gain any reasonable amount of weight, and sometimes even when you are doing nearly everything right, it takes a while for your body to change the way it intakes and processes energy.
So when you're trying to lose weight, you're mostly trying to change the way your body processes food. If you can't change your metabolism, it's almost inevitable that your body will fall back to its natural resting point at some point.
The good news is that we know more and more about how to boost our metabolism all the time, through the miracle of large scale studies and SCIENCE!
And I'm about to share with you one of the best ways to lose weight: eating. Eating the right foods, specifically.
You see just like how carbohydrates can encourage your body to store weight, other foods can encourage your body to burn calories or fat. We scoured the depths of the internet looking for the most potent metabolism-boosting foods, and have dredged up five of our favourites to help you on your journey to lasting weight loss.
Let's do this:
Salmon
Oh I know you remember salmon. Those Omega-3's we've talk about? The fatty acids? Well apparently having a low intake of Omega-3's has been linked to being overweight or obese, which is not groovy. In particular, low Omega-3's are linked to higher incidence of belly fat, which is a greater predictor of poor health in the long run.
Moreover, Salmon has the proteins your body needs to construct muscle, so that the exercise you've been doing has an easier time paying off.
Nuts
Healthy nuts (ditch the spicy peanuts) make you feel full with plenty of protein and fiber, while also offering a variety of added benefits.
Nuts are another great source of healthy fats as well. Yup, just like Salmon, nuts can offer the fatty acids that you need in your diet that you can't otherwise get from your body or effectively from supplementation.
Almonds are also a great source of vitamin E and calcium. Vitamin E is an antioxidant that can help keep your body free of those pesky liberated radicals that damage your cells and make it harder to keep active.
Spinach
Spinach is nutrient dense and super low calorie, meaning you can have giant salads and still not feel too guilty if you did the rest of the toppings right.
Spinach is also high in iron, vitamin C, and potassium. Potassium is crucial in mental performance, which also makes it crucial in boosting your metabolism. If your brain is foggy, odds are you're not going to be getting up and getting active.
It's also another food with helpful antioxidants which can help repair damaged tissues, getting you healthier faster.
Avocado
You might be getting sick of hearing about healthy fats by now, but have you heard about the healthy fats in avocados?
Alright let's pause for a minute. I might not have made it clear enough earlier, but there's a good reason to intake a lot of fats in your diet. You see, if you want your body to burn fat, it needs to be used to burning it for fuel, and become good at it.
Getting your body to run on fats instead of carbohydrates is called entering a state of ketosis, and it's becoming more and more commonly used as a weight loss and health strategy.
The benefits of avocados are greater than just being high in healthy fats though, avocados also help your body intake fat soluble vitamins like D & E, so eating avocados alongside vitamin rich meals makes them even better for your body.
If you like your eyes, avocados also contain lutein. Lutein helps protect your eyes from damage as well as repair damage done by the sun.
Eggs
For men, eggs increase testosterone, which will definitely increase your body's ability to use fuel.
For everyone however, eggs are again a great source of Omega-3's, as well as protein.
Eggs also contain vitamins D, B6, and B12, alongside selenium, zinc, iron, and copper. They also raise good cholesterol, and for those who worry, you can ignore the cholesterol in eggs. There is no correlation between the amount of cholesterol that you intake in your diet and the amount present in your blood.
Final Thoughts
Now admittedly no single food is going to kick your metabolism into gear, or we all would have heard about it by now. However, if you use this list to start focusing your diet around nutritionally dense foods that help your body's overall health, and avoid foods that harm your metabolism, you will eventually hit a point where your body becomes more efficient and starts burning your fuel instead of storing it.
In the meantime, if you need a low-calorie snack to hold you over, there's always NeuroGum ;)
