Can We Really Boost Metabolism

These are the 3 main ways we burn energy:

• Basal metabolic rate (BMR)
• Thermic effect of activity (TEA)
• Thermic effect of eating (TEF)

To boost metabolism you would have to increase the energy burn in one or more of these areas.

What is Basal Metabolic Rate?

BMR is the amount of energy your body requires to function on a daily basis, not including any movement. It accounts for the majority of your energy requirements, 60-75%. This is just the energy needed to cover the basics such as lungs breathing, heart pumping, liver cleansing and brain thinking.

Ways to boost BMR:

Gain weight. The larger you are the more energy your body requires to survive even without activity therefore larger people have a higher BMR, however fat gain is not always desirable. Gaining weight through increased muscle mass will increase BMR whilst improving health markers and the shape and tone of the body.

TEA can be split into 2 components, Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) and Exercise. This basically means you’re everyday movement not including formal exercise e.g. cleaning and your formal exercise e.g. workouts, respectively. The more active you are the higher your metabolic burn which can range between 15-30% of your total metabolic output.

Ways to boost TEA:

• Increase NEAT. NEAT usually contributes more to metabolic burn than exercise so being more chronically active such as a manual labourer or taking up a hobby that requires lots of movement each day e.g. tramping, foraging etc. will have the biggest impact.
• Increase exercise. Increasing formal exercise will increase metabolic burn providing this doesn’t affect your rate of NEAT, injury risk and ability to recover. As humans we have a ceiling where we can no longer increase TEA.

What is the Thermic Effect of Food?

TEF is the amount of energy it takes to break down and process our food through digestion. This will always be lower than the total amount of energy in the food eaten so will never create overall fat loss but can be manipulated to burn slightly more or slightly less energy. TEF contributes to around 10% on average of total metabolism.

Ways to boost TEF:

• Eat more food. The more food that you eat the more energy it takes to break down that food, although this can lead to overall fat gain if you eat in excess.
• Eat higher protein foods. Protein as a macronutrient has the highest energy cost to process, approximately 15% of its total energy. Whereas carbohydrates take around 10% and fat around 5%. However we ideally should consume all 3 of the macronutrients for health so we can’t skew our intakes too far towards any specific one.

So Can you Really Boost Metabolism?

Yes you can... but only by small amounts that may only be meaningful for metabolic rate over your life span but not necessarily for short term fat loss.