by Shaz Slaughter

Created on: March 05, 2009   Last Updated: July 26, 2009

Raising your metabolism is one of the fastest and easiest ways to lose weight. Once your metabolism is active and burning up calories you will not only start to see the weight come off but you will also have more energy. How do you raise your metabolism? Along with exercise and getting a good night sleep, believe it or not the easiest way to raise your metabolism is to

eat.

The reason why so many people have a low metabolism is because they do not eat or rather they do not eat on a schedule. If you eat at different times of the day and skip meals often, your body starts to think that you are starving regardless of how much food you just ate. Because your body is designed to survive at all costs, if it thinks you are starving then it will initiate a lock down on all calories taken in.

You need calories just to keep breathing and if your body does not think that you are up to the task of giving it the constant supply of calories it needs just to function it panics and sends out a memo to the metabolism and tells it to stop using up the calories that are coming in and those calories get redirected to "storage"

The good news is it is never too late to fire up your metabolism.

The first thing you need to do is to eat on a regular basis. Start of by eating breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same time every day, constantly skipping meals with throw your body into chaos. However if you eat at the same times of day then your body knows when to expect the next supply of calories and will start burning off most of, if not all of the calories it takes in.

The next thing you want to do is get active. If you are not accustomed to much physical activity you may want to start off slowly by just taking walks or trying to add a few more steps into your daily routine.

If you are thinking stuff like that takes too much energy the simple fact is your body only gives you energy if it thinks you need it. In other words if you start trying to use more energy than you are used to having your body is forced to find more and it sends a memo out to the metabolism that asks it to start burning up the spare calories in storage because they need more energy upstairs.

Of course the more tedious the exercises the more calories you burn and the quicker you can get your metabolism jump started. Running is the best exercise for burning up calories and kick starting your metabolism because it incorporates so many different muscle groups at once.

If you do not like running you should also look into alternative exercises like dancing. Whatever you do make sure it is something you can do consistently and that you enjoy doing.

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