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Like millions of people world wide, I've struggled with being overweight a long time, starting all the way back when I was a teenager. At my worst I weighed 338 pounds, and suffered from a pretty severe instance of heart arrhythmia during a major hike. I was 26, only four years removed from being relatively healthy and active (I was still overweight, but being large framed, at 235 I was still in really good overall shape) to being one step away from a major heart attack. That's a wake up call.

The problem was, I couldn't find anything that would work. I tried the Mediterranean Diet and it worked great, but I couldn't afford to spend that much on food, being way down on the income level. No carb diets just have major health problems, and the moment you have any bread, it seemed like you put on ten pounds in water weight.

So what was left? The moment of embarrassment came for me in one week's time. This was when I was all the way up to 330, and I sat on, and broke, two toilet seats in one week. Even worse, this wasn't in the privacy of my own house, but at a friend's apartment and at my aunt and uncle's house. Yeah, they may have been the cheap type of cardboard like toilet seats, but the absolute humiliation of that made me determined to lose the weight once and for all.

There is no magic solution: I knew changing diet habits and starting to work out again would be necessary, but I needed to find something I could do and stick with. That's where revving up the metabolism comes in. This is a natural way of losing weight, by making your own body more efficient at burning calories. Metabolism is the rate at which your body burns calories (and fat). Your body is designed to burn calories efficiently, and through bad habits that can cease to happen, but with some good habits, this can be fixed.

Tip #1: Drink lots of water. This is one you may complain about seeing everywhere, but for many people this is simply the most important rule. Drink lots and lots of water. Ice water is preferable, since the body has to heat up to ingest it. Although the exact number is controversial, there are studies saying that if your 8 glasses of water a day are ice water, then your body burns up to 50 calories warming it up. That's not a lot, but it adds up to 18,000 calories burned over a year, or roughly 5 lbs.

In addition, water helps all your organs function at top capacity, including your kidneys and liver. This is important because it makes sugars easier to process, and means less gets

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