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12 Ways to Burn More Fat

Who wants to burn more fat, hands up!

Everybody hates excess fat that builds up in an unsightly manner and makes it hard for you to fit into your size 6 jeans. I think that there’s hardly anyone out there, who would not like to flatten that stomach, wave bye bye to those love-handles or tone up those thighs. So how does one burn more fat, and build more muscle? Well, here are 12 practical ways to burn more fat, which I find really easy to execute.

My top 12 Ways to burn More Fat are.. 

1. Eat Breakfast

Eating breakfast keeps your energy up and keeps you going till lunch. It’s also a great way to boost your metabolism. I don’t know about you but come lunch, I am usually ravenous. But choosing the right things to eat for breakfast is also important. A balanced and nutritious breakfast should provide enough calories, which is a quarter of your daily calories intake. A healthy breakfast should provide some protein, a reasonable amount of complex carbohydrate, a little fat and a variety of vitamins and minerals.

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2. Don’t Diet

Great news people – staying trim is not about eating less – it’s about eating more! After dieting for more than 3 days, your body goes into starvation mode. This then tells your body to reduce your metabolism rate so that you can hold on to existing energy stores. In the long run, you will start to burn muscle and look terrible. Not only that, with less muscle, visceral fat actually has an advantage so you will end up a skinny fat person. Not a great state to be in at all.

3. Eat Watermelon

Watermelon contains the amino acid arginine, which could possibly promote weight loss, according to the Journal of Nutrition. In a laboratory study, adding this amino acid to the diet of obese mice enhanced the oxidation of fat and glucose. Snack on watermelon and other arginine sources, such as seafood, nuts, and seeds, year-round to stay slim and trim. I like watermelon after my run – it serves two purposes – keeping me hydrated and keeping me from getting too hungry before I reach dinner.

Sleeping Watermelon

photo credit – The Candid Street

4. Sleep Early

My mum is a big advocate of sleeping early, and sleeping often. She really loves her afternoon naps and boy does she look young. They say, if you want to see how you will age – look at your mother (lucky me!) Just to prove the sleep theory – a study in Finland looked at sets of identical twins and discovered that in each set of siblings, the twin who slept less and was under more stress had more visceral fat. So sleep your blues and your fats away!

5. Eat Protein

Your body needs protein to maintain lean muscle. In a 2006 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers argued that the current recommended daily intake for protein, 0.36 grams per pound of body weight, is woefully inadequate for anyone doing resistance training and recommend that women get between 0.54 and 1 gram per pound of body weight. Add a serving, like 3 ounces of lean meat, 2 tablespoons of nuts, or 8 ounces of low-fat yogurt, to every meal and snack. Research also shows that after your work out, eating protein can burn calories by up to 35 percent.

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6. Drink Green Tea

Green Tea is great – it helps pump up my metabolism, yet it does not cause me any gastric side effects, unlike coffee on an empty stomach. The proposed mechanism for green tea’s calorie-burning properties lies in the ability of EGCG to increase thermogenesis, or heat production, by influencing enzymes in the metabolic process. EGCG seems to increase the amount of calories burned throughout the day for all activities, from digesting food to climbing stairs to typing. Other food components, like caffeine or capsaicin (in hot peppers) can boost calorie burning, but EGCG has a stronger effect.

7. Move!

Whether you sit or stand at work plays a big role on your waistline! Inactivity of more than 4 hours, causes a near shut- down of an enzyme that controls fat and cholesterol metabolism in our bodies. To keep this enzyme active, walk around – walk to the fax machine, walk to the toilet, walk from the car park to your office (even if it is on the 6th floor). Move baby move!

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8. Get More Vitamin D

In a 2010 study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers found that boosting your levels of vitamin D (and intake of dairy-derived calcium) may increase the likelihood of weight loss while dieting. Vitamin D may help thwart the weight gain that often occurs in middle-aged women, according to a 2007 study from the Archives of Internal Medicine. For the study, 36,282 postmenopausal women were assigned to receive 400 IU of vitamin D and 1,000 mg of calcium in supplement form or a placebo daily. After three years, supplement-taking participants who had skimped on calcium prior to the study were found to be 11 percent less likely to gain weight (compared to those assigned to a placebo). So, Vitamin D, exposure to sun and calcium intake are important factors for your health. Great news for me because I love the sun!

 9. Eat Chillies

It turns out that chillies, boosts your sympathetic nervous system, that which is responsible for your fight-or-flight response, according to a study published in the Journal of Nutritional Science and Vitaminology. Chilies can spike your metabolism by up to 23 percent. Not bad from just eating something you love.

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10. Get Fiber

Research shows that some fiber can fire up your fat burn by as much as 30 percent. With the recent popularity of low-carb plans like Atkins and the South Beach diet, it’s hard to remember a time when filling up on fibre was trendy. However, following huge amounts of scientific research, health professionals suddenly revealed that if you wanted to stay healthy and lose weight, you should eat more dietary fibre. Previously called ‘roughage’, dietary fibre is the term that describes the carbohydrates that human’s can’t digest. Dietary fibre is found in plant foods such as cereals, pulses, fruits and vegetables and occurs mainly in the plant cell wall where it provides structural support for the plant.

11. Eat Iron

Iron is needed to make red blood cells and is a vital component of haemoglobin, which gives blood its colour and transports oxygen around the body to the cells. A low iron intake means haemoglobin levels drop with the result that the blood carries insufficient oxygen to the cells –this is what’s known as iron deficiency anaemia. Typical symptoms, which you’ve probably already experienced, include extreme tiredness, fatigue, breathlessness on light exertion, dizzy spells and an unnaturally pale complexion. Iron is essential for carrying the oxygen your muscles need to burn fat. Unless you restock your stores, you run the risk of low energy and a sagging metabolism. Shellfish, lean meats, beans, fortified cereals, and spinach are excellent sources.

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12. Stay Hydrated

Don’t roll your eyes! The potion for losing that excess body fat is all around you. It covers two thirds of the planet. If you eat right and exercise at the intensity, frequency and duration proper for you, but still can’t get rid of a little paunch here and there, you’re probably just not drinking enough water. Drinking two 8-ounce glasses of water before breakfast, lunch, and dinner while also cutting back on portions may help you lose weight and keep it off for at least a year, according to research presented today at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, in Boston. While each person’s hydration needs are different, the Institute of Medicine advises that men and women try to consume about 3.7 and 2.7 liters of water a day, respectively, including water found in food and other beverages.

 

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9 Responses to 12 Ways to Burn More Fat

  1. David Wang January 9, 2012 at 7:20 am #

    Great tips! I need to work on sleeping early. I think my sleeping habits are costing me. And will be stocking up on watermelon too!

    • ciki January 9, 2012 at 9:03 am #

      Thanks David.. more challenging for you, coz you are a father of a small kid! I think you’ll only get enough sleep once you cross the 3 year old barrier:P poor u!

  2. Yass February 26, 2012 at 9:36 pm #

    Don’t diet? I may have to disagree with you on that, or maybe in the wording you used. Dieting doesn’t mean eating less. Dieting is planning and working on a plan to eat what the body needs in order to achieve fitness goals, even when trying to gain weight. It is true that in some cases, when under eating a person will slow down the metabolism, and in some cases when the body gets into starvation mode, it will save the body fat (stored energy) as much as it can and even use muscle fibers as energy source, but a proper diet is required in order to burn fat. The only way to do this is by knowing and calculating the right amount of calories for the specific individual based on factors like weight, age, height, gender, daily activities, etc. Knowing this will let the person know how much he/she needs to eat in order to burn fat.

    • ciki February 26, 2012 at 10:28 pm #

      thanks for your comment. the dieting here refers to eating less. and diet fads.

  3. Joady May 1, 2012 at 3:24 am #

    The thing with watermelon is that it is also high in fructose… which is not processed by the liver and goes straight to the front of the queue as the body’s source of energy – including other sugars and fat.

    • ciki May 1, 2012 at 11:00 am #

      Really, I eat shit loads of it, and I’m skinny, so I guess it works for me!

  4. Debbie May 11, 2012 at 8:01 pm #

    Anything grown by the earth is healthy for you. Ther is constantly this hang up with sugar. Sugar in fruit is not the same as sugar in a packet. Moderation in everything, but you can’t name a fruit or vegetable that doesn’t have essential vitamins and nutritional value. The last thing I want my children to hear is fruit is sugary and bad for you!!!!! That’s crazy talk!!!!

    • ciki May 12, 2012 at 1:01 am #

      Hi Debbie! Thanks for your comment. Both me and hubby LOVE our fruits..but we are also fitness freaks. Glad to know that we are not alone;)

  5. mike May 6, 2013 at 8:51 am #

    Glad to know I’m gay and not alone as well in this world of weight loss freaks

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