How to Increase Your Metabolism and Lose Weight Quick

I remember the tragedy like it was yesterday…

It was around 9:00pm and I was in Palestine, Texas, staying in a quaint, one room, bed and breakfast Inn called the Gingerbread House.

I was there because I was part of a massive ground search by NASA to help in the retrieval and identification of what remained of the Space Shuttle Columbia – its hardware strewn over a several hundred mile stretch of a mostly uninhabited place they call ‘East’ Texas, after the Columbia re-entry tragedy.

I remember my first day; 9 grueling hours of walking up mountains (14 hour work days), through endless thickets that were riddled with thorns seemingly designed by none other than Freddy Kreuger himself, fording muddy streams, jumping skin-piercing barbed wire fences, evading scary water moccasins, rattlesnakes, aggressive feral pigs, and a cornucopia of little critters that always seemed to find even the tiniest of openings through your clothes and would make your life miserable at best, and life-threatening at worst (ticks carrying Lyme disease, scorpions, centipedes, and more spiders than an arachnid specialist could probably name, for instance, were everywhere).

While there, I also got a chance to ride "free-swinging" style out the side of a helicopter. We were looking for pieces of the Space Shuttle wherever we could find them. I would hang out the side of the helicopter, NASA suit on, helmet on, talking through the headphones to the pilot, letting him know if we saw anything. We found pieces of the Shuttle hanging in trees, stuck in the mud, laying peacefully in grassy fields, everywhere you could think of.

We always had NASA patches and stickers with us to hand out to the kids and families if we happened to encounter them whenever we landed to pick up pieces of the Shuttle, or investigate a mysterious looking piece of debris. The surprised looks on these kids and parents faces as we touched down and walked over to them in our "gear" was what I’d imagine that look to be like if they’d just seen an alien drop out of the sky and say, "we’ve come from outer space… and we come in peace…". They were always appreciative of the NASA souvenirs we gave them.

Every day we’d report to a central processing facility, a massive, hangar-like place that always had hundreds of people there in the morning. The entire trajectory of the Columbia re-entry path was gridded out. Systematically, grid by grid, hundreds of people would go out into the countryside every single day. This went on for months, each person walking side-by-side with their teammates, no more than an outstretched hand from each other. Walking miles in one direction, turning around and then walking back for miles, attempting to cover every square inch of those grids.

We burned a lot of calories, and were provided food, "mess-hall"style for breakfast. We’d take a bagged lunch with us, then would be fed again just after dark when we returned. Although we burned a lot of calories with all the walking we did, most of us picked up weight, as did I. Mostly carbohydrates were what they were feeding us, along with lots of high-fat foods. This insidious combo (fat + carbs) destined to pack on the weight regardless of the amount of "cardio" we were doing.

Which leads me into today’s topic…

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR METABOLISM

Exercise more, increase your lean muscle mass, take a thermogenic supplement…

Those are some of the more well known ways to get your fat-burning ‘engine’ revved up.

However, there’s one little known way (outside of the scientific community) that ups your metabolism almost effortlessly – eat more protein.

Since protein foods require more ‘metabolic processing’ than carbohydrates and fat, your body has to burn more calories to process the protein you eat than when eating fats or carbohydrates.

In fact, several research investigations have proven it. The metabolic increase seen with eating protein is just about double that of eating carbohydrates or fat (Welle et al. 1981, Robinson et al. 1990, Nair et al. 1983).

In one study, the amount of calories expended to process the protein food was about 10% of the total calories eaten (Robinson et al. 1990). So, if I’m eating a 3,000 calorie high-protein diet, then around 300 of those calories will be burned from eating protein alone. That’s like doing a cardio session… without actually having to do it.

Wouldn’t you rather eat your way to a slimmer body than exercise more? I know I would.

I recommend a diet consisting of about 40-50% protein.

Although studies have shown that high-protein intakes might negatively affect those with kidney dysfunction, healthy individuals have little to worry about with high-protein diets. To demonstrate this, a recent study showed that when bodybuilders consumed up to 1.3 grams of protein per pound of body weight, kidney function was not impaired (Poortmans and Dellalieux 2000). In fact, in an older study conducted with female rats, kidney function seemed to be improved with high-protein diets (Sterch et al. 1992).

GOOD FATS GO UP WHILE BAD FATS GO DOWN

It’s almost a crime that there are some nutritionists recommending a high-carbohydrate diet when research has demonstrated that replacing some dietary carbohydrates with protein can lead to favorable blood lipid profiles. Dr B.M. Wolfe, a nutrition researcher at the University of Western Ontario, has been asking himself this question for several years.

In three separate studies, Dr Wolfe has shown that when increasing protein intake from about 11% of the diet to about 23% (in essence doubling it), blood markers associated with heart disease took a turn for the better (Wolfe and Piche, 1999; Wolfe, 1995; Wolfe and Giovannetti, 1991). And this benefit occurs in both healthy and high-risk people. It should be noted that as protein intake increased, Dr Wolfe made sure that the fat content of the diet stayed the same (25-35%) while the carbohydrate content was reduced (from about 63% to about 48%).

The exact magnitude of the changes was pretty large as in one particular study, the bad fasts like LDL cholesterol decreased between 6 – 9%, while the good fats like HDL cholesterol increased between 12 – 17% (Wolfe, 1995). In addition, in this study, the ratio of plasma total cholesterol to HDL (the lower ratio the better) decreased between 15 – 16%. Finally, in this study, the total triglyceride levels decreased between 18 – 23%.

Another interesting effect of the protein increase in these sudies was that the satiety levels of subjects tended to be higher with the high-protein diet. Therefore they felt fuller at the same calorie intake. Protein is well known to have this effect on appetite.

SUMMARY:

* Increasing your protein intake increases your metabolic rate by about 10%
* Increasing your protein intake is not harmful to your kidneys (and in fact may even help them)
* LDL cholesterol (bad fats) will be reduced on a higher protein diet
* HDL cholesterol (good fats) will be raised on a higher protein diet.
* Triglycerides (bad fats) will be reduced on a higher protein diet.

There you have it, up your protein, burn more fat, lose weight quick, and get healthier in the process — just from eating more protein. What more can you ask for from any food?

To get more protein try the leanest cuts of red meat like top round, eye of round (in fact, any of the ’round’ cuts of meat), top sirloin, as well as chicken, turkey, fish, and quality protein powders.

Next, get the entire list of 20 “Blueprints” I created that allowed me to dramatically transform my body and win the 1998 Body For Life contest. Imagine finally getting the body you’ve always wanted! Only available at Harry’s Blog

Article Source: ArticleSpan

Filed under: Diet and Weight Loss

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