A 50-year-old client came to me frustrated and stressed because she couldn’t lose weight. She was a busy business woman often eating on the run or skipping meals. However, she was religious about counting her calories at 1200 a day. She felt like she was doing everything right, but still couldn’t seem to make anything work!
Like many of my clients, she was ignoring a key factor in managing weight and that is metabolism.
Metabolism is the amount of energy your body uses each day and it can be a key factor in losing weight and keeping it off.
So, here’s part 2 of my three-part series for winning the metabolism game.
The first thing I did with my client was to help her stop dieting, counting calories, and fasting. Here’s why.
Research has shown when you go on any type of restrictive diet, you often lose weight quickly but 25-30% of that is lean muscle. Which means you just lowered your metabolism. That’s why so many people regain weight after going on a diet.
To speed up my client’s metabolism and start losing weight I told her she need to eat foods that have a high thermogenic effect. Meaning they take a lot of energy to digest, absorb and transport nutrients.
What would those foods be? They would be simple, unprocessed whole foods.
Let’s look at what is a whole food?
- A whole food is a food that has had nothing added to it or taken from it.
- Whole foods include fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, meat, fish and eggs.
- Whole foods are taken directly from their source, be it plant or animal, and contain all their original nutrients.
- Whole foods do not contain any added ingredients.
- Whole foods are foods that are in the form in which nature intended them to be. For example, an apple or an egg.
Why eat more whole foods? Because they take more energy to metabolize than processed foods.
And she made sure her whole food eating plan included protein at every meal. Why is that important?
Because protein takes a lot of metabolic energy to digest. I suggested she eat her largest portion of protein at breakfast, next largest portion at lunch and smallest portion at dinner.
This helped my client to efficiently utilize the energy from the protein and give her body the energy and fuel it needed to run efficiently when she was most active.
Click here to download a few breakfast recipes she used that are power packed with protein.
Next, I had her add in more water.
There are so many benefits to drinking water. But in relation to metabolism, cellular hydration is necessary for the body to function optimally. The body’s ability to create and burn energy is weakened when hydration is diminished. When a cell shrinks due to dehydration, the body is signaled to slow down the metabolic process. Keeping your cells hydrated is a good way to keep your metabolism working at optimal levels.
I hope this information helps to shed light on a few things you can start to do for a metabolic energy boost.
It worked for my client. She found a regular routine of having easy whole food meals on hand, like those in this downloadable meal plan, eating three meals a day and drinking more water gave her lasting energy and she started to lose weight.
The key is to be persistent, confident and patient.
Stay tuned…more to come next week.
Cheers,
Patti
P.S. I’ll be giving a live training on the use of the Fascia Blaster as a self-care tool for pain management in my Facebook Women’s Wellness group, Wednesday, 2/27 at 7:00 PM EST. It is a closed group so if you aren’t already a member, click here and ask to join. Or share this link with a friend who might find the information helpful: https://www.facebook.com/groups/HMWfitnessnutrition/