11 Tricks To Burn More Calories

By A.C. Shilton for Men's Journal

Image via: averastorycenter.org

If you’re over the age of 20, you’re probably gaining nearly a pound a year. In 2011, the New England Journal of Medicine released results from a decades-long study that found the average American adult gained 3.35 pounds every four years. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The study found, for example, that the biggest weight changes came in people that ate more potato chips and sugar-sweetened beverages. 

To stave off love handles, you need good eating habits and a solid workout routine. But you also need to boost your metabolism, which naturally begins to slow as you age. The faster your metabolism, the more calories your body will consume during the day. “Every little bit counts,” says Cedric Bryant, PhD, the Chief Science Officer for the American Council on Exercise. He likens boosting your metabolism and calorie burn as collecting spare change. You’re not going to buy a car with that change, but it might add up to enough to buy dinner (a salad, please), at the end of the month.

Here are 11 ways to boost your metabolism and burn more calories throughout the day. Make these a habit and you’ll fit into your college jeans for decades to come.  

1. Build Your Leg Muscles

We’ve all heard that a pound of muscle burns more calories than a pound of fat, but the actual difference is pretty illuminating. “Your metabolism has a lot to do with your underlying body composition,” says Wayne Scott Anderson, MD. Dr. Anderson is the medical director for Take Shape For Life, a weight loss coaching service, and author of several books on weight loss. A pound of fat burns 15 calories per day, but a pound of muscle burns 85 calories per day.

Your largest muscles are in your legs, so adding lean muscle there is going to give you a big return on investment. And know that you don’t have to get huge to see benefits. “The more muscle mass you have the more your metabolic rate will increase, but we also see increases in metabolic rates for individuals that don’t get size or don’t want size changes,” says Eric Sternlicht, PhD, an associate professor of exercise physiology and kinesiology at California’s Chapman University. If you want to increase muscle metabolism without increasing size, Sternlicht recommends focusing on explosive movements, like plyometrics and Olympic-style lifts. If you want size, however, load up those weights and go for slow movements like the leg press and squats.

2. Drink More Water

This sounds too good to be true, but it’s legit. A 2003 study published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that study subjects burned up to 30 percent more calories after drinking 17 ounces of water. The study authors noted that most of this increase was likely a result of the body having to heat the water for digestion, so make sure you’re drinking ice water for maximum effect.

“Water actually comes into play in a couple of ways,” says Christy Kirkendol, MD, who specializes in weight loss at her Livelight Clinic in Indiana. “Cold water can help you burn more calories, but it also gives you that sense of fullness and helps you figure out whether you’re ‘stomach hungry’ or just 'head hungry.’”

Plus, even being just a little dehydrated affects athletic performance, meaning you won’t hit it as hard in the gym. A 2007 study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that dehydrated athletes performed single tasks just as well, but failed when asked to perform sets of exercises. So if you’re planning to do more than one rep at the gym tonight, drink up.

3. Turn Down Your Thermostat

Yes, shivering burns calories, but that’s not the extent of it. When researchers in the Netherlands put a group of young men in a cold room for 10 days, the researchers noticed that after a few days the men stopped shivering. This likely was due to an increase in brown fat. Brown fat generates heat by burning energy. Scientists even believe that brown fat can use white fat (which is the stuff that accumulates around our middle) for fuel. A 2012 study published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation found that men exposed to cold temperatures — but not cold enough to induce shivering — for three hours burned 250 more calories.

4. Sleep Eight Hours

If you’re skipping out on sleep to hit the gym, you may not actually be doing yourself a favor. “Sleep is a huge thing for weight loss that people don’t pay enough attention to,” says Roshini Raj, MD, a clinical associate at NYU and the medical advisor for the Lose It! weight loss app. “Sleep deprivation has been linked to obesity and weight gain,” she adds.

When sleep deprived, your body releases cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. These are hormones that signal stress. “They cause weight gain, they affect metabolism long-term and what happens is you’re more likely to get up in the morning and crave sweet, fatty things,” says Dr. Anderson. Both Dr. Raj and Dr. Anderson recommend logging eight hours nightly — even if that means starting your workout later. 

5. Fill Your Vitamin D Fix

There’s a lot of research showing a connection between vitamin D deficiencies, fat cell function, and obesity, but the entire relationship between vitamin D and weight loss is still not entirely understood. Still, it’s important to make sure you’re getting enough. “You need vitamin D for good muscle and bone metabolism,” says Dr. Kirkendol. “Your muscles aren’t going to grow the way they should if they’re vitamin D deficient.”

Dr. Raj, however, cautions against just loading up on vitamins at the local drug store. Instead, she suggests you get checked for a vitamin D deficiency at your next check up. “If you’re truly deficient, your doctor can prescribe a prescription-strength supplement,” she says, adding that over-the-counter supplements are hard to trust due to their lack of regulation. 

6. Eat More Protein

Dr. Kirkendol says most Americans are not eating enough protein, and that she recommends all of her clients eat at least 0.8 - 1 gram of protein per kilogram of bodyweight (that’s about 80 grams for a 175-pound man). “Protein is by far and away the best appetite suppressant there is and it boosts your metabolism because you actually burn calories when you digest protein,” she says.

Here’s how it works: Protein is harder for the body to break down than simple carbohydrates. This forces your body to expend more effort and thus burn more calories during the digestion process. “It basically has to do with the way protein gets broken into the basic building blocks,” says Dr. Kirkendol. She adds that furthermore, protein isn’t stored the way sugars are, so if you end up with extra, it won’t make its way to your love handles the way those extra carb calories will. To make sure you’re getting enough, Dr. Kirkendol recommends eating a fit-sized serving of low-carbohydrate, lean protein (like fish, eggs, poultry, unsweetened Greek yogurt) at every meal, plus two half-fist-sized servings as snacks.  

7. Move All Day

By now we all know that we should be taking the stairs at work and we should be parking far away when we go to the grocery store. Most of us are trying to move more — but maybe not enough. “Really you need to be looking for every single opportunity to move,” says Cedric Bryant. “Research shows that non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, really does have a big impact over time. People who get up and spontaneously move throughout their day really do see benefits.” Bryant took our call on a headset while pacing, and he says that he now makes most of his meetings walking meetings. Even if you don’t have a headset or standing desk, get up and move at least five minutes every hour.  Research show that regular five-minute breaks keep your blood sugar from rising.

Dr. James A. Levin, a leading researcher on NEAT’s effect on obesity, states in one of his early papers, that the difference between a lean sedentary person and an obese one is that the lean individual tends to be ambulatory for 152 more minutes per day. Those extra two and a half hours of micro-movements will pay off big, lifelong dividends.  

8. Workout For An Afterburn

Generally we’ve been told that if you run five miles you’ll burn about 500 calories. And that’s true (give or take a few dozen calories depending on weight, speed, and fitness). But if you throw a few hard intervals into the mix you’ll burn those 500 calories during the workout and burn more calories throughout the rest of the day too. Excess post exercise oxygen consumption, or EPOC, is when your body continues to consume oxygen at an elevated rate after your workout. The workout with the greatest after-burn effect is called High Intensity Interval Training or HIIT. “It’s not necessarily about how many calories you burn during the workout, it’s about the 22-23 other hours when you’re not working out,” says Sternlicht.

In order to really get the benefit from a HIIT workout, you have to go hard. Really hard. Working anaerobically is key to igniting the EPOC flames. Intervals can be as short as six or 10 seconds, but you need to be working at your max capacity for those 10 seconds. “You’re improving aerobic capacity and mitochondrial density and applying stress to your muscles. When you recover from the workout, you gain fitness and muscle and that requires more calories, more energy,” says Sternlicht, meaning you’ll be able to burn more calories all the time, not just after a hard workout. Start by adding in a few short HIIT intervals once or twice a week and add more or longer intervals as you gain fitness. Your all-out efforts need to total at least three minutes to get the HIIT benefits.

9. Get Your Caffeine From Green Tea

“Studies that have shown that epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG, one of the compounds in green tea, can help stimulate your metabolism and help with weight loss,” says Dr. Raj. The caffeine, the second metabolism booster in green tea, probably helps too, but make sure you finish your last cup at least eight hours before bedtime so the caffeine can clear your system. Also, drink green tea liberally. In several studies, three glasses appeared to be the minimum amount needed to see effects. 

10. Find Healthier Friends

That friend who always wants to go out for chili cheese fries and beers? Keep him at arm’s length. Sure, there’s a time and a place for bar food, but Bryant says it’s important to choose friends who want to be active with you too. “Find friends who want to go for a walk,” he says, adding that these are the friends you also should take to lunch. “Research shows that friends who are more thoughtful with their food choices tend to help us be more thoughtful.”

In a large, longitudinal study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers examined the social connections of more than 12,000 participants over 32 years. The study found that your chance of becoming obese increased 57 percent if a friend was obese. Clearly, the point here isn’t to shun your unhealthiest friends. Instead, make mindful choices when you’re out and one person opts for the loaded nachos. 

11. Eat to Boost Your Gut Bacteria

“There are interesting preliminary studies evaluating probiotics for their relationship to obesity,” says Dr. Raj adding, “although we don’t have all the information yet, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to try to add more probiotics into your diet.” She says to skip the probiotic pills and instead opt for eating more fermented foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, and cultured milk products, like yogurt and kefir.

In a September, 2013 article published in Science, researchers took fecal samples from twin sets of mice where one twin was normal and the other was obese. The researchers transplanted the gut bacteria from both the lean and the obese mice and into “sterile” mice. The mice that had received the fecal transplants from the obese twins started gaining weight and showing symptoms of obesity within days. Humans aren’t mice, and more research needs to be done, but scientists are beginning to believe that gut bacteria may have a direct relationship to overall metabolism, and that boosting your good gut flora could help you burn more calories all day, every day.