Your metabolic rate can be a measure of how healthy you are. It refers to all the chemical reactions that take place in the body to keep you alive, from digestion, to burning sugars to giving you energy. There are many advantages to boosting your metabolic rate, including losing weight (as more of your fat reserves are broken down), a lower chance of developing cardiovascular diseases (such as atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, heart attack or other damage, etcetera), and other diseases (such as stroke and type 2 diabetes), and more energy is released, so you do not get tired easily.
But there are some things that you may be doing that may slow your metabolism down. Here are three of them:
1. Not getting enough sleep
Numerous studies have shown that sleep deprived people will have a slower metabolism rate, and hence put on weight. This is because while you sleep, the body burns fats to restore and repair itself in preparation for the next day. Without this restoration and repair, the body has less energy and vigor the following day so metabolism rate slows and you become very tired quickly. 7 to 9 hours of sleep is appropriate for most people, but it should be done at night. That is, do not sleep during the day and stay awake at night, that will do even more harm to your metabolism rate.
2. Stress
When you are stressed, you are telling your body to prepare for the fight or flight response. It shuts down non-essential processes and places the essential faculties of the body on standby. All this slows the metabolism rate, and along with the hormone cortisol that is released during stress, causes sugars in the blood to be stored as fats.
3. Not eating enough proteins
Different nutrients take different levels to process after digestion. The metabolic rate at which different nutrients are processed after digestion is called the thermic effect (TEF).
Protein has a much higher TEF than carbohydrates and fats. It can boost the metabolic rate by as much as 30%.
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