Does Speeding Up Your Metabolism Make You Lose Fat?

Your body's metabolism describes all the chemical reactions that happen in your body and are essential to support life. These reactions include the breakdown of food molecules and production of energy. Your body uses energy throughout the day and night doing functions such as movement, maintaining posture, producing heat, breathing, circulating blood and building new cells and tissues. The amount of energy your body needs on a daily basis to perform all these functions is typically called your basal metabolic rate, or metabolism.

Metabolism and Fat-burning

Metabolic rate plays a role in fat burning, but the main thing that affects whether your body is burning fat or storing it is your calorie intake. If you are consuming more calories than your metabolism uses, your body stores the excess calories as fat. Speeding up your metabolic rate increases your body's energy need and helps burn off this fat. However, this happens only when you are eating fewer calories than your metabolic rate uses. You can speed up your metabolism with exercise or, possibly, by eating certain foods.

Exercise

Speed up your metabolism by doing regular cardio and strength-training activities. Cardiovascular exercise boosts your energy use by increasing the rate and strength of muscle contractions and speeding up your cardiovascular and respiratory systems. The more intense your workout is, the more calories you burn. Strength training not only burns calories during the exercise but also helps increase muscle mass, which boosts your metabolism. This is because muscle tissue uses more energy throughout the day, and the higher your muscle mass is, the more energy you will burn, even at rest.

Diet

Eating certain thermogenic foods can also speed up your metabolism. Thermogenesis is a reaction during which your body burns energy to produce heat. According to a study published in the "International Journal of Obesity" in 2010, eating chili peppers that contain capsaicin or drinking caffeinated beverages and green, oolong or white tea that contains catechin can boost your metabolism by 5 percent and fat-burning by 16 percent. Although the increase in your daily energy consumption is only about 70 to 100 calories per day, in time this can lead to a considerable weight loss.

Considerations

Although you can boost fat burning by speeding up your metabolism, unless you consume a low-calorie diet, you will not lose weight. Caloric balance is essential in burning fat because your body begins to burn stored fat for energy only if you are in caloric deficit. Caloric deficit occurs when you consume fewer calories than your body needs. Combine a low-calorie diet with regular exercise and thermogenic foods to optimize fat burning and to promote weight loss.