healthy living

You know that to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you consume. Lets take a closer look at some easy ways to burn calories that you can incorporate into your daily life.

Fidget. 

It's called Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT), any movement that isn't intended as exercise. You can burn an extra 100-150 calories an hour by increasing NEAT. Here are some ideas:

Reach for the caffeine, pass on the sugar and cream.

Caffeine tends to increase the number of calories you burn, probably because they stimulate thermogenesis — one way your body generates heat and energy from digesting food and because the boost in energy means you move around more (which means more calories burned). Having 250 milligrams of caffeine with a meal can increase the calories spent metabolizing the meal by 10%. Green tea, in particular, seems to be especially conducive to burning calories. Drinking coffee or tea plain will take some getting used to, but purchasing high-quality beans or tea leaves will certainly help.

Increase your after-meal burn by eating more vegetables and phasing out meat and dairy products.

Your body expends around 200 calories to digest your food. People who eat fibrous fruit, vegetables, complex carbs, and low-fat meat burn even more calories after they eat. In fact, vegetarians generally have a bigger after-meal burn than their omnivorous counterparts. And no matter what you eat, adding 5g of Tabasco sauce to any meal can raise your metabolism by 12-20 percent for up to two hours after you're done. This is caused by capsaicin - the nutrient that makes chile peppers hot.

Drink ice water. 

The colder the water you drink, the more calories you burn, since your body expends more energy warming up the water. If you have 8 glasses (64 oz) of ice-cold water in a day, you'll burn 70 more calories than if you drank 8 glasses of a body temperature beverage. In fact, this principle will work with any calorie-free beverage, as long as it's ice cold, so you might want to ice up that coffee and tea mentioned earlier for cumulative calorie-burning effects. Keep in mind, however, that the weight loss impact of this one particular practice isn't drastic: It would take 435 glasses of ice water (about two months, assuming 8 glasses a day) to lose one pound.

Chill out.

Shivering burns calories, so if you can spend more time outside when it's cold, you'll crank up the calorie furnace. Even if you don't shiver, though, you can get a 3-7% increase in calorie burn just from your body warming itself (similar to the principle at work when you drink ice water).

Calories burnt is proportional to your lean body mass.

Consume a good amount of protein, 20-30 grams, within ten minutes of your workout and you will be on your way to increasing you lean body mass and burning better calories.

Eating a small meal every 2 hours will keep your metabolism fired and keep your calories burning.

You can also make weight loss quicker and easier by increasing your metabolic rate and speed up your Rate of burning calories.