It seems some people are blessed with fast metabolisms while others complain of slow ones. Like fingerprints, metabolism — the process of converting the food you eat into energy — is unique to each person and based on a variety of factors.
Your age, height, weight, sex and body composition all contribute to your individual metabolic rate. Having more lean muscle enables you to burn more calories at rest as compared to having more body fat. On the contrary, things that will slow your metabolism include age and under-eating, as your body will become more efficient with the calories consumed.
“If your metabolism has slowed down to adapt to your caloric intake, you can boost it back up by consuming more energy — food,” says McKenzie Flinchum, RD, LD/N, CPT, owner of The Flexible Dietitian LLC, who took first place at an NPC figure show in 2013. “Additionally, since lean muscle burns more energy than body fat, if you exercise and change your body composition from less fat to more muscle, your resting metabolic rate will increase.”
Even though there is no magic pill to boost your metabolism further than its natural rate, Flinchum says there are a handful of practices you can incorporate into your lifestyle to help rev it up: