The One Best Way To Increase Your Metabolism

The commonsense view of muscle growth and weight loss is that everyone needs who wants to become  the proverbial lean, mean fighting machine needs to put on muscle and take off pounds by increasing metabolism. The reality of the relationship between metabolic rate and fitness is not, however, commonsensical. The fatter you are, the faster your metabolism. The fitter you are, the slower your metabolism.

This really should not come as a shock to anyone who has ever been on a diet. Suppose you decide you to lose 2 pounds (about a kilo) a week by reducing your food consumption by 1000 calories per day. The rule of thumb is that a pound of fat releases 3500 calories, so cutting out 7000 calories over 7 days should burn up two pounds of fat.

The first week on your diet you don't just lose 2 pounds. You'll probably lose 5 to 7. That's because the most accessible supply of stored energy in your body is not the fat in your fat cells. It is the glycogen in your liver. Every molecule of glycogen is made by combining a molecule of glucose with four molecules of water, so burning glycogen releases a lot of water weight.

Encouraged by early results, most dieters find the willpower to stay on their diets for another week. In the second week, the results usually are not as encouraging. Since all the easy-to-lose water weight has already been lost, now weight loss has to come from burning fat. If you continue to consume 1000 calories a day less than your body needs, you will probably lose about 2 pounds.

Those 2 pounds probably won't be all fat. The body doesn't just "burn" digested food. It also uses the protein in digested food for everyday building and repair of tissues.

Proteins are made from amino acids strung together in an exact order. If even one of the amino acids is unavailable when it is needed, the protein cannot be formed. If your diet does not provide all the amino acids your body needs when it needs them, it will strip out the missing aminos from muscle—although this doesn't happen unless that amino acid has not appeared in the diet for about 48 hours, not just the 3 hours mentioned in a popular diet book.

Not getting all your amino acids can shift fat loss to muscle loss. But then the problem gets worse.

Most low-calorie diets are also low-fat diets. This means that the body has to burn sugars released from foods that contain carbohydrates, including foods like carrots and celery sticks, which also contain carbohydrates, just not as many carbohydrates as equivalent serving sizes of bread and potatoes. And when any cell uses glucose as a fuel, it has to open an tiny, molecule-sized channel with the power of electricity. Generating that electricity requires the cell to take in three sodium atoms every time it takes in one molecule of sugar.


Sodium is the metallic element in salt. Salt makes cells waterlogged. The sodium in cells has to be pumped out—but if you don't consume enough potassium, cells can't get rid of sodium, and they can't burn sugar. All in a sudden diets don't work. Even if you keep on reducing your consumption of calories, the cells in your body don't have the energy to pump out sodium and water so they can pump in sugar and fat to be burned, and your metabolism starts running slower than it did when you weighed more. Fortunately, there is a way around this problem.

Staying on Your Diet with the Help of Cheat Meals

There's a very simple way to stay off the diet plateau to keep losing weight. Don't diet every day.

Professional trainers usually refer to these planned departures from a limited-calorie diet as cheat meals. Cheat meals aren't really cheating. In fact, they are essential to losing weight over the long term.

Here's how cheat meals work.

Let's say you weigh 220 pounds and you usually eat 3300 calories per day. All the physical activities in your life (even sitting in a chair while you read this article) consume calories. Let's suppose your body burns 1100 calories per day during physical activity and uses the other 2200 calories per day to generate heat, to keep your heart and lungs functioning, to power your brain, and so on.

Now let's suppose you decide you want to get down to 200 pounds. This means losing 20 pounds. You apply the old formula that equates 1 pound of fat with 3500 calories, and calculate that cutting 1000 calories out of your diet every day will take off 2 pounds of fat per week and 10 weeks of dieting will get you down to 200 pounds.

If you've ever tried this plan, you probably found that it didn't work. Here's why.

The first week you stick to your diet plan, you lose about four pounds of water weight and about 2 pounds of muscle and fat. You end the week at about 214 pounds.

The second week you stick to your diet plan, you lose about 2 pounds of muscle and fat. You end the week at about 212 pounds.

But when you weigh 212 pounds, your body doesn't need 2200 calories per day for basal metabolism. It needs about 2100. That's not a big deal. If you stick to your diet through week 3, you will still lose about 1-3/4 pounds.

But the fourth week it will be closer to 1-1/2 pounds. And the fifth week it will be closer to 1-1/4 pounds. And about the sixth week your diet will fizzle out because your cells are filled with sodium and water. You may start gaining weight while eating less than you are used to.

There's a way to avoid this problem.

Diet hard every day of the first two weeks. Then diet even harder just four days a week.

For two weeks, eat 2200 calories per day every day and never eat more than that amount. At the beginning of your third week, celebrate by eating 3300 calories one day, and then just 1650 calories per day the next two days. Repeat this pattern until you reach your desired weight goal.

You'll still be eliminating the same number of calories per week. Giving yourself extra calories two days a week (and only two days a week!) and making up for them on other days however, gives your body the energy it needs to pump accumulated sodium and water out of the cells that burn fat and sugar so they can burn more.

You are more likely to get the full range of amino acids your body needs to make proteins so your body is less likely to strip those amino acids out of muscle. Your body will waste some calories because it has not been making all of the enzymes it needs to digest larger amounts of food. And you will gain the ego boost of eating foods that you want when you want them while maintaining control over the amount.


The whole plan depends on your ability to exert willpower to eat more one day and then eat less for two days. But weight loss is really all about what you do, not what your diet does for you. You can enjoy food and enjoy your life and still lose weight. All it takes is the ability to delay gratification some days and to enjoy food fully on others.

Unfortunately, there is one group of people for whom this approach does not work, diabetics. If you have diabetes, there is never a day you can eat extra carbs. But if you choose high-potassium fruits and vegetables every day, your body will have the energy it needs to avoid the dreaded weight loss plateau.