Losing weight is a tough business and the one thing dieters long to know is how to speed up metabolism.

Controlling your food intake and upping your exercise regime will certainly see the pounds drop off but if your body simply isn’t burning energy as efficiently or as rapidly as it should do, then all your efforts will be in vain. The key is knowing how to increase metabolism and apply that knowledge to your own body and lifestyle and the following three techniques will help you do just that.

Understanding how to speed up metabolism isn’t a difficult thing, although weight loss experts rarely touch on the subject. The rate at which your body converts the food you eat into useable energy for your body and muscles lays such a vital role in your ongoing weight management, that it is this that should be taught in preference to calorie counting, low carbohydrate diets or low fat eating plans.

If you know how to positively control the speed at which your metabolism functions, then rigid reducing diets will become a thing of the past. Permanent weight management will become a breeze and you will never be at risk of re-gaining your lost weight again.

And the really great thing is that, when learning how to speed up metabolism, many techniques can be applied instantly and will deliver real benefits.

Here are three great ones:

• Incorporate a greater number of ‘hot’ foods into your diet, such as chillies, mustard and spices. By ‘heating up’ the spiciness of your food, you will effectively be stoking your metabolic speed too.
• Spend more time sleeping. Studies have shown that people – particularly men – who regularly fail to get between six and eight hours sleep a night have a slower metabolic rate than those who mange a full eight hours rest night after night. Increasing your time asleep in bed can actually boost your weight loss!
• Eat frequently. It seems counter-intuitive to eat more frequently when, for decades, dieters have been told that they need to eat less in order to lose their excess pounds. But radically reducing the amount you consume for more than a couple of weeks at a time actually forces your metabolism to slow down, burn energy sluggishly and, even worse, promote the storage of fat. Why? Because your body is fooled into thinking that food is scarce and, in order to ensure the greatest chance of long term survival, must work to conserve energy, laying down fat as an insurance against starvation.

Of course, you certainly do need to reduce your food intake in order for your body to convert excess fat back into energy to meet the shortfall. So to avoid the ‘starvation mode’ syndrome, the trick is not to trigger it in the first place by never going more than three hours between small, healthy snacks. This way, your metabolism is constantly working, constantly being stimulated to deal with the frequent ingestion of food. And the more that it is triggered into action, the greater the ongoing rate at which it burns energy.

In conclusion then, you now know how to speed up metabolism by putting these three tips into action today. Once you have mastered the art of how to increase your metabolism, your long term weight management will never be a problem again.