11 Simple Fat-Burning Changes for Your Body

It's common to see how much people focus on dieting and exercise. Everyone wants to be at a healthy weight to look and feel their best. But keeping a healthy weight can be challenging. As a functional medicine practitioner, Dr. Will Cole often hears that losing weight is a top health goal for his patients.

To lose weight, our metabolism needs to be working efficiently. Essentially, when we eat, food is either stored as fat or burned for energy. Your metabolism is a complex process that transforms food into energy. When aiming to maintain or lose weight, instead of restricting calories and feeling tired and hungry, focus on speeding up this fat-burning process. Luckily, there are easy ways to burn more fat in your daily routine without extreme diets, weight loss pills, constant exercise, or overly restrictive eating:

This tip makes sense since over half of your body is water. We lose water through eating, sweating, and breathing, so staying hydrated is crucial. Drinking at least eight cups of water a day can burn close to 20,000 extra calories annually.

Limiting your food intake to specific times can stabilize blood sugar, reduce inflammation, and encourage fat burning. Fasting can also lower ghrelin, the hunger hormone, to help curb cravings for sugary and inflammatory foods.

By limiting carbs and increasing healthy fats, you shift your body from burning sugar to burning fat. This means training your metabolism to use fat stores for energy instead of relying on glucose. This process ends up using more energy overall while preserving muscle. A ketogenic diet, which focuses on healthy fats, moderate protein, and fewer carbs, is a great tool to ensure you're getting the right macronutrients for your body.

Thermogenesis is a bodily process that produces heat, which can also increase calorie burn. Some foods contain natural thermogenic nutrients. Catechins in green tea can boost fat-burning by 10 to 16 percent, giving you another reason to enjoy matcha.

Spicy foods like chili peppers contain capsaicin, which has been shown to speed up metabolism, burn fat, and reduce appetite.

Infrared saunas directly heat your core temperature by penetrating your skin barrier unlike regular saunas that first heat the air. Research by Sunlighten, a leading infrared sauna company, revealed that consistent use over three months led to noticeable weight loss. Sweating, your body's way of releasing toxins, also aids in detoxification and reduces inflammation, which are often linked to health problems. So go ahead and treat yourself!

Your gut health is closely connected to your overall health, including your weight. Research 5 has found a link between lower microbiome diversity and being overweight. Individuals with weight loss resistance tend to have higher levels of harmful bacteria such as Actinobacteria and Firmicutes and lower levels of beneficial bacteria including Bacteroides, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, and Verrucomicrobia. Fortunately, consuming fermented foods and probiotics containing bifidobacteria, enterococcus, and lactobacillus has been shown to have a positive impact on the microbiome and can help repopulate the gut with good bacteria.

Muscle burns more calories than fat, meaning the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn even at rest. Strength training 6 can also increase resting metabolic rate, which in turn boosts metabolism.

Every time you consume alcohol, your body must prioritize metabolizing it through your liver, which slows down your metabolism as it diverts energy away from metabolizing fats and sugars. After consuming just one alcoholic beverage, your fat burning is reduced by 7 73 percent.

Your body contains two types of fat: white fat and brown fat. White fat accumulates when you store excess energy, while brown fat boosts your metabolism and burns more energy. According 8 to research, regular exposure to cold temperatures increases your brown fat percentage, helping you burn more fat. Winter might not be so bad after all!

While you can manipulate your metabolism, addressing the underlying cause of your weight issues is crucial for sustainable results. Functional medicine focuses on identifying the root cause of weight loss resistance. We understand that getting healthy is the key to losing weight, not the other way around. Factors such as gut dysfunctions, thyroid problems, and hormone imbalances can all contribute to weight loss challenges. For lasting weight loss, running tests can provide valuable insights into your health, helping you and your doctor create a plan to restore your health from the inside out.