Some people are lucky enough to be able to eat whatever and whenever they want without packing on the pounds. This is probably due to your metabolism.

Metabolism is defined as the amount of energy (calories) your body needs to burn to maintain itself. Your Basic Metabolic Rate is the number of calories expended at rest and in a neutral temperature environment. For example, a 5-foot-6 woman in her 40s has a BMR of 1,473 calories.

Increasing your metabolism will help you burn more calories and help burn your fat. These are some of the best ways to boost your metabolism.

First, muscle burns more calories to maintain compared to fat.

Therefore, the key is to build more muscle to burn more calories. Research has shown that adding an extra pound of muscle to your body allows you to burn an additional 35 to 50 calories per day. Add 10 pounds of pure muscle and burn an additional 350 to 500 calories per day and lose a pound of fat every 7 to 10 days.

Certain types of foods help rev up your fat burning furnace and none more so than foods rich in calcium. One study showed that middle-aged women who had the lowest calcium intake gained a pound of fat each year, while women with the highest calcium intake had no weight change.

Michael Zemel, PhD, director of the Institute of Nutrition at the University of Tennessee identified why this happens. He discovered that the more calcium in a cell, the more fat that cell burns.

Zemel demonstrated these findings with a study of 32 obese people who followed a low-calorie diet and were divided into three groups: those who ate a lot of dairy, those who ate little dairy but took calcium supplements, and those who had a low-calcium diet. . , low-dairy diet. After 24 weeks, the group that ate the high-dairy diet lost an additional five pounds and reduced their waistline by an additional inch and a quarter.

Calcium works by slightly increasing the body’s core temperature, which leads to an increase in metabolism and an increase in fat burning.

Here are some other quick tips to boost your metabolism.

Take half a teaspoon of cinnamon daily. Cinnamon is a tasty spice that will speed up your metabolism alarmingly. Add it to your calcium-rich yogurt for a tasty mid-afternoon snack.

Spice up your meals with chili and spices. Studies show that spicy foods help increase your metabolism by up to 50 percent for up to three hours after eating, as they speed up your heart rate.

Iodine encourages the thyroid gland to burn fat. Fish, plain yogurt, and eggs are rich sources of iodine.

Finally, swap your usual cup of tea for green tea. Green tea not only contains a number of cancer-fighting antioxidants, it also contains a compound that reacts with caffeine to increase fat oxidation and resting metabolism by 20 percent.

This is just a sampling of some of the powerful ways you can speed up your metabolism. There are ways to speed up your metabolism so much that you can eat whatever you want whenever you want and not pack on the pounds.