How to Increase Metabolism By Simply Eating Breakfast

Are you one of those breakfast skippers who thinks that morning fuel is overrated? Or perhaps you don’t hate on breakfast but you just can’t seem to find the time to squeeze in a meal before rushing out the door? Well, it’s time to rethink your morning routine because breakfast is not only important, it’s how to increase metabolism and set the stage for a healthier day ahead. In this article, we’ll delve into the science behind breakfast and why it deserves its reputation as the most important meal of the day.  The Science Behind Your Metabolism Before we dive into the benefits of breakfast, let’s first do a quick 101 on how your metabolism works. Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) or resting metabolic rate (RMR) is the number of calories your body needs to perform its basic functions while at rest. This includes keeping your heart beating, your lungs breathing, and your brain functioning. As you age, your BMR decreases, but having more lean muscle mass can actually increase it, allowing you to burn more calories even at rest. When you wake up in the morning, your metabolism is in a slower state, as your body has been in a fasting mode since the night before. This “powered down” mode is an energy-saving mechanism that helps conserve resources while you sleep. You can increase your metabolism and get it firing on all cylinders by having a nutritious breakfast. The Power of Breakfast: How to Increase Your Metabolism Think of breakfast like a key that unlocks your body’s metabolic engine. When you fuel properly in the morning, you initiate a process called thermogenesis, which is the production of heat in your body that stimulates your metabolism. It’s like giving your body a little jump-start and revving up its engine for the day ahead. Besides BMR, which is the body’s primary calorie burner, two other factors contribute to overall caloric output. These include activity-induced thermogenesis and diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT), i.e., eating—yes, eating. DIT is also known as the thermic effect of food (TEF), which means that your body burns calories to digest the food you eat. RELATED: The Truth About Resetting Your Metabolism, And Tips From A Top Weight Loss Doctor Breakfast and Weight Management If you’re looking to shed a few pounds or maintain a healthy weight, breakfast may be your secret weapon. Several studies have found a link between eating breakfast and weight management. One study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that breakfast eaters tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI) and are more successful at maintaining weight loss compared to those who skip breakfast. Another study published in the Journal of Nutrition reported that people who ate a high-protein breakfast felt fuller for longer and had reduced cravings throughout the day. Protein has a higher TEF and provides the highest satiety so starting your days with breakfast that includes protein is key to reaping breakfast benefits such as increasing your metabolism.  But that’s not all. Breakfast can also have a positive impact on your food choices throughout the day. When you start your day with a nutritious meal, you set a healthy tone for the rest of your meals. A healthy breakfast provides satiety and people who eat breakfast tend to make better food choices throughout the day, opting for nutrient-dense foods and eating less calories overall.  So, if you’re trying to slim down or maintain a healthy weight, make sure to fuel up with a balanced breakfast. Include a combination of protein, such as eggs, Greek yogurt, or cottage cheese, as well as fiber-rich carbohydrates such as berries or sprouted grain toast. This combo will keep you satiated and energized, helping you avoid mindless snacking or overeating later on. Breakfast for Brain Power Not only does breakfast increase your metabolism and aid in weight management, but it also fuels your brain. Your brain relies on glucose, which comes from the carbohydrates you consume, as its primary source of energy. By having a breakfast with a source of complex carbohydrates, you provide your brain with fuel it needs to stay focused, alert, and sharp throughout the day. Skipping breakfast can have a negative impact on cognitive function, memory, and attention span. In a study published in Physiology & Behavior, researchers found that school-age children who ate breakfast performed better on cognitive tests and had improved attention compared to those who skipped breakfast. The same holds true for adults. Starting your day with a brain-boosting breakfast can enhance your productivity, concentration, and overall cognitive performance. Breakfast and Cardiovascular Health Taking those couple of minutes to eat a healthy, nutrient-dense breakfast may have heart health benefits. This study shows how consuming breakfast daily may reduce the risk of various cardio-metabolic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, strokes and cardiovascular mortality. So, it’s not just about eating breakfast to increase your metabolism, you’re doing your heart a big favor too. RELATED: What Yo-Yo Dieting Actually Does To Your Body Quick and Easy Breakfast Ideas So, what’s for breakfast? It doesn’t need to be complicated, take a long time or taste like cardboard. Breakfast can be quick, easy, nutrient-dense and delicious at the same time. The key is to include a balance of protein, fiber, and healthy fats to keep you satisfied and energized.  Here are a few no-fuss breakfast options: Overnight oats: Prepare a jar of overnight oats the night before by combining rolled oats, milk (dairy or plant-based), chia seeds, and your favorite toppings like berries, nuts, or a dollop of nut butter. In the morning, grab and go! Smoothie: Blend together a handful of leafy greens, a scoop of protein powder, a frozen banana, and your choice of liquid, such as almond milk or coconut water. Customize your smoothie by adding in extras like flaxseeds, Greek yogurt, or a tablespoon of almond butter. Avocado toast: Toast a slice of whole grain bread and top it with mashed avocado, a sprinkle of salt

The Truth About Resetting Your Metabolism, and Tips From a Top Weight Loss Doctor

You don’t need an MD degree to know that weight loss results from burning more calories than one eats. But metabolism plays a big role here: After all, it’s responsible for regulating how quickly those calories are burned to create energy. As such, the more we can do to help our clients convert food into energy with speed and efficiency, the more we can help them. But it’s important to be realistic. After all, weight-loss experts agree that “resetting” your metabolism with a cleanse, keto diet, or fasting simply doesn’t deliver sustainable results. What’s more, when weight loss is the goal, focusing on minute metabolic improvements is less effective than zeroing in on excess caloric intake, according to Dr. Charlie Seltzer, M.D., a weight-loss physician based in Philadelphia. Here’s what else you need to know about how to “reset” the metabolism. What Is Metabolism? Metabolism is the series of biochemical reactions that occur within the body to keep it alive. It’s responsible for synthesizing carbs, protein, and fat from food into bodily tissues and fat (constructive metabolism). It’s also tasked with breaking down substances—including the calories we eat and sometimes body fat—into energy (destructive metabolism), thus fueling every process in the body. So how can metabolism impact your nutrition coaching client’s weight-loss goal? While dietary changes that provide sustainable solutions for appetite control will still be your best bet to help a client achieve success, Dr. Seltzer says, certain lifestyle factors can increase the body’s metabolic rate—at least a little—leading to greater caloric burn and potentially resulting in weight loss. What Is a Set Point? Some experts believe the body has a “set point,” or certain weight that it will try to maintain regardless of weight gain or loss. In some ways, this explains why yo-yo dieting is so prevalent: After losing a few pounds, the body turns up its hunger signals to “help” you return to your original weight, making it difficult to maintain the loss, Dr. Seltzer explains. “There’s still a lot we don’t understand about weight, metabolism, and appetite,” he says, “but it’s believed that we have compensatory mechanisms.” The thing about this theory is that it makes the future look bleak, especially among those who put in an honest effort to lose weight and expect metabolic changes to support that journey. If a client’s goal is to lower their weight, one way to adjust their set point is to encourage them to lose weight gradually—say, a 10 % weight reduction—and maintain it for about six months before attempting to lose more, Dr. Seltzer says. This way, your body can adjust and, in theory, create a new set point. What Factors Affect Your Metabolism? The rate at which the body burns calories to create energy needed to fuel basic functioning is known as the basal metabolic rate (BMR). Body size, muscle mass, gender, and age all contribute to BMR. While there are some mechanisms by which one can increase their BMR to promote weight loss, the truth is that it’s appetite, not a slow BMR, that typically contributes to weight gain, Dr. Seltzer says. (After all, the larger your body mass, the more calories your body burns at rest.) Besides BMR, which is the body’s primary calorie burner, two other factors contribute to overall caloric output. These include activity-induced thermogenesis, which covers non-exercise activity, like pushing a grocery cart through the store and exercise, and diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT), i.e., eating—that’s right, eating. See, when we consume snacks and meals, the body burns calories to chew, swallow and digest said food, leading to a temporary increase in metabolism that can account for as much as 15% of the calories we burn every day, according to Dr. Seltzer. ”Tucking in early (or sleeping in late) is the easiest thing you can do for weight control.” How to Increase Metabolism While certain behaviors burn calories by virtue of their energy requirements, there are many lifestyle factors that can increase your resting metabolic rate (RMR) or calories your body burns at rest. 1. Fill your plate with protein. Different macronutrients have different thermic effects, or increase in metabolism due to the amount of effort it takes to digest them. Research suggests that protein has a thermic effect of 25-30%, meaning the body burns up to one-third of the protein calories you take in by simply digesting them. Meanwhile, carbohydrates have a thermic effect of 6-8%, and fat has a thermic effect of 2-3%. Simply put, protein is a good metabolic bargain. 2. Get ample sleep. Skimping on sleep lowers your RMR, decreasing your calorie burn in promotion of obesity, Dr. Seltzer says. Assuming you don’t struggle to fall and stay asleep, tucking in early (or sleeping in late) is the easiest thing you can do for weight control. 3. Strength train. Because it takes energy to turn amino acids into muscle tissue to recover from a strength-training workout, building muscle at the gym can increase the calories you burn after you leave the gym. 4. Do high-intensity cardio. “This raises the metabolism for a period afterward,” Dr. Seltzer explains, with a warning: “We don’t know whether this leads to weight loss since people tend to compensate by increasing their food intake thereafter.” 5. Drink water. Dehydration drops your metabolic rate, according to Dr. Seltzer. Rehydrating after a workout or simply sipping a non-caloric beverage throughout the day can counteract this adverse effect. 6. Drink caffeine. Sans cream and sugar, which could offset its effects, caffeine-containing beverages like coffee and tea both raise the metabolic rate to burn extra calories and act as a performance enhancer so you can work out harder, which can contribute to overall calorie output. 7. Spice up your meals. Research has linked intake of capsaicin-containing foods such as chili peppers to a lower prevalence of obesity—and researchers think they know why: The compound raises body temperature and oxygen intake, increasing calorie burn, though it’s not going to suddenly put you into a smaller dress size overnight.

How Gut Health Impacts Blood Sugar

Created in partnership with Pendulum How we keep our digestive system in tip-top shape, and improve our overall health, is one of the hottest topics in wellness. There are countless studies and articles about the importance of taking care of our tummies and the impact it has on our overall health. Our gut influences everything from heart disease to arthritis to cancer. Now, research has found that gut health—or lack thereof—may be linked to type 2 diabetes.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 1 in 10 people have diabetes, with about 90 percent having type 2 diabetes. Someone who has type 2 diabetes can’t process blood sugar effectively because they’re not responding to insulin or their bodies aren’t producing enough. And this means that people living with type 2 diabetes are at greater risk for heart disease, nerve damage, kidney issues, eye damage, hearing impairment, sleep apnea, and Alzheimer’s disease.  WHAT THE HECK IS BLOOD SUGAR ANYWAY? Now, we’re about to get our science on, so stick with us here. We promise you’ll thank us.  After we eat a meal, our bodies get busy breaking down food to be used as energy or to be stored as fat. After the food is broken down we are left with glucose, the simplest form of sugar. A hormone called insulin gets released from our pancreas and starts traveling through our bloodstream looking for the glucose to bring into our cells.   Picture this: imagine all the sugar in our blood has a little padlock attached to it, and the only way to get the sugar in our cells for energy is to unlock it. Insulin is the only key we have for this padlock. People with type 2 diabetes produce little to no insulin, or over time, they become resistant to the insulin they are producing. The key no longer fits in the lock. Therefore, their cells are starving for energy and screaming “feed us, feed us!”   In an attempt to quiet them down, the pancreas keeps pumping out more and more insulin, but it’s just not fitting in the padlock. When this happens, there is no way to get the sugar out of the blood and into the cells for energy. This causes high blood sugar levels, which is the trademark symptom of diabetes.   HOW OUR GUT MICROBIOME WORKS—AND WHY IT’S IMPORTANT Now that we’ve gone over blood sugar, let’s dig into the gut microbiome. Whether you’ve heard it called microbiome or flora, the bacteria in the gut play a role in everything from weight management to cognitive functioning and immunity to digestion.  In your gut, there are billions of bacteria, viruses and fungi. Billions. You’re hosting colonies and armies of microscopic bugs which we collectively call microbes. This is what’s known as your microbiome. These microbes are essential to your immune system, heart, lungs, skin, and gut.  The foods you eat help to diversify the microbes in your GI tract. This is GOOD. You want lots of different bacteria, viruses, and fungi to have a nice rainbow of microbes that will help to keep you healthy and in fine tune. Research is looking at how diverse and rich your microbiome is as it relates to several areas: Weight Management: There is really good research out there, even twin studies that find that the more diverse and active the gut microbiome, the better, when it comes to weight management. Microbe imbalance is linked to overweight and obesity intimately.  Digestive Disorders: Science is linking digestive disorders like IBS and leaky gut to microbiome imbalance. Introduction of a higher fiber diet and more diversity in foods as well as probiotic rich foods (like kefir and sauerkraut) can help to manage symptoms and prevent flare ups.  Heart Health: There’s evidence showing that probiotics (from food and supplementation) may be beneficial to your heart by lowering total and LDL cholesterol. Blood Sugar: A rich microbiome may help regulate blood sugar and prevent spikes and crashes.  A NEW APPROACH TO MANAGE DIABETES While diet and exercise are pivotal to the management of type 2 diabetes, there is a new cutting-edge microbiome company, called Pendulum, that is dedicated to making people healthier through microbiome-targeted solutions. The company’s flagship product, Pendulum Glucose Control, is the first and only medical probiotic that is clinically shown to lower A1C and blood sugar spikes.*  Many with type 2 diabetes have lost beneficial bacterial strains that help digest dietary fiber and produce butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid which plays a key role in the body’s natural ability to signal insulin production, stabilize blood glucose and provide anti-inflammatory properties. That is how digestive health, insulin and diabetes are all connected. Pendulum has found a way to combine targeted probiotic strains of beneficial bacteria and prebiotics to restore the body’s natural ability to metabolize fiber and manage glucose levels.* New discoveries in microbiome research indicate that the lost or reduced ability to metabolize fiber and manage blood glucose can be restored by replenishing strains in the gut microbiome. Through DNA sequencing, Pendulum has identified unique, targeted strains of beneficial bacteria that help restore disrupted gut function in people with type 2 diabetes. This medical probiotic can help to metabolize fiber and produce butyrate, and as an added bonus, it can help restore the gut lining.  BOTTOM LINE Our gut is extremely important in terms of our overall health. While healthy eating and physical activity (and your doctor’s guidance) is paramount to managing type 2 diabetes, this new medical probiotic could be an additional resource for those with type 2 diabetes to help lower A1C* and manage blood sugar spikes through your gut. What’s even better is that by using the Nutritious Life code, NL33, you can get 30% off your first bottle of Pendulum Glucose Control!   *A nutrition study demonstrated a significant reduction in A1C and blood sugar spikes in people with type 2 diabetes. The study was randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, and across multiple sites in the U.S. **Consult