How To Burn More Calories To Lose Weight?
Everyone knows that we need to burn more calories than we eat to
lose weight. But what are calories? Why is it we can lose weight
by burning calories? How are calories being burnt?
Calorie is a measurement of heat. It is the amount of energy
that is required to raise one milliliter of water by one degree
Celsius. Calorie measures the amount of heat or energy that is
released when you burn food down.
Calories are burnt through a complicated process that oxidizes
food to its basic components. For example, if you burn a sugar,
it will turn into carbon dioxide. However in the body, the food
burnt is converted to forms of energy.
So therefore when you consume food, the food is broken down and
stored as adipose fat or glycogen (which are stored in liver and
muscles cells) to be burnt for energy later. Your body prefers
to burn glycogen as its first choice of energy rather than body
fat when you expand energy such as exercising.
The more muscles you have in your body, the more calories you
will burn. The more calories you burnt, the more weight you will
lose. This is because muscle cells are metabolically active
whereas body fats are not because fat cells do not have much
functionality and are mostly inactive.
Different food categories carry different amount of calories.
For example, a gram of protein or carbohydrate has about four
calories but a gram of fat packs a whopping nine calories. It is
thus a no brainer that the more fat you eat the more calories
your body will store.
Some people raise their metabolic rate by eating many smaller
meals a day instead of three big meals. By eating several 5-6
times a day, your insulin level is also better regulated and
less insulin will then be converted to adipose fat.
So how can you burn more calories and further raise your
metabolism to naturally burn more calories and body fats? A
simple and effective way to burn more calories is to build more
muscles as explained above and exercise to expand energy and
thus burning more calories in the process.