As a registered dietitian who started her career working primarily with weight management, I know losing weight is hard. I also have some personal experience with trying to lose weight, as I recently had to work really hard at losing the ten pounds of post-baby weight I acquired after the birth of my first son. You would think that I would know a ton of secrets that would make shedding those extra pounds easy, but my body works the same as everyone else's, I needed to burn more calories than I was consuming.


But, I do know some secrets to get my body burning a few extra calories daily by including a few special foods that can speed up metabolism a bit. Keep in mind, none of these foods are miracles, they won't help you lose ten pounds overnight, but adding them in can give you a little extra boost to make weight loss a little easier.

What is metabolism?
Metabolism is simply a collection of chemical processes in the body that allows for us to stay alive, grow, repair our bodies, and reproduce. All of these bodily functions, called the basal metabolic rate, require calories from food. Exactly how many calories depends on our age, sex, and size. But, regardless of what people may lead you to believe, you don't actually have a huge amount of control over the speed of your metabolism because most of the energy burned is by innate functions such as breathing, thinking, making hormones, repairing cells, or making the heart beat. There is no real way to change how many calories our bodies are using for those processes.

The part of the metabolism we have the most control over is how much we burn through physical activity, but there are also limits to how much exercise you can do in one day without becoming physically exhausted.

The final piece that makes up the metabolism is called the thermic effect of food or how many calories it takes to digest a specific food. Eating foods that take a lot of calories to digest or have special metabolism "boosting" qualities once digested, can help you tap into this slight calorie-burning boost. Although I wish I could say there was a food that you could eat in unlimited quantities to speed up your metabolism, that is not the case. But, here are eight of my favorites that can provide a slight boost when added to the diet.


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