How to Increase Your Metabolism: What Works, What's a Myth, With Numbers

What is metabolism actually made of?

Your metabolism is the total energy your body uses in a day, in three parts: basal metabolic rate (staying alive at rest), the thermic effect of food (digesting it) and physical activity, both exercise and everything else you do on your feet. The basal rate is the biggest part; activity is the part you can change most.

In a 2013 review in Frontiers in Physiology, Klaas Westerterp of Maastricht University calls basal metabolic rate "the largest component" of daily energy use and puts digestion at about 10% for a person eating a mixed diet. The same review gives the physical activity level (daily energy use divided by basal rate) of sedentary and lightly active lifestyles as 1.40 to 1.69. By our arithmetic, basal metabolism is then roughly 60–70% of the day, digestion about 10% and all movement the remaining 20–30%.

A worked example, using our own arithmetic: someone with a basal rate of 1,400 kcal and an activity level of 1.5 uses about 2,100 kcal a day. About 210 of that goes on digestion and about 490 on movement. Estimate your own figures with the BMR calculator and the TDEE calculator before you try to change them.

Slow metabolism symptoms: when to ask your doctor

No home test or symptom list can tell you whether your thyroid is involved; a blood test can. If you have been diagnosed, our guide to exercise with hypothyroidism covers training once treatment is stable. MakeMyFitness coaches are fitness coaches, not doctors, dietitians or physiotherapists, and Rehab & Recovery is exercise coaching after a clinician has cleared you, not treatment. See our medical disclaimer.

If your tests are normal but your weight has stopped moving on a diet, the cause is usually measurement or the body's response to weight loss, which our guide to not losing weight in a calorie deficit covers in full.

How to increase your metabolism through everyday movement

The most effective way to increase your metabolism is to move more outside your workouts. This everyday movement is called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, and in the best-known study of it, it explained most of the difference between people who gained fat easily and people who did not.

James Levine and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic (Science, 1999) fed 16 non-obese volunteers 1,000 kcal a day more than they needed for 8 weeks. Two-thirds of the increase in their daily energy use came from NEAT, "associated with fidgeting, maintenance of posture, and other physical activities of daily life". Changes in NEAT accounted for the 10-fold differences in fat stored between volunteers. In a 2005 follow-up in the same journal, Levine's team tracked the posture of 10 lean and 10 mildly obese sedentary adults every half-second for 10 days. The obese volunteers sat for about 2 hours longer a day, and the authors estimated they might use an extra 350 kcal a day if they moved like their lean counterparts.

Those 350 kcal are an estimate, not a measured result, but they are over ten times what 2 kg of new muscle adds at rest. Levine also found that posture habits did not change when people gained or lost weight, which suggests extra movement has to be planned rather than waited for. Ways that fit an Indian day:

• Take phone and video calls standing or walking.
• Walk 10 minutes after lunch and dinner instead of going straight to the sofa or the desk.
• Take the stairs for the first few floors, and walk to the market or metro instead of booking an auto for short trips.
• Set a reminder to stand and move for 2–3 minutes every half hour of desk work.

Daily steps are the simplest NEAT gauge; our guide to walking for weight loss gives targets.

Does building muscle increase metabolism?

Building muscle increases your metabolism, but only slightly. Muscle burns about 13 kcal per kilogram per day at rest, against about 4.5 kcal for body fat, so 2 kg of new muscle raises resting energy use by roughly 26 kcal a day.

Those figures were first proposed by the physiologist Elia and checked by Wang and colleagues (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2010) against MRI scans and measured resting energy use in 131 healthy, non-obese adults. For adults over 50 they adjusted the values slightly, to 12.6 kcal for muscle and 4.4 kcal for fat. The arithmetic is ours: 2 kg of muscle at 13 kcal is 26 kcal a day, and if that muscle replaced 2 kg of fat the net gain is about 17 kcal.

So lift for other reasons: a session uses energy while you do it, a stronger body finds stairs and long walks easier, and training gives your body a reason to keep its muscle while you eat less. Our strength training page explains how a program is built, and the Personal Gym Training program puts a coach on video beside you at your own gym.

Are there foods that increase metabolism?

Protein is the one food group that measurably raises how much energy you use, because it costs more to digest than carbohydrate or fat. Westerterp's 2004 review in Nutrition & Metabolism gives the thermic effect as 20–30% of the calories in protein, 5–10% for carbohydrate and 0–3% for fat.

Moving 100 kcal of your day from carbohydrate to protein therefore uses an extra 10–25 kcal, by our arithmetic. The bigger benefit is fullness: the same review concludes that protein-induced thermogenesis "has an important effect on satiety". It also notes that a mixed diet uses 5–15% of daily energy for digestion, and that the main drivers are how much you eat and the protein and alcohol share of it. Set your target with the protein intake calculator and pick foods from our guide to protein in Indian food.

Chilli has a real but small effect. A 2018 meta-analysis by Zsiborás and colleagues (Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition) pooled 9 trials and found that capsaicin or capsinoids, the compounds that make chillies hot, raised energy use by about 59 kcal a day. In trials where participants' average BMI was below 25, there was no significant effect on energy use; above 25, the rise was about 70 kcal a day. The paper does not tell you how much chilli in an ordinary meal gives that dose.

Does green tea boost metabolism enough to lose weight?

Green tea does not boost metabolism enough to make a meaningful difference to your weight. A 2012 Cochrane review (Jurgens and colleagues) of randomised trials lasting at least 12 weeks found that green tea preparations led to "a small, statistically non-significant weight loss" that is "not likely to be clinically important".

In the six trials run outside Japan (532 people), the average difference in weight loss between green tea and control groups was 0.04 kg. Eight trials in Japan reported differences of 0.2 to 3.5 kg in favour of green tea, but they were too different from one another to be pooled. Green tea had no significant effect on keeping weight off after losing it. Drink it if you enjoy it, without sugar; just don't count it as part of your plan.

Do metabolism booster drinks and cold water work?

Cold water raises metabolism by a tiny amount and room-temperature water does not raise it at all. Brown, Dulloo and Montani (Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 2006) gave healthy young adults about 518 ml of water and measured their energy use for 90 minutes afterwards.

Room-temperature water did not increase energy use. Water cooled to 3 °C caused "a small increase in energy expenditure of 4.5% over 60 min", which the authors called well below the theoretical cost of warming the water to body temperature. By our arithmetic, for someone with a resting rate of 1,500 kcal a day, that is about 3 kcal for the 500 ml or so they drank, roughly two glasses. The study was testing an earlier claim of a 30% rise from 500 ml of water.

For drinks sold as metabolism boosters, read the label: if the claim rests on green tea, chilli extract or chilled water, the studies above show what those ingredients do, and any sugar or juice adds calories.

Does eating every 2–3 hours speed up metabolism?

Eating small meals every 2–3 hours does not speed up metabolism or weight loss compared with three meals a day, when total calories are the same. Westerterp's review names energy content, not the number of meals, as a main driver of the thermic effect, so by that logic the same food split into six portions costs roughly the same to digest.

A randomised trial by Cameron, Cyr and Doucet (British Journal of Nutrition, 2010) put 16 adults with obesity on the same calorie cut of 2,931 kJ a day (about 700 kcal, our conversion) for 8 weeks, either as 3 meals or as 3 meals plus 3 snacks. Both groups lost weight, 4.7% on average, but there were no significant differences between them in body fat, appetite or the hunger hormones ghrelin and peptide YY. Eat on whatever schedule you can keep.

A 4-week plan to raise your daily energy use

1. 1

   Week 1: measure where you start

   Work out your basal rate and daily needs with the calculators, and note your average daily steps for 7 days without changing anything. Weigh yourself on three mornings and measure your waist once.

2. 2

   Weeks 1–4: add everyday movement first

   Add a 10-minute walk after two meals a day and stand for calls. Aim to raise your average steps by about 2,000 a day over your week-1 figure, then hold it.

3. 3

   Weeks 1–4: lift two or three times a week

   Train the whole body each session: a squat, a hinge such as a Romanian deadlift, a push, a pull and a carry. Add a little weight or a repetition when the last set feels easy.

4. 4

   Every meal: put protein on the plate

   Build each meal around paneer, eggs, chicken, fish, curd, dal or soya.

5. 5

   Eat a little less, not much less

   If fat loss is the goal, aim for a modest deficit. Very low intakes are hard to sustain, and our calorie-deficit guide explains how the body adapts when you diet hard.

6. 6

   Week 4: review and change one thing

   Compare steps, weight trend and waist with week 1. If steps rose and weight did not move, check your food log before changing anything else. Change one variable at a time.

Who live coaching suits for raising metabolism

MakeMyFitness is live 1:1 coaching on video across India, ₹799 a session at your own gym or ₹899 at home, and it suits people who want to raise their daily energy use through regular strength training and more movement, with a coach who checks form set by set and keeps the step and protein targets honest. Our lead coach, Kumar Abhishek, holds a Diploma in Personal Training and is a Human Performance Nutritionist (both K11). Prices are on our pricing page, and your first session starts with an assessment.