Doctor shares three diet tips to ‘prime’ your body for fat loss

Your body is turning food and drink into energy all day, every day. Your body can also turn stored fat into energy. These processes are known as your metabolism. But not everybody’s metabolism is the same. In fact, what you eat can have a massive impact on how “high” your metabolism is. One doctor has shared three diet tips on how to “prime” your metabolism to help you burn more fat throughout the day.

Doctor Tax Bhatia, suggests on her blog that how high your metabolism is down to “three” main factors, two of which can be altered by what foods you eat.

One of these factors is whether or not the energy you take from food is being used to break down other foods, or is directly burned off. This is called the “thermogenic effect” of food, she explains.

The other two factors include your basal metabolic rate and how much physical activity you do. Your basal metabolic rate is the amount of energy you naturally break down without doing anything.

Doctor Bhatia explains that certain foods can impact your basal metabolic rate as well as impact how other foods are used in the body (the thermogenic effect).

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These special foods can help “you burn more calories at rest and aid in weight loss,” she adds.

So, what are the foods she recommends to improve your metabolism to burn more fat?

Doctor Bhatia actually recommends adding three different supplementary nutrients to your morning brew, whether that’s coffee or tea. She says: “If you add the right ingredients, you can prime digestion, deliver energy to your cells, and support healthy metabolism and hormone levels.”

One of the nutrients she recommends adding is collagen peptides.

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Coconut oil

Her final tip was to add coconut oil to your coffee or tea.

Coconut oil is another nutrient that contains small chemicals that are linked to fat burning.

In particular, it contains lots of medium-chain fatty acids, which studies have shown boost your metabolism.

However, there could be health risks associated with using too much coconut oil. The oil contains about a third more saturated fat than butter, explains the British Heart Foundation.

The health body says: “There has been speculation that some of the saturated fat in coconut oil may be better for us than other saturated fats, but so far there is not enough good-quality research to provide us with a definitive answer.

“For the time being, if you like the taste of coconut oil, then, as with butter, it’s fine to use it every now and then. However, it’s best to restrict yourself to small amounts and use unsaturated oils as an everyday choice instead.”

Moreover, there’s some evidence that drinking too much coffee might not be good for some people’s metabolism in the long run.

Coffee elevates the levels of a stress hormone called cortisol in your body, although this effect may vary from person to person. In the short term, a bump up of cortisol has been shown to help to increase fat metabolism.

But some studies suggest that too much cortisol as a result of overconsumption of coffee may cause you to develop more belly fat and gain weight.