Your body needs a minimum quantity of calories per day to be able to maintain its necessary functions like breathing, sustaining your heartbeat, and keeping the brain correctly functional. This is called your basal metabolic rate (BMR). There is an excellent likelihood that the body burns more calories than your basal metabolic rate, unless you spend the whole entire day in bed doing absolutely nothing.

Your basal metabolic rate accounts for sixty to seventy percent of your day-to-day caloric needs. Several factors influence an individual’s basal metabolism, it consists of:

• Age. An individual’s BMR reduces as he ages.
• Elevation. Researches have actually additionally shown that taller individuals have higher BMR.
• Gender. BMR is typically greater in males than in females.
• Body composition. Individuals who have more muscle that fat have greater BMRs.
• Environmental climate. BMR has actually additionally been noted to be generally greater in extreme climates of heat or cold.
• Diet. People who live on reduced calorie diets have low BMRs.
• Worry. BMR appears to increase throughout times of tension, stress and anxiety.

Factors like age, gender, and height are challenging to change as we can not stop ourselves from growing old, or change our height or our gender! We do have control of additional elements to change our basal metabolic rates though:

• People who reside in areas of extreme temperatures of warmth or cold may need to increase their calorie consumption to keep their body temps regular and support all essential body operations.
• Anxiety could help burn extra calories, nonetheless it is not a good idea to subject yourself to mental or emotional worry merely for this cause! Physical stress on the body, like pregnancy or growth, could also increase a person’s metabolic rate.
• Quick weight-loss diets impact the body by slowing it down, causing the body to initiate energy conservation and reduce its metabolic rate. Not skipping the vital meals of the day may increase an individual’s energy expenditure by 10 %, as eating requires calories for digesting, soaking up, transporting and metabolising food.
• Exercising aids your metabolism in two means. Initially, it helps burn calories while doing the activity, and it burns more calories after you cease exercising. It takes as long as twelve hours for a person’s metabolic rate to return to its regular rate after exercising. Second, it helps form more muscle, therefore increasing in muscle mass which also aids accelerate your metabolism. It’s like hitting two birds with one stone!

Keeping yourself healthy and balanced doesn’t just require that we stay clear of vices and unsafe substances. It additionally consists of eating right and maintaining an active way of living. Healthy and balanced eating, coupled with the best quantity of exercise and the best business causes a better, healthier, happier life.

Here is a quick and healthy recipe for butternut squash soup that you can make with your blender. You may have been put off using butternut squash in recipes before because it’s so difficult to peel. Well fear not, because I have a simple trick to make this totally easy!

I have been making this recipe for a couple of years and it’s a real family favorite, especially in the winter.

Ingredients:
1 large butternut squash
2 large carrots
Half a large onion
A handful of mushrooms
2 stalks of celery
A pint and a half of chicken stock (I suggest low sodium)
Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper to taste
A bayleaf (optional)

Prep time: 15 mins
Cook time: 45 mins

Nutritional info:
cals: 180kcal | fat: 3.82g | carbs: 38.24g | prot: 3.70g
Read the rest of this Butternut Squash Soup recipe

If you eat a “normal” diet then you probably already take in significantly more than the recommended daily limit of salt, as it’s often added to processed foods. When you go and add salt on top as a condiment, you’re going waaaay over the RDA of 1,600 mg (1.6g.)

Thousands of people every year die from high blood pressure complications (such as stroke) which can be brought on by excess salt consumption.

I first became aware of the dangers of salt when my doctor told me to monitor my intake due to my blood pressure being high. When I calculated my average intake over the course of a week I found it was over 4g per day – far higher than the recommended amount!

Of course the reason we add salt, and the reason why manufacturers add it to processed foods, is because it adds flavour. However there are a lot of alternatives for adding flavour to food apart from salt. Try black pepper, or a spritz of lime or lemon juice. Mixed spice can also give an interesting effect.

Experiment with fresh or dried herbs during the cooking process rather than adding salt on the finished product. Herbs like fresh chillies, garlic (fresh crushed or the lazy type), basil, rosemary, lemongrass, dill, thyme, ginger, etc can all help to enhance the flavour during cooking so that there’s no need to add salt on top.

The foods which contain the most sodium are most cheeses, soy sauce (basically made of salt!!) and bacon. If you can substitute other items for these when cooking, it’s all to the good.

Some foods you would never suspect of containing salt actually have tons of it, even sweet foods. A bag of cookies from the supermarket usually contains around 300mg of sodium. A large Starbucks Frappucino has up to 275mg of sodium. A bottle of Coca Cola has 75mg. This is how your sodium level can creep up without you noticing!

Next time you’re cooking vegetables, instead of adding salt to them, try roasting them instead to bring out the sweetness. I’ve learned that kids vastly prefer this cooking method, too!

Make the decision to cut down on salt intake today. Not only can it hurt your blood pressure and heart health, but it can also worsen water retention. Try cutting out salt for 30 days and see if you don’t prefer the natural flavours of foods.

There are a lot of weight loss supplements which claim to increase metabolism or fat burning, and most of these contain stimulants which can commonly cause heart palpitations and cause headaches. For some people it could be pretty risky, especially if you suffer from high blood pressure. It can also make you nervous and twitchy (like you’ve drunk WAY too much coffee) or give you a stomach upset. The worst of these supplements were ones containing the banned substances ephedrine. However since ephedrine was banned there are a whole host of other harmful stimulants springing up to replace it, which I suppose just goes to show how many people are desparate to lose weight. Luckily there are safer alternatives now.

I’m sure you’ve read many Capsiplex reviews before, since it’s been in a lot of magazines, on the daytime TV and a lot of celebs seem to be endorsing it these days. Capsiplex’s main ingredient is Capsicum, which is red pepper extract. Capsicum has long been known to have fat burning properties as well as being good for overall digestive and heart health. However due to the fiery nature of the red pepper, it’s not possible to eat enough of them to get the full benefits just through diet. (Well, you could try, but I think your stomach might explode since you’d need to eat around 10-15 red hot chillies a day!) Because of this problem, Capsicum has never been used as a weight loss supplement before. However the makers of Capsiplex found a way to make it into tablet form which protects your stomach lining from the pepper while allowing it to be absorbed into your bloodstream. The primary advantage with Capsiplex is to take it before exercising as it massively improves the amount of calories you burn during a work out, and for several hours afterwards. You can read about my personal experience with it here at my Capsiplex review, and get a Capsiplex discount code if you want to take advantage of this great supplement.

Cayenne is an excellent source of Vitamins A, B complex and C, and it contains a great deal of natural potassium and calcium, which is of major benefit to the heart.

Dr. Patrick Quillin:

Cayenne pepper – prized for thousands of years for its healing power. Folklore from around the world recounts amazing results using cayenne pepper in simple healing and in baffling health problems. But cayenne pepper is not just a healer from ancient history.
Recent clinical studies have been conducted on many of the old-time health applications for this miracle herb. Again and again, the therapeutic value of cayenne pepper has been medically validated.

Recently as they described in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, a trio of doctors working together in Italy were able to decrease the dyspepsia (indigestion) symptoms of one patient by more than 50%. Their method was red pepper powder. They conducted a study with 30 patients who had “functional dyspepsia” which is where the patient suffers from pain, bloating and nausea after eating, without any known physical or medical condition behind it. In the study, half the patients were given a placebo and the other half were given 2.5g of red pepper powder per day (each group had three tablets per day, before every meal.) The study went on for five weeks and the participants rated their symptoms every day on a scale of zero to three (three being severe pain.) At the end of the third week, the group taking the red pepper was showing a siginifcant decrease in symptoms compared to the placebo group. By the end of the study the pepper group had experienced a reduction of 60% in symptom severity when measured against their initial scores. This was across four key areas of pain, feeling uncomfortable full, nausea, and general overall wellbeing.

Heart
Believe it or not, cayenne has been witnessed to stop a heart attack within 30 seconds. An elderly man in Oregon had a serious heart attack. His daughter was on the scene and was able to get some cayenne extract into his mouth. Medics who attended pronounced him dead at the scene – but within a few minutes he had come to! During the ambulance journey to hospital he was semi-conscious, but his daughter kept giving him the cayenne extract. By the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital he said he felt absolutely fine and wanted to go straight home to continue his normal daily routine! The doctor was extremely interested in the cayenne being given, and said it was the most miraculous thing he’d ever encountered.

Digestion
For people with reduced digestive function, cayenne can help stimulate growth of healthy tissue in the stomach and improve peristalsis in the intestines. It helps with keeping you regular and it also helps the body take up the maximum nutrients from your food. It also stimulates the production of acid which is needed for digestion. (This is especially important if your diet is rich in protein.) Our digestive systems play a really big part in our physical AND mental health, since the digestive function processes fuel for the heart, brain, muscles, glands, etc.

Cardiovascular Benefits
Capsicum has been well known as an aid to metabolism for some years. It has a variety of beneficial effects on the whole CV system. It can improve your cardio performance while at the same time actually lowering blood pressure. It also gives a great energy boost and many herbalists have used it for years to restore stamina and strength and overcome tiredness. It has a great stimulating effect without the usual side effects of hypertension or palpitations which can occur with most stimulants.

Due to capsicum’s effect of improving circulation to all parts of the body and heightened organ function, it helps with the speedy delivery of nutrients and fuels to the right places in the body, so it can also help recovery from exertion and injury. Capsicum’s ability to improve circulation, digestive function and metabolism makes it an excellent natural stimulant and one of the best herbs available.

Me at my heaviest

I thought I would put up this Capsiplex review to let other people know my experiences with this slimming product.

I began taking Capsiplex last year when I was in a really fed-up place. I had been dieting on and off for years and was good at taking the weight off, but not so good at keeping it off. (I’m sure you are familiar with this!!) As I got older it seemed to get harder and harder to lose weight, but much easier to put it back on

When I stopped smoking my weight immediately began to pile on and without the cigs to fall back on, I was having real trouble losing the weight again. I was doing all the right things and eating all the right foods, but my weight loss was so S-L-O-W! It was taking me a month to lose even a pound. Ridiculous! At this rate I felt like I would be in a nursing home before I reached my goal weight!

I invested in a metabolism monitor called a Ki Fit, which is an armband that you wear 24/7 and which monitors your calorie burn. This showed me some very interesting data: I was actually burning about a third less calories than I should have been for my weight and height. This isn’t just because I was sitting on my bum all day – even when sleeping, I should theoretically have been burning 1.7 calories per minute just to maintain vital function (breathing, digestion, etc.) However the monitor showed I was only burning 1.4!

When I spoke to a nutritionist about this she explained that  because of my years of yoyo dieting, my body had got used to using fuel very efficiently, and was burning less calories than someone else of my size. This was just something I had done to myself with the years of bingeing and starving  At this point I was like okay, so now I know I need to work a lot harder than most people, and/or eat a lot less in order to lose weight, and I can’t really complain about it because I’ve done it to myself.

This gave me a big problem though because I work two jobs and all of the rest of my time is spent looking after my son. I didn’t have time to go to the gym or get any more exercise than I was already getting. For a month or so I restricted my calorie intake even further, but this left me feeling horribly tired and lethargic. However, I did manage to lose 4lbs that month, a record! But the payback in energy levels was just too much – I felt I was shortchanging my son and everyone else around me.

I looked online for Capsiplex Reviews

It was around this time that I heard about Capsiplex. What really attracted me to it was that I’d heard of all the ingredients, haha I don’t like the idea of filling myself with some chemical which I can’t even pronounce, but this one is simple – it’s got capsicum (from red peppers), piperine (from black pepper), caffeine, and niacin (vitamin B3.) I’ve always known that spicy food increases metabolism, but as I have a delicate stomach I’d ruled out chillies a long time ago. But Capsiplex is in a tablet form so it can’t irritate the stomach.

Capsiplex claims to work by increasing the metabolism, particularly during exercise. The best time to take it is just before you work out. I read quite a few Capsiplex reviews trying to make up my mind whether to try it. There was scientific evidence in its favour, and a lot of celebrities seemed to be endorsing it, but I was more interested in real people. Some of the testimonials on the Capsiplex site were pretty convincing so I thought I would give it a try with the one month’s supply. It was £30 and I thought “Hmmm” but then I noticed that they have a “no fuss” guarantee so I thought I would give it a go. I made sure to use my credit card to order so I could do a chargeback if the tablets turned out to be crap.

The order arrived pretty quickly and I began taking one tablet a day just before I took my regular exercise (taking the dog for a walk with my son.) I didn’t feel any different and to be honest at first I thought it wasn’t working and I’d been ripped off. But I reckoned I had to give it a fair chance, so I carried on for a week and then weighed myself on the 7th day.

I had lost 4lbs!!! In one week!! That took me previously one month to lose even when trying my hardest!

Me now!

I had not done ANYTHING else differently other than take the tablets. In fact due to the exhaustion I had been feeling my calorie intake had actually gone slightly up.

Needless to say I decided to continue with the Capsiplex and although my weightloss did slow down after the initial week, I have continued losing a very respectable 1-2lbs per week ever since. I have now been taking them for 6 months and have lost over 3 stone!

Get a 10% discount with this Capsiplex Review

I found a discount code for Capsiplex! Wish I had this when I first started, LOL. Click the order link below and select the 3 months package, then enter the code CMN10 on the checkout page.