Five Ways to Burn More Calories – a Personal Observation

1. Do a lot of Mental work

I noticed from my personal experience when I am doing a lot of mental work such as application designing or code writing, my body temparature tends to rise.  This is indicates that I am burning more calories.

Risk

The risk of burning calories this way, is we tend to snack more and end up adding more calories to the body.

2. Be in a very cold surrounding

When we are in an airconditioned room or outside during winter you notice we sometimes shiver.  This is an automatic reaction from our body to keep warm.  Seem this is an automatic reaction, it requires minimum effort on our part but nevertheless burns calories.  Also, internally our body is working very hard to burn more fuel to maintain our body temperature, which also means that we will burn even more calories.

Risk

The risk here is that we may end up with hypothermia and get really sick (which will also help burn more calories when the body works to heal itself).  Another risk is we will get hungry very fast and in turn eat more (which again defeats the objective of losing weight.

3. Run a Marathon

I took part in a half marathon last year.  The run lasted 5 hours.  However, long after the run, I could still feel my body continue to burn calories.  So a 5 hour run resulted in calorie burn of 9 to 10 hours.  Also, while preparing – gettting myself fit enough for the run, I had to do more running and also control my food intake so that I am lighter for the run.

Risk

This method is very time consuming and if not done correctly, will cause injury which requires weeks or even months to recover.

4. Increase the frequency of your meals

Instead of eating three times a day, try eating five or six times a day but in smaller portions.  This will cause the body metabolism to increase and in turn will allow you to burn more calories.

Risk

When we increase the number of meals, there is a risk that we do not decrease the portion for each meal so we end up consuming more calories.

5. Choose unprocessesed food

When eating try eating unprocessed instead of processed food.  The body will then need to burn calories to process the food which in turn will burn more calories.

Risk

There is minimal risk here but very difficult to do since in our modern lifestyle, processed food are more readily available.  It is difficult to sustain.