Are there any herbs or foods to help speed up my metabolism?

The answer to increasing metabolism is to understand why it slows down in the first place. It all begins with the digestion of food.

When we eat anything that has been cooked, steamed or heated to over 118 degrees, we are ingesting food whose natural enzymes have been killed. Enzymes are necessary to break down or digest your food. (They are necessary for a lot more than that, but we will confine our discussion to digestion for now.) If there are no natural enzymes to digest the food, our body must find replacement enzymes. It effectively robs them from other areas of our body. The first place that our body robs is the metabolic enzyme. Since the metabolic enzymes controls our metabolism, our metabolic rate slows.

In order to get our metabolism back up, we must do one of two things. Either eat foods that haven't been heated to over 118 degrees, or replace the digestive enzymes that have been destroyed by heat. (Digestive enzymes are available from any health food or nutrition store.) You could and probably should do both.

It will take some time for your metabolism to get back on track, but if you know how your body functions, you can then take the steps to make it function properly.

One food that can rev up your metabolism even more than proteins (or suppliments) is coconut oil. The MCFAs (medium chain fatty acid) shift the body's metabolism into a higer gear, so to speak, so that you burn more calories. Because MCFAs increase the metabolic rate, coconut oil is a dietary fat that can actually promote weight loss. A dietary fat that takes off weight rather than puts it on is a strange concept indeed, but that is exactly what happens, so long as calories in excess of the body's needs are not consumed. The MCFAs are easily aborbed and rapidly burned.

As a side note, I take coconut oil because I've had a total thyroidectomy which has wiped out my metabolism. It has helped me not only not gain weight from the surgery (which is usually 20+ more pounds) due to the medication I must take but I've actually dropped seven pounds since I started a month ago. It's been a life saver plus I also use it on the scar from my incision. You can hardly see it now.

There are a few supplements that can help with metabolism. Some of the most popular and beneficial are Chromium, L-Carnitine, Garcinia Cambogia (a fruit), Coconut Oil, and even a bit with B-6.

Of course, the best thing to help boost your metabolism is to eat breakfast (at least 3-400 calories to get your metabolism going for the day) and to exercise for even just a few minutes a day. Good luck!

Ginseng, coconut oil,

red zinger tea with lime juice.