Most people know that having a higher metabolism means you burn more calories.
But what exactly is metabolism? Metabolism is the amount of energy (measured in calories) that your body burns in order to maintain itself. Every individual’s metabolism is dependant on a huge number of variables such as their fat to muscle ratio, body weight, fitness, diet etc. Roughly speaking if you burn more calories each day that you consume over time you will lose weight.
Muscle is known to burn more calories in order to sustain itself than fat so roughly speaking the fitter you are, the higher your metabolism will be and the more calories your body will burn. This is why people exercise to help lose weight.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to raise your metabolism without all the hard work in the gym? Well eating chillies have been shown by several studies to raise you metabolism by as much as 20%. So maybe chillies are the new super food that can help you lose weight.
Well before you get too excited eating chillies only raises your metabolism for a very short period of time so the overall effect of extra calories burnt per day is not huge from ‘normal chilli consumption’. In order to eat enough chillies to make a big increase in the calories you burn every day you’d need to eat such huge quantities that you would most probably damage your stomach!
So as with all things diet related the boring advice of taking regular exercise and eating a healthy balanced diet holds true once more. However it would be fair to say that chillies will help a little in the battle against the bulge!
