IF you would like to lose weight and keep it off for the long term then the secret is to make your body more efficient at burning calories off — this means increasing your metabolism.

Metabolism is the rate at which your body burns off energy (or calories). We all have a base level at which at body is run, which means our body will require a certain amount of energy just to function properly.

When we eat food, our metabolism will speed up to digest our food. When we exercise or put additional exertion on our body our metabolism will increase to create the energy we need to perform.

Everybody's base metabolism will be slightly different. Generally speaking, a person with a greater muscle mass will have a faster metabolism than a person with less muscle. Our metabolism also slows down with age.

However, there are ways that you can increase yours so that your body uses up more energy everyday. This will make long term weight loss much easier to achieve.

Exercise is obviously the key to keeping a high metabolism. Weight training will increase your muscle tone which will give you an increased metabolism day to day, cardio will increase your metabolism too.

Increasing muscle mass will be a very efficient way of boosting your metabolism. As we get older, staying active and keeping muscle tone will be crucial to ensuring your metabolism won't slow down too much, not to mention keeping you strong and mobile.

Taking steps each day to use more energy will help keep your metabolism higher. Taking the stairs instead of the lift, walking faster etc. Always choose the active option. So forget severely restricting your calories or starving yourself, short terms weight loss plans like this will slow down your metabolism which means it'll be easy to gain the weight afterwards. #

Instead, think long term, eat well, supply your body with nutrients for health, great skin, nails, immunity and feel good hormones and take steps to increase your metabolism.