Eating to speed up your metabolism

This diet is not about counting calories. When you restore nutritious foods to your diet, nature will take care of portion control for you. While you're still in the process of adopting these practices, though, consider the merits of rebalancing your "energy in."

Eat until you're full...
You need to eat enough to fuel your metabolism. When you eat too few calories, you overtax your thyroid and train your body to do more with less. And while economizing might be a good strategy for your financial health, it sucks as a dietary strategy.

That said, eating until you're full of fast food is not allowed. When you eat healthy, fresh, whole foods until you're full, you will find that your calories are within a perfect range. Not too little and not too much. For girls this is anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800. For boys this is anywhere from 1,800 to 3,000. The difference in calorie allowances has to do with age and activity level. 

Severe diets make your body start eating its own muscle. Drastically reducing your calorie levels for just four days can reduce blood levels of leptin by almost 40 per cent; do it for a month and leptin plummets 54 per cent. When you cut calories to lose weight, the lower your leptin levels go, the more hungry you become—a recipe for yo-yo dieting.

Eating nutrient-dense, high-fiber/high-water-content foods will also help you fill up without any fear of overeating calories. As you eat these high-volume foods, your stomach starts to stretch a bit. This "distension" triggers the release of satiety peptides.

Translation: You'll feel full faster, with fewer calories, and the fiber will help you stay satisfied longer. When you give your body the foods it recognizes, it eagerly absorbs the nutrients critical to optimal hormone production and puts them to work right away.

Hormone homework: Check out the recommended calorie range for your size and activity level. If the range is 1,200–1,400 calories, don't go down to 800—you'll damage your metabolism and inhibit your thyroid. On the other hand, don't do what some of my clients do when they hear that eating often ups their metabolism by 10 per cent—they go out and order a pizza! The problem is that 10 percent for most people is about 200 calories—not 3,000! Know your range and stick close to it.

... But not until you're stuffed
Now for the bad news: If you've been eating at least one large meal a day, you probably stretched out your stomach, making it difficult to feel full and trigger your satiety hormones. You may even have leptin resistance—your body could be releasing leptin to let you know it's full, but you ignore the hormone and continue eating.

Good news: You can return to a state of balance and get your appetite back in check, but you have to follow these rules. Eating smaller meals four times a day will help shrink it back to normal size. When it does, you'll be equally satisfied but faster, with less food.

Page 1 of 2 -- Find out what foods you should be limiting and what foods you can eat without limit on page 2.

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Excerpted from Master Your Metabolism, copyright 2009 by Jillian Michaels and Mariska van Aalst. Used by permission of Random House. All Rights Reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced except with permission in writing from the publisher.