The surest way to speed up your metabolism besides "moving it," is to eat about every three hours, about 5-6 times a day. This sends a very definite signal to the body that it is no longer necessary to "save" or store nutrients. Understanding and applying this principle is crucial to obtaining a lean body. Not only will you have more consistent energy levels, avoiding the afternoon crash, but consistent nutrients will maintain your immune system and provide supplies for building and repairing our stressed (physical and mental) systems. Understand that this doesn't necessarily mean eating more calories per day. To lose bodyfat it does mean eating smaller meals more frequently. To gain lean muscle mass and trigger an anabolic response (building lean body mass), it still means eating frequent, balanced meals but increasing the total consumed calories.

What do you always see a horse doing? Eating, specifically grazing, and yet they remain lean, why? Cows also graze all the time but don't exercise, the result is lethargy and high bodyfat, whereas horses also graze consistently but frolic moderately, hence they are lean animals. Now bears don't graze, they forage when they are hungry, eating infrequently, when food is available and as much as they want. Even though their exercise is also moderate, their meal patterning is inconsistent, so they have trained their bodies to store nutrients for times of famine, next day, next week, next season. The body cannot know when the next meal is coming when it is fed inconsistently therefore the natural response to survive is to store nutrients when they are restricted.

So we have the cow that grazes but doesn't exercise, the bear that exercises but only forages and then we have our horse which grazes and exercises. Which do you want to be? The down side to our lean horse is that they can't hibernate. Your solution rests with you, not with drugs or starvation, nor exhausting exercise, but with your own metabolism and hormones. This IS something within your control.

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