Eat enough calories: When you reduce your calorie intake, your body thinks it is starving and conserves energy, slowing down your metabolism, i.e. burning fewer calories for energy than it would otherwise.
Eat often enough: When you skip meals, you are starving your body, so it slows down, burning fewer calories to conserve energy. Spread your daily calories more frequently throughout the day. Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with a few healthy snacks throughout the day. Remember, a snack is less than 200 calories and meals do not exceed 500 calories.
Engage in regular aerobic/sendurance exercise: Aerobic or cardio activity increases your metabolism while you are working out. There are some studies showing that you continue to burn calories faster for a while after exercise, especially after higher intensity interval training. Aerobic activity is any physical activity that uses large muscle groups and increases your heart rate. When you are performing an aerobic activity, you should be breathing slightly harder than you would at rest. You should still be able to talk, but should be breathing a little faster than usual.
Build muscle: Muscle blasts fat. Strength training increases your muscle mass which increases your metabolism overall. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, and therefore burns more calories. One pound of fat burns about two calories per hour, one pound of muscle burns about 35-45 calories per day. As an added bonus, muscle takes up less room than fat.
Source: wpahs.org
