With an empowered attitude and adherence to a healthy eating and exercise plan You can achieve your ideal weight ? no matter your present circumstances.

You just have to start where you are ? and follow these 4 ways to increase your energy expenditure each day.

Even better, you can influence every one of them, sometimes in a big way. The key to increasing your metabolism and burning more calories is to break down your total daily energy expenditure into each of its individual parts, and then rev up each area to the highest degree possible.

1. Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)

The long-term effect of cardio on RMR is still being researched, but there are two things we know for sure: First, you can temporarily elevate your RMR with intense cardio, as well as strength training. Second, your RMR is directly related to the amount of muscle you have. If you lose muscle from extreme dieting, then your RMR will decrease. If you gain muscle from supportive nutrition and weight training, then your RMR will increase, making it easier to maintain your ideal weight.

2. Weight Training

Many people avoid weight training because they believe it has nothing to do with fat loss. It does! Many women avoid weight training because they think it will make them bulky. It doesn?t. Weight training has the potential to burn as many calories as cardio while simultaneously revving up two other points of energy expenditure: RMR (through increased lean body mass) and post workout metabolic rate.

Weight training is not simply for building muscle and getting stronger; you also create a hormonal environment that tells your body to hold on to lean tissue while you burn off fat.

Effective weight training can burn seven to nine calories per minute and more, even when you count the rest intervals. If your primary goal is fat loss and your time is limited, then full-body workouts with supersets (two exercises performed consecutively without rest in between) will always be one of your best choices to stimulate metabolism and fat-burning hormones.

When you focus on total calories burned and recognise the impact of weight training on lean muscle, you?ll realise that weight training may be the most important but underappreciated and neglected type of exercise for burning body fat.

3. Excess post exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC)

After intense or prolonged exercise, your metabolism stays elevated for up to 12 to 24 hours, and in extreme cases, for up to 48 hours. Exercise physiologists call this ?excess post exercise oxygen consumption? (EPOC). Some trainers call it ?the after burn effect.?

The number of extra calories burned from EPOC is related to intensity and duration, but intensity is the critical factor. Increases in duration produce a linear increase in EPOC, while increases in intensity produce an exponential increase in EPOC. The downside is that EPOC only kicks in after very intense exercise such as high-intensity interval training (HIIT).

If you can?t tolerate intense exercise right now ? either physically or psychologically ? then don?t do it until you feel ready. Low- and moderate-intensity exercise is by no means ineffective, it simply takes more time or volume to burn the same amount of fat.

As you continue exercising, you?ll find that your tolerance for brief stints of more intense exercise will increase. Begin building brief periods of jogging into your walking routine, or brief periods of sprinting into your jogging routine, and you?ll find that you get better results in less time, and also feel your energy levels, strength and endurance increasing.

Just do what you can and continue to challenge yourself a little more each week. But remember, your first priority has to be building your health and vitality, which will naturally make all kinds of exercise easier and more effective. Your desired outcome is to be lean and healthy, not one or the other.

4. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)

As the name implies, Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, or NEAT, is all the physical activity you do throughout the day outside of formal exercise or sports.

This includes standing, pacing, walking, shopping, gardening, housework, and even things like talking, chewing, changing posture and fidgeting.

For most people, NEAT accounts for about 30 percent of physical-activity calories spent daily (the rest is RMR and exercise), but NEAT can run as low as 15 percent in sedentary individuals and as high as 50 percent in highly active individuals. If you manipulate your NEAT in minor ways throughout the day, the results can add up in a big way over the long term.

Take the stairs instead of the elevator, do yard work, and run more errands on foot. In other words, do your best to spend less time in a chair and more time walking. You may want to invest in a pedometer, which will tally up your steps every day.