Vitamins play an important role in improving your health and maintaining your overall well-being, and some vitamins can also promote weight loss and enhance the body’s metabolic efficiency.
A healthy diet can offer most of the nutrients your body requires. But if your diet is limited, increasing your intake of specific vitamins can help fill dietary gaps and offer the extra boost you need to speed up your metabolism and keep your weight in check. In this post, Midss.org highlights certain vitamins that can help you shed extra weight and keep your metabolism working effectively. Keep reading!
What Vitamins Help With Weight Loss and Boost Metabolism?
While vitamin supplements can help boost metabolism and maintain a healthy weight, the best results are usually obtained from whole foods. But even then, not all vitamins found in whole foods are equal when it comes to the roles they play in your body. Some will strengthen your bones. Others will keep your skin glowing. And some will accelerate wound healing. But what vitamins help with weight loss and speed up body functions? Clarke, M from Midss recommends these two:
B Vitamins
The B vitamins are essential for converting foods (fats, proteins, and carbohydrates) into the energy that fuels your body. Without them, the nutrients from these foods will be stored as fats, which, over time, may cause weight gain.
Examples of B vitamins include biotin, thiamine, cobalamin, folate, pyridoxine, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, and niacin. Each of these vitamins plays a specific role in ensuring a fully functioning metabolism. Thiamine, for instance, helps convert carbs into energy. Cobalamin is essential for breaking down fats, and pyridoxine is vital for the metabolism of proteins.
Consuming foods rich in these vitamins is, therefore, important not just for maintaining a healthy metabolism but also for keeping off excess weight. Such foods include lentils, beans, eggs, nuts, dairy products, bananas, lean meat, potatoes, and whole grains. Note, however, that cobalamin is only found in animal products, meaning, you may not get enough of it if you are on a vegan diet.
Vitamin D
Vitamin D helps decrease body fat, strengthen your bones, and keep your hormone levels balanced. While there isn’t enough evidence supporting that this vitamin directly plays a role in weight loss and metabolism, research shows that vitamin D has a few indirect effects on body functions that may contribute to weight loss including:
Regulation of hormones: Vitamin D can influence the production and regulation of hormones, including those involved in appetite control, keeping you from over-indulging in unhealthy foods that may cause weight gain.
Muscle function: Vitamin D is essential for maintaining muscle strength and function, including the muscles that help us perform physical activity. By keeping your muscle strong and working efficiently, this vitamin could potentially reset your metabolism and help you to lose body weight.
While you can boost low vitamin D levels by getting sun exposure daily, consuming tuna, salmon, yogurt, cereals, cod liver oil, and fortified foods could also help raise these levels. If you don’t get out in the sun much, especially, we would recommend adding these foods to your diet or taking vitamin D supplement.
What are The Best Diets For Weight Loss?
For any diet to be effective in weight loss, it must be sustainable and must promote a balanced intake of nutrients. The following diets have been found to be effective for weight management and building lean body mass, but your lifestyle, individual needs, and preferences should determine which plan works best for you.
Mediterranean diet: The Mediterranean diet advocates for whole, unprocessed foods like fruits, veggies, legumes, whole grains, and lean protein and healthy fats such as nuts, olive oil, and avocados, and limits intake of processed foods. It’s called so because it incorporates the traditional eating habits of Mediterranean-bordering countries like Spain, Italy, and Greece. Combining this diet with a healthy lifestyle may increase your chances of losing weight.
Low-carb diet: When you’re on a low-carb diet, you technically restrict yourself from consuming carbohydrates, especially processed and high-sugar foods. How a low-carb diet works is that it lowers insulin levels and causes your body to burn fat for energy. This reduces the need for eating, which encourages your body to lose weight. A good example of low-carb diet is the ketogenic diet. This high-fat and moderate-protein plan puts the body into a state of ketosis where it burns stored fat instead of glucose for fuel, accelerating weight loss.
DASH diet: Short for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, the DASH diet involves reducing the intake of salt, fat, red meat, and added sugars and consuming more fruits, veggies, fiber, and lean protein. While it’s mainly designed for blood pressure and blood sugar control, the DASH diet has also been found to aid with weight loss and muscle preservation. Research shows that combined with magnesium supplements, it can help reduce body fat percentage and prevent the risk of heart disease in people with obesity, too.
Plant-based diet: With plant-based diet, individuals focus on consuming whole foods obtained mostly from plants. But it’s not super strict; it does allow eating of animal products but in moderation as well. Basically, fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and whole grains would be starring the show while fish, eggs, beef, and dairy products would only make small appearances. Because plant-based foods tend to have high fiber content, they keep your stomach full for long periods, which prevents you from snacking on unhealthy high-carb snacks that could lead to weight gain.
Conclusion
While certain vitamins may help rev up your metabolic functions and weight loss, a healthy, well-balanced diet is essential for your overall well-being. A diet rich in B vitamins and vitamin D can be effective for weight loss. But for it to work, it must meet your unique needs and must be something you can maintain in the long term.
Frequently Asked Questions
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What Vitamins Cause Weight Gain?
There’s little evidence to suggest that vitamins directly cause weight gain. However, vitamin and mineral supplements may contain added sugars or other calorie-dense ingredients that could result in a caloric surplus and, eventually, weight gain if consumed in high amounts.
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How to Speed Up Weight Loss?
First things first; be careful what you eat. Decrease your calorie intake and focus more on whole, nutrient-dense foods. Then increase your activity level. Exercise, especially, will help boost metabolism and burn excess calories.
