Do you know people who consistently watch their diet by carefully choosing low-fat, low-calorie foods, are very disciplined when it comes to not ordering the desert, yet order a glass or two of wine with their meal? Well, unfortunately, these people are really undermining their efforts to boost metabolism.

Studies show that drinking alcohol with meals actually encourages over eating; which means more calories that need to be burned away (or transformed into fat!). Furthermore, many people are simply unaware that many alcoholic drinks are laden with calories; almost as much as sugary-rich soft drinks.

A bottle of beer can deliver a few hundred calories, and most cocktails are in the same range. Wine is generally considered to deliver the least amount of calories; but even this is a bit of a slippery slope. Three glasses of wine can be worth 300 calories that the body simply has to deal with in one form or another.

The tip here isn't to stop drinking alcohol altogether. If you enjoy a alcoholic drink once in awhile, there's no reason why you have to quit drinking altogether. You just need to be aware that it influences your metabolism. If you consume excess alcohol (even without becoming inebriated), you force your system to deal with more calories. And unless you're compensating for these added calories through exercise or muscle building, catabolism (Catabolism is the set of metabolic pathways which break down molecules into smaller units and release energy) cannot occur. Instead, anabolism (Anabolism is the set of metabolic pathways that construct molecules from smaller units) will inevitably occur, and new cells will be created from those calories (mostly fat cells).

Sleep is a key factor in boosting the metabolism. Most of us don't have as much control over the amount that we sleep as we should. Work, family, education, and so many other tasks can literally prevent us from getting the correct amount of sleep that we need to maintain a healthy lifestyle. However, as the experts tell us, getting enough sleep actually improves metabolism. On the other hand, people who are constantly sleep deprived typically find that they have less energy to do regular, daily activities; including digestion. Don't you feel drained when you have a restless night?

As a result, sleep-starved people often lower their own metabolism. They simply don't have the strength to break down food efficiently, carbohydrates. This is a very difficult issue, because many people can only find time to exercise by borrowing from their rest time. For example, after a long day of work and dealing with family and home commitments, a person may find that the only time they have to exercise (and thus boost their metabolism) is late at night; say around 9:00 pm, or even later. So what should one do?

Ultimately, it's a question of balance. Naturally, if you're willing to exercise, and your doctor agrees that it's healthy for you to do that, then you're not going to get fit by sleeping instead of exercising. Yet with that being said, if you steal time away from your sleep/rest in order to exercise, over time, you can actually do more harm than good; because the following day, you won't have enough energy to digest what you eat. The answer to this catch-22 lies in balance.

You don't have to work out every night. Or perhaps you can integrate a workout into your life during the day; maybe at lunchtime or right after work. Even if you snatch 10 minutes of exercise three times a day is the same as working out for thirty minutes all at once. That help to not exercise at 10:00 pm. This will help your metabolism boosting because your trick your metabolism into having to call up that extra energy when it least expects it and you don't feel so bad about not exercising. So when you get home at night take a quick ten minute walk around the block and it might not even feel like exercise, you might enjoy it.