You can jog and jog, diet and suffer and starve yourself to the perfect weight, but if you don’t know how to make your body the most efficient fuel-burning machine it can be, you might be missing out on a whole lot of healthy weight-loss.

Your metabolism can get tricky, especially with age, and starving yourself may actually do more harm than good.

So learn about how to boost your metabolism and your weight plan might just get far easier: Here is how.

1. Build muscles: Muscles burn fat and it guarantees you that your body will keep burning calories even after you step out of the gym. Unlike cardio, pumping weights’ effect on metabolism lasts after you’re done exercising. Check out our “Pump It” article on many more reasons to get cracking on resistance training.

2. Keep the cardio for last: We all tend to start off with the cardio training, then move on to resistance training, which is good for warming the body up, but isn’t the most effective fat-burning method. Instead, start with a five-minutes speed walk, stretch, exercise and then finish it off with that jog. As we said earlier, getting your muscles pumping guarantees fat-burning. Also, while it will take you 20 minutes of running to start burning fat, keeping cardio for last means that when you step on the treadmill your body is already burning fat.

3. Do interval training: Interval training gets the heart pumping good. You can either set up interval training on your treadmill or take up a workout like Insanity. Interval training is about changing pace, you get your heart pumping then rest it, only to get it back up again. This is the most efficient fat-burning technique and it is easy to follow. Start up with a jog, sprint for a few minutes, take the speed down again for a minute and speed back up.

4. Exercise in the morning: Studies have shown that when you work out before breakfast you burn 30 percent more calories than you would any other time a day. You can have a tablespoon-full of honey or half a boiled potato for energy to keep you going.

5.  Eat the right foods: Almonds, lean protein, beans, cinnamon, broccoli, cabbage, apples, curry, hot pepper, grapefruits, spinach and oatmeal are known metabolism boosters.

Next 5