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Your metabolism is the process by which your body breaks down food into energy or stores it as fat. A faster metabolism will burn more calories and store less fat. Our metabolism slows down as we age, but it does not have to. While diet pills offer to increase our metabolism, they are often not safe. Below are 13 things you can do to increase metabolism without pills...

These 13 items and more metabolism issues are discussed in Christopher Guerriero's book "Maximize Your Metabolism: Double your metabolism in thirty days or less". 

1. Eat Breakfast

A healthy breakfast is important. Breakfast fuels your body and mind allowing you to be productive. If you skip breakfast your body goes into starvation mode, conserving energy and burning as few calories as possible. This is a survival response for the times when food is less plenitful. Early nomadic man could go days without food and the body developed a way to store fat and break it down slowly.

2. Eat Small Meals More Frequently

Eat four to six small meals (or healthy snacks) a day. Your body burns calories digesting food, some foods like celery have "negative calories" because they take more calories to digest than they contain. Small meals will keep you satiated, stop hunger signals and overeating. Your body won't go into starvation mode when you eat frequent meals and will burn more calories.

3. Body Movin'

Regular physical activity should be a part of any healthy lifestyle. Even if you have a weekly exercise program, your body's metabolism will slow down if you are sitting at a desk all day. Get moving, take the stairs, bike or walk to work, go for a lunchtime walk.

4. Strength Training

Lift weights or take up resistance training 2 to 4 times per week. Your resting metabolic rate will increase for a few hours after strength training. Muscle also uses more calories at rest than fat, replace 10 pounds of fat with 10 pounds of muscle and you could burn an extra 100 calories a day. This may not sound like much but that's 10 pounds a year that doesn't end up on your love handles.

5. Include Protein In Your Diet

The body burns more calories digesting protein than sugar or carbohydrates. Protein also helps build fuel burning muscle. Ever feel like a meal wasn't complete without some meat? It's more than just the taste. Meat or any protein such as beans or dairy make your body send the "I'm stuffed" signal.

6. Vitamins and Minerals

Each cell in your body burns food energy to maintain your bodily processes. The chemical processes that convert food to energy require vitamins and minerals. Keep this chemical process working efficiently by eating nutrient rich fruits and vegetables. It's not a bad idea to take a daily multivitamin either.

7. Drink Water (Especially Cold Water)

Drinking water will increase metabolism. Drinking cold water will make your body burn calories to raise your body temperature. If you drink between 6 and 8 glasses of water a day you could burn another 10 pounds a year.

8. Got Milk?

Researchers at Purdue University found that women who drink more milk tend to burn more calories. Turns out that calcium decreases parathyroid hormone which in turn increases fat burning. Stick to low fat milk.

9. Go Nuts!

Some research has suggested small amount of peanuts or almonds or any other high calorie, high fat nut on a regular basis could increase your resting metabolic rate by 10%.

10. Drink Green Tea or Oolong Tea

A study conducted by the University of Geneva in Switzerland found that men who took green tea extract burned more calories than those who did not. Similar results have been found for oolong tea.

11. Spice It Up

Spicy foods increase metabolism. The compound capsaicin is what makes chili peppers spicy. Capsaicin will raise your body temperature requiring your metabolism to increase to cool you off. A nice side effect of eating spicy foods is that they reduce your hunger so you eat less.

12. Reduce Stress

Stress causes the body to release the hormone cortisol, which helps to break down protein into glucose. Your body then turns this excess glucose into fat and stores it in you stomach. Cortisol competes with dehydroepiandrosterone which is required for a healthy metabolism. Cortisol also reduces hormones necessary for muscle production and libido.

13. Avoid Sleep Deprivation

Chronic sleep deprivation reduces the ability of otherwise healthy individuals to perform metabolic functions such as breaking down carbohydrates or producing hormones. University of Chicago researchers found that reducing from the standard eight down to four hours of sleep each night created effects that resembled the effects of advanced age or the early stages of diabetes. This happened in less than a week.