You have already listed some good points.
I don't believe eating spicy foods has any long term effect on metabolism. It's true that spicy foods increase the body temperature. Calories must be used to generate that extra heat. After a few minutes, the heat goes away, so what good does it do?
Eating regularly makes your body believe that food is abundant and will readily use the nutrients. Eating large portions spaced far apart will make the body believe there is a "famine" and will store the food as fat to prepare for hard times. This is an evolutionary trait going all the way back to the cavemen. They ate as the foraged because they had no way to store the food. As a result, they were lean.
Eating breakfast is related to this matter. But it's more about eating protein in the morning that keeps you satiated - something not directly related to metabolism, but of mental state. Look at this April 2011 article in Men's Health Magazine:
Hard Abs, Over Easy. Wake up and smell
the proof: People with a history of
skipping breakfast have larger waists
by nearly 2 inches - than those who
eat in the a.m., new research in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
reveals. Pass on breakfast and you may
pig out later, the study warned. Over
time, this can cause your body to
store more fat. Shoot for 20 to 30
grams of protein at breakfast.
You may want to read up on Basal animal metabolic rate for more tips on increasing your metabolism. From personal experience, weight lifting to increase muscle mass has given boosted my metabolism through the roof. In the first 6 months of weight lifting, I dropped a pant size, yet gained 10 lbs of lean mass. Muscle burns a ton of calories just to maintain. The more ripped you are, the more calories you burn just by sitting.
The body's generation of heat is known
as thermogenesis and it can be
measured to determine the amount of
energy expended. BMR decreases with
age and with the loss of lean body
mass. Increasing muscle mass increases BMR. Aerobic fitness level, a product
of cardiovascular exercise, while
previously thought to have effect on
BMR, has been shown in the 1990s not
to correlate with BMR, when fat-free
body mass was adjusted for. New
research[citation needed] has however
come to light which suggests anaerobic exercise does increase resting energy consumption (see "Aerobic vs.
anaerobic exercise"). Illness,
previously consumed food and
beverages, environmental temperature,
and stress levels can affect one's
overall energy expenditure as well as
one's BMR.
The afterburn effect also increases metabolism. This effect describes the energy burned on the days after your workout. Scientific studies show that high intensity cardio increases the afterburn effect. So don't waste your time doing hours of slow cardio. 10 to 20 minutes of fast running burns more calories when measured over several days.
Phelian et al. (1997) investigated the
effects of low intensity (50% VO2 max)
and high intensity (75% VO2 max)
exercise on the EPOC response.
Although the energy cost of both
exercise bouts was 500 calories, the
higher intensity bout caused a significantly higher EPOC than the
lower intensity bout (9.0 liters, 45
calories versus 4.8 liters, 24
calories).
