Heterogeneous cellular networks provide significant improvements in terms of increased data rates and cell coverage, and offer reduced user rate starvation. However, there are important problems to be solved. In this paper, we identify that the cell selection criterion is an important factor determining the user rates especially in the uplink transmissions and apply cell breathing to determine the user and base station assignments. We observe that the proposed interference-based cell selection algorithm provides better load balancing among the base stations in the system to improve the uplink user rates. We present the implementation steps in a typical LTE network and demonstrate the performance improvements through simulations.