This is part 2 of The Basics of Eating Foods That Burn Fat. If you haven't already, you can read Part 1: Your Body's Silent Workout, here.
Negative Calorie Foods - Your Body’s Secret Weapon
What if you discovered you could lose weight simply with the foods you choose to eat? Foods that help you work off calories simply by eating them. It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? But it’s not. There are foods that make your digestive system use more energy to consume them than the calories contained in the foods themselves.
When you use more energy to digest a food than the caloric value of a food, then those foods are called negative calorie foods. By eating these negative calorie foods, you will burn calories and you will lose weight effortlessly.
This is a rough example of how it work:
Let’s say you have a slice of chocolate cheesecake from the store bakery and you consume roughly 350 calories (or more depending on the type of ingredients used). Once you’ve eaten that slice of cheesecake, your body goes to work breaking it down and beginning the digestion process.
Let’s say your body burns 150 calories digesting that cake (and that’s probably figuring the amount burned on the high end). You’re still left with a gain of 200 calories. These calories will turn into unwanted fat and weight gain if not used as energy by the body. Now remember, the amount of calories you burn by eating negative calorie food will depend on the type of food it is.
Instead of the chocolate cheesecake, let’s say for example that you chose an apple instead. A medium sized apple has approximately 80 calories. You eat the apple and then the digestion process begins.
Because an apple is a negative calorie food, your body works harder to digest it than you gain in calories by eating it. The difference in negative calorie foods is comparable to the difference between walking and running. When you go for a low key walk, you don’t expend the same amount of energy you would if you were running.
Let’s Do the Math
If you eat that apple, you’ve ingested around 80 calories. Your body begins the digestion workout and without you having to do anything, burns calories.
Let’s say as an example, that your body burns around 100 to 110 calories. We’ll split that and say the body burned 105 calories. To eat that 80 calorie apple, you would have burned an extra 25 calories.
If you had the slice of chocolate cheesecake, but felt the urge to eat the apple afterward, you would then be 25 calories to the good on the cheesecake. Follow me? Boiled down, it means that 350 calorie cheesecake minus the 25 extra calories you burned by eating the apple leaves you with 175 calories charged against your caloric intake for the cheesecake rather than the entire calorie count for the cheesecake.
However, unlike math, there is no simple formula that can subtract months or years of eating the wrong way. But with a little addition of the right kind of foods - negative calorie ones, you can erase those pounds and keep them off.
There are a few things to keep in mind with any type of diet. The more involved a diet is, the less success most people achieve in the long run. Studies have shown that the more elaborate a weight loss plan is, the less likely the person is to stick with it to the end because we like things basic and to the point.
None of us has the time to waste filling out complex charts and recording every single morsel we put into our mouths. That’s why negative calorie foods are an ideal weight loss plan for people who want to lose weight, want to get healthy and want a simple method but need a little something extra working in their favor.
Your own digestive system can give you that boost you need to keep going until you’ve reached your goal weight. By using your body’s own digestive system, you can actually change the equation.
Stealing From the Store
If you’re a junk food junkie, you probably have more than your share of fat stored - fat you would love to see disappear. Remember the apple math? If you have fat stored from junk food and you start eating negative calorie foods, what’s going to happen is those negative calorie foods are going to begin stealing from you.
These foods are going to take the fat your body put in store and they’re going to begin using it. Why? Because it took more energy to consume that negative food than the negative food had to give. That energy deficit had to be made up somehow and your body knows just where to get it.
When you eat negative calorie foods, your body works hard enough to pull the nutrients and energy from the foods to the point that the food calories don’t count. If there’s not enough energy in the foods your body digests to perform the job, like a car putting in more gas, your body will pull up to the pump - in this case the fat stores - and get whatever it needs to finish the task.
I know what you’re thinking!
“This is one thief I wouldn’t mind having around!”
But Are These Negative Calorie Foods Good For You?
Are you thinking there must be a catch? That negative calorie foods are some type of exotic food with names you can’t pronounce? With all the benefits we’ve talked about that come from eating negative calorie foods, they can’t possibly be good for you, right?
Wrong!
In fact, negative calorie foods are exactly the kinds of foods doctors not only recommend that you eat, but also encourage patients to do so for weight loss and disease prevention. What are these mystery foods? They’re certain fruits and vegetables. Since experts agree that more fruits and vegetables are a good thing for everyone, negative calorie foods are a great weight loss plan.
This isn’t a complete list, but for an easy reference, I’ll mention some of those foods for you. In the vegetable department, negative calorie foods are: turnips, cucumbers, lettuce, asparagus, broccoli, radishes, cabbage, celery, spinach, carrots, leeks and cauliflower.
Fruits that fall under the heading of negative calorie foods are: watermelon, apricot, tomato, apple, blackberry, tangerine, cranberry, cantaloupe, peaches, lime, grapefruit, lemon, papaya, honeydew melon, strawberries, pineapple, plums, mandarin orange, raspberry, rhubarb and honeydew melon.
There’s nothing odd about that list of vegetables or fruits. They’re just ordinary foods with the power to create negative calories upon consumption. Now don’t get confused thinking that the phrase ‘negative calorie foods’ means that the foods don’t have any calories, because that isn’t the case at all.
The food you eat does contain calories – your body just has to work so hard to digest them that you wind up with a caloric deficit once it’s all said and done.
Is it safe to eat negative calorie foods?
Yes, it’s safe. You can’t overdose on negative calorie foods. Unlike heavily advertised pills and gimmicks, there are no ill effects to eating negative calorie foods because they’re healthy for your body – working to keep it naturally lean and strong enough to produce the energy you need throughout the day.
