Fat Burning Foods: Eat yourself thin

Body envy. It happens every single time when those infomercials featuring perfectly proportioned models pop onto the television screen promising an enviable bodyweight if you’ll just fork over enough cash to make you skinny forever.

Even though you know there’s no magic pill that guarantees overnight success, sometimes it’s tempting to dole out the money. It’s enticing because losing weight is a struggle and a vicious uphill battle that’s not always so easily fought.

The appeal to find a quick fix hits you every now and then – especially when you’ve worked hard to lose a little bit of weight and then you fall off the diet wagon and gain it all back (and then some). You may have lost count of the times you’ve thought, “There has to be an easier way to lose weight!”

Have you purchased every weight loss book ever published, forced down the diet bars, consumed the shakes, and attended the weight loss meetings so many times you could have paid for the entire building by the time you quit? Have you done all of this and yet you still haven’t seen the long-term results that you crave more than food itself?

Are you sick and tired of trying, but you still know you need to lose weight so that you can have a healthier life?  Or maybe you only need to lose a few pounds to fit into that new outfit or look good for an upcoming class reunion.  You know you want to lose weight, but you don’t want a gimmick and you certainly don’t want to keep going down a road that leads nowhere.

You just want to find a plan that really works for you without all of the empty promises. There’s something you might not know about the battle of the bulge – something that can help you gain the victory once and for all without having to resort to any costly plans or fancy gimmicks.

Best of all, the way you can lose weight can be found in your own refrigerator, in your pantry or at your grocery store. By the way, this little known method of losing weight won’t break your wallet. I guarantee it. 

Understanding the Basics of Weight Loss

To understand how weight loss works, you have to first understand how calories work. A calorie is an energy given in the foods you eat. Your body uses this energy as fuel. Think of it as wood for a fireplace. If you put in too much wood, the fire gets too hot and there’s too much heat produced.

In the same manner, too much consumption of calories, especially those foods with empty calories, equals an overabundance of fuel. The same way you would store wood in stacked piles for your fireplace, the body stacks an overabundance of calories as fat.

It then takes that fat and adds it to the places you don’t want it put. Then you see results like a tummy that laps over the top of your jeans – often called a muffin top – or you discover the results are flabby thighs or a double chin. To make the battle of weight loss even more discouraging, that fat, and its cellulite can give you a lumpy, bumpy look.

Cellulite is pockets of that stored fat beneath the surface of your skin.  In other words, it’s the chocolate cake or donuts or the second helping of carbohydrates if those calories aren’t burned. 

Now, all of that’s the bad news. But the good news is, you don’t have to accept being overweight as your fate (no matter how many times you’ve fallen off the diet wagon in the past).

Because this weight loss technique is easy and inexpensive, so you can stick with it forever. Not only can you stay on the plan, but you’ll find you actually enjoy it!

Your Body’s Silent Workout

When you watch a movie, what you see is the finished product. All of the actors and actresses stand where they’re supposed to. They say their lines like a pro and they look good doing it.

What you don’t see happening is the chapped hands and runny noses from filming outside in below zero weather or the nights filming lasted until two in the morning. You didn’t see what went on behind the show.

Many people sit down to eat a meal or a snack and never give a second’s thought to what goes on behind the scenes once the food is finished. Everyone knows how you gain weight and most of us are pros at the gaining. We gain by eating too much of the wrong kinds of food. But what if I told you something about your own body that could help you lose weight?

With every bite of food that you eat, your body must work to digest it. Because your body is expending energy to digest the food, it’s actually performing a silent workout. Sounds great, right? Your body is working out without you having to lift a finger.

Picture this: your body is burning energy to digest the food while you watch television, while you talk on the phone, drive to work and even while you sleep. It sounds like a fantastic win-win situation doesn’t it?

If it’s so fantastic, then why are some people still overweight? Because you’re not eating the right kinds of foods. You’re still stuck measuring portions and counting carbs and assigning foods as good or bad.

The truth is, there is no such thing. Food is simply fuel. All of it is. But how (and at what rate) the fuel is burned depends on the foods you eat because it correlates to how it makes your bodywork. Still follow me?

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 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 works:

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 number 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

Math was never my favorite subject in school, but this kind of math is the kind I love. So let’s go back to the foods. 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.