Is There Such A Thing As A Fat Burning Diet?

The basic science to losing weight starts with a very simple principle, burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight. While we accept this fundamental principle we also acknowledge that there are many other factors that play their part in any attempt to lose weight. The human body is a complex machine and losing weight can be a little complex as we try to figure out all the issues that make up a fat burning diet. There are five issues that need to be addressed in planning a fat burning diet.

1. Missing Meals and Starvation

On the surface this would seem to be a simple solution, just reduce our calorie intake by missing meals and starving ourselves. This simply does not work in fact it can result in our putting on weight. We have an inbuilt defense mechanism that kicks in the moment we do this. The body reacts as though we are into a period of famine and kicks in body processes to store and preserve body fat. Any fat burning diet has to reduce calorie intake without triggering these defense mechanisms.

2. Foods with Negative Calories

Sadly there are no such foods in that all food has some calorie content. However there is a range of foods that the body actually has to burn more calories to digest than the food gives to the body. We call these negative calorie foods. Most of these foods are natural plant foods. Here is a simple but only a partial list. Apples, apricots, asparagus, beets, blackberries, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, cherries, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, garlic, grapefruit, grapes, green beans, leeks, lettuce, mangoes, mushrooms, onions, peaches, pears, peas, pineapple, prunes, pumpkin, radishes, red cabbage, spinach, squash, strawberries, tomatoes, watermelon. There are many other foods like most fish we could add to this list. While these foods may result in negative calories do not ignore the other nutrients that all these foods bring to the body. Remember food is not just about calories.

3. Foods that Raise our Metabolism

There are a range of foods that serve to increase our metabolic rate. The metabolic rate is the scientific measure used to indicate how fast or how slow we burn energy including fat. Think of the result we obtain when we stoke up the fire to produce more heat. This is exactly what some foods do, they stoke up the fire within our bodies to burn more energy. We are looking for thermogenic foods like green tea, fish oil, chillies, capsicum, cardamom and garlic. They act like the accelerator in our cars making the engine go faster. Make a list of these foods and include them in your fat burning diet.

4. Foods That Impair Our Liver Function

The liver is the main organ in our body that controls our fat burning engines. Just as the heart is the control center for our blood, so the liver is the control center of our digestive systems. Among many of these processes within the liver there are two which concern us in developing our fat burning diet. The first is the control of our energy resources both burning and storing energy as the body requires. The second is ridding the body of the junk we eat. For instance alcohol is not a food it is a chemical the body does not need and it is the job of the liver to breakdown alcohol and eliminate it from our bodies. Simply put, (unfortunately nothing is simple about how food is processed in the body), while the liver processes the alcohol, it is not processing fat. Over burdened livers finish up storing fat around our bodies rather than processing fat as it should. But alcohol is not the only villain on the block.

Top of this list is sugar. The amount of sugar in our western diet is perhaps one of the major causes of increasing body weight. What most of us simply don't appreciate is just how much sugar or sugar substitutes are to be found in modern food and drink. A further factor is the chemical contents of our foods sold in supermarkets and fast food outlets. Preservatives, flavor enhancers, food colorings and a vast host of only numbered chemicals are a part of most prepared foods. All these chemicals need to be eliminated from the body before the liver is able to properly process fat. Put simply a fat burning diet virtually demands a return to a diet of more natural foods, prepared at home with little or no dependence on the vast range of foods from our supermarkets.

5. Exercise

When it come to fat burning we need to focus on our muscles. True every cell in our bodies need energy supplied to them by the blood. But when it comes to burning fat there are no cells that burn more energy and fat than our muscles. It will not matter how carefully we plan our fat burning diet we need to add some form of exercise. This adds a whole new level of complexity to our fat burning diet and I will not attempt to enlarge on this aspect except to say it is an important part of your fat burning diet. Many prefer long periods of exercise but there are many who feel this form of exercise does not always produce the results expected. A growing number exercise physiologists are beginning to see better results with high intensity resistance exercises.

To answer our basic question, "Is there such a thing as a fat burning diet?" The answer is an unqualified YES. For more information visit my website below.

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