What is the Zero Calorie Diet

You would think that almost every month a new diet or two pops up out of nowhere. However, the zero calorie diet is nothing new; rather, it is just another name for the famous negative calorie diet. The concept of ‘negative calorie food’ is gravely misunderstood by many people; they assume that they would have to find special foods that have zero or less than zero calorie.

Negative calorie foods are not special foods which have to be imported from another planet; rather, these are the same organic fruits and vegetables you are familiar with. In fact most, if not all, vegetables and fruits can be categorized as ‘negative calorie foods’.

This doesn’t however mean that they have less than zero calories; there is no such food in the world that has zero or less than zero calories. These foods, being high on fiber and low on calorie, help you lose by creating a calorie deficit within your body; hence, they are called ‘negative calorie foods’.

Every negative calorie food contains a certain number of calories, but when it enters your body, it expends more of your body’s energy for digesting itself than what it gives back to your body. Let’s take the example of celery, which is also a negative calorie food. In order to digest celery, your body would need to expend twenty calories. But guess how many calories it gives back to your body? Only ten calories. There, it has created a calorie deficit of 10 in your body.

If necessary, your body would burn its entire stock of calories in order to make up for this deficit. If that doesn’t prove sufficient, it would start burning your existing fat deposits to produce the required amount of energy. It is when your body starts burning fat that you lose weight. As you can see, the concept of ‘negative calorie diet’ is far simpler than what you thought.

This doesn’t however mean that you should spend all your energy and focus on eating only negative calorie foods all the time. Rather, you should consume foods of varying calorie content; if you keep consuming the same amount of calories every day, your body would soon reset your metabolic rate to the lower calorie consumption level and you would no longer burn fat.
Therefore, your meal should consist of both high and low calorie foods; just make sure that the amount of negative calorie foods in your meals always exceeds that of the high calorie foods. When you eat such healthy and nutritious meals, and keep your junk food intake at a very low level, you are bound to lose weight.

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