Do Fat Burning Food Lists Hold The Secret To Weight Loss?

If you were to do a search online for fat burning foods you'd probably find over a million web pages. However, are these fat burning foods lists just another weight loss lie to convince you to buy into another fad diet program?

These lists of fat burning foods, also referred to as negative calorie foods, mention natural carbohydrate foods which are very low in calories and high in fiber such as green vegetables and fruits like asparagus, lettuce, broccoli, green cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, apples, blueberries, cantaloupes, and cranberries.

Why are these fat burning foods often called as negative calorie foods? It's because some experts say these foods are so low in calories that you use more energy than you take in to digest and process foods. To give you an example of how many calories these foods have let's take a cup of cucumbers. Compared to a cup of rice which has 200 calories, a cup of cucumbers has only 24 calories.

It is true that foods high in fiber such as those you see on these fat burning food lists can be part of a healthy diet. Foods high in fiber fill you up easily, helping to satisfy your appetite, and are usually low on the glycemic index scale and digested slowly with very little effect on your blood sugar level, thereby limiting cravings and hunger. Foods high in fiber, however, can also slow down the digestion of processed and refined carbohydrates at meals and help stabilize your blood sugar level and prevent a large release of insulin which can lead to fat gain.

Before you run to your local grocery to buy all the negative calorie foods you can find I should warn you that while they do have many health benefits you will not burn fat effortlessly and lose weight just by eating a bunch of fat burning or negative calorie foods.

Experts have found that the calorie deficit you get from eating negative calorie foods is negligible and will not directly cause weight loss. When you cook or add other foods this changes the caloric make-up and the effects of the foods on these fat burning food lists. Also, if you continue to eat foods high in sugar and fat you will not be able to reverse the trend of weigh gain until you remove these from your diet first.

You would have to eat a diet that consists of just raw vegetables and fruits, which is very difficult to do, in order to see considerable weight loss results from fat burning foods. However, negative calorie diets are around which teach you do exactly this, claiming that by following their instructions you can lose as much as 2 pounds of fat every day.

When someone tells me I can lose 2 pounds of fat every day this immediately sets off my alarm bells. Don't you think that if such diets were as effective as this then studies would exist to prove such claims? Not only is this claim completely baseless but a diet of just negative calorie foods is also very unhealthy.

You will not only be deficient of necessary nutrients which help your body function when you consume a very low number of calories but your body will also break down muscle tissue. When your metabolism slows down in this manner, you suddenly notice that it's now a lot easier to gain fat which is because, since you do not have as much muscle to provide nutrients to, your body does not need as many calories so can store more as fat.

In addition to this, a negative calorie diet will trigger your body's automatic starvation response. When your body notices it isn't getting anywhere near as much energy as it expects, it will try to conserve the energy that it has stored. This means that any fat loss you experience will eventually stall.

Putting aside the wild claims and marketing hype, foods like those mentioned on fat burning food lists, which are low in calories and high in fiber, will improve your health and aid with weight loss but do keep in mind that too much of a good thing can sometimes be bad for you.

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