The concept of losing weight by consuming negative calorie foods might stump you, but trust me, it is not as complicated as you think. As a matter of fact, with any food your body needs to expend its stored energy to digest it before it can give back some energy to the body. Compared to ordinary foods, the so-called ‘negative calorie foods’ consume more energy from your body to digest themselves than what they supply to the body.

As a result, a calorie deficit occurs which in turn forces your body to burn your existing fat deposits so as to make up for this deficit, thereby helping you lose weight. It is really a simple concept, but the tough part is identifying the negative calorie foods.

Fortunately, you won’t have to import negative calorie foods from Mars; in fact, you may already be eating negative calorie foods without being aware of it. In order to help you select the best negative calorie foods for fast weight loss, I would offer you a free list of the negative calorie foods I highly recommend to all my readers. Read the rest of this entry »

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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 weight 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.

You will find a free list of negative calorie foods below, but first let’s consider what this means. There is no such thing as a negative calorie – a calorie is a unit of heat and it cannot be negative. So when people talk about negative calorie foods, this just means a food whose calorie level is low enough that it takes more energy to eat and digest it than the food contains.

For example, if you consider water to be a food, then cold water is certainly a negative calorie food. It contains no calories at all and the body has to expend energy to bring it up to blood temperature. So every time we drink a glass of cold water we burn up a couple of calories and lose a little weight. But there are very few foods like this. Most foods that are on the list do not really use more calories than they add, or if they do the effect is negligible … until you remember that at the same time the body expends energy just to keep alive and breathing. Celery for example does not give us enough calories to cover both the energy that it takes to digest it, plus the energy that we expend even when we are doing nothing. So that is why people call it a negative calorie food.

Negative calorie foods are most attractive to anorexics. A negative calorie diet would obviously result in starvation in the long term and nutritional deficiencies can occur surprisingly quickly. The calories burnt usually come from muscle mass, and the result is debility and wasting.

A more healthy way to use a negative calorie diet is as a form of fasting or detox. It is something you can do for one to three days right after the Christmas season or another time when you have been eating a over-rich diet. Provided you are otherwise healthy it can be a great way to clean out the system. However it is still best to take medical advice before attempting this.

If you decide to use a negative calorie detox, keep the following points in mind:

1. It is never a good idea to eat huge quantities of one type of food, especially fruits. A lot of foods contain substances that can be damaging if consumed to excess. For example, the acid in grapefruit and pineapple can damage your stomach lining. Other foods put an excessive burden on the liver or may cause diarrhea. So try to use all the different foods in small quantities.

2. Do not spend all day eating. You will just become bloated and feel sick. If you are only doing this for a couple days, you should not feel too hungry. Plan four or five salad meals each day, and let your digestion rest at other times.

3. You will feel more satisfied if you eat slowly and chew your food thoroughly. You will also use more calories that way. So if the foods can be eaten raw, that will be more effective than cooking them. Foods like carrots and beets will also be more satisfying if you eat them grated.

4. Schedule time when you do not have any important commitments. As with fasting or any kind of detox, you may suffer some uncomfortable symptoms including headaches, tiredness, depression and irritability. If these become severe, stop the diet and see a doctor.

5. When you end the detox, plan a gradual return to normal eating.

If all the above points are checked and passed, let’s move on to the list of foods.

* Apples
* Asparagus
* Beets
* Blueberries
* Broccoli
* Cantaloupes
* Carrot
* Cauliflower
* Celery stalk
* Celery root
* Cranberries
* Cucumbers
* Eggplant
* Endives
* Garden cress
* Garlic
* Grapefruit
* Green beans
* Green cabbage
* Lamb’s lettuce
* Lemons
* Lettuce
* Onions
* Papayas
* Pineapples
* Prunes
* Radishes
* Raspberries
* Spinach
* Strawberries
* Tangerines
* Tomatoes
* Turnips
* Zucchini

Please use this free list of negative calorie foods wisely.