Trying to make the right food choices when dieting is so important when you’re expecting a good loss on the scales. Knowing a little more about the foods we eat and how the body breaks them down will help make the decisions a little easier. Obviously we know some foods are better than others but what if you knew the foods that help you burn fat naturally, now wouldn’t that be an advantage?
I came across this interesting article today, its mainly based around calories but it’s interesting the little fact how certain foods can help speed up our weight loss. Taken from the Indepentent.co.uk
Understanding Foods That Help You Burn Fat Naturally
A pound of flesh contains 3,500 calories, so in order to lose one pound a week, you should cut back by about 500 calories per day. Yes, some people do seem to lose or gain weight more easily than others, but it is widely accepted that in order to lose weight one must expend more calories than one consumes. Now, at this extremely late stage in the 2,000-year history of the dieting industry, the whole concept of calorie-counting is being questioned.
The calorie itself is not 2,000 years old. Nor was it invented to help us pursue our dreams of waif-like figures and wardrobes full of size zero clothes. On the contrary, the calorie system was developed to help us eat enough. Do you know how far can you cycle on an egg, for example? Working out how far a man could cycle on one egg was one of the tests carried out in the late 19th century by the American chemist Wilbur Atwater, who painstakingly worked out the calorie content of different foods.
As well as the egg test, Atwater locked students in a chamber and measured the energy fluctuation while they ate and carried out various tasks. He also burnt foods and measured the heat they gave off to determine how much energy – how many calories – they contained. This formed the backbone of the calorie system, which has been recognised and accepted internationally as the most straightforward way to assess the energy in food ever since.
More often than not we talk about calories in the context of weight loss, and the Government urges us to eat fewer calories to tackle obesity. In the early days, calories had the opposite political use, as big employers and the army wanted to discover the cheapest foodstuffs that would provide their men with sufficient energy to do a job, be that on an assembly line or at the frontline. The answer was carbohydrates, which is why bread, pasta, rice and any starchy vegetables are the bugbear of today’s dieting industry.
We’ve known since the 1920s that some calories are worth more than others nutritionally, because of the vitamins and minerals they present the body with. A banana beats a chocolate digestive hands down, hence the phrase “empty calories”, which is sometimes applied to sugary foods. But in recent years and following new scientific developments, the whole calorie system and its accuracy has come under examination. One nutritionist has said that the calorie content of typical items may be as much as 25 per cent out. The idea that we must eat fewer calories than we burn to lose weight still holds, but the calorie content of individual foods does not provide the full picture.
Atwater’s findings were not completely wrong. What he did not account for was how much energy our bodies use up to digest and process different foods. We have to work much harder to digest dense, fibrous foods and those high in protein, right from the initial process of chewing, through to the reactions that go on in the stomach and colon.
The true calorie content – the bit that remains stuck to our hips or is available for that bike ride – is the energy left in the body once we’ve digested the food. Full article published on The Independent.
If this is true, then I think its time I experiment a little further with my diet, I find myself consuming a lot of carbohydrates, simple because I enjoy eating pasta and bread more than meat.
It’s times like this that we can also take a closer look at the individual foods that we eat, I often find myself eating the same lunches day after day, but I know variation will help shake things up a bit.
Do you eat a high protein diet? Because it seem that the foods that help you burn fat naturally are those high in protein and fibre.
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