What Food Burns Fat?

When you are looking to change your diet, you may ask the question, what food burns fat? This is a tricky question because no “food” really burns fat by itself. What occurs is there are foods that take more calories to digest than they contain. These are termed “Negative Calorie Foods”.

This term can be misleading because all foods have some caloric number. All foods contain a nutrient; carbohydrate, fat or protein. They also contain vitamins and minerals. In the negative calorie foods, the vitamins and minerals produce enzymes that help break down the calories in the food itself and burn calories in the overall digestive process.

Little do people realize but our normal bodily functions like breathing, heart beating, sleeping, and digesting food burns a lot of our daily calories. Our bodies extract calories from the food we eat to use as energy for these functions as well as other physical activities we partake.

People who live in places that consume large amounts of negative calorie foods are leaner and thinner than average. These “fat burning” foods have few calories and are low in fat. If your goal is weight loss and you would like to add more of these negative calorie foods to your diet, you should avoid junk foods at all costs to maximize the health benefits of these foods.

Some of the negative calorie foods include vegetables like: celery, carrots, cabbage, radish, spinach, turnips, lettuce, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, and zucchini. Some fruits are also included like: peaches, grapefruit, lemons, limes, mangos, cantaloupe, blueberries, papayas, and tomatoes. We often deplete the nutritional value of these foods by adding fattening salad dressings and syrups to them. Putting the right combination of these foods in our diets can create a situation where you are burning more calories than you have taken in. This is the ideal formula for weight loss.

We must remember to do our best to consume these foods in their raw form. This provides the maximum benefit from these foods. Often times we cook food and add ingredients like butter or vegetable oils that may increase the amount of calories we intake. Steaming or cooking our fruits and vegetables alters the molecular structure and loses the foods nutritional value as most vitamins are water soluble. As the cooking process breaks down the cellular structure of the plants, it takes fewer enzymes to digest the food therefore causing your body to burn fewer calories.

Now you know what food burns calories. The list here is not a complete list of fat-burning, negative calorie foods. But it is a start for a person looking to change their dietary habits and begin to start eating to live.