In a nutshell - effective fat loss is essentially about increasing your metabolism, or more correctly, optimizing your metabolism. All the rules that apply to raw, natural and healthy dieting has its focus on this one crucial aspect. By eating breakfast, you start up your metabolism nice and early; by eating regular but smaller meals spaced throughout the day, you keep your metabolism going in a balanced way ; by exercising and staying active you optimize your metabolism.
With this said, your exercise routine is the first and most important aspect to concentrate on, it does encourage the greatest magnitude of effect.
But is there really such a thing as foods that speed metabolism, and thereby allow you to lose weight?
There are those foods known as "negative calorie foods", foods that burn up more calories in the process of digesting them, than are actually contained in the foods themselves. You thus "speed your metabolism" by choosing foods that have few calories, yet burn many calories just in the process of metabolizing them. Potatoes and cabbage are good examples. Also, raw celery and grapefruit are often claimed to have negative caloric balance, presumably because the thermic effect is greater than the caloric content, due to the complex fibre matrix that must be uncovered to access their carbohydrates.
The expression "thermic effect of food" is used to describe the energy expended by our bodies in order to consume and process food. Dietary fat, for example, is very easy to process and has very little thermic effect, while protein is hard to process and has a much larger thermic effect. Therefore, eating more lean protein foods has also been proven as an effective strategy to help you burn fat and keep it off.
Your metabolic energy levels will be the highest possible if you eat whole, natural foods. Select unprocessed foods with a high thermic effect (lean proteins like poultry, egg whites and fish, as well as green vegetables and other fibrous carbohydrates).
You should ideally avoid processed foods, which is pretty much anything in a bag or a box.
What will optimize your metabolism to the greatest extent, is simpler eating - focusing on fruits, vegetables, nuts, lean proteins, and healthy fats. It will take some effort to rid yourself of processed foods, but in your journey you will learn to appreciate the taste of real food again.
By Kim Levin
