Foods That Speed Up Your Metabolism

by Dan Beckwith

Let's talk a minute about what to eat. Any good, healthy diet will include vegetables. But, for foods that speed up your metabolism, what kind of vegetables should we eat?

As part of any balanced diet, eating most any type of vegetables will kick start your metabolism. However, if you truly want to see the weight start melting away, you'll have to start thinking about calories.

Calories are easy to understand, if you think of them as energy.

Everything you eat, it doesn't matter if it's a cube of sugar or a carrot stick, has calories. Your body must do something with these calories. If it needs energy, it will burn them. If it doesn't need the energy at that time, it will store them as fat.

Our metabolism will slow down if we cut back too much on calories, so we have to find a way to boost our calorie usage. Basically, we are looking for foods that will speed up your metabolism but that still don't provide quite enough calories. Fast metabolism versus not enough calories equals disappearing fat.

Wouldn't it be nice, if we could find a way to keep our metabolism at full speed but still not getting enough energy? Then, the excess energy would come from fat. (And we would finally get skinny.)

Enter negative calorie foods.

A good way to describe negative calorie food, is that it is an edible version of a bunch of jumping jacks. Even though your metabolism is working at full speed and you're getting all the nutrients you need, you still need more energy. Your body gets it by burning the extra needed calories in fat.

Eating foods that speed up your metabolism - and make you lose weight at the same time - makes dieting a lot of fun. Wouldn't you agree?

By now, you are probably wondering what negative calorie foods are?

Whenever we eat something, it gives us calories. However at the same time, your body uses a certain number of calories just to digest food.

A negative calorie food is one that gives us a certain number of calories but burns more calories just in being digested. With negative calorie foods, in theory, you could eat all day and still lose weight.

With negative calorie foods, they use more calories during digestion, than they provide us. So, theory says that we could eat all day and wind up losing weight! Here is what we mean. When you eat a piece of broccoli, it gives you about 25 calories. Your body needs about 80 calories just for digestion, so you lose 55 calories every time you eat some broccoli.

Good stuff, eh?

There are quite a few vegetables that are negative calorie foods, here are a few...

Asparagus, Beet Root, Broccoli, Cabbage, Carrot, Cauliflower, Celery, Chicory, Hot Chili, Cucumber, Garden cress, Garlic, Green Beans, Lettuce, Onion, Radish, Spinach, Turnip, Zucchini.

And, there's quite a few that aren't listed. Ponder this... it would be physically and scientifically impossible to eat a negative calorie diet and not lose weight. For more foods that speed up your metabolism and tons of articles check out my website.

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