Have you noticed how some foods make you feel or look fatter and others make you feel or look skinnier? Have you ever wondered why some foods speed up metabolism and others don’t? You see, food that causes your body to make more fat doesn’t take much energy to burn off. Those foods are digested first and stored as fat “for later use”. On the flip side, those foods that make you feel or look skinnier take a while for your body to digest. They are the foods that speed up metabolism because they force your body to create more energy to burn.
In plain and simple terms, we can say that the foods that speed up metabolism are “negative calorie foods”. When you consume these, they cause your body to generate a lot of energy because digesting these foods is such a tough process. These foods are high in fiber and your system can’t easily break them down into nutrients for your body.
The broken-down version: Your body burns more calories than the total amount of calories you consumed in a meal. That means you’ve created enough energy to burn off the calories from the food you ate IN ADDITION TO stored body fat! That is how food can speed up your metabolism. Here’s a real-life example.
Let’s say you have a small salad or fruit cup that contains about 80 calories and it causes 130 calories to be burned off while your body digests it. Then what that means is your body has used all 80 calories from your meal IN ADDITION TO 50 calories of stored body fat. Now you have an overall calorie loss.
Most of us however are on the other end of the scale. We have a chocolate fudge brownie for dessert that contains 243 calories but our body only uses 70 calories to digest it. Because of that, we’ve now GAINED 173 calories to be stored as body fat “for later use”. But, if you do not exert any energy to actually BURN those backup calories off through exercise or physical activity, they are all going to sit there around your waist or hips or thighs and collect, day by day, until all of a sudden you have to go up a size in clothes.
Get more familiar with negative calorie foods by searching the internet for a list that you can get meals ideas from. Incorporate these foods that boost your metabolism into your daily eating habits and soon enough you can start to see and feel the healthy effects they have on your body.
