Negative-calorie Foods

For those wishing to lose weight easier, faster and smarter!

Hope this article about negative-calorie foods by Mike Adams, Editor at NaturalNews.com will give you valuable insights!

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Negative-calorie health foods - burn fat while making you feel full

How do you eat more while losing more weight at the same time? One of the best answers is to eat "negative-calorie" foods, meaning that these foods actually take more energy to digest than they deliver to your body. While these foods may be an important source of phytonutrients, they are not sources of fat-packing calories.

Because of their surprising lack of calories, these foods can essentially be consumed in unlimited quantities without you gaining weight (body fat). That works because your stomach senses when it is physically full, and it will trigger your brain to stop eating when you can't handle more food. You know that "I feel stuffed" feeling? That's your stomach (which has its own complex nervous system, by the way), telling your brain to tell you to stop eating.

This is why, believe it or not, the simple act of drinking a glass of water before each meal is a proven weight loss strategy. It fills your belly with water, thereby reducing the amount of space left for other foods. So your stomach gets full more quickly, triggering the "stop eating" signals in your brain.

Eating an apple before each meal also works in much the same way. This is true even though apples are not negative-calorie foods. But they are rich in water, and water takes up space in your stomach.

In fact, that's the common property among all negative-calorie foods: They all contain a lot of water locked in a fibrous matrix. Apples are essentially "water fruits," as are grapes and watermelons (hence the name). Many vegetables are also "water vegetables," meaning that they're loaded with water. Celery, for example, is the classic example of a water-rich negative-calorie food (see below).

As you read this list, remember that all foods contain calories, and that the term "negative-calorie food" is a bit of a misnomer. It refers to the effective net calories subtracted from your body through the preparation, eating, digestion and elimination of these foods. In other words, you expend more calories eating them than they deliver to your body.

The upshot is that the more water you consume in your foods, the more quickly you'll feel full and stop eating. Water, it turns out, is the most effective appetite control substance in the world.

So here's the list of the five best negative-calorie foods that you can enjoy every day as part of a healthy weight loss diet:

#1) Celery

One cup of celery (120g) contains only 19 calories. It takes far more than 19 calories to prepare, eat, digest and eliminate this one cup of celery, and that's what qualifies it as a negative-calorie food. You can eat as much celery as you want, and you won't gain body fat.

Even though celery contains effectively no contributing calories, it does contain powerful medicine. Celery juice is a powerful anti-inflammatory medicine (http://www.naturalnews.com/024135_celery_cancer_inflammation.html), and one of the active constituents in celery -- apigenin -- slashes the risk of ovarian cancer, too. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027449_cancer_ovarian_flavonoids.html)

#2) Lettuce, onions and greens

Lettuce is basically just structured water locked into a vegetable matrix. One cup of typical iceberg lettuce contains just 8 calories, meaning you can munch on this to your heart's delight and you'll never gain an ounce of body fat.

Much the same is true with onions, which contain only 64 calories per cup and yet deliver an amazing assortment of anti-cancer nutrients and immune-boosting medicine. (http://www.naturalnews.com/022364_pancreatic_cancer_onions.html).

Virtually all salad greens are "negative-calorie" foods, meaning you can eat as many of them as you want. But be careful:

Slopping on 300 calories worth of oily salad dressing changes the entire equation. While lettuce by itself is a negative-calorie food, salad dressing is mostly definitely NOT. In fact, salad dressings are often loaded with cheap soybean oils and even MSG (monosodium glutamate), a chemical taste enhancer linked to neurological damage and obesity. MSG is almost always found in "Ranch" flavor dressings, in particular.

#3) Grapefruit

Grapefruit technically isn't a negative-calorie food, but it deserves mention for another reason as you'll soon see. For starters, it's still fairly low in calories, delivering only 74 calories per cup.

But the best part is that grapefruit contains naringenin, an antioxidant derived from the bitter flavor of grapefruits, which triggers the liver to break down fat. So as part of a fat-loss strategy, grapefruit is truly essential to your daily diet!

Fascinating research about the fat-reducing properties of grapefruit was just published in the online journal PLoS ONE (http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012399). It shows that naringenin activates two kinds of PPARs (dubbed PPAR-alpha and PPARy) and blocks LXR-alpha -- resulting in fasting-type benefits to the body (http://www.naturalnews.com/029684_naringenin_grapefruit.html).

"It is a process which is similar to the Atkins diet, without many of the side effects," Martin L. Yarmush, MD, PhD, director of the MGH Center for Engineering in Medicine and one of the paper's authors, said in a media statement. "The liver behaves as if fasting, breaking down fatty acids instead of carbohydrates."


Edited from Full article:http://www.naturalnews.com/030912_negative-calorie_foods_burn_fat.html