Healthy Fat Burning Foods Can Help you Lose Weight

Healthy fat-burning foods can help you lose weight and, let’s face it in these days of convenience foods, that’s not an easy task.

If you’re overweight, that doesn’t make you a bad person. You’re simply overweight. But it’s important that you lose the extra weight so you’ll look good, feel healthier and develop a sense of pride and self-esteem. Once you’ve lost the weight, you’ll need to maintain it.

In this article you’ll discover how to lose weight in a safe and painless manner. If you're trying to lose weight, the safe rate of weight loss is between 0.5kg and 1kg per week. That's between approximately 1lb and 2lb a week.

Lose weight faster than this and you're at risk of health problems that include malnutrition and gallstones, as well as feeling tired and unwell. Once you start to lose weight you’ll feel more energetic than before without feeling deprived.

Most people pack on extra weight by eating the wrong foods. Add these fat-burning foods to your diet and, at the same time, change your poor eating habits. This is the key to long-term weight loss, and gaining knowledge about eating correctly will help you to make the necessary changes to your diet.  What you need is a long-term eating plan offering a sustainable and nutritious lifestyle. What you don’t need is a fad diet that promises that you will lose a huge amount of weight in a very short space of time.

How Eating has Changed and Why You need Fat Burning Foods

When humans lived in caves, they didn’t know anything about preserving and storing food. They spent all their waking time and energy hunting and gathering food. When they had it, they gobbled it down instead of storing it in pantries or cupboards. Instead, they stored energy in their bodies in the form of fat to burn during periods when there was little or nothing to eat.

Each year, it was absolutely vital for them to put on a good layer of fat during the warm months. That was the only way they could guarantee their survival during the winter months. And since women bore the young, they needed more energy to sustain themselves and their babies, and that meant they were usually heavier.

Even though we no longer live in caves, we have inherited and maintained this basic mechanism for fat storage from our hunting and gathering ancestors. Each one of us is born with a certain number of fat cells. How many of these fat cells you possess depends on genetics. If you have a lot of fat cells, maybe your ancestors were the biggest people in the tribe, which was a good thing because they had the best chances of survival. However, managing these fat cells can be difficult, and using certain fat burning foods can definitely help.

You can Never Get Rid of Fat Cells

You can never get rid of fat cells but, unfortunately, you can add to them. Depending on what you eat, your body will manufacture new fat cells and, like those you were born with, they never go away.

That doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be fat once you put on extra weight. It’s possible to shrink fat cells, which is what happens when you lose weight by burning the fat stored in those large fat cells.

Think of them as balloons that shrink when you let the air out. Burning off the fat in your fat cells has the same effect as letting the air out of a balloon.

A good weight-loss programme requires a certain amount of restriction of calories. You burn off the fat by eating fewer calories and becoming more active. To guarantee a lifetime of weight-control success, you have to change the type of foods you eat, so that your diet is more balanced and you get the vitamins, minerals, trace elements, protein, fat and carbohydrates your body needs to thrive.

Extremely Low-Calorie Diets don’t Work

Extremely low-calorie diets may help you shed pounds quickly, but they’ll lead to failure in the long run. That’s because humans are genetically protected against starvation. During food shortages, your body slows down your metabolism and burns less energy so that you can stay alive.

A part of your brain, called the hypothalamus, keeps you at an even weight by creating a ‘set point’. Your body is biologically and genetically determined to weigh within a certain weight range, called the set point.

The hypothalamus determines this point based on the level of consumption it’s used to getting. It seeks to keep your weight constant, even if that point is over what it should be.

When you drastically cut back your food intake, your brain thinks your body is starving and, in an effort to preserve life, it slows your metabolism. This is a natural physiological response, and the technical term for it is adaptive thermogenesis.

Consequently, you grow hungry, lazy and you crave food. This can cause you to stop losing weight and will make you feel so miserable that you abandon your weight-loss efforts and regain the weight. How can you compensate for this metabolic slow-down? The answer is that you have to change the nutritional composition of the foods you eat.

Metabolism-Friendly diet Foods

A metabolism-friendly diet includes a significant emphasis on an array of:

• Vegetables
• Fresh fruits
• Lean protein, such as chicken or fish
• Beans
• Seeds
• Nuts and legumes
• Dairy
• Healthy fats, such as those found in avocados, mackerel, salmon and olive oil.

That’s how you’ll avoid putting your body into starvation mode or adaptive thermogenesis.

In fact, you’ll be able to eat more food and feel more satisfied while consuming these foods. This eating plan is based on the Mediterranean diet. As this is such a successful way of eating, I have written a short course for you.

Plant foods break down slowly in your stomach, making you feel full for longer, and they are rich in vitamins, minerals, trace elements, carbohydrates and protein for energy and muscle-building. This allows your body to burn off its excess stored fat.

Fat Burning Foods

Each one of the following foods is thought to promote weight loss as they possess properties that improve your metabolism. It’s believed that these foods can suppress your appetite for junk food and keep you healthy. You can include these foods in any sensible weight-loss plan.

Hunger is satisfied more completely by filling your stomach. Filling it with the right foods is the trick, and adding some of the foods listed below accomplishes that better than any others. At the same time, they’re rich in all the nutrients that your body needs for good health.

Remember that any of these foods can be included as part of a well-balanced diet. You should never exclude any food group completely from your diet, unless you suffer from a particular allergy, have a medical problem, or for ethical or religious reasons. On the other hand, relying on only one food or food group to attain your goals is also not a good idea.

Many people have a sensitivity to certain foods (milk and wheat, for instance) and suffer various complications if they consume large amounts. In these instances, small amounts of the offending foods can be eaten with no ill effects.

I don’t believe that there are any wonder foods, and what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another.

Try these Fat Burning Foods:

• Apples
• Beans and pulses
• Berries
• Broccoli
• Buckwheat
• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Chicken
• Coffee
• Cottage cheese
• Figs
• Fish
• Grapefruit
• Greens
• Kiwi fruit lettuce
• Leeks
• Mustard
• Melons
• Oats
• Onions
• Pasta
• Sweet potatoes
• Peppers
• Potatoes
• Soups
• Spinach
• Tomatoes
• Yogurt
• Whole grain bread.

These fat-burning foods will get you on the right road to improving your health. You’ll find more information on each food and the effect that it has in an e-book, which is free on my membership site. If you’re really keen to get started on a new lifestyle, but you don’t know where to start, I suggest that you contact me so that we can work out a plan for you.