Natural Fat Burning Foods

If you are looking for answers on how to burn fat, there are various methods you can use to accomplish this.  However, the best way to burn fat is to incorporate all of these methods into one fat burning plan.  The following methods are all considered effective ways to burn fat.

Stay Hydrated
Staying hydrated is crucial for your body. Drink plenty of water (8-12 glasses) throughout the day. Avoid fruit juices and soda pop however as these are not good ways to hydrate your body; when trying to burn fat the last thing you need in your system are high concentrations of sugar! Keeping your body hydrated allows your body to function more efficiently and helps keep your metabolism high. Without enough water your digestive system in particular will not function properly and will hold on to fat as a result.

Eat Fat Burning Foods
Another good way to burn fat is to consume fat burning foods. Fat burning foods are foods which have a high thermic effect, that is they take a large amount of energy to digest compared to their calorie content. Eat foods that are high in protein and fiber. Foods that are high in protein take longer to digest and can significantly boost your metabolism resulting in higher caloric burn. Foods high in fiber help you feel full sooner and for longer. Fiber also helps to move fat through our digestive system faster so that less of it is absorbed into the body. Some of the best fat burning foods are fish, lean meats, vegetables, and low-fat dairy products such as skim milk.

Exercise Regularly
Exercising at least a few times a week can really help raise your metabolism and burn fat faster than diet alone. Interval training works best for this where you alternate between short intense bursts of exercise and moderate ones. Regular fat burning exercises can not only help you lose fat faster, but have significant overall health benefits as well.

Build Muscle Mass
Building muscle through strength training can also help increase fat burn. By building up your lean muscle mass you are also effectively increasing your overall body caloric burn rate which in turn burns more fat. Aim to perform strength training exercises 3-4 times per week in order to see noticeable results.

Get 8 Hours Of Sleep
Lastly but not least, you need to ensure that you get a full night sleep. Your body needs to rest and depriving it of sufficient rest can adversely effect your health and metabolism. Many studies have shown that those who get at least 7-8 hours of sleep have lower BMI’s and overall less fat than those who don’t. So rest up, you are doing your body good.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about negative calories foods and how eating them help you rapidly lose weight and burn fat.

What Are Negative Calorie Foods?
Negative calorie foods are essentially foods which require more energy from the body to digest them (aka thermic effect) then the food actually provides, thus a negative calorie effect. With this theory, you could potentially eat large quantities of these negative calorie foods, feel full and yet lose weight fast. Sounds good doesn’t it?

Do Negative Calorie Foods Exist?
Actually there are no foods that have been scientifically proven to be truly negative in calories so negative calorie food is a bit of an urban myth. Why? Well, the main reason they don’t actually exist is because our body is just such an amazingly efficient digestive machine. Even celery that is often quoted as possessing negative calories actually only requires 10% of energy of the energy it provides in order to be digested by our bodies.

Low Calorie Foods
Despite the fact that negative or zero calorie foods do not exist, there are a number of extremely low calorie foods that do and eating them as the bulk of your diet can have excellent weight loss results. Though these foods do not provide negative calories per se, in the end they don’t actually have to in order to still be effective in fat loss. Why? The main reason for this is your body has to burn calories just to stay alive! Did you know for example that at least 1000 calories per day are burned just by sitting and breathing. When you take into account your regular routine of every-day tasks and depending on your gender and weight, you’ll be up to at least 2000 calories. Add in some brisk walks or aerobic exercise and you can be burning well over 2500 or even 3000 calories easily. So even if you’re eating low calorie foods versus no calorie foods, you can still burn a lot of fat and lose weight quickly.

List of Low Calorie Foods
Here are some low calorie foods to add into your diet. These foods are loaded with vitamins and minerals and yet contain very few calories.

Often people are looking for a complete list of fat burning foods.  I’m not sure a complete list exists seeing that nutritionist and scientist are often discovering new foods that burn fat.  Having said that however, here’s my best attempt at a “complete” fat burning foods list.

All the foods listed below have certain common qualities that make them fat burning in nature.  Firstly, all of them are natural foods; there are no foods listed with refined sugars or fat.  Also, these foods have a high thermic effect, that is the increment in energy required above your resting metabolic rate to process food for use.  In other words all these foods require a higher than average number of calories for your body to burn in order to digest them; an important aspect for burning fat and weight loss. I’ve broken the list down into seven main categories:

Vegetables are by far the best foods you can give your body. Vegetables are naturally high in fiber, low in fat, and contain essential vitamins and nutrients to feed your muscles.

Low fat dairy products such as skim milk contain high amounts of calcium and complex carbohydrates, both of which help boost your metabolism and keep insulin levels low, resulting in increased fat burn.

Lean meats contain high levels of protein which boost your metabolism and burn fat. Fish rich in Omega-3 fatty acids such as Salmon are also great for burning fat due to the lowering of leptin levels in your body and higher resulting caloric burn rate.

Fruits which contain Vitamin C are known to help shed fat. Vitamin C dilutes fat making it less effective and also helps in releasing it from the body. Eat fruits in moderation however as they are also naturally high in sugar.

Whole Grains are both high in fiber and complex carbohydrates, keeping your metabolism high.

Spices such as cayenne pepper and jalapenos speed up your heart heart rate and boosts the metabolism, resulting in increased caloric burn.

Teas & Coffee contain caffeine which can increase your heart rate and help burn more calories. Green tea in particular is good as it also contains a chemical known as EGCG which causes the brain and nervous system to run faster and burn more calories.