The Negative Calorie Diet
Negative calorie foods are foods, which use more calories to digest than the calories food really contains! Calories from these foods are much harder for the body to use. In other words, the body has to work hard in order to extract calories from these foods. Even though a food may contain equal amount of calories, much less of these calories can possibly turn into fat in negative calorie foods as fewer calories are really available to the body. This gives these foods a tremendous natural fat-burning advantage.
The negative calorie diet is said to work because it harnesses the power of what you already have: namely, your very own natural digestive system. The effect of the negative calorie diet is sometimes called “diet-induced thermogenesis”. According to Maastricht University biologist Dr. Klaas R Westerterp, “Diet induced thermogenesis (DIT) can be defined as the increase in energy expenditure above basal fasting level divided by the energy content of the food ingested and is commonly expressed as a percentage. It is, with basal metabolic rate and activity induced thermogenesis, one of the three components of daily energy expenditure.”
The negative calorie diet thus is designed to make the digestive process that your body must go through…well, somewhat more hard. Not hard in the sense of painful or possibly harmful, but in the sense of more intricate, requiring more biochemical energy. In other words, if you can make your body’s muscles, heart, and lungs work harder in order to lose weight, then it stands to reason that if you make the body’s digestive systems–including your esophagus, your stomach, small intestine, gallbladder, pancreas, and large intestine–work harder as well, you will also achieve an “exercise effect” and lose weight–except, you will do so without the need for any additional physical exercise or eating less.
The concept of a food with negative calories seems like a joke. Many fad diets are about foods with ‘magical’ properties, and many offer only very temporary weight loss solutions – and who can maintain a monotonous diet of only one or two foods?
There are no foods with a negative calorie value. But it can be possible to obtain a ‘negative’ calorie effect.
