All good fat burning diets must address three components:
What foods are best to eat and what foods you must avoid
When it is best to eat (meal spacing)
How much is best to eat
Each of these is a separate topic, so for now this article will focus the first of these, the foods themselves.
Fat burning foods are simply those that provide calories with nutrients and that do not cause a lot of inflammation. You may not have heard it put this way before. Nevertheless, paying attention to nutrient content and inflammatory potential is the simplest and most effective approach to choosing what to eat for burning fat. Let me give you an obvious example. Carrots contain a lot of sugar AND a lot of nutrient value. Twinkies contain a lot of sugar and no nutrient value. This is a no-brainer. By the way, both contain the same exact kind of sugar, sucrose. So neither the amount of sugar nor the type of sugar are important. You already know that Twinkies are awful for fat burning diets.
Empty calories from sugar and other nutrient-free carbohydrates also cause inflammation. The sugar spike drives up your insulin level, which hangs around so long that it causes inflammation. Insulin is a caustic protein that is not good for you when you have too much in your bloodstream. Excess insulin from a high sugar intake is just one of the inflammatory responses you will have by eating the wrong kind of food for fat burning diets.
Nutrient Dense Foods for Fat Burning Diets
Funny Story: A long time ago (okay, still in my lifetime), every loaf of a certain brand of white bread had the subtitle: Builds Strong Bodies 12 Ways. Are you old enough to remember it? Somewhere along the line this health claim, which was always false, finally became objectionable to the FDA. I'm not sure whether the claim slowly changed over time, to reflect fewer and fewer ways that the bread was supposed to build strong bodies, or if it changed all at once, to no claims at all. Right now no such claims appear on this brand or on any other brand of white bread that I know of. The point is that white bread, or any bread that is made from bleached flour that is enriched with a few of the many nutrients that were removed during processing, doesn't benefit your health very much at all. Eating white bread is like eating sugar.
This story highlights the advice that nutrient density is the key factor for picking a fat burning food. In general, high nutrient density includes many fresh foods and some frozen ones. (Yes, frozen ones! I'll explain in a moment.) Dieticians, naturopaths and other doctors who know what they are doing, trainers, and nutritionists mostly agree that the highest nutrient density comes from several categories of foods: vegetables, fruits, meats, fish, poultry (including eggs), herbs and spices, and seeds and nuts. The best of these are listed below. The best fat burning diets are based on these kinds of foods. They include:
VEGETABLES: Arugula, Bell peppers, Broccoli, Cabbage, Carrots, Leeks, Onions, Romaine lettuce, Scallions, Shiitake mushrooms, Spinach, Tomatoes, Sweet potatoes (NOT yams!)
FRUIT: Apples, Blueberries, Cherries, Grapefruit, Oranges, Pomegranates
FISH: Flounder, Salmon (esp. wild caught), Sole, Tilapia
MEAT AND POULTRY: Beef, Lamb, Pork, Chicken, Turkey, Wild game
HERBS AND SPICES: Basil, Black pepper, Cardamom, Chives, Cilantro, Cinnamon, Cloves, Garlic, Ginger, Parsley, Turmeric
NUTS AND SEEDS: (raw, unsalted) Almonds, Flaxseeds, Sesame seeds, Walnuts
OTHER: Eggs (esp. the whites)
Do you suppose that you could survive on any of the fat burning diets if they were based only on foods taken from this list? Of course! This is a list of incredibly delicious foods, and the variety of taste treats is endless when you use different combinations of herbs and spices.
Frozen Foods
Fruits and vegetables are often picked when they are unripe, then stored or shipped in a cold box. Just before they are put out for sale, they are fumigated with ethylene gas to make them look like they are ripe. You know this is the case when you bite into a really beautiful orange or tomato that has almost no flavor. The gas-ripening process only makes them look good, without making them truly ripe. Even though they look great, they have very little of the flavor and nutrition that you would hope for.
Here come frozen foods to the rescue. Fruits and veggies are left on the tree, bush, or vine longer if they are to be picked for freezing. They have to be ripe at that time because they are going to be frozen right away. By ripening naturally, they have a higher nutrient density than their fresh counterparts. However, regarding frozen foods, you absolutely have to watch out for junk that is added during processing. A package of frozen fruit that is packed in sugar-laden syrup, or any frozen veggies that are loaded with salt, butter, or even artificial colors, are not good choices. Get only fresh-frozen, unadulterated foods for the best benefits to your health and fat reduction program. Food manufacturers consistently offer high-sugar and high-salt foods, which should be a crime. Don't buy them!
Not So Good Foods
You might have noticed that the all-time favorite sources of carbohydrates in western culture are missing from this list: potatoes and rice. The reason that potatoes are excluded is that they carry a big load of starch and little else. Rice is missing because most of what people eat is polished white rice, which is even lower on the nutrient-to-starch ratio than potatoes. Grains of all kinds would be fine if they were truly whole grains: rice, wheat, oat, rye, and quinoa. Grains like these provide nutrient density and some fiber only when they are whole. If you find a grain-based product such as a whole grain bread, and the label says that it is enriched, then that means that it is not whole grain. The grain was first bleached, then some of the nutrients were added back. This is why breads are generally not good for fat burning diets.
Another surprise may be that juices are also missing from the above list. Commercial juices are almost all a bunch of sugar-laden crap. If you can get whole, completely unprocessed, fresh or frozen juices without adulteration by apple or grape juice, go for it. Just be sure to count the calorie density in your daily intake, because a glass of juice can be a big dose of calories.
Really Bad Foods
You have to eat all three food groups - carbohydrate, protein, and fat - to be trim and healthy. Fats, however, have acquired an evil reputation. This is idiotic. The nutrient dense foods for burning fat, listed above, include fats in fish, nuts, and seeds that you have to have in your diet or you will die. I don't how to be more clear about this. So why are fats considered so evil that the food industry has spawned a whole line of low-fat and nonfat foods that make make gazillions of dollars? It is because some fats do more harm than good. The trick is to eat the right ones and avoid the harmful ones.
The biggest culprits, the ones that cause inflammation, are the saturated fats from animal products and the trans fats from chemical processing. Saturated fats most often come from meat and dairy and from processed and fried foods. I am not a big advocate of milk, yogurt, cottage cheese, etc., because so many people are lactose intolerant, including me. If you feel as though you have to have dairy in your diet, get low-fat products. The nutrient density in dairy products is so poor, anyway, that the avoidance of fats from them overrides the pitiful amount of calcium or vitamin D that you would get if they were full-fat.
Meat is fine for you. It is a great source of protein. It is the hormones, antibiotics, and saturated fat contained in meat that will do you in. Just be sensible about eating meat by eating less meat that is fatty or that comes from big-chain grocery stores (unless it is free range, which is hard to find). Marbled steak, as good as it tastes, is too fatty. Chicken and turkey skin are too fatty. Most pork is too fatty, although not all. By the way, the added hormones and antibiotics in commercial meats also stick fat on you like super-glue. The best fat burning diets are free of hormones and antibiotics.
Trans Fats: Evil Non-Food
Trans fats have become the whipping boy of the health food industry, for good reason. You probably know by now that trans fats are made by a synthetic chemical transformation. Food labels that list partially hydrogenated oil indicate trans fats. These are highly inflammatory. They ruin your cholesterol balance, disrupt the function of blood vessels, and promote obesity and insulin resistance. Is that enough for you? Avoid them at all costs. (By the way, ignore what the front of a food label says and read the actual ingredients list. You will find products claiming on the front of the container that they have no trans fats, and yet they list partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in ingredients list. The food industry - and the federal regulators who approve this kind of nonsense - count on consumer ignorance, so buyer beware!)
French fries, potato chips, crackers, baked goods, and all kinds of processed foods are loaded with saturated fats, trans fats, or both. These are triple-whammy early death foods because you get: 1) lots of bad fats, 2) lots of inflammatory carbohydrates, and 3) very low nutrient density. Evil, I tell you! None of these foods will be part of good fat burning diets.
Your Eating Plan
One of the most important keys to the success of fat burning diets is consuming only valuable, nutrient-dense fat burning foods. You don't have to get crazy and start feeling as though you are depriving yourself of good food. Fat burning diets should be appealing, tasty, and offer lots of foods that you can look forward to without missing the ones that you must avoid. Enjoy!
Dr. Dennis Clark, PhD, retired after 30 years as a professor at Arizona State University. He is currently an adjunct faculty member at the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine and owns a retail nutrition store, Doctors Nutrition Center, in Tempe, AZ. His professional research and teaching expertise includes plant biochemistry, integrative medicine, and medical botany. Dr. Clark has co-authored a college-level textbook on plant biology, written popular books on herbal medicine, and published more than three dozen research articles in scientific journals. He invites you to learn more about choosing the best fat burning diets at
http://BellyFatScience.com and about the views of a research scientist on how to live a long and healthy life, at
http://HerbScientist.com.
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