Guidelines for Choosing Fat Burning Foods

Written by Yasar Shahzad Friday, 02 July 2010 19:28

Guidelines for Choosing Fat Burning Foods

Food quality doesn’t fall gracefully into two categories: “good” or “bad.” Rather, food quality arrays from very poor, to poor, to fair, to good and to excellent. It’s a scale or spectrum – the same way temperature and color are spectrums. At what temperature does hot become cold? Where does black become white? Black and white are simply two ends of a spectrum. It’s the same with food choices. Food quality can range from highly processed with zero nutritional value on the low end (an “F” grade) to all-natural with high nutritional value on the high end (an “A+” grade).

Your goal is to make the best choice possible from the foods available to you in any given circumstance. You may not always be able to eat the best thing possible, but you don’t have to eat the worst thing either. If you‘re faced with a choice between bad and worse, take bad. Faced with good and great, choose great. With enough advanced planning, scheduling and preparation, you can ensure that you have “A” and “B” grade choices ninety-nine percent of the time. Here are several guidelines to help you make the best choices possible.

Choose Foods with a High Thermic Effect - Metabolism-Boosting Foods

There are two food groups that have a higher thermic effect than any other foods and these will increase your metabolic rate the most. These food groups are: 1) lean proteins and 2) natural, fiber-containing complex carbohydrates.
Protein foods stimulate the metabolism the most. Studies have shown an increase in metabolic rate of up to 25-30% after eating lean protein. This is one of the many reasons you will be eating a serving of lean protein with each meal.

Natural, fiber-containing complex carbohydrates also have a high thermic effect and boost the metabolism. Complex carbohydrates include fibrous vegetables, whole grains and natural starches such as yams, beans, brown rice, and oatmeal.

Of all the foods, fats have the lowest thermic effect. Refined simple sugars also have a low thermic effect.

Choose Nutrient Dense Foods

Your goal isn’t just to eat a specific number of calories. Your goal is to get the maximum nutritional value, or “nutrient density,” from every calorie you eat. Any food that has been refined, enriched, preserved, processed, canned, boxed or frozen will usually have less nutritional density than fresh foods in their natural state.
Choose natural foods

The best choice you can make is to eat foods the way they appear in nature. You should choose fresh foods over canned or frozen foods, and natural unrefined foods over more processed foods. For example, vegetables, potatoes, fruit, rice, and oatmeal are less processed and more nutrient dense than crackers, enriched bread, pretzels, or bagels. Remember the “acid-test” question for whether a food is natural or not: “Did this food come out of the ground or off the tree/plant this way?”