20 Negative-Calorie Foods That Will Boost Your Weight Loss
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If you’re trying to lose weight, you may be very conscious about your calorie intake. Eating fewer calories and spending more through physical activity is still the most typical advice people follow when trying to shed a few pounds. Here we take a look at some negative-calorie foods that will be of great assistance in the process.
Table of Contents
Everything we eat provides us with a variety of nutrients and some amount of calories (energy) that comes in the form of carbs, fat and/or proteins. Also, everything we do, even the smallest effort, like blinking and sleeping, requires some calorie expenditure, proportional to the amount of effort required.
For instance, food digestion is an action our bodies perform that requires spending some energy, and that’s where the concept of negative-calorie foods comes from. If you eat something that provides you with 10 calories but your body spends 12 calories to fully digest it (which includes chewing, digesting and metabolising), then in the end this food would have provided you (or more precisely, made you lose) -2 calories.
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No research shows with certainty how many calories our bodies need to spend to digest what we eat – it’s common sense to think that it would highly depend on the type of food we consume. However, considering how very few calories some foods have, it’s safe to say that after discounting the number of calories our bodies would need to digest them, we would keep only a tiny amount of them – even though they are NOT really negative-calorie foods, the amount absorbed could be – which is great, if you ask me!
Check Out Below a List Of Negative-Calorie Foods You Can Abuse To Boost Your Weight Loss:
- Broccoli – 31 calories per cup
- Asparagus – 27 calories per cup
- Celery – 14 calories per cup
- Spinach – 7 calories per cup
- Radishes – 18 calories per cup
- Kale – 7 calories per cup
- Cucumber – 8 calories per cup
- Lettuce – 5 calories per cup
- Zucchini / Courgette – 19 calories per cup
- Green Beans – 31 calories per cup
- Cabbage – 17 calories per cup
- Tomato – 25 calories per unit
- Arugula – 5 calories per cup
- Swiss Chard – 7 calories per cup
- Clementines – 35 calories per unit
- Fennel – 27 calories per cup
- Peppers – 24 calories per cup
- Snap Peas – 27 calories per cup
- Turnips – 34 calories per cup
- Watercress – 4 calories per cup
A common denominator amongst this list is the high water content and the huge amount of fibre all these vegetables have, which means that it’s not very likely that any of them will jeopardise your weight loss, not even the ones with higher amounts of calories.
It’s also important to notice that despite the low amounts of calories and the high nutrient content, the vegetables on this list don’t provide either the amount of proteins or the fats needed in a healthy diet – for optimum results they should be combined with a good source of protein such as chicken or fish, that will also provide some essential fats in the mix.
Final Thoughts
In case you’re wondering if you need to be a vegetarian to lose weight, the answer is no, although these negative-calorie foods can definitely increase your success rate. And to be really honest, you don’t need to count your calories either, even though eating mindfully is always good advice. When it comes to weight loss, one size definitely doesn’t fit all – for maximum results, always consult a health practitioner or nutritionist.
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