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Send Your Metabolism Soaring

Make your body a fat-burning furnace!

I said it once and I am going to say it again…

Foods That Send Your Metabolism Soaring

Meals, tips, and recipes that power up your fat-burning engine with every bite!

Turn Up the Burn

A calorie is a calorie, and cutting them is the best way to lose weight, right? Not so fast. New research (well, it’s not new research, it just keeps coming up time and time again) shows that eating certain types of foods can rev your metabolism, curb your appetite, and help you drop more pounds than others. Do you want to eat 800 calories/day of chocolate cookies and feel like crap or 2000+ calories/day of amazing, eat-clean food and have a body like a champion!

When eating-clean, foods are broken down into four types of “active calories”—chewy foods, hearty foods, energizing foods, and warming foods. Here’s how each one encourages your body to burn more calories.

Chewy Foods

(lean meats, nuts, whole fruits and vegetables)

These calories make your body work right from the second you start chewing, literally!  To maximize the chew factor, choose food in its most “whole” state—apples instead of applesauce, for instance. High-protein foods really are your best ally as they take more work to chew, and longer to leave your stomach so you take more time eating—and have more time to register that you are full.

Hearty Foods

(fruits, vegetables, brown rice, whole grains and cereals)

In addition to being chewy, these foods are packed with fiber!  They take up more room in your stomach  (compared to other foods with the same number of calories), and leave less room for second helpings. Foods that take more work to chew make your mouth work harder (ramping calorie burn by 10%) and increasing the thermogenic effect of food, the calorie-burn we get from eating and digesting any given type of food.

Energizing Foods

(coffee, black and green tea, dark chocolate – yes, I threw that in for some of you!)

You can get metabolism-boosting caffeine in coffee and black tea; just be careful not to load them up with milk, cream, or sugar. Caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant, so your daily coffee or black tea can boost your metabolism by 5 to 8%—about 80 to 128 calories a day.  Green tea doesn’t have much caffeine but it does contain catechins, an antioxidant that raises resting metabolism by 4% (about 80 calories a day). Dark chocolate contains both catechins and caffeine, but stick to 1 ounce per day to limit fat and calories.

Fat-Burning

Keep your calories to around 1,500 a day and you could lose up to 10 pounds and a few inches in just 4 weeks. But watch where those calories are coming from…you have to eat-clean if you want to start melting the fat away! And if you didn’t get to read the post “Foods That Aid In Digestion,” please read or re-read as the two topics, eating to burn fat and healthy digestion, go hand in hand!