How ‘Negative Eating’ Can Help You Lose Weight – Without Being Hungry

Sounds too good to be true, but apparently there are a number of so-called negative-calorie health foods that burn fat while making you feel full. My fear is that they are all going to be things I don’t want to eat anyway, but in the spirit of magicking away those last slices of Christmas cake, here goes.

The concept here is that certain foods actually take more energy to digest than they deliver to your body. You can eat unlimited quantities of them because although they are an important source of phytonutrients, they are not high in calories. The theory is that
your stomach senses when it is physically full, and it will trigger your brain to stop eating when you can’t handle more food so what you have to do is get your body to give you that signal clearly by eating foods that fill you up, but don’t make you fat.

The key to many of these negative calorie foods is that they are rich in water. In fact one of the oldest ‘tricks’ that we can use to fool our stomachs is simply to drink a glass of water before each meal. This way the water takes up the space you might otherwise try to cram with food so it takes less food before your stomach signals that is full.

Any food that contains a lot of water, and fibre, is ideal. So what you need to be eating are lots of apples, grapes, watermelons and a really good one is celery. All of these foods take more energy for your body to process than they actually contain in themselves, and that is how you get a ‘negative’ bonus.

Plain and simple water is the most effective appetite control substance in the world and once you start thinking in terms of water content of your food you will make a great difference to your weight. Other ‘water-filled’ items for your shopping basket are lettuce, cucumber, onions and most salad greens but don’t diminish their goodness by using a rich salad dressing as that will just add the calories back in.

On the fruit front, grapefruit is valuable as it contains naringenin, an antioxidant which triggers the liver to break down fat. Pink and red grapefruit in particular are a valuable as they get their colour from the antioxidant lycopene which is a rich source of carotenoids which are known to help to fight free radicals and believed to help (along with green tea) with prostate problems.