The Negative Calorie Diet – The Scary Truth
Everyone is aware of the nutrition density of fruits and vegetables. We’ve been told since we were children that fruits and vegetables are rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and all the nutrients our body needs for daily function and living longer. Our parents made us eat our broccoli when we were kids and told an apple a day keeps the doctor away and fruit is nature’s candy. The negative calorie diet expounds on this principle by being nutrition dense, high in hunger satisfying fiber and being low in calories to help you lose weight, but it goes a step further by having you eat foods that are so low in calories that the energy you exert digesting food is higher than the fiber received from the food itself. Nutrition density plus calorie loss without exercise sounds like a perfect win-win, right? Not so fast.
Let's talk about the basic concept of how the negative calorie diet works, then I'll fill you in on the scary truth. First, let’s start with a typical food that you might enjoy like a delicious bowl of banana pudding, chocolate cake or pizza with extra cheese. Your body requires energy to digest everything you eat. For example, that bowl of banana pudding might be a yummy serving of 600 calories and your body might burn 200 calories just to digest it. That leaves 400 in which your body will use. Some of it will be used for immediate energy, some will be stored as glycogen and the rest will be stored as body fat.
The negative calorie diet focuses on the wide variety of certain fruits and vegetables that are low in calories and require more calories to digest than what's produced from the food itself. They’re also referred to as fat burning foods. To put it simply, if you eat a piece of broccoli, it may have a total of 60 calories. However, your body’s going to burn around 90 calories to fully digest it. This means you are in a calorie deficit of about 30 calories. This is the basics of how the negative calorie diet works. You eat all the fruits and vegetables you want, and you keep losing weight. There have been reports of people losing 1 pound per day on the negative calorie diet. It sounds like a dream.
The problem with the negative calorie diet is it doesn’t account for the type of weight being lost. Also, if you are losing up to one pound a day, the weight you lose is not all body fat. Some of it may be water but a lot of it is hard earned muscle. The human body is simply incapable of burning fat that fast. There are some rare exceptions if you’re highly obese but for the average person, you’re doing a lot of harm to your metabolism. The negative calorie diet may be nutrition dense and it’s hard to argue with basic math, but it fails to consider the complications of the human body. Any diet that seems too good to be true almost always has a major unspoken flaw. The diet is starvation in disguise because it tries to force your body to stop doing what it was preprogrammed to do. Storing fat is a natural process of the human body. Instead of forcing your body not to store fat, you should burn more fat than the fat being stored. One big irony of the negative calorie diet is that it lacks nutrition. Nutrition can be measured in calories and the right diet should contain a high quantity the right balance of nutrition dense calories.
The negative calorie diet turns your body into a fat storing machine because there will come a time where you’ll get tired of eating tasteless rabbit food like lettuce, carrots, broccoli, garlic and unseasoned dry chicken breast. This is because your body treats calories like money. When it has an abundance of money it has no problem spending it, which means you'll feel better and have more energy for daily life. But when it’s not getting enough money it’s going to do whatever it can to save and store anything that’s left over. Your body fat is your body’s savings account and it has a high compounding interest rate. Also, just as you’d lower your spending output by lowering your bills, your body lowers Its spending output by catabolizing muscle. The negative calorie diet only benefits you when food is being digested but your metabolism will always have a much larger impact on your weight loss goals. In order to benefit from the negative calorie diet, you’d have to eat like a cow. Cows eat nothing but low-calorie green grass and are forced to graze almost all day and all night to meet their energy demands.
It’s possible to starve yourself on the negative calorie diet even on a full stomach. Nutrition experts recommend human beings eat a balanced meal because we need essential amino acids and fatty acids that can’t be found in foods approved by negative calorie diet. There are also many fat soluble essential vitamins and minerals your body can only assimilate through the presence of dietary fat, such as Vitamin E and calcium. Eating food is one of the enjoyments of life and the body was designed to eat a wide variety of food. We also crave certain foods when our bodies are deficient in certain nutrients.
You must consume the right balance of carbohydrate, fat and protein and if you’re a vegetarian you must know how to combine incomplete proteins to make complete proteins. Examples of protein combining would be beans and rice, both of which are not negative calorie approved foods because they are starchy complex carbohydrates. There is no substitute for balanced nutrition and physical exercise for weight loss. Dieting can cause weight loss, but it can only take you so far before calories are dropped to low or nutrition is compromised.
Comments
