The Negative Calorie Diet

What if you could eat a food that not only provided no calories, but actually burned more calories than it provided? Would you eat it?

What effect might it have? And which calories would it be burning?

These are compelling questions. But a negative calorie diet it seems like a ludicrous proposition, something like a perpetual motion machine: great in concept, ineffective in implementation.

But there might be something to it. If a low-calorie food could stimulate your body to process it by creating enzymes, expending more energy than that low-calorie food could produce, the net effect of your caloric intake would be less than zero. If this holds true, you could eat these foods all day and, the more you ate, the more weight you’d lose.

However, most foods we eat today are both higher in calories and easier to process than that. Also, pesticides and other modern pollutants rob food of nutrients that would stimulate that enzymatic process. Preservatives, processed foods, and bad cooking practices finish the job.

So what do you do?

How about a diet primarily consisting of fruits and vegetables?

In a recent study by Dr. Dean Ornish of the University of California, San Francisco, heart patients eating a vegetarian diet with mostly fruits and vegetables, with NO prescribed exercise program and NO decrease in either caloric intake or a reduction in serving sizes, lost an average of 20 pounds each!

Why? One idea is that added enzymes, both from processing vegetables and fruits and inherent in the vegetables themselves, helped accelerate all the chemical reactions in the body, resulting in a faster metabolism.

If one were to identify which foods were negative calorie foods, the diet that resulted would allow you to change part or all of your diet and, without removing any calories, lose a significant amount of weight as well as improving your overall health.

In short, if you were to swap out all your empty calories (aka junk food) for a variety of fruits and vegetables equaling the same calories, not only would you get more of the vitamins and minerals you crave, but you’d be adding enzymes that might well increase your metabolic rate, burning off other bad calories at an accelerated rate. It’s like a Jenny Craig dream: weight loss and improved health without exercise or starving yourself.