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3 Foods That Will Boost Your Metabolism

By John Barban

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 30Aug2008 Word count: 827 Viewed: 220 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

A commonly held belief about food is that you need to eat frequent meals to keep your metabolism going and to keep burning calories. I'm not exactly sure where this idea came from but it makes absolutely no sense to me.

In fact, to me it sounds like this nonsense about eating food to keep your metabolism going is a clever myth that only supports the food and nutritional supplement industry. The latest fad in nutrition is eating 6 small meals per day instead of 3. That is 3 more meals the food industry can sell you products for! It won't be long until you will be told to eat 9 small meals per day.

Now don't get me wrong, I've read the research and there is a small increase in metabolism that happens whenever you eat. However, the little effect food does have on your metabolism cannot overcome the weight gain you would experience from eating too many calories overall.

If you apply this idea to the calories you are eating, then eating a 100 calories might make you burn an extra 15 calories, but you still have an another 85 extra calories that you haven't burned off.

So does this mean eating at an all you can eat buffet is the best way to 'rev up' your metabolism and burn lots of calories? Not likely! That just sounds ridiculous.

Let's look at this in a real life scenario to see how far off this logic is.

By this logic eating 1 cheeseburger per day will get me average abs, 2 cheeseburgers per day will obviously rev up my metabolism, I'll burn even more calories and get even better abs, and finally 3 cheeseburgers per day will get me a full blown six pack because now I am eating enough to really turn my metabolism up and burn off lots of fat! This makes no sense at all. I don't care what kind of food you substitute in for my example cheeseburger, this just doesn't make any sense.

The other side of this ridiculous idea about food and metabolism is the 'starvation mode' your body apparently goes into when you don't eat enough food. As the story goes if you don't eat enough food your metabolism will slow down and then this some how makes you store more fat every time you eat! So eating less food also makes you fat? This is also absurd.

When you really examine it, this whole theory basically says that "The more I eat the more fat I will burn, and the less I eat the fatter I will be". Is it just me or does this sound completely backwards?

It seems we are being told that you need to constantly eat to keep your metabolism going...but if you eat too much you obviously gain weight and fat. But if you don't eat enough you also gain fat? What the heck is going here?...Am I missing something? This is just stupid!

I'm sure you are now just as confused as you ever were. It sure confused me for a while. Doesn't this seem impossible, too much food AND too little food both cause you to gain weight?

As for the three 3 foods that boost your metabolism...ok here goes...you ready...protein, carbs and fats! Your metabolism will go up SLIGHTLY no matter what you eat.

Let me repeat that...any and all food you eat will have some minor effect on your metabolism...but this effect is very small and will not stop you from gaining weight if you eat too much.

If you want to weight less then you must Eat less. That's it!

I'll give you an example you can relate to. Picture someone you know who has had some sort of surgery, or maybe had their jaw wired shut, or got sick or even upset for a while and lost their appetite, or had their wisdom teeth pulled, and they couldn't eat or only drink fluids for a week. I'll bet you any money they lost weight! Why? Because they ate less food, plain and simple, no special meal timing, no special food or supplement, and no magical number of calories that kept their 'metabolism going'. This also proves there is no such thing as this 'starvation mode' nonsense. They burned just as many calories on those days when they didn't eat or could only drink fluids as the days when they could finally eat again. This is obvious, otherwise how would they have lost all that weight? They just ate less, and lost weight! This also proves it doesn't matter how you do it. You can take whole days off of eating and lose weight just fine.

The bottom line to lose weight effectively is to find a way to eat less food. There is no way to 'boost' your metabolism enough for real weight loss with food, meal timing or supplements.

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