The Negative Calorie Diet: Why it works...
The Negative Calorie Diet will help you lose weight. You might
- as the book promises - lose 14 pounds in 7 days. However, the
diet is not one that I use or recommend. Let me explain why.
The Negative
Calorie Diet is based on the idea that some foods cause you
to burn more calories digesting these foods than the actual calorie
content of the food itself.
It's true that some foods raise your metabolic rate more than others
do. Carbohydrate and protein, for example, contain about four calories
per gram. But, the thermic effect of protein is far greater than
that of carbohydrate.
In other words, some of the energy in each gram of protein is wasted
as heat during the process of digestion and metabolism. The thermic
effect of nutrients is approximately 2–3 % for fat, 6–8
% for carbohydrates, and 25–30% for proteins [2].
The foods you eat on The Negative Calorie Diet are mainly fruit
and vegetables. For breakfast, you might have a bowl of strawberries
or an orange. A snack might consist of apples or celery. You can
have soup for lunch and dinner, though foods like chicken or fish
are allowed after the first few days.
The reason that fruit and vegetables help you lose weight is not
because they're "negative calorie foods."
Rather, fruit and vegetables have a very low energy density. Energy
density refers to the number of calories in a gram of food. If you
check the nutrition label on the top of a food label, you should
find the standard serving size of the food, and the number of calories
in that serving.
To calculate the energy density, divide the calories by the weight.
A food that contains 200 calories and weighs 100 grams, for example,
has an energy density of 2.0.
Let’s use grapes and raisins (which are nothing more than
dried grapes) as an example. If you wanted to eat 150 calories of
raisins, you’d be able to eat approximately 50 grams. Yet the
same number of calories would give you almost 220 grams of grapes
- more than four times as much.
Because the grapes are higher in volume, they’ll keep you
feeling fuller for longer, and you’ll eat less over the course
of the day.
In one eating study at Pennsylvania State University, a group
of women hardly noticed when they ate fewer calories each day -
as long as their meals contained lots of fruits and vegetables to
bulk up the servings and lower the energy density [1].
The bottom line
You will lose weight on the Negative
Calorie Diet. You might - as the book promises - lose 14 pounds
in 7 days. But 14 pounds of what? A lot of it will be muscle and
water, and not fat.
As soon as people hear the word "diet," they think of
restriction, and pain. However, the word comes from the Latin term diatea, which means "a way of living."
Follow any diet to the letter, and you'll probably lose weight.
But, if it isn't a way of eating you can live with for more than
two weeks, you'll have to come off it again.
Don't be deceived by false promises. When something sounds too
good to be true, it usually is.
Related Articles
Reference
1. Bell, E.A., Castellanos, V.H., Pelkman, C.L., Thorwart, M.L.,
& Rolls, B.J. (1998). Energy density of foods affects energy
intake in normal-weight women. American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 67, 412-420
2. Jequier, E. (2002). Pathways to obesity. International
Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders, 26,
S12-S17
|
| 
