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The 'negative calorie diet plan' - what is it and does it work?
A negative calorie diet plan..? Now if that sounds to good to be true, you wouldnt be the first to think so. Let's try and cut through the hype and separate fact and fiction. The original Negative Calorie Diet book and plan was developed by a US Navy trainer, and based on a scientific premis that is, in isolation, difficult to argue with: digestion requires energy, ie it burns calories. Some foods to technically require more energy to digest than they actually contain for you to metabolise, so theoretically their net calorie contribution to your diet is a negative one. The best example of such a food would be pure cellulose, but as we are not rodents we don't tend to each such a substance as food - however one of the closest human foodstuffs to relate to is the vegetarian dieter's old friend, celery. Containing mostly water and cellulose, celery comes in at less than 10 kcals per stalk. Digesting said stalk of celery requires slightly more than this, given that the cellulose itself passes straight through you unmetabolised and excreted - a net negative of around 4 calories per stalk of celery. So it's true! Certain foods are negative in calories, and if we simply eat enough of them we will burn away existing body resources of fat! Well, yes, it's true, but hang on and do the math for a second. It takes a net depletion of 3500kcal to work of a single pound of excess fat... that's 875 stalks of celery! Compare that to our calories burned through exercise page and the fact that you can burn 600 calories with a typical hour of high impact aerobics, and most of us would rather go down the gym than munch our way through 150 stalks of the green stuff... (btw juicing doesnt count, you need to be digesting the fibre to burn the cals) OK so where does this leave us? Well, hype notwithstanding, The Negative Calorie Diet Plan, has a lot of interesting and useful information you can use to stimulate your vegetarian low calorie weight loss diet. Whilst celery-gorging alone is not going to turn you into a catwalk model overnight, it is unarguable that the foods identified by the plan as negative calorie are all healthy, vegetarian and tasty. The book explains more about using and combining them as well as some excellent recipes that would fit just about any vegetarian weight loss plan, but for a now a list of foods for your negative calorie diet plan would include:
Click here to return to our low calorie vegetarian page
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