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Do you share the common perception that celery and other "negative calorie" items are fat burning foods? Diet gurus of the past would have you believe that you can't eat regular, nutritious food if you want to lose weight. Tragically, studies show that nothing is further from the truth. In fact, if you want to burn fat, you have to eat, regularly. The real trick is what you eat, and how you plan to eat it.
Diet Cheat Days
What? Cheat days? I know you are confused. Why start discussing fat burning diets with cheat days. Quite simply, if you want to teach your body to burn fat properly and consistently, you are going to have to wrap your mind around the necessity of regular cheat days. I know that sounds crazy, but wait.
Recruit your Brain to the Diet Plan
Your brain is an incredibly complex machine that controls all aspects of your body, including weight loss. Most diets keep you on low calorie meals for weeks at a time. At first you lose weight, but after a few weeks you have to decrease your caloric intake again or dramatically increase your exercise, and even then the results are less than stellar. Why is this?
The reason is that leptin, the prime hormone associated with appetite and metabolism, is remarkably tuned in to how much you eat. Caloric intake and body fat levels determine the amount of leptin produced and high levels of leptin keep your metabolism revved up. After about a week of dieting, your leptin levels drop about 50% and that tells your body to slow down your metabolism. Do you see the problem?
The good news is that just one "cheat day" each week is enough to reset that metabolic motor, and you can make especially good use of that dramatic rise in leptin levels by planning to have a low calorie, high exercise day following your fun.
Recruit your Body through Metabolic Typing
The second thing you need to involve is your body. I know you are thinking - well, yeah! Duh! That means you need to take the time to figure out what kind of metabolism you have.
Some people have protein based metabolisms, others have carbohydrate metabolisms and still others have a mixed metabolism. If you are eating the wrong foods, especially if you are cutting calories on top of that, you are going to feel hungry, dissatisfied and irritable.
That means if you find out you have a protein based metabolism you will need to eat protein with every meal. In fact, it will probably be one of your major nutritional sources. If you have a carbohydrate metabolism, you will need to focus your eating patterns more on healthy carbs - whole grains, fruits and vegetables. We are all different and our diets need to reflect what we need, not what is in current fashion.
So What Do I Eat?
No matter what kind of metabolism you have, you will be purchasing the same ingredients, just in different quantities.
• Get sprouted breads, raw nuts and nut butters, coconut oil and olive oil, organic butter, eggs and poultry.
• Purchase plenty of organic produce, wild caught fish, grass fed meats and raw dairy products.
• Get rid of refined salt and get sea salt instead.
• Eliminate all refined sugars and invest in raw honey, stevia and agave syrup.
The next step is to find out how to prepare meals that are delicious, serve your metabolic needs and help you retrain your body and mind to use these fat burning foods. Diet gurus beware!
About this Author
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