Five Overlooked Food Factors in Weight Loss

Losing weight isn't just a matter of cutting and burning calories. There are certain inherent qualities of foods, which, if you understand them, can help you craft an eating strategy that will magnify the effectiveness of your fat loss efforts. Your food's "thermic effect." You burn more calories depending on what type of food you're eating. It takes more calories, for example, to digest, absorb and assimilate protein than other food types. So the more proteins you eat, which have a higher co-called thermic effect of food (TEF), the more calories you'll burn.

Your food's fiber content. The more fiber you eat, the less caloric impact there will be on your body. Fiber is a carbohydrate - but it's an indigestible carbohydrate. Therefore, every 4-calorie gram of fiber you eat will pass through your body undigested and unabsorbed.

For example, if you were to eat 300 calories' worth of red beans (a food in which fiber constitutes close to a third of its caloric content), about 100 of these calories would not enter your system. Your food's glycemic and insulin indices. The glycemic index is a scientific scale indicating how quickly the glucose in a food enters the bloodstream.

Foods with a high glycemic index, such as white bread, breakfast cereal, white rice and candy, are digested rapidly into glucose, which spikes the blood sugar. These foods also have a high insulin index, which measures how much insulin is needed to get the glucose from the bloodstream into the cells. As blood insulin rises, the body's fat burning falls.

Therefore, to burn fat, eat more foods with a low glycemic index, such as fruits, vegetables, whole-grain breads, pasta, legumes, fish, eggs, meat and nuts. Your food's different macronutrients. If you eat carbohydrates and fats together, your body stores more fat. That's because insulin carries not only glucose to the cells but many other nutrients, including lipids (fat).

So, when you're munching on chips and dip, there's a rise in both blood sugar and blood lipids. Then insulin rises to meet the demand and conveys lots of fat to the body's storage areas. The meals you eat: size, frequency, time. Smaller, more frequent meals stimulate metabolism and better utilization of nutrients. Large, infrequent meals lead to fat storage. Having a big breakfast allows the calories to be burned off in daily activities. But eating a lot before bedtime boosts insulin and encourages fat storage while sleeping.