15 Fat Burning Foods these are excellent for burning body fat
These 15 fat burning foods will enable you to burn more body fat by swiftly switching your metabolism from carb-burning to fat-burning.
When used in accordance with the guidelines on this page, these foods can literally transform your body.
These 15 fat burning foods are all natural sources of proteins (and fats).
Why natural sources?
It's because of the way your body works. Until the First Agricultural Revolution about 10,000 years ago, all your ancestors ate natural foods.
In terms of the evolution of our genes, it's not that long ago. It's actually a very short time. Your human ancestors have been around for about 250,000 years and your proto-human ancestors for several million years before that.
Less than 1/10th of 1% of our genes have changed in the last 10,000 years!
Since your genes are 99.99% the same as those of your Stone Age ancestors, your body is well-equipped for the prehistoric Stone Age.
You have been designed by Mother Nature for certain patterns of eating and activity.
Fighting Mother Nature is not fat burning
It is very difficult to fight Mother Nature.
She designed you to eat fresh, unprocessed, whole, natural foods, which are the ones that yield the best fat burning results.
You have not been designed to eat refined or processed foods, including foods that have been canned, frozen, packaged, or boxed.
The 15 fat burning foods listed further down this page form part of a natural diet.
Your body has been designed to flourish consuming these foods. Moreover, in addition to being fat burning foods, they are the best foods to eat to avoid many diet related diseases such as obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.
That makes sense, doesn't it?
Why eat protein foods for fat burning?
So, why proteins?
Well, proteins elicit up to a 30% thermic effect, which is much higher than the rates for the other two macronutrients (namely, fats and carbohydrates).
This means that you will burn more calories digesting proteins than you will digesting either fats or carbohydrates).
In other words, eating more protein will naturally increase your metabolic rate higher than eating either fats or carbohydrates.
Of course, exercising properly also boosts your metabolic rate. It's best to eat plenty of proteins from natural sources and to exercise properly.
Furthermore, eating smaller meals more frequently will also increase your metabolic rate. We recommend eating a protein-based meal every three or four waking hours. This will prevent hunger and food cravings as well as keeping your body in positive nitrogen balance.
Except for a once-a-week cheat day, it's also important to restrict carbohydrate consumption. We do not need any carbohydrates to flourish physically! Please keep your daily intake of grams of carbohydrates to 25 or fewer.
The reason is that your body prefers to metabolize the macronutrients in the following order: carbohydrates, fats, and then proteins. If you are consuming a lot of carbohydrates, the energy from fats and proteins will tend to get stored as body fat.
You will burn body fat if you restrict carbohydrates most days. Don't worry about consuming fats from natural sources: fat is what you want your body to burn! If you are not consuming a lot of carbohydrates, eating fat will not make you fat.
It's carbohydrates that make you fat.
When metabolized, all carbohydrates become sugar. Again, if it's a choice between burning sugar or fat, your body will burn the sugar and store the fat. So, don't give it that choice. Restrict carbohydrates.
Therefore, these 15-fat-burning foods (and similar ones) really are a key to lasting weight loss.
It is best to consume foods only from natural sources, which rules out, for example, farm-raised fish and meat from livestock fed grains [rather than grass] and pumped with hormones and antibiotics.
The 15 fat burning foods list
Lean beef from grass-fed animals is excellent. Here are five examples:
top sirloin steak
flank steak
chuck steak
lean hamburger
London broil
Fin fish are excellent. Oily fish from the deep ocean are the best. Here are five examples:
sockeye salmon
Chilean sea bass
herring
mackerel
trout
Game meat, which was the staple of our ancestors, is also excellent. Here are five examples:
bison (buffalo)
venison
wild turkey
pheasant
elk
Those are just 15 fat burning foods. There are plenty more.
Additional fat burning foods
In addition to the 15 fat burning foods listed above, you can add:
lean pork
poultry
eggs from free range chickens or enriched omega-3 chickens.
Have you ever had rabbit or goat meat? There are also excellent organ meats. Don't forget shellfish such as:
lobster
shrimp
scallops
crabs
mussels.
There you have 15 fat burning foods and some extra.
Notice that these 15 fat burning foods and similar foods were available to your ancestors prior to the First Agricultural Revolution.
If you are serious about fat loss
If you are serious about fat loss and avoiding diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, dental caries, autoimmune diseases, and others, you would be wise to get the bulk of your calories from the kinds of natural sources of proteins and fats that were available to your Stone Age ancestors.
It's also important to drink plenty of clean water.
We recommend at least 2 quarts daily. If you are exercising strenuously or doing hard physical labor, get 3 or 4 quarts.
So, with the exception of (preferably organic) berries and (non-starchy) vegetables, limit carbohydrates. Getting your carbohydrates daily from (preferably organic) non-starchy green vegetables and berries (blueberries, blackberries, bilberries, strawberries, raspberries, etc) is an excellent idea because of their fiber content and phytonutrients.
Except for planned cheating, eliminate refined processed carbohydrates. If you are unsure what these foods are, you will find the page link to our list, at the bottom of this page.
Our ancestors did not have refined processed carbs.
Refined processed carbs are a major cause of weight gain, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes type 2, and many more diet related diseases.
Planned cheating is important for more than just the psychological break it involves. The key hormones with respect to fat loss or gain are insulin and leptin. They rise and fall together.
Unless you are diabetic or your physician advises otherwise, cheating by eating some (high glycemic index) carbohydrates and fats together one day a week is a good idea. When your leptin level declines, so does your metabolic rate as well as fat burning.
It takes about a week for your leptin levels to decline by half. Your cheat day will elevate your leptin levels in order to begin burning fat again. To maximize this effect, on the day following your cheat day keep your caloric intake relatively low. (It's also best to do strength training on that day.)
If you follow these guidelines, you'll be able to keep burning fat for as long as you want. Focusing on the 15 fat burning foods will provide you with plenty of fats and proteins.
If you get 90 to 95% of your calories from the 15 fat burning foods listed and have some non-starchy vegetables and some berries, you will quickly begin to decrease your percentage of body fat.
You can achieve real fat loss that will last.
We recommend a goal of one pound of fat loss weekly, which is the equivalent of one and one-half to two pounds of body weight.
Other web pages related to fat burning foods
Now you have an essential 15 fat burning foods list, if you would like a list of refined processed carbohydrates to avoid (except on cheat day) you will find a page link to that below.
You can learn more about fat burning foods that speed up metabolism, the feeding frequency for these foods, other ways to increase metabolism, in the following sections of our website:
