You’ve probably read every “magical” diet combination on the internet, from drinking cabbage soup for meals to an elixir made with lemon juice and honey. When you read the title, you probably thought, “just another scam.” However, it may be true. Celery may have negative calories. Let’s first consider the calories it takes to digest food. Most food requires about 10% of the calories for digestion and celery has more fiber, so it requires 20% to digest.
Whether you’re consuming protein or fat, your body has to work to digest the food.
It’s called the thermic effect. Digestion takes work and work requires calories. Celery also is extremely high in water, besides being high in fiber. Consider this, a rib of celery is approximately 6 calories, now reduce that by 20% for digestion and you have 5 calories. That’s super low but is there any way it could be a negative calorie food?
Celery is packed with water, besides the fiber it contains.
Even though it seems like the water and fiber of celery, plus the fact that celery burns calories to digest might actually cause it to be a negative calorie food, it isn’t. Sad to say, even though theoretically it’s possible to have a food with negative calories, scientists have yet to discover food that does. However, you could eat a massive amount of celery ribs, even an entire stalk, before you would have eaten 100 calories.
While it has never been proven, spices may be as close to a negative food as you’ll get.
There are many spices that may actually be closer to negative calories than celery. Cayenne pepper, for instance, has 17 calories per tablespoon—as if anyone ate a whole tablespoon. However, like other spicy foods, it also increases the body temperatures, which in turn increases metabolism and causes you to burn even more calories. Other spices that boost metabolism include cinnamon, cumin and turmeric. Cinnamon also helps level blood glucose.
- Celery juice is a natural diuretic. If you have water weight, it can help you shed extra pounds with little or no effort, just by helping you eliminate the bloating from the excess fluid. The fiber in celery can fill you up and keep you feeling full longer.
- Lower calorie, high fiber, foods include leafy greens, another almost zero or negative calorie food. If you want almost no calorie noodles, try zoodles made from zucchini or opt for a slightly higher calorie spaghetti squash.
- Asparagus is also a high thermogenic vegetable with loads of fiber and few calories. You can add it to a spinach or kale salad with a few beets and have a fat burning salad that lowers blood pressure in improves your overall health.
- Not all cinnamon is the same. The type you find at the grocery store, the cheapest type, is cassia cinnamon. It can be toxic at high doses because of the coumarin. Ceylon cinnamon, true cinnamon, has almost no coumarin.
- For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym