Have you ever heard of the negative calorie diet? If you have you may be wondering what is it? And how does it work?

The reason that particular diet is called the 'negative calorie diet' is because the foods you eat actually take away calories from your body!

Yes that's right - you lose calories the more you eat these type of foods.

I know that just doesn't make sense when you first see it, so let me explain a little further.

You see, different foods have different thermic effects. The thermic effect of food is the energy used by your body to digest and store the calories you eat. Fat has a very low thermic effect (meaning that your body hardly has to use any energy in digesting it) and proteins have a high thermic effect (meaning that your body uses a larger amount of energy from the protein to actually digest and store it).

For example, it is said that on average, your body uses 30% of the calories from protein just to process and store the nutrients, so that you will only have 70% of what you ate for use in your body.

So now you may be able to guess how the 'negative calorie diet' works. Certain foods and combinations of foods have thermic effects so high that they take more energy to metabolize and store in your body then the energy in the actual food. So, even though your eating, you're actually using up energy in your body to digest it!

The actual diet is made up mostly of green leafy vegetables that are high in fiber. Fiber can't be broken down by your body and uses up a lot of digestive energy. That's why it makes these type of foods 'negative calorie' foods.

Although it may sound tempting - this diet isn't complete. You want to work with your body by providing it with enough nutrients to function on a daily basis, while promoting muscle maintenance and fat loss for natural, permanent and a long lasting great body. So you need a good balanced diet consisting of a healthy serving of carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Whatever you do, you want to avoid the low carb and low fat fad diets that have popularized over the last two decades.