The Best Foods for Weight Loss

Ask anyone who knows anything about losing weight and they’ll tell you that the often recited combination of diet and exercise is the key to losing weight.  What they might not mention is that the balance is effectively skewed in favour of diet, with calories cut-out easier to come by than a calorie deficit arising from exercise. In this sense, understanding the right types of foods and the best foods for weight loss is imperative in achieving the right balance between the two, and by eating more effectively, calorie-efficient foods, you can lose weight in the quickest, most effective way possible.

Carbs: The Dreaded ‘C’ Word

When it comes to the best foods for weight loss, its comes down to understanding what calories are, where they come from and how you can maximise the efficiency with which you handle your daily food intake.  Calories are simply a measure of the energy that comes from food, and excess energy intake (i.e. energy beyond that which you use through the process of exercising and keeping your body functioning as normal) is converted and stored as fat.  Calorie count bears no relation to how hungry you feel or how full you feel after you have eaten, so the best foods for weight loss tend to be those that are calorie efficient.  That effectively means you want to try to eat foods that are filling, but lack the calories of other foodstuffs.

In order of most to least calorie efficient, the different food groups you need to be aware of are proteins, carobydrates and fats.  Remember that you need to have a balanced diet across each of these food groups in order to maintain good health, but generally speaking the best foods for weight loss are those that fall into the protein category.  That’s things like fish, lean meats and root vegetables – these are all excellent sources of protein and low in carobhydrates, while being filling enough to keep you going between meals.

The contemporary diet tends to be loaded with carbohydrates and fats. These are the worst types of foods to be eating for weight loss purposes, because they are the most calorie intensive. One gram of protein is significantly less calorific than one gram of fat, and carbohydrates sit somewhere in the middle.  But the reason carbohydrates, like bread and pasta, are so bad is because they tend to be consumed in large quantities. So, without giving carbohydrates up altogether, you should slim down on the portion sizes, quantity and frequency of carb-laced meals in order to give yourself the best chance of losing weight in the end up.

Fad Diets

There are a number of fad diets that crop up from time to time that suggest the best foods for weight loss as being some miracle fruit or organic material, and in general, while these may work on an individual basis, you need to remember that fundamentally, there is no secret to the best foods for weight loss.  Humans are biologically built to forage for vegetation, meat and animal produce, and anything that wouldn’t have been available to humans thousands of years ago probably doesn’t fall into the category of the best foods for weight loss.