Foods That Metabolize Slowly

If you want to lose weight or just generally be healthy, you need to eat less and exercise more. However, there is a little more to it than just reducing the number of calories you take in. Every item of food has a glycemic index. Foods with a high glycemic index metabolize quickly, leaving you hungry again not long after eating them and encouraging your body to store them as fat. Foods with a low glycemic index, on the other hand, process slowly, encouraging your body to use them rather than store them and leaving you feeling full longer.

Breads

• A good rule of the thumb for bread is that wheat beats white. Soy and linseed bread, wheat bread, rye bread and pumpernickel bread all metabolize slowly. This is because they are made of more raw, complex carbohydrates. White bread, on the other hand, has more refined, simple carbohydrates that metabolize quickly and are stored as fat.

Vegetables

• Almost all vegetables metabolize slowly. They are made up of complex carbohydrates in the same manner that wheat breads are, which means that your body can burn them slowly, leaving you feeling full for longer with fewer calories. The only vegetables that don't metabolize slowly are pumpkins and parsnips. Anything else -- like carrots, capsicums and onions -- is fair game.

Fruits

• Fruits have more simple carbohydrates in their natural sugars than vegetables do, but they still metabolize reasonably slowly. There are a few more exceptions with fruits than there are with vegetables. Basically, the sweeter the fruit, the faster your body metabolizes it. Mangoes metabolize faster than strawberries, and watermelons metabolize faster than both.

Other Foods

• With carbohydrates you can follow the same theme as you did with the bread -- the grainier, the better. Whole-wheat pasta takes longer than white pasta, and brown rice takes longer than white rice. Nuts are good snack foods because they have natural fats and take a long time to metabolize; pretzels and donuts, on the other hand, are not.

  In general, look at how processed something is. The further it is from its raw source, the faster it will likely take to metabolize. Of course there are exceptions, but this rule covers most foods you will encounter in your everyday life.