List of Negative Calorie Foods for Weight Loss

According to Dr. C. Laird Birmingham, author of Does Dieting Work, an article on the community website RedOrbit.com, most diets fail miserably---only 15 percent of dieters keep weight off by the two-year mark, and only 1 to 2 percent of dieters keep weight off after 10 years. This may be due to the fact that most diets are restrictive. One diet that does not restrict portion sizes is the negative calorie diet, a diet that consists of foods that have fewer calories in them than it takes to digest them.

Fiber

• Eat foods rich in fiber. Fiber is really carbohydrate that the body is unable to break down. It is important in the diet because it can help you feel full, and because it aids in stabilizing and regulating blood sugar levels and bowel movements. Negative calorie foods that are rich in fiber include most fruits and vegetables, with some of the best negative calorie fiber sources being celery, raspberries and asparagus.

Color

• Eat foods in every color of the rainbow. Foods that are richly colored tend to be high in antioxidants, which help prevent cell damage. This is important because even though you want to burn calories with what you eat, you don't want to end up with an amount of nutrients that is insufficient for all the chemical processes that take place in your body. A perfect negative calorie platter might include strawberries (red, 50 calories per cup), Mandarin oranges (orange, 60 calories for a medium fruit), peppers (yellow, 20 calories per half cup), celery (green, 5 calories per stalk), blueberries (blue, 75 calories per cup), and plums (indigo/purple, 35 calories for a medium fruit).

Balance

• Eat a balanced diet. You cannot get the nutrients you need from eating the same foods all the time, so spice up your routine. Get vitamin C from an orange one day and from watermelon the next, for example. Or try fun challenges such as eating red negative calorie foods at breakfast and working your way through to purple by the end of the day. Also, don't forget that you will still need to eat some breads and meats, since most negative calorie foods are fruits and vegetables and therefore don't supply enough carbohydrates or protein by themselves. If you allow yourself this balance, you won't be as tempted to fill up on junk food.

Perspective

• Be realistic. The amount of calories you burn through eating negative calorie foods does add up, but it certainly isn't enough to put you down a dress size in a day. What negative calorie foods will do, however, is make it more likely that you will not consume large amounts of calories, which does help with weight loss. Even if you don't lose a lot of weight, a negative calorie diet is full of healthy foods that are great for you.