Eat Your Way To A Slimmer Waist

Cut The Winter Fat, With Right Foods

November brings nip in the air. It is the best season to begin a clean diet and start a fat reduction plan. The nutrition advisors are of the opinion that starting a weight loss healthy program just before extreme winters can help you keep the fat away.

So, how do you do it? Eat sensibly. Here are simple ideas that can help you actually keep belly fat away and weigh less:

Green Chappatis: Winter harvest boasts of fresh green vegetables like fenugreek, mustard, amaranth, spinach, and kale, broccoli, greens of turnip, raddish, cauliflower and beetroot as well as carrots. These are excellent source of calcium, folic acid, lutein, vitamin K and dietary iron. All these nutrients help boost your hemoglobin level and keeping you active and energetic. Knead your wheat dough with puree of these fresh green leaves. It provides you more nutrition than plain wheat chapatti. Parathas are a desired delicacy on a cold winter morning with tea. It’s a good idea to make green chapatti flavored with spices and enjoy with tea. The green leafy vegetables are excellent to keep your gut healthy. Eating plenty of greens in season helps promote good bacteria micro biome in your gut. This helps prevent gastric conditions from bad bacteria. The sugar molecule sulfoquinovose (SQ) is abundant in green vegetables; this is what good bacteria feed on and promotes healthy immune system.

Fish Oil: Including fresh fish and fish oil in diet is also recommended during winter diet. Research shows fish oil can transform fat-storage cells into fat metabolizing cells in the body which may reduce weight gain.

As explained in the Scientific Reports, fish oil can activate receptors in the digestive tract that fires the sympathetic nervous system; this induces storage cells to metabolize fat.

Experts claim that fat tissues don’t all store fat. The white cells store fat in order to maintain energy supply, while brown cells metabolize fat to maintain a stable body temperature. A third type of fat cell beige cells have recently been found in humans and mice, and have shown to function much like brown cells. Beige cells also reduce in number as people approach middle age; without these metabolizing cells, fat continues accumulating for decades without ever being used.

Research performed on rodents indicated that when the team fed a group of mice fatty food and other groups fatty food with fish oil additives. The mice that ate food with fish oil, gained 5-10% less weight and 15-25% less fat compared to those that did not consume the oil. Observation made that beige cells formed from white fat cells when the sympathetic nervous system was activated, meaning that certain fat-storage cells acquired the ability to metabolize.

Legume salad & lentil soups: Substituting one meal with boiled legumes, pulses or dal soups is good way to losing weight. Research observation by Clinical Nutrition and Risk Factor Modification Centre indicate that a daily serving of pulses improves satiety on a calorie control diet and eating pulses as well as legumes can significantly reduce bad cholesterol. Pulses are a good source of low fat protein and are categorized as warmth providing foods in ayurveda nutrition.

Scientific Facts: Approximately 50 g of white fat stores more than 300 kilocalories of energy. The same amount of brown fat could burn up to 300 kilocalories a day.  Fat and muscle communicate with each other through specific hormones turning white fat cells into brown fat cells to protect us against cold. Cold exposure and exercise, levels of the hormone irisin (produced by muscle) and FGF21 (produced by brown fat) rose. Specifically, around 10-15 minutes of shivering resulted in equivalent rises in irisin as an hour of moderate exercise. In the laboratory, irisin and FGF21 turn human white fat cells into brown fat cells over a period of six days. The study is now published in Cell Metabolism.

When we feel very cold, the body activates the present brown fat because it burns energy and releases heat to protect us. When that energy is not sufficient, muscle contracts mechanically, causing us to shiver, thereby generating heat.

To lose winter accumulated fat in body, Eat green leafy vegetables, fish and fish oil, legumes and pulses. Exercise an hour a day even in winters.