The Negative Calorie Diet has achieved widespread popularity with a broad spectrum of dieters, owing largely to its claim that you can lose up to two pounds per day. Of course, remember the old canard: "If it looks too good to be true, it probably is." While the Negative Calorie Diet does deliver on its promises of sustainable weight loss, the costs just might outweigh the benefits.
About the Diet
The Negative Calorie Diet operates by harnessing the metabolic occurrence known as the thermic effect of food. In line with the adage "it takes money to make money," your body operates under a similar principle: "It takes calories to make calories." Digesting a meal has a caloric cost of its own, so the net calories that you have available for energy following any given meal is actually: [total number of calories consumed] - [cost of digestion]. The Negative Calorie Diet is a bit of a misnomer, as you are not actually consuming "negative" calories. Instead, you are instructed to focus your daily intake around foods that have a higher cost of digestion than the total number of calories provided by the food itself, leaving you in a negative energy balance. Using this principle, weight loss is stimulated at a rapid rate.
Following the Diet
The so-called negative calorie foods generally fall into two categories: fruits and vegetables. Examples of negative calorie foods promoted by the diet include cucumber, broccoli, cabbage, celery, carrots, lettuce, spinach, apples, blueberries, oranges, peaches and pineapples. When following the Negative Calorie Diet, you adhere strictly to the recommended negative-calorie foods in order to attain the diet's optimal rate of weight loss.
Considerations
Of course, while there is nothing wrong with eating a plethora of fruits and vegetables, there is a problem with depriving your body of the other vital macronutrients it needs to survive. As formulated, the Negative Calorie Diet is unduly restrictive. Realistically, very few dieters would have the willpower to live on nothing more than the suggested foods. This makes the Negative Calorie Diet nothing more than a crash diet that individuals are likely to rebound from quite hard, promulgating a cycle of yo-yo dieting whereby the lost weight is quickly regained upon resuming a normal eating plan.
Additionally, the Negative Calorie Diet's target weight-loss progression is far too rapid. Realistically, you should expect to lose around one to two pounds a week on a typical "healthy" diet. If you drop weight at the rate of even one pound a day (which is half of the reported average from Negative Calorie dieters), you will lose a substantial amount of lean mass along with the fat. As lean mass is responsible for keeping your metabolism running at peak efficiency, dropping weight that quickly is quite unhealthy over the long term.
If you decide to endure the Negative Calorie Diet, supplement the recommended "fruits and veggies only" rule with lean meats and healthy fat sources such as fish and olive oil to make the diet more livable. You will not lose weight as rapidly, but there is no point in going from overweight and unhealthy to underweight and unhealthy.
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