4 Powerful Spices That Promote Weight Loss
Everyone knows that to lose weight, changing eating habits and making different choices is key. Eliminating junk food and sugar, adding in more fruits and vegetables, exercising daily, drinking more water; getting more sleep, managing stress – all of these are important parts of a healthy lifestyle that promotes weight loss.
But you may not know that there are several spices that you can add to your food that will help boost your metabolism and promote fat burning. Certain spices can help you maintain a healthy body weight by increasing your metabolism, shrinking fat cells and suppressing your appetite. The good news is that even a small amount of these specific spices has a powerful effect.
Adding spices to your diet will not only help shrink your waist, they also enhance and upgrade your diet due to the substantial antioxidants and phytochemicals they contain.
Below are 4 of the Most Powerful Spices that Promote Weight Loss:
Ginger
Ginger elevates your body temperature and boosts your metabolism so you burn more fat, especially when it’s used in combination with a healthy diet and exercise plan. By increasing metabolism, ginger can help lead to weight loss. This not only translates to a leaner you, but can also help reduce cholesterol and triglyceride levels.
Ginger can also improve weight loss by enhancing the feeling of fullness after a meal. By suppressing appetite, adding ginger to the diet is an effective way of ingesting more calories from food.
Beyond its weight loss properties, ginger is also known to be helpful in reducing motion sickness and general nausea, heartburn, and inflammation.
Ginger comes in root form, powdered form, and even tea. It’s got a crisp, spicy flavor that goes well with many meat dishes, stir-fry, and even desserts.
Turmeric
One of the easiest and most powerful ways to powerfully increase the health of your meals is by adding spices and the golden spice turmeric, is no exception. Turmeric contains curcumin which is the active ingredient in turmeric that promotes weight loss and, in particular, helps shrink belly fat.
The growth and expansion of fat cells needs new blood vessels for fat storage to occur and curcumin suppresses this process.
The benefits of curcumin go way beyond weight loss. The compound has been shown to influence more than 700 genes in the human body that influence our health from digestion, arthritis, liver health, insulin resistance, to inflammatory symptoms associated with obesity.
Cinnamon
Cinnamon also promotes fat burning by thermogenesis (raising body temperature), but it also has an added benefit of helping to regulate blood sugar. Elevated blood sugar is known to cause excess insulin (a fat storage hormone) in the bloodstream, which promotes the storage of fat in the body. Sprinkling cinnamon on yogurt, oatmeal, coffee or tea, smoothies, shakes and even vegetables or savory meals, can have a beneficial effect on your metabolism, reduce and help reverse inflammation and creating optimal health, which can help you burn more fat.
Cayenne Pepper
Hot peppers like cayenne, jalapeno, and habanero really elevate your body temperature, so they are even more effective than milder spices at promoting weight loss. Capsaicin, the compound that gives peppers their heat, may help fight obesity by decreasing calorie intake, shrinking fat tissue, and lowering blood fat levels, Research shows that consuming hot peppers may boost your metabolism by up to 5%, and increase fat burning by up to 16%.
Other beneficial spices that promote thermogenesis are garlic, onion, mustard, and black pepper. Add a little spice to all of your meals and you’ll boost your metabolism and lose weight more easily – not to mention actually enjoying the flavor of your meals more than you ever did before!
The good news? Even if you don’t enjoy spicy foods, remember that you do not need to add a lot of spice in order to enjoy the same fat-burning benefits. A little goes a long way.
©2016 DLS HealthWorks, LLC. Lori Shemek, PhD health expert and weight loss expert. Author of How To Fight FATflammation! and the best-selling author of ‘Fire-Up Your Fat Burn!’