Healthy Foods Part 6: Vegetables!

A Vegetable A Day… Will Help You Lose Weight

The vegetable is one of the best known healthy foods around and should be a staple part of any given diet today. Vegetables are immensely healthy and can help people to maintain a balanced diet, but should also be a major part of a weight loss diet too. As a natural ingredient, they are designed to help people to manage their weight and can be eaten as part of a meal or as a snack. They contain various vitamins and minerals like Vitamins C and A, iron and calcium. However, it is not necessarily these properties that help you to lose a lot of weight. Instead, it is the fiber content that is the main reason for weight loss via the vegetable.

Vegetables can help people to lose weight for a variety of reasons. The first is because of the nature of the vegetable. I’ve mentioned that they contain vitamins and minerals, but they don’t make up the majority of the individual vegetable. Instead, the majority vegetables are mostly composed of fiber. Fiber is essential in helping you to lose weight because it isn’t absorbed by your system. Instead it just passes through and takes any waste that your body doesn’t need with it! As it can get rid of the waste products, it means that your body is not storing anything that it doesn’t need.

The fiber in vegetables is very low in terms of calories. They are considered low energy density as a result. That may sound a little daunting, but all it means is that you can eat as many vegetables as you like and put very little weight on! The recommended daily intake of vegetable is five portions but some diets do recommend more because they have very few calories. Unlike fruit, vegetables tend to contain little sugar and so won’t be converted into fat and stored if your body doesn’t use them.

The fiber in vegetables also has another great property. It makes you feel full. Fiber is bulky by nature and so makes you feel full very quickly, but because it contains few calories it is better to fill up on vegetables than snack on other foodstuffs. The more vegetables you eat, the fewer calories you consume and the more weight you lose because you’re eating enough in the way of energy to keep you going, when your meals are combined with the stored energy you have to burn, but not enough to store what isn’t used.

Vegetables should most definitely be used to help lose and then manage weight. There are so many benefits that eating vegetables can bring, but you should make sure that you still eat a balanced diet so you do get enough energy to keep going. Eating vegetables alone is not enough, but they sure can help as part of a healthy eating regime! There is nothing faddy about vegetables, and the health benefits are proven in various tests. Everyone should take advantage of the vegetable and live a better quality of life as a result!