Benefits of Eating Beans & Legumes When Trying to Lose Weight

Whether you call them legumes or whether you call them pulses, they’re all the same category of fantastic superfoods that have been flying under the radar for many years, despite the fact that they can be fantastic for you while you’re trying to lose weight. Everything from beans to chickpeas and from peas to lentils can all boost your health and your rate of fat loss at the same time.

The reason, according to recent research, is that if you add them to one of your meals every day, you’ll boost the feeling of satisfaction from that meal. Since one of the biggest struggles faced when you’re trying to lose weight has to do with trying to curb your hunger in order to avoid overeating, adding something to your meals that will make sure that you’ll be satisfied by them has a great deal of potential.

A growing number of studies conducted on people who were trying to lose weight have found that people who consumed legumes on a regular basis would drop the pounds at a faster rate than those who did not. In fact, people who changed nothing other than adding beans or chickpeas to their regular daily diets were still able to achieve a slow rate of weight loss, despite the fact that they were eating the same foods as they normally would, aside from the addition of the legumes.

The difference reported by the dieters was that they were more satisfied by their meals. For this reason, they could eat less at mealtime and were less likely to overeat between meals when they chose to have a snack.

Research has also been showing that adding legumes can work in virtually any form. While research conducted in Australia encouraged people to eat whole chickpeas with their meals and obtained positive weight loss results, another study from Canada added lentils in the form of flour in place of cornstarch and still found that it was effective. In fact, in that study, it was observed that people not only feel more full from eating this type of food but it also temporarily boosts the rate of calorie burning within the body.

One study from Purdue University in Indiana and Bastyr University in Washington State showed that eating a large quantity of pulses on most days could actually quadruple the rate of weight loss in a dieter.

All this suggests that adding beans, lentils and chickpeas to your diet could help to bring your goals notably closer.