One of your reasons for losing weight might be to improve your health. This is a great motivator. But when you are designing your weight loss program, it can seem like calories are the only things that matter – not true. In order to heal your body and lose weight, there are a number of foods you will want to add to your diet plan. Not only are these foods healthy for your body, but they are also low in calories, allowing you to create a diet that does it all.
Healing Weight Loss Foods to Add to Your Diet
While this list is not exhaustive, you should try to add at least a few of these foods to your diet to improve your overall health:
- Healthy fat fish – Adding fish like salmon and tuna to your day will not only give you some protein to boost your energy and help to manage your blood sugar levels, but these fish can also help to reduce cholesterol and improve blood circulation.
- Green tea – The tannins in green tea help to promote a faster metabolism, but they also help promote cell repair in the body. This can help to offset infections and some studies have shown green tea might be a cancer preventing food.
- Ginger – With ginger, you can help to heal and to prevent a number of stomach and digestive woes. Adding this to recipes or eating it raw will help give you the maximum effect.
- Cabbage – While this food may seem to be primarily water, cabbage is linked with many healing properties, helping to create a healthy life.
- Leafy Greens – The vitamins, minerals, and antioxidant properties of leafy green vegetables, such as spinach and kale, will help your body feel energized, while also helping to prevent cancerous growths in the body.
- Soy – Study after study has linked soy with helping the heart become healthy and to help the hormones be balanced over the long term (for more information about soy, read the post “How Healthy Are Soy Products?“).
- Garlic – This food has been linked with antibacterial and anti-viral properties, allowing it to help boost the immune system, while also protecting the heart and the blood vessels.
- Citrus fruits – The antioxidant properties of citrus fruits have been widely researched, showing they can help to prevent damage from free radicals in the air, while also boosting immune system function.
- Berries – Berries also have antioxidant properties that can help a person improve their health while also allowing the person to protect themselves from environmental damage.
- Dark chocolate – The antioxidants in chocolate are also revealing themselves to be healthy for the heart as well as for managing depression and anxiety (also see the post “Chocolate Increases Weight Loss“).
Choosing to add some of these weight loss foods with healing powers to your diet will not only help to promote good health, but their calorie counts are low, making them helpful for diet plans. Try adding just one or two of these foods each week to see what you enjoy and what you do not. Over time, you will create a diet that protects you as much as it helps you to be slimmer.
Other Related Posts and Articles you May Find Interesting: “How Antioxidants Enhance Weight Loss”, “Best Foods for Weight Loss”, “Healthy Weight Loss Diet May Prevent Cancer” and “Foods that Improve Heart Health”.
I have heard of the benefits of green tea, but I have also heard that to get the most benefit out of drinking it you would need to dring 4-5 cups of green tea per day. People need to realize you really need to drink a lot of it if you are looking for those benefits. Also just wanted to add another healing food to your list: the herb Tumeric. (Turmeric is mainly known as the spice that adds a yellow color to many Indian foods.) Tumeric is a wonderful, natural anti-inflammatory. It’s excellent for the bowels and kidney function in a stressed or ill body. Also over the past everal years turmeric and its derivative curcumin, has proved to have amazing cancer preventing properties. Curcumin has shown great potential in preventing many types of cancers, including breast, cervical, colon, gastric, hepatic, leukemia, oral epithelial, ovarian, pancreatic, and prostate cancers. Also in addition to being a fantastic food for cancer prevention, curcumin has also been shown to be very beneficial for people who are actively fighting cancer as well.