Fat Burning Foods a Weird Concept

The common phrase that I hear is that your body is like a furnace. If that is the case, then how do you get a furnace to selectively burn just one of the fuels that are stored in it? It would be like storing oil, wood, and coal in a furnace, then adding some kind of magical ‘food’ that makes it burn just one of them. Silly, isn’t it?
It might make more sense if the ‘furnace’ had a liver, some muscles and bones, a pancreas, digestive and circulatory systems, a few hundred hormones, a brain, etc., etc. Oh, and maybe a few trillion tiny compartments (cells). And whatever else that could be built and controlled by about 30,000 genes.

My point is that we are WAY more complicated than the simplistic comparison with a furnace. The way we metabolize foods is biological, not fire-ological.

This is also a phrase that I made up, although it underlies everything that happens to our bodies every day. Metabolic redirection depends on what, when, and how much we eat, on dozens of lifestyle factors, and on age. Regarding weight loss, or more accurately, fat loss, the goal is to redirect metabolism to break down stored fat, to store less fat, and to build lean body mass (muscle).

Foods can help you do that. Indeed, your ‘eating style’ (i.e., what, when, how much) may be responsible for as much as 80 percent of anything that you do for managing your metabolism. In fact, what you eat and when you eat are vastly more important than how much you eat. The extent to which foods can help you redirect your metabolism depends on a long list of factors, the main one of which is hormone balance. Most women experience cravings for sweets, dairy products and salty foods, and other crave weird combinations like olives on cake, fruit with spicy salsa. Each person is different.