• HOME
• ABOUT
• CONTACT

Spice Up Your Life

Welcome back to yet another of these great Top 100 weight loss tips. This post is article number 28 in the series and provides another great tips to help you lose weight.

This post looks at one great way to spice up your life and burn up some of that extra excess fat at the same time by adding a selection of commonly found hot spices to your food.

Chilies are Not Just for Curry

Indeed, those fiery hot chili peppers are not just for the curry, as they can be used in a variety of dishes to turn up the heat and at the same time they'll be helping you to lose weight. But how does that happen?

The endearing property of the chili pepper is in its hotness and that level of heat actually boosts your metabolism to digest food more efficiently. It's almost like when you pick up a very hot cup and you need to put it down again fast before it burns your hand.

Your digestive tract gets a load of the hot chili flavored food coming it's way and it goes into overdrive to get the food passed through as fast as it can. No slouching with the hot stuff!

Chilies also initially increase blood flow as your body attempts to counter the effects of the heat. This, in turn causes your body to use more energy and that makes you burn more calories than you would have done had you eaten the same meal without the powerful spice.

The energy burning power of those chilies can be enhanced by combining them with other powerful spices that are often used together in Asian and oriental dishes. Garlic and ginger are the most common spicy accompaniments to chili based meals and each has their contribution to the weight loss diet process to make.

Garlic and Ginger

Ginger also raises body temperature while aiding the digestive process. Garlic boosts blood circulation and lowers levels of bad LDL cholesterol, while also helping to fight bacterial and viral infections and boosting the immune system.

Obtaining fresh chilies is the beat way to go about making high powered dishes to do this. However, powered chillies, better known as cayenne pepper can also be pretty hot. If you can't always get them fresh in the stores, you can always try growing them yourself.

The plants are easy to grow from seed and as long as they get plenty of light and warmth in summer they will produce a continuous supply of the long, tapering green chilies that will eventually turn red if you allow them to ripen. Of course the level of heat varies from plant to plant and even from individual fruit to individual fruit on a plant, so it's difficult to gauge whether you'll be in for a searing or the effect will be milder!

The easiest to grow are cayenne peppers, although there are many varieties that you can get from seed specialists if you are interested and have a suitable greenhouse or you live in fairly hot climate. Then you can have fresh chili peppers for most of the year to include in a healthy diet.

When you get a glut of them in summer, you can sun dry the red ones and store in a plastic container for later use or simply pop a handful of green ones in a zip bag and put them in the freezer!

Here's to turning up the heat to burn off those excess calories!

100 Weight Loss Tips number 27 follows in the next post!

[BACK TO TOP]

Posted on Sun, 25 Oct 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 1 Comments