When you bend and stretch, do you see a little more jiggle than you’d like? If your pants feel too tight or you can pinch more belly than you could last year, you’re probably in a hurry to lose the extra pounds as quickly as you can. Fat burning foods are a great solution for losing weight, as long as you choose the right ones.

Many diet disasters have been caused by eating the wrong foods. Fatty meats and processed foods, for instance, are sometimes the go-to choice for everyone.

But when you choose them too often, or if your body is sensitive to these particular foods, your waistband size can increase more than you’d like and faster than you might think is possible!

How to use fat burning foods in your diet 

Fat burning foods will help you do double duty by preventing weight gain and even helping burn any existing fat. It takes a little work to incorporate them into your diet, but even without a conventional diet system to work within, you can easily do it yourself. The key is in selecting and preparing, rather than eating.

Before you even begin to cook a meal, look carefully at the ingredients and foods that will make it up. If most of the foods come from the inside aisles of the store, which generally include the processed, canned, boxed, and packaged foods, you need to be careful. Most fat-burning foods are in the outside sections – meat and seafood, fruits, and vegetables, for instance.

In general, the more processed and refined foods you eat, the more you will sabotage your dieting efforts. It’s important not to go halfway and replace some foods with fat-burning meals while continuing to snack on sugar- and fat-laden snacks.

At the same time, you can’t make yourself miserable while dieting… few people will stay on a diet that makes them eat terrible food, even if the reward is a perfect body! Make sure that you find and plan delicious, not just nutritious, meals. There are lots of unique and tasty ways to prepare any food, and chances are good that if you think you don’t like some of these foods, it’s because you simply haven’t eaten them prepared the right way for you yet.

Keep that in mind while you try out these fat burning foods:

1: Citrus fruits and pectin fruits 

Some of the most common citrus fruits are oranges, lemons, limes, tangerines, grapefruit, and more. All of these fruits include vitamin C, a fat-burning nutrient that works by diluting or liquefying fat that’s already in your body. Also, if you have high cholesterol levels, these fruits can make it harder for cholesterol deposits to form, which increases your general health greatly.

Apples, berries, and other fresh fruits with pectin in them can also burn fat. This substance is naturally found in the cell walls of the makeup of these fruits, and will stop your own body’s cells from absorbing more fat than is healthy. If you don’t like crunching on apples, try coring them and eating apple slices, or have some applesauce as a snack (with a sprinkle of cinnamon or another healthy topping if you don’t like plain applesauce).

2: Green veggies

Your mother probably told you to eat your vegetables, and she was right. Broccoli, spinach, artichoke, asparagus, lima beans, peas, cabbage, green beans, and other green vegetables are great examples of fat-burning foods.

These vegetables don’t have many calories in them, but they are very filling. They also contain a startling number of minerals, nutrients, and vitamins considering their size, and they don’t contain fats. In many ways, they’re the ideal diet food. The problem most people have with green veggies is because they’ve never had them cooked properly.

If you hate vegetables, just promise yourself to give them a try for a month. Even one month is enough to help change your taste buds, as it takes time for taste buds to die off and be replaced with new ones that are accustomed to tasting vegetables. After about a month, any unfamiliar food will start to taste great.

Another important factor is how they’re cooked. If you’re not familiar with delicious ways to use vegetables, try looking up some vegetarian cookbooks for ideas. As vegetables are the main food group in a vegetarian diet, these recipes tend to focus on ways to make them taste great. Even if you add meat, you can still reap the benefits of learning how to cook veggies well.

3. Water 

While it isn’t a food and it doesn’t directly burn fat, drinking lots of water has benefits related to fat-burning. Not only does water flush toxins and help you stay healthy, along with plenty of related health benefits, but it replaces other fat-heavy drinks. If most of your drinks every day were glasses of water, you would consume fewer fatty, sugar-laden, and unhealthy drinks.

Eating foods with plenty of water in them is a fantastic way to get water and avoid the temptation to eat fatty snacks. Watermelons and fruits often contain water and certain nutrients and electrolytes that you won’t find in water alone.

When fat burning foods aren’t enough 

Even when you’re eating all the right foods, unless you have a comprehensive strategy, you might not get the results you’re looking for. If this is the case, you probably need to look for a diet solution that works for you.

There are a lot of myths circulating about which foods are fatty, fat-burning, healthy, or unhealthy. Some fatty foods are very healthy, while others should be avoided at all costs if you want to burn fat quickly.

Health foods aren’t everything. In the end, if those pounds you’d like to lose just aren’t coming off, you’ll need to find a complete diet solution program to guide you through the process of losing weight. Like everything else, we need to learn and be trained in how to do it successfully, and it’s hard to learn these fat-burning secrets on your own!