The Spice of Weight Loss

I recently came across a couple of articles that talked about using spices to help with weight loss. After reading the articles, I thought to myself, wow that's pretty much common sense. I had really never thought of it that way before. The gist of the articles was that by substituting spices for fat and sugar, you will lose weight. Obviously there is more to losing weight than just cutting fat and sugar intake. Cardiovascular exercise and calorie intake along with weight training are also big parts of the formula. Since I want to focus of food on this blog, I will stick with talking about spices and the benefits of using the in cooking.

The trick cooking is making food taste great. Why does food at a restaurant always seem to taste better than what we make at home? Is it the atmosphere, the fact that we don't have to put in the effort to cook it? Or is it the ingredients that are being used? Having working in numerous restaurants, I can tell you that the ingredients used are different from what the home cook uses. The amount of butter and cream used in restaurants is amazing. Why, because fat tastes good and allows you to achieve certain mouth feels and textures in food. So let's get back to the spice argument. How can you make food taste good without using butter and cream or other fats? Spices are one great trick in doing this. Peppers, ginger, mustard seeds, turmeric, cinnamon, chili powder, cumin and many other spices add intense flavor to cooking. Not only are they good substitutes for fats, but they also are beneficial in other ways. Certain spices can help speed up your metabolism. I read that less than 1 teaspoon of dry mustard can increase your metabolism by 25% for three hours. Have you ever noticed that when eating spicy foods you break into a sweat? That's the spices at work increasing your metabolism.

Another benefit of spices is that they have been proven to be an important part of the brain's mechanism of regulating appetite. Aromatic foods send a signal to the satiety part of the brain, this part of the brain tells the body that it's had enough. The more aromatic the food, the stronger the signal to the brain to stop eating.

I am going to try to work more spices into my cooking and I encourage you to do the same. Not only to increase the flavor of food, but also because of the benefits that spices bring to the table!