Scientific Study Finds Eating Coconut Oil Daily Leads To Reduction In Waist Size
Discover how a simple tropical fat can naturally trim your midsection and boost confidence!
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Weight loss is something that we have all struggled with at some point in our lives. And haven’t we all been swayed by magic diets, which promise overnight weight loss? Be it capsules or some weird concoction, we have all been tempted to try it. Maybe some of us have actually tried a few of them and have been disappointed, because let’s face it – weight loss is not something that can be achieved overnight.
While it is ok to want to lose a few kgs to feel healthy, we must know where to draw the line between wanting to be healthy and being obsessed with weight loss just for the heck of it. We must also remember that no two bodies are the same, so you cannot hope to be the exact weight and size of the celebrity who just lost those extra inches. Also, to hope to become a certain size may not be a realistic way to assess your body’s health because there are different body types with different ideal weights as well.
The focus should always be on becoming healthy rather than becoming “thin”.
It isn’t too tough to figure out that exercise is one of the healthiest ways to lose weight. But one must also keep in mind that some people never lose weight – all the fat in their body just converts to muscles. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t healthy!
Another way of losing weight healthily is by adopting a healthy lifestyle – which simply means one needs to cut out all the junk food and refined/ excess sugar, fizzy drinks etc. from their diet and start involving some sort of physical activity in their lives. One important thing to remember while trying to lose weight is that we cannot deprive the body of a certain type of food. The body needs to have a balanced diet and a balanced diet includes all the major food groups – carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. To cut off one group, like carbohydrates for example, may make your body unstable and susceptible to illnesses.
This might seem like the most unusual advice but feeding your body fats is actually what helps in losing your waist circumference. Sounds incredulous, doesn’t it? But that is the truth. The whole concept of the Keto diet works on this very principle – where the body is given a high amount of fats, and less amount of carbohydrates, so that the body starts using fats instead of carbohydrates for its bodily functions, thus burning all the excess fat. Please note that we have said “less” amount of carbohydrates and not “no” carbohydrates. Also, another thing to keep in mind is that we are not recommending the intake of all kinds of fat, but good fat. Coconut oil falls in this category of good fats.
Now, What Exactly Are Good Fats? Allow us to explain.
Good fats are those that have MCTs – medium chain triglycerides. MCTs increase metabolic rates in the body considerably and, quite naturally, lead to weight loss. They increase, what is known as thermogenesis of the body, i.e., the formation of heat in the body. This in turn increases the amount that the body digests, increasing vitality in the body. Research in Japan has revealed that consuming MCT rich foods ensures that all the fat gets transported to the liver directly with the help of portal veins and is not retained by the body at all (1).
So the basic idea is to avoid foods with LCTs – long chain triglycerides – and include MCT rich foods only. This puts the body in less-fat-storage mode.
Most fad diets eliminate fat completely, which is not a very good idea because then the body craves for it. Once you’re off the diet, all the fat that you’ve lost bounces back because the body now retains more fat than ever, thanks to the starvation that it went through some time ago!
Like we’d mentioned before, leaving out a certain food group does nothing to help you lose weight healthily. You cannot deny fats to your body just because you want to lose weight because the body needs it to complete its bodily functions. The best way to do this is with the help of healthy fats which contain MCTs.
In fact, you may not even have to reduce the amount of food that you eat in every meal if you replace LCTs with MCTs, because studies have demonstrated that even without reduction in the number of calorie intake, weight loss has been achieved just by including MCTs in the diet (2).
By now you must have understood that coconut oil contains MCTs. But here’s the surprise – coconut oil not only contains MCTs, it is the richest source of MCT in nature. It contains lauric acid which is also found in mother’s milk and both have similar nutritional benefits. In fact it is a surprise that this hasn’t caught on with weight loss enthusiasts the world over yet because Ayurvedic traditions have been recommending the intake of MCT rich fats from time immemorial.
So the next time someone says that you must reduce fat intake in order to lose weight, please tell them about MCTs and LCTs, and the reason why you mustn’t ever exclude fats from your diet. Oh, and don’t forget to recommend coconut oil to them if they want to lose those inches fast!
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