Go bananas! Two reasons why banana is your weight loss superfood

How many times have you heard – if you want to lose weight then eat a variety of fruits, excepting for bananas? Probably a billion times. However, not many are aware that avoiding bananas is one of the biggest mistakes people, who are struggling to battle the bulge, make. Agreed that bananas have a high calorie count, but what people are unaware is that this magical fruit is almost fat free.

Apart from drawing the goodness of its high potassium, Vitamin B6 and Vitamin C content, it’s time you discover the fat burning properties as well, and incorporate it in your program to accelerate your efforts.

Here’s why from this moment onwards bananas are your weight loss superfood:

1) Resistant Starch: Adding carbs rich in Resistant Starch (RS) has proved to aid the body’s fat burning ability. Bananas have this unique property that also assists in filling you up, controlling hunger pangs and regulating blood sugar.

Wonder how this works? As the name suggests, this starch is “resistant” to digestion and hence does not enter the blood stream. This means, like any other carbohydrate it is not stocked as fat when you eat more than you can burn. When it reaches the large intestine, the resistant starch is fermented – a process that produces ‘butyrate’, which essentially stops the body from burning carbohydrates. The result: The body that uses carbs as fuel will instead use the recently consumed and stored fat.

The best time to incorporate bananas as a part of your meal is adding it to your breakfast menu. If you do so, you signal your body to use fat for energy right at the start of your day. And guess what, in no time, you will see the wonders this small change does.

2) Pectin: Banana has a powerful fibre called pectin, which essentially restricts the amount of fat your body cells absorb. A person looking to reduce fat needs to keep a close eye on the insulin level. Insulin is a hormone, which stores excess carbohydrate calories as fat in the body. In other words, when we consume too much of carbohydrates, we are signalling our body to store fat via insulin.

Excess carbs increases faster absorption of sugar into the bloodstream thereby causing an increase in the insulin level. The result: Your body stops burning stored fat for energy. This is where the pectin in bananas comes to your rescue. Pectin regulates the rate at which sugar is absorbed into your blood.

There is no such food in the world that will standalone help you lose weight. If you are promised of exceptional weight loss by consuming just one superfood, then most likely your are being lured by yet another marketing gimmick. Successful weight loss calls for eating right and incorporating adequate amount of exercise. So, be smart and just go bananas!

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