If you are not familiar with the thermic effect of food (ETA), the idea is that the amount of energy that the body uses to process food influences the amount of calories burned during the process. If you eat the right foods, the ETA can burn up to 10% of the calories you consume. If you eat too much fat, the heating effect will be very low, since fat is used easily by your body. If you eat a lot of protein, your body will become you more difficult to make use of the calories you eat, and your metabolism in a food rich in proteins can be up to 30% greater than in a fatty food. Even a meal filled with carbohydrates will require up to 4% of the calories used for food processing.
The thermal effect of food may help to explain the success of diets high in proteins. Is the thermal effect of food useful? Let’s say that you eat a 300 calorie meal composed entirely of proteins. You can expect that more than 80 calories are only used for the digestive process. So that leaves you with less than 220 calories from your meal for 300 calories. Multiply this by several hundred meals and will have some significant reductions in calories.
There is some evidence that the TEF can be further multiplied through regular exercise, especially weight training. It is said that some complex carbohydrates and foods rich in fiber go beyond this, being so complex to digest your digestive system burns more calories trying to decompose them than the calories that these foods contain. Cayenne pepper, celery, chili sauce, coffee, fennel seeds, garlic, ginger, grapefruit, mustard, parsley and sauce are frequently cited as cases of this criterion. A study to determine the degree of realism of the ETA theory was conducted in Australia. The study participants were fed with plenty of fish, while the control group was fed with the same number of calories but with less protein rich foods. Those who ate fish lost 22% more weight than the control group.