Foods with high thermic effect are:
1- Organic meat.
2- Organic/ Free-range eggs.
3- Nuts.
4- Seeds.
5- All kinds of green tea.
6- Coffee.
7- Dark Chocolate.
8- Chili peppers (Spicy food).
9- Beans.
10- Legumes.
For those who wanna dig deeper; the Thermic effect of food is the increase in the body’s metabolic rate that is produced by the consumption, digestion, metabolism, and storage of food. In other words the thermic effect of feeding your body.
The thing is when we ingest calories our bodies actually have to work
to absorb and digest that food. And so the consumption of calories itself is an “activity” and all activities “need” calories and “burn” calories.
Not all foods are created equally.
Different foods have different thermic effect.
There’s a big difference between, the thermic effect of protein and the thermic effect of, let’s say non-fibrous carbohydrates.
The thermic effect of proteins, like chicken and beef, or the thermic effect of fibrous carbohydrates like fruits, and vegetables, can be up to 25%. That literally means that your body may burn up to 25% of the calories in the food, just to process and digest the very same food.
For example, let’s say you eat an apple.
Let’s say you eat a hundred calories worth of an apple (a very high-fiber fruit).
Your body may only gain 80 or 85 out of those 100 calories.
Now contrast that with eating 100 calories’ worth of chocolate chip cookies,
which basically have no fiber.
Well in the case of chocolate chip cookies, your body is likely going to gain
97 or even 98 of those 100 calories.
Now those may not seem like big differences to you. But if you do that every time you eat for weeks, months on end, that’s gonna eventually add up and lead to drastically different outcomes.
