How Coconut Can Aid in Your Weight Loss
If you are struggling to lose weight, coconut can actually help you quite a bit.
Whether you are making the switch to coconut palm sugar or trying to drink more water, coconut will help you.
Here are some different ways that coconut helps to aid in your weight loss efforts.
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You Can Use Coconut Palm Sugar
One excellent way you can use coconut for helping your weight loss efforts is to switch to coconut palm sugar.
There are a few different reasons this type of sugar helps you.
First of all, coconut palm sugar is lower on the glycemic index, so it is a lower carbohydrate form of sugar than when you use regular white table sugar. The coconut palm sugar is also approved by many diets where regular sugar isn’t, including paleo, keto, and whole foods diets.
Drink Coconut Water
If you don’t like the taste of regular water, it can be a bummer when you find out a big part of losing weight is drinking a lot more water.
Drinking more water is important because it hydrates you, gives you more energy, and reduces how often you are drinking more fattening drinks like fruit juice and soft drinks.
However, regular water is hard to drink in large quantities when you don’t like the lack of flavor. A better solution is to drink coconut water and alternative throughout the day with regular water. This adds a bit more flavor and can be more enticing to you.
Coconut water from a full coconut has 37 calories and just under 0.4 grams of protein, 8.7 grams of protein, and 0 grams of fat.
Coconut Oil Reduces Your Cravings
You may be someone who likes to exercise a lot and drinks plenty of water, but your eating is your main issue.
Dieticians recommend choosing oils that are low in saturated fats and have heart health benefits, coconut oil additionally contains no lauric acid.
This is when coconut oil is going to benefit you. Coconut oil has a lot of health benefits, so you are already improving your nutrition by adding it to your meals.
It is also helpful at reducing your cravings and curbing your appetite, so you are less inclined to get a candy bar from the vending machine or getting fast food before you get home to cook dinner. This can be your new best friend when it comes to losing weight.
Coconut oil contains a large amount of medium chain fatty acids (MCTs). This type of fatty acid is difficult for the body to store as fat, as such they are more easily converted to energy in the body to be burned off.
They are also metabolized in the digestive system differently than long chain fatty acids.
Medium chain fatty acids from coconut oil go to the liver from the digestive tract right away. Then the energy from the fat is used immediately or converted into ketone bodies.
There seems to be data on the weight loss properties of MCT oil in general.
The International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders found that the long-term consumption of MCT oil may help you burn more calories than a diet that’s heavier in long chain fatty acids, like olive oil, soybean oil, or avocado oil. Using MCTs instead of glucose for fuel, the body’s metabolism is boosted for up to 24 hours.
Coconut is also known for helping to increase your energy levels naturally and get rid of stubborn belly fat, two things that people losing weight will often struggle with.
A study by Evidence-Based Complementary Medicine found that consuming virgin coconut daily can increase your high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) “good” cholesterol and enhances satiety.
Coconut oil contains no protein or carbs merely hunger reducing fats:
If possible get virgin coconut oil for best results though.
Remember though, that oil is still a fat, it does however do a healthier job of stopping your cravings.
In Summary:
Try to add more coconut to your diet, whether with coconut water and coconut milk, or coconut oil. It will help with body weight, cholesterol and heart health.
You can also add shredded coconut as a topping to a lot of dishes ranging from curries to cakes.