Could Spicy Food Help You Lose Weight?

Often people think of healthy food as bland and boring; adding minced peppers or hot sauce to your food can make it more appetizing and may help you lose weight. Adding a spice factor to foods has been used in many cultures over history to make bland-tasting foods more palatable; the intense heat often overpowers the natural flavor of the food and allows people to eat even foods that they hate.

If food is spicy, you're less likely to eat it quickly. Eating hot food quickly is often a painful experience as the heat level just continues to build as you eat more and more of it. You have to take breaks between subsequent bites more often in order to let your mouth cool down. This is important because the stomach needs a bit of time – researchers say around 20 minutes – in order to report to the brain that it's full. Eating food quickly encourages overeating and thus encourages eating many more calories than you are supposed to. Slowing down how fast you eat is a great method to lose weight, and eating spicy food makes it happen naturally.

As an added bonus, when eating spicy food you're going to want to take breaks often to drink some water in order to cool your mouth down. Drinking large quantities of water with meals helps to slow down the rate at which you digest the food in your stomach as it dilutes the hydrochloric acid in your stomach. This factor, combined with all the water you are drinking, helps you feel much fuller after you are done eating and keeps you feeling full for a long period of time.

If you're sensitive to spicy food, take it slow at first. If you're not accustomed to eating hot sauce on food, don't overdo it – stick with milder hot sauces. You will naturally develop a tolerance to the capsaicin in pepper sauces over time, at which point you can begin to experiment more with hot sauces in order to find one whose flavor you love. If eating something that is intensely spicy gives you problems with indigestion or heartburn, you can always take over the counter remedies in order to allow you to eat it without worry. Over the counter heartburn medication has been taking great strides recently, and is more effective than ever before.

There's evidence that the capsaicin in peppers helps to temporarily boost your metabolism after a meal. Although the effect isn't long-lasting, every little bit helps. Boosting your metabolism means that you will burn more calories each day without having to exercise, which helps you lose weight faster. Combined with the fact that you will be eating less calories each day in the first place when eating spicy food due to a reduced tendency to overeat and the fact that you will most likely feel fuller between meals due to all the water that you are drinking, you can see great weight loss results by working hot pepper sauces into your diet.

Mike has been writing articles for a couple of years now. His latest passion is on Trout Fishing. He just created a page in his site on Trout Flies. When you get a minute and you love to fish yourself come check out his site.