11 foods that can help you lose weight

Hold this thought: To lose weight effectively and permanently, you need to eat. And eat smart. Happily, nature designed a lot of delicious edibles to turn up your fat-burning furnace, flatten your belly, and take a big bite out of your appetite. Here are 11 of the get-slim food gems we're talking about.

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Rice with Veggies

Adding some high-fiber vegetables like broccoli, carrots, and kale to your rice will obviously help lower the calorie count. But not only that. Adding veggies to rice at lunchtime appears to slow stomach emptying, according to research. The end result? You feel full longer. In fact, people in a study ate much less at dinner when they added veggies to their rice at lunch.

Tomatoes save from high cholesterol

Tomatoes may be an effective alternative to drugs in lowering cholesterol and blood pressure and in preventing heart disease.

A bright red pigment called lycopene found in tomatoes and to a lesser extent in watermelon, guava, papaya and pink grapefruit has antioxidant properties that are vital to good health.

Karin Ried and her colleague Peter Fakler from the University of Adelaide are the first to summarise the effect of lycopene on cholesterol and blood pressure (BP), analysing the collective results of 14 studies over the last 55 years.

"Our study suggests that if more than 25 milligrams of lycopene is taken daily, it can reduce LPD (bad) cholesterol by up to 10 per cent," says Ried, reports the journal Maturitas.

Tomatoes have high levels of lycopene, with half a litre of tomato juice taken daily, or 50 grams of tomato paste, providing protection against heart disease, according to an Adelaide statement.

"That's comparable to the effect of low doses of medication commonly prescribed for people with slightly elevated cholesterol, but without the side effects of these drugs, which can include muscle pain and weakness and nerve damage," says Ried.