First thing you need to know about which are the best fruits for weight loss is the fact that the juice that you buy in the supermarket is not the same thing as fresh fruit. Those commercially prepared fruit juices are loaded with sugars, both natural and artificial, as well as a host of preservatives and additives. This is by no means to say that you cannot get the benefits of whole fruits in juice form – the trick is to invest in your own juicer and make your own.
Now that we have gotten that out of the way, I’d like to explain a little about my own investigation into the effect fruits have on weight loss. There are a few scientifically proven concepts that we need to understand in order to choose the right fruits for our purpose.
Weight loss is ultimately dependent on a person eating fewer calories than what their body expends in a day.
People do not limit the amount of food they eat based on calories. Rather, they stop eating when they feel full. That full feeling is dependent on the volume of food they eat, not the caloric rating of the food they eat.
Foods with low caloric value offer a greater volume of food than caloric dense foods. Because fruits are low in calories, they allow a person to eat a greater amount of them to achieve that full feeling.
Fruit has a high water and fibre content that increases its volume.It is a common misconception that if a person eats a high calorie meal, they will feel full and be less likely to overeat throughout the day. Recent studies indicate that the exact opposite is true; that when given the choice of eating as much as they wanted, participants who ate from a low caloric diet were able to achieve the satisfying feeling of fullness with just over half the calories than they needed when eating foods from a high calorie food diet. (1)
Incorporating Fruits For Weight Loss Into Your Diet
So if eating a greater volume of food is the key to losing weight, which foods can we eat in great abundance? The answer is foods whose volume is made up primarily of water, fibre, or even air. For instance, in a study published by Rolls and colleagues in 2000, participants were given milkshakes over an number of days, just prior to eating a meal. On each day, the milkshake they were given was exactly the same quantity of ingredients, the same weight, and the same calorie content. The volume of each milkshake however was different. The first was 300ml, the second was 450ml and the third 600ml. The difference in sizes of these milkshakes were achieved by injecting air into them as they were being prepared. The result? After finishing the 600ml milkshake, the participants ate 12% less of their meal because they were so full from the milkshake, this despite the facts that the 600ml milkshake was the the same as the 300ml except for the addition of air.
Similar results can be achieve through the addition of water to foods. By adding water, you increase the volume and begin to feel full much quicker. And it is the water content of a particular food that is often one of the factors that help determine the energy density of a food (remember, we want to limit ourselves to low energy density foods). Low moisture foods are typically the highest energy dense foods. Cookies, crackers, and high fat foods like bacon, butter. These foods give way to medium density ones like eggs, dried fruit, and steak.
Notice that dried fruit was on the list of medium calorie density foods? This is something that surprised us. The fact is, not all fruits are equal in their ability to help us restrict calorie intake and lose weight. Dried fruits have have their water volume removed and in so doing, the fruit has lost it’s ability to fill that void in our stomach and make us feel full. For instance, a tiny 1/4 cup box of raisins has on average 100 calories. For that same 100 calories, you could eat a whole cup of fresh grapes (2). Also of great importance in choosing the right fruits is the sugar and pectin levels each contain and the impact that these have on the metabolic process.
We have reviewed a number of periodicals and studies on this subject, and the most far reaching explanation that incorporates recent CDC research has come from certified nutritionist Isabel De Los Rios.