In particular when it comes to weight reduction, vegetables are crucial to any balanced diet.
Your body will burn fat thanks to the nutrients found in vegetables and none of that should be a surprise. But not all veggies are made equally.
While the healthiest veggies for weight loss are those that are low in calories, some vegetables might make you put on weight since they are high in calories and starch.
There are several veggies, in general, that shouldn’t be consumed excessively.
Dieticians and fitness experts Nataly Komova, Sara Chatfield and Melissa Mitri have some advice for people who want to know more about the properties of vegetables and which ones you should avoid if you want to lose weight.
With that being said, although beans, legumes, and potatoes are excellent in fiber and protein, some experts claim that due to their high carbohydrate content and potential to unnecessarily increase calorie consumption, they might be the worst vegetables for weight reduction.
Potatoes
While potatoes are actually a good vitamins, antioxidants and minerals source, their starch content makes them a threat to the weight loss process.
Mitri stresses that “The starchy vegetables to avoid if you want to have a flat stomach are white potatoes.”
Furthermore, white potatoes have a really high glycemic index as well, which measures the speed with which food can spike your blood sugar content.
The same expert goes on to explain that “A higher GI means that it has a tendency to raise blood sugar really quickly. Over time, if your blood sugar keeps spiking, it can put you more at risk for inflammation and weight gain, primarily in the belly area. Furthermore, white potatoes are the highest calorie starchy vegetable.”
All that being said, Mitri recommends picking low calorie veggies such as sweet potatoes, which are actually known to help reduce visceral fat, as well as butternut squash.
Beans and Legumes
Even though some beans can speed up your metabolism and help with weight loss, beans and other legumes contain galacto-oligosaccharides that can irritate the stomach and lead to indigestion.
According to Komova, beans, lentils and peas contain large amounts of raffinose, a difficult-to-digest complex sugar.
“They can increase gassiness due to their high amounts of fiber too. I recommend that you limit intake of these foods if you have indigestion problems.”
Although beans and legumes are excellent sources of protein and fiber, Chatfield warns that if you aren’t used to eating them, they may cause symptoms like gas and bloating.
She continues to say that “eating a large portion” or being “sensitive to galacto-oligosaccharides” can also have these adverse effects.
Galacto-oligosaccharides, which are composed of plant sugars, feed the beneficial bacteria in your gut.
But as Chatfield explains, because they enter the intestinal tract in part undigested, “this can cause symptoms like gas and bloating, especially if you have irritable bowel syndrome, which can lead to more difficulty digesting these compounds.”
Peas, lentils, pinto beans, kidney beans, and other such beans and legumes have high starch content.
In other words, starchy veggies offer nothing in the way of nutritional value and are full of empty calories.
Because of this, it’s usually advisable to choose your beans carefully and limit how much you consume if you wish to lose some weight.
What you need to do is limit your consumption of these veggies or substitute them with lower-calorie foods like sweet potatoes and you will soon feel the difference.