In a nutshell - effective fat loss is essentially about increasing your metabolism, or more correctly, optimizing your metabolism. All the rules that apply to raw, natural and healthy dieting has its focus on this one crucial aspect.

By eating breakfast, you start up your metabolism nice and early; by eating regular but smaller meals spaced throughout the day, you keep your metabolism going in a balanced way; by exercising and staying active you optimize your metabolism.

With this said, your exercise routine is the first and most important aspect to concentrate on, it does have the greatest effect on your metabolism. Specifically strength training exercise which builds lean muscle mass, which in turn boosts your metabolism naturally, as muscle requires a lot of energy to sustain itself.

Human metabolism consists of 3 main elements, being RMR (Resting Metabolic Rate), the Thermic Effect of Exercise (TEE), and lastly the Thermic Effect of Feeding (TEF). TEF is that part of metabolism energy that your body uses to digest and process the foods that you eat.

But is there really such a thing as specific foods that speed metabolism, and thereby allow you to lose weight?

The answer is yes – but is not as simple as just identifying individual foods. There surely are individual foods that speed metabolism, because of certain special nutritional qualities, but it is important to remember that any diet has it’s merits only when seen as a whole and complete strategy.

• There are those foods known as "negative calorie foods", foods that burn up more calories in the process of digesting them, than are actually contained in the foods themselves. You thus "speed your metabolism" by choosing foods that have few calories, yet burn many calories just in the process of metabolizing them. Potatoes and cabbage are good examples.

Also, raw celery and grapefruit are often claimed to have negative caloric balance, presumably because the thermic effect is greater than the caloric content, due to the complex fibre matrix that must be uncovered to access their carbohydrates.

• The expression "thermic effect of food" is used to describe the energy expended by our bodies in order to consume and process food. Dietary fat, for example, is very easy to process and has very little thermic effect, while protein is hard to process and has a much larger thermic effect. Therefore, eating more lean protein foods has also been proven as an effective strategy to help you burn fat and keep it off.

Your metabolic energy levels will be the highest possible if you eat whole, natural foods. Select unprocessed foods with a high thermic effect (lean proteins like poultry, egg whites and fish, as well as green vegetables and other fibrous carbohydrates).

You should ideally avoid processed foods, and concentrate on eating whole, natural foods. What will optimize your metabolism to the greatest extent, is simpler eating - focusing on whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, lean proteins, and healthy fats.

It will take some effort for any person to rid is or her diet of processed foods, but it will certainly be a journey in which you will learn to respect your body, and to appreciate the taste of real food.