Phuket Vegetarian Festival : 28 September - 07 October 2008

The Phuket Vegetarian Festival is an annual event held during the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar. It is believed that the vegetarian festival and its accompanying sacred rituals bestow good fortune upon those who religiously observe this rite. During this time, local residents of Chinese ancestry strictly observe a 10-day vegetarian or vegan diet for the purposes of spiritual cleansing and merit-making. Sacred rituals are performed at various Chinese shrines and temples and aesthetic displays such as walking barefooted over hot coals and ascending ladders with bladed rungs are performed by entranced devotees known as "Ma Song".

Negative Calories

Negative Calories

What are negative calories?

Your body expends a certain amount of energy, every minute of every day. It gets it's energy from the calories in the foods that you eat. Any calories that are consumed, but not used, are stored in the body as fat. So, in order to lose weight, you need to be consuming fewer calories than the body is using. Everything the body does requires energy, even digesting food. This is where negative calories come in. Some foods take more calories to digest and process than the foods themselves contain. For example, let's say that a carrot has 5 calories, but it takes 25 calories to digest and process it. So, the body would need to find 20 more calories in order to digest that carrot, and to get those extra calories, the body burns calories from existing fat. Obviously, the term 'negative calorie' is somewhat misleading, as all food has calories. So the negative calorie foods do have calories in them, they just take more calories to digest than the food itself actually contains.

Some of the negative calorie foods are:

Vegetables: Asparagus, Beets, Broccoli, Cabbage, Carrot, Cauliflower, Celery, Chicory, Hot Chili, Cucumber, Garden cress, Garlic, Green Beans, Lettuce, Onion, Radish, Spinach, Turnip, Zucchini

Fruits: Apple, Blueberries, Cantaloupe, Cranberry, Grapefruit, Honeydew Melon, Lemons, Limes, Mangoes, Oranges, Papayas, Peach, Pineapple, Raspberry, Strawberry, Tomatoes, Tangerines, Watermelon

In order to get the maximum benefit you would want to eat these fruits and vegetables as close to fresh as you can get them. Canned fruits and vegetables may have sugars and other additives that reduce or eliminate the negative calorie effect of these foods. It is also a good idea to not eliminate meat, eggs, and dairy products completely, since your body still needs protein, and other nutrients contained in meats and dairy products.

There are critics who argue that eating negative calorie foods cannot lead to weight loss. On the other side of the coin, there are plenty of people who say that the negative calorie diet does work. But whether or not the negative calorie diet works, it is still beneficial to eat more fruits and vegetables. They still contain a lot of vitamins and minerals, without a lot of calories or fat. Negative Calories