Soup off fat 12x faster

Breakthrough science reveals the secret ingredient helping women like Lydia Lynn lose 104 lbs-and keep it off

- ALLISON NEMETZ

A comforting bowl of broth-based soup is already one of the best foods for weight loss-and now there's a tasty way to take it to the next level. The secret: Add beans, peas and lentils. Turns out, these classic soup ingredients are packed with compounds recently proven to speed off pounds up to 12 times faster. "Instead of trying to cut calories day after day, just make a pot of black bean or lentil soup and it'll do a lot of the work for you," promises George Washington University's Neal Barnard, M.D., author of The Power Foods Diet. Lydia Lynn, 59, backs him up. She says unlimited servings of bean soup helped her shed 104 pounds and keep it off for years. Read on to learn how bean soup can help you...

Famous Penn State studies show that even canned soup instantly shrinks appetite by hundreds of calories. Why? Dr. Barnard explains it's because our body craves the same volume of food each day and soup has a lot of volume for far fewer calories than most foods.

Another bonus: Ingredients in soup are cooked until they're soft and nutrients steep in broth, making things like antioxidants and metabolism-revving amino acids more readily absorbed. As for bean soup, it also happens to be loaded with a very special and slimming starch.

The starch that boosts fat burn

Of all the plants in the world, legumes (aka the bean family) have the most resistant starch. "It's a type of starch that literally resists digestion. Our stomach acid and enzymes don't break it down, so it travels to the end of our intestines," explains Dr. Barnard. There, gut bacteria ferment it, releasing a magical fatty acid called butyrate.