First of all, I always appreciate your contributions to these threads.
Second of all, is there any room here for the idea that some foods are more filling than others? I would imagine, if a person were eating less of the same junky stuff, heck yeah they’d be hungry. But if a person has changed his or her diet to include a lot of vegetables, protein and other healthy foods, the hunger is not so bad. At least, that’s my experience. Couldn’t someone who finds these feelings intolerable work on identifying foods that keep them satisfied for a longer period of time?
I have a sweet tooth too. I don’t remember ever NOT having one. What helps me is meeting the craving with something that is in a discrete dose. Single-serving, individually wrapped. Something less than 250 calories.
If I have a craving for oven-fresh cookies, I don’t make a whole pan. I get those kind that you can break up into rectangular servings and make just one or two at a time. I rarely make or buy whole cakes/pies because I can never figure out how much I’m getting in one slice. Plus I’m tempted to nibble on it if it’s just sitting there on my counter. So if I can, I’ll buy single servings from the bakery.
If I tried to get my sugar fix with half a candy bar, I’d just be setting myself up for failure. Who can ignore a half-wrapped candy bar, crying out to be eaten before it goes stale? So I buy the little fun sizes and let myself have just one. Mmm…Almond Joys.
Life shouldn’t be about deprivation, so that’s why I try to respond to my cravings. Minimizing that sense of deprivation is the key to making a “diet” a permanent fixture, IMHO.
That’s what I did. I found that I was consistently hungry around 10 AM. Eventually, I realized that my typical carb-based breakfast wasn’t doing it for me, and I switched to either eggs or cottage cheese. I don’t like it as much as I like a good croissant, but a scoop of cottage cheese keeps me from wanting a mid-morning snack.
I like those 90 calorie SmartOne (or whatever brand they are) brownies for my sweet tooth cravings. One of those and a glass of skim milk a few hours after dinner but an hour or two before I got to bed takes care of my sweet cravings and the milk helps me feel full so I don’t lay in bed hearing my stomach growling.
One thing that can help a lot of people (I don’t know about you personally) is cutting out the sugary drinks. They’re loaded with calories, and generally don’t make people feel more full.
Soda is the most obvious culprit, but many alcoholic mixed drinks are also loaded with sugar. In addition, look out for fancy flavored coffee house drinks. Check out Starkbucks’s nutritional information. A lot of the drinks are in the 200-400 calorie range. If someone was drinking one of those daily, that’s a lot of extra calories.
Then you just have to get fat. Sorry. No, so a long time ago when I started counting calories because I was porking up (damn old age ravaging my metabolism!), I discovered CalorieKing.com which has nutritional info for pretty much every food there is. Also, if you eat at a popular or chain restaurant, they likely have the info for whatever dish you’ve eaten too. It’s amazing and is a total eye opener regarding just how much shit they’re feeding you at major restaurants. That doesn’t help you on your boat, but maybe it can serve as a rough gauge.
There is the satiety index, although it’s based on a study that used self-reported data. And some of its findings seem…counterintuitive (really, carbs satisfy the best? Not to me, they don’t).
Personally, I have discovered that when I have a gnawing hunger, the best food to put a stopper on it is natural peanut butter. I eat a half-tablespoon’s worth (50 calories) and the feeling goes away, almost instantly. 50 calories of meat, cheese, fruit, candy, bread, etc. would do nothing for me, but peanut butter is like a magic hunger killer. I just eat it straight out of the jar with a spoon.
You I am sure recognize that the second is basal metabolic rate. Could a tumor impacting the hypothalamic circuits mess all that up? Sure. So can sleep disruptions, stress, depression, changes in body weight, changes in energy intake, and more … see the linked article for more detail than most would possibly want.
Understood. And it very likely isn’t unreasonable. Meanwhile you need to give yourself well deserved props for staying the course. It is easy to stay the course when the weight is coming off fairly quickly and you see the results. Staying the course during the period that you have little additional to show for it, when like Christopher Columbus you don’t even know for sure if there is going to be land on the other side or when … that takes real toughness. Give yourself the credit for that toughness that you deserve.
gallows fodder already linked to the Satiety Index but let me expand a bit.
The obesity researchers talk about two related concepts: satiety and palatability. Satiety is how full we feel; palatability is how rewarding the food is. Without question some foods have greater satiety and more lasting satiety. Some people seem to have systems that are more efficient at getting the satiety messages to the brain than others as well. Palatability though can override satiety, again to different degrees in different people based on factors from genetics, to inflammation of the pertinent brain centers, to sociocultural factors. Much of the food that surrounds us today is hyper-palatable, so much so that it can and often does over-ride moderate strength satiety cues.
As Ambivalid states the general guideline is that protein and fiber rich foods tend to have higher satiety. So also do foods that pass through a ways partially undigested. Somewhat cooled potatoes, for example, form starches that are slow to digest and end up fermenting in the large intestine some, producing short chain fatty acids - SCFAs - that feed back to the brain and the upper gut as satiety messengers … perhaps why boiled potatoes ranked so high in that study. (Jelly beans in that study are usually explained away because eating a bunch make people feel nauseous, stating no more food please.) Nuts, both tree nuts and peanuts, are famous for having a great amount of satiety, being incompletely digested, and causing more energy to be used. Thus even though they are very energy dense a small snack of unsalted nuts between meals is usually associated with greater weight loss.
So yes. That’s a large part of the idea behind “eat real foods, not food-like substances, including lots of vegetables and fruits.” Real foods generally have high satiety and are not hyperpalatable; food-like substances have been selected by market forces to have low satiety and hyperpalability. That’s what sells more of them.
Actually, when it comes to this, I would recommend deprivation to the fullest extent possible, but only for a month.
I used to have a serious problem with craving sweets, and my trainer made me give up everything sweet. We’re not just talking the standard cakes and cookies; he had me give up sugar in my coffee, fruit juices (I think he still let me have fruit, but fruit juices have a higher sugar content), cereals and granola bars (unless they were low sugar, like Grape Nuts), bread, pasta, rice. If I was out somewhere and needed to grab a quick sandwich, I would eat the meat and throw the bread out.
After a month of doing this, my sugar cravings were substantially lessened on a permanent basis (or, if it’s too soon to proclaim it permanent, they are still lessened nine months later). Now if I crave sugar I’ll allow it (in small quantities, of course), but if you have the discipline to really be militant about it for a single month, this will make your life much easier because you won’t have to be fighting cravings nearly so frequently.
I hear seaweed is pretty good for satiety too. Una, what I’ve found (exercise every other day) is that I lose more weight on days I don’t exercise. Perhaps if you eat some peanut butter (400 calories worth, perhaps on a sandwich with banana) on off days to get more protein you’ll notice a more pronounced effect on weight loss?
If that doesn’t work after a week it’s worth abandoning.
That is interesting about NEAT. I suspect that is a big cause for obesity in many people. I suspect the more sedate you are, the lower your NEAT value. Today’s society is so much more sedate than before.
I know there have been times when my NEAT values were different. When I was a kid and ate a big meal right before bed, I would wake up boiling hot and covered in sweat. I guessed it was my body deciding to convert the food to energy instead of fat. I lost that ability as I got older and my waistline grew accordingly. I used diet and moderate exercise to lose weight, but did not feel like my NEAT value went up. Recently, I have been working out at high levels (4-5 1 hour workouts per week with heartrate near max) and I can tell my NEAT value is higher. I am once again waking up hot and sweaty if I eat and go to bed. I do not gain weight during short periods of overeating and not exercising, like on holidays.
I think that light to moderate exercise gives you a 1-1 benefit to calories. For each calorie you exert, your body burns one calorie. There is not much collateral benefit. But exercising at high levels give you more than a 1-1 calorie benefit. The net effect to to your body when you exert 1 calorie of high-level effort is more than 1 calorie as your body adapts to the stress. It spends energy on the effort, on repairing any damage, on building your body stronger, and increasing your NEAT value.
For example, say you have two people where they each exercise for the same number of calories. One person walks for 400 calories and the other runs for 400 calories. At the end of the session, they have both burned 400 calories. The walker will not have much other caloric benefit after the exercise has completed. But the runner will burn additional calories after the exercise as his body will work to recover from the exertion. In addition, his body may increase his metabolism in response to the exertion, causing more calories to be burned throughout the day.
In what way, exactly, does drinking juice (which is sugar-water with about the same calories as soda) cause the body to burn off 3,500 extra calories per day, every day? Cites will be required.
DSeid, you are a fountain, nay, a wealth of knowledge. Please keep posting! I learn so much from what you share
Filmore, do you have any evidence for your theory that hard exercise ends up burning more calories than moderate, even if nominally the amount of calories burned is the same? It makes total sense, and it’s an hypothesis I’ve held to myself, but I was wondering if there is any evidence for it. When I work out, I tend to do 15 minute sessions spread throughout the day at high exertion levels so that my muscles are left pretty tired, under the idea that more calories will be burned doing maintenance and such.
“Hey, you know those vegetables that are submerged in butter and all that fried stuff soaking in cream sauce… anything in there I need to know about? I’m on a diet!”
The idea behind juice fasting is that you only drink juice (which you make yourself with mostly vegetables, some fruit, and a juicer) and don’t actually eat. I’m sure if I only drank a set limit of Pepsi each day, but didn’t eat a bite, I’d lose weight pretty quickly, too.
Of course you’ll lose some weight if you do any kind of fad fast and don’t eat enough calories to maintain your weight.
But **al27052 **made the specific claim that with juice fasting, a person CAN AND WILL “lose one pound per day”. That’s a 3500 calories deficit. Ain’t gonna happen.
