How To Not Be Hungry, But Still Lose Weight
(Video on this topic at the bottom)
You can lose weight on any diet. This is a simple fact and has little relevance to factors we should care about. Just eat less calories than you burn. Done. A nutrition professor even proved this by losing 27 pounds on a Twinkie diet. However, it is abundantly clear this is unhealthy, and it doesn’t account for how extremely hungry you would be every second of the day.
To formulate an actual dietary strategy that’s going to work longterm, the only things we should be talking about are:
CAN YOU MAINTAIN THIS ENJOYABLY?
DOES IT GIVE YOU PROPER NUTRITION?
Very few people consider these two wildly important points.
When we focus on this, the dietary strategy becomes pretty clear. It’s all about SATIETY and NUTRIENT DENSE foods. Luckily, these go hand in hand.
Nutrient Density Meets Satiety
When eating nutrient dense whole foods you naturally will be full and will most likely be getting all your body needs nutrient-wise. Humans have naturally regulated their appetites this way for all of history. I believe it’s almost impossible to become obese if you are eating 100% whole foods like our ancestors would have done. Unless you have an unlimited supply of honey, it would be hard to overeat enough over a long enough period of time to actually accumulate large stores of excess fat.
On the other hand, the more processed a food is, the easier it is to overeat. Processing can mean any alteration, whether it be cooking, grinding, seasoning, or combining with other ingredients.
Each level of processing adds to greater palatability and overconsumption.
This diagram illustrates this concept:
There’s a lot of context to this. Grinding a steak into ground beef doesn’t make it less healthy, although it could make you eat more than you would have normally eaten if it’s also seasoned to perfection. This table I created is not perfect, it’s used to make a general point.
There’s also the context of your goals. If you are at your goal weight, you can have greater leeway when it comes to your food choices. Many people need to create restrictions to change their relationship with food and create a dietary strategy to lose weight. On the opposite end of the spectrum, people who eat only raw foods actually tend to be underweight. You need to find a balance that works with your preferences, tendencies, health conditions, and goals.
Plant foods have the most negative effects when mechanically processed. This breaks down the cell walls and structure. If you’d like to learn more about this please listen to Gabor Erdosi on episode 21 of the Peak Human podcast. It changes the hormones signaling in our small intestine, the glucose gets absorbed faster, and there are many negative impacts to our body. It’s more than just the fiber being removed from the apple when you drink apple juice.
There’s also the hyper-palatable effect of adding seasonings and doing things like roasting almonds. These things tend to make you eat a lot more. Basically all packaged foods have this effect and have been engineered by food scientists to make you overeat. You can learn more about this from my interview with Mark Schatzker who wrote The Dorito Effect.
The bottom line is eat foods in the most un-altered form to lose weight. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but from what I’ve observed in myself and people we work with at Evolve Healthcare, this seems to hold true. The more weight you need to lose, the more you should be eating foods in their whole form.
Protein
You can’t talk about satiety without mentioning protein. Protein is the most satiating macronutrient and should be the star of every meal. It promotes satiety by triggering the release of signals that tell the body you’ve had enough and you don’t need to keep eating. These include hormones such as cholecystokinin (CCK), glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), and peptide YY (PYY) all of which promote satiety. Protein also has another trick up its sleeve — your body burns a lot of calories merely digesting it. This is known as the Thermic Effect of Food (TEF). Protein has almost double the TEF of the other macronutrients. This means you’ll have an easier time burning off calories (and therefore losing weight) when eating protein.
Standard Diet Advice
Every standard dietitian’s advice I’ve seen is based around eating a similar “balanced diet,” but with just less food. So their genius plan is just to make you hungry all the time? How else do they expect people to constantly eat in a caloric deficit with the same foods that got them fat in the first place?
The problem is, mainstream dieticians have been taught an outdated and inaccurate view of nutrition. It’s all they’ve ever known, and it’s hard to shake beliefs like: we need fiber in our diet, salt is bad, saturated fat causes heart disease, meat causes cancer, vegetables are miracle foods with no downsides, we need 7-11 servings of grains per day, or the concept of a “balanced diet.”
This might be because all the money is in processed foods and the studies and marketing campaigns from these companies have huge influence. Or the fact that this money has likely funded the education institutions and curriculum where these doctors and dietitians are trained.
It also could be because of these outdated notions of needing a “balanced diet.” I believe this gets people into trouble sometimes because they have the wrong expectations for each meal. If you think you have to have heaps of vegetables on your plate or a certain amount of carbs, you could be holding yourself back and making things more complicated. If people knew they could sit down to a simple meal of sausage & sauerkraut and feel full and get a load of nutrients, maybe they could stick to their eating plan.
Putting it all together
To have a sustainable weight loss plan that’s actually healthy, you need to focus on much more than just cutting calories. You need to factor in the level of processing of the foods you eat, because it likely determines how much of them you’ll consume. For some reason none of the mainstream weight loss plans, health organizations, or dietitians take this into consideration.
You have to start listening to your body. When you approach a meal, I think you should be asking yourself “how long is this going to keep me full for ?” If you take notice to different meals you eat and the amount of protein and processing of the foods it contains, I think you’ll see a pattern emerge. From what I’ve seen it really comes down to these 2 things - protein & processing. If you focus on these it seems satiety and optimal nutrition follow. And that leads to naturally eating the “right” amount and allowing your body to burn excess fat.
Most of all, this should lead to a long term way of eating that allows you the be full, maintain a good body composition, and enjoy great health.
So What Should I Eat?
The simple answer is whole foods with most of your calories from animal sources. This means meat, eggs, fish, and (hopefully raw) dairy. You can meet the rest of your energy requirements with whole, unprocessed fats or carbs. This means no vegetable/seed oils, refined grains, or packaged foods with added sugar. This is what we’re calling a Sapien Diet — It’s how we believe humans are supposed to eat for optimal nutrition, along with many other things like weight loss/weight maintenance, sustained energy, brain health, disease prevention, and a long and healthy life.
This also means eating nose to tail. The most nutritious parts of the animal are often the least popular in Western Diets. This includes the liver, bone marrow, other organs, and even the brain. Take a look at some of the most nutrient dense foods compared to some commonly thought of healthy foods like apples or bananas: The Perfect 5 a Day by Dr. Zoe Harcombe.
We know it’s hard for some people to include organ meats and bone marrow in their diet so we’ve created a grass fed meat delivery service that sells products like Primal Ground Beef. This is grass finished beef with liver, heart, kidney, and spleen mixed in. It’s really delicious and provides a ton of vitamins and minerals you cant get from standard muscle meat. Find out more at NoseToTail.org
The great thing about eating this way is that it’s delicious! Full-fat foods like a thick steak or a juicy lamb chop are so satisfying. It’s almost feels like you’re cheating. So eat up and enjoy life!
Brian