To round out my mini-series on reconnecting with your internal food needs, I’m building on last week’s topic around hunger. The content there touched on how you identify your true hunger sensations and how you decide when it’s the right time to eat to keep you moving in the direction of your dreamiest body goals.
This week’s topic focuses on the foods to eat to keep hunger at bay for longer, so you eat less throughout the day—if that’s what you need to do to achieve said body goals.
But before I get into this week’s topic, how did you do with taking note of your own hunger cues? Did you consider your personal hunger index before you reached for food? Did you delay just a bit because you realized you weren’t quite ready to eat?
If you did, excellent work!
Building awareness of how food—or lack of it—feels in your body is crucial to learning what your body needs. Adjusting your food intake based on that awareness will help you take in the right amount of energy for your goals. This is particularly important if, like most people, you’ve been wanting to lose some weight.
Continuing to operate without awareness, eating out of habit, or in response to strong emotions like stress or boredom will likely lead you to eat more than your body needs. That will lead to tighter pants and a heavy sense of frustration now, with an increasing risk of health complications as time goes on.
That’s why choosing foods that will tide you over for longer is the next piece of the puzzle that needs to click into place for you to move towards your goals—with less effort. Feeling like you’re starving all the time never leads to long-term weight loss success.
Enter the unexpected power of potatoes!
Did you know that boiled potatoes got the top ranking in a study of the foods that keep us feeling full the longest?
Surprising, right? The potato gets such a bad rap.
The study was done in 1995 and tested 38 different foods. Each food was portioned into a serving size that equaled 240 calories. As you can imagine, calorie dense foods high in sugar or fat or both, resulted in small portions. Participants got a bigger serving of foods that were less calorie dense.
The study’s authors evaluated everything from white bread to croissants, to Mars bars, to sugary cereal, to bananas, to sweetened yogurt, to steak.
From it, the Satiety Index was created and it still has relevance almost 30 years later.
The authors found that high protein foods, as well as those containing more fiber and water, increased the length of time the study participants felt full. It also influenced how much they wanted to eat when food was offered to them again.
It’s important to note that the study wasn’t exhaustive. It didn’t test more than a handful of protein rich foods and didn’t include a vegetable category—the only vegetable tested was the potato, which fell into the “Carbohydrate-rich Foods” group. Because veggies are packed with fiber and fluid, they’ll naturally keep you feeling full. If the satiety study was run again and veggies were featured, you could expect many to top the list.
In addition to potatoes, other foods that ranked high on the Satiety Index included:
High protein items such as white fish, steak, black beans, eggs, and lentils
High fiber items such as oatmeal or All-Bran cereal, oranges and apples, whole wheat pasta and bread, and brown rice
Highly processed foods, also known as very yummy foods, that were either high in fat or high in sugar, or both, such as white bread, cookies, donuts, cake, croissants, chips, ice cream, jellybeans, or sugary cereals did little to keep participants feeling full.
If you’re a nut lover, it’s important to note that a 240-calorie serving of roasted, salted peanuts did less to satisfy a person than a piece of white bread OR the equivalent serving of chips! If you’ve ever eaten roasted, salted nuts you’ll know that a small handful is simply never enough.
Another interesting finding was that yogurt ranked lower on the satiety index than white bread.
This blew my mind. Until I dug deeper. Then it confirmed everything I know.
The yogurt they used was flavoured and fell under the “Snacks & Confectionary” group. It was highly sweetened yogurt and the test subjects likely got very little of it to make up the 240-calorie serving size. If you’re a fan of Greek yogurt, you’ll know that a 240-cal equivalent is about 1 ½ cups. That’ll keep you full for hours!
Reinforcing this point, the authors noted that not all calories “are treated equally by the body”. This is because energy matched amounts of different foods will have “different effects on satiety”.
For example, boiled potatoes resulted in seven times more satiety than the equivalent calories taken in through a croissant.
Mind blown.
The point that they end with is quite simple. The satiety index of the food you eat will influence future food intake. Feeling fuller for longer means you’ll eat less. Period.
If you’re on any kind of weight loss mission, eating foods that keep you feeling full for longer is key to your success. It’s something I stay focused on because I also don’t want to be distracted by hunger frequently. I have so many OTHER things I want to think about in a day.
Now, I can’t vouch for the power of boiled potatoes but what I can tell you is that yogurt, cottage cheese, and oatmeal top the list of the foods I eat when I want to feel free from thoughts of food for hours.
To help you promote your own sense of fullness, I’m including a couple of my favourite meals combining those items. When you look at what goes into them, you might think they’re snacks. Don’t underestimate them! Try them out and if they don’t keep you feeling full for at least three hours, let me know!
Click here for a printable page.
Before I sign off on the last episode in this mini-series, let’s recap. If you have weight loss goals, these points are key to achieving those goals:
Understand what “enough” food is for your body. Eat to feel just satisfied, content with a little room leftover, or about 80% full.
Slow down the way you eat, be present with your food, and take the time to experience each bite. This will help you figure out how your fullness sensations change with each bite.
Help your body sense that it’s getting full sooner by eating foods that have bulk and make you chew. Each meal should have adequate protein, veggies or fruit, and a focus on fiber. Fluid-filled foods will also help trigger fullness.
Become aware of what it means to be truly hungry. When possible and practical, aim to be about a 6 out of 7 on your hunger index of 10 before you eat. Adjust your meal sizes and frequency to make this possible.
To decrease how frequently you eat, choose foods that keep you feeling full for longer.
Follow these five principles and your body, your mind, and your waistband will thank you. And so might your loved ones because you’ll feel happier, more energetic, more willing to participate in life, and you might just live a longer, better quality of life.
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