Clearly there is an issue with the idea that our food intake is something which we can just instinctively manage by ourselves without conscious thought. We are naturally driven to eat and when we do, to eat more. We are attracted to foods which are the most calorie dense and we are living in a food environment so far removed from the one we evolved in, that we just aren’t equipped to deal with it. What we need is a means of methodically and deliberately serving ourselves the correct amount of food for a given situation and goal, reliably. It may be possible for those looking to gain weight to do this simply by using their hunger to drive them but for losing weight or even maintaining it, it’s fraught with issues.
Historically the advice for weight loss has simply been to ‘eat less’ which logically makes sense because, as we’ve discussed at length, eating less is what people need to do, but on closer inspection the idea is far from airtight.
The reason for this is that it’s almost impossible to eat the same foods in a calorie restricted setting for a long enough period to lose appreciable weight, especially for those who – through genetics or their psychosocial history, find it very difficult to control their consumption of hyper-palatable foods. That’s not to say this cannot be done because thermodynamic laws are undeniable and if someone consumes less energy than they expend while consuming all of the macro and micronutrients that they need then they will almost certainly be very close to as healthy as they can be. Of course, they will also reach a healthy weight over time.
The problem comes with putting that into practice.
Because of the hyper-palatability of foods which we mentioned earlier there is always going to be a strong drive to overeat. Sure, you can lose weight and maintain it by eating ⅓ of a pizza, but that’s going to be hard to do, and if you think you’ll be able to eat ½ of a bag of crisps instead of the whole share bag for the rest of your days, then you are sorely mistaken.
Going beyond hyper-palatability, we need to consider energy density and the impact which a food has on satiety. Satiation is a term used to describe the satisfaction which you experience by fulfilling a basic need. When you eat after being hungry you are not happy in the same way as you would be if you just found out you won the lottery, or you just beat someone at a game. Rather you are back to a level and ‘not in need’ anymore.
This pleasant experience, as you know, lasts for a given amount of time and then you get hungry again, and the amount of food you need to reach it along with the amount of time which satiety hangs around both hinge in part on the foods that you eat. Quite simply and following basic fundamentals of which you’re probably already aware, it takes longer to get full when eating biscuits than it does when you’re eating potatoes, and you stay fuller for a lot longer after eating a large ham and mushroom omelette than you do after a bowl of crunchy cereal. What this short section should tell you is that even within the basic calorie balance and nutrient requirement model, there are still better and worse food choices and better and worse ways by which you can consume those nutrients/calories.
As we will discuss in the next module, ‘junk’ can make up a small part of a diet without impacting your weight or (importantly) your health, but that’s something we’ll cover when we come to it. For now, we are going to look to the first consideration of choosing how much to eat – choosing what to eat.