The Satiety Diet (How to Lose Fat Without Fighting Hunger) | Ep 473
What does a fat loss diet look like when you build it around satiety (fullness) instead of restriction or willpower?
The answer is based on the biology of post-diet hunger, 5 satiety levers that decide how full you are after a meal, and the targets you can set at your next meal.
Most fat loss attempts fall apart around week 5 or 6. The reason is rarely willpower. Hunger is a measurable physiological state that intensifies the longer and harder you diet, and most nutrition plans don't account for it.
This episode covers a study on hunger hormones that stayed disrupted a full year after dieting, the five satiety levers, from how calorie-dense your food is to how fast you eat it, and a simple way to audit your own meals for fullness without counting every calorie. It is built for adults over 40, especially women navigating perimenopause and menopause, who lift weights and want to lose fat in a way you can sustain
Ready to build a fat loss diet around fullness instead of willpower? Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to lose fat, build muscle, and manage their physique for life.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Hunger as the price of fat loss
3:11 - Hunger as a biological signal
5:30 - Hormones a year after a diet ends
9:06 - Engineering a diet for fullness
9:54 - Energy density and food volume
12:58 - Protein and spontaneous calorie intake
15:01 - Viscous fiber and gut hormones
17:20 - Eating rate and fullness
19:58 - Hyper-palatable foods and the supermarket
23:09 - How to design your satiety diet
24:45 - Satiety targets per meal and per day
27:18 - 2-to-3 swap rule for your worst meals
32:07 - Bonus: 200-calorie reality check
Episode Resources:
Download my favorite nutrition app MacroFactor and use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for an extended 2-week free trial
-
Hunger as the price of fat loss
Philip Pape 0:00
You've probably heard that along with fat loss comes some level of hunger, and that you have to sit with it sometimes, sometimes you have to push through, and it is the price of admission. I've seen many fat loss attempts fail because of this willing acceptance for hunger. And today I want to walk you through what a fat loss diet looks like when you instead design it around fullness. There are five big satiety levers that the research tells us can really, really help when it comes to adherence with your diet, which ultimately is the thing that will make you successful. So we're gonna go over that, the specific targets that you can hit at your next meal, and a 200-calorie reality check that's gonna change how you evaluate what is on your plate. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, founder of the Fitness Lab app, and today's episode comes from basically a lot of the misunderstandings I see relative to fat loss phases and appetite. If you're over 40, especially, if you're a woman in the perimenopause or post-menopause transition, you've probably run the following experiment. You decide to lose fat, you of course cut calories to go in a deficit, you have some level of discipline for the first few weeks, you're motivated, and then maybe around weeks five or six, the hunger starts to increase more and more. It gets really loud. You start thinking about or even obsessing about food more than you want to, and then you start to slip. You eat a little bit extra at night, maybe you sneak in a snack here or there. Maybe the foods that you go for are a little bit more calorie dense than you anticipated. And then it starts to stall or push back or slow down your fat loss phase or end it all together. And on one hand, yes, you should have some level of feeling of hunger or some appetite because your body is trying to draw from its energy stores, from its fat cells. And there's going to be hunger that comes along with that. There are a lot of hormonal changes that occur. But also, we shouldn't look at hunger as this like character test, you know, that we like, okay, you've just got to be in this massive level of hunger. That means it's working. That's the thing I hear all the time. It means it's working. This is a measurable physiological state that you should be in that scales with how long and how aggressive a deficit is. And that's fine, but why don't we work with that as best as possible and minimize the effects? Because a lot of you, the way you're eating, whether you're in a fat loss or not, is not really contributing toward the most satisfy or high satiety, I should say, full diet that will make fat loss a bit easier. And by easier, I mean not just that you get through and adhere. That's obviously very important, but you can manipulate the variables, like how aggressively you can go, and maybe you can then shorten the duration because you've made it a little bit easier on yourself, let alone some of the more aggressive experiments like a rapid fat loss phase, which we're gonna be covering in an upcoming episode as we revisit that topic.
Hunger as a biological signal
Philip Pape 3:11
So we're doing three things today. First, the actual biology of post-diet hunger, including a study where people were still hungrier and had altered hormones 12 months after the diet ended. Second, we're gonna talk about the five satiety levers. These are the big variables that research pops up when we think about why do some meals leave us full for many hours and some just don't satisfy us. And then that's when we lead to the midnight snacking or what have you. And then third, we're gonna give you some practical targets that you can set or target or audit for your next meal. I'm not talking about calories, macros, I'm talking about around satiety. And then at the end of this episode, I'm gonna share a 200-calorie reality check. These are just some different foods that are 200 calories each, so you can compare in your head differences in calorie density and nutrient density that will help you with fullness because that's the principle of all of this. All right, so let's start with the framing here that okay, fat loss requires hunger. Eat less, move more, push through the discomfort. You need to be in calorie deficit, energy balance, all that's great. And yet you've heard me talk about the value of behavior change where discipline and willpower are very difficult things to rely on and motivation, right? We don't want to have that. We want to kind of engineer our approach to work with the reality of the situation rather than trying to push through the reality. So when you treat hunger like a thing you have to have and a hat you you have to expect it during fat loss, it also becomes its own moral signal, which is interesting, right? Sometimes we talk about food as good or bad, but also I've heard I've seen on social media talking about hunger as like it's a sign of weakness if you can't outlast your hunger because that's necessary for the fat to come off. Now, this isn't always the framing. A lot of the framing is actually quite the opposite, like, oh, you're not gonna have any hunger at all, and you could lose fat so easily. Well, I think that does a disservice as well. Uh, but but hunger is not a moral thing either. It's just a biological output of your energy state, driven largely by hormones, driven by some other things, but primarily by hormones. And that it gets louder and louder the more that you restrict and the longer you restrict. It's a feedback signal. And for some of you, it's stronger than
Hormones a year after a diet ends
Philip Pape 5:30
others, right? We have brain-related genes. This is why the GLP1s, for some people, when they go off with them, they immediately go back to their prior behavior. And for others, it kind of they can titrate off or even change their behavior while on them. But anyway, I want to share a study with you. Okay, this is Smithran or Sumithran and their colleagues out of the University of Melbourne. And this is published in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 2011, so about 15 years ago. And it's it's a phenomenal piece of work, in my opinion. They took 50 overweight adults, put them on a 10-week diet, and they lost about 13 kilograms on average. Okay, so far, so good. Then they followed them for a full year. And what they found at the 12 months mark after the diet, a year after the diet ended, was almost every hormone that regulates hunger was still abnormal. So ghrelin, the hunger hormone, was still elevated. Leptin, the fullness and energy storage hormone, was still lower, uh, peptide YY, GLP1, cholecysokinin, all the natural satiety signals were all depressed from their previous state. And also the subjective hunger ratings were much higher than they were before the diet started. So that's 12 months after the diet. Now you think about that, the body was still acting like it was being starved, and the hunger wasn't going away. And these were people who were not actively dieting anymore, right? So this is interesting because it's a measurable state of biology, your biology or physiology that could seem to persist after a deficit ends. There's another piece of research I want to share here. It's Rosenbaum and Libel, and this is at Columbia University. And they've been doing some good obesity research for maybe the last three decades. They did some fMRI research that showed that your brain's response to food images literally changes after weight loss, where the reward regions light up more, the prefrontal uh control parts of the brain that say, like, you know, no thanks, I'm full, I'm I'm good, light up less. So when you've lost weight and then you, you know, go back, go past that bakery that you like the cannolis from, and I'm not talking from personal experience, am I? Uh, it's not that you've also be all of a sudden become weaker or something. It's that your brain is processing that smell of those foods with a little bit of a different signal than before. And when in the study they gave leptin to restore the leptin to pre-diet levels, the patterns normalize. So it was the biology, it was the hormones driving the behavior. Now you're like, oh my gosh, that means I shouldn't go into a fat loss phase. I shouldn't diet, I shouldn't lose weight, because then it's gonna be worse. Well, no. What do we do with this information? Obviously, you can lose fat. People do it all the time. I've worked, I've worked with people all the time, clients, people and eat more lift heavy that lose it, and they're actually far better off than when they started, both from a health perspective, but also in managing things like their hunger signals. What I am saying is that just trying to fight willpower is not gonna help you long term when other things are amplifying your hunger all the time, sleep, stress, changes to hormones and things. So I think the best move here is to design your diet so that you trigger less hunger per calorie of deficit in the first place, and you normalize these things and eat in a way in your diet that you would eat not in a diet. The only difference being some of these things are scaled down. Calories are scaled down, maybe a protein scaled up, maybe carbs are scaled way down during a diet, just to, you know, be in the proper energy
Engineering a diet for fullness
Philip Pape 9:06
balance. So if you want to engineer a diet for fullness, the question becomes so this is the title of the episode the satiety diet. What are the variables you have to manipulate? When you look at satiety research from the last 30 years, and I'll tell you, listening to a lot of other experts on this over the past couple years, it's very difficult to tease apart real conclusions. Let's just put it that way. It's it's a mess. Okay. But there are there's been a lot of activity in the last even five years that we can maybe look at. And it seems like five things I'm gonna talk about today really move the needle the most. And those five things are energy density, protein, viscous fiber, the rate at which you eat, and then what we call hyperpalatability. So we're gonna focus on those five
Energy density and food volume
Philip Pape 9:54
things. All right. So the first one is energy density, and this is the calories per gram of food. How many calories are packed in the same volume of food? Barbara Rolls at Penn State, she has been this, I guess, volumetrics person when we talk about volume, volumetrics for decades, really. She built this stream of research, what I'd call the seminal stream of research here. The bottom line is that humans eat to a relatively fixed weight of food per day. Interesting, right? Like we tend to want to eat the same quantity, physical quantity of food. We don't eat to a calorie target. We eat to a volume target, which means, by definition, hey, if you can lower the energy density of what's going in your mouth, what's on your plate, you can eat the same physical amount of food and ingest fewer calories without feeling deprived. Okay. Many of you are like, yeah, I've heard that before, or I know that. That's that seems to make sense. Well, what am I going to do in this modern food environment, right? No. So when we look at specific numbers, very low energy density would be considered less than 0.6 calories per gram. So what is that? Most non-starchy vegetables, that would be broth-based soups. That'd be fruits like melon and strawberries. That's very low energy. That's why I think broth-based soups, for example, are great during fat loss, you know, vegetable soups, fruits like berries. Okay. Then that's a very low. Now, low is 0.6 to 1.5. So that would include fruits, starchy vegetables, low-fat dairy, beans, whole grains, like cooked whole grains, lean meats. So now we're we're expanding to a lot of the wonderful, delicious whole foods we love to eat that include carbs, fats, or carbs and protein primarily, and a little bit of fat in there, but not much. Okay. So then medium energy density, we get up to one and a half to four calories per gram. This would be like the typical Western diet sandwich and meat and cheese zone. Okay. So you're starting to introduce more fats, more fatty forms of the different foods, higher fat dairy, you know, meats, et cetera. Then high energy density is like four to nine calories per gram. Now we're talking about processed foods like crackers, chips, cookies, but also whole foods like nuts and chocolate, which are very energy energy dense. And then the most energy dense is like pure oils, so pure fats and butter and things like that. That's nine calories per gram, which is just fat. Okay. Fat is nine calories per gram. So like a pure fat source is gonna be, by definition, the most energy dense. So if your daily average for your whole meals or your whole uh food log for the day is two to two and a half calories per gram, then you're gonna be eating a small physical amount of food for your calorie budget versus if it's like closer to one to two, right? And hopefully you're if you're and if you're sitting much higher than that, then then you've really got low-hanging fruit, pun intended, to go after here, right? And so these all matter because of things like stretch receptors and your gut hormones. So that's the first big lever, is simply energy density. Lever
Protein and spontaneous calorie intake
Philip Pape 12:58
two is protein, protein percentage. Now I know what you're thinking. You're like, okay, I lift weights, I already eat my protein. This isn't new. I hear about protein all the time. But I want to talk about the satiety data specifically here, okay? Let alone all the other benefits of protein, which we're going to have an episode soon about some counterintuitive aspects of protein, like, hey, you might be able to actually eat more protein, all things equal, and not gain weight or fat and actually lose fat. Anyway, that's beside the point. Let's talk about satiety. So there's a study by Wagel and colleagues in 2005. They took people from a normal diet at like 15% protein. You know, most people don't get very much protein, and they bumped them to 30% protein. But they said you could eat whatever you want, you just have to hit the protein. So all they're tracking is protein, hit your protein. Their spontaneous calorie intake dropped by 441 calories a day without any conscious restriction. The body just said, hey, I don't need as much food. I don't need as much food because you increased your protein. Now, if you look at the average American, you know, at around 15% of calories from protein, that's like the control group that was inadequate. So for many of you, if you're not deliberately upping your protein already, then this is a big lever. Okay. And the practical target we often talk about here is 0.7 to 1 grams per pound of body weight. But 0.7 is more than sufficient for most people, for the average person. If you like to eat more, if you want to eat more, if you can't eat more, go for it. Nothing wrong with it, unless it's so high that it crowds out carbs or fat. But it tends to be kind of on an average diet, eh, 30% of your calories. We don't think percentages for protein. I usually tell you, you know, grams per pound because it's gonna depend on your body size and your goal. But aiming for 30 to 40 grams per meal is usually the way to get there. And we often see that front loading that at breakfast can give you extra benefits. There's also the benefits of, you know, how much leucine you have and hitting muscle protein synthesis and all that. But all I care about here is total protein. Okay, so that's a good one to just to re uh iterate.
Viscous fiber and gut hormones
Philip Pape 15:01
Lever three is interesting. It's viscous fiber, viscous fiber, not just any fiber. Okay, we're talking about a high satiety diet, viscous fiber. Now, this is fiber that thickens the water in your gut. So this would be oats and beta glucan, which beans, legumes, uh, psyllium. You know, some of you actually do use cilium husk as a supplement, chia seeds, flax seeds. Okay. A 2019 meta-analysis by Sally and colleagues looked at the effect sizes of different soluble fibers on subsequent calorie intake. Guar gum had an effect size of negative 0.96, which is actually huge. Beta glucan was negative 0.42, pectin was negative 0.22. So you don't have to understand exactly what that means, just that they are highly correlated with reducing how much you eat subsequently. And when we look at the mechanism, viscous fiber slows the rate at which food empties from your stomach. So it slows gastric emptying, as they call it, and therefore your stomach stays full longer. It also slows the rise of blood glucose. Again, we've talked about eating more balanced meals that include fiber, and that tends to slow down your increase of blood sugar in addition to walking after meals. So as it ferments in your colon, it produces short-chain fatty acids that trigger your gut to release more GOP1, more peptide peptide YY. These are your natural fullness hormones. You know, the GOP1. We know that is the same thing that weight loss drugs are trying to replicate. And again, again, we we don't want to compare them to the drugs. The drugs are far more powerful in terms of the dose. But the average American gets not very much fiber at all, about I think 10 to 15 grams of fiber a day. And we want you at 25 to 40, you know, more for men than women, just due to size and how much you eat. And if you could aim for, let's say, eight to 15 of those from viscous sources, like if you want to be very specific based on this tip in your high satiety diet, look at foods that have higher viscous fiber and make those a per uh a good chunk of the fiber you get every day, not to mention increasing fiber in general. Don't do it overnight. If you get low fiber, don't go from low to super high. That could be not great on your gut. You know, titrate it up over, let's say, a
Eating rate and fullness
Philip Pape 17:20
week. All right, lever four is eating rate, how fast you eat, how fast food enters your body. And this is wildly underrated. And for those of us who love to shovel food down our mouths or love to eat while watching TV or looking at our phone or not eat mindfully, listen up because this could be your biggest lever. Ford and colleagues, they took pooled data across 327 foods and they found that unprocessed foods, so unprocessed foods are eaten at about 35 calories a minute, whereas processed foods are eating eaten at 54 calories a minute. Ultra processed foods at 69 calories per minute. So an ultra-processed meal will be eaten and go into your body twice as fast as a whole food meal. Why does that matter? Probably a little bit obvious, but let's get into it. Your gut takes about 20 to 30 minutes to send a fullness signal to your brain, like a true hey, I am full. Okay. If you front load 800 calories in like 12 minutes, then you're not gonna get that signal until you're already done eating, and now you're thinking of dessert. Okay. So this could this is gonna hit on both mindful eating and calorie density that we already talked about. There's a 2024 crossover trial out of Japan by Habano and colleagues, where they fed people the same calories and macros, same protein, fat, carbs, but in one week the food was ultra-processed, and in the other week it wasn't. So on the ultra-processed week, people ate 813 calories a day. So that's that's a lot of food, just you know, we're talking about the the one meal. And the mechanism behind that was the chewing frequency. There was fewer, there was less chewing, faster eating, and so they consumed more food. So the the lever here for you is really texture, solid versus liquid, intact food versus I'll say pureed or processed food, fibrous versions of food, whole grains and such versus refined foods. And then the mindful eating part as well, like setting your fork down between bites and not being distracted while you're eating. You know, I'm sorry, these are boring, like long-tested pieces of advice, but they're gonna work for slowing down your eating and increasing your fullness just from that. And look, when you're in fat loss and you're not eating very big meals, maybe not even as many meals, wouldn't it be nice to just actually enjoy what you're eating and not just scarf it down and be like, okay, now the hunger starts to hit and I'm trying to lose fat? So it's a very important one.
Hyper-palatable foods and the supermarket
Philip Pape 19:58
The last lever here for a high satiety diet is hyper palatabil hyper palatability. And this kind of overlaps the most of what people think of as junk food and highly processed food, but I want to be careful here because hyper palatable foods, okay, that's a term, I think it comes from Terra Focino at the University of Kansas, based on what I could discover. Hyperpalatable foods are foods that combine fat with sugar, fat with salt, or carbs with salt at specific concentration thresholds, right? Hence they are super palatable. They're so super delicious. Okay, we're we're separating this out from calorie density, which was lever one, even though there can be some overlap here. About 62% of items in the US food supply meet the definition of ult of hyper palatable. Okay, that's 62%, that's like two-thirds of what's in the supermarket, which isn't surprising if you go into a supermarket, but it's still insane. And when we talk about the food environment and engineered foods and the nutrition science and all that behind all this stuff, where the foods are engineered deliberately to bypass your fullness signals. And I think they're trying to even amp that up further since people are eating less on GLP1s, you know, without going into conspiracy theorists, capitalism and the drive to, you know, give people something that's delicious so they buy more of it. I mean, if we buy it, they're gonna make it, is what it comes down to. I'm not gonna blame them. If we're gonna buy it, they're gonna make it. Now, there's been research that that looks at, you know, when you control for energy density, that was lever number one, and then hyperpalatability, hyper palatability, it's not that foods are labeled as ultra-processed that's the problem. It's how it's engineered, one food's engineered versus the other. So, for example, some ultra processed foods are low in energy density and they're not hyperpalatable. And so I put them under the, I'll say, fine condition from a satiety perspective. And then some so called whole foods, whole foods like trail mix or granola are densely caloric. They have a lot of calories and they're engineered for palatability. And they will absolutely get past your fullness signals and you can eat too much of them very easily, which honestly is why people seek them out for going on a hike and having a lot of energy on your hike. It's easy to eat, doesn't fill you up too much, and you get a lot of calories. So if you're trying to lose fat, if you're trying to control for that, you've just got to be aware of hyper palatability in particular, independent of whether it's an ultra-processed food. So those are your five levers: energy density, protein, viscous fiber, rate of eating, and hyperpalatability. Palatability. Now, two meals with the exact same calories can produce wildly different hunger depending on how they score on these variables. A 500-calorie burger and fries versus a 500-calorie, say, chicken, beans, sweet potato vegetable plate are probably going to feel different. You're going to probably be hungry after the burger and fries. I mean, anybody who's ever eaten Chinese food probably feels hungry like an hour later. All right. So before I move into the practical fix here, I want to address something because I know what you're thinking.
How to design your satiety diet
Philip Pape 23:09
You're like, okay, this sounds great, but how do I figure out where my current diet falls on these levers? What do I do? How do I know if my protein percentage is where it needs to be, my average energy density, the hyperballiathy, all that? Well, I do want to mention something that we have. It's a program called Eat More Lift Heavy. It's 26 weeks of skill by skill by skill. And in phase one, we actually set up how you measure these things. Not just calories and macros, but measuring your fiber and energy density and really comparing it to some other things going on, including your biofeedback, like your hunger. And we don't, you don't have to track all of these things and look at all of them. All you have to do is log your food, compare it to how you're feeling, and see where the correlations might be, and then start to tweak the right variables. So that's something we help you with. Obviously, you can do these things on your own if you, you know, apply all these systems, if you have a system, but we give you that system. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. Um, you get human coaching in there. Carol and I are inside providing coaching. There's live calls. There's the one focus per week that you learn and apply and get accountability from. And we help you become independent when it comes to these things. And I'm all about that. That is my mission is to help teach all of you to become independent in this world without having to become a nutrition scientist. So go to eatmorliftheavy.com. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. By the way, when you go in there, you'll see there's something called dialed in, which is closer to a personalized one-on-one coaching experience we have as well. And honestly, I think it's far more affordable than typical,
Satiety targets per meal and per day
Philip Pape 24:45
a typical one-on-one coach because of the systems and tools we put in place. So go to eatmore liftheavy.com. All right, so now we have the five levers. How do you use them? I'm gonna give you some specific targets for these, and then you can decide. You know, do you want to track all of these? Do you want to go after one at a time? That's generally what I would recommend. Do you already know which one is the biggest lever that you could attack right now? So let's talk about the meal level for the targets. I would say 30 to 40 grams of protein per meal, eight to 12 grams of fiber per meal is gonna take you very far. And within that fiber, per today's episode, some of that being viscous fiber, like maybe aim for half of it to be viscous. So that the total energy density is ideally under one and a half calories per gram. You're like, I've got to do math. It's pretty simple. Like log it in your in your tracker. I love to use macrofactor. Please, if you want to support the show, download macro factor and use my code WIT's and weights, all one word, and you get your a nutrition summary there, and you can easily tell how many calories per gram based on the total gram weight of the food. And you don't have to do this every time. I would say do it occasionally to kind of audit yourself. Also, slow the rate you eat and don't have a ton of hyperpalatable foods, even though you can have some, because again, we don't demonize any particular foods on this show. There is no one bad food on the planet, not seed oils, not sugar, not any gluten, none of that. Okay. And we talked about that on a recent episode. Now, what about at the daily level? So that's at the meal level. You know, at the daily level, it really comes down more to your macros. Are you getting enough protein? Are you getting that 0.701 grams per pound? Are you getting enough fat? For many people, that's 20 to 30 percent of their calories, the rest of their calories from carbs. And then specifically within those carbs, are you getting a good chunk of fiber, 25 to 40 grams of fiber, depending on how much you need, and 8 to 15 of those as viscous. So that's on a daily level, which again, you could do it at the meal level, the daily level, whatever makes sense for you. This is something we help help you analyze on an individual basis and eat more lift heavy if you need that kind of support. But you're looking for the average daily energy density of your food, again, in that like 0.8 to 1.5 calories per gram range. And of course, you got to have enough sleep because I know we didn't even talk about that, and I was hesitant to do so, but sleep is gonna actually affect hunger a lot, a lot. All right, so the rule to apply this,
2-to-3 swap rule for your worst meals
Philip Pape 27:18
okay. I don't want you to get overwhelmed and panic that you gotta do this every single meal, every day, all the time. There's something what I call the two to three swap rule. Okay. Two to three swap rule. Audit your current diet, just audit it. Find the two or three meals that score the worst on these levers. So if you if you log for like a week, you've got probably 21 or more meals to choose from. And there's probably a few that you know are just like not as great when it comes to these things, like maybe they have a lot more fat or processed foods or something. And find the two or three worst meals. Heck, you could probably use AI now. Take the macrofactor export, throw it into AI and say, hey, do what Philip just suggested for me. Okay. And for many of you, it's gonna be breakfast where you've got like a granola bar with like the processed yogurt that doesn't have much protein, right? Or a lot of sugar in it or whatever. And again, sugar's not bad. It's just what crowds out what. Maybe it's a snack, right? So, hey, you went for a bag of crackers because they're sitting on the counter. Maybe it's lunch where you have a sandwich. We have our habits, don't we? We have our habits. So find the two or three meals and just replace those with versions that hit these different targets, right? If you're already eating great dinners, like maybe it's fish and some grains and vegetables, it's fine, right? Pick the worst ones and just upgrade them. That's how you kind of slowly shift the whole thing where you want to be. We're adding then the things you want. We're not saying what you have to cut out. So, a concrete example is like if you have this granola bar at breakfast or something equivalent of it, where it's hardly any protein, it's a ton of sugar, it's easy to consume super quickly. Well, swap that one out. Take a couple scrambled eggs with cottage cheese. And when I say with cottage cheese, oh, it's so great to combine them. Delicious, you'll get fluffy, almost like cheesy eggs with a lot more protein, or you can add egg whites, or you can have the cottage cheese on the side. I don't care. However, you want to eat it, and then a piece of fruit, for example. Right? We're talking about swaps here. We're not talking about going perfect and ideal or optimizing. No, we're just talking about swaps. And it's the same amount of calories, but now you've gone from, say, four grams of protein to 30 grams of protein. You've put in something that you have to chew, you've got some fiber from the fruit, the energy density of the meal drops. Now you hit like four of the five levers and you didn't add any calories. Now, sometimes you might add calories. So what? As I mentioned before, sometimes when you add protein, you actually consume fewer calories later in the day because of the satiety. So that's that's a big piece. And then the last thing I want to mention for this is like your mental model each day. Are you comfortably full? Particularly when you're at maintenance calories, like when you're not in a deficit. And then once you've got that set up successfully, I would do that before you ever you do a fat loss phase. Then in a fat loss phase, you probably have some mild hunger per meals between meals, which is fine. That's your biology, but it would be less than it would otherwise. And or it allows you to gain maybe go maybe more aggressively on the on the fat loss phase because now you can handle a little a little bit more hunger, if that makes sense. Right. If you're feeling ravenous though, especially if you're not in fat loss, I mean, let alone in fat loss, go through the questions and ask yourself again about protein and fiber and the you know calorie density and how fast you ate and and then other things like did you sleep enough, et cetera. Okay. All right, before we wrap up, I told you at the beginning of the episode I was gonna give you a 200-calorie reality check. And I'm gonna do that in just a second. But again, if if everything I described today felt useful, but maybe a little overwhelming, that is the problem that we solve with eat more lift heavy. And I'm really serious about this. I'm very genuine about this because we used to have a program where people would come in and be overwhelmed. And I feel like a lot of people working with one-on-one coaches sometimes feel overwhelmed because on day one, they're like, you've got to increase your steps, you have to train, you have to increase your protein, you have to do this, this, this, this. I prefer an approach where each week you focus on one small thing and build it up slowly over time so that the fast approach is the slow approach, if that makes sense. In other words, taking a reasonable skill-building approach results in long-term success and sustaining what you're trying to do. So eat more lift heavy. If you go to eatmoriftheavy.com, you can read all about it. No pressure to sign up, just check it out. It's a 26-week guided coaching program. And in the very first phase, this is where we help you set up the measurement system. Figure out, hey, where does my current diet actually fall across the levers that we covered? Some are relevant to you, some less so. And then you start to execute to that and build and build and build. You start to master your protein, you start to understand your patterns, you know how to get around plateaus, how to get the fat loss, whether you're going for 10 to 20 pounds of fat loss, how to see your muscle definition, and so on. Okay, eatmorliftheavy.com. Go to eatmorliftheavy.com. All right, so here is the 200 calorie reality check.
Bonus: 200-calorie reality check
Philip Pape 32:07
We are going to give you five foods that are all 200 calories, so you can visually in your mind or on a plate compare them so you see the difference in energy density and chewability, okay, which are a couple of the levers we talked about. So, 200 calories, what does that look like? That is a full pound of strawberries or half kilogram of strawberries. Takes you like 15 minutes to chew a pound of strawberries. Okay, I wanted to start right there just to kind of set the baseline. Similarly, broccoli, what about broccoli? What does 200 calories look like? That's five cups of broccoli. I mean, I almost never, ever, ever have 200 calories of broccoli on my plate. If there's broccoli for dinner, if I cook it or my wife cooks it, it's almost hardly hardly any of the calories in there. In fact, more calories probably come from the little bit of olive oil we baked it in. So five cups of broccoli to 200 calories, you probably would distend your stomach and you wouldn't even eat that much. But I'm just, you know, giving you it as an example. Potatoes, three medium boiled potatoes. Now, think about you ever cook potatoes, you know, and you chop them up. Imagine three of those big suckers, you eat them. Okay. By the way, this is the highest scoring food on the satiety index. So you would be stuffed, and that's only 200 calories. Now, what about almonds? Well, okay, 200 calories is only two ounces of almonds. So that's a very small handful. Chomp, chomp, chomp, you're done. All right. Now, I always think about tree nuts and the fact that like our ancestors would have to actually pick them and like shell them and all that, which would slow things down. But we don't do that. We just buy them all ready to go, salted often, sometimes dipped in chocolate, and boom, in your mouth. And you can you can apply that to peanut butter as well. Like 200 calories of peanut butter is just a tiny amount. And then finally, olive oil, tablespoon and a half of olive oil. All right. So that's not a surprise. And olive oil is great, but a little goes a long way. And so you've got to be aware of these calories. Um, and sometimes set things like salad dressings and sauces are full of oils, so they're very energy dense. So that's 200 calories visualized across some very different amounts of uh foods, some that would make you really full, some of them you would hardly notice, like the almonds or the oil. And really that's the premise of the satiety diet in just like a minute. It's the same energy coming in, but it's a way different level of fullness. And that can be the game changer for you when it comes to fat loss. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, hunger is just engineering your diet and working with your signals. It's not a matter of morality or character or gutting it through. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
