The Mango Binge
One night, I ate an entire 10 ounce (284g) bag of sliced frozen mangoes. It was a lot of fruit, and it was delicious. I thought, “I really overdid it,” until I looked at the bag and saw I had eaten only 200 calories! A single 52.7g Snickers bar contains 250 calories. The bag of mangoes is more than five times heavier than the Snicker’s bar, and yet the bar still has 25% more calories!
You can’t just blame the calorie difference on the higher fat content in the Snicker’s bar, either. Avocados get 82% of their calories from fat, and yet a 150g serving of avocado only amounts to 240 calories, which makes it three times heavier, almost all fat, and still fewer calories than a Snicker’s bar. The difference is due to calorie density and water content. Psychologically, it might feel more indulgent to eat an entire 10 ounce bag of mangoes than a single candy bar, but it’s fewer calories and more nutrients.
Aside from the hassle of counting calories to make sure you starve yourself precisely, it’s unnecessary. Whole foods will always possess the greatest satiety-to-calorie ratio, meaning there’s no need to count calories if you eat the right foods. (If you think zero-calorie “diet foods” possess the greatest satiety-to-calorie ratio, you aren’t considering their medium- and long-term effects on appetite.)
Calorie counting has become the most popular way to pretend unhealthy eating is a viable path to weight loss. They say you can eat junk food as long as it’s below your calorie requirement. Since processed food is typically high calorie and not satiating, people who count calories as a means to justify a poor diet may end up semi-starved at the end of the day, and semi-starvation diets end in weight gain.
Calorie counting is like landing a cheap shot on a bigger and stronger fighter. You may catch him off guard and stun him for a moment, but once he regains his composure and figures out what's going on, you're toast.
Tracking how much food you eat, mindfulness, and eating in moderation are redeeming aspects of calorie counting, but the associated notion of all calories being equal is so inaccurate and devastating to progress that we need to throw the whole concept away. You can practice eating in moderation without counting calories. Satiety is nature’s way of counting calories for you.
Satiety
Satiety is the feeling of being satisfied; in laymen’s terms, it’s not being hungry and having little to no desire to eat food.
Satiety collapses the calorie-counting argument by itself, because if calorie counting were the answer, the number of calories we ate would directly correlate to how full and satiated we felt. But that’s not the case. Some foods actually stoke our hunger while others satiate us. Calorie counting fails because it doesn’t consider satiety, and if you’re chronically not satiated and have access to food, you’ll make up the calorie deficit eventually (I’d put money on it)!
One could argue that satiety is most important in weight loss, because if you eat food that leads to weight loss and you’re completely satisfied on a biological level, you have a good chance to win the fight in the long term. There are other factors that affect our food consumption, but the first, most basic goal to get right is satiety. How can we feel full and satisfied with what we eat AND lose weight? Is that even possible? Yes, and you’ll see why with a few examples.
Since it’s difficult to measure satiety directly and technically, we can use the mass of food as a starting point, since part of satiety is dictated by how much space food takes up in your stomach. This is the concept behind bariatric surgery, which makes your stomach much smaller so that you feel full faster and don’t eat as much food. A safer alternative to surgically making your stomach smaller is to eat food that fills you up on fewer calories. Just for fun, let’s compare some foods’ calorie content to their mass. This will give you an idea of how much more satiating natural foods are.
Count These Calories
Half of a standard 8 oz bag of chips weighs about 100g and contains 536 calories. While that’s a lot of chips, it’s not difficult to eat that many in one sitting. Despite their high calorie content, chips do a poor job of making you feel full, and studies suggest that such high-fat, high-carb, high-energy processed foods may even trigger us to eat more food.39
Instead of that 100g half-bag of chips, you could eat 224g of chicken, which is highly satiating and more than twice as much food as the chips. You could try to eat 483g of brown rice (more than one pound). Or how about broccoli? Oh, I don’t think you’re ready for broccoli. If you thought chicken and rice were extreme compared to chips, this is going to stun you.
Instead of half a bag of chips, you could eat 1,000g (2.2 pounds) of broccoli for the same number of calories. I’m kidding. It’s not 1,000g of broccoli, but not because it’s too high. It’s too low! That massive amount of broccoli—more than ten times the weight of the chips—is still not even close to the calorie content in half a bag of chips; 1,000g of broccoli would only set you back 340 calories! To eat enough broccoli to equal the number of calories in half a bag of chips, you’d have to eat 1,576g of it. That’s right, 3.5 pounds of broccoli is equivalent in calories to half a bag of chips. Good luck trying to eat that much broccoli in five days, let alone one session.
What about strawberries? To equal the amount of calories in half a bag of chips, you’d have to eat 3.6 pounds of strawberries (1,624 grams). That means for a full bag of chips or a typical fast food meal,40 the equivalent calorie value would be 7.2 pounds of strawberries. I’m not making this up. This information is available on the USDA website for anyone to see.
But it’s the sugar in strawberries that’s problematic, right? Eh, not really, as 3.6 pounds of strawberries only contains 79.6 grams of sugar. That’s much less than one 32 oz soda, and you’d have to eat 3.6 pounds of them to consume that much sugar.
CICO teaches you to think, “Oh, this small bag of chips is only 160 calories.” It’s a flawed perspective, because it throws processed food into the discussion as a viable option for weight loss, when it is the primary cause of the global obesity epidemic. When it comes to bang for your calorie buck, you won’t beat natural foods (and we’ll talk about low-calorie processed foods soon).
Many would agree that the single worst part of dieting and calorie counting is hunger. But if you eat the right foods, you can easily eat fewer calories without feeling hungry. A 2016 study found “the more food is processed, the higher the glycemic response and the lower its satiety potential.”41
For breakfast, I’ll sometimes eat three hard-boiled eggs (150g) and drink water. It’s quite filling for a small breakfast eater like me. At 78 calories per egg, I don’t exceed 250 calories at breakfast. A 2008 study found that an egg breakfast enhanced weight loss, with a 61% greater reduction in BMI (Body Mass Index) than a group that ate bagels for breakfast.42
We don’t need studies to tell us that eggs are satiating per calorie; we can also deduce that from the fact that they are a single ingredient, minimally processed food.
The Satiety Deception
We deceive ourselves when we compare the size of processed food and whole foods and conclude that “whole foods aren’t as filling.” This is exactly the opposite of the truth. Whole foods are many times more filling than processed foods per calorie.
“I’d eat salads, but I’m still hungry afterwards.” I’m sure you’ve heard or said this statement before. Here’s the problem: that salad you just ate is probably about 20% of the calories of your typical meal. That’s like saying, “I’d eat one taco instead of three tacos, but it’s not as filling.” If you’re hungry, you didn’t eat enough. Eat more salad or other food if you’re still hungry.
“Stuffing yourself” on healthy food still results in a low-calorie meal. A study found the average restaurant meal contained 1,327 calories.43 Let’s see what kind of healthy meal we could create with that many calories.
Half a pound of chicken (227g): 542 calories
One pound of boiled potatoes (454g): 395 calories
Two pounds of spinach (907g): 209 c
alories
Three pounds of green leaf lettuce (1,360g): 204 calories
Total from 6.5 pounds of food (2,948g): 1,350 calories
Okay, so we went slightly over the average calorie content of a restaurant meal. Oh, but this is 6.5 pounds of food. You don’t need to fear overeating or being hungry if you’re eating truly healthy foods. I even included some (relatively) high-calorie foods like chicken and potatoes, but these foods make up for it in satiety. Potatoes ranked as the most satiating food in the satiety index.44
Don’t misinterpret this data. Almost all natural foods have a significantly higher satiety-per-calorie ratio over processed foods, which naturally leads to fewer calories eaten, but that’s not the full story. We’re not trading “only calories matter” for “only satiety-per-calorie matters.” Satiety-per-calorie matters more than just calories, but high-fat, high-calorie natural foods can still be fantastic for weight loss for other reasons.
Only two tablespoons of olive oil (27g) is a whopping 238 calories (a calorie counter’s nightmare). In a study of 28 women, 80% lost more than five pounds on an olive-oil enriched diet, compared to only 31% on a low-fat diet.45 How could that be? Let’s discuss the other factors that make unprocessed food great for weight loss.
The Supreme Importance of Unprocessed Food for Weight Loss
Unprocessed, natural, real food is essential for weight loss, and I know you’ve heard that before, but I’m going to explain some of the biological reasons why that is. These factors affect weight regulation, and they have nothing to do with calorie content.
Inflammation
Inflammation is not a bad thing that happens to us. It’s our body’s response to something bad that has already happened, such as infection or injury. It’s the body’s way of fighting invaders or healing damaged tissue. When you sprain your ankle (and I’ve sprained each of mine several times playing basketball), blood flow to the ankle increases as white blood cells and other immune cells rush in to repair the damage, causing it to swell. Auto-immune problems (such as allergies) cause inflammation because the body thinks it needs to attack something that need not be attacked. It’s like punching yourself in the face, but inside your body.
Obesity is an inflammatory disease.46 This is basic scientific observation: Overweight people consistently show higher levels of systemic inflammation.47 “This may explain the increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and many other chronic diseases in the obese.”48
Does inflammation cause obesity or the other way around? Inflammation and obesity fuel each other, so it’s not a question of which comes first; it’s a question of how to break the cycle.
Inflammation sustains the cycle. It interferes with leptin signals (the hormone secreted by fat cells to signal fullness to the brain), which lessens the satiety response from eating. In most overweight and obese people, leptin levels in the blood remain high, and yet the “I’m full” message doesn’t get through. This is called leptin resistance, and it has been a key focal point for obesity researchers in the last 10-20 years. Scientists have found that “plasma levels of leptin and inflammatory markers are correlated,”49 and “leptin production is acutely increased during infection and inflammation.”50
If inflammation directly and/or indirectly impairs leptin sensitivity (which appears to be the case), it may be a major cause of obesity. If an individual doesn’t know when to stop eating, that’s a problem.
This is a big strike against processed foods, which contain inflammatory ingredients in the form of added flavors, colors, fats, emulsifiers, sweeteners, and preservatives.
A 2015 study found that emulsifiers are linked to obesity and gut disease by altering gut bacteria and causing inflammation in mice.51 Trans fats have been linked to systemic inflammation in women.52 Food coloring studies have shown that they’re toxic to animals.53 About a dozen food coloring chemical concoctions have already been banned by the FDA because of their toxicity (it makes you wonder if the current ones are really okay). Omega 6 fatty acids most commonly exist as various vegetable oils (such as soybean oil) in processed foods, and too many omega 6 fatty acids in relation to omega 3 fatty acids is linked to inflammation (and a host of diseases).54
Monosodium glutamate (MSG), a flavor enhancer commonly found in chips, crackers, and restaurant food, causes significant inflammation in rats.55
The excessive amount of sugar in processed foods causes inflammation, too. Nutritionist Julie Daniluk explained to CNN, “High amounts of sugar in the diet increase advanced glycation end-products, or AGEs, a protein bound to a glucose molecule, resulting in damaged, cross-linked proteins. As the body tries to break these AGEs apart, immune cells secrete inflammatory messengers called cytokines.”56
The same goes for refined carbohydrates like white bread, pizza, burger buns, and most cereals, which are rapidly turned to glucose and sent into the bloodstream. The problem with refined grains is once again the processing, which basically “takes the life out” of the food. It strips out the nutrients and breaks down the food, making it more like an injection of glucose than something you need to digest.
In a single processed food, there are likely to be multiple inflammation-causing ingredients. Don’t become numb to buzzwords such as MSG or trans fats just because “health nuts” talk about them. There is a lot of evidence that these substances are actually toxic to us. The chronic inflammation processed foods cause might not knock us on our backs instantly, but it will covertly make us fat, sick, and unhealthy. It’s a double whammy, too, because the unprocessed fruits and vegetables we could be eating instead are full of anti-inflammatory compounds.
When you choose to eat that candy bar with artificial flavors, colors, and emulsifiers instead of a delicious mango, not only have you consumed several inflammatory ingredients, you missed out on powerful anti-inflammatory compounds.
Vitamins, Minerals, and Flavonoids
Natural, whole foods are full of bioavailable micronutrients that enable the entire body to work better. The more food is processed, the more such micronutrients are destroyed.
Can’t you just take a multivitamin? That could help replace some of the nutrients missing from a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, but the nutrients in a multivitamin have varying levels of bioavailability (how well your body is able to absorb and use a substance).
Many vitamins you buy at the store are synthetically made, rather than derived from food. That’s not automatically bad, but it does raise additional questions about their quality and suitability. Compare an artificial “orange drink” fortified with vitamin C to a vitamin C tablet to eating an orange. Even if, for argument’s sake, you manage to absorb the vitamin C from the drink or tablet, you’re still missing out on the flavonoids, enzymes, and minerals you’d get from a real orange. You’re also missing the synergy!
Registered dietician Jackie Elnahar says, “When you remove a vitamin part from the whole food form, you get fractionated pieces of the whole, but that has consequences. Nature intended for you to consume food in WHOLE form, because all the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and enzymes together work synergistically to give your body the nutrition it requires for optimal health. Your body only absorbs a small percentage of an isolated form of a vitamin and/or mineral, and it utilizes even less, so the bioavailability is greatly affected. You get the best bioavailability in whole food form.”57
Water Content
Most fruits and vegetables consist of over 80% water, and many of them are more than 90% water (cucumbers, tomatoes, watermelon, strawberries, broccoli, lettuce, etc.)! Because of their water content, fruits and vegetables are voluminous, filling, and low calorie.
In contrast, many processed foods have the opposite profile of a fruit or vegetable, some being less than 10% water. Less water content in food means it is less filling and less hydrating. If your goal is to consume more calories and gain weight, then processed food is the answer. Otherwise, whole foods are the way to lose weight.
What Happened When S
weden Ate More Processed Food
In a nationwide analysis of Sweden that covered 50 years (1960-2010), their consumption of unprocessed foods (fruits, vegetables, etc.) decreased 2%, and their consumption of “ultra-processed” food increased by 142%. One hundred and forty-two percent. In particular, soda (315% increase) and crisps/candies (367% increase) became much more popular. Sweden’s obesity rate from 1980 to 2010 more than doubled, from 5% to 11%.58 Are you surprised? I didn’t mention fats, carbs, or calories. I just told you they ate a higher percentage of processed foods.
I know that “correlation is not causation,” because two completely unrelated variables can correlate. The birth rate of turkeys may coincide perfectly with the number of milkshakes consumed in Arizona, but that doesn’t mean one is causing the other. When a particular diet correlates with a change in weight, however, that’s a different story, because we know diet affects weight. Sweden’s increased consumption of processed food is indeed a major cause of rising obesity rates in their country. You could say it’s the calories from these foods, because processed food is very calorie-dense. You could say it’s the high-carb and/or high-fat profile of these foods, which have each been linked to overeating. But why overcomplicate such a clear and simple truth? It’s processed foods.
Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering. Page 7