Top 10 Weight Loss Foods That Will Keep You Feeling Full

Hello health champions! Today we're going to talk about the most satisfying foods that can help you with weight loss. So at the University of Sydney, I had this brilliant idea to start a study and find out which foods were the most satisfying because they had the idea that maybe not all calories are the same. Maybe certain foods affect the body differently and if a food can keep you full longer, then you're going to eat less and it's going to help you lose weight over time. And so far I completely agree with that premise. Unfortunately, it is very very difficult to do a study like that and in my opinion, they didn't do a really great job. For starters, they didn't have a really good idea of what food is, which we'll talk about in detail. But anyway, they started out with white bread just to assign a food like a basic number. So they assigned white bread the number hundred and then all other foods were expressed as a percentage of that. So if it had a higher number, it was more satiating, more satisfying than white bread. So they found that popcorn, for example, had 154. So it was one and a half times as satisfying as white bread. They found that porridge, also known as oatmeal, was twice as satisfying as white bread. They found that beef steak had a hundred and seventy six and a type of fish known as lean fish had two hundred and twenty five. And interestingly, the winner in this entire experiment was potatoes, boiled potatoes, not French fries or anything else, but just boiled potatoes at three hundred and twenty three was more than three times as satisfying as white bread. And then also in the fruit category oranges was the most satisfying at two hundred and two. Now here's the problem. As far as I could tell, this was the only study of this kind that they had performed, which means there are no other studies to confirm or contradict it. But this has been quoted. It's been referenced. People have talked about this study hundreds of times. And I saw several videos where they said, these are the foods. This is how satisfying the foods are as if this was an absolute truth. Now here are some of the big issues that I have with this study. And again, I think it was a good initiative and it is very difficult to perform a study like this, but you also have to understand what you're dealing with. So first of all, the average age here was twenty two. We're talking about very young people who for the most part haven't developed any weight problems yet. The average BMI of these people was twenty three. And what does that mean? Well, it means if you're five foot two, then you'd weigh 125 pounds in centimeters. That's 157 centimeters and 56 kilos. This is a thin person. If you're a little taller at 5.7, you'd weigh 148 pounds. That's 170 centimeters and 67 kilos. Or if you're as tall as I am, six foot three, you would weigh 185 pounds, which is 190 centimeters or 84 kilos. And this happens to be my BMI. So these are people who do not need to lose weight. And yet the whole purpose of this was to study satiety, to study people's eating behaviors and hunger and response to certain foods to help people lose weight. And yet you study people who don't need to lose weight. So there's a huge mismatch right there. The second issue was that of course they have to feed these people a fixed amount of calories. They gave them a thousand kilojoules, which is 240 kilo calories. Or in everyday speak, we call it 240 calories. And that's not a whole lot of food. That's more like a small snack than it is a full meal. And it sort of assumes that if you're eating that small amount of food, then you would need to eat that type of meal eight times per day. So to study satiety behavior and assume that you're going to eat that often is a little bit distorted also. And then this test, the way that they performed it, was they gave these people a certain amount of food and a glass of water. And then they said, don't rush but try to finish within 10 minutes. And then at every 15 minutes, up till two hours, they had them fill out a questionnaire about how they felt. And if they felt like eating something, how full were they, and so on. So they only measured up till two hours. So again, we're assuming that if people are awake for 16 hours, then they would have to eat eight meals of that type every day. Now, is that reasonable? Is that how we want to study satiety and eating behavior? Well, I think that is not how we should eat. But again, a lot of people think that we should have multiple small meals. I think that encourages eating the wrong type of food and overeating. Now, here's perhaps the biggest problem in designing a study like this. They gave them mostly isolated foods because if you want to study a particular type of food, then that's what you give a person to eat. And yet, that is not how we normally eat things. And if we mix foods, then that completely changes how it interacts with the body. And it also limits a lot of the foods that you can test. So one of the best foods for satiety is something like leafy green vegetables, but you can't test that by itself because it would take 30 cups of leafy greens to get up to 240 calories. So they just said, let's not test that at all. And to continue on that issue, these were mostly isolated foods. But for some reason, they decided that cereals and porridge or oatmeal was to be served with milk. So who's to say what the response is from the cereal versus the milk? Rice, pasta, and bread, on the other hand, was eaten plain. They had nothing at all with that except water. Now, the steak, when they served this, they cooked it the night before and then they reheated it in a microwave and served it to these people with nothing else with it. And we'll come back to the state because this was actually low fat. So you have a dry piece of meat that's reheated in a microwave. Now, that is not something that I would ever eat. That doesn't sound very satisfying. I would be desperate to get something to eat after I had forced that into myself. But another food in the high protein category was lentils. But this time now, they cooked it with a lot of other ingredients. So they cooked it with onion and garlic and olive oil and tomatoes. And they spiced it with salt and pepper. So this was much more like a complete meal than most of the other things that they served. Now, the third issue has to do with their choices of food. And they had 38 common foods as they called it. But 18 of these foods had more than 70 percent of their calories from carbohydrate. Now, this just goes to show how warped our perception is of what food really is. If we look more at about how our ancestors would eat like a paleo-type diet, there were basically no foods at all that would have over 70 percent of their calories from carbohydrate. Because with our ancestors' food, you eliminate all sugar, all processed foods, all grains. And there's probably no foods that would get up to that level. And a full 27 foods had more than 50 percent of their calories from carbohydrate. So the vast majority of them, when I talk about food, I usually talk about how fat needs to be high and carbohydrate needs to be low. But the combination is terrible because the carbohydrates trigger insulin, which is a storage hormone. And now that insulin is going to store both the carbohydrate and the fat that you ate. So high fat, high carb is a terrible combination. And yet a full 33 out of 38 foods had more than 81 percent of their calories from fat and carbohydrate. But what I also talk about is how the combination of high fat and protein with very low carb is perfectly fine because it doesn't trigger insulin and it's very satisfying. And yet, there was exactly zero foods like that in these 38. And another issue I found was in how they classify these foods. So one of the groups was called a high protein group. And here's where I thought we're gonna find a lot of good whole foods. This is probably where I would find most of my meals. And yet one of the items here was baked beans, which had 66% of its calories from carbohydrate, whereas meat has zero calories from carbohydrate. And it has massive amount of added sugar, 16 grams in one serving of only 240 calories. It's almost like half a can of Coca-Cola. And yet they fit that with the high protein group. Now when I talk about beef steak, I'm talking about a juicy fatty steak that has 15 to 20% of fat, where the calories are twice as many from fat as it is from protein. That's a good juicy steak like a ribeye. But in this case, they had all the visible fat removed. So we had a dry piece of leather, basically, with 4.8% fat. And again, it's so distorted that we get to learn that these are the foods that we're supposed to eat. Next issue was in the snacks and confectionery group. So here we had the Mars bar, which is candy, with 36.7 grams of sugar in it. But also in this category was yogurt. Now I don't consider this yogurt at all. I do eat yogurt on a regular basis. I eat whole fat, full fat, plain yogurt. I add some berries and some stevia. But here they had 37.6 grams of sugar. There was more sugar in the yogurt than in the Mars bar. Now in this study, they were smart enough to put that type of yogurt in the snacks and confectionery group. But hundreds of people have quoted and passed on this study. And how many of those I wonder are going to put the yogurt in with the dairy group. And now we learn that dairy and yogurt have these characteristics that they found in the study based on the sugar bomb. They also need to be aware of what are we comparing. So in the snacks, they also had jelly beans. They served 88 grams of jelly beans. And they said that these have 5.3 grams of protein. This sounded really strange to me because as far as I know, there's nothing in jelly beans that would have protein. And when I looked it up, indeed there was zero protein in jelly beans. And they said that there should be 44.6 grams of sugar in that amount of jelly beans. Whereas everywhere I looked, it was 71 grams. So obviously jelly beans are not food, but we need to ask ourselves what are we comparing. And if they have a type of food in a study and they find a certain type of result, does that in any way compare to the food that you're going to find and buy and consume. Now if I was to make a list of healthy satisfying foods that would help you lose weight, there would probably be zero brand name products on that list. And yet on this list, 28 out of the 38 foods were brand name products. They were processed in some way. So basically you probably heard that if you want real food, you shop the perimeter of the store where the meats and vegetables and eggs and so forth are. And that all the processed foods are in the aisles in the middle. Well, they basically are picking three quarters of all their foods from the middle aisles where the processed food is. And it's just one more example of how far we've strayed from the idea of what food is. So here were some general things that they found in the study. They found that the higher the weight, the more grams of a certain food that it had within those 240 calories that they fed you, the more satisfied people were. So basically the volume filled them up because that meant if you had more weight, the meant it has less fat, less starch, it had more fiber and more water. So volume does fill you up. No big surprise there. They also found that if something was higher in protein, then it was also more satisfying. So again, we kind of know that the protein is more satisfying. It breaks down more slowly. So no big surprise, but then they also found that the items that were high in fat resulted in less satiety. They were inversely related. And this comes as a big surprise to the people in the low carb community, people who eat a lot of fat and get very satisfied, get very filled. So you wonder how does that fit? Well, virtually all of the high fat products were also high in sugar. These were things like cake and donuts and cookies. So it's the sugar that messes this up like we talked about. You can combine protein and fat and have a very healthy meal. But you can't combine fat with sugar or carbs because now you drive up the insulin and you unbalance the whole system. They also found that the more satisfying the taste, the more palatable that a food was, the less satisfying it was. And that does not mean that a juicy steak is not satisfying. It meant that in this experiment, when they gave people isolated food, like just cooked rice, like just dry bread, a dry piece of steak that was reheated and low fat, the tasty items were obviously the cake and the donuts, which are not going to be very satisfying. Another thing that's really important to understand is that all of these results are subjective. So when they do a study, they ask people, how full are you? How hungry are you? How do you feel? And depending on the person, you're going to get a huge range. And then these results, these responses are averaged and they draw a conclusion. This is called statistics. And the thing we want to understand is that statistics can never predict the behavior of the individual. So just because they found something doesn't mean that it applies to you. So for example, with the potatoes, they scored 323 plus minus 51%. That's an enormous range. It wasn't plus minus 3%, plus minus 51%. So the scores there ranged from 158 to 487. Same thing with this beef steak. It was 176 plus minus 50%. So those responses went from 88 to 264. So if you look at this, even though potatoes overall were almost scored twice as high as beef steak, there were some people who thought that the beef steak was 264, which was higher than some people who ate the potatoes. So again, the statistics can never predict the individual response. And perhaps the biggest factor of all in that regard is what have you trained your body to consume? Are you carb adapted or carb dependent? Or are you fat adapted? Because if you are carb dependent, then those foods are going to be more satisfying. Now remember, they only studied for two hours. They assumed that no one would ever go longer than two hours before they eat again. So in that sense, carbohydrates would work very well. And if you're not fat adapted and you eat fat, then it's not going to be very satisfying. You're going to be looking for those carbohydrates. So I hope you can see how very questionable these results are. Even though it was an honest effort, the intentions behind it were all good. I applaud that. But realize how difficult it is. And yet, this being the only study, it has been re-blogged. And it's been talked about in hundreds of websites and blogs and videos as the way it is. And we just have to understand, it was a relatively poor selection of food. It is almost impossible to study food and satiety in this way. And yet, that is what is being repeated and stated as the truth. So here are the real most satisfying foods in my opinion. And again, we're not supposed to eat every single day. two hours. We don't have to limit ourselves to 240 calories in a food. So when we eat food, I believe the most important factor for it to be satisfying is that it has a low insulin index. That means it is mostly consisting of fat and protein that don't stimulate insulin. And if it doesn't have fat or protein, then it needs to be something like a leafy green or a non-starchive vegetable that has mostly water and fiber that also don't stimulate insulin. And if you select foods like that, you can eat a lot of food without raising your blood sugar more than a few points. They level out your blood sugar beautifully. And if you level out your blood sugar, now you get satisfied and you get full for a very long time. So rather than measuring satiety every 15 minutes after a meal and concluding the experiment after two hours, I think that food should last you six to 12 hours. We should easily be able to go through the night and not wake up hungry in the morning. We should be able to have a meal and go for most of the rest of the day without having to eat again. And also like I mentioned, my list of healthy foods would probably have few or no brand names. Because if it's a brand name, then for the most part, it's a processed food. So I'm going to give you a list of 10 examples. These are not in concrete. These are not an absolute truth. Some of you may find these very satisfying and others not so much. So this is a trial and error kind of thing. Avocado. It's a very low carb, low glycemic, high fat and high fiber. Fantastic food. Leafy greens. They are virtually free of calories. So they're not very satisfying in themselves, but they have a certain amount of bulk. So if you combine them with a healthy fat like olive oil and vinegar dressing, now that can become very satisfying. And then of course you can add some protein or some seeds and nuts to it. And again, we don't eat foods in isolation for the most part. Same thing holds true for non-starche vegetables, things like broccoli and cauliflower and asparagus and brussel sprouts and so forth. They have slightly more calories, but they're not all that satisfying by themselves until you add a little bit of fat. Great foods that we do eat perhaps in isolation, sometimes like a snack would be nuts like pecans would be my favorite because it's widely available. It is very high fat, very low carb. Other great nuts would be like macadamia and walnuts. I sometimes eat pecans by themselves, but for the most part I would put them on yogurt for example, which would be whole plain yogurt, perhaps with some ground up flax and chia seeds. Another thing I often add to that yogurt would be pumpkin seeds, seeds and nuts are both high protein, high fat and low carb, almost without exception. Some more examples of good satisfying foods would be beef and chicken and fish. And I would again prefer to have those recommend that all of these would be relatively high in fat because protein by itself, dry, low fat protein is not all that satisfying. It's better than a lot of carbs, but it doesn't really become that balanced meal until you have a good amount of fat with it and it doesn't become a problem unless you have carbohydrates or sugar with it. If you combine these meats with some of the first items on the list, the low carb vegetables. Now that's a very, very satisfying meal. And some other examples would be things like cheese and also high fat dairy. And down there we probably should include also eggs, but you want to make sure that you eat the whole egg. It's the nature's perfect package. The egg with the yolk and the white. When you eat the white, it is much less, vastly less satisfying because it doesn't have nearly the food value. Now if you want to dig a lot deeper and start understanding the body at a whole other level, I've created a blood work course and I've put some information down below if you want to check that out. There are 15 hours or more of recordings by now and there are nine modules altogether. For each module, there is an overview of a topic. There is a discussion of lab ranges versus optimal ranges. There is a question answers mixed in to the material and we conclude each module with several case studies, real live cases where you get to see it applied and we get to analyze it so you can understand it and apply it to your blood work. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.