Carbs and the Feeling of Hunger

Another factor that I believe plays a huge (yuge!) role in the psychological experience of hunger: The proportion of carbs in your most recent meal.

The problem with carbohydrates is they generally offer very little satiety per calorie. This is entirely separate from all the other problems carbohydrates present to our body: insulin production, hunger roller-coaster, a quick hit of blood glucose followed by cravings for more, and so on.

Years ago, I used to eat a much more carbohydrate-centered diet. Unsurprisingly, I was hungry--a lot--and that hunger was often accompanied by all sorts of physical and psychological symptoms: I would get nervous, my stomach would growl at an astounding volume, I'd get the jitters, sometimes I'd even get even fearful... sometimes I'd even start sweating. I believed I had to have something to eat, right away! And preferably something starchy or sugary, because I thought that was what my body needed to get my blood sugar "up."

Little did I know I was just getting right back onto the proverbial hunger roller-coaster.

After enough years of this went by, I'd become trained, Pavlov-like, to connect the feeling of fear with the feeling of hunger. Yep, fear. Because I knew what was coming, soon, after I experienced the feeling of hunger--that weak, dizzy, jittery, low-blood sugar feeling I would get if I didn't eat something every three or four hours.

Today, I eat a diet much more heavily centered on fats and proteins. Unlike carbs, proteins and fat offer far more satiety per calorie, take longer to metabolize, and they don't put the human body on an insulin/hunger roller-coaster. And on this less carb-centered diet, I regularly execute fasting windows of twelve, sixteen, even twenty hours with no fear and no problem, and only occasional, passing emotions of hunger. And even these passing feelings don't always happen to me all the time.

Of course, I didn't know any of this back years ago when I followed the government's completely upside down Food Pyramid and ate a heavily carb-centered diet. I was hopelessly naive about concepts like satiety or the hunger roller-coaster. So when I experienced "hunger" I actually thought it was the real thing... and feared it.


READ NEXT: "Learn to Live on Lentils..."


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

30 Grams of Protein Within 30 Minutes of Waking Up

I know I've been kind of hard on Tim Ferriss in the past here at Casual Kitchen, but there's one idea that I got from him that changed my mornings forever:

Eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up.

It's a great dietary rule of thumb because it's simple, flexible, and easy to remember. And this easy-to-employ diet hack drives three significant benefits:

1) You'll have a steady blood sugar level for hours after eating, which helps keep you in a calm, focused mental state. This is the ideal state for creative or knowledge work, and it's helped my writing immensely.

2) 30 grams of protein will give you complete satiety for up to 3-4 hours. You won't feel hungry and you won't need to eat.

3) Finally, this is an extremely flexible rule. The world won't come to an end if you eat 24 grams of protein one hour after waking up. You'll still capture all the benefits.

Contrast this with a more typical breakfast of fruit, or worse, starchy, sugary branded boxed cereal. These foods merely put you on a hunger roller coaster, leaving you craving still more carb-rich food within an hour or two of eating. Result? You eat twice as many calories and twice as often, yet you still feel hungry. Pointless.

What kinds of foods can you eat to achieve 30 grams of protein? Here are some ideas:

A dollop or two of peanut butter (7 level Tablespoons yields about 30g protein)
2-3 fried or boiled eggs (about 6-8g protein per egg, depending on size)
3-4 handfuls of nuts (almonds, walnuts, peanuts, cashews, etc.)
A few pieces of good quality breakfast sausage
1 can of tuna (about 40g protein)
A whey- or soy-based protein shake (a typical serving size contains 30g protein)
Canadian-style bacon or ham (5-6 oz yields about 30g protein)
Cottage cheese (½ cup yields about 15g protein)
Hard cheeses (yield: roughly 10g protein per ounce)
Unsweetened yogurt (roughly 10g protein per cup)

Obviously you can mix, match and combine any of the above. Best of all, none of these food items costs very much money--in stark contrast to branded boxed cereal, which is far more expensive, far less healthy and far less filling.

This protein-based meal technique is easy to remember and it easily solves the "what do I want for breakfast?" problem. Try it, and let me know what your results are!

Related Posts:
Eat Less, Exercise More Doesn't Work. Wait, What?
How Do I Follow the Wheat Belly Diet?
Why Box Wine Is Better
How to Blind-Taste and Blind-Test Brands

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Egg on Tata

This is a frequent breakfast I make for myself and Laura. It's cheap, it's healthy, it's hilariously easy, and it provides our bodies with hours of healthy energy.

I often write about thinking about your meals and your diet as tools. I want my readers to make their food work for them, so that what you eat helps you accomplish your goals.

In our case, this is the kind of breakfast I'll eat after a hard morning run, or on the morning after a day of heavy physical activity. It combines carbs, protein and fat in just the right amounts, and it's a good example of why big breakfasts are phenomenal tools for managing your weight and your food intake.

Furthermore, when I eat a high-satiety-factor breakfast like this, I'll be a lot less likely to succumb to hunger pangs later in the day--and eat something I might regret.

Finally, I'd be lax if I didn't use this breakfast an yet another example that contradicts the ludicrous but commonly held view that healthy food has to be expensive. This ginormous plate of food, which was enough to feed two, can be made in its entirety for less than a dollar.
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Egg On Tata

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 uncooked potato, unpeeled and thinly sliced
1, 2 or 3 eggs
Spices of your choosing

Directions:
1) Place potato slices onto the olive oil in a large non-stick skillet. Add some seasonings, then cover and fry at medium high heat for 5-7 minutes, until potatoes are becoming tender and starting to brown nicely on one side.

2) Flip over potatoes, and then crack your eggs over the top of them. Add some more seasonings on top of the eggs. Cover again, and cook another 4-6 minutes, until eggs are done to your liking.
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A few recipe notes:
1) I strongly recommend not peeling the potato. Not only will you save yourself 3-4 minutes of prep time, you'll also add to the nutritional completeness of this meal.

2) Spices: normally we use cayenne pepper as our primary spice, with an occasional splash of Tabasco. But feel free to experiment here by trying other spices: garlic powder, sage, black pepper, etc., or even fresh herbs like parsley or basil if you have them handy.

3) This post is gratefully dedicated to my father, Clayton Koontz, who continues to teach me how to cook easy, nutritious and delicious breakfasts for hilariously little money. My father is still making the most out of the fact that he grew up in the Depression--and I'm all the luckier for it.

Related Posts:
A Tale of Two Breakfasts
The 911 Frittata
The 80-Second Latte
How to Make Creole-Style Coffee


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Feel Less Hungry on Fewer Calories: Hacking the Satiety Factor of Foods

Most of us are aware of the connection between how filling a food is and how many calories it has. A double cheeseburger may have 20 times the calories of a healthy plate of plain lettuce, but if you knew your next meal wouldn't be for another six hours, you'd grab the cheeseburger, right? I certainly would.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem with trying to lose weight by mindlessly cutting calories. If we tilt our diets too far toward light and low-calorie foods, we're going to spend a lot of our lives feeling ravenous and miserable. This is a key reason why diets tend to fail.

Photo credit: MR+G

Thankfully, the relationship between calories and how filling a food is isn't quite as simple as it seems. In fact, some foods can fill us up for a long time with surprisingly few calories. And on the other side of the spectrum, there are foods with horribly high calorie counts that hardly satisfy our appetites at all.

Here's the punchlines: both types of foods offer us opportunities to beat the system by creating a diet around foods that are both filling and healthy. And in today's post, we're going to hack into the secrets of the satiety factor of foods to find out how to take in fewer calories without feeling hungry or deprived.

Before we get started, let me define four terms:

Satiety: In a dietary context, satiety is just a fancy word for being full to the point where you limit further eating.
Satiety Factor: The relationship between how full a food makes you feel and how many calories that food contains.
High Satiety Factor Foods: Foods that fill you up yet contain relatively few calories, and therefore foods you should eat more of if you want to lose weight.
Low Satiety Factor Foods: Foods that don't fill you up yet contain a large amount of calories, and therefore foods to avoid if you want to lose weight.

Let's get back to beating the system. Thanks to a study done in Australia in the mid 1990s, we now have a way to measure a food's satiety factor. The authors of this study fed a group of adults a variety of foods, measuring the effect each food had on the subjects' appetite over time.

Idiosyncrasies of the Satiety Factor Scale
Here's where we get to the intriguing part. It turns out that some foods offered extremely high satiety on very few calories, while some foods offered a horrendous amount of calories and didn't fill the subjects up at all.

Here's a list of the types of "good foods" that offer an exceptionally beneficial trade-off between calories and satiety:

High Satiety-Factor Foods:
Boiled potatoes, skin on
Whole grain pasta
Beans
Lentils
Fiber-rich whole grains, especially oats
Lean meats, such as chicken, white turkey meat or lean cuts of beef
Fish
Eggs
Cheese
Leafy greens (swiss chard, collards, kale, spinach and cabbage)
High water content/high fiber vegetables (grapes, apples, oranges, grapefruit, carrots, bell peppers, eggplant, etc.)

On the other hand, some foods, like donuts or candy bars, are shockingly high in calories, yet they offer very little satiety. Here's a list of typical "bad foods" that offer a terrible trade-off between calories and satiety:

Low Satiety-Factor Foods:
Croissants
Donuts
Candy Bars
Ice cream
Peanuts
Yogurt
Potato Chips
White bread
Corn flakes
White pasta
Cookies

I know I have some of the smartest readers in the food blog world, so I'm certain that by now that you've figured out the secret of hacking the satiety factor: Eat more foods from the first list, and limit foods from the second list. Yep--that's pretty much the secret.

By the way, there are some notable surprises on both lists, aren't there? Some relatively fatty foods like cheese offer surprisingly attractive satiety factors, in part because high-fat foods take a long time to pass through the stomach. At the same time, some seemingly healthy foods don't offer as good a tradeoff as you'd expect. For example, corn flakes and white pasta have shockingly low satiety factors--they're not much better than cookies.

Two additional insights:
1) You can make a big difference in your weight without experiencing any extra hunger if you simply cut out just one or two "worst offender" foods from the second list and replace them with one or two foods from the first list.

2) You'll also notice that many of the foods on the "preferred" list are first-order foods that lack embedded processing, cooking or branding costs. Many of these foods, including potatoes, lentils, eggs, beans, leafy greens and oats, are extremely nutritious and cost very little money. Still more evidence that food does not have to be expensive to be healthy.

Yes, there really are foods out there that offer us the caloric equivalent of a free lunch!

Related Posts:
When High-Fat Food Can Actually Be Healthy For You
The Pros and Cons of a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet
Make Your Diet Into a Flexible Tool
Scarred For Life By a Food Industry Job

Resources for Further Reading:
The Fullness Factor at Nutritiondata.com
What Really Satisfies at Mendosa.com

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!