I have reactive hypoglycemia, and can say that potatoes spike my blood glucose levels more than table sugar - they have a really high glycemic index, and anyone with blood sugar issues should totally avoid them IMO.
And the thing about foods with a high glycemic index is that they cause you to feel hungry when your blood sugar rapidly drops back to baseline.
I find protein and fat way more satiating than, well, anything else. For example, eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.
But zero crashes, monitored by finger stick blood glucose. Crazy stuff, for someone who has them all the time.
Not discounting people's experiences, but trying to suss out the science here. If you were, for example, to inject sugar directly into someone's blood stream would the result be fatigue every time?
It seems to me that there's more involved in this. In my experience (more anecdata!) I'm able to eat anything in the morning. Giant bolus of carbs and sugar, and I feel great. That same meal in the afternoon will give me such a fatigue that I need to lay down.
Clearly there's some other factor at play for me in the function whos result is fatigue.
FATIGUE_LEVEL = CARB_GRAMS * (HOUR_OF_DAY / 24)
For many people, it may not be, I can only speak for myself. There's another thing, called 'idiopathic postprandial syndrome' which is essentially the symptoms above, but without actual low blood sugar (<60mg/dl), which some people think is another form of insulin resistance, where your blood sugar is normal but your body "wants" more sugar in the blood.
Talking with endocrinologist, they say that the insulin sensitivity for most people is much higher in the AM and daytime than at night, so it makes sense that you might have more problems in the afternoon, but you should probably talk to a doctor rather than taking my word for it!
It's often difficult (in the US at least) to get primary care and endocrinologists to take you seriously if you are not actually dying of diabetes or passing out from low blood sugar - this is where dipping into the realm of concierge medicine can be helpful, or at least, it has been for me. They are often much more willing to investigate thoroughly.
Missed this the first time around. They do this, for research, it's called a glucose clamp test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose_clamp_technique
Unfortunately it's almost impossible to find someone willing to administer it to you. It's an outpatient hospital procedure lasting a number of hours, and almost no insurance would cover it, as far as I am aware.
Responses are by readers, so take with a pinch of salt
What? That is quite a boring and obvious observation because your insulin sensitivity is much higher in the morning.
I know 2 T1 diabetics, and both never touch potatoes because of the GI.
Can I ask how you deal with your reactive hypoglycemia? I switched to keto a long time ago, which took me from having hypos multiple times a day to never. But often in late afternoon I start feeling some mild hypo symptoms, even though my blood glucose is stable.
Not only did you boil the potato, but you pre-chewed it too. Mashed potato is about as close as you can get to refined potato (potato flour). What you've created is easily digestable amylopectin - pre-chewed, already gelatinized and suspension with water. The amylase in your saliva can mix extremely well with mashed potatoes, and within minutes that amylopectin will be available as glucose. Maybe you mix in a little fat with butter or oil, but probably not much.
Vs. more or less any other potato cooking method. Even though the starch will have gelatinized with the water present in the potatoe, the potato's structure is more intact than boiling & mashing. Even after chewing the starch is not as well mixed with water, and this will take longer to digest.
We don't eat much mash in our house.
But really we are talking about two different things: GI and satiety. Yes potatoes are high GI. It would follow that they will spike your blood sugar. No claims have been made to the contrary.
Satiety is about how full you will feel per calorie eaten of that food. Multiple factors contribute to satiety. Specifically boiled potatoes score super high on the satiety index.
Not mashed potatoes. Not french fries, potatoes gratin, etc.
The topic is only tangentially related to GI.
Don't mean to be cranky here but I was hoping people would talk about the article, the underlying concept (satiety), and the research, instead of going off on lengthy discussions about quasi-related personal anecdotes.
And that's where GI comes in - high GI foods cause blood sugar spikes, and the crash will make you feel hungry again.
Pasta is a good example - it feels very satiating at the time, but the feeling doesn't last long.
I tried keto but it was difficult to get the variety, especially (as you say) when you're intensely craving sugar. It obviously solved the problem but was really challenging to continue, so I only lasted a couple weeks.
I don't understand the motivation to make such a guarantee. It's as though you assume there are many people on HN who have never tried eating two eggs in the same meal. Do you maybe live in a place where eggs are rare (or not commonly eaten)?
(For what it's worth, my personal experience matches that of others here: two eggs would be a comically small breakfast.)
More interesting to me is why someone would phrase it as a guarantee even if it were true. It suggests that the reader likely hasn't tried it, and would be surprised to discover the result.
Yeah no one likes your humble brags about how little you eat and feel JUST GREAT. You're probably worse for it.
I'm 5'11", ~170 lbs and rather lazy right now, running ~15 miles a week and a couple light lifting sessions because I'm busy. I eat 2500 calories a day and maintain just fine.
I just ate 1200 calories at dinner, no problem, so I'm going to try real hard not to feel judged by you!
I just wonder do any of these people actually move? Apologies if you're less-than-abled but good lord, if you're not and you're surviving on so few calories, I just wonder if you're moving enough to actually be healthy?? Thin !== healthy, necessarily.
What a patently absurd claim. Your anecdata is not evidence.
If your usual breakfast is pretty big and you tried to switch then you'd definitely start to get pangs of hunger earlier than you usually would. But after a while, your body would adjust and you'd be fine for longer and longer (really until whenever you usually ate your next meal). It's the reason why intermittent fasting or "one-meal-a-day" sucks the first couple of weeks you try it.
I'm not recommending one way or the other. Personally, I wouldn't eat just 2 eggs for breakfast because it sounds like a boring breakfast (at least throw it on some toast with some hot sauce). But it's certainly plausible that 2 eggs for breakfast would satiate most folks after they got through the initial growing pains.
When I go out for breakfast I will often have two eggs...and a couple of big pieces of toast, mushrooms, hash browns, spinach etc. I have great difficulty believing that two eggs alone would be sufficient.
Fast forward to today and while I would agree that just two eggs would be boring, add in two slices of bacon to cook the eggs in as well as some nice cheese, scramble it all and there's the lunch I'll have after not having had any breakfast at all and having had that, I probably won't be hungry again until way past previous dinner times.
This is after getting my gut back in order, away from craving sugary meal after sugary meal after carb/sugary meal to not having more than 20g of carbs per day (i.e. what they call "Keto diet"). I totally eat carbs again nowadays but usually eat no breakfast and eat way less carbs than I used to. One thing I noticed is that having a "low fat meal" for breakfast (e.g. white toast w/ just jam) means I am usually hungry again before lunch already. What helped on Keto was basically just eating whenever I was "hungry" but just not eating anything with carbs. I used cheese for it. Whenever I "got an appetite", eat some slices of cheese. No counting of calories. Feel "hungry"? Eat cheese! Lost lots of weight after a short period of time on that. The cravings just went away. It's amazing how little calories you actually get from all that fat and protein but it fills you right up. Of course this only works well if you have some fat to burn (my totally non-scientific reasoning is that your body just figures out that it doesn't have to make you find food and can just use the stores. Which means you better have those fat stores on you and please do make sure to eat enough veggies and nuts for your vitamins and minerals - you get the 20g of carbs just incidentally from the veggies, so definitely nothing with flour will go in you) I don't do Keto any longer and I can now maintain weight instead of loosing it :)
I pretty much never get hungry.
I eat because I’d die and I can only enjoy food having consumed massive doses of thc.
I wish Soylent was more trustworthy or the jetsons pill was real.
It means I can lose weight very easily but combined with severe adhd before I was married I was often in trouble and hospitalized a couple times. Now my wife keeps an eye on me to make sure I eat at least dinner, and Apple Watch reminds me to eat and drink during the work day.
Largely: Salads and roasted veggies like sweet potatoes, broccoli, radishes, carrots, squash. Fruits like apples, grapes, blueberries, strawberries.
The low calorie density foods helped make it so I really wasn't hungry.
For example, I've done the fast mimicking diet twice in the past couple of months - a little bit ineptly at points (always plan properly!) - which left me feeling very hungry. Certainly, by the last day of each, I was planning what I'd eat the next day in great detail and anticipation.
The lasting feeling it left (aside from the obvious health benefits) was to be reminded of what real hunger is like, not the semi-boredom, semi-distracting-itch kind that makes me nip to the fridge for a snack. That is very tolerable to me now.
The big breakfast is called a farmers mreakfat for a reason.
That's not what satiety means (at least in this context), right?
I'm reading OP's definition as "you'll eat less [calories] per sitting because you'll feel satiated more quickly", rather than your "your feeling of non-hunger will last longer".
The two seem pretty orthogonal definitions to me.
What am I missing?
I usually eat 3 scrambled eggs when I have them for breakfast. Lunch can't come soon enough afterwards. I think my record is 7 scrambled eggs. I'm sure I had normal lunch that day.
Should be good until 2-3 in the afternoon, at least in my experience.
Overnight oats are great.
EDIT: Wait... uncooked!?
substitute yogurt instead of milk for big increase in protein!
Makes sense that this diet wouldn't work for you - but I think using this argument is sort of like arguing that peanuts are unhealthy because some people are allergic to them.
Fun Fact: You can let your potatoes cool down, and then re-heat them, to significantly lower the glycemic impact.
Tried that. Two eggs and a piece of toast will get me easily to lunch. Four eggs will get me an hour or so, despite having more calories.
My observation was simply that research exists which substantiates this counterintuitive idea (quite a bit of it I believe, the satiety index has been around since 1995).
I'm sure it would spark an interesting discussion if someone had time to dive into the research and the studies.
http://www.mendosa.com/satiety.htm gives an overview and mentions a few of the studies.
As an aside, this potato diet supposedly allows salt and oil - which is all you need to make french fries. French fries did not score well on the satiety index.
Boiled potatoes did.
I physically can't eat any more than 3 eggs because I'd feel completely full.
Maybe I'm twenty kilos heavier than you, exercise more than you, have a bigger appetite than you. Maybe a tape-worm ;) My post, along with many others that have replied to you seem to have done so to challenge your guarantee.
https://www.pcrm.org/news/health-nutrition/egg-consumption-i...
"The authors note results from a recent meta-analysis and data from the Physicians' Health Study and Women’s Health Study showed an increased risk for diabetes of up to 77% with seven or more eggs consumed per week."
"When egg prices rose in the spring of 1966 and Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman told him that not much could be done, Johnson had the Surgeon General issue alerts as to the hazards of cholesterol in eggs."
There's actually no healthier food than eggs
"Compared with group 1 (30·7 %, low baseline intake and slight increase), both group 2 (62·2 %, medium baseline intake and increase) and group 3 (7·1 %, high baseline intake and decrease) were associated with an increased OR for diabetes. The results suggested that higher egg consumption was positively associated with the risk of diabetes in Chinese adults."
Here's the publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33028452/
For me personally, it feels like you're having a panic attack, you get ravenously hungry and eat anything in sight, tremors and heart palpitations, confusion, irritability, dizziness. No fun at all. Thankfully not life threatening though, at least the "normal" kind.
The problem with potatoes and with all similar starchy food, like cereals, bananas, sweet potatoes etc., is that their ratio between energy content and protein content is much too high.
If you eat enough potatoes to also eat enough proteins, you would also gain weight and it would be difficult to do that, because you will be very satiated long before eating enough proteins.
If you eat only enough potatoes to be satiated, you will not get enough proteins and a large part of the weight loss will be from muscular mass, not only from fat reserves.
After one month of potato diet, unless you had been a very muscular person previously it is likely that symptoms of protein deficiency will already be visible, e.g. swellings of the feet due to insufficient albumin in the blood.
A much more effective single-item diet would be to eat some high-protein legume, e.g. lentils with olive oil and iodized salt instead of potatoes with (unspecified) oil and (unspecified) salt, which would provide enough proteins.
Such a diet would be almost complete, except that it does not have enough of some substances required in very small quantities, i.e. sulfur amino-acids, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, choline, vitamin B12, vitamin D, calcium.
After that, it changes to figuring out how many net carbs you need. I've found that this amount changes and is not a hard and fast rule. When I started keto, I aimed for 20g total (I don't recommend that low). Now, it is more like 50-100g. There's also the mental shift: carbs are not bad, they're just a tool.
The thing that feels most unfair is once your body gets to a lower weight, you're accustomed to eating less, and you've 'reset' things, I found I had a lot of leeway in what I could get away with, diet-wise.
Apparently yes: https://drdavisinfinitehealth.com/2018/02/fermented-raw-pota...
(One of several results on search. I've no idea on merits / validity here.)
I also drink highly fermented potatoes, that's called Vodka!
> Again the diet seemed to be plausible except for calling for the consumption of 200 bullion cubes per day.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160411141356/https://dl.dropbo...
I was surprised just how satisfying a plate of it as a meal, and thought exactly the same thing: I'm pretty sure you could live on that stuff indefinitely and be in great shape.
Peeled Russet potatoes boiled, then strained and let steam some moisture off for a bit.
Kale blanched in water for a few seconds (no more than 30). Then allow it to steam off some moisture. Chop to desired size, pat dry.
Add butter and kale to potatoes. Salt and pepper to taste.
We found that controlling the moisture has a huge impact on flavor and the kale maintaining some texture.
Also I wonder the comparison between potatoes and protein champions like hard-boiled eggs or fish. Maybe we could have a nice American eating competition to compare. Or just a detailed study where people eat short-term diets of each and measure their satiety and other vitals.
Way, way, way more filling. Regular vegetables have basically no fill value at all. Just a fancy form of water & vitamins. Potatoes are quite good at filling.
> Just a fancy form of water & vitamins
No.
1. https://optimisingnutrition.com/calculating-satiety/
2. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/p_QyR5ImpQSJ_QODYl-tKxeKfj...
It specifically mentions the potato phenomenon:
> It’s worth noting here that the star performer in the satiety study was the plain boiled potato. People found it filling and hard to eat much at the buffet three hours later. This could be due to the low palatability of plain potatoes or the effects of resistant starch which forms when we cook and cool potatoes before eating.
> You may have heard of the Potato Hack Diet where people eat nothing but potatoes and lose weight. Unfortunately, while satiating, plain potato is not the most nutrient-dense and may not provide enough protein to maintain high levels of lean muscle mass during weight loss. You would also need to eat it without added fat (e.g. butter, oil, etc.). Otherwise, it’s extremely easy to overeat (e.g. chips).
That's why I speculated that a diet of potatoes, a lean protein source or two, and no added fats could make for a diet that's nutritious and promotes weight loss.
I'll probably break all of these rules and have fish and chips tonight!
Never heard of this before, but I was surprised by the number of potatoes this person ate. I can eat like, 1.5 large potatoes max. Then I’m good. But this guy was quoting 18 med potatoes everyday!?!?
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/18/dining/the-minimalist-tak...
White flour pancakes ALWAYS give me a blood sugar crash, and often cause a mild to moderate hypoglycemic episode; but I can eat whole grain pancakes without too much trouble.
If you're not carrying a large amount of excess weight, it might be worth trying the potato diet for a short time period, with a LOT of caveats. The problem is, as always, what happens when you go off the diet.
In my experience nothing beats the feeling of fullness after eating food with high fat content. It may not be the quickest to kick in, eg. you eat salad with lots of olive oil and cheese, you might feel light in the following hour or so. But then the fat digestion really starts, and you won't even want to think about food for the next 6-8 hours.
This is why keto works so well, especially when combined with fasting / intermittent fasting. If you eat a lot of fat, IF is a breeze - it's not that you have to manage your hunger (and eat various snacks every 2-3 hours), but that you don't have hunger at all, in fact, you feel full all the time. If you hadn't tried it you cannot even imagine how good this feeling is...
> Lowfat yogurt
I've never been satiated eating lowfat yogurt. I actually recently started buying high fat yogurt (10g+ of fat) and it is super satiating. Given I can eat 3x the amount of lowfat yogurt and still not be full, I'm not buying it.
> Watermelon
Maybe due to bloating from water?
> Bean sprouts
I challenge anyone to get full eating just bean sprouts. Again, they are more akin to drinking (crunchy) water than eating food. It is maybe a mechanical sense of fullness, it is not satiated as is normally thought of.
> Fish, broiled
I get bored eating fish long before I get full from eating fish.
> Sirloin steak, broiled
Yes, this works. Steak is super satiating.
> Popcorn
Has anyone in the history of humanity ever been satiated eating popcorn? To be fair I know a few people who go to the movies and eat only a small bit, but most people I know can easily down an entire large bag and it'll have no impact on their appetite soon after.
> Oranges
Eh, this also falls into the category of "hungry a little bit later."
I'll take this one. I actually 100% agree that list is useless, but an entire bag of microwave popcorn is extremely satiating to me. It's the perfect midnight snack IME because it is only 400ish Calories and yet takes up a large volume of space and takes a significant amount of time to eat.
I was more just linking it to highlight the 1995 study. Potatoes were by far the most satiating food found and far exceeding what NutritionData's modeling predicts it would be. (And FWIW, yoghurt was found to be much less satiating than the numbers would suggest.)
All the time. I make it from kernels so I'm not sure on how much is in a bag. I will make between 4 and 6 cups worth and that will do me in. For a real challenge, eat it with chopsticks and hard to go through half as much
That's definitely below what most people need as a healthy minimum (RDA is 0.8g per kg of bodyweight), let alone if you want to build muscle while dieting which is a good idea for improving health. At the very least you want to maintain muscle mass, which requires protein if you're exercising.
If I was going to try this diet I would definitely supplement some protein shakes.
Legumes or sprouts are not an adequate source of B12 and neither are other plant sources.
Your assertion that Nori has B12 is downright wrong. B12 is only synthesized by microorganisms.
There are plenty of vegetarian options, but if you are vegan, you have to rely on fortified products and supplements. This has nothing do to with where you happen to live.
You can check recommendations from physicians, researchers and most importantly Vegan associations all across the globe to the see this is true.
“The Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) suggests that vegans need to have reliable sources of vitamin B12 in their diets. (1) The Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group (VNDPG) of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics says that all vegetarians (including vegans) should include a reliable B12 source in their diets, such as fortified foods or supplements. (2) And The Vegan Society goes so far as to state, “What every vegan should know about B12: the only reliable sources of B12 are foods fortified with B12 and supplements.” (3)“
I have seen people get sick ignoring these issues in a vegan diet.
“According to vegan expert and co-author of Vegan for Life, Jack Norris, RD, there are no reliable sources of B12 in plants, contrary to many rumors about sources, such as tempeh, seaweeds, and organic produce. Plants have no B12 requirement, therefore they do not have any active mechanisms to make or store it. When you find B12 in plants, it is due to contamination, which is not a reliable source. Many seaweeds have B12 analogues, through their symbiotic relationship with cobalamin-producing bacteria, however the evidence is not clear that this form is active B12 in humans. And fermented foods, such as tempeh, are not fermented through B12-producing bacteria, thus they are not a source of B12. Rumors about bacteria on the surface of organic produce producing B12 have not been verified. “Chlorella may improve B12 status, but it’s by such a small amount that I wouldn’t rely on chlorella for B12,” adds Norris. Norris stresses that, unless a food obtained from multiple regions consistently improves B12 status, it should not be relied upon as a source of B12.“
A vegan diet can be a healthy and sensible choice for people living in a modern society with access to supplements and fortified foods as well as the care and knowledge to use them. Otherwise it is not an appropriate diet for humans, especially not outside of the modern Western organic supermarket and supplement infrastructure.
https://veganhealth.org/vitamin-b12/vitamin-b12-plant-foods/
I appreciate your input, but this level of categorical statement seems to fly in the face of historic and current diets which are vegan or vegan-like and have not relied on supplements, or at least not the type we are talking about here.
At any rate I'd review other dietitians/scientists as well; while it's been a long time since I read the literature on this (when a family member went vegan) your quote certainly wasn't consensus view at that time.
Absolutely agree if you were to eat such a restrictive diet, you have to pay attention to vitamin sources, or you can get sick. B12 particularly problematic because you don't need much at all and can go months/years in a deficit situation before showing any symptoms, which can make it hard to pin down.
(To be clear, when said family member did do this for a while, I suggested supplementing but the nutritional science types I was reading weren't nearly as categorical as your above quote)
I provided a source that systemically goes through available evidence (including anecdotal points about vegan cultures).
I think that is fair and it does not imply any value statements about a vegan diet.
None of this is discussion is intended to dissuade a persons' choice to eat vegan, but to ensure they have the tools to do it safely :)
I met someone on a Potatoes + Curd/Butter diet and he said something that stuck with me - "You need to eat the skins too".
So you can't just eat fries or mashed potatoes, but more like baked potatoes in skin with sour cream.
Seems a bit crazy, but it seemed to make him happy & felt like he was discovering something unique rather than being forced by someone else.
> even with a cheat day
Cheat days are under-explained, they're not for fun.
If you keep up a calorie deficit long-term, then your metabolism tanks and the easiest way to convince your body that it doesn't need to cut costs is to take a day of extra calories intermixed with the fasting.
If you don't do them, you will feel tired all the time when fasting.
This causes resistant starches to develop in the potato which is good for you in a handful of ways.
You can keep the skin for both of these though, especially fries, it's delicious, for mashed potatoes it's a bit weird but if you're lazy it works
That doesn’t seem like it’s high in the satiety index.
You can eat 500 calories of butter and not feel even slightly full, but 500 calories of raw potato would have you full to bursting.
You don’t have to consume a certain number of calories to be full. You just need a large enough volume. Competitive eaters eat a huge amount of lettuce to feel “full” but it has almost no calories.
Full != (Sated OR Satisfied)
Burning 400 calories an hour for 12 hours would be about 5000 calories.
Anecdotally, I know a retired guy who's been constructing a gymnasium sized $150K play tube structure for the past month, and he's lost like 25lb.
When I eat a portion of mashed potatoes (I cook them with very little butter), it feels like I've eaten a very dense soup.
They certainly didn't calculate this index by weight, because per gram eggs are far more filling than potatoes
[1] http://www.ernaehrungsdenkwerkstatt.de/fileadmin/user_upload...
Oddly, I love calamari and sushi.
One of my not-well-backed suspicions is that this is closest to the truth of any of the various attempts to explain this.
So there was sound science behind my all-scrambled-eggs-and-hashbrowns diet in college.
If you want to avoid acrylamide when cooking potatoes, you must cook them below 250F (pressure cooking or steaming, I think)?
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18320571/
[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/chemical-contaminants-food/acrylami....
I.e. "I eat lots of vegetables! I had french fries on Tuesday, mashed potato on Wednesday, ..."
Reminds me of the classic regulatory decision (which I actually looked up to make sure that it wasn't an urban myth, that's how crazy it sounds) that the tomato paste on top of pizza is classified as a vegetable for school lunches [0].
And see the resistant starch link as well.
Also, it sounds like water content is a significant contributor to their capacity to satiate, so things like potato chips probably fail miserably under this lense. Many processed foods made from potatoes have far less water in them than home cooked versions (french fries, hash browns).
No.
https://gurmeet.net/Images/food/calorie_density/CalorieDensi...
Boiled potatoes are 870 kcal per kilogram.
1 kilogram of potatoes is a lot.
The flavor is similar to that of French fries and they are an excellent substitute (I say this as someone who when asked what would be his last meal would answer: french fries).
By your standards, Coca-Cola is actually less calorie dense than boiled potato, but I don't think anyone would recommend a Coca-Cola diet.
Calorie density is also not the only metric for recommendation. Everyone agrees that liquid calories are not "felt" by the body in the same way as solid foods.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrient_density [1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/calorie-density
Same with fish, I cannot get full eating fish in any quantity. Shrimp, sure, but not fish.
Nuts, same deal. I'll eat 500+ calories of nuts, does nothing for me.
Most likely, they'll say hmmm, that's strange and you probably should try to avoid eating so much peanut butter in one sitting. Maybe they'll give you an invasive test that's probably not conclusive or inexepensive.
> See a doctor.
Doctors know next to nothing about gut biome stuff.
"I don't get full eating an entire jar of peanut butter" is going to result in the doctor telling me to not eat a jar of peanut butter.
Heck plenty of people don't get full eating entire tubs of ice cream. The answer is to avoid downing tubs of ice cream.
FWIW Salmon drenched in butter and lemon does the trick, but that kind of feels like cheating.
Maybe fish sticks would fill me up? Heck if I know.
Peanut butter is another one, plenty of people can eat crap tons of peanut butter and not get full. Other people get full from peanut butter easily.
Same goes for nuts, and a ton of snacking foods. That is why they are called snacking foods
I once had a coworker who could honest to goodness get filled up from an ice cream cone. Calorically, that is correct, but the vast majority of people's bodies will completely ignore calorie math when consuming ice cream (see: Common jokes about a separate desert stomach).
> See a specialist rather than quibbling over the definition of doctor.
"Hi doctor, yeah, I have a normal BMI and I am in above average health and I work out multiple times per week but some guy online says I should see you because I don't get full eating peanut butter."
You do realize that there are literally not specialists for this stuff? If medical science understood why some people never get full eating certain foods, we wouldn't have so much obesity.
On the flip side, food scientists understand that fat + sugar = never satiated. That is why donuts are even a thing. Realistically a donut and a sweetened coffee are "enough calories" but they aren't satiating at all.
And then there is the nastiness of the human body mostly ignoring liquid calories all together[1], outside of mechanical fullness of the stomach. That is why starbucks can get away with selling drinks that have almost an entire day's worth of calories in them.
[1] Protein shakes are a notable exception to this.
I have a technique that works well 80% of the time: just pull the spine upwards and hope none of the smaller bones break off — and that's a nice, mostly deboned fish!
Maybe 4 or 5 good spoonfuls.
I'm willing to bet that almost any healthy adult could down 4 spoons of peanut butter w/o issue, and that most people would end up being way over their calorie limit for the day as their body wouldn't go "yup that was lunch and half of dinner! All good now!"
4 spoon fulls of peanut butter may or may not register. That many calories in a very short time frame often does not.
The only way to be exceptionally healthy and thin is to ignore the urge to overeat, and this urge is extremely dynamic on a per human basis. As a result, some people out there will eat a case of potatoes and still feel very hungry and unsatisfied.
Yeah, just not according to science.
E.g. there's ghrelin, cholecystokinin and other "satiety signals".
Except if you mean "satiefy is a mental construct" the same way pain is a mental construct. In which case, in a Kantian way, everything is, including space and time.
>What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entirely divorced from nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving.
(a) You'd be surprised.
(b) It only appears that way because we have diverged in a exteremely small span of time (evolutionary speaking) into completely different circumstances and food availability.
Otherwise, what the brain tells us is very much based on nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving.
It's just that in 2022 we have an endless supply of food we can just order or walk into a supermarket and buy, as opposed to food scarcity where we don't know if we will be able to find something to hunt tomorrow - like the last 100,000 of thousands of years before historical times (and millions of years considering our primate ancestors)...
sorry, dont care
You also seem to think that the prevailig theory at some era is intechangable with arbitrary personal opinions about how things are.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
E.G. it’s examples of the Maasai and Inuit eating higher calories make a lot of sense when you consider their exposure to temp extremes and additional cal burn coming from thermoregulation (along with probably elevated levels of daily activity).
Most of the nuance I’ve seen around CICO that holds isn’t that CICO isn’t true, it’s that the intake and output are hard to calculate when you look at nutrient absorption and lifestyle
If you want someone to gain weight, do the same calc, tell 'em to eat 100 more calories. Not gaining? 200. Really not gaining? Wow, fast metabolism, shock 'em with 500 extra. Anecdata, but the only time I saw someone not slowly gain on 200 extra, there ended up being a lot of walking we weren't accounting for in our maintenance cal calculation. Our O in CICO was off. For reference, 200 cals is like a 16 oz of coke, or 2-3 apples. Decently precise.
The variance between a fast and slow metabolizer isn't 20% of daily calorie burn, maybe 10% on the high end. Guesstimation, probably more like 5%. Well within the tolerances that are used for weight modulation (up or down).
If it weren't the case, why are so many body builders (natty or enhanced) able to run repeated bulking and cutting cycles? Are they genetic outliers?
Can you calculate it 100%? Nope -- so many variables, probably tons we don't even know about yet. But it's accurate enough to be very effective, and very simple to implement.
I'm sort of with you, but it sounds more to me like: start eating less, and you'll lose weight; eat more, and you'll gain weight. There's just too many variables here that change how food is metabolized and digested; including the microbiome which CICO ignores.
the other answers here are more detailed, I just wanted to state it simply.
Again, the digestion point seems to reinforce CICO. If you gain weight because your digestion is slower (let’s grant the point), it’s not because your body some how treats calories differently, it’s that you’re getting more calories from your food. Your calories in are higher.
Not to mention that diet products have existed to game your digestive system to absorb less calories from your food. With the rationale being… less CI in CICO. See also: folks abusing laxatives for this purpose
Throwing information out like this (w/o source and at best poorly replicated), that CICO is useless because of digestion rate, is incredibly dangerous because it falsely legitimizes that hopelessness. It traps people. And it maybe only applies in <1% of cases, where you have not just obesity but also compounding, very specific digestive issues. The opposite is also true — you don’t just drink coffee to knock off enough cal absorption to make a diff — you take laxatives you don’t need and have extremely abnormal, frequent BMs.
Anyone and everyone can lose the weight. It’s just CICO. You gotta figure out your input and output to account for the minor individual variances, and lock in a lifestyle to do it. But it’s just CICO at the end of the day.
Different people use different amounts of calories to do the same things (including sitting around), and different people extract different amount of calories from the input. Some people can extract calories from PF Chang or Buca di Beppo, but not me. Weight control by eating foods that go straight through sounds terrible though.
You can run an additional control loop mentally but what purpose does that serve? Reducing caloric intake while your body screams increase caloric intake is very difficult. You should instead use the control loop you already have.
sorry, I don't care
Are you implying that there aren't physical manifestations that cause hunger? In other words, I could inject you with a suprahuman amount of ghrelin and you wouldn't feel hungry?
I'm unsure if that "support" for my argument exists.
However, it is true that your hunger urges are not solely based on thriving and surviving, but also significantly on the current state of your gut bacteria, which is highly influenced by diet and stress. They say the gut is a second brain for good reason.
Basically they're the most filling food per calorie. So if you subscribe to the idea that losing weight is mainly about how many calories you consume, a potato heavy diet should be effective.
And an all potato diet, while monomaniacal, even more effective.
Eggs and fish are also very high on the satiety index. If you threw in pretty much any vegetables and spices of your choosing and just stuck to those along with potatoes, even with a cheat day or three you'd have a very healthy diet which I bet most people would lose weight on.