The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day, and we won't solve that changing food, but lifestyle. The obesity epidemic is a direct result of sitting in an office 9 to 5 (or 6,7,8,...) and making two meals a day full of fat and sugar, because you're craving.
When you have a better lifestyle, you naturally gravitate towards better food, because you have time to cook (as opposed to pizza/snacks) or look for good dinner (as opposed to drive-thru), have time to go to the grocery store buy vegetables/fruits more frequently (as opposed to industrialized food which doesn't spoil), and even time to appreciate food itself making various small meals a day.
EDIT: I would like to know why the downvote. The correlation between obesity and office workers is a recurrent research topic.
Is there any research that actually shows that?
My own personal experience with leangains (intermittent fasting; taking all my calories in an 8 hour window with lunch being my first and biggest meal) is that I find it far harder to overeat that way than with smaller meals. It's "easy" to fit in a snack between small meals, but after lunch I'm totally sick of food, and it's hard for me to even meet my macro nutrient goals (I lift weights; my protein intake is high). Often I have to force myself to take in a second meal to meet my calorie needs (edit: because I simply often don't want to eat again before the end of my eating window, around 8pm, after my massive lunch at noon).
On the opposite end, I see very few people around me that eat "only" two meals. My co-workers for example, might very well only sit down for a meal twice, but they snack constantly. And their "snacks" are often substantially higher calorie than their main meals. When I did try to diet with many small healthy meals, it was a nightmare - I was constantly hungry and constantly craving food.
When I do intermittent fasting, I have hunger pangs in the mornings 2-3 days, and then I stop being hungry in the mornings.
This way I know that I'll be completely satisfied at least once per day, and of course there are limits of what I can eat in a single meal (and not much time left in the day for eating more).
I found out that this is what works best for me, my personality and my relationship with food. I can do this indefinitely, while in the past, I would eat healthily for maybe weeks or months, but then I would go back to the same old habits.
For other people it would not make sense, or be a bad fit. My point is that, in the end, nutrition is something very personal and has heavy psychological implications, and should be treated case by case, there is not a "silver bullet" working for everyone.
You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule. As long as you don't go lunch with a blackhole in the stomach and are mindful about what you're eating, it's fine. Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.
When I eat more meals a day and then suddenly have a longer gap than I'm used to, I find it easy to do that.
When I systematically east 1-2 meals a day, I adapt to that pattern in 2-3 days, and then have no problems eating a diet where getting sufficient fat is actually hard, and where I often find I have to add some "easy" carbs to meet my calorie requirements because the sheer volume of food I am due to eat for my lunch makes it an annoying chore.
Part of the reason I don't like the "many small meals" approach is because I then quickly adapt to getting hungry many times a day, and the chance of getting hungry at a time I can't eat makes it very easy to snack on unhealthy foods.
> You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule.
Exactly. With no need for many meals a day.
> Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.
Not my experience at all. I get the "wild sugar peaks" when I eat irregularly and/or when I consume lots of easily digested sugars. But since I don't get hungry very often while do intermittent fasting, I have no problems eating a lot of my fat and protein first, at which point I don't generally want much sugar, and my diet ends up being foods that are digested fairly slowly. I do get a bit tired shortly after lunch, but I quickly get more energy again and conversely my mornings are generally far more alert than they used to be with lots of small meals.
I am not sure if this is true. I think in people without diabetes, insulin does it's job and regulates your blood sugar pretty well during a fast and I think cognition is better when a large amount of your body's resources are not being used to digest food.
Without snacking during the day, it is far easier to quantify exactly what I am putting into my body and it is easier to make sure whatever it is, is of a higher quality and is actually what I need (or feel that my body needs). In addition to this, big meals in the late afternoon or evening are a lot more satisfying to me than multiple small meals that just leave me wanting more.
I would highly recommend this way of life to anyone struggling with what they are eating.
The "snacks" between meals is for eating something like a fruit, yogurt, nuts... not french fries. Without eating fruits throughout the day you probably don't even meet the minimum fruit intake recommendation. Depending on the country, the average intake is half than the recommended.
Satiety is a measure of how hungry you will feel. It doesn't make sense to call hunger a factor. I agree that we need to measure the quality of the food correctly, and I suggested a way to do it.
The correlation between office work and obesity too small to call it a direct result.
I believe the obesity epidemic is caused by three things:
1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible.
2) Technology driving the price of food to near zero.
3) More women in the workforce leads to fewer domestically prepared meals. These meals are replaced commercially created meals (lunchables, mcdonalds) thus #1 applies more often.
#2, #3 are good things. The best fix is to design a system where profits are maximized by making tasty foods that with the constraint that the foods don't incorrectly inform our biochemical hunger feedback mechanism.
My plan attempts to address this problem.
The problem is, what is irresistible for someone who makes two meals a day is different than what is irresistible for someone in a different diet, lifestyle or even mood.
While I was busting my ass inside an stressful office until 10:00 PM without eating, I wanted to get home and sink my teeth in a pepperoni pizza as fast as possible while watching TV. Nowadays I'm on a different lifestyle and, mind you, I woke up craving for squid, for some reason (the body talks). I went downtown, bought fresh squid, cooked a risotto myself with the things I like. A low fat, low sodium, high protein, Zinc and Selenium rich meal - the exact opposite of pizza, but satisfied me just as much today.
You're saying the food industry optimizes for irresistible (crunchy, fiberless, fat and sugar rich) food and there's no way around this formula. I'm saying they are only selling what hungry, depressed and stressed people are craving to eat.
My contention is that pizza doesn't have to be junk food, it just is most of the time in the US. Choose a better restaurant or make your own.
What the OP was implying is that fast/junk food is inherently irresistible and that's why more people are obese. What I'm saying in turn is that it's today's lifestyle which makes people find it irresistible and that nothing else satisfies.
Pizza can be massively unhealthy if you buy from somewhere that's full of sodium and soaked in grease, but there are plenty of ways of making pizzas that are fine to eat every day even.
Heck, squid works just fine on a thin pizza base too, as do mussels and prawn if you want a nice seafood mix.
Well yes, but solving problems like depression, stress, and overly-long working hours is much tougher than just blaming food executives.
This is unfortunately true, as in it will take probably another 20 to 30 years for the majority of Western men to realize that they can cook, too, and that cooking is not only a "woman's job". Coming from a family where both my parents worked full-time jobs and where my dad was actually cooking tastier meals than my mum it surprised me when I grew up and saw that in other families the husband wouldn't approach the kitchen even if he would be starving to death.
Otherwise I cannot really understand why a majority of people have starting seeing cooking a healthy meal as a "waste of time". This is something so ingrained in our well-being, I'd say is almost quintessential to who we are as a species, that it baffles me when I see so many people relying only on pre-processed food that comes packaged in cardboard boxes.
Got any source for that?
I worked for 3 years in a European Union Scientific project (FP7) of Rural Development and Agriculture in 6 countries (Germany, Czech Republic, UK, France and Bulgaria). The findings we got (including direct interviews with farmers, Eurostat data and other panel data) contradict your claim.
Specially if we consider that one of the main requirements of food is land (either for crops, trees or pasture for animals), and if anything, fertile land is getting more expensive.
Sure: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditures.aspx...
Download Table 7 (Food expenditures by families and individuals as a share of disposable personal income), and you will see a steady march from 24% of disposable income to 9%.
Donald Thompson looks like he might have a BMI above Larry Page.
http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company/leadership/don...
http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/management/
Also not sure how the price of food is near zero? Are you implying that the cost now is near zero because I don't have to go out and kill a cow, nor do I have to farm and scavenge? So cost as in physical cost? Because breakfast and lunch today were not near zero and I have noticed the cost of milk and eggs going up, not down.
Is that the case? Many countries that have much stricter cultural traditions about when and how much to eat (the French, the Italians) eat 2-3 meals a day. They don't eat when they feel hungry, the eat when it is eating time.
Now compare that to having to lunch in 15 minutes when you are starving. You want to swallow a Whooper and grab a Coke that you can drink while walking back to the office.
That's an assertion without provenance and a contentious assumption to make.
But surely there is such a thing as food that is more filling and food that is less so, and how hungry you are (or how happy) will lead to deviations from that baseline, but it won't cause that baseline to magically disappear, I would think?
but more importantly
b) price
-> I once saw a very fat boy (12-14) and his very fat mother (cant guess age) in a very poor neighborhood as I was taking a bus to college.
"Mom, can I eat vegetables today?"
"No, you're eating pasta tonight! We don't have no vegetables"
"AWWWWWWWW!!! No fair!"
"Shut up"
McDonalds is cheap. Pasta is cheap. Most shit food is cheap and easy. Non-shit food is not cheap nor is it easy. We must make a tax to make shit food as pricy as non-shit food. Then people will start making better decisions.
Now going back to hcarvalhoalves' point -- 9-5 schedule gives us that 1 hr lunch. We cannot spend our time preparing food so we can eat during that one hr. We go for fast-food lunch. Usually that means high sugar, or high something not great for you. If its good for you and can fit that 1 hr schedule, its usually very pricy and most people can't afford to spend say $20 per meal 5+ times a week.
I think it's fair to say that the entire medical profession has in the past suffered from a tendency to convince people to maximize their health, rather than maximize the combination of their health, and whatever other outcomes people desire, such as eating tasty food or feeling satiated. This tendency is flawed because it is not consistent with what people want to do, and is always therefore an uphill battle.
As the field matures, this is definitely changing, but the discussion around nutrition shows there is still a long way to go.
Instead of thinking about whether something is "high carb" or not, it's better to think about the digestibility of the carb. Kidney beans, for example, are high-carb and high satiating. Sugar is all-carb and not satiating at all. You can find the satiation relative to carbs by examining the food's glycemic index.
40/20/40 or relatively close to that is a common split. Many will up the fat too (at the expense of carbs). At 60/20/20, there's absolutely no way I'd manage keeping up my lifting program.
say you need 2700 calories on a workout day => 1080 protein calories => 250g of protein per day. that's more than 1kg of lean meat/fish a day?
I do end up with a lot of chicken and prawn, and a lot of jerky, as well as milk, and various protein supplements (shakes with up to 90% protein by dry weight, mixed with water - generally tastes foul; people writing sales copy for protein products are the most blatant liars in the world).
It's not unusual for me to eat a lunch consisting of 400g of lean chicken breast (ca. 100g of protein), ca. 600g of chicken drumsticks (ca. 70g of protein), a small-ish sausage and egg sandwich (~25g protein), a yoghurt drink and a flapjack. The rest I'll make up with a small meal in the evening.
My intake on exercise days is actually ~2800kcal so you hit pretty much where I am. But note that 2800kcal on exercise days is above my maintenance level at 103kg, at relatively advanced (but not competitive) levels on most my lifts.
Most people will need less than that, and you can get by on substantially less - you will just see less progress. It is fairly self-limiting. A lot of people you see struggling with the same weights in the gym over and over are simply eating too little.
The evidence for very high protein diets goes in all kinds of directions, though the evidence for increasing protein to support muscle growth is fairly good as far as I know. There's evidence for various degrees of beneficial (from a muscle building perspective) effects of up to 3g-4g of protein per kg of lean body weight depending on who you ask.
Though the main reason to aim for that kind of level simply "in case" it makes a difference, and because it allows for slip-ups without affecting the gym routine much, and unless you have kidney problems there are few to no negative effects.
Note that even a lot of gym goers would qualify as relatively sedentary...
[cue jokes about mixing systems of measurement]
Your nutritional recommendations gave me cravings and hypoglycemia in the past.
Subjectively it would vary according to cultural norms and personal opinions, for example.
Additionally people can be accustomed to certain foods regardless of such measurements.
There is some serious interest in diets like Ketogenic or Paleolithic, which espouse similar dietary requirements to what the parent suggested (eg: whole milk has significantly more fat than skim milk, as such they affect satiation and satiety differently from each-other).
As a tweak to my general food lifestyle, it's far easier to maintain than a diet or cooking for myself consistently.
With the exception of candies, those are nog bad options per se. The problem with all those options is the way they are packaged: Companies put a lot of salt (in nuts) or sugars (yogurts, oatmeal bars) to 'enhance' the flavour. Unfortunately there seem to be very few options (and usually more expensive) for 'ready made' health-ish food, but it can be made.
The palm sized Fage yogurts packages are almost 300 calories, and wouldn't fill me up. The Fage yogurts have no real additives to them. 300 calories of carrots is a stomach straining 730g. The oatmeal bars are 150 calories each and might as well be air. 1 M&M is 9 calories alone! 5 M&Ms exceed my small bowl of carrots! I can go on and on about how insidious the snacks are at my work.
Raw fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and lean meat all contain a high ratio of micronutrients to calories. Ignorant consumers could finally stop avoiding cashews and avocado, and start avoiding low-fat pop tarts and cereals.
I consume a lot of milk but whole milk can be unpalatable so I mostly drink low-fat, which still has some fat and a lot of protein:
There are 102 calories in 1 cup of 1% Fat Milk.
Calorie breakdown: 21% fat, 47% carbs, 32% protein.
http://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/generic/milk-cow...
I think a huge part of the problem in general is large packs of food. Ready-made sandwiches in packs with 800-900kcal, for example, or nuts or high-calorie drinks sold in quantities that ought to be anywhere from 2-3 to 10+ servings. Ready-meals that comes only in massive portions that might work ok if you're buying it to split 2 or 3 way, but that are often horribly oversized if you eat alone.
It's all great and economical when you're buying stuff to put in the cupboard and have the willpower to resist eating larger quantities, but clearly we can see that people don't. And unfortunately there's little reason for most manufacturers or supermarkets to offer smaller alternatives, as we're too easily seduced into buying the larger packs.
Personally I found my soda intake dropped substantially after I started buying my weekend soda "allowance" in 250ml bottles instead of 0.5l or 1.5l bottles, for example. And a lot of my other diet maintenance boils down to picking smaller containers, smaller plates, smaller glasses for everything except water.
No one talks about it?
It seems you have missed the keto bandwagon.
Unfortunately the research and measurements of these values is thin. We need to fix that. We already know things like whole milk better provides satiation and sateity than skim milk, and children that drink whole milk actaully have less obesity than skim milk drinkers.
If we just measured and labeled foods with a sateity/satiation index (what we really care about), then people would actually have a chance to pick better foods. Right now it is damn near impossible to determine if eating eggs and bacon for breakfast is more likely to drive over eating vs cereal. It can be measured, but we just don't do it.