How can air in food make you more satisfied – make you eat less? How can it curb a tendency to be fat, or reverse a trend?
Can it? Turns out – yes.
Feed a hungry college student a half glass full of smoothie and they will eat 20% more at lunch ½ later than the college student who drinks the SAME smoothie only whipped until it swells to a full glass with air. Not only that, but the ones that eat the airy smoothie don’t make it up at their next meal.
My brother, John, and my food guru, Dick, have both recommended Mindless Eating and Volumetrics to you and me. I finally read them. Actually, John recommends listening to Mindless Eating as a book on tape, so that’s what I did. I recommend it.
Listen to get the fun of it and the flavor of it. Then get the book to read the summaries of what to do.
Both titles don’t really work to tell you their messages. The subtitle of Volumetrics is great – Feel Full On Fewer Calories. I’d rewrite that to read – Feel Satisfied on Fewer Calories.
It’s not my job to re-title these excellent books. Mindless Eating deals with how our brains are tricked to eat more than we want by other visual cues and often by genuine optical illusions.
You could summarize Volumetrics – We don’t eat calories, we eat size, volume. We are stratified by greater volume and not necessarily by greater calories. Satisfied means you eat less, means you lose fat and still feel, well, satisfied.
These are not deprivation diet books. DEPRIVATION DIETS DON’T WORK. And need I say, not fun.
The two cheapest ingredients in food are water and air. Adding air or water is the simplest way to feel more satisfied with no additional calories. You read about air in the smoothie above. Soup is food with water added. Raisins are grapes with water removed.
Let’s see what that does for you…
Raisins
Which is more satisfying. ¼ cup of raisins or nearly 2 cups of grapes (50 ml or 500 ml). The metric numbers makes the size difference even more startling. Exact same number of calories. Exact same food. One has water; one doesn’t.
Which would you choose if you wanted to feel most satisfied?
Yep, me too.
Soup is the Free Lunch of Satisfaction
I live on good soup, not words. РMoli̬re
Even though soup is mostly water, you and your body perceive it as food. This is very counter intuitive to me.
Proof? Give people a 270 calorie chicken-rice casserole and a glass of water as a first course to a luncheon.
Give another group the same casserole with the water added to it to make it a soup. Check both groups to see how much they ate for the rest of lunch.
The soup people ate 100 calories less of the lunch that followed and didn’t make up the loss at dinner. Cool, yes! Soup created more satiety, satisfaction. Other experiments showed that chunky soup creates more satisfaction than strained soup. And hot and cold soups both create the same benefits.
You can read the physiology in the books if you’re interested. But this seems like magic to me.
Bag the Peanut Butter
I over eat peanut butter; it is one of the highest density foods you can find. If I eat volume, then you have to eat a mountain of calories to get a decent volume.
If I lived alone, I would just not bring it into the house. Obviously you can use this useful tip for all your trigger foods. Since I live with the Mysterious Madame Ling, who likes peanut butter on apples, I simply put the peanut butter in a brown paper bag.
Not only is this -- Out of sight, out of mind -- it puts inconvenience into the circuit making it harder to mindlessly eat.
Note: You may be and I am on a seafood diet, I eat everything I see. Out of sight, out of mind.
Eating Out? Eat This, Not That
Men’s Health magazine food editor, David Zinczenko, has written a book that works with some of the same ideas, but he takes it into the world of eating out in America. If you live outside the USA, these examples can still be instructive.
John shared this one with me -- Baskin-Robins’ Banana split or Dairy Queen’s?
I will just tease you. Go to the site or get the magazine to see which one.
http://www.menshealth.com/eatthis/15-Top-Swaps/index.php
This page deals with drinks. Check the classic cocktail for a shock.
http://www.menshealth.com/eatthis/Drink-This-Not-That/index.php
OK, One Optical Illusion
People perceive tall as more than short.
Remember the optical illusion from childhood of the upside down T. They ask which is longer – the horizontal part or the vertical section.
People say the vertical is up to 20% taller when they are in fact the same length. (The illusion is so strong for me, that I got out a ruler and tested it.)
Tall thin glasses will have you drinking less wine, juice, or Coke. And again, you will feel satisfied. Remove the short squat glasses from your life, unless you want to increase your consumption of water, then the idea works in your favor. I drink water out of a Bavarian beer mug.
Action
If you have people in your family who need to monitor fat gain, get the books, read them, and then apply the tricks.
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