8 Tips To Battle Hunger: Part One

One of the biggest struggles people have when losing body fat and maintaining body fat is dealing with hunger.

We have all been there when we know we have already eaten our fair share of food yet our stomach appears to be a bottomless pit and WE JUST WANT MORE! This and the next post will be all about how you can handle the feeling of hunger that doesn’t involve diving face first into a cake.

However before jumping into the hunger destroying tips I have for you I want to make something clear upfront.

I DO NOT think you should be constantly trying to stave off hunger all the time and I DO NOT think that you should not honor your body’s hunger signals sometimes as well.

Actually these two points are really one in the same…

If you find yourself constantly hungry and you know it is legitimate hunger, you have followed some of the tips below and are still hungry, then I think YOU SHOULD HONOR THAT HUNGER and eat some more food. Your body is sending you a signal and your hunger has not been hijacked in some way, so it’s probably a real signal that you are hungry and you need to eat. SO GO AHEAD AND EAT!

If you find yourself in this situation a lot then I think it is a sign you are consistently eating too little and I would suggest you consider increasing the amount of food you are eating at all of your meals. No one should be constantly hungry day in and day out.

These 8 tips are more for someone who occasionally finds themselves hungry and is trying to deal with that hunger in a way that doesn’t involve a pint of ice cream.

First I will give credit to MASS (Month Applications in Strength Sports) for providing the tips. Being that MASS is a publication that dives into research all of these tips are backed by research showing them to be effective.

So why not post a link to the tips instead of writing a blog post on them?

Well because as I have said before, research is great in giving us a direction to move in, but oftentimes lacks information on how to practically implement these practices in day to day life at an individual level.

What I am going to do in this post is not only provide the evidence behind the tip, but also how you can practically apply these tips and put them to work to deal with hunger in real life.

With that out of the way let’s dive into the tips!

Adopt an acceptance-based approach to hunger

This tip comes from a paper titled Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for weight control: Model, evidence, and future directions. There is a lot to this paper, and it has to do with topics besides hunger. Before diving into this tip it’s important to understand what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is. I am no expert here so I will quote the paper as to the definition:

ACT uses acceptance, mindfulness, and values processes to produce psychological flexibility, or the ability to take values-based action in the presence of unwanted thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. In the context of weight control, ACT seeks to promote healthy behavioral patterns consistent with stated values, while teaching mindfulness and acceptance skills to increase behavioral commitment to values-based behavior.

What I think is important to highlight about ACT is that it uses “values-based” goals. Someone might have a goal of maintaining their weight or to lose weight but that can’t be a goal in the context of ACT because it is not values based.

Instead ACT would have you define your goals in terms of what values you might want to instill in your life. For example, the ability to hike with your family, or to be at your best at work, or to see your grandkids graduate from high school. Weight loss might be a way of achieving or maintaining those values but it is not the goal in itself.

This tip however focuses primarily on the acceptance component of ACT.

What the tip is basically saying is that sometimes you need to accept the fact that you will be hungry, and THAT IS OK!

One of the problems we have with hunger is that it is novel to most people. In today’s world many of us are lucky enough to never have to experience hunger if we don’t want to. Food is readily accessible and if we even have the slightest twinge of hunger we can easily find something to eat. It is fair to say that many of us have grown unaccustomed to being hungry.

In fact in some families and cultures it seems like we try our best to avoid kids from ever experiencing hunger. Snacks are everywhere and are at the ready if kids show even the slightest hint of hunger.

As humans we also naturally avoid hunger if we can. Hunger was not a good thing when food was not so accessible, our brains naturally drive us to eat if we are hungry and there is food around because not doing so might be disastrous later on if we pass up the opportunity. As I have mentioned many times before, this is a perfect example of an ancestral mismatch.

Contrary to what our monkey brain might be telling us, for most people a little hunger now and then is OK. It’s OK because most of us can get food whenever we want. Just because I am hungry right now and I pass up on eating at that moment does not mean I won’t have the opportunity to eat again for the next several days (like it would several thousand years ago).

It is important to accept that you likely will experience some hunger, and that it’s OK to experience it, especially if you are trying to lose fat. It’s also important to accept that you can experience hunger that has nothing to do with how much food you have or have not eaten.

For example, the smell of fresh baked cookies might cause your hunger to spike. You can also have cravings just by being in a certain situation. Stress can also trigger hunger, lack of sleep can too. In other words hunger can be triggered for a lot of reasons that don’t have to do with needing more food.

Once you can accept hunger is a natural feeling, realize that it is not a life or death situation and also realize that hunger might come based on the context of life you can prepare yourself with how to better deal with the feeling of hunger and not immediately succumb to it.

It is also important to accept that sometimes your hunger might get the best of you and you will eat when you are not truly hungry, and you will overeat sometimes. Ultimately if you learn from these situations it can better help you handle it the next time.

The reason why acceptance is listed first is because your mental framing is often the hardest part of achieving any goal. If you cannot get into the right mental space around dealing with hunger it will win the battle and win the war.

Minimize intake of hyperpalatable foods and beverages

This tip is based on a study titled Ad libitum meal energy intake is positively influenced by energy density, eating rate and hyper-palatable food across four dietary patterns.

However, we don’t need a study to tell us that hyperpalatable foods and beverages are not going to help us with our hunger.

It comes back to the whole food rule that I continue to stand by…most of your diet should be comprised of whole, natural foods. If we look at any and all diet interventions, none of them emphasize the intake of hyperpalatable foods and beverages, and they all emphasize intakes of whole natural foods.

As we will talk about in the subsequent tips, one of the best things you can do to combat hunger is to slow down the digestive process while providing the nutrients your body needs. Hyperpalatable foods not only taste great but they don’t take a lot to digest and are typically nutrient poor.

The super tasty mocha frappuccino goes down easy, but does little in the way of providing your body with anything it needs from a nutrient perspective while at the same time setting off all the sensations that are going to tell your brain to seek out more of that type of food.

It is very likely going to leave you hungry if not immediately after, a few hours later.

It is also important to point out that whole natural foods can also be hyperpalatable. Some people can eat a whole bag of nuts, or several pounds of meat, or a ton of fruit. So while most whole foods are not hyperpalatable for the majority of people, at the individual level certain people can struggle with them. It is important to realize that any food can be hyperpalatable and limit the intake of those foods, even if they are whole foods.

Try to eat meals with energy density value below ~1.75 kcal/g

This tip comes from a study titled Time to revisit the passive overconsumption hypothesis? Humans show sensitivity to calories in energy-rich meals.

First lets understand what we mean by the term energy density.

Essentially energy density is calculated by taking the total calories in a meal and dividing it by the weight of the meal. For example, if your dinner of steak, potatoes, and broccoli contained 700 calories and it weighed 453 grams (roughly 1 pound) you could calculate the energy density of that meal by dividing 700 by 453 and you would get an energy density of 1.54kcal/g.

What the above study found was that people tended to control their hunger better if the energy density of their meals was below 1.75 kcal/g, so our example above appears to be a good choice.

However very few people are going around calculating the energy density of their meals so how do we put this into practice?

Again this is where our rule of consuming as many whole natural foods as possible helps. Very few whole natural foods will have an energy density of more than 1.75kcal/g.

For example 1 pound of broccoli has 153 calories. We know that 1 lb is 453 grams so we don’t even need to do the math to realize that broccoli is way under the 1.75kcal/g limit.

A 1 lb baked potato has 426 calories, again that is way below the 1.75kcal/g level.

A 1lb chicken breast has 748 calories, so that has an energy density of 1.65…all good.

A 1lb ribeye steak has 1,320 calories, so that has an energy density of 2.9kcal/g….uh oh.

Have no fear because remember we are calculating the energy density of the entire meal you are eating. In reality at a meal we would have 4oz of ribeye (307 calories), 150 grams of potato (110 calories), and maybe 200 grams of broccoli (68 calories). The total calories for that meal is 485, so the energy density is just over 1 for that meal…you can still have ribeye 😉

Now lets calculate the energy density of a McDonald’s Big Mac, Medium Fry, and Medium Coca-Cola.

The medium fry is 310 calories and weighs 110g.

The big mac has 590 calories and weighs 203g.

The medium coke has 210 calories and weighs 67g.

The total calories are 1,110 and the total weight is 380g, that gives us an energy density of 2.9kcal/g.

This example illustrates how the energy density of whole foods and processed foods can differ greatly. Combine this with the fact that the burger, frys, and coke are hyperpalatable and we are setting ourselves up to increase our hunger dramatically.

So from a practical point of view, as a general rule of thumb if you stick with whole natural foods you will be hard pressed to increase the energy density past 1.75kcal/g. The more processed foods we include on our plate, the more likely we are to blow past the 1.75kcal/g mark.

Eat foods that require more chewing

This tip comes from a study titled Speed limits: the effects of industrial food processing and food texture on daily energy intake and eating behaviour in healthy adults.

This study took a look at how soft and hard textured foods affect how many calories you eat.

The overall summary of this study was that choosing foods that are harder versus softer generally result in people consuming less calories overall.

This figure from the study sums it up nicely.

The filled in circle and the filled in upside down triangle represent hard foods. Each larger circle represents a meal…notice how the circle and upside down triangle are at the lower end of the energy intake scale.

Again we need to translate this into everyday life and how it helps battle hunger.

What are some examples of hard and soft foods?

This table from the study shows some good examples contrasting hard and soft foods.

The morning snack provides a great example of hard and soft foods. We have apple pieces, apple sauce, and apple juice. (I don’t know how you consider apple pieces ultra-processed, but oh well).

When you drink apple juice, you can not only consume several apples in a juice but the time it takes for you to digest that food is very quick, there is not much for your body to do. So if you consume the juice of 1 apple it takes up very little space in your stomach and moves through your digestive tract very quickly resulting in you being less full and getting hungrier quicker.

Apple sauce is slightly better because it’s not a liquid, although it’s close. It would take up more room in your stomach, and take more time to digest.

Apple pieces are going to take up the most volume in your stomach and take the longest to digest resulting in you feeling fuller.

Other examples will be steak over ground beef, raw or lightly steamed veggies over mushy veggies, whole almonds over almond butter, hard boiled eggs over scrambled eggs, beef jerky over protein powder.

In general the harder the texture of the food, the less calories it will have, the longer it will take to digest and you will maintain your feeling of fullness longer with less feelings of hunger.

And that concludes the first 4 tips along with how to practically put them into practice. Next week we will go over tips 5-8. If you want to be the first to know when next week’s post is live and get to work applying the next 4 tips, sign up for my newsletter using the form below and I will email you as soon as I post it!