How High Satiety Eating Helps You Lose Weight Without Calorie Counting

There is a new way of eating that is making some waves in the diet ecosystem over the past couple of years.

You might be rolling your eyes and saying “Not another fad diet!”

Well before you close this window and curse my name, let me assure you I wouldn’t be writing about this new diet if I didn’t think you could take something useful away from learning more about it.

This is nothing new, there is always a new diet making seemingly impossible claims about how it can help you reach your goals.

Obviously I am uninterested about the claims a diet makes and more interested in the science it is based on.

Most diets are about restriction.

No animal meat, no carbs, no fat, no vegetables.

Or maybe it’s not about black or white food lists, but it asks you to limit things. For example, limit the amount of time you are “allowed” to eat any food at all.

Then there are diets that combine various concepts, for example doing a low carb diet with some type of time restricted eating.

Moving Beyond Restriction: A New Approach

This new diet is somewhat different in that it’s less about restriction and more about selecting foods that maximize certain metrics about your diet. You can choose whatever foods you want, animal foods, vegetables, carbs, fats, ultra-processed foods, whole natural foods, foods that have glute and grains, liquid calories, anything and everything is on the table, it is all about hitting certain metrics.

As you might guess, I like this concept because it’s not telling you that you can’t have any given food, it is not demonizing an entire food group, and it’s not making blanket statements about whether a food is good or bad. This can take a huge mental burden off someone who is always worried about adhering to the “rules” of any given diet and being kicked out of the “camp” they are “in” if they do.

What Is High Satiety Eating?

This new diet is called high satiety eating. The idea of this diet is to eat the foods that provide the most satiety (ie they make you more full) for the least amount of calories.

Plain and simple.

You can eat any food you want, you just want to make sure that your overall satiety score of your meal is as high as possible.

Understanding the Satiety Score

What makes up a meal’s satiety score?

A satiety score consists of 4 components, protein, fiber, calories, and something called a hedonic factor.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/satiety/science

The Role of Protein, Fiber, and Calories

Let’s take a look at the first 3 components of the satiety score, protein, fiber, and calories. What we are measuring with these 3 components is the amount of fiber and protein per calorie in a given food.

I have talked about the protein to calorie food ratio before when talking about the importance of protein in your diet. If you want to read more about the protein to calorie ratio check out this blog post.

The most important takeaway from the protein to calorie ratio is that ideally you want to find foods that provide the most protein for the least amount of calories. Some examples of foods that have a high protein to calorie ratio are white fish, shrimp, scallops, chicken breast, lean ground turkey, filet mignon, protein powder, and egg whites. Foods with a pretty poor protein to calorie ratio are bacon, ribeyes, nuts and seeds (including things like nut butters), most “protein bars”, and beans and legumes.

We can apply many of the same concepts we just talked about with protein to fiber. Essentially foods that have the highest fiber to calorie ratio tend to make you feel fuller for longer because fiber is a slow digesting component of food. It just sits in your digestive system longer than foods with lower fiber. For more information on the importance of fiber per calorie you can watch this YouTube video I created on the topic.

Ideally, if you can maximize the amount of fiber and protein in the foods you eat while keeping the calories for those foods as low as possible you are setting yourself up for success from a satiety perspective.

Combining Foods for Optimal Satiety

Now it is going to be hard to find a single food that maximizes all three of these things. You will likely find foods high in fiber low in calories but have virtually 0 protein, ie broccoli. You will also find plenty of foods that are high in protein and low in calories but have virtually 0 fiber, ie animal proteins. That is OK because in most cases you will be combining these foods at a given meal. What we are really concerned about is the overall satiety score of a given meal.

If you are curious about how a food ranks in protein, fiber, calories (and hedonicity which we will discuss later) you can use this tool from the website Hava.

How Food Preparation Affects Satiety

Now also be aware of the things that you add to a food can alter its satiety score.

For example broccoli has a good satiety score because it has fiber for virtually no calories.

However when you cover that broccoli in cheddar cheese you add a lot of calories via fat but add virtually 0 fiber and protein so it worsens the satiety score.

Same can be said for the chicken breast. A grilled chicken breast has a high satiety score.

However once you cover that in breadcrumbs, fry it, and lather it in bbq sauce we get a very different score.

Processed Foods: Friend or Foe?

You might be saying…

“Ryan, you are comparing whole unprocessed foods to processed foods, so can’t we just avoid processed foods like you have said in the past and forget about this whole satiety score thing?”

Great observation!

And yes, the more processed a food is the more calorically dense and easier to overeat it will be. If you followed that heuristic you would be pretty well off. However this rule is not universally true of all processed foods.

For example, frozen spinach would be considered ultra-processed, but it’s actually a very good choice when it comes to a food. It is only considered ultra-processed because it’s far removed from its natural form.

Same is true for something like a protein powder.

Does that picture above represent any food you can think of? No, it is far removed from its original form (whey is a byproduct of making cheese), but it’s still a pretty good choice.

So while most processed foods will have pretty low or very low satiety scores and you could avoid all processed foods and use that to guide your food choices and do amazing things, it would eliminate some foods that could be beneficial.

The Hedonic Factor: Why We Overeat

Now let’s address the last factor that contributes to the satiety score, and that is the hedonic score.

All the world hedonic means is how likely are you to overeat a given food. When you think about foods that have a high hedonic score you likely think of chips, cookies, cakes, donuts, and the latest coffee concoction from the local cafe. All of these foods have a high hedonic score.

The Limits of the Satiety Score

However this is one place where I think the satiety score falls short.

The hedonicity of food is subjective.

Here is a good example.

My daughter and wife LOVE chocolate. So for my daughter’s birthday my wife made her this super rich chocolate cake. My wife and my daughter loved it, the hedonic factor for them was pretty high.

My son and I on the other hand like chocolate, but a little goes a long way for us. We both had a little slice and enjoyed it, but a little slice was more than enough for us.

On the other hand I love banana bread, but my wife hates bananas. I could eat an entire loaf of banana bread in a day if I let myself, it’s highly hedonic to me. My wife wants to vomit at the smell of bananas, the hedonic score of banana bread is very low for her.

The subjectivity of hedonicity is where I think the satiety score breaks down. Yes, in general everyone loves cookies, chips, donuts, cake, ice cream. But a certain type of cookie might be highly hedonic to someone while it’s completely unappetizing to someone else.

When we use tools like Hava to look up the satiety score of food it’s going to give us good objective data on fiber, protein, and calories, but I don’t think we can necessarily trust the hedonic score.

That said, I think we all know what foods are hedonic for us. So if you know a food is hedonic for you but the tool says it’s not hedonic, obviously go with your own knowledge about yourself over some tool that knows nothing about you!

Humans are also amazing at increasing the hedonic factor of any food.

Baked potatoes have a very low hedonic score.

However when you add butter, bacon, and sour cream to the baked potato it nearly halves the hedonic score.

Honestly I think the hedonistic properties of food are the most important factor in determining how satiating a food is. Many people will argue that once you get enough protein or you eat enough fiber you will stop eating. Well I think today’s modern food environment allows us to put that theory to the test.

We can create foods that have a significant amount of high quality protein and a lot of fiber but also have hedonistic characteristics to them. Go onto Pinterest and search for something like “high protein low carb cookie recipe”. You will find tons of recipes that use protein powder and sugar alcohols (which typically have all the sweetness but very little digestible carbs because of the fiber content). The average person will overeat these cookies even though they are getting plenty of protein and fiber.

Why?

Because cookies, regardless of the ingredients, macros, and micros, are still cookies and they taste amazing!

All this to say that the hedonistic score of a food is very subjective, can easily be manipulated, and is unaffected by the amount of fiber and protein, so we need to take the score from the “high satiety diet” with more scrutiny.

Is the High Satiety Diet Right for You?

Where does this leave us with the high satiety diet?

Overall, I like this concept and if you really want to deep dive into the concepts behind it check out the website and app Hava.

Do I think it is better than any other diet out there?

No.

Besides the issues with the hedonistic score I mentioned above, I also think the high satiety diet makes people look at their food like they are looking at the Matrix….it’s all just a bunch of numbers. For some people, like myself, that is not an issue, we love quantifying things. However I can also see how this takes the joy out of food too and makes constructing meals like solving an algebra problem.

That said there are a lot of benefits to the high satiety diet, most important being that it is not restricting the foods you can eat and that can be a positive for some people’s mental health and wellbeing. It also prioritizes concepts that have been proven time and time again to lead to successful weight loss that can be maintained for the long term, namely high protein, high fiber, for the least amount of calories.

The Bigger Picture: Health Beyond Diet

There is one more gap in the high satiety diet that I would like to point out.

There are a lot of non-food related aspects of our lives that play into the way we eat. Not only that, a high satiety diet is not guaranteed to provide you good overall health.

We also need to incorporate movement, exercise, stress management, and good sleep habits into the mix if we really want to be healthy and have any hope in choosing the right foods to make the high satiety diet concept work.

In fact if you do not move your body, your stress is high, and your sleep sucks, your diet means nothing because all of these factors typically result in cravings, increased hunger, and a poor hormonal profile which will ultimately result in a poor diet.

If the high satiety diet sounds interesting to you by all means give it a shot, but also don’t forget that you need to address the other pillars of health in order to make it work and be successful.

Final Thoughts and Next Steps

As always there is no magic bullet when it comes to health, however I love the fact that people are still experimenting and trying to find alternate approaches that move us all forward. The more approaches we have the better, because everyone is unique so we need a variety of options to help find each individual’s optimal approach to their own health.

I try to disseminate information in blogs, videos, and short newsletters each week to help you find your ideal approach to health, so if you would like to keep on top on new information in your quest to find ideal health, sign up for my newsletter using the form below and I promise to provide actionable information you can put to work right away!