How To Avoid Overeating
There is a tendency for the vast majority of people to believe that regardless of the bad food they eat or the amount of alcohol or other high calorie drinks they consume,they can still maintain optimal health and lose weight by taking a magic pill, powder or other potion. However, this is a false hope … one that is encouraged by the outrageous claims of the weight loss industry (… who know it makes commercial sense to give the public what they want!) but that has been silenced by too much scientific evidence. There is no miracle weight loss pill. There is only the natural world of law and order, of cause and effect. If you want to lose weight, enjoy optimal health and increase the chances of prolonged lifespan, you must engage the cause … and this means in very simple terms that you must eat a diet of predominately unrefined foods that are nutrient and fibre-rich (full details of which will be discussed later in this site). The only way that you can possibly lose weight in the long term is by eating healthy, good quality foods that are nutritionally rich while at the same time avoiding foods which are nutrient poor. By eating the right foods that are rich in nutrients and fibre and low in calories, we become “filled up” … which will hopefully help us avoid overeating and prevent us from raiding the cookie jar when our mid afternoon hunger pangs start playing up again!
To grasp the science behind how all of this works, we need to understand how the brain controls our dietary drive. A complicated system of chemoreceptors (specialized cells which convert chemical substances into biological signals), in the nerves that line the digestive tract carefully monitor the calorie and nutrient density of every mouthful of food we eat and send this information to the hypothalamus in the brain. There are also stretch receptors in the stomach which signal satisfaction by detecting the VOLUME of food eaten … not the weight of the food. (See illustration above). In fact, if you consume sufficient nutrients and fibre, you will become biochemically filled (nutrients) and mechanically filled (fibre) and your desire to consume more calories will be blunted or at the very least, turned down. Therefore a key factor in your ability to control and reduce your weight is your ability to consume sufficient fibre and nutrients.
To illustrate this in practice, several scientific studies have been carried out involving a group of people and measuring carefully the average number of calories they consumed at dinner. Next researchers gave the group a whole orange and a whole apple prior to dinner. The results in most cases were that the participants would reduce their caloric intake on the average, by the amount of calories in the fruit. .
What would happen if the same group were given the same amount of calories in fruit juice rather that the whole fruit? The results were that the group ate the same amount of food as they did when they had nothing at the beginning of their meal. In other words, the juice did not reduce their calories consumed in the meal but rather became additional calories. This has been shown to occur with beer, soft drinks and other sources of liquid calories. Liquid calories, without the fiber present in the whole food has little effect on blunting our caloric drive. In fact, studies show that fruit juice and other sweet beverages lead to obesity … especially in children.
If you are serious about losing weight, don’t drink your fruit … eat it! Too much fiber and too many nutrients are removed during juicing, and many of the remaining nutrients are lost through processing, heat and storage. There is no substitute for natural whole foods!
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