Which to the articles credit, it links in reference '3', but then fails to use the data within.
The journal article cites potatoes as having a Satiety Index % of 323+-51. The next highest is Ling Fish with 225+-30, yet TFA omits mentioning potatoes and chooses rather to harp on about protein protein protein which is very faddy diet advice across all major social media platforms at the moment.
Focusing on reducing carbs and maximizing protein doesn't really seem faddish anymore. You don't have to go full Keto, but the carbs do spike your glucose and prevent your body from canabalizing fat for weight loss. At least reducing your carb portions is really effective. It took my clinical dietician 4 meetings to get that into my head at least.
The effectiveness or viability of protein maxxxing in diet is tangential to the stated goal of TFA: satiety.
My point was more to say the 'protein all the things' angle of TFA has more to do with the popularity of this diet advice right now than anything informed by satiety research.
Sure, I hope I didn't state otherwise. Prefer protein over carbs when you are hungry, if you have to eat carbs, consider really small portions so you don't spike your insulin too much. You basically eat all the veggies you want, and your protein budget is pretty generous as well although you still need to watch calories on it (150 calories for 40g of protein is ok, but stay away from almonds).
My problem was that I was still eating large bowls of what I thought was a healthy cereal, but even if the calories looked good on paper, the insulin spike was killing weight loss.
Correct. People get mad about the low carb thing because they have come to believe, via habit, that the insane number of carbs on their plate is normal. It's not. There's hidden sugar and carbs in almost everything. Moreover most carbs people consume are highly processed.
People don't get fat eating brown rice. They get fat eating cereal with hidden sweets. 'healthy' oatmeal that's laden with sugar. Fried potatoes, etc.
Brown rice and wheat based carbs are better than processed, but they are still carbs and will spike your insulin if you eat too much. I’ve pretty much given up eating them, but I had a small bowl of cereal tonight so can’t throw them off completely. You get a few carbs in your meat, veggies, fruit, etc…so it’s not like avoiding staples means you get no carbs at all.
> People get mad about the low carb thing because they have come to believe, via habit, that the insane number of carbs on their plate is normal. It's not.
Yeah it's the substitution of low density carbs for calories with high density fats that really makes the difference in satiation. It really only works while in keto (because you are fully burning fat for fuel) otherwise you are just going to end up storing the fat as excess and your body will go after your own protein as a calorie source (which is very very bad).
It's odd to me that they do not aim to calculate a different sort of hedonic factor -- essentially how much pleasure you get from the food.
And arrangement matters because I do not get the same satisfaction from chicken breast, flour, mozzarella, and tomatoes eaten individually than when made into a pizza.
Yes, and they've explicitly thrown out actually quantitative, objective factors ("carbs and glycemic index") for one that is purely subjective (and horseshit, to boot).
I dice up two giant baked potatoes for lunch daily and mix with a lean protein and some toppings like sliced jalapenos and sometimes Greek yogurt.
At 3 PM, I drink a Premier protein shake but don't eat again until 7AM the next day, yet I am still full by bedtime. Breakfast is a larger protein shake with fruit or almond butter + almond milk.
Easiest diet ever, and I feel great and hardly crave bread or sugar now.
While I commend you for your effort, protein shakes are ultimately basically ultra processed food. They have their uses, but if this is the standard diet for humans in 2025, then something is wrong with how people are eating.
I mix whey, full-fat yogurt, and frozen fruit in a blender. I think it's a decently healthy breakfast, even if blending is technically a type of "processing".
Unless you mean the packaged protein shakes, in which case I agree, and also incidentally they are kind of gross.
I haven't tried the tool they advertise, but I imagine that people trying to bulk up might benefit from a diet of low satiety per calorie that maximizes protein intake. This would also be useful for people struggling with appetite due to illness. Not everyone worried about their diet is trying to lose weight. I wonder if they provide that?
I liked the ideas at the link. About 15 years ago I came up with something similar, though not as sophisticated. I needed to lose a lot of weight. However I didn't want to follow a standard calorie-counting diet because I had been reading that many studies find they don't work over the long term, at least for most people, and besides I have no will-power when it comes to food.
So I came up with the idea of eating all I want, but just make it mostly food that is filling but reasonably low in calories. So this is what I did, and I lost 50 lb, and have kept it off ever since. I call it the low will-power diet. I don't know that it would would work for everyone, but I bet it would work with a lot of people who find standard calorie-counting diets don't. Also, it seems to me the Mediterranean diet is a version of this.
After decades of struggling with weight, I no longer believe in the calorie religion. That's not to say that calories are useless or don't matter at all. I just think that calories matters a hell of a lot less than people are led to believe and that the idea of calories in vs calories burned is an oversimplification so extreme that it is useless, and can actually lead people to making bad diet decisions.
I have put myself on extremely restrictive diets where I was consuming 1,000 -> 1300 calories per day. After a few weeks of initial weight loss, the rate of loss completely plateaued and maintained for long enough that if what we have been told about calories were true, my lived experiences would contradict the laws of physics.
The human body is insanely complicated, and from what I've read in research, hormones seem to be the single biggest contributor to body composition and weight management. And for what it's worth, my thyroid is perfectly healthy. I'm not talking about people who have medical conditions impacting their hormones.
Rather, consider that our bodies are basically chemical factories and when we ingest something, our digestive process is a process of chemical reactions. The particular chemicals and nutrients that we are deriving from foods can trigger or suppress certain hormones. When it comes to energy allocation, insulin is the most significant. When your blood sugar spikes, insulin is released in order to direct your cells to absorb that blood sugar. When that becomes saturated, your fat cells are going to begin absorbing. One of the reasons that a lot of people find success on extremely low-carbohydrate diets is that carbs tend to spike insulin.
But there are other hormones that can impact weight as well, such as cortisol (stress hormone), ghrelin (hunger response hormone) etc.
I'm convinced that the reason my ultra-restrictive diets saw plateaus despite sticking with them has to do with what I was eating and less to do with how much I was eating.
I'm not an advocate for any particular diet. I have friends who have switched their lifestyle to a mostly ketogenic diet to great results. I've known other people who eat vegan and do well. I've done those same diets and not seen the same results. What ended up working for me (and only me) was largely eliminating plant-based foods. Given the fact that when I step outside, I am allergic to pretty much every plant that lives ... I wonder if there's some kind of mild dietary allergic reaction at play in my body when I eat certain plants. When I eat pretty much just meat, the weight starts to melt off, I gain muscle mass (makes sense - I'm consuming more protein) and I feel better. My wife can't eat the same diet, though. Gives her heartburn. For her, she seems to look and feel better on a more "Mediterranean diet."
I'm not a fan of fad diets, I'm not an advocate of them. I think it's obviously about long term lifestyle choices. I just think that calories has become a sort of religious belief. I don't think we have ANY data that suggests "You can live on an all cheesecake diet and, as long as you restrict your calories, your body composition will be healthy baseline." And we would need that to be true in order for the calories in vs calories out hypothesis to hold. But research actually suggests the opposite: not all calories are created equal. I even recall a study that was shared on Hacker News a while back where they served two study groups the same daily calorie intake but they were different food types and they were able to observe differences in body fat accumulation in the different groups. I wish I could remember what to search for to dig that up.
> my lived experiences would contradict the laws of physics.
Unless you're the size of a small child or were in an extreme state of inactivity and low metabolism you were almost certainly were utilizing more than 1k calories per day. Where was this extra energy coming from if not from your body's fat reserves? This does indeed seem to violate the laws of physics.
While I don't know of this guy's diet. I can say I agree with his observations, having seen it in myself. I was on 1800/day for a year (6'2", 33yo male here)... Absolutely no change in weight. I weightlift heavy 4x week. I walk 15k steps a day (walk for most chores) and biked (again for daily life). No change whatsoever.
I recently bumped up to 2200 and the weight has shed off. This was on chatgpts suggestion.
I have no explanation. I feel much warmer on 2200 and my workouts are easier for sure.
But yeah, I started at 1800 / day thinking I'd do it for a few months and lose 15-20 lbs and then go to maintenance, but that did not work.
Now you can claim I wasn't measuring or whatever... Maybe that's true. However, I've followed my same methodology in increasing my calories, which means, if I was over counting then , then I am over counting now too.
But the conclusion is the same .. I ate more and lost weight. That is simply an objective reality
Most of the time, people without weight problems, or who has bodies that acts in favor of calorie restriction likes to reject claims of this kind.
If I had a nickel everytime I heard "You have to be doing something wrong".
However science is not clear cut, our bodies and genetics are less so. My personal experience also suggest trying to limit calories is not working for me either. It’s absolutely more complex than that. And I managed to lose 45 kgs to 72 once , and recently around 20 to 105. As this implies yes it was not long term at all. ( 3-4 years of slim body ).
Psychology, Hormones, Stress, Sedantal everyday life, eating habit changes has different effects and if the stars don’t align the correct way I can’t lose weight, or keep doing it. Particularly trying to limit calories with conventional ways requires steel nerves which also affects everyday life inversely.
In my experience this satiety looks like has some - small or big- effect.
There are different effects like NEAT, p-ratios or Adaptive Thermogenesis. As google gemini told me recently, (check for facts as I didn’t do much) there are few theories working towards understanding these body responses to similar diets like set point theory, or thrifty gene theory.
So instead of rejecting these claims perhaps we need to look with more accepting eyes to understand these kinds of calori restriction responses for different gene compositions.
One thing that I almost never see counted in studies of weight loss is the energy acquired from breathing.
We extract out oxygen from the air constantly. I tried to guestimate it once and came up with the rough number that it's possible as much as half of our total energy comes from the air.
So it's not always a violation of the laws of physics, but rather an equation where we're only counting half the variables.
Um, no. We require oxygen to release the electrons that our cells use to do work (ATP + oxygen = free electrons + waste products), but no one generates calories of energy from breathing without food.
That has been tested for thousands of years, and it's technically called "starving to death".
If you're suggesting the opposite - oxygen restriction - that is called "suffocating to death", and again, probably isn't an optimal weight loss plan.
I completely believe that the key factor most diets ignore, even after explicitly telling you they are addressing it unlike all those other diets, is the psychology of eating.
I almost never eat out of hunger. I eat because it's noon, early evening, or I'm bored, depressed, socializing, celebrating, watching TV, or it's some other time I traditionally graze.
Study after study has shown that when people claim to be on very strict diets, but can't lose weight, they are outright lying about what they are eating or at least lying to themselves (a potato chip here, a candy bar as a treat for myself, this salad that has more cheese than lettuce is so healthy)
There are no studies that have shown that calories in < calories out does not work.
I was one of those people, until I got serious and weighed my food, didn't eat unless at a meal, and weight SLOUGHED off and my parents thought I had gotten cancer or a disease since how fast I lost weight.
When I started weighing food and counting calories I found that is soooo easy to accidentally slip in a few 100 calories here and there without even noticing.
That's all it takes to make a difference between losing or gaining. I added a mile or two walk every day to burn just a little more calories just in case. Ended up dropping 50 lbs in about a year without any suffering (and kept all but 10 of it off).
Correct, which is why being satieted is very important as it reduces snacking. Eating foods with a lower glycemic index can reduce the speed of the blood sugar spike you get after you eat which can reduce the amount of insulin produced. When you spike you'll start storing fat faster and get hungry sooner leading to eating more.
Also processed foods love removing fiber that takes a long time to digest.
I have good news for you : there is nothing scientific in the "calorie theory". They pretend they're only using the physics concept of energy but it's all pseudo-science
Failing the smell test.
This feels more like someone trying to sell you something than help you find satiating foods.
There really is only one study in the field of satiety: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15701207_A_Satiety_...
Which to the articles credit, it links in reference '3', but then fails to use the data within.
The journal article cites potatoes as having a Satiety Index % of 323+-51. The next highest is Ling Fish with 225+-30, yet TFA omits mentioning potatoes and chooses rather to harp on about protein protein protein which is very faddy diet advice across all major social media platforms at the moment.
Focusing on reducing carbs and maximizing protein doesn't really seem faddish anymore. You don't have to go full Keto, but the carbs do spike your glucose and prevent your body from canabalizing fat for weight loss. At least reducing your carb portions is really effective. It took my clinical dietician 4 meetings to get that into my head at least.
The effectiveness or viability of protein maxxxing in diet is tangential to the stated goal of TFA: satiety.
My point was more to say the 'protein all the things' angle of TFA has more to do with the popularity of this diet advice right now than anything informed by satiety research.
Sure, I hope I didn't state otherwise. Prefer protein over carbs when you are hungry, if you have to eat carbs, consider really small portions so you don't spike your insulin too much. You basically eat all the veggies you want, and your protein budget is pretty generous as well although you still need to watch calories on it (150 calories for 40g of protein is ok, but stay away from almonds).
My problem was that I was still eating large bowls of what I thought was a healthy cereal, but even if the calories looked good on paper, the insulin spike was killing weight loss.
Correct. People get mad about the low carb thing because they have come to believe, via habit, that the insane number of carbs on their plate is normal. It's not. There's hidden sugar and carbs in almost everything. Moreover most carbs people consume are highly processed.
People don't get fat eating brown rice. They get fat eating cereal with hidden sweets. 'healthy' oatmeal that's laden with sugar. Fried potatoes, etc.
Brown rice and wheat based carbs are better than processed, but they are still carbs and will spike your insulin if you eat too much. I’ve pretty much given up eating them, but I had a small bowl of cereal tonight so can’t throw them off completely. You get a few carbs in your meat, veggies, fruit, etc…so it’s not like avoiding staples means you get no carbs at all.
Don't eat too much?
> People get mad about the low carb thing because they have come to believe, via habit, that the insane number of carbs on their plate is normal. It's not.
It's not normal, it's Nixon!
Yeah it's the substitution of low density carbs for calories with high density fats that really makes the difference in satiation. It really only works while in keto (because you are fully burning fat for fuel) otherwise you are just going to end up storing the fat as excess and your body will go after your own protein as a calorie source (which is very very bad).
[dead]
Also none of their satiety scale illustrations show the humble white potato.
It's odd to me that they do not aim to calculate a different sort of hedonic factor -- essentially how much pleasure you get from the food.
And arrangement matters because I do not get the same satisfaction from chicken breast, flour, mozzarella, and tomatoes eaten individually than when made into a pizza.
Yes, and they've explicitly thrown out actually quantitative, objective factors ("carbs and glycemic index") for one that is purely subjective (and horseshit, to boot).
Potatoes are king of satiety.
I dice up two giant baked potatoes for lunch daily and mix with a lean protein and some toppings like sliced jalapenos and sometimes Greek yogurt.
At 3 PM, I drink a Premier protein shake but don't eat again until 7AM the next day, yet I am still full by bedtime. Breakfast is a larger protein shake with fruit or almond butter + almond milk.
Easiest diet ever, and I feel great and hardly crave bread or sugar now.
While I commend you for your effort, protein shakes are ultimately basically ultra processed food. They have their uses, but if this is the standard diet for humans in 2025, then something is wrong with how people are eating.
I mix whey, full-fat yogurt, and frozen fruit in a blender. I think it's a decently healthy breakfast, even if blending is technically a type of "processing".
Unless you mean the packaged protein shakes, in which case I agree, and also incidentally they are kind of gross.
I haven't tried the tool they advertise, but I imagine that people trying to bulk up might benefit from a diet of low satiety per calorie that maximizes protein intake. This would also be useful for people struggling with appetite due to illness. Not everyone worried about their diet is trying to lose weight. I wonder if they provide that?
Why maximize protein intake? Protein benefits cap out at a certain level that is far below maximal, especially when "bulking".
I liked the ideas at the link. About 15 years ago I came up with something similar, though not as sophisticated. I needed to lose a lot of weight. However I didn't want to follow a standard calorie-counting diet because I had been reading that many studies find they don't work over the long term, at least for most people, and besides I have no will-power when it comes to food.
So I came up with the idea of eating all I want, but just make it mostly food that is filling but reasonably low in calories. So this is what I did, and I lost 50 lb, and have kept it off ever since. I call it the low will-power diet. I don't know that it would would work for everyone, but I bet it would work with a lot of people who find standard calorie-counting diets don't. Also, it seems to me the Mediterranean diet is a version of this.
As a former Swabian I'm a bit hurt that those beautiful Brezeln get such a low score
After decades of struggling with weight, I no longer believe in the calorie religion. That's not to say that calories are useless or don't matter at all. I just think that calories matters a hell of a lot less than people are led to believe and that the idea of calories in vs calories burned is an oversimplification so extreme that it is useless, and can actually lead people to making bad diet decisions.
I have put myself on extremely restrictive diets where I was consuming 1,000 -> 1300 calories per day. After a few weeks of initial weight loss, the rate of loss completely plateaued and maintained for long enough that if what we have been told about calories were true, my lived experiences would contradict the laws of physics.
The human body is insanely complicated, and from what I've read in research, hormones seem to be the single biggest contributor to body composition and weight management. And for what it's worth, my thyroid is perfectly healthy. I'm not talking about people who have medical conditions impacting their hormones.
Rather, consider that our bodies are basically chemical factories and when we ingest something, our digestive process is a process of chemical reactions. The particular chemicals and nutrients that we are deriving from foods can trigger or suppress certain hormones. When it comes to energy allocation, insulin is the most significant. When your blood sugar spikes, insulin is released in order to direct your cells to absorb that blood sugar. When that becomes saturated, your fat cells are going to begin absorbing. One of the reasons that a lot of people find success on extremely low-carbohydrate diets is that carbs tend to spike insulin.
But there are other hormones that can impact weight as well, such as cortisol (stress hormone), ghrelin (hunger response hormone) etc.
I'm convinced that the reason my ultra-restrictive diets saw plateaus despite sticking with them has to do with what I was eating and less to do with how much I was eating.
I'm not an advocate for any particular diet. I have friends who have switched their lifestyle to a mostly ketogenic diet to great results. I've known other people who eat vegan and do well. I've done those same diets and not seen the same results. What ended up working for me (and only me) was largely eliminating plant-based foods. Given the fact that when I step outside, I am allergic to pretty much every plant that lives ... I wonder if there's some kind of mild dietary allergic reaction at play in my body when I eat certain plants. When I eat pretty much just meat, the weight starts to melt off, I gain muscle mass (makes sense - I'm consuming more protein) and I feel better. My wife can't eat the same diet, though. Gives her heartburn. For her, she seems to look and feel better on a more "Mediterranean diet."
I'm not a fan of fad diets, I'm not an advocate of them. I think it's obviously about long term lifestyle choices. I just think that calories has become a sort of religious belief. I don't think we have ANY data that suggests "You can live on an all cheesecake diet and, as long as you restrict your calories, your body composition will be healthy baseline." And we would need that to be true in order for the calories in vs calories out hypothesis to hold. But research actually suggests the opposite: not all calories are created equal. I even recall a study that was shared on Hacker News a while back where they served two study groups the same daily calorie intake but they were different food types and they were able to observe differences in body fat accumulation in the different groups. I wish I could remember what to search for to dig that up.
> my lived experiences would contradict the laws of physics.
Unless you're the size of a small child or were in an extreme state of inactivity and low metabolism you were almost certainly were utilizing more than 1k calories per day. Where was this extra energy coming from if not from your body's fat reserves? This does indeed seem to violate the laws of physics.
While I don't know of this guy's diet. I can say I agree with his observations, having seen it in myself. I was on 1800/day for a year (6'2", 33yo male here)... Absolutely no change in weight. I weightlift heavy 4x week. I walk 15k steps a day (walk for most chores) and biked (again for daily life). No change whatsoever.
I recently bumped up to 2200 and the weight has shed off. This was on chatgpts suggestion.
I have no explanation. I feel much warmer on 2200 and my workouts are easier for sure.
But yeah, I started at 1800 / day thinking I'd do it for a few months and lose 15-20 lbs and then go to maintenance, but that did not work.
Now you can claim I wasn't measuring or whatever... Maybe that's true. However, I've followed my same methodology in increasing my calories, which means, if I was over counting then , then I am over counting now too.
But the conclusion is the same .. I ate more and lost weight. That is simply an objective reality
Most of the time, people without weight problems, or who has bodies that acts in favor of calorie restriction likes to reject claims of this kind.
If I had a nickel everytime I heard "You have to be doing something wrong".
However science is not clear cut, our bodies and genetics are less so. My personal experience also suggest trying to limit calories is not working for me either. It’s absolutely more complex than that. And I managed to lose 45 kgs to 72 once , and recently around 20 to 105. As this implies yes it was not long term at all. ( 3-4 years of slim body ).
Psychology, Hormones, Stress, Sedantal everyday life, eating habit changes has different effects and if the stars don’t align the correct way I can’t lose weight, or keep doing it. Particularly trying to limit calories with conventional ways requires steel nerves which also affects everyday life inversely.
In my experience this satiety looks like has some - small or big- effect.
There are different effects like NEAT, p-ratios or Adaptive Thermogenesis. As google gemini told me recently, (check for facts as I didn’t do much) there are few theories working towards understanding these body responses to similar diets like set point theory, or thrifty gene theory.
So instead of rejecting these claims perhaps we need to look with more accepting eyes to understand these kinds of calori restriction responses for different gene compositions.
One thing that I almost never see counted in studies of weight loss is the energy acquired from breathing.
We extract out oxygen from the air constantly. I tried to guestimate it once and came up with the rough number that it's possible as much as half of our total energy comes from the air.
So it's not always a violation of the laws of physics, but rather an equation where we're only counting half the variables.
Maybe you're trolling. But if not, ask yourself what is the oxygen reacting with?
Um, no. We require oxygen to release the electrons that our cells use to do work (ATP + oxygen = free electrons + waste products), but no one generates calories of energy from breathing without food.
That has been tested for thousands of years, and it's technically called "starving to death".
If you're suggesting the opposite - oxygen restriction - that is called "suffocating to death", and again, probably isn't an optimal weight loss plan.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/sep/22/gerardseenan1
I completely believe that the key factor most diets ignore, even after explicitly telling you they are addressing it unlike all those other diets, is the psychology of eating.
I almost never eat out of hunger. I eat because it's noon, early evening, or I'm bored, depressed, socializing, celebrating, watching TV, or it's some other time I traditionally graze.
Study after study has shown that when people claim to be on very strict diets, but can't lose weight, they are outright lying about what they are eating or at least lying to themselves (a potato chip here, a candy bar as a treat for myself, this salad that has more cheese than lettuce is so healthy)
There are no studies that have shown that calories in < calories out does not work.
I was one of those people, until I got serious and weighed my food, didn't eat unless at a meal, and weight SLOUGHED off and my parents thought I had gotten cancer or a disease since how fast I lost weight.
When I started weighing food and counting calories I found that is soooo easy to accidentally slip in a few 100 calories here and there without even noticing.
That's all it takes to make a difference between losing or gaining. I added a mile or two walk every day to burn just a little more calories just in case. Ended up dropping 50 lbs in about a year without any suffering (and kept all but 10 of it off).
Yeah. You have to be so regimented for calorie counting to work "as counted".
Weighing food, and being selective about what I eat, on top, really helps.
Correct, which is why being satieted is very important as it reduces snacking. Eating foods with a lower glycemic index can reduce the speed of the blood sugar spike you get after you eat which can reduce the amount of insulin produced. When you spike you'll start storing fat faster and get hungry sooner leading to eating more.
Also processed foods love removing fiber that takes a long time to digest.
I have good news for you : there is nothing scientific in the "calorie theory". They pretend they're only using the physics concept of energy but it's all pseudo-science