Quality over quantity: Experts explain how eating better will help you eat less
While losing weight can be difficult, the basics are simple, eat less and get more exercise. But the food you eat may be what’s impeding success.
Obesity rates in the United States have seen a significant drop over the past two years. After peaking at nearly 40% in 2022, the rate is now down to 37% this year according to Gallup data.
Americans have been aided in their endeavor to lose weight with the arrival of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. However, a study published in Nature Medicine found that by simply changing what we eat, we can also achieve meaningful weight loss.
Quality over quantity
Researchers split a group of overweight participants whose diet consisted of at least half their calories coming from ultra-processed foods into two groups. One consumed a prescribed diet including ultra-processed foods and the other one with minimally processed foods over an eight-week period at which time they switched to the other.
Both contained the same nutritional and energy content of up to 4,000 calories per day. However, the participants could eat less if they chose to.
Researchers found that that the minimally processed foods diet resulted in participants eating on average 170 calories less per day than on the diet with ultra-processed foods.
Reason whole foods help you eat less
One of the reasons participants cut back on their calorie intake with the diet consisting of minimally process foods is that whole foods are less energy-dense than ultra-processed foods explains Psychology Today. Receptors in the stomach typically tell the brain when you’ve had enough to eat.
However, this process is inhibited by the high fat and sugar levels in ultra-processed foods. Those high levels of fat and sugar also trigger reward hormones, similar what happens with the consumption of other addictive substances like alcohol and nicotine.
They help rewire your brain to have a ‘hedonic appetite’ that is always seeking pleasure. Whole foods help reduce these cravings, despite consuming less calories.
Thus improving the quality of the food you eat can help you with one of the basics of weight loss, eating less. But furthermore, reducing you intake of ultra-processed foods can also improve your mental state, which may help you get out and about, moving around more, the other basic of losing weight.
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