Taste, Texture & Weight Loss

Below is an excerpt from Part Two of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

by Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.

The Quantity Sensation

Most people have noticed that when their stomachs get full they stop being hungry. (Duhh!!) In other words, quantity—by which we mean the feeling of being full—is a sensation that directly influences you to stop eating. (Formal experiments have also demonstrated that it is distention of the stomach that ends eating.)

This is potentially a very useful effect for someone trying to lose weight. However, it’s one of those things that are so obvious that people rarely ask the question: “How could I use this effect to help get thinner?” (Fortunately, some researchers do ask questions like this.)

Before I try to provide answers to the above question, I’ll speculate a little on why this sensation of quantity shuts off hunger. According to the threshold theory, hunger is triggered whenever body supplies of any nutrient fall below “preferred” (threshold) levels. Hunger and its associated eating are turned off again when supplies of that nutrient have been brought back up to “normal” levels. So how could a transient sensation such as “fullness” affect this purely metabolic process?

In my opinion, the answer is that the Quantity Sensation is probably part of a safety shut-off mechanism. An example may make this idea clearer.

Let’s say your body falls below its desired threshold amount of (e.g.) potassium. When this happens it makes you hungry and you go find some food and you start eating. To keep the example simple, let’s say you find food that actually does happen to have a lot of potassium in it. This means that as soon as that food is digested your supplies of potassium will be back up to the proper levels and your hunger will be turned off.

But notice the problem here. Digestion may take several hours—so it will be at least that long before potassium levels are restored to normal and your hunger can be “turned off” by this method. Such a delay means that you could remain “hungry” and therefore continue to be stimulated to eat for several hours even though the first few bites of the food were actually enough to take care of your real nutritional need.

Obviously, if you actually did eat unnecessarily for several hours you could stuff yourself to the point of causing digestive damage or poison yourself with far too much potassium for your body to handle after it was digested. At the very least, your hunger would keep you focused on the wrong thing (food) for far too long and thereby waste a lot of time and energy—which is itself not a strong species survival trait. Clearly, the body needs a “temporary hunger override mechanism” to prevent such effects.

It is quantity—the sensation of a certain volume and weight of food in the stomach—which seems to provide the needed safety override. This sensation shuts off hunger even though your body’s supplies of (e.g.) potassium are not yet back up to normal levels (because the food you ate has not yet been digested). This safety override prevents the above problems.

During the last 500 million years, vital nutrients have probably most often been available only on a “feast or famine” basis, or in very low quality food, so we can speculate that The Beast “expects” to have to use this override mechanism quite often.

In any case, the sensation of “filling yourself up” with food at least once a day is clearly very satisfying to most people and certainly makes it much easier to stay on a diet. The obvious warning to dieters is that you must do the “filling up” with low-fat, low-Calorie food that also provides a lot of the non-energy nutrients that are what The Beast really wants.

Note that the quantity sensation is only a temporary hunger override. If you need (e.g.) potassium, but fill yourself up with food that has very little potassium in it, the hunger will quickly come right back as soon as the food is digested, and the full sensation goes away, and The Beast finds out you’re still low on potassium. When this happens, it means you ate the wrong thing and gave yourself Calories instead of what you really needed. The Beast will then make you “do it over ’til you get it right” (kind of like your third-grade schoolteacherJ).

According to threshold theory, this common sequence of events (“eat wrong, eat more”) is the underlying cause of weight gain. Learning to consciously reverse the sequence (“eat right, eat less”) is the means to lose that weight.

On the Multi-Diet, you do not “starve” yourself for quantity. Below you will find some ways to use this powerful hunger shut-off mechanism without getting a lot of calories in the process.