How To Avoid Overeating
The only way for a human being to lose weight while ensuring that the diet is nutritionally adequate is to avoid as much as possible those foods that are nutrient poor. You must understand that this is the crucial consideration in the choices of food that you make. We need to eat foods with adequate nutrients, so we won’t need to consume excess “empty calories” to reach our nutritional requirements. Eating foods that are rich in nutrients and fibre and low in calories, “fills us up” so to speak, thus preventing us from overeating.
To grasp how this works, we need to understand how the brain controls our dietary drive. A complicated system of chemoreceptors in the nerves lining 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 than 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 fibre 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!
There is a tendency for the vast majority of people to believe that regardless of their indiscretions and excesses, 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.
