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I don't think that works too well. There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment. The most important factor for

I don't think that works too well. There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment. The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day, and we won't solve that changing food, but lifestyle. The obesity epidemic is a direct result of sitting in an office 9 to 5 (or 6,7,8,...) and making two meals a day full of fat and sugar, because you're craving. When you have a better lifestyle, you naturally gravitate towards better food, because you have time to cook (as opposed to pizza/snacks) or look for good dinner (as opposed to drive-thru), have time to go to the grocery store buy vegetables/fruits more frequently (as opposed to industrialized food which doesn't spoil), and even time to appreciate food itself making various small meals a day. EDIT: I would like to know why the downvote. The correlation between obesity and office workers is a recurrent research topic.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jcampbell1 13y ago
> There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment. Satiety is a measure of how hungry you will feel. It doesn't make sense to call hunger a factor. I agree that we need to measure the quality of the food correctly, and I suggested a way to do it. The correlation between office work and obesity too small to call it a direct result. I believe the obesity epidemic is caused by three things: 1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible. 2) Technology driving the price of food to near zero. 3) More women in the workforce leads to fewer domestically prepared meals. These meals are replaced commercially created meals (lunchables, mcdonalds) thus #1 applies more often. #2, #3 are good things. The best fix is to design a system where profits are maximized by making tasty foods that with the constraint that the foods don't incorrectly inform our biochemical hunger feedback mechanism. My plan attempts to address this problem.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  > 1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible. The problem is, what is irresistible for someone who makes two meals a day is different than what is irresistible for someone in a different diet, lifestyle or even mood. While I was busting my ass inside an stressful office until 10:00 PM without eating, I wanted to get home and sink my teeth in a pepperoni pizza as fast as possible while watching TV. Nowadays I'm on a different lifestyle and, mind you, I woke up craving for squid, for some reason (the body talks). I went downtown, bought fresh squid, cooked a risotto myself with the things I like. A low fat, low sodium, high protein, Zinc and Selenium rich meal - the exact opposite of pizza, but satisfied me just as much today. You're saying the food industry optimizes for irresistible (crunchy, fiberless, fat and sugar rich) food and there's no way around this formula. I'm saying they are only selling what hungry, depressed and stressed people are craving to eat.
  - carlob 13y ago
    Good pizza and good squid risotto aren't polar opposites: they are both full of carbs and contain almost the same amount of sodium. Pizza probably has more vitamins due to the tomato sauce. My contention is that pizza doesn't have to be junk food, it just is most of the time in the US. Choose a better restaurant or make your own.
    - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
      What I'm comparing is the satisfaction hit you get from having a greasy pepperoni pizza delivered and devoured in 20 minutes and eating something completely different depends totally on lifestyle and mood. What the OP was implying is that fast/junk food is inherently irresistible and that's why more people are obese. What I'm saying in turn is that it's today's lifestyle which makes people find it irresistible and that nothing else satisfies.
      - carlob 13y ago
        I know what you were saying, I was going off topic, because as an Italian and a food enthusiast, I'm tired of hearing pizza being described as junk food. That's all. :)
Mvandenbergh 13y ago
>The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day, and we won't solve that changing food, but lifestyle. Is that the case? Many countries that have much stricter cultural traditions about when and how much to eat (the French, the Italians) eat 2-3 meals a day. They don't eat when they feel hungry, the eat when it is eating time.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  Notice one important thing about Italian culture: they eat slow. Lunch time takes more than one hour and includes several dishes (antipasto, pasta, meat, then fresh fruit). Same for dinner. So they do eat spaced and having time to chew does increase satiety. Now compare that to having to lunch in 15 minutes when you are starving. You want to swallow a Whooper and grab a Coke that you can drink while walking back to the office.
vidarh 13y ago
> The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day Is there any research that actually shows that? My own personal experience with leangains (intermittent fasting; taking all my calories in an 8 hour window with lunch being my first and biggest meal) is that I find it far harder to overeat that way than with smaller meals. It's "easy" to fit in a snack between small meals, but after lunch I'm totally sick of food, and it's hard for me to even meet my macro nutrient goals (I lift weights; my protein intake is high). Often I have to force myself to take in a second meal to meet my calorie needs (edit: because I simply often don't want to eat again before the end of my eating window, around 8pm, after my massive lunch at noon). On the opposite end, I see very few people around me that eat "only" two meals. My co-workers for example, might very well only sit down for a meal twice, but they snack constantly. And their "snacks" are often substantially higher calorie than their main meals. When I did try to diet with many small healthy meals, it was a nightmare - I was constantly hungry and constantly craving food. When I do intermittent fasting, I have hunger pangs in the mornings 2-3 days, and then I stop being hungry in the mornings.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  The whole point with many meals a day is not waiting to have a giant munchie to eat, because when you do so you'll look for high-fat, high-sugar food and devour an insane ammount of calories in minutes before your body triggers a sensation of satiety. Then depending on your genetics and level of activity, you will get malnourished, obese or both. You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule. As long as you don't go lunch with a blackhole in the stomach and are mindful about what you're eating, it's fine. Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    > The whole point with many meals a day is not waiting to have a giant munchie to eat, because when you do so you'll look for high-fat, high-sugar food When I eat more meals a day and then suddenly have a longer gap than I'm used to, I find it easy to do that. When I systematically east 1-2 meals a day, I adapt to that pattern in 2-3 days, and then have no problems eating a diet where getting sufficient fat is actually hard, and where I often find I have to add some "easy" carbs to meet my calorie requirements because the sheer volume of food I am due to eat for my lunch makes it an annoying chore. Part of the reason I don't like the "many small meals" approach is because I then quickly adapt to getting hungry many times a day, and the chance of getting hungry at a time I can't eat makes it very easy to snack on unhealthy foods. > You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule. Exactly. With no need for many meals a day. > Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual. Not my experience at all. I get the "wild sugar peaks" when I eat irregularly and/or when I consume lots of easily digested sugars. But since I don't get hungry very often while do intermittent fasting, I have no problems eating a lot of my fat and protein first, at which point I don't generally want much sugar, and my diet ends up being foods that are digested fairly slowly. I do get a bit tired shortly after lunch, but I quickly get more energy again and conversely my mornings are generally far more alert than they used to be with lots of small meals.
stdbrouw 13y ago
> I don't think that works too well. There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment. But surely there is such a thing as food that is more filling and food that is less so, and how hungry you are (or how happy) will lead to deviations from that baseline, but it won't cause that baseline to magically disappear, I would think?
coob 13y ago
> The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day That's an assertion without provenance and a contentious assumption to make.
Justsignedup 13y ago
a) data but more importantly b) price -> I once saw a very fat boy (12-14) and his very fat mother (cant guess age) in a very poor neighborhood as I was taking a bus to college. "Mom, can I eat vegetables today?" "No, you're eating pasta tonight! We don't have no vegetables" "AWWWWWWWW!!! No fair!" "Shut up" McDonalds is cheap. Pasta is cheap. Most shit food is cheap and easy. Non-shit food is not cheap nor is it easy. We must make a tax to make shit food as pricy as non-shit food. Then people will start making better decisions. Now going back to hcarvalhoalves' point -- 9-5 schedule gives us that 1 hr lunch. We cannot spend our time preparing food so we can eat during that one hr. We go for fast-food lunch. Usually that means high sugar, or high something not great for you. If its good for you and can fit that 1 hr schedule, its usually very pricy and most people can't afford to spend say $20 per meal 5+ times a week.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jcampbell1 13y ago

> There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment. Satiety is a measure of how hungry you will feel. It doesn't make sense to call hunger a factor. I agree that we need to measure the quality of the food correctly, and I suggested a way to do it. The correlation between office work and obesity too small to call it a direct result. I believe the obesity epidemic is caused by three things: 1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible. 2) Technology driving the price of food to near zero. 3) More women in the workforce leads to fewer domestically prepared meals. These meals are replaced commercially created meals (lunchables, mcdonalds) thus #1 applies more often. #2, #3 are good things. The best fix is to design a system where profits are maximized by making tasty foods that with the constraint that the foods don't incorrectly inform our biochemical hunger feedback mechanism. My plan attempts to address this problem.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
> 1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible. The problem is, what is irresistible for someone who makes two meals a day is different than what is irresistible for someone in a different diet, lifestyle or even mood. While I was busting my ass inside an stressful office until 10:00 PM without eating, I wanted to get home and sink my teeth in a pepperoni pizza as fast as possible while watching TV. Nowadays I'm on a different lifestyle and, mind you, I woke up craving for squid, for some reason (the body talks). I went downtown, bought fresh squid, cooked a risotto myself with the things I like. A low fat, low sodium, high protein, Zinc and Selenium rich meal - the exact opposite of pizza, but satisfied me just as much today. You're saying the food industry optimizes for irresistible (crunchy, fiberless, fat and sugar rich) food and there's no way around this formula. I'm saying they are only selling what hungry, depressed and stressed people are craving to eat.
- carlob 13y ago
  Good pizza and good squid risotto aren't polar opposites: they are both full of carbs and contain almost the same amount of sodium. Pizza probably has more vitamins due to the tomato sauce. My contention is that pizza doesn't have to be junk food, it just is most of the time in the US. Choose a better restaurant or make your own.
  - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
    What I'm comparing is the satisfaction hit you get from having a greasy pepperoni pizza delivered and devoured in 20 minutes and eating something completely different depends totally on lifestyle and mood. What the OP was implying is that fast/junk food is inherently irresistible and that's why more people are obese. What I'm saying in turn is that it's today's lifestyle which makes people find it irresistible and that nothing else satisfies.
    - carlob 13y ago
      I know what you were saying, I was going off topic, because as an Italian and a food enthusiast, I'm tired of hearing pizza being described as junk food. That's all. :)

Mvandenbergh 13y ago

>The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day, and we won't solve that changing food, but lifestyle. Is that the case? Many countries that have much stricter cultural traditions about when and how much to eat (the French, the Italians) eat 2-3 meals a day. They don't eat when they feel hungry, the eat when it is eating time.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
Notice one important thing about Italian culture: they eat slow. Lunch time takes more than one hour and includes several dishes (antipasto, pasta, meat, then fresh fruit). Same for dinner. So they do eat spaced and having time to chew does increase satiety. Now compare that to having to lunch in 15 minutes when you are starving. You want to swallow a Whooper and grab a Coke that you can drink while walking back to the office.

vidarh 13y ago

> The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day Is there any research that actually shows that? My own personal experience with leangains (intermittent fasting; taking all my calories in an 8 hour window with lunch being my first and biggest meal) is that I find it far harder to overeat that way than with smaller meals. It's "easy" to fit in a snack between small meals, but after lunch I'm totally sick of food, and it's hard for me to even meet my macro nutrient goals (I lift weights; my protein intake is high). Often I have to force myself to take in a second meal to meet my calorie needs (edit: because I simply often don't want to eat again before the end of my eating window, around 8pm, after my massive lunch at noon). On the opposite end, I see very few people around me that eat "only" two meals. My co-workers for example, might very well only sit down for a meal twice, but they snack constantly. And their "snacks" are often substantially higher calorie than their main meals. When I did try to diet with many small healthy meals, it was a nightmare - I was constantly hungry and constantly craving food. When I do intermittent fasting, I have hunger pangs in the mornings 2-3 days, and then I stop being hungry in the mornings.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
The whole point with many meals a day is not waiting to have a giant munchie to eat, because when you do so you'll look for high-fat, high-sugar food and devour an insane ammount of calories in minutes before your body triggers a sensation of satiety. Then depending on your genetics and level of activity, you will get malnourished, obese or both. You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule. As long as you don't go lunch with a blackhole in the stomach and are mindful about what you're eating, it's fine. Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.
- vidarh 13y ago
  > The whole point with many meals a day is not waiting to have a giant munchie to eat, because when you do so you'll look for high-fat, high-sugar food When I eat more meals a day and then suddenly have a longer gap than I'm used to, I find it easy to do that. When I systematically east 1-2 meals a day, I adapt to that pattern in 2-3 days, and then have no problems eating a diet where getting sufficient fat is actually hard, and where I often find I have to add some "easy" carbs to meet my calorie requirements because the sheer volume of food I am due to eat for my lunch makes it an annoying chore. Part of the reason I don't like the "many small meals" approach is because I then quickly adapt to getting hungry many times a day, and the chance of getting hungry at a time I can't eat makes it very easy to snack on unhealthy foods. > You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule. Exactly. With no need for many meals a day. > Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual. Not my experience at all. I get the "wild sugar peaks" when I eat irregularly and/or when I consume lots of easily digested sugars. But since I don't get hungry very often while do intermittent fasting, I have no problems eating a lot of my fat and protein first, at which point I don't generally want much sugar, and my diet ends up being foods that are digested fairly slowly. I do get a bit tired shortly after lunch, but I quickly get more energy again and conversely my mornings are generally far more alert than they used to be with lots of small meals.

stdbrouw 13y ago

> I don't think that works too well. There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment. But surely there is such a thing as food that is more filling and food that is less so, and how hungry you are (or how happy) will lead to deviations from that baseline, but it won't cause that baseline to magically disappear, I would think?

coob 13y ago

> The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day That's an assertion without provenance and a contentious assumption to make.

Justsignedup 13y ago

a) data but more importantly b) price -> I once saw a very fat boy (12-14) and his very fat mother (cant guess age) in a very poor neighborhood as I was taking a bus to college. "Mom, can I eat vegetables today?" "No, you're eating pasta tonight! We don't have no vegetables" "AWWWWWWWW!!! No fair!" "Shut up" McDonalds is cheap. Pasta is cheap. Most shit food is cheap and easy. Non-shit food is not cheap nor is it easy. We must make a tax to make shit food as pricy as non-shit food. Then people will start making better decisions. Now going back to hcarvalhoalves' point -- 9-5 schedule gives us that 1 hr lunch. We cannot spend our time preparing food so we can eat during that one hr. We go for fast-food lunch. Usually that means high sugar, or high something not great for you. If its good for you and can fit that 1 hr schedule, its usually very pricy and most people can't afford to spend say $20 per meal 5+ times a week.