Feeling full is complicated

Satiety and satiation are two of the most abused terms around. Satiation is what you feel at the end of a meal, the thing that stops you eating more. Satiety is how full you feel between meals — it can keep you going until the next one, or leave you raiding the fridge shortly after.

Two foods of equal nutritive value can deliver entirely different satiation and satiety, thanks in part to texture, packaging and your expectation of what nourishment they provide. There’s more to it than “trust yourself to stop when you’re full.” How you perceive a food, and even how stressed you are, plays a role in how full you feel after every meal. Every person responds differently, with patterns of bingeing, undereating or fasting.

Even texture matters: harder, more viscous foods that need more chewing beat liquid and mushy foods, which need less, on both satiety and satiation.

So to trust yourself to eat till you’re full is really to trust every choice you’ve already made — picking the right foods, pairing them well, and eating for hunger rather than for emotional reasons. There’s an entire song and dance behind that feeling of fullness, involving ghrelin, leptin, peptides, how long food spends in your stomach, and what your gut bacteria and digestion break it down into.

Even if you decide weighing your food is too obsessive, any effort to eat better has to start with picking the right foods and making sure you get a minimum of the protein, fat and fibre you need — measurements or not.

Advice to eat till you’re full makes sense for a farmer or a nomadic tribesman. But going ad libitum, if you’re stressed and hardwired to make convenient choices with little regard for your health or well-being, can be a risky strategy — especially working from home, so close to a pantry full of evolutionary and revolutionary temptations. We live in a hyper-stimulated food environment, with imagery, packaging and processing all geared to make you override your rational, logical side.

Measuring satiation and satiety

Volume matters. The less anal you want to be about measuring your food, the more particular you need to be about picking the right foods.

Feeling full in your stomach doesn’t guarantee satiety between meals. Drinking a litre of water will leave you full — and ready to eat again in 30 minutes to an hour, with a bathroom visit in between.

Getting a minimum amount of protein matters for satiety, though there are diminishing returns to how filling protein is. Fibre is as close to a magic bullet as it gets: fibre-rich foods fill you up without the calories, take a while to digest, and release peptides that make you feel fuller. And even when the macronutrients and volume look identical, some foods simply fill you better than others.

Stop and think before you eat these

Butter, oil, ghee and nuts rank low on satiety and satiation — a lot of calories with little fullness. Treat them with caution; be measured and work with weekly quotas.

Processing foods — vegetables, starches, dairy, meat — reduces their water content and raises the calories per serving, which cuts the satiation and satiety you get from them.

A study showed you can eat 50 g of apple in a minute — three times that as purée, and twelve times that as juice, in the same amount of time. Processing an apple makes it more calorie-dense, so eschew juices and processed fruit (jams, marmalades, purées).

Fat and carbs are a deadly pairing — they pack a lot of calories per serving. Think how easy it is to get through a ghee-laden sambar rice with chips on the side, or a paneer steak in cream sauce with a side of French fries, versus a ten-egg-white omelette or five apples. We’re susceptible to over-eating these foods for evolutionary reasons.

The fullness whitelist

Foods that rank well on satiety, satiation, soluble fibre and calories per serving — include these in your daily eating:

• Lean cuts of meat, fish, chicken, egg whites
• Greek yoghurt, cottage cheese, casein
• Potato, in baked or boiled form
• Kidney beans (rajma), chole (chickpea) and lentils
• Minimally processed oatmeal
• Black beans, sprouts
• Avocados
• Apples, pears, papayas, guavas, figs, oranges
• Broccoli, mushrooms, green leafy vegetables, gourds, cauliflower — all kinds of green vegetables

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