Hunger . .

Understanding Hunger and Satiety

Hunger - one of your body's strongest and most beneficial stimuli - helps insure that you consume enough Calories for your needs. However, it also works against you when you're trying to lose weight. You could easily lose weight just by eating less, but the less that you eat or the longer you postpone eating, the hungrier you become, and the longer it takes your hunger to subside once you do begin to eat. So the hungrier you are, the more likely it is that you'll overeat, consuming extra Calories that can quickly slow or reverse your weight loss.

As you know, the only way to end hunger is to eat. Eating provides satiety - a pleasant feeling of fullness and the corresponding reduction of hunger. But did you also know that some foods are better than others for satisfying your hunger? A baked potato, for example, will probably "fill you up" much better than a serving of candy that has the same number of Calories.

Experiments with Satiety
For years, researchers have studied satiety. While many things are known to influence satiety - including individual differences in endocrine levels from one person to another - one of the biggest factors is the type of food that you eat. Some foods fill your stomach faster and/or remain in your stomach longer, and therefor do a better job of holding off hunger.

One of the most detailed studies that demonstrates this was conducted by Suzanna Holt and her fellow researchers at the University of Sydney. The results of their study, "The Satiety Index of Common Foods", were published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, September 1995. In this study, the researchers fed human test subjects fixed-Calorie portions of thirty-eight different foods, and then recorded the subjects' perceived hunger following each feeding.

The results of Holt's study, like many similar studies, indicate that satiety is most strongly related to the weight of the food consumed. In other words, the foods that weigh the most, satisfy our hunger best, regardless of the number of Calories they contain. However, higher amounts of certain nutrients, such as protein and dietary fiber, also appear to improve satiety.

Can Satiety Be Predicted?
If there was a way of predicting satiety, we'd be able to select foods that satisfied our hunger, but contained fewer Calories. These foods would greatly improve our ability to create meals that were effective for weight loss.

Because of the strong relation between satiety and a food's weight, some researchers have recommended the consumption of foods with low Caloric densities - i.e. foods that have the fewest total Calories per gram.

Fullness Factors for Common Foods
Food	FF
Bean sprouts	4.6
Watermelon	4.5
Grapefruit	4.0
Carrots	3.8
Oranges	3.5
Fish, broiled	3.4
Chicken breast, roasted	3.3
Apples	3.3
Sirloin steak, broiled	3.2
Oatmeal	3.0
Popcorn	2.9
Baked potato	2.5
Lowfat yogurt	2.5
Banana	2.5
Macaroni and cheese	2.5
Brown rice	2.3
Spaghetti	2.2
White rice	2.1
Pizza	2.1
Peanuts	2.0
Ice cream	1.8
White bread	1.8
Raisins	1.6
Snickers Bar	1.5
Honey	1.4
Sugar (sucrose)	1.3
Glucose	1.3
Potato chips	1.2
Butter	0.5