Switching to a plant-based diet is especially hard if you’re trying to sell this to your husband or your teenage boy. You offer a plate of all vegetables, and they're like, ‘That's not going to keep me full. There's no way that's going to work.’

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Put to the Test 

One of my favorite stories is when a client came to the program and she wanted to get pregnant.

She heard that your body gets ready to have a baby when you get healthier. She decided to drag her six-foot, four-inch tall husband, a firefighter. He's been working out about 4 hours daily, and he's fit. So he's coming in, and he sits down to the same plate that she has, and he's like, ‘I'm going to starve to death, and I'm going to lose all my muscle in these ten days, and I'm going to be hungry.’

I have to be honest; that was the one time I thought this might not work.

I worried that the concept that ‘this plate will keep you full’ might be challenged. I was immediately thinking, ‘I need to add more food. I need to give him more volume.’ And I began to worry about how to keep him feeling full. 

So I started to give him a double portion of The Plate. So, whatever the meal was, he got two of them. 

He asked to meet with me in the office to let me know about a problem he was having. I'm thinking, okay, this is going to be fun.

When I met with him, his biggest challenge was that he could not eat all the food. He kept looking at his double portions and realized there was no way he could finish it all, but he was so afraid of losing the muscle he had worked to gain. So we struggled with it together. 

I finally said, ‘Would you be willing to experiment for the sake of my research and just do the most you can eat?’ 

And it ended up being that he could eat one and a half plates, which became his regular portion. 

We calculated all the exercise measurements for him, which he was skeptical about because he exercised so much alone. 

But, at the end of the program, he had lost almost one inch off of a chiseled waist. By the end of the process, he lost body fat and gained muscle, all while exercising less.

And, because he was exercising less, he didn't need to eat 6,000 calories daily. He’d never felt better. 

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The Four Ways We Manage Our Hunger

What stuck out in that story was that this firefighter couldn’t even finish two full plates of the food we gave him.

This is deeply connected to what actually makes us feel full. There are four key points to staying full. 

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Hunger Hormones

We have hormones that turn hunger on, and we have hormones that keep us full, turning off the balance of our hunger. We eat when we're hungry, and then as we're full, we stop eating. 

Ghrelin is the hunger hormone. So when Ghrelin is activated, we're looking for food. On the other hand, Leptin is the hormone that turns hunger off and makes us feel full.

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Volume

The next point is volume. Our stomachs have to stretch to feel physically full. We do that by adding volume to our bodies in the form of food. 

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Time to Eat

You’ve probably heard the message to “slow down your eating.” You know, chew slowly, put your fork down. A lot of that advice comes from the 20-minute rule. 

It takes 20 minutes, regardless of what you eat, for Leptin to activate and for hunger hormones to turn off. 

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Regulating Blood Sugar

As we look at controlling blood sugar, I call this the “Max 50 blood glucose response,” which is how quickly your blood sugar comes up and how quickly it comes down based on more refined foods or processed foods. 

The quicker that number comes down, the quicker hunger is triggered again. More processed foods drive more hunger.

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Using Food to Control Hunger

With Ghrelin, specific foods can turn off hunger. 

1. Fiber. This is the number one food that controls hunger. 
2. Lean Protein. It makes us feel full, though many people think too literally that if they eat muscle, they will gain muscle. We will talk about this later. 
3. Carbohydrates. The quickest, most efficient energy. Carbs get a bad rap because we immediately think “bread,” but carbs are so much more than that. 

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Misleading Diet Fads

Many popular diets out there incorrectly fixate on a certain food group to make us feel full longer. 

Like keto, for example. This diet focuses heavily on protein to turn off hunger cues. But how much protein do you need? This diet is popular with people who want to bulk up in muscle. 

I’ve seen some fads and influencers suggest you need over 120 grams of protein a day! That’s a lot. It’s nearly impossible to eat all of that protein every day. 

The vegan diet is a low-fat diet. I call this the “Go Hungry” diet because this diet is lacking in the fats that help our bodies feel and stay full. Healthy plant fats and nuts are not a part of that diet either, so we don’t have a lot of proteins either. 

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Finding the Best of All the Diets

We come back to building a plate that makes it so that we're not feeling hungry. Who wants to feel hungry all day? 

We quickly come back to fiber as a key to turning off hunger.

That's because it fills up the stomach. And remember, fiber is a carbohydrate, and it's a calorie-free carbohydrate. 

It's pretty awesome because now we're turning off hunger with calorie-free food. Women tend to like that. It sometimes scares men who want to get fit. But a lot of times, that's a disconnect. 

So, fiber is a big part of turning off hunger, protein is another, and then the next is fat, especially essential fats.

Essential fats we find in fish like salmon or other fatty fish. These are hunger-crushing foods. 

So that's my formula for a perfect plate. 

If you never want to think about Leptin and Ghrelin ever again, I've got you covered. I've made sure that the plate formula covers the fiber you need, the amount of protein you need, and the fat that you need. 

You won't feel hungry. I've tested it. We've applied it from the firefighter down to the tiny five-foot-two female, every age, and found that I created a plate that works for 80% of people. 

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The Message That I Want You to Hear Today is to Listen to Your Body.

Your body knows best. You'll crave precisely what your body needs, naturally rejecting what it doesn't due to our incredible hunger hormones. 

This is how our body thrives, asking for what it needs, and then it turns off as we're full. 

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Exceptions to Watch Out For: High Fructose Corn Syrup

There are exceptions to this, and the food industry knows them well. There are some formulas to miscue our body. 

A food that can miscue us is high fructose corn syrup, the sweetener the food industry switched to almost exclusively. It used to be table sugar - that used to be in our Cokes and made us feel full. But now it’s high fructose corn syrup in our sodas. 

High fructose corn syrup actually turns off fullness - so we increase our portion sizes more than ever before because we can keep eating and drinking foods with this ingredient beyond what we need. 

Our food industry is good at industrializing and marketing. They get us to consume more of their products and return for more. 

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The Behavioral Side to Our Habits

With smokers, there’s typically a hand-to-mouth component to their habit.

In my TakeTEN^Ⓡ program, we had a very successful smoking cessation program focused on nicotine replacement. 

If we can physiologically take away the drive to smoke, we can just work on the behavioral part: ‘Why am I smoking?’

Some smoke because of anxiety. Some do it for a quick fix. Some do it to feel better right now. Sometimes a trigger causes them to crave a smoke. 

Well, this is just like our relationship with food. Food can trigger the same types of things.

We learn how to cope with food when we’re really young.  Like when you’re two years old and fall down, your mom picks you up and gives you a bottle or some kind of food reward to calm you down. 

Even as a baby, we begin to create these patterns of comfort to pain: I feel pain and get comforted with food. That stays with us for our lifetime.

When we learn to control our hunger, we can start looking at who we really are. The more we can understand our body, the better. 

In our next lesson, we’ll tackle a topic many people don’t realize is critical to understanding health (and weight) management: blood sugar. 

I can't wait for you to feel more confident about regulating your blood sugar. I promise it’s a game-changer.

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