Ask Dr. Cheryl

Topics discussed in this episode: 

• More to calories in vs calories out (4:14)
• 4 key points to staying full (4:40)
• Our better understanding of our bodies (13:51)
• Formulas that miscue our bodies (14:45)

Transcript:

So a lot of people think that when they start eating more vegetables and fruits and plant based foods that they're going to be hungry. It's kind of like the Chinese restaurant effect. When I eat this vegetable food, so I go to a Chinese restaurant and I'm hungry in two hours. And so that's sort of a picture or I'm going to be eating salads all the time. And these salads, and especially if you have like you're trying to sell this to your husband or your teenage boy, and here we've got this plate of all these vegetables and they're like, that's not gonna keep me full. There's no way that's going to work. So one of my favorite things is we had a client that came to program and she wanted to get pregnant. She came in. She heard that, “When I get healthier, my body gets ready.” I wanted to have a baby, but she decided to drag her 6 foot 4 inch tall husband, firefighter, totally fit. He's been working out overall about four hours a day and he's totally, totally fit. So he's coming in and he sits down to the same plate that she sits down to at 5 too. And he's like, I'm going to starve to death and I'm going to lose all my muscle in these 10 days, and I'm going to be hungry. And that was the one time I thought uh this might not work. I think maybe my, my concept of this plate will keep you full, might be challenged, and so I was immediately thinking I need to add more food. I need to give him more volume and I began to go down this journey of how will I keep him full and I found, 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 and says “I, I need to meet with Doctor Cheryl because I need to let her know that I have a problem.” So I'm like, OK, that's gonna be fun. So when I meet with him, he's his biggest challenge was. “I cannot eat all this food. Why are you feeding me so much? Like what everybody else is getting? You know, I'm looking at all this food and I can't eat two portions of this and I thought I was going to be starving, but at the same time I can't lose this muscle. So do I need to eat all of this food?” And it became 10 days of him beginning to so slowly say when I'm eating all of these foods, I'm feeling totally stuffed and this is this big guy. So then I'm noticing that people would start coming to me saying how do I eat all of the plate? And so we struggled with it and I finally said “Would you be willing to experiment, just for the sake of my research, and just do the most that you can eat and it ended up just telling me what it is.” And it ended up being 1 1/2 plates. We did one full plate and we added a half of the other portion and that became his, that became as much as he could eat, and then we will see. We measured. We measured VO2 Max in the the whole exercise, you know on the metabolic cart we did all of his measures. He did the exercise. He's like, I exercise 4 hours a day and I'm you're you don't exercise enough in your program and we have walks and all of our different exercise routine. So at the end of program, he had lost almost one inch off of a chiseled waist. And so I'm like ohh boy, I'm sure he lost a bunch of muscle, he's gonna be really ticked, you know. He's got his 6 pack or 8 pack. I'm not sure how packed and so at the end of it though he lost body fat and gained muscle exercising less and then because he was exercising less he didn't need to eat 6000 calories. And he had never felt better. He had energy, and he never wanted to go back to how he was doing it. He's like now I have time to actually have a baby because I'm a firefighter all day and I'm at the gym 2 hours every night. So for him, It was, he was excited because he felt better. He didn't have to be pushing like he was. It was a more of a balanced life for him. But for me, what I learned was that if he can't eat even 2 full plates, the calories in versus the calories out that I had been taught as a dietician, there must be more to this. And I was seeing this in real life. There had to be more than what I understood because I'm seeing real people. It's real life and it was different than what it looks like on an equation of what people think a body needs to be properly fit and to be nourished. So I like to talk about how somebody stays full. And there's four key points to that. So one way is we have hormones that turn hunger on and we have hormones that keep us full, sort of turning off the balance of our hunger. And now we're full and that's we eat when we're hungry. And then as we're full, we stop eating. So the hunger hormone ghrelin is a hormone that is the hunger hormone. So when ghrelin's going, we're looking for food. And leptin is the hormone that turns the hunger off and makes us feel full, and we stop eating. So those two hormones are a big deal and we've learned a lot more about them in nutrition research. So we can physiologically stay full if we understand hunger hormone and the foods we eat influence those. So we'll talk about that a little bit more, but the next is volume. So our stomach has to have some stretching to actually feel physically full. And then we have time. So for all of this to happen, we need about 20 minutes. So we have 20 minutes to be able to from when we start eating that no matter what we eat, if we eat soup. Quick or if we're drinking our food and we are. How much can you eat in 20 minutes? We we can actually eat quite a bit. So we're always talking about you hear the message of slow down your eating, you know, too slowly. Put your fork down. Well, a lot of that is that 20 minute rule. So it takes 20 minutes regardless of what you eat for the leptin and for the hunger turn off hormones and the full hormones to kick in and begin to make you feel full. So time matters as well. So we've got hormones to be physiologically full and that helps us just really listen to our body and not be suffering with hunger all the time, but we can actually cut that off and live at peace and not feel hungry. We've got volume, so we have to actually put something in our stomach and then we've got the 20 minute time. And then the last is blood sugar. So as we look at regulating blood sugar, I call it the 50, The Max 50, blood glucose meal response. And so how quickly the blood sugar comes up and how quickly it comes down based on more refined foods or processed foods, the quicker that comes down, that can trigger hunger as well. So we can talk, we'll talk a little bit about how the blood sugar response to the meal, more processed foods can actually drive more hunger. So those are really the key components of how can we control our hunger. So what's really neat is that with ghrelin, there are specific foods that can actually turn off hunger, and so as we look at that, ghrelin and leptin can can be very much controlled by #1 would be fiber. So as we look at fiber, that's a part of volume ghrelin. Actually there is some ghrelin that's actually in our stomach. And so the stomach lining actually has to feel a stretch to be able to actually turn off ghrelin, leptin kicks in and we know we've actually eaten and we feel full. So fiber helps us turn off hunger, helps us stay full longer. And then the next we have is lean protein. So protein is a big part of helping us feel full and we see all of that where we need more protein and a lot of people feel like where's my protein at my meal because they really connect having protein with feeling full. And if I eat more protein, I'll also build more muscle. We also think if we eat muscle, we will actually get muscle. So it doesn't quite work like that, but that is the picture in our mind. If I eat fat, I will get body fat. We connect what I'm eating with what type of body tissue I will build. We can talk more about that. But all of our macronutrients, carbohydrate, protein, and fat all turn into energy, just a different process to get there. But the most efficient, quickest energy is carbohydrate. So carbohydrate again, we've talked about it, but it always gets the bad rap because we think carbohydrate, we think bread, we think I'm going to get fat or I can't stop eating it. So it's always interesting to unravel all of the myths and the information that people come with, and it's really hard to break that and to change how people feel about that. So this is a part of a lot of health professionals and even a lot of the popular diets that are out there, even as we look at keto, is they're really focusing on that protein because they want it to turn off hunger and it does. It really does turn off hunger. But how much do we need? And then we feel like if I want to really bulk up, I'm going to the gym, I, I really need to bulk up. You really see this with men, then, they're like we need 100 grams. We need 120 grams. I think maybe I've seen 200 grams recently. And so we're literally trying to figure out how, I'm hearing this with influencers or health professionals, how am I going to eat all of this? So I'm asking for double the protein. And so the idea is that this protein, the way it breaks down for energy, it's going to be a lot better than, say, if I were to eat all this bread or if I were to have pasta, then this protein would be superior, cause carbohydrate, we think, makes us hungry. So what I find with the vegan diet as specifically the vegan low fat diet, these people are definitely more hungry, and I call that the go hungry diet. That's my abbreviation for that. And forgive me for that, because that's probably not what some people would want to call it, but anytime, I know for me it's my go hungry diet, you know, so personally. And I find that because the fat is gone, so even the fat and when we're looking at our plate and we talk about having in a healthy plant fat or we talk about any nuts on the diet. Those things are not part of that diet avocado. So imagine eating all plant foods and avocado, seeds, nuts are not in that diet, so those kinds of, and we don't have a lot of protein. So lower protein probably about 10%. So as we look at a diet like that with the fat out and a lower protein, we naturally feel like there's some hunger there. And so I'm looking at, how can we maximize the best of all of it? As we talked about the popular diets, we come back to building a plate that makes it so that we're not feeling hungry. Because hungry, let's just basically break it down, who wants to feel hungry all day? And this brings us back to what we've already talked about is that people vote that I would rather live 10 years less than feel hungry, or to give up my favorite food. So this brings us right back to that same place that now we're trying to build meals. And we're trying to say how can we get all these good foods that are so important in healthy diet and yet have a combination of foods and a formula that makes us not hungry? So we come back to, as we look at fiber turns off hunger. So that's because it fills up the stomach. And remember, fiber is a carbohydrate and it's a calorie free carbohydrate, so it's pretty awesome because now we're turning off hunger with a calorie free food. So for women, we like that. Um, I think that scares men that I feel like they really want to get fit I think they'll feel like, well, that's a good, you know, that's a good diet for my wife or my girlfriend or, you know, somebody else, but a lot of times that's a disconnect. But I do find for women that calorie free carbohydrate makes them feel good, because again, when we talk a little bit about diet culture women are always just looking at how many calories I'm getting? so fiber is a big part of turning off hunger, protein is another, and then the next is fat and especially essential fats. So the essential fats like the omega-3 fatty acid and we find that in fish a lot of our salmon omega-3 fatty acid fatty fish those also contain omega 3 fatty acids and those are the those are also hunger crushing foods. So, that's kind of the formula. And so what I focused on is I need to make sure that I'm giving you all of that in the perfect plate. And so that's all been considered. So as we move forward and I show you about the plate, I want you to know that if you don't want to think about leptin and ghrelin ever again and you never want to hear those words, I've got you covered. I've made sure that the formula covers the fiber you need. The amount of protein you need, 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 small 5’2” female, every age, and really looked at that for 80% of them. I created a plate that worked for 80%, so the neat part about this is that if we follow this through it would, makes sense. The message that we hear today is listen to your body. Your body knows best. You'll crave exactly what your body needs, and your body will sort of naturally reject what it doesn't. And a part of that is our new understanding and our better understanding in the last 20 years of really coming together and understanding these hunger hormones. And so when our body is hungry,  imagine if we didn't have hunger. If we didn't have hunger or feel hungry, feel that hunger drive, we wouldn't. We'd get busy, especially the workaholic. You'd get busy and you'd spend, I mean, a lot of us do it anyway, but we would spend the whole day and we might not feed our body properly. So this is our body trying to thrive, asking for what it needs and then, it will turn off as we're eating and then that feeling of fullness comes on. So that should work in the perfect world. So what I found is that there are exceptions to this. And the food industry knows them well, so there are some formulas to miscue our body. So I always say, I love the I love the concept of our body listening to our body and being present, and there's a lot of good to it, but I want to give you some concerns I have with that. So some of the foods that can miscue us, the perfect example are high fructose corn syrup. And so high fructose corn syrup we find that in that's the sweetener that we switched to. It used to be table sugar. That was what was in our coke when we had 8 ounces of coke that made us full. But now we have high fructose corn syrup and the industry uses this now in our sodas, a lot of fruit juices have it. A lot of foods have high fructose corn syrup and with high fructose corn syrup, it's one of the exceptions that it actually turns off fullness. So as we're consuming this and drinking it at 8 oz, we can keep going. It doesn't turn off like typical 8 ounces of the old Coke. So as we see portion sizes increase and people keep talking about, we're eating bigger portions than we've ever eaten in America, specifically. And America is the country doing this more. Um, and we're such a melting pot of all different cultures, and we've all come together, but ultimately we're the best at really making our bodies the sickest cause we're really industrialized and we know how to market and we know how to do this perfect formula um so that we can get you to consume more of our product and get you to come back for more. So imagine high fructose corn syrup with caffeine. So the caffeine keeps you coming back for more and more energy. You're getting fluids from it. And then on top of it, I can drink almost a 48 ounce big gulp and continue to go. And so this is really a part of how we can actually not listen to maybe our body that day as we see that our body can get miscued. But in the environment that we're eating normal foods that are not industrialized or not changed, our body can be listened to. So I do think it's really important that we slow down. We listen to our hunger and there's all kinds of elements that are involved in eating and snacking. So there's a behavioral side to it. It's very similar to any other, like if we think about addiction with smoking. So if I'm smoking, there's a hand to mouth component to it. So in the take 10 program, we had a smoking cessation program, very, very successful, and a part of that was a nicotine replacement. So we could physiologically take away the drive to smoke. And then we could just work on in the 10 days the behavioral part. Why am I smoking? I'm doing this for anxiety. I'm doing it because I need a quick fix. I'm doing it to make me feel better right now, something triggered me and I want this cigarette to make me feel better. Well, the same thing I began to see was wow, this is just like food and food can trigger the same types of things where I fell I'm two years old. My mom picks me up and I get a bottle or I get some kind of food reward to calm me down and we begin to do this as a baby and we begin to create these patterns of comfort to pain. I feel pain, I get comforted with food and that stays with us. So what I really love about understanding hunger and the cues is if we can eat food that's like, but it's like a patch where we're actually turning off and controlling hunger properly. And now we can start to look at the behavioral part of why we eat and then we can be really true to like, do I, will that food fix this problem? But mostly if hunger's controlled then we can start looking at who we really are and if those are issues then we have we we really understand our body better. So the more we can understand our body, the better this really works for us. Other things that can miscue us when it comes to hunger is if our blood sugar. So if our blood sugar is really spiked, our insulins, not, if we're insulin resistant. These are the big ones, so I really want to talk to you a little bit about how that can make us feel hungry when we've just fueled our body. So let's look at that for a minute.