A little (or rather big!) health conundrum:
Why does a 1000 calorie roast dinner fill you up but a 1000 calorie Big Mac and fries not?
You eat a roast dinner of meat, veg and potatoes, gravy and trimmings. Say it is 1000 calories. You’re stuffed. Someone offers you another piece of succulent meat. You can take no more. Is that realistic?
You eat a Big Mac and fries which is around 1000 calories too (may be a bit more actually). Yet after devouring all of it, you feel like you can eat another one. I have witnessed many fat gluttons order double. Because they know one is not enough. Perhaps two isn’t but I guess they have to exercise a little restraint.
McDonalds and the food industry know exactly what they are doing. They are fully complicit in making the sheep fat!
You have satiety hormones for protein, natural fats and complex carbs, what you expect to find in natural foods. You do not have a satiety hormone for refined sugar or refined carbs, where all the components that would trigger such hormones, are stripped away. Potatoes trigger satiety very well. How many jacket potatoes can you eat? Not many. That is why McDonald’s fries contain very little potato. I think at one point they contained none. The potato is replaced by refined white flour and flavourings to make it taste like potato and chemicals to give it a long shelf life. How your body reacts to this new mixture is very different to how it would react to potato! I think I saw there were 18 ingredients in McDonald’s fries.
So refined carbs, with the satiety triggering components stripped out, not only makes you feel still hungry, it also massively spikes your insulin. Insulin tells your body to store fat. You need to store it away for a time when you don’t eat!
As you do not feel full after your Big Mac and fries, you eat again in a couple of hours. You have a muffin. Refined carbs and sugar, no satiety again and another insulin spike. Store fat!
With all these “store fat” orders, is there any wonder so many are fat? So long as insulin is present, none of the fat burning hormones will be triggered. Why would they be? The body isn’t stupid. Give the insulin a break. You won’t die of starvation if you don’t eat every 2 hours. Try 24-36 hours and you will have a clean out of the excess and surplus proteins clogging up your joints and neurons in your brain. Don’t worry, it won’t be muscle. Growth hormone has the opposite function of insulin and orders the fat cells to give up their energy for burning. Noradrenaline is triggered and that will make you feel really sharp as well as burning fat too. Makes sense really. If you’re a caveman and you haven’t had a meal for a couple of days, you’re not likely to get another one either if lack of sustenance is making you dopey.
There was an interesting study done where the participants were asked to record every time they ate. They were then spilt into deciles. The 10% least frequent eaters at 3.3 times a day were the slimmest. The top 10% ate 10 times a day and were the fattest.