Facilitate Your Fat Loss Regimen by Understanding Fullness Factor

The toughest part of any fat loss program is for most people feeling hungry a lot, if not most of the time. Hunger is your body’s defense mechanism to ensure your survival and therefore one of your best friends constantly looking after your physical existence. Yet, when on diet, you may not have such friendly feelings for this caring friend, as he is now causing you displeasure and makes you feel miserable.

Hunger will certainly accompany you during the first days of your dieting but for many, if not most, hunger will be their companion for the whole period, where calorie intake is reduced. And hunger can be pretty mean, as the hungrier you get the more likely it is that you will be overeating later, annihilating a lot of your former efforts, when you disciplined yourself to eat less.

There is nothing you can do about the (self-imposed) limited amount of daily calories as per your program and fat loss goals, if you take fat loss seriously. But here is a hot tip, at least a small relief in your period of suffering: you can make yourself feel fuller consuming the same caloric quantity by choosing food with a high Fullness Factor (FF). These are foods with less weight in relation to volume (> more bulky) and where the number of calories per weight is smaller (> low caloric density).

The Fullness Factor rates foods on a scale from 0 to 5, with 5 being the most filling per calorie and 1 being the least. For example, white bread has a fullness factor of 1.8, whereas carrot has 3.8, more than twice as much. That means that you’re probably going to feel a lot fuller after eating 200 calories from carrots than you will if you eat 200 calories worth of white bread!

In a comprehensive study at the University of Sydney from 1995 “The Satiety Index of Common Foods”, the researchers fed people fixed-calorie portions of thirty-eight different foods. They then recorded the individuals perceived hunger afterwards and found that satiety is most strongly related to the weight of the food consumed: the foods that weighed the most, satisfied hunger best, independent of the number of calories they contained. It was found too that protein and dietary fiber improved satiety compared to other nutrients as protein stimulates a body hormone called “glucagon-like petitide 1″, which sends satiety signals to the brain.

So what is the good food and what is the bad stuff? Foods that contain large amounts of water, dietary fiber, and/or protein have the highest Fullness Factors. These high-FF foods, to which most vegetables, fruits, and lean meats belong, will bring you satiety much quicker and lasting longer. Very clearly, into the bad category fall most fats, sugar, and/or starches having all low Fullness Factors, and therefore are much easier to overeat.

However, in spite of all scientific studies, there remains some subjectivity in the world of hunger and satiety, which is the food’s specific taste and texture – so called “palatability” – and which can encourage or discourage a person’s food consumption. Palatability is of very subjective nature and everybody knows best, what food for him or her is most enticing, is so hard to put away after starting eating. That food, belonging into our personal “cravings” category, we should better forget and avoid during our fat loss program, whatever the food’s fullness factor may be.