Why Can't You Just Eat Less To Lose Weight? 3 Main Reasons

“It’s all decided, tomorrow I’ll start eating less!”

If this is where your quest for a better figure and a healthy body usually begins, then I will be the trainer who will stop you from doing this.

“You just need to eat less.” — the simplest and most common recommendation that at some point you just want to take and start following.

And most importantly, it sounds convincing. Especially given its fundamental truth. But don’t let that fool you. Yes, you need a calorie deficit to lose weight, but you can’t just go and eat less. You’ve probably already noticed this. It doesn’t work for you. And here’s why.

Hunger

The main reason you won't be able to simply eat less is hunger.

It is the most obvious and most common reason why people stop or do not start losing weight at all. Hunger is hard to bear. In fact, it is hard to bear even if you do not lose weight. And it is not (only) about willpower, bad nutritional upbringing and genes, but that hunger is a request formed by our individual needs for nutrients.

Everything is arranged in such a way that we cannot simply ignore these needs, because the correct functioning of the body depends on them.

Therefore, trying to simply eat less is not a solution to the problem, but rather an aggravation of it, since it does not suppress the main reason why we want to eat – hunger.

As soon as you try to teach yourself to eat less, you feel even hungrier. If you are hungry more, it means that the body's needs are not being met in the most obvious way. You and I already know very well what this will lead to. But there is good news.

Our body's primary need is not for specific nutrients. In fact, the body has a very poor understanding of what it eats. The digestive system works slowly. What we eat enters the bloodstream after several hours. Therefore, the body does not have the opportunity to promptly assess the amount of nutrients received during a meal in order to reduce hunger. However, it is necessary to somehow understand when to stop eating. And the first thing the body uses as an assessment and indicator of the nutrients received is volume of food and fullness of the stomach.

If we want to feel less hungry, we need to control the amount of food we eat, and trying to teach ourselves to eat less simply won't work.

In this study 186 women were divided into three groups according to different weight loss strategies:
Consumption of pre-prepared portions of food;
Making up a diet in accordance with the satiety index of foods;
Learning to eat less food.
The women knew they were taking part in a diet experiment, but they didn't know their portion sizes would be larger than the standard. Over the course of a year, their portions increased by 25%, 50%, and 75%, and only the satiety-focused group successfully consumed enough calories without overeating.
“This was achieved not by limiting the total amount eaten per meal, but by consuming a higher proportion of low-energy foods.” The rest ate 26 grams more for every 100 grams of additional food.

You don't need to eat less. You need to consume fewer calories for the same amount of food you are used to.

The most important mechanism for suppressing hunger is volume of food eaten. The fewer calories you consume 100g of a meal or dish, the more filling it is and the fewer calories you are likely to consume from it.

IN large meta-analysiswhich analyzed 2,700 nutrition protocols, identified the 200 cc per dish threshold as the most satiating.

More food leads to more satietyeven if it's just water or air, as in sodas or whipped protein shakesThe key indicator here is the pressure on the stomach walls, which forms a signal of satiety.

As an illustration of the influence of energy density, we can cite another fact: that when eating to sensation (until fullness), people in the study ate the same amount of pasta or rice as they did potatoes. Only potatoes are less energy dense (of course, without adding butter, milk, etc.), and, therefore, for the volume necessary for satiety, fewer calories will be received.

Volume control will be a cool dietary skill for you. Yes, hunger will not disappear completely. In a calorie deficit, you will lose fat, and this will cause metabolic adaptation, including through increased hunger. But by controlling the volume of food, it will become much easier for you to control hunger, and this will no longer be a reckless cutting of portions, but a rational approach.

But hunger is not the last thing that leads to overeating. Often we eat even when we are not hungry.

Appetite and Portion Size

If we were rational, we would learn what satisfies us best, eat it, and be satisfied before we consume excess calories. But life is not like that.

The body is not tied to the exact calculation of consumption. It cannot say “STOP” after receiving a sufficient amount of nutrients, again because digestion takes too long. Therefore, the system has developed another mechanism for controlling food intake – appetite. Less rational and more psychological.

Our appetite is influenced not only by how much we eat, but also by HOW WE EVALUATE what we ate.

Let's go back to the first study, where participants were given larger portions. There, every 100 grams of extra food led to overeating by 26 grams above the standard amount. Even though the women had been trained, the larger portions still led to increased consumption. Why? Because portion size is an important cue for the brain to determine how much it needs to eat.

From the brain's perspective, portion size suggests that it is the expected amount of food we should consume. Under different conditions, circumstances, and for different people, larger portion sizes lead to significantly greater energy intakeWe tend to interpret portion size as a social norm or an implicit recommendation about how much we should eat.

We eat about 92% of our food, no matter what the portion size was. The larger the portion, the more we eat.

Make yourself exactly the portions that fit into your norm. Don't take extra, don't pile food on yourself. Try to fit the entire portion on one plate so that you don't have to put it on several times, so that the meal has a clear beginning and end.

Another equally important factor in assessing food to form a more powerful satiety signal will be satisfaction from eating.

Don't make your diet bland, tasteless and too limited. Learn to control your calorie intake not by simply cutting off everything pleasant and bringing food to a state that you don't want to eat in principle.

Appetite and availability

Availability is another signal the brain uses to determine how much food to eat. Our brains are constantly assessing the availability of food. From an evolutionary perspective, if there is no food around, there is no point in being hungry. Have you noticed? When there is no food around, work is easier, concentration is better, and the idea of snacking doesn’t even cross your mind.

Another example: going to a restaurant versus a buffet. In both cases, the portion sizes will be significantly different for the same person. Because the restaurant offers limited portions and a portion is all that is available. Even if you can order as many portions as you want, there is a limit on the number of portions. Whereas a buffet encourages overeating because there is too much available.

In general, proximity to food increases appetite. Many people are familiar with the situation when you put a pack of nuts, chips, candies at your workplace, and by the end of the day the pack is empty. This leads to a huge difference in energy consumption with little effect on satiety.

The availability of food has such a strong impact that It was found that people in families where unhealthy food is visible on the kitchen table (that same bowl of goodies for when guests come over, yeah-ha) weigh 9.4-14.4 kg more than people in whose families there is no such tradition and the kitchen table is always clean or there is fruit on it.

So follow a very simple rule: don't keep food around you, at least not the kind that you can quickly grab and eat. Don't keep food around your desk, in your desk.

Important results

Weight loss and control is a matter of endurance and willpower, but not as much as is commonly thought. Endurance is necessary here only when you do everything wrong every day. And reducing the amount of food with constant restrictions and prohibitions is exactly the condition under which you will have to show enormous willpower to achieve the result. And willpower runs out before a noticeable result occurs, or its constant use leaves no strength to maintain the changes that have occurred and does not leave any pleasure from them.

Do not use willpower in transformation. Use the power of knowledge. For example, to fulfill the first point on reducing calories and maintaining food volume, low-calorie foods containing fiber are needed. You can find out how fiber is useful and download a list of foods with a high fiber content for different regions here in this post on my channel. Come in, download and subscribe to the channel.