Yeah, throwing a bunch of greens into a blender is not a great way to consume them. Boiling/steaming is the way to go. The vast majority of vegetables I personally eat are well cooked and mushy.
I used to make green smoothies all the time, even went as far to by an expensive Blentec blender. If you are following Weight Watchers you actually get penalized for blending/juicing vegetables, so I stopped. Normally these are zero point foods. Their justification makes a lot of sense to me:
Man, I wish that chewing and food volume would reduce my hunger.
The only thing that makes me stop feeling hungry is my blood sugar going back up to a normal level.
I'm truly envious if there's actually anybody out there who can eat low-calorie bulky foods and actually feel satisfied by the meal. I just feel bloated but still just as hungry as before eating.
I don't think that only caloric content matters. How satiating do you find a 150-calorie small bag of Doritos compared to three or four grapefruits, with a similar caloric content? For me the answer is "not very."
Grapefruits aren't a good comparison, since Google says a grapefruit has 104 calories.
But if we compare a 150 calorie bag of doritos with 5 large tomatoes (each one being 33 calories), that feels about comparable in terms of satiating me in terms of giving me a break from hunger for maybe 45 minutes.
On the other hand, just large tomatoes does absolutely nothing for hunger. Which is the indication for me that volume is entirely irrelevant. (And why would volume matter? Your body can't turn volume into calories.)
Only problem with 5 large tomatoes is that it leaves me feeling kind of gross/bloated with that much volume. My stomach will literally feel like it protrudes, which is uncomfortable.
My mistake. I got misled by the “serving size” of half a grapefruit (who just eats half?). But volume mattering is pretty well attested and most people have experience with it. Why wouldn’t it? You physically can only fit so much food inside your stomach before it is uncomfortable to continue, no matter the caloric content.
Yeah I guess that's what mystifies me about it so much. Volume does nothing for me.
Like if I'm on a diet of 1,200 cal/day to lose weight, eating bulky foods does nothing to make me any less miserable, compared to if I stick to dense protein/fats/carbs. The sensation (and distraction) of hunger remains identical.
i know exactly what you mean. I can eat like 4 LBS of cucumbers in one sitting and still feel like I could eat a pizza afterwards. when you consume super low calorie foods like cucs and tomatoes, zuchinni, the body actually keeps on counting the calories with incredible accuracy and adjusts your hunger/appetite accordingly. But, I'll say, it does help a little bit and you do get a bit of discount by going with low calorie veggies, it's just not a silver bullet. at the end of the day you'll still consume less calories than you would have: just don't expect one large salad to fill you up. at the end of the day, you still need to go hungry to loose weight or keep it off.
fats don't all do that well on satiety studies. just look at the holz studies. most of the satieting things didn't have much fats in them: potatoes, apples and oranges.
The fiber factor probably plays a big role too. Sometimes juicers take that out. Fiber can make you feel full and it may also play a role in rate of sugar absorption.
Steaming retains more nutrients. Not only does boiling leach nutrients into water that is often discarded, it's easy and common to boil for longer than is necessary to make the item digestible.
Note that some things must be boiled to become safe; pokeweed greens can be boiled (and the water discarded) to reduce alkalinity. The berries, however, are never safe for human consumption.
https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/blog/food/why-fruit-counts...