six-pound weight loss in eight weeks for those who ate 1 gram of it an hour before their meals.
Step Down to the Plate. Monstrous portion sizes are one of our stomach’s biggest enemies: Studies show that when you’re served bad foods in large containers, you’ll eat up to one-third more than if you were served in smaller containers. By getting served in larger popcorn boxes, bigger dishes, and taller cups, we’ve automatically been tricked into thinking that availability should dictate how much we eat rather than physical hunger. You don’t have to go through drastic changes to make small ones. For starters, change your serving plates to the nine-inch variety to give yourself the visual and psychological clue that you’re full when your physical appetite has been sated. That’s important because studies show visual clues help determine how full you are, in that you may not feel satisfied until your plate is clean, no matter how large the plate is. That’s also reason never to eat directly out of a box or carton and always to remember that one serving size of a food is often about the size of a fist.
Slow Down. Stomach growling stimulates appetite, but growling doesn’t really tell you how hungry you are. It tells you to eat but not how much to eat. That’s why meal size is so important. You’re hardwired to eat but you’re not hardwired to eat a lot. Having a big meal quickly won’t stop you from wanting to eat a few hours later. So slow down and let your CCK act; it takes about twenty minutes after the nuts to decrease your desire to eat.
Add Pepper. Red pepper, when eaten early in the day, decreases food intake later in the day. Some credit the ingredient capsaicin for being the catalyst for decreasing overall calorie intake and for increasing metabolism. It also appears to work by inhibiting sensory information from the intestines from reaching the brain, which is particularly effective in reducing appetite in low-fat diets. Capsaicin works by killing—or at least stunning-the messages that you’re hungry. So add red peppers to your egg-white omelet.
YOU Test
Are You a Supertaster?
We all know that foods we like may send others seeking gas masks. But your tongue-related genetics may play an even bigger role in waist management. It could mean that you’re either not getting the right foods, or more prone to downing an after-dinner pie before the check arrives.
If you’re classified as a “supertaster,” you tend not to eat fruits and vegetables because they may taste very bitter, thereby putting yourself at a higher risk of certain diseases and colon polyps because you’re not getting the nutrients from fruits and vegetables. You should supplement your diet with a multivitamin to ensure you’re getting the right nutrients, as well as use fruits and veggies to enliven other things-as in salads and desserts and as moisturizers on breads (tomato sauce works great here). And if you’re an “undertaster,” you may be more prone to eating (and overeating) sweets because it takes more of a taste to satiate you. By the way, researchers say about 25 percent of us are supertasters and 25 percent are undertasters, while the rest of us are regular tasters.
Which taster are you?
The Saccharin Test: Mix one pack of saccharin (Sweet’N Low) into two-thirds of a cup of water; that’s about the size of the tennis ball. Now taste the water. You’ll probably taste a mix of both bitter and sweet, but see which taste is stronger. If sweet is dominant, then it means you’re probably an undertaster, and if bitter is dominant, it means you’re probably a supertaster. If it’s a tie, you are like half the population, so don’t sweat it. To be sure, you may have to do the test more than once to tease out differences.
The Blue Tongue Test: Wipe a swab of blue food dye on your tongue and see the small circles of pink-colored tissue that polka-dot the newly painted blue canvas. Those are your papillae. Then put a piece of paper-with a 4-millimeter hole, or the size of a hole punch in three-ring paper-over your tongue. Using a magnifying glass, count the little pink dots you see in the hole. If you have fewer then five dots, it means you’re an undertaster, while more than thirty indicate you’re probably a supertaster.
Chapter 4
Gut Check
The Dangerous Battles of Inflammation in Your Belly
Diet Myths
Your stomach is the place where you store your belly fat.
Diets are mostly about calorie control.
Your brain is the only part of your body that reacts emotionally to food.
We all know about the daily skirmishes that play out in the battle against obesity. You versus the ranch dressing, you versus the dessert tray, and in the title fight, your butt versus your college jeans. But it would be a mistake to think that every weight-loss war happens at the table or in the privacy of your own closet. In fact, millions of little firefights break out inside your gut every time you eat or drink—and these are the most influential battles in your personal crusade against excess weight. Deep inside your éclair-encrusted gut, you have cells and chemicals that react and respond to food in two ways: as an ally or as an enemy.
As we move along in our digestive journey to the second half of our digestive system, we’ll explore these battles and how they influence your waistline. Here, your body doesn’t just form allies or fight enemies according to how many calories a particular food has, or how greasy it is, or whether its mascot is a red-haired clown. When interrogating nutrients as they pass through your digestive system, your body classifies them by what kind of inflammatory effect they have; the enemies contribute to inflammation, and the allies quiet it.
We’re not just talking about the inflammation that happens when your belly balloons to the size of a convention center, or the inflammation that happens to your joints if you have arthritis. We’re talking about the chemical reaction of inflammation that happens within your bloodstream and is an underlying cause of weight gain. This process is like the rusting of our bodies. Just like metal rusts when exposed to oxygen, inflammation is caused when oxygen free radicals (no political affiliation) attack innocent bystanders in our bodies.
Inflammation happens on many different levels and through several different mechanisms, many of them having to do with food. Not only can you get inflammation through allergies to food, but you can also get inflammation in the rest of your body—through the way your liver responds to saturated and trans fats, and through the way your body and belly fat respond to such toxins as cigarettes and stress. In turn, these inflammatory responses can cause things like hypertension, high cholesterol, and insulin resistance—and those inflammatory responses influence the total-body mother of all inflammation in your arteries, which leads to heart disease. (We’ll discuss these at length in the next chapter.)
How Tolerant Are You?
With more than 100 million neurons in your intestines, gastrointestinal (GI) pain is immediate, but the level of GI discomfort you feel depends on your genetics; specifically on your tolerance of or allergies to certain foods and your genetic disposition for feeling the effects of those GI land mines. While there are certainly pharmaceutical solutions for dealing with the digestive explosions, there are also foods that produce an anti-inflammatory effect and can come in and put out the fire (see YOU Tips). During these inflammatory firefights, your intestines are contracting too much, or are being dilated-a painful process that works through the vagus nerve. Too much stimulation or distension of the bowel is what causes the pain. Some of us are less sensitive to those internal motions, so we may not always be getting the clue from our gut. These are some of the more common GI firestorms involving food intolerance:
Enzyme deficiencies: When your intestines lack enzymes to metabolize specific foods like milk or grains or beans, the food remains undigested, so you start feeding your intestines’ ravenous bacteria. The result: lots of intestinal dilation and more gas than a Hummer fuel tank. The most common of these is lactose intolerance (the lack of GI agreement with dairy products), and a close second is an allergy to the protein gluten from wheat (and rye and barley; nutritional good guys). As an example, when you lack the enzyme lactase, the sugar lactose in the milk reaching your intestine is not metabolized,