Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 66: Is volume eating just a trend or another "fad"?
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast and I want to talk a little bit about volume eating. is volume eating a fad? know, it's suddenly in very in vogue if that's right term where I feel like a lot of people are talking about it and I actually think that's a really good thing. I think that as always true of life and in many many different ways there's trends, right? There's things that swing in and out of fashion and one of the things I see a lot that's coming in now is about food volume and rightly so because A lot of the time when we think about weight loss, where we often start is we start with some basic things. So I know as a coach, when we're doing Sorted in Six and that's kind of our introduction to weight loss on this programme where we get people moving and get them losing a good amount of weight and actually getting a bit of motivation and understanding about average weight and all the fundamental things that we heavily focus on things like your calories, your average calories. We focus on protein a lot because a lot of people's protein intake is terribly, terribly low and these things to help with fullness, right? So that's where we start. Then often as clients come into one-to-one coaching, we'll explore the other things that can be involved in fullness because there are rather a lot of things to consider. But one of those is about food volume and that is a really, really simple premise. Basically food volume is how big a space, I guess, does the food take up? How big a plate have you got in front of you? There's a couple of things that are useful to understand is that in our stomach, in our digestive tract, we have baroreceptors, which is just a fancy way of saying pressure receptors. So ultimately, we have different things that will kind of indicate how full we're gonna be. One of those things is pressure, right? If you have a food that is, if you have food that is physically large, it takes up lots of space, that is one aspect of fullness. So that's why if you have, you know, a day where maybe for breakfast you have a bowl of yogurt, but with lots of frozen berries, let's say, and then you have, as a snack later in the day, a piece of fruit. Then at lunchtime, you have something with quite a lot of salad in it, or maybe a soup, something like that, but particularly something like a big salad. And then you maybe get to dinner, and then have loads of veggies on your plate, and you have quite a lean protein source, maybe chicken breast. So you've got foods that are relatively bulky. You'll probably feel pretty stuffed, right? You're likely to feel quite full. Whereas if you have... like a bowl of cereal for breakfast, you have some Coco Pops, which are a childhood flashback, and of course, well, they were delicious before they reduced the sugar content by like 30 or 40%, and now they taste pretty naff, but that's by the by. But when we have something like that for breakfast, well, we're probably not very full. And when you do the meal deal at lunch, where you have a packet of Quavers and a very, very stingy little sandwich that hasn't seen a piece of lettuce or a tomato ever, then you end up in this position where you're hungry, right? Even though the calories might be identical. And actually, you could even, let's say you go home and for dinner you do have some chicken, or much veg, and then you have a protein shake. So let's say, for the sake of simplicity, both those days actually have the same amount of protein in them. You might still find, not you won't, not might, but you will find, will still find, that there is a huge difference in fullness, an absolutely massive difference in fullness. And the reason for that's really simple, food for you. we've not got the same amount. Having a higher amount of fibre, having something that takes up lot of space, makes a massive, massive difference to fullness. And in general, in general, a lot of the foods that are higher in food volume are higher in fibre and have a lot of other benefits too. So the great thing about volume eating, and what volume eating is, if you like, and that's the kind of term I've picked up on, and there's lots of different ways of describing it, I like to talk about focusing on fullness and the different aspects of it, but let's say we're volume eating. What we're trying to do there is we're trying to stuff our plate full, make it really, really big in filling. It tends to have a lot of health benefits because you tend to be getting, if you're eating more salads, if you're eating more fruit, more veg, you're probably getting more micronutrients into your diet and you're also getting more fiber as well. So it can be really, really helpful to focus on volume eating. So by no means is it a fast. Now I'm sure there will be someone out there who takes it to the extreme end of things and is like, that's the only thing that matters is volume eating. And look. Ultimately, if you're doing a really good job of volume eating, it probably is likely to reduce the amount of calories you have, but I would still be wanting to track my calories, because there's simply no guarantee of that. You could also volume eat all day and then still scram some chocolate bikkies at the end of the day, and that would still obviously pull you over your calories. However, what I do find time and time again with clients, and I have a few clients doing this right now actually this week, where I've got them to send me pictures of their dinners or lunches. because it may be mentioned that they're either a bit hungry in general or a little bit hungry after dinner and struggling with evening snacking. And I've had a few conversations where they've picked up on this, have made some suggestions, they've had the same meal again but almost like an edited version with more veg. And I've had a few clients kind of ping back a message and say, I couldn't even finish my dinner. Like I maybe got through 90 % of it and I just couldn't have any more, I didn't even want a biscuit after dinner. Now that's not because I'm a magician, it's simply because they've got more fullness, right? Like that's all that is, is we've looked at things. So if you're thinking, okay great, well that sounds like a good thing to focus on and maybe a couple of dinners a week or two or three dinners a week, which is where I would start by the way, and this is a little hack, right? This is the way I like to approach it, is if you are trying to lose weight or you are losing weight but you're finding you're a bit hungry, a little hack for you is this, is pick three meals a week that absolutely stuff you. So I actually just had one, so. I've kind of, I've got my go-to lunch right now is I just have some like chicken mini fillets, which I just stick in an air fryer and then I chuck it in a bowl and there's some pasta, not a tonne pasta because I want to keep the calories relatively low and then I put it in with some broccoli and a bunch of other veg and some pesto, some reduced fat pesto. And it is chock full of protein from the chicken. It's got a little bit of pasta in it, which is nice because, well, pasta's tasty and it's, again, not so much that it's consuming loads of my calories. And I also have it chock full of veg. And honestly, as I sit here right now, I'm stuffed to the gun also. I'm so full. I'm so, full. And I think that the amount that was in that in terms of calories was like 420, 430 calories. So we're not talking about an obscene amount of calories by any means, and I'm stuffed. Like if someone offered me food right now, I do not want it. I'm good, thank you. But that's the difference that volume eating makes. So I would start with two or three meals a week like that. So I actually have been having that as lunch most days, like three, sometimes four days a week recently, just because it keeps me super full, just because it makes my life super, super easy. And I really like that as a lunch and I'm quite like that. I quite like meals that are easy. I can make a big batch of it. That makes me really full. But some things that you want to include, right? And actually I forgot to mention that I included peppers in that too. So I had obviously some like broccoli, some pepper and some other just like mixed veggie stuff that we have. But the point is this, that things like peppers, onions, mushrooms, carrots, what else was I gonna go on to? Within fruits, you talk about strawberries, grapes, melon can tend to be quite low in calories as well. Obviously salad leaves, green veggies, broccoli and things like that. All these things can be added. So often it's not. I look at a client's portion of their dinner and I say, well why not have some more carrots there? Why not have some more broccoli? Why not have some more salad? Whatever it is, right, it doesn't really matter. But the point is is that you do that at two or three of your meals per week, and the goal is to come away from that meal at a nine out of 10 fullness, but without overspilling on calories. That's how you see this little challenge is like, right, I'm gonna create a meal that properly fills me up. And I see this being very effective for a lot of people because what they might find is a couple of days a week they might want to bank some calories for the weekend, so they're kinda conscious, like, oh, I've got dinner on Saturday, I'd like to have you know, few hundred extra calories for that dinner. Okay, how do I do that? Well, if I only eat 1400 calories, I'm gonna be starving. Actually, I can probably eat 1400 calories, not every day by any means, but I could eat 1400 again, contextual to my height and body weight and stuff, that would be very, very low for me. But I can be stuffed on 1400 calories for probably a couple of days before I would start to see my appetite creep up a bit no matter what I did with food volume, because I'm in such deficit. and that's quite low for me, right? That's pretty low. My maintenance calories are 3,000 plus. So I'm talking 40 % of my normal calories and I can still be quite full if I pick only the foods that I'm really full on. So if I have my protein smoothie with loads of fruit in it in the morning, if I have that for lunch and then I have a sensible dinner as well that again, got lots of veggies in it, I'll still be stuffed. So volume eating is by no means a fad. It is really, really useful. And I think it's a good thing that it's becoming more popular and talked about as well, because actually, I think there's a lot of utility in it as well. Now, I'm not the world's biggest veggie lover, which is probably a bit of a, just assume, I guess, that, you know, like, the nutrition to me, all the rest of it, like, ⁓ you must absolutely adore veggies. And like, don't get me wrong, I am very good at having them now, but I was never naturally, as a kid, the kid who was like desperate to eat loads of veggies at all. I've very much gotten better at it by eating more of them. I enjoy them more. But also learning how to season them and make them nice as well. And like, I some really nice roasted veggies yesterday as well. Like, one of the things I would say as well is please don't just have like really plain boring veggies if you don't like them. And then kinda just be shoveling them down and being miserable. Like, that's not the best way to do it. Like I said, for the dish that I had at lunch there, because I have that pesto, the reduced fat pesto, that works really well for me to give everything a bit of flavour. and I will mix that through in a bowl really, really well. And it means everything tastes really, I love pesto, so it tastes really, really nice. I'm not having loads of the pesto, but it does enough to add a lot of flavour to it. And that helps a lot too. So one of the other things I sometimes say is when someone's like, I don't love veg, I'm like, well, it depends on how you're making it. Because if you're just sitting looking at a bit of broccoli that you've just boiled and there's no other flavours to that meal, yeah, that might be the case. but you can often hide veg within your food a little bit more. I always joke like about that, because that was basically what I did for myself to get my veg up is, you know, like you would do for a kid, is like hidden veg, but that works fine. Sometimes even chopping things more finely as well. Silly as that sounds, you know, if you do have something like pesto in that dish and you chop it more finely, it mixes through better, you tend to find the flavors less sort of strong from the veg and more strong from other things. So just some thoughts as well on that regard too. So. Hopefully that was helpful on all things volume eating because it is very topical at the moment I feel. So quite nice to kind of bring that up and have a wee chat about that. If that was helpful and you are struggling a little bit with your weight loss journey or you just want to kick on or you just need some accountability and you feel like you need a bit of a hand to really get this weight loss phase done and dusted. to learn about how to lose weight properly, then learn about how to maintain it, because let's be honest, that's the trickiest part, right? It's not just losing weight, which you've probably done before at some point, it's the bit where you're looking to maintain it that's been the real challenge. If you are looking to do that, then that is exactly what one-to-one coaching is designed for. And the link to that is in the show notes, and you can book a little call in there too. It's very much a no pressure call, where we'll chat a little bit about the challenges you're having right now. if coaching's a good fit. So either way, you come away and you want to jump into coaching, great. And if you just feel like you could do it in a little bit more direction, then you'll also get that from the call too, and you'll still be in a much better spot than before. So if that's obvious, jump into the show notes and click on that. But otherwise, I will speak to you soon.