Well the point isn’t meant to be that the food is inherently unsatisfying. The point is meant to be that the food is stuff that is within the normal range of palatability we are adapted for.
There’s reasonable justification for adding rice and traditional bread too given their long history of consumption before obesity was common.
If you can make nice tasting food from that, that’s a good thing. If you can achieve genuine ‘cafeteria food’ hyperpalatability I’ll be seriously impressed. It seems like it would be very hard to do without a fat like butter/oil or a sweetener like table sugar/honey.
As a Christmas present I got a rice cooker, with the recommendation to use for things other than rice.
For those unfamiliar with this kind of device, it basically heats the water until it evaporates, and then it automatically turns itself off, so the food is actually cooked in the vapor rather than in hot water. (With the rice it provides instructions on how much water for how much rice to get it right. With other food, you are on your own, but in my experience 1 dl water was enough for everything.)
Turns out, vegetables cooked this way are super delicious. (Also, according to doctors in my family, more healthy than vegetables cooked in water, because the nutrients stay inside, and fewer vitamin C is destroyed compared to traditional cooking. Of course, raw vegetables would be even better, but whatever.) The recipe is to take some subset of {potato, carrot, beetroot, onion, celery, broccoli, cauliflower}, peel and cut to smaller pieces, sprinkle with salt and oil, add 1 dl water, and turn the cooker on. Twenty minutes later, the meal is ready and delicious. (I typically eat it with some meat or yogurt, for proteins.)
For the last month, I am using this almost every day. Never before I have eaten so much vegetables. Not only I have eliminated sweets from my diet (I used to eat sweets a lot), but I even mostly stopped eating bread and pasta (not on purpose, I just like the vegetables more now).
And… uhm, my weight remains exactly the same. (Too bad, because I would need to lose about 20 kg.)
This is not exactly what you wrote, because I use the oil, and the yogurt also contains fat. Perhaps I should go further in this direction, e.g. eliminate the oil from cooking (not really needed in the rice cooker). There would still be oil in the yogurt, but hey, you need some to dissolve vitamins A and D.
I guess I wanted to make the following points:
you can make surprisingly tasty meals from mostly vegetables;
switching from very unhealthy diet to a diet consisting mostly of vegetables can have surprisingly little effect (in my case, zero) on your body weight.
Turns out, vegetables cooked this way are super delicious.
Remember: under the hyperpalatability hypothesis, it is the “super delicious” that’s the enemy when it comes to weight loss. So it’s not surprise that this wouldn’t help.
Very interesting anecdote. This is exactly the sort of change I would expect to have some immediate and noticable effect. Oil might be the culprit but probably not. One reason to do it for 100% of food is just to get rid of the confounders.
Well the point isn’t meant to be that the food is inherently unsatisfying. The point is meant to be that the food is stuff that is within the normal range of palatability we are adapted for.
IMO you either want to go the ‘French women’ approach as described in another comment, or you want to select a food that is ‘bland’. The specific property I mean is a psychological reaction, and so it’s going to fire for different foods for different people, but basically: when you’re starting a meal you want to eat the food, and then when you’ve eaten enough of the food, you look at more on your plate and go “I’m not finishing that.” [This is different from the “I’m too full” reaction; there have been many times that I have put MealSquares back in the fridge when I would have eaten more bread.]
One thing that I’ve tried, but not for long enough to get shareable data, is having the ‘second half’ of my day’s calories be bland food. (That is, cook / order 1000 calories of tasty food, and then eat as many MealSquares as I want afterwards.) This is less convenient than a “cheat day” style of diet, but my guess is it’s more psychologically easy.
It’s also helpful to put less food on your plate to begin with, as a tool to recalibrate how much is “enough” for you. It is always possible to take food off your plate and put it back into a Tupperware and then into the refrigerator, but the easy, default choice is to convince yourself to clean your plate—especially when the alternative is putting a spoonful of whatever into either a shared leftovers container (which could be an issue depending on the hygiene standards of the people you’re living with) or in a separate bin to be consumed on the day you’re hungry for a partially-eaten bit of pork loin with a smear of mashed potatoes still attached to one end (which will never look quite as appetizing as properly-plated leftovers or a fresh meal).
Starting with less food to begin with makes the default habit (clean plate) more likely to result in a win condition.
When I tried them (about six years ago), I found them to be quite bland. Partly the density and texture took away from any flavor enjoyment that I was getting out of them.
That’s interesting to me, thanks for replying. I wonder if I just like the chocolate more, flavorwise, or if there was less before. I think without the wetness that comes from me microwaving it and melting the chocolate, it would be pretty damn dry and hard to eat.
I enjoy my first MealSquare. My fourth (I eat one meal a day) is generally “fine.” Whether or not I eat a fifth (or sixth) depends on how hungry I am in a manner much more pronounced than it is for other foods.
Oh geez, I have one in the morning before work and it’s perfect for me, but 5 or 6 would probably burn me out no matter what they are. I can totally see now why they would taste bland after that many, and I’m amused to think that anything you can comfortably eat that amount of is probably required to be bland.
Well the point isn’t meant to be that the food is inherently unsatisfying. The point is meant to be that the food is stuff that is within the normal range of palatability we are adapted for.
I mean it’s fair enough that the restrictions needn’t be too high. But still, the restriction should be on palatability itself, not on the inputs to the food that may sometimes contribute to palatability (unless you have a highly precise set of restrictions to the inputs that are sufficient to match the tradition).
Extra fats and sweeteners do help a lot with palatability. But to some extent, fat could be extracted from other means; to some extent, palatability could be improved by changing proportions; etc.. Even things like careful optimization through large-scale experimentation will help with palatability, and so should probably be avoided.
Let’s say people didn’t used to be obese in the 50′s. Ok, what did people eat back then? How palatable was it, on average? That seems like what one should aim for. Maybe one can contact a food historian or something to figure out more?
I should also add: assuming some sort of monotonicity, it may be helpful for the statistics to exaggerate the unpalatability compared to the past, because it increases the expected effect if palatability matters, and so makes it easier to detect. But obviously it comes with the downside that it’s not as clear whether it really matches what you’d eat on a medium-palatability diet.
You can compare both ingredient lists and serving sizes if you look at cookbooks from the 1950s-1960s and recipe sites today. My Betty Crocker cookbook from 1969 (where I get most of my dessert recipes) has a brownie recipe that calls for 2 cups sugar, 4 oz chocolate, 2⁄3 cup butter; it’s meant to bake in a 13x9 pan and yield 32 brownies.
The brownie recipe on Betty Crocker’s website (that is, “today’s brownie recipe”) calls for 1 3⁄4 cups sugar, 5 oz chocolate, 2⁄3 cup butter, but is meant to bake in a 9x9 pan and yield 16 brownies.
You can compare both ingredient lists and serving sizes if you look at cookbooks from the 1950s-1960s and recipe sites today.
In principle yes, but the question is also the distribution of recipes they ate. I’d assume some of their recipes are more palatable than others, and if you disproportionately ate the more palatable ones, presumably the diet wouldn’t work. I don’t even how popular recipe books used to be back then. It seems like one should put some serious historical effort in to ensure that it gets properly replicated.
My Betty Crocker cookbook from 1969 (where I get most of my dessert recipes) has a brownie recipe that calls for 2 cups sugar, 4 oz chocolate, 2⁄3 cup butter; it’s meant to bake in a 13x9 pan and yield 32 brownies.
The brownie recipe on Betty Crocker’s website (that is, “today’s brownie recipe”) calls for 1 3⁄4 cups sugar, 5 oz chocolate, 2⁄3 cup butter, but is meant to bake in a 9x9 pan and yield 16 brownies.
hmmmmmmmm...
In addition to the distribution question, 1969 is a bit on the late side.
I should have just stated explicitly I don’t think you can achieve hyperpalatability with those as inputs, which is what I’m assuming.
I would be wary about making too big assumptions about what cannot be achieved when optimization pressure is applied. But maybe.
I agree exaggerated blandness would be a better test, but then doesn’t generalise to something you could actually follow for the rest of your life.
I wouldn’t predict past blandness to be something that one could actually follow for the rest of one’s life. Though I am not familiar enough with the quality of the foods back then, so I don’t know.
I should probably add: I think it’s a good idea to try this experiment, and I am considering whether to volunteer for it, but I just think one needs to properly ensure that the food is not too palatable.
I’m not sure why you pick “meat, fruit, vegetables and spices” as the rule. I’d pick something like “only eat unsatisfying food” as the rule.
I feel like I could make some highly palatable food under these restrictions. Mashed potatoes with something akin to beef stroganoff?
Well the point isn’t meant to be that the food is inherently unsatisfying. The point is meant to be that the food is stuff that is within the normal range of palatability we are adapted for.
There’s reasonable justification for adding rice and traditional bread too given their long history of consumption before obesity was common.
If you can make nice tasting food from that, that’s a good thing. If you can achieve genuine ‘cafeteria food’ hyperpalatability I’ll be seriously impressed. It seems like it would be very hard to do without a fat like butter/oil or a sweetener like table sugar/honey.
As a Christmas present I got a rice cooker, with the recommendation to use for things other than rice.
For those unfamiliar with this kind of device, it basically heats the water until it evaporates, and then it automatically turns itself off, so the food is actually cooked in the vapor rather than in hot water. (With the rice it provides instructions on how much water for how much rice to get it right. With other food, you are on your own, but in my experience 1 dl water was enough for everything.)
Turns out, vegetables cooked this way are super delicious. (Also, according to doctors in my family, more healthy than vegetables cooked in water, because the nutrients stay inside, and fewer vitamin C is destroyed compared to traditional cooking. Of course, raw vegetables would be even better, but whatever.) The recipe is to take some subset of {potato, carrot, beetroot, onion, celery, broccoli, cauliflower}, peel and cut to smaller pieces, sprinkle with salt and oil, add 1 dl water, and turn the cooker on. Twenty minutes later, the meal is ready and delicious. (I typically eat it with some meat or yogurt, for proteins.)
For the last month, I am using this almost every day. Never before I have eaten so much vegetables. Not only I have eliminated sweets from my diet (I used to eat sweets a lot), but I even mostly stopped eating bread and pasta (not on purpose, I just like the vegetables more now).
And… uhm, my weight remains exactly the same. (Too bad, because I would need to lose about 20 kg.)
This is not exactly what you wrote, because I use the oil, and the yogurt also contains fat. Perhaps I should go further in this direction, e.g. eliminate the oil from cooking (not really needed in the rice cooker). There would still be oil in the yogurt, but hey, you need some to dissolve vitamins A and D.
I guess I wanted to make the following points:
you can make surprisingly tasty meals from mostly vegetables;
switching from very unhealthy diet to a diet consisting mostly of vegetables can have surprisingly little effect (in my case, zero) on your body weight.
Remember: under the hyperpalatability hypothesis, it is the “super delicious” that’s the enemy when it comes to weight loss. So it’s not surprise that this wouldn’t help.
Very interesting anecdote. This is exactly the sort of change I would expect to have some immediate and noticable effect. Oil might be the culprit but probably not. One reason to do it for 100% of food is just to get rid of the confounders.
IMO you either want to go the ‘French women’ approach as described in another comment, or you want to select a food that is ‘bland’. The specific property I mean is a psychological reaction, and so it’s going to fire for different foods for different people, but basically: when you’re starting a meal you want to eat the food, and then when you’ve eaten enough of the food, you look at more on your plate and go “I’m not finishing that.” [This is different from the “I’m too full” reaction; there have been many times that I have put MealSquares back in the fridge when I would have eaten more bread.]
One thing that I’ve tried, but not for long enough to get shareable data, is having the ‘second half’ of my day’s calories be bland food. (That is, cook / order 1000 calories of tasty food, and then eat as many MealSquares as I want afterwards.) This is less convenient than a “cheat day” style of diet, but my guess is it’s more psychologically easy.
It’s also helpful to put less food on your plate to begin with, as a tool to recalibrate how much is “enough” for you. It is always possible to take food off your plate and put it back into a Tupperware and then into the refrigerator, but the easy, default choice is to convince yourself to clean your plate—especially when the alternative is putting a spoonful of whatever into either a shared leftovers container (which could be an issue depending on the hygiene standards of the people you’re living with) or in a separate bin to be consumed on the day you’re hungry for a partially-eaten bit of pork loin with a smear of mashed potatoes still attached to one end (which will never look quite as appetizing as properly-plated leftovers or a fresh meal).
Starting with less food to begin with makes the default habit (clean plate) more likely to result in a win condition.
I worry that overtly bland is too hard to follow and French is so generous you can still make extremely palatable food.
Very small point here that I’d like clarified for my personal curiosity:
Do you find MealSquares bland? I really enjoy eating them, and I think it’s because they’re “normally palatable” or something, but not bland.
When I tried them (about six years ago), I found them to be quite bland. Partly the density and texture took away from any flavor enjoyment that I was getting out of them.
That’s interesting to me, thanks for replying. I wonder if I just like the chocolate more, flavorwise, or if there was less before. I think without the wetness that comes from me microwaving it and melting the chocolate, it would be pretty damn dry and hard to eat.
I enjoy my first MealSquare. My fourth (I eat one meal a day) is generally “fine.” Whether or not I eat a fifth (or sixth) depends on how hungry I am in a manner much more pronounced than it is for other foods.
Oh geez, I have one in the morning before work and it’s perfect for me, but 5 or 6 would probably burn me out no matter what they are. I can totally see now why they would taste bland after that many, and I’m amused to think that anything you can comfortably eat that amount of is probably required to be bland.
Thanks for clarifying!
I mean it’s fair enough that the restrictions needn’t be too high. But still, the restriction should be on palatability itself, not on the inputs to the food that may sometimes contribute to palatability (unless you have a highly precise set of restrictions to the inputs that are sufficient to match the tradition).
Extra fats and sweeteners do help a lot with palatability. But to some extent, fat could be extracted from other means; to some extent, palatability could be improved by changing proportions; etc.. Even things like careful optimization through large-scale experimentation will help with palatability, and so should probably be avoided.
Let’s say people didn’t used to be obese in the 50′s. Ok, what did people eat back then? How palatable was it, on average? That seems like what one should aim for. Maybe one can contact a food historian or something to figure out more?
I should also add: assuming some sort of monotonicity, it may be helpful for the statistics to exaggerate the unpalatability compared to the past, because it increases the expected effect if palatability matters, and so makes it easier to detect. But obviously it comes with the downside that it’s not as clear whether it really matches what you’d eat on a medium-palatability diet.
You can compare both ingredient lists and serving sizes if you look at cookbooks from the 1950s-1960s and recipe sites today. My Betty Crocker cookbook from 1969 (where I get most of my dessert recipes) has a brownie recipe that calls for 2 cups sugar, 4 oz chocolate, 2⁄3 cup butter; it’s meant to bake in a 13x9 pan and yield 32 brownies.
The brownie recipe on Betty Crocker’s website (that is, “today’s brownie recipe”) calls for 1 3⁄4 cups sugar, 5 oz chocolate, 2⁄3 cup butter, but is meant to bake in a 9x9 pan and yield 16 brownies.
hmmmmmmmm...
In principle yes, but the question is also the distribution of recipes they ate. I’d assume some of their recipes are more palatable than others, and if you disproportionately ate the more palatable ones, presumably the diet wouldn’t work. I don’t even how popular recipe books used to be back then. It seems like one should put some serious historical effort in to ensure that it gets properly replicated.
In addition to the distribution question, 1969 is a bit on the late side.
I should have just stated explicitly I don’t think you can achieve hyperpalatability with those as inputs, which is what I’m assuming.
I agree exaggerated blandness would be a better test, but then doesn’t generalise to something you could actually follow for the rest of your life.
I would be wary about making too big assumptions about what cannot be achieved when optimization pressure is applied. But maybe.
I wouldn’t predict past blandness to be something that one could actually follow for the rest of one’s life. Though I am not familiar enough with the quality of the foods back then, so I don’t know.
I should probably add: I think it’s a good idea to try this experiment, and I am considering whether to volunteer for it, but I just think one needs to properly ensure that the food is not too palatable.