Absolutely. My partner and I realized we were eating a lot of unhealthy food, so we started trying to cut down on sugar.
As it turns out, you can’t really eat out anywhere if you’re cutting sugar, so we started cooking at home.
Cut to about three weeks later, and I go to drink a HALF-SUGAR Gatorade. I could only get about two sips down before I had to throw it away. Way too sweet.
Then, I had to stop somewhere for lunch. Panda Express’ chow mein and 2 entrees were ~1200 calories, and that really wasn’t even filling.
Our bodies are really good at adapting to whatever diets we have to take on, and ultraprocessed food is great for survival due to its high caloric content for the cost. But we weren’t meant to eat like this every day, and raising your kid to adapt to that instead of whole foods is child abuse.
Yeah. I was compelled to go cold-turkey off processed foods a couple decades ago for dire matters of health. I know it’s not possible for everyone, but for me it was utterly necessary and vastly improved the quality of my life.
Everybody’s now talking about satiety because it’s the mechanism of these popular GLP-1 drugs. I’ve been trying to tell folks about it for 25 years. It was literally the key for me to losing ~120 lbs and keeping it off. I resolved diabetes, hypertension and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease -and vastly improved other issues that were making me miserable.
The bottom line was an awareness that what I eat now has a direct and powerful effect on how soon and how much I’ll be compelled to eat later. I began to weight my choices towards the low-caloric density, the low glycemic and high-fiber. This of course also means mostly dumping processed foods.
I realize there is privilege in being able to do this and even devote the time to untangling health puzzles, I was fortunate to have the situation and support to do it.
I guess my point is that given resources it’s at least possible to game your own satiety without being dependent on expensive drugs. No argument at all that the quality of what folks now regard as staple food is lousy and in fact calculated to cause overconsumption, illness.
