Forget Calories, Hormones Rule
A response to a nutrition comment I wrote on Substack has led me to understand why no one understands the 80Bites motto Forget Calories Hormones Rule. A dieter disagreed with my statement about hormones and to prove I was wrong he wrote that he lost 30 pounds and claims he never gained the weight back—only 5% of dieters are in this category! He counted calories and never went above 1600 a day. What made this hard to understand was that he added that the reason he could do this for 19 years and counting (pun!) was that he ate exactly what he wanted. This included ice cream and pizza and fries and candy and cookies etc. These foods are not considered “healthy.” I don’t label foods and glorify some and demonize others. My description is only that some foods are calorically dense which includes ice cream!! But then what exactly was this Calorie Counter person doing? 80 BITES!! Of course, he didn’t know this. But sticking to his caloric goal of 1600 calories a day and eating calorically dense foods means only one thing: staying within that 1600 number requires consuming less quantity. This is NOT portion control which is based on unlimited “healthy” foods—low calorie vegetables—and avoiding other foods you crave. So what do HORMONES have to do with this??
If you eat fewer calories but a lot of quantity your stomach—that small container under your left breast—has a negative reaction and that leads to unbalanced hormones which leads to ravenous hunger. Scientists found this out years ago and now we have Ozempic. Yes portion control has some value in reducing quantity but nothing like following 80Bites where there are no manipulations other than reducing quantity so that you eat exactly what you want and don’t feel deprived or guilty because as we now know from all the chat groups with people who are on these drugs who tell their stories that they eat fewer calories but they really reduce quantity. Then their hunger is not off the charts. The real villain is hunger and once we downsize our hunger using Ozempic, for example, we’re just doing 80Bites which is the natural Ozempic. Soon we begin to see that this approach is self-reinforcing because you are working with your body—not against it—the stomach doesn’t know calories-- it only knows quantity.
Yesterday I'm at Subway and I order a six-inch tuna. They sell hero sandwiches that are 12 inches, but if you only want 6 inches then they cut it in half. So the server is preparing mine and you choose what you want as the main and then the extras which are free an include lettuce and spinach and arugula and tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and celery and chilies and olives and radishes and so many other things so then you end up with a sandwich that’s very thick. I’ve never counted the bites but my guess is around 20. And I always leave few bites on the plate—mostly bread bites—because I am too full and the bread has cooled. This time there was a woman there too in her 20s and she probably weighed over 300 pounds. She ordered the one foot length. I looked at her and I thought I wish we could eat together because I’m fascinated that she could actually get that many bites at one sitting into her stomach without feeling like it was coming back up. If you’ve ever been pregnant at nine months you know what I’m talking about because your stomach is so pushed upwards that it doesn’t have any room to stretch. Obviously she’s stretched hers. I’ve never stretched mine so if I’m overloading my little stomach then it feels bad. Soon when a majority of Americans are on these new miracle weight loss drugs and eating so much less quantity they will feel it too. Just like everyone did before they starting dieting.
