Why Hunger, Not Math, Derails Diets

Philip Pape 0:00

If you're eating fewer calories than ever, but somehow hungrier than ever, and you're wondering what the heck you can do about it, this episode is for you. Today I'm gonna show you exactly how to structure your nutrition so that fat loss happens with less effort because you're actually satisfied, not starving. We're gonna talk about natural appetite control today. How can we suppress appetite at the hormonal level through both food and other means, as well as a counterintuitive food hack that activates your gut's natural foldness signals within minutes? Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and we're talking hunger again today. We're talking appetite in episode two of our eight-episode series. And the reality most people will not tell you about fat loss is the deficit itself is not the hard part. Okay, hitting a number in your tracking app or with your macros is just simple math. What is hard is managing the hunger that comes with it. And if your current approach has you fighting hunger all the time or dreading meals because they're not what you want or losing control in the evening, I think you're doing it wrong. I think there's a better way. Not because you lack discipline, but because you're working against things that could be easier, like we alluded to in the last episode. So we're gonna fix that today. I'm gonna give you some more specific strategies backed by the research on satiety, on appetite hormones, to lose fat without feeling as much like you're so hungry, right? We shouldn't feel like we're starving and miserable. There's always gonna be a little hunger. This isn't about tricks, this isn't hacks, this isn't anything that promises a miracle or ramps up your metabolism, you know, like CLAN or something like that, or steroids or anything weird like that. We're not talking GLP ones either. It's understanding how your body regulates hunger and then trying to structure both your nutrition and using natural means to leverage those systems. And then I want you to stick around until the end because I'm going to share a specific pre-meal protocol that can reduce how much you eat at your next meal by nearly 20%, and it only takes 30 seconds. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by CaloCurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Calocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. Calocurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel satisfied. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash callowcurb for 10% off your first order.

Satiety Hierarchy: Protein And Fiber

Philip Pape 2:53

Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callowcurb. All right, let's start with the foundation, the satiety hierarchy, right? Why do some foods fill you up and others don't? Because this is really the crux of a lot of this. If you want to lose fat with less hunger, you have to understand why some foods leave you satisfied for hours, maybe all day, and others have you immediately hungry minutes or if not seconds later, right? And we're not talking about just ultra-processed foods either, although that's part of the equation along the spectrum. So I think I like to think of it as a satiety hierarchy or spectrum. At the top of the hierarchy, or I well, if we look at it as the hierarchy being the best thing at the top, at the top is the protein, right? Which is hands down the most filling macro per calorie. When you eat protein, your gut releases the hormones we talked about in the last episode, like peptide YY and GLP1, that signals fullness to your brain, suppresses graylin, your hunger hormone. And this is a very pronounced effect. It measurably increases your satiety versus higher carb or higher fat meals. It's also why I like protein to be distributed throughout the day, not because it gives you some far superior muscle protein synthesis. It's a tiny benefit to that, but it's really more the satiety side of the equation, the practical side. There's also something called the protein leverage hypothesis where your body has a built-in drive to consume a certain amount of protein. And so if your diet's low in protein, you're gonna want to eat more until the protein need is met, even if it means overeating, which, you know, shouldn't be a problem if you're deliberately aiming to get the amount of protein we talk about. But I think this is one reason why modern ultra-processed diets, which are obviously very low in protein, right? They dilute the protein or have very little in it, and instead use a lot of cheap fats and carbs, lead to overconsumption. Your body is chasing the protein. That's not the only reason, but it is one of the reasons. So protein's at the top. Then we have fiber. Again, talked about this in detail last episode, or not in detail. We alluded to it. We're gonna get into some more detail today. But there's different types of fiber. There's soluble fiber, the kind you find in like oatmeal, in beans, fruits, some of the carbs I really love, which also have fiber, and that absorbs water and that forms a gel in your digestive tract tract. That physically then slows down your digestion, it stretches your stomach, and it triggers mechanical satiety signals. By mechanical, I mean there are little receptors, physical receptors that get touched by these things by what you're eating that get triggered to say, hey, you're more full. But also, fiber gets fermented in your gut by your gut bacteria. And then it gets fermented into short chain fatty acids, which themselves stimulate the release of the same appetite-suppressing hormones, GLB1 and PYY. So, you know, you hear gut health talked generically, you hear fiber talked about generically. There are direct mechanical and physical implications of eating fiber that will help this whole process and will help with your fat loss. It is, it is such a game changer that it's one of the first things I start with with one-on-one clients is looking at their fiber. If it's not high enough, I'm like, let's jack that up. Yes, protein, I know you get it. But a lot of people, they, the fiber for some reason seems like this afterthought, like, well, it's for my health or for some other nebulous thing over here. But no, it's for the appetite, it's for the gut health, it's for the gut bacteria, it's all of this stuff. Hormonal suppression of hunger, mechanical fullness from volume, delayed gastric emptying that keeps you satisfied longer are super, super important in terms of the hunger side of the equation because so many of you are struggling with things like emotional eating, and there are tools along the way that will reduce the triggers and the circumstances in which you would succumb to emotional eating. And I think helping with your hunger signals is one of them. So the practical application here is simple. Every main meal should include a substantial protein source and at least a couple servings of fibrous vegetables or other high fiber foods. I love fruit. Fruit's super convenient. So fruit's great, but if you like beans, legumes, things like that, lentils, where there's a little bit of fiber and carbs in there and protein, that's great too. So we're talking for most people, it's gonna be somewhere like 25 to 40 grams of protein per meal, right? It's gonna be something like that, depending on your size, plus vegetables that are like half your plate. It's not complicated, but it's kind of a non-negotiable if you're not doing it already and you're trying to improve the situation for fat loss and hunger.

Energy Density And Food Volume

Philip Pape 7:28

All right, so the next thing I want to talk about is energy density, because that's where you can kind of game the system and eat more without more calories. This is where a lot of the uh mantra of eat more to lose weight, I like to, I guess, steal that phrase. When most people say eat more to lose weight, they're talking about literally eating more calories to try to increase your metabolism, which we know is a farce. There's no such thing, right? You can recover your metabolism, but it's not going to make allow you to eat more and lose weight at the same clip. Okay. Different topic. I like to say there is a way to eat more and lose weight, and that's to eat more food with the same amount of calories. And that's energy density. How many calories are packed into a given weight of food, right? A pound of pizza can contain 1200 calories. A pound of mixed vegetables and grilled chicken might be 300 calories. Big difference. You could even go to the store right now in the grocery store, look at two bags of popcorn, one that's like kettle corn with butter and sugar and salt, and one that's just a simple salted popcorn. And look at the serving size on the back. And what you're gonna see is they both have the same weight, right? Usually one ounce, 28 grams, but one's gonna have more cups for that weight, right? One's gonna allow you to have, say, three and a half cups of popcorn for 28 grams. The other one's only gonna give you like a cup and a half of popcorn because it's so laden with calories, right? And I'm not saying good or bad here, just saying those are the differences you can see when it comes to energy density. Your stomach doesn't count calories. That's the important thing. Your stomach, I think a lot of people misunderstand this. A lot of people think your body responds to just the energy level. It doesn't. It actually responds to physical stretch and volume. So if you fill your stomach with low energy density foods, you're gonna trigger your folded signals faster while consuming far fewer calories. Again, this isn't like a new diet trick for 2026. It's basic physics combined with how your gut works. I do think it's important to understand gut health because of these kinds of things, not the mysterious stuff that you know about the gut brain axis that people don't quite get that that gets a little bit technical, but just these very practical things. So, the what foods should you eat to help out in this situation? All right, non-starchy vegetables, like or yeah, non-starchy vegetables, leafy greens, berries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, awesome. Soups, I like vegetable soups, but even obviously soups with protein like chicken and salads. Okay, that's a basic setup in your kitchen because all of these foods have high water content, high fiber, which means they take up a lot of space without many calories. I mean, if you think of just a carb, you think of a fruit, an apple versus chip uh pretzels. Let's go with pretzels because pretzels are almost pure carbs, right? Just like an apple. Which one's gonna fill you up for far fewer calories? It's gonna be the apple because of all the water, right? The the pretzel's been processed because you have flour, and it's basically just flour, right? It's it's bread, effectively. And again, not good or bad. It's just comparing the two, you can see why this would happen. So, like carbs that have water, if you just think about what you're eating, is it a natural carb that hasn't been processed that has water? That's probably gonna be a lot more filling than something that has been processed. So, again, it's not about the carbs, is it? It's about the food volume. We do know from quite a few studies that like starting a meal with a large salad or a broth-based soup, so having that first can reduce your total meal intake in terms of calories by something like 10 to 50, 10 or 15%. And that's meaningful, right? Because over time, those kinds of reductions are going to add up and you're not gonna feel like you're restricting anything. You just switched around what and when you ate something. So a trick here is before your main meal, eat a big bowl of vegetables or broth-based soup, for example, right? Or load your plate with leafy greens and non-starchy vegetables first, and then add your protein, and then whatever else fits your macros, and kind of eat it in that order. Now, some people argue eat your protein first. I mean, it depends. Try both. Try them. That's all I can say is experiment. Not do your and notice none of this is eliminating foods. It's changing the order in proportion and then also adding in things that are gonna help. And yeah, I grew up in the 80s where you had to like clean your plate, but I almost never clean my plate. Even when we eat at home, my wife's totally cool with it because none of us do. We're all used to just starting with like a salad, maybe a soup, something like that, and then digging into the protein and the vegetables, maybe a little bit of the carb, and you have some left over. You know, and I generally might encourage my daughters, hey, I would encourage you to maybe eat that, finish the broccoli and the chicken before you go on to the quinoa, but it doesn't really matter as long as

Natural GLP-1 Alternative

Philip Pape 12:10

you are managing your hunger signals well. All right, we're about halfway through. I'm going to be talking about meal timing strategies next, some appetite control tools, and the pre-meal protocol that I mentioned at the start. Before we continue with meal timing, I do want to tell you about today's sponsor, Calicurb, because this is highly relevant to today's topic. We've been talking about how protein and fiber trigger the release of appetite hormones like GLP1 and PYY. And these are the same pathways that, for example, GLP1 medications target. It turns out there is a natural way to enhance these signals. And that's why I like Calicurb. Calicurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate. Okay, go Google it if you'd like, nerd out on it. It is a patented hops extract developed over 15 years in New Zealand, and it works by activating the bitter taste receptors in your gut. Remember, we talked about mechanical activation of gut receptors. These, it's it's like you've eaten something bitter, and that bitterness triggers the release of the same satiety hormones we just discussed: GLP1, CCK, PYY. And clinical data shows a 40% reduction in cravings, 30% reduction in hunger, and 18% fewer calories consumed all within one hour of taking it. So I think of calllocurb as another powerful tool in the satiety stack. It doesn't replace protein and fiber and all the fundamentals we're discussing today, but it does amplify them. You know, you're still doing the work. This just massively helps your gut biology cooperate so you can eat even less if that is your goal. So if you want to try it, go to wits and weights.com slash calllocurb for 10% off your first order. I've included the link at the top of the show notes as well. Try it out for yourself before you commit to a subscription. Again, that's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. That's C-A-L-O Curb C U

Meal Timing And Morning Advantage

Philip Pape 14:02

R B. All right, let's get into meal timing because I think that can meaningfully impact your hunger levels throughout the day. Again, I'm hammering home some of the things that I've mentioned in the first episode. And as we go through this eight-episode series, you're gonna hear things repeated and from different angles so that they really stick with you. Okay, this is part of the education I want to get across. There's a robust study that I want to highlight here where researchers compared two eating patterns: a large breakfast with a small dinner versus a small breakfast with a large dinner. Same total calories, the exact same foods, just distributed differently. And this is a cool one. I've heard others, I think like Brandon de Cruz talk about this one. It's it's been around the block. The large breakfast pattern produced two and a half times higher diet-induced thermogenesis. So that means more calories were burned just from the digestion. But I think more relevant to today's conversation, it also produced significantly lower hunger ratings throughout the day, especially in the evening. Ah, interesting, right? Even more interesting, I would say, is that the small breakfast pattern, right? So small breakfast, large dinner, increased appetite for sweets later in the day. So if you're someone who struggles with evening cravings, raise your hand, that's many, if not most of us, or you have late night snacking, then skimping out on your breakfast could be exacerbating this or even causing this. You know, or I don't want to say causing it, but you know, it exact it basically ramps up your cravings such that you are eating more because of it. And I think this aligns with what we know about circadian rhythms, where again, your body's more metabolically active in the morning and in the afternoon, your insulin sensitivity is higher, your nutrient partitioning favors muscle over fat storage, and kind of eating in alignment with these rhythms a bit and front loading your calories earlier in the day can possibly reduce your overall hunger, especially for those cravings later, while of course you're trying to improve your body composition. And here's here's something you're gonna find shocking for me to say. If you're thinking of intermittent fasting, many of you are doing it where you skip breakfast and potentially lunch and you kind of squeeze the window into the afternoon. What about trying early time restricted feeding where you can find your meals to an earlier window of the day, like 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.? And I know it's weird for you for a lot of people because we try to have dinners with our family and you know, maybe it doesn't work for you. Okay, fine. I mean, I think intermittent fasting in general for a lot of people is is is it's kind of forced. You're trying to force into it anyway, and it throws off like the typical meal schedule. But if you want to try it, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., I believe there's research that shows a correlation with what we just talked about, where it like lowers ghrelin, it increases the evening, that PYY hormone, where you have less hunger at the times when people struggle the most. And you may actually consume, you may, you may, again, I'm not promising this, you've got to try it for yourself. You may actually more easily consume fewer calories in that time restricted window than in a later time restricted window. Now, I'm not saying you have to eat breakfast if you generally don't want to, okay? Everyone is different. Some of you are like, I just can't eat breakfast, I just don't feel hungry. Okay, I get it, I get it. And I know if you tried it for a while, you might adapt to it anyway. What I'm saying is that if you've been struggling with evening hunger, experiment. Just try shifting more of your protein and calories to earlier meals. Have a nice big protein-rich breakfast. Maybe make your lunch the largest meal and then keep dinner lighter and then see what happens to your cravings. All right, so let's talk about some appetite control tools because I like to get tactical sometimes beyond just the general philosophy of macro and timing. There are tools that you can use to actively suppress appetite. This is these are hacks, these are gaming the system, whatever you want to call them, but they work with what we know about biology and psychology, or mainly biology in this case. The first one is water preloading. And you've probably heard this one before. It's almost too simple. It's drinking like two cups of water, which is 16 ounces, a pint of water, a big glass of water, about 15 to 30 minutes before a meal has been shown to reduce food intake at the meal. And part of that is physical volume. Part of it is that we're often mistaking our thirst for hunger. So it's one, the other, or both. So if you feel hungry, it helps to have a glass of water when it's not mealtime. And then when it's coming up to mealtime, having that glass of water beforehand, totally free, easy, hack, save at works. The second one is caffeine. Coffee is a mild appetite suppressant. Research shows about one to two cups can reduce hunger for a few hours. It's probably suppressing your ghreline. Of course, if you're not compensating with tons of calories like sugar and milk or something, cream, not that I'm, again, against any of that stuff, just you have to account for it. But black coffee with a splash of almond milk or half and a half or something like that, if you're trying to keep it light, is a good thing to try. I wouldn't be surprised. I know caffeine, I know caffeine itself is a mild appetite suppressant, but the fact that you're drinking water as well has the physical stretching effect too. All right, then there's capsaicin. This is the compound that makes chili peppers spicy. And it has a modest appetite suppressing effect as well. A study found that adding chili peppers to meals reduced the subsequent calorie intake by 25% in some participants. That was just one study that I found. Again, you can cherry pick these things easily enough, but you've probably heard this before. If you like spicy food, easy win. Adding hot sauce or cayenne pepper or fresh peppers to your meals or cooking with them, a nice spicy chili, you know, really clears up the sinuses. Great, great idea. And the last tool I want to mention is bitter compounds. And this I've researched a lot lately. It's where things get interesting because certain bitter plant extracts, especially from hops, can stimulate the gut receptors that trigger the release of satiety

Tactical Appetite Control Tools

Philip Pape 19:54

hormones. It is why I took on Callocurb as a sponsor for this series. I think it's a really cool tool. That's kind of in between totally food related and the GLP1 medications. So it's appropriate for a lot of you. There have been quite a few independent studies on this that are legitimate. They're evidence-based that show that a delayed release hops extract can reduce hunger and cravings compared to placebo. And again, you've got to just try it out for yourself. The mechanism is similar to what happens when you eat protein and fiber, but it's activated through a different pathway. And I'm not going to go into all the biology. I think we're going to do that with some of our other episodes. So the theme here is these tools work with how your body works. They're not like magic or some special drug or special supplement. They're just natural things that go along with how your body works and then can respond to those. All right. So the last section here is I want to connect back to what we really care about here, which is building and maintaining muscle while we lose fat, right? How does this all align? Everything we discussed today is not just managing hunger for its own sake, but creating conditions where you can sustain a reasonable calorie deficit long enough to see real results. That might be for you 10 pounds of fat. It might be 30, 40, 50 pounds of fat. It might be that you need to lose 100 pounds and need a series of fat loss phases and a way to control appetite to get there without losing muscle, without tanking your performance, right? Without weird side effects. When you're in a deficit, your body wants to break down that muscle for energy, it's fighting back, it's doing all the things we talked about in the last episode. And the two defenses against this that are the biggest defenses are sufficient protein and resistance training, especially the resistance training. Okay, don't think that the protein is the most important thing. If you are not resistance training, you're gonna have a problem with all of this. That has to be in there. I'd rather you be resistance training and not quite getting enough protein than being perfectly fine on protein and not resistance training for sure. I would make that trade in a heartbeat. And we've covered protein's role in society, but the consumption of protein is, of course, also helping with your muscles, right? With the amino acids you need to resist the breakdown of those muscles so that when you lose weight, you're losing mostly fat. We don't want to lose muscle, we want to lose mostly fat. The fiber and the volume strategies we discussed also help you stay in the deficit without feeling deprived. So don't discount those as well because adherence is everything, right? The best diet's the one you can stick with. You've heard it before. You can't stick to the diet that makes you miserable and hungry all the time. That is what traditional dieting is. We're not doing traditional dieting, crash diets. We're doing it more sustainably. The meal timing piece also supports your training. Notice how this is all connected. If you front load your calories, it means you have energy for your workouts. Now it depends on when you train, right? Most people or a lot of people train in the morning, some people train in the afternoon. I mean, I think it's it helps to train fed regardless. But front loading those calories, having plenty of calories throughout the day is usually helpful. Keeping dinner somewhat light can often help with your sleep quality, with your digestion, things like that. So this is a satiety-focused nutrition approach that's gonna help with all of this. All right, now before we end the episode, remember that I promised you one specific protocol that can reduce your calorie intake at your next meal by nearly 20%. I'm gonna break that down in just a second. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, CaloCurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CalloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callocurb. All right, here is that pre-meal protocol that I mentioned. Before your most challenging meal of the day, the one where you tend to overeat or where hunger is the highest. Do this about 15 to 20 minutes beforehand. Remember how we talked about drinking water beforehand can be helpful? Well, I want you to add a twist to this. I want you to drink a full glass of water with about 25 or 30 grams of protein. So for many of you, this is gonna be like a protein shake, but it could be a little bit of Greek yogurt or cottage cheese. Think of this as a little bit of a pre-meal appetizer, okay? Not salad, not bread. And the reason this works is you got the water stretching your stomach, which begins triggering the mechanical fullness. We already talked

Protecting Muscle While Losing Fat

Philip Pape 24:22

about that. Then the protein combined with that, which takes a little time to digest, it's gonna start releasing the GLP1 and the PYY almost immediately, so that by the time you sit down to eat, you've already significantly activated your satiety response. And this combination, water plus protein before a meal, can also reduce your calorie intake quite a bit. And you are, of course, you of course are adding calories with the protein, but you'll probably end up eating less total, again, unless you assuming you don't try to clean your plate, right? Because the pre-meal dose is far more satiating than what it displaces. And the bonus is it's a way to help you get to your protein goal if that's another thing that you are struggling with. This is really powerful before dinner, if that is when you tend to overeat, because dinner tends to be the biggest meal for most people as well. And this is just a good way to reduce those calories without even noticing you're doing it. I mean, just try it for a week, pick your toughest meal, do the protocol 15 minutes before, watch what happens, let me know. All right, that is a wrap for today. This was episode two of eight in our January Appetite series. So make sure you're following the show to get the next one. Until then, keep using your wits, lifting your weights, and remember you don't have to starve yourself through a diet just to lose weight. You can lose fat sustainably while managing hunger naturally. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.