A Reflection on Eating Enough

This week my group prepared a meal that exemplified the ideas of “Eating Enough: Excess and Satiety.” When deciding how to best display this topic we discussed a lot of potential alterations in external cues. This included ideas such as turning off the lights during meal time or serving all foods in a unit-less manner that would lead the individual to deciding without external cues how much food they should put on their plate and/or eat. But we decided to go the opposite route to see if we could create a highly satiating meal that met portion size guidelines that we would plate ourselves to ensure correct portions. We found our portion guidelines from WebMD, it was guidelines created by a registered dietician. Then we found a list of highly satiating foods. We found that this list was based on foods that had a high fiber and water content. So, we came up with a meal full of items on this list such as quinoa, chickpeas, and salad as the basis of this meal, as well as an oatmeal and apple crumble for dessert.

What I found most surprising about this meal was the amount of food on the plate when it was complete with the recommended portions. I had imagined that the plate would not look very full. I thought people would be concerned that there was not enough food only to find out that they were very satiated from the fibrous meal. However, this was not the case. My impression was that it looked like we had given a large portion of food to each student. It was, however, my experience that I was very full from our meal and was not even able to clear my plate. Yet, like we had hypothesized, I did keep eating popcorn prior to feeling full from my meal because I was tempted with the easy grab, salty food in front of me.

Overall, I was surprised that it was fibrous foods that were the most satiating foods because I was under the impression that the feeling of fullness mostly came from foods high in fat, specifically saturated fat. I am curious to research this more and see if possibly this is the definition of satiety and satiation. Are you able keep hunger at bay longer with highly fibrous foods and high fat foods provide more feelings of satisfaction and the hunger returns more quickly?