Bland Diets are Better for Weight Loss

Research has shown Bland Diets are Better for Weight Loss. One of the most difficult transitions for people wanting to lose weight is the move to foods without all the addictive ingredients.

Big food knows we love sugar, salt, fat. and starches. They are in packaged products, in fast food, and in restaurants. These ingredients/flavors turn on the brain and inspire it to think we are getting the calories we need to survive. The more calories the better. These flavors turn on the brain’s dopamine receptors and make the susceptible addicted.

The brain lets us over eat when getting so satiated on these exciting flavors. We don’t experience them in the wild. In the wild, we have to hunt for meat and vegetation to get the calories adequate to offset the calories burned to find them. That’s why people in the wild are lean.

The brain can’t believe that in modern times, calories are convenient and plentiful. It is still stuck in the early times of life 3 billion years ago where calories were difficult and without enough calories, species did not reproduce. This is Nature’s primary objective.

Moving to the Bland Diet

Studies show in both rats and humans that a bland diet does not excite the brain and we tend to not over eat. In his book The Hungry Brain, Stephen J. Guyenet Ph.D found that liptins tell our amygdala that we have had enough food and can stop eating. They can help the brain reset the lipostat to lower levels of consumption for satiety.

The opposite happens when we eat the variety and exciting flavors of fattening foods. The leptin cannot keep up nor produce enough to offset the brain’s excitement about the calories and it resets our lipostat to a higher level of calories needed for satiety. This, of course, creates unstoppable weight gain as the brain feels we are starving if we don’t hit this satiety point.

Then when we are hungry, our body does not want healthy food. It wants calorie dense exciting flavors and variety. This is why when faced with buffets, holiday dinners, and parties, we cannot fight the desire to over consume. The brain urges us on.

When rats and humans are given the only choice of eating bland food but getting sufficient calories, they consume less. The leptins do their work and lower the lipostat to make us think we need less calories to feel satiety. With more moderate consumption of less variety, it much easier to lose weight. The brain is not feeding us messages we are starving.

Most meal plans do not offer a bland diet. They try to offer lots of variety so that we don’t think we are going to suffer in the process of losing weight. If we consume fewer calories than we burn we will lose weight. The advantage of bland foods is that soon we lose our cravings and can eat less comfortably.

Diets have to be long term. The metabolism and amygdala are set to turn the hunger machine back on once we hit our target weight and resume our normal consumption. We need to find a plan that lasts a long time. A lifetime.

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