Anyone trying to lose weight will tell you how difficult it is. In a way, it’s hard to blame people who cannot lose weight. The reason losing weight is difficult is because over the hundreds of thousands of years that we as humans have evolved our brains tell us to eat high calories food. This is because your brain still thinks we live in a cave where food is scarce. In our modern world however, the opposite is true. We live in a world of cheap, high calorie food, and our bodies have evolved to tell us to eat it!
In 1999 a bunch of scientists discovered one of the main causes for us feeling hungry – a hormone called “ghrelin”.
This hormone is released by cells in the walls of our stomach. It then travels through in our blood to the brain, where the part of the brain monitoring hunger detects it. Once detected, it tells our body that we must eat.
But, the hormone is only released when your stomach is empty (and the body knows this because the stomach wall is not stretched). If your stomach is stretched, then the hormone isn’t released, so you’re not hungry.
Pretty straightward so far isn’t it – a stretched stomach wall means you don’t feel hungry. Not too taxing…
At lunchtime, say you have a sandwich and a drink of water. This will fill your stomach up and therefore stretch the walls of the stomach, and therefore the hormone is not released, and therefore you won’t feel hungry. This will be the case for at least a couple of hours.
Something funny happens when you blend the water with the food, i.e. you make soup – you end up feeling fuller for longer. How can this be when you have consumed the same amount of food?
The reason is that if you drink the water and eat the food separately the stomach allows the water through quickly, but holds the food back so it can digest it. But, if you blend the water with the food, the whole lot is kept back, therefore keeping your stomach walls stretched further for longer, therefore no ghrelin is released and therefore your brain isn’t telling you to find food!
This is a really simply way of tricking your body into thinking it’s eaten more than it actually has. Try eating soup every lunchtime and you will help stop those afternoon cravings!
For butternut squash soup recipes click the link!