Many of you know of my book The Boring Diet (under a pen name) where I share my story of weight loss. The entirety of the book is basically an application of a simple principle, backed by research, that we can only lose weight without significant hunger when we eat the same boring foods all of the time, and that macros don’t matter as much as the various diet “religions” assume. Hunger, it turns out, is partially psychosomatic - i.e. it’s kind of all in your head. When you reduce the variety and desirability of the food you offer yourself, without restricting quantity explicitly, you naturally eat less.
In the book I recommended planning every single meal to target 1200-1500 calories a day (repeating the same meals, particularly breakfast, as much as possible, focusing on high protein targets) while fighting psychological hunger with “unlimited” access to four simple, healthy, low calorie, but unexciting snack options: bananas, carrots (only, no condiments), apples, and turkey breast deli meat. It turns out that if you think you’re “starving,” and these are the only options you offer your body, it will be satisfied with much less than if you offered it a pint of ice cream.
I also discuss how the processed food industry is the result of 100 years of Darwinian market competition to find the exact combinations of ingredients that can be engineered to foster literal addictions to their products. What if, however, that same food engineering prowess was applied to create food products that kill hunger, packaged more conveniently than the whole foods I recommended for hunger-killing snacks?
In April of last year, for her senior trip my daughter and I hiked the Grand Canyon. On our way back to Phoenix, we stopped at a Whole Foods in Flagstaff, Colorado to eat lunch. On my way to the back of the store to use the restroom, I noticed a product in the cereal section of the store I had never seen before, Catalina Crunch. It had an amazing macronutrient profile, chock full of fiber and protein with no added sugar, so I bought a couple of bags out of curiosity. I was surprised that it actually tasted good (but not too good, which is a win for a boring snack option), at least to me, but I was most impressed with how a handful of the stuff with some water seemed to really suppress my hunger.
The following week, on a beach vacation, my daughters took me to a Lululemon store. Now besides being rather expensive (but well made) clothes, Lululemon caters to the fitness crowd and does not engage in vanity sizing. I decided to try on a few of the men’s clothes, and a Lululemon dressing room does not lend itself to self-deception. The lights are bright and there are mirrors everywhere, and I discovered that while I was fit and not objectively overweight, there was still just a bit too much pudge for my liking around my middle. I had recently been following a fitness influencer who had challenged me: why would you want to work so hard in the gym and tolerate 5-10 pounds of extra fat around the middle? What not go all-in? I think the answer is it’s hard to stay motivated when you’re already decently fit to tolerate the hunger necessary to lose the last bit of extra weight. I decided I would do an extended experiment to see if Catalina Crunch could help me hack those last pounds without significant discomfort.
Long story short, over the next few months I lost 7 pounds and took 1” off of my waist with little effort by utilizing Catalina Crunch (CC) as both a standard breakfast and snack to suppress hunger. I have held off sharing about this to make sure it wasn’t a placebo effect, but the loss seems to have stuck and put my body at a record-low set point without hunger. Here’s what I think is going on:
CC contains an extraordinary amount of fiber, particularly chicory root which contains a type of fiber called inulin. This has three primary benefits, in that it’s filling, it cannot be processed and stored as fat by the body, and when processed by the bacteria in the gut produces a substance called butyrate which itself has many health benefits, including hunger suppression and skin health. The big downside is that this much fiber produces a lot of gas, but less over time as the body adapts. In general, the better the diet, the more the gut bacteria are being fed, and the more gas that is produced. I think this is an inevitable tradeoff.
As a result of this fiber content, the stated calories of CC are about half of what the label shows. A serving has 110 calories but 9 grams of fiber. By law, fiber must be counted as a carbohydrate with 4 calories, but as mentioned before this is not processed by the body and stored as fat, but rather by the gut bacteria. So 9*4 = 36 calories
can be immediately discounted as can much of the protein content due to the thermic effect of food*(see correction below).CC requires an extraordinary amount of chewing due to this fiber content. Chewing effort may play a role in hunger management.
The nutritive content of CC, the pea protein, high-oleic sunflower oil (yes, technically a seed oil, but with a fatty acid profile similar to monounsaturated oils like olive and avocado), and tapioca starch, is tightly bound up inside this fiber complex. The stomach and intestines may not be able to extract the stated calories, and then only slowly, moderating blood sugar spikes.
CC tastes a lot like childhood cereals. If this is part of your childhood, as so many Americans were psy-opped into believing that sugar-soaked grains are a nutritious breakfast by that Yankee cultist Dr. Kellogg (many such cases), then CC may serve both a specific and more general reconditioning purpose. Much of the pleasure we derive from junk foods is a learned association between certain tastes followed by endorphins released from the stomach when it receives the expected payoff of a quick glucose hit. By providing a familiar taste, but due to its fiber and protein content frustrating the after-meal gut response, CC may help with deconditioning this link. Since I have started using CC daily, I find myself less interested in food generally.
Since publishing The Boring Diet, I have been contacted by readers concerned with the difficulty of keeping on-hand four fresh foods that generally require refrigeration during a busy workday. Catalina Crunch offers a potential solution to this problem. Here’s how I use it to maintain a boring diet:
One of my key recommendations from the book is to standardize breakfast as a boring meal, since it’s so easy to do so. For breakfast, I have about 1 cup of CC with whole milk and 1/2 cup of blueberries or a sliced banana. I eat this every. single. morning.
For snacks, carry a bag of CC with you and eat a handful when you get hungry with lots of water. The fiber will swell and kill hunger pretty efficiently. An entire 9 oz. bag contains 800 calories, but as I mentioned I think only about 400 of these hit the bottom line, and you probably won’t need an entire bag every day (I get away with about 40% of a bag daily when I use it for breakfast and snacking purposes). The stuff just fills you up.
Otherwise, eat about 1000 calories total for lunch and dinner if you’re looking to lose weight, 1500 calories to maintain (adjusted upwards for extreme activity levels, for example distance running). If you’re hungry, just eat more CC with water, or a banana, an apple, turkey, or carrots. Nothing else.
To be clear, I only recommend the Catalina Crunch cereal (Wal-Mart carries the most popular (and my favorite) Cinnamon Toast flavor for $7 a bag, the best price I’ve seen). Avoid their snack mixes, cookies, and other more palatable foods. Their nutritional profiles are worse, they taste too good, and variety in snacking is your enemy.
I think one of the most useful aspects of the Boring Diet is that it forces one to face the actual addictive nature of overeating, no different functionally from drugs of abuse. There is no hunger necessary with the limited snacking options, so any discomfort is withdrawal from the addiction of unlimited junk food variety. It helps strip away rationalizations, and self-knowledge in this area is key to permanent change. And no, I’m not being paid by Catalina Crunch for this recommendation. I’m curious to hear if this is helpful to readers who try it, so let me know.
Happy New Year to all and I hope you have a healthy, prosperous 2023!
*Potential Correction: In this article I state that fiber calories are counted as 4 calories per gram in nutrition labels like any other carbohydrate. FDA guidance is unclear, but appears to require fiber to be counted at only 2 calories per gram. There is some mystery, due to rounding error, as to how this is counted on the Catalina Crunch label, but it does appear that the fiber is already discounted or ignored entirely in the nutrition label. My experience with the product remains unchanged, and it’s still possible the thermic effect of food or digestion effort would offset the stated calories relative to a pure energy source like sugar water.