Ben Greenfield shares five simple appetite suppressors: pickles, water, broths, leafy greens that expand in your stomach, and high-water fruits like apples. He warns that commercial pickles and coconut water often hide added sugars.
Questions this video answers
May 6, 2011
About 25–50 calories for a few big pickles
About 60 calories
About 240 calories per can (the alternative they found while camping)
Roughly 800–1,000 calories for a couple handfuls of walnuts
Chapters
Hey, it's Ben Greenfield, and I've talked to you before about how to reduce appetite cravings with pills and capsules and herbs and supplements, stuff like chromium and vanadium and bitter orange extract. But what if you don't want to use any of those things and you just want to reduce appetite cravings or suppress the appetite with common stuff that you have around your house? Now, it's night here at the Greenfield house, and I'm lazing around, getting some work done. I wanted to show you the type of things I could find in my cupboard so that would help me reduce my appetite cravings if I'm wanting to eat a bunch of food. So let's go ahead and look through this stuff. Number one, this is kind of an interesting one that you don't hear about a lot is pickles. Now, if you look at pickles at the grocery store, a lot of them have sugar added to them and a ton of different preservatives. We actually made these pickles at home. But if you get pickles at a natural food store and you turn around, you look at the label, just look for things like sucrose and high fructose corn syrup or added sugar, and you really don't want those in your pickles. But eating a few pickles, super low calories, you're getting like, maybe 25 to 50 calories in a few big pickles, and they really suppress your appetite cravings. A little bit of the salt in the pickle helps you taste a little bit or helps you crave foods a little bit less as well. Okay, the next thing I want to go over is water. There's a lot of different ways that you can do water. One thing I've showed to you before, if you've watched videos of Ben Greenfield Fitness is something like a SodaStream. This company doesn't pay me any money or anything like that. I just happen to have one. Somebody got it for me for my birthday. But what you can do is fill up water in a bottle, inject gas into it, and it really makes your stomach feel a lot more full. There are other ways you can go, though, with water. Mint is an herb I've talked about before that can help reduce appetite cravings. And in here somewhere, I have mint water. Aha. Here it is. Okay, so this stuff, this is spearmint water. You can get this at just about any grocery store. This stuff's made by Metro mint. But mint water, if you don't like bubbly water, kind of combines two appetite suppressants. Water and mint. So it's kind of cool. And they have a bunch of different flavors like chocolate, mint, and peppermint and spearmint. The other type of water does have calories. This is a Vita Cocoa coconut water. But it's not a ton of calories compared to a lot of other things you could be snacking on or filling your stomach up with. Vita Cocoa has. I think it's 60. Yeah, 60 calories in Vita Cocoa. When you get coconut water, turn it around. Look at the label. Look for added sugars, added sweeteners. My wife and I were recently camping, and we came across some coconut water. We were sitting around drinking the water. We're like, this tastes a lot different than Vita Cocoa. We turned it around and looked at the back, and it was 240 calories in one can of the stuff, whereas this is 60. So be careful when you pick out your coconut water. But it's an option as well to reduce your appetite cravings. So water is the second thing. Okay. The next thing is going to be some type of broth, chicken broth, vegetable broth. Miso works pretty well, too. It's a fermented form of soy. It's pretty healthy, unlike some other forms of soy. Not a ton of phytoestrogens in miso compared to some other forms of soy, like toys, tofu, or soy milk. So with miso, you can literally put a couple teaspoons of this into a pot of water. It's salty, like the pickles, so it suppresses the appetite a little bit. And if you really want to dress it up, which I would recommend, you can toss something like mushrooms in there. That's a perfect addition to miso soup. Now, it doesn't sound like a big, fancy soup, but miso soup with mushrooms is something that you can snack on, you can have around, and you get a little bit of texture from the mushrooms, very low calories, and this stuff will fill you up. Okay? Speaking of mushrooms and miso soup, if you wanted to, you could add vegetables to that type of soup, or you could do vegetables by themselves. Now, dark, leafy greens specifically tend to expand in the stomach. But unlike oatmeal, which also expands in the stomach, they're very low in calories. And so you could do bok choy. This is spinach. You could do kale. You could do Swiss chard, a bunch of different ways that you could go. But you can eat it raw with vinaigrette, which, again, is very, very low in calories. You can go with a vinaigrette something like that's actually olive oil, not vinaigrette. We have a big thing of balsamic vinaigrette here. I could easily make myself a big bed of spinach. I could throw some vinaigrette on it and that would be a quick appetite suppressing snack. We're not talking about enjoying your food a bunch, but this is something that would be like an emergency food snack. If you want to, you could steam a bunch of different kind of vegetables. And we also have a Bragg's amino acid. This would be another option as well. So the last thing that I go over, number five would be these right here. Sharp intake of breath. For those of you who think that fructose is made by the devil. But for people who are sitting around snacking, a lot of times what you'll get is somebody will grab for what they consider to be a healthy appetite satiating snack. Something like nuts. Now, I have nothing against walnuts, but if you were to grab a couple handfuls of walnuts, you're easily going to get up to 800 to 1,000 calories of fat. Granted, healthy fat, but it's fat. I dare you to try to eat 800 to 1,000 calories of apple. You will literally just feel like you're ready to explode. One apple can really reduce appetite cravings. Suppress the appetite. The sugar in the apple will add up a little bit, but if it's keeping you from snacking on a bag of potato chips or three handfuls of nuts, then you're still going to get fewer calories and that's a significant part of the weight loss or appetite suppressing equation. So apples are a really great source in terms of fiber, pectin, big time water content. Grapefruit is another example of a type of fruit that can fill you up quite a bit. Bananas, not quite so good. Any fruit that's high water content though, like an apple, is better at filling you up. Okay, so those are just five examples of things that you can use. You can go with the pickles, you can go with some type of water. You can go with like a miso soup, vegetable broth, chicken broth. You can use.
The apple that I talked about or you can use greens, like a dark leafy green, like a spinach or a bok choy or a Swiss chard. If you have other things that you found that really help you to reduce appetite cravings, go to banggreetfieldfitness.com where you might be watching this video and leave a comment. In this video 5 Ways to Suppress appetite cravings without actually taking pills and capsules. And let me know what you use. And also let me know if you have questions about this video. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield from Is it Written on my Butt? It is Ben Greenfield Fitness.
