10 Things You Need To Know About Losing Weight – Part 6

September 18th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Part 6 – Eat Healthy Soup

The BBC program used sophisticated equipment like an ultrasound to demonstrate how eating soup can make you feel fuller for longer, giving a longer period of satisfaction between meals.

They gave two groups of Army recruits the same meal consisting of rice, vegetables, chicken and a glass of water – the difference was that they turned the meal into soup for one group.

So the meals were

A solid meal plus and glass of water
A soup blended from all the ingredients

The on-the-spot ultrasounds showed how stomach’s of the group who ate the solid meal plus the water shrank quite rapidly while the stomach’s of the group who ate the soup retained its full volume for several hours.

What are the mechanisms affecting the body? The stomach has a valve called the pyloric sphincter at the bottom end – this hold food back until ytour digestive juices and get to work. However, water easily passes through the sphincter and doesn’t contribute to stomach fullness.

Your stomach has cells which produce a hormone called ghrelin. Grehlin (only discovered in 1999) is released by specialised cells in the stomach wall. The cell produce grehlin when your stomach is empty, the grehlin travels to your brain which understands the signal as “must eat food”. When your stomach is full the production of grehlin ceases.

The soup diet extends the stomach for longer, thus reducing your hunger for a longer period – as much as one and a half hours. I suppose those diet smoothies and shakes woud also work, provided they have sufficient thickness and volume.