There has been a lot of chatter about satiety lately in low-carb and keto circles.
This article uses a low-carb example to show what happens to carbs, protein, and fat when optimising a low-carb diet for greater satiety. It also includes a worked example of what this looks like in Cronometer.
As you’ll see, increasing your satiety score doesn’t mean you go hog wild on refined carbs. Eating for greater satiety is a slight shift in focus from the traditional low-carb theme to ensure we address the root cause of insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and metabolic dysfunction—energy toxicity.
Higher satiety eating leads to:
- reduced hunger,
- sustainable weight loss,
- greater insulin sensitivity,
- better glucose control, and
- improved metabolic health.
A little tracking in Cronometer to fine-tune your macronutrient intake can significantly enhance satiety and support weight loss. This article will show you how we increase satiety for someone on a lower-carb diet in our Macros Masterclass.
- Progressive Overload, Tiny Habits and Lasting Improvements
- How to Use Cronometer to Optimise Your Macros for Satiety
- Why We Hate Tracking Our Food
- Baseline Macros
- The Perfect Day Report
- Higher Satiety Macros
- Optimised Food Lists
- Updating Target Macros in Cronometer
- Ongoing Macro Refinements
- What Else Can I Eat?
- Conclusion
Progressive Overload, Tiny Habits and Lasting Improvements
Our programs are about progressive overload and building tiny habits that lead to lasting change.
There’s no point in giving you a prepared meal plan if it radically differs from how you currently eat. Even if you follow the healthiest meal plan in the world for a couple of weeks, you’ll likely revert to your old habits once the ‘diet’ is over.
Instead, we’d much rather show you how to tweak your foods and meals for greater satiety so you can achieve fat loss without constantly fighting hunger.
How to Use Cronometer to Optimise Your Macros for Satiety
Higher satiety foods help us feel fuller for longer. By tracking your macros for a few weeks in Cronometer, you can ensure you’re getting the right balance of nutrients to help manage your hunger and achieve your dietary goals. In the first week of our Macros Masterclass, Optimisers track how they normally eat in Cronometer.
Cronometer is an excellent tracking tool, particularly if you’re interested in managing your micronutrients, which is critical to our data-driven satiety algorithm. Understanding how to set up your macros for greater satiety to align with your weight loss goals in Cronometer can be a game changer. Once you get the nutrients your body craves from your food, your inner hunger monster calms down, and everything falls into place.
The downside of Cronometer is that it doesn’t tell you what to do with all that data. We created our Macros Masterclass and Micros Masterclass to help fill that void, guiding Optimisers through progressively dialling in their macros and micros to align with their goals.
Why We Hate Tracking Our Food
Does anyone else find it crazy that so many people want to be biohackers and measure everything, like sleep, HRV, ketones and glucose, every moment of the day? Ironically, very few people want to track their food to get the insights they need to improve their diet.
The hate for food tracking is likely because most people track their food to stay under some arbitrary calorie limit. This overly simplistic approach usually fails because our hunger and appetite always win unless we change what we eat.
But what if we could use a little tracking to fine-tune what we eat to ensure we nourish our bodies so they’re satisfied without overeating? Most people don’t want to track what they eat forever, but a few weeks can be invaluable for fine-tuning our dietary choices to align with our goals.
Tracking for a few weeks to fine tune your dietary habits is like learning to ride a bike with training wheels. Once you get the hang of it, you can remove the tracking.
Baseline Macros
Tracking makes us more mindful of what we put in our mouths. It works as a pattern interrupt that stops us from mindlessly snacking.
Interestingly, most people lose weight in their first week of tracking because they’re more mindful of their eating.
The Perfect Day Report
After a week of tracking how Optimisers normally eat, we then extract the data to run their Perfect Day report.
Over the past few months, I’ve run four hundred of these reports for our Optimisers participating in the Macros Masterclass. Every report is unique, but let’s look at Trisha’s, which is the last one I created.
The table below shows Trisha’s average macros during the first week, with a satiety score of 31%.
macros | grams | % | calories |
protein | 119 | 29% | 477 |
fat | 92 | 50% | 831 |
net carb | 80 | 19% | 319 |
fibre | 11 | 1% | 23 |
total carb | 91 | 21% | 341 |
energy (cals) | 100% | 1651 |
Trisha’s current macros are pretty much ideal for healthy low-carb maintenance. Our bodies do an excellent job of seeking the right amount of protein and energy to support our weight and muscle mass. We only need to tweak our food and meal choices a little to increase satiety.
Higher Satiety Macros
Sadly, most weight loss programs calculate theoretical macros and slash 30% from that.
But when optimising for satiety, we don’t need to be aggressive and force unsustainable restriction. We leave the heavy lifting to the satiety algorithm, which optimises their current foods to create their perfect day to achieve greater satiety.
If Optimisers are not yet losing weight, we apply a gentle 10% energy deficit below their baseline macros.
The table below shows Trish’s new macros for week 2:
- more protein (119 g ->145 g per day),
- a little less fat (50% -> 35%),
- a little more fibre (11 g -> 15 g), and
- about the same amount of net carbs (80 -> 82 g).
macros | grams | % | calories |
protein | 145 | 39% | 578 |
fat | 58 | 35% | 525 |
net carb | 82 | 22% | 327 |
fibre | 15 | 2% | 31 |
total carb | 97 | 24% | 358 |
energy (cals) | 100% | 1486 |
This shift in macros increases Trisha’s satiety score from 31 to 63%.
The chart below shows how Trish’s protein and fat move slightly down the chart. Trisha’s carbs are already low, so we substitute some of her dietary fat for protein with a modest energy deficit to target fat loss from her body instead of her diet.
After five years of running the Macros Masterclass, we’ve learned that it’s critical not to try to change everything overnight. We don’t want to jump from one extreme to another.
It’s the people who try to go from zero to hero overnight that flame out in a week or two and end up feeling like they failed again. We only need to make enough change to see a consistent weekly weight loss between 0.5 and 1.0%.
Optimised Food Lists
Effective meal planning can streamline your dietary goals. Using Cronometer, you can plan meals that meet your macronutrient and caloric needs. Meal planning helps prevent last-minute unhealthy choices and keeps you on track for weight loss and improved satiety.
Our goal with the Perfect Day report in the Macros Masterclass was to shortcut the process of trial and error in their meal planning. Working out what to increase and decrease can be a fun challenge for some but a time-consuming and frustrating game of Jenga for others.
The biggest challenge for most of our Optimisers is usually getting the required protein without excess fat, particularly for those from a low-carb or keto background. Many people are surprised to see how much fat they’re eating.
So, we automated the process. We wanted to show people exactly what they could eat to maximise satiety.
To calculate Trisha’s suggested macros, the satiety algorithm runs hundreds of iterations and shuffles all the foods she ate during her baseline week—increasing some, decreasing others, and leaving many off the list—until we get a perfect balance that maximises satiety.
The table shows the remaining foods, with the precise amounts needed to maximise satiety and fit her new macros.
Food | energy (cal) | energy (%) | change (%) |
Beef Sirloin | 225 | 15.1% | 125% |
Protein Powder | 244 | 16.4% | 125% |
Ground Beef | 150 | 10.1% | 83% |
Baked Potato, Skin Eaten | 144 | 9.7% | 106% |
Chicken Nuggets | 118 | 7.9% | 71% |
Whole Raw Milk | 99 | 6.7% | 66% |
Grass Fed Beef Snack Sticks | 76 | 5.1% | 76% |
Aged Cheddar | 69 | 4.6% | 56% |
Beets | 68 | 4.6% | 117% |
Yellow Potato | 65 | 4.4% | 65% |
Shredded Beef | 63 | 4.2% | 63% |
Dark Chocolate Almonds | 44 | 3.0% | 59% |
Hass Avocado | 37 | 2.5% | 65% |
Cucumber | 25 | 1.7% | 111% |
Onion | 24 | 1.6% | 102% |
Lettuce | 23 | 1.5% | 114% |
Asparagus | 13 | 0.9% | 111% |
Notice in the right-hand column that the algorithm highlighted foods that Trisha should eat more of to increase satiety (with a change greater than 100%):
- sirloin steak
- protein powder,
- beets,
- cucumber,
- onion,
- lettuce,
- potato, and
- asparagus.
These foods have a higher concentration of nutrients that align with greater satiety. They are the most valuable players in her unique satiety solution, her hunger-fighting champions.
Focusing on nutrient density is crucial when adjusting your low-carb macros. Prioritizing foods rich in vitamins and minerals can enhance overall health and satiety. Nutrient-dense foods help ensure you get essential nutrients without excessive calories.
Meanwhile, Trisha could use the other foods shown in her Perfect Day to fill her remaining energy requirements, possibly in smaller portions. Most people won’t eat precisely these foods in these quantities. However, the analysis gives a template to show how they could optimise their eating to increase satiety.
Rather than restriction, the focus is on eating more foods to drive greater satiety. This shift from restriction to nourishing our bodies is subtle but profound, leading to a much better mindset and long-term results.
To learn more, check out Trisha’s Perfect Day Report here.
Updating Target Macros in Cronometer
With higher satiety macronutrient targets established in their report, Optimisers can now enter these in Cronometer.
We often suggest that Optimisers enter their energy budget and protein target, leaving the carbs and fat fields blank (as shown in the example below). It’s hard to overconsume refined carbs or fat if you hit your protein target while staying under your energy budget.
For the remainder of the Macros Masterclass, Optimisers play the game of keeping their green protein bar longer than their (grey) energy bar.
When they do this, Optimisers usually find they’re so full and satisfied that they easily stay within their energy budget and lose weight without the unbearable hunger that usually results from simply restricting calories.
Ongoing Macro Refinements
In the following weeks, Nutrient Optimiser makes any necessary adjustments to Optimisers’ target macros to ensure they continue to make sustainable progress.
- Their energy budget will increase if they lose more than 1.0% per week.
- But if they’re not losing 0.5% per week and staying under their calorie target, their energy budget for the next week will decrease by 50 calories to ensure they continue to lose at a sustainable rate.
What Else Can I Eat?
Gamified personalised nutrition is an ongoing adventure of learning new ways to nourish your body and give it precisely what it craves. The best place to start is with the foods you already know and love. But we also encourage Optimisers to explore the satiety vs. nutrient density landscape and audition some new foods to add to their repertoire.
The Perfect Day report includes links to 100+ NutriBooster recipes that precisely fill Optimisers’ current nutrient gaps.
But they can also explore our recipe database to find new recipes that nourish them and provide greater satiety. All of these recipes are pre-entered in Cronometer to minimise the time and hassle of tracking.
Conclusion
- Optimizing your diet for greater satiety with Cronometer in the Macros Masterclass can be a game-changer for weight loss.
- By focusing on whole foods that keep you fuller for longer, you can ditch the deprivation mindset and achieve sustainable weight loss without sacrificing taste or satisfaction.
- With a little data-driven personalisation and a focus on nourishing your body, you can finally develop a healthy relationship with food that supports your weight loss goals.