Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - The ONLY DIET HACK You Need to Meet Your Health Goals - Without Restriction (A Beginners Guide to my Revolutionary Hunger Crushing Combo™ Framework)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Foods will never all be nutritionally equal, but we can make them morally equal by seeing them for what they actually are. Just different foods with various attributes, none of which define who we are. Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, where I dismantle diet culture rules, call up the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. We are sailing through January here, which obviously we know is like the unofficial but kind of official season of Diet Culture

Starting point is 00:00:46 BS. So I'm sure you've all had your fair share of ads for bogus cleanses and skinny teas and like 15 day transformation programs sent to your feeds. But you might also be trying to make some changes to your lifestyle to meet some kind of health or wellness goal. And I love that for you. What I don't love, and you probably don't either, is dragging yourself through some extreme fringe diet for two weeks, only to end up binging at a physical and emotional

Starting point is 00:01:19 desperation. Cue the crushing guilt, the negative self-talk, the heightened food fear, and the promise that the diet starts again tomorrow. Rinse and repeat. So many of us have spent years in this cycle thinking that the next diet will be the one. But as long as you feel deprived of something you enjoy, the outcome will always be the same. You know, food is ultimately one of life's greatest pleasures.

Starting point is 00:01:49 So despite being indoctrinated by diet culture from a young age, we are all hard-wired to fight tooth and nail in the face of deprivation and scarcity. And with each kick of the can, our anxiety and longing for our quote-quote fear foods tend to mount, until yet again, the floodgates open and we're back at square one. Longtime subbies know that I strongly believe that there is no benefit to starting a diet that you're not confident you can maintain for life. Because it's not the one week sugar-free detox that will move the needle. It's the small, effortless changes that you're able to sustain long term.

Starting point is 00:02:33 So today's episode is going to be dedicated to the revolutionary framework that I've developed and trademarked that has completely reframed healthy eating for thousands of people. It's called the Hunger Crushin' Combo. And not to be dramatic, but I do think it will change the way you think about food forever. Before we get into it, a quick disclaimer that the information in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for one-on-one healthcare advice. Also, I would love if you would leave, bite back a comment or five star review,

Starting point is 00:03:11 and also make sure you ring that little bell icon so that you get notified in your app when we have a new episode come out. A ton of work goes into producing these episodes for you, and I would love to continue to do so with your support. Okay kids, let's dive in, because we have a lot of ground to cover. Today's episode is brought to you by New Theory, the company I proudly founded with a mission to revolutionize the

Starting point is 00:03:45 supplement industry. Over the past 10 years as a dietitian working in media, I've been sent thousands of questions about nutrition supplements that are promoted by wellness creators online, and I've been continually let down by poorly formulated products with no third-party testing to ensure safety and quality, no transparency of dosages, and a boatload of sensationalized non-scientific claims. I knew we could do better and according to the feedback I know we did with the launch of our 2-in-1 plant-based probiotic protein powder that's specifically designed for sensitive guts. It's dietitian formulated, woman owned,

Starting point is 00:04:25 third party tested and evidence based. And best of all, the flavor is next level delicious. And Bite Back listeners can now get 20% off of their purchase when they go to neuetheory.com and use my promo code biteback20 at checkout. That's neuetheory.com code biteback20 at checkout. That's n-e-u-e-t-h-e-o-r-y dot com and biteback20. So first of all, what is the hunger crushin combo? Or what a lot of my followers and I call the HCC for short. Basically, this is an additive gentle nutrition framework designed to serve as an evidence-based

Starting point is 00:05:13 alternative to all the rigid rules that have failed you in the past. Rather than focusing on a laundry list of what you need to remove from your diet, it shifts the focus onto what we can add. Namely, our hunger crushing compounds, fiber, protein, and healthy fats. This is really a 180 mindset shift that helps you escape the scarcity mentality that is keeping you trapped in the bingerict cycle and funnels you instead into a more sustainable mindset of abundance. Foods will never all be nutritionally equal. But we can make them morally equal by seeing them for what they actually are.

Starting point is 00:05:57 Just different foods with various attributes, none of which define who we are. The hunger-crushing combo will never tell you to swear off your favorite foods. In fact, it encourages you to work them into your diet every day. Sometimes just as is, but more often dressed up with our hunger-crushing compounds, fiber, protein, and healthy fats. Adding one hunger-crushing combo to a meal is great. Adding two or more offers even more perks. The key here is that we are adding foods to our meals and snacks that satisfy our physical and emotional needs, helping to quiet the food noise that robs us of a full life. Now before I go

Starting point is 00:06:43 too much further, I need to clarify what the hunger crush and combo is not. And that is, it is not a set of hard diet rules. In fact, if we wanna be cheeky about it, we could say that the only rule is to not make any rules. It's kind of a first rule, second rule, fight club kind of situation. And I know that not having hard rules to follow can feel really really scary if you've spent most of your adult life like memorizing points and calories and lists of good and bad food categories. But letting go of the rigidity and robotics of dieting is a really important first step

Starting point is 00:07:29 to getting back in touch with your body's true needs. So treat this as a guideline or framework, not as another rigid set of rules that your body and brain will feel desperate to break. So why are we so keen on crushing hunger? Well, diet culture often teaches us to fear our hunger, to suppress it, to ignore it, to drown it out with black coffee and gallons of water. That's not the point here. Hunger is a truly important evolutionary body sensation that is essential to helping us

Starting point is 00:08:06 meet our nutrient needs and maintain our body's healthiest, happiest weight. However, if we've been stuck treading the toxic waters of diet culture for a while, perhaps restricting our food intake for many years, we have likely desensitized and dulled down our hunger and fullness cues. Deprivation also results in emotional hunger as well, that longing for something that you don't or cannot have. And as you probably know by now from your own past experience, incessant physical and emotional hunger is a massive mental burden. It takes up space, time, and energy in our lives that we could be investing in other responsibilities or things we enjoy and important acts of self-care. no one has time to make themselves a quote-unquote healthy meal or snack only to be hit with hunger

Starting point is 00:09:06 an hour later or to continue to think about the food that you wanted to eat but didn't allow yourself to. So the goal of the hunger crush and combo is not to never feel hunger ever again. We actually want to reclaim and retrain that incredibly important biofeedback tool. The goal is to help you respect your hunger and fullness cues in a predictable, compassionate, and flexible way that fits your beautiful full life. So a quick little introduction to our hunger crushing compounds protein, fiber, and healthy fats. Protein foods would include things like eggs, chicken, tofu, beans, soy, dairy, etc. Fiber rich foods would include things like whole grains, vegetables, and fruits.

Starting point is 00:09:56 And healthy fats would include avocado, nuts, seeds, salmon, and whole food dairy. The hunger crushing compounds are similar but slightly different categories to the three main macronutrients we consume in food, protein, carbs, and fat. The main difference here though is that carbohydrates can come somewhat dressed in fiber or in some cases even protein or fat, or they can come stripped of those hunger crushing compounds in a more refined form. So for example, compare a whole apple versus apple cider. Where the former would be considered a good source of fiber, the cider would be stripped

Starting point is 00:10:42 of its hunger crushing compounds to be left with those simple sugars. We call these foods naked carbs. And they generally include foods like pastries, white bread, sugary cereal, soda, cakes and white pasta, aka all of the most common quote-unquote bad foods on the diet no-no lists. The hunger crushing combo doesn't say you can never have white bread again, but rather it encourages you to dress up those naked carbs with hunger crushing compounds to satisfy both your emotional and your physical hunger without deprivation. And it's this additive approach and nourishing mindset

Starting point is 00:11:28 that is the key to sustainable changes. Now let's talk about some of the major benefits of the HCC. Number one, satiety. So this is the most obvious benefit of the hunger-crushing combo because each of the compounds, fiber, protein, and healthy fats, offer unique satiety perks through a few different mechanisms. For one, they all digest slower than naked carbs, which then stimulates the vagus nerve to send a message to your brain that you're full. They also increase our satiety hormones like GLP-1, leptin, cholecystokinin, and peptide

Starting point is 00:12:07 YY, and they reduce our hunger hormone, ghrelin. Protein is particularly powerful in this arena, as it's also been shown to help downregulate specific regions in the brain associated with food rewards and cravings for less nutritious foods like naked carbs. Now obviously feeling full between meals is advantageous for everyone because as I mentioned earlier most of us are just like too busy in our lives to be making trips to the lunchroom every single two hours for pick-me-ups, but this can be particularly beneficial for

Starting point is 00:12:46 folks with weight management goals. Compared with naked carbs, hunger-crushing compounds, particularly fiber and protein, offer the best satiety bang for their caloric buck. So for example, you are going to feel fuller much longer after you eat a slice of whole grain toast with avocado and eggs than you would after you ate a slice of white bread with jam. And for all you calorie counters doing the math here, thinking, well, the avocado toast maybe has more calories.

Starting point is 00:13:20 Like, won't I actually gain weight? Not so fast. While the former meal will likely get you through until lunch, the latter will have you chasing hunger with multiple rounds of naked carb snacks, all of which could add excess calories to your day. You can also apply this framework to a meal with both hunger crushing compounds and naked carbs. So if you are craving ice cream for example, you might find that you need at least two or three servings to fill that bowl and feel satisfied. But if you fill that bowl first

Starting point is 00:13:59 with fresh berries and like a sprinkle of nuts, it might help to edge out some of the naked carbs and help you feel satisfied and satiated with maybe one serving of ice cream without the deprivation or denial. And this all relates to benefit number two, blood sugar control. For my friends with type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance, this can often go hand in hand with the satiety perks since insulin sensitivity and body fat, specifically belly or visceral fat, are actually bi-directionally related. In other words, excess visceral fat

Starting point is 00:14:42 can increase the risk of insulin resistance, but insulin resistance can also increase visceral fat. So a lot of the satiety benefits of the HCC actually do double duty for blood sugar control. But even if we aren't even talking about weight loss or weight management, protein, fiber and fats can help to stabilize our blood sugars by slowing down the digestion of naked carbs and their uptake into the blood. And we have tons of evidence of each of the HCC's

Starting point is 00:15:17 unique superpowers for blood sugar control. So for example, one 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis found that consuming a protein shake as a quote-unquote appetizer before carbohydrate-containing meals significantly reduced the spike in blood sugar in a dose-dependent fashion. The more protein in the shake, the more profound the glucose lowering effects. Protein also helps to support muscle growth, and the more muscle mass we have, the more cells we have to soak up the sugar in our blood, which then helps to reduce our blood sugar levels.

Starting point is 00:15:58 Likewise fiber, especially soluble fiber, which we find in foods like oats, barley, apples and legumes, forms a slow moving gel in the gut which coats the intestinal lining, creating a pseudo shield to slow down how quickly sugars can be absorbed. Fats are even more slow moving, taking around 6-8 hours or longer to digest depending on how much was in the meal. And that explains why one study found that adding 23 grams of fat to 50 grams of white bread naked carbs reduced the blood sugar response by 29%. The third benefit of my Hunger Crush and Combo framework is that it provides a full nutrition package with a very simple framework.

Starting point is 00:17:02 You know, nutrition can be truly overwhelming. And most of us do not have the time or energy to think about meeting our macro needs, never mind every single one of our micronutrient goals. Thankfully, when we look at the types of foods that are rich in fiber, protein and healthy fats, we find a bounty of important micronutrients and antioxidants that help us live our lives to the fullest. We call this the whole food matrix and it is a huge part of the benefits package of starting to focus on building hunger, crush and combos. So for example, in addition to satiety and blood sugar control, protein is key to helping support immunity, metabolism, tissue repair, and so much more. And protein-rich foods often come packaged with iron, calcium, zinc, and B vitamins, and so much more.

Starting point is 00:17:59 Then there's fiber. Fiber is integral for helping digestion and regularity, reducing the risk of certain cancers, lowering cholesterol, and helping to support a healthy gut microbiome. Fiber is also exclusively found in plant foods. And despite what the carnivore dieters will suggest, the research is undeniable that eating more plants helps to improve our health and reduce our risk of disease. And again, this is because of the whole food matrix of fiber and a ton of antioxidants like vitamin C, E, carotenoids, polyphenols, and flavonoids, just to name a few. And then there's healthy fats, which refer largely to polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated

Starting point is 00:18:50 fats, plus some of the unique fatty acids found in whole food dairy. Different fats offer our body different important benefits. So foods rich in omega-3 fats, for example, like fatty fish, flax, hemp seeds, and walnuts help to support heart and brain function and help to reduce inflammation in the body. Likewise, monounsaturated fats found in nuts and avocado may help to contribute to cognitive function and improve insulin sensitivity. Fat rich foods also tend to contribute key antioxidants in nutrients like selenium, magnesium, vitamin D, E and A and are essential to

Starting point is 00:19:32 enhancing the absorption of the fat soluble vitamins from the rest of our meal. And finally and perhaps most importantly the hunger crushing combo helps you heal your relationship with food for good. the hunger crushing combo helps you heal your relationship with food for good. My hunger crushing combo puts all foods on a level playing field. Nothing is off limits, so there's no feeling of deprivation or denial. And it does this by, quite literally, placing seemingly antagonistic foods on the same plate. A diet culture quote-quote fear food and a quote-quote health food can coexist in the exact same meal.

Starting point is 00:20:13 So for example, cake could be served with berries and a dollop of Greek yogurt. M&Ms could be mixed with popcorn and nuts. Or an Oreo cookie could be added to a girl dinner snack plate of celery sticks, hummus, turkey breast, and cheese. When previously restricted foods are no longer off limits, they get knocked off their pedestal, robbed of their moral status, and become just another food. Our diet becomes the least interesting thing about us and we stop letting food distract us from all of the amazing things life has to offer. Fueling our body becomes intuitive because it's grounded in self-care and what ultimately feels good to our body and soul. And man, it is truly freeing. So let's quickly

Starting point is 00:21:01 put this into practice and close off with some of my favorite hunger crushing combos. Why don't we start with a meal staple, white rice. I will take white rice over quinoa any day of the week. And I don't care if that's a really non-dietitian thing to say. But we could dress up our white rice with some tofu for protein, stir-fried broccoli for fiber, and a peanut sauce for some healthy fats.

Starting point is 00:21:29 And now you've got a solid meal that keeps you full for hours. What about white bread toast? Because sometimes you just do not feel like the really dense whole grain stuff. Let's dress that up with some whipped cottage cheese for protein, sliced strawberries for fiber, and a sprinkle of almonds for healthy fats. Super satiating breakfast and really really delish. Oh what about boxed

Starting point is 00:21:57 mac and cheese? This is actually one of my favorite hacks. I always add in a cup of cottage cheese when making the sauce for protein, a few cups of steamed veggies for fiber, and a handful of sharp cheddar for healthy fats. It is honestly a big upgrade in flavor too, so really, everybody wins here. And why don't we try it with a snack? Like chips. If you feel like it's impossible to eat just one, like the saying says, but you're finding yourself still hungry an hour

Starting point is 00:22:30 after you finish like a whole tub or bag, make those chips into a snack plate with a Greek yogurt-based French onion dip for protein, veggie sticks for fiber, and some olives for healthy fats. So fun. And let's round things off with an actual dessert. Let's say you've still got Halloween chocolate kicking around like I do and you are craving a mini Snickers bar. Make it a meal by cooking

Starting point is 00:22:55 some oats and soy milk for fiber and protein respectively, swirling in a spoonful of peanut butter for healthy fats, and topping it off with a chopped up Snickers bar. Honestly, you will never want to eat oatmeal any other way again. The hunger crushing combo is ultimately a framework that can be adapted to suit everyone's health desires, whether you want to manage your blood sugar, run faster, lose weight, gain weight, or just stop obsessing over food.

Starting point is 00:23:25 That said, I want to reiterate that it should not be approached like another diet that you can fail at because you quote-unquote didn't do it right. Not every meal or snack needs to be a perfect hunger-crushing combo package with fiber and protein and healthy fats. Not every meal or snack will have any hunger crushing compounds at all. Sometimes you will just want to have the fresh bakery croissant on its own. Sometimes you will just want a handful of pretzels. Sometimes you will just order the buttered pasta without any vegetables or protein in

Starting point is 00:24:02 sight. Eating carbs in their birthday suit because it's what you really want and crave at that moment is all part of normal, healthy eating. Remember, this is a framework, not a diet. And it might seem like just a word, but you've really got to embrace that nuanced distinction to make this work for you. Your homework for this week is to make one meal with the hunger crush and combo in mind. Let it be something simple where you can easily identify the components.

Starting point is 00:24:32 So maybe it's like a stir fry, or like a salad, or even just like a little snack plate. But I want you to experience the ease of the process and also take note on how you feel after building a hunger-crushing combo. Do you feel more energized? Are you thinking less about food? Do you have better concentration at work? How's your digestion?

Starting point is 00:24:56 Taking note of these benefits and the ease at which they're obtained can help to reinforce your body's trust in food until eating balanced meals becomes so intuitive is just what you inherently want to do. If you're new to the hunger-crushing combo, I hope this was as helpful for you as it has been for so many others who've been working the framework for the past several years. I have a lot of specific content on my YouTube channel

Starting point is 00:25:23 about the hunger-crushing combo, plus some fun examples of how to turn people's fear foods into balanced meals. So I'm going to be leaving a link to that in the show notes. Now before I sign off, just a quick little reminder that I would love if you would write me a comment and give Bite Back a five star review. It would really, really make my day and it also helps us out a lot. Signing off with Science and Sass, I'm Abby Sharp. Thanks for listening.

Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - The ONLY DIET HACK You Need to Meet Your Health Goals - Without Restriction (A Beginners Guide to my Revolutionary Hunger Crushing Combo™ Framework)

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