episode 191: my number one tip to stop feeling hungry between meals
This week, I’m keeping it real and sharing a bit about the challenges of showing up, even on those days when everything feels overwhelming. We all have those moments when life gets heavy, and it’s hard to stay on track with our goals. So, I’m here to let you know—you’re not alone in that struggle.
In episode 191 of The Diet Diaries, I’m focusing on something simple and tactical: eating for volume. This isn’t about quick fixes or magic solutions, but about building a skill that helps you feel full, nourished, and aligned with your body’s needs.
What you’ll hear:
Why eating a massive plate of pasta might not leave you feeling as good as you’d hope.
How to fill your plate with foods that keep you full without making you feel stuffed
The secret to bumping up your fiber intake without obsessing over numbers.
What to do when eating out and trying to incorporate veggies with your favorite fries.
This episode is packed with practical tips on how to use vegetables to help you feel satisfied and energized, without the sluggishness that can come from overeating more calorie-dense foods. We’ll talk about the benefits of fiber, the importance of portion sizes, and how to make sure your meals are working for you—not against you.
Reminder! If you’ve been considering one-on-one coaching, I’m opening up five spots this fall. Joining the interest list will give you first access to book a consult and $50 discount off the monthly rate. No obligations, this just gives you options.
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191
[00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome back to diet diaries. Um, real talk because I just always try and keep it real. I know I say that a lot. Uh, and because I have no poker face and wear my heart on my sleeve as I'm recording this on Monday, August 12th, I'm having a rough day. Um, Nothing like major, nothing bad is happening, right?
This is kind of what I think anxiety and overwhelm is like when things are going on in life and suddenly it just feels like, Oh shit, like how am I going to make all this happen? And that's kind of how I'm feeling right now. It's weird coming off of three and a half weeks of Ben being at sleepaway camp and he got home yesterday.
So now he's home and school doesn't start for three and a half weeks and we have, almost no plans during the day. He's going to a half day basketball camp. So it's like a lot, a lot of like all of a sudden like he was totally gone and now he's totally back. It's totally like [00:01:00] there was like an all or nothing thing happening with that.
Um, And there's a lot of other like life things going on. Um, and so I'm like, Oh my God, I really need to record. I'm sharing all this to get to the point of this, which is I needed to record a podcast today and I have a bunch of ideas. So that was good. Like I have a bunch of like a list of stuff that I want to record over the next like few weeks and months.
But I'm like, Oh my God, can I actually sit down and do this? Can I sit down and get my head focused enough to do this? And I'm like, you know what? I just need to do it. I'm going to do the best I can. I'm going to talk about something simple, not something that's like super heady and complicated. Something really kind of tactical and external.
I'm not going to talk about body image stuff. I'm not going to talk about mindset stuff. I'm going to talk about something really structured that's food related because it's easy for my brain to process. I think it will be easy for your brain to process. So it's a win win for everyone. Um, so this podcast is really important to me.
to show up [00:02:00] and to share and to connect even though sometimes it feels like very one sided because I'm just talking and people are listening. I don't necessarily know when you're listening or who exactly is listening except for like data that I get.
But it's not really an option for me, at least not right now. I'm never gonna say never. To be like, you know what, I'm just not in the mood to do this today, or I just can't. Like, this is a priority for me, and it's in alignment with my values to show up and do this. And it may not be perfect, and it may not be the best episode, and I may be rambling, and you might be like, eh, I don't really get that much out of that episode.
Like, that's life, but I'm here showing up, and for me, that's as much for me as it is for you to really walk the talk with what consistency is. It's not about perfection. It's not about being perfect. Not every episode that I do is going to be amazing. Not every episode is going to be perfect. Not every episode is going to be maybe super helpful as some of the others.
But I'm hoping in the ways that it lacks in helpfulness, maybe in like the specificity of the topic and the content, it makes up for [00:03:00] it in like me showing up and talking about this as like a little preamble, right? And talking about what consistency looks like and where my head is at and how hard it is sometimes to show up.
It's not convenient. It's not easy. It's fucking uncomfortable today. I will tell you that. Um, and I'm doing it. Ends. I hope that whatever this episode, again, might lack in, um, helpful content, even though I think it will be helpful, it will connect with you and let you know that you're not alone on those days and those weeks where you're like, I don't know how I'm going to get this done.
I don't know how I'm going to keep going. How am I going to make choices around food? How am I going to exercise? How am I going to go to sleep? How am I going to get this all done? How am I going to grocery shop and meal prep and cook for my kids and do all the stuff that we have to do? Wow, it's a lot.
So I always find comfort in knowing that I'm not alone. So here I am sharing the things that I am struggling with in this moment with you. And now I will talk about what I want to talk about, which is eating for volume. [00:04:00] Um, and I wanted to talk about this. I was like, wow, I've never done an episode on this.
Um, eating for volume is something that is always important, that is sometimes more important than what you are thinking about fat loss. That being said, We're not doing it for fat loss, we're doing it as an eating skill. So here, let me just talk about eating for volume. Eating for volume is identifying what foods you can eat in large quantities to help you feel full that do not give you more energy or more nutrition or more calories, basically, energy and calories are the same thing, than your body actually needs, right?
Because here's, for instance, you can eat pasta for volume, or you can eat salad for volume, right? You could eat potatoes for volume, or you could eat strawberries for volume, right? There are many foods that can be eaten in large quantities. The thing is, how does that make you feel when you do that physically, and is it in alignment with what your body [00:05:00] needs?
So when I talk about eating for volume, I'm talking usually about non starchy vegetables. Some fruits, but not to the same extent. Higher fiber, lower sugar fruits, which is pretty much like all berries. And here's the thing, if you are like me, which you may or may not be, I like to see a large quantity of food on my plate.
I don't know if I was always like that or that is something that has now become part of me as a result of my years of disordered eating, when I would see so little food on the plate or I would be so obsessed with how much I was allowed to eat or when I could eat again. Either way, it's very comforting to me to know that I can eat a lot of food at a meal if I want to.
But here's the thing. Eating a lot of pasta, for example, at a meal. A does not feel good, right? When you eat like a shit ton of pasta, you feel really full and bloated and heavy and you get tired and just you feel, you don't feel good. And when I say heavy, I mean like weighed down because it's a lot of like dense food.
And it's [00:06:00] more calories than your body needs, right? This doesn't mean pasta is bad. Pasta is awesome and wonderful in a portion that's in alignment with how you want to feel in your body. And so eating an entire plate of pasta because you're so hungry. Again, one is not going to feel good after the fact, or probably even halfway through.
And two is more than what your body needs. And that doesn't feel good either. That's not good for you mentally or physically. So then we think about, okay, well, I'm, you know, what can I load up on, right? And that's going to be non starchy veggies. You can, you get tons of nutrition, right, in the pasta you're not really getting much nutrition at all.
You're going to get tons of nutrition, fiber, you can eat a lot, and you're not getting a lot of energy from that, right? Meaning vegetables are not very calorie dense. Pasta is very calorie dense, there's a lot of calories packed into a small amount of food. Non starchy veggies, which are greens, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, onions, carrots, peppers, cruciferous veggies, meaning broccoli, sprouts, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, all greens, [00:07:00] Most vegetables are non starchy.
Potatoes, winter squash, corn are like your kind of starchy vegetables, which fall into a different category. We're not going to use those for volume as much. Um, so, You get a lot of nutrition for not a lot of calories. You can eat a lot of vegetables and not get a lot of calories. It's not calorie dense, right?
So that is really helpful for filling you up without feeling physically like yucky and gross for getting a lot of nutrition and eating in alignment with your body's energy needs. Right? This isn't about vegetables being good and pasta being bad. If anything, this becomes a tool, a more objective way to think about food and to strip out some of that good bad emotion and think about concepts of calorie dense versus not calorie dense, nutrition dense versus not nutritionally dense, and eating in alignment with your body's energy needs, right?
Which simply means, am I eating the amount of food that my body needs to [00:08:00] basically like My weight essentially. Um, and again, we, that is going to happen inherently if you are thinking about this in terms of a skill and prioritizing nutrition and fullness, right? So it's not like you have to think about, Oh, I can only have like, I need to have more veggies and less pasta.
It's like, if you think about the portion sizes that you need to feel good, then sort of the energy needs kind of inherently take care of themselves. Versus you having to think about, oh, I'm allowed to have 250 calories of pasta. Like, no, you never have to think about that. You need to think about, how much food of what do I need to put on my plate to feel good?
To feel full? And to feel like a good full, not like a gross Like, sick, overwhelmingly stuffed, lethargic full, and you know exactly what I'm talking about, and am I getting the nutrition that I need? And when you're thinking about those two things, inherently, that's going [00:09:00] to get the food on your plate that's going to feel good.
So eating for volume, again, is really prioritizing large amounts of veggies to help fill you up alongside your portion of protein, alongside your portion of carb. And the other, like, not the other, but another So when you eat for volume, because that, what you're eating are veggies, you're also bumping up your fiber intake, which helps with fullness, which is great for your digestive system and GI health and microbiome and all of that.
So again, like you start to build in all of these. benefits without having to like think about them in such an overt way, right? You'll hear a recommendation of like, eat 25 to 35 grams of fiber a day and you're like, great, another fucking thing I have to keep track of. How am I going to know? Well, you will if you fill up half of your plates with veggies at lunch and dinner and have like a higher fiber fruit, like any type of berry or really any type of fruit, [00:10:00] not any type of fruit, but you know, let's give ourselves some leeway at breakfast.
You're going to be in a really good spot with that without having to think about it or track it. So the skill of eating for volume yields so many benefits, right? Fullness, nutrition, eating in alignment with your body's energy needs, increased fiber intake. Like there's so many pieces to it. Um, and so it's something that like I think a lot about and then I talk to clients a lot about like I, and then so it's like, well, how do I do it?
Right? Um, You want to visually see that half of your plate is filled with veggies. At breakfast, I get it, that's probably not going to happen. So we, we kind of approach a little bit differently with breakfast, maybe bumping up the protein, again using some high fiber fruits, maybe putting in a couple of other fiber sources like chia seeds or flax seeds, um, to kind of help out with some of that fullness.
But lunch and dinner, moving towards that, right, not starting tomorrow if this is brand new to you, or even if you're, it's not brand new, [00:11:00] but slowly building up to half your plate being filled with veggies. That could be raw veggies, that could be cooked veggies, that could be prepared veggies from like a deli.
It could be frozen veggies, it could be canned veggies, it could be like carrots and, carrot and cucumber sticks. Like, there are so many ways to get this without having to have like this fancy prepared recipe of like, know, some dish. It doesn't have to be like this prepared recipe dish, like I just repeated myself.
But there's a lot of ways to get in that volume and get those veggies. Bagged greens are one of my favorite ways. Buy two or three of like different lettuce varieties, mix them up, throw some dressing on, done. I do that all the time. Um, and when you're out, right, it does, I'm not going to lie, it does I think get a little bit trickier when you're out because Restaurants tend to lean more into, like, larger volumes of carbs asides, like fries or chips or potatoes.
So, and this is not about swapping out and saying, oh, can I have a salad instead [00:12:00] of the fries, because you want some fries. Can you order a salad with it? Can you order a salad as an appetizer? Um, can you ask for, like, maybe half fries and half salad, which is not really going to be enough greens, right?
It's like We're looking for consistency, not perfection. So if you go out to eat a couple of times a week, the rest of the time is at home, or even like takeout where you might have more flexibility to supplement, you're good. If you're someone who eats out most of the time, then this is something that you definitely need to pay attention to.
And it might involve like ordering a side of vegetables. Is there a cost implication to that? Yes. Am I ignoring that? No. Like, Is that going to work for everybody because of that? Also, no, right? Like I can't speak to everyone at all times. Um, but sometimes we're like, Oh, well, this is what this is what the meal comes with.
Or like, this is just what they gave me. Well, sometimes you have to like think outside of the box. Can I order a side salad? Can I start with a salad? Can I order a side of vegetables? Pretty much all restaurants will have one of those [00:13:00] three options available to you. And you'll need to order it. And it's like, Think about all the money that we spend on like Starbucks and snacks and sweets and candy and all of this stuff.
But then why are we not willing to spend it on something like nutritious that actually feels good? Um, Again, it's like, it's like the screen time thing. We're like, we're like, we'll spend endless amounts scrolling social media, but then we're like, I don't have time to work out. I don't have time to cook. I don't have time to go prep.
Really? Like, do you not? And I'm not trying to like, be a bitch with this because trust me, I am the first to tell you I spend way too much time on social media and it's sucking away from time from things I actually need to be doing. But this is like the reality check we need to have with ourselves. Um, around like, what am I willing to put in to make these changes to feel better mentally and physically and emotionally?
So I think I captured what I wanted to say. It's a shorter episode. Cool. More is not always better. Always, if you've got questions, let me know. Totally forgot at the top of this episode to just put out the [00:14:00] reminder, um, that I have an interest list going for one to one coaching. I'm going to be opening up five spots this fall to start coaching sometime in October, which means that you would kind of sign up and get registered like mid late September.
I know it's August. I know it feels far away. Um, but it's not that far away. And if you're even thinking about it, or if you think you want to think about it in the future, just add your name to the list. So you have options to kind of get folks access to those spots to book a consult and to get a discount.
It's going to be 50 off the monthly rate for people who join from that interest list. And the interest list is no obligation. It doesn't commit you to anything. It just gives you options. come mid late September. Um, so thinking ahead. That's kind of what's coming down the pike. And that's it. Thank you for being here.
Um, and I'll be back next week.