satiety (n.): the quality or state of being fed or gratified to or beyond capacity : SURFEIT, FULLNESS

As of Monday, I’ve started in on another batshit insane dietary regimen. My anonymous co-conspirator and I started out with some basic, healthy directives: primarily fruits, vegetables, beans, and lean meats, with no sweets, no white flour, limited whole grains, and limited dairy, primarily in yogurt form. We ate chips and guacamole as we hashed out positions on our staple foods. (I stood my ground on Parmesan cheese.) The following day, the battle was met.

Those of you who know me well probably have already assumed the next sentence. The potent combination of my sugar-averse take on nutrition and my residual adolescent self-image issues has since twisted these first principles into something almost wholly unrecognizable.

What’s that? Take a moment to unpack that sentence? If you insist. In 2003, I returned home from an extremely self-indulgent trip to Europe and discovered to my horror that I weighed over 200 lbs, which, given my 5’9″ frame, was more than a little repugnant. It wasn’t long thereafter that I went on the Atkins diet with the reckless abandon of a nihilistic college student on anti-depressants. I lived for some six to eight weeks or so consuming primarily bacon and eggs and buffalo wings, and I lost on the order of 25 or 30 pounds — the majority of which has stayed off since. I’m sure this took years off my life, but god, those weeks were fucking awesome, and not just because they were extremely flavorful, but because I felt really good besides.

I took a few things away from this experience. First and foremost, I developed an admiration for the gospel of low-carb. I won’t give you the whole spiel, but it makes inherent sense: sugar, glucose, and other carbohydrates provide the body with fuel; if you don’t get sufficient exercise to burn the fuel, it’s stored as fat; many if not most Americans consume way too much carbohydrate for the level of exercise they get; reduce your carbohydrate intake, burn your fat stores, have more sex.

Secondly, though, I developed a respectful horror at the way one can immerse oneself in saturated fat and nitrite preservatives and still lose weight. They say sodium nitrites can lead to leukemia and DNA mutations and terrorism and whatnot, and I think most doctors would rather you develop a Vicodin dependency than consume the levels of saturated fat I ate for those two months. So when push came to shove this time around, I’ve still leaned low-carb, but in a lean and largely improvisatory kind of way.

Let me illustrate. On Monday, I consumed the following:

• 16 oz. grapefruit juice
• Small chicken caesar salad
• 12-piece sashimi

On Tuesday, I consumed the following:

• 16 oz. grapefruit juice
• 1 banana
• Chicken breast with broccoli and string beans
• Broccoli with garlic, lemon juice, and Parmesan cheese (so necessary)
• Small bag of pistachios (I was kind of drunk and it seemed like a good idea at the time)

Today, I’ve consumed:

• 16 oz. grapefruit juice
• 1 low-fat strawberry-banana yogurt
• Medium salad with hard-boiled egg, vegetables, limited cheddar cheese

Essentially, I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. It’s low-carb, but it’s got fruit. It’s low fat, but I’m making exceptions for nuts and eggs and cheese. I haven’t done the math, but I think it’s low-calorie. At least, I hope so…

Oh! Satiety! Right! Yesterday I was at NutritionData.com looking up what exactly is in a banana (turns out it’s mostly factory seconds from Malaysian sweatshops) and I discovered that some enterprising researchers had done some experiments to determine which foods satisfy you the most. They created a terrifying looking model (FF=MAX(0.5, MIN(5.0, 41.7/CAL^0.7 + 0.05*PR + 6.17E-4*DF^3 – 7.25E-6*TF^3 + 0.617))) and put their data into a nifty chart, which you can click to read the whole article. Enjoy!