What are your favorite low(er) calorie, low calorie-per-volume-ratio, or appetite-suppressing foods?

#1
  • almond/macademia milks. They are SO filling. they just make you pee a lot. Make sure to get low-calcium versions…
  • Tomatoes and cucumbers (easy to snack on, low bitterness). Tomatoes are really a fruit with a calorie density lower than many vegetables. Greenhouse/Canadian tomatoes have much lower pesticide than Mexican tomatoes.
  • carrots (super-cheap)
  • Salsa. It’s the best vegetable dip ever. Or I just drink out of the jar. Has vinegar. Black bean salsa can help satiate cravings that salsa alone cannot.
  • mustard (very low calorie flavor), also very juicy and substitutes for a lot of other cravings
  • Strawberries. Calorie-density of a vegetable, tho they do spike my glucose. Very pesticide-heavy.
  • wild apples (more bitter, before they got bred to be sweet)
  • ALL the vegetables (goes without saying, though some are hard to snack on as fast-food). Broccoli, cucumbers, tomatoes => easiest to use as fast food. Everything is easier in an instant pot (or you can put a bunch of water over them and boil them => you’ll hear it when the water boils/pours over and then they’re ready). I prefer electric stoves over gas stoves b/c safer. Most cruciferous vegetables have lower pesticide loads.
  • pickled vegetables. VERY tasty and can substitute for other cravings. Just beware of the emulsifier polysorbate 80. Has vinegar. The processing can reduce pesticide load. Also, pickled cucumbers can irritate the stomach lining - Podcast: What Is H. Pylori? - YouTube
  • mangoes. More sucrose than any other fruit so you can blunt the glucose spike with acarbose (which is cheaper and more immediately applicable than SGLT2 inhibitors)
  • VEGETABLE SOUP (too bad they’re hard to buy in stores, and costs can easily blow up with volume). Costs don’t blow up with volume in Ivy League dining halls
  • in Ivy League dining halls, it’s easy to get large amounts of sauteed vegetables (they also sautee them in MUFAs)
  • if you’re friends with some people in CR Society, you can sometimes enjoy their super-specially prepared vegetables (too bad I don’t have the time to prepare them)
  • anything with vinegar (enhances glycemic control, helps one fill full)
  • keto bread. A lot of them have lots of psyllium husk/insoluble fiber. Whole foods has nobagels. ThinSlim foods has some.
  • things sweetened with sugar alcohols (tho really, who needs sweeteners?)

Lower-calorie substitutes for other food (or just super-healthy food)

  • Silken tofu has 45 cal/85 grams (much less than regular tofu for some reason)
  • Slimcado. Can substitute for fat/nut cravings
  • POSSIBLY corn bran (lots of insoluble fiber). Supposedly lower-calorie than wheat bran (only from one source). I felt knocked out after consuming them => not a good indication of “low-calorie” b/c I know when too many carbs knock me out.
  • beans/lentils => combine with acarbose and the blood sugar spike is super-low. Can be used as a primary source of calories.
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#2

Ribeye by far, nutritious, healthy and very satiating

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#3

Absolutely no need to avoid high calorie foods. Eggs, avocado and dark chocolate are my staples.

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#4

OH GLYCINE IS AN APPETITE SUPPRESSANT?!?!? ugh I should try it more

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#5

I’ve taken glycine and never noticed any appetite suppressant effects. Metformin was much more powerful in this area.

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#6

Glycine is a wonder supplement.

You wonder why you didn’t start taking it earlier!

#7

is a salsa I’m beginning to really like (more than other salsas). I think in the near-term I’m going to abstain from everything except nut milk, vegetables, fruit, and salsa (abstaining from beans is tough at first but doable).

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#8

tapenades are great dips for veggies (+ultra healthy+often come in glass containers). I ate tomatoes+mushrooms+onions+cauliflower today, and NONE of them did anything to make me feel full. I then dipped mushrooms in tapenade AT LAST and it did it.

#9

A difference of 110 calories in a single day can make a lot of difference in epigenetic age

The easiest way is to use nicotine gum when hungry but not every day

#10

If you are having a little brain fog, a shot of nicotine from gum or a patch will help.

Surprisingly it appears that nicotine by itself is not particularly habit forming.

“But as laboratory scientists know, getting mice or other animals hooked on nicotine all by its lonesome is dauntingly difficult.”

I keep some nicotine gum around and use it occasionally before undertaking a difficult mental task.

"To my knowledge, nicotine is the most reliable cognitive enhancer that we currently have, bizarrely,” said Jennifer Rusted, professor of experimental psychology at Sussex University in Britain when we spoke. “The cognitive-enhancing effects of nicotine in a normal population are more robust than you get with any other agent. With Provigil, for instance, the evidence for cognitive benefits is nowhere near as strong as it is for nicotine.”

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#11

Ratatouille!! Perfect combo of ingredients though some overload on the oil

Hmm I sometimes think that fake meat/tofu products can make up for nut binges. I binged on 500g of roasted peanuts yesterday…(no other choices though).

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Also… https://www.vitalia.com.mk/en/product-category/specialized-products/keto-products/

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In Macedonia, the keto products are actually CHEAP, unlike the keto breads in the US… (eg nobagel)

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Of the french supermarkets, carrefour is my favorite (I like it more than monoprix). It has cheap glass jars of A LOT of vegetables (not in cans/plastic, can be used as fast food, AND filling in a way that raw vegetables are often not filling)

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Alex K. Chen metabolic / CGM progress (my "everything in longevity" thread)
#12

THIS is as close to cuisinic perfection as it gets. 27 calories per 100 grams (or 122.58 calories per lb). I found it only in a single Carrefour City store in the Latin Quarter…

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#13

But really, Mt Hagen instant coffee (why I have not discovered this earlier, I do not know - it would have prevented the plot-altering nicotine overdose this year). Some brands of instant coffee are higher-quality and lower-acrylamide.

Coffee makes appetite suppression trivial and zero-effort + is pro-longevity in its own right. Tea too, though instant coffee can be done w/o even boiling water (for someone who wants to minimize effort on most things + figures out the low-effort/low-willpower strategy for longevity [the opposite of the crsociety peepz])

pair with 100mg modafinil for synergistic appetite suppression

Ugh, caffeine pills don’t work great enough for me, and I know from conferences and Harvard that drinking LOADS of coffee works great for my alertness. Coffee-makers are too bulky. Why didn’t I discover this simple solution earlier, why didn’t I?

ive recently been pouring olive oil on top of cheap coleslaw - it makes the coleslaw tasty and is much less addicting than nut binges.

ive been back from europe for a week now. europe was a lot of exercise, and my weight was 100 upon arrival (despite intermittent binging on nuts and fake meat => some european fake meat, esp the Swiss kind, is quite delicious even though it’s better to just eat tofu). i overate some foods after arrival but weight is still roughly stable (and now I bought soymilk which should curb appetite, ESP on top of mt hagen coffee). It is higher-calorie density than nut milks though [and SURPRISE - is surprisingly high in soybean oil, so nut milks are still healthier than soymilk].

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I discovered this a few days ago at target (Arnold keto bread): https://www.starmarket.com/shop/product-details.970116752.html . Soybean oil AND sunflower flour (this means omega-6). It is so easy to eat 1200 calories of this in one go (as I did twice)… (modified wheat starch is the second ingredient) Need to figure out calories per gram of this

Also I discovered this today:

(NOTE: ONE FORMULATION OF THIS HAS FULLY HYDROGENATED SOYBEAN OIL - Franz Bakery | Products ). IDK WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT THE TARGET VERSION… (the one I bought at target does not say “hydrogenated soybean oil” BUT the target.com version says it is)

Most likely it’s trashier than the keto bread at whole foods and thinslimfoods (even if it’s the cheapest keto bread available)

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https://archive.vn/Iyvry#selection-2074.0-2078.1

The fiber-rich foods are the best, esp the 2 calories/gram stuff… It’s unknown if fiber in bean calories count as 4 calories/gram or lower. Navy beans have 20 grams of fiber per cup (the highest fiber count of all) - but the 365 brands form only has 12g fiber per cup (and 18g fiber per cup in its black beans)

=

#14

There are some books on dietary fiber!

Silk soymilk is 640 calories per 1.89L carton (much of it protein). Way more than almond/macademia milk (2x that of almond milk) but I have to use it for the near-term

70 calories per 240 mL (just 10 less than silk) is in 365 everyday brands AND whole foods soymilk… They don’t dilute soymilk enough.

#15

Shirataki/miracle noodles. They are a low-calorie miracle, only that they don’t really get digested (you don’t want to eat too much at once b/c indigestion) and they’re always packaged in the most suspicious sharp plastics ever (I’d buy them in abundance if not for the plastics issue - fortunately I guess I have enough vegetables to distract myself with).

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THIS is the most common food I’ve been consuming over the past month (mostly because it’s very cheap - the cheapest to order off amazon):

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[it is HELLA addicting when you add olive oil over it]. Yeah the plastics are a concern but amazon prime doesn’t allow for much else (and the plastics don’t seem that shardy like water-bottle plastics - like - not all plastics are equally “evil” and certain plastics just “feel” much worse than others [like pointier microplastics from waterbottles/shirataki seem more likely to insert themselves into cell membranes, and polyethylene/propropylene plastics seem more “benign” than ones made of weirder materials - never mind that you want to avoid them if you still can]).

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#17

small handful of raw pistachios, feels full but not bloated

used to love peanut butter, but as I got older I developed an intolerance to the Lectin it contains and had to stop

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#18

I strongly go back against Arnold bread or any “keto bread” made of modified wheat starch - they spiked my glucose like crazy. Anything with oat fiber (eg thinslim foods bread) is still okay.

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#19

Of all the Bush’s Blue Zones soup, this is the lowest calorie density

Bush says that took BPA out of its cans as of 2 years ago

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#20

It’s really raw cloves. If I feel like I’m almost full but still horridly hungry, it can be enough to seal the hunger. Just chewing a few can do a lot for appetite because they are JUST on the right gradient of bitterness to matter (and to maximize ORAC)

Note that I don’t put much emphasis on vegetables here - it goes without saying that all vegetables count, but it’s not always easy to be in the mood to eat them.

Vinegar supposedly helps too (it’s in both salsa and mustard) though it also involves risk to teeth

#21

my favorite filling food, that gives me hours of not feeling hungry… my morning oatmeal is 1/3 cup rolled oats, 1/3 cup milk, 2/3 cups water… some salt, when cooked served with some fruits, maybe a teaspoon honey… 150/200 calories

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#22

not the lowest calorie, but everything in it is super-healthy

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#23

With acarbose you can eat anything, but you will pay in other ways, my favorite:

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#24

When I’ve travelled in India i love the lentil dishes… but I had never gotten into cooking lentils before. A few weeks ago I decided to try cooking them at home after reading about Bryan Johnson’s meals and have found them really good and tasty and easy.

@AlexKChen you should try these. It takes about 20 minutes to boil lentils - then i put a little EV olive oil on them with some spices on top, and they taste great, very easy, very quick (and cheap).

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#25

this must be my all time favorite lentil dish… it is so quick, filling and warming.

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#26

For 1-2 years I pretty much ate only lentils, olive oil, broccoli etc. It wasn’t too bad cooked with spices and olives. In fact out of all beans it’s the best tasting one IMO, now just have to think about introducing them back into my diet.

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#27

I eat lentils multiple times per week. I find they go really well with turmeric and black pepper + evoo. Good protein/carb ratio, cheap, versatile, taste good (IMO).

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#28

I know it’s not the kind of answer you’re looking for, but Gatorade Zero has cut down daily calories for me a lot. I get cravings for sweet, cold drinks at night and those are all I let myself have.

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#29
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#30

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Way lower calorie densities than standard bean recipes (and even the nobagel). Still more expensive than them (though still way less expensive than restaurant food)

Nature’s Path Organic Keto Cereal
Really though, cherry tomatoes from trader joe’s are the best…

Tragically, the liked items on this forum seem to be biased towards many people who just want to use rapamycin to cover up their otherwise-terrible diet…

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0992WBN26?psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&ref_=chk_typ_imgToDp

770 calories per bag (and still filled me for now), which is lower than calories from catalina crunch bags

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I had zero glycemic spike from an entire bag of catalina crunch, which is more than what I can say from what I get from blueberries.

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#31

Not sure if I am the only one. But I remember feeling very satiated after adding green banana flour to my smoothie.

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#32

I am increasingly skeptical of processed food after reading the high heat => DNA damage paper.

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#33

Statins :white_check_mark: Rapamycin :white_check_mark: Terrible diet :white_check_mark: Multivitamin :white_check_mark:

Perfection

#34

I find Pacific Foods Butternut Squash Soup to be exceptionally filling. It probably has many issues, but I can be ready to eat everything in the house and I know if I have one cup of this (eaten somewhat slowly and with plenty of water on the side) I will be good to go.

#35

It’s probably more like different diets work for different people. What would be a horrible diet for you (or me) might be the diet someone else thrives on. I eat a 99% whole/natural foods diet personally but realize that doesn’t mean everyone needs to do that nor does it make me superior or inferior to anyone else who chooses or needs to eat differently.

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#36

I’ve tried a whole natural plant foods diet, and it’s reaaaly hard to get calories in. Literally a struggle to figure out how to get enough calories. I’d rather not stress about being too low weight, in case there’s a war or something. Seems like that will age one much quicker than not worrying about food unless it’s warranted (like for apoB levels).

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#37

@AnUser, I have to include animal foods (even meat) to get enough nutrients because of numerous food intolerances and gut issues I developed after a 50 day course of antibiotics. Before that I was primarily vegan and it worked well for me. That’s why I no longer judge the way others need to eat. I figure everyone here is intelligent enough to figure it out for themselves.

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#38

My go-to’s are rather traditional but they work when I am trying to cut calories. I allow myself to eat these items to satisfy real hunger as they are not desired by me when merely craving something “good”.

  • can of tuna in water
  • chewing gum with xylitol
  • hard boiled egg
  • carrot raw
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#39

You don’t really have that low of an opinion of your fellow forum members do you?

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#40

They make red lentil pasta that is pretty solid. Great source of fiber and protein.

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#41

Trader Joe’s Riced Cauliflower (also in a compostable bag so presumably there’s a chance the microplastics are less bad [not a guarantee…])

https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Costeña-Nopalitos-cactus-tierno-29-8/dp/B0000GGHVA

Nopalitos tender cactus (from La Costena) => in glass containers too! Found in the mission. My only concern is that they’re imported from mexico, and growing standards in mexico are not as good (aka there’s higher chance of contamination, though one would hope that since they’re cacti, they may be grown farther from microplastic/pesticide-contamined areas - though I’m less sure about pesticides b/c Mexico produce has higher contamination)’

Prickly pear is also 185 calories/lb which is less than pear calories (still higher than strawberry calories, similar to peach calories)

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#42

This might not be for everyone, but I love raw broccoli and carrots dipped in sugar free bbq sauce + a little bit of ranch dressing.

#43

It’s not wrong. I doubt anyone here eats a healthy diet. Even Alex admits to binging on beyond meat from time to time, that’s not healthy. Drugs is most important. Warren Buffett, for example, eats a junk diet, probably have been on drugs for a long time.

#44

I would disagree. I bet the members here eat remarkably healthy diets. Nobody is perfect, but then don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

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#45

Al dente lentils… (just put dry lentils in water and microwave for like 15 minutes [or even less if you can]). Put in some peppercorns to taste (they are softened and their flavor is memorable).

However, I did microwave for 5-6 minutes and got a terrific stomachache that knocked me out for 2 days

[the main issue is that some people soak them in water to remove dirt, which is inconvenient enough for me to not do it - it’s unknown if this dirt is a problem long-term]

The “less” soft they are, they more full they make you and even further reduces their glycemic index (plus dry lentils are so cheap and easy to carry around). The main issue is that they’re always in plastic packaging (it’s unknown if these plastics are problematic)

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unbread/unbun

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#46

I don’t think that’s the reason, but because it reduces cooking time and by rumors gas.

#47

You can get them in bulk in burlap or cotton drawstring bags. They taste much better if you rinse them a few times before cooking.

Brown lentils are not my favorite. I tend to rotate through green split peas, pink lentils, yellow split peas, blackeyed peas, field peas, lima beans, garbanzos, kidney beans, and black beans.

I get bored and need variety. I’d go crazy with the same legume day after day.

I’ve been soaking overnight and cooking a batch every other day for decades now. Between myself and my three large dogs they go quickly.

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#48

Calocurb (amarsate) [possibly]

also just eat LOTS of carrots

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#49

Better (more edited) thread here: Favorite low-effort, lower-calorie food items that you can easily get from a store/use as fast food. #DiningGuide - General Health and Longevity - CR Society Forum

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#50

Problem is you get a lot of sodium with those foods. Have you thought about powdered food for vegetables, for example?

Like BJ’s Super Veggie, no added sodium:

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Could you design a longevity and wellbeing soylent? We have to build the longevity food.

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#51

Just add potassium salts to neutralize the bad effects of sodium

#52

Umm, I don’t think that is how it works. Is there a mechanistic reason why that would decrease serum sodium and improve hydration, and attenuate the deviation in hydration?

I am still curious how you would design a soylent, DYI, or otherwise.

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#53

@Neo since you like my posts, any thoughts on a possible DYI healthspan soylent and what you would think about? I don’t know whether @AlexKChen has thought of that before. I think it’s important it could be drunk or eaten in a short eating window to optimize sleep? And for serum sodium/hydration.

I think it is completely true as well that the future food will be unlike anything we have today, regarding the optimal diet. It will probably be totally artificial and designed for the person. Maybe it’s possible already.

#54

Haven’t given it a lot of thought - would just make sure in a big way that any processing is not screwing up the foods’ originally nutritional potential and/or adding negative modifications to it in any ways (glycation, etc).

(Edit: I) Mostly try to focus on whole foods for now, but may experiment with some of Blueprint diet packs when on the road or in contexts of limited time.

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