What to Eat to Suppress Your Appetite

What to Eat to Suppress Your Appetite

Video | Controlling Ghrelin | Non-Starchy Vegetables | Dietary Fat | Boost Fiber

Eating more might sounds like the wrong thing to do if you want to suppress your appetite, but when you eat enough of the three things I share in this article, your hunger and cravings naturally stay low.

Suppress Your Appetite At-A-Glance


  • Hunger is driven by a hormone called ghrelin. Eating slow-digesting foods and high-volume foods help to control this hunger hormone. 
  • Non-starchy vegetables are low in calories and carbs but provide plenty of appetite-suppressing volume and fiber.
  • Dietary fat is hunger satiating and does not spike insulin (a.k.a. the fat-storing hormone).
  • In research performed on children, eating more fiber reduced hunger. Adults can get the same appetite-suppressing effect from fiber. 

What to Eat to Suppress Your Appetite [Video]

In this video, you’ll learn…

  • Which kind of vegetables are best for appetite suppression!
  • A recipe for a salad that is both tasty and low in calories.
  • How fat and fiber also help to suppress your appetite!

Ghrelin: Your Hunger Hormone

A few factors control your appetite, but it is mainly driven by a hormone called ghrelin. An easy way to remember ghrelin’s effect is to think, “if my stomach is growling, it’s probably ghrelin.” 

If your appetite is too high, you want to eat in a way that lowers the production of this hunger hormone.

Fill Up on Non-Starchy Vegetables

The first thing you can do to suppress your appetite is to eat enough non-starchy vegetables. This is effective because vegetables have volume. That volume stretches the walls of the stomach where you have receptors that signal to the brain that there is a lot of food to process, and there is no need for more food. 

fill up on non-starchy vegetables

If you have a meal-sized salad for lunch and two cups of cooked non-starchy vegetables with dinner, you are filling your stomach with volume. Those non-starchy vegetables are very low in calories, making them the perfect food for hunger-satisfying weight loss.

Lunchtime Salad

Fill up on non-starchy vegetables throughout your day. They are low in calories and carbs but provide plenty of appetite-suppressing volume and fiber.

lunchtime salad

Dinner side dish

dinner side dish

Appetite-Stopping Tip!

If you are always hungry, a great skill to master is preparing a delicious salad. When you have that skill, you will look forward to eating salad daily and be well on your way to life-long hunger and weight control. Check out my low-carb/high-fat salad recipe.

Eat More Fat

The second thing you can eat to suppress your appetite is fat. For decades, we were told that “eating fat will make you fat.” Today, we know that dietary fat is hunger satiating and does not spike insulin, the fat-storing hormone. 

switch from low fat to full fat

Boosting the fat content of your diet can help you lose weight. However, despite this new understanding, it can be hard to allow yourself to eat more fat. If you are just getting started, aim to get 50% of your daily calories from fat. This amount will help quiet hunger. 

Bottom line: it’s time to leave the low-fat foods on the grocery shelf and put the full-fat varieties in your shopping cart. That means trading low-fat yogurt for full-fat yogurt, eating whole eggs instead of just the egg whites, and trading low-fat snacks like pretzels for high-fat snacks like nuts. 

Side Note: Pretzels are advertised as a healthy, low-fat snack, but their refined carbs and lack of fat will spike and then drop your blood sugar. When your blood sugar dips, hunger returns. 

Eat More Fiber

The third thing you can eat to cut your appetite is fiber. Fiber is found in plant foods, and research shows that it acts as a powerful appetite suppressant. 

An interesting study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition took 42 overweight children and looked at how adding fiber to their diet would affect their appetite. 

They split the kids into two groups and let them eat their typical diet. The only difference was that one group was given 8 grams of fiber per day. 

After 16 weeks, the high-fiber kids reported a significantly higher feeling of fullness, which naturally led them to eat less food during the day (1).

Work on boosting your fiber intake, and you’ll find that it has the same appetite-suppressing effect on you as it had on the children in the study. Adults can aim for up to 30 grams/day. Reaching that level is possible when you follow my 0,1,2,3 strategy, which you can learn for free here on my blog. 

Thank you for reading and have a wonderful week!

Reference: 

(1) Hume, Megan P., Alissa C. Nicolucci, and Raylene A. Reimer. “Prebiotic supplementation improves appetite control in children with overweight and obesity: a randomized controlled trial.” The American journal of clinical nutrition 105.4 (2017): 790-799.

About the Author

Becky Gillaspy, DC graduated Summa Cum Laude with research honors from Palmer College of Chiropractic in 1991.

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