For example, if I eat a small steak with 500 calories, will I feel full for longer than if I ate 10 rice cakes with 30 calories each?
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Hunger is a big thing to try to ELI5, but here is what I know from attending diabetes conferences and reading the occasional research article on it:
Hunger is caused by a chemical released by your stomach (ghrelin), and it stops when another chemical counters it (leptin). We keep getting new research revealing things that make the stomach release each of these chemicals differently. For example, sleep deprivation increases ghrelin and decreases leptin.
With things that you eat, there is some research showing that the weight of what you eat is important. Heavier food weight leads to more leptin and delays ghrelin, light foods favor ghrelin coming back sooner. So foods like broccoli are really good for weight loss because they are dense but low in calories while providing useful vitamins and minerals. Fish is good because the fish is heavy, and the fish oil is a healthy oil that also seems to help control hunger throughout the day.
IIRC, rapid expansion of the stomach can trigger leptin release. So drinking a bunch of water helps control hunger because your stomach expands, thinks it is full, and releases the leptin to say “stop putting things in here”. This lends itself to the saying about how if you think you are hungry, drink a glass of water and then wait 20 minutes; if you are still hungry after that go ahead and eat. This might suggest that portion size is the winning factor of what you asked, but then you also have to look at the composition of those portions. Like, glucose (a sugar found in a lot of foods) is immediately usable by the body without having to convert it. This is great if you are a nurse and a patient gets fainty after a blood draw, since you can give them an apple juice and they will recover quickly. This is bad for managing hunger though, or for weight loss, because if it is a major part of what you just ate you will get to feeling hungry sooner and be loading your body up with sugars.
Someone might look at this information and think “Oh, sugar bad, protein and fats good”, and that also isn’t true. There are bad fats out there that will increase other health risks (like heart health), and high protein diets are not inherently healthy. Definitely talk to your doctor before making a decision to start one of these diets, because there are good ways to do them, bad ways to do them, and a lot of people on the internet insisting they know the good way if you just follow their blog or whatever. Definitely don’t look at an ELI5 from a guy who is sharing the information he has from articles and conferences and make a lifestyle change based off of it.
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