Do you feel like you are always hungry? Do you restrict calories but the scale doesn’t budge? Have you lost weight, then gained weight, maybe you feel like just looking at food packs on the pounds? These are all too common scenarios today. You want to be at a healthy weight, you want to feel good, but you feel like food has just become your enemy.
We want a quick fix, but the problem is that you didn’t get to where you are overnight. Excess weight is a symptom, like skin rashes, tummy troubles, or headaches, this extra fat is a sign that something has gone awry inside your body and has been put off balance. This is why it can be so difficult for many to lose weight, why simply saying "just eat less" doesn't always work. You have engrained patterns in your body that MUST be set back on their right paths before you can find sustainable eating habits and consistent weight loss. If you heal your health, you heal this chaos and reach your goals.
We used to think that fat cells (white adipose tissue) were simply just inactive fluff hanging on our bodies, however, research has proven this to be false. White adipose tissue is actually metabolically active, secreting hormones and interacting with your brain. The most important of these identified hormones is Leptin.
Leptin is a prime controlling agent that is secreted from fat cells, many other hormones rely on it for proper functioning. Leptin is essential for survival, yet is also responsible for cravings, crazy eating habits, and the inability to maintain a healthy body weight.
Normally, your leptin is used to maintain a natural balance. Your brain senses how much fat is on your body through leptin. It is a signal that can tell you when you are full and when to stop eating. When your brain sees that leptin levels are normal, then your body does not need to store excess calories as fat and you feel hungry at normal times throughout the day. This is when we are in balance and at a healthy weight. Leptin would also help us survive during times of famine by sensing that the body was starving, it needed to make us hungry, slow our metabolic rate and store as much fuel as possible, this has kept us alive!
However, in today’s world with food readily available and in large portions, high contents of sugar and other inflammatory ingredients, it is easy to chronically overeat while still being undernourished. Your brain gets bombarded with leptin signals and starts to ignore them, becoming leptin resistant. This can continue to cause confusion within your metabolism and directs you to slow your metabolism, store more fat, gain more weight, and can cause major health problems. This works in tangent with insulin resistance causing the brain to not get the correct hunger signals and the body to not get proper blood sugar regulating signals. Your brain thinks your body is starving due to mishaps in the signaling, despite plenty of fat on your body.
Several factors can deepen this hole of metabolic chaos; history of yo-yo dieting, gaining and losing large amounts of weight, gut infections, and even age. As we age, fat cells more easily replicate and become larger, pairing this with leptin and insulin resistance you may find it frustratingly easy to gain fat and much harder to lose it. But age is not an excuse! You can combat this.
A few signs that you may be leptin resistant:
- >15 lbs excess body fat
- hungriest at night
- sugar cravings
- often hungry even when you just ate
- inability to lose weight
- blood sugar regulating problems