50 TOP TIPS FOR FAT LOSS – TIP 44

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TIP 44 LEARN ABOUT LEPTIN

So, what is leptin and how can learning about it help with losing body fat?

Leptin is the key hormone involved in controlling our appetite. When we eat real foods, the digestive process kicks in and breaks down the food into its constituent parts so that the body can use the contents for all of the various processes that it needs to perform and Leptin gets produced within our fat cells that sends a message to the brain.  In a roundabout way, it is the hormone that tells the brain that we’ve eaten enough food, or in other words, “I’m Full”.

So, if eating real food sends the “I’m Full” message to the brain, how come we overeat? (Isn’t that how we got so obese in the first place?)

The answer while complex can actually be explain quite simply.  The foods and drinks we eat today are so far removed from the real foods our digestive system was designed to process, that the chemical messages usually derived during digestion just aren’t happening anymore and as a result, we aren’t getting the “I’m Full” message.  Let me explain.  In my younger years, a group of us headed off to McDonalds after a game of rugby.  One of our bigger team mates ate 17 cheese burgers and 5 big macs, IN ONE GO.  He washed this down with 2 large cokes.

How was he capable of eating such a large amount of food?  Easy, his body never gave him the hormonal message, “I’m Full”.

Sometime later on that season, that same player was challenged to eat 1 kilo of steak with ½ a kilo of baked potato at a restaurant.  Guess what, he failed.  Why???

McDonalds foods are highly processed.  They’ve removed most of the fibre content in order to prolong the shelf life of the ingredients.  They’ve also added a large quantity of sugar to their product, both in the bun, in the soft drink and they even wash their fries and lettuce in the stuff to give it a consistent colouring and flavour when being cooked.  The steak and potato meal he ate some weeks later did send off the “I’m Full” message.

So how did the McDonalds food affect his Leptin response? It’s quite sneaky and the scary thing is the food manufacturers know this.  The fructose component of sugar and HFCS in the food put out by all fast food companies doesn’t activate the Leptin response. So you can keep eating and eating and eating and never get full.  And another thing, all that extra energy we’ve eaten, it gets uncontrollably converted to free fatty acids and stored.

We often think that the fullness feeling comes from the quantity of food.  This is a mistake.  The fullness feeling doesn’t come from the quantity, it comes from the quality.  When your parents told you to slow down when you were younger, it was so that their food bill didn’t get out of control.  If you eat slower, you get full eating less food.

So, if fat loss is your goal, revert to real foods that activate the Leptin response.