If you have struggled with your weight for a long time or constantly cycled on and off crash diets, there is a very good chance that you have messed up the satiety signals within your body. That means that your body might not effectively get the messages from your hormones that you’re full. The result? Endless snacking and munching. A feeling of being hungry all the time. A higher than normal volume of food required to make you feel full and sastisfied. Chronic hunger. That kinda stuff. Fortunately, you can get those signals back in check with some straight forward changes to the types of foods you eat. Let’s look at the hormones in charge of hunger and satiety and how we tend to mess them up with our Standard American Diet (SAD).
Leptin is at the top of the hormonal hierarchy when it comes to fat loss and body composition. Here’s the thing about leptin: it’s JOB is to keep you from storing too much fat. Unfortunately, when it’s signaling ability gets screwed up, it can make it very difficult for you to release and burn fat. Leptin is released by our fat cells. Consider it the “hall monitor” of fat accumulation. It is always assessing how much stored fat you have and signaling the body to trigger feelings of satiety when there’s enough, and turning down satiety when there’s not. When you start accumulating excess body fat in your adipose tissue, your fat cells release leptin to signal the brain that plenty of fuel is available. This signal then kicks off a cascade of events to decrease your hunger and increase your metabolism (via stimulating your thyroid and adrenals).
On the flip side, when there aren’t an excess of fat cells secreting leptin, the low leptin levels communicate to the brain that there isn’t enough energy stored and so your appetite is stimulated and your metabolic rate is slowed down.
Sounds like a pretty perfect system that should keep anyone from gaining too much weight, right? Unfortunately, just like what happens with insulin, we fuel our bodies so poorly that leptin’s ability to signal goes very wrong. Just like we have the carbohydrate cycle, there is a similar cycle I’ve put together to show how chronically high carbohydrate diets and high insulin levels impair the proper function of leptin in a big way.
Let’s look at what happens here – and remember – this is what happens over time, leading to excess weight gain, insulin resistance and ultimately leptin resistance making it hard for overweight and obese people to break the cycle and successfully lose weight.
So you’ll recall that when we routinely eat high carbohydrate diets, especially processed, cheap carbohydrates that send our blood sugar through the roof, our body becomes far less sensitive to the presence of insulin. This is what we call insulin resistance and it causes our body to store more fat. More fat means that more leptin is going to be released (because leptin is released by our fat cells). Well, as you continuously pile on more fat cells, leptin secretion continues to rise. The same thing happens that we saw with insulin. Leptin is always around and your body tunes out the signals it is sending out. Leptin resistance and insulin resistance go hand in hand.
When you are leptin resistant to any degree, your body won’t receive the satiety signals it is supposed to. You can eat in excess without feeling full. Your hunger mechanisms are rarely turned off. Your metabolic rate slows because you aren’t receiving those messages that ample fuel is available (via your fat stores) so your adrenal and thyroid function slows. So you eat more, you are highly likely to store the food you do eat as excess body fat and you rarely feel satisfied.
There is good news though. As with insulin, we have a tremendous amount of control over the action of leptin through the food we eat and the lifestyle habits we adopt. Because leptin is so significantly impacted by insulin, one of the most important things you can do to encourage healthy leptin signaling is to control blood sugar. How do we do that?
Eliminate processed foods
Reduce or eliminate wheat and grains
Focus on whole foods such as vegetables, fish, beef, poultry, nuts, seeds and some fruits
Eat protein and healthy fat at every meal
When you are ready, incorporate high intensity interval workouts 2-3 times each week.
Keep your sugar intake low – even natural sugars like honey
These metabolic hormones are all closely intertwined. We’ve talked about how insulin and leptin go hand in hand but you also see that leptin function influences your thyroid hormones and your adrenals. You cannot address one without impacting the other. If you do damage to one, it will impair the others. Remember that while calories do matter, you can’t make lasting progress without working towards balancing these critical metabolic hormones.
Ghrelin is a hormone secreted by your stomach that is responsible for making you feel hungry. Understanding what triggers ghrelin helps us to control and minimize both hunger and cravings. Increased ghrelin levels triggers your brain to stimulate hunger. It also encourages your body to store fat in your abdominal region. When we control our ghrelin levels, we control our hunger, our cravings and how quickly or slowly hunger returns after we eat. Low levels on ghrelin have the opposite effect – it minimizes our hunger and cravings.
Here are some strategies to consider to help keep ghrelin levels low and hunger and cravings at bay.
Avoid severe caloric restriction. Low calorie diets increase ghrelin production.
Eat your veggies. Non-starchy vegetables like Brussels sprouts, broccoli and cabbage are high in both water and fiber. They stretch out your stomach, which lowers your ghrelin levels and keeps them low for longer.
Eat protein and healthy fats with each meal. This slows the digestive process and slows the rate at which food is emptied from your stomach. The longer you have food in your stomach, the longer your ghrelin levels stay low.
Avoid fructose, especially from processed foods, soft drinks and fruit juice. Yes, fructose is found in fruit but its most concentrated in processed foods in the form of high fructose corn syrup. Fructose raises ghrelin levels, making you feel hunger, and it also lowers leptin levels, preventing you from feeling full.
Eat often. Especially when you’re starting out in your fat loss journey you’ll be best served to eat every 3-4 hours. This will help keep your ghrelin low and your hunger and cravings to a minimum.
Avoid chronic stress. We all need to work on this one, but chronic stress increases ghrelin production.
Exercise regularly, especially in the form of high intensity intervals and weight training. These activities increase our production of human growth hormone, which inhibits ghrelin.
Make sure you’re consuming adequate omega 3 fatty acids, especially EPA and DHA, from oily, cold-water fish like salmon, sardines, anchovies or mackerel. Studies have shown that insufficient omega 3 intake increases ghrelin production.
Being hungry and battling intense cravings makes fat loss harder than it needs to be. Controlling hunger and cravings can make healthy eating almost effortless.
Wanna know more and take your results to the next level? Check out my Hormones & Fat Loss ebook! 50 pages of diet & lifestyle strategies to help you naturally optimize your hormones and get into fat-burning mode!!
We talk a lot about how for maximum fat loss results you’ll want to limit your carbohydrates to your evening meal or post workout. That generates a lot of great questions from people who wonder how they lost weight while eating oatmeal for breakfast or how very lean people can get away with chowing down on bread and pasta all the time. These are fantastic questions that all point back to one thing: carb tolerance. In today’s episode we talk about the many different factors that influence carb tolerance, how to know your own and how to improve it!
The Problem: Carbohydrate tolerance varies from person to person and what works for one person, especially a lean person, might not work for someone who has more fat to lose. People also mistake weight loss and fat loss. Just because you lost weight on a previous diet program doesn’t mean you lose fat!
The Solution: Understand what impacts carb tolerance. We discuss in detail the ways the following factors influence your carb tolerance:
Your insulin sensitivity or resistance
Your body composition
The type of carbohydrate consumed
The amount of carbohydrate consumed
Your physical activity level
The frequency of your carbohydrate consumption
Everyone has a different degree of carb tolerance. Fortunately there are things you can do to improve your carb tolerance and get to the point where you can maximize the amount of time you spend in fat burning mode and minimize the amount of time you spend in fat storing mode.
Resources: For detailed information on carbohydrate strategies for fat loss including more on fruit, wheat, oats, gluten plus strategies for improving your carbohydrate tolerance, check out the comprehensive carbs & fat loss ecourse! Follow the link below and use the coupon code Primal10 to get lifetime access for only $69 (including troubleshooting help from me on demand!) https://www.udemy.com/carb-strategies/?couponCode=Primal10 Episode 002 – Hormones Trump Calories Episode 007 – Carbs & Fat Loss: Timing Matters Episode 009 – Carbohydrate Spillover – Is the Way You Eat Carbs Making You Fat
Hormones & Fat Loss ebook! 50 pages of diet & lifestyle strategies to help you naturally optimize your hormones and get into fat-burning mode!!
Generally speaking, people understand that there is a connection between stress and weight loss. We understand that when we’re stressed we don’t always make the best food choices. We understand that we’re more likely to overeat or overindulge when we’re under stress. We understand that personal, professional and financial stress can make us choose to put less emphasis on our health and more emphasis on our struggles. But the connection between stress and weight loss goes much deeper than that. It is more than an emotional connection. There is a real, physical, physiological connection between stress and weight loss. And sure, we can’t eliminate stress from our lives, but once we understand what stress is doing to our weight loss attempts and our overall health, we might be much more motivated to find healthier, more productive ways of dealing with said stress.
Cortisol is a hormone released in response to physical, emotional or mental stress. Here’s how it relates to our weight loss – elevated cortisol levels tell the body that there’s immimnent danger – the body responds by PREVENING fat burning – turning off all fat burning machinery – because it wants to reserve all fuel in case of an emergency. Your body is programmed to survive. If it perceives a threat (elevated insulin indicates a threat, elevated cortisol indicates a threat), it will conserve all energy and stop non-esssential processes. This means holding on to stored body fat and not letting it be used for energy. That’s the short version of the story for you CliffNotes folks. 🙂
Cortisol is a steroid hormone produced by our adrenal glands. Its role is to help our body conserve energy and stop non-essential processes in times of extreme physical or emotional stress. Most people focus exclusively on the negative impacts of cortisol but it’s important to note that cortisol can either work for us – keeping us healthy and lean – or against us, accelerating fat storage, breaking down lean tissue, triggering hunger, suppressing the immune system and more. The great news is this: much of what determines whether cortisol is working for or against us is based on our diet and lifestyle choices.
Our stress response was designed to protect us from danger and help ensure our survival. Unfortunately, we were designed to only withstand short bursts of stress (like being chased by a tiger). Our stress response was designed to trigger sensations of urgency and alarm while increasing blood flow to help us outrun said tiger, and live. However, the standard American lifestyle of chronic, prolonged stress leads to a metabolic nightmare where those systems in place to protect us work to keep us fat, hungry and anxious.
When functioning as intended, our stress response can actually help us to burn fat faster. That’s why high intensity interval type exercise (HIIT) is so effective for fat loss. It engages this short-burst stress response that accelerates fat release and burning while preventing fat storage. When cortisol levels are chronically high it does the opposite of what it’s intended to do – it ramps up fat storage and slows down fat release and burning.
A second stress hormone, neuropeptide Y, is also released in response to chronic stress. Neuropeptide Y decreases your overall metabolic rate, increases the rate of fat storage, especially in and around the abdomen, and triggers hunger and cravings for high sugar and high fat foods. This is a particularly dangerous situation when you consider some of the other effects of chronically elevated cortisol: it depletes serotonin, contributing to feelings of sadness and anxiety and blocks the messages sent by leptin, preventing your brain from letting your body know that you’ve had enough to eat and triggering feelings of satiety (fullness).
Cortisol also works differently depending on what other hormones are hanging around. If cortisol is high when insulin is high you can kiss your fat loss goodbye. This is why it’s best to avoid carbohydrates in the morning because you’ll spike insulin at the time of day when cortisol is at it’s highest (it naturally peaks around 7am). Combining high insulin levels with high cortisol levels turns fat release and burning OFF while turning fat storage on high.
On the other hand, when cortisol is elevated in the presence of adrenaline and human growth hormone (and insulin is not around!) then you’ve got a great environment for fat release and burning. So how do we create this environment?
Avoid processed foods, wheat and grains to keep insulin low.
Minimize stress to avoid prolonged high cortisol levels
Engage in high intensity, short duration exercise to create the environment of elevated cortisol with human growth hormone and adrenaline.
A few other things worth mentioning as they relate to managing cortisol:
Get enough sleep. You need to work towards 8-9 hours each night
Don’t go overboard with caffeine. This elevates cortisol.
Engage in relaxing activity each day. Try leisure walking, meditation, naps or sex.
Managing cortisol can have a massive impact on the success or failure of your fat loss efforts. Remember that none of these hormones work in isolation. If any one of your metabolic hormones are out of whack, the entire communication network is in jeopardy.
Wanna learn more about the connection between hormones & fat loss to take your results to the next level? Check out my Hormones & Fat Loss ebook! 50 pages of diet & lifestyle strategies to help you naturally optimize your hormones and get into fat-burning mode!!
Everybody wants a plan. They want to know what to eat, what to avoid, when to exercise and how. They want approved food lists and meal plans. But what if that’s actually not the best way to reach your goals? Here’s a hint: it’s not. In this episode we talk about how that approach might be holding you back and how you can actually accelerate your progress to your fat loss goals by creating your OWN plan. But how do you do it? How do you know where to start? Just how do create your unique fat loss formula? We’ll tell you!!
The Challenge: We always in a frantic search to find the “right” plan. We read blogs, diet books and news stories about the latest fads, always hoping to find the miracle answer to our weight loss. The thing is that no one is capable of designing a fat loss lifestyle for anyone other than themself. Everyone comes at fat loss from a different angle. Sure, there are basic fat loss principles that can be broadly applied but at the end of the day, the specifics of a fat loss lifestyle are absolutely unique to each individual. We have different emotional needs, hormonal needs, physical needs – we have different food preferences, family situations, budgets, degrees of motivation – you name it. There is no one size fits all when it comes to fat loss.
The Solution: You have to start paying attention to your own unique response to food and lifestyle factors. Instead of asking “can I eat fruit and lose fat”, expecting an answer from an “expert” – turn the question around and ask it of yourself!! Decide that you’re going to keep all other factors the same for a week but add in fruit once or twice a day. Monitor your fat loss progress as well as your hunger, energy, cravings, stress, mood & sleep. Were you able to make fat loss progress? How did you feel? Did it negatively impact your hunger, cravings, mood, stress or sleep? No? Fantastic!! Keep going! On the flip side, did you notice that you had more sugar cravings? Or did your fat loss progress slow down? Were you more hungry? Those answers will tell you everything you need to know. To be successful in achieving fat loss that you effortlessly maintain for life, you need to pay attention. YOU need to chart the course. As you get further and further into your journey, it needs to become increasingly customized to what works for you. Look to find the answers to the following questions:
What foods satisfy my cravings?
What foods send me into a downward bingeing spiral?
What foods keep me fullest, longest?
What foods give me the most energy?
What foods do I look forward to eating?
What are the most manageable foods to prepare?
What are the most convenient and satisfying snacks?
What can I maintain for the rest of my life?
Where MY point of balance between eating healthy, being satisfied, getting results and being happy with my plan?
If we polled 100 people who have lost 50 lbs or more, I bet they’d all have different answers to those questions and guess what – none of them are wrong!
Practical Implementation: Keep a food journal. Spend 2-5 minutes each day writing down everything you eat and what type of exercise you do. At several points throughout the day assess your hunger, mood, cravings, energy and stress levels. Monitor your fat loss progress on a weekly basis via your body weight, measurements or how your clothes are fitting. Look for patterns. When you’re struggling with cravings is it because of the types of meals you’re eating? Maybe it has more to do with your stress level or sleep patterns? When you start to experience great fat loss results look for patterns in your diet and your body’s feedback.
If I were to try to map out your entire fat loss formula, I’d be doing you a major disservice in the long term. The better you know your body and your individual response to food, stress and exercise, the more effective you will be at achieving your fat loss goals and maintaining them for life. Dig in, do the work, pay attention to your body and find those answers for yourself.
Resources:
Hormones & Fat Loss ebook! 50 pages of diet & lifestyle strategies to help you naturally optimize your hormones and get into fat-burning mode!! Too much protein slowed my fat loss
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My last few posts have been alllll about carbohydrates. Why? Because they are such a controversial topic when it comes to fat loss. Their hormonal impact is HUGE. (If you’re more of an audio/video person, check out this training I did on carb strategies for fat loss)
There are so many carbohydrate trends and many of them are far more extreme than needed (high carb, low carb, no carb, etc). If we make smart carb choices – and this goes far beyond the TYPE of carb – it can significantly accelerate our fat loss progress.
If we make not-so-smart carb choices, it can prevent fat loss entirely (and make us have extreme cravings, fatigue and hunger). If you want to reach your fat loss goals and maintain them, you’ve GOT to make smart carb choices. Understanding carbs and fat loss can be one of the keys that helps you unlock your true health & weight loss potential. If you haven’t already, I wrote an overview post about how carbs impact our hormones and how hormones turn fat burning potential on or off. Check that out here. And now, for what I lovingly call the “Golden Rules of Carbs & Fat Loss”.
Right time.
Limit all carbs to your evening or post-workout meal
I’ve written extensively about why nighttime is the right time for carbohydrates and did a long podcast on the topic as well. For maximum fat loss you’ll want to eat your carbs with your dinner time meal OR post workout. Sometimes I’ll have them after dinner as dessert – a baked apple or something like that. In short, the reason we want to avoid carbs early in the day is that we are MOST sensitive to the hormone insulin in the morning. Even a slight rise in blood sugar will produce a larger insulin response in the morning because we’ve fasted overnight. The presence of insulin turns off our fat burning machinery so an exaggerated AM response puts us at a major fat-burning disadvantage for the day.
The other reason for avoiding carbs early in the day is that the hormone cortisol is highest in the morning. That’s just part of our normal sleep/wake cycle. Cortisol, a stress hormone, peaks in the morning to help us wake up. We always want to avoid spiking insulin when cortisol is naturally high, because cortisol exaggerates the fat-storing potential of insulin, especially around the abdomen.
So what should eat in the morning for fat-burning? I’m so glad you asked! My most popular podcast episode was actually on how to make breakfast a fat burning meal. Def don’t miss that one! You can check it out here.
Right carbs. Choose unprocessed carbohydrates
Let’s first talk about the WRONG carbs for fat loss. You want to avoid the carbs that will send your blood sugar through the roof. You want to avoid the highly processed, chemical-laden kinds of of foods you get in boxes and bags. I’m talking chips, cookies, cakes, etc. If it is made in a factory, it is not the right carb for fat loss. It doesn’t mean you can never enjoy an Oreo, it just means that for optimal fat loss, you’ll want to choose healthier carbs MOST of the time. The more processed carbs are generally higher in sugar and starch and will have a more significant impact on blood sugar and insulin than whole food carbohydrates. Remember, the more you spike your insulin, the longer you stay out of fat-burning mode and the more likely you are to experience chronic hunger and carbohydrate cravings.
The carbs you want to emphasize are going to be those that are as close to their natural state as possible. Ideally, we’re talking about fruit (especially berries, apples or citrus fruit) and starchy vegetables. Starchy vegetables are things like potato, sweet potato and squash.
Right amount. Start by limiting your serving size to 1/2 cup and adjust up or down from there
That means 1/2 cup of sweet potato or 1/2 cup of berries – one carb limited to roughly 1/2 cup. If you’re cruising along and burning lots of fat, you can add a little more and monitor your results. On the flip side, if you aren’t getting the results you want, you can try scaling back to 1/4 cup and see how that goes. For me personally, I try to stay around 1/4 cup with my dinner time meal or post-workout (depending on the length and intensity of my workout) and that’s where I get the best results.
Right company. Pair carbohydrates with protein or fat
For optimal fat loss, never eat your carbs alone. Always pair your carbs with either fat or protein (or both). Why is this important? Because eating your carbs with either fat or protein will slow down the digestive process as fat and protein are more cumbersome to digest than carbohydrates. By slowing down the digestive process you slow the release of sugar into the blood stream. What does that do? It requires less of an insulin response. This is one of the important ways we can enjoy carbs and still stay in fat burning mode!
I go into a lot more detail on carbs & fat loss on the Primal Potential podcast! You can check out some of those episodes here: Carb Timing: The right time and the wrong time for carb consumption. Overcoming Sugar Cravings Carb Spillover – How carbs make you fat and how to avoid it
I totally know that this is a complex topic and much of the recent strategies for fat loss are soooooo different from what you’ve heard your whole life. That’s why I put together a comprehensive e-course on carbohydrate strategies specifically for optimal fat loss. We talk about overcoming cravings, defeating hunger, increasing energy, improving sleep and much more. We talk about hormone balancing and stress responses and debunk a lot of low-carb and no-carb myths. We get into the nuances about fruit, gluten, oats, wheat, beans and so much more! Best of all, we talk about how you can actually IMPROVE your carbohydrate tolerance and your insulin sensitivity so you can eat more while staying in fat burning mode!
Here’s a video I put together to help explain what the carb course will teach you:
