Is the current situation keeping you indoors?
Do you find yourself indulging in ice cream and popcorn this season while watching your favorite show?
Needless to say, chances are everything has conspired lately to make you feel more bloated, heavier, and sluggish.
The good news is that I am going to share with you my simple step-by-step process to make things work in your favor. Especially to help you improve your mood, gain energy, and lose weight without spending hours at the gym or focusing on ‘Yo-yo’ diets that got you stuck. If you have already tried restrictive diets but failed to make the scale budge, you know there is more to the weight-loss equation than calories taken in minus calories used.
I will specifically discuss the remarkable weight-loss hormone called leptin, which seems to be effective 90% of the time in my patients who are looking to lose weight, have more energy, reverse diabetes, and improve heart health. You must understand that chances are your weight problem or feeling lethargic is not a matter of will or discipline, but a hormonal imbalance.
While many still think that losing weight is simply about willpower, eating less and exercising more, the latest research on obesity indicates the problem is far more complex, involving many factors specifically cortisol depletion and leptin resistance.
We already discussed cortisol, now let’s focus on leptin.
Research studies indicate that leptin resistance, in which your body does not respond to this hormone, is now believed to be the leading driver of weight gain in humans.
So, what is leptin?
Leptin is a hormone that is produced by your body’s fat cells, which plays an important role in appetite control, metabolism, and weight loss. It is your body’s natural weight control mechanism. This special hormone is also known as the “satiety hormone” or the “starvation hormone.”
Leptin’s responsibility is to tell your brain that when you have enough fat stored, you don’t need to eat and can burn calories at a normal rate naturally. In addition, leptin is important for fertility, immune function, and brain health. However, its main role in the long-term is to regulate energy, including the number of calories you eat and expend, as well as how much fat you store in your body.
When leptin does not function well, this broken mechanism that is supposed to prevent you from overeating and storing too much fat is called leptin resistance.
The great thing about leptin is that it is produced naturally in the body.
What is leptin responsible for?
Regulate fat storage and how many calories you eat and burn on a day-to-day basis.
So how does all this work?
Leptin is produced by your body’s fat cells. The more body fat they carry, the more leptin is produced. It is carried by the bloodstream into your brain, where it sends a message to the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls when and how much you eat.
Basically, the fat cells use leptin to tell your brain how much body fat to store. High levels of leptin tell your brain that you have plenty of fat stored, while low levels tell your brain that fat stores are low and that you need to eat.
When you eat, your body fat goes up, leading your leptin levels to go up, thus, you eat less and burn more calories. Conversely, when you don’t eat, your body fat goes down, leading your leptin levels to drop, at this point, you eat more and burn less.
This kind of system is known as a negative feedback loop and similar to the control mechanisms for many different physiological functions, such as cortisol release during normal and stressful situations, regular breathing patterns, body temperature, and blood pressure.
So what is leptin resistance?
People who are overweight have a lot of body fat in their fat cells because fat cells produce leptin in proportion to their size. Simply put, people who are obese have very high levels of leptin. Given the way leptin is supposed to work, many people who are overweight should naturally limit their food intake. In other words, their brains should know that they have plenty of energy stored.
However, in the majority of people who can’t shed off the weight easily, leptin signaling may not work, while copious leptin may be present, the brain doesn’t register. This condition is known as leptin resistance, which is now believed to be one of the main biological contributors to weight gain.
When your brain doesn’t receive the leptin signal, it mistakes that your body is starving even though it has more than enough energy stored. This triggers your brain to eat more in order to prevent starvation. Hence, your brain decreases your energy levels, makes you burn fewer calories, and feel more sluggish.
The most important concept you need to understand is that eating more and exercising less is not the underlying cause of weight gain but rather leptin defect. For my patients who struggle with leptin resistance, overcoming the leptin-driven starvation signal is not easy. This requires overall body system support especially thyroid, gut, and adrenal balance to regulate leptin hormone.
As a scientist and a natural doctor, I’ve witnessed over and over again that leptin resistance may very well be the main reason that many diets fail to promote long-term weight loss. YES, even the Keto diet will fail until the leptin resistance is addressed.
According to NHANES statistics, over 70 million adults in America are obese (35 million men and 35 million women) and 99 million are overweight (45 million women and 54 million men). It’s estimated that obesity will continue to rise 50% from 38% in the next decade. It’s well understood that complications from weight gain appear to be the leading cause of heart disease, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes.
Uncontrollable weight gain is common to see during the perimenopause phase in women ages 45 or above and andropause in men over 50. It is apparent that metabolism slows down with age but with an appropriate individualized treatment plan you can feel amazing and look fabulous within your body during all stages of your life.
And of course, don’t you dare settle for less.
STOP wasting your time trying a cookie-cutter approach that’s got you stuck in the first place.
The good news is that there is a simple natural approach to get your stress hormone such as leptin balanced that is simple and side effect free so you can take control of your health and be happy again, which I’ve discussed in my video HERE.
Comment #replay when you watch my video so I can hop in there to answer your questions and give you a big shout-out.