The Secret Reason You Aren't Losing Weight

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but EVERYONE is talking about weight loss right now. 

Everyone is talking about how we need to move away from the traditional model of calories in versus calories out. 

And I’m HERE. FOR. IT. 

I inherently knew this to be true 20+ years ago, but still had work to do on myself before I could put the pieces all together succinctly. 

I was joking with a friend recently that it’s been so funny to watch all the “influencers” who started off as makeup, beauty, and fitness experts, now transition into health experts. 

Because they are all going through perimenopause and when we women find a problem, we go looking for answers. 

And dealing with weight gain during perimenopause has been the bane of women’s existence for decades. And it wasn’t until this generation of 30-50 somethings decided to dig in and get to the bottom of it, that we’ve had answers and solutions to healing this age-old issue. 

I talk a lot about hormones: in emails, on Instagram, in articles, to my friends, to strangers on the sidewalk…

The hormonal shifts that happen as we approach our 40s and 50s are REAL and we need to talk about them.

Today we are going to go into more detail than usual about one particular hormone that gets very little attention, because 1) it’s important, and 2) it’s one of my core values at Larson Family Health, to empower my clients, and those around me, with the information and tools to heal their bodies from the inside out. 

This core value is THE reason I finally created the Reclaim Your Metabolism weight loss group coaching program, BTW. 

Introducing LEPTIN.

Chances are, you’ve actually heard about leptin. It’s well known as our satiety hormone. But do you know ALL that it does in our body and how it is intricately connected to our metabolism? 

Chances are not, because even most medical doctors don’t fully understand the complexities of this hormone. 

Ok, let’s dive in. 

Leptin is a hormone and a protein that is made and released by the fat cells in your body. In theory, the more fat cells you have (indicating obesity or a hyperfed state), the less hungry you'd feel. 

If you are among the 92% of Americans who are considered “metabolically unhealthy”, you likely aren’t feeling this reprieve from leptin as you should. 

How leptin is supposed to work is that when you eat enough food, it is released into the body and reports to the hypothalamus (a part of the brain) that the body has enough energy to maintain itself, therefore quenching your appetite, and prompting you to stop eating. As a result, hunger pangs are fulfilled and the body and brain are satisfied. 

When leptin is in balance, we are metabolically healthy, and everything else is balanced. Your appetite will feel normal and you will experience hunger and fullness appropriately. 

When the body is lacking food (such as an intentional caloric deficit), a signal is sent to the brain to store more food coming in as fat, which increases leptin. 

This might seem like a good thing. “Katie, doesn’t this mean I won’t feel hungry when I’m cutting calories?” 

But a funny thing happens in the overweight or obese body. 

If you have extra fat cells hanging out on your body, you actually have MORE leptin than the average person. HOWEVER, what research has found is that the leptin response to the brain is blocked, leading to what is called Leptin Resistance, meaning you don’t get the benefit of feeling full. 

As a very important side note: leptin receptors (the little gates that allow leptin into the brain to tell the brain to stop eating) can be blocked by inflammation, insulin, and elevated triglycerides. 

As you may recall from my previous articles and emails, insulin is released in response to carbohydrate intake. When insulin is high, it blocks perception of feeling full to the brain and blocks satiety. This is a survival mechanism–if carbohydrate was available back in the caveman days, our body needed us to eat as much of it as possible because it could be months before it was available again. 

As the body and brain becomes resistant to leptin (as with over-eating), the brain (specifically the hypothalamus) thinks you are starving, so your metabolism down regulates. This causes you to store more weight on less calories because the body believes it needs to conserve energy. 

This is a big reason why calorie deficit diets don’t work: it increases hunger hormones and decreases leptin sensitivity over time because the body believes it is starving and is trying to stimulate you to eat. 

You cannot out-willpower this biological mechanism. 

Additionally, leptin extinguishes the reward we get from food. Dopamine, one of our feel good and calming neurotransmitters in the brain (which is made in the gut–this is important) is suppressed while leptin is elevated. 

Leptin also decreases the reward value of food by engaging the brain's dopamine reward system. When you eat highly processed foods (particularly high-fat and high-sugar foods), you make more dopamine, which l causes you to go look for MORE food.  

Pair this with the fact that food today is so HIGHLY addictive even with ALL of these protective pieces in place, Americans can literally not stop eating. 

The add in leptin resistance in the overweight body and it results in a constant feeling of hunger.

All. The. Time.  

So it’s no wonder that every time you try to lose weight, you end up feeling uncomfortably hungry and eventually going back to your old habits. 

Losing weight the traditional way is NOT how someone who is overweight or obese can be successful. 

Ok, so how do we fix this? If overeating is making it worse, but so is undereating, how can we heal from this issue? 

More on that in a sec. Stay with me, we have a few more important concepts to get through first. 

I want to take a quick side trip to talk about insulin. One of my favorite hormones. 

Yeah, I’m weird like that. 

Insulin rises when we eat foods that contain carbohydrates, from vegetables and fruit to highly processed foods as a result of needing to remove the glucose from these foods out of the blood stream. 

While the response varies, any food with carbohydrate in them will result in an insulin response. 

Insulin’s job is INCREDIBLY important and it’s life saving, just ask any Type 1 Diabetic. 

Insulin removes glucose from the blood after carbohydrate intake and shuttles it to muscle, the liver, and eventually fat cells, if there is an excess. 

We are releasing double the amount of insulin compared to 2 decades ago.

Could this be a possible link to our obesity and metabolic crisis? Hmmmm…

One of insulin’s lesser known jobs is to clear dopamine from the neuro synapses (the way that information travels between the brain cells). As you learned above, the presence of dopamine leads us to look for more food (and not vegetables). In a healthy insulin response, the insulin would clear the dopamine receptors, which would turn off the search for food and mitigate feelings of insatiability.  

In insulin resistance, (92% of Americans have an insulin issue), you need more food to release the same feeling (especially hyperpalatable foods) than if you have a healthy insulin response. 

If you have food addiction, you are never satiated because these biochemical processes are not functionally properly. 

As someone who struggled for YEARS with food addiction, the ONE strategy that worked was the ONE strategy NO ONE told me about. More on that later too. 

When insulin is in check, we can eat intuitively. This is why I believe that the root of our obesity and food addiction crisis is hormonal. 

Ok, let’s throw one more hormone into the mix and then we’ll talk about solutions. 

Cortisol emergency survival mechanism, it’s a very helpful hormone, until it’s not (seems to be a theme with today’s post, does it not?).

It is generally known for its role in stress. 

Cortisol affects the neurons that interpret satiety. When cortisol is elevated, ghrelin (our hunger hormone) increases, leptin is decreased, and blood sugar is elevated. When chronically elevated, cortisol increases the craving for quick carbohydrates, like sugar, because it makes the dopamine receptors less sensitive. This means you need more and more sugar to feel “good”, causing addiction over time. 

Chronic dieting kills the body’s ability to understand satiety, the chronic dieting never results in you becoming fat adapted  

Ok, let’s talk about solutions to this complicated mess. I’ve got 3: 

1. Eat real food: The body knows what to do with the nutrients from foods that came from an animal or the ground. Period. The hormone response to real food will be a healthy release of leptin, and ceasing of food intake, and return to baseline. This is the NUMBER ONE way I personally lost the weight and have kept it off. REAL food does not create addiction or craving. It allows your body to know when it’s hungry and stop when it’s full. When you eat real food you don’t binge, you don’t overeat, and you feel satisfied at the end of the meal. 
2. Minimize sugar: If you think you have leptin or insulin resistance, I’m actually going to encourage you to not eat processed sugar at all for a while. Sugar is the main driver of diabetes, fatty liver disease, and elevated triglycerides. 
3. Fasting: This is the fastest and most effective way to reset these hormones. Don’t jump into this out of the gate by yourself-that can be dangerous. Go slow and start giving yourself breaks between meals and at least 12 hours overnight. Longer fasts will reset dopamine receptors as well as utilize all the available blood glucose, thereby decreasing inflammation and resetting insulin. 
4. Fiber: We hear about fiber for gut health and bowel motility, but did you know that when eaten, it stimulates GLP-1. Yes, THAT GLP-1, that everyone is talking about as the miracle weight loss drug. It's actually a normal mechanism in the body stimulated by both fiber AND protein. This leads to feeling full and satisfied after you eat. This technically falls under the "eat real food" category, but is important enough I wanted to give it it's own line. 

If this is all resonating with you and sounds like YOUR journey, leptin might be part of your metabolic issue. It CAN be resolved. You don't need pharmaceuticals or even supplements. Using real food and natural healing mechanisms such as fasting, can be enough to course correct. 

If you are curious about how Reclaim Your Metabolism can help you reset your hormones, your cravings, and help you lose the last 10-100lbs, let’s hop on the computer and chat. Book a complimentary consult call here. Find out more about Reclaim Your Metabolism HERE.