Leptin and Ghrelin: Two Powerful Hormones to Heat Up Your Holiday Fat Burning Furnace
Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes when you get hungry?
What gives the signal that you’re full?
Have you ever eaten beyond full and felt uncomfortable?
With Thanksgiving coming up in just a couple of weeks followed by the winter holidays – Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s – holidays focused around food, you may have thoughts of getting out your “eatin’ pants” to avoid the painful dig and pinch of a waistline that often becomes too tight this time of year.
You’ll need those pants, unless you learn to make friends with leptin and ghrelin and the powerful effects you can have on fat burning when you understand how to make them work for you.
The Fat Burning Benefits of Ghrelin
Neither ghrelin nor leptin has a gland the way that estrogen, thyroid, cortisol, and insulin do. Ghrelin is secreted by your stomach and leptin by your fat cells.
Your stomach secretes ghrelin when it’s empty, signaling the hypothalamus to turn on your appetite. As a society, we’ve come to fear hunger and avoid it like the plague. As soon as we feel hungry, we look for ways to satisfy our desire for food.
But what if you could make friends with hunger and actually learn to enjoy the feeling?
There are benefits to prolonging eating and staying hungry for a while. You see, ghrelin is a potent stimulator of growth hormone, and growth hormone has profound effect on fat burning and building lean muscle. It is often considered an anti-aging hormone.
So the next time you get hungry, remember that the longer you hold out (within reason) the more you rev up your fat-burning furnace.
The Appetite Attacking Benefits of Leptin
Did you know it is now believed that eating many small meals actually contributes to increased fat rather than decreased?
By delaying eating and spacing your meals 5 – 6 hours apart, you profoundly affect leptin levels. Leptin is the hormone your fat cells secrete after a meal to tell your hypothalamus to turn off your appetite.
Leptin levels are optimized when you space your meals 5 – 6 hours apart, avoid snacking, stop eating within 3 hours of bedtime, avoid high carb breakfasts and instead include protein at breakfast, and avoid overeating.
“Whoa!” You might be thinking, “That sounds hard AND it flies in the face of what I’ve been taught. I thought it wasn’t a goodidea to let myself get too hungry because that’s a sure-fire trigger for overeating.”
Yes, indeed. Getting too hungry can cause you to eat everything in sight. That’s why I recommend a gradual approach, so you can retrain your conscious brain as well as your hormones.
Eating small meals may keep you from getting hungry and overeating at your next meal, but generally the results for weight loss are short lived. When you eat all day, you keep your insulin and leptin levels elevated all day. Insulin puts you into fat storing mode, which is the exact opposite of what you want.
Elevated leptin does indeed turn off your appetite, which is a good thing, but chronically elevated leptin results in leptin resistance, wherein your hypothalamus doesn’t hear the cry of leptin any more and it shifts your metabolism into starvation mode. You’re constantlyhungry and your metabolism is so low that every morsel you eat gets protectively stored away around your waist like an energy insurance policy.
In my B4 Be Gone program, I share my Snack Attack Strategy for dealing with the desire for food that creeps up on you in between meals as you move towards spacing your meals.
Part of the trick is to eat enough at each meal to hold you for 5 hours. Many of my B4 Be Gone members are finding that they can’t even finish the meals I’ve laid out for them because they get too full, so they’re not hungry again for many hours.
When retraining yourself, it’s important to start with choosing snacks that are nutrient dense and calorie and carbohydrate sparse to prevent insulin spikes.
Things like green smoothies and juices, vegetable sticks with delicious omega-3 fat-rich dips, steamed or raw vegetables, and chia seed drinks or porridges are the most helpful here.
Ghrelin and Leptin Optimization Strategy for the Holidays
To keep the extra weight from creeping in this holiday season, follow these guidelines:
- Start your day with a low to moderate carbohydrate meal that includes ample protein. You can include choices that will stabilize your glucose, insulin, and leptin levels and keep you satisfied for hours if you include more:
- green smoothies made with low-glycemic fruits like berries and green apples
- green juices
- shakes made with powdered greens and veggie protein powder for when you’re in a hurry
- chia-rich meals like shakes or porridge
- Do a 30-second burst of high intensity exercise every couple of hours to increase fat burning.
- Be prepared. Make a variety of delicious vegetable dishes and dips to satisfy the nibbles when everyone else is eating the low-nutrient, high-calorie hors d’oeuvres and hoarding away the extra pounds. If you’re looking for ideas, click here.
Learn delicious alternatives for traditional dishes. There are all sorts of great book resources for Thanksgiving and winter holiday ideas. You can also find videos and recipe guides.
- Satisfy your sweet tooth healthfully. While sweet desserts, even the healthy, gluten-free raw kind are not the best for daily consumption when you have a few extra pounds, they are welcome and delicious alternatives to traditional apple pie, pumpkin pie, cookies and truffles. All you need are some mouth-watering recipes and some guidance on how to recreate some sweet treats.
- Pace yourself. Eat slowly, give thanks for every bite and truly enjoy. Then stop when you get the signal you’ve had enough.
- Wait to be really hungry before you eat your next meal. Remember, ghrelin, the appetite stimulating hormone, is your friend. You burn more fat when you’re hungry than when you’re full. Spacing your meals allows for the normal ebb and flow of leptin so you can retrain your brain to turn off your appetite when you’ve had enough.
Above all, learn to eat with an attitude of gratitude, fully conscious of the effects the food has in your body. You are what you eat, digest, and absorb. Keep that in mind as you eat.
Do I want this to become a part of my cell structure? What you put in and on your body becomes your body, so choose wisely.
Tags: belly fat, cortisol, ghrelin, Healthy Holiday, holiday diet, hormone health, hormone imbalances, leptin
Posted in Healthy Holiday, Holistic Nutrition, Hormone Imbalance, Natural Hormone Support, Reduce Belly Fat, Sleep for Vibrant Health
How a Lack of Sufficient Sleep Makes You Fat
The subject is SLEEP: how lack of sufficient sleep disrupts your hormones, your immune system, and your ability to think clearly. The average person in our modern world gets between 5 and 6 hours of sleep each night. And that’s just not enough.
Ever wonder why you can’t diet or exercise your weight down to where you’d like it? Or, have you ever thought about why you have a spare tire around your midline, even though the scale says you’re not overweight?
Resistant weight loss and belly fat are intimately related to your hormones, and your hormone balance can be severely disrupted by chronic sleep disruption.
Did you know that your sleep habits are just as important as what you put on your fork when it comes to releasing weight? (especially the extra padding around your middle!) Research shows that shift workers are, on average, heavier than those who work day jobs! And it has to do with disruption to the hormone dance that happens while you sleep.
The hormones affected by sleep control your appetite, the growth of lean muscle and your fat, and carbohydrate metabolism.
How Insufficient Sleep Affects Your Weight:
Decreased serotonin and dopamine production, which leads to cravings for sugary foods to bring the levels back up.- Increased ghrelin (a hormone that makes you feel hungry even if your body has enough food) and decreased leptin (makes you feel full and satisfied after eating) – the result means sugar cravings and continued hunger even after you’ve eaten a full meal.
- Decreased growth hormone, leading to decreased ability to burn fat and lay down lean muscle.
- Increased cortisol, “the stress hormone” which triggers the breakdown of muscle stores, increased blood sugar, and increased insulin. This leads to the deposition of fat, mainly around your waist.
Module 3 of my new program, B4 Be Gone, is called The Hormone Dance. In it, I outline the exact steps to take to determine how much sleep you need and what to do to get your hormones in balance so you burn rather than store fat at night.
Sleep Your Way Slim
My video, The NOT-So-Sexy Hormone Imbalances That Keep You Flabby, Foggy and Fatigued goes into a lot more detail more about the hormone imbalances and offers you a couple of steps to take right away to turn your bed into a super charged fat burning monster. On that video, I bust the myth of eating small frequent meals, which plays havoc on your hormone balance.
It’s not just important for your appearance that you get a good night’s sleep. These same hormone imbalances can have long term, dangerous consequences on your heart, increase inflammation and pain put you at a higher risk for cancer.
The loss of my parents, then my sister, a couple of friends and cousins, and most recently my brother-in-law and father-in-law has made me fiercely determined to stop the madness. I know their deaths could have been prevented had they just known what to do and had a guide to take them through every step of the way.
Turning Loss into Life
I created the B4 Be Gone Program to offer just that step by step guidance that so many need. Within 30 days, most people have lost their cravings and reset much of the faulty metabolism by bringing into balance five key elements: diet, stress, exercise, sleep and TIMING.
All the sleep research has me really taking a look at my own choices. I push the envelope with sleep because I feel fine even when I don’t sleep. But that’s on the outside. I know enough to realize that what’s going on inside as a result of my lack of sleep could come back and bite me in the you-know-what. Indeed, I have noticed that I’ve been extra hungry during the day these past few sleep-deprived weeks.
I am looking forward to doing the 30-day metabolic reset with the group and committing to getting enough sleep.
It’s All About Balance.
Balance is the key. It’s not enough to just drink green smoothies or just exercise daily or just get lots of sleep. The balance among stress, sleep, exercise and diet are key.
And on top of that, Timing is EVERYTHING.
You can do all the right things, but if it’s out of sync with your bio-rhythms, your belly will stay flabby — no matter how many sit-ups you do or green drinks you drink.
If you’re feeling flabby and frustrated, my advice to you is to sleep on it and then join us in the next B4 Be Gone Journey.
Tags: belly fat, cortisol, cravings, dopamine, Exhaustion, fat, fatiuge, ghrelin, growth hormone, hormones, lack of sleep, leptin, serotonin, sleep, stress, weightloss
Posted in Chronic Fatigue, Exhaustion, Fatigue Treatment, Holistic Nutrition, Reduce Belly Fat, Sleep for Vibrant Health
Metabolism Boosting Blunder: Why Eating Smaller, Frequent Meals May Make You Fat!
- by Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo
I want to share one of my favorite tips for keeping the extra pounds from creeping in around your waistline, and it has to do with how far apart you space your meals.
One of my Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Brain Fog, and Burnout video subscribers wrote and asked me why I was advising only 3 meals a day spaced 5-6 hours apart when she had at least 5 books on her shelf written by respected health educators telling her to eat frequent, small meals.
All too often, “so called experts” tell you to eat many small meals throughout the day to keep your blood sugar steady. What they don’t tell you is that constant feeding means you have a steady stream of insulin in your bloodstream.
Whatever sugar insulin can’t manage to get inside your cells, it stores away as fat… around your belly!
So, while eating every couple of hours keeps your blood sugar from getting too low, it never allows for the rhythmic ebb and flow of insulin. It also causes your leptin and growth hormone levels to go down.
Since these hormones are involved in feeling satiated after meals and in fat burning, you’re shooting yourself in the foot when you eat every few hours. The ideal meal spacing appears to be somewhere between 5 and 6 hours.
You might be thinking, “I can’t go 5 hours without eating.”
Of course you can’t NOW. You have faulty metabolic pathways that need to be repaired before you can space your meals optimally.
Eating every couple of hours may appear to “solve” your problem and keep your blood sugar even, but it’s really just masking the underlying issue. A balanced body can go 6 hours or longer without feeling faint or irritable.
My B4 Be Gone System gives you the steps to repair the underlying imbalances so you can keep your blood sugar nice and steady without the damaging effects of high insulin all day long.
And I show you exactly how to gradually increase the length of time between meals so your energy remains steady. My system is designed to guide you to find the right timing for YOU and gradually optimize it as your cells repair. This can happen rather quickly.
One of my clients went from having to eat every hour to easily going 5 hours between meals…within less than two weeks! And she finally dropped 12 of the pounds she’d been struggling to let go for years. In my B4 Be Gone Program, I show you exactly how to restore the sensitivity of your cells to insulin so you can space your meals, burn more fat, lay down more muscle, and keep your energy and focus nice and steady all day long.
You owe it to the world to get out from under the veil of an under-focused mind, low energy, and lack of confidence in your appearance. It’s your time to shine. Join us for the incredible B4 Be Gone Journey and unleash your greatness.
You really are unstoppable!
You’re going to step into your passion and potential as soon as you step out of the fog.
Tags: achieving your ideal weight, belly fat, blood sugar, insulin, insulin sensitivity, metabolism, weightloss
Posted in Fatigue Treatment, Health Coach, Reduce Belly Fat
Fear, Anxiety, and Thanklessness – A Sure-fire Prescription for a FAT Midsection
Most people consider me an expert in restoring and maintaining health using diet and lifestyle approaches. My “claims to fame” are my in-depth knowledge of nutrition and biochemistry, and my program effectiveness for restoring balance to achieve vibrant health and energy.
Countless people come to me for advice, wondering why they are still overweight and ill, in spite of eating a healthy diet.
How Stress May Supersize You
While I can usually find things to tweak in clients’ diets, and I can recommend herbs or natural nutrition supplements to restore balance, we’re fighting an uphill battle if we ignore the role of stress, negative emotions, and worry; your health, energy level, AND weight are all affected.
On a past radio show, Your Muscles May be Making You Fat, I explored in detail the mechanism by which stress and worry contribute to belly bulge, and I encourage you to listen for details.
In summary, fear, worry, stressful thoughts and situations, and negative emotions trigger the release of cortisol and adrenaline from your adrenal glands. This hormone release triggers a series of fight or flight mechanisms that cause your liver and muscles to release sugar into your blood. Normally, this release would ready you for your “chase” or “escape”.
But what also happens, and this is the troubling part when it happens frequently, is that your insulin is also triggered to rise, so the sugar in the blood can be absorbed by your cells and fuel them to flight or fight. Keep in mind, that extra sugar in your blood would normally get used. Unfortunately, when your stresses are mental, you can’t burn all the released sugar. Insulin, in following through with its job of maintaining healthy blood sugar levels, causes the sugar to be put back into storage… as white adipose tissues, whose main receptors are – you guessed it – right around your belly.
I discuss more details concerning insulin, its role, and insulin resistance in Video 1, of the 5-part Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Brain Fog, and Burnout video series.
When you get stressed over situations that are beyond your control – like fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, traffic, other people’s attitudes – you are creating the perfect environment not only for “turning your muscles into fat” but for injuring your insides and setting yourself up for diseases. The three most serious and very common sequelae [secondary conditions] to chronic stress are the BIG 3: Heart disease, Cancer and Diabetes.
If achieving a slim trim body and keeping yourself safe from “the Big 3″ aren’t enough motivation to get a handle on stress, there’s more.
A Change of Heart Can Mean a Change in Dress Size
Your thoughts and emotions impact others around you, both those in close proximity and those far away.
Let me explain.
Research at the Institute of HeartMath has confirmed that your thoughts and emotions affect your heart rate variability (HRV). When you’re calm, HRV, when graphed, looks like a nice even sine wave and when you’re frustrated or angry, worried or anxious, it’s erratic and spikey. Notice the difference in the graphs to the right.
The smooth wave pattern is associated with ideal blood pressure, clear thinking, proper metabolic function and overall well being. The other pattern hallmarks disease, dysfunction, resistant weight loss and a host of other serious metabolic disruptions.
This article on the HeartMath website gives all the details, and it also takes you step-by-step through a couple of their techniques for restoring balance:
http://www.alternativeworldwidehealth.com/files/Heartmath_Stress_chapter.pdf
According to HeartMath:
In my Mend Your Metabolism & Maximize Your Vitality webinar, I will take you step-by-step through one of the HeartMath processes for Transforming Stress so you can feel for yourself the effects of being in a state they refer to as “coherence”.
It’s an amazing feeling and you too can learn it. In my 30-day B4 Be Gone program, I guide my patients and students through daily practice of this technique, and send them daily reminders and a recording of me guiding them through the process.
Join us on the webinar to get yourself started.
Get Slim, Stress-free, and Save the World
So now for the really amazing, almost unbelievable finding.
YOU have more power than you think over the state of the world, the energy in the room, and the stressful feelings of others.
Hear me out on this one…
When two people with different HRV patterns come into each other’s energy fields, the HRV’s tend to synchronize, and the strongest field prevails. This has been measured by the institute of HeartMath researchers on medical equipment!
By practicing the HeartMath technique called Quick Coherence several times a day, with as little a time investment as 5 minutes a day, you’ll become proficient at changing your emotional state and the HRV’s of others with whom you come into contact.
How cool is that?
And when you practice their more advanced technique, called Heart Lock-in, you actually practice deliberately projecting your energy out into the room. To master Heart Lock-in takes a bit more time, 15 minutes about 3-4 times a week!
When natural disasters like fire and flood strike, the natural tendency is to feel victimized. That puts you into the “triple P emotional state” that has been shown to be the most damaging of all… powerlessness, pessimism, and pervasive worry.
It’s times like these that we need to band together energetically and send positive thoughts, prayers, and uplifting energy to those whose lives are affected. Imagine the effect of thousands of people all over the world projecting their positive energy field! According to the above aforementioned article from the Institute of HeartMath (which I highly recommend you read in its entirety), “positive thinking” without accompanying positive feelings usually only provides temporary relief from emotional distress. Whereas the activation of positive emotions is more likely to transform the stress at its source.
According to Joe Vitale, author of The Attractor Factor, “there are over 25 scientific studies that prove when a group of people meditate together, they can change their surroundings — just by getting settled inside.”
Dr. Vitale lives not too far from where I live, just outside of Austin, and he sent out a plea for help with getting the fires under control through the power of positive emotion.
I’ve printed his entire letter on my blog, where Joe tells of his experience with this process when Hurricane Rita threatened Austin a few years back.
Whether you believe Dr. Vitale’s account of changing the course of natural events or not, there’s no disputing the positive effect of appreciation and love on your own chemistry and that of those around you. Lots of studies at www.heartmath.org support this.
So, what do you have to lose?
Even if you think it’s goofy, it can’t hurt and it will change your own emotions and your internal well-being.
So take a deep breath… find that place of peace inside yourself where you know all is well. Access that area of inner calm…and then just feel the fires going out; imagine the hurricanes heading out to sea; envision the earth’s core relaxing; and perceive that all the people affected are safe, sound, and protected.
Stop, breathe, focus, pray, or in some positive way send out an energy that will help dissolve the fear.
It’s your way of making a difference in the face of disaster, even if you can’t send lots of money or travel to the scene to help.
Check out the book Unconditional Bliss by Howard Cushnir. He says you can find happiness in the face of hardship.
And in the words of Joe Vitale, “… be happy, right now. Smile. Send that loving energy out, in the direction of Texas.
Intend for all to be well, for, in reality, all is well.”
Tags: anxiety, belly fat, brain fog, burnout, cortisol, fatigue, fear, HeartMath, hormones, Joe Vitale, stress, weightloss
Posted in Adrenal Fatigue, Brain Fog, Chronic Stress, Events, Exhaustion, Fatigue Treatment, Health Coach, Reduce Belly Fat, Vibrant Health
Thyroid Issues: What’s Really Leaving You Feeling Flabby, Foggy, and Fatigued!
- by Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo
Thyroid imbalance can leave you feeling flabby, foggy, fatigued and unfocused because your thyroid gland rules your metabolic rate.
Fatigue is a huge part of thyroid imbalance… and not just general fatigue either. Did you know that your organs and glands can suffer from fatigue? Your skin and immune system can too.
When you turn down the internal metabolic furnace and burn your fuel more slowly, the inevitable result is weight gain or the inability to easily shed your extra pounds. Generally, this slow-down is accompanied by a feeling of exhaustion, but not always.
Often the “exhaustion” is at a cellular level. When your skin is tired, you get outbreaks and slow wound healing. When your digestion becomes sluggish, you may experience constipation or indigestion. A fatigued immune system can’t adequately protect you from microbes and starts to attack itself. And a worn out liver is unlikely to be efficient at eliminating toxins.
While fatigue and exhaustion can have many causes, an underactive thyroid is a very common one. And what most people don’t realize is that most hypothyroidism (about 80%) is caused by an autoimmune process. Which, incidentally, means the real cause of your fatigue and weight gain has nothing to do with your thyroid. The thyroid gland is just an innocent bystander in the war that’s raging in your immune system, for it’s your immune system that creates antibodies that attack the thyroid and make it malfuntion. So simply replacing thyroid hormon without fixing your immune system does not solve the problem.
Learn all about thyroid function, testing, and a few tips to restore balance on my video here. It’s best to identify autoimmune thyroid problems early on, before your thyroid is completely destroyed. And the best way to do that is to balance your immune system. We’ll discuss that more in the new 5-part video series Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Brainfog, and Burnout, so be sure to sign-up and follow the series!
Join the program here:
Tags: belly fat, digestion, Exhaustion, fatigue, hormones, immune system balance, thyroid
Posted in Adrenal Fatigue, Brain Fog, Chronic Fatigue, Exhaustion, Fatigue Treatment, Hormone Imbalance, Reduce Belly Fat, Vibrant Health
