The Simplicity of Wellness Podcast
The Simplicity of Wellness podcast is about learning how to bring your body into balance so that you get leaner, stronger and healthier as you age. Each week I'll share thoughts and ideas that help my clients build the self-awareness, self-confidence and self-reliance to lose weight, shed inches, manage muscle mass and master their mind so that they can stop dieting and enjoy living at their healthy weight with optimal wellness.
The Simplicity of Wellness Podcast
Leptin: The 'I'm Full' Hormone
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Ever wondered why despite feeling full, you still reach for that extra bite? Discover the fascinating world of metabolic hormones in this episode of the Simplicity of Wellness podcast. We unravel the discovery of leptin by Dr. Jeffrey Friedman and its profound implications on obesity and weight management. Learn how this "I'm full" hormone, produced in fat cells, influences satiety and what happens when its signals go awry. We'll also explore the intricate dance between leptin and insulin, and how inflammation can throw this delicate balance into turmoil, impacting everything from energy production to immune function.
Looking to get a grip on your dietary habits without turning your life upside down? We've got you covered. This episode guides you through a practical approach to balancing your metabolic hormones by examining your current diet. Conduct a food inventory with us to reflect on your sugar and carbohydrate intake, and learn simple, effective tweaks to improve your metabolic health. Whether you're aiming to shed a few pounds, build muscle, or simply feel better, we offer actionable advice to reconnect with your body and enjoy the foods you love. Tune in, share your thoughts, and don’t miss next week's episode for more insights and tips on your wellness journey!
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Welcome to the Simplicity of Wellness podcast. I'm your host, board-certified holistic nutritionist and professional life coach, amy White. The purpose of this podcast is to share information that you can use to become leaner, stronger and healthier by losing weight, shedding inches, maintaining muscle and managing your mind, all while living your normal busy life in this modern, sugar-filled world.
Speaker 2:Hello simplifiers. Today I want to expand on last week's Metabolic Hormone Podcast and introduce you to leptin, the I'm full hormone. I'm hoping today's episode will shed some light on the phrase if I look at a cookie, I gain weight, in other words, why two people can eat the exact same thing and one person can easily put on weight while the other person doesn't. I'm going to start with what leptin is and why it matters when it comes to weight loss and managing your body. I'll then go through the particulars about leptin where it's produced in the body, what stimulates that production, why you need it, the relationship between insulin and leptin, how it can become problematic and, finally, what you can do to keep your leptin levels healthy. Leptin was discovered by Jeffrey Friedman at Rockefeller University in 1994. Jeff Friedman is an MD and a PhD who studies how the body regulates food intake and body weight, something I think we all would like to know more about.
Speaker 2:Through his research with mice, dr Friedman discovered that leptin was a hormone that had a direct relationship to obesity. He discovered that there were mice that didn't have the hormone leptin. They had no leptin in their body due to a gene mutation. He had other mice who did have leptin, but hormone leptin. They had no leptin in their body due to a gene mutation. He had other mice who did have leptin, but no leptin receptor on cells. So no way for their little mouse bodies to use the leptin they had. In both cases these mice were hugely obese. If you want to see the mice, google OB-OB mice the first picture that popped up for me was two white mice, one very large mouse next to a normal-sized mouse.
Speaker 2:Dr Friedman discovered that the normal-sized mice, unlike the obese mice, had leptin which their body processed normally. He injected the mice that didn't have any leptin with leptin and the mice lost weight and dropped back to a normal size very rapidly. As you can imagine, this was super exciting. So they decided to test this on people. Sadly, the results weren't what they were hoping for. However, the human testing wasn't a total bust. They did discover that there are people who are born without leptin. It's not common but it does happen, and this is something that is typically discovered when a person's very young. When these children are given leptin therapy, their size does normalize and keep them from rapid, uncontrolled weight gain throughout their life. Most people don't have a leptin mutation. Most people have no trouble making leptin. In fact, people who are overweight and obese actually have too much leptin, which is why injecting more leptin didn't work. It was like adding gasoline to a fire.
Speaker 2:So what is leptin? To be very specific, it's a peptide hormone that's produced primarily in your fat cells. Your body also makes some leptin in muscle cells and even in some stomach cells, but most of it comes from your fat cells. Your body also makes some leptin in muscle cells and even in some stomach cells, but most of it comes from your fat cells. The more fat you have, the more leptin you have. As your body fat increases, so does your leptin.
Speaker 2:Leptin is known as the stop eating hormone. It tells your body when you're satiated and to stop eating. This makes it appear that being overweight would be a good thing, because your body would have a lot of the stop eating hormone so you wouldn't overeat. Clearly that is not what's happening, or being overweight would be a very fleeting thing. Leptin in the right amount is a good thing and allows the leptin to do its job effectively. Too much leptin throws your metabolism out of balance, and that's when all the signaling to eat, to stop eating, to stop storing fat, gets messed up. This brings me to what stimulates leptin to be released. The number one thing in your body that tells fat cells to release leptin is the hormone insulin. Last week's podcast was all about insulin, so if you haven't listened to that podcast, you should go back and listen to it now. Fat cells do secrete leptin on their own, but when insulin is circulating through your body, your fat cells release just about double the amount of what would be considered a normal, healthy amount.
Speaker 2:The second big thing that impacts how much leptin your body releases is inflammation. Like I explained in last week's podcast, I am not talking about obvious acute inflammation related to a big wound or an injury. I'm talking about total body inflammation being dialed up on a cellular level. For example, the kind of underlying ongoing inflammation that happens with a food intolerance. An unaddressed food intolerance is you putting something in your body that your body can't process properly, so it's always in a fight against this substance. That ongoing fight causes inflammation on a cellular level. Guess what else stimulates cellular inflammation? Fat cells. As your fat cells grow and get bigger, they become more pro-inflammatory, meaning they promote inflammation in the body.
Speaker 2:You actually need leptin. You want leptin circulating in your body, and leptin does come from fat cells, so a healthy body has a healthy level of fat tissue. Fat cells are storage tanks. A healthy fat cell isn't huge. It's a space to hold fuel until needed. A healthy body holds fuel and uses that fuel regularly. A healthy fat cell doesn't just keep growing and growing. It cycles fuel, it expands and contracts. In a healthy body and balance.
Speaker 2:Leptin regulates your metabolism by controlling how much insulin your body releases and by decreasing your appetite. Leptin helps your cells produce energy, which is what keeps you from feeling tired all the time. Healthy leptin levels promote fertility, so women can get pregnant and have healthy babies. Leptin influences your body's ability to make thyroid hormone. It helps manage your immune system so that you can heal and fight off infection. It plays a key role in keeping your blood pressure normal. It also helps a young body grow and remodel bone. These are all things that leptin is necessary for and does well in a healthy body. When your metabolic hormones are out of balance, you can have problems in all of these areas.
Speaker 2:One of leptin's biggest jobs is to calm insulin when, in a normal, healthy range, increasing leptin tells the body to shut down the release of insulin. Leptin and insulin have a kind of checks and balances relationship, because as insulin climbs, it stimulates or encourages the release of leptin. High insulin is bad. Leptin counters insulin. It's almost as if insulin knows once it gets going it has a hard time stopping, so it calls in its friend leptin to keep it in line.
Speaker 2:Now here's where things get interesting. Back to that idea of I look at a cookie and I gain weight. It is impossible for the human body to become obese unless insulin is involved. The lack of leptin in a mouse or human body will cause rapid and excessive weight gain. But this isn't the result of just a leptin imbalance. The body needs a trigger to induce fat growth. Leptin is a product of fat cells, but it doesn't cause your fat cells to get bigger to grow. For weight gain or fat gain to happen, you need insulin. Here's how all of this shows up as a problem in your life.
Speaker 2:Insulin is what causes your fat cells to grow. Without insulin, your body won't store fat. Type 1 diabetics don't have enough insulin. Without that insulin, they will waste away to skin and bones and die. A type 1 diabetic injects insulin to stop their body from breaking down. The insulin allows them to be able to store energy. Insulin is what tells your fat cells what to do with incoming calories. When insulin is high, it orders that food energy to move into your fat cells and make those cells expand, get bigger. When insulin is low, the body gets the metabolic okay to burn off that stored energy. Most people who are overweight or obese have too much fat and in turn have too much leptin. They're suffering with leptin resistance. They have so much leptin being released from their fat cells that their body just ignores leptin's orders. The checks and balance system for insulin is blown. The leptin isn't calming the insulin, so insulin, in the words of Dr Friedman, goes sky high. There's nothing to stop it. So your body is perpetually in fat storage mode.
Speaker 2:If you believe that weight gain and obesity are a calorie problem, then it would make sense that a leptin problem would be the cause of this. The logic would say that without the proper messaging from leptin, your appetite is never told to shut down, so you're always hungry and therefore overeating. Calories do matter, but from the research I've done and what I've seen with my own clients, the hormones that control what the body does with those calories also matters. I believe the hormones matter more than the actual calories. This is a good thing. This is how you lose weight without dieting misery. Learning to manage your metabolic hormones so that they function properly is how you get your body to help you lose weight and keep that weight off. Long term has shown that if you feed mice the exact same food, so the calories and macros the carbs, fats, proteins are all the same, the mice that have leptin and insulin problems, so metabolic hormone imbalance will get hugely obese, while their metabolically balanced counterparts won't gain any weight eating the exact same thing. So if you're a person who says I look at a cookie and I gain weight, it's likely your metabolic hormones are out of balance. If you're frustrated because your friends don't feel the same way, they eat cookies and don't gain weight then it's likely their metabolic hormones are in balance. Your metabolism is set to store calories as fat rather than burn those calories for energy. I'm sure if any of this is hitting home for you, you're ready to figure out what you can do to regain metabolic balance.
Speaker 2:The first thing you need to fully understand is what causes this metabolic imbalance. Number one too much circulating insulin. High insulin all the time. Are insulin resistance? Number two too much circulating leptin. Are leptin resistance, circulating leptin or leptin resistance. And then, number three, chronic cellular inflammation, which is a result of both too much insulin and too much leptin. So here's what you can do To manage your insulin.
Speaker 2:You need to control how much sugar hits your bloodstream and how often that sugar hits. As someone who is overweight or obese, this means cutting back on your incoming sugars. That means cutting back on the grain-based carbs and other processed carbohydrates. You'll want to switch out starchy carbs like rice, pasta and potatoes for more fiber-rich carbs in the form of vegetables that grow above ground. You'll also want to eliminate or at least severely cut back on high sugar foods like muffins, ice cream, candy, cake, jelly, fruit juice and even alcohol. Once you get your blood sugar into a healthy, normal range, you will lose weight. Your sugar cravings will go away, your energy will go up and you'll feel comfortable eating three meals a day, or two big meals and a mini meal. The weight loss will impact your leptin because you'll reduce the size of your fat cells, which means you'll secrete less leptin. This is a good thing. You want less leptin so that it can work effectively. Working effectively means your body hears leptin and responds to the direction it's giving the leptin will once again effectively calm your appetite and calm your insulin.
Speaker 2:What I just described is what you do in phase one of Mayhengred Healthy Coaching Program. You adjust your diet to bring your metabolic hormones into your insulin. What I just described is what you do in phase one of my Hangry to Healthy coaching program. You adjust your diet to bring your metabolic hormones into balance so that your body can help you hit your weight loss and health goals. I say phase one because what I just described is not a lifelong eating plan. It's too restrictive and much more of a rebalance intervention. It's what you do to regain metabolic balance. Once in balance, you then figure out how to work with your body going forward so that you can maintain that balance even when you add back foods you originally cut back or eliminated. And that's what you do in phase two and three of the Hangry to Healthy program. Creating balance is step one, but learning how to maintain that balance is actually the bigger achievement. It's time to join my Hangry to Healthy program when you're ready to bring your body into balance so that you feel in control with food and never again have the thought if I look at a cookie, I gain weight. Follow the link in the show notes to go to the Hangry to Healthy program page so you can see exactly how you'll benefit from becoming a Hangry to Healthy client.
Speaker 2:Take some time over the next week to do a food inventory. What do you eat all the time? How many sugars and carbs are in those foods? Do you suspect that your metabolic hormones are out of balance? What kind of adjustments can you make right now that would help manage your metabolic hormones? As always, if you liked the episode, please share it with your friends and drop some stars and a review. I'll be back next week with a new episode. Do you like the idea of eating for the body you want? Is there a piece of you that's eager to learn how to become leaner, stronger and healthier without having to overhaul your entire life? If this is you, then you're in luck, because this is what I do. I can help you reconnect and work with your body so that you can enjoy the body, comfort and confidence you deserve, eating foods you love. Click the free consult link in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about where you are, what you want and how you can get there.
