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This Is How Hormones Are Responsible For Your Weight
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Hormones are responsible for more than just the occasional binge eating and unusual cravings. As the levels of hormones change in your body, they control nearly every aspect of your weight from when you get hungry to when you’re most likely to store fat. Even fat cells themselves secrete multiple hormones. And guess what? You can actually harness and use these hormones to your advantage to achieve your weight loss goals. Read on to found out about the key hormones responsible for weight loss and how to include them in your strategy.
1. Leptin
The hormone leptin plays a key role in appetite control. In fact, it’s the hormone that makes you feel hungry and reminds you when you’re full. Studies have shown that having increased levels of body fat can make a person develop what is known as leptin resistance, which essentially means your brain is no longer affected by higher levels of leptin which would normally trigger you to feel full and causing you to stop eating. You see where this is going, right? While it’s not exactly known why the body exhibits this behaviour, what is clear is that it’s self-perpetuating: The more weight you gain, the less full you feel, the more you eat, the more weight you gain…and so on. The good news is that you can fight back against leptin resistance by having a good diet and a regular exercise regime. One good tip is to eat a breakfast with a high fiber content which will keep you full well throughout the day and prevent you from craving sugary and salty snacks, which will perpetuate the problem.
2. Insulin
Insulin is probably much more well-known than leptin. It’s role in the body is to pull extra glucose from the bloodstream when the levels of the sugar in your body shoot up, like when you drink a fizzy drink or just after eating a carb-heavy meal. If you eat too many carbohydrates such as white bread and pasta and/or consume too many sweets and fizzy drinks, insulin is likely to cause this excess sugar to be stored in the body as fat. Which of course is exactly what you don’t want! As with leptin, if you pile on extra bounds your body can also develop “insulin resistance”, which is precisely why overweight individuals are at a higher risk of developing diabetes, as they body no longer responds to insulin in the same way it did before, causing blood sugar levels to skyrocket. To prevent this and to control the amount of insulin your body produces, you must cut back on sugar. This could come under the obvious guise of alcohol and sweet treats like cake and biscuits, or it could be in the form of alcohol and refined carbohydrates. Switch these out of your diet as much as possible and replace them with fibrous foods which encourage a slow release of sugar in the bloodstream. This in turn means that your body is not having to suffer the spikes and drops which can send your insulin levels haywire.
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