Have you ever wondered why some people can eat anything they want and never gain an ounce and others just have to look at an ice cream to gain weight?
The answer may not be about willpower or discipline at all. The answer lies in a tiny little hormone that we didn’t even know existed until 1994…
Leptin is the master hormone that body weight and since its discovery it has revolutionized our understanding of weight gain.
Early experiments proved that leptin is key in keeping our bodies thin…
For example, mice bred to be incapable of producing leptin, would eat and eat, getting fatter, and fatter—and fatter. In fact, they would grow to three times their original body weight.
But when scientists injected the mice with leptin, they stopped being hungry, their metabolism sped up, and they got thinner. And the more leptin they got, the thinner they became.
You can imagine the excitement! They thought, “Wow! We’ve got the cure to obesity. All we have to do is give people leptin!”
So they started treating overweight people with the hormone leptin and guess what happened? Nothing!
The reason nothing happened was because overweight people already have a lot of leptin in their system. The actual problem is that their bodies are not listening to the leptin. Nearly all overweight people have a condition called ‘leptin resistance’.
See, leptin is a hormone basically tells your brain how much fat you have on your body.
If there’s too much leptin, your brain gets the message that you’re too fat and it makes certain subtle changes that will virtually ensure that you lose weight…
You become less hungry, your metabolism speeds up, your tongue becomes very sensitive to sweets, you become very efficient and burning fat, your body resists storing fat and boom! You lose weight easily and effortlessly. It’s as if your body actually wants to lose weight and it all happens automatically.
The problem is that sometimes the brain can become ‘leptin resistant’. Leptin resistant means that the brain actually stops ‘listening’ to leptin.
When that happens you become like one of those mice that can’t produce leptin, you just get fatter and fatter…
Having leptin resistance is the same as having no leptin in your body. Your brain gets ‘tricked’ into thinking that you have zero fat on your body and literally forces you to gain weight.
So you become insatiably hungry, your metabolism slows down, your body resists burning fat and you become very efficient at storing fat. It’s as if your body has been transformed into a fat storage machine.
Stress is the real culprit…
Research shows that it’s stress—what they call the Chronic Stress Response Network, that causes leptin resistance.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s the stress of famine, or cold weather, or just the day in, day out kind of stress of making ends meet, hating your job, or other stresses, like intestinal dysbiosis, leaky gut, toxins, sleep disorders, inflammatory foods, nutritional starvation.
Any and all chronic stress can make your body stop listening to leptin.
If you reverse the stress triggers your brain starts ‘listening’ to the master hormone again.
So you can fight 24/7 with willpower and discipline but in the end, it’s not about that—it’s about leptin.
The key to getting your body to want to be thin, and losing weight easily and keeping it off forever is reversing leptin resistance…
If you’d like to understand better what types of chronic stresses are causing leptin resistance in your body and activating your FAT programs, you can take our FREE FAT TRIGGER Quiz here.
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