All About Leptin

You've been dieting for a few months now but this past week you've noticed that you are having food cravings that seem stronger than a tornado ripping through the city. Every dessert that passes catches your full attention and you just can't seem to get your mind off all the goodies that hide in the pantry.

You may have also noticed that you are experiencing more fatigue than normal and it's taking a lot more motivation to get through your workouts.

What's going on you wonder? If you are a determined dieter and have a type A personality, you may pass this off as your own personal weakness; that you just don't have enough will-power and strength to stay the course and keep pushing yourself forward.

Unfortunately, if you do this you might just be worse off then before. This likely is not just a psychological battle you are fighting, but a physiological one.

There is a hormone called leptin that circulates in the body whose role it is to monitor current fat store status and try and maintain your body fat levels where they are. When you start losing weight, getting leaner and leaner, your leptin levels start to drop and this sends a signal to the brain that will try and get you to consume more food. It may slow your metabolism too, making any further fat loss hard to come by. Basically, leptin is the dieter's worst enemy.

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What To Do About This

The way to prevent leptin from becoming a problem however is to implement a day or two of higher calorie eating to help restore its levels closer to normal. Note that you will likely not restore it back to its original status; the only way to do that would be to gain back all the fat you lost, but you can get it back to a level where it is not making your cravings so strong you simply cannot tolerate them anymore.

On this day, you will particularly want to eat slightly more carbohydrates than you are used to as this seems to help leptin slightly more than fat or protein does. Also, do not be scared to bump your calorie intake up significantly. Many dieters will error on the side of caution and will end up not eating much more than they usually would. If you do this you are not going to see many benefits and likely the problem will not get any better at all. This is one day where you definitely do want to overfeed yourself. If you find it would be more comfortable to not eat quite so much, do this over two days so that you are overeating by a slightly lesser amount on both days (but you are still in fact overeating).

Try and institute a few of these into your diet program every so often. The leaner you are the more often you should be doing this as leanness is a key regulator of what the levels of leptin will be. You may face a gain of one pound or so after doing these higher calorie days but it is a small price to pay to get yourself back on the road to further weight loss.

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