Your Hormones

It’s not excess calories that are the culprit of your weight gain, it’s your hormones.

Let me explain.

There are three hunger hormones.

Hormone #1 – Ghrelin

Ghrelin is the hormone that tells you that you’re hungry. An easy way to remember this is that ghrelin sounds like growlin’ (what your stomach does when it’s hungry). Ghrelin is very useful if it is regulated properly. It operates on an internal clock. If you’re use to eating at certain times during the day, your body will release ghrelin at those times. If you change your eating schedule, say you want to cut out snacking, you’re going to feel hungry during your normal snack times because ghrelin will automatically be released. This hormone is easy to reregulate. If you ignore it for 3-5 days, ghrelin will work itself out and reregulate to your new schedule. Again, remember it’s okay to feel hungry. You will not starve. 

Hormone #2- Leptin

Leptin is the opposite of ghrelin. It tells you when you’re full, and it is also very useful. This hormone will also need to get reregulated in your body. Using the hunger scale will help. The problem with leptin, and why it’s included here, has to do with the third hormone, insulin. If you have too much insulin in your body, it blocks the ability for leptin to get through to your brain which results in you never really feeling full. When this is the case, you can eat and eat and still feel hungry.

Hormone #3- Insulin

Insulin is the hormone that regulates your blood sugar, also known as glucose. It basically takes the sugar in your bloodstream, which comes from eating all kinds of foods, out of your bloodstream and into the cells of your body. Your cells then either use the glucose as energy or they store it as fat. Without insulin, we would literally starve and die.

If you have a weight issue, you have way too much insulin in your body, way too often. Insulin is the fat storing hormone. Its job is to store fat.

This fat storage is good. Our body needs fat so it can access it later on so if we can’t find food, we won’t starve to death and die. This worked great for people living centuries ago who had little access to food – think of the cavemen or the pioneers. The problem in our society is that we have an overabundance of food. We are eating so frequently that our body never gets the chance to access our stored fat. When you have too much of this stored fat, your body carries extra weight.

When insulin is present in the bloodstream, we do not burn fat; we are in fat storage mode. All the sugary, floury, over-processed fake foods we’re eating these days release a lot of insulin. The more insulin, the more fat you will store, the more fat you store, the more fat you have on your body. It’s as simple as that.