Reset Your Hunger Hormone

Lost Kilos Crept Back on and Can’t Work Out Why? Let Us Introduce You to a Little Hormone Called Leptin. New Science Has Revealed Keeping It Happy May Be the Key to Finding Your Perfect Weight

- Roisin Dervish - O'Kane

‘What goes around comes around.’ ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ ‘It’s just mind over matter.’ Cliches are designed to make us feel better. That last one, though, is often bandied about as a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to weight loss – or rather the lack of it. Hate to break it to you, but this one is slightly more realistic: ‘Your body actually wants you to be fat.’ Oh. But it’s not doing it out of spite, we promise. “You’re hardwired to want to hold on to fat because that tells your brain how long you can survive without food,” says geneticist Dr Giles Yeo. The culprit behind this self-sabotage? A hormone called leptin. The secret? Get to know leptin and you can make it work with, not against, you. Here’s how...

Don’t be mistaken, leptin’s a good egg – it regulates appetite, tells you you’re full and to step away from the buffet. It lives in your fat cells though, so if you lose weight, you’ll also kiss goodbye to some of your leptin. And less leptin means fewer ‘stop eating’ messages. So you keep munching.

As well as increasing your appetite, this response slows your metabolism (the rate at which you burn fat for fuel). “From the first time you lose a significant amount of weight, your body is always trying to bring you back up,” says Yeo. Research from the UK’s University of Exeter backs him up, revealing that those who try to lose weight by dieting actually end up gaining more in the long term than those who’ve never dieted. Yep, bummer.

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