THE HUNGER GAMES

Hack your appetite

It’s only 11.30am but you’ve already started counting down the minutes until lunchtime, which is at 1pm. Today you’ll be lucky if you make it to noon. You can feel yourself becoming irritable and impatient, and the smell of fresh coffee and croissants wafting over from your neighbour’s desk isn’t helping either.

To take your mind off food, you pop a piece of gum and start scrolling mindlessly through social media. But then there it is on Pinterest: a slice of moist chocolate cake, dripping in caramel. And before you know it, you’re in the canteen ordering a brownie and a large latte. It feels as if you haven’t eaten in days, but in reality you had a bowl of oats and a banana at 8am, rice cakes with Marmite at 10.30am and several cups of coffee in between. So why are you so ravenous?

INSULIN

This hormone is made in the pancreas and its primary job is to allow cells to absorb glucose from the bloodstream to use as energy. If you eat too many refined carbohydrates over an extended period of time, this mechanism can become faulty and ultimately damaged, resulting in insulin resistance. The cells no longer respond properly to insulin prompting the pancreas to secrete more insulin and causing a build-up of glucose in the bloodstream.

When this happens and insulin can’t do its job, you can experience what is known as insulin resistant hunger. Rather than being physically hungry, you might experience it as a ‘gnawing’ desire to eat.

Think back to the earlier example. Even though you

Meet the culprits: hunger hormones insulin, ghrelin and leptin.

weren’t physically hungry, your body gave you the signal to eat. In these situations you know you’re not ‘supposed’ to be eating, but your body continues to send you the signals. As a result you find yourself gorging on high-carb or sugary snacks – chomping on cucumber sticks or a piece of biltong simply won’t do the trick. Your body prefers to use carbohydrates or glucose as its primary fuel, so if you are eating a high-carbohydrate diet (or have been in the past), your body will first try to utilise the carbohydrate before tapping into calories from fat or protein. And so the vicious cycle continues. The more refined carbohydrates you eat, the more your energy levels fluctuate between high and low throughout the day.

So what you’re doing is going from one meal to the next – with several snacks in between – and never truly feeling like you are running on ‘real’ energy. You’re merely trying to prevent yourself from running on empty.

To make matters worse, regardless of how little you eat, it becomes extremely difficult to tap into your fat stores if you’re trying to lose weight.

If you eat a diet high in sugar and simple carbohydrates your body will prompt you to continue eating these foods, which will keep you hungry and craving carbs. Often the craving is so intense that it feels impossible to ignore.

GHRELIN

This hormone is produced in your stomach and secreted when it is empty. It enters the bloodstream and affects a part of the brain known as the hypothalamus, which governs your hormones and appetite. Ghrelin levels typically rise before a meal, when your stomach is empty, and decrease shortly afterwards when your stomach is full. Irrespective of how much body fat you have, ghrelin levels increase when you start a diet, leaving you feeling hungry and ‘deprived’. This is a natural response from your body, which tries to protect you from starvation. Within a couple of days of starting a diet your ghrelin levels will rise and continue to do so over the course of a few weeks, which will leave you hungrier and make it a lot more challenging to maintain any weight loss.

LEPTIN

Leptin is essentially the antithesis of ghrelin. It’s often referred to as the ‘fullness hormone’. Its primary job is to send signals to your brain to let you know you are full or satiated, and that you should stop eating. At the same time leptin sends signals to your brain to ‘turn on’ your metabolism and thus start converting food to energy.

As leptin levels rise, you will be less hungry; as leptin levels decrease, you feel hungrier. Likewise, rising leptin levels will increase your rate of metabolism, while falling levels will slow your metabolism.

So if this hormone is so finely tuned, why do we struggle with hunger/satiety signals and continue to gain weight?

According to Dr Robert Lustig, Professor of Paediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, the problem is that although overweight people have large amounts of leptin, their brains aren’t getting the important signal to stop eating because of something called leptin resistance. Leptin resistance is similar to insulin resistance, in which the pancreas produces large amounts of insulin, but the body doesn’t respond to it properly.

Leptin levels continue to rise as people gain weight. ‘We all have a leptin floor; the problem is, we don’t have a leptin ceiling,’ explains Lustig. ‘In leptin resistance, your leptin is high, which means you’re overweight if not obese, but your brain can’t see it. In other words, your brain is starved while your body is obese. And that’s what obesity is: it’s brain starvation.’

None of this is particularly encouraging. The idea that your brain could be sabotaging your weight loss efforts is rather depressing! Fortunately, there are steps you can take to keep these hormones in check. See the table on the next page.

The vicious cycle continues. The more refined carbs you eat, the more your energy levels fluctuate throughout the day.

Worry not! There are several ways to make your hormones work for YOU. Here's how...

• If you haven’t already started following an LCHF lifestyle, start now. Remove all refined carbohydrates and sugars from your diet and focus on eating fresh, whole foods. Even having fruit alone can trigger a spike and then a drop in insulin, leaving you ravenous in no time. If you are going to have fruit, add some nuts, a piece of cheese or full-fat plain yoghurt to it. For those who are trying to lose weight and/or combat insulin resistance, keep your daily carb content to a minimum (no more than 50g) and go easy on dairy.

• Include a source of protein at all meals. This will help lower your ghrelin levels and minimise a spike in insulin levels to keep hunger levels at bay throughout the day.

• Eat foods that improve leptin sensitivity: red meat, almonds, spinach, broccoli, eggs and green tea can all assist with leptin resistance prevention. They’re also low in carbs and rich in micronutrients so you can’t go wrong.

• Get enough sleep. Aim for a minimum of seven hours each night. Getting adequate rest helps keep your ghrelin and leptin levels in check.

• Do some exercise – but do the right kind of exercise! For years, generic weight loss advice given by most health care providers focused on low-to-moderate aerobic activity such as walking or running 30–60 minutes every day. Research from the past decade reports that ghrelin increases (and therefore appetite goes up) and also that leptin decreases after these types of exercises, making this notion obsolete. Instead of doing this style of ‘steady state cardio’, rather do some high intensity interval training (HIIT) a few times a week. Sessions don’t need to be long: just 20 minutes will do the trick, as long as you get your heart rate high enough. HIIT is one of the best ways to manage hunger, as it manipulates ghrelin and leptin levels. HIIT can also increase lean muscle mass and help you lose that extra stubborn visceral (belly) fat.