Yesterday’s water intake= 4 cups
Yesterday’s exercise = 0
Today’s Weight= 282.8 (-1.6 lbs)
What I’m learning from the book I’m reading, You on a Diet.
Two hormones dictate our hunger and satiety levels- leptin and ghrelin.
Leptin-Fat produces a chemical signal in your blood to stop eating. Leptin is a protein secreted by stored fat. If leptin is working the way it should, it gives you a double whammy in the fight against fat. The stimulation of leptin shuts off your hunger and stimulates you to burn more calories.
Ghrelin- This chemical is released in your stomach when it’s empty. It sends the desperate message that you need to eat something urgently. When you diet through deprivation, the increased ghrelin secretion sends even more signals to eat, overriding your willpower and causing you to eat. Your stomach secretes Ghrelin in pulses every 30 minutes, sending subtle chemical impulses to your brain. When you’re really hungry or dieting, those messages come fast- every 20 minutes or so- and they’re also amplified. So you get more signals and stronger signals that your body wants food. After long periods your body can’t ignore those messages.
It’s impossible to fight the biology of your body. The chemical vicious cycle stops when you eat; when your stomach fills is when you reduce your ghrelin levels, thus reducing your appetite. So if you think your job is to resist biology, you’re going to lose that battle time after time. But you can reprogram your body so that you keep those ghrelin gremlins from making too much noise, then you’ve got a chance to keep your tank feeling like it’s always topped off.
Ghrelin works in the short term, sending out those hunger signals twice an hour. Leptin works in the long term, so if you can get your leptin levels high you’ll have a greater ability to keep your hunger and appetite in check. If you focus on ways to influence your leptin levels, your brain will help control your hunger.
At least as far as your body is concerned, food are drugs; they’re foreign substances that come in and switch around all those natural chemical processes going about their business within your body. When the body receives foods, different chemical reactions take place, and messages get sent throughout your system- turning some things on and some things off. While your body internally gives orders, you set the tone and direction of those orders through the food you’re feeding it. Eat the right foods (like nuts), and your hormones will keep you feeling satisfied. But eat the wrong foods (like simple sugars), and you’ll cause your body to go haywire hormonally.
A major gang leader against your body is fructose, found in hig-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a sweetener in many processed foods. When you eat calories from healthy sources, they turn off your desire to eat by inhibiting production of NPY or producing more CART. But fructose in the HFCS, which sweetens our soft drinks and salad dressing; isn’t seen by your brain as a regular food. Because your brain doesn’t see any of the fructose in the thousands of HFCS-containing foods as excess calories or as NPY suppressants, your body wants you to keep eating (which means that even low-fat foods can have extremely bad consequences, calorie- and appetite-wise) Americans have gone from eating no pounds of this stuff per person in 1960 to eating more than 63 lbs of it every year (that’s 128,000 calories). That’s a contributor to weight gain. Foods with fructose- which may be in fact labeled as low-fat- make you both hungry and unable to shut off your appetite.
YOU tips:
Avoid drinking excessive alcohol- not solely because of its own calories, but also because of the calories it inspires you to consume later.
Choose unsaturated over saturated fat- meals high in saturated fat produce lower levels of of leptin. You can increase your satiety and decreased hunger levels by avoiding saturated fats found in such foods as high-fat meats (like sausage), baked goods, and whole-milk dairy products.
Read the labels. Don’t eat foods that have any of the following as one of the first five ingredients.
simple sugars
enriched, bleached, or refined flour
HFCS
Don’t confuse thirst with hunger. The reason some people eat is because their satiety centers are begging for attention. But sometimes, those appetite centers want things to quench thirst, not to fill the stomach. Thirst could be caused by hormones in the gut, or it could be a chemical response to eating; eating food increases the thickness of your blood, and your body senses the need to dilute it. When you feel hungry, first drink a glass or two of water to see if that’s really what your body wants.
Watch your carbs. Eating a super-high-carb diet increases NPY, which makes you hungry, so you should ensure that less than 50% of your diet comes from carbohydrates. Make sure that most of your carbs are complex, such as whole grains and vegetables.
Stay satisfied. Sex and hunger are regulated through the brain chemical NPY. Some have observed that having sex could help you control your food intake; by satisfying one appetite center, you seem to satisfy the other.
Manage your hormonal surges. There will be times when you can’t always manage your hormone levels; when ghrelin outslugs your leptin, and you feel hungrier than a lion on a bug-only diet. Develop a list of emergency foods to satisfy you when cravings get the best of you- things like V8 juice, a handful of nuts, pieces of fruit, cut-up vegetables, or even a little guacamole.
I took that opportunity to let him know the above mentioned. He asked if he could pray for me. He did. It was kind of awkward. I thought about it. I’m one of those people who smiles and says everything is ok. I’m more about helping others and tend to keep help at arm’s length away. While he was praying for me, I felt like others needed his attention. When I left there, I left kind of awed at the way things work out.