Okay, I just tried to bone up on mastering what leptin really is... Must have looked at 10 pub med article abstracts and a whole mess of commercials for that book...
I need some tylenol! (LOL... just kidding!!!)
Well it seems that the general function of the hormone Leptin is to tell the brain how much fat there is, and regulate three things...
1. How much we need to eat/or not eat....
2. How much energy we should be burning/conserving....
3. (In women) whether we have enough fat reserves to support a fetus, therefore affecting reproduction....
Since adipose cells produce the leptin, the bigger the cells, the more leptin the brain should be receiving... So the fatter we get, the more leptin we produce...
In theory, this should inhibit appetite and food intake should naturally be less... But apparently the whole "Mastering Leptin" argument is based on a hypothesis that obese people are infact, leptin resistant...
In other words, the brain simply doesn't realize it's there in the blood and can't get a good read on whether the person needs food or doesn't...
In normally functioning people, when we have too little fat, like in starvation, leptin is very low, and so hunger signals in the hypothalamus are activated... If it is high, because we have all this fat, theoretically the brain
should know to lower food intake and burn more calories...
My read on all this is that when we consistently overeat, and don't challenge our body's "picture" of itself, by staying in a rut... Stagnating...
We become leptin "resistant"... I personally believe that all the medical info basically points to the idea I have mentioned in some of my past postings of "becoming numb"....
We don't know when we are hungry when we are always eating, we tune out to the fact that our bodies really don't want that fat around and feel like crap, and when our minds say "time to get off your butt and burn some of this fat" we ignore it and just sit around some more...
I guess you won't find my take on this in the Pub Med articles, but I'm going to just stay out on my "Limb" and say that the whole
"Leptin Resistant" hypothesis, is just another way of saying we aren't really "Listening" to our bodies and are going into numbness and unconsciousness... We just tune out. So the rules for different eating behaviors, I believe, just puts some new input into the mix, and "wakes us up", both mentally and physically from our "rut"....
When I wake up in the morning, maybe due to all that leptin floating around in my pituitary, I usually have a bad appetite and don't want to eat.
As soon as I start moving around, and especially if I do a massage, or something physically active, my metabolism gets fired up again and I feel hungry... It's on/off... not steady...
I think that by having regular meals, we just promote balance and gently, not with these huge pendulum swings in appetite (nothing vs. starving) teach ourselves what is real hunger and whether we should and can afford to move around and exercise...
On an aside, not directly related to Leptin!, one of the common things people will say to me during a massage session is "oh my goodness, I had no idea how tense I was" or "I didn't know I was so sore there"...
Chronic tension, and pain often becomes something we just tune out to..
Until the therapist visits an area which is somehow experiencing dysfunction or this "dull" pain, it's very easy to just ignore it... Unlike an acute injury, chronic pain will often just become endured for long periods of time until, one day, there's some straw that breaks the camels back...
This is why I love and believe massage is so therapeutic.. It reminds the body to heal itself by bringing awareness to us about how we feel.... It breaks that cycle of unconscious stagnation by putting in some new "input" for the body and mind to process...
So I just say, don't worry about your Leptin resistance, just stay awake..
Feel your body, and listen...
Love,
"Dr" Deb
*my book is coming out in September. Advanced purchases receive a free gallon of Leptoturbocharger-GOYD'syne....
(the chemical component aka "get off your duff"syne)
NB the above editorial is not necessarily the views of the NoS network or it's leader! LOL.....