Three Effective Ways to Control Your Hunger Hormones
Smart weight loss is about knowledge, not willpower
What makes you want to eat? However complex your motivations may seem, the hunger game is essentially a game of hormones. Don’t turn it into a power struggle — you can learn how to trigger or suppress the hormones involved in the desire to eat, and stay in control of your appetite.
These hormones were forged during the evolution of our species. Evolution is about survival. That’s why, when you reduce your food intake, you automatically trigger a cascade of hormones whose mission it is to break your will and force you to eat, in order to prevent starvation. It’s not you; it’s your biology.
Of all the hormones involved in making you hungry, none is more potent than ghrelin. That is why it is often called the “hunger hormone”.
Ghrelin is a peptide, secreted principally in the stomach, that stimulates appetite by acting as a hunger signal. It targets the hypothalamus region of the brain and the vagus nerve to stimulate the desire to eat. The vagus nerve is a direct line of communication between gut and brain.
Sooner or later you will succumb. That’s the whole idea. When you eventually and inevitably give up on the diet, you find you overeat to compensate, and regain more weight. It’s a phenomenon somewhat charmingly called “fat overshooting”.
The good news is that high ghrelin secretion is not a given. It is very much influenced by factors that are within your control: what and when you eat. If your goal is to take a healthy, long-term approach to weight loss, you need to plan ahead.
You also need to become familiar with other hormones that interact with ghrelin and with each other. The main ones are leptin, peptide YY (PYY) and cholecystokinin (CCK).
Leptin is key to appetite control. It works in opposition to ghrelin by suppressing hunger. In order to burn fat stored in your adipose tissue, you need to produce plenty of this appetite-suppressing hormone. Secreted predominantly by fat cells, and in the small intestine, leptin informs the brain that you are full, and further eating is not required.
CCK has been the subject of some intense research over the last thirty years, mainly because of its influence on the gut-brain connection. This hormone is secreted throughout the small intestine and is released after eating. It inhibits gastric emptying, meaning that it slows down the rate at which food leaves the stomach, so you stay fuller for longer. Like ghrelin, it also acts on the vagus nerve, informing the brain that you are full.
CCK induces the feeling of fullness. It suppresses ghrelin and stimulates the release of another appetite-suppressing hormone, PYY.
PYY is secreted further down the digestive tract, following ingestion of food. Levels increase after eating, reducing appetite, and decrease during fasting. PYY rises within 15 minutes of eating and reaches a peak 1–2 hours after eating, and can stay high for several hours.
PYY increases energy expenditure and the rate of fat oxidation. But how long it does this after eating depends on what you eat.
Three ways to work those hormones
1 Eat quality protein with each meal
Food is composed of three macronutrients: fat, protein and carbohydrate. Protein is considered the most satiating, and studies consistently demonstrate that high protein meals are the most effective way to suppress appetite and therefore reduce food intake.
“Higher protein weight-loss diets have led to beneficial reductions in body weight, fat mass, and food intake, while preserving lean body mass, and improving satiety in overweight and/or obese individuals. Because of these benefits, higher protein diets are potentially a preferable dietary strategy in combating obesity than traditional reduced energy diets.”
A quality protein includes meat, fish, dairy and eggs. Base your meals on these foods. A diet consisting of 30% protein has been found to markedly increase fullness, and to lead to reduced desire to eat.
If your diet is low in protein, ghrelin secretion increases, which is what you are trying to avoid.
The effect is long lasting, too: protein suppresses concentrations of ghrelin once you have finished eating, and for prolonged periods thereafter. It also increases levels of both CCK and PYY.
2 Cut carbs, eat more fat
When you cut out carbohydrates and increase your intake of fat, along with protein, you switch from burning glucose for fuel to burning fat, and you make ketones in the process. Ketones are proteins that provide the body, especially the brain, with energy.
Once you are burning ketones, you are essentially ketogenic. Weight loss on a ketogenic diet is associated with decreased appetite and “altered gut hormone levels”, in particular elevated levels of PYY and reduced ghrelin.
This effect has been demonstrated in an interesting experiment. When volunteers were given either a ketone drink or a dextrose (glucose) drink, following an overnight fast, ghrelin levels were “significantly” lower 2–4 hours after consumption of the ketone drink, compared to the dextrose drink. Both drinks had the same number of calories and looked and tasted the same.
“Increased blood ketone levels may directly suppress appetite, as KE drinks lowered plasma ghrelin levels, perceived hunger, and desire to eat”.
Of all three macronutrients, carbohydrate is the least effective when it comes to suppressing appetite. So cut out the bread, rice, cereals, pasta, potatoes and so on. They raise your blood glucose, and inhibit fat burning.
One sugar you should definitely limit is fructose. Fructose is fruit sugar. The amount found in fruit is fine, but high levels of fructose, as found in soft drinks and fruit juice, reduce circulating leptin and increase appetite. So fruit juice not only does nothing to fill you up, it actually makes you more hungry.
3 Get enough sleep
Your metabolic rate falls by around 15% during sleep. If you think about it, this is a surprisingly small reduction for such apparent inertia. But don’t be deceived; as you slumber, blissfully unaware of the workings of your autonomic nervous system, your body is busy carrying out innumerable metabolic processes, and your brain is burning fuel furiously.
Lack of sufficient sleep is a risk factor for weight gain: adults who sleep less than seven hours a night are more likely to become obese than adults who sleep 7–8 hours.
Hormones clearly play an important role.
“Reduced sleep duration (both acute and chronic) and poor-quality sleep are linked with impaired glucose tolerance, reduced insulin responsiveness following glucose challenge, increased body mass index, decreased levels of leptin, and increased levels of ghrelin”
Look after your brain, and it will repay you in kind. Sleep for seven to eight hours, in a darkened room, and your brain will switch on the hormones that initiate fat burning.
Sleep too little and the whole metabolic balancing act is thrown into reverse. Leptin levels fall and ghrelin increases if you are sleep-deprived. Consequently, poor sleep leads to increased hunger and appetite.
It is in your interest to allow leptin to get on with its job; however, if you don’t get enough sleep, it can’t. There is an interesting piece of research that has been ongoing since 1988, called the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study. One notable finding to emerge from this continuous research is that a loss of three hours sleep (five hours instead of eight) is associated with low leptin production.
Interestingly, sleep-deprived individuals also appear, from studies, to be predisposed to overeat. One study found that participants ate around 300 more calories a day when they were sleep deprived.
What’s more, they tended to eat more carbohydrates and snack more.
“Furthermore, the preference for high carbohydrate foods suggests sleep deprived individuals may make unhealthy food choices, and a study in Japan has found that self-reported short sleepers do in fact report less health eating behaviors, such as irregular meals, increased frequency of snacking and a preference for salty foods”
In summary, to play the hunger game to your advantage you need to eliminate carbohydrates and increase protein and fat intake . Ditch any notion of attempting — yet again — to reduce your calorie intake. See the article below for further details of why calorie restriction is such a bad idea.
Base your meal around a protein component, with some low carbohydrate vegetables on the side, such as leafy green vegetables.
And get enough sleep. For further information on the role of your circadian rhythms in improving metabolism, see:
