Many people are avoiding fats in an effort to reduce weight. They may be doing the exact wrong thing. How can that be?
Meet Ghrelin and Leptin, they control your appetite.
Certain fats are essential to your health. For a start, without healthy fats you cant make hormones, and hormones control your hunger and appetite. Without these specific hormones, made from fats, you could be eating lots and never feel full or satisfied. That “want something” feeling never shuts down. It all gets out of control. So too little of the right fats or oils can lead to too much of a bad ones, or too much food in general, and then weight gets way out of balance.
Hormones control your hunger and appetite. A key hormone is ghrelin, which is secreted by your stomach when it is empty, to increase appetite and induce you to eat. The counter balance to ghrelin is leptin, the hormone which tells your brain that you are full so you naturally stop eating.
To regain control over your appetite and get back to a healthy weight you need certain fats to make hormones, to buffer your nerves, to support brain function.
What if you could turn down the hunger hormone and increase the fullness hormone? Would you eat less or maybe less often? This is worth knowing about. You actually can reduce production of hunger hormone ghrelin, in a number of ways, and maintain the fullness hormone leptin too.
According to Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz, both MDs, in their best seller, You: The Owner’s Manual, An Insider’s Guide to the Body that Will Make you Healthier and Younger, it can be quite easy and simple to reduce your appetite and feel full longer.
They explain if you have a cup of tea and piece of dry toast for breakfast, avoiding fats as dieters often do, you will digest that and pass it on to small intestine in about half an hour, leaving your stomach empty in a short time. That emptiness can trigger the production of hunger hormone ghrelin.
But if you put avocado or cheese or egg on the toast you will slow the digestive process. And why is that? What you put on the toast contains fat and fat will slow down digestion, keeping hunger at bay. And it also contains protein that needs digesting too. It can take three hours or more to process the toast with fat and protein so your stomach has some content and is not totally empty all that time. No need for more hunger hormone ghrelin.
If you put jam on your toast you are virtually putting a sugar on a sugar. That will digest and be absorbed quickly and leave your stomach empty too fast. All that sugar creates a blood sugar spike and then a drop that can leave you feeling flat and hungry in no time, setting off the production of hunger hormone ghrelin again. That sets you up to be looking for morning tea and a quick blood sugar fix long before lunchtime.
And if the jam had high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) added, a sugar substitute that is a sugar itself, it will make matters worse still, as HFCS inhibits leptin secretion, so your brain never gets a fullness message to cut out the appetite stimulating hormone ghrelin. As your carbohydrate, sugar and fructose corn syrup combination empty into small intestine quickly, you trigger hunger hormone ghrelin again.
So a little healthy fat can help you eat less and reduce weight without feeling hungry all the time. It could even be a good idea to have a little healthy fat before your biggest meal, like dinner at night, for instance.
The suggestion of the two MD authors, Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz, is to have maybe seventy calories, equivalent to about six walnuts, or twelve cashews, or some peanuts, before your meal to slow down digestion so you feel satisfied and full sooner as you eat dinner and don’t need to go back for seconds. These fats also help you absorb fat-soluble nutrients such as lycopene in tomatoes.
And another way to turn off the hunger hormone ghrelin is to include lots of fibre vegetables, plenty of greens, as part of your dinner. This provides bulk to create the full feeling that releases leptin, telling your brain you are full and turning off your appetite hormone.
Chew each mouthful at least 20 times is a further suggestion that has proven itself too. That means you will be paying attention to what is on your plate, on your fork, in your mouth, noticing the smell, the colour, the texture, and savouring the flavour of your food. The longer you spend chewing, the more full you will feel because it takes your stomach about 20 minutes to register fullness.
Eating too quickly or mindlessly while watching TV means you don’t register the amount of food you eat or the taste and just keep shovelling it in till the distension of your stomach finally stops you. The result is a stomach full of poorly chewed food that needs a lot more energy to dissolve the content before the stomach enzymes can do their job of splitting the foods’ chemical chains to simple components, to be absorbed and used as energy and repair material.
To regain control of your appetite you need to understand how appetite stimulating grehlin and fullness communicating leptin work and help them out.
You don’t have to avoid all fats to reduce weight. You just need the best fats that can be made into hormones, particularly ghrelin and leptin. Savour your food and take at least 20 minutes to chew really well before swallowing. Chewing makes more saliva and triggers the cascade of digestion through the whole digestive tract. Make sure you include lots of fibre foods to create bulk and trigger the fullness hormone. And add fats or oils from seeds and nuts and grains.
Aren’t you glad you met ghrelin and leptin. Work with them and not against them. Help them do their job of appetite control for you?