Hormones and Fat Loss Part Two

I hope you all enjoyed my last post on the hormone Leptin. We should now all have a better understanding when it comes to fat loss and leptin.

Now to further your knowledge of hormones, today we will focus on Ghrelin. What? Ghrelin, yes thats right. It sounds like jibberish and something I made up, but this hormone is responsible for telling you if you're hungry or not. Usually it will tell you that you're hungry all the time. Then you over eat, then you're sitting at 10+ lbs you shouldn't have gain last Christmas.

So let's dive right in further detail about our new friend Ghrelin.

We've all been there. We ate about an hour ago, you get bored at home and you "feel" like you can snack on something. But really you don't need to. Your brain is telling you no, but your body is telling you yes. Then you find yourself in the fridge and pantry going through every snack you have ever bought in the last month and feel disgusted that you finished off a half eaten bag of chips.

Ghrelin is your hunger hormone and is produced in your hypothalamus (in your brain) kidneys and along with your pituitary gland. (That was just an lesson from good old high school bio) Ghrelin is also synthesized in and released by the stomach whenever its empty, throughout the night and when you wake up each day. 

Here is the important thing to remember, Ghrelin follows a schedule, this schedule is based on your eating routine. Now if you plan your meals accordingly you can keep your hunger signals in check. But if you tend to skip meals, like forgetting to eat breakfast, you end up feeling hungry all the time and end up snacking; then when you're supposed to eat, your too full, and then the whole world explodes.

This is the spiral you don't want to go down. To make matters worse if you combine a horrible eating schedule along with bad sleep habits you get a shit storm. Ghrelin and poor sleep are like the annoying couple you know. Always posting pictures on Facebook, doing things, and you could care less if they bought matching T Shirts over the weekend.

The lack of sleep impacts the hormone levels in your brain which in turn pushes ghrelin to activate more frequently and there you have it, you are snacking uncontrollably. Now if this sounds like you, a simple step is to work on better sleep quality and a better eating schedule.

This is why I nag my clients to make it a habit to eat every 3-4 hours and have at least 7 hours of solid sleep.

If you can control these two factors, you can do anything when it comes to any fitness related goal!

Let me know if you have any questions!