A topic that has really captured my interest lately is leptin and leptin resistance. Leptin is a hormone that was discovered in 1994. If you have never heard of leptin, or don’t really know what it is, you’re in good company. I heard of leptin for the first time just recently, in July (2009).
When I googled leptin, I found a few books and websites that looked like good starting places. Bookwise, I started with The Rosedale Diet
Dr. Rosedale advocates a lower-fat diet than I do, but the information about leptin was informative. I felt it was a pretty good introduction to leptin. I could not tell from the book, if Dr. Rosedale’s admonitions against overconsumption of fat was just the normal dietary taboo, or if there was actually something specific he knew about saturated fat and coconut oil that should cause me to remove it from my diet in order to restore leptin sensitivity. One final dissappointment for me was when I went back to the internet to check out Dr. Rosedale’s website, and found it to be a disconnect.
UPDATE: Rosedale’s website is back, and he has explained his position on coconut oil and saturated fat and frequent meals. See: Dr. Ron Rosedale and the Rosedale Diet.
As a nonscientist, the first thing to learn about leptin is that leptin, like insulin, is known to act as an adiposity signal. Isn’t that a great 50-cent word? I like it, but I’m going to use the more common version: FAT SWITCH. Leptin is the Master Fat Switch. Circulating leptin levels signal the brain to regulate appetite and metabolism. So: leptin levels turn our Master Fat Switch to STORE or BURN. If leptin levels remain elevated for a long time, your cells can become resistant, similar to the way a Type 2 Diabetic suffers from Insulin Resistance. Furthermore, leptin regulates insulin.
Significant weight loss for the obese is about controlling insulin and leptin. We have known for a long time that insulin senstivity is critical for weight loss. Now we know that leptin sensitivity is critical for improving insulin sensitivity. If you are obese, especially if you have significant abdominal or visceral fat, you are likely dealing with both insulin and leptin resistance. Your body will not give up the fat deposits as long as it cannot get the fat burning message from your leptin and insulin! Turn on the switch; burn off the fat!
Thus, the main goal of a Leptin Diet is to decrease your resistance to leptin, which in turn will turn your body’s Fat Switch from a position that makes you store fat, to a position that makes you burn fat.
The most relevant technique I learned to accomplish this from The Rosedale Diet, is a new rationale for meal timing. Common advice for people with insulin resistance is to eat more frequent, smaller meals to avoid the high blood sugar spikes that can be experienced after large meals, which I had been practicing for the past 3-5 years. I hated that program, for several reasons (which I might address in a future post…), but I kept it up in hopes of controlling my blood sugar, which – to tell the truth – was not cooperating at all!
Dr. Rosedale recommends only 3 meals a day, with no snacking in between. This flies in the face of everything I have heard, read or tried on a diet in the last 20 years! I haven’t heard any admonitions against “healthy snacking” for a long time. However, for the leptin resistant (and the insulin resistant, if I understood correctly), our bodies need 4-5 hours to digest a meal and then adjust hormonal secretions that “reset” our fat switch (your leptin and insulin levels). So, one of the main principles of the Rosedale diet is to allow this 4-5 hours to pass between meals. There is an additional requirement not to eat after dinner, and to try to get a good 10 hours or more between dinner and breakfast.
I rescheduled my meals immediately, and stopped all between-meal snacking. I increased my fat intake to keep my blood sugar stable throughout the increased time between meals. I do not cook or eat alone, so the best I could do was meals at 7 and 11 a.m. and after 5 p.m. I felt really lousy for the first few days, but my indigestion and headaches cleared up in only a few days. I’m not very good at gradual change. I’m a radical, so I just tough out the side effects of the sudden changes. I’m not suggesting this method for you. Numerous experts on change management recommend the opposite, but this works better for me. Usually.
I should probably also mention that Rosedale also addresses exercise as a means to improve leptin sensitivity. Exercise is well known to be one of the most effective means to improve insulin sensitivity. That’s not really where I’m headed with this post, so I’m not going to comment further on that right now. I’ll comment more about exercise after I read a book I just bought: The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution
While I continued my leptin research, I continued to eat my normal Low Carb diet, with plenty of fat, but limiting my meals to 3 per day, spaced as far apart as I could manage, while continuing in fellowship with my usual mealtime companions.
I regret now that I did not monitor my blood sugar more closely. It would have made this story much more exciting to know the actual levels! (sorry about that!!) But I hardly expected this to work so well or so quickly. I can say that my overt symptoms of high blood sugar all improved significantly by the end of the first week of spaced out meals. You know what I mean, right?? I wasn’t as thirsty, and didn’t have to get up as much to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I slept better and felt more rested in the morning. Stuff like that. So, I am certain that my blood sugar had started coming down a little. However, since I pay full price for my test strips, I didn’t want to use enough of them to really monitor my first week on this program.
Just how high was my blood sugar??? It was high. Too high. The last few times I had checked it, it was about 250-300. But I am unwilling to go on the terminal meds unless I absolutely have to, and I do not believe I have to!!
Studying leptin resistance and trying the 3 meal plan got me on the path I’m on now, and it’s really starting to work. Tune in for my next post, Leptin and Meal Timing, to see what happened next!
To be continued …
Lovin’ It Low Carb
Ramona Denton
Hi Ramona,
Found this interesting but did I miss something? You limited your meals to 3 space out a day. You feel better but your blood sugar is way up?? How is this good?
Maureen
Thanks for the comment!! I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. I was guessing that my blood sugar was actually DOWN, from the improvement in symptoms. But I also know it was still too high. I edited the post to try to clarify. I hope it makes more sense now.
Hi Ramona,
great to see that you’re researching leptin! You’ve definitely found the key to long term success. Dr. Rosedale has actually teamed up with Max International and their breakthrough that reduces leptin resistance. Worth looking at! Contact me if you need more info. I have been researching leptin for about a year now.
All the best,
Adrian
Adrian,
Thank you for the encouragement and the offer! I have really been feeling great since I have tried Dr. Rosedale’s suggestions. I checked out your website only briefly, but I’ll definitely go back. thanks again.
I found your experience with following 3 meals a day interesting. I have also had success sticking with 3 meals a day: – I have more energy and faster weight loss. I follow the rules set out by Byron Richards. I have looked at Dr. Rosedale’s information on the Mercola site and I did not find any reference to meal timing – I thought he advocated 3 meals and 2 snacks.
Hi Violet! It was a while ago that I read Rosedale’s book. I got most of my leptin education from him initially, along with reading everything by Byron Richards I found online. So, maybe I misquoted his book. Personally, I feel a lot better and lose weight faster, and keep more stable blood sugar if I don’t eat between meals. So, for me that is the way to go.
Though this is an almost 2-year old post, Ramona, I thought I’d add my a comment about leptin.
I wanted to mention one particular source’s recommendation to restore leptin regularity.
A book that i currently have checked out from the library called The Cheat to Lose Diet by Joel Marion has an interesting approach that eschews low-carb (something I adopted due to Taubes’ book), for a more balanced approach of simply low-gi carbs, but he recommends, in order to keep Leptin activity normal, to cheat once a week so that the body doesn’t think it’s starving.
There’s a 3-week priming stage, a 1-week core phase, and then maintenance starts after that.
(the weekly cheating, every Saturday is only duringv the 3-week priming stage).
Anyway, just throwing that out there. The thing that lit up for me is that he is against low-carb, because according to his references, doing that messes up the Leptin thing in your body causing a tendency to gain weight. Not sure about if this outweights the insulin effect, or which has a more prominent role in weight gain.
Steve
Thanks for the input, Steve! I’ve read about some of the “cheating” plans, but not in depth. I appreciate your comment – even on an older post!
Ramona
I was under the impression that fat cells job was not just to store excess caloires and release when needed, but rather it job is much more, it turns over it’s fat load regularly to refresh it’s stores due to eventual oxidation of it and cholesterol which fat also stores until cells need it (if all cells are healthy and working as they should) it buffers glucose when your resistant to it as sugar is so toxic if left in blood so long, and converts it to fat so the cells can burn it instead since they are resisting glucose (insulin resistance).
so in fact if your insulin/leptin resistant your a fat burner not a sugar burner. the cells cannot access the sugar so are forced to use fat only. saving the sugar for the brain. if your using sugar as fuel too (which acts as a catalyste to fat burning) then your blood glucose would not get so high and your fat cells job of conversion would be lifted.
if you do not consume saturated fats in sufficient quantities(which translates into more carbs and protein to make up the difference in caloires) then your fat cells would be forced to do that job. and if your needs are high especially if your active and fat (resistant) then your need more fat cells to do the job that fat cells do (such as cholesterol refreshment, or repairing cholesterol as well as hoarding calcium, vita d a k etc when these tend to run low due to low fat diets which deprives other cells of enough calcium to absorb and handle glucose.) hence you get fatter. hence the fat cells use the more hands on deck thing to handle the load so one cell gets their burden reduced especialy if deficient in nutrients that low fat low sun lifestyle gets you.
so by lowering one’s glucose load and upping the saturated fats like coconut oil whole milk etc then the burden off the fat cells is reduced and hence you need less of them. I get the impression it is not about forcing the body to use the stored fat but rather making the fat cell redundant by not needing it at all because your consuming all the sat fat and glucose you need (quality foods that is not junk).if you force it to burn it, it only shrinks, that is symptom of starvation or the signal anyway and it cries to become full again.
but if it becomes redundant it is apoptosised. no longer there no longer crying out for food/nutrients. that is how I understand it, more complicated actually but this is my efforts at nutshelling.
rosa
Thanks for your comment, Rosa!
You have a much deeper understanding of this than I do. I was being extremely unscientific and big picture for lay people like myself.
I appreciate the difference you are highlighting in your comment, though. I know that trying to simplify to the extent I did, with master fat switch on and off, would not hold up in the details, and could actually be incorrect. So thanks for this detailed information about leptin signaling!
Ramona