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

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

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