Appestat Regulation

Insulin is the Master Hormone

When you eat sugar or other carbohydrates, you turn insulin "on." If you're lean, it means that your appestat is functioning perfectly. If you are overweight, imagine that it's because your appestat is not working properly and isn't able to signal you when to stop eating.

When insulin is on glucose in the blood is too high, that's a dangerous situation, so until that problem is dealt with insulin will remain "on," and the signal from the hormone leptin telling you to stop eating is over-ridden.

Eating sweet things encourages more eating. Thus we tend to over-eat.

Eating to a Routine

Fructose in the Diet

While fructose is the main sugar in fruit, it's not the fructose in whole fruit that you eat that is controversial.

When fructose is consumed in whole fruit, the whole fruit also contains water, fibre, antioxidants, and nutrients so our body can tolerate it quite well.

The controversy is about high-fructose corn syrup, that is widely used as a sweetener in drinks, breakfast cereals, biscuits and most processed foods. In the USA anyway, HFCS is cheaper than sugar.

Fructose always comes mixed with glucose, and in the body, the first process separates them.

Glucose goes straight into the energy metabolism process.

Fructose is sent to the liver, where it too can become glucose. However, given that there is already glucose in the system, more likely it will be converted to fatty acids and stored as fat in adipose tissues. It may be the direct cause of fatty liver disease.

Essentially fructose is one step removed from being glucose, and in the body behaves like glucose, especially if the source is whole fruit. However some people are arguing the fructose from High Fructose Corn Syrup (and perhaps fruit in juiced form) is somehow very different. Richard Feinman tells me that there is no-good science to demonstrate that. He also says that getting funding for that sort of research would be very difficult. Such an issue is considered unimportant.

We often eat for social reasons and not because we are hungry.

The tradition of eating three times a day doesn't have to be what we do, in many cultures people only eat twice a day.

In many city cultures, people eat six or seven times a day, usually with coffee, or alcohol, and almost always with carbohydrate foods, cereals, toast, bagels, muffins, pizza, chips or cake. Insulin is turned "ON", and kept running HOT all day. Eventually, that makes us sick.

These cultural behaviours are stronger than hormone auto-regulation. That's why in a family or a social group you can all get fat (or thin) together. Social behaviours and modeling are important to us.

Adding to Your Adipose Tissue

When insulin is "on", there is a continuing emergency, excess glucose is turned into fatty acids and stored in the adipose tissues (Fat tissues). When this storage begins, the adipose tissues respond by producing leptin, a hormone that in the appestat is supposed to turn off the desire to eat.

But leptin is overruled, by insulin, because there is still an emergency going on. There is glucose that must be stored. So the appestat doesn't work. You keep on eating.

If you are becoming insulin resistant (or carbohydrate intolerant), the ability of the body to pass glucose into the cells to become energy declines, and the amount of glucose available to make fat rises.

How to avoid Problems?

If you eat a very varied diet, including carbohydrates and sugars, eat less often, give insulin a chance to clear itself from the blood-stream.

Eat slowly, and eat low-glycemic index carbohydrates, keeping the insulin spike lower, and giving the leptin signal to stop eating a chance to function.

However, because you are reading this, quite likely the opportunity to do either of those successfully is long gone.

Eating Regulation in the Body

Your body tells you what sort of foods it needs. The appestat is assumed to be the part of the brain that prevents us from overeating.

Be careful though, your body is trying to restore homeostasis. If the "home" setting is in the wrong place, or dysregulated, you'll crave things that satisfy you, that restore homeostasis, but actually contribute to your long term ill-health.

If your body is used to an excess of sugar and carbohydrates, you'll often feel hungry, because carbohydrates are rapidly turned into glucose.

You'll also crave more carbohydrates, because that will restore the amount of glucose in your system that's become normal for you.

Begin Banting

First, get ALL the obvious carbohydrate out of your diet. Sugar, cereals, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, anything made with flour needs to go.

Look at what we know about fattening livestock. Knowledge that's 200 years old. It applies to us too.

Join a support group, get to know other people who have done this, and are doing it.

Get a little coaching and get as far down the path to nutritional ketosis as you can.

Now take the Banting Course from "The Real Meal Revolution." Waiting this long, doing preparation for the course will help you get the full benefit from the course.