Losing weight is hard but keeping it off can
be even harder. I’ve heard time and time again from women
who have lost the same 20 or 30 pounds multiple times in their lives. Why is it so hard to keep the weight off? Why on earth does it seem to take forever
to lose weight, but then it can come back on so fast? There are several reasons for weight regain,
and today I’m focusing on a major player...a little hormone called ghrelin. Also known as your hunger hormone. Have you ever lost weight and struggled with
your appetite? Like you were constantly hungry, or your hunger
increased after losing weight, making you feel like you’re swimming against the current
to stick to your plan? Have you ever tried intermittent fasting but
felt like you had uncontrollable hunger and weren’t able to fast for as long as you
would have liked? Knowing how ghrelin works, and using the 3
tips I’m going to share with you today, will help with your fasting efforts, and arm
you with vital information to keep the weight off. Ghrelin’s primary role is to stimulate your
appetite, slow your metabolism, and increase your fat storage. Not surprisingly, ghrelin levels will rise
after a period of dieting, specifically with chronic calorie restriction. Said differently, your hunger hormone goes
up after you lose weight to stimulate your appetite and try to make you regain your weight. It’s not fair is it? Ghrelin is just one of the many reasons why
eat less, exercise more doesn’t work for lasting weight loss. In this episode, you’ll learn three tips
to lose weight in a way that helps reduce ghrelin levels so you’re less hungry, less
likely to regain the weight you worked so hard to lose, and can increase your fasting
window. Be sure to watch all the way until the end
for a couple bonus pieces of information you won’t want to miss. I’m Dr. Morgan Nolte, founder of the Weight
Loss for Health Online Course, Community, and Coaching program. I help women in perimenopause and postmenopause
reverse insulin resistance to lose weight and prevent disease. If you haven’t already, please take a moment
and subscribe to my channel, like this video, and leave a comment. I would greatly appreciate it because that
engagement helps this video get seen by more people, so thank you in advance for helping
me spread the word. Ghrelin is a hormone produced in your stomach. Ghrelin acts at the hypothalamus, an area
of the brain that controls appetite, and on reward processing centers of the brain. Think of ghrelin as your appetite stimulating,
weight gaining hormone. When your ghrelin levels go up, you’ll sense
more hunger and want to eat more food. Plus, ghrelin slows your metabolism down and
causes more of the food you eat to be stored as fat. Ghrelin is more than just your “hunger hormone”
and has effects on muscle, bone, heart and even cancer. But for the purpose of this episode, I’m
just reviewing its role in weight management. While there are at least 14 hormones that
regulate appetite and satiety, ghrelin is a major player and worth understanding on
a deeper level. Ghrelin is released in a pulsatile pattern,
meaning that it rises and then it falls again. Some literature states that ghrelin rises
before a meal and falls after you eat. However, new research is challenging that
assumption and suggesting that ghrelin, like many other hormones, has its own circadian
rhythm, often corresponding to a person’s normal meal times. Chronic calorie restriction diets and sleep
deprivation also lead to more ghrelin and an increased appetite. You may think that not eating for a while
- like through intermittent fasting - would stimulate your appetite as well, but research
is showing otherwise. My first tip for you to reduce your ghrelin
is to use intermittent fasting, also known as time-restricted feeding. Take a look at this graph from a study that
measured fasting ghrelin levels every 20 minutes for 24 hours. There are a couple of important things to
note here. First, ghrelin levels are usually lowest around
9 in the morning. Recall that this is also generally the longest
period of the day where you haven’t eaten. This reinforces the fact that hunger is not
directly related to how long you go without food. At 9 AM, you have not eaten for about 14 hours,
yet you are the least hungry. Eating does not necessarily make you less
hungry. When I’m intermittently fasting, I’ll
notice very little hunger for the 16 to 18 hours of fasting, but once I start eating
for the day I’m hungrier the rest of the day. Often I’ll tell women to skip breakfast
to extend their fast and they say, “Wait a minute, I thought breakfast was the most
important meal of the day to boost my metabolism!?” I won’t get into specifics here, but I tell
them that’s just good marketing by food companies. Very often they’re relieved and tell me
they were never hungry for breakfast in the first place, but felt like they should eat
it because that’s what everyone else does and that’s what other weight loss programs
taught them to do. Now you see from the research, hunger is indeed
lowest in the morning after the initial peak before our normal breakfast time, which is
possibly why breakfast is the easiest meal of the day to skip if you want to start intermittent
fasting. If you can just ignore the hunger first thing
in the morning, chances are you’ll easily make it closer to lunch before you’ll notice
hunger again. Next, notice how there are three distinct
peaks that correspond to our normal meal times. This indicates that there is a learned pattern
to ghrelin’s release. If you’re used to eating at 8:00, 12:00,
and 6:00, you’ll get hungry about those times. This can help you mentally prepare for hunger
around your normal meal times when you’re fasting, and expect the hunger to pass relatively
quickly. Another study showed that over 3 days of fasting,
ghrelin gradually decreased. This means that patients were far less hungry
despite not having eaten for the past three days. This study also showed a clear circadian rhythm
to ghrelin and highlights the fact that hunger “comes in waves” Notice in this graph, men are the white bar
and women are the black bar. Research has shown that women have a higher
amount of ghrelin, which may be why we tend to feel stronger food cravings compared to
men...rarely do I hear my husband say, “I just need some chocolate.” Both men and women had a significant decline
in ghrelin, but the women showed a greater overall decline than men after this three
day fast. I often hear from women that they thought
fasting would be so hard, but in fact it’s easier than they anticipated, especially if
they follow my recommendations of priming with protein the day before a fast, staying
distracted, and being well hydrated. I’ve been doing a 24-hour fast once a week
for the last couple months and hope to make this a regular part of my lifestyle. I was most surprised that my hunger didn’t
compound. I thought each hunger wave would get bigger
and bigger until I couldn’t take it anymore and just succumbed to the food. And these graphs reflect what I felt and what
many of my clients feel, the ghrelin and hunger level gradually decreased over the day. A few other notes about the hormonal changes
of fasting. Notice that cortisol does go up during fasting. That’s because fasting is a hormonal stressor
on your body. I never do my 24-hour fast unless I’m well
rested. It’s going to be harder due to increased
ghrelin and cortisol levels. If you’re not sleeping well, don’t beat
yourself up if fasting seems hard for you. There are plenty of strategies to make it
easier, but first and foremost focus on improving your sleep. Insulin also goes down, which is great because
it allows your body to tap into stored energy for fuel and helps reduce insulin resistance. One study showed that people who fast for
24 hours once a month are about half as likely to be insulin resistant and develop diabetes
as those who don’t. Growth hormone goes up during fasting to help
preserve your muscle when you’re fasted. This is why intermittent fasting is one of
the best weight loss strategies, and when you pair it with proper nutrition, you’re
well on your way to losing weight, reducing belly fat, and lowering inflammation. My second tip for you to keep ghrelin low
is to mind your macros. Different types of macronutrients will affect
ghrelin differently. The food you put into your mouth impacts your
hunger and satiety after that meal. There are three types of macronutrients - carbohydrates
made up of fibers, starches, and sugars, proteins, and fats. If you want a specific foods list I recommend,
go to www.weightlossforhealth.com/ultimatefoodguide and download it for free. This study found glucose (a type of carbohydrate),
consistently caused a decrease in ghrelin levels. Protein had no effect on ghrelin, and fat
caused a significant decrease in ghrelin levels but only in women. Wait just a second because this is not a green-light
to go eat a bunch of carbs and expect to have less hunger. Cholecystokinin (CCK) and peptide YY are two
hormones involved in short‐term regulation of food intake and are also impacted by the
type of food you eat. CCK and peptide YY are triggered by protein
and dietary fat, but not starches and sugars. I like to say this is why we always have room
for dessert even after a huge meal - because those simple carbs don’t trigger our satiety
hormones. To eat in a way that will significantly reduce
ghrelin (or hunger) and increase your satiety (or fullness), it’s important to include
protein and healthy fat in your meal. If you just have a meal or snack that’s
primarily carbohydrates, like cereal, oatmeal, a granola bar, or even just fruit, you’re
not going to be triggering your satiety hormones, and further, you’re going to cause a blood
sugar spike, which inevitably leads to a drop, and that drop in blood sugar will make you
want to eat again. Normally, after we eat, ghrelin levels go
down so we aren’t hungry anymore. But research has shown that in people who
are obese with insulin resistance, their ghrelin doesn’t go down as much as someone with
a healthy BMI and better insulin sensitivity. Certainly not all people with obesity eat
an excess of food, that’s not the only cause of weight gain, but many of them do report
they struggle with appetite control, and this suppressed reduction in ghrelin following
a meal may be one of the reasons why. Interestingly, the study found that this phenomenon
of a suppressed reduction in ghrelin only occurred after a glucose load. In contrast, the presence of obesity did not
alter ghrelin response to the lipid or protein loads. Remember there that ghrelin (or hunger) was
significantly reduced after eating fat, and was not affected after eating protein. I cannot emphasize enough the fact that all
calories are not created equally. In previous episodes I’ve talked about how
different types of calories affect insulin differently, and this episode proves that
they also affect your hunger and satiety differently. And it’s common sense really. Think about how full you feel after eating
500 calories of chicken versus 500 calories of cake. It’s so important to eat real, whole foods
and reduce your consumption of processed sugars and starches to reduce your insulin resistance. My third tip for you to reduce ghrelin is
to get some sleep! Sleep deprivation will result in higher levels
of ghrelin. As you can see from this study, short sleep
duration not only led to increased ghrelin, or hunger hormone, but also contributed to
reduce leptin, or satiety hormone. When it comes to weight gain, sleep deprivation
is at least a triple whammy. Sleep recharges your willpower battery. Not only will you have higher levels of ghrelin
making you more hungry, and reduced levels of leptin making you feel less full, you’ll
also have reduced self-control and willpower, making it more likely you’ll overeat. Remember how I said if you hung around till
the end I’d share some bonus pieces of information with you? Well we’ve made it to the bonus round! If you know me, you know I’m always asking
the questions “why?” and “how?” I like to know the physiology behind what
I teach so I want to briefly explain how ghrelin causes a rise in blood sugar and fat storage,
ultimately contributing to insulin resistance. There are three types of adipose, or fat,
tissue: white, beige, and brown. Brown adipose tissue is brown because it has
more mitochondria in the cells. Mitochondria are the energy producing parts
of the cell. Brown adipose tissue actually burns energy. Compared to adults, babies have a higher amount
of brown adipose tissue...one of the reasons my little Leah whose 9 months old is always
so snuggly and warm. White adipose tissue is the storage type of
fat. Beige fat falls in the middle and acts more
like brown fat to burn energy. Ghrelin will reduce the metabolic activity
of brown fat, essentially slowing your metabolism. Ghrelin has a two-pronged effect on white
fat. Ghrelin will cause your body to make more
white fat, a process known as adipogenesis, and reduce it’s breakdown, or lipolysis. More fat than your body needs leads to inflammation
and insulin resistance. Ghrelin’s effect on the pancreas serves
to raise blood sugars. To do this, ghrelin reduces insulin secretion. I know this sounds counterproductive because
increased insulin leads to weight gain, but remember this short-term reduction in insulin
allows for increased blood glucose. Insulin’s job is to allow blood glucose
to move from the bloodstream into the cell, but ghrelin wants to increase blood sugars,
at least in the short term, so it inhibits insulin. At the same time, ghrelin will cause an increase
in glucagon from the pancreas. Glucagon is the opposite of insulin. While insulin wants to lower blood glucose,
glucagon wants to raise it. Glucagon signals the liver to create more
glucose. What happens is that your blood sugars go
up, and then your insulin will be released to bring them back down. Anything that stimulates an increase in blood
glucose will ultimately increase blood insulin, leading to an increased risk for insulin resistance
and a higher body set weight. I covered a lot in this episode and wanted
to be sure you were clear with takeaways so let’s recap the main points. First, ghrelin is also known as your hunger
hormone. It increases after a typical chronic calorie
restricted diet, or when sleep deprived, and makes you want to regain the weight. Ghrelin is pulsatile in nature and seems to
be released in conjunction with your normal meal times. Intermittent fasting helps lower ghrelin levels. Knowing that your hunger will increase around
normal meal times, you can be proactive and ensure that you’re properly hydrated and
distracted around those times to ride the hunger wave until it passes. Remember that intermittent fasting isn’t
about eating less, it’s about eating less often. Food absolutely still matters. Eating a diet high in healthy fat significantly
helps lower ghrelin. Including plenty of protein in your diet will
also help stipulate other satiety hormones including CCK and peptide YY. For obese individuals with insulin resistance,
your ghrelin supresssion is going be blunted after eating refined starches and sugars,
meaning you can anticipate hunger again quickly after eating those kinds of foods. Set yourself up for success by avoiding or
reducing these processed carbs. Sleep is crucial for weight loss and maintenance
success. Getting enough sleep can help reduce your
ghrelin levels and make intermittent fasting a lot easier. You can’t out diet and exercise the negative
hormonal effects of chronic stress or sleep deprivation. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you have any other questions about ghrelin,
put them in the comments below. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you soon
in the next video!
