If you haven’t read the other two previous articles (Obesity isn’t the problem- Click here) and (Sugar – “White Poison”- Click here) then I recommend you read them first. Otherwise, lets crack on and discuss hormones.

 

A hormone is a chemical that’s made in one place in the body but works somewhere else in the body. Hormones regulate various organs and systems inside our bodies. They cause growth, the cause puberty. They are the master controllers to either burn and use energy or store it. You’ve heard of raging hormones in teenagers right? We’ll you also get raging hormones when you digest processed food too. The body makes numerous chemical hormones but we will focus on the four that play the most important roles when we eat.

First we will cover the short term (meal to meal) hormones that either make you hungry or make you stop eating (satiety).

Ghrelin comes from your stomach and it’s the “hunger hormone”. When you stomach’s empty, ghrelin increases, goes to your brain, tells your brain “Hey I’m hungry, feed me!” You then eat, the stomach is filled, and ghrelin goes back down. That’s the end of the meal right? Wrong. There’s a mistake. The urge to eat will continue even after your stomach is full and you keep eating. How come? Ghrelin tells your brain that you’re hungry, but lowering ghrelin does not send the signal that you’re full. Your stomach’s full, but you don’t realize you’re full until much later. That’s where the second hormone comes in.

It’s a hormone called Peptide YY (sounds like a rock band doesn’t it). It’s made at the end of the intestine and it’s the satiety hormone. It’s the hormone that tells your brain, “Not another bite. I’ve had enough. I’ll die before I eat again!” We’ve all felt that way at least once in our lives I’m sure. But have you ever sat down, only to start eating and then be interrupted by a long phone call? A funny thing happens when you come back to the table and you can’t eat anymore. Had that yourself? You don’t get the “full” signal for a good twenty minutes after you’ve started eating. Give the food time to reach the intestine, to reach the Peptide YY and have it tell you’re brain you’re full.

“Slow down when you’re eating, and give your hormones a chance to work their magic”

Next, we’ll look at the long term signals (day to day). The third hormone to talk about is called insulin. It’s made in the pancreas down near your tummy and its the energy storage hormone. It sends nutrients of whatever you’ve eaten to where they need to go in the body. When everything’s working right and balanced, the right amount of insulin is released, for the right amount of food, the system stays in balance and all is good.

• Amino acids from protein will go to muscles.
• Fat will go to fat cells.
• Carbohydrates are either burned and used right away for energy, or the excess will get deposited in fat cells.

 

Then you have the fourth and final hormone we will discuss called Leptin. Leptin is made in fat cells and it’s the starvation hormone. When you have enough energy stored up in your fat cells, your leptin levels are higher, it goes to your brain through your bloodstream and tells your brain, “Hey, I don’t need to eat so much at the moment, I got enough energy on board. I don’t need to store anymore.” When this occurs, you naturally cut back on your food intake.

 

Normally insulin and leptin get along together just fine, you eat the right amount of food, you make the right amount of insulin etc. But look what happens when you eat processed food with lots of sugar and minimal fiber.

The glucose in the sugar goes into your bloodstream, the insulin surges because of that rapid rise in fast-absorbing glucose, and now you have a massive amount of insulin released that will make fat. At the same time, the fructose from the sugar goes to your liver, the massive influx of rapid sugar absorption overwhelms its capacity to burn it, it is forced to turn the rest into liver fat, the liver becomes sick and doesn’t work as well. So now your pancreas has to make even more insulin to compensate for the poor processing capacity of the damaged liver and insulin becomes a raging hormone. It’s a monster. You now have about as much control over your insulin, as a mum would have over their teenage children. It drives the energy out of your blood and into your fat cells and you’re gonna gain weight. You then can’t make enough insulin to tend that body fat, your blood sugar starts chronically rising, and now you have type 2 diabetes.

Ever wonder why you suddenly feel more sensitive to carbs? This is probably why. Because you have a damaged liver that is becoming sick due to liver fat accumulation. If you wanna learn more about this process, then watch this video I made after finishing this article.

 

Since 10% of the population now has diabetes, and an additional 40% of the population is at risk of getting it, this is a huge deal! It’s a bad disease and it has lots of serious complications. Everyone knows that high blood sugar is bad because it damages small blood vessels like in your eyes, your nerves, kidneys and your legs. But there’s a second problem. There is also the issue of high blood insulin which promotes inflammation and large blood vessel diseases like coronary heart disease and strokes. It also puts you at risk of developing cancer.

If you get diabetes, your doctor may put you on pills or insulin shots to lower your blood sugar (that’s important and it’s necessary), but that’s only tackling one of the problems of diabetes. The high blood sugar going down is good, but the high insulin is still there and it can continue to promote those large vessel diseases. What you really need is to prevent both of them from occurring. If you wanna do that, you’ve got to reverse the process so that you don’t need any medicine!

So how do you reverse type 2 diabetes? 30 million people wanna know! There are several programs that can work, but every single one of them changes the food.

“Diabetes can’t be fixed until the food is fixed. Period.”

In the past, one of the biggest drivers of type 2 diabetes was in fact alcohol. Sugar has a very similar impact on the liver as does alcohol. In fact, that’s why we now call this disease non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Look below at these two sets of liver cells under the microscope. On the left is the normal liver, nice and pink, and you can see the blood vessels nicely formed and flowing throughout. On the right is a patient with fatty liver disease, and you can see the white spaces (that’s fat) inside the liver cells themselves. The blue on the right is the fibrosis and inflammation, and the little dots are cell death.

Here’s the surprise, as you can’t tell from the right image if that came from a patient who’s sick from alcohol or sick from sugar. Alcohol and sugar have a lot in common in terms of their impact on the body. They’re both metabolized exclusively in the liver, in excess they both lead to liver fat accumulation and they both cause metabolic syndrome. Another reason sugar’s like alcohol is because it also affects the pleasure center of the brain in the same way to make you want to consume more. Fructose is a substance just like alcohol where it acts just the same in the liver and just the same in the brain. In fact sugar is worse. When you go drinking you can only drink yourself under the table once that evening, but sugar doesn’t have that effect and allows you to continue eating it until you become sick from the inside out.

“You would NEVER give your child a can of beer, but you don’t think twice about giving them a can of soda.”

Sugar and alcohol do the same thing to your liver and your reward center. Bottom line?

“Sugar is the alcohol of the child.”

The break on this system is supposed to be this hormone leptin, and it’s supposed to tell your brain that you’re topped off with energy and you don’t need to eat so much, but there’s a glitch. It’s a big biochemical glitch that’s not your fault. That highly elevated insulin (that we talked about before)  actually blocks your leptin from telling your brain you’ve had enough food. Too much insulin, now your leptin signal is overpowered and your brain never gets that message. Now you didn’t know you’ve had enough to eat and you’re brain thinks you’re starving. So what happens? You keep eating, more sugar, more insulin, fat in the body and it’s a vicious feed-forward cycle. Eat more food, produce more insulin, more fat storage, leptin blocked more, get more hungry, eat even more.

You often hear that obese people are always hungry, and they’re telling the truth. Their bodies are not being fed properly. The food they’re eating can’t send those hormone signals to their brain to tell them that they’re full. Their brain is starving, obesity is brain starvation. Kids can’t focus in class, they feel tired and then they eat junk food and drink soft drinks to feel better and it’s not their fault. It’s not our fault. It’s our biochemistry working against us from eating processed food.

 

People ask me, “Why do we love sugar so much?” It’s not just us, it’s every species on the planet. Studies show that when parents introduce a savory or salty to an infant and it will take an average of 13 attempts before they accept it. If it’s sweet? Then it only takes one time. Why is that?

First, no foods on the planet are both sweet and acutely poisonous. So our sweet tooth is actually ingrained into our DNA for survival and our ancestors knew that the sweet signal meant that the food was safe to eat.

Second, we’ve evolved during times of famine. Our bodies are designed to put on the pounds of fat using high energy sources of food to store up for times like winter or drought when food is scarce. We naturally crave high energy foods for survival. The food industry has realized this and it provides us with easy and cheap access to a wide range of high energy-dense foods, every day, every meal, 24/7, 365. Sugary foods are available everywhere you go. Of the 600,000 items in the American food supply, 77% of them are all spiked with added sugar. That’s for the food industry’s benefit, not for yours. This is a difficult problem but it is within your power to get healthy, and I’m gonna help you get there.

I don’t do this for my main work, and I don’t do it for money, but if you’re obese or overweight, there are some very simple steps that all of you can take. Your health and your family are more important than anything in the world.

“If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.”

Because of individuals like you, the world is starting to take notice and starting to change. Just like we changed and cut down on smoking, we are now changing and cutting down on sugar, and we’re gonna start preventing the chronic illness affecting 75% of all diseases in developed and developing countries. We’re gonna get it out of our lives.

 

“Hey guys, thanks for reading this series of articles.

If you still haven’t read either of the other two (Obesity isn’t the problem – Click here) or (Sugar – “White Poison” – Click here) then check them out as they are well worth a glance over.

If you’re ready to take your physique to the next level and get lean for life, click here and be guided along.

Thank you.”