I don't remember seeing this here, it's from back in May.



http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...50518145437.htm

I'm thinking that what drives hunger and satiety will turn out to be quite complex, not something that can be changed with a simple pill. There has to be several underlying mechanisms that give us cravings, and likewise turn us away, from the different elements of our diet, trying to get us to a balanced state with all our different nutrients needs satisfied. Of course this has gone horribly awry with our modern diet.

Agreed. To me, the operative word here is THE. Leptin isn't THE overeating culprit. I thought that was already established. Even if you do have a screwed-up leptin system, it's probably not the only factor. Fixing that alone would probably be like slapping nicotine patches on people and expecting them to just magically cease smoking. The behavioural/emotional/cultural aspect is just as important to address.

Yeah, they've discovered quite a few hormones that control appetite and energy expenditure.

Over the past year and a half, I've been learning something new... what normal hunger and satiety really is. That is something that I really didn't have much experience with over the course of my life. I ate too much to ever be really 'hungry.' For most of my life I was not eating to hunger and certain foods (and we all know what they are) actually made me want to eat more. I was feeding a craving. I've found real hunger to be much more subtle in comparison. Satiety is a wonderful thing - I love it. Who'd have thought you could actually go for several hours and not be thinking about your next bite of food. Until recently, not me.

For me and what I think I've figured out for myself -- it all comes down to maintaining stable blood sugar. Crashing and low BG creates some sort of "need" for food that has nothing to do with real hunger. I don't think everybody experiences this and it is likely more prevalent in the obese. What ever is going on here, eating sugary junk starts a process that totally overrides what the naturally lean know of hunger and satiety. I've always felt that I was different than those people and they just didn't get it. Managing how much I eat each day is doable when normal hunger and satiety is the driving factor behind how much I eat. Eating high GI/processed carbs throws me into a completely different mode and I an numb to the feeling of feeling full. Feeling "stuffed" is what I used to think feeling "full" was. Feeling normal satiety is completely different. If I feel stuffed after I eat, then I overate -- past the feeling of satiety.

I think normal hunger and satiety was always there for me. It was just over-ridden by a different (and much more powerful) need. So the whole leptin discussion was for me, IMO, attempting to fix something that wasn't broken. They are barking up the wrong tree.

I am like you, and the LCHF LIFESTYLE is definitely key. Having a "normal" relationship with food makes you realize how many years were wasted starving on very low calorie HCLF diets, feeling flawed because it was so hard to resist foods while the "normal" people around us seemed to have such effortless self-restraint in the face of the same foods. Now I realize they were sated and not tempted or controlled by the food like we were.

Thanks, Teaser. It occurred to me that if we believe the problem is leptin resistance, we also have to conclude the default state is constant hunger. That makes no sense to me. I prefer to believe the default state is no hunger, then there's signals for both hunger and satiety, like for example ghrelin and leptin. If leptin isn't the problem, then the problem lies elsewhere, probably on the ghrelin side which is probably powerful enough to override leptin. That's just two hormones I know of, there's probably more things that regulate hunger and satiety, like enzymes, maybe ketones and fatty acids or even insulin. In the case of insulin however, it's probably not needed for satiety, i.e. when you eat a high-fat meal, you're still sated but there's barely any insulin produced from that meal.

Lack of hunger as a default state makes sense. Anybody who isn't dangerously underweight has enough stores on their body to last a month or more without eating.

Insulin for satiety might make some sense, hunger is a classic symptom of insulin deficiency. That doesn't mean that it takes much though, insulin can be extremely low on a ketogenic diet or extended fast at the same time as hunger.

Yeah I meant in context, not in absolute terms. You're right, we still need normal insulin for things to work properly. Another thing I just thought of. It's the semi-starvation experiment findings and how they fit with this latest stuff about hunger. These subjects were constantly hungry yet they ate something. Compared to outright starvation where hunger disappears after a short time, it becomes obvious there's something going on with the stuff we eat. Besides the hunger/satiety signals independently of fat accumulation, I wonder if the fact that some stuff is obesogenic might also have an effect on hunger down the line or in parallel. You know, if the stuff we eat just makes us eat more but doesn't make us fatter, then I don't see much of a problem because then the surplus must obviously be spent somehow. But now it makes us both eat more and fatter. I think it's related to fasting insulin or in-between meals at least cuz that's when we grow fatter or leaner.

Khrussva-that is exactly how I have spent my life!! Eating HFLC keeps me stable of mind. Previous way of eating was all consuming, frightening and completely outwith my control. How could other people say no to those sugary comforting foods!!!!
Now, I know and accept this is what quick release carbs do to me, change my personality to a carb seeking missile . And yes, I don't think everyone is affected by carbs like this.

Me too. I was mostly ravenously hungry and occasionally completely overstuffed. I didn't understand "full". I was simply hungry almost all the time. Things are so much better now. When I first decided to go low carb I was sure my blood sugars were way out of wack, on a roller coaster of up and down, and that I was either diabetic or on my way there, like other members of my family. I didn't go to a doctor since I knew what to do to avoid diabetes, stop eating carbs. So I did, and the rest is history. I am lucky I grew up before the low fat era so that cutting carbs was the natural thing to do.

Jean

This reminds me of something I posted in another thread the other day;

Reposting from Fung thread... Dr. Fung often says that muscle is spared during fasting, as long as there's enough body fat...

http://www.ergo-log.com/leanmassfasting.html

This is a blog post on a rat study of severe calorie restriction vs. fasting that I found interesting. The blog itself is worth reading, there's also a link to the actual study here;




It took six days for the underfed rats to recover about the same amount of body protein that the starved rats recovered in two days.



In the rats in this study at least, the fact that the two weight loss methods resulted in an equivalent ratio of lean mass to fat mass loss is irrelevant, once the effect of the refeed is taken into account.



In the Minnesota Starvation study, with refeeding, before lean mass returns to pre-diet levels, there was an overshoot of fat mass. There's an increase in appetite that remains until both fat mass and lean mass are recovered--and since fat mass recovers first, it's hypothesized that the appetite continues to be high until the lean mass is also recovered, and that this is what causes the increase in fat mass--not necessarily a drive to fatten with the body in "starvation" mode, but a continued increase in appetite needed for recovery of lean mass.



http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9062520