An obese rat with a ramped up appetite proved something most of us already suspected: when you're trying to lose weight, battling your appetite isn't easy.
Scientists already knew that gherlin, a hormone primarily produced in the stomach of both rats and humans, drives appetite by stimulating the brain's hunger centers. What surprised researchers in 2000 was the discovery that gherlin levels increase when laboratory rats are forced to forgo food. Essentially, dieting makes rats hungrier.
What's the implication for a human trying to lose weight? The next time you're dieting and fighting the urge to devour an entire box of ice cream, you can thank a rat, and blame your gherlin.
Biochemical Changes During Dieting
Follow up studies regarding gherlin's hunger-inducing ability suggest this hormone may be partly responsible for our bodies' ability to resist weight loss. By making food seem irresistible, gherlin ensures our bodies hold on to extra pounds despite our best efforts. If this weren't enough, dieting decreases levels of leptin, a hormone responsible for signaling to brain hunger centers that your body has consumed enough food.
Meal Management
Spreading food intake throughout the day may help reduce the intensity of those pesky hunger signals triggered by gherlin hormones. Carefully space meals so that your body rarely senses acute hunger. Planning three meals and two to three snacks a day, scheduled to avoid going over 4 hours without eating, may keep your body from launching into starvation mode. Going too long on an empty stomach, however, is likely to trigger gherlin production and leave you insatiable at your next meal.
Food Choices
Keep your stomach full longer by choosing foods that digest slowly. Load up on low-calorie foods that take up a lot of room in your stomach such as fruits, vegetables, and beans and legumes. Because protein digests more slowly than carbohydrate and simple sugars, work in healthy protein sources during snacks and meals. Fat-free dairy, nuts, seeds, tuna, baked or broiled fish, baked chicken breast, and lean ham added to a meal provides protein to help ward off hunger.
Recognizing Hunger Cues
Remember that gherlin and leptin levels are not completely to blame for increased appetite. Sometimes it's just difficult to get used to eating less food. Before eating, always ask yourself how hungry you are on a scale of one to 10, with 10 representing extreme hunger and one representing the feeling of being miserably stuffed. Ideally, you should eat before ever reach nine, because delaying a meal until you are starving increases the chances you'll overeat. Alternatively, you also shouldn't not eat if you rate yourself at the lower end of the hunger scale. You may have a desire to eat, but you're probably eating for the wrong reason -- such boredom, habit, or impulse.
References
- Gherlin as a Source of an Obesity Vaccine; Vic Carriere
- Plasma Ghrelin Levels After Diet-Induced Weight Loss or Gastric Bypass Surgery; David Cummings, et al.; New England Journal of Medicine; May 2002
- Role of Leptin in the Neuroendocrine Response to Fasting; Ahima et. al.; Nature; 1996
- The Regulation of Food Intake in Humans; Finlayson, Halford, King, and Blundell; Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds
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