WHY YOU SHOULDN’T FORGET YOUR METABOLIC DROPS - I

In order to understand why the Metabolic Drops are effective, you first need to understand the hormone leptin. The whole topic of the hormone leptin and leptin resistance is somewhat new, relatively speaking, but within recent years we have grown to understand a lot more about the rather large role it plays in weight loss.

In general, if we eat a lot and our body fat goes up, leptin increases to let our brain know we are satisfied physically and no longer need more fuel. We will then find ourselves eating less and less often, which results in our bodies burning fat for fuel.

On the other side of this equation, if we aren’t eating enough regularly and our body fat percentage goes down, leptin decreases. Low leptin is a signal that tells our brain we are starving, which will prompt us to eat more and burn less fat.

When we have a high body fat percentage, there is a lot of body fat in our cells. Given the way leptin is supposed to work, we shouldn’t be eating, as our brain should know we have plenty of stored energy and suppress our appetite. However, the leptin signal isn’t working. There is a whole lot of leptin floating around, but the brain doesn’t “see” that it’s there. This condition is known as leptin resistance, which is now believed to be the main biological abnormality in human obesity.

When the brain doesn’t receive the leptin signal, it erroneously thinks that the body is starving, even though it has more than enough energy stored in the form of fat. This causes us to want to eat more.  The brain thinks we must do this so that we don’t starve to death, so it also reduces our metabolism. Since it believes we are starving, the brain thinks we need to conserve energy, so it makes us feel lazier and causes us to burn less energy at rest.

So, why does this leptin resistance even exist in the first place? Something had to kick it off.

There are three cellular mechanisms behind leptin resistance.

• The first is inflammation. You see, leptin tells the body what to do by attaching to hormone receptors on our brain cells that are specifically designed for leptin only. However, inflammation of that brain cell membrane prevents the hormone leptin from attaching and, therefore, prevents it from communicating with the cells. So, leptin just bounces off and floats in the bloodstream without being utilized.
• Second, is having an elevation of free fatty acids in the bloodstream. When our fat mass increases, the           concentration of free fatty acids increase in the brain, which interferes with leptin signaling. Elevated levels of free fatty acids can lead to insulin resistance, diabetes and organ damage due to fat toxicity. We end up with an accumulation of fats in non-fat tissues, like the kidneys, liver, heart and skeletal muscle.
•  And lastly, having a lot of leptin, actually causes leptin resistance. We can produce so much leptin from increased body fat that our cells become desensitized to it. In other words, they are no longer receptive to the leptin.

Every one of these three factors result in increased obesity, which can form that vicious cycle of storing more fat, which only makes us even more leptin resistant.

In part II, we will discuss the things we can do to prevent and reverse leptin resistance.