Leptin is your natural fat-burning hormone. Although men have it too, it is of special importance to women. When leptin levels are low, your body is in ‘starvation’ and fat-storing mode. Things that cause leptin levels to plummet include eating less calories, eating less protein and burning off a lot more calories than you consume. All of those things are what many diets recommend. This leads to the dreaded rubber-band effect – you gain back all the weight you’ve lost plus some more.
How to Boost Leptin Levels?
In my opinion, the best diet for boosting leptin levels is the Venus diet, explained in this short video. This is the secret behind the extremely fast results it delivers for women. It combines a few key principles to achieve very fast weight loss, without any hunger pangs, plateaus and frustrating ups and downs. But why does it work so well? Is boosting leptin levels really the secret? Well, it won’t make you lose a ton of weight on it’s own, but when combined with other dietary principles it can multiply your results 10-fold. If you think about it, what most people do to lose weight is the exact opposite that boosts leptin levels. That’s why many people suffer a lot of frustration and ultimately give up.
You cannot achieve steady, long-term weight loss if your diet kills your leptin levels.
Here are some factors that increase leptin levels:
Protein intake
This is the most important part. Keeping your protein intake high tells your body that it’s not starving, therefore there’s no need to get into starvation mode. Starvation mode is what happens to your body when you rapidly decrease it’s caloric intake. To prevent you from dying of starvation (supermarkets weren’t available during most of evolution) it shuts down your metabolism and stores as much calories as it can.
Fiber intake
Fiber intake keeps food moving throughout your bowels steadily, which speeds up your metabolism and boosts leptin.
Certain foods
Certain, fat-burning foots boosts your metabolism on their own. Apples are a great example.
How Eating Less Puts Your Body Into ‘Starvation mode’ and Makes You Gain Fat
As soon as your body ‘realizes’ you have stopped eating and started starving, it kills your leptin levels and puts the brakes on your metabolism. This is especially true for women, whose metabolism slows down even further as soon as their body thinks that they can starve. This is a simple evolutionary mechanism that is there to help you – it’s how we survived back in the day when food was scarce and there weren’t supermarkets on every street corner. When your body thinks its starving, it aims to preserve every last calorie your consume and decreases the amount of calories it burns though your metabolism.
What do I mean by “through your metabolism”? Well, your body does not burn calories only during physical exertion. If you were to lie down and watch TV, you would still burn between 50 and 100 calories each hour. People with fast metabolism burn more calories through their metabolism, regardless of how much they exercise. Of course, this is only a part of the ‘trick’, as burning calories does not necessarily mean you are burning body fat.