Are Your Hormones Hijacking Your Hunger?

So what's ghrelin? Start there. It's the hunger hormone. When your stomach is empty and you're hungry, it releases ghrelin. And what about leptin? Leptin is actually the satiety hormone. It's the feeling full hormone. Now, you can think of leptin and ghrelin as sort of two sides of the same coin. What happens when these hormones are out of whack? They did a study with college students where they basically took one group and they got them normal sleep schedule. Another group, they sleep deprived them every night for a while. And the ones that were sleep deprived had higher levels of ghrelin and they craved more carbs and sugar. So if you're having ghrelin level problems, you're going to actually eat more carbs and sugar. If you're healthy, leptin levels will go up when you finish the meal, and then they'll go down. When people have inflammation, when they start putting on visceral fat or belly fat, which is basically like a fire in your belly, and they lead to leptin resistance. And so you'll see a lot of obese people with high levels of leptin, and it causes you to think you're starving, it decreases your energy level, lowers your metabolic rate, and it makes you have more weight gain.