4 Hormones That Are Making You Fat

Hey. Hey, what's up? My future of health. Now, peeps, it's Ben Greenfield again. And I'm sitting here in my home in Spokane, Washington, thinking today about hormones. Because I'm weird like that. I'm a total geek down there and I like to think about hormones. But there's a reason why you should care about hormones too. And it has to do with the way that you might feel during the day. Do you get brain fog sometimes? You have no clue why. Maybe you feel like you gotta eat and eat and eat before you feel happy or full. Or maybe you lay awake at night having a hard time sleeping. Or worse yet, maybe you can't fit into your T shirt or that pair of fitted jeans. And a big, big reason for all of those things are hormones. And there's four hormones that you really want, really got to care about if you want to take charge of your life and especially if you want to take charge of your body, your weight loss and your fat loss. Because these hormones that I'm going to tell you about are intimately related to fat loss and weight loss. So what do you think? Let's jump right in. The first hormone I want to tell you about is called adenopectin. Adenopectin, it's basically your body's fat burning torch. It's your signal to your fat cells to release fat and use them for energy. Now, unfortunately, adenopectin levels are capable of dropping. And one of the things, one of the common things that causes your adenopectin levels to be low is what's called a magnesium deficiency. Now here's the cool thing. You can find magnesium pretty easily. Two of my top sources for magnesium that actually go pretty well together and are pretty tasty when you eat them together are pumpkin seeds and then dark leafy greens like kale or spinach. So if you want to bump up your adenopectin activity, just like for lunch, have a salad bed of spinach, maybe some kale, throw some pumpkin seeds in there. If you're more of a breakfast person and you like to do the green smoothie thing, throw some kale or some spinach into a blender with some other ingredients, but make sure you add some pumpkin seeds as well. So get magnesium into your body to step up your adenopectin hormone levels. Pretty cool, huh? Alright, next one I want to tell you about is insulin. And insulin is the hormone that, if released in excess throughout the day, causes your body to take energy, specifically glucose, and carbohydrate, and shove it into fat cells and then create more and more fat cells to store all that glucose, all that energy. So what can you do about high insulin levels? Well, there are a few different strategies out there, but one of my favorites, that's super duper easy to do. And you may have heard of this before, it's not the tastiest stuff on the planet, but it's called apple cider vinegar. You can find it anywhere at health food stores, whatever. And again, it's got a little bit of a gag factor to it, but apple cider vinegar, if you just throw back like a couple shot glasses full of that right before your biggest meal of the day, and I prefer to tell people that I talk to do it before dinner, that really, really helps control the insulin release. Super cheap. You can find it anywhere. Again, not the best taste on the planet, but try apple cider vinegar for those insulin levels. Now, the next one that I want to talk to you about is called ghrelin. And this is always a hard hormone for me to remember. So what I think about is ghrelin is the hormone that makes your stomach growl. It's your hunger hormone. And here's the deal with ghrelin, if you have a bunch of ghrelin always circulating through your body, then you're always hungry, and food just doesn't keep you full. You'll eat something that you really, really like, and then right after you want dessert or dark chocolate or more of what you just got done eating. So here's the number one way to control your ghrelin levels. And this is going to sound dumb and silly and simple, but here it is. You got to sleep more. Okay? Seven to eight hours of sleep a night is what it takes to control your ghrelin levels. So for those of you who lay awake at night trying to get to sleep, maybe you wake up super early, maybe you wake up at 1 or 2am and you have a hard time falling back asleep. I want to give you one of my top recommendations for enhancing your sleep levels. Okay? Number one thing. And. And this again might sound silly and stupid and simple, but it worked so well for me. I unplug everything in the bedroom. So, like, my computer can't come in there, my Kindle can't come in there. I unplug the lights. Like, the bedroom is just basically the dark, dark place in the house. And basically bedroom is sleep. And I don't want to make anybody blush, but sex, okay, Those are the two things that you do in bed, in the bedroom. And you. You do not bring your kindle or your computer or anything like that into the bedroom and you even keep the lights really low. Now I'm kind of a bedroom beauty queen, so I also use a sleep mask to keep things really dark. But basically using the bed as a dark, relaxing place is a very, very good way to enhance your sleep levels. Okay, so you don't write emails on Facebook and stuff like that in bed. That bumps up the ghrelin levels or I'm sorry, bumps down the ghrelin levels so you don't get hungry as much during the day. Okay, I've got one more for you. Is that cool? One more. Okay, last one that I want to talk to you about because we already covered adenopectin, right? We covered ghrelin, we covered insulin. The last one you've probably heard about, it's called cortisol, right? It's your body's stress hormone. Now if cortisol levels are always high, not only are you hungry in the same way that you get hungry when ghrelin levels are always high, but your body goes into this fat storage mode. It goes into this I'm going to hold on to all the energy I can get because I'm stressed out mode, right? Your body wants to store this stuff away because you're telling it that you're fighting, that you're running from a lion. You know, maybe you're just like whatever, talking to your mother in law or trying to respond to five emails or chasing the kids around the house. But either way your body doesn't know that. It just knows that cortisol levels are high. So it's got to store fat. So what do you do about high cortisol levels? Again, kind of similar to sleep. Bunch of stuff you could do about that. I mean, you could probably find thousands of things on the Internet. But I'm going to share with you one of the things that directly affects cortisol levels and has been proven in research to help with cortisol. Okay? It's breathing. And I start off every single day because I'm a super busy guy and I get stressed out really easily. I start off every single day with a simple breathing exercise. Now this is called four, seven, eight breathing. Okay? Don't get your eyes too crossed. It's pretty easy to remember once you repeat it a few times. Four, seven, eight, breathing. Here's how it goes. You breathe in for four count, you hold it for seven count, and then you breathe out for eight count. Okay? In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. Now what I personally do is I do it for five minutes before I get out of bed in the morning. And I find that by starting off my day like that, I kind of subconsciously keep deep breathing throughout the day, and it really helps with stress and cortisol levels. Try it right now. Go ahead. Do it with me.

Okay, that was the four count in. I hold for seven.

Okay, good. Out for eight.

Don't you already feel a little bit more relaxed? Feel that? Four, seven, eight. Breathing. Okay, so that's the cortisol part. All right, so now you know about adenopectin, you know about insulin, you know about ghrelin, and you know about cortisol. All right, so those are the four hormones that are affecting your waistline that are keeping you from losing fat as fast as possible, and. And that's exactly what you can do about it. Okay? Get some magnesium, sleep a little bit more, a few shots of apple cider vinegar. Yummy, yum, yum. And then breathe. All right. I'm Ben from BenGreenfieldFitness.com I'm wishing you a happy, healthy week. And until next time, signing out. Thanks for watching.