Does hunger stop you reshaping your body
16 Jan, 2018
There is a hidden hunger hormone in your body.
You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. But you can feel it.
It’s there when you wake. It’s there when you lay your head down at night.
HUNGER
Hunger destroys motivation. It tears up your plans to get the physique you want. And it sucks every drop of willpower from your body, leading you back to food.
But there is a way to transform your body’s reaction to hunger.
You can switch your body to burn more fat, look more muscular and leaner than you could ever imagine.
I thought controlling my hunger and my weight was a question of willpower.
If hunger takes over, your brain goes into survival mode.
Your “need” to binge on food is a natural response by your brain.
And it’s all down to
one “hidden” hormone in your body
you’ve never heard of.
In leaner times, it played a role in helping us survive… but modern living has let it off the leash with shocking consequences.
So, you see, it isn’t your fault.
Food plays a part stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain. When we eat it releases dopamine and serotonin.
I spent years attempting to lose the weight and once I did struggling to keep it off, with NO success.
It took me 20 years to get the balance right. It all clicked into place once I discovered the impact of the “hidden” hormone. But now I understood how the body works…
THE REAL REASON YOU’RE STILL STRUGGLING WITH FAT (and it really isn’t your fault)
For the thousands of people I work with, one of their biggest challenges was losing fat and maintain weight.
Getting the balance right to eat the right amount was difficult.
For clients, this is always an issue. Too restrictive a diet and hunger threatens to wreck all their hard work in the gym.
To understand what was going on, 11 years ago I started to study the effect of hormones on the human body.
That’s when I discovered the “hunger hormone” called ghrellin
Your body doesn’t like change. It likes to stay the same. When we try to make changes, like losing or gaining weight, the body responds with various mechanisms to bring stability back.
One of these mechanisms is appetite.
If your body senses it is losing weight your appetite hormones kick in to regulate this. There are two appetite hormones: leptin, which inhibits hunger and its difficult twin,
ghrelin which does the opposite – INCREASES hunger.
Ghrelin has a clear mission: to tell your body to eat.
And it doesn’t care how loud it shouts.
Ghrelin is found in the lining of the stomach and reacts to how well you’ve eaten. If your stomach is empty, ghrelin is produced.
But when your body secretes too much ghrelin, all hell breaks loose.
What causes your body to go into ghrelin meltdown?
Ghrelin is at its highest before eating and its lowest after a meal.
If you’re on a diet or program that severely restricts calories, you’ll feel the effects of ghrelin as the hunger grips you.
The more calorie restrictive your diet, the more ghrelin secreted.
And with all those signals firing to your brain to “EAT, EAT, EAT” it’s no surprise when you succumb to the urge to guzzle food and end up over-eating.
In this “hunger state” ghrelin sends the body into survival shut down and promotes fat storage . It forces the body to hold onto its fat reserves.
Now, it’s possible to see how ghrelin causes you to work against your body when you’re trying to eliminate body fat.
What complicates it further is ghrelin levels can be affected by factors other than food. The amount of sleep you have, for instance, can also impact on your ghrelin levels.
Here’s the thing about ghrelin.
It can be your best friend… or your worst enemy.
Ghrelin in itself isn’t bad. From a survival standpoint, ghrelin is there to guide our body.
When you have a balanced level of ghrelin it can benefit your body.
Many experts suggest the following:
Get a Minimum of 7 Hours Sleep Per Night:
If you sleep less than 7 hours you’re likely to have high ghrelin levels, decreased leptin and you’ll feel more hungry. Generally people who sleep less are heavier than those who get enough rest.
Increase Dietary Fiber:
This is another strategy for reducing ghrelin. The feeling of fullness in the stomach after eating fiber slows the production of ghrelin and does so while minimizing caloric intake. Foods high in fiber include artichokes, broccoli as well as other dense vegetables.
Have Eggs for Breakfast:
Protein has been shown to take longer to digest keeping you feeling full longer. In a study of 21 men published in the journal Nutrition Research, half were fed bagels while the other half ate eggs for breakfast. The men that ate the eggs were less hungry 3 hours later and ate less the next 24-hours.
These tips scratch the surface and can help but I know the approach that really works and there’s more to it. You see…
CONTROLLING OUR HUNGER HORMONE
GHRELIN IS ONLY HALF THE BATTLE…
You see we spend more hours sitting than our bodies were ever designed to do. And it’s destroying our muscles, posture and wellbeing.
Sitting for prolonged periods increases risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and death.
One international study said the risk could be reduced by doing 1 hour of physical activity every day. But who seriously has time?
It is said you can’t out-train a bad diet, the same is true of your lifestyle.
Spending hours sitting at a desk has long-term effects built up over time.
Your muscles shorten and tighten up while your posture suffers.
Most strength and conditioning programs I’ve seen start with a dynamic stretching routine that takes 15-minutes, followed by a 15-minute mobility circuit. You’ve been exercising for a full 30-minutes before you’ve even officially started the “workout”.
The reason coaches design workouts this way is because it actually takes your body that long to wake up, establish the mind-body connection and make sure your muscles are fully activated and prepared to workout at full capacity and avoid injury.
I don’t know about you, but most of my clients want to have their workout completed by 30-minutes, not just finishing up their warm-up!
So how do you take the fight to a sedentary lifestyle and bring your muscles back to life so they’re PRIMED for their workout and firing at 100 percent and ready to go? Is there a way to go from 1st gear to 5th gear so you can get more accomplished faster?
I stumbled across the answer when working in the field of rehabilitation…
How to prime your muscles and make every rep count
It’s shocking to hear this but I’m going to say it anyway:
Our bodies have been ravaged by inactivity. They weren’t built to do so little.
Inactivity has switched our muscles off.
And now we need a way to switch them back on again, so they work as they’re supposed to when we perform resistance exercises.
I call this method Fat Diminishing Strategy
There are some important additional benefits to using muscle activation moves which also help promote fat loss, including increasing blood flow to muscle tissue to increase lipolysis, which burns fat.
Most fat loss programs suffer from three problems:
1) they’re too complicated
2) they take too much time, and
3) they try to change ingrained habits
An at-home program needs to be SIMPLE.
The final reason most fat loss programs don’t work is because we don’t change our habits easily!
Most programs tell you to change some part of your behavior. Often overnight.
You’re commanded to go from eating one thing every day to not eating it at all.
For most programs to work, YOU need to stop and leave behind all your bad habits that got you there in the first place.
But here’s the problem: if changing your habits was so easy to do, we’d ALL change our habits in a moment.
It’s why other programs you may have tried haven’t worked…
That’s why working with existing habits is the ONLY
way to achieve permanent change.
Once you acknowledge old habits die hard, you’re forced to work in alignment with them.
It’s about removing resistance.
Work in harmony with your existing behavior and meals are simpler, activity becomes easier and, in turn, shifting stubborn body fat becomes so much easier.
Using this understanding let me explain…
How I helped a menopausal 50-year-old lady to rapidly drop body fat by eating cups of JELLY BEANS
One client was a lady who struggled to lose body fat. After months without success, she made an admission. She was so focused on jelly beans she couldn’t help but eat a few even while on a diet, And once she had gone off her plan, she went off HARD.
So, we agreed that on her workout days she could have one small cup of sugar free jelly beans straight after her workout. It transformed her progress within weeks.
She stuck with her program and the fat dropped off. By working with her habits, rather than forcing her to restrict something that was part of her life.
See now how restriction works against your habits.
Remember, it’s NOT about eating anything, anytime. It’s about still eating what you enjoy. The restriction isn’t on the item itself, but on the quality and quantity.
If eating even less and exercising more isn’t working
now, what makes you think more of the same
will make a difference?
Now you start to see how these three factors work together to make it near impossible for you to rid your frame of fat.
Conflicting advice, a lifestyle centered on poor posture and inactivity and a hormone that rears its head so often if feels like it’s controlling you, rather than the other way around.
However, there is another way.
When you recognize that habits can’t be changed so easily, you change how to approach the problem.
When you acknowledge the problems caused by sitting down for most of the day, you can work around it.
When you discover how long hunger has controlled your feelings and behavior, you realize you have the power to change your future.
Here’s my 3-part methodology for sustainable fat-loss:
ACTION 1
Tame your hunger
hormone so you
don’t overeat.
ACTION 2
Activate your muscles
so that you can combat
an inactive lifestyle with
shorter workouts.
ACTION 3
Work with your existing
habits… to make fat loss
easier and sustainable.
Midlife Fatburn Gives You An Easy-To-Follow Program
You Can Use Today For Taming Your Hunger Hormone
& Activating Your Muscles for a Leaner, Stronger, Healthier
Body in Less Than 15-Minutes a Day.
The Midlife Fatburn Training Manual
If you want quicker results, I’ve included a selection of 15 minute easy to do powerful “intensifier” techniques with the program. These short movements take only a few minutes and can be added after your core workout to fast-track your journey.
