What do golf swing and a blowout have to do with you and your eating? Keep listening!

Welcome to The Done Bingeing Podcast. This is the place to hear about how you can pair the emerging brain science about why you binge with powerful life coaching to help you stop. If you want to explore a non-clinical approach to end binge eating, you’re in the right place. It’s time to free yourself. You have more power than you know. And now, your host, Life and Weight-Loss Coach Martha Ayim.

Welcome to Episode 51 of The Done Bingeing Podcast and to part 17 of this special series, 12 Keys to End Binge Eating. We’ve been talking about the seventh key: Reduce the Desire to Overeat. In the last two episodes, we began to explore hormonal desire to overeat by looking at how ghrelin and leptin regulate hunger and fullness signals. But we found that the ability of these hormones to signal clearly is influenced by the food we eat and by the presence of another hormone. And it’s that hormone, insulin, that’s the focus of this episode.

So, let’s recap: Ghrelin is the hormone that tells you when you’re hungry. Leptin is the hormone that tells you when you’re full. Ghrelin increases hunger and leptin decreases it. Since ghrelin and leptin regulate appetite, they clearly influence how much we eat and how much we weigh.

Ghrelin in released by your stomach, while leptin is released from your fat cells. Both hormones send signals to your hypothalamus to tell you how hungry or full you are and whether to keep eating or to stop.

Since leptin in secreted by fat cells, the more fat you have on your body, the more leptin you have. But past a certain point, the excess of leptin stops signaling fullness due to leptin resistance or leptin insensitivity. In fact, some people who are overweight tend to feel more hungry, rather than less hungry. That’s because their brain isn’t getting the fullness message. Their brain may actually think that they’re low on leptin and, therefore, underfed and so send out signals to eat even more.

Part of what may be happening here is that too much insulin is blocking leptin at the brain, preventing a fullness signal from being properly deciphered by your brain and possibly even sending out a hunger signal.

You want to get to a place where you have enough leptin without an excess of insulin so your brain can clearly signal that you feel full. That will make it so much easier to stop eating because your brain will actually be able to read the signal that you aren’t really hungry. That’s a very different place from trying to stop eating when your brain is telling you that you really are hungry. Then, if you have excess fat stored on board, and if you’ve unlearned the desire to overeat, you’ll finally be able to access your fat stores and use them for fuel.

Do you see why it’s so important to balance your hormones? Managing your insulin levels so your leptin can accurately signal when you’re full reduces a hormonal desire to eat food you’re not really hungry for.

So let’s take a deeper dive into insulin.

Insulin is sometimes called “the fat-storage hormone” because it’s the main hormone determining whether you gain, maintain, or lose weight.

Insulin controls your blood sugar, also known as blood glucose. When you eat, food gets broken down into glucose in your blood, and that glucose needs to be managed. So your pancreas pumps out insulin to drive glucose out of your blood and put it into fat for storage or into muscles for use.

When insulin is elevated in the blood, the body can’t burn fat to fuel your body—not so good if you have extra fat on board that you wouldn’t mind melting away.

If you want to burn fat, you want to be insulin sensitive, not insulin insensitive.

Insulin insensitivity resembles leptin insensitivity. So just like when there’s a lot of leptin floating around and your brain stops listening, the same goes for insulin. When too much insulin is produced, your body starts to ignore it.

Picture a time when someone in your life never stopped talking about something. Maybe it was a co-worker who bitched about the boss every morning by the office coffee pot, every lunch break in the lounge, every afternoon on the way to the parking lot. Not to mention the texts and thinly veiled Facebook rants. What did you do? You probably plugged your ears. Maybe not literally, but the effect was the same. You tuned them out. Enough already, right?

Now, imagine insulin as your co-worker knocking at your office door to dis the director. Are you about to willingly let those soundbites in? Not likely.

You’ll likely resist the message.

Suddenly, you’re looking at your watch. Oh gosh, how could you have forgotten you needed to pluck your eyebrows, like, right now? Or, my, was . . . was that your phone vibrating? I mean it didn’t light up or anything but this must be an urgent call. Or, oh no, is that headache back? You’re just not feeling up to this talk right now, are you? Or, maybe something more like this: “Look, Sam. I’m sick of you stomping on our supervisor. Why don’t you just shut up?”

Now, you’re getting a little insensitive yourself. But who could blame you for that blowout? You’d heard it a million times already and you couldn’t be bothered to hear any more.

Well, the same goes for your insulin. When you’re insulin insensitive, you can have high levels of insulin in your blood, but the muscles are becoming resistant to the message. They’re like, “Easy Dude. I don’t want anymore. I had enough of you.”

What happens? Sugar stays in your blood and raises your blood sugar level. Your pancreas panics, thinking that there’s not enough insulin because the glucose isn’t reaching your muscles. So it pumps more insulin into your blood. Now, you have even more insulin in your blood and your muscles become even more resistant to it. This is insulin resistance, and it’s the precursor to type 2 diabetes.

Every time we eat, we secrete insulin. How much we secrete depends on the food we eat. High-sugar and highly refined foods tend to spike insulin the most. When we’re not eating, our insulin levels subside.

When you learn to eat in a way that doesn’t spike your insulin and keep it high, your body learns to tap into your own fat stores (if you have some you could stand to lose) and your leptin can begin to signal your fullness levels more clearly so you can feel less hungry and less deprived.

The benefit: you take one huge step closer to unlearning the desire to overeat.

Now that’s a takeaway worth taking.

Here’s what not to take away: The idea that you need to instantly start some crash diet and completely eliminate carbs. That’s a takeaway that’ll probably take you to the takeout, again and again.

How do I know? Because I have enough clients come to me after being on those diets who’ve either returned to bingeing or started bingeing for the first time in their lives.

One of the things clients share with me is how they love the support they get as they navigate what works for them and what doesn’t in the context of how their body responds to foods and of their history with food and weight. My clients also say that laser coaching helped them train their brain to start working for them intentionally instead of keep working against them innocently.

If you’ve listened this far, you’re ready to take control of your eating and your life. Your next step is to get on the waitlist for the next Done Bingeing group experience. Here is how you do it: You to https://www.holdingthespace.co/group-programs/ and sign up to get updates. You’ll get first access to early enrollment bonuses, including a full private session with me for free!

Did you know that a trained takeaway is the prelude to a great golf swing? A takeaway is the backswing of a golf club.

How you swing back informs how you swing down and how you strike the ball. What matters is how you hold the club and the path it travels back. What matters is what parts of you stay centered and what parts of you rotate around that center.

Sometimes you have to learn to go back before you can learn to go forward. But when you do, you’ll be far more likely to head straight in the direction you’d intended to go. Stay centered where you need to and let go where you can, and you just might find that you can fly high and far and land on a luscious bed of green.

That’s it for Episode 51. Thank you for listening! If you’re ready to apply the concepts in this podcast at a deeper level, get on the waitlist for the next Done Bingeing group experience. Go to https://www.holdingthespace.co/group-programs/ and sign up for updates.

Thanks for listening to The Done Bingeing Podcast. Martha is a certified life and weight loss coach who’s available to help you stop bingeing. Book a free session with her at www.holdingthespace.co/book. And stay tuned for next week’s episode on freeing yourself from binge eating and creating the life you want.

References

Klok, M.D., Jakobsdottir, S., Drent, M.L. (2007). The role of leptin and ghrelin in the regulation of food intake and body weight in humans: A review. Obesity Reviews, 8(1), 21–34.

Kollias, H. (n.d.). Leptin, ghrelin, and weight loss. Retrieved from https://www.precisionnutrition.com/leptin-ghrelin-weight-loss