5 Facts About Leptin: The Satiety Hormone

Leptin is the main satiety hormone. It is responsible for sending a series of messages to your brain telling you that you are already ‘full’ and that you are no longer hungry. 

However, it is important to explain a small detail. Hunger is not the same as hunger.

Being hungry is an emotional desire. Because of this, it is not always controlled by this hormone. Instead, cognitive mechanisms, perceptions and especially emotions are added to the process.

On the other hand, what we define as ‘hunger’ is a physiological need. It is used to fulfill your nutritional needs so that we can thrive.

This makes it clear that you should eat when you are hungry.

Your body needs several healthy nutrients. It uses these to maintain cellular structures and functions. They also give you energy. When you get these nutrients, satiety hormones such as leptin work optimally.

So we’ll take a look at some more background on the most important satiety hormone. And you will also find out how to “take care” of it so that it will continue to do its job correctly and accurately.

1. Leptin: the satiety hormone that is abundant in overweight people

It is possible that this statement caught your attention. If leptin is the satiety hormone, why is there a surplus of it in overweight people?

Let’s look at some data to understand this:

• Leptin is a hormone mainly produced by adipocytes (fat cells).
• This is what is known as a “signal hormone”. In other words, it communicates with your hypothalamus to tell you when to stop eating after it realizes you’ve already taken in enough fat from food.
• Now, what happens to overweight people is telling: they suffer from leptin resistance.
• Obese people have very high levels of leptin in their blood. In other words, it accumulates without doing what it should.

Because of this, it is normal that it takes longer before you feel full.

At the same time, another problem may affect this resistance to leptin. This is if you have a problem with your hypothalamus that makes you lose your sensitivity to this hormone.

What can you do to reduce leptin resistance?

• Avoid pungent foods
• Eat foods with good fats: olive oil, salmon, avocados…
• Sleep between 7 to 9 hours a day
• Exercise regularly

2. Leptin, the satiety hormone, has many other functions

We already know that one of the uses of this hormone is that it sends signals to your hypothalamus to tell you that you’ve got enough energy. And it tells you to stop eating because you are full.

However, this hormone also has other functions:

• It inhibits the production of other hormones and peptides that increase your appetite. This is the case with neuropeptide Y.
• What’s also interesting is that leptin increases your caloric and metabolic consumption. In other words, it speeds up your metabolism to help you lose weight or get rid of excess fat you have.

3. Strict Diets Reduce Your Leptin Level

There is information to remember: people on very strict diets reduce the activity of the main satiety hormone.

• Low calorie diets, or the so-called ‘crash diets’, are therefore a real health risk.
• Your leptin level drops, your metabolism becomes very slow, your hunger is more intense and your energy level drops.

4. Stress can make you gain weight because of leptin

We know that there are people who lose weight when they are going through a very stressful time. However, it is also common for those who have ‘chronic stress’ to do just the opposite.

We explain the reasons for this below:

• A greater amount of stress means a greater amount of cortisol in your blood.
• The more cortisol you have, the more the presence of leptin is reduced.

As a result, something that many people do know happens: you become hungrier, you enjoy more food and you use less energy.

5. Is Leptin the Best Remedy for Weight Loss?

It is very likely that more than one person is now thinking about how to increase the effectiveness of leptin. This would make you feel full sooner and you would eat much less.

• It’s worth mentioning that the satiety hormone works synchronously with your brain.
• As a result, it would never signal to stop eating when you need more nutrients and energy.
• As a result, it would harm your health and that would not be good.

With all this information, we want to make something very clear. It is not good to buy dietary supplements that say they contain leptin to satisfy your hunger. It is also not good to follow a miracle diet or a crash diet.

If you are overweight you should consult your doctor. This way you can determine if there is a hormonal problem behind it.

If you really want to take care of your leptin levels and their proper functioning, you should not wait any longer to change your diet. You also need to exercise and manage stress and tension in the right way.

Featured image courtesy of wikiHow.com