Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Everything You Need to Know About Leptin and Weight Loss

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

The first few weeks after starting a diet are usually smooth sailing. You aren’t that hungry, your energy levels are good, and you’re still adding weight in the gym. Then, often at about the four to eight-week mark, the gears begin to grind to a halt. You feel more hungry before meals and less satisfied after. Your energy levels drop and it becomes increasingly hard to add weight to your compound exercises. And worst of all, the number on the scale moves slower and slower with every weekly weigh-in. What changed? Why did dieting suddenly transform from a sprint into a slog? Are you eating too much or too little? Not doing enough cardio? Not eating the right foods? Not taking the right supplements? The answer to all of those questions lies in a hormone called leptin, which is the topic of this podcast. Leptin lies at the center of the constellation of problems every dieter experiences as they lose fat—lethargy, hunger, metabolic slowdown, and even increased risk of illness. Like anything related to weight loss, there’s a lot of misinformation, hype, and chicanery surrounding leptin. In the past decade, a new wave of Internet doctors, fitness gurus, and online influencers have seized on the significance of leptin and come up with specialized diets and supplements designed to “hack” weight loss by controlling leptin.   They throw around enough big words and studies to make their pitch sound sciency, but like any fad diet, it’s all a bunch of smoke and mirrors. There’s no such thing as “hacking” your metabolism, hormones, or body fat, though, and controlling leptin levels isn’t the secret to weight loss any more than controlling other hormones like insulin or testosterone is. Now for the good news: Understanding how this hormone works can give you a better perspective on what’s going on inside your body as you lose weight and how to make fat loss easier by making a few simple modifications to your diet. On the plus side, though, understanding the workings of leptin allows you to make a few informed changes to your diet that make losing weight significantly easier. Let’s start by looking at what leptin is. Mentioned on The Show: Shop Legion Supplements Bodyweight Set Point Podcast Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.legionathletics.com/signup/

Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Head over to www.LegionAthletics.com now to check it out. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will

save 10% on your entire order and it'll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States. And if you're not, it'll ship free if your order is over $100. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Have you ever experienced this while dieting? So things are going well. You are losing weight at a pretty rapid clip, you know, slow and steady. And your workouts are good. You feel strong.

Maybe you're even still making progress while in a calorie deficit and you're not too hungry, you're not dealing much with cravings. And then for no apparent reason, things get harder. They start to become a grind, your weight loss slows down, your hunger goes up, your workouts get harder and harder. You not only stop making progress, maybe you start having to take weight off the bar, or at least you start losing reps on your key lifts. You probably have, if you have been in the body composition game for any amount of time and you've probably wondered why, what changed? Well, most of the the time the major change that seemed to just flip a switch in your body that made it go from easy cut mode to hard cut mode

it has to do with a hormone called leptin now leptin is a hormone that's produced by your fat cells and it is involved in many functions in the body including regulating appetite, metabolic rate, motivation and mood, immunity, fertility, and sex drive. And leptin's primary job, at least as far as your body composition goes, is to help you maintain a healthy body weight. So how this works is your brain monitors your body's leptin levels to understand how much food it's being fed, to understand energy balance, to understand if energy is abundant or if it is scarce. And then based on its determination as to how much energy it's getting versus how much energy it needs or how much energy the body's getting, not just the brain, versus how much energy the body

needs, your brain can then calibrate various physiological systems accordingly. And so that's why when leptin levels are high, you experience various positive effects. You have more motivation to train. You are stronger in your workouts. You are generally in a better mood. Your metabolic rate is higher. And the reason for that is the elevated leptin levels tells your brain that energy is abundant. It tells your brain that your body is getting plenty of energy. It's getting enough energy compared to what it's burning. So what that means practically speaking is you are probably going to be in at least a slight calorie surplus more often than not, or minimally eating as many calories as you are burning more often than not. Now on the flip side, lower than normal

leptin levels has more or less the opposite effects because that tells your body that energy is scarce, that it's not getting enough energy compared to how much it's burning. And when you restrict your calories for fat loss, for example, leptin levels drop. And anyone who has successfully dieted to lose weight before has experienced this as leptin levels have gone down because of calorie restriction, hunger goes up, metabolic rate goes down at least slightly, motivation to train goes down, and mood goes down. A lot of the negative side effects associated with restricting calories has to do with leptin. Now, another factor that makes getting and staying lean difficult is as body fat levels go down, so do leptin levels because leptin is produced by

body fat. So the leaner you get, the more fat you lose, the less leptin your body can produce, period. And the reason why the body becomes more and more resistant to fat loss, And the reason why the body becomes more and more resistant to fat loss, and this is one of the mechanisms that it uses to resist fat loss, is it doesn't know what our intentions are. It doesn't know that we just want to get shredded and then we'll stop cutting. All it knows is if current conditions remain for too long, it dies. If we stay in a calorie deficit for too long, we eventually die. And so as the body gets leaner and leaner, it turns up the volume more and more on the different physiological countermeasures it has to counteract the calorie restriction, to erase the calorie deficit and get us to start eating more food or moving less or both. And as far as leptin goes, the stimulation of hunger, fatigue, and less motivation and worse

mood are effective ways to convince us to eat more food. Now on the flip side, if we're eating a lot of food and leptin levels are high, the body doesn't want to be eating an excess amount of calories for extended periods of time either, because that too can lead to all kinds of physical problems, obviously. And so when leptin levels are high, we generally feel fuller. We feel more motivated to move around and to burn energy and we are in a better mood. We are less likely to eat a bunch of calories to try to make ourselves feel better. Now you might be wondering how that fits into the context of obesity. Why has the appetite of all these people failed them? Why have they egregiously overeaten for so long that they now are, you know, 30, 40, 50% body fat? Well, it turns out that the total amount of leptin in the body is not the only

factor here. There is also the point of how sensitive your body is to leptin's effects. And so what that means then is in obese people, what scientists have found is that leptin levels can be very high, but leptin sensitivity levels are quite low. And so when that's the case, you can have a lot of leptin and symptoms that you would normally see when leptin levels are low, like increased hunger, decreased mood, decreased motivation to move around, and so forth. And what researchers have also found is that when overweight people lose weight, when they restrict their calories and drop fat, leptin sensitivity goes up. So total amounts of leptin circulating in the body might go down, but sensitivity goes up and the net result is positive. sensitivity goes up and the net result is positive. Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based

health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check everything out, just head over to legionathletics.com. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order.

That's essentially 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics.com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. to eat a lot of minimally processed, highly nutritious foods, you know, the stuff that you have to prepare yourself, the stuff that our moms always told us to eat every day. And although it's not clear if this is the case, that may be why studies have shown that obese people can lose a lot of weight, can lose weight very effectively eating very bland foods, eating a rather monotonous diet of just simple, minimally processed, nutritious foods, you know, fruits, vegetables, whole grains,

lean proteins, stuff like that. Exercise is another very effective way to improve leptin sensitivity. And this one's particularly interesting because in athletes, you often have relatively low levels of body fat, which means relatively low levels of leptin. But you don't also have the negative side effects that you would necessarily expect. And there's good evidence that one of the reasons why this is, is that exercise fine-tunes your appetite, so to speak, and it helps you get more satisfaction from the food that you eat, and it also makes you less likely to overeat. And those are things that you normally see when leptin is more abundant, when leptin levels are higher. You get more satisfaction from you feel fuller when you eat food and you feel less inclined to overeat. That said, that only goes so far. And if you get too lean and try to stay there,

you are going to experience negative side effects related to low leptin, regardless of how much exercise you're doing, what types of food you're eating, and even how many calories you're eating to maintain a certain level of body fat. For example, I've experienced this a couple times when I've gotten quite lean for photo shoots. So I've gotten down to probably about 6% body fat or so and tried to stay there. And what I found is while I could stay there, I wasn't able to eat as much food as my body wanted. I wasn't necessarily hungry all that much because I don't generally get hungry, but I just felt like I needed more calories. I needed more food. I also found that my workouts were harder than they should have been. They were harder than they were before I started cutting. So even though I

finished my cut and brought my calories back up to maintenance, I didn't really feel that much of a boost in the gym. I remember my sleep would get impacted. It didn't go to shit, but I just would wake up more often and I would feel less rested and my energy levels were a little bit lower. My mood was a little bit lower. Again, all the normal things that you'd expect to see when leptin levels are simply too low. And I wish there were some biohack that I could have used to keep my body fat levels that low and somehow bring my leptin levels up enough to negate the downsides or bring my leptin sensitivity up enough to negate the downsides. But there is no such thing. You can temporarily increase your leptin levels by eating more calories. Like if you're cutting,

for example, and it's getting a bit difficult, it's getting grindy, you can take a little break. You can raise your calories up to around maintenance. Maybe you want to undershoot it by about 10% or so per calculation and stay there for three to five days. That will temporarily increase leptin levels and you'll feel the difference. But once you get back into your deficit, your leptin levels will just go down again that doesn't mean though that you shouldn't take diet breaks you should every couple months or so if you have a long cut it's a good idea to take a few days eat a bit more food maybe schedule a deload during that time as well give your body a little bit of a break and then get back to it and also

if you want to optimize the benefits of the diet break, raise your carbs. Just leave your protein and fat wherever it is and just raise your carbs to get those extra calories because research shows that carbs have a much greater effect on leptin levels and leptin production than protein and fat. But the bad news is to raise your leptin production to a stable high level that is going to add to your life, that's going to positively influence your training and your appetite and your mood, you have to raise your body fat levels. You just can't be super lean. You can be lean, but if you're a guy, you can't be 7% body fat and have high leptin levels. It's just not going to happen. And for women, I would say just double that number. So

you're not going to be 14, 15, 16% body fat and have high leptin levels. Now you can be about 10% or so, maybe 10 or 11% as a guy and not run into any issues related to leptin. And for women, again, double that, let's say somewhere around 20%. That is realistically maintainable. Now, as with all statements like that, it's not going to apply equally to everyone under all circumstances. Some guys can stay quite lean, can stay sub 10% body fat and experience no negative side effects associated with lower levels of leptin. And some find 10% fairly uncomfortable and they need to be a bit higher to really feel good inside and outside of the gym. And that's fine. You just have to see how your body works. You

have to do your own little experiment like I have a number of times and see how lean can you stay without suffering for it, basically. And if you want to learn more about that, check out the podcast that I recorded on body weight set point. If you search body weight set point, it'll pop up. All right. Well, that's everything I wanted to share with you about leptin. I hope you liked the video. And if you did, please do give it a like and drop a comment down below, letting me know what you thought. And if you really liked the video and you want to be notified when my next video goes live, just click the big red subscribe button over there and then click the bell next to it. And YouTube will notify you when I upload the next one.

I hope to see you then. Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Head over to www.legionathletics.com now to check it out.

And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order. And it'll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States. And if you're not, it'll ship free if your order is over $100. So again, if you appreciate my work, and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this.