Turner - The hunger type diet : discover what drives your hunger, rebalance your hormones -- and lose weight for good

What is hunger? You may think you know. You may have found that after just one day on most diets youre so hungry that the contents of the cats bowl can begin to look appetizing, but there are actually different types of hunger. There is genuine physical hunger; the simple, direct hunger, which signals itself with stomach pangs. If the only sort of hunger we responded to was this sort, and we responded to it by sitting down to a nice healthy salad and a piece of grilled chicken, then we would all be slim all the time.

The trouble is, there are other kinds of hunger. And these are the kinds that make you fat. Theyre the reason you cant resist that creamy dessert, even though youre full already, and why you ignore the diet meal you planned to have for dinner and cook yourself a huge bowl of pasta instead.

Ah, you think, Im talking about emotional hunger, the sort where you eat an entire cheesecake when you get dumped. And, yes, to an extent I am. The interplay between emotions and eating is fundamental to the reason why so many people struggle to lose weight. The term comfort eating is well known for a reasonso many of us do it.

There is also eating out of boredom or habit, or childhood programming. I have many clients who come to me to help them lose weight who cannot throw food away because they were taught it was wrong to do so. They treat their own body as a trash can instead. I have other clients who treat themselves with cake because thats how they were rewarded as a child. Many of us can work our way though a jumbo bag of tortilla chips in front of Americas Got Talent just because theyre there.

Disentangling emotions from food and altering unhealthy patterns set in childhood are vital if youre overweight and want to get the weight off and keep it off. As a hypnotherapist, as well as a nutritionist, I work a lot with so-called behavioral change.

But what this book is really about is the physical rather than the emotional reasons for weight gain. By this I mean physical imbalancesprimarily hormonalin your body that could be driving your hunger. And, yes, I do realize that this sounds like the oldest excuse in the book (any book): Im not overweight because I stuff too many chocolate eclairs. Its my hormones. But those who pooh-pooh the hormoneweight link are actually behind the times.

The obesity epidemic in developed countries is leading to a scientific scramble to try to find a cure. As part of this research, researchers are looking closely at the biological mechanisms of appetite and weight gain andsurprise, surprisehormones are proving to play a key role.

In The Serotonin Revolution: The Low-Carb Diet That Wont Make You Crazy, I focused on the current new research into three key appetite hormonesserotonin, dopamine and leptinand showed how you could use this knowledge to help you lose weight. Science doesnt stand still. There are constantly new discoveries, so, as well as the big three, this book looks at new understandings of other hormonesghrelin, cortisol, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and othersand how they could be affecting your weight, plus what to do if they are.

Before men put this book downdont! Were not just talking about womenmen have hormones too, and not just testosterone. They have cortisol, a hormone with a key role in weight gain around your middle, as well as some of the female hormone estrogen. A mans estrogen level should be quite low, but when a man gets man boobs it is often a sign of elevated estrogen (a side effect of weight gain in both sexes). The chap with the boobs is becoming feminized. (That should be enough to scare some men into losing weight.)

The body is a series of systems modulated by hormones, which work best in precise ratios to each other. When the ratios become unbalanced, this can result in increased appetite and reduced satiety. A rise in certain hormones can slow down your metabolism or cause more of your food to be stored as fat. Hormonal imbalance can also affect your mood, which can increase appetite and weight. You are not powerless, however. You can alter the balance between hormones just enough to make a differenceto reduce appetite and increase fat burning. All you need to do is find your Hunger Type.

Research into hormonal imbalance and weight gain began with the discovery of insulin resistance, a condition where your cells cannot respond to the hormone insulin and so your blood sugar and energy levels become unstable. Insulin resistance is known to be a major cause of weight gain and type 2 diabetes. Insulin is a fat-storage hormone, and raised levels should switch off appetite. Those who have insulin resistance produce more and more insulin but they dont stop eating. This leads to weight gain and type 2 diabetes.

Focus has now moved to two other hunger hormones, leptin and ghrelin. It is now believed that you can become resistant to these too. The result is that your natural appetite-signaling system stops working and you never feel truly full, so you keep eating and, yes, you gain weight.

Hunger involves many systems in the body. Other studies are looking at the brain, and specifically the role of neurotransmitters, aka brain hormones, in hunger. Dopamine and serotonin are already well established as being important for weight control, but deficiencies in GABA, an anti-anxiety neurotransmitter, may also increase appetite. Then there is cortisol, the stress hormone. Increased levels have been shown to promote what is known as apple-shaped weight gainexcess weight around the middle. The sex hormones can also play a part: too much estrogen, known as estrogen dominance, or, for women, too little premenstrually or during the menopause, is associated with increased appetite. Too much testosterone in women (which causes polycystic ovarian syndromePCOS) or too little in men (causing the andropause) are linked to weight gain.

Is your head spinning yet? Fortunately, you dont need to remember any of this right now, as Im going to explain it all, and how it applies to you, as we go along. Its worth mentioning now, however, that new hunger hormones are being discovered all the time. Recent additions include neuropeptide Y (NPY), cholecystokinin (CKK), adiponectin, glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), peptide YY (PYY) and orexins. If this all makes you want to put this book down and go out for a breath of fresh air, good idea. A lack of sunlight can also affect your weight, because it leads to a deficiency in vitamin D, which is associated with depression and increased appetite. Finally we have your DNA. Research is pointing not necessarily to one fat gene but to several.

Hunger is complicated. Far from it being a simple case of a message going from your stomach to your brain to say that the former is empty, so the latter had better tell us to fill it, messages go back and forth constantly. They can be blocked or re-routed or simply not recognized.

Most importantly, I think, all the new appetite research underlines that you are not crazy or weak-willed if you overeat. If you feel hungry all the time, if you cant stop picking or snacking, or if you cant distinguish between emotional and physical hunger and find yourself eating compulsively and/or bingeing, it may be that your natural hunger, or full messaging is simply not working. If you were a house, youd need rewiring.

Thats no reason to give up (so put that family-size bag of salt and vinegar potato chips down now!). There are ways to rebuild the natural hunger message system that will help you lose weight and keep it off. The key is to work out what is driving your eating (your Hunger Type) and then to customize your food and behavior accordingly.