Weight Maven

Chris Masterjohn wrote a great post explaining why you really don’t want to be eating a 95% fat diet. Well worth a read, but what I found really interesting was John’s response in the comments answering Paul Jaminet’s comment/question re the cause of leptin resistance (emphasis mine):

My guess is that elevated fasting insulin is an option for this, because insulin seems to act on the same neurons in the arcuate nucleus as leptin (NPY and α-MSH). And as an energy signal, insulin is postprandial/urgent, while leptin is long term/less urgent.

So to me it sounds plausible that insulin signalling will override leptin signalling. No problem when it’s only postprandial, but when it’s still overriding it in the fasted state, it might be that the hypothalamus doesn’t “see” all the fat. So it thinks there isn’t enough fat, and it switches the energy balance to a starvation mode: “eat more, move less”.

One option to get elevated fasting insulin levels seems to be fatty liver, which Chris has written about extensively. A high calorie, low nutrient diet (e.g., lacking choline) seems to bring about fatty liver fairly consistently.

Of course, if a diet is highly palatable and nutrient poor, it seems very easy to get fatty liver eventually: eat all the energy rich empty yummy stuff, and flood your liver with energy it cannot process because of lacking nutrients. And the leptin resitance resulting from the fatty liver will then cause even more eating, so a vicious cycle of metabolic derangement begins.

As I’ve mentioned before, I particularly like the idea that liver injury plays a role in obesity. John’s comment adds some interesting potential context to how this might work.

It also suggests a remedy: yes, moderating carbs to reduce insulin is helpful. But it’s also about restoring normal function. Like Paul, I think NourishedEm’s comment is spot on:

You don’t need to lose weight to get healthy, you need to get healthy to lose weight.

Word!